Ronan turned back to the desk. Setting the puzzle box on it, he pulled open the main drawer. A copy of his father’s will sat on the very top of the contents, just as he remembered it.
Not bothering to reread the earlier clauses of the document— they would only anger him — he flipped directly to the last page. There, right before his father’s signature.
Niall Lynch was, at the time of so executing said Will, of sound mind, memory, and understanding and not under any restraint or in any respect incompetent to make a will. This Will stands as fact unless a newer document is created.
Signed this day: T’Libre vero-e ber nivo libre n’acrea.
Ronan squinted at the final phrase. Picking up the puzzle box, he turned it around until the side with the unknown language faced him. It was painstaking work to plug in each word. Though he couldn’t understand how the box managed it, it held the previously entered words in its workings in order to translate the grammar as well. That was how it had worked in the dream, after all.
If it worked in the dream, it worked in real life. He frowned at the translation it provided.
This Will stands as fact unless a newer document is created. Pressing his finger on the paper to keep his place, he compared it. Sure enough, the translated sentence was identical to the final sentence in English. But why would his father write the same thing in two different languages?
Hope — he hadn’t realized what the feeling was until it abandoned him — slowly trailed out of him. He’d been right about the language, but wrong that there was a secret message. Or if it was a secret message, he wasn’t clever enough to decode it.
Ronan shoved the drawer shut and folded the will into his back pocket to take with him. Just as he turned with the puzzle box, Matthew appeared in the doorway. He arrived with such speed that his shoulder crashed into the doorjamb.
“Nice,” Ronan said thinly.
Matthew waved a hand and panted, voice low, “I think someone’s here.”
They both looked behind them at the basement door.
Ronan asked, “What kind of car?”
Matthew shook his head wildly. “In the house.”
It was impossible, but the hair on Ronan’s neck crept up.
And then he heard it, distantly, from somewhere else in the house:
Tck-tck-tck-tck.
The night horror. Ronan didn’t think. He threw himself across the room and dragged Matthew inside.
There was a slow scrape from the direction of the kitchen.
“Basement?” gulped Matthew, shocked.
Ronan didn’t answer. He shoved closed the sitting room door and looked wildly around. “Chair!” he hissed at his younger brother. “Hurry!”
Matthew cast about before carrying a flimsy, armless chair over. Ronan tried to work out a door jam, but the old-fashioned door hook resisted his efforts. Even if it had been an ordinary knob, the chair wasn’t even tall enough to provide a whisper of leverage.
Tck-tck-tck-tck.
“Ronan?” Matthew whispered.
Ronan leapt over three old flour crocks to where a cedar chest was pressed against the wall. He tested the weight and then began to shove.
“Come on, help me,” he grunted. Matthew skidded over and threw his shoulder against it.
The claws tapped on the hallway floorboards. Scuffling.
The cedar chest scraped to a halt in front of the door. Ronan didn’t know how powerful the night horrors were. He’d never tested one like this.
Matthew looked up at Ronan, bewildered, as his older brother climbed on top of the cedar chest. Ronan stretched out an arm and hugged his brother’s curly head, once, hard. He pushed him away.
“Sit next to Mom,” he hissed. “It doesn’t want you. It’s me.”
“Ro —”
“— But if it gets past me, don’t wait. Just fight.”
Matthew retreated to where Aurora Lynch sat on her chair in the middle of the room, tranquil and motionless. Ronan saw him crouched there in the dim space, holding their mother’s hand.
He should have never brought him with.
The door bucked.
Matthew jerked in surprise. Aurora didn’t.
Ronan held the doorknob as it jiggled. There was a slow sound like water tapping out of a faucet.
The door jumped again.
Again Matthew started. But the cedar chest didn’t budge. It was heavy, and the night horror was not. Its strength was in those claws and that beak.
Three more times the door jerked on its hinges. Then there was a long, long pause.
It was possible it had given up.
But Ronan hadn’t considered what their next step would be. They couldn’t risk opening the door if the night horror was on the other side. Perhaps he should go out by himself — the bird men never wanted anyone else. It was only Ronan they despised. Everything in him was loath to leave his brother and mother behind, but they would both be safer without him.
Long minutes stretched out in silence. And then, somewhere in the house, a door shut.
Matthew and Ronan stared at each other. Something about the sound had been very unhurried and human — not at all what Ronan would have expected from the night horror.
Sure enough, ordinary footsteps began to creak down the hall. Possibilities unwound in Ronan’s mind, none of them good. There was no time to move the cedar chest without drawing attention to it. No wisdom to warning this newcomer of the nightmare, either — Ronan’s presence would only make it more dangerous.
“Hide,” Ronan ordered Matthew. His younger brother was frozen, so he grabbed his sleeve and tugged him away from their mother. There was just room for them to tuck themselves behind the rolled-up rugs in the corner of the room. It wouldn’t withstand careful study, but in the dimness, there was no reason why they’d be discovered.
Many minutes later, after much creaking of floorboards elsewhere in the house, someone gave the door an experimental shove. This time, it was quite clearly a someone rather than a something. There was an audible, human-sounding sigh on the other side, and the shuffling of feet on the floorboards was clearly produced by shoes.
Ronan held a finger to his lips.
There was only one more shove, and then the door cracked an inch. Another grunt, another shove, and the door came open far enough to admit a person.
Ronan wasn’t sure who he had expected. The home nurse, probably. Maybe even Declan, visiting illegally.
But this was a handsome, wiry man all dressed in gray; Ronan had never seen him before. The way he flicked his gaze around the room was so keen Ronan was afraid he would see them behind the rugs after all. But the man’s interest was snagged by Aurora Lynch on her chair in the middle of the room. Ronan tensed.