Tara’s claws ticked on the stone path leading up from the creek. She had no shoes in the size and shape of her overlarge feet, and her bare toes had gone numb hours ago. However, if she wanted a bath, she needed to suck it up — and she needed to hurry. It was after 7 AM, and the sky was starting to lighten. Two heavy buckets of icy water hung from her hands and sloshed as she quickened her long strides to a loping run across the open clearing between the house and the trees.

  The weather-beaten old mansion sat in a meadow by itself. From the outside, it looked silent and dark, with all the downstairs windows boarded up. She was careful to keep it that way. If anyone driving down Sanctuary Road saw a figure where none should be, that could lead to trouble.

  The electricity had been off since shortly after Todd’s... disappearance, so the well didn’t work. Fetching water was a near-daily task. Fortunately, there was a spring a quarter mile away along the creek, right at the limit of her range. It always held clear water even when everything else dried up in the summer. If she tried to venture any farther away, however, she would find herself walking in confused circles through dense junipers until she stumbled home, exhausted, hours later.

  A truck turned into the driveway.

  Heart pounding, Tara darted behind a clump of bushes and crouched down out of a heartbeat before headlights raked across the yard. When the vehicle stopped in front of the house, and she was certain she was out of sight, she dumped the water out on the already muddy ground and ran for the back door.

  Inside the kitchen, Tara left the buckets on the dirty linoleum, where they’d blend in with the rest of the clutter. Normally, she didn’t go into the first floor unless she needed something, but the best route to safety, with the least risk of being seen, was through the house. She would only be exposed to view for a second, and she could time it for when they were on the other side of the house.

  Tara sucked her breath in, turned sideways, and squeezed between the Amazon boxes stacked floor-to-ceiling down the entire length of the hall. All, as far as she could tell from past investigations, had never been opened before she snooped into them. The space was narrow, and navigating it was difficult. Twice, she had to stop and steady a wobbling stack of crap before it toppled.

  The boxes in this part of the house held either size four sundresses or big-and-tall men's outfits. Her current clothes came from the latter selection: a man’s collared shirt, a Carhartt parka too tight through the shoulders, and men’s Levis that were skin tight and fit her like capris. She’d had to add zippers cannibalized from other clothes to the legs to get the latter over her feet. The masculine look wasn’t far from her usual appearance — she’d transitioned from ‘tomboy’ to ‘butch’ shortly after dropping out of high school her senior year — but everything was too small.

  Her path took her past the main staircase. Mountains of boxes of books blocked the way up it, and even if she’d scrambled over them, the landing at the top was jammed with an assortment of stacked dressers, wardrobes, and desks. The novels had always been there, but the latter obstacle was Tara’s work. If the Rileys or a random intruder decided to get ambitious and go household spelunking into the building’s least accessible corners, the effort needed to clear everything away would give her time to escape. She highly doubted anyone would notice her changes to the layout of the hoard.

  At the end of the downstairs hall was a sunroom, which randomly contained an overflow of religiously themed country music CDs from towering piles in the living room, lawn furniture, three snow-blowers, a rototiller, and twenty big boxes full of tiny hotel-size shampoo bottles. There was no conditioner here, nor had she found any elsewhere. None of the machines looked like they were in working order. All had visibly missing parts and plentiful rust.

  Muffled words came from the front of the house. After opening the sunroom’s exterior door, she paused to guesstimate where they were, and she recognized Mark Riley's voice, plus somebody else.

  Mark said, “Sorry about the early hour. I’m working fourteen-hour shifts right now. The closer quit.”

  She was surprised he had a job. She hadn’t thought him capable of interacting with other people for more than thirty seconds without completely pissing them off.

  “No worries. My schedule is about the same.” The second person was another man. “With the real estate market being this hot, we're all working crazy hours.”

  The front door creaked. Mark said, “Unfortunately, it all looks like this. My mom was a bit of a... well ... well, she was sick. She claimed to be psychic and that the End Times were approaching. The family joke was that she was so mean, she was just preparing to be left behind when everyone else got raptured.”

  “Huh. That’s a of boxes.” The man's tone was no longer upbeat.

  “It’s fairly worthless. Most of it, she picked up at yard sales. There’s some new clothes, freeze-dried food, whatever junk she got from Amazon, and antique furniture, but every time I tried to have an estate sale, nobody showed up. People don’t want to drive out this far. Even tried selling unopened Amazon boxes for $5 each, figured people’d like the surprise, but nope. First few turned out to be full of ten-year-old cell phone cases, equally old bags of beef jerky, and packs of leaky batteries. No value. None of the locals wanted to buy any after that, an’ they accused me of knowing what was in them.”

  Tara grinned at his description of the contents. He probably should have started with the shit on the third floor, which was where Mrs. Riley had, for reasons only known to a crazy old woman, stored endless unopened boxes of hand tools, tents, yarn, salt and pepper shakers, chess sets, and fishing lures.

  Mark added, “Wish I’d known about that beef jerky when I was a kid, when it was still good. She kept most of the food locked up in the basement so I wouldn’t eat it. It must have slipped by her; it was in the living room.”

  He was oversharing, but Mark was like that – he had no filter. Tara had learned a long time ago to keep the horrors of her own childhood to herself. She had so many stories that she found funny, which left others appalled; so many other anecdotes that most people would assume were exaggerations in a bid for attention.

  Tara, as quietly as possible, slipped out the sunroom door. From there, she swiftly scrambled up onto a planter. She was tall and agile enough to haul herself onto the sunroom roof. As lightly as her size would allow, she hurried across the roof to a second-floor master bedroom window.

  She paused just outside for a second, peering through the glass. Then, with paranoid instincts that weren’t entirely her own, Tara pushed the window up, gave the room’s air a good sniff, and listened for the sound of breathing. Her senses were now far sharper than human.

  Everything was as she left it, which the one bedroom wall lined with stacks of antique furniture and cardboard boxes piled into precarious towers, plus some suitcases in a corner stuffed with an enormous collection of CDs.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Tara hadn’t found a CD player yet, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. The old woman had a God and Country taste in music. Tara’s preferences ran more toward Marilyn Manson or Rammstein, or Bowie if she wanted something to sing along to.

  Her new voice had an unfortunate resemblance to Keith David's; before, she’d often been compared to Cher. One of the hardest things about being alone in an empty house was boredom, so she spent hours upon hours down in the basement where no one could hear her singing. Often, those sessions ended in tears as she struggled and utterly failed to reach her old range. Her current sound reminded her too much of what had happened to her, the horror that looked back every time she dared glance in a mirror, but she couldn’t entirely stop singing. A world without song was the worst option.

  In this room, which could be accessed by climbing up from below, Tara had played Crap Tetris to clear a space around the bed. There was no heat, but she’d found numerous blankets for warmth. The bathroom toilet functioned when she hauled enough water up with a bucket and a rope — and, in winter, that included pouring a tea kettle of hot water down it every few hours, especially at night, to prevent the trap from freezing. She’d set up a makeshift kitchen with a tiny propane burner, a wash basin, some pots and pans, and a handful of dishes. There were candles and solar garden lights for illumination.

  In truth, this room was vastly better than her childhood bedroom. The roof did not leak, the windows weren't broken and patched with cardboard, and it didn’t stink nearly as bad. She didn't have to share her bed with an ever-rotating cast of her father’s girlfriends’ kids. More than once, she’d woken up to a wet bed after a younger child had peed in it, with no possibility of a shower before school. It was quieter and, all things considered, safer.

  When she finally convinced herself nobody had invaded her space, and she ducked through the window and put her weight on the floor, the joists creaked. Tara had weighed three hundred and fifty pounds before the transformation. Afterward, that same weight had been redistributed, adding twelve inches of height to her previous six feet and giving her more muscles than she’d thought possible.

  She froze in place, afraid to move for fear of creating more noise.

  "You hear something?" the man said, voice muffled but audible through a floor vent.

  "Old building," Mark said. "It does that."

  "Huh. Sounded like a footstep."

  "I mean, this place could be haunted. It always feels like there’s somebody here, watching me." Mark laughed nervously. "It's ancient."

  "1900 or so, yeah?"

  "Yeah. That's why I need you here. There’s a bunch of unpermitted work to the wiring plus some knob-and-tube left over in the attic that’s still hot. The house won’t pass the inspection to turn the power back on.”

  Ah. That explained why it had sat empty, with the power off, for three years.

  "The realtor says we’d get a better price if it was fixed up. I figure once we've got power, I'll let a handyman stay in the garage apartment in exchange for remodeling everything. I just haven’t been able to find anyone yet — nobody wants to work anymore, y’know? — but I’m still looking.”

  The "apartment" in question had pack rats, a hot plate for a stove, and was about two hundred square feet. It was also incredibly filthy. Tara stared down at the floor, in Mark’s direction, with disbelief.

  The truth was, the house had good bones, but it needed enormous amounts of work. If he were smart, Tara thought he'd sell it for whatever he could get from a house flipper, though she dreaded what might happen to her if he chose that path. She was bound to the property by magic too strong for her to defeat, and if someone cleaned out the old woman's hoard, her presence would be discovered.

  What then? She didn't know, but she assumed it would be bad. There was no place in the world for someone like her, and it felt like there hadn't been one even before Todd’s spell.

  "What's your plan for clearing the stuff out of the house so my men can work?" the man asked Mark, sounding dubious.

  "Eh ... Dumpster, probably. I was hoping your crews could handle it. Y'all can keep anything you want. Might be some good stuff in there."

  "Sure, I could get some laborers in, but it won't be cheap."

  "... How expensive?"

  The man named a number in the mid-six figures. Tara, whose uncle was also a contractor, and who relied on her to do estimates for jobs, nearly snorted a laugh despite her fear of being detected. That quote was about two or three times what it should have been even if they were factoring in the weeks of labor and cost involved in clearing the crap out — and about ten times the value of the electrical work alone — and had come so fast that it was almost certainly a 'fuck off' price. The man downstairs only wanted the job if Mark was willing to pay a stupidly high amount.

  Occasionally, rich flatlanders with vacation homes pay crazy amounts to get work done up here in the Rim Country, in which case the fuck-off price made the hassle worth it, but Mark was a local and rich. Also, that quote was far more than the usual 20-30% asshole tax. She didn’t blame the contractor, though; her suggestion for dealing with the problem would have involved a bulldozer, matches, and marshmallows on sticks.

  Mark snapped, "Oh, screw that. The house isn’t even worth that much! I was thinking five grand, paid when it sells. I just need the wiring fixed enough to pass inspection and get the lights on.”

  Five thousand dollars was an insultingly low price. It wouldn't even cover the materials. She was not surprised that Mark was cheap and clueless. The whole family was the biggest collection of idiots she'd ever met, even counting her kin on either the elven the Bright sides. Mark needed to go up about an order of magnitude, and the contractor come down one, and they'd both be in the proper price range.

  The contractor barked a laugh. "Yeah, no. Payment's required before I start work, and five grand won’t even cover hotel rooms for my guys. I'd need to bring a crew up from the valley for this job, for a week or two, just to clear the shit out.”

  "And that's a problem! There's plenty of local boys who need work." Mark sounded angry. Like many local residents, he resented ‘outsiders’ who ‘took jobs away’ from the locals, even if those locals couldn't do the work.

  "Do you want your house fixed up by Goober, Methany, and Hillbilly Sons?" The man’s retort came swiftly. “We might be able to hire them with a case of beer, but their work won’t pass inspection. It’d be a waste of booze.”

  Tara covered her mouth as silent giggles threatened to bubble up to real laughter at the contractor’s assessment of the shallow local labor pool. Perhaps by accident or not, he’d just described her father, any of his long string of interchangeable trashy girlfriends, and her half-brothers.

  Mark did not see the humor in that comment. He responded with a tirade of admittedly creative profanity — ‘motherfuckface’ was probably worth remembering — and a moment later, she heard the truck spin its wheels in the gravel driveway.

  Keeping her laughter contained was becoming downright painful. If Mark was taking this approach, perhaps the place would not be sold anytime soon.

  Left behind, Mark immediately made a phone call. His angry voice was quite clear through the floor vent at her feet.

  "Tyler! Damnit, the contractor you said was good me here ... what, no, I didn't do anything! ... he's crazy ... my truck broke down, shop wants two grand to fix the transmission. C'mon, man, can you at least pick me up? ... oh, fuck you, you douche canoe! I'll be late to work! I have a job! The Dollar Bin hired me as a manager, you know that! I've been working there for several months!"

  It seemed his cousin Tyler didn't appreciate being cussed at any more than the contractor. "Fine!" Mark snapped. "I'll walk!"

  A moment later, she heard the front door bang shut.

  It was twelve miles to Payson, where the Dollar Bin was located in a repurposed fast food building. That discount store had an ever-rotating cast of "management" paid pennies over minimum wage, with frequent and dubious deductions taken for ‘not catching shoplifters’ and ‘short cash drawers.’ Tara had lasted there precisely three weeks as a teenage ‘assistant manager.’ They’d shorted her paycheck and she’d immediately walked and then written a letter to the state labor board, which had made them pay up every last penny of the $67.29 they owed her. It hadn’t been money she could spare — and crappy retail jobs were interchangeable and easy to replace.

  Even without seeing him, she knew Mark was wearing cheap cowboy boots. They were terribly impractical footwear for a long walk, especially for a man of Mark’s substantial size. She wished him all the blisters in the world.

  Once she was certain he was out of earshot, she straightened up. The floor groaned, but now there was nobody around to hear. She was blessedly alone again, safe in her solitude.

  Then, she noticed that the blanket she'd thrown over a mirror had slid off, likely when he’d slammed the door. Tara kept her eyes averted and did not look at her own reflection as she put the fabric back.