A couple days after finding Mathias’s missing sword, Holden and Sable crashed on the bed in Holden’s apartment located behind his office. Holden was sound asleep. Meanwhile, Sable was lying on the foot of the bed. The cait-sith had had been restless all night. In fact, Sable had felt restless every night ever since he started living with Holden.


    Sable couldn’t explain this restlessness. Was it anxiety from not finding any signs of the red pixie, or any of the other fey he had been held captive with? That certainly weighed on his mind, but didn’t feel like that was the reason he couldn’t sleep.


    Sable got up in the middle of the night to use the restroom. There was no way he could use a toilet, and cait-sith were too proud to use a litter box like common cats. Holden usually left the bathroom window open so Sable could use it to go outside. However, that night Sable found the window closed.


    “That dolt,” Sable grumbled. “He probably closed it by mistake. Idiot.”


    Sable jumped onto the bed and started pawing at Holden’s face. “Hey, chopped liver. I need to use the restroom.”


    Holden groaned as he rolled over, eyes still closed, to face Sable. “Use the window.”


    “You closed it, you fool.”


    “Can’t you just teleport through it?”


    “No. I can’t teleport to the other side of open barriers.”


    “Ugh.” Holden groggily got out of bed, opened the window, then fell right back asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.


    “Hoe can someone fall asleep so quickly?” Sable wondered aloud. “Honesty, is it some kind of magic, or special ability? What I wouldn’t give to not have to toss and turn all night.”


    Sable then teleported up to the window, then down to the ground in the street by the apartment. It took him a few minutes to find a place to relieve his bladder and return. Sable was about to curl up in a ball at the foot of the bed again when he heard a faint whisper.


    “I need you.”


    Bwah! Sable screamed so loudly that it woke Holden up.


    After being startled awake by Sable’s scream, Holden immediately grabbed the dagger he kept beneath his pillow and started looking around in every direction. “What’s going on? Who’s there.? Where’s the intruder?”


    Holden saw Sable curled up in a ball shaking with his fur standing up. “Cat, what are you doing?”


    Sable’s voice was stuttering from fear. “I heard a voice. There was a voice. Someone is in here.”


    “Are you sure you didn’t just hear someone from outside? There are probably still people wandering the streets.”


    “No. It sounded like it came from inside the apartment.”


    Holden shook his head, then grabbed another dagger off of the end table next to his bed. The two of them started making their way around the apartment with Sable staying behind Holden the entire time, still shaking with fear. There were no signs of anyone else being in the apartment, or breaking in. All the doors were closed and locked, and every window was closed, aside from the one in the bathroom, which was too small for anything larger than an ordinary house cat to fit through.


    “See Sable, you’re just hearing things,” Holden said as the two of them made their way back to the bedroom.


    “Well, how are you sure it’s not something we can’t see, like a fairy, or a ghost? Or maybe, it’s the red pixie.”


    “What’s with you and the red pixie thing? I swear, you blame everything on the red pixie.”


    “I don’t blame everything on the red pixie,” Sable insisted. “Just all the weird stuff, like that disappearing sword from a few days ago, and that strange voice I just heard.”


    “It’s called hyperbole, cat. Look it up in the dictionary.” Holden than flopped on the bed, and once again fell asleep right away.


    Sable contorted his face in both bewilderment, and mild irritation. “How does he do that?” He tried going to sleep again, only to hear the same faint voice, but much louder this time.


    Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    “Please, help me.”


    Reow! Sable let out a cat-like scream while jumping up into the air with his claws out. He ended up landing right on Holden’s chest and accidentally digging his claws in Holden’s skin.


    “Ouch! You stupid cat!” Holden shouted in pain. “What is it now?”


    “I heard it again. Something’s here I tell you. Something is here.”


    “Are you going start talking about the red pixie again?”


    “No, this isn’t the red pixie. I could barely hear the voice the first time. But this time I heard it clearly. It definitely wasn’t her voice. But it was some other woman’s voice.”


    Holden was about to go back to sleep when Sable jumped on his face. “Wait. Don’t go back to bed. It could be a ghost. I can’t deal with ghosts.”


    “Cat, you’re digging your claws into my face.”


    Sable dropped to the bed, meekly looking at Holden. “Sorry. Please don’t go to bed. There’s a ghost here. I’m sure of it.”


    Holden rolled his eyes. “Ghosts don’t actually exist. What you call ghosts are just magic that has absorbed the lingering regrets of a dying person. It’s a psychic impression of them made by magic, not the soul of an actual person.”


    “It doesn’t matter what they are; they’re still scary.”


    Holden groaned in frustration while Sable continued shaking on the bed. The two of them stayed up together for several more minutes waiting for the voice. However, the entire apartment was silent. It was during that time that Holden recalled something the realtor had said when he was first looking at this place. “You know, you’re right. There actually is a ghost here.”


    Sable’s jaw dropped. “There is?’


    “Yeah. The realtor who sold me this place said they had a lot of trouble selling it because of rumors that it was haunted. They’re just psychic impressions, though, so I don’t really care.”


    “Okay, but it’s still-.”


    Right then Sable saw a blurry figure appear right behind Holden. The figure reached out toward Sable and said, “Please help me. I don’t know where I am.”


    Sable’s entire body froe from fear as he eyed the blurry figure. Holden could tell that Sable was looking at something behind him, but when Holden turned around, he didn’t see anything.


    “What’s wrong with you now, Cat?”


    “It’s behind you,” Sable said in a gaunt voice, still seeing the blurry figure behind Holden.


    Holden turned around, but once again saw nothing. “Are you alright? Do we have to take you to the kitty doctor?” Holden teased.


    “No. It’s there. I swear. It’s-.”


    The blurry figure suddenly started to take form. It looked like a girl in her early teens with long, black hair, fair skin, and a white nightgown. However, the girl was translucent.


    “Please, I need your help,” the ghost girl said.


    Reow! Sable screamed like a cat once again, then hid under the bed.


    The ghost girl just passed right through the bed, and lay on her stomach right next to Sable. “I’m sorry for scaring you, but could you please help me?”


    “What do you want, ghost? Please don’t possess me, or teal my soul.”


    Holden rolled his eyes and dragged Sable from under the bed. “Cat, who are you talking to?”


    The ghost girl than floated right above the bed. “He can’t see or hear me, but you can. Can you help me? I don’t know how I got here. Or where here even is.”


    Sable quivered as he spoke. “If I help you, will you go away?”


    “I think so. I’m not really sure. I’ll try not to appear before you, or talk to you anymore at the very least.”


    “Okay. What do you need?”


    Holden couldn’t hear the ghost girl talking, so it just sounded like a one-sided conversation from his perspective. “Sable?”


    “Shh! The ghost girl is talking.”


    The ghost girl than started explaining everything she knew about her current situation. She didn’t know how she died, nor how she ended up in Holden’s apartment. The last thing she could recall was waking up in the bathroom as a ghost with no memories. From there, the ghost girl tried again and again to reach out to the residents of the apartment, but none of them were able to see or hear her. Even the realtor who had leased the apartment to Hoden couldn’t. Occasionally people would feel a chill when she was near them. There were even those who said they felt like they were being watched when the ghost girl was looking at them. However, no matter how hard she tried no one could hear or see her, until now.


    Sable tried to stop himself from quivering while listening to the ghost girl’s story. However, there was a chilling aura coming from the girl that kept him on edge. “So, you just want me to figure out who you are, and what happened to you? We should be able to do that. The human and I are detectives, after all.”


    Holden tilted his head in confusion at Sable’s statement. “What are we doing now?”


    “We’re going to help this ghost girl find out how she died.”


    Holden stared blankly at Sable, then jumped back into bed. “I’m just going to go to sleep. We can talk about your sudden onset of psychosis in the morning.”


    Sable jumped onto Holden’s chest, this time intentionally digging his claws into his skin. “I don’t think so, Chopped Liver. You’re going to help me figure out what happened to this girl, so I’ll finally be able to sleep. Otherwise, I’ll continue jumping on you every time you fall asleep.”


    “If you do that, then I start keeping the bathroom window closed at night.”


    Sable grumbled at Holden’s threat, but desperate times called for desperate measures. There was only one other thing the cait-sith could think of to motivate Holden, but it would require him to behave like an ordinary house cat. “If you do that, then I’ll start peeing on random spots on the floor.”


    “You wouldn’t dare.”


    The two of them locked eyes, waiting to see if the other would relent. However, Holden was a good judge of whether or not someone was lying. As far as he could tell, Sable was serious about his claims about peeing on the floor. “Fine. I concede. Even if you wimped out about turning my floor into your own bathroom, I doubt you’d let me sleep until we dealt with this. Give me a second to change into something decent. I know exactly where we should start.”