Page 50 of 13 Nights

"Or you won't come and you won't call and I'll drive up there on November first and find an empty cottage."

The accuracy of that prediction sits between us.

"I love you," I tell her.

"I know you do. That's why this is so goddamn terrifying." She exhales. "Three days. And if I don't hear from you by noon on November first, I'm coming."

"That's fair."

"It's not fair. None of this is fair. Call me tomorrow."

She hangs up. I sit at the table with my cold coffee and the marks in the wood.

The silence that follows is the particular kind that arrives when someone who loves you tells you exactly how scared they are, and you can't do anything about it because the thing scaring them is the truth.

Dusk arrives early. October is eating the daylight in greedy bites, and by five thirty the kitchen windows have gone dark.

I leave the porch light on and wait.

Severin appears at the edge of the yard just after six. I know because I check the time on my phone when I see the shape of him crossing the gravel, and the habit of documenting his arrivals has become as automatic as locking the door.

He looks different tonight. The difference isn't visible so much as structural, as though the space he occupies has more mass. He fills the doorway when he steps through it, and the floor registers his weight with a creak the cottage hasn't produced for him before.

"Something changed," I say.

"Yes."

"The curse."

"It's been weakening since October twenty-third. Tonight is different."

He stops in front of me. The authority is intact, the composure that has defined every night since the first. But underneath it, a current is running at a frequency I haven't heard from him before.

"Put your hand on my chest."

I cross the kitchen. I put my palm flat against his sternum, over the wool of his coat, in the same place where I found only silence on October twenty-fifth.

His heart is beating.

The rhythm is slow and steady and unmistakable. A heartbeat, real and continuous, pushing blood through a body that hasn't needed it since 1776.

"When did it start?" I ask.

"I don't know. I manifested and it was there. As if the Ride's destruction removed whatever was suppressing it."

"Can you feel it?"

"I can feel everything." His voice drops. "The coat against my skin. The floor through my boots. The temperature of this room, which you keep too warm. Your hand."

His fingers close around my wrist where it rests against his chest. The warmth of them startles me.

Not the increasing warmth of the past week, the gradual thaw I've been tracking from cool to tepid to body heat. Warm like living hands are warm, with capillaries and circulation and a heart driving the blood.

I turn his hand and press my thumb against the inside of his wrist. A pulse beats there, strong and certain.

"I can feel yours," he says.

I've measured every change he's given me since the first night. Documented, photographed, cataloged. None of it prepared me for a dead man's heart beating under my hand.