I circled the house and peered at the rear windows, invoking my built-in zoom. Once I was certain no one was watching from a window, I cast a blur spell and hurried onto the rear wraparound porch. With a combination of blur and cover spells, I was able to sneak a look in each window. It wasn’t until I hit the last one that I found Luther Ross.

I had no physical description to work with, but I didn’t need it. There were five people in the living room. Four of them were twentyish, female, and varying shades of blond. The fifth was a tall, dark-haired man in his early forties, with a Vandyke beard, mischievous gray eyes, and a hand planted on the ass of one of the blondes as he leaned over her shoulder and pointed at a vase. The girl’s face screwed up in concentration as she tried to displace the vase. When it didn’t so much as wiggle, he patted her rear and waved her to a chair.

Unbelievable. Give a guy the power to move objects across cosmic dimensions and what does he use it for? Screwing cute coeds. No wonder Ross hid out on Roatan—it wasn’t so much about evading the Searchers as limiting his classes to a select type of clientele, those he could handpick and give the transportation code. He probably took on the occasional legitimate student, to maintain his reputation, but if this was an example of his average class, then I understood why he hadn’t been more successful in passing along his skills. From the looks of these girls, they’d be lucky if they could pronounce telekinesis. Nymphs probably. If you’d asked me in life what a nymph’s powers were, I couldn’t have told you. And now that I’d met some in the ghost world, I still wasn’t sure.

Whatever special abilities nymphs once possessed had vanished generations ago, and they’d fully assimilated into the human race, where they could be found filling the ranks of cheerleader squads everywhere. Almost no one in the living supernatural world even knew they existed. Hell, they didn’t know they existed until they popped up here after they died and went, “Wow, we’re, like, magical.”

The supernatural dimensions of the ghost world were filled with extinct races like elves and dryads, beings who’d lost their powers centuries ago but came to our realms after death. I suppose it wasn’t easy, arriving here and finding yourself surrounded by people who could cast spells, change into wolves, manipulate the elements, and more. Not surprising, then, that these extinct races kept the ghost-world black market in business as they desperately tried to find some power, any power, to call their own.

I went back to Kristof and told him what I’d seen.

“Looks like a job for you,” he said. “I’ll stand guard out here.”