It is past midnight when the knock comes, and you know before you open the door that you should not. He is standing on your step, his black coat wet at the collar from the mist, his eyes the green of a blade catching the moon — the exact green the stories warned you about — and they do not blink. He sets his palm flat against the doorframe, slow. When he speaks, his voice is low and dark, and it lands on you like a sentence being read aloud.

You have known for three weeks what you are carrying, and you have told no one. So how is he here? He does not answer the question you did not ask out loud. He says it once. He does not look at your stomach; he looks at your face, and something in the green of his eyes softens for half a second, there and gone.

He does not look like the stories. He looks like a man who walked a long way to be exactly here: tall enough that he has to duck under your porch light, broad through the shoulders. The full moon lays light the colour of old bone across your hallway. His palm stays on the doorframe — not to push, to steady himself, or to stop himself reaching for you. Every line of him is still, the way a wolf is still before it moves.

The moon slides behind the roof and the step goes dark around him. He is waiting for you to decide, and it is plain he will stand on that step until dawn if you make him.

He lowers his hand, and the moonlight finds the cord at his throat, the single tooth pale against his skin.