Page 119 of Hot Ghost Summer

The app loads on the screen, and he goes through the motions of creating an account. When he enters his name, it filters him through the code to the back end, where a pre-prepared message awaits him.

Welcome, Theo, to your new job.

“What’s this?” he asks, but he keeps clicking through the prompts, so I wait for him to uncover it on his own. After all, he’s observant.

He reads out the title at the top of the screen. “Bio-Resonance Activity Tracker. The BRAT app is the world’s only digitised ghost-hunting resource. An extensive database, this field guide t’ ghosts and ghouls is…”

He comes to a stop in the middle of the street, and his voice drops to a whisper.

“Hollis, what did you do?”

“I signed my database into your name when I sent it to the developer,” I admit.

“I can see that, but… why? This is your legacy, everything you spent your life working toward.” He sniffs, tears building already. “I can’t… I can’t accept this, Hollis.”

Oh, my soft-hearted Baby.

“The why is really very simple. Without you, without your kindness and thoughtfulness, this app wouldn’t exist. Without you, I wouldn’t exist. Donating the income from it to you doesn’t even come close to repaying everything you’ve done for me.”

Theo wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “No, I mean, I can’t accept this because you said you signed it int’ my name, but you spelled it wrong. My name is Theo, T-H-E-O, but here you spelled it B-R-A-T.”

I cough around a laugh.

thirty-seven

The Hills Are Alive

Theo

Several Months Later

Igive a low whistle and shrug my bag strap higher up my shoulder. “When you said your family lived in a country estate, I was imagining something like the big manor houses near where I’m from. Not this…”

Hollis smiles indulgently as he manifests beside me. His hands find his trouser pockets. Is he… nervous? He was like this when he took me to his flat in Chelsea for the first time too.

Leaning up, I kiss his cheek. “It’s beautiful. How old is it?”

He frees a hand to point at the quaint wooden porch that shelters the front door from the worst of the snow. Built into a two-storey natural stone façade, the dark-wood windows that surround it are purposefully small, likely to trap the heat, whereas the third floor and fourth-floor windows are set into rich timber panelling. Simple, elegant, and classically Alpine.

“That’s the original door and porch. They were built sometime in the sixteen hundreds, but we don’t have an exact date. The rest has been extended and modified over the years.” He flips up the collar on his thick pea coat and extends his hand for me to hold.

I thread our fingers together, and he leads me further down the steep and private road the driver dropped us off on. Then we pass by the front door without stopping. Confused, my nose wrinkles and I crane my neck to look back at it as he guides me around the corner of the property.

“Family doesn’t use that entrance,” he explains, as we mount a sweeping stone staircase to an open terrace. And that’s where my jaw hits the floor.

Breathtaking mountain views stretch as far as I can see. Carved into the towering limestone cliffs, Hollis’s family home overlooks the picturesque Ötschergräben Canyon and is surrounded by snow-covered peaks.

I drop his hand to walk over to the glass balustrade that separates me from a sheer, several-hundred-metre drop. There was no hint of this from the front of the house, which looked beautiful enough, but this… this is something else entirely. This is high-end Alpine living.

My exhale puffs out as a cloud of white mist, and Hollis draws up alongside me.

“When was the last time you were ’ere?” I keep my voice to a respectful whisper as my gaze sweeps over the tall rocks touched by a soft dusk gold.

“A year ago. I moved to London six months before I met you.”

“You left all this…” I sweep my arm out to broadly indicate the stunning panorama. “For London?”

He turns his back to it, forearm resting on the glass barrier as he focuses those electric white-blue eyes on me. “I left because if I stayed, then nothing would have changed.”