“You were right,” I said. Lu just hummed, not even stirring. She felt safe enough to fall asleep while I was driving and it did a lot of good for my confidence.
“I know you don’t like me,” Val said from somewhere behind me to my left. “But whatever that was back there at the gas station, it wanted the necklace she’s wearing.”
I thought about that for a minute, chewing on how much I should share with him.
Ghosts, in my experience, were attention-seeking troublemakers. Once they’d found a way to get a living person to notice them, they were impossible to get rid of.
But Val had stepped up when it mattered most. When I’d been frozen.
“They want the magic in it, maybe,” I said, hoping my voice was quiet enough not to wake Lu.
Val made a considering noise. “It’s a key, isn’t it?”
“The pocket watch?”
“The silver feather.”
The feather was the key to a book of magic Lu had nearly taken a bullet for, and which our stupidly brave dog had taken instead when she put herself in the line of fire.
A hunter—a human who hunted monsters—had stolen the book from us, even though we’d gone to a lot of trouble to retrieve it from a ghost.
“The key’s powerful,” Val said, fishing for details.
“It is,” I agreed.
He puffed out a frustrated breath. “I think the rabbit is more than a statue or a building or a point on the map. I think it’s alive.”
“A real rabbit?”
“No. And maybe not human. Probably not human. But alive.”
“Well, if you see it, tell me. The sooner we find it, the sooner you can go home.”
“I’m dead. I don’t have a home.”
I shouldn’t get suckered in by the bitterness in his voice. But I’d been there, drifting alongside the living and feeling more lost than found. I still woke in the middle of the night expecting Lu to no longer be able to feel my touch, hear my voice.
“You were born somewhere,” I said. “Spent your life somewhere. Near the bar?”
“Devil’s Elbow? No. Up the road a ways, though. Mostly.” He fell silent and I wondered how many of his memories were still fresh. Wondered if life—the people he loved, hated, the places he’d called his own—were fading while his time as something apart from the world grew richer.
I didn’t ask him about family, wasn’t sure he wanted to be reminded of what he’d lost. He didn’t say anything else, but from what I could see of him in the rearview mirror, he was staring at some middle distance, his wolf lying with its head on his lap.
Everyone was cozy, so I left the radio off, settled my shoulders to ease the hitch in my neck, and drove east.
The road rolled by, slow and steady, the horizon never growing closer. Even though I was driving instead of riding invisible in the passenger seat, this was familiar, and in its way, comforting.
I knew the dangers on the road, or at least most of them. But I wanted miles between those creatures who had marked Lu before we stopped for the night, no matter what Cupid wanted.
“Stop over there.”
We were pulling into St. Clair, the Big Hunt Thrift and Junk just ahead.
“We’ve been there already,” I said.
“Go there again. Go there now.”
“Do you think the rabbit’s in there? We looked.”
