Her parents must have kept a first aid kit somewhere. Margot began looking through the kitchen cupboards. She found eight kinds of napkins, three sets of wineglasses, fancy plates and plain plates, multiple strainers, and baking tins in almost every shape imaginable. Her parents had not been fond of throwing things out apparently.

In the cupboard above the microwave, she found a large, clear glass bottle. Its label had been written on with shaky pen: Holy Water. It was empty.

Margot didn’t know what to think of that. She replaced the bottle and moved on. A box of gauze strips was hidden behind stacks of paper bowls, and she patched two over her leg. At the very least, it would keep her from getting spots of blood on her sheets.

She wasn’t going to risk leaving her familiar routes to have a shower that night. Worst-case scenario, she could save it for the first motel she stopped off at on the way home.

Home. It feels strange to call another place that now.

She sagged, the scraps from the gauze clutched in one hand as she stared down at her patched leg.

She could still return to her old apartment. Her job would most likely take her back, as long as they hadn’t found a replacement yet. She could slot back into her old life, probably with less effort than she even anticipated.

So why did it feel so much like failure?

Stop. Whatever’s happening here isn’t your problem. You just need to get out, get somewhere safe.

As she packed the gauze away, she couldn’t keep her mind from returning to that thought again and again. Not your problem. But it was, wasn’t it? This was her house. Her land. They might not feel like it, but her blood had lived here for eleven generations before her.

And she would be the first to abandon it.

Margot kept her dinner simple. Her stomach wasn’t easy, and everything tasted slightly wrong, the way it would when she got sick with a cold. No matter how much hot coffee she drank, she still felt cold.

She hunched at the table, chewing a piece of buttered toast. Her eyes landed on the small, leather-bound book. After everything that had happened, she’d almost forgotten about it. Margot pulled it up beside her plate.

It was her first time seeing it in proper light. The shape was warped, the pages rippled with moisture absorbed over a very long time. The leather spine had come free when she pulled it from its nook and now the stitching was visible—gray threads, heavy with dirt, fraying and splitting out of the fragile paper. She opened the cover. It came up without much trouble, but the first page was blank—no title or author name.