Subtle Blood

by KJ Charles

  “What about any of them being Zodiac?”

  “Harry, with much muttering, has agreed to keep an eye out for wrist tattoos, but I don’t expect anything to come of it. If Leo is reasserting control, he doubtless has people to do his dirty work. If he did it at all.” He shut his eyes. “I am not convinced.”

  “No?”

  “No. It was Father’s visit that swayed me. Maybe Leo wanted Fairfax dead, maybe others felt the same, but the fact is, so did Chingford. He wanted him dead, and I am very afraid he did something about it.”

  “Bugger,” Will said. “So where do we stand?”

  “On the edge of a precipice.” Kim knocked back the remainder of his wine and poured another glass. “You asked this morning what we were going to do next. I have an answer, but you aren’t going to like it.”

  “Go on.”

  “I took all Fairfax’s papers with me. Filled the Daimler, brought it back here, stashed it in Peacock’s flat, and will put the lot in a safe-deposit tomorrow.”

  “Why a safe deposit instead of handing them over to the police or the Private Bureau?”

  “Because I’m not going to hand them over,” Kim said. “I’m going to go to DS, and exchange Fairfax’s papers for Chingford’s life.”

  “You’re going to—?”

  “Exchange. Make a deal.”

  “I know what it means. What was the other part?”

  Kim took a deep breath. “I want a guarantee that Chingford will not face a capital charge. I don’t care how they do it—provocation, whatever. I don’t care if he ends up with ten years for manslaughter, if that’s what it takes. Just so he doesn’t hang.”

  Will wasn’t sure what to say first. He went for, “Can the Bureau do that?”

  “They can do something. Deals are struck every day. They’d doubtless have given Pisces immunity if he hadn’t got greedy. I’ll try not to be greedy.”

  “Not greedy? You want your brother to get away with murder!”

  “For Christ’s sake, Will, I don’t think this is a good thing!”

  “I’m glad to hear that, because it stinks.”

  “Granted,” Kim said thinly. “But I’ve got nothing else. For all we’ve done, I’ve achieved absolutely nothing.”

  “You’ve proved Fairfax was Zodiac.”

  “Which will do no good at all unless I leverage my findings with the Private Bureau.”

  “Leverage? Sounds more like blackmail to me.”

  Kim’s lips tightened. “I’d rather see it as bribery, but you’re doubtless right.”

  Will examined his face. “If you save this brother’s life—”

  “It won’t make up for the one I got killed. I’m aware of that.”

  Will had no siblings and had never known his father. He had no idea what pressure was bearing down on Kim, what he was hoping for or fearing, what burdens or obligations he carried. “Hell’s teeth. Will DS agree to do it? Is he going to take this well?”

  “He’s going to take it extremely badly. He’s going to invent an entire new philosophy of how to take things badly, just for me. I don’t know what else I can do.”

  “You could give him the information and ask for help, instead of demanding it.”

  “And what would I do when the response was, ‘Your brother’s guilty as sin, let him swing’?”

  Will didn’t have an answer. He stared at the pale golden wine in his glass, catching the late light and casting amber shadows on the walls. “Can you live with this?”

  “Can I bear the knowledge that someone close to me has taken human life? I think I can probably choke it down.”

  “Hold on,” Will said, roused. “That was wartime. I didn’t murder anyone.”

  “You’ve killed four people in front of me.”

  “Three.”

  “Four. That man in the wood died.”

  “Did he? Balls.”

  “I don’t care, and nor do you,” Kim said. “You didn’t kill for gain, or to cover up crimes. You did it because people were trying to kill you or me at the time. All the same, you killed, and if I’m playing God now, I’ve done it before, when I begged DS and pulled every string I had to make sure you didn’t face consequences for any of them.”

  Uncomfortably, that was true. “I’d have faced my trial if I had to.”

  “Trials, plural,” Kim said. “I dare say you would have, but I didn’t want you to, and most people would not agree that decision was mine to make. God damn it, Will, I don’t want Chingford to get away with it. Left to myself, I wouldn’t lift a finger for the stupid sod.”

  “But you are.”

  “Yes. He probably murdered a man, and I’m going to help him get away with it because—” He shut his eyes. “Because I can be of use for once.”

  That phrase rang a bell Will didn’t like. “Your father doesn’t know a sodding thing about you, or what you’ve done.”

  “He knows that he’s lost one son and is about to lose another. I could change that.”

  “And you think he’ll thank you for it?”

  Kim made a helpless gesture. Will shoved a hand through his hair and topped up his own glass. He needed a drink.

  “It is undeniably a step further and worse than anything I have yet done,” Kim said after a moment. “I know that.”

  “Can you live with doing it?”

  “I’m not sure I can live with it if I don’t.”

  “You’d become a bloody marquess eventually! It’s not the end of the world.”

  “You say that. My father would disagree.” Kim sounded calm, but his knuckles were white on the stem of his glass, and if he rolled up his sleeves, the silver lines of boyhood scars would be visible on his forearms, where he’d used physical pain to replace other kinds. Will hadn’t pushed to know more about that because he was pretty sure it would be too helplessly enraging to stand.

  “I don’t understand this,” he said, feeling his way. “I mean, I can’t. My ma would rather have died than let me bend the law on her behalf, because she knew right from wrong. I think this is wrong. Maybe I’m a hypocrite, but I do. What if he gets off and then kills someone else?”

  Kim put the glass down, and his face in his hands. “You had to say that, of course.”

  “Don’t tell me you hadn’t already thought it.”

  “Jesus, Will. I know this stinks! I know I’ll despise myself for it, and should. I realise every part of that, but my life is accelerating very fast towards a brick wall, and this is the only turning I can see. Think about what happens if Chingford hangs. My father’s loathing—well, perhaps I can bear that, and the contempt of all the others who’ll assume I’m delighted to take his place, but that’s only the start of it. The Press will crawl over my life like cockroaches, which means they’ll infest yours, Phoebe’s, Peacock’s. The Lord Arthur part of my life will expand unstoppably. And you already hate my title when it’s nothing but a word, and dislike our relative positions when they’re a great deal less unequal than they’re about to become. If he dies now, I’ll lose you.”

  “Who says?”

  “Oh, come on. You lasted about half an hour in the Symposium before you were throwing punches.”

  Will cursed himself. “I can do better. I haven’t hit any journalists.”

  “Yet. What about when one of them gets wind of us? Insinuating questions about how much, or little, you mean to me? What when someone wants my pet war hero’s comments on my cowardice, or asks you how I celebrated my second brother’s death?”

  Will exhaled. “All right, I hear you. But—”

  “But it could ruin us. But I could lose you, because your position will be intolerable, and I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to do without you; I don’t want you to leave me. I can’t stop you, of course, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try. I’ll beg if I have to, and won’t that embarrass us both. I want a future with you.”

  It was like a box on the ear out of nowhere, stunning in its force. “A what?” Will said.
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  “A future. You know the concept? The shape you want the rest of your life to take? I want mine with you, all of it. A future, a forever. I love you.” He said it quite calmly, as if it was an established fact. “People say I love you to madness, but I love you to sanity, because loving you is the sanest thing I have ever done. You are everything to me, Will, and I cannot lose you to my miserable family and an accident of birth.”

  Will had no idea what to say. His heart was thundering. Kim examined his face for a moment then tilted his chin, a tiny movement that suggested he was bracing himself. “Perhaps I’ve started in the wrong place. Perhaps I should have asked first if you want a future with me. Because if you don’t, I need you to tell me now.”

  It took an effort to fill his lungs. “Uh. Wait. When we talked in spring—”

  “On the way back from Etchil,” Kim said. “I remember every word of that conversation. You asked me what I wanted, what we both wanted, out of this, and I couldn’t give you an answer then, except to say I wanted you in my life somehow.”

  “Yes, and we agreed we’d keep on and see where we go. We agreed that.”

  “We did. And I dare say we could have carried on doing so if my brother had restrained himself, but he didn’t, and now there is that brick wall across the road. And the only way I can see around it is this one, but if you don’t even want to go around it—”

  “It’s not I don’t want to.”

  “Then you do want to?” He held up a hand before Will could reply. “Ugh, no, pretend I didn’t say that. I don’t mean to harass you into a response. But you need to understand that for me, the ‘just keeping on’ was becoming a lie of omission. I don’t want to ‘just keep on’. I love you, and I want—I have been hoping—to put things on a different footing between us. I might have been too much a coward to broach that for a while yet, but Chingford’s criminal idiocy has forced my hand.”

  “You need to know. I understand that. But...”

  He stalled there. Kim said, “Will, talk to me. If this is something I can’t have, I don’t want to carry on hoping for it. That would be...painful.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But you wanted to know where we might be going. You asked me. Where were you thinking that might be?”

  “I don’t know! I wasn’t thinking about forever!”

  That landed with the dull thud of a mortar shell. Kim’s face stilled. “Right.”

  “I mean—Look, I just don’t know!” Will said almost frantically, against the muscle-clenching sensation of impending disaster. “How the hell should I know? I didn’t expect any of this to happen. I bloody didn’t expect you, and I never thought you could—we could—”

  “You didn’t think a future was a privilege our sort could claim? Or is it that you want something else? Because if your hopes for the future are entirely different, that’s your right, but I’d rather like to be informed!”

  His voice rose and cracked on that, and Will knew why. Kim thought he was conventional at heart, and had more than once hinted he might want to return to the respectable life—the steady country existence, the wife and children—he’d grown up expecting.

  He wasn’t miles off the mark, either. Will had been brought up with a belief in what was right and proper that was all the firmer for being unexamined, and he had a deep-seated instinct towards propriety, in theory if not practice. But he’d finished his growing up in the trenches, where ‘right and proper’ had quickly dissolved in blood and mud and endless noise, and if there was a Will Darling who belonged in what most people would call a respectable life, he hadn’t come back from Flanders.

  That was the point. That was the problem.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, and put his face in his hands. “Shit. Give me a minute.”

  “Christ. I didn’t expect this reaction. Look, if the very idea is beyond the pale—”

  “It’s not that. Not you. Shut up a second, will you?”

  Kim shut up, for which Will was grateful. His heart was thundering. He needed to think, and he didn’t know how, because he’d been doing his best not to think about this for some time. He’d jammed it all out of sight and out of mind, and now Kim had pulled everything into the open and he didn’t know where to start.

  “Will?” Kim said, more gently. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “No, you aren’t. You’re stiff as a post, and not in a good way.”

  “It’s not you,” Will said again, staring at his palms. “It’s other things. It’s what you said. About, uh, the future.”

  “Look, if you don’t want that—”

  “No.” He couldn’t make himself look up, at Kim. “Listen. It’s... You couldn’t plan ahead, understand? I mean, people did. They talked about when they got back to Blighty, their jobs, their girls, and then the next day they’d be dead. My first trench raid, three of the lads were chatting about what they’d do when the show was over, and they asked me too, only I was eighteen and I didn’t have a thing to say. Go back and marry the girl next door, if she’d have me? They’d have taken the piss for the next hour. So I said I wasn’t making any plans beyond the raid, and they all laughed at me for that instead. ‘Life goes on, lad, we’ll be home soon, get your thinking cap on.’ We lost all three of them that night.”

  “Will—”

  “I’m just saying, plans don’t mean much if your number’s up. And if I’d always been thinking about what I stood to lose— You can’t live like that. Or maybe other people can, maybe it helped them, but I couldn’t. So I just got on, do you see? Day by day. I got on with it, and I’ve been getting on with it ever since.”

  “You do it well,” Kim said. “At least, to appearances.”

  “I got on with being poor, and with the bookshop, and I got on with bloody Libra kidnapping me and then all that mess in February. I do what needs doing right now, and that works. And now you want me to look ahead and plan and promise and think about forever, about the rest of our lives, and I don’t know how to think about that sort of thing. I don’t know what I’ll think. And—ah, hell.” He didn’t want to say this. He needed to. “What if I can’t do it?”

  “Can’t do what?”

  “What it is you want of me. The things you should expect. Being the sort of man someone could have a future with. Christ, Kim.” His chest heaved suddenly. “What if I’m not right?”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Kim reached for his hand, an urgent motion. Will couldn’t look at him. “Where did that come from? You’re right if ever a man was right.”

  “I’ve killed four people since November and I don’t care. Does that sound right to you?”

  That gave Kim a moment’s pause. “I didn’t say you were a vicar. Look, you were trained. The army trained some things into you and some things out of you. That doesn’t make you wrong. Damaged, perhaps, but aren’t we all?”

  “Maybe I needed the things they trained out of me.” His shoulders felt solid with tension. “Maybe they couldn’t have trained them out of other people. I know they couldn’t. There were men who never fired their guns, plenty of them. They’d go over the top but they couldn’t make themselves kill, not even from a distance. The Army picked out the ones like me for a reason.”

  That was the truth of it, the thing he hadn’t wanted to face. The reason he kept the Messer, carved by a man he’d killed, so he never forgot who he was. He’d been almost relieved that his mother hadn’t survived to see him come back, because he wouldn’t have wanted her to look at him and see a stranger. Even worse, what if she’d recognised her boy in the man he’d become? What if the war had merely peeled back the outer skin and shown what was already there?

  Kim was still gripping his hand. His fingers felt hot, or maybe Will’s were cold. “I want to be sure I have this correctly. You learned to cope by taking things as they come. If you live one day at a time, you can’t fear the future or brood about the past. Whereas to look to the future, to decide where you want to go and what you want to be, y
ou have to consider where you are, and who you are. And that’s disturbing you. More than I’d understood, and more than you saw coming.”

  Will’s throat was painfully tight and, absurdly, his eyes were wet. For God’s sake, Kim had only repeated back what he’d been trying to get at, except better. He swallowed, as quietly as possible. “Yes. I—Yes.”

  Kim breathed out, long and slow. “I have wondered where you were hiding the damage. First things first: forget what I said. I shouldn’t have asked and I’m sorry. You came through a meat grinder alive and won medals on the way. You ‘just got on’ in order to survive hell. If that’s what you have to keep doing, then in God’s name keep doing it, at least until you don’t need to any more.”

  Will took a shuddering breath. “Think that’s likely?”

  Kim gave him a smile that made his heart twist in his chest. “I was holding myself together by my fingernails for a very long time, until the most magnificently stubborn sod of a bookseller came into my life. You treated me, against all the evidence, as if I were something resembling the man I ought to be, with such pertinacious obstinacy I have all but started to believe it myself. I spent the last few months thinking about this as I reordered your outrageous mess of a bookshop. How I came to be where I was, what I’d done to bring it on myself. What I need to do differently.”

  “You didn’t say.”

  “No, well, not telling people things is my version of just seeing where we go. Another thing I need to change. Anyway, my point was that yes, I think you might very well find it useful to examine a few things. Know thyself, as the philosophers say.”

  “Urgh.”

  “Uncomfortable, I grant you, but perhaps necessary,” Kim said. “I’ve always considered you an immovable object—you do such a good impression of one—but of course you’re not. You’re a man like the rest of us, albeit gloriously strong and gloriously solid, but perhaps the solidity comes at the expense of flexibility. That’s physics for you. Maybe you need to be a bit less strong and a bit more vulnerable for a while and see what happens. Good Lord, I felt you twitch there. You can be vulnerable if you want, my love. You aren’t at war any more.”