Chapter 4

VANDA

She opened the door with a knife from her kitchen half hidden behind her leg.

Smart. I noted it before I noted anything else, the way her grip was steady, the way she had already checked the peephole and still kept the blade ready. Whatever she did not remember about herself, some part of her had never stopped preparing for a fight.

"You," she said, like the word itself was an accusation.

"Me."

"You left without paying for your drink."

"Put it on my tab."

She did not smile. Her eyes moved past me to the empty hallway, checking it the way I would, and something about that small precise motion made my throat go tight. I had trained soldiers who did not check a hallway that well.

"How did you know where I live?"

I could have lied. I had a dozen lies ready, the kind that come easy after two centuries of practice. Standing in that hallway, looking at her face lit by the weak bulb over her door, none of them would come.

"I followed you home last night," I said. "I think someone else did too."

She went very still. "That's supposed to make me feel better?"

"No."

"Then why are you telling me?"

Because I could not watch her walk into whatever was coming without warning her first. Because I had already failed her once, in a way she would never understand, and I was not going to fail her twice from a distance. I did not say any of that.

"Because you're in danger and you don't know why," I said instead. "And I might be the only person who can help you survive it."

She looked at me a long moment, knife still low at her side, weighing the strange offer of a stranger who paid nothing and demanded nothing except to be let in from the cold with a warning nobody asked for. Then she stepped back and let the door swing wider.

"Five minutes," she said. "And you're explaining the part where you followed me home."

I stepped inside, and that was when I saw it. Her robe had slipped slightly at the collar as she turned to lock the door behind me, and there, just above her collarbone, was a mark I had not seen in two centuries. A thin curved line, old and familiar in a way that turned my blood to ice.

I knew exactly what that mark meant. I knew exactly what it was preparing her body to become.

I must have gone pale, because she caught me staring and pulled her robe tighter, suspicion sharpening every line of her face.

"What," she said. "What is that look."

IANA

He looked at my collarbone like he had seen a grave open.

I pulled my robe closed, heart hammering, every instinct telling me to grab the knife I had set down on the counter the second I decided to trust a stranger with a warning nobody sane would deliver at midnight. "What," I said again, sharper. "What is that look."

"Nothing."

"Don't do that. Don't stand in my kitchen and lie to my face after telling me I'm in danger."

Something moved behind his eyes, a decision made and unmade in the space of a breath. "How long have you had that mark."

"I noticed it this morning." My hand went to my collarbone before I could stop it, covering the spot like that would undo whatever he had seen there. "Why does that matter."

"It matters."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I can give you right now."

I wanted to throw him out. Every reasonable part of me knew that letting a strange man who refused to explain himself stand in my kitchen at midnight was the kind of decision that ended badly in every story I had ever heard. But some other part of me, the part that had spent the last two nights flinching at shadows and waking with my heart in my throat, did not want him to leave.

The television in the other room, left on low for background noise the way I always leave it, cut from a late night talk show to a breaking alert. I heard it before I understood the words, that particular urgent tone news broadcasts use when something has gone wrong close to home.

I walked to the doorway and turned up the volume.

A body found near the docks that evening. Drained of blood, the reporter said, in language careful enough to avoid the word everyone was clearly thinking. Third such death in six weeks. Police urging the public to stay indoors after dark until the investigation concludes.

I turned back to find him watching the screen with an expression that had nothing to do with surprise. He already knew.

"You're not just some stranger who followed me home," I said slowly.

"No."

"You knew that was going to be on the news before I turned it on."

"Yes."

My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my sides, refusing to let him see it, though something in the way he watched me told me he saw it anyway, saw everything, in a way that made my skin feel too thin.

"Then tell me what's happening to me," I said. "Tell me what that mark means, or get out of my flat."

He opened his mouth to answer.

The lights went out.

Not just in my flat. Through the window I could see the whole street below had gone dark at once, every lamp, every lit window, swallowed into a black that felt wrong in a way ordinary power cuts never do. In the sudden silence I heard him move, fast, placing himself between me and the door before I had even registered the room had changed.

"Stay behind me," he said, voice dropped low, all warmth gone out of it.

"Why."

Through the window, in the dark where the streetlamp used to glow, something moved that was far too tall to be a person and far too quiet to be anything else.