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Alex had been sitting in cold water for what felt like hours. It was hard to tell without her phone, which she had dropped sometime back… if she'd had it in the first place. It was hard to tell without light. This far underground she had no line of sight to the surface.
No way of knowing how long he had left her down here.
She let her cheek rest against rough stone. Just for a minute. She just wanted to close her eyes. She wasn't going to sleep.
---
"Alex," Strand said, relief dripping from his voice.
He sagged when their eyes connected and ran a hand over his face. He hadn't shaved today. Or yesterday, by the looks of it. He was wearing an unbuttoned red flannel shirt over a black tee, and jeans that were muddy at the cuffs.
Alex could only stare.
There was cloth in her mouth, wrapped tightly around her face and shoved between her teeth. It was a struggle to breathe. When she tried to move her tongue, a metallic taste filtered through her rising panic. There was cloth around her wrists, too, both her hands yanked behind her body and tied together. Tied to the hard chair she was sitting in, because when she tried to move away from it she couldn't. The chair cut into her arms. Her butt was somehow sore and numb at the same time. She looked Strand up and down. His boots were muddy, too. She realized there was mud on her own shoes and leggings.
No one else was in the room with them. Alex swiveled her eyes back and forth, but there was no one else in the room. Her heart pounded against her chest. Unless there was someone standing directly behind her there was no one else in the room. The only door was behind Strand and it was shut.
Why wasn't he helping her? She was tied to a chair and they were alone. Alone… Had he found her this way, or…? But he hadn't just walked in. He was kneeling on the floor.
Yeah. Then there was the floor.
A white chalk circle surrounded her. Alex blinked several times: the only light was from a flashlight propped upright on a table in the corner. The circles were ringed with numbers and lines at sharp angles. There were symbols she didn't recognize and brown drips of dried blood. She looked back up. There was a cut on Strand's arm.
When he saw her looking, he pushed his sleeve down to cover it.
"I can explain," he said.
---
Alex was out of her bindings and sitting very still in the passenger seat of Strand's car. Her eyes were alternating between the speedometer and the car door. It remained unlocked.
"There was a demon," she repeated.
Strand shifted uncomfortably. "Yes."
Alex couldn't decide whether what the worst thing about his explanation was. That she had been invaded by a demon, so he'd brought her up to a remote cabin in the woods - the floor of which he'd had to scrub clean before leaving, because it was a rental - or that Dr. Richard fucking Strand was willing to say demonic possession to her out loud without qualifying it. After he'd untied her, and told her… Told her… The door hadn't opened. No one had walked in with a camera and a smile on their face to tell her it hadn't been real.
Strand had just scrubbed the floor, and watched her from the corner of his eye, and started explaining. The circles were part of a ritual to call certain energies into play. That part had made her eyes glaze over. The blood - Strand's blood - had been necessary to kick everything off. The cabin was a rental, which he needed to clean if they didn't want questions.
Alex had a lot of questions but halfway into the story she'd pleaded a need for air. She'd gone outside and walked in circles around the cabin until it felt less like she was going to run full-tilt into the trees and never come back. Also, her ankle had started to hurt.
So she had gone back inside and Dr. Richard fucking Strand had not said he'd been joking. Instead he'd said he was ready to go. He had tied her to a chair and cut his arm open and he wasn't joking, and he was ready to go if she was.
"And I was out for three days?" she asked.
Strand tightened his hands on the steering wheel. If she had felt up to driving, she would have offered. She would have insisted. But in addition to bruises on her arms, there was that pesky ankle. When she'd asked, Strand said she had tried to kick him down a staircase.
"Yes," he said, after a moment. "What's the last thing you remember?"
A well. Sitting in water, at the bottom of a well. "I had a dream."
"You didn't come into work on Wednesday," Strand said. "Nic went to your apartment and you weren't there. He called to see if you were with me, and when we realized neither of us had heard from you I went to join him. Then Ruby called to say you had come looking for me at the office."
The trees outside the car were a green blur. She looked back at the speedometer. At least that didn't make her feel nauseous. "I don't remember that. I didn't call Ruby. I don't … remember calling Ruby."
"Do you remember anything from the last three days?"
Alex watched the needle on the speedometer hover at 70. Her tongue felt swollen and heavy in her mouth. The metallic taste from when she'd woken up had apparently been because she'd bitten at her own lips before Strand had gagged her. He'd said he had put it off as long as possible but the - the things she'd started saying. He couldn't listen anymore, so he'd gagged her. She could tell from the tilt of Strand's body that he was trying to keep his eyes on the road and on her at the same time. There was nothing she could say, but she could and did take her hand off the door handle.
Had he been worried she was going to jump? Would asking about it sound like a threat?
"The last thing I remember is my dream," she said. She let her eyes drift shut, reluctantly. It was a struggle to recall anything. Her memory was dark and wet, and if she tried to go forward from the dream, all she got was a green blur, like trees flashing by on the highway. "I cancelled our meeting because I had a migraine."
"That was Tuesday."
Alex sunk down in her seat.
"I didn't want to bring you all the way out here," Strand said, sounding like he actually meant it. There had been wildlife pamphlets on the kitchen counter with a town name Alex didn't recognize. Somewhere way out from the city. "But I thought it was best if we weren't… around other people. The information I got suggested that it was going to take a significant effort to recover you."
"Information?"
"I called Tannis Braun."
Alex turned to look at him. His face was faintly pink. "You told Tannis Braun what was happening to me? So he just … knows? He's just out there, and he knows I was… And he's not doing anything about it?"
"He said that he wouldn't have been useful."
"What?"
Strand tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. "He said it had to be someone who was important to you."
She had absolutely no idea what to say to that.
After a few more miles, Strand said, "You're probably dehydrated. And hungry. You - I couldn't get you to eat, earlier. I'll stop somewhere on the way. Do you mind fast food?"
"That's… fine."
---
Alex couldn't see her feet anymore. It wasn't raining. She couldn't hear water flowing into the well, or feel it moving around her. But the levels had risen. The water glimmered in the dark. That didn't make sense. There was no light, but the water glimmered. It let her see the outline of her body, and her feet were gone. The water was up to her thighs now.
She hugged her knees to her chest and scooted backward. The ground sloped up slightly behind her. It didn't bring her feet out of the water, but it did let her find a place to rest her shoulders.
When was he coming back for her?
Had he forgotten?
---
Alex sucked in a breath so hard it made her cough. She hunched over, pressing a hand to her mouth. Strand's hand tightened on her shoulder. Alex caught herself leaning into it before she remembered the feeling of his hands undoing the gag in her mouth and, instead, pressed herself up against the car door. The warmth from his hand still lingered on her shoulder. She wiped at her face and took a few deep breaths until the coughing stopped. They were two cars back from a speaker attached to a colorful menu featuring a lot of chicken.
"You fell asleep," Strand explained. "I didn't want to wake you until we got here."
Alex wasn't sure here qualified as important enough to wake up for. Her stomach was still queasy. Her throat was dry, though. She glanced at the clock - which meant absolutely nothing, she hadn't looked at it when they'd gotten in the car. She could have been asleep for ten minutes or ten hours (okay, not ten hours, the sun was only just starting to set).
"I want a large soda. And fries."
Strand got her a chicken sandwich too. Their fingers brushed when he handed it to her. Alex didn't raise her eyes but did notice Strand's fingers curl inward the moment he could let go of the bag. She put the bag at her knee and held her soda with both hands as he drove them out of the parking lot.
It wasn't until they were back on the highway that she had any idea where they were. Not far to the city from here. Maybe only a few miles out.
She started methodically shoving french fries into her mouth.
As soon as they were back on city streets, they ground to a halt. It was dark enough now that the street lamps were on and apparently every car in town was on the roads. They ticked forward, slowly, but it was going to be a while before they got anywhere. At yet another a red light Strand cleared his throat. Alex had been slowly sipping at her melting ice for the past few blocks. She glanced at him without turning in her seat. He let his hands slip down the steering wheel a little.
"I don't think we should tell Nic exactly what happened," Strand said.
"Excuse me?"
"I…" Strand turned to look at her, for just a moment, and Alex's face went pink. He turned his attention back to the road. "I called him to tell him you were okay. When you showed up on my doorstep on Wednesday night. He's under the impression that you thought you had called in sick and didn't realize that your voicemail didn't go through."
Alex rubbed her thumb along her cup, through the condensation on the cardboard. "He's 'under the impression'?"
"I told him."
"Why?" She was snapping, but he deserved it. There were red chafe marks on her wrists.
Strand was quiet until the light turned green. "You asked me to."
"Excuse me?"
He looked down, then reached up to push his glasses back into place. Part of her wanted to yank them off and crack them - her hand clenched, and she had to put it in her lap. "I was… unhappy, when you arrived at my home. I wanted to know where you had been. Why you hadn't been answering our calls. You said it was secret. You asked me to tell Nic you were still out, that your migraine had gotten worse."
"And you did?" That confused her more than how steadily he was telling this story. An entire evening in a memory she didn't have.
"You insisted."
"Richard," she said, through her teeth. "What the fuck does that mean?"
"You said you would leave," he replied. His hands tightened on the wheel, the only sign he was starting to get angry too. "You said what you had to tell me was important, and that you would leave if I wouldn't make sure that we… That no one from the studio would be checking on you."
Alex took her straw out of her cup and wrapped it around her fingers. She still wanted to break his glasses. She didn't want her hands to be free. "And you didn't think that was weird?"
"I thought it was alarming. "
He let out a breath and abruptly yanked the car into an empty space on the side of the road. Alex slumped in her seat again and glared up at him as he turned to face her - his eyes were dark, and his face was rough with stubble and lack of sleep, but he remembered the last three days. He'd said it'd been three days, and she didn't remember a second of it.
"I did what you asked because I didn't want you to leave. And then you sat at my kitchen table and told me you weren't Alex, and if I wanted to know who you were, I had to play nice. "
His eyes were so, so dark. Alex gave into impulse and pulled his glasses off - he flinched. She turned the glasses over in her hands and forced herself to put them down on the center console. "Did you?"
"Until last night," he said, flatly.
"Why should I believe you?"
Strand ran a hand through his hair. "You're finally choosing to be skeptical about something and this is what you pick?"
"You tied me to a chair!"
"I had to!" He jerked in his seat like he would have stood if they'd been anywhere else. He looked younger, without his glasses. "You - It tried to kick me down the stairs, Alex. It tried to lock me up in my own home, because I didn't want to go along anymore. Do you know how hard it was to get you to stop without hurting you?"
"It sounds real fucking difficult." Alex was shaking. It felt like her whole body was pulsing in time with her heartbeat. "Like maybe you could have used help from one of my friends. Like Nic. But he doesn't know, does he? Does anybody? Did you really call Tannis Braun?"
Strand pulled his phone out and threw it in her lap. "Call him yourself, if you don't trust me. I thought it might be my turn for that, but his number is still there."
Alex stared at the screen. She didn't move to touch it. She did throw his glasses back at him. "I don't want to go to the studio anymore. Take me home."
---
Alex: I'll be back at work tomorrow.
Nic: Oh, did your migraine go away?
Alex: Yep. :)
Alex left her phone charging on her nightstand after she got changed. The traffic hadn't gotten any better after the last argument. It had taken forever to get to her apartment. When they'd finally arrived the first thing she had done was change. She couldn't stand being in those filthy clothes a second longer. The only thing she could find that looked bearable was an oversized sweater dress. It was short, but the sleeves were long and covered her wrists.
The bathroom mirror showed her a pale face ringed with exhaustion. It made her stop with her hand outstretched for her toothbrush. Strand had said the thing inside her had stayed awake most of the time. Right now, she was too wired to feel it, but her face definitely looked like someone who had just been through the wringer. She wanted to put on makeup before she went back to the living room, but all she could get her hands to stay steady for was brushing her teeth. Then she dunked her head in the shower and toweled her hair mostly dry. It made her look a little less awful.
Strand was sitting on her couch, fiddling with a wooden puzzle. He faltered when she walked out and looked away. "I can leave," he offered.
Alex barked out a laugh. "Uh, you're not leaving." She walked over and sat on the coffee table, so their knees were touching even though it put her lower than him. Strand shifted awkwardly. "We only covered up to Wednesday night."
"You spent Thursday and most of today in the basement," Strand said. He cringed when she started laughing, so hard she had to press her face into her sleeve to muffle the noise. "I don't understand why you're acting like this."
Alex took a few deep gulping breaths and swiveled to face him. All she had to do was point at the marks on her wrists.
Strand just looked at her.
"I want to know what it wanted," she said.
"Does it matter?" he asked.
"I wouldn't have asked if it didn't. "
He swallowed. She could see his throat move. The flannel and dirty jeans were worse now - he looked like he was wearing someone else's clothes. She'd never seen him on her couch before. He didn't fit. "It wanted me to go to Geneva."
"You were already going to Geneva. Did it want you to double-go to Geneva?"
"It wanted me to take it to Geneva with me."
"What if," Alex asked, throwing her hands up in the air, "you told me the entire story at once. "
Strand exhaled. "I was supposed to arrange for a second ticket to the conference. My sponsors are… very generous. It said that I needed to meet people in the city. That it had been sent by them to … collect me."
"And … why would that be important?"
"It said one of these persons is my father."
"Your dead father?"
Strand pressed his lips together. "My allegedly not-dead father. Nic is the one who uncovered that there are still payments being sent to a bank account of his."
"So… your father sent a demon to possess me and bring you to a city you were already going to?" Alex asked, her voice slowly rising until it cracked. Strand looked like he was trying to sink into the floor. "Because you're so difficult to contact?"
"I don't completely believe my father is actually alive."
Alex grabbed his wrist, over where he'd sliced his skin open. His jaw clenched - but that was the only sign she might be hurting him. "But you believe I was possessed? You keep calling the thing it. You really believe it was a demon?" she asked. She didn't wait for him to not-answer, she couldn't stand it. "Who was the other person in Geneva supposed to be?"
"Thomas Warren."
Alex stood up and shoved past him. Strand made a confused sound and got up to follow her. "Just wait," she said.
A minute later she was back with her laptop. She put it down on her spot on the coffee table, and sat next to Strand. "Jen Perkins sent me this. I interviewed her right before I went home sick. I didn't have time to do anything with my notes."
"What were you interviewing her about?"
"She said she'd heard your father was working on experiments with an energy corporation. I asked her if she had any documents confirming it, or anything on the experiments themselves. She said they were trying to prove ghosts were real."
"My father didn't believe in-"
"Richard, please." She finally got into her email and opened up the attachments Perkins had sent her.
In the first photo, it was an underground particle accelerator. The space was huge. Standing next to men in lab coats were three men in dark suits. All were impossible to identify: they had their backs to the camera.
In the next photo everything was dark except for a clear glassed-in section of the particle accelerator. Alex was sure that it had a specific, scientific name, but she hadn't bothered to look it up. That wasn't what mattered. What mattered was that there was a bright light coming from behind the glass, and inside, black shadowy clouds. But they were somehow glowing. Luminicesent.
"I've seen this tunnel before." Alex might not remember the past few days, but she did remember this. "It's the tunnel from the first Black Tape you showed me for season three."
In the last photo, the team was celebrating. Alex didn't have to point - Strand was looking directly at the man in the corner, grinning from ear to ear. A young Thomas Warren.
"What do those look like to you?" she asked, quietly.
In the glassed-in tube, the black glowing clouds had thinned and separated. They'd stretched out into tall… almost human shapes.
When Alex had first seen this photo, her head had started to throb. She'd gone home thinking the migraine was psychosomatic. There was no way for a person to create demons. But what else could she call those shadows?
Strand's hand was suddenly on her knee. Alex stilled before it sank in that she'd started rocking back and forth. She held still, but she could feel her body trying to sway. Like she had just stepped out of moving water and her body hadn't caught up yet.
"I don't know what to do," she finally said.
Strand's thumb moved in circles on her knee, twice, before he pulled his hand back into his lap. "It's late," he said. "We can figure it out in the morning."
---
It had been a long time since she'd fallen down here. Alex was sure. There was no way to track the minutes, and she still couldn't feel the water rising. And yet.
Sometime back she had gotten to her feet and leaned against the nearest surface she could find. It sloped and bore her weight, so she didn't have to stand upright. Exhaustion pulled at her limbs. At least for the moment, the well would hold her up.
Cold, clinging water sloshed against her thighs when she shifted her weight.
---
Alex woke up and wrapped a towel around herself. Her pajamas were dry, her skin wasn't wet. But she didn't feel like she could breathe until she had run the towel over her hair and pulled it over her shoulders. The only light in her room came from the alarm clock. She stared at her feet, not damp, not blue from cold.
A moment later there was a soft knock at her door. "Are you awake?" Strand murmured, almost too soft to hear.
"Yeah," Alex said. When the door didn't open she added, dryly, "I'm decent."
Strand still entered the room slowly. Alex leaned over to switch on a lamp, and to his credit, he didn't ask about the towel. "I heard a - I heard you open and shut a door, and I thought I should… check on you," he said.
He gingerly sat on the corner of her bed, their legs almost but not quite touching. Alex was in an oversized t-shirt that nearly came to her knees. "I had a bad dream," she said.
Strand had taken off his boots and pulled on a t-shirt and pair of sweatpants one of Alex's exes had left in her apartment. They didn't quite fit: the shirt pulled tight across his chest and the sweatpants were too short. He had put on his glasses to come investigate whatever was wrong with her. Earlier she had offered him a spare razor, the cheap store brand, and he had gone from totally stubbly to just shadowed.
"Is the sleep itself worth it?" he asked.
Alex splayed her hand out on her thigh. She could still feel the water - had it been slightly viscous? Was that what that had been? - on her skin. "Not this time."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Why did you leave me there? pressed against Alex's lips. She forced herself to swallow it. "I feel like I've been asleep for days," she said, slowly. Strand's hand clenched, beside her leg. "I keep having the same dream. It gets worse each time. I'm in the dark, and the water is rising." And you're not coming for me.
"Are you afraid to go back to sleep?"
"What?" Alex looked up to meet his eyes, startled. The lamplight glared off his glasses, but his face was creased, concerned. She took a couple of breaths to steady herself. "I mean. I - guess? I mostly don't really want to think about it. I don't really want to … get to the end of it."
"Have you considered this may be a reflection of the past few days?" Strand asked, tilting his head slightly. It let her see past the glare: He was watching her intently, his eyes focused. "Why does the end of the dream have to be drowning?"
"That's what happens when you're trapped," Alex said.
Strand uncurled his fingers and only half-finished a movement in her direction. "You're not trapped," he said, quietly. "You're here."
"Am I?"
She didn't remember anything past Tuesday night. But she was still having these dreams. Had the signs he'd scrawled on the cabin floor, the cut he'd made in his arm, all been for nothing? Was the water still rising?
"I broke you out," Strand insisted.
Alex looked up at him. He clenched his jaw and turned away - until she reached over to turn his wrist to the light. The cut was puckered and red. She traced a finger along it, listening to Richard's breath stutter. The mark was over two inches long. Even though she had walked into his home and claimed to be someone - something else. Even though she attacked him. Even though there was no reason for one of the most famous skeptics in America to believe she hadn't lost her mind.
The ritual had required someone important to her.
When she kissed him, she expected him to tense up and pull back. It was what he always did when she reached for him. She expected him to back away and tell her that she wasn't in her right mind. This would convince him she was crazy - not sitting at his kitchen table telling him she wasn't Alex Reagan.
Instead, he pulled his hand from her grasp and curled it over the side of her face. She gasped and he bore down on her, his other hand coming up to press against the small of her back as he kissed her Alex thought of every other time he'd put his hand there - briefly, getting her attention when an elevator door opened or the crosswalk light came on, lingering, sometimes when they were trying to interview people who were giving them a hard time. She had to latch onto his shoulders to keep herself from falling back on the mattress when he used that hand to pull her up against him.
When she tried to come up for air it was like breaking the surface tension of a bubble - Richard abruptly let go of her and sat back, clutching at her sheet with one hand. He looked like she'd been the one to nearly crawl on top of him - it probably didn't help that she'd mussed his hair - and was staring at her like, okay, now he'd decided that she'd lost her mind.
"I…" He inhaled. "I… shouldn't have…"
Alex snapped, and threw the nearest pillow at him. He let it hit him in the face, which was the worst part. "Fuck you," she said. Her voice was shaking. "Get - Get out of my room, if you're going to-"
"Alex-"
"I want to go to sleep," she said, and pressed her face into the last pillow on the bed.
After a few seconds, he got up and left.
Okay. That was the worst part.
---
Alex had an arm thrown over a rough patch of the wall, a piece of rock that jutted out just far enough for her to hold onto. It let her pull herself up to her toes.
It wasn't enough.
The water had spilled over her shoulders. Her hair was floating in it, and she couldn't find another break in the stone to pull herself up. She struggled for more height anyway, even half an inch, and the water slapped against her chin. It was so cold it made her teeth hurt when she swallowed a mouthful of it. It settled hard in her stomach.
She tried to pull harder on the rock. The water splashed over her nose. She tried to jump, and her hand slipped.
Alex fell, and the bottom of the well wasn't there to catch her. The water closed over her face.
---
Richard was shaking her.
Both his hands were clutching her shoulders tight, and he was leaning over her, his face frantic and pale. Alex gasped awake. He sucked in a breath in sympathy. His grip didn't loosen. "I've been trying to wake you up for three minutes," he said, folding her against him. She twisted the fabric of his shirt in her hand but didn't shove him away. "You knocked your lamp over - I could hear it from the living room. When I came in you were thrashing and clawing at the sheets. You wouldn't wake up."
Alex pressed her face into his shoulder even though it stung. His skin burned where it touched hers. Her stomach felt hard and cold.
"I drowned," she said, her voice damp. Her hair clung to her neck: she had been sweating in her sleep. There were tears coming down her face. If she pushed him away, she was going to fall again. She hated it. He held on, and she hated him.
"You didn't drown. I pulled you out."
"Are you sure?" Alex twisted one arm between them to wipe her eyes clear. "What if it's still in me?"
"It's not. "
"How can you know that?"
"Because I filmed the exorcism," Richard blurted, his fingers digging into her shoulders. "I - I wanted to be positive. That I hadn't been tricked."
"You taped it?" Alex flushed hot. Her mouth was hard to work and her hands shook. Richard looked like he was bracing for her to throw something else at him and she didn't care. She wrung herself out of his grip and pressed into the corner behind her nightstand. He didn't move from her spot on the bed. "You taped it, that wasn't the first thing you told me?"
"I didn't think you would want to see it."
"You didn't think I would want proof?"
He did flinch then. "That's not fair."
"Not fair? Not fair?" Alex laughed and choked on it. "I want to watch."
Richard got to his feet and approached her, one hand out. Alex curled a fist at her side, but he caught her wrist when she tried to bring her arm between them. He brought his free hand up to the side of her face and ran his fingers through her hair. She bit the inside of her lip until she tasted blood. She refused to meet his eyes. "You don't want to see yourself like that, Alex," he told her.
"I've given you everything I've recorded. You insisted on it."
"That's different."
"How?" She shoved at his chest with her fist hard enough to make him let her go. She squeezed around him, making for her bedroom door. He'd left his phone in the living room and what else would he have used to record it?
"Please, Alex, wait-"
"No. You should've shown me as soon as I woke up. You should've shown me the moment I told you I didn't remember what happened!" Alex spun around and took several steps backwards, watching Richard follow her out of the dark bedroom. Light from the street cut slashes into the living room through her blinds.
"You don't understand."
"Then make me understand!"
Richard stood framed in the doorway. He let his hands hang at his sides, and watched her pick up his phone. Finally, he said, "The pin is 2672."
---
The video was murky. It opened on the cabin from what looked like the other end of the table from where the flashlight had been set up. She sat in the center, tied to the chair. It was impossible to tell for sure on this small screen, but her pupils seemed dilated. Her eyes were dark, at least, as they tracked Richard around the room.
Alex had to key the brightness up to maximum to make out the chalk circles he was beginning to draw on the floor. There wasn't much noise coming over the speakers yet, but she could see his chest moving like he was breathing hard.
Her body was at an awkward angle in the chair. Like it didn't remember how to sit upright. One of her legs was stretched out, the other pulled up so her heel rested on the rungs underneath the chair. There was no way to see her wrists in this video, but … there wasn't a gag in her mouth, like she had woken up with. Not yet.
On the screen, she licked her lips. Alex found herself doing it in real time, reflexively, and had to bite down on her tongue to make it stop. Richard was staring at her from the doorway leading back to her bedroom. In the video, he was refusing to raise his head.
The circles had gotten to the point she'd call elaborate when … when it finally spoke.
It sounded just like her.
"I could kill her, you know."
Richard made a dissatisfied noise. He had come to draw on the floor near the phone, so on the screen, it was easier to see his face. He looked exhausted."While tied with your hands behind your back?"
"I could stop breathing."
Strand did pause, then, but only for a second. "Even if you were able to stop breathing until Alex passed out, as soon as she was unconscious her body would take over. It wouldn't hurt her."
The thing clicked Alex's tongue behind her teeth. "Do you think this is going to work, Richard Strand?"
"Mmm."
"If it does work, she won't remember. She'll wake up tied to a chair in a dark dirty room with bruises on her arms from you, and you crouched in runes and chalk in your hand." There were more clicking noises as one corner of Alex's mouth rose up. The longer the thing sat in the circle, the less control it seemed to have.
That wasn't what a smile looked like if you had your own lips to smile with.
"Do you think Alex Reagan trusts Richard Strand so much?" it asked.
He continued drawing.
---
Alex wanted to turn the video off. Richard came to stand behind her. He let her hold the phone until it was over, and he took it back without speaking when she pressed it into his hands. If she held it another second she was going to drop it.
"I never want to see that again. But you still should have shown it to me."
He nodded.
"I also don't want to stay in this apartment for another minute."
That made him blink. "What?"
Alex had a tiny green suitcase she used for emergency trips. It was hard-sided but small enough to fit in the overhead bins even after the airlines shrunk them.
Richard watched her in increasing bafflement as she pulled it out of the hall closet and brought it into her bedroom. "Where are you going to go?"
"You have multiple guest rooms."
"I have - Oh." He blinked again. "But…"
"In a week, you'll be driving to the airport for your convention. We might as well already be together if we're going to carpool," Alex said. She dropped her suitcase on her bed and opened it as wide as it would go. This was going to take some smart packing if she didn't want to come back here until after the … Until after.
Strand hesitated. "You're welcome, of course," he said. "But do you… feel comfortable, staying for that long?"
"I don't want to be alone."
"Oh." He leaned against the wall and cleared his throat. "Are you… Are you positive you want to come?"
Alex shoved a sweater into the suitcase. "I want to meet the people who did that to me."
"Do you think that's wise?" Richard asked. When she slowly raised her head to stare at him, he flushed. "Given the past few days, in context of the photographs Perkins sent you… I have to assume now that you were deliberately attacked. Do you think it's wise to try to confront someone who was capable and willing to do that?"
"You're still going."
He opened his mouth and closed it without saying anything.
"You can't honestly think you're going to leave me behind."
"I don't want to expose you to unnecessary risk."
Alex snorted. "I don't think I have a choice about that, either here or in Geneva." What wouldn't she want to buy in Geneva? Socks. More underwear. The bag was getting full and she still needed to pack her laptop and some extras to bring to Richard's place until they were ready to go.
"We might be walking into a trap."
"I know that."
"I - I might not be able to protect you."
Alex's hands stilled. He hadn't put his glasses back on since her nightmare had woken the both of them and he looked vulnerable. "Are you really worried about protecting me?" she asked.
"That's what this has all been about."
Alex snorted. "All of it?"
When he answered her, his voice was quiet. "I shouldn't have taken advantage."
She took a quick breath and smiled up at him, snapping her suitcase shut. "If that's the story you want to tell," she said. He frowned, confused, and she held up a hand to cut him off. "You always want to choose your own narrative, Richard. I want to go to Geneva. I need to go to Geneva. So. You get to pick. Either you want to pretend like nothing happened…"
"Or?"
"You're the one who gets to choose."
"That thing inside of you said something similar," he said. His eyes had gone a little unfocused. "It said a lot of things, before it tried to push me into the basement. It wanted me to be amenable. In exchange, it said that it would…"
Alex felt the deep current of the well tug at her skin. She stood up, which only helped a little.
"...tell me things, that you hadn't," Richard finished. "You say you don't remember what happened. But you're having these nightmares. What if … it … It claimed it could read your memories, your thoughts. What if it could leave new ones behind?"
"You're the one who said it was gone." The latter half of the video had certainly been proof enough for Alex.
"You feel an unreasonable fear of darkness overcoming you, even though you know rationally it isn't happening any longer. Why is it far-fetched that you might be feeling differently about me because I was the one to bring you out of it? Alex, I watched something else speak from inside your body. You already believed in this kind of thing, I-" He swallowed. "I am still catching up."
"Are you asking me to keep going without you?"
"What if you regret it?"
"Richard."
"I can't go through that."
"Richard."
He finally looked up from his feet and saw that she was standing in front of him.
"Yes or no?" she asked, eyes on his. "Are we sweeping it under the rug, or not?"
A long, long moment, stretched thin between them.
Then: His hand, on the side of her face. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, letting him fumble to get his arms around her.
When one of his hands drifted to her hip she made herself lean back to breathe. She didn't want to be in this apartment for much longer - who knew what had been set up to get that thing into her. All she still remembered from Tuesday was coming home with her flaring migraine. Not much after that. For all she knew, there was a tangled mess of lines and numbers and sigils carved into the floor beneath her bed.
"If we don't release another episode of the show, people will know something is wrong," Alex said. Richard looked confused and she kissed him, briefly, to keep him from interrupting before she lost her train of thought. "We need to think of a way to throw people off our track. We need to get to Geneva and have it be a surprise."
And when they did, she was going to punch Thomas Warren right in the face.
---
Richard would never admit it, but deep down, it scared him a little that Alex was such a good actor. She'd given him a script and then taken it away before putting her recorder on the table. Reading from a page would make it too wooden, too obvious, she said. Instead she pulled her chair up directly across from his so their knees touched. She switched the recorder on and started talking.
When she said she'd bought plane tickets to Mordor, he couldn't stop his eyebrows from going up. Nic was going to censor it, but really?
She just winked at him. Personally, he thought he could hear the smile in her voice where she should have sounded nervous - but he wasn't going to critique her acting choices now. They'd already had three separate fights about the script.
He hadn't wanted to mention Bobby. Alex and Nic had both said if they didn't throw in some details like that, no one would buy it as a closer.
He was also still irritated that But what if something happens to you? came out of Alex's mouth. She'd pulled half of his very reasonable arguments about the entire trip, and why he still thought it was too dangerous for her to go on, and put them on her own tongue.
"One does not simply fly to Geneva," Alex said, the instant the recording stopped.
"Are you sure Nic shouldn't do a voiceover at the end?" Richard got up and moved to check his bag. They weren't really having dinner. It was ten o'clock in the morning and they had to leave for the airport as soon as Alex sent the encrypted file to the studio. "I still think it would make it more realistic."
"I want Thomas Warren to feel unsure," Alex said, crossing her arms. "I want him to doubt where we went. Whether the studio is going to release a note, like American Public Radio did with Lia Haddock. Whether we might come back with an episode - or if we really gave no fucks, and went off to a beach somewhere."
Richard sighed. He turned away from his bag - it had been ready since six a.m., he wasn't going to change anything now. And they had already had this conversation, nearly word for word, over their actual dinner from the night before. "All right," he said. "Let me know when you're ready."
"We're going to be fine," Alex said, bending over her laptop. "Trust me."