Page 35 of 13 Nights

He rolls to the side and pulls me against him. The gesture is so unconscious and so unlike him that it undoes me more thoroughly than anything his body just did. We drift into a light sleep as we wait for the night to end.

Dawn comes slowly. The sky pales outside the kitchen windows and I watch the transformation with my phone in my hand, stopwatch ready.

Severin stands at the door, dressed and composed, every trace of the night contained beneath the cold authority he carries into the Void.

Sunrise for October 26 is 7:19 a.m. I start the stopwatch at 7:19:00 and count.

The pull arrives at three minutes and four seconds. Severin grips the doorframe. The gouges from last night are still there, and this time he adds new ones beside them. He holds the frame for seven more seconds before the Void tears him away.

I document the new marks. I enter both numbers into the spreadsheet. Onset delay: three minutes four seconds. Active resistance: seven seconds. The delay is steepening. The resistance is growing. At the current rate, both will be measured in hours before the thirteenth dawn.

I should find that encouraging.

Instead, I remember the message wrapped around Eliza's ring. I am not dead. I cannot return.

My phone buzzes. Lena.

Call me. What’s going on?

I stare at the screen. I start typing: I need to tell you something. Delete it. Type:

Working on something big. Call you soon.

Send.

I press my fingers into the newest gouges in the wood and hold them there.

Severin may be breaking free. Or we may be holding the Gate open long enough for it to take me, or to let something other than Severin come through to the land of the living.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Severin

Rain is falling when I manifest, and I can smell it. The scent hits before I've finished forming, carried on the wet air like a fist: stone, cold earth, the mineral sharpness of water striking October leaves. I stop on the gravel shoulder and drag the air into lungs that haven't needed it since I died.

The rain soaks through my coat. Each drop carries its own weight and temperature, and the world becomes more detailed than it has been in 250 years.

Night Eight. Five more after this one, assuming the pattern holds.

I stand in the rain and breathe until the sensation stops being extraordinary and starts being mine.

The porch light is on. Ashley's silhouette moves behind the kitchen window as I cross the yard. The sight of her waiting does something I've spent the past week cataloging as fascination, then as desire, then as something more dangerous than either.

Tonight the ache comes with her coffee, the old wood of the cottage, and the warmth of a room she has occupied all day. The door opens and every scent reaches me.

"You're soaked," she says.

"It's raining."

"Yes, I can see that. Were you standing in it on purpose?"

"Yes. I was smelling it."

She studies my face. Whatever she finds there makes her step aside without another question.

Inside, the Hadley observation logs cover the kitchen table and half the counter, reorganized since last night and annotated in Ashley's careful handwriting. She's added cross-references, color-coded flags, and a timeline pinned to the wall with manifestation entries connected by red thread.

From the number of annotations, the cold coffee and leftover food on the counter, she's been at this all day. The cottage looks less like a home than I’ve ever seen it.