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"Sid isn't a suitcase."

"Maren."

"No, do the whole thing." She turns on me on her own front step, in her socks, in the cold. "Do the part where you say my name in that voice and I'm supposed to go get my toothbrush."

She's frightened, my wolf says. Fix it.

There's nothing to fix. That's the entire trouble with this week.

"Your house is a door now," I say. "That's what the mark is. It isn't a warning. It's an invitation, and it's addressed to them, and they wrote it while I was inside."

"This is my grandmother's house."

"I know."

"I painted that door. Twice. The second time because I hated the first color."

"I know."

"You don't get to just decide..."

The dead bolt turns itself.

We both hear it. The heavy, expensive one I installed Sunday with a locksmith standing over my shoulder telling me it was overkill.

It slides back like a hand pulled it.

Then the door opens six inches on its own, into a hallway that's suddenly darker than the daylight behind us, and cold rolls out over the threshold and up my legs.

I put Maren behind me.

Now, my wolf says. Now now now.

The thing that comes through isn't shaped right. It never is. Too many joints in the arms, yellow eyes set too far apart, mouth opening past where a mouth should stop. It pours out of her hallway in broad daylight.

There are neighbors on this street and a school bus two blocks over, and I can't shift. Not here. Not at nine in the morning.

So I hit it as a man.

It's like punching a held breath. My fist goes through the chest and comes out slick and burning to the wrist. The smell hits after, smoke and rot and old blood, and then it has me by the shoulder and drives me into the porch rail hard enough to split the top board.

"Gage!"

"Get in the yard."

She doesn’t get in the yard.

Maren grabs the sack of rock salt I left by her steps last night and swings it two-handed into the side of the thing's head.

The bag bursts. White salt sprays across the porch and over its shoulders, and where it lands the creature comes apart in little hissing pits, like water dropped in hot grease.

It screams, and it's not a sound with a direction. It goes in through the teeth.

Then Maren screams back at it.

Every bulb on her porch blows out at once. Every bulb on mine, twelve feet away, goes with them. Down the block, a streetlight bursts, and the salt on the boards lights blue and low, a flame with no fuel under it, running the seams of the porch like it's following a line someone drew there.

The creature goes into the blue and doesn't come out.