Page 78 of Ghoul as a Cucumber

It’s coming from the window.

My heart hammering, I slide out of the edge of the bed, grab the sword that Pax insists I keep beside the bed (he does have some great ideas), and approach the window. I press my back against the wall and listen. Yes, I can hear something outside, rustling in the bushes.

Slowly, I insert the tip of the sword behind the curtains and lift it a little so I can see. But as soon as I see who’s responsible for the noise, my heart does a little patter and I throw the curtains open and push up the sash.

“Ambrose?”

He stands in the middle of the garden beneath the window, next to a family of concrete badgers, and grins up at me. “Bree, you did hear me? I thought you must be sound asleep.”

“Iwassound asleep. It’s three in the morning! What are youdoinghere?”

Ambrose swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I realised that I was so engrossed with Edward’s unfinished business that I left here without saying goodnight.”

“You came all this way and woke me up to say goodnight? It’s actually morning now. How did you even get here?”

“I called an Uber. Mina showed me how.” Ambrose looks sheepish. “She said that I needed to get over here and—” he raises his hands to make air quotes, “—‘shag your brains out.’”

Mina is a good friend.

But there’s only one problem with this little plan…

“You could come in, but my parents are home,” I say apologetically. “They probably won’t wake up, but I know you feel strange about that.”

“Perhaps…” Ambrose holds out a hand. “You could come down here?”

“I don’t think that will be much better. Between the nosy neighbours and the ghosts everywhere, nowhere in this town is private, and I don’t have enough money to get a hotel room. That trip to London wiped me out—”

“I can think of one place.”

Yes.

My heart races. I know exactly where he’s thinking.

“Give me a second.” I step back from the window and hunt for my boots. I sleep naked, so I pick up my black trench coat and shrug it over my shoulders, doing up two of the buttons. I don’t need a condom, because I’m on the injection and I’ve made them all get tested and it turns out that being a ghost for a century or tendoescancel out any nasty ancient STIs you may have picked up. Both Pax and Ambrose are clean.

As a teen, I snuck out of the house more times than I’d like to admit, usually to hang out in the cemetery with Dani. It’s actually easy to sneak out of a B&B because my parents expect guests to come and go at all hours, so they don’t worry about an unlocked door. But I’m not even going to go to the front door, not with Ambrose standing there, looking incredible in the moonlight. Not when I have a ground-floor bedroom now.

I shove the sash window as high as it will go. “I’m coming down.”

“Is that safe?”

I swing my legs out and pull the tails of my trench coat through. “Sure. There’s not much of a drop, and no prickly rose bushes or anything in the flower bed.” Something about the wordrosegives me a little chill, but I don’t have time to wonder why.

I push off and drop ungracefully to the ground, managing to leap over the border garden without crushing any of Dad’s flowers or decapitating a badger statue. I run to Ambrose and throw my arms around him.

My lips find his and the kiss we share…it makes my body comealive. Ambrose can always do this to me – with just the touch of his lips he can make me feel like the world is new and exciting and wonderful. His hand cups my cheek, angling me just right so that he can go deeper, so that he can take his fill of me.

When he pulls away, his lips are slightly bruised, and his whole face is bright and smiling. “You know,” he says. “I once climbed out that same window.”

“No way?”

“Oh, yes, Cuthbert had just acquired a new mummy for his museum, and I was dying to have a look at it, but Penelope was annoyed with him for some reason, so she said that no one was going anywhere near that dusty old museum of his until he had completed whatever task she had set him. So we waited until she was asleep and snuck out together.”

I can’t help but laugh. “Trust you to sneak out of the house so you could go to amuseum.”

Ambrose’s long eyelashes flutter as he loses himself in his memory. “Cuthbert and I unwrapped the first layer of bandages that night. We found many amulets of gold and precious stones nestled between the ancient linen. I know that it’s wrong to take things from other cultures, to use wealth to buy and sell pieces of history like trinkets, but being able to touch that mummy, to see it with my fingers, to smell the ancient dust and the resin and the honey wax seals on the canopic jars, it was one of the happiest memories of my life.”

“I know.” I rest my head on his shoulder as we walk. “But maybe no talk about mummies tonight, okay?”

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