Page 53 of 13 Nights

I press my ear to his sternum and listen. The rhythm is even, unhurried, as though his body has always known how to do this. His chin rests on the top of my head. Neither of us speaks.

The biological implications arrive a few minutes later, as they always do when the body is finished and the mind resumes its commentary. He came inside me. His body is producing what a living body produces. The IUD handles the immediate question, but the larger one is more complicated: what is his body becoming, and how much further will the transformation go before the thirteenth night? I file the question with the others that don't have answers yet.

The hours pass without either of us mentioning what comes next.

Dawn arrives while we're still in the kitchen, dressed and leaning against each other at the counter with coffee I made and he can taste. The sky grays by degrees through the windows. I check my phone.

"Sunrise for October 30 is 7:23 a.m."

I start the stopwatch at 7:23:00. Severin braces one hand against the doorframe from habit, and I watch the second hand climb.

The pull hits at four seconds. I see it seize him, the sudden rigidity, his fingers locking on the frame until the wood groans. He holds. His arm braces hard against the frame. I count: seven seconds. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven.

At eleven seconds, the pull releases.

He sways. He grips the doorframe for balance rather than resistance, and he's still there. 7:24. 7:25. 7:30. Still there.

The Void didn't take him.

"Pull onset, four seconds," I say. "Resistance, eleven. Then it let go." I'm already writing the numbers down, my hand unsteady on the notepad. "On Night Ten it took you at zero. Tonight it couldn't finish."

He looks at his hands. He looks at the doorframe, where his fingers have left fresh gouges. He looks at me.

"I'm still here," he says, as though naming it will make it dissolve.

"You're still here."

I go to him and press my palm against his chest. His heartbeat is steady. His skin is warm. He's solid under my hand, and the solidity doesn't flicker.

"If the curse is breaking because of what's between us," I say, "then surviving sunrise may mean the Gate has started to open."

"Or it means the curse is simply dying."

"The two aren't mutually exclusive."

He doesn't answer. I photograph the doorframe gouges. I take his temperature with the infrared thermometer I bought in town three days ago.

I note the exact time, the exact duration, and the fact that for the first time in his existence, the sunrise pull released him instead of taking him.

He sits down in the kitchen chair and the act is so ordinary and so impossible that I have to press both hands against the counter to keep myself upright. Severin von Brandt, who has vanished at every sunrise for the length of American history, is sitting in a kitchen chair at seven thirty in the morning looking at the daylight on his own hands.

"I'm hungry," he says. He sounds offended by the discovery.

"There are eggs."

He burns the eggs. He sets the toaster too high and produces two blackened slabs that smoke when they emerge, and when I try to show him the dial his irritation is so targeted and so disproportionate that I start laughing and can't stop.

He eats the burned eggs. He chews with the deliberate focus of a man experiencing flavor for the first time in his adult memory, and what crosses his face as the taste registers is so unguarded that I have to look away before it breaks me.

"Don't," he says.

"Don't what?"

"Whatever you're doing with your face. Stop it."

"I'm watching you eat breakfast."

"You're looking at me the way people look at things they're about to lose."