24. Reality Settles
twenty-four
Reality Settles
Archer
Eggs… Bacon… Liam…
Liam.
Damn it, he’s sexy. I cannot stop replaying last night in my mind, over and over and over.
I’m of the firm belief I’ll never rise very high in the world of HR, as apparently my ability to fire a man is somewhat underwhelming.
But after all, this is what I hired him for, right? I hired him to come kill a ghost for me. And he wants to kill the ghost. So you know what? Maybe we’ll just kill that ghost, or whatever it is, and move on with the day. Move on with our lives. Move in together…
Yes. Yes, I know. I mean a year or two from now. A year or two of dating, and sleeping over, and waking up with him beside me.
God, I bet he smells good in the morning.
I bet the morning sex is incredible.
I need to not get hard just thinking about him.
About last night.
About the weight of him on top of me. About those little gasps he made when he fucked into my palm. About that little smile he gave me afterwards…
He has me eating out of his hand, and I can’t believe I thought for one minute I was in control of this situation.
“Looks good.”
I just about jump out of my skin when I find Simon standing there next to me, surveying the fresh loaf I just pulled out of the oven.
“Have we talked about this?” I pretty much shout at him.
Dropping an offended hand on his chest, “What? It’s hardly my fault you were too busy staring out the window to notice me. Hardly my fault my footsteps don’t make any sound.”
“They can if you want them to,” I mutter.
He pushes himself up onto the kitchen bench languidly. “Oh, but it takes enormous effort.”
“Sorry to put you out.”
Edgar taps at the window, so I push it open for him, then chuck him a piece of bacon, which he snaffles up at light speed.
“Listen,” I tell Simon, though it’s for Edgar to hear too, “today, Liam and I are going to…” Here I lower my voice to a whisper, “kill the thing upstairs.”
“You’re going to what?” asks Simon, too loudly.
“We’re going to…” I raise it just a little more than last time, “kill the thing upstairs.”
“Kraa!” screams Edgar.
“I said, we’re going to…” A little louder again, “kill the thing up—”
“Good morning!” Helena announces loudly, appearing out of nowhere right in the middle of the kitchen, making me almost drop my nice loaf.
“Quiet, darling,” says Simon. “Archer was just telling us something very important.”
“Oh? Oh.” She rustles up against Simon, and both of them lean in on one side of me, Edgar stooping forward eagerly on the other.
“I said,” I whisper, slowly and carefully and anxiously, “today, Liam and I are going to… kill the thing upstairs.”
“You’re going to kill the thing upstairs?” Simon yells, bringing me to the brink of an aneurysm. Then, while I’m concurrently wishing I could stab him and myself, not sure who first, he lets out an even louder laugh. “Good luck with that. He’ll have your guts for garters, that thing.”
“You can’t kill the thing upstairs!” Helena exclaims just as loudly. “It’s far more powerful than you, by the sounds of it.”
“Kraa!” Edgar agrees.
I lean back against the bench, raising an eyebrow at her. “You found something out then?”
“Not much.” She wanders over to Edgar, strokes his neck.
She’s doing well learning to manifest touch in this realm.
“Only that the bridge is open to all and sundry. Anyone, or anything, travelling along those ley lines can get on. I did turn a few back, told them it was very dull here with you—that they’ll simply be stuck here watching a man bake. ”
“Thank you so much,” I sigh out. Facts, though.
“But the bridge hasn’t wavered once since I discovered it,” she continues. “You know the kind of energy it takes to keep something like that open. You can only do it for a few hours at a time, maximum, last I checked.”
My heart squeezes at the plain sense she’s talking, but I concentrate on setting the bread on a nice board for breakfast as if she’s not crushing all my hopes with a few straight words. “We’ll handle it.”
“No, you won’t,” Simon throws back. “Did you hear what she said? You’re no match for that thing.”
I slam the pan down on the stove, whirling to face him. “Well, what do you want me to do?”
“I want you,” Simon replies, “to finish my job so we can all get the hell out of here before it kills the lot of us.” This he accompanies with a pointed glance at the staircase.
Edgar flaps over to the bench and taps his beak on the plate covering the bacon.
“Off!” I swish at him. Then to Simon, “You can leave anytime you like.”
“No, I cannot.” He flicks the ghost ash of his ghost cigarette onto the floor. “My name’s mud in the ghost world. You know that. Where am I supposed to go?”
“Kraa!” Edgar shouts.
“One more piece and that’s it.” I chuck another sliver of bacon onto the windowsill to get him away from the meat, then address Simon again. “Can it really be so bad? Compared to this?”
“No one invites me to parties anymore,” he whines, and he does look genuinely dejected, especially when he adds, “It’s been a long and lonely two hundred years.”
“Aw, Helena could take you along to a few things, I’m sure. Isn’t that right, Hele…”
Where she was is now empty space, gone in a puff of social awkwardness.
Simon raises a sharp eyebrow at me. “See?”
I let out another sigh, then set about collecting condiments from the pantry. “If they still don’t believe you, then why would they believe me? Why do you imagine I can change anything that goes that far back in time?”
“Because history goes to the victors!” he announces dramatically. “You fix my name in the current era and watch! They’ll adore bringing the black sheep back into the flock. But then, Archer, then…”
It’s so deliberately said that it’s clear he’s desperate for my reaction. So I throw him a quick, “Then what, Simon?”
“That’s when I’ll get my revenge.” He sucks at the cigarette bitterly. “That’s when I say who gets their name on the guest list. And Lord Fairfax will rue the fucking day.”
“Lord, save me from the afterlife,” I mumble.
“What’s that?” he snaps.
“It’s a very meaningful way to spend your afterlife,” I tell him a little more loudly, then reroute the conversation with, “Either way, I think we’ll both be happier once Liam arrives and once we shoot that thing upstairs.”
“Shoot it?” He repeats, all gall. “You think you can just waltz in and shoot it?”
“Liam has a very special gun, or so I’m told. And he’s quite capable. Unlike the rest of the people they’ve been sending this week.”
He laughs smugly. “I assure you, Fabian was quite capable.”
“And that’s another thing.” I point the egg flip at him with heavy meaning. “No more fucking the ghostbu—”
“Spirit. Extraction. Specialists.”
Thank you for the reminder.
“Those. None of those. You don’t appear before them. You don’t kill them. And you most especially do not fuck them in the barn.”
“He was all over me, Archer,” he sighs. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Kraa!” says Edgar.
“That’s right,” I agree heartily. “I didn’t need to see it either.”
Simon sneers are Edgar. “Two hundred years and you’d think people would be a little less prudish.”
“It’s really mostly the death thing,” I explain, perhaps a little sarcastically. “You know, the murdering him so you could have your way with him? Living people are funny about that.”
“Not all of them,” he quips.
“Well, I am. So no more taking advantage of hapless young men who are thinking with the wrong organ.”
“Oh?” he replies archly. “And does the same go for you?”
“What?” I’m trying to act surprised at the implication, but let’s be real. Liam is pure fire, and I can barely think straight when he’s around. It’s not as though Simon, Edgar, Helena, or literally any other spirit in the place could have missed the doe eyes I’ve been making at him.
Edgar lets out an annoying gurgling sound, which is absolutely him mocking me.
Simon scoffs loudly. “You’re out here ruining my date, and do not even try to convince me it’s for any reason but to impress your boyfriend with your ability to keep his colleagues alive.”
“He’s not my boyfriend!”
“Then what is he still doing here? Because the way I see it, you could have let him kill that thing on day one instead of wasting time on your cakes and your bread and all of this, all while you’re telling me it’s not ethical to fuck the help.”
“That’s totally different,” I bluster. “I’m not fucking ‘the help.’ That’s not even… Liam’s alive! He’s alive, and I’m not killing him just to sleep with him.”
“Aren’t you?” Simon asks starkly.
That brings a very dark silence over the room. A deep and grim one.
“I’m not,” I try to protest, but my voice comes out unconvincingly quiet.
Because maybe I am.
Simon saying that has awoken all the same fears that Liam replaced with kisses last night.
Maybe I shouldn’t be taking him upstairs to try to kill this thing, no matter how badly he wants to.
Maybe I shouldn’t be having him back here at all.
I shouldn’t. And I know it.
He just seemed so sure last night that he could take it out. And I wanted to believe him. Believe he had even a tenth of the supernatural knowledge I have. But I know he has next to nothing. And I’ve just invited him into the lion’s den.
“I’ll be there with him,” I tell Simon and Edgar, reassuring myself at the same time. “If anything happens to him, I’ll be there to take care of him.”
“No.” Simon shakes his head at me, then glances towards the stairs again. “That thing can open its own gateway to the underworld. So you know it can take him through it just as easily.”
It’s a thought I hadn’t fully fleshed out until this moment. And it’s a terrifying one. “If it tries, I’ll get him back.”
“You don’t know where it will take him though, do you?” Simon pursues. “Because the things it’s letting through… some of them are dark. Some of them are coming from places you just don’t go, Archer.”
“Are you trying to help, or what?” I snap at him.
Just then a knock hits the door. Liam. Here, now, in the middle of all of this.
Edgar flies over and perches on my shoulder, leaning his head into my cheek, so I raise a hand up to stroke him, even if I’m on edge at Simon, at everything right now.
Simon slides off the bench and leans close, making sure Liam can’t hear us.
“I am trying to help. Take my advice and stop trying to fight the thing. Get out of here, leave this place to it. Take Liam and run. I’ll come, and we’ll set up shop somewhere I don’t need to worry about it wrenching me back into the void at any second. Or somewhere worse.”
He drops the ghost cigarette to the floor and stamps on it with his blue silk slippers. “If you need me, I’ll be in the barn. Sans Fabian. Thank you so much.”
Then he disappears into thin air.
After a soft nuzzle against my cheek, Edgar flaps back outside.
Now, it’s just me and Liam, and one very big decision to make.