The poltergeist.

Thin red light spills in from the hall, and I’m on my feet, padding barefoot through the dark. By the time I reach the doorway, the crimson glow is sliding down the stairs. I step into the hall and reach for my mirror pendant, only to realize I’m not wearing it. I must have left the necklace on the bedside table. As I turn back to get it, the hotel door swings shut, locking me out.

A draft rolls down the hall, sudden and cold, and I fight back a shiver.

“Cassidy …”

My name is a whisper on the air, faint and far away, but I know that voice.

“Jacob?” I call out, trying to keep my voice low.

“Cassidy …” he calls again, his voice drifting up through the floor. Something crashes, and I hurry toward the stairs, sure that the poltergeist has Jacob, that he’s in danger.

Hold on, Jacob, I think, plunging down the stairs. Hold on, hold on.

They don’t have any qualms about hurting people, Lara said.

Hold on.

With every downward step, the temperature falls.

By the second floor, I’m cold.

By the first, I’m shivering.

“Jacob?” I call again, my breath fogging in front of me as I reach the lobby, slipping on the marble floor. I scramble to my feet, ready to fight, ready to save my best friend— But there’s no one else here.

No poltergeist attacking him, only Jacob, on his knees in the center of the lobby. His head is in his hands as the air around him churns into a frenzy. The chandelier swings, and the paintings shake, and a chair scrapes across the floor, and I realize with horror that all of it is coming from him.

“Jacob!” I shout over the howling wind. “Can you hear me?”

He lets out a low groan. “What’s happening to me?” His voice sounds strange and hollow. “Cassidy …”

He trails off, the color seeping out of his clothes, his skin. Water drips from his hair, his jeans, pooling around him on the marble floor until he looks the way he did that one time I saw him in a mirror.

He looks gray and wet and lost.

He looks dead.

No. No. No.

“Cassidy!” calls a voice, but it’s not coming from Jacob.

It’s Lara.

She’s standing behind the front desk, bracing herself against the worst of the chaos, her black braid whipping in the wind. Lara, who always seems to have an answer, who always knows what to do. But her eyes aren’t wide with worry. They’re furious.

“I warned you this would happen!” she calls, her voice warping from the force of Jacob’s whirlwind. “I told you he was getting stronger.”

I duck as a vase shatters against the pillar over my head, raining down shards of glass and broken flowers that are then yanked back up before they ever hit the marble floor.

“Cass!” screams Lara as the chaos in the lobby reaches a high, keening pitch. “You have to send him on.”

But I can’t. I won’t. There has to be another way.

Jacob curls in on himself at the center of the storm, and I try to get closer, to grab his hand, to pull him back from wherever he is. I can save him. I know if I can just get close enough—but the whirlwind around him is too strong, and it slams me backward until I hit a marble pillar and— I sit up, gasping in the dark.

It was just a bad dream.

“You’re acting weird,” says Jacob the next morning.

He looks like Jacob again. No ghoulish face, no empty eyes, no pool of water at his feet, just my best friend in all his semitransparent glory. I wish I could throw my arms around him. Instead, I do my best to clear my mind, grateful he can’t read my dreams as well as my thoughts.

“Just tired,” I say as we step off the Metro.

The truth is, my morning isn’t off to the best start.

I nearly jumped out of my chair at breakfast when someone in the salon dropped a coffeepot. No spirit activity there, just a server with slippery fingers. I know not everything is a portent of danger, but it still put me on edge.

I tried to shake it off, but it only got worse. As we were leaving the hotel, a car alarm went off down the street. And then another, and another, the horns blaring like dominoes.

“Bit nervous this morning?” asked Dad, patting my shoulder as I squinted through the crowded sidewalk, trying to catch sight of whoever triggered the first one. I thought about cutting through the Veil—but I couldn’t, not in front of my parents, Pauline, and the film crew.

Now we step through the cemetery gates, and I feel the temperature dip.

“Are you catching a cold?” asks Mom when she sees me pull my sweater close against the chill.

“Maybe,” I say, shoving my hands in my pockets and clutching the mirror necklace. I feel like my nerves are wound tight enough to— A tree branch crashes to the ground on the path in front of us.

Mom jumps, her arm holding me back.

“That was close,” she says, looking down at the branch.

“Way too close,” I mutter.

What was it Lara said? First comes mischief, then menace, then mayhem.

I need to take care of things before they escalate.

And a graveyard seems like a good place to start.

I study the large paper unfolded in Mom’s hands.

“What kind of cemetery needs a map?” I ask.

She beams at me, eyes bright. “A very, very big one.”

That, it turns out, is an understatement.

Père Lachaise is like a city within a city. There are even street signs, blocks, neighborhoods. Cobbled paths wind between graves. Some graves are low, like stone caskets, and others looming, like small houses side by side. Some of the crypts are new and others are old, some sealed while others yawn open, and here and there old trees threaten to unbury tombs, roots pushing up between—and beneath—the stone.

There’s no anger in this place.

Just a shallow wave of sadness, and loss.

“Cass,” says Mom, “don’t wander off.”

And for once, it doesn’t feel like an idle warning. This place is huge, and it’s too easy to imagine getting lost. But that also means my parents won’t notice if I slip away.

I fall back a little with every step, finally stopping to linger among the tombstones.

If I were a poltergeist, where would I be?

“Here, ghosty ghosty,” calls Jacob.

I look up and see him perching on a large stone angel, one leg dangling over the edge and the other drawn up, his elbow resting on his knee. As I lift the camera to snap a photo, he strikes a pensive posture, surveying the cemetery.

The camera clicks, and I wonder if he’ll show up on the film.

There was a time when I knew he wouldn’t. Now I’m not so sure. I think of the last photo from Edinburgh, the one I keep tucked in the pocket of my camera bag. In it, Jacob and I are standing on opposite sides of a window. Me in the shop and him on the street, each of us turning to look at the other.

He’s not really there, in the glass.

But he’s not not there, either.

It could have been a trick of the light, a warped reflection.

But I don’t think it was.

Spirits this strong have no place in our world.

Lara’s warning fuses with her words from my nightmare.

You have to send him on.

Jacob clears his throat.

“Well,” he says, jumping down from his perch. “No poltergeist.”

“No,” I say, looking around. “Not here …”

Jacob frowns. “I don’t like the way you said that.”

Up ahead, Mom and Dad stop in front of a crypt, Anton and Annette readying their cameras, and I see my chance. I tug the mirror from my pocket.

“Come on,” I whisper, reaching for the Veil. “If the poltergeist won’t come to us, we’ll go to the poltergeist.”

I’m plunged from something into nothing and back again, all in the time it takes to blink.

My feet land back on the cobblestone path, and Père Lachaise stretches out again, a ghost of its former self. Tendrils of fog curl around my legs, and the cemetery is vast and gray and eerily still. I draw the mirror from my pocket, wrapping the cord around my wrist as Jacob appears beside me. He looks around, nose crinkling a little.

“What is it with graveyards and mist?” he asks, kicking at the cloudy air around our feet.

“A-plus for atmosphere,” I say.

Nearby, a crypt door swings on a broken hinge. Across the path, a crow caws and takes flight.

“I’ll take creepy Halloween soundtracks for two hundred,” mutters Jacob.

But for all the moodiness of this place, it’s quiet.

The thing about cemeteries is that they’re not as haunted as you’d think. Sure, there are a few ghosts here and there, but most restless spirits are bound to the place where they died, not the place where they’re buried.

So it shouldn’t be that hard to find our restless spirit.

As long as it wants to be found.

“And if it doesn’t?” asks Jacob.

Which is a good question.

How do you lure out a poltergeist?

“Maybe if we ignore it, it’ll just lose interest in us and go away.”

“It’s not a bee, Jacob. And you heard Lara. The longer the poltergeist is out, the more chaos it will cause. Which is bad on its own, and worse since this particular spirit seems intent on bothering us.”

I scan the tombs.