Hollow Night

On Halloween night, Hollow Hill closes Tallow Street to cars and the whole town comes out in the dark.

Paper lanterns strung between the oaks. A brass band of skeletons, which is to say, actual skeletons, playing actual brass. Witches selling charms off folding tables, a ghost tour that is mostly ghosts touring the living, kids and grown-ups in costumes so good you can't tell who's wearing one. Hollow Night, they call it. The one night a year nobody has to pretend.

The Crooked Kettle's stall sits on the sidewalk in front of the shop under a striped awning. Liesbeth's half has twelve kinds of tea in glass dispensers. Your half has a hand-lettered sign that Liesbeth wrote in about four seconds: NIGHT PASTRIES. MADE BY A VAMPIRE. NO GARLIC, OBVIOUSLY.

"That's going to scare people," you said, when she hung it.

"That's going to sell," she said. "This is Hollow Hill. Trust me."

She was right. By ten o'clock you're out of pumpkin-cardamom knots. By eleven you're out of black sesame croissants. You've been baking for two nights straight with the Tasting Tea on your tongue, Liesbeth reluctantly brewing a pot every evening and pretending it's for quality control, and it shows.

"Your hands," says a witch in a velvet hat, biting into your last apple-brown-butter tart and moaning. "Marry me."

"She's busy," says Liesbeth, without looking up from the tea.

The witch laughs and leaves a twenty in the jar.

You glance over. Liesbeth is pouring a cup of something purple with complete concentration. There's a pencil in her hair and a lantern behind her head, and the light catches in her curls like it's trying to stay there. Half the people who stop at the stall stop for the tea. The other half stop to stare at her and then forget what they were going to order. You watched a vampire in a top hat buy three cups of chamomile without blinking.

"What?" she says, catching you.

"Nothing."

"You're staring, lodger."

"You're very pretty when you're being rude to customers."

Her pen stops. Two spots of color come up on her cheekbones. "Rule three," she says to the cash box.

"That's not falling. That's an observation."

"Observe less."

At 11:30 a black car pulls up at the end of the street, where cars aren't allowed, and nobody stops it.

The woman who gets out is wearing a camel coat over a black dress and heels that should not be possible on cobblestones. Glossy black bob, sharp as a paper cut. A red mouth. She walks down the middle of the fair like it's a runway and everyone else is the audience, and people move out of her way without knowing why.

She stops in front of your stall.

"Liesbeth," she says pleasantly.

"Mariska," says Liesbeth, not pleasantly at all.

"My offer stands. It's gone up, actually. I'm feeling generous." The woman slides a card across the counter. MARISKA ARBOGAST. ARBOGAST HOLDINGS. "The building, the land lease, the whole leaning mess. You'll never have to fix that roof again."

"I like the roof."

"The roof has a tree growing out of it."

"The tree pays rent." Liesbeth tears the card in half without looking at it. "Go home, Mariska."

Mariska's dark eyes slide sideways and land on you. They stay.

"Well," she says. "Who's this?"

"Nobody," says Liesbeth.

"I'm Ava," you say at the same time, and Mariska smiles, slow and delighted, like you're a dessert she didn't know was on the menu.

"The vampire baker. I heard. Everyone's talking about you." She picks up the last pumpkin knot, which wasn't for sale because you were saving it, and takes a small bite. Her eyebrows lift. "Oh, you're good. Wasted here. If you ever want a kitchen with a door that closes all the way, call me." She leans in, and she smells like expensive smoke. "Or if you just want to call me."

"She doesn't," Liesbeth says.

"Can she not speak for herself?"

"She has fangs and a mortgage-free room. She's fine."

Mariska laughs, and it's genuinely lovely, and you hate that it's lovely. "Happy Halloween, Liesbeth. Ask your tenant if she's read the fine print." She turns and walks back to her impossible car.

You turn to Liesbeth. "What fine print?"

Liesbeth is wiping down a tea dispenser that is already clean. "Mariska's been trying to buy this house since we were kids. She thinks it's worth something."

"Is it?"

"It's worth something to me." She throws the rag down. "Can you watch the stall? I need more cups from the back."

You don't get to watch the stall, because a man in a rumpled cardigan steps out of the crowd and says, "Oh, thank God. It's you."

You know his face. You would know it anywhere. Gray-eyed and tired and handsome in an old-movie way, with a pocket watch chain across his vest. The last time you saw that face it was bent over your neck in an alley.

You grab a bread knife.

"No, no, please." He holds up both hands. "I'm Ptolemy. Ptolemy Fairlamb. I've been looking for you for a week. I went to the bakery, the man there was very rude, he threw a baguette at me. I'm so sorry. I'm so dreadfully sorry. I had not fed in nine days, I was delirious, I would never, I have never in two hundred years—"

"You bit me."

"I did. Yes. I did that." He looks so miserable that your grip on the knife loosens. "I registered you at the Office. I have money. I have pamphlets. I have so many pamphlets. May I please, at some point, help?"

"Not tonight," you say faintly. "Tonight I'm selling tarts."

"Of course." He bows, an actual bow. "I own a laundromat on Cistern Street. Spin Cycle. Open all night. Please come." He backs into the crowd, still apologizing.

You find Liesbeth in the narrow alley beside the house, stacking paper cups out of a box.

"Your maker is a very polite man," you tell her.

"I saw. He looked like a sad librarian." She rips the tape on the next box with a box cutter. "Did he hurt you?"

"Eight days ago he did."

"Want me to hex him? I could give him hiccups for a decade."

You laugh, and she glances at you, and the box cutter slips.

It's nothing. A nick on the pad of her finger. A bead of red, bright as a holly berry.

The smell hits you like a hand to the chest.

Your gums ache, then burn, and your canines slide down into points before you can stop them. You clap your hand over your mouth. You stumble back into the brick wall. Every part of you is suddenly, horribly aware of her: the pulse in her throat, her heartbeat, the heat coming off her skin in the cold air.

"Go," you manage through your fingers. "Liesbeth. Go inside."

She doesn't go inside.

She sticks her finger in her mouth, sucks it clean, and wipes it on her cardigan. Then she steps right up to you, close, closer, until the toes of her boots touch yours.

"Let me see," she says.

"No."

"Ava. Let me see."

Slowly, you take your hand away.

She looks at your fangs. She doesn't flinch. She doesn't step back. She lifts her hand, the one that's not bleeding, and lays her thumb very lightly against your bottom lip, just under the point of one fang, like she's checking whether it's real.

Her eyes are green-gold and enormous and very close.

"Rule one," she says softly.

It doesn't sound like a rule. It sounds like a dare.

Her thumb is still on your lip. Her breath is on your mouth. She tilts her head an inch, and you tilt yours, and the space between you is the width of a single held breath...

Every church bell in Hollow Hill starts ringing midnight.

Liesbeth jerks back like she's been burned. She stares at you. Then she turns and is gone, through the side door, and you hear her boots go up the stairs two at a time.

You make it up to your room. The window is gone again. The velvet curtains are back.

You sit on the edge of the bed with your fangs still out and your hands shaking and the taste of nothing in your mouth.

Your phone buzzes on the quilt.

A text. From a number you saved yesterday as Landlord (Rude).

It starts with a moon, a teacup and a single drop of blood.