"Who are you?" I whispered.
"Fighting Badger." He was studying me. "How did you find me?"
"I, uh …" There was no explaining microchips and a mental map. My eyes went to the floor of the cave, to the places where the dead lay. I had the sense of disconnecting with the world around me, of watching rather than existing.
How was it possible for me to sense something like that? Had Carter put something else in my head that let me read objects and places, or was this empathic memory chip much more powerful than he let on? Was this what he implied about the chip when he said it was experimental?
How was I able to read dead people?
"You are a spirit," Fighting Badger voiced quietly.
I shook my head, struggling to focus with the whispers and images. A small part of me was warning me to run, telling me I should fear this man and place, that they were both evil in a way I didn't know existed before tonight.
"You must be." He followed my gaze to a random spot in the cave, where the whispering was loudest at the moment. "Only a spirit can hear others."
"You can hear them, too?" I asked, surprised.
"They are loud tonight." Fighting Badger tossed his rabbit and knife down then wiped his hands on his pants. There was an emptiness to his eyes. Though I wasn't a superstitious or religious person, or someone who really thought twice about souls and the afterlife, I experienced the strange sense that this man had no soul.
"They are." I swallowed hard and shifted feet. He was built like someone who tracked, hunted and killed his own food, the opposite of the comparatively pampered life I lived, which meant I wasn't going to get far if I made a run for it. "You are not a ghost and you can hear them."
"I hear them because they are mine. I did not free their spirits. They stay with me. They are mine."
He's a fucking serial killer. One who collected souls instead of other souvenirs of his victims.
"Come, ghost. You must sit with me."
"I'm not one of your spirits," I objected.
"I know." Fighting Badger sat down near the fire and motioned for me to do the same.
I glanced towards the path that led back to my horse.
"I will hunt you, spirit or woman," he told me calmly.
"Okay," I whispered. Not wanting to step on the dead, I made my way through the unmarked graves to the fire and sat across from him.
My best friend always said I had a knack for making friends of the least friendly people possible. I doubted she had a serial killer in mind when she said it, but I was about to test her theory. If I survived, she was right.