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“It’s a video we filmed for the Grimdale Cemetery Instagram,” I say. “It’s about you.”
“I hear that, but…but when did you do this?”
“Today.” I lean forward and pick up the leather-bound journal from the table. “Edward helped me write the script, and Mina and Quoth helped to film and edit it. They’re all much more artistic than me. I’m thinking of hiring them to do the Grimdale history project full-time.”
The faintest glow shimmers around Ambrose. His silver cord twitches, jerking toward the object I hold in my hands.
“But why? The project was supposed to be about the most famous and remarkable graves at Grimdale—”
“Why? Because you’reremarkable, Ambrose. You are wonderful, and no one ever appreciated you in your first life. So many of us spend our lives wishing for a second chance. But even though you were ripped off because people couldn’t see past your blindness as a novelty to appreciate you as a person, you never have wished to do it over. You have always been content with what is. Well, today, you get your second chance. Edward and I…we want everyone in the whole world to hear your story. And it’s working, better than we could ever have imagined.”
“Bree, something’s happening to me.”
Ambrose holds his stomach, where the silver cord stretches and unfurls, coiling between us. Silver light pours from his eyes, from his open lips. The tears on his cheeks turn to rivers of silver, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything more beautiful.
I follow his silver cord until it plunges into my own chest, and I grit my teeth as it pulls taut. The pain shoots through my body, but this time, I’m ready for it. A familiar fear rattles in my heart, that I don’t know what I’m doing, that I will accidentally send Ambrose away instead of bringing him to me. But I hold strong.
I know who I am now.
“Ambrose, we have so much to tell you.” I look over at Edward, who smiles broadly – not his self-satisfied smirk, but a real, genuine smile. We have had the best day. “We put this video up this morning, and it’s already gone viral. It’s had over twenty-five thousand views. Hundreds of people have commented on it. Mr. Pitts says that the phone’s been ringing off the hook with people booking cemetery tours. Someone’s asking about a documentary. And that’s not all…” I grit my teeth through the pain as I raise my phone to click through a button to another site. “Mina helped me to set up this page. It’s for people to take pre-orders of your book. We’ve already sold eighty-two copies…”
“What book?” Ambrose’s eyes darken. “I don’t have a book.”
“You do. A memoir about your adventures.”
Ambrose’s body shimmers with light. He looks a little queasy. “But the only copy of my manuscript burned in the fire.”
I drop the leather-bound volume in his lap. Ambrose yelps in surprise and the book falls through him and lands on the sofa with aplop. I should feel at least a little guilty, but the silver cord wraps tighter and tighter, and now I feel only him – his love for me stretching across the Veil that separates us.
“That’s your book,” Edward says stiffly. “I found it hidden in the piano in the attic. You put it away there for safekeeping and forgot about it. I saw you do it before you left for your Russia trip.”
“You saw me hide my book?” Ambrose’s eyes widen as he leaps away from the book as if it might bite him. “When I was alive?”
“Yes, and I should have told you about it, but I didn’t.” Edward stares at his shoes. “It was wrong of me. I realized then that if you had the book, your unfinished business would be complete and you’d cross over and leave me all alone with Pax again. And the Roman might be cool—”
“I am cool!” Pax calls out.
“He isn’t…that is…” Edward coughs. “He and I have a different kind of friendship. I did not want to lose you.”
Ambrose swallows. His whole body glows with light. “I understand. I don’t want to lose you, either.”
“No, you don’t understand. I should have said something sooner, on the very day that Brianna made Pax Living! I should have said something earlier than that. I should have given you the choice—”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Ambrose says.
“I haveeverythingto be sorry for,” Edward rages. “At first I was afraid of losing you, but then, I was jealous. Pax got to touch Brianna. He got to be with her in all the ways that I have hungered for her since she returned to us. All I have longed for in these years of exile between the living and the dead is the kind of love that would make a true poet of me. And now I have that love but I…I cannot touch it. I cannot make it real. All the relationships I had in my life were because people wanted something from me. My friends cared for me only because I kept the party going and the absinthe flowing freely. My string of adoring countesses were enamoured of my wicked tongue and the things it could do to them, but they never knew my heart as Brianna knows it, as you and Pax know it. I had everything in life, and yet I still managed to squander it all. So what could I possibly wish for so hard in death that it tethers me to this place for eternity? There is no answer to that question, for the truth is that I am not a ghost because I have unfinished business, but as the ultimate punishment for my sins.”
Ambrose reaches for his friend. “Oh, Edward, no—”
Edward backs away and continues talking. “Do not feel sorry for me. I have accepted the truth of it now. But when I found the book, I knew it meant that Brianna could bring you back, too, and I didn’t want to be the only one left as a remnant. I didn’t think I was strong enough to endure the torture of it. And so I kept it hidden. But now I know that I can endure anything if I can have but a taste of Brianna’s love. And so, I want you to have what I can never have. I was not a good friend to either of you. For that, I apologise. To make it up to you, I shall write an epic poem immortalizing my distress—”
“No!” Edward, Ambrose and I yell in unison.
The room fades from my vision as the silver light spools around me. The tightening in my chest becomes unbearable, and I gasp for breath. But I keep holding on, keep winding tight the silver thread that tethers Ambrose to me and to the Living world. The light welcomes him inside, envelopes him in my magic, and his life runs through my fingers, decades of unlived time still waiting for him…
“Thank you, my friend.” Ambrose’s eyes fill with starlight tears. “Thank you for this gift. Thank you for not telling me before, where on my darkest days I may have chosen to leave this place forever, and I would never have met Bree, and I wouldn’t have this moment, right now, with you. Thank you…thank…heavens, but I do feel strange…and has it got bright in here all of a sudden…”
Ambrose reaches for Edward, his limbs encircled in the silver light. As he moves, the light moves with him, tugging at—
