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“I…” I run my fingers through my tangled hair, aware of how awful things were between us when I left her, and that despite that, she’shere. “I’ve had quite an eventful night, and I’ll tell you all about it if you want. But why are you here? I thought you’d never speak to me again.”
“Alice and I have been cleaning up the mess at the party and dealing with the museum security and she said to me…” Dani rubs her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. I’m glad you’re awake. I was going to sit in the cemetery a while, get my head together, but when I saw the lights on I got worried that something might have happened.”
A wave of gratefulness washes over me that Dani wasn’t a half hour earlier and ended up meeting the Ripper in the cemetery.
“You came to talk to me?” My voice cracks with hope.
“I guess so, yeah. I came to apologise. I was angry and I said some things I didn’t mean and I—” Dani stops short, her eyes darting between my bloodstained yoga clothes and the rolled-up rug on Pax’s shoulders. “Bree? What’s going on?”
3
Bree
“Let me get this straight,” Dani glares at the rug Pax insists on holding over his shoulder after I gave her a two-minute run-down of what happened after I got home from the party. “You’re a reincarnation of a dead saint and you want me to help you getrid of the bodyof a priest that your blind ghost boyfriend shot?”
“Accidentallyshot,” Ambrose says quickly.
“That’s pretty much it, yes.” I squeeze my eyes shut. “I don’tthinkI’m a reincarnation of Lazarus. I think I’m…like a descendant? I have a gene or something that gives me his powers. And there are others out there like me, and this Order of the Noble Death is trying to eradicate us unless we join their ranks and Father Bryne resurrected Jack the Ripper to kill us all and I—”
“Yes, yes, I got all that.” Dani holds up her hand. She’s still staring at the carpet, and I haven’t even got to what happened in the cemetery. “I’m stuck on the wholemurdered priestbit.”
Panic rises inside me at the wordmurder.
This is bad, so bad.
Dani could run to the police right now. Sheshouldgo to the police. It’s exactly what a sane, normal person would do if their best friend told them that her ghost boyfriend accidentally shot a priest in her house.
I turn away from Dani and look out over the cemetery. The moonlight casts the tops of the highest monuments in long, elegant shadows that might appear creepy to some people. To me, they’re as familiar as old friends.
“Remember that night we snuck that bottle of your mum’s scrumpy?” I whisper, afraid to speak the memory aloud in case Dani thinks I’m trying to manipulate her. Maybe I am, I don’t even know anymore. “It was a still, clear night, just like this one, and we sat on the steps of Edward’s mausoleum and drank all the cider and ate those horrendous pie-and-mushy-pea flavoured crisps and pinkie swore that we’d have each other’s backs no matter what and help to bury the bodies?”
“Of course.” Dani comes to stand beside me. Her eyes flick over Grimdale graveyard, and a thin smile plays over her lips. “I remember you singing Sisters of Mercy lyrics at the top of your lungs, horribly off-key, and then you were trying to climb back through the fence and you threw up scrumpy all over your boots, remember?”
“I remember. I totally ruined my brand-new pair of boots.” I wince. “Dani, I know I’m not your favourite person at the moment, but if that promise meant to you what it did to me, I need your help to get rid of this body.”
“You live next to a graveyard. Can’t you do your own gravedigging?”
“I meantmetaphorically. I was hoping you had some chemicals that would, like, dissolve him.”
Dani’s face makes it clear what she thinks of my idea. “My job is to preserve the remains of my clients, not to speed things up. And you can forget about what you see in movies and read about in those mafia romance books of yours. Getting rid of a corpse is much harder than you think. Even if we had a vat of lye, which we don’t, we’d have to heat it to three hundred degrees to get the job done, and it’ll take several hours, and the smell would wake half the village. And you can’t pretend he drowned in the duck pond, either—”
“Dani, please?” I clasp my hands together in a pleading motion. “Pax died tonight and I found out what I am and I know this is bad, but I’m afraid.”
Dani leans against the doorframe, as if she needs the house to hold her upright. “Pax doesn’t look dead.”
“I…well, I brought him back.” As quickly as I can, I explain to her the final part of the story, how the Ripper had stabbed Pax but I’d managed to push his silver cord back inside him, and now his wound has healed.
“I would love to help you, Bree. Iwould. I’d never turn you over to the police for killing that scumbag priest, not after he brought the Ripper to life and tried to hurt you. But if you can’t pull this off, I’m not going down with you. I won’t lose the job I love or Alice over this. So that means I can’t help you, okay?”
“Okay.” My shoulders slump. That’s fair.
“What Iwilltell you,” Dani says, that cautious smile once more playing at the corner of her mouth. “Is that old Ralph Sommersby was just interred at Grimdale. The grave is still freshly dug and he ordered an extra-large coffin so he could be buried with all his golfing trophies. If I wanted to get rid of a troublesome priest—”
“Argh! Nothimagain!” Edward wails.
“—I’d sneak in there late at night, say…” Dani glances at her phone screen. “…around 3:42 AM, and I’d have my Roman warrior dig up the grave, remove said golfing trophies, and toss the priest in on top.”
“Really?”
