Chapter Text
Muffled thuds from downstairs pulled Jenny gently from slumber. She blinked up at her ceiling for a moment, brain and limbs heavy with sleep, vision fuzzy, and for a moment didn’t know what had woken her. Another thud echoed through the frame of her building. Lightning struck her heart. She jolted upright, eyes wide all of a sudden, the last remnants of sleep forgotten.
Niko!
It was a stupid thought. A stupid fear. Niko was dead. (And the last time Jenny had seen her had been in the shattered, blown out remains of her life’s work.)
No, it was probably a burglar, breaking through her boarded up windows to steal whatever equipment she had left that she hadn’t sold off or trashed already. Some of it still worked, after all. Or it was just the wind rattling the bones of a structure that she didn’t quite trust to be stable at the moment, whatever the appraiser had said. (Which, okay, sure, the explosion hadn’t hit any load bearing walls. It didn’t mean she felt safe here.)
There was a cleaver on Jenny’s bedside table. There had always been a cleaver on Jenny’s bedside table, before she had two teenage tenants, before she found out she had four teenage tenants, before ghosts and demons and witches and whatever the hell else was apparently real. (Before she had three teenage tenants remaining.)
(Maybe she’d never felt safe here. Maybe here wasn’t why Jenny felt unsafe.)
She scooped up the cleaver in her left hand and let her bare feet fall to the floor. Her toes dug into the plush rug she had at the side of her bed. She soaked in the warmth as she stood, ears alert, and cast a look at her old digital alarm clock. 11:32pm.
Maybe it was just Crystal banging away downstairs. Stress cleaning or whatever. It was Crystal last time. It was usually Crystal, actually, when there was a weird noise somewhere in the building. Crystal or her ghosts, who were the very definition of in cahoots because apparently they had a whole regular Scooby-Doo thing going on—except with them the monsters were actual monsters. (Sue her for the comparison. Niko had liked to watch that. And Jenny couldn’t get Niko—quiet, cheerful, intrusive Niko, who’d only ever wanted to help—off her brain.)
Though, the ghosts apparently had their own place they were no longer prohibited from going back to (which, what? Jenny hadn’t asked. She didn’t want to know), so it was probably just Crystal.
She didn’t loosen her grip on her cleaver. Eleven-thirty at night didn’t feel too early for a burglar. Some people got robbed in the middle of the fucking day, didn’t they? She padded to the door and remembered the last time she had burst in on Crystal, downstairs in the shop after closing. It didn’t feel the same right now. They’d swept up all the glass, gotten most of the loose debris, but… Jenny slipped her feet into her shoes, sans socks, and grabbed a jacket to toss over her sleep shirt. It wasn’t much, but it made her feel a little better as she headed down the stairs. She didn’t bother to be quiet. It didn’t matter who was downstairs—Crystal, a burglar, fucking ghosts—she wanted them to hear her coming.
Maybe then she wouldn’t have to deal with them.
She felt a little bad at the thought. If it was Crystal, dealing with the grief of losing a friend…
She hoped it wasn’t Crystal. She really hoped there wasn’t a burglar in her shop because after Maxine she wasn’t sure she could actually slice anyone with her cleaver. She stepped into the backroom.
Some fucking ironic force of the universe granted her her wish in the worst possible way. It wasn’t Crystal, bent over one of her butcher blocks. It wasn’t a burglar, sleeves rolled up and a knife in one hand. It was one of Crystal’s ghost friends. He’d turned all the lights on, more than enough for Jenny to see that there was blood on his hands, streaked up his exposed forearms.
Jenny didn’t used to think of herself as squeamish. She didn’t faint at the sight of animal blood, she was fine with hospitals, and chopping up raw meat was literally her job. (Was. She didn’t know what the fuck she was going to do now.) Then Maxine died in her shop. Then she had found Niko’s still body in the ruins of her father’s business and her emotions had gone on a rollercoaster she was probably still on. Sheer relief had pushed her up when Crystal had come back and helped her pull Niko upright. Relief that had kept her strong, let her shove Crystal and Niko out of the walking hazard that was her life, off to face the fucking witch who’d blown it up.
And then everything after the relief, the terrifying plummet downwards. Crystal, stumbling back alone, into her arms. Niko, dead.
She wasn’t squeamish. But she didn’t have a lot of experience with human blood either, human injuries that maimed and killed. And Crystal’s ghost friends… they looked human.
It was the bitchy one standing in her backroom now, the one she’d seen less of than the other. Edwin. He usually wore old-fashioned formal clothing. Right now he had shed his usual overcoat, rolled his sleeves up above his elbows. He’d had to: his forearms were coated in flecks of blood as his nimble fingers picked at a mess of red and white on her butcher block.
Jenny felt her legs go a little weak, even though the second glance let her see clearly that the blood wasn’t his. (If ghosts even had blood.) The hand that wasn’t holding her cleaver reached out to press reassuringly against the nearest wall, holding her steady. She wasn’t sure if she should have been trying to banish her fear or not. Edwin wasn’t an intruder (or, well, technically he was, he was just one she’d started to expect) but the blood wasn’t the least bit reassuring.
Had Crystal been making friends with animal mutilators? Should she have asked more questions about ghosts? Maybe all those horror movies she’d watched were closer to the truth than her own lived experience from these last few weeks. Crystal’s friends had seemed so normal that Jenny had been able to mostly put it from her mind that they were already dead. She couldn’t forget that now.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she asked. Her voice came out too weak, too high-pitched. Thready and panicked. Jenny hated it, but her chest felt like she was close to hyperventilating and her brain wanted to send her to the floor, so she couldn’t do much about it either.
The ghost jumped a little, hands stilling, but he got control of himself quicker than her, throwing her a glance over his shoulder. “Apologies,” he said, his own tone stiff and formal. “I assumed you would be asleep at this hour.”
That absolutely did not answer her question. Her heart pounded in her chest; the flutter somehow felt weakened and incredibly loud all at once. Edwin was Crystal’s friend. But Edwin had snuck into her shop to carve up small animals while everyone else was asleep.
She pointed her cleaver at him. Her grip wasn’t firm—and, honestly, she wasn’t expecting to use it. Would it even work on a ghost?—but she wasn’t backing down from figuring out what the fuck was going on here either. She needed answers, before the dizziness in her head traveled down to her legs. She needed to know what the fuck was being done in her shop, with her tools.
There’d already been one murder here, and nearly several more. Jenny didn’t need any more deaths on her conscience.
“Hard to sleep when someone’s killing small animals in my shop,” she said, accusing.
Edwin gave her a look, plain and exasperated, as if she was the one overreacting here. As if he was the adult in this situation, and her the child. “Where else would you prefer that I do so?”
Literally anywhere else! (Jenny ignored the little voice in her head that told her that butcher shops, generally speaking, perhaps were the best equipped places to dismember small animals. Even butcher shops that had recently had their storefront blown up. Usually, she was the one doing the dismembering and she knew exactly where those animals were coming from.)
“Besides,” said a voice behind her that was way too chipper for the hour, “we didn’t kill it, it was dead already.”
Shit, fuck, and god fucking dammit! Jenny jumped and had to sag against the wall again to still her beating heart as the other ghost walked past her into the room, grinning. A flood of dizziness washed over her, heat in her breast and nothing in her head.
“Whoops!” the other ghost—Charles—said, still too cheery, and he paused at her side instead of continuing on to his friend’s. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Doing alright?”
Jenny gaped at him. “Am I…? What the fuck!”
Charles winced. “Right, sorry about that.”
Jenny looked between the two ghosts for a moment. Her eyes flickered down to the white feathers drifting down to her floor.
“You know what?” she decided. “This isn’t my problem. I’m going back to bed and this mess better not be here in the morning when I wake up.”
“You got it,” Charles agreed cheerfully, with a fake little sloppy salute.
“We are not children,” Edwin said haughtily. “We can clean up our own messes.”
Jenny did not point out that he was dead, or that he had blood all over his forearms: she knew perfectly well that they weren’t children, thank you very much. Children would have the good sense to be in bed at this hour. (Or maybe not. What the fuck did she know about children? At least they probably wouldn’t be elbow deep in a dead bird.)
She shook her head, thanked a nebulous unnamed cosmic force she probably didn’t believe in that her legs weren’t shaking too, and went back to bed.
Sure enough, the mess was gone in the morning. Not that the butcher shop was clean, exactly—Esther fucking Finch had blown it the fuck up, after all—but there was no blood or feathers, no matter how hard she looked. And whether it was morbid curiosity or a desire to scold someone or just an inability to believe in such a thing as a responsible teenager—dead or otherwise—Jenny did look. Peered behind and underneath the butcher block, checked the cracks between it and the counter. There wasn’t a feather out of place and the boys—and Crystal—were nowhere to be seen.
The three of them—Crystal, really—must have gotten up early. Off on another case, probably, another thing they wanted to wrap up before Crystal left town. Like cleaning up Niko’s room.
Not Jenny’s problem. Nothing to do with her. She had enough on her plate as it was.
But she couldn’t stop thinking about that dead bird in her shop. She couldn’t stop seeing the streaks of red on Edwin’s forearms when she closed her eyes. She couldn’t stop thinking about Niko.
She had Crystal’s number. She could text. Check in on her. See what was going on. Get a goddamn explanation. But she wasn’t the girl’s mother. She didn’t want to be the responsible adult in this relationship, just the distant landlord. (Maybe, maybe, the cool older friend.)
Jenny called up her insurance instead (again) and continued the hassle of trying to figure out whether or not she was covered for a fucking bomb.
That afternoon, Crystal fucking Palace stumbled into Jenny’s butcher shop—through the side door; they had the front all boarded up now—with blood on her hands. There was a dead seagull cupped in them too, her hair windswept and her chest heaving a little, as if she’d just run up from the beach with the dead thing in her grip.
Well, that gave Jenny a bit more information that she hadn’t been looking for. Or thinking about.
“What the fuck is that?” she blurted out, despite the fact that it was pretty fucking obvious what it was. More obvious than the partially dissected bird last night had been, at least.
Crystal blinked at her. “You said you were going shopping this afternoon.”
Was something like this always happening in her shop when she said she was going to be out? Or when she was fucking sleeping? God, was this what kids were doing these days? (Probably not. Jenny figured Crystal and her two ghost pals were the opposite of ‘kids these days’.)
“Plans change,” she deadpanned, staring at the teenager.
Crystal blinked at her again. Her cupped hands offered up the dead bird. “Know anything about seagulls?”
Oh, for Christ’s sake!
Jenny wound up with blood on her hands, of course, fingers digging around the innards of a dead seagull Crystal and her ghost friends had apparently found on the beach. She’d stopped Crystal before she could get any more information out. Jenny very much did not want to know if there was some kind of seagull-killing monster in her town or whatever the fuck else it could be. She had enough to deal with with witches and ghosts and fucking demons.
Crystal was lucky a dead bird was a dead bird and that Jenny had done this before with chickens and turkeys and the occasional quail.
“Do I want to know why you and your friends are removing the air sacs and hearts of dead birds you found on the beach? You know these things are crawling with disease, right?” Wanting not to know what killed the thing was a very different question from the sensible inquiry into why the fuck they were interested in seagull organs. (If they needed bird hearts, Jenny could just get them some. She wasn’t sure she would, but she could.)
“We’ll wash our hands,” Crystal said, clearly not paying much attention to Jenny’s words. Instead she was watching Jenny’s fingers with interest and only occasionally wincing at the blood and viscera.
Oh, great. They’d wash their hands. That would solve everything! Teenagers! Jenny huffed out a sigh and didn’t think too deeply about the fact that she was now the one with her hands in the dead bird. Better her than Crystal, at least. Her fingers settled on the bird’s heart. Her vision wavered.
Jenny knew this sensation. She’d felt it just last night, walking in on two ghosts dissecting freshly dead birds in her dissected butcher shop. Only last night had been a perfectly natural reaction to the fear generated by wandering in on dead kids covered in blood. A little dizzy spell was definitely preferable to a heart attack.
Today’s reaction, though…
Shit! Jenny barely had the time to think before the dizziness overcame her and she passed right the fuck out.
She came to only a few seconds later, butt on the floor of the shop. She blinked, waiting for her brain to catch up with her vision, and realized she was staring into Crystal’s worried expression, the girl’s hands just above Jenny’s elbows, holding her upright.
“What. The fuck. Just happened.” She exhaled the words with a throat that wheezed, dry and tight. Sure, she’d gotten faint last night. And there had been that mess with the fucking demon that possessed her. But Jenny Green didn’t faint. She didn’t.
Crystal, speaking quickly, filled her in on the situation.
The good news: Crystal had caught her before she’d hit her head or anything else. Her tailbone didn’t even ache from her abrupt transition to the floor. The fainting spell had been caused, presumably, by direct contact with the heart. She was fine now that she wasn’t touching it.
The bad news: Crystal’s hands still had bird blood all over them and now it was on Jenny’s shirt, her arms, her floor, as Crystal had braced herself to lower Jenny carefully without hurting her and her own hands had flopped uselessly downward.
The incomprehensible news: The dead seagull was apparently a part of a case Crystal and her two ghost friends were finishing up before Crystal left town in a few days, back to London, just as Jenny had suspected. What she hadn’t even begun to consider was that before it was a dead seagull it was an evil seagull. Whatever the fuck that meant. Not to mention that the currently-dead-formerly-evil seagulls had something to do with severed feet that had been washing up on the shores of Port Townsend.
When Jenny felt faint all over again at the story, it was entirely back to being a natural reaction. She kept her butt firmly on the floor as Crystal rambled and let the girl think it was solely as a result of touching the fucking bird’s heart. Because apparently touching an evil seagull’s heart was enough to make a regular human pass the fuck out.
What. The fuck.
“Okay,” she said, when Crystal finished summarizing the situation for her. “First, I didn’t ask.” She ignored the fact that her first words on waking up had been ‘What the fuck just happened?’ “Second, next time you want to dissect the root of all evil or whatever, let one of your ghost friends do it, yeah? They didn’t seem to have any problems last night.”
Crystal at least had the good graces to look a little sheepish about that. “I didn’t think it’d be a problem,” she said.
“Well, it was,” Jenny pointed out bluntly, then immediately felt bad when Crystal looked a little crestfallen. Shit. Right. Teenagers. “Look, I don’t blame you for not realizing the… the evil seagull heart would be dangerous.” What. The fuck. Was her life? “Just, be a little more careful next time, maybe? Check in with your ghost friends. They’re supposed to be the experts, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.”
“There you go then. Just—stop hiding it, okay? Your friends can dissect as many dead birds as they want in the shop, just so long as you keep your fingers out of them, got it?”
“Yeah, got it,” Crystal said, back to looking sheepish again. She cast her gaze around the shop. “Look, I can clean up—”
Jenny pointed a finger at her. “No,” she said. “I mean, fuck, help me up.” She took the hand Crystal offered her and heaved herself to her feet. “Yes, clean up, please, but don’t touch the bird. Leave that to your friends. I’m going to go fucking shower. And just… tell them not to wake me up in the middle of the night again?”
“Tell them yourself,” Crystal muttered under her breath. Jenny figured it was less a dig at her than it was a plea to the boys—she wondered how many times they’d woken Crystal up in the middle of the night, then decided she didn’t want to know that either.
“Right,” she said. She smoothed down her shirt, realized she still had blood all over her hands and wasn’t even wearing her apron, and let out an emphatic, “Fuck!” again. It wasn’t like she wouldn’t be able to get the blood out of what she was wearing—she had a lifetime of experience with that, and a few blood stains never hurt anyone—but the butcher shop was supposed to be closed. Nearly permanently at that, maybe. She was wearing clothes to go shopping in, not something to toss blood around in. Fuck.
Crystal looked like she was going to reach out to her. Or apologize. Jenny pointed another finger at her. “Don’t,” she said, and then she swept out of the room, leaving the mess behind her for a hot fucking shower. It was a good thing she kept the wine in her room.