A tremendous crash echoed through the hall.
Everyone froze. The music stopped. Heads turned toward the source of the sound.
Clyde stood in the middle of the dance floor, looking extremely pleased with himself. At his feet lay the remains of what had once been a very large, very expensive-looking vase.
“Clyde!” Archie barked, his face a mask of exasperation. “That vase was from the sixteenth century.”
Clyde bellowed apologetically. Maybe. It was hard to tell his apologetic “moo” from his excited one.
“Sorry doesn’t fix a sixteenth-century vase.”
But Clyde wasn’t looking at Archie. He’d swung his big head toward the door, and his eyes had widened.
Everyone followed his gaze.
“Oh my goddess,” Lia gasped.
In the doorway stood another ghost. A Highland coo, to be exact. She was just like Clyde, semi-transparent and glowing faintly in the firelight. She was prettier, if such a thing could be said about a spectral coo. And she was looking at Clyde with an expression that could only be described as coy.
“Is that...” Willow started.
“A lassie ghost coo,” Ramsay finished, sounding completely baffled. “There’s a lassie ghost coo.”
Clyde bellowed again, but this time it was different. Softer. Almost... romantic?
Or maybe I’d just reached the point of exhaustion that I was reading everything into Clyde’s tones.
The lady ghost coo bellowed back.
“Bloody hell,” I said. “But I think … Clyde may have found a special lady friend.”
Clyde and his new companion approached each other slowly, their transparent noses touching. It should have been ridiculous. Itwasridiculous. But there was also something oddly sweet about it—two spectral bovines finding each other in the middle of a celebration, surrounded by witches and warriors and gnomes that couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
“Where did she come from?” Sophie asked, having reappeared at some point.
“Hector might know.” Lachlan looked around. “Hector?”
The ghostly farmer materialized near the fire, his translucent hat clutched in his hands.
“That’s Bonnie,” he said sheepishly. “She’s been haunting the old dairy barn on the north edge of theproperty for about two hundred years. Kept to herself, mostly. But I think...” He trailed off, watching Clyde and Bonnie nuzzle each other. “I think she got lonely.”
“Bonnie and Clyde,” Willow wheezed, waving a hand in front of her face as she swallowed down laughter. “I can’t. It’s too good.”
Clyde and Bonnie had begun walking together toward the door, their ghostly forms bumping against each other. Clyde paused at the threshold and looked back at us, letting out one final bellow that somehow managed to sound grateful.
Then they walked through the wall together and disappeared.
“Well,” Hilda said into the stunned silence. “I suppose that’s one way to end a party.”
And then, because the night couldn’t end on anything but bedlam, Gnorman climbed back onto his table, microphone in hand.
“One more song!” he announced. “For the happy couples. All of them.”
The opening notes of “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” filled the hall.
Graham looked at me. I looked at Graham.
“No,” I said.
