“Hard to believe,” I murmured.

“Quit interrupting,” Eli instructed, but he gave me a quick grin. “I went on like that for a few years. Until they came for me, of course.”

Something about the way he said “they” made me flinch.

“I’m not sure what they saw in me that made me worthy,” Eli went on, unaware of my sudden discomfort. “But one day, while I paced uselessly by the river, they appeared to me. They told me about all the things I’d hungered to know: my nature as a ghost, my powers, and my purpose. They told me I was special . . . essential, even, to their mission. Like I told you before, they then commissioned me for an important task and gave me control of this place. They gave me power again.” He gestured grandly around him: to the crooked, shimmering trees and the flat black sky above us.

I shivered. “An icy tundra made for one?”

“The cold is a part of their world, Amelia. And ours.”

“Yours,” I corrected him softly.

“You’re wrong about that,” he said offhandedly.

“Oh? And what exactly am I wrong about?”

“About the loneliness of this place. It’s meant to be shared, you know.”

“By whom?”

“My masters have always wanted two ghosts to work together, pulling new souls into this world.”

“Two ghosts?” I raised one eyebrow and looked meaningfully around us at the otherwise empty forest. I knew Eli wanted me to join him, but it struck me now that he had spent an awful lot of time on the job without help.

A strange look passed over Eli’s face, one I couldn’t quite place. A number of emotions might have explained that look: defiance, arrogance . . . and even a little bit of fear. Before I could decide whether it was one of those or all of them, Eli gave a curt reply.

“I had a mentor once. And now I don’t.”

He turned away quickly, so that I couldn’t read his expression. Obviously, he meant to end this topic of conversation, and fast. I blinked back, startled by this evasion.

“Um . . . where’s your mentor now, Eli?”

With his face still turned away from me, Eli shrugged. “Gone. And that’s that.”

I could sense there was more to it—much more. I had the sudden, overwhelming urge to find out what had happened to Eli’s former mentor; if I had to guess, I’d have bet it wasn’t anything pleasant. I opened my mouth to push the issue, but Eli’s dismissive wave stopped me.

“I’m not going to talk about the time when I played apprentice, Amelia, so don’t bother to ask. What I’m more interested in is the subject of my own apprentice.”

“Oh, and I’m the current winner of that prize, right?” I twisted my mouth disdainfully to show Eli exactly what I thought of that honor.

“Actually,” Eli said, giving me another strange look, “you weren’t the first helper I chose out of the souls I’d brought to this world.”

“Huh?” I asked. “Who are you talking about?”

His face changed then, shifting from smugness to some other expression, one I couldn’t identify at first. Then it struck me—Eli was sad. Not snide or condescending, or even angry. Just sad.

Slowly, he walked over to a low-lying tree branch—one that curved up, looped around, and then extended into the gray air like a misshapen J—and sat down on the makeshift bench it created. He removed his hands from his pockets and placed his palms on his knees. When he spoke again, he stared at a fixed point in the moss beneath his feet.

“Melissa.” He said the name tenderly, mournfully, as if each of its three syllables was precious.

“Who’s Melissa?”

“She is . . . was . . . my first real taste of life after death.”

Eli’s head suddenly jerked upward. He caught my gaze and held it, his own eyes glowing with a near-violent intensity. I felt as though I were hypnotized by the power of that stare. Eli didn’t even blink when I folded my legs beneath me and sat down on the moss in front of him.

“The best night of my death,” Eli whispered, still staring hard at me, “I stood on the bridge, preparing to collect a soul. Just business as usual; all I had to do was wait for her to fall off of it.”

I made a small choking sound, but Eli didn’t seem to hear me.

“While I waited, I watched her,” he went on. “She was beautiful, with bright auburn hair that floated around her in a halo. She looked like an angel set on fire. I tried to reach out to touch her, but of course I couldn’t yet. I was dead, and she was still living.

“Part of my mission consisted of listening, waiting until her heart thudded to a stop and then pulling her soul from the river so I could take her to the darkness. But the moment before she fell, I caught a glimpse of her eyes. They were green, and as bright as yours. She looked straight at me, and I could have sworn she saw me, even before she’d died. At that moment I was hers. Immediately and completely.”

Eli paused for a moment, studying my face—for what, I wasn’t sure. Then he went back to staring at the ground, the faraway look of remembrance in his eyes as he spoke.

“I had to have her. I had to. After she died, I pulled her from the river and begged my masters to let me keep her as an assistant. To my surprise, they agreed.

“Because I’d woken her immediately after her death, the girl never experienced the fog like you and I did. She retained all of her memories of life, and seemed more than willing to share them with me. She told me her name was Melissa and the year was 1987. In her life, Melissa had been a student, studying nursing at that little college off of the highway. And although she had died violently, she was still . . . cheerful. Sometimes joyful even.

“She was everything I wanted in a companion: smart, beautiful, full of fire. I loved her immediately.

“But, maybe because of her nature, Melissa quickly grew unhappy with our existence. Unlike you, I didn’t exactly give her my detailed job description. Still, it wasn’t long before she realized what my mission consisted of and expressed her distaste for it.

“For a few weeks she tried to convince me to give it up—to let go of my power and set all my followers free. When she saw that approach wasn’t working, she began to disappear for days at a time, materializing away and then reappearing with little explanation for her activity.

“Then one autumn morning less than a year after her death, she came back to me looking . . . different. Her skin still glowed like ours; but it was brighter, warmer. Like real fire . . .”

Eli trailed off, frowning at the moss across which he absently raked his shoe. Small sparks of ice drifted up in the air and hung there, stirred up by his feet. I waited for almost a full minute for Eli to go on, but my impatience eventually outweighed my empathy.

“What did she say to you then?” I pressed.

He shook his head. “She told me I couldn’t trap souls in darkness for eternity. She said the dead are meant to decide for themselves where they go. She said that, by forcing them into this world to serve me, I wasn’t helping them at all. I was supposed to let the newly dead wander lost, because only after they wake up from the fog should they choose which of the afterworlds they wanted to occupy.”

“Afterworlds?” I breathed. “What other worlds are there?”

Eli shrugged, not fooling me with his forced nonchalance. “According to Melissa, she’d been someplace . . . else. Better. She asked me to go with her, but I refused. There’s too much for me here. I’m too important. I’m obeyed here.”

The prideful glint returned to his eyes, sparkling with an almost unnerving intensity. I could read his thoughts perfectly in those eyes: Eli was obsessed with this place. He would do anything his masters asked, capture and command any soul, to retain his supposed power.

“What happened to Melissa after that?” I asked carefully.

Eli sneered. “She vanished for the last time. I haven’t seen her since, not that I’d want to.”