The Shadow Beneath
The old quarter had always been the part of the city that didn't quite behave. Emre had grown up on the edge of it, in one of the narrow townhouses that leaned toward each other across the alley as though sharing a secret, and he had learned as a child which streets were reliable and which were not — which would take you where you were trying to go and which would deliver you somewhere adjacent, close but subtly wrong, so that you arrived at your destination slightly off-kilter and couldn't quite say why. Everyone who grew up in Meridian knew this. It was not considered remarkable. It was, in fact, considered a mark of a certain kind of local pride: our city is old enough to have its own personality.
The darkness that had taken up residence in the old quarter since the turn of the year was different in kind. It did not behave like shadow, which moved with the sun and disappeared in lamplight. It did not behave like fog, which had texture and moisture and eventually burned off. It occupied specific spaces — the same spaces, consistently — with a precision that suggested intention, and it did not respond to light in the way that darkness should. He had stood at the entrance to Tallow Court on three separate occasions with a lantern, and on each occasion the darkness had retreated exactly far enough to keep itself from direct contact with the flame, and then stopped, and waited,