Jon couldn’t sleep. Despite the events of the day, not to mention the extreme emotional roller-coaster that had been the conversation that followed—despite, in fact, being weary to the bone and feeling drained of all energy—he found himself lying awake in the darkness.
There were probably a lot of reasons for this. One was the general unfamiliarity of the mattress—it wasn’t uncomfortable, it was just different enough to make his brain itch a little. On the other hand, the feel of the sheets was definitely unpleasant, too stiff and scratchy where they touched his bare skin, too light and insubstantial where they didn’t, and they smelled of bleach. He was starting to ache a bit, not crippling agony, but definitely the kind of pain that distracted him from being able to sleep, but the painkillers were too far away. He wasn’t alone, either, and while he didn’t necessarily prefer being alone, he was used to it at this point and suddenly and unexpectedly sharing a room, not to mention a bed, no matter how large, was making it hard to fall asleep when he hadn’t mentally prepared himself and they hadn’t discussed boundaries.
Also, Tim snored like a horse being sawn in half.
Jon lay on his back for a while, trying to call on literally any of the coping mechanisms he’d come up with over the years to fall asleep, hopefully without dreaming. Then the thought of the dreams he’d been having lately, coupled with the idea dropping into his mind that he might dream about tonight, about the tunnels and the worms and the screaming and everything else, struck him like the proverbial ton of bricks and effectively killed off any idea of sleep for the moment.
Carefully, so as not to either exacerbate his injuries or wake Tim, he peeled back the top sheet and eased out of the bed. While he was on the one hand reluctant to go wandering around Melanie King’s house without her permission, he was…curious. As long as he didn’t touch anything, it should be fine, right? If all else failed, he could always claim he’d been looking for the bathroom.
The door opened silently, and he closed it gently behind himself before making his way down the hall. It was carpeted, thank God, which meant the likelihood of creaky floorboards was greatly diminished. It was also dark, though, and he had to move extremely slowly and carefully to keep from getting hurt…or making too much noise. As late as it was—as late as it had to be—he didn’t want to wake anyone.
There was a light on towards one end of the hall. The tiny part of Jon’s brain that had been in full panic mode since the first worm had reared its ugly head clamored that Melanie had left the candle burning and the living room was on fire and oh, God, Martin was in there, but he made himself think rationally. The candles didn’t seem to actually do much damage, really, not unless the wards were tested severely. And they seemed to have been placed sensibly, or rather, things around them had been placed sensibly. Besides, the light wasn’t right for it to be a fire. It was too dim, too…steady. It must be something else. Probably someone had just left a lamp on.
As he got closer to the source of the light—the door to the living room, which was ajar—he could hear voices. Sudden panic made his heart kick against his ribcage for a second, until he got close enough to make out words and recognized the speaker. Martin.
“—bad as all that,” he was saying. Something in Jon’s chest he hadn’t even realized was tight loosened at the sound of his assistant’s voice. “Not now, anyway.”
“He left you trapped in your flat for two weeks.” It took Jon a second to recognize the voice as Gerard Keay’s. “And then let you get eaten by worms. Sounds pretty bad to me.”
“This wasn’t his fault. And it wasn’t his fault I was trapped for two weeks, either. Jane Prentiss had my phone, she’d texted him and told him I was sick.”
“And he didn’t come check on you once.” That was Melanie.
“He’s my boss, Neens. Not my friend. Not…I mean, we weren’t then. I’d barely managed to get upgraded from nuisance to colleague. If it happened now, yeah, I think maybe he would have. But back then, I wouldn’t have expected him to come see how I was. That’s not the relationship he had with any of us, really, least of all me.”
They were talking about him. Jon’s stomach squirmed slightly with guilt, because there wasn’t anything Martin had just said that was untrue. Over the last four months—particularly the last few weeks, since the night Martin had sung for him when he’d asked—they’d become friendly. For God’s sake, Martin had carried him back there, had wrapped him in his own jumper when he couldn’t stop shivering, had comforted and protected him. And he’d…been useless. As both a boss and a friend.
“He really thought you were a nuisance?” Gerard’s voice brought Jon back to the present, although not particularly pleasantly.
Martin snorted, sounding amused. “Oh, yeah, he was never subtle about that. You should hear the summing-ups he did on most of the early statement recordings. ‘Well, this is obviously patently false, but if it does turn out to be true, I hope it kills Martin.’”
His imitation of Jon’s voice was almost spot-on, and it was pretty funny, even if it was also a bit too close to a direct quote for comfort. It sounded like Gerard and Melanie both found it funny, too, because they laughed, if reluctantly. “And now?”
“He pushed me a bit too far one day and I snapped at him. Things got a bit better after that, weirdly.”
“Told you. Sometimes you have to take up space,” Melanie said.
“I’m six foot six and over three hundred thirty pounds. How much more space can I take up?” Martin huffed. “Anyway, that’s when he started…I don’t know, respecting my work? Not nitpicking it so much, anyway. We didn’t get to start being friendly until after Prentiss, though.”
Someone sighed. Jon presumed it to be Gerard, since he spoke next, but while the door was ajar, he’d positioned himself on the hinge side so that if it opened, he would be hidden, which rather limited his line of sight. “What did he push you over? I’m genuinely curious as to what the final straw was for you over someone who had the power to make the rest of your life absolute hell.”
There was a surprisingly long pause before Martin answered. “That guy you bought Ex Altiora off of made a statement.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. That was the latest one he’d unearthed. We were researching it, and…honestly, Gerry, it’d been a lousy day to begin with. You know those days where nothing goes right? Started off with my alarm not going off and went downhill from there. I was tired, I was stressed…I was starving, because I hadn’t had time to eat before I left and I forgot my lunch, and it was the end of the pay period all the bills came out of, so I didn’t have money for the canteen. Just altogether not in a good mood. And it was Mum’s birthday, which didn’t help.”
Melanie sighed this time, a lot more exasperated of a sound. “You got Sheila when you called, too, I bet.”
Martin sighed, too. “Give the lady a cigar. Anyway, yeah, it just…it was a perfect storm of suck, so when Jon basically accused me of slacking off, I blew up at him.”
It hadn’t really been an explosion, Jon thought to himself, so much as the pop of a Christmas cracker, but he put that aside at the question Gerard posed. “And you weren’t worried he’d actually kill you?”
“I said he was starting to put the pieces together, not that he knew what was going on. At best I thought he’d try to fire me. I almost wish he had. Might’ve made things easier. Or Elias would’ve come down and killed us all, I don’t know.” Martin was really way too nonchalant about these things. “Anyway, Jon’s not anything like Gertrude Robinson, thank fucking God. The more I’ve got to know him, the more I realize that if he’d actually known these things were dangerous before he went to record them, he wouldn’t have actually sent any of us to investigate. Even me. He’d have probably tried to go himself. He’d never sacrifice anyone else for his own curiosity, and I think he would actually die before he let any of us be hurt.”
“Oh, I’m so glad the two of you have found each other, that’s exactly what the world needs,” Melanie drawled.
“Shut up, Neenie.”
“Okay, let me ask a less obvious question,” Gerard said. “You weren’t worried he’d start sending Tim and Sasha on the dangerous fieldwork if he didn’t want you at least out of the way, if not dead?”
Jon slammed his hand into his mouth, despite the pain it caused around the worm holes, to keep from gasping aloud. That had never occurred to him, but—hang on, he hadn’t only sent Martin to look into things, had he? He’d—Tim and Sasha, they did their share of fieldwork, too. He tried desperately to remember if any of them had been cases that wouldn’t record on his laptop. Oh, God, had he put Martin in danger and let Tim and Sasha stay safe because he wanted—he didn’t really want Martin dead, he’d been annoyed by him, exasperated, would have been happier at the beginning if he had quit, but dead?
“We don’t have to do actual fieldwork that often, really. It’s mostly phone calls,” Martin answered. “And…I’m not stupid. There are some things Tim’s better at than I am, or Sasha. And I know better than to get too close to the Buried, not after what happened at the Mermaid Inn.” He sighed. “But…well, sometimes people will talk to me who won’t talk to the others, because they can tell that I know. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to let anyone else go to Bexley.”
“Bex—shit, not that woman bound up in the Flesh, the one with the…”
“Angela Grackle, yeah.”
Jon frowned, momentarily distracted by the fact that they’d never known Angela’s last name and that Martin had claimed not to be able to find her—it had been one of the last times he’d insulted Martin on recording, more out of habit than anything—but then Melanie started speaking and he focused back on the conversation. “You know they’re not going to let you get away with that now that they know about the Fourteen, right?”
“Yeah, I know.” Martin sounded resigned. “I can already foresee some nasty go-rounds with Tim about it.”
“Buddy system, Martin. You should’ve been using it from the beginning. Always goes worse for us when we try to go solo. I mean, look at me.” Gerard yawned. “I’m…shit, I’m actually tired. God, you have no idea how good that feels. But I need at least a night’s sleep before I try to give a proper statement to your Archivist.”
“Don’t call him that, please.”
“What, Archivist or yours?”
“Good night, Gerry,” Martin said emphatically.
There was some soft snickering and a bit of murmuring Jon couldn’t quite make out. He pressed himself harder into the corner, hoping he wouldn’t be given away when the others came out into the hallway—he’d never make it back to the room unobserved—but nothing happened for an agonizingly long time. After a couple of minutes, though, he heard Martin call quietly, “Jon?”
Guiltily, Jon pulled himself out of the corner, stiff and sore from having stood still too long, and came into the living room. “How did you know it was me?” he asked, pulling the door shut behind him.
Martin was alone in the room—Jon could see now that there was another door he’d been too shell-shocked to notice earlier—and still sitting on the loveseat, although he had his feet propped up on the low coffee table in the middle. He also had his eyes closed and his glasses off as he rubbed at his forehead. “Saw the flash of socks under the door and knew someone was out there. Sasha would’ve been on the other side of the door so she could see as well as hear, so it was fifty-fifty whether it was you or Tim. Took a chance it was you.” He slid his glasses back onto his face and raised his head to look at Jon. Surprise flitted through his eyes as his eyebrows jumped up to his hairline.
“It’s not mine,” Jon said weakly, feeling his face catch fire. Melanie had offered to find all of them something to sleep in—she hadn’t been able to find anything that fit Tim, who had simply stripped down to his pants, and she’d given Sasha an oversize sleep shirt that would do—but he wasn’t sure which of them had been more dismayed to discover that Jon and Melanie were essentially the same size. Still, she’d handed Jon a soft cotton t-shirt and a pair of flannel sleep pants worn smooth from numerous washings, and even a pair of socks he’d at first looked slightly askance at but that had turned out to be the most comfortable things he’d ever put on his feet. And he was grateful.
He just knew it did something probably unhelpful for his reputation, such as it was, to be wearing a shirt advertising an American punk rock band’s European tour.
“I know it’s not yours. I’m just…surprised is all. When Neens said she’d given you lot stuff to sleep in…never mind.” Martin gave him a tired half-smile. “Hurting?”
“A little.”
Martin gestured to the various seats in the living room—the sofa he, Tim, and Sasha had crammed onto, the loveseat Martin had somehow managed to share with Melanie and Gerard, an overstuffed leather armchair with a knitted throw tossed casually over the back. Jon contemplated the chair for a moment—something about that throw drew in his attention—and then, rather to his surprise, made his way across the living room and settled next to Martin on the loveseat.
“Do you mind?” he asked, somewhat belatedly.
To his relief, Martin shook his head. “Not if you don’t.”
They sat in silence for a bit, but it was a comfortable one, not charged or tense like the silences in the Archives usually were, especially these days. Finally, Martin took a deep breath. “So…how much of that did you hear?”
“You, ah…everything from Gerard saying I’d let you be trapped for two weeks without checking on you,” Jon admitted. “I am sorry about that, Martin. I—I should have—”
“Honestly, Jon, I think the fact that you wouldn’t have is the only reason she went away,” Martin said. Jon blinked up at him in surprise. “I wasn’t afraid of her. Not then. Not once I realized…I wasn’t sure if Tim would come to see how I was doing, but after a couple days, I realized nobody was coming, and that meant nobody would walk in on her unprepared. So I wasn’t afraid anymore. Her leaving was probably less because she was bored and more because she was starving.”
“Starving,” Jon repeated.
“She fed off fear. Most things that have become that entwined with the Fourteen do, in the end.”
Jon could hear the faint note of sadness in Martin’s voice. He studied his assistant’s face, then asked the question he probably didn’t want to know the answer to. “Even you?”
Martin swallowed and nodded. “Even me. Eventually. It hasn’t happened yet, but…every time I Look, every time I See, it gets worse and worse. Someday I’ll go too far and I’ll have to, and the worst of it is it’s not going to be a big thing. It’s like putting a single drop of poison in the well every single day until one day you can’t drink the water anymore.”
“It’s not the hundredth blow that splits the stone, but the ninety-nine that came before,” Jon said softly.
“Yeah, something like that. It’s…never mind.” Martin took a deep breath. “But no, right now I don’t have to live off the fear of the people around me. Prentiss, though…me not being afraid of what would happen was probably what got her to let me go, in the end.”
Jon mulled that over for a minute. “So that’s the trick? Not being afraid?”
Martin shrugged. “Maybe, but it’s really difficult to just…not be afraid. There’s a rumor…some university student who had an encounter with an agent of Terminus and lost the ability to feel fear…but that’s not something that comes easily to most people. I wasn’t afraid for myself because I was, well, prepared. At least at home. I had the ward, and I knew it worked. I had a few things that would have helped if she’d forced her way in. And if all else failed, I could have taken a few precautions to make sure she couldn’t have used me to get to you all.”
“I’m going to have to get you to teach me some of those things,” Jon murmured, settling back against the loveseat. “Not tonight, though.”
“No. No, not tonight,” Martin agreed.
Another silence fell. This time Jon was the one to break it by blurting out, “I didn’t really want you dead, you know.”
Martin gave a surprised and slightly bemused-sounding laugh. “What brought that up?”
“It’s…you were, y-you were talking with Gerard and Melanie about the way I treated you in the beginning, and—I was awful to you, I shouldn’t—”
“I probably deserved it. At least some of it,” Martin interrupted. “And no, I never thought you actually wanted me dead. I’d have called you out on it if I did. I just thought you hated me.”
Jon wanted to deny that he’d hated Martin, but he wasn’t sure he plausibly could. Instead, he asked the question that had been bothering him…well, for a while, but especially since he’d asked Martin why he stayed. “So why didn’t you quit?”
Martin was quiet for a lot longer than Jon had expected. Finally, he said softly, “We can’t, Jon. None of us can. We’re bound to the Archives now.”
That probably should have been horrifying. Or terrifying. Or both. Jon was vaguely aware there was a distinction between the two, but he couldn’t remember what it was exactly. It had something to do with the mood, didn’t it?
He must have said something out loud, because Martin gave him a funny look. “Terror comes before an event, horror comes after. One of my teachers said once that fear is worrying there’s a werewolf after you, terror is seeing it spring out of the bushes and charge at you, and horror is realizing your feet are stuck to the ground. Something like that. Why, are you trying to figure out which one’s more applicable here?”
“I mean—kind of?” Jon tried to laugh. “It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. It should be…I suppose it should be horrifying, right?”
“But it isn’t?”
Jon shrugged. “I can think of worse things than to spend the rest of my life working in the Archives with you.”
The surprised laugh that burbled out of Martin was one of the nicest sounds Jon thought he’d heard in a while. “I think it might be more productive to talk about this in the morning. Once you’ve had a good night’s sleep. But…for what it’s worth, thank you.”
“Thank you,” Jon said, suddenly aware he hadn’t said it earlier. “For…everything today. For saving my life. For looking after me.” For caring about me, he wanted to add, but he bit that back. It felt…a bit excessive, really.
“Of course.” Martin sighed. “I wish I’d told you sooner. I wish you’d all been more prepared. I—I wish I could have done more. But I was glad to do what I did.” He paused. “Speaking of, I’ve, um, Melanie left the bottle of aspirin. Do you…?”
Jon was, in fact, still in a fair amount of pain. “Please.”
Martin opened the bottle and shook out a couple of the little white pills, then handed the rest of the bottle to Jon before tossing back the ones in his cupped hand and chasing them with a sip of tea. Jon took three—more than he probably should have, but the pain was severe and he hoped it would help him sleep—and was about to dry-swallow them when Martin nudged him, very gently, and gave him the mug as well. “Here. There’s not much in it, but it should be enough.”
“Thank you.” Jon’s fingers were not shaking as he took the mug, and if they were, it was definitely from the pain. There was no more than a swallow left in the bottom, and it tasted faintly sticky, but as Martin had said, it was enough to keep from feeling the powdery drag down his throat.
He set the mug down on the coffee table and leaned back against the loveseat, waiting for the pain to subside enough that he could force himself to his feet and stumble back to the room he was sharing with Tim. Or maybe he’d stay here until Martin left—presumably he had a bed of his own somewhere in here—and sleep on the loveseat. It would be safer. Funny how he never worried about what might happen if he slept in the same room as Martin. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Tim, just that he worried one or both of them might do something…unseemly. There was, strangely, no fear of that with Martin.
Jon was still turning that over in his head when he drifted off to sleep, right there in the living room.