Page 25 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

"Hannah." Nathan's voice is too quiet. "Don't say my name if he's still there."

My hand closes harder around the phone. "What?"

"Is Lily bleeding?"

The kitchen seems to tip. I look at Lily in the doorway, towel pressed to her arm. "And you know that, how?"

"Because this is what they do. They leave humans hurt, grateful, and confused about who caused the damage." His pause is careful. "Do not let Blackwood back inside. Do not let him touch your daughter. He was close to hear you scream tonight, wasn't he? To arrive before help. Ask yourself how many nights he has been that close."

Rain spits through the broken door. Alaric stands beyond it, silent.

"I have to go," I tell Nathan, and end the call before he can wind it any tighter.

He's using this. I know he is, but knowing it doesn't unmake the part of me that's afraid. I turn to Alaric.

"You don't come inside," I say. "Not tonight. Not ever again. You don't watch this house. And you don't speak to Lily alone—not one word."

Alaric inclines his head, but doesn't promise me anything, doesn't tell me what I mean to him.

"Ok."

He steps back off the porch, and I haul the broken door shut as far as it will go.

20

ALARIC

The storm has disintegrated, but the eaves keep weeping long after the sky goes quiet. My forearms have stopped smoking, but the marks remain—welts where the bloodroot rope lay against me, slow to close because the poison settles into the tissue and mocks whatever I am. A human would have scarred. I will heal by morning; that is the easy part. Harder is the memory of Hannah in the doorway, putting her body between me and Lily as though I were the thing that almost harmed them. She was not wrong in a sense, but I would never.

I hear Lily before I see her. The mud betrays her: the wet suck of sneakers crossing the dead garden, the careful breath of a girl who has decided to be braver than she feels.

"You shouldn't be here," I declare, without turning. "Your mother asked that I not speak with you alone. Go home, Lily."

"And." Her voice is thin in the cold, but it does not waver. "She's asleep. And I needed answers."

"This is not something she would appreciate."

"Yeah, well," She stops a few feet off, arms crossed, chin lifted. "There's a lot she doesn't appreciate right now."

I turn. She flinches—a small wince she hates herself for—and I look away first, so she knows I noticed and won't press it.

"You're hurt," she says.

"I'm healing."

"Yeah, slowly."

Sharp girl. Always has been. "It will pass."

She studies the burns.

"Those men who came. Were they trying to kill me, her or you?"

"They want something your great-grandmother left behind. They believe your mother knows where it is." I keep my voice plain. "They would not have been gentle about asking."

"Hunters." She says the word like she's testing a stair that might not hold. "That's what you called them."

"Yes. Of me. Of what I am."