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“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the ghost snapped.

Nate leaned back in the chair. “I’ll call you Leo,” he said.

“You will not.”

“Red hair, bad attitude. You look like a Leo.”

“I look like a — that is the most — you can’t just name someone.”

“I just did.”

“That’s not how this works! I have a name. I have a perfectly good name. I’m simply choosing not to share it with you because you are an intruder in my home and I find you⁠—“

“Leo.”

“— deeply unpleasant and I will not be — stop calling me that.”

Nate rose from his chair. “Leo. I’m going to try something. It won’t hurt. Stand still.”

“I will not!”

The medium reached for him.

Not with his hands. With something else, something that seemed to come from underneath his skin, a strange force that rolled across the kitchen like a wave and wrapped around the ghost.

The ghost recoiled. He couldn’t breathe—which, no, technically he didn’t need to but he rather liked the habit—and now he couldn’t perform it because something was trying to get a hold on the core of what he was, and his entire being locked up in blind, white-hot panic.

This had happened to him before. Something like this.

Hands that burned. A grip he couldn’t break. Something tearing — ripping — pieces of him coming away like he was a tree someone was taking an axe to —

The memory came in flashes that didn’t make sense.

And then Nate’s grip slid off.

The medium frowned. “This isn’t right.”

He tried again. The ghost felt the wave build, felt it press against him, firm and deliberate — and again it slid away.

The medium’s frown deepened.

Whatever he was trying to do to the ghost, he couldn’t manage, could he?

The panic hammering in the ghost’s chest started to subside, to be replaced with something else.

The medium couldn’t move him.

He’d walked around the ghost’s house as if he owned the place, tested his windows, broken through his door, watched his best haunting effort as if it were no more interesting than watching paint dry and now it turned out his own powers weren’t all that great.

“Problem?” the ghost asked.

Nate’s jaw tightened.

“Oh dear. Are you having an off night?”

“Be quiet for a second.”

“It’s just that you came all this way.” The ghost drifted closer. “That’s what you get for breaking into my home and trying to name me after a cat.”