I bolted forward, hands outstretched to—to I didn’t know what, exactly, but I was by God going to try. Billy let out a yell and I dodged his grab, crashing to my knees at Sonata’s side. Outraged healing power lit me up like a Christmas tree, making my flesh translucent to my own eyes. I caught Sonata’s face in my hands, and beneath the quiet repose of her expression, Matilda flung her ghostly head back and shrieked with glee.

As a child, I’d gotten the idea that when I was in pain, if I could only stick a needle into the hurting part—whether it was a headache or a gassy tummy or a scraped knee—that I could draw the pain out with it and cast it away. I’d probably picked up the concept by reading about trepanation, but the point was that even as an adult, part of my brain thought it made sense.

Matilda, for all intents and purposes, became a needle pulling my pain out, except my pain in this case was actually my power, and I didn’t want to let it go. My fingertips turned to ice against her skull, stuck like a kid who’s licked a frozen pipe, and magic flowed out of me free as water. Her ichory color flushed to a healthier hue, green revitalized into a springtime shade. The other four ghosts suddenly came violently clear to me, brightening with yellow and orange and double spikes of blue for the twins. They surged forward, all eagerness to lay their hands on me. For a dizzying moment I felt myself fly apart, and doubted I’d ever come together again.

Patrick slapped his hand against my forehead, and against Sonata’s, and began to shout in a language I didn’t understand. Matilda laughed, a cold hard sound all wrong from a child’s throat. Under the shouting, under the flood of magic rushing out of me, I heard Billy’s voice, compassionate and stern: “Matilda, there’s a way out for you, but this isn’t it. Let us release you. We’ll take what you’ve told us and do our best to find your murderers, but you deserve to rest now.”

Her voice vaulted me out of my body, if I’d even been there anymore. I looked down at myself, feeling like I was a million miles away. A silver cord thrumming with power attached me to myself, though even as I watched, it contracted, losing cohesion as Matilda sucked magic out of me to strengthen her speech. “I don’t want to rest. I want to live.” For the first time she sounded like a child, full of desperation and fear. “I never had a chance to live.”

“And you still won’t,” Billy said calmly. “This body isn’t yours to take.”

“She gave it to me!”

“And you agreed to leave it.”

Her smile turned nasty again. “Only when she says the words, and I won’t let her. This one’s power will let me keep her voice locked inside.”

Gosh. Apparently there was a reason Billy’d told me not to let a vengeful spirit latch on to me. Patrick was still speaking, his voice gaining strength. I concentrated on that, trying to use it to get back to my body, but after a few seconds it occurred to me that I didn’t even know the guy, and there was no reason he should be my guiding light. I wrapped my hands around the cord, which felt weak and watery even in my non-corporeal grip, and started pulling myself down.

Patrick stepped back to English and murmured, “This is your final chance, Matilda. Let us guide you through your pain and anger and into what waits beyond. It will be a better place, that much I promise you.”

Sonata shuddered, as though Matilda was entrenching herself more deeply, and my body-attaching cord turned to mist. I gave a panicked yell and dived downward, slamming into my body with a sick thud. I tried shouting, “Tally ho!” because I thought it was funny, but instead I said, “Trk!” and was astonished how much effort even that much sound took.

It didn’t matter. Patrick was making sound for me, a low steady murmur: “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…”

Matilda arched under his hand and gave what, under normal circumstances, I would call an unholy shriek. Right now that was too accurate, and therefore seemed inappropriate. I Saw magic release from each of the child-size ghosts, and it snapped back to me with the sting of giant rubber-band guns misfiring.

Patrick’s voice rose, and then rose again, rolling over the little girl’s swearing and bellowing with infinite compassion and inexorable resolve. She bucked and twisted, and while my Latin wasn’t exactly fluent, even I could recognize that I was witnessing—hell, participating in—an exorcism in God’s name. Billy’d told me to get a priest if he was possessed. I hadn’t believed he’d really meant it until right now.

I guessed Patrick wasn’t a boytoy after all.

The children winked out, leaving cold spaces where their ghosts had been. Not the coolness of dead flesh, but the absolute nothingness I’d encountered in the Dead Zone, which was so remote from the rest of the astral planes I didn’t know if there was anything on its other side.

If there was, I didn’t think they’d passed through to it.

Matilda tore away from Sonata’s body, her aura losing the healthy color it’d stolen from me and turning discolored green again. It stretched and thinned like a snot toy flung against the wall, distorting her features until she became something alien and terrible. Her fingers turned to claws, tearing at Sonata’s flesh, and finally, howling wordlessly, she boiled out of Sonata’s body. Sonata collapsed into Patrick’s arms, the spirit quite literally no longer moving her.

The last parts of Matilda dove forward, dissipating into me.

I dove after her.

A song ran through my head: Round and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. I spun after Matilda without a hint of control and even less idea where we were going. If we were going anywhere: I had no sense of the dead girl’s ghost, no feeling of her presence. For all I knew, she’d launched herself at me to give me a scare, and for all I could tell, that was all that had happened.

I broke through into the cold bleak space of the Dead Zone, and hung in its infinity with every cell in my body straining to hear or see or feel an intruder. What I got, in spades, was nothing. No ghosts. No vengeance. No giant snakes or dead shamans or spirit guides, though I’d have taken the first several gladly if I could have the last one back.

This place has much in common with dreams, Coyote’d told me. I hung on a few long seconds, forgetting about Matilda and just wishing, wishing, that my friend and mentor might step through the nothingness and snap his teeth at me one more time.

After what felt like forever and still no time at all, I let go, fleeing the Dead Zone and retreating to the garden at the center of my soul.

The door to the desert was closed tight, key still in place under a lump of moss. Aware I was probably risking too much, I put the key in the lock and turned it, opening the door to a sandblast of wind that came scraping down the crater my door made the inverse apex of. Magic waited at the ready, the ridiculous Trans Am all but making tire treads in the earthy floor. But no one came screaming through the door, not from either side, and I locked it again before studying my garden.

I usually looked at it with pretty normal eyes, not calling up the Sight. This time, though, I was searching for intruders, and for once in my life, put everything into it. I could taste the waterfall with my skin, hear the recovering soil with my gaze. It flowed through me, filtered by my blood and magic, and I encountered impurities by the dozens. By the thousands, but even so, I recognized them as my own. Such overblown pride, hiding uncertainty, and the same with arrogance and smart-ass commentary. Shining confidence in a few places, strong enough to become a different kind of arrogance; those were my mechanics skills, or, of all things, the ability to deconstruct a poem. There were a hundred cracks in my armor—flaws in the windshield, when I turned my metaphor to vehicular terms—but they were mine, and not streaked with Matilda’s vitriolic hate.