Lucy:

Something about the case didn't sit well with us. The skull was right – a powerful haunting without any build-up? Then there was the Source itself. The tiara covered in blood didn't quite look like a normal prop from a magic show. It was likely planted there.

As soon as we'd packed our things, I called George for backup. Lockwood and Quill came along too but as soon as they arrived, Quill and Kate slipped away. It wouldn't do for her to be recognised by DEPRAC.

Holly filled the others in on what had happened. Lockwood kept glancing in my direction, but I concentrated on packing all the things and making sure we had everything.

People from the fair had also started turning up. At the exact moment Kate had wrapped the tiara in silver, Charley Budd had apparently recovered completely and asked for food.

Hesitantly the stagehands and performers came into the theatre and I worried that some of them might have sticky fingers. I had seen the type of employer Tufnell was and odds were that he didn't pay his crew much, so I stuck to the equipment and let the others handle the rest.

George came up next to me. "So, how did it go with Godwin?"

"Shh! Not so loud." I looked around a bit. "We really ought to come up with some sort of code name for her."

"How about stuck-up bi –"

"George!" I admonished.

He shrugged uncaringly.

"It wasn't half-bad actually. I suppose she can be a bit…"

"Stuck-up?" he offered.

"Yeah… but it wasn't bad. She was actually nice. Fun. I think the skull has a crush on her,"

George snorted. "Figures."

"How about you? Did you find what you needed at the library?"

"Well, I went to Hardimann Library to follow up on a lead. Might be something interesting but I'll fill you in when I know more."

I frowned. "Wasn't Hardimann out of bounds?"

He shifted a bit.

Many restrictions had been put in place by DEPRAC in recent time, and one of them were restrictions on several of the libraries. Now you were only allowed to enter with a permit. Something that was incredibly hard to come by and something I knew George had been moaning about not having.

"Well, it's fine. I know the curator there and he owes me a few favours."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "What's it about then?"

He took off his glasses and slowly polished them in his shirt. "I've been researching the start of the Problem. From the very beginning when Fittes and Rotwell first started out, but I'll keep you posted."

"Sounds promising. Just be careful, yeah?"

He snorted. "You know me; I'm always careful. You're the wild card."

I shook my head. "Where did the others go?"

"I believe they went to interview that girl – the stage manager. She was the most likely candidate for planting the Source, right?"

"Yeah…" There was something about it that nagged me. The planted Source, but not from this case. It was like the thought was there, but just out of reach. The concept seemed familiar, but we didn't have that many cases of murder by ghost.

I shook my head, trying to let it go. I left George in charge of our stuff and went outside for some air, just as the fair was flooded with red and blue lights from DEPRAC and the police.

Along with the police came a boy, probably close to my age, in Fittes uniform with a special badge. One of the specialised agents Kate had talked about. He smirked at me and looked me up and down. He looked around and came towards me.

"You're Lucy Carlyle, aren't you?"

I shrugged. "Yeah. And you are?"

"You can call me James," he grinned at me. "Is your boyfriend around?"

It took me a second to remember what he was talking about. "Quill? No, not tonight."

His smile didn't waver, and he stepped forward. "That's a shame, isn't it? No one to warm you up, is there?"

"Well, it's not exactly cold out, is it?" I took a step back and tried to discreetly look around for one of my team-mates.

"Indeed. You know, I can see why you're the one he went with." He took another look that lingered around my hips and my chest before smiling at me in a way that was possibly meant to be charming.

I didn't bother responding with anything other than a raised eyebrow. I felt like crossing my arms in front of me, but I didn't want to move my hand too far away from the throwing knives or my rapier.

He took another step closer. I couldn't move any further back. I was up against the wall of the theatre.

I looked over his shoulder but couldn't see anyone I knew. Everyone had their back turned. One of the officers from DEPRAC turned his head, but quickly looked away, pretending not to see anything. It made my blood boil.

I huffed a bit. "Well, was there anything in particular you wanted?"

His grin widened. "Oh, there are lots of things I want."

He put his hand under my chin, tilting my head upwards, and I was about to knee him in the jewels.

"Excuse me, if I'm interrupting something, but I believe your job requires you. Mr Rumsford, wasn't it?"

Lockwood stood, leaning casually against the wall, pointing in the direction of the flashing lights.

His smile was pleasant enough, but the set of his jaw and the kink of his eyebrow gave away his fury.

The Fittes special agent smirked at Lockwood.

"Of course! If you'll have me excused." He winked at me and let his hand fall from my chin. I felt like biting it.

I didn't breathe properly until I couldn't see him anymore. When he turned behind a tent, I breathed a sigh of relief.

"You alright?" Lockwood asked me carefully.

I nodded and gave him a polite smile. "I am. Thank you for the assistance."

He tried to reach for my hand, but I crossed my arms. "Did you sign things over to DEPRAC?" I asked.

"I did. You did good work here today," he smiled at me.

I scoffed. "Two people did good work today, and I wasn't one of them."

"That can't be true," he smiled gently at me.

I shook my head. "Just ask Holly. Or Kate," I added after looking around.

"Whatever happened, everything is fine." He rubbed my arms. "The haunting is over, we've been paid, we signed it over to DEPRAC and we can go home."

I sighed. "Yeah. Let's go home,"

I walked around him to go back into the theatre.

I woke up around nine the next morning. I blearily opened one eye to see the skull glowering at me. I stretched my arm out to open the lever and let the litany of curses overflow me.

"It wasn't actually me that shut you off." I pointed out when I managed to get a word in edgeways.

The skull scoffed. "No! It was worse! You just let some ghost-woman get her filthy plasm on me? I feel violated! It's your fault! This jar is your responsibility! I'm under your care!"

"Get over it, skull. Nothing happened and you're not a child. You're fine."

"No thanks to you!"

I sighed. "Have you thought of anything more about Marissa Fittes?"

"Have you thought of anything more about my freedom?" it countered.

"If we can find some way of freeing you in a way that doesn't include you killing my friends, I'll see what I can do."

"Well, you're no fun."

"But Marissa – do you remember anything?"

"I think I've told you everything,"

I hit the pillow in frustration. "You haven't told me anything you never tell me anything! Not about Marissa or who you are or about the Other Side! No facts or anything, just insults and lewd comments," I cried out.

"Well, when you're a ghost you learn that facts are overrated. They don't matter so much after a while. As a spirit it's all about emotions and desire! You know that. All that unfinished business isn't exactly quantifiable. D'you know what my desire is?"

I made a face. "Do I want to know?"

The skull grinned at me. "To live, Lucy. I want to live! That's why I talk to you. That's why I've turned my back on what waits on the Other Side."

I pursed my lips. "Well, what does wait for us on the Other Side?"

Rather than giving me some insight, the skull made a ghostly snort. "You've been there. What did you see?"

"Well, I saw a lot of darkness. It was cold…" I trailed off.

"No pearly gates or angel's trumpets to greet you?"

I huffed. "Well, I was a bit busy, trying to survive."

"Me too! That's basically what I've been doing for the past hundred years. Sticking to my lovely Source here, rather than wandering in the dark like all those other idiots. I keep myself turned towards the light."

I bit my lip and considered my next question carefully. "Can anyone become a Type Three or was there something special about you?"

The skull's plasm wrapped around its Source, giving me a glimpse of how his face had looked in life. The face I had seen clearly on the Other Side. He grinned at me. When he was like this, I had a harder time thinking of him as an 'it'.

"See, now you're asking the right questions. I knew you'd want to hang out when you die. What do you think the secret is?"

I frowned. "Is it to do with the Talents?"

"Maybe, maybe not. All I'm saying is that while Type Threes are rare, so are the people who can talk to them." He winked and blew me a kiss before dissolving in a cloud of plasm.

I chuckled. "Then what about Marissa? What sort of questions did she ask?"

A pair of glowing eyes appeared in the plasm. "Probably a lot of the same ones you are. Life after death and the Other Side and such. She was extremely interested in ectoplasm though."

"Ectoplasm? Why?"

"Well, it's fascinating stuff. You can do all sorts of fun things with it. Like killing people. Or you can mould it into funny or obscene shapes. That's what I've spent almost a century perfecting. Look at this; I call it the Happy Farmhand,"

I squeezed my eyes together, trying to unsee it. It didn't work.

"Impressive, but somehow I don't think that's what she was interested in,"

"It wasn't, to be fair. No sense of humour, that dry old crone."

"Well then what did she want with it?"

"Well, ectoplasm is sort of what makes you, you, I suppose. It's what you are, once you leave behind that rotting flesh. Your life force or whatever you want to call it. Your essence or Soul if you want to get philosophical. It doesn't decay, it doesn't change. That's how I knew that Penelope Fittes is really Marissa."

"Even though they look so different?"

The spirit in the jar blew a raspberry at me. "I couldn't care less about how people look. I'm hanging out with you, aren't I."

I reached for the lever.

"No, come on. Can't you take a joke?"

I put my hand down and looked at it with an eyebrow raised.

"But seriously. When you've been dead for a while, you start to realise how superficial it all is. How you look, I mean. When that's said though, you should know that I very much appreciate that you've never been shy around me. Even if I suspect that you mostly just forget I'm in the room when you undress,"

The plasm wrapped around the skull again to make a grinning face, and especially with what the skull had just told me, I was suddenly acutely aware that while there wasn't a body, this thing in front of me in the jar, was essentially a person.

Not just a person, but a boy.

And he had seen me naked. Many, many times.

I could feel my cheeks burning and my jaw go a little slack.

The skull cackled with joy.

"I don't mind sharing, you know!" it called after me as I stomped down the stairs, wrapped in my duvet.

I went in the kitchen where Lockwood sat in his pyjamas with a cup of tea. His hair was standing up in weird places. He looked at me with a bemused smile.

"Not a word," I ground out.

I rummaged about a bit in the drawers before finding what I was looking for.

"Not. A. Word." I repeated as I clumsily made my way back up.

Lockwood's smile widened and I frowned in consternation.

"You're turning into a prude now?!" the skull protested as I shoved the tea cosy down over the jar with a satisfied smile.

After going about my business, I went back downstairs, where Lockwood and George stood, leaning over the newspaper. I was a bit miffed that I hadn't been included.

"What's new? Is it bad?"

Lockwood winced. "You remember how we spoke about Adam Bunchurch some time ago?"

I went to put the kettle on. "Yeah, that he didn't want to sign over to Fittes?"

"Well, he died."

"Really? Ghost-touch?"

Lockwood shook his head gloomily. "No. He was attacked. He was on his way home and someone lay in wait for him. They beat him up and left him. He wasn't found until next morning. He died in the hospital."

I rubbed my face and sighed. "That's awful. Are there any suspects?"

"Nope." He wrinkled his nose. "At least nothing's mentioned. Quill and uh – Kate are coming in about half an hour. Holly is at Arif's." Lockwood continued.

I looked away from him. "Sounds good."

I slowly went about finding other things we needed for breakfast. Eggs, bacon, tea.

Now we had to set the table for six. One more person and we would have to bring out the extension. Slowly our little family was growing, and it hurt to think that I might leave them. But then again, the whole thing with Fittes had virtually stalled. We didn't know where to go from here. I didn't know where to go from here.

"Fancy seeing you here, Carlyle,"

I jumped with a yelp and Kate laughed. She had snuck up on me as I was finding cutlery.

"Wow. It's good you're not that jumpy on cases."

She leaned against the counter and her smirk turned into something softer.

"How are you after yesterday?" she asked me.

I shrugged. "I'm fine. Bit angry with myself, but that's the worst of it."

"Happens to everyone from time to time."

She looked around to see if anyone was eavesdropping before leaning in with a conspiratorial grin.

"Once, we were on a case – that was before Ned…" her smile dropped a little. "Before Ned died. Just after the Joplin case. We were out to clear a house. You know how it is; old woman died; her kids want to sell the house as soon as possible. Anyway, this old lady apparently had some unfinished business –"

Kate interrupted herself with a chuckle. "She was knitting a pair of socks for her grandson," she told me with mock seriousness. The effect was diluted by the giggles that kept escaping.

She looked over her shoulder again and leant in closer. "Quill got possessed or what influenced or how you want to put it, and he just took her needles and started to knit out of the blue –" she was again cut off by her own giggle. I couldn't help but smile.

She composed herself, "It took us forever to find the Source. Turned out to be a darning needle that had fallen down a crack in the floorboards."

She laughed out loud, not being able to keep it together anymore. "By the end of it, Quill had managed to knit three pair of socks," she snorted. "You should ask him if he can still do it."

I laughed with her. We laughed until we had to support ourselves against the counter.

That's how Quill himself along with Lockwood found us. "Uh – Is everything alright?" Quill asked hesitantly, sending us into another laughing fit.

"Knitting," was all I could get out while gasping for air.

Quill's cheeks turned deep pink and he looked at Kate accusingly.

I laughed again, wiping tears from my eyes, and holding my poor stomach.

Lockwood looked highly interested, but Kate didn't seem interested in sharing anything else. George came out from his room, probably to see what all the noise was about.

We heard the door open and shut and turned expectantly towards the entrance to the kitchen where Holly predictably showed up not a few seconds later. She gave Quill and Kate a look of alarm.

"Which way did you get in?" she asked as the first thing.

Quill pointed over his shoulder. "We took the back door."

Holly nodded thoughtfully. "Okay, that might be – yeah, that might be fine," she mumbled to herself, pacing back and forth in front of the kitchen table.

Lockwood "Hol, what's going on?"

"I uh – Sir Rupert Gale. He was there, at Arif's," she told us distractedly.

Kate's eyes widened and her hand shot up to the light brown wig she was wearing again today.

"What did he want?" Lockwood asked.

Holly grimaced. "Urgh. He's so foul," Kate nodded distractedly in agreement.

"He wanted to know where we'd been. Yesterday and the other night. He asked where George had been," she glanced at George whose face predictably didn't give anything away.

"What did you tell him?" I asked.

She rubbed her face. "Well, I panicked! I said that there was a case yesterday and the other night and besides that, I'm not keeping track of you all."

She looked at Kate. "Then he wanted to know about the new girl. Asked why she hasn't been registered to the agency."

Kate's eyes widened.

Holly went to the sink and took a large glass of water. "I'm sorry, but I panicked. I said you weren't actually an agent. That you were Lucy's sister from up north, didn't have any Talent to speak of and that you wanted to come and see how we work,"

"Brilliant, Holly," Lockwood praised.

I nodded in agreement. "You did so well, Holly."

Lockwood started pacing. "We knew they were checking up on us. In reality, we've been reckless. We should probably meet somewhere else in the future."

He looked at Quill who raised his hands.

"Don't look at me. If they're having you under surveillance, there's a risk that they're following you. I don't want you to lead them to my doorstep."

I thought about it a bit. "What if we split up and arrive separately? Or we can meet in different places each time we meet."

Lockwood rubbed the back of his neck. "Quill of course can come here as he pleases. You've got a good excuse to come here,"

He nodded towards me and I felt my cheeks warming.

"Speaking of which," he continued, "you should probably keep an eye out for James Rumsford."

He looked at Kate and Quill.

Kate made a face. "He's still not as bad as Gale, but he can be quite unpleasant to pretty girls. Are you alright, Lucy?"

Quill looked at me with a worried frown. In fact, they all looked worried.

I crossed my arms in front of myself. "I'm fine. Nothing happened."

Lockwood's jaw worked. "What if I hadn't come by when I did? Do you think you would still be fine?"

I snorted. "Thank you for saving me, but I think that what you saved the most, was Rumsford's ability to have children in the future."

His frown turned into a grin.

"But seriously, be careful." Kate butted in.

Quill nodded. "You're a double target. One thing is that everyone thinks we're together and I have an unofficial price on my head, but you're a beautiful girl too and these shits can virtually get away with anything and they know it."

My cheeks were burning from the compliment and Quill smiled softly at me. I looked away. It was far too easy to get drawn in.

"Right." Lockwood cleared his throat. "I think we all need something to eat now, wouldn't you say?"

"Hear, hear!" George cried out, even though he was already stuffing his mouth with a chocolate croissant.

…

Thank you guys who reviewed and in general thank you guys for reading. I'm happy you're staying patient and sticking with the story.

I hope you've enjoyed the chapter and find it in you to leave a review for me. I get so excited every time I get an email, but then it turns out to be like a Pokémon newsletter or something like that. And while that can be exciting, I love hearing from you considerably more.

So please review and let me know what you think.