Marked by the Shadow King

He is still here

Chapter Two: He Is Still There

She called the Police. Adaeze was a practical woman and there was a strange man at her third-floor window at ten o'clock at night with no ladder, no rope, and no reasonable explanation for his existence. She was not the kind of woman who stood around wondering about it. She dialled and reported, then stood as far from the window as the small room would allow, her back pressed to the opposite wall, watching him.

He watched her back.

He did not fidget or look away. He simply stood there as though standing outside a third-floor window in the dark was a perfectly ordinary thing to do, his arms loose at his sides, his robes completely still despite the wind she could hear rattling the zinc rooftop above. He was not touching the wall. There was nothing beneath his feet.

Adaeze looked down at her wrist without meaning to.

The mark had stopped glowing or rather, it had dimmed to something just below visible. She could feel it though, a low pulse like a second heartbeat, steady and calm in a way that made her furious because nothing about this situation deserved calmness.

"They're coming," she said, mostly to fill the silence.

"Yes," he said. "I know."

"And you're still there."

"Yes."

She gripped her phone tighter. "What do you want?"

For the first time, he changed his expression.It was not exactly soft, more like the careful adjustment of someone choosing their words with extreme precision.

"To explain," he said. "Before they find you first."

"Before who finds me?"

Downstairs, a door slammed. Mama Ngozi's voice rose, sharp and suspicious, the woman had the instincts of a retired army general and then came the sound of heavy boots on the stairwell.

Adaeze looked toward her door. Just for a second.

When she looked back at the window, he was gone.

The officers found nothing, no footprints. No marks on the outer wall. One of them looked at the window, looked at the drop, and told her she must have been dreaming. The other one wrote something in a notepad and did not show her what.

Mama Ngozi made them tea they didn't drink and watched them leave with the expression of a woman who had decided to form her own conclusions.

"Ada." She sat beside her on the parlour sofa after the officers had gone, folding her wrapper neatly across her knees. "What really happened?"

"I told them. A man at the window."

Mama Ngozi's eyes dropped to Adaeze's wrist. Adaeze had not pulled her sleeve down fast enough.

"Let me see," the old woman said quietly.

"It's nothing, a rash."

"Adaeze Okafor."

She held out her wrist.

Mama Ngozi took it in both hands the way you hold something precious and breakable. She studied the mark for a long time without speaking. Her thumb traced the outer edge of it and Adaeze felt that pulse again stronger this time, as if responding to the old woman's touch.

"I have seen this before," Mama Ngozi said.

Adaeze stared at her. "What?"

"Your mother had it." The old woman's voice was very careful. Very still. "On the same wrist, In the same place. The night before she disappeared."

Adaeze did not sleep.

She sat on her bed with her back against the headboard and the lights on full and thought about her mother. Amara Okafor, who had been beautiful and restless and full of secrets Adaeze had been too young to ask about before she was gone. Who had gone north with their father six years ago and never come back. Whose disappearance the police called an open case and Adaeze called the wound she carried quietly everywhere.

Her mother had this mark.

The night before she disappeared.

Adaeze pressed her palm flat against the wall beside her bed and breathed slowly. She was not going to panic. Panic was a luxury she had never been able to afford. She was going to think.

The man had said: before they find you first.

Which meant he was not the danger or at least he wanted her to believe he wasn't the danger. There was a difference, and Adaeze was smart enough to know it.

She was still turning it over in her mind when the mark pulsed, hard, like a warning and then she heard it. A sound from outside her door, it was not Chidi's shuffling midnight walk to the kitchen, nor was it mama Ngozi's prayer murmurs. This was something else. It had no footsteps, it moved like air pressing against air.

The door handle turned.

Adaeze grabbed the closest thing on her nightstand a heavy hardcover novel she had been meaning to read for two years and held it up.

The door opened and it was him.

Taller in the room than he had seemed at the window. He filled the doorframe not with bulk but with something else, a kind of weight that had nothing to do with size. His eyes found her immediately and stayed there, and up close she could see they were not fully dark. There was something moving in them. Like smoke in water.

"If you throw that book," he said, with that same almost-not-a-smile, "I will be very unimpressed."

"Get out of my room," she said.

"In a moment." He did not move forward. That, at least, she noted. He stayed at the threshold as though he needed permission to cross it. "There are three of them outside your building right now. They followed the mark's signal. They are not like me, Adaeze. They will not wait and they will not explain."

Her blood went cold. "How do you know my name?"

"I have known your name since before you were born." He said it simply, without drama, which somehow made it worse. "The mark chose you. The mark is mine. Which means, for now, you are under my protection whether you want it or not."

"I don't want it," she said immediately.

"I know."

From somewhere below, a sound. Glass breaking. Then silence, the wrong kind of silence, the kind that meant something had stopped whatever was making noise before.

Adaeze's grip on the book tightened.

He stepped back from the doorframe and held out one hand, "I will bring you back," he said quietly, "You have my word. But we need to go. Now."

Downstairs: another sound, which sounded Heavier and Closer.

Adaeze looked at his hand and looked at the door. She thought of her mother, the mark on the same wrist, the same place, the night before she vanished.

Her mother had disappeared.

Adaeze was not going to disappear.

She put down the book, picked up her phone, and took his hand.

— End of Chapter Two —