Darker London

Zoe couldn't sleep. Rachel was safe in the room upstairs with Danny and Deirdre and Jason were about, being demonic shields. As soon as they'd got home, Rachel and Danny had gone straight back to Danny's room and Rachel had climbed in, piled up with blankets. Zoe had poked her head in on them, a little while later, like her mother would have, and Rachel was either very firmly asleep or very firmly pretending. Either way, safe, wrapped in Danny's arms. But it wasn't enough to relax Zoe. Her head ached and banged, whatever she did.

Deirdre had set up mattresses for her and Cai on the floor of the library at Victoria Lane, and Zoe was lying fully dressed under the quilt staring at the ceiling. Cai looked lost. He wanted nothing more than to wriggle over and hold her.

"They need to find his body," she said to Cai, in the dark "She needs to be sure he's dead. Or alive. She needs that."

( ... )

Josie woke up gasping for air.

There was none to gasp for - only water - and her body convulsed in the effort to expel it from her lungs, but each time she coughed she gasped in again afterwards - and more of the water, ice cold, rushed in.

( ... )

The scene smelled of spilled petrol and Stephie clutched Marie tighter, gagging not from the smell itself but the sense memory of the Templar splashing Thomas with petrol. She pressed her face against Marie’s hair, and clung. Marie was wailing and clinging too, Stephie could feel her tears hot on her neck in heartbreaking contrast to the icy shock as they were both soaked completely in the rain.

( ... )

Josie spent the days after the blackout worried, stressed, and angry. It wasn't unusual, but it had more of a focus and that focus was Dead Meat and an upcoming fight. Josie couldn't foresee a future where there wouldn't be a fight. It seemed inevitable and it pissed her off that she wasn't ready.

Rosa had gone home with Stephie and Thomas and it pissed Josie off even more that she wasn't ready for that, either.

( ... )

At 2:53 pm, Thomas and Svetlana stepped into the super secure demon ward in the basement of Robert McGillivray Memorial Hospital. Had they been staff members, they would have known when the power cut off at 3:12, they had a total of sixty seconds to exit the secure ward before it locked up tight.

Instead, Thomas and Svetlana stared at Amaris, who stared back at them, shrugging. The lights flickered, and then rose again, at about 40%. They heard the air conditioner cease working. "That can't be good," Thomas mused. "We should probably check on it."

Svetlana and Thomas let themselves out of Amaris' room just in time to hear the sound of metal scraping against metal as the large security bolt slid into place. It was there on purpose, to protect the secure ward from anyone who might try to access it by cutting RMMH's power. The ward would not be accessible again until power was restored.

Not that Thomas knew that. He jogged the last few steps, worried about the sound, and tried the door.

Nothing.

He tried again, keying in the code with shaking fingers.

Nothing.

"Svetlana!" Thomas panicked, and she immediately took out her phone, calling Stephie.

The thing about being this happy is that Stephie truly wanted to believe nothing could break it. All day she'd been dizzyingly high, the excitement bubbling up in her chest, grinning, joking, not staying still while Lavinia fixed her hair. And all day she'd been aware that something might go wrong - someone might disappear, someone might attack.

But everyone was as safe and protected as Peter could manage and there was certainly nothing else Stephie could do to make it safer. All she could do was hold onto this feeling and cherish every moment of it.

( ... )

Stephie stepped out into the hall and carefully shut the door of the hospital room she'd been sharing with Thomas. She had to take a little breath to resettle herself; inside the room it had felt like safety but outside in the hall it just felt like work. Usually she had time in transit to step out of her home-persona and into her work one, usually she barely noticed, but today, when the physical distance between home-and-work (or at least, Thomas-and-work) was so small, she really noticed the shift.

When it was just her and Thomas in that room she was allowed to be vulnerable, she didn't need to hide her fears or her anxieties or any of the mess. But at work - well, sometimes the fears and anxiety and mess still showed through, but they were covered by an extra layer of armour, a bit more cockiness, a lot more guarded.

( ... )

Jinx hadn't seen Josie for a few weeks, and even then it had been brief. Since Josie had put herself in the hospital, Jinx hadn't seen much of her at all. Mostly their relationship had turned into an online thing, where they skyped and facetimed and played co-op games and watched the same movies while IMing. But they'd only seen each other in person less than half a dozen times since then. Jinx waited for Josie to be in a good mood and invite him to visit, because he had no intention of going against her wishes.

Mostly this was for the selfish reason that he didn't want her to throw him into another wall. No, having your girlfriend do that just the once was enough.

And they certainly hadn't been intimate since Josie went to hospital.

It had been a very long six months.

And he couldn't even go complain about it out loud and with great vehemence, since most people still didn't know about him and Josie. Which was bad, because the longer it was a secret the worse it was going to be when it came out. And of course it was going to come out.

Once when he'd arrived at the hospital to see Josie, he'd run into Del on his way. He'd stood there and flat out lied to her face about why he was there. Del, who was supposed to be his best friend. Del, who'd been freaked out and wary about demons even before one had kidnapped her and held her captive for months.

But Del was overreacting about Josie, just like she overreacted about all the demons they knew.

He didn't know if Del was ever going to forgive him for keeping this secret.

Just don't think about it, he told himself as he walked to Del's room, hands down in his pockets. If you don't think about it then it isn't a problem.

He knocked on Josie's door.

The issue that Josie hadn’t anticipated, when she’d gone to Yvonne to say shoot me full of drugs and make me feel human, was that Yvonne didn’t have those drugs just… lying around.

Sure, she’d been working on different theories about what different formulas might work, but there was not a syringe at the ready. Josie was at the ready. Josie had been building herself up to this for what felt like a very long time and to be told she would have to wait maybe a couple of weeks – that was hard. That was almost ‘sweep everything off the table and pin Yvonne to the wall by her neck to hurry her along’ hard.

( ... )

Hospital, Stephie’s orders had been. Hospital, fight, and then come home, Josie.

Josie didn’t know how. She wanted to. She wanted to exorcise the demonhood out of her. She wanted to figure out a way to save herself. Fix herself. Stop herself doing stupid shit that would only lead to her hurting Stephie again, or Jinx, and losing them both.

She was so fucking staggered that Jinx hadn’t left her after what she’d done to Stephie. So fucking staggered. And grateful. And desperate to stop anything like it happening again.

( ... )

Stephie’s phone buzzed on her last night in Spain. It took a long time for her to find it, then once she’d figured out it had slipped down the back of the bed it took even longer to wriggle her arm behind the mattress and grab it.

It was Josie, and she was video calling.

A dozen reasons why she would be using video thundered through Stephie’s mind, none of them good. Had she been kidnapped and needed to show Stephie where she was? Had she kidnapped someone?

The kidnapping possibilities were endless.

( ... )

Josie was sitting quietly on the roof, wrapped in layers of clothing. She was healing from surgery, but slowly, and this time felt more depressed than angry. Over the last week or so, Rosa had been her rock, always there for her, but never too much. Making her laugh sometimes when she didn’t think she had it in her. Or chuckle, gently, sometimes, not really laugh. Laughing hurt her, and not just in her stomach but in her heart. Her laughter felt undeserved, and was followed each time by bitter guilt.

She’d chosen the roof of the residential ward in the middle of the night as the least likely place to run into company. The only other people up here would be residents and – for the most part – they’d get what she was going through. Josie wasn’t going to seek non-Rosa company out, but at the moment she was feeling like she wouldn’t automatically turn it away, either.

( ... )

Stephie woke up with a start, gulping in air, from a vivid dream that it had all been a trick. Amaris wasn’t in hospital and they weren’t safe from her and she was laughing, delighted, that they’d all been so stupid as to fall for it. Stephie had to force herself to remember details of the flight, remember exactly what room 23 looked like, but it still took a few long, long moments before she could start to believe it. She lay back down, pulled the blankets around her, stared at the ceiling and doubted herself, doubted her memory, doubted their luck.

Don’t do this, Stephie told herself. Amaris is in hospital. That’s real. That happened. Don’t get sucked into doubt because it’ll spiral out of control and you’ll end up where Tasha was a few months ago. This is real, Amaris is really in hospital. You flew her there. You saw it. It’s real.

( ... )

Josie woke up from surgery wrecked.

She had wanted to wait till they got news that Stephie and Peter were back safe before letting anyone put her under, but by the time Katia had found someone who knew how to cut a person open and dig around inside them, and done an ultrasound to figure out exactly where the bullet was and how to get it out, Josie was starting to go into shock from internal blood loss and they couldn’t put it off. The last thing Josie remembered saying before the anaesthetic dragged her down was threatening Razvan’s life if he let anything happen to Stephie, and then next thing she knew it was the early hours of the morning and she was in recovery.

( ... )

Josie escaped the house and walked away, her head a storm of Stephie’s You are stronger than every bad things inside you countered with Josie’s I am every bad thing inside me countered with Ko’s I wish we found you first all repeating in a maddening round in her head.

She knew she’d fucked up. She could barely find the logic now that had led to her pinning Stephie down, or what had compelled her to try scare the living daylights out of her.

Because I’m shit – that was the obvious answer. Trash, just human trash or not even that, nothing better than a leech, an angry leech who ruined everything she gave a shit about. Of course she didn’t want Stephie to hate her, but she knew she deserved to have Stephie hate her.

( ... )

Every now and then, Stephie’s anxious twitchiness made her reflexes sharp as scalpels. She did start to wonder, quietly and underneath the rampant trash talk she was throwing at Jinx, if trauma was giving her an unfair advantage at Mario Cart. But then there were too many times that it went the other way and she ended up reacting too much, spinning off the track and crashing into walls.

So not really an advantage at all.

( ... )

The boredom was a killer and Josie wasn’t sleeping.

Peter was sleeping. Or at least, Peter had gone home for the night and was probably in bed with his wife by now or stressing about the world or still at Thomas’s reading Stephie old journal stories; either way, not here. Josie was also stressing about the world, but she wasn’t in bed, she was on the roof.

It was shitty weather up on the roof. But as much as Josie hated the discomfort of the cold, she wasn’t shivering. Was this, she wondered, a demon thing? Could she even get hyperthermia? Or was her skin and her muscles and her blood too removed from human to succumb to that?

( ... )

"I want to keep them in at least another twenty four hours" Katia had said, and then added out of pure fucking vampiric spite: "If not two days. You need to take it easy, Josie."

Josie didn't know if she was angrier at Katia or at herself for not healing fast enough.

She planted herself firmly in Peter's office, in his chair, and was not going to move till one of two things happened. Either he came back, or Katia appeared at the door, her attitude toward taking out Josie's stitches miraculously reversed. Josie pulled out her phone and messaged Peter, furiously.

( ... )

Stephie made a mean cinnamon toast. It was an easy enough dish but she was pretty proud of it, it was comfort food, it was sugar, it was hot sweet carbs. Pancakes was, of course, the other excellent breakfast staple, but she could never get them as good as Thomas could, although flipping them was the most fun you could have cooking breakfast.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen, stressing about food, trying to think of anything other than cinnamon toast. They’d already had breakfast, and several cups of coffee, and right now Stephie’s body felt like it was running on nothing but caffeine and sugar and stress. She should eat a vegetable. Something rooted in the earth. She’d volunteered to cook something for lunch while Thomas showered and it was going to be great. Wholesome. At least borderline healthy.

She was so good at cinnamon toast though.

( ... )

He tapped lightly on her door, the man with the curly hair and the easy smile. Rachel regarded him warily from her position curled up on the chair, under a magazine, under a window. “Hi Rachel,” he said, making Rachel instantly wary because he knew her name, even though her name was everywhere, it wasn’t a scary thing, that staff here knew her name, it was a normal thing. But she didn’t like it. “Do you mind if I come in?”

She did a bit, but she felt like the hospital would mind more if she refused him. He waited till she said “okay” before he actually came into her room, but Rachel’s whole existence was a world of unease at the moment and his waiting did nothing to calm her.

“Do you remember me?” He asked, taking a seat across from her. “My name’s Lee.”

( ... )