Chapter 8
The funeral home was finally silent.
Not the creaking, groaning kind of silence it had adopted before, where the walls whispered and the chandeliers trembled with unsaid things…
but a true stillness. The kind that settles after a long-held breath is finally released.
Even the ever-present pipe organ had gone mercifully mute.
No Phantom, no show tunes, no coffin theatrics.
Just silence. It wasn’t hollow. It wasn’t cold. It was reverent.
I stood in the viewing room beneath the cracked chandelier, the light no longer fractured and haunted but soft, almost honeyed, casting a warm golden wash across the aged wood and blood-red velvet couch.
Everything felt quieter in that glow. Gentler .
Like the place, after years of grief and noise, had finally remembered how to be at peace again.
The salt circle I’d drawn was deliberate, precise. This one wasn’t to bind or banish, but to bless. A closing of the loop. An offering. There was no urgency in the chalk lines this time, no trembling hands, no adrenaline in my throat. Only intention. Only care.
Zelda was upstairs, quiet for once, letting me do this alone.
She hadn’t said anything before stepping away, she’d just given me a nod, and a look I hadn’t known how to return before making herself scarce.
She knew this wasn’t just a ghost story anymore.
It was a story about a man who deserved a real goodbye.
I arranged my beeswax and sandalwood candles carefully, their amber scent already bleeding into the room like a promise.
I lit each one with a silver match. The smoke curled upward in lazy spirals; rich, earthy, and grounding.
The room smelled like old wood and warm endings surrounded by family. It smelled like home.
I sat cross-legged just inside the circle, letting the magic settle around me, threading through the floor, the air, my lungs. And I closed my eyes.
He came like mist rolling off water. Quiet and slow, soft around the edges, but unmistakably there.
It was unlike any energy I’d felt from him up until now, and for the first time I got a glimpse of the depth of his soul.
This man who had hidden in life behind bravado and outlandish behavior, but whose tender heart had, in the end, paid the ultimate price. lHad he been perfect? Of course not.
But then who was?
His form shimmered briefly, then solidified into something real.
The candlelight moved through him as if he were made of gauze and starlight, flickering in the hollows of his shape.
There was no grand entrance this time. No floating violins.
Just Beau. Whole. And then he looked at me and fixed me with that crooked frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn smile.
“Damn,” he murmured, eyes shining with something that looked suspiciously like awe. “You really are good at this.”
I let out a shaky breath, and ignored the compliment. I’d never learned how to take them without feeling arrogant. “You remember everything now?”
His smile dimmed, softened into something sadder. More human. “Yeah,” he said, the word landing with weight. “All of it.”
He stepped forward slowly, stopping just shy of the salt circle.
The glow etched itself along his outline, not as a barrier but a frame.
Like moonlight catching glass. There was something almost sacred about the way it held him there…
half-in, half-out, balanced between worlds.
Time seemed to hold its breath for us. The flickering candlelight stilled.
Even the floorboards, usually prone to the occasional dramatic groan, were humbled.
I glanced around, my gaze drifting over the peeling walls, the age-spotted mirrors, the forgotten corners no longer haunted. “Do you feel... ready now?”
He didn’t answer at first. Instead, he stepped just close enough for the candlelight to kiss the edge of his form. His gaze met mine, steady and luminous, with a depth that took my breath away. Like staring into a painting you saw every day, only to still find something that surprised you.
“I should ask you that,” he said gently.
I blinked. “Me?”
He threw me a teasing look. “You’re the one who came here exhausted and skeptical. The one who stayed up all night whispering to ghosts. You solved a murder, banished a cursed lawyer, and looked good doing it.”
I snorted. “Flattery won’t distract me from the trauma, Beau.”
His smile widened. “Worth a shot.”
We stayed like that for a while, suspended in something fragile and strange.
Not grief, not exactly. More like the echo after it.
The part where the ache doesn’t leave, but it changes shape.
Where you realize you survived something, and you’re still standing, and you don’t know what to do with your hands.
He glanced at the candles. “That scent,” he murmured. “Sandalwood and beeswax. Smells like my grandmother’s church. She used to sneak me sweets from her purse during mass. I’d never admit it, but I liked going. Felt like magic.”
“It is,” I said softly.
And for a moment, I let myself just sit there in the golden silence. With him. With everything. With the quiet.
My brow lifted. “You flirting with me on your way out?”
He grinned, slow and crooked, like he’d just remembered how. “Wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.”
“Careful,” I warned, my lips twitching despite the ache building behind my sternum. “I might start calling you the ghost with the most.”
That earned a bark of genuine laughter, rough around the edges, and so very him that the walls seemed to hum in response. The air shimmered faintly around his shoulders, like even the ether couldn’t hold still under the weight of his charm.
“Well now,” he drawled, voice warm enough to thaw a grave. “If that’s not on my tombstone, I’ll haunt someone until it is.”
I laughed. “No more haunting! Bad ghost!”
We stood in the golden hush of the viewing room, caught in a moment stretched taut between worlds. My pulse thrummed quietly, slower than usual but louder in my ears, as if my heart knew it had only so many beats left in this particular kind of liminal magic.
I found myself reaching out without quite meaning to, my fingers drifting toward the edge of the salt circle.
He met me halfway. His ghostly hand hovered over mine, and though there was no true contact, no skin or heat or nerve endings, something brushed me anyway.
A weightless pressure. A spark. The ghost of a ghost of a touch.
A connection, stretched between worlds. It was enough to make my throat tighten.
“You’re a much better witch than you pretend to be,” he said softly, his gaze tracing my face with something like reverence.
I shook my head, blinking away whatever threatened to rise. “I’m not a witch.”
His smile curved, sly and secretive. “Not yet.”
Before I could roll my eyes or say something sufficiently sarcastic to cover the way my chest ached, a soft sound came from the doorway.
Zelda.
She leaned against the frame like she hadn’t been eavesdropping, even though we both knew she absolutely had.
Her arms were folded, auburn hair a little wild from whatever spellwork she’d been wrangling upstairs.
But her face was gentler than usual. Like even she knew not to interrupt something delicate.
“Not to rush you,” she said, her voice pitched lower than usual, her usual dramatics stripped back to something honest. “But… don’t take too long. Veil’s thinner tonight. He’s got a very defined window.”
Beau nodded at her, eyes warm. “Thanks for not hexing me on sight.”
Zelda shrugged, casual. “I liked you. You were dramatic. And you didn’t hit on me, which is rare.”
He chuckled and turned back to me. “Guess this is goodbye, then.”
“Guess so,” I said. It felt small. Stupid. Too tiny a thing to carry the weight in my chest… but it was all I had.
I swallowed hard. “If you ever get bored on the other side…”
“I’ll flicker a light or two,” he promised, his grin softening into something that belonged to no one else. “Maybe rattle a windowpane. Real subtle stuff.”
I stepped back reluctantly, giving him space as Zelda stepped inside the room.
Her lips were already moving in steady rhythm, voice lifting in a chant that felt older than bones, curling through the candlelight.
The salt circle flared once, bright enough to make me blink, and then softened into a gentle gold glow.
The kind of gold you’d find in a dream just before waking.
The candles flickered, casting long shadows that didn’t feel ominous anymore. Just sacred.
Beau turned to me one last time, his expression unreadable.
“I hope wherever you end up,” I said, voice barely more than breath, “they’ve got bourbon, good music, and people who appreciate your flair.”
“And I hope you figure out whatever it is you’re running from,” he replied. “When it catches you, because it will, you better stare it down and make it regret ever chasing you.”
I smiled through the burn behind my eyes. Because that? That hit a little too close to the bone. “Dramatic to the end.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way, darlin’.” He paused. “You’re wasted in Savannah,” he murmured, low and warm. “But not for long.”
I blinked. “What?”
He winked. “You’ll see.”
Then, with one last wink, one that might have broken me if I hadn’t been so damn proud of him, Beau Moran stepped into the light.
He didn’t fade, he moved… forward, upward, through.
The gold shimmer swallowed him like silk catching fire, the flames burning brighter than any star.
When he vanished, it was like the room exhaled.
The salt circle crumbled. The air still held the faint scent of bourbon and beeswax, like he’d left just enough of himself to say I was here.
Zelda came to stand beside me, her arm brushing mine. “Well, he was kind of a pain in the ass,” she said, not unkindly.
“Yeah,” I murmured, blinking hard.
She nudged my elbow. “Drinks on me?”
“You always say that.”
“This time I mean it.”
We turned toward the front door, walking slowly through the funeral home that had, for the first time in a long time, nothing left to say. The sun had started to rise, soft and pink and full of promise. The veil had lifted. The ghost was gone.
But somehow, I wasn’t alone.