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Tightly. “Look. I’ve been following this guy for three days, and the pursuit already got me nearly killed last night. God knows what’s going to happen when I actually run into him.” Matt glanced down at his ax, at the keen edge of it, seeming even sharper in this cold. Despite his words, he had a pretty good idea what was going to happen. “I need to catch him before he kills anyone else.”
    “Who are you?” she said.
    He looked at her. She was lovely, standing there in the snow. He swallowed. “I’m the man who’s going to stop him. And that means I need to know what you know. If you know anything. If you aren’t just crazy.”
    “Maybe I am crazy.” An edge to her voice.
    He shook his head.
    “That’s what you’re thinking. She’s just some crazy bitch. Carries a knife almost as long as her forearm. Out on those docks with no reason to be. Almost kills you for rescuing her. Fucks a total stranger.”
    “Thought you said that didn’t happen.”
    She seized his shoulder, and he stopped, faced her. Her breath in the air between them. Her eyes cold with anger.
    “I’m not crazy,” she said.
    Matt glanced at her shoulder, but if there was any rot there, it was hidden beneath her coat. Was that what he’d seen? That she was harmless, but might kill in a burst of madness? That there was evil lurking within her but for now it was only the smallest germ, not the full, raging plague he’d seen rotting Richard Oslo’s face off?
    He took her hand in his, felt how small it was. How small she was. Despite himself, he blushed. She had felt… good… during the night. Small in all the right ways.
    “You’re not crazy,” he said. “God only knows what you are. I sure don’t. I wish you’d tell me.”
    She looked back at him for a long time without blinking or lowering her eyes. Then she swallowed. “Have to wait for the second date,” she said. Her hand left his, and she stepped past him. He watched her, standing with his ax in the snow.
    A few footsteps from him, she stopped. Cocked her head to one side. “That one,” she said.
    Ahead through the trees, the warm gold of a porch light against the kind of hulking shadow whose outlines were hidden by the dark but that could only be a house.
    “All right.” Dropped to a whisper. “Let’s do this.” Tightened his grip on the ax.

    There are different kinds of silence. There’s a silence that is a shared thing, a comfort. There is an uncomfortable silence between lovers, a silence loud as a hurricane wind, sweeping into each of their hearts and knocking everything loose from its place, tearing as it goes. There is the old, dead silence of a place long abandoned. And then there is the empty quiet that comes after the rasp of death in the throat.
    This house had that kind of silence.
    The windows of the house were dark, all but one upper room, probably a bedroom. He tested each step, putting his foot down, careful not to make the porch creak. Adette came upbehind him—on his left so as not to encumber his ax—and he could tell she was holding her breath.
    Matt placed his hand on the doorknob, gave her his “Are you ready?” look, saw her small nod. Her eyes wide.
    He turned the knob.
    Nothing. Locked.
    He let out his breath slowly. Of course it was locked. What reason anyone living had out here to lock their doors, who knew. A killer, on the other hand…
    “I don’t suppose you know how to pick a lock.” He mouthed the words, almost a whisper.
    Adette shook her head.
    So he could break the door, or knock. Matt considered the stout wood. Knock it was, then.
    But even as he lifted his left hand to rap at the door (his left, so that he could keep a tight grip on the ax in his right), the knob turned and the door swung open. Matt stopped with his hand half-raised, staring. All the breath sucked out of his body.
    The woman who stood there, silhouetted against the light from the hall—he knew her. He knew her. This was a woman he had spent years of