Daniel’s children liked the old stories best when he did not try to make them frightening. If he lowered his voice or paused before the gruesome parts, Mara accused him of performing. Elias, younger and far more willing to be scared, usually pulled the blanket beneath his nose and told his sister she was ruining it.
So Daniel had learned to tell the stories plainly, usually in the half hour between getting home from work and sunrise.
That morning he sat at the foot of seven-year-old Elias’s bed while thirteen-year-old Mara leaned against the doorway brushing her teeth, which was how she listened when she wanted everyone to believe she wasn’t.
“There used to be more humans than vampires,” Daniel said. “Not a few more. Millions.”
The toothbrush stopped.
“Millions?”
“Whole cities.”
“Outside?”
“Mostly.”
“In the daytime?”
Daniel nodded.
Mara pulled the toothbrush from her mouth. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You’ve never seen one.”
“I’ve never seen Dracula either.”
“That is an entirely different conversation. Finish brushing your teeth.”
She stayed exactly where she was.
Elias disappeared farther beneath the blanket. “Did they really hunt vampires?”
“Some did.”
The oldest stories said humans came while vampires slept. They broke into houses, tore shutters from windows and dragged families into the sunlight. They carried wooden stakes because, for reasons Daniel had never entirely understood, human beings had apparently looked at the entire range of available weapons and decided sharpened lumber was the proper tool for killing vampires.
That part always made Elias laugh.
The blood stories did not.
Vampire blood could do remarkable things to a human body. It closed wounds faster than they should close. It restored strength. Most importantly to humans, whose lives seemed impossibly short to vampires, it could slow aging.
“Gross,” Mara said.
“Humans used to say the same thing about us drinking theirs.”
“That was different.”
“Why?”
She opened her mouth, thought better of whatever answer had occurred to her, and resumed brushing.
Daniel gave them the short version of Dracula after that—the one his father had told him when he was young. Maybe Dracula had been a ruler. Maybe a general. Maybe something closer to a saint by the time the stories were done with him. What mattered was that he had taught vampires to stop hiding alone.
Elias asked what had happened to the humans.
“Everything,” Daniel said. “War. Disease. Famine. Time.”
There had been fewer of them each generation until most vampires could live for centuries without ever seeing one.
“Are there any left?” Mara asked.
“Probably.”
She smiled around the toothbrush.
Daniel sighed. “What?”
“Probably means yes.”
Sunrise was minutes away. He pulled Elias’s blackout curtain tight, checked the green indicator above the window and sent Mara toward her own room. By the time Daniel reached his bed, the shutters had sealed and the neighborhood had gone silent.
He had been asleep less than four hours when everything stopped.
The fan beside his bed went quiet first. A heartbeat later came the heavy mechanical thunk of the house switching to backup power, followed almost immediately by a second silence that should not have happened.
Daniel was standing before he was fully awake.
The blackout shutters remained locked, but the ventilation had stopped. No refrigeration. No interior lighting. The backup panel downstairs was nearly blank.
Mara appeared in the hallway with her hair flattened against one side of her head.
“Power’s out?”
“Yes.”
Elias emerged behind her, squinting. “Is the sun up?”
“Yes.”
He disappeared back into his room.
Under different circumstances Daniel might have laughed.
The generator behind the shed was old but dependable, which was exactly why Daniel had spent two years promising himself he would replace it next month. He pulled the shade-lamp from the utility closet.
Mara followed him downstairs. “You’re going outside?”
“I’m going to the generator.”
“At noon?”
“For five minutes.”
“What happens if that thing quits?”
Daniel looked at the lamp. “You inherit a very nice collection of tools.”
She didn’t smile.
“I’ll be fine.”
The instant he opened the service door, he regretted saying it.
Daylight punched through the shade field with enough force to make him recoil. The lamp filtered the part that would kill him, but it could do nothing about the glare. The yard seemed bleached white. Heat pressed against his skin. His eyes watered before he had made it ten feet.
At night Daniel could read a street sign from across a parking lot with almost no light. Out here, the white siding next door was painful to look at even through the lamp’s protection.
The shade-lamp showed nine minutes.
The generator had suffered the sort of failure Daniel would have found almost insulting at night: a fuel line had rattled loose, and the starter battery had finally died after years of neglect. He reseated the line, clipped on the jump pack and swore at himself until the engine coughed alive.
Seven minutes remained.
Then he smelled smoke.
Not exhaust.
Wood.
Daniel stood still. His hearing found the generator, insects, a truck on the distant highway and the tiny movements of daytime animals in the trees behind the property.
The wood smoke came from there.
Six minutes.
Going inside was the obvious choice.
Daniel walked toward the fence.
The trees reduced the glare, though the shade-lamp kept counting down. Behind a fallen oak, hidden well enough that he might never have noticed it at night, someone had made a small camp.
A shallow fire ring. An old blanket. A dented cup. Several empty cans. A blackened cooking pot hung from a branch.
No vampire needed a fire while the sun was up. No vampire cooked food over one.
Beside the ashes lay a piece of wood, one end shaved to a point.
Daniel looked at it longer than he should have.
The lamp chirped.
Ninety seconds.
He ran.
His speed had frightened Mara once when she was small. She had wandered into the street after a ball and Daniel had crossed the front yard before she understood he had moved. He rarely had reason to push himself that hard anymore.
He did now.
The service door slammed behind him with the shade-lamp screaming its final warning. Daniel switched it off and stood in the dark utility room while his eyes recovered.
Mara appeared at the top of the stairs. “There’s something outside.”
“No.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You’re lying.”
Daniel hated that she was getting better at detecting it without any supernatural assistance.
“What did you find?”
“Mara.”
She went upstairs, but only because she understood the conversation had been postponed rather than won.
By evening the house had returned to normal. Shutters opened. Elias accused Mara of using the last towel while wearing it around his shoulders. Daniel poured refrigerated cattle blood into three mugs and warmed two of them.
Elias took one sip and grimaced. “It’s the metallic one.”
“All blood tastes metallic,” Mara said.
“Not like this.”
“You’re drinking blood.”
“That doesn’t mean it should taste bad.”
Livestock blood was ordinary enough that grocery stores carried competing brands, and Elias had opinions about most of them.
Daniel barely heard the argument. His attention kept drifting toward the dark trees beyond the kitchen window.
Mara noticed.
“You saw something.”
“I found a campsite.”
Elias stopped complaining.
“Human?” Mara asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You do.”
“I suspect.”
“Because of what?”
Daniel thought about the fire ring.
“A fire.”
At eight-thirty Daniel left for the county prosecutor’s office. Most of his work was ordinary: thefts, assaults, fraud, property disputes that had become less civil than they started. He spent his nights sorting what people had done from what they claimed they had meant to do, and years of doing it had taught him that those were rarely as closely related as anyone wanted them to be.
Normally he was good at leaving the work there.
That night he checked the home cameras before he had even reached the office.
At 10:16 his phone rang.
Mara.
“There’s a man outside.”
Daniel was moving before she finished the sentence.
The stranger stood on the back porch and claimed something was wrong with Elias’s exterior shutter. Mara had not opened the door. Elias was with her.
“Stay away from the windows.”
“He says it isn’t closing.”
“Do not open the door.”
“I’m not.”
A muffled voice reached him through the phone. Mara repeated what the man said.
“He says if it stays like that, sunlight will cross Elias’s bed.”
Daniel stopped walking.
The power failure. The shutter cycle.
He had checked the interior indicator after restoring electricity, but not the exterior track.
“Tell him to get away from the house.”
A pause.
“He says he already fixed it.”
Daniel drove home faster than the law recommended.
The man was gone.
Outside the east bedroom, a guide bracket had bent just far enough to prevent the shutter from sealing. The restart must have knocked the exterior track out of alignment even though the interior indicator had gone green. At sunrise the narrow opening would have thrown a blade of direct light across Elias’s bed.
Someone had straightened the bracket. Not elegantly, but enough.
A folded sheet of paper sat beneath a stone on the back step.
SORRY I SCARED THE CHILDREN.
Below it:
THE LITTLE ONE’S WINDOW WASN’T SAFE.
Mara waited inside with the fireplace poker across her knees.
“He was human.”
“I think so.”
“You said there probably weren’t any.”
“I was wrong.”
Her eyes flicked toward Elias’s hallway. “He knew which room was his.”
“He could have been watching us,” Daniel said.
“Then why did he fix it?”
Daniel folded the note.
“I don’t know.”
For the next several nights, Mara kept the poker near the sofa.
Two nights later another note appeared beneath the stone.
I WILL STAY AWAY FROM THE HOUSE.
Daniel wrote beneath it:
WHO ARE YOU?
The answer arrived the following night.
THOMAS.
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
Two days passed.
NOTHING FROM YOU.
Then, squeezed beneath it:
FOOD WOULD HELP.
Daniel stared at that for a while.
He had absolutely no idea what humans ate.
The following morning he stopped at a farm market after work and eventually cornered a clerk stacking sacks of grain.
“I need food a human can eat.”
The clerk stopped. “A human?”
“Yes.”
“No one’s kept humans around here in fifty years.”
“That wasn’t really my question.”
“I know. Haven’t heard anyone ask it in about as long.”
They assembled potatoes, oats, beans, vegetables and a package of beef the clerk described as technically human-edible.
Daniel did not find the phrase reassuring.
Thomas’s reply appeared the next night.
THE POTATOES WERE GOOD.
THE MEAT WAS NOT.
PLEASE NEVER BUY THAT AGAIN.
Daniel laughed aloud.
Mara did not.
“You’re feeding him now?”
“He fixed Elias’s shutter.”
“That doesn’t make him safe.”
“No.”
The immediate agreement seemed to bother her more than an argument would have.
Elias began adding questions to Daniel’s notes. What color was the ocean during the day? Did sunlight feel hot?
Thomas answered patiently.
BLUE, MOSTLY.
BUT NOT THE SAME BLUE YOU SEE IN PICTURES.
Mara read that one three times before adding her first question.
WHY ARE YOU HERE?
NOWHERE ELSE TO GO.
Her next:
WHY DID YOU FIX ELIAS’S WINDOW?
BECAUSE HE WAS IN IT.
The poker remained beside the sofa.
Mara stopped holding it.
Daniel met Thomas for the first time at dusk.
The old man was waiting near the fence when Daniel carried out another grocery bag. His coat hung loosely from a narrow frame. White hair had thinned across a sun-weathered scalp, and one hand trembled despite his attempt to hold it steady.
“I’m unarmed,” Thomas said, raising both hands.
Daniel could already see that.
“Are there others?”
“Humans?”
“Yes.”
“Not with me.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Thomas glanced toward the trees. His pulse quickened.
Daniel heard it.
“No. Not nearby.”
“You knew what Elias’s shutter would do. You knew when it was safe to approach the house. How?”
Thomas hesitated.
“The people I traveled with knew vampire houses.”
“Because they hunted them.”
Thomas nodded.
“You learn which windows matter when you’re trying to get them open.”
Daniel watched him.
“Have you ever hunted a vampire?”
“No.”
Thomas’s heart stumbled.
Daniel did not know whether it meant fear, guilt or simply the knowledge that the question mattered. He knew only that the answer had cost him.
“Try again.”
Thomas held his gaze.
Daniel crossed the remaining distance in less than a heartbeat and caught Thomas by the front of his coat, pinning him back against the fence.
“I traveled with people who hunted vampires,” Thomas said.
“For blood?”
“Sometimes.”
“And you helped them.”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“Kept watch. Carried supplies. Found places.”
“Sleeping places.”
Thomas nodded.
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
Daniel’s grip tightened.
“Why did you leave?”
“Because eventually I understood what they were.”
“That sounds convenient.”
“It probably does.”
“What changed?”
Thomas looked away. “Not tonight.”
Daniel let out a short, humorless breath. “You think you’re in a position to decide that?”
“No. But that’s the answer I have.”
“Why should I let you anywhere near my children?”
“You shouldn’t. Not because I tell you to.”
Thomas glanced toward the house.
“I fixed the window because the boy was in it. I’m staying in the woods because you don’t want me near them. If that changes, it changes.”
Daniel left him outside.
The temperature dropped over the next several days. Daniel began leaving blankets with the groceries. Thomas returned one neatly folded with a note reading TWO IS GREEDY.
Daniel left three the following night.
Thomas kept them.
During another dusk conversation, Thomas told Daniel where he had come from. Six humans had lived in the settlement where he grew up, four by the time he was an adult. Eventually two died and one left searching for other humans. Thomas stayed until living there became, in his words, “mostly maintenance on empty buildings.”
Then he walked.
Months later he found the hunters.
“At first I was happy just to hear human voices again,” Thomas said. “You can forgive a lot when you’re lonely.”
“Apparently.”
Thomas glanced sideways. “Was that a joke?”
“No.”
“Shame. You’re getting closer.”
Not every hunt had been for blood. Some were for food or supplies. Sometimes a vampire settlement was considered too close. Sometimes someone had lost family and wanted another family to lose theirs.
“And sometimes blood,” Daniel said.
Thomas nodded.
“Blood was the worst of it.”
“Why?”
“Once they started taking it, there was always a reason to take more.”
He also noticed what Thomas never did.
He never asked for blood.
Winter came harder the following week.
Daniel had looked up the old laws after meeting Thomas. Nothing clearly prohibited feeding or sheltering a human, but legality was not really the problem. A county prosecutor secretly housing a former vampire hunter would raise questions about his judgment long before anyone argued about statutes.
They were watching a weather report warn of temperatures low enough to kill an old human sleeping outdoors.
“He’ll freeze,” Mara said.
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t mean he comes in here.”
“No.”
Mara glared. “Stop agreeing with me.”
The corner of Daniel’s mouth moved.
“He can’t stay outside.”
“I know.”
“You still don’t know why he left those hunters.”
“No.”
“Then ask him.”
Daniel did.
Thomas sat on the fallen oak beside the dead fire ring, his breath white in the cold.
“You told me what you did with them,” Daniel said. “You never told me why you stopped.”
“I told you enough.”
“Not if I’m considering letting you near my children.”
Thomas looked at him for a long moment.
“There was a family.”
A mother, a father and their daughter had been hiding beneath an old farmhouse. The parents woke first.
“The people I was with killed them,” Thomas said.
“And you?”
“I was there.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“I helped find them.”
For an instant Daniel pictured Mara asleep behind her shutter while someone outside studied the hinges.
Thomas looked into the ashes.
“The girl hid behind some crates. They pulled her out afterward. She might have been twelve. Thirteen.”
Mara’s age.
“She knew what they were going to do. She kept begging.”
Thomas stopped. His heartbeat had gone ragged beneath the quiet of the trees.
“One of them handed me the stake.”
“What did you do?”
“I ran.”
Daniel looked at him.
“You saved her?”
“No.”
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know.”
“You left her.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I was a coward.”
Daniel had expected an excuse.
“I could tell you that was when I finally understood what we were doing,” Thomas said. “That would be true. I could tell you I couldn’t kill a child. That would be true too. But I didn’t save her. I didn’t fight them. I didn’t take her with me.”
His hands shook harder now, though Daniel could no longer tell how much was cold.
“I ran until I couldn’t hear her anymore.”
After a while Daniel asked, “Did you ever go back?”
“There was nothing to go back to.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
Thomas looked away.
“No.”
Daniel left without inviting him inside.
That evening he told Mara.
Elias received a gentler version. Mara refused one.
“He left her there?”
“Yes.”
“Did she die?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“Because he ran.”
“Yes.”
The fireplace poker had been beside the hearth for nearly two weeks.
Mara retrieved it before bed.
The following night she left Thomas a note.
WHY DIDN’T YOU SAVE HER?
No answer came.
Nor the next night.
On the third evening:
I WAS AFRAID.
Below it:
I HAVE WISHED FOR A BETTER ANSWER FOR A VERY LONG TIME.
Mara read it twice and put it back beneath the stone.
She did not write another question.
Elias did. Thomas kept answering him.
Mara read every reply.
Then the temperature dropped into the teens.
Thomas refused Daniel’s invitation immediately.
“No.”
“It’s going to be twelve degrees.”
“I’ve been cold before.”
“You’re seventy-something.”
“Eighty-one.”
“That makes your argument worse.”
Thomas pulled his coat tighter.
“You have children in that house.”
“I do.”
“And I used to help hunt people like them.”
Daniel held his gaze. “I know exactly who I’m inviting inside.”
“Mara knows?”
“Mara knows. Elias knows enough.”
Thomas looked toward the house. “She still wants me in there?”
Daniel thought about the poker.
“I didn’t say that.”
Thomas’s mouth twitched.
“Come inside before I carry you.”
Thomas looked at Daniel’s size, considered the threat, and started walking.
The basement guest room became Thomas’s during the day. Daniel showed him the bathroom and kitchen, then established the rules: no entering bedrooms, no opening exterior shutters, no touching the medical blood refrigerator and no opening an exterior door during daylight without discussing it first.
The small refrigerator held six sealed vials of vampire blood, the family’s emergency reserve. Replacing one meant a clinic visit, a donor draw and paperwork Daniel preferred never to need.
Thomas listened to every rule without complaint.
Mara stood in the hallway with the fireplace poker beside her leg.
For three nights Daniel locked the basement from the outside. After that he stopped turning the key, although habit kept pulling him back to the door before bed to test the latch.
Thomas never mentioned it.
Before sunrise he checked the exterior shutters to make sure they had sealed, then waited downstairs until Daniel and the children were safely behind their blackout doors. At sunset the arrangement reversed.
If Daniel woke during the day, he sometimes heard Thomas moving upstairs: a kettle, footsteps, once a muffled curse followed by a screwdriver rolling across the kitchen floor.
Elias stopped being afraid first.
On the fourth evening Daniel found him explaining a cartoon to Thomas with the intensity usually reserved for medical emergencies.
“And then the robot turns out to be his brother.”
Thomas frowned. “Was his brother always a robot?”
“No. That’s the twist.”
“That seems unnecessarily complicated.”
“It makes sense if you watch it.”
“I strongly suspect it doesn’t.”
Mara stood in the doorway. The poker remained nearby, but her hands were empty.
Soon the crooked kitchen cabinet hung straight. The dripping faucet stopped. Thomas repaired the shed latch and replaced a cracked stair tread.
Then one evening Mara entered the kitchen and found him holding a sharpened piece of wood.
Daniel heard her stop from the next room and reached the kitchen almost instantly.
Thomas stood beside the counter with part of a broken fence picket in his hands, one end whittled to a point.
For a moment nobody spoke.
Then Thomas set it down.
“The fence.”
Mara’s face had gone pale.
“I was replacing the broken section.”
Her eyes remained on the point. Thomas looked from her to Daniel and understood.
Mara walked away.
The next morning the damaged section of fence had been repaired with metal screws. Every spare sharpened piece remained outside.
No one discussed it.
A week later the fireplace poker had returned to its place beside the hearth.
Thomas tired more easily as winter deepened. His hands shook when he worked too long, and carrying a toolbox upstairs left him winded. Once Daniel watched him struggle with a sack of feed before taking it from him with one hand.
Thomas glared.
“You could’ve waited until I asked.”
“You were losing an argument with a bag.”
“I was winning slowly.”
Elias asked why humans became weak when they got old.
Thomas lowered himself into a chair. “Humans are in a hurry from the moment we’re born.”
“Does getting old hurt?”
“Sometimes.”
Elias frowned as though aging were a poorly designed machine he intended to repair later.
Dusk became the easiest part of the day.
Thomas ate human food while Daniel and the children drank warmed cattle blood. Their first few meals were awkward until Thomas admitted that he had expected vampires to use goblets.
Mara laughed before she could stop herself.
After that, four places at the table began to look normal.
One morning Daniel returned from work nearly an hour late and found Mara asleep on the sofa, Elias curled beneath a blanket on the rug, and Thomas sitting beside the back door with the fireplace poker across his lap.
“You’re late,” Thomas said.
“Court ran long.”
“They tried waiting.”
Daniel glanced at the poker.
Thomas followed his gaze. “There’s a human in the house. Thought somebody should keep an eye on him.”
Daniel went upstairs.
He passed the basement door on the way to bed and, for the first time since Thomas had moved in, did not stop to test the latch.
By the end of winter, Thomas had begun slowing down. Repairs went unfinished. He rested between trips upstairs. His hands shook more than before.
Then one evening he did not come up at dusk.
Daniel heard the problem before he saw it.
Thomas’s heartbeat was wrong.
He reached the basement in seconds and found him beside the guest bed, conscious but barely. Daniel lifted him onto the mattress.
“Get the children out,” Thomas whispered.
“They’re fine.”
“They shouldn’t see this.”
From the doorway Mara said, “We’ve seen people die before.”
Daniel looked back sharply.
“On television.”
Thomas laughed weakly and immediately coughed.
Daniel knew what was happening. Human bodies failed quickly. Every vampire child learned that.
He went to the kitchen and opened the medical refrigerator.
Six vials.
The smell reached him immediately—his own kind, concentrated, alive in a way cattle blood never smelled.
His fingers moved toward one.
This is why they hunted us.
The thought arrived in his father’s voice.
Families dragged into daylight. Vampires chained and drained because frightened old humans wanted another year. Hunters who discovered that death could be delayed and then found themselves unable to stop delaying it.
Thomas had traveled with those people.
Daniel remembered the farmhouse. The parents. The girl saying please.
His hand stopped.
Thomas was old.
Humans became old.
Humans died.
Daniel began closing the refrigerator.
Then he remembered what Thomas had told him weeks earlier.
Blood was the worst of it.
Thomas knew exactly what the six vials could do. He had lived in Daniel’s house for months and spent entire days alone while they rested behind sealed doors.
He had never touched them.
Daniel closed the door anyway.
Mara entered the kitchen.
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
“Can you help him?”
Daniel didn’t answer.
Her eyes moved toward the refrigerator.
“You can.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
“Why?”
“Because people like him killed people like us for what’s in there.”
“He didn’t kill the girl.”
“He helped find her family.”
“I know.”
“He left her.”
“I know.”
Daniel’s voice rose. “You don’t know.”
The kitchen went still.
Mara did not back away.
“No. I know exactly what you told me.”
“My job is keeping you alive. You and Elias. What happens if I’m wrong about him?”
“You’ve already been wrong about him.”
Daniel looked at her.
“You thought the stick by his camp was for killing vampires. You thought he was watching Elias because he wanted to hurt him.”
“He could have been.”
“But he wasn’t.”
“You thought bringing him inside was dangerous.”
“It was.”
“Maybe.”
Her voice softened.
“But he could have hurt us every night you were at work.”
Daniel said nothing.
Mara glanced toward the stairs.
“He ran away from that girl.”
Daniel waited.
“He didn’t run away from us.”
Then she left him alone in the kitchen.
Through the floor and walls, Daniel could hear Thomas’s failing heart.
He stood there for a long time.
Then he opened the refrigerator.
Thomas recognized the vial immediately.
“No.”
“You’re dying.”
“That happens.”
“Probably tonight.”
Thomas managed a weak smile. “You have a terrible bedside manner.”
Daniel held out the vial.
Thomas did not take it.
“That blood is why people like me hunted people like you.”
“I know.”
“I helped them.”
Daniel nodded.
“You don’t owe me this.”
“No.”
Thomas looked at the vial.
Some part of Daniel still wanted to put it away.
Instead he pressed the vial into Thomas’s hand.
“I want my children to wake up tomorrow and find you here.”
Thomas looked toward the doorway, where Mara and Elias were watching.
His eyes filled.
“I don’t deserve that.”
“That isn’t why I’m doing it.”
Daniel kept his hand beneath the vial until Thomas took it.
“Drink.”
Thomas drank.
There was no miracle. His hair remained white. The years stayed in his face.
But Daniel heard the change before anyone else could see it. The frantic rhythm beneath Thomas’s ribs steadied one beat at a time.
By the following dusk he was sitting at the kitchen table complaining that Daniel had overcooked the potatoes. Within a week he was repairing things again, though more slowly now.
One evening Daniel opened the medical refrigerator.
Five vials remained.
The empty space looked smaller than the decision had felt.
He closed the door.
Months later Daniel sat at the foot of Elias’s bed shortly before sunrise, telling another old story.
The hunter in this one carried a stake made from ash.
Mara paused outside the doorway.
“Thomas says ash is terrible for stakes. It splits.”
Daniel looked at her. “Why are you discussing stakes with Thomas?”
“He was fixing the fence.”
“That does not answer my question.”
Elias laughed.
Daniel sighed. “Fine. Oak.”
Mara smiled and disappeared down the hall.
Elias waited until her footsteps faded.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Were humans really monsters?”
Daniel looked toward the dark window.
Once, the answer would have been easy.
“Some were.”
Elias seemed satisfied.
Downstairs, a cabinet opened.
Thomas was awake early.
Daniel found him on the back porch with two chairs angled toward the trees. The eastern sky had begun to pale, though sunrise was still a little way off.
“How was the story?” Thomas asked.
“Interrupted constantly.”
“Good.”
Daniel sat beside him.
From upstairs came the faint sounds of Mara and Elias settling in for the day. Thomas wrapped both hands around a mug that smelled like coffee. The air carried the sharp edge of approaching morning.
Neither of them spoke for a while.
Beyond the trees, the darkness slowly thinned.
They still had a few minutes.
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