Page 81 of The Crow Games

Were they going to toss me off the train?

Spirit surged out of me, knocking revenants down. I fell onto the heap of them, into the tangle of struggling limbs. Fingers gone gray, I stuffed a hand inside the nearest chest of the faceless undead, and it was like shoving my hand into cold stew.

There was nothing in there but smothering magic. Repulsed, I jerked away and was snatched up again by more hands. They carried me into the lounge and threw me into my seat at the corner table, blocking up the exits with their bodies.

I couldn’t catch my breath. My lungs hitched. I searched my arms, touching my sides, checking for injuries. I’d been scared out of my mind, but I was whole.

The temperature in the car plummeted sharply. Cosmic darkness crawled across the windows, blotting out the unnatural skylight. The lanterns flickered, then dimmed. My heart tried to beat itself out of the cage of my ribs. The pulse at my throat surged.

“Please don’t take my soul, Lord Death,” I begged, and this time my words were sincere. I was no fan of the Old One, but I shouldn’t have tried to take my vengeance out upon him. He hadn’t earned it like the guilty god had. “I’ve come to make amends. I’ve come to beg your forgiveness for my trespass and for the attack you did not deserve, and—”

Shadows pooled in the chair across from me. They roiled and rippled, and then they parted, revealing Death’s favored.

Asher.

I let out a relieved breath. “Oh, thank the Crone. It’s you. Where is the Old One? Nott said that if I apologized to him, we could have his sigil and be out of here by tonight. All of us.”

Asher’s eyes were black as pitch. His magic had curled all around me and then gone still, like the tail of a feral dog when agitated, right before it strikes. “Maven,” he breathed.

Not Trouble, which oddly enough made me feel like I very much was in trouble.

“Where’s Death?” I repeated, enunciating with care, because something suddenly seemed very wrong indeed. My fingers clenched and unclenched. My body had figured out the problem well before my mind had, and my thoughts were rushing to catch up.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Where. Is. Death?”

His eyes slid shut, and he sucked in a pained breath. When he opened them again, his gaze was fathomless and aggrieved. “You’re looking at him.”

“What? No . . .” I sputtered.

Death. The Old One. All those times he’d answered questions with ‘we’. . .

But no. That couldn’t be right. He was a traitor to the gods, a reaper they had mistreated.Mytraitor. Not a spy. He was my friend, not one of the horrid gods I hated.

The images of the broken crow sprang to mind, the legend of the god king ordering Death to break himself in half so that he would fit inside the Otherworld.

“No,” I whispered.

If Asher is interested in you, then the Old One is . . .

“Nott played you, Maven,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be on the train for this part of the journey. No one is. Only the dead.”

My nostrils flared. Heat spread across my chest and flowed up my neck. My fingers went gray. “Was everything between us a lie?”

“No. Never that. I wanted to tell you . . . I was going to tell you . . .” His chest heaved and his mouth turned down in a grimace. “If I had told you sooner, I was certain you’d probably just . . .”

“I’d shoot you again,” I supplied, voice low. My body was still processing his betrayal, all his lies, sending up the alarm that hardened my belly and sent ice water through my veins. The only thing worse than being a spy for the godswas being one of them. “You knew I thought you were a reaper. Not . . . not what you are.”

“I am a reaper. The very first one,” he said. He rested his elbows on the table, leaning closer to block me in. “The Old One remains on the train. He holds the broken parts of my magic, a piece of my divinity, and a portion of my spirit. We are like Nott and Mara. The Old One is my brother.”

He was admitting all of it, and I still couldn’t process one single bit. The worry growing in me felt misplaced and detached from the rest of me, like a loose bolt in my machinery. I shook my head. It couldn’t be real. None of this was real.

“You’re Asher. Not Death,” I retorted, not wanting any of it to be true. Not wanting the man I was falling for to be the man who’d thrown me into the games in the first place. The man who’d pretended to be my ally. Then my friend. Then claimed to want to be my lover when he’d always been my enemy. He would always be the god who had taken my sister to a place I could not go, another one of the deities who had made my life so difficult.

Ihatedthe gods. All of them. I’d made them my enemies, and he knew that better than anyone.

“You’re Maven. Not Fria,” he said. “Iama prisoner here. I am a traitor. I didn’t lie about that.”

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