You know if you're ever really bored you could do your own research and probably figure out everything the same time they do. I literally get most of my plots by just following redirect links on Wikipedia and looking for something that seems relevant.


Chapter 12

Somehow Fabian's apartment had become the new Sibuna meeting place (not that it was really Sibuna with just the three of them). Still Nina showed up at lunchtime as if everything was perfectly normal, and Fabian was too busy talking to remember that he was supposed to not like having her in his apartment.

"So I was doing some reading last night about Banebdjedet, but I haven't come across any solid connections to his worshipers. That is unless I believe that the Freemasons of Liverpool are secretly Satanic."Eddie snorted a laugh at Fabian's joke, but Nina had a look which puzzled him. "Nina, what are you thinking?"

Fabian watched as Nina pulled herself back to reality and forced look of calm. "Oh, it's probably nothing. I was reading some carvings yesterday and found one that was odd. It was written in English but with the hieroglyphic alphabet. Once I translated it I discovered that the text was carved into a church basement in Liverpool."

By the gods, Nina was brilliant! Fabian couldn't believe how stupid he'd been to just brush off the Freemason theory. Had he really been out of the game for so long that he'd forgotten that the answers were always found in the most ridiculous place. "What kind of men are Freemasons? Powerful, a little stuffy, a lot obsessed with the past. That's the same kind of people who were in Victor's secret society. Robert Frobisher-Smythe was probably a Freemason as well. The whole club might know something!"

"Well I could have told you that," Eddie spoke up, the small grin on his face giving Fabian lots of hope for his recovery. "Everyone knows the Freemasons are just one giant conspiracy. Even I've seen the Di Vinci Code."

Fabian was too glad that Eddie felt up to making jokes to care that the joke was technically made at his expense. "So we just need to go to Liverpool then. But there are probably dozens of chapters in Liverpool. How do we know which one?"

Eddie's face suddenly lost all the amusement it had previously held. His eyes turned dark and depressed, and to Fabian he looked more lost than ever. "My father is a freemason. I can guarantee if any order has secretly turned away from Christianity and to Egypt it's his."

"Well that's good, isn't it?" Fabian didn't get why Eddie looked so horribly depressed. If they had a contact then all they had to do was call Mr. Sweet and could easily find Banebdjedet, get the Ram of Mendes, and get Eddie's Osirian spirit back.

"I haven't spoken to my father in years. Last we spoke he said he was going to cut me off from his bank account if I didn't go into rehab. I didn't go into rehab. He never actually cut me off. I've been running his account since," Eddie admitted. Suddenly Eddie's lifestyle made a little bit more sense. Fabian had been wondering how Eddie had worked at all with the state he was in, but apparently Eddie hadn't been working. He'd just been stealing from his father.

Nina moved next to Eddie and squeezed his hand. "Eddie, if your father never cut you off it's because he couldn't bring himself to hurt you. He still loves you a lot and I'm sure he wants to make everything right. He'll be thrilled to know that what we're doing is to help you get back to normal. Rehab wouldn't have done anything to solve your problem, but this will. He'll be thrilled."

Eddie didn't seem thrilled, not to Fabian at least. Fabian sort of understood. He knew Eddie and his father had never really been close, hence Eddie going by his mother's last name, but they'd been getting better towards Eddie's graduation. Fabian didn't really know what had happened after that but obviously it wasn't good.

See Nina didn't have parents. She could promise Eddie that his father still loved him because everything she knew about parents she knew from books. Fabian had parents. He had the type of parents who shipped him off to boarding school at age 12 and never looked back. They weren't bad people, they were just cut from a different cloth than the make-believe parents of Nina's imagination. Eddie's parents were similar to Fabian's. They had money more than they had time, and they focused more on providing their children with the best possible futures than the happiest childhoods. It wasn't necessarily bad, but it hurt sometimes. It hurt a lot sometimes.

So Fabian understood Eddie's hesitance to call his father far more than Nina ever could, but he also knew they had no option. "We'll wait until Friday, okay? Nina and I can do some more digging, see if we can find anything concrete without having to drive all the way to Liverpool. This isn't a 'this second' sort of thing. You have time to think about what you'll say to him."

Eddie nodded, and forced a smile. Both Fabian and Nina could tell it wasn't real. It was hard to lie to the people who know you best.


Eddie felt like he was going to throw up. The idea of having to face his father was more terrifying than a dozen vengeful spirits. His father had to be furious. Eddie hadn't been living the high life, no, but drugs cost money. He wasn't proud of the fact that he'd used his dad's bank accounts for drug money, but he hadn't had any better ideas. He couldn't work. He didn't have any real reason to work, to exist. The few jobs he'd held always ended up firing him for being too lackluster. One of his former-bosses had actually gone so far as to call Eddie a zombie when Eddie had been desperate enough to use him as a reference. After that Eddie hadn't been able to find any sort of job at all.

So he'd stolen from his father and spent the days high. He knew that made him the lowest of the low, but it had been the only way for him to feel a little less broken. Or at least he'd felt fulfilled enough not to just shoot himself.

But that kind of lifestyle was expensive. In the past two and a half years Eddie had probably spent 100,000 pounds on drugs alone, and while that was the biggest cost it wasn't the only one. He'd made withdrawals for food, for rent, for booze and a night out. Eddie had actually wondered a million times why his father hadn't just gone and cut him off. Eddie would have been mad if someone stole hundreds of thousands of pounds from him. His father had money, yeah, lots of it handed down the generations, but even he had to notice what Eddie was doing. Eddie had been stealing more than his father probably made in a year as headmaster, and his father had done nothing. (And how could Eddie bring himself to stop doing it when his father made it so damn easy?)

So Eddie had spent two and a half years stealing and lying and getting high. Two and a half years trying to numb a pain that never went away. Two and a half years ignoring the father who obviously cared about him far more than he deserved.

And now Eddie had to go back, the prodigal son, and beg, plead, grovel for his father's help once more. And the worst bit was that Eddie knew his father would give him help. His father would gladly give him help, help he didn't deserve. Help he really, really, really didn't deserve.