I wished Captain Murphy had lived long enough for me to meet him in the real world. I had a feeling he’d have made one hell of an ally.

“I might be in touch with Karrin,” I said.

“No messages. I’ve done her enough harm,” he said, almost before I had finished speaking. His voice carried a tone of unquestionable finality. He nodded toward the house. “But you can tell the big fellow over there that I sent you. It might help.”

I nodded. Then I took a deep breath, opened the door of the car, and stepped out into—

I was more impressed with what I hadn’t stepped into, for a moment. Because when my feet hit the ground and the car door shut behind me, I wasn’t standing in Chicago’s rainy, abandoned corpse. Instead, I was on a city street on a cold, clear evening. No rain fell. The stars and moon burned bright overhead, and the ambient city light combined with a fairly fresh and heavy snowfall to make it nearly as bright as daylight outside.

Sounds rushed all around me. Traffic, distant horns, the thumping beat of music from a large stereo. A jet’s passage left a hollow roar behind it—I was standing only a few miles from O’Hare.

I turned to look behind me, but Captain Murphy’s car had vanished, back into Chicago Between, presumably.

I stood there alone.

I sighed. Then I turned and walked onto the property of Mortimer Lindquist, ectomancer.

Once upon a time, Morty had covered his lawn with decorations meant to be intimidating and spooky. Headstones. A wrought-iron fence with a big metal gate. Eerie lighting. The overall impression could be scary if you were gullible enough and the lighting was low, but mostly it had looked like cheap Halloween decorations outside a crack house.

Times had changed.

Morty had gotten rid of all the cheap junk, except for the fence. He’d turned his front yard into a Japanese garden. There were a few hedges, and a koi pond complete with a little wooden bridge that spanned it. Raised planters everywhere contained bonsai, all of them trees native to North America. It was a little unnerving to see what looked like an adult oak tree—only fifteen inches high and complete with miniature leaves.

There weren’t a lot of people in Chicago doing that for money, which implied that it was Morty’s own handiwork. If so, it had taken him a lot of effort and patience to create those.

I walked forward calmly, reaching out to open the gate.

My hand went right through it.

Yeah, I know, I was essentially a ghost, but I’d never gotten much practice with intangibility. I was used to reaching out for objects and being able to touch them. Now my hand simply tingled, as if waking up after I’d taken a nap and used it as a pillow. I pushed my arm a little farther forward, leaning to one side, and saw my fingertips emerge from the metal of the gate. I waggled my fingers, just to be sure.