Some facets of magic are relatively steady, like the way a person with a strong magical talent fouls up technology—but even that relative constant is one that has been slowly changing over the centuries. Three hundred years ago, magical talents screwed up other things—like causing candle flames to burn in strange colors and milk to instantly sour (which had to be hell on any wizard who wanted to bake anything). A couple of hundred years before that, exposure to magic often had odd effects on a person’s skin, creating the famous blemishes that had become known as the devil’s mark.

Centuries from now, who knows? Maybe magic will have the side effect of making you really good-looking and popular with the opposite sex—but I’m not holding my breath.

I mean, you know.

I wouldn’t be. If I still had any.

Anyway, the point is that everyone thinks that the sunrise is all about abolishing evil. It’s the light coming up out of the darkness, right?

Well, yeah. Sometimes. But mostly it’s just sunrise. It’s a part of every day, a steady mark of the passing of whirling objects in the void. Granted, there isn’t much black magic associated with the sun coming over the horizon—in fact, I’ve never even heard of any. But it isn’t a cleansing force of Good and Right.

It is, however, one hell of a cleansing force, generally speaking. Therein lay my problem.

A spirit isn’t meant to be hanging around in the mortal world unless it’s got a body to live in. It’s supposed to be on Carmichael’s El train, I guess, or in Paradise or Hell or Valhalla or something. Spirits are made of energy—they’re made of 99.9 percent pure, delicious, nutritious magic. Accept no substitute.

Spirits and sunrise go together like germs and bleach, respectively. The renewing forces flowing through the world with the new day wash over the planet like a silent, invisible tsunami, a riptide of magic that will inevitably wear away at even the strongest of mortal spells, giving them an effective shelf life if they aren’t maintained.

A wandering spirit, caught out beneath the sunrise, would be dissolved. It isn’t a question of standing in a shady spot, any more than standing in your kitchen would protect you from an oncoming tsunami. You have to get to somewhere that is actually safe, that is somehow shielded, sheltered, or otherwise lifted above the renewing riptide of sunrise.

I was a ghost, after all. So I ran for the one place I thought might shelter me, and that I could reach the quickest.

I ran for my grave.

I have my own grave, headstone already in place, the darned thing all dug out and open, just ready to receive me. It was a present from an enemy who, in retrospect, didn’t seem nearly as scary as she had been at the time. She’d been making a grand gesture in front of the seamier side of the supernatural community at large, delivering me a death threat while simultaneously demonstrating her ability to get me a grave in a boneyard with very exclusive access, convincing its management that it ought to break city ordinances and leave a gaping hole in the earth at the foot of my headstone. I don’t know what she’d bribed or threatened them with, but it had stayed where it was, yawning open in Chicago’s famous Graceland Cemetery, for years.