HE COULD TOUCH ME AFTER I DIED

Chapter 1 — The Ghost at Her Own Funeral

Aurevia opened her eyes to the muffled sound of crying.

At first, she could barely make out her surroundings. The light above her seemed too bright. Dozens of candles burned along both sides of the hall, their flames reflected in the black stone pillars, and the air smelled of white flowers and melted wax. She knew this place. It was the main hall of the Serranthe estate, normally used for banquets and family councils.

Today, black drapes covered the walls.

The hall was crowded.

Almost everyone there was a vampire she knew.

Some stood with their heads bowed. Others pressed handkerchiefs to their eyes. Several older members of the family had gathered near the wall, speaking in hushed voices. Every so often, someone glanced toward the center of the hall, only to look away again almost immediately.

Aurevia still had no idea what was going on when her body tipped forward. Instinctively, she reached for the bench beside her.

Her hand went straight through the wood.

She froze.

Her hand looked perfectly normal, right down to the color on her nails, but her palm had touched nothing. She tried again. No change. Her arm passed through the back of the bench as if it were made of air, without the slightest resistance.

“What the hell...?”

The words left her mouth, but no one reacted.

A relative happened to walk past. Aurevia turned to call out, and their shoulders met—or at least, she thought they would. Instead, the man passed straight through her without noticing a thing. He did not slow down. He did not even look back.

Aurevia stared after him until he disappeared into the crowd, then slowly lowered her gaze. She pinched her own arm, then pressed a palm to her chest.

No pain. No warmth.

And no heartbeat.

A vampire’s heart beat far more slowly than a human’s, but while she was alive, she had never been completely unable to feel it.

Then her mother’s sob broke through the room.

Aurevia looked up.

There was a coffin in the middle of the hall.

It was made of deep black wood, edged in silver, with the Serranthe crest carved into the front. White flowers surrounded it. Her father stood beside the coffin with one hand resting on its edge. His back was still straight, but exhaustion showed plainly on his face. Her mother sat nearby with relatives around her, her eyes swollen red from crying, the handkerchief in her hand already soaked through.

Aurevia walked toward them slowly. The closer she came to the coffin, the hollower she felt inside.

A woman lay inside.

Her long hair had been carefully arranged over her shoulders. She wore the black formal dress Aurevia kept buried at the back of her wardrobe—the one she had only worn to a few important functions before deciding the collar was too tight and abandoning it altogether.

The woman’s hands had been folded over her abdomen. White flowers rested against her chest.

Aurevia looked at her face and forgot how to take another step.

The sounds around her faded until all she could hear was the occasional faint crackle of candlewick. It took another sob from her mother to push her forward.

The woman in the coffin had Aurevia’s face.

Slowly, Aurevia raised a hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she reached for the pale cheek.

Her fingers touched nothing.

They passed straight through.

She jerked her hand back. Her breathing stopped halfway through an inhale, and only then did she realize she had not actually drawn in any air.

“How...?”

She looked at her parents, then at the room full of people dressed in black.

No one could hear her.

A relative steadied her mother and murmured, “Sit down. Please. You’ve been on your feet all day and you haven’t eaten anything since this morning.”

“How am I supposed to eat when she’s right there?” Her mother’s voice began to shake again. She bowed her head and dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief.

Her father did not join the conversation. He remained beside the coffin. Whenever someone approached to offer condolences, he answered with a brief nod. The man Aurevia knew had always been composed, even during family meetings that dissolved into arguments at midnight. Today, even acknowledging people looked exhausting.

Aurevia started toward her mother.

She had only taken a few steps when the crowd parted on the other side of the hall.

Dacien walked in.

Aurevia stopped the moment she saw him.

She had known him for far too many years, since they were young, and she had rarely seen him look this disheveled. His clothes were still properly arranged, but one button at his collar had been left undone. His hair had not been fixed. Dark shadows sat beneath his eyes, and his face looked barely better than the corpse in the coffin.

He came to a stop beside her body and placed one hand against the coffin’s edge. His thumb moved back and forth over the grain of the wood.

A young vampire who knew him well followed a few steps behind. After watching him for a while, he finally reached out and patted Dacien’s shoulder.

“You stayed here all night, and you’ve been standing since this morning. There are enough people here. Go rest for a while. No one’s going to think you didn’t care about her.”

Dacien seemed not to hear him. His eyes remained fixed on the coffin.

Only after a long silence did he say quietly, “I won’t sleep if I go back. If I stay here, at least I can still be with her.”

His friend frowned and looked ready to argue, then thought better of it. An older woman nearby overheard and sighed before stepping closer.

“Dacien, everyone knows how long you and Aurevia were together. None of us can accept what happened to her. But if you keep this up and collapse before the funeral is over, her parents will have to worry about you too.”

Dacien rubbed a hand over his eyes.

“I know.” His voice was hoarse with exhaustion. “Just give me a little more time.”

The woman did not press him. She only gave his arm two gentle pats before stepping away.

Aurevia stood several paces from him, watching.

The last time they had seen each other, Dacien had said that once he finished dealing with the work on his hands, he would take her away for a few days. She had complained that he always blamed work for everything. She had grumbled for a while, but she had not actually been angry.

Now he was standing beside her coffin.

Aurevia walked over.

“Dacien.”

He did not look up.

She moved closer and reached for his arm. “You really can’t hear me?”

Her hand passed through his sleeve.

Dacien lowered his head as though something inside him had finally given way. He stood with his eyes closed for a long time. When he opened them again, they were wet.

He bent over the coffin and smoothed a strand of hair away from the dead woman’s face. His movements were slow. His fingers lingered near her cheek before he finally pulled them back.

The people nearby quietly moved away to give him space.

Aurevia stared at his reddened eyes, her throat tightening. Without thinking, she tried to put her arms around him.

Her entire body passed through his.

She went still.

Dacien felt nothing.

He remained beside the coffin, tears slipping from the corners of his eyes.

Aurevia slowly lowered her arms.

Footsteps sounded from farther down the hall.

Erynd entered carrying a stack of lists for the funeral arrangements. He was dressed in black formalwear, his collar fastened properly, his cuffs as neat as ever. People stopped him several times on his way in with questions. He answered each one patiently. When a relative asked about the cemetery arrangements, he checked the time on one of the papers and instructed someone to prepare two more carriages.

Only after he had dealt with all of that did he come to the coffin.

Aurevia saw him and called out automatically.

“Erynd.”

The steward did not react.

He first gave her father a quiet update on the remaining arrangements. Once he had confirmed there was nothing else requiring immediate attention, he finally fell silent.

Her father looked at him. “Go sit down for a while. You’ve been carrying everything in this house for the past few days.”

Erynd shook his head. “I’m still fine. I’ll rest after the guests have left.”

“She always hated it when you did this.”

The list in Erynd’s hand bent slightly beneath his fingers.

He lowered his eyes. The corner of his mouth shifted, but the smile never formed. “Every time Miss Aurevia said that, she would turn around and give me something new to do five minutes later.”

Her father said nothing after that.

Standing beside them, Aurevia suddenly remembered dozens of scenes exactly like it. She had always complained that Erynd managed too much of her life while simultaneously dumping every inconvenience she had on him. What she wanted to eat. Where she had left an outfit. An invitation she had forgotten to answer. Dacien deciding at the last minute that he would stay for dinner.

All she ever had to do was call Erynd’s name.

Erynd finally stepped up to the coffin and looked inside.

Until that moment, he had remained composed in front of everyone. Now that no one was asking him questions, the control in his expression slowly loosened, and his eyes began to redden.

He rested his fingers against the edge of the coffin and left them there.

“Miss Aurevia,” he said so quietly that only someone standing close could have heard. “Everything at home has been taken care of. You don’t have to worry.”

Aurevia stood beside him, her chest aching.

“I’m right here.”

Of course, Erynd did not hear her.

He remained there with his head lowered for a while. Then someone called to him from behind, and he gathered himself again before turning away to deal with the next task.

Aurevia watched him go.

As her gaze followed him across the room, it landed by chance on the far end of the hall.

Sairen Asterveil stood there.

The witch clan’s Divine Son.

He had positioned himself well away from the crowd. He wore the dark robes common among witches and no ornament bearing the crest of House Serranthe. Aurevia barely knew him. They occasionally crossed paths in a corridor or the library, but most of their interactions had amounted to a nod in passing.

And yet he had come today.

Aurevia watched him for a while.

Almost everyone in the hall showed some sign of grief. Even relatives who had never been particularly close to her paused beside the coffin for a moment before moving on. Sairen, by contrast, looked completely calm. His eyes were not red. His expression had not changed at all.

Aurevia immediately found that irritating.

She walked over and stopped in front of him, giving him a long look.

“We knew each other, technically. You can’t even pretend to be sad?”

Sairen’s gaze remained fixed somewhere ahead.

Aurevia waited, then deliberately shifted sideways until she blocked his view of the coffin.

“I know we weren’t close, but the person lying in there was still someone you knew. Why are you standing all the way over here?”

Sairen did not react. He did not even look at her.

Then Aurevia remembered that no one else could hear her either, and the irritation drained almost as quickly as it had come. She waved a hand in front of Sairen’s face twice and started to turn away.

His eyes seemed to shift with her.

Aurevia stopped.

She stared at him for two seconds, then moved one step to the left.

Sairen remained exactly as he had been. His gaze did not move again.

Aurevia decided she had imagined it and walked away.

Once she returned to the coffin, she finally tried to remember what had happened before she woke up.

The memory was incomplete.

She remembered leaving the estate alone that afternoon. The weather had been pleasant, the streets busy. She had followed one of her usual routes through the city, wondering whether she should go see Dacien that evening.

Then there had been a strange scraping noise above her, like something hard dragging against stone.

She looked up.

A huge shadow dropped toward her.

A chunk of stone was falling from above.

Aurevia did not even have time to dodge. Pain exploded across the top of her head. The street lurched in front of her, and all the sounds around her suddenly seemed very far away.

After that, there was nothing.

Aurevia looked back at the coffin.

Her body lay inside. There was no obvious wound on her face, and her hair had been carefully arranged. She reached up and touched the top of her own head, although of course her ghostly body carried no pain from the injury.

She searched her memory again and came up with the same sequence.

The stone fell.

She lost consciousness.

The next time she opened her eyes, her family was holding her funeral.

Aurevia muttered, “A rock fell on me and killed me?”

No one in the hall answered.

Dacien still stood beside her coffin. A friend handed him another drink, which he accepted but did not touch. Erynd was at the entrance speaking to the people handling the next stage of the funeral. Her mother leaned against a relative, her eyes never leaving the coffin.

Standing in the middle of all of them, Aurevia finally understood that she had somehow left the world they still belonged to.

She did not notice the man on the far side of the hall.

Sairen slowly lifted his eyes.

His gaze settled on the place where she had been standing.