Page 16 of 13 Nights

When I appear at the edge of the property, the horse is at the foot of the porch steps with its head raised toward the window, as if scenting something through the glass. Hoofprints mark the dirt in a circle that starts and ends at the same spot, with no trail leading in or out. The animal arrived from the air, or the earth, or wherever it goes when I'm pulled into nothing.

It turns its head toward me. The lamplight catches one flat, dark eye.

Then it's gone. Not dissolved. Not retreating. Simply absent between one breath and the next, the way I'm absent for the rest of the year when the Void takes me. The hoofprints remain.

Ashley's porch light is on. Through the window I can see the kitchen table set with two plates, two glasses, a bottle of wine she opened before I arrived. Steam rises from something on the stove.

She isn't standing on the porch with a chair and a challenge. She's set a place for me at her table and gone back to her work, as if a dead man joining her for dinner is a routine appointment she intends to keep.

I should turn away. Every night with Ashley draws more attention from whatever watches the boundary, and tonight it's sent the horse to her door.

I cross the yard and knock.

She opens the door with a pen behind her ear and a smudge of graphite on her thumb from the pencil notes crowding her mother's documents. Her gaze drops to the porch floor behind me before she looks at my face.

"You're early. And there are hoofprints in my yard that weren't there an hour ago."

"I know."

"Are they yours?"

"No."

She considers this for exactly the amount of time a woman with her training should, then steps aside. "Come in."

The folder I saw last night is open on the table beside her laptop, new notes crowding the margins of documents I recognize from her mother's collection. She’s been waiting, but she hasn't wasted the time.

The kitchen is small and warm and smells like something with garlic and tomatoes. The warmth of the room registers on my skin the way sunlight through glass does: I know it's there, and I know it should feel like more than it does. My senses are muted. Pressure, temperature, texture arrive as facts rather than experiences. I can tell the chair is solid when I sit. I can't feel the grain of the wood beneath my palms. She sets a plate in front of me with pasta and bread and pours a glass of the wine.

No one has set a place for me since 1776.

The pasta has texture and no flavor. The bread is warm and blank. The wine is wet and nothing else. I chew and swallow and understand the mechanical function of eating without any of the pleasure that would justify the effort.

"What do you miss most?" she asks. She's watching me eat with an expression I can't categorize. Not pity. Something more clinical, as if my chewing is data she's collecting.

"Coffee."

She laughs. The sound lands in my chest like a fist, sudden and physical and unwelcome. I haven't made a woman laugh in a very long time. I haven't wanted to.

"I'll make a pot tomorrow night," she says. "If you show up."

"That's not in question."

She sets down her fork. "Then what is?"

Whether I should. Whether the horse at the porch is the Veil's way of telling me I've already come too close. Whether the woman sitting across from me with smudged hands and garlic on her breath is going to become the next name in whatever record the Hadleys keep of people who got too close to the Horseman.

"Your investigation," I say, because the alternative is telling her the truth.

She reaches for the folder. "I have something. You're not going to like it."

She opens the translation her mother prepared and lays it beside the muster roll. "Johann Brandt appears in the regimental records at Rinteln. One of my mother's letters also references a sworn declaration filed in Kassel claiming Severin von Brandt fled his obligations. If the person who put you on that wagon filed the declaration after the muster records place Johann Brandt with the regiment, then he manufactured both identities. The disposable conscript and the missing nobleman."

She looks up from the documents. "I don't have that declaration. Not yet. But if it exists, and if the date is after the muster records place Johann Brandt with the regiment, then we're looking at evidence of a coordinated erasure."

We. She said we.

"Who would have filed the declaration?" she asks.