Maren had rung the hollow bells over six hundred graves. Each toll dragged a dead soul up just long enough for one last word. She'd done it so long it bored her. But tonight the bell rang before she touched the rope. One cold iron note rolled across the frozen yard. She opened her casebook to write it down, and the page was already full, in handwriting that was not hers.

Maren had a rule: never answer a bell she didn't ring. So she tore the strange page out, held it to the lantern flame, and let it burn. The writing didn't char. The letters lifted off the paper, hung in the cold air, and rearranged into new words. "Burning the message," they spelled, "does not cancel the debt."

Maren grabbed the floating letters out of the air. They were cold and solid, like little iron filings. As she closed her fist, a memory she'd buried surfaced: a deal she'd made as a starving girl, trading a future favor for the gift of waking the dead. The bill had finally come due.

The memory shook Maren so hard she dropped the lantern. In the dark, the bells rang all at once, and six hundred voices she had woken over the years spoke together. "Pay what you owe, or we drag you down to where we wait." The cold hands of the grateful dead closed around her ankles.

Maren did the only thing she knew how to do. She grabbed the nearest bell rope and rang it backward, the way her teacher once warned her never to. The pull on her ankles reversed. The grateful dead were yanked back into their graves, and the debt rang itself empty. She lay in the snow, alive, her bells now just metal and her gift burned out.