HIDE-AND-SEEK^*

MEGAN SHEPHERD

Beware a man who comes in a black coat with a bird on his shoulder. If you see him, it means you are already dead. He is Crow Cullom, death’s harbinger, and the only way to win back your life is to challenge death to a game. But be warned, death has never lost . . .

—Excerpt taken from A Patchwork Death, a book of Appalachian folktales

PART I: SUNSET

Annie stepped onto the front porch. The screen door thwacked behind her, echoing through the narrow valley loud enough to scare a flock of crows into flight. They disappeared over the ridge into the fading summer sun. She pressed a hand to her rib cage and slowly sank into one of the rusty metal chairs, watching for the crows to come back. She hoped they would. She was already feeling sleepy. It was a heavy sort of feeling, but not unpleasant—like being wrapped in a winter blanket. She let her arm fall away from her ribs, releasing a gush of blood that soaked her new sundress, rolled down her bare leg, pooled thickly on the uneven boards.

Dying wasn’t so bad, not really.

Not when you could go out like this, on a summer’s evening with the fireflies winking in the trees. She always thought dying would be a scream into a void, a thrashing, a searing. Not this slow and sleepy drip.

Behind her, inside the house, heavy footsteps moved fast. A man’s voice making a telephone call. An accident, he said, his voice slurred with gin. While Annie was sitting here dying among the fireflies, he was probably cleaning his fingerprints off the knife and rehearsing the drunken lies he’d tell the police.

A crow landed on the porch railing. It was one of the ones that had flown away. Or was it? It seemed bigger than most, and blacker, like its feathers had lost all sheen, but Annie thought that might just be blood loss blurring her vision. The bird cocked its head.

“Annie Noland.”

A man had spoken, not the crow, and it came from the side of the porch. She wanted to turn toward it, but her movements were sluggish. She tried to stand, but her legs didn’t work. She collapsed to the hard porch floor with a crash. Painless. She barely felt anything at all.

Footsteps came up the stairs—slow, calm, not like her stepdad’s panicked ones inside the house. A man’s black boots, polished, but with an unreflective sheen like the bird’s feathers. Then the hem of a black coat, stained with salt rings. The man crouched down so that his face was in her line of sight, and she knew. That sea-tangled black hair, the rough face that seemed ageless.

Beware a man who comes in a black coat with a bird on his shoulder, her grandmother had read from the old book of Appalachian folk tales when Annie was a little girl. If you see him, it means you are already dead.

The crow landed on the man’s shoulder and cawed.

“You’re Crow Cullom.” Annie’s voice was barely audible, but he seemed to hear her just fine. “I thought you were only a story.”

The crow cocked its head.

“I’m much more than a story, chère,” Crow Cullom said. “And it’s a pleasure not to have to introduce myself. So few people know me.” He smiled. “The residents of this valley have always been an exception.”

His boots scuffed as he stood to help her up. She felt nothing as he slid his hands under her arms. He had no temperature to him, no pressure, no smell other than the faintest odor of the sea. But then that started to change. She detected a flicker of warmth. Her legs moved a little more easily. By the time she slumped into the chair, the sluggishness was gone. Her entire body hummed with life.

“Did you heal me?” she asked, touching her blood-soaked dress.

He gave a brittle laugh. “No, chère. I took away the last traces of your life. You’re in the in-between now. You needn’t worry about feeling pain anymore.”

Annie looked through the gash in her red-wet dress. The wound was still there, a gruesome slice through layers of skin and fat and flesh, but it had stopped bleeding. Not worsening, but not healed either. She smoothed the fabric back.

Crow Cullom extended a pale hand. “I have come to take your soul to death’s realm. There are no worries there.” There was a scar across his palm, just as there had been in the inky black drawing in her grandmother’s book of legends. Annie used to trace that drawing of his scar as a little girl. Her grandmother had said it was from where he’d taken his own life many, many, many years ago.

A door slammed from inside the house, and Crow Cullom’s head turned. His eyes narrowed as a figure slunk out the back door, moving with a drunk’s uneasy lurch. A car roared to life, just as sirens started from somewhere deep in the valley. His eyes shifted to Annie’s slashed dress.

She grabbed his wrist, staining him with a bloody handprint.

“I don’t want to go. Not yet.”

“Death waits for no one, Annie. Didn’t your grandmother teach you that?”

She gripped the chair arms with her newfound strength, pushing herself up, and then took a step down the stairs. “She taught me that I have the right to challenge it. To challenge death.” Night was falling on the valley, and the light was growing faint, but she could still make out the flicker of surprise on his face. “A game,” she added. “Of my choosing, for my right to return to the realm of the living. Isn’t that how it goes?”

“A game?” His lips curled in a smile. “You do know the legends. Very well, you pick the game, but I, as death’s representative, set the terms. And I should warn you, chère. Death has never lost.”

Annie forced herself to stand straighter. The sirens were getting closer now.

“What will it be, then?” Crow Cullom asked, seemingly unconcerned. “Not chess. I grow so weary of chess. I played Go Fish with a Russian dissident once, on death’s behalf—it was delightful. None of these modern video games with the flashing lights, I hope. They’re so dull. Push a button and just—”

“Hide-and-seek.”

When she was a little girl, she’d played hide-and-seek in the valley every summer with Suze at the Dixon Farm down the road—the only daughter in a family with four sons. Annie knew every inch of the valley, down into town, to her high school and the train tracks beyond. It has to be a game you’re good at, her grandmother had said, if you have any chance of winning.

Crow Cullom raised an eyebrow. “Very well—but it won’t be me searching for you, but death itself. Death is a force of nature, like luck and fear and fate; think of me as a referee of sorts. An impartial party. A riveted spectator. You’ll never know what form death might take. A tree branch falling. A hunter’s stray bullet. You’ll have to be very alert. If at the end of twenty-four hours you have successfully hidden from death, you shall win back your life. Any collateral damage between now and then shall be undone.” He produced a silver ring from his pocket. “But if you die before sunset tomorrow, the damage remains, and this ring will claim its wearer’s soul.” He held out his scarred palm.

She hesitated.

“I need your hand, Annie. This is a pact, and all pacts must be sealed.”

She slowly gave him her left hand, sticky with her own blood. He slid the cool metal around her fourth finger. His smile indicated that she would lose.

“When does the game begin?” she asked.

“Now.”

The crow took wing, soaring off into the sky as the sun dipped below the ridge. Crow Cullom followed it down the dusty road toward town, disappearing among the fireflies until he was as dark as the rest of the world.

PART 2: EVENING

Annie tested the ring, trying to twist if off her ring finger, but it didn’t budge, as if she was married to the game. The sound of sirens grew louder and red and blue lights flashed on the road up the valley, and suddenly it all came crashing back to her. The kitchen knife slicing under her ribs. Her warm blood splashing on the porch floor. Her own murder. She spun toward the garage, but her stepdad’s truck, of course, was gone.

The police were almost there.

They couldn’t find her.

She crashed into the woods, pulse racing. The world spun. Overhead, storm clouds were rolling in. The air seemed soaked in feverish sweat. Suddenly she wanted the sluggishness of death again, or the euphoria of the in-between, now that life meant, any second, something would be hunting her down.

It was darker in the woods. The full moon came only in cracks from the leaves and the massing clouds overhead. But she knew these woods. It was why she had chosen this game. Her sandals found the paths she knew by heart, and she dashed along a dry creek bed that flanked the road. She’d go to the Dixons’ farm on the other side of the valley—she knew all the good hiding spots there, from the horse stalls to their abandoned chicken coop. The creek split around a flat riverbank shaded by an enormous oak where she and Suze used to hold make-believe tea parties. She dropped to her knees. Ferns had overgrown the area, but she ran her hands through them until she brushed something hard and metal. An old fork. The marker for their treasure box. She tore at the dirt beneath the fork until she found the bucket they’d buried all those years ago. Tea party supplies: nuts for squirrels, old broken china, and a knife to cut cake. Her hand curled around the knife. It was old and rusted, the blade long since dulled. She paused for a second, considered climbing the tree and hiding in its branches, but one wrong move and she could come crashing down.

She wouldn’t make it that easy for death.

She veered up the bank instead, pushing through a tunnel of rhododendron that spit her out on the road a quarter mile from the Dixon farm.

Sudden lights blinded her. She hissed against the glare, covering her eyes.

“Don’t move,” a voice blared through an intercom.

She squinted into the light, heart racing, and made out the side of a police car. The lights were headlights. A car door slammed, and she flinched. The officer coming around in front of the car had a gun strapped to his hip, a baton on the other side. She spotted a police rifle between the driver and passenger seat. Even the car, engine running and just ten feet away, could plow her down.

“Don’t move, Annie.” She recognized the voice. Officer Burton—he worked at their school during the year. There had been rumors of him hooking up with students, and she didn’t like the way he had a half dozen pit bulls tied up with stakes behind his house, but he’d always looked the other way when she’d cut class, and once he’d even driven her home when her stepdad had forgotten to pick her up.

His hand dropped to the gun. “We got a call from your dad. Said you’d gone wild, tried to hurt him. Then we found his car in a ditch with blood on the seats. You want to tell me why you’re covered in blood?”

She’d tried to hurt him? That bastard. Her eyes darted between the farm and the woods. “Everything’s fine, Burton.”

“You don’t look fine. Your dad said you might have been on drugs. Said you’d been unpredictable recently.” His hand clicked open his holster. “And now he’s gone missing, and that’s a mighty big knife in your hands. We have to take you in for some questions. That’s all.”

She couldn’t let them take her in. The whole point of the game was to hide, and in a jail cell she’d be trapped. Death could seek her there so easily: Faulty wiring. A roof collapse. Another inmate, drunk and angry.

So she ran.

Burton cursed and pulled the gun on her, fumbling with the safety just as she dove into the woods. She braced herself for the sound of the gunshot, death’s first attempt, but nothing came. Her sandal caught on a root and she went smashing to the ground, stopping herself a second before her head connected with a broken, sharp branch.

“Get back here, Annie!”

Panic blinded her. Another inch and the branch would have impaled her. This was how death was going to play it, then. It was going to throw surprises at her. Show her a loaded gun and then try to kill her with a sharpened branch.

Officer Burton called for her again, and another car door slammed, and she shoved herself up and started running. The torn sandal dragged behind her. She kicked it off, then raced through the woods until they opened on the edge of the Dixon farm, where she skidded to a halt before she crashed into their electric horse fence.

NO VOLTAGE, the sign said.

“Nice try,” she muttered. The Dixons always left the fence electrified, and the rains had been heavy recently—the far end of the pasture was probably flooded, which meant the wire could be live enough to sizzle a person alive.

The clouds were rolling in fast now. She dropped to her stomach to shimmy under the bottom wire, like she’d done a thousand times playing hide-and-seek with Suze. She pushed free of the fence and raced across the field, dodging the horses. She needed to get rid of her bloody dress, and she needed better shoes.

Annie collapsed against the side of the Dixons’ double-wide trailer, breathing hard. In the last twenty minutes, a gun had been aimed at her, she’d nearly been impaled, and she’d ducked an electric fence—all after she’d already died. This was going to be the longest twenty-four hours of her life.

The Dixon trucks were gone; Suze’s parents and brothers usually went to Chapel Hill on the weekends for the big game, but Suze didn’t love basketball. There was no sign of her, though. Probably gone into town to meet up with kids from school. Annie figured she could break in a window, borrow some baggy clothes—Suze was pushing six feet—maybe some food and a better knife. Hide out in the barn, where she’d watch any seekers coming from the hayloft, just as she used to as a little girl.

A shadow circled in the darkness.

It landed six feet away.

A crow with dull feathers.

It cocked its head at her. Watching, no matter where she hid.

PART 3: NIGHTTIME

Annie used her rusty tea party knife to pry open the Dixons’ bathroom window. She shimmied into it, climbing down carefully onto the toilet, listening hard. The last thing she needed was Mr. Dixon coming to relieve himself after dinner and finding a blood-soaked girl with a rusty knife crouched on his toilet.

She pushed open the bathroom door an inch, peeking through the crack. The kitchen light glared, buzzing faintly, but they usually left that on when they went to town. Otherwise the house was silent. She tiptoed down their carpeted hallway, the knife tight in her hand, alert. She made it to Suze’s room—more of a closet, really, since her brothers were all crammed in the two extra bedrooms. It was filled with messy stacks of library books and beat-up soccer gear. She started pulling open drawers until she found a pair of running shorts and a tank top, then peeled herself out of the bloody dress. Toweled off with Suze’s soccer jersey. Left everything balled in the corner of the room. It was such a mess anyway, Suze wouldn’t find Annie’s clothes for days.

She tugged on a pair of Suze’s sneakers—a few sizes too big, but she laced them up tight—grabbed a backpack, then tiptoed to the bathroom and started shoving in medical supplies and any prescription bottles she could find. Who knew what tricks death had planned for her—swarming bees? Escaped fugitives? She paused, remembering that Mr. Dixon kept a gun. She had found it once while playing hide-and-seek with Suze. She’d crawled under their kitchen sink, ducking amid Mr. Dixon’s empty beer bottles and Mrs. Dixon’s cleaning supplies, and there it had been, strapped to the bottom of the sink.

She’d never asked Suze about it. She’d been too scared.

Now she headed for the kitchen. The old light buzzed, high-pitched and whining. Annie had overheard Mrs. Dixon tell Suze to change the bulb last week, but in typical Suze fashion, it was untouched. A bowl of popcorn sat on the counter, still warm. She opened the sink cabinet and shoved Mr. Dixon’s beer bottles to the floor—some things never changed—and felt along the top of the sink. Her fingers grazed a nylon holster with Velcro holding it in place. Something trilled, like an insect. Annie froze.

“Uh, Annie, if I were you, I would crawl backward very slowly.”

Suze. But she sounded terrified, and there wasn’t much that frightened Suze Dixon. The trilling sound grew stronger. Annie jerked, her head slamming against the bottom of the sink.

“Suze, just—”

“Seriously, Annie. Don’t move. There’s a rattlesnake coiled up in there. I found it a minute ago while taking out the trash. I was just getting a shovel from the barn to take care of it.”

The same trilling came again, and Annie’s stomach shrank. Not an insect. She couldn’t see much, but her eyes landed on something coiled and glistening behind the cleaning supplies. The rattle came again.

“Just back out, really slowly, and I’ll kill it,” Suze said.

“No,” Annie tried to whisper. “You just get out of here. Get away from me. I’m not safe.”

“Yeah, no shit. You’re cozied up to a six-foot rattlesnake.”

“No, I mean me. I’m not—”

The rattlesnake lunged, and Annie jerked out, scattering beer cans. It sank its teeth into a Miller Lite she thrust at it as she scrambled out. The snake came right after her, nearly on her. It reared back—

Suze slammed down the shovel.

The rattle stopped.

Annie balled herself up on the floor, checking for bites, watching the snake twitch and rattle in death throes, unwilling to feel any relief. Twenty-one hours were left and anything could happen. Death must have put the snake there knowing about Mr. Dixon’s gun—it was anticipating her hiding spots.

“Jesus.” Suze picked up the dead rattler by the tail, kicking it slightly. She let it fall back down at Annie’s feet. “You know, you could have just called if you wanted to come over.”

Annie finally relaxed her hold on the rusty knife. She pushed to her feet, leaning over to catch her breath, feeling like she might throw up in the sink. “I thought you’d gone to town.”

Suze kicked the snake again, then grabbed a handful of popcorn from the bowl on the counter. “So you always break in when the house is empty? That’s not very comforting.”

“I needed your dad’s gun.”

“That’s really not comforting.” Suze frowned. “Are you wearing my clothes? This isn’t about those sirens all over your side of the valley, is it? Wait—is that blood on your arm?”

Suze moved closer, but Annie jerked away. She grabbed the kitchen towel and wiped the last of the blood off. “I can’t explain. You’d never believe me anyway. I just need to borrow that gun for a while. And I need to hide out in your barn.”

Annie crouched to unstrap the gun from beneath the sink, but Suze got to it first. She held it high above Annie’s head.

“Hang on. You’re not getting this until you explain what the hell’s going on.”

Sirens wailed from outside. At the same time, rain kicked up, pelting the windows. Lightning crashed, and Annie flinched. From somewhere outside, a horse let out a high-pitched squeal.

“It’s a long story. You wouldn’t believe me. It’s a game—a twisted one. And I have less than twenty-one hours left to win.”

Annie stood on tiptoe to reach for the gun, but Suze didn’t lower it until her eyes caught on Annie’s hand. She tucked the gun in her waistband and grabbed Annie’s fingers, splaying them. In the flickering kitchen light, Crow Cullom’s ring gleamed with unnatural brightness.

Suze gasped. “I know this ring.” She dropped Annie’s hand and ran into her bedroom. There was the sound of shuffling books and papers. She came back, out of breath, an old leather book clutched in her hands. The same book Annie had tucked away in the back of her closet ever since her grandmother died. A Patchwork Death. Suze flipped through the pages until she found a drawing of the ring and shoved it in Annie’s face. “The game . . . that’s part of it. If you die, you can challenge death for a chance to return to life. There’s a man in black with birds who governs the game. Crow Cullom. Is that what happened. Are you dead?”

Annie let her hair hang in her face as she leaned over the counter. Her fingers wrinkled over her borrowed tank top, where the gash still throbbed beneath. She took a deep breath and lifted the shirt, revealing the gruesome slash—deep and wet and raw.

Suze made a face. “Holy shit. What happened?”

Annie covered the wound. “My stepdad happened. And a knife. And a bottle of gin. And a grudge he couldn’t let sit.”

“That bastard! I could kill him—”

“It doesn’t matter. I should be dead, but I’m in the in-between, just alive until sunset tomorrow unless I win this game. Hide-and-seek. Against death.” She toed the dead snake. “Hence this.” Lightning crashed outside, close enough, it felt like it hit the house. “And that. That’s why I said stay away, Suze. I don’t want you caught up in this.” She held out her hand for the gun, but Suze clutched it to her chest.

“No way death is after you and I’m letting you do this alone. Hide-and-seek? Please. Nothing’s a match for the two of us at hide-and-seek, especially not with this.” She waved the gun. “Remember why we even started playing that game? It was second grade. I’d just moved here. My brothers were all such assholes, shoving me around, picking on me because they could. You found me hiding in that clearing in the creek, where we had the tea parties. You turned it into a game. Taught me all the places around here I could hide from them until I got tall enough to kick their asses. You helped me then, Annie. Let me help you now.”

Lightning crashed again, this time even closer, and they both shrieked as sparks flew out of the kitchen light. Darkness absorbed the room. For a second there was a tense silence. Then Annie sniffed the air.

“That’s smoke. The lightning must have struck the house.”

They ran for the door, but flames erupted in the living room. The house caught quick, everything cheap and flammable, pushing them back toward the rear bedrooms. Suze aimed the gun at the flames like they’d come to life, clutching A Patchwork Death. Annie ran to the bathroom. She shoved at the window, but it had jammed when she’d come in, and now it wouldn’t budge. The flames were spreading up the carpet, racing toward them.

Annie hurled herself at a bedroom window, smashing the tea party knife hilt against the glass. Through the darkness and pelting rain, she could make out a dull-winged crow on the other side, flapping its wings against the glass, taunting her. She slammed the knife at the glass again and it smashed open. She hurled the knife at the crow, who took off into the darkness.

“This way!” she yelled. Suze hurried to the bedroom and slammed the door just as flames reached the other side. Smoke poured through the door cracks as Annie used her elbow to break out the shards of glass. She shimmied through, dropping to the muddy ground below, and helped Suze climb out.

“Couldn’t have just picked charades, could you?” Suze yelled.

Annie searched the ground for her knife, but it was gone. The roof splintered behind them, and they ran from the house just as something exploded. Suze skidded to a stop and threw a look over her shoulder. Flames reflected in her watery eyes. The smoldering house. All her belongings—gone.

Annie blinked as she looked between Suze and the wreckage. It wasn’t fair. The Dixons were innocent.

She glanced at the book clutched in Suze’s arms, and her grandmother’s voice returned to her. Don’t expect death to play by the rules, she had read. Death is not a person. Death cannot be reasoned with. In death, as in life, nothing is fair.

Thunder cracked the night, and Annie jumped. “We can’t stay out here!”

“Head to the barn,” Suze yelled above the wind, and then, “Shit, I left the door open—the horses got out!”

The horses were stampeding in the field, set on edge from the storm. Annie and Suze ran from the raging house through the torrential rain to the Dixons’ old barn, dodging holes in the pawed-up pasture. They’d played hide-and-seek in this barn for years when they’d been younger, burying themselves in the hay bales, crouching in the horse stalls, hiding behind the feed bins. Now the hay could so easily catch on fire. The feed could smother them if the bins broke. But Annie didn’t know where else to go.

Suze threw open the barn door at the same time a gunshot rang out from the slurry darkness.

Annie screamed and ducked as a bullet shattered into the siding just above her head. She whirled to find Officer Burton by the road, car lights flashing, gun aimed at them. He was yelling something she couldn’t hear over the storm.

Annie’s pulse raced. His car door was open, the keys in the ignition, and he was a good thirty feet away. If she could beat him to it, she could drive deeper into the woods and hide out in the mountains, away from Suze and anyone else who might get caught up in the game.

“I owe you for that snake,” Annie called over her shoulder to Suze, and took off toward the car. Officer Burton must have guessed her plan, because he ran toward it too, and then suddenly Annie was facedown in the mud, tackled, a second before she reached the car.

“Stay down! He’s going for his gun!” She smelled popcorn—it was Suze, pinning her down just as Officer Burton got to the car and pulled out his rifle. The wind howled, pushing at the trees, and there was a giant snap. The old oak tree they’d used to climb pitched toward the ground.

“Suze—run!” Annie scrambled up, digging her fingers into her friend’s shoulders, trying to pull Suze out of the way as the whole trembling tree crashed toward the ground. She screamed and braced herself around Suze.

The ripping trunk fractured the night.

The tree crashed to earth, shaking the ground. Annie and Suze were both screaming, until after a breath, and then two, Annie realized they were untouched. She shoved to her feet, blinking through the rain.

The tree had fallen in the opposite direction, leveling everything—including the police car and Officer Burton. Suze pushed to her feet beside her, watching in horror. A puddle of blood was already forming in the dirt. One fleshy white arm stuck out from under the tree.

“Oh god.” Annie pressed a hand over her mouth. Officer Burton maybe wasn’t the most upstanding citizen, but he didn’t deserve to die. She started for the body, but Suze grabbed her and dragged her toward the barn.

“It’s too late for him. It’s another trap. We have to hide, that’s the entire point!” Suze threw the door open. They crowded inside, where it smelled warm and thick with animals. It was an old barn—water drizzled in from the leaky roof—but it felt safe. Familiar.

Annie collapsed against the closed door.

In front of her, in the center of the barn, a crow flapped its wings.

Anger unfurled in her like an animal ready to strike. She launched herself at the bird.

“That was supposed to be me!” she yelled, seeing again Officer Burton’s blood in the dirt, and she collapsed into sobs, Suze holding on to her fiercely.

The crow cocked its head, and flew outside.

PART 4: MORNING

When the sun rose the next morning, the storm was all but gone. They had huddled in the hayloft the rest of the night, Suze with her gun aimed toward the door, Annie flipping through A Patchwork Death for more clues, hugging her knees in close, every nerve alert, waiting for death’s next attempt. Crow Cullom had said, once this terrible twenty-four hours was over, that the world would reset itself if she won. Her stepdad would have never gone to the police. The Dixons’ house would never have burned. Officer Burton would be alive again.

But if she didn’t win, all this destruction would remain.

She spun the ring on her fourth finger, uselessly tugging at it.

Suze eyed her closely. “Can’t you take it off?”

“Not unless I win. And if I don’t, I’m dead for good.”

Suze scratched her chin with the grip of the gun. “Shittiest engagement ring ever.”

Hours passed with nothing but the dying storm outside. Suze eventually even fell asleep in the hay, gun hugged tight. Annie would have thought death had taken pity on her if she didn’t know better. This temporary reprieve only made her more on edge, more careless—more likely to fail when the next attempt did come.

She unwound her tight limbs and crawled to the hayloft window with the book clutched in one arm. By the early morning light, she flipped to the page with Crow Cullom walking along a dusty road, a crow circling above him.

There is only one rule in Crow Cullom’s games, the caption said. Only the dead can play.

Annie slammed the book closed, looking out from the hayloft at the wreckage of the Dixon house and the oak tree smashed over the police car. Why hadn’t more police come yet? Either Burton hadn’t radioed in his last location, or Crow Cullom was working his tricks to keep them away. She could barely make out the lumps of Burton’s body beneath the tree. It didn’t seem fair. If only the dead could play, then Officer Burton should be alive right now, hungover with a pit bull drooling on his face while the TV flickered infomercials.

A crow circled lazily in the sky against a backdrop of summer-morning blue, and landed on the highest branch of the oak tree, right above the puddle of Officer Burton’s blood.

Rage gripped Annie. She slammed the book closed, pausing only to pry the gun from Suze’s fingers gently enough not to wake her, and started down the ladder. She slipped out of the barn door and jogged across the grass to where the crow calmly watched her.

It dropped down and started picking the flesh off Officer Burton’s arm.

Annie raised the gun, so angry it shook, and let off a shot at the bird. The bullet tore through the quiet morning and shattered a branch just above the bird. The bird took flight, cawing, and then swooped down behind her. She spun around, the pistol still aimed, but froze.

Crow Cullom stood behind her, his sea-tangled hair unkempt, fresh salt rings on his coat. The bird settled on his shoulder.

She didn’t lower the gun.

“It isn’t fair,” she seethed, and jerked her chin toward Officer Burton’s body. “He wasn’t part of the game. No one else was supposed to die. Only the dead can play—those are the rules.”

“The trap was set for you, Annie. He just got in the way.”

“Well, you’re about to get in the way of this bullet.” She squeezed the trigger. A bullet ripped into his chest, tearing a hole in his black shirt, but he didn’t flinch. Another crow landed on the ground beside him.

“You can’t kill what’s already dead, chère.”

She gritted her teeth and lowered the gun. The rush of everything caught up with her and her body started shaking, and she spun on the tree and kicked it hard.

“Well?” she spat at him. “You’ve found me—aren’t you going to kill me?”

“It isn’t me seeking you. I’m just death’s harbinger, not death itself. I’ve just come to tell you that you’re doing remarkably well. It’s been twelve hours and you’re still alive. I particularly enjoyed the snake. Clever, don’t you think? Death always finds a way.”

She pointed the gun at Officer Burton’s foot. “Clever? An innocent man is dead.” She tucked the gun in the back of her pants and folded her arms across her chest.

The playful smile faded from Crow Cullom’s face. The bird took off from his shoulder, circling higher and higher, like smoke disappearing into air. His face was bleak and worn as the cliffs at sea now. “Don’t mourn him, chère. As for the rules, you’re right. Only the dead are supposed to play, but I’ll admit that, as death’s referee, I blur the rules on occasion. For Burton, I made an exception. Cheating has its place, you see—the man was a monster. He tortured dogs. Raised them to fight against one another.” Crow Cullom looked with disdain as one of his birds landed on the officer’s hand again and started picking off the flesh. “I was happy to bend the rules of death, if it meant ridding the world of one more miscreant.”

Annie stared at the crow picking at Officer Burton’s pinkie finger. She didn’t want to believe Crow Cullom, but something itched in the back of her head. All those times she’d driven by Officer Burton’s house and seen the kennels out back, the pit bulls tied to stakes.

“What about my stepdad, then? Why don’t you kill him? He’s a monster.”

Crow Cullom sighed. “The universe is not a fair place.”

“You don’t say.” But the truth was, she didn’t know exactly what to think. This man, with his crows, was a legend come to life. A folktale that had walked off the pages to claim her soul—but standing in his salt-stained clothes, rubbing the scar on his palm, he seemed like so much more than a story.

She twisted the ring around her finger.

He pointed behind her. “I have been a spectator until now. And I have enjoyed watching you play. I suggest, if you wish to keep playing, that you hide now.”

She whirled around. The Dixon horses, still jumpy and panicked from last night’s storm, were stampeding toward her, tearing at the ground. She could just make out Suze in the hayloft window waving frantically and screaming.

She didn’t give Crow Cullom a second look as she raced across the farm.

PART 5: AFTERNOON

Annie threw herself into the streambed, splashing in Suze’s oversized old sneakers. She’d lost the gun in her dash. It must have fallen in the field, but she didn’t dare go back for it. One of the horses—the big one Suze could never catch—had stampeded for her, nearly catching her under its iron-clad hooves before she’d rolled away at the last second. She’d fled into the forest, where the thick rhododendron on either side of the bank would protect her from sight. Her pulse pounding in her ears, she made her way along the slick rocks, straining to listen for any approaching danger.

How did someone hide from death? It could come from any direction. A moss-slick rock to trip on. A satellite falling from the sky. A tiny insect carrying a deadly disease.

She reached a split in the stream and stopped. She could follow the larger stream down the valley, but that led to town, where she didn’t dare go. The police would still be looking for her, especially if they’d found Officer Burton’s body. Not to mention all the cars that might swerve off the streets and hit her, or the streetlights that might short out and electrocute her, or someone’s air-conditioning unit falling from an upper story.

No, town was too dangerous.

She had no choice but to continue upstream, back toward her stepdad’s house. Ever since her real dad had left one night and never come back, and then cancer got her mom, and her grandmother not long after, it had just been Annie and her stepdad and his bottles of gin. He’d threatened to beat some sense into her so many times, just like he had her mom. But he never had. Not until last night, when he’d been deep into the bottle and they’d argued over her college applications and she’d said the one thing she knew she never, ever should.

I’m glad the cancer killed Mom—before you did.

It had all been a blur after that. He’d raised his fist. She’d grabbed for a knife, but he’d beaten her to it. Then there’d been warm blood pooling on the porch floor, and a man in a salt-stained coat walking up the dusty porch steps.

Her foot sank into a deep puddle, and she froze. Voices. Filtering through the leaves. She crouched down and climbed through the rhododendron until she could see the road, maybe a half mile off from her house. Three police officers, heavily armed, scanned the trees.

She ducked, silencing her breath, but her foot slipped and splashed back into the creek.

One of them spun and raised his pistol. “There—in the trees.”

“Annie Noland!” another officer said. “Show yourself with your hands up!”

Annie cursed. They wouldn’t be armed unless they thought she was a real threat. They must have found Officer Burton’s body.

Did they think she’d killed him?

“She’s wearing a white tank top,” one said. “Annie, come out!”

She gritted her teeth, weighing the chances they’d actually shoot. On any other day, no. But today death was out to get her. Someone could misfire, or get spooked and fire too soon. She couldn’t risk it.

She tore up the stream instead, knowing she could run faster through the woods than they could. A shot rang off behind her. She gasped and ran faster. Leaves blurred by as she plunged through an opening in the trees and ran up the bank, sliding and slipping. Another gun fired. She felt a sting in her arm and cried out, touching her arm, coming away with blood. But it was only a flesh wound, a nick—death had missed her by a few inches.

Through the trees she heard the sound of the police calling, and someone radioing for backup. Shit. Sunset—the end of the game—was still an hour off. Plenty of time for the town’s entire police force to comb the woods, seeking her like death itself.

She clamped a hand over her arm and stumbled through the woods toward her house. She could at least bandage it so she wouldn’t bleed to death—that would be a sneaky way for death to win—and change clothes into something darker, less visible.

She looked off at the ridge, where a crow circled lazily. Her hand tightened over her bleeding arm.

Just one more hour.

She pushed through the leaves until she could make out the shape of her house in the late-afternoon light. She crouched behind the tool shed, looking for signs of movement, but from the tire marks in the mud and grass, it looked like the police had already been there and left. She took a deep breath, ready to dart into the house.

A low growl came from behind her.

She turned slowly. Wolf, her neighbor’s German shepherd, stood on the other side of the tool shed, teeth white and gleaming. Her neighbor had trained him as a guard dog, but with Annie he’d always been ridiculously sweet; a big puppy. Now he had a crazed look in his eye, like he didn’t recognize her. Slobber hung off his mouth in thick lines. He sniffed the air and growled again. He must have smelled the blood dripping from her shoulder.

She regretted losing the gun—not that she could bring herself to shoot Wolf anyway, especially when death had to be behind this terrible, snarling version of him. As quietly as she could, she opened the shed latch. There would be hammers inside, and axes. She didn’t want to kill Wolf, but she wasn’t above knocking him out cold.

On the horizon, the sun sank lower.

Wolf lunged for her. She twisted the latch, throwing open the shed door. Wolf smashed into it, just barely missing her leg. She reached for a hammer but froze—everything inside was gone. Every tool, even down to the nails. Her stepdad must have cleared it out, or the police had.

Wolf lunged for her again, and she threw herself into the shed and pulled the door shut behind her, holding it closed as Wolf tore at the other side. Her mind raced. Death must be as desperate as she was now; time was winding down and only one of them could win. Outside, Wolf ripped at the wooden door, scratching at the cracks.

He’d get in eventually, but could the door hold until sunset? Could she wait it out until the game was over and Wolf—and the world—would be reset?

Through the cracks, she saw that Wolf was trying to dig underneath the shed. He’d unearthed some old metal pipes. She crouched in the far corner, hands over her head, until she remembered what those pipes were.

The gas main.

They went from the house to the barn, right under the tool shed. Her stepdad had never replaced them. They were always leaky and rusted—that’s why he’d built the shed here, to hide them from the inspectors.

Wolf dug frantically, nails tearing through the red soil, scratching on the pipes.

Annie’s lips parted. All it would take was one scratch, at just the right pressure, to cause a spark. The entire shed could explode.

She pushed up from the floor. In the distance, she could make out the sound of sirens on the road. Dammit. The police probably had the entire valley surrounded by now.

The sun was sinking lower and lower. Blood gushing from her arm, dog tearing at the door, police surrounding her, a gas main ready to blow—there was only one place she could hide now: her own house. She’d make a stand.

She took a deep breath, ripped off a strip of her blood-soaked tank top, and twisted it in a ball. She pushed a hand through the crack in the door, Wolf tearing and snarling, and held up the piece of shirt.

“Go get it!” she cried, and threw it as far as she could down the yard. The dog took off after it. She shoved the door open, running for the house, but her shoelace caught. She was pulled to the ground just as she turned to see the metal door scrape against the exposed gas main pipe.

Shit.

Wolf was already coming back, lunging toward her, nearly on her, when the explosion came. It blasted the tool shed apart. Splintering wood crashed over her. She covered her head, braced to be impaled, but she’d avoided the worst of the blast, lying flat on the ground. Wolf lay nearby, dazed and panting heavily.

Annie’s ears rang. She could see the lights of the police cars closing in. She stumbled to her feet, away from the blazing tool shed, and climbed the porch steps in a daze. Her blood from last night was still there, dried in the cracks. She opened the door and locked it behind her.

She was streaked with soot and dirt and blood. The police would be there any second. But the sun was just a sliver above the ridge now. Just minutes until sunset.

She might win this thing yet.

She stumbled down the hall to her room, then stopped. Her stepdad’s door was open. She saw his boot first, then his leg, and her pulse raced faster. He was asleep in bed, passed out with a fresh bottle.

She could only stare. She’d thought he’d be in town, or halfway to Kentucky. Was this what death had planned for her—some twisted end where the past repeated itself, where she’d have to face her stepdad once more?

Annie looked closer at him. He must really be drunk if the shed explosion and all the sirens didn’t wake him. Maybe it wasn’t death’s plan after all. Maybe Crow Cullom had stepped in again—not so impartial of an observer anymore—and taken pity on her. Did death’s harbinger have a heart that still felt something?

The sirens were louder now. The sun still hung in the sky, stubborn to disappear. She grabbed her stepdad’s camo hunting jacket and pulled it on. If she could get back in the woods, hide out for just a few more minutes, she’d be camouflaged in the shadows and the police might not see her. She pushed open his bedroom window and climbed out. A crow landed in front of her, but she shooed it away. Another one sat on the porch railing, and two more by the ruined tool shed. Dozens of them perched on the porch, huddled in the grass. Annie’s breath grew shallow.

The sun was so very nearly gone.

What was death planning now? Was Crow Cullom here, watching, waiting to call the game?

She turned at the side of the house, ready to run for the woods, but a crack ripped the air. She froze. A gunshot? Who had—

An impact like a fist slammed into her. She blinked. Her vision blurred. When she touched her stinging chest, she came away with blood.

The sleepiness of death started to overtake her again.

She turned, the shock of it all numbing her, and found Suze standing in her front yard, Mr. Dixon’s gun in hand, eyes wide with horror. She must have seen where the gun had fallen and picked it up.

“Annie! I thought you were him! Your stepdad. Your coat . . .” Suze dropped the gun.

That bastard, Suze had said. I could kill him for this.

Annie sank to her knees, surrounded by crows as her blood drained into the red dirt. On the horizon, the last sliver of sun disappeared.

It was sunset.

She had lost the game.

PART 6: SUNSET

Annie collapsed to hands and knees. Crows swarmed the earth, but Suze didn’t seem to see them as she ran up. “I didn’t know it was you!” Suze cried.

“Just get out of here,” Annie choked. “The police are coming. They can’t catch you.”

“You’ll die.”

“I’m dead anyway.”

Suze looked ready to protest, but Annie shook her head, waving her away until at last Suze turned and ran. She listened to Suze’s feet pounding on the dirt road until she couldn’t hear them anymore. It was just her and the crows in the twilight. She closed her eyes. Another set of footsteps came, slow and deliberate. When she looked over her shoulder, a man with sea-tangled hair was slowly walking up the dirt road.

Annie clenched her jaw. She’d lost the game. She’d lost her last chance at life. The ring on her finger started to warm. How much longer did she have before it claimed her?

With her last bit of strength she pushed herself up, stumbling through the grass and up the porch steps, back into their house. She found the knife in the kitchen—the one her stepdad had slid against her ribs the night before. Perfectly clean now. When the police came, they’d never know. Her stepdad would get away with it, just like he’d gotten away with beating her mother, when cancer had been the excuse for the bruises.

She stumbled down the hallway as crows cawed outside, louder and louder, and Crow Cullom’s boots sounded on the porch steps. She pushed open her stepdad’s bedroom door. He was still passed out on the bed. She sank down next to him. Her reflection flashed in the knife blade, streaks of blood and soot on her face.

“If death can cheat, then I can too.”

She splayed out her hand on the bedside table and brought the knife down on her own fourth finger. The pain was blistering. It seared all the way to her toes, throbbing and pulsing and she nearly dropped the knife. But she gritted her teeth, and clutched the knife harder until she cut her finger clean off. She let the knife fall to the floor, crying out at the pain. Her finger sat on the bedside table, just sat there. She picked it up with shaking hands and pulled the silver ring off of it. She held it up to the light, thinking back on her grandmother reading her stories in this very house. Don’t expect death to play by the rules, her grandmother had said.

Annie slipped the ring onto her stepdad’s pinkie finger.

Crow Cullom had said if she lost the game, the ring would claim its wearer’s soul. He had neglected to specify whose soul.

Her stepdad stirred, just slightly. A few mumbled words. One bloodshot eye oozed open, and for a second, their eyes locked. His mouth frowned.

“Annie.” His voice was slurred. He tried to sit up, but he groaned like the room was spinning, and lay back down. “You’re dead.”

“No,” she said, and stood up. “You are.”

Her stepdad blinked at the strange ring on his finger, tugging it uselessly. Annie turned away; she pressed her good hand to the wound in her chest and made her way back down the hallway, out onto the porch. Crow Cullom was waiting for her, leaning on the railing, a crow perched on his shoulder, looking as ageless as the first time she’d seen him.

She sank into the porch chair, wincing. His eyes went from her missing fourth finger to the window of her stepdad’s room.

“You know that’s cheating, don’t you, chère? It’s supposed to be your soul the ring claims.”

“Sometimes there’s a place for cheating. Someone told me that once.”

For a few seconds, as twilight changed into night, and the crows watched patiently from the porch railings, neither of them spoke. Annie knew that even as death’s harbinger, he had a soul. He had compassion. He had interceded in death’s game to kill Officer Burton not as a lark, but to rid the world of a monster. Well, her stepdad was a monster too.

Crow Cullom smiled. Annie felt that sleepy blanket of death lift, and her body started to pulse again, and feel warm, and hurt.

“It’s been thrilling watching you play, chère. As for the police searching for you, and your stepdad’s body, you needn’t worry. It all ends with the game. Your friend’s house will return to normal. The dog will too. Any damage shall be corrected—except perhaps Office Burton, and your stepdad. Let’s leave them to rot where they lie, what do you say? Alcohol poisoning seems a likely enough excuse for your father, and as for Burton, it was stupid to stand beneath a falling tree.” He paused, eyes falling to her hand. “But your finger. That you shall forever lose—a toll for cheating.” The corner of his mouth twitched in a smile. “I look forward to the next time we meet. Hopefully not for many more years, but one never knows.”

Crow Cullom left her on the porch, walking down the dirt road just like the drawing in her grandmother’s book. His crows went with him, except for one. The inky one with the dull feathers. It cocked its head at her and cawed.

Annie leaned back in the chair, hesitantly lifting her shirt. The wound was nothing but a scratch now, and healing rapidly. As she watched, the last of the redness faded until her stomach was smooth again. When she glanced toward the side of the house, the tool shed was standing, and Wolf was nosing around it as calmly as always. Warmth spread out to her limbs. The sirens had vanished. When she went back inside, she knew her stepdad would be dead, the ring gone. Taken to death’s realm in her place. She’d never have to see him again.

She looked down at her left hand, with the missing finger.

She might have lost at hide-and-seek, but she had won at a much bigger game.

She watched Crow Cullom disappear among the fireflies, and wondered, when he came for her next, hopefully when she was old and gray-haired, what game they would play—and if she could cheat him once more.