Chapter 3
ASHTON
brother is here!
brother is… huh?
— gus
Deep down, as though some primal part of my brain is already shouting a warning, I know what I’m going to find.
I still have the presence of mind to grab the topmost trash bag with the least amount of ‘dumpster’ scent clinging to it and throw it onto the pavement.
The keys will have to be in there, though that’s not the worst of my problems—especially when Gus dives headfirst into the dumpster, disappearing under the nearest bag.
I suck in a breath. “Get back here, you little… opossum.”
No surprise that Gus doesn’t answer me. And while every nerve in my body is telling me not to dig any deeper since I definitely don’t want to know what’s in this dumpster with me, I start to shift the trash bags so I can search for Honey’s pet.
The first time I get a whiff of bergamot, I stop breathing in through my nose. Not like that helps. My inner raccoon is chittering wildly, trying to get my attention while I continue to search.
I don’t find Gus; at least, not at first. Instead, my fingers brush against something solid. Something warm. Something that definitely shouldn’t be in Honey Lobo’s dumpster, but is.
The second it hits me, that I’m standing on a body…
his body… I scramble backward so quickly that my shoulder slams into the metal wall of the dumpster, rattling the whole damn thing.
Empty boxes collapse beneath my boots while the overpowering stink of stale frosting and old coffee suddenly turns sickening around me. My heart hammers so hard it hurts.
No. No. It can’t be—
My hands tremble. I force myself to push the last trash bag in front of me to the side and gasp as I reveal the most gorgeous face I’ve ever seen.
For one impossible heartbeat, I’m sixteen again, climbing out of a dumpster behind Onancock High with a french fry tangled in my hair as a stunning opossum shifter watches me with a curious expression.
What I wouldn’t give for him to be looking at me like that now instead of…
He looks like he could be sleeping, and I hesitate to reach for a pulse so that I can convince myself that he is. His skin is pale, almost as pale as his white-blond hair, and though his eyes are closed, I know exactly what color they are.
Purple.
They would be purple.
Gus found him first. Cushioned by a layer of garbage, his soft blue sweater stained while his features are flawless, he’s laid out on his back, the wild opossum sitting on his chest as he stares down at the motionless opossum shifter.
Somehow, I find myself doing the same.
It’s been twelve years. Twelve years since the chance meeting in the parking lot of Onancock High. He’s just as pretty as I remember, though his hair looks shorter, and his features not as soft as they once were. Still, I know exactly who he is.
So does my raccoon.
Mine. My beast hammers its fists against my insides, desperate for my attention. Mine, it demands, and as I inhale against my will, breathing in the fading scent of dark woods and bergamot, twenty-eight-year-old Roxy Kane agrees.
This male is mine.
Not Honey’s. How could he be Honey’s? Honey’s fated mate is Max Lobo, and she has the mating mark to prove it.
But the stranger who I’ve never been able to get over no matter how many males I entertained over the years…
no matter how often I scoffed at the idea of fate or searching for the one male that I’d actually let claim me… he’s here, he’s mine, and he’s dead.
My heart stops beating.
Dead.
Mine.
Fuck.
Gus lets out a gentle whine. For the first time, I’m on his side. I want to whine. Fuck, I want to scream. How the hell is this fair? What the fuck, Fate? You bring him back to me after twelve years and now he’s dead? How did—? What could have—?
Wait.
My raccoon snaps its teeth at me. At the same time, Gus bends low, nudging the male in his cheek before he sticks his nose in the air.
He makes a sound that, okay, isn’t unlike the noise my raccoon is making inside of me, then disappears under another trash bag until all I see is his pale pink tail before he’s gone.
I put a pause on the panic, focusing on what my inner raccoon is trying to tell me. I blink. “What do you mean, he’s not dead?”
He looks dead, but if there’s a chance he isn’t… I’ll take back any shit I’ve ever said about Fate if only she’ll give me this one thing.
Somewhere outside of the dumpster, Gus is making a lot of noise. The sound snaps through the panic—the hope—just enough to remind me that, dead or alive, I can’t leave the maybe dead opossum shifter in the trash.
But what am I supposed to do?
When I don’t respond to Gus, frantic clicking follows. I hiss at Gus to be quiet as I lean down and press two fingers against the male’s throat.
Nothing.
Because he is dead.
He’s dead dead—
Gus screeches, so loud it breaks through the white noise in my head.
I squeeze my eyes shut briefly before turning and glaring over the edge of the dumpster. “What is it, boy?” I snap. “Did Timmy fall down the well? Huh? What is it, Gus? Is there a ghost or something behind me?”
A male voice answers politely, “Actually, yes.”
I scream.
Not attractively, either. I don’t let loose one of those delicate little horror movie screams. Oh, no.
It’s a full-bodied, dumpster-shaking terrified shriek that tears out of me as I lunge down and grab the nearest object my fingers can find—a slimy old banana peel—and throw it directly at the male that just stepped out from behind the side of the dumpster.
The peel sails cleanly through his slightly transparent chest before splattering wetly against the pavement a couple of feet past him.
We both stare at it for a long second. Three of us do, if you count Gus who parked his furry little rump by the male’s… the ghost’s shoe.
It’s not a penny loafer, I think almost hysterically.
He’s got on a white dress shirt and a soft blue sweater over it, crisp blue jeans, and brown leather dress shoes, going with the same preppy vibe he had as a teenager…
but there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m looking at the grown-up version of the white-haired, purple-eyed opossum shifter who once visited Honey in Virginia.
Apart from being twelve years older, there’s only one other difference: the fact that’s he’s fucking see-through.
Because his dead body is in the dumpster. Because he’s a ghost.
Just in case he needs a reminder, I point one of my fingernails at him. “You’re a ghost!”
He doesn’t look surprised. Rather, he looks relieved. “And you can see me.”
Barely. He’s at, like, forty percent opacity. I kind of see him, but I can also see right through him.
“If I say no, will that make at least one of you disappear?”
For a second, he looks like he doesn’t understand what I mean. Then his purple eyes—definitely purple eyes—flicker to the dumpster and he frowns.
Right. He probably knows about his dead body being tossed away like yesterday’s garbage. I can’t imagine that would make anyone smile.
I don’t know what to say. Seriously. I think this might be the first time in my life that I’ve been knocked completely speechless, but what do you do when faced with the ghost of your mate? Ask him how he died?
Ask him his freaking name?
I open my mouth, but before I can get out a single word, Gus rises up on his hind legs, pressing both tiny paws against the ghost’s shin.
The banana peel sailed right through him. But Gus? The wild opossum touches him like he’s solid.
How?
I don’t get it. “What are you?”
The opossum shifter brushes his ghostly fingers over the top of Gus’s head in a gesture similar to how Honey pets him. Then, straightening up, he looks at me and says, “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I’ve been drifting around town for hours trying to get someone’s attention,” he says. “No one could hear me. No one could see me. The last thing I remember was looking for this bakery, and then I was back here and I was…” He smooths one hand down his middle. “This.”
It’s the middle of spring in Maryland, yet the alley suddenly feels much colder than it did a minute ago.
“Drifting,” I repeat faintly.
He nods.
“So… what? You somehow died and now you’re haunting Moonburrow?”
“I don’t think I actually died.”
There’s a cooling corpse in the dumpster that says otherwise.
“I don’t,” he insists. “I’m an opossum shifter, you see. I’m not as bad as my cousin, but, sometimes, when I’m startled, I experience thanatosis.” At my blank expression, he explains: “It’s an instinctive response to fear that leads to a catatonic state, not actual death.”
“You mean like how opossums—and opossum shifters—play dead when they’re scared?”
“Exactly. Now, I do remember someone grabbing me from behind and shouting something while I was heading down this alleyway. I must’ve gone catatonic, but instead of coming to again, I turned into this.”
Right. Because he must’ve died, and the killer tossed his body in the dumpster to hide the evidence.
At that reminder, I finally decide I should get out of his… well, grave. I climb out of the dumpster too fast, nearly slipping on the edge before my boots slam into the pavement almost as hard as my poor shoulder did before, whacking into the metal siding inside the dumpster.
I jerk my thumb behind me. “Just so you know, there’s a body in there.”
The ghost glances toward it grimly. “I noticed.”
“And it’s your body.”
“That also appears to be true.”
I drag both hands down my face hard enough to squish my cheeks. “Oh, fuck. This cannot be happening. I’m only supposed to be watching Gus and baking bread… not dealing with a ghost.”
“My name is Ashton,” he says, like introducing himself will make this who situation a little better. “My friends call me Ash.”
What does your mate call you?
No. Bad Roxy. You can’t mate a ghost so get that thought out of your head… even if it’s kind of nice knowing that the pretty opossum boy from Virginia finally has a name.