Chapter 1 · The Regular Human (1)

In a city with nine million secrets, I was the least interesting thing in the room. I liked it that way. You don't survive Harrowgate by being memorable. You survive it by being the girl nobody looks at twice — the one in the damp apron who hands you your oat milk latte with the foam slightly wrong, who says "have a good one" like she means it, who clocks out at midnight and walks home through the rain because the bus fare is a luxury item now.

My name is Lynn Voss. Twenty-two. One semester away from a degree in "what was I thinking." Two months behind on rent. Three dollars and forty-two cents in my checking account. And a cold, hollow thing in the middle of my chest that I've had since I was six years old, that I have never once mentioned to a single soul, and that I am extremely normal about.

That's the thing about secrets. The big ones sit so close to your skin you stop feeling them. Mine has been sitting there for sixteen years, patient as a stone. I have a therapist appointment next Tuesday to talk about my "avoidant patterns." She thinks I have commitment issues. Technically true. She doesn't know I'm afraid of commitment because every time I get close to someone, something in my chest goes cold and tells me they're going to die.

Anyway. Normal problems. Normal girl. Nothing to see here.

The night it all went wrong was a Tuesday in late October, the kind of Harrowgate night that makes the city look like it's crying. Rain came down in sheets. The Hollow Bean had been dead since eight, which meant I'd spent four hours wiping the same counter, pretending not to notice Mr. Ashworth watching me from the back office with his one good eye and his ancient, knowing smile.

Mr. Ashworth is seventy-something and owns the café. I've worked there for three years and I still don't know his first name. I don't think anyone does. He's the kind of old man who appears behind you silently, who knows your order before you open your mouth, who once told me — apropos of absolutely nothing — that "the good ones never knock, girl. Remember that." I'd assumed he meant men. Now I'm not so sure.

"Lynn." He came out of the back at 11:58, coat already on, which was weird because he never leaves before me. "Lock up and go straight home tonight."

"Boss, I always go straight home. I can't afford to go anywhere else."

"That's the spirit." He patted my shoulder. His hand was cold — colder than the rain. "And if anything knocks on your window tonight, don't open it."

I laughed. He didn't.

"Not even if it's handsome," he added, and went out into the dark.

I locked the door, counted the till, and told myself Mr. Ashworth had been watching too many late-night ghost shows. Old people and their anxiety. My generation has student debt; his generation had the Cold War. We both cope badly.

The rain doubled down on the walk home. My apartment is twenty minutes from the café — a studio above a 24-hour laundromat that smells like fabric softener and existential despair. The stairs creak. The radiator makes sounds like a dying whale. The landlord, Mr. Demetriou, is a man who believes "goodwill" is a kind of cheese and "maintenance" is a word he read once in a magazine.

I was two blocks from home when I heard the crash.

Alley on my left, between the bodega and the shuttered taxidermy shop (Harrowgate's finest, now closed; the cats are gone, which the neighborhood agrees is for the best). A trash can went over. Something big moved back there — I heard it breathing, wet and ragged, like a dog that's been drowning.

My legs made a unilateral decision to keep walking. I have excellent instincts. My instincts have kept me alive through three years of closing shifts, one armed robbery, and an unfortunate incident with a pigeon. The cold thing in my chest stirred, the way it does when I'm near a hospital or a funeral home or my ex-boyfriend's poetry.

<em>Keep walking,</em> it said. <em>Do not look.</em>

I looked.

There was a man in the alley.

He was huge — the kind of huge that makes you understand why humans invented architecture. Six-foot-something of lean, dangerous muscle, half-collapsed against the wall, one hand pressed to his side. Even in the dark I could see the blood. It was black. It moved — no, it didn't move, I was imagining it — but it was black, blacker than blood has any right to be, and the skin around the wound was veined like cracked marble, like the wound itself was trying to spread.

He raised his head and looked at me.

And the cold thing in my chest — the thing that has sat there silent and patient for sixteen years — sat up. It looked at him the way a guard dog looks at a wolf.

<em>Danger,</em> it said, with more feeling than it had ever shown. <em>RUN.</em>

"Are you —" My voice cracked. "Are you okay? Jesus. Do you need an ambulance?"

"No," he said. His voice was low and rough, like gravel being dragged over a tombstone. "No ambulance. No police. No —" He coughed, and more black blood came up. "— anything that asks questions."

Great. A dying man with a criminal record and a distrust of authority. In this economy, who could blame him.