Chapter 1

My birth chart is four pillars of pure yin, an all-yin fate that comes once in a hundred years. I am half a step into the land of the dead already.

At the Ghost Festival blessing rite, the young acolyte carried out the life-sustaining eternal lamp I had fed with my own blood for seventeen years.

All I had to do was sign my name in blood and light the wick, and I would live through the death-fate waiting for me at twenty-six.

A breath before my pen touched the paper, my mother, who had come to pray beside me, slipped into the lotus pond.

Weak as I was, I didn't stop to think. I jumped in after her and rushed her to the emergency room.

I paid the fees, pushed open the door to her room, and heard my father's voice coming from her phone.

"Good thing you drew her away. When the acolyte asked for the name, I just told him she couldn't bear to see her adopted sister Flora suffer, so she gave the lamp up herself."

Then my brother, quick and excited: "The ritual's working. Flora's fever has come down a little."

I was stunned. "You swapped my life-sustaining lamp over to your adopted daughter. Did you ever think about what that would do?"

My mother had been lying in that bed looking so weak. Now she dropped the act.

"Flora's fever won't break, and you've lived safe for seventeen years off that lamp. What's the harm in letting her borrow it to hold off the yin for one night? We're all family. Can you really stand to watch her suffer?"

I coughed up a mouthful of blood and water and stopped arguing.

They thought that by fooling the acolyte and changing the name, they could take my life-sustaining lamp.

What they didn't know was that seventeen years ago, the acolyte's master had bound me to it with a blood-pact. The lamp and my fate were already tied together.

The master had passed into stillness two years ago. They could change the name carved on the lamp's base, but they could not change the blood-pact in the wick.

Since they were bent on stealing my fate for their adopted daughter, then tonight, when the hundred ghosts walk, I hoped the girl the whole family adored could bear it.

……

1.

I wiped the blood from my mouth, water still dripping from my hair.

My mother glanced at me. Not one word of concern. Instead she went right back to blaming me.

"If you hadn't been dragging those filthy things around since you were little, Flora wouldn't be running a fever because of you. Even the doctors can't find a cause."

She slapped the blood-draw needle into my palm.

"Your father and brother have already brought the lamp back."

"The acolyte said the lamp needs blood to draw it out. Fill a vial, quickly, so I can take it back with me."

I looked down at the needle. "Mom, that lamp's wick has been bound to my blood for seventeen years. It knows its owner. Flora's body isn't like mine. If you force it—"

"Don't feed me that nonsense."

She cut me off, out of patience.

"So what you're saying is, Flora deserves to burn to death, and nobody's allowed to touch that lamp of yours?"

"That's not what I meant."

"That's exactly what you meant." She turned her face away. "You'd hoard that life-sustaining lamp for yourself and let your own sister die. That's a cold heart, all right."

I gripped the needle. Something rose in my throat that I could neither swallow down nor spit out.

My mother took out her phone and started a video call.

My father, Lance Henson, stood by Flora's bed, my brother Michael Henson beside him.

The lamp sat on the nightstand. The spot on the side of the base where my name used to be carved now read Flora Henson.

"Laura." Michael leaned in toward the camera. "Look, Flora's at a hundred and three, and the hospital's out of options. The lamp's already here. Just help out. One vial of blood, that's all."

I stared at my own brother on the screen.

Five years ago, when he gave me the warm-jade pendant to ward off evil, he had leaned in from that same distance.

"Mikey, you know full well that lamp is what keeps me alive."

My brother's lips moved. Before he could get a sound out, the image swung, and my father's face filled the screen.

"Laura, you're perfectly fine right now, aren't you? Let Flora borrow the lamp for the emergency. We're not keeping it from you. Once her fever breaks, we'll give it back."

"Oh, and the acolyte said the scriptures have to be copied eighty-one times before the lamp will settle. Isn't that your specialty? Finish copying them at the hospital before you come home. Don't bring the bad luck in with you. It's no good for Flora's condition."

The call cut off. My mother had ended it. She tucked the phone into her pocket.

"Laura, just think of it as paying your father and me back for raising you all these years. Help your sister. Blood first? Or the scriptures first?"

I said nothing.

When I didn't answer, my mother's voice climbed. "Laura Henson, do you really have no feeling left for your own sister after all these years? How can you be so selfish?"

Selfish.

Of everything my mother had said to me in twenty-six years, that was the word she used most.

My fate runs to yin by birth. When I was small, my parents were forced to see spirit-things again and again because of me.

They couldn't stand the bad luck I carried, so they turned around and adopted an ordinary girl from an orphanage and named her Flora Henson.

For as long as I can remember, anything of mine that Flora wanted, I had to give up. If I didn't, I was a big sister who didn't know better. Selfish.

The year I turned nine, my first death-fate came for me. It was my grandmother who carried me up the mountain on her back, three kneelings and nine bows, and begged the master for the method of lamp-offering life extension.

The master said there was one more death-fate waiting for me, the year I turned twenty-six.

I would have to sign my name in blood, light the wick, then hand-copy the warding scriptures eighty-one times for all living beings, and I could make it through.

But now they had taken away the lamp that kept me alive.

They cared nothing for whether I lived or died, and still called me selfish.

I lowered my head and opened my backpack. Inside was a thick stack of paper.

I had copied them out before I set off this morning, to hold off tonight's midnight death-fate. Eighty rounds in all, one short of the last.

My mother stared at the stack, her mouth working, but she said nothing.

I tucked the scriptures under my arm and walked out of the room.

"Mom, you go on ahead. I'll settle your hospital paperwork and then come home."

She shot me a sidelong look, snatched up her bag, and headed for the door.

A few steps out she turned back. "Don't forget the blood and the scriptures."

After she left, I went out to an empty stretch of ground at the hospital.

I took out a lighter and the eighty rounds of scripture I'd copied so carefully.

The flame touched the corner of the paper. The orange edge crept inward, the lines of writing blackening one row at a time, curling upward, crumbling into ash.

The smoke drifted off into the air.

Three hours to midnight.

No life-sustaining lamp, no scriptures. I didn't know whether I could hold out.

But if I was fated not to live past twenty-six, then Flora wasn't going to have an easy night of it either.