Page 38 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

I stand in the middle of my grandmother's vault and feel the whole weight she carried alone. She wasn't hoarding secrets. She was holding the only honest record of a thing someone powerful had tried to smooth into rumor. Not proof of one enemy. Proof that raids, vanishings, and warnings had crossed each other for years in ways nobody had wanted preserved. She kept it because the dead had no other way to be believed.

"You don't have to read all of it tonight," Alaric says, close, quiet. The lamp stays steady in his hand. He hasn't turned it away from the page, hasn't tried to step me out of the room. "But I'm not going to say stop."

"I know."

I reach for the last thing she left — a small box at the head of the table, twine and red wax, her loop pressed into the seal. My box. Mine to open.

The wax is whole, the loop pressed clean into its center. No hand has broken it. No one has lifted this lid since Elspeth tied the twine and left it waiting in the dark.

My thumb rests against the seal, and for one breath I cannot move. Every ledger, every map, every testimony in this room belongs to the dead and the hidden. But this was left for me.

"This one hasn't been touched," I say.

Alaric's head comes up. He's hearing something past the stone, and whatever it is, it's on more than one side of us.

Ben's radio coughs static and a torn-off scrap of a voice, —coming in from the north por— and then nothing at all.

The vault waited so long to be found. It picked tonight, and we are not the only ones who came.

28

ALARIC

Ihear the boots before anyone else does — two sets, maybe three, coming down separate cuts, and the slick drag of a body easing along the lower drift. The chamber sits quiet around us, Elspeth's whole secret life stacked, and the certainty lands in me like cold water. We cannot stay.

"Out," I say. "All of you. Now."

Vivienne turns from the nearest shelf, one hand still resting on a ledger spine. "We only just found this."

"Which is exactly why they can't. If we fight in this room, the hunters mark it. Everything she buried down here dies with us tonight."

Ben thumbs his radio. Nothing comes back but a wash of static, then not even that. He looks at the dead handset, then at me, and for once the sheriff doesn't argue. "Where's clean ground?"

"Away from this door." I'm already crossing to Hannah. She's bent over the little box. "Hannah. We're leaving."

"One second." Her hands move fast over what's inside. She isn't reaching for ledgers, isn't lifting anything she can't close a fist around. She works a single folded square of paper free, presses it flat against her sternum, and shuts the lid. "Done. I've got what I need."

"Good." I look back at the rubble wall we came through, the old counterweight stone Elias muscled aside. "We close it behind us. Same as we found it."

Elias is already there. Together we ease the stone back into its cradle until it seats with a low grind, and the seam between fitted rock goes dark and seamless. Hannah drags her boot through, scattering the dust until the floor reads like no one's crossed it in ten years. Vivienne kills the spill of lantern glow against the wall. When we step away, it's only a wall again — fallen stone, black mortar, a scar in the rock that means nothing to anyone who doesn't already know.

"Move," I breathe. "Single file. Keep a hand on the left wall and don't lose it."

The drift narrows within twenty feet. The air thickens — mineral, stale, hard to pull all the way down — and under it I catch the first thin bite of something that has no business this deep in the earth.

Then a hand lamp flares around the bend ahead, small and shaking, and a voice I know far too well says, "Mom?"

Everything in me drops to ice. "Lily."

She's wedged where two cuts meet, lamp trembling in her grip, her face bone-white in its light. Hannah moves past me toward her, and I don't try to stop her — nothing on this earth would hold her back.

"What are you doing down here?" Hannah has the girl by both shoulders. "I left you with Theo. Alaric told you⁠—"

"Nobody came back." Lily's chin shakes. "You've been gone ages, and Theo kept staring outside like a car was going to come up the drive any second, and then he said stay, just stay put, and that — I knew that meant it could be bad." The words spill out of her. "I saw the marks, so I followed it, because I thought — I thought it would take me to you."

Elspeth's marks. The trail her own great-grandmother left scratched, and the child read it like a string of breadcrumbs straight into the worst place she could be. I don't have the heart to tell her how close it's brought her, and I don't have the time.

Then another scent moves through the tunnel. Not bloodroot. Not human. Vampire. Elias goes still beside me.