Page 17 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

"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."