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Sid's voice goes off in my skull like a struck bell.

Maren. It's taking you off the ground.

Something hits us from the left. Now I scream my head off.

Gage comes over his own porch rail without using the steps, and he isn't a wolf, he's a man with a torn sack of rock salt in one fist, and he swings it into the creature that has me the way you'd swing an ax.

Salt bursts white through the dark and goes blue.

The joints let go. I drop, and the grass comes up hard, and above me the creature splits open along its whole length and comes apart into smoke that smells like a house fire.

Then Gage’s hands are under my arms and my back is against his chest and he's saying my name, over and over, low and wrecked, and I let him hold me up because my legs are rubber.

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Maren. Are you sure?"

"No."

He doesn't let go. Neither of us says anything.

Sid gets to the walk before we do and goes flat on his belly in the frost, tail down, nose an inch off the ground.

Gage crouches beside him and smells, and I watch his shoulders go rigid.

"Nothing," he says.

"What do you mean, nothing?"

"I mean nothing." He lifts his head. "No rot. No smoke. Not a person, not an animal, not a thing that ever ate. There's a print in the frost and there's no scent in it. Something is masking it."

I look down.

Bare feet. Narrow through the heel, half a size smaller than my boot.

"The ones at your house," I say. "The ones that walked around your house in a circle. You told me they didn't smell like anything at all either."

He doesn't answer. That's the answer.

I stand on my own front walk with my ears still ringing and I finally understand what I've had backward since the first day.

I've been assuming there was only one of them.

One haunting wearing different masks. The mirror, the dream, the woman on my porch, the thing that whispers through my back door, all of it the same open mouth.

There are two.

One of them wants me.

The other one just stood between me and the road and made a nice old lady back up.

Gage rises. He follows the prints with his eyes and I follow them with mine, and they don't go out to the road, and they don't come from it.

They go around my house.

One unhurried circle. And, they come back to my front step, and they stop there with their toes pointed in.