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I hold the glass in my hands and breathe deep. But just as I go to take a drink, something slams into me. A feeling ofwrongness.
It reminds me of the demon, but it can’t be. The demon is gone.
Yet it feels like he is right here in this room, his mist crawling about inside me.
I search around for some reason for this feeling. “Pax, can you see something odd about this room?”
“No,” Pax says. “Unless you mean people drinking wine without watering it down…wait, yes, there is something outside the window. It is the night. It looks…wrong.”
“The night looks wrong?” I stand up. Pax loops his arm in mine and drags me over to the window.
“I see Bree and Edward walking toward the cemetery. There are many stars in the sky tonight,” Pax says. “But not over the cemetery. It is as if a black cloud hovers there, but I see no cloud.”
A shiver rockets down my spine. “I don’t like this. I feel…cold. But not a normal kind of cold.”
“There’s only cold. No different types.”
“No, there are different types. When I was travelling across Russia during the winter, I experienced a kind of cold that lives in your bones. That’s a different type of cold to getting into a bath after others have finished, and the water has cooled. And it’s vastly different to what I’m feeling now, which is a kind of creeping, unsettling coldness and…that’sit.”
“What’s it?”
“It feels like I’m touching the demon,” I whisper. “Father Maxwell says that before this happened, he noticed the Veil thinning around him, and once it’s thin enough, that’s how a revenant like the Ripper, or a demon, could slip through. I think that the Veil is thinning over Grimdale.”
“But Bree has only brought you and I back to life,” Pax says. “Not lots of people like Father Maxwell.”
“You heard what Maxwell said – it’s way more powerful than what he does. Maybe it’s enough. Oh, this could be a bit of a pickle.” I dust off the front of my frock coat. “Bree said she’s figured out how to bring Edward back. If she does, it could be all that true evil needs to pour out and come for her. We need to stop her.Now.”
43
Bree
“Are you carrying that pry bar because we’re going to fuck up Kelly Kingston’s horseless carriage?” Edward’s lips curl back into a smirk. “Because your prince is amenable to that. But I must insist that you first allow me to whisper a poetical curse in her ear. I have one written for just such an occasion.”
“We’re not going to haunt Kelly.”
“Then I must confess to being confused as to the nature of our outing.”
We near the end of the path and step in front of his mausoleum. “Do you trust me?”
Edward’s lip wobbles as he peers up at the leering cupids that guard the door to his eternal resting place. “I trust you with my afterlife.”
“Then come with me.” I hold out my hand.
After a few moments, he takes it. His ghostly fingers slip into mine.
In my other hand, I hold the ancient key to the mausoleum that I swiped from the ticket office.
We have keys to all the mausoleums in the cemetery. We go in sometimes to check on things, make sure there’s been no vandalism, and to do a bit of cleaning. But I’ve never been inside Edward’s tomb. It felt wrong somehow to disturb his rest, even though Edward’s afterlife hasn’t exactly been restful.
Tonight, that changes.
We walk over the threshold together. I lift my mobile up and shine my torch around the dim interior. The walls are elaborately carved with dancing skeletons – memento mori revelling in their danse macabre. In the centre of the room is a long stone sarcophagus, the lid carved with a line by John Dunne.
‘Go and catch a falling star.’
“I always loved that poem,” Edward says with a sigh.
I move around the sarcophagus, peering into every shadowy corner, not certain what I’m looking for.
