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Charles woke up with a choked gasp.
That was a bad sign. Not the gasp, or even the fact that it was choked. As Edwin so often reminded him, ghosts didn’t need to breathe.
The waking up, on the other hand, was something to be concerned about. The last time that Charles had woken up from anything, he’d still been alive.
“Charles,” said a familiar voice, with a measured note of relief. Charles shot upright. Pain lanced through his head, bright and blinding. The voice hissed in sympathy. “Be careful.”
“Edwin,” Charles said. It was like an invisible garotte had just been released from his throat, knowing that Edwin was here. He wasn’t alone.
His heart sank just as quickly as it had risen in the first place. Edwin was here. And ordinarily, that would be great—it wasn’t like they never spent time apart. They absolutely did. During cases, even in between them. It was just that…after a few hours, Charles started itching to at least set eyes on Edwin. To make sure he wasn’t hurt or anything.
And for now, Edwin seemed to be unharmed.
Unfortunately, their current circumstances didn’t really inspire confidence that either of them would stay that way.
They were locked in someone’s basement, if a basement had love children with a medieval dungeon. The floors were concrete, almost industrial, but the cells were made of old, rusting iron, including the side that nestled up against the outside wall. Dirt and sod swelled out between the bars.
The row of cells ran perhaps twenty feet down, though it was difficult to be sure. A single wall-mounted lap in the stairwell was their only source of light. It didn’t carry particularly far, and the room faded into darkness well before Charles could make out the end of it.
This wasn’t the first time either of them had been kidnapped. It wasn’t even the first time that they’d been kidnapped together. In fact, over the course of the two years they’d been in business, it happened with almost comedic frequency. But normally they were escorted off by iron weapons or teleported away by magic—never knocked unconscious. Charles hadn’t even known that was possible.
And what made Charles even more nervous was their respective positions. He was locked up in a cell. Edwin…was not.
Instead, Edwin was tied to a chair in the middle of the room. His suit jacket and tie were gone. Cuffs trapped his ankles against the chair legs, crinkling those grey-knit socks, and his arms were bound behind his back, in chains that ran wrist-to-elbow. All iron, judging by the way that he was keeping terribly still in his bindings.
Charles had no idea how he was going to get Edwin out of there. He could probably pick the locks, but for that, he’d have to get out of this cell and find a hairpin or something.
“Bloody hell,” said Charles. “What happened?”
“I believe that it was some manner of spell,” Edwin replied evenly—which meant that he didn’t know either. Great. “Our attacker struck as soon as we set foot outside the office. They must have been waiting for us.”
Charles could hear what went unsaid. What Edwin perhaps didn’t even know was an issue. Their attackers had been lying in wait, and he did fuck all to actually keep Edwin safe, even though he was meant to be the brawn.
He had one job, and he couldn’t even do that right.
“Are you alright?” asked Edwin. Charles must have been quiet for too long.
“Fine, mate.” Aside from the pounding in his head, which was a little staggering. “I ought to be the one asking you that, don’t you think?”
Edwin gave him a considering look. “I imagine we can ask each other,” he said, kindly. “And I must admit that you had me…worried. You were unconscious for quite a while.”
“How come you woke up so early?” Charles said. He regretted it when Edwin’s only reply was a patient, expectant head tilt.
That meant isn’t it obvious? in Edwin speak. Occasionally, the thing that Edwin considered obvious was a clue or even a strongly held opinion, and when that was the case, he always took the opportunity to monologue about it.
But usually, it was about hell.
And hell was one of those things Edwin never discussed aloud. Aside from the fact that he brought it up all the time. Which might sound contradictory to most people—but it honestly made perfect sense to Charles. Maths wasn’t his best subject, but he had done his percentages once, to put it into perspective for himself. To try and figure out how to ask about it.
Over 80 percent of Edwin’s entire existence had been spent in hell. How could you talk about something like that? How couldn’t you?
“Right,” said Charles. He did not add “sorry, dumb question” to his reply, because Edwin always lectured him fastidiously when he did.
“Charles,” Edwin told him quietly. “Listen, you ought to be prepared—“
Charles did not get to find out what for, because the door at the top of the stairs creaked open and killed the words dead in the air.
The woman who descended down into the grimy, dark basement looked to be in her late twenties. She had a mess of brown curls, which were chopped unevenly about her chin, all the more stark for the pallid color of her skin, and she looked above all else tired, clad in jeans and an oversized band tee. There could be no mistaking that she was a living person, and for a second, Charles thought that she must have been some unfortunate family member or a friend who’d wandered somewhere they shouldn’t.
That proved itself wrong when she glanced between the two of them and smiled. It was a small, half-hearted thing that didn’t quite reach her eyes, but there was an undeniably cruel edge to it. Like she’d been having an incredibly bad day and finally had a moment to curl up on the couch and turn on the telly.
“Good,” she said. Her voice was raspy, worn out. Her accent was vaguely American, but with the lilting, piecemeal edges that reminded Charles of the kids at St. Hil’s whose families were military—words rounded out with sounds from every place they’d lived. A little of this, a little of that. “You’re awake.”
“And you,” Edwin replied bitingly, “are an ingracious host.”
“Ooh, if you think I give a fuck, you’re wrong.” The woman rolled her eyes.
Charles didn’t like the shape of this at all. He didn’t like that he was on this side of the iron bars while the woman and Edwin were on the other. He didn’t like that Edwin was mouthing off when that was, ostensibly, Charles’ job. He especially didn’t like the feeling that built in his stomach, worse and worse the longer he watched her. The woman was not physically imposing, nor did she seem especially cold, the way that most of the worst monsters did.
She seemed desperate and done, and that was far more dangerous.
He slammed his fist into the bars, pushing through the burning sensation. When the woman turned to look at him, he smiled in the way he knew was closer to a snarl than anything else.
“Listen,” Charles said. “Don’t know who you are, don’t really care, but this kidnapping thing never works out for anyone involved, yeah? Trust me, we’ve done this song and dance a few times. But you let us go now, and I figure we can let this one pass. No harm done.”
“No harm done,” the woman echoed. Her expression went thoughtful, the crease of her mouth turned—if only for a moment—sympathetic. Then she set her jaw. “Except you’re wrong. There’s been a fucking ton of harm. But it’s fine, I’m not here to collect my pound of flesh. You don’t need my name, and you don’t need to get hurt. You just have to answer my questions, and everything is going to be okay.”
“Yeah, alright,” said Charles shortly. “Spit it out then. But for future reference, consultations are free, so maybe start there next time.”
“Charles,” Edwin said, dismayed—like he couldn’t believe Charles had just invited her to the office, of all places.
The woman only turned her gaze back to Edwin, looking down at him with a determination that set Charles decidedly on edge.
“You,” she informed him simply, “are going to tell me how to break out of hell.”
Six months ago, the Dead Boy Detectives had been hired to solve a murder. That was not especially out of the ordinary for them, nor was the fact that the culprit, in the end, turned out to be a ghost.
What had been unusual—a first for them at the time, not that they knew that it would happen again—was that this ghost was not a poltergeist or revenant or any other form of distorted spirit.
It was a ghost just like them, by the name of Hamish Martin. He had been murdered, violently though not slowly. There was a dent in his skull that he hadn’t yet learned to vanish away, and he wanted revenge.
Charles could almost sympathize. Almost. It wasn’t like he’d never thought about giving the boys who’d killed him a good fright, though his fantasies had never hit murderous heights. But, you know, he had an Edwin around to distract him, and Charles generally prided himself on being an easygoing sort of bloke. Without those two things…who knew?
Unfortunately, Hamish wasn’t content to chase after his killers. He hadn’t hurt them at all, actually. Not yet. First, he was killing their spouses, their parents, their cousins, their kids. And that? That was not fucking on.
Six months ago, they stopped Hamish Martin’s killing spree, and hell came roaring up to claim him. He’d screamed all the way down, and Edwin had looked faintly green for days after. Case closed.
Except maybe not, because apparently Hamish Martin had had an Edwin after all. And he still killed all those innocent people, so who bloody figures?
Actually, Charles wasn’t sure whether the woman was Hamish’s friend, sister, wife, second cousin twice removed or what. He could only suppose that she wasn’t his mum, on account of being roughly his age, but he still couldn’t rule out surprisingly young aunt.
Either way, she was damn set on getting him back, judging by the fury on her face when Edwin said, calmly and evenly: “I am sorry, but I’m afraid I cannot help you.”
“Color me crazy,” she replied, something which Charles was in fact inclined to do, “but I don’t fucking believe you. I asked around, when I heard what you did to him. God, every witch and potion seller in the goddamn city won’t shut up about the Dead Boy Detectives. The ghost who broke out of hell and his guard dog.”
Edwin’s expression soured, but he remained silent.
“You want to get him out of there?” Charles bit out. “Go join him, and leave us the bloody hell out of it.”
The woman didn’t even turn to look at him. “If that’s what it takes. But first, I need to know everything. Last chance.”
Edwin’s eyes flicked over in Charles’ direction. That was a look Charles knew well, walking the line between Edwin’s reassuring trust me glance and his much bossier follow my lead, I swear to God, Charles glare.
Charles wanted to listen, really. Edwin was the brains, and this situation seemed serious enough that he couldn’t risk fucking it up.
It’s just that listening started to seem a lot less smart when the woman walked over to a metal storage shelf, picked up a toolbox, and set it on the floor only a few feet in front of Edwin.
“What’s that for?” Charles asked. He felt nearly like he was reading off a script, asking questions to which the answer was so clearly obvious, the way that characters in horror films walked down dark hallways to their inevitable deaths. But he was certain he was wrong. He had to be wrong, because it couldn’t—she couldn’t. “Stop. What the fuck are you doing?”
She ignored him. And Edwin, who normally detested loud noises, didn’t seem to notice either. His eyes were closed—not pressed shut as if in terror but almost restfully, like he was meditating or trying to catch a quick nap. But his face was cast ever so gently downward, and he was breathing. Each inhale and exhale was so slow that the rise and fall of his chest was nearly imperceptible. If Charles weren’t so used to the absence of that motion on Edwin, he never would have noticed at all.
The woman pulled a pouch out of the toolbox, and from the pouch she pulled a handful of what looked like powdered charcoal.
“Okay,” she said. Edwin’s eyes cracked open, and he lifted his chin to regard her. He had to raise it higher once she stepped in close. “I want you to take a nice deep breath for me.”
“And why would I—” Edwin started, which was about as far as he got before the woman crammed her hand over his mouth and nose.
He did not breathe. Even still, his face began to smoke under her vice-like grip. It was not charcoal at all, but iron powder. Charles swore and flung himself against the bars, for all the good that did.
After a solid thirty seconds, the woman pulled her hand back. Edwin spat out a mouthful of iron. His cheeks and mouth were already beginning to heal. “Ghosts don’t need to breathe,” he informed her, almost pleasantly. “It’s more of a personal choice, so I’m afraid that won’t work.”
“Oh, I know,” said the woman. “But for the record, you can, personally, choose to breathe it in. Or I can, personally, choose to go grab the funnel I keep upstairs. Up to you.”
“That would get the iron into my digestive system, not my lungs,” replied Edwin. “Not that I have either, mind you, so this is all rather absurd.”
“I’ll give you a tracheotomy if I fucking have to.” The woman took another handful of dust from the pouch. “And I have it on good authority that this should work just fine.” She glanced over her shoulder at Charles. “You want to try talking to your buddy? Otherwise, this is about to get extremely unpleasant.”
Charles didn’t. Charles didn’t want to do anything except get out of this cell and maybe, for the first time ever, kill someone.
“Get fucked. I’m going to—”
Before Charles could finish his half-formed threat, Edwin heaved a sigh. “Goodness. Fine, if you insist.”
And this time, when the woman shoved her hand up against his face, Edwin inhaled deeply. Almost at once, he began to cough. Violently. The woman backed up a few steps. Smoke trickled out the corner of Edwin’s mouth with every wheeze.
After what felt like years, Edwin finally stopped choking on air. He looked…off, his skin gone almost a sickly gray. Even the white of his shirt abruptly seemed a little darker than it had been. A black liquid trickled slowly from his left nostril.
“Edwin,” Charles said, choked.
The woman brushed the iron dust from her hands and promptly laid her bare hand on Edwin’s cheek. Her fingers didn’t pass through him. And when she fished a knife, iron even still, out of her toolbox and nicked Edwin’s skin just under the left eye…
It didn’t heal. Something almost like blood bubbled out of it.
“Great,” said the woman, leaning back in satisfaction. She turned the knife over in one hand. “This is gonna be a blast.”
Charles had no idea how long she stayed down there before she got bored and left. It couldn’t have been that long; living people still had to sleep and eat. But it might as well have been days from the way it felt.
As soon as the door at the top of the stairs closed behind her, Charles pressed himself against the bars. “Edwin,” he said, then was surprised by the sound of his own voice. It was hoarse and thready. “Fuck. I’m so—”
Edwin cracked his neck with a grimace and glanced over at Charles. He had scarcely made a sound, aside from the occasional restrained breath of discomfort or surprise, as the woman worked him over. Still, he looked an absolute mess. His body was littered with cuts, all seeping that same strange black liquid. The woman had even unbuttoned his shirt to get better access to his chest. This was far and away the most skin that Charles had ever seen exposed on Edwin, and it felt wrong, witnessing his only friend in the world—who felt vulnerable when his sleeves were rolled up too far—undone in such a way.
“Ah,” Edwin said, with a small frown. “Charles, you’ve injured yourself.”
“What?”
“Let go of those bars,” Edwin’s words were sharp. “You burning your fingers down to stubs will do neither of us any good.”
Charles relinquished his grip with a hiss. It hurt in a distant sort of way, but not nearly enough to deter him from trying again. If he could burn enough of his hand off and slip it through the bars, he could—
Well, he wasn’t sure what. There was nothing here he could use on the cell lock, and to snake the keys off the woman, she’d have to get within reach. And he would have to find some way to keep her from noticing. And Charles would have to figure out if she was even carrying the keys on her in the first place.
Until he had a solid plan, he could keep from grabbing the bars while Edwin could see. It wasn’t like Edwin needed anything more to stress about.
“I’ll kill her,” said Charles. He wanted it to be reassuring, but it came out wobbly. “I won’t let her—”
Won’t let her what? Hurt you? Failed that one already, hadn’t he?
“Oh, Charles,” Edwin looked terribly pained. “Whatever are you crying for?”
Charles had to swipe a hand over his eyes to find that Edwin was, indeed, right. Tears were running down his cheeks, cold and quiet.
“What do you mean, what for?” Charles asked. “She’s fucking torturing you, that’s what!”
He kicked the bars separating them with no small amount of prejudice, briefly imagining them as the woman’s face, then regretted it right after.
Edwin, however, looked entirely unbothered. If anything, the expression on his face was almost amused. “I have had considerably worse, Charles,” he offered, not unkindly. “To call this torture is…overgenerous.”
It looked a lot like torture to Charles. And if he couldn’t even protect Edwin from this—this, which was apparently little more than a footnote when appended to the suffering Edwin was used to—how could he be trusted to protect Edwin from hell?
“It’s horrible,” said Charles wetly. “I can’t…”
He did not finish the sentence. There were too many truths to parse. He couldn’t bear it anymore. He couldn’t stop it from happening. He couldn’t imagine how Edwin would ever forgive him for this failure, monumental as it was.
“We musn’t give her what she wants,” said Edwin quietly. “If she gets Hamish Martin out of hell, he will be more dangerous than ever.”
Charles heard what he wasn’t saying.
I can’t stop this either. I’m sorry.
She came back, eventually. This time, she dedicated herself wholly and passionately to excavating Edwin’s clavicle with a cast iron kitchen knife.
You have skin, the woman said. How about bone?
The answer was yes. It took her some time to find it, but that was more for lack of effort than anything else. She wasted endless minutes just corkscrewing the knife deeper and deeper into the hollow at the base of Edwin’s throat, until it puddled with ichor and started to interfere with her view. Edwin did nothing, only watched her through damp lashes and crooked his mouth faintly upward when she looked him in the eye to gauge his reaction.
She found his collarbone eventually and mused for a bit about whether his ghostly body maintained the illusion of marrow, too. Charles’ relief when she moved on from that idea was short lived, because she promptly began to wiggle the blade back and forth until it was nestled to the base behind that silvery length of bone. She ignored Charles while she worked—it didn’t matter what he said. Pleas, threats, personal insults all slid off her back like water.
Upstairs, the phone began to ring. Only then did the woman look away from her work. She sighed and glanced up at the door. Then she promptly jerked the knife by its hilt like she was pulling a lever.
Edwin’s collar bone dislocated with a sickening pop. This time, he did make a noise—the only sound of substance Charles had heard him make since the most recent bout of torture began. It was so small, more a gasp than anything else, but it echoed off the walls, in Charles’ ears, until it was the only thing that existed in the world.
The woman pulled the knife free, threw it back in the toolbox, and proceeded up the stairs.
“Goodness,” said Edwin, but it was distant and distorted, like he was speaking to Charles from deep underwater. He coughed a few times and spat a glob of thick black liquid out onto the floor. “How tedi—Charles?”
Charles opened his mouth to apologize and found that he couldn’t get the words out. “I…I…” the world slid off its axis. When he finally reoriented himself, he found that he had at some point collapsed to his knees.
“—with me?” Edwin was saying.
“Mm.”
“Breathe with me,” Edwin said firmly. “Come now, Charles. Like so.” He demonstrated, taking an exaggeratedly loud inhale through his nose, holding it for a moment, then exhaling slowly and deliberately through his mouth. “Now.”
It was almost impossible to ignore Edwin when he took on that tone of voice, though Edwin had to go through a few more repetitions before Charles could bring himself to join.
The high whine in Charles’ ears faded out eventually. “Bloody hell,” he managed.
“There you are,” said Edwin. His shoulders relaxed, and he offered Charles the distant flicker of a smile. “You do not have to watch, Charles. Just don’t leave me.” That hung in the air between them for several long, terrible seconds. “Please.”
Christ, he must have been in a bad state, if Edwin was worried about him checking out like that and not coming back.
“Course I won’t,” Charles promised.
It wasn’t like he could do anything else.
After three more rounds of torture, each of which Edwin seemed less impressed by than the last, the woman came down the stairs with a hammer and a box of sewing needles.
Edwin observed her with a distant sort of curiosity. Charles did so with growing dread, though he stayed carefully still. He’d lost all the progress he made on burning his wrist down during his panic attack earlier, and he’d had to start over. Luckily, as long as some part of him was still touching the iron, he was physical, which meant that he didn’t really heal. He’d been switching off which parts of his body he held to the bars for hours now, only applying his wrist when he felt certain that his labors wouldn’t be detected.
The woman settled down on the ground and removed Edwin’s shoes. Then she removed his sock garters, his socks, and pushed his trousers up as far as the cinched ankles would allow.
She took Edwin’s right foot first, bracing it against the chair leg, and moved one of the needles into place under his large toenail. “Sure you don’t want to talk?” she asked.
Edwin only scowled, but Charles didn’t miss that it took a few seconds longer than usual for him to come back with a reply. “To you? I’d rather you just got back to the torture.”
The woman laughed and shrugged. “Suit yourself, man.” She adjusted her grip on the hammer and brought it down.
“Stop,” said Charles. It didn’t do anything, much like it hadn’t any of the times before.
Edwin’s jaw was set tight, but the occasional hitch of his chest was a dead giveaway. He wanted to scream—he just refused to. Still, occasionally, when he wasn’t braced for one of the needles to slide home, he’d jerk in his bonds, the instinct to pull away overwhelming even his ironclad control.
Charles slammed his shoulder into the bars. Once, twice. Then a dozen more times. He could feel it searing his flesh, slicing inches deep into his arm, but what he could not feel was any sort of give. The bars were solid and immutable. “Leave him alone!” he tried. “I swear, I’ll kill you.”
His cheek hurt as well, and the vision in his right eye was starting to go a bit blurry, but he threw himself at the bars again and was readying himself for yet another attempt when Edwin snapped: “Charles! That’s enough.”
Charles stopped, slumping miserably against the bars. The woman stopped too, looking between the two of them with interest.
“Charles,” said Edwin in a strained voice. “Please stand up. You’re hurting yourself.”
It took a moment, but Charles struggled to his feet. He kept one ankle subtly pressed up against the bars and hid his whittled-down wrist behind his back. It wouldn’t do for either Edwin or their captor to see the damage, though obviously for different reasons.
Edwin slumped in his chair. “Apologies for the interruption,” he said, suddenly bored again. “You may resume.”
But the woman only stood up, eyes bright. “Oh,” she said. “No. I think I’ve been going about this all wrong. Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
Edwin’s face went blank. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“When I cut him up,” she said. “Will you tell me then?”
“No,” Edwin replied sternly, but there was an uneven edge to his reply.
“Ha!” the woman rummaged around in her tool box and fished out a set of cuffs. Her step was light as she approached Charles’ cell. “God, I can’t believe I didn’t see it. I’m on my way, Hame.”
“If you think this will do anything—”
She ignored Edwin and threw the cuffs into Charles’ cell with a clatter. “Put those on. Now.”
Charles stayed very still.
“Hurry up,” the woman ordered. She stepped in close, her cheeks red with some combination of anger and excitement. “Unless you want me to go back to work on your friend, over there?”
“Nah,” said Charles. “Just one problem, though.”
He whipped his hand out between the bars, seized the collar of her shirt, and pulled her forward with as much force as he could manage. Her head cracked against the metal side of the cage and left blood on the bars. Charles slammed her into it one more time, just to be sure.
She went unconscious, limp in Charles’ weakening grip. He hadn’t thought about how he was going to search her pockets when he only burnt one of his wrists down, and after some consideration, he simply pressed his good wrist into one of the metal bars as hard as he could to expedite the process. Since he wasn’t trying to hide it this time, it went much more quickly.
“Charles,” Edwin snapped, sounding frayed. “You—!”
He cut himself off with a furious noise. Either he’d realized that this was the best opportunity to escape they were ever going to get, or he’d calculated his odds of talking Charles down and found them lacking.
Once he could get his other arm through the bars, Charles rifled around in her pockets and checked her belt for a keyring. He didn’t find one, but he did turn up a swiss army knife. Good enough.
Charles weighed his options. He did not want the woman regaining consciousness while he fiddled with the lock, so he settled for awkwardly dragging her over—he could only move her perhaps half a foot at time before he had to switch which bars he was sticking his arms through—so that she stayed within reach while he worked. After a head injury like that, he was willing to bet that he could react faster than she did.
In the end, it didn’t matter. The lock stalled him for an embarrassingly long time, pain, exhaustion, and relief making him clumsy, but the woman still hadn’t even begun to stir by the time the door clicked open. Charles moved her into the cell, used the cuffs to lock her wrists behind her back, and closed the door on her. It locked automatically, but he wasn’t willing to risk that she had a key on her after all, so he undid the chains around Edwin’s arms and coiled those around the door too, ignoring the way that his fingers sizzled the entire time.
“Charles,” said Edwin, sounding pained. Shit. Charles finished chaining the door closed and slid the lock into place.
“‘M here,” he said, rushing back to Edwin. There was still a matter of the bonds around his ankles.
Charles dropped to his knees, fumbling with the swiss army knife as he tried to get a grip on the cuffs. Those were iron too, though, and now he found that he couldn’t quite get a hold of them the way he needed to. They kept slipping from his hands, made slick with ash and black blood. “I’ve almost got it,” he said faintly, even though it wasn’t true. Charles was distantly aware that he had started crying again at some point.
It took too long, but he got one of Edwin’s ankles free. The second, however—the one with the needles still—
He dropped the knife. “Shit,” he swore. “Shit, mate. Sorry. I’m sorry. I…” his voice cracked horribly down the middle. “Fuck, I’m so sorry.”
Where the hell had it gone? Charles felt around without any luck. He reached up to swipe at his eyes, hoping to clear his vision, but before he could start searching again, a hand dropped onto his shoulder.
It urged him up. The touch was gentle; it could not have forced him anywhere, but Charles did not think it was within his human ability to refuse it. Especially not now. He sat upright again, but the second he tried to meet Edwin’s eyes, he caught sight of that bloody nose and the cut on his cheek and flinched away.
He felt weak. Dazed. Half-unconscious of himself, Charles tilted his forehead against one of Edwin’s knees and willed the world to stop spinning around him.
“Alright,” said Edwin, with a fond huff of laughter, like he was listening to Charles deliver a particularly atrocious joke and not, you know, tied to a chair with sewing needles wedged under his nails. “Now, if you’d enlighten me as to what on earth you have to be sorry for?”
He began to card his fingers through Charles’ hair. This was a thing he did only very rarely, usually when Charles had been grievously injured in some manner, and also last year on his mum’s fiftieth birthday. That had also been the first time Edwin ever hugged him. Or, more accurately, the first time Edwin ever initiated a hug rather than simply returning one that Charles offered first.
And now Charles couldn’t even appreciate one of his favorite feelings in the world.
“Promised I’d never let anyone hurt you again,” he said quietly. “Didn’t I?”
“Oh?” Edwin replied archly. “Now if I am being honest, I do not remember you saying any such thing. I believe the words you used were ‘I’ll be the brawn.’”
“Promised myself,” Charles corrected. “For all the good that did. And now I can’t even get you out of these bloody chains.”
“Charles.” Edwin’s hand moved to Charles’ chin, and Charles looked up at him. “You did more than enough, and burnt yourself half to death in the process. Now, I’ll not hear another word against you.”
Bloody saint-like, that was Edwin. He’d emerged from hell to warm Charles while he slowly froze to death. And now, tortured and bound and almost glowing from the way he was backlit by the light, he was worrying about Charles?
For all that Edwin loved to complain about Charles being overgenerous, overtrusting, overly forthright, it was funny how he didn’t see that he was extending the same ridiculous naivete to Charles himself.
Though now that Charles was paying attention, it did seem that he had burnt himself rather more than he expected. The smaller burns—littered all about his body from where he’d tried to stem his own healing—had not even begun to close, which he knew from experience meant that the larger wounds were very, very slowly knitting themselves together from within.
He looked a bit like doll that someone had dropped in the fireplace: singed all over; left arm burnt almost half off, absurdly skinny and stone gray all along the edge where flesh ought to be exposed.
“I’m getting ash on your trousers,” Charles said, with belated dismay.
Edwin’s answering smile was small but no less true for it. “And you have my blood on your face,” he replied, “so I suppose we will have to call it even.”
Feeling more like himself again, Charles cast his eyes back to the floor. “D’you see where that knife went by chance?”
“Oh, it’s here,” Edwin raised his bloody foot. The knife, now stained sticky black, laid where it had apparently been hidden under his heel. “Though you might have an easier time just breaking the warding sigil under my chair.”
Charles snatched the knife up and shot Edwin a glare.
“What?” Edwin said innocently. “I was tired of watching you scald yourself.”
“Unbelievable,” Charles muttered, but he crouched down again and scrubbed his hand through the seal, which was drawn in black paint beneath Edwin’s seat.
As soon as it was broken, Edwin said a few simple words in Latin.
The remaining cuff clicked open.
“Yeah, alright,” Charles said, mostly to himself. “That was easier than burning myself again.” He looked at the woman, who still lay unconscious in the cell. That was…probably not good, though the rise and fall of her chest suggested she was at least alive. “Should we do something about her?”
“Later,” Edwin suggested. “There are…measures that must be taken.”
Yeah. Charles could agree with that. Because if she came back and hurt Edwin again, he was pretty sure he actually would kill her. And at that point, he thought it was distinctly possible he wouldn’t even feel bad about it.
He and Edwin had to support each other as they limped up the stairs. It wasn’t especially difficult, since they didn’t exactly weigh anything. The real problem came when they got to the bathroom mirror. Edwin, who normally led, bounced off the glass—too much iron powder still coursing through his system, no doubt.
So they stole the woman’s car. Charles drove, because he was the only one between the two of them who knew how, and he nearly crashed when Edwin started pulling the needles out of his feet and discarding them on the dashboard.
Edwin seemed, as ever, unbothered, which made Charles want to throw up a bit. He turned his gaze back to the road and focused on not hitting anything living, even if he did knock over a few street signs and also a fire hydrant that promptly started spraying water everywhere.
A police car started following them ten minutes away from the office. Charles did not pull over, because he had no reason to, and when they got to their building he simply stopped the woman’s sedan in the middle of the street, swung Edwin’s door open, and helped him out while the hapless officer shouted at empty air.
When they finally made it back inside, he tried to lay Edwin down on the couch. It worked, except Edwin stubbornly refused to relinquish his grip. It seemed like he wanted Charles on top of him, but there was simply no way to do that without putting pressure on one or more still-open wounds, so he just wedged himself beside Edwin—on the side closer to the edge, because if either of them was going to fall off their pathetic little sofa, it ought to be Charles, even if Edwin’s collarbone had slowly realigned itself without Charles noticing.
It was a tight fit. They were pressed entirely against each other, which Charles didn’t mind—and Edwin seemed surprisingly alright with it too.
“I—”
“Don’t apologize.”
Charles shut his mouth. “Fine. Not ever letting this happen again, though.”
“It really was no trouble,” said Edwin, wryly amused. “You musn’t blame yourself.”
It was trouble, and Charles absolutely did.
“Charles,” Edwin added, in reply to the expression Charles made then.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Mm. Will you show me the way?”
Edwin stilled. “The way where?”
“Out of hell. I know you took notes.”
“I don’t suppose I should ask why.”
“Just in case.”
“Of?”
“Bloody hell, I don’t know,” Charles said, and he was, of course, lying.
He didn’t know who that woman was to Hamish Martin, and he hated her more than a little for what she’d done.
But he couldn’t say, not honestly, that he didn’t understand her. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do, if Edwin ended up back down there somehow. Not that that would ever happen. He would not allow it.
After all, Edwin was not in hell right now, nor was he locked in that awful woman’s basement. He was here, on their undersized, moth-eaten couch, in Charles’ arms, and Charles wasn’t planning to let him go anytime soon.