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Nate felt the cold of him along his arm.

“I’ll restore him,” Nate said.

Miriam stared at him. “You don’t know how.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Nate claimed. “I’ll restore him and then I’ll exorcise him properly.” He turned his head and looked directly at Leo. “No ghost beats me twice.”

Leo held his gaze. Slowly, some of the emptiness left his face, and what came back was the ghost who had spent an entire morning scooting across a kitchen counter to defy him.

“I’d like to see you try,” he said.

Chapter

Twelve

Nate woke at dawn with a ghost six inches from his face.

Practice kept him from flinching, but only barely.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning,” Leo said back. The room was dipped in gray light, and the ghost’s eyes seemed to stand out in it. Impossibly green. Too alive for a dead man.

Nate turned and sat up, rubbing the sleep from his own eyes. The night had been rough. Not because his childhood bed was too small for him now, but because every time he’d surfaced during the night, he’d felt Leo there — a cold pressure drifting near the ceiling, or by the window, or, apparently, directly above his face. The tether didn’t give him much range.

Eight feet, give or take.

Leo hadn’t complained once. A whole night trapped in a strange room with a man he claimed to despise, and not one word about it.

“Did you rest at all?” Nate asked.

“I’m dead.”

Nate let it go. He got up, dressed, and picked up his boots instead of putting them on.

While he did this, Leo drifted to the wall and pointed. “What are these?”

Nate glanced at the paintings on the wall. They’d been there so long he’d stopped noticing them. “That’s Georgie,” he said, referring to a crayon drawing of a boy with no feet. “And that’s Marianne,” he added, gesturing at another drawing of an elderly woman sitting on the edge of a bed, this one done in pencil.

“They’re ghosts?” Leo asked.

“They were,” Nate agreed, his boots in hand. “C’mon, we’re leaving.”

“Why are you carrying your shoes?”

“Because if my family wakes up, leaving takes two hours.”

Leo considered this. “Sneaking out of your own mother’s house,” he said, with something that wasn’t quite disapproval.

“Yes.”

“...Good plan.”

Nate eased the door open and made his way down the stairs as quietly as he could.

It was no use.

The kitchen light was on.