4. Alaric
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.