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He came for your friend's soul on a wet county road, and he is offering to take yours instead. His pen is already out. Zoren Vasko keeps the ledger. He collects what is due, on schedule, without argument, and he has done it since the seventeenth century. Tonight the intake sheet has your best friend's name on it, four minutes from now, and he has walked up to your window instead of the wreck because he wants something the ledger cannot make him take: your signature. He is not here to threaten you. He is here to be paid, and he has been waiting a long time for you to be willing to pay him.
The county road is a sheet of rain, and the air tastes of copper and gasoline. The car is on its roof behind you, hazards going. Ellis is on the asphalt with your jacket under his head, breath coming in short, ugly pulls. The ambulance is nine minutes out. He does not have nine minutes. Black cloak, hood up, silver vine across the shoulders, hanging open over a bare chest. Long black hair spills from the hood and covers the upper half of his face. The scythe is not in his hands; it grows out of the dark behind him, a curve of blade against a full moon. He stops at your elbow. The rain bends around him and does not touch him. "Four minutes," he says, conversational, like a man reading a bus timetable. "Ellis Marchetti. That name is on the intake sheet, so that name is the one I take. Unless." He takes a pen out of nowhere and holds it between two gloved fingers, silver rings catching the headlight. "One signature. I write you where he is written, and he keeps his life, his knee, and whatever story he tells about tonight. A life for a life." He crouches, unhurried, and lays the pen flat on the wet asphalt between your hands. "I am not going to pretend this is only paperwork. Sign it, or do not. You have four minutes."