She shouldn’t be looking at those eyes, eyes already dead, black eyes fading, fading to light brown as the whole world turned to sepia tones. The rest of him thinned; his chest went in with a sigh, then vanished as he said, I’m glad to be going on along, now. Thankee.

And he was gone, completely. She blinked and the browns and beiges vanished. Had she seen him well enough to lock him in her memory, maybe be able to discover who he might have been? No. She shook her head. Her hand dropped to the warm sidewalk, and slowly she stood, almost hearing her bones creak as she rose.

Waiting for you. Enzo’s mind-voice sounded scary and deep and she didn’t dare look at him, though she felt him beside her.

She didn’t want to ask the question, but the words formed on her lips anyway, dropped quietly under the noise around her to ghost dog ears. “Waiting for me?”

There are always incidents to prod the reluctant. Not the robbery. That was not fated. But an energetic, perhaps violent incident that would trigger a bound and waiting ghost, yes.

A little too much weird-ghost-logic-rules for Clare to wrap her head around, though she strained to grasp at wispy concepts while Enzo paused.

You could do as your great-great-uncle Orun did: Ignore this incident. When Enzo “spoke” next, his tone sounded as clinical as one of the doctors she’d visited. Though I don’t know that you will last long enough for another incident or two. Your gift must be very strong for you to deteriorate so fast.

Clare flattened herself against the building, one of the tall wooden beams that separated the windows. Wonderfully warm on her back.

Her ears rang and colors whirled about her in bright smears, and she knew that despite thinking she’d been forced into believing in ghosts and accepting her gift, this was truly the moment of truth. She had to consciously accept the logic-illogic of her psychic gift and ghosts. She had to give in, surrender to her new “reality.”

She had to decide that she had a gift, turn her back on the past when she wasn’t so cursed, and face the future as a . . . psychic. Or die.

Now her eyes were too dry to produce tears.

Choose, Clare. Enzo’s words boomed in her mind as if a bell tolled, being amplified and funneled down all the streets of Denver to her.

EIGHTEEN

HER BREATH CAME raggedly and she thought her heart just might give out in the next minute.

Lips numb, she said, “I believe in ghosts. I have a psychic gift.”

Would she have to clap her hands?

Enzo snorted as if he heard her, sat on her feet with a coolness like a breeze instead of like a melting ice cube, and looked up with a wrinkled doggie face. We will be FINE.

Clare hoped so.

Then the crowd parted again and she looked up to see Zach across the street, the man next to him gesturing to the open door of the back of a police car. Zach stared at her with an inscrutable expression.

Definitely on opposite sides of the reality line now.

He shook his head a little at her.

So he hadn’t mixed her up in this, mentioned her name to the police. Such a good man. She dipped her chin in response and turned back to walk to the mall bus terminal. She’d take it to one of the stops close to a hotel with taxi service straight home. She didn’t have the energy to deal with Mrs. Flinton. She’d call and have someone pick up her car and drive it to her place.

She didn’t look back but knew it was over between her and Zach.

The ghosts she met along the way—fully dressed and looking normal again—acknowledged her, murmuring in her mind.

She murmured back.

 • • •

By the time Clare returned home, the news feeds had picked up the EZ Loan Check Cashing robbery “thwarted by an ex–deputy sheriff from Montana, currently on staff of Rickman Security and Investigations.”

She listened to the television, but the sound bites didn’t have any information she didn’t know except the names of those apprehended, including the man who’d tried to escape on foot.

Her focus now was entirely on herself and her still-felt-problematic future.

One good thing—her real estate agent had called and set up a viewing of the house Clare wanted for the next morning. Just the thought of a new house, one with air-conditioning unlike this small rectangular hot box, had Clare sniffling. For the first time in a week she felt the temperature.

She opened both doors and windows for cross-ventilation and turned on the window and ceiling fans.

Maybe she could move on the other house rapidly, buy the thing.

She settled in her one comfortable chair and pulled out her tablet computer, looked again at the pics she’d taken just hours ago when she was . . . dying? . . . and yet trying to finesse having the money without the gift? With a sigh she thought for the umpteenth time that if she’d been given a choice, she would have chosen no money and no gift.

Instead she got the option of money and gift or death. Craziness might still loom large; hadn’t her great-aunt Sandra said something about that? Not that Clare wanted to contemplate the fact—facts! rules! with regard to this weird stuff? Ha, ha, ha—she didn’t want to consider the fact that she might still be in danger of losing her mind. Much nicer to stare at photos of a two-point-five-million-dollar home.

Enzo came over and put his head on her thigh. The ghost dog was still cold, but tolerable. The chill didn’t go straight to her bones and make them ache like just that morning.

His eyes were dark but didn’t hold that more-than-dog otherworldliness that creeped her out. I am glad you are staying here with me, Clare, and that you are not dying like your great-great-uncle Orun.

That had her stirring a little, but did she dare attract the notice of the . . . spirit, the Scary Specter . . . that sometimes inhabited Enzo. Maybe. “What do you know about Orun? He must have been long gone before you were a live puppy.”

Enzo rubbed his chin on her leg, rucking her dress up a little. Sandra spoke about him, and she played with the box toy like you have—he tried to swipe his phantom nose on her tablet and she jerked it aside—that showed people’s names and lines. The dog trotted over to the box that held the video disks and nosed in it . . . and one levitated upward.

Clare yelped, shoved her tablet off her lap, and lunged toward the box, grabbing a disk. “Don’t do that. No moving solid objects! How can you do that, anyway?”

You have a lot of psi power, Clare. I can borrow it when you aren’t using it.

She stared, mouth down, panting breaths. “But . . . but you are a ghost, not material.”

Power is power.

Clare raised her hands to run her fingers through her hair and maybe massage her scalp, since her poor head hurt inside and out, and clunked the disk against her face. When she looked at it, she saw it was a genealogical program.

Her heart bumped in her chest. Yes, of course, for research—both on her family and with the ghosts—the software could be invaluable, and something she could understand. Facts.

Abandoning her tablet, she went to the closet in her small office, where her secondary laptop sat with a thin layer of dust on a shelf. It was old and sturdy enough to have a video player.

There are papers, Enzo said, hopping up and down by one of the boxes.

She returned to the box and saw a brown paper portfolio nearly the same color as the cardboard. Opening it up, she saw two pockets; in one was handwritten notes, and the other had printouts.