He wasn’t, but anxiety still quickened her pulse and set her stomach a-flutter.

“For your information, popping up on unsuspecting women when they’re in the bathroom is just creepy,” she threw at him. Gathering her courage, thankful for the heavy terry and capacious pockets of her robe that allowed for the concealment of something so substantial, she pulled out the thick white candle and set it down on the counter beside the glass. It stood sturdily upright, its wick pristine.

“You think I came looking for you deliberately? Get over yourself, Doc. Your bathroom just happened to be where I came out.” He squinted at the candle.

“Came out from where?” She turned on the stove. The hiss of gas made what she was doing impossible to overlook. Not that the sound actually mattered, because he was watching her closely anyway.

“Hell if I know. That other place. And if you think I’m going back in there, you’re crazy.” He folded his arms over his chest as his gathering frown solidified. “What are you doing?”

“Lighting a candle. The scent helps with the nausea.” In a roundabout way, that actually had the advantage of being true. The scent would help with the nausea, because it would help get rid of him. As flame raced out of the pilot light and ran around the burner, igniting the gas, she took a deep breath. Her palms were damp, and her pulse raced. What she was feeling was acute anxiety, but there was more to it than that. Unbelievable to realize that she actually felt guilty about what she was getting ready to do. Picking up the candle, she felt a little bit like the ruthless murderer that she needed to keep reminding herself he was. “Anyway, you have to go back there. It’s where you’ll find the way to …” she hesitated “… the hereafter.”

His eyebrows went up. “The hereafter?”

Okay, heaven she wasn’t promising him. “You know, the afterlife. Eternity. Or … whatever.”

“Whatever. Yeah, that sounds about right.” His voice was dry.

Tilting the candle into the flame, she watched the wick catch fire. “There should be a white light—”

“We’ve been over this already. Take it from me, there is no fucking white light.”

“You just haven’t found it yet.” Holding the candle, she turned to face him. The faintest scent of jasmine wafted upward.

“Too bad. I’m sure as hell not going looking for it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it damned well isn’t there. And I wouldn’t trust it if it was.”

As the scent of jasmine grew stronger, Charlie had to work hard to corral her guilty conscience. “So what is there?”

“Mist. Fog. A constant, purple twilight.” He gave her a long look. “There’s things in it. People—I can’t see ’em, but I can hear ’em screaming. It’s like they’re being hunted down or something. Whatever’s hunting them—I think it’s hunting me.”

A flash of fear darkened his eyes. Whatever could make a man as big and bad as Garland look scared, Charlie didn’t want to meet.

Then she remembered: he wasn’t a man anymore. Where he’d found himself, big and bad probably didn’t matter.

She had no idea what did. But none of it was her problem. The universe had been rolling along just fine for many millennia before she’d come along, and the whole Great Beyond deal had to have been fine-tuned by now. It was up to a higher power to sort things out vis-à-vis Garland. She just had to trust in the process.

“You have to go back. There’s no other choice.” Mentally squaring her shoulders, holding the candle carefully so that the flame wouldn’t go out, she moved toward him.

He didn’t budge. “Sure there is. And I just made it.”

Eyes narrowing, Charlie was forced to stop because he was in her path. Theoretically, she probably could have walked right through him. Unless she had to, though, she wasn’t about to make the attempt. “What do you mean?”

“I’m staying here.”

“You can’t.”

“Sure I can.”

“No, you can’t. Even spirits who linger almost always move on within about a week. Uh, you want to get out of my way, please?” There was no point in arguing with him. The discussion would be moot in a couple of minutes anyway. All she had to do was position the candle behind him, and then herd him toward it. She felt a little bad about resorting to what amounted to psychic force, but in the end she had no doubt that it would be the best thing for both of them. She would be rid of a phantom serial killer, and he would be where he was supposed to be in the eternal scheme of things. “I need to set the candle down on the table. It’s dripping wax.”

“This helps you to not throw up?” His tone was skeptical, but he stepped aside.

“It does.” Moving past him, Charlie set the candle down on the glass-topped dining table, made sure the flame was burning strongly, then headed back into the kitchen.

“You left the burner on.”

“I know.” She was back at the stove. No longer blocking the door, he was all the way inside the kitchen now, watching her curiously. Not a hint of suspicion in his face. Get thee behind me, guilt. Pulling a slender wand of sage incense from her pocket, she held the tip of it to the flame. It caught with a crackle and a flurry of sparks.

“What the hell is that?”

“Incense,” she told him over her shoulder.

Inhaling the earthy scent, Charlie waited a second to make sure that the incense was burning strongly enough to be effective before shutting off the burner and turning to face him. His eyes fastened on the smoldering stick in her hand.

“You’re starting to weird me out here, Doc.” Then, as the smell of sage grew stronger, and slender white tendrils of smoke rose from the tip of the stick to waft in the air, his gaze shifted to her face. “That crap stinks worse than three-day-old roadkill. Are you seriously telling me that stops you from throwing up?”

Waving his hand in front of his face, he tried to ward off the aroma. It was clearly bothering him, but he just as clearly had not yet figured out that anything was majorly amiss. Charlie wet her lips. Her heart thumped. What she felt was a kind of dreadful anticipation. The sage would drive him not only from the apartment, but from this earthly plane entirely, while the jasmine candle would open a portal to the other side. At least, that was how it had been explained to her by her gurus in ghostbusting, and she knew from experience that at least the sage worked. The key was to refuse to think about what eternity might be like for Garland.

This is the way it’s supposed to be, she told herself defensively. But she couldn’t help feeling bad for him nonetheless.

“I’m sorry, but you need to go now,” she said firmly. Careful not to get too close too soon, Charlie inched toward him, taking tiny baby steps, waving the burning sage so that the smoke formed a barrier between them. “Your time here on earth is over. You have to move on.”

“What the fuck?” As the smoke reached him, Garland’s eyes widened. Then his face contorted. From his expression, by waving the sage at him she was assaulting him with the ghostly equivalent of mustard gas. Throwing up an arm, he started backing away from her and it. “Goddamn it, Doc, put that stuff out. You hear me? I’m not kidding.”

The budding threat in his voice was clear.

It took every bit of resolution she had, but Charlie kept going. “The light is there, waiting for you. That’s the purpose of the candle, to draw it near. You should be able to find it if you look.”

“Jesus Christ, this is some kind of voodoo shit you’re pulling on me, isn’t it?” His mouth twisted as if he were in pain even as he continued to back away. His heel caught on the threshold between the kitchen and the eating area, where tile floor turned to carpet. “Oh, God. Don’t do this, Doc.”

Her stomach clenched. “I’m really sorry, Garland, but it’s for the best, I promise you.”

“For you, maybe.” Panic flared in his eyes as she kept coming, waving the incense, backing him inexorably through the kitchen doorway toward the table. The candle was close enough now to start pulling him in. Charlie could see the ends of his hair starting to move toward it, could almost feel the gentle suction herself. “Ah.” He made another pained sound, and it was all she could do to close her heart to it. “Damn it to hell, that hurts. Put that thing out!”