But CeeCee believed it. CeeCee had figured it out for herself, and she believed it. Maybe, I thought. Maybe it wasn’t as crazy as I’d always thought.

I was sitting there, trembling, even though it was seventy-five degrees and sunny out. I was so deeply absorbed in my thoughts, I didn’t hear the voice that was addressing me from the other side of the booth until he’d said my name—or a semblance of it, anyway—three times.

I looked up, and saw a young man in a pale blue uniform grinning at me. “Susan, right?” he said.

I looked from him to the face of the old man whose wheelchair he was pushing. It was Paul Slater’s grandfather and his attendant. I shook myself and stood up.

“Um,” I said. “Hi.” To say I was feeling a bit confused would have been the understatement of the year. “What are you—what are you doing here? I thought…I thought…”

“You thought he was housebound?” the nurse asked with a grin. “Not quite. No, Mr. Slater likes to get out. Don’t you, Mr. Slater? In fact, he insisted on coming down here today. I didn’t think it was appropriate, you know, given what happened to his grandson last night, but Paul’s at home, recuperating nicely, and Mr. S. was adamant. Weren’t you, Mr. S.?”

Paul’s grandfather did something that surprised me then. He looked up at the nurse and said in a voice that was perfectly lucid, “Go and get me a beer.”

The nurse frowned down at him. “Now, Mr. S.,” he said. “You know your doctor says—”

“Just do it,” Mr. Slater said.

The nurse, with an amused glance at me as if to say Well, what are you going to do? went off to the beer booth, leaving Mr. Slater alone with me.

I stared at him. The last time I had seen him, he’d been drooling. He wasn’t drooling now. His blue eyes were rheumy, it was true. But I had a feeling they saw a lot more that was going on around him besides just Family Feud reruns.

In fact, I was sure of it, when he said, “Listen to me. We don’t have much time. I was hoping you’d be here.”

He spoke rapidly and softly. In fact, I had to lean forward, over the cannolis, to hear him. But though his voice was low, his enunciation was crystal clear.

“You’re one of them,” he said. “One of those shifters. Believe me, I know. I’m one, too.”

I blinked at him. “You—you are?”

“Yes,” he said. “And the name’s Slaski, not Slater. Fool son of mine changed it. Didn’t want people to know he was related to an old quack who went around talking about people with the ability to walk among the dead.”

I just stared at him. I didn’t know what to say. What could I say? I was more astonished by this than by what CeeCee had revealed.

“I know what my grandson told you,” Mr. Slater—Dr. Slaski—went on. “Don’t listen to him. He’s got it all wrong. Sure, you have the ability. But it’ll kill you. Maybe not right away but eventually.” He stared out at me from a gray, liver- spotted mask of wrinkles. “I know what I’m talking about. Like that fool grandson of mine, I thought I was a god. No, I thought I was God.”

I blinked at him. “But—”

“Don’t make my mistake, Susan. You stay away from it. Stay away from the shadow world.”

“But—”

But Paul’s grandfather had seen his nurse coming back, and he quickly lapsed back into his semicatatonic state, and would say no more.

“Here you go, Mr. Slater,” the nurse said, carefully holding the plastic cup to the old man’s lips. “Nice and cold.”

Dr. Slaski, to my complete disbelief, let the beer dribble down his chin and all over his shirt.

“Oops,” the attendant said. “Sorry about that. Well, we’d better go get cleaned up.” He winked at me. “Nice seeing you again, Susan. See you later.”

Then he wheeled Dr. Slaski away, toward the duck-shooting booth.

And that, as far as I was concerned, was it. I had to get out. I could not take it a minute longer in the cannoli booth. I had no idea where CeeCee had disappeared to, but she was just going to have to deal with the pastry sales on her own for a while. I needed some quiet.

I slipped out from behind the booth and strode blindly through the crowds packing the courtyard, darting through the first open door I came across.

I found myself in the mission’s cemetery. I didn’t turn back. Cemeteries don’t creep me out that much. I mean, though it might come as a surprise to learn, ghosts hardly ever hang out there. Near their graves, I mean. They tend to concentrate much more on the places they hung out while they were living. Cemeteries can actually be very restful, to a mediator.

Or a shifter. Or whatever it is that Paul Slater is convinced I am.

Paul Slater, who, I was beginning to realize, wasn’t just a manipulative eleventh grader who happened to be warm for my form. No, according to his own grandfather, Paul Slater was…well, the devil.

And I had just sold my soul to him.

This was not information I could process lightly. I needed time to think, time to figure out what I was going to do next.

I stepped into the cool, shady graveyard, and turned down a narrow pathway that, by this point, had actually become sort of familiar to me. I went down it a lot. In fact sometimes, when I borrowed the hall pass, pretending I needed to visit the ladies’ room during class, this was where  I went instead, to the mission cemetery and down this very path. Because at the end of it lay something very important to me. Something I cared about.

But this time, when I got to the end of the little stone path, I found that I was not alone. Jesse stood there, looking down at his own headstone.

I knew the words he was reading by heart, because I was the one who, with Father Dom, had supervised their carving.

HERE LIES HECTOR “JESSE” DE SILVA, 1830–1850, BELOVED BROTHER, SON, AND FRIEND.

Jesse looked up as I came to stand beside him. Wordlessly, he held his hand out over the top of the headstone. I slipped my fingers into his.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his gaze darkly opaque as ever, “about everything.”

I shrugged, keeping my gaze on the earth surrounding his headstone—dark as his eyes. “I understand, I guess.” Even though I didn’t. “I mean, you can’t help it if you…well, don’t feel the same way about me as I do about you.”