“Witty,” Trevor Stone said from behind the soft light and the Weeble and Lurch chuckled softly.

“Witty,” the Weeble repeated.

“Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro,” Trevor Stone said, “I can promise you that I don’t want to hurt you. I will, I suppose, but I don’t want to. I need your help.”

“Oh, well.” I stood up on wobbly legs, felt Angie rise beside me.

“If one of your morons could drive us home,” Angie said.

I gripped her hand as my legs swayed back against the couch and the room tilted to the right just a bit too much. Lurch pressed his index finger into my chest so lightly I barely felt it, and Angie and I fell back into the couch.

Another five minutes, I told my legs, and we’ll try it again.

“Mr. Kenzie,” Trevor Stone said, “you can keep trying to get up from that couch and we can keep knocking you back down with a feather for at least another, oh, thirty minutes by my estimate. So, relax.”

“Kidnapping,” Angie said. “Forced incarceration. Are you familiar with those terms, Mr. Stone?”

“I am.”

“Good. You understand that they’re both federal crimes, carrying pretty stiff penalties?”

“Mmm,” Trevor Stone said. “Ms. Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie, how acquainted are you with your own mortality?”

“We’ve had a few brushes,” Angie said.

“I’m aware of them,” he said.

Angie raised her eyebrows at me. I raised mine back.

“But those were brushes, as you said. Quick glimpses, here and gone. You’re both alive now, both young, both with reasonable expectations that you’ll be here on this Earth thirty or forty years from now. The world—its laws, its mores and customs, its mandatory sentences for federal crimes—holds sway over you. I, however, don’t have that problem anymore.”

“He’s a ghost,” I whispered, and Angie elbowed me in the ribs.

“Quite right, Mr. Kenzie,” he said. “Quite right.”

The yellow light swung away from my eyes, and I blinked into the black space that replaced it. A pinpoint of white in the center of the black pirouetted into several larger circles of orange and expanded past my field of vision like tracers. Then my vision cleared, and I was looking at Trevor Stone.

The top half of his face seemed to have been carved from blond oak—cliffs of eyebrows cutting shadows over hard green eyes, an aquiline nose, and pronounced cheekbones, flesh the color of pearl.

The lower half, however, had caved in on itself. His jaw had crumbled on both sides; the bones seemed to have melted somewhere into his mouth. His chin, worn to a nub, pointed straight down at the floor within the casing of a rubbery flap of skin, and his mouth had lost all shape whatsoever; it floated within the mess of his lower face like an amoeba, the lips seared white.

He could have been anywhere from forty to seventy years old.