Chapter 5
Ifollow the silver stars down a corridor I’ve never noticed before, which is saying something considering I’ve lived on this ship for over a year.
Either the Emerald Queen has been holding out on me, or the dead get a better deck plan than the living. The stars lead me past the main dining room, past the theater, and down a narrow hallway lined with vintage maritime posters that were clearly purchased in bulk at a nautical yard sale.
I trot along behind them with my fistful of breakfast bacon held high. Some women bring flowers to a meeting. I bring cured meats. We all have our love languages.
The stars blink out at a door marked Neptune’s Sanctuary: Private Event Space. The door swings open on its own. Naturally, it does. Ghosts never met a door they couldn’t dramatize—or float through.
I step inside and immediately understand why this room isn’t in heavy rotation.
It’s gorgeous in that over-the-top way that says someone’s rich uncle decorated it in 1977 and nobody has had the heart to update it since.
The walls are painted a deep marine blue with hand-painted murals of mermaids and sea creatures that look vaguely anatomically confused.
One of the mermaids has two navels. I counted twice.
Octopus-shaped chandeliers hang from the ceiling, their tentacles dripping with crystals.
Somebody paid real money for confused sea life.
Velvet couches in seafoam green line the walls, auditioning for a mermaid’s parlor, and a bar in the shape of a giant clamshell holds down the corner.
It’s hideous. It’s also strangely perfect. Much like most of my social circle.
The room smells of old carpet and lemon furniture polish with a thread of briny sea air sneaking in through a cracked window.
Sunlight pours through the floor-to-ceiling windows, showcasing endless blue water, and standing directly in that beam of light, backlit and glowing at the edges, is my Viking.
I’d bet my breakfast waffle he staged it. I’d bet the syrup, too.
And oh my word, he’s gorgeous. Seven feet tall if he’s an inch, bare-chested, with muscles straight out of a museum’s Norse wing.
A fur cloak drapes over shoulders broad enough to make doorways nervous.
The unruly braids from the atrium are gone, replaced with dark hair that falls past those shoulders in thick waves, artfully tousled for a man who’s been dead a few centuries. He glowed himself up for this meeting.
Death has done nothing for my hair volume and everything for his. There’s no justice in this world, and I now have confirmation there’s none in the next one, either.
Not that I’m dead. I just do an alarming amount of business with the people who are.
Dark eyes, nearly black, lock onto mine.
He knows exactly how good-looking he is.
I can tell he’s built an entire personality around it, and possibly a small kingdom.
He’s holding a spear taller than he is, which should look ridiculous but somehow makes him more dangerous.
Furry boots climb to his knees, completing the whole “I’ve come to pillage your village and possibly your heart” aesthetic.
He could have leaped off the cover of one of those steamy novels Nettie is currently hoarding in her cabin like a literature-obsessed dragon.
Be still, my married heart.
“Hello, little one.” His voice is deep and rumbly and has no business being that attractive.
“I’m five-five,” I’m quick to tell him. “That’s a perfectly average height for a woman. I’ve done the research.”
“You’re tiny.” He grins, showing perfect teeth that no actual Viking ever owned. “I am Magnus Darkwater, warrior of days of yore.”
“Days of yore.” I cross my arms and try very hard to look unimpressed. “Really?”
Magnus Darkwater. The name alone comes with its own wind machine. His hair certainly seems to think so.
He snaps his fingers, and moody music starts playing from nowhere, all violins and heavy percussion, the soundtrack you’d want for a candlelit dinner or a duel. With this man, I suspect there’s no difference.
He sets down his spear with a thunk, crosses the room in three massive strides, and pulls me into his arms. The bacon never gets a chance to open negotiations. It hits the carpet without so much as a eulogy.
And just like that, we’re slow-dancing.
I’m slow-dancing with a dead Viking in a nautical-themed event space while mysterious music plays from thin air.
I should be more surprised by this, but honestly?
After a year of finding bodies and chatting up ghosts, my threshold for weird has sailed clean out of port.
Besides, this particular ghost is my best lead, and my best lead currently smells fantastic and dances better than my prom date did.
The bar was low. He’s clearing it in furry boots.
I’m calling it a win for the investigation.
“Delicious,” he murmurs against my ear, and goose bumps rise on my arms even though he’s a ghost and shouldn’t be able to affect my body temperature or my common sense.
Focus, Trixie.
“Magnus.” I try to put some space between us, but he pulls me closer and spins me until my feet barely skim the floor. “I need to ask you some questions.”
“Ask me anything, beautiful one.”
“How did you know Astrid?”
He dips me low, and I grab onto his shoulders, his very solid, very muscular shoulders, to keep from falling.
How is he this solid? Shouldn’t ghosts be more ghostly? Whatever the afterlife charges for a gym membership, it’s worth every nickel.
“Know her?” He pulls me back up until we’re nose to nose. “What makes you think I knew of the woman? I swear I didn’t, but I do know of her.”
“The ghost who comes back is always someone the deceased loved most.” I attempt a step back, but he keeps me swaying to the music. “So how did you know her? Were you married? Dating? Secret lovers? Did you meet at a Renaissance fair? Blink twice if it was a Renaissance fair.”
Magnus laughs, rich and warm, and I’d wager that laugh alone has felled entire villages of women.
Good thing I’m married to Ransom and therefore immune to ghostly charm.
Mostly immune. Okay, slightly immune. Fine.
Not immune at all, but I’m pretending really hard, and pretending is nine-tenths of marriage law.
“Astrid loved me most,” he says, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear with fingers that somehow have substance. “All women do.” He winks.
Somewhere in the great beyond, Astrid Storm is rolling her eyes hard enough to stir the Baltic.
I sigh the official sigh of women everywhere dealing with men who believe they’re gifts to humanity. Somebody really needs to check the receipts.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer that matters.” He tries to pull me close again, his lips brushing near my temple.
I frown and shake my head, literally shaking it to clear the fog he’s pumping into my brain. “Magnus. Focus. I need information, not seduction.”
“Why not both?” His grin widens, all charm and zero shame.
“Because one of us is dead and the other is married.” I hold up my left hand and wiggle my wedding ring in his translucent, troublemaking face. “See? Taken. Unavailable. Spoken for. Married to Ransom Baxter, who is very much alive and very good at violence.”
“I was once very good at violence too,” he says wistfully. “It’s how I got this cloak.”
I decide not to ask the cloak’s previous owner for a reference. Odds are he’s down one corporeal frame himself.
He nods my way. “Your husband is a lucky man.”
“He is. Now tell me about Astrid before I stop dancing with you and start demanding answers, and trust me, nobody enjoys me when I demand. Ask my husband. Ask the buffet staff. There’s an omelet chef on deck twelve who still flinches when I approach.”
Magnus gives a theatrical sigh, as if I’ve asked him to do calculus instead of answering basic questions about a murder victim.
But then the swagger dims a notch, and I catch a glimpse of the man behind the paperback persona.
Assuming there is a man behind the paperback persona.
With Magnus, I’m genuinely not sure. He might be pectorals all the way down.
“Astrid Storm was a retired hospital administrator,” he begins, still swaying with me to the invisible music. “She founded the Velvet Viking Book Club twelve years ago. Ran it with an iron fist inside a velvet glove.”
“Velvet, naturally. The woman committed to a theme,” I say. “I respect that.”
“I’m a romantic.” He brushes his fingers down my arm, and a shiver sneaks through no matter how hard I fight it. “She was independently wealthy via an inheritance from her late husband. She used that money to control the group. She funded the annual cruises but demanded absolute loyalty in return.”
“Generous with a leash attached.” I let out a low whistle. “The most expensive flavor of free there is.”
And these cruises don’t run cheap. Ask me how I know. I may work on this ship, but Ransom and I still pay for our own cabin so we’re not relegated to steerage with the rest of the crew. Marriage comes with many perks. A free cabin is not one of them.
Money and mandates. Poppy’s little jab from last night just got a promotion from catty to evidence.
I lean in, genuinely interested now and temporarily forgetting that I’m being romanced by a dead Norseman. “Ooh, tell me more.”
Magnus beams, sensing a victory, and dips me again. I let him, because I’m willing to be manhandled by a ghost if it means cracking a murder wide open. My priorities are questionable at best. My spine files a formal complaint on the way down, and something tells me my husband would co-sign it.
“Astrid’s perfect marriage to her wealthy late husband was a lie,” he murmurs, his face inches from mine, his dark eyes locked on my lips, which is a boundary violation in at least two realms of existence. “It made her miserable. And it made her want to make others miserable in turn.”