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Niko got home – it was still weird, thinking of an entire dimension as home, but she did now – nearly a year too late. She walked out of the bathroom mirror in the house where she grew up, with the shower that her dad was always trying to fix but never quite managed to get draining right, and startled her own mother so bad that she fell down half a flight of stairs and nearly died, which didn’t exactly help with the whole thinking-Niko’s-a-ghost thing. It was only after they got to the hospital, and Niko confirmed that everyone else could see her too, that she found out the date and realized exactly how long she’d been gone.
It was good to see her mother again – really, it was, and she felt stupid for not having just come home sooner – but there was something missing, now, that kept this from feeling like home. Or more like home than anywhere else in this dimension, anyways. She didn’t have any friends here, or anyone who might have understood what it meant to have mostly-died, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a place out there for her, with people who knew, if only she could find them again.
She didn’t even know if they were okay. For all Niko knew, she’d kinda-died for nothing, and Charles had been eaten by that giant snake thing and Edwin had still been tortured and Crystal was dead too. Maybe death had come for Niko, and missed her, and taken them away.
She didn’t think so, though. Because that wouldn’t have been good luck, and her good luck charm had worked, even if it hadn’t done it quite right. So after a week in Japan, she filled a backpack with the few old t-shirts still left in her closet here, and got a plane back to America. She was worried they might have flagged her passport as dead, and then she’d have had to figure out on the fly how to walk through mirrors without getting lost in the wrong dimension again, but nobody did, and her mother didn’t notice and reverse the credit card charge right away either. That was okay, though. Crystal’s shitty loaded parents could pay her back.
The problem, really, was that when Niko did arrive in Port Townsend, everyone was gone. Crystal and Edwin and Charles, and even Jenny were gone. Even the nice ghost she’d met in the comic shop who was telling her about American comics from when he was alive was gone, though Niko did find him later at the movie theater, which was good. She’d been trying to take him to a movie since the first time they’d met.
Tragic Mick was still there, at least, to tell her that everyone else had gone back to England. “Your ghost boy came in here and yelled at me for peddling bad good luck charms. Said it was irresponsible. Told him I didn’t.”
“Which one? The one that’s like this-” She leaned on a shelf and almost fell over. It was cheating for Charles not to weigh anything. “Or the one that’s like this?” She stood up very straight, which was easier to do when you were mostly-alive.
“The second one.”
“That was probably scary,” Niko decided. Mick nodded solemnly. “Well, I’ll make him come say sorry when I find them. I promise.”
“You do that,” he told her, and for the price of a flower she’d put in her pocket and forgotten about in that dimension where everyone had rabbit ears, he sold her a compass that pointed wherever she needed to go. Then she had to go buy a regular compass so she could figure out which direction the magic compass was pointing. And then she had to google how to use a compass. But she figured it out eventually, and was pleasantly gratified to confirm that it was pointing in the right direction for London.
Now all she had to do was book another flight. Or two. Shoot, this was looking like a pretty complicated route.
Actually, wait.
She went back to Tragic Mick’s. “Hey, did they leave you with a way to contact them, if you ever had mystery-problems? Like, an address? Or a phone number? Maybe.”
“It’s funny you should mention that,” he said. “I think I do have a note from your friend Crystal somewhere around here. She sent me a letter thanking me for trying. It might have a return address.”
It did, but it had something better too, penciled in the P.S. right at the bottom of the page, and so Niko gave the regular compass to Tragic Mick in exchange for using his phone to make an international call.
It rang three times before there was a click on the other end of the line, and a prim voice said disdainfully, “This is the… Dead. Boy. Detectives. Are you alive or dead?”
“Uhhh…” That was kind of complicated, actually. “Is Crystal there? Or maybe Edwin? Ooo, or Charles. Charles would also be good.”
The voice on the other end of the line sighed – it was very familiar, but all Niko could picture was the dancing woman from that dimension where everyone walked on their hands for some reason – and then she said, “someone is asking for one of you specifically.”
There was a muffled noise on the other end of the line, and then Edwin – she hadn’t forgotten his voice, and he was there, and okay, and not screaming – said, “may I ask who is speaking?”
“It’s me.” What if he didn’t remember her voice? “I mean, Niko. I’m at Tragic Mick’s. Can you-”
The other end of the line buzzed. He’d hung up on her. That jerk. She stared desolately at the phone for a second before Edwin burst through the door of the shop crying, “you’ve covered all your mirrors!”
And he looked just the same, except for the look on his face when he saw Niko, which was like she was important. Like she really mattered. Nobody had looked at her like that in a really long time. Even her mother had mostly just been nervous and confused. She couldn’t help the fact that her eyes were getting wet, even as he pointed some kind of wand thing at her and waved it all over the place and then stared, baffled, when it glowed blue.
She knew Edwin didn’t like hugging, but when she started to cry, he put away the wand, and took the still-buzzing phone out of her hand, and he hugged her.
--
It took a long time to convince Edwin that he did have to apologize to Tragic Mick, and an even longer time to convince him that Niko could go through mirrors now, even if she got lost in them when nobody was directing her. But in the end they got back to London within the hour without having to buy another plane ticket. Niko held his hand most of the time. For the mirrors, obviously, but for something else too. For the fact that, for the first time in over a year, she felt like she belonged somewhere. Edwin’s hands were… not even cold, really, they just didn’t feel like anything at all, but they were Edwin’s, which made it alright, and she thought she could feel a little more warmth, more reality, than anyone who was properly alive could.
“You don’t feel like Crystal does,” he affirmed for her. “Like that you feel like anything at all, for one thing. You do know ghosts aren’t supposed to feel most sorts of things.”
“Well, I’m probably not properly human or properly alive anymore, so…” She frowned. “Maybe I’m part cat now. You can feel cats, right? They can hurt you?”
To her amazement, Edwin had started to blush. “Yes. We can feel cats.”
Wait. “Edwin, what happened while I was gone? Did you touch the Cat King?”
“Not while you were gone!” He said too loudly.
“Did you touch the Cat King before I was gone?”
“No! If anything, he touched me.”
“In an ‘I should go back to Port Townsend and yell at him’ way?”
“Charles may have already done that. With his cricket bat.”
It was good he had Charles – and probably Crystal – to do that kind of thing for him. And now they’d have Niko to make them apologize to people who didn’t actually need to be yelled at. Which definitely did not include the Cat King.
“Are you and Charles okay? About the L-O-V-E thing, I mean. I bet it was a lot to have that and then be kidnapped right after. Again.”
“And then you died.” He added, snappily, but he was also blushing even harder than before.
“Edwin. What happened?” Niko hadn’t ever seen anyone blush this hard. She hadn’t even known ghosts could blush. This was amazing. “Edwin, did you…?”
“We just kissed, okay. That’s it. Maybe a couple of times, and it was very recent, and-”
There was the sound of thudding coming up the stairs.
“Edwin Payne I had to go through like fifty dimensions to get back here you are not keeping details from me. I don’t care if you’re repressed-”
And the door to the office burst open to reveal a sopping-wet Crystal, and swung shut through Charles as he followed after her.
“Got the poltergeist off the bus!” He reported, hurrying over to snag the appropriate card off the wall. “Do you want to play ludo after we’re done for the night?”
“Charles,” Edwin said, rather sternly.
“Oh, and Crystal fell in the river, but she’s alright, yeah?”
“Crystal wants to take six million showers,” Crystal said, “right after someone tells me why the fuck that looks like Niko. Edwin, what the fuck?”
“It is me,” Niko said, because she hated the fact that all the triumph of Crystal’s successful case had washed away at the sight of her. “My good luck charm worked, kind of. I wasn’t all the way dead, and Death didn’t come for me or anything. I just got… lost, I guess. For a little while.”
“I checked,” Edwin assured them, waving that wand of his around again. “I confess she is not completely alive, as best I can tell, but neither is she completely dead, and Tragic Mick did confirm her story as best he could, so with all the evidence we have now, I think it is safe to assume-”
“I’m really sorry about this,” Crystal said, and then she left a trail of squelching wet footprints all across the office to give Niko the most sopping, stinky, awful hug of her entire life.
It was basically perfect. Even if Crystal was definitely using it as an excuse to check if Niko was lying with her psychic powers.
“I really missed you,” Niko said.
“You missed me?” Crystal was frowning at her, but she also hadn’t let go of Niko’s hands. “I thought you were dead, Niko. You saved me, and you died, and I missed you so much, I-”
The second hug was also wet and stinky and perfect. This time, Niko didn’t let her go. Not until after Charles had hugged them both and Edwin had started to make noises about ‘the amount of water on the floor, Crystal, and do you have any idea what kind of strange sicknesses could be in that river? Because we have no need to become a dead girl detective agency any time soon.’
So they had to both go take a turn in the tiny shower in the bathroom at the agency, and by the time Niko was done, and wearing her change of clothes, Jenny was there, and Niko got a hug from an entirely different person who looked like they would never have voluntarily hugged anyone in their entire lives. That was at least the third today.
So basically, it was amazing, and she’d been entirely right. This dimension was home.