I PREPARED FOR A séance. As set pieces went, this one was so lame I’d never put it in a movie. No sputtering candles to cast eerie shadows on the walls, no moldy skulls forming a ritual circle, no chalices filled with what the audience would suppose was red wine but secretly hope was blood.

Did experienced necromancers use stuff like candles and incense? From the little I’d learned about the supernatural world, I knew some of what we see in movies is true. Maybe, way back in history, people had known about necromancers and witches and werewolves, and those stories are based, if very loosely, on old truths.

My method—if I can call it a method since I’ve only used it twice—came from trial and error and a few grudging tips from Derek. As a guy who was taking college-level courses at sixteen, being confident of his facts is important to Derek. If he isn’t sure, he’d rather keep his mouth shut. But when I’d pushed him, he’d told me that he’d heard that necromancers summoned ghosts either by being at a graveside or by using a personal effect, like Liz’s hoodie, so I was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, clutching it.

I pictured Liz and imagined myself pulling her out of limbo. At first, I didn’t try very hard. The last time I’d focused all my power into summoning a ghost, I’d summoned two right back into their buried corpses. I wasn’t near a grave this time, but that didn’t mean there weren’t bodies around somewhere. So I kept the voltage low at first, gradually ramping it up, focusing harder and harder until…

“What the—? Hey, who are you?”

My eyes flew open. There stood a dark-haired boy about my age with the build, looks, and arrogant chin tilt of a star quarterback. Finding the ghost of another teenager in this place wasn’t a coincidence. A name popped into my head—that of another Lyle House resident who’d been taken away before I arrived, supposedly transferred to a mental hospital, like Liz.