Jameson was the porter tonight. He barely lifted an eyebrow when we stumbled through the foyer as the sky began to lighten at the horizon, even if we were dirty like hell and stunk of fire from that same place. That was the sort of service one got from generous tipping and polite conversation.
One of the things I'd learned from my mother – the people who work for us are the ones who made the wheels turn. Without them we were nothing. 'Treat them fairly and with respect. Pay them generously. If they show you disrespect in return, you fire them. And you don't dawdle about it either.'
Jameson was one such person. It only took a few words to the right people and we could be dead or arrested within the hour. But I liked Jameson and I trusted him. I gave him an apologetic smile and a shrug, and he gave me a nod in return.
We were dead on our feet. None of us had energy to climb the stairs and by silent agreement we trudged into the small lift.
It slowly went upwards, and I almost fell asleep against the wooden panel.
The 'ding' sounded weird.
I fumbled with my keys. I was nauseous. If I didn't hurry, I would barf in the hallway.
Finally, I managed to get us inside.
My head was pounding. Lucy turned on the lights which made me wince.
"Can't we just please just use the lamp on the side-table?" I begged pathetically.
Holly went to turn it on as Lucy turned the lights back off. I sighed in relief.
"I need a shower," I groaned.
Holly grimaced. "Just try not to get your ear wet. I think maybe you burst your eardrum."
"That explains a lot," I grumbled. Like the fact that it sounded like we were walking around in an indoor swimming pool.
"Just go have your shower but don't wash the left side of your face. We'll do that after. You have some small wounds we need to clean too." Holly waved me off towards the bathroom.
I sighed. "The kit is in the office in the second cupboard to the left."
I accidentally bumped into the doorframe when I went to the bathroom. That sort of set the tone for the whole experience.
I had a quick shower in which I almost fell asleep again. Happy I hadn't taken the tub. Every movement felt heavy and slightly uncoordinated. My ear felt strange. Like there was a wind going through it.
I didn't have the courage to wash my hair. An old colleague of mine had burst an eardrum in an encounter with a Screaming Spirit. She had gotten an infection afterwards and lost all hearing on one ear.
Instead, I took a comb and ran it through my hair again and again, combing out bits of salt, magnesium, sand, rubble, and small pieces of wax that I cringed at.
In fact, it would be a long time before I could look at candles in quite the same way again. The idea of a candlelit dinner suddenly seemed far from romantic.
When I couldn't get any more out and my hair was standing up from static, I put on a t-shirt and a pair of pyjama bottoms and joined the girls in the kitchen.
Holly was speaking when I arrived. "Lucy, I think it might be better if you had a shower and I'll patch up Quill in the meantime. I'll need to get going soon. If that's alright with you of course," she added to me when I walked through the door.
I scoffed. "Of course, it's alright. Lucy can do whatever the hell she wants here."
Lucy squeezed my arm lightly before passing me.
I grabbed her hand before she went too far. "You can just take some clean clothes from my bedroom," I offered.
She gave me a small smile. "That's becoming a recurring theme, isn't it?"
I made a small snort. "I suppose."
She kissed me on the cheek and went down the hall. I stared after her as she walked all the way down.
When I turned my head back around it was to a supremely smug looking Holly.
"Shut up," I told her.
She smiled widely and raised her hands defensively. "I didn't say anything!"
"You didn't need to," I grumbled.
She shook her head. "Just sit down."
"In a moment."
I went to Lucy's bag and fished the jar out of it.
I took it with me in the living room, put it on the coffee table and sat down in front of it on the sofa.
I sighed deeply and rubbed my face. "Thank you for tonight, skull. While I don't wholeheartedly approve of the first bit, even if it was funny like hell, I reckon that we probably owe a lot of our success to you. So, thank you for your help."
The face in the plasm rolled its eyes.
I put the film on for it.
"Enjoy," I told it and returned to the kitchen.
Holly looked at me, a bit disgusted. "Why you bother with that thing, I'll never know."
I shrugged and sat down in the chair in front of her. "It doesn't hurt to be a little nice,"
She scoffed. "I just mostly feel like throwing it out of the window. It's disgusting,"
I laughed. "I'd be happy to take it, but it isn't up to me. I doubt that Lucy will ever part with it,"
Holly smiled and shook her head. "You'll just have to take her too."
I sighed heavily and looked at my hands. They weren't dirty anymore, but they had gotten a few scrapes. "Just drop it. It's not going to happen."
"Maybe it won't, maybe it will," she shrugged. "You never know. Hold still."
She grabbed my face and held it in the position she wanted it in. Then she got to work with tweezers, picking out small bits of the same sort of debris I had in my hair, out of the side of my face.
"I'm not Apollo, Holly. I'm not going to chase someone who doesn't want to be chased."
"You can be so dramatic sometimes," she chuckled, and my cheeks might have gone a bit pink. "Anyway, Lucy doesn't exactly strike me as someone begging to be turned into a tree any time soon. Just let things happen, Quill. Don't give up on her."
I gave her a rueful smile. "Don't think I could do that even if I tried," I shrugged in a way I hoped looked careless. "Hell, I have tried."
I winced when she started cleaning the small wounds with disinfectant.
"How is Kate doing?" I jumped when Lucy re-entered the kitchen with wet hair, barefoot, in my t-shirt and a pair of my gym shorts.
I blinked a bit to get my brain to make an attempt at functioning. "I uh – Last I heard, she was doing okay. She might get appointed to one of the positions with the police next month."
Holly looked at the clock before turning to us. "I need to go. You," she pointed at me, "need to go to bed, and you," she pointed at Lucy, "have to wake him up every two hours. If you can't wake him up, you call the hospital immediately."
She gave us both hugs goodbye and before we knew it, we were alone. Well, with the skull in the living room, but still.
"They've been keeping me away from the major gathering points as much as possible. The furnaces, DEPRAC headquarters and so on." Lucy crossed her arms in front of her. "It's getting ridiculous. It's not like people believe that I could split the two of you up anyway."
I snorted. "Trust me. They do." I looked at my hands again before looking up at her and gave her a smile. "I forgot to tell you, but last week I met some old colleagues who, congratulated me for snagging you up. Met them at the supermarket."
My smile widened when she blushed heavily.
"They wanted details of course."
Lucy's eyes went bigger, and she looked like a deer caught in the headlights. "What – what sort of details?"
"The sort of details I told them we prefer to keep private," I grinned and waggled my eyebrows a bit.
She punched me in the shoulder "You arse!"
I laughed, even though it hurt my head. "What, would you rather I invented something sordid?"
She blushed even more profusely and looked at her feet. "No."
"I just said what I would have said otherwise in a situation like that."
She crossed her arms in front of herself. "Is that a situation you often find yourself in?"
I smiled at her. "Nope. Which is probably why they found it so interesting. Well, that, and then the fact that it was about Lucy Carlyle."
"Why on earth would that make it interesting?" she rolled her eyes.
I shook my head in exasperation. "You really have no idea?"
"No idea about what?" she huffed impatiently.
"That about half the boys in London want you in their beds." I smiled widely, looking at her as she took in that information.
Rather than blushing as I had expected, she made a face at me. "I don't believe you, but now I just feel super grossed out. Thanks a lot." She snarked.
I laughed, but it turned into a wince when it felt like my head was being split in two. I still couldn't stop a chuckle or two from escaping as I clutched my poor forehead.
Lucy pushed me gently. "Go to bed. I'll stay on the sofa."
"The skull is watching television." I told her.
She shook her head with a smile. "Then I'll go and sleep with the knives."
I grimaced. "that might be problematic. I dropped an entire bottle of tarnish remover in there this morning and I haven't cleaned it properly. I just about had time to open the windows before I had to go. If you go in there, your brain will be more damaged than mine."
"Sofa it is then." She rolled her eyes. "Been a while since I fell asleep in front of the television anyway."
"There's no television at Portland Row." I remembered. "Did you fall asleep a lot like that when you lived at home?"
She considered the question longer than I thought it warranted.
"Not on purpose,"
I snorted. "I hardly think most people fall asleep in front of the television on purpose."
She smiled. "No, not like that." She took a deep breath. "When I was little, I didn't have a bed."
I blinked at her a bit uncomprehendingly. "How?" I ended up asking.
"That's a long story." She crossed her arms again and stared at her bare feet.
I took one of her hands and she let the other fall. "I've got time."
She shook her head at me with a chuckle. "No, you don't. You're supposed to be sleeping."
I bit my lip. "Then come with me. Tell me a bedtime story."
I started down the hall towards the bedroom, and she reluctantly trailed behind me.
"Aren't bedtime stories supposed to be cheerful?" she asked rhetorically.
I snorted. "As cheerful as the Red Riding hood and her grandmother being eaten by a wolf? Or Timothy being Ghost Touched by the spirit of the Black Knight?"
Lucy scoffed. "They all ended well, didn't they?"
I turned around to look at her. "And your story doesn't?"
She opened her mouth and closed it again with a frown.
"It hasn't ended yet, has it?" I grinned at her. "No matter what the story contains, it isn't over. When you don't have any more to tell, you'll just say; 'to be continued' and then we'll take it from there."
She smiled at me and her eyes looked a bit wet.
I had been exhausted. Ready to pass out on the kitchen table. Now I felt more awake than I ever had in my entire life even if I was a bit dizzy.
Turned on the small lamp on the nightstand and sat down on the bed.
Lucy looked around a bit and then started to walk back out. "I'll just go get a chair."
"The hell you will. Just get down here."
She squealed when I grabbed her around the waist and rolled us over. Now we were lying on top of the covers, facing each other.
God, she was beautiful as she was lying there, red cheeked and smiling widely. I could wax poetics about it for days.
"Tell me," I prompted and tried to get comfortable.
Her smile fell just a bit, but it didn't disappear entirely.
"I'm the youngest of seven girls," she started with.
I nodded. "That's a lot of children,"
She chuckled. "I think we all agree on that." She bit her lip. "My mum didn't actually want to have all of us. I think she wanted to stop after number four, but my dad wanted a son and uh – he didn't want to stop."
I frowned. "Your dad sounds like an idiot," I told her bluntly to her apparent amusement. "Seriously. I'm happy you came out of it, but he sounds like a wanker."
My verbal filter seemed to have been affected by the concussion. It felt a bit like being drunk, but without the fun bit.
She smiled widely enough for someone who just had her father insulted though.
"You have no idea. Anyway, it just wasn't practical to have that many children. The house they had was built for maybe four people, but nine had to live in it. There wasn't room enough or beds enough. When I was a wee baby –"
"Say that again." I interrupted.
"What? When I was a baby?"
"No, you said something before you said baby,"
She frowned at me. "Little?"
"Mm no, that's not what you said."
Her cheeks went a little pink. "Wee?"
I felt my smile widen. It was adorable. "Say it again."
She shoved me a bit and went a bit pinker, but she humoured me with a demonstrative eyeroll. "When I was a wee baby, I actually didn't have a cradle because my sister Mary was sleeping in the one we had. I slept in a dresser drawer. Then when I was about two perhaps, I got to share a cot with my sister, Elisabeth. She's the oldest. There are twelve years between us. Her and Emma were mostly in charge of us younger ones. Sarah, Mary and me."
"What about your parents?" I couldn't help but ask.
She frowned a bit and shifted to support her head with her hand. "Well, my mum worked hard and when she came home, she would be tired. She didn't have patience for any of us. She expected food on the table and a clean house. Then if everything was in order, she would go to watch television."
I hesitated. "What if everything wasn't in order?" I asked slowly.
"Then it got put in order. Fast. As I said, she didn't have any patience so if something was done wrong, you very quickly learned to do them right."
She bit her lip and turned her focus on the pattern of the duvet, following the lines with a finger. "She could have a heavy hand if things were not the way she wanted them," she admitted.
I frowned a bit. "And your dad? You said he wouldn't let you get away with anything. I suppose that means..."
She gave me a strange little smile. "I did say that didn't I? He worked at the train station. When he wasn't working, he was at the pub. Sometimes they cut him off when he'd had too much. We would usually pretend to sleep if he came home early. Sometimes, at the end of the month when he didn't have any more money to drink for, he would come home after work and it was…" she trailed off in a memory.
She startled when I put my hand on top of hers. I ran my thumb slowly over the ups and downs of her knuckles, waiting for her to continue at her own pace.
"My dad was not a good man. But he died when I was still small, so that's one less thing to worry about," she chuckled fragilely.
"See, I knew he was a wanker," I remarked, and she laughed for real.
"After that, things were mostly uneventful. I grew too big to share a bed with Elisabeth and I had this habit of repeating what the ghosts were saying out in the streets," she grinned mischievously, "So none of the others wanted to share with me. I slept in the living room while my mum was watching television."
I couldn't help but laugh at the idea of little Lucy, scaring the shit out of her sisters with her Talent.
"Have you ever invented a ghost?" I asked her with a grin.
She shook her head.
"My brother is two years younger than me and he never had any sort of Talent, so sometimes, to tease him a bit and keep him in line, I would invent some horrific spirit to scare him with,"
"No!" she exclaimed with a laugh. "You are absolutely awful!"
I raised my hands defensively. "I did what I had to do. He gave me plenty of shit in return."
"Alright, I've scared my sisters plenty, but I've never resorted to inventing things. There were horrors enough to spare where I'm from. The 'agency' there makes Bunchurch look like a well-oiled machine."
"Is that where you started?"
She made a derisive snort. "I started there, part time when I was six and went full time when I turned eight."
I raised an eyebrow. "Full time at eight? But that's illegal." I pointed out.
She rolled her eyes. "Just because things are illegal, it doesn't mean people don't do it."
I conceded her point. Exhibit A would be ourselves, breaking and entering a few hours earlier.
"You didn't finish school then," I realised.
She blushed and bit her lip, staring intensely at the pattern on the duvet again.
"Hey," I tried to catch her eye. "There's nothing wrong with that. It wasn't your choice."
"Lockwood said that it didn't matter at all. That it only matters that I'm a good agent," she said in a small voice.
"Yes, well. Tony has never exactly been known to plan ahead. Would you like some help with the exams?" I offered.
She huffed a small laugh. "George is already on the case."
"Ah. Never tell him that I said it, but I reckon you're in good hands with Cubbins. He's great with academics. But if you need anything, just let me know."
She nodded and stuck the bare parts under the duvet. I rolled my eyes and grabbed the one behind her to cover her with.
"Thank you."
"I don't think I like your mum," I told her bluntly.
She laughed. But it was the bitter sort. "Doesn't matter if you like her or not. I don't have her anymore anyway. She disowned me."
I wrinkled my nose. "Why on earth would she do that?"
She pressed her lips hard together and I thought she might not want to tell me.
Then she took a deep breath and started. "When I first started, my mum made an agreement with Jacobs and my entire salary went directly into her account."
"But that's –"
"Illegal, yes. We've already established that some people don't care about that. Anyway, that continued the entire time when I worked there. Then when I came down here, there was a few weeks where I didn't have a job and she was angry that I didn't send money home, so when I started with Lockwood, I sent my entire first salary, except for the part of the food I pay and a bit that I was saving for emergencies. And then I sort of just continued to do that every month. She was cross with me when I left from there because I had to pay rent in Tooting, and I couldn't send her as much."
I didn't know what to say. I interlaced our fingers instead and she smiled a bit at that.
"Anyway. After a talk with Holly a while ago, I decided to stop sending her money and she more or less said that that was the only use she had of me and that I shouldn't bother coming back."
I closed my eyes for a few seconds, trying to keep my temper in check.
I pursed my lips, trying to find the right words.
"I know that it's probably easy enough for me to say with the way I grew up. There's probably a lot of things I take for granted – I know that there are a lot of things I take for granted, but money isn't everything. It makes life easier, sure, but money can't buy friends or family," I swallowed.
I moved my hand up to rub her arm and push a bit of hair that had been bothering me away from her face.
"I know that nothing can replace her – your mum. But the people you are surrounded by, care about you deeply. We all do, so much. If you're ever in need of people to call family, you don't have to look any further than the people you live with."
"I don't live with you," she was quick to point out.
I blushed a bit. "No, but that's a bit different, isn't it?"
"Is it?"
I wanted to tell her. I needed to tell her. It was right at the tip of my tongue, all my hopes and dreams that would scare her away. All those unrealistic ideas of the other sort of family I was thinking myself in with her, but I couldn't burden her with that.
It was all there, in my chest, in my throat, in my mouth, on my tongue. Words that were begging and threatening to spill and ruin everything, because what we had right here; just talking, being together – that was enough. If that were all I could have with her, that had to be enough.
"You haven't known me for as long as you've known the others," I pointed out with a yawn instead.
She smiled widely. "It's a bit odd, but I keep forgetting that. Is it awful that I used to think you were somewhat of a uh – pompous prick, back then?"
I laughed aloud and winced when pain shot through my skull. "Well, I am somewhat of a pompous prick," I had to confess, which made her laugh in turn.
My eyes were starting to feel heavy. "I think I need to sleep soon," I admitted.
Lucy shook her head. "I think you needed to sleep a long time ago,"
"But I don't want to sleep," I heard myself whine.
She chuckled. "But you need to. Holly said so."
"Holly is mean." I sulked.
Lucy shook her head. "I thought she was delightful."
I snorted. "Wolf in sheepskin,"
She looked at me funny.
"Why don't you want to sleep?"
"'cause if I fall asleep you'll leave. 'N I don't want you to go."
Her eyes softened and she sighed heavily. "I'll stay,"
"Promise?"
I could hear how ridiculously pathetic I sounded, but I had a hard time bringing myself to care.
She sat up on her knees and reached over so she was almost on top of me to reach the bedside table.
"I just need to set your alarm clock. You have to wake up again in two hours."
I groaned and put my arms around her.
"But I don't want to go to school," I grumbled to her amusement.
She rolled off me and out of my reach. I could feel my eyes drooping.
"Don't you need to call in sick for work or something too?"
"Urgh. I don't want to deal with my mum. You do it."
She lifted an eyebrow at me. "We'll see when you wake up."
I barely registered the words because I was already falling asleep.
My last thought was that if this were the view I would fall asleep to every time, I hit my head, I ought to do it more often.
…
Thank you for reading this far! I'm really happy that there are people reading this. Tbh, I didn't have high hopes when I started it.
But please leave a review and let me know what you think of the chapter or the story in general. It would make me insanely happy!
