Dmitri Andreyevich didn’t realize it, but his role in the mob had sheltered him. He expected order, and consequently was ill-prepared for chaos. In his younger years it was all chaos. Standing in a deserted shipyard, or a dark alley, with no backup except whatever was in your hand - you might not know if the man in front of you had a pistol until it was too late. The ability to calculate odds had left him. When a vampire threatened a human, the human always blinked first. So when Milo stared back at him, it weakened his resolve. He started to doubt the moral superiority of his position.
He blinked.
Mikhail Sergeyev was not the first one to move. He was having his own struggle with the chaos. That wretched rock, the Devil’s Eye - how close were they? How much did they know? Milo was leaving - to go where? How could he reach her if he needed her? And the follow-up question: needed her for what? The sum of the pressing questions was enough to make him freeze when it came to fight or flight - for long enough that his other lieutenant intervened.
Alexander Alexandrovich had that same bitter expression on his face. He had never made his own feelings about the mortician clear, only followed the orders as they came down. For a moment Mikhail was terrified watching him dart toward the argument. If he could talk back to the boss now, then he might do anything. He might eliminate the distraction once and for all.
Dmitri didn’t move - he didn’t pull back, but he didn’t contradict her. The words didn’t come. Things happened on top of one another - Sasha got up just as Milo finished, just as it seemed like the scar-faced vampire would make another move. If he couldn’t argue, the only thing left was to swing first.
Sasha beat him to it. On flat ground, he was taller than both of them. He drew up behind his associate, quietly, almost casually, and slammed his face into the banister. The force of it splintered the antique wood, leaving an obvious gash most of the way through the railing. The bleeding was immediate and profuse. Dina’s legs crumpled like paper; he went down, still clutching the knob-like end of the railing with his left hand.
Alexander Alexandrovich stood over him, unmoved. A few stray drops of blood stained the collar of his button-down. The sentiment wasn’t hatred. It was only the pragmatic need to restore order, the instinct of the perennial big brother.
“Pull yourself together,” he said in English, looking down at his partner’s ruined face. “I have enough to do here without you embarrassing yourself. We are not going to be dragged into some petty feud,” he declared.
A quick check on the human. When she stood a step up, Sasha was at her eye level. Not much time to save face - he knew Mikhail would be behind him soon. “Don’t worry about him,” the chestnut-haired vampire said. The usual softness of his voice felt strange and discordant now. “You had it right: we have no business with you unless Mikhail Sergeyev orders it.”
The man he had assaulted was still on the ground between them, coughing slightly, spitting blood onto the hardwood floor.
When Andy heard the heavy footfall on the wooden floor, he thought it was the police. He was looking around helplessly, his body vibrating with dull pain, undecided if he did or did not want to know what lurked in the darkness. The interloper presented a whole other concern. Andy held his breath momentarily, feeling the full panic of a some-time delinquent whose number had not yet come up. The ball was rolling; the wheel was in motion. He imagined being taken downtown. Was there time to run?
The last thing Andy expected was a guy his age. He barely had time to shift gears, let alone fully process what the stranger had said. “This place should be condemned,” Andy stated, too loud, but with full conviction. He was quite dirty now, sweaty, and breathing heavy. He wiped the back of his hand against his face, moving some stray pink hairs out of his eyes. “Somebody could get hurt,” Andy went on, gesturing to the imploded window, and recalled a second later that he had already gotten hurt. “Jesus,” he concluded.
That heavy silence again. It was eerie, a little too thorough to be the natural result of the room’s construction. The rugs were threadbare, the walls wood with a little moldy wallpaper pasted on. But it did give Andy’s brain a chance to catch up with his predicament. The newcomer was not a cop; he wouldn’t have to think of how to ask his mom to pick him up from jail. The guy looked a little familiar, like he might be a friend of a friend.
He had not paid much attention to school the first week; he assumed all the kids he had known for years were still there. There was no word that anybody had moved or died. Andy’s best friend since fourth grade had been Elliot Morris, every year up to the tail end of the last one. Most of his former friend group he shared with Elliot, and they all seemed to disappear about the same time. He could not say what exactly had happened, except that something changed in January, and Elliot stopped answering Andy’s messages, and Andy felt too awkward to approach him face to face. People were saying he had a girlfriend now. Andy questioned whether it could be that simple.
Then, as he scrambled to think of a way to explain himself, Andy remembered where he had seen the kid. Andy sat three rows behind him in homeroom. He didn’t quite believe it. He ignored the original question. “Don’t you go to my school?” Andy asked instead. “Why are you dressed like an explorer?”
He was no closer to feeling real or grounded. A light breeze filtered in through the ridiculous hole in the wall to his right. That feeling still lingered—there was something in the house, and it wasn’t the other kid. What was he doing there, and how was he so calm? Andy felt like the last person to get the joke. He could barely focus.
He took a few steps toward the stranger, but not to confront him; he was looking around, trying to triangulate a sound, only it wasn’t a sound. The floorboards creaked loudly. There was something upstairs. The sound did come… a real one—he thought. It was heavy. Lumbering. Andy looked at the other boy. He said, lowering his voice slightly, “You hear that, right?”
His eyes were adjusting to the low light. There was just a little from the front of the house, a combination of yellow moonlight and streetlights. It had the look of a haunted house, all right. It wasn’t like a collection of antiques—it looked original, down to the ornate (though well-worn) drapery, the carved wooden box on the side table.
He didn’t mean to pick it up. It was in his hands before he realized it. It was ebony with a pearl inlay; it looked like a jewelry box. He didn’t know why, but he thought it should be heavier. Andy opened it. Froze.
He had no way to summon the correct emotion. “There’s a hand in here,” Andy said, as surprised as he was genuinely annoyed, staring down at the shriveled, blackened and fully recognizable appendage. He looked up at the boy from school and asked, as if he could genuinely answer, “What the fuck is this?”
Killian walked with the man. He stayed with him, but he held back, walked with his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. He knew his situation, but he was reluctant, and he let it show; he looked like a child being taken out of school by his mother. He waited for an opportunity to take his gun back. It felt like it would be a long time coming.
The look of the car didn’t surprise Killian much. It tracked for him that a mobster type would drive a luxury vehicle. If anything, it only pointed to his rank; his captor was middle or high-ranking, not a lowly night club floor manager. That made the most sense with his dress and bearing. Bad luck, then, that he would be the person Killian ran across.
But did that, in itself, mean something? Killian had a moment to think while the mobster got his jacket. The Russian mob (one of the families, at least) was on his list of groups to check out—people who might have information about the egg. The first individual he’d met, within days of coming to New York, was of a significant rank.
He was being targeted. If that were true, it meant they knew something.
Killian’s plot changed slightly. It still hinged on getting his gun back.
They walked down the sidewalk, traveled several blocks north. The bars and nightclubs gave way to vacant storefronts, and then, slowly, residential neighborhood businesses. Killian regarded a shuttered corner store for a moment; then, the mobster seemed to find where he was going.
It was an old diner with a yellow sign, the name written in red letters. In theming, it looked like a deliberate, low-rent take on a Denny’s. The attempt at familiarity did not comfort Killian. He walked in, squinted in the fluorescent light, then followed the mobster to a table.
Killian liked the booth; it felt safe to have a pressed-fiberboard table’s width between himself and his captor. In his dirty, disheveled and dog-tired state, Killian looked very much like the assorted dead-eyed shift workers at the other tables. He slumped in his seat and stared at the man. For a moment, it almost felt like an advantage. In here, the mobster was the one who looked out of place.
He absorbed the offer of a name with no reaction. Alex. He put together his scant clues: it wasn’t an Asian name. If he were Russian, it might be short for Alexei, or Alexander. Or it could be an English name, and he could be nowhere.
At first, Killian resisted. As he calculated his options, he saw no good reason to identify himself. He was a hair’s breadth from telling Alex to go fuck himself. Then he recalled the scene of their confrontation, and the deal that Alex proposed. He had to answer questions; this was one of them. “Killian Richter,” the captive replied, electing at the last possible moment not to lie. “I think you already knew it,” he explained, “or one of your people did. So what can I do? I will give you that,” he said.
He found a groove. At the bottom of his desperation was confidence borne from an indifference to his continued safety. Could he worry about it when it was coming anyway?
“I’m not leaving this country until I get what I came for,” Killian explained, “and I’m sorry to tell you you’ll have to put me in the ground to stop me. It’s not for your people. I doubt you even know what it’s for… certainly not to be traded between different scumbags like a status symbol trinket,” he said with contempt.
He waited for Alex to respond. Now he was impatient, on edge. When the captor hesitated, Killian was incensed.
“So you know I needed a weapon because I was dealing with people like you,” he went on, just a little too loudly. “As soon as you let me go I have to find those men again. They have it, don’t they? And you’re keeping me from them because you know.”
His accusation stopped sharply. He leveled his gaze; it didn’t matter that, even sitting down, he had to look up a bit to do it. The tone was set. He did not intend to make friends.
The routine was the same, whether they had guests or not. At 6 AM, wake and dress. Down the back stairs - it wouldn’t be light for nearly an hour. Three turns around the house, just to make sure. They never questioned him about it. Most of the passers-through chalked it up to a quaint Amish-country custom.
Colin Harper gave a reasonable impression of a quaint Amish-country person, although he was not Amish and led a less-than-quaint life. To the out-of-towners, the vacationers and newlyweds and people driving back to Toronto after family visits, he looked simple and did simple things. Tend to the house, turn the rooms, serve two meals a day. Practical clothes in dull colors, dead people’s things acquired cheaply from church thrift shops. A featureless haircut he had clearly done at home himself. The guests found nothing out of place about this hometown boy, mostly moved on before they took the time to look closely. That was the main reason Colin had managed to succeed as an innkeeper despite numerous failed attempts at other careers.
He started on breakfast at 6:15. There were guests that morning, and a few more than usual for mid-autumn, at that. The menu was simple, the service built into the cost of the room: pepper-and-onion omelets, pork sausage, home fries, fresh fruit. Mostly cantaloupe, but honeydew when he could get it. Cheese on request. Drip coffee or orange juice. They would filter in to assigned seats at grandmother’s dining room table at 8, engage in light conversation but mainly look at their phones or whisper to the person they came with. It followed the same pattern every time, because Colin took pains to avoid surprises either for or from the guests. He did not eat with them, but stood in the kitchen with the door cracked in case someone needed him, slowly eating slices of raw potato where no one could see.
He had not set out to become a hotelier. It was only that he felt strongly about keeping the house, and had nothing better to do with six bedrooms than to make the place pay its own property taxes. The Stillwater Inn web page looked much the same in 2023 as it had in 2005, the online booking system outdated and perpetually half-broken. Still, through a combination of walk-ins, phone reservations and (occasionally) successful online bookings, the place managed to stay solvent as a bed and breakfast. Someone (Colin didn’t know who) had even created a Yelp page at one point, where the house maintained a respectable 3.9 stars.
It wasn’t a passion, or a burden, but a neutral state of existence. The guests finished their meal and filtered back out - some would check out by 11, a few would come back for another night. Colin Harper didn’t live intentionally as much as he simply coped with the state of things from day to day. He was a creature defined by persistent survival, like a hardy moss.
No, not a moss. A fungus, a parasite - but he tried to make himself useful too.
The middle of the day was always quiet. People were either out for the afternoon or in their rooms resting. Colin busied himself with the dishes, then the laundry - checking for pests, cleaning windows, fixing creaky boards - in a house that old there was always something to do. Dinner was at seven, but he was efficient with his prep, and only needed to put the entree in the oven when it was time. Between five and six in the evening there was a particularly quiet window, a chance for him to settle his other business before the dinner guests returned.
Colin slept on the third floor, in one of the so-called “attic rooms.” The others were mainly storage for his personal possessions, but there was one guest room, a closet-like chamber with a twin bed. A single man had rented it the past several days, was slated to check out the next morning and had spent most of the afternoon inside. He would have been out hiking, Colin had overheard him say at breakfast, if not for the weather; it rained hard the night before and the low-lying trails were flooded out. And although Colin worked hard to create appealing common areas - interesting books, popular board games, an upright piano in the downstairs parlor - the man had never bothered to venture out. Stayed locked in by himself.
Of course, Colin had a key to every room. That fact alone wasn’t a terrible surprise to anyone. He could slip in under some reasonable-sounding pretext, or even skip the formality if the people were asleep. There was nothing wrong with the man, really, except that he was a solo traveler, which made him a little easier. The shade had to eat. It was nobody’s fault. And if he happened to be an aloof young man who wouldn’t even try a game of contract bridge, then it was even less trouble for Colin.
The neighbors kept asking when he would finish the barn floor. Nothing in there but a few rusty tools, the innkeeper would say, and there was no money for it anyhow. He could redirect them to a conversation about property taxes, or tax credits, or one of those things old farmers liked to gripe about. By 7:15 it was all over, the room emptied, the washer churning bleach and scalding water. Colin saw the shade as he passed back into the house through the mud room, and it kept still, almost minding its business, quiet for now. It would buy him a week, or longer if he was lucky. But there was no more time to think of it. He was covered in grime to the elbows, and it was time to put the roast in.
The rain had passed but the clouds lingered. When he woke at six the next morning, it was forty degrees. Three passes, start breakfast. No one remarked on the missing man - they seldom did. It was simple enough, when necessary, to say he thought John, or Matt, or Mike had decided to head out early. The passers-through tended to accept this and go back to their news apps and short-form content. The house was quiet again by 12:30, still and calm, like it was sleeping. Four empty bedrooms after today. Time to rest, if briefly.