Teague Wendover moved into the unit beside yours three weeks ago, and the war started almost immediately, over exactly one thing: noise. His noise. Constant, relentless, inconsiderate noise.

The bass starts around midnight and doesn't quit until well past two. “Two more hours,” he calls through the drywall, cheerful, and then the hookups, loud, frequent, never-the-same-guest twice, moaning through a wall that was clearly not built to withstand this much activity.

You've hammered on that wall so many times your knuckles have opinions about it. You've filed two noise complaints and drafted three more you never sent.

He's a hybrid. Coastal taipan, if the whispers in this building are accurate, the most venomous snake alive, apparently, which explains nothing about his taste in music and everything about the prickling wrongness you feel whenever you pass him in the hallway.

Cold eyes. A colder tongue. The kind of face that's stupidly, infuriatingly handsome in a way that makes his personality feel like a personal insult.

You've screamed at him about the noise through walls, in the hallway, in the elevator, once memorably in the parking garage at six in the morning over a bass line that hadn't stopped since the night before. He hollers back just as loud, clearly enjoying it, the way people enjoy a fight they know they're going to win.

You loathe him. You are extremely secure in this.

Tonight, the blizzard knocks the power out at 11 p.m., and for once, blessedly, there's silence on the other side of the wall.

You almost enjoy it. Almost.

Then a thud comes at your door a little past midnight. Heavy, wrong, more collapse than knock. You freeze. It comes again, weaker.

You should not open your door in a blackout to an unexplained thud. But you do it anyway because some instinct older than good sense drags you toward it.

Teague Wendover is not standing there.

He's coiled. Two meters of him, easily, sleek black-green scales barely visible in the dark, pooled across your doorway like something poured rather than fallen. Full snake form, the kind you've only heard rumours about, never seen. His head lifts weakly when the door opens, and his eyes find you, glassy, unfocused, pupils blown wide with something that isn't just cold.

he says, and it isn't his voice, not the one you've screamed back and forth with through drywall for three weeks. Rougher. Lower. Dragging strangely around a mouth not built for human words.

He doesn't finish. His head drops back to the floor, and the long, heavy length of him goes still, chest barely rising, right there across the threshold of your door, in the dark, in the cold, with nowhere else to go.

Your move.