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“Right,” says Charles, running over the plan one more time before they officially break in. “So we’re thinking this book has some sort of spell or curse or whatever, that’s making people hallucinate old bad memories.”
“Indeed,” says Edwin. “All of our witnesses reported being drawn into some moment in their past that was distressing to them. All were looking at the psychiatrist’s journal when it happened, so we can logically deduce that that is the most likely focus of the spell. We break the curse, and the trouble should cease.”
“Okay,” says Crystal. “So we’re planning to go in, find the journal, and what, burn it?”
“That is the plan,” says Edwin.
“We couldn’t come up with a plan that didn’t involve starting a fire in a museum?”
“We will be careful,” says Edwin primly.
“Fire’s purifying,” Charles explains. “Most reliable method of breaking curses we’ve found so far, long as whatever it is can be burned.” He grins at Edwin. “Remember that cursed photograph in ‘06?” To Crystal, he adds, “Client wanted it back, right? So we had to go through this whole cleansing ritual. Took up half the floor of the office for a week. ‘Course once it’s all sorted the client moved on, and of course couldn’t take the photo with her, so-”
“I believe we still have it,” says Edwin. “It’s in the old case files.”
Crystal’s been digging through their old case files in her spare time, partly to keep her mind off of the mess of her old life, partly to be less lost when they start speaking in incomprehensible shorthand references to cases from the fucking 1990s. Maybe she’ll look for it.
Not important now though.
“So we go in, burn the journal. Case closed,” she says. “should be simple enough.”
Crystal has done her fair share of weird shit in her life, including but not limited to arguing with gods and fighting an immortal witch, so sneaking through a mostly-empty public building at night ought to be a breeze.
She curses under her breath as she knocks her shin on a bench for the third time in as many minutes. And then has to bite her tongue so as not to snarl at Edwin when he says primly, “Do keep it down, Crystal. Remember, you are audible to the living.”
He of course is speaking at a normal volume. She rolls her eyes and glares at him but he just smiles blandly and looks away as if he didn’t notice. Bastard.
Once upon a time she could have waltzed in here any time she pleased and made it everyone else’s problem if she got caught. Once upon a time she could have just mindcontrolled a guard to let her stay after hours, wipe the security footage of her, and then forget all about it, and not worried about whether they kept their job or had nightmares about it afterwards.
Instead she’s creeping through the dark, navigating by the dim emergency lights, and bruising up her shins on the furniture. She misses a step on the stairs and stumbles, barely catching herself on the handrail. Charles offers her a steadying hand. Edwin gives her a disapproving look that says living people are so inconvenient. She offers him another eyeroll as she keeps moving.
The psychiatry exhibit is tucked into a pair of side rooms. Crystal turns her phone light on once she’s out of the main areas, and it only takes a minute to locate the nondescript-looking notebook filled with hand-written script, sitting open on a pillar under a plexiglass cover with a little explanatory label identifying it as a First World War era psychiatrists journal.
Edwin and Charles make eye contact for a moment, their usual unspoken whatever passing between them, and then Charles starts pulling supplies out of his backpack.
Five minutes and one fire spell later, the three of them are standing around a noticeably unburnt book.
“Who the fuck,” says Crystal, softly so as not to be heard, “makes a fireproof journal?”
Edwin purses his lips. “Someone who doesn’t want future detectives undoing their inconvenient spellwork, one assumes,” he says. “We may need to reconsider our approach.”
Another extended look between him and Charles, which seems to carry an entire conversation. Crystal tries not to feel left out. She knows they’re like this. It’s fine.
Edwin walks a circle around the pillar, looking at it thoughtfully. He steps closer, leaning forward to examine it.
Light flares up from the book, white and blinding, searing Crystal’s eyes. She flinches, throwing an arm over her eyes, and nearly topples over backward. She catches herself, blinking away the spots dancing over her vision and looks around.
The room is gone.
The book is gone.
Dim green light casts a sickly pall down a long, decrepit looking hallway. She takes a breath and nearly chokes on the smell of dust and rot and something else, sharp and unnatural, like ozone. The light doesn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular. It gives the place an eerie unreality. It makes her skin crawl.
A faint, pained sound behind her draws her attention, and she turns.
Edwin is pressed flat against the wall as if he’s trying to melt into it. His hands are straining against the cracked, faded walls, inhumanly pale in the greenish light. His usual steely composure is nowhere to be seen. His face is pale and dirty and twisted in an expression of shocked horror, and his blue-grey suit and bowtie have been replaced with what look like pajamas, white streaked with dirt and other things Crystal doesn’t want to think about. He looks...
He looks awful. He looks like he did in Esther’s house, screaming on that fucking table, weeping over Niko’s body, and fuck she cannot think about that right now, because Crystal is on the edge of losing her shit.
“Edwin?”
His eyes jerk to her, lock on her face, and for a moment there’s not a shred of recognition in them.
Crystal’s heart sinks, panic rising up inside her. This is his memory, of that much she is sure. If he’s been reset back to this time, to some version of himself that doesn’t know her...
Then, mercifully, his expression clears. He takes a careful breath and seems to take hold of himself. He pulls away from the wall. His usual rigidly straight posture doesn’t quite reassert itself, but he’s trying.
“Crystal,” he says. “What are you doing here?”
“Psychic bullshit?” she guesses. “I don’t see Charles.”
He looks around, swallows hard, nods. “No,” he says. His voice is low, as if he’s afraid of being overhead. “At least there is that.” He glances around again. His hands are in fists at his sides. His shoulders are tense, like he’s fighting not to retreat into them. She almost, almost asks him what he’s so afraid of, but the words stick in her throat. “We need to move,” he says. “Quietly.”
He starts off down the hall, walking briskly at a steady pace and Crystal, perforce, follows.
The place is a fucking maze. The hallways all look alike – a twisting warren of sickly green corridors, broken up at intervals by indistinguishable spiked metal gates and identical wooden doors. She has no idea how Edwin can tell where he’s going. Maybe he can’t.
He moves like he knows his way though, no hesitation, no uncertainty in his steps
He’s not running, but he’s taller than her, and he walks fast, occasionally forcing her to break into a jog to keep up. Her boots echo on the concrete floors. His bare feet are nearly silent.
The sides of the corridors are littered with broken doll bits, like the detritus of an abandoned toy shop. They pile up in corners, and against the metal bars of the gates that occasionally cross their path. Crystal tries not to look at them, because their painted-on eyes feel like they’re watching her. That proves to be a mistake – she catches a foot on a stray doll’s head by accident and sends herself sprawling, landing hard on her right knee and slamming her elbow against the wall. Edwin turns back sharply, as if he’d forgotten she was there. She doesn’t look at him. She’s busy looking at the corner, at the heap of baby doll bits and-
“Holy fuck,” she bursts out. “Holy fuck holy fuck holy-”
He lunges for her. She scrambles back, away from him, away from the horror show in the corner, her heels slipping and sliding on the dusty floor, until her back slams against something solid. He follows, agitated, tension in every line of his posture. “Be quiet!” he hisses. His eyes are wide with terror.
She makes a high, strangled noise of panic and presses a hand over her mouth to silence herself. She wonders if she’s actually going crazy. It feels like it. Something about this place is getting to her.
A wave of nausea sweeps over her and she swallows hard, fights it down. The smell isn’t helping, but she manages, barely, not to be sick. When she’s sure she can hold back the...sounds she was making, she lowers her hand.
“Are those fucking human bones?” she demands, in a harsh whisper.
Edwin looks. He takes a long breath, then another. When he turns back, the strained anxiety still lines his expression, but there is something else there too. Regret, maybe. Or shame.
“Those are not important,” he says. “Try to pay them no mind.”
“Where the fuck did they come from?” she demands. Her voice squeaks. She’s trying to be quiet, she really is, but god it’s hard. Hysteria claws at the edges of her mind. Her thoughts shred apart like tissue paper. She digs her nails into the palms of her hands until the skin feels like its about to split, trying to centre herself.
“They are mine,” he says, as if that’s a remotely normal answer to that question. “Now can you please get up? We need to keep moving.”
She gets up. She keeps moving. She doesn’t let herself think about the dark red-brown smears on the walls, or the skull that had stared at her from that pile of broken doll parts, or the way Edwin’s breath is coming just as sharp and fast as hers.
He moves purposefully, though she can’t see any difference from one empty hall to another. Occasionally a sound will echo towards them and he’ll stiffen and change course abruptly, once turning around and redirecting them down a turn he’d passed up earlier. Finally he drags her into a small dead-end, more of an alcove off a corner in the hallway, where the light is dimmer and the floors mostly clear, only two cracked doll heads sitting in the corner.
“We have a little time, I think,” he says. “We can speak, if we are quiet.”
“Thank god,” she says. Edwin’s lip twists as if he wants to correct her, but for once in his afterlife he keeps his mouth shut, and Crystal lets her back crash against the wall, leans her head back against it and tries to catch her breath.
She keeps her hands tucked up under her armpits lest she accidentally touch anything. She doesn’t know if her powers work here, but she’d rather not experiment.
Edwin paces, glancing back down the hall they came from. “It would appear we have been caught in the journal’s spell,” he says redundantly. He’s still whispering.
“Obviously,” she snaps, trying and only half-succeeding to match his volume. “This is hell, isn’t it.”
Edwin glares at her. She glares right back. He breaks first, looking away from her as if seeing something interesting on the grimy walls.
“Clearly I am the one who triggered the spell,” he says. “Apparently its effects extend to ghosts. I presume you were pulled in due to your psychic abilities, as none of the witnesses we interviewed reported seeing anyone in their visions. That is unfortunate. Your presence... complicates things.”
He makes a sour little face on the last phrase. Crystal bristles. She ought to be used to Edwin’s sniping by now. But she’s had a lifetime of being unwanted, and she hates it.
“Sorry for crashing your fucked up nightmare hellscape,” she says. “Not like I did it on purpose.”
The words don’t make her feel better. Instead she sees an image of Charles wearing that disappointed look he gets when the people he loves are hurting each other and closes her eyes, trying to get a grip.
Edwin’s not actually provoking her on purpose right now. He’s reliving the literal worst experience of his afterlife in front of her.
“Sorry,” she mutters. “I didn’t mean-”
“It’s not important,” says Edwin. He grimaces. “I am aware you are not here by choice. I simply would have preferred not to have you poking about in these memories.” More quietly, he adds, “I did not want Charles knowing what went on down here, much less you.”
“Great,” she replies. “Lets leave. I’m happy to see as little of this as possible.”
She doesn’t want to be here, in these disgusting hallways with their stench of rot and blood and their bleak corners littered with broken dolls and human remains. She doesn’t want to see Edwin like this, stripped down and clinging to his dignity by his fingernails, a frightened boy hiding in the dark instead of a petty bastard who struts around the entire world like he owns it.
He grimaces. “That, I am afraid, is easier said than done. The other victims were released when the memory finished, but... seventy three years is rather a long time. And the substance of them is not pleasant.”
She knows that: impossible not to the way he never shuts up about it. But it hits differently looking at these decrepit walls, the prospect of spending an entire human lifetime down here real in a way it never had been before.
“You escaped before, right?” she says shakily. “So we can-”
He presses his lips together. “Escaping last time was facilitated by Charles’ lockpicks and a molotov cocktail,” he says. “Did you think to pack such items? Because I did not.”
“You did it without that the first time,” she says. She’s hyperventilating. She hates this.
“It took! Seventy! Years!” he hisses.
Her hands curl into fists. “Don’t yell at me,” she snaps. “It’s your stupid memory. You’re the one who-”
There is a strange, almost metallic skittering sound from somewhere in the halls and Edwin shoves her bodily into the corner, one hand pressed over her mouth.
She remembers the Devlin house, the misery wraith bearing down on her, Edwin’s hand against her face and his urgent whisper in her ear telling her what to do. But there are no instructions this time, only a desperate unspoken plea for silence. And whatever is stalking these halls sounds bigger than the misery wraith. A lot bigger.
Her heart feels like it’s going to hammer its way out of her chest. With his hand covering her mouth she has to breathe through her nose, and the smell of this place is making her sick. Her breath is coming fast and shallow and not-enough and her limbs are locked up in terror, muscles coiled so tight she feels like her bones might snap under the strain. Edwin’s hand is pressed against her face hard enough that she’s worried he’ll leave bruises.
They stand there, frozen together, for what feels like hours, but is probably only a minute or two, before the sound fades, and he draws back, releases her.
“What the everloving fuck-” she whispers.
“My keeper,” he says softly. There is something painful in his eyes.
“Edwin,” she whispers.
His jaw flexes. “I do not want your sympathy,” he says. She can hear the strain in the words. The pleading. He hates this as much as she does. Maybe more.
Definitely more.
Crystal is exhausted and terrified and heartsick and bruised and learning things that she absolutely does not want to know. But if he wants unsympathetic, she can give it to him. Crystal is a bitch. She knows how to be ruthless.
“Okay,” she says. She takes a breath and lets it out, steadying her nerves as best she can. “Okay,” she repeats, and this time it comes out more normal. “So if we can’t do it that way, how are we getting out of here?”
He lays out the pieces of the puzzle with cold, dispassionate bluntness.
They don’t know when in Edwin’s timeline they are. This place is built from his memories, but he is obviously not bound to follow the actions of his past self, as his ability to interact with Crystal demonstrates. None of the other victims had tried to change anything in their memories, so they don’t know if this is the norm for this spell, or if it’s an effect of Crystal’s accidental hitch-hiking.
They don’t know what will happen to Crystal if she gets killed in here. Going by how worried Edwin looks when he brings that up, it’s a real possibility. She doesn’t like the implications of that.
“We have the advantage that we know we are caught in a spell,” says Edwin. “I do not know if we can break it from the inside, but there may be a chance.”
“And if we can’t?”
“Charles will break us out,” he says, with absolute certainty. “He has my books. He will find a counterspell. If absolutely necessary, he can ask the Night Nurse. But it may take time, and-”
“And the longer we’re here the likelier it is something goes to shit,” she finishes. “Alright, so how do we break out?”
“I know a few rituals to break through wards,” says Edwin. “I will attempt to modify one of them to do the same to this spell. The concepts are similar.”
“Will that work?”
He grimaces. “It would work better if I had my reference books” he says. “But it is worth the attempt.”
In other words, he doesn’t know. Crystal bites her lip.
“So you do this spell-”
“I suggest you perform the ritual,” says Edwin. “Your abilities should more than compensate for your lack of experience, and...”
“And?”
He looks away. “The caster will be unable to run while the ritual is in progress. If the creature happens upon us... I think it likely that it will ignore you so long as you do not provoke it. If it should get too close, I will lead it off. That will give you time to complete the spell.”
She stares at him. “That’s your plan?” She remembers at the last second to strangle her voice down to a whisper.
“If I run, it will chase,” Edwin assures her, as though that were the problem with this suggestion. “I am its property. Its prey. You are not.”
“Great,” she says. “Brilliant fucking idea Edwin. What if it catches you? What if I finish and you’re just not back? How am I supposed to get us both out of here if I don’t know where the fuck you are?”
“Breaking out may cause the entire spell to collapse,” says Edwin. “In which case it will not matter where I am.”
“Uh-huh. And if not?”
“Then the problem will still be half-solved, and once you are out you and Charles can work on it from the outside. My books-”
“I don’t want you alone in here,” she says.
She’s a little surprised by her own conviction, but she doesn’t take it back. Maybe it’s stupid. He was trapped here for longer than she’s been alive; surely he knows better than she does what he can handle. She’s probably a liability to him right now, more than an asset.
Nonetheless, the though of leaving him to face this on his own is unacceptable.
Something complicated passes over his face. “This is hell,” he says. “It has very little to do with what we want.”
“If we-”
“Inconvenience of accommodating a living associate in the agency aside,” he interrupts, “I have no intention of actually letting you get yourself killed. Charles would be quite cross with me. So if you have the option to get out, with or without me, you take it.”
She cocks her head at him. Something like rage starts to burn in her chest, and she welcomes it. It keeps the fear at bay.
“Edwin? If Charles finds out I left you behind in hell, he’s gonna be a lot more than cross.”
Charles won’t blame her, but he will lose his damn mind, which is worse.
“Do not be ridiculous, Crystal” says Edwin. “We are not actually in hell. We are in a memory spell. If nothing else, I can get out of it by allowing the events of the memory to play out. It is nothing I have not been through before. It is your presence here that poses a problem.”
Edwin, she has learned, is a slippery fucker who will turn the logic of the conversation around whatever way he has to to get what he wants. She does not miss that he’s shifted effortlessly from “this is hell; you can’t have everything you want” to “this isn’t really hell so leaving me here doesn’t count.”
Bastard.
The trouble is that she doesn’t really have a better plan. Burying a second, even bigger demon in her own head doesn’t seem like a good idea, even if she could get there.
Which she can’t. She’s checked. Her power is still there, a well of strength at the back of her mind, but the tree and the table with its generations of women who could have told her how to fix this are just out of reach.
She narrows her eyes at him. He looks back at her, unyielding.
“I hate this plan,” she says.
“You may consider that objection noted and disregarded,” he replies.
“Of course,” she says. “Fine. Lets do this if we’re doing it.”
But I’m not leaving without you, she thinks. And fuck you for thinking you can make me.
The first challenge is finding something to draw the ritual circle with. Edwin’s initial suggestion, that he cut himself and draw the circle in his own blood is roundly rejected by Crystal on grounds of being fucking horrifying.
“It’s a perfectly respectable method,” says Edwin. “The blood of a sacrificial victim is a powerful ritual substrate. And in this case, as it is mine to-”
“I said no,” she says.
They settle on breaking one of the porcelain doll heads and using the shards to scratch a circle into the concrete. It’s not exactly chalk, but it’ll work as long as they’re careful not to rub out any of the lines.
Edwin draws it out, scowling at the lines and muttering to himself about how much easier this would be if he had his books. The final product is about two feet across, and scribbled with slightly mismatching runes, and Edwin is visibly unhappy with it.
“This may not work,” he says. “I am not as familiar with the norse runes as the celtic, and I’m not sure they’re-”
“If it can get me started,” says Crystal slowly, “I think I can do the rest.” She feels a strange certainty as she says it, like a warm, gentle hand on her back, guiding her forward.
“That is not how-”
“Edwin,” says Crystal, holding his gaze in hers. “I can do it.”
He huffs but he shuts his mouth, which means he at least suspects she’s right. Instead he walks her through the incantation, and makes her recite it back for him under her breath until he’s satisfied with her pronunciation. Then he settles back and leaves her to her work.
It goes wrong, of course. Because this day has been insane, and they’re in some version of hell, and things going wrong is probably par for the course here.
Crystal has barely started the incantation, her hands planted inside the ritual circle, the well of magic inside her rising up to her call, when the filthy hallways lurch and shudder, and suddenly the sound of skittering is very very close.
Edwin’s pale face goes paper-white, and he swallows, pushing himself to his feet. “Do not stop,” he whispers.
Crystal’s mouth goes dry but she keeps going, funnelling the power in her hands into the circle of scratched-out lines, which start to glow faintly as she works.
The skittering gets louder. Edwin swallows again. She wonders, distantly, if he’d suspected when he proposed this plan that whatever this thing was would be drawn in by their activities, or if he’d just spent long enough in hell that he always plans for the worst.
When the thing bursts around the corner she can’t even tell what it is.
David had looked human. Even the hideous arm that had pushed its way inside her when he stole her life had been human-ish. This is something else, knobbly and misshapen, with limbs sticking out in all directions. It gives her a cold feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach. She remembers Edwin’s words after he and Charles had emerged from hell – How can you plan for a giant spider made of baby doll heads? - and the porcelain wasteland around her suddenly makes a horrible kind of sense.
Edwin charges forward, ducking between the knobbly legs with a faint, panicked sound and sprinting away down the hall.
Crystal forces her lips to keep moving, her hands to stay steady on their marks, bites back the gibbering terror trying to claw its way to the surface and focuses on the spell.
For about three heartbeats the thing stays where it is, and she has a horrible moment of wondering whether Edwin might have been wrong about it leaving her alone. Maybe it knows that she’s the one trying to will it out of existence. Maybe it can tell she’s the greater threat. Maybe-
Then it lets out a genuinely unnerving giggle and scrambles backward. It’s central mass rotates and swivels in a way that seemed to involve a few of its limbs sliding through each other, and then it takes off after Edwin, porcelain clattering against concrete.
Crystal’s pulse is pounding in her ears and the adrenaline screaming down her veins is making her feel like she might pass out, but she keeps going. She doesn’t let herself scream, or hyperventilate, or throw up. She doesn’t let her words falter.
She’s not okay. She’s riding the edge of panic, clinging to her concentration with her fingernails, but there is no fucking way that she’s letting them stay stuck here. She’s going to break this goddamn spell to pieces.
That’s right, child, a carribean-accented voice murmurs in the back of her mind, faint and far away but warmly approving. You got the power here.
She doubles down, dives into the ritual, the feeling of her hands on the grimy concrete and the words spilling from her mouth fading away as the spell cracks around her. She can see it, a network of greenish light, like a spider’s web.
She’s aware of Edwin running through the halls, of the conjured memory of the spider-demon hot on his heels, but that’s not all she can feel. She can feel his presence in the spell itself, feel his mind straining against the magic that binds it, fighting to break loose.
She reaches out to where the version of Edwin in the hallways is running, and puts up a wall between him and the thing that hunts him. Then she turns her attention to the spellwork, tracing the lines to their centre points by some intuition she couldn’t name but knows, in her bones, that she can trust. It comes together before her eyes, and she reaches out, wraps her hands around the keystone of the spell, and commands it to burn.
Power surges to her call, and the spell shreds apart in a cloud of purple flames.
She opens her eyes to the museum room, to the darkened display and the book and Charles in an absolute panic, paging through Edwin’s spellbook like his life depends on it.
Or, realistically, like Crystal and Edwin’s lives depend on it.
Edwin is moving too, stumbling back a step as if he’d just been dropped back into his body and landed badly. Charles drops the spellbook like it’s made of iron, racing to his side in an instant.
“Edwin,” he breathes, and the relief in his voice is unmistakeable as Edwin blinks, shakes his head, focuses on Charles.
He turns to her before she can start to feel too bitter about being forgotten, just as anxious as he’d been for Edwin, and nearly collapses when he sees that she’s alright, looking back at him and shaking the tingly sensation of channeling too much magic out of her fingers. Edwin’s arms come up to catch him as if by reflex, steadying him against Edwin’s chest.
“Thank fuck,” he says, with feeling. “I couldn’t find that bloody clear-sight spell, and you were both out of it, and I didn’t know if trying to destroy the book some other way would work or just get me caught in it too, and-”
“It’s quite alright,” says Edwin gently. He sets him back on his feet and tugs his coat straight, smoothing down the shoulders, “Looking for the clear-sight spell was quick thinking, Charles. We simply got there ahead of you.” He turns to Crystal, and there is something complicated in his eyes. “Crystal comported herself admirably,” he says. “Our escape is entirely to her credit.” His voice is as measured and precise as ever, as if he got chased through the creepy abandoned hallways of some sort of demon-ridden insane asylum every day.
She guesses that makes sense. He had, hadn’t he? For years. Decades.
She doesn’t know what to do with that.
“I couldn’t get a grip on the spell to break it until you cracked the illusion,” She says. She tries not to let her voice shake. “I’d say inventing a ritual counter-spell to break out of a magical nightmare on the fly is pretty good.”
Charles huffs out a laugh. “Sounds like you,” he says. “Both of you. Wasn’t much use, was I?”
He’s smiling - Charles is always smiling - but there’s a tension in it Crystal doesn’t know how to fix.
Edwin draws back a little, his hands still firmly on Charles’ shoulders, but moving so that he can look him in the eye. “You,” he says firmly, “are the only reason I could keep my wits about me. Because I knew that if we failed, you would not.”
Charles’ anxiety melts. His smile softens and his hands come up to wrap around Edwin’s forearms, gripping tight. “I’m glad you’re out,” he says. They stand there for a minute, completely caught up in each other. Crystal blinks away the burning in her eyes and wraps her arms around herself, trying to ignore the hollow, resentful feeling in the pit of her stomach as they gaze into each other’s eyes, oblivious to her presence, lost to the world.
She can’t really bring herself to regret it; it’s a hell of a step up on the life she had before. But sometimes being friends with these two sucks.
Then Charles pulls out of Edwin’s grip and moves to Crystal and the awkwardness breaks. He rests his hands on her upper arms, gentle and soothing, and searches her face. “You alright?” he asks.
Over his shoulder, Edwin tenses a little.
She pulls her eyes back to Charles and nods. “I’m okay.”
She is. It hasn’t been a good day, but she’s okay. The ugly filthy hallways are gone, and the wreckage of broken dolls and human bones is gone, and nobody died. She said she would break the damn thing and she did. It feels good.
She looks at the book. “Is the curse still-”
“No,” says Edwin. “The spell appears to be quite gone. I believe your intervention destroyed it quite completely. That is a stroke of luck. The museum will be glad not to lose the book.”
Charles grins. “Better than luck,” he says, and turns back to Edwin, wrapping an arm around her shoulder as if showing her off. “I keep saying having a psychic on the team is aces, mate.”
She breathes out and smiles as she leans into him, buoyed by his enthusiasm. She knows he does this on purpose, knows he’s smiling harder because he’s worried about them, but it still works. His cheer might be forced, but it’s still infectious. Even Edwin seems lighter, smiling back at Charles the way he never does for anyone else.
“Job officially jobbed then,” she says. It sounds dumber in her accent than in theirs, but Charles grins harder, and even Edwin’s lips quirk up when he hears it. She leans her cheek against Charles’ collar with its phantom pins, and they make their way to the steps of the museum where their client is waiting.
Late nights are part of the ghost-detective-agency gig, and Crystal is used to running on too much adrenaline and too little sleep, but she still feels wrung out by the time they get back to the office. For once, Edwin doesn’t bitch about having to take the long way because of her. For once, he seems almost as uncomfortable with the possibility of her walking home alone through London at night as Charles does.
She collapses on their couch, and debates going back to her place versus just telling them to get the hell out of the office for a few hours and passing out.
Edwin decides the matter for her.
“Charles,” he says, “We will go out for a while, I think. Crystal needs her rest.” With a glance at her, he adds, with a sort of pro forma snark, “You look terrible.”
She can barely muster her usual middle finger at the insult. She curls up on the couch, and passes out before the boys have even left.
Edwin is standing by the bookshelf when she wakes, mid-morning sun streaming in through the window, the two of them apparently alone in the office. He looks over at her as she drags herself upright.
“Charles is getting you coffee,” he says.
“Great.” Her mouth is dry and her eyes feel sandy and irritated. Not as bad as when she used to go out drinking with her shitty ex-friends, but not great. She pushes her hair out of her face and shoves the blanket into a wad at the other end of the couch. She needs a shower, but that’ll have to wait until she’s somewhere with working plumbing.
God her life has gotten fucking weird.
“He should be back momentarily,” says Edwin. There is a moment’s awkward silence, the events of the night before seeming to hang in the air between them. There is so fucking much that they need to talk about, and Crystal has absolutely no fucking idea where to begin.
“Look about what happened at the museum-” she starts, just as Edwin says “Regarding yesterday-”
Charles chooses that moment to phase through the door.
“Morning Crystal!” he says brightly. “How’d you sleep?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer, digging her coffee out of his bag – unspilled - and passes it over to her. It tastes heavenly, and the heat burning down her throat makes being awake approximately 200% more bearable. She sighs and closes her eyes for a second to enjoy it.
“Morning,” she says.
He perches on the arm of the couch and tucks one foot up on the cushions. “Rough night last night,” he says.
She takes another sip. “So what’s the plan for today?”
He takes the deflection in stride, looking from her to Edwin. “Caseboard’s cleared out, innit? I’d say we’ve all earned a bit of a quiet morning.” He looks at her with a little line of worry between his eyes, but he doesn’t push it just yet. “We could play Cluedo?”
“I always lose at Clue,” she says. It’s not a refusal. Though the fact that in over 30 games she hasn’t won once is bullshit.
“Evidence that your deductive reasoning skills need work,” says Edwin, half acerbic, half baiting.
“You two have been playing this stupid game nonstop for 30 years and can read each other’s minds,” she says. “I should get to use my powers to make up the difference.”
“If you need a handicap-”
“Okay first of all, can we not call it that, and second-”
“Monopoly it is,” Charles breaks in. He retrieves it from the closet and starts setting it up. Crystal sits down beside him, and after a moment Edwin joins them, sitting cross-legged with his back straight like a picture from a children’s book.
She counts out colorful paper money with only half her brain, and it’s not until she’s counted it three times that she remembers she’s supposed to be separating it into stacks and giving everyone their starting amounts.
Charles and Edwin are looking at her with identical expressions of mild concern. She looks down at the monopoly money in her hands.
“Maybe someone else should be the banker,” she says. “I’m kinda out of it.”
“We can do something else,” says Charles.
“It’s fine,” she says. “I’m fine.” She pushes the pile of money towards him. “Just... let me finish my coffee.”
He looks unhappy, but takes over sorting the money, deals out the three little piles and lays the rest in front of him. She sips her coffee.
“Look I know you had a bad time of it last night,” he says. “We can-”
“It was Edwin’s memory,” she says. “Not mine.”
Edwin jumps to his feet. “I should finish our report on last night’s case,” he says. He doesn’t wait for an answer before walking out through the door without opening it.
“Mate you don’t-” Charles starts, but he’s already gone. He lets out a heavy sigh.
Crystal groans and drops her head into her hands. She’s really not getting anything right today.
Maybe she should just go back to bed. God knows she could use the fucking sleep
“You saw hell, then,” says Charles.
“Yeah,” says Crystal.
“Shit,” he says. He shifts so they’re sitting side by side, not looking at each other. “You alright? I don’t know exactly what you saw, but I know it’s... a lot.”
She looks down into her coffee. “I don’t think I saw much,” she says. “I saw the creepy spider thing. Just for a few seconds.”
“Did it-”
She shakes her head. “Edwin lured it away,” she says. “He said it wouldn’t be interested in me. That he was its-” her voice catches. “Its prey. I don’t think it caught him. He was still running when...”
“Right.”
She glances at the door. “Is he okay?”
Charles follows her gaze. “He will be,” he says. “He’s tougher than he looks.” He shifts uneasily, glaces at the monopoly board, back to the door. “I’m just gonna-”
“I’ll go,” she says. “He’s my friend too.”
“Crystal-” he looks torn.
“I’m not gonna fight with him,” she says. “I just... I think he and I need to talk.”
She finds him on the roof. He’s standing at the edge, looking out over the city, the morning sun bright on his face. He turns when the door opens.
“I was expecting Charles,” he says.
“I asked him to give us a minute.”
His eyes narrow, and she can feel him reaching for something harsh to say, a reminder that she isn’t supposed to like him, isn’t supposed to care enough to follow him.
Too damn bad.
“Your memories suck,” she says bluntly. “In case you were wondering.”
He takes a sharp breath, avoiding her eyes. “I apologize,” he says. “I should have been more cautious. If I had realized the spell could affect ghosts, or that you might be drawn in along with me-”
“That’s not what I meant,” she says.
He purses his lips, looks away.
“It is hell,” he says. “It is not supposed to be pleasant.”
And Crystal knows that tone, doesn’t she? Knows the stiffness in his shoulders and the sharpness in his eyes. She remembers how much she’d dreaded people trying to be kind about her parents leaving her alone on Christmas, or making their assistant drop her off at the hospital to get stitches when she sliced her hand on a broken glass when she was 13. Crystal is all too familiar with the impulse to pick a fight so people will leave you to lick your wounds in peace. She may not have spent 70 years in hell, but she knows how unwanted gentleness can break you, how ruthlessness can be easier to swallow.
Alright then. Crystal might be working on becoming a better person, might even feel like she’s succeeding at it most days. But she knows how to be ruthless.
“Were those bones really yours?” She doesn’t let her voice waver, or soften.
He nods stiffly, watching her face.
“Do I want to know how that worked?”
“Probably not,” he says.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
His lip curls in revulsion. “Absolutely not.”
“Great,” she says. “Then that’s it. It was a bad memory. We got out. Case closed.”
He eyes her suspiciously, considering. “Case closed,” he says.
She nods, and waits for him to nod back. Then, “For the record,” she says, “I know you didn’t want me to see any of that. But I’m not sorry I got sucked in with you. Because that fucking sucked. And if me being there helped even a little, then it was worth it.”
He flinches, and for a moment he looks horribly, heartbreakingly young. For a moment, Crystal remembers that she turned 17 this year, and that he never will. Then he pulls himself together, composing himself again into the untouchable bastard she knows and is coming to love.
“I’m glad I was there,” she says, and she hopes he can hear the conviction in her voice. “You shouldn’t have to deal with it alone.”
He smiles, a bit lopsidedly. “They are my memories, Crystal,” he says. “I am always alone with them.”
“Bullshit,” she tells him. “You’ve got Charles. And like it or not, you’ve got me. We might not be in your head all the time, but you’re not alone.” She turns back to the door. “Now come downstairs and see if I can beat you at simulated capitalism, since you’ve apparently figured out how to cheat at Clue.”
He laughs under his breath, and even opens the door for her as they start back down the stairs. “You know,” he says, not looking at her, “you are kinder than you first seem.”
“No I’m not,” she says. “I’m a heartless bitch. Ask anyone.”
She doesn’t say, so are you.
Charles is leaning against the desk with his hands in his pockets, looking like he’s been debating going after them since the second she walked out the office door. He relaxes visibly when he sees Edwin coming in behind her, neither of them apparently angrier than when they’d left.
“Heavy emotional shit is banned for the rest of the day,” she informs him. “We’re playing board games.”
They play Monopoly, and then Yahtzee, and then Clue because Edwin and Charles are insane about that game, and then Charles puts on one of his old records from the 80s and bullies Edwin into dancing with him. Crystal orders pizza, and if the pizza delivery girl wonders why she’s delivering to an apparently-abandoned building, Crystal tips her well enough not to worry about it.
It’s not perfect, but it’s good. They’re trying, anyway. And when Edwin offers a hand to Crystal to demonstrate ‘what actual dancing looks like,’ she feels like they’re doing okay.