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“He wanted to take us to paradise,” she said, growing a bit more emphatic, a bit more present.

“I remember.” Adam crouched to better meet her eyes. “Did he say how?”

“No.” She hung her head. After a while she said, “I think he might have forgotten about us. Or maybe he lied. Why else would he go away like that?”

“He didn’t go away,” a man said. “The royals killed him.”

He was dressed like he was ready for clubbing in the 1980s, in jeans that must have once been bright white, and a polo so green it nearly hurt Adam’s eyes beneath a black jacket that looked like it was made of plastic. Costume aside, his expression was razor sharp.

Beside Adam, Vic tensed. Other Lost Ones were taking note. They hadn’t moved closer, but their own conversations had stalled.

“Why do you say that?” Adam asked.

“They were afraid of him, afraid of us,” the man said. He’d sounded angry, but he sank into something else, sorrow, as he continued. “We just wanted to go home, or to find a new one.”

The girl reached to pat his arm.

“He promised us wishes,” she said. “That each of us would get one.”

That was new information. It sounded like something out of a fairytale, but Adam regularly consorted with elves and was in love with a Grim Reaper, so who was he to judge?

“What will you do if he never comes back?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I do,” another man answered. He was dressed like a miner. It was hard to guess his age beneath the layer of dust coating his skin. He fixed his eyes on the northern horizon. “We’ll tear it down. We’ll tear it all down.”

“They’re immortals,” Adam said, shaking his head. “That’s a fight you can’t win.”

“Maybe it don’t matter,” the miner said. “When you’ve got nothing to live for, then why not die for a good cause?”

Adam didn’t know what to say. He could feel the anger in the man. It burned hot, and he might just be telling the truth. These people had been pushed to the limit. There might not be a way back for them.

“The last time we spoke,” Adam said to the girl. “You told me you’d seen an angel, remember?”

“Yeah. It was beautiful.”

That wasn’t how Adam would describe the boggins, but taste was subjective and he’d read the Bible. The angels it described were terrors.

“Have you seen another one?” Adam asked.

The girl stared into the distance, toward what looked like a building made of trash.

The guy from the eighties gave her a pointed look.

“No,” she said.

Vic tugged Adam’s sleeve, telling him it was time to move on.

“Can I ask your name?” he asked the girl.

She considered it, and he understood her hesitation.

It could be a sensitive topic in the spirit realm. Names had power, and more often than not they were gifted, given, and rarely asked for.

“Lily.”

“Thank you, Lily. I’m Adam.”