Page 2 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

"Mountain people are private." I'm already explaining it to myself. Long drive. Empty stomach. A strange house and stranger nerves. An imagination that's had eleven hundred miles to wind itself up. "Come on. Let's find the kettle before it's pitch black in here."

We eat gas-station sandwiches at the kitchen table by the torch of my phone because three bulbs are dead and I haven't found which box I put them in. Lily tells me the upstairs faucet makes a noise like a dying goose. I tell her we'll add it to the list. The list is already, in my head, extending past my arm.

She goes up around ten. I stay down to check the locks, a habit Gregory left me—the man cheated for two years and somehow I'm the one who learned to check that everything's secured before bed. The front door's solid. The side door's solid. The back door is not.

It's ajar by a half-inch, the deadbolt thrown but the strike plate splintered, as though someone forced it and then, oddly, pulled it almost-shut behind them. I pause on the spot and listen to the sounds surrounding me. Nothing. Just the dying goose, dropping somewhere overhead.

There are marks on the floor by the pantry. Dried mud, the tread of a boot, tracked in, stopping at the pantry door and going no farther. I crouch over them. Bigger than mine. Bigger than Lily's.

And in the small room off the pantry—Elspeth's old workroom, empty but for shelving—there's a smell that doesn't belong. Sharp and metallic, like a fistful of old pennies.

I check the silver in the drawer. There. The clock on the mantel, the only thing in this house worth lifting. Untouched. Nothing's gone that I can see, and that's somehow worse than a clean robbery would be—because a thief takes things, and I don't know what this was looking for, or whether it found it.

I consider calling the sheriff. But explaining out loud this feeling, on my first night, in a town that doesn't know me yet, doesn't make sense. Instead I push the rear door shut, drag the table against it, and find a hammer in the KITCHEN—MAYBE box.

"Not tonight," I say to the empty house. To whoever was here. To Gregory, maybe, three states away. "You don't get to scare us off on the first night."

Upstairs, my daughter is finally asleep. I'm overreacting from all the stress, so I head upstairs and lay down, praying I will sleep away the worry.

2

ALARIC

The estate has been quiet for so long, I can feel when someone isn't quite right, and tonight that feeling is rising.

I have stood at the east window most nights since before the road outside was paved, and I have never once needed to grip the sill like I am now. The tumbler in my other hand gives a small, clean sound, a fracture running corner to corner, and I set it down before I crush it. Blood is the last thing I should waste tonight. I am already losing enough. Across the black stand of pines, the old Victorian has lights in it again.

I remember when Elspeth kept that kitchen lamp burning through snowstorms, not because she feared the dark, but because she had opinions about refusing it. She would open the door in wool socks, gray braid over one shoulder, and tell me I looked like a funeral had learned to walk. Then she would leave a jar on the step without asking whether I wanted it. Blackberry. Fig. Once, a bitter tonic she said would improve my manners.

I never told her I kept the jars. Cleaned, shelved, empty now. Human things have always outlived the humans who pressed meaning into them. That is their particular cruelty. That house had already taken one stubborn woman from my life. Now another has stepped inside it, carrying boxes, sarcasm, and a daughter with Elspeth's chin.

My ears haven't stopped filling with her heartbeat. I should be able to single one out at this distance, but it threads through and finds me anyway—steady, a little quick from work, unmistakably alive. Beneath it, the particular warmth of a body that has spent the day moving. Human. Wholly, helplessly human. Whatever she is, she is not one of mine.

I know what the pull means. I have spent a century pretending the knowledge died with the last, but the old language wakes in me without permission, certain as gravity. Mate. The word lands in a place of my mind that I sealed long ago. Now, it's at the front of my cortex, as if it had always lived there.

Once, a long time ago, I believed I felt something like this. I was wrong then. I will not name her. Naming her has never helped. What matters is that the memory rises now only to show me. Older. Sharper.

And she does not know. She has been in that house two days. She has no idea what I am, no clue what the dark in this valley remembers, no idea that a man she glimpsed once already feels her pulse as though it were his own. She is exactly the wrong kind of person for this to find—newly arrived, building a life out of a dead woman's furniture. Unguarded in every way that matters.

I convince myself I will return to my book, but I can't. I stay at the window like a sentry posted by no one, and I am ashamed of the watching even as I refuse to stop.

She is working late. Her shape moves past the downstairs windows, a length of trim balanced on one shoulder, and the girl's voice carries thin and clear across the cold.

"It's freezing in here. Why is it freezing?"

"Because the storm windows are a hundred years old and so is everything else. Hand me the level."

"This is a haunted-house level of cold, Mom."

"Then put on the haunted-house sweater. The one from the cedar chest."

A pause. "Okay, that one's actually nice."

It is nothing—just a mother and daughter in an old place that will not hold its heat. I find I am listening to the cadence of it like a starved man at a kitchen wall, and the comparison does not flatter me, so I let it go.

This is precisely why I cannot and will not go near her. Not because I do not want to. Because I do, and desire is the most dangerous thing. My world is not a place a human walks into and out of with a soul. There are old debts in it, older enemies, and the plain fact that nearness to me has never once been safe for anyone soft enough to bruise. The best thing I can do is allow that woman and her daughter to remain clueless. She will think me rude for not being neighborly no doubt, but rude is survivable for her.

But I have eyes, and they will not stop working merely because I've ordered myself to not. I see every part of the house from here. The cellar doors at the side—two slanted leaves over the old coal chute—sit crooked, the latch between them rusted through and hanging by a single screw. Any drunk with a screwdriver would be inside in under a minute. Any creature with worse intentions would not need the minute.