"It's official. I didn't really have any doubts, but you're officially an idiot."

I slowly opened my eyes. This was the fifth official declaration of my stupidity, so I didn't take it too seriously anymore.

"Now what?" I groaned. I didn't bother lifting my head.

"He thinks he's so clever, but I see right through that – that niceness. And all his trying to be nice… thing."

"I don't follow."

"No! That's why you're stupid!"

"Then tell me what you bloody mean, so I can go back to sleeping."

"Quill! – I mean Kipps! He's talking to me! But I know it's just a ploy. Trying to gain my favour because he knows that I'm the key to get to you."

"George and Lockwood talk to you too sometimes."

"No, no. They talk AT me – usually insulting me. Carrot top is trying to talk WITH me."

"Don't be daft. He can't hear you."

"No! But he's trying to communicate! It's unsettling," the skull whined.

I raised an eyebrow. "You're a Type Three ghost tied to a skull in a jar and you're unsettled?"

"Wait, are you calling me a coward? Yeah! Yeah, you are! You're calling me a coward! I'm not a coward! It's just… weird! Let's run before he gets back from work!"

"I can't believe you're freaking out because Quill wants to talk. And because he's nice to you. That's literally the opposite of a problem."

"But don't you see? I'm trying to protect us here! He wants to be nice to be because he knows that you listen to me –"

I gave the skull another unimpressed look.

"- and then he wants to get between us and when you two get all mushy-mushy, then boom! I'm out in the cold."

I frowned a bit. "Skull, are you jealous?"

"What? No! I just – I'm protecting you!"

"You so are!" I grinned widely, "You're jealous!"

"Am not!"

With an air of finality, the glowing plasm was sucked into the skull which stayed still and quiet.

I shook my head at it and ran a hand over the glass.

"You, silly old ghost," I chuckled, "Quill might be… very nice. But he's no Type Three."

"And don't you forget it," came the hollow response from the depths, but after that, the skull remained silent.

I picked up the note Quill had left on the table.

Dearest Lucy

I would have preferred to stay at home with you, but unfortunately, I had to go to work. Please make yourself at home – I mean that. Do whatever you want. You might notice that I put padlocks on certain rooms in case of unwanted visitors. I set the combination on all the locks to the day you saved me from that Spectre, not far from here. DD/MM/YY

Quill

Well hell. I hoped the bathroom wasn't locked because the only thing I remembered was that it was stupid, and it was winter.

I stretched and moaned and considered burying my face back into the pillow, but in the end, my bladder won the battle against my laziness.

To make myself at home.

What would I even have done if I was home?

To start with I would have had a shower yesterday. I looked at my reflection in the skull's jar and realised that I had a long black streak down the side of my face. Probably from when Lockwood accidentally tackled me, and my face hit the floor. I was sort of annoyed that Quill hadn't told me, and my thoughts strayed back to Kate Godwin's effortless perfection.

I gathered courage and smelled my own armpit but had to recoil from the sour smell of day-old onion. Yup. Quill probably wouldn't blame me for taking a shower. Blame would be thrown around though if I made him pass out from my stench.

I had borrowed another t-shirt of his. This one was thankfully free of the Fittes logo. I wondered idly how much of his wardrobe he'd had to toss. The shirt reached down far enough so I didn't bother put my own clothes back on. They smelled and were incredibly dirty from last night's misadventure.

It was odd, walking around in his house when he wasn't there. I tip-toed around. Without him, the place seemed so empty that any sort of noise might make an echo. My bare feet barely made a sound on the stairs, but what little sound they did make, felt deafening.

I had planned to take a quick brisk shower, but that wasn't what I ended up with. Now that I wasn't standing with one arm in the air and didn't have cuts stinging all over my skin, I couldn't help but appreciate how lovely Quill's bathroom actually was.

The walls of the shower stall were made with frosted glass and the shower had one of those things where you could set the temperature you wanted the water to be rather than spending eons turning taps trying to find the right balance between hot and cold.

The warm water beat down heavily on my back loosening the muscles that were tense from the stress of hunting ghosts, searching for the skull, unravelling mysteries, being threatened by Rotwell, the Winkmans, Penelope/Marissa Fittes and then that loneliness that I barely wanted to acknowledge, even to myself.

I tried to empty my head of all those things. To just let the stress and worry flow down with the water and down the drain.

It didn't work very well.

Points to me for trying.

Steam slowly filled the room with the scent of Quill's shampoo and tempted as I was to drown in it, I had to finish my shower eventually, when it felt like my entire body was pruning.

I towelled off but cringed when I caught a whiff of the t-shirt I had planned to put back on. If I did that, the shower would have been for naught. Instead, I tip-toed back out of the bathroom and down the hall a bit to Quill's bedroom where I knew he kept his clothes. Unfortunately, I was faced with one of the padlocks he had mentioned in his note.

It felt odd that he could remember when I didn't. But then again, I had always been rubbish at those things. Things like dates and anniversaries seemed silly to me. I couldn't remember if I had even celebrated my own birthday before. Holly had started picking up on those things though. She made George an entire birthday cake a few weeks ago.

Thinking back though, the thing with the Spectre definitely happened in December.

I wished I had worn a sweater underneath my jacket; it was so cold I was almost shivering. It was always hot at the furnaces, which made it even worse when going back outside. I had worked a quick case with a small team of Tendy-agents. We had gotten an early start due to the early nightfall and the case was so ridiculously easy that even Bunchurch wouldn't have managed to foul it up. We were done by five and by five fifteen, the pretty comb the old maid used to do her hair with, was being incinerated. My job for the night was done.

I briefly considered going to DEPRAC. They sometimes had stray cases that needed to be taken care of and it was good money, but I decided against it.

Instead, I slowly made my way through the light snow towards the nearest tube station.

It was odd this time of year, how people were hiding inside most of the time, but at the same time it seemed as if they were compensating for the darkness by drowning it in the streets with decorations of all sorts.

It was completely irrational, but I actually quite enjoyed it. We never had much at home, and most of the decorations we did have, were homemade. Mum didn't like them because they would only collect dust, she said. The year before I left home though, our neighbour had bought fairy lights and hung them in a tree in his garden. For some reason, I loved them. They filled me with a small sort of joy, like the crispness of the first flowers of the spring or putting on new bedsheets that had been hung to dry in the fresh air.

London was full of fairy lights. Even in the parks. I don't know exactly why they would put them in the parks since no one would be out at night to see them in their full effect, but I supposed they could look nice in the daytime too.

I took a shortcut through St James's Church Garden. It was beautiful there. They had hung fairy lights in the trees, and they hadn't turned them off for the night.

Everything was made even brighter by the fresh snow that had fallen over the past few hours. It lay completely undisturbed throughout the entire place and it was a fascinating sight.

The snow crunched under my boots and I was dreadfully cold, but I couldn't help but walk slowly, taking in the beauty of it. I wasn't alone in this. Someone else was standing up ahead, admiring one of the trees. I automatically put a hand on my rapier in case I needed to defend myself. One never knew what types of people were strolling around after dark.

I was surprised to realise that I knew the person and I stopped a bit away, trying to buy myself time to figure out how to go about this. Kipps had been always been nice with me, but he had been an enemy of Lockwood and co.

Since I first met him, I'd disliked him. I didn't like his arrogance or his flashiness. I didn't like the way that he boasted about his accomplishments, which he no doubt did in order to compensate for his complete lack of Talent. While I didn't like him, I had to have some respect for him. He was overly cautious, bordering on cowardly, but he wasn't without skill and I could see that he took good care of his people. Especially now that I'd worked with a fair few supervisors, who didn't seem to care whether they lost a kid or two because there were always more children to be taken advantage of.

Last time I'd seen Kipps had been an odd meeting. It was a few days after the Aickmere case. We had met by coincidence on a bench in Cavendish Square Gardens. It was on one of my many moody walks in the days that followed the case. I had been sitting there, obsessing over what the Fetch had told me about Lockwood, when he suddenly sat down beside me. As if it was something, we did all the time. We talked about the weather, the latest True Hauntings, DEPRAC-regulations and then he told me about his promotion in an almost modest way. The death of Ned Shaw had truly changed him, just as the Aickmere case had changed me.

I briefly considered turning around and walk the other way, but in a fit of politeness I called out to him instead.

"Kipps!"

He turned his head, and his face broke into a smile when he saw me. I made my way towards him, but so was something else.

A Visitor had appeared almost out of nowhere and it was moving faster towards him than I was.

I broke into a run, conscious that the path was slippery with the snow, and just as the Spectre was about to ram its arm through Kipps' head, I tackled him all while swinging my rapier in a beautiful semicircle, efficiently dispelling the ghost for now. I briefly admired the way the fairy lights glittered against the metal before I heard Kipps clearing his throat beneath me.

I looked down at him wide-eyed. His nose was completely pink from the cold and his red hair seemed an even deeper shade of copper against the white of the snow. He was smiling widely, and his eyes twinkled in the soft light.

"A bit of warning next time, darling and I promise, I'll catch you."

I rolled my eyes, "Maybe next time, I'll just let the Spectre take you instead."

"What?" He frowned.

I got up and gave him a look. "There was a Spectre coming at you. There's bravery, cowardice and stupidity. How can it be that you only possess the two latter ones?"

He huffed a small laugh and stood up next to me. "I've been accused of many things, Carlyle, but rarely being stupid. It's odd. My team and I have cleared this path entirely. Bobby has researched it ad nauseam and there's nothing left," he looked around as if he were actually able to See something. "This entire place is packed with iron two feet down. If a Visitor is indeed here, it didn't come from the ground."

"Are you doubting me?"

He shrugged and smirked obnoxiously. "Maybe you just wanted an excuse to be close to me,"

I gritted my teeth.

"What are you even doing out alone after dark? You're blind as a mole!"

The infernal smirk didn't leave his face. "Were you worried about me?" he teased.

I didn't feel like that deserved more response than a raised eyebrow.

He sighed. "Fine. As I said, my team and I cleared this pathway. We cleared the entire way from the furnaces to Woodbridge Street, where I live. It's just up here," he pointed. "I just came from the Furnaces and I felt like enjoying this," he gestured at the garden around us. "It's beautiful, wouldn't you say?" he took a small step closer.

I took a look around and it was indeed beautiful. From our standpoint, we had a full view of the entire garden. It wasn't just beautiful, it was breath-taking. The untouched snow glittered in the lights from the many trees.

I felt a gloved hand underneath my chin, pushing upwards to close my mouth which had apparently opened due to my astonishment.

I batted the hand away and turned my head back towards him to find him staring at me with a small smile.

"It is," I agreed. I wondered why my voice sounded a bit breathy. I did just have a sprint, but nowhere near hard enough to create a strain.

He took another step closer. "Thank you for saving me then, I suppose."

I scoffed. "You suppose? If it wasn't for me, your head would be the size of a barrage balloon. And it's already big enough as it is! Can you even get through doors with that thing?" I ranted.

He grinned. He was standing awfully close.

"Alright. Thank you, Lucy Carlyle, for saving my life. Now, can I offer you a cup of tea? It's the least I can do. That way you can tackle me again on the way if need be."

I rolled my eyes. "Fine, I'll see you home to make sure you don't die stupidly. We should get a move on before the Spectre returns. This way you said?" I asked rhetorically and trudged on in the direction he'd pointed.

It was the seventeenth. The date popped into my head as I reminisced.

I held the towel up with one hand while I used the other to try and turn the button-like things to the right combination.

I laughed a bit with pride when the lock popped open.

I quickly found a fresh t-shirt, but issues arose when it came to the bottom part.

I picked up my knickers and the t-shirt from before, went down to gather the rest of my clothes.

It wasn't much, but I had to wash it. It felt wasteful to start a washing machine for it, so I set about washing it in the kitchen sink. I hung each piece to dry on various radiators. My knickers went on first.

I was in the process of washing my skirt when I heard a key in the door.

Panic bubbled inside me like a pot of potatoes boiling over.

There I was, in Quill's kitchen, without knickers and I knew that Bobby Vernon had a key to his house.

I heard the door slam open and shut. I quickly grabbed a tea towel to hold in front of me when Quill showed up in the doorway with a shopping bag in each hand. My eyes went wide, and my mouth suddenly felt rather dry. My internal organs made a collective somersault.

I was used to seeing Lockwood in a suit. His were always a bit too small. Quill though; that was something entirely different. Probably because I wasn't used to seeing him in one.

Quill wasn't quite as tall as Lockwood and he was a bit thinner, but that didn't mean that he didn't fill this suit out. It suited him, so to speak. I had no idea entirely and it was far out of my expertise, but something told me that it was tailor-made.

I reached his face to find him staring at me with an eyebrow raised. Particularly looking at the tea towel I was holding protectively in front of me.

"I'm not wearing any knickers," I blurted like the idiot the skull claimed I was.

Quill dropped one of the bags and fruit went rolling on the floor. His entire face took a vibrant pink hue. I could only imagine how my own burning cheeks looked.

He turned around and cleared his throat.

"I know I told you to make yourself at home, but are you often walking around in the buff at Portland Row? Is everyone?" he asked with a chuckle.

I gave a small huff.

"Well, George often prefers to uh – cook in the nude. Sometimes."

"Yeugh! Remind me never to eat there again."

I shrugged. "It's fine. He's getting better. I'll just –"

Even though he couldn't see me, I gestured at the living room, where I had left my underwear and went there. Thankfully, it was dry. I'd left it on the hottest radiator there.

"I'm cooking dinner. And I'm keeping my clothes on for it!" He called after me into the living room.

"Bet he won't mind you staying naked though."

"Shut up." I growled at the skull.

Slowly, my clothes dried, item by item and by dinnertime, I was finally fully dressed in my own clean clothes. The leggings were still torn, but there was nothing for it. We sat in the kitchen at the small table there. The skull was sulking on the counter.

The food was great.

"I figured Pasta Bolognese would be a safe choice," he explained. "I don't know anyone who doesn't like Pasta Bolognese"

I smiled widely. "You still don't, I assure you."

He smirked. "I'm glad you like it."

"Now, do you always come home from work this early? What are you even doing now? I keep forgetting to ask."

He snorted a bit. "I work at my parent's company, but what I'm doing, I couldn't tell you."

"Why? Is it a secret?" I raised an eyebrow at him.

He laughed. "I couldn't tell you because I haven't a clue. That's why I came home early. My dad sent me home and I'm supposed to start something new tomorrow."

"Sounds interesting to do something different."

"I doubt it," he smiled ruefully. "I'm supposed to start at the archives, so it's probably just sorting and dusting or something like that."

"Sounds like a job for George," I grinned.

"Nah Cubbins is more into science. At the moment we only have fictions and biographies and things like that."

"I thought you published for the Lockwood's."

He smiled "That was more of a friendly favour."

"What about -"

CRASH!

Both of us were up in less than a second at the sound of splintering wood and breaking glass.

There was a sound of yelling from the hall and heavy boots moved through the hall.