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"Something walked across your bedroom while you were sleeping." His voice drops. "Three feet from your face."

I open my mouth. And, close it.

He's right. I hate that he's right.

The fear I've been white-knuckling tips over into something hotter. Good. Anger I can use. Anger doesn't shake.

"Candles light themselves. Mirrors say my name. My furniture rearranges when I lose my temper. A hand came out of the glass yesterday." My voice climbs. "And you keep turning up on my doorstep before I've even called for help."

Quiet.

"How did you know I screamed?"

"I heard you."

"From your house. Doors shut. Windows shut."

He says nothing, which is its own kind of answer.

I step in close enough to see the pulse in his throat.

"You smelled something just now. You've been smelling the air since the day the mirror started talking."

"Maren."

"No." I jab a finger at his bare chest and try not to notice it's like poking a wall someone left out in the sun. "No more ‘lock your door’. No more ‘trust me’ while you tell me nothing. Something is in my life, and you know what it is."

“Fuck.” Pain moves across his face. I let it.

"I get to know what's hunting me."

"Yes."

I wait for the rest. It doesn't come. His eyes go to the prints, then the window, then me.

"Yes what?"

"You deserve the truth." He picks the tire iron back up. "Not just standing here. Let me clear the house first."

"You already checked."

"Not all of it." He steps toward the hall, then looks back. "Please."

That word again. He says it like it costs him something, and it goes straight through my snark and out the other side.

Damn him.

I follow.

We go room by room. Bathroom. Spare room. The narrow stairs down into the dark shop, where the skeleton in the feather boa keeps watch over a register full of nothing worth stealing.

No broken locks. No open doors. Nothing missing.

Only the mud tracked in one direction. Outside to my bed.

Gage checks the back porch. The cellar. The little crawlspace under the eaves. He searches the way other people breathe, without thinking about it, and I add it to the growing list of things about my neighbor that don't add up.

By the time we land in the kitchen, gray light is bleeding in around the curtains. Somewhere out there the sun's coming up on a perfectly ordinary Sunday.