For half a minute, I actually thought having my dad's ghost show up might be a good thing.

Aren't dead people supposed to review their life or something? If he knew who'd killed him, we could solve the mystery right now.

He quickly disabused me of that notion.

'If I knew that, I'd have sent my worthless familiar to avenge me, not to babysit my disappointment of a son,' he said, in response to my inquiry.

The room grew steadily colder as he spoke, to the point I saw my breath cloud the air.

I crossed my arms over my chest and shivered as I frowned at his shadowy form. "But don't you find out all the answers to everything and shit, after the, uh, 'fact?'"

'Not in my experience,' he rasped.

"Then why are you here?"

He faded into the shadows at the corner of the room until just the pinprick lights of his eyes were visible, and his whispered words were like the rustle and crunch of dead leaves.

'You tell me,' he said, and then the lights of his eyes blinked out.

Great. More nightmare-fuel. Thanks, Dad.

I went downstairs to get Janelle.

Clearly, I was either psychic or psychotic, and I trusted her to know which.

❧

"Can you see him now?" she asked as she did a sweep of the room with a bit of incense in a bowl.

I glanced at the corner, where the vague outline of a form was just visible if I didn't look right at it. "Sort of."

He flickered in and out of my perception, like a radio station with a bad signal.

"What's he doing?"

"Just... standing there," I said.

I gestured, and Janelle went over, incense in hand.

"He say anything?"

"Not now. He did before, though. He said I 'summoned' him."

She turned to look at me, brows raised. "He's aware he's dead?"

"Seems to be. Is that... not how ghosts work?"

She wafted the incense back and forth a few times without answering. When it produced no effect, she gave up and came to sit at my side on the bed, making the mattress dip so I had to lean away not to fall into her.

"You ever watch any of those ghost-hunting type shows? Bunch 'a dumbasses running around, jumping at shadows and scaring each other?"

"Once or twice," I admitted.

"They're a load of bull, mostly, but they get a few things right—that there are different types of hauntings, for one thing. There's 'residual hauntings,' which is like a bit of tape stuck on a loop—the same thing playing over and over again. Your classic lady in white, who walks down the hall every night at the same time, for example. It's not so much a spirit as a... 'psychic recording,' of a sort. Then there are 'intelligent' hauntings, or spirits that seem able to communicate, in one way or another. Finally, sentient hauntings—the least common—are spirits who are fully aware of who and what they are, as well as where, why, and when. Typically, only powerful spirits, with a powerful connection to this world, fall into that category."

"But why would my dad be connected to your house?" I asked. "He never even came here, did he?"

"Nope. But he's not haunting the house; he's haunting you."

"What?"

"You're his connection; you're what brought him here. Where you go, he'll follow."

"Janelle, I swear I didn't summon him," I said. "I wouldn't even know how."

"Not on purpose," she agreed. "But you been thinking about him a lot, recently, haven't you?"

I nodded.

"And you're a powerful witch with powers you haven't yet learned to control. That's a recipe for unintentional summoning sauce, right there."

I swallowed. In my peripheral vision, my father's pinprick eyes gleamed.

"Can you... get rid of him?" I whispered.

She shrugged. "Maybe. But unless he gets physically violent, I think it would be good for you to handle this one on your own. He's here for a reason, Ellie. When he's ready to go—or when you're ready to let him—he'll move on."

I sighed. Ro wasn't going to like this, I thought.

❧

When Ro returned some hours later with Luke in tow, having failed to find any trace of Tobin, I briefly considered not telling him about my father's ghost at all.

Ghost-dad had, as Janelle predicted, followed me everywhere. He lurked in the corners of the shop while I worked, and in the kitchen doorway while I did my best to follow a recipe for vegan carrot cake; and when, to my surprise, the cake turned out reasonably well, he followed me back to my room.

He didn't say much (thankfully) but he didn't need to. I could sense his disapproval and disdain well enough.

Janelle had explained that the first law of thermodynamics applied to ghosts, too. They needed energy to speak or make themselves visible, or otherwise have an effect on the physical world. That energy had to come from somewhere, which is why the room got so cold when my dad spoke. After consuming whatever ambient energy it could find in a given area, a ghost would have to wait for it to recharge, or find another source.

This had both benefits and drawbacks, I found. On the one hand, my dad could only speak a few sentences at a time; on the other hand, every time he opened his ghostly mouth, the room turned arctic.

That's how it felt, anyway, when Ro entered and found me wrapped in a blanket and reading a book.

"Why is it so cold in here?" Ro asked, sweeping the room with his gaze. His eyes passed right over ghost-dad, and I realized he couldn't see him any better than Janelle had.

"Dunno," I said, shrugging and setting the book aside as I got to my feet.

The truth is it was cold because my dad had just been telling me how disappointed he was to have a 'gender-confused pansy' for a son, who wasted time working in a dusty gift shop and baking (of all things) instead of doing something useful, like figure out who murdered him.

"Well, lucky I know how to warm you up," Ro said, and moved to take me in his arms.

At which point my father let out a horrific sound that made me jump out of my skin and caused all the lights to flicker.

"What was that?" Ro asked in a falsely casual tone, the way one might after hearing an alarming noise from the engines during a flight. He'd gone completely still and held me in an almost painful grasp.

I winced. "So... you ever read Hamlet?"

"I read most of the books in your father's libraries at one point or another, out of boredom."

"Okay, you remember how Hamlet's dad shows up as a ghost because he wants his son to figure out who murdered him?"

Ro narrowed his eyes at me. "Yeees?" 

"Well, don't be mad, but..."

I told him about ghost-dad and discovered I was right: he didn't like it at all.

He switched to cat-form, in which he could see ghosts perfectly well (more of a cat thing than a demon thing, he explained), then switched back and proceeded to curse in my father's general direction for a good five minutes. Unfortunately, it had little effect on my father's ghost, who continued to lurk in the shadows as a barely visible shape, having exhausted his store of energy already.

When Ro finally ran out of steam, he grilled me with the same questions as Janelle, though he was significantly less willing to let ghost-dad hang around until whatever unfinished business he had was resolved.

"If he's not going to be useful, I'd banish him to the bottom of the thirteenth hell, if I were you," he said. "I'm sure we'll find a book of suitable banishments at his house."

I groaned. In my ghost-induced distress, I'd nearly forgotten our date with Al. The thought of going through my father's things was bad enough; the prospect of doing so while his ghost literally breathed down my neck was worse.

Then again, maybe he would still prove useful, after all. If anyone knew where to find what we were looking for, it would be him.

❧

Al was waiting for us when we arrived, leaning casually against the locked gate with Peetie perched on his shoulder.

He greeted us with a smile, and I mustered something like a smile in return as I dug the key to my father's house from my pocket and let us into the yard. The lawn was long dead and overgrown with weeds, and what had once been a hedge was now a row of dead bushes, brown and dry. I bit back a sigh as I remembered that—for all the magical chaos in my life right now, both the house and its derelict yard remained my problem. If I survived, they'd be here waiting for me, along with who knows what bills.

Al and I exchanged a few casual words of greeting as we made our way towards the house, Ro leading the way in cat form with his tail held high.

"So, how's this work, anyway?" I asked Al as I fit the key into the lock and opened the front door. "I gotta say some magic words or something to let you in?"

"I don't think so," Al said, aiming what looked like a small golden compass at the house with a slight frown. "You've got the key; and in another way, you are the key. As long as you're here, and with me, willingly, I think the house will let me in."

He was right, and we passed inside without so much as a creaking hinge to protest the intrusion.

The house looked (and smelled) much the same as it had when I'd last left it: dusty, musty, disused and abandoned: boxes piled high in every corner. The only clean spaces were those Ro had cleared away with inhuman cleaning skills: the kitchen, bedroom, and master bath.

Ro transformed as soon as we were through the door and dusted himself off with a sniff. I hid a smile, thinking that his natural fastidiousness must have clashed horribly with my father's tendency to hoard everything from books on the occult to paper clips.

Thus reminded of my father, I peered into every shadowed corner for the creepy pin-prick gleam of his eyes but saw nothing. Maybe Janelle had been wrong, I thought, and he wouldn't follow me from her house after all.

"Any idea where to start?" Al asked, clearly daunted by the mountains of boxes before him. It was actually a little satisfying to have someone else share my pain.

"You probably knew him better than I did," I said.

"Me?" Al scoffed. "I worked with him, yes. I didn't live with him." He looked pointedly at Ro. "Surely his own familiar would know best where to look."

Ro raised a brow. "Perhaps if you enlighten me as to what we're looking for."

Strangely, Al appeared a little discomfited by Ro's attention.

"Well... his books of shadows, would be a start," he said, fidgeting and stroking Peetie's little parakeet head.

"Books of... shadows?" I asked.

"His witch journals, basically," Al clarified. "A 'book of shadows' is like a journal where a witch keeps a record of their spells and such. Recipes, current projects, experiments—that sort of thing."

"So, a journal," I said.

"But for witches." Al nodded.

"Right." I turned to Ro. "Did my dad have something like that?"

Ro shifted his yellow gaze from Al to me. "Of course. But a 'Book of Shadows' is among a witch's most closely-guarded possessions. It contains things they trust with no one else—not even familiars. Because familiars can be replaced."

Al looked away. "Tobin and I... I wouldn't have let him go, if... Well, it's complicated."

"Do you know where he is?" I asked.

He looked back at me, surprised. "I thought he was with you, at Janelle's?"

"He was, until yesterday morning," Ro said. "No one's seen him since."

To my surprise, Al paled visibly and turned to me.

"We need to find your father's journals, Ellie," he said. "There's no time to spare. I could tell you everything I know right now, but even I don't have the full picture, yet, and I fear a fragment of the whole won't help. I'm not asking you to trust me—I wouldn't trust me, in your position—but you have the advantage, here. Your familiar could annihilate me and mine in a heartbeat if you told him to. Please, help me find those books. Then, I swear on my life I'll tell you everything I know."

"I'll hold you to that," Ro said.

Al met his eyes, and I saw a strange, honest openness in his face that inclined me to trust him more than anything yet.

"I expect nothing less, from a prince of Rel," he said.

Ro's eyes briefly flared the color of molten gold, and then he looked away, like a cat who'd lost interest in a toy.

"Fine. Let's get started, then," he said.

Confused, but deeply curious, I signaled my agreement, and we began unpacking boxes.