“What are you doing here?” I growled.

Miranda laughed before her sharp eyes burned a hole through my own. As she stared her hand waved over her black flaming dress. The dark licking tongues turned a brilliant shade of pink. “There, feel more comfortable with me now?”

“Yeah, my discomfort doesn’t come from the color of your dress,” I said.

Stella growled and took a single threatening step forward. Miranda’s gaze dropped to the hound and she smiled, unafraid. “Not you too, girl. I thought we were friends.”

“The friends thing stopped being true the moment you sided with Melumek,” I said.

“Well, whose fault is that, Joe? I relied on you. You were the one who saved me from the cage of Melumek’s false followers. You gave me a new family to be a part of. You knew I could do things with my magic even before I did. I didn’t mean as much to you though, did I? You abandoned me. You abandoned all of us. Why are you surprised we changed?”

I blinked, my mouth hanging open just a little as her speech washed over me. The aggressive bite of guilt, a feeling that was painfully familiar to me, chowed down on my gut. There was truth hidden in her crazy. It was my mistake that got me sent to the Shadow Realm. Did that make the disbanding of my little clan my fault? Maybe it did.

I swallowed past the growing lump in my throat and croaked, “You didn’t answer my question. What are you doing here?”

She folded her arms over her chest, pressing the jeweled scepter up under her chin. “Can’t a woman visit an old friend without being interrogated? Also, I’ve been trying not to ask but she’s literally staring me in the face. What the hell did you do to Stella?”

I had to bite my inner cheek to keep from smiling. There was something about Miranda that brought down all my walls. I hated that.

“She is what she needs to be which makes me wonder, how did you get in here?”

She tilted her head, pink sparkles glimmering around her fingers. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not a thief. You can’t be in here.”

The smug look on her face dropped away for half a second before she plastered the same smile back in its place. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I frowned. Something was wrong here. A flash of steel rushed from the side, joining Miranda in front of the door. A cloud of tangled brown curls bounced around her shoulders as she planted the butt of her axe hard on the ground by her steel-booted feet. Stella rose from her crouch, whining as she tilted her head.

“Nora?”

“Miranda’s right, Joe. You shouldn’t be so standoffish when friends come to visit. No one will use your precious safe house if they get this kind of treatment when they walk through the door.”

I swung my sword between the pair of them as the voices inside my head screamed. I flashed up my Blindsense, glaring at the absence of auras where Miranda and Nora stood. This couldn’t be real. Nora and Miranda had never been close. There is no way she would have run off with Boopzy and Sob to join the misguided necromancer.

“What’s going on here?” I demanded, stepping further away from the false players in front of me.

My eyes swept the room but aside from Stella’s brilliant green glow, there wasn’t a single other aura. This was all fake. It was just a trick Pete the Poltergeist was pulling on me.

“Very funny, Pete. You can’t distract me that easily,” I said.

Nora and Miranda giggled behind me and whispered frustratingly loud enough for me to hear.

“He sounds so stupid with his face yanked out like that.”

“Yeah, he really does. Love the tail on him though.”

I swore and glared at them over my shoulder. They might not be the real people but they were close enough. I reached behind me, yanking my tail up and stuffing it behind my belt to keep it out of the way. It was bad enough that I had it at all without them poking fun.

“Have you forgotten about me, Joe?”

I jumped so high I almost left my boots behind as I turned. Standing opposite the others was Isabella. A hole in her chest dripped blood and her wings drooped, her feathers dragging over the ground. The amulet she had clutched the moment I’d last seen her still dangled from her fingers.

“You knew I was hurting and you still let me end it all,” she said. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

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“Isabella… I… I didn’t mean for it to… If there was anything I could have… please.” The words were jumbled and not just because my face was horribly misshapen.

Clara appeared beside Isabella, her arms folded over her chest and a snarl marring her face. “Don’t even bother. He’s too stupid to understand how royally he fucked up.”

I ground my teeth as I glared right back at her. The bite of guilt was digging ever deeper, joined now by the wicked slice of her insult.

“It wasn’t my fault, it was the Djinn,” I said.

Clara rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure. And yet you somehow managed to survive. We’re Daughters of Umbra. The elite of our Goddesses chosen. You weren’t even blessed by a primordial yet. How is it that you survived when we didn’t, hmm?”

“They’re right you know. Everything you touch seems to break apart,” a man slurred from beside me.

I whipped around and pointed my blade at the pile of filthy rags leaning against the bare stone wall. The pile hiccupped and a dirty foot stuck out the end of it. A foul stench akin to soured milk burned my nose.

A filthy hairy head poked up from the pile and suddenly I knew who was bellowing at me. “It’s your fault I lost my daughter. She’s all I had and you took her away from me. “

“Theo, that’s not what happened and you know it.”

The Theo lump howled with laughter and threw back his cape of rags. “Blame, blame, blame. It’s all you ever do. It couldn’t possibly have been something you did, yeah? Surely not. You’re Mr. Perfect. That’s why all of us are here telling you it was your fault and yet you still don’t believe us.”

“Fuck off, Theo, you know I had nothing to do with it. She was coming back for you. You walked away. Don’t you dare put this one on me.”

Theo shifted to his knees, jabbing a fat finger in my direction. “You’re the one that filled her head with all that Daughter of Umbra shit. If she’d just stayed with me it all would have been fine.”

“Fine? You think it would have been fine? You lied to them all, you fucking dropkick. You knew how to progress the main questline but you kept it to yourself to play Outsider. You threw it all away and for what? What did you get aside from a life of loneliness being hunted by monsters from the dunny?”

Theo started throwing senseless insults in my direction. I ground my teeth harder and turned away. I was wasting time arguing with a phantom. That was Pete’s plan and I couldn’t let him win. I turned back toward Miranda and Nora and marched toward them.

“I needed your help, Joe. The spirits wouldn’t stop screaming the moment I stepped on that island. It wasn’t just the noise though. There were visions. So many visions.” Her eyes filled with tears and her shoulders began to shake. Nora reached out, pulling the other woman hard against her. “No one else knew how to help me. You could have. I know you could have. You saved me from the Fellowship. You could have saved me on Rottnest too.”

Nora glared at me over Miranda’s dropped head. “She followed behind us like a lost puppy. I didn’t even realize how bad she was hurting until we got back to the mainland.”

Sweat was streaming down my back, pooling in the most uncomfortable of places as I shoved between them to reach the door. They were more substantial than I thought they would be which only served to tighten the force gripping my chest. Stella followed, pressing up against my leg as hard as she could.

I tried the knob first of all but it wouldn’t turn. Pete wouldn’t be that kind.

An icy wind rushed around the room as all the gathered phantoms spoke at once, reminding me of every bad choice I’d ever made. They even threw in a few I had nothing to do with. There was no escaping Theo’s stench, it wafted from his direction, settling over Stella and me like a dense fog that made me want to hurl only I had nothing in my belly.

Stella whined and pawed at me, digging her head under my hand until I started scratching between her rounded ears. I had to bend a little to do it. She had shrunk to half the size she had been before. The transformation was close to complete and I wouldn’t be far behind.

“Joe?” A soft voice whispered behind me.

I slammed my fist into the door and closed my eyes, my shoulders tensed so hard I thought one or both my pop out of their sockets.

“Pete, you can’t do this. Not him. Anyone but him,” I said into the wood of the door.

“Joe, please. Don’t leave me alone. Not this time.”

“Pete, I’m serious,” I begged.

The poltergeist screamed in my ear, louder now than he had ever been before.

Get out…

“I’m clearly trying! Open the door and I’ll walk right out the front door and not bother you ever again. I don’t even care what you do to Old Man Wellington a this point.”

The sniffling intensified behind me and the newest phantom cried, “What did I do to make you so angry?”

I sighed and turned, looking at the line of my old friends and teammates. Standing in front of them was Rory in the torn pillowcase he’d been using for a shirt that night. Our mother had slapped us both around the day before when he’d accidentally shredded his last good shirt and refused to give him any more than that. If I’d been there earlier I would have given him mine but no, I’d avoided home for the most selfish of reasons. The red marks around his throat made it hard to look him in the face.

“I’m cold and hungry. Please help me,” Rory begged.

“This isn’t real,” I said to them all but mostly to myself. “I just have to open the door.”

I marched away from all the hollering phantoms, throwing back the heavy red drapes to look behind them. There was nothing there but more of the same solid wall. There would be a clue somewhere. There always was. I just had to tune everyone out and focus for half a second.

Stella sneezed and squeaked. I turned my eyes down to her, she was shrinking even more, now shorter than my knee.

A cold hand wrapped itself around mine. My head whipped around. I stared into the milky white eyes of my brother.

“You should have seen her face when she came for me,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to make a noise but I thought I heard you coming home.”

I cried out and dropped to my knees. The others might have been talking out of their asses but Rory was telling the truth. His death, his pain, it was all my fault.