~Ghost/Camila POV~
The voice came back three hours after the clearing.
I had been moving through the outer woods, putting distance between myself and the ward line I had chosen not to cross, and I was managing the power with the kind of attention that left nothing spare for anything else, when the body I was occupying simply stopped walking.
Not because I told it to stop.
Because something inside it decided we were done moving for the moment.
I stood in the middle of the path and took inventory of what was happening, and what was happening was that Camila's consciousness, which I had been treating as residue for weeks, was no longer behaving like residue.
"You heard me earlier," the voice said. From the inside, not the outside. Quiet and completely certain. "In the clearing, when you spoke out loud. You were talking to me."
"Yes," I said. Out loud, because I did not yet know how to do this any other way.
