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Later that morning, Nola found me a pair of mismatched boots. They would get the job done until we could trade for something better.

The seventh trial was made worse by incessant rain, but the smaller number of participants was a blessing on the high platform. The rope bridges were damp, but fewer bodies meant they rattled and shook less.

I felt lighter when I reached the bottom. My palms were chapped from clinging to the cords too hard.

The insect garm didn’t like the storm, it seemed. They stayed hidden inside the industrial buildings. We made it through the district sopping wet, wind-whipped, but unscathed. It was well out of our way, but we hiked back toward the part of the park where the beast had been slain.

I showed them where I’d covered Liesel and Emma’s bodies the day before. We turned the branches and stones into a proper pyre, and Nola lit it with a ball of crimson magic that burned hot and fast. The magic fire consumed everything quickly. Blue collected their ash into a clay jar she then blessed with her wand and her tears. Ruchel sang a prayer to the Crone for the departed.

I stood together with my sisters as witness. To honor their connection with the earth, we buried the urn under a linden tree.

The streets before the clock tower were eerily quiet. The markets were empty. More red-hooded warlocks hung from the library walls, but the large doors were shut up tight, and there was no one at the entrance to the tower collecting a tax.

“The calm before the storm,” Blue muttered.

I hoped she was wrong about that.

Hello, pet , Nott purred in my ear. Then he bounded into view, and the great black panther wasn’t alone. His sister prowled behind him.

“My lord . . . and my lady,” I greeted with a bow of my head.

The others bowed too.

Nott was distinguished from his sister by the patch of white on his chest. He made me scratch behind his ears. Mara circled each of us, taking us in with sharp yellow eyes.

Tell the other witches to go on , Nott said. My sister and I wish to talk to you.

My coven left me reluctantly. I didn’t like being parted from them either, our shared loss pulling us together tighter. The sisters’ death was a horrid reminder that our end was always around the corner in the games and we were the only force standing together to keep it at bay.

Nott and Mara walked on either side of me down into the stone tunnels.

My lovely sister has had a change of heart , Nott explained.

I glanced at Mara, who nuzzled my hand, demanding more pets.

She knows I tried to have her killed , Nott said, and my stomach dropped, though Mara seemed unfazed. Your adamant refusal has endeared you to her. She has a new proposition for you.

“I’m honored,” I said to Mara. “What is it you need from me, my lady?”

It was Nott who spoke for her. She will grant your request for a sigil, but only if you make amends with the Old One. She’s willing to risk the upset of the God King by disrupting his games, but not at the expense of angering the most powerful one amongst us at the same time.

I came to a halt, trying to process the request.

Nott nudged me forward. Will you do it? Will you apologize to the Old One? When you have his favor, you’ll have our sigils.

“I . . . I would, but I don’t know how.” I’d already tried to apologize to him once in the hopes that the Lord of Death would spare me from the games. That hadn’t worked.

Oh, but it’s easy. You just say—

“No, I mean— Sorry,” I added hurriedly when he hissed at my interrupting him. “I mean, I don’t know how to contact him.”

When I wish to talk to him, Nott said , I simply wait on the train until after the prisoners are delivered to the trials. He’ll seek you out then.

“My lord, I can’t stay on the train. I’m one of those prisoners. If I do, the Old One will rip my soul out and turn my body into a revenant.”

Nott chuckled. He’s less likely to do that if you make amends well. Be nice to him, pet.

I shook my head. “I don’t know, my lord . . .”

Mara yowled, showing off her ferocious teeth.

My sister is not a patient goddess. The decision is yours, but you had best do this tomorrow before Mara changes her mind. Apologize to the Old One in the morning when the prisoners are gone. Get your sigil. You and your coven of misfits could be out of the games in a matter of hours. How could you say no?

* * *

I contemplated my choices all evening. I ate with my coven. I wished Asher was there, but there was no sign of him and no telling exactly when I’d see him again. Over drinks, we discussed what the goddess wanted from me.

“If you stay on the train . . .” Nola whispered, unwilling to say the horrid part out loud.

“I know,” I said.

“But could he rip out your soul?” Ruchel asked. “I mean, being a gray must have some advantages in that regard, surely?”

Blue sipped her favorite tea to replenish herself. “I don’t have any advice for you,” she said. “I’m as eager to see the back of this place as the next witch, but with the stakes so high, this is a decision you have to make yourself.”

But I didn’t know what to choose.

Later that night, I paced inside Asher’s bedroom, hoping he would appear, knowing it was doubtful I’d see him for a few days, based on his other adventures with giants and spying.

I picked one of his journals at random and read from it until my vision was blurry and my spirit was as full as I could get it with my heart so heavy. I slept in his bed. It smelled like him.

Morning came. Trial one included the mist of nightmare shades, which immediately made me think of Emma and Liesel, and my spirits plummeted. Blue would be able to get the wax we needed from Talia. It was an easy trial. Not one my coven would need my help with.

I could stay on the train. Meet with Death. Apologize. Asher always talked about the Old One as though he were the reasonable god amongst the Otherworld deities, the one who didn’t treat prisoners with malice. Death could have killed me, but he hadn’t. He’d spared me. I couldn’t ask Asher what I should do, but I could make educated guesses about what he’d suggest from the things he’d shared in the past. Asher always stood up for his maker. Traitor or not, he seemed to care for his god.

I could beg Lord Death not to snatch my soul out of my body and damn my remains to his service.

If he didn’t listen, would Asher come? Would he collect my body off the train, take me to the desert where the hills turn purple, and bury my remains? Would he visit me every night? Would he sit with my soul in the passenger car after he felt me die?

I believed he would. And immediately I felt like a fool for turning him away last night. That might have been my last chance with him.

But what about Bram? What about answers and revenge? He’d stolen my boots and my pistol to goad me into seeing him. He wanted me to beg him for the truth. Bram wanted to play games with me.

I could go and see him. I could charge further down the path of revenge that had gotten me thrown into the trials in the first place. But I was done with that. The vengeance that had once burned in my heart had died a little with Liesel and Emma. Then it had died a little more when Asher reminded me that Lisbeth was not the only family I had a responsibility to.

They were all my sisters.

I wanted to tear the murdering god apart, but there was something I needed even more than that now. I wanted my family safe. Never again would I watch one of my sisters die. And I only had one day to ensure that.

As the bell pealed once to signal the first trial, Nola and Ruchel and Blue lined up at the exit. I threw my arms around them and hugged them tight.

Nola’s chin trembled. “Ducky, I don’t know what I’ll do if I have to see you as a revenant on this train . . .”

“You’ll ask me to fluff your pillow,” I teased. “Make me mix your drinks.”

Nola nudged my arm. “I hope you’re right about all this.”

“It’ll work,” Ruchel said with a false cheer meant to bolster me. She couldn’t know it was true. The risk to others wasn’t as clear to her as her own, but I appreciated the vote of confidence. I needed it.

“We’ll see you soon,” Blue said somberly.

I watched them depart without me. The train chimed, and this time the bell sounded like a sharp warning. When the wheels started up, I had the sudden urge to throw myself against the doors, beg the train to open and spit me out.

I swallowed my panic.

The Schatten pulled away from the platform, and much too quickly Wulfram was a blur in the distance. I paced the lounge car. Then I paced the dining car and picked at the food, not really interested in eating anything, just keeping my hands busy.

I returned to the lounge and sat at the corner table, leaning my head back against the window, eyes wide, watching and waiting. My foot tapped out a wild patter.

A revenant appeared in the archway. Faceless and yellow-haired, she was the young beast-born woman with a tail I’d met my first day, or she had been when she was alive. I’d forgotten her name.

“Hello?” I said.

Her chin cocked to the side.

Then another revenant entered the lounge behind her. And another. And another.

My pulse jumped and my heart took off, beating like a war drum in my chest. I slid out from behind the table and sprinted away from them, into the series of dining cars.

They pursued, and others joined them. More revenants dropped their trays and abandoned their trolleys. A burst of gray knocked a revenant with shorn hair aside. I barreled through another into the first of the sleeper cars.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” I hissed.

I leapt inside the nearest compartment, and I slammed the door shut, remembering too late there was no way to lock it from the inside.

The door handle jerked. I clung to it, keeping it latched. Revenants beat against the wood, rattling it in its frame. I squeezed the handle shut until my fingers ached, blood pumping loudly in my ears.

“Just stop!” I screamed.

They didn’t stop. Nails scratched at the wood. They were all around the compartment, scraping at the walls, crawling into the vents, the thump, thump, thump of their knees and hands beating in quick staccato as they drew closer.

“Hang it all,” I gasped. My vision narrowed and my fingers paled, trying to keep the damned latch shut.

The door burst open, and I was thrown to the floor. Faceless revenants swarmed the cabin like angry hornets. I was grabbed up by more hands than I could count and dragged cursing, kicking, and thrashing into the aisle, back through the dining cars.

Were they going to toss me off the train?

Spirit surged out of me, knocking revenants down. I fell onto the heap of them, into the tangle of struggling limbs. Fingers gone gray, I stuffed a hand inside the nearest chest of the faceless undead, and it was like shoving my hand into cold stew.

There was nothing in there but smothering magic. Repulsed, I jerked away and was snatched up again by more hands. They carried me into the lounge and threw me into my seat at the corner table, blocking up the exits with their bodies.

I couldn’t catch my breath. My lungs hitched. I searched my arms, touching my sides, checking for injuries. I’d been scared out of my mind, but I was whole.

The temperature in the car plummeted sharply. Cosmic darkness crawled across the windows, blotting out the unnatural skylight. The lanterns flickered, then dimmed. My heart tried to beat itself out of the cage of my ribs. The pulse at my throat surged.

“Please don’t take my soul, Lord Death,” I begged, and this time my words were sincere. I was no fan of the Old One, but I shouldn’t have tried to take my vengeance out upon him. He hadn’t earned it like the guilty god had. “I’ve come to make amends. I’ve come to beg your forgiveness for my trespass and for the attack you did not deserve, and—”

Shadows pooled in the chair across from me. They roiled and rippled, and then they parted, revealing Death’s favored.

Asher.

I let out a relieved breath. “Oh, thank the Crone. It’s you. Where is the Old One? Nott said that if I apologized to him, we could have his sigil and be out of here by tonight. All of us.”

Asher’s eyes were black as pitch. His magic had curled all around me and then gone still, like the tail of a feral dog when agitated, right before it strikes. “Maven,” he breathed.

Not Trouble, which oddly enough made me feel like I very much was in trouble.

“Where’s Death?” I repeated, enunciating with care, because something suddenly seemed very wrong indeed. My fingers clenched and unclenched. My body had figured out the problem well before my mind had, and my thoughts were rushing to catch up.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Where. Is. Death?”

His eyes slid shut, and he sucked in a pained breath. When he opened them again, his gaze was fathomless and aggrieved. “You’re looking at him.”

“What? No . . .” I sputtered.

Death. The Old One. All those times he’d answered questions with ‘we’. . .

But no. That couldn’t be right. He was a traitor to the gods, a reaper they had mistreated. My traitor. Not a spy. He was my friend, not one of the horrid gods I hated.

The images of the broken crow sprang to mind, the legend of the god king ordering Death to break himself in half so that he would fit inside the Otherworld.

“No,” I whispered.

If Asher is interested in you, then the Old One is . . .

“Nott played you, Maven,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be on the train for this part of the journey. No one is. Only the dead.”

My nostrils flared. Heat spread across my chest and flowed up my neck. My fingers went gray. “Was everything between us a lie?”

“ No . Never that. I wanted to tell you . . . I was going to tell you . . .” His chest heaved and his mouth turned down in a grimace. “If I had told you sooner, I was certain you’d probably just . . .”

“I’d shoot you again,” I supplied, voice low. My body was still processing his betrayal, all his lies, sending up the alarm that hardened my belly and sent ice water through my veins. The only thing worse than being a spy for the gods was being one of them . “You knew I thought you were a reaper. Not . . . not what you are.”

“I am a reaper. The very first one,” he said. He rested his elbows on the table, leaning closer to block me in. “The Old One remains on the train. He holds the broken parts of my magic, a piece of my divinity, and a portion of my spirit. We are like Nott and Mara. The Old One is my brother.”

He was admitting all of it, and I still couldn’t process one single bit. The worry growing in me felt misplaced and detached from the rest of me, like a loose bolt in my machinery. I shook my head. It couldn’t be real. None of this was real.

“You’re Asher. Not Death,” I retorted, not wanting any of it to be true. Not wanting the man I was falling for to be the man who’d thrown me into the games in the first place. The man who’d pretended to be my ally. Then my friend. Then claimed to want to be my lover when he’d always been my enemy. He would always be the god who had taken my sister to a place I could not go, another one of the deities who had made my life so difficult.

I hated the gods. All of them. I’d made them my enemies, and he knew that better than anyone.

“You’re Maven. Not Fria,” he said. “I am a prisoner here. I am a traitor. I didn’t lie about that.”

“I let you in ,” I ground out, disdain coloring every syllable. “I trusted you, and all this time you’ve been playing god games.”

“I don’t want to play games with you.” His eyes squeezed shut. His fingers tapped out an anxious beat on the tabletop between us. “I convinced myself the truth didn’t matter. What did it hurt that you obviously believed I was just another crow? We both wanted the same thing. I just needed you to get me to the Upper Realm, and I didn’t care what you thought about me. But then that all changed. What I wanted changed. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but my feelings for you—”

“Don’t! Don’t you dare go there,” I breathed, nostrils flaring. “Just tell me what you’re after. Where do you want to go now?”

“Wherever you are,” he said so sadly that the tiniest part of me, a part shrinking by the second under feelings of betrayal, felt sorry for him.

It was like being back in my shop all over again, seeing Lisbeth broken and not being able to comprehend any of it. My thoughts had gone slippery. I couldn’t cling to any one of them for long before another stole its place. But now, instead of a fury that fueled me, there was a new icy, determined ache. A new desire to set it all to rights again, come what may.

Our shared kiss the night before flashed through my mind. I shoved the image away, pressing my lips together to quell the phantom sensation of his mouth against mine.

Just like that moment all those years ago when little Lisbeth had smiled up at me with a mouth full of missing teeth, that same sense of weighty responsibility settled across my shoulders. Come what may, I wouldn’t see my coven harmed. I could bury my feelings if it meant protecting my new family.

No more of my sisters would die. I was getting all of us out of here. There was no going back now. I was ready to face the Old One and conquer whatever the deities threw at me.

I rubbed at my throat, trying to clear it. “Mara was never going to give me her sigil, was she?”

He shrugged his broad shoulders, and they drooped forward. “I don’t know, but there are far more pressing concerns we need to deal with first.”

The cosmic shadows left the windows to encircle me. Light poured inside, casting him in a glow that made him look gray as the grave. The car filled with even more faceless revenants. They lined the cabin and crowded the archways.

“I need you to understand that what happens next,” Asher cautioned, “isn’t entirely up to me. There are rules.”

I glanced from the smothering darkness to his grimacing face, and my heart jumped into my throat. I shrunk down into my seat, needing separation from the encroaching cosmic midnight.

“Asher,” I pleaded, my voice small, “are you going to rip out my soul?”

He pinned me in place with those same bottomless black eyes that made me feel seen through. “We haven’t decided yet.”

The End For Now