Elza exhales a lungful of smoke, frowns up at the trees around us. It’s early morning, before homeroom. I asked her to meet me here, our spot, in the graveyard of Saint Jude’s. We’re sitting at the side of an old mausoleum, surrounded by trees. We’ve been coming down here over lunch for months, and no one’s ever mowed the grass or plucked any weeds in all that time. I doubt anyone else ever comes to this part of the graveyard. Elza finishes off her cigarette and drops it into the dirt, grinding it out with her boot. I look at the angel statue that looms over the graves, its face hidden by foamy yellow lichen. I remember looking at it the first time Elza ever brought me here.

“So what did you do after that?” she asks me.

I pause. “Put Ham inside. Tried to sleep,” I say.

“So do you think they knew it was your house? Were they coming after you?”

“I don’t think so. If they’d wanted me dead, I’d be dead. They caught me away from the hazel charms. I had nothing. This ghost, the woman with the spear through her . . . she was ferocious. Someone’s bound spirit, I’m certain. Part of a Host. I couldn’t understand what the girl was saying. She wanted something, but they didn’t want to kill me.”

“This girl, with one arm? You’re sure it was this American girl? Ash?”

“It wasn’t exactly Ash. The hair was different, but the same face, same build, same everything. Do ghosts ever look different from their bodies?”

“I don’t know. When your Host forced you out of your body, you looked exactly the same . . . but maybe if they’d controlled your body for years, it would’ve started to look different? Hair grown out, something like that? I presume ghost hair doesn’t grow?”

“Yeah,” I say, “maybe. Maybe this girl, Ash, she had the same problem as me. Maybe she inherited a Host, and they forced her out of her own body?”

“So whatever’s driving her body around, it isn’t Ashley Smith. It’s something else,” Elza says.

“OK,” I say. “But the Ash ghost, she seemed . . . I don’t know . . . happy? Like she was trying to say something about the sky? It’s hard to explain. I mean, I was scared of her at the time, but looking back . . . I think she was just excited.”

“And this other ghost, the woman, she only appeared later?”

“She knocked me down and stood between me and the one-armed girl.”

“Like a bodyguard,” Elza says.

“That kind of vibe, yeah. I felt like I got between a mother bear and her cub.”

“Maybe this has nothing to do with you,” Elza says slowly. “Maybe Ashley Smith is just part of something else that we don’t understand? The world doesn’t revolve around us. I don’t expect the supernatural world does either.”

“She came into my class and called me by name. She — it — wants something from me.”

“Yes.” Elza sighs. “I expect she does. It seems a bit too much to hope that she’s flown halfway around the world to visit Dunbarrow by some weird coincidence.”

She looks down at the ground.

“Hey, are you all right?” I ask.

“I’m fine,” she says. “I just . . . I really thought this was over, you know? You nearly died. I nearly died as well. I thought that was it. Haven’t we been through enough? The last five months have been so great, I just thought . . .”

I kiss her on the forehead. “They have been great. Whatever’s happening, we’ll get through that as well. I promise. Ash can’t be worse than my dad’s Host.”

“Yeah, we hope,” she says, muffled by my shoulder. We sit there for a while, with my arm around her.

“So what do you think we should do? Should we, like, talk to Ash?”

“What?” Elza laughs. “No, I don’t think so. What are you going to do, just walk up to her and start talking about ghosts? She, it, whatever, will pretend she doesn’t know what we mean. Our one advantage is she thinks we don’t know.”

“The ghosts could’ve told her I saw them. She knows I know. Like, we know that she knows that we know.”

“A perilous wedding cake of deceit,” Elza says. “You’re probably right. But we have to be careful. We don’t know what she wants or what she’s capable of. This girl might not even be remotely human. She might even be something to do with Mr. Berkley. We don’t have a wyrdstone. I’m almost wishing you hadn’t gotten rid of your dad’s stuff. . . .”

I don’t say anything. I dug up the toolbox last night. The Book is in the bottom drawer of my wardrobe right now. Still in the toolbox I buried it in. I didn’t want to risk Ash, or whoever’s behind these ghosts, getting their hands on it. I’m wondering if this might be a good moment to reveal this to Elza, and then I decide against it. This isn’t the time to start an argument about that.

I’ve actually got my dad’s sigil — the black ring that was the focus of his power — in the inside pocket of my jacket. Problem is, without a Host to back me up I’m not sure how powerful it is. I feel like it might be the magical equivalent of an unloaded gun.

“Oh, I forgot to mention,” Elza’s saying, “it doesn’t seem as exciting now, but I did some research of my own. Your old mate Mark Ellsmith? Who according to Ash is in California on exchange? His social media’s been dead quiet since a couple days ago. No updates.”

“You think . . . ?”

“I don’t know. Somehow I don’t think he’d go to California for a month and not post a single photograph. Imagine all the opportunities for shirtless pictures. Shirtless at passport control, shirtless by the pool, shirtless crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Plus we’re only a few months from exams. Plus what kind of exchange program takes one student? The timing she chose for all of this just makes no sense at all.”

“So where’s Mark?”

I didn’t always get along with Mark, even when we were mates — I played rugby with him, had to keep on his good side — but the idea that something bad happened to him because of me and Elza, without him even understanding what he was caught up in, makes me feel like I’ve stepped on a splinter of glass.

“My thoughts exactly.”

Elza takes out another cigarette. She examines it, turning it over in her hand, then puts it back in the pack. “Has Ash ever seen us together?” she asks.

“I don’t think so. But I mean, she seems to be staying with Holiday. She’ll tell Ash who you are if Ash asks about you.”

“It’s not a great plan, but how about I try to stick close to them in school today? Just observe and report. I’ll see if I overhear anything useful.”

“All right,” I say. “Let’s just try and play this cool.”

Ash isn’t difficult to find. She’s become an overnight sensation at Dunbarrow High. At morning break you can see her, dressed in white, sitting at one of the outdoor picnic tables with Holiday and the other popular girls. I’m at the other end of the lot, over near the cars, keeping an eye on her, just wondering. She knows I can see her, but never even glances at me. All I want is for her to slip up, show me something abnormal, prove to me that she’s more than a cheerful Californian schoolgirl. In the light of day, watching her across the yard, all our evidence seems less substantial. For all I know, Ash can’t see ghosts, has no idea there’s a spirit with her face roaming the fields of Dunbarrow at night. Those ghosts might be hunting her, not me. Maybe there’s a necromancer after her, and we’re the only ones who can help her. All we’ve got are little pieces of the puzzle, and Ash just looks so blissfully confident and happy, sitting with Holiday Simmon and Alice Waltham, throwing her head back to laugh at something they’re telling her. I know appearances can deceive, but her surface is still throwing me off.

Elza is struggling in her surveillance mission. She has many admirable qualities, my girlfriend, but blending into crowds isn’t one of them. Her thunderhead of black hair foils any attempt to stay anonymous. She’s lurking under a tree near the picnic benches, leaning against the trunk, pretending to read a paperback, but she’s been on the same page for five minutes already.

After a while the bell rings for the second morning period, and Ash strolls into the main building with a flock of girls around her, Elza hurrying after them like a sheepdog in combat boots.

Lunchtime is the same story. Ash is at the center of a crowd, no doubt regaling them with stories about California. Her popularity actually functions as a defense: it’s difficult for Elza to get near her without being instantly noticeable. I can see Alice Waltham and a couple of the other girls getting snippy when Elza tries to sit at the table nearest them in the dining hall, and eventually she gets into a full-blown argument with them and leaves. Ash watches her go.

I’m barely able to focus on my classes. My ribs hurt, and my sleepless night has left me feeling like my head’s full of wool. I’m too tired and weirded out to pay attention to anything that’s happening, even when Kirk does an impression of my fit during history and gets sent out. I basically stare at the floor, going over and over the previous night in my mind: the one-armed girl, the black-eyed woman, the way she sent me flying through the air with a single blow. I don’t remember my Host being able to hurl people around like that. Just how powerful is that spirit? Should I tell Elza I’ve still got my dad’s things? She’s going to want to know why I kept that quiet since November. Would it even help us? I know the sigil can control my own Host, but I’ve got no idea what it’d do to someone else’s. The Book of Eight would tell me, but the idea of ever looking inside that thing again makes me shudder. Last time I read the Book, it sucked my mind into its pages for three days. We still don’t know why, or how I came out of it when I did.

At the end of the day, Elza’s waiting for me on the road by the school gates, cigarette held loosely in her left hand. I pull her in for a kiss.

“I thought you said you didn’t want to kiss me when I was smoking,” she says when we break apart.

“Rules are made to be broken,” I say.

“I know I should stop,” she says, giving the cigarette a guilty glance.

“I’m not going to make you. You know that.”

“Well, I’m sorry. Today was stressful.”

“Did you overhear anything?”

“Mostly no. Let’s just wait here a moment.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say, pulling her in for another kiss.

“Seriously,” she says, laughing, “give it a break. We have to watch.”

I lean against the tree trunk beside her, casting my gaze over the kids leaving through the front gate, heading downhill, packs of girls with bags flapping by their hips, boys shouting and kicking balls around in the road. I actually resent them, I realize, these people who don’t seem to have a care in the world. I know really they’re all worried about acne or girls or boys or exams or their families, but it’s hard to feel any sympathy when you’re trapped inside a whole different set of problems.

“Holiday always leaves through this gate, right?” Elza asks.

“I mean . . . probably?”

“It was hard to get close to them,” Elza says, “and to be honest, they weren’t talking about anything interesting. Ash is hardly going to tell Holiday and her friends that she’s a necromancer or a demon host or whatever she might turn out to be. She was mainly telling them about the bands she’s seen in San Francisco. If she’s acting, she does an exceptionally good impression of a nice, brainless California girl.”

“So what are we doing here?”

“We’re about to head back up to school. I heard Holiday talking about this charity fashion show they’re rehearsing for. It seemed pretty clear that Ash was expected to stay and help out. They were discussing skinny jeans versus straight-legged jeans for like twenty minutes, I swear. . . . Anyway, they should all be in the main hall.”

“So . . . ?”

“If they’re there, it means we’ve got a few hours while Ash and Holiday aren’t at home. Then I think we should go to Holiday’s house and see what’s going on there.”

“How is that going to help?”

“I’d like to get a look at the current state of the Simmon household — preferably while Ashley Smith isn’t around. I mean, aren’t you worried about them? It’s a whole family. We could at least ask when they decided to have Ash stay, how long she’s with them, et cetera. I think it’s worth trying.”

I still sometimes have trouble believing I have a girlfriend who says stuff like et cetera in everyday conversations.

“She’ll know we went up there,” I say.

“She already knows that we know. We think.”

“All right. What if we don’t find anything, though?”

Elza shrugs. “Then we try something else. We talk to her?”

“Yeah, maybe.” Even though I suggested confronting Ash this morning, it now sounds like a pretty unlikely strategy. But we don’t have anything better. After another few minutes, we head back up the hill to Dunbarrow High. Most of the students are gone now, and there’s no sports practice on Tuesday. It used to be the night we all met in the park. I remember those days, when my biggest worry was getting there before Kirk hogged all the alcohol. We make our way around the side of the school and sneak through the shrubbery toward the row of windows that look into the main hall. I can hear some pop song playing from behind the glass. We press ourselves against the brickwork, peeking into the hall. The lunch tables have been packed away, and there’s a low wooden walkway protruding out into the room. Nobody’s doing any fashion stuff at the moment; they’re all laughing at some video on Holiday’s phone. Ash’s bright-white hair is clearly visible to Holiday’s left. There’s a big rack of clothes pushed up against one wall.

Watching them through the window, I still can’t get myself to see Ash as an evil being.

“Well,” Elza says quietly, “they’re there, all right. Now let’s make a call at Holiday’s place.”

I’ve only been to the Simmons’ house once before, for what turned out to be among the most memorable parties of my life. I still remember the way, up to a big mock-Tudor mansion at the top of Wight Hill, the kind of neighborhood where you can imagine the residents meeting to discuss fining someone for having a hedge above the height specified in the residents’ agreement. We walk up the gravel driveway to Holiday’s sunburn-pink front door, still in school uniform. Elza pushes the doorbell before either of us can think better of it.

Holiday and her mum both have this thing where they can make anyone feel easy and welcome, no matter how surprised or unhappy they actually are to see them. I feel like I could be wearing a ski mask and waving a gun in Mrs. Simmon’s face and she’d still give us the exact same smile.

“Luke? And Elza? How lovely to see you.”

“Hello, Mrs. Simmon,” Elza says, smiling back. “Are Holiday and Ashley here?”

“Oh, I’m afraid they’re out at the moment,” Mrs. Simmon says cheerily, although there’s a subtle change in her expression when Elza mentions Ash. “They’re still at school, rehearsing for Holiday’s show.”

“Oh, of course,” Elza says. “How silly of me.”

“I haven’t seen either of you in a long time,” says Mrs. Simmon. “Not since . . . Halloween, I think?”

There’s an awkward pause. My Host came to the Simmons’ house during the Halloween party, used everyone there as part of some kind of black-magic ritual that I still don’t understand, and brutally killed the family cat for good measure. Mrs. Simmon doesn’t know this is my fault, but I feel like she connects me with it in some hazy way.

“We’ve been busy studying, haven’t we, Luke?” Elza says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Big year.”

“It’s such a stressful time for you all,” Mrs. Simmon says. “I bet you can’t wait until it’s all over. I know you’ll both do fine.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“So, Mrs. Simmon, we’re very sorry to be a bother,” Elza says, winding some hair around her right hand, “but Holiday borrowed a DVD from me about a month ago. She said she’d give it back to me if I came by this evening, but maybe she forgot she wouldn’t be here? So I was thinking, since we already walked over, maybe we could just go up to her room and get it?”

This story makes no sense at all, because Holiday never speaks to us and surely never speaks about us, and why would it be so important that we get the DVD right here and now? Holiday could bring it to school tomorrow. I fully expect Mrs. Simmon to raise some or all of these objections, but instead she just smiles even wider and says, “Of course!” and lets us into the house. Despite her leather jacket and combat boots and smoky bomb-blast of hair, which make her look like she’s starring in a public service announcement about the Dangers Of Sniffing Glue, Elza has an incredibly winning way with adults. They just seem to trust her.

“Thanks so much,” Elza says as we walk through the kitchen. “We need it for class, you see?”

Last time I was here, there were people standing motionless in every room and a circle of murderous ghosts waiting for me outside. I still shudder when I catch a glimpse of the garden through the kitchen windows. I remember the demon’s hand reaching out, clutching that dark red rope of light that joined my body with the corpse of the cat . . .

“Luke?”

Mrs. Simmon is staring at me with alarm. I force a smile.

“Sorry,” I say. “Just my mind wandering.”

“So how long is Ash staying with you?” Elza asks.

Mrs. Simmon frowns.

“You know, I’m not exactly certain. But she is a lovely girl.”

Elza frowns as well.

“I thought she said it was a month?” I say.

“Oh, of course,” Mrs. Simmon says, almost gratefully. “A month! She’s here for a month.”

“What made you sign up with the Goodman Foundation to be her hosts?” Elza asks.

“Oh, you know. It’s empowering for young women to get out into the world. She’s a lovely girl. So polite. I think it was Holiday’s idea originally. They started talking online somewhere. She’s very fond of Ashley.”

“Ash is just so . . .” Elza searches for a word. “Vivacious.”

“Oh, she is.” Mrs. Simmon smiles. “Ashley is a regular little hummingbird. She’s a lovely girl.”

“Well, it’s really great of you to be her hosts,” I say.

Nobody says anything for a moment. Mrs. Simmon’s smile is unwavering.

“Would you mind if we . . . ?” Elza begins, and for a horrible moment, I think Mrs. Simmon is going to escort us up to Holiday’s room herself — denying us the time to search for anything — but she just nods and tells us to find her if we need any help.

They’ve replaced the carpeting in the hall where Alice poured wine on Elza. I wonder if Holiday got in trouble over that, or if the mass amnesia and brutal cat slaying made some spilled wine irrelevant. Probably the latter. We leave Mrs. Simmon smiling to herself in the downstairs hallway and press on up the stairs, across the landing, through the white-painted door with a golden H nailed to it.

“What was that?” Elza hisses the moment the door closes. “Did you see that? She didn’t even know how long Ash is supposed to be here! ‘She’s a lovely girl.’ Just kept saying it! It made my skin crawl.”

“It was really weird. She barely seemed to know who you were even talking about.”

Elza glares around Holiday’s room. “I think we can take about ten minutes in here before it starts to seem suspicious. I’m imagining the white suitcase full of white clothes belongs to Ash?”

“Be kind of a surprise if it doesn’t.”

Holiday’s room is much as I remember it: a neat desk, a bookshelf, a large wall chart with a study schedule highlighted in twelve different colors. Four-poster bed draped with lights, an entire wall plastered with photos of Holiday and Alice and the other popular girls, all standing in those weird posing lines that girls do. Holiday smiles confidently from the center of a thousand different pictures. It’s a whole galaxy of frozen smiles. I suppose if things had turned out differently, it would’ve been me standing next to her in these photos, rather than Mark.

Elza’s staring intently at the desk.

“Did you find something?” I ask.

“No,” she says, looking away. “Not at all.”

She was looking at a framed photo of two girls on the beach, young, maybe eight years old. One of them is blond, the other red-haired and scowling.

“Is that . . .” I begin.

“Yeah, it’s me and her,” Elza says. “This was so long ago!”

“I always forget you used to be friends.”

“I always forget, too. I was sure she had.”

“You don’t look very happy,” I say.

“Second day of a summer in Devon. I was already sunburned. The redhead’s curse.”

“You used to go on vacation together?”

“Yes. I mean our mums used to be pretty close, too. . . . Anyway, that’s over. We’re different people now. I mean, this is so type A!” Elza glances over the rest of the desk with disgust. “Look, she arranges her pencils in order of length . . . and the books are, like, color coded by spine!”

Elza’s room looks like a missile strike leveled a library and then someone came and sprinkled tea mugs over the rubble.

The new addition to Holiday’s room is a single camp bed, which is unfolded to the right of her four-poster. It’s neatly made with white sheets and pillows. There’s a white suitcase, which is full of neatly packed white clothes. We rifle through them, growing more and more frustrated. There’s an unworn pair of white Converse, two identical white sundresses, a pair of white-framed sunglasses that won’t be getting much use in Dunbarrow. A white cardigan, white gloves, a white silk scarf. White jeans, both skinny and straight. White T-shirts, six of them, still wrapped in plastic. White bras, white underwear. Some packs of spearmint gum.

“Who is this person?” Elza asks in despair. “Who has a suitcase like this? She can’t be human.”

Ash is somehow even more of a mystery than before. I don’t know what we expected to find, but this wasn’t it.

“No occult books?” Elza asks. “No jewelry? Like, a potential sigil or something?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“She’s going to know we went through this,” Elza says. “I can’t fold it all up again.”

“I didn’t think we were worried about that,” I say. I put my hands inside the Converse, first the left and then the right, but there’s nothing hidden in them. I cast my eyes around Holiday’s room, but I can’t see anything else that might belong to Ash.

“She could be anyone,” Elza says to herself. “Ashley Smith could literally be anyone. Do we know she’s even American?”

“It’s an impressive accent if it’s fake.”

“I can’t believe this.” She sighs.

“What did you think we’d find? A little notebook titled My Plan to Kill Luke and Elza — Please Don’t Read?”

“Don’t be such a jerk,” Elza snaps, waving one of Ash’s bras around to emphasize her point. “You came up with precisely nothing —”

“What are you doing?”

We both freeze and turn sharply to look at the door, the picture of guilt.

A boy is leaning against the doorframe. He’s wearing tracksuit bottoms and a football shirt. He looks about twelve years old. I realize it’s Holiday’s brother. I remember her talking about him, what seems like a thousand years ago. How she was worried he’d started smoking.

“We’re friends of Holiday’s,” I say.

“Never seen you before,” he says.

“We just came by to get a DVD?” Elza says, letting Ash’s bra fall to the ground.

“Which one?” he asks.

“Er . . .” I grab the nearest case from Holiday’s shelf. “This one. It’s mine.”

Holiday’s brother sniggers.

I’m holding a Best of Hannah Montana DVD. Why does Holiday even have this?

“Lame,” he says. Then, “What are you doing with Ash’s stuff?”

“We thought the DVD might be in there,” Elza says. “But it wasn’t.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“We’re going to leave now,” I say firmly.

We walk toward Holiday’s brother, and for a moment I think he’s going to block the way and start shouting for his mum or something, but he lets us pass by.

“Are you friends with Ash?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Do you like her?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

“She’s a lovely girl,” Elza says heavily. “Once you get to know her.”

I tuck Holiday’s DVD into my jacket and we leave, saying a hurried good-bye to Mrs. Simmon. Once we’re on the street, we start walking faster, looking around us, half expecting Ash to lunge out of the undergrowth at any moment. The sun is low in the sky, and the trees cast long shadows over the road. There aren’t any clouds. It looks like it’ll be a cold night.

I say good-bye to Elza in the center of Dunbarrow, and we head our separate ways. I walk back home, stolen DVD still in my coat. I don’t know what we were thinking. All we’ve done is confirm to Ash that we’re onto her. We don’t know who (or what) she is or what she wants.

About halfway up the hill, I get a call from Holiday’s phone. Who knew she still had my number? I don’t answer.

I eat dinner, play with Ham. But I just can’t get Ash out of my mind. I want to know who she is, what she’s doing. We could be in danger. I have to know. So at eleven o’clock, I decide to try something else.

The way it happens is this: I lie on my bed with the door closed. Sometimes it helps to have the radio playing, but not always. I lie on my bed and I look up at the ceiling. I look at the crack in my ceiling and think about not having a body. I look at the crack, a slender dark flaw running through an expanse of perfect white, and forget I have a body. I listen to my breath, to my blood flowing, to the shrill electrical noise that I’ve come to think of as my nerves singing, and I try to forget I have blood or flesh or bone. I try to hear the silence beyond all these noises.

And when I get it right, become part of that silence, I don’t have a body at all.

I’m floating up near the crack, about a finger’s length away from the plaster skin of the ceiling. I drift, turn over lazily, like I’m floating in warm salt water. Below, on my bed, my body’s eyes are closed. I’m sleeping. Or rather, I’m up here. It’s all a bit complicated.

In October, my Host cut my spirit loose from my body and possessed me, drove my body around instead. I managed to get it back from them, but it was a close thing. I’m doing fine, as far as my body is concerned, no adverse effects, but the moorings feel a bit looser now. It seems that after you’ve left it once, that makes it easier the next time.

The problem with watching people — one of the problems — is it’s hard to stay on them all the time. You have to sleep, have to eat, have to piss. Your foot goes dead; you have to lie in the mud; the neighbors call the police because you’ve been hanging around their cul-de-sac for six hours. Without a body, many of these issues disappear. The only people who’ll see me are the ones with second sight, and there aren’t many of them in Dunbarrow. Elza and me are the only ones I know of, although for the moment I’m going to assume Ash can see me as well. It’s not a perfect way to watch her, but if I stay out of her line of sight, I should be fine.

Anyway, I leave my body safely resting on my bed and fly out through the roof into the night sky. There’s a strong wind, silvery clouds rushing past the moon, but without my skin, I don’t feel a chill. Dunbarrow from above is a map of orange street lamps, the conical headlights of cars snaking through dark streets. I fly higher, almost touching the lowest clouds, until the town is just a smear of electric light against the dull shapes of the forests and moors. I float there for a moment, looking down at Dunbarrow, at Brackford to the south and Throgdown in the north; then I dive back down, wishing I could feel the wind in my hair as I fall like a hunting bird toward Wight Hill. You don’t see a lot of ghosts flying, maybe because they don’t accept that they’re dead. They’re missing out, anyway. It’s the best part.

I fly down Holiday’s road and come to a halt almost directly above her house. One problem I hadn’t thought about is the black-eyed woman. Assuming she does work with Ash somehow, I might dive into the house and come face-to-face with her, which is not something I want to risk. I don’t know if Ash herself could hurt me when I’m just a spirit, but that ghost definitely could. If she’s hanging around, this will be much more difficult.

I descend in slowly through the attic, homing in on the room where I can hear music. I drift across the landing and lower my head slowly through the floor. For a moment all I can see is the inside of the landing, a horrible blur of darkness; then my face breaks through the ceiling of the room below, and I’m looking down on them all.

They’re watching TV: Holiday, Mr. and Mrs. Simmon, and Ash, her vivid white form occupying a beanbag to the right of Holiday’s chair. She’s wearing white pajamas. There’s a game show on. Ash laughs. I wonder why she’s putting up this amount of pretense. She doesn’t know anybody is watching her, does she? Who is she pretending to be normal for? Maybe it’s for herself?

I stay hidden inside the ceiling, with only my face breaking through the plaster. If Ash looks directly upward then she’ll see me, but that seems unlikely. Assuming she even has second sight, of course. I watch them for half an hour, and then at midnight the TV goes off.

“Time for bed,” Mr. Simmon says, stretching, and then, in a different tone, “Who are you?”

“I’m sorry, dear?” Mrs. Simmon says.

“Who is this person?”

“Dad —”

“No, no! Who is this? I’ve never . . .”

Ash says nothing, just looks at them all with her gray eyes. Holiday’s dad gestures at her helplessly as his wife and daughter look on with slight frowns. Nobody gets up from their seat. He clutches at his head and puts the remote down on the coffee table.

“I . . .” Mr. Simmon sounds like he’s having trouble breathing. “I don’t . . . I think I’ll lie down. I must apologize, Ashley. You’re a lovely girl. We’re glad to have you.”

“Sorry about my dad,” Holiday groans as he leaves the room. “He gets really stressed out.”

“It’s fine,” Ash says with a wide smile.

There’s no way I’m going to leave after that little episode. I keep inside the walls, staying out of Ash’s sight, hiding in the insulation foam, lurking beneath the floorboards in the company of spider husks and dust. Holiday and Ash sit on Holiday’s bed, talking about the fashion-show rehearsal. Ash does a pretty good impression of Alice Waltham, which would make me laugh if I didn’t find Ash the most sinister person on the planet right now.

It’s way past midnight by the time Holiday switches the light off and they finally stop talking. They’ve already tidied the room up from my and Elza’s invasion. All of Ash’s clothes are folded back into her suitcase. She lies motionless in her foldout bed while Holiday turns over in her bedclothes, snuffling and adjusting pillows. Then there’s silence. Holiday’s phone is charging under her bed, pulsing orange like the beat of a strange luminous heart. After half an hour, I’m starting to feel like a serious creep. Do I just watch them sleep all night?

Without warning, Ash sits upright.

I dart underneath Holiday’s chest of drawers, only the top of my head sticking up through her cream carpet. I see Ash’s feet and shadow moving on the floor. She’s getting dressed. Silently, she crosses Holiday’s room and closes the door behind her.

The chase is on.

I drift out onto the landing, but she’s already downstairs. I hear the front door close. I shoot up through the attic and hide behind one of the chimney stacks, peering around it at the moonlit street. Ash is wearing a white overcoat, white leggings, a white wool hat. She’s not particularly well hidden, although she moves with an easy silence that I can’t help but admire. She makes her way down Wight Hill, seeming unhurried, not bothering to check if she’s being followed. I trail her at a cruise, keeping myself behind houses and trees, trying to make sure I’m not crossing any open patches of sky.

Ash strolls down a side street, rustling in her inside pocket for something, then unlocks an old car (surprisingly, it’s navy blue) and gets in. How old is she? I know they let you drive earlier in America, but still . . . The car roars to life, coughing exhaust, the headlights illuminating a plastic bag blowing in the road. Ash sits still at the wheel for a few moments, thinking about who-knows-what. Then she pulls out into the road and drives.

She’s a good driver, has clearly been doing it awhile, and I have no doubt that if the police pull her over, she’s got some plausible-looking license in the glove compartment. This isn’t a joyride. Ash does this regularly. She’s heading out to the southern side of town, near the motorway, up past the school and out through Kirk’s estate, and then farther out, the only car on the road, easily tracked by watching her headlights cut through the trees. There’s nothing out here. Where on earth is Ash going? The only thing this far out is the new Pilgrim Grove development, and it’s still under construction.

Ash does pull into the development. She drives slowly through the half-built houses, a whole fresh outgrowth of Dunbarrow, two hundred new homes, each with an angled roof and buttery stone walls and geometrically precise garden plots, all half-constructed, windows without glass staring at me like blind eyes. There are yellow construction machines parked here and there, sleeping dinosaurs, monstrous diggers with wheels that look like they should be exploring the surface of the moon. Crates and trucks and barrows and enormous revolving drums of cement. What is she looking for? Her headlights illuminate a mound of gravel, and then a house with half its walls missing, the skeleton of a house, just the idea of a home . . . and then another house that’s something more. One of the Pilgrim Grove houses is already finished.

It looks like all the others: sloped orange roof, smooth stone walls, a garage that Ash pulls her car into, a garden that’s just churned mud surrounded by a fence, a swinging gate . . . except there’s glass in all the windows, a front door, an electric light burning inside; everything but milk bottles on the front step. Ash gets out of her car and fishes for another set of keys, opens the front door, and vanishes inside. I stay where I am, hidden in the shell of the house opposite. Clouds drift in front of the moon. The silvered fields around Pilgrim Grove darken. I hear an owl again, whooping somewhere in the trees. Another light turns on, in the upstairs of the house. Then Ash pulls a curtain across the window.

When I’m certain she’s not coming out again, twenty minutes later, I float down to ground level and make my way up to the fence. There’s none of the supernatural defenses I’ve seen in the past: no hazel charms chiming, no undead animals screaming at me from the undergrowth. There doesn’t seem to be anything stopping me from gliding right in.

I melt into the house through the wall. I’m in what presumably is meant to be a living room, although it’s difficult to tell because there’s no furniture. The walls are white; the floor is nondescript polished wood. I can hear Ash moving upstairs. I float into the hallway, which is also empty of anything except a pair of white Converse sneakers by the front door. I move through into another blank room, possibly intended as a dining room. The large bay windows afford a view of a cement mixer, a hollowed-out house, and the moonlit sky. If I had a body, I’d probably have goose bumps right now. I move into the kitchen, which looks slightly more normal. There’s a stove, a fridge, a microwave. Someone — Ash, I imagine — has left a package of dried fruit on the counter. At least we’ve got some proof she eats something. The kitchen loops back around to the front room again. There’s a large dark-framed mirror hanging on the far wall, which I didn’t notice before.

Being in spirit form isn’t making me feel much safer in this place. Is this even the same living room I was in before? I definitely didn’t see the mirror last time. I feel like the view from the window may have changed a little as well. Like the moon is in a different place or something. I turn back toward the kitchen and come face-to-face with the one-armed girl ghost.

She’s smiling at me.

“Hi,” I say.

She replies in gibberish. She is the spitting image of Ash, right down to their voices. She’s got the same mouth, same sharp cheeks, same everything. They have to be twins. Her hair is lank and unhealthy-looking, and there’s no ring in her nose, but other than that, there are barely any differences at all. Now that I’m looking closer, I realize that this ghost’s eyes are a far deeper blue than Ash’s colorless eyes.

“Are you Ashley Smith?” I ask her. “What’s going on?”

The ghost twin, the one-armed girl, reaches out toward me. I move backward, into the blank living room. I’m extra nervous now, because I’m sure the black-eyed woman can’t be too far away. And what’s Ash — Ash’s body — doing upstairs?

The one-armed girl is pointing behind me. I turn. She seems to be gesturing at the mirror. It’s enormous, taking up most of the far wall. I notice we’re both reflected in it, which is pretty weird, actually, because mirrors don’t normally show reflections of ghosts. . . .

There’s a high ringing noise in my ears, and I realize, as the one-armed girl laughs with delight, that I’ve made a mistake.

When I come back into consciousness, I’m trapped in a strange room. I remember looking myself in the eye, and then suddenly there was no reflection, and everything was chiming like a bell — the sound, I’ve started to learn, of magic that means business. I’m confined inside a room with black walls, maybe a little larger than your average coffin. There’s no space to move, although luckily I don’t have muscles that can cramp. The far wall is made of glass, and through it I can see the blank living room in Ash’s house. It’s empty. The one-armed girl is nowhere to be seen.

The first thing I do is try to fly out, of course, but there’s no way. Whatever these walls are made of, it’s not stone or wood or metal, and I can’t pass through them. I’m trapped here. I don’t even know where here is.

After a long time, I hear footsteps approaching, and Ash walks through the living room beyond the glass, with her back to me. She doesn’t glance in my direction. Is this a window? What am I watching her through?

I must be inside the mirror. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it’s the only view of this room that makes sense.

She clatters about in the kitchen for a few moments, then reemerges carrying a plate of rice cakes, celery, dried fruit. Diet food. She looks me right in the eye, gives a little squeak, and drops the food all over the floor. A rice cake rolls across the blond wood, coming to rest up against the far wall. Ash composes herself.

“How long have you been in there?” she asks, as if we’d just met by accident in the park or something. There doesn’t seem much point in lying to her.

“A while,” I say.

“Spirit walking . . .” she says to herself. “I should’ve thought of that.” No sign of her permanent questioning lilt. I suppose this is her real voice.

Ash runs a hand through her cropped white hair. She bends down, picks up her plate, puts as much of the food back onto it as she can reach. She leaves the farthest rice cake where it is. I wait silently, still not sure what’s going on. Should I be scared?

Ash takes the plate into the kitchen, then comes back without it and walks right up to the mirror. She puts one finger against the glass, frowning. Her nose ring glints in the reflected lamplight. Her eyebrows are as pale as her hair, which is unsettling. I thought she bleached her hair to get it so white, but it seems to grow like that on its own. Ash bites her lip.

“I guess,” she says softly, “we have some stuff to talk about.”