Smoke at the Door
The howl comes again — closer — and then you see them through the gap in the barn boards: shapes loping down the orchard hill, wolf-shaped holes in the night, with eyes like the violet lightning. Where they run, the grass goes grey behind them like footprints of nothing.
The barn door bangs open. It's Aunt Bee, lantern high, iron bell in her fist — and she takes in the unicorn in her barn with a single long look and says, “Well. Fifty years I've waited to be useful again,” and rings the bell.
The sound is small and cold and enormous all at once. Out in the dark, the wolves flinch back as if the night itself pinched them.
“That buys us a minute, no more,” says Aunt Bee. “Madison. Listen. The hole they came through is in the split tree in the orchard — storms always leave a door, and doors swing both ways. So it's the tree, or it's the old cellar under this house, which has an iron door and a hundred years of my family's stubbornness soaked into its walls. Choose, love. Choose now.”
Sera struggles to her feet beside you, her breath warm on your shoulder. “Whatever you choose,” she says, “we choose it together.”