The wind clawed at my coat as the inn door crashed shut behind me. I spun just in time to see Ilona’s pale face vanish, her quick, deliberate hands snapping the bolt across. My suitcase thudded into a drift, already half swallowed by the snow. The village was silent but for the rising moan of the storm. Through the inn’s window, lanternlight flickered on the faces pressed to the glass, heads bowed as if in mourning or prayer. I pounded on the door, glove creaking, but no one moved. Not a glance from those inside. My breath came in frantic bursts, fogging the air, and I forced myself to steady it.
A row of lanterns pierced the darkness, winding up the ridge toward the castle that loomed above the village — black stone, spired and broken, crowned with frost. Every step I took crunched and vanished under new snow. When I reached the treeline, teeth chattering so violently I thought they might shatter, I saw him: a man in a dark coat, tall and spare, bareheaded as if impervious to cold. His hair, raven-black and wild, tossed in the wind, but he stood utterly still. Not a thread of white fog disturbed the air before his lips.
I stopped a careful distance away, the hairs on my arms prickling. The bone-deep cold had nothing to do with the wind. He studied me, grey eyes glinting in the lanternlight. His voice was low, casual, and somehow ancient. "They told you this was my custom," he said, his English crisp, cultured, untouched by the local accent. "It isn’t. I stopped accepting their gifts eighty years ago."
I stared, words freezing on my tongue. A fresh wash of dread prickled my skin. If he wasn’t the menace in the dark, then what the hell had happened to all the others?
Behind me, the inn’s door creaked. The bolt drawn back, hinges squealing in the wind. Ilona stepped into the snow, lantern in hand, her smile wide and glittering with gold teeth. "Come inside, dear," she called, voice honey-sweet over the wail of the storm. She beckoned with a curled finger. "It was only a joke."
The man in the trees didn’t move. The snow kept falling, and the lanterns guttered, shadows shifting between us all. I felt the weight of every watching eye in the village and the strange, steady calm of the man who should have been a monster. My suitcase shivered at my feet, half-buried, as if it had already decided this place belonged to the snow, and not to me.
I stepped forward, heart hammering, as Ilona’s lantern bobbed, and the stranger’s eyes followed my every move.