Cole salted the last of the revenant’s bones at two in the morning, under a drizzle that turned a two-hour job into six.
The farmer had hanged himself in a barn in 1974 and spent every April since scaring off whoever was renting the property.
Tonight he stopped for good.
He was loading the truck when the Writ showed him the secretary.
She was standing outside the Methodist church two blocks south.
Late fifties.
Gray coat.
Thin the way a candle gets near the end of the wick still upright, but the substance mostly gone.
The print was clear.
Nine days.
Internal cause.
Cancer, probably.
Advanced.
Cole turned toward the church.
The lights were off.
It was past three in the morning and the drizzle had left the sidewalk smelling like wet limestone.
The woman wasn’t there.
The Writ was just telling him she would be.
He should have gotten in the truck.
He walked to the church instead.
The cemetery behind it was old.
Crooked headstones and grass that needed cutting.
Cole sat on the low stone wall and waited, listening to the drizzle tick against the granite markers until it stopped and the only sound left was a cardinal somewhere in the elms.
The sky stayed dark.
At seven-thirty a car pulled into the church lot and the woman got out.
She unlocked the side door and went in, moving carefully, like her ribs hurt.
Cole counted the headstones.
Forty-three.
At eight a school bus ground to a stop in front of the church, brakes hissing, and a girl got off.
Eleven or twelve.
Blond hair in a ponytail.
Backpack.
She walked up to the church and went in the side door without knocking.
The Writ showed Cole her print before she reached the steps.
One week.
External cause.
A car accident.
The shape of it was clear.
A sedan.
A wet road.
The girl in the passenger seat.
The angle wrong.
Cole sat on the wall and did not move.
Two prints.
Two deaths.
One nine days out.
One seven.
He looked at the church door.
The Writ had never shown him two at once before.
He walked to the diner across the street and ordered coffee he didn’t drink.
The booth vinyl was cracked and cold under his forearms.
He sat by the window and watched the church.
At noon she came out and walked to the gas station on the corner, bought a sandwich and a Coke, and walked back, checking both ways before crossing the street.
Careful.
At five the woman came out and locked the door.
The kid followed.
They stood in the parking lot and talked for a minute, the woman’s hand resting on her shoulder, and then they got in the car together.
The woman drove.
The kid watched her the whole time, one hand gripping the seatbelt strap at her collarbone.
Cole left money on the table and walked back to the truck.
He should have driven south.
There was a vetala in Decorah and a revenant in La Crosse and a week of cases waiting.
He had forty dollars in his wallet and the motel rent was three days overdue.
He stayed.
The next morning he parked outside the church at six and waited.
The woman arrived at seven-thirty.
The girl came off the bus at eight.
Cole walked to the side door and knocked.
The woman answered.
Tired.
Eyes flat and careful, reading him the way you read a stranger standing at a church door at eight in the morning.
“Help you?”
“I’m looking for the secretary,” Cole said.
“That’s me.”
“I need to ask you something.”
The woman studied him.
She didn’t open the door wider.
“About what.”
“Your granddaughter.”
Her face changed.
Not much.
Just enough.
“What about her.”
“I think she’s in danger.”
The woman looked at him for a long time.
Then she opened the door.
“Come in.”
Inside, the kid sat at a desk in the office folding bulletins.
She glanced up when Cole walked in not scared, just watchful, sizing him up the way you size up a stranger who might have an answer.
“This is Mr.” the woman said.
“Brenner,” Cole said.
She turned to her grandmother.
“Is this about the hospital?”
“No,” the woman said.
“Then what’s he here for.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You know your grandma’s sick.”
“Yes.”
“You know it’s bad.”
“Yes.”
The woman said, “Emma”
“It’s okay,” the girl said.
Her chin came up.
“Can you help her?”
“No.”
Her face didn’t change.
“Then why are you here.”
Cole looked at the grandmother.
Nine days.
Then at the girl.
Seven.
“I can see when people are going to die,” he said.
The room was quiet.
The grandmother sat down.
She didn’t say anything.
The girl said, “When.”
“Your grandma has nine days.
You have seven.”
Emma turned to her grandmother.
The old woman stared down at her hands.
“How,” the girl said.
“Car accident.
You’re in the passenger seat.
Wet road.
The angle’s wrong.”
The girl was quiet.
Then she said, “Can you stop it.”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you try.”
He studied her.
Eleven years old.
Clear-eyed.
Asking him to try.
“Yes,” he said.
The grandmother said, “What do you need.”
“Time,” Cole said.
“And a name.”
The girl’s father came at ten.
He was younger than Cole expected.
Thirty, maybe.
Carpenter’s hands, scarred across the knuckles, and he smelled like sawdust and cold morning air.
He listened to Cole explain it twice and didn’t interrupt.
When Cole finished the man turned to his daughter and said, “Go wait in the hall.”
“Dad”
“Hall.”
She left.
The father looked at Cole.
“What do you want.”
“Nothing.”
“Everybody wants something.”
“Not from you.”
The father looked at his mother.
She pressed her lips together and dipped her chin once.
“All right,” the father said.
“What do we do.”
Cole told him.
The father listened, arms folded, weight on his heels.
At the end he said, “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“And she’ll be safe.”
“I think so.”
“You think so.”
“I don’t know for sure.
I’ve never done this before.”
The father looked at him for a long time.
Then he turned to his mother.
“Mom.”
“Do it,” the grandmother said.
That night Cole drove to the edge of town and parked at a crossroads.
Gravel and corn and no streetlights.
He got out of the truck and stood in the center where the roads met, the gravel sharp under his boots, the air carrying that flat green smell of young corn and turned earth.
The sky was clear.
He could see his breath.
He said the words.
Nothing happened.
He waited.
At midnight the air moved.
Not wind.
Something else.
The temperature dropped ten degrees in a second.
Cole felt the pull in his chest.
The same pull he’d felt when he’d read the Writ.
The same pull he’d felt when a print moved under his hands.
A man stepped out of the dark.
He was wearing a suit.
Black.
Old-fashioned.
His face was plain.
His eyes were black all the way through.
“Hello,” the man said.
“You called,” the man said.
“What do you want.”
“A trade,” Cole said.
The man smiled.
“Everyone does.”
Cole told him.
The man listened.
When Cole finished the man tilted his head.
“That’s two,” he said.
“I know.”
“Two runs steeper than one.”
“I know.”
“What are you putting up.”
“What do you want.”
The man looked at him, smile unchanged a butcher eyeing a side of beef he’d already weighed.
“How much time do you have, Cole Brenner.”
Cole didn’t ask how the man knew his name.
“Enough.”
“Let me see.”
The pull in Cole’s chest moved.
It felt like something reaching in and counting.
It lasted five seconds.
When it stopped the man nodded.
“You’ve got sixty years if you’re lucky,” the man said.
“Forty if you’re not.
I’ll take ten.
And a piece of your soul.
Small.
You won’t miss it at first.”
“The grandmother dies in nine days.”
“She does.”
“Can you stop it.”
“No.
Cancer doesn’t wait for deals.
But I can make the girl’s accident not happen.
I can move her off the road.
The father too, if he’s driving.
Clean.
No scars.
They won’t even know it didn’t happen.”
“And the grandmother.”
“Dies on schedule.
Some things don’t move.”
Cole looked out at the crossroads.
Gravel and corn.
The stars were out.
He could see the truck parked thirty feet away.
“Ten years,” he said.
“And a piece of your soul.”
“How big a piece.”
“You’ll know when it’s gone.
You’ll feel lighter.
Emptier.
A little less than you were.
It grows back, mostly.
Takes a lifetime.
You’ll be fine.”
Cole thought about the girl folding bulletins.
The grandmother’s hand on her shoulder.
The father who’d listened and then asked what to do.
“Deal,” he said.
The man smiled wider.
“Good.”
The pull in Cole’s chest came back.
Harder this time.
It felt like something tearing not painful, worse than painful, like something being removed that shouldn’t be removed.
A piece of him pulled out clean.
He tasted copper at the back of his throat.
He could feel it go.
He could feel the space it left.
The man held out his hand.
Cole shook it.
The pull stopped.
The man let go.
“Done,” he said.
“The girl’s off the road.
The father too.
They’ll take a different route Tuesday morning.
Won’t even know why.
You won’t see them again.”
“And the grandmother.”
“Nine days.
I’m sorry about that.
I really am.”
The man stepped back into the dark.
The temperature rose.
The air was still again.
Cole stood in the crossroads and held up his hand.
Same scars, same knuckles, same lines in the palm but something behind it had shifted, like a house that still stands after you’ve moved the furniture out.
He put it in his pocket.
The space inside him where the piece had been felt like a room he’d walked past a thousand times and never opened.
He walked back to the truck and drove south.
The vetala was waiting.