Page 13

“Sometimes thinking about your life gives me a headache so big I think it’s going to split my skull in two.”

—Juniper Campbell

Worcester, Massachusetts, in the lobby of City Hall, preparing to play bait for a bunch of Covenant ghost hunters

W E APPEARED IN THE DARK lobby of the city hall, Jonah’s hand tight on mine, his face pale and pinched in the light coming in through the windows. I looked down at him, relieved to see that he wasn’t measurably glowing. Homesteaders don’t, usually, but again, he’d already done things his type of ghost wasn’t meant to do. A broken caddis could be capable of just about anything, and I wouldn’t necessarily know about it. It was a complication I didn’t need, with ghost hunters lurking around every corner and two— two —divinities watching over me.

The lobby looked like the lobby of every other city hall I’d seen in the last decade. Modern design sensibilities had a way of pressing things into the same mold, homogenizing them one curved desk and brass seal at a time. Even the air had the cool, dry, dusty smell that I associated with government buildings, perfectly generic, perfectly neutral.

Jonah released me. “This is where they took Martha,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Will you go back to the others?” I asked. “I can find that place now, since I’ve been there. I’ll come when I’m finished here.”

“You promise?” There was a world of mistrust and damage in his eyes as he looked at me.

I nodded. “I promise,” I said, and he was gone, leaving me alone in City Hall.

Clicking my flashlight on, I started for the hall that would take me deeper into the building. I needed to find these people.

Once out of the lobby, I could hear the distant sounds of motion, of living people trying to navigate in the dark. I nodded to myself and started toward them, flashlight high. The longer I could keep them from getting a clear look at my face, the better my chances would be. I walked, and tried to figure out whether I was being clever or foolish. I was walking straight into danger, but that was the only way I was going to know what that danger really looked like.

Elsie and Arthur were with me so I’d have backup, but they weren’t immortal, and I wasn’t making ghosts out of any more of my charges. I might have, if I’d known they would linger; I’m not too proud or too ethical to admit that the temptation was occasionally there. A lifetime ago, when Alice was wounded in the Galway Woods, I tried to convince Thomas to back out of his bargain with my employers and let Alice slip into the afterlife, with me. I’d been trying to save him, yes, but I’d also been thinking of myself, of binding Alice to the crossroads so she could never leave me.

I’m not Peter Pan, but I’m the Wendy Darling who never left Neverland, who never stopped playing mother for children who would inevitably outgrow her and slip away. Sometimes I get lonely. Sometimes I wish they’d die young enough to keep needing me forever. And every time that thought pops up again, I push those shameful pieces of myself down as hard as I can, burying them under obligation and understanding that dead is very rarely better. It’s not their fault they still have lives to lead, while mine is incontrovertibly over. So I was going to risk my own unlife before I asked my kids to come and risk the only real lives they were ever going to have.

Besides, they were probably eating dinner by now, Elsie possibly flirting with Amelia, Amelia possibly flirting with Arthur, everyone laughing and a little bit uncomfortable at the same time as they tried to work out how serious everyone else was being. Phee seemed like the sort who’d set a warm and welcoming table, the kind of place where everyone felt comfortable and no one walked away hungry. It was better this way. Let me do the legwork; let them enjoy being young and alive and together for just a little longer.

I turned a corner, and there they were, three living people in a place that should have been left to the ghosts at this hour, the taller of the two men positioned in front of the single woman, a flashlight of his own in his hands. She was carrying a large mason jar, the lid already removed, the interior painted with sigils in silver paste of some sort. Crushed rosemary filled the bottom inch or so. I could feel it calling to me, pulling at me across the distance between us. A second man lurked a bit farther back, this one the dark-haired man who’d made Benedita scowl so, and his hands were empty, which meant he was the most dangerous of the three, or would have been, if I’d been a living opponent. He was ready to go for a weapon.

Weapons are bad. For me, in the moment, the open spirit jar was worse. “Hello?” I said, trying to make it more of a demand than a simple question. You will answer me, you will tell me what I want to know. You won’t turn and run away, even though it would be the sensible thing to do. “You can’t be here.”

That seemed like a very security-guard thing to say, and I was momentarily proud of myself before the man in the lead replied, in what sounded like the same British accent I’d heard from Aoi, now stripped of its Boston undertones: “Oh, no, miss, we have permission from the mayor.”

“No one told me about any permission.” True, if incomplete. No one associated with the city was likely to be telling me anything. “Why do you have permission from the mayor? To do what? And if you’re allowed to be here, why are you creeping around with the lights out? That’s creepy-cakes territory, and I don’t like it.”

“We’re ghostbusters,” said the woman with the jar, keeping her voice light, bright, and measured, like she thought she was auditioning for a children’s television show about creeping around municipal buildings in the dark. I couldn’t imagine it was going to get particularly good ratings, although I’ve been wrong about that sort of thing before. “We’re taking care of that pesky haunting you’ve been dealing with.” Her accent matched the first man’s perfectly.

“We’ve caught two of the ghosts so far,” said the man. “Tell us, do you know where the little boy normally manifests?”

If he was smart, in the courtyard by the fountain, or the strip-mall basement where his friends were. But the two Covenant operatives who’d spoken were looking at me with too-bright eyes and artificial smiles, while the third watched the hall behind them, keeping an eye out for ghosts who might want to sneak up and get a little revenge.

Not that I’d blame any ghost who wanted to kick these people in the throat for what they’d been doing, but it would a wasted effort for most phantoms. Very few of us are capable of interacting concretely with the material world, and touching actual, living humans was beyond even most ghosts who could float a rock or slam a door when they wanted to. He was keeping an eye out for nothing.

“Ghosts don’t exist,” I said, crossing my arms. “Did Davey put you up to this? Nerd. Just because I got freaked out at The Blair Witch Project one time, he thinks he can prank me with Scooby-Doo stories any time he wants to.” I pitched my voice louder, not quite shouting. “Not funny, Davey, you hear me? You’re not funny, and I’m not going to prom with you, no matter how many times you try to scare me into saying yes.”

The nonexistent Davey didn’t reply. The three Covenant operatives flinched, moving a little closer together, while the man at the front turned his flashlight on my face, shining it directly into my eyes.

I was suddenly, fiercely glad that the anima mundi had stolen the graveyard from my eyes. You can bluff even trained killers like these Covenant operatives, if you do it the right way and with absolute confidence. But I didn’t think there was a bluff in this world that would stand up to them looking into my eyes and seeing the impossible.

“I assure you, miss, ah, Eloise, ghosts are very real,” said the man smoothly. “We’ve been moving up and down the coast hunting for them, and we’ve managed to collect quite an assortment. When we heard that your city hall was home to not one but three spirits, we knew we had to intervene.”

“So where’s the TV cameras?” I asked. “If you’re saying actual real ghosts exist, and you can actually for reals catch them, you should be filming it and making, like, all the money.”

“We’re doing this for our own reasons,” said the woman. “We don’t want to be famous.”

“Oh yeah? What reasons are those?” I didn’t actually like how long this conversation had been going on. The longer we talked, the more chance there was that they’d realize something was wrong with me, or that an actual security guard would come along. No matter how smooth they were about claiming to have permission to be here, I didn’t buy it. They were getting nervous, although they were covering it as well as they could.

Not for the first time, since I’d been in New York when things were just starting to get bad, I was struck by how young all of these operatives were. So far, I had yet to encounter a Covenant agent who was older than my kids, and sure, my kids were reaching the age where they settled down and had kids of their own, but still. I never saw any Covenant elders, none of the people who supposedly ran the show. Were they all in hiding, or were they all dead?

If the Covenant was putting on a good show of still having a coherent leadership in place when they were really just a bunch of kids trying to keep the monsters away from their doors, this all might come to a much easier end than we were afraid of. I would like that. My kids would like that. And we probably weren’t going to get it, because nothing is ever that easy, not really.

“A ghost—a very dangerous ghost—damaged our family home,” said the woman, earning herself a sharp look from the man who was probably her brother. “We don’t know exactly how. Poltergeists aren’t supposed to be that powerful. But the ghost managed to cave half the building in on top of itself, and our mother was killed.”

“Oh, no,” I said, and I meant it. “I’m so sorry.”

We knew when we set off the bombs that people were going to be hurt. We’d been hoping for it, even—what was the point of an attack that didn’t hurt anybody? We wanted the Covenant to go away and leave us alone, and that meant making a point they couldn’t ignore. But there was an abstract “people might get hurt,” and then there was someone right in front of me with hollow, grief-struck eyes, telling me that I had helped to kill her mother.

I spent decades working for the crossroads. I killed a lot of people’s mothers, either because they came to us with a petition and the price destroyed them, or because they’d been collateral damage to someone else’s bargain. I killed a lot of people, period. And none of that made it any easier to face this girl who looked a few years younger than Antimony and know, completely, that I had put her mother in the ground.

“So we’re going to hunt down every ghost in the world and make sure they can’t hurt anyone else,” she continued, as if that were a perfectly reasonable, proportionate response. My brief spark of sympathy flared and died.

“Ah,” I said.

“My mother is alive and well,” said the darker-skinned man, accent South American and sweet. “She’s back home in Brazil, waiting for me to return and tell her that my sister’s soul is finally at rest.”

“Your sister?” I asked, dreadfully afraid I already knew the answer he was going to give me.

“She was a foolish girl. She ran afoul of a silbón in the club where she spent her nights, and she danced with him until dawn. She returned the next night to do it again, and again the night after that, and every night until he had drained the life from her body and she collapsed in the street, old beyond her years, with a heart as worn and tattered as tissue paper. We buried her in holy ground and thought to grieve her in peace, only for people to see her at the club the night after her funeral. She had risen as a midnight beauty, compelled to return from beyond the grave by her cruel lover. I will find her, and I will bring her home to our family, where she can rest at last.”

That explained Benedita’s reaction when Aoi had put on the man’s face. He was her brother. All these people had been victimized by the dead, one way or another, and all of them were good arguments for why the twilight and the daylight needed to stay separate.

And I couldn’t feel too bad for them, because their response to that victimization was to turn around and hurt people who didn’t have anything to do with their fight. It didn’t matter that the people they were hurting were already dead: we were still here, we had feelings and dreams and reasons to keep existing, and as far as I could tell, Agnes and Martha had never hurt anyone. These people were lashing out in all the wrong directions.

I unfolded my arms. “Gosh, those are some sad stories,” I said. “Guess I could understand why you wouldn’t want to go on television and tell the whole world how the ghosts hurt you.”

“Thank you,” said the first man. “Now if you could just—”

“But I didn’t hear anything about you being allowed in the building after we locked up for the night, and I really need this job. So if you want to wait here for a minute, I’ll go back to the lobby and call the mayor’s nighttime office. They can tell me if he gave you a pass to come in while we’re closed.”

His face fell, then slammed shut, all geniality gone in an instant and replaced by a hard, cold shell of businesslike efficiency. “I don’t think you want to do that,” he said. His free hand dipped into the pocket of his jacket, and produced a Taser.

I blinked at him, trying to maintain the aura of guileless, somewhat bumbling security guard that I’d been projecting thus far. “Gosh, mister,” I said, aware even as I spoke that I was on the cusp of laying it on too thickly. But then, none of these folks were from around here. Maybe they’d assume all American teenagers talked like me. Sorry, American teens. “I didn’t know you could hurt ghosts with a Taser.”

“You can’t.”

“So why are you carrying one?” I let my eyes go wide and round. “Unless you’re going to hurt something that’s not a ghost.”

“I don’t want to,” he said, and he sounded almost sincere; I could almost believe him. “If you just turn around and walk away, and promise not to call anyone about us being here, I won’t have to.”

“If you really believe that, then you’re as tactically inexperienced as you look, and you have no business being in the field,” I said.

“What?” he asked, looking genuinely startled. So did his sister. Benedita’s brother was a bit older, or just a little more jaded, because he looked less surprised than he did resigned, moving closer to his companions with a small frown on his face.

“You can’t let me walk away,” I said, shining my flashlight full in his face for a change. “Even if I promise not to call anyone, I’ll have seen your faces. I’ll be able to identify you on the street. And I know you’re creeping around government buildings at night with a Taser in your hand, which isn’t the sort of thing a security guard is supposed to just let go. It would be worth my job.”

“Is your job worth letting yourself be shocked into unconsciousness?” asked the girl, sounding genuinely concerned.

“In this economy it might be, if this were my job,” I said.

“What do you mean?” asked the man, warily.

I measured the distance between me and the girl with her so-threatening jar. Sure, it was open, and sure, it was technically magic, but it wasn’t a vacuum cleaner. She’d need to be much closer to threaten me properly.

I grinned, a little manically. “Dead people don’t normally have jobs,” I said.

To my surprise, the man with the Taser laughed, lowering it. “Is that so?” he asked. “Anything else you want to tell us about how ghosts work?”

I blinked. “Not really,” I said. “There’s being a good neighbor, and then there’s giving information to the enemy, and I prefer to stay on the side of the equation where I don’t wind up in a jar.”

The woman was the first to get my meaning. Her eyes widened incrementally, and she began trying to ease her way forward, past the man with the Taser. He didn’t move out of her way. He was too busy staring at me like I had suddenly become a puzzle very much in need of solving. I raised my free hand—the one that wasn’t holding the flashlight—and wiggled my fingers in a mocking wave. If I timed this right, it would be the wave that he remembered, the feeling of dismissal that it carried. It would haunt him when he tried to sleep.

“Boo,” I said, and vanished.

I remanifested on the other side of the room, behind the trio, remaining invisible. No sense in making this easy on them.

“Shit!” said the man in the lead. “Shit, shit, shit !”

“You kiss our mother with that mouth, Nathaniel?” asked the woman. “Oh, no, wait, you don’t, because ghosts like the one you just let get away from us killed her. Well, swear away! I suppose that’s all you’re good for.”

“That ghost was taunting us,” said the man at the rear of the group. “The locals must have called for backup.”

“Can ghosts do that?” demanded the woman, voice going shrill. “Can they just phone up other ghosts and ask them to come help them haunt innocent people?”

They both looked toward Nathaniel, who had apparently been elected “guy who knows things about ghosts and how they work,” whether or not he wanted the position. Based on his expression, the answer was very much “not.”

“Some ghosts can,” said Nathaniel, flicking his flashlight’s beam quickly around the edges of the room, clearly looking for me. I spared a momentary thought for appearing when he reached the corner where I stood, giving him one nice, cinematic jump scare, but decided against it.

They were armed and anxious and already looking for ghosts. Playing with them wasn’t going to help at all.

“Why in the formerly living fuck are ghosts like Pokémon?” demanded the woman. “We don’t need all these fucking flavors! We could have done perfectly well with the ones who haunt houses and the ones who haunt highways, full stop, close the book and walk away! Ghosts should be easy and predictable.”

“Shut up, Chloe,” said Nathaniel. “Ghosts are as diverse as people. It makes sense that they’d have different capabilities.”

“It makes sense,” repeated Chloe, in a mocking tone. “God, there’s a reason you were never supposed to be out in the field. Heitor, have I reminded you recently that my brother is going to get us all killed?”

“You’re not helping,” said Benedita’s brother, who I now pre sumed was named Heitor. “Strong emotions make for stronger ghosts. Are you hoping to return and haunt us from beyond the grave?”

“Of course not,” said Chloe, sounding offended. “But my brother just decided to have a long chat with a ghost instead of getting rid of it, and that means there’s one more haunt out there for us to deal with.”

“We knew there was a third ghost tied to this location,” said Nathaniel.

“Yes, a ghost that appears as a prepubescent boy, ” snapped Chloe. “Even if we want to say that we can’t guess ghost genders—not that they matter, they’re dead, they don’t need genders anymore—that ghost was definitely postpubescent.”

Still bickering about ghosts, the trio moved on. I watched them until they were out of the room, then turned visible again with a silent sigh of relief. Invisibility isn’t easy. My “body’s” first impulse, when I tell it not to be seen, is to drop down into the twilight, where there’s no chance the living will spot me. Useful as an escape strategy, not too great for hiding.

On the positive side of things, holding invisibility is no harder than holding my breath or tensing a muscle was when I was alive. It even seems to use the same part of my brain—not that I have one of those anymore, either. I was sure our three intrepid ghost hunters would be thrilled to shift their argument to ghost anatomy—why do human ghosts tend to look like people, anyway? Why do we behave as if we still possess the bodies we lost when we died?

(And looking like people isn’t voluntary for most of us. There are ghosts like Aoi, who can change their faces, and there are ghosts that can turn themselves into fireflies or change their apparent age, but for the most part, what you see is what you get. A ghost like a coachman, who’s bonded with their vehicle, will always be bonded with that vehicle. They don’t get to turn themselves back into an independent biped just because they’re tired of it. The spirit endures after death, and it endures as itself. There’s probably something profound about that. If so, it’s not something I’ve ever seen clearly. I just work here.)

With Jonah safely out of the building, the ghost hunters could search until dawn and not find anything. It didn’t feel like there were any other ghosts in the vicinity, and so I vanished again, this time reappearing outside, in an alcove against the side of the building.

If City Hall had CCTV, someone might see the flicker of my appearance, but I doubted that any of the building’s security was currently connected or staffed. The Covenant ghost hunters wouldn’t have been strolling around so casually if there’d been a chance they’d be caught on tape, and I didn’t believe they had permission to be here. Maybe in a different world, or if they’d hired some mooks to follow them around pretending to film a reality television program, but in this world, without their own cameras? They were skulking about where they weren’t supposed to be, and I was perfectly willing to exploit that.

Safely outside, I looked down to see what I was wearing, and decided the Sabrina-from- Archie -esque black-skirt-and-sweater ensemble with thick blue tights was acceptably neutral to be believable as something a teenage girl might wear while taking an ill-advised midnight walk. There was a strange pressure at my scalp. I reached up and verified that the outfit came with a headband.

I am the universe’s Barbie doll some days, and I’m pretty much okay with that.

Stepping away from the wall, I began circling the grounds of City Hall. Halfway around the building, I found my target: a plain blue-gray van parked at the curb, next to an unfed off-hours parking meter. The engine wasn’t idling, but there were no windows beyond the bare minimum legally required for them to re main road-legal. I walked closer, then did a quick circuit around the van before knocking on the rear door.

There was a scuffling sound from inside. Several seconds ticked by. I knocked again. The door swung open, and a pale, scrawny man with dark hair and the beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip stuck his head out. His had been the fourth face Aoi showed me, but the way he wore it looked so much like a stereotypical Hollywood nerd that I almost wanted to blip myself back inside and scold the Covenant team for playing in to expectations. Instead, I folded my hands behind my back and smiled at him with all the innocent teenage guilelessness that I could muster.

The longer I’ve been sixteen, the funnier it’s been to me that most people over the age of twenty—living or dead after that age—will accept anything I say as true, as long as I say it with a smile. It’s like they’ve forgotten what it was to be young, and innocent, and heartless.

“Hi,” I said, cheerfully. “This is a no-parking zone. Are you okay, mister?”

“I have a permit,” he said, moving as if to close the van door.

“No, you don’t,” I said, before he could.

He stopped, blinking like a member of an improv troupe whose “yes, and” had suddenly transformed into a “no, why” without warning. “What?” He had a generic American accent, and I silently cursed Hollywood for making it so much easier for people to sound like they came from nowhere, everywhere, and Toronto all at the same time.

“My uncle’s in charge of parking for this area, and I know he didn’t issue any parking permits for the no-parking zones around City Hall,” I said. “He always tells me, because I like to TP the cars that aren’t supposed to be here. Makes it easier for the traffic cops to find them the next day.”

He blinked again, before alarm blossomed in his face like a strange, terrible flower. “You do what ?”

“Toilet paper,” I said. “Eggs, too, to help it stick to the cars. They damage the paint sometimes, so I’m not supposed to let anybody see me, but it’s a civic service and I have a lot of fun doing it. So again, are you okay, mister? Because vans are big, and it’ll take a lot of toilet paper to really mess yours up. I’d rather not, if you don’t mind moving along before I absolutely have to.”

He looked over his shoulder and back into the van. That was long enough for me to flicker out, and when he looked back, I was standing exactly where he expected me to be, still smiling angelically.

I promptly pegged him in the chest with a roll of toilet paper. He yelped, and I tried not to scowl.

You’d think after raising three generations of Price-Healys to adulthood that I’d have the aim of a Greek goddess, and yeah, I hit the guy. But I’d been aiming for his face, not his chest, and I was annoyed by my own inaccuracy.

“Hey!” he said, straightening up and looking wounded. “What was that for?”

“Just proving that I’m serious, mister,” I said, and grinned. It was easy to grin at the expression on his face.

“You shouldn’t throw things at people,” he said.

“And you shouldn’t be parking here,” I replied. I’d already confirmed one thing beyond all question: they weren’t somehow sneaking around City Hall on a permit from the mayor. If they were, this guy would be bragging about it. He looked like the sort of jerk who liked to brag to teenage girls about how cool he was.

“… fair enough,” he said, and stepped out of the van, closing it behind himself before I could get more than a glimpse of blinking lights and static-filled monitors. There was no sign of anyone else. I didn’t think he was working alone, not with that trio inside, but I suspected he was the only one they’d left to watch their backs.

Amateurs.

“My friends and I are doing a very important, sort of extracur ricular project, and I don’t have a parking permit because there wasn’t any way for me to ask for one, but please don’t TP my van, I can’t really afford to get it detailed right now,” he said, all in a rush.

I raised an eyebrow. “What, your friends won’t help you after they left you out here to be their van guy? What could be so important that you’re willing to sit alone in a van like a giant creep in the middle of the night? Oh, are you trying to kidnap local kids? Should I be worried?”

“I’m pretty sure anyone who kidnapped you would put you right back where they found you,” said the man.

“That’s not very nice!”

“Neither is hitting people with toilet paper, and yet here we are.”

“Rude,” I said, biting my lip the way Elsie did when she wanted someone to think they might have a chance. Either he would find it incredibly off-putting, due to my age, or he would find it incredibly appealing for the same reason. If it was the first, I could back off and try something else—maybe bringing Elsie for a chat with him, maybe abandoning this angle completely. If it was the second, then he was the kind of skeeze who thought teenage girls walking alone at night were reasonable dating prospects, and I wouldn’t have to feel bad about anything we decided to do to him.

Not that I was going to feel bad one way or the other: he was working with the Covenant, if he wasn’t a full member—and having an American accent didn’t exempt him from membership. They might not have been very active in North America for the last few decades, but Americans had a tendency to travel, and vulnerable people can be recruited anywhere.

Ask me how I know.

To my vague disappointment, he stood up a little straighter, looking like he wanted to straighten the tie he wasn’t wearing. A cute girl was paying attention to him. He wanted to look his best. Gross much?

“If your uncle’s in charge of parking, I’m sure you’ve heard the old city hall is haunted,” he said, sounding suddenly self-important.

I shrugged, like that was the least impressive thing I’d ever heard. “Yeah, three ghosts, big spooky, much scare, wow. What about it?”

He blinked and frowned, looking suddenly less inflated and more wary. “Well, they’ve been here forever,” he said. “My friends are ghostbusters. Real ones, like in the movies. And they gave me a list of things to watch for when I’m trying to keep an eye out for ghosts. Things like outdated clothes and slang. Did you know that doge fell out of favor on the internet more than a decade ago?”

Since it had been more than a decade since I had a teenager to take care of, no, I hadn’t been aware of that. I tried to cover my surprise by looking down at my outfit. “This isn’t outdated,” I protested. “These are my creeping-around-in-the-dark clothes, and black is timeless. Besides, I wasn’t aware that saying ‘far out, man’ was an offense worth calling someone a phantom over.”

“I didn’t call you anything. I just implied.”

“Yeah, well, when guys like you imply things about girls like me, we’re somehow always the ones who wind up with our reputations in tatters, while you get to keep hanging out in your creepy vans like nothing happened.”

He frowned. “Okay, that’s a little extreme, and my van is not creepy.”

“If I were a ghost, could I have thrown that toilet paper roll at you? You should give it back, by the way. The stuff’s expensive.” It was still on the pavement where it had fallen after it bounced off of his chest, and Alice wouldn’t want it back after it had absorbed all that grease and oil from the street—I just wanted him to touch it and confirm that it was real, not some ghostly trick.

I mean, it was a ghostly trick. The trick was just that I had blipped myself to Michigan and swiped the paper from the bath room, then come back again before he could see that I was gone. Alice hadn’t changed where she kept anything since she moved into that house, and I’d been banking on that still being the case.

“Sorry,” he said, a little sullenly, and bent to pick up the toilet paper, grimacing at the wet, sticky feel of the side that had been against the pavement. “You sure you want this? It’s pretty nasty.”

“Give it here,” I said, holding up my hands.

My ability to catch is better than my ability to throw, and I’d been assuming he could at least toss a gentle underhand. I was braced. Instead, he threw that roll of gross paper like it was the football at the big game, and it bounced off my arm with a nasty squelching sound.

That was almost better than me catching it. I yelped—half a beat too slow, but he was so busy looking horrified that I was pretty sure he didn’t notice—and pulled my arm to my chest, glaring at him.

“ Look at my sweater!” I said, turning to show him the mucky, oily stain now spreading through the fabric. “Do you feel better now, dick?”

“I—I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I just got sort of freaked out sitting here in the van all by myself, and then you came along, and you ticked off so many of the ‘might be dead’ boxes, and I… I’m sorry.” He opened the van door. “Come inside, I’ll help you clean that up.”

I looked at him mistrustfully. A real teenage girl would have to have been a fool to get in that van with a strange man. I, however, wasn’t real in the “can be hurt” sense, not anymore. I was a dead teenage girl, and the rules were different for me than they were for anyone with a pulse. After taking what I hoped would read as a long enough pause to consider, I shrugged, said, “Why the hell not?” and walked over to step past him into the van.

Two things immediately jumped out at me. First, in addition to the wall of monitors and blinking electric equipment, there was a wall of metal shelves bolted into place and loaded down with glass mason jars in a variety of sizes. They contained a wide assortment of objects, nails and railway spikes and bits of broken mirror. That was the unimportant part, because they also held ghosts. Every single one of them was occupied, phantoms beating intangible fists against the glass, mouths open in silent, endless screams.

When you don’t need to breathe, you can keep screaming for a long, long time. Like forever.

The second thing was more subtle, but more alarming. Someone had etched a Mesmer cage into the van’s frame, making the whole thing one big, mobile, ghost-containment unit. Which I was now standing inside.

Fuck.