Chapter Text
Uncle John called it a networking opportunity.
Johanna did not understand why networking with John seemed to involve wandering into dodgy, abandoned buildings after dark. This place in particular, an old textile mill near the river, was a step above his usual standard of haunted and well into the territory of actively decomposing. John muttered a spell to magic away the rusty chain that held the door shut and opened the door wide, revealing an old industrial floor so full of dust and mildew that Johanna found herself rummaging through her memory for her most recent round of vaccinations, hoping they were all up to date.
“Is there a reason you never take me anywhere that’s up to building code? Or during daylight hours?” she asked her uncle, looking askance at a mysterious collection of green smudges on a brick wall as they entered the building. This was probably why John wore that tan trench coat everywhere he went. It helped keep off the muck. Johanna tugged the sleeves of her own black rain jacket down to cover her wrists more.
“Nobody’s forcing you to mess around with the occult, you know,” John answered. “Still plenty of time for you to pursue a normal career path. Become a solicitor and represent me when I finally end up on trial in Hell or something.”
Johanna flipped her long brown hair over her shoulder. “Who says I can’t do both? We both know you could hold down a day job if you wanted to.”
“That’s the thing.” John snapped his fingers and summoned up a nice floating point of light that cast an even glow across the whole interior of the mill. He nodded towards a back corner and led Johanna to walk in that direction. “Getting too involved in this world makes the real one seem a lot less real.”
The warped wooden floor creaked almost boisterously under Johanna’s footsteps, and little plumes of dust and who knew what else rose up in her wake. Clearly nobody had walked here in quite some time.
“So these colleagues you want me to meet,” she began. “No chance they’re human mortals, is there?”
“Nah, no chance of that,” John agreed. The point of light hovered at his shoulder, and he squinted around the back corner of the mill. The floor was littered with antique looms, but there weren’t enough of them to constitute a functioning old mill floor. It looked more like someone had gotten halfway through clearing the place out and then abandoned the project. A rickety set of stairs with completely inadequate structural support was set right in the middle of the room, leading up to a glorified hole in the ceiling that allowed access to the second floor. “Not demons either, though, I wouldn’t go around introducing you to that sort. Any guesses?”
“Ghosts, I would imagine,” Johanna guessed. “This place hasn’t been disturbed by physical people in years, judging by the dust clouds, and whoever came in here before us didn’t have to bother undoing the chain on the door.”
“Clever girl,” John said with a nod. “I got a tip that these two were spotted going in here yesterday to deal with some banshees and never came back out, even after the banshees ran off. And that’s odd, for them, they don’t usually hang around.” He pointed towards the ground a few yards away. “Ah. That’ll do it. There’s one of them, there.”
Johanna looked where he was pointing, half expecting to see one of John’s usual femme-or-homme fatales lounging on the dusty floor. Instead, she saw a ball, roughly the size of an apple, made of pulsing and shifting light.
“That’s a colleague?” Johanna asked, interest piqued.
“Of a sort,” said John. He approached the ball on the floor and squatted down to examine it more closely. “He’s had a bad day at work, though. This doesn’t happen to ghosts very often. Normally if they get hit with something that mucks up their energy they just revert back to what they looked like when they died. The bubble routine is a last resort for when they can’t withstand whatever is going on around them. Stuff like ambient magic or being trapped somewhere too small to manifest their whole bodies. In this case, I’d guess banshee screams came a little too close to rattling him apart, so he downshifted.”
“Can all ghosts do that?” Johanna had never seen such a thing before.
John shrugged. “Probably, if they took the time to learn how. It’s not usually something they do on purpose. This one’s a special case. He and his partner have figured out just about everything a ghost can do at this point, and how to be menaces with it.” He prodded at the ball. “I can’t tell which one of them this one is, though, and I’m not keen to wake up the wrong one first.”
Oh lord, this was probably one of John’s colleagues that was actually a mortal enemy except under specific circumstances. “There’s a wrong one?” Johanna repeated, mildly incredulous.
John carefully scooped up the glowing ball in his hands and rose to stand again. He extended his handful of ghost to Johanna. “To be honest they’re both royal pains to deal with when they’re separated, but if you have to pick, Charles is always a better bet than Edwin. Would you mind holding him? I need my hands.”
Johanna accepted the bubble and tilted her head curiously. The surface of the ball didn’t touch her hands, but rather levitated just above them like it was being suspended by magnets. Light danced around the surface of the bubble in pretty, rippling patterns. “He’s kind of cute like this, isn’t he?” she reflected.
“Don’t let him hear you say that when he’s got ears again, whichever one it is,” John warned. He had both hands in his coat pockets, digging around for something. “If it’s Edwin, he’ll never forgive you, and if it’s Charles he’ll never stop gloating about it.” He pulled an ordinary looking, palm-sized gray stone out of his pocket. “Here we are.” He brought the stone to his lips and whispered, “Edwin Paine.” The stone began to faintly glow. John held the faintly glowing stone up and brought it close to the bubble in Johanna’s hand. The glow faded somewhat.
“Does that mean this isn’t Edwin?” Johanna asked.
“Yep,” John confirmed. “Johanna, meet Charles Rowland. Died in 1989, been running amok around the whole UK ever since, joined at the hip with his friend Edwin.” He made finger quotes around the word friend. “They run a little operation called the Dead Boy Detective Agency. Mostly they help other ghosts solve their unfinished business, but they dabble in all sorts of supernatural fuckery. If you’re serious about getting into the magic PI business around here, you’ll be running into them at least a couple times a year. They pop up pretty much everywhere. Charles, here, is the one you’ll want to do most of the talking with. More sociable, less likely to hex you if you spook him.”
Johanna took all this in and filed it away as useful information, but she was a bit hung up on the finger quotes. “Are they dating?” she asked.
“They don’t seem to think so,” John answered with a truly scathing eyeroll. “I think they may have just skipped dating and jumped straight into being married. You’ll see what I mean in a minute. Let’s wake him up. Time for you to learn some ghost first aid.”
John walked her through the incantation and warned her not to put too much of her own power into it lest she give herself a wretched hangover. Charles just needed a little boost to get himself back in order, he explained, not a supernatural steroid injection. When John was satisfied that she was ready, Johanna cast the spell with a hint of her own flair, sprinkling in some soothing intentions. If Charles was, indeed, going to be a nuisance to deal with, she figured she may as well get a head start on calming him down before he could raise a fuss.
The ball in her hands darkened and shifted. Johanna let it tumble out of her hands and John stepped in to catch the forming human shape by the shoulders before it could sprawl on the floor. In between one blink and the next, the figure in John’s grip flickered from a vague blue wisp in the shape of a man to a solid human being.
A solid teenage boy, to be specific.
“You didn’t mention your colleague was a schoolboy,” Johanna snickered.
John rolled his eyes again. “Come off it, he’s older than you,” he scoffed. His body language betrayed him, though. He settled the boy-ghost on his feet with a marked gentleness that Johanna knew he reserved for children. Charles blinked a few times, wavering back and forth a bit as he adjusted to having arms and legs again. John kept steadying hands on his shoulders all the while.
Charles Rowland looked like a character from an old film about teenage rebels, Johanna thought. He had a flashy earring and three horizontal notches carved into his sideburns, and his long black jacket was decorated with patches declaring his allegiance to ska. Johanna supposed ska must have been in vogue when he died. She’d never seen the appeal of it, herself. She had never thought that rock and roll was wanting for a brass section. She could admit, though, that Charles pulled the whole thing off rather well. A few years ago, a boy like this would have had no trouble making her blush.
Now, though, Johanna was twenty-one years old, and the sight of this teenager who had been dead since she was a baby, currently blinking like a newborn kitten in her uncle’s hold, made her feel strangely maternal. She sort of wanted to make him a cup of tea.
Then the boy jolted to full awareness, phased right through John’s hands, and tumbled back into a tidy little roll to jump back to his feet when his back was against the wall. He reached over his shoulder into a bag that Johanna had not yet had a chance to notice and produced a cricket bat that he wielded like a sword out in front of him.
“Stay the fuck back!” he shouted, a wild and furious look on his face. His hands, covered with black leather gloves, tightened dangerously around the bat handle.
Johanna obligingly took a step back. John did not. He stood his ground and shoved his hands in his pockets. “See?” he said to Johanna over his shoulder. “Royal pains, both of them. And this one is the people person.”
Charles lowered his bat a few inches, the look on his face shifting to one of deep suspicion. “John?”
“Nice to see you, too,” John said dryly. “I suppose I should be grateful you didn’t hit me this time.”
Charles’ shoulders slumped and he dropped his arms, letting the bat swing freely by his side in his left hand. “Jesus, you scared the shit out of me,” he complained. “Thought I got nabbed by a warlock or something. And where’s Edwin?”
John shook his head. “No clue. We found you first. I assume he was with you?”
Charles didn’t answer. His eyes widened in panic and he took off running, sprinting right past both John and Joanna to leg it up the set of rickety stairs. Johanna started to run after him, but John caught her arm and pulled her to a stop before she made it to the stairs.
“First of all, I don’t trust those stairs with a physical person’s weight on them,” he growled. “Your mum will kill me if you show up for Sunday tea with a broken leg.”
“Right, sorry,” Johanna agreed, face hot. She’d forgotten that Charles didn’t have any actual mass to him, and was therefore a terrible indicator of what the stairs could hold.
“Second of all,” John went on, releasing her arm, “You want to give them space when they’re looking for each other. It’s like a mother bear thing, but they both take turns being the mother and the cub. If you get between them they freak the fuck out, and they’ve gotten downright dangerous in the last decade.”
Johanna accepted the warning, but she also latched onto the delightful implication that underlay it. “Uncle John. Did the dead teenage boy with a dangle earring beat you up?”
John glowered. “Yes he did, as a matter of fact. Me and half the magicians he’s ever met. That bat’s enchanted. It hits like a ton of bricks. Not that he needs it, one time he just tackled me and started kicking me in the ribs. While he was blind, I would add.”
“That’s not fair, I was delirious!” Charles’ voice protested from above. Johanna looked up to the top of the stairs, and there was his head peering over the edge of the opening in the ceiling. Instead of walking down the stairs to rejoin them he just let himself fall through the floor, landing on his feet with surprising lightness. “And I said sorry, and I gave you all that nice stuff to make up for it!” The bat was nowhere to be seen. Charles instead cradled another bubble of shifting light carefully in both hands.
“The brick of gold was nice,” John allowed. “Could have done without all the nicotine gum.” He nodded at the ball in Charles’ hands. “He doing alright?”
“Yeah,” Charles said with obvious relief. “He was right where I left him. There was a whole funeral’s worth of banshees in here, and Edwin had to bubble up after he cast the banishment spell because they all started screaming, so I hid him in one of the offices upstairs while I chased the stragglers out.”
“Why didn’t the banshee screams affect you the same way?” Johanna asked, curious. Maybe different ghosts had different vulnerabilities.
Charles smiled sheepishly. “Well, it did eventually, didn’t it? I just do a little better with loud noises than Edwin does, so I could hang around a bit longer.”
“Uh huh,” John said drily. “Charles, this is my niece, Johanna. Johanna, what Charles means to say is that once Edwin bubbled up, Charles went fucking berserk and kept fighting until the mill was clear, then immediately went into a ghost coma because he took too much damage to keep himself together. That sound about right to you, kid?”
“Edwin says the bubble thing is more like hibernation than a coma,” Charles deflected, looking embarrassed.
“That’s worse,” John pointed out helpfully. “Animals who hibernate drop their heart rate so low they’re almost dead.”
“Don’t have a heart rate, do I?” said Charles with a shrug. He pointedly shifted his gaze to Johanna. “Sorry, I’ve been rude. I was just worried about my best mate, here.” He gently lifted the glowing ball in his hands, indicating who he meant by best mate. “Thanks for waking me up, really. Cheers. I’m Charles, this here is Edwin. You’re John’s niece? The magic one we’ve been hearing about?”
“Yes, nice to meet you” Johanna said. She didn’t bother extending her hand to shake, Charles did not seem remotely inclined to take either of his hands off the ball. “Johanna Constantine. I’m learning the ropes of the supernatural private investigation business.”
“Oh!” Charles brightened. “That’s aces! We’re doing some proper networking here, aren’t we? Me and Edwin are the Dead Boy Detectives. You gonna talk John into retiring soon, then?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” John groaned. “I’m not old, you just never learned what normal aging looks like.”
Charles gasped in mock offense, clutching the glowing ball closer to his chest. “Rub it in, why don’t you!” he exclaimed. He then turned to Johanna and made sad puppy dog eyes. “No respect for the dead, this one, not even when they’re dead kids.”
“You’re thirty-four,” John retorted.
“And you’re almost fifty,” Charles countered. “This is a dangerous line of work for a living person, especially with the state of your lungs. You should think about letting Johanna take over for you.”
“Oh,” Johanna realized. “You’re the one that keeps filling his office with nicotine gum and patches.”
“Smoking kills,” Charles informed her. “I smoked when I was younger, and look at me now.”
“Smoking didn’t have anything to do with that, and you can’t make me quit just because you’re jealous,” John told him. Charles raised his right index and middle fingers up away from the bubble in his hands and re-angled his wrist to flash an inverse V-sign at John without jostling Edwin.
“Would you like me to wake him up?” Johanna offered, gesturing at the glowing ball.
Charles stiffened and wrapped his arms around the ball, mostly concealing it from view. “Er,” he said nervously. “Sorry, I know you woke me up and did a bang-on job of it, it’s just. Edwin doesn’t take well to new people.”
John snorted. “Bit of an understatement there, I’d say. I can do it, he knows me.”
Charles glanced between the two of them, not relaxing his stance one bit. He gave a tiny shake of his head. “I think I’ll just bring him back to the office, actually. He can finish resting up somewhere safe.”
John raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms. “We’re not seriously doing this whole song and dance again, are we? It’s been fourteen years. I’m not asking you to tell me all his deepest darkest secrets, just let me give him a magic espresso shot.”
Charles tightened his arms around the ball. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, honest,” he said plaintively. “But Edwin hates it when people do magic on him. And he’s never met Johanna. We’ll scare him even worse than I was. I can just take him home and he’ll wake up when he’s ready.”
“He’s not a wilting flower, he tried to burn me alive in my own flat,” said John, clearly exasperated. Johanna would need to hear that story sometime soon. “He’ll be fine.”
Charles took an anxious step backwards. Johanna chose this moment to intervene. “Of course we won’t do anything you’re not comfortable with,” she assured Charles, shooting a reproachful glare at John. “Obviously you want to protect your partner, and that’s completely understandable. I would just imagine that if things were reversed, and we’d found him and woken him up first, you might not like it if we left you as a bubble.”
Charles hesitated and then nodded slowly. At the same time, John grumbled, “If we woke Edwin up first that would be the least of our worries.”
Johanna ignored John and forged ahead. “It looks to me like you two watch each other’s backs. If I were your partner, and I found out that you left me on the sidelines while you made your way home after a massive blowout with a bunch of banshees, and didn’t even let me check on you first, I might be a little peeved.”
Charles sagged. “Shit,” he mumbled. “You’re right, he’ll kill me if I leave him like this. Especially if he hears I talked to you two.” He angled his head towards John. “He should do it, though. Edwin will still be freaked out, but at least he knows John.”
“Wow, if only I had thought of that,” John drawled.
Charles grimaced apologetically at Johanna. “I’m really sorry, you seem really nice, but would you mind hanging back a bit? Edwin will probably be a little disoriented, and if he sees someone he doesn’t know he might panic.”
“Of course,” Johanna assured him, because she was sensitive and good with people. Unlike certain relatives of hers who had the bedside manner of a cantankerous lorry driver. She backed off and lingered around the corner of the staircase in the middle of the room, out of view.
“Okay,” she heard Charles say softly. “Thanks, John. Sorry to be difficult. You know how it is.”
“Yeah, I know how it is,” John agreed, with a gentle sort of resignation. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah.”
John murmured the incantation. Johanna noticed that he incorporated some of the calming intentions she’d used in her version of it, and glowed a bit with pride. John was always telling her that she’d be a better magician than him in no time, but it was still nice to see evidence that he really meant it.
She heard a scuffle and an offended sort of yelp, and could not resist taking a peek around the corner of the staircase. Charles was no longer holding a bubble. Instead he had his arms looped around the chest of another teenage boy, holding him upright. The second boy, presumably Edwin, dangled bonelessly in Charles arms but still managed to sort of swat at the hands clasped around his chest.
“Let go, I’m fine,” Edwin mumbled. He had a bow tie and a waistcoat on under his tweed jacket. He was wearing knee high socks. If Charles looked like a character from a teen film, Edwin looked like a smaller version of Johanna’s great-great-grandfather.
Edwin was adorable, in the way that an angry cat wearing a top hat would be adorable. Johanna vowed she would never let this realization affect how she talked to the poor boy, he would probably be so offended he just disintegrated.
“‘Course you’re fine, mate,” Charles crooned. “It’s just me and John, banshees all clear, we’re good. Didn’t even have to hide from Death this time.”
“Why the devil is Constantine here?” Edwin finally got his feet underneath him and stood fully upright, fussing with his layers to reassert some kind of dignity. Charles released his hold on him. “And did you put me in a drawer?”
“Sorry mate,” said Charles, keeping one hand on Edwin’s back while his partner got his bearings. “There was an old desk upstairs, and the drawer was the only place I could find with a working lock. Didn’t want something snatching you away while you were a cricket ball, did I?”
“If you ever call me a cricket ball again I will throw your firework collection in the river,” Edwin grumbled. He fixed his bow tie, as if that made him look more serious and less like a child in a costume.
Charles laughed, patting Edwin’s back firmly before taking his hand away. “There he is. Good to have you back.”
John nodded to Edwin. “Nice to see you, baby arsonist,” he greeted with just a touch of irony.
“I’m at least fifty years your elder, rookie,” Edwin responded in the exact same tone.
Johanna was impressed. They really were friends.
“John brought his niece with him this time,” Charles told Edwin, softly enough that Johanna almost didn’t hear. “Remember her? The magic one. He’s been talking about her for years.”
Edwin cocked his head and looked at John. “You told me you didn’t want us to meet her. Something about Charles being liable to break her tender young heart, if I recall.”
John choked on nothing. Charles burst into a gleeful laugh. Johanna ducked back behind the staircase to conceal her burning face even though nobody was looking at her. She took back every nice or sentimental thought she’d ever had about her uncle, she was going to kill him.
“Is that why we haven’t met her before?” Charles cackled.
“That was years ago,” John muttered.
“I don’t see why a few years should change your stance,” said Edwin airily. “Any living person interested in him is already a necrophile. What’s an age difference, at that point?”
Charles laughed so hard he sounded like he was crying.
“Okay,” John said loudly over Charles’ hysterics. “Edwin’s obviously himself again. Johanna, come on over to be introduced.”
Johanna composed herself and emerged from her side of the staircase. Edwin had pulled himself together as well, all of his layers settled into their proper arrangement, his hands folded neatly behind his back. Charles, on the other hand, was still wheezing, doubled over with his arms wrapped around his stomach.
“Oh bloody hell,” Charles gasped. “I’m so sorry, Johanna, I’d say he isn’t normally like this but–” His next words were lost to hysterical giggling.
“Yes, my apologies,” Edwin agreed, not looking the least bit apologetic. “I did not mean to implicate you in anything untoward. I was merely curious as to your uncle’s motivation for delaying our meeting so long.” He extended his hand. “Edwin Paine, co-founder of the Dead Boy Detective Agency.”
Johanna shook his hand firmly. “Johanna Constantine,” she said. “I believe my uncle will shortly be giving a very detailed answer as to why our meeting was put off. I’ll let you know if the explanation satisfies.”
“I don’t understand how I ended up in trouble here,” John complained. “Can you blame me for not wanting my own blood running around with you two? I’ve seen the trouble you get into.”
“That’s slander,” Charles chucked. He righted himself and swiped his gloved palms over his eyes to wipe away tears of mirth. “We’re model citizens! You can trust us around your replacement.”
“Oh I can, can I?” John raised one eyebrow. “It’s because of your serious commitment to safety, then, that I found you all bubbled up on the floor?”
The smile dropped off Charles’ face at once. Edwin pivoted on his heel, turning his side profile to Johanna, to fix his partner with an icy stare. Charles met his gaze with wide, panicked eyes.
“Charles,” said Edwin dangerously. “Did you drop into your dormant state out in the open?”
“It wasn’t on purpose!” Charles defended himself. “The screaming made it hard to hold together! And I didn’t bubble up until the building was clear!”
“We have had this conversation!” Edwin hissed. “Your dormant state is your most vulnerable condition! It’s as if you’re hibernating! If you think you’re going to drop, you must either find me or find a secure place to hide!”
“You were already a ball!” said Charles. “I got you someplace safe, didn’t I? And I didn’t want to hide while there were still banshees about! I was on my way to a nice little gap in the floorboards, I just didn’t quite make it.”
Edwin didn’t respond to that out loud, he just pressed his lips into a thin line and glared. Charles answered the glare with a devastating pair of puppy-dog eyes. They seemed to be silently continuing their same conversation.
Johanna was starting to see what John meant about these two having skipped dating and jumped straight into marriage.
“How long have you two been working together?” she asked.
“Seventeen years,” they answered in unison, not breaking eye contact with each other.
A fairly long marriage, at that, then.
“We can continue this discussion later,” Edwin said to Charles, concluding their eye contact conversation for now. He turned his attention back to Johanna. “May I assume, from your presence here, that you are now training to take over Mr. Constantine’s private investigation firm?”
John opened his mouth to object, but Johanna beat him to it.
“I’ll be operating independently,” she said smoothly. “John and I have different strengths that are best suited to different clienteles. I’m just taking advantage of my uncle’s experience and connections to learn as much as I can about the business before I start my own firm.”
Edwin nodded. “A practical course of action. I will look forward, then, to our paths crossing often in the future. It is always a pleasure to meet a colleague.”
“Yeah, plus I owe you now, for waking me up,” Charles chimed in. “Actually, hang on. What sort of stuff do you like? I’ve got some nice jewels in here, if that’s your thing.” He dropped his backpack off his shoulder and started rooting around in it without waiting for an answer.
“Is he joking?” Johanna asked Edwin.
“He is not,” Edwin answered.
“Here we are!” Charles declared, pulling his arm out of the bag. He had between his fingers a sapphire the size of a robin’s egg. “This thing used to have a nasty curse on it, but Edwin got it mostly clean. Now it just makes your eyes sort of hurt if you stare at it too long. Not sure how much it’s worth, but it ought to be a fair bit.”
Johanna stared at the stone in shock for a long moment. It did make her eyes sting a bit, after a second. “You can’t just give me a precious gemstone the size of my thumb.”
Charles frowned quizzically at John. “I can’t?”
John shrugged. “It’s up to her.”
“That thing is worth thousands of pounds,” Johanna insisted.
“That is the point, if I’m not mistaken,” said Edwin. “Do consider that those thousands of pounds of value are currently residing in the infinite storage space of a person with no use for money.”
“Yeah, exactly!” Charles agreed. “You’d be doing the British economy a favor. And this thing’s not even stolen from the colonies, I don’t think.”
Johanna started to shake her head. John caught her eye meaningfully.
“I should warn you,” he said, “If Dead Breakfast Club here thinks he owes you, odds are he’ll keep breaking into your place to leave you stuff for the next fourteen years or so.”
Johanna recalled a small crate of nicotine gum in the corner of John’s office and held out her hand to accept the sapphire. “Thank you very much, Charles. Consider us even.”
Charles beamed. It was a dazzling thing, all white teeth and shining eyes and boyish charm. “Cheers!” he said, and dropped the surprisingly heavy stone into her palm.
The four of them made their way out of the mill shortly thereafter, once both ghosts had done a quick sweep of the area to make sure they hadn’t overlooked any curses or portents of doom. They had a surprising professionalism about them as they performed their once-over, falling into well-practiced patterns of movement that let them cover every inch of ground without ever overlapping. When they were done, Charles recited a thorough list of observations to Edwin, who wrote them all down with the speed and precision of a court stenographer even as they walked out of the building and up the road that led back into the more populated part of town.
“I don’t do so great with the note-taking,” Charles explained when he caught Johanna watching him give his report. “Memory’s fine, I just can’t spell for shit.”
“Your memory is excellent,” Edwin corrected. “And once I have finished compiling the required materials, I mean to run a screening for dyslexia, if only to confirm what we already know.”
Charles made a vaguely unhappy sound, even though the expression of his face could only be described as besotted. “Still think it was a bit fucked for them to give can’t-bloody-read-or-spell syndrome a name like dyslexia.”
“I will include your feedback when I send in my criticisms of the current screening process to the NHS,” Edwin said dutifully.
At the nearest building that wasn’t long-abandoned, which appeared to be a road sign manufacturer, Edwin and Charles stopped and said their goodbyes.
“This place has an intact mirror in the back room,” Charles told Johanna. “We’ll use that to hop back to our office.”
“That’s a convenient way to travel,” Johanna said.
“Not as convenient as teleporting at will,” Edwin observed. “Speaking of which, I do hope that you return home safely. Thank you both for your assistance this evening in emerging from our dormant state in a more timely manner than circumstances would have otherwise allowed.”
“Right, thanks for the wake-up call,” Charles agreed. “Get home safe, yeah?”
The two of them strolled through the solid brick wall and vanished from sight, Charles throwing a jovial wave over his shoulder as he went. Johanna was once again alone with her uncle in a dodgy part of the city after dark. A typical weekday night, truth be told.
“And there you have it,” said John. He rolled his shoulders back and pulled his pack of cigarettes out from his breast pocket. He must have waited to light up until Charles was out of sight. “The Dead Boy Detectives. They’re not the easiest people to work with, and they’re probably the most codependent little shits I’ve ever met, but they’re good lads. They do good work. A useful connection to have in your back pocket.”
Johanna nodded. There was a question she’d been meaning to ask that she thought would have been rude with the boys within earshot. “Do you know how they died?”
“No, I never wanted to ask,” John answered. “I think Charles might have drowned. When I saw him reverted back to how he looked when he died, his hair was all wet. No clue about Edwin, though. He’s an odd case. He talks and dresses like he grew up in the 1910s, but as far as I can tell, he was never spotted by any mediums until Charles showed up in 1989. He might not be from around here.”
Johanna hummed thoughtfully. “They make me feel a bit sad.”
John snorted and took a drag from his cigarette. “What, you mean the two dead kids? Fancy that.”
“You don’t seem sad around them,” she noted.
John smirked, just a bit. “You wanna know why I call Edwin an arsonist?”
“Obviously.”
“Back in ‘92 he set a bunch of my furniture on fire, and seriously considered burning me alive along with it.”
Johanna’s jaw dropped. “Why?” she asked, aghast.
“There was an outbreak of some supernatural fungus that ate ghosts,” John explained. “Charles got infected, and I had a bunch of the magic purple stuff that would save him. Edwin’s got some serious fuckin’ problems with authority, and he didn’t trust me to help him without a threat. So. Green fire everywhere.”
“I see,” said Johanna faintly.
“I helped him anyway, of course,” John added. “I wasn’t ever gonna let the dead kid die twice, I’m not a goddamn psychopath. But anyhow. That’s how we all got properly acquainted with each other.”
Johanna couldn’t quite connect the dots. “So they don’t make you sad because you know one of them would barbecue you at the drop of a hat?”
“Oh, they would both barbecue me if they thought it would save the other one,” John corrected. “Charles just happened to be the one out of commission that time. But then, you may have noticed, just yesterday that little maniac chased off a whole pack of banshees to keep them away from Edwin while he was down for the count.” He shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a romantic at heart. Not many folks get seventeen years with someone that would burn a man alive for them. They make me less sad every year.”
“I don’t know if that’s romantic or alarming,” Johanna said, but she smiled a bit.
John took one last drag and stubbed out his cigarette. “Is there a difference? I wouldn’t know, half my exes crawled out of Hell.”
Johanna laughed. This was one of the reasons she loved John. No matter how bizarre her life got, with or without the involvement of magic, John could always make her feel normal by comparison.
“You ready to go home?” John asked, extending his hand.
“Yes, please,” she answered. “I’d like to wash off all the dust and mildew.”
John clicked his tongue. “The mildew is half the appeal of this line of work, kid. Get used to it.”
Johanna took his hand and vanished alongside him with a shower of golden sparks.