On the seventh day after Grandma died, I saw a ghost.
Old Chen from downstairs called my name through the crack in the door. He'd been dead since last week. A faceless child crawled into my bed in the middle of the night, waiting for me to fall asleep so it could strangle me. An old woman with a black umbrella on the subway smiled at me, baring every one of her teeth. I was scared out of my wits, but then the ancestral Soul-Quelling Bell Grandma left me rang, and they vanished. Really, every last one of them.
The next day, a man wearing gold-rimmed glasses showed up at my door. “That bell is something we've been searching for for a long time.” He told me I was the last heir to the Zhang family of spirit exorcists, the blood moon was near, the prophecy was about to come true, and I was the one destined to face the calamity.
Zhang Wuyang: “Wait, I just wanted to earn some overtime pay. How did this turn into the end of the world? And you, cold-skinned zombie lady, stay away from me. When your heart-fire flares up, I feel pain too!”
