"Conrad! Get in the car, we can talk about this later!" Jack whisper yelled. I plopped down on the curb I had just kicked, my foot throbbing as tears ran down my face. I felt Jack sit down next to me, but I didn't acknowledge him. We sat for a long moment, me just letting the tears fall and she soft sobs rack my small body.

I felt like everything that I'd been putting off was just now catching up with me. I'd felt sorrow, I'd felt hopelessness, but for some reason this was the moment that just made it all feel real. "I thought we really had a chance, you know?" I said through a cracked voice.

"We still do, what are you talking about?" Jack asked, his voice filled with hesitation on how to handle the situation. I felt like shit going back and forth between hope and depression, but I couldn't help it, I was just falling apart.

"We can't find these people, we can't find out the common denominator, we can't find out where this ghost will be, and people will die, over and over again and it will all be our fault. Don't you see, Jack? This is the last hope we had, and it up and moved the fuck out!" I shouted in frustration.

"Jack, we can still call them. And we have another house to go to. We can find this person, you have to believe that," Jack said as he tried to pull me to my feet. "Come on, we've got to go."

I didn't move, sitting on the curb for a long minute. "I know you're right, I can logically say that you're right, but it just feels so hopeless. I don't know where to go from here, Jack."

"We just need to push through for the month, just get through the month and we can do whatever we need, alright?" Jack pleaded. "Come on man, we don't have time for this."

I nodded, holding up a hand for help up. "I think I broke my toe," I said, sniffling as he pulled me to my feet. Jack started laughing as he opened the passenger door for me before going to the drivers side. I slid into the leather seat and pulled out my multitool, opening and closing it over and over to occupy my mind.

Jack threw the the car into drive and pulled out, handing me his phone so I could guide him to the next house. After a few minutes of being stopped by red lights we made our way to another small building, this one a little bigger but in worse repair. This was the more recent murder, right behind Kaylyn. I took a deep breath and got out of the car, favoring my my left foot slightly with each step.

I walked up through the yard of dead and dying grass with Jack by my side, taking a deep breath and searching inside myself for that bit of hope I'd found yesterday that lead me here. I knocked lightly on the door, the resounding sound screaming finality, like there was no turning back now. Why I'd want to turn back I couldn't fathom.

"Coming!" I heard from the other side of the door. A young girl, quite possibly in kindergarten quickly threw the door open.

"Are your parents home?" I asked.

"Mhm!" she said with innocence pouring out of her small frame as she bounced on her toes for a moment before running off with energy only little kids can portray.

"I'm sorry, we ain't lookin' to buy anythin' today," said a slim woman around the age of thirty, hair pulled up and deep circles making themselves clear, even against her dark skin.

"We aren't trying to sell you anything. I don't know the best way to say this, but we are investigating a murder that was eerily similar to your daughters. Would you mind answering a few questions?" I asked.

"So what? You PI's?" she asked.

"N-"

"Yes," Jack said over me. We shared a look, mine asked "What?" while his said "Just roll with it."

"Yes," I said awkwardly. "We're PI's."

"Yeah? Aight. Come in, we'll talk in the kitchen," she said, stepping aside and motioning for us to come in while shooing the kids to go play outside.

"Thank you. Would you start with just a rundown of what you think is relevant? Anything from aliens to ghosts to werewolves and we'll believe you, I promise," I said.

"I don' know about aliens or werewolves, but it sure seemed like a ghost. Look, what I'm about to say sounds crazy, but I'm sure PI guys like you get this sort of stuff all the time, it's probably just some science thing I don' understand, right?" she asked.

"What sort of thing specifically?" Jack asked.

"Well, I didn't tell the police this, 'cause they'd think I'm crazy. Late that night I came home, my oldest daughter was watchin' the kids while I was workin', and I go into the kids room to make sure they were all okay. When I got close I got real sleepy, like I almost couldn't stop myself from falling asleep. But I'm glad I didn't fall asleep, 'cause I saw somethin' crazy. Sheighla, she was floatin', like she was bein' held up by some big monsta and she was screamin' somthin' fierce but I couldn't hear a thing. I didn't know what to do so I just carried all the other kids out, and no matter how hard I shook them they wouldn't wake up. I got all the kids out of the room, but then I heard this sound, like glass or somethin'. When I went back to the room her eyes were burned and there was blood everywhere," she said.

"That sounds like what we've heard from other people," Jack said. I looked back at him and nodded.

"Where did she go that day? Anything in particular that stands out, or perhaps somewhere she would have went later in the day?" I asked. The woman was crying as she told her story, and I tried to give off a sort of sympathetic energy. She was more hopeless than I was, I at least had someone to blame.

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"She went to school, then she went to work, and after that she came home. I think maybe she took the kids to the park down the street? It'd explain why they was so tired," she said as she clearly wracked her brain for something useful.

"And you're sure that's all?" I asked quietly.

"I know my daughter, that be all she did," she affirmed. I was struggling with the lack of grammar in her words, growing up in the west hadn't prepared me for this and I wasn't one to get out into the world in college.

"Okay, I think that's all the information we'll need. Thank you for being willing to share," I said.

"That's it? The police asked all kinds of questions, and all you needed was that? You think you can catch a ghost with just that?" she said confrontationally.

"We already know who killed your daughter, and you're right, it was a ghost. I don't know what we're going to do, but finding where the ghost is is the next step," I said. Jack tried to halt my words with hand motions but I ignored him. She had the right to know, this ghost killed her daughter and she was the biggest witness to one of the murders we had. Why did we have the right to this kind of knowledge when we lost a friend but other people lost family? Other people saw greater horrors, why didn't they have the right to know who did it when I did just because I was born a freak?

"So a dead person killed my daughter? Why?" she asked as tears fell down her face.

"I don't know, but we're going to find out." The resolve in my voice was fake, driven by anger at the unfairness of the world.

"And what do you do when you find the ghost?"

"We save lives," Jack said. "We should get going, we have things to do."

I nodded and moved to the front door. Before I closed it behind me I turned and said over my shoulder "Thank you for helping us out." I closed the door, the chipped paint falling in flakes and sticking to my hand.

"The fuck was that Conrad? What is with you today? Telling people a ghost killed their daughter? Your ass is lucky she didn't call the fucking cops on us!" Jack lectured quietly as soon as we were outside.

"I don't know! Something feels weird, like something is fundamentally changing and I don't know how to deal with it," I responded with mild panic filling my voice.

"Of course something's changing, this has been the weirdest week of my entire life! If both of us weren't fundamentally changed by it we wouldn't be human. I don't know what you're going through, it's different for you, I get it, but we have to think. Don't become a child because things got hard," Jack berated me.

"I'm not becoming a child, I'm just. . . I don't know. Look, she had the right to know and it's already done, so lets just drop it," I said before I stormed off and slid into the passenger seat of Jack's car. Jack followed with a frustrated gait, opening the door and opening his GPS to get us back to the hotel. I'd been out enough that I knew where it was, but I didn't say anything, letting him use his GPS to get back without dealing with my random and irrational mood swings. It had been a very long week.

We drove for several minutes in silence before Jack turned on the radio, the first music we had really listened to that wasn't humming or whistling since Kaylyn died. Country music poured through the speakers, some sad song about the same thing every country song is about. Alcohol, trucks, wives, and dogs, usually about something dying too.

"What happens when you play country music backwards?" I asked out of the blue.

"Uh, I don't know, gibberish? Where are you going with this?" Jack asked, not for the first time confused at my sudden shift in tone again.

"You sell your truck, you get your job back, you quit drinking, and your wife comes back," I said, struggling to keep the laughter at the joke in.

Jack spit on the dashboard in surprise, unprepared to hold the laughter in at the unexpected joke. "What the hell. You're not wrong I guess." Every time a new country song came on the radio I noticed Jack revisit the joke in his head and chuckle to himself.

This is me. This is the kind of person I am, not some brooding emo kid that think's he's cooler than he is, I thought. I felt something deep within me almost click into place as I finally started to feel like maybe things weren't changing anymore. I felt like maybe I'd found myself again.

We pulled into the parking lot and parked, Jack taking much more care with making sure he was within the lines than I had the previous day. We slowly made our way up to the room, knowing we'd have plenty of time to call the Johnsons as it was barely noon according to my watch. The elevator played something simple this time, a piece that made me think of a noble knight saving a young maiden from the hands of an evil king from a far off land.

We walked into the apartment and sat down on the couch, pulling up Mr. Johnson's phone number. After four rings he picked up with a "Hello?"

"Mr. Johnson?" I asked with the phone on speaker so Jack could listen or add anything if he needed to.

"That's me," he said, his annoyance growing clear.

"I'm a private investigator looking into a murder, and the one that claimed your wife has many similar attributes, would you mind answering a few questions?" I asked hesitantly.

"I told the police what happened, they know I'm innocent," said the man on the other side.

"We know, we are currently looking for the place the killer stalks his victims. Do you know everywhere your wife went that day?" I asked. The park and school were safe bets to rule out, the Johnsons were a young marriage and didn't have any kids yet.

"Oh, uh, sure. She went to an early yoga class, then she went to work, she was a host at Svartalfheim. After that she picked up a smoothie at smoothie shack, she goes there all the time. It's a nice way to take advantage of my student discount, you know?" he said.

He had lived a little ways out from campus to be a college student, although I couldn't judge, I knew plenty of people that lived in different cities, not everyone was willing to stay in a dorm room for so long. "Anything else?" I asked.

"Nope, she came straight home after that, at least she said she did. I had no reason not to trust her," said the boy who was clearly feeling the pain of loosing his wife again, being forced to relive that night.

"Thank you, I know it was hard. This will be immensely helpful in catching this guy, I can promise you that," I said reassuringly.

"Yeah, well you keep my number and let me know when you catch him. Let me know how he did it to, the floating still has me in therapy," he said. I heard a rustling on the other end that sounded like he was wiping his face off.

"We will. Thank you again for helping us out," I said before I hang up the call.

"She was at the smoothie shack, same place our other victim worked. It's the only correlation," Jack said.

"How do we know that's where she worked?" I asked, scrunching up my face in confusion.

"Because I did a quick google search during your phone call. Honestly, this detective stuff is easy," Jack bragged as he held his phone up to show an Instagram filled with pictures of the young girl in a smoothie shack uniform.

"Well, she wasn't subtle about it. So at the end of the month we run a late night stake out at the smoothie shack?" I asked.

"Yeah, now we just need to bide our time until the next full moon," Jack said as he got up. "Let's celebrate with some dinner, I'm buying!"