Darker London

It was that weird, timeless time between Christmas and New Years, Joss was lying awake beside Hope in her bed listening to the rain thrash against the window above his head. He had slept a little, but really only long enough for Hope to fall asleep as well, and she slept so much deeper than he did.

He got up slowly, carefully trying not to wake her, and went to find somewhere in this house he could read somewhere, out of the way. Living in Razvan's house for so long - longer than he'd lived anywhere else in his life - meant the size and grandeur of the Kemp manor wasn't as intimidating as it might have been. Besides it was hard for a house that contained Hope and Liz to be intimidating, and Emma was perfectly nice.

( ... )

Alex couldn't keep still as she waited for Cai and Danny to arrived at the house, she was a mass of nervous energy centered around an uncertain stomach. Liz and Emma had lent her several suitcases and this morning Alex had gone out and killed the time by buying herself a green trench coat with wonderfully deep pockets.

Aesthetically, the coat made her feel like a spy from the 1940s. The rest of it - the suitcases, the waiting, the company, the thought of screaming at her mother - made her feel wild and feral and cut loose. It felt good, knowing that the anger toward her mother was going to have somewhere to go, but it also felt uncomfortable and unpredictable.

When Cai's car came rolling up the drive, Alex climbed down from where she'd been balancing on the railings around the porch and threw open the side doors to the van. No time to waste! The empty suitcases were already inside, the van just needed people. "Hey!" She said, too nervous to be patient. "Let's go!"

"Hold your horses," Cai said, pulling an empty bag out of his own car and locking the boot. Zoe descended the porch stairs to meet them, empty backpack on her own back. "Alright?" he asked Zoe, since last time he'd seen her in person she'd been pretty much wrecked by her vision and last night talking to her online she hadn't sounded much better.

"Yeah, we're good to go," Zoe told him, making her way over to join Alex at the van.

"Hold my horses," Alex repeated, incredulous, to Danny and Zoe. "What does he think I've been doing all morning?"

"Shopping?" Zoe offered, with a nod to the coat, and Alex good-naturedly flipped her off.

Zoe went to her room early, under the excuse that she was going to sleep because she was exhausted. The exhausted bit was true. She did climb into bed, but fully dressed, music playing on her laptop as she tried to read.

It was too much - she turned the music off, but that only extended her concentration for another couple of sentences. She pulled up a set of her flashcards, and managed half a dozen, but on the seventh her mind gave her an image of cages in the dark, instead. There'd been someone sobbing in the distance of the warehouse, Zoe had never seen their face but couldn't get them out of her head.

( ... )

Leaving Paddington at rush hour meant Alex had someone in the seat beside her most of the trip, though it was no comparison to the tube because she'd paid for this seat. The tired looking woman beside her got off at Reading and Alex stretched out a little, finally free to finish her rum and coke in a coke bottle without worrying the woman would report her. The coke said Alex on the bottle because she wasn't immune to stupid marketing, although she'd peeled most of it off by the time the train terminated in Bedwyn station.

She'd only chosen it because she'd never heard of it before, and once she was off the train it was obvious why. Great Bedwyn was one of those places where the word 'village' was a bit of a grasp and 'parish' was much more apt. She started walking, since she had no other plan, looking for something to do (and, probably, eat, since it was past seven thirty and she'd skipped dinner because her mum was freaking poisoning it.) The first street she took wound past little houses that didn't even touch each other and ended up on a street called Farm Lane that trailed off into the darkness, losing streetlights, heading, Alex imagined, for farms.

( ... )

Rachel had been lying on her back under her quilt, scrolling through her phone, but when she read Danny's post she had to put it down for a minute.

Alarm bells. Muscles across her chest, tightening.

She couldn't leave her phone face down for long, the pull was too strong. She picked it up again and his post still said the same thing. He wanted to move out of his house. And Rachel was convinced her was going to ask her because surely, he'd ask her, and she'd have to say - something...

( ... )

Alex went to bed the earliest, though it was far from early. In the living area, on their soft fat couches with the windows facing the beach open to the warm night air, everyone else was sitting around, legs and laughter all entwined. Rachel had come back from her dinner with her parents and things seemed okay but Alex's mood had changed, and she just kept thinking you're all so sick.

How could they laugh, and flirt, and order room service like nothing had happened.

How could Lydia and Dylan forget the sound of people screaming as they tried to escape the theatre.

How could Rachel forget she'd lived with that monster for so long before she snapped.

( ... )

When Cai and Zoe arrived on Danny's doorstep, Zoe was grinning in pure nerves. Sure, they had demon bodyguards was hanging close but in order to relax Zoe would have to have faith that someone like Rosa could keep them 100% safe and since nothing in the world could do that Zoe didn't think relaxation was really on the cards.

Cards, however, were on the cards. Cai had packed some. "Gonna park my butt under the air conditioning unit and play some poker!" Cai was trying to make up for Zoe's nerves by being overenthusiastic about everything and talking about his butt a lot.

Although currently he was poking his head through Wolf's dog door. "Dannyyyy!" he called. "We're heere!"

Zoe looked down at his butt, sticking out of Danny's door, then back down the road to check she could still see the bodyguard car.

Cai had the car for the day, providing that he picked up groceries on the way home, so he'd picked up Alex first on their way to Mariposa. Alex wasn't going to admit it, but she was relieved Cai was coming too. It was kinda weird to get an invitation to have coffee just from Danny. Kind, she supposed, rather than weird.

No, still weird. This whole group's unanimous adoption of her was weird. Still, Alex didn't have a lot of options. It was certainly better than hanging out on her own, and a hundred times better than hanging out with her mum. She'd rather be meeting at a pub, but coffee and something sweet would do for a while. She bet she could convince them to turn it into a pub crawl. Cai had been kinda cute when he was drunk.

They had to park a few blocks away and the walk to the cafe wasn't as shady as she would have liked. Stupid summer. "Ugh, I'm gagging for a cold brew," she muttered to Cai as they approached the cafe. Cai was looking at his phone and she leaned in to see, and Cai didn't try to hide it. "Rach saying she's late," he said, flashing the screen of the group chat toward her, then grinning as he caught sight of Danny already waiting at a table in the shade. "Hey bro," he said, holding out his hand for a fist bump. "All right?"

After the service let out, Cai saw Alex break away from her mother while Ellen talked to their priest. His first instinct was to bolt through the elderly and plant himself in front of her, but she looked like a harsh breeze would blow her over, as Dom used to say. She was dressed neat, her skirt just long enough for church but just short enough to let her legs breath in the heat, the crochet lace cardigan long enough she could pull it nervously over her hands but airy enough she wasn’t dying. There was a pinched look on her face and she looked entirely alone. Cai restrained himself to some extent, and sidled over with a casual motion he felt must look altogether false from the outside, because it certainly felt false from the driver’s seat.

She spotted him; Alex was on the lookout for any kind of approaching movement. Cai pushed his hands into his pockets and smiled at her. She had not been at church since Indigo had put her in hospital and it wasn’t like she’d been a faithful every-Sunday attendee before that, but her absence since the massacre had been notable. Her mother’s presence in the congregation radiated even stronger, ever since, and Ellen had made sure that her daughter’s name was mentioned, every service.

( ... )

Alexandria had been through many variations of her name as she grew up. From Alexandria to Alex to, last year, Xan. She wanted to be the kind of person who could pull of Xan, it was way more unique than the other variations, short and powerful. But it felt like it took a lot of work maintaining a persona that fit the name Xan, and she’d slowly abandoned it. She was getting older now anyway, she’d turned seventeen recently and wanted her seventeenth year to be one of effortless coolness. Trying too hard to fit into a name like Xan reeked of effort, so Alex rolled her eyes whenever anyone called her Xan now.

She’d thought about going by her last name, Tai, for a while. She liked that too – it was pretty, but it just drew too many ignorant comments from people who assumed she was Thai.

( ... )

Rachel was waiting outside the school gates for Cai, her fluffy coat pulled in tight around her body. It was not freezing outside today, but she hadn’t been able to get back to sleep last night after her nightmare – and the realisation that, at some point, her father has acquired a handgun. She was too scared to ask him about it; scared to find out if he’d always had one, or if he’d acquired one after the thing with the vampires, not knowing that his daughter thought she was more dangerous than all the handguns in the world. She wanted to forget it existed, because if she forgot, she was less likely to tell anyone. Zoe wouldn’t let her stay if she knew Harley had a gun. Neither would Danny. Nor Cai.

She felt like she was on tenuous ground with them all anyway. None of them liked her moving back in with father and none of them knew why she’d become so stubborn about it, not really. But she couldn’t stay at Cai’s since the chicken incident, and she couldn’t stay at Danny’s because what if she did something to Wolf and besides, Danny’s mum didn’t like her, and she didn’t want to stay at Zoe’s because she didn’t want Zoe to find out that maybe Rachel was way more destructive than Zoe thought she was.

( ... )

For as long as she could remember, Indigo had known as much as she needed to about her family.

When she was very little, she lived with a big group of them, a few other cousins older than she was, a few aunts and uncles who were also cousins. It was one of them – it must have been one of them who told her that her parents were cousins, and two of her grandparents were half-brother and sister. She’d known that, and known that it was a shameful secret, for as long as she could remember.

( ... )

Alex and Indigo spent a lot of time talking about what life would be like if things were fair. It was a game they played, a what-if, like what-would-you-do-if-there-were-aliens.

Fairness was a bit of a foreign concept to the pair of them, but an interesting one. When they were alone together they’d compare their lives now with the way their lives would be if fairness was a thing, if the universe was a just place, if God really existed.

Indigo was a total atheist; Alex was not, but she knew that God and Indigo could not occupy the same space; they were like oil and water. She didn’t mind Indigo ragging on God and his believers, not really.

( ... )

Cai sat near the back of his history class, paying cursory attention to the lecture while his mind was really poking and prodding at the vision of the funeral. Danny was going to come to church with him this weekend, and he was planning to tell Danny about the vision afterwards. It didn’t seem right, leaving him out of it.

He better talk to Zoe about it first, though. As a heads up, and to see if she’d told Rachel yet. He didn’t think she had.

( ... )