Page 57

“Yes,” the ghost said.

“Here we go, then.”

A strange sensation settled over the ghost.

But! Nothing tore.

Somehow that surprised him. He’d been bracing for something to tear, for hands that burned, for a grip he couldn’t break. Instead, there was only the sensation of something loosening. Like a knot coming undone in patient fingers, exactly the way she’d said, and the dark soft gray of the seal thinned around him, and thinned, and —

The pull.

It took him like a current takes a leaf. One instant he was in the seal, and the next he was rushing sideways through brightness and noise, and he was looking for the house, his house, he needed to go back to his house—but he didn’t end up back at the manor. He ended up pressed against something warm that smelled like coffee and sawdust.

Nate.

He was standing with his nose pressed against Nate’s chest.

What?

He tried to step away but only made it a few feet before the tether drew taut, gentle and absolute, like the world simply ended there.

Nate was looking at him. Down at him, slightly, from much too near.

“Hi,” Nate said.

The ghost glared at him. Then he turned to Miriam. He’d been right to be suspicious! “What is happening?”

“That,” Miriam said, “would be your tether.”

“My what?”

“You were bound to the ward. The ward is gone now, so you’ve attached to the strongest anchor in the room.” She began smoothing the seal’s fur back into place, entirely unhurried. “That’s Nathan, I’m afraid.”

The ghost glanced at the medium who had broken into his house, then back at Miriam. “Change it.”

“It’s not a setting, dear. It’s just what souls do. The moment you’re back on your own ground, the house will take you again. Until then, wherever he goes, you go.”

“This is unacceptable.”

The ghost took a step back to test his leash. The tether drew taut at the same distance as before. He tried to escape sideways. It was no use. He walked a slow half-circle around Nate, and the invisible line turned with him while Nate stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets, watching him orbit.

“So I’m the center of your world now.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” the ghost hissed. “This is temporary.”

Somewhere at the table, Sally was reaching the end of her patience. “What is happening? I can’t see him!”

“He’s standing next to your uncle Nate,” Miriam said.

Sally stared at the empty air beside Nate. So did Nicky. So, the ghost realized, did most of the table — Sophie and Claire and Richard, all of them aimed slightly wrong, looking through him at the wallpaper, the doorframe, at nothing.

Sally slid off her chair, marched over, and stopped in front of the empty air with her chin tipped up.

“Hi,” she said.

The ghost looked down at her.

“Hello,” he said, even though she couldn’t hear it.