“You absorbed the souls of your victims, and now they’re fighting for a way out.”

He half laughs. “Good luck to them—they have nowhere else to go.” His voice is different now; it’s lost its Southern intonation and turned into the dude-bro voice of a trust-fund white boy.

“How do you do it?”

“I suck up their life as it leaves their body. It’s easy, Jake.”

He leaps off the carousel and ends in a midair float. The fog and mist have grown so thick and wrapped so much around us that all we are is top halves.

Sawyer crosses to the swing set, and I follow. He presses down on the wooden seat and sits, not passing through it. “Funny thing is, I didn’t want to do it.” Strings of red energy wrap around his throat like a choker. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody for real. Never planned to.”

“Then why are you still doing this?”

“What else would I do? I’m trapped here—might as well make the most of it.”

“Killing people is the most you can make of dead world?”

He’s silent. His cold blue gaze shows no feeling, not even the emotions of the people he stole. If he gained control of my body, I’d become a murderer by the power of his wicked hand. My record would catch up to me, and he’d step out of me after running me straight into prison, because Sawyer can exist in either world but wants to live in mine.

I’ve been such a good target. If his mission is to induce fear to gain strength, it makes sense he would choose me.

But I know now I have power in dead world. The power of my ancestors.

And the wraiths—the choking hands from Sawyer’s throat, and the whips—they only work on me because of my association with them. Because of my traumatic memory and the memory in my body. Not because they’re dangerous.

If I can get inside his mind and know the things that trouble him, I can fight him with his own fears. I can conjure a wraith powerful enough to wipe him from existence.

“Have you ever thought that you don’t have to do this?” I ask. “That maybe if you asked, I would help?”

He chuckles. “Sure, because you’re dying to surrender your body to a murderer.”

“Why do you have to murder? Something happens in the brain when you connect it with another one. You wouldn’t just be you in my body, we’d be both of us.”

“So you’re offering me rehab.”