Page 14 of 13 Nights

The words drop without emphasis, the way you'd mention a train departure or a lease expiration. As if the deadline doesn't raise every question I've been circling since I opened my mother's drawer. If he's real, if any of this is real, then October thirty-first isn't arbitrary. Something happens to him after that date. Something he's already accepted.

"Why October thirty-first?" I ask anyway.

"Ask me again when you've verified Leutnant Haas."

"That's not how this works. I give you something, you give me something. That's the deal."

His expression sharpens, a look close to approval. "You negotiate like someone who's done this before."

"I have. Usually with people who are trying to avoid a subpoena, not a conversation."

"I'm not avoiding the conversation. I'm managing the sequence."

"So am I."

Neither of us speaks. Somewhere past the tree line, the darkness gathers the same unnatural weight it carried last night, and Severin sees it at the same moment I do. His attention cuts toward the woods, and the black horse at the boundary has gone rigid, ears flat, weight braced.

"Inside."

"We're not finished."

"No. We're changing location." His gaze stays fixed on the tree line. "Take your folder and go inside."

"You could try asking."

He looks at me then, and the command in his expression is colder than the air around him. "Inside, Ashley."

It's the first time he has used my name.

I pick up the folder. Not because he ordered me to, but because the horse has frozen at the tree line and I'm not stupid enough to ignore corroborating evidence.

Severin follows me into the cottage.

The kitchen table is small, scarred, solid. He pulls out a chair across from where I sit and settles into it with the ease of a man who has occupied this room before. Of course he has. My mother sat across from him at this table decades ago.

"My mother left because something frightened her," I say. "Not the research. Not you. Something else."

"Yes."

"What?"

"Something that pays attention when people get close to me. Your mother was wise enough to keep her distance."

"Is that what just happened outside? That thing at the tree line?"

"That is what happens when someone stays too close to me for too long. Your mother recognized the danger. She left because it had already found her."

"Found her how?"

He doesn't answer.

"Did you try to protect her?"

"I told her to leave. That was the only protection I could offer."

The admission sits between us. Whatever gathered at the tree line, he can't fight it. He can only warn people away from it.

"And now you're telling me to leave."