"I take it you know who I am?" Freddie asks as Fionna and I gape at each other.

I'm the first one to recover my voice. "You said Steve Walker wanted to see me? What, is today Dead People Reunion Day or something?"

"Sort of," says Freddie. "It's not All Souls' Day weekend for nothing, buddy. Now are you gonna come with me or what? You can come along, too," he adds, beckoning to Fionna. "What's your name?"

"Uh...Fionna Lee. And wha...okay, I'm a bit freaked here. More than a bit freaked, really."

"Yeah, so was I when the Aqua Killer got me." Freddie sighs, then looks back at us and sees that we're staring at him blankly. "Okay, got a little ahead of myself there. I'll let Steve explain it all. He's got a better handle on the situation than I do, I think."

Freddie sets off again, heading directly towards Balthazar before remembering that there's no cable car up the hill here. He then turns east, making his way toward the road leading up to the school.

Fionna and I stand there staring for a while longer before Freddie turns around and waves at us, calling, "Come on, then! Or am I gonna have to tell Steve I couldn't find you?"

I look at Fionna once again before muttering, "Screw it. I've had enough of being run into by dead people," and following Freddie. Fionna stays behind for a moment before jogging forward to catch up with me.

"Alex, what's going on?" Fionna asks me.

"You know how there was a dead guy at my school?" I ask. Fionna shakes her head, and I press on. "Steve Walker was the dead guy. And then yesterday, after I talked to you, I ran into him in the woods."

Fionna whistles. "Holy shit. Any particular reason why they're haunting you? Wait...w-wait a sec - Freddie's the..." Fionna pauses, looking at Freddie again. Even though she's only seeing him from behind right now, I can spot a glimmer in her eyes as she recognizes him as one of the Three Guys. "Oh my God. He's the same one who-"

"Who threw out that drunken asshole who was harassing me on Monday night?" Freddie finishes Fionna's sentence for her. "Yeah. If I'd have known it was the last cool thing I'd ever do, I'd have videotaped it for posterity. Or, at least, for my cremation." He stops and looks around - we're halfway up the delivery road. "Um, okay. Sorry, I don't know this place too well anymore. It's been years since I've delivered up this way."

Freddie spins around again, looking east towards the woods - the same part of the woods where the party was held last night. Having gotten his bearings again, he walks off the road, around the trees. From here, it's a five-minute walk to the clearing, where the remains of the campfire still sit, charred black.

Steve Walker is sitting on one of the rocks. He's changed out of his hospital gown since we last met, and is now wearing more ordinary clothes - jeans, long-sleeve white tee, black glasses, and a gray beanie. Next to him sits a woman I've never seen before, a small, mousy woman in her late twenties with a pixie haircut, holding a notepad and pen in one hand. The other is touching the infinity scarf wrapped tightly around her neck.

"Hey, Krause," Steve says. "Told you you'd find him easily."

"Are you sure he's the one?" Freddie asks.

"He fits my description perfectly, doesn't he? Hey, Snow," Steve says, standing up to shake my hand. I return the gesture with more than a bit of reluctance, and am surprised to find that he's still solid. Maybe ghosts, or whatever Steve is, have some kind of sensory projection ability or something so they don't phase through people or objects? "How goes it?" he asks.

"Considering I'm on the point of having my bloody head explode," I say, "I'm fine, thanks." Behind me, Fionna chuckles nervously, probably a bit more amused than she should be by my use of Hellish cursing. "This is Fionna Lee, my...uh...friend." Why did I not say "girlfriend?" I have no idea. "Fionna, this is Steve Walker."

"Nice to meet you, Fionna Lee," Steve says, stepping forward to hug her. "So you're a demon, huh? Enjoying what you've seen of our world so far?"

Fionna rolls her eyes. "I dunno. The place seems pretty dead."

"Haha, a clever one," Steve says. "Good catch, Snow." He punches my shoulder lightly, as if we're friends, even though this is the first time we've ever really talked. Steve, being Paul's friend, is a lot like him - very friendly to everyone. I've always found Steve a little more likable and approachable, though, for some reason. I'd like to think that in an alternate universe, we could actually have been friends, had I taken the opportunity to get to know him.

"Who's this?" I ask, gesturing to the woman.

In response, the woman clicks open her pen and starts scribbling on her notepad. When she's done, she turns the notepad around so we can read what she's written.

"My name is Penny Crowe," her notepad reads. "I apologize for only communicating in writing, but my throat was damaged when I got killed and I can't talk at the moment."

"'Damaged?'" I repeat. "What does that mean? Did they slit your throat or something? Is that why you're wearing that scarf?"

Penny writes her answer as quickly as she can, but partway through it, she stops writing and puts down her pen and paper. She's crying - quietly, but still hard enough that her body is shaking too much for her to write. Steve picks up the notepad and shows us the chilling message:

"My throat...and other parts of me. Like my chest, and my stom-"

I look from the note to Penny, who's still weeping and trembling as she curls up in a ball, her back against the rock. My chest freezes as I try to imagine the slow, agonizing death Penny has just described. Holy shit, nobody should suffer that.

"How come I haven't heard about this?" I ask. "I saw the news this morning, they would've mentioned some suspicious-"

"Except this murder took place across the Bridge from here," says Freddie. "Unless you watched the Hell news this morning too?"

I shake my head, shivering as the wind picks up. "No, I didn't. I was mostly interested in what happened to you, Steve."

"They still got nothing on my killer, though," Steve says. "And I doubt they ever will, to be honest."

"Oh my God," Fionna whispers as she finishes reading Penny's note. "That's awful. And it still isn't...but if you're dead, shouldn't it not hurt anymore? How does that work?"

Freddie takes off his sunglasses again to show us his reddened eyes. "So you guys heard what happened to me, right?" Fionna and I nod, signaling him to continue. "The Aqua Killer burned my eyes out. Now, when you die, you enter the afterlife as you were at the moment of death. That means whatever illness or injury got you, you still have it, until they fix you."

"'They?'"

"You know how funeral homes have makeup artists to help beautify the corpses?" Steve asks, grimacing at the thought of making corpses beautiful. (I actually hear him thinking about how he really should have made a better choice of words.) "Imagine if they had doctors and nurses instead, but with better medical technology than anything available here or in any of the other dimensions. They can't exactly send you into the great unknown without a clean bill of health."

"Uh-huh. And that's why I'm wearing these," Freddie says, putting his sunglasses back on. "They fixed my eyes up, but they need to heal before I can expose them to regular light again. Takes a few days."

I look down at the forest floor for a minute, processing this massive info-dump as quickly as I can. "Okay. You guys are all dead...whoa, wait a minute. How come Penny's not fixed up yet?"

Penny holds out her hands and takes back her notepad from Steve so she can write. "I died yesterday, and it's All Souls' Day tomorrow. For this three-day period, they make us stay in the Prime Universe, which means they don't do any healings. Damned if I know why."

Fionna and I look at each other, still confused. Steve explains a little more. "Okay, we're gonna have to stop adding new crap in. There's a lot of it we still don't understand ourselves. What we know is, basically, there's the Prime Universe - that's this one, right here - and the Second Universe, which is the afterlife - Paradise, or Purgatory, whatever you wanna call it, I guess. Basically, you're supposed to go into the Second Universe after you die, but once you cross over, you can't come back. Ever."

"Really?" Fionna asks.

"We haven't met anyone who has, anyway," Freddie says. "The place where they fix us up, that's sort of a halfway house between Prime and Second. And they say that as long as you don't go to Second, and as long as your remains are still viable in Prime, your soul can come back, and you carry back with you whatever healing they've done for you."

While Freddie's been talking, Penny has been writing away furiously, and as soon as he finishes, she holds out her notepad again. "And if there's a serial killer who killed you, all his victims, they find their way to each other. Some kind of mental connection or something. That's what we all did. Also, speaking of mental connections, if you're wondering why I'm talking in writing instead of using my thoughts, I just find that it's easier this way. My thoughts won't form coherent words right now because my brain's too busy trying to process the pain I'm in."

"So this Aqua Killer..." I mutter.

"That's what I decided to call him, anyway," Steve says. "Because after hearing Freddie and Penny's stories, I figured out that about the only thing we had in common was the fact that we were all killed near some source of water. The toilet for me, kitchen sink for Freddie, and shower for Penny."

"The toilet?" I ask. "Didn't know that. They found your head in Marco's room, and your body in the woods."

"That's why I think they're never gonna get anything on the Aqua Killer," Steve says. "Because he scattered my body so far from the actual crime scene."

"But why water?" Fionna asks.

Steve frowns. "Okay, now this is really messed-up. I didn't even believe it myself at first. Before I tell you, you guys gotta promise me you'll take this seriously."

"Sure, sure. Go on."

"Have you ever been possessed by a demon?"

"What? No," I say, looking at Fionna and trying not to laugh. She shrugs at me, equally unsure of what Steve's getting at, but I can see her lips curving upwards a tad bit - clearly she's sharing my initial reaction.

There are many popular myths about demons, most of them untrue, but all with some grain of truth involved in the story. Among them is the myth that demons can possess other people's bodies and force them to do things they normally wouldn't do. This is supposed to be impossible, although many powerful demons over the years have claimed to have pulled off a successful possession or two in their time.

The underlying truth is that, while demons do have the same thought-reading telepathic power as angels, they also have the ability to project their consciousness into other people. This means that demons can really read your mind - all your thoughts, past and present, not just what you're thinking right now - and can also share their own thoughts and memories with you. It's a lot like a Vulcan mind-meld, but it's exercised with caution. For one thing, some people might find it rude and invasive, having demons consulting your brain pretty much at will. For another, it's a very tough ability, said to be too difficult for most demons to learn, let alone master.

"You're saying the Aqua Killer is a demon?" Fionna asks. "And he's...no. That's impossible."

"I dunno," I say. "This time yesterday I would've said it was impossible to see dead people running through the woods."

"If I remember correctly, you actually did," Steve points out.

"Can we get back to the possession thing, please?" Freddie asks. Steve steps aside, making that "you-have-the-floor" flourishing gesture. "Thanks. Now, there's another thing about the Aqua Killer that seems impossible, but obviously it happened, or else I wouldn't be here talking to you guys right now." Freddie stops to catch his breath - I guess even dead guys need oxygen once in a while. "He got to us through water, because he actually was the water. It was like, the second I touched the water, he possessed me and made me burn my own eyes out."

"And I was about to take a piss, but then the water came out of the toilet and splashed me, then I found myself raising my flaming hand up to my neck," Steve says. He swallows, clears his throat, then adds, "Next thing I knew, I was in a hospital bed, and this nurse came in and just dropped the news on me that I was dead."

"He used your own elementals against you?" I whisper. "But...but how?"

"The possession thing," Freddie says. "And because he was all in the water. I mean, I've heard that the most advanced water elementals can dissolve themselves in water and travel through the liquid, but I didn't know that was real."

"Until now," Fionna asks. "But what about Penny? She said her boyfriend killed her."

"Because my boyfriend was in the shower, then he came out and attacked me out of nowhere," Penny writes.

"Jesus Christ, that's sad." I look down again, my stomach in knots - and not in that good/bad way, like when I'm checking out a hot girl.

"You said it, Feathers." Speaking of hot girls - Fionna sits on a rock, her arms crossed in front of her chest. I'm reminded of how I was sitting the exact same way just last night - was it on this same rock? I can't remember. I sit next to Fionna and slowly wrap my right index finger around hers. She uncrosses her arms, and I hold her right hand in both of mine.

Thanks, she thinks. I needed that.

You're telling me. I raise her knuckles up to my lips.

"Hey, I know this is a lot to take in," Steve says. "Believe me, I totally understand you guys' reaction. Sure beats mine, anyway. I puked when they first told me what happened."

Fionna and I let go of each other's hands, and I stand up as I ask Steve the question that's really been burning in the back of my mind. "Why us? You could've gone to anyone with this information. What makes Fionna and I so special?"

"Considering you were the one who ran into me last night, Snow..."

"But why invite Fionna along too? She's got nothing to do with this. All you're doing is scaring her. Not cool, dude."

"Don't act like you weren't scared yourself," Fionna gripes, looking affronted.

"I just knew to look for Alex Snow," Freddie says. "I figured anyone with him would be all right, too." He looks at Steve, as if trying to apologize for bringing another party into the mix.

"It's okay." The raspy whisper startles us for a moment, because none of us recognize the voice. We all look around before realizing the voice belongs to Penny. She's already writing out the rest of her thought, pausing every so often to massage her neck. My insides churn again as I remember her grisly murder tale. I really hope she can get her voice back soon.

Finally, Penny finishes writing and shows the notepad to us. "I felt better being able to tell someone else what happened. It's good that other people know the truth."

"That's really sweet of you, Penny," Steve says. He adjusts his glasses, then paces on the spot for a moment. "Okay. So, Snow, you did find me, I guess. But that's not the real reason why I wanted to come to you."

"What? What is it, then?"

"Now, before I tell you, I just wanna say, it's gonna sound really goddamn weird." Steve pauses again, keeps pacing. "Again, take it seriously - but maybe with a grain of salt, because I'm not even sure it's true myself."

"Try me."

Steve looks at Freddie and Penny, who both nod - apparently they know what he's gonna say. Finally, he speaks to me. "On Monday morning, when the Aqua Killer got into my body...well, I couldn't see his own body, because he'd scattered himself into the water. Except his eyes."

Freddie rubs his neck with one hand. "The eyes are important. Demons can't project, or in this case possess, without having eye contact with the other person."

"Right," Steve says. "And the last thing I thought before he took over me was, his eyes look really familiar. Took me a while to make the connection. Then again, it's not like I ever really got the chance to study your face close up."

He stops and takes his glasses off, then looks me in the eye. "Has anyone ever told you, Snow, that you have really stunning eyes?"