Elms tasted the thief's blood on the wind an hour ago, and it led her here, to a dead field under a greying sky. Someone had carried her clan's heirloom through this place. She could read blood the way other people read faces, and the trail was fresh. But the sky told her a crueler fact. The grey was turning pale at the edges. Dawn was coming, and she had no roof, no cellar, no grave to hide in. If the sun caught her in this open field, she would burn before she ever found the thing that bound her people's wandering spirits to the road. She turned in a circle. Flat grass. A broken fence. Then, far off, a humped shape of old stone. A crypt, sealed and weathered, half-swallowed by weeds. She ran. The door was stone, cracked down the middle, heavier than it looked. Elms dug her fingers into the seam and pulled. It ground open an inch. The pale edge of the sky widened. She pulled again, teeth bared, and the slab shifted enough for a body. A voice came from the dark inside. "It's taken." Elms froze. A man sat against the far wall, knees up, a black fedora tipped low over red eyes. Another vampire. She smelled his blood and read exile in it, a severed line, no clan to protect him. "Then make room," she said. "Or we both cook." He didn't move. "You first, maybe." The light at the door turned gold. Elms felt it reach for her heel. She stopped arguing. She shoved inside and dragged the slab shut behind her. Darkness swallowed the gold. She stood there, breathing she didn't need, listening to her own fear settle. "Smart," the man said. "Shame. I was comfortable." She sank against the cold stone across from him. For now she was alive. For now the trail waited outside, cooling with every hour she hid. "Prince," he said, after a while. He tipped the hat without lifting it. "Don't touch my corner." "Elms." She watched him in the dark. "You've been through here a day, maybe two. You'd have seen someone pass. Someone carrying something old." His jaw tightened, just slightly. That was answer enough. He had seen. "I don't do favors," he said. "I didn't ask for one." They sat in the dead air while the sun crossed the sky above the stone. Elms closed her eyes and held the thief's scent in her memory so it wouldn't fade. She had shelter. She had a witness who knew more than he'd say. And she had a whole day trapped beside a man who owed her nothing, waiting for a night that couldn't come fast enough.

Elms had the deed, but the house knew her now. A guard's step changed on the stair below. She pressed her back to the hall wall and listened. One set of boots became three. They were climbing. She still did not know which room held her maker. The study had given her the deed, not his door. If she ran the wrong way, she would find guards instead of the man she had hunted for six years. She needed a map, and the house was full of the dead. Dead things held memory the way wood did. She slipped past the study and found a narrow servant's hall. A corpse stood frozen there, mouth stretched wide in a silent laugh, eyes dark and hollow. It had died standing and never fell. Elms knew a laugh like that came last, at something a master said. She cut her thumb again and touched its gray hand. The memory came fast. The laughing corpse had carried trays up these stairs for years. It had served a man behind a gold door at the top of the house. Elms saw the door. She saw the man's hand take a cup. She pulled back, breathing hard. Top floor. Gold door. She finally knew. But the boots were close now. She could not reach the stairs without crossing them. A small shape stepped out of a doorway between her and the way up. A zombie girl, no taller than Elms's waist, twin pigtails stiff with grime. She hugged a worn teddy bear against her chest. One eye glowed yellow. She watched Elms with no fear at all. "You read the funny man," the girl said. Her voice was flat and wet. "I read people too. I just watch them." She tilted her head toward the climbing boots. "They think you're in the study. I can make them keep thinking it." Elms did not trust her. But the guards were twenty steps away. "Why would you?" The girl squeezed the bear. "Nobody comes up here. It's boring." She pointed a small finger down the hall. "Scream from the study. They'll run to it. You go up." Elms had no better plan. She slammed her palm against the study hearth and let out a cry that broke in the middle, a girl's cry, the kind the house expected. The boots stopped, then rushed the sound. Three guards thundered past the servant's hall toward the hearth. Elms went the other way. She took the last stairs three at a time. At the top she found it—the gold door, exactly as the dead man remembered. Behind it, her maker. She stopped with her hand flat against the wood. The deed was folded in her coat. The guards would learn the trick soon. She had one quiet moment and a door that would not stay shut. Elms pushed it open.

The room past the gold door was long and dim. Elms expected a man. Instead she found a shelf. A row of severed heads stared back at her, each one a different face, each one set like a specimen. She knew why they were there before he spoke. He wanted her to look. He wanted to start talking before she could act. "The last one still smiles," a voice said. Her maker sat in a chair beyond the shelf. Six years had not changed him. He was the man who took her life at fourteen. "I kept them because each one thought he knew me. Like you think you know me, Elms." Her name in his mouth undid something. She had planned this moment a thousand times. In each version she stayed cold. Now her hands shook. He stood and came closer, slow, easy, as if she were still a girl at his table. "You were going to be a dancer," he said. "You told me that the first night. You cried and I let you cry. I know you better than anyone left alive." He nodded at the heads. "They heard me out. You should too." That was the trap. He wanted her to listen. He wanted the talk to soften her, the way it had softened these dead men into trophies. If she let his voice find the old grooves in her, she would freeze, and he would win without lifting a hand. So she did not answer. She did not let him finish. She drew the knife she had carried north for six years and crossed the floor while he was still speaking. His mouth kept moving. Some word about her mother. She drove the blade into his chest before the word was done. His eyes went wide, surprised, as if he had never believed she could refuse the conversation. He had always won with words. He had never learned what to do when no one waited for them. He dropped to his knees. Blood spread dark across his shirt. Elms knelt with him and pressed her palm to the wound. His blood ran warm over her fingers, and his memories came. She saw the heirloom. She saw her clan's stolen heirloom in his hands, saw him pass it to a buyer she did not know, a buyer in a far room. He had already sold it. The handoff downstairs tonight was only payment. The thing she came to reclaim was gone, carried off to someone else. Her maker died with his mouth open and nothing in it. Elms stayed kneeling in his blood. She had killed the man she hunted. She had the deed in her coat. But the heirloom had slipped past her, into another's hands, and now she knew only the shape of his face. Boots hit the stairs below. The guards had learned the trick. Elms stood, wiped the knife, and turned toward the sound.