The river path looked different in daylight.

Less serene, more purposeful — the kind of place that reveals its working parts when the borrowed city light isn't softening everything. Rachel walked it the way she walked scenes, which is to say with the particular attention of someone who understood that a location had its own evidence to offer if you asked it the right questions.

We were asking it questions.

The Gerald Marsh thread had started with a name in a green room and had led here, to the same riverbank where Evelyn had followed her husband's ghost trail four years after he'd walked it himself. We weren't looking for Evelyn specifically — we were looking for whatever mechanism had been operating through Elias Crane's audience. Grieving people directed to a river. Not all of whom, we were beginning to understand, had come back.

Rachel had pulled the records on…

Jacob was praying when I left.

I didn't interrupt. I never did. This was the pattern we had arrived at somewhere in our working lives and had never felt the need to discuss — when Jacob was seeking, I was moving. Two paths. We always seem to wind up in the same place.

I called Rachel from the car.

"I need to go back to Crane," I said. "I have more questions. Will you come?"

A pause. The particular pause of a woman deciding whether what she was about to agree to was professional, personal, or some navigable combination of both.

"When?" she said.

We didn't speak until we were in the Highlander.

Not a conscious decision — just what happened. The night air outside the studio had a particular quality to it, the quality of air that has just had something significant pass through it and hasn't settled yet. We walked to the car in the quiet that wasn't uncomfortable so much as necessary, the kind that means both people are still processing and have agreed without discussing it to wait until they have more of it assembled.

Jacob got in. I got in. I sat with my hands on the wheel without starting the engine.

"Even if it's a demon talking," I said. "Even if everything you said in there is right — the source, the mechanism, all of it." I looked at the dashboard. "What if there's a sister?"

Jacob didn't answer immediately.

He looked down the street through the windshield,…

"Wait a second."

We had been standing to leave. Elias said it the way you say something when a thought arrives faster than you can manage it — not pivoting, not inserting another argument into his position. just stopped by something he hadn't expected to find in the room.

He was looking at us differently.

Not the way he had looked at us during the conversation — the engaged, careful attention of a man working through a difficult exchange. This was something else. The quality of attention had changed. It was the same quality I had watched him bring to certain members of the audience tonight, just before he spoke — that small inward shift, the brief absence, like a man listening to something slightly outside the room.

I did not like it.

He started carefully. Slowly, feeling around the edges of whatever he was receiving.

The green room was smaller than the production suggested it should be — a couch, a coffee table, a mirror with bulbs around it that someone had turned down to something bearable. It had the particular quality of a space that existed entirely to serve another space. Everything in it was temporary except Elias Crane, who was sitting on the couch when we came in and stood with the ease of a man who had been waiting and didn't mind.

He was different back here.

Not less — more, actually, in some ways. The television warmth was still present but it wasn't performing anymore. He extended his hand to Jacob first, then to me, and the handshake was the handshake of someone who was actually glad you were there rather than professionally glad.

"Jeremiah Yaats," he said, and the name carried genuine warmth in it, the warmth of a debt…

Jeremiah had the tickets by the following morning.

He didn't explain how. He rarely did when the explanation would take longer than the result, and the result was two seats in the eighth row of a studio audience for a live taping of Beyond the Veil, which was either a significant favor called in or a minor miracle, and with Jeremiah those two categories had always overlapped more than you'd expect.

We went on a Thursday. I wondered if this would be worth missing pot roast.

The studio was not what I expected, which meant I had expected wrong. I had been picturing something cheap — the visual grammar of late-night access television, folding chairs and bad lighting and a host who worked very hard to seem sincere. What I got instead was a properly built set, warm colors, careful lighting that made a large space feel intimate without…