She flopped into a nearby chair, used her fingernails to muss her Afro into shape, and then turned to me with an affected sigh.

“Don’t you think you could have let us all sleep for a few more hours?”

I grabbed an arm of the couch and fought through the pain to pull myself upward. While I moved, the weight in my chest grew heavier, stronger. I tried to ignore it until, finally, I managed to get myself into a seated position. From there I shot Gabrielle an angry glare.

“Who are you people, really?” I demanded, panting from my efforts. “Where am I? And what the hell did you do to me?”

“That’s a lot of questions for seven a.m., Princess.”

“Amelia,” I corrected automatically.

“Fine. That’s a lot of questions for seven a.m., Amelia.”

“Gaby,” the boy scolded, still not rising from his chair. “Stop taunting her—she’s been through enough.”

Gabrielle rolled her eyes. “Like I don’t know.”

“Yeah, but you got to choose. From what you told me last night, you weren’t exactly forthcoming with this girl, were you?”

“Choose what?” I croaked. “Would someone please start explaining things? I’m grateful you guys saved me from the other ghosts, but—”

“The Faders,” Gabrielle interjected.

“The what?”

“Faders,” she repeated in a blasé tone. “That’s what I call the ghosts who tried to trap you.”

“So … you’ve had experience with them before,” I said slowly. My brain began to pluck memories and phrases from last night’s attack. One word in particular came to mind: “intermediary.” When I spoke again, I did so carefully. Guardedly.

“How do you know the Faders, exactly?”

Gabrielle and the boy shared a look. When she turned back to me, her eyes seemed decidedly less flippant.

“We’ll … get to that,” she said haltingly. “But maybe we should start with the basics. You already know I’m Gabrielle.” She placed her fingertips on her chest. Then she pointed to the boy. “That’s my brother, Felix. We’re the Callioux twins.”

I raised one eyebrow. “Twins?”

“Fraternal,” she said.

“Yeah, I got that part. It’s just … you two look like you’re different …”

“Ages?” Felix offered, grimacing. “Well, we look like that because we are. Now, anyway.”

“Now?”

Felix didn’t respond but instead shot his sister another pointed look. She sighed heavily and met my eyes.

“Felix is twenty,” she said. “But I’m seventeen and, like, ten months. I have been, for a little over two years.”

I waited for her to tell me she was joking. When she didn’t, I balked.

I knew the implication of what she’d said better than anyone. Still, I had to ask the important question out loud. Just in case.

“You’re … dead?”

“Yup,” she said, popping the p. “A little ghostie ghost, just like you.”

I remained silent for a moment. Then, in a hushed voice, I asked, “How?”

“You mean, how did she die?” Felix said. “In a car accident. The same one that killed our parents.”

He spoke plainly enough, with no emotion registering on his face. And yet—even from across the room, even though I hardly knew him—I could see a glint of pain in his eyes. It made my stomach clench, that glint. How on earth did someone lose his entire family in one fell swoop? Even if part of it had obviously returned to him?

“Yes, yes, it’s all very tragic,” Gabrielle said, drawing my attention back to her. “My boyfriend accidentally jerked the wheel out of my dad’s hands, and our car went over the Crescent City Connection Bridge. We haven’t seen him or our parents since.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “You died falling off a bridge?”

She scrutinized me for a second. Then her eyes widened in genuine surprise. “You too? Seriously?”

When I gave her a dry, close-lipped smile, she barked out a mirthless laugh. “Wow. Of all the dumb luck.”

“Tell me about it,” I said dismissively, wanting to get back to the subject at hand. “So, you died, Felix survived, and you came back to haunt him?”

Felix shifted forward in his chair, nodding. “Pretty much, yeah. I must have been thrown from the car or something, because the emergency crews found me on the shore a couple hours later. Everyone else in that car died, though, including her jackass boyfriend.” Gabrielle made a noise of complaint, but Felix cut her off: “That’s too good a word for Kade LaLaurie, and you know it. I don’t care if he was some frat boy honors student; that guy was a total freak. I’m still not convinced he didn’t intentionally cause that crash. Sorry, Sis, but you had the worst taste in guys.”

After she shot her brother a withering glare, Gabrielle continued the story. “Moving on,” she emphasized. “It only took a couple days for Felix and me to find each other again. Actually, he found me, looking all lost and confused outside our family crypt the day of the funeral.”

“At first I thought she’d survived, too,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “I mean, I’d never seen a ghost before, so I didn’t really know what I was looking at.”

“You are a Seer but didn’t know it until you almost died,” I concluded.

Felix nodded. “Guess so, although I didn’t learn what that word meant until we started researching why she didn’t have any senses, and no one could see her, and she couldn’t touch anything.”

“Nothing?” I asked, trying to keep my tone as bland as possible. I didn’t want to reveal the reason for my curiosity to the twins. But since the first moment I touched Joshua, I’d wondered whether the electricity we experienced was specific to all ghosts or just specific to … us.

I frowned heavily. Right now I didn’t want to think about the fact that “us” didn’t exist anymore.

Felix noticed my expression and gave me a curious glance. Fortunately, he didn’t press me about it but instead answered, “Nothing. That’s what finally made us realize she was dead.”

Gabrielle snorted. “Yeah, that and the fact I could send myself to Michigan and back in two seconds.” She shifted forward in her chair, rearranging the kimono around her long legs. “Too bad that was around the same time we also realized that our folks were in major debt when they died. The bank sold off our house in Metairie to pay the bills. By the time all the legal stuff was done, Felix was of age and no one was too worried about where he’d live. So after that … we were homeless.”

I frowned, letting my eyes circle the interior of the apartment. “Looks like you’re doing pretty well now.”

Felix’s gaze followed mine, and he began to squirm. But despite her brother’s obvious discomfort, Gabrielle grinned wickedly, clasped her hands, and leaned forward.

“Did you know,” she said conspiratorially, “that a lot of Hollywood stars have bought town houses and apartments in the Quarter? Would you believe that some of them don’t put in alarm systems? Would you also believe that most of these people hardly ever visit, especially when they’re about to go bankrupt and a court orders them to six months of rehab?”

She cocked her head toward a framed photograph sitting on one of the side tables. There, flashing a high-wattage smile at the camera, was one of the most famous actresses in the world. Even I knew who she was, and I’d been dead for more than a decade.

“Oh, my God,” I gasped. “This is her apartment? You’re squatters? Aren’t you afraid of getting arrested?”

Gabrielle cackled. “Me? No. But Felix obviously is.”

“Hell yes, I am,” he chimed in gruffly. “Especially since I’m the one who busted the lock on the downstairs door so you could carry out this epically stupid plan.”

His sister, however, just rolled her eyes. “Live a little, Felix. Besides, if you believe the tabloids, the bank’s probably going to foreclose on this place before she gets out of rehab. Other than some clothes and the bedding, we haven’t touched anything. The sheets on the furniture, the pills on the coffee table—it looked like that when we got here, it’ll look like that when we leave.”