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It’s…strange. It feels wrong, but in the way that wrong things can sometimes be exactly what you need. All of me feels stretched and full. He’s moving around, making himself comfortable, and I am so nervous about him being there but also…this is beautiful. He’s inside me. He’s in my veins and my heart and my bones.
He is me and I am him.
His thoughts and sensations crowd out mine until I’m no longer certain where I end and he begins.
A memory surges to the surface. It’s wobbly, the edges blurred. As soon as I settle inside it, my head swims.
This is an opium memory, I realise. It doesn’t belong to me. Edward is high as a kite and so now I am, too.
“What do you mean, you don’t wish to marry?” A woman’s shrill voice enters my skull. “I will make you a fine wife. I will never tie you down, if that is your concern. I just want us to continue like this forever. I love you, Eddie. I want to be your wife.”
My body swells with emotions that don’t belong to me. There’s pity and there’s also a surge of hope, that maybe this is it for me, maybe her love is what will set me free. But I am resolved. I know that she does not truly love me as I long to be loved. She loves theideaof me, but I will never live up to her lofty ideals. As soon as I disappoint her, she will fall just as hard and fast and deep for another.
“You will regret this. You will regret giving up your life for me,” I tell her, and this voice is mine but not mine, the words come from me and yet I’ve never heard them before. “I am not worthy of your devotion, and I do not love you as you deserve to be loved. You must stay, and endure, and let your pain fuel your art. But know that wherever I am, you will always be a muse to me.”
And so I tell her no, and I watch her pretty face distort with sadness, and then rage. She balls her pretty little fingers into fists and beats them against a pillow.
She rages. “If I can’t have you, no one can!”
She bursts into tears and flees the room, but I don’t watch her go. My vision swims and I reach for the wine bottle next to the bed, but it’s empty. Damn, I need more. I stagger to my feet, and that’s when a dark shadow lunges at me, and everything goes black…
…and when I open my eyes, Edward hovers above me, his dark eyes wide with concern.
“Are you well, Brianna? I was inside you, and then you left me.”
“I fell too deep into one of your memories,” I say. “You were high and it dragged me under. Thank you for pulling me out.”
“I should never have agreed to this. I should have known that I could hurt you.”
“No, Edward, it was beautiful. What was it like for you?”
His long eyelashes flutter, and his lips curl back into a rare, genuine smile. “I saw you, Brianna. I saw all of you. I was you, and it was the most beautiful experience of my afterlife. And it made me realise something.”
My throat closes. I don’t want to talk about what he might have seen. “What?”
“When I was in the Ripper, I might have got a clue that can help us.”
That isn’t what I expected at all. But I’ll take it. I’ve had far too much vulnerability for tonight. I sit up. “What is it?”
“I saw the Ripper watching as one of his victim’s bodies was discovered. There was a man in a greatcoat trying to control the crowd. He was of special interest to the Ripper, who enjoyed taunting him. It was part of the game for him. I think this man might have been a police officer, and he probably knows the Ripper better than anyone. What if we could get his help.”
“But he’ll be long dead by now…oh.” Edward’s suggestion registers. “If he’s a ghost, we could talk to him. You’re right.”
I crawl out of bed and find Vera’s book of serial killers. I flip to the four-page spread on Jack the Ripper and point to a lithograph of a figure in the bottom corner. “Is this the man you saw?”
“That’s the fellow.” Edward squints at the page. “Inspector Frederick Abberline.”
“He was in charge of the Ripper case. He never caught the killer.”
“In my visions, the Ripper enjoyed watching Abberline’s failures being raked over in the gutter press as every clue the Ripper planted led him in a new direction.” Edward’s eyes bore into mine. “That sounds like enough to drive a man to…”
“…haunt a bitch.”
“If Abberline is a ghost, then we could go and ask him about the Ripper,” Edward says excitedly. “He might know something about how to make sure he’s really dead or how the Order resurrected him.”
“It’s worth a shot.” I grab my phone and start typing furiously. It’s strange, I’ve spent my whole life trying to avoid ghosts, and now I’m planning to seek one out. “If I were the ghost of a detective, I’d be haunting the site of my most famous unsolved murder. Which means the Whitechapel district of London.”
“Oh,” Edward’s face falls. “Then I suppose you’ll be leaving me to travel to London with Pax and Ambrose. Probably Mina, too, and the bird. What a merry band of detectives you will make.”
