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He’d been the worst thing that had ever happened to the boy.

Certainty there.

Pressing his hands over his eyes, he curled in on himself. He wasn’t sure if he screamed again or not, the noise was all inside him.

Something terrible had happened to the boy he loved, and that was why Leo was feeling so terrible. That must be why.

Had he died along with Leo?

Had they died together?

Leo reached for his own death and got what he always got — nothing.

But.

He had not been alone when he died.

Someone had been there. In the dark, at the end, someone — and if it was the boy, if the boy had been there, if the terrible thing that hummed under all of it was that Leo had dragged him down too⁠—

Leo wanted to scream again.

He didn’t, though.

He uncurled.

If the boy had died with him, he might be on the list that Nate had shown him. The first time he’d read it, he’d only been looking for his own name. He hadn’t been aware of the boy, then.

But if he read the list now…

He’d recognize the name if he saw it, he was sure of it.

He stood up.

The window was gray. Some hour of some day. Below him the house went on making its small alive noises. It sounded like Nate was sawing at something? And probably had been for a while. Oddly, Leo hadn’t cared.

Now he only cared that the noise made the medium easy to detect.

He flew downstairs for answers.

Chapter

Twenty-One

The sawing was coming from the dining room.

Leo went through the ceiling and stopped. The room had changed. The far corner had been opened up, the plaster gone and the wall stripped down to thin wooden slats, and Nate stood in the middle of the wreckage with the saw in his hand and dust in his hair.

This should have bothered Leo. It did bother him, enormously, but not enough to forget about his real objective.

“I need to see the list again,” he demanded, stopping right in front of Nate’s face.

Nate stopped sawing to look at him. Something happened in his face, some emotion flickering across his features too fast for Leo to place.

Was it surprise?

Nate set the saw down on the sawhorse, slowly. “Which list?”

“The names of all the dead people.”