Chapter Text
They studied the books, and they found magic shops, and they asked questions, and they took the cases that they stumbled across, and they bought more books.
Edwin carried a select few about with him in the leather bag. The rest of the things they collected were stashed away in an abandoned warehouse they’d found during one of their investigations. The wards around the warehouse were those of a beginner, and Edwin was sure they had many flaws, but they would have to do for the moment.
And in between all of that, Charles showed Edwin around the city. Not that Charles knew the place so very well, but at least he could explain the machines, the music, the clothing that had come with the times.
Charles loved the city, loved how lively it was at nighttime, and Edwin was more than willing to indulge him, not just for Charles’s sake.
Because Edwin was, well, afraid of the dark.
After the night he’d been taken, after decades clinging as close to the sickly greenish light of the Doll House as he dared, Edwin wanted to be in bright places.
And how brightly London was lit, these days! Every building electrified, every shop glowing from its enormous plate glass windows to its brightly colored signs. Bright traffic signals hung at every intersection, and as November turned to December, a further layer of twinkling decorative lights began to spread.
Edwin could justify their choice to walk the city streets of London at night any number of ways, in any case. The city contained a number of magic shops, a resource they needed access to for their magical research.
One evening, while perusing the merchandise at Stella’s magic emporium, a woman in a colorful shawl, pushing a stroller, came in.
“Hello Tricia!” Stella greeted her immediately. “How’s things?”
Tricia pushed the stroller up to the counter and heaved a weary breath. “Stella, love, it’s been a bit of a week. I’ve got a ghost hanging about, and don’t get me wrong she’s a sweet little thing and her story is so sad. I want to help, but I’m afraid it’s too much risk for me to go poking around in that sort of stuff these days, now I’ve got baby Petey to look after.”
She reached down to stroke the fine hair of the baby in the stroller, and he grinned sunnily up at her.
“Absolutely,” Stella agreed. “Don’t risk yourself.”
Edwin stepped closer, clearing his throat. “Excuse me, I couldn't help but overhear, but is it true you deal with ghosts who need their problems solved?”
Tricia looked at him sadly, and said, “Oh, well, I try, but I’m afraid I’ve got rather a lot on my plate at the moment. I don’t suppose it’s something simple?”
“Ah, no, you misunderstand,” Edwin hurried to correct. “My associate Charles and I are founding a ghost detective agency, and I wondered if we might be of any help.”
“Ghost detectives?” Tricia said thoughtfully. “Now there’s something we don’t get a lot of. I bet you have lots of advantages in snooping about without getting hurt.”
Charles came ambling up just then. “Hello! Did you make some new friends, Edwin?” he asked.
“Charles, this is Tricia and Petey,” Edwin introduced.
“Professional psychic,” Tricia said, holding out a hand to Charles, who shook it. “I hear you two are detectives.”
“Yeah, I mean, just starting out, but we’ve closed a few cases,” Charles agreed. Then he crouched down in front of the stroller. “Afternoon, Petey,” he said with a little wave.
“The little lad hasn’t got a psychic bone in his body, I’m afraid,” Tricia told Charles. “He won’t be able to see you.”
“That’s all right,” Charles said with a grin, undeterred. “I’ve got tricks.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a red silk scarf, one of the ones he’d been using to try to learn to juggle.
Some of the magic shops they’d visited had tended more towards sleight of hand and stage magic, which had disappointed Edwin at first, but then he discovered they were marvelous places to get bits and bobs for Charles that helped him keep his restless hands busy.
Petey grinned at the floating scarf, trying to grab it with his tiny hands, and Charles laughed in delight.
“Oh, that is clever!” Tricia said.
“Now, I understand you may have a case for us,” Edwin said.
“Yeah, there’s a dead girl who’s been hanging around my office,” said Tricia. “Name’s Angela. She’s pretty upset, poor thing. Doesn’t know what’s happened to her sister.”
“That’s awful,” Charles said, still playing with Petey.
“We should go over the details,” Edwin said.
“Somewhere we can sit down,” Tricia said. “Your office or mine?”
They’d met with clients in their warehouse on occasion, but Tricia was living, an adult with a baby, and Edwin could not imagine inviting her to the decaying warehouse, even if it had been in a more convenient location.
“Yours would probably be best,” Edwin said, “if it’s not too much of an imposition.”
“Works for me,” Tricia said, collecting a few things from the incense display. “Do you boys have an office?”
“Not, like, a proper one,” Charles said. “More of an out of the way spot to keep our books and stuff.”
“Ah,” said Tricia. “Really just starting out, then. How long have you been ghosts?”
“Beginning of November, wasn’t it?” Charles asked Edwin, standing and pocketing the scarf again.
“Yes, the first, I believe,” Edwin agreed.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Tricia said. “Still must be pretty fresh.”
“Sometimes,” Charles agreed easily. “Has its perks, though, being a ghost. Got to meet Edwin, for one.”
“Technically, we met on the thirty-first,” Edwin corrected. “Before.”
“Well, I was already pretty much a goner, ’s why I could see you, right?” Charles argued amiably.
Edwin did not really understand how Charles could speak so casually of his own death, but Edwin was glad it did not weigh too heavily on him.
“Yes,” Edwin said softly. “There was nothing I could have done for you.”
“Nothing he could do, he says,” Charles said to Tricia with a crooked smile. “Like he didn’t bring me a lantern and help me wrap up in blankets and read to me.”
Tricia smiled sadly back at Charles. “He sounds like a very good friend,” she said.
“Yeah,” Charles said, grinning. “Edwin really is the best friend I’ve ever had.”
Tricia’s smile got even softer and sadder.
“And what about you?” she asked Edwin. “What’s your story?”
Edwin froze.
“You don’t have to say, I was just curious,” Tricia backpedaled. “It’s not my business, is it, we just met and you’re not asking for my help. Just a habit.”
“Quite all right,” Edwin said. “Only my situation is a bit complicated. I died in 1916, but I only became a ghost the day of Charles’s murder.”
“So you were… trapped somewhere,” Tricia guessed.
“Yes,” Edwin agreed. “And all in all, I am very glad to be where I am, instead of where I was. I intend to remain a ghost as long as possible.”
“Noted,” Tricia said. “I’ll just see if Stella has my special orders ready, shall I, and then after that we could head over to my office?”
“Sounds good to me,” Charles said. “What do you think, Edwin?”
“That would be agreeable,” Edwin said.
Tricia led them across a few blocks of the city, chatting aimlessly to them, but in the sort of way where it could have been to her little boy.
The row of brick buildings where she had her shop was a bit of a hodgepodge, some shops seemingly vacant and some brightly lit and well maintained.
She went straight for a door next to a window with a large neon sign reading “PSYCHIC” with an image of an eye inside of a triangle.
Edwin found himself fascinated by the glow of the glass tubes, the wiring between them, the way it was all put together.
“You brought more ghosts?” a girl of twelve or so commented, coming floating through the door. “I thought you said you weren’t helping anybody right now, because of your baby.”
“Not with the big stuff,” Tricia agreed. “But maybe we can figure something out, anyway. Angela, I want you to meet Charles and Edwin. They’re interested in trying to help you figure out what happened to Katie.”
“Other ghosts want to help me?” Angela asked. “Haven’t you got your own troubles that keep you from moving on? All the other ghosts were too busy.” She rolled her eyes.
“Nah,” said Charles easily. “We just like being here, we’re not stuck here. We like solving people’s problems. And Edwin, he’s clever as anything, reads all these detective stories. So we figured we could be ghost detectives.”
“Come on inside and let’s sit down,” Tricia said, rolling Petey’s stroller through the door. So Edwin followed Tricia inside, and Charles and Angela trailed after, right through the glowing sign in the front window.
“Now, Angela,” said Tricia, “can you tell these boys what you told me?”
Angela sat in one of the chairs around the table in the cluttered little office, looking small as she eyed the boys dubiously.
“It’s all right,” Charles told Angela. “I know Edwin looks all serious, but he’s aces, really. You can trust him.”
Angela let out a breath, and began to speak. Edwin shot Charles a grateful look before focusing on her story.
“The other girls dared us to go knock on the witch’s door,” Angela said. “Well, they dared me, but I was too scared, so Katie said she’d come with me. It’s my fault she’s missing.”
“It absolutely is not, Angela,” Tricia said. “We’re going to try and find out what happened, and who did this to you and your sister. But I can tell you right now, it wasn’t your fault.”
Meanwhile, Edwin had taken out his notebook and was writing down the crucial points. “What sort of witch?” he asked Angela.
Angela shook her head. “I don’t actually know anything about witches. The other girls called her that like it was a bit of a joke, we didn’t actually think she was dangerous. She was just mean and a bit weird, we thought.”
“Weird how?” Tricia asked with a tiny frown.
“Like, every time we’d accidentally knock down one of her plants, in her garden, she’d yell at us so loud, and then it’d be all neat and nice again the next day. We thought she’d go out and buy new and plant it in the middle of the night, but maybe it really was magic.”
“Perhaps,” Edwin agreed.
“So you said Katie went with you to knock on her door?” Charles asked.
“Yeah, and we went, and I knocked. And then I was dead and I didn’t know where Katie was.”
“So you see why I’m a bit hesitant to go and investigate,” Tricia said. “I’m mainly psychic, I haven’t got a lot of experience with whatever went on there, and if I ended up dead, then Petey wouldn’t have anyone at all.”
“Yeah, I see,” Charles said. “Not a problem, we’ll go! We’re already dead, and we’re learning more about magic all the time. I’m sure we’ll manage.”
“Be careful,” Tricia told them.
“We will be,” Edwin agreed.
They found the place, the neat rows of plants on either side of the front walk just as Angela had described. The door was decorated with a wreath.
“Now, as I understand it, there is only so much that wards can do to a ghost,” Edwin reminded Charles. “And I’ve been learning to counter those. But she may still be able to see us, especially if she really is a witch, so we should stay out of sight as long as possible.”
“Got it,” said Charles. “And in this weather, all the windows will be shut up tight. So no eavesdropping that way.”
They ended up sneaking in through a cupboard, pushing the door just slightly ajar and watching and listening as the witch, a woman whose hair was a silvery gold and who was dressed all in black except for long, red talons of fingernails, did a love spell.
When she was done, she tossed her spellbooks into a rucksack that sat on a nearby chair, picked up the phone, and called someone.
“Hello, Sam,” she said. “I was wondering if you were free tonight?”
When she heard the answer, her face lit up with a magnificent, terrible grin. “Oh, aren’t you sweet?” she said. “I’ll be right over. I’m sure it’ll be a wonderful evening.”
She listened again, and then said, “Morning, too? How forward! I like that.” She hung up with a very satisfied hum.
Once she left, the boys snuck out into the house.
“I guess we’ve got time to look around,” Charles said. “What was that spell, was she trying to get herself a date?”
“It was a love spell,” Edwin agreed. “She seems to do her casting in here, but would you take a quick look around the rest of the house while I go through her books?”
“Sure thing,” Charles said, and disappeared down the hall.
Edwin went through the books on the shelves, but at a glance they all appeared quite mundane. Colorfully printed, perhaps the modern equivalent of dime novels, but a look revealed the covers to contain scandalous images of couples on the verge of… amorous activity.
Not what he was looking for.
Charles wandered through on his way towards the kitchen. “Bed and bathroom are all like the yard, neat and pretty like something out of a magazine. I’ll see if the kitchen’s more interesting.”
Edwin nodded absently, moving on to the other contents of the shelves, which seemed to be a series of small plastic ponies, squat and cartoonish, in a wild array of pastel colors and with unnaturally bright, shimmering manes and tails.
Odd, but Edwin couldn’t see how they were relevant.
So the final place to look for this woman’s magical arsenal was the small, unassuming bag on the chair where she’d stashed the books she’d used for the love spell.
Edwin wanted to look at those books most of all, of course; the spells she’d been using recently could hold a clue to what she’d done with the girl, Katie. He opened the bag, reaching into —
Pain.
He froze, all his hellforged instincts flooding back. It had him. Biting and rending. All too familiar.
But his arm was not torn off.
He was not in Hell.
There was no inevitability to the end of this form and the start of another. His fate was in his own hands.
Such as they were.
Edwin took a shaky breath, steadying himself as best he could.
He —
He had to find out what had his hand pinned.
Cautiously —
He pulled.
Silently, silently, he was good at that, moving silently even when in pain. The wicked arcs of iron teeth hissed for him though, smoking where they bit into his flesh. And out of the canvas bag slid —
An old iron foothold trap. His wrist caught squarely in its heavy black jaws.
Ah.
That was…
Not ideal.
No. There was no use trying to downplay this.
This was awful.
Hell was Hell, but this, this was another sort of horror. There was no giving up and trying again next time.
There was no reset button.
There was only one self which he must act to save, despite the pain.
He didn't know if he could do this.
With one free hand.
And only a passing knowledge of how such devices worked. There had to be — there had to be a way to disengage it, did there not?
Edwin set the trap on the desk, and then simply stood there and trembled.
“Found anything interesting, mate?” Charles’s voice broke in from the kitchen. “Only I’m sure there’s lots of magic potion ingredients and stuff in here and I just don't know how to tell them apart from normal kitchen-y stuff.”
Oh, Charles.
Edwin was not used to having anyone else — witness his pain, unless it was for the purpose of taunting him. So his first instinct was to hide, to keep quiet.
But.
Well, Charles — Charles was kind.
Charles always offered to help.
They — they were a team. That meant something, Edwin supposed.
“I’m afraid I may need help with this,” Edwin called back.
He heard the tremor in his own voice and hated how exposed it made him feel.
“Right,” said Charles, his voice moving closer already. “You —” His words cut off as he came around the corner.
“I’ve run into some trouble,” Edwin said as evenly as he could.
“Jesus,” Charles breathed. “And you can’t just… do the ghost thing and go right through it, like usual?”
Edwin felt like snapping that of course he could not, obviously, or he would have done so, but in fact, he hadn’t actually tried. Something about the way his arm throbbed, the way it felt all too real right now, had led him to assume.
He tried to turn transparent, to float through, but nothing happened.
“No,” he told Charles tightly.
“Okay, okay. Just let me…” Charles came closer, wincing. “Oh, this looks bad,” he said.
“I am quite aware of how it looks,” Edwin snapped. He could feel for himself how much damage had been done, how much was still being done.
“Right, sorry,” Charles said, closing his eyes. “I’m just. Fuck. When you said you needed help…”
“Are you going to be able to focus?” Edwin asked, voice still unavoidably tight as his hand smoked where it was caught in the iron trap. “Can you figure out this mechanism? Or do I need to walk you through this?”
Edwin did not want to think about the possibility that Charles would leave entirely, not able to endure the task that needed to be done.
He had gotten himself out of worse, Edwin reminded himself. He had gotten out of Hell. He did that on his own.
It had simply… taken time. And pain.
A great deal of both.
But no, Charles had taken a breath and now he was suddenly steady, smiling, even, with a confidence he certainly hadn’t had a moment ago.
“I’m not bad with gadgets and stuff, yeah?” Charles said, eyeing the evil contraption. “I had a mate I met at a ska show who showed me how to pick locks. This has to be easier than that, right?” He reached for the device.
“Do not touch the metal,” Edwin warned sharply. “It burns.”
“Cursed? Enchanted?” Charles asked, frowning down at the thing, looking at it from different angles.
“Perhaps, but.” Edwin had realized something. “Iron injures certain types of supernatural creatures, I have heard, and I — I rather think we qualify.”
Charles’s expression went tight as he heard that. “Right, I’ll find something to poke at it with.” He looked around the room, and then his head snapped up. “I know something in a kitchen that stops you from getting burned. Oven gloves!” He gave Edwin a serious look. “Back in a tick — promise,” he said.
He was gone for a very, very long two seconds. When he returned, he was wearing heavy, quilted fabric mittens.
“Right,” Charles said, and focused in on the mechanism again, tongue poking out of his mouth as he pondered. “If that’s a sort of spring,” he said to himself, “then what we need is… right.”
Charles stood up, taking a breath. “Right, I’m gonna try pressing down on these bits at the side, like, both at once. Tell me if it’s worse, I’ll stop.”
Edwin readied himself. “Do it,” he said.
There was a horrible creaking noise from the mechanism, but eventually it gave, and the jaws began to part.
As soon as there was slack, Edwin tore his hand free of the wretched thing. His wounds smoked and throbbed, but he was free. He gasped and shook, cradling his injured arm with the other.
Charles let out a noisy breath and let the trap’s jaws snap shut on nothing. Then he turned to look at Edwin, absently pulling off the oven mitts.
“Hey,” Charles said cautiously. “Anything we can do for that, d’you think? With a house full of magical witchy stuff?”
It took a moment for Edwin to register the question. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he was forced to answer.
“Right,” said Charles. “Well at least let’s see how bad it is.” He reached out towards Edwin, and when Edwin flinched back involuntarily, Charles slowed down, eyes wide and soft and sad. “Come on,” he said softly. “We need to see how it is, yeah?”
Edwin told himself that he was being ridiculous, and that Charles would not hurt him. Slowly, he uncurled his good arm from around the other, revealing the holes in his gloves, the black burned gashes in his wrist peeking through.
Charles hissed sympathetically. “Can you move your fingers?” he asked.
Cautiously, Edwin wiggled his fingers. It hurt… less than he’d anticipated, actually.
“Good,” said Charles, sighing with relief. “Now. Is it all right if I take that glove off? Have a look?”
Edwin nodded sharply, clenching his jaw in anticipation. But Charles’s fingers were slow and careful, tugging at the brown leather so that it moved only as far as it could easily. And then Charles talked, tone conversational, just as he would if they were going through a newly acquired magic book.
“Now if we had some other supernatural creature,” Charles asked, “something fae, maybe, some kind of sprite, who’d been burned by iron, do the books say anything about how to heal that?”
That was a good thought, and a nicely distracting question. Edwin turned his brain to the task.
“Chamomile,” he said, retrieving the information at last. “In a poultice.”
“Right, what’s a poultice?” Charles asked, still working the glove gently away from Edwin’s burned skin.
“A warmed mixture,” Edwin explained. “Put on a cloth.”
“So like a hot compress, but with herbs in,” Charles said, nodding. “I can do that.” He grimaced a little and tugged just a bit harder, and Edwin’s glove came free.
It only stung a bit more than it had, but Edwin was afraid to look at his newly bared skin.
He looked anyway.
Red, charred, jagged holes.
“We’ll get that compress made up, right, and it’ll help, just you wait,” Charles said. “Come in the kitchen while I look around, I don’t want you out of my sight again just now.”
There was a tightness to Charles’s expression, now that Edwin was getting more accustomed to it.
He followed Charles into the kitchen, sitting in one of the witch’s kitchen chairs.
“Anything else I need to know about making this poultice?” Charles asked, rummaging in the cupboards. “Ha!” he said, taking out a box. “Chamomile tea, in bags and everything. You think if I just make tea, then use it to make a compress?”
“I’m not entirely certain,” Edwin said. “Is that what makes sense to you?”
He was not at his sharpest at the moment, and the idea of treating a ghost with a poultice seemed slightly ridiculous, anyway, but it clearly made Charles feel better to be doing something for the injury.
“Yeah, if what we want is to get the herbs warm and up against your skin, that seems like as good a bet as any.” Charles filled the witch’s kettle and turned on her hob underneath it, then got out a mug and a thick tea towel.
When the kettle boiled, Charles poured the water over the tea bag, and then, after it had steeped for a few minutes, he rolled the tea towel up and dipped it into the mug. And the whole time, he kept up a gentle patter about different teas and herbs he’d tasted and the times his mum had given him a hot compress for his sinuses.
“Now,” Charles said, wringing the tea towel out a little over the sink, “I don’t think that’s in any danger of burning you, but then I didn’t know iron could burn us either, so if anything feels wrong, just yell and I’ll stop, right?”
Edwin nodded, holding out his injured wrist.
Charles took his hand gently, and, watching Edwin’s face, slowly touched the tea towel to Edwin’s wrist, and wrapped it around carefully.
Edwin felt…
Less pain, but also, more than any point in the long decades preceding, and perhaps more than ever in his life, as well, Edwin felt cared for, and he was going to cry.
It was also perhaps the first time in his many years of existence that that didn't feel like anything to be ashamed of.
Edwin cried as he had not, not since the very early days of Hell. After that, he had learned to weep silently.
Charles’s eyes went wide. “Is it worse, did I do something wrong?”
Edwin shook his head emphatically. “No, it’s better. Thank you. I just.” He didn’t know how to explain.
But once Charles knew it wasn’t anything he had done, he seemed quite ready to take it in stride.
“Not a problem, mate,” he said, sitting in the other kitchen chair. “Take your time.”
Edwin put himself back together, but as the vulnerability of the moment sunk into Edwin’s awareness, he wondered, could the two of them ever go back to that easy, casual rapport they’d developed?
He looked over at Charles, not at all sure how to go on.
“So where was that thing hiding?” Charles asked. “Must’ve been somewhere really weird, to take you by surprise like that.” Charles jostled his shoulder companionably.
Was it that easy?
Edwin abruptly remembered that he’d watched Charles die. That they’d huddled together, hidden by only a closet door from Death. And every time, Charles had smiled jovially after, and gone on as if nothing was amiss.
It was simply that easy, with Charles.
“Inside the canvas bag, on the chair,” Edwin said.
“What?” Charles leaned over to peer back into the study. “A big steel bear trap all laid out like that, in that little bag?”
“I saw her put her books into it just before she left,” Edwin said. “They should have been the first thing I found. And they certainly wouldn’t have fit inside with the trap. It must be a magical item.”
“A magical bag?” Charles pondered. “Like your ghost bag.”
“Considerably more unique, I should think,” Edwin said. “I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
Charles frowned in the direction of the study, and then at Edwin’s injured hand. “Okay, next time maybe let me go first when there’s something a sports lad’s reaction time might be good for, yeah?”
“I hardly thought a bag was going to prove so dangerous,” Edwin argued amiably.
“Well, now we’ll know,” Charles said.
“What, to be suspicious of bags?” Edwin raised his eyebrows. “This will not be a common problem, I trust.”
That tightness returned to Charles’s expression for a moment. He seemed to shake it off, then said, “Well, if there’s anything that needs investigating, let me get my hands on it first, yeah? Not just bags, anything.”
“That would be entirely impractical,” Edwin pointed out reasonably.
“When it’s practical, then,” Charles argued.
Edwin thought about that.
“You’re going to have to start wearing gloves as well,” he told Charles.
“Mate, gloves didn’t do you much good with this,” Charles said, eyebrows raised.
“This? No,” Edwin allowed. “But other iron objects, other magical items triggered by touch?”
Charles bit his lip. “Yeah, fair point,” he admitted. Then he got a determined look on his face. “I’m taking the oven gloves,” he said. “This witch can get burned next time. See how she likes it.”
Edwin found himself smiling, despite everything. “Our revenge?” he asked, standing.
“For now,” Charles said. “I know we haven’t found a lot of clues about what happened to Katie, but I’d really like to get out of here before anything else goes wrong. We can come back.”
“And if her oven gloves are missing, and her things are all askew, what if she decides she needs to be better prepared for the return of whoever did that?” Edwin asked. “We have gained very little knowledge here of her skills, or of anything, really, except for a distressingly intimate new knowledge of what iron does to ghosts.”
Charles paced into the study and picked up the oven gloves from where he had dropped them, next to the rucksack and that awful iron trap.
“You reached in there because she put the books she was using in there, right?” Charles asked. “You think those are her spellbooks?”
“I don’t see any other arcane volumes here,” Edwin argued, “and it does seem that she valued those books dearly, to protect them with such a vicious trap.”
Charles reached towards the bag, and Edwin snapped, “Do not even think about putting a finger inside that bag. We have absolutely no idea how many traps or protections she might have left guarding the contents.”
“Right,” Charles agreed readily enough. “Well, even if we can’t get the books, it’s easy enough to make sure she can’t either — we’ll just take this with us!” Charles hefted the bag by the strap and gave Edwin a grin.
“Charles, that is an incredibly dangerous magical object!” Edwin objected.
Charles looked up at him blankly. “Yeah, I know,” he said, “that’s why I want to make sure it’s not with that awful witch, it’s with someone…” Then Charles looked at the bag in his hand, and then at Edwin, with a look that was turning quickly to hurt. “Wait,” he said slowly. “Edwin. Do you not trust me with it?”
For a moment, Edwin didn’t know what to say. That bag had caused Edwin so much pain, and yes, the sight of Charles holding it made Edwin’s phantom nervous system light up with a feeling of wrongness, but that was only because, well, what if it hurt Charles, too…
Edwin had been quiet for too long, because Charles’s face had gone blank and stiff and sad.
“Apologies,” Edwin said. “You must know that I do trust you. More than anyone I have ever known. I only…”
“Alright then.” Charles tossed the oven mitts inside the rucksack, closed the flap, slung the bag over one shoulder and gestured to the door. “Can we get the fuck out of here? Please?”
Edwin nodded his agreement, and Charles walked out.
Over the past weeks, since Edwin had obtained his ghost bag, if Charles wanted to take something back to the warehouse that was too big to go in his pockets, he would ask Edwin if he could put it in the brown leather doctor’s bag, so they could travel through the mirrors with it.
Charles didn’t ask about the rucksack. He carried it over his shoulder as he walked the long way back to the warehouse.
Edwin didn’t comment, he simply followed.