Of course, my recipe had used depleted uranium dust, which would have made it just a tad silly to spread around the interior of my apartment.

Not that it mattered. My apartment was gone, taken when a Molotov cocktail, hurled by a vampire assassin, had burned the boardinghouse to the ground along with most of my worldly possessions. Only a few had been left, hidden away. God knew where they were now.

I suppose I couldn’t really count that as a loss, all things considered. Material possessions aren’t much use to a dead man.

I lifted a hand to my nose, wincing and expecting to find it rebroken. No such thing had happened, though a glob of some kind of runny, transparent, gelatinous liquid smeared the back of my hand. “Hell’s bells. I’m bleeding ectoplasm?”

That drew a smile from the late marine. “Ghosts generally do. You’ll have to forgive him, Dresden. He can be very slow to understand things at times.”

“I don’t have time to wait for him to catch on,” I said. “I need his help.”

Sir Stuart grinned some more. “You aren’t going to get it by standing there repeating yourself like a broken record. Repeating yourself like a broken record. Repeating yourself like a broken—”

“Ha-ha,” I said without enthusiasm. “People who cared about me are going to get hurt if I can’t act.”

Sir Stuart pursed his lips. “It seems to me that if your demise was to leave someone vulnerable, something would have happened to them already. It’s been six months, after all.”

I felt my jaw drop open. “W-what? Six months?”

The ghost nodded. “Today is the ninth of May, to be precise.”

I stared at him, flabbergasted. Then I turned, put my back against Morty’s impenetrable door, and used it to stay upright as I sank to the ground. “Six months?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not…” I knew I was just gabbling my stream of thought, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from talking. “That’s not right. It can’t be right. I was dead for less than a freaking hour. What kind of Rip van Winkle bullshit is this?”

Sir Stuart watched me, his expression serious and untroubled. “Time has little meaning to us now, Dresden, and it’s very easy to become unattached to it. I once lost five years listening to a Pink Floyd album.”

“There is snow a foot and a half deep on the ground,” I said, pointing in a random direction. “In May?”

His voice turned dry. “The television station Mortimer watches theorizes that it is due to person-made, global climate change.”

I was going to say something insulting, maybe even offensive, but just then the rippling sound of metallic wind chimes tinkled through the air. They were joined seconds later by more and more of the same, until the noise was considerable.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Sir Stuart turned and walked back the way we’d come, and I hurried to follow. In the next room over, a dozen sets of wind chimes hung from the ceiling. All of them were astir, whispering and singing even though there was no air moving through the room.