Page 1 of Giving Up The Ghost
CHAPTER 1
JULIAN
Oscar was doing his best not to wince whenever the plane jounced with another wave of turbulence, but the fact I was squeezing his fingers into a fine paste wasn’t helping. “Keep going,” I muttered, eyes closed tight. Heinrich had had the right idea, I thought wildly. He’d begged off the trip to England, ostensibly because he’d taken several client appointments in New York but confessed, at the last moment, he was still wary of the curse that seemed to have befallen so many in his circle back home. Sudden, unexpected deaths had driven him stateside in the first place and he’d be damned, apparently, if he chanced his luck setting foot back on British soil.
I was starting to think maybe I should’ve offered to stay with him and keep him company.
“We really are going to be okay,” Oscar promised, the soothing tone of his voice prickling my nerves. “The pilot?—”
“Yes, yes. Training, skill, yada yada yada. But my fears are irrational at best and”—I swallowed bile as the plane hit a pocket that made us drop several feet and a shrill scream erupt from some rows behind us—“well-founded at worst. I’m more than aware of the science behind this and, while I’m not an aerospace engineer—” Another bounce and rattle. “Shit!”
“Where was I?” Oscar mused, pushing into my snowballing panic-ramble. “Ah, right. So, Charlotte is a cousin of sorts on my father’s side. My grandfather’s sister’s granddaughter, I think. She and her daughter live in France, I believe. Nadine moved back in with her recently.” Oscar hummed thoughtfully, staring off into the middle distance. “Charlotte never said exactly why, but I think it had to do with money. Anyway, my mother didn’t have much in the way of family when she died, other than Dad and me. Her own parents died when she was very young. Her mum had… let me see,” he faltered. I wouldn’t—couldn’t—open my eyes but I knew without seeing that he was making that thoughtful expression that was surprisingly hot, the one where he pinched his lip between thumb and forefinger and sort of unfocused his eyes a bit.
Okay. I might be biased.
“Mum’s mum died of pancreatic cancer when she was just thirty-something and Mum was about three. Mum’s brother—my uncle, ah… Clark, I think. Yes! Clark!—died in Afghanistan when he was twenty-two and Mum was sixteen. And her dad died soon after.” He hesitated again. “He, ah. He showed himself out, according to Grandmere.”
I did chance a small peek then. The lights were still off except for the strip of safety lights down the aisle at floor level. It wasn’t much but still enough for me to make out the lines of Oscar’s face and Ezra slumped on his opposite shoulder, sleeping the sleep of the well-medicated (lucky bastard). The other passengers around us were either ignoring the turbulence entirely or white knuckling it with tense silence. Oscar’s expression was pensive, very calm despite the unpleasantness going on around us. Almost like he wasn’t even part of it. I wondered if I needed to add a new section to my research, something about mediumship and whether it equated to the ability to dissociate from situations. “Your mother had no other family?”
Oscar glanced at me, a surprised smile touching his lips when he saw my eye open and peer at him. “Hello there,” he murmured just loud enough for me to hear. “I was wondering if you were talking in your sleep.”
“Applying cat logic. If I can’t see it happening, it’s not happening.”
“I always knew you were a cat person.”
At his shoulder, Ezra snorted, jerked, and twisted a little, his head flopping in the other direction. Oscar reached out and tugged him back, so he wasn’t leaning into the aisle. “Whatever he got from that doc in a box back in Houston, I need to get me some too,” I complained. Oscar chuckled softly.
“To answer your question, not as far as I know. Her parents were both only children, according to Grandmere. And Grandmere never really spoke of Mum or her family much at all.”
I opened my other eye. “That seems kind of weird. Only one kid? In that day and age? She never talked to you about your mom or her side of the family at all.”
Oscar gave a restless shrug at that, focusing his gaze on our joined hands where I was still clutching him in a death grip. “She didn’t even talk about Dad much, either. I think the loss of her only child made discussing him too painful even years after his death. And Grandfather…” He trailed off. “Well, he followed Grandmere’s lead on many things.”
Another rattling bounce and a flash of the seatbelt sign, reminding us to stay seated and strapped in so they’d be able to find all our bodies with the wreckage later. Even Oscar tensed up at that one.
“So,” Oscar sighed, dragging the conversation back around to the previous point, “Charlotte is my grandfather’s cousin.”
“Cousin twice removed, actually.”
He pressed his lips together. Not a smile but an attempt. “Of course. Well, I never met her in person. Didn’t even know she existed till this past summer, actually.”
“And now she’s offering you the keys to the kingdom,” I murmured.
“Something like that,” he chuckled. “Maybe it’s silly of me, but I really am excited to do this dive into the family lineage.”
“The Fellowes lineage,” I clarified more for myself than to remind him how one-sided his familial knowledge was—and would continue to be apparently.
His glance this time was cool, pointed. “Yes.”
Ezra snorted awake, patting his hoodie pocket for his phone. It took him a moment to come online and realize we were still on the plane and nowhere he could actually use it to engage in his favorite pastime, messaging Harrison. Not unless he wanted to shell out an arm, a leg, and his firstborn. “Shit, I was sure we’d landed,” he grumbled. The plane did a weird shimmy that made me squeeze Oscar’s fingers so tightly that I was worried he might have permanent damage. “Thought all this bouncing was you driving us down that damn road in St. Alban’s again.”
Oscar laughed outright at that. “We never did find that hubcap.”
“Thought Sinjun was going to have a stroke when he saw the damage,” Ezra added, the pair of them falling into decidedly boyish giggles. The sharp sound of the man across the aisle from us clearing his throat and hissing at them to have some manners sent them into another gale of laughter. Ezra caught my eye and added, “We’ll have to take Julian there. He’d love that weird old bookstore that smells like Branston pickle and stewed tea.”
Oscar patted my clenched hand with his free one. “The smell is negligible once you get a look at the shelves,” he assured me. “It’s an antiquarian bookseller that gets the strangest things.”
“Old man swore he had a collection of grimoires from the Middle Ages last time we popped in,” Ezra reminisced. “Wouldn’t show them to us though.”
