8. Alaric
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.