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"Even for a Pythia, you’re acting a bit crazed," he saidto be if I didn’t find a certain playful ghost, I thought gri stared back, except for an old portrait on the wall, so relative of the family that used to own this place before Tony decided he wanted it It was li else in here, which was a problees, and damned hard to spot in a chiaroscuro of old furniture, stuffy portraits, and leaping shadows Lightning flashed outside,the whites of the painted eyes stand out creepily

"No fair hiding," I called tensely

But it looked like I was the only one who thought so

This really wasn’t going to be easy And what else was new? I thought savagely If there was one thing I’d learned in the last threein Murphy’s Law

Only no

That would be a step up

According to Murphy, if so, it will But that wouldn’t work forthe lines of "if so, because it is completely impossible for it to happen in the first place, it will so anyway"

Case in point:one’s father killed by a va the soul of said father end up trapped in an enchanted paperweight, because the valoat over his for as possible, was just plain silly Add in the fact that the fate of the world ht and the spirit it held and the whole thing edged into the ludicrous And if the ht, because said bastard of a vampire ran off to Faerie with itwell I don’t even know if they have a word for that

But they need one Because it happened anyway Just like that, to ht now retrieving the paperweight of doo to save a world I wasn’t that a to save a friend

And it wasn’t going so great

I gave up on subtlety and pulled the world’s ugliest necklace out of enie fro cowboy chic and looking pretty spooked "No," he told me flatly "No way, no how Don’t even think about--"

"I don’t have a lot of time here," I whispered harshly "And she can do this for hours We had a game that lasted a whole week once"

"And that’saround nervously "Da with ectoplas," I said i aed himself, he didn’t know crap about death Maybe because he spent eternity watching cheesy oldme crazy

We’d ht the necklace he haunted as a birthday gift for overness She’d ended up with soot a nineteenth-century Irish ga mouth and a yellow streak Some days, I still think she came out ahead

"Oh, really?" Billy asked, his usual sarcas around like a huave it capitals when it was really just the way seers look at the world Sohted, with that second set of eyes the kind that focuses on the spirit world I usually tried to ta others tends toto watch you back, and there’s so to be finding Laura any other way

"See what I mean?" Billy demanded, when I switched over Only now, instead of a semitransparent cowboy in a ruffled shirt and a Stetson, he was a shining green coluuely cowboy-shaped smoke And less distinct, instead of ht--the whole rooloith the same eerie color

It wasn’t just that the farmhouse’s previous owners had met a messy end This place had started out as an Indian burialbefore anybody ever built on it, and after that had been a battlefield in the Revolutionary War And then there were the various rivals Tony had dragged back through the years, eful spirits that had followed a few of the vae payback The final result was basically ghost central, with the glowing trails they left so thick on the floor and walls and ceiling that the whole roohosts," Billy said, whipping his head around at some sound I couldn’t hear "Like, really, really hate theround," I pointed out "The original owners didn’t like the newbies, and they’ve been battling it out ever since"

"Yeah, well, they can battle it out without me," Billy said "I’m done" And he started to disappear back into his necklace, which, since he haunted it, was neutral ground

At least he did until I hauled hi hihosts I ever met She just likes to play"

"Yeah, I bet With my bones, if I had any!"

"She isn’t like that!"