The cellar smelled of mold and promises gone sour. Cobwebs hung in the corners, nearly as thick as the blankets that remained tossed over the long-past-unusable sofa. The elderly woman kept these things as they were for two reasons, one perhaps that she couldn't deal with the flurries of a emotion that might threaten her into sorrow or guilt or remorse, two because the sentimentality of the basement were her daughter sliced through mist as though it were the dead that couldn't be vanquished, was too strong an odor to was away with a bucket of soap and a washcloth.

She had called the number on the back of the smudged business card when she couldn't sleep with the reality that someone was, in fact, beneath her. The boy has come to the door alone, equipped with a sweeping trench coat and a rapier strapped to his belt. He promised the end of what was already Lucy Carlyle's end and Mrs. Carlyle agreed because she couldn't live with tearstained pillows and what-ifs.

He opened the door, and something like a scream erupted from the walls. He could see her in the corner, even before he had descended the stairs enough to get a clear picture of what occupied his surroundings.

She was floating, no legs tethered her to the gravity she had left behind years ago. Her hair was short, wiped of the color it had once possessed. Her features may have been warm, if her eyes weren't so startled, so fearful, so…done.

The most striking of their first meeting was the sword at her side, and the way she didn't make any move to come closer.

He drew his weapon, edging around her carefully in an attempt to find her Source. Lucy cocked her head, as her pupils followed his movements as though she didn't understand them, or didn't find them necessary, or something in between.
Anthony Lockwood of Lockwood & Co. didn't hear her speak. He was incapable of that skill, though his Sight allowed him to catch the movement of her lips from the corner of his eye.

Ghosts weren't supposed to talk. They were supposed to be violent, vicious, wanting whatever they didn't have the opportunity or time to get in the life they'd been given. But the girl seemed as perturbed by his presence as he was of the situation.

She swept across the floor, to a mirror that lurked as ominous as the shadow her ghostly form cast upon it. The glass clouded, and she lifted an arm which had previously hung limp at her side to form a sentence across the perspiration.

I am not your enemy

It was at this moment, the memory that had never before failed him returned. The girl who had sat on his couch, hands clenched around an object with no violence attached to it, and told him a tale of murder by poison from George's toothbrush cup. He had declined her desperate offers of service, and the guilt had plagued him for about 2 days before he had moved on.

Anthony swallowed, his eyes darkening with the thoughts of what might lie ahead of him. But she did not come forward with the touch that would drain him of his life.

Part of him still hadn't come to the realization that he had had an interaction with a ghost that would write itself into history.

She started to write again, more nervous, more desperate, more pleading than before. He turned his fading attention to her once more.

Help me

But he found nothing that contained her spirit, and he was left with the resounding realization that he had failed. But Anthony didn't fail. He was perfect. At least, that was what he had always told himself.

Morning arrived with enough speed to leave the boy wondering if time passed differently with Lucy looking over his shoulder.

He treaded upon the stairs, pouring himself a cup of cold tea from the teapot the mellowed Mrs. Carlyle had laid out for him before she herself had gone to bed. It wasn't that she was a kind woman, or that she had been a good mother, but she had some level of compassion for his job. Maybe she had learned the feeling when Lucy had died trying to prove her mother wrong.

It was a stupid story, a ridiculous way to die, really. The girl had stolen a Source of a Type Two not yet burned to ashes, and brought it into the cellar. She'd waited until nightfall and attempted to use the skills she had taught herself to keep it from escaping to the first floor.

Of course, all of this had been incited by Lucy running away at the indignance of her mother using her existence solely to gain profit. When the daughter had returned, her mother had hated her, and if Mrs. Carlyle was entirely honest she wasn't sure how she'd gotten into the basement, or added any of the additions the authorities had found when the girl had gone missing and they first thought to check her house.
` She'd won against the ghost, but she'd died.

Her Source was not an item to be found and broken, it was her mother's regret and that was something the newly diminished Anthony could not fix.

The conversation the agent and the mother shared was brief, formal, disturbed. Nothing was different than it had been when he left. It would change, once her body joined her daughter's in the graveyard. She would be at peace, not because her decisions or actions were justified, but because she was sorry, and she was shattered, and she had finally let go.