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wind is lonely, love, and always looking for company.
    My father had lessons and he had stories, and it was up to me to learn the difference between the two.
    The wind howls and I discard my father’s warning, stretching my ears to meet the sound, to unravel it. My head begins to ache dully as I listen, trying to make words where there are none. I give up, slipping back beneath the sheets, folding myself into my cocoon so that the wind song comes through broken.
    Just as I’m about to find sleep, Wren shifts beside me. She rouses, and I hear the soft padding of feet as she slides from the bed and crosses the room, slipping out in search of our mother’s bed.
    But something is off.
    There’s a slight creak, the sound of footsteps over one of the two warped boards between the bed and the window. I sit up. Wren is standing, framed by glass and wooden borders, her blond hair almost white in the darkness. Without the shell of blankets, I can hear the wind again, the music on it, and the almost-words that hum against my skull.
    “Wren?” I whisper, but she doesn’t turn around. Am I dreaming?
    She reaches one hand up to the clasp pinning the window shut, and turns it. Her small fingers curl around the bottom lip of the window, trying to slide it up, but it weighs too much for her. It has always weighed too much. I realize for the first time that the shutters are open beyond the window glass. I don’t remember unlocking them, but there they are, thrown back, exposing the night beyond. Wren presses her fingers against the wooden lip, and somehow the window begins to slide up a fraction.
    “Wren!”
    I’m out of bed and at her side before she can get any farther, pulling her back into the room and closing the gap where the cool air is seeping in. I look for something out on the moor, something that would have drawn my sister to the window, but there is nothing. Nothing but the usual black-and-white night, the stray trees and rocks and the humming wind. I turn to face Wren, barring her path, and she blinks, the kind of startled blinks of a person waking suddenly. At my back the wind presses against the glass, and then it seems to break, dissolving into the dark.
    “Lexi? What’s wrong?” she asks, and I must seem crazed, stretching myself across the window frame and looking at my sister as if she’s possessed. I peel myself from my post, ushering her back to bed. On my way I light the three candles, and they burst to life and fill the room with yellow light. Wren slides beneath the covers, and I climb in beside her, resting my back against the headboard, facing the candles and the window and the night beyond.

K NOCK . K NOCK . K NOCK .
    I curl deeper beneath the blankets. I can tell by the smell alone that it’s morning. Bread and late-summer air. I don’t know when I fell asleep, or if I only slipped into that space between…
    Knock. Knock. Knock.
    I hear the front door open.
    My shoulders and neck are stiff, my head pounding and my thoughts too thick as I pull myself from the bed and lean back against it. I listen, but the voices at the door are too low to be deciphered through the walls. One grumble is distinct enough, and I wonder how long Otto has been here. I pull my clothes on and open my bedroom door, pausing in the doorway.
    “Sometimes boys wander off, Jacob,” says Otto.
    Jacob Drake?
    “Think,” adds my uncle. “Where might he have gone?”
    “No,” answers a thin, nervous voice. It is indeed Mr. Drake, Helena and Edgar’s father. “He wouldn’t. He’s afraid of the dark…Afraid of the day, too.” He adds a sad, strangled chuckle.
    I hear Otto pacing back and forth. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he says finally. “Come in. You too, Bo.”
    I wait until they’ve gone into the kitchen before slipping in behind them.
    “Could someone have taken him?” asks Otto, accepting a mug of coffee from my mother.
    Mr. Drake is slight and unimposing, with hair that must once have been as