I slowly turned to face the voice to find Liam looking at me as though I were crazy. As though I were the one who had just materialized in the middle of the fucking hallway. I honed in on his sound, trying to pinpoint his exact location in my mind, but it was impossible. It felt like his voice was coming from everywhere all at once. “Is that where you came from, too? Things in here just materializing out of thin air?”

  “Ahh, you’re always so clever,” he said, his voice gliding over me like a caress. I wanted so desperately to believe this was actually Liam. I wanted to believe that there were two of us, and not just myself trapped in here with this demon. But as much as I didn’t want to be alone, I didn’t want Liam to suffer through being trapped in here, either. And I reminded myself, that no matter how much this thing sounded like Liam, and even if it looked like Liam, Liam wasn’t here. He was back wherever my body was, and definitely not in this hellscape. Probably. “You know that’s why I liked you immediately, right? Seeing ghosts is a perk, but intelligence is a virtue.”

  “And I liked you immediately because of your lack of willingness to kill me,” I joked, slowly turning around to face the voice. Liam stood in the middle of the barren hallway. Or, at least, it looked like how Liam would look if he’d died a while ago. His face had taken on the distortion that came with ghosts that hadn’t moved on - one of his eyes was a little higher than the other, and the very edge of his mouth took an uncharacteristic droop that looked a little too sharp to be human. If I hadn’t been dealing with ghosts for the vast majority of my life, it probably would have concerned me a lot more than it actually did. For me, it was just further proof that this wasn’t the actual Liam I knew. Unless he’d been trapped in here for a lot longer than I could imagine, but it couldn’t be that, because that would mean that the man I had grown to care for wasn’t real. That was honestly a scarier proposition than what I was facing.

  Liam held his hands up in a soothing gesture. “Always so ready to assume that I’m trying to kill you. Who’s to say that I don’t just want to talk?” He tilted his head, looking at me with curiosity in his eyes. Though he kept his hands up, he took a tentative step forward, and I fought not to step back myself. If this thing had the ability to pop up at random, then there was no point in my running.

  “Who’s to say I’d be willing to listen if you wanted to talk?” I asked. I tightened my fingers around the chair leg, feeling the bite of the corners on my skin. Not that I knew if hitting this thing would do any damage anyway. Nor did I know if I’d actually be able to hit it - after all, I could remind myself as often as I wanted that this wasn’t actually Liam, but it was hard to argue against my own senses.

  “You have more self-preservation than that, I could think,” he said with a light sigh. Then, he extended his arm, the flexed muscles nearly popping through the skin. In a heartbeat, a bat appeared in his hand. “If you’d rather fight, we can do that instead, I suppose, but I have to tell you, you will lose. You don’t know how to survive in this place. I, however, have had time to figure it out.”

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  I flexed my fingers against the wood of the chair leg again, debating. It was right, of course - I could function here just like I could in the real world, but I had no clue how to manipulate the elements of this world as he did. We were silent for a few moments as I debated my next steps. During that time, Liam didn’t react at all - he simply stood there, his head tilted slightly as he stared at me unblinkingly.

  “Fine,” I said, slightly loosening my grip on my weapon. “We can talk, but if you try to kill me, I’ll kill you first.”

  “As I would expect,” Liam said, turning lightly and walking down the hall, and I followed. My senses worked overtime to make sure there was nothing else that was about to attack. But the hallway was quiet save for our footsteps, and for once, there seemed to be a sort of calm energy radiating throughout the room. “Although I’ll have you know that if I actually wanted you dead, I could have done it when your back was still to me.”

  He had a point. Still, I didn’t loosen my grip as I followed him through another door and into a room that looked like a distorted version of Luke and Liam’s living room. Or maybe the comparison just came to mind so easily because everything was monochrome like it was in their house. The distorted Liam walked over to one of two small chairs surrounding a circular table and sat down, gesturing for me to do the same. I followed him over and sat down, facing the pseudo-facsimile of Liam. He smiled as I sat down and opened his mouth as though to speak, but then seemed to think better of it.

  “Well, you said you wanted to talk. Then talk,” I said after what felt like ages of silence. I knew being rude probably wouldn’t help me in this situation, but I couldn’t help it - after all the times I’d been attacked here, I couldn’t just go back to pretending whatever this was was friendly. While I no longer seemed to bear the wounds from the previous attacks here, that didn’t mean that I could look at him without remembering the spike piercing through my chest.

  “It’s mildly hard to explain,” Liam said. His voice almost had a nervous air about it, but his face looked just as bemused and curious as it had before. “Honestly, I didn’t think we would have a chance to talk.”

  “You’re the one who made that happen,” I spit back at him. “It’s hard to talk when you’re fighting for your life.”

  “And one could say the same thing for me,” he said, giving me a light shrug. “It’s not my fault that I’ve had the upper hand while you’ve been in here previously. We’re both just fighting for our lives, and while I think we can both agree that I have the upper hand in here, I realized something important.”

  I raised my eyebrows, silently asking him to continue, but he remained silently looking at me. “What could you have possibly realized that would make you go from trying to kill me to wanting to talk?” I asked, my voice quieter than I would want it to be.

  “If I killed you,” he said slowly, as though he was trying to choose his words very carefully, “then I would have to start all of this over again, and the only people I can bond to are people who know how to get rid of me.” He shrugged. “They might not be as strong as you are in this department, but still, having to battle them all would take more of my strength than I am willing to offer.”

  I nodded - I could see why this would be exhausting for him. Hell, even just this little bit of time in here had pushed me to a point of mental exhaustion that I was just barely able to stave off. “But I’m assuming you don’t want to just continue as normal?” I asked.

  He smiled faintly at me as he leaned his elbows on the table. He turned his heard just a little more, to the point where it was just starting to seem uncanny for a human movement. “I do not,” he answered. “That is why I wanted to talk to you. I’m here to propose a bargain.”