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“Leo…”

“I don’t know that face.” He was still looking at it. “I wasn’t here for you to draw me so you must have gotten it wrong, drawing from memory. Why would you do that anyway? Why would you—“ He stopped, and started again a little quieter. “I thought you were drawing a stranger.”

“I wasn’t.”

Leo considered him. “I remember the drawings of ghosts you had in your bedroom. You have weird hobbies.”

“I guess so.” Nate chose not to mention that he had not drawn another ghost in years and years.

Leo glanced at the drawing again. “My face looks like this?”

“It’s a good face,” Nate said, because it was true, and because he was an idiot.

Leo looked at him then. Just looked, green eyes bright in the lamplight, exactly as hard to capture as they’d been on paper, and whatever was in them, Nate didn’t have a name for the emotion.

And then, in true Leo fashion, he scowled. “You’re a terrible artist,” he said. And with that, he floated away.

Later that night, Leo patrolled his house like he always did. Exactly as he always did.

The sitting room where Nate was sleeping was part of his route. And if he floated a little closer to the notebook each time he came through? Well, that was only coincidence.

He did not need to see that stupid drawing again.

He did not.

He did.

It was three AM by the time he gave up the pretense. He found himself in the sitting room once more. Nate slept flat on his back with one arm around the seal, and the notebook lay on top of the toolbox beside him.

The first problem Leo discovered was that the notebook was closed. The second was that it was pitch dark in the room. The work lamp was off, the moon was on the wrong side of the house, and even if he got the notebook open, the page would be nothing but gray on gray.

He’d have to wait for the sun.

That was fine.

It would take him all night to get this notebook to open anyway. If he could open it.

No, he could.

He’d moved a seal across four feet of counter once, before an audience of paint cans, under combat conditions. He could open a book.

He gathered himself, gathered his frustration, the not-knowing, his indignity at the world, and pushed again.

The cover lifted a quarter inch. And settled.

“Oh, come on.”

Nate snored softly.

Leo squared up to the notebook and got to work.

Gray light was starting to creep into the room by the time Leo got the cover open with a small cry of triumph that he immediately muffled in order not to wake the medium.

But he had succeeded! He had won against the notebook!

And now he was looking at a page of foyer measurements. Fascinating, except really not.

At least, turning the pages was easier than turning the cover had been.