Page 19 of Ghost With the Most
My blood was up now, heat rushing into my face even as the room turned to ice. I stepped between them, talisman raised, palm sweating against the cool obsidian disk etched with binding wards. Its weight grounded me. Its hum matched the pulse behind my eyes. “You used Beau like a battery. You didn’t grieve, you gambled. And you lost.”
His gaze darted between us. He looked unmoored, like a man realizing the game had never been stacked in his favor to begin with. His lips moved, maybe a curse, maybe a prayer. He collapsed to his knees, suddenly hollow. Whatever magic he’d leeched, whatever desperate fuel he’d been siphoning from Beau’s soul, had snapped back like a broken wire. It left him looking empty, like a scarecrow after the storm. Deflated, disheveled, deeply human.
He looked smaller now. Diminished. Just a coward with another man’s death on his hands.
“She didn’t tell me he would die,” he confessed, his voice hoarse and broken. “She said he would just sleep, that the Belladonna would put him out for a week or so. Just long enough…” he cracked, sobbing. “Just long enough for me to say goodbye.”
So. Gigi and Meredith had been in on this together.
Zelda, it seemed, had heard enough. With one powerful jolt of magic, she had Ramsay gagged and hog-tied.
My gaze flicked to her, stunned. “You could just do that the whole time? What the hell, Zelda!”
She shrugged. “More fun this way.”
I reached down and picked up the now-dormant locket. It was cold again. Heavier somehow, like grief had sunk into the metal itself. Just a trinket. A kitsch accessory with a body count. “Bag this,” I told her, holding it out carefully.
She conjured a containment pouch from the folds of her jacket, black velvet embroidered with sigils that shimmered in the dim light. As she took the locket from me, the air hummed briefly and then stilled, like the room was finally exhaling.
“And Ramsay?” she asked.
I turned, gaze landing on him. “He’s going to make a full statement,” I said. “I’ll leave Gigi and Meredith to you.”
Zelda nodded, a satisfied gleam in her eyes at the thought of meting out her own justice. “Fine. But can I at least hex his eyebrows off? Just the outer edges. He won’t even miss them. He probably waxes anyway.”
I didn’t answer. But I didn’t say no, either.
8
The funeral home was finally silent.
Not the creaking, groaning kind of silence it had adopted before, where the walls whispered and the chandeliers trembled with unsaid things… but a true stillness. The kind that settles after a long-held breath is finally released. Even the ever-present pipe organ had gone mercifully mute. No Phantom, no show tunes, no coffin theatrics. Just silence. It wasn’t hollow. It wasn’t cold. It was reverent.
I stood in the viewing room beneath the cracked chandelier, the light no longer fractured and haunted but soft, almost honeyed, casting a warm golden wash across the aged wood and blood-red velvet couch. Everything felt quieter in that glow. Gentler . Like the place, after years of grief and noise, had finally remembered how to be at peace again.
The salt circle I’d drawn was deliberate, precise. This one wasn’t to bind or banish, but to bless. A closing of the loop. An offering. There was no urgency in the chalk lines this time, no trembling hands, no adrenaline in my throat. Only intention. Only care.
Zelda was upstairs, quiet for once, letting me do this alone. She hadn’t said anything before stepping away, she’d just given me a nod, and a look I hadn’t known how to return before making herself scarce. She knew this wasn’t just a ghost story anymore. It was a story about a man who deserved a real goodbye.
I arranged my beeswax and sandalwood candles carefully, their amber scent already bleeding into the room like a promise. I lit each one with a silver match. The smoke curled upward in lazy spirals; rich, earthy, and grounding. The room smelled like old wood and warm endings surrounded by family. It smelled like home.
I sat cross-legged just inside the circle, letting the magic settle around me, threading through the floor, the air, my lungs. And I closed my eyes.
He came like mist rolling off water. Quiet and slow, soft around the edges, but unmistakably there. It was unlike any energy I’d felt from him up until now, and for the first time I got a glimpse of the depth of his soul. This man who had hidden in life behind bravado and outlandish behavior, but whose tender heart had, in the end, paid the ultimate price. lHad he been perfect? Of course not.
But then who was?
His form shimmered briefly, then solidified into something real. The candlelight moved through him as if he were made of gauze and starlight, flickering in the hollows of his shape. There was no grand entrance this time. No floating violins. Just Beau. Whole. And then he looked at me and fixed me with that crooked frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn smile.
“Damn,” he murmured, eyes shining with something that looked suspiciously like awe. “You really are good at this.”
I let out a shaky breath, and ignored the compliment. I’d never learned how to take them without feeling arrogant. “You remember everything now?”
His smile dimmed, softened into something sadder. More human. “Yeah,” he said, the word landing with weight. “All of it.”
He stepped forward slowly, stopping just shy of the salt circle. The glow etched itself along his outline, not as a barrier but a frame. Like moonlight catching glass. There was something almost sacred about the way it held him there… half-in, half-out, balanced between worlds. Time seemed to hold its breath for us. The flickering candlelight stilled. Even the floorboards, usually prone to the occasional dramatic groan, were humbled.
I glanced around, my gaze drifting over the peeling walls, the age-spotted mirrors, the forgotten corners no longer haunted. “Do you feel... ready now?”
