Don’t leave me here alone, she wanted to say. He was eyeing the house as if it were cursed. Even the horses swiveled their ears, pawing at the ground and kicking up plumes of snow.

Wren swallowed her reflexive, childish protest and instead waved limply. “Safe travels.”

“Thank you,” he said. “And good luck to you.”

He snapped the reins, the horses took off, and Wren was left alone.

She stood in the ankle-deep snow covering the garden, if it could be called a garden at all. It was little but a snarl of leafless branches encased in ice like strange laboratory specimens. Wren turned toward her new home with its frowning pediments and eaves that dripped with wicked icicles. The house seemed to stare back at her from the belvedere squatting on its scaled roof. It raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Someone was there, watching her. She could feel it. But the empty windows all gleamed black as a beetle’s wing in the moonlight.

How foolish, she scolded herself, to be afraid of a house. It was only the melted snow seeping into her boots. Nothing more than Basil’s strange behavior worming its way under her skin.

As the snowfall intensified, blotting out her vision and tangling in her hair, Wren carried her bags to the porch. A vaulted arch made of iron hooded the entryway to the imposing double doors, and knotted up in the metalwork ivy were anguished faces and snarling gargoyles. Gathering her nerve, she grabbed the iron knocker. It burned her bare hand with the bitter chill of it. She lifted it and let it fall with a dull bang deadened by the thick snow. Here, no sound traveled. She could scream if she wanted.

No one would hear her.

After a minute, the doors opened to reveal a woman of about twenty, cast in the glow of a candelabra. Four columns of flame burned steadily, barely quivering in the wind that pulled at Wren’s cloak. The woman’s eyes were concealed by the shadows pouring off her brow bone, but her gaze seared, hot as the wax drip, drip, dripping onto the worn floorboards in the rhythm of an intravenous infusion.

“Lord Lowry was expecting you hours ago.”

Such hospitality. “My apologies. The weather delayed us.”

The woman kept her gaze trained over Wren’s shoulder. Without another word, she took Wren’s bags from her hands and went inside. There was nothing to do but follow. Stepping over the threshold and into the fold of darkness felt something like being swallowed alive.