Page 28

The ghost stopped short, and then he drifted closer.

It was.

A fat, gray, smug-faced stuffed animal, round as a dumpling, jammed into the crook of the medium’s elbow the way a child would hold it. Its short flippers stuck out at nothing. Its stitched black eyes stared up at the ceiling with an expression of pure, insufferable contentment.

The ghost stared at it for a long time.

“Unbelievable,” he muttered. “Fucking unbelievable.”

The medium didn’t stir. Neither did the seal, obviously, but its expression somehow got worse the longer the ghost looked at it. Serene. Superior. Unfathomably content, in a way that nothing in this house had any right to be, least of all a dumb stuffed doll that got to spend the night held in a pair of very strong arms.

Something hot and unreasonable rose up in the ghost’s chest. It wasn’t jealousy. He refused for it to be jealousy. It was the principle of the thing — the sheer nerve of this medium, sleeping soundly in a stolen house with his ridiculous toy, while the ghost patrolled cold hallways he couldn’t even remember dying in.

The seal smirked at the ceiling.

The ghost swatted at it.

He expected his hand to go through, but it connected.

Yes.

The ghost was going to knock this stupid toy right out of the stupid medium’s arms!

Except the moment he tried, the seal grabbed him back.

Oh.

Oh no.

This was wrong. This was impossible. Seals did not grab, especially not stuffed ones, but something inside the fat gray body had latched onto his hand like a current, and it was pulling. The ghost tried to jerk his hand back, but it was no use. The room tilted. The dark folded in from the edges, soft and gray and…

“No,” the ghost said. “No, no, absolutely not!”

He was inside the seal.

He was inside the seal.

He had to get out! He had to⁠—

He thrashed, he shoved, he gathered every scrap of cold and fury he owned and threw it against the dark, but the dark absorbed it the way a pillow absorbs a scream. Somewhere at the edge of himself he felt something move. A fat, stubby, useless something that responded to his flailing.

The flipper. He was moving the flipper.

Of all the indignities that had ever happened to him…!

He stopped moving the flipper immediately.

The medium shifted in his sleep, closing both arms around the ghost. No, not around the ghost. Around the toy. Around the stupid, stupid toy that the ghost was stuck in.

Being held was worse than being trapped.

The medium’s arms were warm. The ghost could feel it through whatever the seal’s body counted as skin, a low, steady warmth that soaked into him from two sides. It was the first warmth he’d felt in longer than he could remember. His whole existence was cold hallways and colder rooms, and now he was pressed against a sleeping man’s chest, rising and falling with someone else’s breath.

It was awful.

Positively awful.

“Let go of me,” the ghost said. It came out muffled and small, spoken into stuffing. The medium slept on, breathing slowly against the top of the seal’s fat head.