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let my voice carry through. “Yeah, Bob. It’s me.”
    “Thank the stars,” Bob said. “You said you wanted to know if I found out anything else ghostly going on.”
    “Yeah, yeah, go ahead.”
    The radio hissed and crackled with static—spiritual interference, not physical. The radio wasn’t set up to receive AM/FM any more. Bob’s voice was garbled, but I could understand it. “My contact came through. Cook County Hospital, tonight. Someone’s stirred up Agatha Hagglethorn. This is a bad one, Harry. She is one mean old biddy.”
    Bob gave me the rundown on Agatha Hagglethorn’s grisly and tragic death, and her most likely target at the hospital. I glanced down at my bare left wrist, and abruptly felt naked. “All right,” I said. “I’m on it. Thanks, Bob.”
    The radio squalled and went silent, and I dashed out the door. Sundown would come in less than twenty minutes, rush hour had been going for a while now, and if I wasn’t at Cook County by the time it got dark, all kinds of bad things could happen.
    I flew out the front door, the sack of ghost dust heavy in my pocket, and all but slammed into Michael, tall and broad, toting a huge athletic bag over his shoulder, which I knew would contain nothing but Amoracchius and his white cloak.
    “Michael!” I burst out. “How did you get here?”
    His honest face split into a wide smile. “When there is a need, He sees to it that I am there.”
    “Wow,” I said. “You’re kidding.”
    “No,” he said, his voice earnest. Then he paused. “Of course, you’ve gotten in touch with me every night for the past two weeks. Tonight, I just thought I’d save Him the trouble of arranging coincidence, so I came on over as soon as I got off work.” He fell into step beside me and we both got into the Blue Beetle —he got in the red door, I got in the white one, and we peered out over the grey hood as I pulled the old VW into traffic.
    And that was how we ended up doing battle in the nursery at Cook County.
    Anyway, you see what I mean about a day being fairly normal before it falls all to pieces. Or, well. Maybe it hadn’t been all that normal. As we took off into traffic and I gave the Beetle all the gas it could take, I got that sinking feeling that my life was about to get hectic again.

Chapter Five
    Michael and I plunged through the hole I’d torn in reality and into the Nevernever. It felt like moving from a sauna into an air-conditioned office, except that I didn’t feel the change on my skin. I felt it in my thoughts and my feelings, and in the primitive, skin-crawling part of me at the base of my brain. I stood in a different world than our own.
    The little leather sack of ghost dust in my duster pocket abruptly increased its weight, dragging me off balance and to the ground. I let out a curse. The whole point of the ghost dust was that it was something extra-real, that it was heavy and inert and locked spiritual matter into place when it touched it. Even inside its bag, it had become a sudden stress on the Nevernever. If I opened the bag here, in the world of spirit, it might tear a hole in the floor. I’d have to be careful. I grunted with effort and pulled the little pouch out of my pocket. It felt like it weighed thirty or forty pounds.
    Michael frowned down at my hands. “You know. I never really thought to ask before—but what is that dust made of?”
    “Depleted uranium,” I told him. “At least, that’s the base ingredient. I had to add in a lot of other things. Cold iron, basil, dung from a—”
    “Never mind,” he said. “I don’t want to know.” He turned away from me, his arms steadily holding the massive sword before him. I recovered staff and rod, and stood beside him, studying the lay of the as-it-were land.
    This part of the Nevernever looked like Chicago, at the end of the nineteenth century—no, strike that. This was the ghost’s demesne. It looked like a mishmash of Agatha Hagglethorn’s memories of Chicago at the