“This is Marco,” Wales said. “He was hanged in his cell five years ago, his hand cut off, his spirit enslaved. I didn’t ask for it. Neither did he.” “Who would?” Demalion asked, revulsion in his voice.

“You’d be surprised,” Wales said. “Some old-time thieving families planned on it—a legacy for their kids.”

Demalion shuddered; in the ghost light cast by the Hand, Demalion’s skin—pale-washed and shimmering—echoed the shudder, one step out of rhythm, one moment too late. Wright’s spirit, clinging fast to his body, Sylvie thought, and feeling the horror a single beat behind.

“Fascinating,” Sylvie said. “I don’t care about the history. What about the rest of your collection? I count eighteen Hands here, Ghoul. You didn’t ask for them either? They just . . . came to you?”

“Same situation. Different names. I took them away from those who made ’em. They might have been felons, bad men while alive, but that doesn’t mean they deserve to be sentenced and bound to a prison after their death. Our government thought they did. I disagreed. I won.”

“The ISI did this?” Sylvie asked. She shot an accusing glance at Demalion, forgetting for a heartbeat of time that he was no longer her rival, and dead besides. Seeing Wright’s body instead of Demalion’s felt like a jolt of electricity.

“CIA and Texas jailers. ISI’s real? The secret Secret Agency? I thought they were propagan—” Wales followed her gaze, frowned at Demalion. “Are you a spook, spook? There’s something off about you.” He squinted closer, his ghostly companion whispered in his ear, and Wales’s expression got tight. “You’ve got a ghost of your own bound to you. You’re haunted.”

“Never mind about him,” Sylvie said. Wales’s attention refused to be drawn away. A hobbyist faced with a new species, he wasn’t about to let Demalion’s puzzle remain unsolved.

“There’s lots of types of ghosts,” the Ghoul said absently. “Shouldn’t be surprising. Dead will always outnumber the living, after all.” He circled Demalion, Marco following him like a pale shadow. “But I’ve found they fall into three categories: intangibles, tangibles, and takeovers.”

“Can we spare the lecture for some time when I’m not holding a body part?” Sylvie asked. Now that she’d seen Marco, she kept getting nervy twitches of realizing there was a ghost attached to the Hand of Glory she held also—unseen, inactive, but there.

Wales ignored her, still pacing circles around Demalion, his narrow face abstracted, Marco his faithful shadow. “Intangibles,” he said. “Common as dirt. Covers ghosts who are images on repeat, voices in the dark, cold spots, apparitions. Common, easily dismissed. No big deal. They barely recognize us at all.”

He stroked through the air near Demalion’s face, and Demalion and Wright’s pale shade shied away.

“Tangibles, on the other hand . . . well, they’re tangibles. Where the trouble starts. They can see us, and they can touch us. Poltergeists throwing lamps, things that alter the world—houses that run blood out of electrical sockets, that kinda thing—and ghostly servants like the Hands of Glory, who open doors and attack witnesses.” He broke off, which was all to the good, Sylvie thought, since her flesh was beginning to crawl. She knew the dead shouldn’t interact with the living; she didn’t need a list of how many ways they could.

Wales stared at Demalion, suspicion in his eyes. “Did you kill him? Is that why you’ve got his ghost stuck to your skin like a burr?”

“No,” Demalion said.

“The third type?” Sylvie said. She didn’t like Wales’s attention on Demalion, on Wright. Didn’t like the anticipatory look on Marco’s ghostly face that suggested Wales might sic Marco on them if he felt inclined. She itched for her gun, shifted uncomfortably in her seat, wished she could just force the words out of his throat. She’d been a fool to let Wales light that Hand; he’d gained control the moment he did.

Wales studied her a moment; he knew she wanted to divert his attention, and he turned back to Demalion with a flicker of a smile. “Takeovers. Rare. Deadly. Liches, dead spirits yoked to living flesh, created by magic, sent out as assassins. Possessing spirits—the desperate dead who’ll steal your flesh for their own—”

He looked at Demalion again, studied Wright’s pale overlay, and stiffened. “That’s not your body. You’re not the haunted. You’re the haunt.”

Demalion growled, “I don’t think you’ve got the moral grounds to complain. I’m sharing this body. Temporarily. You’ve got a roomful of trapped spirits.”

“Possessing spirits,” Wales said, “are dangerous and delusional. There’s no reasoning with ’em, no matter how sweet they talk.”

Demalion stared steadily back at him. “You’re wrong.”

“Hard words from a necromancer,” Sylvie said. “And I don’t recall asking your opinion.”

“You came to me,” Wales said. “I’m telling you things—”

“No,” Sylvie said. “You’re making us a part of things. You’re flaunting your powers, your unnatural ally, and you’re making judgment calls you’re not qualified to make. And you’re still the most likely suspect I’ve got for passing out Hands of Glory to teenagers.”

“I wouldn’t,” Wales said, shifting to defensiveness. “I’m not a necromancer. I’m a researcher, a . . . curator, at worst.”

“A curator with a booming gift shop.”

“Damn you, no!” he snapped. Marco drifted forward, stood before her with a considering expression. He leaned closer, and his lips moved, showed teeth as grey as needles; cold air bloomed and faded on her skin. I killed bitches like you. The words crystallized in her mind, bypassing her ears entirely, as icy cold as his presence.

The little dark voice roared through her, Never like me.

Marco retreated like an icy fog, leaning into Wales’s side once more.

Sylvie didn’t like that at all; it argued a symbiosis between the living and the dead, made Wales more dangerous, made her look at all the Hands dangling stiffly and imagine their ghosts active and malevolent.

She and Wales studied each other a long moment, and Wales caved first. “I wanted you to see behind the Hands. So you’d understand. But if you care so little for words—” He strode to the door, opened it in a clatter of locks, and Marco slid into the hallway like killing frost. Sylvie jerked to her feet. “What are you—”

“Better look, or I’ll have to send him out twice,” the Ghoul said, his expression bleak. “The guy in 2C comes home every night this time, comes home to count the cash he took off of people at gunpoint. I take the cash from him when I can. I don’t live in luxury, but still, I’ve got expenses.”

Demalion said, “You can’t—”

Wales overrode Demalion’s complaint, and Sylvie heard the faint footfalls weaving up the stairs between the junk. She opened her mouth, but had nothing to say—call out a warning to an armed man who’d probably shoot first? Ask Wales nicely not to do . . . whatever it was he was doing? She didn’t even have the vocabulary for that.

“When I light the Hand, I direct the ghost’s action, but he gets paid, too.”

The robber stepped into the second-floor hallway, a machine pistol tucked precariously into his belt, and Marco swarmed him. Even as the man fell, Marco leaned in like a vampire, pulling at the falling man’s chest.

“When the Hands put you down,” Wales continued inexorably, “it’s nothing so benign as sleep. It’s a type of shock. It’s what happens when a ghost takes a bite of your soul.”