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alone—or both.
    “You are working in pairs,” Piotr said, fingers clenching for the handle of his knife. Anger pulsed in a hard, steady beat behind his eyes, giving the clearing a stutter-flash look similar to what he saw when he let the visions of the living world sneak up on him. His fury felt like it was lighting up the night. “You haven't gone back to your old ways.”
    While the ghosts of adults and those of younger people, like the ones the Riders gathered in large, protective groups, tended to congregate where they'd had the most fun while alive, the Walkers had shed their silver cords and their souls in order to ensure their own sort of hideous half-life. For centuries they had been solitary, mistrusting creatures that avoided not only the light and heat of the living but also the other dead.
    Until the White Lady came.
    “Hunting alone?” The Walker waved a negligent hand as if to say that is so yesterday . “Why should we do so when it is so easy to draw foolish Riders away from prey?”
    “Not all Riders are like me.” Piotr put his back to the closest wall. “Most Riders go in packs. They're strong in will. Much stronger than a beast like you.”
    “Yes, we learn from the flesh!” The Walker cried, clapping its bony hands together. “She healed us, made us stronger, and taught us well! Many good lessons from the White Lady, yes! She says for us to work together, like flesh, like Riders do, like the other spirits do. It is hard at first but the White Lady had ways of making us follow her orders.”
    It touched its face, where the taut skin beneath the hollow eyes was crisscrossed with twisted ropes of scars and crosshatched brands burned into the flesh.
    Despite his hatred of the once-man before him, Piotr winced in sympathy. He'd been well acquainted with the White Lady's persuasive methods. She'd been a master of healing the Walkers with a kiss or, if they angered her, stripping them to bare bones with a swipe.
    It was no mystery why the Walkers had flocked to the White Lady, while they willingly subjected themselves to all sorts of agony in her employ. Living in the Never required a constant influx of willpower, the ability to keep slogging through the dim, gray days of eternity without looking too hard at the shadow of the world around you. The younger a person was when they died, the easier it was to keep going on in the Never. The young seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of willpower and hope.
    Not so for souls who'd lived a longer life before passing into the Never. It was often a struggle just to keep going, and adult spirits who found their will weakening had a limited number of choices—they could allow themselves to fade away, as the Shades did, or they could follow the path of the Walkers.
    Being a Walker was to willingly become a monster; Walkers chose to cannibalize the essence, the unlived years, of other spirits. Those unlived years were most plentiful in the ghosts of children, the Lost. They could get nothing from the Riders, but the Lost were like ripe peaches, sweet and juicy and filled with life.
    No one could remember when it had all begun, but it had been this way for eons. The Riders grouped together and protected the Lost from the Walkers, the Walkers did everything in their power to steal away the child-spirits every chance they got.
    Then the White Lady—Wendy's mother—had come into the Never and everything had grown further twisted and wrong. The Walkers, normally untrusting and near feral, began to work together. And the Riders, normally a tight-knit group dedicated to the Lost's cause, had fallen apart.
    Part of this, Piotr knew, was his fault.
    “Jamie's gone,” Piotr said, holding out his hand to show the Walker that the cap had vanished. “But you're still here. Didn't you want some of your prey?”
    The Walker patted its midsection. “I eat when I eat. Tonight is not my night for prey. Tonight is my night for talking to the Rider. We knew you would come