Someone jostled me from behind. A physical jostle that, considering I was in the living world, should have been impossible…which meant that whoever hit me had to be another ghost.

“Watch where you’re going there, sweetheart.”

I looked over my shoulder to see a guy about a half foot shorter than me, dressed in spats and a straw hat, with a machine gun slung over one shoulder. He grinned, tipped his hat, and slid past.

I was on a sidewalk, across from a soot-crusted brick building with boarded-up windows and a sheet of paper plastered on the door. I sharpened my vision to read the paper on the door across the road. A notice of closure, in accordance with the Prohibition Act of 1920.

Ghost-world Chicago. Like most major cities in the afterlife, the landscape of Chicago was frozen in its heyday, and many of the residents, like the portly gangster, played along with the period. But if I was here, that meant Jaime really had banished me. Damn.

There were ways to avoid banishing. A few months before, Kristof had needed a necro’s help, and went to one who owed him major favors. Guy made the mistake of thinking Kristof’s death canceled out those IOUs, then made the even bigger mistake of trying to banish Kristof when he came to collect. Kris had done something that rendered the necro’s banishing powers impotent for the next few months, a reminder that you didn’t screw with a Nast—even a dead one.

So all I had to do was track down Kristof and ask for his help. Sounds easy enough…except for the part about asking Kristof for help. Oh, he’d give it to me—without a moment’s hesitation and with no expectation of anything in return. That was the problem. When I took something, I always gave something back—no favors owed, no debt remaining. While I counted Kris as a friend—the best I had in the ghost world—I hated asking him for anything. I’d taken enough from him already.

Better to try again on my own.

Jaime’s dressing room was empty.

“Damn,” I muttered.

There were ways to track a necro, but I hadn’t bothered to learn them. We were in Chicago, in late March. If she’d left the building, she’d have taken her coat, which was gone, as was her purse. But the suitcase with her outfit for the show was still here. I remembered her bout of dry heaves earlier, and guessed she’d gone onstage with an empty stomach. Now she’d likely slipped out for chow.