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And it assaulted me.

Then it hit me.

Oh my god. I could see. My chin quivered. I saw everything: equipment lined the room, cracks snaked through the tiled floor, and jars of what looked like human organs sat on the countertops. I gagged.

Tears blurred my vision, and a rough sob escaped my lips as I clamped a hand over my mouth before the medical examiners could hear me. I could see.

“We need to tell them,” the woman said.

“No, thanks.”

“We need to. It might be part of their investigation.”

The man let out a long-suffering sigh. “Fine, but they are going to blame us for the disappearing corpse.”

The woman’s face blanched. “Fuck,” she said under her breath, but she still motioned for him to follow, and they left the lab.

I followed as they crossed a pedestrian bridge connecting two red-brick buildings. They walked mostly in silence. The woman wrung her hands, and the man was stiff as a board.

On the other side of the bridge was a security checkpoint. The FBI was no joke. When we reached the offices, the detectives and the special agents were in the middle of a heated meeting about a brutal killing, and they were yelling something about jurisdiction.

Photographs of a young woman were pinned to a murder board. A beautiful brunette posed reading The Godfather in front of the famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Thick red stitches sealed her lips, and words were embroidered into her body, marring the skin beneath a sheer white dress.

I averted my eyes, tears sliding down my cold, invisible cheeks.

That poor girl.

No one deserved to die like that.

My jaw locked as the voices around me faded and the room receded, leaving only the photograph and the relentless pounding in my ears. My vision blurred into colors, and a sudden spike of fear rattled through my bones.

I couldn’t see again.

For a moment, I froze, until I realized only tears were coating my sight. I wasn’t blind.

I turned on my heel and fled the room. I couldn’t handle this. The last thing I needed was to discover pictures of my corpse, and I didn’t want to know why I’d ended up in an FBI morgue.

Honestly, I was a little surprised I wasn’t thrown into a ditch somewhere or melted in an oil drum.

I shuddered and glanced down. Shit, I was so naked.

Completely and totally.

Clothes. I needed clothes. My heart sank, because unfortunately, the only place I could think of finding any was an evidence room.

The last thing I wanted to do was steal some poor dead girl’s clothing. But what was the other option? Going out into public naked, where I might possibly become visible again.

Or was I going to stay a ghost?

Shifting my weight from one foot to the other, I bit at my fingernails. Ghost or not, I still wanted to be a clothed one.

After nearly forty minutes of searching—and discovering things I really shouldn't have seen—I finally found the evidence room. A few minutes later, I was staring at a blue dress speckled with blood.

Only then did it occur to me to wonder whether the clothes would be visible to everyone else.

Would they look as if they were floating through the air?

It would have been hilarious if that were the case, but the moment I touched the dress, it turned translucent, a faint halo appearing around its edges.