I shivered.

It could happen to me, too.

“Listen to me, boy,” Sir Stuart said. “We didn’t trust you. We assumed you were mixed up in whatever it is the Grey Ghost wanted.”

“Like hell,” I said.

“You don’t know that,” Sir Stuart said flatly. “For all we knew, you could have been directed by that creature without your own knowledge. For that matter, you don’t have the feel of a normal ghost. It could have created you whole from the spirit world.”

I scowled and began to argue—and couldn’t. I’ve been faced with the odd and unusual and had drawn incorrect conclusions too many times. When people are scared, they don’t think straight. Mort had been terrified.

“Do you still think that?” I asked.

“No reason for you to be here if you were,” Sir Stuart said. “The worst has happened. Were you a plant, you would not have come. Though I suppose you might still be a dupe.”

“Thanks,” I said wryly.

He softened the words with another smile. “But dupe or not, it may be that ye can help Mortimer. And it is critical that you do so. Without his influence, this city will be in terrible danger.”

“Yeah, you aren’t exactly increasing the tension by telling me that,” I said. “We’re already sort of playing for maximum stakes.”

“I know not what you mean,” Sir Stuart replied. “But I tell you this: Those shades standing around the house, one and all, are murderers.”

I blinked and looked back at the still-smoldering house and at the enormous circle of spirits around it.

“Each and every one of them,” Sir Stuart said. “Mortimer gave them something they needed to turn aside from their madness: a home. If you do not restore him to freedom so that he may care for these poor souls, they will kill again. As sure as the sun rises, they won’t be able to help themselves.” He exhaled wearily and closed his eyes. “Fifty years of maddened shades unleashed upon the city all at once. Preying on mortals. Blood will run in buckets.”

I stared at him for a moment. Then I said, “How am I supposed to do that?”

“I’ve not the foggiest,” Sir Stuart replied. He fumbled at his belt and drew that monster pistol. He paused for a moment, grimacing. Then he tossed it weakly at my feet. It tumbled through the circle with a flicker of energies and landed atop the snow without sinking into it—the apparition of a weapon.

I stared for a second. A spirit couldn’t project its power across a circle—and I was sure that power was exactly what the gun represented. So if it had crossed the circle’s barrier, it meant that it was power that no longer belonged to Sir Stuart. On several levels, what he had just done was a violent act of self-mutilation—like chopping off your own hand.

He gestured weakly toward the gun, and said, “Take it.”

I picked it up gingerly. It weighed a ton. “What am I going to do with this?”