Page 5 of 13 Nights

My breath fogs between us. It didn't when I stepped outside.

"This is my house," I say.

The words come out steady. The answer to what frightened my mother out of this cottage may be standing at the foot of my porch, and I am not closing the door until he gives me a reason to.

He studies me as if my refusal to run is an inconvenience he'll need to account for.

Then he's gone.

The light shines on the place where he stood. Two deep boot prints mark the grass. There are no others leading toward or away from them.

I step as far as the bottom stair and stop. The darkness past the lamplight is deep enough to hide someone within arm's reach. Professional curiosity does not require me to offer a stranger better cover.

Inside, I lock the door and check every window.

Then I pull up the recording and scrub backward. He's there. On the screen, his coat and boots and lifted chin are sharp against the dark yard. I hear my own voice say This is my house. Two seconds later, one frame holds him at the foot of my stairs and the next holds empty grass and the same two boot prints. There is no blur of motion, no dissolve. Between one thirtieth of a second and the next, he is simply gone.

I scrub through the sequence three more times. The audio is continuous, no skip or gap. The time stamp runs clean. The frames before and after the disappearance are properly sequential, with no corruption, no encoding artifact, no dropped data. The recording is intact. What it shows is impossible.

I upload the file to cloud storage and email myself a copy before I do anything else.

I set the phone down and pull out my mother's journal. I read the entry one more time.

I want to stay, but I lack the courage. God help whoever tries to break the curse.

I look at the sketch. The cheekbones, the jaw, the reworked eyes all match what I just saw on my porch.

My mother drew this decades ago and locked it in a desk she never mentioned to anyone.

Outside, something strikes the wood. A sharp, singular impact, like a hoof.

I don't open the door again.

The novel can wait. Tomorrow, Tom Hadley is going to tell me why my dead mother's research references his family's collection—and what he knows about the man who just disappeared from my yard.

CHAPTER TWO

Severin

The last drink my brother ever bought me tasted like cloves with something bitter underneath. I should have questioned it. Fritz had never bought me a drink in his life, and a man who breaks a lifelong pattern the same week his brother's betrothal is announced deserves closer attention than I gave him.

But I was young and bored, sitting in a Kassel tavern on a February evening in 1776, listening to men at the next table discuss Margarethe Eisling's dowry like a public auction. When Fritz appeared with a second glass and a warmth I hadn't earned, I drank what he offered because the alternative was listening to strangers price my future wife by the acre.

I did not want Margarethe. I wanted no other woman in her place. What I hated was the life already measured and fitted around me: the wife chosen, the estate waiting, every year decided before I had lived it. I wondered, that night in the tavern, whether I'd spend the rest of my life resenting a future I hadn't chosen and being too comfortable to refuse it.

Fritz said something about the cold. I remember the shape of his mouth but not the words. The clove taste sharpened, then blurred, then the tavern tilted sideways and the floor rushed up. Hands closed around my arms before I hit the ground. The last clear thought I had as a free man was that the drink had been wrong. That Fritz had been wrong. That everything had been wrong, and I had been too contemptuous of the life arranged for me to notice my brother preparing to steal it.

I woke on the floor of a locked wagon with my wrists bound. My coat, waistcoat, breeches, and boots were gone, replaced by clothing coarse enough for a debtor conscript. The documents shoved into the rough linen identified me as Johann Brandt, substitute conscript.

I screamed my name through the slats of the wagon. 'I am Severin von Brandt.' A guard told me to shut my mouth. The paperwork said Johann Brandt, and paperwork outranked a conscript's screaming in every army that had ever marched.

Fritz had been thorough. He'd planned this while sitting across from me at our father's table, and I had given him every opportunity by caring about nothing enough to pay attention.

The wagon rolled toward Rinteln, where the regiment was assembling for the voyage to the American colonies.

The signet ring I wore on a chain beneath my shirt was the last proof of who I was. Fritz's men had missed it. An officer at Rinteln did not. He found it during processing and entered it in the confiscation ledger without looking up.

Everything after came in pieces that I carry like shrapnel: the stench of the ship's hold, the New York heat pressing against my skin, and the officers who disciplined Johann Brandt for persistent claims of noble identity.