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ponytail who is crying—Amber can see her tears, even in the rain. The little girl’s mouth is open, but her little-girl screams are drowned out by other shrieking, like the whistle of fireworks just before they explode, but so much louder and filled with such anguish that at last Amber screams, too.
    The Reaper stands in the street, swirling from nothing to solidity as though sculpted from and by the storm. Black ribbons of fabric whip in the wind and hot rain, dragging against its body so that she can see it is anything but human. Its limbs and torso are thin as iron piping, and the wind wails as it passes through the gaps where its eyes should be. Yet it turns and looks at her, and there is a kind of ice-blue light that gleams deep down in those pits like distant stars. In each of its hands it holds a thin, curved blade, black as pitch but gleaming in the rain.
    It moves through the air as though it is spilling from one world into another. Ribbons of torn clothing flutter from its stick-body. Sickles slash the air and it has fallen upon the family, cutting the woman and her husband and her child, but it isn’t blood that splashes out of them. It is light. It is laughter. It is spirit.
    And the rain pelts down, and screams echo along the streets of Hawthorne, and the hateful storm sags lower, smothering, and there are so many more Reapers in the sky, riding the winds like murderous ravens, like ancient witches . . . like Death.
    Amber only screams. The hot rain is burning her skin, eating flesh and muscle, heading for bone. The sky splits, the clouds peeling back like the edges of a wound, and something is born from the labial folds of that storm. She can see infinite stars like Reaper’s eyes in the night sky beyond that split.
    In the street stands a woman, bathed in the light of those stars. But she is not a woman at all. She is wrapped in gauzy veils that do nothing to hide her three sets of heavy breasts. Her long arms end in talons as sharp and savage as the Reaper’s blades, but entirely her own. Her hair is indigo fire, burning cold, and her flesh the blue of drowned children. Light and shadow play across her face, showing beauty and grotesquerie in zoetrope flashes.
    The Reapers flock to her, moths to a terrible flame, their sickles gone. Their hands are filled, instead, with the viscera of their victims, and with it they begin to paint their goddess’s flesh the bright crimson of human suffering, and the goddess shivers with arousal.
    The whistle of the wind through the Reapers’ empty eyes grows suddenly loud and Amber spins to see one of them spilling through the air toward her. At last, she stops screaming. She can only stare at this death that comes for her.
    The rain turns cold.
    “No,” a silken voice says. “Not her.”
    Amber turns to stare at the goddess, and finds the old one looking back at her. Knowing her. And this time her scream destroys her own voice.
    She knows me .

     
    DESK chairs scraped the floor as students got up. People swore and muttered, whipping out cell phones. Some of them were calling for help, but others were catching the girl’s seizure on video.
    For a few seconds, Miles Varick could only stare at the flailing, bucking student sprawled on the floor. In his years of teaching, he’d had classes disrupted before—by rude boys, feuding girls, snoring sleepers, ringing cell phones, and once even by the police there to make an arrest—but never anything like this. Is this some kind of joke? he wanted to ask. But then his thoughts and vision both cleared and he saw that it was Amber Morrissey there on the floor, twitching hard enough that her skull kept knocking on the linoleum, and he knew it wasn’t a joke. Not from Amber. She wasn’t that kind of student.
    “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and rushed from the lectern, knocking his notebook to the ground. Miles strode toward the students who had begun crowding around her. “Back away. Give her space, you