Page 11 of How I Met Your Murderer

Brushing all thoughts of Eric aside like cobwebs, I reached the top of the stairs and sprinted toward the bedroom with the draped furniture as tendrils of fog spilled out into the hall. Slowly, I peered around the doorframe.

There was the shape of a woman cloaked in the thick mist that now filled the room, her outline just visible. Tall and lithe, small waist and full hips, coils of hair piled high on her head. As she sang, she gyrated her hips to the music, her billowing skirts swishing with each movement—the kind of thing a straight guy’s fantasies were made of, though it only set alarm bells ringing in the back of my mind.

Assuming the PolterPulse would be useless after zapping Eric, I holstered it and grabbed the Turbo Pro instead. I was breaking out the big guns for this one.

Slowly, the woman danced her way toward me, making it clear she was as aware of my presence as I was of hers.

I aimed the scope of the Turbo Pro at her, tracking her movements with it until she stopped in the center of the room and blew me a kiss.

I blinked, startled. And in that moment, she was gone.

With that, the two warm lamps in the room popped on like we had reached the end of the show. The light switch was still flipped up like I had left it, after all. The mist began to dissipate, and I took a few steps into the room while keeping a firm grip on my weapon.

There had to be something more here. Something I was overlooking, something that would have made Eric so determined to block my way.

The furniture had definitely been moved. The armchair I had been reading in now hulked in a far corner, the voice recorder and EMF meter having fallen on the floor near my bag. The dresser had been pushed several feet away from the heavy gilt mirror on the wall above it, an antique that Caoimhe told me she had worked hard to source and paid a small fortune to acquire after losing the last one to ghostly antics.

For a few minutes, I waited in total silence, listening for the slightest unusual sound or a shift in temperature. But my jacket was once again enough to defend against any chill, and my hands were warming up a little.

The ghosts had welcomed me to the castle in their way, and now I would have to figure out what each of them was about and how to move them on. Surely they wouldn’t all be as easy as Eric. Good thing I had almost two months before opening day to sort it all out.

Sighing, I stashed the TurboPro back on my belt and went to shove the dresser back into place. As I finished, I caught sight of myself in the mirror, its immaculate surface unforgiving to the smudges under my eyes, my pasty skin, the odd cluster of freckles on my cheek.

I looked shite.

My hair was also sticking up at odd angles in the back like I’d never seen. Maybe Eric had messed with it again and I hadn’t noticed, or—

Oh, no. That wasn’t my hair. There was another figure in the mirror with me, slowly rising up from behind me. I didn’t have to turn and look to know it wouldn’t be in the room with me in the flesh, so I kept my eyes fixed on the glass. On her.

“Lady Síofra. Tráthnóna maith duit,” I said, wishing her a good evening in what I guessed was our shared language. I was proud that my voice didn’t waver in the slightest, even though the porcelain face of the noblewoman gazing back at me was warping as I watched.

A rosy cheek withered and wrinkled. Sores sprouted on her lips, cracking and oozing. Lustrous chestnut hair turned lank and greasy, hanging in clumps around her ruined face as she pulled back her lips in a snarl.

Cold breath gusted over the back of my neck, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Shee, that’s enough!” someone said from the doorway. “We don’t need any more death around here—think of the last guy!”

I knew that voice. I knew that accent.

What I didn’t know was whether Eric was capable of making his so-called friend stand down and stop acting the stuff of nightmares. Especially when he sounded exhausted, like he had just run a marathon—probably a side effect of being zapped.

“I’ve got this,” I muttered to him as I struggled with where to aim the TurboPro. Over my shoulder seemed like a good choice when the back of my neck was still prickling, but what if most of her energy was concentrated on the mirror?

“Do you, King Puck?” Eric questioned, louder now, like he was moving closer.

The sickly-sweet stench of rotting flowers crawled down my throat as the noblewoman in the mirror leered at me, her eyes a milky grey and her snarling lips cracked and bleeding. Her flesh was rapidly sinking into her bones, exposing the hollows of her cheeks.

Still, I managed to choke out, “That’s Lord Raff to you, Yank.”

I made the split-second decision to aim at the mirror as the noblewoman’s ghost raised a skeletal hand, clawing at her eyes—reaching like she intended to claw at mine.

“Don’t hurt her—I’m telling you, she’s just not herself!” Eric shouted, much louder now.

I pulled the trigger just as a burst of energy knocked the weapon slightly askew. A bolt of white heat crackled from the TurboPro and struck the mirror a few inches above the noblewoman’s rotting reflection.

She vanished with a small shriek as the mirror shattered with the force of the impact from the weapon, shards of glass littering the top of the dresser.

Good thing this job was going to be the death of me so I wouldn’t have to suffer all seven years of bad luck.