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For William Mayol (1989–2017)

Acknowledgments

This book wouldn’t exist without Diana, my editor. I’d also like to thank Erich, for basically feeding me while I wrote this book; Pip, for a receptive ear; Amar, for feedback on transmasculine representation; Eleni for help with the Greek; Heather for letting me steal her name; Marybeth for encouragement and help with outlining; Firestorm Books & Coffee for being my office; and the queers and the punks and the anarchists of Asheville for being such an amazing community. I'd like to thank some of my patrons: Chris Costello, Sam Mikesell, and Hoss, the dog. I’d like to thank everyone who has put their body and their freedom on the line in this era of growing oppression. Finally, I’d like to thank everyone I’ve ever committed a crime with: without you I wouldn’t be the writer I am today.

ONE

The towering bursts of flame that staggered their way across the empty, black horizon weren’t helping my mood. I’d been dozing in the backseat of the car, my head against Brynn’s shoulder, but the staccato, silent bursts were too eerie to sleep through.

“Where the hell are we?” I asked.

Outside, as far as I could see, were featureless plains. No stars in the sky, just blackness. Blackness and fire.

“Hell’s about the word for it,” Brynn said. She was gazing out the window, her face lit a little by the interior lights of the car and a lot by the occasional streaks of fire outside. A single thick black tattoo line cut its way down her face from her short bangs to the bridge of her nose, and her face was severe. Even more severe than usual. Or maybe I was just drowsy.

The rest of the passengers were silent, and we tore down the road through all that darkness.

It was gas flaring. As I woke up more properly, I remembered. Must be in North Dakota somewhere. Excess natural gas production, beyond what they’ve got the infrastructure for, gets burned off. I’d never seen it with my own eyes, those flames that stood in monument to the wastefulness of civilization.

My left shoulder ached where thread—regular sewing thread—held together a crowbar wound. My right hand was sore, still, and mottled with supernatural gray where an undead goat had bitten it.

Behind us, a thousand miles of highway ago, was nothing. Dead bodies and probably some investigators who wanted explanations we couldn’t really give. A demon killed those police officers, sir. It wasn’t us. They probably shouldn’t have pulled guns out around a bloodred, three-antlered deer with obvious supernatural agility, so whose fault was it really.

No one would believe us. A week ago, I wouldn’t have believed us. We couldn’t go back.

Ahead of us, there was also nothing. We had a sort of scattershot map of towns with friends who might shelter us, of places that might have books or witches who could teach us. Doomsday was convinced that if we made it to the Washington coast, we’d eventually find people who’d get us on a boat to the islands off the coast of Canada. Vulture had a Google map populated with disappearances and strange phenomena we might look into. But none of us had anything concrete. No real plans, only chaos.

This is how we’re meant to live.

* * *

Thursday drove for sixteen hours straight, his fists gripping the wheel at ten and two. No music on the stereo, but the ethereal, washed-out voices of AM radio preachers were on sometimes. I think they were telling us we were going to hell. I always assume that voices like those are telling me that.

We left the fields of fire behind just as the sun edged over the horizon behind us. Thursday pulled into a rest area “to watch dawn, maybe eat something,” but once the engine was off he didn’t even make it out of the driver’s seat before he fell asleep.

The rest of us, better rested, leaned against the car in the chilly morning air and watched that sunrise. If you stay up all night, you owe it to yourself to watch sunrise, every time.

Vulture passed around a tiny bottle of orange juice he produced from somewhere, maybe his hoodie pocket because those blue jean short-shorts sure didn’t have serious pockets on them. He would have made a good stage magician. He had the right kind of charm, and all of his motions were fluid, almost hypnotizing. He smiled easily, and even though his smile rarely looked genuine, when he smiled you found yourself smiling too.

“Is this going to work out?” Brynn asked, breaking hours of silence. She was sitting on top of the spray painted–red old Honda Civic hatchback, her steel-toed boots hanging down over the side. She ripped at a pomegranate, casting its pulp onto the pavement. Her arms were bare to the shoulder—I’m not sure she owned any T-shirts that still had their sleeves.

“On a long enough timeline,” Doomsday said, “no. But it’ll work out today.” Even if she was only just now learning to weave words into ritual magic, Doomsday had a way of warping the world around her when she spoke.

“What’s more important?” I asked. “Laying low or our new career?” It was idle curiosity, nothing more. What mattered was our motion, not our purpose.

“Laying low,” Doomsday said.

“Find some demons,” Vulture said, at the same time.

They looked at one another. They’d known one another how long? Years? I’d known them not even a week.

“Find some demons while laying low,” Vulture said. It was his way of conceding.

“The more we know about magic, the more equipped we’ll be to handle whatever comes at us,” Doomsday said.

“So both?” I asked. “How the hell will we do both?”

“Magic,” Vulture said, grinning.

Brynn, probably delirious, laughed with her whole body, her heels banging on the window glass.

“Shut the fuck up,” Thursday mumbled from inside the car. At least, that’s what I think he said. It’s what I would have said.

Thursday would have driven the whole way if we’d have let him, but his protestations were scarcely audible as we helped him up into the backseat. I took his place behind the wheel, Brynn took shotgun, and we ran away from the encroaching day.

* * *

I’ve spent most of my life in the flyover states, and their beauty is largely unmatched through the rest of the country. But sometimes the endless expanse is too endless.

I spent the full day driving. Vulture was nocturnal by choice, and he snored softly with his face against the glass. Thursday was wiped out. Doomsday was wanted for murder—more actively than the rest of us—and wasn’t excited about being the one who would get ID’d if we were pulled over.

Brynn could have taken a turn. I’m sure of it. But I didn’t want her to. She looked happy, sitting there in the passenger seat. She put her hand on my arm and left it there for a long time, and that settled that: I wanted to be the driver.

I drove all day.

I used to think I was going to end up a trucker. When I first started hitchhiking ten years back, I’d been eighteen and I’d fallen in love with basically every lady trucker I’d met. Even when that thing happened when I was nineteen where I had to stab a man trucker in the hand, even after that I’d assumed I’d wind up a trucker.

Open road, solitude, books on tape, decent pay. Who wouldn’t want to be a trucker?

By the time I was old enough for the job, I didn’t want it. Mostly because I didn’t want any job. I’d found my niche as a wanderer, and driving on some company’s schedule just wasn’t going to suit me.

Still, I was pretty sure I was one hell of a long-haul driver.

* * *

We crossed into Montana and I kept driving. Glacier National Park is probably the single most beautiful place in the country and I figured we’d get to sleep there—blend in with the tourists at some campground—if I just kept at it.

We made it halfway across the state. I was on a side highway, avoiding the interstate because the occasional small-town speed trap seemed like a better bet than the highway patrol, who might have had an all-points to look for us.

Some British man was narrating a fantasy book at us from the stereo—Vulture’s doing—and the sun was just starting to get low. Brynn was asleep. Everyone in the backseat was quiet, hadn’t said a word in an hour. The sun was just starting to look a little low on the horizon.

I nodded off.

I came to, halfway into the oncoming lane, and corrected. There was no traffic to run into, just an endless stretch of Montana highway. I slapped myself—it’s usually good for ten minutes or so—and made a mental note to pull off at the next exit, switch drivers.

I nodded off again.

I’d never crashed a car in my life.

When I came to probably half a second later, I was in the wrong lane again. Fully this time. Startled, I corrected, fast, and saw myself headed real quick toward running off the right side of the road. So I corrected again. Still wasn’t thinking. Way too fast. The car went up on two wheels, and my vision got choppy.

Blackness.

The sunset streaming through the window, with the road where the sky should be.

Blackness.

Maybe I screamed. Maybe someone else screamed.

Where’s the reset button? Like I was a kid again, playing Nintendo. Just hit the reset button. Start over from the last save.

No, it’s actually happening.

Blackness.

Then it was over. We were twenty feet off the left-hand side of the road. The car was upright again—we’d spun a full 360. The windshield was fucked. A beautiful spiderweb of fucked, with trees in the distance that I could see through the kaleidoscope of fucked.

Guess the car didn’t have air bags. What year did air bags get to be standard?

Thursday’s voice cut through the white noise that I hadn’t even noticed. “Doomsday?”

“Yeah.”

“Vulture?”

“I’m fine.”

“Brynn?”

“Alive.”

I freaked out. Just started gasping for air.

“Danielle?”

I’d rolled the car.

I’d almost killed Brynn.

“Danielle?”

“Fine.” I answered because I wanted to be left alone and answering seemed like the fastest way to accomplish that. I took off my seat belt—thank fuck we’d all been wearing seat belts. Even the people sleeping—even the other people sleeping—had been wearing seat belts. I opened the door and tried to stand, but my legs gave out and I collapsed in on myself.

“Danielle,” Brynn said. She was next to me, crouching, her arm around me.

“I fucked up,” I said, fighting for air. “I don’t need anything. I’m the one who . . .” I gave up trying to talk. I got my head between my knees and I retched out gasps. No tears, though. Not yet.

Vulture knelt down on the other side of me, put his arm around me too. I lifted my head up to see him. Wet blood smeared across his brown skin.

“You’re bleeding,” I said.

“I’m fine. Just cut up my arm a little, nothing deep.”

“I fell asleep.”

“We’re alive.”

Vulture pulled aside the shoulder strap of my tank top. “Hey,” he said, “my stitches held!”

“Got to get this thing away from the road before anyone drives by,” Thursday said. “Into the trees.”

Vulture glared at his friend, but Thursday was right. We didn’t want to deal with cops or ambulances or any of that shit.

Brynn tried to help me up, but I shook her arm off. The only thing worse than needing emotional support after what I’d done was stubbornly refusing help I so obviously needed, but I couldn’t help it. Which made me resent her support even more.

Pushing a fucking car, though. That I could do. Vulture and I were tied for being the smallest, but no one made any suggestion that I should get back behind the wheel. Doomsday got in and steered while the rest of us pushed, and we got it into what was probably a tree farm. The trees were in those unnaturally perfect rows and I was sure the car wasn’t completely hidden, but with any luck we’d gotten it far enough from the road that it looked like it was supposed to be there. A few cars went by while we were doing it, but none of them slowed down.

“What’s next?” Doomsday asked, getting out.

“Get the VIN numbers off,” Thursday said.

“It’s just VIN,” Vulture corrected. “Vehicle Identification Number. Like ATM machine or PIN number or whatever.”

“Fuck off.”

“There’ll be a plate on the dash, that’s easy,” I said, cutting in. “But it’ll also be stamped into the frame a few places. We’d need a pretty serious file to get it out, even if we can get to all the VIN numbers without taking the thing apart.”

They talked it over for a moment, then Thursday pried the metal tag off the dash while Vulture and Brynn took off the plates. Close enough for government work, I guess.

Me, I leaned against the back of the car. I tried not to take stock of what condition the car was in, but the windows were all busted out and the roof was caved in on the back corner.

“You alright?”

It was Doomsday. Probably the least emotional of the five of us. Strangely, that helped.

I put my hand on the massive dent on the roof. “If we’d landed anywhere else . . .” I said.

“We didn’t.” Doomsday pulled out a cigarette, lit it, took a drag.

“You smoke?” I asked.

“Not usually,” she said. “Used to more. Still keep a pack around. But . . . I could use a cigarette. You did almost just kill us all.”

“I’m not going to say ‘don’t remind me.’”

“I probably won’t again. You know what you did, and you’ll mostly get over it, and there isn’t one of us who’s anywhere near as mad at you as you are.”

“Thanks,” I said. I didn’t smoke either. “Can I have a cigarette?”

“I don’t bum cigarettes out to nonsmokers.”

* * *

It’s hard to hitchhike with five people. Under normal circumstances, the thing to do would have been to split up into two groups. But these obviously weren’t normal circumstances.

To make things even more fun, we had to get a ride before the cops stopped us and ran our names. None of us had any idea if there were warrants out for us yet, but none of us wanted to find out the hard way.

Five people and luggage. Brynn, Vulture, and I had travel packs. The Days had decent-sized suitcases. All of them were covered in glass, and Vulture’s yellow pack was now replete with bloodstains.

“Alright,” Doomsday said, dropping her cigarette from her lips, letting it fall to the ground where she stomped it out with a heeled boot. “Gather ’round. Hold hands. Got a ritual for this hitchhiking shit.”

We were still in the woods, hidden from the road. I took Vulture’s hand and Brynn’s hand, and the five of us formed a little pentagon.

“You say what I say,” Doomsday said, “but like, in a round. I’ll say a line, then Thursday, you say that line while I say the next one. Then Brynn, Danielle, Vulture. You say the line the person on your left said the last time. After I say the fifth line, you all go on without me, until Vulture says the last line alone. Anyone fucks it up, we just start over. First time I tried this method, I fucked up every line once. It’s not a big deal. Got it?”

“Got it,” we said back. We began.

“We ask for good strangers.”

“We ask for the barrow to send what it may.”

“We ask that ill eyes pass us over.”

“We ask for the dead to guard us.”

“We ask that sorrow be held at bay.”

It took us about four rounds to get it right. It’s hard to listen to what someone is saying while you’re talking, but not as hard as I would have thought. I’m glad I was never the one to fuck up—I don’t know how well I could have handled any more failure.

I felt the energy pass between our hands. A subtle thing. The kind of thing I might have felt before I’d seen magic. But after Vulture said the last line, a silence fell over us and a wind picked up. A gyre spun itself between us, the same direction as our ritual, then spun outward through the trees.

Then that silence.

“So . . .” I asked at last. “The fuck did we just do?”

“It’s nothing,” Doomsday said. “Just a spell for good luck with strangers, keeping people who would hurt us away.”

“And all that shit about the barrow and the dead?”

“I don’t know the spell too well. I think Barrow is the name of the endless spirit it appeals to. He’s a death spirit, I guess, but that’s not what the ritual is about.”

“Yeah, great. What could go wrong?”

* * *

An SUV picked us up, not ten minutes after we’d been waiting. For those keeping score at home, neither being picked up by an SUV nor so quickly is common. I mean, both have happened to me before, but usually not while hitching with five people, two of them being people of color and men besides. Oh, and Brynn had that face tattoo. And Doomsday was a bona fide cop-killing, husband-killing murderer.

I actually can’t blame anyone who drove past the five of us though, no matter what their car. No one wants to be outnumbered by strangers in their own vehicle. It takes a certain kind of person, one with bravery and belief in doing right by people, to pick up a crew like us.

It takes a person like Gertrude Miller, it turns out.

“Where you headed?” she asked after the other four got in the back and I climbed in shotgun.

I’d been designated “driver-dealer-wither” by a rather hasty consensus decision, with the caveat that Thursday be ready to step in if the driver was a creep or just a bro looking to bro down. Gertrude Miller wasn’t either of those things. She was a white woman, probably fifty, with a vacant look in her eyes and a cold but somehow genuine smile on her face. She had that tired look of a woman who’d done service-class work her entire life, and the self-confidence of the same.

“Out to Glacier,” I said. “You?”

It’s good practice to ask where a ride is going. Probably more important when you’ve got reason to be skeptical—like when I’m hitching alone and a man picks me up. If they can’t give a clear answer, I don’t get in their car.

“Pendleton,” she said. “That’ll get you close to Glacier, but I’m afraid the sun’ll be down before we get there.”

“That’s fine,” I said, “we’ll figure it out from there. Thanks for the ride.”

“Anytime,” she said. “Know why I picked you up?”

Probably: Jesus told her to pick us up. Or maybe I reminded her of her daughter or her granddaughter. Or she was worried about me in the company I kept.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“God told me to,” she said. “There’re some young folks who look just like y’all in Pendleton. They run the library, ever since the county gave up on it, and they still run it for free. Never would have thought I’d make friends with someone with a face tattoo, no I didn’t, but these kids are alright. Figured you’re alright too.”

The smile dropped off her face for a moment as she squinted at the road ahead.

“Plus,” she went on, “I’ve already died once. Ain’t got nothing left to fear.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t. Instead, she put the radio on, pop country filled the car, and we drove back off into the sunset.

TWO

Staring out a windshield again at the low sun. I wasn’t in my body, but just above it. Or was I in the driver’s seat again?

I wasn’t. I was in the passenger seat of a stranger’s car. Not a stranger. Gertrude.

Maybe I was concussed. What did the doctor ask me, when I was a kid and I hit my head super hard on the playground? What year is it? What’s my name? Count backward from one hundred by sevens. One hundred.

Ninety-three.

I should have just pulled over earlier, as soon as I’d been tired. Why hadn’t I?

Eighty-six.

It had felt good, driving. I’d felt useful. No, it hadn’t been for other people. Driving west, away from Iowa, I’d felt in control of my own life and destiny. That’s half of why I travel.

Seventy-nine.

I hadn’t felt in control for months. It wasn’t the magic-and-demons thing. It was Clay’s death. He’d been such a, I don’t know . . . not a cornerstone. A keystone. His existence, somewhere in the world, had been keeping me together. He was gone, and ever since I hadn’t felt like I was in control. Maybe it wasn’t him specifically; maybe I would have felt that way if any of my close friends had died. Did I have close friends anymore?

Seventy-two.

Traveling with others is always a trade-off. Being close with other people is always a trade-off. Do we give up pieces of our autonomy to be with others? Is it worth it?

Eighty-five.

No, that wasn’t right. Fifty-five? What number was I on?

I couldn’t be concussed, for the simple reason that I didn’t want to be and I wasn’t sure there was anything to do about it even if I was. I probably couldn’t count backward from one hundred by sevens if I was fine.

It was fine. I was fine. I could breathe.

Thankfully, blissfully, the sun made its way below the horizon and stopped reminding me of that time I flipped a car and almost killed everyone.

I even let myself doze off.

* * *

It was about a three-hour drive, and we discussed our plans as best we could in someone else’s car. We’d try the library. If the folks there were as similar to us as Gertrude figured, then they’d put us up at least for the night. Anarchists stick together. Well, except when we get at mad at one another over small details.

Also I guess I kind of fed an anarchist to a deer a couple days ago but that’s beside the point. It was collective self-defense. He was trying to get the deer to eat my friends.

No matter. We’d try the library, then see what we could do about getting a new vehicle.

Pendleton goes from rural road to downtown in less than a block, which is kind of impressive. Nothing, nothing, pasture, nothing, trees, nothing, then a speed trap and a tourist trap right in a row—the latter even had a concrete tyrannosaurus out front, that kind of awesome place you don’t see much of until you get to the part of the country people write road trip movies about.

Then a Western-style tourist downtown, complete with boardwalk and old-timey-looking lampposts.

“This town has seen better days,” I said, as we drove past a broken chunk of wooden fence that lined the boardwalk.

“Ain’t no jobs now that the tourists are gone.”

“Why are the tourists gone?”

“Budget cuts,” Gertrude said. “I don’t know the whole ways of it, but a lot of public land went private and there’s not so much outdoor recreation like there was. It was okay for a while, there was still work for the gas companies. But I guess this area wasn’t so good after all, so all the jobs are a couple too many hours east of here and no one young sticks around.”

“That’s a shame,” I said, because it was.

“Everything ends,” she said. “That’s just God’s way.”

I didn’t believe much in God, but she wasn’t wrong.

“People are staring,” I said. We were stopped at a light—probably the only light in town—and an old white man was glaring from behind the curtains of some kind of knickknack store.

“Oh, they’re not staring at you,” Gertrude said. The light turned green, and she turned left off the main drag. The town was only about three, maybe four blocks wide. Maybe ten blocks long. Lots of small houses with forest and plains just beyond. “People here ain’t prejudiced, got nothing against black folks or even folks who dress like, I don’t know what you call that . . .”

“Punks?” I asked. We weren’t what most people think of when you think of punks. None of us had Mohawks, and I don’t think a one of us besides maybe Thursday or Brynn listened to the Sex Pistols. But we were punks.

“Sure, yeah.”

“What about trans people?” Vulture asked.

Gertrude looked up into the rearview, probably looking at Vulture to see if she could tell he was trans.

“Oh, honey, this is Montana, not North Dakota,” she said.

“Does that mean yes or no?” Vulture asked.

“We read the news, we’ve seen people like you online, and people around here are willing to let people be people.”

“That’s cool,” Vulture said. He didn’t sound incredibly reassured.

“You know,” Gertrude said, “I never would have noticed. You pass really well.”

“So that’s the kind of thing that probably sounds like it’s going to be a compliment but turns out not to be,” Vulture said.

“Have you had, you know . . .”

I think three of us tried to cut her off at once.

“Not a real polite topic of conversation,” I said.

“Got it.”

She genuinely seemed to take it well, but telling her not to ask the questions she so clearly wanted to ask still managed to kind of silence the car for a moment.

“So why are people staring?” I asked at last, as we stopped at a stop sign.

“Folks have been staring at me ever since I came back.”

“Back to town?”

“Back from the dead.” She said it so casually, like it was something no one would raise an eyebrow at.

“About that,” I asked. “You mean, like, they had to put those paddles on you and shock you back to life after a car accident or something? If that’s not, I don’t know, also the kind of question that’s rude to ask?”

“No, no, it’s okay.” Gertrude turned right, onto an unlit street. Maybe the library was this way. Maybe something worse was happening.

For the first time in the whole interaction—hey, I may be slow, but I’d had a rough day—I was getting uneasy. Sitting on the edge of my seat, eying the locks on the doors.

“I died of cancer. Last Christmas Eve. I was dead six months.”

“God bring you back?” I’d dealt with crazy folks all my life. It was fine. We’d be fine. I turned over my shoulder, to see if my friends were paying attention. They were. Brynn had her hand on her knife. Thursday had his hand in the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie, probably on his gun.

“Someone like that,” Gertrude said.

I had a feeling it wasn’t God who’d told Gertrude to pick us up after all. We’d asked for the dead to guard us.

She stopped the car.

It wasn’t sudden—she’d been slowing down—but it caught me off-guard and I reflexively flicked off my seat belt, ready to fight or run.

“Well,” she said, turning to smile with her cold smile. “We’re here. Been a pleasure meeting you ‘punks,’ and God bless!”

* * *

The library was in the old post office building on a darkened side street. Greek-style columns supported the front of the stone building, and a single flickering bulb in a sconce illuminated the door. A hand-lettered wooden sign read:

PENDLETON LIBRARY. STILL FREE. STILL OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. 10 A.M.–4 P.M. RUN BY ANARCHISTS.

Beneath it, someone had tacked a piece of paper that read:

WE DO NOT CARRY THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK. GET YOUR BAD POLITICS AND BAD SCIENCE RECIPES OFF THE INTERNET, NOT FROM US.

Yeah, okay. We could find friends here.

“What’s our cover story?” I asked.

Thursday shrugged. “Play it by ear. Back up whatever someone else comes up with.”

Thursday knocked. He broke up the rhythm of his knock, presumably to sound friendly and less like we might be cops. No one likes a cop-knocker.

It started raining, out of the blue. There’d been a few drops on the windshield in the last hour, but nothing serious. As soon as we stood under the awning of the library, the sky opened up.

“We’re closed,” a voice said, sleepily, from the other side of the door.

“We’re travelers, heard there were good people here.”

The door opened a slit. The white man peering through the crack looked to be a bit older than us, maybe in his midthirties. Gray streaked his thick black beard, and one half of his mustache was stark white. A spade was tattooed in faded blue on his cheek. “Who told you that?”

“Gertrude Miller,” I said. “She picked us up hitchhiking.”

There was fear in his face. His eyes darted to each of us in turn.

Another face appeared behind his. A woman closer to my age, with pitch black hair cut into baby bangs that continued into an undercut on the side of her head. Feral bangs, I’d sometimes heard the style called. They went well with her septum clicker and immaculate makeup. Sometimes I’m jealous of people who pull off high femme so well.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Vasilis,” she said, “let them in.”

“Sorry,” the man, presumably Vasilis, mumbled. He opened the door and we went inside.

I’m used to anarchist spaces being a little bit . . . humble might be the polite word for it. Scrappy. DIY. But this place still looked like a library. A small one, sure, but also one inside a beautiful old post office building. Rows and rows of books on thick wooden shelves filled the downstairs.

The only thing they’d done differently, it seemed, was try to kill the sterility one usually sees in small-town libraries. Tasteful sconces set into the wall lit the place, and a slightly ragtag assortment of comfortable chairs and couches were everywhere.

“You live here?” I asked. All my questions about more pressing matters—like the apparently dead woman who’d driven us to town—were lost in my excitement about people having taken over a small-town library and kept it running.

“Yeah,” Vasilis said. He led us through the main room of the library. It’s hard to walk past that many books without stopping to flip through them, but I followed him up the back stairs to the apartment above. It looked a lot more like places I was used to. The living room was still covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, but there was also a dining table and a counter that separated off a small kitchen area. A short hallway led to three other doors, presumably two bedrooms and a bathroom.

“How?” I asked.

“The county left it empty. We moved in.”

“It’s squatted, then?”

“Technically,” Vasilis said. “But even the sheriff’s wife comes here to check out books. I’m not sure anyone knows or even cares that no one legally owns the place. People assume we bought it and we don’t discourage them.”

“I’m Heather,” the woman said, and we did introductions.

“Wait,” Vasilis said, after I introduced myself as Danielle. “What’s your last name?”

“Cain.” I waited, cringing, to hear him call me Dani. He didn’t.

“You knew Clay,” he said. “He talked about you a lot, last time he was through here.”

“You know Clay?” Doomsday asked. At the same time as the ice was broken by knowledge of a mutual friend, a different sort of tension filled the room—the tension of discussing a mutual dead friend. “Knew. Knew Clay.”

None of these assholes had come to his funeral. Everywhere I traveled, people knew Clay. Everyone talked about him like he was a magical gift from the universe to its denizens. Which he was. But not one of them had made it to Denver to drink and mourn with me and his mom. Maybe I’d go out that way too. I’d live on in legend, but no one would feel obliged to actually miss me.

“Sure,” Vasilis said. “He came through a couple times a year. Always wanted to check out whatever new books we had.”

The books up here were, in fact, different from those on the shelves downstairs. A lot of them had blank spines. A lot of them were gold-embossed. Some of them looked older than some people think the Earth is.

“This is an occult library?” I asked.

“Well, what else are you all doing here?” Vasilis asked.

He and I were the only ones still standing, I realized. Everyone else had made themselves comfortable on couches and chairs. Rain lashed against the windows, and thunder rumbled across the plains.

“We, uh . . .” I tried to figure out what to tell him. I tried to figure out what was safe to tell him.

“We’re demon hunters!” Vulture blurted out. He put down a book and his phone—he’d been taking pictures of the pages. “We’re on the run because some stuff went wrong and Uliksi maybe killed a lot of people and some cops too!”

So much for a cover story.

Doomsday and Thursday shot him the same look at the same time. The combined glare would have driven lesser men to silence, or at least to show remorse on their face. Vulture did neither.

“You’re demon hunters?” Vasilis repeated, like the words didn’t make sense in his mouth, like he was speaking some language he didn’t know and was just parroting the phrase back.

“I mean, we are now, I guess.” Vulture gave his best “whoops, sorry” look to the rest of us.

“You’re here because of the disappearances, then?” That was Heather, who was sitting next to Brynn on a love seat.

“No,” Thursday said.

“Yes,” Vulture said, at the same time.

Doomsday’s ritual must have done a hell of a lot more than get us a ride safely.

“What disappearances?” I asked.

“You might want to sit down,” Heather said. “This is weird.”

* * *

I found myself in a large, comfortable chair by the window, and Vasilis brought us all tea. Heather, with a cup in her hand, told us the story.

“There used to be two more of us living here,” she started, punctuating her sentence by blowing across her tea. “Damien and Isola. Then there’s Loki.”

“I know Loki,” I said. It’s a small scene, hitchhiking weirdos. “Queer, kinda small, book thief?” I’d stayed with them (Loki didn’t like being called “he” or “she”) in Oakland for a couple weeks the summer before. They’d been planning a rare book heist. I skipped town before I found out how it went.

“Yeah,” Heather said. “Loki came through with some books for us. Real shit, they said. Then they and Damien and Isola went winter camping in Glacier, and then none of them came back.”

Heather took a tiny sip of her tea, decided that it was cool enough, and took a longer sip.

“Months go by, no word from any of them. Vasilis and I tried to track them down, but never found anything. Not their car, nothing. A record in the backcountry hiking registry at Glacier and that’s it. Then, this spring, Isola shows up in town. She won’t talk to us. Squats an empty bed-and-breakfast at the edge of town. We see her around town, sometimes, but it’s like she looks right through us. She looks right through everyone else too. She’s back, but she’s not back.”

“Where are the books Loki brought?” Doomsday asked.

“Most of them are shelved now,” Vasilis said, gesturing at the walls around us. “Most of them are the same garbage you always find, though. Ninety-nine point nine percent of ‘occult’ books are just trash. Gibberish packaged up all spooky, made to sell for as much money as possible.”

“Most of them are shelved?” Doomsday continued.

Vasilis sighed. “The three of them went to Glacier with one book, one that seemed legit. Loki says they stole it from some Evola-type fascists on the Olympic Peninsula, says those people had stolen it from somewhere in England. The Book of Barrow. Our friends took it to Glacier because they were going to try something out.”

“What were they going to try out?” Thursday asked.

Vasilis looked to the floor.

Heather answered instead. “Resurrection. Loki wanted to hunt a bear and bring it back to life.”

“Oh, fuck that,” Brynn said.

“So they went out to the backcountry wilderness in the dead of winter to go kill a hibernating bear—which by the way doesn’t count as hunting—and turn it into a zombie bear, and then they didn’t come back?” Thursday asked. “Gee, I can’t think of anything that might have gone wrong with that plan. What a mystery.”

“Thursday,” Doomsday said.

“No,” Thursday said. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Mystery solved. They got killed by winter or the bear and frankly it’s hard to claim they didn’t have it coming.”

“What about Gertrude Miller?” I asked. “She told us she was dead six months, then was resurrected.”

“Honestly,” Heather said, looking at Thursday, “when they didn’t come back from Glacier, Vasilis and I thought the same thing you did. But then Isola came back. Okay, she’s shell-shocked and doesn’t want to talk to us.” Heather turned to me. “But then Gertrude came back. She was dead. For six months.”

“She was telling the truth about that, then,” I said.

Heather nodded.

Vulture clapped his hands together. We all looked at him, and he tried, and failed, to wipe the smile off his face. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just . . . we have our first mystery!”

Thursday sighed. “We’ll start first thing in the morning?”

* * *

Dinner consisted of reheated couscous, baked potatoes, and green salad. There were too many of us for the table, so we ate on the couches and easy chairs. We talked about friends in common who weren’t dead or missing. The state of the anarchist movement and its role in fighting the rise of fascism and nationalism globally. Then, more interesting to me, the state of magic.

“How many practitioners do you think there are?” I asked. “Until a couple days ago, I’ve gone my whole life without seeing an ounce of real magic, and I’ve met plenty of people who spend their time trying.”

“It’s hard to answer,” Vasilis said. “I’d guess that, worldwide, we’re talking about a few hundred, maybe a thousand people who are real magicians, who are tapped into what the endless spirits have to offer. Then below that, I don’t know, a couple million people who stumble upon magic here and there but mostly fail?”

“What do you mean?”

“As far as I can tell, there’s only one system of magic that actually works with any consistency, and that involves appealing to—or summoning directly—the endless spirits. But there are a lot of rituals that end up tapping into that power kind of by accident, through a side door, that people stumble upon from time to time as they practice other systems. Most of those side doors are for magic that only affects the practitioner. Like, rituals to grant you courage work well. Rituals to heal yourself work a little less well. Rituals to heal other people—almost never, unless you’re communicating directly with a specific spirit.”

“Okay,” I said. “If there’s a system of magic that works, why doesn’t everyone know about it? Keeping information ‘rare’ is harder and harder these days.”

“Oh! I know!” Vulture said.

We all turned to look at him. He’d finished his food already and was lying across Heather and Brynn on the love seat.

“It’s the magic feds!” he said. “I’m on this forum, right, and I dunno, a lot of it probably isn’t true but there’s this thing people mention and no one knows its name but it’s the magic feds and they’re like Mulder and Scully but evil. Well, not evil from their point of view. But evil from my point of view.”

“Yeah,” Vasilis said. “It used to be the church. Now it’s the state. Still an inquisition.”

“Wait,” I said, “should we be worried about this, then?”

“I mean,” Vasilis said, “as long as you don’t do something crazy and spectacular like set an endless spirit against your enemies in broad daylight, you’ll be fine.”

Brynn started laughing.

“So,” I said, “yes. We should be worried.”

* * *

There was a spare bedroom—it had been Isola and Damien’s—and we piled in with our bags. Doomsday claimed the bed for herself and Thursday, and I laid my sleeping bag out on the floor. Vulture said he was going for a walk, Thursday said he was going to stand watch because something felt off.

Brynn was out in the living room, still talking with Heather.

I was exhausted, but as soon as I laid my head down on my balled-up hoodie, I was awake.

Too much, all in one day. Too much, all in one week.

I wanted Brynn there. I wanted to hold her. We’d been cuddling, most nights. I hadn’t kissed her or anything. I hadn’t really been sure I’d been ready to do something like that, and vice versa.

But I wanted to cuddle with her.

She was out in the living room, talking to a high-femme, gorgeous stranger. That was fine.

It would be fine.

The rain had let up, but there was still thunder in the distance. Other than that, everything was quiet. Small towns are strange at night—none of the people noises of big cities, none of the car noises of busy rural roads, none of the wildlife noises of the countryside. Just that thunder, and the sound of Brynn laughing from the living room.

It wasn’t fine.

I was being an idiot, and I knew it. Brynn didn’t owe me anything, and she wasn’t doing anything wrong or even weird or mean. Knowing I was being an idiot didn’t make it better.

Couldn’t I just think about the car crash instead?

Lightning lit the room. Doomsday started snoring.

Worry became anxiety, anxiety started on its way toward panic.

I got up, pulled my hoodie on, slipped on my boots, and went out to the living room. Brynn and Heather were leaning against one another, talking sweetly. Brynn caught my eye and smiled. It was fine.

I went down the stairs and out the front door.

Thursday was on the porch, staring off down the street. His backpack was in his hand, concealing his gun.

“Couldn’t sleep again?” he asked.

“What is there to keep watch for?” I asked. Talking about something other than me would be good. It was what I needed.

“Hell if I know,” Thursday said. “I’m just . . . I’m just trying to be useful.”

“I feel that,” I said.

“I’m not always this way,” Thursday said.

“What way?”

“I don’t know. Protective? Kind of macho?”

I nodded.

“I love Doomsday more than I love life itself. I’m worried about her, I’m worried about the rest of us. So I don’t know what else to do besides watch out for her best I know how.”

“What are you like usually?”

“Believe it or not, I think I’m usually the funny guy,” he said. “When shit ain’t serious, I ain’t serious either. It’s just . . . shit’s real serious right now.”

“I can feel that.”

“You like Brynn,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He’d seen the two of us together.

“Yeah.”

He looked over at me, took in my expression for moment. “You’re jealous of her and Heather.”

“No, I’m not.”

He didn’t say anything to that.

“I guess I am.”

“Want to know why I think that is?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Because you don’t know where you stand with her. That’s it. That’s all. You figure out where you stand with her, you talk it over with her, and none of that shit will bother you anymore.”

He was probably right.

“Doomsday and me, we know where we stand. She fucks someone else, hell she falls in love with someone else, it wouldn’t bug me much. Because she makes it clear where she and I stand.”

“You all are poly?” I feel like most of the people I know are polyamorous, but it still surprised me. The Days seemed so, I don’t know, traditional. In a “wandering occultists with a bounty on their heads” kind of way.

“I wouldn’t worry about her and me unless, I don’t know, Idris Elba decided he was single and started hanging around.”

“Doomsday has a crush on Idris Elba?”

“Hell if I know,” Thursday said. “I’m the one with a crush on Idris Elba.”

I laughed at that.

“Glad to know I can still be funny when shit’s serious,” he said.

“I’m glad I met you all,” I said. “This is hands down the weirdest week of my life, but I’m glad I’ve gotten to meet you all.”

“You too, Danielle Cain.”

“I’m going to go back and try to sleep again,” I said.

“Don’t say anything to her.”

“What?”

“You’re in sad-sack mode. I get it. We’re all sad sacks sometimes. But if you go talk to her right now, you’re going to come across wrong, you’ll come across controlling. Just go to bed, and if she cuddles up with you, cuddle right back, and if not, try not to stress about it.”

“Thanks for looking out for us, Thursday.”

“Sleep well, Danielle Cain.”

* * *

On my way back through the library, I saw three rats on the checkout counter. I have a hard time getting mad at rats. All the best animals are scavengers, squatters.

On my way back through the living room, I saw Heather sitting next to Brynn. Heather’s arm was across Brynn’s lap, and Brynn had needle and ink in hand. She was tattooing Heather. I couldn’t tell what the design was.

Brynn looked up at me and smiled, sweetly, and I knew Thursday was right. If I told Brynn I was sad, hell, if I said anything at all, it would come across wrong and Brynn wouldn’t be smiling so sweetly no more.

I smiled back, then went down the hall to where my sleeping bag waited for me.

It was fine.

I was fine.

THREE

Morning came too soon for my taste. I’d scarcely been asleep before the first birds announced their desire to herald the dawn. Brynn was spooning me, and the idea of staying there, like that, was a lot more interesting than getting up to go chase down . . . what? A demon? A resurrectionist? Zombies?

There’d be coffee, though, if I woke up.

Sometimes I think I let myself become addicted to coffee not because I liked it, not because caffeine did me any favors, but because it takes the urge of a physical addiction to provide any kind of upside to getting out of bed in the morning. It didn’t bother me, thinking that.

Brynn liked coffee even more than I did, so as the dawn light came in through the window, I untangled myself from her and went off to figure out the kitchen.

Vasilis was already there, chopping potatoes. He brought the blade down slowly with each cut, working silently so as not to wake the house.

I found myself the coffee grinder.

It would be fine. Waking up was fine.

* * *

Over breakfast, we worked out our plans. Vulture and Thursday would take the library’s car—actually the old bookmobile—and head up to Glacier for the day, see what they could find. Doomsday and Vasilis were going to go through the library, see how much information they could dredge up about The Book of Barrow and resurrection. The rest of us—Heather, Brynn, and myself—would see what we could find out in town. Presumably, we’d start by talking to Isola and Gertrude. We’d reconvene at sunset, or whenever the boys came back from Glacier.

Now that I was awake, fed, and caffeinated, I was actually fairly excited to get this thing figured out. Everyone likes a good puzzle. Turns out, a puzzle with magic in it is twice as interesting.

Brynn, Heather, and I hopped on bicycles—janky old cruisers perfect for a town as flat as Pendleton—and went off to find Isola. I had my travel pack with me, emptied in case we found anything.

The few people we saw looked friendly enough. Outside the gas station/grocery store/diner combo, an older fellow waved at Heather, who waved back. The tattoo on her arm was fresh, a simplified ouroboros.

“This town actually likes its punks?” I asked.

“We run the library. Vasilis and Isola are from here too. Well, Vasilis is from Greece but he’s been here twenty years. People don’t really understand us, but they also don’t really mind that they don’t. If that makes sense.”

It did. I’d never really stayed put long enough to get that kind of feeling in a town, but I’d met a few folks who had over the years. It sounded nice. A bit lonely, though. Living in one place always sounded kind of lonely to me.

It took us maybe ten minutes to bike out to the western edge of town. It had been a tourist town, that was easy to see. The gateway to the great outdoors or some shit. We must have been closer to Glacier than I realized.

The last block of town held four bed-and-breakfasts in a row. One of them, the first one we passed, even looked like it was still probably operational: the lawn was maintained and a little fountain shot water up about a foot from some rocks in the front yard. The other three B&Bs, though, were boarded up and overgrown and, to my eye at least, all the more beautiful for it.

“This one’s it,” Heather said, parking her bike along the wrought-iron fence of the last house on the block. The building itself was small, barely more than a cottage, but its yard was expansive and it backed onto forest. If I was rich, I’d live somewhere like that.

Or, you know, since I was poor, I’d squat someplace like that. It would be nice to live somewhere where you didn’t have to worry about the cops kicking down your door, but the trade-off of being law abiding didn’t sound worth it.

We didn’t lock the bikes. We didn’t even have bike locks.

“You two might want to go up there alone,” Heather told us. “I think if Isola wanted to talk to me, she would have by now, you know?”

So Brynn and I opened the iron gate and started up the front walk.

“Never been on a zombie’s doorstep,” I said, after I rang the doorbell.

“I figure it’s more like Lazarus’s doorstep.”

“The guy Jesus resurrected?”

“That’s the one.”

“What’s the story with him?” I asked.

“Hell if I know. Just that Jesus brought him back from the dead.”

“Why was he so special?”

“Go away.” This last bit came from inside the house, right on the other side of the door.

Brynn and I looked at each other.

“We, uh, we come in peace?” I offered.

“We’re not cops or nothing,” Brynn added.

“Yeah, I didn’t think the two crust punks at the door were cops. But I’m not trying to talk to anyone.”

“Why not?” I asked. That’s a shitty question to ask, and I knew it. Isola wanted to be left alone. She’d made that clear in a thousand ways. Yet here we were, prying.

“I’m going to open the door, but only because I’m too tired to yell through it,” Isola said. “You can’t come in.”

“Alright,” Brynn agreed.

The door swung open.

I don’t know why I expected her to look like a zombie or something. I mean, I’d met Gertrude already, and she looked normal enough. But I legit assumed Isola was gonna look like a zombie.

Isola didn’t look like a zombie.

She looked, instead, like, well, one of us: she wore a slip dress that showed off her full figure, and her hair was tied up in a loose bun, revealing tattoos across her neck even though she probably wasn’t a day over twenty-two. She had a claw hammer in her hand. No, wait. Both hands. She had a claw hammer in each hand, it’s just that only one of the two was raised.

Instant friend-crush.

“What’re you doing here?” she asked. “You’re going to get yourselves killed.”

“On a long enough timeline,” Brynn agreed. She had her hand hovering near the folding baton on her belt.

“No. I mean, if anyone sees me talking to you. I don’t know what’s going to happen. You might wind up dead.”

“That’s an argument for letting us inside, then,” I offered.

“That’s an argument for y’all leaving,” she countered.

“True,” I agreed. But we didn’t go. “Who would kill us? Barrow?”

“I don’t know.” She thought about it. “No. Not Barrow.”

“What happened to you and everyone up at Glacier?” I asked.

She put the hammer down and met my gaze, unflinching. Somehow, this was even more intimidating than when she’d had the weapon raised.

“We all died.”

“Okay.”

“That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

“Okay.” I waited for her to tell me more anyway.

“Look, you’re wasting your time talking to me.”

“Who should we talk to, then?” I asked. “Gertrude? What’s she got to do with it?”

“No, no. Gertrude’s innocent. I don’t think she knows anything.” Isola sighed, then set the hammers down on a table near the door. “Look. If I tell you where to look next, I’m guessing you’ll die. Magic is too fucked up to be safe, at all, for anyone. Hunting down madmen with access to it, that’s worse. You really, really should just skip town and never look back. Forget the name Barrow. Forget the name Pendleton. Forget me, forget Gertrude.”

“Ain’t gonna happen, though,” Brynn said.

“You want to know what’s going on, you want a man named Sebastian Miller.”

“Gertrude’s husband?”

“Ex-husband,” Isola said. “He runs the gift shop, on the east edge of town.”

“With the dinosaurs?” I asked.

“With the dinosaurs. Don’t confront him. Don’t let him know you’re investigating him. Don’t let him know you exist. Don’t tell him I talked to you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She started to close the door.

“Wait,” I said. “I still have so many questions to ask.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got about three more seasons of Xena I plan to watch while I pretend like I don’t exist. So I’m afraid I’m too busy for questions.”

“I’m sorry,” Brynn said, as the door was closing. “I’m sorry about whatever happened to you.”

The door hesitated.

“Thank you.”

The door closed.

* * *

We reconvened with Heather, out by the street, and told her what we’d learned.

“Hey, that’s more than I’ve gotten out of her,” Heather said, “and we used to live together.”

“So Sebastian Miller,” I said.

“I bet he’s at Dawson’s right now. The diner or grocery store or whatever. He’s there most weekdays. Only opens the gift shop on the weekends.”

“Do we go to Dawson’s or the gift shop?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” Brynn asked. “Isola was pretty clear about that. We’ll go to his place, now, while he’s not home.”

“And just break in?” Heather asked.

“Yeah,” Brynn said.

Heather seemed to think that over for a minute.

“Alright.”

* * *

We had to bike down side streets to avoid Dawson’s, but it still didn’t take us longer than maybe ten minutes.

Everyone we passed looked friendly, but riding through town during the day you could tell the town was poor. Destitute, maybe. About a third of the houses were abandoned, and most of the rest were poorly maintained. Every road but the main one was full of potholes. They were probably maintaining the main road for the sake of tourists, if one day the tourists came back. Or maybe they were maintaining the main road for their own sake, for their own dignity. It was hard to tell.

We cut through an alley, the small-town kind that goes between backyards instead of brick buildings, to approach the gift shop from the back. It was easy to pick out the right place: a twenty-foot-tall brontosaurus, with purple paint chipping off its concrete, kept watch over the backyard.

“How will we get in?” Heather asked.

“What are we looking for?” I asked.

“Don’t know and don’t know,” Brynn said. “We’ll know it when we see it, to both questions.”

The building was a plain cube, two stories tall and peppered with windows. I went to the closest one, popped the screen out, and tried to lift the glass. Locked. I put the screen back in and went to the next one.

“You get much crime in Pendleton?” Brynn asked.

“No, not really,” Heather answered. “No cops in town either. Sometimes the county sheriff comes in to handle something, but we’re pretty much on our own.”

“People usually lock their windows?” I asked. The next window was locked too.

“No,” Heather said.

“Asshole has something to hide,” Brynn said.

“I mean, we are trying to break in,” I said. “Kind of justifies his paranoia.”

“Help me up this apatosaurus,” Brynn said. It was deceptively hard to get ahold of, since the ridge of its back was just out of reach from the ground and the whole belly of the thing was round.

“I think it’s a brontosaurus,” I said. I gave her a boost with my good arm and she straddled the beast like she was riding it. Vulture would have wanted a photo for his Instagram. Hell, I wanted a photo, because Brynn looked awesome as a crust punk dino-riding cowboy. But, you know, you’re not supposed to take pictures of yourselves at the scene of any given crime in progress.

“I thought brontos weren’t real?” Brynn said. “I thought they were all apatosauruses now?”

“Nope.” My youngest niece had been obsessed with dinosaurs, last time I’d gone to see her in Illinois. She’d schooled me good when I’d tried to say brontos weren’t real. “They count as real dinosaurs again.”

“Next thing you’ll tell me that Pluto is a planet.” Brynn reached down to help me up, but I waved her away. My shoulder was way too still-stitched-up to climb something like that.

Brynn started to climb up the beast’s neck, toward the building.

“You think it’ll hold?” I asked. By which I meant: I don’t think it’ll hold.

But in a second, she had scrambled up the little bronto head and was looking at the wall of the building, about five, maybe six feet away.

She was going to jump. She would have to cross the distance and get ahold of the narrow window ledge, pull herself up, then hope the window was unlocked because there was no other logical way down.

“Hey, uh,” I started.

“I’d really rather you didn’t!” Heather shouted.

Brynn jumped.

Time didn’t slow down or anything. Maybe it sped up. One second I was yelling, and the next second . . . no, the same second . . . Brynn was clinging to the windowsill, which couldn’t have been more than three inches deep. She pulled herself up and crouched on the sill.

Brynn should have been a cat burglar. Actually, for all I knew, she was a cat burglar.

She got the window open and disappeared inside.

“What do we do?” Heather asked. Unspoken: “Do we try to follow her? Because I don’t want to.”

“No,” I said, answering her unspoken question instead of her spoken one. I went to the closest window. About ten seconds later, Brynn was on the other side and let us in.

* * *

I wonder what was going through the head of the person who decided the world needed hundreds of shot glasses with the words “Pendleton, Montana” emblazoned on the side. Because I didn’t share that particular opinion. But what do I know? Maybe they’d moved thousands of them already.

I pocketed one, then spent a full minute having an ethical argument with myself. I don’t have any particular issue justifying theft of necessities or from big box stores. But a shot glass wasn’t food, and this wasn’t exactly a Walmart. The store looked like any roadside bullshit gift store anywhere.

On the other hand, the guy who owned this place was probably a bad man. Isn’t that why we’d broken into his place?

That was terrible logic. That was state logic. A man wasn’t guilty just because he was being investigated.

I put the shot glass back. I’m pretty sure eighteen-year-old me would have laughed at twenty-eight-year-old me. But eighteen-year-old me was kind of an asshole, so I didn’t really hold myself responsible to her. I also didn’t need a shot glass.

There wasn’t much we could imagine him hiding inside the store itself, so after the briefest of searches we went up the stairs to his apartment. Heather took watch by the front window, since she knew what the guy looked like and the truck he drove. Brynn and I combed through the apartment, careful to set everything back into its right place. Since we weren’t wearing gloves—we should have been wearing gloves—we wanted to make sure he never even suspected we were there.

It was frustrating, anxious work. One slipup could land us in prison. Even the natural joy of snooping was diminished by how careful we had to be.

There were two photos framed on the wall: one of Gertrude and a man who must be Sebastian holding hands on a mountaintop, with a valley and river in the distance below. He was an unremarkable old white man, hard to distinguish from any other.

The other photo was of a younger couple in the same place. Probably the two of them thirty years earlier. Younger, he looked happy and handsome. The difference between the two made me sad: happy old couples give me a sort of hope. But judging by those photos, the happiness had been gone for decades.

There were glaciers in the background of the older photo, but they had melted by the time the newer one had been taken. More sadness. Why should the march of time be inherently melancholic? It didn’t seem fair.

I opened the frames, carefully. No hidden notes. Not even a date written on the corner to sate my curiosity.

I hadn’t done snooping like this more than a handful of times. The first time, a couple of us had robbed some rich asshole’s house and sold his stuff for food. I was young, reckless, and I’d never been to jail, so it was just kind of fun. The second time, the whole affair had been deadly serious. My friend’s mother had been trapped in an abusive relationship, so we’d broken into the man’s summer home for blackmail to hold over his head so she could leave him in comparative safety. That time, the stakes were too epic for it to be thrilling, but righteousness imparts a kind of high of its own. Both of those men had had entertaining secrets like embarrassingly crass porn collections or a false-bottom drawer with cheesy ninja weapons hidden inside.

Sebastian Miller had an easy chair, a bed, a bookshelf full of mediocre-but-not-embarrassing books, and a fuck-off big TV. A mounted deer—nothing impressive—and a run-of-the-mill hunting rifle hung on the wall. My pack stayed empty.

“There a basement?” I asked at last, after I’d checked every damn horror book on his shelf for a hidden compartment.

“Maybe through the office downstairs,” Heather said.

“Okay. Office, basement, and then I give up.”

“We’ll find something,” Heather said.

“What’s he like?” I asked. “He weird or anything?”

“I never thought twice about him until Gertrude came back,” Heather said. “He drives a 1950s truck, that’s about the most interesting thing about him. He used to come by the library sometimes, check out thrillers for himself, romance for Gertrude. Called her Gertie. He was the only one in town who called her that. I don’t think she liked it.”

The office door, behind the checkout counter of the gift shop, was locked with a dead bolt. I got out my tools—I keep a tension wrench and a basic rake in a hidden pouch in the waist belt of my pack, usually to break into Dumpsters for food—and set to work.

“Who the hell are you people?” Heather asked. “Climbing in second-story windows, busting out lock picks like it’s nothing.”

Brynn laughed in that out-of-character giggle of hers. “We told you, we’re demon hunters.”

“We should get a crew name,” I said.

“The Uliksians,” Brynn said, without hesitating.

“We can’t name ourselves after a demon we banished,” I said.

“No, no, think about it,” Brynn said. “Uliksi wasn’t bad because of what he did, stopping those who wield power over others; he was bad because he was the single manifestation of that ideal. We can do that same work, but as people. Not omnipotent.”

“It doesn’t really roll off the tongue,” Heather said.

“Fine,” Brynn said, “fine.”

The tension wrench gave way in my hand, the lock turned over, and I opened the door.

Just an office. Well, an office straight out of the eighties or nineties or whatever. Big, ugly monitor on a big, ugly desk and the carpet was about twice as thick as could be reasonably justified. There were two other doors on the far wall.

“One of you a hacker too?” Heather asked.

I shrugged.

“Sure,” Brynn said. “Vulture is.”

We went through the drawers, found nothing but business receipts and junk mail.

“To be honest, I don’t think we’ll find anything on the computer either,” I said. “I think this whole thing is a bust.”

I opened one of the two doors. A closet. With cleaning supplies and office supplies. I opened the other door.

Now here was something interesting.

The door led to a short hallway—about ten feet long, with another door at the other end. Above the door, someone had crudely carved in Greek letters:

τίποτα ζωντανό δεν θα περάσει

Brynn and I stared blankly.

“Uh,” Heather said, squinting. “Tipota zontano den tha perasei.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“No clue. I can’t really speak Greek. I just learned how to sound it out a couple years ago. Vasilis is Greek, I think I was trying to impress him.”

“How long have you and him . . .” Brynn started to ask. I don’t know if she trailed off because she was shy to ask with me around or if she realized it wasn’t the time and place.

“Five years,” Heather said. “It’s good. Mostly.”

She opened the door. A set of plain wooden steps led down into darkness.

“I sometimes wish . . . I don’t know,” Heather said. “I wish things were easier between us. More relaxed. He’s not controlling, but somehow . . . I just wish I felt more free.”

She took a step through the doorway.

This time, my perception of time slowed down. I saw her hand move and green light rippled out across . . . something. Like someone had strung an invisible window screen across the doorway. Her whole arm pierced that veil, and she screamed. She didn’t have time to stop. Momentum carried her forward. Every bit of her on the far side of the doorway glowed with green fire.

I grabbed for her. The fingers of my hand—my goat-bitten hand—went through the doorway, and it tingled. My wrist, though, passed through and it hurt like fire. Well, most of the times I’ve gotten burned, fire only hurt later once the nerve endings started growing back or whatever. This time, it hurt immediately like how fire hurts later. I got ahold of her jacket and yanked back.

She fell on top of me. She stopped screaming.

If she was breathing, it was too faint to hear.

FOUR

She was alive. I found her pulse easily enough.

“What the fuck,” Brynn said.

“What the fuck,” I agreed.

We dragged Heather back into the office. Brynn ran back into the hallway and I heard her phone snap a photo. She slammed the cursed door shut.

“Found our fucking magician,” I said, as I worked the office window open. Brynn shut and locked the office door.

“Doomsday,” Brynn said. “She’ll know what to do.”

I climbed out the window, Brynn handed me Heather, and we ran for it. We couldn’t lock the window behind us. We couldn’t grab our bikes. Brynn put Heather into a fireman’s carry and we made for a side street just as a 1950s pickup truck roared down the main street and skidded to a halt out front of the building. I didn’t think he saw us.

“Don’t die,” Brynn said as we ran. “Don’t die don’t die don’t die.”

* * *

Doomsday met us at the front door of the library, and we ran up the steps. I was just as out of breath as Brynn, and I didn’t have one-hundred-some extra pounds of friend thrown over my shoulders. I swept dozens of books off the table, and Brynn laid Heather down atop it. I told Doomsday the gist of what had happened.

“You got a hospital in town?” I asked as Vasilis came up after us.

He shook his head. “Nearest one’s about an hour east. We’ve got a little emergency clinic, though.”

“Won’t do any good,” Doomsday said, as she inspected the patient. “It’s not physical damage. It’s metaphysical damage. That green fire, it’s called witch’s fire. Rebecca mentioned it once. Burns the . . . not the soul. Imagine that you’ve got a second body, a metaphysical body. The bones of that second body, that’s your soul. Witch’s fire burns away that second skin, the membrane that protects the soul. It’ll kill you as sure as being flayed.”

“We’ve got to try to reverse the damage,” Vasilis said. “We’ve got to regenerate that second skin.”

“No,” Doomsday said. “Too dangerous. Just need to soothe the burn. Keep it from getting infected while it heals itself.”

“That could take years!” Vasilis shouted. “I’ve been studying this a decade. Half of what you know, you learned here, today, reading from my collection.” He rose to his full height. Everyone freaks out a little bit differently. Vasilis, apparently, freaks out by trying to dominate people. He wasn’t winning me over.

“And she’ll be in a coma the whole time,” Doomsday agreed.

“We have to do this now,” Vasilis said.

Doomsday looked thoughtful. I was going to back her whatever she chose. That was an easy conclusion to reach.

“She’s your friend,” Doomsday said at last.

“She’s my everything.”

The two of them, together, prepared the ritual. Vasilis was the teacher, Doomsday the student. It was sort of bizarrely elaborate, complete with ringing the floor with herb-infused salts and washing Heather’s nude body with oils.

Brynn and I stayed out of the way, watching from a couch in the corner. Brynn was folded in on herself in worry. I held her.

Vasilis chanted, in Greek and English. A supernaturally bright red flush moved across Heather’s skin in the wake of his hands as he incanted. By the look on his face and the sweat beginning to form on his brow, it wasn’t working. After a minute maybe, Doomsday joined him. She too looked desperate.

I heard a crack as Vasilis’s hands jerked into an unnatural position. He fainted, crumpling down onto himself and the floor.

Then Heather screamed. Then Heather died.

* * *

Vulture and Thursday came back that evening, before Vasilis came to. Doomsday had briefed them over the phone shortly after it happened, but I imagine it was still quite a shock to walk into the apartment. Heather was laid out on the table, still, with a sheet covering everything but her face. Vasilis was passed out on the floor in a fetal position. Doomsday was pacing. Brynn was sobbing. I was holding her with my good hand. My wounded hand, the hand the goat had bitten, the hand that hadn’t been burned by the witch’s fire, I didn’t let it touch her. I was afraid of my own hand.

“What did you find?” Doomsday asked the boys. She put on the kettle for tea. Sometimes it was unclear if that woman was capable of expressing emotion.

“I guess . . .” Vulture said. “I guess that still matters?”

“Matters more than ever,” Doomsday said. She wasn’t wrong.

“We found their car,” Thursday said. “Pushed into a lake close to the trailhead. Vulture found the tread marks in the dirt, even six months later. I wouldn’t have noticed them. I dove in and found the car.”

“And?” Doomsday asked.

“And it’s a sunken car,” Thursday said. “That’s it. That’s all. No skeletons. No backpacks. Just a fucking car.”

Vasilis stirred. Brynn and I jumped up and helped him to his feet, then to a chair. Doomsday set the tea in front of him. Maybe she hadn’t been as callous as I’d assumed.

“We are going to talk about this,” Doomsday said, kneeling on the floor in front of his chair.

“Let me be.”

“If I leave you alone right now, you may never emotionally recover from what’s happened.”

“I don’t care.” Methodically, he pulled on his mangled hands and worked them back into place. I’d never seen anyone injured like that, and I’d never seen anyone heal themselves like that.

“When a person is dying, you don’t stop to wait for their permission to intervene medically. You know that. You acted on that. The same is true now, for you.”

I’d never even imagined this side of Doomsday. I assumed she didn’t have a nurturing bone in her body. Tough love is still love, though.

“You were right,” Vasilis said. “She was too far gone to heal. We should have soothed her wounds instead of trying to directly reverse the damage. Is that what you want to hear?”

“That’s true,” Doomsday said, “but it’s immaterial. I could have been wrong. You did what you felt you had to, which is always ethically better than doing nothing.”

“Then what are we going to talk about?”

“We’re going to talk about Barrow. Because I don’t know the first thing about emotional support, but I want to get you problem solving instead. I want you to worry about this later. Soon, even. Think of problem solving right now as your emotional tourniquet to stop the bleeding before you can get real support.”

“What does this mean?” Brynn asked, and showed Vasilis a photo of the Greek carving over the door. Vulture and Thursday, who hadn’t yet seen it, stood behind him to look as well.

“None that are living may pass.”

Doomsday nodded. “That’s about what I figured.” She steepled her fingers. “How long have you known that Sebastian Miller was responsible for the resurrection of Isola and Gertrude?”

“I didn’t know.”

“You’re not an idiot.”

“It was only a guess.”

“You’re lucky I’m not in a blaming-people mood,” Doomsday said. “Blaming-people moods are the opposite of getting-shit-done moods, and I’m in a getting-shit-done mood.”

Vasilis nodded weakly. “I had no idea when Isola came back. She wouldn’t talk to us. But when Gertrude came back too, yeah, I suspected.”

“Was he ever in here, ever checking out books on magic?”

“All the good stuff is closed to the public. It’s all up here.”

Thursday nodded.

“He did check out a book on modern Greek, last winter. Returned it not a week later. I was disappointed, because it would be nice to have people locally I could talk to.”

“That’s how he knew the right words for the barrier,” Doomsday said.

“My hand went through the barrier without burning,” I said.

“Let me see it,” Vasilis said. I showed him. He whispered arcane words, throwing them forcefully from his lungs as though afraid of them, then held his hands above my hands. My left hand, my undamaged hand, glowed red. My right hand was unchanged.

“This hand . . .” he said. “It doesn’t have a soul.”

“Cool,” I said. Brynn laughed a little, then got self-conscious. “What does that mean?”

“Practically? Almost nothing. Enough wounds like that one, and you’ll die, but I don’t think it’ll have any effect on you other than that.”

“Okay,” Thursday said. “This is easy enough. The barrier won’t let anyone through who’s living. An undead hand doesn’t count as living. I bet Isola and Gertrude don’t either. Get one of them to head on through, find out what happened.”

“They won’t do it,” I said. “Think about it. They’ve got to know more than they’re telling us already. If they wanted to help more, they’d have offered.”

“Gertrude’s probably in on it,” Thursday said. “They’re married, after all.”

“I get resurrecting your dead wife,” I said. “But I wonder, why Isola?”

“We resurrect Heather,” Vasilis said. “To get through the barrier.”

I looked at Doomsday, expecting her to shoot him down.

“Yeah,” Doomsday said, instead. She put her hand to her cheek, scratching in thought. “Yeah, that would work. She’d be able to go through the boundary.”

“Are you fucking kidding?” Thursday asked.

“Thing is,” Doomsday said, still thinking it over, “I don’t think we could do it without The Book of Barrow. I only know a few of his minor rituals, not resurrection. Also . . . don’t you have to end a life to bring one back?”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, you can bring them back temporarily, as long as the ritual is still being cast. But if you don’t give Barrow his due at the end of the ritual . . . right back to death the person goes.”

“This is really obviously a shit idea,” Thursday said.

“Why?” Doomsday asked. “Are you telling me that if you could bring Heather back, right now, that you wouldn’t do it?”

“It’s unnatural,” Thursday said.

“It’s fucking magic,” Doomsday said. “None of it’s any more or less natural than anything else. I’m not here to just learn about this stuff in the abstract. I’m here to gain and wield power.”

“Over others?” Thursday asked.

“No goddammit, not over others. Everything is power. A fucking gun is power. I used one once to end three lives, but it wasn’t because I wanted to wield power over them, it’s that I needed them to stop wielding power over me. There’s a pretty fucking massive power imbalance in this world, and I don’t see why we should be afraid to correct it.”

Doomsday stood up, bringing her teacup with her, taking a long sip.

“Are humans supposed to fly? I don’t know. We built airplanes, though. Are we supposed to bring back the dead? I don’t know, but EMTs do it all the time. It’s not a question of whether or not it’s ethical to bring Heather back from the dead. It’s whether or not we can, and whether or not it will further our aims.” She turned to face Vasilis. “If it’s a life for a life, will you do it? Will you die for her?”

“Yes,” Vasilis answered, but then doubt clouded his features. “I don’t know.”

“Moot point,” Vulture said. “We don’t have the book. Maybe he’s got it on him, but I bet it’s on the other side of that barrier. I say we send a drone.”

Doomsday laughed.

“I wasn’t joking,” Vulture said. “We get a drone to fly down there with a camera.”

“Where the hell would we get a drone?” Doomsday asked.

“Oh, like I’m the one with the unrealistic plan? I’m not the one planning human sacrifice and reanimating corpses.”

“Oh, shit, wait,” Doomsday said.

“What?” Thursday asked.

Doomsday went to the pile of books still scattered across the floor next to the table and picked one out, flipping through the pages.

“Yeah, okay. No resurrection for us,” she said. “‘Barrow: an endless spirit who stands at the gate between the living and the dead, waiting to tear it from its hinges. While capable of granting power over many things, he is most known for his ability to reverse death by imbuing the body of the dead with a piece of his soul. It is believed that if enough of his soul passes from the land of the dead into the land of the living, the gates will open. The distinction between living and dead will be forever destroyed. The living will storm heaven, the dead will storm earth.’”

“So . . .” Vulture said. “If enough people are resurrected all at once, we get some Bible-style apocalypse?”

“Basically,” Doomsday said.

“Cool,” Vulture said.

“How many resurrections, do you think?” I asked.

“No idea.”

I looked to Vasilis. “You knew about this apocalypse thing?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking down at his hands.

“And you didn’t say anything about it because . . .”

“I want to bring back Heather.”

“Holy shit,” Brynn said, “if I really could trade your sorry ass for Heather I’d do it in a second.”

“Hey, don’t be mean to him!” Vulture protested. “He’s just . . . well . . . he’s had a rough day.”

“The odds of one more piece of Barrow being the tipping point are so incredibly low,” Vasilis said. “These rituals have been performed for thousands of years and it hasn’t happened yet. We could bring Heather back, and just her, and it would almost certainly be fine.”

“Almost certainly,” Thursday mumbled.

I would bring Clay back. I realized that, all of a sudden. I would go to Denver and I would dig up the body of my old best friend and I would bring him back to life. Because the world needed someone like Clay. Because I needed Clay. I don’t know that I would kill to do it. I don’t know if I’d sacrifice myself to do it. But I might risk the apocalypse for him.

“All of this is one hundred percent beside the point,” Thursday cut in. “We don’t have the book. We can’t resurrect anyone. We probably can’t find a drone in town.”

Vulture looked sad.

“We can either try harder to recruit Isola or Gertrude or we can confront Sebastian head-on,” Thursday said. “Those are our options.”

“Or we follow Sebastian and figure out how he gets into his basement,” I said. “He’s not resurrected, not that we know of. He’s got to get in there somehow.”

“He can probably bring the barrier up and down at will,” Doomsday said. “And it will last until he’s unconscious or dead.”

“Like, asleep?” I asked.

“No, actually unconscious.”

“How do you summon a barrier like that anyway?” Thursday asked. “Can we do that, and keep ourselves safe?”

Doomsday looked to Vasilis, implying she didn’t know.

“It’s not Barrow’s work specifically. A lot of spirits can grant witch’s fire. But it’s still necromancy. The only ritual I know, it involves inflicting immense pain on an unwilling victim.”

“That’s out, then,” Vulture said.

Thursday still looked thoughtful.

“Hey,” Brynn said, from where she stood by the window. “Is there supposed to be a black SUV parked out front of the library? That a normal thing?”

“No,” Vasilis said. Instead of coming to look, though, he dropped his head in sorrow.

“I bet it’s the magic feds,” Vulture said.

“How’d they find us?” I asked.

“I dunno,” Vulture said. “Probably the tracking devices we all have in our pockets. I keep trying to get you all on burner phones and VPNs, but you never listen.”

“What do we do?” Vasilis asked. It was hard to understand him with his head buried in his hands.

“We sit tight,” I said.

“It just drove off,” Brynn reported.

“Problem solved forever,” Vulture said.

“What were the plates?” I asked.

“California.”

“Could be tourists,” Vasilis said. He still didn’t look up.

“Nah, I bet it’s the magic feds,” Vulture said.

“Doesn’t change anything,” Thursday said. “Just raises the stakes, is all. It’s never good to get caught with a body.”

“They won’t be after us,” I said. “They’ll be after the book. And fuck, if they get it . . .”

“I sure am so glad you came to town,” Vasilis said. He tried for biting sarcasm, but halfway through his sentence, his voice broke and he started to cry.

“There, there,” Vulture said, rubbing our host’s shoulders. “It’s okay.”

Then Vulture thought for a minute.

“I mean, not actually okay.”

Silence reigned in the apartment.

“But I guess you knew that.”

* * *

That night, Vasilis slept in the living room and gave Brynn and me his room. He said he wanted to keep vigil. I could think of a few reasons it was a bad idea to let him, but I wanted to sleep in a bed, so I didn’t say anything.

Vulture took off to scope out the town. That was also a bad idea—there were magicians and feds about—but I knew my opinion on the matter wouldn’t have any bearing on his actions, so I didn’t say anything.

Thursday, actually sensible, decided to keep watch from inside the library, rather than standing out front with a gun.

For a long while, I lay on my back on Vasilis’s bed. Brynn was curled up with her head on my shoulder. Wracking sobs from the living room filled the air, and I focused my attention on Brynn’s breathing.

“Today fucking sucks,” I said at last.

“Yeah, it does.”

“Being demon hunters is garbage.”

Brynn laughed a little bit at that. But it wasn’t her giggle. It was too soft, too tenuous, to be her real laugh.

“I don’t say this much,” Brynn said, “and I don’t even know where I mean by it. But . . . I want to go home.”

“God,” I said. “Me too.”

I held her tighter.

The crying in the living room hit a crescendo, and it sounded like Vasilis was trying to vomit his heart out of his chest.

“How do you think we get ourselves thrown in the same prison, if we go down for this?” I asked.

“If we’re lucky they’ll send us to prison,” Brynn said. “I’ve got a feeling, though, that this is some X-Files shit and they’ll just quietly make it so you and I were never born.”

“Who would have figured? Mulder and Scully are the bad guys after all.”

I thought it over for a while.

“If we can see them, they’re not after us,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Feds don’t show up looking obviously like feds unless they’re there to scare you, not arrest you.”

“It’s the mortar shell you don’t hear coming that kills you?” Brynn asked.

“Yeah.”

“Hope there aren’t more mortar shells around.”

The crying from the living room faded into silence.

“I like you,” Brynn said. “We don’t get to choose how we die, only how we live, and I like you and I’m glad I got to know you.”

“I like you too.”

“You know what Heather and I talked about last night so late?” Brynn asked.

“What’s that?”

“You. Well. Me, but me as relates to you. I told her how I felt about you, how I wasn’t sure what to do. She told me . . . I’m going to get the exact words wrong, which is going to drive me fucking crazy because it was one of the last things she ever got to say. She told me that it’s okay to let yourself love someone, but that letting yourself love someone is like letting someone have the keys to your control room, so you can share the responsibility of running yourself with someone else. It’s worth doing, and people will get in there and pull the wrong levers but that’s just the risk you gotta take.”

“I like that,” I said. “What was with the ouroboros?”

“New start,” Brynn said. She choked up a little on her words. “She wanted a snake that eats its own tail to remind herself that things go in cycles. That it’s never too late for a new start.”

There wasn’t anything to say to that.

There’s always time for a new start, until one day there isn’t.

Holding one another, trying not to think about the world outside that bedroom, we slowly let sleep come for us.

FIVE

“Rise and shine!”

It was still dark out. Midsummer, that far north . . . if it was still dark out, then whoever the fuck thought it was time to get up was wrong.

“Isola’s on the move, and Mr. Magic Death Door Man just left his house in his truck.”

It was Thursday banging on the door, being wrong.

“Give us a fucking minute.”

“You’ve got thirty seconds. Meet us at the bookmobile.”

Another beautiful day in the demon hunter business.

“Is there coffee?” Brynn asked. She was already standing, pulling on her work pants and buckling her belt.

“No,” Thursday shouted back.

Brynn was handsome. I knew that already. I mean, I’d had a weird sort of crush on her since I first met her. But it kind of just hit me again, watching her pull the shirt over her muscled torso.

Maybe I was delirious, thinking about that instead of what needed thinking.

Maybe I’d rather be delirious.

* * *

Thursday drove, conspicuously fast in the predawn light, taking turns far too quickly for a clunky old bookmobile van.

Doomsday had stayed at the library to keep Vasilis from doing something stupid. Brynn was sitting shotgun, and I was in the back with the books. Shelves lined the walls, with webbing straps holding in the mysteries and romances and sci-fi. Like how you batten things down on a ship. Which was good, even though we totally weren’t going to flip over. Definitely not.

I wasn’t strapped down myself, though. I was sprawled out on a beanbag, trying and failing to find things to hold onto every time we took a corner while I also tried to keep my wounded shoulder safe. From my vantage, I couldn’t see out the window. All I saw were the brief flashes of streetlights and headlights that fought against all that darkness.

Not half a minute later, we stopped. The side of the van slid open, and Vulture hopped in. He was panting, holding his side.

“Graveyard,” he said. “She’s at the graveyard. Take this road another mile and turn right on the first road after you see some tombstones.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I saw Isola leave her house,” he said. “So I followed.”

“And that warranted waking us up?”

“Mr. Miller left his house shortly after,” Vulture said. “Dressed all in camo with a duffel bag.”

“Okay that warrants waking us up.”

“Wait,” Brynn said. “They live on opposite ends of town. How’d you see them both?”

“I set up a camera outside Mr. Miller’s house,” Vulture said.

“What?”

“Yeah, you just take an old phone and set it up as a surveillance camera. I set it to stream video to my main phone video whenever I asked or it detected motion. Then I went to go watch Isola’s place myself.”

We must have gone that mile at a breathtaking speed, because Thursday yelled “Turn!” just as he jerked the wheel and sent those of us in back sliding into one another.

The books held.

Of all the ways to die, I think being pummeled to death by trashy hetero romance novels might be the worst. Or best. Either way, it didn’t turn out to be my fate.

We screeched to a stop, which slammed us forward, and Thursday killed the engine. I opened the side door and stumbled out, desperate to stand on solid ground.

At the other end of the short gravel parking lot, a 1950s pickup truck sat empty.

“We should split up,” Thursday said. “Find her faster.”

“Oh,” Vulture said, pulling out his phone. “I know where she is. Or at least her bicycle.”

He opened an app called “Find My Phone” and a map filled the screen, with a dot representing us and a dot representing, presumably, some third phone he’d hidden on Isola’s bicycle.

“Where do you get that many phones?” I asked.

“I steal them from people,” Vulture said.

The graveyard was surprisingly large for such a small town, and like the town itself it looked like it had seen better days. Most of the stones were small and worn. Many were cracked or tipped over. Huge oaks sat atop hills and cast moon shadows across the haphazardly maintained lawn.

Somewhere in all of this was a back-from-the-dead woman and a magician who had pulled off the kind of miracles that people write bibles about. Who had also just killed Heather. Well, maybe it wasn’t fair to blame him for Heather. I wasn’t feeling fair.

Whenever I got out of this alive and not in prison, I was going to sit down and have myself a well-deserved panic attack.

Thursday had his gun held slack at his side as we moved through the graveyard. Brynn had her baton out. Mine was lost somewhere in Iowa, so I took out my knife. Vulture stopped to take a picture of a tombstone with the name HARDWOOD.

We crossed to the very back of the cemetery, where an iron fence separated lawn from forest. Several of the vertical bars were missing, and Vulture led us through the gap and into the trees.

“Not much farther,” he whispered.

He was right.

A muddy impromptu path led us through young pines to a small clearing. A red bicycle leaned against a tree near us. Ten feet away, in the light of Vulture’s phone’s flashlight, Isola stood over two unmarked, impromptu tombstones. She still wore the same black slip dress, but she’d paired it with sensible hiking shoes.

“Don’t know how you followed me,” she said, without turning around. Cut wildflowers, in blues and reds, sat at the foot of each stone. “But you shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah, let me guess,” I said, “it isn’t safe.”

“It isn’t.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

Her back was still to us, but she pointed at each stone in turn. “Loki, Damien.”

“What happened to them?”

“The same thing that will happen to you.”

“Sebastian Miller?” I asked.

I’d seen magic close up and personal. Still, though, it was hard to be afraid of some man while I had my friends at my side, armed and on guard.

She turned to look at me. I doubted she could see us, because we had a light on her. She nodded. Her blond hair hung loose over her black slip and alabaster skin, and just for a moment I thought we were talking to a ghost. She was real, though. She was alive. Which was scarier.

“Are you working with him?” I asked.

“Loki came to town in December,” she said, instead of answering me. “They rode in on a salt truck that had picked them up hitching, and they showed up with a whole suitcase full of stolen books and one hell of a grin across their face. Said we’d never believe it. They showed us The Book of Barrow and yeah, they were right, we didn’t believe it. Didn’t believe it was real.”

She sat cross-legged, there in the mud, resting her head against the stone she’d called Damien.

“So they said they’d prove it. Vasilis and Heather tried to talk us out of it, but you don’t talk Loki out of doing things, Loki talks you into doing things. So we went out with snow chains and snowshoes and snow boots and snow everything to a backwoods spot where Damien once saw a bear. Figured we’d catch it hibernating. Shoot it. Bring it back to life.”

“What could be easier?” I said.

“He found us the first night. We’d barely made it three miles from the trailhead. He got us while we were asleep. Tranquilizers, I think. I go to bed in a tent, and I wake up in a dark place. Warm, damp, dark. Gag in my mouth. Shooter’s muffs over my ears. Then I’m unconscious again, then I’m awake. That cycled who knows how many times.”

“Oh god,” Vulture said. “Oh god.”

“He didn’t torture me. I think he wanted us out cold the entire time. But I know that he killed me. I was so delirious, the whole time. Yet when he killed me, when he put a needle in my arm and killed me, I knew. I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. I knew I was dying. Then I was awake, months later.”

“Why’d he let you go?” I asked.

“Movement!” Thursday shouted. His held his gun in a two-handed grip, tracking something through the trees.

Brynn dashed into the darkness. Not toward the movement, not away from it. Parallel.

A crack, not as loud as gunfire, pierced the air. Thursday fired in response and deafened us.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

It took a while before the words registered. But Sebastian Miller came out of the trees and into the glow of Vulture’s flashlight with his hands above his head, a rifle held loose by the barrel. He wore camo head to toe, hunter’s camo, the kind with actual pictures of trees and leaves printed on it. It had to be him. I barely recognized him from his own photo—not that he looked different, but that his face was so forgettable. It was like face camo, being as unremarkable looking as that.

I turned back to Isola. Her head lolled from side to side, then she dropped forward with a confused look in her eyes. Her face struck the mud. Two running strides and I was next to her, my hand feeling for a pulse for the second time in less than twenty-four hours.

“If she’s dead, you’re dead,” Thursday said.

“Hear me out,” Sebastian said.

“She’s alive,” I said. Her pulse was strong. Then I found the dart, a simple tranquilizer round projecting from her shoulder. He was a pretty fucking bad shot. No one aims for a shoulder . . . he was aiming center mass and hit high right. I pulled out the dart.

“Kill him anyway,” Vulture said.

“Hear me out.”

“What?!” Thursday roared.

“One of you asked why I let her go. I let her go because I’m not a monster. I won’t keep a girl prisoner in my basement forever, and I didn’t think I had it in me to kill her twice. But I should have.”

“Why’s that?” Thursday asked.

“I don’t know how much you know about any of this,” Sebastian said. “Magic, resurrection, everything. But it’s dangerous. Real, real dangerous.”

“You came here to kill her because you actually bothered finishing the fucking book,” I accused him. “You got to the good part, with the apocalypse, and you had, what, resurrecter’s remorse?”

“You could say that,” he said. “But listen. I’ve got everything under control. This will all be over soon, back to how it was, the world no closer to its end.”

“Kill him anyway,” Vulture repeated.

Brynn appeared behind him, struck him with her baton. He stumbled, and she was on him. He was half again her weight, and she got him to the ground without a problem.

“Begone!” he shouted. His words cut through the air louder than I felt they ought to have. A flash of light caused my vision to stutter, a series of bangs deafened me again, and he was gone.

“Fuck,” Brynn said, lurching to her feet. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m going to kill that man!”

* * *

We got Isola to the van and drove back to the library in silence. Two doors down from Isola’s squat, the shiny black SUV was parked in front of the still-operational bed-and-breakfast. Feds don’t stay at bed-and-breakfasts, do they?

Thursday pulled the van up alongside the curb next to the library. Our bikes were back—presumably Vulture had grabbed them the night before.

“Someone’s got to get Gertrude,” I said.

“Oh fuck,” Thursday said. “He would kill her, wouldn’t he?”

“I’ll go,” Brynn said.

“I’m coming with you,” Thursday said.

“Good luck,” I said. Fear of missing out and protectiveness argued in favor of me going too, but if Brynn and Thursday couldn’t handle it, having me along wouldn’t change that. Vulture, reluctantly, passed Brynn his phone and opened up a map with Gertrude’s house pinned on it. Vulture had been busy.

Brynn and Doomsday took off on bikes. Vulture and I carried Isola into the library and up the stairs to lay her down in her old bed. Where she’d lived with her since-murdered partner. The bed she’d consciously avoided ever since her return.

Still, we had to keep her safe. As safe as we could.

Safer than we’d kept Heather.

Vasilis was sleeping in the living room when we came in. Doomsday was absorbed in a book, sitting with the window in sight and her handgun on the table next to her in easy reach.

“What happened?” she asked, standing.

I’d been a bit jealous that she’d gotten to stay at home. But she moved like a woman three times her age, exhausted, presumably from the effort of researching, standing guard, and consoling our host.

“Tranq dart,” I said.

Doomsday shot a look at Vulture.

“Not me!” he said. “I don’t even own a dart gun yet. It was Mr. Miller. He was going to kill her! Again!”

“How long is she going to be out?” Doomsday asked, again looking at Vulture.

“I don’t know, because I have never tranquilized a human.” Then he thought for a moment. “I have never tranquilized a human with a dart, nor have I tranquilized an unwilling human. I also don’t know what agent he used, and basically I have no idea.”

Screams broke into the living room, from the bedroom.

“Not long,” Vulture answered, authoritatively.

* * *

“I think he killed all three of us,” Isola said. She was sweating. Maybe from the heat but probably from the drugs or just outright fear. “I think he killed one of us to resurrect me. I think I was the test subject. Then he killed whoever was left to bring back Gertrude.”

“Oh fuck,” I said. I couldn’t come up with a better way to comfort someone who’d been through worse than I would have imagined possible.

“You know what I’ve spent all this time thinking about? Instead of thinking about things like how do I get better or how do I kill that man, what really keeps me up at night?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

We were strangers, really. I didn’t want to crowd her. I sat on the bed, about a foot away from her. Doomsday sat on a chair next to us.

“I don’t know which of them died for which of us. I don’t know if Loki died to resurrect me or if Damien did. It doesn’t matter. I know that. I don’t think anyone’s soul has joined mine. But it . . . it fucks me up. Barrow stands by the gate and he let me slip out into the land of the living when it opened for . . . when it opened for who?”

I put a tentative hand on her shoulder. She jerked, and I almost pulled it away, but she grabbed my wrist and held my hand against her.

“I haven’t touched anyone in three months,” she said. “Not once. Not since before I died.”

“Oh, honey,” Doomsday said. She stood up from the chair, sat down next to me on the bed.

“Do you want us to hold you?” I asked.

She stared at the ceiling for a moment, then nodded.

We laid down on either side of her and held her, and she cried. Nothing like the hacking, fearful sobs we’d heard from Vasilis the night before. She just cried. After a while, I did too. She’d kill me if I told anyone, I don’t doubt, but I’m pretty sure Doomsday did too.

We need people.

It’s not really giving up our freedom to be close with people. Because freedom only exists in relation to other people. I thought I needed to be left alone. I just needed people. Good people.

Like my murderous witch friend or this dead stranger.

Outside the window, the sun finally, gracefully, rose.

* * *

Half an hour later, the library door opened and shut and several pairs of feet tromped up the stairs.

“Hey,” Thursday shouted. “We’re back.”

More shuffling of feet, as someone, presumably Thursday, walked through the whole of the apartment. At last, he opened the door to the room we were in.

“Where’s Vasilis?”

SIX

“Son of a shit!” Thursday roared, running down the stairs to search the library below.

Gertrude stood in the living room, staring at Heather. A weak smile sat on the older woman’s lips, and fear and sadness were fighting for control of her eyes.

“He killed her?” she asked, running a finger along Heather’s cheek.

We really had to do something with the body. I never would have guessed I’d ever be too busy to deal with the dead body of a new friend, but there we were, scrambling to keep everyone else still alive while a corpse grew cold on the table. How long till it started to rot?

“Sort of,” I answered.

“He definitely killed me, though.” Isola walked into the room. “And he killed two of my friends. To bring you back.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I . . . didn’t know.”

I couldn’t get a good read on whether or not she was lying.

“What’s your story?” I asked. “For real. What happened to you?”

“I died of cancer. I remember dying. It was peaceful—a sharp end to pain. Like falling asleep, but simpler, better. I was in the hospital, in Billings, and there were flowers everywhere, and he was next to me, holding my hand. He was crying. We never had children, him and me. I never wanted them. Just for a second, I wished I’d had kids. Someone else for him to love. He’s never been good at not having someone to love, and I worried about him. I wanted to tell him it was fine. I wanted to tell him I was going to a better place, that he could still love me, or love someone else too, and that I’d see him again. But I didn’t say anything. It was all too complicated, I didn’t know how to say it. I just let myself die.”

I nodded.

“Then I woke up in our bed, here in town. I’d died with snow out the window; I woke up to the sound of summer birds. Six months had gone by. He told me what he’d done . . . a bit of it. Only part of it, I’m guessing. He told me he’d brought me back to be with him. He told me he couldn’t live without me.”

“And you left him?” I asked.

“I didn’t say anything at all for a whole day. I laid in bed, thinking about everything. He was respectful; he noticed I wasn’t feeling right and he slept on a cot next to our bed. He only left my side to bring me food and water. He just sat there, reading books, while I laid there, thinking it over.”

There are so many sides to every person.

“After I stayed up through the night, when the sun rose again, I looked at him, and the first words I said were ‘Till death do we part.’ Then I told him it’s not right, what he did. I told him the dead are supposed to stay dead and what he’d done wasn’t right by God. I’d always known and loved God more than my husband did, and my husband had always loved me more than he’d loved God. So I moved out, simple as that. That was the last I’d ever wanted to think about any of it. Then your friends show up tonight, tell me he’s liable to kill me. Part of me thinks he’d be right to do it. Most of me, though, is just damn scared.”

Vulture put his arm around Gertrude, and she hugged him.

I decided I believed her. Not completely, but you don’t need to believe someone completely to choose to believe them enough that you can act on their words.

“One of the books is missing,” Doomsday said, crouched next to the stack of books on the floor. “Small one. Gold spine, black cover. It’s where I learned about witch’s fire.” She looked up toward the window, where she’d been sitting earlier. “Fucking gun is gone too. Getting fucking sick of people stealing my gun.”

“Vasilis went to the gift shop, I bet,” I said. “He’s trying to get into the basement, trying to get the book without waiting for us.”

I thought that through for another moment.

“He wants the book because he’s going to try to resurrect Heather. I bet he’ll kill Mr. Miller to do it.”

“He seemed desperate,” Doomsday said. “But I didn’t realize he was both desperate and stupid.”

“Men will do anything if they think it’s in the best interest of some woman they love,” Gertrude said. “Whether or not the woman agrees.”

Thursday rushed back up the stairs, slamming open the apartment door. “He’s not in the library. I checked everywhere.”

“He probably went after Sebastian,” I said.

“Okay,” Thursday said. “Vulture, Brynn, Danielle, we’ll go after him? Doom, you stay here, guard these two?”

* * *

The town was just starting to rise as we tore down the main road on bikes, and people came out of stores on the main strip to stand on the boardwalk and stare.

Crows and magpies sat on the power lines, watching us too.

We hit the one traffic light on a red and waited, though there were no cars coming in any direction.

Thursday pulled up beside me. “Feel like it’s high noon or something.” He laughed.

I heard shouting up ahead and ran the light.

Vasilis and Sebastian stood in the shadow of the tyrannosaur, not ten feet distant from each other, weapons leveled. Vasilis held Doomsday’s pistol in a one-handed, amateur grip. Sebastian held a bolt-action hunting rifle, shouldered.

“Cis men,” Brynn said, shaking her head. She dropped her bike on the street and flicked open her baton, walking toward the pair.

“Hey!” I shouted.

If the two exchanged fire, it wouldn’t work out well for either of them. Vasilis didn’t know what he was doing, but he had a semiautomatic pistol and likely a full magazine. Sebastian had probably brought down an animal or two in his day, but a bolt-action rifle ain’t the tool for the job of close combat.

They both turned to look at me.

“Who in God’s name are you people?” Sebastian asked.

“I’m Danielle,” I said. I knew what he meant, but I didn’t feel like answering his implicit question.

“I caught this man trying to break into my place of business. I have every legal right to shoot him if he doesn’t leave the property.”

“You don’t care about law,” I said. “I don’t care about law.”

“I care about what I can get away with. And that includes shooting your face-tattooed freak of a librarian friend.”

“You don’t want that.”

“I don’t even know what I want anymore.”

All the fuss had attracted some onlookers. We were at the very end of town, but a few people had already filtered over. None of them looked particularly friendly toward us. In their shoes, I wouldn’t be either.

“He’s stalling,” Brynn whispered into my ear. “Waiting for a crowd. We should bring him down now.”

“No, come on,” I said back. “I don’t want Vasilis to die. I’m sick of seeing people die. We’ll talk our way through this.”

Sebastian had a small backpack thrown over one shoulder. Vasilis kept eyeing it, and Sebastian kept moving his body, unconsciously, to keep it as far from his assailant as possible.

The book was in there.

It was a hunch. Nothing to gamble a life on.

I approached, raising my hands over my head.

“Stay back,” Sebastian said. His voice was cracked with worry and exhaustion. For all the world, he could have just been someone’s dad. If things had played out the slightest bit differently, he’d just have lived his life reading thrillers and watching TV and hunting and none of this would have happened.

“Just want to talk this through,” I said. “We’re at an impasse. Let’s find a way past it.”

“I don’t see the impasse. I’ve got the upper hand.”

“You attack us, we’ll kill you. We attack you, you kill one of us and likely at least some of us end up in jail, you included.”

“You’ll end up in jail in either scenario,” he said.

“You think people with face tattoos are the kind of people who are afraid of ending up in prison?” I asked. I stepped closer. I approached from his right side, which was convenient because it’s the harder direction for a right-handed shooter to swing a rifle. I wasn’t near enough to reach his gun, even if I lunged, but I was getting close. “You think you can scare women who’ve spent their lives hitchhiking alone?”

“You think a man who raises the dead would be afraid of a bunch of fucking punk kids?”

“No,” Brynn said, standing shoulder to shoulder with me. “You’re right. You’re not afraid of us. You’re a different kind of coward. You’re afraid of being alone. You didn’t resurrect your wife for her. You did it for you.”

“Take one step closer and I’ll shoot at least two of you.”

“See,” I said, “what was I telling you? Impasse.”

I looked over my shoulder. Thursday and Vulture were with the bikes. Thursday had his hand in his hoodie pocket. Vulture had his phone.

A serious crowd was gathering, maybe ten people already with another dozen on their way. They stayed clear of the line of fire between the two armed men, but were getting awfully close to the rest of us. A few of them were open-carrying pistols at their waists.

Interpersonal crime is so much more annoying to commit in open-carry states.

At the back of the crowd, leaning against the glass front of a lawyer’s office, a man with black sunglasses and a black suit sipped coffee, his blond hair in a tight bun. Next to him, a freckled woman with her hair in a sixties bob, dressed identically to the man, ate a donut. They weren’t part of the crowd. They were just watching.

Fucking magic feds. Hipster magic feds.

“You need any help, Mr. Miller?” a young voice shouted.

“These punks broke into my shop!” he answered. “I scared them off, because they’re chickenshit, but they got me outnumbered out here.”

Fuck this.

I took another step forward. Sebastian started to swing the gun around to face me. Long barrel, terrible for close range. I pushed in closer, knocking the barrel aside. Used my bad arm to do it, which I shouldn’t have—the stitched-up wound in my shoulder complained. Got my knife out of my pocket and open in one motion, brought it up. He flinched, hard, closing his eyes, dropping the rifle to point slack at the ground while he covered his throat.

I cut the strap of his backpack, down at the bottom where the strap is thinnest and farthest away from meat, and snatched it. I stomped the barrel of his rifle and disarmed him.

Too many armed strangers around to kill him then and there.

“Fucking run!” Brynn shouted.

We ran.

Vasilis came with us. Thursday, at the front, put his not-insubstantial mass to bear and plowed through our audience before they had time to react.

We got off the main street, first thing, and Vasilis took us through an alley. Brynn overturned a Dumpster in our path to slow down our pursuers.

“Ahead of us!” Thursday shouted.

Four men at the mouth of the alley barred our path.

We grabbed a second Dumpster and pushed it ahead of us on its caster wheels. I pushed with my one arm; the other hurt like hell. I might have ripped the stitches.

A shot rang out, the ping against the steel side of the Dumpster almost as loud as the report itself. Couldn’t have been a long gun, or it would have gone through—and probably into someone I cared about.

All five of us were packed tight behind our moving shield, and I found that strange clarity I’d only ever really known in riots. The world had always, it seemed, been against me and my friends. These, though, were moments of me and my friends against the world. I know that’s bullshit on a bunch of different levels—hell, the people shooting at us right now weren’t even our enemies. I wouldn’t shoot back even if I could.

But our collective power felt like its own magic just then, in the early morning in some small town in Montana. We picked up speed and shouted our wordless power.

We hit the street. As I’d guessed, the men trying to stop us moved out of way of the couple hundred pounds of steel barreling toward them. They were still armed, though, and we were in the open in the street, the library twenty feet away.

Another shot rang out, but it wasn’t from our assailants. Thursday had his gun out. He’d fired at the ground by their feet. They bolted, taking cover behind cars. They’d be returning fire any second.

We sprinted for the library, Thursday covering us, firing shots to keep our attackers behind cover. Doomsday met us with the door open, and I dove through. Bangs everywhere. Loud ones and tinny ones and ones that went poof more than bang and just way too much gunfire everywhere.

Thursday was pinned down behind the Dumpster. Vasilis drew his pistol aloft, but Doomsday snatched it out of his hand and stepped outside, firing calmly. I don’t think she was aiming to keep those guys pinned down. I think she was aiming for the guys themselves.

They ducked. Thursday ran, zigzag. A shot shattered the glass of a window not a meter in front of him, but he got in through the door and Doomsday slammed it shut. The firing stopped.

I fucking hate gunfights.

SEVEN

Nothing says well-established squat like barricades and other defenses ready to deploy. I went through the building with Isola and dropped thick wooden panels over every window. Upstairs, an argument raged.

“How’re you feeling?” I asked Isola.

“I’d rather be watching TV,” Isola said, as she helped me get a steel bar in place over the front door.

“Yeah.”

“I used to think I wanted a life of adventure. Now I just want to be left alone.”

Yeah.

I felt that to my core sometimes. I’d gambled everything on a life less ordinary. I had no savings. No long-term partner. No home. No roots in any given community. All I had were stories and scars and vivid memories of moments too beautiful or horrid to comprehend.

Sometimes I wish I just had a little bit of peace, instead.

I didn’t say any of that to Isola, though. Because . . . me even pretending to understand where she was coming from? That was bullshit. I didn’t know shit about shit. I’d never been kidnapped and murdered. Everything bad in my life—truly bad—I’d stabbed and fought and kicked my way out of, to varying degrees of success.

“Maybe we’ll get through this,” I said. I didn’t sound optimistic though.

“Maybe,” she said. “I hope so. It’d be cool to find out what happens in Voyager. Find out if they ever get home.”

I looked out through the peephole. Half the town must have been gathered outside. No pitchforks or torches, just handguns and cars. The modern pitchforks and torches, I guess. Which made us . . . what? Frankenstein’s monster? Dracula?

If we were the monster, Frankenstein himself was out there, somewhere, in that crowd. He was out there and he was lying, to everyone, and everyone was going to believe him.

“You can hide in there!” Sebastian shouted, his voice muffled through the thick door. “But we’re patient, we can wait!”

I didn’t want to watch TV and live a simple life. I wanted to kick open that door and walk out into that crowd and stab Sebastian Miller to death. That’s what I’d do in a dream world, a world in which I could do anything. Bucket list be damned.

There wasn’t shit I could do.

“You want to go upstairs and join the argument?” I asked.

“No,” Isola said. “I’ll stay down here, keep an eye on the door. If I’m going to die again, I’d rather be first, and I’d rather be surrounded by books.”

I nodded, then plodded up the stairs into the angry chaos.

* * *

The argument was split into two camps. Thursday and Vasilis wanted to get out onto the roof and try to shoot Sebastian. Brynn, Gertrude, and Vulture wouldn’t let them. Doomsday was sitting cross-legged on the floor, poring through The Book of Barrow. She refused to acknowledge the conversation.

“I don’t see any other option!” Thursday yelled.

“Dying in a standoff with innocent people isn’t an option either,” Vulture said. “Come on. You know that.”

“This is bullshit,” I said, once I got the gist of what was going on. “Quit arguing. It’s just making everything worse.”

“Well, what the hell else am I going to do when these idiots won’t let me at least try something?” Thursday asked.

“Thursday,” I said. I approached him. Adrenaline kicked into my system, almost the same as when I’d approached Sebastian. Angry, armed men. And this was one I usually trusted. “Listen to me. We’re a team, right?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“We’ve made it this far, right? You saved my life in Freedom, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Save it again. By calming down. By not doing something stupid.”

“Fuck,” he grumbled. “The longer we wait, the worse the situation is going to get.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But if there’s one thing I learned while traveling . . . if you’ve got a losing hand, it’s better to shuffle the cards and draw all new ones, even if the new ones might be worse.”

“That’s not how poker works,” he said.

“Yeah, I know but it’s kind of how life works. Everything is shit right now. But in here, for the moment, we’re comparatively safe. We don’t have to act this second. We can just get ready for when things change.”

“When is that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe everyone will get bored. Maybe Sebastian will say something damning and they’ll figure him out. Maybe they’ll all go home tonight. Maybe Doomsday will figure out something good in that book, or maybe one of us will think of something.”

“Or maybe those rednecks will set this place on fire,” Thursday said. “Or maybe the magic feds will show up and kill all of us.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Thursday sighed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you all. I don’t know what to do.”

Doomsday, without standing up from where she was, reached out a comforting hand and held onto his calf.

“If we’re going to hunker down,” she said, “anyone want to make us some tea?”

* * *

I hate being barricaded inside a building with enemies outside. I also, for what it’s worth, hate that this is something I know about myself, because it’s happened more times than I could count. Thanks, property laws, for making my way of life illegal.

There’s never enough air or something once you barricade the doors. There’re always too many people, both inside and outside, when you barricade the doors.

We’d waited half the day already. The sun was high overhead.

When I’m fighting off a panic attack, I go into scientist mode and observe my body. I think to myself: how am I feeling? As specific as possible. How and where exactly is the worry manifesting in my body? How long does each “wave” last and how intense is it on a quantifiable scale, like from one to ten?

This serves two purposes. First, it gives me something to do. Just the act of trying to track my feelings distracts me enough to break out of the worst feedback loops of anxiety. Second, it gives a database of sorts that I can refer back to. Okay, I could say to myself, you’re having one of your existential loneliness panic attacks: expect three major waves with a high water mark of seven on the panic scale, one every three to five minutes, each one lasting roughly a minute before ebbing back down to a level four. Or if it’s a false alarm medical panic attack, that’s good for a single eight followed by a descending succession of waves until it’s over.

Knowing what I’m in for keeps the panic from controlling me utterly. It knocks each panic attack down one to four increments on that scale.

This was the old “barricaded inside a building with cops outside” panic attack. Well, in this particular case, it wasn’t cops, it was armed strangers and an evil magician. Which was better in some ways—they didn’t have the institutional authority to lock me into a cage for the rest of my life—but overall kind of worse because Sebastian was not what could be called a rational actor and it was impossible to tell what he might do with what power he had.

So that was the kind of panic attack I had. The worst kind.

A couple of the waves, they hit up toward nine, maybe ten. A wave of panic that hits nine, it takes me right out of scientist mode and right into that prison called my own head. I sat on the couch closest to door, my head between my knees, and tried to count my breaths. I couldn’t.

I tried to drink my tea. I couldn’t.

It was just all too much. For way too long, it was all too much.

“Can I join you?”

I looked up. Vasilis.

The past few days had wrecked him, and he looked it. The darkness under his eyes had reached the skeletal stage. His hair was a frightened, uncombed mess. His lip quivered under his mustache, a nervous tick.

“Yeah,” I said.

He sat next to me, but not rudely close.

“I can only imagine what you think of me,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mind him opening up to me, though. Any distraction at all was welcome.

“Every excuse I could tell you, it would sound like something Sebastian would say. That’s part of what’s eating me alive, seeing all the parallels between me and him. I want to say ‘I’ve lost everything!’ because in a lot of ways I have. Heather was my world. I wasn’t hers, but she was mine. I just . . . accepted that dynamic, while we were together. I knew she was going to leave me one day.”

That wasn’t what I thought he’d tell me. I lifted my head to listen better.

“When you all came to town, I thought: ‘This is it. She’ll leave with these people.’ I accepted that. But of course, the reality is so much worse.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I thought, for a moment, about what I was apologizing for. “There’s this thing, when people die, where people always blame themselves. I’m maybe hyperaware of that being what people usually do, because I do the opposite. People die, and I absolve myself of guilt. Clay died, and yeah it was partly because of a demon but I’m sure it was partly because of loneliness. And I know he loved me, non-romantically, and I loved him, non-romantically, but I didn’t keep up with him as well as I could have. I chose solitude. I chose the road over him.”

“We can’t save one another,” Vasilis said.

“I know we can’t. But if I could go back knowing what I know now, I would have stuck with him, and I bet you anything he’d still be alive and I bet you anything I’d be happier than I am right now. So that’s what I’ve avoided thinking about. And with Heather . . . she made her own choices. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“I wasn’t blaming myself for Heather’s death. I was blaming you and Brynn.”

If I’d been in any other mood, I might have taken that badly or pointed out his botched attempt to save her. Instead, I just nodded.

“Which is bullshit, of course,” Vasilis said.

“Mostly bullshit. But it’s true, if we hadn’t been here, she’d be alive right now. It’s not our fault, but it’s still causation and not correlation. What do you call that?”

“Life,” he said. “Chaos.”

“Yeah.”

“I understand Sebastian. I understand what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling. I know magic. I don’t have a natural aptitude, but I’ve been studying it for years and I can perform most rituals if I’ve got the right book in front of me. Now I’ve got a book, here in my apartment, that could bring Heather back from the dead. I could sacrifice myself to bring her back, but I won’t. And I know why Sebastian grabbed other people instead of doing it himself.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because Sebastian didn’t want Gertrude alive for her sake. He wanted her alive for his sake. It wasn’t that he wanted Gertrude to feel the summer air on her skin one more time. It was that he wanted a wife. He wanted company.”

“True.”

“I love Heather. Loved. I loved Heather. But not more than I love myself. If we survive this, I’m going to wind up alone, now. At least for a while. That’s just the way it is. You’ll leave, and maybe Isola will stay, but I have a feeling we’ll both be alone for a while, a long while, even with the other around.”

He laughed, all of a sudden. “That’s the best-case scenario.”

“How do we get to that scenario?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I know one thing, though. We’ve got to kill Sebastian. There’s no coming back from what he’s done.”

“I don’t know if there’s such a thing as ‘beyond redemption’ in my book,” I said. “I try not to believe in vengeance, only solving problems. If that means we’ve got to kill him, I won’t cry. But there’s always coming back from what we’ve done. The path back into the light is always there, even if most people won’t take it and sometimes you need to kill them if they won’t, in order to keep yourself or your community or even strangers safe.”

Vasilis shook his head. “Any other situation, I’d probably agree with you.”

I didn’t want to argue nitpicky shit about creating societies with radically transformed ideas of crime and punishment. I also didn’t want to get up off the couch to get away from him. Surprisingly, I didn’t want him to get up either. Talking doesn’t always help with panic, but it was helping just then.

“What’s with the spade?” I asked, nodding toward his tattoo, to change the subject.

“I was a different man, when I was younger. Gambling man. Lost a bet. I’ll tell you one thing that a drunken face tattoo is good for—it’s good for teaching you not to regret.”

“You ever think about getting it removed?” I asked.

“Hell no. I love this thing. How many librarians do you know with face tattoos who run a library that they technically stole from the state?”

“You’re the only one,” I said.

“Damn straight.”

“There’s nothing in here,” Doomsday said, standing up at last, setting the book atop Heather’s body like she was a table. “Nothing that’s gonna help us.”

“What we need is a distraction,” Gertrude said. She was handling the whole thing rather well. I suppose she had nothing left to fear.

“Like what?” I asked. I peered out the narrow crack between the wooden shutter and the window. Most of the crowd was still there, leaning on cars, smoking cigarettes, looking bored. Sebastian Miller stood sentinel in the middle of the street, staring intently at the front door. It had been what? Eight hours? Our magic feds were nowhere in sight, which was not reassuring.

“I bet they’ll let me go. Me and Isola. We’re not with you. We know those people. I bet they’ll let us go, and we’ll figure out something.”

“You’re the two that Sebastian was trying to kill,” I said.

“He won’t, not with everyone else watching. Sebastian always cared a lot about what people think of him.”

It was a dangerous plan, but it wasn’t “get to the roof and start shooting” dangerous, and it was better than anything else we’d come up with.

I followed her downstairs to the front door. Isola was easy to convince.

Gertrude opened the door a crack. “Don’t shoot!” she yelled. “It’s me! Ms. Miller! I’m coming out!”

She slipped out, Isola close behind, and I slammed the bar back in place behind them. I was trapped inside again.

Fuck, I wish I’d been able to join them.

* * *

“I wonder what they’ll do.”

I was back upstairs, back on the panic couch. It didn’t hit me so bad this time, maybe because whether or not it was me doing something, I knew that someone was doing something. I knew that the current situation would not continue indefinitely. Even without physically moving, every passing minute got me closer to not-in-the-library as surely as if I was walking toward the exit.

“Fuck off and leave us here,” Vasilis said. “That’s my guess.”

Thursday and Doomsday sat on the love seat, quietly whispering. Vulture was asleep in Isola’s bed. Brynn paced, her boots a rhythmic clomph clomph on the floor. Every time her circuit took her past the window, she peered out for a second.

“Hey,” she said, on one of her rounds. She motioned us over. “Check this out.”

In the distance, from the west edge of town, a thin trickle of smoke turned into a billowing cloud erupting up toward heaven.

Isola’s house was on fire.

EIGHT

“They’re leaving,” Brynn said.

“All of them?” Thursday asked.

“Yeah. Wait. No. Almost everyone. Mr. Miller’s still there, plus some other guy.”

Vasilis went to the window and looked out. “Arthur Dawson,” he said. “Runs Dawson’s. Probably Miller’s best friend in town.”

“He armed?” I asked.

“Oh yeah.”

“What now?” I asked.

“Take to the roof?” Thursday suggested.

“Wait, what the fuck is that?” Brynn asked. The rest of us stacked up by the window to peer through the crack to see what she was talking about.

Sebastian stood on the street, his face shaded by a baseball cap. In front of him, a tall, thin man in blue jeans held a pistol in his hand and had another holstered at his hip. Sebastian’s rifle, though, was leaning against a parked car, and Sebastian had some stubby black device in his hand.

Sebastian stepped up to his friend and jabbed him in the side while simultaneously muffling him with an elbow around the face. Arthur went down, thrashing.

“What the fuck is he doing?” Brynn asked.

“Taser,” Vulture said.

“Whatever it is,” I said, heading for the stairs, “we’re going to stop him.”

Informal decision making is great: when there’s time, you bicker about what to do; when there isn’t, you just go for it. My friends were right behind me.

The ground floor of the library was empty, had been empty for days. It already looked abandoned—rats gathered on the checkout counter. Sunlight cut thin swaths across the floor, from where it broke through the edges of the barricade shutters.

I reached the front door and carelessly threw the bar to the side. My motives here weren’t entirely altruistic: I wanted out. The door swung outward and the day poured in, blinding me for a second.

As my eyes adjusted, a rat ran out the door. Well, it tried to run out the door. No sooner had it crossed the threshold than green fire burst from its body and it collapsed, lifeless, on the stoop outside.

Everyone saw, I think, because I threw out my arm to block the way but no one tried to leave.

“The window,” Brynn said.

I tossed back the shutter from the nearest window and opened the pane. I couldn’t see anything, but that meant nothing. I edged my soulless hand out the window, and sure enough it tingled and glowed pale green.

On the street outside, Mr. Dawson lay motionless on the street. Sebastian knelt over him with a hunting knife in an ice-pick grip, stabbing the corpse of his friend over and over. It must take a massive amount of pain to raise the barrier.

Sebastian saw me looking and raised his head to meet my eyes. “I can’t believe you killed him!” he shouted in a sarcastic tone. Then he switched to menacing. “You’ll wait in there until everyone comes back from whatever chaos you tricked my wife into causing. I’ll let down the barrier and you’ll see how the town of Pendleton, Montana, deals with a bunch of freak murderers like you.”

Crack.

I jumped at the sound of gunfire. I’d never been a particularly jumpy person before all of this.

Adrenaline kicked in.

“Turns out bullets don’t have souls!” Thursday shouted from the door. More gunfire. He and Doomsday were both shooting.

Sebastian reeled, maybe hit. He spun a little and dashed behind the hood of the nearest car. Bullets wouldn’t get through the engine block, sadly, or the Days might have still had a chance. If they brought him down, the barrier would drop with him.

They stopped firing.

“What now?” Thursday asked.

“Told you we need a drone,” Vulture said.

“Not helping, Vulture,” Doomsday said.

“I’ll check all the windows,” I said. I was the only one who could do it safely.

I thought doing the rounds would give the adrenaline a chance to clear my system, but I was just too jacked up and nervous for my body to consider calming down. Each time I put my hand through the barrier at a different window, I inched closer and closer to overwhelming nausea. It needed doing, though.

The last window, the fifteenth one, was in the living room upstairs. I put my hand through, felt that green fire, and dry-retched. I couldn’t remember the last time I ate something.

There was no way out.

The townspeople would come back and see Arthur Dawson stabbed to death on the asphalt. Sebastian would drop the barrier, and dozens of angry, armed, innocent townspeople would storm this place. And what? Citizen’s arrest us? Lynch us?

I could only come up with two sources of hope: the Days might kill Sebastian—maybe he was already bleeding out, or maybe he’d stick his head up at just the wrong second—or maybe Isola or Gertrude would find their way back and . . . and I guess kill him themselves.

Slim hope, either way.

Maybe one of us could rush the barrier. The witch’s fire took a while to kill Heather. Maybe one of us could rush the barrier and kill Sebastian and the rest of us could make a break for it.

I sat down on that same fucking chair I’d spent way too much of the past couple days sitting on, and dropped my head into my hands as my brain and stomach raced.

It should be Vasilis. I mean, mostly because he was the odd man out and I’d rather lose him than anyone else. It should be Vasilis because he was the one who didn’t do anything for months when he knew there was something evil going on. He was the one who didn’t step up. Hell, he was the one who was too afraid to let Heather heal on her own time and rushed the ritual and got her killed.

Cold logic became a sort of hate as it coursed through my brain. Vasilis deserved to die, and noble sacrifice was about the best he could do. I could talk him into rushing Sebastian.

No, the fuck I couldn’t.

That snapped me out of it. There’s only so far our thoughts can wander outside our ethics before something kicks in and brings us back.

If Vasilis deserved anything, it was to run a library and drink tea and study magic and maybe fall in love again one day. To get over Heather.

Shit. Heather.

I looked over. She was still on the table where she’d died. Atop her, The Book of Barrow sat where Doomsday had set it down.

She could get through the barrier.

“Hey!” I shouted down the stairs. “Hey, guys!”

* * *

“I would like the record to state my objection to this plan,” Thursday said, “so that when it goes horribly wrong I won’t even have to say I told you so.”

“I would like the record to state I think this is metal as fuck,” Vulture said, “so that no matter how this goes I’ll be right.”

“Boys!” Doomsday said.

“If this works,” Vasilis said, “she will be alive so long as Doomsday and I hold the ritual space. Our own life energy will hold open the gate. Unless we condemn another soul to death and send it to Barrow in her place, she will die again as soon as we drop the ritual. We might be able to hold it an hour, without risking our own lives. Once it’s over, once Heather has passed through the gate that second time, there’s no bringing her back. Not even temporarily. Barrow, uh, won’t be happy with any of us when he doesn’t get his due. He probably won’t seek revenge, but he probably won’t heed our call ever again either.”

We nodded, solemn.

I was beyond fear, firmly into the realm of awe. We called them endless spirits, or sometimes demons, but as I thought about what we were going to do, I realized what they were: gods. We were about to risk pissing off a non-abstract, non - bearded - dude - in - the - sky god. I wasn’t in awe of Barrow. I was in awe of Doomsday, of Vasilis, for that level of courage.

Fortunately, none of the rest of us had to participate in the actual spellcasting. We stood in a semicircle several steps away, outside the line of salt that encircled the table.

Vasilis spoke in Greek, then put his hands on one of Heather’s shoulders.

Doomsday said her part: “We ask you, Barrow, to animate this vessel.” She put her hands on Heather’s other shoulder.

“We open this space as ritual space,” Vasilis said, in English this time, “and hold it so, until such time as we close it.”

Silent, green fire erupted from the salt and encircled our friends.

When I was younger, I used to spread that conventional wisdom that magic, real magic, was subtle, not something you could see. Nope. Turns out that magic, real magic, ain’t subtle for shit.

“We ask you, Barrow, to animate this vessel!” Doomsday’s voice filled every corner of the room, then faded to nothing.

Vasilis released his hands from Heather’s shoulder, then Doomsday did the same.

Then Heather screamed. Then she sat up.

Doomsday and Vasilis stood statue-still. They had no energy to spare on speaking or moving. By their expressions, they were in pain.

Brynn’s turn. “Heather,” she said, as loudly as she could while still trying to calm someone down. “It’s okay, Heather.”

Heather’s scream subsided, and she jumped off the table to her feet. She stumbled for a moment, then caught her balance. She was still inside the circle of flames.

“Is it safe?” she asked.

“You can pass through, yes,” Brynn said.

Heather came through. The ouroboros tattoo still looked fresh on her arm. It still looked like it was healing.

“What happened?” she asked.

“You died,” Brynn said.

“I remember that.”

“Listen,” Brynn said, taking in a deep breath. This was hard on her. “You’re not back for good.”

“How long do I have?”

“Maybe an hour,” Brynn said. She choked up, was barely able to get the words out. “As long as they can withstand the pain, basically.”

“Okay,” Heather said. It clearly wasn’t okay, and tears were forming in Heather’s eyes.

“Sebastian Miller did this. He did all of it. He killed Damien and Loki and Isola, and now Arthur Dawson, and who knows who else. And we’re trapped inside right now, until he drops a barrier of witch’s fire. By choice or by lack of consciousness. And that barrier? Only the dead can pass.”

Vulture stepped forward and gave her a ratty black hoodie. She pulled it over her naked body, and it was long enough to serve as a dress.

Thursday stepped forward and gave her a gun. She took it in her hand, carefully, then dropped the magazine to count bullets before seating it back in.

Brynn had given her knowledge. Doomsday and Vasilis had given her this brief respite from death. Thursday and Vulture had both offered her gifts.

I had nothing. That felt wrong somehow. The whole scene was so goddammed biblical that I felt like I probably should have had something to give to her.

“I’ve got nothing to give you,” I said, feeling a bit silly as I did.

“I’m dead, and nothing’s going to stop that, so basically anything I say right now, I can’t really be held responsible for?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Brynn has a big ole fat crush on you,” she said, then laughed. “She’s falling in love with you. She told me herself.”

“Heather!” Brynn said. It turns out, Brynn is capable of blushing.

“Okay, I’m gonna go kill this fucking guy for you losers.”

* * *

She ran out the front door, gun blazing. I mean, I couldn’t see actual muzzle blasts or whatever in the daylight but she just ran straight for that sedan with the pistol firing, over and over. She wasn’t saving ammo. That wasn’t good.

It flushed him out, though. He must have seen her coming and he ran. Thursday took a shot from the door and hit him in the leg. He dropped like he was a bike with a stick in his spokes and face-planted.

Heather had a wild smile on her face as she dropped the gun and leapt onto his chest. She’d never meant to shoot him.

Her hands went over his throat, choking off his screams.

I put my hand into the barrier over the door, watching the green light flicker over the gray mottled wound, and I tried my hardest to disassociate from the nausea that rose again in the pit of my stomach.

After a short moment, the green light disappeared. I reached farther, cautiously, letting my wrist pass through the threshold. Nothing. My whole arm; nothing.

“Go!” I said, and we ran out the door.

The plan was to get Heather inside for a final good-bye while we packed up the bookmobile for as quick an exit as we could manage. As soon as I got near Heather, she stood up.

Sebastian rolled over and threw up.

He wasn’t dead. He’d just been unconscious.

“Why isn’t he dead?” I asked.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Heather said.

“What’s that?”

“We make him fucking confess to the whole goddammed town. Bring everyone back to his place, let them see his basement.”

“Then he doesn’t die,” I said, surprising myself. I didn’t realize just how deeply invested in the death of that man I’d become. “He’ll just go to jail.”

“Death’s not a punishment,” she said. “So don’t seek it as one.”

You don’t argue what death is like with a dead woman.

Brynn pinned Sebastian, and Vulture, picking up on what was going on, ran inside and came back out with duct tape. We hog-tied the man, there in the street. Brynn searched him for weapons and found a stun grenade—it wasn’t magic he’d used to get away from us behind the graveyard, just a damn flashbang.

Thursday grabbed the rifle but left Mr. Dawson’s guns on his body. Brynn threw the man over her shoulder, crouching a little with the weight, and jogged east, toward the gift shop. That woman, she knew how to get things done.

Fuck just having a crush on Brynn. I really was in love.

* * *

Gertrude was shaking, holding herself up against the tyrannosaur.

I ran ahead to greet her. She opened her arms, and I let her fall against me. She held me tight.

“I saw the basement,” she said. “Oh god. I saw what he’s done.”

“We’re going to make him confess.”

“No one will believe you, about the magic. Not really. They stare at me because they think I came back from the dead but they don’t really believe it. I think they actually stare at me because they don’t approve of me leaving my husband after a near-death experience.”

“When they see the basement, though,” I said.

“He’ll go to prison, for a long, long time. And you kids will be off the hook.”

She sighed, then pulled a phone out of her purse and dialed a number. It rang for a long time, then someone picked up.

“Hey,” she said. “It’s Ms. Miller. Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. No, listen. You’ve got it backward. I wouldn’t have believed it either. The library people. Yeah. It was my husband all along.” A long pause. “Look. Just come to the shop and don’t threaten anyone until you’ve looked in the basement. Come see for yourself.”

Everyone else trudged inside. I wanted to go with them, because as terrible as I assumed it would be, I really wanted to know what was in that basement. Someone needed to stay with Gertrude, though, and for some unknowable reason she’d taken a liking to me.

So I was standing with her when the posse—what else could I call it?—rolled up. Two dozen men, all armed. No one leveled a weapon at me, but neither did anyone give me any impression that I was in any way free to go.

“Well,” one man said, stepping forward and lifting his baseball cap. He was the spitting image of that corpse we’d left in the street, and he had an assault rifle with a hunting scope. “My father’s dead, and the only reason I’m not shooting this stranger right here and now is because she’s a woman.”

“Fuck you; shoot me.”

I said it without thinking. There were at least three reasons why that was the wrong thing to say. But fuck. I hate that shit so much.

“What?”

“I didn’t kill your father. I saw Sebastian Miller do it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Come inside, Trent,” Gertrude said, shaking her head, tears in her eyes.

We went inside.

* * *

Whatever blood there had been at any point was washed off the furniture and the cement floor.

There were three large dog cages, reinforced with welded rebar. There was a shelf filled with glass jars of salts and herbs. The tranquilizer gun sat on a workbench, with darts and vials of toxin next to it. Most damning of all, a third of the floor had been ripped up to reveal three grave-length mounds of dirt in parallel lines. Next to them, two empty graves. Beside that, a pickax, shovel, and the hill of exhumed dirt and rubble.

A dentist’s chair stood in the center of the room. There were no restraints cobbled on, nothing like that. The chair alone was terrifying enough.

Thursday, Vulture, Brynn, and Heather stood over Sebastian, who was still gagged and bound with tape.

Trent Dawson took off his ball cap and held it over his chest.

“I would never, not in a million years . . .” he said, before trailing off. A few of the others came down with him, and one ran back upstairs immediately, presumably to tell everyone what was down there.

Trent strode over to Mr. Miller and ripped the tape off his mouth.

“Say something,” Trent said. There was gravel in his voice, barely concealing rage.

I stared at our captive, trying to guess what lies he would tell, and how we might have to counter them. Sebastian staggered up to his knees.

“No,” he said, simply.

“I said say something!” Trent roared.

“No.”

“You killed my father, you son of a bitch.”

“I would like to speak to a lawyer.”

“I ain’t the cops!”

“I would like to speak to a lawyer.”

Trent raised the barrel of his gun level with our prisoner’s face. No one moved to stop him, though Vulture got out of the way in case the bullet kept going.

“Ricochet,” one of the townspeople mentioned. That was, apparently, the only objection to putting Sebastian down right then and there.

“To hell with you, Sebastian Miller.” Trent spit. He said hell like he believed in the place, which is frankly a different kind of curse than when I use it. “Gertrude, in respect for you, for everything you’ve been through, I’m going to walk away. You come and find me, let me know whether you need me to call the cops or fill in one of those graves.”

They left us, simple as that, tromping heavily back up the stairs.

“Well?” I asked Gertrude.

“Gertie,” Miller said. “I did it for you, Gertie.”

“Gag him,” Gertrude said. Brynn obliged.

“Anyone know how this thing works?” Gertrude lifted up the dart gun.

Sebastian whimpered.

Vulture stepped over. “You have to know your target’s weight in order to use it safely,” he said. “It’s probably loaded for you or Isola, so probably not strong enough to guarantee it’ll knock him out. Two shots almost certainly would, but there’s a chance it’ll kill him.”

She turned, aimed, and fired. The dart went into his lower ribs. He looked up, more surprised than afraid.

“Lord forgive me,” she said. “But I cannot let this man walk upon your earth another day.” She fired again. The second dart pierced his belly. Either the toxins were fast, or he fainted.

“Hey,” Vulture said. “We’ve uh, we’ve got kind of a choice right now. We’ve got a guy who’s about to be dead soon anyway. In case we wanted to, you know.”

“It’s never too late to start over,” Brynn said, looking at Heather.

Heather shook her head. “I’ve been dead before. I’m not afraid to be dead again.”

“Fuck that,” I said. Heather turned to me, surprised. “It’s up to you. I get that. But really and truly, this man is about to die. Let him not have killed you too.”

“Um, the apocalypse,” Thursday said. “Remember how every resurrected person brings us one step closer to the apocalypse?”

“A million to one,” Vulture said. “A million to one odds in our favor, that we don’t destroy the gates between heaven and earth.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” I added.

“Okay,” Heather said. Hope broke across her face like dawn, brightening faster and faster.

“I can’t fucking believe . . .” Thursday said. “Gertrude. You’ve got to be against this, right?”

“I don’t want another living soul on this earth to have to go through what I went through,” Gertrude said, “knowing that an innocent person died so that you might live. But he’s dying anyway.”

“Apocalypse!” Thursday shouted.

“If Heather’s the second coming then she’s the second coming,” Gertrude said, “and that’s God’s will.”

“I can’t . . . I don’t . . .” Thursday took a deep breath, then calmed down. “Heather, you okay with this?”

“Okay,” she said. She had tears in her eyes and a smile quivered on her lips, coming in and out of existence.

“Then we better hurry,” I said. “Bullet hole in his leg and two doses of god-knows-what.”

Thursday threw Sebastian over his shoulders and walked sideways up the steps like he was moving an awkward piece of furniture. Trent and his friends stared at us as we trooped past them through the gift shop.

“Gertrude put two of those darts into him before having a change of heart,” I explained. “We’re getting him to the library, Vasilis knows a lot about this stuff. I have a feeling, though, that we’ll be right back here to bury him.” None of it was technically a lie, even.

Trent nodded.

On the way out the door, I swiped a Pendleton shot glass.

NINE

There aren’t so many glaciers in Glacier National Park anymore, but the vistas are still something special. Clouds sat heavy on the horizon, threatening rain, but the lake below us shone a heavenly blue and earlier that day I’d seen a mountain goat and its kid.

My left arm was in a sling. I’d ripped a stitch after all, and while Vulture had been happy enough to sew me back up, he insisted that I try harder not to mess up his handiwork this time.

Brynn lay on her stomach next to me, stick-and-poke tattooing my leg. The ouroboros. It’s never too late to start again.

The bookmobile was parked nearby. Vasilis and Heather had given it to us, and I have to admit it’s a step up from the Honda Civic, at least for traveling with five people.

The ritual had gone without a hitch, and Heather got to stay living again. Despite what Vasilis had figured, she decided to stick around Pendleton. She told us that new beginnings don’t have to involve new places or even new people. Which is obviously wrong—new places are the only thing worth living for. But I suppose not everyone is a traveler.

“Demon Crew,” Vulture said, sitting in the open door of the van.

“No,” Thursday said.

“Anarcho-Team.”

“No. You’re not even trying anymore.”

“The Children of the Road.”

“Now you’re just saying random things.”

Those two had been at it all afternoon. Brynn had mentioned us needing a crew name, and Vulture couldn’t seem to get the idea out of his head.

“The A-Team,” Vulture said.

“That’s taken,” Thursday said. “Twice over.”

“I changed my mind,” Brynn said. “I don’t think we need a name.”

“Is that actually true or do you just want me to stop brainstorming?” Vulture asked.

“I honestly don’t know the answer to that,” Brynn said, her voice low enough that only I could hear her.

“Cain’s Children,” Vulture said.

“No,” Thursday said. “Wait. I don’t know. That’s pretty metal.”

“No!” I shouted.

“Grumble, grumble, grumble,” Vulture said. Like, he actually said the word grumble three times.

“I thought you all were going down to the lake,” Brynn said. “To leave us alone?”

“We were,” Thursday said. “But then Vulture and I agreed it was more fun to argue where we had a peanut gallery.”

I looked around for something to throw and saw an empty soda can left by some other picnicker before us. It didn’t fly well, but it made my point. They left.

“Should we do this then,” I asked, “while they’re gone?”

“Totally.”

“You sure? You’re not worried they’ll come back and catch us at it?”

“Absolutely.”

I reached into the top pouch of my travel pack for the book I’d hidden there.

“A Lustful Bride for the Horseman Prince,” I read, “chapter one.”

Brynn smiled.

“‘I first came to these lands in search of fame and glory, because I believed those things mattered. Instead, I found her.’”

Brynn giggled as she stabbed my leg repeatedly with an inked needle, and I read to her.

I didn’t tell her anything about love, not yet. There would be time enough for that.

* * *

“Hey, guys, time to go, we gotta, so let’s go now.” Vulture was out of breath. I woke up, my head curled up in the nook of Brynn’s arm. The book lay across my hip, folded open on its spine. Which is a terrible thing to do to a library book.

“What?” I was groggy and mostly thinking about the book and whether or not Vulture had noticed it and read the title.

“Magic feds. Gotta go. Magic feds. More this time. Go go go.”

I staggered to my feet and Vulture handed me a pair of binoculars.

There on the road, a string of three identical black SUVs threw up dust.

“Those could be any three identical black SUVs with tinted windows,” I argued, but I handed Brynn the binoculars and grabbed my pack.

Thursday had the engine running by the time we climbed into the back of the bookmobile. Brynn slammed the door shut, and we were off.

No specific destination, not yet, but I had a feeling one would find us soon enough.

About the Author

MARGARET KILLJOY is an author and anarchist with a long history of itinerancy who currently calls Appalachia home. When she’s not writing, she can be found organizing to end hierarchy, crafting, or complaining about being old despite not being old at all. Her most recent book is the utopian A Country of Ghosts. She blogs at www.birdsbeforethestorm.net and says things @magpiekilljoy on twitter.

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Also by Margaret Killjoy

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

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Table of Contents

1. Title Page

2. Copyright Notice

3. Dedication

4. Acknowledgments

5. ONE

6. TWO

7. THREE

8. FOUR

9. FIVE

10. SIX

11. SEVEN

12. EIGHT

13. NINE

14. About the Author

15. Also by Margaret Killjoy

16. Copyright Page

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE BARROW WILL SEND WHAT IT MAY

Copyright © 2018 by Margaret Killjoy

All rights reserved.

Cover illustration by Mark Smith

Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill

A Tor.com Book

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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-9737-9 (ebook)

ISBN 978-0-7653-9738-6 (trade paperback)

First Edition: April 2018

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