Chapter 10

Declan's POV

"Declan — Declan, are you in there — please, please open the door —"

"Trap," Bracken said. "Do not open that door."

I was already at it. My hand was on the chain before I'd finished deciding to move.

I knew the voice. I'd have known it with my ears full of water. I slid the chain, turned the deadbolt, and pulled.

Piper stood in the hallway with her coat over her uniform and her hair half-plastered to her face, and she was shaking so hard that the water on her jacket was visibly moving.

I stood back and let her in.

She came past me and stopped in the middle of the floor without seeming to know she had, and her mouth was working and no sound was coming out.

"Someone — there was — someone was following me, I think, I don't know, I couldn't — the stairs, he was at the top of the stairs, he was —" Her hands were going, and then they stopped, and she pressed them both flat against her mouth.

I took her by the shoulder and steered her to the table, pushed her down into a chair, and put a glass of water into her hands. She held it with both hands like it was heavy. She drank half of it.

"Start at the beginning," I said. "Slow."

She took a breath that shook on the way in.

"After my shift. I walked home." She kept her eyes on the table, and her voice came out flat and careful, the way people talk when they're trying to hold themselves together by being precise. "On Fennimore I noticed somebody behind me. It was raining, I had my hood up, I couldn't hear anything, I just — I kept seeing the same shape. I told myself it was nothing. People walk home."

"And then?"

"Then he turned when I turned. Every corner." She looked up at me. "He kept the same distance the whole time. When I walked faster he walked faster. When I stopped, he stopped. He was — behind me, the entire way, for eleven blocks."

She drank more water. A drop came off her chin and landed on the table.

"At the bottom of our street I turned around to look at him. And he started running."

I felt the change in my own body before I understood it — the specific cold that comes over the back of the neck when the world has just rearranged itself into something with teeth in it.

"I got inside. I locked my door." Her voice was getting thinner. "And then the lights went out. And then — Declan, somebody tried my lock. Not kicking. Trying it. Little sounds, one after another, like — like he was feeling for the right —"

"Take a breath."

She took one. "I sat on the floor with my hand over my mouth and I didn't move. And then he stopped. And it was quiet for a long time and I thought he was gone, so I opened the door to come and get you. I got about four steps." Her eyes came up and locked on mine and stayed there. "He was standing at the top of the stairs. Right across from my door. Just — standing there. Looking at it. He didn't move the whole time and then I started knocking and I didn't stop."

"Could you see him?"

"It's pitch black out there."

"Anything. A jacket. A shoe. How tall he was."

She thought about it, and something in her face pulled tight. "White," she said. "Just — white. All of it. That's the only thing I could see." She swallowed. "Like a ghost. There was nothing where his face should be."

I looked at the candle flame for a second and let the pieces slide into place.

White. All of it, white.

Not one of mine. Wolves don't dress in white, not unless they're walking into a place where they mean to be seen, and even then — no. And I would have caught a wolf's scent in the stairwell the moment I opened the door, three floors up, rain or no rain.

But something else had already been making itself heard under the rain, and I'd been ignoring it, because it was fainter than rain and sliding under the cooking smell, and now it came up the corridor through the crack of my own door and settled in the back of my throat like a mouthful of cold pennies.

Vampire. Or something that works for one.

They found me.

And then, in the corridor, I heard footsteps.

They were quiet — heel, then toe, placed carefully on old wood — and to anyone else they'd have been buried under the noise of a storm. To me they were as clear as if the man were walking through my skull. Down the hall. Slowing. Stopping.

The door handle turned. It went all the way to the end of its travel and jammed against the deadbolt, and metal ground on metal.

Then the whole door jumped in its frame. The hinges complained, the wood flexed, and the chain snapped up hard against its mount and rang once like a struck bell. Piper made a sound I'd never heard her make before and got partway out of the chair, and I put my hand flat on her shoulder and pushed her back down without taking my eyes off the door.

I listened.

The footsteps had stopped at my threshold. The weight behind them was in the front of the foot, the stride was short, the rhythm of the blows was one rhythm and not two.

One person. The steps, the weight, the timing of it — one person.

And one person is not going to be a problem.