Chapter Seventeen
The door slammed behind her with enough force to rattle the floorboards.
Augustine leaned back against it immediately, her hand gripping the handle like the flat might try to throw her back out again, and for a few seconds she just stood there, breathing hard.
Calm, she ordered herself. You’re home. You’re safe. Chill out, before you give yourself a stroke.
The hallway light flickered faintly overhead while somewhere in the wall a pipe clanked ominously.
Her mail had been shoved under the door, and Augustine looked down at the pile of junk leaflets by her shoes with a feeling of despair.
An advert for a new Indian takeaway. The details of a cleaning service.
Price cuts at a local supermarket. All of it felt distant and unreal, like she’d walked into the wrong life by mistake.
Maybe I have, her mind traitorously thought. Maybe this isn’t my life at all.
With a start, Augustine pushed the thought away rapidly, her chest still rising and falling too quickly. “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. You need to chill. You need to calm down.”
She pushed herself away from the door and stumbled a few steps into the living room before dropping onto the sofa.
She felt like a puppet someone had cut the strings off, unable to hold her body upright, her hands shaking horribly.
It wasn’t the small, ordinary kind of shaking that came from nerves or too much caffeine either.
No, this was much deeper, and much more disconcerting.
A bone-deep tremor that hadn’t stopped since the moment she’d snapped back into her body at the table in her shop.
The cards. The memory.
And Theo.
Theo Manford.
Augustine pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, remembering it all with a mute kind of horror.
She’d run the moment the world had come rushing back to her. Abandoned her shop and her cards, as well as the ghost sitting so hopefully across from her. She hadn’t said a word, just stood, grabbed her coat, and fled like the building was cursed.
She’d barely even managed to lock the door.
Theo had called after her — she remembered that much. His voice had followed her, confused and worried. “Augustine?”
She hadn’t stopped, though. Instead, she’d rushed through the Greenwich streets, past displays of Halloween pumpkins, vampires and toilet paper- wrapped mummies until she’d reached the safety of her home.
She didn’t dare turn around or try to explain.
Because how could she? How on earth could she tell Theo any of what she’d just been through?
Oh, sorry, I just inhabited the body of your girlfriend from across both time and space.
Did you know you met at a Halloween party where she was dressed as a cat?
Did you know you caught her when she fell out of a lift?
Did you know your hands feel like warm water when they touch someone?
Oh, and did you know I might slowly be going crazy?
Also, would you mind terribly if we never — never ever — speak about this again?
Augustine groaned softly and let her head fall back against the sofa, while her stomach rolled uneasily. The out-of-body sensation she’d experienced still clung to her skin like static electricity, like her soul hadn’t quite settled properly back into place yet, and worse, much, much worse . . .
She could still feel it.
Slowly, she lifted her hands to her hair, her fingers hovering over the top of her head.
She knew they wouldn’t find anything there, of course they wouldn’t.
But still. Still she could feel them, that soft, ridiculous weight of cat ears sliding irritably down her hair, just like they had that night.
Augustine squeezed her eyes shut. “Nope,” she muttered firmly to the ceiling. “No. Absolutely not. Stop thinking about it. Stop remembering it. They aren’t even your memories to remember.”
She dropped her hands into her lap, because if she started unpacking that sensation — the memory of the party, of the lift, of Theo’s hand around hers — she was fairly certain she might actually throw up, or scream, or both. And the worst part? The part that made her stomach twist even harder?
The worst part was that she liked Theo even more now. She really, really liked him.
Augustine groaned. Before the memory, Theo had just been .
. . well, a ghost. An extremely handsome ghost with kind eyes and a strangely endearing habit of quoting statistics at inappropriate moments true, but still, all the same, just a ghost. A mildly inconvenient supernatural problem who had wandered into her shop.
That had been manageable. But this? This was very much not manageable.
Now she knew what it felt like to stand close to him while he laughed.
Now she knew what his hands felt like when they caught someone, warm, steady, and oh so careful on her skin.
He had the sort of hands that didn’t drop things, the sort of hands that instinctively held on.
Brilliant, Augustine thought as she stared at the ceiling. Now you’ve got a full-blown crush on a man who has a girlfriend, is currently extremely determined to find and protect said girlfriend, and, oh, yes: a man who is also dead.
There was a long moment of silence in the flat as another thought crept quietly into her mind, unwelcome and persistent: he had a girlfriend. A girlfriend he was trying desperately to find. A girlfriend he believed might be in danger.
Which meant that somewhere out there was a real woman who had loved him. A real woman who had lost him. A woman who was probably mourning him.
Augustine swallowed. That woman deserved better than her sitting here on her sofa developing inappropriate feelings for her dead boyfriend. That woman deserved better than for her to start romancing Theo from beyond the grave.
Augustine pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “This is a mess,” she stated, only to uncover her eyes and look straight into the face of her flatmate.
“Bad day?” Roy asked archly, a book in one hand and his glasses in the other.
“You have no idea.”
“You’re home really early,” Roy remarked, watching her with calm patience.
He clearly recognized a brewing crisis when he saw one.
Then, with deliberate slowness, he crossed the room and lowered himself into his usual armchair by the fire, which gave a soft, familiar creak as he settled into it.
He adjusted his glasses, opened his book, and placed it carefully on his knee.
But he didn’t read it. No. Instead he just sat there, waiting.
Augustine stared stubbornly at the opposite wall.
Roy waited.
She picked at a loose thread on the sleeve of her jumper.
Roy waited.
The silence stretched out for a good thirty seconds before he sighed softly and set the book down on the small table beside his chair, crossing his legs languidly.
“All right,” he said mildly. “Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing happened. I had a normal afternoon.”
“You fled your shop two hours early, slammed the door to this place hard enough to shake the building, and then announced to the furniture that your life is ‘a mess’.” Roy paused. “Yes. That all sounds very normal.”
Augustine scowled at him, but Roy simply leaned back in his armchair, folding his hands together over his stomach in that infuriatingly perceptive way he had.
“You’ll feel better if you tell me,” he informed her. “You know you will.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Ah.” Roy leaned forward. “So, something did happen then.”
Augustine groaned. “Roy—”
“Come on,” he coaxed. “Emotional honesty is therapeutic. Strip it down to zero, and you’ll feel so much better on the other side.”
“Strip it down to zero?” Augustine rolled her eyes. “Where on earth did you get that from?”
Roy grinned. “Kylie Minogue.”
“Well, stop it.” Augustine covered her face with her hands. “I don’t need to be interrogated with Kylie Minogue.”
“Kylie Minogue isn’t interrogation, she’s emotional first aid. Kylie faced the world and cancer in metallic hot pants. Find that kind of energy and talk to me.”
“Fine.” Augustine let out a long sigh through her fingers. Where did she even begin? In just one day, she’d salt-circle tested a perfect stranger, discovered he was a ghost, developed an entirely inappropriate crush on him, and then somehow time travelled into his girlfriend.
She took a deep breath. “So, the man came back.”
“Right.” Roy didn’t even blink. “The conventionally attractive one.”
“I can’t believe that’s all you took from that conversation, but yes.”
“Hey, the hot guy returned. I’m interested.” Roy sat forward. “And what happened?”
“I used Maddy’s magic to salt circle check him, and he came out clean.”
“Magic, magic, magic. Ancient family powers. Mystical salt circles. Yada, yada, yada. Got it. What then?”
“He asked me to read the cards.”
Interest sparked in his eyes. “And did you?”
Augustine nodded mutely.
Roy sat back again, clearly settling in for a story. “And after that?”
Augustine opened her mouth, then closed it again just as quickly; her cheeks continued to flush a deep shade of red.
Which Roy — damn him — noticed almost immediately. “Oh, this is going to be good, isn’t it?”
Augustine glared at him. “No. Nothing about this story is good.”
“It will be for me.” He grinned. “Don’t miss a single detail.”
She groaned and flopped back against the sofa cushions. “While reading his cards I kind of . . . accidentally transported myself into the body of his girlfriend.”
Roy blinked once. Then twice. “His girlfriend,” he repeated carefully.
“Yes.”
“You transported yourself into her.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re sure this was accidental?”
“Yes! I mean, what kind of person do you think I am?”
Roy looked puzzled. “It’s just that I didn’t know you could do that. I thought that where witchy things were concerned you were, you know, like the vanilla version.”
“What? You mean entirely flavourless?”
Roy nodded. “Yeah. You know, like witch-lite. Diet Witch. I-can’t-believe-it's-not-witch. That sort of thing.”
Augustine sighed. “This has never happened to me before. I didn’t know I could do it. I didn’t even know what was going on, really. It all felt so real though. Everything about her . . . It felt like it was happening to me.”
“Really?” Roy’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I guess I have to ask then — what exactly were you doing while occupying the body of the girlfriend of this conventionally attractive man?”
Augustine dropped her hands from her face. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous.”
Roy leaned back into his armchair again. “Why do I get the feeling,” he began calmly, “that you wouldn’t have said no if that had been an option?”
Augustine gaped at him. “Roy! I did not seduce a man while temporarily inhabiting his girlfriend’s body!”
“Well.” Roy lifted an eyebrow. “That’s a sentence I never expected to hear.
So, let me see if I have this straight. The man you were having kittens about not two days ago came back to your shop, just like you expected.
Being you, of course you caved and read the tarot for him.
Then — and this is the part I’m still sketchy about — you psychically time-travelled into his girlfriend? ”
“Yes.” Augustine looked up cautiously. “Umm, there’s one more thing.”
Roy paused, the amused curiosity slipping slightly from his expression as he regarded her more carefully. “One more thing? Honey, isn’t psychic time-travel enough?”
“You’d think, right?” Augustine sat up a little straighter, twisting her hands together in her lap. “But this guy. He’s, um, dead.”