Page 70 of A Ghost’s Guide to Haunting a Witch

But now . . . now Augustine wondered. Was it just another lie? She paused, looking around her shop again. There was an upstairs, but it belonged to the estate agent next door. She didn’t have access. She’d never had access. Or had she?

Her gaze shifted, drawn instinctively, almost magnetically, towards the back wall. Towards the bookcase.

It stood exactly where she’d shoved it the other day, still as tall and solid as ever. Packed tight with old grimoires, second-hand paperbacks, and a few decorative spell jars that had never actually been used. It was mostly there for aesthetic purposes, and was entirely unremarkable. Entirely innocent.

Or maybe it’s just meant to look that way.

Augustine stepped towards it, appraising it from different angles. “If there was a way for me to get upstairs from here,” she murmured, her voice barely above a whisper now, “the access point would be behind the bookcase. But I checked. Just the other day, I checked. There’s nothing there. Just wall.”

Still, her pulse quickened as she took a step forward, then another, the floor creaking softly beneath her boots as she approached. She crouched slightly, peering behind the wood at the wall once more, tracing the seams with her gaze like she might catch them shifting if she looked hard enough.

“Okay,” she muttered, tilting her head. “So either I’m losing my mind . . . or my sister is hiding an entire floor from me.”

She straightened slowly, folding her arms. She waited and watched, urging the wall to give itself away.

“What are you staring at?”

Augustine yelped, actually yelped, like a frightened puppy. There was a full-body jolt involved — shoulders, spine, dignity, all of it — before she spun around so quickly she nearly took out a stack of ethically-sourced incense sticks with her elbow.

Theo was there. Just standing there, like he hadn’t been not there for the past, well, however many hours she’d spent sleeping badly on the floor.

“Oh my God.” Augustine pressed a hand to her chest. “Do you have to do that?”

Theo blinked at her, mildly taken aback. “Do what?”

“Appear,” she said, gesturing wildly. “Without warning. Like some kind of . . . of . . . emotionally confusing jump scare.”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Theo replied earnestly. “That was never my intention.”

She held his gaze a moment longer than necessary . . . then she moved. She’d closed the distance between them in three quick steps, something in her chest loosening all at once at the sight of him, the relief of it hitting harder than she’d expected. She almost, almost, threw herself at him, the instinct immediate, absolute and altogether terrible.

She stopped so abruptly it was honestly impressive she didn’t sprain something. Because this was a bad idea.

He’s a ghost. And a very taken ghost.

She stood frozen a foot away from him, hands twitching slightly at her sides like they hadn’t quite received the updated memo from her brain.

You cannot throw yourself into the arms of a spectral entity, she told herself firmly. We’ve discussed this. He’s an apparition. You’d go right through him and end up on the floor. That outcome doesn’t end in romance, only concussion.

So instead, she did the only reasonable thing left and chewed on her thumbnail. She tried to look casual and composed, the very picture of calm. She wasn’t sure she was succeeding, though, as Theo just watched her, one eyebrow lifting slightly.

Augustine swallowed, dragging her hand away from her mouth and attempting something resembling normal human behaviour.

“Where have you been?” she demanded, her question sharper than she intended, and much more worried than she’d planned. Her gaze flicked over him quickly, like she was checking — what exactly? That he was still intact and whole? As if ghosts came in varying states of disrepair?

“You just disappeared,” she went on, a little breathless now. “After the card. After holding my hand. After everything. I came back, and you weren’t there.”

There was a beat of silence between them, and Theo’s eyes rested on hers intently. He was listening, Augustine realized. Waiting patiently for her to finish.

“I waited,” she added, and then immediately wondered if she shouldn’t have, because maybe it was too much. Maybe it was too honest. She couldn’t take it back, though, and she suddenly realized she didn’t want to take it back. “I waited all night,” she admitted, realizing how it sounded, but not really caring. “But you weren’t there.”

At that, Theo took a step towards her. Briefly, she wondered if he was going to touch her. She knew the feel of his hands, knew the feel of his lips now, too. Touch was something shared between them, something within the realm of possibility in this impossible situation. Theo didn’t reach for her, though. Instead, his hands were kept steadily by his sides, a slight tension to them the only indicator that he was holding something back.

“When you touched that tarot card, I disappeared,” he told her, and Augustine was surprised to hear a hint of anger in his words. Not anger for her, but anger towards the cosmos, for separating them. “I wanted to come back. But I couldn’t.”

“Where did you go?” she asked, and his face darkened.

“Somewhere . . . wrong. It was empty. Echoing. There was just me. It felt like a trap.”