Page 106 of Dead Vengeance

“Oh, good.” He lets out an audible sigh of relief. “So those things upstairs in your room are…” He trails off, waiting for me to fill in the blank.

“Not antiques… They’re… necromancer stuff. But they’re how I find the antiques.”

“Then you…” He narrows his eyes at me, not quite grasping it yet. And how could he?

“Liam, I’d love to show you my office and explain everything to you. Would you… come upstairs with me?”

thirty-one

Dead Vengeance

Liam

I’m on high alert, staring down the hall into the darkness. I’m expecting to be swept up in the smoke and spiders of another hallucination at any moment. Expecting Jem to reach out of the void for me. Or, at the very least, expecting a random ghost to jump out at us for another chat. But none of it happens, and we cross the threshold from the dark hall into his ‘office’ safely.

It still feels ridiculous he calls it that. As if he’s in here making spreadsheets and pie charts, or hashing out marketing plans, or whatever people usually do in offices.

He’s held my hand since we were on the sofa, all the way up the stairs and through the door, but as soon as we’re inside he steps back, giving me a respectful distance. Space to look around. Not that I need it. I took in more than enough yesterday. It was frightening then, and it’s frightening now. Only in a different way.

I still don’t understand any of it, but now everything holds a different weight. One that maybe makes or breaks how I feel about Archer.

I wish, again, that we could go back to the ease of how things were in the car that night. Or when we had breakfast that morning. Those short snatches of time when our true realities weren’t breaking into what was a beautiful fantasy.

I wonder if it was that for him too.

“Welcome to my office,” he says softly. “The base of all my operations.” He points at the wall where those red and dark and perfectly satanic-looking words are scrawled. “Welcome to Dead Vengeance.”

“What the fuck is Dead Vengeance?” I utter, maybe sounding a little more scared and a little more forceful than I’d meant to.

Archer grins. “Dead Vengeance is your one-stop-shop for all things unrequited, unresolved, and unerringly revisionist. We set the record straight, so you don’t have to.” He’s switched from worried, careful, into what sounds like a sales pitch, made kind of cute, if a little bizarre, by the fact he’s still in his pyjamas and dressing gown, which look so nice on him. Homely. Hard to keep my hands off of on the sofa downstairs.

He snatches an actual pamphlet off his messy desk and thrusts it out for me to take, that same writing on the front of it, DEAD VENGEANCE, like it’s… a company logo?

“Picture this,” he says, standing back, arms stretched wide like he’s showing me a screen. Or a whiteboard. “You’re dead. Let’s say you were murdered, or framed for a crime you didn’t commit, then executed, which is actually the same thing. Or let’s say someone badmouthed you after you died, and you went down in the history books as a villain because you never got a chance to set the record straight. You’d haunt the heck out of the place, wouldn’t you?”

“I might…” I mumble. “I guess…”

He claps his hands together so enthusiastically I jump. “Well, now you don’t need to! Finally, there’s a service for the dead in which we—I, so far—right the wrongs of the past in exchange for a little kickback on the side.”

“You…” My mouth drops open as the understanding clicks into place. “You help the dead move on… for a fee?”

“In this economy, you have to learn to pivot,” he explains excitedly. “Put all your weird skills to work to make a living in whatever way you can. Think outside the box—”

“Archer, slow down…”

He shoves his hand in his pockets and presses his lips with a keen nod.

“How…” Where to even start with the billions of questions I have? “Wait. You’re telling me you find a ghost who has problems, have them pay you somehow, and you… solve all the problems they left behind to help them cross over?”

Another nod, sharper this time. “That’s exactly right.”

“And they pay you?”

“Yes. Perfectly correct.” He nods again. Very happily. Like whatever weight was on him this morning from our falling out has lifted. And also, like he’s… proud. Which is very sweet.

“But they’re dead…” Okay, very much stating the obvious here, but I just need a moment to get this straight. “How do they pay you?”

He gives me a shrug and a grin. “Depends on the client. My nice car?”