“I’m afraid it’s one or the other, Callum,” added Frank. “Either we help one another with our respective problems, or you return to your life with no memory of meeting us, nor any of what we’ve discussed here. I’m sorry, but things being what they are right now, we can’t risk it, even with one of our own.”
“Risk it? What are you talking about?”
“You’ve decided that’s none of your business.” Frank turned to the smoking woman. “I’m sorry, Brigitte. It seems we won’t be needing you tonight after all.”
The woman nodded, extinguished her cigarette and got to her feet.
“Wait!” Callum felt four sets of eyes on him. “You can’t… I can’t just forget all this!”
“I assure you, you can,” Frank said. “Robert can do it if you prefer, but you’ll find we’re more than capable of safely erasing ourselves from your memory. You may lose one or two other details from the past two days, but maybe that’s for the best.”
“No!” he barked. “Look, all right, fine! What is it you want from me? The truth!”
Jacqueline rose to her full height and smiled at Robert.
“Thank you both,” Frank said to them. “I think Brigitte and I can take it from here. Callum?”
Callum watched the dark-skinned woman cross to the chair opposite him and sit down. Her gaze, which never left him, bore the same curious intelligence as Frank’s. She wasn’t mocking him. She was intrigued, just as Frank was. Just as Callum was. He heard the door shut behind the two vampires. Not travellers, or strangers, or simple murderers. They were actual vampires, whatever they chose to call themselves. He couldn’t deny what he’d seen. “And Brigitte? Is she like them?”
“I am in the room,” the woman muttered.
“Brigitte is an expert in what most would call paranormal phenomena. She comes to us after… was it four years in Savannah, or five?”
“The savanna?” asked Callum. “Africa?”
“Savannah, Georgia, in America. You think the spirits of the dead only walk the old world?” Her voice chilled him, despite the warm lilt of her American accent. “It was five years. After three in Boston, and six in New Orleans before that.”
“Just answer our questions as best you can, Callum. Since you’ve been touched by ‘the other side’ as it were, Brigitte will use her abilities to fill in the gaps.”
“Abilities?”
She placed a single black candle on the table between them and set it alight. Frank extinguished the lamp next to him, and sat in the remaining armchair, facing Callum.
“We’re ready.”
“Very good,” Frank said, the light of the candle flickering across his face. “So, Callum, I have to know. What is it like to kiss a ghost?”
CHAPTER SIX
Dawn came and went. By the time Callum saw sunlight again, it was coming on dusk. Frank’s questions, genial as the man was, had gone on and on, interrogating every minute detail Callum could recall about the bar where he’d met Max, and everything that had happened in the moments leading up to his finding it. Where he’d been standing. What he’d seen when it was time to depart. The clothes. The music. The distinguishing features of as many patrons as he could remember. He’d described Ferdi and the others with as much detail as he could, though Max was the only one of whom he felt absolutely certain.
It didn’t seem to matter. Each time his answer wavered, the candle between them mirrored it, flitting around in the darkness. Each time it did, Brigitte was there to fill in the details with unnerving accuracy, as if possessed by an objective memory of the night itself. Beyond these interjections, however, she didn’t interrupt. There was also something about Frank’s calm presence that made him want to talk. In that moment, Callum felt as though he were sitting with the only two people in the world who’d believe what had happened to him. Frank in particular, seemed as interested in Callum’s own gradual disappearance as he did about Max and the club.
By some better sense, he’d been conscious of the hours ticking by. But as the car now carried them toward Suzi’s bar, he couldn’t remember falling asleep, nor the candle going out, nor Brigitte leaving them. It was as if his day at the Institute, and the curious all-night interrogation that had followed were the dream.
The sight of Suzi’s, its windows darkened by drawn curtains, shook Callum back to reality.
“You said Brigitte was meeting us?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t attempt this without her,” Frank answered. “Even if, based on your own helpful experience, these spirits are benign, one can never quite predict how these things will go.”
He turned to Frank, eyes widening. “What’s that supposed tomean?”
“It means, my friend, that Brigitte can close the veil between our world and theirs within seconds, before anything gets out of hand. It’s the safest possible way of doing this. Try to relax. All will be fine.”
As the car pulled up outside Suzi’s and Frank disembarked, Callum realised he still didn’t know the driver’s name. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m Callum, by the way.”
The man didn’t move. He just stared vacantly at the road in front of him through black sunglasses, leather-clad fingers tapping on the steering wheel. Callum at last noticed the long, sharp claws that pierced the fingertips of those gloves, and heard their harsh, quiet tap on the wheel in between the squeak of leather on leather.
