Even Boo turned away now. “We have ways,” Stephen said. The bright look in his eye had gone out, and he stared at the people sitting on the lions. I had asked something they didn’t want to be asked. I got the sense that the more I pressed this, the more unhappy and possibly unhinged I would become. I had to embrace the daylight, the sanity I had at this moment.

“Fine,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.

“We just wanted to give you some experience with your new ability,” Stephen said. “But we have to get back to work. Boo will take you back.”

“Wait,” I said as Stephen and Callum turned to go, “one more question. If there are ghosts, does that mean there are . . . vampires? And werewolves?”

Whatever misery I had caused by my previous question, it was wiped out with this one. They all laughed. Even Stephen, who I didn’t know could laugh.

“Don’t be stupid,” Callum said.

Chapter 24

24

GHOSTS, ACCORDING TO THE INTERNET:

Souls, spooks, shades, poltergeists, revenants. Generally regarded to be people returned from the dead, though there are also ghost animals, and ghost ships, and even ghost trains and planes and articles of furniture and plants. Often known to linger around places they lived in or died in, looking sad. Both can and cannot be photographed, though when photographed, may appear as a blob or orb of light. Science rejects and confirms their existence. Can be contacted through mediums, who are all fakes.

In other words, the Internet was useless at teaching me anything, except that a lot of people had strong feelings about ghosts, and every culture in the world had something to say about them, through all of history. Also, a lot of people online who claimed to be ghost experts were clearly much crazier than anyone from my town, which was saying something.

What was reassuring, I guess, was the sheer number of people who believed in ghosts and who claimed to have seen them. I certainly would never be lonely. And they couldn’t all be crazy.

There were about a half-dozen television shows devoted to the subject of ghost-hunting. I watched a few of these. What I saw were crews of people sneaking around houses with night vision cameras, jumping at every noise and saying, “Did you hear that?” Replaying said noise over and over—and the noise was always a little bump or a door closing. Or they’d have some piece of machinery that they’d hold over a spot in the room and they’d say, “Yup, a ghost was here.”

Not very impressive. Not one of them was seeing an actual, talking person. The shows, I concluded, were all bull, designed to entertain people who really liked to see things about ghosts, no matter how lame they were.