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“What?”

I thought he was joking at first, but his brows had pulled together, and he looked pissed.“I was gone fora few months, and this—thisis what you get up to?”

“It wasn’t me!”

“It never is!Yes, somehow, here you are, right in the middle of—”

He cut off abruptly, which might have given me a chance to get in more than a couple of words, but he held up a finger.And since he’d also cocked his head and seemed to be listening for something, I swallowed my comment back down.And waited while nothing happened except for the wind throwing a tumbleweed around.

Until a dim scarf of a ghost zoomed up and stopped abruptly in front of Billy Joe.

It was disturbing, consisting of nothing but a vague, amorphous torso and a couple of huge, pale eyes.And even that much looked like it was disintegrating.Some parts were thicker than others, to the point that they mostly obscured the landscape behind them, but others were so pale that it looked like he had holes in what I was charitably calling a body.

I finally decided that he looked like an amoeba, which was not normal.Ghosts tended to keep the shape they’d died with, or else took on an appearance that had meaning for them in life.An elderly woman might show up youthful again or wearing her wedding dress, for instance, but this?

Nobody would want to look like this.Yet he did.And that, plus the lack of anything like a human shape, made me wonder if he’d started out as one to begin with.

“Relax, it’s just Hansen,” Billy said, like that explained anything.

“Who?”

“One of my guys.He’s part of the crew who found you for me and has been watching you ‘til I got here.”

I didn’t understand that, but there were other priorities right now.“Why...does he look like that?”I whispered.

“Like what?”Billy glanced at him.“Oh, yeah.I forgot you don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Sometimes, when the so-called gods can’t catch something more tasty, they go after whatever they can find.And one of ‘em found Hansen.And ate about half of him before another god attacked the first, and he managed to tear away—literally.”

I stared at the little thing that had once been a man, after all, or the ghost of one, until a god had—

Gooseflesh broke out all over my arms.

“Can’t he...feed back up and...and fix that?”I whispered.

“Yeah, but food is kinda hard to come by these days, and when he does get energy, he doesn’t like to waste it manifesting the limbs that bastard tore off.It’s wasteful.Now, hush.”

I hushed because I couldn’t form thoughts currently, not that it mattered.If words passed between the two spirits, I couldn’t hear them.But it looked like information was conveyed somehow because, after a minute, Billy sighed.

“The goon squad has noticed you’re gone,” he told me.“And they’re panicking.Pritkin can’t raise you on whatever communication link you two got going—guess you’re outta range—and they’re tearing up the place looking for you.Better send that fey telepath, what’s her name—”

“Bodil.”

“Better send her the message that you’re coming back.”

“For what?”I said because nothing had changed there.Yes, Billy had returned and was reaming me a new one—and really, why hadn’t I expected that?It was our usual method of communicating, after all.And while that was both great and terrible, it didn’t change what was coming.

Or the fact that I wasn’t ready.

“Oh, give me a break,” he said.“For once, can we skip this shit?”

“Skip what?”

“You know very well what!”He knocked his hat back on his head and took on a gormless, big-eyed expression that didn’t make sense until I figured out it was supposed to be me.“Oh, no, I’m just a poor widdle Pythia, powerless and scared and surrounded by big bad gods—”

“Cut it out.”