HOME | DD

Description
Chapter One

Raven Shawn was flying.

It was the most wonderful feeling he had ever experienced.  He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, his arms spread out widely.  The breeze ran through his hair, strands blown from his face in the cool currents.

He opened his eyes, ignoring the sensation of them watering, and looked down below him.  The city that he lived in rushed by hundreds of feet below him at a rate of what felt like the speed of sound.  No wings beat at his back – he flew on his own volition, occasionally diving down or making loops.

Folding his arms at his side, he leaned skyward and shot up towards the clouds, the freezing water forming droplets on his skin as he flew through.  He emerged on the other side of the cloud formation, casting a shadow right beneath him as he ran his hand through the white wisps.

They seemed so much smaller from the ground.

The clouds beneath him began to thin and he looked downwards.  The city beneath him was gone, and all he could see was a huge stretch of beautiful green ocean.  He smiled and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath of the cold but fresh air.

He felt so at peace that he hardly noticed when the sky began to darken.  Night fell at an impossible rate, but there were no stars or moon to be seen even above the clouds.  He stared upwards into the blackness before looking around, unable to see anything anymore.  Not even himself.

Somewhere behind and above him, a scream filled the air.  It wasn’t a human, but it was no animal that he had ever heard before.

And Raven Shawn began to fall, screaming.

-

He was still screaming when he sat up in bed.

Shaking slightly, the young man stared at the wall directly across from his bed, beads of cold sweat running down his back.  He slowly looked back and forth before closing his eyes and falling backwards, landing heavily on his bed.

He took a deep breath, beginning to worry again.  That marked the fourteenth time he’d had that dream… only, with each repetition, it went on a little longer before the scream and the inevitable following plummet into…

…he didn’t know what.

Slowly, he began to calm down through sheer force of will and sat up again, wiping what remained of the sweat from his forehead.  Kicking his legs over the side of his bed, he got to his feet, shivering as the air hit his skin.

It was Saturday, so it was unusual for him to be awake before noon anyway, but a glance at the cable box over his television told him that it was four AM, an inhuman hour by any sane person’s standards.  For the past two weeks, he had been unable to get a decent amount of sleep because of these damn dreams, and his work was beginning to show it.

Of course, it had been after that first dream that the voices had started – not schizophrenic-type voices, but words from memories he hadn’t even been aware he possessed… people, both familiar and unfamiliar all at the same time, talking to him, telling him that everything was going to be all right.

“What’s going to be all right?” he muttered to himself as he shook his head, turning on the light in the bathroom.  He allowed his mind to wander, turning the shower on and letting it warm up as he thought.

The voices never told him what would be all right, exactly, just it.  He strained for the answer, but it always eluded him.  But he wasn’t even positive that the voices were even addressing him.  Half of them referred to someone by the name of Reiha – an odd name that he was fairly positive he had never heard before.  But if they weren’t addressing him, who would they be talking to?

Staring into the mirror and forcing the sound of running water out of his head, Raven looked himself in the eye.  No, nothing unusual about his appearance today, either – nothing that signified he was anyone other than who he should be.  He was fairly certain that everyone looking at him saw just what he saw – a young man, twenty-ish, with shoulder length black hair and blue eyes, pale-skinned from spending too little time outdoors and rather scrawny from spending too little time feeding himself or working out at the gym.  His eyes had traces of bags underneath them, probably from spending too much time partying or whatever it was “young people” did these days.

Since he happened to be that young man, he could identify deeper things that no casual observer could.  He was twenty-one, as far as he could tell – orphaned as an infant with no identification, it was impossible to tell exactly what age he was… so to say it had been twenty-one years since he had been found would probably be a better estimation.  He was a columnist for a small local newspaper and did everything from the main room of his apartment, hence his lack of sunshine and fresh air.

He didn’t party.  He had no friends, so he didn’t really have an abundance of parties to go to.  It wasn’t that he was unlikeable, he just didn’t socialize well.  Raven was getting the feeling, however, that if these voices and dreams didn’t stop, he was probably going to have to go see a psychiatrist, since there was no one else to really talk to.  He hated to do that, but he needed someone to talk to.

The mirror was getting hard to see due to the steam from the shower, so Raven ceased his musings, stripped, and showered and shaved as fast as he could manage.  It was October and the eighth floor apartment, with all its windows, wasn’t well insulated, so standing around wet and naked for long periods of time didn’t seem like a terribly good idea.

Shivering, Raven dried himself off and hurried back into his bedroom, pulling his boxers and jeans on with an almost inhuman speed.  He pulled his wet hair back into a ponytail as he looked for his shirt, finally locating it in the corner, of all places.  It was clean enough, so it would suffice.

Before he dressed, he held the shirt up, staring at it.  It was his favorite shirt – black, with two dragons entwined with one another.  The gold one with the red eyes seemed to be flying upwards, towards the sky, while the white one with green eyes seemed to be flying down to the ground.  Apparently, he had been found in it, and the owner of the orphanage had given it to him when he had left at age eighteen.  He had been unable to help wondering exactly why it was he had been left at the orphanage in the first place.  Perhaps his parents had simply been unable to take care of him.  He hated to think they didn’t want him.

Sighing, he pulled the shirt on over his head and walked into the other half of his apartment, which consisted of his kitchen and living room-slash-dining room.  Turning, he looked out the large window, which made up most of his South-facing wall, and stared out over the city.  It was still dark, thanks to the miracles of Winter, but a few lights could be seen from other buildings… presumably, people who had woken up early just like himself, probably for equally annoying reasons.  A thin layer of fog covered the ground and made headlights from the few passing cars seem to stretch for almost a mile.

After a moment of car watching, Raven shuffled into the kitchen and, after having no luck finding anything else, began to prepare a toaster pastry.  He walked back into the living room long enough to flip the television on the “What the hell are you people doing awake at this ungodly hour” o’ clock news, half-listening to the reports as he continued making his breakfast.

The farm report was just finishing as he sat on his couch, a small plate with his breakfast in one hand and a glass of milk in the other.  He set the glass down on the side table and began to examine a burn he had received from the toaster as it faded into commercials; apparently, it was quite important at five a.m. that the local supermarket had just set up an olive bar.  He began to eat his slightly-cooled pastry as the news came back on.

“And now for our top story,” the anchorman said, very seriously, with a complexion that led Raven to believe this had been taped yesterday at around three p.m.; no one looked that awake at this time.  “Elaborate prank or something more diabolical?  Police are unsure, but the seventh in a series of disappearances occurred at around twelve thirty this morning: Richard Carver, aged twenty-one, was abducted from his home.  There was no sign of a struggle, nor of a breaking and entering.  His disappearance was noticed by his little sister, who said she heard voices coming from his bedroom.  Mr. Carver was found a mile from his home two hours later, still in his pajamas and rather confused.  When questioned, he not only had no recollection of the events of the night, but also could not remember the past week.  He was apparently unhurt, but he is currently in the hospital undergoing extensive tests.

“Mr. Carver makes the seventh twenty-one year old male to disappear from the city in the two weeks.  If you know anyone who falls within that category, please, encourage them to be careful, and if you have any information on who may be perpetrating these acts, please call the police.”  A phone number, presumably for a hotline, filled the screen as the newscaster continued to talk.  “Police are still investigating the matter, and hope to apprehend whoever is behind this before the week is out.”

Frowning, Raven grabbed the remote and punched the “Off” button, not wanting to hear any more of that particular report.  Sinking back into the couch with a deep sigh, he allowed his eyes to slide shut.  A paranoia that had been forming for the past two weeks began to grow stronger, as it did after every report of a missing young man.  He wasn’t positive that he was actually twenty-one, but the old woman at the orphanage had assured him he was a newborn when he was found a little over twenty-one years ago, and she hadn’t been wrong about… well, anything, as far as he was aware.

He forced the thoughts out of his head with a vigorous shake, sitting up straight again.  He couldn’t think about this now.  He had a column to finish by Monday – a column he hadn’t even started – and he wasn’t going to have time for it between visiting a shrink and slowly losing his mind if he allowed himself to dwell on an issue that, more than likely, would never have anything to do with him anyway.

It’s all right.

Raven stood up quickly, placing his right hand on the side of his head.  That voice again.  It was so comforting, somehow, but the sensation of having an unfamiliar voice speaking in his ear was so unnerving that he didn’t care how comforting a voice it was.

You’re going to be fine, I promise.  It’s not forever.  It’s only for a little while.  Don’t worry, Reiha, one day you’ll come back.

Smacking the side of his head forcibly with the heel of his hand, Raven picked up the remains of his breakfast and carried the plate and glass back into the kitchen, leaving it with the other dishes in the sink to be dealt with at a future and, as of yet, undetermined date.  He grabbed a phonebook in passing and flipped it open to the medical pages, quickly looking up the number for a therapist… preferably, a cheap one.

He called a few before he found one with an opening for that afternoon.  She was more of a counselor, apparently, but that was fine with him.  Either a shrink or a counselor was perfectly capable of telling him that he was crazy, so it didn’t matter whose mouth the information came from.

Tossing the phonebook back onto the counter, Raven picked up his laptop and seated himself on the couch again, kicking his feet up on the coffee table and flipping the lid open.  He idly scratched something small, white, and fuzzy off the edge of the screen as it started up, then loaded his favorite word processing program (the free one that came with the operating system).  After consulting his notes for a brief refresher course on what it was he was supposed to be writing about, he got to work.

It wasn’t a topic he really cared about – something about the anti-liquor crowd trying to get a local bar shut down for this reason or that.  It wasn’t a piece that was going to get a whole lot of attention, so he wasn’t even paying much attention to the words he was writing.  He realized he had miswritten the quote by the head of the local Ladies’ Aid Society – he also realized how little he cared and left it as it was.

His hands stopped as his eyes were drawn to the large window again.  Perhaps it had been due to an overdose of fantasy novels when he was a child, but he was very certain that this was not what he wanted to do with his life… what he didn’t know was what he did want to do.

Adventure was the only word that repeatedly entered his head, but that sounded so ridiculous that he brushed it off.

What was he going to do, go skinny-dipping in the Amazon?  Not that that wouldn’t be an adventure, per se, but it wasn’t his cup of tea.  He just knew that he wanted to get out and see places that no one had seen before… he supposed an explorer would be the most accurate term for it.

Not like he was going to get a lot of that done if he didn’t get this damn column finished, of course.

Setting the laptop to the side, Raven stretched his arms over his head and glanced at the calendar on the wall.  The date surprised him – when he had been a kid, he had never allowed Halloween to sneak up on him like this… and now it was Halloween and he hadn’t even noticed.

“Looks like I’m going to have to visit the orphanage,” he muttered to himself with a smirk as he rubbed the back of his head, resigning himself to the typical enthused reception he received from the children.  At least it wasn’t an uncomfortable place – he had always viewed it as home, since he had never actually gotten adopted, and he went back at every holiday to see the woman who ran the place.  She liked to call him the son that she never knew she wanted – he wasn’t positive whether he should have been flattered or insulted by that, but it always made him laugh.

He began planning the rest of his day as he retreated back into his bedroom, having resigned himself to finishing the column tomorrow, when he might manage to care a little more.  He pulled on his coat, staring blankly at the wall – go get some lunch, visit the shrink, buy candy, and go see the kids.  That sounded nice and innocuous… not to mention as average as he was becoming accustomed to.

Locking the door behind him, Raven spun the keys around his index finger as he walked down the hall to the elevators.  He heard people readying their apartments for Halloween parties as he passed, occasionally seeing people disappearing into other rooms with armfuls of orange and black streamers and balloons or plates of cupcakes and other sweets decorated like pumpkins.  Ignoring them, he punched the down arrow and put his hands in his pockets, tapping his foot idly as he waited.

The elevator doors opened, and he stepped inside, leaning against the back wall as the door shut again.  He closed his eyes against that familiar sinking feeling of the elevator beginning its trip to the lobby – ever since the flying dreams had begun, the sensation of falling made him ill.

“Are you all right?”

Raven nearly jumped clear through the ceiling as another voice filled the elevator.  He turned his head quickly to see another male in the corner, leaning very casually against the wall and apparently completely unaware that he had nearly given Raven a heart attack.

“S-sorry,” Raven said nervously, placing his hand over his heart in a silent plea for it to calm down.  “I… I didn’t notice anyone else in here, so I… uh… you surprised me,” he finally finished lamely.

The other male’s lips quirked upwards in a smirk – Raven found it ironic that he had been the one to ask if Raven was all right.  This guy looked far from all right.  His skin was about the same color as old milk with twinges of what appeared to be gray where there should have been red.  He was dressed in a gray sweatshirt, black shorts, and boots; his black hair made his skin look even worse, and his eyes were completely covered by black sunglasses.

“I’m sorry,” the stranger said – Raven could tell that he wasn’t sorry at all, by his tone.  “You just looked… uncomfortable.  I probably shouldn’t have disturbed you.  I just wanted to be certain you weren’t about to lose consciousness, or something severe like that.”

“N-no, I’m good.  Just a bit distracted.  You know, the reports on TV and all that.”

“Oh?”  The man sounded surprised, as though he had no clue what Raven was talking about, before he continued.  “Oh, yes.  You mean the disappearances.  That’s got a lot of people worried… and you look about twenty-one, so it’s no surprise that you’re nervous.”

Raven nodded slowly – the man had a thick and extremely strange accent, but an excellent grasp of the language, like he had been studying English for years in a country where very few people spoke English.  “Yeah,” Raven said.  “Well, you look about the same age, so you might want to be careful, too.”

Surprisingly, the man laughed.  “No… I don’t have anything to fear from the kidnappers.  Let’s just say that I can take care of myself.”

Oh? Raven thought skeptically, glancing at the man again.  You look like you’re up from your death bed, dude.  I don’t think you could take a small child, much less a bunch of kidnappers.  But he just nodded before looking up at the steadily decreasing numbers.  The elevator stopped at the lobby as soon as his eyes hit the numbers, and with a melodious note, the doors slid open.

“Have a good Halloween,” the man said with an idle wave, making no move to leave the elevator.  Raven nodded at him, at a loss for words to reply to such a strange farewell, before hurrying out of the elevator, through the lobby, and out onto the street.

“What a strange man,” he muttered to himself, pulling his collar up as a breaker against the soft but freezing wind.

-

Waiting rooms had to be one of the most highly uncomfortable places in existence.

Everyone was there to see the doctor in question, so really, it shouldn’t have been awkward at all.  But there were only two options for entertainment in a waiting room – read one of the magazines that absolutely no human being was interested in, or stare at the other people and wonder what was wrong with them.

That was exactly what made these places so awkward.

Raven looked around, smiling uncomfortably at everyone that he accidentally made eye contact with.  He didn’t read the magazines, but he also didn’t wonder what everyone else was there for – as a matter of fact, he spent the entire time wondering what everyone else thought he was there for.  Whether they really cared or not was a moot point.

“Mister Shawn?”

Raven stood up quickly and offered the nurse an awkward wave, a smile he was positive looked idiotic forming on his lips before he could stop it.  Resisting the urge to slap his forehead with the aforementioned hand, he followed the nurse through the door and down a hallway.

“The doctor will be with you momentarily,” the woman said as she opened a door and ushered him into a small but tasteful office.  Nodding, Raven entered the room and sat in front of the desk, listening as the door was shut, signifying the nurse’s departure.

Sighing, he began drumming his hands idly on his knees, looking around the office.  Why they called you in just to make you wait was beyond him.  He resisted the urge to begin playing with the paperweights on the doctor’s desk, figuring that might be seen as bad form.

“Hello, Mr. Shawn,” the doctor said as she opened the door, holding out her hand to him.  Raven half stood and shook the offered hand as she introduced herself.  “My name is Elizabeth Raytrie.”

“Hi,” Raven said, lowering himself back into his chair as she sat.  She looked about forty or so, and she seemed easy to talk to, which would make this entire ordeal easier.

“Now,” she said, once she had gotten herself completely settled and they had finished the cursory introductions and ‘how are you’s, “What would seem to be the matter?”

Sighing, he ran a hand through his hair uncomfortably, having removed the ponytail earlier.  “Well… I… I don’t know, really.  It’s kind of weird.  For about the past… two weeks or so, I’ve been having this dream that I’m flying.  You know, just over the city and the ocean.  I have it every night.  But I never get anywhere.”

“You just keep flying?”

“No…” He sighed, leaning back in the chair, looking up at the ceiling.  “The dream always ends before I get to wherever I’m going.  Every time I dream it, I hear screaming, and it startles me – I fall out of the sky and I wake up.”

“Who is screaming?”

“I think it’s less of a who and more of a what,” Raven said immediately, having been expecting the question.  “I mean… you know how those little bitty dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park movie sounded?  With the frills around their necks?” When she nodded, he continued, “Kind of like that, just louder.  Like a bunch of them screaming all at once.  Every night, it’s like… I get closer to wherever I’m going, because the dream goes on longer, but it always ends up the same.

“I haven’t been able to sleep because this dream wakes me up way early in the morning, and I’m always so worked up afterwards that I can’t go back to bed.  And ever since I started having those dreams, I’ve been hearing voices… like memories, almost, except they’re voices I don’t know, and I don’t remember having ever been told things that they’re saying.”

“Like what?”

“Well… there’s a man who’s telling me that something’s going to be all right, but I don’t know what he’s talking about.  He tells me that I’ll be coming back soon… but I don’t think the voice is even talking to me, because he keeps saying ‘Reiha’, and I don’t know anyone by that name.  I… I feel like I should know what he’s talking about, but I don’t have any idea.  It sounds kind of… crazy, I know.  I just don’t know what any of it means.  Does it mean I’m going insane or something?”

Shaking her head, Dr. Raytrie just smiled.  “I don’t think so, no,” she said, her tone signifying that ‘insane’ wasn’t the phraseology she would have used.  “I think it just means that you need to pick up some sleeping pills.  The voices you’re hearing might have been spawned from some movie you saw, and you just can’t recall where you heard the lines.  As far as the dream, a dream of flying isn’t terribly unusual – in fact, I have them myself.  As far as what’s making the sound, I couldn’t begin to tell you that.”

They talked for a little while longer, and on his way out, Raven made an appointment for the following Saturday.  Dr. Raytrie advised him to pick up some over-the-counter sleeping medication for the time being to see if that did anything for his sleeping problems, and promised to do what she could for him if he was still having the same issues in a week.

Stepping outside, Raven realized that he must have been at the office for several hours longer than he had thought, as the sun was beginning to set.  Heading down the street, he stopped in a local drugstore and picked up the sleeping pills and an economy-sized bag of candy.  As he stood in line behind a group of giggling, tipsy teenagers, he turned the pills over in his hand, lost in thought.  Maybe he was insane.

He felt insane right about now.

Tilting his neck slightly to stretch muscles sore from staring at a computer screen all morning, Raven walked to the cashier and paid for the pills and the candy.  He refused the plastic bag offered him, instead shoving the pills in his back pocket and hefting the candy over his shoulder.  He stepped out into the street, noting that the sun had disappeared behind the skyline and the air had chilled with the darkness.  He fumbled with the zipper of his coat one-handed as he headed down the street, shivering involuntarily from the cold wind.

The fog was thick but very low, reminding him of typical cemetery setups for movies.  He shifted the candy to underneath his arm once his coat was zipped so he could slip his hands into his pockets, ducking his head away from the wind as best as possible.  In his opinion, it was a bit annoying that it had to get cold in October like this.  It felt like a typical December, close to January, and he was surprised it wasn’t snowing… not that he wanted it to.  He passed few trick-or-treaters as he walked; mostly shivering children running ahead of bitter teenagers that obviously would have rather been anywhere else.

St. Augustine’s Orphanage’s windows were lit up with a bright yellow glow.  Raven stopped in front of it to just stare.  This place had raised him, and had really been the only place he had ever felt truly at home.  Everywhere else he felt like a strange, out-of-place outcast, but he figured that was simply due to his lack of parentage.  All the kids here were in the exact situation he had been in at their age.  As a matter of fact, the woman who ran the place, Mrs. Pennington, had been an orphan herself, and therefore well equipped to handle any conceivable situations.

Walking up the steps, Raven regretfully pulled his hand from the warmth of his pocket lining to rap sharply on the door with his knuckles, wincing at the sudden impact of wood on his chilled skin.  He waited patiently, listening to the chain lock slide out of place, before the door opened to reveal a woman, sixty-ish, with flyaway gray hair and a floral dress that was perpetually covered in flour.

“Raven!” she said happily as she laid eyes on the young man on her stoop.  “Well, don’t just stand out there all night; you’ll catch your death.  In, in!”  It was much more a demand than a request, and as he stepped over the threshold into the warm, old building, he felt her hand on his back to usher him in further while she closed the door with a brisk snap.

“What in blazes are you doing out here at this time of night?”

“The sun just now set, Mrs. Pennington,” Raven said with a good-natured laugh, shifting the bag underneath his arm.  “Besides, it’s Halloween.  I know you can’t let the children out trick-or-treating, not with the limited help you had, so I thought I’d bring the candy to them.”

“Oh, you are such a dear,” the old woman said as she reached up to pat Raven’s face gently.  “Well, come on then, don’t just stand there like a lump.  Into the kitchen, we’ll see if we can get you a bowl to put all that in.”  Making small little ‘tsk’ noises, she made her way into the kitchen.  “My, my, but you are going to spoil these children.”

“It’s the least I could do,” Raven said, still clearly amused as he entered the warm kitchen.  The scent from dinner still hung in the air, and he breathed deeply, closing his eyes and enjoying the comforting scent of home cooking.  “Don’t suppose the little vultures left any extra food, now, did they?”

Laughing, the old woman ushered him into a chair.  “Oh, you know I knew you’d be coming.  I saved you some,” she said with a smile as she got to fixing him a plate.  Smiling contentedly, Raven laid the candy on the table, surprised that just sweets could weigh so much after a time.  He soon had dinner in front of him – roast beef with gravy, mashed potatoes, corn, green beans, and a glass of tea.  They conversed easily about the children and his writing as he ate and she drank her own tea, and Raven was once again reminded of how much he truly missed this place.  The woman across the table from him was the closest thing he had ever had to family.

After he was done, she swept his plate up while he busied himself with finding something for the candy.  He finally found a large plastic bowl, yellow with white daisies, and plunked it down on the counter.  Drawing a small knife from his pocket, he slit the bag and dumped the contents into the gaudy bowl.

“The children will be so happy to see you,” Mrs. Pennington said sincerely as she carried the bowl into the sitting room.  It was like a waiting room for potential parents, in addition to a relaxation room for the orphans.  There was a large fireplace on one wall, comfortable armchairs scattered around, and bookshelves that housed volumes on everything from fantasy and westerns to academic books.  Raven remembered spending a great many rainy afternoons in this room, either doing his homework or losing himself in one of his favorite novels.

He chose his favorite chair and settled himself into it as the woman returned to the foyer, calling up the stairs.  “Okay, I know you’re all awake!” she called to no one in particular.  “Yes, Raven is here now, so all of you get down here and say hello to him!”

It was almost as though she had summoned them with magic – one moment, Raven was alone in the room, and the next, there were twelve children seated around him, laughing and chattering.  One little girl, about three, had unabashedly clambered up into his lap and was playing with a loose strand of his hair, fascinated.

Smiling, Raven settled back into the chair.  It was strange.  He had thought he would never want to return to this place after all the years of living here, being rejected time and time again for adoption, but now here he was, telling less-than-scary ghost stories to the enraptured kids around him, sharing candy with them and laughing.  He found himself here every holiday, regardless of his schedule.  He loved the kids, and he was always one of the first to befriend a new child.  Mrs. Pennington always teased him about his way with children; no matter how quiet or shy they might be when they arrived, he would have them laughing and smiling within an hour of meeting them.

The night dragged on in extreme comfort.  In fact, it wasn’t called to an end until long after the candy was gone, the youngest had fallen asleep, and some of the older ones were beginning to nod off.  “Okay, it’s time for bed,” Mrs. Pennington said, gently clapping her hands together.  “It’s nearly eleven, and all of you have been up for an hour past curfew.  To bed, to bed.”

Raven helped carry the smallest upstairs and tuck them into bed, saying goodnight to the ones still awake.  He took the empty bowl back to the kitchen and placed it back in the cabinet after emptying the wrappers he’d collected in it into the trash can.  He stilled after he had closed the cabinet, staring at the patterns in the wood door.

“…Mrs. Pennington,” he began uncertainly, his voice trailing off.  He didn’t know how to ask what he wanted to, mostly because he wasn’t really sure what he wanted to say.  He contented himself with continuing to stare at the cabinet for a moment.

“What is it, dear?” the old woman asked as she continued washing dishes that had piled up from earlier.  She was using the voice she always used when she knew he had something on his mind – almost as though she was saying, “It’s about time.  What’s wrong with you?”

“I… I’ve been wondering something,” Raven said quietly as he turned around to lean against the counter.  “About… when you found me.  When I was a baby.”  He shifted uncomfortably as she turned the water off, flicking his gaze to the linoleum floor.  “When you found me… was… my name, was it Raven?”

Silence filled the kitchen before the woman began to dry the plates, still not looking at him.  “This is sudden.  What is all this about?”

“I… I’ve been having dreams lately.  About someone talking to me… at least, I think it’s me they’re talking to.  But they don’t call me Raven, they call me Reiha, which is why I don’t know if they’re even talking to me or not.  It’s a little disconcerting.  I mean, I know I was orphaned, and I wasn’t sure if maybe that was my real name… but the voice sounds so clear and I was abandoned so young that I didn’t think it was possible for me to remember anything that was said to me before I came here.”

More silence greeted that proclamation before Mrs. Pennington sighed and turned, walking to the table.  “Come, dear.  Sit down.”  Blinking, Raven did as he was told, folding his arms on the table and looking intently at the woman who was like a grandmother to him.

“I had wondered if this would ever come up.”  She was quiet for a moment, and then began to speak again after a deep breath.  “When I found you twenty-one years ago, you were just an infant.  You didn’t seem more than a few months old… less than six months, that much was obvious.  I saw you lying on the porch bundled in the very shirt you’re wearing now.  I brought you inside, naturally, because in this city it isn’t terribly unusual to find orphans in such a state.

“I dressed you in clothes that I had used for some of the other boys, and folded the shirt up in my dresser to give to you when you left the orphanage.  It was an adult-sized shirt, so you obviously didn’t have any need for it at the time.  When I was folding it, I found a piece of rice paper in it – it bore brush-script letters that simply said ‘Reiha Xen’.  I assumed this was your name, but began to call you Raven because it sounded similar but more… well, more normal.  Shawn you picked out for yourself, because it was the last name of your favorite character on a television show you enjoyed when you were young… I forget the name of it now.

“When you were a baby, and even a little boy, you always startled me with how different you were.  You very rarely cried as an infant, usually content to let the other children hold you or lie on your back and stare at the ceiling.  In the eighteen years that I raised you, I can’t remember a single instance of you getting into a fight.  You were such a sweet child, always eager to help out and trying to do everything you could for the people around you.  You never complained about doing your homework or going to school, and I was the one who had to make you stay home when you were sick.

“You never seemed to be bothered that you were never adopted.  In fact, it was almost like you would rather have stayed here… almost as though you felt safe here, for some reason.  In fact, you told me when you were about five that you never wanted to leave.  That had changed a bit by the time you had turned eighteen, but here you are, three years later.”

Sighing, Raven nodded, staring at the table.  “This is the only place I’ve ever felt at home,” the man muttered, mostly to himself and a bit redundantly.  He had known about the shirt, but… his real name was Reiha Xen?  What kind of a name was that?  It didn’t feel right at all.

It’s a title, a quiet voice said in his head.

It’s your title.

“Raven?”

Blinking sharply, Raven shook his head.  “Sorry.  Just took a mental walk somewhere and got lost,” he said a bit sheepishly.  “I’m fine now.”

“Are you sure, dear?” Mrs. Pennington asked, concerned.

He wasn’t sure, not at all, but instead of saying that he merely smiled, nodding.  “Absolutely.  I’m positive.  Now, I really must be getting home.  It’s late and a bit of a walk back to my apartment, and I need my beauty sleep… got a column to finish tomorrow.”

“All right, dear,” the woman said as she pulled him down to kiss his cheek.  “Don’t be a stranger, now.  You know you’re allowed to come by on more than just holidays.  I’d like to see you between now and Thanksgiving,” she added with a bit of a laugh.

“You’ve got it,” Raven said with a jovial wink before he grabbed his coat, pulling it on and zipping up before heading out into the cold again.  The wind was fiercer than it had been a few hours ago, whipping his hair around his face and freezing his skin to the point he could barely feel it.

His hands were nearly frozen, despite being in the confines of his pockets, and he flexed his fingers to make sure he could still move them.  He was pretty certain he could, but with the gradual loss of feeling it was a bit difficult to tell.

Reiha… the voice began again, and Raven ducked against the wind.  The words were louder and clearer now.  Almost like the person was speaking beside him.

Reiha, one day you will grow up and you will do a great many things.  Some will be good, and some will not, but they will all be great in some way or another.  You will be the one to bring the Lasting Calm.  I know it.  I believe it.

The streetlights flickered slightly behind the thin fog.  A pool of yellow light fell around him as he stepped beneath one.  As he reached the middle, the most disconcerting thing he had ever experienced happened.  What had just been severely howling wind suddenly silenced as it died, everything falling still around him.  There was no sound, save for his breathing, which was gradually increasing in speed.  The cold was still there and he could barely feel anything, but the wind was definitely gone.

The next thing he heard was footsteps.  A young girl stepped into the circle of light, stopping a few feet from him.  She reminded him of the man he had met in the elevator earlier that day – she had the same jet black hair that fell long and shapeless to her waist, the same skin like old milk.  She was dressed in a gray tank-top that revealed scrawny arms, gray shorts that revealed scrawny legs, and heavy gray work boots with loosely tied laces that looked ready to fall off her feet at any moment.  However, she wasn’t looking at him – Raven doubted she could see anything with the dark green strip of cloth wrapped around her eyes and tied behind her head.

The girl merely stood there, seeming to stare at him without staring, for almost a minute.  Raven found himself unable to move, simply stuck staring back at this strange and disconcerting creature before him.

After a moment, her lips parted, and a voice like none he had ever heard before escaped them.  It was like three people speaking simultaneously – a man, a woman, and a young child – and she merely said one word.

“Reiha.”

More footsteps approached him from behind.  Raven began to turn around to see what it was, but he didn’t even see the lead pipe that smashed into the back of his head, causing him to see stars for a brief moment before he crumpled to the concrete.

Description
Chapter One

Raven Shawn was flying.

It was the most wonderful feeling he had ever experienced.  He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, his arms spread out widely.  The breeze ran through his hair, strands blown from his face in the cool currents.

He opened his eyes, ignoring the sensation of them watering, and looked down below him.  The city that he lived in rushed by hundreds of feet below him at a rate of what felt like the speed of sound.  No wings beat at his back – he flew on his own volition, occasionally diving down or making loops.

Folding his arms at his side, he leaned skyward and shot up towards the clouds, the freezing water forming droplets on his skin as he flew through.  He emerged on the other side of the cloud formation, casting a shadow right beneath him as he ran his hand through the white wisps.

They seemed so much smaller from the ground.

The clouds beneath him began to thin and he looked downwards.  The city beneath him was gone, and all he could see was a huge stretch of beautiful green ocean.  He smiled and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath of the cold but fresh air.

He felt so at peace that he hardly noticed when the sky began to darken.  Night fell at an impossible rate, but there were no stars or moon to be seen even above the clouds.  He stared upwards into the blackness before looking around, unable to see anything anymore.  Not even himself.

Somewhere behind and above him, a scream filled the air.  It wasn’t a human, but it was no animal that he had ever heard before.

And Raven Shawn began to fall, screaming.

-

He was still screaming when he sat up in bed.

Shaking slightly, the young man stared at the wall directly across from his bed, beads of cold sweat running down his back.  He slowly looked back and forth before closing his eyes and falling backwards, landing heavily on his bed.

He took a deep breath, beginning to worry again.  That marked the fourteenth time he’d had that dream… only, with each repetition, it went on a little longer before the scream and the inevitable following plummet into…

…he didn’t know what.

Slowly, he began to calm down through sheer force of will and sat up again, wiping what remained of the sweat from his forehead.  Kicking his legs over the side of his bed, he got to his feet, shivering as the air hit his skin.

It was Saturday, so it was unusual for him to be awake before noon anyway, but a glance at the cable box over his television told him that it was four AM, an inhuman hour by any sane person’s standards.  For the past two weeks, he had been unable to get a decent amount of sleep because of these damn dreams, and his work was beginning to show it.

Of course, it had been after that first dream that the voices had started – not schizophrenic-type voices, but words from memories he hadn’t even been aware he possessed… people, both familiar and unfamiliar all at the same time, talking to him, telling him that everything was going to be all right.

“What’s going to be all right?” he muttered to himself as he shook his head, turning on the light in the bathroom.  He allowed his mind to wander, turning the shower on and letting it warm up as he thought.

The voices never told him what would be all right, exactly, just it.  He strained for the answer, but it always eluded him.  But he wasn’t even positive that the voices were even addressing him.  Half of them referred to someone by the name of Reiha – an odd name that he was fairly positive he had never heard before.  But if they weren’t addressing him, who would they be talking to?

Staring into the mirror and forcing the sound of running water out of his head, Raven looked himself in the eye.  No, nothing unusual about his appearance today, either – nothing that signified he was anyone other than who he should be.  He was fairly certain that everyone looking at him saw just what he saw – a young man, twenty-ish, with shoulder length black hair and blue eyes, pale-skinned from spending too little time outdoors and rather scrawny from spending too little time feeding himself or working out at the gym.  His eyes had traces of bags underneath them, probably from spending too much time partying or whatever it was “young people” did these days.

Since he happened to be that young man, he could identify deeper things that no casual observer could.  He was twenty-one, as far as he could tell – orphaned as an infant with no identification, it was impossible to tell exactly what age he was… so to say it had been twenty-one years since he had been found would probably be a better estimation.  He was a columnist for a small local newspaper and did everything from the main room of his apartment, hence his lack of sunshine and fresh air.

He didn’t party.  He had no friends, so he didn’t really have an abundance of parties to go to.  It wasn’t that he was unlikeable, he just didn’t socialize well.  Raven was getting the feeling, however, that if these voices and dreams didn’t stop, he was probably going to have to go see a psychiatrist, since there was no one else to really talk to.  He hated to do that, but he needed someone to talk to.

The mirror was getting hard to see due to the steam from the shower, so Raven ceased his musings, stripped, and showered and shaved as fast as he could manage.  It was October and the eighth floor apartment, with all its windows, wasn’t well insulated, so standing around wet and naked for long periods of time didn’t seem like a terribly good idea.

Shivering, Raven dried himself off and hurried back into his bedroom, pulling his boxers and jeans on with an almost inhuman speed.  He pulled his wet hair back into a ponytail as he looked for his shirt, finally locating it in the corner, of all places.  It was clean enough, so it would suffice.

Before he dressed, he held the shirt up, staring at it.  It was his favorite shirt – black, with two dragons entwined with one another.  The gold one with the red eyes seemed to be flying upwards, towards the sky, while the white one with green eyes seemed to be flying down to the ground.  Apparently, he had been found in it, and the owner of the orphanage had given it to him when he had left at age eighteen.  He had been unable to help wondering exactly why it was he had been left at the orphanage in the first place.  Perhaps his parents had simply been unable to take care of him.  He hated to think they didn’t want him.

Sighing, he pulled the shirt on over his head and walked into the other half of his apartment, which consisted of his kitchen and living room-slash-dining room.  Turning, he looked out the large window, which made up most of his South-facing wall, and stared out over the city.  It was still dark, thanks to the miracles of Winter, but a few lights could be seen from other buildings… presumably, people who had woken up early just like himself, probably for equally annoying reasons.  A thin layer of fog covered the ground and made headlights from the few passing cars seem to stretch for almost a mile.

After a moment of car watching, Raven shuffled into the kitchen and, after having no luck finding anything else, began to prepare a toaster pastry.  He walked back into the living room long enough to flip the television on the “What the hell are you people doing awake at this ungodly hour” o’ clock news, half-listening to the reports as he continued making his breakfast.

The farm report was just finishing as he sat on his couch, a small plate with his breakfast in one hand and a glass of milk in the other.  He set the glass down on the side table and began to examine a burn he had received from the toaster as it faded into commercials; apparently, it was quite important at five a.m. that the local supermarket had just set up an olive bar.  He began to eat his slightly-cooled pastry as the news came back on.

“And now for our top story,” the anchorman said, very seriously, with a complexion that led Raven to believe this had been taped yesterday at around three p.m.; no one looked that awake at this time.  “Elaborate prank or something more diabolical?  Police are unsure, but the seventh in a series of disappearances occurred at around twelve thirty this morning: Richard Carver, aged twenty-one, was abducted from his home.  There was no sign of a struggle, nor of a breaking and entering.  His disappearance was noticed by his little sister, who said she heard voices coming from his bedroom.  Mr. Carver was found a mile from his home two hours later, still in his pajamas and rather confused.  When questioned, he not only had no recollection of the events of the night, but also could not remember the past week.  He was apparently unhurt, but he is currently in the hospital undergoing extensive tests.

“Mr. Carver makes the seventh twenty-one year old male to disappear from the city in the two weeks.  If you know anyone who falls within that category, please, encourage them to be careful, and if you have any information on who may be perpetrating these acts, please call the police.”  A phone number, presumably for a hotline, filled the screen as the newscaster continued to talk.  “Police are still investigating the matter, and hope to apprehend whoever is behind this before the week is out.”

Frowning, Raven grabbed the remote and punched the “Off” button, not wanting to hear any more of that particular report.  Sinking back into the couch with a deep sigh, he allowed his eyes to slide shut.  A paranoia that had been forming for the past two weeks began to grow stronger, as it did after every report of a missing young man.  He wasn’t positive that he was actually twenty-one, but the old woman at the orphanage had assured him he was a newborn when he was found a little over twenty-one years ago, and she hadn’t been wrong about… well, anything, as far as he was aware.

He forced the thoughts out of his head with a vigorous shake, sitting up straight again.  He couldn’t think about this now.  He had a column to finish by Monday – a column he hadn’t even started – and he wasn’t going to have time for it between visiting a shrink and slowly losing his mind if he allowed himself to dwell on an issue that, more than likely, would never have anything to do with him anyway.

It’s all right.

Raven stood up quickly, placing his right hand on the side of his head.  That voice again.  It was so comforting, somehow, but the sensation of having an unfamiliar voice speaking in his ear was so unnerving that he didn’t care how comforting a voice it was.

You’re going to be fine, I promise.  It’s not forever.  It’s only for a little while.  Don’t worry, Reiha, one day you’ll come back.

Smacking the side of his head forcibly with the heel of his hand, Raven picked up the remains of his breakfast and carried the plate and glass back into the kitchen, leaving it with the other dishes in the sink to be dealt with at a future and, as of yet, undetermined date.  He grabbed a phonebook in passing and flipped it open to the medical pages, quickly looking up the number for a therapist… preferably, a cheap one.

He called a few before he found one with an opening for that afternoon.  She was more of a counselor, apparently, but that was fine with him.  Either a shrink or a counselor was perfectly capable of telling him that he was crazy, so it didn’t matter whose mouth the information came from.

Tossing the phonebook back onto the counter, Raven picked up his laptop and seated himself on the couch again, kicking his feet up on the coffee table and flipping the lid open.  He idly scratched something small, white, and fuzzy off the edge of the screen as it started up, then loaded his favorite word processing program (the free one that came with the operating system).  After consulting his notes for a brief refresher course on what it was he was supposed to be writing about, he got to work.

It wasn’t a topic he really cared about – something about the anti-liquor crowd trying to get a local bar shut down for this reason or that.  It wasn’t a piece that was going to get a whole lot of attention, so he wasn’t even paying much attention to the words he was writing.  He realized he had miswritten the quote by the head of the local Ladies’ Aid Society – he also realized how little he cared and left it as it was.

His hands stopped as his eyes were drawn to the large window again.  Perhaps it had been due to an overdose of fantasy novels when he was a child, but he was very certain that this was not what he wanted to do with his life… what he didn’t know was what he did want to do.

Adventure was the only word that repeatedly entered his head, but that sounded so ridiculous that he brushed it off.

What was he going to do, go skinny-dipping in the Amazon?  Not that that wouldn’t be an adventure, per se, but it wasn’t his cup of tea.  He just knew that he wanted to get out and see places that no one had seen before… he supposed an explorer would be the most accurate term for it.

Not like he was going to get a lot of that done if he didn’t get this damn column finished, of course.

Setting the laptop to the side, Raven stretched his arms over his head and glanced at the calendar on the wall.  The date surprised him – when he had been a kid, he had never allowed Halloween to sneak up on him like this… and now it was Halloween and he hadn’t even noticed.

“Looks like I’m going to have to visit the orphanage,” he muttered to himself with a smirk as he rubbed the back of his head, resigning himself to the typical enthused reception he received from the children.  At least it wasn’t an uncomfortable place – he had always viewed it as home, since he had never actually gotten adopted, and he went back at every holiday to see the woman who ran the place.  She liked to call him the son that she never knew she wanted – he wasn’t positive whether he should have been flattered or insulted by that, but it always made him laugh.

He began planning the rest of his day as he retreated back into his bedroom, having resigned himself to finishing the column tomorrow, when he might manage to care a little more.  He pulled on his coat, staring blankly at the wall – go get some lunch, visit the shrink, buy candy, and go see the kids.  That sounded nice and innocuous… not to mention as average as he was becoming accustomed to.

Locking the door behind him, Raven spun the keys around his index finger as he walked down the hall to the elevators.  He heard people readying their apartments for Halloween parties as he passed, occasionally seeing people disappearing into other rooms with armfuls of orange and black streamers and balloons or plates of cupcakes and other sweets decorated like pumpkins.  Ignoring them, he punched the down arrow and put his hands in his pockets, tapping his foot idly as he waited.

The elevator doors opened, and he stepped inside, leaning against the back wall as the door shut again.  He closed his eyes against that familiar sinking feeling of the elevator beginning its trip to the lobby – ever since the flying dreams had begun, the sensation of falling made him ill.

“Are you all right?”

Raven nearly jumped clear through the ceiling as another voice filled the elevator.  He turned his head quickly to see another male in the corner, leaning very casually against the wall and apparently completely unaware that he had nearly given Raven a heart attack.

“S-sorry,” Raven said nervously, placing his hand over his heart in a silent plea for it to calm down.  “I… I didn’t notice anyone else in here, so I… uh… you surprised me,” he finally finished lamely.

The other male’s lips quirked upwards in a smirk – Raven found it ironic that he had been the one to ask if Raven was all right.  This guy looked far from all right.  His skin was about the same color as old milk with twinges of what appeared to be gray where there should have been red.  He was dressed in a gray sweatshirt, black shorts, and boots; his black hair made his skin look even worse, and his eyes were completely covered by black sunglasses.

“I’m sorry,” the stranger said – Raven could tell that he wasn’t sorry at all, by his tone.  “You just looked… uncomfortable.  I probably shouldn’t have disturbed you.  I just wanted to be certain you weren’t about to lose consciousness, or something severe like that.”

“N-no, I’m good.  Just a bit distracted.  You know, the reports on TV and all that.”

“Oh?”  The man sounded surprised, as though he had no clue what Raven was talking about, before he continued.  “Oh, yes.  You mean the disappearances.  That’s got a lot of people worried… and you look about twenty-one, so it’s no surprise that you’re nervous.”

Raven nodded slowly – the man had a thick and extremely strange accent, but an excellent grasp of the language, like he had been studying English for years in a country where very few people spoke English.  “Yeah,” Raven said.  “Well, you look about the same age, so you might want to be careful, too.”

Surprisingly, the man laughed.  “No… I don’t have anything to fear from the kidnappers.  Let’s just say that I can take care of myself.”

Oh? Raven thought skeptically, glancing at the man again.  You look like you’re up from your death bed, dude.  I don’t think you could take a small child, much less a bunch of kidnappers.  But he just nodded before looking up at the steadily decreasing numbers.  The elevator stopped at the lobby as soon as his eyes hit the numbers, and with a melodious note, the doors slid open.

“Have a good Halloween,” the man said with an idle wave, making no move to leave the elevator.  Raven nodded at him, at a loss for words to reply to such a strange farewell, before hurrying out of the elevator, through the lobby, and out onto the street.

“What a strange man,” he muttered to himself, pulling his collar up as a breaker against the soft but freezing wind.

-

Waiting rooms had to be one of the most highly uncomfortable places in existence.

Everyone was there to see the doctor in question, so really, it shouldn’t have been awkward at all.  But there were only two options for entertainment in a waiting room – read one of the magazines that absolutely no human being was interested in, or stare at the other people and wonder what was wrong with them.

That was exactly what made these places so awkward.

Raven looked around, smiling uncomfortably at everyone that he accidentally made eye contact with.  He didn’t read the magazines, but he also didn’t wonder what everyone else was there for – as a matter of fact, he spent the entire time wondering what everyone else thought he was there for.  Whether they really cared or not was a moot point.

“Mister Shawn?”

Raven stood up quickly and offered the nurse an awkward wave, a smile he was positive looked idiotic forming on his lips before he could stop it.  Resisting the urge to slap his forehead with the aforementioned hand, he followed the nurse through the door and down a hallway.

“The doctor will be with you momentarily,” the woman said as she opened a door and ushered him into a small but tasteful office.  Nodding, Raven entered the room and sat in front of the desk, listening as the door was shut, signifying the nurse’s departure.

Sighing, he began drumming his hands idly on his knees, looking around the office.  Why they called you in just to make you wait was beyond him.  He resisted the urge to begin playing with the paperweights on the doctor’s desk, figuring that might be seen as bad form.

“Hello, Mr. Shawn,” the doctor said as she opened the door, holding out her hand to him.  Raven half stood and shook the offered hand as she introduced herself.  “My name is Elizabeth Raytrie.”

“Hi,” Raven said, lowering himself back into his chair as she sat.  She looked about forty or so, and she seemed easy to talk to, which would make this entire ordeal easier.

“Now,” she said, once she had gotten herself completely settled and they had finished the cursory introductions and ‘how are you’s, “What would seem to be the matter?”

Sighing, he ran a hand through his hair uncomfortably, having removed the ponytail earlier.  “Well… I… I don’t know, really.  It’s kind of weird.  For about the past… two weeks or so, I’ve been having this dream that I’m flying.  You know, just over the city and the ocean.  I have it every night.  But I never get anywhere.”

“You just keep flying?”

“No…” He sighed, leaning back in the chair, looking up at the ceiling.  “The dream always ends before I get to wherever I’m going.  Every time I dream it, I hear screaming, and it startles me – I fall out of the sky and I wake up.”

“Who is screaming?”

“I think it’s less of a who and more of a what,” Raven said immediately, having been expecting the question.  “I mean… you know how those little bitty dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park movie sounded?  With the frills around their necks?” When she nodded, he continued, “Kind of like that, just louder.  Like a bunch of them screaming all at once.  Every night, it’s like… I get closer to wherever I’m going, because the dream goes on longer, but it always ends up the same.

“I haven’t been able to sleep because this dream wakes me up way early in the morning, and I’m always so worked up afterwards that I can’t go back to bed.  And ever since I started having those dreams, I’ve been hearing voices… like memories, almost, except they’re voices I don’t know, and I don’t remember having ever been told things that they’re saying.”

“Like what?”

“Well… there’s a man who’s telling me that something’s going to be all right, but I don’t know what he’s talking about.  He tells me that I’ll be coming back soon… but I don’t think the voice is even talking to me, because he keeps saying ‘Reiha’, and I don’t know anyone by that name.  I… I feel like I should know what he’s talking about, but I don’t have any idea.  It sounds kind of… crazy, I know.  I just don’t know what any of it means.  Does it mean I’m going insane or something?”

Shaking her head, Dr. Raytrie just smiled.  “I don’t think so, no,” she said, her tone signifying that ‘insane’ wasn’t the phraseology she would have used.  “I think it just means that you need to pick up some sleeping pills.  The voices you’re hearing might have been spawned from some movie you saw, and you just can’t recall where you heard the lines.  As far as the dream, a dream of flying isn’t terribly unusual – in fact, I have them myself.  As far as what’s making the sound, I couldn’t begin to tell you that.”

They talked for a little while longer, and on his way out, Raven made an appointment for the following Saturday.  Dr. Raytrie advised him to pick up some over-the-counter sleeping medication for the time being to see if that did anything for his sleeping problems, and promised to do what she could for him if he was still having the same issues in a week.

Stepping outside, Raven realized that he must have been at the office for several hours longer than he had thought, as the sun was beginning to set.  Heading down the street, he stopped in a local drugstore and picked up the sleeping pills and an economy-sized bag of candy.  As he stood in line behind a group of giggling, tipsy teenagers, he turned the pills over in his hand, lost in thought.  Maybe he was insane.

He felt insane right about now.

Tilting his neck slightly to stretch muscles sore from staring at a computer screen all morning, Raven walked to the cashier and paid for the pills and the candy.  He refused the plastic bag offered him, instead shoving the pills in his back pocket and hefting the candy over his shoulder.  He stepped out into the street, noting that the sun had disappeared behind the skyline and the air had chilled with the darkness.  He fumbled with the zipper of his coat one-handed as he headed down the street, shivering involuntarily from the cold wind.

The fog was thick but very low, reminding him of typical cemetery setups for movies.  He shifted the candy to underneath his arm once his coat was zipped so he could slip his hands into his pockets, ducking his head away from the wind as best as possible.  In his opinion, it was a bit annoying that it had to get cold in October like this.  It felt like a typical December, close to January, and he was surprised it wasn’t snowing… not that he wanted it to.  He passed few trick-or-treaters as he walked; mostly shivering children running ahead of bitter teenagers that obviously would have rather been anywhere else.

St. Augustine’s Orphanage’s windows were lit up with a bright yellow glow.  Raven stopped in front of it to just stare.  This place had raised him, and had really been the only place he had ever felt truly at home.  Everywhere else he felt like a strange, out-of-place outcast, but he figured that was simply due to his lack of parentage.  All the kids here were in the exact situation he had been in at their age.  As a matter of fact, the woman who ran the place, Mrs. Pennington, had been an orphan herself, and therefore well equipped to handle any conceivable situations.

Walking up the steps, Raven regretfully pulled his hand from the warmth of his pocket lining to rap sharply on the door with his knuckles, wincing at the sudden impact of wood on his chilled skin.  He waited patiently, listening to the chain lock slide out of place, before the door opened to reveal a woman, sixty-ish, with flyaway gray hair and a floral dress that was perpetually covered in flour.

“Raven!” she said happily as she laid eyes on the young man on her stoop.  “Well, don’t just stand out there all night; you’ll catch your death.  In, in!”  It was much more a demand than a request, and as he stepped over the threshold into the warm, old building, he felt her hand on his back to usher him in further while she closed the door with a brisk snap.

“What in blazes are you doing out here at this time of night?”

“The sun just now set, Mrs. Pennington,” Raven said with a good-natured laugh, shifting the bag underneath his arm.  “Besides, it’s Halloween.  I know you can’t let the children out trick-or-treating, not with the limited help you had, so I thought I’d bring the candy to them.”

“Oh, you are such a dear,” the old woman said as she reached up to pat Raven’s face gently.  “Well, come on then, don’t just stand there like a lump.  Into the kitchen, we’ll see if we can get you a bowl to put all that in.”  Making small little ‘tsk’ noises, she made her way into the kitchen.  “My, my, but you are going to spoil these children.”

“It’s the least I could do,” Raven said, still clearly amused as he entered the warm kitchen.  The scent from dinner still hung in the air, and he breathed deeply, closing his eyes and enjoying the comforting scent of home cooking.  “Don’t suppose the little vultures left any extra food, now, did they?”

Laughing, the old woman ushered him into a chair.  “Oh, you know I knew you’d be coming.  I saved you some,” she said with a smile as she got to fixing him a plate.  Smiling contentedly, Raven laid the candy on the table, surprised that just sweets could weigh so much after a time.  He soon had dinner in front of him – roast beef with gravy, mashed potatoes, corn, green beans, and a glass of tea.  They conversed easily about the children and his writing as he ate and she drank her own tea, and Raven was once again reminded of how much he truly missed this place.  The woman across the table from him was the closest thing he had ever had to family.

After he was done, she swept his plate up while he busied himself with finding something for the candy.  He finally found a large plastic bowl, yellow with white daisies, and plunked it down on the counter.  Drawing a small knife from his pocket, he slit the bag and dumped the contents into the gaudy bowl.

“The children will be so happy to see you,” Mrs. Pennington said sincerely as she carried the bowl into the sitting room.  It was like a waiting room for potential parents, in addition to a relaxation room for the orphans.  There was a large fireplace on one wall, comfortable armchairs scattered around, and bookshelves that housed volumes on everything from fantasy and westerns to academic books.  Raven remembered spending a great many rainy afternoons in this room, either doing his homework or losing himself in one of his favorite novels.

He chose his favorite chair and settled himself into it as the woman returned to the foyer, calling up the stairs.  “Okay, I know you’re all awake!” she called to no one in particular.  “Yes, Raven is here now, so all of you get down here and say hello to him!”

It was almost as though she had summoned them with magic – one moment, Raven was alone in the room, and the next, there were twelve children seated around him, laughing and chattering.  One little girl, about three, had unabashedly clambered up into his lap and was playing with a loose strand of his hair, fascinated.

Smiling, Raven settled back into the chair.  It was strange.  He had thought he would never want to return to this place after all the years of living here, being rejected time and time again for adoption, but now here he was, telling less-than-scary ghost stories to the enraptured kids around him, sharing candy with them and laughing.  He found himself here every holiday, regardless of his schedule.  He loved the kids, and he was always one of the first to befriend a new child.  Mrs. Pennington always teased him about his way with children; no matter how quiet or shy they might be when they arrived, he would have them laughing and smiling within an hour of meeting them.

The night dragged on in extreme comfort.  In fact, it wasn’t called to an end until long after the candy was gone, the youngest had fallen asleep, and some of the older ones were beginning to nod off.  “Okay, it’s time for bed,” Mrs. Pennington said, gently clapping her hands together.  “It’s nearly eleven, and all of you have been up for an hour past curfew.  To bed, to bed.”

Raven helped carry the smallest upstairs and tuck them into bed, saying goodnight to the ones still awake.  He took the empty bowl back to the kitchen and placed it back in the cabinet after emptying the wrappers he’d collected in it into the trash can.  He stilled after he had closed the cabinet, staring at the patterns in the wood door.

“…Mrs. Pennington,” he began uncertainly, his voice trailing off.  He didn’t know how to ask what he wanted to, mostly because he wasn’t really sure what he wanted to say.  He contented himself with continuing to stare at the cabinet for a moment.

“What is it, dear?” the old woman asked as she continued washing dishes that had piled up from earlier.  She was using the voice she always used when she knew he had something on his mind – almost as though she was saying, “It’s about time.  What’s wrong with you?”

“I… I’ve been wondering something,” Raven said quietly as he turned around to lean against the counter.  “About… when you found me.  When I was a baby.”  He shifted uncomfortably as she turned the water off, flicking his gaze to the linoleum floor.  “When you found me… was… my name, was it Raven?”

Silence filled the kitchen before the woman began to dry the plates, still not looking at him.  “This is sudden.  What is all this about?”

“I… I’ve been having dreams lately.  About someone talking to me… at least, I think it’s me they’re talking to.  But they don’t call me Raven, they call me Reiha, which is why I don’t know if they’re even talking to me or not.  It’s a little disconcerting.  I mean, I know I was orphaned, and I wasn’t sure if maybe that was my real name… but the voice sounds so clear and I was abandoned so young that I didn’t think it was possible for me to remember anything that was said to me before I came here.”

More silence greeted that proclamation before Mrs. Pennington sighed and turned, walking to the table.  “Come, dear.  Sit down.”  Blinking, Raven did as he was told, folding his arms on the table and looking intently at the woman who was like a grandmother to him.

“I had wondered if this would ever come up.”  She was quiet for a moment, and then began to speak again after a deep breath.  “When I found you twenty-one years ago, you were just an infant.  You didn’t seem more than a few months old… less than six months, that much was obvious.  I saw you lying on the porch bundled in the very shirt you’re wearing now.  I brought you inside, naturally, because in this city it isn’t terribly unusual to find orphans in such a state.

“I dressed you in clothes that I had used for some of the other boys, and folded the shirt up in my dresser to give to you when you left the orphanage.  It was an adult-sized shirt, so you obviously didn’t have any need for it at the time.  When I was folding it, I found a piece of rice paper in it – it bore brush-script letters that simply said ‘Reiha Xen’.  I assumed this was your name, but began to call you Raven because it sounded similar but more… well, more normal.  Shawn you picked out for yourself, because it was the last name of your favorite character on a television show you enjoyed when you were young… I forget the name of it now.

“When you were a baby, and even a little boy, you always startled me with how different you were.  You very rarely cried as an infant, usually content to let the other children hold you or lie on your back and stare at the ceiling.  In the eighteen years that I raised you, I can’t remember a single instance of you getting into a fight.  You were such a sweet child, always eager to help out and trying to do everything you could for the people around you.  You never complained about doing your homework or going to school, and I was the one who had to make you stay home when you were sick.

“You never seemed to be bothered that you were never adopted.  In fact, it was almost like you would rather have stayed here… almost as though you felt safe here, for some reason.  In fact, you told me when you were about five that you never wanted to leave.  That had changed a bit by the time you had turned eighteen, but here you are, three years later.”

Sighing, Raven nodded, staring at the table.  “This is the only place I’ve ever felt at home,” the man muttered, mostly to himself and a bit redundantly.  He had known about the shirt, but… his real name was Reiha Xen?  What kind of a name was that?  It didn’t feel right at all.

It’s a title, a quiet voice said in his head.

It’s your title.

“Raven?”

Blinking sharply, Raven shook his head.  “Sorry.  Just took a mental walk somewhere and got lost,” he said a bit sheepishly.  “I’m fine now.”

“Are you sure, dear?” Mrs. Pennington asked, concerned.

He wasn’t sure, not at all, but instead of saying that he merely smiled, nodding.  “Absolutely.  I’m positive.  Now, I really must be getting home.  It’s late and a bit of a walk back to my apartment, and I need my beauty sleep… got a column to finish tomorrow.”

“All right, dear,” the woman said as she pulled him down to kiss his cheek.  “Don’t be a stranger, now.  You know you’re allowed to come by on more than just holidays.  I’d like to see you between now and Thanksgiving,” she added with a bit of a laugh.

“You’ve got it,” Raven said with a jovial wink before he grabbed his coat, pulling it on and zipping up before heading out into the cold again.  The wind was fiercer than it had been a few hours ago, whipping his hair around his face and freezing his skin to the point he could barely feel it.

His hands were nearly frozen, despite being in the confines of his pockets, and he flexed his fingers to make sure he could still move them.  He was pretty certain he could, but with the gradual loss of feeling it was a bit difficult to tell.

Reiha… the voice began again, and Raven ducked against the wind.  The words were louder and clearer now.  Almost like the person was speaking beside him.

Reiha, one day you will grow up and you will do a great many things.  Some will be good, and some will not, but they will all be great in some way or another.  You will be the one to bring the Lasting Calm.  I know it.  I believe it.

The streetlights flickered slightly behind the thin fog.  A pool of yellow light fell around him as he stepped beneath one.  As he reached the middle, the most disconcerting thing he had ever experienced happened.  What had just been severely howling wind suddenly silenced as it died, everything falling still around him.  There was no sound, save for his breathing, which was gradually increasing in speed.  The cold was still there and he could barely feel anything, but the wind was definitely gone.

The next thing he heard was footsteps.  A young girl stepped into the circle of light, stopping a few feet from him.  She reminded him of the man he had met in the elevator earlier that day – she had the same jet black hair that fell long and shapeless to her waist, the same skin like old milk.  She was dressed in a gray tank-top that revealed scrawny arms, gray shorts that revealed scrawny legs, and heavy gray work boots with loosely tied laces that looked ready to fall off her feet at any moment.  However, she wasn’t looking at him – Raven doubted she could see anything with the dark green strip of cloth wrapped around her eyes and tied behind her head.

The girl merely stood there, seeming to stare at him without staring, for almost a minute.  Raven found himself unable to move, simply stuck staring back at this strange and disconcerting creature before him.

After a moment, her lips parted, and a voice like none he had ever heard before escaped them.  It was like three people speaking simultaneously – a man, a woman, and a young child – and she merely said one word.

“Reiha.”

More footsteps approached him from behind.  Raven began to turn around to see what it was, but he didn’t even see the lead pipe that smashed into the back of his head, causing him to see stars for a brief moment before he crumpled to the concrete.