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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.

“Shh,” I whispered as I knelt down by him. His bleary eyes blinked helplessly up at me, yellowed and watery from the too-bright sun. His sickly-white skin was already starting to burn. “I’ll take care of this,” I promised him as I took out my sharpest knife, “and you’ll feel much better soon.”

I’d never leave a creature helpless and vulnerable on my own property, and there wasn’t a single craftswoman’s instinct in my body that would allow him to leave as mangled as he had arrived.

It took ages to get the measurements exactly right, what with all the distracting twitching. I wasn’t used to sealing together that kind of meaty matter, either. Once I was finally finished, though, he stood firmly on two feet once more, and if those feet didn’t match, well, at least the legs above them did. Now that they were evenly sized, he wouldn’t trip over them anymore, and my stitches—with a bit of extra help—were tight enough that even if something else made him stumble, they wouldn’t come loose and leave him helpless again.

By then, the exposed skin on his face and hands was peeling terribly, but he still shuffled eagerly before me, pawing at my hands and grunting as I put my tools away.

“Yes, well…” I patted his arm, forcibly resisting the impulse to check the stitching in his throat as well. “It was nothing. Really. Just go home now before you burn any worse, and don’t let anyone stitch you up so badly ever again.”

That was that, as far as I was concerned…but I should have known better from the start.

Wicked necromancers aren’t known for leaving mysteries alone.

An hour later, I had just returned from my invigorating hike down to the swamp and had a whole new pack of ideas all jostling for position in my head. I was busy scribbling notes as I heated a kettle on the stove when a sudden clatter sounded at the kitchen window and made me start.

Outrageously, when I looked up, I found that a sharp-eyed crow had bypassed every one of my protections just by tossing a hard pebble at the iron-framed glass above my mostly-ignored little window box. The moment the creature caught my eye, it opened its beak to let a piece of paper flutter to the ground just beyond my buried horseshoes.

Rude!

I pointed forcefully at the ugly scratch that it had left on our nice thick windowpane.

The crow flapped its wings and cawed even more forcefully back at me, kicking one clawed foot towards its waiting message.

Enough! I abandoned my kettle for the privacy of my own workshop. I’d dealt with more than enough of my neighbor’s intrusions for one day.

Luckily, Dad thought to turn off the stove before we had any more disasters. When I finally emerged to look for food, several busy hours later, I found him sitting on the sagging couch by the fireplace, holding that small slip of paper in his hands and studying it thoughtfully with his puzzle book and pencils set aside.

“How did that get in here?” I demanded.

He looked at me, calmly, over the rims of his spectacles. “So you’ve already seen our neighbor’s invitation?”

“Pah.” I rolled my eyes as I opened the lid of the cheerfully humming new icebox I’d created last month. There was more to its design than would have been easily explainable to anyone who’d insisted on examining it closely, but it looked ordinary enough from a distance to be safely stored in our windowed main rooms rather than hidden in my workshop. “You know I’m not interested in any social invitations—especially when their messenger damages our window to deliver them.”

“Hmm.” Dad’s skeptical tone made me glance back at him—only to find his gaze moving thoughtfully to the window and the grass outside, which I’d so carefully lined with iron horseshoes on our first day here. “Did you leave any path for him to knock on the front door?”

“What kind of a question is that?” The ice box lid hung open behind me as I swung around, a cold chill skating up my spine through my coveralls. “We moved out here to get away from nosy neighbors, remember? Or have you already forgotten…?”

My words trailed off into a horrific silence. Shame suffused me like toxic gas billowing up to overflow a beaker.

Of course he hadn’t forgotten. How could he?

I opened my mouth to apologize—but he shook his head, stopping me.

“Here.” He held out the slip of paper as he rose, metal supports shifting smoothly all along his legs. “You should at least read the invitation before you make any decision.”

Biting my lip, I took the paper from him.

Your presence is requested tonight at eight o’clock.

Ha, I thought. But I kept my mouth shut under Dad’s steady gaze.

He sighed as he looked up at me. “Even the strongest iron can’t keep the world out forever, you know.”

Maybe it couldn’t…but I could send a message of my own.

No one would ever hurt my family or our home again. The townsfolk nearby might all cower when those great gates swung open, but I never would. I knew how to send flying messengers, too…and wasn’t it useful that all of those respectable townsfolk hid behind their high walls at night?

They wouldn’t see a thing.

At eight o’clock on the dot, I was sitting comfortably in my workshop with a pot of fresh, hot tea before me as my cloud of mechanical messengers answered our neighbor’s invitation with a rapid-fire barrage of hard pebbles against every narrow window in the black castle’s upper walls. Every single piece of visible glass was hit at once with a pebble from my garden designed to leave a scratch exactly like the one left on my window earlier that day.

The answering howls of the castle’s denizens were so loud, they filtered all the way down the road, through the window-less walls of my workshop.

I smiled as I poured myself a cup of tea and settled back into work. Message received and acknowledged.

My perfect satisfaction lasted all the way until the next morning, when I looked out through the kitchen window.

“Unbelievable!”

There wasn’t one undead minion lying in sad pieces on the grass outside today. There were seven…and they were the most mismatched group imaginable, an appalling jumble of horrifically misassembled limbs.

That first one had obviously stumbled into my wards by accident. But for this many to arrive today? My neighbor must have sent them all against my wards on purpose, trying to overwhelm me with sheer numbers in punishment for rejecting his almighty summons.

The arrogance of it was breathtaking. Clearly, he had no idea of how strong my wards really were…but all the same, I couldn’t let these poor creatures pay the price. They’d already suffered enough.

Taking a deep, calming breath through my teeth, I turned towards my workshop to gather up my tools.

“You’d better bring your tea along with you,” said Dad, without bothering to look up from his puzzle book. “It’ll take you a bit longer this time—and it’ll do you good to work out in the sunshine for once.”

It took quite a bit longer, actually…and the next morning, there were even more.

As I looked around on that third morning at the dozens of twitching body parts scattered across our grass, all waiting to be evened out and reassembled, I told myself that I should feel real satisfaction in this visible triumph of my careful wards. Better yet, my infuriating neighbor had to feel the sting of humiliation each time I not only failed to cower at his fury but actually sent his minions back to him in better shape than before. That had to prove my lack of fear without a doubt.

And yet…

It wasn’t only the lost hours that nagged at me as I spent my third day in a row on painstaking repairs. It was the sense that I was missing something vital in my challenge. For an inventor, there could be no greater frustration.

I was still gnawing over it in mid-afternoon, well after I’d sent the last minion shuffling on her way, her skin blistering with temporary sunburn but her limbs permanently perfected. I’d seen different minions today than on either of the first two days; for all that the numbers thrown at me had grown each time, none of the minions I’d seen had ever returned to my property a second time. Something about that bothered me intensely. Instead of walking out my prickly tangle of thoughts or retreating to the sanctum of my workshop as usual, I planted myself on our own front step to stare at that ugly black castle and brood.

That was how I saw the townsfolk coming.

It was a flicker of movement in the distance that first caught my eye—a flicker that clarified into a large clump of people moving together…with torches flickering in their grasps.

I didn’t even realize I was moving until I’d already leapt to my feet, my heart doing its best to escape my chest.

Burning timbers.

And my father’s cry as that flaming beam had fallen on him, trapping—

“No.” The word came out like a vow…or a prayer. I forced air through my chest and blinked hard, focusing on the space around me here and now.

It was a new space. A protected space, because no one here knew us, not like the town where I’d grown up—or those neighbors whom I’d always thought I’d known, before torchlight had turned all of their faces into masks.

This time, we hadn’t given our respectable neighbors any reason to think we were different from them. I’d hidden everything about us too well.

The door opened behind me. Metal clanked as Dad stepped to my side, watching the procession in hollow-cheeked silence.

“We’re safe,” I told him, my eyes fixed on the line of torches. “They’re not coming for us.”

“I know.” He didn’t move.

His legs had to be paining him from so much time standing upright. The metal supports that I’d created might make it possible, but nothing I did could make it easy…or make it up to him for what had happened.

“You can go back inside now,” I told him softly. “Weren’t you working on a new puzzle in there?”

He shook his head, a sigh whistling through his teeth. “Mia…I don’t think that’s the most urgent puzzle to solve.”

My father hadn’t set his mind to anything but puzzles on paper ever since our old house had burned down. He’d never once blamed me for it, even though we both knew that my inventions were the ones that had brought those torches down on us that night, turning ordinary, respectable acquaintances into an angry, frightened mob.

No one ever got so frightened of regular metal-working, the kind he’d mastered long before my birth…but from the moment I’d first fastened my toddler hands around one of his tools, my inventions had always turned somehow into more.

“I’ll put the icebox in my workshop,” I promised. “They’ll never see it. I’ll put some extra flowers in our window box, too. I’ll even make sure that they match and look good. I’ll—”

“Mia.” That was all that Dad said. But I’d seen that look on his face a hundred times across my life, from my very first lesson decades ago. It meant: You’re not paying attention. Start again.

So I dragged my head out of my burning memories, and remembered what I’d been thinking just before I’d been interrupted.

Sometimes, a challenge looked obvious but contained secret complexities behind that shiny surface…like a locked workshop hidden behind a respectable flowery window box.

Our neighbor didn’t bother with window boxes or any other such pleasantries to appease the respectable folks. His big black castle shouted exactly what he was: Wicked.

He’d sent his minions to attack me twice in a row, hadn’t he? Really, I should be grateful that the mob was coming to burn his ugly castle down.

But then again…I’d never seen a single minion twice. That was what had nagged at me earlier. If he wanted to overwhelm me with numbers, why didn’t he send the minions that I’d made strongest, the ones most likely to succeed? Instead, he sent mangled minions to my property each night, I fixed them…and then he went ahead and sent me even more badly-built minions right on the verge of breaking, even though he had to know what would—

Oh. Oh! My jaw fell open in outrage.

The sheer audacity of the man—!

“He did try to invite you over and be sociable about it,” Dad said mildly.

“Ha!” I shook my head, still stunned. “You know I’m not interested in socializing with neighbors. That’s why we moved here in the first place.”

I’d learned the hard way that it was never safe to reveal my own truths to the respectable folk around us.…

But my own closest neighbor nowadays didn’t even pretend to be respectable—and despite everything that I’d assumed, he actually did care about those poor creatures he was stewarding, after all. Had he even been the one who had built them so badly? All I knew was that he was looking after them now…even when that meant sending them to a cranky, unsociable neighbor to be fixed.

“I can’t.” I whispered the words. Then I repeated them, my gaze jerking back to my father. “I can’t! After the last time I let other people see…”

“Did I ever teach you to worry about window boxes?” Dad shook his head chidingly. “Remind me, Mia. Who put your first tool in your hands and taught you exactly how to use it?”

Tears stung my eyes, blurring his familiar, beloved face. “You did,” I whispered.

I’d always wanted so badly to make him proud.

Now, his mouth was bracketed by white lines of pain…but his smile still shone with pride as he patted the metal supports that I had built him. “Haven’t I been telling you to do more of your work out in the sunshine?”

By the time I joined the twenty-person-long, torch-bearing procession, they had already reached the great black walls of the castle and were milling around in front of it. I recognized their leader from the group that had visited us on our first day in the neighborhood: the town’s mayor, a tall, upright man with a close-shaven face, a rigidly straight nose, and a fanatic’s zeal in his blue eyes. Mayor Hall’s face broke into a fierce smile as I walked up to join all of them, pulling an open wagon packed full of metal behind me.

“We hoped you’d join us, friend! I’m only thankful that you’ve survived ’til now. The last people who owned your cottage fled the very day after the necromancer arrived. We’ve all feared terribly for your safety, but don’t worry—we’ll end this creature and his monsters now. The sunlight weakens them, you see, and they all have a terrible fear of fire.”

I shifted closer to the door of the big black castle looming over us. Everyone would be asleep in there for hours, but I lowered my voice anyway. “What happens when they’re not afraid?”

“I beg your pardon?” The mayor frowned, glancing around at his supporters.

“When they’re out and about and not frightened,” I said patiently. “Do they actually eat people? Ever? Or do they just wander around moaning and getting some exercise?”

His brows snapped even tighter together. “What kind of a question is that? They’re monsters! If they haven’t eaten anyone yet, it’s only a matter of time. You should be grateful that we’re saving you! Unless…” His eyes narrowed. “You haven’t been corrupted by the necromancer’s dark magics, have you?”

Grumbles broke out behind him. Suspicious gazes heated my skin. Torches rose higher in anticipation.

“I’ve never spoken a word to him,” I said as I took a final step and planted myself between the torch-wielding group and the big black door that protected all the minions. “But I do believe in being a good neighbor—and I don’t particularly like fire, myself.”

“Now, see here, young lady—!”

I snapped my fingers. Twenty arm-sized mechanical mosquitoes lifted from their limp, resting pile in my wagon and rose into the air, wings snapping out around them with loud clicks! As the townsfolk all stumbled back in surprise, high-pitched buzzing burst out from my inventions to fill the air with humming menace.

Each mech-squito held a sharp metal rock in its skinny, multi-legged grasp. Each of their long, metal snouts dripped with the water I’d pumped into them, just waiting to be deployed now.

“Luckily,” I said, “my creatures are more than capable of dealing with a bit of fire.”

“But that’s—that’s—!” Mayor Hall was stammering too much to even create a full sentence. Behind him, though, more and more cries flew out.

“Witchcraft!”

“Unnatural!”

“Spellcraft!”

“Abomination!”

I lifted my right hand. The mech-squitoes followed its lead and flew into a V-formation, visibly preparing.

“One,” I said, loudly and clearly, “two…”

That did it. The crowd turned and ran, their torches streaming trails of hot smoke in their wake.

Only their leader turned back, twenty feet away, to point one shaking finger at me. “You’re next,” the mayor snarled. “You may have fooled us before, but now that we know what you really are, you can’t stay awake to guide these things forever. So—”

A man’s voice spoke calmly from a window high above me. “Isn’t it fortunate, then, that my creatures do stay awake all night? And they believe in looking after our neighbors, too.”

As I spun around to stare up at him, the famous necromancer nodded politely down at me.

He was just unfairly handsome for someone wearing a rumpled and ragged old crimson bathrobe, with sleep-stubble covering his pale cheeks and his black hair standing up in all directions.

…And he had absolutely, definitely been eavesdropping. “You’ve had that window open the whole time, listening in on us?” I demanded.

“I find it safer to leave my windows open, nowadays.” His lips quirked as he looked down at me, an unsettling warmth in his dark eyes. “I have to protect my precious glass from my new neighbor, you see.”

“Ugh!” The mayor let out a frustrated groan, turned, and ran the rest of the way, following his own followers back towards the respectability of those high town walls.

I didn’t look after him for long. My attention was firmly focused on my own outrageous neighbor, who had propped his elbows on his windowsill and was sending down a lazy smile that sent all sorts of suspicious reactions tingling through my skin.

“May I invite you in for tea?” he asked idly. “Or will you attack my home again if I dare?”

“I just saved your home,” I reminded him.

“In that case…”

He gestured elegantly, the crimson bathrobe falling away to reveal one pale, lean wrist. The great black door to the castle swung open before me with a long, ominous creak. Darkness awaited me within.

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