“I just need to ask him a question,” I said. “Just one little question. It’ll only take a second.”

“But…” The attendant, a young guy who, judging from his sun-bleached dreads, probably used whatever spare time he got to hit the waves, scratched his chin. “I mean, he can’t… he doesn’t really talk all that much anymore. The Alzheimer’s, you know…”

“Can I just try?” I asked, not caring that I sounded like a whacko. I was that desperate. Desperate for answers that I knew only one person on earth could give me. And that person was just right upstairs. “Please? I mean, it couldn’t hurt, could it?”

“No,” the attendant said slowly. “No, I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

“Great,” I said, slipping past him and starting up the stairs two at a time. “I’ll just be a couple of minutes. You won’t mind leaving us alone, will you? I’ll call you if he looks like he might need you.”

The attendant, closing the front door in a distracted sort of way, went, “Okay. I guess. But… shouldn’t you be in school?”

“It’s lunchtime,” I informed him cheerfully, as I made my way up the stairs and then down the hall toward Dr. Slaski’s room.

I wasn’t lying, either. It was lunchtime. The fact that we weren’t technically supposed to leave school grounds at lunch? Well, I didn’t feel that was important to mention. I was less worried about facing the wrath of Sister Ernestine when she found out I was skipping school than I was about explaining to my stepbrother Brad why I’d so desperately needed the keys to the Land Rover. Just because Brad had happened to get his driver’s license about five seconds before I’d gotten mine (well, okay, a few weeks before I’d gotten mine, actually), he seems to feel that the ancient Land Rover, which is supposed to be the “kids’ car,” belongs solely to him, and that only he’s allowed to ferry the two of us, plus his little brother, David, to and from school every day.

I’d had to resort to using the words “feminine hygiene products” and “glove compartment” just to get him to surrender the keys. I had no idea what he was going to do when I didn’t return before the end of lunch and he discovered the car was gone. Narc on me, doubtlessly. It seemed to be his one joy in life.

Sadly, I never seem able to return the favor, thanks to Brad generally having some kind of goods on me.

In any case, I wasn’t going to squander what precious little time I had wondering what Brad was going to say about my taking the car. Instead, I hurried into Paul’s grandfather’s bedroom.

As usual, the Game Show Network was on. The attendant had parked Dr. Slaski’s wheelchair in front of the plasma screen television. Dr. Slaski himself, however, appeared to be paying no attention whatsoever to Bob Barker. Instead, he was staring fixedly at a spot in the center of the highly polished tile floor.

I wasn’t fooled by this, however.

“Dr. Slaski?” I picked up the remote and turned the TV volume down, then hurried to the doctor’s side. “Dr. Slaski, it’s me, Suze. Paul’s friend, Suze? I need to talk to you for a minute.”

Paul’s grandfather didn’t respond. Unless you call drooling a response.

“Dr. Slaski,” I said, pulling up a chair so that I could sit closer to his ear. I didn’t want the attendant to overhear our discussion, so I was trying to keep my voice low. “Dr. Slaski, your nurse isn’t here and neither is Paul. It’s just the two of us. I need to talk to you about something Paul’s been telling me. About, er, mediators. It’s important.”

As soon as he heard that neither Paul nor his attendant was nearby, a change seemed to come over Dr. Slaski. He straightened up in his chair, lifting his head so he could fix me with a rheumy-eyed stare. The drooling stopped right away.

“Oh,” he said when he saw it was me. He didn’t exactly look thrilled. “You again.”

I didn’t think that was completely fair, seeing as how the last time the two of us had spoken, he had sought me out…sought me out to deliver a cryptic warning about his own grandson, whom he’d equated to the devil, no less.

But I decided to let that slide.

“Yes, it’s me, Dr. Slaski,” I said. “Suze. Listen. About Paul.”

“What’s that little pisser been up to now?”

Clearly there is very little love lost between Dr. Slaski and his grandson.

“Nothing,” I said. “Yet. At least, so far as I can tell. It’s what he says he can do.”

“What’s that, then?” Dr. Slaski asked. “And this better be good. Family Feud comes on in five minutes.”

Good God. Was I, I wondered, going to end up wheel-chair bound and addicted to game shows when I was Dr. Slaski’s age? Because Dr. Slaski—or Mr. Slater, as Paul wanted everyone to think of him—is also a mediator, one who’d gone to the ends of the earth looking to find answers about his unusual talent. Apparently, he’d found what he was looking for in the tombs of ancient Egypt.

Problem is, nobody believed him. Not about the existence of a race of people whose sole duty it was to guide the spirits of the dead to their ultimate destinations, and certainly not that he, Dr. Slaski, was one of them. The old man’s many writings on the subject, most of them self-published, went ignored by the scientific and academic communities, and were now gathering dust in plastic bins beneath his grandson’s bed.

Worse, Dr. Slaski’s own family seem to be trying to sweep him under the bed, as well, Paul’s father even having gone so far as to change his name to avoid being

associated with the old man.

And what had Dr. Slaski gotten for all his efforts? A terminal illness and his grandson, Paul, for company. The illness, or so Dr. Slaski claimed, had been brought on by spending too much time in the “shadowland”—that way station between this world and the next. And Paul?

Well, he had brought Paul on all by himself.

I guess he had a reason to feel bitterly toward the human race. But why he felt that way toward Paul, I was only just learning.

I tried to start out slowly, so he’d be sure to understand.

“Paul says mediators—”

“Shifters.” Dr. Slaski insisted people like him and Paul and me are more properly called shifters, for our (in my case, newly discovered) ability to shift between the dimensions of the living and the dead. “Shifters, girl, I told you before. Don’t make me say it again.”