"I suppose so." What else could we do? I couldn't simply let the matter drop. Not only had we failed to return Mr. Wiggam to the Waiting Area, we'd left him with a person who despised him. There was no handbook for spirit mediums when it came to summoning the dead, but I knew deep down that this situation wasn't acceptable. Celia and I had no right to rip souls out of the Waiting Area and reignite emotional wounds in this world. It had never been a problem in the past, so I'd never given it much thought. Besides which, the ghosts we summoned at our drawing room séances had always willingly returned to the Waiting Area afterwards, and they'd done so feeling content that their loved ones could move on too.

Or so I liked to think. The Wiggams' situation had shaken me. Celia and I were fools to think we could control the deceased, or the living for that matter.

I also had the awful feeling we'd released something else in Mrs. Wiggam's drawing room by using that strange incantation. Something sinister. I only wish I knew what.

"Now, what shall we have for supper?" Celia asked.

I stopped with one foot on the stairs leading up to our front door and suppressed a small squeak of surprise. A man stood on the landing, leaning against the door, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked older than me but not by much, tall, with short dark hair and a face that was a little too square of jaw and sharp of cheek to be fashionable. It wasn't a beautiful face in the classical statue sense but it was certainly handsome.

The odd thing about him wasn't that we'd not noticed him earlier—we'd had our heads bent against the wind after all—but the way he was dressed. He wore black trousers, boots and a white shirt but nothing else. No hat, no necktie, jacket or vest and, scandalously, the top buttons of his shirt were undone so that his bare chest was partially visible.

I couldn't take my eyes off the skin there. It looked smooth and inexplicably warm considering the cool air, and—.

"There you are," he said. I dragged my gaze up to his face and was greeted by a pair of blue eyes that had an endlessness to their depths. As if that wasn't unsettling enough, his curious gaze slowly took in every inch of me, twice. To my utter horror, my face heated. He smiled at that, or I should say he half-smiled, which didn't help soothe my complexion in the least. "Your mouth is open," he said.

I shut it. Swallowed. "Uh, Celia?"

"Yes?" Celia dug through her reticule, searching for the front door key.

"You can't see him, can you?"

She glanced up, her hand still buried in her reticule, the carpet bag at her feet. "See who?"