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“Do we need to bribe him?” she asks me as we approach.
I can’t help but laugh at that. “I’m afraid it wouldn’t help. He has his own set of morals I don’t know much about.”
“Ethel Rose Bagley,” the Magician says in his strange voice, both empty and flat and yet deep and echoing. “Here, the cards of your life are drawn. Are you ready to accept whatever is dealt?”
Ethel shakes her head, stubborn to the end.
“I’d rather have a choice, if that’s alright with you,” she says.
Despite not having a face, I swear, I feel the Magician smile. A shooting star curves up across the lower half of his void face.
He shuffles the deck, as is customary, the cards flying through the air as if moved by invisible hands, until he selects one with black, velvet gloved fingers.
He looks at it and then turns it around.
A picture of a skeleton burning in fire.
“Inmost,” the Magician booms.
“Is that good or bad?” Ethel asks.
I barely have time to voice my shock and displeasure before the gates of the City swing open, and black smoke, curled into the shape of claws, comes shooting out. They grab Ethel by her shoulders and snatch her back through the air in an instant. All that’s left behind is the reindeer pelt I lent her, and it falls to the snowy ground as the gates slam shut.
“Inmost!” I exclaim to the Magician. “There must be some sort of mistake! She was a sweet old lady. Well, maybe not sweet, but old anyway, and?—”
“She murdered her husband and his lover,” the Magician interrupts me.
I swallow hard, my eyes still wide. All that talk about her ex, and it turns out, she’s the one who killed him. No wonder she’s been so worried about running into him in the afterlife.
“Surely if you repent for your crimes and sins, you’ll at least go to the Golden Mean,” I say to the Magician, feeling the need to barter for Ethel’s doom.
“She hasn’t felt remorse a single day in her life,” the Magician says plainly. “She has gone where she belongs. As the ferrywoman, you should know better than to get involved with the lives of the dead. I’m surprised you felt the need to accompany her here to begin with.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s just that I was feeling…well, it doesn’t matter. But this storm. The cold. She was so cold, and I felt bad that her afterlife was going this way. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you think this storm is odd?”
“I feel nothing.”
Of course he doesn’t.
“There’s something wrong,” I say, staring into the inky abyss of the Magician’s face.
“Indeed, you’re right about that,” he says.
I blink. “I am? What do you think it is? Is it my father? Do you know if he’s, he’s…”
“The Bone Match is over. Your father left this place not long ago,” he says. “Heading back to Shadow’s End.”
My heart soars. “He’s alive!”
The Magician doesn’t say anything for a moment. If he had a face, I think I would see him close his eyes in thought, but there are only spinning galaxies and waxing moons.
“He is alive,” he finally says.
I exhale a shaky breath, my hand at my chest. “Thank the Creator,” I say before I pause. “Wait, you agreed that something is wrong.”
He nods. “Yes.”
“So what is it? Is it connected to this storm?”
