Page 74 of The Witch They Fear

It smells like me—stale air and the lavender from the stone and the faint ghost of instant coffee. I stand in the doorway and scan the interior. Kitchen counter: empty, same as I left it. Bed: sheets rumpled, the indent of my body still in the mattress. Stone on the nightstand. Laptop on the pillow. The bathroom door ajar, the way I left it.

Everything where I left it. Everything undisturbed.

But someone was in here.

The thought crawls up my spine. I step inside slowly, checking every surface, every corner, every shadow. The closet. Behind the couch. The kitchen cabinets. Everything is where I left it but the air feels wrong—contaminated. Like finding a stranger's fingerprint on a mirror you thought only you used.

I set my bag on the counter. Pull out the chalk. The candle. The folded diagram. Lay them out in a row. Odette’s instructions rolling through my head like a ticker on the bottom of the evening news.

Aamon is standing at the threshold. Not inside—at the threshold. His toes are exactly at the line where the porch becomes the floor, and the porch light is behind him, throwing his face into shadow and gilding the edges of his dark hair with silver. His sleeves are rolled to the forearm—when did he do that? during the drive?—and the tattoos are visible, those angular lines of ancient script I still can't read, dark against his skin. His hands hang loose at his sides. His jaw is set.

Oh yeah. The threshold rule holds him in place the way it's supposed to hold every vampire, and he's obeying it without a flicker of resistance. It’s kind of funny actually, a probably hundred year old and he's standing on my porch like a boy waiting to be invited to the dance.

"What does the counterspell require?" he asks from the doorway. His voice is level but his eyes are scanning the cottage behind me with focused attention like he’s cataloguing potential threats.

"Ward chalk on the inside of the door. Counter-rune—mirror image of the anchor. Then the candle." I hold up the bone-colored cylinder. "I light it, hold my palm over the flame, and channel through the fire into the chalk lines. If my control holds, the ward activates and the anchor is blocked."

"And if your control doesn't hold?"

"Well then I’m burned again. Ironic isn’t it?”

I shoot him a look but he doesn’t react. I continue.

“Or the ward shatters. Or it pulses back through the anchor and tells whoever carved it that I know what they did and am actively fighting against it."

He's quiet for a moment. Processing.

"I can talk you through it from here," he says. "Guide your breathing. Monitor your output by the ward's response."

I look at him. Stuck on my porch because I haven't said the magic words. Literally stuck—held in place by the same threshold rule that someone carved a loophole through on the other side of this door. He can't step inside. Can't help me directly. Can't do anything except stand three feet from the action and coach me through a fire ritual by voice.

I'm essentially holding him hostage on my porch. And the fact that he hasn't complained about it once—hasn't sighed, hasn't shifted his weight, hasn't so much as glanced at his watch—makes me feel like I can trust him.

I think about the porch in Thibodaux. His hands on my arms. His voice—breathe in, hold, out. The way the spike crumbled because he told it to.

I think about the sidewalk. I'm done giving you space on this. I think about every reason I have not to trust him. The fail-safe. The council. The institutional machinery that put him between me and freedom with a button in his pocket.

And then I think about every reason I do.

"Come in," I say.

His eyes meet mine. His lips part—barely, a millimeter—and his throat works. A swallow.

"Are you sure?"

"Don't make me say it twice."

He steps across the threshold. One stride and closes the door behind him. The ward hums as he passes through it—a low, resonant note, the magic acknowledging a vampire who was invited in properly. The way it's supposed to work. The way it was always supposed to work before someone carved a loophole into my damn door.

The cottage feels different with him in it. Smaller. The temperature drops a degree—his cold, radiating outward, pressing against the warm stale air of my space. He stands in my kitchen and his head is close enough to the ceiling that I notice the height for the first time—really notice it—the way his shoulders fill the frame of the room, the way the lamplight from the counter catches the sharp angle of his jaw and turns his profile into a woodcut. He looks like someone cut him out of a painting and dropped him into a studio apartment.

Focus, Dellaby. Counter-rune. Candle. Stop cataloguing his bone structure like it's going to be on the exam.

I unfold the diagram on the counter. Study the counter-rune—angular lines, inverted, the mirror image of the anchor outside. Then I pick up the chalk and go to the door.

The inside surface is smooth, unmarked. I find the spot—same height as the anchor, same position, directly opposite—and start drawing. The chalk is rough against the wood, leaving dark lines that hum faintly as they're laid down. My hand is steady. The lines are clean. I follow the diagram exactly, checking each angle, each turn.

"Good," Aamon says behind me. He's moved to the center of the room. Giving me space but close enough to intervene. "Take your time with the intersections. Those are where the ward's structural integrity is weakest."