The Sight winked on, lending a surreal depth to the room and making Sonata flare with yellow and red as bright as the face on her T-shirt. I wondered if she knew her aura tended toward those colors, or if it was a sort of cheery coincidence. Patrick, in comparison, glowed serene white, a bastion of calm. Sonata closed her eyes, slowing her breathing.

I turned the Sight on Billy, checking his aura and his general sense of well-being. His gray ghost cloak moved away as I watched, gathering itself in the middle of the room and quivering. For incorporeal spirits, it sure looked like they were jittery with excitement. A few tendrils still led back to Billy, as if the ghosts were anchored there, but it was clearly Sonata they were interested in now. All except one: it hung back, staying with him, and when I turned my gaze away, it teased me with the faintest shape of a child, pigtailed and open faced. She disappeared again when I looked back, and I rubbed my eyes, wondering if I was losing my mind.

Sonata said, “Restless spirits,” in a vibrating deep tone completely unlike the voice she’d spoken in earlier. The ghosts snapped to attention, and so did the hairs on my arms. Even Billy jumped a bit, but Patrick remained calm and utterly steady. Presumably he’d heard the voice before, and had been expecting it. “You are welcome in my home from this moment until I bid you leave. If you would speak with us, you will agree that my voice and the words restless spirits, begone will send you from this place. Strike a hard surface thrice, if we’re agreed.”

I thought only poltergeists had the corner on making noise and pushing things over. The cyclone of ghosts spun around, then darted to the room’s hearth. I heard nothing, and shot a glance at Billy, who shrugged one shoulder. Sonata, though, opened her eyes and focused on the gathering of ghosts with a satisfied nod. “We’re agreed.” Then dismay contorted her face and she breathed, “Oh.”

Billy and I both tensed, trying to anticipate disaster. Sonata sat silent, looking at the blur of ghosts with sorrow deepening the lines in her face. I wished, briefly, that I could see what she did, and was equally glad I couldn’t.

“They’re children,” she finally said. “So many of them are children. A girl in a pinafore, two boys in diapers, an older boy who threatens me with a slingshot, and one who’s just on the childhood side of being a woman. She has the most rage in her, and anchors the others.” Sonata put out a hand, an inviting gesture, and the cloud of ghosts swirled around it. She rocked back, letting go a soft sigh, and spoke again in a voice much lighter than her own: “My name is Matilda Whitehead. I will not go back into the dark.”

I nearly bit my tongue in half as Sonata’s colors bleached, then tinged an off-shade of green. Another face faded into existence over Sonata’s, outlined in lime and making her hard to look at. I cut off a combination of a yell and a question with a strangled noise, and Billy gave me a quick look that both appreciated and approved of my rare silence. He slid to the floor so he could kneel in front of Matilda/Sonata. “There’s light waiting for you, Matilda. Are you called Matilda?”

“My brothers call me Tilly, but it isn’t a proper grown-up lady’s name. I like Matilda.”

Billy cast a brief smile at the floor, then straightened his expression before meeting Sonata’s gaze again. “Matilda, then. When were you born, Matilda?”

“In the year 1887.” A shadow passed over Sonata’s face. “That was a very long time ago, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Billy said quietly. “Yes, it was. The others who are with you, do you know when they were born?”

Sonata turned her head to look toward the cloud of ghosts. “The twins are too little to say. Anne-Marie was born in the year 1846.” Consternation creased her forehead. “Ricky says he was born in 1943, but I remember nothing but the darkness after the year 1900. There are others.” Her gaze sharpened and she brought it back to Billy. “There are others with us here, but I care for the twins and Ricky and Anne-Marie. The others are not like us.”

The others. Billy’d collected ghost riders of his own before he’d taken on the ones trapped in my garden. I slid a glance at him, not wanting to speak, but he understood Matilda as well as I did. “How are they different?”

“They’re older.” I got the sense she meant they’d died older, rather than having died earlier in terms of calendar dates. “They died in the wrong way. In the wrong times. They are not like us.” Everything the girl said was delivered in a cool, precise tone, as though she disdained or mocked us. I hoped it was just a century of being dead, and that she hadn’t been quite so horrible when she’d lived.

“Died the wrong way?” Billy asked diffidently. I’d seen him use the approach with his own children when they didn’t want to confess to something they’d done wrong. Affected disinterest on Billy’s part made admission on theirs less scary.

“They were not sacrificed.” She said it with such disinterest I suddenly felt the rage behind her words. The little girl had been dead for decades. What Billy was really talking to was a fury so potent it had refused to cross over.

“Can you tell me what the sacrifice was?”

Sonata put her arms out, and a long thin line of red split each of her forearms. Then she stood, and another bloody line scoured her from throat to groin, and then again, splitting the muscles of her thighs. Magic roared to life inside me, sending me forward a few jerky inches before I realized the blood was tinged with ethereal green, and that beneath Matilda’s ectoplasmic presence, Sonata’s body was unharmed. She said, “Five cuts, such a pretty star,” and bent forward at the waist, arms spread out to the sides. Blood dripped from her arms and torso, pooling beneath her. Then she lifted one leg, then the other, so she hung in mid-air as though she’d been lifted there on a glass plate, and blood poured from all five wounds, splashing to the floor.

To my eternal gratitude, Billy, and Patrick, who’d stood when Sonata did, looked as astounded as I felt. We all three just stared at the woman hanging in the air, none of us able to get beyond the blatantly abused laws of physics.

The blood had actually started to slow before Billy finally cranked his jaw up and said, “Thank you for showing me, Matilda. You could sit down again, if that would be more comfortable.”

To everyone’s relief, she did. The injuries and the blood faded away, leaving the cool-faced child to meet Billy’s eyes again. He, cautiously, said, “A star has five points,” and I understood what he meant: the cuts she’d shown us made four starlike points, but the fifth obvious one would be the throat, not the torso.

Matilda shrugged. “The throat is too quick. The star bleeds slow to make the potion potent.” She sing-songed the words, as if they were a nursery rhyme long since committed to memory.

Billy nodded as though she hadn’t said something horrifying. “And the others died in the wrong times, too,” he reminded her. I couldn’t have maintained the casual calm tone he used, and was two parts impressed and one part shocked that he could.

“Fifty, one hundred, fifty, one hundred.” Matilda flicked her fingers dismissively, sounding suddenly bored. “There is something the woman who offered me her body should know.”

Magic thumped inside me like a heartbeat, warning. I hadn’t spoken in a while, and my throat was dry as I asked, “What?”

Matilda’s eyes came to me, and her mouth turned to a predator’s smile. “I said I would give it back. I lied.”