When no one answered my knocking, I laid my hand upon the intricate metal filigree of the handle and gave it a twist. It turned without protest, opening with a slight push. Unsure of what else to do, I stepped inside.

The door swung inward onto a narrow entryway with just enough space for a bench and a haphazard stack of muddied galoshes. The sound of the door closing was loud in the quiet that greeted my ears. I stared at the shoes, counting upwards of ten differently sized pairs. Someone had left their rain-spotted coat on the wooden bench.

"Hello?" I called as I passed through an archway. The floor changed from roughhewn stone to knotted hardwood done in a herringbone pattern. I stood in a foyer with numerous archways and doors branching from the hexagonal perimeter. A sizeable wooden staircase rose to a high mezzanine overlooking the foyer. The curved walls of the outer mezzanine were traced by a second, set of spiral stairs ascending upward to the far-off ceiling.

The sense of spatial of distortion gave me vertigo. The interior of the building didn't match the exterior, not in style or in shape. I had expected a mass of disjointed, woebegone rooms connected by a series of stubby halls. What I found was something much different.

The décor wouldn't have been out of place in an old English hunting lodge, what with the wood paneling, stone accents, and bone-white antlers hung above every lintel, but there were touches of other elements as well. The chandelier laden with teardrop crystals and amber wall sconces added aristocratic flair. Frames cluttered the available wall space, each showcasing a painting of a different scene. Some were lovely. Others...not so much.

Unnerved by a Gothic portrait of a man without a face, I clutched the bag to my middle and lowered my gaze from the walls.

It was quiet, but not silent. The house thrummed with an imminent energy, like a breath just waiting to be let go.

"Hello?" I said again, feeling foolish. "Is anyone, ah, here?"

Naturally, there wasn't a response. The rain dripping from my loose hair pattered on the wood floor. I would have felt guilty about the mess I was making if I hadn't been so exhausted and irritable.

If I was a Sin living in the middle of a marsh, this is definitely the type of place I'd stay, I mused. I eyed the stairs, then the collection of doors and arches. The doors were all comprised of the same heavy wood, but each was stained differently and had a different number of panels upon its face. One of the shadowy arches was covered by a curtain of roughly cut crystals and beads.

Muttering under my breath about frustrating demons, I set the bag on the floor and began to rub my weary face. A low growl sent a thrill like thrown ice water through my heart.

Two glimmering eyes had appeared in the shadow of an opened door. The eyes watched me with unwavering focus as the growl grew in intensity, shivering through the floorboards until I could feel it in my knees. Paws thumped as a wolf as large as a man inched forward from the darkness. Its furry lips were parted to reveal white teeth.

I didn't move. I held my breath as the beast stalked nearer.

It was because I was so utterly still that I felt the sudden, curious motion of a shadow spilling through my thoughts. I could not rightly describe the sensation, having never experienced anything similar before its first occurrence. I had become aware of its existence several weeks ago, not long after the Sin of Pride had saved my life. I wasn't an idiot. I knew the intangible darkness had something to do with Darius, but how could I ask him about something I couldn't even put a word to?

All I knew was that there was a shadow living beneath my thoughts, and when I was afraid or when I was angry, it slid over my mind in a nacreous, transparent veil of living darkness.

My hand was numb. My left eye burned.

The wolf hesitated as its claws clicked together in quick retraction. 

"Mark," rumbled a voice from one of the doorways. A middle-aged man with a scruffy chin and headful of messy brown hair appeared, holding a steaming mug in one rough-knuckled hand. The wolf glanced at the man and whined, bowing its massive head. 

"Sorry about that, lass," the man said as he addressed me in a thick Scottish brogue. He dropped his freehand to the wolf's tangled fur and gave the slavering creature a casual scratch behind the ear. "He didna scare you, did he? He's just a wee pup."

"A-a bit," I admitted as my heart continued to beat a painful rhythm against my sternum. I shook myself, and the darkness that had seeped through my consciousness dissipated until it vanished altogether. I could almost convince myself I had imagined it.

The man grinned, the motion sheepish. "Pay him no mind. Yer just a bittie thing, ain't cha? Come on, come get cha some grub."

He turned and disappeared into the room he had just exited. The wolf did the same after grimacing in my direction. Left with no other choice—and more than a little confused by the man's cumbersome accent—I followed, dragging the heavy bag at my heels.

I entered a dining hall. It was darker than the foyer had been and not as well-appointed. There was a single large, long table flanked by two equally long wooden benches. One end of the room held a stone fireplace of gargantuan stature. The flames crackling within its cavernous hearth provided the majority of the room's light. The scruffy man, the wolf, and a second man all sat at the table by the welcoming heat of the blaze.

At the opposing end of the hall was yet another archway, presumably leading to a kitchen. From that archway entered an elderly woman bearing a fresh loaf of bread on a cutting board and a knife as long as my forearm.

"Bloody wolves eating Sloth out of a house and home—oh!" The woman spotted me standing in the doorway like a half-drowned specter as she dropped the bread onto the table. She shoved the mass of her gray hair over her skinny shoulder and patted her hands on her apron. Tiny puffs of flour were released. "Hello, dearie. Why, aren't you a sight?"

"Uh, hello," I replied. Sloth. I plucked the word from the woman's brief tirade. Did she mean the Sin of Sloth? So, I was in the correct house?

"You've come from under the hill, then?" she continued, cutting the loaf into thick slices. One of the men reached out to snatch a piece and she slapped his hand. "Manners, Thomas!"

"Ouch, Mattie...."

I approached the table but didn't sit down, though the fire's warmth was a relief to my chilled skin. "I'm here to...meet someone?" Technically I was there to wait for someone, but saying so seemed odd.

"Aye, just sit yourself down and we'll get you settled soon enough." The woman finished slicing the bread and tossed the crispy heel to the wolf laying on the stone floor. The harsh snap of its jaws closing over the slice made me flinch.

I chose not to argue with a woman who fed a wolf like a puppy dog begging for table scraps. I plopped onto the bench next to the man she had addressed as Thomas, across from the scruffy guy who had retrieved me from the foyer and was now dunking his bread into a bowl of thick, brown stew.

"I'm Thomas," said my tablemate, extending a hairy hand for me to shake. "That there's me Da, Gavin Banswolf, and down here is Mark."

The wolf huffed as it licked its chops for crumbs.

"Which hill are ye from, then?" Gavin asked around a mouthful of food.

"Gotta be the one out by Launceston, Da. She's got the smell of town about her." Thomas sniffed in my direction to illustrate his point. I glared.

Hill? What does that mean?

When I didn't answer, Thomas shrugged, a faint blush coming to his cheeks.

"The one out on the West Dart?" Gavin asked as curious light sparked in his green eyes. "No? The one on the Tavy?"

"I don't understand what you mean by hill," I confessed, tucking my bangs behind my ear. "I'm from Verweald. America."

Gavin frowned. He looked at Thomas, questioning, but Thomas only shrugged.

I was shocked by their common acceptance of the wolf and their foreign way of speaking. I processed the information again and again, opening my mouth to speak only to shut it once more. Sloth. That woman, Mattie, said Sloth. Who is the Sin of the Sloth? It was not Gavin nor Thomas. They did not exude the same off-putting chill, their eyes too genial and kind. Where is Darius?

The door I had walked through minutes ago swung open. Thomas and I turned on our bench to see behind us as another man strolled in—one so strikingly different from the two I sat with it took my breath away.

Gavin and Thomas were only middling in height, both well-muscled and dressed in flannel shirts with torn jeans. Gavin appeared to be in his mid-forties while Thomas was only a touch older than I was. Their hair was curly, uncombed, and their chins sported thin beards. Though both had pleasant faces, they were a rough sort—wild almost.

The newcomer was half a foot over six feet with a thin, willowy frame of lean muscles and slender bones. His raven hair was the same shade as my own and nearly the same length. It fell in a loose queue to the middle of his back. The fairness of his features was spared from femininity by the breadth of his shoulders, the rigidness of his facial structure, and the definition of his muscles in his slender hands. He didn't appear a day over thirty.

He was dressed in an emerald sweater with the sleeves rolled past his elbows and a dark pair of fitted canvas pants. His bright eyes were utterly colorless, just two steely mirrors set in a golden skinned face below two sharp, black brows.

His ears were narrow and pointed at the tips.

As the man came into the room, Gavin and Thomas groaned into their bowls of stew. The man paused to consider the two of them, his lips parting into a severe, spine-chilling smile. The woman reentered the dining room with another bowl—presumably for me. She saw the third man and missed a step, sloshing soup onto the floor.

"Mattie, love," he crooned in an elegant, masculine voice. His accent was decidedly English, and yet it held the barest whisper of something else. Something I couldn't put my finger on but had heard before. "You've let the dogs into the dining area again. It's simply unsanitary." His gaze remained upon the back of Thomas's head.

"Oi, Mattie," Thomas said, dribbling stew into his beard. "Looks like yer broomstick got out of the closet again."

"Och, Thomas!" Mattie chided, but I saw the way her creased lips twitched with the need to grin. "Have a seat, Anzel, I'll get you a dish."

"Thank you, Mattie," the man, Anzel, said as he swung a leg over the bench next to me. He sneered at Thomas once the elderly woman departed again. She left my bowl on the table but I didn't touch it. "You're as charming as ever, mutt."

"Right back at you, knife-ear."

I sat between them on the solid bench, more than a little concerned by their blatant antagonism. Anzel seemed to finally realize there was someone seated between himself and Thomas, for his eyes snapped from the ruffian to me. They softened.

"Oh? You're not a mongrel, are you? My apologies. I don't believe we've met." He extended one of his hands for me to take. I noticed there was a silver, powdery substance on the side of his forefinger and thumb. I guessed he had recently been writing with chalk. "I am Anzel Vyus. You are?"

The vehemence Anzel had spat for Thomas's benefit was gone. The sudden switch in the handsome man's demeanor was shocking in its alacrity. Nothing of his aspersive mien remained in his pleasant, affable smile. If I hadn't seen him use such a tone, I would have never guessed he was capable of it.

It was a benign sort of duplicity, something I should have overlooked without a second thought, but something about Anzel Vyus was anything but benign. There was something dangerous in those reflective eyes.

"I'm here for someone," I responded as I placed my hand within his own. His skin was rougher than I thought it would be, considering how polished the rest of him was.

"Oh?" he said, eyes flickering over my mouth, my eyes, my dark, sodden hair. He didn't release my hand. "Who?"

"Leave the sidhe alone, Anzel," Gavin grumbled from the other side of the table. His eyes caught the light of the fire and glimmered like an animal's—like a wolf's. He curled his fingers into a fist around his bent spoon. "If ye know what's good fer ya."

Anzel's eyes narrowed in Gavin's direction. "She's not sidhe, dog."

Their pronunciation of 'sidhe' sounded like 'she,' but the emphasis they place upon it led me to believe it was a different word. "Sidhe?" I asked the table at large. Anzel was the one who answered.

"Aos sí. The Good Neighbors. People of the mounds."

I choked. Scottish and Irish mythology had not been prevalent in my curriculum in college, but I had perused various accounts and texts of the Aos Sí and the Tuatha De Denann. I knew what they were. Gavin and Thomas thought I was a fairy.

"No, I'm human. Definitely human," I explained as I extracted my hand from Anzel's. I was growing more uncomfortable with the situation and if it hadn't been raining, I would have gone and waited outside for Darius. Perhaps I should have, regardless of the weather.

"Don't smell human," Thomas grunted as he ate his meal, unperturbed by the conversation or my presence. "Mark don't think so neither."

The wolf snorted in agreement.

Anzel leaned upon his arm, balancing it on the table's edge. His fingers tapped the swell of his lower lip as he observed my confused expression. "No," he muttered, lost in thought. "Definitely not human."

I recognized the futility in arguing even as I started to do just that. What did he mean 'not human?' That was a rude and unfounded assessment. I didn't know this man at all, and he knew nothing of me.

I was human.

"Sara."

The voice loosened a knot of anxiety in my chest. The Sin of Pride stood at the threshold of the dining room's door as he glared at the men accompanying me. I jumped up from the bench, banging my knee on the underside of the table in my rush to join Darius. I almost forgot the duffel bag and had to drag it out from under the bench.

I did not miss the sudden cold devouring the fire's warmth, nor the vitric stare the Sin and Anzel shared with one another. Gavin and Thomas grimaced into their stew as they bowed their heads. Mark whined, his tail curling about his hind leg.

The chill stole through my lungs as I paused at Darius's side. The Sin's black gaze lingered on the svelte man as his lip curled over his sharp teeth in disgust. I exhaled a frosted cloud of air as Darius finally looked away from Anzel. He blinked, then disappeared into the foyer without another word.

Behind me, I heard the hushed exclamations shared between the men eating their dinner. Someone struck the table with a loud, heavy blow.

"Pride has returned?"