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"They're already tracking you."
Iris didn't look up from the kitchen table. She had a deck of cards spread out in a pattern I didn't recognize, each one showing symbols that hurt to stare at too long.
"Who?" I stayed by the door. My palm still throbbed where the flames had burned through yesterday—or this morning, or however the hell time worked now.
"Your people." She flipped a card. It showed a man with his throat cut. "Collections doesn't let assets walk off the job. You missed your morning check-in."
I had. Voss expected a text every six hours when I was on assignment. I'd been too busy dying and waking up and setting things on fire.
"So I'll call him," I said. "Tell him the job's complicated."
"With what phone?" Iris tapped another card. A tower breaking in half. "You burned yours. Along with my couch, two rugs, and the curtains."
The apartment still smelled like smoke. I'd woken up this morning with fire crawling up both arms and no idea how to stop it. Iris had shoved me into her shower and turned the cold water on full blast. It hadn't helped. The flames kept burning underwater until she'd grabbed my wrist and said something in a language that tasted like copper on my tongue.
The fire went out.
I'd asked her how.
She'd said, "Because I told it to."
"You don't get it," I said now. "If I don't report in, Voss sends someone else. You think I'm bad? Wait till you meet what comes next."
Iris finally looked at me. Her eyes were the color of smoke, or maybe steel. Hard to tell in the dim light filtering through the burned curtains.
"They're already on the way," she said. "You've got maybe twenty minutes."
"How do you know?"
She held up a card. The symbol on it pulsed with a rhythm I recognized—my own heartbeat.
"Because I can feel them tracking you," she said. "And in about fifteen seconds, you're going to feel it too."
The pain hit like a nail through my palm.
I looked down. Nothing there. Just skin. But the feeling was precise—a point of pressure drilling into the meat of my left hand, right below the middle finger.
"What the hell—"
"Tracking mark," Iris said. She stood up, started gathering the cards. "They tagged you before you came here. Standard Collections protocol. You didn't think they'd send you after a witch without insurance, did you?"
The pain got sharper. I could feel it moving now, burrowing deeper.
"Get it out."
"I can't."
"You stopped the fire."
"That was your power. This is theirs." She shoved the cards into a leather pouch. "Different rules."
I grabbed her wrist. She didn't pull away, just looked at my hand on her skin, then up at my face. She was close enough that I could feel the heat coming off her—or maybe that was me. Hard to tell anymore.
"You did this," I said. "You cursed me. You can uncurse me."
"Not how it works."
"Then tell me how it does work."
She met my eyes. This close, I could see the silver threading through the gray of her irises. Not contacts. Something deeper.
"Seven jobs," she said. "You do seven jobs for me, I break the curse."
"What kind of jobs?"
"The kind people like you collect for."
"I collect debts. You want me to shake down six more people while I'm stuck in your nightmare loop?"
"No." She pulled her wrist free, but she didn't step back. "I want you to kill them."
The tracking pain spiked. I could feel it now like a hot wire threading through bone.
"I'm not a killer," I said.
"You are now." She moved past me toward the kitchen counter, started pulling out supplies—salt, chalk, something in a glass jar that looked like it used to be alive. "Every time you die, you come back stronger. More dangerous. Eventually you won't need a curse to be a weapon."
"And you want to aim me."
"I want to survive." She unscrewed the jar. The smell hit me—rot and roses. "I owe a blood debt. Seven lives for seven years of borrowed time. You help me pay it, I set you free. You don't, we both die. Probably a lot."
"Who do you owe?"
"Someone you don't want to meet."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you get right now." She turned around, held out her hand. "Deal or no deal? Because in about eight minutes, your friends kick that door down and we both have a very bad day."
I looked at her hand. No burns. No scars. She'd caught fire yesterday when I'd grabbed her, but her skin was perfect.
"Why me?" I asked. "You knew my name. Before I knocked. Why'd you pick me for this?"
Her expression didn't change, but something flickered behind her eyes. Just for a second.
"Does it matter?"
"Yeah. It does."
The tracking pain was a constant scream now. I could feel them getting closer. Voss didn't send gentle people for recovery work.
Iris lowered her hand.
"Because you were already dying," she said quietly. "I looked at you through the door and saw it. Three months, maybe four. Something in your blood eating you from the inside. You were dead anyway. I just moved up the schedule."
The words hit harder than the tracking mark.
"You're lying."
"I'm not."
I wanted to call her on it. Wanted to say I felt fine, that I'd passed my last physical, that she was making it up to justify whatever she'd done to me. But I couldn't. Because somewhere in the back of my head, I'd known something was wrong. The weight loss. The way I couldn't shake the cold. The fact that I'd started taking jobs further from home because I didn't want anyone to notice.
"Three months," I said.
"Was. Now you're already dead. And you keep waking up." She picked up the jar again. "I gave you a chance. It's a bad one, but it's more than you had."
Footsteps in the hall. Heavy. Multiple sets.
"Deal," I said.
"Say it properly."
"What?"
"Say: I accept the terms. Seven lives for one curse. Bind it."
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
"I accept the terms," I said. The words felt wrong in my mouth, too big, like they took up more space than sound should. "Seven lives for one curse. Bind it."
Iris threw the jar contents at my feet. It hit the floor and spread in a pattern that should've been random but wasn't—a perfect circle, symbols drawn in rot and salt.
"Bound," she said.
The tracking pain cut off.
Someone knocked on the door. Three times. Professional.
"Merrick," a voice called. Not Voss. Someone older. "We're here for a welfare check. Open up."
Iris moved to the wall—not the door, the wall—and pressed her palm flat against the plaster.
"What are you doing?" I whispered.
"Leaving."
A door appeared under her hand. Not a door that had been hidden. A door that hadn't existed until she touched it. It swung open onto darkness and a smell like rain on stone.
"Come on," she said.
Behind us, the apartment door shuddered. They weren't knocking anymore.
"Where does it go?" I asked.
"Somewhere they can't follow." She stepped through, then looked back. "You coming or not?"
I followed her through.
The door shut behind me. The darkness wasn't empty. I could hear something breathing. Something big. And then, from somewhere ahead or behind or all around, I heard a voice I knew.
Voss.
"Bring back my collector," he said.
Iris's hand found mine in the dark. Her grip was cold.
"Too late," she whispered. "He already belongs to me."
The breathing got closer.