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“We owe the dead. We can’t live for them, but we can live remembering what they gave for us to exist as we do, to live. If nothing else, we owe them kindness.”

—Juniper Campbell

Inside a spirit jar, which is an experience I had managed to avoid up until now, and really wish I’d been able to continue avoiding

T HE GRAY WAS ALL - ENCOMPASSING , LIGHTLY scented with salt, and painful against my skin. I couldn’t seem to stop myself from breathing, and it felt like every breath scoured the inside of my lungs, bleaching and burning them. A living person could never have been able to fit through the mouth of the jar, but here, inside the glass, it felt like I was more alive than ever. Which didn’t exactly jibe with the swirling clouds of diffuse mist I’d seen in other spirit jars. Maybe the experience of being inside one didn’t synchronize with the experience of looking into one, a voyeur in someone else’s agony?

Speaking of which, I couldn’t see the walls of the jar. No matter where I looked, it was just the endless, stinging gray. Experimentally, I tried to disappear and move myself in a random direction, but nothing happened. Living people can’t disappear and reappear just by thinking about it. It doesn’t work.

I was trying to decide on my next move when the world around began to shake. I spun in place, hunkering down and bending my knees in an effort to keep my balance despite the increasingly vicious shaking of my impossible prison. Inevitably, I failed, and went flying through the air like Dorothy inside the tornado, bits of debris slamming into me from all sides. They stung when they hit, but no worse than the fog.

Until an iron bar as big around as a tree trunk came flying at me, and the wind that held me captive left me no way to dodge out of its path. I braced for impact as best as I could, but wasn’t prepared for the moment when it slammed into my chest and kept going, tearing through me like a butcher’s knife cleaving through a prime roast.

The pain was inconceivable, sharp and bright and agonizing, and I blacked out for a moment.

I blacked out and I was sitting by my mother’s bedside in those long last days, when every minute seemed to last for an hour, and I wished them away as hard and as fast as I could, wanting to be anywhere but there, in that small white room where my mother lay dying, all the miracles of modern medicine unable to do anything but ease her pain. Hospital bills hadn’t been as dear in those days. For all our fears and all our clutching, clawing certainty that this was going to be the end of the world, we’d never been worried about losing the house—or if we had been, my father’s last great act of mercy had been handling the death of his wife without letting his only child fully understand how bad it had become.

I stood, the book I’d been holding open and unread in my lap tumbling to the floor, and my mother turned her face agonizingly toward me, every motion clearly costing her more than she had left to pay. She looked more dead in that bed than I ever had, so pale that she would have seemed bone white if not for the sheets around her, skin drawn taut across her knobby skeleton. The can cer was a hungry beast. It had swallowed every scrap of her, wearing her down to nothing one grain at a time.

This didn’t feel like a memory. I looked around me, and every detail of the hospital room was precisely as it was meant to be, unchanged from the last time I had seen it. So no, this didn’t feel like a memory, didn’t feel like my mind trying to protect itself from the pain by dredging up something even worse to put it into perspective. This felt like real life.

“Mary?” croaked my mother, and my breath caught in my throat.

How could I have thought this was anything other than reality, that my mother was dead and buried and gone, that I was a ghost? Sure, I’d felt like one for weeks, like I was dwindling alongside her, soon to disappear, but that was just a feeling: that wasn’t real. She was here and I was here, and we were both alive, if not well. She was my mother. How could I have dreamt her dead?

A daughter who dreams her mother dead might as well be wishing her mother dead, and a daughter who wishes her mother dead is no daughter at all, just a monster walking around all wrapped up in girl-skin. That explained why my weird fantasy had been so focused on the lives and rights of monsters: I’d been trying to forgive myself for the unforgivable, to rewrite the world so that I didn’t have to blame myself for what I was so blatantly becoming. How could I?

“Mary,” croaked my mother again, reaching for me. I reached back, moving closer to the bed, and just before her hand would have closed on mine, I was back in the whirlwind, tornado buffeting me with stinging air and cascades of salt from all sides. I felt suddenly less solid, less anchored in the memory of my own bones than I had been before the iron bar slammed through me. I looked down, and there was no injury.

Of course there wasn’t an injury. You can’t wound the dead.

The wind kept flinging me around like a rag doll, and then there was a woody branch flying toward me, one which I recognized as a spring of rosemary the size of a great broken bough. I tried to twist away from it, to no avail, and it caught me in the throat. There was the same terrible tearing sensation, and I was standing at the crossroads, the sunlit physical manifestation of my own employer, the place where they took their penitents to negotiate their terrible bargains.

The hot sun baked down against my exposed neck, and the air was filled with the lazy drone of locusts—only these were no locusts that had ever existed on the Earth. These were the droning wings of something from another reality, ones that had become a terrible intelligence that preyed about the Earth for years without number. And I had been its servant.

No, wait. I was its servant. Any illusions of a world where I didn’t belong to the crossroads were just that: illusions. Nothing was ever going to defeat them. Certainly not a descendant of the girl who lay on the ground in front of me, her eyes closed and her breath coming so shallowly that I could almost believe she was already gone.

Not that she could die. Not here, in this time out of time, this place out of place. No one ever died when they stood before the crossroads. That was part of the point. Sometimes the people who came looking for deals really just wanted a place they could stand while they came to terms with the fact that they were already past saving anywhere else but here.

Alice hadn’t brought herself here, of course. She wasn’t the petitioner. She was the prize.

The man walking slowly toward me through the heat haze of this eternal summer afternoon, he was the one who was coming to sell his soul to the proverbial Devil in exchange for everything he’d ever wanted—a concept which took the form, currently, of a gangly teenage girl with hair the color of a dragon’s prized possession, the skin on her leg already softening and breaking down as the venom the bidi-taurabo-haza had pumped into her bloodstream broke her down on a cellular level. She was going to die soon, unless the crossroads intervened.

And the crossroads were going to intervene. I could almost taste their eagerness, their panting desire to have Thomas Price for their own. He was one of the last true sorcerers in the world, and if he served them, he couldn’t hurt them. They’d be safe from whatever threat a sorcerer was destined to one day offer them. They’d be safe.

He wouldn’t be.

I clapped my hands over my mouth. “Thomas, what have you done?”

He was suddenly directly in front of me, not down the road and coming closer. “I’m ready to bargain with you, and with your employers, for the life of Alice Enid Healy. This isn’t how she dies. I refuse to allow it,” he said, and his voice was heavy with understanding and hobbled with grief. Grief for the girl dying on the ground; grief for the life he had been building for them every night when he slept, when he forgot their happiness was impossible and started turning it into something shining and secure.

His accent was so much thicker in those days, and even then, it was thinner than it had been when he first came to Buckley. He sounded like the children whose mother I would eventually help his grandchildren kill, like the Covenant coming home.

He sounded like a future that was never going to be.

“I’m here for the same reason,” said a second man, this one behind me. I turned and there was Jonathan. Poor, dear Johnny, who’d never deserved the number of funerals he attended: his son, his wife, and soon, his daughter. He’d been trying to found a legacy, and all he’d done was become a ballad.

“I asked first,” said Thomas sharply. “I have prior claim.”

I didn’t want to have any part in this. I wanted to vanish, to leave them to fight for the fate of a dying girl who I loved more than I loved anything else in this world. But I had a job to do. I was going to do it. “My employers aren’t bound by your human ideas of fairness or waiting in line,” I said. “Fortunately for you, I am. And as your representative in this negotiation, I get to choose who speaks first. You’re dismissed, Johnny.” He made a wordless sound of unhappiness. I looked at him, face hard and cold. “You have nothing left to lose worth taking away, and a sorcerer is a better prize by far.”

I knew—I knew —that this was a memory. This all happened long ago, and there was no taking it back or changing what had happened on that sundrenched road, the sound of locusts hanging heavy in the air. Thomas had traded his freedom and his magic for Alice’s life, and she’d lived. Oh, how she’d lived. She’d lived, and she’d found her way back to him, and they’d had two children before the crossroads ripped them apart, and with those two children, they had founded a dynasty. It was still going, and I was going to do what I could to keep it going forever, because those children were my home and my heart and it had all started here. Could it have gone differently? Yes. Should it have?

That was harder to say.

I turned to Thomas, inhaling to speak, and I was back in the whirlwind, being thrown carelessly back and forth, the rosemary bough no longer embedded in my flesh. I felt even less solid, and when I looked at my hands, I could see right through them to the other side. The spirit jar was unmaking me, unraveling me one trauma and trial at a time. The gray fog around me looked like it was getting thicker all the time, and I was willing to bet without proof that its increased thickness was my substance, unraveling but with no place else to go.

The jar shook again. This time, when I saw the jagged piece of broken mirror flying toward me, I didn’t even try to dodge. There was no point. I stayed where I was, spreading my arms, and it slashed through me in a white lance of pain and penance.

I don’t know how long the man from the van kept shaking the jar that held me, mixing and remixing its contents, before he finally stopped. I just know the shaking continued for another half dozen traumatic flashes of my life, things I’d seen and said and done swallowing me alive and digesting me, one layer at a time, until I was stripped bare and defenseless. That had to be how a spirit jar broke you down. It showed you the parts of your life that had hurt the most, and it carried them away, but the pain never stopped. Combine that with the gnawing loss of self, and it was no wonder that ghosts who spent too much time in spirit jars became unsettled and irrational.

I pulled myself back together as best as I could, collapsing to what felt like the bottom of my prison. The gray mist still swirled around me, but it was thinning, settling as the lack of motion allowed it to return to a more neutral state. I felt myself growing more solid, or at least more coherent, and sat up, hugging my knees to my chest.

Being a ghost means always being a disembodied entity trying to trick the universe into treating you like you still exist. I didn’t have knees to hug, and so I wasn’t hugging them; I didn’t have a behind to sit on, and so I wasn’t sitting. My whole body was a phantom limb syndrome, and I was just occupying it. I knew that, but the habit of being human is hard to break, and so I felt myself doing the things I thought I was doing, trying desperately to be small and compact and contained.

The mist settled farther, until I could see through it and out the side of the jar, into a distorted world viewed through thick, uneven carnival glass. I was looking at a large room of some sort—probably the attic, based on the slope of the walls and the boxes shoved against them. Large glass jars were stacked on every flat surface, every one of them filled with a familiar swirling mist.

But that was less important than the bodies sprawled on the floor, with the boneless carelessness I associate with small children and the deeply unconscious. Elsie was on her back, face pointed toward the ceiling, while Arthur was on his stomach; they were equally motionless. But I could see that Elsie was breathing, her chest moving in long, slow inhales and exhales. Neither of them had any visible injuries, which was something. I didn’t know how long secondhand aconite would knock them out; were the moths poisonous to humans at this stage? Or was it just the Lilu sensitivity that was keeping them under?

I stood, trying to rush for the glass, and got nowhere. The distance inside the jar remained unutterably vast, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never quite get anywhere. In the end, I sat back down, trying to collect myself and think of what I might be able to do next.

Fact: they had dozens of ghosts captive in these jars and were working at turning us all into weapons. I didn’t know how many of us might already be fully weaponized, but I did know none of the jars could be safely opened in the daylight. Even the twilight might be too close. Ideally, I’d be able to get out of this one, and start grabbing the others and transporting them down to the starlight, where I could find someplace to safely let the ghosts inside them out.

Or maybe I could take them to the anima mundi, who might be able to help them heal.

Or maybe I was just telling myself stories, because I was as trapped as any of the spirits around me, and I was never getting out of here.

Lilu are empaths. Most of the focus gets put on their preternatural attractiveness, which they encourage with their incredi bly potent pheromones, but they can also read, manipulate, and amplify emotions. Elsie got a stronger dose of the empathy than Arthur did—his big trick had always been pheromones so strong that sometimes he wasn’t willing to leave the house—but they both had it. And maybe that was going to be the answer to getting me the hell out of here.

I settled in to wait, trying not to pick at the raw wounds the fog—which I now knew to be a mixture of water, salt, and iron shavings—had opened in my psyche by dragging me back and forth through the memories of my worst moments. It felt like I’d gone ten rounds with a cheese grater, and the cheese grater had scored a decisive win.

As I watched, Elsie’s eyelids began to flutter, until finally, with a groan, she opened her eyes and blinked up at the ceiling. She raised a hand, pressing it hard against her temple like she thought she needed to hold her brain inside despite its desperate attempts to escape.

Groaning louder, she pushed herself into a sitting position and looked around the attic, squinting and blinking, like she was trying to clear a film from in front of her eyes. She paused when she saw Arthur, then scrambled over to shake him with one hand.

“Artie? Art—thur?” she whispered. “Arthur, wake up. We’re not in the boardinghouse anymore.”

The urgency in her voice was unmistakable, and I was quietly proud of her for remembering to keep her voice down. If she shouted, someone would probably hear her, and she’d have to deal with the armed Covenant assholes downstairs even sooner than she was already going to. Not fun. She and Arthur had been allowed to keep their clothing, but I had little doubt that they’d been searched for weapons.

Too bad for the Cunninghams that every child of the current gener— No . Every child of the previous generation had been trained in unarmed combat and improvised weapons as well as the more common forms. Elsie might prefer a couple of knives and a nice garotte, but if you forced her hand, she’d be perfectly at home smashing a chair and stabbing you with a leg.

She kept shaking Arthur until he groaned and started to swat at her hand, trying to push her away. Relief washed over her face and she grabbed him by the shoulders, yanking him into a seated position so she could hug him. He opened his eyes and blinked, pure bemusement in his expression.

“Wha’?” he asked.

“I thought you were dead, ” she said. “I thought I’d lost you again. ”

“You’ve never lost me before,” said Arthur, pushing her away. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m not your brother?”

“But you are my brother. My pheromones don’t affect you, and yours don’t mess with me. We have the same blood type, and you still have the scar on your collarbone from where I shoved you—or the body you live in—down the stairs when I was seven. I know I used to say I didn’t want a baby brother, but I didn’t mean it. You are my brother. You may not be the same brother I used to have, but you are my brother, and I don’t want to lose another one.”

Arthur frowned, then rubbed his face with one hand. “I guess that’s fair,” he said. “I didn’t really think about it like that. I just thought you were trying to wish Artie back, and I don’t know how to give him to you. Sometimes I wish I did.”

Elsie nodded then, before she pulled away from him and sat back on her heels, resting her hands on her knees. “I guess it’s hard to find yourself living a life where everyone expects you to be somebody else,” she said. “I’m sorry I haven’t made that easier for you.”

“I don’t think anyone could have made it easier for me,” he said. “Sometimes I’m mad at me for not being him. I can’t imagine what it feels like for everybody else.”

Now that they were awake, I started thinking about every moment of their lives that had ever gotten an emotional rise out of me. I’d been present for Elsie’s birth. Not Artie’s—when you have a babysitter who can watch the existing child during labor and delivery, you take advantage of it—but Arthur’s, the moment when Sarah slammed the last broken pieces of memory into place and the patchwork boy came to life under her unpracticed hands. I thought about my terror when we’d thought that Artie was dead, and my lonely, lost regret when I’d realized he truly was, no matter what the living seemed to think.

I thought about Elsie’s first girlfriend, her first kiss, the dress she’d worn to prom and the joy she’d taken in every scrap of it all, like she was the first high school girl in history to fall in love and figure out who she wanted to be when she grew up. I thought about how much she did and didn’t look like her mother, all the ways they were similar, all the ways they were different, and how much both the similarities and the differences could hurt. She had Jane’s way of biting her pinkie when she was thinking really hard, and Jane had learned that mannerism from Laura, following the woman who’d had most of the job of raising her like a child in a fairy tale following the Pied Piper off the edge of the world.

Laura was still with us in the shape of the children she’d raised, just like I would always be with the Price family, carried in a thousand little gestures and turns of phrase, a generational tendency to mouth off to danger when running away would have been the better choice. Maybe letting people with poor senses of self-preservation breed and then hand those children off to a dead girl for care and feeding had been a bad idea, but we did it, and now we were reaping the rewards.

Arthur started crying, fat tears rolling unchecked down his cheeks. At first, he didn’t seem to notice. Then he blinked, swiped a hand across his face, and looked at his wet palm in confusion.

“Is the roof leaking?” he asked.

“What? No,” said Elsie. “What’s going on?”

“I just felt really sad all of a sudden. Like something bad was about to happen.”

Elsie gave him a flat, disbelieving look. “Arthur, we’ve been drugged and kidnapped, and I can tell even without groping myself that someone’s taken the knives out of my ankle sheaths. I’d say something bad already happened.” Then she started to giggle, eyes going wide with surprise as she did. She put a hand over her mouth, trying to stifle the sound.

It didn’t do any good. The giggles continued as I stared at her, thinking hard about the trip we’d taken to the state fair when she was four, when she’d gone to her first petting zoo and made friends with all the sheep. We had laughed so much that day, just laughter piling on top of laughter, endless and bright, like the world was a kinder place than I had ever known it to be.

“Elsie?” asked Arthur, sounding concerned. “Elsie, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know! I can’t stop laughing !” She turned away from him, looking at the shelves of mist-filled jars surrounding them. “I think I’m picking up on feelings from inside one of these jars.”

Oh please, oh please, you can do it, I thought. You’re halfway there already.

“Mary said they’d been jarring ghosts to turn them into weapons,” said Arthur uneasily. “You need to be careful.”

And normally I would agree with you, but right now, let’s not do that, okay?

“Most of these jars feel like static, like emotional slurry. But one of them is making big, clear feelings, like it’s trying to get our attention,” said Elsie stubbornly. “It feels like Mary.”

“You can tell whose emotions belong to who?”

“Yeah. I’ve always been better at that than you were, whichever version of ‘you’ is living in my brother. I’m guessing it’s biological. You got stronger pheromones than I did, I read emotions more clearly.”

Arthur made a face. “That doesn’t seem entirely fair.”

“Seems fine to me.”

“You would think so. You’re the one who got the good part!”

“Try saying that when you’re trying out for the spring musical with fifty other teenage sopranos who believe their entire lives will be defined by how successful they are in high school.” She pushed herself to her feet and moved toward the nearest assortment of jars, reaching out to touch one. Then she recoiled, sending the jar rocking with the force of her withdrawal. “Augh!”

“Elsie? What’s wrong?”

“It felt… wrong. Like sticking my arm into a puddle of frozen slush and warm vomit. Both things at the same time. It shouldn’t have been possible, but it was, and it hurt. ” She gave the jar a mistrustful look. “I don’t think that’s where the feeling was coming from.”

“So what do we do, just touch every single jar in this room? There must be dozens.”

Carefully, I thought. If you have to do it this way, do it carefully.

Elsie and Arthur exchanged a look and nodded, almost in unison. It was the closest to seeing Artie again that I had come since Sarah dragged his hollow husk home from her cross-dimensional adventures.

Together, they rose, and began moving to touch the various jars, shuddering each time, moving away from outcomes that weren’t correct but at least weren’t upsetting enough to make them knock something over. And I sat in the bottom of my own jar, and tried to think about the things that would make my emotions ring out over the rest of the room, the things that would tell them to come for me.

It was tempting to go back to the sore spots the spirit jar had ripped open in my memories, the places where I was unsettled and leaking ectoplasm into the air around me. They were raw, they were agonizing, and they were right there to be exploited. But they were all terrible things, moments when I’d been so ground down that I thought I might die, moments where hope had been little more than a lie. All these shattered, shredded spirits were capable of that kind of suffering. I wasn’t special.

What I was was still coherent enough to focus my mind where I wanted it, and right now, I wanted to project emotions that would help me stand out from the rest of the unquiet dead. I thought back almost to the beginning of my afterlife, to the moment when my family’s phone rang and I’d answered it to find an exhausted Frances Healy on the other end. She’d been looking for someone to take care of her little girl, and I’d agreed on the spot. The town hadn’t known that I was dead yet—technically, Buckley never did know, since we’d buried my father while I played at being among the living, and then I’d simply drifted away rather than staging a funeral of my own—and my flyers advertising babysitting services had still been posted at the library.

I didn’t know when Fran called that taking the job would mean shifting myself into a whole new kind of haunting. If I had, the crossroads would never have allowed it. But it did, and they did, and now here I was, doing my best to mentally scream the hope and joy that had come from that simple call.

When neither Elsie nor Arthur looked in my direction, I shifted my thoughts forward to the day Alice had called me to the porch of the Old Parrish Place, exhausted and wreathed in bandages like she was trying to emulate a mummy. “Mary,” she’d said, “guess Thomas loves me after all, because he says I can stay, and I think I’m going to do it. Can you haunt me here?”

It had been such a little question, and it had carried an entire future on its shoulders. I’d long since given up hope that Alice would fall in love with anyone else, and she wasn’t the sort of girl who went out and had children with strangers for the sake of having had them. She’d embraced me on that porch, and I’d held her in return, and I’d known that it was all going to be all right. The world was going to keep moving forward, and I’d be able to move with it, and life would go on. That was all I’d wanted. For life to go on, and let me keep haunting it as it unfolded.

I hopscotched from happy moment to happy moment. Jane’s birth, Jane’s wedding, and then, bright as a new star, Elsinore, first child of her generation, family to me before she ever drew breath. Alex and Artie and Verity and Annie, and then Sarah, bright bauble fished out of a storm drain, adopted but no less dear for any of that. School plays and school pictures, Alex’s first SCA meeting, Annie’s first cheerleading practice, Verity leaving us to go on television and dance for the world…

Thomas, coming home at last, and Alice promising me that they were finally back to stay.

Elsie stopped where she was, turning her head and looking directly at my jar. Then she started toward me.

Yes, yes, yes! I thought. Good girl, Elsie.

“What did you pick up on?” asked Arthur.

“Spike of joy from one of these jars over here,” she said. “I think I may have found Mary. If not Mary, then a ghost that’s still coherent enough to be happy at the prospect of being found, and right now, that’s good enough for me.”

“If you can’t be sure, I don’t think that’s a good ide—” he began, and stopped as Mary picked up a jar two away from my own and began to loosen the top.

She hadn’t finished unscrewing it when the attic door swung open and Nathaniel appeared, a small pistol in his hands and a grim expression on his face. “Put your hands up and put that down,” he said, sternly.

Elsie raised her hands in the universal gesture of surrender, letting go of the jar at the same time. Nathaniel realized what was about to happen and shouted, firing a single round before he slammed the attic door.

As moments went, it was so like the moment when his brother shot Jane that the world seemed to stop, everything going grayscale and slow. The bullet caught Elsie in the shoulder, jerking her back and spinning her halfway around. She grunted. Arthur howled, diving for his sister.

And the jar hit the floor.

It didn’t shatter on impact so much as it exploded, shards flying everywhere. A gray mist rose from the broken bits of glass and assorted debris where the jar had been, starting to laugh a horrible, distorted laugh. I stood and rushed for the wall of my own jar, intending to at least attempt to reason with the emerging spirit, but as before, no matter how hard I ran, I didn’t get anywhere. I was trapped on a treadmill in my own private hell, with no way to move backward or forward.

The mist rose higher and higher, and then, without any warning of what it was about to do, pulled together into a thin column of smoke-dark air and drove itself at Arthur. Being a smart boy who remembered everything about dealing with ghosts that had been known by anyone in his hospital room when he was constructed, he clamped his mouth shut and turned his face away.

All this happened in a matter of seconds. Elsie was still falling, not yet having made her own impact with the ground. She wasn’t covering her mouth. She was still falling, and I’m not sure she could have covered it if she tried.

People always cover their mouths. They forget about their noses, their eyes, all the other points of entry into the human body.

The smoke whipped around Arthur’s head, surrounding it like a cartoon cloud, and then, abruptly, it was gone. Arthur turned back to his falling sister, moving to grab her hand even as her ass hit the attic floor.

Gripping her hand firmly in his, he pulled her back to her feet and looked pointedly at her wounded shoulder, which was bleeding freely. “That looks like it hurts,” he said, and his accent was wrong, thick Boston instead of relatively neutral Portland. “Think there’s a first aid kit up here?”

Elsie clapped her free hand over her shoulder and narrowed her eyes, glaring at him. “Get out of my brother, asshole.”

“Don’t believe I will, sweetheart, if it’s all the same to you,” said the man in Arthur’s body. “He’s barely anchored to this thing as it is. Seriously, no grip strength at all. I could boot him out of here no trouble, and then it’d be my body, unless you wanted me to leave it to fall down dead on the attic floor. That your idea of a good time?”

“I said get out, ” said Elsie, all but hissing the words.

“Or what? You’ll bleed on me? Sorry, but that’s not a great threat. Blood smells kinda funny, though, you might want to get that looked at when we get out of here.”

“They took all our weapons. We’re not getting out of here.”

“Nah. They didn’t take them all.” He moved nonchalantly away from Elsie, not sparing her a backward look, and began peering into jars. He studied each of their contents for only a few seconds before moving on, and when he reached my jar, he barely glanced at it before he turned his attention to the next jar in the line. “They left us all the weapons we could possibly need.”

“What are you talking about?”

“See, we’re surrounded by pissed-off ghosts who don’t have anything better to do with their time than help us get revenge, and I can tell without even trying that they’ve warded the house to keep the dead from getting away. So you let me hold onto your brother’s body for a few minutes, I let all these not-so-friendly spirits out of their jars, and then they tear the people who hurt us both to pieces. I just gotta find a ghost who’ll fit your body.”

Elsie blinked. Then, expression hardening, she said, “My babysitter’s in here. I felt her. If you need to put a ghost inside me, I want her.”

“Not all ghosts can do the possession thing,” said the ghost in Arthur’s body. “You can’t just break any old jar and expect it to work out the way you expect.”

“Mary will figure it out,” said Elsie. She paused for a moment, closing her eyes as she clutched at her shoulder. “She always figures it out.”

“Right. How long ago was she jarred?”

“I don’t know exactly, but it can’t have been more than six hours, if she was jarred at all. I don’t know for sure that she was.”

He turned to give her a disgusted look. Elsie scowled.

“I felt her before your jar got broken. She was somewhere near where I found you. She’s here, I swear she is, and that means she’s in a jar, because if she could appear, she’d have done it already.”

“Last few hours, you say?”

“Something like that.”

“So she’d still be most of the way intact. Hold, please.” He turned to go back to scanning the jars. This time when he reached me, he paused, expression turning contemplative. “What’s your Mary look like, anyway?”

“Late teens, white hair, probably wearing something with no sense of style behind it. On the skinny side. Nice tits, though.” Elsie paused. “And she’s been my babysitter since I was a literal baby, so I probably shouldn’t admit that last part, but it’s true and if it helps you find her, she can be mad at me about it later.”

Oh, honey, like that’s the first time one of the kids I’ve raised has had inappropriate thoughts about the babysitter, I thought. As long as they didn’t vocalize them until they were legal adults, and didn’t try to do anything about it, I didn’t care all that much. People get crushes. People think other people are pretty.

At least that’s what I’ve heard, about the crushes. I know it’s true about the pretty people.

The man in Arthur’s body picked up my jar, moving it gingerly so as not to set the mist swirling again. He squinted at me through the glass. “You fit the profile, but I hope like hell she’s right about you being able to figure things out, or this isn’t going to help,” he said, and dropped the jar.

There was one last rush of stinging mist, and then the glass was breaking all around me, and I was breaking free. I turned toward Elsie, or attempted to, anyway—no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t force myself to take the bipedal form that had been my default since my death. I was a formless cloud of pale, swirling smoke, hovering in the air above my broken jar.

The man in Arthur didn’t look surprised. He also didn’t look particularly sympathetic. “Sorry, princess, but even a little time in a spirit jar scrambles everything,” he said. “You’ll need to resettle, and that’s going to take time. So seize what you can get. Take the girl.”

I didn’t like the way he was talking about Elsie, but if this was going to be how it went for all the ghosts inside those jars, I wasn’t going to sit around waiting to settle. I dove for Elsie, and this time, when I tried to move, I moved, arrowing toward her with a speed and accuracy that felt totally alien to me, and totally right at the same time.

She inhaled as I struck her face, and I was pulled inside her, out of the formlessness, out of the cold. Her body enfolded me, warm and solid and alive—and in agony, the wound in her shoulder still bleeding openly. The shock of the pain almost knocked me loose, but I dug in with everything I had, holding tightly to the shape of her skin.

Elsie blinked, and she was me, and I was she, and this was going to be weird.