Two and Twenty Dark Tales Read Online Free Page B

looming there. His long dark hair was wild around his face, his gray eyes alight with fury. She knew him now.
    “Your Majesty,” she said.
    He halted in mid-stride, for what he saw made him pause. He took in the form of the golden-haired young man lying motionless on the floor, the left side of his head a mass of burning crimson gore, and did not know what to make of it.
    “Hir yw’r dydd a hir yw’r nos, a hir yw aros Arawn,” he said.
    She understood what she heard, for he had said it countless times before. Long is the day and long is the night, and long is the waiting of Arawn.
    “You will wait no longer,” she said. “For this time I have killed him. Instead of, you know, the other way around.”
    His eyes ran over her, realizing, and though they were gray, they held the same covetous look she had seen in Matthew’s face. “At last. I will take you back to my world, out of this cold. Six thousand years it is since I slept, since I last heard you sing. Now you will be my sweet songbird forever.”
    “No,” she said. “I will sing to you only once more.”
    “Wait!” His face grew pale. “Not yet, not here…” He strode toward her, hand outstretched to cover her mouth.
    But she had already begun to sing the words of the old lullaby he had taught her long ago.
    “Holl amrantau’r sêr ddywedant
    Ar hyd y nos.”
    The furious gray eyes fluttered. He halted mere inches away. “Six thousand years since…” he said, trailing off as her voice hushed low, soft, drowsy, irresistible, whether in Welsh or English.
    “This is the way to the realm of glory,
    All through the night.”
    He swayed and shivered. “So cold,” he said. Then his eyes closed. He would have fallen if she had not helped him to the bed, where he curled on his side like a baby and slept.
    She touched his cheek. It felt like ice.
    “Darkness is a different light,
    That exposes true beauty.”
    A scuffling sound made her turn her head. The mustachioed man in the tracksuit was stealing toward her, ignoring the body on the floor. His tiny eyes were narrowed as if against a gale force wind, and she understood it took all of his will to resist the power of her song.
    “I… mean you no harm,” he said, wincing at every note. “The bag he has. The velvet bag.”
    Still singing, she stepped back, allowing him to move past the body of Matthew to get closer to Arawn. His fingers wiggled into the big man’s coat, now cracked with frost, and drew forth a heavy velvet bag full of something that clicked.
    “Teulu’r nefoedd mewn tawelwch
    Ar hyd y nos.”
    Henderson focused all his thought on the bag, forcing himself not to see the rim of ice now gleaming where Arawn’s skin had been. He could not be bothered with impossible twaddle like that now. One slip and the girl’s song would take him too. Only the siren call of the gems was stronger, so he laid all his thoughts upon them. They winked as he poured them into his palm, whispering their promises.
    A small hand reached over and scooped up half the gems. He dared glance at her face with its white skin and black eyes, nose like a beak, sharp over her mouth as she sang. The sleek black hair on her head resembled nothing so much as feathers now.
    The song came to an end, and the silence was like a death.
    On the bed lay a man made entirely of ice, sleeping as if he would never wake.
    Aderyn slipped the gems into her pocket and made her way to the wreckage of the door. Henderson tried to hum the melody she had sung, longing to hear it again. But he was off by a note here or there. He knew he always would be.
    “Have you ever been to Peru?” she asked, but not as if she was expecting an answer. “I bet Bengal is a beautiful place. There are two books on the bed you might find interesting. I leave them to you.”
    She fixed the silver pin to her t-shirt and stood in the doorway, her silhouette black against the sunset sky. “Now I really must fly,” she said.
    And she did.
    – The End