Page 38 of 13 Nights

My skin registers the warmth like the surface of water breaking over me, sudden and total. My hands flatten against the table where I'm leaning. The pressure leaves marks, deep impressions of my fingers and palms forced into the grain with a strength I didn't intend.

Every sense sharpens simultaneously. The rain outside becomes individual drops striking individual leaves. Ashley's heartbeat reaches me, fast and steady, and beside it Tom's, which is faster. The world floods in, vivid and overwhelming and mine in a way that nothing has been mine since the night I died.

My weight bears down through my palms. The oak yields.

"Don't move," Ashley says. She's already reaching for her phone. She captures the impressions forming beneath my fingers, the lamp still blazing behind me. "The marks from the twenty-third lasted seconds. These are deeper."

Tom's gaze drops to my hands, then the wood, then the lamp. His face has gone pale, but he doesn't leave.

"How long?" he asks.

"However long they last." Ashley doesn't lower the phone. "The response coincided with the documented name being read aloud. It's measurably stronger than the response to the name alone on October twenty-third."

Tom picks up his folder. "I should go."

"Tom." Ashley stops him. "Thank you."

He nods. His eyes find mine once more. What crosses his face has moved past fear into something closer to awe, or grief, or the discomfort of a man realizing he's been guarding a prisoner instead of a monument.

The door closes behind him. Ashley and I are alone.

The lamp has dimmed back to amber. The heat from the surge still sits in the air.

My fingers are still pressed into the table, and when I lift them the prints remain, pressed deep into the oak.

Ashley touches one of the marks. She traces the impression where my palm compressed the grain and looks up at me.

"You gave me back my name," I say.

"I gave you back the truth. The name was always yours."

"No one has said it correctly in 250 years. Fritz erased it. Irving never had it. The Hadleys preserved it and buried it in a filing cabinet. You dug it up, proved it, documented it, and read it into a room where three people heard it and the walls remembered."

"Two people and a supernatural manifestation," she says. "That's what journalists do."

"That is not what journalists do, Ashley." My voice drops lower than I intended. "Journalists build cases. You restored a dead man's identity because it mattered to you that someone had stolen it. You corrected a lie that has stood unchallenged since Fritz filed it because you could not tolerate its survival. That is not professional detachment."

She holds my gaze. "No. It's not."

Neither of us speaks. The walls I've kept intact since Fritz are beginning to crumble tonight.

"I've told you about Eliza," I say. "She loved me. The Gate took her. But there were others. Women who found me across the years. Some fascinated, some frightened, some drawn back year after year." I lean against the counter and cross my arms. "I kept every one of them at a distance."

Ashley waits. She doesn't prompt. She gives me the silence and trusts me to fill it.

"Fritz taught me that affection grants access. He was my brother. I trusted him, and he used that trust to drug me, erase my name, and ship me across an ocean to die."

My fingers tighten against my own arms. "I made certain no one would ever have that kind of access again. Every time a woman returned often enough for tenderness to become dangerous, I drove her away. I blamed Fritz. I blamed the Veil. I blamed the Hadleys, Irving, fate, the British, and the collective population of Westchester County."

"You were protecting them," she says. "And yourself."

"Yes." The admission comes hard. "Fear kept others away from the Gate. It kept me from making promises the Void would break."

"And now?"

"Now it isn't what you might do to me that I fear. It is what the Gate may do to you." I hold her gaze. "I dislike giving you ammunition."

"Then stop handing it to me."