Page 39 of 13 Nights

"You extract it with alarming efficiency."

"Absolutely," she says.

A sound escapes me, rough and startled, closer to laughter than anything I've produced in this cottage. Ashley's mouth curves, and the moment is more dangerous than anything we did last night.

The hours pass in the kitchen, sitting across from each other with the Hadley records and the new impressions gouged into the wood between us.

Ashley works through the observation logs, cross-referencing her new data. I read over her shoulder and correct three dates her sources have wrong. We argue about a Hadley entry from 1847 that she interprets as evidence and I interpret as wishful thinking.

The coffee goes cold twice. She makes more without asking.

"Getting closer to October twenty-eighth," Ashley says without looking up from the logs. "The anniversary of White Plains."

"I'm aware."

"Then we have another variable. The delay may be responding to your name, to us, or to the anniversary itself."

"You make my death sound inconveniently timed."

"From a research standpoint, it is."

Dawn arrives while I'm standing at the window, watching the sky lighten. Ashley joins me, phone in hand, and we move to the doorframe without discussing it. The routine is established by now: she documents, I hold on as long as I can.

"Sunrise for October 27 is 7:20 a.m."

She starts the stopwatch at 7:20:00. I brace one hand against the frame and wait for the familiar tightening at the base of my spine.

Nothing.

Ashley counts. One minute. Two. Three. Four. Her voice is calm and clinical, but her free hand has laced its fingers through mine. I close my grip around hers.

At five minutes and thirty-eight seconds, the pull strikes.

My fingers dig into the oak and find purchase. The pull drags at me like a tide reversing, and I hold, because last night I held for seven seconds and tonight I intend to hold for longer.

I hold for seven seconds, then eight, then nine.

The Void tears me away on the ninth second, wrenching my hands from the frame and her fingers from mine.

"Pull onset, five thirty-eight. Active resistance, nine seconds." Her voice reaches me at the edge of dissolution, clinical and steady. "Still growing, but it didn't double."

The last things I register are those numbers and the gouged impressions still visible in the table from hours ago.

The pull has me. The Void opens. And in the final instant before consciousness ends, the strategy crystallizes with the cold clarity of a man who has always chosen control over everything else.

The warning. The passive voice. When the Horseman is loved, the Gate will claim...

Eliza loved me and vanished.

Ashley is moving toward the same threshold. Tonight she restored my name because she could not tolerate the lie. She stood in the carnival of my death and held my arm. She looked at me with something in her face that I told her not to let me examine.

She hasn't crossed yet. But if I stay, there's a very good chance she will.

The only move left to me is withdrawal. Stop going to the cottage. Stop giving her reasons to close the distance between fascination and the word that triggers the Gate.

Tomorrow night, I’ll stay away and let the anniversary come. I’ll let the Ride tear me apart somewhere far enough away that Ashley will be spared. I've endured it before, and I'll endure it again and without her standing in the dark waiting for a man who will only get her killed.

Ashley will not forgive me for this, which is precisely the point.