“The town isn’t haunted,” Hollis said to Finn. “Well, I mean, there are spirits around. But nothing evil or dark or even bothersome.” Despite her own words, she felt uneasy about the old man and the crow. And she still felt cold.

“Is that . . . usual?” Clearly, he had almost said normal.

“Pretty much. Usually I know they’re around but don’t see or hear them. If one of them . . . steps forward . . . and obviously has something to say, then it always means something. Not that I always understand at the time. Like now.”

“So they never speak plainly?”

Hollis thought about it, absently rubbing a hand up and down her sweatered arm. “Well, sometimes they’re less cryptic than other times. But they never point straight at the bad guy. Seems to be a rule.”

Miranda murmured, “The Universe never makes it that easy for us.”

Finn looked at her. “Apparently.”

Since he still appeared wary, Hollis tried to reassure him at least somewhat. “Sometimes I see them doing the sorts of things we living do, just busy getting along. Walking along, eating in restaurants like this one, doing what most people do every day. It’s only the ones with unfinished business or who otherwise need our help that tend to want to talk to us.”

Finn did not look particularly reassured.

Diana said, “I rarely see them the way Hollis does, here among the living, but I’ve learned to feel them around me. Which they mostly are. They seem drawn to mediums even if they don’t have anything to say.”

Hollis wondered. She almost always saw spirits singularly; she felt them around her as Diana did quite often, but it was a distant awareness usually. When she saw them clearly, when they were trying to tell her something, it was almost always one spirit—and her own reality remained as it always had.

But not this time. This time she had the uneasy conviction that she had somehow stepped into the spirit realm. That had never happened to her before.

And she had no idea what it meant.

NINE

Nellie leaned forward slightly, clearly more than a little disconcerted as she looked back and forth from Hollis to Diana. “Bishop said you were both warned; if you didn’t see them here among the living, then where—?”

Diana explained as briefly as possible about the gray time, with Hollis pushing aside troubling questions, adding a helpful word here and there.

Finn was shaking his head slightly as he looked at Bishop. “You weren’t kidding when you said every psychic was unique.”

“I’ve never met any two psychics with the same ability who used it in exactly the same way. The basic definition always holds: Mediums see and/or hear the dead, telepaths read minds, empaths feel emotions, telekinetics affect objects in the physical world, seers catch glimpses of the future, clairvoyants pick up information from people and things around them—maybe from the very air around them. But each individual person filters the abilities through their own experiences and viewpoints.”