by Harper Fox
“Oh, I can’t drive one of those anymore. I’ve been put on indefinite sick leave. I think they’ll probably fire me once they work out how, but an hour after the counsellor left yesterday I got the call.”
“Bloody hell, Rufus. I’m so sorry. But what are you doing here, if you’re not on duty?”
“I am on duty. I have a place here. I don’t care what that old woman says—she’s had it in for me from the beginning, and it’s worse still now she’s come back from the dead. I have a place.”
Gideon and Lee exchanged a look. They had ordinary married couples’ telepathy as well as the gifts Bolton-Reeves would call weapons-grade. They wanted ’em weapons-grade, Alice said again inside Gideon’s skull, and he hid a miserable flinch. The General was dead or disabled, the Bowithick school, as he’d seen for himself, nothing but an abandoned shell. All that was over. They learned how to explode sacks of cement from the inside, to see if they could do it to human beings.
Now it was Lee’s turn to flinch, a reflex of sickened recoil, and Gideon hauled them both back into the moment, their immediate problems. What the hell are we going to do with this poor guy? “I tell you what,” Lee said equably. “You come back with me and Tamsie, Rufus. She’s a bit upset, as you can see, but she loves you, and I bet you could calm her down. Play I-spy with her or something. Then you can have some dinner with us, if you like, and one of us will give you a lift home.” He paused, gasping. “Tamsyn Elizabeth, I love the bones of you, but you are gonna strangle me if you carry on like that. Won’t you go to Ofus for a carry now?”
Tamsyn surrendered. The change was sudden and horribly familiar to Gideon. Usually it came in the interview room, when a suspect heard that his cronies had sold him out and were singing his name from the rooftops. When the game was up and there was just no point in holding on or out anymore. Her arms dropped from around Lee’s neck, and she held out a hand towards Rufus like a small, tired socialite hailing a taxi home after a bizarre and exhausting party. Tears sprang into Rufus’s eyes. Whatever else had gone wrong with him, his love for Gideon’s girl had been pure and complete. He lifted her away, and began a slow, slightly unsteady track towards Lee’s car.
“I spy,” Gideon began thoughtfully, sotto voce, as soon as he was out of earshot, “something beginning with... N.”
“Nutter,” Lee fired back instantly, and pressed his knuckles to his lips to silence a freaked-out snort of laughter. “Oh my God, Gid. Shut up. He’s lost it, hasn’t he?”
All kinds of things are getting lost today. I never take my wedding ring off; I just never do. “Yep. Whatever he had, it’s lost.”
“What are we gonna do with him?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one who invited him back for dinner.”
“I just thought, maybe if he spent a few hours in a normal household...”
“By which you mean... ours?”
“Yeah. It was a long shot. But maybe you can call his counsellor while he’s with us, and she can come out and sit with him, try and peel him back down from the ceiling of wherever the hell he’s gone.”
“Okay. Not the worst idea.”
“And I don’t want to manipulate the poor sod, but he loves his alone-time with Locryn and Tamsie. I’ll probably have him calmed down by the time we get home.”
“It is the worst idea.”
Gideon spun round. There was his brother, right at his shoulder. “What is?”
“For Rufus to travel home with Lee. For you and Lee to be separated at all at this time. I can’t explain this to you now, Gideon, and I don’t want to waste time trying. I will drive Rufus. Lee and Tamsyn can go with you in the truck, and the two of you can come back and collect Lee’s car some other time.”
A pang of angry jealousy went through Gideon, and he stepped back, dismayed. What the fuck was the matter with him? He’d used to feel like this back in the bad old days of his relationship with James, when he’d spent half his time convinced—and had eventually been right—that someone else would come along, someone not afraid to hold James’s hand in public and be out with him. Was Zeke suggesting Lee couldn’t be trusted alone with Rufus?
Outrageous. Then, Gideon had never liked Zeke. Christ, how could he, with all the bad blood between them, Zeke’s bigotry and resentment of his very existence? Gideon couldn’t even remember when his brain had decided upon the familiarity, the fraternal sweetness, of Zeke. The starchy git’s name was... “Back off, Ezekiel. Lee can do what he wants.”
A flurry of movement in the church doorway made all three of them turn. A grim-faced paramedic had just backed out into the sunlight, at the head of a stretcher bearing a body so frail it barely disturbed the blanket tucked around it. How did it feel, Gideon wondered, to have to care for someone who’d burst human bodies like bags of cement, to wipe that person’s mouth and tenderly lift them? The medic knocked the wheel framework into place with a blindly expert kick, and he and his colleague rolled the stretcher down the churchyard path between the nodding heads of the buttercups. Ezekiel would probably know. Like their father, he’d be enough of a hypocrite to bury her, spieling out some cookie-cutter elegy over her grave, even though he’d never known her.
Gideon had always hated that. Take the most bitter-hearted, backbiting old bigot in Dark village, the one who’d religiously spat on the ground after James had gone by on his way to school, and Pastor Frayne would stand there in the crematorium and call her a pillar of the community. And you couldn’t tell Zeke and the pastor apart, could you? Not really.
Ezekiel. Zeke. Gideon swayed and rubbed his eyes. Alice vanished off through the lychgate, leaving only a single pale hair attached to the front of his vest and an echoing voice in his head: I’ve been working on the pair of you. Haven’t you felt things falling apart? I can do it in three words: you never met.
He detached the hair. It seemed to tighten around his fingers with razor-wire power, a life of its own, and he rubbed it off on the rough lichen of the nearest gravestone, shuddering. These feelings about Zeke were the ones that had grown up with him, grown into him, until he’d met Lee. Lee, who’d taught him that even the least-loved of nature’s children might be different after death, and a few kind words to send them on their way might not be hypocrisy but the opening notes of a cosmic symphony, a forgiveness beyond understanding. For some reason this comforting thought made Gideon’s vision turn scarlet with sparkling rage. “Does everyone have to be forgiven?”
Zeke’s eyebrows flew up. “You were.”
“Oh, what—for my original sin? What kind of church comes up with that idea—little unborn babies with sin on them? I fucking hate that idea so much. If ever you breathe a word of it to Tamsie—”
“I’ve told you. I’ve lived a narrow life. I know I’ve been blind and a fool. And I don’t mean that, no. I mean you were forgiven, back in... I don’t remember. My head hurts.”
“Sorry,” Gideon said, turning to catch Lee’s stricken glance. “Sorry, Zeke. I don’t much mind who travels where, all right? As long as we get out of here. For God’s sake let’s just go.”
***
Shade and sunlight flickered across the police Rover’s windshield. Up ahead, Lee’s indicator flashed as he pulled to the kerb to allow the ambulance to pass. Then he moved on, out through the last of the winding lanes and up to the junction with the main road. Gideon followed, leaving the careful two-second gap drummed into him from his driving lessons. Nothing worse than rear-ending your other half. Briefly lost in speculation about how the insurance would work, he almost did it, and he pulled himself sharply together.
The Rover was second in the motorcade, the hearse bringing up the rear. The travel arrangements had turned out exactly as his brother hadn’t wanted them. Gideon wasn’t sure how this had happened, except that Rufus had jumped into the front seat of Lee’s Escort before Zeke had been able to get near him. Like Tamsie, Zeke at that point had appeared to give it all up, and had slumped wearily behind the wheel of the hearse, leaving Gid to
clamber alone into the truck. It hardly mattered. They were all heading home, and just as well. Gideon had the clearest memory of offering Elowen a lift. “Oh, it’s fine,” Elowen had said. “Granny Ragwen says any broom will do, so she’s off to the hardware store. I’ll just hop on the back.”
And that couldn’t be right. Gideon was prone, he knew, to bouts of summer flu. They seemed to get worse around full moon, and he could see a beauty on the rise right now, a lacy ghost on the shining afternoon blue. None of this made sense either, so he in his turn surrendered, and just kept his eyes on the road.
The route back took them through Lamorna. Gideon loved this run. No banks of hawthorn blossom now, but the bushes towered and arched, a dense barricade full of birds and small creatures atop the drystone walls. Sunshine and shade, sunshine and shade...
A glare like a nuclear flash. Gid swerved, knocked his sun visor down and grabbed for his shades. Hitting his hazards to warn Zeke, he tried to discover the source of the light.
The fields to his left were filled with solar panels. The drystone and hawthorn hedges had been stripped away along the road’s edge, replaced with raw pine posts and chicken wire. No care had gone into the installation’s alignment: all afternoon all summer, the panels would blind drivers on the eastbound road. In the midst of this murderous silver sea, a single megalith shot skywards as if trying to escape. Lee was the man for ley lines and weird energies, but Gideon could almost hear the huge stone’s ongoing whale-cry wail for help. So lonely, so lonely. Cut off from its network, severed, all alone...
Christ, it was one of the Spinner stones. The land on his left belonged to Mabel Pascoe, and last summer a body discovered in these fields had saved them, the delay caused by the investigation just enough to let a scheduling change go through. The Spinner stones were connected, and therefore the earth between them was sacred too. Mabel could farm but not build. Oh, the panels were a good thing in themselves, just like every wind turbine and green supply was good, but not here! Why here, for God’s sake, on one of old Kernow’s last stretches of unspoiled moor, when wasteland lots stood empty on brown-belt acres around half her villages and towns?
That question had been answered decisively last year. Not here, Historic England had said, and the JCBs and lorries with their loads of pine posts, wire and panel fittings had vanished from the Pascoe fields overnight. That hardly mattered, though. A battle waged all that time ago was nothing. Gideon had driven through here last week, and the fields had been green and intact.
He slewed into the nearest layby. Lee had done the same thing and once again Gideon just barely avoided him: hauled up the handbrake and sat gasping. The layby was a broad one, created for tourists who wanted to stare in wonder at the great standing stones strung out across the fields. Here DI Lawrence had gone to meet a lady known to Gid until then as her childminder, checked nervously up and down the road, and then pressed a passionate kiss to her mouth. The layby was right opposite the Pascoes’ farm gates. Gideon could, he supposed, march through them and up to the house, find Mabel and demand to find out how she’d sold out her sacred trust for a gigantic, fully operational solar farm in the space of seven days.
Lee would most likely come with him. Ezekiel, too, pulling up behind the Rover. They’d all three been embroiled in the struggle for the land, and for Nate Pascoe’s lonely soul. Maybe together they could make this travesty not be. God knew they’d done it before.
Lee unfolded from the driver’s seat. He was white-faced and yelling, and not about the farm. Gideon had so seldom heard his voice raised in anger that he barely recognised the sound of it, and half-fell out of the truck onto the grassy verge that bordered the layby. Peripherally he was aware of his brother coming to join him. “What’s going on here?” Zeke demanded. “Where did all those panels come from? Are they filming something around here? Is it a set?”
“What the hell for—Barn Wars?”
“None of it was here yesterday. I came out to visit Reg Penyar. You remember him—old codger who used to belong to the coven around here...”
Gideon tuned him out. Of course he remembered Penyar, old chicken-head, who’d have betrayed his coven-mates for nothing more than zealotry and vengeance. Still worthy of pastoral visits from Minister Frayne, apparently. Forgiveness as a concept was in the air today, flapping about like a flock of terrified doves. Gideon strode towards Lee’s Escort. Rufus was out of the car too. An overhanging hawthorn twig had hooked his cap off and it was dangling there like an absurd fruit. He was backing off, face a perfect mix of defiance and defence. “Where did you go?” he choked out, staring at Lee across the hot metal roof of the car. “Who did you turn to, when he turned on you?”
Lee’s hands were clenched on top of the open door. “Rufus, this is the last time I’m going to warn you. Shut up.”
“No. No, I won’t. I’ve lived with this, and all those memories, and he just got scot-free away with it, like he always does everything else. He nearly killed you in Kerdrolla, and where did you go? You came running to my house.”
“Running? You drove me there. I needed shelter, Rufus, somewhere to be with Tamsie that wasn’t...”
“Where? The House of Joy?” Rufus covered his face with his hands. “But that never happened, did it? Christ, I’m going mad.”
Lee turned to face Gideon. “I think he is. Don’t listen to him, Gid. Don’t mind him.”
“I don’t. I’m just interested in... how you remember the thing that never happened, too.”
“It’s okay. I’m just playing along. Rufus, I swear to God, if you don’t put a sock in it...”
“No. Not this time. What’s the point? Everyone might as well know.” Rufus unhooked his cap from the tree and jammed it on top of his spiky, lightning-struck skull. “I’ve tried to get over you, Locryn—but everything’s over now, isn’t it? Daisy’s left me, and I don’t blame her. I only really loved Amber—and you.”
With an effort so intense that Gideon almost heard the creak of his knuckles, Lee let go of the door. He took a couple of unsteady steps in Gideon’s direction. “Please don’t listen to him.”
Through static in his head, Gideon sought out the sweet, true new ways of perceiving the world which Lee had taught him. His jealousy over James had been a passive thing, sad and resigned, a waiting game. Every moment of his life with Lee blazed in his memory like fire. “You must know,” he grated out, not caring that Zeke was right behind him, “that he could show me drone footage of the two of you having it off on top of Minions Hill, and I still wouldn’t believe it.”
Lee’s smile shone out briefly. “Yeah. I know.”
Rufus looked back and forth between the two of them. Some jealousies were of the active kind, Gideon knew from years of house calls to scenes of domestic affray, and would burn up their target rather than let go. “All right,” Rufus said, like a man who’d set his house on fire and no longer cared to escape, so long as Lee and Gideon burned too. “All right. Here’s something more for you, then. I’ve finished up all my research now. I’ve had all the time in the world, without a baby crying, and this is what I’ve found out. Your house isn’t the house of joy, or even the house of the wolf. Chy Lowen means House of the Wolves.”
Gideon sighed explosively. “For God’s sake. Not this again.”
“Right. Poor crazy Pendower, Sergeant Weird-Shit with his books and his obsessions. Well, now I know what it was all for. You know who held a copy of the deeds to Chy Lowen? Baragwanath and Co, that’s who. I walked in while the office was being searched and I just took them. And I found the names of everyone who’s lived there in the last three hundred years, Gideon, and I chased back through old newspapers and police reports, and in every family there’s always been one.”
Lee spun to face him. “Rufus. No.”
“Always one. So here’s what you should know, Guardian Frayne. Chy Lowen, the House of the Wolves, is hereditary home to all the Bodmin beasts. Each one of them, nearing the end of his time, makes sure it goes to
the next, just as Dev Bowe did for you. And this is all nonsense and moonshine, except that he has a watertight alibi for every moment of his escape from Lamshear Hall on the night when John Tregear was killed. It wasn’t Dev Bowe. It was you.”
“Is that what you call love?” Lee rasped, staring at Pendower hopelessly. “I thought you did love me, Rufus—far too much to say any of that!”
Lee needn’t have worried. Gideon was distracted. “Lee,” he said, holding out an unsteady hand. “Our wedding rings. I know they’re at home somewhere, I know we just have to get there and find them, but... there’s no mark from mine on my finger. No mark on yours.”
“Oh, Gid. Don’t look.”
“I have to. What’s happening? Why... Why are the solar panels here?”
“Some things are leaking through. I tried to seal the gate with Alice—to take the edge off her curse, have it all land on me, but...” Lee stopped, swallowed audibly, ran a hand over his hair. “If we’d never met, you wouldn’t have gone out to the Pascoes’ farm that night.”
“I would. Why not?” This was insane, but the insanity had thorns like a wicked patch of brambles, snatching him, dragging him in. “I’ve known Nate for years. He’d still have asked for me.”
“Not if you weren’t around to be asked.”
“Christ. Did I die without you? Because that’s how it feels right now.”
“Oh, darlin’. No. We never met in the first place. You probably just... went away.”
“Lee, stop this. For God’s sake.”
“I can’t. I’d give anything. But, look—what’s happened here, with the farm and the solar panels, that’s just something small. Maybe it doesn’t get any worse.”
Gideon broke paralysis. He strode to seize Lee’s hand, grasped it tight and towed him over to Ezekiel, who was watching this unfolding scene with the same harrowed vigilance he’d displayed at the church. Well, Zeke watched over things. Like it or not, there he was, the stone eagle, deeply human now but still a witness, an arbiter among the unfolding chances of life and fate. He married people, sanctified their children, put them in the ground. “Zeke, you stop this,” Gideon said helplessly. “I am not having any of this seventh-fairy bollocks where Lee throws himself under some kind of cosmic fucking bus to save the world. Make him stop.”
