The hall was growing dim as the sun began to creep toward the horizon outside, and the elevator took an interminable time to come when he called it. The long hallway, all linoleum and flickering fluorescent lights, felt suddenly cold. Ulysses frowned.

The elevator slid open and he stepped in.

In general, ghosts did not wander campus buildings. There was no specific reason for this other than that students tended to be young and fairly healthy, so there weren’t a lot of deaths. But sometimes buildings could develop a kind of rudimentary self-possession. Ulysses didn’t know if that was indeed what was happening, but it felt like something was trying to get through to him. There was a sense of tension in the atmosphere, like the breeze before a thunderstorm. The elevator crawled downward slowly, creaking as it went.

On the fourth floor, the door opened, and Sam was standing there.

Ulysses jumped before he realized that Sam was corporeal.

“Sorry, Lenkov,” Sam said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I didn’t mean to—I’ll get the next one.”

“No!” Ulysses reached out and held the door. “You just startled me. It’s fine.” Sam looked cautious but stepped into the elevator. “Also, call me Ulysses.”

“Really?” Sam pressed the button for the ground floor automatically, even though Ulysses had already pressed it. “Call me Sam.”

The elevator doors creaked and shuffled closed, giving the sense that they really didn’t want to, and the elevator took off again.

“What brings you to this part of campus?” Ulysses asked. The elevator was getting noticeably cold now, and a very slow breeze stirred Sam’s hair.

“Research.” He glanced at Ulysses. “What about you?”

“Business.” He smiled politely. The sense of tension was getting stronger, and something definitely smelled odd—pungent, like myrrh rather than old paper. Frost started to form on the inside of the elevator doors. “Did you, uh, get a new cologne or something?” His heart beat faster, adrenaline hitting his bloodstream as his body realized something was happening and objected.

“No,” Sam said. “That’s not—I don’t really like scented—”

Every hair stood up on Ulysses’s arms. The elevator jolted to a stop.

Sam looked around, clutching his briefcase. “This is—” The light went out and he made an involuntary little squeak. Ulysses’s eyes went wide; this guy, who was apparently an incredibly powerful magician, was afraid of the dark? He reached into his pocket and fished out a Zippo.

“Hey,” he said, “it’s gonna be all right.” He flipped the wheel.

As the light flared, they saw words scraped into the frost on the inside of the elevator doors: DIONYSUS IS MINE.

Sam actually shouted then. He stumbled backward into Ulysses, knocking them both against the wall of the elevator. The Zippo dropped to the floor and went out. For a moment, Ulysses was pressed against the wall by Sam’s rangy form. Lacking a better idea, he put his hands on the man, one on his upper arm, the other grazing his

side and hip. “Hey,” he murmured quietly. “It’s okay.”

The lights came back on as abruptly as they’d gone off. There was no frost, no message. Sam looked up at the ceiling, then back at Ulysses, wide-eyed. “You saw that, right?”

“Yeah, I saw it.”