Chapter 1
I brought home a guy who was half dead from hunger and made him my butler.
He was pale, skinny, and couldn't be in the sun. He claimed he had some kind of "rare skin condition."
And I believed him.
Then one day, I woke up in the middle of the night and found his head resting against my neck.
"What are you doing?" I shouted.
He wiped his mouth in panic and said primly, "Sleepwalking."
I had two little holes on my neck, and blood was seeping out.
"What kind of sleepwalking is that supposed to be?" I asked.
"The really serious kind," he muttered.
His ears turned bright red as he said it.
And that was when I noticed his canine teeth were a little longer than a normal person's.
*****
It was a stormy night, and there was a guy sprawled out on my doorstep.
He was nothing but skin and bones. His face was white as a sheet, and his lips had no color at all.
I squatted down to check if he was breathing. He was.
"Hey, are you dead or what?" I called out.
There was no answer.
I sighed and dragged him inside.
Honestly, it was kind of embarrassing. On paper, I was the only daughter of the Earl of Belleridge, but in real life, I was flat broke.
What my parents left me was a leaky old mansion and a mountain of debt I'd never pay off.
I made a living by doing laundry and mending clothes for the people in town. I couldn't even afford to hire help.
And now I had another mouth to feed.
When the guy finally woke up, it was already the next evening.
He opened his eyes. They were a very light gray, like a frozen lake in winter.
"Where am I?" he asked.
"My place. You passed out on my doorstep, so I picked you up and brought you in," I said.
He was quiet for a moment, and then the corner of his mouth turned up slightly. "Picking me up?"
"Yeah, like picking up a stray cat."
He didn't get mad. Instead, he looked at me seriously and said, "My name is Ash. I don't have a home. If you don't mind, I could work for you as your butler to pay for my keep."
I looked him up and down, wondering what someone as scrawny as him could do.
But free help was free help.
"Deal," I said.
*****
On Ash's first day as my butler, I knew I'd made out like a bandit.
The breakfast he made was better than what the nicest restaurant in town could serve.
The fried eggs had that perfect crispy golden edge. The toast was golden brown. And the way he arranged everything on the plate looked like something out of an art gallery.
"Were you a chef before?"
"Well, you could say... I've learned a thing or two."
He stood off to the side and watched me eat without taking a single bite himself.
"You're not eating?"
"Don't worry about me. I have a special diet."
I didn't think anything of it.
On the third day, I asked him to help me move an old wardrobe that was stuck in the staircase.
That thing had to be at least two hundred pounds. I'd been fighting with it for three days and hadn't moved it an inch.
Ash picked it up with one hand and set it down at the end of the hallway like it weighed nothing.
I stared at him in disbelief. "Whoa. You're ridiculously strong."
"I've done a lot of physical labor over the years," he said, totally unfazed.
I looked at his arms, which were as thin as twigs, and decided not to ask any more questions.
But more and more strange things kept happening.
He never went outside during the day, saying he had a "rare skin condition" where sunlight made him break out in a rash.
He covered all the windows in his room with black cloth so that no light could get in.
He never looked at himself in a mirror. Not that there were many mirrors left in my mansion, but he even flipped over the broken piece of glass on my dressing table.
He could also toss out phrases in some old foreign language like he'd been speaking it his whole life.
And when he patched up my clothes, his stitches were so small and neat that one would think a sewing machine had done it.
This guy was no ordinary drifter; that was for sure.
But I didn't ask.
Everybody had secrets. And the one thing I was good at was not poking my nose where it didn't belong.