MY NEIGHBOR LITERALLY BITES

SABRINA SIN

MILLY TAIDEN

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Copyright © 2026 by Sabrina Sin

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1

HANNAH

The road into Briar Glen narrows to a single lane, and by the time the house comes into view, my hands have memorized the wheel.

"Okay," Lily says from the passenger seat, lowering her phone. "That's either our house or where they film the documentaries about it."

I slow the car to a crawl. Grandmother Elspeth's or Grandmother Evie, as known to everyone else, Victorian rises out of the overgrowth like something that grew there—three stories of gray clapboard, a turret crowned with a weathervane gone green, porch railings sagging in a slow surrender. Ivy has climbed halfway up the east face. Two of the upstairs windows are dark in a way that feels deliberate.

"It has good bones," I say.

"It has a good skeleton, Mom. That's different."

I pull into the gravel drive and cut the engine. The quiet that rushes in is enormous—no traffic, no neighbors' televisions, just wind moving through pines and the tick of the cooling engine. After eleven years in an apartment where I could hear Gregory's new key in the lock before I could hear my own thoughts, the silence is almost a physical thing.

"Boxes won't carry themselves," I say, and get out before she can read my face.

The porch step gives a little under my boot, soft with rot. I test it twice before trusting it. Lily comes up behind me with a box marked KITCHEN—MAYBE and stops at my shoulder, looking up at the door. Stained glass, dust-furred, a pattern of leaves I remember tracing as a kid.

"She really left it to you," Lily says, quieter now.

"She really did."

"Why not your dad? Or⁠—"

"Because she liked me," I say, as I turn the key in the old lock.

Inside, the air is cool, stale, and smells of cedar and dust. Something sweet passes through my nose—lavender, maybe, ground into the floorboards decades ago. Sheets cover the furniture in the front room. A grandfather clock stands dead in the corner. Lily sets the box down and turns a slow circle, taking in the height of the ceilings, the carved banister, the water stain blooming across the parlor plaster.

"This is going to cost a fortune," she says.

"Probably."

"Like, a visible fortune. We're going to be able to see the money leaving."

"We'll do it room by room." I run a hand along the banister and it comes away gray. "I did the whole apartment myself, remember. The bathroom tile⁠—"

"They fell off in November."

"It held until November."

She almost smiles. That's what I keep watching for in her—the almost-smile that means she's still in there under the sarcasm, still the kid who used to narrate our grocery trips like wildlife footage. She's been behaving okay for me since the divorce, but I've been performing for her, and neither has called each other out for it.

We haul boxes until daylight goes amber. Lily claims the bedroom with the window seat. I take my grandmother's old room without thinking about it, then stand in the doorway a long while, not going in.

Around dusk, dragging the last suitcase up the drive, I see it through the trees. A neighboring estate sits next door, hidden behind a wall of dark pines, and where my house is decaying, that one is intention. Wrought iron. Black stone. Not a single light on, though the windows are sparkling clean. It seems to observe the road like a closed face watches a stranger.

Where the properties meet, I see a man standing. He's tall, dressed in dark clothes, perfectly still. Not working in his yard, not walking a dog, not doing any of the ordinary things people do. Just standing. Looking at the house. Looking, I realize, at me.

I should look away. Instead something holds me there, some pressure between us like the moment before a storm breaks out. His eyes are burning into mine, and the rest of the evening seems to go very quiet, quieter than the quiet already was, as if the wind itself paused to see what I'd do.

A creak behind me breaks the spell. Lily's foot appears next to me, and when I look back, he's still there. I lift a hand—neighborly, automatic, but he doesn't wave. After a moment he turns and walks back toward the black house, unhurried, and the pines close over him.

"Who was that?" Lily asks.

"Neighbor, I guess."

"Friendly."

"Mountain people are private." I'm already explaining it to myself. Long drive. Empty stomach. A strange house and stranger nerves. An imagination that's had eleven hundred miles to wind itself up. "Come on. Let's find the kettle before it's pitch black in here."

We eat gas-station sandwiches at the kitchen table by the torch of my phone because three bulbs are dead and I haven't found which box I put them in. Lily tells me the upstairs faucet makes a noise like a dying goose. I tell her we'll add it to the list. The list is already, in my head, extending past my arm.

She goes up around ten. I stay down to check the locks, a habit Gregory left me—the man cheated for two years and somehow I'm the one who learned to check that everything's secured before bed. The front door's solid. The side door's solid. The back door is not.

It's ajar by a half-inch, the deadbolt thrown but the strike plate splintered, as though someone forced it and then, oddly, pulled it almost-shut behind them. I pause on the spot and listen to the sounds surrounding me. Nothing. Just the dying goose, dropping somewhere overhead.

There are marks on the floor by the pantry. Dried mud, the tread of a boot, tracked in, stopping at the pantry door and going no farther. I crouch over them. Bigger than mine. Bigger than Lily's.

And in the small room off the pantry—Elspeth's old workroom, empty but for shelving—there's a smell that doesn't belong. Sharp and metallic, like a fistful of old pennies.

I check the silver in the drawer. There. The clock on the mantel, the only thing in this house worth lifting. Untouched. Nothing's gone that I can see, and that's somehow worse than a clean robbery would be—because a thief takes things, and I don't know what this was looking for, or whether it found it.

I consider calling the sheriff. But explaining out loud this feeling, on my first night, in a town that doesn't know me yet, doesn't make sense. Instead I push the rear door shut, drag the table against it, and find a hammer in the KITCHEN—MAYBE box.

"Not tonight," I say to the empty house. To whoever was here. To Gregory, maybe, three states away. "You don't get to scare us off on the first night."

Upstairs, my daughter is finally asleep. I'm overreacting from all the stress, so I head upstairs and lay down, praying I will sleep away the worry.

2

ALARIC

The estate has been quiet for so long, I can feel when someone isn't quite right, and tonight that feeling is rising.

I have stood at the east window most nights since before the road outside was paved, and I have never once needed to grip the sill like I am now. The tumbler in my other hand gives a small, clean sound, a fracture running corner to corner, and I set it down before I crush it. Blood is the last thing I should waste tonight. I am already losing enough. Across the black stand of pines, the old Victorian has lights in it again.

I remember when Elspeth kept that kitchen lamp burning through snowstorms, not because she feared the dark, but because she had opinions about refusing it. She would open the door in wool socks, gray braid over one shoulder, and tell me I looked like a funeral had learned to walk. Then she would leave a jar on the step without asking whether I wanted it. Blackberry. Fig. Once, a bitter tonic she said would improve my manners.

I never told her I kept the jars. Cleaned, shelved, empty now. Human things have always outlived the humans who pressed meaning into them. That is their particular cruelty. That house had already taken one stubborn woman from my life. Now another has stepped inside it, carrying boxes, sarcasm, and a daughter with Elspeth's chin.

My ears haven't stopped filling with her heartbeat. I should be able to single one out at this distance, but it threads through and finds me anyway—steady, a little quick from work, unmistakably alive. Beneath it, the particular warmth of a body that has spent the day moving. Human. Wholly, helplessly human. Whatever she is, she is not one of mine.

I know what the pull means. I have spent a century pretending the knowledge died with the last, but the old language wakes in me without permission, certain as gravity. Mate. The word lands in a place of my mind that I sealed long ago. Now, it's at the front of my cortex, as if it had always lived there.

Once, a long time ago, I believed I felt something like this. I was wrong then. I will not name her. Naming her has never helped. What matters is that the memory rises now only to show me. Older. Sharper.

And she does not know. She has been in that house two days. She has no idea what I am, no clue what the dark in this valley remembers, no idea that a man she glimpsed once already feels her pulse as though it were his own. She is exactly the wrong kind of person for this to find—newly arrived, building a life out of a dead woman's furniture. Unguarded in every way that matters.

I convince myself I will return to my book, but I can't. I stay at the window like a sentry posted by no one, and I am ashamed of the watching even as I refuse to stop.

She is working late. Her shape moves past the downstairs windows, a length of trim balanced on one shoulder, and the girl's voice carries thin and clear across the cold.

"It's freezing in here. Why is it freezing?"

"Because the storm windows are a hundred years old and so is everything else. Hand me the level."

"This is a haunted-house level of cold, Mom."

"Then put on the haunted-house sweater. The one from the cedar chest."

A pause. "Okay, that one's actually nice."

It is nothing—just a mother and daughter in an old place that will not hold its heat. I find I am listening to the cadence of it like a starved man at a kitchen wall, and the comparison does not flatter me, so I let it go.

This is precisely why I cannot and will not go near her. Not because I do not want to. Because I do, and desire is the most dangerous thing. My world is not a place a human walks into and out of with a soul. There are old debts in it, older enemies, and the plain fact that nearness to me has never once been safe for anyone soft enough to bruise. The best thing I can do is allow that woman and her daughter to remain clueless. She will think me rude for not being neighborly no doubt, but rude is survivable for her.

But I have eyes, and they will not stop working merely because I've ordered myself to not. I see every part of the house from here. The cellar doors at the side—two slanted leaves over the old coal chute—sit crooked, the latch between them rusted through and hanging by a single screw. Any drunk with a screwdriver would be inside in under a minute. Any creature with worse intentions would not need the minute.

The lights go out a little after midnight. I wait longer than I need to, and cross into the garden. I right the cellar latch and sink a new screw and a second beside it where the wood is still sound, working by touch in the dark. The north window I ease back into its frame and shim until the catch finally bites. The porch bolt I don't replace—too obvious by daylight—but I free the seized one and set it true so that, thrown, it will hold. I leave no card, no note, no sign. Just small improvements any tired woman might credit to a house finally cooperating, or to her own half-remembered effort.

I decline to believe it's protection, as I walk back through the wet pines. I'm preventing anything from happening. Nothing more.

I reach my own door, and turn back, making myself the only promise that has ever mattered. I will keep my distance. I won't touch the bond. I won't carry my world to her threshold.

3

HANNAH

Ihave learned that a scrub brush is cheaper than a therapist. The front parlor has surrendered three layers of grime by noon, and I'm on my knees working a rag into the baseboards when Lily drops onto the bottom stair with a paper sack and a triumphant expression.

"So," she says. "I have intel."

"You have a soda and a sunburn."

"Both. Also intel." She unwraps a stick of gum and folds it into her mouth. "I went to the hardware place for the wood screws you wanted. Ruby — she owns it, red hair, talks like she's being timed — she knew grandma. Knew the house. Knew the porch needed re-flashing before I even said which house."

I sit back on my heels and stretch the ache out of my shoulders. "Small towns."

"It's not small, Mom, it's nosy." Lily chews, considering. "Anyway, she asked who was helping us. I said nobody. She got weird about it."

"Weird how?"

"Weird like she wanted to say a name and didn't." Lily nods toward the dark line of pines and the roof beyond them that belongs to the man we haven't talked about since we saw him. "Three different people brought up the neighbor. Nobody finished a sentence about him. It's a whole town of unfinished sentences."

"Maybe he's just private."

"Maybe everyone's terrible at gossip." She stands, brushing off her jeans. "I'm gonna go figure out the upstairs bathroom. The faucet sounds like an orchestra."

"It's just the pipes."

"That's what the pipes want you to think."

She thumps up the stairs, the radiators resume their slow clicking, and a shutter bangs somewhere I keep meaning to fix.

I return to the chest I was sorting through. grandmother kept everything. Hymn programs, seed catalogs, a tin of buttons sorted by color. I'm halfway through lifting out spools and a cushion bristling with pins, when the bottom doesn't sound right under my knuckles. Hollow where it should be solid.

I work the panel with my fingernail, and it lifts. Three notebooks, cloth-bound sit organized underneath. Inside one, columns of symbols I don't recognize. Dates running back forty years, each one paired with a set of initials. Marginalia in grandmother's tidy hand: meeting moved, third lantern, trust C., not the others. On another page, underlined twice, a single line that snags on something in me and won't budge: We shelter the ones the world would drag into the light.

I read it three times. It's a metaphor. It has to be — she taught Sunday school, she ran a literacy drive, she was a woman who collected buttons. Daylight is the kind of thing you say about the shy, the shamed and the forgotten. People who couldn't show their faces. I give the notes a sensible answer, and I keep the notebooks, stacked beside me where I can see them.

By late afternoon I've stopped pretending I'm not rattled, so I do what I always do with a feeling I can't fix — I ignore it. I head to grandmother's workroom, off the back hall, where the good tools and the worse drafts live. I put the hammer inside, and lock the wooden door behind me to avoid the house getting colder than it already is. It's so hot outside, I can't make sense of why it gets so cold in here.

The evening creeps in, and I pass the hall again to find the workroom wide open. The dark of the room exhaling cold into the corridor. I stop with a plate of toast going cold in my hand and run the whole evening backward. I locked it. I felt the bolt. The key is still warm in my pocket; I close my fist around it to be sure.

"Lily?" I call to the second floor.

"What?"

"Did you go in Grandma's workroom?"

"The creepy one? Hard pass."

So. The key, in my jeans, and the door is open anyway. The tools hang where they belong, the drafting table sits untouched. It would be easy to decide the old latch failed, that a house this tired can't be trusted to hold a bolt. I can't explain it, so how can I explain that to someone else. I've had a lifetime of being told my feelings aren't valid, and I'm done with that. I shut the door again. I lock it again, and I stand a beat too long before I find something else to do.

I'm fixing a loose tread on the cellar steps with a flashlight. The third step from the top has been off since we arrived, and I set my weight on it to test the give. A dumb idea because the board splits clean and my foot drops through into nothing. As I'm close to tumbling over, a hand clamps around my arm and stops the fall.

"Don't twist," a voice says. "Lift straight."

I turn to the voice, and a man's eyes meet mine. Silver, bright, gorgeous yet intimidating. His black hair falls slightly over his forehead giving him an incredibly handsome look. It's the neighbor. I'm sure of it. He steadies me as though I weigh nothing, and I begin to remove my foot from between the boards. Once I'm stable he lets go and steps back.

My heart misbehaves. "Who are you, and how did you get in my cellar?"

"Alaric Blackwood." His answer is quiet. "Outer door. Doesn't latch." He kneels, examines the broken tread, runs a thumb along the splintered edge. "Rot, not the screw. Whole stringer's soft. This would have happened eventually."

"And you happened to be passing my cellar at night, Mr. Blackwood."

"I saw the light." He says it like it explains everything, and maybe in his world it does. He's already lining up the flashlight on the next tread, testing it. "This one too. And the one above it."

"I can manage my own stairs."

"Clearly." Dry man, but not unkind. The cellar feels smaller for him standing in it. "Replace the stringer before you put weight anywhere on these. I'll send dimensions."

"I didn't ask you to."

"No," he agrees, and that's all. He climbs past me, careful of the rot he already mapped in darkness, and pauses at the top. "Lock the outer door, if it'll hold. Some of them don't, in these old houses."

He disappears leaving me staring where he stood. I move toward the landing and lock the main door with certainty, and sit in bed mulling over what he said.

4

ALARIC

Ileave her in the cellar and don't go home. Tonight, I know the darkness and the night won't hold me. The bond hums deep inside like a struck wire, but it's the other that grinds me down: the certainty, cold and exact, that I am not the only one who has studied this house.

So I search the surroundings. The soil along the wall is disturbed on the far left—not churned by an animal, not scuffed by a wandering boot. There are prints of knees, the impressions paired and even. Someone's weight settled forward and watched. The grass beyond is bent in a line that points, with unkind precision, at Hannah's kitchen window.

I bend over and lay two fingers in the depression. The fence is worse. Third post from the gate, low on the inner face where nobody would ever look, a small notch has been cut into the wood and rubbed dark to keep it from showing. A marker. A range, perhaps, or a count.

Under the hedge I find the wire threaded along the base of the growth where the shadow swallows it. A hair is caught in the twist. Not Hannah's. Not Lily's. Coarse, gray-blond, threaded deliberately through the wire as a tell. Whoever set this trip line wanted to know whether it had been touched. It's been set to tell a careful hand when something crosses. I follow it with my eyes because the sort of person who lays a wire like this also remembers exactly how he left it.

And then, at the old stones near the lilac, footprints. I freeze, there were protections here once. Old ones. Elspeth's, most likely, though she never told me everything she laid into this land. The fact that anyone still tries to cross her when she protected us always upset me. The footprints sit beneath the marker stone, the residue of something burned to test what the burning would wake.

The vampires that tried to harm her always took it a step too far, but this is fresh. They know what this house used to hold. It doesn't hold it anymore, and they haven't stopped.

I straighten and let the night settle around me. Whoever moves here understands sightlines, and patience, and the soft places around a household. They avoid the obvious paths. They kneel instead of stride. They mark wood instead of breaking it. This is no thief. I don't finish the thought. There is no profit in finishing it tonight. What I can finish is the stair.

I go back to the cellar from the outside—an offense I have already named to her and intend to remedy whether she permits it or not. The split step waits where I left it, splintered along the rot. I have watched enough wood die to know what killed this one.

I work fast, and quietly while the two females sleep upstairs. Pulling the ruined board, bracing the stringer, fitting new wood I carried from my own workshop, and sinking the fasteners by feel. The wood takes the screws clean. When I press my weight against the step, it holds without complaint.

"You're really bad at being a burglar."

I turn.

The girl stands three steps up, arms folded, an unlit flashlight in one hand. The daughter, Lily. Dark hair down, pajamas, bare feet, and not one trace of fear on her face. She should be afraid. A strange man, a dark cellar, but she's more defiant.

"You don't fix what you came to steal," she says. "First rule."

"I'll remember it."

"Most people, you catch them somewhere they shouldn't be, they jump." She tips her head. "You didn't."

"I heard you on the stairs," I lie.

"I came down the quiet way."

"There isn't one of those."

Her mouth twitches—not a smile, an assessment. "Huh."

I should leave. A century of discipline tells me to set down the screwdriver and disappear. Instead I stay, caught by a sixteen-year-old, and find I don't entirely want to go.

"Lily Marlowe," she says, and does not offer her hand. "Since that's the second time you've been here tonight, you should know whose stairs you're trespassing on."

"Alaric."

"I know. The scary neighbor." She studies me. "You're less scary than I thought. That's probably a flaw in my judgment."

"It isn't."

"No?"

"Whatever you think is wrong with this house," I say carefully, "trust the part of you that came down here barefoot to check."

Her arms loosen, a fraction. "So there is something wrong with it."

I don't respond to her statement, it's better she doesn't know.

She watches me the way clever children watch adults who lie gently—not insulted, just filing it away. "You're really quiet for a rich guy. And really calm. And you're not freezing."

"It's a mild night."

"It's forty degrees and you're in shirtsleeves."

There isn't an answer, so I give her none. I lower the screwdriver on the workbench where Hannah will find it and assume it was always hers.

"Your mother shouldn't use the cellar door until it's fixed. Tell her it sticks. Don't tell her I said so."

"Why not?"

"Because she'll want to know why a stranger cares."

Lily turns this over with the suspicion of a girl who has already been lied to by men that smile. Then she nods once—a small, dangerous concession. "Okay, Mr. Blackwood. I won't tell her."

"Good."

"This time."

I climb from the cellar and stop. I can hear Hannah breathing in sleep above. I had braced myself for that moment like I do most nights now, but what I didn't brace for was the lighter, sharper weight of a child, awake, watching me on purpose because some animal sense told her to.

Two of them now. Two heartbeats I have decided, without deciding, to stand between and whatever knelt by that fence. I repeat to myself that I'll still remain distant, but the voice inside calls me a liar.

5

HANNAH

The double doors of the Community Hall open onto the smell of coffee, floor polish, and someone's very confident casserole.

"There," Lily says, steering me in by the elbow. "Now townspeople have seen you, and we won't become the people who live in the haunted house and never come out."

"We've been here three weeks now, Lily."

"Exactly. Any longer and kids start daring each other to knock."

The hall is fuller than I expect for a Wednesday evening. Folding tables line the walls, covered with sign-up sheets, tool catalogs, donated pies, and a handwritten poster that reads ANNUAL HOUSEWARES SALE.

A red-haired woman spots us from behind a table stacked with paint samples and pamphlets. "You're Hannah. Lily, you didn't warn me your mom was coming." She sticks out a hand. "Ruby Bell. I own Briar Glen Hardware store."

"She talked me down from the expensive primer," Lily offers, like a credential.

"You didn't need it. That house has good structure. Bad everything else, but good bones."

People look without fully turning. Cups pause halfway to mouths. Conversations dip, then rise again around us.

"Don't mind them," Ruby murmurs. "They're deciding if you're Evie's granddaughter again or your own thing. Takes a week."

A small woman in three overlapping scarves appears with a paper plate of lemon bars. "Elspeth would be beside herself, seeing you here." She presses my hand in both of hers. "Clara Whitmore. I run the bookshop. Your grandmother and I were close. Closer than most knew, honestly."

"She never mentioned a bookshop," I say.

"No." Clara smiles, and something careful lives behind it. "She kept her people in separate drawers, your Evie. Always did. You'll find that out, restoring the place." Then, lighter: "Ask me anything about the town. I'm a terrible gossip and proud."

An older man with a white beard and suspenders has been listening from beside a table of donated tools. "You're doing the south porch yourself?" Blunt, no introduction.

"Trying to."

"Theo Maddox. I framed half that porch in nineteen-ninety-something." He doesn't shake my hand, as his are too dirt-stained to bother. "Whoever rotted out the column hid it under filler. Don't trust filler. You'll go to lean on something and meet the floor."

"I've already met several floors."

That earns me the first real laugh tonight, and some of the watching loosens into welcome.

A man in a flannel shirt eases over, coffee in hand, sheriff's star half-hidden by the cup. "Ben Holloway." He has a steady, unhurried arrival. "Settling in all right? No trouble up the hill?"

I think back to the door unlocked, the journals I don't understand, and the cellar. "Nothing a hammer won't fix."

He holds my gaze a beat past comfortable. "It's an old house, alone at the end of that road. You see anything that doesn't sit right, you call me. Doesn't have to be a crime to be worth a call."

"I'll remember that."

He nods like he knows I'm storing the comment rather than using it, and lets it go. The talk drifts, as small-town talk does, to my nearest neighbor.

"Blackwood paid for the whole roof on the church and never put his name on it," Ruby says. "Won't come to a single thing, though. Weddings, funerals, nothing."

"Generous and rude," Clara says fondly. "Both. Mr. Blackwood has always been both."

"Mr. Blackwood." Theo snorts.

"My grandmother swore the man looked the same in nineteen-sixty as he did when she was a girl," someone calls something from the coffee station, and the room laughs. Clara laughs a half-second late.

"Mountain water," Ruby declares. "Keeps you young and mean."

The side entrance opens, and the atmosphere changes before I understand why—conversations don't stop so much as recalibrate, and people stand a touch straighter. I swing round and Alaric comes into focus, and everything else blurry.

Alaric is not built for the lights glare and lemon bars. He stops just inside the hall, in black clothes as usual, perfectly still while everyone else remembers how to move.

"Mr. Blackwood." Ruby recovers first. "We're honored."

"Ms. Marlowe." He says to me, past all of them. "Your boundary wall."

"Good afternoon to you too."

"The old garden wall between our properties is leaning. The frost heave took the footing. It will come down in the next hard rain, onto your side."

"Then I'll deal with it when it does."

"You'll deal with a ton of wet stone across your only access to the back. Or you'll handle it now, while it's stacked dry."

Theo grunts approval from the tool table. "He's right about the footing. Always was bad ground there."

"It's my wall on my side. I'll have it looked at."

"It's half my wall. That's the trouble with shared lines." Something almost like dry amusement moves under the words. "I'm not offering to take it over, Ms. Marlowe. I'm telling you a thing about gravity."

"Generous," I say, echoing Clara without meaning to. A few people grin into their coffee.

His attention hasn't left me once. Not in a way I can call rude. He isn't crowding, isn't charming. He simply tracks me, unbothered, the way you'd watch the one moving part in a machine you don't trust. It should make my skin crawl. It does something less convenient than that.

I'm not doing this again. I spent years across a table from my ex-husband who analyzed my every move so he could use them.

"Theo," Alaric says, still focused on me, "you know that wall."

"Stone by stone."

"Then come before the rain. In daylight, so Ms. Marlowe can supervise and disapprove."

Lily makes a small strangled sound that is absolutely a laugh.

"I don't need supervising," I react.

"No," he agrees. "But you'd want to. I would, in my place." He inclines his head a fraction—to me, to Theo, to no one else—and turns. "Saturday morning. I'll bring the levels."

The entrance he came in closes, and everyone exhales. Conversation rushes back in to fill the space he left.

"Well," Ruby says brightly. "That's the most words I've heard out of him in a decade."

"Lucky me," I say.

Lily bumps my shoulder. "You're making that twitch thing with your mouth."

"What twitch thing?"

"The thing where you're annoyed and trying not to smile."

"I'm only annoyed." I pick up a lemon bar trying to act normal. Saturday morning. In my own garden, with witnesses, because of gravity.

On the drive home, I notice I'm still annoyed, but something tells me that it's more than that. In fact, I know it's not only that. It's that pull I feel when he's near.

6

ALARIC

Ilisten from outside the hall to all the conversations starting again now I've left. Lily laughs at something, and Hannah answers a question in her soft voice. Their voices dissolve as I hear two villagers on the corner, collars up against the wind.

"—after the old Marlowe place," the heavier one says. "Real polite about it."

I take it for talk about Hannah and Lily. Then the other shakes his head.

"Older fellows. Wanted to know who took Evie's things after she passed. Who got the house, her stuff."

"Strangers care about an old schoolteacher's boxes?"

"Said they were historians." He laughs, uneasy. "Asked if Evie had family who knew her work."

I cross to them before the laugh finishes. People here have learned not to expect conversation from me, and the lack of it unsettles them more than any sharp word would.

"These men," I say. "When?"

The heavier one steps back. "Mr. Blackwood. Couple days back, maybe three. Why?"

"What did they drive?"

"Dark car. Didn't think much of it." He frowns. "Should we have?"

"No," I say, because a true answer would do them no good. "Goodnight."

It is the first courtesy I have shown anyone in this town, and the wrongness of it moves them off faster than a threat.

I walk past a lamp and the road turns to gravel. The public notice board stands where it has always stood, at the trailhead, layered with church suppers and lost dogs. I nearly miss it. The mark is small, scored low into the post and half-covered by a flyer — a circle crossed by three short lines. The hunters' sign. I haven't seen one carved in earnest in forty years. My hand does not rise to touch it. The last one was outside a mill town that no longer appears on maps.

In the dead grass below the post there is ash. Not from any chimney — finer than that, paler, the kind left when a thing is burned to send a message rather than to keep warm. I kneel over it. The wind has not yet scattered it, so it is fresh. Whoever scattered it knew precisely what it said, and trusted that no one in Briar Glen would.

These are not tourists. Tourists do not cut old warnings into trailhead posts. Vandals break what they can see; thieves take what they can sell. This hunter has done it before and will do it again.

I think of the lit windows behind me, and of telling Hannah. Of her face changing, and the questions that would open after it. Who burns a circle into a post, and why. What her grandmother truly did with her evenings. Who I am, that I can read every line of it at a glance. Every honest answer is a door I cannot hold open. A warning stripped of its reasons is only fear with no shape, and fear like that has never kept a single person alive. So I will say nothing. The choice is the right one and sits in me like a swallowed stone.

I drive back and call it caution. It is a cleaner word than the truth, which is that I cannot point the car home until I have seen the two walk out of that hall unharmed.

I am in the lot, close enough to count the heartbeats still inside, when a voice cuts across the dark.

"Normal people go home when they leave a party."

Lily. She has come out alone, hands buried in her sleeves, and she crosses the gravel toward me like I'm a fixed part of the night, not a man she has met only once.

"I left," I say.

"You left and then stood in a dark parking lot. That's weird. That's two steps from a true-crime documentary."

I say nothing. Most people read silence as a door closing. She reads it as one held ajar.

"Mom thinks you're rude," she says. "I told her you're just bad at people. Different problem."

"Is it?"

"Rude's a choice. You look more like somebody who forgot how it's done." She tilts her head. "So why are you really out here?"

The question is harder than her voice carries it. She is sixteen and she has already learned to notice the gap between what a person says and does. A useful habit. An inconvenient one to stand in front of.

"It's late," I say. "I like the quiet."

"Sure." She doesn't believe me and doesn't bother to hide it. "You had a face on, when you came in. Like somebody handed you bad news."

"Not at all."

"Huh." She nods slowly, as if I've finally said something worth keeping. "Go figure." She turns, then stops. "For the record — you're not nearly as scary as you think you are."

Then she's gone, back inside. I wait until the door shuts. Until the heartbeats inside come whole again before heading home.

The road home is familiar, ten thousand times driven without a thought. Tonight I cannot stop hearing Lily. Somewhere in this last week they stopped being a complication on the next property and became something I lack any clean word for. Not strangers. More like family. It's not comforting.

I learned that last time, in the cruelest lesson there is. It means heartbreak. Problems. Difficulties. None of which I want to deal with. I came here to outlive everyone I might lose, to want nothing the world could take from me. The first true threat to find me has chosen the one town where that plan has already, quietly, failed. The hunters aren't the only danger I carry home tonight. They came for whatever Elspeth hid. They do not yet know I'm here — that next door to Elspeth, I'm there.

7

HANNAH

The pencil snaps against the page, and the line I meant to trace goes ragged. I've spread the journals across the quilt, and not one of them will make sense. My grandmother's hand is small, looping through dates and the symbols. A triangle and a circle together, and a circle with horizontal lines. A mark like a key. A column of initials that match no one I know. Under one she's written, moved it to the second safe place. The first is no longer ours. As if she handed me a map and kept the explanations. Evie. What was your secret?

The silence is driving me crazy, and I can't think straight. Lily's downtown with a couple of girls she met at the diner, gone till dark. I slide the smallest notebook into my bag and go find Clara.

Her bookstore is all dust, warm paper, and a cinnamon stick she keeps smoldering by the register. She brightens at the bell, then sees my face and sets down her tea.

"Hannah. You look like you've been arguing with a ghost."

"My grandmother." I lay the journal on the counter and open it. "I can't understand half of what she wrote. I thought—well, I thought you may be able to help because you knew her for a long time."

Clara pulls her glasses down and goes quiet. Her finger hovers over the triangle and circle.

"Now that," she says slowly, "I've seen. Not in a book." She lifts a yellowed map of Briar Glen from the wall and spreads it between us. "Evie used to walk. Everywhere, all weather, marking her routes. Give me a minute."

She matches the journal to the map. The key-shape, she decides, is the old chapel past the orchard; the triangle-circle one, the creek crossing below it. She taps, frowns, corrects herself twice.

"This one." Her nail rests on the horizontal lined circle. "That's the north woods, the tree line. And this, beside it—" She hesitates. "There's a hut up there. Trapper's place, ancient. Your grandmother went up more than made sense especially at her age. I asked her once. She said she liked the walk." Clara's smile wavers. "She didn't, particularly. She hated the cold."

"What was she doing up there?"

"I never knew." Clara closes the journal gently. "She kept her own counsel, your Evie. I told myself it was grief, after your grandfather. Now I'm less sure." She pats my hand. "Don't go up alone, dear."

I drive home with the chapel, creek, and hut turning over behind my eyes. I'm in my own world as I pull my key to unlock the front door to find it open. Not wide, but eased back, the frame splintered.

"Lily." Her name is out of me, and then I'm through the door shouting it. "Lily!"

The lounge answers with disorder. Not wrecked—searched. The boxes I stacked by the stairs are pulled down and tipped, my grandmother's papers fanned across the floor. The writing desk stands with every drawer dragged out, including the false bottom I only found last week. Journals lie spine-up where they were dropped, pages bent back hard. One is torn.

Then it lands—the diner, the girls, till dark. She isn't here. She was never here. The relief drops through me so fast my knees loosen, and I catch the banister and breathe. Footsteps sound behind me, I turn with a journal raised like it will protect me, but I see Alaric and lower it.

"You were shouting," he says.

"How did you—" I don't finish. My pulse is everywhere at once.

"The splintered wood. I was walking past." His gaze moves to the spilled boxes; whatever he's thinking, he doesn't mention it. "Are you hurt?"

"No. I was in town. Lily's in town. Someone was in my house."

"May I?" He waits for my nod before he enters. He moves through the room without touching anything, crouches by the desk, studies the false bottom without asking what it is. "They knew where to look."

"You can tell that?"

"Something like that is hard to find, left hanging open." He glances up. "Nobody finds that if it's jewelry they're after."

I should feel unnerved. Instead something eases, because he's saying what I didn't want to say first. "It isn't the first strange thing. But it's the first one that feels aimed."

"Then it's aimed." No softening, no telling me I'm overwrought. "You're right to take it seriously."

The door won't latch. He tests it, then glances at me instead of fixing it himself. "Do you have a drill?" I fetch my grandfather's old kit. He sets a new lock and I hold it level while he marks the holes. Then he turns the drill around and holds it out to me, handle first.

"You renovate houses," he says. "You'll do it straighter than I will."

I take it and sink the screws myself, his palm braced flat against the wood to keep it true. Twenty minutes of honest noise, and by the end my breathing's level, the room less like a wound.

"What did they take?" he asks.

"I'm not sure yet. Papers, probably." I think of the small journal still in my bag—the chapel, the hut, the things Clara couldn't quite read—and I keep all of it back. Not because I think he'd hurt me. Because it's the last of her that's mine. "Whoever it was wanted my grandmother's things. Hers, not mine."

"Did anyone know you'd be out today?"

The question stops me. "No. I didn't plan it."

I'm grateful he doesn't make a lecture out of security or fixing things. Tires sound on the gravel.

"I'll keep an ear out."

I'm standing there with my hand on the bolt, listening to his steps fade off. Wishing he would stay a little longer. He stops, looks back, and smiles. That immediately sends goosebumps down my spine, the good kind. I suddenly realize I'm finding it harder by the day to not want to get to know him.

8

ALARIC

The trail is not difficult to find. Whoever crossed Hannah's yard tonight was careful with locks and clumsy with the earth. I leave her porch behind, leave the warm yellow rectangle of her kitchen window glowing at my back, and follow the broken line of crushed fern north into the trees.

The woods are cold, but does nothing to me. My body stopped needing warmth a century ago. What matters is the scent. Two men. Sweat, gun oil, cheap coffee gone stale on their clothes. Beneath it, the iron tang of someone who has handled silver recently and not bothered to wash. That detail settles in my chest like a stone. I move faster.

The boot prints climb toward the ridge, toward the old trapper's hut that has been rotting against the hillside since before Elspeth was born. I slow when the structure comes into view, a black shape hunched under bare branches. Woodsmoke coming through the chimney, and voices low.

I circle wide and come at it from the uphill side, where the wind carries my scent away rather than toward them.

Through a gap in the warped boards I see what they've made of the place. A lantern. Bedrolls. And tacked to the wall, a sketch—crude but accurate—of the Victorian's lower floor. The cellar. The back corridor. The study where Hannah keeps the boxes she hasn't unpacked. Beside it, torn paper covered in handwriting I don't recognize, but circled twice in pencil is Elspeth. So. Not vandals. Not drifters looking for copper pipe.

"—telling you she found something," the first man says. His voice is thin, impatient. "Why else move the boxes? She's been in those journals."

"Or she's a woman cleaning out a dead relative's house," the second answers. Slower. Older, maybe. "You see ghosts in everything."

"That old woman hid it for years. You think she didn't leave a clue for someone to find?"

A pause. The scrape of a boot.

"There's the girl, too," the older one says. "The daughter. She's sharp. She watches. That's a complication we weren't paid for."

Lily. The stone in my chest cracks open into something with edges. They have been watching the house long enough to take its measure. Long enough to weigh a child as a problem to be solved. I have spent years teaching myself to feel nothing I cannot afford. This is not one of those nights.

"I'll take another pass before light," the thin one says. "Confirm the layout."

Wood creaks, and the door drags open. A shape detaches from the hut and starts down the slope toward Hannah, toward Lily who are likely sleeping now.

I follow him, and let him cross the porch boards. He tests the lock, and the latch gives a soft click before I move. Then I stop being where I am and become where he is.

He doesn't see me. That is the point. I take the dark with me when I move, and to him it must seem the dark simply thickens, breathes. The cold of my hand closes over the back of his neck before he understands he is no longer alone.

"You're a long way from home," I whisper, very quietly, against his ear.

He lunges. I'm already gone, already three feet to his left, a branch snapping where I was not. He spins, sees nothing, breath sawing loud in the silence.

"There's nothing in that house for you." My voice comes from his right now. "There's nothing in this town for you. Men have walked into these woods before and not walked out, and no one came looking. Do you understand?"

"Who—" He gets the gun half-raised. I take it from his hands and break it across my knee in the time it takes him to blink, and let the pieces fall where he can see them.

He runs, and I watch him go. He crashes uphill toward the hut, and his partner in crime. I hear the panic in his voice before the words are clear⁠—

"There's something out here, we're done, we're done. Let them carry that down the mountain. Let them tell whoever pays them that Briar Glen has⁠—"

I want the older one's throat under my hand and the name of the man who ordered them to come. But the sky to the east is brightening, and dawn will bring attention to the noises they will make. There are two people in that house who need a protector more than I need an answer tonight. I choose them while still convincing myself I had a choice.

When I come beyond the trees, Hannah is on the porch wrapped in a coat too thin for the hour, sitting on the top step with two mugs steaming beside her, and she does not look surprised to see me. That should trouble me, but it doesn't.

"I figured you'd come back this way," she says, and holds out one of the mugs. "Tea. It's the only thing I trust myself not to ruin at five-thirty in the morning."

I take it because refusing would mean explaining why, and stand a careful distance from her on the boards.

"You fixed the lock," she says. "And didn't tell me I imagined someone in here. You have no idea what that's worth." She wraps both hands around her own mug. "Everyone in my old life had a very gentle way of telling me I was overreacting. You just—believed me."

"You weren't wrong to be afraid." The words come out rougher than I mean them.

She studies me, the tired stubbornness in her holding steady. "No. I wasn't."

The pull between us is physical, and the worst part is how easy it would be. To set the mug down. To sweep the hair from her face. My hand has actually started to lift before I close it into a fist and let it fall. She sees it. And instead of giving me the distance I am begging the universe for, she steps closer.

"Mom." Lily's voice drifts down from the open window above us. "If you two are going to stare at each other, do it quieter. Some of us have school."

Hannah laughs, short and surprised, and the moment loosens its grip on my throat. I place the mug on the rail.

"Go back to sleep," I suggest.

I am retreating toward my home while the sun rises. It's only gratitude, I tell myself. Gratitude is harmless. The bond, stirring like something waking, and the unsettling feeling of being a liar stays with me.

9

HANNAH

Theo arrives Saturday at seven with a level so old the bubble has gone amber. He stands in the garden with his boots planted in the wet grass, studying the leaning boundary wall like a man greeting an old grudge.

"Footing's gone," he says. "Told them it would happen when they reset this stretch in ninety-one."

"You worked on this wall?"

"Helped reset it once. Your grandmother paid in pie and arguments." He sets the level on a flat brick. "Mostly arguments."

He moves slow but nothing about him is uncertain, and when his thumb follows each mortar crack, it feels as though the wall might answer back. We start at the worst section, where the bricks have bowed toward my side and the frost has shoved the base out of line.

By eight, Alaric comes through the gate carrying a coil of string line, and enough quiet authority to annoy me before breakfast.

"The bottom row has shifted," he says, without preamble. "If we stack over it, the wall comes down again by next winter."

"Good morning, then."

"It isn't safe."

"You keep saying that." I fold my arms. "You've said it about the staircase, the door, the back step, and now the wall. At some point a person starts to wonder if you just like being right."

"I like this house standing." A pause. "And the people in it."

He says the second part quietly, like he didn't quite mean to, and then he's already setting Theo's level against the brick, rolling his sleeves. I should send him home. Instead I hand him a mason's chisel. It bothers me how quickly that feels normal.

Gregory used to do this differently. He would arrive with concern on his face, leave with my checkbook and my opinions, having decided what was best for me somewhere between the driveway and the kitchen. I could never tell the difference between being cared for and being managed.

Alaric isn't managing anything. He asks which section I want taken down first. He waits while I decide whether to keep the original bricks in their same order. When I say I want the wall rebuilt exactly as it was, even if it takes longer, he only nods and marks each one with chalk before lifting it free.

"You've done this before," I say.

"Once or twice."

"With walls older than this one?"

"More than a few." He sets the brick down with absurd care. "Older."

Theo snorts from the other end of the wall. "Don't let him fool you. Man stacks brick like he's asking permission from it."

"I stack brick," Alaric says, "like I'd prefer not to redo the work."

"That's what I said. Asking permission." Theo winks at me, and I notice Alaric almost smile before he buries it away. I've started collecting those twitches.

We work through the morning. They settle into a rhythm that surprises me, Theo narrating decades of the property's history while Alaric keeps the cord taut and resets the heaviest bricks as if weight is only a suggestion. I watch how his hands move, he isn't showing off. He's just patient, steady like that makes the whole garden feel less likely to collapse.

Lily wanders out around ten, hair in a knot, headphones around her neck, and surveys the half-dismantled wall.

"You're letting the weird neighbor demolish our garden."

"He's restoring it," I say.

"Restoring it," Alaric agrees, not looking up. "Hand me that pointing trowel. The small one."

To my astonishment, she does. She kneels at the toolbox, finds it, and slaps it into his palm like a surgical nurse. "You owe me. I have an entire list of things to repair."

"Such as."

"The back gate shrieks. The front step wobbles. Something in the shed smells disgusting."

"Make the list. I'll do the gate first." He accepts it like she's a foreman handing down a work order, and she beams at being taken seriously. He treats her seriousness as a fact rather than a phase. Most adults can't even manage that.

By noon my hands ache and there's grit under every fingernail. We get the lower course reset, level and stubborn, the bricks fitting back together with a satisfaction I feel somewhere behind my ribs. I step back just to look at it.

"That's better," I say.

"That's the footing doing its job," Theo says. "A wall's only as honest as what it stands on." He gathers his tools. "I'm off to feed the dog. Back tomorrow if the weather holds." He pats the nearest brick on his way out, a goodbye, and Alaric and I are the only ones left.

We tackle the bowed middle section together, and neither of us can line them alone without making the whole thing lean again. He holds the string line while I set the next brick, his attention fixed on me. He isn't watching to catch me failing. He's just staring, I can't figure out if it's admiration or caution.

"Use the flatter edge," he says.

"I've got it."

"You do." He doesn't say anything else. He lets me find the angle, and curse quietly when it rocks out of place, and only when I ask does he brace the low part with two fingers.

The final brick gives me trouble. I crouch beside the wall, damp grass against my shin, trying to guide it into place while keeping the mason's cord clear. I need the chisel tucked beside Alaric's boot, but it sits too far away unless I risk the brick slipping.

He reaches for it first. His hand closes around the worn wooden handle, then sets it into my open palm, and for a moment his fingers stay there, warm and rough with old work, beneath mine. We don't move a muscle.

There's dust on my cheek; I feel it, gritty, and he lifts his free hand halfway as if to brush it away. Then he stops himself.

"You should finish," he says, low. "Before the mortar sets."

"Right." My answer sounds too raw for brickwork. "The mortar."

I turn back to work the wall. Beside me, he holds the brick steady without releasing it.

10

ALARIC

The walk back to my own land takes less than two minutes and feels like crossing a border I shouldn't have. By the time I reach the gate, the dust from the Marlowe driveway still clings to my boots. I notice it on the steps of my own house—pale grit tracked across dark slate—and I stand there longer than the observation warrants. A century of careful habit, and I have carried her dirt home without thinking. That is the part that troubles me. Not the work. The ease of it.

I spent the afternoon handing tools to a teenage girl and answering her questions about mortar as though I were any neighbor with strong hands and time to spare. Lily asked whether the wall would outlast us. I said it would outlast her grandchildren. She laughed. Hannah looked over at the sound, and for one unguarded moment her face held softly. I close the door on the memory and on the day.

The study is the only room I keep lit. Old glass in the windows warps the sun into something liquid. I pick up the phone I have not used in years.

Elias answers on the second ring, which means he has been waiting for someone, though not for me.

"Blackwood." His voice is dry, amused. "I assumed you were dead. It would have been more polite than the silence."

"Elias."

"Long time. No card, no quarrel, no funeral. And now a call out of nowhere. You don't reach out unless something is wrong. So, what's wrong."

I keep my account short. Briar Glen. Elspeth's house. Strangers asking questions about her belongings, her heir, and anything she might have left behind. Elias goes quiet.

"You knew Elspeth better than most of us did," he says. "If you are calling me now, this is not about village gossip."

"It's about what she protected," I say. "And who has come looking for it."

"Then the rumors were true." The amusement leaves his voice. "For years, there has been talk that the old human networks kept records. Enough to expose people who survived only because no one knew where to look."

My hand tightens on the phone. "Elspeth never told me the scale of it."

"Of course she didn't. She was wiser than both of us." A pause. "But hunters have believed in that archive for a decade. Patiently. The heir is the question now. They will assume Hannah inherited the location, or the means to read it."

"Hannah knows nothing about any of this," I say. "She paints window frames. She has a daughter."

"That will not matter to them in the slightest." His tone softens, which is worse. "You've grown fond of her."

I ignore his suspicion and he continues, "Then hear the rest, because I won't repeat it. The hunters are the obvious danger. They're not the only ones. "If our side learns this archive exists, Lucien Draycott, for one, will want it gone more badly than any hunter ever could. He burned a sanctuary in Quebec because one ledger named his donor line. Not because it endangered him that night. Because it might one day. That is how he thinks. He won't care who is standing over the archive when he decides to dig. To him, Hannah is a leak. A problem."

"She is under my protection."

"She is a liability to two factions who have never agreed on anything," Elias says. "And you are one tired man on a hill. I'll say this as a friend, not an elder. Move carefully. Don't say anything that’s not needed. And Alaric—" the line crackles "—if you mean to stand between her and all of that, you should be very sure you have already decided to lose your second life over it."

I thank him. He laughs softly, sadly, and ends the call. For a while I do not move. Then I rise, take my coat, and go back out into the cold.

The patrol I've been doing is different tonight. I walk the tree line first, where the firs thin toward the road and a man could lie for hours watching the upstairs windows. The ground is undisturbed. I cross to the low stone wall along the eastern garden and crouch where the shadow of the shed falls long across the grass—the one approach the porch light never reaches. From here I can see the gravel turn where any car must slow, the gap in the hedge Lily uses as a shortcut to the bus, the kitchen window where the curtains never quite meet.

Every instinct I trust suggest I wake her tonight and lay it all bare. And every older instinct says the truth is too dangerous for her. Once she knows vampires are real, she lives forever in that knowledge. It harms the innocent first. It always has.

So I do nothing. Again. I understand that the silence is becoming its own kind of lie, that there will be a night when she counts my kindnesses and sees they were also concealment. I understand it.

I make my last circuit and stop by the trees, far enough that no one inside would feel watched. A lamp comes on in an upstairs room—Lily's, the corner one. A moment later her laugh carries through the old glass, bright and unguarded, answering something her mother has said. Then Hannah crosses the lit square of the window, a towel over one shoulder, pausing to say one last word at the door before the room goes dark.

The house settles after them. Beams easing. A pipe ticking somewhere as the heat drops. I wait to feel the life inside the house: Lily's laugh, Hannah's shadow at the door, the old pipes. Small, ordinary things. Breakable things. Then I turn for home realizing that I am in this far deeper than I can walk back from.

11

HANNAH

On Monday, I visit the town records office. It stinks of floor polish, and the clerk has been frowning at the same drawer of permit cards for a quarter of an hour.

"The north wing," I say again, sliding the photograph across the counter. "I just want to know when it was built. The framing doesn't match all other parts of the house, and the trim color's wrong. I need to know if my grandmother had it added or if it came later."

"Anything before the seventies, you're at the mercy of whoever filed the cards." The clerk thumbs through them without much hope. "Half of these are water-damaged. You might do better asking someone who remembers."

"That would be me," Clara says, appearing at my elbow with a cardigan over her shoulders and a scarf the color of marigolds. "Evie's wing went up around 1962. She told me herself. Said the original kitchen flooded so badly she gave up and built a new one onto the back."

"You see," I tell the clerk, "that I can use."

"Built it the same year my father retired," Clara adds. "I remember because she borrowed his truck."

I'm writing 1962 on the back of my own hand when a man steps up to the counter. He's tall, neatly dressed, with dark-blond hair and the kind of open smile that makes you feel you've known him longer than thirty seconds.

"Forgive me for eavesdropping," he says. "I couldn't help it. You're working on the old Marlowe house?"

"I am."

"Then I'm delighted to meet you. Nathan Graves." He offers his hand. His grip is strong. "I'm a historian—regional preservation, mostly. Lost mountain settlements, the towns that didn't survive the mining years. Briar Glen is something of a miracle, you know. So much of it still standing."

"Hannah Marlowe." I shake his hand. Beside me, I feel Clara's uncomfortability.

"Marlowe," Nathan repeats, as if tasting it. "You'd be Elspeth's granddaughter. She was wonderful. We never met, but I've read about her work with the school. And the house—the Victorian on the north ridge, with the original workroom off the rear hall?"

"You've done your reading," I say lightly.

"Occupational habit. I find old houses have a lot to tell if you let them. The northward wing's a later addition, isn't it? You can see it in the rooflines. And those markings around the cellar door. People assume they're decorative, but in that era they're often something else. Boundary marks. Old protective customs." He tilts his head. "Did your grandmother keep records? Notebooks, that sort of thing? Sketches, maps? Women like Elspeth usually did. They knew things others are still trying to piece together."

The clerk has wandered off to find a stapler. Clara folds a quilt very precisely acting like she's not listening.

"I haven't really gone through her things," I say. "It's all still in boxes."

"Of course. It's overwhelming, I'm sure." He produces a card from his wallet, not quite pushing it toward me. "I'd be glad to help. I can date the additions, identify markings, even put a little order to her stuff if you'd like a second pair of hands. I have contacts at the state preservation office who'd kill for a house like yours. No charge. I just like to see these things saved."

It's a generous offer, delivered easily, but it's just too coincidental, and it makes absolutely no sense.

"That's kind of you." I leave the card where it is. "But I think I want to learn myself before I let anyone else loose on it. It's how I'm getting to know her, really."

Something passes behind his eyes and is gone. "Naturally," he says. "Take all the time you need. I'm in town a while yet." He nods to Clara. "Mrs. Whitmore." And then he's gone, the door letting in a breath of cold mountain air behind him.

I exhale. "Clara."

"I don't care for him," she says quietly, smoothing the quilt that doesn't need smoothing. "He's odd. If your grandmother was still around, she'd have known him for what he is in five minutes. Trust your senses, Hannah. You've got more of hers than you think."

I exit the car, and find Alaric between our properties that afternoon, doing something to the gate hinge that he promised Lily he would. He straightens when he sees my face.

"What's wrong?"

"Some man in the records office made me feel uneasy. He knew things about the workroom and those markings I keep seeing. He named stuff in the house I never mentioned." Alaric stops moving entirely.

"Say that again," he says. "What did he ask about the records?"

"Notebooks. Maps. Whether she kept things written down." I watch him. "I didn't tell him anything. I'm not a fool. It just—he knew this place. Rooms I haven't shown anyone. It felt rehearsed."

"It does. Did he give a name for an organization? Did he mention how long he's staying?"

"A while, he said. He left a card. I didn't take it."

"Good."

I notice again Alaric isn't telling me what to feel. He's just listening as though my instincts are evidence. I don't mention it.

We both walk to my door, and he stops at the bottom step, hands in his pockets, and does not come up.

"Promise me you'll tell me if he turns up at the house," he says.

"I'll tell you if he turns up," I counter.

He considers this longer than the negotiation deserves. "All right," he says.

He stays at the bottom of the steps until the lock clicks behind me. When I glance through the side glass, he isn't watching me. He is watching the road. Whoever Nathan Graves really is, Alaric is already suspicious.

12

ALARIC

Nathan Graves keeps regular hours for a man pretending to chase old records. He leaves the motel at the same dim hour each evening, and walks the length of Briar Glen's main street as though counting the doors. Tonight I follow at a distance no human eye could keep, hanging back among the shuttered storefronts while the last light bleeds out.

He pauses reading the posted hours on the office doors, and continues past the bank, turning down a service lane toward an old depot the railroad abandoned sixty years ago. Weeds have split the loading platform. An oil smell travels up my nose, making me aware of the freshness of it.

I climb to the roof of the neighboring grain office and settle where the broken cornice throws a deep shadow. Below, a lamp flares inside, hooded so it shows only as a seam of yellow under the eaves.

A second man waits there. Lean, precise, dressed like a surveyor who has never gotten dirty. When he speaks his voice carries the flat patience of someone accustomed to being obeyed.

"You took your time," he says.

"I was being careful, Cassian. The sheriff watches strangers."

"Then time to get more careful. We're close." Cassian sets a leather case on a crate and opens it. Inside lies a coil of fine silver wire, a sealed glass vial of gray ash, and a folded map marked with symbols—the old sanctuary marks, the routes the protected ones once used to move between safe houses. My hands tighten on the cornice stone.

"The old woman hid the archive well," Cassian continues. "She hid something important. Enough that people have died trying to find it."

"And the granddaughter?"

"The heir." Cassian says the word without warmth. "She doesn't know what she's sitting on yet, or she'd have run. Get into the house, get into that workroom, and we uncover what Elspeth buried before she does."

"And if she won't cooperate?"

"Then we stop being gentle."

My anger bubbles, I've heard enough, and I jump from the roof. I move to where the lane meets the path Lily takes home from her friend's house each night, and wait. Minutes later, Cassian nearly walks into me.

"Evening," I say.

To his credit, he does not flinch. He simply stops, recalculates, sets his feet. "You're the neighbor. Blackwood."

"And this is a strange place for a historical record."

"I like a walk." His hand drifts toward his coat pocket, the gesture of a man reaching for nothing in particular. "Small town. Quiet."

"I'd like it to stay that way." The cold comes into my voice. "There's a girl who uses this path most nights. I'd hate for a stranger to startle her."

"I'd never." His fingers close in his pocket. Then his arm comes up fast, and a fine bright loop sails toward me—bloodroot wire, weighted at both ends, the kind of thing meant to bind a wrist that ordinary rope could not hold.

I catch it before it touches me. The wire burns where it crosses my palm, a thin sear of pain rushes through me. I close any space between us and set my hand flat against his chest, pushing him to the depot's brick wall, his feet half off the ground. I see the calculation finish behind his eyes. He felt the speed. He felt the strength.

I slow myself, and allow my arm to tremble as if from effort, lower him until his boots scrape gravel, loosen my grip enough to look like a man and not a vampire.

"Bloodroot wire," I say evenly, dropping the wire between us. "Strange thing to carry on a walk."

"Family heirloom." His breathing has gone careful. He is afraid now, but he is also pleased because he's confirmed what he suspected. "You're fast."

"I've had practice. Stay away from that house. Stay away." I step back. "I won't say it twice."

He gathers the wire staring me in the eye, and walks off calmly. They are ready for creatures like me. They came knowing what they might find.

Instead of going home, I go to Hannah's gate. I lift it true on its post, work the rusted pin free, and set a new one. It takes me minutes. When I latch it, it swings clean and silent. Fixing things here is helping my frustration in what's happening around me.

Through the kitchen window, warm and unguarded, Hannah stands at the counter while Lily talks with both hands, recounting some injustice from school. Hannah laughs—really laughs, head tipped, flour on her wrist—and reaches over to tuck a strand of hair behind her daughter's ear, and Lily lets her, rolling her eyes, leaning into it anyway.

I'm an ordinary distance away, just a neighbor who happened to be passing, and the thing that moves through me is not the bond, not duty or the long ache of who I lost. It is plainer than all of that, and far more frightening.

I love her. Not because fate decided it. I love how she refuses to be managed, how she got her hands dirty rather than ask anyone, how she treats her daughter. She is no one's replacement. She is entirely, stubbornly herself. But I leave the truth where it is. Not hidden because I am ashamed of her, but buried because the people hunting would use it against her.

13

HANNAH

The lanterns go up at dusk, strung between the stalls on lines of waxed cord, and when Lily and I reach the square the whole town glows amber. Someone has set a fiddle and a banjo against the courthouse steps, and the music drifts over the crowd. Children chase each other between hay bales. A woman ladles cider from a copper pot. Vendors crowd with salvaged shutters and reclaimed brass, and Lily makes a beeline for a booth heaped with old hardware before I can catch her sleeve.

"Mom. Mom, come look. They have the exact hinges for the back parlor."

"We have a budget," I remind her.

"Yeah, but I have taste."

Ruby approaches me, flushed and grinning, and loops her arm through mine. "There you are. You're not allowed to be looking responsible. Come judge the pie table with me. I need a witness when I lose."

She tows me into the warm press of bodies. It is easier than I expected, being carried along by people who know my name now, who ask about how it's going and whether the chimney still smokes. Near the bandstand, Clara has gathered a group of children onto the courthouse steps.

"Long ago," she's saying, her scarves catching the lantern light, "before the road came, travelers used to pass through these mountains by night. Night travelers, we called them. Folks who couldn't walk in daylight, for one reason or another. And the brave families of Briar Glen kept their lamps lit and their doors unlocked, and they sheltered them, asking no questions."

The children stare up at her, rapt. I smile at the harmlessness, and move on. I find Lily again at the hardware section with Alaric. He has a tarnished brass escutcheon in one hand, turning it over as though it has personally offended him. He looks like he's enduring a medical procedure.

"He came," I say.

"I demanded it," Lily says. "Someone has to confirm if these are real or reproductions, and he's a snob about it."

"I am not a snob. It's a reproduction. The screw heads are wrong."

"See. Snob."

A few feet away, two older women have stopped talking to observe him, heads bent close—a small ripple of attention, respect and wariness in the same glance. Theo ambles past with a paper cup of cider and pauses.

"Blackwood," he says. "Surprised you remember where the square is."

"Maddox."

"He's seen more autumns here than all of us put together. Don't let his quiet fool you." He winks and moves off before I manage to ask what he means.

My phone buzzes. The screen says Gregory. I just stare, unamused, then step back from the noise, toward the dark margin where there are less stalls.

"Hannah." His voice is smooth, reasonable. "I'm just checking in. About Lily."

"She's fine. Having a good night."

"Good. Good." A pause shaped to make me fill it. I don't. "I have to say, I worry. Pulling her out of everything she knew, dragging her up some mountain on a whim⁠—"

"It wasn't a whim."

"You always did this. Decide first, think later. I'm only saying it as someone who⁠—"

"You're saying it as my ex-husband," I blurt out, and I'm surprised by how level I sound. "Lily's enrolled, she's settled, she's happy. If you want to talk to her, call her. Goodnight, Gregory."

I end the call before he can find the next issue to relay. I'm less steady, but at least I'm still standing where I get to choose.

When I turn, Alaric is a little way off, near the old footbridge. He isn't eyeing me, exactly. He's simply there, giving me space. I find I'm grateful for that. I walk over. The lanterns end a few yards behind us; ahead, the creek talks to itself.

"My ex-husband," I say.

"I gathered."

"He has a gift for making concern sound like a major problem." I watch the water. "I couldn't tell the difference until I up and left. He'd ask if I was sure about something, and I'd un-decide it. It's only recent I hear my own voice again, under his." I glance at him. "Being believed matters to me more than it probably should."

"I've lived with silence too long," he says. "To the point that it stopped feeling like a choice. There was a time I mistook grief for loyalty. I thought if I kept apart, if I stayed still, I was honoring what I'd lost." He studies the creek, not me. "Then I forgot what it felt like to be expected anywhere. To have someone notice when I wasn't there."

"And now?"

"Now your daughter texts me about hinges at eleven at night." The corner of his mouth moves, almost. "It's disorienting."

I giggle, low, and we stay there, close to each other. I feel cold lifting off him, he's that close, but he doesn't choose to step closer, and neither do I, although I kind of want to.

"Mom!" Lily, somewhere behind us. "Mom, come here, you have to see this."

She's at the history display under the bandstand, a corkboard of town photographs. She points to one near the bottom—a faded harvest crowd from decades ago, men in hats, women in long coats.

"Look at this guy," she says, half a joke in her voice and something else underneath. "Tell me that's not—" She stops. Tilts her head. The man in the frame is dark-haired, half-turned from the camera. "Weird. Never mind."

But she doesn't remove her eyes from it. And before we walk back toward the lanterns, I see her glance once over her shoulder, then slip out her phone and quietly snap a picture of the photo.

14

ALARIC

The festival went dark hours ago, but I cannot make the night sit quiet inside me. Knowing Lily saw the photograph with me in it, worries me. She'll have questions in the morning, but she won't know how to ask them. Currently, I have no answers that will keep her from the truth. So I do what I always do when thinking becomes unbearable. I pace the perimeter.

The Victorian sleeps under a full moon. I mean only to circle it once, confirm the locks, and be gone before the windows pale. But near the oldest wing, where the original stone foundation meets the newer clapboard, something is wrong with the air. Disturbed. A scent that does not belong—oil, cold iron, and beneath it the dry bitterness of crushed bloodroot. I follow the smell.

They have not forced a door. That is the first thing I understand, and it concerns me more than a shattered lock would. Along the north wall the old paint has been scraped back in patches, careful rectangles peeled to bare wood. Someone has knelt at the foundation stones and worked a blade into the mortar. Window trim hangs loose where it has been pried and set back to look untouched. They are not searching for valuables. They are reading the house itself, hunting for the marks Elspeth left in the grain, mortar, wood, or stone.

They must think the house has directions attached to it. I round the corner of the northern side and there they are. Two of them, dark-clothed, crouched at the base of a sill with a small brush and a pouch open on the grass. Powdered ash, pale as bone meal. One of them is dusting it along a seam in the wood, watching for what the old protections will reveal.

"Vandalizing a widow's house," I say. "How noble of you."

Their reactions are fast. The closest one comes at me with a blade already drawn, and I smell the coating before I see the dull gray smear. Bloodroot, worked into the steel. The other pulls a rope from his coat—braided, threaded through with metal that catches the moon.

The first one swings. I am much faster than he expects, and I take his wrist before the blade cuts me, turning him into the wall hard enough to empty his lungs. The rope comes around from behind. I feel it bite across my forearm as I twist clear, and a deep burn goes past the skin, the bloodroot sizzling my skin. I throw my elbow back and he falls

"Tell Nathan. The house is empty of what he wants."

They run—grabbing what they can, leaving what they must. The pouch spills. The brush is abandoned in the grass. I chase them, but realize to chase is to be seen, and there is a window above me where a light could ignite at any moment.

I stare at the wreck of their work and force my breathing slow. My forearm is opening along a line, the cut shallow but stubborn, refusing to close like it usually would. The bloodroot saw to that. I press my sleeve against it, gather the pouch, and scuff the spilled ash into the dirt with my boot, and turn the soil over it.

I take everything they left, including the scraped curl of wood showing a part of Elspeth's symbols. I press the loosened trim back into place. Now, it looks as though nothing happened, and the evidence to say it did is bundled in my coat. I almost make it away from the garden, and my name being shouted.

"Alaric?"

She is on the steps in a robe, a flashlight, and her hair loose. The craving to touch her rises.

"You're up early," I say.

"There was noise." Hannah comes down the steps, the beam sweeping the grass, the scraped paint, me. It stops on my arm, where I have not hidden the dark stain spreading through the sleeve. "You're bleeding."

"It's nothing."

"It's through the cloth." She is already crossing to me, practical, unhurried, the flashlight tucked under her arm. "Inside. Now."

"Hannah—"

"You can argue at my kitchen table." She never asks permission to help; she simply decides, and I can either walk behind her or be talked about as I stand there bleeding in the yard.

She sets a bowl of clean water, cloth, and a roll of bandage from a drawer she opens without looking. She pulls the wound into my open, and I watch how she begins to click.

"This isn't from a fall," she says.

"No."

"It's a cut. A clean one." Her fingers are soft as she presses the water against it, but the feel of her skin is worse, warmer, her pulse near enough that I have to avoid my gaze. "It should be bleeding more than this. Or less. It's a little confusing. Why aren't you—" She stops. "You haven't made a sound."

"I've had worse."

"That's not what I asked." She wraps the bandage, firm, neat, her hands sure. I count every shoulder-length hair on her head.

"You always do this," she says, quieter.

"Bleed?"

"Deflect." She smooths the bandage. "Make a joke when you're avoiding the real answer."

"I don't joke."

"No," she says, and her mouth curves. "You make very serious sentences that accidentally become jokes."

Her fingers remain around my wrist, light enough that I could move it, firm enough that she would feel the choice.

"You should be afraid," I say.

"Why?" Her eyes lift to mine.

The question makes me anxious. I gaze at her hand instead of her face.

"Hannah."

"I know. You don't want questions."

"I don't want you hurt."

"Not the same thing."

"No."

Her thumb brushes the edge of the bandage. Dawn is approaching, but all I feel is her warmth, her pulse, her stubborn care.

"Lily will be up soon," she says.

"Yes."

"Then go before she turns this into breakfast entertainment."

My desire is too strong, so I do. I have no strength left to fight it.

15

HANNAH

Igrip the screwdriver tighter, the metal cool, and drive another screw into the cabinet hinge. The morning light slants through the windows, catching dust motes that drift like tiny accusations. Lily left for school an hour ago, her backpack slung over one shoulder and a sarcastic quip about my restless energy still hanging in the air. I ought to be grateful for the quiet. Instead, every creak of the old floorboards pulls my thoughts back to Alaric.

He just left again yesterday. His answers as sparse as ever. The way he looked at me—guarded, almost pained—lingers like a memory I return to. I put the screwdriver down and move over the sink, testing the latch. It holds firm, the wood reinforced with fresh brackets I don't remember installing. My fingers trace the neat metal edges. When did that happen?

I check the back door next. The deadbolt turns smoothly, too smoothly, the mechanism replaced with something heavier than the one I bought. A folded note sits on the mudroom shelf beneath a hammer I thought I'd misplaced last week. I unfold it, the handwriting crisp and unfamiliar.

Mr. Blackwood covered the upgrade and labor. Said to bill him directly if anything else needs attention. —J. Harlan, Lock & Key Services

My stomach creases, and I crumple the paper, then smooth it out again. This isn't the first coincidence. The loose porch step that fixed itself overnight. The window that wouldn't stay shut until suddenly it did. Tools that reappeared exactly where I needed them after I swore I'd left them scattered. I'd chalked it up to small-town helpfulness or my own distraction. Now the pattern stares back at me, sharp and deliberate.

Alaric has been moving through my life like a shadow I never asked for. Protecting me. Deciding what I needed before I could even see any threat. Gregory used to do the same thing—frame control as care, wrap it in concern until I couldn't breathe. The memory burns, hot and familiar. I won't do this again. I won't allow another man to curate my safety while keeping me oblivious.

I grab my jacket and head across the yard that afternoon before there's time to talk myself out of it. The air carries the sharp bite of pine and damp earth. Alaric's house looms, solid and imposing, its shutters closed against the day. I've never stepped inside.

I knock hard, three times. The door opens almost immediately. Alaric stands there in a simple black button-down, sleeves rolled to his forearms, his silver-gray eyes meeting mine without surprise. "Hannah."

I push past him into the foyer. The space feels like him—high ceilings, heavy oak beams, furniture arranged with precise restraint. Low lamplight pools on polished wood floors. No clutter, no photographs, just clean lines and quiet order. A single leather armchair faces a cold fireplace. Books line one wall in neat rows. The air smells faintly of cedar and something warmer, like him.

"You've been fixing things at my house," I say, turning to face him. My voice echoes slightly in the stillness. "Locks. Windows. Paying tradesmen behind my back. How long?"

He closes the door with a soft click, his movements measured. "Since the first break-in attempt. I checked the boundaries most nights. Reinforced what I could without you noticing."

"Without me noticing." I laugh, short and bitter. "That's the point, isn't it? You decide I can't handle it. You step in and handle it for me."

He steps closer but stops short of touching me, his broad shoulders tense. "I saw vulnerabilities. Doing nothing felt impossible. I wasn't trying to run your life, Hannah. I kept my distance where it mattered."

"Distance?" I gesture around his immaculate space, the controlled quiet of it all. "This is your version of distance? Watching, fixing, deciding? Gregory used to pull the same shit—disguise it as love, as protection. I left that behind for a reason."

Alaric's jaw works, but his expression stays steady, those piercing eyes shadowed with something raw. "I'm not him. I was afraid something would happen to you or Lily. Every time I told myself to stop, another loose end appeared. I tried not to cross lines. Clearly I failed at that."

His honesty hits harder than defensiveness would have. No excuses, just the weight of it. I see the strain in the set of his shoulders, the way his hands flex at his sides like he's holding himself back. He's not cold. He's unraveling, just enough for me to glimpse the fear beneath.

My heart pounds against my ribs. My hands come up to his chest, feeling the steady thud there. "You should have told me. I deserved to know."

"I know." His voice drops lower, rough. "You did. I'm sorry."

The apology lands simple and real. No grand gestures. Just him, standing in this sparse room, letting me see the crack in his armor. Something inside me shifts—anger twisting into need, sharp and undeniable.

I stomp over to him with the intention of warning but I freeze as I get close. Gaze into his eyes, questioning myself.

"Hannah." My name is almost a warning. "If you stay another minute, I'm going to⁠—"

"What? Going to⁠—"

And then he kisses me. I don't pull away, I put my arms around him, one hand of his splays at my back. The kiss, urgent, our mouths meeting with the heat of everything unsaid. His lips are firm, cold, tasting faintly of coffee. I press closer, fingers curling into his shirt, and he responds with a low sound that vibrates through me.

"Are you sure you want this?"

"Yes," I say.

Our lips return, passionate, like he just unlocked something he sealed. One hand curves to my cheekbone, careful. The other settles at my waist. I push up into him. I make a sound against him that I'd be embarrassed by if I had room left to be embarrassed.

His restraint is its own language—every movement deliberate, held on a leash—and it makes me reckless. I get my hands under the hem of his shirt and find skin, cool and smooth over hard muscle, and the careful sound he makes lands somewhere low in me. I drag the shirt up, lifting his arms, and then his hands are at the buttons of mine with a slowness that's almost cruel, undoing me one at a time, his knuckles brushing each new inch of skin he uncovers until my shirt falls open and his breath goes ragged against my throat.

"Wow," he murmurs, and there's wonder in it, and hunger, and the leash beginning to fray.

He walks me backward until my shoulders meet the cool plaster of the wall, the chill of it a shock against my bare back that makes me gasp and arch into him. His mouth moves down my throat, over my collarbone, and his hands learn me slowly, thumbs tracing the lace at my ribs, then beneath it. He cups a breast and takes a nipple into his mouth that instantly hardens, and my breathing comes uncontrollable. The groan he gives in answer is the first sound from him tonight that isn't controlled. His fingers work at the button of my jeans.

"Don't stop." I beg, and I help him get my jeans off.

I kick free of them, and his hand rests on my left thigh, and I forget the wall, the cold, the argument, my own name. He touches me like I'm a gift from God, like he has all the time anyone has ever had. Eventually, I start rocking against his hand and saying please. He undoes his pants, and drops them, only then does he lift me, my legs wrap around him, and his forehead drops to mine.

His cock pushes into me slowly, and he watches every movement from me, reading every flicker of it, holding himself still each time my breath catches. I tighten my legs around him indicating I'm fine. His control is trembling, but mine is long gone.

He moves, deep, slow, and devastatingly attentive, his hand sliding to the small of my back to angle me, his eyes buried in my soul. The sensation rushing through me as he gazes is what undoes me. The room filled with the sound of my wet pussy clenching around his cock. The thrusts get deeper every time, and my head falls back against the wall. He grunts repeatedly, and I grab his hair pulling his head back too.

That's when I come, the scream so loud that I know I'd never previously felt this. The pulsing of my pussy around his wide cock makes it sensational. He follows straight away, his cock expanding inside, prolonging my orgasm. Both our knuckles white against each other, holding on. His name breaks on my lips, and both our bodies drag down the plastered wall until we are sat on the sanded floorboards.

Instead of staying on the cold floor, he scoops me up and carries me to the chair by the fire. He places a linen blanket over us, and his severe, ordered house holds our scattered clothes on the floor like evidence of a crime against it. His heart, when I lay my hand on his chest, is slower than it should be, and steadier than mine.

I'm aware of everything I still don't know about him, and I know the questions have not disappeared just because his hand is moving slow circles over my bare shoulder. But the fire is low, and his breathing is steady against my hair, and for the first time since I came to this town, the unknown does not feel only like something waiting to hurt me.

"I should have told you," he says finally.

"Yes," I say. "You should have."

His hand stills. "I will try to do better."

"This isn't just what happened between us," I say quietly. "Not for me."

His eyes lift to mine, careful and bright in the low firelight. "No," he says. "Not for me either."

The answer settles somewhere tender instead of frightening. I turn enough to see him. The words are not everything, but they are not nothing either.

"Then start there," I say.

He nods once, solemn and quiet, and draws me closer. For some crazy reason, I believe him, but it's not the end of an answer, it's just the beginning.

16

ALARIC

The mug her lips were around still sits by the windowsill where she set it, a brown ring drying at the bottom. This house has been clean, ordered, undisturbed for many years. Now, it has a woman in it. One of her boots lies by the cold hearth and the other halfway across the room, as if she'd been pulled out of it. A thread of chestnut hair clings to the back of a chair. I find I have no wish to move any of it. Hannah comes down the stairs, working her arm into a sleeve.

"You let me sleep," she says.

"You needed it."

"What I need is to be home before Lily wakes up and starts building a case." She lifts the mug, sees the ring beneath it, and winces. "I'll clean that."

"Leave it."

She pauses with the mug in her hand. "I've seen your shelves. Every spine lined up like soldiers."

"They prefer it that way."

"They're scared of you." She sets it back down, deliberately off-center, and watches to see if I'll flinch. "Huh."

"What?"

"Nothing." She says it like she's memorizing something.

I walk her to the door. The morning is wet with mist tangling through the pines between my land and hers.

"Come for dinner," she says. "Tomorrow. Lily's threatening to cook."

"That sounds scary."

"It is." She rises onto her toes, kisses the corner of my mouth, and is gone down the path.

The house behind me is quiet, and I feel her absence immediately. On the mantel, the empty space beside the clock looks suddenly obvious. Last night she noticed it and asked what used to stand there. I told her nothing. That was not true. Renee's portrait had stood there for decades, face turned toward a room I never let change. This afternoon, the absence feels less like loyalty and more like a question.

I think of Hannah's head tilted, decorating my bottom floor with a warmer color. My mind flutters to the table in hers with three chairs and one of them mine. I admire the thought of being invited instead of watching. It should all frighten me. Instead, I hold onto it like it might still break.

The wind turns, and I catch it. Bloodroot. Crushed, fresh, carried down off the ridge. I dress fast, and speed out the door into the trees before the scent fades.

Two days after spending the night with Hannah, the marks become visible. The first, on the old chapel, where the congregation stopped meeting before I ever came here. A symbol into the warped door and packed the grooves with red paste. Bloodroot sap, thick as a wound. It's another hunter's mark.

I follow the ridge down to the creek crossing. Another, scored into the underside of the footbridge where no casual walker would look. At the cemetery I find a third, low on the stone gatepost, half-hidden by moss someone scraped away to make room. Each one fresh. Each one fed with that sap like poison.

The last is the worst. Elspeth's old schoolhouse. The mark there is not cut but painted—large, deliberate, spanning the boards beside the door. They aren't hiding, they're done with that. The marks must be a warning to other hunters that vampires are here, or they've checked each place for the archives. Knowing which one is something I can't answer.

My phone buzzes against my chest. Elias. I answer without speaking.

"You felt them," he says.

"They've marked four sites. Bloodroot."

"It's gotten worse. Movement's tripled this week—and not only hunters. The old families are interested now." His voice drops. "Draycott's name is moving through the private channels. Quietly, which is worse. If Lucien has heard Elspeth's archive is real, he won't send negotiators. He'll send silence. You know what that means for the woman."

"I know."

"Do you? The last time you understood, you came to me with ashes." The line goes quiet a moment. "Get clear of it. Or get her clear. There's no third door."

He ends the call. Boots crunch the frost behind me. I turn, and Ben is coming up the lane with a flashlight he doesn't need now that the sky has gone pale, his cruiser idling at the bend.

"Blackwood." He stops a few feet off, studying the painted boards. "You're out early."

"Couldn't sleep."

"Yeah." He rubs his jaw. "Third one of these somebody's phoned in this week. Chapel, the bridge, now here." He crouches, touches the red with a gloved finger, frowns at how it smears. "County's calling it kids. Some club. Spray paint and nothing better to do."

"You don't believe that."

"I think kids don't drive this far for a shut-up schoolhouse nobody remembers." He straightens. "We've had people through town. Quiet ones. Renting the old motel by the highway, paying cash. That historian and a few friends of his." His eyes cut to me. "You seen anybody around the Marlowe place?"

The question is careful. So is my answer. "Hannah keeps her doors locked."

"Good." He means it. "Elspeth was a friend. I'd hate for her granddaughter to inherit her trouble along with the house."

"What trouble?"

Ben shrugs, slow. "Old woman kept odd company. Visitors at strange hours, right to the end. People I never met. I figured it was her secret." He nods at the mark. "Starting to wonder if it's becoming mine."

"It might be everyone's," I say, even though I knew her secret.

He studies me, then clicks off the flashlight. "If you see those quiet men near her, you call me."

"I will."

He believes me. It's strange that a sheriff this practical decided I'm worth trusting, and he has no notion of what he's trusting. I watch his taillights shrink toward town and the morning goes colder than the weather accounts for. Elspeth was clever. She carried more than the town ever guessed.

I'm supposed to be glad of that. I'm not. Keeping Hannah ignorant is keeping her protected. That's the bargain I struck when I met her, but now, I see that's a cage. Hannah is walking this blind. She's no idea what she could find out or what hunts her along the way. She needs to know what surrounds her. She needs to know what I am.

Not tonight, with Elias' warning still cold in my ear and my own fear whispering that there will be a better moment, a softer one. There won't be. But I cannot turn her world upside down. Soon, though. Before the old families move.

17

HANNAH

Iwipe dust from me and survey the older wing of the house, the part that has resisted every fresh coat of paint and every straightened floorboard. Sunlight filters through in uneven patches, catching on the warped planks. After my night with Alaric—his quiet presence lingers in me like a promise I'm not ready for. Lily will be home from school soon, and I want progress to show her, not questions.

I kneel where the original foundation meets the addition my grandmother oversaw. The boards creak differently, hollow in spots. I pry at one with a flathead screwdriver until it lifts enough for me to shine my phone light underneath. A narrow crawlspace opens up, just wide enough for shoulders. I hesitate a moment before sliding in on my stomach, elbows scraping against joists.

Thick beams run the length of the space with carvings that look to have been there years—deep, deliberate lines sealed over with a crusty paste that flakes away under my fingernail. Symbols. One repeats in a careful row: a circle bisected by a single line. Others resemble marks I've seen in Elspeth's journals. I snap photos from every angle, the flash harsh against the dim timbers, then ease backward until I can stand again.

I pull the latest journal from my bedside and flip to the pages where those same symbols appear. The circle and line matches one exactly. Clara mentioned old founding-era markers once, scattered through town like silent witnesses.

The front opens, Lily drops her backpack with a thud that echoes up here. "Mom? You in the creepy wing again?"

"In here," I call. She appears in the doorway, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, cheeks flushed. Her eyes scan the room and land on the journal and my dusty clothes.

"What'd you find?"

I show her the phone screen. "Symbols carved into the beams, matching the journals. This one—" I point to the circle with the line

Lily leans closer, her expression sharpening. "That's outside the schoolhouse, big as well," She straightens, brushing her hands on her jeans. "You think it's connected to whatever she was hiding?"

"I do. I'm going into town to check the other landmarks Clara mentioned. The ones tied to the founding families. You stay here, I won't be long."

She crosses her arms. "I could come. Two sets of eyes are better."

"Not today. I'd rather you keep an eye on things here. Text me if anything is off." I pull her into a quick hug. She's too observant for her own good sometimes. "I mean it, Lil. Just homework and the usual."

"Fine. But call if you need backup." Her voice stays light.

The festival was a few days ago now, and the town has cleared where it was held. The light stretches long shadows out front. The drive into town feels heavier than usual. A dark sedan sits at the corner near the hardware store, engine idling. My grip tightens on the wheel as I convince myself it's nothing. Ben's cruiser rolls past slowly, his nod brief when our eyes meet. He's been circling more often lately.

I park near the bookstore and find Clara outside arranging a display of local history books on a small table. Her colorful scarf flutters in the breeze. She catches a glimpse of me and gives a warm smile that doesn't quite hide the worry lines around her eyes.

"Hannah, perfect timing. I was just thinking about you. Those carvings you asked about—the founding ones. Most of the old buildings along the original grid have them. The schoolhouse, the old mill foundation by the creek, even a few spots in the park. They're not decoration. Elspeth always said they pointed to agreements older than the town charter. Safe ground, she called it."

"Safe from what?" I ask.

Clara glances down the street. "She never spelled it out. But she made sure I remembered the patterns. If you're following her trail, start with the schoolhouse marker. It lines up with the others in a rough triangle." She touches my arm lightly. "Be careful out there. Town feels a little tight these days."

I thank her and turn toward Cedar Street. The schoolhouse is exactly as I remember it, just a little more weathered. I examine the base where the circle and line carving shows faintly beneath layers of paint. It matches. My pulse quickens as I snap another photo, piecing together how these marks might form a map.

"Interesting find, Hannah."

I rise slowly. Nathan stands a few feet away. His smile is pleasant, but today I feel his energy emanating differently.

"Mr. Graves. You seem to turn up wherever there's history being dug up."

He steps closer, gaze flicking to the journal. "I've been straightforward with you from the start. Your grandmother's collection is important. More than you realize. Have you found anything beneath the house? Coded markings, perhaps? Anything that might explain the recent damage?"

I shut the journal. "Elspeth's belongings aren't public property. How do you know about markings under the house? That's not information I've shared, or found."

His expression stays smooth, but something calculated flickers behind it. "Small towns talk. And I've made it my work to understand threats to people like you and Lily. Alaric Blackwood, for instance. He's been interfering, hasn't he? Inserting himself into your repairs, your life. Men like him are dangerous. They hide things. If you keep secrets from the wrong people, Lily could pay the price."

My blood boils, and I stare right through him while my voice stays calm, "I decide who I trust with my family's history. And I don't appreciate threats wrapped in concern. Whatever you think you're entitled to, you're not getting it from me."

Nathan's smile thins. "I'm trying to protect you both. Some truths are bigger than one old house. Bigger than whatever hold your neighbor has on you." He gestures vaguely toward the street. "Look around. Things are shifting. It would be wise to cooperate before choices get made for you."

Instead of reacting, I turn and walk back toward my car, feeling his glare on my back. The sedan is still there. Another unfamiliar face watches from a bench across the park. Ben's cruiser passes again, slower this time. The town feels watched, hemmed in by eyes I can't quite place. My phone buzzes—Lily checking in. I text her back quickly.

When I reach the house, the sun is setting, painting the Victorian in deeper shadows. The symbols under the floor and the other journals wait inside, full of answers I still can't unlock. Nathan's warning echoes, mixing with the unease that has settled over Briar Glen like a coming storm. I lock the door behind me and lean against it for a moment, listening to the quiet creak of the old beams. Whatever comes next, I won't wait for it to find us.

18

ALARIC

The mark outside the courthouse door is fresh. I press two fingers to the wood, and the paste of Bloodroot burns. Even through my glove, a low heat means they mixed it strong. Someone did this within the hour.

I straighten and look each way. The lamps along the street's main row buzz and flicker, the bulbs guttering as the wind climbs. A storm coming, the kind that floods the culverts.

I start moving toward the footbridge where I find another sign. They are marking the town like surveyors, and every line they draw runs toward her.

I visit Elspeth's grave as the rain starts to needle me and my memories flicker from Elspeth's help, Hannah's insatiable curves, and Lily's sarcasm. I fear for them, Nathan is getting too impatient.

The first real gust takes a dead limb out of the oak above me. It cracks the cemetery gate's top rail, and I begin to move toward the next spot.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. Lily.

"Lily." I keep walking, then stop. No answer comes. There is only breathing, fast and shallow, and the muffled drag of fabric.

I think she may have dialed me from her pocket, but a man's voice suddenly flows through the speaker. "—make this simple. The journals. Then we're gone."

Then Hannah. "There are none. You've torn this place apart twice. You'd have found them."

"We found the floor under your kitchen." A second voice, drier. "We found what you scraped clean down there. So you'll forgive me if I don't take your word."

Hannah again, "Get out. Now."

"Mom." Lily, close to the phone, scared and sharp at once. "Don't touch her. Don't you dare touch her⁠—"

Something heavy strikes the floor. Hannah's voice climbs and breaks off. I hang up and move at vampire speed, the street blurs and the rain thumps against me. As I reach the house, I scale the wall upward.

I creep downstairs and they're all planted in the back room. It's a ruin of upended chairs and broken lamp-glass, and it fixes in me in a heartbeat.

I see a man in a wet jacket with his hand around Hannah's throat, bending her back over the table; a second by the door with Lily pinned against the newel post, a wrench raised in both her hands; a length of restraint half-looped over Hannah's wrist, silver thread bright against dark leather.

My anger takes over, and the man holding her hears nothing. That is the mercy of what I am. I take him off her and put him through the parlor doorway, and the frame splinters around him, and Hannah falls back gasping with her hand at her neck.

"Hannah—the restraint⁠—"

I tear it from her wrist. It's bloodroot soaked, but I don't feel how much it burns to my bone. The second man lunges for Lily.

I get there first. I always will. I catch his arm and the bone gives under my grip like green wood, and he screams. He scrambles for a weapon and darts toward me, and I bare my teeth. I watch the nerves break just like his arm already has, speed toward him and fling him over my head to the ground.

"Cassian," he chokes. "Cassian, we're done, fall back⁠—"

From the dark of the hall the dry voice answers. "Yes." Calm. Unsurprised. They came tonight to learn one thing, and they have learned it. He scolds me with more bloodroot blown to my face, and scrambles free. When I open my eyes they're gone, Hannah is curled in a corner with Lily.

The storm hammers the windows. The lamp swings on its cord, throwing my shadow long across the wall and theirs small beneath it.

Hannah has dragged Lily into her, one arm flung across the girl's chest, her body wedged between Lily and me. Her eyes go to my mouth. To my hand, my face, where the burns still smoke faintly.

"What—" she tries to find the words. "Erm, what are you?" She already knows the answer.

I get to their level slowly, but I don't edge closer.

"They're hunters," I say, avoiding her question. "They came because of what Elspeth hid. I've been trying to stop them from reaching you and Lily."

"That isn't what I asked." Hannah's arm tightens around Lily. "What the hell are you?"

Lily is shaking against her mother, but her eyes are clear, and they're on me, and there is no horror in them. There is only horror in Hannah's.

"Get out," she says.

"Hannah—"

"You were in my house. You were—" She stops. She will not say it in front of Lily. She doesn't need to. I watch her run back through every hour I gave her and find the lie folded under all of it. "Get out of my house, Alaric."

So I do. I rise, cross to the broken wall where the rain blows in, and look back once at the two of them on the floor of the house I've spent weeks keeping whole.

I saved her tonight. The bloodroot still aches in my palm to prove it. And standing in the ruined doorway with the storm at my back, I understand exactly what it bought me. Not her trust. The end of it.

19

HANNAH

The front door hangs from one hinge, swinging with the wind, and the rain comes through it in a thin gray sheet across the entry corridor.

I make myself move.

"Lily." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Lily. Look at me. Are you hurt?"

She's wedged into the corner behind me, knees pulled up. When I say her name, she lifts her head. A red line runs along her forearm where she caught the edge of something, and her eyes are too wide.

"I'm okay," she says. "I'm okay. Are you—are you⁠—"

"Don't move yet. There's glass everywhere."

The room is wrecked. The side table, on its back, the lamp shattered, and a dark smear streaks the windowsill—the same bitter, scorched residue. I pick a path through the wreckage and take her arm, turning it toward the light. The cut is shallow, and I inhale slowly.

"Up," I tell her. "Watch where you step. Come on."

I run her arm under the tap, press a clean towel to it, and hold it there with both hands like that's the only thing in the world I have to do. My hands are shaking.

"Mom." Lily watches my face. "Mom, you saw it too."

"I saw a lot of things."

"He moved—" She stops. Starts again, quieter. "Nobody moves like that. And his teeth. Mom, did you see them?"

I don't answer. I lift the towel, check the cut, fold it to a clean side, press it down again. If I keep my hands busy, I won't have to put words to the thing buried inside me.

"He saved us," Lily says. It isn't a defense. It comes out more like a question she needs me to solve. "Those men were going to take you, and he stopped them. So what is he?"

"Lily."

"You know. A little.You must do."

"I don't, Lil."

I leave her holding the towel and return to the mess, because I need to occupy myself. I set the side table upright. I gather the larger pieces of the lamp into the wastebasket. I drag the runner away from the spreading wet, and I'm reaching to pull the broken door closed against the rain when I see him. Sat with his hands on his head. He hasn't gone anywhere. I stop with my hand on the splintered frame.

"You need to leave," I say.

"I know." The rain runs off him, and he doesn't seem to feel it. "I'll go. I wanted to be sure no one came back first."

Behind me I hear Lily in the kitchen doorway. I don't turn. I keep my eyes on him, on the man I've spent weeks learning to trust, standing in the dark like something I dreamed.

"Are you a—" I can't get the word out.

I expect him to lie, instead he says, "A vampire. Yes."

His admission sits there, ridiculous and certain at once. Parts of me want to laugh, but it doesn't quite come out because I saw what I saw. The speed. The strength. The burns on his hands closing while Lily and I gawped.

"The men tonight were hunters," he goes on, steady, careful with every word. "They've been watching this house. They believe there's something here that leads to what they want. I've been trying to keep it away from you. From both of you."

"By what? Watching us?" My mouth is dry. "The staircase. The locks. You were in the trees that first night. That was you."

"Yes."

"You let me—" I stop. The festival. His hands. The night I told myself I'd earned the right to feel something again. All of it rearranges. I promised myself I'd notice a man like this next time. "Every conversation. You let me bring you into my house. Near my daughter. And you decided what I got to understand and what I didn't."

"I should have told you sooner." No excuse follows it. He just stands there in the rain and lets it be true.

My phone buzzes against the counter. I almost ignore it, but Lily hands it to me and Nathan's name appears on screen. I answer the way you grab a railing on a falling staircase.

"Hannah." Nathan's voice is too quiet. "Don't say my name if he's still there."

My hand closes harder around the phone. "What?"

"Is Lily bleeding?"

The kitchen seems to tip. I look at Lily in the doorway, towel pressed to her arm. "And you know that, how?"

"Because this is what they do. They leave humans hurt, grateful, and confused about who caused the damage." His pause is careful. "Do not let Blackwood back inside. Do not let him touch your daughter. He was close to hear you scream tonight, wasn't he? To arrive before help. Ask yourself how many nights he has been that close."

Rain spits through the broken door. Alaric stands beyond it, silent.

"I have to go," I tell Nathan, and end the call before he can wind it any tighter.

He's using this. I know he is, but knowing it doesn't unmake the part of me that's afraid. I turn to Alaric.

"You don't come inside," I say. "Not tonight. Not ever again. You don't watch this house. And you don't speak to Lily alone—not one word."

Alaric inclines his head, but doesn't promise me anything, doesn't tell me what I mean to him.

"Ok."

He steps back off the porch, and I haul the broken door shut as far as it will go.

20

ALARIC

The storm has disintegrated, but the eaves keep weeping long after the sky goes quiet. My forearms have stopped smoking, but the marks remain—welts where the bloodroot rope lay against me, slow to close because the poison settles into the tissue and mocks whatever I am. A human would have scarred. I will heal by morning; that is the easy part. Harder is the memory of Hannah in the doorway, putting her body between me and Lily as though I were the thing that almost harmed them. She was not wrong in a sense, but I would never.

I hear Lily before I see her. The mud betrays her: the wet suck of sneakers crossing the dead garden, the careful breath of a girl who has decided to be braver than she feels.

"You shouldn't be here," I declare, without turning. "Your mother asked that I not speak with you alone. Go home, Lily."

"And." Her voice is thin in the cold, but it does not waver. "She's asleep. And I needed answers."

"This is not something she would appreciate."

"Yeah, well," She stops a few feet off, arms crossed, chin lifted. "There's a lot she doesn't appreciate right now."

I turn. She flinches—a small wince she hates herself for—and I look away first, so she knows I noticed and won't press it.

"You're hurt," she says.

"I'm healing."

"Yeah, slowly."

Sharp girl. Always has been. "It will pass."

She studies the burns.

"Those men who came. Were they trying to kill me, her or you?"

"They want something your great-grandmother left behind. They believe your mother knows where it is." I keep my voice plain. "They would not have been gentle about asking."

"Hunters." She says the word like she's testing a stair that might not hold. "That's what you called them."

"Yes. Of me. Of what I am."

She nods. "The blood thing. Is that real, or the part everyone made up?"

"It's real."

"Did you ever⁠—"

"No." I don't make her finish. "Not from you. Your mother. Or anyone here. There are ways to live that don't require it. I chose that life."

"Could you hurt us? If you wanted."

"Yes." I give her the ugly truth. "I could. I won't."

Something loosens—not trust, not yet, but the first slack in a rope pulled too tight.

"Then why lie? You let us think you were just some rich grump who hated company. You let Mom—" Her voice splinters, and she swallows it down. "She started to like you."

"More than a hundred years ago, before there were vehicles on these roads, I was made into what I am. I won't dress it up; it was no gift. After, I lived among my own kind a while. I loved a woman. The world I belonged to destroyed her life, and she did not survive it."

Lily doesn't speak. She lets a terrible thing keep its full size instead of shrinking it with a joke.

"After that, it seemed simpler to want nothing. Wanting is how they find the people you love. Then your mother appeared with you trying to convert a house back to a liveable state. She frightened me, Lily. Not for what she is—for what she made me want. A future. And every future I imagine had a door in it that men like the ones tonight could walk through."

She is quiet a moment. Then: "That's such a coward's way to love somebody."

Her words sting because they're true.

"You decided," she goes on, the fear in her catching fire, "all by yourself, that we couldn't handle it. That lying was safer. You're doing it right now—being noble so you don't face her." She steps closer, her chin trembling. "My dad decided things for us too. What we needed. What we could take. I'm sick of people like that."

I have no answer that isn't an excuse, so I keep silent.

"She has every right to be furious. You lied—that's hers to be angry about. But that man on the phone, Nathan, isn't protecting her. He's using how scared she is. He wants her too frightened of you to confirm what you are." She drags a sleeve across her face, livid at her own tears. "I've watched you. Every time you could've taken the easy way, you didn't. That's the only reason I'm here. So don't make me wrong about you."

Something settles in me—not relief. Resolve, maybe, with the bark still on it.

"You're right."

"So stop."

"I will."

I take from my coat a small folded paper and begin writing, then I pass it to Lily.

"This is for your mother. Only if she wants it." I hold it out, so the taking is hers. "It isn't a letter. Nothing about me, or feelings, or anything she has to answer. It's how to make the house harder to enter. Window locks, the gap in the cellar, which boards give a person away. If she'd rather burn it, that's hers to do."

Lily looks at the paper, then at me. "You're not even going to ask me to put in a good word."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because a good word from you would be mine, not hers. Only she can decide whether I'm good for her." I press the paper into her cold hand and fold her fingers over it.

She holds it as though it might bite. For a breath she's just a child who has been afraid for hours and wants someone to make the world simple again. I can't. The kindest thing I have is refusing to pretend otherwise.

"Go home, Lily," I say, gentler now. "Lock the cellar window. If she asks, tell her I'm sorry—only that. Not why. The why is hers to hear from me, when she's ready. Or never."

She turns and crosses the ruined garden, the note pressed to her chest. I hold the boundary until the dark takes her, until I hear the click of a lock, and then I stay where I am, listening to the house I am no longer allowed to guard.

21

HANNAH

Morning comes with clouds and the gray grudges through the broken parlor window. I couldn't sleep so I'm on my knees with the dustpan.

Glass is scattered everywhere, catching the weak light. Warped now, and swollen where the rain entered through the gap the door left when it tore loose of its top hinge. I sweep, and the broom snags on a nail head pried up. I work it free.

The coffee starts to knock and spit on the stove. The house stinks of scorched iron and a chemical bite that catches at my throat. The hunters left it on my threshold. I have scrubbed that board twice. It will not come out of the grain.

I drag the kitchen chair we never sit in over to the front door, wedge its back under the ruined handle, and lean my whole weight on it. It holds. Just.

"You didn't sleep." Lily is on the stairs, wrapped in the quilt, hair a dark snarl.

"Neither did you."

She comes down slow, favoring the arm she hurt, and stops three steps from the bottom. She holds a square of paper, folded twice, the creases pressed sharp.

"He gave me this." Her chin is steady. "I'm not defending him. I'm just handing it to you."

I don't reach for it. "Lily."

"It isn't what you think." She sets it on the post instead, flattens it once under her palm. "It's not a letter."

I pour the coffee, drink half of it while leaning against the doorway. I last maybe six minutes before I take it.

Lily was right. It's a list, written in a hand so even it looks ruled against a straightedge: the two north windows that don't seat in their frames, the cellar hatch with a gap wide enough for a forearm, the third and fifth porch boards that announce a footstep before it lands. How to seat a brace. How to salt a sill. Where the man who built this house left the back stair weak for anyone patient enough to lean on it.

No apology. No *because.* Nothing about himself at all. It unsettles me more than tenderness would have. He knows every nook and cranny of the house. He has been counting our weak places. And then he wrote them down so I could close them. I fold the note again, but I don't throw it away.

I hear a scrape come from the chimney. Walking by it, a clatter inside.

"What was that?" Lily asks.

I take the poker and shift the cold ash that's been there since we moved in. Something drops from the flue with a puff of soot: a dented tin, blackened, wrapped in oilcloth so old it flakes under my fingers.

Inside is no journal. Just a folded paper, a narrow ledger page, and Elspeth's handwriting, cramped and deliberate.

Not enemies. Shelter them.

Below it, a list of initials, dates, and single words: Passage. Kept. Quiet.

Beside each line sits the same hooked mark carved into the cellar beam.

They come hunted, she wrote, not hunting. The nightfolk who keep the old peace need a roof the hunters cannot read, and I have given them one. No blood is spilled under this roof, and none will be while I draw breath. Tell my granddaughter, when she is ready, that the danger was never the dark. It was always the men who came to cleanse it.

I read it twice, and cold rushes through to my fingertips. She was helping vampires, hiding them. From men. Hunters.

"You found something." Lily pipes up.

"Yes." I throw myself back on my heels. "Why did you go to him?"

"Because nobody will just say what's true. He didn't ask me to forgive him, ya know. He didn't even try. I asked questions and he told me straight, no excuses. Then he said the choice about all of it was yours. He kept saying that. Yours."

"He lied to us. He stood here and lied."

"I know."

The knock comes soft. Three taps, considerate, against the braced door.

Nathan stands well back, hat in his hands. He doesn't step on the third board. Or the fifth. The same boards from the note. I tuck that away where I keep the rest.

"I saw movement," he says. "I won't come in. God, Hannah — look at this place. Are you both all right?"

"We're fine."

"Lily?"

"Fine."

His gaze drifts past me, gentle, thorough. "Has he come back? Alaric?"

"No."

"Good." He turns the hat. "And the back room — did the weather get into Elspeth's papers? Her ledgers. If anything's water-damaged, I know a man who restores⁠—"

"Who told you she kept ledgers?"

A pause. Smooth as water closing over a dropped stone. "Everyone in this town knew Elspeth had records." He smiles. "Did you find them? Anything strange in there?"

I glance at the hooked mark on the beam, then back at him, and I lie. "There's a page about the old well. Some blessing for the water. Nothing strange."

There is no page about a well.

"The well." He nods slowly, and something behind his eyes adjusts — a man fitting a new fact into a frame he built before he ever arrived. "Of course. She did love that well."

He doesn't ask which well. We don't have a well.

"Salt those sills," he says, already stepping back. "You can't be too careful, with what's out there."

"What is out there, Nathan?"

"You know what." He's turning away.

I pretend I'm considering how to fix the door, but really I'm waiting for him to disappear before going to the pages.

Lily comes to my shoulder. "He's lying."

"Yes."

"About what?"

"Not sure."

I go back down to the ledger and letters. Below Elspeth's signature, smaller, is a line I missed.

What I have written would end people if the wrong hands closed on it. Names. Roofs. Every safe place. Burn it before you let it be taken. Better lost than turned into a list of the hunted.

A list of hunted. Somewhere I haven't found, dangerous enough to get people killed. I don't know where she hid it, but I know she ain't no liar.

I lay Alaric's note on the floorboards and set Elspeth's letter beside it. One says how to stay alive, the other how to notice the ones who don't keep peace. And Nathan definitely what she had.

Nathan's story, that Alaric is the danger, is a lie. It doesn't mean I forgive him though. I'm too angry to consider that. But not once did he ask me to fear the wrong thing.

"Mom," Lily says. "What do we do?"

"We find more." I stand. The braced door holds at my back — the house broken and upright, full of supports I never knew ran underneath it. "Before either of them gets into my head. Before I trust one more word."

22

ALARIC

I'm in my old library, where the air holds the weight of undisturbed years. The heavy oak doors remain closed, sealing in the quiet that has become my habit. I have honored Hannah's requests for two days now, even as every instinct pulls me toward her. Nathan's shadow lengthens across Briar Glen, hunters prowl, and fragments of Elspeth's old secrets at my ears. Yet I remain here, because forcing myself would only confirm what she already suspects: that I'm just like her ex-husband.

The grandfather clock in the corner has not ticked in years. Its hands rest at a fixed hour, a small mercy I once welcomed. Tonight, the silence presses differently.

A knock echoes through from the main door. I cross into the corridor, my steps muffled on the worn runner. When I open the door, Elias stands on the wide stone steps, his coat cut in an old European style that speaks of another century. His eyes, sharp as polished flint, meet mine without warmth or accusation.

"Alaric," he says. "The town stirs with unwelcome visitors. Draycott being one of them. It's time I came."

I step aside, letting him enter. We move without further greeting into the library. Elias surveys the room—the draped furniture, the books untouched since the last war, the single chair I use. He chooses to stand near the window, fingers tracing the velvet curtain drawn tight against the night.

"Hunters have grown bolder," he says, turning to face me. "But that is not why I crossed three territories before nightfall. I came because I felt the disturbance around you. Not fear. Not grief. Something older waking."

I lean against the desk, arms crossed. "Then you came for nothing. Whatever you felt is mine to manage."

"It is not managing you," Elias says. "It is moving through you like weather through a cracked house."

"Poetic."

"Accurate." His gaze sharpens. "Where is the woman?"

"Where she asked me to leave her. Away from me."

"And still it pulls this hard." Elias's voice lowers. "Then I was right to come."

"She needs space to weigh the truths for herself. Pushing would prove I value my judgment above hers."

He moves to the far shelf, where a small silver frame rests face-down beneath a thin layer of dust. He lifts it and turns it toward the light. The portrait holds a woman with steady eyes and a half-smile that once anchored my world. Her name lingers in memory but stays unspoken between us.

"You have carried this grief for too long," Elias says, setting the frame upright on the shelf. "Loyalty does not require you to become a mausoleum."

"Stop."

"No. You have been careful for ninety years, and look what it has made of you."

The woman in the frame belonged to a life I buried whole. I loved her. I failed her. Those two truths seemed enough to build a prison from.

"Hannah is not her," Elias says.

"I know."

"Do you?" He steps closer. "The first bond you mistook for destiny was grief wearing a crown. This one is different. Rare. Reciprocal, if she ever chooses to meet it. It does not ask you to guard a memory. It asks whether you can stand before a living woman without making her pay for the dead."

The words strike where I have no armor.

Elias continues, mercilessly gentle. "A rare bond does not make her yours. It makes the truth harder to avoid. She remains free. She must remain free, or the bond curdles into possession."

I stare toward the face in the frame and, the memory hurts cleanly. Not as a chain. As a grave.

"I loved her," I say.

"Yes."

"And Hannah is not a second chance at her."

"No."

"I lied to Hannah because I thought knowledge would endanger her," I say. "But I chose what she was allowed to know. I made fear sound noble. That is not protection."

"No," Elias says. "It is only another locked door."

"What do you expect me to do?" I ask.

"Stop treating silence as mercy."

"She told me to stay away."

"Then stay away." Elias' gaze does not soften. "But do not confuse absence with honesty. If you cannot stand at her door, leave her something true enough to test without touching her. A choice is not a choice if you keep the lock and call it safety."

I almost laugh. "You always did prefer impossible instructions."

"I prefer clean ones." He turns toward the door. "Tell her what the bond is not. Not ownership. Not replacement. Not a hunger she is required to answer. Begin there, before Nathan teaches her an uglier version."

I draw the curtains wide. Moonlight spills in, and I sit at the desk, pull out a fresh sheet of paper, and begin to write. Not a plea for forgiveness, not explanations wrapped in pretty restraint. Plain facts: what the bond is, what it's not, why I'm usually reclusive, and every choice I took from her. No plea either. I title the pages simply—What I Owe You—and put them in her mailbox.

The room no longer feels preserved in amber. I leave the portrait facing forward, the curtains open. Hannah has to forgive me. I do not expect her to though, not yet. But I will not be silent or be a shadow anymore. I will do everything I can to win her back.

I extinguish the lamp, and the weight on my chest feels lighter—not gone, but no longer absolute. The future I once refused to imagine now waits in the space between us, unclaimed but possible.

23

HANNAH

Iwalk up the gravel drive to Alaric's house under heavy low clouds. My boots crunch the stones. It's time I found out the truth. My choice. No one called me here. After days of turning over every scrap of truth I could find, I simply came because staying away felt worse than facing him.

The light casts a warm circle on the weathered boards. I stop and knock twice, firm with confidence. Inside, footsteps move, then pause. The door slowly opens, and Alaric stands there, shock crossing his face.

"Hannah," my name said with caution. "Come in if you want."

I step through the doorway. He closes the door behind me but keeps distance between us. I take off my coat and hang it on the hook, then turn to face him, lamplight pools on the rug.

"I read it," I say, pulling the papers from my pocket and setting them on the low table. "Every bit. You laid it out straight."

He nods once, hands at his sides. "Every word is true."

I sit on the bottom of the staircase. He remains standing a fair distance away, giving the space I need. My chest feels tight, but I push the words out anyway. "The worst part wasn't learning what you are. It was realizing you chose for me, the same way Gregory used to. It's a type of control dressed up as care."

Alaric shifts his jaw, but he doesn't look away. "Yes. I told myself it was protection. It wasn't. I was wrong, and I'm sorry."

The apology seems simple and bare. No explanations. My shoulders drop with ease at how easy that was.

I lean forward, elbows to knees. "Tell me. The woman you lost. Who was she?"

He moves to the opposite chair and sits, elbows on his knees. "Her name was Renee. We met in another life, another town. She died because of the world I lived in then. Hunters. The grief was real. It carved out pieces of me."

I study his face, searching for any familiar evasion. "And the bond?"

"It's a pull. A recognition. It doesn't own you. It doesn't command you. It doesn't mean you owe me anything you don't freely give. Your choices stay yours. Always."

The room shrinks with the air thickening. I cross to the window, looking out at the dark trees swaying in the wind. He stays seated. I appreciate that more than I can say right now.

"I'm still angry. And scared. But Nathan's story isn't adding up. Elspeth's notes prove there's more to what he's saying. I'm done letting him convince me otherwise."

I turn back. Alaric watches me, patient. I walk over and stop in front of him. "I'm choosing to believe you. Not because everything feels safe again. It doesn't. But because I want to walk into the rest of this with open eyes. With you."

He rises slowly, careful. "Then we do it together."

I reach up and touch his face, my thumb brushing the line of his jaw. He leans into the contact but lets me lead. I kiss him first, tentative, then deeper when he answers with the same measured hunger. His hands settle at my waist, light, ready to release if I pull away. I don't.

The tension snaps between us halfway up the staircase. I back him against the banister, my fingers twisted in the front of his shirt, and he lets me. No rush. No demand. Just the steadiness of his body under my palms and the way his breath catches when I press closer.

I pull the hem of his shirt free and slide my hands underneath, mapping the cool firmness of his skin. He exhales sharply when my nails graze lower. I push the fabric up and off; it drops to the steps behind us. My sweater follows, then my shirt. His hands trace the line of my ribs, and the dip of my waist.

I straddle his thigh on the next step, grinding down against his cock through our remaining clothes. The friction is rough, but it's not enough. I rock again, chasing pressure, and he grips my hips to steady me, thumbs pressing into the hollows above my hipbones. His mouth finds my throat, teeth scraping lightly before he soothes the spot with his tongue.

"Hannah," he breathes, the word fractured. "Look."

I hold his gaze, and reach between us to open his belt, the zipper, freeing him. He's thick, the blunt head already slick. I stroke once, twice, watching him grind down. A low sound escapes him—half growl, half plea.

He works my jeans open with steady fingers, shoving them down my thighs along with my underwear. I kick them aside, one leg still tangled in fabric. He sits on one step and pulls me over him so I'm straddling his lap, knees braced on the wood. The step digs into my shin, but I don't care. I sink down slowly, taking his cock with more ease this time. The fit is tight, a burning pressure that forces my body to yield. I feel every ridge, every thick slide as I settle fully onto him.

A ragged sound leaves me. His hands flex on my waist, holding me there but not forcing movement. "You feel—" He cuts himself off, breathing mingling. "So fucking perfect. Take what you need."

I roll my hips experimentally. The angle lets me control the depth, grinding down so he presses against that sensitive spot inside me with every motion. Wet sounds fill the stairwell—the slick slide of my body around him, the soft creak of the wooden steps under us. I brace one hand on the banister and ride him harder, chasing the friction. His thumb finds my clit, circling in tight, relentless strokes that match my rhythm. The dual sensation shreds my focus; pleasure coils sharp and hot low in my belly.

He leans back slightly, one arm locked around my lower back to keep me anchored. His other hand stays between us, working my clit until my thighs start to tremble. I lean forward, biting his shoulder to muffle the broken moan that tries to escape. He hisses at the sting but thrusts up to meet me, driving deeper.

"Don't hide it," he rasps against my ear, voice chopped and desperate. "Let me hear you. Let me feel how you fall apart for me."

The words tip me closer. I move faster, the slap of skin on skin growing louder, obscene against the quiet house. Sweat gathers at the small of my back. His stubble scrapes the swell of my breast when he mouths at it, leaving a flushed trail. I dig my nails into his shoulders, leaving crescent marks that I know will be gone before this ends.

The tension builds, merciless. My rhythm falters as everything tightens—my thighs, my core clenching greedily around his cock. He senses it, thumb pressing firmer, circling faster. "That's it. Come on me, Hannah. I've got you."

It hits like a wave crashing through every nerve. My vision whites out. My body locks down around him in pulsing, rhythmic squeezes, a soaking, fluttering grip that milks him. A raw cry breaks from my throat. He keeps moving through it, drawing it out until I'm shaking, oversensitive, gasping against his neck.

Only then does he let go. With a guttural sound, he pulls me down hard and holds me there as he comes, pulsing deep inside me. The sensation drags another aftershock from me. We stay locked together, hearts hammering against each other, breaths ragged and shared. Sweat cools on our skin. The wooden step bites into my knee; his arms stay where they are, wrapped.

I press my forehead to his, still joined, the intensity of it grounding me more than any words could. The hurt from before hasn't vanished. It lingers in the quiet spaces between our heartbeats. But this—choosing him here, on these stairs, body and trust both laid bare—feels like the first real step across the gap he once created.

We stay like that for long minutes, hands stroking slow paths over damp skin, trading soft kisses that say more than we manage in words. Eventually I ease off him with a shared hiss. He helps me pull my clothes back on, careful with the tangles, then dresses himself. We move to his sofa and I lay in his arms a little longer.

"We need to find the archive," I say into the quiet. "Before Nathan or anyone else gets there first. Whatever answers it holds, we could face them side by side. If you want that."

Alaric's hand stills, then resumes its gentle path. "Agreed. No more secrets between us about this. We start at the old property records tomorrow. Cross-reference what Elspeth left you. We learn it all, together."

I lift my head to look at him. "And if it gets dangerous?"

"We stay careful. But you're not walking blind anymore. We aren't. I got you, Hannah."

I settle back against him, the weight of the day easing into something like solid ground. Outside, the wind picks up, rattling the windowpanes, but inside the room holds steady. We are not safe from what waits beyond these walls, neither is Lily. The larger threat remains. Yet here, in this moment, we have chosen each other without illusion.

24

ALARIC

The morning light inside Hannah's house is a different animal than the morning light I've watched it through. All I've done is watch over this house and them instead of appreciating the beauty of it. Now I'm standing in Elspeth's dining room holding a cup of coffee I have no use for, and the change is small and total. Hannah put the key in my hand last night. I keep finding it in my pocket, the cold weight of being let in instead of kept out.

She's spread all of her grandmother's things across the dining table. The chimney tin sits open at the center, rust freckling its lid. Around it she's arranged the rest: the brittle survey, three journals, the rubbings she lifted from the cellar marks, her own notebook crowded with pencil.

"Let's sort it by type," I say. "Dates together, names together, anything with a measurement on its own page⁠—"

"No. Not paper first."

I make myself stay where I am and let her cross the room ahead of me.

"Elspeth didn't trust paper," Hannah says. "She trusted walls. Floors. The places nobody searches because they use them every day." She lays her palm flat against the wall beside the chimney breast. "We start here."

"And here is⁠—"

"Wrong. Can you see what's wrong with it?"

I look. Plaster, a picture rail, a seam where newer paint meets old. "It's been worked on."

"It's eight inches too far into the room." She knocks it, flat and hollow, then knocks the chimney breast, which answers like stone. "Nobody who built the original would throw away eight inches in a house this tight. Somebody added a skin to this wall later and aged it to match." Her thumb finds a crack thinner than a hair. "Restoration's just reading. You learn what a year does to a joint, what ten years does. This wall is lying about how old it is."

She brings the old survey to the table next and floats the modern property map on top of it, lifting both to the window so the light pushes through the two together.

"The boundary," she says. "Watch the northwest corner."

The lines agree almost the whole way around. Then, at that corner, they split. The old survey runs the property out in a long finger toward the ridge. The new map cuts it off square.

"Someone redrew it," she says. "On paper the land shrank. On the ground nothing moved an inch." Her pencil traces the missing strip. "She kept the survey in the chimney because the chimney's the only part of the house still pointing the honest way."

Theo's been quiet, turning a folding rule end over end. He came at first light because Hannah asked, and because he's framed half the additions in this town and knows the feel of an honest wall under his hand. He sets the rule to the false partition and walks its angle across the boards.

"Carry that line out past your corner," he says, "and it doesn't quit at your line. It keeps going." He tips his head at the window, at the dark shoulder of the hills. "Straight at the old workings up the Glen. The dig every grandfather around here worked and not one of them will talk about."

Hannah is already dialing. She sets the phone on the survey, speaker on. "Clara. That rhyme you and Elspeth taught the little ones. The hill one."

Clara's voice comes through thin and amused. "The water song? I haven't sung that since they shut the school." And she sings it, the way you give back something your mouth remembers better than you do.

Under the hill where the cold creek runs,

three ways for the daughters and one for the sons.

Follow the iron and never the light,

and the Glen will keep you the whole of the night.

"Counting song," Clara says. "Kept them from straying off up the slope."

"Thanks Clara." Then Hannah hangs up.

Hannah's pencil hasn't stopped. "It isn't a song." She underlines three ways, the iron, the light. "It's directions. Three entrances—four. Follow the rails, stay off the surface. It's how you cross the whole works without ever coming up where you'd be seen."

My phone goes off against my hip. Elias, who never texts without a reason. Sanctuary roads always ran beside the digging. The tunnels carried the hunted and our kind both, a long way back. If she's reading toward the workings, she's reading right. Watch the road in.

The old reflex is to turn the screen down and shave the truth thin enough for her to swallow whole. I turn it face-up instead and slide it across to her.

"Who's that?" she asks. Not suspicious. Reading me.

"A friend who knows the old roads better than anyone living. He's telling me what the house already is. And he says watch the road in. Hannah—there's bloodroot coming up at the head of the survey road. It wasn't there last week. Bloodroot doesn't just arrive."

She knows what it means now. I watch her take it the same way she took the wall: not flinching off it, weighing it.

"Nathan's people," she says.

"Watching the way up. Maybe already started down."

She goes quiet, but it isn't the quiet of someone breaking. She squares the journals at their edges, the way she squares anything she's working through. "Then we don't get to do this carefully." Her eyes come up, steady. "If they're sitting on the survey road, they don't have what we have. They're guessing at entrances. We're not."

"You want to run at it."

"I want to be there first. With you—not instead of you, not three steps behind you. With you."

"There's four."

We both turn. Lily's there, sock-footed, holding the cellar rubbing she was told to leave alone. Sixteen and she misses nothing.

"The song says three ways and one for the sons. That's four." She turns the rubbing so we can see. "There's a fourth one nobody counts because it's the boys' one."

Theo lets out a short laugh. Hannah goes to her and rights the paper, and there it is—under the three scored lines she'd read as a single mark, a fourth, fainter, set off on its own. A door no one was ever told to look for.

"She's right," Hannah says.

"Obviously," says Lily.

"From here you stay. That one isn't up for debate." I request.

She gives me a look with more of her great-grandmother in it than she knows. "No need for the voice. I already wasn't coming."

We move fast, and it's the first time the speed feels shared—Hannah inking the four entrances onto the clean map, me hauling gear to the truck, Theo penciling the false wall's angle onto the page so we can throw the line by daylight. She hands me the map before I ask for it. I fold the survey into the tin and the tin into my coat. Partners.

At the end of the drive I stop the truck. The bloodroot at the survey road has been cut. Fresh—the stems still weep where the blade went through. Somebody cleared the path in the dark. And nailed to the post where the road bends up toward the Glen, pale on the weathered wood, is a new mark: three scored lines, and a fourth set apart.

"They've already gone down," Hannah says.

I put the truck in gear. "Then so do we."

25

HANNAH

The truck stops where the road runs out of gravel and the mountain starts in earnest. I'm down on the verge before Alaric has the engine off, crouched over the bloodroot that grows thick along the ditch.

Someone's been at it. The stems are sheared clean, the cuts still weeping rust-red, and the boot prints pressed into the wet ground beside them are new — four sets, maybe five, all angled downhill toward the black mouth of the main adit.

"They've already gone in," Alaric says.

"How far ahead?"

"Not far. The sap hasn't even browned." He touches a cut stem and his fingertip comes away red and sizzling. "Within the hour."

Headlights wash through the trees behind us. A county cruiser climbs the last of the road and stops, and Sheriff Holloway, Ben, gets out slow, one hand resting near his belt.

"Hannah." He names me like he's making sure. "You want to explain the three trucks with downstate plates parked off the fire road? And the men in my woods carrying rifles they're calling survey gear?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"Try me with the part I will." He thumbs his flashlight on and runs it across the cut bloodroot, the churned ground, Alaric standing quiet. His attention holds there for too long. "Elspeth send you up here before she passed?"

"In a manner of speaking."

That's enough for him. Whatever he makes of Alaric, whatever he doesn't understand yet, the name does the work. He knew her. Half the county did.

"They told the clerk they're a historical society," he says. "Historians don't cut a padlock."

"No. They don't."

He crouches across from me and spreads a map over his knee — old paper, the county seal faded to a ghost. "My granddad's. He surveyed these workings before they sealed them. Pulled it when the new trucks showed." He taps a second map, a glossy county print, laid beside it.

I look between them. It takes a moment, and then it's plain. The old map has a road the new one doesn't — a thin spur breaking off below the main adit, curving east along the slope before the paper crease swallows it.

"That road's gone," Ben says. "Not collapsed. Gone. Somebody scrubbed it off when they redrew the county. You don't lose a road by accident."

"No," I say. "You lose it on purpose."

And then I see the mark. It's small, inked in the margin beside that vanished spur — three short strokes and a fourth off on its own, scored a shade deeper. My pulse goes loud. I've seen it on the door of the old church annex, under the eave of a barn, carved into a post we found before. Elspeth's hand. Her counting.

"Sheriff. Who marked your grandfather's map?"

He frowns at the margin. "That's not — huh. I always took that for a fold guide."

"It's not. It's hers. She was on this map before anyone."

Alaric leans in to look, and stops moving entirely — too still, the way he gets when something underground reaches him before it reaches us. He catches himself fast and straightens. "Engine," he says, mildly. "Down the slope. Idling."

Ben's head comes up. "I don't hear an engine."

"You will."

I'm already counting it through. Three strokes and a fourth apart. Three workings any map will give you — the main adit, the upper air shaft, the haulage cut. And a fourth, set apart, that no map will. The fourth way. The one Lily said about the sons in the song.

"It's not the entrance they want," I say, and I stand, because I'm sure of it now and being sure is its own kind of standing. "Nathan's people went down the adit because it's the only door their maps gave them. But Elspeth never counted the front one. She counted the one that drains."

Ben rises with me. "Drains where?"

"There." I point east, past the cut bloodroot, to where the laurel grows in a line too straight to be wild. "Old workings flood. Every one of them needs a way to bleed the water off, low and out of sight. An ore spur, an exit nobody bothered to seal because nobody remembered it. That's where she'd put something. Not behind the obvious door. Past the one that drains."

"Hannah." Alaric's voice drops — the worry rising under it. "If you're right, that's exactly where they'll come up when the adit dead-ends on them. You'd be walking toward four armed men."

He's not wrong, and for a breath I watch him want to finish the thought, want to put himself between me and end the argument with his body. He stops himself because he remembers what we said to each other — that I get to stand in this, not behind it. His hand opens at his side.

"Then we move before they do," I say, gentle, because I understand what he just gave me.

Ben's reading something he can't fully see. "If we go off the marked workings, I'm not radioing this in. Two of you and me against four rifles, in tunnels I can't map⁠—"

"You can map this one." I crouch back to his grandfather's paper and trace the vanished spur, off the crease, to where the old man's pencil ghosted a small square. "He drew the outflow. Right here. Your granddad knew about the fourth way too." Ben stares at the square.

We gather everything and move fast. The laurel line gives onto a cut bank, and the timbers begin where the brush thins — pit props, gray and split with age, leaning out of the hillside like the ribs of something long dead. I run my light along them. On the third post, low, where a careless eye skims past, the bark's been shaved and the wood beneath scored with my grandma's symbol

"She marked the way in," I breathe.

I clear the moss above the fourth stroke with my thumb, and the wood under it is pale and raw. Somebody else scraped here, recently, and got the count wrong — cleared the three and missed the fourth. They read part of her and not the rest.

A sound carries up out of the dark below us. Metal on stone, then metal on metal — a chain, dropping somewhere deeper in.

Ben's flashlight finds the old gate twenty feet down the spur, hanging open on a sheared hasp. He goes to it, touches the bright cut edge, and his face changes.

"That's cut from the inside," he says quietly. "Somebody came up to open it."

Below us, deep in the throat of the fourth way, a lantern swings — once, slow, where no honest light should be. I switch mine off.

"Then we already know the way," I whisper. "We just have to reach it before they figure it out."

26

ALARIC

The iron gate stands open, and the fresh cuts on its hinges face the wrong way. Whoever opened the fourth route worked from below, sawing outward toward us, not in.

Hannah crouches at the lip of the shaft, her flashlight angled low, and the beam finds a thread of lantern light far down the incline — swinging, shrinking. "There," she says. "They're already past us."

"I see it." She's already half over the edge, and I've learned not to take hold of her arm when she's like this. "Ben. The grade."

Ben Holloway runs his own light across the rotted timbers. He's breathing shallow through his mouth, the dark gone personal on him. "Drops forty feet, then it levels. The old county survey called this a dead heading." He looks at me, not at the shaft. "Except somebody dug it past dead, didn't they."

"Somebody did."

I drop to my heels by the gatepost, and that's when the other smell finds me, under the cold iron and standing water of the mine. Beeswax. Char. Something colder braided through both, like the emptiness a body leaves in a room it's been gone from too long. I follow it to the post and find what no hunter would ever leave: a flat coin of black wax pressed to the wood at eye height, a single hair set into it, a bead of dried blood sealing the seam. I don't touch it.

"Hannah. Come look — but keep your hands off it."

She comes. Ben follows, and he swears under his breath when his light catches the thing. "That's no survey mark," he says.

"No."

"Then what is it?"

"A knock," I say.

Ben straightens slowly. "A knock from who?"

I look at Hannah first. Not for permission exactly, but because the truth belongs partly to her now too. She gives one small nod.

"Not Nathan's people," I say.

Ben's eyes narrow. "That's not an answer."

"No."

He looks from me to Hannah, then back to the wax pressed into the timber. His hand settles near his holster, not drawing, only remembering it exists. "Blackwood, I have men with rifles in my woods, a gate cut from the wrong side, and an old mark on my grandfather's map that matches the dead woman's trail. I am past patient."

"This was left by a vampire," I say.

The word seems to take the air out of the mine mouth.

Ben does not laugh. That is to his credit. He only stares at me, jaw hardening by degrees. "Say that again without making it sound like mountain rot."

"I can't."

Hannah steps in before the silence can turn dangerous. "Ben. It's true."

Ben looks at her then, and whatever he sees on her face does more damage than my words. "You knew."

"Not for long."

His gaze returns to me. "And you?"

"I am one."

For one clean second, there is no sheriff in him. Only a man standing in a world he has spent his life calling folklore. Then the sheriff comes back, battered but upright. "Does this explain the things I don't have reports for?"

"Some of them."

"Does it explain why Nathan's people came armed?"

"Yes."

He looks at the wax again, swallowing whatever first response wants out of him. "Then keep talking. Slowly."

"It's a claim," I say. "Someone marking that what lies below belongs to them now."

I step off to make the call I've been dreading since Hannah first said the word archive aloud. Elias answers on the second ring. I give him the place, the wax, the blood. He's quiet. "Don't let her go down," he says. "Not till I've seen it. I'm bringing someone who reads these."

They arrive out of the treeline within minutes while the lantern below is still a coal in the deep.

"I was already on the ridge," Elias says.

She's small and gray-suited, with the stillness of a person who stopped needing to fidget several centuries ago. She names herself before Elias can. "Vivienne Ashcroft, but call me Vivi. I keep records." A look at Hannah, frank and cold. "You're the one following Elspeth's trail. Brave. Or you haven't learned yet what it's worth."

Hannah holds her eye. "I've learned enough."

"We'll see."

Elias draws close to my shoulder, his voice under the wind. "She is the best reader of old seals I could bring without waking half the eastern territories."

"Can she be trusted?"

"No," he says, honest enough to be useful. "But she can be relied upon. Tonight, that may have to be enough."

Vivienne kneels, she doesn't touch the wax — she breathes it. "Mm. Old seal. Older than the mine. This wasn't left for Nathan's men, Sheriff. They couldn't read it if they tried. This is a warning from one vampire faction to another. It says the ground past this gate has been spoken for."

Ben folds his arms, but his face has gone pale beneath the weathering. "Spoken for by who?"

"That," Vivienne says, "is the question worth asking." She rises.

I won't have Hannah standing in the dark without a frame for it. "Tell them, us, why an old woman's papers are worth one of us coming up into the open air."

She weighs Hannah, deciding how much she'll bear. "Because Elspeth didn't only write down what the hunters did to us. The burnings. The bounties. The families your grandfathers' grandfathers called vermin and put down." Ben says nothing, but his hand finds the cold rail of the gate. "She wrote down what some of us did with the silence that came after. Who we let vanish. Whose quiet we bought. An honest record is a blade that cuts toward everyone still holding it." She turns to me, and there is nothing warm in her at all. "There are vampires who'd sooner see that chamber drowned than read. By now, some of them have heard the girl's name."

"Then we move before they finish what they came to do." I'm already laying it out, and this time I make myself look at Hannah before the old instinct can turn the plan into a cage. "Elias takes the upper adit so nothing comes down behind us. Ben, you know the roads that feed this hill. If Nathan's people fall back to circle around, you'll catch them before any of us. Someone keeps Lily nowhere near this mountain."

"Marge at the diner," Ben says at once. "She'll keep her there if I tell her to sit on the girl personally."

Hannah exhales, short and grateful, but her eyes stay on mine. "And me?"

"You know Elspeth's trail better than anyone here," I say. "So you'll stand with me. But you carry Ben's radio. If the tunnel shifts, if smoke comes through, if I say the route is closing, we both turn back."

Hannah studies me for a breath. Then she holds out her hand for the radio. "Partners. Both directions."

I pass it to her. "Both directions."

Ben already has his phone out contacting Marge. While Vivienne and Elias bend together over the seal, I draw Hannah a few steps up the slope, where the dark is only the ordinary kind.

"You should hear this from me, not from her." There's no soft shape for the words, so I don't try to make one. "Until tonight, the only people hunting you wanted Elspeth's secret kept. Nathan's kind. Now there are people who want it gone — and to them, you aren't a woman from town. You're the hand reaching for the thing they want buried. Some of those people are mine, Hannah. My side of it. They'll look at you and see a problem with a simple answer."

She takes it without flinching. "All right," she says. "Then they've made the same mistake everyone makes about me." A slow breath. "What do we do next?"

The answer arrives on its own. Below, the one lantern has become three, fanning along the lower drift — Nathan's people, deeper than they ought to be, moving with purpose now.

At the gatepost, Vivienne has gone rigid. She's bent close over the wax again, and whatever she's found in it has stripped the cool amusement off her face. "Alaric. This knot of lines. I know the hand that presses a seal like this." She gives it to the cold air at last, and the name drops between us like a stone down the shaft. "Lucien Draycott's people."

Elias goes still and I have only seen that before courts and executions. Ben notices it too, because his hand settles closer to his holster though he cannot know what name just entered the hill with us.

Hannah looks from Vivienne to me. "How bad?"

Vivienne wipes the wax from her thumb with slow precision. "Hunters leave warnings because fear is useful to them. Lucien's people leave gaps. A place with no witnesses left. A family name missing from every register. A road everyone remembers using and no one can prove existed."

"So they erase things," Hannah says.

"No," Elias answers. "They erase the proof that anything needed erasing."

Behind us, with a groan of tired timber, the gate we came through shifts on its cut hinges and begins, very slowly, to swing shut. Two enemies. One door. And all of us already inside it, racing toward the same room not one of us has found. I take Hannah's hand. Not to hold her back. To go.

27

HANNAH

The gate behind us settles with one last grind, iron seating into stone, and then the gray seam of daylight thins to nothing. Nobody says the thing we're all carrying — that it won't lift again until someone on the far side decides it should. We heard it shut. We keep walking anyway.

"Stay off the left fork," I tell them. "The rhyme said to follow the iron and never the light."

Alaric stays a half step behind my shoulder, near enough that the cold coming off him reaches me like a cracked window in January. He doesn't push to the front of us all.

Ben's flashlight jerks across the roof — props swollen and furred with white rot — and I hear him work a dry swallow. Vivienne and Elias move without sound.

"Survey calls this drift collapsed," Ben says, his grandfather's map pressed to his chest in its fogged plastic sleeve. "Nineteen fifty-one. Roof failed, they pulled the men, walled it up. There's nothing on the paper past here."

"Then it's the right way," I say. "She'd have wanted it off the paper."

The floor tips down and the water rises to meet us, ankle-high and cold enough that it stops reading as cold and starts reading as weight. Two rails run beneath it, rust over rust, and where they fork I put my hand back and stop the whole line.

"This one weeps." I point left, where the rail sweats orange into the standing water. "So not that one." My boot finds the other fork. "Here. It runs dry."

"You're certain," Elias says. Not a challenge. He's measuring me.

"She built it for one person to find," I say. "Me. She wasn't going to make it hard and then hang a label on it."

We climb. The water falls behind and the air turns from wet to only old. I count props as we pass — sound, sound, sound — and then the fourth leans wrong, shouldered out of true on purpose, a wedge of slate driven in to hold the tilt. Crooked three.

"There." Ben's beam catches it before I do, a mark cut into the timber: a cross inside a circle. "That's a surveyor's bound-stone symbol. It's got no business on a pit prop."

"It does if you want a hidden door to pass for a clerk's mistake," Vivienne says, low. She's stopped dead a few feet from the packed wall past the prop, her attention crawling over it. "There's no vampire seal here. No blood mark, no claimed threshold, no faction sign. Anything our kind made." She turns. "Which is the cleverest thing I've seen all night. You don't hide a vault from hunters and vampires with old vampire craft. We both know how to read that."

"You hide it with rubble," I say.

The wall past the leaning prop is just gob — waste stone, the dullest surface in the world, the kind miners pack into worked-out ground. I run my hand along the courses until I find the one laid a half-inch too neat, and there, scratched so faint you'd take it for a slip of the tool, is a small double loop, one thread crossing back through itself.

I know that mark. She used to stitch it inside my mittens where the thumb met the palm, so the wool wouldn't unravel, so I'd always know which pair was mine.

"That's her," I say, and my voice does something I don't let finish.

The keystone isn't mortared. It draws out into my hands, heavier than it looks, and the courses above it sag and split along a seam no eye would have found. Alaric sets his shoulder beside mine without being asked, and the wall swings inward on a frame of oak gone black and hard as iron. Dry air comes out to meet us. Not the mine's wet breath. Something kept.

It isn't a room full of paper. It's a vault built to outlast everyone who'd want it gone — shelving cut into the living rock, lead-lined boxes, ledgers stood spine-out in oilcloth, glass photographic plates racked like dinner dishes. Sealed crates. A wall of small drawers, each chalked with a name. Maps pinned and curling, routes inked between towns I know and towns that aren't on any road now. And on the long table at the center, laid out the way you set evidence for someone you trust to come after you — testimony. Signed. Some of it gone brown where the ink isn't ink.

"God," Ben breathes. "These are people."

I lift the first ledger. Names down the left margin, dates beside them, a column headed in her own slanting hand: given quiet. Vampires, I understand after a moment. The ones she hid. The ones who never touched a soul and got to keep breathing because a human woman wrote them down as worth keeping.

Beside it, a hunter's field book, leather worn pale at the corners. A killing on the third of a month, written up clean as a chore — containment achieved, subject neutralized, family advised of accident. No name for the subject. Just a number.

"They wrote their murders like invoices," Elias says, reading over my arm. He doesn't sound surprised. He sounds like a man recognizing his own handwriting on the wrong side of the page.

But she kept both. That's what stops me. A vampire's letter, folded small — a confession, a man owning a girl he'd drained in a hard winter, asking her to keep it so it would be true somewhere. Elspeth's note clipped on top: He told it himself. That counts. She didn't pick a side to believe. She believed all of it and made it stay.

The thing that turns the cold in the room into something worse, a small glyph appears in the corner of the hunter's field book. Six spokes inside a wheel. I find it again on a sanctuary map two shelves down, smaller this time, almost hidden in the border. The dates beside both records sit too close together to feel accidental. A hunter sweep in one book. A protected route abandoned in another. Three names cut clean out of a page with a blade, the holes square and deliberate.

"These overlap," I say slowly. "Hunter records and vampire routes. Same season. Same mark."

Vivienne has a vampire roll open, and the color has gone from her face. "This shouldn't exist," she says. "These records were burned. I saw the order carried out."

Elias steps beside her. "Then Elspeth had copies."

"Not copies," Vivienne says. "Witness records. Names. Routes. Sanctuary losses we were told were accidents." She looks toward the hunter field book on the table. "And some of the dates match."

Elias takes the field book, then compares it to the sanctuary map. "A hunter sweep here. A protected route abandoned the same season." His voice lowers. "That does not prove who arranged it."

"No," Vivienne says. "But it proves someone benefited when both sides bled."

I stand in the middle of my grandmother's vault and feel the whole weight she carried alone. She wasn't hoarding secrets. She was holding the only honest record of a thing someone powerful had tried to smooth into rumor. Not proof of one enemy. Proof that raids, vanishings, and warnings had crossed each other for years in ways nobody had wanted preserved. She kept it because the dead had no other way to be believed.

"You don't have to read all of it tonight," Alaric says, close, quiet. The lamp stays steady in his hand. He hasn't turned it away from the page, hasn't tried to step me out of the room. "But I'm not going to say stop."

"I know."

I reach for the last thing she left — a small box at the head of the table, twine and red wax, her loop pressed into the seal. My box. Mine to open.

The wax is whole, the loop pressed clean into its center. No hand has broken it. No one has lifted this lid since Elspeth tied the twine and left it waiting in the dark.

My thumb rests against the seal, and for one breath I cannot move. Every ledger, every map, every testimony in this room belongs to the dead and the hidden. But this was left for me.

"This one hasn't been touched," I say.

Alaric's head comes up. He's hearing something past the stone, and whatever it is, it's on more than one side of us.

Ben's radio coughs static and a torn-off scrap of a voice, —coming in from the north por— and then nothing at all.

The vault waited so long to be found. It picked tonight, and we are not the only ones who came.

28

ALARIC

Ihear the boots before anyone else does — two sets, maybe three, coming down separate cuts, and the slick drag of a body easing along the lower drift. The chamber sits quiet around us, Elspeth's whole secret life stacked, and the certainty lands in me like cold water. We cannot stay.

"Out," I say. "All of you. Now."

Vivienne turns from the nearest shelf, one hand still resting on a ledger spine. "We only just found this."

"Which is exactly why they can't. If we fight in this room, the hunters mark it. Everything she buried down here dies with us tonight."

Ben thumbs his radio. Nothing comes back but a wash of static, then not even that. He looks at the dead handset, then at me, and for once the sheriff doesn't argue. "Where's clean ground?"

"Away from this door." I'm already crossing to Hannah. She's bent over the little box. "Hannah. We're leaving."

"One second." Her hands move fast over what's inside. She isn't reaching for ledgers, isn't lifting anything she can't close a fist around. She works a single folded square of paper free, presses it flat against her sternum, and shuts the lid. "Done. I've got what I need."

"Good." I look back at the rubble wall we came through, the old counterweight stone Elias muscled aside. "We close it behind us. Same as we found it."

Elias is already there. Together we ease the stone back into its cradle until it seats with a low grind, and the seam between fitted rock goes dark and seamless. Hannah drags her boot through, scattering the dust until the floor reads like no one's crossed it in ten years. Vivienne kills the spill of lantern glow against the wall. When we step away, it's only a wall again — fallen stone, black mortar, a scar in the rock that means nothing to anyone who doesn't already know.

"Move," I breathe. "Single file. Keep a hand on the left wall and don't lose it."

The drift narrows within twenty feet. The air thickens — mineral, stale, hard to pull all the way down — and under it I catch the first thin bite of something that has no business this deep in the earth.

Then a hand lamp flares around the bend ahead, small and shaking, and a voice I know far too well says, "Mom?"

Everything in me drops to ice. "Lily."

She's wedged where two cuts meet, lamp trembling in her grip, her face bone-white in its light. Hannah moves past me toward her, and I don't try to stop her — nothing on this earth would hold her back.

"What are you doing down here?" Hannah has the girl by both shoulders. "I left you with Theo. Alaric told you⁠—"

"Nobody came back." Lily's chin shakes. "You've been gone ages, and Theo kept staring outside like a car was going to come up the drive any second, and then he said stay, just stay put, and that — I knew that meant it could be bad." The words spill out of her. "I saw the marks, so I followed it, because I thought — I thought it would take me to you."

Elspeth's marks. The trail her own great-grandmother left scratched, and the child read it like a string of breadcrumbs straight into the worst place she could be. I don't have the heart to tell her how close it's brought her, and I don't have the time.

Then another scent moves through the tunnel. Not bloodroot. Not human. Vampire. Elias goes still beside me.

A shape slips across the lower drift, too quick for Ben's lamp, too silent for human feet. It turns toward the sealed way behind us.

Vivienne whispers, "That is not ours."

The vampire darts toward Hannah but Elias moves before it reaches her. One moment he is beside me; the next he has the stranger by the throat and pulling out his heart. Its body drops.

"Hannah." Vivienne's voice has dropped to almost nothing. "They're on us."

I hear it in the same heartbeat — the whisper of cloth, the soft tick of wire being paid out hand over hand. "Down," I say. "Everyone behind me. Now."

The first hunter comes out of the side cut fast. I drive him into the rib of the tunnel hard enough to split stone, and it shrieks, dust sifting down across us both. A second one whips something pale and fine through the lantern light — ash, ground to powder, bloodroot in it — and it fills my chest and turns every breath to broken glass. I cough, and the cough costs me half a second, and that's all the third one needs.

The wire comes around my forearm out of the dark. It isn't rope. It's bloodroot, twisted and barbed, and where it bites it doesn't only cut. It burns inward, a black heat that climbs the arm toward my heart, eager, alive. I get my free hand into it and rip it loose, and the barbs take skin and more than skin, and the burning keeps crawling after the wire is gone.

"Alaric—" Hannah, close behind me.

"Stay back." The ash has me half-blind and slow — slower than I have ever fought — and these men know precisely what they carried down here. They didn't come to kill me cleanly. They came to take her, to make her speak the room, to walk her back to it at the end of a leash. That will not happen while I'm breathing.

"Lily, the lamp — hold it on me, don't drop it." Hannah's voice has changed. It's flat now, fast, working. "There's a cord by your head, the gray one. On three you pull it hard as you can. One. Two. Three."

Lily yanks. Far above us a bell starts hammering, ringing down the wire to some station I can't see, and the hunters flinch toward the sound — for one breath they read it as men, as discovery, as anything but a frightened child and a frayed cord. It's enough. I put one of them through a rotted timber and the roof comes down where he stood.

"Brine," Hannah says, hauling on my good arm. "There's an old salt store down the grade, a pump room — Elspeth's notes, bloodroot can't keep its teeth in salt water. Move with me. Move."

I plant my feet. "Take Lily. Get to the adit. I'll hold the cut."

"No."

"Hannah—"

"I said no." She's already ducked under my ruined shoulder, taking weight I outmass her by triple, and Ben catches my other side. "You kept them off us. Now I keep you upright." She drags me down the grade toward the sound of water and the rusted bones of an old pump. "Elias, cover the cut. Vivienne, the lamp. Lily, my hand — don't you let go of me."

The brine, when we reach it, closes over the wound like cold fire fighting hot. The black heat in my arm stutters and slows. Not gone. Slowed. My ribs grind when I breathe and the ash still grits inside my chest, but where the salt soaks in, the bleeding eases.

Behind us a fall — a charge, or rotten stone giving up — brings down the cut we left, and the light shudders, and Ben swears and shoulders at my side with his pistol up. The hunters are still out there. I hear them working the rubble, calling low to each other, hunting — but not here, not yet, and not toward the archive.

"They don't have it," I rasp. "The room. They don't know where it is."

"Not yet." Hannah doesn't slow. Her face in the brine-light is set and terrified and absolutely sure. "Which means we get it all out before Nathan does. We don't stop. You don't stop. Keep your feet under you, Alaric, and stay with me."

The drainage swallows us, water sucking at our boots, the dark folding shut behind. I keep my feet under me.

29

HANNAH

The brine channel pulls at our boots like cold hands trying to keep us. I keep one arm locked around Alaric's waist, his weight heavier than it should be, the other hand skimming the rough stone to my left. Salt crust flakes under my fingers. The drainage slopes gently downward, black water swirling around our ankles and soaking the hem of my jeans. Behind us, the sounds of the hunters are muffled but persistent—low voices echoing off timber props.

"Keep moving," I say, voice low. "The flow is stronger this way. It has to lead out."

Alaric's breath rasps against my hair. The bloodroot burns are still open on his forearm, angry and slow to close. He tries to straighten, to take some of his own weight, but his steps falter. "Hannah. Leave me at the next side cut. I can slow them."

"No." I adjust my grip, feeling the unnatural cold of his skin even through his sleeve. "We stay together."

Lily's light bobs ahead of us, her shoulders tight. She hasn't said much since we found her in the tunnels, but I can feel the guilt coming off her in waves. "Mom, I'm sorry. I thought I could help. I saw the marks on the posts and just… followed."

"You're here now," I keep my tone steady. "Hold the lamp higher. Watch for any low scratches on the timbers. Anything that looks deliberate."

Ben stays close on Alaric's other side, one hand on the pistol at his belt. Elias brings up the rear with Vivienne, their steps nearly silent. The vampire woman's gaze keeps flicking toward the jacket I'm clutching closed with my free hand. She suspects something. I don't blame her.

The channel narrows. Water deepens to our knees. Ahead, rail bed curves, old iron half-submerged and slick. I pause at the bend, letting the group catch up. Alaric leans heavier against me. His silver eyes meet mine in the dim light—pain and frustration and that steady protectiveness that never quite leaves him, even now.

"I can still fight if it comes to it," he murmurs.

"You can stand," I answer. "That's enough."

Lily's lamp catches something on the wall—a faint hooked mark low on a timber prop, the same loop my grandma used in her journals. I ease Alaric against the stone and crouch, ignoring the cold bite of the brine. My fingers find the folded paper inside my jacket, the one I took from Elspeth's sealed box before we left the vault. I haven't shown it to anyone. Not yet.

I unfold it carefully. The page is dense: columns of initials, dates, small sketched marks matching the ones we've followed through the mines. Routes cross-referenced in her neat hand. Some lines connect hunter records—kill dates, containment notes—with vampire sanctuary paths abandoned in the same seasons. Overlaps. Too many to be chance. Initials that appear on both sides of the ledger, powerful enough that someone wanted them buried.

Lily leans in, lamp steady. Her eyes widen. "What is that?"

"Her index," I say quietly. "The key to the whole thing. Marks, safe routes, names that shouldn't match but do." I trace one set of overlapping dates with a wet fingertip. "Hunters and vampires bleeding each other for years. Someone kept it going."

We push on. The drainage opens into a wider sump, water pooling deeper, old pump machinery hulking in the shadows like sleeping iron beasts. Chains hang from a spillway valve above us, rusted but still solid. I guide Alaric toward the drier rail bed on the far side, Lily and Ben helping steady him. Elias and Vivienne fan out, listening.

A figure steps out from a side cut ahead, lantern raised. Nathan. Controlled, polished even down here, dark-blond hair damp from the damp air. Two of his men flank him, rifles lowered but ready. His gaze locks on me, then flicks to the way I instinctively press a hand to my jacket.

"Hannah," he says, voice calm, almost regretful. "This doesn’t need to be made harder. The archive. Whatever you took from it. Hand it over and walk away. Your daughter, the sheriff—none of them need to get hurt."

Ben's hand tightens on his pistol. "Graves. Stand down."

Nathan ignores him, eyes on me. "You've seen the records. You know what's in there. Proof that changes everything. But some truths are too dangerous to let loose. Give me the paper. The location. I'll make sure no one touches your family."

Alaric shifts, trying to put himself between us, but I feel the tremor in his frame. He's in no shape to charge. Lily's breath catches behind me.

I keep my voice even. "You're not here for protection, Nathan. You're here because the overlaps point higher than you want anyone looking."

His expression doesn't change. He steps closer, boots splashing. "Elspeth should have burned it all. Instead she left it for you. Hand it over."

One of his men moves toward Lily. She backs up, lamp swinging. I see the chain hanging from the spillway valve above the sump. Old iron, heavy links. The timber props around the valve look swollen, unstable where water has eaten at them for decades.

"Lily," I say, low and clear. "The chain. When I say."

Nathan lunges, reaching for my jacket. His fingers brush the fabric. I twist away, shoving Alaric toward Ben. "Now!"

Lily yanks the chain hard. The valve groans open. Brine surges from the spillway in a sudden rush, slamming into the rail bed and knocking Nathan's man off balance. The unstable timber props crack under the pressure. I grab Alaric's good arm and pull him toward the narrow gap beside the pump machinery as debris begins to fall.

Nathan shouts, wading through the rising water. "Hannah—don't be stupid. You can't outrun this!"

A section of timber gives way behind us, crashing down in a spray of salt and stone. It blocks the main channel, buying seconds. I push Lily ahead, Ben and Elias covering our backs. Vivienne slips through like smoke. We scramble up a short incline onto drier ground, the roar of the redirected brine echoing.

I risk one glance back. Nathan is pulling his man clear, face set in cold calculation. He doesn't follow immediately. Instead he lifts a radio to his mouth.

"Fall back to the adit. Tell the others the woman has the index. We take the high ground and wait for them to surface."

The words settle cold in my chest. He's not alone. He never was.

We keep moving, the group tighter now, Alaric leaning on me again. My jacket feels heavier with the folded paper against my ribs. The archive isn't only proof that vampires exist. It is proof that someone has been arranging who fears whom, and for how long. I don't know whose name sits at the center yet, but I can feel the shape of it pressing through the paper. Keeping the fear alive. Keeping the blood flowing.

I tighten my grip on Alaric and don't look back again. We have the key. We have each other. The rest we'll face when we reach the surface.

30

ALARIC

The door is iron, riveted, gone the brown of dried blood, and it takes Ben two runs of his shoulder before the hinges remember how to move. Then it gives, and we spill into a room that stopped being used long ago.

A paybox. A clerk's counter behind a brass grille, a wall of pigeonholes furred gray, a board of numbered check-tags where every man hung his brass before he went down. Most of the tags still hang there. Every tag left is a man the mountain kept.

"Here." Ben gets me down against the foot of the counter, where the wood is dry. "Stay put, Blackwood. Not a request."

He straightens and crosses back toward the iron door, pistol low. Elias takes the second opening, breathing cold up. Vivienne has Lily by the lamp at the far wall, turning the girl's cut arm to the light, saying something dry that makes Lily almost laugh on purpose. Four people on one side of a dead room, two on the other, and the distance feels chosen.

Hannah folds down beside me. She doesn't ask how I am; she's stopped wasting questions on it. She spreads Elspeth's survey across her knees, and smooths the creases flat.

"Ben. Your grandfather's map."

He slides it from its sleeve, sets it in her hands, goes back to the door. Then she takes the folded square from inside her coat, and works it flat against the ground.

"All right," she says, low enough that it's only mine. "Help me read these."

I shift onto my good side. The bloodroot in my chest grinds when I breathe, but my eyes work, and they have read older cruelties than Elspeth's ink. The page is not a map. It is a record of passage: sanctuary marks, hunter signs, and the places where names vanish.

"This row." Hannah drags her nail beneath one line. "Not the place. The purpose."

"Safe shelter," I say. "A vampire could reach it before dawn and be hidden through daylight."

"And this mark beside it?"

"Hunter watch-sign. It means the shelter had been named."

She finds the matching line without me. "Containment declared, creek crossing." Her finger stills. "Dated the night before the warning went out."

"So they knew the shelter was exposed before anyone was warned," Hannah says.

"No." I stare until the shape of the marks open. "They made it exposed. Someone gave the sanctuary sign to hunters, then delayed the warning. By the time our people ran, every clean exit was already closed."

"These aren't two stories sharing a season."

"No," I say. "They're one hunt written in two hands."

"Hunters on one."

"And on the other⁠—"

In the margin, scratched almost too fine to hold its shape: a wheel. Six spokes. The outer ring broken at the top. Her breath changes. Flatter and colder than a gasp.

"Vivi said that one. On the wax, at the gate. Lucien." She glances once, and Vivienne hears nothing. "Who is he, Alaric? Not what title. My grandmother's drew this out for a reason."

I've spent the night refusing to say his name, the way you don't speak of a thing in case speaking summons it. There's no profit in that now.

"Lucien Draycott is a vampire even other vampires avoid naming," I say. "He does not threaten first. He removes. People. Records. Houses. Whole histories, if they become inconvenient. Elias told me he burned a sanctuary in Quebec because one ledger named his donor line. Not because it endangered him that night, but because one day it might." I look at the wheel on Elspeth's index. "That is what makes him dangerous. Lucien wants to win. Lucien wants no proof there was ever a fight."

Her thumb moves down the page, slow. Hunter action. Sanctuary loss. Wheel between them. Again. And again.

I'm looking at a date I've measured a hundred winters against. The town. The road out of it. Elspeth's single line, set down without knowing whose grief she was filing: route given to the other side. No one returned. And the wheel.

"Whose is that line," she says. Not a question.

"This is Nathan's."

"Nathan's," Hannah repeats. Her finger drags from the wheel back up the page, to the hunter's mark, then down again to the place where the two cross. "He's not working against Lucien. He's working for him. The break-ins. He was never a different threat. He was the same one wearing a face I'd open the door to."

"Two hands," I say. "One hunt."

She goes still over the survey, and then her breath catches on something worse than fear. "Then why didn't they just kill me?"

She turns Elspeth's index over and there—on the back, in that small slanting hand—a list that isn't routes at all. Names down the margin. Holloway. Whitmore. Bell. The county clerk. A firm in the city. And above them, underlined twice: If the heir dies untimely, these open. The same morning.

"She built a deadfall," Hannah whispers. "Not to protect the archive. To protect me." Her hand presses flat to the paper. "If I die wrong—suspiciously—it all goes outward at once. To Ben. To Clara. To lawyers I've never met. Sealed civic records nobody's touched in years. She would have made my death the loudest thing that could possibly happen."

And the whole shape of it opens under me, cold and complete.

"That's why there's patience," I say. "Why Nathan smiled and offered to help. Why they searched instead of burned. Lucien removes things quietly—but he can't remove you quietly. Kill you outright and Elspeth's hand reaches up out of the ground and names him before noon. So they couldn't take it. You had to give it. Every threat, every man at your fence, every word out of Nathan's mouth—it was never robbery. It was a hand closing slow enough that you'd hand over the key just to make the fear stop."

Hannah doesn't flinch. She folds the index back into her coat, deliberate, and her voice when it comes is level as a set stone. "Then the one thing they can't survive is the thing they've spent weeks trying to prevent."

"Daylight," I say. "Not the kind that burns me. The kind that names them both. We don't hide the archive. We open it. Town, lawyers, Ben—all at once. The way she meant to."

Across the room Ben turns from the iron door. "Surface is clear topside. No engines. They've fallen back to wait us out somewhere they think we'll come up."

"Then we come up where they aren't." Hannah is already on her feet, my good arm over her shoulder, and Lily's lamp swings toward us. "Home first. All of it goes home."

We climb. The drainage gives onto a culvert mouth choked with laurel, and then the open dark, wet pine and the long ridge of the Marlowe roof black against a graying sky. No one on the road. No one at the gate. We all enter, and Hannah demands I go upstairs and rest straight away.

31

HANNAH

The house feels like it's breathing with us—old wood creaking under hurried footsteps, the faint metallic tang of bloodroot still clinging to coats slung over chairs. Mud streaks the hallway. Lamps burn low because the gray afternoon light slanting through the tall windows isn't enough. I move between the dining table and the sideboard, Elspeth's index open like a map to the end of this nightmare.

Ben's on the phone in the corner. "No, this isn't a request for comment. This is evidentiary material. Chain of custody starts now. I need it logged with the county clerk and the state investigator I gave you yesterday." He glances at me, nods once. Practical. Solid. The kind of anchor this house needs right now.

Vivienne paces near the window, her elegant fingers flying over her phone screen. She speaks in rapid, precise French to someone on the other end, then switches to English that cuts like glass. "Lucien's network is compromised. The ledgers, the transfers, the names—send them through the old covenant lines. He cannot burn every bridge at once." Her eyes meet mine. She doesn't smile, but there's respect there, hard-won.

Elias sits at the far end, laptop glowing. He's quieter, typing code and routing files through channels I don't pretend to understand. "Vampire councils hate surprises," he says without looking up. "This one will burn slow. They'll see what Lucien's been feeding them for decades."

Lily leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, still wearing the same mud-splattered jacket from the mines. She looks shaken—cheeks pale, eyes too bright—but her voice stays sharp when she speaks. "You're really doing this. Not hiding it. Just… letting it out."

I nod, sealing another envelope with trembling fingers. My hands are filthy, but the fear has burned down to something cleaner. Fuel. "We're not waiting for rescue, Lil. This is how we start the fall. They can't bury it if enough people know the truth."

She watches me a moment longer, then pushes off the frame and comes over. Her hand brushes my shoulder—brief, warm. "I trust you. Both of you." The words land soft, but they matter. She glances toward the stairs. "He's still up there?"

"Resting," I say. The word feels too small for the weight of Alaric in my bed, healing from wounds he took protecting us.

Lily's mouth quirks, almost a smile. "Good. Don't let him play martyr again." She squeezes my arm once and steps back, letting the others pull her into the next task.

We don't read every page aloud. The index guides us—specific names, dates, accounts that tie Nathan's hunters to Lucien's quiet control. Enough to crack the silence wide open. Ben's contacts will lock down official channels. Vivienne's people will tighten their network. Elias' messages will ripple through the shadows where Lucien thought he was untouchable. Their plan is starting to collapse, but I know something is still coming. I feel it in my bones—the shift. Nathan and Lucien aren't thick.

As I climb the stairs the light outside has gone bruised and golden. The house downstairs fades to a low hum of voices and keyboard clicks as I reach the landing. My bedroom door stands ajar.

Alaric lies propped against the pillows, shirt unbuttoned and pushed off one shoulder. The bloodroot rash has faded to faint red lines across his chest and arms, but he still looks like a man who fought the dark and won by inches. Evening light filters through the storm-dark windows, catching on the dusted mirror above the dresser and the faint scar along his jaw. He's not helpless. Never that. But the exhaustion sits heavy on him.

He turns his head as I enter. Those sexy eyes find mine, and something in my chest cracks open—relief, want, terror.

"You should be resting," I say, voice low.

"I am." A faint smile ghosts his lips. "Your bed is more persuasive than mine has ever been."

I shut the door and cross to him, kicking off my boots. The floorboards creak familiarly under my feet.

I sit on the edge of the mattress. "Let me see."

He doesn't argue. I peel the shirt the rest of the way off, careful where the residue still clings. My fingers trace the fading marks, not clinical, not distant. Just touch. I fetch a damp cloth from the basin I left earlier and wash the last traces from his collarbone, his ribs. He watches me the whole time, breath steady but eyes dark.

"You're hiding how much it hurts," I murmur.

His hand covers mine, stilling it against his chest. "Doesn't matter now."

"It does to me." I set the cloth aside and climb fully onto the bed, knees bracketing his hips. The quilt bunches beneath us. Outside, the light is dying fast.

Alaric's hands settle on my waist, thumbs brushing the hem of my shirt. "Hannah."

I lean down. "I love you." The words come out plain, unshakable. No hesitation left. "Not because you saved us. Not because of the bond or the danger. I just love you."

His fingers tighten. For a moment I think he might stay silent, the old walls rising. But they don't. He exhales, rough. "I love you too." The admission sounds torn from him, raw and certain. "I thought loving you would be another failure to carry. Another way to lose what I swore to protect. But you're not a betrayal of the past, Hannah. You're the reason the future feels possible."

The words sink into me, warm and deep. I lean to kiss him, slow, tasting the bloodroot that does no harm to me. The exhaustion and fierce tenderness rises from beneath me. His mouth opens under mine, and he places a hand at my nape, holding me in place.

I pull back just enough to tug my shirt over my head. His gaze traces me, hungry but careful. "You're still healing," I whisper.

"I know my limits." His hands slide up my back, unclasping my bra with deliberate focus. "And right now, my limit is not having you."

I laugh softly, the sound surprised out of me, and press him back against the pillows. His chest rises faster as I explore—palms over the fading red lines, lips following the path my fingers took earlier. He groans low when I nip at the hollow of his throat. His cock rises in his pants, pushing against my thigh.

"Easy," I murmur, but there's no real command in it. I want him wild. I want him to be mine.

He flips us carefully—still mindful of his strength—and settles between my legs. The weight of him is comforting. He trails his tongue down my neck to a breast, and he circles the peak until I arch and curse under my breath. My hands fist in his hair, holding him there.

"Alaric—" His name breaks on a gasp when his fingers slip beneath the waistband of my pants, finding me already wet. He strokes slow, teasing, learning every hitch of my breath. Two fingers slide inside me, and I can't help but rock into them, chasing the friction.

Our eyes lock. The mate bond hums between us—not demanding, not completing, just present. A current of need and choice and forever that makes every touch sharper.

I shove at his pants until he helps, kicking them away. Naked, he's devastating—lean muscle, old scars, the fading bloodroot marks that only make him more real.

I push him to his knees, and slide down his body, kissing the fading bloodroot marks, then to his abdomen, until I bend over and my ass in the air, and my head, between his thighs. Alaric's breath catches as I wrap my fingers around the thick base of his cock, stroking once, twice, feeling him harden fully under my touch.

I look up at him through my lashes, then take him into my mouth—slow, wet heat enveloping the head. My tongue swirls around the sensitive underside. He groans low, fingers threading gently into my hair. I sink deeper, hollowing my cheeks, sucking with deliberate rhythm while my hand works what I can't swallow.

"Fuck, Hannah," he rasps, hips twitching but holding back. I hum around him, taking him further, loving the way he loses control for me—raw, vulnerable, mine.

His fingers tighten in my hair, gentle but firm, and he pulls me off just as his cock throbs against my tongue. "Not yet," he growls, voice wrecked. I release him with a wet pop, lips swollen.

Alaric lays me down in one smooth motion. He spreads my thighs wide, settling between them with predatory grace. His breath ghosts over my slick folds before his mouth descends—hot, hungry. His tongue drags slowly from the entrance to the clit, tasting me deeply. I arch with a sharp cry as he sucks the swollen bud between his lips, two fingers sliding inside me, curling perfectly.

"Alaric—" I moan, hips grinding against his face while he devours me like a man starved.

His tongue works me relentlessly, flicking fast over my clit before flattening to lap broad strokes that make my thighs tremble. Two thick fingers pump deep inside me, curling against that sensitive spot with every thrust. I clutch the quilt, back bowing off the bed as pleasure coils tighter.

"Alaric—oh god," I gasp, one hand fisting his dark hair. He growls against my pussy, the vibration shooting straight through me. He adds a third finger, stretching me open, fucking me harder with them while his mouth suctions my clit. Wet sounds fill the room—obscene, perfect. My hips buck wildly against his face, chasing the building pressure.

He doesn't let up. His fingers curl and stroke with devastating precision, tongue circling faster. The bond amplifies every sensation until I feel like I'm coming apart at the seams. Heat floods low, different this time, sharper, overwhelming.

"I'm—fuck, I'm going to—" The words dissolve into a broken moan.

Alaric pushes deeper, sucking hard on my clit as his fingers thrust relentlessly. The orgasm crashes over me like a wave. My walls clamp down, then release in powerful spasms. A hot gush floods his hand and mouth as I squirt, thighs shaking uncontrollably. He drinks it down with a low, satisfied groan, fingers still moving through every pulse, drawing it out until I'm whimpering, oversensitive, and utterly spent.

He lifts his head, lips glistening, eyes dark with raw hunger and love. "Beautiful," he murmurs, kissing my inner thigh as aftershocks ripple through me.

I'm still trembling, thighs slick and quivering, when Alaric rises over me. His cock is rock-hard, flushed dark and glistening from my earlier attentions. He kisses me deeply, letting me taste myself on his tongue, then notches the thick head against my pussy.

"Need you," I whisper, wrapping my legs around his waist.

He pushes in, stretching me. We both groan at the perfect fit. Then he starts to move—long, powerful strokes that drag against every sensitive nerve. The bed creaks as he picks up speed, hips snapping forward. I meet every thrust, nails raking down his back, urging him deeper.

"Harder," I demand, voice hoarse. He obliges, fucking me with raw intensity, one hand braced beside my head while the other grips my hip. Each deep plunge sends sparks through me. My breasts bounce with every thrust; he leans down to capture a nipple between his teeth, sucking hard.

The mate bond flares hotter, syncing our pleasure until I can't tell where I end and he begins. I clench around him, gasping his name like a prayer as another climax builds fast and fierce. He angles his hips, hitting that spot again and again, driving me higher, relentless, perfect.

He drives into me harder, deeper, the thickness of his cock filling me completely with every punishing thrust. I claw at his shoulders, then fist the headboard above my head. Sweat drips from our bodies, the old bedframe slamming against the wall in rhythm with us.

"Eyes on me," Alaric commands, voice rough velvet. I obey, locking gazes with him. His eyes burn into mine, stripping me bare, seeing every hidden part of me. The bond surges like wildfire between us—raw, undeniable—binding pleasure and love until nothing else exists.

I grab his biceps, nails digging in as he angles his hips and slams in again and again. "Alaric—fuck—" The orgasm builds unlike anything before, a deep, terrifying wave rising from my core. My walls flutter wildly around him. I reach back desperately, grabbing the iron headboard with one hand, the other clutching his sweat-damp hair as my body bows tight.

It hits me like lightning. A shattering, soul-deep climax that rips through every nerve. I come harder than I ever have, gushing around his cock, thighs locking around his waist as powerful contractions milk him. My scream echoes raw and broken in the room.

Alaric's eyes never leave mine—wide, vulnerable, eternal. "Hannah," he groans, voice cracking with emotion. He buries himself to the hilt and shatters with me. His cock pulses deep as he floods me, hips jerking through wave after wave while we stare straight into each other's souls. Love, survival, forever—all of it laid bare in that locked gaze. No walls. Just us.

The intensity leaves us gasping, bodies locked together, still joined as the aftershocks roll through us both. We trade lazy kisses, and my fingers trace his jaw. His palm rests over my heart. The bond feels steadier now—not a chain, but a promise we both chose.

"I'm not letting go," I tell him.

"Neither am I." His voice is quiet, fierce.

The sex lingers, warm and sated, bodies tangled under the quilt as the room darkens fully. We are steadier. Ready.

Then the lights flicker once, twice. The entire house plunges into blackness.

A beat of silence. Then screams—sharp, terrified—rise from downstairs. The front door crashes open.

Alaric tenses beneath me. My heart slams against my ribs. Nathan and Lucien's last move. It's here.

32

ALARIC

Ireach for Hannah in the same instant she grabs my arm. No shielding her behind me. We move together, shoulders brushing as we descend the stairs, her steps sure beside mine despite the blackout.

Glass crunches underfoot in the foyer. Voices clash—Nathan's sharp commands, lower growls from his remaining hunters. Colder tones cut through from the shadows near the parlor: Lucien's people. They have the others. Lily stands rigid between two men, Ben's wrist pinned in another's grip. Elias and Vivienne are held by figures whose outlines carry the unnatural stillness of vampires.

I scan the room without stopping. The Victorian's old floors groan in familiar patterns under the intruders' weight. Hannah's grip tightens once on my sleeve, a silent signal. We keep advancing.

Nathan steps forward, lantern light from one of his men catching his face. "Hannah. This has gone far enough. You've stirred forces you don't understand. Release the materials and we can still contain the damage. Think of Lily's safety. Exposure brings retaliation none of us can stop."

"You used fear like a leash. I see it now. I'm not handing anything over."

Lucien emerges from the deeper shadow, his movements precise. He nods to one of his own. "Destroy the index. These witnesses are liabilities. Blame the mess on the hunters' impatience." His gaze slides to me, flat with disdain. "Even you, Blackwood, reduced to guarding strays. Attachment makes you brittle."

I keep my focus on the room, not the taunt. Lily catches my eye from across the space. She flicks her gaze deliberately toward the sideboard near the window—once, twice. An iron poker rests there, half in shadow. I shift my weight, ready.

Vivienne speaks first, her tone cutting through the tension. "The evidence is already out. Multiple channels. Your attempt here changes nothing, Lucien. Your own contacts are receiving it as we stand here."

Elias twists against his holder, voice steady. "Council votes are moving. You're isolated. This ends with your exposure, not our deaths."

Hannah slips something from her pocket—the index case, but she holds it loosely. "Copies went wide before the lights died. It's not the only record anymore. You can't bury what everyone's already seen."

Nathan's expression fractures. "You're risking everything we built here. The balance⁠—"

"Balance you broke by working with him," Hannah says, nodding toward Lucien. "Using your position to feed information, to keep secrets that served you. It's over."

One of the hunters shifts, and the room erupts. I lunge toward Lily's position, trusting Hannah to stay close. My hand closes on the poker as I pass the sideboard. Metal meets resistance when I swing it low, catching a hunter's knee. He buckles. Ben uses the opening, driving an elbow back and breaking free.

I collide with Lucien near the hallway, our clash rattling old frames. He strikes with cold precision; I counter using the narrow space, driving him into the banister. Glass shatters somewhere behind us. Across the foyer, Ben grapples a hunter, slamming him against a sturdy side table while Hannah dodges another's reach and kicks low, buying Lily room to grab the poker I dropped nearby her. Elias twists free and joins me, pinning Lucien's arm as Vivienne disarms a second vampire with sharp efficiency.

Lucien claws for my throat, but I pin his arm back down. "You hid behind silence. That silence is gone. Isolation kept me breathing, but it never made me strong. They do."

Vivienne steps in once the hold breaks, her presence enough to still his remaining allies. "Your line ends here."

Nathan tries to slip toward the back passage, but Ben blocks him, steady with practiced authority. "You're done. Official channels have your collaboration documented."

Hunters drop weapons under the weight of numbers and evidence. Lucien's group falters as his orders lose their sting. The house's sturdy construction absorbs the last scuffles—no shattered heirlooms, just scuffed floors and a few overturned chairs. We secure the doors again, the heavy bolts sliding home with solid finality.

In the quiet that follows, Hannah checks Lily first, pulling her close. I stay near but let them have the moment. Ben coordinates quick calls. Vivienne and Elias confirm the records' spread across networks. The archive stays protected, its secrets now tools for justice rather than weapons.

One year later, sunlight filters through the restored stained glass above the entryway, painting the foyer in soft blues and golds. The locks turn smoothly now, oiled and true. Warmth fills the rooms where drafts once lingered, and the floors no longer have old secrets. The house feels lived in, claimed.

I stand in the kitchen, watching Lily arrange cookies on a plate with exaggerated care. "These are for you specifically," she says, sliding two onto my plate. "Because you finally stopped hovering like a gargoyle."

I accept them, the corner of my mouth lifting. "Noted. I'll try not to loom tomorrow."

She grins, the easy affection of someone who has decided I belong. No more careful distance. I sit at the table with them, part of the rhythm.

Hannah enters from the garden, brushing soil from her hands. Her movements carry the same strength I first admired, now deepened by time and choice. She meets my eyes, and the connection settles deep—no force, no shadow, just the steady truth that we belong together.

We step outside later as evening falls, the three of us on the wide porch. The lights inside glow steady behind us. I lean against the railing, Hannah beside me, Lily perched on the swing with a book open in her lap but her attention on the quiet street.

Hannah's fingers brush mine. "This place feels right now," she says softly.

I turn to her, the words simple and certain. "It does. It feels like it could be forever."

"It will be forever."

"Marry me?" I ask, and pull out a ring I've been keeping for a moment like this.

Lily's eyes light up, "Mom, say yes."

Hannah smiles, the kind that reaches her eyes fully, and puts her hand out. I put the ring on her finger and squeeze gently. We stand together as the town settles and we all hug. Family, chosen and kept.