by Harper Fox
“That’s the Beaumont curse, Alice. Not yours.”
“Oh, I know. I was just playing, though that one will come true. My curse is better by miles.”
Better by miles. She sounded like a boastful kid in a playground, and Gideon would’ve laughed if she hadn’t been stopped an inch short of demolishing a building around him. “Mind what you’re saying,” he rumbled. “Curses have a knack for flying home.”
“Who told you that? Have you been listening to the witches, to old Granny Ragwen? Not your preacher father, and not...” The knife-blade smile gleamed again. “Not your mother. Your mother loves Lee, doesn’t she? Not Ma.”
Gideon took a step towards her. Lee shot out an arm and held him back. “No, Gid. I need to hear. Is that what you’re doing, Alice—cursing us? How can you do that?”
“Because I’m like her, you little fool! Do you think it’s just things she can move? She’s done it twice for you now, and Ma’s where it started, that old girl who should’ve died four years ago at winter solstice.”
“No.” Gideon dropped wholesale into the world of her madness, because Alice couldn’t know this, couldn’t know how he, Zeke and Lee had sat by Ma’s bedside and watched her fade. “I made a journey. I found where the paths of Ma’s life divided, and Tamsie...”
“Tamsyn was just a baby, asleep in a cot next door. She was only two and a half when you destroyed everything you cared about in Story Town, and Jana Ragwen stood in front of the burning church and asked her to lift the weight of the whole world. But it wasn’t the world she turned back on itself, Guardian Frayne. It was time. She can’t keep doing that, can she? Can’t keep fixing what you break, giving you back the things you lose. Curses do come home, and miracles, too. Where’s your bracelet, beast? Where are your wedding rings—yours and the prophet’s? I’ve been working on the pair of you. Haven’t you felt things falling apart?”
The effort not to recoil wrenched muscles in Gideon’s spine. If he fell back from her—if he showed fear, he was lost. His life was beautiful, a seamless whole. As for his bracelet and his ring, the first was missing, but that was okay. Lee would find it in the house somewhere, just as he always found and gave him exactly what he needed every day. And he never took his plain gold band off. The tendons in his hands had thickened a little over the past five years, just as every part of him had solidified and grown stronger: the ring was set firmly in place. The patch of skin there felt cold, strange, but that didn’t matter. If he didn’t look, he didn’t have to know. “We’re fine,” he choked out, reaching for his husband, who stumbled close to him and took a bruising hold on him in return. “Lee and I are fine.”
“Well, isn’t that the lie that’ll send you both to hell! What if I took down the shields Locryn’s raised around his mind? Tamsyn, little flower of the field—how would you like it if I did that? What would you see?”
Only love. Only love, Gideon knew that. Lee hid nothing, especially not from his girl. He turned, skin crawling, bones aching, to find his conviction reflected in Tamsyn’s eyes. But she was blank-faced, clambering down out of Elowen’s arms. “No, Elowen. Hold on to her. Keep her away.”
“I can’t. Christ, Gid, you know I can’t, not if she wants to go.”
That was true. And if Alice’s power was limitless, surely the only cure for it was Tamsyn’s—limitless and benign. Surely Tamsyn would take the tearstained horror from Lee’s face. Lee was fighting to be away. Gideon wouldn’t let him go. He had to protect his daughter, but old Jana Ragwen was limping to intercept her, arms outstretched. “Tamsie,” he called, through the staticky roar in his ears. “Can you stop Alice—properly, forever?” Can you take the weight of the whole world?
She would do it. She’d do it for him, because he’d asked, and he was her father. Suddenly Gideon understood the wrongness of that. Alice was shrieking, cringing as far back as the confines of the chair would allow. In the background, Zeke was yelling at him to stop. He tried. He put out a hand, and Tamsyn, who’d begun a track towards Alice, swung towards him instead. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, my poor little maiden. Come here.”
Alice’s cries morphed into thin, inhuman laughter. “Oh, you... pussy, Guardian Frayne. Let her try! Do your worst, brat. We’ll see who’s the true witch of Dark.”
Her challenge—the absurdity of being called pussy, after all this drama—pulled the teeth and claws from her for Gid, left him fighting laughter of his own. He’d have scooped up his daughter, but Granny Ragwen had got to her and was kneeling stiffly at her side. Gideon smiled: shook his head at Alice. “Where are we—kindergarten? You do your worst, Alice Rawle.”
Granny had got hold of Tamsyn’s chin. She was stroking her face like a chalice, whispering. “Do you see,” Gideon heard, and the words brushed his mind, swift as dove’s wings, fluttering. “Do you see? All the flowers we’ve learned, all our spellbooks and grimoires, little girl. They’re so we can recognise this, the true flower of evil. We weave our circle round her thrice, and cage her and keep her from harm, and so at the end of her life she goes back to the deep dust and sparkle of things, and the Mother remakes her so she may return. And we return too, to find her and love her again.”
Tamsyn nodded. She turned to the old lady, smiling. “To find her and love her again.”
Alice Rawle stood up. She made a snakelike movement with her upper body, and Gideon’s handcuffs clattered to the ground. She rubbed her wrists and looked around her as if she’d just arrived. “My worst,” she echoed. “My own curse? I can do that in three words.” Tamsyn wrenched round in Jana Ragwen’s arms, but Alice ignored her. She jabbed her finger in the air twice—the first time at Lee, who cried out as if the movement had gone through his heart, and then at Gideon. “You never met.”
Tamsyn whipped around. In her movement Gideon saw a vibrant adult power. Alice went up on her toes, as if electrified—no, worse than that. As if something had grabbed her by the hair from above, and something else by her ankles from below. These two opposing entities—God and the devil, Zeke might once have said, or in symbols from Gid’s own profane mind, the horses from the Levi’s ad—gave one jerk. Alice snapped. The uses to which she’d been put had made a sparrow of her, a handful of feathers barely worth the bullet. She hit the stone flags in a flurry of soft thuds and lay still.
Instantly Tamsyn reverted to the child she was. She let loose one terrified yell, and Granny Ragwen scooped her up. “Ah, no, my true flower,” the old woman cried, falling a few steps back with her and turning her away from the broken heap on the floor. “That’s not how it works, not like that. Ah, you see it already—but what a hard lesson, my Tamsie! What a hard, dreadful scourging for us all, and more than anyone for Guardian Frayne.”
Gideon shook his head. He wasn’t a guardian and he wasn’t a beast. He was a policeman. A husband and father too, and he had to be those three things right now. A woman had just dropped dead at his feet. His daughter was shrieking, and Lee was folding down onto his knees as if some terrible side-blow had caught him too.
He couldn’t move.
A big hand closed on his shoulder. “Gideon.”
His brother. Zeke was already holding Rufus Pendower by the wrist. Gideon tried to form a sentence, but his mouth and throat were numb. “What?”
“Get hold of Lee and come out of here.”
“Tamsyn.”
“The old lady has her. Come on.” When Gideon didn’t respond, Zeke’s eyes flashed, a rare but recognisable storm warning. “Gideon! This is what happens when mortal men seek to toy with forces beyond their control. This is a house of God, and be assured that if evil has been unleashed here, a greater power of good will redress it. You have to come with me now. Take hold of your husband and come.”
Mortal men, evil, the power of good. The start of his usual harangue. On some level Gideon had missed the rants since Zeke had acquired twin boys, some perspective and a sense of humour. There was something reassuring about his hectoring voice now, a rope of reality thrown t
o him across a roaring gap. Even if Gideon couldn’t move, perhaps he could obey.
His colleagues were arriving. They passed him in black-clad blurs. The AFOs wore natty peaked caps, not just Jim Squires with a shotgun but a whole team of them, the Penzance and Truro and Bodmin squads combined. Jim was signalling to them with a tight-wound calm Gideon knew well: keep it together, lads, but get the bastard. Make a perimeter. Lennox might not have been popular, but she’d been one of their own.
The bastard was already down. Gideon tried to lift Lee away from her body. “Come away, love,” he said, because that was what Zeke had said, more or less. In the background he could hear the confused shouts of the arriving teams: where is she? Is that her on the ground? She’s just a girl.
Yes. Stripped of savage power, Alice was just what the world called a girl. Thin, under forty, unlikely to snap back with a feminist’s insistence on woman. Her hair was in pale rat’s tails on the flags. As Gideon watched, Lee put a hand to the back of her skull and gently raised her head. “Alice? Alice, can you hear me?”
“I can hear you, Locryn.”
Her voice was like sand across paper. Gideon, who’d thought his child had killed her, hauled in a breath of relief and disappointment mixed and crouched beside Lee. Girl or not, safety catches were clicking off in the circle of men around them. Some crimes caused coppers to care less about intervening bodies than others. “We’ve got to go,” he whispered, but Lee was set like rock. “Lee, please. She’s not our problem now.”
“She’s mine. Alice,” he whispered, and the desperation in his voice sent a pang of fear through Gideon, the nearest approach to panic he’d experienced since the Beast had chased him home across the moor. “Alice, do you know the story of Sleeping Beauty? The fairytale?”
She smiled, a tiny flicker. “I know everything now.”
“All right. The baby princess, Briar Rose, is getting christened, remember? And the parents invite seven good fairies to give her their gifts—beauty, grace, goodness, all the rest of it. But there’s this one poor old fairy who’s been forgotten, and she’s furious, so she says that one day Briar Rose will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die.”
“I get it. You’re the seventh fairy.”
“That’s right. The one who hasn’t given her gift yet.” Lee eased Alice up into his arms, and Gideon helplessly held out a hand to the surrounding gunmen. “She tries to take off the curse, Alice, but she can’t. The old fairy was too badly treated, too hurt. So her gift’s that Briar Rose will only fall into a sleep, not die.”
“But you... you don’t have any gifts. Nothing that I want, anyway. Not now.”
“No, but suppose I changed the curse. I know you can’t take it off. But you could lay it all on me.”
Jim Squires had had enough. “If that woman’s talking,” he barked, “I want her. I don’t know what’s happened here, Gideon, but I need you and Lee to step away.”
Gideon needed that too. He took Lee by the armpits and lifted. This time Lee didn’t resist: laid Alice down, turned to Gid with a look of pure love and reached up for him. And Gideon heard Alice Rawle whisper, with perfect last-breath clarity, “All right, little prophet. Done.”
Chapter Twelve
The Widening Gyre
Tamsyn wouldn’t stop crying. Nor would she let go of Lee. He jounced and rocked her. The delicately chubby arms and legs of her infancy were longer now, and carting her around like a sack of animated compost wouldn’t always be a possibility, Gideon knew.
Still, Lee could manage her for now. She’d attached herself to him with a baby bat’s determination. Wildly abnormal for her, but such a daily-bread scene in most families that Gideon let it settle like a poultice on his heart. Everything was normal. Lee had carried his squalling burden into the shade of the cherry tree, where Granny Ragwen was sitting on a tombstone beside Elowen, companionably holding her hand. Ezekiel, stone face unreadable, was watching over them all. Rufus Pendower had recovered to the extent of hovering around Lee and the baby, offering suggestions to quiet her.
Lee wasn’t paying attention. Seeing Gideon emerge from the church, he strode over to meet him, finding a daily-bread smile. “Everything all right in there?”
“I think I have new standards for all right, but yes. The paramedics are looking after Alice.”
“She’s not...”
“Dead? No. She’s completely unresponsive, but she’s breathing. It’s like somebody just... switched her off.”
Tamsyn’s distraught cries stopped. She laid her flushed little face on Lee’s shoulder, her own breath catching and hiccupping. “There,” Lee told her calmly, stroking her hair. “Not the world’s cutest little homicide after all.”
“Stop. It’s not funny,” Gideon said, beginning a grin anyway. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t try for the moment. Maybe we should just get our kid home. Can we leave?”
“Yeah, the AFO chief said we could go, though Lawrence wants all of us to go through interview to try and work out what happened here. That can happen tomorrow though, or... Oh, Tamsie. Are you gonna tell us what the bloody hell we ought to say?”
“Swear box,” Lee reminded him absently. “All right. If we can go, I think we should. I want to be at home. Did she just save up all her tantrums for today, I wonder?”
“Out here? Or...”
“In there? I don’t know what happened in there, Gid, but I’m pretty sure she saved all of us. I can’t think about it anymore for now. Here’s your bracelet, love—I found it under the bathroom sink at home.”
He was lying. Gideon knew the sound of it—rare, bright, utterly benign. Nevertheless he put out his hand when Lee spared one from their daughter for long enough to pull the silver chain out of the pocket of his jeans. “Thank you. Oh, Christ, Lee. Where are our rings?”
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? We both left them at home. If we think about some kind of alternative to that, we’ll both go nuts. So let’s get back and find them, right now.”
Gideon swallowed hard. His world was on its axis, even if Alice Rawle had dragged a raw-meat trail across it on her journey here today. The Reverend Charles Sawyer was raving and weeping at a bewildered community officer, and the church was full of gunmen, surrounded by sirens and blue lights, but this was a knowable chaos, a bust of the right kind, assailant disarmed and under arrest. Alive, too, which made for a better outcome than Gideon had dared hope. Still, he shared Lee’s impulse to run home, to the world he and his husband had created together. “Are you okay to drive?”
“Yeah. Not sure I’m gonna be able to pick this barnacle off me, but... Tamsie, if you want to come home with me, you’ll have to let go so I can put you in your car seat. Or do you want to go in the truck with Dada?”
Sometimes she loved that. Gideon waited hopefully. He could strap her booster seat into the Rover, find a quiet stretch of the backroads and switch the siren on for her entertainment. It made her sing the chorus from Eminem’s Business. Her sobs had faded out, but when Gideon moved to lift her from Lee’s arms she clenched her grip tight on him and hid her face. “Oh, dear,” Gideon said, trying not to let anyone see that he was genuinely upset. “Looks like it’s all about you today, Mr Tiger.”
“Ah, don’t worry. You know how fickle she is. She’ll probably change her mind halfway down the A30.”
“Well, I’ll be right behind you. And Zeke will be bringing up the rear in the family hearse.” Glancing over his shoulder, Gid saw his brother still in place, still watchful. “He brought Elowen and Mrs Coulter here, so he’ll probably give them a ride back too. If I tell you he picked them up in a layby because the old girl’s broomstick had broken down, would your day feel any weirder?”
“Weirder than when I found out she wasn’t Mrs Coulter at all?”
“We should’ve known that, shouldn’t we?”
“I’m starting to think there’s a whole lot of stuff we should’ve known. But I’m s
ure... I’m just so sure that once we get home and find our wedding rings, all this weirdness will stop.”
“Okay. Look, you’re not worried about Alice and her so-called curse, are you? We did meet. And all the other things she said, about the burning church and Kerdrolla... All that was just a dream.”
Lee looked up through the green shadows of the cherry tree, and memory pierced Gideon sharply of why only an agate set in platinum could possibly have graced the hand of the man he loved. “I don’t think I ever heard you say that,” Lee said faintly. “Kerdrolla, I mean. Jesus Christ, Gid—do you remember?”
“Yes. No. I... I only remember a dream.”
“All right. Please let’s just go.” Lee shivered, holding Tamsyn close, and glanced into the car park beyond the churchyard wall. “What about Rufus? I don’t see his patrol car.”
“Me neither. He must’ve parked somewhere else. We’d better check what kind of mess he made of your window before you set off.”
A shadow fell between them. Taller than Alice Rawle’s, unthreatening, even a touch of anguished comedy about it, but a shadow still. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about me,” Rufus Pendower said, tugging off his uniform cap and clutching it in both hands, “as if I wasn’t there.”
“Oh. Oh, sorry, Pendower. I didn’t see you. I was just saying to Lee—”
“I know what you were saying. You thought I did something wrong by bringing Tamsyn into the church, but I didn’t, did I?”
No point in reminding Pendower that the kid could’ve picked him up and floated him and the car in wholesale if she’d wanted to. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Gideon said patiently. “She stopped Alice Rawle, though I’m far from understanding how. I’m glad you brought her. Are you okay to drive back?”
“No need for that. I came by taxi. I can book another to take me home.”
Gideon looked him over. His uniform was immaculate, every piece of his kit in place. “Taxi? Where’s your squad car?”
