Page 112 of Just One Little Bargain

“Welcome to Brindlewood After Dark. My name is Daisy. Tonight, I’m going to walk you through five of the oldest, strangest landmarks this town has. Some of what I tell you is documented history. Some of it is legend. And some of it . . .” She waits until discomfort tips into anticipation. “. . . you can decide for yourselves.”

Without waiting for a response, she leads us into the dark and the group falls in behind her.

We start along the river path, where the trees lean close and lace their limbs into a low canopy that strains the moonlight into thin coins on the water. The current pulls them apart before they can hold any shape. Cold gathers harder here than it did on Main Street. Mist hangs over the bank in pale strips, silvering the reeds and blurring the trail until the ground ahead seems to vanish and return with each step. Overhead, bare branches rasp together. Somewhere beyond the hedgerow, a creature darts through dead leaves, stops, then skitters on. Even knowing whatever moved is almost certainly harmless does very little to stop my attention from fixing there.

Daisy walks at the front, her voice carrying backward through the group, and she’s remarkably good at this. She knows when to stop talking and let the path do the work, waiting through the mist curling around our shoes, the scrape overhead, the unseen rustle where no one can quite look fast enough. By the time she speaks again, we’ve drawn closer without meaning to, all of us listening for whatever might answer. She understands that sometimes what you leave unsaid does more than anything you could tell them.

“So.” Evie matches her stride to mine as the group moves along the riverbank. “You come from an actual place of . . . Let’s call it supernatural activity. What’s your professional opinion on ghosts?”

I glance down at her. The mist has dampened a few loose strands of hair against her cheek, and the cold has put color high on her face.

“Most of what humans call ghost activity is residual impression,” I say, lowering my voice so it belongs only to her. “Not conscious entities. More like a photograph impressed into a place than anything with awareness or intent.”

Her eyebrows lift. “So none of it’s real?”

“I didn’t say that.” I let my hand settle at her waist when the path narrows around a bend. “Some places carry genuine energy. It gathers where intense experiences repeat over time. Whether that counts as a presence depends on your definition.”

“Daisy actually believes Brindlewood is haunted.”

“She might not be wrong.” My thumb shifts once against the soft knit of her sweater. “Old places remember more than humans think they do.”

Evie’s head turns. In the dim light her face is shadowed, the angles of her jaw and cheekbones catching fragments of moonlight. “What do you mean?”

This town has a vampire running a clinic, drawing blood from patients and storing it in neat, labeled vials, yet nobody thinks twice about it because he’s charming and handsome.

And now there’s me, a demon summoned to the same unremarkable dot on a mortal map by accident.

Two supernatural beings in a town this small could be coincidence, but I’m starting to doubt it. Some places attract things because the same kinds of need have worn grooves into the ground. Blood spilled. Promises made. Grief buried. After generations of it, monsters start finding their way in.

I’m beginning to suspect this place has been leaving the door open for years.

“Brindlewood is interesting,” I say. “But some things are better left as mysteries.”

Evie studies my face for a long moment. I can practically hear the questions stacking. She nods once and lets her shoulder rest against my arm as we walk.

The first stop is the Holloway House. It sits back against the hillside, dark windows watching the path, one shutter hanging at an angle. The roofline sags toward the trees as if the woods have been pulling at it for years. The porch has long since given up any pretense of being level. Mist gathers in the dip of the yard, caught low around the fence posts, and something has scored four deep grooves into the gate. Daisy arranges us along the fence, where the cold seems to pool thicker.

“Elspeth Holloway moved into this house in 1847 with her husband, James.” She runs one hand along the top of the fence post as she speaks. “He walked out into a winter storm three winters later and never came back. People said the weather took him, but there were no footprints leading past the tree line. Only hers, stopping at the porch, and another set the size of a man’s that changed shape near the woods. She lived here alone for forty more years. After she died, the family who bought the place kept finding the front door unlocked at dawn. No matter how many bolts they installed, every full moon it stood open, facing the edge of the trees, with wet leaves blown halfway down the hall and four fresh gouges cut into the wood. And the front window would be fogged from the outside, high up, as if something had waited there, breathing against it.”

“And they stayed?” I ask.

Every head in the group turns to me. I don’t understand why the question is surprising. It seems fundamental.

Daisy’s face lights up. “For three months. Long enough to document the pattern. Always before sunrise, and after a hard frost. And according to the original complaint letters, with the same smell in the hall: wet wool and woodsmoke.”

“Condensation on old glass,” Wilfred begins, “is a well-documented phenomenon, especially in houses with poor insulation and inconsistent heating.”

“From the outside?” Theo asks, not looking up from his EMF detector. “High up? In the shape of breath?”

Wilfred opens his mouth, then closes it.

“Thought so,” Theo mutters, smug.

Evie leans into me while the group moves on, keeping her voice beneath the crunch of everyone’s footsteps. “You’re enjoying this.”

“I am taking an informed interest.”

Her laugh muffles against my shoulder, and I press my mouth into her hair on instinct.