The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  I reached out for her hand.

  “Jesus, Watson,” she said, and her face was clear and shining. “This is going to get ugly.”

  “I know,” I told her. “I’m not going anywhere,” and the black-clad driver yanked me out of the car with his massive fists and shoved me up against the windshield.

  I put up a good fight. That was my job, wasn’t it, to be the brawler? I was playing my role. He had a normal face, the face of a dry cleaner or a dog walker or an old friend of my mother’s, but he was some stranger, someone I’d never seen before, and he was punching me in the face. It was stupid to be so surprised at it. All we did was lurk around the edges of this kind of danger, so why was it such a shock to be hauled into the center of it by my shirt and then have my nose broken?

  “Run,” I yelled. Where was Holmes? I couldn’t see her anywhere. I was trying to buy her time. This man had a hundred pounds of muscle on me, and I wasn’t a skinny kid. When he hit me in the jaw, I heard something splinter. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, and it wasn’t because of the blood streaming down my face. It was because I was furious.

  I hooked my leg around his and took him down. Thank God for rugby, I thought with some bitter, distant irony, because I had him on his back now. He was scrabbling against me, ready to fling me off, and I knew nothing about street fighting, when it came down to it, but I did know to jam my fingers into his eyes. With his forearms, he flung me backward and lumbered back up to his feet.

  Through the blood in my eyes I saw Holmes behind him. What had she been doing? Why hadn’t she run, gotten help? But she was here, wrenching the driver’s arm behind his back. With her cool, calm efficiency, she kicked out his knees with her sharp-heeled boots, but she was calling for help all the while.

  He turned and gave her a shove that sent her sprawling on the ground.

  I shouted her name. I shouted it again. Was this the warehouse district? I listened for cars, sirens, any sign of human life, and then I stopped listening, because all I could hear was the driver’s grunts as he slammed his fist into my stomach. I tried to heave him off me, but I couldn’t. It was like I was being beaten up underwater: time was moving that slowly. It was so impersonal. I’d never known that fighting for your life was so invasive and so cold. Had it been five minutes? An hour? On the pavement behind him, Holmes groaned and sat up, her face scratched red with gravel, and I couldn’t look anymore because he was punching me in the mouth.

  I told her to run, or tried to—I ended up spitting out a thick stream of blood, and just as the driver pulled back for another blow, I saw Holmes struggle up to her feet.

  “Don’t kill him,” a voice said, but it wasn’t hers. Where was I? “My brother won’t be happy.”

  I think the driver nodded. I couldn’t see, not out of both eyes, and my head was beginning to loll on my neck. “Sorry, kid,” he whispered, two words so surprising that I almost choked, and when he hit me again, it kicked me off the ladder of consciousness and sent me falling down, down, down.

  ten

  FIRST AND FOREMOST, I SHOULD SAY THAT I AM PROVIDING this account under great duress, and only with the reassurance that Watson will not read it for a period of eighteen to twenty-four months after the events in question. Contrary to what he believes, I don’t take any joy in upsetting him. He asked me to fill in some particulars about the period of time in which he was incapacitated, and to tell it in a way that appeals to the reader. No info-dumping, Holmes, he’d said.

  If I’m to do this, I’ll do it on my own terms. Here are the facts: we were locked in Hadrian and Phillipa Moriarty’s basement. It had a very plush red carpet on which Watson was currently sprawled. They had tied me up, but I’d made short work of my bindings. All of this was August’s fault.

  I’m not sure if you remember this particular detail from his last account of our adventures, but it takes Watson an absurd amount of time to wake up after he’s been knocked unconscious. You might make the argument that I shouldn’t know this. That a good partner would in fact actively and successfully prevent such occurrences.

  Your assumptions would be correct. But I do try to prevent such things. Why else would I have left him in Milo’s sad little hotel? (Before we’d arrived, I’d asked my brother to stock our room with paperback classics and murder mysteries—Jamie Watson’s poison, if you’ll excuse the expression—and I hoped that he’d be engrossed enough in Slaughterhouse 5 to not notice that, from time to time, I would slip out to do some work on my own. The fact that Milo ordered those books in German is an unfunny joke and hardly my fault.)

  Yes, I was upset with Watson. I was quite upset, in point of fact, but it was nothing in comparison to the anger I felt when I saw his worried-sick face over the shoulder of my mark. Of the two of us, I am the only one who has successfully solved a crime. I am, in fact, the far more competent partner, not to mention equipped with far better foresight. These aren’t boasts. These are quantifiable facts.

  Here is something I can’t say to Jamie Watson: I can’t be your girlfriend because I’m terrified you’ll try to wrap me in cotton and hide me away. “Try” being the operative word. He needs saving far more often than I do.

  But there, at least, I’d failed. Watson laid out on that plush carpet was disturbing for a number of reasons. Every few minutes I made sure that he was breathing, and in the time between, I sat on my heels beside him, considering our situation.

  The basement had no visible doors or windows. Our phones had been confiscated and the back of my head was bleeding. I would give myself, and Watson, ten minutes of rest before I began ripping apart the wooden furniture to fashion myself a weapon.

  My father trained me to prioritize in situations like this. Make a concrete list, he’d said. Be unsparing.

  A list, then. What were my priorities?

  1.Keeping Myself Alive. Note that it may appear mercenary to put this first, but anyone who doesn’t have this at the top of their list is a parent or a liar, and I am neither. Not to mention that failure to keep myself alive renders the rest of this enterprise moot.

  2.Keeping Jamie Watson Alive, as his reckless disregard for his own safety works against him. Neither of us believes that we personally need caretaking; the other disagrees. He and I find ourselves at an impasse. As very recent events have proved, Watson will throw himself into a physical altercation he knows he will lose in an attempt to buy me time to run away. Clearly he needs caretaking, if not a thorough head examination.

  3.Recovering My Uncle. Because Leander never goes without leaving me some small present—a book on vivisection, a pheasant quill—and nothing can rouse him in the middle of the night. There is quite literally no situation I can imagine that would lead my uncle to willingly leave his bed between the hours of ten and four. Most importantly: he has never, ever called me Lottie, not since I told him I hated the name when I was seven. That said, he can and does take care of himself; for that reason, one would argue I should move him further down the list.

  4.My Parents . . . how to put this? Ideally they would remain living. That said, I cannot imagine them as anything other than alive, anyway, as they are capable, ruthless, and wealthy enough to make the best of those two other attributes. (Jamie would call them “vampires.” This term also has appealing qualities.) I am aware of their disappointment in me, which I once found motivating, and now find tedious; I have a somewhat vague desire to rescue them just to prove them wrong. That said, I don’t wish them to be poisoned, though I can understand Lucien’s desire to give it a shot.

  That is one of those things Watson wouldn’t want me to say out loud. You’re awful, he’d say. They’re your parents. At times, Watson is far too sentimental. I’ve yet to see him with a puppy, but I imagine it would be too much for me to handle.

  Nota bene: my brother does not appear on this list because he has approximately seventy-two thousand armed guards and an ego the size of a small blimp.

  All of the above items have been carefully ranke
d. They all must come before #5, the hardest of all, which is to Keep Watson Happy. (One might argue that I rank this the lowest on my priority list because it proves to be the most difficult, and I dislike failure.) What does Watson want? To have us at our happiest and also to be in romantic love. In our case, because I am a “bit of a broken robot,” to use his words, these two things are mutually exclusive. He is a boy and he is in love with me, but only because the world bores him. His world is boring because it loves him, you see. Of course it does. And so it all comes so easy to him, and his world grows wretched and long, and he begins casting around for something of interest in all that dark. If I am broken, at least my hazard lights are appealing to a boy like him.

  Personally, I’ve often thought that Watson and I had all the trappings of a standard romantic relationship—absolute exclusivity, obsessive intensity, constant arguments, crime-solving—and have been confused as to what more he wants. Sex, of course, but that’s a small thing. An unwieldy, impossible, giant small thing.

  (My last romantic relationship wasn’t categorically romantic, per se, but it certainly also involved crime. Carload of cocaine, local constabulary, etc.)

  Watson still hadn’t stirred. By my count, I had three more minutes before I should begin dismembering an armchair.

  Looking down at him, at his closed eyes and battered face, I began to think. I thought perhaps Watson had a brain injury. Perhaps there was a chance that he wouldn’t wake up, perhaps I would be left in this basement, alone, and then killed, or even worse, rescued by my omnipotent asshole of an older brother and then left to contend with August Moriarty, Human Conscience, alone, and if so I wouldn’t ever see Watson again do the thing where he almost trips over a curb when crossing the street and overcompensates by windmilling his arms, and if that was the case I would certainly never again be able to say his name, Watson, in the way I say it to him, with affection and also a certain kind of despair, and then I forbade myself from thinking any more about Watson at all.

  The best way to help him was to disregard him for the time being. I’ve often found this to be the case.

  The basement was sparsely furnished, and I took the likeliest-looking chair and broke off its legs by bashing it against the floor. Taking the sharpest-looking piece of wood, I tested it for length and weight and then knelt again next to Watson on the floor. I checked him over. He was still breathing, his eyelashes beginning to flutter, but he didn’t respond to either my touch or my voice. With luck, in another two minutes, he would be ready to go.

  I reviewed what I’d gathered about our situation.

  This wasn’t Hadrian and Phillipa’s primary residence; no self-respecting bon vivants would live in the warehouse district, and the walls were cinder block under their paint. We’d been taken to some secondary property.

  From the mix of preserving chemicals in the air, I assumed that we were in a facility where they falsely aged the art they produced.

  Even if I broke us out through the window well, I’d still have an incapacitated Watson and an empty road in the middle of nowhere. Milo was in Thailand, and while I know he kept a tail on me most times, I wasn’t sure how or how quickly he’d respond to my texts. (Before they’d taken my phone, I had sent a contingency message to an old friend, asking for aid and transportation. I would wait on that.)

  Any bug Milo had placed on me had been hacked by the Moriartys, most likely after Hadrian’s bodyguard regained consciousness and called his boss. That car had come at my request. (I took the next twenty-seven seconds to locate that bug—he’d had it sewn into the sleeve of my jacket—and then crushed it with my boot.)

  Really, this was August’s fault as much as anyone else’s. If my read on him last night was correct (one untied shoe, his keys nearly falling out of his back pocket), August had immediately ditched Nathaniel and gone to Hadrian for help in finding Leander. August, like me, was never that untidy. August, even when driven to his absolute limits, would never threaten to kill a man’s parents. August would assess the situation and go to his brother to attempt to broker a deal.

  Milo had called it exactly. He’ll go to Hadrian, he’d said in my ear, right before he left, and when the dust settles, we’ll know exactly how he’s involved. Just bide your time. Who, indeed, needed money and resources when one had a Moriarty with a heart three sizes too big?

  I couldn’t blame him, really. Families were complicated animals.

  Through the thick walls, I could hear a banging sound upstairs. It had the hollow ring of someone battering a wooden door. August, most likely, in full martyr mode. I hadn’t quite forgiven him either for bringing Watson to that party. Boy problems, I thought to myself, and when I tapped Watson’s shoulder again this time, I did it rather harder than I needed to.

  His eyes flew open. “Holmes,” he said. It was a horrible croaking sound. His mouth was swollen; his jaw, too. And his eyes. And his nose was broken.

  Looking at him, I began deciding which of Hadrian’s fingers I would stomp on first.

  “Don’t talk,” I told Watson, because I didn’t want him to strain. “Listen to me. I’m about to scream. I’m telling you so that you don’t physically react. There will be a body. I’ll remove it. We’ll haul you up the stairs, and one or the other of them up there will give us an address, and then my contact will help us arrange transportation to Prague.”

  This was more information than I usually gave, so I was unsurprised by Watson’s apparent confusion.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  He blinked, which I took for assent.

  I made my preparations. With my fingers, I streaked the blood on my forehead down my face. I coated my hands in it. I hefted my makeshift club, feeling something like a warrior god, and positioned myself behind the locked door.

  Then I began to cry. Softly at first. I turned up the volume slowly, as one would a dial, letting the tears call up a corresponding thickness in my throat. When I began to keen, I wanted the sound to be genuine.

  “Jamie,” I whispered. He turned his head to look at me. I could tell it hurt. Not you, I mouthed, and said his name again. “Jamie—oh God, Jamie. Please don’t. Please—please breathe.” (This part was necessary; I didn’t know if anyone was standing on the other side of the door.) “You can’t be dead,” I said, and took my voice louder, higher in pitch. I hunched my shoulders and brought my hands up over my face. “You can’t be. You promised. You promised me London, you— God, could you just breathe? Please, start breathing again. I’ll do anything, I don’t care what I am to you, I’ll be anything, do anything, please, please—”

  By then I was taken over by it, the grief, the fury, and I let myself dig in deeper, deeper, as far down as I could go. I’d lost him. He’d gone, not in the way I’d imagined, him slamming his way out the door in the middle of the night (we’d be in uni, or he would, as I belonged in uni as much as I belonged anywhere else, which was to say not at all, but we’d have a little flat, maybe in Baker Street, that would have a kitchen and a good library and at least one room in which no one was allowed to speak to me under any circumstances barring fire, and it would be good between us, until one night we’d be in bed and the old horror would rise up in me again, where he’d touch me and I’d well up with it, that feeling of wrongness, how I’d been suckered into letting anyone touch me like this again, how had I allowed it, who was this person and why was he touching me and it was a con, I’d been conned by him or myself or both of us, and I’d either break down entirely or throw him out, and in the end, in how it played out in my head, it was always me throwing him out, and I’d want him to leave as much as I never wanted him to go) but we wouldn’t have that, would we? We wouldn’t even get to that point. He’d be taken away from me by something else, something before that, some peripheral affair I’d dragged him into, something like this—a missing uncle, a man with a taste for my blood, and he wouldn’t leave on his own two feet—no, instead, we’d have a gun or a virus or a knife to the throat or this, him yelling for me to
run while I stood like some dumb animal, watching a Moriarty bullyboy take him apart piece by piece, and I was useless, and then we got into shelter only for me to watch him die on the ground, and Watson, I heard myself say it now, aloud, Watson, please, please, and I broke down into some approximation of hysterical sobs.

  If you’re going to take on a persona, my father used to tell me, it can’t be a persona. You have to believe it.

  I was very good at what I did. I believed all of it, everything. Always.

  I was so caught up in it, in fact, this private recitation of my worst fears, that when the door did swing open, I nearly forgot what to do.

  But I was in position, hidden behind the door and out of view. I hefted my table leg.

  “Where’s the boy?” the thug said gruffly, taking two steps into the room, and it was mere luck that he didn’t see me and more that he had no one behind him.

  “Here,” I said, and knocked him on the head. He went down with the usual speed. I took the ring of keys from his hand and rolled him into the corner. Luckily he was not the man who’d roughed up Watson, or I would’ve struck him again.

  “Mmph,” Watson was saying, and when I returned to his side it was clear that he was only semiconscious. It took some coaxing, but I managed to get him to his feet, propping him up against my shoulder. He’s largely muscle, which makes him quite heavy, and while this was something I had of course noticed (and yes, appreciated, I am in fact a heterosexual human girl), I didn’t like having to haul him out the door. He supported some of his own weight, but not nearly enough.

  The hallway was empty, as I knew it would be, and there was a set of stairs on either end. I stood there listening, aware that Watson was bleeding on me while I in turn bled onto the carpet. While I calculated the odds of either staircase being the more direct route to our destination, I thought also about the state of my boots, which Lena had coaxed me into buying on something called a flash sale site, an experience I found traumatic enough to never want to do it again. A timer ticked down, telling me how long I had to keep these hypothetical boots while I typed in my bank information, and it made me think of all the false scarcity we had in our lives, one shoe left! act now!, one more day for this sale!, and the way the boy leaning on my shoulder was coughing now, low in the throat, was ringing an awful bell somewhere in my head, scarcity and plenty, boom and bust, this being the only time in my life that I’d ever have this and then it would be over, done, never—