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coincidence; it had to be design, but whose? None of the prospects pleased. Vengeful sphinx? Manipulative god of Justice? Or some villain she hadn’t even thought of, some enemy made with a single careless action she’d already forgotten?
    Maybe Alex’s “be nice to the neighbors” policy had something going for it after all.
    She leaned back in her worn seat, settling herself into the groove she’d made over the years, and let her breath out slow and steady. It misted against the windshield, fogging her view.
    She should turn him down. Refund his money. Get him and the reminders of Chicago out of her life. They’d both be better off.
    Keep your lies for the enemy, her little dark voice said. A fool lies to himself.
    Sylvie gritted her teeth. Yeah, she’d never been that good at maintaining self-deception. If she said no, Wright would suffer for it; he’d go blundering after the first person who promised him help. The Magicus Mundi was full of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Trust the wrong person, and, crazy or not, he’d be better off dead. Hell, even if he went at it on his own, hunting a ghost he probably didn’t have, he could end up in trouble. Sylvie had heard more than one story of people attracting the very things they were trying to repel. There was a house in the Grove that hadn’t started out haunted until a young wife had decided it might be. Now the house was abandoned, even by squatters.
    Her little dark voice grumbled, always complaining. It might disapprove of her lying to herself, but it didn’t want her to embrace Wright either.
    Wright sat perfectly still, at ease to a casual glance. But the cords in his neck were tight, his breathing shallow. Waiting for a much-needed answer was always a bitch.
    “All right,” Sylvie said. “All right. I’ll take your case. You think you’ve got a ghost? Tell me about it.”

3
    The Particulars of the Case
    PUT ON THE SPOT, GIVEN A WILLING AUDIENCE, WRIGHT STALLED LIKE an engine unexpectedly taxed. He drummed his fingers, tapped his heels on the dash, and groaned.
    Sylvie licked salt from her lips and started with the tried and true: Ask a specific question to get an answer. It worked on small schoolchildren, and it worked on a man with too much on his mind. “So tell me about dying. Your troubles started after that, right?”
    “Yeah,” Wright said. “The docs said lightning, but . . .”
    “You don’t think so?”
    “I saw enough of it that night for sure. It burned the sky.” His eyes glazed, slowly closed, chasing the memory of a night that he could only barely recall. “There was something else. Like a ball.”
    “Ball lightning? Rare,” Sylvie said.
    He shook his head without opening his eyes. In the dim light, the shadow of his lashes joined and deepened the bruised sockets. “Not lightning. It glowed. Solidly. Fell out of the sky, chased by something . . . horrible.”
    Horrible, she thought. There’d been a lot of that. Monsters and cataclysms. Last she’d heard, Chicago was still mopping up.
    Wright shifted in the seat, dropped his feet into the wheel well. He contorted severely, pulled his shirt out of his waistband, and peeled it up toward his shoulders. “Only scar I got was this. No lightning flower, just this . . .”
    Grimacing, Sylvie flicked on her flashlight, trying to keep it low in case her burglars showed up. Wright, in its unforgiving beam, was too skinny; his ribs stood out like bars, but the skin was smooth, no Lichtenberg burn, no ferned-out blood vessels. He squeezed his shirt higher and showed her the scar he meant. High up on the right side of his rib cage, just beneath his armpit, a glossy white line etched three-quarters of a circle into his side.
    “Had a chunk of glass stuck deep, melted into my skin. That’s why the docs said lightning. To melt glass into skin. They said I was lucky it hadn’t gone through my throat. I thought they were right. Thought I was lucky.”
    “Glass,” she said. What kind of