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thing. Beat it to a bloody pulp.

He closed his eyes.

* * *

A storm rode over the mountains and into the valley.

He didn’t want to be here—it meant he was weak. He’d let his guard down, and now she’d found him, battering at him with wind and thunder—that rattling of the bars again, even though there weren’t bars anymore. On a slope, he ducked toward a tree at the edge of the valley with his arms over his head, trying to wait it out.

Her shouts were the wind. “Let me in, damn you! I must speak with you! You stubborn fool, let me in! I will speak!”

It was a cosmic wail. He, who could wait out statues, couldn’t stay silent against it.

“I can’t help you!” He turned to the sky, screaming a year’s worth of frustration. Maybe a lifetime’s. “Leave me alone!”

“Let me speak!” She was a ghost, a stuck record, a moment in time. She was drawing him into her loop, driving him mad. He would never again leave this room or crawl outside his mind.

“No.” The only word he could throw at her, his voice faltering to a whisper. The blowing wind made him deaf.

“Listen, just listen to me! What must I do to make you listen!” she howled. The wind blasted through the forest; trees groaned.

“Try asking!” he shouted to the sky.

Then, like a whisper through pine boughs, a breath against his cheek, “Please talk to me. Please.”

His legs gave out, bringing him heavily to the ground, sitting on grass that was damp with rain. This was all in his mind. He shouldn’t feel the wet soaking into his jeans. He shouldn’t smell the clean, earthy damp in the air.

“Okay,” he said.

And she was there, standing a few paces away, clutching her hands together. Still poised, back straight and chin up, as if refusing to admit that saying “please” had cost her pride. Like she didn’t want him to see the pleading in her gaze. The wind-touched strands of her dark hair, curls fallen loose from her bun and resting on her shoulder. He might touch the curl and smooth it back into place.

He looked away from her and across the valley. The stream ran full, frothing over rocks. The green seemed even greener. It was high summer here, and he relaxed. Maybe because he could see her now he knew where she was, what she was doing. He could keep an eye on her.

She’d wanted so badly to talk, but she just stood there, like she was waiting for punishment. Waiting to be hanged. If she really was a ghost, if she really had been executed, she would have been hanged. He didn’t want to think about that.

“Well?” he said finally. “After all that, you going to say anything?”

She glanced at the hem of her skirt and wrung her fingers. “I’ve not engaged in conversation in a very long time, and even then I was not a paragon of courtesy. I’m sure I’m more than a little mad.”

That made two of them. “Amelia Parker,” he said. “You’re Amelia Parker. What the hell’s going on?”

She blinked at him. “You know my name? How?”

“I looked it up. You could have just told me, instead of this garbage you’ve been pulling. You want to explain?”

“It’s difficult,” she said, glancing behind her.

“Try me. I have a pretty open mind,” he said.

“Yes, I know. That’s how I found you. I needed an open mind.”

He glared at her. “For what? So you could break it into pieces?”

“No, so I could … so I could control it. I need a body, Mr. Bennett.”

“Let me guess: It’s harder than you thought it’d be.”

“Yes. Minds … they tend to twist up into knots in spite of my intentions.”

“You’ve tried this before?”

She didn’t answer.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

She swallowed, wetting her lips to speak—which made no sense, because she was a ghost. Cormac could almost smell the soap on her skin. The contradiction was making him dizzy.

“I was hanged for murdering a young woman, but I didn’t do it. I’m innocent. I know what did do it, and it’s here now. I hunted this thing a hundred years ago, Mr. Bennett, and while I’m not inclined to believe in an omnipotent God, I believe I have survived—or rather that this small part of me has survived—so that I can stop it now. But I need help.”

Put like that, it did seem like fate. How much did she know about him, besides his name? Had she done enough digging in his psyche to learn that he was also a hunter? That she couldn’t have picked a better body for her purpose?

He said, “Olson—the psychologist here—said this has happened before. Half a dozen bodies over the last hundred years or so, with their throats cut in locked cells. Just like the girl you were hanged for. You say you didn’t do it, but you seem to know a lot about it.”

“I hunted it. Tracked it to Lydia Harcourt, where they found me. Then it followed me here.”

“Why? Why you? You were supposed to be dead, why’d it stick around?”

“I know I can stop it—”

“Where’d it come from in the first place? Do you know?”

“—but I need hands, a voice. I’m so close—”

“I’m not giving you my body,” he said, turning away. “Why not tell me where this demon came from?”

Her brow furrowed, and she seemed to grapple with something. Guilt? Shame, even? “I suppose I ought to have taken it as a lesson not to meddle. Yet I keep on meddling, don’t I?” Her smile was pained.

“What happened?”

“A scene from a boys’ adventure novel. I’m sure you’ve had a few of your own. Something had been buried at a crossroads—imprisoned, rather. I should have heeded the warning carved into the headstone. But there was a promise of treasure.”

“This is all about a pot of gold?” he said, disbelieving.

“No. A Sumerian cuneiform tablet meant to be buried alongside. I thought I could secure the demon, prevent its escape, obtain the tablet that promised tremendous knowledge. I was wrong.”

“The tablet was bait, wasn’t it?” Cormac said. “It didn’t really exist.”

Bowing her head, she hid a sad smile. “The thing bound itself to me. Cursed me. It always stayed just out of reach. I could watch it kill and never stop it. Even now.”

He could almost feel sorry for her. He considered the saying about the road to hell.

She paced a few steps down the slope, across his field of vision, looking at the scene, his private valley. Hilltops emerged through misty, breaking clouds. The air was cool on his skin, a different kind of cool than a prison cell in winter. This felt like living rather than being in storage.

“You’ve gotten better at this,” she said, gazing around, squinting against the breeze and surveying the valley as if it were real. “What is this place? It’s somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, I should think.”

Don’t open the door, he thought. After a hesitation, he said, “My dad used to take me here when I was young.”

“What was he?”

“A hunter,” Cormac said, remembering, and flinching at the memory.

“And you?”

“Same,” he said.

“You were sent here for murder, yes?”

He considered his words. Picked at the grass, which felt real, waxy between his fingers. “I killed a skinwalker. She was a monster and needed to die.”

“Who are you to decide that?”

“She was trying to kill my friends.”

“Ah.” She paced a few more steps; her fingers were no longer wringing, but her expression had turned