Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Severin
Tonight the black horse is standing next to Ashley's porch.
In all the years I've manifested, I've never seen the animal leave the tree line.
It paces the boundary between the woods and the road, watches my movements from a distance, and dissolves before dawn.
Tonight it's crossed the entire yard to reach her door.
When I appear at the edge of the property, the horse is at the foot of the porch steps with its head raised toward the window, as if scenting something through the glass.
Hoofprints mark the dirt in a circle that starts and ends at the same spot, with no trail leading in or out.
The animal arrived from the air, or the earth, or wherever it goes when I'm pulled into nothing.
It turns its head toward me. The lamplight catches one flat, dark eye.
Then it's gone. Not dissolved. Not retreating. Simply absent between one breath and the next, the way I'm absent for the rest of the year when the Void takes me. The hoofprints remain.
Ashley's porch light is on. Through the window I can see the kitchen table set with two plates, two glasses, a bottle of wine she opened before I arrived. Steam rises from something on the stove.
She isn't standing on the porch with a chair and a challenge. She's set a place for me at her table and gone back to her work, as if a dead man joining her for dinner is a routine appointment she intends to keep.
I should turn away. Every night with Ashley draws more attention from whatever watches the boundary, and tonight it's sent the horse to her door.
I cross the yard and knock.
She opens the door with a pen behind her ear and a smudge of graphite on her thumb from the pencil notes crowding her mother's documents. Her gaze drops to the porch floor behind me before she looks at my face.
"You're early. And there are hoofprints in my yard that weren't there an hour ago."
"I know."
"Are they yours?"
"No."
She considers this for exactly the amount of time a woman with her training should, then steps aside. "Come in."
The folder I saw last night is open on the table beside her laptop, new notes crowding the margins of documents I recognize from her mother's collection. She’s been waiting, but she hasn't wasted the time.
The kitchen is small and warm and smells like something with garlic and tomatoes.
The warmth of the room registers on my skin the way sunlight through glass does: I know it's there, and I know it should feel like more than it does.
My senses are muted. Pressure, temperature, texture arrive as facts rather than experiences.
I can tell the chair is solid when I sit.
I can't feel the grain of the wood beneath my palms. She sets a plate in front of me with pasta and bread and pours a glass of the wine.
No one has set a place for me since 1776.
The pasta has texture and no flavor. The bread is warm and blank. The wine is wet and nothing else. I chew and swallow and understand the mechanical function of eating without any of the pleasure that would justify the effort.
"What do you miss most?" she asks. She's watching me eat with an expression I can't categorize. Not pity. Something more clinical, as if my chewing is data she's collecting.
"Coffee."
She laughs. The sound lands in my chest like a fist, sudden and physical and unwelcome. I haven't made a woman laugh in a very long time. I haven't wanted to.
"I'll make a pot tomorrow night," she says. "If you show up."
"That's not in question."
She sets down her fork. "Then what is?"
Whether I should. Whether the horse at the porch is the Veil's way of telling me I've already come too close.
Whether the woman sitting across from me with smudged hands and garlic on her breath is going to become the next name in whatever record the Hadleys keep of people who got too close to the Horseman.
"Your investigation," I say, because the alternative is telling her the truth.
She reaches for the folder. "I have something. You're not going to like it."
She opens the translation her mother prepared and lays it beside the muster roll.
"Johann Brandt appears in the regimental records at Rinteln.
One of my mother's letters also references a sworn declaration filed in Kassel claiming Severin von Brandt fled his obligations.
If the person who put you on that wagon filed the declaration after the muster records place Johann Brandt with the regiment, then he manufactured both identities.
The disposable conscript and the missing nobleman. "
She looks up from the documents. "I don't have that declaration. Not yet. But if it exists, and if the date is after the muster records place Johann Brandt with the regiment, then we're looking at evidence of a coordinated erasure."
We. She said we.
"Who would have filed the declaration?" she asks.
The question has only one answer, and I've avoided saying it aloud for longer than any of the other names I carry. "My brother. Friedrich. Fritz." The name tastes like the wine. Empty.
"He arranged it. The drugs, the wagon, the forged papers, the officer who took my ring. Fritz wanted what I had. Not me. The estate, the betrothal, the position. He got all of it."
"What happened to him?"
"He lived comfortably and died in his bed. I am told old age is peaceful when your conscience is clean, and Fritz had the advantage of never possessing one."
She doesn't offer sympathy. She writes the name in her notebook. Friedrich von Brandt. Then she looks up.
"I'm going to find that declaration. Then I'm going to establish who Johann Brandt actually was."
"In an article no one will remember?"
"In every archive, database, and historical account willing to print the evidence."
The meal goes cold while we work. Hours pass across the documents: dates cross-checked, names added to Ashley's growing timeline, questions answered or refused according to my choosing. The wine drops below the label. Outside, the horse doesn't return.
On the wall behind her, a Halloween calendar shows October 22. Not much time remains before the final sunrise cuts me off from this kitchen and everything inside it.
It's well past midnight when she closes the folder.
"What did it cost you?" she asks. "Beyond the name. What did you lose that mattered?"
I feel the question land somewhere I didn't invite her, and my expression closes before I can decide whether to let it. "That's not a road you need to walk."
"You don't have to answer that. But don't pretend it doesn't matter."
I look at her across the table, at the set of her jaw and the documents spread around her, and I understand that she won't stop.
She'll push until she finds whatever is behind my refusal the way she pushed until she found the anomaly behind Johann Brandt's paperwork.
The folder on her table is labeled with my name.
Her questions have moved past verifiable claims into ground you cover only when you care about the answer for reasons that have nothing to do with evidence.
I stand. The chair scrapes against the floor. I cross the distance between us in two strides and stop close enough that she has to tilt her head back to hold my gaze. I don't touch her. I let the proximity and the cold radiating from my body do the work that language has stopped doing.
"You do that every time you don't want to answer," she says.
"Do what?"
"Use your size to change the subject."
"Is that what I'm doing?"
"You tell me." She doesn't move. Her pulse is visible in her throat, and she's making no effort to hide it. Then her chin lifts. "Before this goes any further, I need a direct answer. You've been dead for centuries. I'm not in the habit of sleeping with men whose biological status is unclear."
The laugh comes before I can stop it. Low, rough, startled out of me.
"The body the Veil gives me doesn't carry disease. It restores function, not infection or living seed." I pause. "I can spend inside you. I can't father a child."
"How do you know?"
"The Veil remakes me each night in the same unchanging form. Hair doesn't grow. Wounds don't heal; they remain until sunrise, and the next manifestation restores me. I can climax. I can't reproduce. The body is physical. It isn't alive."
She processes this with the same precise, unsentimental attention she brings to a muster roll. "And the other risk. The thing outside. Does this make it worse?"
"Yes."
"How much worse?"
"I don't know. No one has gotten this close."
"The horse crossed the yard before you came inside," she says. "Whatever is happening, keeping your hands off me hasn't stopped it."
"That doesn't mean touching you won't make it worse."
"Then if anything changes, you tell me. Immediately. You don't decide for me and you don't keep me ignorant to protect me."
"Done."
"Do you want me?" she asks.
"Yes."
"Then stop trying to make my decision for me."
I take her wrist. Not gently. My fingers close around the bones with enough pressure that she feels the cold in my grip, and I watch her face for the flinch that would end this.
She holds still. Her pulse hammers against my thumb.
"If you tell me to stop, I stop. That's the only word that ends this." My voice drops low enough that she has to hold her breath to hear it. "Everything else, you give me. When I ask a question, you answer. When I tell you to hold still, you hold still. If you can't do that, say so now."
"Agreed."
"Say it clearly."
"I agree to your terms."
"Good."
I pull her to her feet and she steps into me.
Her mouth is warm. I know this the way I know the pasta was warm: as a fact, registered but incomplete. The texture of her lower lip caught between my teeth.
I can feel the mechanics of the kiss without the full dimension of sensation, and the frustration of it sharpens my focus into something predatory. If I can't feel everything, I will catalog everything I can reach.