5. Bat
five
Bat
Days at Grimthorne Manor fell into roughly the same pattern.
Life, as a ghost, tended to be fairly predictable. I would know. I’d spent each day here since I died.
1999. Twenty-three years old. Those facts stayed sharp.
Everything else got fuzzy. The date I’d died? Gone. What I’d been doing in this bloody manor that day? Blank. How that wound between my ribs had appeared—dark and precise and so fucking deliberate? Nothing. Just a void where memory should have been.
Nearly three decades now. Sometimes it only felt like a couple of months.
Other times, the weight of it stretched endlessly.
The manor had changed around me. New wallpaper appeared in the dining room.
Then peeled. Then had been stripped away entirely.
The Lancasters were the seventh set of owners I remembered. Or was it the eighth?
I’d searched for answers in every corner of this place. Grimthorne kept its secrets well.
The days themselves, though? Those I knew intimately.
Scaring off workmen by day. Rattling pipes. Knocking hammers off scaffolding. Once, I’d made an entire bucket of paint levitate and dump itself over a plasterer’s head. That had been a good day.
Keeping the other ghosts coordinated. Molly needed constant reminders about subtlety. The twins required supervision, or they’d giggle and blow our cover.
Roaming the halls by night. Drifting through walls. Testing how long I could manifest before exhaustion dragged me back to nothing.
Arguing with the other ghosts about sharing, especially books. Lady Grimthorne insisted the library was hers, never mind that she’d been dead for over two centuries and had read every book at least ten times.
Yes, my days were predictable all right.
Monotonous.
Until today.
Because today he arrived.
The lovely one.
The blond, beautiful one, with his golden wire-rimmed glasses and that perfect amount of stubble I wanted to trace with my fingers. Or my tongue. Preferably my tongue.
I’d seen a lot of people pass through Grimthorne. Surveyors. Estate agents. Historians with their notebooks and reverent whispers. The Lancasters themselves, with their designer luggage and their plans for luxury spas.
None of them had made my non-existent heart stutter.
But him.
Charlie.
The name suited him. Soft. Approachable. Nothing like that absolute waste of oxygen he’d arrived with.
When Charlie had climbed those attic stairs, I’d felt it. A pull. A magnetism I hadn’t experienced since… well, since I’d been alive. He’d picked up my guitar—my guitar, the one I somehow knew was mine, though I didn’t remember holding it.
And he played.
Really played.
His fingers moved across the fretboard with a confidence his posture lacked. The melody had ached. Raw. Honest. Music that carved out your chest and left you bleeding.
I’d wanted nothing more than to touch him.
So I had.
Just the ghost of sensation. Barely there. But his breath had caught, and I’d felt that too—the sharp inhale, the confusion, the heat radiating from his skin.
God, his skin.
I wanted to nibble every inch of it.
Then Brad—that meathead, that absolute thundering asshole—had ruined everything. Kicked the door open like some knock-off action hero. Worse, he’d kicked the cat.
Kicked the cat.
I’d possessed the poor creature in a blind rage, ready to claw Brad’s eyes clean out of his skull. But the logistics had stopped me. Brad looked like the type who’d kill a cat without blinking. The type who’d laugh while doing it.
The cat didn’t deserve that.
Plus, Grimthorne had enough ghosts without adding an angry feline to the mix. Lady Grimthorne would probably try to claim it as a pet. She collected grievances like some people collected porcelain.
So I’d settled for the satisfaction of Charlie throwing Brad out instead.
Watching him defend the poor creature—defend me, sort of, even if he didn’t know it—had been better than any revenge I could’ve scratched into Brad’s face.
Still in the cat’s small, warm body, I curled against Charlie’s chest. He carried me down the corridor toward the kitchen, murmuring promises about food. His voice rumbled through my ribcage, a sensation I’d never experienced as a ghost. Solid. Real.
“Let’s get you something to eat, yeah?” Charlie’s hand stroked between the cat’s ears, and I leant into it shamelessly. “Maybe there’s tuna. Do you like tuna? Of course you do. You’re a cat.”
Food. That sounded good.
Maybe he’d even hand-feed me.
The thought sent a thrill through the cat’s spine. If I were in my own body, I’d have been grinning like an idiot.
I’d never possessed an animal before. Never had reason to. But this? This was novel. Fascinating. The world looked different through the cat’s eyes—sharper in some ways, softer in others. Colours muted. Movement tracked with predatory precision.
Charlie’s heartbeat, steady and strong, echoed through the space between us.
I could get used to this.
Though already, I felt the drain. Possession took energy. A gentle but persistent tug, like water circling a drain. I wouldn’t be able to maintain this forever. Another hour, maybe two if I pushed it. After, this would leave me weak for a long while.
But right now, wrapped in warmth and the scent of Charlie’s skin, I didn’t care.
Charlie nudged the kitchen door open with his hip and flicked on the light. “Right. Let’s pray they’ve left us some sort of food.”
He set me on the kitchen island. Cold granite pressed against my paws, and I kneaded it automatically, claws extending. Charlie’s bag lay abandoned by the door, contents spilling out. Wires. A battered notebook.
A granola bar.
Charlie followed my gaze and laughed. “That’s mine, not yours. Don’t give me those eyes.”
What eyes? I didn’t even know what expression the cat wore.
But Charlie relented, tearing open the wrapper and breaking off a small piece. He held it out, and I sniffed delicately. Oats. Yogurt coating. Sweet and artificial. Not remotely appetising to a cat, but I took it anyway because his fingers were right there, warm and long and lovely and—
God. This was pathetic. I was pathetic.
Dead for however-many years and reduced to this: a ghost possessing a cat, pining over a stranger’s fingertips.
“I’m glad you came along,” he said. “You’re much better company than Brad.”
Yes, I wanted to say. I’ll stay with you. Pet me. Cuddle me.
But the cat only purred.
Charlie’s hand returned to stroke my ears, and I melted into it, eyes half closing. His touch sent sparks through the cat’s nervous system, grounding me in a way I hadn’t felt since—
The void where my death should have been gaped open again. No answers. Just static.
“You’re a sweetheart, aren’t you?” Charlie murmured. “You’re perfect.”
Perfect.
The word lodged somewhere in my chest. Or where my chest used to be. The cat’s chest. Whatever.
Charlie abandoned me to rummage through the cupboards, eventually producing a tin of salmon. “This’ll have to do. I prefer tuna, myself. Do you like salmon?”
He found a chipped porcelain bowl in one of the lower cupboards and scraped the salmon into it. He set it on the floor, and I hopped down from the counter with feline grace I definitely didn’t possess as a human.
The fish tasted even better than expected. Rich. Oily. I devoured it in quick, hungry bites, barely pausing to breathe.
God, I missed eating.
Missed it desperately.
Three meals a day. I’d taken it for granted when I’d been alive.
Complained about my mum’s overcooked vegetables, ate mainly instant noodles once I’d moved out, skipping lunch to rehearse with the band.
What I wouldn’t give now for burnt toast. Cold pizza.
Anything that required teeth and a functioning digestive system.
Being dead meant never tasting anything. Never feeling full. Just the memory of hunger, phantom and persistent, that no amount of manifesting could satisfy.
But right now, in this borrowed body, the salmon filled the cat’s stomach, gloriously real and substantial.
I licked the bowl clean.
“Good, yeah?” Charlie crouched beside me, chin propped on his hand. That grin—soft, genuine, transforming his entire lovely face. “You were starving, weren’t you? Poor thing.”
His smile made something twist inside me.
He hadn’t smiled once before this. Not when I’d trapped him in the attic, panic flooding through him as he’d banged against the locked door. Not when he’d played that song, fingers bleeding emotion across the strings, face blank and hollowed out with grief.
But now, watching a cat eat salmon from a bowl, Charlie smiled like it was the best thing he’d seen all day.
Beautiful.
He was so beautiful it hurt.
I nuzzled his hand, and he laughed, scratching behind my ears. “I had a cat once—”
A bang erupted from somewhere below us.
Deep. Resonant. Metal on stone.
The basement.
Terror shot through me, instant and visceral. The sort of fear that bypassed logic and went straight to the brainstem. My fur bristled. Claws extended. The cat’s heart thundered against its fragile ribcage, and mine—my ghostly non-existent heart—seized in sympathy.
The basement.
God, no. Not the basement.
I hissed, backing away from the sound.
“Hey, hey.” Charlie’s hand found me again, gentle and grounding. He stroked the knobbles of my spine, voice pitched low and soothing. “It’s just the wind, yeah? Old house. Pipes settling. Nothing to worry about.”
But his fingers trembled slightly against my fur.
And I knew better.
It wasn’t the wind.
It was never the wind.
The basement held something. Something that made every other ghost in Grimthorne avoid it. Something that dragged at the edges of my consciousness whenever I drifted too close. Something that whispered in frequencies I couldn’t quite hear but felt, bone-deep and wrong.
Another bang. Closer this time. Echoing up through the floorboards.
Charlie’s hand stilled on my back.
I couldn’t stay here. Couldn’t keep playing the helpless cat, letting him stroke my fur and feed me salmon. Couldn’t let him wander these halls with that gorgeous smile, thinking he’d found a friend in a stray.
This house would kill him.
The thing in the basement would kill him.
And I’d be damned—again, apparently—if I let that happen.
Another bang. The lights flickered.
Charlie stood, tension coiling through his shoulders. He stared toward the corridor, where the basement door was.
“That’s not the wind,” he said.
No. It wasn’t.
I watched him square his shoulders, lift his chin, despite the fear I could smell rolling off him in waves. Brave. Stubborn. Beautiful in a way that made me want to weep.
This man. This gorgeous, kind, talented man who fed stray cats and played my old guitar so beautifully and smiled like sunshine breaking through clouds.
Exactly the sort of person I’d have wanted to fall for when I was alive.
Hell, I was probably already halfway there, despite us not exchanging a single word.
And that was the problem.
I needed to scare Charlie away. For his own good. Before whatever lurked below decided it was hungry for something human and alive and warm and lovely.
Even if it meant never seeing him smile again.
Even if it meant crushing whatever was blooming in my dead, useless heart.
Because if I knew anything, it was this: love at first fright never ended well.