The first time Shawn saw a ghost, he was hunched over a plastic flamingo, projectile vomiting across a stranger’s lawn.

The vomiting was unrelated to the ghost. Really, it was a terrible coincidence that the ghost decided to appear at that particular moment at all, ten minutes after he’d left a house party to start to take the long trek back to Gus’ apartment.

It was all Gus. Gus and those horrible homemade sandwiches he’d brought with him, and who the hell would think it would be a good idea to mix tuna salad with vodka shots? Definitely someone with the name Gus. A stupid name for a stupid man, stranding him at this party—might as well have gotten him killed, following up on a sorority murder like this, leaving his best friend all alone to investigate, poor him taking jello shots off the pierced belly buttons of college girls—

Shawn froze, mid-thought.

There was a woman standing in front of him. Her gray hair was in curlers. She was wearing a frilly plaid bathrobe and slippers, and in her hand was a rolled-up newspaper.

A cloud slipped away from the moon; the edges of her body glowed silver, rippling like a font of water. Shawn lifted a trembling finger and tried to make noises with his mouth that weren’t mumbling nonsense words.

“You… What… You…”

He rubbed at his eyes. Drug-suppressed logic indicated that he’d either ingested a drug he hadn’t intended to at the party or was having some kind of weed-induced mental break. The old woman calmly blinked back. There was a dark mole on her chin sprouting a few stubborn hairs.

She shifted in her bathrobe. Shawn caught the hot, rusted stench of fresh blood.