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Dedication

For Richard Burgis, with love. Here’s to wonderful fathers!

Good Neighbors

It wasn’t so bad living next door to a notorious necromancer, most of the time. The cottage came dirt-cheap for me and my father because of the location. Of course, the locals all whispered and shook their heads when they saw our wagon, piled high with luggage, rolling through their town along the way. A few kindly souls even ventured out to warn us, that first day, in case we’d somehow mistaken that black monstrosity of a castle down the road for a mere eccentric’s folly.

Once they’d accepted that they couldn’t talk us out of moving in, though, they left us alone, shaking their heads even more dolefully—but moving quickly, too, to get safely behind their high town walls before darkness arrived. That was when the great doors of the castle would open wide to let the bats and the hellhounds and the undead minions stream out unchecked.

Luckily, I’ve never cared to go rambling at night. I have better things to do when the sun goes down, mostly involving small tools, a set of good gas lamps, and my own private workshop. I’m only too happy not to have any shock-able neighbors peering in through the windows as I do them.

In my new home, iron horseshoes planted three feet from the windows kept the undead minions and so forth at bay, leaving me to putter away, safely undisturbed, for the first three and a half months after moving in. Dad worked happily through his latest puzzle book, and the seasons shifted from summer to autumn outside the iron-laced windows of our cottage.

But some things can’t be ignored after all…and when I stepped out of the cottage one morning to find a moaning, human-shaped creature lying on the grass beyond our horseshoes, his horribly mismatched legs separated and twitching on the ground beside him, I realized I couldn’t ignore our sinister neighbor any longer.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Hissing with frustration, I turned and stomped back inside, forgetting all about the nice hike down to the swamp that I had planned to get my ideas moving for the day.

Dad was still sitting at the kitchen table, working out a particularly tricky acrostic. He didn’t look up as I passed him the first time, but when I came stomping back out of my workshop and started back towards the front door, carrying a clanking bag of tools by my side, he raised his eyebrows. “Working in the sunshine for once, Mia?”

“Not by choice.” I sighed.

By rights, I knew I ought to go hammer on the gates of that ugly castle until some responsible party came out to take care of the problem for me…but whoever had created that poor creature had nothing responsible about them.