Page 31 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

“Heeeeee!” squealed the skull.

“I can see why they keep her in the fridge,” Percy muttered, placing Molly’s skull on the floor. “Cleo, as I was saying, was a nice person. She was sweet, and she was dreamy, occasionallycaustic—often caustic, in fact—and I genuinely liked her. And that’s all there was to it. I never fell in love with her, I never imagined a future with her, and I certainly never asked her to marry me.”

Succinct.

Painfully succinct.

The last comment took the bitter edge off the pill, just as Percy had intended, but then Percy kept talking. “Oh, and I slept with Charlie and Vaila, too.”

“What!” Joe actually did spit his wine this time, just a little.

Percy, mildly miffed, watched the trickle of red swirl into his carefully crafted garlic sauce, yet he held himself together admirably. “Would you like to swap plates?”

“Both?” Joe blustered. “At the same time? What are they, sixty?”

With an infuriatingly judgemental head tilt, “Ageism? I expected better from you, Joe.”

“But—”

“And don’t slut-shame me either. I can’t entirely trust that they won’t mention it, because Vaila looked like she wanted to invite you over, so I thought I should probably tell you before they do.”

“But…” Joe’s mouth did a silent wobble, before, “CharlieandVaila? As in… From this afternoon?”

Percy shrugged. “Three months is a long time in Twatt.” Joe was lost for words, so Percy helped him out. “Is all this honesty making you happy, darling? I’m doing my best. I could go on if you’d like more details?”

“No.” Joe swallowed. Joe frowned. “I think… I think maybe we’ll… We might stop doing that. With the honesty. To that extent, at least.”

Percy smiled back proudly. “Just tell me anything you want to know. I’ll give you all the details you like. I’m an open book now.”

“Yes. You are. And I appreciate it.” It was on the tip of his tongue to ask Percy exactly how many people he had slept with, but Joe was smarter than that. It was one thing to be forced to imagine gorgeous Percy with gorgeous Giordano, particularly if Joe was in the middle, but… No. He would let his mind wander no further than that. Ever again, if he could help it. “Maybe from now on, you just judge if it’s pertinent for me to know something. And I’ll trust you to make the decision whether to tell me about it or not.”

Percy nodded, perfectly unsure which of the things he’d told Joe he should or should not have said.

“So, back to Cleo’s place,” Joe redirected.

“Herrrrrrrr,” Molly moaned.

Joe glanced down at her. “Maybe we should give her a cigarette or something?”

“No smoking until after steak. What about Cleo’s place?”

“Herrrrr!” said Molly.

“How terrifying is it?”

“Utterly. For a normal person. It was always clearly haunted. Lots of banging, creaking, things going missing. In truth, I never liked being there alone, though I felt safe enough to do it. But there’s definitely a very dark feel in a few spots. One in particular. Cleo always talked about knocking through a sealed fireplace, restoring it.”

Here the skull received a soft tap from Percy’s shoe for an especially loud interruption, and he and Joe resolved silently to ignore her from there on out. “That fireplace, as I was saying, was sealed long after it was built. You could see the bricks were newer in that spot. Still old, though. I told her no, don’t knock it through. Everything felt all wrong in that part of the house,but particularly there in that spot. Funnily enough, she’d always had the same feeling there, which is why she asked me and other guests about it. Everyone sensed it.”

He bit the tip off an asparagus spear in a meditative sort of way, appearing to be sorting through hazy memories for anything else of significance. He hit on, “Oh, and there’s a girl that wanders outside at night. A ghost of some sort. She weaves around between the graves. I watched her from the window, but she didn’t notice me. Seems harmless enough.”

“Graves?” Joe gasped out. “There are graves now?”

“Oh, yes. That’s where we’ll steal our replacement skull from.” Percy dragged the long, green stem back through his sauce, explaining, “The place was abandoned, as you know, and I guess at some point another local cemetery filled up, so they needed a new one. The ground there doesn’t freeze in winter due to some sort of microclimate around the lake, so it’s a sensible option. There were already some dead buried there, anyway. They simply added some more.”

“Ah. Good,” said Joe. “So we’re going to go to the haunted house you have a bad feeling in, to investigate murder, where there’s a ghost wandering around the graveyard, where we’re going to dig up a grave in that graveyard to steal a skull?”

“Mmm, and maybe more than one. Because if what Althea said is true, and Cleo’s killed a bunch of teenagers, well…” He snapped a crisp chip in half and assessed Joe. “What would you do with the bodies?”

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