I woke late the next morning and, after a long shower, slipped on a black skirt and overdress over my white gown and slipping Annabelle’s red leather jacket over all that. My hair wrapped in a towel while it finished drying, I went into the main part of Vergil’s fourth floor and to the small kitchen area.

  Vergil, always one to celebrate me staying, had went to ordering pizza the night before, and I fetched a few leftovers and slapped them on a plate I brought to the microwave. Letting out a long sigh of exhaustion as I rested my forehead against the cabinet and closed my eyes while I waited. The dim ring of a headache wanting to curse me as I tried not to let the stress keep getting to me, as little as I’d slept last night. The sound of the coffee pot being fumbled with beside me the only thing that stopped all sense of time disappearing; even as I ignored it until a cold chill ran down my spine.

  “Hey, Calliope,” I muttered, looking over to the ghost beside me. Once a young woman of my age, the ghost was now completely white and translucent, with the only color two glowing red death marks on her forehead and chest. She wore old colonial clothes, rather like fancier versions of the ones she’d helped me sew, and smelled of the cold. Currently floating above the ground as usual, she set the coffee maker to brew as I told her, “I could have done that.”

  “You were looking pretty out of it there, Mary Cherry, so I’m helping out,” the ghost told me, smiling as she gestured to me to sit at the breakfast bar. Not one to complain, I did so and started eating as she continued, “besides, you showed up looking depressed, your phone was turned off and in your room all night, and you barely laughed during our Kart competition, and you brought enough clothes for at least a few days. I took it that you got into a fight or something, you know?”

  “Something like that, just lying low for a few days. I’m going to have someone drop off some papers late, but probably the only guest,” I said, sighing as I closed my eyes. I turned on my phone last night for a time, trying to not read several texts or go through the voicemail I’d been sent. Instead I’d just had a brief call with Barbie where I offered a date idea to counter hers and another to tell Allie to meet me here before shutting it off once more.

  “Well, you’re always welcome here,” Calliope told me, smiling as she ‘sat’ on the breakfast bar next to my plate. “Honestly I told Vergil he should offer you that guest room full time. I couldn’t imagine living in that fucking houses basement, it looks disgusting. I wouldn’t have lived there when I was alive.”

  “It has woods I can run around in as a wolf, can’t do that here. Good human-wolf balance for the whole Purist thing,” I countered with a small laugh, not sure how else to describe the appeal. Besides that, I was still loosely under parole, and I imagined moving in with one of The Lady’s coworkers was as likely to make her mad as it was to get me in trouble easier.

  Even those matters aside, I wasn’t sure I could put up with Calliope’s energy or trying to borrow my body full time. Letting her get to borrow me a couple times a month already involved some schedule carving, and that said nothing of the fourth floor’s smell. There were no natural scents up here, no dust, no smells in the carpet, nothing. Food, blood, nothing left more than a temporary smell on the air, and I still couldn’t figure out how that worked.

  I ate in peace, and once I finished I set up a small work station in the main part of the fourth floor on a poker table with the cover pulled over. Calliope stayed nearby for a bit where a bit where we tried unsuccessfully to maintain a conversation. The attempt generally ending in me zoning out trying read a paper and not hearing her, before Calliope eventually flew out of the room to Vergil’s own bedroom.

  Not long after that, Allie came up the elevator — surprising me a little bit she had a key too — carrying two large file boxes. I helped her take both to the table, and we started pulling papers out as she explained, “I worked my way back to the late eighties before the disappearances stopped happening, at least until I stopped just looking for missing persons. Found a few cases that looked suspicious nearby a couple decades back, but The Lady had those files sealed, told me it wasn’t related. Didn’t see anything ghost related though that would give us any real idea what was going on.”

  “What are we looking at then?” I asked, frowning as I started to organize the reports in piles based on years.

  Clicking her tongue, Allie started to set up her own binder as she explained, “I got curious, so I ran a check on some basic things. Unsolved murders, nothing that stuck out. Kidnappings, nothing. I tried to do something foolproof though, so I set up a program to check for a specific point — people with birth certificates and tax returns on file, but never did again and weren’t issued a death certificate.”

  “You fucking did all that?”

  “I took a few programming classes, took me like six hours to set up a code and run everything,” the woman brushed off with a sigh, “the point is though, I set it back five years to start and got four hits, two in the same year. Things were starting to slow down, I figured if I kept going I’d find something eventually. I kept getting hits back to the late 60s, from there I had to go through and figure out which ones I thought were related. You know?”

  “How many are we looking at?”

  “Somewhere between two hundred and eleven and two hundred and thirty eight,” the woman said, frowning as she clicked her tongue and ignoring my shocked stare, “I wasn’t sure on counting a lot of the older disappearances, they didn’t fit the same sort of profile as the others. Not as many college students, more just random queer people, didn’t want to accuse-”

  “Your ghost probably just likes that sort of thing,” Calliope said, surprising us both as she rose up through the table before floating over to sit on its edge. “I mean, might surprise y’all, but the climate changes a lot. College in the sixties wasn’t going to have as many people openly being gay — they were a lot, lots of gay guys in the dorms — but nowadays you see it more openly. If your ghost is into that sort of thing they’re going to be around a lot more college students nowadays than fifty years ago.”

  I nodded, furrowing my brow at the recommendation as I slowly admitted, “that…could be it actually. Would a ghost be that active around half-ones though?”

  “No idea, but maybe it’ll give us a glimpse into what’s going on,” Allie admitted, frowning as she took a note on her phone, “I go to a few meetups around the city, LGBT stuff, a few study groups, maybe I can get my mom to help make something for seeing if there’s ghosts there.”

  “Oh, you like women too?” I asked in perhaps the worst way possible, even as I was trying to figure out if I could ask her for relationship advice. The woman looked at me confused for a long time, and I tried to specify, “I do too. I was…you know…I’m new to this…I knew you like women, you have sex with The Lady… this shouldn’t be a surprise, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine, Mary,” Allie said slowly, furrowing her brow at the thought, “I’m also trans, if you hadn’t noticed.”

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  “Oh,” I said, genuinely having not, or at the least never really paid attention if I had. As bad as the Purists had been, I’d at least gotten used to not really caring how people looked and taking what they said at value. Gender was weird for werewolves, your body transitioned to whatever degree it wanted, and people kinda looked the same covered in mud and unwashed. All the same, that was weird to say, so instead I told her, “I’m trans too, you know. Becoming a werewolf does that sort of thing, you know?”

  “I’m doing stuff naturally, don’t really want the full works and feel better doing it this way,” Allie admitted with a shrug, seeming confused by my point. “I mean, still pretty good, Elizabeth raised me, offered to help me herself when I came out at like thirteen. I wasn’t sure about the magic change, but The Lady already paid for a lot of my shit so she agreed to get me medicine. Not very formal, a guy just shows up at my apartment every several months, draws my blood, leaves me a few plastic bags of pills and some instructions.”

  Calliope nodded, watching on in confusion as she asked, “how am I the only one here who lives a partway normal life? I ain’t even living.”

  “Actually, you might be able to help,” I said, frowning as I remembered what the Shadow and Chaser had both said, “what sort of Ghost gets made by someone getting killed by someone who loves them?”

  “A ghost?” Calliope asked, rolling her eyes at the question, “it doesn’t really create anything special on its own. I mean, have I ever told you how I died? Two guys were really into me, I kinda led them on, they decided to duel for me, I had to go to Belle Island and make a show of stopping them. Neither of them knew how to fucking use a pistol and I got shot twice while they were figuring it out. They loved me, I kinda loved them, I’m the same as any other ghost.”

  I nodded, watching her for a moment as I processed all that and told her, “that…good to know, but not sure it helps. This thing’s-”

  “Ahem.”

  “This ghost,” I corrected, “isn’t normal, it’s…I’m not sure, killing people, erasing them from existence? No one seems to remember the people it kills it’s like-”

  Calliope moved suddenly, floating straight in front of me as she said, “Mary, fucking lead with that next time, I know what you’re dealing with. During the eighties I was dating this vampire guy, real cowboy The Lady hated- never mind that’s not important. The point is, he dealt with something like this, told me about it happening in Leeds or Kent or one of those other places the British pretend are real. A ghost killed off an entire apartment building, no one knew until he was investigating something else. Found some random guy living in the building, not knowing he was dead.”

  I nodded, taking the story in with a furrowed brow as I looked papers over, slowly explaining, “I…I got some information, and was told not to learn this thing's name. What if it kills people who learn it exists?” Saying the words, I hastily searched the oldest pile, laying the five names there out in a row. “Phillip was researching historical hate crimes, Lucy went to a bar in Carytown, said she wanted to play music there or something. Her and Sigyn are dating, what’s the chance-”

  “There’s a gay bar there, they do live music pretty regularly,” Allie confirmed, frowning as she looked at the papers in front of her, “it’s not very historical there, I doubt you’d be hearing names from this far back and it’s not exactly a spot with a lot of old people. It’s also Carytown, so it’s not exactly the most attached to the rest of the city in terms of culture.”

  “But it’s a connection,” I said, frowning as I kept looking at the oldest files, finally announcing, “three of these people are within a year of each other, two of them are a good twenty years older. How did you determine who is gay or not?”

  “Partly guess work, but there were some hints,” Allie admitted, frowning as she looked down at explained, “the three younger people here, I found evidence they were involved in some pre-Stonewall demonstrations. This one was on some digitized police records, got brought in for cross dressing a few times — historically that can mean actual cross dresser or trans. These two girls were long term roommates, and this one was listed as a speaker at a march so I drew a conclusion there. The older guy I couldn’t find anything on, but the older woman I found mention of in some far right Baptist pamphlet — assholes being the best at digitizing some of their old stuff for some reason — and they accused her of having an affair with a student.”

  “They cared about that in the sixties?”

  “The fifties was when the accusation was made, but also no,” she explained, furrowing her brow as she flipped through and pointed at a paragraph, “they were accusing her, and she taught an all girls oil painting and all girls sculpture class at the local college. Time of questionable age gaps and affairs, and the gays were not immune.”

  I shrugged with a neutral sound, almost immediately realizing it was much weirder to a non-Purist as I hastily said, “weird yeah, weird relationship.”

  “I fucked my Piano and etiquette teacher, he was hot,” Calliope shrugged, laying across the table.

  “The Lady was sort of like a distant aunt, I think she asked mom to adopt me for someone, and she's like two thousand years older than me,” Allie agreed, sounding a bit disheartened, as though it had set in for her in that moment.

  “My ex-husband was like my third mentor, and then I almost dated Misha whose almost my dad’s age,” I agreed with a small sigh.

  “That point aside,” Allie started, raising her hands defensively, “if what you’re saying is true, then this entire first year of deaths might have known our ghost at least, right?”

  “At least,” I agreed, frowning as I picked up the sheet detailing the accusation of an affair with a teacher. A terrible photocopy, the words were barely legible, and the one large photo at the top, with an apparent circle drawn on it, was black and white with no details or shading. My eyes tracing over it, I frowned as I saw the year of the article, and I asked, “when was this first year of deaths?”

  “1968, why?”

  “Because the younger people in our first disapearances are thirty one and thirty two,” I said slowly, frowning as I tried to do the math in my head, “this picture was taken in 1954. They’d be like, eighteen or nineteen then right? Perfect age to be enrolled in our teacher’s college class here for the girls. Ghosts take a while to form, I was told this one would be years before, so-”

  “I can find an original picture,” Allie said quickly, snatching the paper up with a broad smile, “classes weren’t that big then, the college just digitized a bunch of its old records and photos a couple years ago. I know the year, I know the teacher, I can probably find shit out pretty fast.”

  “Any way to find out who our ghost is then?” I asked, furrowing my brow as I looked down at the paper. Someone knew these people, someone was a ghost who did this, and finding that out might have been dangerous but was our best bet for stopping this.

  “I’ll figure out who lived up to at least a few years before the first deaths,” Allie muttered, seemingly deep in thought, “most of these women are going to be straight, it’s before HIV even if a chunk of them are queer, maternal mortality wasn’t exactly the highest at this point. There’s no reason to think more than one or two of these students should have died that young even back then, which means-”

  “Likely any deaths there have a huge chance of being our ghost,” I agreed with a small sigh, slapping the woman on the shoulder, “get Elizabeth to get you a ward against ghosts and make it as strong as she can manage. We don’t know how this ghost works, but I do know learning the name is apparently dangerous.”

  “She was already prepping one for the guy decoding that video you sent. I’d had one I kept on me ever since I was old enough to go to school, I can get her to reinforce it,” Allie admitted as she pulled a small necklace from her shirt and held up a bone charm, “I’ll head back out, I left my laptop at The Lady’s house. I should have an answer for you sometime tomorrow, maybe the next day if I run into any issues or mom takes a minute on reinforcing my wards.”

  “Take your time, I have a date tonight and need to stop being dead tomorrow,” I muttered, resting my face in my hands, the weight of that resting on me.

  At least the date might have been relaxing.

  “Oh, Mary, why didn’t you tell me you had a date!” Calliope chirped, even as Allie quickly excused herself, leaving the papers behind. “Come on, let me do up your hair, I know what I’m doing.”

  “You’re a ghost from the 1700s, no offense but powdered wigs are kinda out of style,” I said, not sure what else to describe the issue as.

  “I know more modern stuff,” Calliope countered, smirking as she flew over to start playing with my hair, “come on, Catherine has some brushes and ties in her room, I think I can do something with it.”

  I nodded, slowly lifting up my head as I told her, “if I get laughed at you fucking owe me.”

  Calliope smirked as she leaned forward, testingly parting and bouncing my hair against her icy hands, “Any yarn or fabric you want; thirty yard bolt of fabric or fifteen skeins. If you get laid you owe me a third night this month.”