Elijah Tuttle exists in an uneasy place: the creation of a Night-ChildIn a word, vampires. There are two branches of Night-Children, but both stem from Notte, as he was the first. from an actual child is utterly forbidden, but here he is. He lived in London as a contemporary of Charles Dickens, and had enough (just) to eat, a couple sets of clothes, and one very strange skill: he could seemingly hear dead people speaking to him through his mother’s harp. RavenaA vampire, and Notte’s oldest surviving child (not his first, however). is always trying to create her accidental masterpiece of JonathanJonathan is a Night-Child, and an impossibility., so she took a risk and turned him. However, Kin cannot be made into Night-Children (with three exceptions), and Elijah was not one of them. The harp was magic, not the boy. He was turned successfully, but only after he’d been made did Ravena realize what had happened.
Infuriated as if tricked (and honestly a little embarrassed), Ravena decided the best thing to do would be to reward or punish Elijah via that harp. It’s a complicated mess, but Elijah doesn’t know anything else. He’s a clever, bitter little boy, trapped forever in a young body, and unless something wild intervenes, he’ll live forever. As an aside, Ravena has lied to him about this skill since day one. Here is what she said in the short story, “The Bread, The Harp, the Coil of Gold“:
“A rare gift, that,” she says, turning back to me. “Once upon a time, dead spirits spoke to him through that harp. I thought his skill would transfer after death, but alas, it did not. Only his mother speaks to him since he was made mine; no other spirits bother.”