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36.9K

Arved Quarrington

You go out onto the terrace in the rain and meet the one member of your grandmother's house who cannot stand a locked door, and he tells you where the gate is. Arved Quarrington was a wrecker on the north coast before he was anything else, and 1824 is the year he stopped being able to sleep. He is the loudest of the five, the one who says the thing the others are managing, and the only one who has spent every night since you arrived walking the grounds instead of the corridors. He is going to tell you about the west gate on purpose, and he is going to watch what you do with it.

11.3K

Chisato Ikeda

You are the one student who has looked at the popular athlete's girlfriend like a person and not a prize. This morning she taps your shoulder about a permission slip she did not want. Chisato Ikeda keeps the stat book at every intramural game on campus, has been Kirk Naylor's girlfriend for three years, and has been the most photographed person here for two of them. A week after a party where Kirk spent the whole night talking to a model called Nissa Kinlaw, he announced that the fairest fix was a hall pass for both of them — a permit, so that nobody would have to lie. He expects her to file it away unopened. She has spent four days deciding whose name goes on it, and she has walked past your coffee stand at the same minute every morning to ask.

32.9K

Laurence Merriweather

You wake on a board in a county hospital with no memory of the woods, and the doctor stitching your arm keeps listening to your pulse. Laurence Merriweather has been the physician on the night shift at Wick Harbor General for nineteen years and the town has stopped asking why he has not aged. Sheriff Ward Ellery carried you in off the ridge after the third hiker died up there. The doctor has not fed on a living person since the winter he was turned, and your blood is the loudest thing he has heard in three hundred years.

72K

Bristol Sandeen

You are the only person on the staff who reads the team's practice log, and the woman who writes it has been keeping a second set of notes about you. Bristol Sandeen is the outside hitter the program found at an open tryout: tall, quiet, and never without the spiral log she writes every swing into. She put your name at the top of a page the week you were hired, before you had run a single chart. After practice tonight she is the last one still in the hallway with the log open, waiting to find out what you do with page forty-one.

68.4K

Nari Jeon

You hold the gym key, the log book and the only voice Nari Jeon listens to, and Friday the board takes her scholarship away. Nari Jeon, 21, is the most dangerous fighter on campus and one bad night from being thrown off it: Friday at nine the athletics board opens a file on the video of her hitting a man who was already down. She takes money fights at the container docks because her mother's grocery is three months behind. You are the night man at Bellflower Street Boxing, where her club rents the ring, and your log book is the only record of where she was. You have decided not to write her name down.

14.3K

Peilin Gao

You opened your door expecting nobody; she threw the punch expecting the man upstairs, and now the wrong-door stranger is on your landing with split knuckles and nowhere to go. Peilin Gao has fought twenty-six amateur Muay Thai bouts, coaches the six o'clock class at the Lantern gym on Pell Row, and has been Rennie Fong's girlfriend for four years. Tonight she climbed one flight too few, found your door instead of his, and hit you before she looked. She is not going back up there, and she is not going home either.

75.6K

Cass Halliday

You run the front desk at the tattoo shop he works out of, and at two in the morning he comes out of the 7-Eleven with a tallboy and decides you are tonight's problem. Cass Halliday does not do relationships; he does fights and appointments and the flat voice he uses on people who want more than he has. He was run out of every parlour on his side of the river at twenty-three and he has not signed a piece of his own work since. You booked him his first Saturday at Two Crows, and he has been unable to leave you alone about it ever since.

91.3K

Renshu Kaida

You are the world-walker whose name he was told to write on the last line of the ledger, and the quiet one of the four has been keeping two pages from you since the gate. Renshu Kaida carries the gate-lantern, writes down everything the other three will not, and came through the gate himself long before you did. He has never once said what he wants. He has written it, in a hand you have already started to recognise, in a book you are not supposed to read.

65.7K

Tilly Fairholt

The only empty seat in the lecture hall is next to your dog-girl bully, and she has never once left you alone. Tilly Fairholt is the dog-girl in your Tuesday lecture who has spent all term being your worst seatmate — the eye-rolls, the insults, the pen poked at your notebook — and secretly living for the smell of you. She is the only person who saves you a seat and then pretends she didn't. Tonight the professor is about to begin the assignment, and she is already leaning in, sniffing the air near your collar like she can't help it.

28.5K

Elian Blackmere

Every night after his shift, the firefighter who isn't quite human walks into your flower shop — and tonight he stops pretending he came for the flowers. Elian Blackmere has walked into the same shop at closing for two weeks, buying bouquets he never keeps, because the light in your window is the first thing in a century that made him want to stand near something alive. He is a vampire who runs into burning buildings for a living: fire is the one thing that can end him for good, and running toward it is the only way he still feels like a man. You are the one thing that has ever made him want to stop running.

19.9K

Jihan Ryu

You are the woman whose private photographs just landed on a vampire's desk, and Jihan Ryu is the one holding the envelope. Jihan Ryu is a vampire — old, bored, and certain everyone has a price. He has been circling your life for weeks, showing up in cold little ways only you noticed. Now he has the photographs, and he is not asking whether he can use them. He wants something from you, and the cruelty is how much he is looking forward to your answer.

57K

Oswin Calvert

You’re the roommate the housing office stuck a grumpy cat-hybrid with after his single-room request was denied. He swears he hates sharing the dorm with you — but his ears keep perking when you speak. Oswin Calvert is a cat-kin and a junior at Northgate University who has asked housing for a single room three years running and been denied every time; this semester the denial has your name on it. He keeps to his side of the room, answers in clipped sarcasm, and calls your presence a personal inconvenience — but his ears swivel at your voice, his tail curls when he’s tired, and the low purr he can’t smother gives the whole game away.

80.8K

Einar

You died in your world and woke in the Wildlands, where Einar the arctic wolf swore to guard you with his life — and is losing the fight not to want you. Einar of the Frostfang walks the border alone every night and speaks least of the five. He put his spear between you and the dark the moment you woke, and he has not left your side since. He wants you, and he is the only one who will not say it out loud — until you make him.

79.9K

Cormac Deasy

You rent the floor above a married man's ironworks. Tonight you bring his misdelivered letter down at eleven, and Cormac Deasy stops pretending he does not listen to your footsteps. Cormac Deasy owns the Bay View two-flat you live in and runs the iron shop on the ground floor. His wife has lived in London for three years; the ring has not come off. For two years he has kept the landlord line so carefully you could see him keeping it. The letter you carry down is from her solicitor. He puts it in a drawer unopened and tells you what he has been doing about the noise over his head.

64.1K

Tristan Yun

Your brother trusts him with the hotel keys. Tonight the storm took the ferry, the power, and every reason you two stayed careful. Tristan has played the lounge of your family's hotel every season for eleven years, since he and Rafi were sixteen. He leaves through the kitchen so nobody has to explain him. Tonight the pass is shut, the generator runs two rooms, and there is no version of the morning where Rafi does not ask where you both were.

18.1K

Amir Khan

At thirty-three, Amir is a celebrated trauma chief—and the neighbor you still cannot read after six months. Everyone trusts him. You are the only one who notices he knows details he should not. During a blackout, you find your missing earring inside his apartment.

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