“Of course, I won’t be able to conduct any interviews with you in the house until you learn how to block them out,” Nico adds. “So, we have some work to do.”
“Why are you and I the only ones who can hear them?” I ask.
“Because we’ve seen things the others haven’t.”
“Like what?”
His hands grip the edge of the control panel, and the only sound for a couple of seconds is him breathing. “Evil.”
I find Dad’s dog tags and grip them hard. “What evil did you see?”
Nico’s eyes soften, looking almost lost, but then he schools his features and sits on the floor with his legs crossed, gesturing to the space across from him. “Sit.”
I stand firm, folding my arms. “I’m not a dog.”
“No. If you were a dog, you’d follow my instructions.”
The casual arrogance in his voice makes me want to march right back up those stairs just to prove I don’t have to do what he says. He raises his eyebrows and waits.
I sigh and lower myself onto the hard metal floor. The cold bites through my layers, and my legs are going numb, but I’m not about to complain when this is clearly the last place he wants to be, and he’s doing the last thing he wants to do with the last person he wants to do it with.
He sits so straight that he could probably balance a book on his head. My old ballet teacher would love him. Everything he does is annoyingly graceful, and his posture makes me very aware of how I’m probably sitting like a hunchbacked pretzel.
“Ghosts operate differently than humans,” Nico says. “They feel negative emotions more intensely than we do.”
“Sounds like you should be giving them therapy instead of interviewing them,” I say.
“I shouldn’t be giving anyone therapy.” He runs his tongue across his bottom lip, huffing a breath that on some planets could be misconstrued as a laugh. “They don’t feel happiness or empathy. At least, not the way we do. And they lie. Ghosts like Billy will say anything to get you to do their bidding.”
I tuck my legs under me, trying to get comfortable. “Are they human at all?”
“No,” he says. “They’re pieces of what once was human, distilled down to their most fundamental drives and emotions. The longer they exist after death, the more concentrated those emotions become, like… reducing a sauce until only the strongest flavors remain.”
I can’t help the snort that escapes me. “Yummy.”
“What’s left of Billy isn’t the person he was when he was alive. It’s the worst parts of him amplified and stripped of whatever humanity might have balanced him out. All of his cunning. All of his sadism. None of his restraint.”
“Sounds like a real catch.”
Nico stares at me. I’ve never talked to anyone else who makes me feel so much like I’m having a conversation with a piece of furniture.
“None of the entities down here want to talk to you about their feelings,” he says. “They will do anything to avoid talking about what you want to talk about. That includes trying to crawl inside your consciousness and play with your brain. They willdig into your head for fun. See what they can convince you to do. Some of them can even erase things.”
“Things like memories?”
“Of conversations, or even people.” He rolls his lips. “Billy can do it.”
Imagining Billy erasing my family from my memory makes me want to throw up.
“So, when you interview them,” I say slowly, “you have to keep them out of your head the entire time?”
“One slip, and they’re in. Then they can do anything they want with you.”
I can’t help but think of Bonnie, stuck in an asylum, asking for a husband who doesn’t exist. What was that like for DJ and Nico? Finding their teammate with all parts of who they were taken away, leaving a husk of the person they knew?
“Close your eyes,” Nico says.
“Seriously?”
