Page 11 of Spellbound By the Firefighter

She breaks.

Not away from me. Into me. Both fists close in the front of my bare chest, and she drops her forehead against my sternum and shakes. I get my arms all the way around her, gown and armor and all, and hold on while it goes through her. I don’t shush her. I let her have it. Every button she sealed herself into comes apart under my hands without a single one of them opening, because they were never the thing holding her shut.

“Stay,” she says into my chest. Muffled. Wrecked. The opposite of everything she said ten minutes ago. “I don’t want the one-night version. I never did. I was just⁠—”

“Braced. I know.” I press my mouth to the top of her head. “You can stop bracing. I’ll never let anyone hurt you again.”

She laughs, soggy and startled, and tips her face up. The collar’s crushed where she buried it against me, the severe line of it crumpled, and she has never looked less sealed shut.

“It’s dawn,” she says, like she’s daring it now instead of dreading it.

“It’s dawn.” I glance at the window, the full gray warming at its edge, the first real light coming up over Prospect and finding both of us still standing in it. “And here I am.”

She reaches up, and instead of buttoning anything, she works the hidden zip at her side back down an inch, then another, undoing the armor herself this time, in front of me, on purpose. Choosing it. The bravest thing I’ve watched anybody do, and I’ve watched men walk into fire.

“Come back through the shelves,” she says. “The shop doesn’t open until ten.”

I’ve spent my whole life certain I wasn’t built to stay.

I follow her into the dark at the heart of the store, the light coming up gold behind us, and I have never in my life been so sure of anything as I am of not leaving.

EPILOGUE

AUDRIANA: 5 YEARS LATER

The best part of a scary story is that you can close it.

I opened every Halloween reading with that line for years. I don’t anymore. I found a better kind of fear somewhere along the way—the kind with no cover, the kind that doesn’t end when you shut anything—and I’ve lived inside it five years now. I wouldn’t trade it for every safe scare on my shelves.

Tonight, the shop’s full of scares—the safe kind. String lights loop the front window, orange and low. The horror section’s been roped off for the evening, and the good rug’s covered in kids in costume, sugar-drunk and delighted, here for the not-too-scary reading I do every October 31 before the little ones fade.

The Last Page runs in gold leaf across the front glass, the same as it has since long before I started here. Ellie still owns the place, still signs my checks. I just run it most nights like it couldn’t last one without me—and after all this time on these shelves, maybe it couldn’t.

At the podium, I drop my voice for the part where the thing under the porch stops pretending to be a cat, and a dozen kids gasp and shriek and clutch each other. One small witch in the front row does not so much as blink.

“Mama.” Penelope, three years old and unimpressed, tips her pointed hat back to look at me. “Do the knock.”

So I do the knock. Three of them. Slow, spaced, all the time in the world. The room comes apart in the good way, and my daughter grins at me like a girl who already knows fear is a thing you get to hold in two hands and set down laughing.

She comes by it honest. She also comes by it early, since her father does the knock on our own front door every single night he’s home—three slow ones before he lets himself in. It’s a joke that’s now five years old, but still, it’s the best sound in my day.

Tanner is at the back of the shop, arms crossed, watching us. Off shift, showered, no soot on him tonight—but I know exactly what he smells like coming down off that mountain in a long season. I also know he’d have driven the whole grade for the sound of this.

He’s not the man nobody could name anymore. Half this town’s kids call him by it. The crew stops by the shop like it’s a second station. Somewhere in five years, the man who lived at the edge of the frame—the one this whole town could never put a name to—got himself planted dead in the center of it. He now has a wife, a daughter, and another baby due in the spring that’s still ours alone to know about for one more week.

He catches me not reading and lifts an eyebrow. I find my place and finish the story. The thing under the porch wins. It always does, in the ones worth telling.

We get Penelope home past her bedtime, sugared to the gills, and it takes one more chapter of a much gentler book to talk her down. Tanner handles it tonight. I listen to the low rumble of him doing the voices wrong on purpose so she’ll correct him, her giggle going thinner, then gone.

When he comes back down the stairs, the house has dropped into that deep quiet I used to sit alone in at the far end of a night. Braced. Waiting to be left.

I don’t sit in it alone anymore.

“She out?” I’m on the couch, shoes off, the last of the orange light from the porch decorations coming through the front window.

“Out cold. Told me my werewolf voice was ‘not even scary, Daddy.’” He drops down beside me, gets an arm around me, pulls me into his side, where I’ve spent five years learning to fit. “Ruthless. Gets it from you.”

“She gets the knock from you.”