A Knock She Didn't Expect
307 Words
The knock came just after sunset, three sharp raps that didn't belong to either Cael's heavy fist or Soren's silent arrivals.
Mara opened the door cautiously, the grandmother's letter still folded in her back pocket where it had lived for two days straight.
A woman stood on her porch — sharp-eyed, professional, dressed like someone who worked a normal job in broad daylight. Nothing about her screamed danger. That, Mara was beginning to learn, was exactly the problem with dangerous people.
"Mara Voss." Not a question. "My name is Reyes. I'd like five minutes of your time."
"I don't know you."
"No," Reyes agreed easily. "But I know what you are, and I imagine that's been a fairly overwhelming discovery this week."
Mara's hand tightened on the door frame.
"I'm not wolf or vampire," Reyes continued, reading the wariness on her face accurately. "I'm something else entirely. The third thing nobody tells border town children about, because the wolves and vampires would rather you never knew we existed."
"What do you want?"
"To offer you something neither of them can," Reyes said. "A choice that doesn't require choosing a side at all."
Behind Reyes, parked at the curb, Mara could see a car with two more figures inside, watching the house with the patient stillness of people who had done this many times before.
"Five minutes," Reyes said again, softer now. "That's all I'm asking."
Mara looked past her toward the car, toward the equipment she could just make out through the windshield, toward the particular silver glint of something she didn't have a name for yet.
Every instinct in her body was screaming the same thing Soren's roses had screamed days earlier.
Something dangerous is standing on my porch.
She didn't close the door. But she didn't open it wider either.
"Talk," she said. "From there."
- Writer
