Page 65 of How I Met Your Murderer

“We need to make Lorcan talk,” Raff murmured. “He worked for ExorSquad, too. And he died most recently. Maybe he was working on a way to fight this thing. Or maybe he at least knows something that could point us in the right direction.”

“I bet he knows plenty,” I agreed as the glow inside me stuttered. A tiny skip, like it forgot how to stay steady. I just wasn’t sure I was ready to hear it. But if it meant crossing another item off my list, and maybe learning how to protect the living—or the dead—from the elemental’s whims, then there was no sense putting it off any longer.

twenty

After the Fall

Eric

Lorcan McGilroy usually haunted Caoimhe’s office in the castle’s west wing. Although he either vanished entirely or locked the doors when Raff and I made our rounds, we had seen his shadow pacing in there from a distance, and this time we had come prepared with the keys. Raff thought Lorcan liked the hum of modernity: the combination printer and scanner, Caoimhe and Jordy’s laptops, a tangle of tech and wires. He was the newest spirit here, so maybe the shiny veneer of the office helped him feel at home.

“How are we going to get him to talk this time, when he’s never felt like it before?” I asked, following Raff into the office as he flicked on a desk lamp, its soft glow providing just enough light to see by.

“Rule number one-sixty-six,” Raff muttered more to himself than to me. “Never turn on the big light until you’ve warned everyone in the room.”

“What’s rule one-sixty-six?” I turned, curious, but he just grinned and shook his head.

“Some advice I probably should ignore,” was all he said. “Anyway, I’m not sure how we can get through to him. I was just hoping to appeal to his better nature, unless you’ve got a grand idea in that brilliant head of yours.”

He pulled out Caoimhe’s desk chair, the most comfortable one in the room, and gestured for me to take it. Then he drew a smaller wooden chair over to the desk and joined me. The relief that crossed his face as his rested his knee made me ache all over. Oh, Raff. Who was going to take care of him when I was gone?

Talking to Lorcan, getting closure, was one more step down that road. But it was either that or eventually get consumed by Gary, and only one of those seemed like a real choice.

“Let me try,” I said to Raff, putting a hand over his sore knee to ice it.

Raff didn’t flinch at my touch anymore. Didn’t even act like the cold was soothing him. Maybe he’d just gotten used to me.

Still, I kept my hand there as I softly called, “Lorcan? It’s us. Eric and Raff. Your, uh . . . coworker. Come on out. We know you’re in here.”

Nothing.

“We—I—wanted to talk to you about how you died. Just for a minute. It could really help us out.” Yeah, still nothing, which I kind of expected at this point. “If you don’t care about that, maybe you care about helping your fellow spirits? Or . . . maybe you care about giving ExorSquad the middle finger one more time from beyond the grave after where they landed you?”

A shimmer at the corner of my eye. A tall, lanky shape, thin lines melding into something solid as Lorcan drew on the hum of energy that filled the room and slowly manifested.

He appeared in front of a sleek set of filing cabinets: mid-thirties, dark, gel-slicked hair in disarray, in the same uniform as Raff but with a white t-shirt beneath. One strap of his black overalls had slipped off his shoulder. His edges were frayed, flickering like a candle caught in a draft. His eyes, which might have once been brown but now appeared almost entirely leeched of color, darted around the office, wild and terrified. One hand hovered near his sternum, like a pain lingered there.

Maybe the poor guy really did die from a heart attack.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he rasped, seemingly to both of us. “You need to leave. We can’t talk here—anywhere. It listens. It listens.” He shook his head, the nervous energy rolling off him making it hard for me to keep sitting still. “It watches from the stone . . .” His jumpy gaze finally settled on Raff. “Did Gerald send you to collect my soul so he can sell it and pay a few bills?”

“What?” Raff spluttered. “Don’t be ridiculous. We want to know—”

“We need to know how you died. Exactly how you died, if you remember it.” The words left my mouth before I could stop myself, before I had fully thought them through.

I couldn’t bring myself to meet Raff’s gaze, though I could feel his eyes on me, so I focused on Lorcan instead as he paced in front of the file cabinets, his hands in the deep pockets of his overalls.

“It was in the air,” he murmured, quick and quiet, watching the walls like he thought they had eyes. “I was trying to zap the noisy ghosts upstairs when the air got really humid and heavy. It pressed in on my chest until my heart just couldn’t beat against it. I tried to move, but I couldn’t, and the whole time, these two dark hollows in the stone were just . . . staring at me. Like they were part of it, these horrible growths like eyes. You know it watches.”

“We do know about the elemental. We know it can kill the living,” Raff said evenly as I sank deeper into my chair, trying not to get swept away in a tide of unwelcome memories that Lorcan had just unlocked. “What we don’t know yet is what might protect us—the living and the dead—from the entity. We’ve been calling it ‘Gary.’”

“Don’t talk about it! Don’t fecking name it!” Lorcan was shouting at Raff now. “Don’t even think about it! I tried to warn them, the owners. I tried. But they wouldn’t listen about shutting this whole thing down. And look where it got me. The first guy was right to run and never look back. But if I hide, stay quiet—maybe it won’t take me next.” His form flickered harder, edges blurring first, then his features. “You want advice? There’s no fighting it. There’s no winning. Get away from this place while you can.”

“You don’t want it to take your soul, too,” Raff pointed out, rooted in calm. “I understand that. I don’t want it doing that to anyone here, or getting any stronger. That’s why—”

“I can’t,” Lorcan choked out. “I can’t talk to you anymore. I’m sorry. It’ll finish me next if I do. And then it’ll come for you, Rafferty O’Meara. It doesn’t take kindly to threats.”

A gust slammed through the room out of nowhere, rattling the closed windows. The gentle orange glow of the lamp on the desk flared and nearly extinguished as a shadow danced along the wall opposite us, tall and lean, neither human nor animal. One I realized I had seen before, unlocking a floodgate of memory.