Page 41 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

"Here." Ben gets me down against the foot of the counter, where the wood is dry. "Stay put, Blackwood. Not a request."

He straightens and crosses back toward the iron door, pistol low. Elias takes the second opening, breathing cold up. Vivienne has Lily by the lamp at the far wall, turning the girl's cut arm to the light, saying something dry that makes Lily almost laugh on purpose. Four people on one side of a dead room, two on the other, and the distance feels chosen.

Hannah folds down beside me. She doesn't ask how I am; she's stopped wasting questions on it. She spreads Elspeth's survey across her knees, and smooths the creases flat.

"Ben. Your grandfather's map."

He slides it from its sleeve, sets it in her hands, goes back to the door. Then she takes the folded square from inside her coat, and works it flat against the ground.

"All right," she says, low enough that it's only mine. "Help me read these."

I shift onto my good side. The bloodroot in my chest grinds when I breathe, but my eyes work, and they have read older cruelties than Elspeth's ink. The page is not a map. It is a record of passage: sanctuary marks, hunter signs, and the places where names vanish.

"This row." Hannah drags her nail beneath one line. "Not the place. The purpose."

"Safe shelter," I say. "A vampire could reach it before dawn and be hidden through daylight."

"And this mark beside it?"

"Hunter watch-sign. It means the shelter had been named."

She finds the matching line without me. "Containment declared, creek crossing." Her finger stills. "Dated the night before the warning went out."

"So they knew the shelter was exposed before anyone was warned," Hannah says.

"No." I stare until the shape of the marks open. "They made it exposed. Someone gave the sanctuary sign to hunters, then delayed the warning. By the time our people ran, every clean exit was already closed."

"These aren't two stories sharing a season."

"No," I say. "They're one hunt written in two hands."

"Hunters on one."

"And on the other⁠—"

In the margin, scratched almost too fine to hold its shape: a wheel. Six spokes. The outer ring broken at the top. Her breath changes. Flatter and colder than a gasp.

"Vivi said that one. On the wax, at the gate. Lucien." She glances once, and Vivienne hears nothing. "Who is he, Alaric? Not what title. My grandmother's drew this out for a reason."

I've spent the night refusing to say his name, the way you don't speak of a thing in case speaking summons it. There's no profit in that now.

"Lucien Draycott is a vampire even other vampires avoid naming," I say. "He does not threaten first. He removes. People. Records. Houses. Whole histories, if they become inconvenient. Elias told me he burned a sanctuary in Quebec because one ledger named his donor line. Not because it endangered him that night, but because one day it might." I look at the wheel on Elspeth's index. "That is what makes him dangerous. Lucien wants to win. Lucien wants no proof there was ever a fight."

Her thumb moves down the page, slow. Hunter action. Sanctuary loss. Wheel between them. Again. And again.

I'm looking at a date I've measured a hundred winters against. The town. The road out of it. Elspeth's single line, set down without knowing whose grief she was filing: route given to the other side. No one returned. And the wheel.

"Whose is that line," she says. Not a question.

"This is Nathan's."

"Nathan's," Hannah repeats. Her finger drags from the wheel back up the page, to the hunter's mark, then down again to the place where the two cross. "He's not working against Lucien. He's working for him. The break-ins. He was never a different threat. He was the same one wearing a face I'd open the door to."

"Two hands," I say. "One hunt."

She goes still over the survey, and then her breath catches on something worse than fear. "Then why didn't they just kill me?"

She turns Elspeth's index over and there—on the back, in that small slanting hand—a list that isn't routes at all. Names down the margin. Holloway. Whitmore. Bell. The county clerk. A firm in the city. And above them, underlined twice: If the heir dies untimely, these open. The same morning.