Page 17 of 13 Nights

The question has only one answer, and I've avoided saying it aloud for longer than any of the other names I carry. "My brother. Friedrich. Fritz." The name tastes like the wine. Empty.

"He arranged it. The drugs, the wagon, the forged papers, the officer who took my ring. Fritz wanted what I had. Not me. The estate, the betrothal, the position. He got all of it."

"What happened to him?"

"He lived comfortably and died in his bed. I am told old age is peaceful when your conscience is clean, and Fritz had the advantage of never possessing one."

She doesn't offer sympathy. She writes the name in her notebook. Friedrich von Brandt. Then she looks up.

"I'm going to find that declaration. Then I'm going to establish who Johann Brandt actually was."

"In an article no one will remember?"

"In every archive, database, and historical account willing to print the evidence."

The meal goes cold while we work. Hours pass across the documents: dates cross-checked, names added to Ashley's growing timeline, questions answered or refused according to my choosing. The wine drops below the label. Outside, the horse doesn't return.

On the wall behind her, a Halloween calendar shows October 22. Not much time remains before the final sunrise cuts me off from this kitchen and everything inside it.

It's well past midnight when she closes the folder.

"What did it cost you?" she asks. "Beyond the name. What did you lose that mattered?"

I feel the question land somewhere I didn't invite her, and my expression closes before I can decide whether to let it. "That's not a road you need to walk."

"You don't have to answer that. But don't pretend it doesn't matter."

I look at her across the table, at the set of her jaw and the documents spread around her, and I understand that she won't stop. She'll push until she finds whatever is behind my refusal the way she pushed until she found the anomaly behind Johann Brandt's paperwork. The folder on her table is labeled with my name. Her questions have moved past verifiable claims into ground you cover only when you care about the answer for reasons that have nothing to do with evidence.

I stand. The chair scrapes against the floor. I cross the distance between us in two strides and stop close enough that she has to tilt her head back to hold my gaze. I don't touch her. I let the proximity and the cold radiating from my body do the work that language has stopped doing.

"You do that every time you don't want to answer," she says.

"Do what?"

"Use your size to change the subject."

"Is that what I'm doing?"

"You tell me." She doesn't move. Her pulse is visible in her throat, and she's making no effort to hide it. Then her chin lifts. "Before this goes any further, I need a direct answer. You've been dead for centuries. I'm not in the habit of sleeping with men whose biological status is unclear."

The laugh comes before I can stop it. Low, rough, startled out of me.

"The body the Veil gives me doesn't carry disease. It restores function, not infection or living seed." I pause. "I can spend inside you. I can't father a child."

"How do you know?"

"The Veil remakes me each night in the same unchanging form. Hair doesn't grow. Wounds don't heal; they remain until sunrise, and the next manifestation restores me. I can climax. I can't reproduce. The body is physical. It isn't alive."

She processes this with the same precise, unsentimental attention she brings to a muster roll. "And the other risk. The thing outside. Does this make it worse?"

"Yes."

"How much worse?"

"I don't know. No one has gotten this close."

"The horse crossed the yard before you came inside," she says. "Whatever is happening, keeping your hands off me hasn't stopped it."