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She smiled at me and tucked my hair behind my ear. “I know you are. You’re the strongest person I know.” She looked down at my feet. “Now double knot your shoelaces, tripping over your own feet while you’re running the hell out of here would really suck.”

She wasn’t wrong. I quickly did what she said. “So, what’s going to happen at this meeting?” I asked as we headed deeper into the forest.

“I’m not totally sure, but I’ll explain what we need to do when we get there. Death said you had safe passage to the meeting spot, but that might not include me. So we need to stay quiet. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. This place is crawling with demons.”

I shivered. No, we most definitely didn’t want that.

We moved quietly through the woods. Growls, cries, and other odd noises that weren’t animal echoed through the trees. There were demons around us, but they hadn’t approached, and I had to assume that was Death’s doing.

Still, neither of us spoke as we made our way to the meeting spot.

We finally reached the small clearing that Death had told me how to find, and cold dread slithered down my spine. Yes, this was most definitely the place. “Here,” I whispered.

Zinnia nodded and rubbed her arms. She felt it as well. Then she motioned to a tall pile of rocks, all fairly large, nothing smaller than a bowling ball. They formed a rough, misshapen mound that had to be the gate. “How much time do you think we have?” Zinny asked, taking off her pack and placing it on the ground in front of her.

I checked my phone. There was a message from Ronan, checking in again. I looked up at the night sky and the position of the moon. “About fifteen minutes.” I quickly replied to him, telling him I was visiting a friend with Zinnia, lying through my teeth so he didn’t worry, and shoved my phone back in my pocket.

Zinnia unpacked all the ingredients, along with a small mortar and pestle, then glanced up at me. “Strip.”

“My clothes?”

“Yep, everything.”

Awesome. I got to meet Death for the first time in person completely naked. “What kind of spell is this?” I hated that my knowledge was so limited. If I survived all of this, I was going back and filling in all the blanks of my magical education.

She poured oil into the mortar. “It’s a variation of a ritual we use to protect ourselves from rogue spirit possession.” She added the nettle leaves and a handful of cemetery dirt. “Only instead of locking a spirit out, we’re locking yours in. So Death can’t get his hands on it, or at least make it difficult for him to extract it.”

I was scared before. Now I reached a whole new level. I quickly undressed. Zinnia added a few more ingredients, then motioned me forward. “Add a few drops of your blood, then cover yourself with the potion.”

I pricked the tip of my finger and added the blood, then did as she said.

She stripped off as well and tossed her clothes aside.

I looked into the mortar. “Will there be enough?”

“That’s just for you.” Then she took her blade from her pack, sliced both her palms, and smeared blood over her face, chest, stomach, and thighs.

I’d never seen anything like that, never read anything like it either. “What will that do?”

Zinnia turned to me and flashed a grin. She’d been so serious, so unlike the Zinny I knew since she got here, that her grin, the confidence, took me off guard.

“Boost the hell out of my power…and make me look badass. I’m coming face-to-face with Death. I plan on making a memorable first impression.”

I wanted to laugh, to cry, to scream and run like hell from this place. I stared at her in disbelief. “But your soul…you need the oil.”

“My soul is going to be just fine. It’s going to be okay, Roe, I promise,” she said.

I quickly finished covering my body with the oily potion, and she reached out, taking my hand.

The stones rumbled and we spun to face them. The rumbling became a trembling shake, the earth rolling beneath our feet as if it were trying to force us apart. My hand was slipping from Zinnia’s blood-covered one, but we linked fingers, refusing to let go.

The stones moved, reforming, and as they did, they revealed skulls, as if the bones had been fossilized in each one, empty eye sockets and jaws hanging wide.

A doorway to Limbo.

The shadowy forest behind it vanished and darkness, deep and cold, appeared. A distant thump echoed through the arch, rolling over us, slow and steady but growing in volume, until I felt it vibrate through my bones.

Death was coming.