I could see twenty or thirty ghosts clearly enough to see their faces. Another dozen were wisps of whatever substance ghosts are made of. But beyond them I could feel them filling the room. I realized I was paying attention to them because the golem wanted me to.

Don’t you? asked the golem, again. Feed them to me, and I can go remake myself. I know how to do it. So I can protect my territory again.

“Feed them to you?” I asked.

Feed me the ghosts, he said, as if he thought I hadn’t understood him the first time.

“No,” I told him. “They don’t belong to me.” As if to disagree, the ghost who clung to my side put her face against my shoulder and wept silently. Her tears ran down my shoulder.

Feed them to me. I will clean this place of the vermin who prey upon my people. If you tell them, the ghosts, to let me eat them, they will give themselves to me. He paused. I cannot get them to do that, though I have tried since you and I met, and I conceived of this possibility.

I opened my mouth to answer, but at the top of the stairs, the doorknob turned. The ghosts left more quickly than they had come. I shifted to coyote and waited to meet Mary and discover just how bad a fix I was in.

—

I HAD BEEN VERY SURE OF MY ANSWER TO THE GOLEM before Mary’s visitation, but Kocourek’s information changed everything.

—

AS SOON AS MARY AND HER CADRE TOOK THEIR LEAVE, I changed back to human and looked at the golem, who’d observed the whole thing undetected.

I did not order the dead to give themselves up to the golem. Apparently he needed their consent, but he did not need their informed consent or even their willing consent.

But I did. Because unlike Rabbi Loew, I knew what I was doing. I knew the difference between good and evil, and I knew that the humans on this planet were not the only ones deserving of being treated under the “do unto others as you would have done unto you” clause of good behavior.

I called the ghosts to us, not just those who had come initially, drawn by the combination of our presence together. I called all the ghosts I could sense. When the golem touched me to reach farther, I accepted it. This was a horrible thing to do—and the only thing more horrible would be to take everything from those who had only a little existence left and have it not be enough to get the job done. They came, filling the basement impossibly deep, until I breathed shallowly in an attempt not to breathe them in with the air I needed to live.

“Listen,” I told them. As with Libor’s ghosts and the golem, there was no language barrier between me and the dead here. They fell silent, and I could feel their attention, like the sun on the back of my neck in the summer.