Chapter 10 — Four Thousand One Hundred and Six
His name was Alaric Saltzman and he had been standing on that porch for eleven minutes trying to decide whether to walk over.
He was still deciding when Klaus came out of the Stilinski house and crossed the street without hurrying, and stopped at the bottom of the steps with his hands in his pockets.
"You're in my house," Klaus said.
"Technically I'm on the porch of a house you don't close on until Friday."
"I closed on Thursday."
"Then I'm trespassing." Alaric took a drink. "Hello, Klaus."
"Ric."
"You remember me."
"You put a white oak stake through my chest in a high school gymnasium."
"That was a different guy in my body."
"It was very much your body."
"Yeah," Alaric said. "It was."
They looked at each other across eight feet of concrete.
"Why are you here?" Klaus said.
"Bonnie."
Klaus's expression did not change, but something behind it did.
"Go on."
"Three weeks ago she got a nosebleed grading papers," Alaric said. "That's how it started. Then she started waking up with the same word written on the pad by her bed, in her handwriting, and she doesn't remember writing it, and Bonnie Bennett does not do things she doesn't remember doing."
"What was the word?"
"It wasn't a word. It was a number."
Klaus waited.
"Four thousand, one hundred and six," said Alaric.
"Meaning what?"
"We don't know. She's been trying to find out for three weeks and she's gotten exactly one thing, and the one thing is a direction." He nodded at the street. "West. It got stronger the further west we came. It's loudest here."
"How convenient."
"I thought so too," Alaric said. "That's why I came first and alone, and that's why I've been standing on this porch for eleven minutes instead of knocking on that door, because I saw a moving truck and three cars and I thought, well, that can't be a coincidence, and then I saw *you*, and then I stopped thinking it was a coincidence at all."
"I'm here for my granddaughter."
Alaric lowered the glass.
"I'm sorry, your what?"
"My granddaughter," said Klaus. "Three months old. She's in that house. Her father is the sheriff's son."
Alaric stood there.
"Okay," he said. "That's — congratulations. Genuinely. That's a hell of a sentence to hear out loud."
"It is."
"How's Hope?"
"Tired. Furious. Extremely good at it." Klaus came up one step. "Which brings me to the thing I want to say before you knock on that door."
"Say it."
"If the Bennett girl's number leads to that house," Klaus said, "you will bring it to me first. Not to the sheriff. Not to the boy. To me."
"That's not how I work."
"I'm aware of how you work. You work by telling everyone everything and letting a room full of frightened people vote on it, and it has cost you a remarkable number of friends."
That landed. Alaric's jaw tightened.
"And you work by keeping everything and letting people walk into it blind," he said.
"Yes," said Klaus. "And my daughter is alive and most of your students aren't, so let's neither of us pretend we're the good one."
Alaric looked away, out at the dark street.
"You know what the worst part is," he said.
"Tell me."
"I came out here ready for it to be you." He turned the glass in his hand. "The whole drive. I had a whole thing worked out. *Of course it's Klaus, it's always Klaus, some thousand-year-old thing he did in 1702 is finally coming due.* And then I get here and you're buying a house on a cul-de-sac because you're a grandfather."
"Life's long."
"Yours is."
"Come inside," Klaus said. "You're about to find out that this is considerably stranger than anything I did in 1702."
They sat in the living room, which was too small for it.
Stiles counted the people in his house — his father in the doorway with his arms crossed and his jacket still on, Hope on the arm of the couch, Klaus standing, Freya at the table with a cloth pressed to her nose, Elijah by the window, a history teacher from Virginia on the good chair — and had the distinct feeling of watching two weather systems meet over his living room carpet.
"Start again," Noah said. "For the guy with the badge."
"My name's Alaric Saltzman. I run a school in Mystic Falls, Virginia, for kids who — " he stopped. "For kids like the ones in this town, if I had to guess."
"There's a school?"
"There's a school."
"Huh," said Noah.
"A friend of mine is a witch. Bennett witch, which in our part of the country means the strongest one in the room, always, no exceptions. Three weeks ago she started writing a number in her sleep. Four thousand one hundred and six. And she started following it west."
"And it led here," said Hope.
"It led to this county. She narrowed it down to about eight miles yesterday from a motel outside Sacramento and then she called me and told me to drive ahead of her, because — " he paused.
"Because what," said Klaus.
"Because she said she didn't want to get any closer until somebody looked at it with normal eyes," Alaric said. "She said the last twenty miles felt like walking toward something that was already looking back."
Freya lowered the cloth.
"Four thousand one hundred and six," she said.
"Yeah."
"Days."
Alaric looked at her.
"What?"
"It's not a code and it's not a page reference," Freya said. "It's a count. Somebody's counting days."
"Four thousand one hundred and six days is — " Noah did the math out loud, the way cops do. "That's about eleven years and three months."
The room went quiet.
Stiles was standing by the stairs with his hands in his pockets.
He did not move. He was very aware of not moving.
"Eleven years," Hope said slowly.
"Eleven years and about ninety days," said Noah.
"From when?"
"From nothing," said Freya. "That's the problem with a count. It doesn't tell you where the start is, only that somebody's been keeping it. And they've been keeping it every single day for eleven years without missing one, or the number wouldn't be clean."
Elijah turned from the window.
"That's not a spell," he said. "That's a person."
"That's a person," Freya agreed.
"Somebody has sat down every day for eleven years and added one," said Elijah. "That isn't magic. That's grief, or that's a debt."
Alaric set his glass down on the coffee table.
"Okay," he said. "Now can I ask the thing I've been sitting on for ten minutes?"
"Go on," said Klaus.
Alaric turned in the chair and looked at the kid by the stairs.
"What's wrong with you?" he said.
"Excuse me?"
"I've been in rooms like this for twelve years," Alaric said. "You learn to read them. There's a thing everybody in here is not saying and all of them are not saying it in your direction."
"Ric," said Klaus.
"No, it's — " Alaric put his hands up. "I'm not accusing him of anything. I'm saying the number came west, and there's a room full of very old people standing around a teenager, and I'd like to know if those are the same subject."
Nobody answered.
Noah pushed off the doorframe.
"That's enough," he said.
"Sheriff — "
"You've been in my house eleven minutes." Noah's voice was perfectly level. "You want to sit at that table and work a problem, I'll make coffee and we'll be here till three. You want to point at my son in his own living room, you can do it outside."
Alaric looked at him.
Then he nodded, once.
"Fair," he said. "That's fair. I apologize."
"Don't apologize to me."
Alaric turned. "I apologize."
"It's fine," Stiles said.
It was not fine, and everybody in the room heard that it was not fine, and the conversation moved anyway, the way conversations do.
Stiles went out to the back step at some point after eleven.
He sat down on the cold concrete with his forearms on his knees and looked at the grey line Josette had laid along the fence, just visible in the dark, and did the arithmetic that he had been refusing to do since the word *eleven* came out of his father's mouth.
Four thousand one hundred and six days.
Eleven years, three months, and change.
He was eighteen years, two months old. He had been seven years, eleven months, and some number of days old on the afternoon Mrs. Ferrell backed out of her garage. He could not remember the exact date. That was the thing he kept coming back to. He could remember the warmth of the asphalt and the sound of his mother's voice and the pattern on his shirt, and he could not remember the date, because he had been seven, and seven-year-olds do not write things down.
But he could get it inside a week.
And a week was not enough to be wrong about.
The door opened behind him.
"Don't," he said.
"I haven't said anything," Hope said.
"You were going to."
"I was going to sit down." She sat down. "You've been out here forty minutes."
"Yeah."
"It's thirty-nine degrees."
"I don't get cold."
Hope stopped.
"Since when?"
"Since always," Stiles said. "I get *told* I'm cold. My hands go white. My dad's made me wear a coat since I was nine because it upsets him. But I've never once actually been cold." He rubbed his hands together anyway, a habit. "That one took me the longest to notice, because who notices that?"
Hope pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.
"You did the math," she said.
"Yeah."
"And?"
Stiles looked out at the yard.
"I'm inside the margin," he said.
Hope closed her eyes.
"How close?"
"A week. Maybe two. I don't know the exact date, Hope, that's — " he laughed, and there was nothing in it. "That's the single stupidest thing about my entire life. Somebody's been counting since the day I should have died in a driveway and I can't tell them what day that was."
"Your father knows the date."
"Yeah," said Stiles. "My father definitely knows the date."
"Are you going to ask him?"
"No."
"Stiles."
"If I ask him," he said, "he'll know why I'm asking. He'll know within about four seconds, because he's the best interviewer in this county and he's been waiting eleven years for me to bring it up, and he will walk into that living room and put the number on the table himself."
"Maybe that's what should happen."
"Maybe." Stiles nodded slowly. "Yeah. Maybe."
He didn't move.
"But not tonight," he said.
Hope leaned her shoulder against his.
They sat there.
Out past the fence, past the grey line, somewhere in the two miles of dark between this street and a stump in the woods, something was awake and had been awake for a long time, and neither of them said anything about it, because neither of them could have said what it was.
Inside, in the kitchen, a man was writing a number on a legal pad and circling it twice.