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“Don’t worry about it.”

“Thanks.” Nate texted his brother the address of the house he probably shouldn’t have bought.

The ghost heard the engine around eleven.

He’d been listening for it all morning. Not because he was nervous, no, but because it was his house and he liked to know who was approaching it. When the sound finally turned onto the gravel drive, something in his chest dropped.

“He’s here,” the ghost said.

Nate looked up from his sawhorses. “You’re talking to me again?”

“No.”

Nate went to the door.

The ghost sat on the counter in his fat prison and listened to a truck door slam, boots on the porch, the creak of the second step. Another medium. Another one of them, walking into his house like it was nothing, and the ghost couldn’t even try to block the door. He was a loaf-shaped lump of stuffing with a view of the kitchen table.

If he’d still had a body, he’d have straightened his shoulders. He settled for aiming his stitched smile at the door with as much menace as he could.

Voices in the foyer. The new one was louder than Nate’s, and warmer.

“—can’t believe you bought this place, look at it, it’s practically screaming haunted house. But I guess that’s good content for you.”

“Good to see you too, Jonah.”

“So where’s the ghost?”

“Kitchen.”

Jonah came through the kitchen doorway. His face had the same shape as Nate’s, but he was slimmer and obviously not someone who worked with his hands. When he spotted the seal sitting on the counter, he grinned widely.

“There he is.” He crossed the kitchen. “Hi, Bartholomew. Long time.”

“Do not approach me,” the ghost said.

Jonah stopped and tilted his head. “Huh. I heard something. Kind of like radio static.”

“I said, do not⁠—”

Jonah picked him up.

Just like that. Without ceremony, or caution, or respect for the dead. Two large warm hands closed around the ghost’s fat felt body and lifted him off the counter, and one thumb pressed directly into what would have been his stomach.

Oh, the indignity.

“Unhand me!” the ghost bellowed. “Put me down this instant! I have destroyed better men than you! I have driven grown adults from this house weeping! I am not a — stop squeezing me!”

“He’s talking, right?” Jonah said, turning the seal over. “I’m getting a few words. Something about weeping?”

“He weeps a lot,” Nate said.

“I do not!”

Jonah held the seal up to eye level. Stitched eyes met living ones. The ghost summoned every scrap of cold and menace he had ever owned and poured it into his stare.

“He’s so round,” Jonah said fondly.

Now the ghost did want to weep.