‘Psst! Psst! Neevie wake up!’
‘No.’ I rolled over in bed, ignoring my ghostly wake-up call. I knew who it was. But I was trying to catch up on sleep. He wasn’t helping matters by turning up past midnight. Surely he knew how sleep-deprived I was? He’d only seen me a few hours ago!
‘Neevie!’
I opened my eyes. Javi was lying on his side, floating above the bed opposite me. Oh, the times I’d woken to see him lying beside me, that mischievous grin of his the first thing I saw. Damn, I missed him.
Except when he woke me up. It was all right for him. He didn’t need sleep.
‘Yes?’
‘You’ve got a visitor.’
‘I can see that.’ He was right in front of me.
‘No, another one.’
He pointed behind me.
Who else would want to talk to me who couldn’t just appear without Javi’s help? I sat up and turned back around. Lindsay, Ben’s sister, was floating between my bed and the window. She was a witch, which meant there were many things she could do. But visiting unannounced from the Other Side required help from a necromancer ghost.
‘I’ll give you two some privacy,’ said Javi. He floated through the wall and outside into the night air. No doubt to nose on the neighbours.
‘I know we haven’t really spoken,’ said Lindsay, ‘but I wanted to talk to you about Ben.’ She rubbed her hands together, avoiding eye contact. Her curly brown hair fell into her eyes, but she didn’t move it out of the way. She looked a lot like Ben. If I hadn’t known she was his younger sister, I’d have wondered if they were twins. The biggest difference was her lack of glasses and her better dress sense. She wore slim-fitting blue jeans with a black V-neck T-shirt that hugged and hid all the right places. Simple, classic, effective.
I shifted in bed to sit up. She had my attention. ‘What about him?’
I hadn’t heard any barking or movement, so Edie and Tilly must’ve still been asleep. I appreciated Javi not waking them up. Edie needed her sleep even more than usual with everything that was happening lately.
‘Ben can be really harsh on himself sometimes.’ Lindsay hovered up and down, whatever was going on with her brother clearly making her restless. ‘He talked himself out of getting the bookshop, you know.’
‘I figured something like that had happened.’ I mean, I didn’t know the exact reason, but a U-Turn that fast usually stemmed from a lack of confidence or a lack of finances. His reaction made me think it was the former. Being self-employed was scary and hard. I didn’t blame him.
Lindsay shook her head, then looked up at me. Her hair fell over her shoulders. ‘I need you to talk to him.’
‘Me? Why me?’
‘He’ll listen to you,’ she said, meeting my eye for the first time since she’d woken me up.
‘The last time we talked about it, he stormed off. That doesn’t sound like someone who’s going to listen to me.’
Lindsay pursed her lips. She started hover-pacing the length of my bed. It would’ve been unnerving if I wasn’t used to Javi doing it. It was a sign of a restless ghost. Kind of like when a person did it. But mid-air, obviously.
‘Have you tried talking to him?’ I asked her.
She laughed. ‘I’m his baby sister. He’s never going to listen to what I have to say.’
‘That sounds like exactly the reason he’d listen to what you have to say.’ Not that I really knew anything about siblings. Maggie, Javi, and I were all only children.
‘I appreciate you asking for my help, but I don’t want to get into another argument with him. He seemed dead set on not opening it. If you feel that strongly, you should really talk to him about it yourself. I think he’ll pay more attention than you think.’
He’d beaten himself up about Lindsay’s death for a long time. She’d been in her late twenties, and he’d been convinced she was killed because she’d got into dark magic. Turned out, she’d been killed trying to stop Dominic from using his. And while she’d succeeded, she’d lost her life in the process, leaving her twin daughters motherless.
Lindsay opened her mouth to say something else. She stopped, closing her mouth and narrowing her eyes as if concentrating on something.
Javi floated back in. ‘Do you hear that?’
The whistling. It was back.
‘Is that the noise you keep hearing?’ he asked me.
I nodded. It was the murder noise.
‘I’m going to follow it.’
Before I could tell him not to – not that he would’ve listened anyway – he’d floated back through the wall in the direction of the whistling.
Lindsay and I waited, avoiding talking about Ben any further but otherwise falling into a comfortable conversation.
Javi returned ten minutes later, his face taut. ‘I couldn’t find it.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Lindsay.
‘I tried to follow the direction of the whistling, but it sounded like it was really close and really far away. Like it was coming from everywhere and nowhere. It was so weird.’
‘Did you find anything?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Javi. ‘It was impossible to track.’
But the inevitable victim that would be found in the morning wouldn’t be.