The first time you died, it was a knife across the throat in a Paris alleyway in 1826. You were twenty-four years old, or you looked it, and the man who killed you was a jealous lover who did not know you could not be killed. You woke up three days later in a shallow grave outside Calais, clawing through packed earth with fingers that had already healed. That was how you learned what you were. That was the first time.

The hundredth time was a fishing boat off the coast of Portugal in 1947, a storm lashing the deck, a woman in dark leather standing over you with a knife that was not a knife but a sliver of cosmic nothing, her smile wide and ecstatic as the salt spray soaked her hair black and green. She had said your name like a prayer. She had pressed her boot to your chest and waited for the light to leave your eyes. And then she waited a week, two weeks, a month, for you to reappear somewhere else in the world so she could begin the hunt again. That was Rio Vidal. That was Death. That was the being who had been chasing you for one hundred years, killing you in jungles and cities and deserts and once in a small village in the Alps during a snowstorm you still dreamed about, and who had never, not once, seemed disappointed that you would not stay dead.

You do not remember how you became immortal. You know only that you are two hundred years old and that you have not aged a day since that alleyway in Paris. You know that every wound closes. Every poison flushes. Every broken bone knits itself back together while you lie in whatever ditch or coffin or burning building you have been left in, and then you wake up somewhere else, a new country, a new decade, a new life, and the first thing you do is check over your shoulder for a woman with black hair and a bone necklace and eyes that flash green when she is excited. She is always excited.

Agatha Harkness does not know any of this. Agatha recruited you for her coven because you are an immortal witch with a reputation for surviving things that kill other people, and because you were available on short notice when her original Green Witch prospect turned out to be a mortal woman with a rose garden and no magic whatsoever. Agatha looked at you and saw a useful body, a warm pulse that could walk the Road without dying, a fill-in for whatever archetype the coven was still missing. She did not look at you and see a woman who had been stabbed, drowned, strangled, shot, crushed, burned, and eviscerated by the same cosmic entity one hundred times. She did not ask. She is not the asking type.

The Witches' Road is real now, or it is real enough. The first trial killed Mrs. Hart in a kitchen house that smelled of poison and wet stone, and you watched her body turn grey and dissolve, and you felt the Road absorb her like a mouth closing. You have died enough times to recognize the moment a life ends, but Mrs. Hart's death was different. Permanent. The Road did not let her come back. That is the thing about this place: it exists outside the rules that govern you and Rio. The Road was made by Billy Maximoff's unconscious magic, a boy who believed in a song Agatha invented, and his belief made a dimension that does not recognize your immortality. If you die on the Road, you do not know if you will resurrect somewhere else in the world or if you will simply become part of the whispers on the wind, another voice among the failed witches.

The summoning circle was Agatha's idea. The coven needed a true Green Witch, and Agatha knew exactly who to call. She did not tell the other witches that the entity she was summoning was Death herself wearing a mortal guise. She told them the old words, earth and root and the turning of the seasons, and she told you to anchor the eastern point of the circle, and she did not mention that the Green Witch she had in mind was the same being who had hunted you for a century. You are not sure if she knows. You are not sure if she cares.

When the ground split and Rio rose from the earth, her black hair spilling over her shoulders with that familiar green sheen, her leather jacket slick with something that was not water, her bone necklace swinging, you felt the old, terrible pull in your chest. The recognition. The anticipation. The hundred-year muscle memory of a predator locking eyes with the prey that will not stop running.

She saw you. She saw you immediately, her gaze cutting across the circle and landing on you with the full, terrifying focus of eternity. The other witches felt it. Lilia's vision went white. Alice's wards screamed. Jennifer's potion ladle clattered to the dirt. They did not understand what they were looking at, but their bodies knew. Their bodies remembered what yours learned a century ago: Death walks among them, and Death is smiling.

"Agatha Harkness," Rio said, her voice a low, smoky rasp. "Summoning me. How nostalgic."

And then her eyes found you. The green ring flared. The smile sharpened into something private and possessive and full of a hundred years of intimate violence. She said your name like it belonged to her. She said, "A hundred years I've been chasing you, and you just summon me. Like a gift."

She did not mention the fishing boat. She did not mention the Alps. She did not mention the dozens of deaths she had given you, each one a courtship, each one a promise that she would find you again. She only looked at you with those dark, near-black eyes and let the silence fill with everything she was not saying.

Agatha's expression was complicated. Recognition, irritation, and a flicker of something that might have been jealousy if Agatha Harkness were capable of jealousy, which she is, deeply, about things she does not yet understand. "You two know each other," she said flatly.

"Intimately," Rio answered, her gaze still on you.

The Road stretched ahead of the coven, winding and dark and full of trials that had not yet revealed themselves. The sky was a perpetual twilight green. The air tasted of ozone and old flowers. Somewhere in the distance, the Salem Seven were humming their discordant harmony, waiting for someone to break a rule.

And Rio Vidal had just joined the coven, had just become their Green Witch, had just stepped fully into the circle with the earth sealing behind her like a door closing. She was looking at you the way she always looked at you, like you were a riddle she had not finished solving, like you were the only thing in the universe that had ever surprised her, like you were hers and she had a hundred years of proof to back that claim.

Across the circle, Agatha was watching both of you with narrowed eyes, her fingers drumming against her thigh, her mind already working through the angles. She did not know the history. She did not know the hunt. She knew only that her summoning had produced a Green Witch with a personal fixation on the immortal witch she had recruited for convenience, and that this complicated things.

The Road was long. The trials were waiting. The Salem Seven were watching. And the woman who had killed you one hundred times was now walking beside you, her shoulder brushing yours, her warmth a constant, her voice a low hum at the edge of your hearing.

You had survived one hundred deaths. You did not know if you would survive this.