Jake stopped next to him. They were both looking at the door, at eye level, where there was a capital M as tall as a hand, cut deep and a little crooked. The middle of it dipped too low, and the last leg leaned out like it was trying to leave. There was a fresh claw mark right across it.
The flies kept going. Nobody else said anything.
Ray had a lot of time to think in that silence, and all he came up with was the same thing he'd said two weeks ago.
"...It came with the house."
"That's what you said last time!" Finn turned around. "That's the exact same thing you said!"
"Because it's true. It did come with the house."
Jake didn't say anything. He went up the step, put his nose to the door, right on the M, and sniffed. Once, then a long one, the same way he'd done it on the morning after the stomper, except this time his ears went flat.
"Old apples," he said. "Buddy. Why does your door smell like the vampire?"
'Okay. Busted. So fucking busted.' Ray put his hands up, slowly, like somebody was pointing something at him.
"So. Funny story."
"Ray."
"It's her house." It came out faster after that. "The cabin. It's hers. She showed up on my ninth night, kicked me out, and then she, uh, let me back in. I'm kind of her tenant now."
Finn's mouth fell open. Jake went small, and then smaller, until he was the size of a teacup and climbing up Finn's leg toward the backpack.
"Tenant? Like, you pay her?"
"Kind of."
"With what?" Finn said. "You don't have anything!"
Ray rubbed the back of his neck. "Songs. She likes songs she hasn't heard before. I sing one, I keep the roof."
"We are on a vampire's porch," said the backpack. "We're on her porch right now, Finn. Talking. On her porch."
Finn wasn't listening to the backpack. He was looking at Ray, and Ray could see him putting it together the way he did math, one piece at a time, with his lips moving a little.
"How'd she know about our tree?"
Ray could have said a lot of things. He could have said she'd lived in Ooo for a thousand years and probably had a list. He looked at the kid's two bee stings and his face, which had not slept, and didn't.
"...I might've mentioned it."
"You told her?"
"It slipped out! She asked where I got the sword, and I said my friend has a pile of them in his tree house by the pond, and she got all weird about it, and I played dumb, and..." He ran out. "I didn't think she'd just go take it."
That was mostly true. The rest of it, the bad feeling, he couldn't explain to anybody in this world.
Finn heard the part he could hear.
"You knew?" His voice cracked in the middle. "You knew she was a vampire, and you lived with her, and you knew she knew about our house, and you didn't tell us?"
"Finn..."
The kid turned around and walked off toward the stream, kicking at the grass the whole way.
...
Jake gave the kid some space, because that was a big brother rule, and also because he was starving.
He climbed out of the backpack and got back to his normal size on the porch. He had been up all night. He had been chased out of a beehive and a birdhouse, and he hadn't eaten a single thing since yesterday's dinner, which he had technically shared. Whatever Finn and Ray had to work out, Jake could not work it out on an empty stomach.
The tree by the cabin had apples on it, big red ones. He stretched an arm up.
"Not the red ones." Ray was sitting on the step with his elbows on his knees. "Those are hers."
Jake's arm came back on its own.
"The grey ones are fine," Ray said. "She said I could have those."
There was a bowl of them on the table inside. Jake took one and looked at it. It was grey all the way through, like it had been left out in the rain for a hundred years. He bit it anyway, because a guy had to eat.
It tasted like nothing. Like air that used to be an apple. And it smelled like the door.
'Oh. So that's what that was.' He ate the rest of it, and then two more. They didn't help at all.
Then he went and looked at the stomper.
It was worse up close. Half of it was gone now, eaten out by something during the night, and what was left was mostly legs, shell and flies. He had promised, though. He had promised yesterday with his nose pinched, and a promise with your nose pinched still counted.
He grew until he was taller than the cabin, took a huge breath and held it, and grabbed the back half by two legs.
It came up with a wet noise that he decided not to think about. He dragged it across the clearing and into the trees, past the first row, past the second, all the way to a gully where it could stink at nobody. Ray came after him and pushed from behind, which did nothing, but it was the thought that counted.
On the second trip, with the front half, Ray cleared his throat.
"So. Good news and bad news."
Jake let some of his breath out through his teeth. "Mm?"
"The good news is I'm alive. Some things came for the stomper last night, a lot of them. One got in the window. And I handled it." Ray was talking fast again. "The bad news is, the way I handled it was, uh, mostly with your bread knife."
Jake dropped the half into the gully. It slid down to the bottom and stayed there.
"How mostly?"
"It's a handle now. It's a very nice handle."
He shrank back down to normal size and wiped his paws on the grass for a good long while, thinking about it. That had been his second-favorite. It had a good wooden grip and it went through crusty bread like a dream. On the other hand, Ray had said there were a lot of them, and he was standing there in one piece with all his blood in him.
"Okay," Jake said. "You owe me a knife."
"I owe you like six things."
"Seven. I'm counting the apples."
He walked back to the cabin, ahead of Ray, and thought about it on the way the only way he knew how, which was in order.
The vampire took their tree. That was bad. But it was daytime now, and everybody knew vampires slept in the daytime.
Ray had been living in the vampire's house for two weeks. Jake had looked; there wasn't a single bite mark on him.
And Finn was never in a million years going to leave Ray, mad or not, so wherever Ray was sleeping tonight, that was where Finn was sleeping, and Jake wasn't sleeping anywhere without Finn.
'So we stay.' He looked up at the M on the door and decided not to look at it again. 'We stay, and I sleep with one eye open. Maybe both.'
...
Finn had thrown about forty rocks into the stream by the time Ray came down.
He knew it was Ray without looking, because Ray's shoes squeaked on wet grass. He threw another rock. It didn't even skip. It just went in.
Finn had fought plenty of bad guys who lived in places; he could handle a vampire. What made him mad was Ray. Ray had taken him into the ground and shown him the moving stairs and the little fork and the people who held hands at the end, and he'd told him all of that, all the big stuff, and he hadn't told him this.
He'd been living with a vampire and coming over for pancakes every morning like it was nothing.
Ray sat down on the bank next to him. He didn't say anything for a bit, which was good, because Finn would have yelled at anything.
"She was gonna kick me out," Ray said finally. "First night she found me. I was sitting under that tree out there, and I didn't have anywhere to go, so I sang something. And she let me stay if I kept paying in songs."
Finn threw another rock.
"Two nights ago I paid her. She asked where I got the sword. I was tired, and I was still kind of in the song, and my mouth just said 'tree house'." Ray picked up a rock too, looked at it and put it back. "That's all of it. I'm sorry, little bro."
Finn thought about it. He thought about the slumber party, and Ray singing in the candy hall with everybody going quiet, and about the vampire getting that too, every time, in Ray's house that was really her house.
"You sing for her?"
"Every time she shows up. That's the rent."
"...Is she good? At the music?"
Ray huffed. "She plays bass. She's scary good."
Finn didn't like how that made him feel, so he picked up the biggest rock he could find and threw it, and it made a really good splash.
"I'm still mad," he said.
"You should be."
"Like, a lot."
"Mad as you want, little bro."
He stood up and wiped his hands on his shorts. The thing was, being mad didn't change where they had to sleep. And he'd been thinking about this since he landed in the wet grass last night.
"We're staying," Finn said. "Here. Tonight. She took one house. She's not taking two."
"Technically, this one's hers too."
"Not tonight it isn't!"
He marched back up to the cabin, and Ray followed him.
It turned out there was a lot to fix. The window frame was split where something had come through it, so Finn found a good straight branch and Jake turned one arm into a clamp and held it while Finn tied it in with vines, tight, like a raft.
The plate was in three pieces; Ray said there was no saving it, and Finn put the pieces on the shelf anyway, in case. They swept the floor with a bunch of twigs. BMO found a spot on the windowsill and played something soft and bouncy for working to.
Last of all, Finn stood at the door. There were long scratches down the wood, and one went right across the M. He rubbed at it with his thumb for a while. It stayed.
"That's not coming off, buddy," Jake said.
"I know." Finn kept looking at it. Then he went inside.
...
Across the valley, Marceline woke up when the sun went down.
She had slept the day in the Tree Fort, upside down from a beam in the main room, and the whole place still smelled like pancakes. It had stopped smelling like her a long time ago. That bugged her more than she wanted it to.
There was a pile of swords in the corner. Six of them, leaning together, no scabbards, all of them pretty good, the same kind of junk her squatter had broken on the stomper. She had looked at those last night, and it had all come together in a way she did not like.
'So the friend with the swords is a kid. A kid and a dog.' She had stuck them in the wet grass at midnight. 'And Mister Lot of Trees knew exactly who lived here. Little shit.'
She had a few things to say to him about that. And he owed her rent anyway.
She went out the window and over the hills with the last of the red still in the sky, and her skin prickled the whole way. The cabin came up in the dark between the trees, and she slowed down.
The stomper was gone. Somebody had dragged it off, and the porch was swept. The window frame had a branch tied into it with vines, neat and tight. The door was open, there was a candle burning inside, and she could hear voices.
She came down without a sound and looked in.
Her tenant was sitting on her floor. Next to him was the kid from last night, cross-legged and frowning, and the dog, chewing on one of her grey apples like he hated it. A little game machine was playing music on her windowsill.
Marceline floated down to the step. There were three heartbeats in her house, and only one of them paid rent.