Gerard follows the woman in the sensible shoes down the corridor, silently willing her to hurry up already. Logically he knows any danger—any immediate danger, anyway—is past, but he needs to see for himself before he can be sure.
The woman’s talking. He’s only partly listening. She probably doesn’t actually know the full truth anyway. Nobody’s giving him details about anything, not really. The woman’s saying a lot about care and caution and something vague about a regular therapist, and he wants to laugh at her because the last thing that would help in any plausible scenario is a therapist. Someone who doesn’t know the situation isn’t going to be able to help them recover from it.
And it’s not like telling someone would make things better.
They round a corner and he spots a familiar figure standing outside a door, arms crossed and jittering with suppressed emotion. Gerard rushes past the nurse and walks over as fast as he can without outright running. “Melanie. How is he?”
It’s a mark of how worried he is that he says her full first name. Melanie’s face is pinched with anger and worry and a bit of accusation. “I don’t know. They won’t let me in without a guardian.”
“It’s all right, she’s our sister,” Gerard tells the nurse with the disapproving frown. “I’m here to take both of them home…is he ready to go?”
Just like that, the frown vanishes, and the nurse nods and holds up a finger before disappearing into the room behind him.
Swiftly, in a low voice, Gerard asks, “What happened?”
“Not here.” Melanie’s expression, in contrast to the nurse’s, does not relax. “When did you get back?”
“Like two hours ago.” Gerard and his mum have been on one of their continental jaunts, so he really has no idea what’s happened.
Before either of them can elaborate, the door opens, disgorging Martin. It’s obvious he’s just gone on a growth spurt in the last couple of months—his trousers clear his ankles by a good inch and his jawline’s gone square as at least some of the puppy fat burns off—but he’s huddling in on himself. He looks…humiliated is the best way Gerard can put it. A combination of guilt and embarrassment and general upset.
And Gerard’s stomach lurches.
“Hey,” he says, his voice soft so that it doesn’t shake or crack. “Ready to go?”
“Hi, Gerry,” Martin mumbles. His eyes flick up briefly to Gerard’s face, then drop to the floor again, and his hands tuck a little tighter under his arms.
“Remember,” the nurse says, coming out from behind Martin and wagging her finger at him sternly. “Keep those covered until they heal. Dr. Browning will want to see you next week to have those out, or you can go to your regular doctor.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Martin’s voice is no more than a thread, and Gerard’s worry ratchets up another few notches.
Concealing it as best he can, he places a hand on the center of Martin’s back—they’re the same height now, Martin’s going to be tall when all’s said and done—and wraps the other around Melanie’s shoulders. “Come on, then. How about an ice cream?”
They aren’t children anymore, not really—Martin turned fourteen just before Gerard left town, Melanie will be fourteen in a week—but ice cream is as good a peace offering as any. Martin shakes his head wordlessly, though, leaving Gerard casting about for something else to do. Taking him home, he instinctively feels, is right out.
Most places in London are too crowded, too historically or paranormally significant, or too full of books for them to go right now. Martin feels fragile, in a way Gerard isn’t accustomed to, and they’ll have to take care with him. In the end, they wind up in one of the few spots they can count on being unobserved and uninterrupted, a small, secluded public garden in the ruins of an ancient church. What Melanie sometimes refers to, rather dramatically, as “the Green” has reclaimed enough of it that any blood or ghosts soaked into the church’s stones are well-hidden, and it’s almost never visited, at least not during the week in the autumn. They should be able to talk.
Martin still won’t look anyone in the eye as they settle on a wide stone ledge. Melanie crosses her legs underneath herself and leans on them, trying to stare up at Martin’s face, while Gerard settles on Martin’s other side. For a long moment, there is silence, save the faint rustling of leaves in the wind.
Finally, Martin speaks in a small, miserable voice. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Melanie says, with an emphatic immediacy that feels like she’s been waiting for him to apologize so she can impress this fact on him—and, knowing both of them, she has been.
“Martin, what happened?” Gerard asks, as gently as he can. “All Aunt Lily said was that you’d gone to the A&E.” Actually, she said a lot of rather dismissive things, and that Martin would just have to wait until his stepfather gets home from work if he can’t be bothered to check himself out, but he isn’t going to say that. From the brief look Melanie gives him, he doesn’t have to.
Martin hunches his shoulders forward like he’s trying to make himself as small as possible. “It’s…I found a book. It’s one Leitner never had—it didn’t have his label on it or anything—and I probably wouldn’t have even picked it up normally because it’s one of the ones we read in English earlier this term and it seemed innocent enough when we did. I wasn’t even really searching for them then. But it, it felt powerful, so I-I Looked at it, and it was so bright, I’d never seen anything that bright. The man at the shop told me I could just…have it when I asked him how much.”
“Which should’ve been our first clue,” Melanie interjects. “Nobody just gives these away.”
It doesn’t matter—or maybe it does—but Gerard asks anyway. “Which one was it?”
“The Spiral. It…I brought it home to give it to Mum so she could give it to Aunt Mary, but it wasn’t in my pocket when I got there. She went on at me for being careless and told me to go find where I’d dropped it.” Martin swallows. “It was dark by the time I got home and—it was in the bottom of my bag all along, I thought. I found it and put it on my nightstand to give it to Mum in the morning, but…”
“It wasn’t there,” Gerard guesses. “And of course you thought it was your fault.”
“I—you know I forget things all the time—”
“Which just made you easy prey for it. It’s not your fault, Martin.” Gerard touches Martin’s chin lightly. “But if you just kept losing it, how did you get hurt?”
Tears spring to Martin’s eyes, and he looks away again. “I kept…it got to where the only way I could find it was to Look, because I’d see it glowing and I’d find it. A-and then, after a couple of days, it…a man turned up. He kept insisting it was his book, that I’d stolen it—and of course I didn’t have a receipt from the shop because the man gave it to me, so I couldn’t prove I hadn’t, or that I hadn’t done it on purpose, but every time I tried to bring it to Mum for Aunt Mary it wasn’t where I’d left it and I’d start—panicking that maybe the man had taken it. Except nobody else ever saw him, so—”
“So Aunt Lily said you were making him up.” Gerard’s stomach flips. “Whether she believed it or not.”
“Yeah,” Martin says softly. “It just—I-I knew, I knew it was the Spiral and that I, I couldn’t trust my senses, but it still was just—it got too much, a-and…finally I read some of the book.”
“Martin!”
“I know! I know, I just—I thought if I gave into it, maybe a little, that it would, I don’t know, bind it to me and I’d stop losing it. And anyway I was kind of curious as to how it was different from the one we read in school. But it just made the man angry when he turned up, he, he said it wasn’t for me, that it wasn’t meant to be Seen, and what would my mother say if she knew? But it, it had sort of stuck, so I brought it to Mum, and she went on at me about how I should have brought it to her days ago and what use was I…” Martin presses his lips together hard for a moment. “That was last night. Then this morning, I went out to bring in the bins and the man was there and…he was just looking at me with so much pity. Said I was stupid to have handed the book off to another unfortunate soul, that I should’ve destroyed it before anyone else could have read it, and that it was just going to draw the Twisting Deceit’s attention, that I was leading it right to Melanie and Mum and you and oh, Martin, what have you done?”
“He knew your name?” Gerard was horrified. These things never knew names, not unless…
“And yours, and Neenie’s, and everyone else’s. It—he said it was my fault, that I’d made myself so bright anyone could see and…that whatever happened would be because of me. I had Mum calling me useless on one side and the man calling me dangerous and stupid on the other and…i-it just got to be too much.” Martin raises his head and manages to look Gerard in the eye, although he’s still on the verge of falling apart. “The Spiral didn’t do this, Gerry. I did.”
Numbness spreads throughout Gerard’s body. “Let me see.”
Slowly, Martin uncurls his arms and stretches them out in front of himself. Like his trouser legs, the sleeves of the grey hooded sweatshirt ride up on his arms, exposing the edges of stark white bandages. Gerard takes Martin’s hands as gently as he can—they’re trembling faintly—and pushes back the sleeves further, one at a time. Fully exposed, it’s easy to see the white gauze wrapped around both forearms…and it’s not hard to guess what happened.
“Oh, Martin,” he says softly, tears welling up in his own eyes. He lets go of his brother’s hands and hugs him tightly. Martin hugs him back, almost hesitantly, and now it’s easy to tell he’s shaking all over. “Martin, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, it never—this wouldn’t have happened if I’d been here, I—”
“You’re not listening, Gerry. I did this to myself.”
“Because it got in your head! That’s what it does, Martin, and you know that. It—it lies to you. It makes you think you can’t trust what you see, what you know. It made you think you were worthless, that you—”
“That I was bringing attention to you and Melanie,” Martin interrupts, shoving back from Gerard, and he’s still crying but he’s obviously angry, too. “That the Spiral wasn’t the only one that could see me. That every time I Look hard enough to See the evidence of one of the Fears on an object, o-or a person, I burn brighter. That I’m a beacon, a big, juicy, flashing target, and if someone wants what I have, or wants to stop me from doing what I’m doing, they’ll go after someone I love just to get at me. Was that a lie?”
Gerard inhales sharply. Melanie and Martin are both looking at him for the answer to that question. The difference is that—for once—Melanie’s eyes are the ones pleading, while Martin’s, behind the tears, are like chips of ice. Melanie wants him to reassure her. Martin’s realized the truth.
“No,” he admits, his voice low. “It wasn’t.”
“What?” Melanie practically shouts, jerking upright. “You—wait, you knew?”
“I knew it was risky, I just didn’t think it would happen this…fast.” Gerard wants to bury his face in his hands, to beg for his brother’s forgiveness, but he forces himself not to. That’s manipulative, and it isn’t fair. “All right, it’s probably not…that bad. Yet. You’d be fighting them off all the time if it was. He—the man, whoever he was—he was probably exaggerating. You know it does that, too, it takes tiny bits of the truth and twists and exaggerates them so it can pretend it didn’t lie. But…yeah. This…this thing you can do, the Seeing thing, that’s, it’s from the Ceaseless Watcher. The more you do it, the deeper you’re going to fall into it. And the more in servitude to one power or another you get, the more attention you’re going to draw from the others. I mean, you’re no Archivist, thank goodness, but—things are going to be drawn to you. And you know the Fears don’t have the best interests of humanity at heart.”
Martin’s shoulders slump. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. That’s why I…” He tugs his shirtsleeves down again. “Don’t worry. I’m not stupid enough to try that again.”
That is, in fact, the worry on the tip of Gerard’s tongue. “I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“But you did think I was going to keep trying.” It’s not a question and Gerard doesn’t deny it. “It was…it was a stupid thing to do. It was an impulse and I just…I got scared. I thought if I was dead, it would keep you two safe.” Martin raises his head and looks from Gerard to Melanie and back. “It won’t, though. In the first place, I don’t know if…I-I mean, I’m not important enough not to die or anything, but it wouldn’t be easy if I tried, I guess. More important, though…it’s not like you two would stop if I wasn’t here.”
Melanie shakes her head emphatically. “If you die, I am dedicating my entire life to taking those things out of the world.”
“Yeah, same,” Gerard says. “And same if anything happens to you, Neens. And…” He swallows hard. “For what it’s worth, which is probably nothing, I am sorry, Martin. I should’ve told you as soon as I realized what you could do and what it meant, I just…I dunno. I guess I realized you wouldn’t stop even if you knew it was dangerous—to you, anyway—and I thought it would be kinder on you if you…didn’t know what was happening.” He pauses. “And now that I’ve said it out loud, that sounds really stupid.”
Martin laughs, a little unwillingly. “Maybe a little.”
“Never again,” Gerard promises. “I swear. Anything else you two get involved in, you’re going to know exactly what that entails. And…maybe we’ll look into setting wards or something. Some kind of protective ritual. There’s got to be something helpful in those books of Mum’s. Anything I can do to protect you two.” He reaches out to hug them both, a little tentatively, but thank whatever gods are listening they both reach back.
“Promise you’ll protect yourself too,” Martin mumbles.
“I promise,” Gerard says. His mind flashes back to the book he picked up in that backstreet market in Lisbon, the one his mother dismissed as nothing. “I think I might have an idea.”