Chapter 4 · The House of Teeth (1)

The window came in like it had been shot out of a cannon.

Shower of glass. Cold October air. The Pale Stranger's voice, still smiling, still coming, still somehow in my apartment even though I'd heard Kael break his neck three hours ago. "You can't kill what doesn't die, little lord," it said, and I believed it, because the thing climbing through my window was wearing the Pale Stranger's suit and the Pale Stranger's too-white smile, but underneath the suit it was not the Pale Stranger. It was something taller. Something that bent the wrong way at the shoulders.

My first coherent thought was: *my security deposit.*

My second thought was: *I just refilled that window.*

My third thought was: *Lynn, you absolute genius, you brought a supervillain home from an alley and now he's going to get you killed over a studio above a laundromat that smells like wet dryer lint.*

Kael moved.

I've seen him move before — through the café door, across my kitchen, around my couch when he thought I was asleep. But I have never seen him move like this. He was between me and the window before the last shard of glass finished falling, and the gold was in his eyes, and his teeth were wrong, and he made a sound in his chest that was not a growl and not a roar but the thing a wolf makes when it knows it is about to die.

"Behind me," he said.

"I'm not —"

"BEHIND ME."

I got behind him. I have never been more professional about anything in my life.

The Pale Stranger — the thing wearing the Pale Stranger — stepped fully into my apartment, and more came behind it. Three. Four. Five. They came through the window like it was a doorway, peeling themselves out of the dark at the end of the fire escape, and they were all wearing human coats and they were all smiling with teeth that did not fit their faces.

"House of teeth," Kael said, very quiet. I felt the words more than I heard them. "Lilith's vanguard. She sent her whole mouth."

"Good for her," I said. My voice was steady. I was proud of my voice. My hands were shaking like a maraca. "Kael. Love you. We have a one-bedroom. They don't all fit."

"The Keeper wakes," said the lead thing, and it tilted its head, and the smile stretched. "We've been waiting for you, little flame. The Queen sends her regards. She'd like her wall back."

"The what," I said.

It lunged.

I am going to be honest with you. I did not have a plan. I had a vague idea that I should duck, and a very specific memory of every action movie I'd ever watched where the plucky sidekick gets shot in the third act, and a cold thing in my chest that had stopped being cold about nine seconds ago.

The cold thing surged.

This was different from the café. This time I *let* it. This time I reached for it the way you reach for a light switch in a dark room — on purpose, deliberately, knowing what would happen — and the ember answered. It flared up my arms, out through my palms, hot and bright and angry, and I threw it.

I threw a wall of white fire at the first thing climbing through my window, and it screamed, and it burned, and it came apart like wet paper going up, and the rest of them stopped.

They stopped.

They looked at me.

They were afraid.

I had never, in my entire life, been the thing someone was afraid of. It should have been a revelation. It was mostly just inconvenient, because I still had four of them in my living room and my rent was still due on Friday and the ember in my chest was already starting to flicker like a dying phone battery.

"Kael," I said. " heads up. My superpower has a ten-percent battery."

"I see it." He was already moving. He was between me and the next one before it finished lunging, and his hand was around its throat, and there was a sound like tearing cloth, and the thing in the suit crumpled and didn't get up. "Lynn. Run."

"RUN WHERE. THIS IS A STUDIO."

"FIRE ESCAPE."

"The fire escape is rusty and I weigh —"

"LYNN."

I ran.

I made it to the fire escape. I made it down one flight. I made it to the landing outside Mrs. Kowalski's window, where I could see her television through the curtains — she was watching a baking competition, of course she was, the world was ending and Mrs. Kowalski was watching *a home-baking contest* — and then I heard the next thing come through the window behind me, and I felt it, the cold thing flaring up again against my will, and I turned and I threw again.

This one went wider. Less accurate. It clipped the stair railing instead of the target, and the railing melted, and the thing dove sideways, and I had a moment of very clear thought: *I just melted a city-owned railing. Mr. Demetriou is going to bill me.*

"Lynn!"

Kael was behind me. He had my hand. He was pulling me down the rest of the fire escape, three flights in two seconds, his grip iron and his eyes still gold and his face — his face was not the face I'd been living with for nine days. This was the face of something that had fought wars. This was the face of something that had lost them.

"Kael, the apartment —"

"The apartment is gone. I'm sorry."

"I had a lease. I had a *couch*."

"I'll buy you a better couch."

"You can't buy me a new security deposit, I had —"

"We have to move, Lynn."

We moved.

We moved through the back alley behind the laundromat, over a fence that I would have cried about two hours ago, into the next street, where Kael flagged down a taxi the way a hurricane flags down a tree. The driver took one look at Kael's face, one look at me, one look at the gold in Kael's eyes, and he did not ask questions. He did not even charge us. Kael gave him a hundred-dollar bill and the driver stared at it like it was radioactive and drove off without making change.