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“You understand you have just, essentially, attempted to steal the mind of a person who is literally the only human on Earth who cannot be stolen from, and you now must apologize and never do it again, and you must also live in the same room with him for a month, and he now knows what you are, and there is a man with a camera outside a bar—”

“Sabine.”

“—and there’s an exam I have not studied for, and I would like to be very clear that this is the most stressful morning of my life and I am thrilled. “

I found, to my great surprise, that I was smiling.

It was a small thing. It sat at the corner of my mouth and would not leave. I had not felt it in so long that it seemed to belong to someone else’s face.

“Do not laugh at me,” she said.

“I am not laughing.”

“I can hear it.”

“I do not laugh.”

“You did in 1974. In Leningrad. It was at a very unfortunate moment and I have not forgotten it.” She blew out a breath. “Listen. I am serious now. Do you want to hear what I think?”

“I have never been able to stop you.”

“I think you have been afraid for so long that fear has started to feel like safety. I think you have been so careful for so many years that you’ve forgotten the point of being careful. You keep a rule about not hurting anyone. It’s a good rule. It’s the best thing about you. But somewhere along the way you decided that the only way to keep the rule was never to want anything.” She paused. “He is the first thing you have wanted in a thousand years. And you tried to make him forget it, because wanting scares you more than the hunters do.”

I said nothing.

“So here’s what you do,” she said. “You apologize. You tell him what you did, all of it, and you let him be as angry as he likes. Then you go to the rink. You play hockey. You keep your hands to yourself. And you let him come to you.”

“He may not.”

“Then he may not. That will be the right answer, and you will live with it.” A pause. “But he might. I have a feeling about this boy.”

“You have not met him.”

“I’ve heard you say honey bread like a man saying his own name. I do not need to meet him.”

I ended the call with the sound of her laughter in my ear, which is a bad way to end a call with a person you are afraid of losing.

The phone buzzed again almost at once. It was not Sabine but a text from a number I had saved as MARCUS SABLE.

Plate came back. Rental sedan, booked through a company called Roake Clinical Consulting. Address is a PO box in Providence. Company has no website. No staff listed. One director.

Another buzz.

Name is Gideon Roake. Surgeon, retired. Wife died six years ago. Cause: “unknown animal attack.” No suspects. No investigation. Thought you’d want to know.

I read it twice. Then I put the phone face-down on the desk.

The hairs stood on the back of my neck. I know that name. Not the man; the name. It had come down the network a year or two ago, one of those dry, dull notices that get passed between old houses like a bad smell. A doctor in New England, not a hunter by training, asking questions about a certain kind of predator. Pays well for information. Watch for him.

I had filed it and forgotten it. I am not a person who forgets things. I had forgotten it because I did not think it would be about me.

I got up and went to the window. Down in the lot, two figures came out of the guest house into the snow: Lex, in his heavy gray coat, and beside him a shorter man with a shock of dark hair and a tray of coffees, talking with both hands. Lex was nodding along. His shoulders were up around his ears. Every few steps he glanced back over his shoulder at the building, toward the second floor, toward the window I was standing in.

I stepped back from the glass.

My chest felt strange. Heavy, and warm, and somehow too full, like a house with too many candles lit. I could hear the last of the compulsion still humming faintly in my hands, and it made me want to be sick.

I will not do it again. I said the words in my head with all the weight I had. Not to him, not for safety, not out of fear, and not ever.