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“And with your attitude, it’s a wonder you’ve lived as long as you have,” the Death God remarks. “Has no other god found you utterly infuriating?”

“Most would say I’m very agreeable.” My voice is pleasant, calm, yet the voice inside my head is sharp, pressing in: Hurry up. My heart thrums wildly like a frightened bird as I tip the poison out into the bowl. With my magic infused in the ingredients, the poison should be potent enough to send the Death God into a deep sleep while I run. “Many have commented on my gentle mannerisms. If you find that I am different around you, then perhaps you ought to reflect on your own behavior first.” Done. I lift my arms again, letting the vial slide deeper into the folds of my robes, and push his bowl over to him. Incredible, that my fingers do not quiver.

“That’s only because you are a healer,” the Death God says dismissively, accepting the bowl from me. I feel my pulse skip when he picks up a golden spoon, my body tensing in anticipation, but he doesn’t drink the soup. Not yet.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

“It’s easier to make people warm up to you, in your role,” he tells me. He stirs the soup a few times, the gold clinking against the bowl’s edge, and each time, my breathing halts, then starts again. “All you do is take away pain.” Then, almost too low for me to catch what he says next: “All I do is inflict it.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that when I decided to become a healer,” I admit, surprising even myself with the truth. But maybe if I can just keep talking, he will be distracted, and drink.

“No?” His face is devoid of judgment, only a faint, rising interest. “Then what?”

“I don’t know.” I look down at my hands, the intricate map of blue and green veins just visible beneath my skin, the soft, petal-pink flesh under my nailbeds, the curve of my palm, the long, straight bones of my fingers. A healer’s hands. Those were one of the first words our tutor had ever said to me—but then, they had made the same remark about at least four other gods in my class, and they had gone on to do other things. One had even chosen to become a war god, and he was good at it, perhaps too good; at least one empire had fallen partially because of him. Only I had latched on to the tutor’s comment like a rare, precious jewel, determined to wear it for the rest of my life. “I just remember, in those first years of classes, when we were learning all the basics—destruction, transportation, restoration—I was drawn to healing the most. The simple act of it, I mean. The satisfaction of smoothing out a cut. Of closing a wound. There was something beautiful, almost poetic about it. I know that sounds foolish—our powers should be picked based on practicality instead of beauty, but, well, what is the point of life if there is no beauty in it?”

I pause just to take a sip from my own soup, hoping it will inspire him to follow suit. The red beans are so sweet they taste like bursts of honey, boiled as soft as flour, dissolving instantly on my tongue. “This one class,” I continue, swallowing, “someone cracked open their knee, and I was the first to come up with a remedy, and it worked. I watched them go from not even being able to stand to moving around again within minutes. There was joy, of course, in healing another god, but it wasn’t like I was being completely selfless. It was because everyone was talking about what I’d done even up until the next day, and I felt special. I felt valued, like I had a purpose. Back then, that was all that mattered.

“So when it came time to choose our specialties, the choice was obvious. I had never been particularly talented in any of the other areas either. And once I made my choice, I made that my everything. If I was going to be a healer, I promised myself, then I better be the best one there is, no matter what it takes, how many centuries I throw into it, how much blood I get on my hands. I better make it worth it.”

The Death God lifts his spoon a few inches. The poison hovers in midair, so close to his lips I’m afraid to look. “Was it?” he asks. “Worth it?”

I release a rattling breath. “Once you are the god of something, you are the god of it forever. There is no room to regret your choices.”

There is no room to regret this either:

For at last, at last, he takes the soup and drinks it. My eyes follow the slight pulsing motion in his throat, and my stomach twists as if the poison is entering my own body. I force myself to stay still, to act like nothing is wrong. Now, the tremors in my fingers have started. In my mind, the seconds tick by.

One . . .

Two . . .

Three . . .

He ought to feel the effects and collapse right in front of me. But as the time stretches out into silence, the Death God only glances down at the soup, then up at me. It is the slightest of changes: his mouth is pressed into the same tight line, his hand still gripping the spoon, but something crosses the dark of his eyes. Not rage, but worse, like the silver flash of a shattered mirror. If I were not breathing so shallowly that my head feels light, I might be tempted to call it disappointment.

“A good try,” he says, his voice little more than a murmur. He regards me coolly over the empty bowl, and only through contrast do I realize that he’d been listening to me earlier with some semblance of warmth. “But you should know that a poison of this strength works about as well on me as a weak wine.”

I stand up, shaking. There is no use denying it. “You—can’t be poisoned?”

A shadow drifts over his face; a passing memory, perhaps. “Certainly not by something like this. If you don’t believe me, you are welcome to try again. Though next time,” he adds, his jaw tensing, the table and candles and heavenly food vanishing again with another wave of his hand, as if all of it never even existed, “there’s no need to trouble yourself with a dinner and conversation first. I’d rather you get to the point.”

I run back to my room, defeated and more desperate than ever. Another way, I am already thinking as I shut the door behind me, there must be another way. But my mind is terribly blank, a test with no answers. The Death God cannot be killed, and he cannot be poisoned, and after the dinner, he may not even be willing to spare my life much longer. When I recall the look on his face, the cold settling into his features, my stomach clenches. I feel ill. Too ill to fall into a deep enough sleep, which only makes me more restless, which then makes sleeping even more difficult. Instead of visiting the dream realm and telling Yuemo and Hanchen my plan had failed, I end up spending the night drifting in and out of consciousness, turning around on the hard mattress, unable to get comfortable. And when my mind at last goes quiet and true darkness falls, I am soon wrenched from my sleep again by an odd murmuring sound.

At first, in those dim, bleary moments where the fog of exhaustion has yet to clear, I think I’m back in the cottage, listening to the ocean waves crash and fall outside my open window. That would also explain the chill permeating the air and seeping into my bones even as I wrap my blankets tighter around me. But then the cold grows teeth, nipping at the skin on my ankles, and the noise crescendos until it sounds less like the gentle lull of water and more like a gathering of knives.

My eyes snap wide open.

Ghosts surround me. Dozens of them, at the very least. Their white forms fill the room, as translucent as the skin of a cream-colored lantern lit from within, their feet hovering just above the floor. Never fully grounded to the planes of this realm, but suspended beyond it, floating like kites in a winter sky. Though their eyes are milky hollows, they are all facing my direction, and I have the terrible, queasy sensation that they are staring at my face, watching me as I watch them.

A trickle of unease rolls down my spine, breaking into a violent shudder.

“What do you want?” I ask, my voice still croaky.

The ghosts drift forward silently, and the walls seem to shrink as they do, closing in all around me. There is too little space, not enough air. I am sitting up now, my back pressed against the headboard, my blankets tossed aside.

Unnatural.

There is something off about this. In all my time here, the ghosts have kept to themselves, stayed to the shadows. I cannot imagine what has changed in the course of one night.