by Lola Gabriel
1
Boden
Boden swung his legs off the edge of the bed and put his feet on the floor. It was sticky. Gross. There was no light creeping around the edges of the hastily closed curtains yet, but it was January in London; it wouldn’t really be light until 9 a.m.
He remembered spilling a drink…that was the stickiness, then. Rum and coke. It had been that or straight rum, and though Boden had a strong constitution, today was important-ish for work, and he hadn’t wanted to go into it half blind with a hangover. I feel fine, Boden thought, moving his feet away from the sticky patch and standing up. Then sitting down again extremely quickly. He was all tangled in the blankets, had forgotten to push them off himself. Also, he was just a touch dizzy. He lifted the blankets, barely breathing for fear of making noise, and placed them behind himself on the mattress. He thought he’d made it, that he was going to get away, but all of a sudden, he felt something on his back. Boden jumped.
“Scared of me, are you?” She was husky with sleep. Her finger traced up and down his spine.
“Cold hands,” Boden said, inching away from her. But she was already leaning in the other direction, snapping on a lamp. Boden reacted surprisingly violently to the light, scrunching his face up, a hand flying to shade his eyes.
“Is it even morning?” Dru asked, grabbing a pack of cigarettes from the bedside table and flipping them open. There was nothing in there. She crumpled the pack in one hand and threw it towards the center of the room. Boden eyed her floor, with its tangled carpet of clothes in various shades of black and grey. Occasionally, within the chaos, were mugs that had been used as ashtrays. Many of the mugs contained an interesting mixture of mold and ash, cigarette butts and the very ends of joints, and slowly drying teabags.
“It’s seven, some of us have to work,” Boden said, stretching, “and you should tidy up… can’t you magic it clean?”
He could feel Drucilla rolling her eyes behind him. “I hate domestic magic,” she said, “and I have a fucking job. I have plenty. I just don’t do them at 7 a.m.”
“Well,” Boden stood and pulled on his underwear, “I was trying not to wake you, I’m considerate like that.” He turned to look at her. Her hair was a bird’s nest, and her eyeliner had run. She’d found a cigarette somewhere. “You’re smoking before breakfast?”
“I don’t eat breakfast,” she said, holding the cigarette in such a loose grip it was almost comical. “And you are many things, but considerate is not one of them. You just hate seeing me the morning after, and facing the fact that we came home together again rather than both picking up a hot little human.”
She wasn’t wrong. But Boden hated her being right. Or, he hated being read correctly, by anyone, but particularly by bloody Drucilla.
She smoothed her hair and wiped her face on her duvet cover. “On a scale of one to decomposing corpse, how bad do I look?”
“Closer to corpse,” Boden said. His trousers were on, but he couldn’t see his shirt anywhere.
Dru laughed, “That body, Boden,” she said, intentionally letting her eyes linger. “How do you have time to run the country? And do you tan? It gives you cancer, you know.”
“We don’t get can—” She was fucking with him. Why, after all these long years, he still let the messiest witch in London get to him, he did not know. “I’m a great multitasker,” he said. “Where’s my shirt?”
Dru shook her head, shrugged. She knew where it was. She had that glint in her eye, the one that preceded all their worst decisions. The time they’d ended up in the Thames. The night they’d slept with those Swedish twins and ended up spending a week in Stockholm with nowhere to stay, bar hopping… the incident with the orchard…
“I’m not getting into this. I’ll just put my jacket on without it.”
Dru leaned back into her pillows, looking a little disappointed that she hadn’t managed to get a rise. “Okay, I’ll keep it as a trophy.”
Boden snorted. “You definitely do not think I’m trophy-worthy.”
Dru narrowed her eyes and looked him up and down. “Ah, Bodie,” she said, “if only you were a woman. I’m trying to imagine it… maybe I could love you.”
Boden had already turned to leave by the time she’d finished this bit. He flipped her the bird as he left her room.
“Shower before work,” she called after him, “you stink of rum and sex.”
Boden knew he should, 100 percent, get on a bus. Or call his assistant to get him a car. But he wasn’t going to. He slipped out the front door of Drucilla’s cat-pee-smelling building and made his way toward the park.
2
Jane
The drip was driving her mad. It had been going on for some time, but she couldn’t be sure how long. She wasn’t even sure how long she’d been down here, in this solitary cell anyway. They just pushed her meals in through a hatch in the wall and took the tray away afterwards. She couldn’t count plates or remember how many meals she’d eaten. It might have been days, weeks, or possibly months.
That guard had spat at her. All she’d done in response was let the change take her a little. She’d been angry. And for goodness’ sake—the whole prison was encased in a skin of silver. She wasn’t going to get very far with turning, was she? But everyone had freaked out. As usual. And here she was. Solitary.
The meal thing was performative. There was no need for a hatch, for the scrape of the tray against stone. The walls were enchanted to hide their doors, the temperature was set by the low-level witches employed by the dragon king to keep her here.
Even in her own head, dragon king was said with a sarcastic edge. Not exactly a brilliant ruler, if the gossip was to be believed. He’d just been coming to the throne when she entered prison…but that had been a very, very long time ago.
Drip.
Jane was pretty close to screaming but wasn’t sure she remembered how to scream. Maybe, it occurred to her, the drip was a feature rather than a bug. Maybe they were torturing her with it. She smiled. That was quite clever. If that was true, maybe she had underestimated the bastards. But, she had been imprisoned in the building for…at least decades, and they’d never been so subtle with punishments before. She had the scars to prove it.
Drip.
Jane looked up at the ceiling and let her gaze soften. She had perfected this distraction technique a long time ago. Her vision blurred until everything was white, her breathing slowed, and then she was not looking at the ceiling but at the inside of a strange building. The ceiling was vaulted, and there were paintings everywhere. Moving paintings. They didn’t bother her; she had seen things like this in her daydreams before. A bored brain under pressure really is a strange thing. There were so many in here, though—they were edged in metal and colors swam on them, almost like jellyfish.
She wasn’t exactly in the room, more floating around head height. She could turn and look at everything that was going on. Outside the big windows, it was a grey morning. There was a low desk and a sign reading GENIUS BAR. This place didn’t look like a bar. But she supposed she was the one who’d invented it, she should take that up with herself. She looked to the windows again. Her attention had been caught by something…a streak of gold rising into the sky. It looked like someone launching into flight. There were often people in her daydreams, but never really characters. She would like her brain to conjure a friend, but—
There was a noise, and the strange bar, or whatever it was, shimmered, faltered, disintegrated. Jane gasped. She was in her cell again, and it was chilly. Suddenly, the face of that awful guard was above her own. She was being poked by a baton, right in the side.
“You,” said the piggy-eyed guard, “come with me.”
3
Boden
They were waiting for him when he arrived in his official chambers—Aaron, the intern, on one wingback chair, Talia, his assistant, sitting on his desk with her feet on the other chair. Boden snapped his fingers at her as he walked in, and she stepped to her feet, a pl
astic smile crawling over her face.
“You’re late,” she said. Talia was the only immortal Boden had ever met who had the air of a haughty schoolmarm. She looked, as they all did, as though she was in her late twenties or early thirties, but she just had an air about her. Maybe it was the sharp trouser suits.
Boden’s too-long blond hair was still damp, curling against his collar. He lifted his hands to let Talia do up his top button and fix his tie. He’d brushed his teeth, but still he attempted holding his breath. Didn’t want to breathe on her…
Talia pulled the tie tight. Intentionally tight. Boden shot her a look, but she only continued to smile. “Important day today,” she said.
Boden coughed and nodded, running a finger around his neckline. Talia had been his father’s assistant too, and she had never liked him. But she’d been here too long to replace. And he’d been too young to make the intelligent decision of a clear-out when he’d stepped up to this job.
“Alisdair and Niamh are on their way?” Boden asked, heading round the desk to his seat, mostly just because he needed to sit down. He’d been on a Tinder date last night, and it hadn’t gone well. It was a human girl…a boring human girl. Then he’d run into Dru, and, well, then it got really blurry.
“Official titles today, Boden,” Talia said. She turned on her kitten heel. “Your eyes are bloodshot. And everyone saw your botched landing in the flower garden. The last thing we need is another PR disaster. I will get you a car next time you wake up smelling like this. Which I assume will be tomorrow.”
Behind Talia’s back, Boden bit down on a balled fist. He made I’m going to kill her and eat her eyes at the intern. Aaron didn’t react. He looked pale. Boden had never known his mother, but he thought being bossed around by Talia was probably a good approximation of what it might be like to have one. He leaned back in his desk chair. It was made of soft leather, upholstered with gold tacks. One of a kind just for him. And it reclined. He threw his feet up onto the back of the desk, one ankle crossed over the other.
“Wake me up if you hear her coming back in,” he said, though his eyes were already closing. “Or if the, Scottish alpha and his woman are arriving. I hope the ceremony doesn’t take too long. I’m shattered.”
He was just drifting into a warm half-sleep when he heard a squeak from the intern. He ignored it, hoping it would go away, but a second squeak came.
Boden opened one eye, leaned sideways a little on his favorite chair. He’d had it imported before airplanes and trucks. It had been a big job. He had the same family of Italian furniture makers, humans, come in and see to it once a decade or so. He opened one eye.
“Is there something wrong, Aaron? You know, you don’t have to ask to use the toilet. And just ignore your dating app duties today. Can’t take anything tonight. Well, don’t hold me to that. I can’t think about it until later.”
Boden’s eyes were closing again when Aaron almost shrieked, “I did something bad!”
Well, this was a bit more interesting than the inside of Boden’s eyelids. He opened both eyes and rocked forward in his chair. “Did you, Aaron? Bad for who?”
The kid was, if possible, even more pale than he had been a few minutes ago. He was practically disappearing into the big chair he was sitting on.
“I don’t know… me? Everyone?” A long pause. “You?”
Boden grinned. There was nothing on earth this kid could have done that would be even a bother to him, but making him sweat could be amusing.
“The scroll!” the kid squawked before Boden could develop a plan. “I went to look at the scroll, and I know I shouldn’t have, and I touched it and maybe— Well, should I have been wearing gloves? It just crumpled.” Now Aaron was pulling a small bag from his pocket. Was that a doggy poo bag?
“Do you have a dog?” Boden asked, still too surprised to take anything in.
“A chihuahua mix. She’s my mum’s.”
Boden grabbed for the bag and held it up to the light that had so rudely, finally, decided to stream in through the windows. He let out a string of expletives that had Aaron cowering even further back into the chair that seemed increasingly too large for him. He didn’t really mean to, really he didn’t, but before he knew it, Boden had flung the bag at Aaron’s head, and the intern had burst into tears.
“I’M SORRY. I’M SO SO SORRY!” Aaron was keening through his snotty cries. For a moment, as he was taking in the image of the pale, mousy-haired boy covered in the grey former-contents of the bag, he thought about letting Aaron take the fall for this. Yes, he could say, you really fucked up, only my hands and the Alpha of the North can touch that scroll. Well, and the guy who cleans it.
When had that guy last cleaned and retouched it, anyway? A decade ago? Aaron let out another swampy sob, and Boden responded with an irritated noise.
“It’s dust, kid,” he said after his own outbursts, and though Aaron’s noises didn’t get any more palatable, he was at least listening. “Dragon skin parchment doesn’t turn to dust. It’s near enough indestructible. Someone’s messing with us. And they want us to bloody know it.”
Boden was up and around the front of the desk. “And bloody Alisdair and his bloody girlfriend—”
“His…uh…mate, sir.”
Now Aaron had a couple of brain cells to rub together, did he? “Right,” Boden said, “his special, royal girlfriend—”
“That’s not really how…” Aaron’s face had gone an interesting shade of red, whether from embarrassment or annoyance, Boden wasn’t sure.
“When was this, Aaron?” Boden asked, and he picked up the dog poo bag from the chair beside the intern. There was now only a small pool of the grey dust in one of its corners. Maybe he shouldn’t have thrown it like that. But that thought only annoyed Boden more, and he had to tense his arm to stop himself from pouring the rest out onto the floorboards of his state room.
“It was this morning,” Aaron said, pulling himself up off the chair, visibly shaking. “It was just this morning, I swear. I was here early, and you were not here yet and I was excited about today, and about being here for the exchange. I mean, it’s only once every five hundred years, you know, a symbol of peace in our great land, the common words that bind our great protectorates. I mean the lands of the alpha in the north and the alpha in the south. That is…uh…you, sir…I mean…”
The kid looked like he might suffer an aneurysm at any moment. That wouldn’t be great, on top of what he was already dealing with. Not that it was possible. But this was barely possible either. Talk about a PR disaster.
“Did you swallow a textbook?” Boden asked, and then he reached out one of his big, tanned hands and smeared what he could of the ash from Aaron’s face. He swore under his breath and tried again with his shirt sleeve. Aaron flinched under him, and Boden realized he’d got him with a fairy-glass cufflink to the eye.
“Sorry! Sorry, Aaron,” Boden said, pulling his arm away and stepping back. “Look, kid, this isn’t your fault. And you aren’t in trouble. Just…and this is going to be rough, but I think we need to get—”
But just as he thought her name, there was the crack of a flat palm against oak, and the double doors to Boden’s chambers smacked open. Then, there was the click of kitten heels.
“We’ve got a serious problem on our hands,” Talia said icily, as she stopped in front of the alpha and his intern. “I imagine it’s your fault, Boden?”
4
Jane
“What’s happening?” Jane asked as she was shoved into the showers. The guard just shrugged, throwing soap in her direction. None of the other prisoners had been in their usual cells on their walk through the main, dark, dank, mildew-smelling wing of the jail. It was all underground, of course, a pocket beneath the earth with a skin of silver around its edge to dull all magical powers. At first, the silver had felt palpable to Jane. It had been like an itch, but an itch she could never quite touch. A subcutaneous itch. But she had gotten used to it, she supposed. Over the years, i
t had become just how she always felt. Just like how her eyes had gotten used to the dimmer light, and she had gotten used to the loneliness. She had stopped missing the people she knew and loved. She had made a couple of card-playing friends, and had started living in her daydreams—the strange world she had built in her head of angry bright machines, screaming-tall buildings, and now these moving frames of color.
Jane soaped up. She couldn’t remember the last time she had washed. No washing in solitary. Whatever the occasion, she’d take it. Maybe, she thought vaguely, there had been an outbreak of something. Fleas. Lice. Ringworm. Jane sniffed the soap. It didn’t smell medicated. It was flower scented, she thought. Strong, sickly, a little like death. Or maybe that was just what flowers smelled like? She couldn’t really remember anymore. When Jane was younger, she had helped her mother to garden. But that had been more vegetables than—
“It’s not a spa!” the guard hollered, hammering what sounded like a hammy fist on the steel wall of the shower. “Get a move on!”
Jane sucked in her breath. She would be jumpy for days after so long alone. If it had even been long. “I don’t have a towel,” she said. But she said it way too quietly. So she tried again. This time, she was shouting. Unintentional, but it got the job done.
“Okay, inmate, I get the bloody idea,” came the guard’s answer, and then the flimsy plastic curtain of the shower was slid slightly open and the guard’s hand came in, fist tight around a ratty orange towel.
“Thanks,” Jane muttered. The guard made a noise like a tired dog. A harrumph, sort of. “Clothes are out here,” she added.
Jane tried her best to dry herself, but it was a losing battle with the old towel. Even when it was new, it would have been a task. As she dried herself, Jane realized she hadn’t seen her own body properly in a long time. Group showers were the only reason to undress, usually, and they were something to get over as soon as remotely possible. She had been living in her dreams so much, she had almost forgotten she had such a thing as a body… but here it still was. Brown hair, longer than she had ever willingly kept it, curls pulled straight by the weight of the water, still twisting slightly, though, as it cascaded down her front and over her breasts. Five-foot-six, and green eyes. Jane knew these things about herself, though she hadn’t observed them in a very long time. Pointy elbows. This, she could see. She flexed her arms and ran her fingers over the joints. It kind of tickled. She had just begun to smile when the guard’s voice came from outside again. “Inmate, your clothes are waiting. I don’t have all day.”