Not Quite Human

Chapter 19

Eyene was lazy.
Extraordinarily, comprehensively lazy — so lazy, in fact, that he had spent the past several years in comfortable hibernation in his cave, having reached a point where even eating and thinking felt like more effort than they were worth. It was bound to happen eventually. He was, as far as he knew, one of the oldest living things on earth. He had been there when there wasn't much earth to speak of — a few strange shrubs, some lizards, a sky that hadn't yet decided what colour it wanted to be. He had no idea where humans and feys had come from. It was as though nature had simply made a decision one day and suddenly they were everywhere, in every direction, endlessly busy and endlessly convinced that what they were doing was new.
He was neither fey nor human, neither warlock nor demon, certainly not a ghost. He was, as best he could determine, the only one of whatever he was. Over time he had taken to calling his kind Darky Cox — simply because he could, and because there was no one else to object to it.
He walked for a while, taking in the state of things. It amused him, as it always did, how little had actually changed. The people were the same — each generation certain it was moving forward, fighting the same wars its ancestors had fought, making the same mistakes with the same confidence. He knew why he was awake. He always did. The world had a way of nudging him when things were becoming interesting.
"It is the one forgotten, the tainted soul, she toooooook mine life, hurts — rip, drip, dripping, rip, rip..."
Neil woke with a gasp, sitting upright in the dark.
He'd been hearing the voice for days now — a recurring presence that spoke of being killed by an old friend, of betrayal, of being led astray by someone worse. He'd told himself it was just his brain filling the silence, that the dead-friend-turned-traitor storyline was hardly original material. But today there had been an image to go with it. Henrietta on the floor, face twisted, a figure standing over her with a knife — face obscured, but the smile visible, wide and wrong — and then the slow, deliberate work of the knife, and he'd woken up before his brain could finish showing him the rest.
"Are you sure you aren't drunk?" Damien asked, studying him with a carefully neutral expression.
Nerezza cut in before Neil could answer. "Look at him properly, Damien. He's sober." She considered Neil for a moment. "I think it might be your gift. The ability to receive information from the dead — or to let them reach you, at least. It's not a bad gift, if you learn to control it. You could direct it. Contact specific people, get specific information."
Neil scowled. The voice had been unsettling enough when he'd thought it was his imagination. Knowing it was probably a dead woman trying to tell him something about the person who killed her made it considerably worse.
"Tainted soul," Damien repeated, mostly to himself. "A person forgotten." He drummed his fingers on the table, his scowl — which had become something of a permanent feature lately — deepening. "Not much to go on for now. Hopefully it becomes clearer before the end of the world as we know it."
Neil understood the frustration. He just wished Damien would find somewhere other than directly at them to put it.
The door opened.
All three of them looked up — and then kept looking, because the figure in the doorway required it. An enormous man, unhurried, dressed in a long silk robe, with midnight-black hair falling almost to his knees and green eyes threaded through with flecks of red. He moved into the room the way water moves — without apparent effort, taking up exactly as much space as he chose to. He looked around with the cheerful curiosity of someone who had all the time in the world, which, Neil would shortly learn, was more or less accurate.
"Now, now — no need to get your defences up on account of little old me," the man said, smiling at their expressions. "I'm quite ancient, I assure you. Heart thoroughly wrinkled and withered at this point." He paused, as though remembering something. "Introductions — yes. I'm Eyene. Probably the first man on earth. Well — the first Darky Cox, technically. And no, I won't trouble you with Old English. It wasn't in use where I come from either. Cave drawings and wild gestures were the fashion then, and I've kept up with changes since. Thou and thither wouldn't do me much good these days."
Damien and Nerezza stared.
They knew who he was. Of course they did. Eyene had held positions of power before the Seelie Court had its first king, had shaped events that fey history barely recorded because there was no one old enough left to remember them accurately. Standing in front of him made the room feel smaller and their problems feel simultaneously more urgent and more manageable, depending on which way one looked at it.
Eyene found the young boy's lack of reaction rather charming. Too young to recognise the name — understandable, given how recently he'd arrived in this world. It was refreshing, honestly. He didn't encounter new borns often.
It also amused him that they had already assumed he was here to help.
He didn't recall mentioning that.