Page 26 of 13 Nights

"Eliza loved you," Tom continues. "She wrote it plainly in the journal we used to authenticate the message. The Gate took her anyway."

If Eliza's love was enough, Ashley was in danger before I ever touched her.

"After tonight, you have seven nights left," Tom says. "She has seven nights to decide whether she wants to risk disappearing from her own life the way Eliza did. Stop making her decision harder."

I could tell him that the decision isn't mine to make harder or easier. I could tell him that the Hadley impulse to stand between women and their choices is a tradition I've watched his family practice for generations. I don't say any of it.

The truth is that Tom's fear isn't irrational. Eliza vanished. Diane fled. The warning is incomplete, but incompleteness does not make it harmless. I cannot promise him that loving me won't kill Ashley.

"Your family remembered my name," I say. "You preserved the truth when no one else did."

Tom's jaw unclenches. The defensive tension in his shoulders eases by one degree.

"And then you buried it in a filing cabinet and built a gift shop over my grave." I stand. "I am grateful and furious, Hadley. In equal measure."

I walk back through the darkened aisles and pull the front door shut behind me. The night air is sharp enough to sting, and I register the discomfort with a precision I haven't possessed in centuries.

The cottage porch light is still on. Ashley is already at the door before I reach the steps, and the speed of it tells me she was watching from the window.

I dislike knowing she worried. I dislike even more how much I wanted her to.

"You're late," she says.

"I went to see Tom first."

Her eyebrows rise. "You confronted Tom?"

"I had a conversation with Tom. Confrontation implies I raised my voice."

"Did you?"

"I don't need to raise my voice." I step past her into the cottage.

The warmth of the interior registers across my arms, and I pause at the transition. Two nights ago the cold-to-warm crossing was abstract. Tonight it prickles across my forearms and raises the fine hairs.

I stare at the hairs standing upright on my skin with the kind of attention that would look absurd to anyone who hasn't spent centuries unable to feel a draft.

Ashley closes the door and watches me. "What did he say?"

"He told me about a woman named Eliza Marsh. A schoolteacher who came during the thirteen nights in the 1840s. She loved me. I didn't feel the same and kept my distance." I turn from my arm to her face. "She vanished on November first. The Hadleys found a message from her decades later, inside the boundary. Her handwriting. I am not dead. I cannot return."

Ashley goes still with the focused intensity she reserves for information she hasn't anticipated. "She was alive. Wherever she went, she was conscious."

"Then the Gate didn't put her where it puts me. The Void holds nothing: no waiting, no thought, no time in which to write a message."

Ashley's expression sharpens. "You have no consciousness between manifestations? None at all?"

"Nothing. I exist, and then I don't, and then I exist again. There is nothing between."

She absorbs that faster than most people would. "Then Eliza isn't in the Void. She was conscious enough to write. So there's somewhere else, a destination the Gate sends people that isn't oblivion." She leans forward. "Taking and killing aren't the same conclusion."

That is so precisely her that I almost smile.

"Get your coat. I want to show you something."

"Is this the kind of 'I want to show you something' that ends with me standing in the cold watching you walk into an invisible wall of pain?"

"Different venue. Equally grim."