I watch him a moment, considering my next words, and then say, “I don’t think the kid knew what he was doing. This…thing…this creature erupted out of him and fled. I tried to follow it, but…”

“It’s energy. You can’t follow energy.” He pauses a moment and looks away. “It thrives here with all the dead in the woods.”

So the dead fuel the monster. That’s unsettling.

“You shouldn’t try to chase it. It could have gotten you—crawled inside you and possessed you.”

“Which is what it was doing to Sean?”

“More or less,” Thane says, bringing the cigarette to his lips again. He takes a drag, letting the smoke escape his mouth as he talks. “They have a name for that particular kind of energy—the kind born of the dead.” There he goes again, using they. They as in the people—or not people at all—who are tracking Vera, the ones who will trace her disappearance back to me. He continues, “It’s called Influence. It latches on to insecurities and aggression, feeds them, and then bad things happen.”

Like Sean bashing his friend’s face in. Like my poppa’s suicide.

“But that’s not what it’s going to look like,” I say. “The police are already saying drugs spurred his actions.”

“The police aren’t death-speakers. They can’t see what we see.”

I look up. “What did you say?”

Thane blinks and doesn’t move to speak.

“Did you just call me a death-speaker?” I ask.

“Yeah. That’s what you are, in case you didn’t know. Same as me. A human who can see and speak to the dead.”

So Natalie’s description of me wasn’t just a random nickname. She knows I can see the dead. Which means Lily does too.

“Is everyone at this school a death-speaker?”

“No, though I can’t always spot them as easily as I spotted you, but that’s your fault. You act like you just got the sight.”

I glare at him.

“Wait,” he says, as if just now realizing that might actually be true. “You didn’t just start seeing the dead, right?”

“No. It’s been a few months now.”

Thane stares at me for a long moment. “Who died?”

“What?”

“If you aren’t born seeing the dead, usually the death of someone close to you activates the sight. So who died?”

I touch the chain of my necklace but don’t pull out Poppa’s coin, conscious Thane is watching me. “My poppa,” I say. “What about you?”

Thane takes another drag from his cigarette. It’s smaller now, and he holds it between his thumb and forefinger. “I was born seeing the dead—shadows, mostly, from the corner of my eye. Then, when my mother died, everything came into focus—in living fucking color.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Everyone is.”

“What about your dad?”