Chapter 1
My earliest memories were of my baby fat legs walking down a cobblestone road; cobblestones that were each individually different, unique and shimmering as if coated in crystal and gold, where the sky was a blue so perfect I could never imagine it so pure and consummate. Where the trees were the epitome of what a tree should be and were just not quite as perfect as what I now saw around me.
My hand was held in a woman’s palm, soft, scented and trembling as the woman hurried down this enchanted roadway. My baby legs could not quite keep up so she hoisted me in her arms and tucked me against her silk covered breast. I smelled flower scented hair and a sharp tang of ozone yet no thunder or lightning accompanied us. I smelled fear and her skin was damp as sweat stained her clothing.
Fireflies winked around us, burst against my skin with tiny stings that made me cry out in distress that something so delicate could hurt so much.
Darkness swept in around us and something wrenched me from her hands. I heard her howl of anger and vile curses before my next memories coalesced to become the rocking sensation of side to side motion that made me nauseous. I was carried in arms that were decidedly odd, hairless, scaled but no less welcoming. Past skies that burned orange and jets of blue flame burst around us as the thing that carried me traveled down a road made of flaming black bricks. Day turned to night, night became twilight and days twisted until my memories fragmented and I could recall only wisps and traces of those early years.
A birthday one my caretaker called a sixth, in a place that resembled a hobbit’s cave. A long journey after in a boat that sailed across an emerald sea where two moons vied for the surge of tides and great storms made me wonder if I would dwell below the breakers with the mer-folk I saw from the railings. The motion made ms so sick, I couldn’t remember much except the constant puking.
Years went by where survival was my only concern, my goal and mental focus. Each stay a bead in a chain that remained unbroken, each gem totally unlike the one before or after until I accepted each berth as normal in my crazy existence, the only facet remaining the same was the odd creature I took to be my caretaker. Sometimes, it was a man, sometimes a demon and sometimes an animal but always the same personality and character traits---a thing that kept me fed, clothed and safe until it was time to move on.
When I turned fifteen by its reckoning, we were in the City with a million occupants and it told me that this day was my birthday.
I looked around at the dirty streets, the corner where a score of us homeless were huddled around a metal drum housing a fire that glowed on our faces and turned us all into golden statues.
My companion was an older man with gray hair, gray skin and eerie gray eyes that no darkness could dim. He stood over me by a hands-breadth with broad shoulders and wide arms, a fierce man with enough danger in him to scare off most of the predators we might encounter on these mean streets.
He smiled at me, his teeth white, very sharp and strangely inhuman but I was unaffected by his outlandishness as I had been subject to it for many years. He held out a small cake covered in chocolate frosting with a tiny candle in its center. It burned without smoke.
“Happy Birthday, Corbin,” he whispered calling me by my old name. Raven. It meant Raven, dark of hair and yellow eyed like the famed Corbel of Ireland or so the legends stated. I knew my name was Raven, as I knew my birthplace was Ireland and my mother had brought me here to the city from the Emerald isle, dying in the process but not before placing me in the care of the thing now masquerading as the gray man.
We haunted the shadows, the street corners, the old abandoned and deserted places. We stole, begged or borrowed what we needed to survive and so far, had not been discovered by what purported to hunt us. Although, I had never seen what supposedly hunted us, only had his word for it that we were relentlessly pursued.
The thing I called the gray man called itself a morph, neither explaining or naming itself so I gave it a name years before as Murphy in mockery to its Irish beginnings. In truth, I didn’t know what it was other than my mother, my nursemaid, my bodyguard and my mentor. Without its protection and care, I would be dead, raped, starved or insane. It was my jailer and my benediction, my survival and my prison.
I took the cake and pulled out the candle sucking the frosting off the wax end. Carefully, I peeled the cake into pieces and shared it around the fire with the rest of the street people who shared the warmth of the blazing oil drum.
Murphy knew all their names only minutes after meeting them whereas it took me longer to memorize people’s names and faces. I was better at remembering places. Within a moment’s glance at a scene or room, I could describe it down to the number of tiles on the floor or cabs parked on sidewalks, to the color of the sky and how far the clouds covered the horizon.
The cake was enough for everyone to have a bite and all of them sang Happy Birthday to me. Next, Murphy gave me a present wrapped in brown paper, a box the size of a paperback book and from its shape, I assumed it was one. I held it awkwardly and he gestured for me to open it.
It was a box, cardboard and inside was a hard piece of metal wrapped in leather. When I unrolled it, I held in my hands a dagger---eight inches long shaped like a leaf and made of a blue metal that gleamed in the firelight. The hilt was like that of a small sword, the grip made of gold wrapped ivory with a pigeon egg ruby on the end. It was beautiful and deadly, sharp as a shaving razor and balanced in my palm. I looked in his gray eyes. He nodded. “You will need a longer blade when you take to the road, Corbin.”
“We’re leaving again?” I asked. Not that I was attached to this oh so elegant neighborhood but I knew its every hidey-hole and nooks and crannies. I was comfortable here and knew how to stay safe and anonymous.
“They will find us sooner or later,” he warned.
“Who? Who will find us? For years we have hidden and skulked like rats in the shadows. Not once, have I seen anyone after us,” I complained. “Just once, I’d like to settle in one place. Rent a room, go to school, live a normal life. I know you have money,I’ve seen you spend it when we had to. Why can’t we stay and live like normal people?”
His blue eyes flared like unholy demon fire and I swallowed. He could still incite fear in my stomach and wasn’t above corporal punishment. Twice, we’d left towns and villages for just that reason---the state didn’t like to see children beaten. Funny, I’d never thought about running away from him---what followed us was far worse than anything he could do to or had done to me.
I shut up and pretended to look at my present, the ornate dagger. Dojo, the old man who was sharing the corner with us admired it and said, “looks like old Italian or maybe Spanish. Fine steel in the blade.”
“It’s Celtic,” Pretty-boy added and Murphy shook his head to all three guesses.
“It’s Krillian,” he named and no one asked what that was. Even I didn’t know its origins.
“The blade will never rust, break or dull,” he told me. “It belonged to one of your ancestors.”
That peaked my interest, he had never mentioned any of my family before. I’d asked if the woman I’d remembered had been my mother but his answer puzzled me, he’d said he had always been with me.
Subtly, he steered me away from the barrel and down the street towards the mission where we’d spent the last week sleeping among a hundred faces. Some I knew and others were always changing as new people moved in from other states or their circumstances worsened. Only last weekend, I’d met a woman and her three little kids kicked out of their apartment and forced to live in their beat up old car. Then, it had been towed leaving them homeless and with only the clothes on their backs.
I’d given her my last ten bucks and she’d nearly hugged me hard enough to break a rib. I’d offered to watch her kids so she could go spend it.
All three were quiet, watchful little ones, two girls and a boy all under the age of four. They huddled together at my feet while I told them fairy tales about a wondrous land of marble skies, deer-like creatures that shimmered in silver, had hands for hooves and antlers of gold.
Murphy said, “Chessaria. It’s called Chessaria.”
I snorted. “I made the place up, Murph, it’s whatever I want to call it.”
The little boy said, “Sezaria.”
“Fine. Chessaria it is,” I agreed and when Mom came back, she had bags of clothes and her little ones were asleep.
Lights went out at 10 pm. By then, I was tucked under the thin blanket and in my coat but I was wide awake. I never once saw Murphy sleep, his eyes were always open and glowed at night like my own personal night light which made it nearly impossible to sneak out from under his watchful eye.
Mostly, I waited until I was in the restroom before I sneaked out. I never went far, just a few blocks to explore a park or stare into a shop window. Once, I made it all the way inside a museum. I think it was in Dallas, there were horses, cowboys and bulls.
He’d whipped me for that and the promised treat of a week on the beach at Padre Island was taken back. We spent it in some little coal mining town in West Virginia instead. In a shack in the woods, no electricity, no running water and we ate only what I could trap or hunt.
“You’re such a dick,” I mumbled under my breath remembering the awful conditions.
“Go to sleep, Corbin,” he said calmly. “Tomorrow, we leave for upstate.”
I leaned up on one elbow “Upstate! What’s upstate but more snow, more cold and smaller cities?”
“Albany. The Director of this place is too interested in you. I’ve seen her staring at you when she thinks no one is looking.”
“The really pretty lady with the blue eyes and long hair?”
“Flora. Her name is Flora.”
“She likes flowers,” I said drowsily, laying back down. In a few minutes, my eyes closed and I was lost in a place where the flowers had faces; I was in the center of a meadow dancing with her and all the flower faces followed us around. The grass was blue, the sky green and Flora wore a dress that floated around her changing colors from the deepest emerald to the most cerulean blue and her hair matched the colors of her dress. Her hand was ice cold in my own and I could not let go of hers.
“Beware the Trump, young Raven,” she warned and her grin became a Cheshire cat with saber teeth. I woke before the morning came. I woke to the presence of a warm scented hand on my mouth and another under my neck. To two lashed eyes beneath a flowered scarf framing a face as lovely as a flower. I wasn’t sure if I was still dreaming.
She brought my head and shoulders up, sliding me off the cot without disturbing my neighbors or my guardian. When I tried to turn my head to check on his whereabouts, she tugged me forward gliding like a soft shoe salesman through the quilted checkerboard of cots. Not until we were outside and aimed towards an open and waiting stretch limo did I voice a protest.
Once inside, she leaned over me to snap my seat-belt and the scent from her skin and hair made me dizzy. I swallowed the words I had wanted to utter and melted into the plush upholstery. Her long manicured nails stroked my face and she tapped the dimple in my chin. “Your name, boy. What is your name?”
“Corbin,” I whispered.
“Your surname?”
“Murphy-Sines.”
“Murphy-Sines. Surely not.” She laughed then, a high tinkle of a laugh. “Ah, a joke on the morph. Morph---Morphy, Murphy.” She leaned forward and told the driver to head for her home. I don’t remember where we went save that it was long enough for me to pass out with no recollection of any part of the journey.