The memory faded, until I was once again watching black waves lap at the beach of an unfamiliar sea. I had the sudden urge to touch the mud one more time. To mold it into something important. Something memorable.

Still feeling inexplicably calm, I squished my fingers into the silt. Before I could raise my hand, though, a hushed voice spoke next to me.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said softly. “That this is an ocean. But it’s definitely not.”

I turned toward the voice, strangely unsurprised to see the pretty redhead from my prairie dream. She sat cross-legged next to me, arms propped behind her so that the sleeves of her green tunic skimmed the sand.

Looking at her, my brain did a few automatic leaps: if this girl—an obvious figment of my imagination—sat here, then that meant “here” was just another dream space. Which meant this place wasn’t real.

This also meant that my pain might not actually be gone.

“If it’s not the ocean,” I said in an oddly detached voice, “then what is it?”

Still watching the waves, the girl shuddered. “It’s the river.”

“What river?”

“The river.” She nodded toward the shoreline. “Maybe not the biggest in existence, but the biggest one I’ve ever seen. So wide that when you’re sitting beside it, you think it’s the ocean.”

I looked back at the supposed river, searching for another side. Another bank, matching this one, somewhere far across the water. No matter how hard I searched, I found none. Only black waves undulating into the horizon.

Glancing back at her, I shrugged. “Well, it sure looks like the ocean.”

“It looks like anything they want it to. Same as our place. They can shift and change it all they want.”

“They …?” I said, but she cut me off with a soft shh. Wordlessly, she pointed to the shoreline directly in front of us.

At first I didn’t see anything. Then, while we watched, a small, dark shape appeared, hanging in the air without support. It was moving too, swirling and spinning around itself like a mote of dust in the wind. As it moved it expanded, stretching and widening until it eventually took the shape of a small house.

For a few seconds it hovered several feet above the ground, and I wondered whether the strange building process had stopped. But then stilts began to form beneath it, anchoring the house to the sand. Next, a steep roof appeared, supported by evenly spaced columns instead of walls so that we could see through to the ocean. Finally, in this state, it settled.

And I gasped.

The structure wasn’t a house—it was the dark pavilion. The one I’d hallucinated last night before Joshua and I left for the cemetery. The only difference was, now I sat outside of it. But I would have recognized it anywhere.

We were in the netherworld.

“We have to get out of here,” I breathed, scrambling backward in the sand. “Any second, High Bridge will show up, and then the demons, and then—”

“High Bridge isn’t going to show up,” she said. “This is a different part of their world, one that they’ve intentionally designed to match the living world—or, at least, parts of it. They traditionally stick to moving bodies of water. Transitional places. You know, ‘crossing the River Styx’ and that whole bit. But don’t be fooled; their world is completely interconnected. They can get from Oklahoma to here in a matter of seconds. Besides, every portal—whether in Oklahoma or New Orleans—leads to the same dark place.”

Before I could tell her Thanks for the info, but we should probably still be running, she spun around to face me. Her bright green eyes were suddenly fervent, wild.

Without warning, she grabbed my wrists and jerked me toward her so hard that the wet sand slopped over my skirt.

“Amelia, you have to stop doing this,” she pleaded.

I shook my head and tried to pull away from her. “Let me go. Now!”

My command only made her hold on tighter. “I can’t, Amelia. Not until you understand that you have to stop.”

“Stop what?” I growled, tugging harder. The longer she held on to me, the more my wrists began to ache. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong!”

Finally, she let go. The moment her hands released mine I clutched at my wrists and tried to massage feeling back into one, then the other. The girl, however, seemed totally unconcerned about my discomfort. Wearing that same fanatical expression, she gestured with one hand down the length of my body.

“This,” she said flatly. “This is what you need to stop.”

I followed her gesture and then blinked in confusion.

“My … dress? Look, I get that it’s outdated, but that’s no reason to—”

She cut me off with a violent shake of her head. “Not your dress. You, Amelia. You’re the problem. What you’re doing is unnatural, and we won’t put up with it for very long.”

“I don’t … I haven’t done anything,” I sputtered, now totally lost.

“But you have. You’re doing it right now.... You just don’t know it yet.”

“I … I’m sorry?”

The girl sighed and tugged at her copper curls. “I know. Trust me, I know. I’ve seen this coming for a while, and I’ve been trying to warn you, with all the visions. I’ve been trying to keep you away from this place. But you are so … damn … stubborn.”

She pronounced each of her last words individually, as if to emphasize her frustration. For some reason that rankled me. By now my zenlike feeling had completely vanished. So I sat up straight, stopped massaging my wrists, and looked her directly in the eyes.

“Maybe—now, this may sound totally nutso—but maybe you should have tried to make the dreams easier to understand. How about that?”

She groaned. “I have to work within the parameters they set for me, okay? This guardian thing has rules, and I can’t just—”

“They?” I quoted. “You keep saying that like I’m supposed to know who you mean. And what’s a guardian? Are you my guardian angel or something? Because, if so, you’re a really bad one.”

She waved both hands in front of her, looking distraught.

“No!” she cried. “God, no. I’m just … I’m a … crap, I can’t tell you what I am. Just trust me when I say you have to figure out a way to undo this.” She gestured down the length of my body again. “Then go home.”

I arched one eyebrow. “Home? To Oklahoma?”

“Yes, Oklahoma. Perfect.”

“But the demons are waiting for me there.”

“They’re waiting for you everywhere, Amelia.”

When I blanched, she rushed on: “Don’t worry, though—we’ll take care of it. Just go home, stop talking to the living, stop hanging out around that bridge … just go back to your old existence.”

“You mean … the wandering? The fog?”

She nodded vigorously. “Yes, exactly. The fog. You think you could do that again?”

I puffed out a long, frustrated breath before answering her. “Okay, let’s just say for argument’s sake that I thought going back home was a good idea and that I wanted to reenter the fog. Do you know any ghosts who’ve done it before? And if so, could you give me some tips? Because I have no idea how to unremember everything at this point.”

The girl groaned again and flung her arms up in the air. “Truthfully? I have no clue. Almost every soul gets claimed right after death.... There are only a few ghosts who wander, and even less of you who wake up.”

She surprised me by flopping back onto the wet sand as if she didn’t fear the netherworld at all. Lying flat, she released a heavy sigh. “You were doing just fine on your own, staying off their radar and ours. But then I just had to give in. And things got too complicated, with the living guy and that fire glow, and Eli not doing what I thought he’d do—”

I cut her off. “Wait. You know about the glow? You know Eli?”

She darted a guilty look at me and pinched her lips shut, like a little girl who had just divulged someone else’s secret.