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he wrapped his fingers around her wrist. They were still surprisingly strong. For a moment their gazes locked.
    Then he died.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Charlie knew the instant death occurred. Garland’s chest quit rising and falling, and the sound of his breathing ceased between one breath and the next. His grip on her wrist slackened, and then his hand dropped away. The blood stopped spurting from his wound. Instead what was left from the last pump of his heart oozed out in a warm gush that she could feel soaking through the cotton of her lab coat. His lips quivered once, and then remained motionless. His eyes, which had been focused on her face, fixed and began to glaze.
    “Mr. Garland .” Refusing to accept the truth, she leaned in, pressing harder on his chest, her voice urgent.
    Then it happened. The thing she dreaded, that she went to extraordinary lengths to avoid, that she had never come to terms with and never would.
    Garland’s soul left his body. Frozen in place, leaning over him, her hands, which were drenched in his blood, still pressed to his wound, Charlie saw it begin. Her heart started thumping as she watched what looked like tendrils of white mist gather above the whole long length of him. The mist engulfed her wrists in a surge of electric energy. The tingle of it was tangible. She snatched her hands away, out of the force field, sinking back on her heels as the shimmering miasma gatheredand seemed to hang like fog in the air just inches above Garland’s body. In the next instant she felt a cold rush of wind that went past her with a whoosh . The fog blew away, swirling upward, seeming to rise and solidify until Garland himself stood there. Or, rather, until what Garland had now become stood there.
    Charlie sucked in air.
    Garland’s body lay limp and unmoving on the concrete floor beside her, framed in a growing pool of his own blood. His soul, his essence, his being, his ghost —Charlie was never sure how best to describe the apparitions she saw—stood near the body’s head, not quite solid, not quite as substantial as a living, breathing human being, but undeniably there. His feet appeared to be planted on the concrete floor. His ankles and wrists were shackled just as they had been at the moment of his death. His jumpsuit was unzipped to the waist. His bloody chest was exposed. But no blood pumped from the wound, which was visible as a small black slit, and he appeared as hale and hearty as it was possible for anyone to be, except for the fact that he was dead .
    Charlie’s gut clenched.
    Dear God, don’t let this be happening again , was the half thought, half prayer that sprang instantly to her mind.
    But it was happening, and she was the unwilling witness. Garland looked down at his dead body, the apparition taking in the corpse lying on the floor at its feet. Charlie saw a long shiver run through the shade. Then it—or he , rather, for the corpse was no more Garland now than discarded wrappings were the gift they had once adorned—raised his head and met her gaze.
    Charlie’s heart lurched. Her breath caught. His eyes were once again their normal sky blue, alight with awareness and consternation and a touch of disbelief. He looked as conscious in death as he ever had in life.
    “Fuck,” the apparition said. “Are you shitting me?”
    She could hear him as clearly as if he were still alive, she realized, rattled. Profanity and all, it sounded so exactly like something he would say, it didn’t seem possible that the words were coming from a phantom.
    “No,” she replied, forgetting the crowd around them, that theycould see her talking to what to them looked like empty space, that they could hear her side of the conversation.
    His eyes widened. “I’m dead?”
    She nodded. “Yes.”
    His lips parted, and she thought he would say something more. But then he glanced around sharply, as if he heard a sound behind him. Charlie didn’t know what was there—she could never see more than the