Page 76 of How I Met Your Murderer

A fallen broom lay by the cold hearth where Sorcha had been sweeping. Basil obviously hadn’t been in this room since yesterday to tidy yet.

Almost at once, Eric tugged on my hand and nodded to a stretch of wall that held a pastoral painting of a young girl in a bonnet tending her flock. I braced myself for hollows in the stone, for eyes that saw us as little more than ants, if that, and rested my free hand on the holster of the PolterPulse. Yeah, I was going to shoot it, even if it didn’t help.

But that’s not what was making Eric tremble.

Faintly, as though with the tip of a claw, a message had been etched messily into the wall under the painting.

HE’S MINE

“No, he’s mine!” I shouted at the stone without thinking, drawing Eric into my arms. Only after a few moments of nothing slithering out of the walls to challenge me did I start to relax and realize the random message could have been about someone else. Meant for someone else, too. Maybe.

I still doubted it, after all the ways the elemental seemed to be taunting us.

Eric ran his fingers through my hair until my heart rate slowed a little. Then he murmured, “Yours? Is that how it is?”

“Thought that was obvious.” I kissed his forehead and tried not to let him feel how I was still shaking at my core.

“Mine,” I repeated to the restless gloom and shadows that moved on their own as we hurried outside for some fresh autumn air. “Mine.”

But I knew as well as anyone that simply saying it didn’t make it so. No matter what we both wanted. There were bigger forces at work here, and it was only by the elemental’s whim that we made it out the oak front door together.

twenty-three

The Full Irish

Raff

Days to Halloween: 10

Every day since we’d found the message carved into the wall that Basil and his team were still trying to fully erase, the air inside Ardruin had gone thick and heavy, like we breathed through wet wool. Even the cheapest and most cheerful of Basil’s store-bought decorations seemed to have permanently taken on some of the castle’s gloom, as if stained by its shadow. They looked vaguely grotesque out of the corner of my eye whenever I passed them, whether it was a jack-o’-lantern or the randomly cackling plastic witch, their shadows stretching too long and thin to match their shapes.

Eric and I had had a busy few days between finally setting up a game of pub trivia in the castle—with help from some of the spirits as well as Jordy and Basil, who had agreed to be the opposing team—and scrambling to clean up the minor disasters that seemed to occurred every night we went out to the van to sleep, or not sleep.

Like something was taunting us. And of course, we knew exactly what.

A few of the other spirits also pitched in with the cleanup when they realized what was happening, helping us sweep up shattered glass from burst bulbs and mop random puddles on the various floors. We found Liam’s goldfish dead one morning, which seemed especially cruel, and he was inconsolable. I rushed to buy a new one. There was also the moss that had started to grow at random along the interior walls, which needed a firmer hand to scrub it away. It felt like the more ghosts the elemental consumed—over the past few days, at least Lorcan and Tadhg, the nervous footman, who had both gone missing from their usual haunts—the more it was able to infect the castle itself. To entrench itself here, spread its roots ever deeper, letting us know we wouldn’t win any war against it.

Tonight, however, we were taking a break—from cleaning, from D&D, from everything that didn’t involve sitting on our arses and thinking about nothing in particular. Just me and Eric, having a little date of sorts in the parlor because we spent too much time in a van that smelled like sex no matter how I tried to air it out. Our mission was to get me drunk on Guinness, another item from Eric’s list, so I’d made the room as safe as I could knowing that I would be half out of my mind later if all went to plan: the protective salt sprinkled across every threshold, including the bathroom door and the two hallways leading in and out.

Guess we’d find out if old Gary was willing to cross the line.

While Eric lounged on the couch (yes, that one), I’d swept the half-melted grinning skull candle off the coffee table and shoved it in a closet, the memory of the whispering flame still too sharp, too cold. Then, in the space I’d cleared, I arranged a twelve-pack of Guinness to see what I could possibly make my way through now that the day shift workers had all gone home. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the black stuff—I preferred a nice red ale—but the thought of being warm and silly and a little boneless with Eric to watch over me was a good one, so I had been looking forward to this.

I settled on the couch beside Eric with the first glass bottle in hand, my body pressed against his mildly warm one from shoulder to thigh, our weights sinking the cushions toward the middle. It was like sitting next to a living person. Every time we touched lately, that warmth messed with my head, even if I never wanted it to stop.

“I still think Jordy let us win at trivia,” Eric said with a small grin, picking up an earlier thread of conversation from before I’d started safeguarding the room.

I tipped the bottle toward him, taking in his swept-back dark hair and his delicate, lovely features, and said, “Sláinte,” in a little toast to him before taking my first sip. It was thick, rich, and malty, heavy stuff. This wouldn’t be like getting drunk on a few quick shots of whiskey, which meant we were going to be here a while.

I wrapped an arm around his shoulders, settling back against the cushions, and considered his point about the trivia game. Basil and Jordy were mighty for agreeing to play when Liam had been our host. Maybe they were getting used to the chill of being near the dead, like I was, thanks to our nightly D&D sessions with Eric and Síofra. This was a bit different, though, as several of the other spirits had come to watch the game, too. It wasn’t like they had anything better to do, or maybe they felt safer being closer to me and the PolterPulse at my side than they did sat in a dark corridor or tower somewhere, waiting to be grabbed by Gary.

Sure, Basil had worn his designer sunglasses through the whole thing, like it might make the spirits who had chosen to manifest less visible—and less frightening, now that half of them were moving like broken marionettes and losing their looks—and Jordy had teased him something fierce. But they had decorated a banner together with their team name, The Holy Terrors, which was already more effort than Eric and I had put into team Dead Inside. And they had tolerated our ghostly host’s questions well enough, bizarre and rambling as they were.

“I don’t think Jordy was in control of anything going on there, any more than we were,” I said with a soft laugh, taking another sip of my bottle.

We had borrowed a dry erase board from Caoimhe’s office, on which Liam could keep score. He’d asked us things like “Name a fish that’s bigger than a man” and “What’s the most famous shipwreck to ever grace the Kerry coast?” and “In what frightful year did the moon fall out of the sky for a bit?”

Eric was the only one to figure out that he meant an eclipse. And, lucky us, our prize for winning had been a rock shaped vaguely like a baked potato. So much for the usual basket of endless tots, but then, Ardruin was hardly a pub and Liam was hardly a bartender.