I sat on a shady patch of grass, cleared my mind, and opened the door in it to everything that might be.

The nuns were there waiting for me.

"Hi," I said, trying to look confident and in control, as if I talked with spirits all the time. "I'm glad to see you're so prompt. I don't have a lot of lime, so if you could be as brief as possible about what it is you want me to do for you, I'd really appreciate it."

Jim flopped down next to me in the shade, panting just a little. "Oh, way to go, Ash. Rush the poor dead nuns."

"Sorry, um, ladies. Go ahead and tell me what you want."

The first nun, the one closest to me, shimmered and looked agitated. I think. It was hard to tell under all that medieval cowling. Her mouth opened, but she didn't speak, not exactly. A dim, breathy rushing sort of noise came out of her mouth, almost like a wind heard at the end of a tunnel. Riding the top of the noise, so faint it was almost impossible to hear, words formed.

"Thread of crime," the first nun said.

The second wafted forward, her image as translucent as the first. Her hands stretched toward me, entreating me to understand. "Evil in design."

"Um ..." I said, goose bumps rising on my back and arms. The ghosts didn't have an evil feel about them, nothing that made me feel sick like some demons did, but it was still very creepy to be sitting in the middle of a haunted convent ruin, listening to ghostly howls. "OK. You want me to solve a crime? Get in line. Oops. Sorry. Didn't mean to be flip. Did someone kill you?"

"Cord go round," nun number one said, her image flickering in an ethereal breeze.

"Cord? You were strangled?"

"Soul be bound," the second one intoned, her voice soft, the words spoken on a half moan.

"Right. Your souls are bound here. I understand. Were you both strangled, or just one of you?"

"Call elements fourfold," the first one said, her image fading until there was just barest faint impression of her.

"OK. I can do that. I think," I said in what I hoped was a reassuring voice, totally at a loss. They were strangled nuns, but they wanted me to call the elements? That was usually done only in conjunction with a being of the dark powers—demons and the like. Maybe ghosts were part of the dark world, and no one had bothered to tell me.

"By the fifth the spirit you hold," the second nun said, then she, too, faded into near-nothingness.

"You want me to call a spirit?" I asked, hoping they would clarify the situation without any further rhymes. "You want me to call a demon to wreak vengeance on the person who strangled you?"

The nuns disappeared completely.

"Hey! Well, crap. What was that supposed to be? Jim, what do yoeeeee!"

The first nun appeared suddenly, her white face pushed into mine, her dark, tormented eyes enough to make my soul weep. "Cast your spell, bind him well. Bright as fire glow, deep as water flow."

Before I could blink, she was gone.

"Now that was truly freaky," I said, rubbing my arms and blinking as I opened my eyes up to the normal world. Despite the heat of the day, I was chilled, little shivers of cold making my skin tighten. "What is it about ghosts that they all have to speak in rhyme?"

Jim shrugged. "Revenge, mostly."

I got up, walked over to a beam of sunlight, and sat on a broken bit of stone wall, still shivering even as I soaked up the heat of the sun-warmed stone. "What are you talking about?"

"Revenge. The dead often get a bit testy about things, mostly the fact that they're dead and you're not. If you had to hang around a place for a couple of hundred years, trying to pass along a bit of information, or ask for help, or offer advice, but no one listened to you, you'd get cranky, too. That's why most spirits speak in rhyme. It's their revenge, to make you work in order to understand them."

"Lovely. Like I don't have enough to do without trying to decode ghostly messages to find some four-hundred-year-old strangler."

'I don't think they were asking for your help, Ash," Jim said, snapping at a bee that buzzed past.

"No?" I leaned back against the wall to consider what the nuns had said. "Thread of crime, evil in design. Cord go round, soul be bound. Call elements fourfold, by the fifth the spirit you hold. You know, you may just be on to something there, Jim. It almost sounds like a warning."

"Or a solution to a problem." Jim rolled onto its back, kicking all four legs into the air in an attempt to scratch its back. "You're forgetting the last part. Cast your spell, bind him well. Bright as fire glow, deep as water flow."

"Cast your spell, bind him well. Damn, Jim, I knew there had to be a reason I was saddled with you! You're right, you're absolutely right. That first part is a spell. A binding spell. The nuns were giving me a spell... to catch the murdering bastard incubus!"

I stood up, conviction flowing strong. The nuns had given me a tool to catch the incubus—but why?

"Why would they help me find an incubus?"

Jim shrugged. "Why not?"

"For starters, they don't have anything to do with incubi. They're ghost nuns."

"So? Not everything is a big, dark secret, Aisling. Sometimes things just are. If I were you, I'd stop questioning why and put my mind to work on how to use the information."

"Hmm." I thought about what Jim said. "You have a point. All right, now all I need to do is to arrange for the incubus to pay another call. If I could catch him and bind him, I'd be able to turn him over to Monish and the Oth-erworld watch, which not only would clear my name but also would prove to any available Guardians who might happen to be lurking around that I would be hot stuff, apprentice-wise. Come on, Jim-Dog."

"Where are we going now? Can I eat, wherever it is?" the demon asked, watching as I marched off to the south end of the island.

"We're going back to the conference, and if you're a good demon, you can have lunch. Hurry up, lazybones. Lots to do. Things to plan. Incubi to catch."

I was in such high spirits when we arrived back at the hotel, it was a shame that my life pretty much took a turn for the sucky.

Again.

A glance at my appointment book showed a lamentable lack of Guardian appointments (the three Guardians I'd scheduled with had canceled after Nora's attack— falsely attributed to me—was made public), but there were still interesting workshops to attend, a dragon's brain to pick, and Nora to talk to about the plan that I'd mulled over on the walk back to the hotel.