I cracked open my bottle of water, then stared at it. I was sitting on a dead woman’s couch, drinking a dead woman’s water. Hell, I was now a dead woman’s daughter. How was it possible that without changing at all, the world we lived in now looked nothing like the world I’d thought I understood twenty-four hours before?

“How do you do it?” I sipped from the bottle, struggling to bring my thoughts back on track, then screwed the lid back on. “How do you…get in there?” I waved my empty hand at Reese’s body.

“I don’t know.” He looked surprised by the sudden change in subject. “I’ve never really thought about it. I just kind of…step in. Figuratively speaking, of course, since I don’t actually have any feet.”

“Why not? Where’s your body?” That was probably the strangest question I’d ever had to ask.

“I don’t have one.”

All the questions skittering around in my head stuttered to a stunned halt, and the abrupt internal silence left me reeling. Grasping for his meaning. “What do you mean? How can you not have a body?” A sudden horrible possibility made my heart ache for him. “Are you…dead?”

He actually laughed, and even in Reese’s voice, the laughter sounded like Finn. “I’m not a ghost, Nina. I just don’t have a body. I never have, at least not as far back as I can remember.”

“How is that possible? Are you human?”

“Of course I’m human!” He wasn’t laughing now, and I realized I’d hurt his feelings. I felt bad about that, but my initial fear had taken root again, deep inside me, and I couldn’t think past it.

People have bodies. Demons don’t, at least in our world—who knows what they look like in their world?

Only demons could possess someone else’s body. Only demons would want to, right?

True, I’d never heard of a bodiless demon not getting sucked back into hell, but I’d never heard of a bodiless human at all. Was one really any less believable than the other?

“I’m sorry, Finn, I just…I don’t understand. I mean, if you don’t have a body, how do you know what you are?”

“Well, I guess I don’t. Not for sure.” He shrugged. “But I know what I’m not. I’m not a demon, Nina. I have a soul. In fact, that may be all I have.” He held my gaze, waiting for my response, and just like every time he’d looked at me since the moment we’d met, there was no sign of doubt in his green eyes. He meant everything he’d said. Including the fact that he didn’t know for sure what he was, and I didn’t know how to process that.