My family have always been sleepwalkers. When my grandfather was still alive, he would sit my daughter down on the rug by the fire and light up his father’s pipe. Carved from the bones of prey deep in our family’s past, the stem had the bite marks of decades of smoking.

Every generational patriarch or matriarch replaced the stem with another as it wore. Always carved from bones of

He’d stuff it from a pouch with something that smelled rich and foul at the same time. Every time, he’d offer her a sniff, then laugh as she recoiled.

“That’s good Johnny. You’re teaching her well. Keep her away from that stuff until she’s an adult”

Then he’d smile at me with a mouthful of teeth so yellow you’d think he was jaundiced. The eyes would make you think that too. But despite the color, his mouth looked healthy. Not a missing molar. Each canine sharpened to a point.

I’d smile back as I lit up a cigarette – coffee long ago stopped helping. Never opened my mouth, though.

Didn’t want him to have the satisfaction of knowing my teeth were just like his. That my daughter’s teeth were coming in soon.

Then, my grandfather would tell my daughter stories. The same stories his father told me. Same pipe. Same sharp teeth. Same yellow eyes.

“It’s generations since a girl in our family was blessed with ‘The Gift of Somnambulism’,” he started, packing tobacco into his pipe. “It’s important we prepare you for the night.”

“Why do I need to be prepared?” she asked, relentlessly curious.

“A good question! See, honey, the world shows its true face only at night, away from the judgment of the sun. Generally, only the mad and the broken get to see it. Those who work at night hide away from the night. They fortress themselves in hospitals, police cruisers, and great buildings of steel and stone.”

He lit the family pipe on with an ember from the fire and puffed away. “Not us. We are lucid. We are whole. And we do not fear the night. We walk in it and let it fill us. We wake, knowing things terrible and wonderful. In the Old Country, we served the High King by walking at night and doing the terrible things needed. The things High Kings cannot not have the sun judge them for.”

“Why would a king need that?”

“To keep the English out, of course! Sometimes, to save your home, you must do terrible things. Things a High King should not do. So we did it for them because the sun could judge us.”

“Why aren’t we in the Old Country any longer?”

My grandfather’s eyes sparked wildly. He knelt in front of her, close enough to her face so that she could smell his breath.

I knew because I remember his father’s breath in my face. Fishy, coppery, rotten blood. The flecks of flesh in his teeth.

I stepped forward, and my grandfather stopped me with a look. I froze in fear, sweat pouring down my brow. It was his will that I not interfere. When I held the pipe, my will would be law, but now?

Now I listened as he told the story.

“A long, long time ago, a foolish High King – barely a laird, really – got a notion in his head that some victories aren’t worth the cost. That survival was not worth it if we became monsters in the process. And when we did it anyway, he drove us out with silver and flame. We wait here in the new country. Waiting to be needed again.”

My daughter – still with her flat baby teeth – tilted her head to the side. Her mother’s “Thinking” gesture.

So much of her mother in her. Her mother, who did not understand our gift. Who my father bade drive out because she wanted to save our daughter from the gift.

Now I sit here in our family cabin, playing with a cigarette and waiting for my daughter to return from her first sleepwalk.

My daughter’s words ring out in my mind, a final insistent question that stuck in my gullet and drove my grandfather father to a wrathful sleepwalk.

“Did we hurt the king, grandpa? Are they still angry at us for that?”

My grandfather sputtered in rage at the suggestion. The hair on his arms grew black and coarse. My grandmother bundled him out into the night, where he could sleepwalk without harming the family.

Because we did.

Because they were.

Because, an hour after my daughter left home on her first sleepwalk, the moon full and ripe, I got a package. A small thing. No return address, but a postmark from the old country. The old High King’s coat of arms in blood-red wax, sealing the envelope.

At this moment, my little girl – not a little girl any longer, a young woman – is sleepwalking. Learning the secrets the night reveals only the mad and the broken.

She will be red in tooth and claw when she returns. The price we pay for our somnambulism. The due we gave to the High King before we took it from the High King.

I opened the package and took out the silver bullet. It was meant as a message from the agents of the long-dead High King.

But I see a tool.

I load the bullet into a revolver and call out to my father. He holds my grandfather’s pipe, now his. I suggest we have a smoke together, by the fire.

When his blood is on the mantle, the pipe will be in my hands. My will law.

And my daughter will never have to sleepwalk ever again.