I want to grab him by the hair and smash his head into the railing. Kill him, right here, right now.

But I’m . . . too . . . weak . . . to move? Can’t . . . touch . . . I can feel the . . . Can’t see the . . . Can’t . . . breathe . . .

A hot wind thrashes me in the face and spins me through the air, so I land like a hammer on my stomach and chin, gray spots exploding everywhere.

“What’s wrong?” His voice is in my head and seeping from the cracks in the stones, the fountain, the foundation of the school. Possessing dead world and the living world all at once.

I cough my way to healthy breaths and find my feet. “What do you want from me?”

Back away from the ledge. I’ve gotten closer to it. I think he wanted to throw me off.

“What do you want from me?”

He’s blinking in and out of existence again, fading and returning like he did on my patio—one moment a fully formed boy, and the next, a suggestion of a figure, a see-through screen with the trees in full view behind him.

“What do children want from toys?” He’s coming toward me.

“To . . . To play with them?” I don’t know why I’m answering his question. My mind is upside down. There’s a roaring in my head. A rumbling in my stomach.

My energy returns, little by little. Dizzy and dreary, but I can stand up straight, at least. My thoughts are decomposing, and the paving is gray, and everything is gray.

“I’m banishing you.” It weeps out of me. “I said I’m banishing you.”

“I heard you.” His voice is strong enough to lift my head to face him.

In the smoke of his aura rise striking snakes, a diving hawk, a swarm of flies. Temporary visions of predators and pests jumping at the air and escaping through it.

Everything I know about ghosts feels somehow irrelevant now.

Sawyer levitates, veins popping with red energy, the aura lifting him into a state of fragile flight.

“How does it feel to be caught in the middle of something that has nothing to do with you?” His voice is like ten voices from ten rooms of hell. “Do I hear a question from Matteo Mooney? Matteo wants to know—Did you feel bad for me, Jake? When you saw how I died?”

“What?”

“Answer the boy, answer the boy!” says a voice like a horrible jingle from a circus intercom, and I am on a carousel of doubt.

Did I feel bad for Matteo? Of course. He got murdered by a floating knife. That’s fucking awful. But what happened between them had nothing to do with me, and I fail to see why anything between them would concern me.