“Are you—my grandfather?” Manfred said, almost holding his breath at the enormity of this question. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
“I am,” Sylvester said.
Manfred’s breath whooshed out. He didn’t know if he was relieved or disappointed. Mostly, he was terrified. After all these years . . . an answer. At least one. “Okay, a few questions,” he began cautiously.
“How come we don’t look anything alike? I mean, at all.”
“I don’t always look like this,” Sylvester said.
Again, not what Manfred had expected. “Aaaaargh,” he said. “I’ll come back to that later. Did you ever see my grandmother after your, um, fling?”
“I think two years is more than a fling. Yes, I saw Xylda from time to time. But not in her last ten years.”
“So you know she died?” Manfred said slowly.
“Yes. Her light blinked out in my heart.”
“Flowery. But you didn’t come to her deathbed. You didn’t attend her funeral.”
“I was very fond of her, nonetheless.”
“So just to be absolutely clear, my mother is your daughter.”
“She is.”
“But she’s not anything like you. Or me. And she sure as hell can’t change her appearance.”
“No. Everything skipped a generation. That happens sometimes.
Xylda told me that her grandfather was the one who’d had the power before her.”
Manfred dimly recalled Xylda telling him the same thing. “Do we have to do this question by question? Can’t you just tell me the story?” Manfred forced himself to take a sip of tea. His hands were shaking.
“I am not so good at telling histories. But I’ll do my best. I was born to Chickasaws in the area now known as Tennessee. My mother, Squirrel Hands, was a wise woman. Her husband had just died, and she was childless. She wanted a son more than anything. She knew she had the sickness in her belly, the same one that had killed her own mother.
When she met up with a demon named Colconnar—and she was never clear about how that happened, whether he had sought her out or she had summoned him—she struck a bargain with him. Her bargain was this: that in return for becoming free of the sickness, she would bear the child of Colconnar. Demons rarely breed to make their own babies, which perhaps you knew.”
Manfred shook his head faintly.
“No? Huh.” Sylvester seemed a little disappointed. “My mother got Colconnar to agree that she would have her child with her as long as she lived.”
Manfred nodded. This story is not going to end well, he thought. Sylvester nodded gravely back. He continued, “Colconnar—my father—had said he would take the cancer away. He did. But he did not guarantee Squirrel Hands that she would be healthy, and she didn’t think of asking for that. Whether Colconnar caused it or not, my mother got an inflamed appendix, or maybe some womb infection—at least, those are my best guesses. I was about ten, maybe twelve, when my mother died, after considerable suffering. The moment she was dead, Colconnar came to get me.”
Manfred had heard stranger stories and believed them. “There were other people there?” he asked. “Members of your tribe?” Sylvester nodded.
“Did they see him?”
“How would I know? He took me. I didn’t get to do any post-abduction interviews.” Sylvester looked at Manfred as though he were wondering if his grandson was deficient.
Manfred reminded himself to be patient. “All right. So you went with your father. Did you know who he was?”
“Oh, he told me who he was right away. I believed him. If you had seen him, you would have believed him, too.” And Sylvester shivered.
Manfred tried not to think about how frightening that must have been for a preteen boy. “So were things a lot different? With your dad?
I know that’s a stupid question, but I guess I want to know how you managed . . . in demon-land. I guess it’s not actually below us.”
“Different realm,” Sylvester said. “A different dimension, I think.
Different creatures. Different laws.” All the lines of his face were drawn and grim as he told Manfred this.
“Why’d he want you?”
“Good question,” said Sylvester, for the first time showing some approval. “He was preparing me to be useful, so he could offer me to his ruler as a servant. Colconnar was proud of having a son. I would have been a rare gift.”
“But that didn’t happen?”
“Colconnar sent me out into the earth. Time had passed differently. Everything had changed. There were white people everywhere.” Sylvester Ravenwing looked sad. “He’d sent me here, though there was no town then, no Midnight. He ordered me to verify the report that a powerful witch was living in this area. Demons enjoy having sex with witches, especially virgin witches, though the witches don’t always survive it.”