On the quiet road, Michael walked around to the back of the van, thinking.

The woman had fought him. He was the barghest, he was the wolf, but she had pulled a boxcutter, of all things, from her bag and slashed at him with it, tearing through his thin shirt and across the skin underneath. It had only taken him a moment to strike it from her hands, and she only managed to cut him that once, but … What did it mean, if the barghest bled? Had he chosen the wrong one? Was that possible?

In another, more logical part of his mind, Michael wondered if people had been paying attention to the news lately, and had noted the number of women going missing in the area. Perhaps this one wasn’t the only girl to go out walking with a blade in her handbag.

He had had the sense to pick the boxcutter up and take it with him, at least.

Casting a glance back down the road to make sure there were no lights approaching, he opened the back doors of the van. Her body was a crumpled form in the back, her hands and her face pale shapes in the gloom. One of her shoes had come off, and her foot was thrust out at him. In the struggle, her tights had been laddered all over.

This was all wrong, of course. The rules were very clear about this—he never brought their bodies back to Fiddler’s Mill. It was unthinkable. The fact that he had come this far with it only demonstrated that the entire evening was a mistake, that there was something discordant in the night air. Abruptly, he wasn’t the barghest at all, he wasn’t the Wolf, he was just a man with a knife and a sleeve turning stiff and tacky with his own blood. If he wasn’t the wolf, then was he anything at all?

He slammed the backdoors shut and got back into the van. He drove. Once he was back within his woods, he knew that his mind would clear. When he walked back over his graves, and felt their hearts singing there, things would seem normal again.

But when he got back to Fiddler’s Mill, he found his way thwarted; the young people had sprawled their dwellings over one of the main access roads. He could see their lights and hear their voices, and a slow kind of panic began to grow in his chest; the panic of a prey animal, realizing that they had made a mistake, that they were trapped. He couldn’t get to his woods, he couldn’t get to the House. He was bleeding. He had brought a body back with him. This had to be where it all ended.

Michael was leaning over the steering wheel, convinced that the walls were closing in on him, that he could smell the musty cupboard and feel his sister’s hands taking hold of him, when a white face appeared at the open window.