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Edwin eyed the young man who had found his way to their office consideringly. There was a disheveled air imprinted into his informal clothes, his wild hair. He was barefoot, frazzled, and it took him a moment to regain enough solidity to his semblance to settle himself in their indicated chair. In all likelihood, a new ghost who had died in the comfort of his home. Or possibly one having difficulty with corporeality, or simply just a man who’d lived life reckless and carefree. There were a number of different possibilities, and he would not know the full truth without further information.“I’m Charles,” Charles said from his usual position near-lounging at Edwin’s side, relaxed in the easy way he sprawled across the top of the desk. “This is Edwin. What needs detecting?”Charles’ tone was cheery, easy, and friendly, all remarkable traits that Edwin both envied and was extremely grateful for. Charles had likely picked up on the same things he had, which bolstered his own impression of their potential future client: frazzled, but not outright distraught; unsettled, but not taken aback by the two teenage ghosts in front of him. Not someone who, necessarily, needed a delicate hand or a stern scolding. Likely with an issue that didn’t require too much of a somber tone, or one that would have them ushering him out of their office because of its ridiculousness. (No, they were not in the business of solving the mystery of which members of a funeral party were gossiping the most about the deceased, no matter how much Charles thought it might be ‘fun’.)All that was needed this time was just an outstretched hand, as Charles was so liable and willing to offer.The prospective client introduced himself informally as Gavin Howell and then drew in a breath, preparing to tell his tale, no doubt. It was a bracing movement, though it was difficult to say if he was wary of their reaction or his own ability to tell his story.“There’s this doll,” Mr. Howell started.Edwin froze. Mr. Howell continued to speak, perhaps describing the doll, or its history, or some other important detail Edwin was allowing to slip through his fingers, but Edwin did not hear the words. Nothing other than muffled speech reached his ears, as though they’d been stuffed with cotton. (Not as though his eardrums had been damaged, though: in Edwin’s experience, that was a near singularly painful injury to withstand.)He drew in a breath of his own, small and subtle, nothing deep, just a slight inhale through his nose, and, with effort, refocused on the conversation. He had encountered dolls on cases before and would again in the future. With any luck (when did luck ever favor him?), the doll in question would not be one of those ill-thought-of porcelain monstrosities that held not an ounce of cheer or joy within them.“…but any living person who comes to the door, it’s like it scares them away. It’s been a week, and no one’s gone inside. No one’s even found my body. My mum got the closest, came to check on me, you know? But she only got so far as her hand on the knob before she turned ‘round and fled. Hasn’t been back.”Edwin swallowed and nodded, as though he’d heard the whole sorry tale. No one seemed to have noticed his wandering attention, which was a relief. Charles could be incredibly keen at times but though he’d noticed Edwin’s discomfort at the sight of dolls on occasion he did not know the whole of it. Edwin had put forth his best efforts to ensure that he never would.He tried to mentally sort through what he did know, which was scant little: a recent death yet to be discovered and a doll that scared the living away. He settled on what felt like a safe question.“How recent was your death?”Mr. Howell seemed to have been talking solely about the doll and its effects; hopefully the details surrounding everything else had not already been shared.Charles’ form twitched in the slightest of ways; Edwin let his eyes flicker that way quick as could be to catch the tail end of a tiny wince before he resettled his gaze on their prospective client. He rewound his own words in his mind. Ah. Yes. He’d thought he’d been playing it safe by not asking about the manner of Mr. Howell’s death, a touchy topic for most (including himself), but perhaps, in his haste to cover up his error, he’d spoken too quickly.Mr. Howell seemed to be struggling with the question. A recent ghost indeed. Charles and Edwin had taken one such case, oh about five years back, where they’d been tasked with finding a murder weapon to convince a ghost they even were dead, and they’d been murdered some three months prior. That had been an extreme case, of course, and Mr. Howell certainly seemed to know he was deceased, even if he had difficulty processing it.Straightening his shoulders and closing the small gape of his mouth, Mr. Howell nodded minutely, as if to himself. “A… a week ago, or so,” he said. “I’m not really sure.”Hmm. Interesting, although, strictly speaking, not terribly rare. Death could be disorienting. Charles had known it straight away, of course, but then Charles was terribly clever and not easily fooled.Mr. Howell’s death did not appear to have been violent in nature, unless he’d learned to control his semblance quite quickly. (Wryly, Edwin thought, that if he’d managed that, the least he could have done was manifest himself some shoes. It was an unlikely scenario, however, so he banished said thought from his mind quickly.) And if not violent, it was possible he’d died in his sleep, which was not usually a factor that contributed to scrambling the mind.Edwin retreated though, metaphorically of course, lest he asked the wrong question again, and allowed Charles to follow up on the puzzling answer.“Death can be hard,” Charles said sympathetically. “Were you alone?”Not the question Edwin would have asked but an astute one. It eased Howell into the conversation while also gave them the chance to learn of any witnesses who could have been useful to their case.“I don’t know,” Mr. Howell said.Another flicker of Edwin’s gaze confirmed that Charles was frowning just as he was.“You don’t know?” he found himself asking.Mr. Howell shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t remember it.”“Any of it?” Charles asked incredulously, shocked out of his usual compassionate tone.Mr. Howell shook his head again. “I just. I remember getting home after work. I was really tired, and I’d had to put in some overtime, and—Well. I remember getting to the building. And I remember unlocking my front door. But that’s it. The next thing I knew I was standing in my bedroom, and my body was laying on the bed next to me.”Edwin knew something about forgetting. “Had you been injured prior to your death?” he asked. “It does not need to have been terribly recent. Head wounds can have a terrible effect.”They’d seen enough people who’d died from them that he did not think Charles would believe his knowledge of the like came from personal experience, but Edwin knew he was missing some memories of Hell. (Not many. The point was to remember the tortures. But in the Doll House, where the torture had certainly been less personal, in a way, he’d certainly hit his head a time or two and his whole brain had turned fuzzy. Sometimes he’d even died from such injuries before the creature could reach him.)But Mr. Howell was once more shaking his head. “No, I’ve never had a concussion in my life.”A brain aneurysm was also possible, Edwin supposed. And just because Howell had never had a concussion did not mean he had not hit his head, or suffered some other injury that had taken awhile to take effect. But even he could sense that that line of questioning would get them nowhere, given the stubbornness in Howell’s denial.“Are you interested in hiring us to investigate the cause of your death as well, or just the doll you wish to be rid of?” he asked, and prided himself on being able to utter the horrid word with barely a hesitation or a hint of his trepidation in his tone.Mr. Howell stared at him. “You think I was murdered?”This, Edwin could console. “It is far more likely some unseen injury, or other illness, resulted in your death, especially compounded with the memory loss, which suggests damage to the brain.” He realized what he was saying only after the words left his mouth. He believed it was incredibly poor taste to suggest the man had been brain damaged, especially given that he might have died from that. But at least he’d put to bed and soothed down the thought of murder, which perhaps made up for his social error.“I just want you to get rid of the damn doll,” Mr. Howell said. “They can do an autopsy when they find me, but they just have to find me first. My mum… she’s getting so worried, I’ve seen her, but she can’t bring herself to go back to my flat.”Edwin’s mouth thinned a little, though he tried to hold in his reaction best he could. It was seldom a good idea to haunt living relatives, friends, or loved ones. Though, he supposed, in this instance, the man’s mother did not yet know her son was dead, so he at least had not had to watch her grieve him, just fret. But it was not his place to advise the man against lingering. He was a detective and there was a mystery to be solved.“What else can you tell us about the doll, then?” Charles asked easily. He certainly had no struggle saying the word, and likely would have no difficulty when faced with the actual cause of the trouble. Edwin was grateful for his presence all over again, a nearly overwhelming sensation. He wasn’t sure he would have survived his afterlife, without Charles, without the purpose being detectives with his best friend had granted him. (Best friend. Even now, twenty years on, Edwin delighted in that he had any friends at all, let alone one who could be described with such a wonderful adjective.)Mr. Howell did his best to describe the thing, and Edwin did his best not to have any further lapses in attention. (Hopefully the further description would make up for Edwin’s earlier lapse by re-describing any relevant details Howell had already uttered; people were often circuitous in their storytelling, which rarely followed a logical progression when heard firsthand, not written in a published novel somewhere.) It sounded absolutely horrid, but luckily Howell spent more time describing the sound the doll emitted, and the effect it had on nearby passersby, than he did on its appearance. In fact, the effects of the doll were quite fascinating, if Edwin ignored the fact of the form of the thing that led to said effects. He was picking up on a pattern that Howell seemed not to have noticed.“Is your flat particularly well sound-proofed, or close to its neighbors?” he asked.Mr. Howell gave him a look, as if he found the question absurd, or irrelevant. Well, that was why he had come to them, was it not? He was certainly no detective. “We share walls,” he said, flatly. “I can hear it every time my neighbor has his girlfriend over.”How crass. Edwin knew his expression revealed his distaste at the comment, but it was distaste well-deserved. Even now, in the twenty-first century, courtesy still existed, though it was sorely lacking in many he came across. To be loud enough in, in the bedroom, to trouble your neighbors…It wasn’t relevant, at least, and Charles was already picking up on his train of thought.“But they can go in just fine, right?” he asked. “The shrieking doesn’t scare them away?”Charles’ follow up question, once Edwin’s suspicions had been confirmed, was enough to put even Howell on the same track as them. He was frowning in thought, only now having come to the same realization. Edwin supposed he could not fault him too much for that; he’d clearly been frazzled considerably by his own death and was desperate not to have it go ignored. Edwin’s mouth thinned at the thought. He and Charles would ensure that was not the case.“I… I never thought about it, but yeah, it’s just people looking for me who get scared away. And, and, I think they can hear the shrieking, I saw Corey jump once, but he didn’t seem too bothered by it.”Who Corey was did not seem particularly relevant, so Edwin did not ask. There was definitely something supernatural to the sound then, if it was only targeting specific people.“Sounds like it’s right up our alley,” Charles said, still clearly thinking in tune with Edwin.“Indeed,” he concurred. “I believe we are both happy to take the case. The only thing remaining is the finer details—your address and such—and the matter of payment.”Mr. Howell seemed to slump a little in relief at hearing they would take the case—and then fell right through the chair and barely stopped himself from falling through the floor as well.“Woah!” Charles said, and jumped up in an instant to help the man to his feet, nattering on in a manner most found comforting. Which was not to say that Edwin usually found it discomforting; nearly anything would have sounded pleasant, spilling from Charles’ mouth.Today, however… Edwin worked hard to banish any thoughts that he might have possibly frozen in place—just for a second—at the sudden, unexpected movement. It was only a natural reaction to a slight shock after all. And he was already on edge for perfectly understandable reasons—even if they were reasons he would never explain to anyone, not even Charles—given the subject matter of the case. He stood, since the others in the room were now standing as well, and watched Mr. Howell flicker a nervous gaze between him and Charles.“I didn’t, I don’t have any pounds on me,” he said.“It is not always money we take as payment,” Edwin clarified, though he doubted the man had anything the least bit mystical in his flat. He gave the man another look. Hmm. It was doubtful he even had any jewelry or expensive accessories. “What sort of books do you own?”Charles shot him a look, perhaps an entreaty to go easy on the man. Edwin thought he had been, but perhaps his tone had been off, critical of what he suspected would form this man’s reading selection.Mr. Howell shrugged. “I dunno. Some stuff from school, I guess. I wasn’t a big reader.”Edwin refrained from commenting on the statement and sent Charles a raised eyebrow indicating his restraint. Charles laughed a little, which both warmed Edwin’s dead heart and drew the attention of the client, and, for once, it was Charles who had made the social faux pas. Of course, him being who he was, he easily and readily corrected it.“Sorry,” he said, still grinning. “Just thinking of the books I had to read in school. Reckon they haven’t changed the selection much.”Mr. Howell was smiling now too, his nerves considering the manner of payment forgotten by Charles’ ability to put near anyone at ease. “Probably not,” he agreed easily.Edwin realized, startled, that the man was probably not twenty years out of secondary school. There was a high likelihood he was around Charles’ age, or the age Charles would have been had he lived. The books probably were the very same Charles had been told to read, give or take a few depending on his school’s curriculum. It did not seem as though Charles had had the same thought, so Edwin did not voice it. Reminding Charles of his death—of the life he’d missed out on—always seemed to put him in a dour mood. He inevitably bounced back, Charles was nothing if not unflappable, but even if it was only for a few minutes Edwin did not like to do anything that lost Charles his wonderful cheer.“And the doll,” Charles added on, still grinning. “Might be worth something, if we can figure out what’s wrong with it.”“You can have the damn thing,” Howell said, and the joking around had lightened the mood so much so that he was now talking to Charles like an old friend, easy and comfortable.Edwin barely noticed. For fully the third time that client meeting he found himself frozen in place, feet glued firmly to the floor. He was always grateful at these times that he had no breath to catch in his lungs, that he did not need to heave like a boy starving for oxygen just to regain the slightest fraction of his wits and strength, but it was a poor sort of gratitude. Everything else about the situation was horrendous—everything but the fact that Charles, so good with their clients, hadn’t noticed.And why would he have? He knew Edwin didn’t like dolls, but he’d already said quite plainly that he was thinking of selling it, not keeping it, and even if he had indicated he’d like to keep it, no doubt he’d do so in his backpack, and Edwin would never have to see the thing anyway. (He’d know it was there though. Always. He dearly hoped Charles did not wish to keep it, and his heart ached with anticipatory fear.)No, Charles had not done anything wrong. As usual, it was Edwin who was at fault. He mustered his wits and sent stiff fingers, more numb than usual, fumbling for his notebook.“There remains the matter of your address, then,” he said. His words sounded vaguely distant, but even distant he could tell his diction had remained precise, his tone even. “And then it is likely that Charles and I can settle the matter right now, if you like. It should not take long.”He didn’t know why he’d said that. He should not have—he would very much like a moment to collect himself before visiting the very scene where the doll in question resided. Even Charles sent him a mildly startled look at the suggestion. But said it he had, and there was no taking it back now. Besides, they had no other cases on hand at the moment. Best to be done with this one quickly, so he did not have to think on it again.Mr. Howell rattled off his address and Edwin’s fingers wrote it down for him. “Splendid,” he said. “If you could meet us back here at, say, this time tomorrow, avoiding your flat in the meantime, it is likely we will have the matter sorted. If not, we will at least have some idea of how to proceed.”“Really?!” Mr. Howell looked so pleased at the estimate of their speed that Edwin felt better for his own haste. His was for selfish reasons, of course, but his goals aligned with Howell’s and would bring the man the peace he was looking for, so it worked out in the end.“Course!” Charles said brightly. “Worst case scenario we chuck it in the ocean or something.”Mr. Howell shook his head, grinning ever so slightly. “Good luck,” he said. “I couldn’t touch the thing myself.”Edwin almost wanted to question him on that last statement—had he meant his words literally or figuratively?—but Charles was already shepherding the man to the door and passing along a few recommendations of nice places for ghosts to hang out, his typical spiel when they were kicking someone out of their usual haunting location. (“Avoid Buckingham Palace, no, really, it’s warded like crazy, can’t even go near it, but the Tower’s a right nice place, lots of ghosts hanging around there, and you can even sneak up Big Ben if you wanted. No, sorry, No. 10’s warded against us as well.”)“Eager to get started, are we?” Charles asked with a cheeky grin, turning around to face Edwin once Howell was properly off.Edwin knew exactly why he had hastened their usual timeline in this instance, but he certainly could not share that explanation with Charles. It would only needlessly worry him, and Charles—dead at sixteen, stuck with Edwin, who could never (would never) move on to the afterlife—had enough to worry about.“It should be a simple enough matter,” he said. “As you said, we can always ‘chuck’ the thing in the ocean if it proves troubling.” The suggestion wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounded. They’d done it once before with a particularly troublesome amulet that had resisted destruction by other means.“I can hear the finger quotes you know,” Charles said. He’d moved for his backpack, sticking his hand in there and concentrating, likely checking on a few key supplies they made to have stocked for every case. “Chuck is a perfectly fine word you know.”Finger quotes. Edwin rolled his eyes. He understood the connection between the visual appearance of a double set of fingers and the common double quotation marks, but he did not see the point of the gesture itself, nor quite it’s meaning. Charles said it conveyed sarcasm, but he had meant nothing sarcastic in his copying of Charles’ word.“It’s not that I am not aware of its usage,” Edwin said as he moved for the bookcase. “It was commonplace in my day as well, it’s just that I find it so dreadfully banal.” He frowned thoughtfully and began pulling a few books off the shelves. Charles usually had what they needed handy, but this case was not so straightforward as many of their others.Charles laughed. “Too “crass” for you?” and used finger quotes as he asked it.That was entirely the wrong word. Edwin rolled his eyes even as he smiled and went back to his books. “Are the Minor Arcana Volumes with you?”Despite the common contrary expectation, ghosts were rarely mixed up in the arcane beyond their own existences. They solved the occasional mundane murder (with the strict meaning of non-magical, not meaning ordinary; Edwin knew most murder victims would vehemently protest that description, himself included. Then again, his own murder had not been mundane in either regard.); tracked down lost heirlooms and relatives; passed on messages that had never been sent; and only occasional dealt with a supernatural creature of some sort that was either terrorizing the client in question, their living friends and/or relatives, or was, most rarely, the thing that had killed them.Still, they dealt with such things far more often than the average ghost. It was best to be prepared.“Three and…” Charles paused, digging around a bit in his bag before pulling out a book to peer at the spine, “five.”That matched the shelves; they’d yet to manage to procure a copy of volume one. He pulled four from the shelf as well and added it to his stack, wandered over to Charles, and dumped it all readily into his hands.“You know,” Charles said bemusedly. “I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of time for reading on this case.”Edwin rolled his eyes again. “Really, Charles. Are you trying to imply that thing is running out of space.”Charles laughed, cheeky. “Nah,” he said easily, and dumped the lot inside.They did not waltz directly through the mirror in Howell’s flat, of course. The object that was causing all the fuss was most directly triggered by approaching from a distance and it would help if they had as much data as possible. Edwin brought them out of a storefront across the street where they walked straight through traffic and the front door of Howell’s building (literally).The screaming started then, and they paused in the lobby for a moment as they took it in. Truthfully, it was a distant sound and, as Howell had implied, being not living themselves, neither of them felt the impulse to leave, or a fear so great they turned away.“Well, it knows we’re here,” Charles said with grim amusement.So it seemed indeed.Being also without lungs, or real muscles, they took the stairs up to the ninth floor and used the walk to converse about the case, stopping now and then to listen as the sounds grew louder, and more eerie. Even once they’d reached the proper floor though, Edwin found he wasn’t so unsettled by the screams as he’d worried he’d be.The sounds really were more of shrieks than screams, as Howell had described. There was no terror in the noise and certainly no pain. It sounded more like it would were someone yelling—at a rather high pitch—for others to go away, or having hysterics, though there were no words with the shrieks. Still true fear eluded them, and they were able to walk right up to the door of Howell’s flat without issue, where they paused again.“Should have brought earplugs,” Charles said, chipper and serious all at once, his optimism blending with his “game face”, as he called it.“I very much doubt they would have helped,” Edwin said, and then stepped through the door before he could talk himself out of doing so. They’d walked past one other individual—living, obviously—on the staircase, and they had seemed not to notice the shrieks at all.“Oi, wait for me, will you?” Charles said, stepping through after him.Edwin tossed him a skeptical look. As if Charles had not been about to do the same, or as if he would have not followed Edwin inside.“I’m the reckless one, aren’t I?”“I would not call stepping into our client’s flat reckless,” Edwin said. “And I would prefer if neither of us were to take up that mantle, thank you very much.”They had to speak a little louder than normal to be heard. The shrieks weren’t truly continuous, but a new one picked up after the old one died out. There was little to no variety to them; now that Edwin had been listening for a few minutes, they’d begun to grow monotonous. More evidence that they were supernatural in nature. Apart from being emitted from an object, of course.“Bedroom, then?” Charles asked.Edwin took a moment to look around. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the small flat. He could see the kitchen, living room, and see the doorway to the bathroom and bedroom both from where he stood. The place was dingy and gray, though that was no fault of Mr. Howell’s, and messy and unclean, which was. (Granted, some of the dust was a result of him being dead, which Edwin certainly could not fault him for, but the clothes and blankets strewn about the living room and over the backs of the chairs in the kitchen, coupled with the table that only had space enough on it for one plate and the pile of dishes in the sink spoke to a man not interested in keeping his space tidy.)He made a face and looked back to Charles with a nod. “Quite, I think.” There was likely to be little of interest outside the bedroom, which was both the location of the object they were there to investigate and Mr. Howell’s corpse.The two of them stepped through the closed doorway together. It was rather dim inside and Charles, being closer to the switch, turned on the light. Mr. Howell’s corpse was easily the most notable item in the room, splayed out over his bed in the same outfit he’d come to them in. It had, of course, begun to decompose in the way most bodies did when left in the open air, his skin greyed and sagging.Charles put a hand under his nose, though they could not smell anything, and looked away. “Weird that he’s just laying there!” he said, nearly having to shout over the noise.“Yes!” Edwin agreed, also loudly over the shrieking. It was odd that he had not made it under the covers, of which there appeared to be several layers bundled up beneath the body’s back, the bed having likely been unmade when he’d lain down. But Mr. Howell’s death was not what had brought them to this room.“Found it!” Charles shouted to him. He strode forward, toward a half-height bookcase against the far wall.Edwin looked that way without realizing what he was doing, then froze—again—when he laid eyes on the object they were looking for. It was at least almost a deliberate freeze that time, so determined as he was not to flinch in front of Charles, and it was a near thing even with his mental preparations. The doll looked more modern, and plastic, perhaps even a rubbery, elastic sort of thing on the outer limbs, but it’s face had clearly been modeled after the dolls of Edwin’s time: few features beyond those pits for eyes, sheer blackness staring into Edwin.It's outfit, too, was simple and plain, merely an off-white smock that did not help Edwin’s association of the thing with his time in Hell.Charles was saying something. Charles was saying something, and Edwin knew it was best if he listened, but the shrieking was so loud, and it seemed as if doll was staring at him, and, and… was that giggling, in the distance?Charles bent over and reality snapped back into place, the phantom giggles fading from Edwin’s ears. Of course he was not in Hell: he had no need to wet his throat as it dried from his fear, felt no burning need to hold his lungs steady lest his loud breathing gave him away, couldn’t feel the rough concrete beneath his bare feet. Charles was bending over—“Charles, don’t!” Too much of Edwin’s fear entered his voice. He was conflating the doll with Hell when it was merely an object that might pose some nebulous danger.But it was too late. Charles had already picked up the doll to study it. For a moment, nothing happened—and then the doll opened a mouth it shouldn’t have had, bared unnatural teeth, and lunged for Charles’ throat.“Charles!” Edwin yelled again as the teeth clamped down. At least the demented shrieking had ceased with the doll’s movements, and he could hear himself think again, but that was of little comfort, given that it had also somehow glued his feet to the floor.He leaned forward where he stood, unmoving, as Charles’ hands reached up to grab at the doll again. He’d made an awful, strangled sound Edwin never wanted to hear again when the doll had bit him, which suggested there’d been some pain. (Another supernatural sign, Edwin noted distantly, though it was not as if they needed more evidence of that.)With effort, Charles managed to wrest the doll from his throat and toss it across the room. It hit a wall and fell to the floor where it lay, unmoving, as if it had never reacted at all. There was stillness and silence for a moment, Charles’ chest heaving—he was still mostly in the habit of breathing, especially during tense moments—and then the awful thing shrieked again.Edwin winced and still his feet wouldn’t move. “Charles?!” he said worriedly, and had to raise his voice once more to be heard.Charles was rubbing at his throat. “I’m alright!” he said, though he plainly wasn’t. There was a mark there, where there shouldn’t have been. “Think that crosses ghost off the list!”Ghosts tended to possess people more than objects, and they tended to do neither, but they were relatively certain both were possible. A ghost, though, could not have left a mark on Charles like that. Edwin doubted a spell could have either.“Demon,” he said quietly. Perhaps his feet hadn’t been glued to the floor after all. Perhaps they’d been weighted down with cinderblocks sunk into the floorboards. It was the only explanation as to why he was still frozen in place.“Think it’s a demon?!” Charles asked over the shrieking. It was clear he hadn’t heard Edwin at all.Edwin mustered all his strength and tried to ignore the way Charles’ voice croaked a little, as if the bite had done damage to his vocal cords. As if he still had vocal cords.“It is likely!” he agreed, raising his voice again. “We will have to perform an exorcism, quickly!” He didn’t want to look at the doll again—didn’t want to look at all—but he needed to be certain it wouldn’t attack again at their conversation, and he had already failed Charles once. It remained where it had fallen. When Edwin looked back, Charles was rubbing at his throat again, and hastily put his hand down when he saw Edwin’s head turn.Edwin’s heart jolted in his chest. He found the strength to lift his feet from the floor—not glued at all then—and stride to Charles’ side.“Demonology in the 18th century, second edition, please,” he said, only slightly quieter now that they a touch closer in proximity. “It is leather-bound.”Luckily, Charles had it on hand. “Cheeky bugger, isn’t he!” he said, handing the book to Edwin. “Almost looks familiar too.” They were both still raising their voices ever so slightly, despite the proximity.Cheeky was not a word Edwin would ever use to describe a demon. He flipped rapidly through the pages.“Given that it has chosen to scare its victims away, rather than draw them in closer, I suspect it is a lesser demon,” he said. He was carefully not looking up again as he sought out the required page.It was certainly no thing of intelligence, though that was scarcely a relief to him, given the form it had taken. There were probably some who might have referred to his last captor as a lesser demon as well, though Edwin had no Earthly (or Hellish) idea of if that were a true description or not. At the very least, the similarities were unsettling: the doll, for one; the eerie sounds in place of any rational speech; the lunge for Charles’ throat.Out of the corner of his eye he saw Charles move and looked up to see his partner dropping to one knee on the floor. Edwin felt something seize in his chest area. Were he alive, he would have described the sensation as being akin to his heart skipping a beat. But it wasn’t his partner conceding to an injury, just that Charles had already fetched the customary black paint they used for such things from his bag and was starting on a circle on the floor.“Gonna have to get the thing in the circle somehow!” he said when he noticed Edwin looking. His voice croaked again, and he winced at the end of his statement, ducking his head.Edwin wanted to draw attention to that. He wanted to soothe Charles’ wounded throat (tea, with a dollop of honey, faint memories encouraged him, though that was nonsense of course; they were dead). He wanted to encourage Charles to stop talking until he could do so without pain. (The likelihood of that encouragement working was slim; Charles made for a terrible sickbed patient.)He opened his mouth to do none of those things, to offer to take the danger on himself, and nothing came out. He did not want to touch the doll, did not want to face it. Not even for Charles. How dreadful of a friend he was.Luckily, Charles had not noticed he’d opened his mouth at all, absorbed as he was in his task on the floor. Edwin returned to his book, located the proper circle, and held it out to Charles. Demons were a rare occurrence, even for them, but they dealt with lesser and lower demons most frequently. Usually none so dumb as this one, but Charles would be loosely familiar with the symbols.It was short work to form the circle and the incantation was short as well. Edwin did not need the book to recite it. Charles stood. A shiver of fear ran down Edwin’s spine, which was quite absurd. They’d dealt with far worse foes and it wasn’t as though the shrieking was particularly menacing. It had all but become background noise, in point of fact.(Not like the giggling, the shrieking, the glee or rage of his captor. Edwin could never, ever ignore the giggling, and what that sound typically heralded for him when he heard it.)“Right then,” Charles said. “Nothing for it.” And he stepped away from the circle on the floor and toward the doll.Edwin wanted to warn his best friend to be careful. The words died in his throat before he could utter them. He watched on tenterhooks, as if he’d been strung up and suspended with the other souls in Lust, as Charles hesitated by the object’s side. Then, in one smooth, quick movement that spoke to Charles’ athleticism, his grace under pressure, he bent, scooped up the foul thing, and tossed it toward the circle.The last shriek nearly doubled in volume as the thing opened it’s mouth mid-toss, baring those unnatural teeth again. Silence fell as it landed on the floor.Edwin froze again, staring at it.“Edwin!” Charles said, more worried than alarmed, confident in his circle’s ability to hold the thing.Edwin jolted, a terrible, horrible, flinch, then cleared his throat and began the incantation. There was one final shriek, another terrible heart-stopping moment as the doll showed the first signs of activity on its own, struggling to fight against the circle’s hold, and then there was a woosh of displaced air and Edwin knew the thing was done.He did not relax.Charles stepped forward to pick the dreadful thing up. “Huh,” he said, staring down at it, and then stuffed it in his bag without further ceremony. He looked up to Edwin. “Want to check this guy’s book collection now?”Edwin did not have the wherewithal to refuse him and it would have been quite out of character had he done so. He didn’t have the capacity of mind to truly sort through the tomes in question either, mostly old classics, long untouched, as Mr. Howell had told him. They swept the small lot into Charles’ bag and left the man’s corpse behind them.“We believe you have been murdered,” Edwin said, carefully, confronted with a joyful Mr. Howell, ecstatic at the quick conclusion of his case.Mr. Howell’s smile faded a little. “What?”He and Charles had discussed it most thoroughly, but… the placement of the body, the lack of obvious signs of trauma, the presence of a demon in a vessel the man did not remember owning… They suspected the demon had tried to possess Howell first, and killed him in the prospect, but they’d discarded the idea that Howell had been the one to summon him. Even though he could have bought the doll himself it seemed unlikely.No, even if it had not been murder, strictly speaking, the doll had gotten there somehow. They needed to investigate that.“Don’t worry,” Charles said, with a grim, determined smile. “We’re taking this part of the case pro bono.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Knew I recognized it!” Charles declared out of the blue, clearly pleased with himself. His voice was still slightly hoarse but the mark on his throat had largely cleared up in the last twenty-four hours.Edwin looked up from where he’d been dissecting the finer details of an ill-formatted, barely legible treatise on the ability of demons to possess inanimate objects. (There was some debate in the text, which was even older than he was, as to whether or not such a thing was even possible. Edwin knew well that it was, but he suspected it was somewhat dependent on the qualities of the vessel in question and was hoping historical record of known incidents might provide illumination on which qualities mattered most.)Digging around in his bag, Charles pulled out the doll with obvious satisfaction, handling it carelessly. He’d grabbed it by the torso, fingers stretched across its back, and its head and limbs dangled in his grasp.Edwin did not flinch, but only because he had been keeping the bag within his view from the moment Charles had stuffed the doll into it, preparing himself for this very eventuality. His motions shuddered to a halt; glue had once more stuck his feet fast to the floor, as though fear for him was an adhesive substance. (At the very least, he no longer had a heart to go rabbiting away in his chest.) He could not move, even as Charles brandished the doll in his direction. He could not even speak to ask what connection Charles’ clever brain had recalled.“Finnegan’s shop!” Charles continued. “He sells the exact same kind of doll!”Edwin did not breathe, did not move, did not even think too much, lest he drew unwanted attention. (Attention from whom? The thought was but a whisper, the rational question hid behind his irrational fear.)“See?” Charles was saying. “It’s the same kind of doll, though presumably his come without demons in them.”Say something, Edwin’s thoughts urged him. Charles was grinning. Charles was waiting on a reply. Say something you jolterhead! He opened his mouth, but no response came to mind. He was not even certain of what Charles had been saying.“Oh, right,” Charles said, contrite. “Ugly thing, isn’t it?” And he stuffed it back in his bag.Edwin swallowed.“Sorry about that.”“It is no matter, Charles,” Edwin finally managed to say, though he still felt he could not so much as twitch a finger. “You merely caught me off guard.” Liar. “I was lost in thought.” Rather, the concept of thinking at all had seemed to escape him.“Oh yeah?” Charles asked, interest piqued. “Find anything?”Edwin’s thoughts struggled to return to the text he had been reading. He shook his head. His finger managed to twitch where it still rested on his open page. “The author is most circuitous in his thoughts,” he admitted. “It is difficult to keep track at times.”Charles was still peering at him a little worriedly. Edwin hoped he didn’t catch on that he was still sneaking glances at the bag, more than he was watching Charles.Decisively, he closed the book, feeling his whole torso loosen at the moment, though his legs still felt heavy and immovable. (He had known this was coming, but to see the doll here, in the office…) “Perhaps a break would not go amiss,” he said, and then hastily searched for some way to phrase things that did not alert Charles to the fact that he had not processed a word of his realization, or discovery, or whatever his excitement had been. “Investigating the… doll may prove more fruitful than investigating the demon, in any case,” he settled on, since Charles’ excitement had certainly had to do with that foul thing.He hoped the other boy did not notice his slight hesitation. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth. Still his legs felt as though they’d been carved from stone. (He wanted out of here, and yet fleeing felt impossible; there was nothing to flee from, not really, and with Charles at his side the dreadful thing would be with them too.)“Really?” Charles asked happily, already throwing his bag over his shoulder. (Edwin carefully tracked the movement of it as it settled on the other boy’s back.) “Awesome. Been a while since we talked to old Finn.”Finn. Charles was likely referring to Finnegan Gold, the proprietor of a shop all the way out in Derby they seldom frequented, though that had more to do with its location than any deficit of its stock. True, mirror travel allowed the collapsing of distances, but it had still been easier and more fruitful to familiarize themselves with the shops in London most of all.And perhaps, Edwin only now realized, he’d had a subconscious bias against the shop—because Mr. Gold sold dolls. Ah—so that was the connection Charles had made! How clever! It had probably been nigh on two years since they’d visited that particular shop.“We must hope that he is still in business, then,” Edwin said, though he suspected the man would be. Old Finn though many of his patrons called him, he could not have been more than fifty or so when they first met some ten years past. He was hardly elderly, even now.“Haven’t been to Derby in ages either,” Charles added on.That was also true enough. Edwin took in the way Charles was fidgeting, near bouncing on his feet, clearly eager for the chance to be out and about for a bit. He wondered how long he had been engrossed in the text before him. His legs still did not move.“If you’ll give me a minute or two, Charles, to finish my reading?”“Sure,” Charles readily agreed, as Edwin had known he would.Shame touched him briefly, for exploiting Charles’ good nature so easily, and he forced himself to add a few notes on the last page he’d read to his notebook, willing his legs to move all the while. Charles was all but tapping his foot by the time Edwin looked up again. The sight enlivened him, lightened him, deflated most of the tension he was holding inside his breast. Only Charles could induce such feelings in him, while he held one of the things that had been the form of his tormentor no less!He stood and tucked his notebook back into his customary pocket. “Shall I?” he asked, gesturing to the mirror, and Charles gestured right back for him to lead the way.“Oh, yeah, we got a whole host o’ those,” Mr. Gold said.Charles had pulled the doll from his bag and set it firmly on the counter. He hadn’t cared to be gentle with it; it was face down at the moment, limbs akimbo. Edwin had carefully positioned himself a full stride behind his partner, and in the middle of the aisle in front of the shop as well. He could easily see the city street out the front door, and the mirror Mr. Gold had set up near the entrance for his spectral visitors. There were escape routes aplenty and, Edwin knew, absolutely no need of them.“Knew it looked familiar!” Charles crowed again, grinning. “Any chance you want to buy one back?”Mr. Gold picked up the doll and studied it with a keen eye, flopping it over onto its front again. “Depends why yer sellin’,” he said.Edwin’s feet had become cinderblocks again, though he felt he could have moved them if needed. It was lucky he was not needed for this conversation; Charles, with his brilliant smile, usually handled any finagling over prices.“Well it’s not ours, is it?” Charles asked. “Found it possessed by a lesser demon.” He leaned over the counter with a charming smile, propped up on one elbow. “Trade it for some information, if that’s enough for you.”Mr. Gold looked up at that. “Wha’ kind o’ information you boys lookin’ for?”Charles tapped one finger on the dolls chest. “You the only one who sells these?”Raucous laughter erupted from the shopkeeper. “Tha’ all you looking for? Hell, boy, I’ll give you tha’ information for free. Local fella makes ‘em, sells ‘em to a few shops ‘round town. Advertises ‘em as a useful little ghostie trap and the like.”Charles raised both eyebrows, still grinning. “Ghost trap? You looking to get rid of us?”Mr. Gold chuckled. “You know you boys aren’t the only ghosts out there—and not all of ‘em are near as friendly.”Leaning back, Charles finally glanced his way, chuckling himself. “Yeah, we know all about that, don’t we Edwin.”It took Edwin a moment to realize he’d been prompted, and another to realize that both Charles and Mr. Gold were awaiting a response from him. “Yes, of course, Charles,” he said.Turning back to Mr. Gold, Charles rolled his eyes. “Always with his head in the books,” he said, but Edwin caught the worried glance Charles allowed himself to take, a quick flicker toward Edwin out of the corner of his eye.Edwin would have to do better. He straightened and tried to focus more on the conversation as Charles procured the doll maker’s business card—or, likely, a spellcaster of some kind—and set about bargaining to sell the thing back to Mr. Gold.“Doing alright?”Edwin glanced over at Charles as they strolled down the road in the countryside. Their quarry did not live in Derby proper, so it was some walk to their destination, but it was not as if either he or Charles minded.“I am splendid, Charles,” Edwin said, and did his best to mean it. Truthfully, his mood had been incredibly buoyed up upon leaving Mr. Gold’s shop, knowing that they were leaving the dreadful doll behind them—for about a minute, until he had realized they were heading to the home of it’s maker, who doubtless had many more on hand.“No, you’re not, you know you can’t lie to me, Edwin. What’s up?”Edwin winced. What was there to say to Charles that would not alarm him, or allow Edwin to avoid further thoughts of Hell?“I am not opposed to the idea of ghost traps in principle,” he settled on, grateful for the easy and obvious threat they’d yet to discuss. “You know we have used a number ourselves on occasion for the most troublesome of poltergeists. However, we have also never met anyone who created them for a living.”Charles grimaced. “Good point,” he agreed. “What do you say we sneak in first and do a little reconnoitering before we introduce ourselves to the man? Maybe we can find his distributor list without even needing to meet the guy. Heck, maybe we’ll get lucky and he can’t even see ghosts!”“Well,” Charles said, more bemused than upset at the moment. “I’d say he can see ghosts.”Edwin gave up on his efforts at trying to reach the corner of the rug, which was outside of the trap. He suspected it was something under the rug which had trapped them but, contained as they were, he could not get to it to check. “Do not be hasty, Charles,” he snapped back. “Of course a maker of ghost traps would have security around his home, regardless of whether he is actually capable of laying eyes on us. It was foolish of me not to consider—”Charles’ hand entered his vision, waving a small pocketknife. “Foolish of us, you mean?” he countered, and then knelt before Edwin could say anything, sawing at the rug.Edwin felt his temper diminishing. At the very least, they’d yet to encounter any dolls, though they’d only made it to the entryway of the rather elaborate country manor their quarry resided in. He consulted the business card again while Charles was busy.Edward Wright. Not a name he’d heard before, but then, Mr. Gold had said he sold his merchandise largely to the locals. Apparently he had not been interested in branching out to London. It was mid-afternoon, so it was likely the man was home, but if the trap had also triggered an alarm he had yet to investigate it.He looked down to see that Charles had managed to create a small tear in the rug—enough that he might have also potentially started to score the wooden floorboards beneath it.“Careful not to damage the floor,” he warned, less out of concern for Mr. Wright’s property and more out of wariness at what damaging the components of an active trap might do.Charles waved him off. He was using the tiny tear he’d created to finally lift the rug ever so slightly, sticking his finger into the hole, and proceeded to saw without putting his knife to the floor.  “I’ll thank you not to damage my floor,” a polished voice rang out a minute later, echoing in the large room, likely an effect of the domed ceiling.Edwin whirled around to face the speaker at the same moment Charles stiffened and stood; when he turned, he kept a firm grip on the knife in his hand.The owner of the voice—Mr. Wright, presumably—was a gentleman with a touch of gray to his temples and a fashion sense that, though modernized, would not have been out of style during Edwin’s youth. He carried a thin black cane topped with a polished orb—crystal or glass, Edwin could not have said—though he wasn’t leaning on it at the moment.His lips were thinned with displeasure and his irritation had been clear in his tone. Given that Charles was the one with the knife, Edwin took it upon himself to be the peacemaker.“Mr. Wright,” he said precisely. “I am Edwin Payne and this is Charles Rowland, of the Dead Boy Detectives Agency. We are here to inquire about your ghost traps. One was recently used to—”“I have no need of two more ghosts,” Mr. Wright said. He hadn’t appeared to have listened to a word Edwin had uttered and his tone, while still irritated, also carried a healthy heaping of exasperation. He waved his cane in their general direction, the tip of the orb at the top pointed straight for Edwin.A bolt of energy—red and angry, almost giving off little bolts of lightning or static electricity all its own—left the thing in an instant and gave Edwin little time to react before it was headed straight for him. His feet were bolted to the floor again, startled at the danger as he was.“Edwin!”Charles’ alarm was much appreciated but his dive was not quick enough—the ball of writhing pain hit Edwin straight in the chest the second before Charles tackled him to the floor. He let out a tiny sound at the impact, his jaw tight, and hoped Charles believed it was the surprise of hitting the floor that had forced it from him. That had hurt, and he had no desire to experience that again.He sat up, rubbing at his chest, even as Charles bolted to his feet and whirled on their attacker.“Oi! No need for that, is there! Sorry for trespassing and all, but we can just leave—all you had to do was ask politely!”Because Charles’ back was to Edwin as he squared off against their foe, Edwin knew not to expect a hand up. He levered himself to his feet and was greeted with a look of bewildered startlement upon Mr. Wright’s face as well.“Well,” Mr. Wright said, and, just as before, he seemed not to have listened to a word they were saying. “Aren’t you a sturdy one? Now that could be useful.”Edwin wondered idly, and rudely, if perhaps the man was deaf. He opened his mouth to say something of that nature—Mr. Wright clapped his hands together twice—Edwin blinked—and the world went black.“Now, who did you say you were again?”Edwin blinked. Exiting a ghost trap was, in his limited experience, usually more disorienting than entering one was. This occasion proved to be no different. The name of the man before him, and quite what his association with Edwin was, escaped him at the moment. He looked around; though the world was certainly sharp enough under his gaze the fuzziness of his brain prevented him from registering exactly what he was looking at. He knew what he hadn’t seen, however.He turned back to the man who’d spoken to him. “Where’s Charles?”“Your little friend will be joining us next,” the man assured him. “And your name?”“Best friend,” Edwin corrected absently, looking around again. He had been in a ghost trap; surely Charles was too, which meant likely there was some object nearby that held him. Edwin just had to find it.“I beg your pardon?”He looked the man fully in the face. “Charles is my best friend,” he corrected. “There is nothing little about him.” Edwin blinked. Hmm. Right. That had been an insult. He was starting to regain his wits and was a little embarrassed about how foolish he’d become when he’d lost them. He drew himself up taller, and only then realized he was sat in a chair, straps around his wrists holding him in place.He tested the straps, and his wrists burned. Hmm. Leather, but a small inset of iron wire had been included in the design. It barely stung but the corporeality the iron granted him meant he could not phase through the restraints. He disliked that more than he disliked the pain, though at least the chair was quite different from being strapped to a table, and no other part of him was restrained.“Interesting,” the man—Edward Wright, Edwin recalled—said. He was gazing at Edwin keenly. “You do not seem startled by the iron.”Edwin flinched, and it had nothing to do with the man’s words, or the iron now pressed to his wrists as he pulled tight on his restraints. He did not answer. In fact, he was no longer paying any attention to Wright at all because he’d caught sight of a terrible, dreadful thing. They were in Wright’s workshop, the distant rational part of his brain told him, and he knew that because he had laid eyes on the workbench that held the man’s ghost traps and finally recognized the objects there for what they were.Dolls. Near a dozen of them splayed out on the countertop, some in various stages of disassembly, which only harkened him further to his memories of the Doll House. Above the countertop were even more of them; a half-dozen on a lower shelf, tipped over and haphazardly arranged without care, and a further score on a shelf above that, these arranged ever so neatly, each of them seeming to stare at them with their dark, soulless eyes. There were small pieces of paper stapled to the front of the doll’s smocks on the top row, though Edwin could not make out the words written upon them (as if it mattered).One of them was giggling but he could not tell which one. He held himself still lest his movements draw their attention.A form stepped up right in front of him, blocking Edwin’s gaze, blocking the dolls from peering deep into his shattered, broken soul. He did not untense, still did not move, fearing what would come next. If he did his best not to anger his captor, maybe, maybe…“Really now. Ignoring me will only delay my experiments,” the form said with clear irritation.Edwin’s eyes flickered over him, up and down his polished, neat form. Human. Wright was a human soul, untortured, because they were still on Earth and not in Hell at all. No one was giggling. (But, Wright was, perhaps, still a torturer.) He swallowed and had not a clue what Wright had been saying to him.“Charles?” he managed to ask instead. Charles would fix things, get Edwin out of here no matter that Edwin could not bring himself to move. (He would though; at the slightest twitch from one of those things he would have been all too happy to tear his wrists free from the chair and run as he had for so many decades. Distantly, he knew Charles would not be pleased by that solution, however, which meant that Charles needed to be here, coming up with a clever solution all his own.)Wright rolled his eyes. “Really now, is that all you can say?” He leaned a little closer, studying Edwin more deeply. “Is he as resilient as you are?”Resilient. Experiments. The bolt of angry, red pain upstairs before they’d been trapped. Edwin put together in an instant what Wright was getting at and it did nothing to help him forget his memories of Hell.“Charles is a young ghost,” he said, stiff. “He can survive the touch of iron on occasion, but nothing like—”“Nothing like you, is that it?” Wright interrupted.Well. What a scrub.Edwin’s limbs were still stiff, but he forced his eyes to roll. “If you are not going to listen to me speak then I do not see why I need answer you at all.”Wright continued to disregard him, and did not seem to even note that statement. He was already moving away from Edwin, turning to… to a chair beside him, Edwin realized. Wright’s back was largely between him and the chair and he could not see what Wright was doing. He knew in an instant when Charles had reformed though, and thankfully not a second after that Wright stepped back, sizing up the both of them.Charles yanked his wrists reflexively where they were also strapped down, as disoriented as Edwin had been on reforming, and let out a hiss as the iron touched his skin.“Hmm,” Wright said. He reached out to his side and grabbed a clipboard off his workbench, picking up the attached pen to write something down. “Not as resilient at all then.”Charles looked up at him. “Where’s Edwin?”“Edwin, is it?” Wright made another note. “You two are quite the pair.”“Charles,” Edwin said quietly, trying to be reassuring.Charles turned his head Edwin’s way. “Edwin!” he said, delighted. He did not seem to have fully become aware of the situation just yet, but that was alright. Edwin was at least pleased to have provided his friend some small measure of comfort.Wright was in the meantime turning back to face Edwin. “I have enough ghosts in my collection,” –and he waved his hand idly toward his workbench, and the dolls strewn about there; Edwin’s eyes went to the intact, orderly dolls on the top shelf— “but you, you are most intriguing. I have never seen a ghost quite so resilient as you. You will assist me in practicing my magic. Ghosts are ever so finicky and I have gone through quite a few trying to fine tune my creations enough so as to not destroy them instantly.”Edwin struggled to wrap his brain around the contradictions in the man’s speech as the dolls continued to stare down at him. So, he wanted help not destroying ghosts—but he didn’t care how many he eliminated in the process.“I have no interest in assisting you,” he said.Wright, still, did not seem to actually process the words leaving Edwin’s mouth. His eyes flickered instead to where Edwin’s wrists were still tight in the straps. The iron wire was thin enough that contact was minimal but his jacket sleeves were starting to smoke in its grip.“Honestly,” Wright said, “I must admit to being curious as to whether or not you would be able to escape iron bonds. However, before you get any ideas, the entire basement is warded, much like the circle you encountered upstairs. You will not be able to pass through the walls here.” Then Wright frowned. “Though, I may need to adjust the things for a ghost of your energy levels,” he said, more to himself than to Edwin, and made another note on his clipboard.“Leave him alone,” Charles said, low and quiet and dangerous. He finally seemed to have realized what was going on. Edwin offered him a sorry glance, worried and apologetic and seeking reassurance all at once. Charles’ bag was still on his back, even strapped to the chair as he was, but he could not reach it with his hands restrained as they were.“Now,” Wright said, looking up at Edwin again, as if Charles had not said a thing. “I would like to test some magics on you and record your responses. Mitigating the power levels can be tricky and it is ever so troublesome to continually need to seek out new subjects.”Edwin’s earlier denial had been completely ignored as well. He and Charles were mere objects to this man, nothing human remaining in them that he cared to give notice to. Or maybe he treated the living this way as well. There was no way to tell, but there was no point in responding either. Wright was not the first man—well, the first being—Edwin had met to treat his opinions as less than irrelevant.He looked away, toward Charles instead. His eyes flickered to the bag on Charles’ back. He knew Charles could not reach it as it was, but it was only thrown over one shoulder. Perhaps if he shifted enough he could force it into his lap, within reach of his hands? Edwin almost wondered whether or not Charles would even need to be subtle, Wright’s disregard for them was so high. Even so, he hoped—Pain! Edwin froze up, jaw clenching at the unexpected sensation. He did not twitch and he did not flinch, but he could tell Charles had read something in his expression from the way Charles froze as well.Charles unfroze faster than Edwin. “Oi! Leave off! He’s done nothing to you!”The pain stopped. Edwin did not do anything as pedestrian as drawing in a breath to steady himself mentally. Such an action would only be taken as weakness and he had no interest in exposing any of his softer sides to Wright. He did not even bother to look down to see if anything had been done to his form as well.But perhaps staring at Charles was not the best solution either. He did not need to see Charles’ empathy causing him suffering at Edwin’s pain, or for Wright to catch sight of his stare and turn his attention to Edwin’s partner instead.He twisted only his neck and turned back to look at Wright.“Remarkable,” Wright was saying. “You’re not even flickering.”On the edge of his vision, Edwin could see that the man was holding something, but he did not bother to look down and see what it was.“How did that feel, as compared to the previous spell?”Edwin said nothing. He was a statue and though this captor was looking for descriptions of his pain, not tears or begging or screams, he had learned well in Hell to keep quiet. Not always, of course—when it came down to it, Edwin always screamed, in the end, and cried, and wept, and begged. But this was still the beginning, and it was very little compared to Hell.Edwin would give this man nothing.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Charles, enough,” Edwin said, unable to keep the weariness out of his tone.“Almost… got it,” Charles replied, determined to find a way to access his bag.Edwin had been hopeful at first as well but Charles didn’t have the angle to get the thing across his arm, out from where it had been trapped between his back and the chair. They would have to find another way out.“He will have to let us out of these chairs eventually.” Edwin did not think it was entirely a futile hope, but he tried not to imagine that eventually ending in him—or worse, Charles—dissolving into nothingness.Charles snarled, jolting where he sat, then flinched and hissed as the movement forced his iron binds into contact with his wrists again. Edwin wanted to look away from the sight, but he knew he could not. He’d already spent some minutes non-responsive, frozen in his chair, after the torture had ended. To look away from Charles would be to look at the… the things in the room that he was not thinking of. And Edwin could not do that.He was barely holding himself together as it was, and the pain had barely been a factor in that. On it’s own the pain would have been…Well, bearable, he supposed, however dreadful and excruciating. But coupled with the restraints, and the things, and the knowledge that Charles was not free either, it was near to a miracle that Edwin’s mind was not already fraying, that he had not retreated to a Hell-forged mindset. Only a few times in their tenure as detectives had Edwin lost control of his visual semblance, returning to that shivering, frightened boy who’d died in St. Hilarion’s basement in nothing but his sleepwear and then spent over seventy years being tortured without a single change in outfits. (Unless he counted the change in bodies, which he very much did not.)He wasn’t interested in increasing that number.“If I—”“No,” Charles snapped at him.Edwin held back a huff of frustration. “I was not going to suggest attempting self-amputation again,” he said, making his exasperation well known. No, Charles had shot down that idea repeatedly. “But if I were to merely break my wrist, I might still be able to remove my hand.”“You don’t have any bones,” Charles said, in a tone that screamed No.Edwin did not roll his eyes, but only because he was tired (mostly metaphorically; he was incapable of sleeping) and in pain. “You know that that is irrelevant the same as I. If I—”“Nope.”“Charles.”“Still nope.” Charles furrowed his brow in thought. “Maybe if I break my wrist…” he looked down at his restraints.“And why would it be acceptable for you to do so?”“Well,” Charles said, in the tone he used when speaking to people he thought were simpletons, “I haven’t been recently tortured.”Edwin scowled and tried to push down his anger at Charles for being so condescending. His emotions were high, it was only fair that Charles’ were as well. He could not blame his companion for being short with him. “You know as well as I do that as soon as our captor refines his technique on me, he intends—”The sound of the door opening cut him off short, and Edwin froze in place. He’d presented as neutral as possible of an exterior thus far and had no intention of breaking that façade now. Wright did not seem like the sort of torturer who would care, perhaps, he truly did seem to view Edwin only as another piece of equipment for practicing his magics, but Edwin still did not want to give the man anything to hold over his head. Least of all his friendship with and affection for Charles.He turned away from Charles, but closed his eyes before he did so, so that he did not have to look at the things in the room.“You know, this would be much easier if you gave me something to work with.” The tone was genial, the words only mildly irritated.For the first time in what must have been nearly a half hour, Edwin opened his eyes to see Wright peering down at him. The man was a constant conversationalist, but this was the first time that Edwin really felt he had expected a reply and was not just talking aloud to himself.“And why, pray tell, would I be interested in making things easier for you?” he asked.“Well,” Wright said simply, as if they were having a chat over tea, “if you gave me some indication of how this feels for you, I would have a better idea of how much power to use on your friend.”Edwin’s jaw clenched. Fear was a familiar presence to him, but it had become nearly overbearing, here in this basement, with the pain, and the dolls, and Charles stuck just as fast as he was. Only the lack of a need to breathe kept him calm, otherwise his chest would have been heaving with the effort he was putting forth to remain as neutral as possible. “It feels painful.”Wright actually rolled his eyes. “Pain is the only sensation ghosts can feel, so that is not surprising. I am asking about the level. How would it compare to what a less resilient ghost would feel?”What a complete and utter dunce. How was Edwin to know that? He’d died, gone to Hell, and only then experienced existence as a ghost. He had not the slightest idea of how a “less resilient ghost” would experience the sensations he had been subjected to.“On a scale of one to ten,” he snapped out, “I would rate your skills as a torturer at a three, perhaps.” That was somewhat because it wasn’t the torture Wright was interested in, or even the pain really, but Edwin did not care for the finer details of his petty assessment at the moment.An irritated huff escaped from Wright. He took a step back, and Edwin carefully kept his eyes on him, and not his expanded field of view of what was behind Wright. “Perhaps we need another break,” he said, although it had only been a couple of hours since his return from his first break. (That one had been for supper, Edwin thought. He hadn’t really listened to all the man’s prattling.) “I suppose I shall go and polish up the wards.”Edwin took the pause to consider what Wright was asking him. He snuck a peek at Charles out of the corner of his eyes. Wright was, per his own easily divulged explanation, not trying to make things painful for Edwin. He was trying to refine a way to use magic on ghosts without destroying them. Without destroying Charles.“If I answer your questions, will you answer mine in turn?”Wright paused from where he had been beginning to turn away. “You did say something about that when you came in, didn’t you? Something about my ghost traps?”It wasn’t a no. “We found one in the home of Gavin Howell,” Edwin said. “Although he did not remember purchasing one. He had also died recently, we suspect at the hands of the demon who was residing in your trap instead of any ghost.”“Gavin Howell…” Wright muttered to himself, frowning. “The name doesn’t ring a bell…”“Nice bloke,” Charles cut in with ample sarcasm. “’Bout in his early thirties, white, died a week ago.” From the derision in Charles’ tone, Edwin suspected they were on the same page at the moment. (From the tension, Edwin knew that Wright would suffer one day, for what he’d done to Edwin.)They’d come here expecting a doll maker, a creator of ghost traps who could tell them how one would use his tools to trap not a ghost but a demon. Instead, they’d found a man who seemed to care not one whit for anything but his own arcane experiments. Charles clearly suspected Wright of the murder, same as Edwin did.“Ah, only a week ago. Yes, I remember him. Dreadful thing, that experiment, didn’t turn out at all the way I expected.”“Then you were the one to summon the demon.”Wright returned his gaze to Edwin. “What does it matter to the both of you? One more or less ghost in the world won’t make a difference.”That was patently untrue.“That’s called murder,” Charles said.As Edwin had suspected he would, Wright ignored the comment. He didn’t care for morality, especially not as concerning ghosts.“But one more demon in the world might,” he said quietly. Up until this point his growing hatred for Wright had been a cool, logical thing. To Wright, ghosts didn’t matter, not a one of them. To Wright, Edwin’s suffering was just, because it helped him along with his goals. To Wright, scientific pursuits were more important than anything else. These were facts—there was no malice or menace in Wright’s actions. Edwin’s hatred had been a fact too. He detested men like Wright on principle, men who acted as if all the world was beneath them.There had been nothing personal, to Edwin’s hatred. (Though he doubted Charles would have said the same.)But now. But this. Edwin’s hatred began to bubble in his chest, true emotion for the first time. Wright had summoned a demon, on purpose, and cared not for the consequences of that. Everything that had happened to Edwin, everything he had been through in Hell, had been the result of a cruel, malicious, accident. His tormentors had intended to hurt him, embarrass him, scare him, but they had not intended to summon a demon.Wright was very nearly the opposite of them, in that regard, and Edwin found he hated him all the more for that. Wright was a grown man. He should have known better.“Don’t take me for a fool, boy,” Wright said dismissively, in reaction to Edwin’s cool comment. “It was only a lesser demon.”Only.
Only.
The dolls were giggling again. Edwin found he was shaking and could not have said if it was fear or anger. He did not get angry often. Vengeful, on occasion, when Charles was hurt. Frustrated and irritated and annoyed and exasperated and upset, most certainly. But this. This rageful hatred?Edwin had thought he’d long since relearned all of the emotions he’d lost in Hell. He did not care for them all, especially not when they threatened to swamp him and drag him down, but he’d relearned them. The careful edges of gentleness. The joy of true pleasure. Inane boredom with no consequences. The tight throat of sorrow. Adoration and anxiety. Confusion and relief. Awkwardness and awe.This sort of rage, this depth of hatred, was new.He looked at Wright, and he thought about what would have happened if the bolt in the entryway had struck Charles instead of him, and the hatred grew.Wright was an abomination, and Edwin reviled him. Wright was a stain on humanity, and Edwin loathed him.To him, Gavin Howell’s death did not matter. Edwin’s destruction would not matter.Neither would Charles’.“Edwin?”It was Charles, of course, Charles who never failed to notice when a new emotion seized Edwin up and carried him away. Charles who was so kind, and so good. It had been some time since that had happened. Edwin found, startled, that he did not mind it so much now.He stood. Something ached, but he could not have said what. Had he phased through the iron wires, leaving his wrists smoking and useless? Had he ripped the straps from the chair itself? Had he left his hands behind, vanished them entirely, in his desire to be free? It did not matter. Edwin did not care.Wright had turned away from him. He had moved to return his clipboard and tools to his workbench, evidently still intending to take that break. He did not noticed Edwin had broken free.His cane was leaning against the workbench.Edwin picked it up. (Ah, so he did still have hands. Or had them again, at least.) It was thin and long in his hand, slender like a fencer’s foil. He shifted his grip on it, holding it in his right hand only by the rubber tip at the bottom. He’d certainly seen Charles swing his bat often enough, hadn’t he?The dolls were still giggling but he could not even see them now. The lighting had gone eerie and green. There was danger lurking around the corner, and Edwin’s fear was a cannonball in his gut, threatening to pull him down, but there was danger in front of him too—danger to the world, danger to Charles—and Edwin could do something about that.He hefted the cane into the air and brought it down with frighting force. There was a crack! A yelp. A shriek that Edwin was distantly aware was only in his memories. A shout from Charles. Whether it was encouragement or dismay he couldn’t have said that either. All he knew was that Wright wasn’t unconscious.The man had fallen halfway, gut pushed into the workbench and his top half draped over it.Hmm. Edwin had to concede he did not know much about generating head wounds—only that they could be notoriously finicky when experienced himself. Perhaps his blow had been fine, Wright had simply gotten lucky. Sometimes, where one hit killed, another barely wounded. Another try, then, seemed prudent.He hefted the cane again, but he was too slow. That made sense. The world had seemed to still eerily around him. Sounds rang in his ears, but distantly. He was fairly certain none of them were real. Except for Charles. Charles was real.Edwin watched as Wright scrambled around on the workbench, falling to one knee as he pushed himself away from it. His eyes were wide and blown, startled and fearful. There was something in his hand.Edwin hefted the cane a third time. Wright staggered to his feet and held out the object in his hand. It was a doll. An awful, horrible thing, black eyes staring like pits into Edwin’s damaged soul.He froze, cane in hand—“Get away from him!” Charles shouted.—“Afraid of dolls, huh?” Wright said with a wry amusement, half-mad from the pain of the blow he’d already suffered—Edwin’s wrists hurt—the doll shrieked again, so like it had done in Mr. Howell’s flat.The world vanished around him, and took Edwin’s fear and rage with it.When the world returned to Edwin he found himself strapped in the chair again, his head tilted back, something liquid being poured down his aching throat.There were several things wrong with that scenario. Not the least of them was the sounds of Charles’ screams and shouts of rage from next to him. Edwin’s brain struggled to understand what was happening to him. He’d been caught in a ghost trap again. He was disoriented and confused. He’d attacked Wright.His throat hurt as he swallowed. The taste of ash and sand lingered on his tongue. He was a ghost? Why was he drinking anything?The hand on his head tipped him back further. The hand on his head? Someone was holding his mouth open, someone was pouring the dreadful thing down his throat. Someone was talking, someone who wasn’t Charles.Edwin blinked up at the man—Wright, Wright the man who summoned demons and let them kill people and thought it was nothing. Edwin tried to summon his rage but could barely summon distaste. He tried to jerk his head and only got a dribble of the foul liquid spilled on his lips for his trouble. A trickle made its way down his chin. That burned too, which didn’t make sense.“So much easier when you’re pliant,” Wright was saying, almost to himself again.Behind him, Charles was making threats.The hand lifted from Edwin’s forehead. The burn in his throat traveled all the way down to his gut.Once, in Hell, Edwin had been forced to swallow molten metal. It had scorched him all the way down and burned up that body from the inside out. The breadth and scope of what he was feeling now was far from as extreme as that excruciating sensation had been, but it was the only comparison that felt apt.“I’ve always wondered if demons could possess ghosts,” Wright said, when he noticed Edwin’s eyes had settled on him again. There was a vindictive glee in his words now that Edwin was only just picking up on. He waved an empty jar at Edwin.Fear swept over Edwin. The prospect of being possessed by a demon shouldn’t have been nearly so frightening as the prospect of returning to Hell, but in that moment it was about the worst thing he thought Wright could have done to him. (To him, at least. Charles was another story.)“Unfortunately, I haven’t had any successes so far. Haven’t managed to keep anyone corporeal long enough. But I think you can withstand the iron.”Edwin couldn’t say anything. Next to him, Charles had fallen silent too.“We’ll give it a while to sink in,” Wright said. “In the meantime, I’ll be extra sure to fix the wards. You aren’t going anywhere.” He turned and swept from the room; Charles took a moment to spit a few final curses at his back.All was silent for a moment, as the door shut behind Wright.“Edwin?” Charles said a moment later, voice wavering a little. “You alright?”Edwin swallowed and took stock of himself. His hatred of Wright was slowly returning, though he wasn’t running nearly so hot as before. His gut burned. His throat and mouth felt scratchy and raw.“It… hurts,” he settled on, since there was no hiding that. He was already hunched over in the chair a little bit, curled over his aching stomach. “But, it…” Even talking hurt, though there was no familiar taste of copper in his mouth. He wondered if he would have tasted it, or if it would have just tasted of ash and sand, the way everything else a ghost consumed did. “I do not believe I am at serious risk.”“Serious risk—Edwin! He shoved a bunch of iron flakes in a jar and made you drink nearly two pints of the stuff!”Ah. That explained the raging fire eating at Edwin’s insides. He tried to double over further but all he could do was bend over his knees, the straps around his wrists tighter than before. (The leather—the iron wire—was undoubtedly digging into his wrists, but he could barely feel anything other than the slowly smoldering fire in his gut. Even the burn of his throat was starting to become inconsequential.“I’m going to kill him.” There was no humor in Charles’ voice, no humor at all.“Is this a situation where ‘dibs’ is applicable?” Edwin asked, and wrenched at least his neck up as he croaked out the words so he could see Charles’ response.Charles stared at him for a moment, startled into stillness.“I did already give it my best go,” Edwin croaked out again.A huff of laughter escaped Charles’ mouth as he shook his head in bewilderment. “Wasn’t a bad go, at that,” he played along, though Edwin noted the way his gaze flickered down to Edwin’s wrists.The pain of the iron burning away at him flared for a moment and Edwin took a deep breath through it, conscious more than ever of Charles watching him carefully.“Think you might have gone poltergeist a moment there.”Edwin assessed his prior mindset, the way he’d recategorized Wright alongside his killers in his mind. Charles’ observation did not entirely surprise him; he doubted Charles could ever understand how he felt about demons, the primal fear they brought out in him. He did not want Charles to.He looked into Charles’ eyes. Was that hesitation there? Fear of Edwin. He did not know. “I… apologize. I did not mean to…” To frighten him? Would Charles have appreciated that apology? “To worry you,” he settled on.“Nah, it’s alright,” Charles said, offering a small, genuine smile. “Was proper brills actually. Thought you had him there for a moment.” His eyes flickered again down to Edwin’s wrists.Lodging itself amongst the flames, a tiny pit of shame entered Edwin’s gut. He had no doubt that if it had been Charles who had broken free, they would have been out already, away from this dreadful place. He drew in another breath against the coupled guilt and pain and wished that he could feel the cool air on his burnt throat. If the air even was cool; he had no way of knowing.“Perhaps next time.”Charles’ eyes grew worried again but at least he didn’t voice any doubts out loud. Edwin was grateful for that. He was grateful for Charles’ presence as well, no matter how horrid a friend that made him. It had been the strength Charles granted him that had allowed him to break free last time, and it was the strength Charles granted him that prevented him from breaking down now. He still had his jacket and coat, his bowtie and shoes. For all that he’d been thinking of Hell, for all the pain he was in, he hadn’t become that frightened little boy again.He never did, when Charles was right next to him.“Did I ever tell you what happened the last football game?” Charles asked. The lines of his body were tight as he kept himself turned toward Edwin, but his smile was still there, still genuine, however small.It took Edwin a second to realize Charles was referring to the ghostly football games some of the local ghosts corralled him into playing. In the fifteen years Charles had been participating in them, rare as they were, Edwin had attended a grand total of one match. He’d gotten thoroughly lost in the first five minutes and spent most of the rest of the time writing in his notebook, thoughts on the last few cases mostly, except for a brief interlude in which he’d been startled by the sight of Charles stripping down to his vest.It had been quite ridiculous. There had been no need for Charles to do so—it wasn’t as if ghosts could sweat! Edwin hadn’t been to another match since beyond occasionally walking with Charles to the start of one or collecting him at the end.It took him a further second to realize what Charles was offering him.“No,” he croaked. “I do not believe you have.”And Charles grinned at him and started to talk. It didn’t dull the pain; nothing could do that until he purged the iron from his system. But it was a more than welcome distraction from it. Edwin let Charles’ wonderful voice wash over him and tried not to drown.“Woah.”Edwin blinked. He’d stopped listening to anything other than the rhythm of Charles’ words some minutes ago, but even he could tell the startled exclamation from Charles wasn’t part of his story.“You feel that?” Charles asked.Edwin could not feel anything but the iron in his gut. His mouth and throat had healed, more or less, but the iron was still inside him, settled into his stomach, and Edwin had never been the sort to be able to vomit on command. Not without triggering his gag reflex, which he couldn’t do, restrained as he was.He did not get the chance to voice his confusion though, because the room was suddenly flooded with ghosts. He and Charles looked around in alarm as they appeared from nowhere one after the other in a bare instant. No, not from nowhere: from the dolls on the top shelf. The ghost traps.“The wards,” Edwin croaked. Wright had said he was going to change the wards. Had he…? Edwin struggled to put the pieces together. Wright had wanted to increase the limit of ghostly energy his wards could contain but maybe… maybe it wasn’t a maximum limit, maybe it was a range. The ghost traps had passed through the earlier versions of the wards after all, at some point.Had Wright made a mistake, shifted the range of energies that could pass through the wards instead of increasing it? Could it… was it at all possible? Luck rarely went Edwin’s way when he was alone, but he wasn’t alone, was he?He and Charles had gotten lucky breaks on cases before, enough that had Edwin actually believed in luck as more than statistically inevitability that rarely fell his way, he might have described Charles as his good luck charm.The freed ghosts—the weaker ghosts, if Edwin’s hypothesis was correct—were milling about with dazed looks in their eyes. Post-trap confusion. Charles was trying to entice one of them to his side, cajoling them to undo the straps.Edwin did not bother. For one, he was not interested in attempting speech unless necessary. For another, once Charles got free—and he would, eventually, as soon as at least one ghost regained their awareness Edwin knew Charles would be able to persuade them to help—it would be short work before his own bonds were released.He waited on tenterhooks as the milling of the ghosts slowly ceased, each of them remembering who and where they were. Some of them were still confused; Edwin wondered if they’d been captured outside the basement. He wondered how long they’d been trapped in those dreadful things, the outside world passing them by.Bending over his knees again, he bowed his head in pain, aching.“—wards might be broken,” he heard Charles say over the increased murmur of conversation in the room. “You should try to get out of here.”Or that. Or Wright had just fully messed up, and there were no wards anymore. But Edwin hadn’t felt anything when Charles had—was that because the wards still held for him, or because there was nothing more poignant than the iron in his gut? He didn’t mention the possibility to Charles. He wouldn’t be heard against the crowd anyway.The murmuring had grown in volume to full on conversations. Some ghosts were filling others in. Some were panicking. One was helping to undo Charles’ straps. Others had heard his words and were moving for the walls.When the first woman phased through them, there was a general outcry from the ghosts who had seen the basement before. They flooded after her, each of them choosing near identical points on the wall, as if they’d found a single weak spot. More followed, spreading out a little as they escaped. Nearly as quickly as they’d appeared the other ghosts were gone and Charles was at Edwin’s side, elegant fingers freeing Edwin from his own leather-and-iron bindings.Edwin was happy to let Charles support him, one arm thrown around his partner’s shoulder as he stood on shaky feet.“Let’s get out of here.”Edwin did not express his doubts. It was entirely possible that he was wrong, and he did not want to ruin Charles’ optimism. They made for the wall. Charles was leading, a half-step ahead of Edwin as he supported him. His foot passed through the wall easily, his right arm. Edwin found himself crashing into the thing as Charles kept walking without him.Reaching a hand out to the wall to support himself in Charles’ absence, Edwin let himself sink to the floor. He didn’t stop to think about how quickly Charles would return, just shoved his finger into his mouth and trigger an upheaval of a watery sort of bile. He didn’t have any real bile in his gut, after all, just the iron-laced solution he had been forced to swallow.He heaved a second time as it came up, less because his gag reflex had been triggered and more because the iron seemed to burn his throat even more heavily coming up than it had going down. A coughing fit erupted from him, just as he heard Charles exclaim his name.Gentle hands pressed into his shoulders, allowing him to use one hand to cover his mouth as the burning numbed his tongue, his gums, every inch of the inside of him, it seemed.“Get all of it?” Charles asked softly, once the coughing subsided. There was a weariness to Charles’ tone, and so much wonderful, lovely concern.Edwin leaned further into his best friend’s grip and shook his head. No. No, there was still iron in his gut. Less of it—the relief was obvious, now that the initial burst of pain from his freshly scorched throat was starting to fade again—but not nothing.“Stupid of me,” Charles muttered. “C’mon, let’s get you in the bag.”Stupid of Edwin as well. He’d been so focused on whether his or Charles’ assumptions about the wards were correct that he’d forgotten about the iron. Luckily, they had a solution for that, though ingesting iron wasn’t a scenario they’d encountered before.He let Charles help him to his feet, and then into the bag’s hold. After so long in the basement, with those things, and Wright’s careful neutral expression staring down at him as he inflicted pain, it was a relief to be in the secure darkness of Charles’ pocket dimension. Even the items Charles had sorted him amongst in his haste—near the top of the bag, he presumed, rather than their usual hiding spot—were so quintessentially Charles that Edwin found himself relaxing even as he braced himself for the inevitable failure of this solution as well.True, he could have been wrong, but… He seldom was, in these regards. When it came to people he would happily refer to Charles’ expertise, but magic was his domain. Wards, security—demons—Edwin devoured everything about those topics that he could get his hands on, which had been quite a lot the past twenty years.It did not take long—though time could be fuzzy, tucked away from reality—for Charles to open the bag and pull him out again. Sure enough, they were still trapped in the basement and the worry on Charles’ face was strong.“It will not work.”“Sure it will. Maybe I just went through the wrong bit of wall, or…” Charles trailed off, staring at Edwin. “What is it?”“I suspect Wright shifted the energy levels his wards are meant to contain. Ghosts with a lower energy level were set free. Those with higher energy levels…” He shook his head.“No,” Charles said. “No, that’s, that’s ridiculous. I’ve got higher energy than most of—” And he waved his hand at the empty basement, as if to indicate all the ghosts who had just been there.“You do,” Edwin said carefully. “But I—”Charles was shaking his head. “No,” he said a third time. “We have to—I can’t—”The only way Edwin was leaving this basement was if—his eyes drifted toward Wright’s workbench, covered in ghost traps and enchanted crystals and iron tools—was if his energy level was considerably lower than it was now, even with the iron in his gut.“The ghost traps suppress energy,” he said, still so careful, though it was a struggle to get the words out.Charles looked at the workbench too, then blanched. “One of those things? Edwin, you cannot be serious.”Edwin didn’t want to be but he knew what Charles would prefer, if presented with the other options. He looked down at his own wrists, still blackened and charred. He had to be careful with this. Suggesting that Charles hurt him, when he knew it was one of the last things Charles ever wanted to do…Perhaps he should not have been so hasty as to expel the iron from his gut.“There are,” he started slowly, “other ways of lowering a ghost’s energy levels.”Charles stared at him, horrorstruck. He swallowed and gritted his teeth. “The ghost traps, you said,” he said, his tone angry and defiant despite his capitulation.Edwin felt himself relax a little. He was honestly torn between what would be worse, the iron or the doll, despite that only one would cause him pain, but he knew which would be worse for Charles.“Yes.”“What if, what if it mixes badly with the iron? What if I can’t get you out again?”“Charles,” Edwin said calmly, even as he burned. There was no telling how much time they had. “The wards undoubtedly have provisions against Wright’s own traps, otherwise he would not have been able to bring any of these ghosts down here. It is the only way I am leaving this place.”“We can try the bag again, maybe. Something, anything.”“Charles,” Edwin said, stern.Charles gave the workbench another look, then cast his gaze away from the iron tools and enchantments that had already been used on Edwin. “I don’t know how they work,” he said, a little desperate. “You’re the brains here! What if I can’t get you out? What if he’s the only one who can? Maybe, maybe you should test it on me, first.”“Charles!” Edwin snapped. He was in pain, and dreadfully aware that his only escape was to allow his essence to be captured by a doll or to force Charles to torture him (or for him to torture himself, but even he would only be able to hold the iron for so long). He had no desire to linger on that prospect. Drawing in a deep breath through his nose he faced Charles more properly. “Charles,” he repeated. “I trust you. In point of fact, I don’t trust anyone else, if I’m being honest. You will get us both out of here, and then you will get me out of the spirit trap. I have the utmost faith in that.”Watching him, Charles took a deep breath too. His jaw clenched for a moment, and then he offered a short nod. Hesitating for only a second longer, he stepped over to the workbench and picked up one of the dolls. Edwin could barely bear to watch, but he knew he had to.“Here goes nothing.”Here goes nothing indeed—despite the iron burning in his gut, the fear racing over his skin, Edwin’s world went black once more. His last thought was on the surety of his own conviction. It was true after all: Charles was the only person in the world he trusted. Charles would get them out of this.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The first thing Edwin became aware of again was the aching, fiery pit in his stomach. That was important. He knew that was important, though he couldn’t remember why. He knew it was less than before, but he was having trouble remembering before at that exact moment.The second thing Edwin became aware of was the feeling of arms around him, holding him tight. He froze, limbs stiff and frightened, but when he blinked he realized that he knew who was holding him, knew him and trusted him. He would have recognized the head nuzzling into his neck anywhere, no matter how disoriented he was, no matter how much else he didn’t know.The third thing Edwin became aware of was that they were back in the office. He found himself relaxing, limbs losing the tension they’d gained when he’d first realized Charles was hugging him.Wright. The iron. The ghost trap. The doll.Charles, holding him fast, like Edwin would fade away if he didn’t cling on tight. Ridiculous. Edwin wasn’t going anywhere.After a moment, his memories and wits returned to him, he brought his arms up and loosely tried to hold Charles back in return. Charles immediately pulled back, though only so far as to keep his hands on each of Edwin’s shoulders and look into his eyes.“Edwin! You alright?”There was almost a touch of mania to Charles’ words, his expression, a desperate sort of need that added a tiny stone pit alongside the smoldering embers in his stomach. Charles needed him to be okay, he realized—so of course he said that he was.“Quite alright, Charles.” He offered his best friend a smile and relaxed even further. It wasn’t even a lie. That they were back in the office, that Charles was in front of him, whole and unhurt… It was more than enough.But Charles recoiled, pulling his hands off Edwin’s shoulders. “Oh God, the iron!”Unbidden, a grimace crossed Edwin’s face. Yes, that was most unpleasant. But… “It will keep,” he assured Charles, and cast his gaze around the office. He froze again as he found what he’d been looking for: the shattered remnants of the prison that had trapped him. The foul thing that had carried him safely from their captor. The doll, broken on the floor not far from their feet.Charles barely seemed to be listening. He’d all but dove for his bag, also on the floor, not far from the doll, and shoved his whole arm into it. “Of course you’re not alright!” He pulled out a jar of something liquid and clear and set it next to him, then dove his arm back in.“Charles,” Edwin said.A bucket appeared next to the jar, one of the new-fangled flimsy plastic ones that Edwin could have cracked with his bare hands, even when he was alive.“Charles.”“Sorry,” Charles was saying. “I didn’t—I was just—I mean, the trap came first, obviously, but I didn’t forget—”“Charles!” Edwin finally gave up and just yelled, only realizing after the fact what a poor idea that had been. From the perspective of his physical form, it had only been mere minutes since he’d expelled the bulk of the iron from his stomach—straight up his throat, coating the inside of his mouth before finally leaving him. The yell aggravated the lightly scorched surfaces, and a coughing fit overtook him. He found himself doubling over and the coughs, thanks to his corporeality, further aggravated the burning in his gut.It really wasn’t so bad as it had been before he’d vomited most of it up, the raging fire replaced by smoldering embers, but Edwin knew better than most how sensitive the interior of the mouth was. The nerve endings there—in the tips of his fingers and the soles of his feet, and several other places besides—responded to pain in a way the rest of him did not. It hurt, and his eyes watered, but he knew it would pass.He was safe, in the office, with Charles. Everything else would pass. (The thing was still there, and it being shattered on the floor of the office did not help Edwin any. He’d seen enough broken dolls to last him several lifetimes. That he had been inside it—he held back a shudder.)Charles had stopped his frantic motions, frozen in alarm with one hand still in the bag as he watched Edwin cough and cough, and then he jolted, lunging upward and for Edwin. Firmly but gently, he hustled Edwin over to the couch and forced him to take a seat on it.“I am quite alright, Charles,” Edwin tried again, voice hoarser and croaking. He could tell Charles wasn’t buying it. “I believe I may be able to induce vomiting again.” Better to scorch his throat and mouth even worse now, get it all out and over with and done with at once, then to wait for this to heal and do it all over again.“No, no, hold on.” Charles hurried back over to his bag, and the assorted items he’d fetched from it. “Here,” he said, returning to shove the bucket into Edwin’s hands.Ah. Good. Edwin had not yet had time to give thought to ruining the floor of their wonderful office yet, but Charles had clearly thought things through. (He’d had time to think things through—But, no. Edwin wasn’t thinking about that right now. What day it was wasn’t important.)First, though, the doll. “Charles,” he started.Charles was shoving something else toward him, the small jar. “It’s mostly water,” he said, as though he had not heard the beginning of Edwin’s entreaty. “But I was talking to Old Finn, and he said you shouldn’t have any stomach acid, so we have to sort of, saturate the iron to get it out again? Something like that. I can, there’s a list, of what’s in it—” and he plunged his hand back into his bag.Edwin was momentarily distracted. How clever! Of course more liquid—without additional iron this time—would assist in the process. “No need, Charles.” He unscrewed the lid to the jar, grateful for the ease with which he managed to do so, and downed the thing in one go. He had no need to pause for breath, after all.The water—and whatever it was laced with—still tasted like ash on Edwin’s tongue—as far as he and Charles were aware, there was nothing readily available that would allow them to taste again—but it went down easily. There was no burn this time, even if the sensation of anything in his gut felt strange. He felt almost bloated, even, but he knew he wouldn’t for long.Hand now out of his bag, Charles had returned to hovering by Edwin’s side. He looked worried still, despite the way he usually soaked up Edwin’s compliments, so Edwin felt compelled to give another, even though the coolness of the water hadn’t washed away the fire in his throat.“Well done,” he said, and his eyes, unbidden, moved to the thing on the floor again. He swallowed. “Charles—”“You shouldn’t wait too long,” Charles said. “But if it, if you need…”“No, no.” Edwin drew himself upright, took a deep breath, and stuck his finger in his mouth again. Charles made a tiny, wounded sound as he doubled over the cheap bucket in his lap, vomiting up the water. And hopefully the iron.It scorched again, but Edwin had known it would and braced himself for it. He remained bent over the bucket for a moment longer than necessary, collecting himself. When he drew upright his stomach felt much better even as he dealt with the additional pain in his mouth.“Much better, Charles,” he said, and attempted a smile up at his partner.Charles’ return smile was shaky. He snatched up the bucket before Edwin could say anything more and hurried over to the mirror, vanishing through it in an instant, as if he could not bear for the iron to even remain in Edwin’s proximity for a moment longer. Edwin used his absence to suck in a deep breath, cough a little, prod gently at his gut, and very delicately not look anywhere but directly in front of him.He’d relaxed a bit, on seeing, on hugging, Charles, but doing this in the office, having that thing here, while Charles was not... The pain and the fear were starting to tug at him again. He did his best to push them down. It was patently ridiculous, after all. If Wright had not already tracked them down, while Edwin had been trapped (however long that had been!), then there surely was no need to fear it now, and the office was warded besides. He was safe here.Charles’ return was the balm he needed.“Charles,” he tried again, but then paused when he noticed Charles still had the bucket, presumably empty, in hand.“Here.”Edwin took the bucket back, distracted again. “I believe I have gotten it all, Charles,” he said.“No point in not being sure,” Charles said, and brought over a horseshoe. “Never thought we’d have much use for this, did we?” His tone was wry, lacking its usual cheer.Though horseshoes were typically made of iron, this one, made of silver, was capable of detecting iron. Since most iron was quite obvious—crowbars, rebar, fire pokers, and the like—what had felt like a unique and useful payment for a case had ended up sitting in Charles’ bag for years on end. It seemed they were finally going to get their proper use of it.But it was Charles’ tone that Edwin was focusing on, not the horseshoe in his hands. “My incorporeality should be proof enough,” he tried to reassure his partner.“Don’t even try it! You know you don’t react to iron like the rest of us. C’mon.”React was the key point there. Edwin was still subject to iron’s deadly touch, same as any other ghost was. He was just better at ignoring it. With a weary sigh, he moved his arms and the bucket out of the way, letting Charles pass the horseshoe over his chest. When it neared his stomach, he could see it start to vibrate in Charles’ hand.Charles was quick to pull it back and fetch Edwin another jar of treated water. Edwin wondered idly how many jars Charles had prepared—how long had it been? How long had he been trapped? How much more of the world had passed him by?—as he took it with a grimace. Vomiting up the iron was not at all pleasant; only the reassurance that it would be worse if he delayed convinced Edwin to down the second jar, but he still hesitated to trigger his gag reflex again.Charles was still hovering. Edwin gave the water a moment to settle and repositioned the bucket over his lap, gripping it with his left arm. He hoped this would be the last time he had to endure this. His throat was still sore, his lips, his tongue. His gaze flickered over to the dreadful doll again. He froze. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want this to have happened to him! Would he never stop being targeted for what he was, as he had been by his classmates all those years ago?He found himself wincing at the thought, at the faint echo of a giggle in his ears. The doll had invaded his space too much, this case. Edwin wanted it gone.Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Charles flinch. “What is it?” the other boy asked, rushing forward. “Are you okay?”The movement—the concern—was enough to get Edwin moving again too. His jaw clenched. “I dearly hope we no longer require the remnants of the trap I was kept in?” he asked carefully.Charles jumped again. “No, no. ‘Course not. Here, I’ll just—” And he quickly swept up the pieces into his arms, hurrying over to the mirror again.Even in Charles’ absence, Edwin found himself relaxing a little. The dreadful thing was gone, every bit of it, and the office was safe again. Quickly, before Charles could hurry back, he stuck his finger in his throat again. He was coughing when Charles returned.“What did you—Why did you do that? You could have waited—are you—did you—”“That should be the last of it,” Edwin said hoarsely, mostly just hoping. He looked up at Charles. “The trap?”The look on Charles’ face was grimly satisfied. “Do you remember the Case of the Drowned Steelworker?”Ah. Vindictive satisfaction rushed over Edwin. “Capital choice, Charles,” he said happily, then coughed into the bucket again.“Are you sure…?”Uncouth though it was, Edwin wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand as he straightened. The exhaustion that had sunk its claws into him in Wright’s basement was choosing now—perhaps because he had purged the iron completely—to dig in deeper. His ghostly semblance felt tired, which was near impossible a result to achieve. He’d been corporeal for too long, and now he was not. The same effect resulted if they spent too long forcing corporeality to interact with the world without the use of iron, though that was not something they’d often needed to do at length.Now it was just a matter of convincing Charles the iron had left him.“The horseshoe,” Edwin said. “I do believe that did the trick.”Charles remained quick to take the bucket away from Edwin, and quick to run the horseshoe over Edwin’s chest again. It did not vibrate. Charles passed it over a third time.When he made to do so a fourth time, Edwin pushed his hand away. “Really, Charles. I do think that is quite enough.” He stood and looked around. There was nothing in the office that immediately caught his attention, nothing that screamed danger at him. He almost didn’t trust it. But there was nothing too out of place either. Perhaps some books had been rearranged, but no sign of the passage of time.“You have to be careful,” Charles told him, gathering up the bucket, putting the horseshoe back in his bag.“The danger has passed,” Edwin reminded him.“No cases,” Charles countered. “And don’t tell me your throat's not still scorched. You need time to heal.”Edwin’s jaw clenched but… he could do with a few days of relative peace, without the two of them running pell-mell all over the city. “Very well,” he conceded, and Charles grinned at him and went to go dispose of the last of the iron.“Hey Mister, Mister!”Edwin looked over at the semi-familiar calls of Sam George, a six-year old ghost who never left the park he haunted but otherwise would have followed Charles to the ends of the Earth. Charles had that sort of effect on people.Following behind Sam as he ran up to them were the usual pack of miscreants—Viola, ten; Sally M, eleven, though she insisted to anyone who asked she was near enough to twelve to make it count; Harry, seven; Amir, a very firm eight and a half; Broderick, also ten—and a couple new faces Edwin couldn’t put names to.Sam came to a halt at their sides, already tugging on Charles’ sleeve. “Play a game with us?” he asked, cheerful and bright.Just as Edwin was resigning himself to sitting around watching until the children got bored—or, worse, get dragged into the game himself—Charles gently disentangled Sam’s grip.“Not today, sorry.” He was grinning as he said it, but firm too. “We’re out on a walk.”“Boo!” Harry declared.“That’s boring,” one of the unknown children agreed.“Walks are for old people,” Sam argued.“Well, Edwin’s old, isn’t he?”Hmph. Trust Charles to use him as an excuse. He found he wasn’t too displeased though, that Charles was choosing to stick by his side, instead of going off with friends. True, that was what usually happened after a particularly harrowing case, until one of them got annoyed with the other being too clingy, but it was still heartwarming, a little, to see visible evidence of Charles choosing him.The kids seemed to consider Charles’ words. Sam was the sort to usually argue on principle, and he and the rest of his gang didn’t care much for how many years each of them had spent as a ghost, but he’d learned better than to argue against Edwin.“How old is he?” one of the new kids asked.Charles bent over, like he was delivering a secret. “Over a hundred,” he said in a hushed tone, grinning.“No he’s not!”“I’m two hundred.”“No you aren’t!”“Harry’s seventy-three though, aren’t you Harry?”“Isn’t Ms. Williams like, five hundred whole years?”“Don’t be stupid, you can’t be five hundred.”“I am!”“No you aren’t. You’re only thirty-three. You said so yesterday!”“No I didn’t!”Sam whistled, bringing the raging pack of miscreants to a halt.“Just ‘cause Edwin’s old doesn’t mean you have to go on a walk with him, does it?” There was nearly a pout on his face.Charles reached forward, still grinning, and tweaked his nose. A disgusted expression crossed Sam’s face as he jumped back. “Ew!”“Didn’t anyone ever tell you to respect your elders?” Charles turned subtly toward Edwin and gave him a wink.Edwin did not bother to mask the roll of his eyes. “It is perfectly respectable to go for a walk at any age,” he scolded the children.“Why?”Edwin opened his mouth and received an elbow to his side from Charles before he could so much as utter a word.“Oi, don’t go getting him started!” Charles told the children. “Now go on, off the lot of you, go get into trouble. Next time Sam, promise.”Giggling—and still arguing about their ages—the children ran off.“I believe it is customary to tell children to stay out of trouble.”Charles laughed. “Maybe in your day.”“Oh, do not tell me customs have changed that much,” Edwin snapped out. He resumed their stroll down the path.Still laughing, Charles easily caught up with him. “Admit it, you like the little buggers.”They were children. Dead children. Edwin had not the slightest idea of how to interact with them. Still, Sam, all of six years old, had brought them a dozen child clients over the years; half they’d helped move on, the other half they had merely assured a happy afterlife. Sam himself had died around Charles’ time, or shortly before. He was waiting until his baby sister—now solidly middle-aged—died before he moved on. Edwin could not deny he felt a sliver of fondness for the boy.He slowed on their walk, gazing off at where the children had begun a rousing game of tag, though it seemed like fully half of them had decided they were going to be it. Charles slowed with him, and for a moment they watched the children play. ‘Go get into trouble,’ Charles had told them.“You know,” Edwin said, carefully, “we never did finish Mr. Howell’s case.”Charles froze for a moment. Edwin saw him swallow out of the corner of his eye.“I talked to him, for a bit, while you were… you know.”Edwin froze too, at the memory of his lost time, of the burden he’d placed on Charles by suggesting the spirit trap as a means of egress. He turned fully to face his partner. “And what did he say?”Charles shrugged. “Didn’t seem that fussed, honestly. Said thanks for looking into it, was glad to know of how he’d died, but mostly it was just the finding his body thing he’d been worried about. Apparently his mum was almost all set with the funeral, so he said he’d probably move on after that.”Edwin digested the information.“Told me she was donating most of his stuff too, said we could have the pick of the lot, if we wanted,” Charles said into the silence. “But I didn’t bother to go look, to be honest. Was a little busy.”“He did not even care that he was murdered?” The very thought seemed baffling.Again, Charles shrugged. “Guess not. Didn’t tell him the whole story though. He might have been more fussed if he knew Wright was hurting other ghosts all the while.”“How could he not care? That is… he was murdered, Charles!”Charles grimaced. “Not so loud,” he muttered, and Edwin was reminded of the kids playing not too far from them.He forced his irritation down a little.“Anyway,” Charles continued, “he’s the one who was murdered, so I reckon he can feel how he wants about it, can’t he?”Edwin looked away. He and Charles were of two minds about whether Charles’ death had been murder, even—Charles cited the lack of intent, Edwin grandly pointed out the end results—and he had no intention of rehashing that argument.“It’s actually pretty healthy, I figure. I know you were worried about him hanging around his family. Besides, no point in getting upset. You probably can’t yell at him anyway; that was a few days ago, so he’s probably already moved on.”A fair point. “Even so,” Edwin said carefully. “The case is not over.”It was exceedingly obvious, the way Charles’ good mood faded a little. “No, it’s not,” he agreed plainly. “Can’t leave Wright to go around terrorizing Derby forever, can we?”“I think not.”Charles shot him a look. “You up for it? We could—”“I was fully healed on the first day, Charles. I think I have rested enough. Besides, there is no telling how many more ghosts Wright might have in his clutches.” How many more might have been destroyed, while he and Charles were taking strolls in the park. Edwin did not feel too guilty about it—it was not his fault, what Wright did with his time, and the recovery truly had been necessary—but there was no point in delaying any longer.“Or people.”Edwin hummed carefully, a soft question in his tone.“Just been thinking about it. He came all the way to London to kill Gavin. Didn’t want to attract too much attention from the authorities, I guess. No telling how many other trips he’s made, is there?”No, no there was not. “Good thinking, Charles.” Edwin turned back to the path, ready to go back to the office, and Charles stepped up to his side at the movement. The sounds of the children's fun faded behind them as they walked, until they’d reached a storefront on the other side of the park that had a mirror that was well familiar to them.They paused for a moment. Edwin concentrated on the office, then gave Charles a look.“Ready?”Charles nodded. “Back into the belly of the beast we go.”Wright’s house was quiet, as it had been the first time they’d visited. In the dark of the night, he could see no notable changes to the exterior; when Edwin slipped on the lenses Charles had handed him, there was no sign of wards on the outside of the manor either.He handed the lenses back. Charles slipped them into the bag, threw the strap over a single shoulder, so he could have ready access during what was coming, and pulled out his bat. Edwin slipped a hand into his pocket, feeling at his enchanted rope. His other hand came up to his breast, and the anti-possession charm now hanging there.Single use only, and probably wouldn’t last past forty-eight hours even if they didn’t use them, Finnegan Gold had warned them, but he did not intend to take forty-eight hours to resolve this. They had been Charles’ idea, the amulets. Strictly speaking, they were meant to prevent ghosts from possessing living humans, but Charles had posited that they might perhaps inhibit them from being forced to possess objects, as Wright had already made them do.It had been an exceedingly clever idea and Edwin had been more than willing to go along with it. Mr. Gold had as well, offering a pair up to them free of charge. When Charles had tried to bargain, he’d shot him down. Thanks, he’d said, for sharing the news of Gavin’s murder and Wright’s crimes. In the few days since Charles had visited him, desperate for help with Edwin trapped, Gold had already warned all the other shops in Derby away from accepting Wright’s merchandise.In the light of that, Charles had accepted the charms and they both wore them now.“In through the side?”Edwin nodded at the casual question. Charles had entered a state of near deadly calm and Edwin was using it to bolster himself up. Coming here had reminded him of his hatred of Wright—and of the number of dolls that had residence in the man’s basement. But they didn’t plan to visit the basement again. Justice would be done here tonight without them needing to step into that dreadful room.They slipped through a random wall, then carefully made their way through the manor. If Wright had added more traps, it was difficult to tell. There were a few of them but nothing that looked hastily constructed in the last few days. They avoided the iron wall hangings, the suits of armor, any rugs on the floors, and one tapestry that had nearly flowed in the wind despite the dead stillness of the air in the place.Eventually, they found Wright’s bedroom. They rolled up the main rug first in silence, exposing the trap underneath and squirreling the rug away in Charles’ bag. Then, one by one, they took down everything else in the room they could get their hands on. The scattered papers and books and pens on the desk. Every single item—books and book ends and tchotchkes and all—on the singular bookcase tucked in the corner. The watches and cologne and hairbrush left out on the top of the long, low wooden dresser.If it was small enough, and out in the open enough, for them to collect it quietly, they took it and kept it. It wasn’t meant to be a form of payment for the case, or even a twisted sort of revenge, though Edwin felt plenty of pleasure at the thefts. Primarily, there was no telling what might have been enchanted, what Wright might be able to do with his own objects and his magics combined.They even snatched up the glass of water from his bedside table as he slept. There was no need to give him even the smallest of things to use as a weapon against them. Eventually, when the room was near bare, they took up their positions on either side of Wright’s bed.Charles stretched forward with his bat and tapped the man none too gently on the shoulder. “Wake up,” he ordered, hard and harsh. There was no forgiveness in his tone.Edwin didn’t think there should be. There was no forgiveness in his heart either.Wright didn’t immediately wake. Charles took the bat again and pushed at his shoulder, shoving the man onto his back. He jolted into the air, sitting bolt upright, eyes wide. It reminded Edwin of the look he’d gotten on his face when Edwin had managed to land a single blow across the back of his head. He was glad to see it.“What—”“Didn’t think you’d see us again, did you?”Wright looked wildly between Charles and Edwin, clearly as disoriented as they had been, released from his traps. Good. Edwin gave him a moment to collect his thoughts, a moment to really realize what was happening, and then, before Wright’s fingers could move too purposefully, pulled out his enchanted rope and bound the man’s arms to his sides.“How many ghosts,” he said, slow and careful and cruel, “are still trapped in this house?”When Wright did not immediately answer he tugged at the rope, tightening his bonds. Not too long ago, this man had had him and Charles at his mercy, bound and helpless. Now he was at theirs. Edwin thought of the bolt of red energy that could have killed Charles, if it had hit him. The careless dismissal of the demon that had killed Howell as a lesser demon. All those trapped ghosts, freed because Wright had been so focused on torturing Edwin.He remembered the prospect—the fear—of Wright intending to allow a demon to possess him as well. He tightened the rope again. Wright grunted.“I’ll thank you not to ruin any more of my experiments.” The words were tight, the tone bitter, as if they were the villains in this scenario.“You can take your thanks and shove it.” Charles pressed his bat under Wright’s chin and tilted his head upward. “Last time we’re going to ask.”Wright only stared, defiant.Edwin should have known he would give them nothing. Laid out before them in his nightclothes was the sort of sick, sorry man who believed he was right in everything he did and gave no consideration to others.“Very well then. Charles?”“Right.” Charles tucked the bat into his coat and reached into his bag. He pulled out real ropes, and steel manacles, and a roll of duct tape for good measure. He lay them on the foot of the bed and then, with Edwin keeping a careful hand on his rope, manhandled Wright into his office chair. The manacles clipped his hands behind the back of the chair. The rope was wound around his torso, his thighs, his calves, replacing Edwin’s enchanted bindings. The tape went over his mouth.“Don’t go anywhere,” Charles said, playfully cruel. “We’re going to go make sure you don’t have any more victims trapped in this torture mansion, but we’ll be back for you. Promise.”Wright attempted to speak to them, or perhaps just growl, but the tape muffled whatever sounds he managed to emit. They left him there, in the middle of the room, and resumed their careful stroll through the manor’s many rooms.In the southwest corner of the first floor, they found his office.“Jackpot,” Charles said, grimly satisfied.Edwin could not help but agree. He wandered over to the open notebook on the desk and saw G. Howell pinned there in Wright’s neat hand. He slammed the book shut before he could read anymore. “We take everything,” he said, vicious.Charles nodded and they began the process of collecting every note that Wright had ever taken about his experiments, every book, every scrap of paper. Every pen. They left nothing but the furniture, and even then, they hesitated and did not yet leave.When Edwin looked over, Charles had one of the notebooks open in his hands and was staring in horror at whatever was written on the pages. He seemed to sense Edwin was watching him.“It’s going to take ages,” he said. “Going through all these. Finding his… Finding all his victims.”Edwin had not originally intended that as their next course of action—his only thought was to remove everything he could that would allow Wright to conduct future research, every scrap of the results he’d undoubtedly slaved over for years—but from Charles’ tone he could tell that the suggestion was non-negotiable. Not a suggestion at all, then. He hesitated, staring at his partner, and remembered the number of notebooks he’d shoved into Charles’ arms to put in the backpack.“You are right,” he said, and the hoarseness of his voice had nothing to do with his long healed iron burns. He stared a moment longer. “I believe you carry matches with you, usually.”Charles stared right back at him for a moment, then nodded. He shoved the notebook in his bag and dug his arm in. When he came up, he tossed the matches at Edwin without further hesitation. Edwin fumbled the catch, then looked around the room.“One of the empty notebooks, please.”Charles pulled one out for him, then began ripping out the pages without needing to be asked. Edwin collected a small pile and began arranging them around the most flammable pieces of furniture, taking more when Charles proffered them to him. He stepped back only when every last page in the leather-bound notebook had been stripped out.He lit a match, hesitated, and then doused it again.“Having second thoughts?” Charles did not sound like he would blame Edwin, if he was.“No, it is only… We never did verify if there were any more ghosts, in his traps.”Charles nodded. “I’ll check.”“Charles—”“No, just me. In fact, think I’ll clear out the basement too.” He clapped Edwin on the shoulder. “Back in a tick.”Edwin did not like the idea of letting Charles venture off on his own here, of being left on his own here. He liked the idea of returning to Wright’s basement even less. He waited, tense, and resolved to give Charles twenty minutes or so before he went after him. Any more than that and he would assume Charles had unintentionally triggered a trap. The minutes passed anxiously but it was only about ten or so before Charles was stepping back into the room, grimly satisfied.“Cleared out everything that wasn’t bolted down,” Charles confirmed.Edwin sucked in a breath. “The iron?”“Except the iron.”Good. He didn’t want Charles touching those tools. He gave his partner a once over, but there was no evidence that Charles had lied to him, no smoldering burns or blackened flesh.The second match lit as easily as the first. Edwin crouched down carefully and lit the first piece of paper aflame, then stepped back to Charles’ side to watch the fire catch. When it was still only just the paper burning, if a greater amount of it, and not yet the furniture, they exchanged glances and left the room.Wright was exactly where they’d left him, squirming in his bonds. Slowly, Charles unwound the ropes from around him. When that was done, he leaned over Wright’s restrained form, one hand on the armrest of the chair, the other poised above the tape over Wright’s mouth. The man was glaring at him, but it was their turn to ignore his reactions, just as he had ignored theirs.“One last chance,” Charles said, and then ripped the tape off his mouth.Wright sucked in a breath, face red with anger. The first syllables that dripped from his poisoned mouth had the sound of Latin to them.There was no need for Edwin to warn Charles. The other boy palmed a knife Edwin hadn’t realized he’d had on him and slammed it into Wright’s leg. The spell was cut off by a scream of agony.Edwin froze in place, startled by the sound. It had been a while since any screams of agony had reached his ears. In this place, memories of Hell were around every corner it seemed. He swallowed and forced himself to take a small step back, just to assure himself that he could still move. Charles looked his way, and he gave a small nod. It wasn’t the violence that had bothered him—it had been his suggestion to burn the man’s house down, after all.Turning back to Wright, Charles plastered the tape back over the man’s mouth and took his own step back.“Wrong move.” He’d left the knife where it was.Then he reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of lockpicks, waving them in Wright’s face until his agonized eyes managed to focus on them. Reaching around him, Charles tucked the lockpicks into Wright’s palm.“You should be able to escape. Took me two minutes to get out of cuffs like that, last I tried it. I’ll give you five just to be safe. The fire should reach you in fifteen, Edwin’s very exact like that.” Charles looked at his wrist as if a watch sat there. “Maybe ten by now, though, after this chat.” He shrugged, then looked to Edwin again.There was a touch of worry in Charles’ eyes. That wouldn’t do. Edwin stepped up to his side and studied Wright for a moment. The man still looked furious, despite the role reversal, despite that they had become his torturers. Knowing his kind, he probably still thought that he would come up on top.In one fluid movement, Edwin bent forward and yanked the knife out of the man’s thigh. Another grunt of pain was muffled by the tape. “I recommend seeking medical attention for that,” he said coolly, and then he handed the blade back to Charles, handle first, turned, and left the room. Charles followed him out of there, and right out of the manor besides. By the time they reached the front lawn, the fire in the southwest corner could be seen from outside.“Pity he has no neighbors,” Edwin said as they watched it for a moment.A bark of startled rough laughter escaped Charles. “Yeah. Real pity.”They watched the fire burn for only a little longer before they left.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Woah, woah, easy there. You’re okay. C’mon, just have a seat, things’ll be a bit clearer in a moment.”Edwin flipped another page in the notebook in front of him, then paused and scowled when the wind threatened to flip further ahead than he was ready for. He held one side of the thing in each hand, waiting for the wind to die down as he read on ahead. When he was confident would not be interrupted again, he picked up his pen once more, adjusted his much smaller notebook on the larger one beneath it, and resumed taking notes. Charles’ steady voice washed over him as he did so, a comforting background noise.“There you are—all good, see? I’m Charles, that’s my mate Edwin. We found you trapped in some mad witch’s home. What’s your name?”Edwin was not certain, strictly speaking, that Wright counted as a witch. At the very least, there had been little natural about his magics. But he knew to Wright’s victims—most of them, at least, himself excluded—the point was moot. They had been wronged, and Wright had used magic to do it.He pulled his smaller notebook out of the way again and flipped another page in Wright’s journal as the newly re-formed ghost started to stammer out an introduction. Hmm. It seemed that was the end of that experiment and the end of the notebook. Wright had been nothing if not organized. Each of his avenues of investigation had been given their own journal, kept separate from the others, leaving several of them half-filled.“Ghost trap, see? This here’s a little bit of quartz, and see how it’s kinda hollowed out on the inside, even though we don’t take up any space? It’s a bit beyond me. Edwin could explain it to you, if you really wanted?”Edwin suppressed a huff of irritation and rolled his eyes without looking up, closing up the current journal and putting it to his side on the bench. He dearly hoped not. They had moved on from all the doll traps, thank heavens—Charles was now going through some of what appeared to be earlier iterations he’d grabbed while raiding the basement—but Edwin had no desire to explain the technicalities of how they worked to a disoriented and likely out of time ghost.He could sympathize, certainly, with coming back to a world that had moved on, years or perhaps even decades later. But empathize? Console and comfort? No, Charles had done that for him at a time when he was newly dead himself, forced to take on Edwin’s burdens as well as his own. If he could do it as wonderfully as he had under such difficult conditions, he could spend a half-hour or so helping these ghosts adjust without Edwin needing to get involved.Settling the next notebook on his lap, Edwin flipped it open and grimaced. Ah. Another earlier journal detailing Wright’s work on his first ghost traps. This one seemed to start off with Wright’s investigations as to the type of crystal he placed at the center of his creations. Edwin skimmed until he found the first mention of a test on an actual ghost, prepared his pen, and then let it rest again at Wright’s careless single line of text noting the ghost had been destroyed. Mustering himself, he noted down the mention nevertheless. There was not even an initial to hint that the ghost had had a name, had been a person once, before Wright had gotten his hands on them. So Edwin merely noted the date, and the limited physical description Wright had provided.“You know how to mirror travel? No? No worries, I can get you where you need to go. Hey, Edwin!”Edwin looked up into the green space before him, the open blue sky and far-off horizon (masked though it might have been by trees). Charles was waving for his attention and a timid older gentleman who looked as though he might have died several decades ago stood a few feet from him.“Yes, Charles?”“Just gonna take Mr. H over to his niece’s place, won’t be a minute.”Edwin nodded and took in the stranger again. There was sorrow lining the ghost’s face, and a not unfamiliar look in his eyes to one who spent a considerable amount of their time helping other ghosts move on. He’d missed too much. He was ready. “Do not linger,” he cautioned Charles.He wondered what he would have done, climbing from the depths of Hell to a world that didn’t remember him, if moving on had been an option. Would he have taken the opportunity in a heartbeat, anything to escape Hell’s clutches? Or would he have been too afraid of the unknown fate awaiting him, willing to settle for what there was on Earth? It was difficult to say. Edwin’s memories of the early days after his return to Earth were hazy. Sometimes it seemed as if there had been no time at all between escaping Hell and meeting Charles; though he knew there had been, he could not have given a number of days, or weeks, or months, if anyone had asked him.Charles rolled his eyes and elbowed Mr. H. “Don’t worry. We can hang out if you want. Got all the time in the world.”That hadn’t been what Edwin had been cautioning Charles against, and Charles knew it, from his subtle nod to Edwin after his statement. But Charles was, as he always did, simply putting their client’s mind at ease. Edwin watched as Charles led Mr. H through the mirror propped up against a nearby tree, then returned to the journal in front of him.“Well, that should be the last of them,” Charles said, sweeping up the pieces of the last ghost trap he’d broken open. He bagged them up quickly, so the pieces wouldn’t scatter, and set the bag inside his backpack.Edwin looked up from the latest journal with a grimace. He hadn’t even gotten halfway through the stack of journals they’d taken from Wright, let alone any of the loose pages they’d hastily collected up as well. “I am done with those.” He nodded at the small stack to his left.Charles stepped up to him and bundled them into his arms. “Add them to the burn pile?”Edwin grimaced again. “Perhaps not just yet. Just in case I may have missed some key detail.”“Doubt it,” Charles said, but he shoved the lot back into the backpack without further argument. “Need a break yet?”Should he have? They’d started going through the stack in their office, the both of them together, but Charles had quickly been repulsed by what he was reading and struggled to get through the descriptions of many of the experiments Wright had carried out. They’d settled for this solution instead, coming to a nice open space in a secluded park outside of London where Charles could handle sorting through all the physical items they’d taken (ghosts and ghost traps included) and Edwin skimmed the notebooks.While the content of what he was reading had indeed been disturbing, Edwin had not yet felt the overwhelming need to look away. He suspected it was only another thing that made him different, another trait he had Hell to thank for. Or maybe he’d always been this way, and it was simply another trait that he’d gotten killed for. (Ridiculous—Edwin had certainly been called soft often enough when he was alive.)He closed the notebook on his lap. “We might as well start investigating some of these names,” he said, carefully sorting it back into his pile of unread ones. “Do be careful not to mix those up in your bag.”Charles gathered them up too and threw on a cheeky grin. “Careful? Me?”“Yes, you,” Edwin said as he stood, smoothing down his jacket and trousers. “If I recall, there is still an entire bowl of ice cream floating around in that mess somewhere.”“Okay, that was an accident, and you know it.”“Putting it in there in the first place, or losing it?”Charles laughed and tucked the last of the notebooks into place. “I’ll find it one day,” he vowed. “Where to next?”Edwin flipped open his own small notebook. It was mostly a list of names, with short descriptions if Wright had cared to provide any. Some he’d noted as (living), some as (ghosts). Some had been living when Wright had started an experiment but not by the end of it; Edwin had marked those as (deceased), in case there were ghosts to track down in those cases as well. Too many were simply (destroyed).They would not be able to do anything for those poor souls but if anyone ever came looking, Edwin would at the least be able to tell them what had happened. It was those who remained nameless, even in Wright’s notes, that he and Charles would never truly be able to help, and Edwin felt another surge of anger at Wright, for treating those people as objects, as people whose deaths mattered even less than Edwin’s and Charles’ had to their peers.There was something a little brittle in Charles’ smile. He’d just spent the last several hours sorting through a madman’s tools and consoling distraught, confused, and angry ghosts. Edwin flipped a few pages forward in his own notes on Wright’s experiments.“Did you know that Wright was interested in clockmaking as well?”Charles blinked, bemused. “What’s that got to do with anything?”“He seemed fascinated by the construction of gears. So much so that I believe there may be some ghosts trapped in clocktowers—both in London and in Derby, as well as a few other notable historic locations.”“Hold on, do you mean Big Ben? I didn’t sign up for breaking Big Ben.”“I’m sure we can find a way around breaking the thing, Charles.” Edwin looked around the clearing. It seemed as if Charles had collected everything, mirror included, into his backpack again. “Shall we?”“Slow down,” Charles said with a grin, reaching over to grab Edwin’s hand from the air before he could ring the bell again. “We’re here to deliver bad news. Don’t need to go irritating her before we even start.”Edwin huffed with impatience. “There are three other souls in this town we intend to visit—”“And we’ve got all the time in the world, don’t we?” Charles interrupted, still grinning. “No need to rush this one.”Edwin’s foot tapped with impatience but Charles, as usual, had been correct. He could hear the sounds of movement coming from inside the house, someone coming to the door. He forced himself into stillness and waited for it to open.“Ms. Beattie?” he inquired, once the woman had finally come to greet them.She did not look at him. She did not look at either of them.“Uh, Edwin?”Edwin followed Charles’ gaze. He froze. There was a very large black dog at Ms. Beattie’s feet. It was growling at them.Ah. It had not alerted on Edwin fully, so, not a Hellhound, but… Edwin would not have been surprised to learn if it had the blood somewhere in its ancestry.“Time to go!” Charles said, and shoved Edwin off the porch in front of him.“It seems as though Ms. Beattie has found her own means of protection!” Edwin shouted to him over the sounds of the dog barking behind them.“Guess we can cross her off the list!” Charles agreed.“Is that… an iron coffin.” Charles’ stare was bewildered and horrified all at once.They were in a storage unit in London, an address they’d found on a stray piece of paper from Wright’s office. Apparently, he’d stored some supplies in town for when he visited.Frozen where he stood, Edwin swallowed. The idea that, that Wright had… To even create such a thing…He wondered, feeling sick, if Wright had ever used it. Iron burned, but it burned where it touched. It could burn through a ghost entirely but Edwin had only experienced that once, losing a few fingers in a desperate situation. The thought of being completely encased in iron…It wasn’t even an experiment at that point, it was just cruel. Maybe—hopefully—it had never been intended to use on ghosts. Edwin wasn’t sure if that was worse. Had it been to trap a demon? To trap a living human, and test what happened if they died suffocated by iron?“Edwin?”Charles was talking to him again. Edwin forced himself to unfreeze. Two weeks they’d put other cases on hold, going through the tedious and painstaking effort of reading everything Wright had ever written down, of tracking down every victim of his they could find. For the first time, Edwin thought that maybe they could both use a break.He cleared his throat. “Apologies, Charles, yes, it does appear to be made of iron. We best avoid it for now.”Chares shot him an uncertain glance but rolled with Edwin’s faux calm. “Right then. I’ll take the left, you take the right?”Edwin nodded and stepped for the boxes Charles had assigned to him. He opened the first one, and froze again as he caught sight of the tools inside it. He drew in a breath through his nose and glanced behind him. “Do be careful, Charles.”“Ouch!”Edwin glanced over in time to see Charles withdrawing his hand from the suitcase, shaking it in the air as if he’d been burned. He frowned. The case in question was an old leather thing—he did not see any iron on it anywhere.“Must have warded the damn thing,” Charles said.Bending over to inspect it, ignoring Charles quick “Careful!”, Edwin quickly located a tiny rune circle etched into the leather.“Amateur work,” he declared, and picked the case up. The shock traveled up his hand much as it had for Charles but dissipated somewhere around his elbow. No further pain followed.“Oi!” Charles was already exclaiming.“It does not hurt, Charles,” Edwin consoled him. “It was only charmed for the initial shock.”“That still hurt!”Well, yes, but… it had not really been pain, Edwin supposed, just a brief… tingle, or some other silly word. He chose not to mention this to Charles. He already knew that they did not experience pain the same way. It had rather been a point of contention for Charles in the earlier years, as he kept insisting that Edwin stop performing actions that hurt him, while Edwin kept insisting that he had not been hurt, really, merely suffered a mild pinch, or ache, or twinge, or whatever description best fit. It was best not to rehash such arguments.“It has passed.” He carefully unzipped the sides of the case to peer inside and immediately froze at the sight of what was inside.“What?” Charles asked quickly, already moving to snatch the case away from him. It shocked him again, and he dropped it immediately with another startled yelp.Edwin burst into action, sweeping forward to grab the case before Charles could again, ignoring the second shock as it raced up his arms just as much as he had the first. “Nothing dangerous Charles, I was merely startled.” Bracing himself, he flipped the case over and shook out it’s contents to the floor. The doll, of course, landed with its head twisted, dark eyes staring up at Edwin. He froze again and forced himself to breathe deeply.Charles groaned. “Another trap? What was the point of hiding these things all over England?”Swallowing down his fear and discomfort, Edwin took two careful steps backward from the dreadful thing. His mind recalled the details of this experiment, as noted by Wright’s journals. He did not share the information with his partner. “Back to the park, then?”“Might as well.” Charles scooped the doll carelessly off the floor and shoved it in his backpack. There was no small amount of frustration in his movements, which Edwin well understood.“Your pocketknife, Charles?”Charles handed it to him. Quickly, Edwin scored a line through the rune circle in the leather, rending the enchantment null and void, and tossed the case to the side.“What do you mean this fucker was running experiments on me?”Edwin winced at the crass language. “Strictly speaking, he was running experiments on the house. However, as you happen to reside in the—”“Of course I fucking ‘reside’ in my fucking shitty-ass house you stupid fucker!” Ms. Tanner stood, face flushed with anger as she advanced toward Edwin’s disguised person. “I’ve been living here for three fucking years and if that—”Edwin had frozen as the woman had stepped toward him and, in one smooth move, Charles had picked up on that, stood, and stepped between them.“Woah, woah,” he said, soothing, gentle. “You’re angry. Good. You’ve got every right to be. But we’re here to help you, ma’am.”Ms. Tanner’s shoulders pulled back as she stopped advancing. “Don’t fucking call me ma’am,” she snapped out, but it carried a lick of exhaustion with it rather than the raging anger of only a moment ago.Unfreezing, Edwin stepped up to just behind Charles’ right shoulder. “If you’ll put some of that energy toward assisting us, I do believe we can get this resolved all the quicker.”Ms. Tanner snorted, derision and disgust dripping from her. “Tell me what I gotta do to get this fucker out of my house.”“Well, this is certainly unique.”Charles didn’t say anything for a moment; when Edwin chanced a glance over at him he was staring at the latest of Wright’s in-use ghost traps they’d managed to track down, three months after they’d initially taken Gavin Howell’s case. (They’d taken other cases in the meantime, at this point, but Charles’ initial assessment had been depressingly correct. It was turning into a real slog, going through every single one of Wright’s experiments, going back decades, and tracking down the victims, living or dead. They were both growing tired of it.)“Yeah,” Charles finally said. “It’s, uh… It’s something.”Something indeed. Wright had seemed interested, according to his notes, in testing the effect of salt water on the ghost traps. Rather than fill a bucket from the ocean or find a boat or pier he could tether the trap to, he’d sunk it to the bottom of one of the saltwater tanks in London’s largest aquarium.At least it wasn’t another doll. Edwin looked down at his notes again. Mostly, he’d been writing down little but names and personal descriptions, going through Wright’s notes, but this trap had been more elaborate than most. Edwin had filled several pages of his own notebook even just paraphrasing the basics. Simply put, he and Charles would have to venture into the trap to bring the ghost out with them. It would be their second time doing so, although the last iteration of this trap they’d encountered had not been underwater.Closing his notebook again now that they’d located the thing, Edwin tucked it back into his breast pocket. “Shall we?” he asked, not even waiting for Charles’ reply as he strode forward. It took until he was halfway into the tank—incorporeal of course, so as to not get wet—before he realized Charles wasn’t following. When he turned back, the other boy seemed almost frozen in place, staring at the trap.Edwin hesitated. He doubted it was the trap itself that had glued Charles’ feet to the floor. They’d dove into the previous one together without any similar hesitation. But, perhaps, the water…“If you’d like, I could—”Charles shook himself, stepping forward. “No, no. I’ve got this. C’mon.” And he stepped into the tank before Edwin could argue back, walking along the bottom in the water where attempting to speak would have been pointless.A little tense now himself, Edwin followed after him. When they reached it, Charles did not hesitate further. Together, they bent down, put their hands to the thing, and triggered the trap.The trapped ghost’s name was Jason Greene. He’d died at forty-four in the Blitz. Wright’s notes said he was paranoid, distrusting of strangers, and proudly British. He’d lured him in nearly half a decade ago by asking the ghost to share some of his stories of the war with him. And the worst of it was that this trap was not like the others: per a metaphor Charles had come up with, it was more akin to a genie’s lamp. Mr. Greene, trapped though he was, was entirely aware of his imprisonment, of every second that passed by.Edwin had been worried about the kind of effect isolation—itself a form of torture, in the right, or perhaps wrong, scenario—would have on an already paranoid dead man. As a screaming ghost came charging at him carrying a rather large beam of wood (perhaps a table leg?), he realized he had been right to be worried.His feet froze in place at the attack and Charles stepped up between him and the approaching ghost, deflecting the attack with his cricket bat.“Oi, watch it!” Charles called out, handily swiping his bat in just such a way as to pull the makeshift weapon from—presumably—Mr. Greene’s hands. “We’re here to rescue you!”Mr. Greene had pulled up short at the loss of his weapon, though he put up his fists now. “I’ve no interest in help from the likes of you,” he snarled.Protected, and with their foe weaponless, Edwin stepped up to Charles’ side. “The ghost you just so rudely attempted to attack is Charles Rowland. I am Edwin Payne, and together we are the Dead Boy Detectives. I assure you, we have no association with the man who trapped you here.” His eyes flickered around the sparse room. There was indeed a table now missing a leg, two chairs, and three ratty books on a shelf.Mr. Greene’s eyes flickered between the two of them. “Detectives, huh?”Edwin’s mouth thinned. He would stomach no disparaging comments on their chosen profession. “Indeed.”Mr. Greene relaxed a little, though his hands remained fists even as they fell to his sides. “And you’re here to rescue me? Thought you’d do that by getting yourself trapped, eh?”“In point of fact, we have already dismantled one of these traps. If you follow my partner’s instructions, he will assist you to the exit.”When Mr. Greene’s eyes landed on Charles again, there was a distinct look of displeasure on his face. Edwin was not pleased to see it. Charles, of course, ignored it. He flashed Mr. Greene a smile. “Heard you were in the war, stationed in London,” he said. “Just wanted to say thanks for your service and all that, yeah?”The compliment seemed to take Mr. Greene aback. He blinked at Charles and flickered his eyes up and down his form again. “And when did you die, boy?”“Eighty-nine,” Charles answered easily, “so never saw any of it myself. Edwin, though, he died in ‘sixteen. Middle of the Great War and all that. Never got the chance to enlist.”While nothing about Charles’ statement was strictly a lie, it was a gross exaggeration of Edwin’s circumstances. True, he had been sixteen in 1916 when he’d died, too young to enlist. True, the war had still been ongoing in 1918, when he would have come of age, though it had ended that year. But Edwin never would have enlisted unless circumstances had vastly changed for his family. Children of the wealthy—if they did fight—did not enlist. They became officers. And Edwin’s father had long known—and disparaged—that Edwin had not been cut out for that sort of life.The statement caught Mr. Greene’s interest again though and brought him to relax even further. Clever Charles.“There’s an exit, you say?”“It’s a tricky one,” Charles told him. “Need to be careful. But, yeah. No more being stuck here.” He flashed a grin.Mr. Greene grunted unhappily. “Careful,” he muttered under his breath. “As if I’m interested in pussyfooting around like a chicken.” He seemed entirely unaware of their presence for a moment, as if it was not even a consideration that they could hear him.Edwin had run across souls like that in Hell, people who were consumed by their own experiences, muttering only to themselves, largely unaware of the world beyond their bubble. The false walls of the trap seemed to grow closer together, though he’d never been claustrophobic. He reminded himself that he and Charles had escaped from one of these already; they would do so again.Charles took a small step forward, gentling his voice. “The walls hurt, if you try to go through them, right?”It was the wrong move. Mr. Greene bristled instantly. “Don’t take that tone with me, whelp! What would you know about pain?”Under the older man’s anger, Charles froze, and Edwin instantly found himself bristling as well. He stepped between the two of them. “You will watch your tone as well,” he said, cool and detached. “We are all dead here, if you recall. Do not speak to us about pain.” It had been internal bleeding that had gotten Charles in the end, that and the hypothermia. A result of the beating—the pain—he’d suffered, merely trying to help a peer. Edwin would not see events repeat themselves.Charles carefully stepped up to Edwin’s side. “It’s meant to be a deterrent,” he said. He was still keeping his voice calm but had returned to more normal tones, clearly having learned from Mr. Greene’s reaction not to treat the man too delicately.Personally, Edwin thought Mr. Greene needed a sharp slap upside the head more than he did a delicate touch. He did not have high hopes for the man’s prospects once they were out of the trap, and he had to interact again in society with his fellow ghosts. Still, he knew his own emotions were incorrect. That was the trouble with feelings. A sharp slap to the head would have done him little good when he was that frightened, shriveled thing he’d been in Hell. He doubted it would do Mr. Greene any better here.Charles went on to describe the proper method of escaping: a slow, gradual push through the wall, as if it wasn’t there at all, treating the wall as if it were incorporeal. Haste reminded it, for lack of a better term, that it was a wall. But slow enough movements could allow one to pass through. Edwin honestly wasn’t sure if it was a flaw in the trap or not, given that Wright’s notes had made it clear that this was the only way for a ghost to escape.“Push through the pain, eh boy?”Edwin quickly spoke up before Charles. “Not quite,” he snapped out, irritation surging forth with the way this man was treating his partner no matter that he knew how irrational his reaction was. “At a slow enough speed, the trap will cease to fight back. There should be no pain at all.” At least, he hadn’t noticed anything significant and if Charles had he had failed to inform Edwin of that fact. But he didn’t think Charles would have hidden that from him, or have been able to. The last ghost they’d freed had been quite alright on exiting as well.“Here,” Charles said, moving to one of the walls. “Seemed to work best last time when we just sort of, leaned into it.” And he put his back to the wall and rested his shoulder blades against it, heels less than a centimeter away from pressing into it as well. Slowly, very slowly, he started to sink in, as if it was quicksand pulling him sideways.Mr. Greene eyed him skeptically. “You want me to turn away from my enemy?”Charles, having begun the process, could not now move. He had to proceed with his slow lean backward until he’d left the trap entirely. Holding himself still, he spoke anyway. “You don’t have to lean, if you don’t want to. I think Edwin walked through face first last time.”Edwin’s appreciation of Charles’ patience with unruly ghosts knew no bounds. ‘Turn away from my enemy’! As if it mattered which direction one faced leaving the trap, when their physical semblances were simply going to reform outside! Irritated, but doing his best not to mess up Charles’ calming effect, Edwin strode for the wall next to his partner.“I did indeed,” he said. “Like so, Mr. Greene, if you so desire.” He stepped close to the wall and put his palm up between it and his torso, pressing against it with the lightest of touches.“You just have to go slow,” Charles cautioned him again, “but you can go through however you want.”Mr. Greene grunted skeptically again, but he stepped up to a bit of wall even as he did so, eyeing it like a live bomb set before him. “Slowly, eh?” he muttered, again as if to himself. He pressed his palm gently to the wall the way Edwin had, though he had not brought his body nearly so close. “Huh,” he said, which Edwin took to mean that he’d done it slow enough so as not to cause pain.“Exactly like that,” Charles encouraged.Edwin watched Mr. Greene carefully, but though the man was still muttering to himself under his breath, he did not speak louder to disparage Charles again. The minutes ticked by. He felt his palm disappear into the wall, and then his whole hand, and, as he took a careful step forward pressing the toe of his boot against the thing, half of his right foot. The back of Charles’ head was consumed as well, the tips of his heels as he pressed his own shoes to the wall.And then it all went terribly, terribly wrong. Mr. Greene’s muttering increased in volume, though it still did not seem directed at them. He started to shift and fidget as the time passed, even as he kept his arm still and his hand disappeared up to the wrist, then the halfway through his forearm.Edwin could not hear what he said, but he saw it when the impatience grew too large on the other man, saw the moment when Greene decided to push forward just a little faster, now that his hand, presumably, felt free on the other side of the wall. Time seemed to speed up again. Greene cried out in alarm—in pain—and immediately flinched backward reflexively. He’d shoved forward to his elbow and pulling out again, no matter that it was an instinctive reaction, was too much pain for his ghostly form to handle.Before their eyes, in a matter of mere seconds, he’d burst in a flash of light and a shout of pain.Charles twitched in alarm, no doubt desperate to help, and let out a cry of pain all his own as the trap shocked him too.“Charles!” Edwin kept himself still as he could, watching as Charles put forth the effort to still himself. If it took but a second longer… No, Charles had gotten himself under control. Still, it was an effort to not rip himself free—to not experience the pain himself—to ensure that Charles truly was safe.“I’m alright,” Charles said, panting a little, half of him still firmly encased in the wall. He couldn’t turn his head, but his chest moved up and down as he breathed reflexively. “I’m alright.” He wasn’t looking at Edwin. He was looking at where Greene had been, moments ago.He gave Edwin a frightened, distraught look, and then he tipped his head back, and his eyes were gone too. Edwin looked down at where he’d begun to step into the wall himself, carefully leaning back just so so that he could send his head through last. The trap caused pain, yes, if one moved too fast, but there was no evidence that one couldn’t still escape that way. He would not be too hasty—he was not Mr. Greene—but… But Charles was further through than him at the moment, and Edwin wanted to be there, when his partner emerged from the trap alone, into the saltwater tank above them.Pressing himself further into the wall, Edwin ignored the tiny shocks that raced through his form as he did so.Returning to the office from the aquarium was a somber affair indeed. Edwin’s mind kept replaying Mr. Greene’s final moments over and over again. That he had died right in front of them, or rather, worse than that, that he had ceased to be before their very eyes… He retreated behind his desk almost immediately, took a seat, and drew in a breath, drawing himself upright in the meantime.Right. It had not gone as planned, but it was not their fault Mr. Greene had failed to listen to Charles’ repeated warnings. It was a failure, but they would learn from it. It would not happen again.Edwin looked at the stack of Wright’s notebooks tucked away on the floor in the corner of their office. He had gone through every one of them by now, but because they had not yet located all of Wright’s victims, they had not yet destroyed them. He wanted to set them ablaze, much as they had to Wright’s home.He forced himself to look away, to Charles, to his partner. He knew Charles was more devastated by Mr. Greene’s death than he was. He knew that he was a poor person to turn to for comfort. And he knew that it was comfort Charles needed.Drawing in a deep breath again, Edwin stood and made his way to Charles’ side. For a moment, neither of them spoke. When Charles looked at him, it was with red rimmed eyes.“You warned him sufficiently,” Edwin told him, firm. “It is not your fault, what happened.” It was a poor excuse for comfort but Charles had to know that Edwin did not blame him, that no blame should rest on his shoulders at all. They’d given Greene the wings to free himself, and he’d ignored their warnings and flew too close to the sun. Icarus, escaping his cage.They were not at fault for that.When Charles looked at him, it was with eyes rimmed red, but he nodded. “I know,” he said, though Edwin was not sure he did.But Charles didn’t linger on the emotions. He rarely did. Instead he wiped at his eyes and pasted on a smile. “But hey, the aquarium was mint, wasn’t it? We should go again sometimes.”Edwin did not point out that Charles hated water. He grimaced instead, an affected, exaggerated thing. “There are far better ways we could be spending our time—”“I know, I know, cases to solve and all that!”Edwin pointedly rolled his eyes. “If you must know, I was referring to a number of museums that have opened the past several years that we have yet to make our way to. Including a new London Film Museum.” He did not see how it would be different than the Cinema Museum, which they had already visited at Charles’ urging, but he figured Charles might appreciate the exhibits all the same.Charles laughed. “Alright, alright. We can take a few days off and head over, I suppose.” The smile he shot Edwin was smaller but more genuine.“Days, Charles?” Edwin countered. “If we are to visit multiple museums—”And Charles laughed again over his false objections, even louder than before.It wasn’t true comfort, but Edwin hoped it would be enough to keep Charles’ spirits up. Wright’s experiments would be waiting for them when they got back.