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“What do you want?” I ask again, louder.

It is the ghost girl I recognize from my first day who speaks. “I’m sorry for this,” she says, her eyes and mouth dragging downward with what appears to be genuine regret. Before, her voice had been soft and distant as a breeze fluttering through a bamboo forest, an echo in an empty pagoda. Yet, for some reason, it sounds closer now than ever before, each word firmer around the edges. Not just that. It could be the effect of the moonlight streaming in through the single window by my bed, its luminosity strange and slanted, moving over the silhouettes of the ghosts, but they seem more . . . real. Their outlines are still a shade paler than the tiled walls, fluid in the way of water, yet they’re distinct, the colors of their bruised skin and ruined robes filled in.

“You don’t know what day it is, do you?” the ghost girl continues.

“The day?” I try to remember, but time in the Night Realm does not move normally. It is difficult enough to distinguish morning from night.

The ghosts around her sway back and forth with eerie concentration, still murmuring under their breaths. Their words are too fast for me make out what they’re saying, but with every passing second, they seem to grow increasingly restless, their bony, bloodless hands reaching for me.

My gut twists in premonition.

And then—understanding.

Belatedly, I remember the brief section in our textbooks on the Ghost Festival. The one night the ghosts adopt something close to physical forms, when the lines between the living and the dead are thinnest. When the ghosts are at their most bloodthirsty.

Under the sheets, my hands curl into fists, my power humming through me and gathering in my palms.

“They say that bathing in the blood of a healer god can bring us back to life,” the ghost girl says, her voice strengthening. The raw hunger in it makes my insides curl. “We only have this one chance. I’m sorry.” Her tone changes, becomes sickly sweet, meant to comfort. “We’ll try not to make it too painful for you.”

Then they all lunge at me.

I lift my arms and make a rapid slicing motion, a bright blaze of power streaking through the air like a crescent blade. The walls tremble from the force and loose dust trickles from the ceiling, but the ghosts continue, undeterred. I cannot harm them, I realize, fear rising to my throat and choking off my breath, but they can harm me. Nothing is stopping them from harming me.

Fingers wrap around my ankle. Horribly solid. Their skin is still that of the dead, too cold and too clammy, like the outside of a plum left too long in the rain, but there’s also weight and pressure and so much force it hurts. I can feel their sharp nails scratching at my calves, digging into my flesh.

“Stop—” I kick out, scrambling as far back on the bed as I can go, but when one grip loosens, another immediately latches on in its place. My stomach turns. My heart slams between my spine and my rib cage with such speed I fear it will break something. They’re everywhere, crowding forth from all sides, those blank white eyes haunting me. “Stop. Get away—”

A sharp pain tears up my leg. I seem to be drifting above my own body when I look down and see the fresh cut stretching from my knee to my ankle, the rough width of a talon. Deep enough to glimpse bone. Blood blooms instantly, trickling onto the sheets.

The very sight of it stirs them into a greater frenzy.

They swarm the room like insects, swooping in like vultures around a carcass. Their grips on my leg tighten and the pain intensifies until it feels like my every nerve is being clamped together, my muscles braided into one long rope, squeezed like a lemon for juice, and the blood runs, warm and wet and oozing down my limbs. I think I’m screaming. My throat is raw, my mouth filled with the bitter taste of rust, but I can’t hear it, can’t hear anything except that awful humming and my desperately thumping heart.

More pain. New, searing points of it, along my wrists and across my neck.

Through my panic, I imagine myself lying motionless in the aftermath, my blood gathered in their palms and my eyes glazed. Perhaps they will cut me into pieces. Perhaps they will pour my blood into pretty clay bowls. That is the true duty of every healer, is it not? We let ourselves be split up and divided into precious morsels by strangers, draining and starving ourselves so others may thrive. To them, we do not really exist in our own bodies. We are here to serve a purpose and little else. The ghosts look at me and see a hollow shell, a plate of fruit at the altar, an animal offered up for sacrifice, brimming with life yet empty of any thoughts or feelings. They do not hear my screams. They do not care to. It seems they have already taken all there is to take, yet somehow they continue, tearing me apart with their fingers, ripping the agony open.

As more moonlight spills into the room, they strengthen. Their silhouettes are smooth and firm as the edge of a silver spoon, so solid that they cast long, eerie shadows over the floor. As I watch through the haze of my horror, those shadows appear to merge to resemble something of a beast, leaping at me, claws and fangs bared, yet no matter how many times I jerk my arms out of the ghosts’ grasps to dredge up my power, it’s still futile. I cannot kill it. You cannot kill something that is already dead.

The ghosts do not even stumble when my energy hits them square in the chest. They simply absorb it.

There’s a riddle, I think hysterically. How does a god stop a ghost?

My only solace is that it must be over soon. I can sense my energy leaking from me, flowing even faster than my blood. It is something I have given surprisingly little thought to—before, I was too concerned with saving the other gods, and in recent days, I have been too preoccupied with the matter of survival. But what does death feel like for a god? Perhaps it would be different from mortals, whose lives are fragile and short as that of flies, so often dropping from the air without warning. They close their eyes and it’s over; their bodies will return to the soil, their hair will be fed to flowers, their bones will soften and collapse with decay. But the gods are said to die like stars. In a blaze of brilliance, and then darkness. Our powers fade with our celestial forms until all that remains are our souls. So will those final moments be like falling asleep? Or like waking up in the middle of the night, disoriented, still clinging on to the edge of a dream, and fumbling around for a candle only to find there is none?

I could fall asleep now, I think.

I’m so deeply exhausted. Not just from the past days, but the past centuries: rising every morning just to work, to prove myself, and hold on until the night, never resting, never complaining, and having to do it all over again, sustained only by the hope that my efforts would be recognized by the greater gods. I have lived like this for so long. To a mortal, five hundred years must seem such an extravagant, almost obscene number, more than they could ever imagine in their lifetime. To a sparrow, or a hare, or a butterfly, that must seem like an eternity.

And at least the pain would be gone . . .

Already, it’s fading. I can no longer feel their sharp, scrabbling nails, their iron-hard grips on me. The room has gone quiet as a deserted forest. For a moment I wonder if I’ve already died. If it’s really that simple, that easy. But the throbbing in my legs isn’t fully gone yet, and the bedding is still crumpled beneath me, damp with my blood.

My eyes, which I hadn’t even realized were shut, flutter open.

The Death God is here.

Only the back of his head is visible from where I lie—the sleek trail of his hair ending at his waist, the crow-feather black of his robes, the straight, sure lines of his shoulders. The space around him has been cleared as if by a great shield, extending five feet from the base of the bed. The ghosts are all cowering before him, shriveled up and whispering apologies, wiping the blood on their fingers in some sorry attempt to hide the evidence.