Page 86 of How I Met Your Murderer

“You’ll take care of my sister, won’t you?” I asked her quickly, before my throat could get too tight. “When I’m not around anymore?”

“Who?” she asked, frowning, even though I was pointing at her. “Eric James Crawford, you aren’t going anywhere yet. Enough of that talk.” She reached out, and I thought she might pinch my cheek, but she cupped it instead with an icy hand. “So warm,” she murmured wonderingly before giving Raff a hug, too.

“We should do this again sometime,” Jordy suggested to the room at large, and even though everyone knew it wouldn’t be possible, we all nodded.

“Oh darling, we’re absolutely doing a sequel,” Basil told him, putting a hand on his back and guiding him toward the land of the living—the castle’s front door.

And that was it.

One last game. One more item scratched off my list while everyone said goodnight and pretended their hearts weren’t churning with so many emotions.

At 1:52am, Raff fell asleep in my arms, the blankets half-kicked off because he said he was too warm snuggled up next to me. Once he was out, I tried so many different ways to say goodbye, but I couldn’t get the words to leave my tongue. I ate one of his protein bars instead, because I was hungry for the second time in a handful of days.

I chose a brownie-flavored one, avoiding the chocolate peanut butter.

Oh, peanut butter. It had tasted better than I remembered. It was apparently also a spirit aphrodisiac, but as worked up as I was, it hadn’t changed that I wanted Raff to be the one I shared all my firsts with. I’d even been about to tell him that I loved him before my stomach interrupted us with a random craving.

I hadn’t tried to tell him since. I was sure of what I felt, then and now, but I didn’t want him to spend the rest of his life grieving what might have been.

We would have been magic.

With a side of chaos, of course. But we could have worked through whatever life threw our way, done it all with a cup of tea while we watched the stars and talked late into the night.

When I finished the protein bar, I snuggled up against Raff’s back, feeling at home in my body. Feeling the pull of the earth more than the dark pulse of the castle. Not feeling ready to float through any open doors to other worlds. Loving him had helped me fully embrace every part of myself, all the things he so openly admired, and I wasn’t ready to leave that behind.

I counted Raff’s heartbeats. Even now that I knew how I died, it had just . . . become a habit, looking out for that heart. What if the elemental attacked him for moving me on? Surely Jordy would help him get to his van and get out of here.

“I love you,” I whispered when he stirred slightly in his sleep. “Love you, Raff.”

There was only one item left on my list now. One more gift I wanted to give him, the same one he’d given to me the other night. He had felt incredible, hot and tight and willing, his body drawing me in like it was playing for keeps. If only.

I refused to sleep while there were only so many precious hours left to share with the only man I’d ever loved, would ever love. But I did close my eyes and drift. Thinking about what I wanted to say if I wrote him something in his notebook. A goodbye letter, a few words for him to find once I was gone. But none of them sounded quite right, maybe because all the words that really mattered were ones that had been spoken between us under falling stars, in the stillness of the night, holding hands in the courtyard. He already had my best stories, my questionable singing, my most passionate rambles. He had my compliments and my flirting and my care. There wasn’t anything more I could leave him with.

I just didn’t want to leave him at all.

At 9:25am, we headed inside for tea, me fully manifested and holding Raff’s hand. We’d barely stepped into the foyer when I was struck by the contrast in energy between the living and the dead. Between the bustle and brightness of all those preparing for tomorrow’s festivities and the dark pull of a place that seemed to have its own sort of gravity, rooted in restless sorrow.

It was so strong that I nearly pulled Raff back outside.

“What is it?” he asked when I tugged on his hand. One look at my face, and he brought an arm up around my waist, glowering at the walls like he expected them to sprout eyes.

Here, it seemed like anything was possible.

“I think I’ve realized why Síofra and the others look . . .”

“Like they’re getting in the Halloween spirit?” Raff supplied, as I struggled to find a gentle way to say it.

“Exactly. I think it’s because—well, you know how ghosts need energy to manifest? They have to draw it from somewhere, right? Usually, they draw from whatever killed them or the place they died.” I paused for breath, and Raff nodded. He knew all this already. He also had the most adorable case of bedhead, so I reached up to smooth his hair while I continued in a low voice: “The elemental killed some of us, right? And it’s . . . how you explained it, it’s like a part of this place. Like it can’t be separated anymore. So what if the energy we draw on to manifest is . . . tainted by that thing, somehow? What if that’s why I sometimes felt so out of control that I had to go scream in the dungeon?”

Well, that explained a lot. Stunned by my own realization, I was quiet for a moment, but Raff picked up the trail of thought for me. I could always count on him.

“And since it’s getting stronger,” he said thoughtfully, “maybe it’s harder for the other spirits to maintain their usual appearance. Maybe they were sort of . . . used to its old frequency, able to use it to manifest in the ways they wanted most of the time, but this more powerful one has them all banjaxed. All messed up,” he added in a disturbingly accurate American accent, like I wasn’t already used to his slang.

Suddenly he was grinning at me, and leaned in for a kiss despite a florist bustling past us with her arms full. “There’s that smile I’ve been missing,” he said triumphantly.

He needed to get used to it, but I didn’t say that.

I just followed him to the kitchen for tea.