“Yeah, you said that. Look, thanks. I’ll try to bring you another chocolate bar, okay?” I tipped my head to one side. His skeletal fingers tapped over the compass again, sliding over to the S.

“Friend. Safe,” he whispered and tapped the S again.

I smiled. “Friend. Thanks, Robert. You did good.” I had a suspicion that my offer of a second candy bar had made him give me the better route. The safer path.

A quick turn on the heel, and I was walking down the path that would take me south. I made myself pat Robert on the head as I went by him.

Felt the scraggly hair.

The bone under it.

The lack of flesh.

I could see the words in Gran’s old leather-bound book inside my head, as if I were actually looking at the page, the memory coming unbidden but still helpful.

Skeletons still guard the graves of those who are forgotten.

Robert reached up and took my hand in his skeletal one. “Friend.”

Okay, the shakes I got then were nothing short of an earthquake. Because I wasn’t . . . he wasn’t . . . crap on toast, Robert really wasn’t alive, and I just didn’t know what to do with that. I’d been hanging out with him for the last hour. Talking to him. Asking him questions that he’d been reluctant to answer.

So, I said the only thing that came to mind.

“Well, I suppose I’ve been on worse dates with Himself than with someone who’s legitimately dead.”

4

I made myself give Robert’s skeletal hand a squeeze even though my head felt like a balloon that would float off my shoulders. I found myself swaying a little, in time with him, wondering just how real he and this experience in the graveyard were. Yes I knew it was real, but that little part of me that had lived in Seattle for so long was struggling to keep up. “Gran, I had no idea just how much of what you’d taught me was really real.”

Despite the indisputable fact that I was standing in the middle of a forgotten Savannah graveyard in the dark, holding hands with a skeleton, I couldn’t get past the thought that none of this should be possible.

Which had to be part of the test.

They wanted to see how I’d deal with all the crazy of the shadow world. I hadn’t told Eammon who my gran was, or that I’d been trained by her and her friends. And Corb likely didn’t know much about me, black sheep that he was. He’d come to the wedding between Himself and me when he’d been a teenager, and I’d only seen him once or twice since then.

I let go of Robert’s very real skeletal fingers and walked away down the south-leading path. “See ya ’round, Robert.”

“Later.”