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O.

Lilia Calderu was surprised that she did not recognize Death when she saw her on the Witches’ Road.

Their paths had crossed over centuries, over continents, beyond the edges of reality, and when Lilia finally sat beside her at the end of things, she was again surprised that they found themselves chatting like old friends, as if Lilia hadn’t been running from her all her life.

Lilia glanced at Rio, across from her at the table of the divination trial.

“This is absurd,” she said.

“What is?” Rio asked. “Being dead?”

“No, being on the ceiling.”

Lilia looked up—or down?—to where her impaled corporeal form awaited its magicking off the Road. Some unsuspecting townie taking his dog for a whiz was going to find her by the side of the state road into Westview, still wearing that insulting pink organza dress; really most sincerely dead.

There was also a chance she would rot away in here forever. A frilly skeleton in a rack of swords, trapped in the gravity-defying hourglass of the upright Tower. She supposed this was the least of her problems now. Maybe she didn’t have problems anymore.

Lilia rapped her fingers on the table. “Can’t we do something, I don’t know, dignified?”

Rio shrugged and flexed her fingers, and a chill ran down Lilia’s spine.

Death’s magic surged in a nauseating thrill, like discovering a patch of tire tread was roadkill, and then they were… outside somewhere? Lilia squinted, but the shapes around them never came into focus. She could smell damp earth, clean and pleasant.

“Better?” Rio asked.

Lilia almost said yes, but there was her body again, on the ground in front of them. Speaking of roadkill. It was no longer impaled—just a dark red splotch in the middle of her chest—but she was still in the same ridiculous dress.

“Couldn’t spring for a pair of palazzo pants, could you?” Lilia asked. “Something closer to home?”

“I dunno.” Rio looked at the dress, then back at Lilia. “I think it suits you.”

Rio Vidal, on the other hand, was still her newest manifestation: lithe and unnerving and beautiful, coerced out of the ancient visages from Lilia’s childhood that rattled the old Catholics and Pagans, and into the perfect disguise of another elusive, undeniable myth: the Cool Girl. Death had the best vintage motorcycle jacket. The quickest quips. She was meeting some other friends later. She hung up first.

Lilia sighed. “Is that how I’m going to be remembered? As Glinda the Good Witch?”

“You’d rather you were dressed as a Sanderson Sister?”

Rio lifted her fingers, and Lilia grabbed them. Rio’s hands were still primed with green magic, and something viscous slithered along her bones until she let her go.

“I’d rather be myself.”

Rio was grinning her terrible grin, her eyes wide and challenging. Lilia had the sensation she had just sprung a well-laid trap.

“And who was that?” Rio asked.

Lilia thought for a long time about her answer.

Wouldn’t it be nice if she’d ever had the privilege of starting at the beginning?

I. sicily, 1551

Lilia, age fifteen, scaled the dirt path up the hill behind the church with a heavy bag of bread in her arms, puffing her long hair out of her face. Uncle Gaspare, who had come up the stone stairs from the cellar of the duomo and passed it to her, told her to go home quickly and to not be seen.

He did not need to tell her this; Lilia had done many things with speed and discretion since she arrived here, most of them in broad daylight. With the sun hanging low, she could dart in between houses and vanish like a ghost. When she tripped on a stone and almost dropped her quarry, she whispered a prayer under her breath that was forbidden to utter at Mass.

Her training in magic was progressing with surprising swiftness under the hawkish tutelage of her maestra (teacher) and the subtle reinforcement of her grandmother, who had taken her out of Messina when her mother died to learn the cunning arts and connect with those who came before.

It had been years since her first official lesson. These days Lilia could spot the difference between a headache and a binding spell; between a thunderstorm and an omen. She could recite the scongiuri (spells) for long life, bountiful harvest, strong wine. They gave these services away to the men, women, and children of the commune. It was their duty and their privilege, and they did not ask for tithe or currency. This peace, this symbiosis afforded them a soft blanket of safety atop the real work, sacred beneath the surface of things.

On many late nights, the women of the house would disappear into the forests to the south and come back at dawn, sweating and manic, their eyes shining with forbidden power. Lilia did not want to invoke the malocchio (evil eye), so she did not covet, but she prayed and prayed. To the Trinity, to the Madonna; to the Roman goddess Diana, whose influence was more mysterious and unknown to her than any holy thing she learned from her mother.

Today those prayers were answered. Her nanna told her if she could follow Gaspare’s instructions and complete this important mission, she would be allowed to come with them and be welcomed at last into the warm embrace of the donni di fuora—the Ladies from Outside.

She squeezed her arms tighter around the bundle and kicked open the gate with her heel. She marched past the rue and rosemary in the garden, through the open door, and down the steps to the hearth where Nanna and Maestra were whispering over the pot. The younger children brought piles of chopped vegetables. Lilia, exhausted from running and hauling, dropped the package on the stone step next to the oven and collapsed in a heap.

“Lilia,” Maestra said, without turning around, “Facisti comu ti dissiru (did you do as you were told)?”

“Haiu u tò pani (I have your bread).”

“Bring it to me.”

Lilia wiped the sweat from her forehead and heaved back to her feet. As she dragged the sack of bread across the room, two loaves spilled out and one almost touched the coals of the fire.

“Watch it,” Nanna said, and scooped it off the ground before it caught.

She tossed it at Lilia’s cousin, who was standing nearby with his arms open. He scampered away with some of it already in his mouth.

Lilia looked at the sack and saw something else inside, something Nanna pulled free. Another bag under the bread. She tugged open the drawstrings and put two fingers in its contents, and her hand came back glistening white.

Salt.

That’s why Gaspare didn’t tell her what it was for.

Salt was a luxury for many, but a necessity in this house. They could not buy it at the market; the tax was too high for a family of this size, and they did not want to answer questions. How many fish could they possibly have to cure in a week?

But it was not for fish, of course.

Until today, Lilia did not know where it came from. She smiled to herself—she had been trusted with another secret.

Leaning over, Maestra tasted the tips of Nanna’s fingers, sucking the salt off them. Nanna watched her. Lilia watched Nanna.

Maestra rolled her tongue around the inside of her cheek. “Good.”

Nanna set the sack on the ground. “Good,” she said to Lilia, rubbing her wet fingers together in the flickering firelight, wiping them on her skirt.

Lilia shrieked with triumphant delight and tore out the back door. There was so much to do now. She didn’t know what it would be, only that there was so, so much of it.

II. boston, 1926

Lilia unlocked a half-dollar padlock attached to a filing cabinet she could only fit in the bathroom. She pulled open the top drawer and it knocked a bar of soap into the sink.

At the back of the drawer was an envelope with her last twenty bucks, soon to be her last forty bucks if she’d predicted correctly. And when hadn’t she? That was always the trouble.

Lilia’s most volatile powers, the sharp, staccato gaps she’d put away, tried to resurface in the stifling Puritan architecture of Boston. They arrived in clusters, knocking along the edges of her mind, threatening to steal time from her. Though she was almost four hundred years old, an even older Lilia had chosen the heart of the roaring twenties to check in on herself, to make sure she was still stumbling towards some as-yet-unknown destiny.

As a rule, after she lost her coven and left Sicily behind, she tried to refuse these ‘visits’ entry. She did not trust the agenda of this Lilia of the future, or her control of its outcomes, so she would turn them away. She would take a deep breath and count down from ten. She would look around the room and name something aloud. She would think, ‘thank you, but not today.’

The swells of them again in Boston, after so long without, made her feel unmoored. It was a sign (and Lilia’s life was nothing but signs) there was something coming, something she could no longer run or hide from, though she had been running and hiding for as long as she could remember.

Behind the envelope of cash was her oldest deck of tarocchi cards, still wrapped in soft leather.

Watching the myths of the tarot grow over the centuries made Lilia feel immense, and grounded, and vindicated. She’d acquired decks of every variation and tradition, traded and bartered for them, gave them away to the gifted and the worthy. In the faces of these cards—The Empress, The Wheel, The World—Lilia could see order out of chaos, disparate images that came together to form an unexpected and satisfying whole. Reading tarot was Lilia’s secret joy, one of the few things that still made her happy. It was the way she wished her magic worked.

This particular deck, however, was not for clients. The only power in them belonged to Lilia alone, but that power was undeniably divine. Holding them was the scent of lemons. Shuffling them was the sea.

They were once a relief from the unending hours she spent staring into crystals and mirrors, cups of tea, curls of smoke—what her nanna called the ‘real’ divination work. To Nanna, tarot would always be a game. A con. She did not deny that Lilia had a prophetic gift but maintained that the only future you could predict with tarocchi was whether you were about to win a night’s worth of drinks.

(Nanna was wise, Maestra said, but she did not know everything.)

What Lilia came to see as ‘real’ divination was tragedy, over and over on an endless loop back on itself. Across the years, everyone preferred the game. Even, or perhaps especially, Lilia.

She left the envelope and the leather-wrapped cards in the drawer, and pulled out her pre-loaded .38. She stuffed it under her blouse, against the small of her back, and was off to work.

Of all the things Lilia saw herself doing for a living, telling fortunes for drunken mobsters in the back of a speakeasy was not one of them.

But she was out from under the thumb of close-minded lawmen, and the all-seeing eye of the Catholic church. Throwing in with a syndicate like Cosa Nostra gave her insurance, without compromising her independence. She was in control of her destiny.

Once she recited this lie to herself enough, it would finally start to feel true.

When she made it down the three flights of stairs and out to the street, she looked out and up into the rainy sky and spotted a flicker of violet lightning. This was the last thing she would remember about Boston for another hundred years.

III. sicily, 1576

The fever was going to take them. All of them.

The first two seconds of every day was a sickening lurch into consciousness, a flash of dried lips and bloodshot eyes. Every day, Lilia saw her coven die before she even knew she was awake, before she saw the sun.

The first time she saw it she forgot it, like a passing dream. The second day she felt cold sweat on her neck from terror. The third day was deja vu; coincidence. A recurring nightmare.

The fourth day she knew it was prophecy.

Though Lilia was old enough for sparse grey hairs to tickle at her temples, she sat at the feet of her maestra and her nanna like a child. She saw their hands clasped together as she described the cough, the blood on their sleeves, the blisters, the sweating.

They did not cry out with fear. They nodded. They looked at each other with what Lilia would later recall as the finality of a suicide pact.

When Nanna was the first to go a few weeks later, in her sleep, her breath rattling in her throat, Lilia thought it was over. She decided the blight in her dream was symbolic, something she had to see through. But the visions came back the next day, just the same. And the next.

For three more years, Lilia saw her coven die each morning.

By the time the prophecy came to pass, she was sure she would be prepared for Death, that this sight would be her last. On both counts, she was wrong.

Death in those days walked with a limp and a shepherd’s crook. She dressed in a cloak of green fire. She had charcoal eyes and smelled like the smoke from a swinging censer. Dry grass immolated as she walked through it, and flowers bloomed over the scorched ground.

The Ladies from Outside were so sick they wept with joy when Death came for them. Her maestra was the last, her head in Lilia’s lap as they both waited for the end.

Death smiled—this was where she kept her scythe—but she did not look at Lilia. Maestra glanced at something over Death’s shoulder, and caressed Death’s cheek, and smiled back, and they were both gone.

IV. schwarzwald, 1674

On an icy morning in 1674, Lilia heard the earth shift.

The sound came to her in her dreams first: a colossal mountain hag crouched outside her bedroom window and leapt out of view, showering bolts of violet lightning as it cracked the sky. Rabbits appeared where the lightning struck the ground—black rabbits that stood on their hinds and looked at her in unison with deep, glassy eyes. When Lilia screamed in cosmic terror, she woke herself up.

She righted herself as best she could. She was in her bed, in her cottage in the Black Forest, and she was almost one hundred and fifty, and she was not going to be eaten by rabbits. Probably. She sat up and looked out the window at her garden, hoping not to spot one, like the seedling of a new superstition.

She threw her cloak around her shoulders and stepped outside. Frost lingered on the top edge of every stone, on her house and the narrow path leading up to it.

Was it a premonition, a dream, or something else?

The rising sun gilded the edges of the spruce trees. She lost hold of herself for a moment.

She was still in the same spot on her front step, but it was summer, and her once humble garden now swelled with years of cultivation—fresh vegetables and fruit trees and herbs, a wheelbarrow overflowing with harvest. A woman she did not recognize was stalking up her path with a jar of milk and a sack of food. She slipped past the spells Lilia placed on the house, the ones that made people wander in circles and never find their way to her.

“Hast du es heute Morgen gesehen (did you see it this morning)?” the woman said.

Lilia, still reeling and unsure of where or when she was, said, “Der Blitz (the lightning)?”

“I couldn’t believe it,” the woman said, “Just like your dream from the day we met. How did you know?”

“You tell me,” Lilia said. She couldn’t answer her if she wanted to.

“Things are getting worse,” the woman said, “there are women in the New World getting the noose every day.”

“Maybe it will blow over,” Lilia heard herself say. She was slipping away.

“Can you be sure?”

“No,” Lilia said, “I’m always guessing. You know that.”

Who was she, that they spoke to each other this way?

“Hard to believe you guessed all this,” the woman said, and looked up. Lilia joined her; the sky was turning purple.

Not a thunderstorm. An omen.

Lilia frowned and blinked, and it was winter, and she was in her cloak, and she was alone.

That afternoon, Lilia was deep in the woods behind her home, looking for Lady’s Mantle to help a new mother in the town below. She stumbled upon a small and unassuming cottage just like hers. A seductive smell of cinnamon and sugar rose from a smoking chimney.

A woman came out, wiping her hands on her apron, peering at her. Lilia recognized her, though she was not carrying milk or food or grave news now. The woman waved like she was unsurprised.

“Were you expecting me?” Lilia said, in her halting German. The sounds were still new on her tongue.

“No,” the woman said warily, “I thought I heard a mouse at my door. Where did you come from?”

Lilia thumbed behind her. “Not far.”

“Oh, you’re my neighbour? The one with the herb garden?” When Lilia said yes, she huffed a sigh of relief and jutted her hip out. “Thank goodness. I’m glad to finally meet you—I covet your sage. It smells divine.” She wiped her hands again.

Lilia’s chest swelled with pride. “You’re too kind.”

“I can’t seem to grow anything here.” The woman gestured to a barren plot beside her cottage. “I have to get it all from town.”

“I hate going to town.”

“Me too,” the woman said, shaking her head. “I go because I have to.”

Hate, Lilia already knew, was often inseparable from fear.

“I’d happily barter for whatever you’re making in there,” Lilia said, angling her face toward the house, “I can grow things but I’m a terrible cook.”

“Are you hungry now?” the woman asked. Lilia nodded. “Come in, I’ll set a place for you.”

Lilia stashed her herbs in her bodice. “That’s very kind of you.”

She stepped up the steep path to the woman’s house. As she approached the entrance, the aroma around the house shifted. She could now smell briny water, fresh pasta, tomatoes, olives, basil—scents too far from their origins to be real. Lilia’s stomach rumbled with hunger and homesickness.

“Anyone ever told you this whole house smells good enough to eat?” Lilia asked, as she crossed the threshold.

The woman tossed her hair over her shoulder and smiled too sweetly. “All the time.”

V. sicily, 1551

Lilia, in her excitement, had chosen the warmer of her two shawls to bring to her initiation to the coven and showed up bundled and ready for a long journey. The Ladies from Outside, who stood inside a circle of salt in the empty room upstairs and were not dressed for the weather at all, took care not to laugh at her.

“But I know you walk to the woods—how are you not freezing?”

But they did not walk to the woods, as it turned out. Not in the way Lilia thought they would.

With her shawl now tucked under her back, Lilia was sprawled on the floor, arms and legs wide, bare feet touching the toes of the women on either side of her. She was breathing and humming in tune with the rest of them, in time with their breath: a hiss of inhale, a drone of exhale. Above their monotonous song was Maestra, her soprano voice crackling and electric. She beseeched the grove to come to them.

Lilia smelled and heard the forest before she opened her eyes, and recognized the sensation of leaving herself. The small journeys her mind took usually lasted seconds, maybe a minute. Once she righted herself, she would be able to look down at her hands and know whether she was older or younger. Memory or premonition.

But this time, her hands were her own. She saw the smudges on her left hand from the soot of the fire she just put out downstairs. When she looked around, there was no one staring at her with confusion, no one asking her if she had hit her head. The women of the coven came up beside her, holding their arms out in guidance.

“Where are we?” Lilia asked, her reverence masking her fear.

“Outside,” Nanna replied, striding past.

It was still night, but the moon was low and full and enormous. Light filtered through the gnarled branches of the trees and coaxed her toward it. Up ahead were Nanna and Maestra, walking. They were ringed in white, their fingers linked together in silhouette.

They walked in silence for several minutes and came upon an ancient, mammoth walnut tree. It was heavy with green-shelled walnuts, and the soft ground was littered with fallen husks.

One of the walnuts on the branches wiggled, and it caught Lilia’s attention. She stood staring at it while the other women formed a horseshoe in front of the tree, Lilia at its center. The walnut rocked back and forth, side to side until it broke free and fell right at her feet.

Lilia looked up at Maestra, who tilted her head at it encouragingly.

“It’s yours,” Maestra said.

Lilia picked it up. The shell around the nut opened easily, and the meat inside was glowing. It stayed her hand.

“What do I do with it?” Lilia asked.

“You eat it,” Maestra said.

She turned it in her hand and watched it shimmer. “What does it taste like?”

“Knowing.”

Lilia dug with her fingers until she held the pieces in her hands, the shell falling away to the ground. She tried not to drop it but her hands were shaking.

Bringing a walnut up to her mouth, she could hear the humming of the women and the sound of Maestra singing trapped inside it. When she bit down, the song came to her. She chewed, and swallowed, and the singing moved from the palm of her hand to her throat, to her stomach, and then between her ears, where it settled and faded away.

As if waiting for her, the sea of her new sisters parted, and they all made their way to the base of the tree to eat. Lilia’s mouth was tingling, watering. Maestra bade her to have her fill.

The next bite whispered a recipe for sweet bread that could cure a barren womb. The third one burned a prayer into her mind, for the dead or dying. For preservation of the spirit.

She ate the stories of the beginning of the world. Stories from the end of all things. Tales from faraway lands, where the trees grew out instead of up. Stories of women who became stars.

She ate them all. They sated a hunger she’d never known.

Lilia rejoined Nanna and Maestra at the edge of the grove, where they had been watching them for some time.

“Are you not going to eat, too?” Lilia asked them both.

Nanna shook her head. “We have had many, many trips to this forest together. We are satisfied.”

How could anyone be satisfied, when there was this much to know?

“Can I come back here?” Lilia asked.

“Anytime you like,” Nanna said, “you know the song now.”

“Will we all come together?”

“Of course. It is always better to share.”

Lilia turned to look in the direction they were both facing.

She thought she had a premonition then, a dream within a dream. People were walking in from the edges of the grove, new faces beneath the tree. Lilia looked down and her hands were thin with age, but they looked new again in the moonlight. Her skin prickled with possibility.

She blinked and they were gone. There was only the moon, the path, the walnut tree. There were the owls in the branches, and the warm wind, and the Ladies from Outside.

“What do we do now?” Lilia asked, looking up into the sharp, pale faces of her Nanna and Maestra. They looked only at each other.

“Now?” Maestra said, smiling at Nanna, “Now, we dance.”

VI. boston, 1926

“We have someone coming to meet you today,” Vito said, downing the rest of his drink. “Make sure he leaves happy.”

“Who is he?” Lilia asked.

“A client,” Vito said, “and this is gonna be big for us, so get cleaned up.”

He disappeared into the front-of-house before she could ask anything else.

She wasn’t sure if he meant for her to clean up the bar or her face. She took a long look at herself between the bottles as she wrung out a cloth, scrutinizing the bags under her eyes and the yellowing in her teeth. What a sorry shape she was in these days.

She coughed and turned to slip a dollar from the register into her bodice. ‘Always better to share,’ she thought, though this could not have been further from what Maestra meant.

Lilia had been careful never to form a coven again, but after landing in New Orleans in the late 1800s, she found something of a family. One night, a Sicilian man who looked like her Uncle Gaspare took her into his modest estate in Little Palermo to entertain his brothers and nephews with oinomancy. All she had to do, he said, was tell them what they wanted to hear.

Lilia could not read wine. That was a pretense. She read people. The wine was incidental. And delicious.

It was heaven to speak her mother tongue again after suffering through heavy mouthfuls of German for so long, and it compounded with the relief of having no ill tidings to bring. At the end of the night, delirious with wine and praise, the man offered her a reeking fistful of American money for her time.

She thought of her nanna, and the Ladies—Maestra’s warning of what happened to the hearts of those who did not give away their gifts. But half of it was lies. A game, a con. Was this even a gift? Was this even magic?

The commune withdrew from her when her coven died, for fear of catching the same death. What followed were endless years of bartering tragedy for ostracism: cold nights in the hills, her body wracked with hunger; relying on the kindness of the cunning folk she crossed paths with, who never had enough themselves.

She gave and gave and what did it get her? Every person she’d ever cared for was dead. The evil eye had already won. What harm could it possibly do to her now?

So she took his cash. Fifty years later, she had followed Cosa Nostra up to Boston, and she was still taking. Now everything had a price. Absolutely everything.

The traffic picked up in the bar, and she was between mixing a rum and bitters and a gin rickey when someone slapped twenty dollars on the counter in front of her. A bit of splashed seltzer water soaked into the corner of it. She spotted several gold rings on a hairy but well-groomed hand.

Right on time.

When she looked up, she saw a man with a crooked smile interrupted by a half-smoked cigarette. He slid into the nearest chair and waited for her to speak first. His eye contact was unwavering, like a suspicious animal.

“What can I get you?” Lilia asked.

“You tell me, doll,” he said, grinning, and he looked down at his hand.

She crushed the twenty under her fingers and jammed it into her bodice with the stolen dollar. “Come with me.”

She nodded at the slight, tattooed button man watching the door at the end of the bar, and he nodded back and traded places with her. She pushed through the door and a set of heavy curtains behind it to lead them into the back-of-the-back-of-house.

There was her low, sturdy table, and her brocade chairs; her hanging lights, and her tapestries. The Moon. The Tower. Just how she liked them. Just the way she’d arranged them in her tent in New Orleans.

“Step into my office,” she said, with the time-honoured twirl of her fingers.

She turned to face him and glowered—he brought his dame back with him. She had on an expensive-looking fur coat and an expensive-looking sneer. Her eyes vanished under the shade of her hat.

“Uh-uh, no,” Lilia said, the flourish turning into a point, “paying customers only. She can wait at the bar.”

“No can do, sweetheart,” he said, slipping his arm around her waist, “she’s my good luck charm.”

Lilia rolled her tongue over her teeth and thought about the cash in her bodice, and how much more of it she was going to need before the end of the week. She thought about how fickle Vito’s patience was, how quickly it was swapped for violence. He just hated hitting an old lady.

“Fine,” Lilia said, “but I don’t want to hear a word out of her. She’ll taint my energy.”

“You got that?” he asked his companion.

Silence.

“Good girls,” he said.

Lilia sat him down in front of her crystal ball and gave him the usual pride and prosperity racket. He laced his fingers around his crossed knees and leaned back, unimpressed, so she dialled it up. She picked his patron saint, his hometown in Sicily. She gave him a little tidbit about his mother; they always had a thing about their mothers.

She avoided talking about his wife, who he knew was not the woman reclining on the chaise, vacantly staring at all her wall hangings.

“Listen, dollface,” the man said, “Vito told me you were good. You ain’t said something you can’t get from a newspaper.”

This crumb was in the newspaper? “The spirits call and I answer,” Lilia said, her nose in the air.

“Well, phone a little more long distance, baby, or I want my twenty clams back.”

“All right,” she said.

If he wanted a show, she was going to give him one.

Tossing a black cloth over her crystal ball, she reached beside her into her bowl of charms and plucked one out. Squeezed it in her free hand. A shiver traveled up her spine; a message was coming. It sizzled into her subconscious, and floated to the top. She skimmed the surface of it. Closed her eyes.

“You will outlive all of your enemies,” she said, “but not all of your friends. You lost something when you were very young that you can never get back. You think about it every day. You’re thinking about it now.”

“I am,” the man said, his voice rising with interest. The table creaked when he leaned his elbows against it.

With one hand still closed over the charm, she ripped the cloth back off the crystal ball. She did not need to look at it to know it was now crackling with golden light, a frightening and gorgeous display that drew in all but the fiercest skeptics. She could smell the sparks. She stopped skimming and plunged.

“You thought you lost the love of your life,” she continued, “but you will see her again. You will look into her eyes and you will feel stillness in the endless violence of your heart. She will welcome you back into her arms, but if you go to her, it will cost you everything.”

Lilia smiled to herself at this. His wife, his dame, they couldn’t be the love of this man’s life. Not this woman in her mind’s eye. That must be burning the hell out of that woman on the chaise. Good for him.

The woman in her vision looked like a walking funerary procession. A sliver of darkness cut between streetlights. A daisy on a compost heap. If she didn’t know any better, she’d say she looked like—

“I knew it,” the man said, crashing to his feet, “I knew she’d come back to me one day. Erna. My Erna!”

Lilia opened her eyes, and the light in the ball went out. The man’s face was ruddy, his cigarette vanishing into dust. He was holding onto his hat, and with his other hand he grabbed her palm and shook it hard.

“You’re the real deal, lady, goddamn.” He looked over his shoulder. “Come on, baby, I’ve got some phone calls to make.”

He blustered out of the room, leaving his dame behind. Poor idiot didn’t even listen to the warning. He was doomed. Oh well.

She unclenched her hand and looked at the charm she’d picked up, and her breath caught in her throat.

A rabbit.

In the strange glare of the back room, it looked black.

She looked up and the woman on the chaise had taken off her hat and crossed the room and was now leaning over the table, staring right into Lilia’s face. Her eyes had the menace of a tropical storm. Her hair was dark and wild, and her smile made Lilia want to swallow her own tongue. The crystal ball reignited, and the light inside shifted to the ominous shade of purple that had been haunting her for centuries.

“You just cost me my golden goose,” the woman said, and Lilia realized with horror that she was not moving her lips.

The woman looked down at the rabbit in Lilia’s palm.

“That’s for me, isn’t it?” she said aloud, seizing it. “That wasn’t his goddamned fortune you told.”

VII. new jersey, 2026

It was the sensation that accompanied the onset of a cold. A tickle in the back of the throat, a swollen wrongness explained away as allergies or barometric pressure. In the morning, it would be impossible to remember what it was like not to be sick, impossible to appreciate breathing freely.

That was the feeling that gripped Lilia when Agatha Harkness came through the front door of Madame Calderu’s and back into her life—not for the first time, but for the last.

(When Agatha asked her to walk The Road, Lilia consented before she even believed she would consider it.)

That second clash across her crystal ball—probing each other for telltale symptoms of witchcraft—burned with an intensity and familiarity she could not diagnose. She would be minutes from death before she realized Agatha had stolen her right to remember why.

They’d stolen it from each other on purpose, one fateful night in Boston, a hundred years ago.

VIII. schwarzwald, 1674

The woman with the delectable cottage was called Adalheidis.

She walked with a cane and had trouble with her eyes. She had soft, boundless curls that smelled of gingerbread. The day Lilia first called her ‘Addie’, the laugh that rang out would sound like home for the rest of her life.

She hadn’t had a nickname in a long time, she said. Her name was old. When Lilia asked her how old, she said, “Older than you.”

“I’m very old,” Lilia said.

“I know. I can tell.”

“Thank you,” Lilia said, and meant it. “How much older than me?”

Addie tapped her fingers on the jar of spices she had just finished grinding with her mortar and pestle. “You remember what happened when the Germans broke from the Church?”

Lilia picked up a towel and helped her clear off the table of dust and crumbs. “No, not really.”

“I used to bake lebkuchen for the great-great-great-great-grandmother of Martin Luther.” Lilia regarded Addie and started putting numbers together in her head, but they were too big. “And by then I’d been baking lebkuchen for a hundred years.”

Lilia’s eyebrows jumped up. Addie wouldn’t have even been allowed to add up how old she was; they wouldn’t have let her learn arithmetic.

“I’ve been out here longer than anyone down there can remember,” Addie said, “but I didn’t flee as far as you did. Why did you come here of all places? All the way from Sicily?”

Lilia scraped the bottom of the bowl with her crust of bread. The soup had been a balm for her freezing insides, and Addie, nurturing as always, had provided.

When Lilia could not bring vegetables, she brought stories for Addie to eat, about the beginning and end of the world, about women who became stars. Sometimes the stories were a little more down-to-earth—lessons learned in the years between.

“I met a girl in Paris, years ago. A seer.”

“Like you?”

“Like me,” Lilia said, nodding. “She was the first in her family.”

“A heavy burden,” Addie said, breaking off another piece of bread and offering it to Lilia. Lilia put her hand up in protest and Addie bit into it instead.

“Too heavy a burden.”

“Did they take her away?” Addie asked.

“No. It was much worse than that.”

“They killed her?”

Lilia took care with her answer. To this day she still wasn’t sure.

Her name was Elise.

Lilia found her on the streets of Paris in 1640, reading palms for a few francs. The girl had a gift already at seventeen, while Lilia was just over a hundred. So pale and thin her bones would catch the sunlight, the girl could weave a tale that would charm a man’s pockets inside out.

She could name the stars under which Lilia was born. She spoke of a strong family connection broken; self-reliance, gentleness, humility. Flattering even to Lilia, who could spot a sugar-tinged trick of probability from twenty paces.

Then Elise said some things she could not have simply guessed: she said Lilia would bear no children but mourn the loss of many mothers. She would have much of her life stolen by a woman made of fire.

When she studied Lilia’s hands more closely, she said her fate lines seemed to shift even as she looked at them. Fractured, misleading. Upheaval from every angle. Lilia asked her once if she knew when she was going to die. Elise said palms didn’t work that way.

‘Ils peuvent (they can),’ Lilia had said, ‘donne-moi tes mains (give me your hands).’

Lilia did not read palms the way Elise did, but when she touched her she knew this girl’s life was a truncated tragedy, like so many others. As she stared at her hands, she saw them soaked in red. Elise’s mother stood over her—weeping, pious, unrepentant. She clutched a rosary between her fingers until her knuckles turned white, and then she put it around the girl’s neck as she breathed her last few breaths.

‘I guess you’re right,’ Lilia had lied, ‘I see nothing at all.’

Though the air around the fire was warm in the cottage, Lilia’s hands were cold, and she clasped them together.

“The fear of Death killed her.”

“Poor thing,” Addie said. “That’s nothing to fear.”

“Have you not seen Death?” Lilia asked, incredulous. “There aren’t many things more fearsome.”

“I have no stories about Death, but I do know about Frau Holle, and I would not disgrace The Lady by looking. I keep a clean house, and I leave bread and soup for her on the Twelfth Night, and no Wild Hunt has come for me yet.” Addie poured more cider into Lilia’s cup. “Is that why you fled? You saw Death coming for you?”

Lilia found the girl just after her mother took flight, her calls for help falling on deaf ears. Lilia saw Death again that day, as pale and skeletal as Elise, walking at a slow march. Her white dress was so delicate, it moved on its own through the air.

Death was humming a song to Elise when she crouched down beside her, drawing down her cheek with one crooked finger. When she laced their fingers together, Elise opened her eyes and peered into Death’s face and smiled.

Lilia wept when they were both gone, though she had to do it in the dead of night where no one could see.

“I see her come for everyone but me,” Lilia said to Addie, and shook her head. “She’ll come for you, too, one day.”

Addie shrugged a shoulder and took a long drink. “One day, maybe. But not today.”

She offered Lilia bread again, and this time Lilia took it.

“Your food is too good,” Lilia said, “it gives you too much confidence.”

Addie grinned and licked her thumb. She rubbed a smudge off Lilia’s cheek. “That must be it.”

She let her fingers trail lightly across Lilia’s shoulders as she walked past to take the washing out. Lilia didn’t dare touch her in return.

IX. sicily, 1573

Lilia Calderu, age thirty-six, had been crying since she was thirty-five. Her birthday came and went, but the grief remained.

Everything still reminded Lilia of her grandmother. Ten or twenty times a day, she would see or think of something and the wound would split open again, like new. Lilia rarely saw Maestra and Nanna apart, and now, each time Maestra entered a room, Lilia’s eyes fixed on the door where she entered, waiting.

Even in the heat that made animals lie flat in the dust, Maestra wore black, and Lilia loved her for it. But Maestra did not cry. She did not sigh and stare out the window as Lilia did, or weep at the sound of church bells. She simply walked from room to room: cleaning, cooking, calling the children to bed. This, Lilia could not love her for.

Maestra sat on the stone ledge behind the house, wrapping twine around a sheath of dried herbs, as she did on most days. Lilia came and sat beside her, watching. With every simple, silent, soulless revolution, Lilia’s shoulders grew tighter.

Finally, when she could no longer bear it, she stood, heaved high the pitcher of wine that sat between them, wound her arms back, and flung it to the ground. It shattered with a sound that satisfied her, the wine exploding all over the terracotta, leaking between the cracks, staining the ground, splashing on her feet. The way the huge clay pieces flew in every direction, the way the tiny shards vanished into crevices and bounded away into the grass. Dust spewed up in the aftermath and caught in her hair.

She opened her eyes, smiling. Maestra would be so angry. She would lose her temper. She would tell her she’d have no supper, like a child. Then Lilia would say, ‘I don’t need anything from you,’ and storm out of their lives forever, through the wine-soaked courtyard, leaving vinous footprints like blood on the steps.

But Maestra was smiling, too, still wrapping twine.

“How can you act this way?” Lilia asked.

“What way?” Another loop. And then another.

“As if she did not matter.”

“You are speaking of your nanna,” Maestra said, extending the twine again from the roll beside her. She rooted around for her knife and sliced the length free.

Lilia spoke through gritted teeth. “Of course I am.”

“You think I am not unhappy.”

“She is dead,” Lilia said. How could she not hear her?

“Yes.”

“She is gone.”

“Is she?” Maestra asked.

The question wrapped itself around the bundle of herbs. Maestra took a sip from her glass, the last pour from the now-displaced jug.

“What do you see?” Maestra asked, gesturing at the wreckage.

Lilia shook her head. She did not want a lesson today. “I can’t see anything.”

“Look again.”

Knowing Maestra could not be denied twice, Lilia stood, hands clenched, and stepped into the center of the mess. She looked down, her feet steeped in burgundy.

The rivulets of wine formed a tangled mess of curls, tendrils still rising up and up in a crown of cypress trees. The clay pieces scattered like leaves, like seashells in her hair. The pools around her feet were shoulders, arms, elbows. She realized she was standing in a portrait—was this the Madonna? No. This woman was too rushing, too alive.

This woman was a forest and a crashing wave. She was a thing between.

“Nanna,” Lilia whispered, and her face emerged, almost unrecognizable with youth. Nanna’s watercolour gaze cast out at something beyond where Lilia stood, toward something that poured into her.

“Who could be sad, who goes to a place like this?” Maestra said. “Who should be sad for her?”

Lilia blinked tears down into the spilled wine. They landed on her neck, cut through the red like pearls. Maestra’s hands were on her shoulders.

“Be sad for yourself,” Maestra said, “don’t worry about her. Or me. At night, I can still hear her laugh. I can hear her sing. I hear her howl at the moon. You can too, if you are still. If you want to hear it.”

Lilia leaned back against her, almost too much, but Maestra held her up. As she took a step back, she felt a pain in her foot that she had been ignoring.

“You’ve cut yourself,” Maestra said.

Lilia looked down. There was a darker red mixing with the wine.

“Quite a cocktail you made,” Maestra said, turning Lilia toward the door. “Come inside, I will fix you.”

Unremarkable to anyone but Lilia and her maestra, the Dianic portrait of blood, tears, and wine stained the ground for six days and six nights, until Lilia could scrub it up.

The visage remained in her mind forever.

X. boston, 1926

The rabbit came back one morning, like a bad penny.

She was in the back room of the speakeasy, counting her money. The last two clients had set her up for a couple of months—food, rent, cigarettes, everything—and after that spectacle with the new boss, he’d put her on retainer. Halle-fuckin’-lujah.

She’d just finished stuffing her earnings into her bag and returned to her chair only to find the rabbit charm sitting on top of her tarot deck. It gleamed with an unusual lustre. Her eyes darted around, her skin prickling with anticipation, but there was no one there.

She set the charm aside and shuffled the deck.

“Wanna read for me again?”

That dame was in front of her as if Lilia had looked past her the first time. Lilia shouted, then cursed herself for shouting. Nothing should startle anyone at her age.

She recomposed herself and sniffed. “You get what you get.”

“You sure?”

She shuffled the deck again, ignoring her.

The woman sat down across from her, reached forward, plucked the top card off, and turned it over. Lilia balked at her, but couldn’t resist looking at what she’d drawn.

Seven of Swords. Betrayal. Deceit. Backdoor dealings.

Lilia’s eyes flicked up and the woman was holding her gaze.

“Looks like you’re still pulling for me,” she said, “or is this for you?”

“Hey, whoa.” Lilia put up a hand. “Everything I’m up to is on-the-level, all right?”

The woman guffawed. “Are you serious? You’re on the take from this new capo and you run a crystal ball scam out of a gin joint.”

“I’m a legitimate businesswoman.”

She arched an eyebrow at Lilia’s cleavage. “Tell that to the sweaty cash keeping your girls company.”

Lilia shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

The woman placed both palms on the table, on either side of the card.

“Listen, I’m not here to start anything,” she said, decidedly calmer than the whip-crack attitude she’d brought to their last encounter. “I mean, I am, but not with you. I’ve got a proposition for you.”

Lilia blinked slowly at her and said nothing. The woman glanced at the door and back.

“I’m gonna rip off your boss, and I want you to help me.”

Lilia laughed, her earrings swinging like pendulums. “God, wouldn’t it be faster just to kill me?”

“If that's what I wanted, you’d already be dead.”

It was the most truthful thing she’d said since she came in here. For some reason, this made Lilia relax.

“What makes you think I’d want to screw over my boss?”

The woman’s eyes shone. Her voice was like honey cut with black pepper. “Because he treats you like a dime store huckster—”

“I get paid pretty goddamned well, actually—”

“—and he has no idea what he really has.”

Lilia idly pushed a few cards out from the center of the deck with her thumb. Set them on top. “And you do?”

“Mmhm.” The woman pulled another card. High Priestess. Intuition. Truth. Knowing. “Me or you?”

Lilia looked at the table and shook her head.

“Don’t you ever get sick of being stepped on?” the woman asked. “Don’t you stand out there at that bar, day after day, looking at these rubes, thinking about how easy it would be to just take what you want? Because I do, babe. I really do.”

She was spinning the Seven of Swords between her palms now, the artwork flickering out and then in and then out.

“But instead, we stoop,” she continued. “For our own necks, we stoop. Walking around in men’s shadows, laughing at their idiotic ideas, turning our work—our craft—into a joke, a racket, instead of what it really is. What’s the point, Lilia? So we can keep on living? Who wants to keep living like this? It should be us out there. They’re the ones who should be afraid.”

Lilia had heard this tune once before, in another language. The singers could not have been more different.

“You really think I’m going to throw in with you?” Lilia asked. The bright bloom in her chest betrayed her, warning her she was already being won over. “I don’t even know you.”

“Yet you’ve got no problem telling me how I’m going to die.”

The woman set the card down and picked up the rabbit charm off the table instead, rolling it through her knuckles in a mesmerizing flourish.

“That’s different,” Lilia said, watching her, “I see flashes. Out of context. Images. Vivid but—unfocused.”

“Sounds pretty intimate to me.”

Lilia shook her head. She didn’t get it. “I didn’t even know it was you. The details on these things don’t always make sense.”

“You don’t have to deal with details. Leave that to me.” The woman pulled the deck in front of her now. Set the other two cards in the center. “Should we do another one? For us?”

Lilia’s heart was racing. Her blood felt hot. “Why me?”

“You already know the answer to that question,” the woman said, and flipped a third card.

Ace of Pentacles. Manifestation. Potential prosperity. New business.

Lilia rubbed her neck. Why did the idea of throwing this life away seem so appealing? More importantly, why did the cards want her to go?

She thought of her half-dollar padlock. Her five-cent soap. The three warm bills wedged at the bottom of her bra. The petty theft didn’t even matter anymore, it was just for the thrill.

What was there left to throw away?

“If you really want to deal with me,” Lilia said carefully, “we’re not gonna talk about it here.”

The woman smiled a slow smile, and Lilia thought of all the stories she knew about rabbits. Half of them were lucky. The other half were trouble.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“Uh-uh, no way. Your place,” Lilia said.

She glared at her and sucked her teeth. “Corner of Tremont and Dover, tomorrow. Seven o’clock. Don’t come armed,” she said, looking pointedly at Lilia’s waist. “At least, not yet.”

Her fur coat flew around her shoulders as she whirled to leave, then she spun back as if she’d forgotten something. Lilia was still staring at her, frozen, as she stuck her hand out.

“Agatha Harkness,” the woman said, “you’ll be pleased to have met me.”

XI. schwarzwald, 1693

Lilia no longer remembered how old she was when she decided she was done with divination for good—done with the gaps, done with the tarot, done tallying death tolls, spying on tragedies and telling twisted tales and whispering truths; done, done, done.

But she remembered it was a lemon that did it.

She had gone down the hill with a burlap sack full of beeswax candles and honey, the fragrant fruits of shared labour. She’d almost sold the lot—and picked up a few other customers she would meet more discreetly after sundown—when, out of the air, like a trill from a thrush, she heard an old man speaking broken German with a thick Italian accent.

He was a stranger to her, but she found him in the crowd and cornered him with little regard for her own safety. She conversed with him for much of the afternoon in a half-Italian, half-Sicilian hybrid that met somewhere upstream; sonorous vowels like the bells of the duomo, syllabic accents like footsteps on terracotta.

Just when she thought there were no reminders of home left to wring out of him, he set his pack on the ground and produced a lemon the size of her fist. He offered it to her. She clapped her hands over her mouth and tried to refuse him. When he insisted, she offered him her last jar of honey and a sachet of vervain for peace and protection. He accepted graciously, though he must’ve known this fruit was worth ten times that. She kissed him hard on the cheek when they parted.

Lilia strode up the hill to Addie’s cottage with a sack full of barter and a lemon hidden at the bottom, feeling fifteen again, smuggling bread and salt.

When Addie set her eyes on it, her eyes went wide. “What is that?”

“What? Nu limuni (a lemon)?” Lilia said, without thinking.

“Wie heißt es auf Deutsch (what is it called in German)?” Addie asked.

Lilia stared at it. It struck her that she’d never had to say it before. “I have no idea.”

She handed it to Addie, who cupped it in her hands like spring water. “Nu… limuni,” Addie said, her lips puckered around the word. “What will you make with it?”

Addie tried to hand it back, but Lilia stopped her.

“Nothing,” Lilia said, shaking her head, “I want you to have it.”

“Oh,” Addie said, “I don’t know how to cook with this.”

“No, I want you to eat it. Please. It’s my gift. It comes from my homeland. It’s a treasure to me.”

Addie sat with it at the table. She gazed at it. “What does it taste like?”

Lilia found Addie’s best knife: white, engraved with a mushroom, and set it down next to her. She smiled. “It tastes like summer with teeth.”

Lilia helped her slice it into wedges. Addie’s eyes followed her fingers as she punctured the skin, and the smell of it burst into their nostrils. She showed her how to hold it, and they both took a bite at the same moment.

Lilia did not need to skim through time to be transported.

Addie’s eyes went wide. She squinted, the juice running down her chin. “Scheiße,” she swore, rubbing at her mouth and laughing.

“Do you like it?” Lilia asked, licking her lips. “Is it too sour? You don’t have to eat it.”

“I love it,” Addie said and blinked. Blinked again. “It tastes like nothing I’ve ever eaten before. Do you know how long it’s been since that happened to me?”

Lilia shook her head.

“Centuries, Lilia.” The blinks came closer and closer together, until Lilia could tell they were holding something in.

“What do either of us care for time?” Lilia asked, her voice soft and teasing.

A sobriety came over Addie, then. Her gentle, jovial face took on a stony vacancy that stole the smile from Lilia’s face as well.

“Sometimes,” Addie said, “I get so tired of being stuck in this gottverlassen forest, handing out candles and cords just to survive another winter.” She fingered the handle of her knife. “When I was young, I dreamed of traveling, like you did. I never imagined I would live here forever.”

Lilia watched as Addie dragged the blade of the knife across the table, leaving a long scratch on its surface.

“I wonder what would happen if one day we left here together,” Addie continued, “to walk among the common folk, as ourselves.”

This made Lilia’s breath quicken. There was nothing for them out there. She had seen it. In the eyes of the townsfolk, in the parishioners, in the news coming in from Austria and Sweden. The trials continued. Executions continued. She never wanted Addie to know what was waiting out there for them. They were still not safe. They might never be safe.

Lilia gently took the knife from Addie and set it down next to the lemon.

“And risk everything?” Lilia asked. “Why would we want to do that?”

“What’s the point of long life if we can’t spend it living?”

(Lilia would ask herself this question again, two hundred years from now, when the world’s most covenless witch sat across from her at a divination table and asked her to take stock of what little dignity she had left.)

There was more than one way to live, Lilia thought, watching the warm air blow the curtains in and dance around Addie’s hair. There was the dangerous way—full of terror and worry, the freedom to walk off a cliff or into a trap—or there was the way Lilia wanted to live now. Day by day, meal by meal, minute by minute. To see what was perfect in what was ordinary.

As Lilia bit into another lemon wedge and squirmed and howled in youthful ecstasy, Addie’s lingering scowl broke into a cackle, and Lilia thought she might never devote another second to anything but living.

XII. boston, 1926

Agatha slammed the door of Lilia’s apartment behind her, a bag of cash in her arms like a stolen baby. As soon as Lilia spotted her fugitive companion, she shot to the window, scanning the crowd in the street below and pulling the blinds closed.

“How did you even find me?” Lilia asked, out of breath.

Agatha dropped the bag by the radiator and pushed a thick lock of hair out of her face. “You’re not the only one who sees things they shouldn’t.”

“You can’t be here,” Lilia said. She closed the distance between them. “You want to get me killed?”

“Relax. You haven’t seen anyone coming, have you? With your eyes or—otherwise?” She winked.

She hadn’t. That was true. “Doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

“I’m going to be their first stop when they realize what we did.”

“What we did?” Lilia asked. “You tricked me into this, Agatha. You said we were only going to rob the boss, that it was payback—”

“And it was. Sweet, sweet payback.” Agatha strode past her to poke around in her cabinets. She magicked the drawers open and levitated a corkscrew out from under some wooden spoons. She snatched it out of the air. “You got any red wine around here? I heard you people do party tricks with wine.”

“Those men you killed had families,” Lilia said.

Lilia had already put her gun back in the cabinet. She was going to have to get rid of it now. It was supposed to be for protection. To keep herself safe.

“And now their families are free. And so are we,” Agatha said.

“You don’t care at all what happens to all those wives, those women? Their children?”

Agatha found the contraband wine squirrelled away behind the oil and vinegar. “Sure I do. But I have more faith in them than you do. We didn’t take all of it. They’ll get by, same as us.”

“We have—advantages that they don’t have. We’re different.”

“I know we’re different. We’re resourceful. We’re strong. Survival of the fittest, baby.”

Lilia smirked despite herself at the word ‘we’, and then grew sombre as she watched Agatha pour the last of her wine into teacups.

(Before they’d fled through the fire escape and made a miraculously clean getaway, Lilia had seen the silhouette of Death’s hood creeping up the stairwell, Death’s eyes peering through rippled glass. Agatha’s hand grew tight and clammy around Lilia’s wrist, and she pulled and pulled.

Lilia wanted to look, wanted to see Death touch those men’s faces, to finally ask her when it was going to be her time.

Agatha wanted to run.)

Lilia accepted a cup of wine from Agatha and watched her drag the sack from the radiator to the couch. Agatha came down on the cushion with the broken spring, and groaned when she sank into the seat.

“First thing you’re doing with your half is buying some new furniture. This is ridiculous.”

“I do fine,” Lilia said, “I’m thrifty.”

“You’re cheap. Even after this job, I bet you’ll still be cheap.” Agatha pulled out a stack of cash and licked her thumb. “You’re too used to having nothing. That’s what lets them take advantage of you.”

Lilia thinned her lips while Agatha counted everything out on the table. She was fair. Fifty-fifty, down to the dollar. It was more money than Lilia could imagine.

When Agatha put her half back in the bag, she said, “You should find someplace safe to stash this. Everyone in this building looks like they’d steal the wax outta your ears.”

Instead of laughing, Lilia’s heart lurched. Everyone in this building was down on their luck, just like Lilia. Everyone everywhere around her was poor and in need. She’d been charging for her services for almost fifty years and she had less now than she ever did.

She thought of her Maestra.

“I don’t want it,” Lilia said.

“Don’t want what?”

“Just give it away or something.” Lilia set her teacup down and stood up. “I don’t want any of it. I don’t need a curse like that following me around.”

Agatha leaned on every syllable. “You superstitious idiot,” she said, “this is your chance to get out of this mess. Don’t you want to go make something of yourself while you still can?”

“No,” Lilia said, “I don’t want to make anything anymore. I want to be left alone. I want everyone to forget they ever met me.” As a self-pitying afterthought, she added, “I’d forget myself if I could.”

She expected Agatha to scoff and give her some kind of backhanded pep talk. A belligerent motivational speech about reclaiming lost vitality.

Instead, she said, “Listen, if that’s what you really want, I can do that for you.”

Lilia shivered at the sincerity in her voice.

“What?”

“Yeah.” Agatha shrugged, her lips pursing. “You want the world to forget you? I’m your gal. I used to do memory spells all the time. Forgetting yourself? No problem. Consider it a bonus for good behaviour.”

“You would do that?” Lilia asked.

Agatha lifted her eyebrows in the tiniest acknowledgement. “It’s a hell of a spell, though. I’m gonna want something in return.”

Lilia felt the air in her lungs grow thick and heavy.

These signs she’d been seeing since her days in the Black Forest—the rabbits, the lightning—had she followed them here? To this?

Lilia licked her lips. “Name it,” she said.

Agatha’s fingers twitched. Flexed. “I want some of your power.”

“You want to take my power?” Lilia put an arm across her chest.

“Not all of it—just enough that I can do what you do.”

Ah, here was the downside. “Why? So you can divine ways to rob more people? Forget it.” She threw up her hands.

“No. God, I don’t want your cheap crystal ball tricks, Lilia,” Agatha said, and she braced herself on her knees. “You go somewhere, sometimes. I’ve seen you do it. I know you don’t just tell the future. And I don’t want to look forward, anyway.”

As Agatha’s expression shifted, Lilia stayed silent, watching her eyes glaze over. There was pain there instead of malice, and this only frightened Lilia more.

“I want to go back.”

XIII. schwarzwald, 1756

The rain fell harder and longer than she'd seen in all the years she lived in the Black Forest. Sheets of huge droplets, walls of sound, digging pockets out of the earth with their strength, pouring dirt downhill. She came outside in the aftermath, hesitant as the sun, and saw something sharp and bright poking out from under the shady leaves of her angelica plants. It was not bone; bone did not glint. It did not belong here.

As she approached, she saw it was a knife, blade-up.

Unearthing it took some effort. Mud clung to the handle, and she had to pick it away with slippery hands without cutting herself, but it did come free. She brought it in and washed it until she could see the engraving on it.

A mushroom.

Instantly, she knew whose it was. She did not know how it had gotten down here, nor could she reunite it with its owner. Not anymore.

Time flowed like sand through a bottomless hourglass when Addie died, one grain at a time.

There were no gaps to fill. Lilia had chosen to live every second of every day with her, and now all her memories were just that: memories. No promises of sights unseen, no moments to reclaim in the years ahead. This was her reward for hoarding time like a dragon, brooding over her hours until they hatched into dust.

With two gifts this time on Allerseelen (All Soul’s Day), Lilia returned to the ashen wreckage of Addie's cottage. Its destruction was never foretold, as Lilia promised herself, but avoiding the vision had not spared anyone anything at all.

The young girl and boy had been lost, starving, desperate. Addie kept them in her house for three days, as much milk and water as they could drink. She made them her special soup, and cooked vegetables, and baked gingerbread that they swore tasted like the one their mother made. Lilia visited and brought them toys; carved animals made from wood and rope.

When they were well enough to go home, Addie brewed them a cup of tea to send them off: chamomile, for strength and protection; a big dollop of honey, for sweet dreams.

Lilia learned, in bits and pieces from the town below, that the boy had dropped dead on the walk home. The girl described him as having lost all the air from his lungs. His gasps soon came out as squeaks, the colour left his face, his lips swelled and his arms turned red with blisters, and he clutched at his throat until he fainted and never stood again.

Poison, the people of the town said. That crone in the woods hated children and wanted to steal them and eat them. She cursed the ones who escaped. She was a danger to children. A danger to everyone. She had to be cut down.

Cut down, they said.

Adalheidis was the oldest tree in the forest. They did not speak her name; perhaps they never knew it. Her felling signalled the end of an age no one was left alive to remember.

She placed Addie’s knife on the ground, on the ashes where the hearth once stood. A token for Death, who had spared them her gaze for so many years. Lilia was not there in her final moments, but she could imagine Addie’s surprise at the sight of Death—her first glimpse and her last.

What would Death have looked like, then? Would she have come as a weary traveller, a smiling guest, a hungry mouth? Would Death have touched her as Lilia could not, a knuckle drawn down her freckled cheek?

On the stone stoop that remained, she placed gifts for Addie. A loaf of bread, a bowl of soup.

Burned to death in her own oven. A fitting end.

A fitting end, they said.

And it was, though they were wide of the why of it. Lilia could not imagine Addie accepting her demise any other way than to be brined by her stock, to be marinated in her marrow, to be roasted sweetly beneath the herbs she plucked from Lilia’s garden to season the finest meals this wild country could have ever dreamed of. To smell the air around her, then, as she burned, would have been heaven.

In Addie’s absence, Lilia had taught herself to cook.

XIV. boston, 1926

Lilia found a pen, but she had no paper.

“Can you hurry this up? I’m gonna be late for a dinner date.” Agatha was watching Lilia open drawer after drawer.

“Got another salivating gangster to take for all he’s worth?” She slammed another one shut.

“They wish. No, I’m breaking into a new line of work.” Agatha picked her nails. “Doing some basic revenge spells for cash. Got my first client lined up.”

“No rest for the wicked, eh?”

Lilia resented that she was still acting conversational with this woman. It was a sign she was feeling indebted. The spell hadn’t even been cast yet. And it never would, if she couldn’t find a piece of paper that she wouldn’t just accidentally throw away.

“Rest is for people with no ambition, so let’s get a move on, shall we?”

“Don’t you need to meditate or something first?” Lilia snapped. “Channel your power?”

“Maybe you do. This engine is always on. Look, can we just use this?” Lilia turned to see Agatha holding her old, beloved tarocchi deck, which she had nosily unwrapped and started picking through. Lilia should not have left them out today, or ever.

“I’m not going to let you doodle on my cards.”

“It’s not a doodle, Calderu.” Agatha picked one up and flourished it between her fingers, flashing the back. Blank. “I don’t have all day. This looks like something you’re not gonna lose. And hey, after this, no one will ask you about it. So.”

Lilia could already feel her anger giving way to helplessness. She closed the lid of the box she was looking through, and her shoulders sank. “Fine,” she said, “let’s get it over with.”

“‘Atta girl.”

The symbols were smaller and simpler than Lilia thought they would be. Agatha’s hands were steady and smooth; the calligraphy flowing from the pen was thicker, darker ink than it could have reliably produced on its own. It was wet, and black, and glistening.

After a few moments, Agatha stopped.

“When we’re done here,” Agatha said, and pointed at the edge of the card, “I need you to add a line crosswise to this last symbol here. That will finish off the inscription. I don’t wanna be all spun out in your house when this thing goes off. Capisce?”

Lilia nodded. She clenched her teeth when she found they were chattering.

“Now.” Agatha set down the pen and stood, walking around the coffee table over which she’d been hunched and taking a poised position opposite Lilia in the open space of her living room. Her stance was wide, her shoulders squared. “My payment.”

“How do I—”

“Just hit me with it. I’ll do the rest.” Agatha gave her a beckoning wave with both hands.

“Is this—” Lilia started, and she could feel her powers reaching out across the room to her, but the end of her sentence never made it to Agatha.

“—going to hurt?” She was standing in a circle with the Ladies in Sicily, tentatively reaching for their outstretched hands.

“—going to hurt?” She was in Paris, smiling at Elise and holding up a glass of absinthe.

“—going to hurt?” She was in New Orleans; a pale man held her hair away from her neck, his sharp mouth opening wide. She readied her fist.

These were gaps filling in, she had lived the seconds and minutes around these things already. Agatha was rooting around in her mind, looking for something. Testing, experimenting.

She could feel something happening to her body in the present moment. Something leaving. Instinctively, Lilia tried to yank it back.

“—going to hurt?” She was standing in a circle again, but these were not the Ladies; they were wearing bonnets and homespun dresses and they were enraged and descending upon her.

“ —going to hurt?” She was chewing hard on a lemon—nu limuni?—her belly swollen and her back arched against a tree trunk. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a green hood, an iris bloom, a pale face that looked so much like—

“—going to hurt?” She was in a field of wheat, looking down at a child. The boy’s hair was dark and wild. He had eyes like a tropical storm. He was holding up a finger with a splinter in it. His smile looked like a scythe.

These were not gaps, but they were not memories. Was this Agatha’s mind?

Somewhere far away she could hear Agatha cursing, and cursing, and cursing. Something ripped out of her and her power snapped back like an elastic. Lilia felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach.

She blinked a few black blinks, and then she was in her shabby old apartment in Boston, doubled over and gasping.

“This is useless,” Agatha said, with the punishing smack of anger she doled out the day they met.

Lilia was still heaving, her mind racing to keep up. She delved down into her mind, searching herself for holes in her powers and found them untainted, unaffected. Complete.

“Did it work?” Lilia asked.

Agatha shook her head, not looking at her. “The deal’s off. I can’t do anything with this—what even was that? Your powers are a trainwreck, Lilia.”

Lilia lugged herself forward until she flopped onto the couch. The cushion with the missing springs gave and her hips and her sit bones knocked awkwardly against the wooden frame below. It was going to bruise tomorrow.

“You’re the one who wants to do what I can do,” Lilia said, wincing.

Agatha pinched her fingers on the bridge of her nose. “Yeah, well, you neglected to mention the loophole, didn’t you?”

“What loophole?”

“I think I get it. Sort of.” Agatha sat on the coffee table across from her. “You don’t see straight. You get the kick twice.”

Lilia shrugged. That was about the gist of it.

“But when I tried to do it—all I got was time I already had. Memories. I couldn’t say or do anything, I just had to watch.” Agatha’s gaze left the room, it went back somewhere else. She shook her head. “And that’s when it hit me—if I was ever gonna do what you do, I would already know I could do it. Cause I would’a already done it. Get it?”

“It’s tricky that way, but—yeah, I guess you’re right.” Lilia should have known it would never work. In its twisted logic, it was obvious. “No gaps, huh?”

Agatha shook her head. “I never missed a day,” she said. “Probably not even a minute.”

Lilia thought of what happened when she gave away her days. What happened when she didn’t. She tried to summon something to say, to tend the wound that sat so openly on Agatha’s face.

“It’s–it’s really a blessing to bear witness—”

“Don’t tell me about bearing witness, okay?” Agatha snapped, and rose to her feet. “Not me.”

She grabbed the pen off the table.

Lilia realized with a cold shock that she was going to mark out the inscription on the card. “Hey!” She charged after her. “You don’t get to take it back just ‘cause you got buyer’s remorse.”

She grabbed Agatha by the wrist, wrenching one hand away from the other.

Agatha twisted in her grip until they were almost nose to nose. “You knew this was a raw deal, and you were just gonna let me go through with it.”

“Bullshit. I had no idea what you wanted my powers for.” Lilia frowned. “I still don’t.”

But she had an inkling. Those split-second memories of Agatha’s told a longer story.

Agatha’s lip curled. “You got more out of me than you should have already.”

She reckoned Agatha had a bone to pick with Death, too.

“I knew this was a stupid idea,” Lilia said, “I knew I’d get taken for a ride, soon as you drew that goddamn Seven of Swords.”

“I thought that was the whole point of drawing them.” Agatha flickered the marked card in her free hand. Lilia finally caught the front of it.

The Queen of Cups.

“And what does this one tell you?” Agatha asked, and Lilia remembered.

Intuition. Compassion. Listen with your heart.

This card made her think of the portrait of her Nanna on the terracotta, in wine and blood and tears. What would Maestra say now? What would she tell her to do?

‘Look again.’

Lilia looked down at her hand, holding Agatha’s wrist. Her thumb slipped up to Agatha’s palm and before a vision could come to her, there was a knocking at the edges of her mind. It was not Agatha—though Agatha’s fervent desire to read her thoughts still ached.

It was herself.

Lilia did something she had never done before, and let her in without question.

She wasn’t sure how much time she lost. More than a heartbeat, less than a song.

When she was back in line with her thoughts, Lilia and Agatha were on the other side of the coffee table, sitting again, and Agatha was explaining something to her. She tapped her finger on the edge of the card, the symbols still visible and wet.

“—probably a better deal than you think. So, how about it?”

“What?”

Agatha gaped at her for several seconds, then threw up her hands. “Where were you? Which one of you did I just explain all this to?”

Lilia shook her head. “Just give me the highlights, would ya? Stop being so confrontational.”

“I’m doing you a massive favour here, okay? Pay attention. You draw the last line like this”—she drew a long fingernail crosswise over the end symbol—“everyone forgets you. Me. You. Your boss. Your earwax-stealing neighbours. No take backs. No refunds. I won’t even know I did it. You draw it like this”—she drew a circle with her nail around the last symbol—“and you and I forget we met instead.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Caro Dio, Lilia, why do I gotta tell you all of this twice—”

Lilia flattened her face, put up her palms in surrender. “Would you just—”

“—because then it’s peace, babe. A truce. A do-over. You don’t want to go through with this, and this’ll fix it. You’ll forget you can be forgotten, you’ll never have to regret the regrettable. And I won’t have to kill you later for learning too much about me.” Her eyes flashed, and Lilia did not doubt she meant it.

“And you?” Lilia drummed her fingers.

The flash gave way to thunder, and a swell of rain, but it looked more like surrender than destruction. “Honestly?” Her eyebrows knit together. She swallowed one long deep breath, and then it was gone. “I don’t know. We’re just both going to have to trust you on this one. Either way, I’m outta here.”

Agatha hid her sack of cash under the coat on her arm. She took Lilia’s gun without asking. She left the pen on the table.

“You’ll thank me later,” she continued, “of that much I’m sure.” Without the fur to flourish, she flicked her wild hair over her shoulder in Lilia’s front doorway. “Hey, maybe you did rub off on me a little after all.”

The door slammed behind her as she left. Lilia stared at the unfinished spell and considered her options.

She practiced them with the pen on the backs of her hands. Held them both out in front of her.

On one hand was the long line. Swords. Wands. Slipping in and out of the world unnoticed. No more run-ins with Death. No more unnecessary entanglements. She would not have to protect her heart, because there would be nothing to penetrate it.

On the other was the circle. Cups. Pentacles. An obligation to look, an obligation to see. There was the hard work ahead of reckoning. Of remembering to give instead of take. Freedom. Real freedom, and every cliff and trap that came with it.

But there was no real decision to make, was there? Even if it wasn’t destiny, there was still only one right answer.

She drew the circle in dark black ink.

(When Lilia remembered this forgetting a hundred years later, she recalled it as something like the tide going out. Cyclical and inevitable.)

When the daze wore off, Lilia studied the small pile of money sitting on her coffee table, wondering why she had it. Wondering what to do with it.

She put some of it away, in the envelope at the back of her cabinet, just enough to float her until she could skip town. New York, maybe. Or New Jersey. Somewhere she could settle down and work.

The rest she left with the receptionist at the Overseers of the Public Welfare. She’d read in the paper they were working on a rebuild of a clinic and shelter on the west end for women and children. When they asked her what she thought they should spend her money on, she thought of the first place that ever felt like home, and the last.

“A kitchen,” she said, “a nice kitchen will do just fine.”

On the street corner outside the Overseers’ building, she found a discarded couch with a cushion full of good springs. She pried the cushion loose and hauled it under her arms all the way home.

XV. schwarzwald, 1720

The fire crackled and the air smelled like winter’s rest.

Bulwarked against the cold, Addie and Lilia were tucked under a blanket, watching the kettle boil. The snow had stopped, but it was piled high enough that they could not see out the windows of Lilia’s cottage. ‘Frau Holle shook her blankets out,’ Addie would say.

(Lilia learned, through whispers and stories, stitching clues to coincidences over the years that The Lady, Frau Holle, was none other than the very same Diana her Maestra bade her pray to. It felt like proof that home was a thing you could carry; home was a tune you could hum.)

Lilia should have felt trapped, entombed. But instead, she felt safe. The things that mattered most in the world were all trapped in here, too, except perhaps Addie’s best cookpot. Their supper would have been difficult to assemble in the hands of a lesser Küchenhexe (kitchen witch), but Addie thrived on the challenge.

The wreckage of the excellent meal was in a bucket by the door, waiting for well water. The heaviness of the pasta she was digesting made her feel sleepy and comfortable.

Lilia looked at Addie, who had stopped watching the kettle and was now reaching for Lilia’s tarocchi cards, left out by mistake. Lilia thought to take them back, but instead she waited with a mild curiosity. She wanted to see what she would do with them.

“You’ve never tried to tell my fortune,” Addie said, peeling one card at a time into her palm, “after all this time. Not once.”

“No, and I never will.”

“How can I possibly know you’re skilled, then?” She brought the deck onto her lap and started counting them, started taking them off the top and placing them upright on Lilia’s knee.

Lilia was too wise to her game. “You’re not going to trick me into it, either.”

“Why not?”

“Your mystery is my favourite thing about you.”

Addie let the cards in her hands fall into a haphazard pile. “That’s your favourite thing about me?” She pushed the cards back together again, tried to restore the deck to its original state.

“And your Spätzle,” Lilia admitted.

She took the deck out of Addie’s hands, and with her dexterous fingers she straightened them out. Now it was Addie’s turn to watch.

“Why?” Lilia asked, shuffling the cards between her fingers, reveling in the soft weight of them. She so rarely picked them up anymore. “What’s your favourite thing about me?”

Addie flashed a wild look at her. “Your appetite.”

Lilia let out a spectacular laugh, her head whipping back. When she looked back down, Addie had drawn the top card, turning it out to Lilia.

To Addie, it was just a drawing. To Lilia, it was The Empress.

Beauty. Pleasure. Gratitude. Groundedness. The divine feminine.

Of course it was The Empress. It could be nothing else.

Something stirred inside her, something old and persistent and familiar, and the kettle whistled. Lilia did not react—she kept her hands in her lap, kept her thoughts in her head—but she could not help but look at her. This, she could not help.

Addie hummed in thought and tapped the card against her temple. She smiled at Lilia with her chin in her palm, her expression unreadable.

“And your eyes.”

XVI. the witches’ road, 2026

When Lilia touched the tarot deck in the divination trial, she knew her beloved tarocchi had made it onto The Road. The imagery was different—more modern, like the painted decks she loved that came out of London—but the feel of them in her hands was as old as time. It was unmistakable.

When she cut and shuffled them, she felt a stillness come over her. Her hands no longer trembled. Her mind was focused. She was taking a break. ‘Real’ divination was exhausting—the smoke, the oil, the wine, the palms, the tea—but tarot was still a game.

This reading was not for Billy Maximoff.

Her mind went in circles. For every trip she took around the warrens below, there was another journey that sent her further and further away.

She saw Maestra again for the first time in centuries. A conversation she never had before. Gaps she thought would never fill in, as long as she lived.

She was nine. She was at home, at the commune, with the Ladies from Outside. Her first divination lesson.

After every abrupt return to the divination trial, her coven became more and more frantic, but Maestra looked so genuinely pleased to see her that the temptation to linger was irresistible.

Nine-year-old Lilia would never have known the worth of a quiet morning like this—the birds, the grove, a hot cup of tea. She could never have appreciated how sacred this time with Maestra was.

Lilia had many moments of clarity in the minutes before she died, but this was the first: right now was when she was meant to appreciate it. Lilia Calderu, age four hundred and ninety, with her path wound out of time. She was the only one who could.

The stonework table in the garden gazebo read Noli dominari sed interpretare.

Lilia had never bothered to take in the words before, despite running her fingers along the carvings nervously whenever Maestra asked her to look again.

Do not dominate; interpret.

“I’m a forgotten woman,” Lilia said.

It had been exactly what she’d asked for, and she could no longer bear it.

“Then remember yourself,” Maestra said.

When Lilia flipped over the Queen of Cups, she saw strange symbols on the back of the card. The ink still looked wet. The pads of her fingers smudged it before she could catch herself, and something cracked open.

Her first meeting with Agatha—not the one in New Jersey, but the real first time—came back to her in a whirl of colour and shape. A speakeasy, a fortune, a rabbit, a con—a spell? They had cast a spell together?

She flicked her eyes up to Agatha, who was gripping the iron grates at the edge of the room like she was overcome. She made a cutting comment that now felt more familiar than ever.

This covenless witch, this woman she thought she knew only by reputation, had been her Sister for over a century. The memories filled in en masse, but they were incomplete. There was still one space left she could not account for, even now.

She drew the Three of Swords. Heartbreak, sorrow, grief; but also: the path out. The choice to rise again.

Lilia shot back into her apartment in Boston, in 1926. Her half-dollar padlock and her four-cent soap. She had her hand closed around Agatha’s wrist, her thumb in her palm. She looked up.

Agatha looked the same, now she could remember what she used to look like. The wildness was still untamed, the thrum of energy emanating from her was undiminished. But she looked more unhinged, closer to grief than she did on The Road. Closer to madness.

“What?” Agatha said, trying to squirm out of her grasp.

“You’re going to give us a better deal,” Lilia said.

“Sorry?”

“You aren’t going to bail on me like this today, Agatha. You’ll get another chance to try and screw me over and the odds’ll be better for you by then.”

“Since when do you—” Agatha stopped herself. Stopped resisting. “You sure?”

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

Lilia’s manner of speech was unnerving, she could tell. The Lilia speaking to her now had a hundred years in Jersey nestled in her accent. Compared to the ambiguous dialect she was growing out of back then, she must’ve sounded like a completely new person.

“You tell me,” Agatha said. She wrenched her hand free from Lilia’s grip. She set down the card and the pen and rubbed her wrist.

“You underestimated me.”

“No I didn’t. This character bit you’re doing right now for instance—terrifying. Thank you. Well played.” When Lilia stared at her, Agatha continued, “I never underestimated you. You know better than that. I didn’t take you out, I recruited you.”

“Then you know I’m going to regret this.”

“That’s not my problem,” Agatha said. She sat on the arm of the couch and folded her arms.

“I’m telling you that it is. Neither of us will get what we want this way.”

“How can you—sorry, right, I know,” Agatha added, throwing her hands up. “Fine. Let’s say I believe you. What’s the better deal?”

“You’ll think of something.”

“You’re going to leave it up to me?”

“Yeah, I am,” Lilia said. “Mi fidu di tia.”

She wanted to say ‘I will trust you,’ but, ironically, there was no future tense in Sicilian.

The best she could manage was ‘I trust you,’ with the hope that Agatha knew it meant ‘...when our paths cross again.’

(And she did trust Agatha, even when she did not know what following her instructions would do to her, what it would lead to for both of them. But when things were all in order again, at the end of The Road, she realized who she really trusted at that moment.)

Lilia’s chance to repay Agatha appeared in an instant when she snapped back to the divination trial. A vision not at all unlike the fortune she told in a smoky bar to a wild dame in a fur coat, a black rabbit squeezed tight between her fingers.

She wasn’t sure if she could get her out of it; she was a seer, after all, not a doer.

But for Agatha, the woman who helped save her from herself, the witch who reminded her what her powers were for, she was going to give it one more shot.

“When she calls you a coward, hit the deck.”

XVII.

Rio had been watching Lilia for some time. Somewhere between the end of the question and the beginning of the answer, she’d shed her Cool Girl exterior.

Rio was undeniably the Death she’d known all her life, the one she’d seen in dreams and visions, and on terribly special occasions, close enough to touch—or not.

She had the cloak of green fire, the smoke, the shepherd’s crook. But no sign of a limp. Perhaps it had been a comforting affectation for mortal benefit. If Death herself could be wounded and worn down, maybe nothing was timeless.

Death’s magic encircled Lilia, gnawed at her. Who was she, after four hundred and ninety years alive? Had she been anything to anyone at all? The ones who cared for her, taken too soon? The ones she loved, unable to touch?

Even after choosing not to forget herself, to live with her own mistakes, she squandered it—she managed to live forgettably until the day she was called to The Road. Not in squalor, not in avarice, but unobtrusively. On the edge of things.

Sure, she eventually returned to her roots in New Jersey, when she left Boston behind. She honoured her maestra and her nanna by giving away her gifts to the most unfortunate, the most in need. But those she helped were sworn to secrecy. They’d never utter her name.

All that time begging to be forgotten, and now she had the gall to dictate how she’d be remembered. No one would remember her. She’d guessed it and it had come to pass. That was the trouble, wasn’t it?

“That’s where you’re wrong, Lilia,” Rio said, as if Lilia had been speaking aloud. “You couldn’t control who you were to other people any more than you could control what happened to them.” She shook her head, rolled her eyes. “All this sight, and you still can’t see it.”

“See what?” Lilia asked, hands flying from her sides. “Endless tragedy? Limitless sorrow?”

“And what is sorrow?” Rio asked, that unceasing pressure in her tone. “What is it, if it isn’t joy in reverse?”

Lilia could smell flowers blooming.

“You forget, Lilia,” Rio said, “you forget that so many of them had full lives before I came along. Are you not a part of that?” Rio came to stand beside her. “Can’t you see who you were to them?”

The titles came to her like gaps, but their linearity no longer mattered.

Pupil. Sister. Daughter. Mentor. Friend.

Witch.

Memories and premonitions circled back on themselves. She found order out of chaos, disparate images that came together to form an unexpected and satisfying whole. Through it all, so much joy. How could she have missed it?

“Ready to go?” Rio asked, the voice of an usher at a funeral.

Lilia regarded herself at her own feet, dressed in pink organza. It didn’t look that silly anymore.

“Can I be alone for a minute?” Lilia asked.

“Don’t you think you’ve been alone long enough?”

When Lilia looked back up, the gates to the beyond had opened. Through the darkness, she could see the moon, and the path, and the walnut tree. The Outside.

(All those years and she’d never asked: Outside of what?)

Death held out her hand. The green fire was everywhere.

Someone was calling her. She looked over Death’s shoulder towards the sound. When she looked back, Death was smiling. Not a challenge, but an invitation. She touched Lilia’s face with the back of her fingers. It felt like nothing she’d ever felt before. It felt like nothing at all.

Lilia embodied all the Aces, brimming with potential. A cycle begun anew. She didn’t know what there was to do, at the close of her life, only that there was so, so much of it.

She put her hand on Death’s hand, and smiled back, and they were gone.