“Well,” Bob said. He cleared his throat. “You idiot.”

“Argh,” I said. “My head hurts.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Bob said scornfully. “You just think it should.”

I paused and reflected and saw that Bob was right. And I decided that my head hurt anyway, dammit. Just because I was a spirit or a naked soul or whatever didn’t mean I needed to start ignoring who I had been.

“Bob,” I said, lifting my head suddenly. “What does this mean? I mean, why not just let me die and move along like normal?”

Bob pursed his lips. “Um. Yeah. No clue.”

“What if…?” I felt short of breath. I hardly wanted to say it. “What if I’m not…?”

Bob’s eyes widened. “Oh. Oooooohhhhhhhh. Uriel’s people—Murphy’s dad and so on—did they say anything about your body?”

“That it wasn’t available,” I said.

“But not that it was gone?” Bob pressed.

“No,” I said. “They… they didn’t say that.”

“Wow,” Bob said, eyes wide.

Mine probably were, too. “What do I do?”

“How the hell should I know, man?” Bob asked. “I’ve never had a soul or a body. What did they tell you to do?”

“Find my killer,” I said. “But… that means I’m dead, right?”

Bob waved a hand. “Harry. Dead isn’t… Look, even by terms of the nonsupernatural, dead is a really fuzzy area. Even mortal medicine regards death as a kind of process more than a state of being—a reversible process, in some circumstances.”

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

“There’s a difference between dead and… and gone.”

I swallowed. “So… what do I do?”

Bob lunged to his feet. “What do you do?” He pointed at the table of Mother Butters’s feast food. “You’ve got that to maybe get back to, and you’re asking me what to do? You find your freaking killer! We’ll both do it! I’ll totally help!”

The light in the room suddenly turned red. A red-alert sound I remembered from old episodes of Star Trek buzzed through the air.

“Uh,” I said, “what the hell is that?”

“Butters calling me,” Bob said, leaping to his feet. The form of the young man, who I now realized must have looked a lot like Butters when he was a kid, only taller, started coming apart into the sparks of a wood fire. “Come on,” Bob said. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Thirty-six

I didn’t actually will myself out of the skull, the way I had gone in. Bob’s passage just sort of swept me along in his wake, like a leaf being tugged after a passing tractor-trailer. It was a forcible reminder that, the way things stood now, Bob was the heavyweight. I was just the skinny newbie.

I hated that feeling. That feeling sucked.

I reintegrated standing in a dusty room. Afternoon sunlight slanted through it, its danger abated by the thick coating of grime over the windows. The place looked like an industrial building’s entryway. There was what had been a heavy-duty desk, maybe for a receptionist or security guard. An alcove housed rows of small personal lockers. Several rectangles of less-faded, commercial-grade taupe paint on the walls had probably been where a time clock and time-card holders had gone. Butters stood nearby, holding Bob’s flashlight, and the eyes of the skull were glowing brightly with Bob’s presence in the physical world, now that he had left his “apartment.” The little ME looked tense, focused, but not afraid.