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.
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