I stopped about a hundred yards away from Morty’s house. There I felt it: a trace of the summoning energy that had been built into his former home, drawing me forward with the same gentle beckoning as might the scent of a hot meal after a long day. It was like the Corpsetaker’s summons, but of a magic far less coarse, far more gentle. The necromancer’s magic was like the suction of a vacuum cleaner. Mort’s magic had been more like the gravity of the earth—less overtly powerful, but utterly pervasive.

Hell. Mort’s magic had probably had some kind of effect on me all the way over in Chicago Between. His house was the first place I’d come to, after all, and though I had a logical reason to go there, it was entirely possible that my reasoning had been influenced. It was magic, after all, intended to attract the attention of dangerous spirits.

At that very moment, in her moldy old lair, the Corpsetaker was torturing Morty and planning to murder my friends—so the remnants of the spell were definitely getting my attention.

I went closer to Morty’s house and felt that same pull get a little stronger. The spell had been broken when Mort’s house had burned down, and it was fading. The morning’s sunrise had almost wiped it away. It wouldn’t survive another dawn—but with a little help, it might serve its purpose one more time.

From the voluminous pocket of my duster, I withdrew Sir Stuart’s pistol. I fiddled with the gun until the gleaming silver sphere of the bullet rolled out into my hand, along with a sparkling cloud of flickering light. As each mote touched my skin, I heard the faint echo of a shot cracking out—the gunfire of Sir Stuart’s memory. Hundreds of shots crackled in my ears, distant and faint: the ghostly memory equivalent of gunpowder. Sir Stuart had heard a lot of it.

But what I needed wasn’t firepower, not for this. I took up the shining silver sphere, the memory of Sir Stuart’s home and family, and regarded it with my full attention. Once again the scene of the small family farm seemed to swell in my vision, until it surrounded me in a faint, translucent landscape that quivered and throbbed with power all its own. For a second, I could hear the wind rustling through the fields of grain and smell the sharp, honest scents of animals drifting to me from the barn, mixing with the aroma of fresh-baked bread coming from the house. The shouts and cries of children playing some sort of game hung in the air.

They weren’t my memories, but I felt something beneath their surface, something powerful and achingly familiar. I reached into my own thoughts and produced the memories of my own home, casting them up to merge with Sir Stuart’s cherished vision. I remembered the smell of wood and ink and paper, of all the shelves of secondhand books that had lined the walls of my old apartment, with their ramshackle double-and triple-stacked layers of paperbacks. I remembered the scent of woodsmoke from my fireplace, blending with the aroma of fresh coffee in a cup. I threw in the taste of Campbell’s chicken soup in a steaming mug on a cold day, when my clothes had been soaked with rain and snow and I had gotten out of them and huddled beneath a blanket near the fire, sipping soup and feeling the warmth sink into me.