New Orleans is—something else.

It’s not the kind of place you can capture in a photo.

It’s loud, and crowded, and full of things that don’t fit, the clop of horse hooves at odds with the honk of a sedan and a saxophone. There are plenty of restaurants, and tattoo shops, and clothing stores, but in between are windows filled with candles and stones, and pictures of saints, and neon signs with upturned palms, and crystal balls. I can’t tell how much of it is a show put on for tourists, and how much of it is real.

And on top of it all—or rather, behind it all—there’s the Veil, full of ghosts, wanting to be heard and seen.

Spirits sometimes get stuck there, caught in a kind of loop of their last moments, and it’s my job to send them on.

“Debatable,” says Jacob, who would rather pretend that it’s totally normal for a girl to hear the knock-knock-knock of ghosts and feel the constant pressure of the other side trying to pull her through. “I’m just saying, when has sending ghosts on made your life easier?”

I get his point, but it’s not about doing what’s easy.

It’s about doing what’s right.

Even if, now and then, I wish I could mute the other side.

A carriage goes by, decked out in red feather plumes and gold tassels, and I follow behind it, trying to get a good photo.

“Hey, Cass, watch out,” says Jacob, right before I run straight into someone.

I stagger back, blinking away the darkness. I’m already halfway through saying “Sorry” when I look up and see a skeleton in a pitch-black suit.

And just like that, the world slams to a stop.

All the air rushes out of my lungs, and New Orleans drops away, and I’m back on the train platform in Paris, the day we left, staring at the stranger on the other side of the tracks, wondering why no one else has noticed the smooth white skull beneath the wide-brimmed hat. I’m trapped in my skin, unable to breathe, unable to think, unable to do anything but stare into those empty eyes as the stranger reaches up and pulls away the mask, and there’s nothing but darkness beneath.

And I’m falling, through those empty eyes, and back into New Orleans, as the skeleton here steps straight toward me, reaching out a bony hand.

And this time, I scream.

The skeleton pulls back.

“Hey, hey,” he says, recoiling. “Sorry, kid.” He lifts his hands in surrender, and they aren’t bone at all but flesh, fingertips jutting up from cut-off gloves. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

His voice is easy, human, and when he pulls off his mask, there’s a face beneath, warm and friendly and real.

“Cassidy!” says Mom, taking my elbow. “What’s going on?”

I shake my head. I hear myself mumbling that it’s fine, that it was my fault, that he didn’t scare me, but my heart is pounding in my chest, so loud it fills my ears, and I have to force myself to breathe as the man walks away. And if anyone thinks it’s strange to see a man dressed like a skeleton in the middle of the morning, they don’t say. Nobody so much as looks twice as he wanders, whistling, down the street.