“Cass,” says Jacob softly.

I look down, and see my hands are shaking. I wrap them around the camera case, squeezing tight until they stop.

“You okay, kiddo?” asks Dad, and both of my parents are now looking at me like I’ve sprouted whiskers or wings, transformed from their daughter into something skittish, and fragile, and strange.

I don’t blame them.

I’m Cassidy Blake.

I’ve never been squeamish. Not when a girl at school got a bloody nose and looked like she’d spilled a bucket of red paint down her front.

Not when I reached into a ghost’s chest for the first time and pulled out the rotten remnants of its life.

Not when I climbed into an open grave, or fell through a pile of crumbling bones five stories underground.

But the skeleton in the black suit was different. The memory alone is enough to make me shiver. Back in Paris, when the stranger in the skull mask looked at me from across the platform, it was like they looked straight through me. Like I was a nice warm room, until they threw the windows open, and then everything went cold. In that moment, I had never felt so sick, so scared, so alone.

“Like a Demental,” says Jacob.

I blink, dragging my attention back. “What?” I ask.

“You know, the creepy wraithlike monsters in Harry Potter who suck out your life, eat all your joy, and leave you cold.”

Oh. He means Dementor.

Jacob has never actually read the books, so his knowledge is made up entirely of movie snippets and my constant references—but for once, he’s almost right.

It was kind of like that. Like I looked darkness in the eye, and it ate up all the light inside me. But Dementors aren’t real, and whatever that thing was, back in Paris, it was. At least, I think it was.

Nobody else saw it.

Not even Jacob.

But it felt real enough to me.

“I believe you,” he says, knocking his shoulder against mine. “But maybe you should talk to Lara.”

Which may be the last thing I ever thought I’d hear Jacob say.

“I know, I know,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Jacob and Lara don’t exactly get along. You could say it’s a difference of temperament—Jacob’s all Gryffindor, and Lara’s undeniably Ravenclaw—but it’s more complicated than that. Lara’s an in-betweener, like me, and her job—which is my job, too—is to send ghosts on to the other side, and Jacob is firmly, undeniably here.

He clears his throat.

Which is exactly where he’s supposed to be, I think pointedly.

“Look,” he says, “Lara doesn’t know everything, but she does know a lot of stuff, and maybe she’s seen one of these weird skeleton men before.”

I swallow hard. Whatever I saw in Paris, it wasn’t a man. It was shaped like one, more or less, with that black suit and that broad-brimmed hat. But a man has flesh and blood. A man has a face behind his mask. A man has eyes.