The East Coast Sorcerer was unhappy.

Like any wicked sorcerer, he had expected to be caught eventually, but he hadn’t expected to be caught so soon.

He had barely even done anything yet! A string of unrelated hauntings, some casual arson… it was the latest supernatural technology that had proved his undoing; he was sure of it. The Paranormal Crimes Unit had traced his signature easily. He needed to be more careful about that. Evil gods, but he hated technology.

And now he was being exiled to Silicon Valley.

He would almost have preferred to have gone to jail. At least there were real ghosts there – proper haints, who’d died lonesome, painful deaths; they would have broken him out eventually. Which was probably why the government had stopped sending sorcerers to prison.

Instead, he was in a matrix of metal and glass that glimmered like a mirage, choking him, constricting him like the inside walls of a python.

He was the most unhappy sorcerer you’d ever seen.

There were ghosts here, of course. But not… the proper sort.

“And then Bethany got pregnant – out of wedlock – and gave the baby to her mother, and then Sadie showed up in the same dress she wore last week, and-”

“That’s very nice,” the sorcerer said, trying to hurry away from the translucent ex-starlet. “Don’t you have somewhere else to haunt?”

“Oh, no!” Said the glossy brunette – Abigail, her name had been – twirling a lock of hair around a ghostly finger. “You’re the most interesting person I’ve gotten to haunt since I overdosed fifteen years ago!”

The sorcerer sighed. It was just his luck. Not only was he sensitive to supernatural disturbances, but he also possessed a sort of ghostly magnetism. Ghosts followed him like he was a charismatic cult leader. Never mind that he possessed no charisma; or if he did, he never used it. Ghosts would flock to him from blocks away just to chat, and were easily influenced by his desires. It was why laying waste to the East would have been so easy…

“Hello?” Said a small voice.

The sorcerer looked around, but saw no one. He frowned.

Normally, ghosts never chose to be invisible to him. So it was improbable that- ah. He looked down.

The floating figure of a small boy stood just off to the side from where he’d been walking. He had wide eyes and fair hair, white under the ghost effect, with a curlicue over his forehead. He looked like a young cherub, or a baby angel.

The sorcerer’s nose wrinkled in distaste. He did not like angels.

“Hello,” he said politely. “How did you die?”

“I got run over by a limo,” the ghostly boy said, pointing at the street behind him.

The sorcerer looked further down. The boy’s legs were a mangled ruin.

“Ah,” said the sorcerer. “I suppose you have some unfinished business here, then – some unresolved anger toward the person who owned the limo? Or perhaps toward all limo owners?” He could work with this. Class warfare wasn’t his specialty, but any kind of anger was enough.

“No,” said the boy. “I’m just bored.” He scratched the back of his head. “I’m tired of always coming back to this same old street. I visit home every now and then, but nothing new happens. I want to go see new things.”

“Oh,” said the sorcerer. “Well… I intend to do some traveling in the future. Across the entire country, if I can manage it without getting caught. I suppose you would like to come along?”

“Yes,” said the boy, eyes widening. “I would love to.”

“Alright,” said the sorcerer. “Where’s your touchstone?”

“My what?”

“The thing anchoring you to your death here. Is it the street? The limosine? Your childhood home?”

The boy didn’t know, but a series of tests revealed that his touchstone was the bicycle he’d been riding at the time of death. The bicycle had been buried in some landfill a few miles away, where it would be nearly impossible to find.

The sorcerer sighed. He didn’t want to disappoint a ghost, even if it was an angelic little snot.

“Let’s go visit your parents,” he said. “Maybe they kept some part of the bike.”