One Listing

The thing nobody tells you about being a vampire is how much paperwork there is.

"Form N-12," says the ghost behind the counter, sliding it through the window. Her hand goes through the glass. The form doesn't. "Proof of Nocturnal Status. Then N-14, Blood Ration Application, in triplicate. Then we talk housing."

"I don't have a pen," you say.

Winnaretta Gallowglass, Clerk, Hollow Hill Office of Nocturnal Affairs, according to her nameplate, adjusts her cat-eye glasses. She is wearing pearls and a cardigan you can see the wall through. She died in 1987 and has clearly never forgiven anyone for it.

"Dear," she says, "you have fangs. Make do."

You make do with the pen chained to the counter. It's 11:40 at night on October 29. The office is a converted funeral parlor on Wick Street with flickering lights and a vending machine that sells only tomato juice and something labeled PLASMA (O NEG): ASK CLERK. Behind you, a werewolf in a business suit is filling out a dog license application with enormous dignity.

Eight days ago, you were a pastry chef. Second in command at Oberholt Patisserie, laminating dough at four in the morning, sugar in your hair, a burn on your thumb from the caramel. You walked out the back door after a closing shift and found a man collapsed in the alley, gray as old dishwater, and you knelt down to help him.

You remember his eyes opening. You remember him saying I'm so sorry before he did it.

Then you remember waking up on the alley bricks with the sky going pink, and the first sunbeam hitting your arm like a blowtorch.

Chef Raimund Oberholt fired you two days later, after you fainted into a tray of éclairs at 6:52 a.m. I need a pastry chef who can survive a sunrise. Your landlord found the blood bags in your fridge on day five. Zainab has been letting you sleep in her coat closet, which is very kind and smells like her ex-boyfriend's hockey gear.

"Housing," Winnaretta says, when the triplicate is stamped. She opens a drawer. She pulls out a binder labeled UNDEAD-FRIENDLY RENTALS, HOLLOW HILL PARISH.

It contains one page.

"That's it?" you ask.

"Hollow Hill is a very old town, dear. Old towns have very old opinions." She taps the listing with a translucent nail. "13 Tallow Street. Spare room above the Crooked Kettle. The owner is a hedge witch. She's turned down every applicant we've sent for six years."

"Then why are you sending me?"

Winnaretta peers at you over her glasses. "Because I like your face, Ava. And because the house hasn't met you yet."

Tallow Street runs downhill toward the river, all gas lamps and live oaks and wet cobblestones. The houses lean on each other like tired friends. Number 13 leans the most.

It's a narrow brownstone, four stories, every window a slightly different size, as if the house was built by people who disagreed about everything. The ground floor glows. Hand-lettered gold on the window: THE CROOKED KETTLE. TEAS, TISANES & SMALL MERCIES. OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT. Dried herbs hang in bundles behind the glass. A black cat sits in the window display between two teapots and looks at you like you owe it money.

Over the door, someone has nailed a braid of garlic.

You sneeze three times on the doorstep. Your eyes water. A hive blooms on your wrist.

"Seriously?" you say to the garlic.

The door opens before you can knock, and the most beautiful woman you have ever seen says, "No."

You actually take a step back.

She's tall, leaning in the doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder. Copper hair, a lot of it, wild curls with two pencils and what looks like a chopstick stabbed through the knot. Freckles everywhere. Green-gold eyes, the color of tea held up to a lamp. A wide mouth that seems built for smirking and is currently doing it at you. She's wearing a moss-green cardigan over a black slip dress and about nine rings, and there's ink on her fingers and something like lavender on her sleeve.

She looks you up and down. She takes in the hives, the watering eyes, the duffel bag, the very faint point of your canines.

"Vampire," she says. "No."

"I haven't said anything yet."

"You're wearing an Office of Nocturnal Affairs visitor sticker, you're sneezing at my garlic, and you're standing in my doorway at five to midnight with everything you own in a gym bag." She folds her arms. "Winnaretta sent you. Winnaretta sends me one a year because she thinks it's funny. The answer is no."

"I'm very clean," you say. "I'm quiet. I bake."

"Wonderful. Bake somewhere else."

"There is nowhere else. You're the only listing in the binder." Your voice cracks, which is humiliating. "Please. I was turned eight days ago by a man who apologized while he did it. I lost my job, my apartment, and my ability to eat my own focaccia. I've been sleeping in a closet with a hockey bag. I just need a room with no windows."

Something flickers in those green-gold eyes. It's gone fast.

"I'm Liesbeth Haverlock," she says. "This is my house. And I don't rent to people who are going to make my life complicated."

"I'm Ava. I'm not complicated."

She laughs, short and surprised, like you've startled it out of her. "Everyone's complicated, lodger. Go home."

She starts to close the door.

The door doesn't close.

It stops, a foot open, as if it's hit something. Liesbeth pushes. Nothing. She frowns at the hinge. Behind her, deep inside the house, you hear a sound like a sigh, and then a long, slow creak, like a staircase stretching.

Then, somewhere above you, another door bangs open.

Liesbeth goes very still.

"What was that?" you ask.

"Nothing." She's staring up the narrow staircase behind the shop counter. "That was the spare room."

"Did it just open by itself?"

"Yes."

"Does it do that a lot?"

"No," says Liesbeth Haverlock, quietly. "It's never done that."

The cat jumps down from the window, trots past your ankles, and sits on your duffel bag like a paperweight. It begins to purr.

Liesbeth looks at the cat. She looks at the stairs. She looks at you for a long, uncomfortable moment, the kind of look that feels like being read.

"Pickwick," she says to the cat, "you traitor." Then, to you, with the air of someone swallowing a whole lemon: "Fine. Come in. Wipe your feet. Don't touch anything that's glowing."

The shop smells like bergamot and woodsmoke. Jars line the walls to the ceiling, labeled in looping handwriting: Smoked Orange. Hush. Fennel & Honey. For Liars. For Grief, Light. For Grief, Heavy. A copper kettle steams on a ring. The floor slopes so much that a marble on the counter would roll straight into the till.

She takes the garlic down from over the door without comment. She hands you a cup of something gold that stops your sneezing in two sips.

Then she pulls a sheet of thick paper from under the counter, uncaps a fountain pen with her teeth, and writes fast, in the same looping hand as the jars.

"Rent's due Fridays. Cash or baked goods, I'll decide which. You get the room under the eaves. It has no windows, the house took them out in 1974 for reasons it hasn't shared." She turns the paper around. "Sign."

You read it. It's a lease. It's very short and very rude. One clause says Tenant shall not alphabetize the tea.

You sign your name at the bottom.

The ink of your signature shimmers. Then, under it, in a hand that is not Liesbeth's, new words begin to write themselves, slow and black, as if someone invisible is holding the pen.

TENANT SHALL VACATE BY THE WINTER SOLSTICE.

Liesbeth makes a small sound.

When you look up, every bit of color has drained out of her face.