Or… or maybe I was just that slow.

I tried to follow, and all I could manage was to drift in the Corpsetaker’s wake, moving with grace, but slowly. So slowly.

Corpsetaker made a gesture and a veil fell away from another shade at the top of the stairs. It was Butters. He stood there dressed not in his winter gear, but in the scrubs I was far more used to seeing him wear. He was completely motionless except for his eyes, which rolled around frantically. A rapidly evaporating puddle of ectoplasm spread at his feet. An expression of pure confusion was locked onto his face.

Corpsetaker had been a big fan of body switching. When she left me and Morty in the basement, she must have come directly up here to grab a new body. She’d probably dropped some variant of a sleeping spell on Murphy and the wolves—and then Butters must have shown up.

Corpsetaker had gone with her usual trick, forcibly trading bodies with a victim—and the manifested ghost body she’d been in had fallen back into ectoplasm the moment she wasn’t there to give it energy and form. Butters’s essence, his soul, had just been booted out of his body, and now it stood there, vulnerable and unmoving—brightly colored but fading away, even as I watched. She’d tossed a quick veil over Butters’s shade so that no one who might come upon her would see him standing there, forlorn and confused, while she drove around in his hijacked body.

The thing that really got to me? Corpsetaker threw a little smirk back at me as she got to Butters’s shade. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop her, but she wanted me to see how thoroughly she’d outthought and outmaneuvered me.

But the universe has a funny sense of humor, and apparently it’s not always aimed at me. While Corpsetaker looked back at me to smirk, Molly rippled forth from under a veil of her own, on the last step between Butters’s stolen body and the explosion-chewed door. She grabbed the Corpsetaker by the front of Butters’s coat. Butters wasn’t exactly heroic in build. Molly, on the other hand, was several inches taller than he and had her mother’s genes, everything I’d been able to teach her about mixing it up, and six months of hard time under the tender guiding hand of the Leanansidhe.

Molly slammed the Corpsetaker against the wall so hard that stolen teeth slammed together. Then she seized Butters’s freaking face in a clawlike hand and thrust her head close, locking eyes with the Corpsetaker.

I wanted to scream a negation, but nothing came out. I frantically tried to move faster. If I succeeded, it didn’t show.

“You want to play head games?” Molly snarled, her blue eyes blazing. “Let’s go.”

The Corpsetaker’s face contorted into an expression somewhere between murderous rage and that of an orgasm, and she opened her stolen eyes wide.

Molly and the dark wizard went into a soulgaze, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it—except keep trying to get closer.