Chapter 1

The moment after I died, two things were immediately clear: I couldn’t remember my own name, and the man in front of me wasn’t human.

“Wake up, dead girl.”

The words jolted me, making the world zoom back into focus. Disorientation lingered, the oddest tickle in my throat, as if I’d just been screaming. Though I couldn’t remember why. It was akin to waking from a dream in which your brain struggled to justify the difference in your surroundings despite no longer remembering where you were moments before.

If I’d looked around well enough, I might have figured out that it appeared to be a professor’s office decked out in academic finery—a massive wooden desk, glossy leather armchairs, and row upon row of red leather book spines ascending to the massive arched ceiling. The man was framed by a raw stone mantel, but the fire in question had been dulled to crackling embers. A light gurgling brought my focus down to an electric kettle on the desk, and it was a relief to have an excuse to look away from the man.

At first glance, he might have seemed normal enough. He was tall and broad, with lines around his eyes and a neck that sagged around his suit collar. But a growth sprang from the spot above the knot of his tie, coiling back around his nape and coming to rest by his right ear.

It was the head of a turkey vulture. And it was watching me.

“Is there something on my face?” the man asked.

It was the beak of the turkey vulture that moved when the words came out, not his mouth.

“Relax.” He chuckled. “It was rhetorical.”

The kettle clicked, making me jump. He opened a drawer behind the desk and fished around before leaning back up with something pinched between his fingers. With his other hand, he pulled a glass mug toward himself and dropped the mystery items in.

The small white twigs clattered together, bouncing against one another, before settling at the bottom of the teacup. And as I looked closer, recognition tickled the back of my mind.

Mouse bones.

I stared in disbelief as he poured the boiling water over them. They swirled in the current before settling at the bottom of the darkening liquid.

“Why don’t I remember anything?” I asked, searching my brain for something, anything, about the life I’d been living only a moment before.

But the memories were like a necklace pulled from my neck, tiny beads of recollection skittering away out of sight.

“It’s best you don’t,” the man said before taking a longer gulp of his drink, “for now, at least.”

“Your tone implies a future.”

Scanning the room, I wondered if my mind was conjuring this up, my brain firing off frantic, random signals in anticipation of destruction. But it felt too detailed, too real. It was more grounded than a dream. Imaginative didn’t feel like a proper adjective to ascribe to myself, and nothing about the room felt particularly familiar.

My chair scraping against the soft pile of the carpet forced me to register that I was on my feet and approaching the window. As I looked, the warm yellow light diffused enough to reveal a swirl of winding stone paths below. Autumnal shades of red and orange bathed everything, familiar yet jarringly saturated.

“Is it all real?” I asked, pressing my hands to the glass and finding it cool to the touch.

“As real as you and me.”

I turned back to the turkey vulture man. “My question stands.”

He smiled with his human mouth. “Please, come have a seat, Agnes.”

My ears perked up as if accustomed to the name.

I pointed to my chest with a shaky hand. “Agnes?”

He nodded.

“What about you?”

He extended a hand to me. “Ephraim.”

“Just Ephraim?” I took a tentative step forward.

“If you want to be technical, I’m your chancellor, but that’s a bit of a mouthful.”

“No last name?”

“Last names indicate familial attachment, which isn’t relevant here. Your future at this institution and beyond depends on your ability to stay flexible and untethered. You’re free to develop relationships while here but with the understanding that, after you graduate, you will, likely, go decades between visits. It’s just the nature of our existence.”

“Graduate?” I asked, circling back to my side of the desk.

Before sitting, I picked up his teacup, holding it up to my nose and giving it a sniff. It smelled bloody but also oddly sweet, like violets.

“Yes, that leads into the real meat of my speech.” He eyed me as I swirled the liquid in the cup. “You can try it if it tempts you, but I make no guarantees about the flavor.”

I set the cup back in front of him. “Sorry.”

He waved away my apology and motioned for me to sit. “Curiosity is an important quality here. It’s best not to waste such a valuable resource on the refreshments.”

“Then, spill.” I felt his eyes track me as I settled back in my seat, as if expecting me to lash out suddenly like a cornered animal.

“Well, Miss Agnes, due to the nature of your untimely demise, you qualify for enrollment at our Revenant Academy.”

My eyebrows climbed my forehead. “Academy?”

“Yes.”

“There’s school in the afterlife?”

“It’s not just any school. This is where my faculty and I have been teaching the recently deceased how to haunt the mortal world for centuries and, sometimes, even longer.”

“You need to be taught that sort of thing?”

“It’s not as easy as it looks.” He winked. “Despite popular belief, we don’t just let spirits reenter the mortal world willy-nilly. That would be a nightmare to organize. Alas, when dear old granny returns from the great beyond to comfort someone, it’s usually just one of us with a few cosmetic tweaks.”

“And what does Granny have to say about this identity theft?”

He shrugged. “There’s no way for us to know. By the time we get the job, Granny is somewhere we can’t reach her.”

A shiver tickled my spine, and I steered the conversation to calmer waters. “Why do I qualify, then? Am I exceptionally ghoulish?”

Silence stretched between us, and I could tell he was choosing his words carefully.

“It’s complicated criteria, but in short, you have unfinished business. Those who can’t quite leave the mortal world behind need to be trained to interact with it properly.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Of course,” he said, spinning in his chair to face the corner of the room over his left shoulder.

I hadn’t seen the door at first, even though it was a massive black blemish in the otherwise sun-soaked room. It seemed to be slowly eating the surrounding light. I got the distinct feeling that, if I watched it long enough, bits of the wall would break off and float into it like a black hole.

“What’s in there?” I asked, the back of the chair biting into my spine as I subconsciously leaned away from the door.

“Once you cross over, there’s no going back. Only those on the other side of the door know what lies beyond it.”

“Not even you?”

He shook his head. “If you’re not interested in this offer, you can walk right through there and carry on into the true afterlife.”

“So, if I attend this ghost school, I’ll just stay here forever?”

He laughed. “Everyone goes through the door eventually. You’ll just have to wait for retirement.”

“Right.”

“So, think on it. Take as much time as you need,” he said, then leaned back and sipped from his teacup.

“You don’t have anywhere better to be?”

He shrugged. “I’m everywhere I need to be.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, still inclined to believe this was some odd dream. But when I ground my nails into my palms, I was met with pain.

Although ghost school sounded daunting, something in my gut twisted every time I looked at the black door.

Not yet.

“I guess—”

The end of the sentence caught in my throat.

From under the desk came scraping, and an animal emerged, a deflated soccer ball clutched between its long jaws. It looked like a medium-sized dog but longer and sinewy, with stripes on its flanks. It seemed to offer me the lumpy ball, but when I reached for it, my hand sank right through the warped pleather.

“Why can’t I touch it?” I asked.

“That’s one of the things you have to learn.”

The creature moved, and I was surprised when its thick skull bumped into my fingers.

“This is a strange dog.”

“That’s because he’s not a dog. He’s a thylacine. They weren’t quite so domesticated in life, but Kazak has had a few centuries to adjust to human company.”

Kazak butted up against me, dropping the ball to the floor and shoving his face into my palm.

“If you think he’s interesting, he’s only the beginning.” Ephraim took another swig of tea. “Have you come to a decision yet?”

“I guess I just don’t even really understand what I’ll be doing here. What does an academy for the recently deceased even entail?”

He smiled. “You will attend classes, make friends, and drink the horrible cider concoction the upperclassmen brew behind the dining hall. I promise you, unless you squint, you might not be able to tell the difference between Revenant Academy and your average modern-day liberal arts college.”

“That sounds . . . nice.”

It came out sounding like a question as I struggled to picture it.

It seemed too beyond the pale to be true.

“We do our best to make things comfortable, and as long as you follow the rules, the afterlife is pretty easy to enjoy here.”

“Rules?”

He brushed off my worry. “It’s nothing terribly oppressive, I promise.”

My eyes flicked to the looming black door over his shoulder, trying to shake the sensation it was watching me in return.

I looked back up. “Then, yes, I accept, I guess.”

“Fantastic!” He slapped his hands together and got to his feet.

A sharp creak behind me had me spinning in my chair to find a door opening.

“All right, chop-chop,” he said, already halfway to the door.

I stood, but my feet remained planted on the red carpet. “Where are you going?”

He looked back, gesturing for me to follow. “You need to be sorted.”