He stares at me quietly for a moment. “You’ve been watching the crime channel again, haven’t you?”
“Danny’s a fan of unsolved mysteries.”
“Of all of them, you’ve always been my favourite.” He gives me a lazy smile.
“All of who?” I reply in confusion. “And does being a favourite come with house points or gold stars? I work well with stickers as an incentive.”
He chuckles and it’s a strange sound. The air shimmers around us like it’s reacting to him somehow.
“What are we doing here? What’s going on?” I ask, wondering if I’m going to remember this very vivid, extremely weird dream when I wake.
“I’m here because things are about to change,” he says quietly.
“Wow…” I raise my brows. “Can you vague that up for me?”
“A body is about to be uncovered and it’s someone I believe you are very familiar with,” he answers, his pale arctic eyes filled with enough seriousness to make my flippancy dissolve into a scowl.
“Who?” I see him hesitate and a ball of annoyance curls in my gut. “Don’t clam up on me now. Weird dream or not, you can’t just tell me someone I know is going to end up in my mortuary and not give me a heads-up on who it is.”
“They won’t be arriving at your place of work.” He gives a graceful shrug. “They will be brought to a colleague of yours, a forensic anthropologist by the name of O’Hara.”
“O’Hara?” I stop to think for a moment. “Roger O’Hara? Then it’s not a corpse, the body is just bones. That must mean it’s a cold case,” I reason. “But who…?” The sentence dies on my lips as the answer comes to me. “Bruce.” I glance across at him sharply. “I’m right, aren’t I? The remains that are going to be found are Bruce’s. Dusty told me his body was never recovered.”
He sighs. “I had hoped his remains would stay buried for a few more decades at least. The timing is very inconvenient.”
“I’ll be sure to let him know how inconvenient his murder is. I’m sure he’ll be mortified,” I reply dryly.
“Don’t be obtuse, Tristan,” he mutters absently as he toys with the stem of his wine glass, the inside of his signet ring tapping against the crystal in a soft repetitivechink chink. “You need to intercept his remains before they’re identified.”
“What? Why?” My mouth falls open.
“They’re what’s keeping him tethered to earth. It’s his unfinished business.”
“Surely finding them is a good thing, then? It means he can cross over now, he can finally find peace.”
The beautiful stranger shakes his head. “You don’t understand, Tristan. It is imperative you stop him from crossing into the light,” he says bluntly.
“Why?”
“Because he is needed here, whether he realises it or not. His fate is now inextricably bound to the astral portal.”
“You mean the magic door in the bookshop?”
“Must you oversimplify everything, Tristan?” He sighs as he rolls his eyes.
I shrug. “It saves confusion later on.”
“Yes”—he arches a brow, his tone slow and deliberate—“the portal in the bookshop.”
“So let me get this straight. You want me to wait until his bones are discovered.” I begin to tick the items off my fingers. “Then you want me to steal them from the forensic anthropology department before they can be identified as a cold case murder. Then you want me to hide them so Bruce can’t solve his unfinished business and can’t cross into the light and find peace.”
“Yes.” He gives one decisive nod.
“You’re an arsehole,” I conclude.
“I’ve been called worse.”
“How can you ask me to do that?” I glower at him. “You’re asking me to go against everything I believe in, everything I’ve trained for. Not to mention, commit a crime. You do realise my boyfriend is a detective at Scotland Yard, right?”
