Eden knelt on the cottage porch with a paring knife and a pear, and tried to think of one gift that would not insult a thing older than the wood. The pear was bruised. The knife was hers. Neither belonged to the watcher at the treeline. She had felt him again at dawn, a weight between two birches, patient as rent coming due. She had moved into the cottage in spring because no one else would claim it. Something had died in the front room before her; she knew the moment she crossed the threshold, the way other people knew a stove was hot. The house had said her name that first night, quiet, from the rafters. She had answered. She had been trying to earn the answer back ever since. Now there was him, too, watching from between the trunks, and she wanted him the way she wanted the house to keep speaking. The black cat pushed the door open with his shoulder and sat beside the pear. His eyes were the color of shallow ice. He did not blink at her. He blinked at the woods. "He can take the pear off the tree himself," Willow said. She stood at Eden's elbow, transparent as breath on glass, lace hem drifting an inch above the boards. "He can take the tree. Try again." "I know." Eden set the knife down. "That's the problem. Anything I bring, he already owns." "Then don't bring a thing." Eden looked at her oldest friend, who had been dead six years and still stood closer to her than anyone living. Willow's face was flat, patient, the way it had been the last afternoon Eden had lied to it. "Meaning what," Eden said. "Meaning you keep offering him apples off his own orchard." Willow's voice did not soften. "Give him the one thing out here he can't reach." The cat stood. He walked three steps toward the trees and stopped, tail curled, waiting. Eden understood then. The cottage knew her name because she had given it. The watcher did not. She had been treating courtship like tribute, and tribute was what a landlord took. She stepped off the porch in her boots. She left the knife. She left the pear. She walked to the edge of the yard where the grass went to moss and stopped where she could see the shape of him between two trunks, tall, still, listening. "My name is Eden Riverwallow," she said. "I moved into the house that already knew me. I want to know you the same way." The woods held their breath. Then a branch bent, though no wind moved it, and bent again, lower, closer, an answer shaped like a step forward. Behind her, the cottage door clicked shut on its own. She was outside now. Whatever came next would meet her in his trees, not hers.

The branch bent a second time and held. Eden stood at the moss line with her hands open at her sides. The watcher was close enough now that she could see the shape of a shoulder, the pale line of a jaw between two trunks. He would not step past the last tree. She understood the shape of the problem. He had answered her once. He would not answer again unless she gave him a reason to cross. "He's waiting," Willow said behind her. Her friend's voice came thin through the air, the way it always did outside the cottage. "You said your name. Say more." "More what." "True things. He can smell a lie." Eden believed her. Willow had been dead six years and had not been wrong yet. Eden took one step forward onto the moss. The black cat moved with her, tail up, and stopped at her ankle like a marker driven into the ground. "I was afraid of the house for a week," Eden said toward the trees. "I slept in my car. I came back because it said my name and no one else ever has, not like that." The watcher's shoulder shifted. One boot came forward onto leaf litter. Not moss. Not yet. "Keep going," Willow said. "I don't know what you are," Eden said. "I don't care. I want to." The watcher took the second step. His boot pressed the moss. He was in her yard now, tall, thin, hair long and black, skin the color of paper held to a window. His eyes caught red at the center like a struck match. He did not smile. He looked at her the way a man looks at a door he has been standing outside of for a long time. "Riverwallow," he said. His voice was low and old. "I am Maleficit. This wood has been mine since before your grandmothers." "I know," Eden said. "I'm not offering it back." His mouth moved. Not a smile. Something under one. A branch snapped hard to her left. Eden turned. A man stepped out of the far treeline in a black jacket, white hair pushed back, brown eyes tired and fixed on the vampire, not on her. Kane. She had seen him twice at the market and once at her fence. He had never crossed her yard before. "Eden." Kane did not look at her. "Inside." "I'm talking." "You're bleeding at the wrist and you don't know it." His voice was flat. "Inside. Now." Eden looked down. A thin red line ran from her palm where she had gripped something without noticing. The paring knife lay on the porch behind her. She had not carried it. She was sure of that. Maleficit's eyes were on the cut. He had not moved. He was not going to. Eden stepped back toward the porch. She had wanted him closer. She had gotten him closer. Now two men stood in her yard, and only one of them had been invited.

Eden pressed a rag to her wrist and watched Kane from the porch rail. Maleficit was gone. He had left the moment Kane crossed her yard, backing into the trees without a word. The cut had already stopped bleeding. Kane stood at the bottom of her steps with his hands in his jacket pockets and would not look at her. "You knew he was there," Eden said. "Before tonight. You've known." "Yes." "Then tell me what he is." "He told you himself." "He told me he's old. He didn't tell me what you are." Kane's jaw moved. He looked past her at the door. The cottage was quiet behind them, the way it went quiet when it was listening. The black cat sat on the top step between them, tail curled around his paws, eyes on Kane. "Come inside," Eden said. "I made tea an hour ago. It's still hot. The house keeps it hot." "No." "Then answer one question and go." He waited. "What are you." "Not something you need in your kitchen." "That isn't an answer." "It's the one you get." Willow drifted through the doorframe and stopped at Eden's shoulder. Kane's eyes tracked her. He saw her. Eden noted it. Most people who came to the fence looked through Willow like weather. "He can see me," Willow said. "I know," Eden said. Kane's mouth tightened. He had given something away and knew it. Eden stepped down off the porch. The cat moved with her. She stopped one stair above Kane so their eyes were level. "You put yourself between me and him," she said. "Twice now. You watch my fence. You know my friend is dead and you can still see her. Whatever you are, you're closer to this than I am." "That's why I'm telling you to stop." "Stop what." "Whatever you started with him tonight. He crossed your line because you called him. Don't call him again." "I wasn't going to." She held his eyes. "I was going to call you." Kane went still. Not surprised. Caught. His hand came out of his pocket and hung at his side like he had forgotten what to do with it. In the porch light his eyes caught yellow at the back for one blink and went brown again. Eden saw it. She did not look away. "Don't," he said. "Too late." He stepped back off her walk. "Wash the cut. Salt the sill. Don't open the door tonight, not for him, not for me." "Kane." He was already at the treeline. He did not turn. Eden went inside and locked the door. Willow was waiting by the stove. The cat jumped onto the table and sat. "His eyes," Eden said. "I saw." "He's not a man." "No." Eden set the rag down. She had wanted a name for what Kane was. She had gotten a color instead, and a warning, and the certain knowledge that he was afraid of what she would do with either.

Eden salted the sill the way Kane told her to. She poured the line thick along the wood, then did the back door, then the two windows that faced the trees. The cottage stayed quiet while she worked. It did not say her name. It had not said her name since Maleficit crossed the moss line, and she was starting to think it was holding its breath along with her. Willow followed her from room to room. The cat came too, stopping wherever Eden stopped, sitting on the salt bag when she set it down. "He said not to open the door," Willow said. "For anyone." "I heard him." "So don't." "I'm not going to open the door." Eden set the salt on the counter. "I'm going to make him come back to it." Willow's face did not change. "How." "I don't know yet." She had no way to call him. No phone number, no name he'd answer to twice, no fence he watched from anymore. He had walked into the trees and taken the shape of whatever he really was with him. She stood at the window and watched the dark press against the glass. The moss line was a pale seam at the edge of the yard. Past it, nothing moved. She went to the drawer under the stove where she kept the things she had found in the cottage before she owned it. A cracked amulet lay at the back, a full moon under glass, split down the middle. Strands of white hair were caught in the crack. She had pulled it out of a floorboard her first week and left it in the drawer because it felt like it belonged to someone. She had known, the way she always knew, that whoever left it had died in that room. White hair. Heavy tired eyes at her fence. "Willow." "I see it." Eden held the amulet up to the lamp. The hair was his. She was certain in the same flat way she was certain about deaths. The cottage had kept a piece of him for her before she ever moved in. She carried it to the porch. She did not open the door. She pressed the amulet to the glass of the window facing the trees and held it there with her palm flat over it. She said his name once, low, into the wood of the frame. The cat's ears turned first. Then Willow's head. Something moved at the treeline. Not stepping out. Stepping closer. A shape the size of a man, low to the ground and wrong at the shoulders, stopped just inside the trees and stayed there. Two points of yellow held on her window. Eden lowered her hand. The amulet stayed stuck to the glass where her palm had been, as if the house had taken it from her. He did not cross the moss line. He did not leave, either. He lay down in the dark at the edge of her yard and watched the door. She had called him. He had come as far as he would come. Now she had to decide what she was willing to walk out to.

The wolf lay in the grass past the moss line all night. Eden watched from the window until her feet went numb. Kane had come as close as he would come. Between him and her door, something else was moving in the trees. Willow drifted to the glass. "He's out there too." "Maleficit." "Pacing. He's been pacing since the wolf lay down." Eden pressed her forehead to the cold pane. She could not see him, but she could see what he did to the woods. Branches jerked where nothing had touched them. A crow burst up and did not come back down. The vampire was walking a circle around her yard, and the wolf on her grass was the reason. "If I go out there," Eden said, "they'll tear each other apart." "Then don't go out there." "He won't stay forever, Willow. Kane's already bleeding from the shoulder. I saw it when he shifted his weight." The cat jumped onto the sill. Lucien stared past her at the wolf, tail flicking once, slow. His eyes caught the porch light and threw it back blue. Eden went to the drawer and took out the salt. She poured a fresh line across the inside of the threshold. Then she opened the door. The wolf's head came up. Yellow eyes locked on hers. He did not stand. "Kane," she said. She kept her voice low and even. "Come inside." He did not move. She saw his ribs pull with a breath. She saw the dark patch on his shoulder where the fur was matted flat. "The moss won't stop you if I'm asking." She held the doorframe. "I'm asking." Something cracked in the trees. A branch, thick, snapped clean. Willow's head turned sharp toward the sound. "He heard you," Willow said. "Eden, he heard you." The wolf stood. Pale, huge, wrong at the shoulders, claws pressed into her grass. He crossed the moss line in three steps and came up the porch. He was bigger than the doorway. He had to lower his head to fit under it. She stepped back and he came through, and the salt broke under one heavy paw and scattered across the boards. She shut the door. She threw the bolt. She poured salt over the broken line without looking away from him. He sat down in her front room. The shape of him did not change. He watched the door with her. Outside, something struck the porch rail hard enough to split it. Then nothing. Then, further off, the sound of a man walking away through dry leaves, unhurried, letting her hear every step. Eden slid down against the door until she was sitting on the floor beside the wolf. Her hand found the fur at his neck. It was warm. He did not pull away. "He knows now," she said. The wolf did not answer. He didn't have to.

The wolf bled onto her floor. Eden watched a dark bead slide off his shoulder and soak into the wood. Another followed. She thought of Maleficit out past the trees, and of what blood in this house would call. "He can't stay like that," Willow said. The ghost hovered at the wolf's flank, her lace hem drifting through his fur without moving it. "Not bleeding. Not here." "I know." Eden went to the kitchen and came back with a bowl of water and a clean cloth. She knelt an arm's length from him. His yellow eyes tracked her. His lip pulled once off a tooth and settled. "Kane." She kept the cloth on her knee. "I can't help you if I don't know what you are. I need to know what to clean it with. I need to know if my hands make it worse." He looked at the door. He looked at her. "Tell him," Willow said. "Tell him you already know." Eden set the cloth down. "Your eyes went yellow on my porch. You see Willow. You crossed a moss line that wouldn't let you across before. I have an amulet with your hair in it that called you back to my window." Her voice held. "I'm not guessing anymore. I'm asking you to say it." The wolf's chest worked. The shape of him shivered along the spine, then the shoulders, then the jaw. Fur pulled back into skin. Bone folded. It was not quick and it was not clean. When it finished, a man sat on her floor in torn black clothes, one hand pressed to a gash that ran from collarbone to bicep. White hair stuck to his face. His brown eyes were tired in a way that had nothing to do with the wound. "Werewolf," Kane said. "That's the short word for it." Eden let out a breath she had been holding since the porch. "Thank you." She went to the cupboard where she kept the things she didn't remember buying. The roll of gauze was there, wrapped in itself, the marks on it glowing faint blue and violet. She had found it the same week she found the amulet. The cottage had wanted her to have it. She understood that now. She knelt beside him and pressed the cloth to the wound first. He hissed once and held still. She wound the gauze over his shoulder. The runes warmed under her fingers. The bleeding slowed, then stopped. "Salt the sill again," Kane said. "He'll have smelled it by now." Eden nodded, but she did not move yet. Her hand was still on his shoulder. He did not take it off. Outside, past her yard, past the moss line, something down the slope where Maddie's old cottage sagged in the dark began to walk toward the trees.

Eden salted the sill while Kane watched from the floor. The white line closed the gap she had broken letting him in. It would not be enough. Maleficit was already coming up the slope, and salt would only slow a thing that had owned this ground for centuries. She needed to know what he wanted from her. Without that, she had nothing to bargain with when he reached the porch. "He wants the wolf," Willow said. She drifted at the window, lace hem passing through the sill. "That's the easy answer." "It's not the real one." Eden set the salt jar down. "He was watching me before Kane ever came near this house." Kane pressed his palm harder to the bandage. "Don't call him again." "I have to." Eden picked up the salt jar and stepped back from the door. "He can't lie to me if I make him answer. You said it yourself. Truth is the only thing that works on him." "Eden." Kane's voice was flat. "He'll take the invitation as a yes." "I won't invite him in. I'll speak to him from the porch." A black cat sat on her kitchen table. Eden had not seen it come in. Its blue eyes held her, and a pale shimmer curled off its fur like smoke that did not rise. Willow looked at the cat. The cat looked back. Neither of them explained. "The house is letting things through tonight," Willow said. Eden opened the door before Kane could stand. The porch boards were cold under her feet. Past the moss line, Maleficit stood already, red eyes low in the dark, coat black against black trees. He had covered the slope faster than a man should. "You came to my door," Eden said. "Tell me what you actually want. Not the wolf. Me. Say it plain or leave." He smiled without showing teeth. "You already know." "Say it." "I want you to come home," Maleficit said. "To the keep. The stone one past the ridge. It was built for the woman who held this ground before your grandmothers. That seat is empty. I mean for you to fill it." Eden's hand tightened on the jar. "I'm not her." "You are her line." He tilted his head. "The cottage knows. It has been calling you the whole time." She heard it land in her chest as true. He could not lie to her, and he had not. That was the leverage. That was the shape of the trap. "Then you'll wait," Eden said. "I'll come to the keep on my own feet, or I won't come at all. Not tonight. Not while he bleeds on my floor." Maleficit considered her. Then he stepped back into the trees. Eden closed the door. Her hands were shaking. Behind her, Kane was already on his feet. "You just promised him you'd go," he said.

Kane was on his feet, one hand braced on the wall. Blood had soaked through the fresh bandage. "You promised him you'd go," he said again. "You don't know what the seat does. Once you sit it, you're his to instruct." Eden set the salt jar on the table. The black cat was gone. Willow drifted closer, lace hem passing through the chair. "Then tell me what it does," Eden said. "I don't know the whole of it," Kane said. "I know the woman before you didn't come back out of that keep the same. She answered to him after." Eden opened the cupboard she had never opened before. She did not decide to. Her hand went to the latch and the latch lifted. Inside sat a triangular vial, corked and sealed, the liquid inside layered dark red over something paler that caught the lamp. It had not been there yesterday. The cottage had put it out for her. Willow leaned in. "That's blood. And something else under it." "His blood," Eden said. She knew it the way she knew a room had held a death. "Mixed with holy water. The house wants me to have it." Kane stared at the vial. "Where did you—" "It gave it to me." She turned the glass. Pale threads moved through the red. "He can't lie when I make him answer. I'll make him answer before I sit anything." She pulled her coat from the hook. Kane pushed off the wall and nearly went down. "Stay," Eden said. "You'll bleed out on the path. I'm going to the keep now. On my feet. In daylight coming. Not as his guest." "Eden." "If I wait, he sets the terms." She pocketed the vial. "If I walk up while he's weakest and ask the question at the door, he has to answer. That's the only way I know what I'm agreeing to." Willow said, "I'll go with her. He can't touch me." Eden crossed the moss line before dawn. The woods thinned uphill. Past the ridge the keep rose out of the trees, a cathedral of dark stone with broken spires and ivy crawling the cracked windows. The front doors stood open. She had expected them locked. She stopped at the threshold. She did not step through. "Maleficit," she said. "Answer me from where you are. What does the seat require of the one who takes it?" His voice came from inside, close and tired. "Blood oath. Yearly. To me. Once given, it cannot be unspoken." Eden's stomach dropped. She had almost walked in blind. "Then I don't take it," she said. "Not tonight. Not on those terms." She turned and started back down the slope. The vial was warm in her pocket. She had her answer, and she had something of his in glass. She was not bound. Not yet. But he knew now that she had come to the door and refused it, and that changed what he would do next.

Eden crossed the moss line back into her yard while the sky was still gray. The vial sat warm in her pocket. She had the seat's terms and she had refused them, but refusal was not the same as knowing him. She could feel that now, walking uphill with wet grass on her boots. She had learned what he wanted from her. She had learned nothing of what he had ever wanted before her. Inside, Kane slept on the cot by the stove. Willow drifted from the window, transparent lace catching no light. "He'll come back," Willow said. "You know that." "I know." Eden hung her coat. "And when he does I'll have nothing to say to him. I told him no at his own door. Anything I offer next will sound like pity or a trick." "So don't offer." "I have to." Eden sat on the floor by the hearth. "He's not going to leave. I'm not going to sit that seat. If I want him to stop hunting the edge of my yard I have to reach him some other way. And I don't know him. I only know what he wants from me now. Not what he was before." Willow was quiet a moment. Her voice, when it came, was flat and small. "I heard him once. In the woods behind your grandmother's. I was seven. He was singing." Eden looked up. "Not words I knew. It was old. He didn't see me. He stopped when a bird landed on a branch and he watched it until it left." Willow's mouth twitched. "That's all I have. I forgot until now." Eden stood. She went to the cupboard the cottage had opened for her before. She put her hand on the latch and waited. The latch did not move. She tried the drawer under the window. The shelf behind the kettle. The floorboard that had given her the amulet. Nothing lifted. Nothing shifted. The cottage sat closed around her like a held breath. "It's not going to help me with this," Eden said. "No," Willow said. "I don't think it can." Eden pressed her forehead to the cupboard door. A bird landed on the sill outside. She watched it the way Willow had described him watching. It flew off. She stayed at the cupboard a long time. Then she went to the table, took down a silver cup she had never used, the one shaped like a raven with red glass in its belly, and set it in the center of the wood. She did not fill it. She left it empty and waiting. "An invitation," she said. "Not a gift. He can bring what he wants to put in it." Willow drifted closer. "That might work." "It might not." Eden sat down across from the empty cup. "But it's the first thing I've done that isn't about me."

Eden woke before dawn to the sound of something screaming in the trees. Not a person. A rabbit, maybe, or a fox. The scream cut short. She sat up on the floor by the hearth. The silver cup still waited on the table, empty. Kane slept on. Willow was already at the window, one transparent hand raised toward the glass. "Something's wrong out there," Willow said. "The woods went bad in the night." Eden pulled on her boots and stepped onto the porch. The air smelled like iron and wet leaves. The moss line at the yard's edge had darkened to near black. Past it, the trees stood too still. She saw a dead squirrel on the path, then another. Then a crow, its wings folded wrong. Small bodies laid out like a warning. "He did this," Eden said. "He came back to the door I closed and this is what came out of him." "You can't cross that," Willow said. "Not with him angry. Not without something between you." Eden knew she could not sit and wait. If Maleficit stayed like this the woods would keep dying, and she would never reach the man who once stopped to watch a bird. She went back inside. She took the triangular vial from the shelf, the one that held his blood and holy water. She put it in her pocket. She took the silver raven cup off the table and tucked it under her arm. "You're bringing both," Willow said. "He needs to know I'm not coming to fight him. But I'm not coming empty either." She crossed the moss line. Ten steps in, she saw it. A ram the size of a horse stood between two trunks. Its coat was black. Its horns curled gold. Its eyes burned green. It had a fresh kill under one hoof, some small thing already stiff. It lowered its head at her. Eden did not run. She set the raven cup on a flat stone between them. Then she uncorked the vial and poured a single drop of the red mixture into the cup. The drop hissed against the silver. "Tell him I'm here," she said to the ram. "Tell him the cup is for him. Tell him I want to know what he sang in the woods behind my grandmother's house." The ram stared. Its green eyes dimmed a shade. It stepped back once, then turned and walked deeper into the trees, leaving the kill behind. The air lifted. The iron smell thinned. Somewhere far off, a bird called and was answered. Eden picked up the cup. The drop inside had not spilled. She walked back across the moss line with it held level in both hands. She had not summoned him. She had sent word. For the first time, she had asked him about himself, and something in the woods had agreed to carry the question.

Eden waited three days for an answer. On the fourth morning, a black ribbon lay across her doorstep. She did not remember hearing anyone approach. Willow drifted over her shoulder and studied it. "That's an invitation," Willow said. "Or a summons. Hard to tell with him." Eden picked it up. The cloth smelled like old smoke. She thought of the corrupted woods between her cottage and the keep, still black at the moss line, still full of small dead things. Crossing them alone had almost killed her last time. She could not do it again without cover. She went to the cupboard. This time it opened. Inside sat the silver raven cup, cleaned and filled to the brim with dark red wine. Beside it lay the triangular vial of Maleficit's blood and holy water. The cottage had chosen for her. "It wants you to bring both," Willow said. "Together." Eden understood. She poured the entire vial into the cup. The wine hissed once, then went still. She capped the cup with her palm and stepped outside. The woods let her pass. Dead leaves crunched under her boots, but nothing moved in the brush. The corruption thinned as she climbed. By the time the keep's broken spires rose over the trees, the air smelled like rain again. Ivy hung from the shattered windows. The front doors stood open for her. Maleficit waited on the stone floor of the great hall. He was smaller than she remembered, or thinner. His red coat hung loose on his shoulders. His eyes were tired. "You sang to my grandmother," Eden said. "I sang to a woman who looked like you." His voice scraped. "Before the seat. Before the wood was mine." She walked to him and held out the cup. "Then drink what she would have given you. Not tribute. Not an oath. Just this." He looked at the cup a long time. He knew what was in it. He could smell his own blood. He could smell the holy water. He could smell the compulsion. "You are ending me," he said. "I'm letting you stop." He took the cup in both hands. He drank slowly, like a man finishing a long meal. When he lowered it, his mouth was red. He sat down on the stone. Then he lay down. His black hair spread around him. The tired went out of his face first. Then the rest. Eden knelt beside him. She waited until his chest stopped moving. Centuries, gone quiet in a room. She stood. The keep felt different already, lighter, unclaimed. Outside, the corruption in the woods would lift. Kane was still in her cottage, still wounded. She had killed the thing that had been watching her from the trees since she arrived, and she had done it with his own hand offered as a cup. She walked out of the hall with the empty cup and did not look back.

Eden walked home with the empty cup in her hand. The corruption in the woods was already thinning. Dead leaves crumbled to gray dust behind her boots. She should have felt lighter. She did not. She kept hearing him say You are ending me, and hearing herself say I'm letting you stop, and she could not tell if either of them had meant it as love. A black cat sat on her doorstep when she reached the cottage. Sleek, blue-eyed, tail curled around its paws like it had waited a while. It had not been there that morning. Willow drifted down beside it and frowned. "That's not a stray," Willow said. "That's a witness." The cat stood and walked inside ahead of Eden, as if it knew the floor. It jumped onto the table and sat next to a book Eden had never seen before. Heavy. Silver-bound. Her name was pressed into the cover in small letters beneath the words FAMILY HISTORY. Eden set the cup down. Her hand shook once and stopped. "The cottage gave you that," Willow said quietly. Eden opened it. The pages were thin and dry. She turned past names she half-recognized, past her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother. The line kept going back. The cat watched her fingers. She found him four generations deeper. His name written in the same careful hand as the rest. Maleficit Evervood. Married to a woman whose face Eden had seen in an old photograph on her mother's shelf. A daughter listed under them. The daughter's daughter. Down and down, to Eden. She sat on the floor because her knees would not hold. "He was my great-great-great-great-grandfather," she said. The words did not sound like hers. "He knew," Willow whispered. "He knew." Eden pressed her palm flat on the page. "He wanted me on that seat because it was his blood. Not because he loved me. Because I was his." The cat leaned forward and touched its nose to her knuckle. The cottage door opened. Kane stood in it, one hand on the frame, favoring his hurt side. His white hair fell over his eyes. He looked at her face, then at the book, then at the empty cup on the table. "You did it," he said. "He was my grandfather." Her voice cracked. "Kane, he was singing to his own daughter's daughter's daughter. That whole time." Kane crossed the room slowly. He did not touch her. He knelt on the floor across from her and set something on the boards between them. The cracked moon amulet, the one with his hair inside it. He pushed it toward her hand. "He didn't love you," Kane said. "He wanted the line back. That's not the same." "Then what did I give him at the end?" "An out." Kane's tired eyes stayed on hers. "That's mercy. Not love." Eden closed the book. The cat curled against her hip. She picked up the amulet and held it in her fist. Something in her chest settled that had not settled in weeks. It was not the answer she had wanted. It was an answer. She looked at Kane. He did not look away.

Kane left before dawn. The amulet stayed in Eden's hand. She could feel him at the other end of it, the way you feel a rope pulled taut across a room. He was somewhere in the trees, awake, tethered. Willow drifted through the wall and sat on the table. The black cat did not move for her. It watched Eden's fist close around the amulet. "You called him yet?" Willow asked. "No." "Why not?" Eden looked at the window. The cottage had washed the glass clean overnight. The sill smelled of lemon and old salt. "Because it hears everything in here. It gives me things. It watches who comes in." Willow nodded slowly. "You don't want it listening." "I don't want it choosing for me. Not this." The cat stood, jumped down, and walked to the door. It looked back once. Its tail curled a question. Eden pulled on her boots. She took the amulet and a knife. She followed the cat out past the moss line and into the woods. The corruption was gone. The ground felt ordinary under her feet, which was its own strange thing. The cat led her uphill. It moved through brush like it knew the path had been waiting. They passed the slope where the ram had stood. They passed a low stone Eden did not remember. The cat stopped at the base of a massive weeping willow. The tree hummed. Not sound exactly. A pressure against her teeth. Its branches hung to the ground in a full curtain. The roots had swallowed something; she could feel the shape of it buried there, warm and wrong. She did not touch the ground above it. She stepped around it. Inside the curtain of branches, the light went green. The trunk was wide enough to lean against. No wind reached her here. No cottage. No book on the table listening for her breath. "Here," she said. Willow slipped through the branches. "He won't like the tree." "He doesn't have to like it. He just has to come." Eden pressed the amulet flat against the trunk instead of a window. She said his name once. Quiet. Certain. The pull in her chest went slack, then tightened toward her. Branches shifted. Kane stepped through the curtain, favoring his hurt side, hair damp from the climb. His eyes flashed yellow once and settled. "You're a long way from the door," he said. "I needed somewhere the house couldn't hear." He looked at the roots. He knew what was under them. He did not say so. He sat down against the trunk beside her, close enough that his shoulder touched hers. "Then talk," he said. Eden let out the breath she had been holding since he gave her the amulet. The cat curled between their feet. Above them, the buried thing waited, and for the first time in weeks, it was not her problem to solve tonight.

Kane's shoulder stayed against Eden's. The green light through the willow branches held them like water. She had almost let herself believe the quiet was theirs to keep. Then the ground under the roots shifted. Not a tremor. A pull. Something below the buried vessel turned toward the surface. Eden felt it in her teeth, the same hum as the tree, only hungrier. Kane sat up. His eyes flashed yellow and stayed that way. "Something's coming." "From under?" "From the trees." He tilted his head. "Two things. One under. One walking." Eden closed her hand around the cracked moon amulet. The white hair inside it pressed warm against her palm. "How close?" "Close." The curtain of branches parted before she could stand. A man stepped through like he owned the doorway. Red hair spiked up between two curling ram horns. Black wolf ears twitched forward. His forked tongue tested the air once. He wore torn black and too many chains. He grinned at Kane the way a person grins at an old debt. "Wolf," he said. His voice scraped. "You brought her to the loudest tree in the wood." Kane was already on his feet, putting himself between the demon and Eden. "Raze." "Kane." Raze Brimstone's grin widened. He looked down at the roots. "You know what's humming under there. I can smell the light through the dirt. So can the thing that wants it." Eden stood. "Say what you came to say." Raze's eyes moved to her, slow. "The old vampire's dead. The wood's still bleeding from it. That buried lantern is calling something worse than him up through the roots. You sat here long enough to ring the dinner bell." Under their feet, the pull sharpened. A root creaked. A thin blue light leaked up between two knots of wood and then snuffed out. "Move," Kane said. "Where?" Eden asked. "Downhill. Away from the tree. Now." Raze stepped aside, mock-polite. "I'll watch you go. Consider it a favor. You'll owe me." Kane grabbed Eden's wrist. He pulled her through the branches. The black cat shot ahead of them into the brush. Eden looked back once. The willow's trailing strands were lifting, slow, like hair underwater. The hum had climbed into a ringing. They did not stop until the ground leveled and the ringing thinned to a pressure behind her ears. Kane let go of her wrist. He was breathing hard. His hurt side had opened again; a dark stain spread under his jacket. "The tree isn't safe anymore," he said. "It was the only place that was." "Not now." Eden pressed the amulet flat against her chest. The cottage waited downhill, listening. Behind them, something under the willow answered the buried light. Their private place was gone, and whatever slept beneath the roots had just learned her name at the door.

They stopped only when the ringing faded. Kane leaned against a birch, one hand pressed to his side. Blood darkened his jacket. Eden reached for him, but he shook his head. The willow was gone as a refuge. So was her cottage, if she wanted to speak without the house hearing. She had nowhere left that was theirs. "I need to know where you go," she said. Kane's eyes stayed on the trees behind her. "Home." "Then take me there." He looked at her for the first time since they had run. His mouth opened, closed. "No." "Kane. The tree is done. The house listens to every word. If I can't find you, I can't warn you. I can't do anything." She stepped closer. "Please." He pushed off the birch. His breath was shallow. The wound was worse than he was letting on. He took two steps and swayed. Eden caught his arm. His weight came down hard against her shoulder. "Show me," she said. "Or bleed out here." He made a low sound that might have been a laugh. Then he started walking, and she went with him. He led her uphill, then sideways along a slope she had never crossed. The trees thinned. Grey stone pushed up through the moss. He stopped at a split in the rock she would have walked past a hundred times without seeing. He ducked through it. She followed. The passage opened into a hollow the size of a small clearing, roofed by stone. A cottage sat inside it. Wood and river rock, moss along the eaves, two lit windows. A paw print was carved into the door. The air smelled of him — wet fur, cold earth, something warmer underneath. He unlocked the door with a key from his neck. He crossed the threshold and turned back to look at her. He did not invite her in. He waited. "May I?" she asked. "Yes." She stepped inside. The room was small and dim and lived-in. A stove. A bed against the far wall. A chair with a black coat folded over the back. No mirrors. No windows that faced the woods she knew. Kane sat down on the edge of the bed and finally let his hand fall away from his side. The stain underneath was worse than she had thought. His shoulders dropped. In the low light his eyes flashed yellow once and then held that color. His teeth showed. His fingers curled against the quilt and lengthened. "Kane —" "Stay," he said, through a mouth that was changing. "Or go. Choose now." She shut the door behind her and slid the bolt. He let the shift take him. Pale fur pushed up along his arms. Bone moved under skin. A long white wolf stood where the man had been, breathing hard, watching her. She sat down on the floor in front of him and did not look away.

The wolf slept before Eden did. She sat on the floor with her back against the door and watched his ribs rise. The bleeding had slowed. The room smelled of him and only him. That was the problem. She stood when the light through the small windows went grey. She moved carefully. She did not want him to wake and find her touching his things without permission. But she looked. A stove with one pot. A shelf with three books, spines worn blank. A hook by the door with the black coat. No cup that wasn't his. No picture. No sign that anyone else had ever stood where she stood. She understood then what the cottage was. It was not a home. It was a hole he crawled into to bleed in private. He had brought her here because she made him. He had not brought her here to stay. She pulled the moon amulet from under her collar. The crack in the glass caught the window light. His white hair curled behind it. She set it on the small table by the bed where he would see it when he opened his eyes. It was not enough. An object he had given her, returned, only said she had been here. It did not say she wanted to come back. She thought about it, then pulled off her outer shirt. The black tee underneath she had worn for two days. It smelled like her hair and the woods and the sweat of running. She folded it small. She set it beside the amulet. She wrote nothing. She could not think of a sentence that would not sound like a trap. The wolf shifted on the quilt. His eye opened, yellow, then brown as the man came back through the fur. Kane pushed up on one elbow. He saw the table. He saw the folded cloth. He saw the cracked moon beside it. "Eden." His voice was raw. "What is that." "Mine," she said. "I'm leaving it here." He stared at the shirt like it might bite him. "Take it with you." "No." "Eden —" "You brought me here because I forced you." She stayed by the table. "I don't want to be a thing you hid from. I want to be a thing you come back to." His hand moved before his face did. He picked up the shirt. He held it against his chest, once, quick, like checking a wound. Then he set it down again, flat, careful, next to the pillow where his head had been. He did not look at her. "Then it stays." She let out a breath she had been holding since the willow. "I'll go before dark," she said. "So the house doesn't ask." He nodded. His fingers stayed on the cloth. When she stepped out through the split in the stone, the cottage behind her held something of hers for the first time. She walked back toward the house that knew her name, and did not feel she was walking home.

Eden walked back through the trees with the taste of her own choice still in her mouth. She had left him a piece of her shirt and a cracked moon of his own hair, and she had called it enough. It was not enough. She knew the shape of his hands and the shape of his silence. She did not know a single name he had once answered to. She could not love a hole in the woods. She turned around before she reached the moss line. The split in the stone was where she had left it. She did not call. She stepped through. He was sitting on the floor by the bed, her folded shirt across his knee. He looked up and did not stand. "You came back." "I forgot something." She sat down across from him, close enough to touch, and did not touch. "I don't know anything about you." "You know enough." "I know what you do. I don't know what happened to you." She kept her voice level. "Tell me one true thing. Then another. I'll stay until you run out or you tell me to go." His jaw set. "Eden." "One thing." He looked at the shirt on his knee for a long time. His thumb moved across the hem. "There were seven of us," he said. "A pack. I was the youngest." She waited. "Something came through the trees when I was nineteen. Not the old vampire. Something older. It took them one at a time. I was the last one standing because I was the smallest and I hid." His mouth tightened. "I've been hiding since." "What were their names." He flinched. She had guessed right, that this was the cost. He said six names. He said them slowly, the way a person sets down glass. He did not say the seventh, which was his own. When he was done, his hands were shaking on her shirt. "That's why you watch the trees," she said. "That's why I watch you." He met her eyes. "I wasn't fast enough for them. I'm going to be fast enough for you." She reached across and put her hand over his. He did not pull back. His fingers were cold through the cloth. "I can love you now," she said. "I couldn't before. I was loving a shadow." He closed his eyes. "Don't say that yet." "I'm saying it. You don't have to answer." He didn't. But his hand turned under hers and held. She stayed until the light thinned. When she stood to go, he stood with her. At the stone split he stopped her with one word. "Eden. The thing that took them. It never left the woods." She walked home carrying six names and a seventh problem, and knew she had bought her bond at the price of knowing what still hunted him.

Eden woke with six names in her head and no idea how to hand a wolf her heart. She had walked home from the stone split knowing she wanted him. She did not know how to say so to something that was not only a man. A human suitor took flowers. A human suitor took her hand across a table. She had watched him drop to four legs and lift a muzzle full of teeth. Flowers were an insult. She was sure of that much and nothing else. She sat at her kitchen table and made herself think. The cottage listened. She could feel it listening. She did not ask it for help. It had refused her before, and this was not its business. She thought about what she had seen him do. He watched. He guarded. He ate what he caught. He lived alone in a stone hollow that smelled faintly of animal. She took her coat and went to the butcher at the edge of town. She bought two thick steaks, bloody through the paper. She bought a new hunting knife with a bone handle. On the walk back she cut rosemary and thyme from the yard and tied the bundle with twine. Steak, herbs, knife. Meat he could eat raw or cook. A blade sharper than the one on his belt. Nothing that pretended he was only a man. She carried the bundle through the woods without calling him first. She wanted him to see her arrive with her hands full. The stone split was cold. She stepped through into the cottage in the hollow. He was at the table cleaning something. He looked up. His eyes moved to the bundle in her arms and stopped there. She set it down between them. She unwrapped the cloth. The steaks lay dark on the wood. The knife lay across them. The herbs smelled sharp in the close air. "I don't know how this is done," she said. "For you. I'm guessing." He did not speak. He reached out and picked up one of the steaks in his bare hand. He held it a moment. Then he tore a piece with his teeth and chewed, watching her. Her stomach turned. She held his eyes. He swallowed. He set the steak down. He picked up the knife, tested the edge with his thumb, and laid it beside his own on the table. "You brought meat and a blade to a wolf," he said. "You didn't guess wrong." "Then I want to know the rest. How your kind courts. What I'm supposed to do next." He was quiet a long moment. His hand went to the amulet at her throat, the cracked moon with his hair inside. He touched it once and let it go. "You already started," he said. "But there's a hunt after the gift. Both of us. Together. And what we bring back, we share." "When." "Tomorrow night." She nodded. The cottage she had left behind did not know where she was. The wolf across the table did. That was the answer she had come for.