Page 13 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

"Elias."

"Long time. No card, no quarrel, no funeral. And now a call out of nowhere. You don't reach out unless something is wrong. So, what's wrong."

I keep my account short. Briar Glen. Elspeth's house. Strangers asking questions about her belongings, her heir, and anything she might have left behind. Elias goes quiet.

"You knew Elspeth better than most of us did," he says. "If you are calling me now, this is not about village gossip."

"It's about what she protected," I say. "And who has come looking for it."

"Then the rumors were true." The amusement leaves his voice. "For years, there has been talk that the old human networks kept records. Enough to expose people who survived only because no one knew where to look."

My hand tightens on the phone. "Elspeth never told me the scale of it."

"Of course she didn't. She was wiser than both of us." A pause. "But hunters have believed in that archive for a decade. Patiently. The heir is the question now. They will assume Hannah inherited the location, or the means to read it."

"Hannah knows nothing about any of this," I say. "She paints window frames. She has a daughter."

"That will not matter to them in the slightest." His tone softens, which is worse. "You've grown fond of her."

I ignore his suspicion and he continues, "Then hear the rest, because I won't repeat it. The hunters are the obvious danger. They're not the only ones. "If our side learns this archive exists, Lucien Draycott, for one, will want it gone more badly than any hunter ever could. He burned a sanctuary in Quebec because one ledger named his donor line. Not because it endangered him that night. Because it might one day. That is how he thinks. He won't care who is standing over the archive when he decides to dig. To him, Hannah is a leak. A problem."

"She is under my protection."

"She is a liability to two factions who have never agreed on anything," Elias says. "And you are one tired man on a hill. I'll say this as a friend, not an elder. Move carefully. Don't say anything that’s not needed. And Alaric—" the line crackles "—if you mean to stand between her and all of that, you should be very sure you have already decided to lose your second life over it."

I thank him. He laughs softly, sadly, and ends the call. For a while I do not move. Then I rise, take my coat, and go back out into the cold.

The patrol I've been doing is different tonight. I walk the tree line first, where the firs thin toward the road and a man could lie for hours watching the upstairs windows. The ground is undisturbed. I cross to the low stone wall along the eastern garden and crouch where the shadow of the shed falls long across the grass—the one approach the porch light never reaches. From here I can see the gravel turn where any car must slow, the gap in the hedge Lily uses as a shortcut to the bus, the kitchen window where the curtains never quite meet.

Every instinct I trust suggest I wake her tonight and lay it all bare. And every older instinct says the truth is too dangerous for her. Once she knows vampires are real, she lives forever in that knowledge. It harms the innocent first. It always has.

So I do nothing. Again. I understand that the silence is becoming its own kind of lie, that there will be a night when she counts my kindnesses and sees they were also concealment. I understand it.

I make my last circuit and stop by the trees, far enough that no one inside would feel watched. A lamp comes on in an upstairs room—Lily's, the corner one. A moment later her laugh carries through the old glass, bright and unguarded, answering something her mother has said. Then Hannah crosses the lit square of the window, a towel over one shoulder, pausing to say one last word at the door before the room goes dark.

The house settles after them. Beams easing. A pipe ticking somewhere as the heat drops. I wait to feel the life inside the house: Lily's laugh, Hannah's shadow at the door, the old pipes. Small, ordinary things. Breakable things. Then I turn for home realizing that I am in this far deeper than I can walk back from.

11

HANNAH

On Monday, I visit the town records office. It stinks of floor polish, and the clerk has been frowning at the same drawer of permit cards for a quarter of an hour.

"The north wing," I say again, sliding the photograph across the counter. "I just want to know when it was built. The framing doesn't match all other parts of the house, and the trim color's wrong. I need to know if my grandmother had it added or if it came later."

"Anything before the seventies, you're at the mercy of whoever filed the cards." The clerk thumbs through them without much hope. "Half of these are water-damaged. You might do better asking someone who remembers."

"That would be me," Clara says, appearing at my elbow with a cardigan over her shoulders and a scarf the color of marigolds. "Evie's wing went up around 1962. She told me herself. Said the original kitchen flooded so badly she gave up and built a new one onto the back."

"You see," I tell the clerk, "that I can use."

"Built it the same year my father retired," Clara adds. "I remember because she borrowed his truck."

I'm writing 1962 on the back of my own hand when a man steps up to the counter. He's tall, neatly dressed, with dark-blond hair and the kind of open smile that makes you feel you've known him longer than thirty seconds.

"Forgive me for eavesdropping," he says. "I couldn't help it. You're working on the old Marlowe house?"

"I am."