Page 27

Leo was standing straighter now, and Nate could see the tension in his posture. “You’re right,” Nate said. “That was a bad choice of words.”

“Forget it.”

The ghost left the room.

Nate sighed and finished his meal.

Nate set up his bed in the sitting room. It won by process of elimination: the ceiling in there had no stains, the draft was manageable, and it was the shortest walk to the coffee maker, which he’d set up before the sawhorses because he had his priorities in order.

He rolled the sleeping bag out along the wall, well clear of the straight line between the door and the fireplace. Ghosts tended to pace their territory along fixed routes, and sleeping in the middle of one was like pitching a tent on a game trail. Nothing dangerous would happen, but he’d get the shivers every few hours.

The house was quiet around him.

Leo hadn’t shown himself since dinner, but the pressure of him was still there behind Nate’s eyes, faint and sullen, somewhere on the second floor. Still offended, then.

That was fine.

Nate had apologized once, and he wasn’t going to chase a ghost through his own house to do it again.

He dug through the duffel for his toothbrush and headlamp, and his fingers brushed against something soft. Bartholomew.

Sir Bartholomew Flopsworth III, to be exact, was a stuffed seal. He was gray and round, and about the size of a loaf of bread. His flippers were stubby and his stitched on face was eternally smiling.

Jonah had won him at a fair years ago, the same summer their mom cleared the staring ghost out of Nate’s bedroom. Nate had had trouble sleeping afterward, until Jonah had shown up in his doorway, tossed him the seal, and informed him with total authority that ghosts hated seals. Everyone knew that, he’d said. Famous fact.

It wasn’t a fact.

Even at eight years old, Nate had suspected that his brother was just saying that to make him feel better. But he’d slept through the night, and Bartholomew had been with him ever since.

Was it a bit ridiculous for a grown man to be sleeping with a stuffed seal?

Yes.

Did Nate care?

No.

He brushed his teeth at the kitchen sink and after that, he killed the work lamp, climbed into the sleeping bag, and tucked Bartholomew into the crook of his arm.

The dark settled in around him. Somewhere above, a floorboard creaked.

“Goodnight, Leo,” he said out loud.

There was no response.

The ghost waited until the house had been dark for an hour before he came downstairs.

He wasn’t checking on the medium. He was patrolling. He’d patrolled this house every night for as long as he could remember — which admittedly wasn’t very long — and he wasn’t going to change his routine just because someone had moved a sleeping bag into his sitting room.

He drifted through the foyer wall and stopped.

The medium slept like a dead man. Flat on his back, one arm flung out of the sleeping bag, breathing slow and even in a house that should have been giving him nightmares.

It was insulting.

So what if Nate had experience with ghosts? That didn’t give him the right to lie there and⁠—

Was that a stuffed animal?