I made it three miles from the cemetery before my hands shook too badly to control the steering wheel. Sweat soaked through my shirt despite the cool morning air, and my vision kept blurring at the edges—not tears, but some primal response to terror that my body hadn’t evolved past. I pulled onto the shoulder of an empty county road, killed the engine, and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. Repeated ragged breaths did nothing to slow my galloping heart. I’d seen things today that shouldn’t exist outside of nightmares, and worse—I’d apparently helped create them.

  A soft tap on the passenger window made me jerk upright with a strangled cry. The raven perched on the side mirror, watching me with that unnerving intensity that suggested it was seeing far more of me than my just my stylish suit and fantastic hair.

  Without waiting for an invitation, it hopped onto the hood and then—impossibly—passed through the windshield as if the glass were merely a suggestion rather than a solid barrier. It settled on the passenger seat and folded its wings with fastidious precision.

  “You look terrible,” it said. I noted the absence of mockery in its tone, or maybe it was too dry even for me to pick up on. Raven didn’t seem to be laughing anymore.

  “What the hell is happening?” My voice sounded thin and reedy, nothing like the confident purr I used to charm money from marks. “Those… things. The graves. That figure with its eyes—” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “You used words that have power,” Raven said. “You gave them names, you opened a way, and they accepted the invitation.”

  “I didn’t know! I was just running a con!” The words burst from me. It was a child’s defense against punishment: I didn’t mean to. It hadn’t gone over well for the Nazis at Nuremberg, and it sounded just as pathetic coming out of my mouth.

  “Intention is irrelevant. Effect is what matters.” Raven’s feathers ruffled slightly, then settled. As I expected, my defense crumbled before the judging eyes of the terrible bird. “The effect is that you’ve opened a pathway that’s been sealed for generations—a way between the land of the living and something much older and hungrier than the ordinary dead.”

  I gripped the steering wheel like a life raft, anchoring myself to something solid in a world that suddenly seemed made of smoke and shadows. “What are you talking about? What pathway?”

  “The Veil between worlds isn’t a metaphor, Rodney Holmes. It’s real—thin in places, reinforced in others, maintained by rules and boundaries as old as consciousness itself.” Raven’s voice took on a rhythmic quality, like a professor who had given the same lecture countless times. “What you did, with your bone talismans and your midnight ritual, was find one of those thin places and tear a hole in it.”

  “I just told them to talk to their dead relatives!” I protested.

  “You told them to call the dead by name, to invite them to speak, to offer them a vessel.” Raven tilted its head, the gesture even more unnerving on a bird than a human. “That’s not talking to the dead, Rodney. That’s inviting them to return. And the dead are never alone on the other side. There are older things that have been clawing at the veil since long before your father first lied to your mother.”

  My stomach lurched. “Are you saying I’ve started some kind of… dead invasion?”

  “Not yet. But the tear you made is widening. Those three who came through—they’re just the first. They answered because they were specifically called, but now that the way is open, others will follow. Things that haven’t been among the living for centuries. Things that hunger for sensations they can only get through flesh.”

  A cold sweat broke out across my forehead. “What do I do?”

  “You have two options,” Raven said, its voice dropping lower. “Walk away now. Pretend none of this happened. Go back to being the Sham Man in some other town. The tear will widen, more will come through, more will die. But you’ll have time—maybe months, maybe years—before the consequences find you personally.”

  “That’s it? You said there was two options.”

  “Fix it.” The simplicity of the statement belied the weight behind it. “Learn what it costs to mean something. Stand in the path of what’s coming and seal the tear you made.”

  “And how, exactly, am I supposed to do that? I’m not a… whatever you are. I don’t have powers or knowledge about this stuff. I’m just a con man.”

  “Are you?” Raven fixed me with its glittering eye. “You spoke words of power without training and opened a doorway sealed for generations. That suggests you’re either extremely lucky or something more than you believe yourself to be.”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  The implications hung in the air between us. I shook my head, unwilling to consider it. “This is another con, isn’t it? You’re manipulating me for some reason I don’t understand yet.”

  “Yes,” Raven admitted, which surprised me. “I am manipulating you, in the sense that I’m pushing you toward a particular outcome. But not through deception. Everything I’ve told you is true.”

  “Why do you care what happens? What are you, anyway?”

  “I am a witness and a keeper of balance,” Raven said after a pause. “I watch, I remember, and occasionally, I intervene. As for why I care…” It made a sound that might have been a sigh. “Let’s just say I’ve seen what comes through when the veil tears too wide, and it benefits no one—not the living, not the dead, and certainly not beings like me who have to clean up the aftermath.”

  I stared out at the empty road. It stretched to the far horizons. I could make Los Angeles or San Diego today, still, say bye-bye to Fresno and never look back. But the road stretched in a symbolic way I wasn’t equipped to interpret, and that bothered me. I wasn’t a mark, I stole from marks. This ignorance made me feel… weak. Alone. Afraid.

  “Not much of an answer. Are you God? A god? A ghost? An alien? A talking animal?”

  Raven made a sound close to laughter, but hollower, ancient. “I’m older than your concept of gods, Rodney. I was here before humans learned to speak, before they dreamed up deities to explain their fears.”

  It hopped on the seat, its feathers catching the light in ways that seemed to bend reality slightly. I noticed colors shifting beneath the black—midnight blues and purples that shouldn’t be visible.

  “Think of me as… a custodian of boundaries. A guardian of thresholds. In most cultures and mythologies across your world, ravens and crows appear at crossroads, at moments of transition.” Its voice dropped lower. “We watch the spaces between life and death, between one world and another. We maintain… balance.”

  The word balance seemed to resonate in the car, the air vibrated a little.

  “So you’re not a bird,” I said. I struggled to process the answer. It sounded like made up bullshit I’d tell a mark.

  “This form is convenient. Your species recognizes it, fears it a little, respects it more than most creatures. But no, I am not ‘a bird’ any more than you are ‘a suit’. This is merely what I wear to walk among you.”

  I swallowed hard. “What do you really look like?”

  “You couldn’t comprehend my true form any more than an ant could understand algebra. Your mind would simply… fill in the blanks with something it could process.” Raven’s eyes glinted. “But if it helps, imagine something like thought given consciousness, like memory with purpose, like the space between heartbeats stretched into awareness.”

  “That doesn’t help at all,” I growled.

  “I suppose it doesn’t.” If birds could shrug, this one would have. “The point is, I and others like me maintain certain boundaries. The veil between life and death is one such boundary. And you, Rodney Holmes, have damaged it.”

  I stared at the windshield and the empty road. My mind felt like a tube, everything was just going in one side and out the other. If what Raven said were true I’d torn a hole that could end the world.

  “These things that are coming through,” I said slowly, “what exactly are they?”

  “The dead are the first wave,” Raven answered. “Humans who once lived, who remember enough of life to mimic it, but have forgotten why it matters. They return wrong because they’ve spent time on the other side, learning things the living aren’t meant to know.”

  “After them?”

  “Older things. Hungrier things. Entities that were never human, that existed in the spaces between worlds since before dinosaurs crawled from the primordial ooze.” Raven’s voice took on a disturbing resonance. “They’ve been watching humanity through the veil for millennia. They hunger for your sensations, your emotions, your life.”

  “Fuck me,” Rodney sighed.

  “If I tried to fix this… what would it cost me?”

  “Time. Blood. Certainty.” Raven’s voice softened slightly. “The comfort of believing the world is simple and explicable. The luxury of walking away from messes you create.”

  “You’re not being very specific, are you?”

  “Because I don’t know the exact price. That’s for you to discover.” Raven hopped closer to the edge of the passenger seat, closer to me. “But I know this: whatever you give up will be less than what you’ll lose if you do nothing.”

  The weight of choice pressed down on me like a physical thing. Walk away and let others pay the price now, and still pay the price later, or step into a world I didn’t understand to fix a problem I’d created through my own greed and some kind of magical natural talent.

  My entire life had been built around walking away, around creating illusions and disappearing before they failed. I was Rodney Holmes, the Sham Man, master of smoke and mirrors. I wasn’t a hero or a mystic or whatever Raven seemed to think I might be.

  And yet… those empty graves. Martha Wilson’s terror. The figure with its sewn-shut eyes, mouthing my name. The whisper in my mind: You called. We answered.

  “I’m not sure what to believe,” I said finally.

  “That,” said Raven, “is the first honest thing you’ve said since we met. It’s a start.”

  The bird spread its wings, preparing to depart. “You have until sunset to decide, Rodney Holmes. By then, the tear will have widened enough that simple solutions will no longer suffice.”

  “Wait!” I reached out, but stopped short of actually touching Raven. “How do I find you if… if I decide to try fixing this?”

  “You won’t have to find me,” Raven said, and for the first time, I detected something like sympathy in its ancient eyes. “I’ll be watching. I’m always watching.”

  With that, it passed through the windshield as if it were merely an illusion and launched into the morning sky, a dark shape against the brightening blue.

  I sat alone in my car, the key in the ignition, two paths stretching before me—one familiar and selfish, one unknown and costly. For the first time in my life I didn’t know which con to run: the one I’d played on others for years, or the one I’d been playing on myself.