Did he think I hadn’t noticed when I’d gone all see-through back there? I opened my mouth to point that out, but what good would it have done? He was still angry, and right now it seemed he was determined that I would be sticking around, if only so he could yell at me some more.

The car bumped up over the curb into the driveway, taking out a portion of the dried-out yard with it.

“Wait here.” Will unbuckled his seat belt and got out, leaving the car running.

“Yeah, right,” I said. I switched off the engine, snagged the keys before he got too far away, and scrambled after him.

He caught a glimpse of me following him and sighed heavily. “Do you ever listen?” he asked.

“When someone’s trying to tell me what to do? Uh, no. Besides, who died and made you the boss of me?”

He shot me an unhappy look as he rounded the corner.

“Oh, touchy, touchy,” I muttered. “Like I’m going to just sit out there while you waste time online,” I said in a louder voice. In truth, I didn’t want to be by myself at the moment. It felt like if Will wasn’t there to glare at me, I might slip away. And while I’d accepted that was a possibility, I…I didn’t particularly want to be alone if/when it happened. Besides, it wasn’t like we’d be disturbing anyone. His mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway.

“I think you’re confusing me with you, Miss I Have Nine Thousand Friends on Facebook,” he said darkly, yanking open the screen door and reaching for the doorknob. Then he stopped, flummoxed momentarily by the locked door.

“Oh, ouch, seriously wounding me there.” I dangled the keys over his shoulder, and he snapped them away without so much as a thank-you. “Between the two of us, who do you think has better research skills? I would have graduated with honors.”

“At least Igraduated,” he muttered, stabbing the key in and unlocking the door.

I sucked in a breath. “I think dyingwas a little outside my control, thank you very much.”

“If you say so.” He shrugged, but I saw the corner of his mouth turn up in a faint smile. So maybe I wasn’t the only one taking comfort in the familiar nature of our exchange.

He shoved the door open, and I followed him into the kitchen, where he stopped short and I nearly bumped into him.

“Not now,” he said under his breath, seemingly to himself.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He turned with a grimace and held his hands up in the classic stop position.

Ooookay.I listened for a second; it didn’t take me long to identify the sound of voices, lots of voices, coming from the back of the house. What the hell?

Before I could ask him, even in a whisper, what was going on, an unfamiliar face appeared in the doorway to the hall. “You’re here,” she exclaimed at Will. Then, when she caught sight of me, her eyes widened. “You found her!”

Uh-oh.

She disappeared from the doorway, and I heard her yell, “They’re here!”

Within seconds, the kitchen was flooded with spirits, many of whom I didn’t recognize, all jabbering at once. They flowed in, surrounding Will and me individually, cutting us off from each other.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?” I shouted at him over the clamor.

“What were you going to do? We didn’t know you were still my spirit guide,” he shouted back. “And it wasn’t this bad…until now.”

Fabulous. Well, that was helpful. I straightened my shoulders, tossed my hair back, and started to wade my way through to Will, or at least to the last place I’d seen him. The kitchen wasn’t that big.

Of course, most of the spirits were too agitated to pay attention to what I was doing. They kept pulling at me, trying to stop me so they could explain, beg, plead, whatever. Though I couldn’t see Will, I could only imagine it was worse for him.

The last straw came when someone actually grabbed hold of my arm and yanked until I stumbled back.

Not. Cool.I pulled my arm free with a vicious tug that sent my attacker—a soccer mom circa the 1980s, based on her wardrobe and her pink-and-purple-braided headband— eesh—sprawling forward.

I sidestepped her face-plant, but barely. “Enough already!” I shouted.

The room quieted immediately, faces whipping around toward me. Through a gap I could see Will’s pale face. They’d cornered him against the door to the basement.

I took a deep breath to reinstate my claim on him, to tell them they had to go through me to get to him. That would shut them up and make them go away…or at least freeze them in place.

Before I could say anything, though, I heard Will.

“You heard her. Out, now!” He stepped away from the basement door and pointed to the nearest exterior wall.

Shock rippled through me. I stared at him, but he refused to look in my direction, splotches of red rising in his pale cheeks. He focused instead on the spirits in front of him, some of whom were already starting to protest.

He shook his head and spoke over them. “Who else do you have to help you? No one. So don’t piss me off!”

I gaped at him. This was exactly what I’d been after him to do from the beginning. Take control, own his power. It’s what I would have done. If you can’t get rid of a feature in your life that is less than desirable, make it work for you. But I’d never expected he’d actually follow through on it.

It took a few moments for his words to take full effect. But then some of the ghosts started drifting out the back door. Others moved through the wall that Will had indicated.

“We will be back to help you,” he said to those who lingered. “Just not today. We’re already on task for someone else. You wouldn’t want us to stop if we were working on your behalf.”

Points to him for not framing that as a question.

With a few more reassurances and warnings from Will, the rest of the crowd slowly dissipated.

“You did it,” I said, when the kitchen was empty except for the two of us. I couldn’t quite keep the note of disbelief from my voice.

He shrugged, but he looked pleased, if a little stunned by his own accomplishment. “I wasn’t sure what would happen to you if you tried to stop them. I didn’t want to risk it.” He turned and walked down the hall to his room.

I stayed put. He didn’t want to risk it, but why? Because he didn’t want me to be gone? Or because he still needed me to try to stop Erin? Both? It shouldn’t have bothered me that I wasn’t sure which his answer would have been had I been brave enough to ask. But it did.

Especially because he’d just proved, in no uncertain terms, that he no longer needed me as much as he used to, if at all.

This was a good thing, I told myself. Will needed to be able to take care of himself. That’s what I wanted for him.

Except…what about what I wanted for me?

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I didn’t want to disappear for forever, that was for sure. But I didn’t know if I had a choice in the matter. If I was lucky, the light might come for me before that happened. That would be okay, except I’d sort of gotten invested in what was happening here. I couldn’t imagine being happy or at peace, not knowing what happened to Will or the Turners. And returning to life as Ally Turner…was that even an option? Did I want it to be?

I rubbed my forehead, pushing at the dull ache starting there. God. Who said being dead was easy? Dying had only been the start of my troubles.

With the details about Edmund that we had now, thanks to Will’s questionable landlord performance, it didn’t take long to find the information that we needed online. We tracked down his parents’ names from his sister’s obituary and then their address from a white-pages search. Easy peasy.

Ted and Althea Harris lived on the outskirts of Peoria. A couple of hours away at most. And Will was convinced from the conversation he’d had with Edmund that that was where he was headed.