A few clouds scudded their way across the velvety blue-grey of the morning twilight. The scent of petrichor still hung in the air, mingled with the more earthy odors of freshly mown hay and cattle and, just beyond it on the faint edges of the senses, the crisp, clean smell of the sea. A gentle breeze was blowing, barely strong enough to ruffle the grass still wet from an overnight shower, carrying with it the distant, plaintive calls of the seabirds, the high twittering of a lark, and the gentle clang-clang, clang-clang of cowbells. There was no noise of traffic, no smells of exhaust or smog, no lights or oversized buildings to spoil the view. It was a scene of utter serenity and peace.
Jon rested his elbows on the top rail of a three-board fence, a steaming mug of tea cradled in his hands, and stared idly towards the horizon. The September air still held a bit of a nip, especially this time of day, and he was glad for the jumper that—he smiled to himself—he could no longer say he’d stolen, borrowed, or otherwise appropriated from his boyfriend. It was too late, or early depending on your point of view, to stargaze, but the sunrise wasn’t that far off now. He couldn’t wait to see what it looked like. Something special, that was for sure. There was no way it wouldn’t be. It was almost a completely perfect morning.
A pair of wool-clad arms, one of which ended in a hand clutching a mug of its own, wrapped around him from behind, and something warm and solid and heavy settled against his back. “Morning.”
Jon felt his smile widen. Now it was completely perfect.
“Good morning.” He managed to turn his head and see Martin’s resting on his shoulder, a playful smile on his face. “Sleep well?”
“As well as I ever do. Sure slept heavily, anyway.” Martin kissed his cheek, then stepped away. Jon barely had time to miss his warmth before he settled on the fence next to Jon and draped his arm around his shoulders. “Did you? I notice you’re up earlier than usual.”
“It’s so…quiet out here.” Jon nestled against Martin’s side and reached up to lace their fingers together. He smiled even more broadly at the soft clink as the plain gold bands brushed against one another. “I never realized just how much ambient noise there was in London, even in the Archives, until I was somewhere I couldn’t hear anything. I suppose I’m more accustomed to hearing sounds when I sleep than I thought, and the absence of them just…pulled me out of it.”
Martin hummed. “We can try and find you a white noise machine or something. Maybe a little fan.”
“I’ll get used to it. Besides, I think I would have chosen to get up early if I’d thought about it. This is a day I didn’t want to waste a minute of.”
“So you don’t mind?” Martin asked. “That we didn’t wait until…I dunno, December? The winter solstice, longest night of the year, light starts winning over darkness, that sort of thing?”
Jon looked up fondly. “Martin, if we had been allowed to do it, I would have gone straight to the register office and had the ceremony the day you asked me.”
Martin laughed. “I know that, Jon. I’m just asking if, once I told you I wanted to pick a date for the actual ceremony that had some kind of significance, you minded us not picking something more…dramatic.”
“No.” Jon looked down at their joined hands again. “The exact halfway point between our birthdays is perfect.”
He would carry that memory around for the rest of his life, he knew that. They hadn’t wanted a fancy party, just a simple exchange of vows with their family there, so they had just gone to the registrar’s office and done the basic ceremony, with no additions or flourishes. Still, the moments had impressed themselves into his mind: the genuine emotion in Martin’s eyes as he repeated the rote words, the way his hand had trembled as he slid the ring onto Jon’s finger, the sound of the others cheering as they kissed, the swell of emotions when the registrar pronounced them legally wed. There had been promises—or threats—of a bigger party when they got back, but for the time being, they’d had to set off in order to be sure of making the first of the trains that would take them where they needed to go.
The journey had been nice—long, but nice. It was something of a novelty to be able to take a long trip with Martin that wasn’t with the end goal of investigating or stopping something horrible, eldritch, or potentially world-ending. And from the number of people who had asked them, it was probably incredibly obvious, if not where they were going, then at least why. Jon had been extremely surprised to be met by anyone at all at the final station; they’d expected to have to rent a car, something neither of them were keen on—as Martin said, if they’d wanted to be able to drive around they’d have driven themselves up to begin with—but instead there had been a weathered old farmer with a piece of cardboard with BLACKWOOD-SIMS scrawled on it in marker. While Jon was still riding that particular high, they’d followed him out to what turned out to be a farm cart and pony, both equally as old and weathered as the farmer himself.
It had been dark when they arrived, too dark to fully appreciate the place, so they’d eaten the cold supper Daisy had insisted on packing for them, toasted one another with the small bottle of champagne tucked into it, and collapsed in bed together. That wasn’t new either, not exactly, but it felt new, and Jon had lain awake for some time listening to Martin’s gentle breathing and marveling at the fact that he was no longer curled up against his boyfriend, or even his fiancé.
He had, for the first time in his life, spent the night with his husband.
“It was good of Daisy to let us use this place,” he said, a bit absently, as he turned his gaze back to the horizon. “She didn’t have to.”
“She didn’t have to come up last week and clean it out for us, either, but from the things she said she found while she was, I’m glad she did,” Martin said wryly. “Wouldn’t have wanted to spend the first day we were up here cleaning out ancient tins and dessicated dry goods.”
“Do you think there were any peaches in there?” Jon teased. Martin groaned dramatically. “Why does she have a house in Scotland, anyway?”
“It was one of her safe houses. You know, somewhere she could go when she was hunting…or being hunted…and needed to lie low for a few days. Especially if she needed to escape jurisdiction.” Martin took a sip of his tea. “Honestly, the fact that she even told us about it, let alone offered to let us use it for our honeymoon, is a pretty good sign that whatever she’s doing in therapy is working. I know she’s been opening up more to Tim and Gerry about all of her bolt holes and strongholds and whatnot, but…”
“She likes you. Or at least trusts you.” Jon took a sip of his own tea, which had started to go slightly cold. “I’m surprised she’s the only one of us who’s actually still in therapy.”
From the rustle of fabric, Jon guessed Martin had just shrugged his other shoulder. “The Hunt’s a bit easier to talk around than most of this stuff. And I can understand why, once she found a therapist who was willing to help her actually work through her problems instead of justifying everything she ever did, she was keen to keep going.”
Jon mulled that over for a moment. “I’m…I think I’m proud of her,” he said finally. “I can see how easy it would be to…to say that you did things because you had to, because it was the job, because you didn’t have the choice. And how easy it would be to stay with a therapist who would let you.”
Martin pulled Jon a little closer and rested his chin on his head. “The lot of us can probably keep Laverne in business for the rest of her life if we let her. Well, maybe not Sasha.”
“Or Basira.” Jon sighed. “She probably needs it more than the rest of us, but…”
“She has to do it because she wants to, Jon. Not because we tell her to. Otherwise it won’t help.” Martin sighed, too. “And you know Basira. She will never admit there’s anything she can’t logic and will her way out of.”
Jon nodded solemnly. Basira’s idea of dealing with her problems was to give Martin a statement about her time working for Peter Lukas—and particularly the final encounter with him and Jonah Magnus—in the expectation that it would mean she would be able to just stop thinking about them and move on. She’d avoided him for almost a month after it became clear that Martin hadn’t lied when he’d told her it wouldn’t work.
Speaking of…
“I saw you last night,” he confessed. “I didn’t realize it was you, just—I-I tried to ask you for help and…”
“I know, Jon,” Martin said gently. “I was there, too, remember? It’s okay. I’m sorry me being there wasn’t more help.”
“I just—I need you to know that’s not why I wasn’t in bed when you woke up this morning. I was just feeling restless, a-and then I realized the sun was coming up and…I was going to wake you, but you don’t get enough sleep as it is and—”
“Jon.” Martin turned Jon’s face towards his and kissed him, which effectively shut up his slightly fearful babbling. “You left a mug out, with the teabag already in it, and the kettle still warm. And you took my jumper. For God’s sake, you married me, apparently of your own free will.”
“Of course it was of my—” Jon began, and then stopped when he saw the amusement in Martin’s eyes. He relaxed and smiled. “You bastard.”
“Hey now, according to Papa, my parents were married well before I was conceived.” Martin laughed and tucked his chin over the top of Jon’s head again. “Trust me. I don’t need to use the Eye to know you’re not actually upset with me when you’re awake for anything that happens in the dreams. The only one who consistently recognizes me and still gets mad at me about it is Basira.”
Jon pressed himself closer to Martin. There had been a lot of fallout from the twenty-fifth of May, both predictable and not, but the thing that was still, oddly enough, taking the most getting used to had been that all of them started having dreams about the things they’d once given statements on again.
Jonah might have lied about being a literal dead-man switch—Tim’s theory was that he’d simply been trying to keep them from discovering the eye transfer thing too early because it would have been impossible at that point for him to use Martin or Jon for his ritual if they’d known too much and threatening Basira was the only thing that would have kept Daisy from doing it, and it made more sense than anything else—but he hadn’t lied about being the “beating heart” of the Institute, in a sense. His body, his original body, had crumbled to dust, finally giving in to the weight of the centuries, in the instant Gerry reaped his remaining eye, but they hadn’t had long to gloat before Martin and Daisy leaped into action to triage Basira, who, with Jonah’s eye gone, had begun to bleed out through the ruined socket. Jon had lost all track of time in their desperate, headlong rush for the surface, worrying with every step that it had been too late, that they’d end up sacrificing Basira anyway, until he’d grabbed Martin’s hand and tried desperately to remember the route and suddenly seen a shining silver thread running ahead of them, like a kite string through a labyrinth.
Melanie had taken to calling him Ariadne off and on, but at least she didn’t mean the Mechanisms’ version.
They’d emerged, unsurprisingly enough when they thought about it, into a crime scene swarming with sectioned police officers and EMTs. Martin had been quietly devastated when he’d learned just how much destruction Trevor and Julia had managed to wreak on the Institute before they had managed to find the Archives: three dead, a dozen more wounded, and Manal had been badly burned trying to put out a fire before the 999 dispatcher had finally convinced her to evacuate with everyone else. Fortunately, the Hunters’ dead bodies, and the fact that they were unmarked—the coroner had eventually determined that Trevor’s lung cancer had caught up with him and Julia had suffocated from a previously undetected, likely because she’d been avoiding medical care herself for so long, form of aggressive throat cancer, both caused by extensive tobacco use, and if it was at all suspicious that they’d both died in the same moments nobody wanted to think too hard about that—had lent credence to their story that they had fled into the tunnels, and Sasha and Jon between them had spun a convincing enough explanation for what had happened to Basira’s eye while an officer who’d worked with her on the Brodie kidnapping yelled for the paramedics. Once she’d come out of surgery, she’d confessed readily enough to killing Elias Bouchard and Peter Lukas, but the police had pretty much decided at that point that it was self-defense and closed the case without too much fuss. There’d been a bit of worry that their families might kick up a fuss, but Elias had apparently cut off his family shortly after becoming Jonah Magnus, presumably so they wouldn’t notice his eyes were a different color, and the Lukas family was too busy dealing with their own problems. The families of the three employees who’d been killed had filed wrongful death suits against the Institute, and the Lukases, as both the family of the last man who’d run the place and the biggest donors, were largely on the hook for that. One thing had led to another, and within a month of the attack, it had been clear that the Institute was going to have to shutter its doors permanently.
The first night after they got their severance papers had been bad for all of them, but especially Martin, who’d described the mental landscape as standing in a room with a dozen locked doors all around him that suddenly blew open all at once, drawing him in through an ever-shifting sequence of clowns, spiders, fans, fires, clutching tunnels, and yawning doors; the rest of them hadn’t seen him, but he’d known all of them and woken up with his face soaked with tears. The rest of them had had to sit down with Martin and assure him, over and over, that they knew it wasn’t his fault, that he couldn’t control the dreams, and that there was no way he could have known—that any of them could have known—that it was the Institute itself that had locked their doors. The fact that it was happening before the Institute was even technically all the way closed down was unexpected, but at least it gave them time to shore Martin up before they were completely cut off from what was in it.
They’d spent the last week of June packing up the Archives, putting the hundreds of thousands of files into boxes to be put in storage or sent to one historical society or another, and if they had secreted a few to take home with them, well, nobody was going to miss them; after all, even they hadn’t known exactly how many files were down there. Martin had estimated that what they’d managed to get would run him at least a year, maybe even longer, if he rationed it out properly, but he’d admitted privately to Jon that he was a bit worried about what would happen if he couldn’t get more of them. Gerry had solved that particular problem with a series of quiet advertisements, and now Cinnamon Rose Books had a dedicated quiet room where anyone who’d had an encounter they couldn’t explain or get over could come and make their statement, either to Martin’s face or to a tape recorder. Since those lasted longer than the written ones, every one he took meant that much longer before Jon would have to start getting seriously concerned about the possibility of him starving.
“Did you bring any statements with you?” Jon asked, bringing himself back from that particular train of thought.
“I’ll be fine,” Martin assured him. “Someone came by the shop day before yesterday with a statement. Pretty hefty one too. I’m probably good for a month as long as I don’t try to See anything, and, you know, we’re on our honeymoon, so I’d rather not.”
“I’d rather you didn’t, too,” Jon admitted. “I-I mean, I’d rather you didn’t at all, but…”’
“I know, and I’m trying not to. It’s easier now that we know we don’t really have to worry that much about any rituals.”
“You’re not worried another Fear might figure out that they need to bring them all in?”
“Not really. The Web and the End are the only two that might, and Gerry reckons neither of them have what it takes to actually come up with a good ritual that will pull it off. Anyway, most of them have tried too recently to build up enough power to go again any time soon. Since the details of what Jonah came up with died with him, and I think that technically counts as a ritual fizzling out, we’re safe for now.”
Jon hummed. “Well, since you’re—what does Melanie keep calling you? ‘The Ceaseless Watcher’s special boy’—I think I’ll take your word for it.”
Martin gave a mock groan. “I’m going to have to start calling her Venkman again.”
“I—I don’t think I know that reference,” Jon confessed.
“Ghostbusters. He was kind of a jerk, actually, and in the second film he’d started a psychic reality show.” Martin chuckled softly. “We’ll have to get everyone together and have a movie night when we get back.”
“If we can drag Melanie out of her editing studio.”
“You’re assuming Daisy isn’t going to take an interest in that, too.”
With the Institute gone, and all of them suddenly without jobs, they’d flailed a bit. Martin had simply moved in and started helping Gerry with the shop, but it didn’t need all of them—it barely needed two of them—so the rest had been at loose ends. In sheer desperation, and also because she’d found the equipment still intact when she’d moved back into her house, Melanie had decided to try and get Ghost Hunt UK up and running again. She’d told Jon she wasn’t ready to leave the paranormal completely behind, and besides, she’d liked that part of things. This time, though, she was doing a much more stripped-down version, with Sasha as her cohost and Daisy doing everything that didn’t involve getting in front of the camera. She’d proven to be quite good at sound mixing, and ferreting out hauntings sated the Hunt enough that she could concentrate on healing. Melanie was hoping for a Halloween premier, but as Gerry pointed out, she’d hoped that before and ended up having to wait until the following May. Her argument was that she knew what she was doing better now, and that she wasn’t being held back by perfectionist jerks, and also that if Gerry didn’t have anything useful to contribute he could take a long walk off a short pier and hug an octopus.
Tim had picked up a summer job at a climbing gym; the pay wasn’t great, but it got him out of the house and moving. He’d turned out to be quite popular with the kids in the camps he was working. One of his students had apparently been so enthusiastic that the gym had put him in charge of another session she was part of, which turned out to be for kids in foster and residential care. He’d enjoyed the week so much that the gym had added a second session. Daisy had mentioned offhand, at dinner one night around the middle of August, that Laverne was proud of her for finally setting a concrete goal for her therapy, and Tim’s surprised eyes and Gerry’s pleased grin when she replied to Jon’s dutiful prompt with to get to a place where the three of us can have a serious talk about signing up to foster had made her laugh. She was doing more of that lately, and it was doing everyone good to see it.
Basira, once she got out of hospital, had had a harder time of it than the rest of them. She was still learning to navigate the world with only one eye, especially since it hadn’t been her dominant eye, something made harder by the fact that she absolutely refused to let anyone else help her. They were all still trying to strike a balance between giving her space and making sure she knew they were there for her. Jon suspected that part of her problem was that, while Daisy still knew her better than anyone else—because Daisy was the only person she’d really let get close to her—the same couldn’t be said in reverse. Not only did Tim and Gerry know and understand Daisy the same way they did one another, and vice versa, but it was becoming more and more clear that Basira had never really known Daisy all that well at all, and her pride couldn’t handle that. She helped out at the bookstore a time or two, although she got grumpy when people tried to buy books she was reading, or attempting to read, out from under her. The last few weeks, though, she hadn’t been around as much, and she hadn’t been at their wedding.
That, at least, wasn’t much of a surprise, since she didn’t like to leave London.
“Look,” Martin murmured.
Jon looked—and his heart caught in his throat as the first ray of sun stabbed at the horizon. The gentle sounds of the village waking up went on around them as the great golden disc rose slowly, as if uncertain it really wanted to come out, then suddenly burst forth in all its glory. The grass turned to waving sheets of gold, tipped with sparkling diamonds of damp and dew, and a new day dawned. Their first sunrise as a couple.
They watched for a few minutes, and then Martin pressed a gentle kiss to Jon’s temple. “Come on. Let’s go back and get breakfast.”
As Martin made pancakes—not the ones filled with farmer’s cheese and topped with cherry preserves that he and his siblings always made when one or all of them had survived an encounter with the Fourteen, but more traditional British flapjacks—and Jon took inventory of what else they had, he said, “I missed this.”
“What, peace?” Jon asked distractedly, shifting aside the tinned goods Daisy had stocked the pantry with to be sure she hadn’t left them any peaches.
“Well, not…living in the city, anyway. I mean, Lancaster’s not exactly a small town, but, well, you saw Granddad’s farm.” Martin turned a pancake over carefully. “Next time we go—I mean, if you want to go back—I’ll show you the house I lived in before we moved to London. It’s just…quieter, I guess. I’d kind of forgotten how much I missed not being in the middle of…everything.”
Jon considered that for a moment. Martin had been shocked to get a letter from his grandfather’s solicitor a month before his birthday, telling him in detail what he would need to do in order to take possession of the trust the old man had evidently set up for him to inherit on his thirtieth birthday; Jon wasn’t sure if he was more surprised that his grandfather had left him the property or that he’d survived to be thirty. Either way, the farm and its contents were his now, and they’d all gone up for a day or two in order to see the place before the wedding. Jon had liked it, not in the least because of how comfortable Martin had seemed while they were there. It was certainly quieter than London, without being too quiet for Jon.
“Would you be all right there?” he asked. “It’s—I mean, it’s not exactly close to…everything.”
“It’s only two and a half hours from London by train,” Martin said with a shrug. “Easy enough to go down to visit. And the Fourteen are in more places than just London, you know. The better question is, would you be all right there? I mean, it’s…well, two and a half hours from everybody else you know.”
“Yes, but consider: It’s two and a half hours away from Georgie, who is possibly dating or attempting to date Basira and is at the very least friends with her, and therefore likely to turn up in our lives if we stay in London,” Jon said dryly. Martin, who knew better than anyone that both Melanie and Jon—or at the very least Melanie—had a grudging tolerance for Georgie at best these days, laughed. “I—I could. I think. I mean, I’m just…drifting these days. At a loss for what I’m going to do with my life now that I don’t have the, ah, rigors of academia. Might as well drift in Lancaster as London.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, actually.” Martin paused, pancake balanced on his spatula, until Jon handed him a plate. “You know, the part of Lancaster near where Granddad’s farm is—”
“Your farm,” Jon reminded him.
“Where the farm is,” Martin amended. “There’s…you know, there’s not a used bookstore near there. We could open one up maybe. Sort of a northern branch of Cinnamon Rose Books. We could come up with a good name for it, get in some stock, deal with people who don’t want to travel all the way down to London to sell their antique books. Keep all those statements we…rescued…from the Archives in the back and set up a place for people to come give statements if they wanted to. Just…build a life up here that’s about us.” He shrugged. “Or we can go back to London, do something down here, and keep the farm as a…vacation place or something. Or sell it. You know, whatever we decide.”
Jon smiled. “I like the sound of that.”
“Of whatever?”
“Of we.”
At that, Martin smiled, too. “God, you’re such a sap.”
“Maybe.” Jon slipped in to steal a kiss. “But I’m your sap.”
Martin caught him before he could pull away. “Always,” he said in a low voice before kissing him properly.
Jon let himself get lost in the kiss, and tried not to think about the implications of that word. He couldn’t help it, though, and when they broke apart, he found himself asking, “Martin?”
Something in Martin’s eyes told him he’d guessed what Jon was about to ask, but he said, “Yes, Jon?”
“Are you…” Jon bit his lip. “Can you…die?”
“Yes,” Martin said, without hesitation. His eyes didn’t even flash. “Nothing lasts forever, no matter how it tries. It’s…possible that having already died once means I can’t die of natural causes, o-or of old age or whatever, but…well, the Eye doesn’t really go in for the future, so I don’t Know. Still, I can die. And I’ve already talked to Gerry about it. If it doesn’t look like I’m going to die normally…well, when you go, he’ll help me to follow you.”
Jon’s shoulders relaxed. “That…that shouldn’t be comforting. And yet…”
“I know. We’re not exactly the world’s most normal couple. But I promise you, I won’t live forever without you.”
“Good. Not because I wouldn’t want you to live forever, but…I don’t like the thought of you being alone.”
“I don’t like the thought of you being alone, either,” Martin admitted. “Luckily, it’s not something we have to think about right now. Any more than we have to decide what we’re going to do about the farm, or the future, or anything like that.”
Jon nodded. “We do have to talk about it, but…”
“Yeah, but not today. Not even this week.” Martin turned the final pancake out onto a plate and set it on the table. “Let’s eat breakfast and then…I dunno, go for a walk maybe. We can let the idea of moving or, or starting a bookshop or whatever sit for a while. We don’t have to make a decision today.”
Jon smiled up at Martin and slid his arms around his husband’s neck, pulling him close. “No,” he agreed. “No, we don’t. We have all the time in the world.”
As the souls of the dead live fore'er in my mind,
As I live all the years that they leave me behind,
I'll stay on the shore but still gaze at the sea;
I remember the fallen, and they think of me,
For our souls in the ocean together will be...