Before Dawn

Hattie gets there in nine minutes, in pajama pants and her aunt Rosa's bathrobe, holding a baseball bat.

"I said text me every half hour," she says, and then she sees the seascape and goes white. "Oh, Ava. Oh, no. Dr. Pruitt's boat."

"Dr. Pruitt's boat," you agree, and that's when you start shaking.

She makes you sit on the stairs to your little apartment over the studio. She calls the police, who say they'll send someone "when a unit frees up," which in Savannah on a Friday night means sometime next week. She mops up the solvent with a towel and her own bare feet in rubber boots, swearing in two languages.

"Who did this?" she says. "Who even knew you were going there tonight?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know who did this, or you don't know what you're not telling me?"

Hattie has been your best friend since grad school. She was the first person you came out to, at twenty, in a dorm laundry room at two in the morning, and she said obviously, babe and handed you her fabric softener. She knows your face better than you do.

"The client," you say carefully, "has enemies."

"Enemies. Like a lawsuit?"

"Like a lawsuit," you lie, for the second time tonight, for the same woman.

By four in the morning the studio is mostly upright and Hattie is asleep on your couch upstairs, bat across her chest like a knight on a tomb. You can't sleep. You sit on the bottom step with the door propped open for the air, staring at the ruined seascape.

You don't hear the car. You just look up and she's there.

Vesna Blackwood stands on the cobblestones outside your door in a long black coat, the lane's one streetlight making a halo of her hair. She doesn't come closer. She stands at the threshold of your studio like it's the edge of a cliff.

"May I come in?"

You blink at her. "Is that a thing? Do you need me to invite you?"

"No," she says. "Nothing stops me from walking in. I'm asking anyway."

Something in your chest unclenches a little. "Yes. Come in."

She steps over the threshold and stops dead in front of the easel. The black letters are still wet, still dripping onto the floor. You watch her read them. Her face doesn't change, but the temperature in the room seems to drop five degrees.

"Barnaby told me you walked," she says.

"Barnaby is a snitch."

"Barnaby is a professional." She turns. "I'm sorry, Ava. This is my fault. The man who made me is called Teodor. He has people in this city. Mortal people, who work by day when I can't. They followed you from my door."

"He wants it unfinished."

"He wants it unfinished until Halloween, and then he wants it in his hands." She looks at the slashed canvas. "This is a warning. They don't usually give more than one."

"Great," you say. "Cool. Love that for me."

She almost smiles. Then she looks down, and you see her right hand is bleeding. A clean cut across her palm, dark red.

"What happened to your hand?"

"I came through the window of a man on Bull Street who was standing under an oak tree three hours ago." She flexes her fingers. "He won't be following anyone for a while. He's alive. I'm not a butcher. But he was very surprised."

"You're bleeding."

"It'll close by dusk."

"Sit down," you say, and point at your stool, and to your amazement, she does.

You get the first aid kit from under the sink. It's mostly for solvent burns and scalpel slips. You kneel in front of her and take her hand, cool and heavy, and turn it palm up under the work lamp. The cut is already narrower than it should be. You clean it anyway, slowly, the way you'd clean a flake of gold leaf off a frame. She watches you the whole time.

"You're very calm," she says.

"I'm a conservator. Panicking near priceless things is frowned on."

"Am I priceless?"

You look up to answer and realize how close you are. Kneeling between her knees. Her hand in both of yours. Her face just above you in the lamplight, every line of it so beautiful it's almost rude.

Her eyes have changed.

The gray is gone. They've gone pale silver, bright as coins, and her lips have parted, and you can see, just at the edges, the tips of two very sharp teeth.

You don't move. Neither does she. You can hear your own pulse, loud as a drum in the quiet room, and you can tell from the way her gaze drops to your throat that she can hear it too.

"Let go of my hand," Vesna says, very quietly. "Slowly."

You let go.

She stands, in one fluid motion that is far too fast to be human, and suddenly she's across the studio by the open door, her back to you, one hand braced on the frame. Her shoulders rise and fall once, like someone remembering how to breathe.

"I apologize," she says, without turning around. "That was unforgivable."

"It was—" You don't know what it was. Your heart is still pounding and it isn't entirely fear. "You didn't do anything."

"I wanted to." The honesty of it hits you like cold water. "I haven't fed properly in some time. That's not your problem. It's mine." She finally looks back at you, and her eyes are gray again, shadowed. "Barnaby will be outside your door at seven tomorrow evening. He'll drive you wherever you go, every night. If you've changed your mind, tell him, and he'll bring you a check for the full amount and you'll never see me again. I won't hold it against you. I'd think you were wise."

The sky over the carriage-house roofs has started going pale at the edges. Vesna glances at it, and something in her body goes tense and listening, like a deer hearing a car.

"I have to go," she says. "Lock the door behind me."

And she's gone, her coat a dark blur down the lane, before you can say anything at all.

You lock the door. You stand with your back against it. Upstairs, Hattie is snoring. Outside, a bird starts singing, ridiculously cheerful.

Your phone buzzes on the workbench.

Unknown number. A text.