“Hey, stranger,” he said with a slight smile.

I groaned, turning more fully toward him before I took his offered hand. “How long was I gone this time?”

“Not too long—only a few minutes. Getting better, I think.”

I snorted. “Better? Seriously? It’s hardly getting better if it just keeps happening.”

Joshua shook his head and smiled wider, undeterred. “You’re wrong, Amelia. The disappearances are getting shorter and shorter. I bet they stop happening altogether soon. It’s going to get easier—I promise.”

In the face of his perpetual optimism, I bit my lip to keep my mouth shut. Or to keep my response locked inside, more like it.

How could I tell Joshua the truth about what I’d really been thinking lately: that our relationship would never get easier? That if things were this difficult now, when we were both young, they would grow insurmountable as Joshua aged.

Because, inevitably, Joshua would age. Very soon he would graduate from Wilburton High School and move away to college. At some point he would probably want a girl he could introduce to his family, one whom all of them could see and half of them wouldn’t want to exorcise. A girl he could make out with for more than ten minutes. A girl with whom, maybe someday, he’d start a family.

A girl I could never be.

Still biting my lip, I looked at Joshua more closely. The soft, hopeful look in his eyes told me that he didn’t share my troubled thoughts. At least, not at the moment.

“So, where’d you go this time?” he asked, taking his hand from mine and brushing a strand of hair off my face.

I pulled my lip from my teeth and tilted my head to one side. “Your roof, actually.”

Joshua’s eyes widened. After a long, stunned pause, he cleared his throat. In an intentionally calm voice, he asked, “Oh? And how was it up there?”

“Icy. Probably freezing.”

Joshua grimaced, from either the idea of the storm outside or the thought of me sitting in it. “This one wasn’t like any of your old nightmares, was it?”

“No, thank God for that,” I said, shuddering.

I hadn’t had a real nightmare in several months, at least not in the way I defined the word “nightmare.”

Before I’d met Joshua, before I’d saved him from drowning in the same river I had, a series of waking nightmares controlled my afterlife. In daylight as well as darkness, I would sometimes lose consciousness and then relive part of my death. Upon waking, I would find myself someplace other than where I’d been just before the nightmare occurred. I’d learned these nightmares were involuntary materializations, much like the ones I experienced now, but worse.

I still wasn’t entirely sure why the nightmares had ended. I suspected it had something to do with the fact that I now remembered the details of my death. Or maybe because I’d fought back against the dark spirits who had engineered that death.

Whichever the case, the end of the nightmares meant the beginning of an entirely new set of troubles. These new—but still unwanted—materializations, for example. And then there were the weird dreams, like the one I’d had tonight.

I didn’t like thinking about the dreams, but after one occurred, I just couldn’t stop. I obsessed over their details, trying—without much success—to find a pattern in them, or a reason for them.

So far each dream differed in content from the previous one. But they all shared a pretty common theme. All of them happened at night, when I shouldn’t have been sleeping, and all of them were incredibly disturbing.

In each dream I saw people for whom I cared but couldn’t speak to them, couldn’t touch them. Sometimes I saw Joshua, watching me with a cold, impassive expression while I begged him for help. Sometimes I saw Jillian drop to her knees in pain as Eli—the cruel ghost who had tried to acquire my soul for his demonic masters—tore the life from her.

Or sometimes I saw my father’s ghost, wandering lost beneath the ruins of the bridge I’d destroyed several months ago in an effort to protect Joshua and Jillian from Eli. In those dreams my father called out to me. He asked, in a broken voice, why I hadn’t yet freed him from the dark netherworld that waited just outside the living boundaries of High Bridge.

I hated those dreams the most.

Tonight’s dream, however, was a new one. Never before had I watched myself like some outside observer; never before had I seen myself hurting, maybe even dying, in a setting I didn’t recognize.

I didn’t exactly have the clearest memories of my life before death, but most things I recalled had at least a touch of familiarity to them. Nothing about tonight’s dream, however, seemed familiar—not the dark room or the shabby furniture. The only aspect of the room I recognized was the girl on the couch. Me, maybe.

So … what on earth was I supposed to make of that?

I shook my head and curled up beside Joshua without touching him. Joshua mirrored my position, facing me. My long silence didn’t seem to bother him, probably because I’d had so many of them lately.

“Well,” he finally said. “At least tonight’s materialization wasn’t a nightmare. But you did sit up screaming earlier. Do you want to tell me what that was about?”

My eyes darted down to the pillow beneath my head, away from Joshua’s intent gaze. I shrugged. “Another one of those weird dreams I keep having. This one was different, though. Weirder.”

I felt Joshua twitch beside me. “How so?” he asked.

I continued to study the pillow while I described the dream’s eerie details. When I finished, Joshua blew out a puff of air.

“That’s … well, that’s creepy, Amelia.”

“Very. And the even bigger issue is that I don’t sleep. The fact I’m dreaming at all makes me think these dreams are—I don’t know—important maybe? Tonight’s dream really makes me wonder. Everything seemed so real: the sounds, the smells.”

“And you’re sure you saw yourself alive in this one?”

“Well … not completely sure. The girl looked a lot like me, but there was something else about her. Something I can’t put my finger on.”

Joshua frowned, thoughtful. “Maybe the girl was just some, you know, manifestation. Of your worries.”

Despite my apprehensive mood, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Wow, Dr. Mayhew. Someone’s been doing his psychology homework.”

“My favorite elective.” Joshua chuckled goodnaturedly. Then he yawned.

I propped myself up on my elbow, glanced over his shoulder at his bedside clock, and fell back onto the bed beside him.

“We can talk more about this later,” I said. “It’s past four already, and you’ve got a calculus final today.”

“Don’t remind me.” He groaned, pulling his own pillow around his ears in a U shape. “Why sleep at all? I’ll probably get a better score if I just try to hallucinate the answers.”

“I’m not going to let you hallucinate your way through your last final. We’ve been studying for weeks. So … sleep.”

With the pillow still pressed to his ears, Joshua shook his head. But even through the fabric, I heard the muffled sound of another yawn.

I guess I didn’t need to give him any more commands or warnings because soon, without further protest, he began to drift off. Eventually, his breath deepened enough that I knew he’d fallen asleep again.

With an enormous sigh, I rolled over to stare blankly at the ceiling. For a while I tried to stay calm and restful. To run through a few of the calculus equations Joshua had struggled with the most. But soon, instead of numbers, my head started to spin with all the lingering questions that still plagued me.

Several months ago I thought I’d finally solved my greatest problems. I’d begun to piece together the sketchy details of my past and gain control of my ghostly powers. I’d prevented Eli from trapping me in the dark netherworld and forcing me to become a sort of grim reaper like him. Even Joshua’s grandmother Ruth and her coven of ghost hunters had left me alone as some sort of repayment for saving Jillian’s life.