A House With Good Bones


 Contents
 
 Title Page
 Copyright Notice
 Dedication
 The First Day
 
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 
 
 The Second Day
 
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 
 
 The Third Day
 
 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
 
 
 The Fourth Day
 
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 8
 
 
 The Fifth Day
 
 Chapter 9
 Chapter 10
 
 
 The Sixth Day
 
 Chapter 11
 Chapter 12
 Chapter 13
 
 
 The Seventh Day
 
 Chapter 14
 
 
 The Eighth Day
 
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Chapter 17
 
 
 The Ninth Day
 
 Chapter 18
 Chapter 19
 Chapter 20
 Chapter 21
 Chapter 22
 
 
 Day or Night or Nowhere
 
 Chapter 23
 Chapter 24
 Chapter 25
 Chapter 26
 
 
 Days Later
 
 Chapter 27
 
 
 Acknowledgments
 Tor Books by T. Kingfisher
 About the Author
 Newsletter Sign-up
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Start of Content
 Title Page
 Dedication
 The First Day
 Chapter 1
 Acknowledgments
 Contents
 Copyright
 
 
 
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 Table of Contents
 About the Author
 Copyright Page
 
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 This is for my grandmother,
 who was actually pretty awesome
 
 
 
 The First Day
 
 Winchester Cathedral: An old-fashioned English shrub rose. Grows to four feet high and four feet wide. Produces masses of large, loose-petalled white roses, occasionally with a touch of pink. Fragrant. Repeat bloomer.
 
 
 
 CHAPTER 1
 
 There was a vulture on the mailbox of my grandmother’s house.
 As omens go, it doesn’t get much more obvious than that. This was a black vulture, not a turkey vulture, but that’s about as much as I could tell you. I have a biology degree, but it’s in bugs, not birds. The only reason that I knew that much was because the identification key for vultures in North America is extremely straightforward. Does it have a black head? It’s a black vulture. Does it have a red head? It’s a turkey vulture. This works unless you’re in the Southwest, where you have to add: Is it the size of a small fighter jet? It’s a California condor.
 We have very few condors in North Carolina.
 “I bet you have some amazing feather mites,” I told the vulture, opening the car door. The vulture tilted its head and considered this, or me, or my aging Subaru.
 I took out my phone and got several glamour shots of the bird. When I tried to upload one to the internet, however, my phone informed me that it had one-tenth of a bar and my GPS conked out completely.
 Ah yes. That, at least, hadn’t changed.
 My mother lived on Lammergeier Lane, which made the vulture even more appropriate, although we don’t have Lammergeiers—“bearded vultures”—in North Carolina either. They’re a large species of vulture from Africa and Eurasia that eats bones. Why would you name a private road after a bone-eating vulture from a different continent? I looked it up one day when I was bored, and discovered that the developer of the subdivision had been obsessed with birds. His first project had been Accipiter Lane, then Brambling Court, then Cardinal Street, and so on through the alphabet until Whip-poor-will Way, whereupon he died, presumably so that he would not have to come up with a bird for X. (The correct answer is Xantus’s murrelet, but I admit it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.)
 Lammergeier Lane was a type of subdivision that we have all over the South, although I don’t know if they’ve migrated out to other areas. You’ll be driving along a rural road, surrounded