Chapter 1
Notes:
edwin's pov
Chapter Text
London’s Office
2025
The knock on the door sounds ominous, like the prelude of a particularly violent opera.
This visit comes at a rather inconvenient time. Edwin has just started reading the new book on ancient curses that was given to them as payment for their latest case, and he hates having to leave his reading mid-chapter. On the couch Charles seems to share Edwin’s sentiments, for he huffs as he puts away his headphones.
“Come on in!” Charles calls after sending a knowing glance toward Edwin, who places his book carefully on the desk.
Edwin presses his palms against the surface as Charles saunters to his usual spot on the edge of the desk. Crystal isn’t around this time—she’s at school, making up for lost time. It’s not unheard of, that they have to meet new clients on their own—they’re still called the Dead Boy Detective Agency, after all—but Edwin misses Crystal’s analytical eye. Even if he’s not so keen on admitting it out loud.
He’s stubbornly ignoring the—what did Crystal call it?—big pink elephant in the room. He won’t think about Niko’s absence, about the void that he feels a little to the left of his sternum. He can’t afford to be distracted now, with a new case in the making. Or ever, for that matter.
They were two, once. Then they were three, against Edwin’s will, and then they were four. And then there was death and destruction and grief so deep Edwin thought he would drown in it. Now they’re back to being four, much to Jenny’s chagrin. But for thirty years they were just the two of them, a perfect pair for imperfect cases. They can take over the world, even though Edwin wishes Crystal would have at least been present this time. He has a bad feeling about it, despite not yet having met their client.
He sighs, running his fingers along the edge of the desk to calm his rising nerves. He reminds himself that they’ve got all they need right here, and shares one last glance with Charles to ensure they are both ready, albeit lacking half of their assets.
They’ll just have to make do, for now.
The door opens, a mere formality since a ghost enters the office. She looks like she must have died in her thirties, and is wearing a floor-length gown peppered with red stains that Edwin believes could be blood. He doesn’t usually speculate about the ghosts that enter their office—that’s Crystal, who loves to gossip with Charles behind Edwin’s back.
“Welcome to the Dead Boy Agency,” he greets, his voice dripping professionalism. “My name is Edwin Payne, and this is my partner, Charles Rowland,” he continues, gesturing towards himself before motioning towards Charles. “How can we assist you today?”
The woman sits down on the empty chair in front of the desk following Edwin’s silent offer—one hand proffered forward—and crosses her legs, causing her dress to float around for a moment before settling elegantly against her curves.
“I am Mariella Wilkins,” she says, a posh accent swathing her words. “I came here today because I’ve been told you are the best detectives in town. I wasn’t aware that you died this—young.”
Edwin winces at the mention of their immortal ages while Charles whistles lowly, but not low enough to not be heard. Not for the first time, Edwin wishes he could kick Charles underneath the desk, but, perched as he is on one edge, he is too far for Edwin to reach without being noticed.
Of course Edwin recognizes that surname. The Wilkins Case was huge back in the day—Abelard Wilkins, aged fifty-eight, allegedly came home to find his much younger wife in bed with a man around her age, and that drove him crazy. According to the police reports, Abelard killed both his wife and her lover with the first object he had handy—a knife from the kitchen, which Abelard had picked up on his way up for fear there were intruders in his home. Apparently, he had found the entrance door ajar and thought there might be thieves inside. The police found the body of the wife, Mariella, in a pool of blood and guts. The lover’s body has never been found.
Abelard was sentenced for life despite his claims to be innocent—that it had all been an act from God, making Edwin’s nonexistent skin crawl—and thrown into the darkest depths of Belmarsh Prison. The house has been decaying ever since, rumored to be cursed.
“I have been haunting the house where I was murdered,” she explains, bringing them both back to the present, ignoring Charles’s lack of tact. “It’s been a relatively calm seventeen years. The usual, scaring the ignorants that dare to squat in the building and occasionally helping build the legend among the children who dare each other to brave the broken locks and spend a night at the Wilkins Haunted House.” She shakes her head, clearly amused by the image she is painting. “Urban legends have turned my home into a horror theme park.”
“I understand how that may be problematic,” Edwin says. “But I am not sure how we can be of assistance. We are not experts in chasing away nuisances to haunted houses caused by the living.”
“What my mate Edwin here means,” Charles interrupts, no doubt attempting to avoid the disaster Edwin’s nonexistent social skills could lead them to, “is that we don’t see how our expertise can relate to your problem.”
“Oh, but I have yet to reach the source of all my troubles,” Mariella continues, leaning forward in her chair. Ever since sitting down, she’s been shifting in her seat. “You should really invest in other seating arrangements. This chair is highly uncomfortable.”
Edwin tenses. “We may think of catering to your suggestion, should we take your case. Which, unless I have missed it, has yet to be stated, Mrs Wilkins.”
Mariella Wilkins smiles lopsidedly, much like Charles’s own smirk whenever he is dared to do something he knows he will excel at. “I will get to it in due time, my impatient young friend.” She keeps her stance, as she uncrosses and recrosses her legs, seemingly never quite comfortable her legs. “As I was saying, I have been haunting the house for seventeen years. It has only been me in the neighbourhood for so long, but ever since a few weeks ago another presence has been tormenting the place next door as well.”
As she falls silent, Edwin grows more nervous. He shifts on his chair, carefully removing his hands from the desk and placing them on his lap, obscured from view. He can feel his fingers twitching.
“It is not unheard of,” Charles begins slowly, when it’s obvious that nobody in the room will keep talking, “supernatural beings haunting houses or scaring the living.”
“This other presence,” Mariella says, the italicization of the word evident in how it rolls off her tongue, “is actually not tormenting the living. It’s torturing the dead.” She sits back against the chair, waiting for the desired effect of her words on the ghosts before her.
For a moment, neither Edwin nor Charles react. When the revelation dawns on them, Charles is the first to speak up. “There is a supernatural being torturing ghosts?”
“I bet that is exactly what you specialize in, am I right?”
“Could be,” Edwin intervenes with a conciliatory tone. He throws a look at Charles, compelling him to stop whatever question he is about to ask. Edwin is successful, for Charles shuts his mouth. “How is this affecting you, exactly?”
“Oh,” Mariella says casually. “The shrieks are completely unbearable. I cannot even properly haunt my own house, it’s so distracting.”
“If we were to take this job,” Edwin starts, only to be cut off by Charles.
“Mind if we have a moment?” Charles interrupts, grabbing Edwin’s arm and yanking him out of his chair. He practically drags Edwin to their cupboard. With a polite smile thrown to Mariella, he phases them both through the closed door and pulls the cord, casting a soft, yellow light over them.
“Charles!” Edwin exclaims, scandalized. “That is no way to treat a potential client. You know that.”
“We cannot take any clients, not with Charlie gone these weeks. She was very clear on that,” Charles tries to reason, but Edwin is not having any of that.
“Since when do you care about following the rules that she sets?” Edwin questions. “And don’t call her Charlie. The Night Nurse hates it. And she isn’t here. It will be done before she comes back.”
“How do you know that? This case sounds extremely dangerous!” Charles scream-whispers, way too aware of the visitor capable of overhearing them.
“All the cases we have ever taken have been dangerous.”
“Not even one of them featured something torturing ghosts, not after you know who,” Charles insists. “We’ve faced demons and witches, and even ghouls. But not one of them posed a clear threat to us from the beginning.”
“You forget we’ve been in Hell. There’s nothing more dangerous than Hell.”
Charles sighs. He lets go of Edwin’s arm, suddenly realizing he is still digging his fingers into Edwin’s ghostly flesh. “This could be. I have a bad feeling, Edwin. And I don’t understand why you can’t see it.”
Edwin straightens his jacket in the places where Charles’s hands have rumpled the fabric, avoiding eye contact. He doesn’t give a direct reply, not yet—he is unsure whether he could even think of an honest answer to Charles’s unasked questions. He’s been reckless before but, ever since losing Niko, Edwin has become almost suicidal. It has not been a conscious progression, more like he has allowed himself to stop thinking about his self-preservation as much as he did when Niko was alive.
“I admit I may have been—generous in considering cases as of late,” Edwin says, still not looking at Charles. “But I think we could help her with this one.”
“With what exactly?” Charles lifts his arms in the air in a clear gesture of despair. “She’s saying that some supernatural presence is torturing ghosts. I don’t know about you, but I still consider myself a ghost. This could be really dangerous for us. What good would we do if we end up tortured by whatever is haunting Mariella’s turf?”
“Some of us have already been tortured, and we survived,” Edwin huffs out. The moment the words leave his mouth, his eyes widen in realization of what he has just said. “Sorry, Charles, I didn’t mean to—”
Charles looks defeated when Edwin dares to shoot a glance his way. “But you did. You always bring up Hell, and Esther Finch, whenever you want things to go your way. This is still a partnership, Edwin. We should vote.”
“It would be a tie. You and I would cast opposite votes.” Edwin stills for a moment before adding, “I suggest we bring this up to Crystal for her to break this tie. When will she be back from school?”
Charles shakes his head. “I dunno, mate. Today’s Thursday, innit? Maybe she has an appointment with her therapist. Or she needs to help Jenny at the shop. I’ve never figured out her schedule for Wednesdays and Thursdays.”
“But do you agree that asking her is the most sensible thing to do in this instance?”
“I’m still baffled that you have suggested consulting Crystal, but who am I to argue?” Charles says. He shrugs to signal that he acquiesces, albeit not completely on board with whatever plan Edwin is concocting. “Who should tell Mariella?”
“I will.” Edwin squares his shoulders, determination set in his furrowed brows. “I have a feeling she’d appreciate it.”
“Because she is as posh as you are?” Charles teases him lightly. When Edwin glares at him, he adds, “I’m just joking, mate. You know I think it’s brills when you connect with a client. Potential client.”
“Let’s get out of here and inform her, shall we?”
Without even waiting for Charles to follow, Edwin phases out of the cupboard and almost stumbles into Mariella’s arms, who is tapping her foot, standing in the middle of their office.
“You know those walls are thin, right?” she says, sending a pointed glare their way. “If you do not feel prepared enough to take on my case, please do so. I will contact the next on my list.”
“We need to consult with our psychic,” Edwin explains as professionally as he can muster. “We wouldn’t take on a case without her input.”
“A living psychic?” Mariella feigns a grimace. “Why would the best ghost detectives in London need such input?”
“We are the best detectives in London because we work with her,” Edwin replies calmly. “Our team runs like clockwork. You may see it, should we take your case.”
“And agree on the payment,” Charles intervenes. “Although, given your appearance, I doubt you’d have any trouble with that part of our agreement, if we ever reach one.”
“Oh, but we will,” Mariella promises before turning towards the door. “You can contact me at my address when you make your decision. Don’t take long. I don’t like waiting.”
And with that, she exits their office, leaving behind a trail of doubts planted in Edwin’s and Charles’s minds, and what looks like a business card sitting on the chair she has just vacated. Charles picks it up, turning it in his fingers. “I knew the Wilkins were rich beyond measure, but check out this address! It’s a manor. In Mayfair.”
“What did you just say?” Edwin crosses the space in two strides and snatches the card out of Charles’s grasp. He pales even more when he reads the address on the card.
“Edwin, what’s wrong?”
But Edwin doesn’t answer. Instead, he blinks his coat over his suit and turns around, leaving the card on the desk. “I need to run some errands. I will be back in time for our talk with Crystal, though.”
“Edwin, talk to me! What’s going on?” Charles almost begs, but Edwin has already mirror-hopped by the time he finishes his sentence.
Chapter 2
Notes:
crystal's pov
Chapter Text
Belgravia
2025
On her way out of her classes at a posh school in the heart of Belgravia, surrounded by teenagers wearing the same uniform she is wearing, Crystal pauses for a second to decide which way to go.
She stands out of the masses of teenagers crowding the sidewalk, a sore thumb in a sea of carbon-copy robots. Over the past few months, Crystal has been studying with them in the same classes, but she hasn’t managed to make any new friends. It’s partly because she’s scared of going back to her old manipulative ways, but also because she’s now aware of how different she is from everyone else.
She can see ghosts. She can interact with the supernatural. She fell in love with a demon and befriended a humanized walrus. She made out with a boy who had died in the eighties and forcefully adopted an Edwardian dead boy as her brother. She even fought a witch and won—although neither of them had come out of that battle unscathed.
Crystal wasn’t able to save her best friend from dying at the hands of magic.
Her past prevents her from thinking about a successful future—she doesn’t fit anywhere. She isn’t sure about what she wants to do with her life once she graduates. She can’t control a future she can’t see.
She can only control her present.
Crystal spends her evenings doing homework, in Jenny’s shop or at the agency. The boys have even made some space for her—a desk by the wide window, a cot behind the couch—for whenever she doesn’t feel like going home to an empty two-story house in Belgravia. Crystal would be lying if she said her queen-sized bed at her parents’ house is more comfortable than the narrow cot Edwin had managed to squish into the limited space of their London office.
It’s Thursday, which means she usually goes to Jenny’s new butcher shop in Montagu Street to help her set it up. So far, they haven’t made much progress except for getting all the permits straight—which left them both in a fit of giggles while Edwin didn’t understand and Charles tried to explain to no avail. But there are so many things still left to do at the shop; they’re renovating the space themselves with as little or as much help Charles and Edwin can provide given their incorporeal nature. Jenny has ordered new counters, and Crystal is working slowly on the new sign that copies the one that enthralled Edwin the first time he entered the Tongue & Tail back in Port Townsend. It’s just frustrating that, after almost a year, they have made little progress on transferring Jenny’s whole life from America to England.
Crystal doesn’t want to think about the other reasons why they are so distracted while helping Jenny earn a living.
She doesn’t want to think about the way Jenny’s hand trembles ever so slightly when she accidentally grabs one of the books that they never sent back to Japan. She doesn’t want to think about how Edwin closes off whenever he lays eyes on the heart-shaped cushion that now rests on their couch. Charles is better at hiding his pain—but that’s hardly a surprise, given that he’s been masking his discomfort for over thirty years. And Crystal—Crystal tries to be the strong one for them all.
But putting up a brave front means she’s perpetually exhausted.
Today, under the warmth of a spring day in London, Crystal decides she’s taking a day off from working through the kinks of someone else’s grief. Instead of turning to the closest Tube station, she fishes her phone out of her pocket, fires a quick text to Jenny, and begins walking up the street, heading towards Hyde Park.
Wandering among the trees holds some healing power over her soul. She’s always found nature to be soothing. From time to time, she likes disappearing into the woods and connecting on her own terms with her ancestors who live inside her head. As well as helping Jenny with the shop and the boys with the agency, Crystal has been working on her own case.
The Case of the Buried Demon.
Three-hundred-forty-four days later, Crystal is no closer to a solution than she was when she first buried David underneath the tree that feeds her powers. She’s been investigating in between cases; she’s borrowed Edwin’s old books and even set foot in a library for the first time in forever to do extensive research. Sadly, there is little to no information on how to unbury a demon and banish him into oblivion in one go. She doesn’t dare dig David up without having found a way to send him on a one-way trip back to Hell.
As she walks up the street, the whispers of her schoolmates follow her. She feigns indifference, trying to make them believe she doesn’t care what they say or think of her.
“Fucking morons,” she mumbles, mostly to herself, although she doesn’t really care whether her schoolmates can hear her.
She’s back to square one at this school. Once she regained her memories, she remembered that her parents had sent her to a mixed boarding school in the countryside—expensive enough for them to chase away the guilt of not taking proper care of their daughter, far enough for them not to witness the failure she had become.
Crystal demanded to be sent to school in London, despite her parents’ fruitless efforts to send her to an American school this time around. It’s for your own good, her mother said. It’d build your character, her father sentenced.
Way too hypocritical for the people who didn’t even notice that she was missing for months—that she even moved across the ocean.
Crystal kicks at some loose stones as she walks away from the school as fast as she can. She tries to maintain her nonchalant exterior—head held high, fingers wrapped around the straps of her backpack—while the murmurs get louder. She doesn’t know what possessed her when she accepted her parents’ offer to enrol in this school set in a cute Victorian townhouse.
She’s lying to herself, of course.
She would accept anything if it meant being close to the people she’s grown to love.
Crystal follows the trail she knows will lead her to Hyde Park, to the border between Belgravia and Mayfair—the fine line distinguishing the rich from the richer. Some of her schoolmates are walking in the same direction with not a care in the world, an event that often occurs and that irks Crystal to no end.
Now she has to endure their chatter as she tries to reach her safe green haven.
“Where are you going today? This isn’t your usual route.”
She looks to her left briefly to meet Peter Wilkins’s dark eyes, boring holes in her skull. She shakes her head, trying to duck him and his minions—two giggling girls and the star of the rugby team—but it seems they’re headed to Hyde Park too.
“It’s impolite not to reply when asked a question, Surname von Hoverkraft,” Peter mocks.
“It’s worse to ask about things that are not your fucking business,” Crystal hisses back, unable to stop herself.
“Leave her, mate,” the star of the rugby team—Nathan Hudson, Crystal’s mind supplies—quips. “Don’t give that creep any more of your time.”
Crystal huffs. Being called a creep is probably an insult she could take as a compliment. She’s heard way worse—she’s a psychic who can see the dead and works with two ghosts to solve supernatural mysteries. Creep doesn’t even begin to cover it all.
She quickens her pace in an attempt to put some distance from them, but Peter catches her with two long strides.
“Hey,” he says, stepping in front of her to cut her off. “I’m talking to you.”
“You don’t know how to take a hint, geez,” Crystal retaliates, stopping mere inches away from him. “You may be talking to me, but I’m definitely not talking to you.”
The giggling girls, whose names Crystal has already forgotten, shoot her a glare that could shake the foundations of Buckingham Palace.
“Let me past,” she says, trying to walk around Peter but finding it impossible as he moves in sync with her.
“This is a free country,” Nathan tells her matter-of-factly. “I can’t see why you wouldn’t be able to reach your destination.”
“Because I have four useless idiots blocking the way, you fucking twats,” Crystal finally explodes, the expletive leaving her lips with a hiss.
There’s something reminding her of Edwin in her response—a hint of conceit laced with that motion of fear that is intrinsically him. Luckily for her, the four bullies don’t pick up on the latter, focusing only on the former, and step aside in surprise.
Crystal takes advantage of the situation to cut in between them and start sprinting, headed to the park, her backpack bouncing crazily against her.
By the time she reaches the entrance to Hyde Park, she’s breathlessly panting. She doubles over forward, palms on her slightly bent knees, and heaves. Her curls cover part of her face; when she turns around to check if she’s been followed, her loose hair cascades down her back. She doesn’t see Peter or Nathan or Polly and Molly—her new nicknames for Giggling Girl Number One and Giggling Girl Number Two. But what she does see freezes the blood inside her veins.
Across the street, wandering in front of some of the most expensive buildings in town, she spies a familiar long coat and knickerbockers, neat high socks and polished shoes, as well as a thoroughly battered leather-bound notebook in one slender hand. Crystal would have recognized him anywhere.
Edwin Payne, her Edwin Payne, is roaming the streets between Mayfair and Belgravia on his own, when he’s spent the past year actively avoiding going out of the office alone.
She follows his figure as he looks up at the buildings as if searching for something. He cocks his head to the side, back still to Crystal, and then he jots something down in his notebook before stepping towards the next building. Equally fascinated and intrigued, Crystal follows him from a distance; she doesn’t want to attract any attention upon her by calling out his name—she still shudders when she remembers that particular evening at the malt shop in Port Townsend—so she remains on the pavement and keeps at least fifteen steps between them.
Edwin comes to a halt next to what looks like a Victorian house, with great views of Hyde Park. Crystal guesses it must have already been a privileged location, back when it was built. There’s a sign in front of the steps leading up to the door; Crystal can’t make out any of the words written in white letters against a dark background, but Edwin suddenly tenses—his posture becoming taller, more proper—and takes a step back.
Crystal fights the urge to cross the street and make her presence known. She doesn’t understand why Edwin is walking the streets of London alone—she may have some words with Charles later—but she is sure he could use a friend right now, if she’s reading his stance correctly. She looks right and left, makes sure she won’t be run over by a car, and crosses the street.
Crystal doesn’t make her presence known—rookie mistake on her part, she’ll admit later—before landing a hand on Edwin’s arm. He bolts, scared by the unexpected touch, but Crystal manages to keep a grip on him for a few seconds. Her fingers curl around Edwin’s wrist and, against her will, like every other bad thing that’s happened in her life, her eyes roll back into her skull, and she’s thrown into Edwin’s mind.
Through the sepia filter she associates with ancient images, Crystal can see a tall, brunette woman opening the front door to find a young boy sitting on the entrance steps, reading a book. The woman looks eerily like an older, feminine version of Edwin.
The image shifts, and now Crystal is thrown into a garden where the same boy—Edwin—is being lectured about something she can’t hear, the words lost to the emptiness around Edwin’s memory.
Another shift, and this time she sees an older Edwin, around twelve or thirteen, drawing flowers in a notebook. His tongue is delicately peeking out of his mouth in concentration as he traces lines following the different features of the house garden. Crystal’s heart aches for the innocence of the child in front of her, who didn’t deserve what Fate had in store for him.
She feels a jolt as she is pushed out of these memories, and suddenly she’s back on this London street, surrounded by the noises of a very present, very modern city.
Panting from the exertion, Crystal bends forward for the second time this evening. Her eyes catch a glimpse of the sign she’s seen before, her tired gaze reading over what she now realizes is gold letters against black background.
Payne-Hoverall Memorial House-Museum
Confused, she glances over at Edwin, who is standing a few feet from her, eyes wide like a deer on the brink of being hunted. A million thoughts run amok in her mind, piling up and threatening to tip over, plunging her into a spiral of conjecture and what ifs.
“Edwin?” she says questioningly, but he only shakes his head.
Crystal tries to wrap her mind around everything she’s experienced in only a few seconds, although it’s an Herculean effort.
There’s only one thing she’s positive about.
This used to be Edwin’s family house.
Chapter 3
Notes:
charles's pov
Chapter Text
London’s Office
2025
To say Charles is nervous might be the understatement of the century. Upon Edwin’s escape through a mirror, Charles tried to follow him, but navigating the mirror universe requires a level of concentration he can’t match, not when he’s worried sick about his best mate.
So he’s left to wait, on his own, until Edwin sees fit to come back home.
Charles has never been good at waiting. Too much sitting around, very little action. Charles has always been an active type of guy—he was accepted to St. Hilarion’s on a sports scholarship, after all—and he’s never borne not taking the lead well. For the past thirty-six years, Charles has gladly been part of a tandem with Edwin—becoming the brawn while Edwin seamlessly took over the role of the brain has allowed Charles to blow off some steam whenever he’s needed to.
Disenchanting some cursed ghosts and the occasional Lost and Found Department Emissary is only a bonus to this arrangement.
But now he is lost. Even though it’s not the first time they’ve been apart, Edwin and he, it’s not usual that they separate under such circumstances. Edwin became circumspect as he read the card Mariella Wilkins gave them, but Charles senses that it’s more than that. Charles has noticed Edwin’s behaviour becoming more and more erratic ever since Niko’s murder—there’s no way Charles is going to catalogue it under any other label—but Edwin has never been this secretive until today. Even Charles, always the most impulsive out of the two of them, can see the danger in getting near a supernatural presence that tortures ghosts. It baffles him that Edwin simply can’t.
Charles would have carved a path out of his pacing across the office, had he been in possession of a weight. He doesn’t dare to go out of the office just in case Edwin comes back. He can’t be sure when that might be, or even in what state Edwin might come back. He’s been acting so strangely lately that Charles can’t anticipate Edwin’s next movement. Before Port Townsend—before Niko—Edwin would always tell Charles when he went to visit the National Library or any of his most trusted second-hand libraries across town. He would go alone to places where he knew Charles would get bored easily, but he would always let Charles know where he would be. Edwin knows him better than Charles knows himself; he knows Charles grows antsy in silent places. But now, Charles isn’t sure anymore.
In the past eleven months, Edwin has taken to keeping secrets from Charles, starting with leaving the office on his own on several occasions, without giving Charles any explanation—not that he should, but a little warning would have been nice. Once or twice, Charles managed to follow Edwin through the mirror, pretty much in the same way he checks up on his folks weekly. He knows it’s not correct, but he’s worried. Edwin hasn’t been acting like himself, so Charles needs to find out how to help him.
The first time Charles followed Edwin, they ended up in Japan visiting Niko’s memorial. Charles had to crane his neck to be able to see Edwin from a puddle of water dripping from one tombstone across from Niko’s.
The second time, Edwin led Charles back to Esther’s house, now sealed off by the police. Charles watched on as Edwin walked slowly around the living room, fingers tracing the walls, until he stopped in the exact spot where Niko had breathed her last breath. Edwin managed to remain stoic for a total amount of three seconds before breaking down. He fell to his knees, howling in pain and unable to cry as much as he wanted to. Charles felt as though he was intruding on something very personal.
He hasn’t tried to follow Edwin after that.
Right now, Charles wouldn’t know where to start. He’s far too agitated to focus, and focus is what he needs to search for Edwin.
He eyes the phone Crystal forced them to install on the desk, arguing that they could reach her anytime with it. It took Edwin some convincing, since phones weren’t that widespread when he was alive, but in the end he caved. They’ve used the device a couple of times, mainly to test it. Charles can spot a purple Post-It note stuck to it, with both Crystal and Jenny’s phone numbers. With a shake of his head, he makes up his mind and covers the distance between the door and the desk in two long strides. He quickly reads the numbers, chooses Crystal’s and moves to grab the phone.
His fingers phase right through the device every single time he tries to pick it up.
“Fuck!” he swears, throwing his hands in the air in exasperation. “Fuck, fuckity fuck!”
He can’t believe his bad luck. He hasn’t been unable to touch things ever since the first days of his afterlife—he’s mastered the art of corporeality, thanks to Edwin’s classes.
“Where are you, Edwin?” he mumbles, one finger sneaking in between his collar and his ghostly skin. He’s got the illusion of heat all of a sudden, his preoccupation showing itself in the worst way possible. He doesn’t need to look down at his collar to know that the hem has become dark red, almost black, instead of its usual burgundy.
As if on cue, the surface of the mirror they keep in the corner ripples and Edwin stumbles through it. Charles rushes to his side, catching him a second before he collapses on the floor. Edwin’s coat is skewed and his chest is heaving with unalive breathing as he slumps on his knees, accompanied by Charles.
“Edwin!” Charles exclaims, unable to stop himself. “What’s wrong, mate? I was worried!”
“You needn’t be,” Edwin pants. He pushes his hands off the floor for impulse, and gets to his feet. He dusts off his coat, corrects the angle of his bow tie, and entwines his hands in that way of his that Charles has come to recognize as an anxiety trait. “As you can see, I am perfectly dandy.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” Charles mutters. He stands up as well, his suspenders askew from his stunt to keep Edwin from hitting the floor—although ghosts can’t really get hurt, Edwin seems to be too distressed to control his own corporeality. He would have been mortified if Charles had allowed him to tumble onto the floor. He steps closer, inspecting Edwin’s face, which is now a mask of feigned indifference. “Where were you, Edwin? You’ve been gone for hours.”
“I was assessing the situation,” Edwin replies as nonchalantly as ever, but Charles knows him well enough after all these years. Edwin is just putting up a front—just like all those times he brushed off mentions of his time in Hell, only for Charles to find out just how much Edwin had kept to himself.
“The situation?” Charles frowns. “Which situation? Don’t tell me you went to check on that address Mariella Wilkins gave us. We agreed to wait.”
“We agreed to consult with Crystal,” Edwin says, ignoring Charles’s chastising tone. “I was just gathering some data that may come in useful to build a case to present to Crystal.”
“Are you hearing what you’re saying, Edwin?” Charles can’t help but raise his voice. “We haven’t taken on the case! Why would you put yourself in danger unnecessarily?”
Before Edwin can answer Charles’s mostly rhetorical question, the door to the office opens and Jenny bursts in, disheveled and looking around in a frenzy while holding a mobile phone against her ear. The butterfly inked on her throat flutters when she swallows, its wings rippling as she cocks her head to the side upon seeing them.
“Jenny,” Edwin greets her, the last syllable an octave higher as though he’s posing a question instead of stating a name.
“Thank God you’re here,” Jenny says. She then speaks into the phone with a wavering voice, “Edwin’s back at the office.” A pause. “Yeah, mostly unscathed.” Another pause. “What do you mean, check on him? I’m not going to pat a ghost down to make sure he doesn’t have any broken phantom bones!”
Charles looks between Jenny, who’s still on the phone, and Edwin, who seems to be unmovable. To the untrained eye, Edwin would appear to be normal, whatever that means for him. But Charles is not a rookie, although he may still make rookie mistakes. He knows all of Edwin’s tells, from the way he presses his knuckles together when something doesn’t go exactly how he anticipated to the silence that falls on him whenever his thoughts lead him to somber places.
This, whatever it is, qualifies as somewhere in between.
“Yes, Crystal, Charles is here,” Jenny says. “Wait a moment, I’ll put you on speaker.” Jenny withdraws the phone from her ear, touches the screen and all of a sudden Crystal’s voice is coming out of the device. “They can hear you now.”
“Edwin Payne!” she begins. “Don’t you ever pull that stunt on me or on anyone ever again! D’you know how scared I’ve been? One moment you were in front of your house and the next you ran away through the nearest puddle!”
“It wasn’t my intention to scare you.”
“Well, you did!” Crystal’s voice quavers. Whether it’s because of bad reception or intense feelings, Charles doesn’t know. “Good thing Jenny’s shop is really close to the office, and she could go and check. I’ll be there in a few, since you left me in front of Hyde Park and it’s quite the walk up to Baker Street.”
Charles glares at Edwin. “You left Crystal on her own?”
“I apologize for my improper manners,” Edwin says. “I should have communicated better, but you reading my memories caught me off guard!”
“You read his memories?” both Jenny and Charles splutter almost at the same time, but not quite, a cacophony of surprised yelps filling the air.
“It was an accident!” Crystal protests. “But I am fine, in case any of you were wondering. Will be there in five. Don’t move!”
She hangs up, leaving the rest of them to wait for her until she reaches the office. Charles can’t stop staring at Edwin, as if his friend would magically start spilling the beans about whatever nonsense Crystal was talking about. There’s something that nags at the back of his mind, prodding at knowledge Charles isn’t sure he is willing to bring to the front.
He bites the bullet, anyway.
“Crystal says you were in front of your house,” he begins carefully, not wanting to spook Edwin more than he already is. Jenny proceeds to close the door she’s left open—nobody can see the ghosts and they’re in an abandoned building, but they follow just the one rule–they can never be too careful.
“Edwin?” Charles presses, when it’s evident Edwin is not going to reply. “What were you doing at your house?”
“Investigating,” Edwin says in the end. He’s still putting up a front, but the trembling of his fingers pressed against each other is giving him away. “It appears that my old family house might be, indeed, the place Mariella Wilkins was talking about.”
Charles can only stare at him, agape. “What do you mean? It can’t be, now can it?”
Edwin looks away from the interesting stains on their floor, eyes trained on the window now. “Mayfair is big, so the chances of this happening were slim. But I wasn’t wrong.”
“Are you ever?” Jenny mutters. “I need a drink.” She flops down on their couch, complaining once again about the lack of beverages in the office and the uncomfortable sofa they keep in it.
“I couldn’t ascertain whether the building is being haunted by any presence, be it Mariella’s or otherwise. But there is only one building next to the address she provided us.”
“Your family house.”
“My family house,” Edwin repeats, emotionless. “It’s been turned into a museum of sorts, apparently.”
Charles sighs. This complicates things, and that’s reason enough to reject the case and wait for the next client to show up. They have plenty of cases, thanks to their collaboration with the Lost and Found Department but also by word of mouth. Surely they can afford not taking one.
Edwin has never spoken about his family. Not that Charles has ever been particularly keen on sharing his own story, but Edwin’s been really closed off. Charles doesn’t even know if he was an only child or if he had siblings. It comes as a surprise to learn that not only has Edwin’s family house been turned into a museum—but also that it’s in fucking Mayfair of all places.
Charles has always known that Edwin came from money.
He didn’t know that the Payne family was filthy rich.
“Now you may agree with me that we shouldn’t take the case,” Charles says. “It’s bound to end up being personal.”
“We don’t reject cases because they may turn personal,” Edwin says. “We are—were—human. Everything is personal.”
The way Edwin corrects the tense in his sentence shouldn’t feel like a punch in the gut to Charles. It shouldn’t.
It does.
“Besides, Crystal’s case turned out pretty personal, didn’t it?” Edwin insists. “I didn’t push you to drop it.”
“Not in the last few months,” Charles admits. “But you were adamant it was closed three seconds after liberating her from David.”
“This is not the same.”
“Why? Because it’s you?”
Edwin sighs. “It’s not the same because there’s no way these memories could hurt me the way getting involved with a living girl could hurt you. I made my peace with this situation long ago. I’m never going back where I wasn’t happy. This is my home now.”
Charles rests assured by the warmth in Edwin’s words. It must be very obvious, for Jenny gags from her spot on the couch, which she hasn’t left despite her claims of it being worse than a torturing machine.
“I still think we should talk to Crystal and vote,” Charles says.
“We should take the case,” Crystal says from the door. It closes at her back with a loud bang that makes her cringe. “I’ve been there. I’ve heard the screams. Whatever it is, it’s evil.”
“It tortures ghosts!” Charles reminds them once again. “We are ghosts!”
“You got trapped in a loop in Port Townsend,” Crystal reminds him. “I didn’t hear you complain much.”
“It wasn’t torture!” Charles throws his hands in the air. “Don’t you think you’ve endured enough torture to last you an eternity, Edwin?”
“Ah, so there’s the real reason.” Edwin steps forward and grabs Charles’s hands in his. “I will be fine. I got you to protect me. You’ve got my back. I trust you.”
Charles bites down on his lip, defeated.
“On one condition,” he concedes. “We flee and regroup at the very first sign of supernatural fuckery towards any of us.”
Edwin nods curtly, and it’s all Charles needs.
He’s never had to question Edwin’s word when given.
Chapter 4
Notes:
jenny's pov
Chapter Text
The Payne-Hoverall Memorial House-Museum
2025
The mansion stands haughtily against the starkness of the London sky. It is surrounded by other buildings, but none are as impressive as the Payne-Hoverall Memorial House-Museum.
They are observing from across the street, so Jenny can take in the whole picture—Edwardian manors clashing against more modern houses, all of them classy and expensive. She would know, she went looking for an apartment everywhere in London for several months before giving up and accepting Crystal’s help to pay rent. It’s been quite an adjustment, letting other people help her—letting Crystal use the money her parents give her to build back Jenny’s life—but at least she’s alive.
“That one there,” Charles says, finger pointing at a mansion on their right, “is Mariella’s house. Edwin is convinced that, given the information she provided, the other haunted house is this one,” he moves from the right to the manor in front of them. “Coincidentally, it happens to be his family house.”
Jenny can hear the bitterness in those words. She shouldn’t really react when the boys interact with her in broad daylight—she’s been trying not to look like a lunatic in public—but it’s so unlike Charles to sound so beaten that she has to turn and stare at him. Luckily, it still seems like she’s admiring her whereabouts. She cocks an eyebrow at him, urging him silently to elaborate.
He finally caves in. “I didn’t know. I’ve known him for over thirty years, and I didn’t know there was still a piece of him out in the world. He hasn’t even told me where he is buried so I can at least place a bouquet of his favorite flowers there from time to time.”
She fishes for her phone in her pocket and lifts it to her ear so it seems like she’s having a conversation without looking suspicious. “He isn’t one to talk about himself,” she says into the microphone while she stares at him. “Maybe he didn’t know, either. He spent a lot of time in Hell,” she adds in a whisper. “He may have thought the world had moved on without him.”
“Maybe,” Charles agrees before plastering a smile on his face. Jenny has gotten to learn their tells by now—Charles is trying to mask his own pain. He’s always the cheery one, always positive and happy, but Jenny can see right through him.
He’s hurting, but he won’t let anyone in.
Crystal has told her about an incident with the Night Nurse—although, for Jenny, the Night Nurse will always be the creepy red-head who tortured her for information—involving an ancient boombox-like device and an anglerfish. She knows Charles is capable of anger; she just has to see it directed to Edwin.
Jenny has wondered, for the past year, about the relationship they don’t seem keen on defining. She’s perceptive, a tad too observant for her own safety; she’s seen signs. She’s seen Edwin withdrawing a hand when it came too close to curl into Charles’s hair. She’s seen Charles longingly staring into the void Edwin leaves whenever he goes somewhere without his counterpart. She’s sure they will realize they are in love, sooner rather than later.
Although, if that goes at the same pace they’re taking cases, it may be way too late.
“I doubt we could have snuck you in the museum while it was about to close,” Charles muses, interrupting Jenny’s train of thought. “And even now, there are people around, guards most likely. It’s not safe for you.”
“We could set an observation point in Mariella’s house,” Jenny suggests, phone still against her ear. “According to Edwin’s notes, she has a neat visual on the presence that is torturing ghosts, so her house should be a good starting place.”
“That’s brills, Jenny!” Charles exclaims. His smile broadens, and this time Jenny can tell it’s genuine. “I’ll lead the way. Follow me!”
Jenny turns to walk right behind the ghost, pocketing her phone once again. She readjusts her ponytail as she tries to keep up with Charles’s pace, who’s already crossing the street and heading into the unruly garden of the abandoned house next to the museum. It’s crazy, she thinks, that such a place exists so close to a thriving building like a museum, in the heart of Mayfair. The Wilkins’s house remains the same as it presumably was when Abelard Wilkins killed his wife; as part of her own research for this case, Jenny read that Abelard’s brother refused to set foot in the murder scene, and Mariella’s sister only grabbed the few items she wanted to keep once the police cleared her to enter the building. Without anyone claiming it—or taking care of it—what once could have been a pretty household has become a dwindling building at risk of collapse.
Jenny can’t believe she’s going to enter a place where she could meet her death under a crumbling wall.
Charles is already picking a rusty lock when she reaches him. He could have phased through the fence, but she’s not athletic enough—or young enough—to be jumping over fences at such an ungodly hour. Silently, she thanks him with a nod when he opens the door with a soft clink.
“M’lady,” he jokes, mockingly standing at attention.
She slides in through the crack Charles has managed to open. They silently make it through the wild garden and past the broken entrance door. The stairs creak under her weight as she climbs up to the second floor, with Charles ahead of her. He’s peeking into the rooms as they walk through darkened corridors, the wallpaper sticking out in some places, the whole space reeking of disuse and damp and decay. Jenny wrinkles her nose at the stench.
“Mariella, here you are!” Charles exclaims, motioning for Jenny to enter the fourth room on the left. “We were looking just for you!”
Jenny enters the room to find a woman in her early thirties, floral dress stained with blood. The woman smiles warmly at her, a stark contrast with the red on her clothes.
“You must be the psychic,” she says. “I’m Mariella Wilkins.”
“I’m Jenny. Not the psychic. Just your regular human being.”
Mariella’s smile doesn’t even falter. “Nice to meet you, Jenny.” She then turns to Charles. “I take it you have decided to investigate my case.”
“We’re doing research,” Charles explains as simply as he can, winking at Jenny. She still doesn’t know how he manages to do it, but he gets people to relax in his presence. Mariella is no stranger to his charm—she smiles at him and nods. “Can you tell us exactly where this presence shows up? I could sneak into the building next door and gather some data.”
Mariella points out of the floor-to-ceiling window that is miraculously whole in the crumbling mansion. “Exactly at eleven forty-eight every night, in that hall there. Ghosts come in, get tortured and then vanish into thin air. As if they never existed.”
Charles moves to leave the room without asking anything else, but Jenny—Jenny’s mind is swimming with questions. She checks her wristwatch; it’s already close enough to the time Mariella has stated. Jenny briefly wonders whether that was a detail Charles knew beforehand.
“You say it tortures ghosts?” she asks Mariella, who’s taken a spot in front of the wide window. “Why would we send a ghost into a place where that happens?”
“Not just any ghost. These two. They are the best.” Mariella shrugs. “That’s because they have little regard for their own safety when it comes to saving other souls.”
Jenny agrees with her on that extent. In the year she’s known Edwin and Charles, she has come to realize just how much they care for literally everyone but themselves. “It tracks.”
“Now, come here,” Mariella urges. “It’s almost time.”
Jenny covers the distance in two long strides and positions herself close to Mariella, a cool breeze blowing around her when she steps next to the ghost.
The window has a direct view of the museum. Jenny can see big paintings hanging off the walls inside one of the halls, although she can’t really make out any of the details. Beside her, Mariella is vibrating with anticipation, her whole ghostly body leaning forward. Through the window, Jenny watches as Charles phases through the walls and enters the hall, standing tall in the middle of the empty space. There are lights flickering downstairs—undoubtedly the guards checking other halls—but the upper floor remains eerily silent.
Jenny hears the screams before she sees the ghosts shrieking.
They show up out of nowhere, a young woman dressed in tatters with a toddler on her hip; Jenny sees her falling to her knees, clutching at her middle while still holding the toddler. In her peripheral vision, Charles manages to hide behind the curtains, his back to Jenny and Mariella. Almost as a second thought, Jenny is grateful that he got out of the way of whatever is causing pain to the woman—Jenny wasn’t aware that ghosts could feel, but after being told what transpired at the witch’s house back in Port Townsend, she thinks she could believe almost anything.
By her side, Mariella gasps when the woman hits the floor, the woman’s rags curling up her arms as she writhes. The toddler has begun weeping while the woman begs for the torture to stop.
The woman keeps crying out for help, and Jenny hopes Charles is not stupid enough to leave his safe haven and try to help her. Charles is known for his impulsivity, so it’s actually not a crazy thought that he might come in harm’s way to save someone.
He doesn’t, but not because he wasn’t getting ready to do so—Jenny can see him arching his back, legs bent so he can break into a run at any given moment—but because something else, someone else, enters the room.
Maybe the presence was there before, hidden from view, but Jenny can’t be sure about it. Right now, though, she has a half-obscured view of a man walking in circles around the woman, whispering something. She’s too far away to make out the words, but his whole body language screams power and disdain.
Behind the curtain, Charles has straightened up, back against the clear glass of the window.
The man enters Jenny’s field of vision, way taller than Charles. Jenny’s guess puts him around seven feet; he seems taller than any basketball player. The way he moves is enthralling—despite his size, there’s such a grace in the way his feet seem to barely touch the ground, as though he is floating over the floor.
But when Jenny gets a glimpse of his eyes, she freezes—they’re a shade of gold that could be described as the color of sweet honey if it weren’t for the sheer coldness that emanates from them.
He definitely isn’t human.
The man moves about the hall as though he owns it—slowly, carefully, purposefully. He circles around the ghosts, leaning in from time to time to whisper something to them. The ghost woman keeps looking up, as if following the voice—as though she can’t see him, but she can feel him.
The scene is mesmerizing—Jenny can’t keep her eyes off it.
Suddenly, Charles moves to reposition himself. Even from afar, Jenny knows that somehow he has caused some noise—despite ghosts not being able to actually touch anything—because the man stops in his tracks and turns towards the source of the ruckus.
Now that he’s in the light, Jenny can see him fully. And what a sight he is.
She is faced with the embodiment of beauty. She is a lesbian, but she can still admire an objectively handsome man from time to time. And this man is gorgeous. He has long hair that falls in waves down his back, slender limbs that swing elegantly whenever he moves, and his golden eyes meet Jenny’s for a fraction of a nanosecond before following Charles’s movements behind the curtain.
She’s frozen under the spell of those unnatural eyes, unable to move as the man stomps towards Charles’s hiding place.
“He’s beautiful,” she whispers. “Disturbing, but beautiful.”
“Who is?” Mariella asks, frowning at her. “All I can see is torture there.”
Jenny is unable to turn towards her, too enchanted by the man’s presence. “The man, can’t you see him?”
Before Mariella can reply, the man points at the curtains from across the room and sweeps them upwards with one fluid movement of his wrist. The curtains curl over Charles, covering him like a blanket while the man frowns at the heap of cloth dancing in front of him.
Charles turns around in a frenzy, his head caught in the curtains now holding him ina vicious grip. Jenny can’t help him as he fights to get free from his captor; she can only watch in horror as he finally tugs away with a cry and phases through the window, free-falling into the museum’s front garden. Without pausing to think, Jenny flees the room she’s been sharing with Mariella—who’s completely still before the window, entranced by the scene in the other building—and runs downstairs, taking two or three steps at a time. She almost trips over her own feet as she speeds across the entrance hall and out of the abandoned mansion, her hair escaping from her ponytail as she skids through the muddy ground and steps onto the curb. She turns right and freezes, a locked wrought iron fence standing between the street and Charles, who’s lying flat down on the ground.
“Charles!” she bellows, not caring that she can be heard. There doesn’t seem to be anyone on the street, the only people around being the museum guards and whoever lives in the neighbourhood. “Charles, you okay?”
He lifts himself off the ground, hands digging into the mud. He flashes her one of his trademark smiles—the one that doesn’t really reach his eyes, the one that Jenny finds the saddest of them all—and rushes to her side, squeezing his aethereal form in between the bars. A burnt smell fills the air as he makes it out the other side with only a scratch on his arm from having touched the metal.
“I didn’t know they still made these from iron,” he says casually, as though he hasn’t just escaped a powerful supernatural force.
“What was that?” she asks while checking that he is, indeed, in one piece.
“I’m not sure,” Charles whispers, dusting off his jacket. “Couldn’t see it.”
“You couldn’t see it?” Jenny almost screeches. “But you were running for your life back there!”
“Some presences aren’t visible to ghosts,” Charles explains matter-of-factly.
“Oh, this one definitely wasn’t showing off for ghosts.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mariella couldn’t see what I was seeing. She kept referring to the presence,” she explains, air-quoting her words. “It was like he was invisible to her. Same for the ghost woman and the child. But I could see him.”
“Could you describe him to me?”
When Jenny does as told, Charles simply nods. “I’m positive it’s a Nephilim. The appearance you describe, the powers, ghosts being unable to see him, everything points to him being a son of God.”
Jenny nods. She knows a bit of mythology, so she understands what a Nephilim is. What she can’t wrap her head around is the fact that this is her life now—fighting supernatural beings to make the world a safer place. “What was he saying?”
“I don’t understand Aramaic as well as Edwin does, but I’m pretty sure he was asking for his son,” Charles explains. “But he was also trying to push me out the window, so it’s a bit confusing.”
“I didn’t know Nephilim even existed,” Jenny tells him. “I’m not the one you should be consulting.”
“Let’s go back to the office and tell Edwin and Crystal,” Charles suggests. “They will know what to do. But Edwin will push for us to take the case now.”
“And you can’t say no to him.”
“I won’t be able to,” Charles sighs. “He’s way too stubborn for his own good.”
Jenny nods. She doesn’t tell Charles that he is also a stubborn son of a bitch sometimes, particularly when it involves convincing Edwin to try new things. Right now, they need to go back to the office as soon as possible. Mirror-hopping is not an option, as it wasn’t when they walked all the way to the museum.
Charles nods in agreement.
Just as they are about to leave, Jenny feels a presence next to them. Before she has time to react, the Nephilim has grabbed Charles and is tugging at him to keep him from walking away. He’s chanting something in what Jenny now knows is Aramaic, and trying to drag Charles back with him into the museum. Charles fights back, but the Nephilim is way stronger. Jenny remains petrified for a moment, too stunned to react; and then, she yanks at Charles as hard as she can, pulling him from the grip of the Nephilim.
Something flies through the air and falls onto the ground with a tinkle, blinking up at them. Jenny throws one last glance back as they flee the place, only to see the Nephilim bend down and pick it up.
Charles pushes her to run away, and she doesn’t even question anything else as she follows his steps back to the office.
Chapter 5
Notes:
edwin's pov
Chapter Text
London’s Office
2025
Taking on a case, in Edwin’s experience, requires much more research than actually solving the case does. They have been following the very same steps ever since they started the agency, back in the nineties—they observe, they read, they find a solution, they close the case. From observing the physicality of a curse to solving a ghostly disappearance, the Dead Boy Detective Agency has a stellar track record.
That hasn’t changed with Crystal’s addition to the team. If anything, she has improved their technique, polishing their methods until they adapted to modern times. She has cut their research time by half with the use of her powers, and she has proven to be brave and bold whenever a case called for it. And, with the occasional help from Jenny—with her meat cleavers and her human wisdom that stems from disappointment—the Dead Boy Detective Agency has developed into the Dead Boy (And Their Psychic Human And Her Former Butcher Landlord) Agency.
They are still working on the name.
Edwin grimaces as he picks up one of the oldest books their shelves host, dust flying everywhere and making Crystal snort. He is not apologizing for the dust—bound to happen when you store books in a secluded space—but he knows he should be apologizing to her for his attitude.
He left her on her own at a house haunted by what looks like an evil presence. Even if the threat may only affect ghosts, if they are to believe Mariella’s words, that wasn’t a gentlemanly thing to do. His mother would have chastised him for his actions, and his father would have caned him while his governesses looked the other way.
Edwin shakes his head. Ever since visiting his family house, now turned into a museum, his mind has been all over the place. He has not been able to focus on any task for longer than a few seconds, thoughts always wandering back to the vision of the front door—closed for the day—and conjuring the memories of his short time inside those walls.
Crystal overstepped some boundaries, too, when she read him like a book. That was one of the first things she promised them—never to use her powers on them without their permission. And Edwin surely hadn’t granted any authorization when Crystal intruded into his mind, stomping over some of the images he treasured in the palace of his memory.
So maybe she should be the one groveling.
Either way, Crystal is spending her Saturday evening helping him peruse their collection of books, trying to find something that could match Mariella’s description of what is going on in the house next to hers. Charles has gone to do some field work with Jenny; he mumbled something about it being too personal for Edwin to be completely objective about it before hopping into a mirror and disappearing.
“I can’t find anything in here,” Crystal complains. “I still think we should go to the library, in case there’s something in there about possible supernatural events at the mansion.”
“I doubt there will be anything there,” Edwin replies. “Nothing ever happened in that house.”
“And how would you know that?” Crystal doesn’t seem to want to let go of the topic. “You left for school and died there before coming back, over a century ago!”
“I didn’t,” Edwin says before he can stop himself, the words escaping his mouth of their own volition. He clamps a hand over his lips but it’s too late—Crystal is already turning towards Edwin from the dusty book she’s been checking.
“What do you mean, you didn’t? Weren’t you sacrificed to a demon in a cellar back at school?”
Edwin sighs. He’s never told this story in its entirety, and he wasn’t expecting today to be the day he disclosed the truth about his death. Not even Charles knows about where Edwin died, back in the Edwardian era; he has allowed everyone to believe the obvious—that he died down in that cellar in St. Hilarion—but he’s never referred to his last moments at that school as anything but a disappearance.
“I already told you that my disappearance was labeled an act of God,” he says, his eyes never leaving the page of Major Arcana he has been poring over.
“Your ‘disappearance’,” Crystal repeats, air quoting the last word—at least Edwin thinks he’s gotten that modern idiom right. “Why do you keep referring to it like that? Why can’t you call it your death?” She fires those questions without pause, until all of a sudden she covers her mouth with her hand in a horrified grimace. “Oh my God,” she exclaims, realization dawning on her. She walks around the desk and stops right next to Edwin. She reaches out, placing a hand on top of his and helping him withdraw his fingers from the page. She forces him to look at her, but he doesn’t dare to. “Edwin, look at me.”
“Let it go, Crystal. We have a case to solve.” He tries to divert her attention. “Charles and Jenny will come back any moment with more information on the subject.”
“We would have gotten more information by researching at the library,” Crystal insists. “There must be articles about the museum and everything that’s happened there.”
“Maybe you should go, then,” he concedes, almost convinced that he’s managed to make her forget about her previous questions on his death. “I’ll remain here and keep searching for some spells that might come in handy.”
“I will,” Crystal says slowly, but she still doesn’t budge. “But I’d rather you tell me whatever secrets I may find.”
“I wouldn’t know, now would I? As you said, I’ve been dead way too long for me to know any secrets my family might have kept.”
“Only you didn’t really die, now did you?” Crystal says back, a dangerous gleam in her eyes. It’s then that Edwin knows he hasn’t succeeded in distracting her. “Not at your house, not at school. You never died, right? You were simply taken to Hell.”
There’s no judgment in her voice; it’s so calm that it irks Edwin.
He doesn’t say anything at first, taking his time to study her face. It’s the first time anyone has ever figured out the truth of his afterlife, his secret bared in front of them like a gaping wound that never healed. And maybe that’s what it is—he’s still reeling from the pain of what happened to him back in Hell.
“I did die,” he says finally. “But I was brought to Hell alive, same as the boys who summoned the demon that first took me.”
“That first took you,” Crystal repeats slowly, letting the words sink in. “As in, there were more demons?”
Edwin nods curtly.
“I have never—not even Charles,” he mutters. “He could never—I should tell him myself.”
Crystal doesn’t say anything. She takes some heartbeats to reflect on his words before nodding as curtly as he did.
“Sa’al brought me to Hell, and he enjoyed torturing me for a long time. Don’t ask me how long, I wouldn’t know. Time works differently down there. I was alive for that first torture session.”
He leaves the rest of the story unspoken—the pain and the fear, the darkness that followed him everywhere whenever he tried to escape, the Misery Wraiths that caught up on him at every turn.
Not knowing where his body actually lies, bones piling up and turning into dust.
“I—I don’t know what to say, Edwin. That is horrible,” Crystal says, closing her eyes as though she is the one in pain. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Edwin agrees. “I still don’t know how you knowing about my demise could help us in this case.”
“It doesn’t. But it wasn’t me who started speaking about death. Or lack thereof.”
“I died,” Edwin insists. “Only not in the way everyone believes I did.”
Crystal takes a step backwards, putting some space between them in order to study his face. Edwin isn’t sure what she sees there, but it must be satisfactory because she walks around the desk again and picks the book she had been reading before. She puts it away onto the shelf—in its original spot, no less.
Edwin thinks he might like her a little.
Not that he is going to admit that to anyone. Especially not Crystal herself.
“There won’t be any trace of you in that house, will it?” She hasn’t even turned around, her curls bouncing slightly as she moves her head, scanning the shelf. “It will be as though you never existed. And if we went to the archives, to read about the legacy of the Payne-Hoverall family that ensures a museum, there would be not a single mention of Edwin Payne.”
Edwin gulps. It’s a strange feeling, because he hasn’t needed to untie any knots in his throat for decades. “Crystal—”
“I bet you have already checked, haven’t you?” Crystal finally turns around to face him, her eyes filled with tears, devastation etched in her features. “That’s why you know going to the library would be in vain. You have already gone and reviewed everything under your family name. That was the first thing you did, after escaping Hell. You went to see if someone was still around. To see if they remembered you.”
“They didn’t!” Edwin explodes, the anguish pooling in his chest finding an out in a vicious way. “They erased me from existence, like the school did, or Hell did! It was as though I never existed, as though I was never there, as—”
“—as if you didn’t matter,” Crystal finishes for him, understanding coloring the words he had spat at her back in Jenny’s shop in Port Townsend.
Edwin pants, doubling forward. The pain that had been dormant in his soul has been released with a vengeance—everything he has been bottling up blowing up in tiny shards of grief and loss. It feels like a million knives slicing through him, tearing apart the mockery of normalcy he has been able to maintain throughout the past thirty-six years, reaching into him to pull out the worst he stored during an afterlife in Hell.
It’s worse than anything he ever felt while being tortured—it cuts and burns and stomps over everything he has ever attempted to cherish.
It takes him a few ticks to sober up; the anguish receding like it always does. He learned how to tame it a long time ago. Once he does, he straightens up, palms brushing over his jacket to make sure it is in a perfect state, and stares at Crystal serenely.
“Anyway,” he says, only a slight quiver in his otherwise calm voice, “I don’t understand why my family house has become the central piece of a haunting gone awry. But I highly doubt that we will find answers in any library.”
“You are right, maybe we won’t,” Crystal acquiesces. “But I hate that you feel like you don’t matter. Maybe you didn’t matter back then to the people who should have taken care of you. But you matter to us, Edwin. You matter—you mattered to Niko. You matter to Charles.” She isn’t deterred when he huffs out a strained laugh. “And you matter to me, Edwin. Believe it or not, we would never have confronted Esther Finch if we didn’t care for you.”
Edwin has to look away. He can’t cry unless he specifically conjures the tears to his eyes, but this interaction has left him in shambles. He is the closest to breaking down that he has been since he died.
Probably before that, even.
There’s a ruckus by the door, the knob protesting as it turns and Jenny and Charles enter the space. She looks like she’s seen a ghost—which is a lot, Edwin thinks, given that she’s been living among phantoms for a year—wide-eyed and scared and trembling. Charles isn’t in better shape; his jacket is askew on his shoulders, his earring is nowhere to be found, and his arms are hugging his magic backpack.
Both Edwin and Crystal rush to their sides. Crystal pushes the door closed again; the building is abandoned but they can never be too careful. She helps Jenny to the couch, where she lies down without a word. Edwin does the same with Charles, leading him towards the other end of the couch. Charles flops down there without letting go of his backpack. Edwin notices that his polo shirt has turned dark red.
“What happened?” Edwin asks. His hands find their way to Charles’s face before he can stop himself, fingers lightly touching his earlobe. “You have lost your earring. Did you end up in a fight?”
Charles shakes his head. “It’s—it’s worse than I thought,” he stutters. “That presence—it’s evil. He lures ghosts into the mansion—young women and babies—he doesn’t care how young the babies are. He just preys on them.”
“Even I could see him through one of the windows,” Jenny says. “So tall and dark and—handsome—but so terrible.”
“I must have lost the earring when we were leaving. I could feel the pull, I was scared. I’m sorry,” Charles almost sobs into his backpack. Edwin allows his fingers to caress Charles’s temple in a soothing gesture, intended to calm his friend.
Charles seems to have his tremors appeased by that simple motion, for which Edwin is grateful.
“So dark and handsome,” Jenny repeats in a muffled voice, as if she has fallen under an enchantment.
Edwin stalls, his fingertips hovering over Charles’s ear. Without turning to Jenny, he asks, “Did you say that he was tall and dark and handsome?”
“Why is that surprising?” Crystal intervenes. “We all can admire a handsome man from time to time”
“And dark,” Jenny adds. “Don’t forget that.”
Edwin moves frantically to the book he’d been reading before he was interrupted, and flips through the pages until he finds what he is looking for.
“Here,” he says, turning the book so everyone else can see it. “Tall, dark and handsome. It is a Nephilim.”
“Is that bad?” Crystal asks.
“Worse,” Charles replies in a low voice. “Nephilim are the most powerful supernatural beings that exist.”
“Have you ever confronted one?” Jenny sounds unsure.
“Have you ever won against one?” Crystal asks.
Edwin shivers. “I have no knowledge of anyone ever defeating a Nephilim,” he states.
This is, indeed, the worst case scenario possible.
Chapter 6
Notes:
crystal's pov
Chapter Text
London’s Office
2025
“What exactly is a Nephilim?” Crystal asks, fully aware that she will regret having ever opened her mouth.
Ever since Edwin connected the dots the night before—at an impressive speed, Crystal must admit—the office has been a whirlwind of movement, and neither of the boys are talking to the living people in the room. Edwin has delved into his book, searching for clues; Charles has managed to let go of his backpack and is gazing at the pages over Edwin’s shoulder.
Crystal has an inkling that she should know what a Nephilim is, but she’s sure she has never encountered one in her almost seventeen years of psychic experience. Demons, ghosts, the occasional ghouls and now, thanks to helping the boys, a bunch of Misery Wraiths and a powerful witch. Honorable mention to the shape-shifter cat with the airs of a monarch. Her list is extensive, and yet she has never met a Nephilim.
From how Edwin has explained the notion of Nephilim, Crystal isn’t sure she wants to.
“Nephilim are the offspring of God,” Edwin tells them slowly, eyes trained on the yellowing pages of the book. “They are born from the coupling of God’s sons, or angels, with human women. Therefore, they are stronger and larger than any other human being, and much more powerful.”
“Like Hercules,” Jenny provides from her spot on the couch. She claims to have developed yet another migraine, which is not at all surprising. Crystal believes she would feel exactly as run-over-by-a-bus as Jenny sounds if she had been through half of what Jenny has seen today.
“Much worse,” Charles says. “Hercules was a demi-god because he was the son of Zeus. He was a hero. Nephilim are abandoned by God because they are impure—they’re the consequences of an impure act—and often they are angry about it. They roam the Earth punishing humans for their sins in an attempt to reconcile with their father and regain a place in Heaven.”
“Pretty much like everyone else,” Crystal mutters, more to herself than to anyone else. Edwin snorts, signaling that he has, in fact, heard her. “Everyone who’s been brought up in a religious family knows that you have to earn your place in Heaven. Isn’t that what you are trying to do with your work at the agency? Earn leniency?”
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” Edwin says, but Charles cuts him before he can start a tirade.
“Nephilim are way worse than any other being. They hold God’s powers but they are mortal, being human and all that. It’s more about finding their weaknesses and exploiting them than anything else, innit, Edwin?”
Edwin nods. He doesn’t lift his gaze from the book, but Crystal can feel him radiating nervous energy. She doesn’t want to read his aura against his will; they both have had enough of that already. But it doesn’t take a psychic to understand that Edwin is worried about this case; maybe he is beginning to understand why Charles hadn’t wanted to take it in the first place.
“Why does this Nephilim only lure women and babies?” Crystal keeps questioning, this time more rhetorically than anything else.
“That is what we will try to find out,” Edwin answers, his voice tense.
Crystal closes her eyes. “I know that’s what we will try to find out,” she counters. “It was rhetorical.”
“You will not go near the Nephilim,” Edwin states at the same time as Charles says, “As if I’m letting you get close to that house!”
“Good to see you agree on something, “ Jenny deadpans. “But I have already been there. That thing seems to be interested only in ghosts, who, coincidentally, can’t see him. Maybe it’s you,” she motions between them, making Crystal snicker, “who shouldn’t go there.”
Crystal doesn’t miss the glance that Edwin and Charles exchange. Over the course of the past year, she has come to understand their silent communications better. She now knows that they usually agree on simple things with just a brief smirk, that Edwin can convince Charles to do anything with just a press of his hand on Charles’s shoulder, that Charles disarms Edwin with just one goofy grin. She’s come to fear the silence within them as well—they can gang up on her in a second, which she knows is what is happening here.
Crystal is very much aware that being human is one of her biggest weaknesses. She knows she’s not invincible, but neither are they. If their confrontation with Esther Finch taught them anything, it is that even the dead can be killed.
Obliterated, even.
She’s not going to let them walk into that trap for ghosts on their own. At least, not without a fight.
“This Nephilim is looking for young women and babies, because he seems to be looking for his own son,” Charles tries to explain. “He’d do anything. And we don’t know how he might react to living people. You going there with us would be very dangerous for everyone.”
“I will not allow it,” Edwin says sternly. “I can’t lose—we cannot afford to lose anyone else.”
Crystal hears Niko’s name in the words that Edwin doesn’t speak.
“And that thing is after ghosts, from what Jenny and Charles have gathered.” Crystal isn’t deterred by Edwin’s stubbornness. She is even more mulish. “We are a team, Edwin. We are not leaving you to fend for yourselves with an enemy as powerful as that one, and in a place that has such a hold on you.”
“We have been doing this for almost forty years,” Charles insists. “We know what to do.”
Crystal is surprised when Jenny lets out a low laugh. For the past year, she has remained on the outskirts of their investigations, helping them but never becoming too involved. Crystal suspects that it has a lot to do with Jenny not really knowing what to do with ghosts and their antics—she’s firmly stated over and over again that she never believed in the supernatural, so it tracked back then. But she now seems to want to be involved—only for the boys to try and stop her.
“I may not be a detective like you,” Jenny begins, sitting up on the couch, “but I’ve been there, in the museum. Which, by the way, I guess it’s your family home. Thanks for telling us. It’s always nice to know that your team trusts you enough to tell you important details like that one.”
Crystal feels like she’s attending a tennis match. Her gaze bounces from Jenny to Edwin to Charles, who is now looking down at the floor upon Jenny’s mention of Edwin’s house. It’s been some sort of silent agreement—after reading that sign, all of them gathered that it was Edwin’s family home, yet none of them openly spoke about it. Until Jenny took the bull by the horns.
“You’re not even going to pull an Edwin Payne and dismiss me, huh,” Jenny huffs. “You’re not the only one who’s lost someone, Edwin. We are all hurting. And don’t come tell me you’re hurting more than anyone else, because this is definitely not a competition.” Jenny gets to her feet, straightens her black t-shirt and points a finger towards the ghosts. “That thing is after ghost women and babies. I think we all are safe on that front.”
“But—”
“No buts,” Crystal interrupts. “We are helping. So tell us how we can help. You are the expert on the supernatural.”
She knows it’s the thing to say, for Edwin shakes his head, mumbling something her ears don’t catch, and turns back to his book. Charles looks lost for a moment—with Edwin backing out and Jenny stepping forward—but in the end he shrugs.
“Usually, Nephilim have one weakness, just like Achilles,” Edwin explains after a beat. “We need to get close to him, to study him. Each Nephilim is different. We cannot generalize a solution.”
“Then what do you suggest? That we go back there and get a closer glimpse at the problem at hand?” Charles asks, sounding unsure.
“That’s exactly what I am suggesting,” Edwin confirms. “I know there’s a protection spell against Nephilim somewhere. Where have I put the Grimoire from Ancient Days? I know I haven’t misplaced it.”
“Have you looked in the Bag of Tricks?” Crystal suggests. “Remember we needed it for the Case of the Lost Candles? I bet Charles forgot to take it out.”
Charles sticks his tongue out at her before sheepishly opening his backpack and reaching into it. Elbow-deep in the magical pocket universe, he frowns in concentration. Crystal will never know how the backpack works—only that it can hold an infinite number of items, like Edwin likes reminding them—but it’s fascinating to watch Charles interact with it. He produces a faded-green volume that has seen better days and offers it to Edwin before closing the flap on the backpack.
“That one,” Edwin says with a soft smile. “Thanks, Charles. I’ll find the right incantation and we’ll be good to go.”
“As good as we’ll ever be, having to face a Nephilim,” Charles mutters.
Crystal knows that the reason behind Charles’s attitude is not doubting Edwin’s knowledge. Charles has been trusting Edwin since before dying—he’s actively choosing to remain by Edwin’s side despite everything. She’s become fluent in the Charles-Edwin dynamics, and she understands that Charles’s hesitation stems from a place of concern for his friend. Edwin has been through too much. None of his friends would ever want him hurt again, even though he can take much more pain than everyone else in the room.
She suspects that there’s much more going on with Charles than he lets her see—much more about his feelings for Edwin than Charles himself understands. She doesn’t need her powers to feel that there’s more simmering below what Charles shows to the world. Crystal is aware of Edwin’s feelings for Charles—they were obvious to her from the beginning, but Niko let it slip that Edwin confessed to being in love with Charles—and she guesses Charles is still figuring himself out.
She hopes he doesn’t take long to find out that he’s also in love with Edwin, for the sake of everyone involved—and especially her. There’s only so much she can take before wanting to smash their heads together and force them to kiss.
Fingers snapping in front of her bring her back to the office, pulling her out of her own mind.
“We are ready to go,” Edwin announces primly. “Should we wait for you to gather your wits before going?”
In the time Crystal spent lost deep in her thoughts, Edwin managed to find the right protection spell and cast it over them all. She frowns at him.
“I am ready,” she grumbles. “Just lost in thought.”
“Do pay attention from now on, Crystal,” Edwin admonishes. “We will be entering uncharted territory. Here.” He thrusts a small, brown bag into her hands. “Throw this onto the Nephilim when you see him.”
When Crystal frowns at him in confusion, he explains, as though talking to a small child, “It will make the Nephilim visible to us, therefore making it easier for us to assess the situation.”
“Get the full picture and all that,” Charles adds. “Edwin says it’ll last a while.”
“It’ll be sufficient for us to get an idea of who we are up against,” Edwin nods.
Crystal nods and follows Jenny out of the door as the boys step into the mirror. They’re used to this mixed traveling arrangement—the boys would use the fastest way to get places and assess the situation while Jenny and Crystal arrive as quickly as humanly possible. If the case was not dire, or they were not in a time crunch, Edwin would consider walking with them. But not today.
When Crystal and Jenny arrive at the museum, panting from exertion, Edwin and Charles are already waiting outside. Edwin is eerily silent, warily eyeing the entrance door. It’s still opening hours, meaning that people are walking around the space, making it easier for Crystal and Jenny to enter the museum. Jenny pays for their tickets at the box office; the plan is for them to lounge around until closing time and then hide somewhere until it’s safe to get out.
It’s easier said than done, Crystal finds out, when they go to the bathroom to find that there’s a woman controlling the queue and making sure everything is perfect. Jenny mumbles as she stomps around; there’s nowhere they can hide, really—the museum is an open-plan concept, with huge halls and wide windows. Crystal wonders if it was like this when Edwin was alive.
“I don’t remember it this luminous,” Edwin answers her unasked question, as though he can read her mind. “But I didn’t spend that much time here. I was sent to boarding school very young.”
“Why don’t we try breaking into restricted spaces?” Jenny whispers. She moves her head towards a sign by the back end of the room they are in; there is currently no guard watching the spot but there is a security alarm device, angry red blinking at them. “Any way that you could disable the alarm?”
Charles chuckles, already pulling his lockpicks out of his backpack. Crystal would have questioned his methods—for he often uses his lockpicks on doors and padlocks—but she’s seen so many things in the past year to guarantee that a ghost picking a security alarm is even a normal occurrence.
While he works, Jenny keeps guard in the crowded room. Crystal has read the information sign by the entrance; this space used to be the visiting room, where the inhabitants received their visitors and invited them to tea. Nowadays, several paintings hang from its walls, featuring different people who may be related to each other if the resemblance is anything to go by.
Edwin is standing in front of one of them, head cocked to the side while he inspects the painting. Crystal stands next to him, carefully avoiding other people as she looks up at the wall. A blonde woman stares back at her, sitting on an armchair with a boy and a girl—both seemingly in their teenage years—standing at each of her sides. There’s another boy, not older than six or seven, sitting on the woman’s lap, looking down at a cocker spaniel. It’s a candid family portrait, one that could have gone unnoticed—most people don’t even pay attention to it, way too busy admiring a painting of a high-ranked soldier on a horse—if it hadn’t been for one tiny detail.
Crystal is sure that the boy on the woman’s lap is Edwin.
She turns to face him, a question ready on the tip of her tongue, when a hubbub coming from the other side of the room startles her. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Edwin also breaking eye contact with the painting, subtly wiping away a tear. She files that tiny detail for later, since she thought ghosts couldn’t cry, and focuses on the task at hand.
The task being a tall, dark and handsome man accompanied by a young woman holding a baby in her arms clashing with Charles, who has dropped his lockpicks and is trying to stop the man from stepping further into the room. Crystal doesn’t need to double-check to know that, while the woman and the baby are undoubtedly ghosts, the man isn’t.
She moves forward, throwing the contents of the small bag Edwin gave her before towards the man. She can feel the moment the Nephilim is visible to ghosts, because the young woman gasps in terror, and Charles enters what Crystal calls brawn mode.
The scene would be funny if the Nephilim wasn’t so scary. The rest of the people are staring at him like he has gone mad, talking to thin air—because nobody else can see Charles. Jenny is trying to stop the Nephilim from hurting Charles, but he dismisses her with a harsh movement that makes her stumble backwards. The ghost woman by the Nephilim’s side seems to shrink as he struggles to get rid of Charles and his cricket bat—when he took it out of his backpack, Crystal isn’t sure.
Everything happens at once, so fast that Crystal thinks she’s missed most of it.
Edwin launches himself at the Nephilim, but he doesn’t even reach him. The Nephilim bellows something in a language Crystal isn’t sure even Edwin understands, and a powerful wave lifts her off her feet and sends her swiveling in thin air across the room. She falls on her stomach with a loud thud, probably spraining an ankle or a wrist or both in the process. The room spins around her, people rushing out in a stampede, almost stepping on her in their haste to leave. She looks up in time to see that only they have been injured in the Nephilim’s rage; Jenny is trying to scramble to her feet at the other side of the hall, Charles is seemingly unconscious on the floor, and Edwin—Edwin is suspended in the air, grabbing at his throat as though he’s being choked, legs kicking in panic.
The Nephilim grabs the young ghost woman and her baby, and pushes them towards Charles. Something sparkles in his hand—Crystal recognizes Charles’s lost earring. The Nephilim smirks a dangerous, painful smile, and stretches his arm, slewing it as Edwin twists in return. The Nephilim says something, smirk still poignant like a well-sharpened knife, and everything fades to black.
The last thing she hears is Edwin’s choked voice begging for his life.
Chapter 7
Notes:
charles's pov
Chapter Text
St. Hilarion’s
1989
Everything is damp.
That’s all Charles can feel in the darkness. Dampness and darkness, lacing together like a vicious grip on his heart.
He looks around, eyes adjusting to the lack of light surrounding him, until he manages to outline the building about a hundred meters from where he is standing, shivering and wet.
Charles hugs himself, fingers sticking to the soaked coat he is wearing. His arms hurt; when he looks down, he can see blood seeping through the darkened fabric. He frowns in confusion; he can’t remember why he is hurting, but it’s evident he’s in some sort of trouble. Behind him, a chorus of voices is calling his name.
“Rowland!” he hears at his back. “Get out of your hiding place, you rat!”
“He’s a coward,” another voice quips in. “He isn’t even brave enough to come face us.”
Charles closes his eyes briefly, leaning back until his body collides against a tree. He’s too exhausted to even think of running from those voices, which sound eerily familiar. He racks his brain searching for clues, but he comes up empty-handed. There’s a big hole where the memories of his immediate past should be; he has no recollection of where he is or how he ended up here. Not even why his arms are bleeding or why it seems like he went for a dive into the lake while fully dressed.
The voices approach, chanting his name and spewing expletives. From the noise they are making, Charles guesses there must be four or five of them—maybe more, but he can’t distinguish any other voices. They’re joking about what they’re going to do to him once they lay hands on him, and it doesn’t sound pretty.
They’re laughing about how they will go after the Pakistani boy he helped earlier, once they’re done with Charles.
It’s then that the memories rush back to the forefront of his mind.
He remembers seeing how a bunch of kids were hitting someone in the rugby field. Charles broke up the fight, helped the kid to his feet and instructed him to leave. He confronted the aggressors, earning himself a few bumps and shoves. He fled the field, accidentally stumbling into the freezing lake. Once in the water, the bunch of violent kids started throwing stones at him.
Coincidentally, he had considered some of those kids his friends.
Charles shivers against the bark of the tree. He managed to get out of the water, soaked and scared. Some of the stones must have hit his arms, hence the bleeding, but his legs and his chest also hurt. He guesses it must be due to the freezing water he spent at least half an hour in, ducking rocks thrown at him and diving down in an attempt to fool his aggressors. It didn’t work, evidently, for he is now hiding in the woods while also trying not to die from hypothermia.
Somehow he knows he won’t be successful in either of those things.
The voices get farther and farther away, giving Charles some time to run in the opposite direction. Maybe running is a tad too generous a description of what he can do on wobbly limbs and shivering body, but he rushes towards the main building of the boarding school he’s been attending for the past five years.
St. Hilarion’s was supposed to be a safe place. Charles took his time there as a reprieve from the harsh situation at home—from the beatings of his unforgiving father and the contrite tears of his silent mother—and for all those years it accomplished that mission. Charles made friends among his classmates; he even toyed with the idea of becoming Head Boy, given his rising popularity among his peers.
Now, running as though he’s running away from Hell, Charles wonders if that was also a fever dream—a mirage of a world he imagined to escape the reality he lives in.
There are lights on in the first floor of the main building. Charles hopes the Headmaster is still up doing some reading—he’s known for staying until late. Maybe if he runs straight into the Headmaster’s office, if he gets there before the clique catches up with him, Charles will be able to explain the situation. Maybe those other kids could be punished for what they did to the Pakistani boy. Maybe they could even get expelled.
Charles shivers, although he is not sure whether it is from the cold, from the dampness or from the fear. The building is looking closer and closer, making Charles feel safer by the second, until he exits the woods and starts running under the open skies.
There’s a yell at his back—the motherfucker’s getting away!—that makes Charles run more quickly. He’s always been fast, but right now he wishes he’d trained more these past few days. He takes an unexpected turn to see if he can throw off his pursuers, and finds a rusty door half-hidden behind the mould that’s eating at the bricks.
Desperately, he pulls at the knob with shaky hands; the door gives under his weight and he manages to pry it open enough to slide inside while it still looks mostly closed from the outside. However, Charles isn’t keen on staying to see if his trick has worked—he keeps running. Inside that part of the building there’s a set of stairs Charles has never seen before; he’s pretty sure he hasn’t been in this wing of the school.
He climbs the stairs as quickly as his legs allow him, exhausted from the exertion and the fear. Charles stumbles into what looks like a forgotten attic—dusty furniture covered in ratty sheets greet him as he makes his way through the space. He ends up falling to the floor in between a stand-up shelf and the mansard, a heap of limbs and tremors. A threadbare blanket falls on him as he inadvertently rattles the shelf; he stills at the noise the old wood makes, sure it will attract the other kids.
Nobody comes bursting through the door, so Charles relaxes a bit. He can’t stop the shivers that now dominate his whole body, but he can at least try to appease the cold seeping through his bones. He bundles up in the blanket, rests his head against the crooked wall. The bumps in the wooden mansard dig into his skull, but it’s almost a blissful feeling that tethers him to the ground—if he can feel pain, it surely means he is not dying.
Because everything right now feels like he is, in fact, dying.
Not that he has much experience with death. His grandparents were long gone when he was born; his father’s parents passed away when Charles’s father was a teenager, and Charles never knew his mother’s parents since they had lived in India their whole lives until they passed when he was a baby. And yet, somehow he just knows this is what death feels like—a vicious grip on his chest, the freezing knowledge that he isn’t going to make it out of this attic.
There are so many things he wanted to do in life, and now he understands that he was never meant for them.
He’s never attended a concert—not just a punk concert, any concert. He loves music so much, but it’s a bit of a rebellious act to even defy his father’s ironclad set of rules, which includes not staying out after dark.
He’s never had a pet—always wanted a dog, but he was terrified of his father’s reaction if he ever showed up with a puppy. Or worse, in the hypothetical case that he did manage to sneak a dog into the house without his father noticing, he wouldn’t have been able to anticipate the reaction of said hypothetical dog to his father’s beatings.
He’s never had a girlfriend—sure, he’s kissed a bunch of girls and has even gotten handsy with a couple of them, but it’s never really meant anything, with any of them. He always preferred spending time with his mates, playing cricket or lounging around. And he wouldn’t have known what to do with a serious girlfriend, anyway. It’s not as if he could have taken her to meet his parents.
He keeps staring at the door, half expecting the other teenagers to burst through it, half hoping for the warm light of an oil lantern to illuminate the space.
He doesn’t know where that last thought came from, but it’s a comforting one—the idea of someone stepping into the attic with a light on, like a beacon in the middle of a stormy night, to guide him wherever he needs to go.
Nothing happens. The door remains closed as his shivers intensify. He grabs the edges of the blanket to tuck it around him even tighter, but the cold is imprinted in his bones already.
“You can’t even die a normal death,” comes a voice at his right. Confused, Charles turns his head to the side to see his father squatting next to him, a belt rolling between his fingers.
Charles recoils. His father leans forward, the belt slipping slightly. “I haven’t been toughening you up so you go die from a few bruises,” he tsks. “I should have punished you harder.” His father reaches out, belt dangling from his fingers. Charles moves backwards until his back collides with the shelf.
There’s nowhere to escape, and he isn’t strong enough to keep running. His father grasps the belt with one firm hand and lifts it, ready to strike.
Charles braces himself for the hit, but it never comes. When he looks up, fingers separating from where he’s brought them up to cover his eyes, his father has been replaced by his mother. He blinks, but the image is blurry around the edges, glitching like a bad cut in a movie.
He must be hallucinating.
His mother’s image shifts again, and this time the fuzziness shows him a devastated place—smoke covering everything, and a distant voice calling his name. Charles frowns, because the voice sounds familiar enough for him to know he should recognize it, but he can’t quite place it. The voice is sharp, desperation laced in the way his name is called out, and it sounds closer by the second. But when Charles tries to move his head towards the voice, he finds that he cannot budge. His neck is stiff and he is unable to avert his gaze from the image of the destroyed room.
“Charles!” the voice keeps calling, although he can’t see who it belongs to. “I don’t think he’s hearing me, Jenny.”
“Edwin isn’t much better,” comes another voice—Charles also has the feeling that he should know this name, but he doesn’t seem to be able to put a finger on when or where he has heard it before. “We need to leave now.”
Charles wants to yell at them not to leave him in the smoky room but no sound escapes his mouth. He opens and closes it, and before he can make head or tails of the everchanging scenario, he sees a table in an attic—pretty much the same as the one he’s currently dying in—and an oil lantern on top of the table. The light it casts is orange and soft, shadows playing around as if waiting for someone to catch them.
There’s nobody around, and Charles feels a yearning in his chest, his heart breaking at the absence of whoever brought the lantern. He blinks, sudden tears filling up his eyes at the notion of being completely and utterly alone.
There’s nothing but emptiness around the lantern.
He feels another tug, this time harder, and his vision focuses back on the attic where he’s holed up in an attempt to escape his aggressors.
He has definitely been hallucinating, he decides.
A bout of coughing grips him from the inside, twisting and twitching, until he’s spitting up blood. He brings a hand up to his mouth, and it comes back red from just touching his lips.
“What’s going on,” he splutters. He tries to stand up, the blanket sliding down his wet frame, but there’s a dizziness taking hold of his brain and all of a sudden the attic is spinning around him. “Where’s that lantern?”
Charles is unsure about why his mind keeps coming back to the idea of an oil lantern on a dusty desk in the far corner of the room, illuminating the space with orange softness. There’s something more there—something intangible—that Charles can’t understand yet, but his soul yearns for it like his whole eternity depends on that damned lantern.
It never comes, and Charles keeps coughing up blood, staining everything and everywhere until he falls back to the floor, on his side, trembling. His curls are still wet although not dripping any longer, the drops of lake water mixing with the drops of blood on the floor.
He hurts everywhere—where the stones have visibly reached him and in other places too—and he just knows he won’t make it out of this attic unscathed.
He isn’t going to make it out alive.
There’s a pull and suddenly he is standing tall, all pain gone. He looks down at his body, now clad in a white undershirt and cargo pants, and frowns. When Charles glances over at the shelf, he sees his own reflection in a body half lying under a blanket, a peaceful gesture on a face otherwise scattered with blood.
Charles feels there’s something he is missing, something wrapped in warmth and love. He should be able to remember; he isn’t old enough to be suffering from memory loss.
He’s barely sixteen, his birthday having been less than a week ago.
Nothing comes to mind.
He closes his eyes in frustration, and when he opens them again the pain is back, as well as the shivering and the blood.
And he is back in the woods, hiding from the kids who will kill him.
Chapter 8
Notes:
edwin's pov
Chapter Text
Hell
1916
The screams follow Edwin all the way until his feet touch solid ground. For a moment he is disoriented—there’s nagging at the back of his mind, somewhat familiar voices whimpering I don’t think he’s hearing me and Edwin isn’t much better, a thought dissolving as the scene around him stops spinning and his gaze focuses.
By his side, a tall being is staring at him apologetically.
“I’m sorry,” the being says with a grave voice. “It had to be done. You were technically sacrificed.”
Edwin frowns. His brain feels foggy with the spiralling that brought him here—wherever here is. It’s a warm space, filled with red and orange and yellow. It wouldn’t be hideous if Edwin didn’t notice the streaks on the crooked walls.
He is fairly certain that those streaks are blood.
Slowly, the memories of his last few moments at St. Hilarion’s come to his mind in a whirlwind, and he lurches forward as nausea rises in his throat. He remembers the hands tugging the duvet from his sleeping body, the arms yanking him from his bed and manhandling him around the school to the cellar where they strapped him to a table, the laughter ringing in his ears as he took in the faces of his kidnappers.
They were a bunch of schoolmates, some older than him, some from the same year. All wearing their sleeping clothes and sadistic smiles as they discussed whether Edwin would make a good virgin sacrifice. And among them, Simon.
Simon betrayed him.
Edwin’s throat works as he swallows. He remembers them calling him names—Mary Ann, Mary Ann, Mary Ann—and Simon staring down at him with his brother’s book in his hand.
“Who are you? Where are we?” he shoots, looking up to the being in front of him. “Is this Hell?”
“My name’s Sa’al. I am the demon in charge of stray souls in Hell.”
“So this is Hell,” Edwin mutters. “They were right. I do belong here.”
Sa’al shakes his head. “I am not the judge of that. I just bring the souls here and prepare them for Hell. This is only your first stop here—”
The demon hesitates, clearly fishing for Edwin’s name, which he is yet to provide. He knows he shouldn’t take pity on a demon who’s just announced that he prepares souls for Hell—whatever that means—but Edwin can’t help himself. “Edwin,” he offers swiftly. “My name’s Edwin Payne.”
“Such a suitable name for your purpose here,” Sa’al tells him. “I will take good care of you, Edwin. Nobody will know you've come here on a technicality.”
Before Edwin can even think of asking what Sa’al means, the demon blinks and Edwin finds himself suspended in the air. It’s a strange feeling, not having his feet on the ground; he’s read about men who pilot the flying machines the Wright brothers invented, but Edwin himself has never seen one, and he's not keen on trying new things. And yet here he finds himself, floating in thin air with a demon in front of him speaking in a language he doesn’t understand.
Edwin wonders if this is just a nightmare—like the ones he’s been having ever since Father forced him to attend St. Hilarion’s—but it feels too real to be a figment of his imagination.
“You will need to learn some words,” Sa’al is saying in English now, circling around Edwin as though they are predator and prey. Edwin doesn’t like the feeling of being observed, much less when he doesn’t fathom why. “Most demons that will bid for you don’t speak English, and nobody wants a toy they can’t understand.”
“A toy?” Edwin asks, blinking at Sa’al. Now, up in the air, Edwin is almost as tall as the demon. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
Sa’al laughs. “Of course you don’t.” He stops his circling and looks back at Edwin. “This is the part I dislike the most about my job,” he mutters. Out loud, Sa’al continues, “I will try to explain it to you, but you have to pay attention because I don’t have the time to explain it twice. You have been sent to Hell as a virgin sacrifice, so now it’s my job to prepare you to face your new reality down here.”
Edwin shakes his head. The demon is speaking English, but the words might as well have been Mandarin for all he understands. The sounds mix in his head with the echoes of the screams that he can still feel raw in his throat.
“As any other sacrifice, you have been brought to Hell alive,” Sa’al tells him matter-of-factly, like he’s reciting a grocery list. “It’s my job to prepare you for eternity down here, but you can’t really spend eternity anywhere if you’re not dead.” Sa’al pauses, giving Edwin time to digest what he is saying, before speaking in a softer tone, “I am afraid I have to kill you now, Edwin Payne.”
Before Edwin can protest—because, in all seriousness, if Sa’al thinks he’s not going to fight not to be killed, then he’s definitely not in his right demonic mind—a group of beings scurry into the room. He takes a moment to study them, unable to move up in the air.
They’re all completely different from Sa’al and yet Edwin can tell that they’re also demons. He counts four of them, all shorter than Sa’al, one with a tail, one with horns, and the other two, albeit human-like in appearance, sport long nails and hideous gleams in their eyes. The four of them stare at Edwin for a moment before positioning themselves strategically—while two of them stand right below Edwin’s legs, the other two unfurl big black wings and levitate until they are next to each of Edwin’s arms. Sa’al remains close to his head.
“Now,” Sa’al says, “I am going to teach you some words that will come in handy when you’re serving your first master.” He says something that comes across as a mix between a dog barking and a snake hissing, and points at Edwin’s right leg. “That’s the word for leg.”
Sa’al signals his other leg and has Edwin repeat the sound. At first, Edwin fumbles with the sounds, his mind not really catching up with his reality, so he needs a few tries until the sounds start rolling correctly off his tongue.
At last, Sa’al seems satisfied with Edwin’s proficiency. He even pats Edwin on the shoulder. “You’re a quick study,” he praises. “The melée are going to have so much fun with you. Now, you’re going to learn how to say thank you, please and more.”
Edwin frowns at Sa’al. Despite the dread that’s been pooling in his gut ever since the demon appeared in St. Hilarion’s cellar, Edwin has been trying to convince himself that this is most probably a dream—the worst he’s ever had, if he’s being honest—but this is way too wild for his mind to have made it up. “Why would I want to learn those expressions in whatever language you’re trying to teach me?”
“Because a demon loves it when their sacrifice begs,” one of the smaller demons replies, pinching Edwin’s arm with its long nails and leaving a bleeding line along his vein.
The pain is searing—much deeper than a scratch like this should feel—and it somehow grounds Edwin even though he is still floating in the air. It makes the situation real, because Edwin wouldn’t feel anything if this were a dream, and that worsens the dread Edwin is feeling.
“Why are you doing this to me?” Edwin says through gritted teeth. Even though he is terrified out of his mind, he will never let it show. “We’re all supposed to be sons of God,” he tries to reason, digging deep in his memories for the religious knowledge that has been ingrained in his soul.
“You’ll find out that some of God’s spawn are actually real sons of bitches,” Sa’al retorts with a sinister smile painted on his noseless face. “Now, back to your training. I need you to learn everything properly before getting your body ready for Hell.”
Edwin is scared of asking for the meaning of those words, because he isn’t sure he wants to know the answer, but he bites the proverbial bullet anyway. “Isn’t this the preparation you’ve referred to previously?” he asks, tilting his head towards the winged demons who are waiting on Sa’al’s orders.
“This is preparation for your soul,” Sa’al explains slowly. He sounds almost bored—Edwin reckons he must have explained this to countless people before. He shudders just by thinking of how many innocents may have been sacrificed before him. “We’ll need to dispose of your body before the bid on your soul starts.”
“The bid on my—”
“Don’t act like you don’t understand, Edwin Payne,” Sa’al interrupts him. “I can see you’re a bright boy. You know what I mean. You know what this is.”
Edwin shakes his head. He infers what the demon means, but it feels the same as with the rest of the situation—it’s not real until someone speaks it to life.
Or death, in this case.
A question begins to form in Edwin’s mind, pressing against everything he’s ever known. “You said you need to dispose of my body,” he says slowly, carefully not to word it as a question, for that seems to bother Sa’al. “I believed only souls reached either Heaven or Hell.”
The winged demons laugh sinisterly, drawing circles around him. Sa’al offers him a sardonic smile, showing off his pointed teeth. “That’s for souls that have left a dead body on Earth,” Sa’al explains. It’s clear he is having fun with this foreplay—he doesn’t seem to mind that Edwin is trying to win some time in order to scheme a plan to escape, if that is even possible.
“But my soul is here,” Edwin insists. “Then my body should be on Earth. No need to dispose of a body that’s not even on the same plane.” He tries to sound sure and full of himself, but it is clearly not working when the winged demon by his left feet grows bored and picks at Edwin’s ankle.
It burns in a way no other wound has ever done.
“I knew you were smart,” Sa’al laughs. “You’re not entirely wrong, Edwin Payne. The thing is,” he continues, leaning conspiratorially towards Edwin, “sacrifices don’t leave a body on Earth.”
Edwin shudders at the implications of what the demon is saying. If he is technically a sacrifice, then his body has been sent to Hell along with his soul to be tortured for eternity.
He gasps, the sudden weight of the truth falling on him like a ton of bricks.
“I am alive,” he whispers, both marveled and aghast. “I have been sent down here alive.”
“You deserve a treat,” Sa’al tells him. “You’ve unveiled one of the mysteries of this hall. It’s the only place in Hell where humans can breathe.”
Edwin nods. He understands that, given the chance to flee, he wouldn’t survive long—there shouldn’t be anywhere with enough oxygen for him to make it out while still breathing.
He’s condemned to die in Hell. And no one will ever know what has become of him, since there will not be a body to bury, a corpse to mourn.
“Now,” Sa’al continues, as though Edwin’s whole existence—both life and death—has not been upended, “as a treat, I was thinking of making it a quick death. Nothing too terrible. There’ll be time to train your soul to endure pain after my demons have finished with your body.”
Edwin doesn’t say anything; he doesn’t think there’s anything he can do. He thinks of his mother, the tears she might shed upon learning of his demise—maybe his disappearance, since there will not be any sign of his passing. Perhaps his father will stop being disappointed in Edwin for not being just like his older brother Emmett—or perhaps he might be aggravated by the fact that Edwin hasn’t met a more honorable end to his life, like fighting in the trenches in the Great War.
“Get on with it,” Edwin finally concedes, sagging forward as much as his weird position in the air allows him to—he’s awash with relief in the knowledge that he will never have to go back to St. Hilarion’s, to those halls where everything reminded him of what he would never become. The fact that he will never learn anything more than what he already knows, that he will never read more installments of Detective Carrados’s adventures, pales in comparison with the enormity of being free from suffering on Earth.
Hell may have some impossible suffering for him, but Edwin’s already lived through some hellish experiences of his own. He will learn to deal with it. He will survive.
And, one day, he will escape.
“Nice of you to grant us your permission,” Sa’al mocks him. “So polite and British. You may start,” he orders the winged minions, who stop circling around Edwin and stall in the air close to him. “And once we’re done here,” Sa’al says in a quiet, maniacal voice, “we will move on to training your soul for delicious, neverending torture.”
Edwin closes his eyes briefly, only to force himself to open them again. He is going to die, but he will make sure that Sa’al knows he is not scared anymore. The demon nods in appreciation before flicking his wrist as if giving a silent order.
The pain of those long nails scratching his skin only intensifies as large patches are scraped off his legs. Edwin endures the suffering bravely, unable to move and somehow being conscious of every single touch his body is receiving, until he is a mess of blood and flesh and the pain no longer bothers him.
If this is dying, Edwin doesn’t believe it’s much different from the life he’s been living.
He feels his consciousness fading as he is skinned to death, and he welcomes the darkness with no fear.
There’s a short moment of calmness, of numbness, and then the screams wake him up and follow him until he falls on his feet.
And then it all starts all over again.
Chapter 9
Notes:
crystal's pov
Chapter Text
The Haunted House, London
2025
When Crystal comes back to her senses, it’s to smoke and a burnt smell that fills up her nostrils and makes her cough.
She’s lying face down on the floor, hands spread at both her sides, her curls glued to her temple. She can feel something trickling from her forehead to the floor. She manages to lift one finger to her skin and brings it to her mouth testingly—she’s positive it’s blood.
“Great,” she groans, pushing herself off the floor. “Now I’m fucking bleeding.”
Crystal looks around as she lifts one hand to her temple. It doesn’t take her long to spot Jenny, getting on her knees as well and holding her head as though she’s going through a nasty headache.
This whole case is a mess.
Through the haze and the smoke—and the ringing in her ears that Crystal has yet to identify—she searches for Edwin and Charles. She can’t imagine how scared they must be; she wasn’t there when Esther Finch kidnapped them after committing supernatural arson, but Crystal believes this situation must bring back some bad memories. She scans the room, squinting to keep the smoke from getting behind her eyelids, but it’s an unsuccessful action, since a few tears escape her eyes. She sees the guard slumped against the wall, scraping his nails against the bricks as he tries to get up, red trickling down from his hairline. His back is to her, so Crystal can’t see if he is seriously wounded or there are just scratches that she’s seeing. There’s a device on the wall—the guard is trying to reach it—with the logo of some security company stamped on it.
That must be the source of the loud ringing, which is mixing up with the ringing she’s suffering from the explosion.
The Nephilim and the other ghosts are nowhere to be found; Crystal fears that he’s managed to obliterate them. That thought only fuels her instinct to find her friends—she doesn’t think she could ever forgive herself if the Nephilim has taken them as well.
She turns around to face the middle of the room.
Charles is on the floor, arms around his bent knees, fetal position in place. Crystal runs across the space, skidding until she is kneeling by her friend. She reaches out to touch him—his incorporeal skin is cooler than before, presenting a sheen of what Crystal thinks is water. She frowns.
“Why are you wet, Charles?” she mutters.
Charles is shivering slightly, his eyes closed and his breathless chest heaving. Crystal nudges him; when that doesn’t give her a satisfactory result, she resorts to blatantly shaking him. She calls his name repeatedly, out loud, not caring if the guard hears her and thinks she’s crazy for calling out for someone who isn’t visible.
Charles doesn’t even budge.
“Charles!” Crystal practically begs, the tears that are now running down her face unrelated to the smoke that’s slowly clearing. “I don’t think he’s hearing me, Jenny!”
“Edwin isn’t much better,” Jenny replies, her voice coming from behind Crystal. When she turns around, she’s greeted by a sight she would have never expected.
Edwin is in the middle of the room. How Crystal has been able to miss him, she doesn’t understand—because he is floating in the thick air. His jacket is torn and his knickerbockers are frayed; forgetting about Charles for a second, Crystal rushes to Edwin—covered in the purple dust she tried to throw on the Nephilim, Edwin’s face is contorted in an aching grimace. His eyes are closed, just like Charles’s, and when Crystal tugs at the loose end of Edwin’s jacket with enough force to tear down a brick wall, Edwin doesn’t even stir.
“What the actual—” Crystal mumbles, but she doesn’t get to finish her train of thought before Jenny interrupts her with an urgent tinge to her voice.
“We need to leave now!” Jenny cries, signaling at the guard who’s turned around to face them. He’s finally noticed them both—Crystal isn’t sure about whether or not he can see the boys now that he’s been so close to dying—and he’s trying to move towards them.
Crystal shares a quick glance with Jenny, a split second to make a decision, and the older woman seems to understand her, for Jenny nods and approaches Charles in a somewhat feline movement. She scoops him up, throws his unconscious form over her shoulder, and makes a beeline for the exit door.
Crystal grabs Edwin by his ankle and tugs, surprised when she doesn’t receive any resistance from him. It feels like holding a giant, human-form balloon. She doesn’t give it much thought—there’s no time to second-guess herself when there’s so much at stake—and follows Jenny’s lead with Edwin floating right behind her.
As they both make their way onto the street, the sirens of approaching ambulances and fire engines fill the air. They must have been pretty quick, Crystal thinks, if the first responders have yet to arrive. Before her, Jenny turns towards the haunted house where Mariella lives, and Crystal heeds her. She’s grateful that the crowd these kinds of wrecks usually attract is more focused on the fire and the smoke than on the two women escaping the building in what she suspects must be a really weird body posture—one of them with her hands holding the air over there left shoulder, and the other with her right arm risen up and grabbing thin air.
Not that she would have cared, anyway. But she doesn’t need to give her bullies even more ammunition. And there are some people in the crowd who are recording everything with their phones. Crystal knows that her image could be all over the internet in a couple of minutes, so she lowers her head and moves fast behind Jenny. Nobody seems to point their camera at her.
Surprisingly, they make it to Mariella’s house almost unnoticed. The guard who was in the same room as they were has followed them to the street and is calling out for them. With her head still low, Crystal speeds up and steps into the wilderness that’s the front yard through a gap in the metal bars surrounding the building. Since it’s been abandoned for so long, the house is boarded up. Once they’re inside, she can hear a faint “I am definitely not going there” before footsteps fade away in the distance.
Jenny stops for a moment, readjusting Charles’s form on her shoulder. Crystal knows Charles doesn’t really weigh anything—she’s dragging Edwin around, after all—but running away from a supernatural fire and a very human, very bleeding guard with one hand keeping someone on her shoulder must have taken a toll on her.
“You okay?” Crystal asks, fingers tightening around Edwin’s ankle.
“Yeah,” Jenny mutters. “When I thought I had seen everything...”
Crystal chuckles. “What do you think is going on?”
“I don’t know, but we’re finding out,” Jenny says, still not turning to face Crystal. She shrugs Charles’s incorporeal form until he’s positioned once again in what Crystal hopes is a comfortable position. “It’s high time you meet Mariella.”
Crystal nods. For all the time they have spent researching her case, Crystal has yet to meet Mariella. She’s heard everything about their client—from her appearance to her sad story—but she has never seen her.
Jenny leads the way into the building and up the stairs. The wood creaks under their weight as they climb up to the next floor, Jenny calling out their client’s name. They hear a faint voice calling back; Jenny rushes to the door, Crystal hot on her heels, and they both stumble into a crumbling room.
In the middle of the space stands a beautiful woman; if Crystal hadn’t had her bisexual awakening years ago, she’d have it right in this moment. Crystal can’t take her eyes off the ghost—her dress floating around her, her hair a crown against the orange lights of the street lamps—but there’s something in her features that leaves an unsettling feeling in Crystal’s gut. It’s not that her face is red from crying—Crystal has yet to confirm that ghosts can sometimes wish for displays of human emotions—and it’s definitely not the blood staining her dress. She can’t put a finger on it yet.
“Mariella, we need some help,” Jenny says in a rush. “This is Crystal, our psychic,” Jenny adds, as she eases Charles down gently to the floor.
He doesn’t even budge.
“Nice to meet you, Crystal,” the ghost says slowly. “Mariella Wilkins.”
Crystal trips on her own feet, her grasp on Edwin’s ankle tightening. “Wilkins?” she chokes out.
She was right to feel uneasy around their client.
“Yes,” Mariella confirms. “I would have thought you would be too young to remember my case, but I see you know my last name.”
“Any chance you’re related to Peter Wilkins?” Crystal asks, unable to stop herself. “Seventeen years old, tall, brown hair, brown eyes, a birth mark on his left arm?”
“Abelard’s brother had had a son shortly before I died,” Mariella says. “I remember them considering the name Peter for him, but I never found out which name they chose. I died before even meeting the baby.” There’s a pregnant pause—something that Crystal can’t recognize shadows Mariella’s face for a second—before Mariella adds, “I doubt you want to talk about my in-laws when that,” she gestures towards Edwin and Charles, “is happening right here and now?”
Crystal nods curtly, setting her shoulders square as she lets go of Edwin and prays that he won’t lift in the air like Uncle Albert from Mary Poppins, Edwardian style. Luckily for her, Edwin remains floating in the air, this time facing one wall.
“Did you see?” Crystal asks.
There’s that fleeting emotion sweeping Mariella’s face once again, and this time Crystal thinks she recognizes it. Maybe it’s distress—after all, if she witnessed what happened in Edwin’s family house, Mariella must be affected in some way.
“I was watching, even though they told me not to,” Mariella explains. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but then the explosion happened and everything was blurry and I lost sight of you for a moment.” Mariella turns to the window briefly, her hands intertwined as she stares out. “I couldn’t believe that he—how was I supposed to know—and then everything went kaboom and—” She trails off, her voice dying as she turns around to face them again.
Crystal bites her tongue, the need to ask further questions tamped down by the softness in Mariella’s face as she looks at Charles and Edwin. “We don’t know what happened. I may need to check Edwin’s books to find a cure, but I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“We wouldn’t be able to even read those books,” Jenny adds. “I swear they’re all written in languages that have been dead way longer than Edwin.” She snickers at her own joke and Crystal follows, hysteria finally catching up with her.
She falls down to her knees, doubling over with laughter, with tears streaming down her cheeks, until the guffaws give way to wails. She braces herself as she cries, the weight of everything that has happened—of everything they could lose—pinning her down to the broken tiled floor.
She wipes her eyes and sits on the heels of her feet. “We need to know what happened in order to revert whatever curse the Nephilim has put on them.”
“Gabriel,” Mariella supplies, seemingly out of the blue.
“What?” Jenny shares a questioning look with Crystal. “Mariella?”
“His name is Gabriel,” Mariella explains. At Jenny’s cocked head and Crystal’s inquisitive yelp, she continues. “The Nephilim.”
“And you know that because?” Crystal prompts her.
“Gabriel is the reason why I am dead,” Mariella says. She trembles, ever so slightly, as she turns to face the window once again, her hands still laced when she begins to retell her death story.
She tells Jenny and Crystal about the long walks she used to take through Hyde Park whenever life got too harsh—trapped in a marriage she once believed in but that ended up being a gilded cage, with an older husband who took his anger out on her when they discovered he couldn’t have children.
She tells them about the handsome stranger she used to cross by the Peter Pan statue, and how one day he greeted her and she greeted him, and all of a sudden they were talking while taking laps around The Serpentine. She tells them about holding hands and feeling like a teenager and a first kiss under the stars while sitting close to Princess Diana’s Memorial Fountain.
Mariella goes on and on about shared interests and fears and even starts reminiscing about how Gabriel didn’t like cats because he thought they were evil. “He used to tell me that cats would strip him of his magic,” Mariella chuckles, still with her back to them. “I thought he was joking, about the magic, but it turns out that was the only truth he ever told me.”
Crystal, who has moved forward until she is standing beside Jenny, nods even though Mariella can’t see her. She relates a lot to what the ghost is telling them; she senses that there’s a purpose in Mariella’s story, despite Jenny’s impatient sighs.
“Gabriel and I had been seeing each other for months when Abelard found out. And then it all went south.” Mariella doesn’t elaborate further, but she doesn’t really need to. Crystal knows what happened next. “When it was all done, I had become a ghost, Abelard had been arrested and Gabriel was nowhere to be found, the bastard.”
She may have not read the newspapers, but it’s pretty obvious that Mariella is haunting her old house because she has unfinished business regarding Gabriel the Nephilim.
“Maybe he was around but you couldn’t see him,” Jenny says in an attempt at comforting Mariella that could very well go badly, if Crystal is being honest with herself. Jenny’s not known for her subtlety. Crystal still remembers the pep talk on that dark alley behind Tongue & Tail back in Port Townsend. “We have confirmed that ghosts can’t see Nephilim.”
“And you said he hated cats?” Crystal asks, her brain focused on that tiny bit of information that Mariella offered in passing. “Because of his magic?”
Mariella nods.
“Please tell me you’re not going to,” Jenny pleads, grabbing Crystal’s wrist. “Crystal, don’t do it.”
“We need some help on the supernatural side of things,” Crystal tries to reason. “You and I, we’re only humans. If Niko was here, maybe we would have a chance at fixing this, because she was always the believer. But she isn’t here, so we need to play this by ear. And he is the only one who’s capable of reading books in dead languages and has been holding the power of the supernatural for centuries.”
“Who are you talking about?”
Crystal looks down at Charles’s peacefully sleeping form—from time to time disrupted by tremors—and up to Edwin’s twitching form—suspended in space and time. She knows it’s risky; she knows she may be gambling beyond her means. But she can’t help her friends, and neither can Jenny or Mariella. They need reinforcements.
“I am definitely calling him,” she says with finality and determination.
“Who?” Mariella insists.
“Thomas, and Monty,” Crystal offers as she closes her eyes. “The Cat King himself and his crow sidekick.”
Chapter 10
Notes:
monty's pov
Chapter Text
The Haunted House
2025
London isn’t that much different from Port Townsend, Monty decides as he steps out of the cab. The air is humid, and there is a greyness around the buildings he can see from where he’s standing on the curb.
Monty studies their surroundings while Thomas gives the driver a generous tip—there’s a wide park across the road from the row of buildings behind them. Several families seem to be enjoying the spring weather, kids running on the grass on the other side of the metal bars. He sighs.
“So here we are,” Thomas states, bringing Monty back from his thoughts. “Why has Crystal brought us here?” he continues, gesturing towards the buildings behind Monty.
Monty turns around and frowns. It is weird, indeed—there’s a row of houses, each one completely different, facing them, but two of them stand out from the poshness of the rest. At their right, the building seems to be abandoned—closed windows, fading colors on the walls. In front of them, there’s a sign where Monty reads Payne-Hoverall Memorial House-Museum in bright golden letters, but condition of the building doesn’t seem in keeping with the luxurious letters—the windows on the second floor have soot marks around their frames, and Monty can see the remnants of disaster wherever he looks.
“Let’s go find out,” Thomas says cheerfully, huddling his fur coat tighter around his body.
“What are you doing?” Monty calls after him when Thomas starts walking towards the abandoned building. “You can’t go in there in the middle of the day!”
“He isn’t wrong, you know,” comes a voice from behind them. “You should come with me.”
When they turn, Monty sees Jenny Green standing on the curb, arms crossed over her chest in a protective manner. He nods his greeting at her and steps closer to her. “It’s always good to see you, Jenny,” he mutters.
“Can’t say the same,” she almost barks, frowning at them. “You travel light.”
“I don’t like lugging around suitcases,” Thomas replies with one of his fake smiles. “And we were urged to come as soon as possible.”
“For the record, I definitely did not agree with Crystal summoning you here. Traitors and tricksters are the last thing we need right now.”
“I’ll take it as a compliment,” Thomas retorts breezily, in that nonchalant way that Monty envies. “Lead the way, then.”
Jenny turns around and crosses the street, guiding them into the park. Monty can see the beautiful sign reading Hyde Park on top of the gates. As they walk behind her, Monty can see the beauty of spring blooming in every corner. It seems that Thomas is taking the scenery in as well, for he lets out a low purr that only Monty can hear.
They’ve become attuned to each other in the past year, ever since Thomas took Monty into his lair after Esther was dragged away by Lilith. Nobody cared about the crow that was left to die in the witch’s crooked house, not even Charles and Edwin.
Not that Monty blamed them—he betrayed them in unspeakable ways, almost got them killed. Not even his feeble attempt at helping Charles get rid of the snake in the magical basement could overshadow the terrible decisions he made in the name of jealousy and scorn.
But Thomas saw beyond Monty’s flaws and helped him regain part of his sense of self by providing him with another human form. Monty now looks similar to how he looked when Esther concocted her plan—although his hair is shorter and a bit fairer, and his eyes are a bit more slanted than before.
“We’ll wait for Crystal here,” Jenny commands, stopping next to a bench and flopping down on it.
“Where is she? And why haven’t the detectives called us?” Thomas fires as he takes a seat beside Jenny.
“She’ll explain everything,” Jenny says sternly. “You just need to be patient. See? There she is.” She gestures to a group of uniformed teenagers headed straight to The Serpentine. Monty would recognize Crystal’s signature curls anywhere.
Monty may have never been to London before—he may have never even left Esther’s house before she sent him on a quest to gain Edwin’s trust—but he knows a few details about London parks. He’s always dreamed of flying around leafy trees, enjoying the humid breeze. He always thought he would love being in a big city such as London.
And now that he’s here, he doesn’t even know why they have been summoned. He’s a bit worried, because Crystal was the one to call them instead of Edwin. Monty has no beef with Crystal whatsoever, but it’s strange that Edwin has gone radio silent on them, in spite of everything, letting Crystal do the talking. Monty knows Edwin might still be a bit resentful of him after what he did, but Thomas has been in regular contact with him.
His train of thought is interrupted when the teenagers disband, some of them heading towards the spot where Jenny has dragged them. Thomas is carefreely sitting on a bench, his fur coat wrapped around him like armor. Monty can sense his unease, but he can’t address it because he recognizes Crystal power walking towards them.
He takes a moment to take the sight in. Her uniform is a bit too big for her—oversized, his mind supplies—as though she’s hiding from the world. He doesn’t know her that well, never paid too much attention to her when he was playing a part in deceiving Edwin, but he would have never thought she’d be one to hide. Behind her, two boys and two girls trail hot on her heels; they seem to be snickering. When they’re closer, Monty can hear them belittling her—no doubt an attempt to get on her nerves.
By their side, Jenny gasps. “No way,” she murmurs, eyeing the group of teenagers following Crystal. “It can’t be.”
“Hey,” Crystal greets when she reaches them, hands gripping the straps of her backpack. “I’m glad you could make it.”
“So the freak has friends,” one of the boys snarls. Monty glares at him—he may be handsome with his pale eyes and fair hair, but apparently he’s also an asshole.
“I’d be careful if I were you,” Jenny warns, stepping forward. The boy recoils as though he didn’t see her; Monty doesn’t blame him, given that Thomas’s presence tends to overshadow everything else. “One could think you’re bullying my little sister.”
Crystal blushes at Jenny’s words, but doesn’t refute them. The boys and the girls walk away without saying anything else.
“You okay?” Jenny asks Crystal. “You should have told me they were bullying you.”
“I can handle it,” Crystal replies curtly. Then, she turns to Thomas and Monty. “Thank you for coming so quickly. I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t dire.”
“What’s wrong with Edwin?” Thomas asks as he stands up. “As much as I love a woman in charge, I guess something’s happened to him. He wouldn’t have let you anywhere near his books if that wasn’t the case.”
Monty has spent most of his life—human and crow—watching people; he can tell Crystal and Jenny are both unsettled. “Let me show you,” Crystal says, rushing past them and heading to the abandoned building across the street. Monty and Thomas have to speed up to keep her pace, while Jenny is just walking almost leisurely behind them.
They haven’t walked into Hyde Park much, so the way back out is short. Monty slides in between the cracks of the abandoned fence, right behind Thomas who’s still trying to catch up with Crystal. The first thing he smells is humidity and that disgusting undertone of mold that is usually attached to old buildings that haven’t been tended to. However, there’s something else in the air; Thomas must have smelled it too, for he stops dead in his tracks and sniffs the air around them.
“What is it?” Monty asks, confusion dyeing his words as he stares ahead at the stairs that lead upwards. Crystal is already halfway up.
“This is ancient magic,” Thomas murmurs as he turns to follow Crystal. Monty doesn’t hesitate, climbing the stairs two at a time. “Really powerful magic,” Thomas continues. “What happened here?”
“See for yourself,” Crystal offers as she stands in front of a closed door. Monty thinks there’s not really any need to keep doors closed in an abandoned building, because there’s nothing to hide. But apparently that’s not the case here—Crystal pushes the door open and steps aside. Jenny, who has finally caught up with them, stands awkwardly beside Crystal, as if unsure whether or not to throw an arm around Crystal’s shoulders.
Before stepping into the room, Monty thinks that someone should give Jenny pointers about how to properly behave in social settings.
His thoughts are deterred by the image in front of him once he fully turns his attention to the room. What he sees takes his breath away—and not in a good way.
There’s a woman wearing a flowery floor-length dress splashed with blood standing by the window; she turns around when she hears the noise they make upon stomping into the room. After a quick once-over, she moves back to staring outside the window, as if yearning for something that won’t come.
But what makes Monty’s blood run cold in his newly-human veins is the tableau in the center of the room.
Charles is slumped on the floor. His body is trembling and he seems to be wet. Monty frowns—ghosts don’t feel anything, therefore Charles shouldn’t be shivering. Monty watches as Thomas crouches down to inspect Charles closer, and that gives him time to take in the other ghost in the room.
Edwin is floating in the air, static. He twitches from time to time—short and small enough to be missed, but Monty is a perceptive being. His whole posture is stiff and would be painful if ghosts could actually feel pain. From the grimace that Edwin’s sporting, Monty is beginning to think that, whatever curse has been cast upon them, it’s bound to make them feel human sensation.
“No,” Thomas exclaims when he stands up and notices Edwin floating around. “It can’t be.”
“What is it?” Monty asks.
“This is not just ancient magic,” Thomas says through gritted teeth, turning to Crystal and shooting her a glare that Monty has only seen directed to the most rogue cat subjects in Port Townsend. “It’s God’s magic.”
“Nephilim’s, to be precise,” Crystal confirms, not even slightly flinching under Thomas’s hard stare. “We don’t know what the Nephilim said before casting the curse. It was probably in Aramaic.”
“You should have led with that,” Thomas keeps talking as he approaches Edwin. He reaches out, one hand flittingly touching Edwin’s ankle. “Nephilim’s magic is way more powerful than what I can usually stand up against.”
Crystal looks crestfallen. Monty has to resist the urge to rush to her side and hug her; instead, he focuses on Edwin, who is still twitching in the air.
“I told you he would bail,” Jenny says derisively. “We shouldn’t have called him. You have more power in your pinky than this twat can muster with his whole body.”
“I’d love to see her try,” Thomas counters, seemingly not affected by Jenny’s words. “Lifting a Nephilim’s curse needs much more than intensity, you know. It requires skill.”
Crystal sighs. “That’s what I’ve been trying to make her understand,” she explains. “I don’t want you here more than Jenny does. In fact, if you never came around my friends ever again, I’d be ecstatic. But we need you and your cat magic. Apparently, it’s the only kind of magic that can reverse the curse.”
Thomas tuts. He takes a step back and stops in the middle of the room, facing Charles with his back to Edwin.
“I can try,” he says. “But you will have to give me something in return.”
“Are you asking for a payment to save your friend?” Jenny screeches so loudly that Monty has to cover his ears.
He knows that’s not what Thomas is implying. Sure, the Cat King is a trickster and he can be a player, but he wouldn’t refuse to help someone in need simply because they wouldn’t pay for his services. More so when the soul in need is Edwin’s—Thomas is infatuated with him, has been for over a year now. Hell would freeze over twice before Thomas denies help to one Edwin Payne, and Monty understands him entirely.
Edwin has that effect on people.
“I’m asking for information on the Nephilim,” Thomas says matter-of-factly, still not looking at Crystal or at Jenny, focused on the task at hand. “And for information on the son he’s looking for.”
“How did you—” Crystal splutters at the same time as Jenny bursts out, “How on the fucking Earth—”
Monty would have questioned Thomas as well, given that neither Crystal nor Jenny have told them much about the Nephilim in question—they didn’t even tell them half of what happened when they summoned Thomas and Monty to London. How Thomas has fathomed that bit of information escapes Monty’s understanding—but that’s cat magic in the most Thomas way possible.
Without missing a beat, and not even deigning to reply to any more questions, Thomas flicks his hands—the right towards Charles, the left towards Edwin—and begins an incantation in a language that Monty doesn’t recognize.
Time seems to freeze as Thomas recites words upon words, the veil of reality dissolving around them. Thomas closes his fists forcefully, signalling the ending of whatever incantation that he cast, and bows his head, the hem of his coat sliding down his arm.
For a moment everything and everyone is still. Monty doesn’t even dare to breathe, for fear that he might break the spell. Nothing happens for a beat—for two beats. And then everything happens at once.
Edwin crumples to the floor in a heap of ghostly limbs and incorporeal flesh, eyes still closed. And then Charles’s hands tremble and his head moves.
Chapter 11
Notes:
charles's pov
Chapter Text
The Haunted House, London
May 2025
One moment he is dripping wet as he runs from the lake, being chased by his mates for the umpteenth time, and the next he is facing down a hard surface, completely dry.
Charles pushes himself up, limbs still shaking from the fear he felt while being caught in a time loop centered on his own death.
“What on Earth—” he begins, patting his torso. His words trail off as he checks his incorporeal body for any signs of distress from his repeated reliving of his death before he looks up to meet Crystal’s wide gaze and Jenny’s astonished stare. But what startles him the most—even more than not knowing what happened to him—is what he sees when he moves his head to the side.
Edwin is lying on the floor, and there are two figures next to him—two people Charles would have happily gone without seeing ever again. The Cat King and Monty are looking at Edwin with frowns marring their features, and Charles would love nothing more than to punch that worry away from both their faces. He doesn’t understand what those two are doing in London—if they are still in London and they haven’t been transported to some parallel universe—and, more importantly, Charles doesn’t understand what happened to turn Edwin to being unconscious on the floor.
The last thing Charles remembers is running towards the Nephilim, back in Edwin’s family house, when everything went black. Then he woke up at St. Hilarion’s, sent back in time to relive his death over and over again, without the light that Edwin’s lamp had cast moment before Charles had passed. It was torture, and only now that Charles is back in his present is he able to understand that he was deprived of his own memories while under whatever spell he was under.
He can only wonder if Edwin suffered the same fate he did—Charles shudders just thinking about Edwin back in Hell, reliving his first moments down there, when he’d been sixteen and naïve and innocent, a sacrifice sent to Hell on a technicality. Charles conveniently ignores that he himself was sixteen when he passed away. He definitely wasn’t innocent.
He shakes himself free from those thoughts as his gaze flickers from Edwin to Crystal and back to Edwin, not completely understanding what’s going on. He’s about to ask—he’s about to rush to his mate’s side and try to wake him up, because an unconscious Edwin is never good news—when the Cat King beats him to it and kneels beside Edwin, one hand outstretched as though asking for permission to touch.
Charles wants to scream that he is not allowed to be near Edwin anymore, not after the horrid situations his bracelet put Edwin through back in Port Townsend, but out of the corner of his eye he catches Crystal’s gaze—hard and worried—silently asking him not to do anything. His gut tells Charles that Crystal has something to do with the Cat King and that traitorous crow being here, wherever that is. So he stays put and simply watches.
Crystal moves to his side, subtly leaning into him as if to make sure he is actually there and not a figment of her imagination. They remain still, staring at the Cat King as he checks in on Edwin.
There’s a gentleness in the Cat King’s touch to Edwin’s face, cradling it with what Charles can only describe as love. Heat courses through him, a foreign feeling given that it’s been decades since he last felt anything—this recent stunt to going back to his own death notwithstanding. Charles has to look away when the Cat King leans in, fingers carding through Edwin’s loose curls—and how Charles never knew Edwin’s hair wasn’t straight is a mystery to him.
“What is wrong with him?” Jenny asks. “Why hasn’t it worked on Edwin?”
“Why hasn’t what worked on Edwin?” Charles parrots, eyes still trained to the way the Cat King’s fingers are massaging Edwin’s scalp as though he could wake Edwin up with that small gesture. “What’s going on?”
“You were cursed by the Nephilim,” Crystal explains, her hand still on Charles’s arm. “You wouldn’t wake up, we didn’t know what to do. You were lying on the floor, unconscious, but Edwin was floating around like a balloon. Mariella said the Nephilim was scared of cats so we thought—”
“Wait a tick,” Charles interrupts. “Why would Mariella know that bit of information when not even Edwin knew that? Edwin would have mentioned that detail in case something happened—and something has clearly happened.”
“She, uh.” Crystal hesitates, and that’s how Charles knows that whatever she’s trying to say is important. “She confessed that the Nephilim is actually her former lover. When Edwin’s purple powder made the Nephilim visible to ghosts as well, she recognized him.”
“Her former lover?” Charles repeats stupidly. The new information is so surprising that it manages to make him tear his gaze from the Cat King still cradling Edwin in his arms. “The reason why her husband murdered her? Why didn’t she say something before?”
“Because,” Crystal says with an exasperated huff, “she wasn’t able to see the Nephilim. Remember how you couldn’t see him either?”
Charles nods sheepishly. “So you called reinforcements,” he says, gesturing towards the two additions to their party. “Why did whatever he did work on me and not on Edwin?”
The Cat King lifts his gaze to Charles, pinning him with an unreadable stare—one that manages to freeze Charles in a way the coldness of the lake couldn’t. “Even cat magic is flawed,” he admits.
Charles shakes his head. His brain is still trying to catch up with the current situation—being sent to die again and then being rescued by the Cat King while Edwin remains unconscious and most probably reliving one atrocious death over and over and over again.
“Well, you better work on it,” he says, not caring that his tone is harsh. He can almost hear Edwin chastising him for being impolite. “If Edwin’s going through what I went through, he must be back in Hell, dying all over again.”
“You were reliving your death?” Crystal croaks out, her hand on Charles’s arm tightening. “That’s horrible.”
“I guessed that was what had happened,” the Cat King says, voice even. “Nephilim’s magic works in ineffable ways, just like God’s. But they tend to favor sending living people to their deaths; if they curse a ghost, it’s usually to send them back to their demise on a loop until the curse is broken.”
“How come you know so much about magic and Nephilim?” Jenny asks. Charles bites down the smile that threatens to bloom on his face at her naïveté—he keeps forgetting that she’s been surrounded by the supernatural for roughly a year. There are tons of things she doesn’t understand yet.
“I’ve been around for centuries,” the Cat King explains with a patience that surprises Charles. “And I’ve run into Nephilim before. Never fought one—I’m not that crazy.”
Charles can recognize a jab thrown his way, and this one hurts deep. He hears the words unspoken—how were you so reckless as to let Edwin get in the way of a Nephilim, of all supernatural creatures?—and he would love nothing more than to retaliate and erase the smugness on the Cat King’s face.
But he can’t, because he is right. Charles should have stopped this nonsense before it even began. He should have convinced Edwin to reject the case. He should have been more insistent. He had only one task, and he failed miserably.
He wasn’t able to keep Edwin safe.
“But your magic worked on Charles,” Monty intervenes, breaking through the haze of Charles’s thoughts. “What are we missing here?”
The Cat King pauses briefly, one finger tapping on his chin. He’s always had a thing for theatrics, Charles remembers. He just wishes he would get straight to the point. Edwin’s soul is on the line.
“Maybe it’s a question of proximity,” he says. When everyone stares at him, frowning, he elaborates. “This kind of curse breaks the bond between the soul and the physical body. So the counterspell tries to bind them together again.”
“Bind them together?” Charles asks, not sure he is understanding correctly.
“Let me put it into easier words,” the Cat King says, trying to appease Jenny’s doubts. “Usually, the soul is tied to a body. When the body perishes, the soul is liberated. The body gets buried, and the soul either moves on or roams the Earth.”
Crystal splutters, as though she’s choking on her own breath. Charles pats on her back until she calms down enough to speak. “You tried to bind their souls to their dead and buried bodies?”
Charles frowns at her question. He doesn’t think he’s particularly brilliant—he always got average grades at school, and he didn’t even get to sit his GCSEs—but he understands what the Cat King is trying to say.
“What’s wrong with that?” he asks. “I’m buried in the local cemetery, where my parents will be buried when they pass. Surely Edwin is buried along with his parents in his family mausoleum, although maybe not in London? I’m not sure if he ever mentioned being buried in London.”
“I bet he never even mentioned being buried,” Crystal tells them. “You sure there’s no other way to break this spell than by binding souls and bodies?”
“I could find a way to bend that particular part of the spell, but it wouldn’t be as powerful or effective. I’d rather lose time finding out where exactly Edwin is buried, if it’s not in London.”
“Then we’re going to have a problem,” Crystal insists. “Because I know where his body is buried, and you’re not going to like it.”
“Please, Crystal,” Charles pleads. “Stop this nonsense and riddles and tell us where we should go!”
“Are you up to go back to Hell?” she fires, clearly fed up with his tone. “Edwin told me he was sent to Hell while still alive. He died down there, so there’s no body in this astral plane.”
Everything becomes silent and still all of a sudden, except for Charles’s non-existent blood ringing in his ears.
He should have known; he’s shared his afterlife with Edwin for almost forty years, and not once has he deemed it necessary to talk about this subject. In his defense, Charles guesses it’s not a common topic—he doesn’t think of chatting about where their coffins lie as a good icebreaker.
“Maybe you could wake up that demon you have buried in your mind,” the Cat King says casually. “Don’t gape at me, Crystal, it’s not elegant. You should know by now that there’s very little I am not aware of.”
“No way I am unburying David,” Crystal snaps. Charles adds that particular piece of knowledge to the ever-growing list of things he apparently ignores about his closest friends, and files it for a moment when they have less pressing issues—like saving Edwin from Hell again. “And no one is going back to Hell, so you can start thinking about a new solution. And fast.”
The Cat King turns their back on them again, focusing on Edwin. He sits down, fingers once again through Edwin’s hair; he’s got a pensive air around him.
Charles grows impatient with every second ticking away without a solution, but there’s little he can do. Beside him, Crystal grows restless as well. A few feet from them, Jenny starts pacing. The only one who doesn’t seem fazed is Monty, who simply stands there looking down at Edwin.
Charles would love nothing more than to be the one cradling Edwin in his arms; there’s probably a hidden meaning behind that feeling but Charles has no time to dwell on it because the Cat King stands up as swiftly as he sat down. Everyone zeroes in on him.
“There could be a way,” he starts. “Not as powerful as binding souls to physical bodies, but it could work. Is there anything physical that belonged to Edwin or could be related to him in this plane? Something that comes from his time,” he specifies when Charles almost blurts out that there are books and notebooks and the magnifying glass. “If we could bring it to him, or bring Edwin closer to it, I could try to bind his soul to that object.”
“I have an idea,” Jenny says, pointing out the window. They all follow her finger towards the building next door, straight into the burnt room where everything exploded. On the wall opposite to them, there are the remnants of a painting, edges rough and brown. “Would a painting work?"
“Could be. Is it a painting of Edwin’s property?”
“Better than that,” Crystal adds. “It’s a family portrait, featuring his mother, some siblings and Edwin. And it’s right there!”
The Cat King nods sagely. Before he can order everyone to move, out of the corner of the hall a figure emerges—a security guard, different from the one who was there when they encountered the Nephilim. Charles guesses he’s on medical leave, after everything.
“It’s too big to be transported without being noticed. But we can’t be seen getting inside,” the Cat King instructs. “Monty and I, we can shapeshift. But you two,” he continues, pointing at Crystal and Jenny, “you’re too visible.”
“But you can’t bring Edwin there either! A cat and a crow can’t really drag a ghost around, now can they?” Jenny intervenes.
“I’ll do it,” Charles offers, his mouth working before his brain can catch up. “I can move Edwin there without being seen, and Crystal and Jenny can watch from here. Don’t try to stop me. I’m doing it.”
“I wouldn’t dare get in the way of true love,” the Cat King mutters under his breath, but Charles hears it all the same. He’s too focused on putting some space between the Cat King and Edwin to notice Crystal’s scoff as he saunters towards his mate’s unconscious presence and sweeps Edwin up in his arms.
It feels different, touching Edwin when he’s this pliant, lacking any of his characteristic stiffness and perfect posture. It sends a thrill up Charles’s spine, and his hands move of their own volition, making sure Edwin’s head is safe and tucked close to where Charles’s heart should be.
“We’re ready to go,” he announces proudly. “Whenever you see fit.”
The Cat King snaps his fingers and he transforms into a dark cat—slick fur and too vivid eyes. Monty follows suit, the crow emerging from behind his guarded eyes. When they’re all ready, Charles leads the way and they all leave Mariella’s house.
Chapter 12
Notes:
edwin's pov
Chapter Text
Mayfair, London
May 2025
Edwin is still facing Sa’al—still forced to keep his eyes open while the demon rips his limbs slowly, deliberately—when he hears a murmur. A voice so faint it is almost drowned out by the cacophony of screams and demoniacal laughter that surrounds him in Sa’al’s hole in Hell. The murmur grows stronger the harder Edwin tries to understand it, a voice surging from within the walls of the entrapment he’s forced to relive repeatedly. It’s a sound he wouldn’t have expected to hear in a situation like this; maybe he expected to see Charles bursting into Sa’al’s lair to save him, or even Crystal. In his wildest dreams—fueled by the everlasting pain of being torn apart at his seams—Edwin even dreamed of Niko chivalrously raiding Hell to rescue him.
But he never expected to hear Thomas’s voice luring him back to Earth.
The volume rises as Thomas’s voice picks up pace, speaking faster and faster in a language Edwin doesn’t recognize at first, mixed with the ancient languages spoken in Hell that have been torturing him for decades. Then, when Thomas’s voice rises over the chants, Edwin surmises he’s speaking in ancient Hebrew—specifically, a derivation spoken in the Nazareth area back when Jesus and his apostles roamed the Earth.
Haḥǎzēr ʾēt̠ hannep̄eš hazzōt̠ min hāʾāreṣ hazzōt̠ ʾēlay (החזר את הנפש הזאת מן הארץ הזאת אליי)
Edwin feels the pull, so much different from the one he’s been undergoing at Sa’al’s hands. This pull forces him apart from Sa’al and his demonic altar, and up, up, up like a captive balloon yearning to break free from its tether and ascend into the boundless sky. Edwin closes his eyes, not willing to stare at Sa’al one final time, and allows himself to be dragged out of Hell by the one voice powerful enough to dispel the curse the Nephilim threw upon him. Behind his closed eyelids, a blinding light makes its way through until all Edwin can see in his head is white—powerful, purifying white.
He falls to the floor with a loud thud, his head hitting the hard surface in the process. Before he can open his eyes, the memories of his time in Hell—the torture, the loneliness, the pain—slowly fade away in a swirl of black, until all Edwin is left with is confusion. Confusion because all of a sudden he isn’t sure where he is anymore.
There’s a void in his memory where something is nagging at him to be remembered but he can’t grasp it. Edwin’s trying his best but his mind refuses to cooperate until the freshest memory he can muster is an image of his governess chastising him for losing his composure over dinner.
He pushes himself up, sitting primly on what he recognizes as the marble floors from his family’s Mayfair house. His hands touch the rough and battered edges, tinted dark from what could be soot—Edwin shudders just thinking about how Father is going to scold the service for this huge misstep. What catches Edwin’s eye is, however, the clothes he is wearing; instead of his usual playing clothes—dark brown shorts and washed-out white shirt—he seems to be wearing grey knickerbockers with high socks and a grey jacket.
It reminds him of his brother Emmett’s St Hilarion’s school uniform.
When he dares to look up from the floor, he sees three young men he doesn’t recognize staring down at him. They look older than Edwin, closer in age to Emmett, who has already turned seventeen—he is considered an adult now.
One of the strangers has olive skin and sports an earring in his left earlobe. The second of the young men wears longish dark hair, his big eyes widened at Edwin. The third man is slightly slumped forward, as though he’s trying to recover from strenuous exercise, a floor-length fur coat floating around him as he crouches down.
The one with the earring speaks first. “Edwin, mate! You’re back! How are you? Are you hurt?” He even kneels beside the spot where Edwin is sitting on the floor, hands reaching out to touch Edwin’s arms.
He can’t help it.
He recoils, narrowly avoiding this stranger touching him.
He sees hurt in the eyes of the man—still pretty much a boy—but he can’t make himself care about it. After all, Edwin doesn’t know who he is, or why he knows his name. And Mother has always told him to keep clear of strangers.
Still, he can’t stop his throat from working out, “How do you know my name?”
His voice comes out harsher than he expected. He frowns, the confusion he already feels deepening.
“What’s happening?” the one with the long hair asks the third man. “Why does it seem like he doesn’t know us?”
The third man frowns slightly, as if he’s deep in thought, and when he speaks, he uses that rich voice Edwin’s heard somewhere—maybe in his dreams—to say, “I have an idea, but it may be a wild one.”
“I’m tired of your wild ideas,” the earring boy almost barks.
“At least this one worked,” the long-haired boy says. “Let’s hear what Thomas has to say.”
“Needless to say, it’s been the first time I’ve cast this spell like that,” the man with the coat says, one hand flourishly moving in the air. “The spell as it is binds the soul to the buried body, with all the memories and experience from both the living and the supernatural existences. But I brought Edwin back by tying his soul to that painting.” He points at a big picture hanging on the wall that Edwin hadn’t noticed until now.
He recognizes the people depicted in it. His mother is sitting front and center, with Emmett and Edeline at her sides. Edwin himself is sitting on his mother’s lap. He remembers with sheer clarity the days he spent posing for the painter, and the gala dinner his parents threw, merely a few weeks before, when the frame was delivered.
“So maybe he’s trapped in that period of his life,” the boy with the earring states, his voice wavering. “That’s not exactly aces.”
“Is it reversible?”
“Am I going to die?” Edwin asks with that voice that doesn’t sound like his, interrupting the man with long hair. “I don’t want to die.”
Silence falls upon them all like a blanket. Edwin doesn’t like the feeling of dread that pools in his stomach as the three strangers look at each other, sharing a wordless conversation. Edwin has seen that happen sometimes, between his parents—Mother would say something and Father would just throw a hard look her way.
“Why would you think that?” The man with the coat speaks in a soft voice that reminds Edwin of something he cannot explain, at least not yet. He has the feeling that he knows this man; he just doesn’t remember where from.
The lack of memories is disturbing, and added to the big words these men are using—souls and buried bodies and binding spells—it makes Edwin’s skin crawl. He knows most of those words, and they have never meant anything good, at least not in Edwin’s experience.
“You are talking about buried bodies and souls,” he says. “Mother spoke about burials when Grandmother Phyllis passed away. Who has died? Has Father died?” His voice quavers ever so slightly when he adds, “Has Mother died?”
He knows something isn’t right with his mother; doctors don’t prescribe seawater baths to everyone. That kind of medical treatment is always reserved to seriously sick people—or royalty, which Edwin is almost certain his family isn’t. But his mother was forced to move to Margate last summer, to the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital, under Doctor Thibault’s orders. She took the whole family with her—except Father, who dismissed the doctor’s orders and stayed in London to take care of his businesses. Edwin had never seen the sea before, wide and endless and as blue as Edeline’s eyes; he loved every single second they spent there, far from Father’s yoke.
But now his Mother might be dying, and there are strangers giving him bad news.
“Edwin,” the man with the coat says in a low, soothing voice, “nobody in your family has died. And nobody is dying. I hope that eases your mind.”
Edwin nods, somehow comforted by that voice. “Then who are you and why are you here?”
The man chuckles. “You’re right, we have been highly impolite, haven’t we?” He gestures for the other two to take a step forward. “My name is Thomas Grimalkin. And these are my friends Monty Finch,” he introduces, pointing at the long-haired one, “and Charles Rowland,” he finishes while pointing at the one with the earring.
Edwin commits to memory those names, mumbling them for better remembering. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he says slowly, hoping he’s pronouncing the big words properly. He doesn’t want Father to find out he’s been slacking in his etiquette duties.
“No need to be so formal, mate,” Charles blurts out before Thomas can stop him. The camaraderie with which he addresses Edwin is unnerving. “Sorry, but—”
“Enough, Charles,” Thomas says in a stern voice. “Edwin, I need to ask you a question that might sound weird, okay? But could you please tell us what year it is?”
Edwin doesn’t even have to think too hard before saying, “I believe it’s the year of our Lord 1907,” he replies. The question is strange indeed, but not weirder than the whole situation.
Charles’s face grows even paler, and it seems like Monty is going to be sick. The only one who doesn’t look like he might be losing his mind is Thomas, who nods sagely. “Afraid so.”
“I swear, if you’ve permanently messed up with him I’m killing you, Whiskers,” Charles threatens. “Fix this right now.”
“Shut up, Charles,” Monty grits out. “You’re scaring Edwin.”
Edwin huffs. “I am not scared,” he declares, although deep inside he is trembling. Funnily enough, he can’t feel his heart beating in his chest. He doesn’t understand what is happening.
“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Thomas says, “but I need you to trust me. I know you don’t know me at all, but can you trust me?”
Edwin finds himself nodding. Father is going to be so unhappy, he thinks.
“Hold out your hand and close your eyes,” Thomas instructs. Edwin does as told, his hand softly enveloped in what he hopes is Thomas’s bigger hand. It feels velvety—almost as if Edwin is petting a cat. “Good boy,” he coos. Then he murmurs something in a language that nudges at Edwin’s psyche but that he can’t really place, and a whirl of lightness makes its way through Edwin’s closed eyelids, turning everything white.
“What happened, Thomas?” Edwin hears a feminine voice—definitely too high-pitched to belong to anyone in his family—followed by Charles’s unmistakable sneer.
“He mucked up big time, that’s what happened. Edwin thinks he’s seven!”
“You can open your eyes now, sweetie,” says another voice, this time softer and calmer. It doesn’t belong to anyone Edwin has heard before, but it sounds enticing and comforting, oddly similar in pitch and regulation to his mother’s.
He obliges, only to be met with light eyes and a tight smile on a feminine face. She is wearing all-black clothes, her hair up in a ponytail; Edwin spies ink flowing on her skin. He has seen tattoos before—on sailors in Margate—but never on a woman.
The room is different—the whole building seems decaying, the paint on the walls fading away in parts. He suspects they aren’t in his family house anymore.
How is this possible? he wonders. Maybe he is asleep, entrapped by one of his nanny’s bedtime tales where magic and talking animals and teletransportation are always feasible.
By his side, Thomas lets go of his hand as if Edwin himself burns.
“I am Jenny.” The woman smiles at him warmly. “Don’t be scared. Everything’s going to be okay, I promise.”
Somehow he believes her. This Jenny seems like someone who would never lie. Her eyes are too kind for that even though she seems to enjoy displaying a tough exterior.
“And this is my friend Crystal,” she introduces a girl—again around Edeline and Emmett’s age—with curly hair and a pained expression. “We are going to take good care of you until the situation is sorted.”
“That’s great,” says another voice, coming from one of the corners of the room. “But who’s going to sort our situation?”
When Edwin turns, his movement is followed by muffled gasps at the sight. Three miniature human beings are staring up at them—one man and one woman wearing winter clothes, and one girl with white hair looking as confused as Edwin feels.
“Niko?” everyone but Edwin exclaims in breathless awe.
Chapter 13
Notes:
edwin's pov
Chapter Text
The Haunted House, London
May 2025
Crystal can’t decide which is more surprising: the fact that Edwin seems to have regressed in time, Niko’s return from the land of the dead along with Kingham and Litty, or that Niko has come back in the same size as the Sprites.
From the spluttering sounds of everyone around her—with the exception of one Edwin Payne, who is probably as confused as Crystal should be—Crystal isn’t alone with her feelings.
“How is this even possible?” Jenny all but squeals before catching herself. “I shipped your coffin to Japan!”
“Man, we saw you lying there—” Charles begins.
“—I was there, Esther shot at you—” Monty continues.
“—you were gone!” Charles finishes.
The Cat King is the only one, along with Edwin, who doesn’t say a thing at first. Pretty much like Crystal, who’s not sure what she’s supposed to say. Glad you’re not dead doesn’t start to cover the extent of what Crystal feels. I saw you die sounds way too macabre. But the truth is that Crystal will never forget the moment when she realized what happened—that Niko pushed her out of the way and took the brunt of a spell that was aimed at Crystal herself, with no hesitation or doubt in her stride. Crystal doesn’t think the echoes of Edwin’s anguished screams will ever fade from her memory.
“I can’t explain it,” Niko says. “One moment I was here and then I was supposed to be dead but instead we were sent to this igloo and we were freezing over—”
A chorus of questions fills the air, a cacophony of asks that have no answer. Crystal can tell that Niko is starting to be overwhelmed, but she can’t bring herself to stop the chaos. She too needs to understand.
“But what’s going on here?” Niko tries to sneak out of the questions. “How have you managed to bring us back? And why are you that much taller all of a sudden?”
“Wasn’t us for sure,” Charles says.
“There’s been a bunch of archaic magic going around.” Crystal finally finds her voice. “There’s a lot I can’t explain. But I am so happy that you’re back, even if it’s not full-sized.”
Niko makes a strange noise as she looks down at herself. “Oh well,” she sighs after patting herself a few times. “At least we have come back complete,” she jokes. “But what’s wrong with Edwin?”
Crystal would love nothing more than to have an answer to Niko’s question. When she turns once again to have a glimpse at Edwin, the ghost is still in the same position as he was before—sitting on the floor, staring at them as though they are mythological creatures. Jenny is crouched down by his side, once again, so she is almost at eye level with him. Edwin’s face is contorted in a grimace that Crystal recognizes as a mask of horror combined with interest—exactly how her six-year-old cousin looks when they’re doing things he doesn’t comprehend.
“Apparently a spell gone wrong,” she tries to explain, kneeling down so she can look at Niko and the Sprites more closely. “We’re in the middle of a case. It’s been a terrible couple of days.”
“I can help, now,” Niko says forcefully, determination in her voice. “Get me up to speed, and I can try my best to help you all reverse whatever happened to Edwin.”
“It also happened to me,” Charles quips. “But Whiskers here didn’t have enough juice to bring us back, so he mucked it up with Edwin.”
“I didn’t muck it up,” the Cat King argues. “Do you ever listen to anyone who’s not yourself? Just like a golden retriever, always ready to wag your tail but never actually listening!”
“Hey, hey!” Crystal feels the need to break up the tension building between the two of them. “Don’t turn this into a pissing contest. We’re trying to help Edwin get back to his usual self. As much as I dislike his uptight ass, him being a child trapped in his ghostly body is making me feel very uncomfortable.”
“I am fine,” Edwin says, his clear eyes fixed on Crystal as he speaks.
“No, you’re not!” Charles insists, a tad too loudly, making Edwin recoil.
“Don’t scare him,” Jenny instructs, her hand soothingly reaching out to rub circles on Edwin’s back. “This situation has to be stressful for you, am I right, Edwin?”
“Don’t know what ’tresful means,” Edwin replies, eyes still trained on Crystal. “But Father is not going to be pleased that the family portrait is damaged.”
“Your father will not notice,” Jenny promises.
“He will, when he comes back. I don’t know where he went, but he will come back and find out,” Edwin insists. “I don’t know where everyone else is. Have Edeline and Emmett gone back to school already? Father is sending me to St. Hilarion’s in the autumn, but Mother has promised me that I will not have to go if I don’t want to.”
Jenny shares a quick glance with Crystal, asking for clarification—probably about the names Edwin has just belted out. During the year they have spent working together, the boys and Crystal have updated Jenny on the basics—how and when Edwin and Charles died, how and when they met—but they never mentioned those names. Objectively, Crystal knows that Edwin, just like Charles, had parents who died probably long before Edwin managed to escape Hell. But never did he mention having siblings, so maybe he is referring to some cousins or family friends’s children.
“I don’t know who Edeline and Emmett are,” Jenny whispers. “But I can assure you, you don’t have to go to St. Hilarion’s.”
The way Edwin’s shoulders relax for a fraction of a second before he resumes his usual tight posture breaks Crystal’s heart. She knew that Edwin didn’t have the best of times at that school—he was murdered there, after all—but he never spoke ill of the institution. Crystal has yet to hear Edwin—the older version of him—speaking ill of institutions, even though he’s had reasons to. Edwin might have roasted her at the beginning of their friendship, but he’s always had a kind word for her as well.
Hearing this younger version of Edwin’s soul sound downright scared about going to St. Hilarion’s makes Crystal want to bubblewrap him and stop the world from hurting him.
“Where are we now?” Edwin asks, his voice small.
For a moment, everyone seems to be at a loss for words. Crystal doesn’t think that explaining the whole situation to Edwin in his current state is advisable—he’d most probably freak out, and she isn’t sure whether the repercussions of their acts while he’s regressed in age will carry on with him when they fix this mess.
Somehow, she isn’t surprised at all when Niko comes to their rescue, her now tiny legs moving fast so she can race up to his side. “Have you ever read Alice in Wonderland?” she asks.
Edwin nods. “Mother used to read it to me at bedtime until Father found out. He didn’t like it very much.”
Crystal is beginning to hate Edwin’s father, and she’s only ever heard about him at length in the past ten minutes—the Edwin she knows never mentions his family.
“Well, that was a long time ago, since now you’re all grown up,” Niko coos. Edwin blushes—Crystal wasn’t aware that ghosts could blush, but she wonders if it has something to do with the fact that Edwin doesn’t know he’s a ghost and therefore can’t control his emotions. “Remember how Alice had been playing outside?”
“She fell through a rabbit hole and went on an adventure!”
“Exactly,” Niko smiles. “Something similar happened to you.”
“I fell through a rabbit hole and entered a magical kingdom?” Edwin marvels. “I don’t even remember being outside.”
“That’s the wonder of magic,” Niko says, lowering her voice until it’s a stage-whisper. “You get to control your adventure now. And maybe you decide to help us find a way to solve this mystery.”
“I love mysteries!” Edwin laughs. “But do I have to go back when we solve the mystery?”
“No,” Charles interrupts categorically. Crystal doesn’t have it in her to scold him for breaking the delicate bubble Niko has created—Crystal wouldn’t want Edwin to believe, not for one second, that he might be forced to go back to an existence he despises so much. “After we solve the mystery, you can remain in this enchanted realm for as long as you want.”
Edwin’s gaze moves from Niko to Charles, bouncing then from Crystal to Jenny to the Cat King and Monty standing awkwardly in a corner, before he settles on staring at Niko, the Sprites hot on her heels. “What do I have to do?”
Everything is a blur afterwards, Crystal has to admit.
They place the Sprites and Niko in a mason jar to avoid stepping on them. Edwin remains close to Niko and Jenny while the Cat King explains to them what he thinks went wrong while trying to tie Edwin’s soul back to this plane.
“I can’t be sure, but I think his soul might be tied to the painting,” the Cat King tells her tiredly, as though he’s already explained this before; from Charles’s frown, Crystal believes this is a redo of an old conversation. “Before you ask, no, I can’t undo it and I can’t fix it. The Nephilim’s curse is way stronger than my magic, and I don’t want to fuck it up further by even trying.”
“So you admit you fucked up!” Charles jabs.
“Enough, Charles,” Crystal warns in a stern voice that somehow reminds her of the Night Nurse. “If you’re not going to help, you can go over to the mason jar and start planning your next Cluedo game with Niko and the gang.” Charles looks down, chastised. “That’s what I thought. Now, what do you suggest?” she asks the Cat King.
“I’d say go to the source,” he tells her. “Our best chance to fix this is finding that Nephilim.”
“And do what? Ask him to lift the curse on Edwin?”
“He may comply, if you ask nicely,” Monty intervenes. From the look in his eyes, Crystal thinks he’s as fed up with this macho rivalry between the Cat King and Charles as she is. “But I doubt Thomas here is suggesting we actually find the Nephilim and ask him.”
“Not ask him for sure.” The Cat King points at Monty as though he’s suggested something insane. “But we need to find him. Ideally, trap him so I could try and snatch the magic he used out of him.”
“Gabriel wouldn’t like being trapped,” comes Mariella’s voice from the threshold, startling them all. Crystal turns to find her standing awkwardly in the doorway, her dress sweeping the floor. “That much I know. I never knew he could curse people like that.”
“And you are?” Monty questions before the Cat King can interrogate Mariella.
“She’s Mariella Wilkins, our client,” Crystal introduces hastily. “She’s the one who tipped us in the right direction about who the Nephilim was. The Nephilim’s name is Gabriel, by the way.”
“I didn’t know it would come to this,” Mariella says, stepping into the room. “I didn’t even know it was Gabriel haunting the house next door, or torturing the ghosts. I just wanted to have a quiet afterlife.”
“You called some ghosts to check on a supernatural being who tortures ghosts?” Monty almost screeches. From her place inside the mason jar, Niko huffs.
Edwin, for his part, seems busy with a piece of paper Jenny has given him, swiftly drawing what Crystal spies to be a beach. Upon closer inspection, she finds out that he is wearing earbuds; probably Jenny’s idea to keep him from the more adult themes going on around him.
Once everything’s fixed, Crystal needs to remember to gift Jenny with the tattoo design she chooses, no matter the cost.
“I called some ghost detectives,” Mariella specifies. “How was I supposed to know that it would backfire like this?”
“You knew something could go wrong and yet you called them anyway,” the Cat King presses. “What did you expect? Maybe you wanted the Nephilim to destroy these particular ghosts. Or maybe you wanted to see if they could summon one Nephilim in particular.”
“I certainly hoped it would be him but—”
“You hoped?” Charles’s nostrils are flaring in anger. Crystal has only seen him so mad once before—when he bulldozed his way to the Night Nurse and fed her to the sea monster without batting an eyelash. “You made us go through this hell just because you hoped you might see your lover again?”
“It wasn’t like that!”
“But it definitely turned out to be like that,” the Cat King surmises. “You summoned some ghost detectives in the hopes that they could help you get closer to a supernatural creature that could be your long-lost lover. What for? So you could apologize to the Nephilim for having had a son with him and then move on to your afterlife?”
The silence that falls upon them is deafening. Crystals blinks at the Cat King, who’s smiling like the Cheshire Cat.
“How did you—”
“Well, it was a simple deduction,” the Cat King mutters. Everything in his body language screams you’re the one who put Edwin in danger to Crystal; she isn’t sure if she feels it because she is psychic or because the crush the Cat King has on Edwin can be sensed from outer space. “You were Gabriel’s lover back in the day, right? So you’re the one who had a son with a Nephilim, kept the news from him and snowballed this whole debacle, am I wrong?”
Chapter 14
Notes:
niko's pov
Chapter Text
The Haunted House, London
May 2025
The igloo was cold, but nowhere near as freezing as the room as the Cat King’s words linger in the air. Niko presses her hands against the cool surface of the mason jar, fingers curling until her knuckles are crushing against the glass. The tip of her nose briefly touches the surface; she shivers, her whole body reacting to the cold. Even though by sheer magic she was dressed for the weather—a layered white coat and mittens—Niko never got used to the cold. She isn’t sure how long they stayed in that igloo, freezing over and unable to move. There wasn’t anywhere they could go, anyway; Kingham had stuck his head outside of the igloo to find a snowstorm screaming over them.
Still, that cold had nothing on the moment she’s witnessing right now. She hasn’t been updated on the case—she’s been back for barely a few minutes—but it must be something dangerous, if magic has made Edwin regress to his seven-year-old self. It pains her to see her friend unaware of who he really is—of who he will become—and instead so focused on not disappointing his father.
Not that Edwin has ever spoken about his family. Niko never pressed the subject, sure that Edwin forgot about the tiny details given the amount of time that had passed since he died. Now, safe inside a mason jar with the Sprites who helped her survive in the cold, Niko is not sure of anything anymore.
“What’s going on?” she asks, directing her question to Jenny, who’s the one closer to the mason jar. “Why does Edwin think he’s seven?”
“I know about as much as you do,” Jenny tells her, leaning into the jar. “A Nephilim cast a curse on Edwin and Charles, and Crystal called them,” she points at the Cat King and Monty, “to fix it when her own magic couldn’t. Evidently, the solution backfired, for Charles is back to normal, but Edwin isn’t.”
There’s a fondness in the way Jenny speaks of Edwin—as though she’s finally warmed up to him. Niko remembers that, when Jenny found out about ghosts, she didn’t take it very well in the very beginning. She’d just had an encounter with a demon—Crystal’s demon David, if Niko recalls correctly—and every supernatural thing was way too novel for Jenny to wrap her head around. Meeting Edwin and Charles, with their opposed personalities but equal charm, was a tad too hard on the Jenny Niko remembers.
This Jenny, though—Niko almost doesn’t recognize her. Even though she’s talking to Niko, her body leaning forward, her whole focus is on Edwin—on how he’s drawing a beach on an old bill Jenny has found in one of her pockets, on how his head is bobbing to the tune of whatever music Jenny has hooked him up to on her earbuds.
“Are you playing music for him?” Niko asks. “I didn’t realize—”
“He didn’t need to hear all the freaking out on his behalf,” Jenny explains, voice dropping as though Edwin could hear them. “I remembered I had my earbuds with me, and it seemed as good a solution as any.”
“It is smart, I’ll give you that,” Litty says from Niko’s right. “Although I’m not sure earbuds were a thing when this one was seven.”
“He believes he’s in a wonderland,” Jenny tells Litty, in a harsher tone than the one she used before. “Everything’s magic to him. Even my earbuds and the way they can play music. I’ve lined up some children’s songs so he doesn’t have to listen to this nonsense.” Niko follows Jenny’s hand movement up to the group formed by Crystal and Charles, teamed up against the Cat King and Monty while Mariella stands awkwardly at the side.
They look borderline murderous, with their fists balled at their sides and Charles’s body tensed in a way Niko has only seen once before—when he thought Edwin was in danger.
“I didn’t peg you for a kids’ woman,” Kingham interrupts Niko’s train of thought, bringing her back to the current conversation.
“There are so many things wrong with that line, Kingham,” Niko intervenes when she sees Jenny’s eyes ready to pop out of their sockets. “You can’t go around saying things like that.”
“I was just making small talk!” Kingham complains.
“But it implied something horrible,” Niko says. “I’ll explain later, when we’re not trying to rescue Edwin from this curse. Kingham must have meant that you didn’t seem to like kids back in Port Townsend, and yet you’re protecting Edwin from this situation.”
“I’m protecting him from them,” Jenny points out. “He doesn’t need to hear how they’ll kill each other before finding a solution. And I like kids. I just don’t like teenagers.”
“He’s a teenager,” Litty says.
“Very helpful here, Litty,” Niko almost barks. She’s reaching the end of her patience quickly with these two and their interactions in this plane.
“He’s a seven-year-old kid trapped in a teenager’s body,” Jenny explains. “It’s different.”
And how it is different is a concept that escapes Niko. But she’s happy that Jenny is back on speaking terms with her—last she remembered, Jenny was keeping her distance after the whole Maxine debacle.
“—if that’s what you think might work.” Crystal’s words cut through the air, startling Niko and making her focus on the group discussion taking place a few feet away. “I still don’t understand how you knew the son Gabriel is looking for was also Mariella’s.”
“That’s because of my powers,” the Cat King replies swiftly.
“Those same powers that aren’t enough to fix Edwin?” Charles retorts, effectively shutting the Cat King up.
Since nobody has given Niko exhaustive details on the case at hand, she needs to infer everything she can from their interactions. Surprisingly enough, she finds herself picking up things just from visual inspection—not only from body language, which is obvious this time around, but also from tiny subtleties. She can’t pinpoint what it is exactly, but it feels as though she can hear thoughts floating around if she concentrates enough.
And concentrating, Niko knows a lot about. She spent half of her life being the best student at school—up until she dropped out—so she knows her way around focusing and tuning out whatever distractions might come up around her. She closes her eyes and waits a beat before the voices come back to her.
It was obvious it was her son, Niko hears in Crystal’s voice. I bet Edwin must have come to the same conclusion right before being hit with the curse. It’s so evident I should have seen it too.
How did he know I had a son with Gabriel? Mariella’s voice takes over. It’s been a secret for so long, not even Abelard knew before it all went crazy and I ended up killed by—”
Honestly, Whiskers? Niko almost chuckles at Charles’s voice cutting through her brain. All you want to do is get into Edwin’s pants, you good-for-nothing ball of fur!
If I’m wrong, then we lose Edwin forever, the Cat King muses as Niko peruses his mind. He’ll be trapped in this loop forever, not able to grow up, always tied to that painting. If I need to beg that Nephilim, I will. God, why am I such a romantic when it comes to him?
Little thing, you’re so innocent and you’ve been through so much. Jenny’s thoughts tug at Niko’s heartstrings, for they are softer than the tough exterior she likes showing off. I wish you’d told us before what it was like to grow up with such a family. I’d have been a better role model for you.
“I would love to help,” Niko says when she allows the voices to fade. “But I’m not sure I have all the information I need.”
“I thought it was crystal clear,” the Cat King cries out. “A Nephilim has cursed Edwin, and I’ve made it worse. So now our Plan A consists of begging the Nephilim to reverse the spell on Edwin.”
“You didn’t make it worse.” Monty tries to reason with him. “You tried your best, and brought him back from Hell again. It’s not your fault the counter-spell backfired on you. You already said that Nephilim are very powerful creatures and nobody should ever fight them.”
“It was me who brought Edwin back from actual Hell,” Charles mumbles.
“Can we please focus on the task at hand?” Crystal steers the conversation back. “In the year that you’ve been gone, Niko, a lot of things have changed. But, as you can see, this rivalry isn’t one of them.”
A year. Niko blinks as she digests the bit of information. She was wondering about time-passing and how time had stalled when she was in that igloo, but she never had the impression that so many days had gone by. A year is a long time for humans, even if it’s not that much for supernatural beings. Niko’s missed so much.
“Fighting each other will not summon the Nephilim,” Jenny cuts in, eyes still trained on Edwin’s silhouette now coloring his drawing. “Probably summoning him won’t fix this mess either, but what do I know?”
“First, you need to explain how you knew that Mariella had had a son with the Nephilim,” Charles commands, lifting an eyebrow towards the Cat King as if daring him to come clean.
The Cat King bites the bullet. “It was so obvious it physically hurt. The way you all spoke about how the Nephilim asked for his son seconds before making the room explode, and how Mariella had confessed to being his lover. I just had to put two and two together.”
“But there’s something more,” Crystal insists. “Back in Hyde Park, you said something about one of my classmates. And then you were adamant on giving us more information about it.”
“That’s right! You commented something about one of the kids bullying Crystal!” Monty adds.
“You’re being bullied?” Charles barks out at the same time as Niko asks, “What kid?” and Mariella almost screeches out, “I will never allow you to find him!”
The whole room falls silent once again, this time with Mariella’s words hanging over them like Damocles’s sword.
“What do you mean, you’ll never allow us to find him?” Charles takes a menacing step towards Mariella. “Do you know where he is?” When Mariella stubbornly refuses to speak, Charles takes a few more steps until the Cat King, out of everyone, reaches out and grabs him by his jacket to keep him from causing a scene.
“Charles!” Niko chastises from behind the glass of the mason jar. “Violence is never the answer, you should know that!”
“I wasn’t going to be violent!” Charles protests, trying to get free from the Cat King’s grip. He squirms, but all he manages to do is entangle his jacket more in the Cat King’s fist. It would be comical if they weren’t so pressed for time. “I was just going to ask, nicely—”
“Nicely my ass,” Crystal mutters, only to earn herself a stern look from Jenny, who gestures to Edwin. “Come on, Jenny! He can’t hear us now, can he?”
“Still! Show some manners!”
“While we’re discussing manners,” Monty tries to infuse some sanity in the situation, “we’re losing precious time to try and summon the Nephilim. So pray tell, Mariella, do you know where your son is?”
“And more importantly,” Niko feels the need to add, “why did you feel the need to hide him from your killer? Who is your killer?”
“Her killer is her husband, Abelard Wilkins,” Charles says. “I’ll give you some microfiche pointers so you can get up to speed on this case later.”
“It wasn’t her husband, was it?” Kingham says, probably feeding on Niko’s doubts. “That’s what it looked like, but it wasn’t him, right?”
“It was the Nephilim!” Crystal and Charles exclaim at the same time. Niko presses her hands harder on the glass, making it vibrate in agreement.
“Why did he kill you?” Monty asks. “Wasn’t he supposed to love you?”
Mariella shifts uncomfortably. Niko thinks it’s a good thing that the only way out is blocked by Jenny—although Mariella, being a ghost, can phase through the walls at any moment. Although, now that she comes to think of it, Niko remembers that Mariella had shown up at the door, not through it or the wall.
Maybe the walls contain asbestos, she thinks distractedly. That would explain Mariella’s hesitancy to leave the room through the walls. Niko remembers learning that asbestos is composed partly of iron as well.
“He did love me,” Mariella cries when it’s evident she’s not getting out of the interrogation. “But he went bonkers when he learned I was pregnant.”
“Bonkers?” Charles repeats. “Didn’t he want children, then?”
“Oh, he very much wanted children.” Mariella chuckles sadly. “But he started acting weird—weirder than before, I mean. There had been signs that he might not be exactly normal—”
“Like his size and his eyes, for example?” Jenny huffs out.
“—like those, yes,” Mariella agrees. “But once he knew I was pregnant, and that it was his, he began acting all territorial. Like the baby belonged to him and him alone. He even threatened to kidnap my baby and run away when I told him I was trying to make the baby pass for Abelard’s son.”
“It was never your intention to leave your husband for the Nephilim,” the Cat King muses. “You’re one naughty lady, Mariella.”
“I wasn’t about to lose my social position, no matter how much Gabriel promised me the world,” Mariella says. “And he did promise me even the heavens. I didn’t know back then that he was God’s own spawn!”
Niko can feel Mariella’s desperation seeping from her thoughts to her words. She is sincere in her pain; Niko has the inkling that maybe they’re closer to an answer now.
“So you lied to him.”
“I told him the baby was stillborn. But instead I gave the baby to one of my closest friends—a sister, really—who couldn’t have children of her own. I didn’t think Gabriel would be back, asking for the baby, and I didn’t think Abelard would be home early that day!”
“But they both showed up,” the Cat King adds when Mariella trails off. “And one of them killed you, and I’m betting it wasn’t Abelard.”
“Abelard wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Mariella chuckles. “Gabriel took the knife and attacked me when I refused to tell him where my baby was. I kept saying the baby was born dead, even when he was boring holes in my flesh with the knife. That’s when Abelard came home, and I don’t remember much after that.”
Niko watches as Jenny checks that Edwin isn’t listening, still in his magical world of coloring and music, before she speaks. Slowly, deliberately, Jenny asks, “I’m sure I’ll regret asking this but what was the name of your friend? The one you gave your baby to? Maybe we can track her down.”
“There’s no need,” Mariella sighs. “There’s no point in hiding it anymore, now that Gabriel’s back to find a ghost baby that’s very much alive.”
“So?” Charles presses on. “The name?”
“Her name was Rachel Prickles,” Mariella rattles out. “But when she married, halfway through my pregnancy, she took her husband’s last name. So now she’s actually Rachel Hudson.”
Chapter 15
Notes:
charles's pov
Chapter Text
Belgravia, London
May 2025
Three days after the metaphorical earthquake Mariella brought upon them, Charles finds himself keeping guard in front of Crystal’s school in Belgravia with Monty of all people.
It’s been a hard pill to swallow, learning more about their client and her actions back when she was alive. Knowing all the information Mariella kept from them—information that ultimately led to Edwin going back to Hell again—makes Charles so angry that his blood would be boiling if he were alive.
He knew they shouldn’t have trusted Mariella; he knew they shouldn’t have accepted the case. But now there’s no time left to wallow in self-pity, not when they might have a chance at saving Edwin from an eternal afterlife of being tied to an old painting.
After hearing that name come out of Mariella’s lips—Hudson—Crystal turned very pale very suddenly, and she almost choked on thin air. Once she recovered, she explained that she had a classmate named Nathan Hudson who fit the description—similar age, same last name. The Cat King inquired whether that Nathan Hudson was one of the two boys bullying Crystal in Hyde Park the day he and Monty arrived in London. That’s when Charles learned that Crystal had been keeping secrets from him. She tried to downplay the situation, but Charles knew better. He was a victim of harassment, once.
He died from it.
Charles has never felt like this before—this helpless. He’s the self-appointed brawn of their agency, the one to keep them all safe and sound; and that includes saving his friends—his family—from bullying and harassment, not only pushing them out of harm’s way during cases. The fact that Crystal saw fit not to tell him about the situation at school worries him, even though Jenny has tried to explain to him that maybe Crystal was protecting him.
As if he needs protection.
Charles huffs as he kicks the ground below his boots, Monty rolling his eyes at Charles’s antics. “I would have thought you were good at this detective stuff,” Monty says, a playful edge to his voice. “You know, after being one for over thirty years.”
“He’s not the patient one,” says Niko from inside Charles’s breast pocket, her head peeking out of the hem, her hair spilling out like Rapunzel’s. “That’s Edwin.”
Charles sighs. “It’s not that I’m impatient,” he tries to explain. “It’s just—”
“You miss him,” Niko says when Charles trails off, gaze fixed on the closed doors of the school, not really seeing them.
“I miss him,” Charles confirms. Niko places a hand against the fabric of his polo shirt, right where his heart would be. The pressure is comforting in a way Charles didn’t expect. But then again, everything that’s Niko has always been unexpected.
That’s why losing her wrecked them all so much they were still recovering from the pain one year later.
And now there’s no need to miss Niko, since she is right back where she belongs, even though she’s now Sprite-sized.
In the mayhem that followed Edwin’s retrieval from Hell, the Cat King managed to open a portal to another plane—such was the extent and strength of the magic he had to summon to bring Edwin back. Charles doesn’t understand magic that much—that’s Edwin’s field—but he knows enough to comprehend that opening a portal to the Astral Plane and bringing back a soul that was lost—along with two Sprites—is an unthinkable feat.
Charles would commend the Cat King if he didn’t despise that ball of fur so much. After all, he rescued Niko from an eternity of freezing.
But Charles can’t be completely glad that she is back. Edwin doesn’t even know who they are, he doesn’t remember them. Therefore, he doesn’t remember Niko and the pain that losing her brought him; similarly, Edwin doesn’t feel the incommensurable relief and happiness Niko’s return should make him feel. Edwin isn’t himself anymore.
Charles misses his best mate, his partner for the last thirty-something years, so much it hurts.
“We’ll bring him back,” Monty assures him. “I promise you that.”
“Don’t make promises you don’t know if you can keep,” Charles fires back, eyes still trained on the doors. “This plan could still fail, and then Edwin will be tied to that painting for eternity, forced to haunt his family estate forever.”
“But he’d still be here,” Niko says. “We’re doing everything we can to help him, but even if our plan doesn’t work he’ll still be around.”
“As a seven-year-old who believes he’s in a fairy tale,” Charles mutters. “He’d hate being that helpless so much.”
“You know him well,” Monty says, more of a statement than it is a question. The words force Charles to pause and close his eyes, the pain of not having his best mate by his side—instead having been paired with that traitorous crow—flaring up in his chest.
Charles knows Edwin—his Edwin—inside and out. Sure, there are some things yet to be discovered, because nobody ever really knows someone else perfectly, but Charles feels confident that he can anticipate every move Edwin might make, every line Edwin might say. With the sole exception of that ill-timed love confession back on the stairs out of Hell. But other than that, he thinks they know each other inside out.
They work together seamlessly. They live their afterlives complementing each other—Yin to Yang, light to darkness, brain to brawn. Charles didn’t realize just how much he relied on Edwin being by his side until Edwin wasn’t there.
Sure, there’s an Edwin sitting on the floor of a haunted house in Mayfair—unable to walk far from his family painting for fear the spell might be broken and he might be sent back to Hell. But that’s not Charles’s Edwin.
“I do,” he whispers. His gaze moves briefly from the door to Monty, who’s watching him intently.
“Even when he’s not our Edwin,” Niko adds, her voice small.
“He’s the same Edwin,” Charles tells them, allowing himself to stop staring at the school door for a few moments. Last he checked, classes wouldn’t be over for at least another hour. But watching the school helps put his mind at ease. “He just doesn’t know, because he doesn’t remember us.”
Monty hums, taking Charles’s task of watching the doors instead. “It must be heartbreaking.”
“What must be?” Charles isn’t really understanding where Monty wants to go with this conversation. Over the years, the Dead Boy Detective Agency has undergone several troublesome periods, and they have always come out mostly unscathed. Charles knows, deep down to his bones, that they will persevere this time too.
“Having lost your partner, even temporarily,” Monty explains. His voice is even but the twitching of his hands betrays his nonchalant façade.
Charles doesn’t reply immediately. Instead, he takes a moment to reflect on Monty’s words, on the way they make his insides churn and his pained soul twist. There have been times, throughout the years, where he’s had to rely on his own wit to keep them out of danger—their stint in Hell a year ago being the latest example—but those haven’t been the norm. It’s Edwin saving Charles’s ass more often than not, but it’s always them against the world.
They’ve always been together during Charles’s afterlife, to the point where Charles doesn’t know who he really is without Edwin. He is his own ghost—he’s made decisions, good and bad, throughout the years that have been his and his alone—but Charles has been part of a tandem for longer than most couples last. He wouldn’t want it any other way.
Realization breaks over on him like a thunderstorm suddenly soaking them up in the middle of summer.
He is in love with Edwin. Has probably been his whole afterlife. Charles asked Edwin for some time to figure things out, because he always thought that this kind of feeling burst out of the heart of whoever is having it. He was expecting fireworks to signal the moment when he knew. Instead, he’s been falling slowly but steadily for his partner in crime without any indication.
Maybe that’s how love works. Or maybe it’s how it works for them.
However it is, he is feeling like a bloody idiot for only realizing it now.
“He is my partner,” Charles says, more to himself than to anyone who might be listening. “How have I been so blind?”
“Baffles me,” Monty teases. Niko lets out a squeal from Charles’s pocket. “If it’s any consolation, at least you weren’t oblivious enough to kiss someone who’s evidently in love with someone else.”
Charles chuckles, jealousy dissolving into something less ugly. Although it still stings, to think of Monty and Edwin and what could have been, Charles’s mind is reverberating with the echo of Edwin’s confession on the steps of Hell. Those words were for him, and him only, and still Charles wasn’t able respond in kind. And then he had the nerve to tell Edwin that they had forever to figure everything else out.
As though the first forty years of their afterlives hadn’t been enough.
“I’m an idiot.”
“On that we agree,” Monty tells him. “But now you can make it up to Edwin. We need to lure that boy back to the haunted house with us, and let Thomas do the rest.”
Charles glares at Monty. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for that ball of fur.”
“His name’s Thomas,” Monty insists. “I don’t know why you hate him so much, to be honest. He’s made mistakes, and he’s a player, but he’s not that bad.”
Charles looks back to the school when chiming reaches his ears. The doors remain closed still, but Charles feels it in his bones—he needs to be ready. He replies to Monty’s words with a stern voice. “Where do I start? He entrapped Edwin in Port Townsend as a punishment, and then he all but threw himself all over Edwin when it was evident Edwin was uncomfortable with his advances. He’s nothing but a creep.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Monty nodding. “I understand why you would see him in that light. I’m not defending him when he acts like a wild kitty, but Thomas didn’t know that Edwin wasn’t teasing him back. It’s hard to believe that a ghost who’s been around for seventy years wouldn’t have come to terms with his own sexuality.”
“Edwin doesn’t owe his journey of self-discovery to anyone.” Charles is aware that his tone is harsher than he intended—even Niko flinches in his pocket—but he couldn’t care less. “Not to me, not to you, and certainly not to that fucker.”
“I doubt that’s what Monty is saying,” Niko intervenes in a conciliatory tone. “You’re overreacting.”
“I am not,” Charles insists, crossing his arms over his chest. “Thomas,” he adds, sarcasm lacing his words, “just wanted to have fun with Edwin, use him and then forget all about him.”
“And that’s bad why exactly?” Monty counters, ignoring the sigh that comes from Charles’s breast pocket, where Niko is growing restless. “So long as both parties consent—”
“Edwin wasn’t consenting!” Charles exclaims, eyes darting to Monty. “That’s what I’m trying to say. And that joke of a king not knowing doesn’t make what he did any better!”
“Hey! Don’t take your frustration out on Thomas!” Monty retorts. “It’s nobody’s fault that it took you over thirty years to realise you have feelings for Edwin!”
“I do not—” Charles begins, but he trails off, distracted by Niko, who starts tapping on his chest frantically, her voice piercing the air. Charles turns his head towards the doors at the same time as Monty bolts to his feet, for the school day has finally ended and there’s a troupe of uniformed students rushing out of the building.
Charles stands up as well, fingers wrapped around the straps of his backpack, ready to bring out whatever weapon he may see fit—he doesn’t know how much of a fight this Nathan Hudson may put up.
Among the throng of students, he spots Crystal almost immediately. They’ve been working together for over a year now, if he counts their very first encounter—back when she was a client and not a detective—so he is almost as attuned to her as he is to Edwin.
Crystal walks up to them, head low, followed by four other kids, everything according to the plan they concocted. She approaches them quickly, as if running from her bullies—two boys and two girls taking turns between talking to each other and to Crystal. One of them, Charles notices, bears a striking resemblance to Mariella; how Crystal didn’t connect the dots sooner, Charles doesn’t know. It’s pretty obvious to Charles, who apparently is Captain Oblivious according to himself and the rest of the world.
“Monty!” she greets loudly when she reaches them, eyes darting from Monty to Charles ever so slightly. “What a nice surprise! I didn’t know you were coming today!”
Charles watches as the boy who doesn’t look like Mariella—Peter Wilkins, Mariella’s nephew, he infers—gives an appreciative once-over to Monty. Interesting, he thinks.
“Ice Princess has a friend!” one of the girls squeals.
“And quite a handsome one,” the boy Charles thinks is Mariella’s nephew says, whistling.
“Peter!” the same girl chastises. So Charles was right—he is Peter Wilkins, indeed. “Don’t go hitting on that loser’s friends. You could catch anything.”
“I’d catch whatever he may be offering.” Peter keeps flirting, winking at Monty. Charles would love to punch this jerk in the face—he may not like Monty, but he is also against sexual harassment, and this conversation is dangerously verging on that.
“Crystal,” Monty says, somehow stealing the limelight of the conversation with a blinding smile. “You hadn’t told me your friends were so—funny.”
Crystal blinks; Charles knows this isn’t part of the plan, even though they haven’t really figured out how to lure Nathan into following them to the haunted house, but given how it’s playing out, maybe it’s for the best. “They are not my friends.”
“Now, Crystal dear,” Peter coos, stepping closer to her. “We’re the closest you have to friends in London. Care to introduce us to hot stuff here?”
Charles sees how Crystal’s fists ball at her sides. He wants to snap, to tell this jackass that Crystal has family in London, but he remains silent. His job right now is to make sure nobody gets left behind on the route to the haunted house.
“I’m Monty Finch,” Monty says, exaggerating his American drawl. “And you must be—” he pauses for what looks like effect when he is really waiting on Charles to whisper the correct name to him, “Peter, right? And Nathan, I suppose. Crystal’s always talking about you guys.” He shoots an apologetic glance at the girls. “Sorry, but I never caught your names. Crystal and I are very much alike when it comes to our tastes.”
Unbelievably, Peter snickers. Crystal looks like she’s about to pop a vein, and Charles shares the sentiment. The whole situation is deranged, and Charles would be laughing about it if it weren’t so dire—Edwin needs them to figure this out and bring him back for real.
“Wanna go somewhere?” Peter offers casually.
“I wouldn’t mind,” Monty replies, playful tone taking over. “I know just the place. Crystal, do you remember that place right beside the museum in Mayfair? Close to your house.” Crystal nods. “Let’s go there.”
It’s taken Monty less than five minutes to get the whole gang of tossers to follow them all the way to Mayfair.
Chapter 16
Notes:
thomas's pov
Chapter Text
The Haunted House, London
May 2025
The butcher is grating Thomas’s nerves. She’s not doing anything, Thomas has to admit—she’s simply tending to Edwin like he is her child, and the voice she uses to address him is starting to give Thomas a headache.
The situation is not ideal. Although he wasn’t around when the Nephilim hit the ghosts with his spell, Thomas is the only one to blame for how things have escalated until reaching a point of almost no return right now. And he’ll be cursing himself forever if he doesn’t find a way to reverse what has essentially turned Edwin into a bratty seven-year-old trapped in his usual teenage body.
Even though enough time has passed so Thomas isn’t infatuated with him anymore, seeing Edwin not being himself is unnerving. Sure, this Edwin is showing signs of the ghost Thomas knows—giving smart retorts despite his young age, questioning everything and being a brat through and through—but he’s still a child. And, if Thomas doesn’t find a solution soon, he may remain a kid for the rest of his afterlife.
Thomas sighs, attracting the butcher’s attention from across the room. She’s managed to find herself a comfortable spot to pass the time while Thomas has been pacing back and forth, almost boring holes in the decaying floor. She’s been reading a book Charles produced from that bottomless backpack of his.
“You’re going to fall through the floor if you keep doing that,” she says, lowering her book. “And you’re going to give me a headache. You’re also making Edwin nervous.”
Thomas glances towards the makeshift table by the far corner of the room, a bunch of books spread over it—Edwin is currently sitting with his back straight, looking at Thomas as though he holds all the answers to the universe. It’s been so long since Thomas has had to deal with kids—even longer since he was one himself—that he isn’t really sure how to behave when Edwin looks up at him with such wonder.
“He isn’t,” Edwin protests. “It’s distracting, but I’m not nervous. Why should I be? You’ve promised Mother will be back soon from her travels, and that I don’t have to go to St. Hilarion’s.”
Thomas closes his eyes. His heart aches whenever Edwin mentions the school where he was doomed to Hell. It’s just so casual, the way this Edwin drops bombs like not wanting to go to school, and it’s a contrast to the Edwin he knows—uptight and proper, British through and through—because Thomas knows Edwin has become who he is partly because he attended St. Hilarion’s.
He clears his throat, intent on dissolving the dread pooling in his gut, and cheekily says, “I’m distracting.”
Thomas bites down on the laughter that bubbles in his throat at the butcher glaring at him.
“Still,” she says, “you should stop. It’s making me nervous.”
“Miss Jenny,” Edwin says, hand stretching out to touch the book on top of the table. He sounds like a seven-year-old would; Thomas finds it very distressing to realize that Edwin’s psyche doesn’t match his appearance.
“Yes, dear?” And there it comes again, the voice that’s nagging at Thomas’s mind. It’s soft and supple, and it doesn’t really suit the butcher, with her tough exterior and her badass tattoos.
“Can you please read me once again the story of the blind detective?”
The butcher nods, picking up one of the books and opening it to the first page. Thomas resumes his pacing to the window, where he comes to a halt abruptly when he sees the scene on the streets. He checks his pocketwatch—he never really saw fit to get himself a wristwatch—and huffs out a surprised laugh. “That was fast, even for him,” he mutters. Louder, he declares, “I’d get ready if I were you. The cavalry has arrived!”
“The cavalry! I have read in my books that the cavalry always comes to rescue people!” Edwin exclaims. “Who needs saving?”
“You, you idiot!” one of the Sprites calls out from the mason jar they’ve been trapped in. Thomas mostly forgot about the little menaces that came back along with Niko when he tried to bring Edwin back from Hell. The butcher apparently didn’t, for she stands up swiftly and covers the mason jar with the first thing she can get her hands on—a ratty blanket Charles recovered from his backpack.
“They said a funny word,” Edwin snickers. The warmth in his voice melts Thomas’s heart. “When Emmett says funny words, Father gets really angry.”
Thomas shakes his head, turning his back once again on the butcher and Edwin. He has never had such a strong need to strangle anyone—not even his worst enemies—as he does with Edwin’s father. His remnants have probably dissolved into dust long ago, but that doesn’t mean that the urge to unearth Edwin’s father and kill him again isn’t there. He thinks Charles feels the same way, if the daggers shooting out of his eyes whenever Edwin has mentioned his father are any indication.
“It’s too soon,” the butcher mutters.
“We need to make do, then,” Thomas tells her.
It’s time to implement the plan, even though he thought they’d have more time. He moves towards the door swiftly, a result of his feline nature; he needs to shift back to being a cat but he doesn’t want to freak Edwin out. The ghost has been very receptive about the strange things happening around him, but Thomas doesn’t want to risk it.
He walks out of the room and takes a few steps into the corridor before willing his shape to become the black cat he’s been ever since Esther Finch robbed him of his third life. Thomas licks his paw before jumping downstairs to meet the group in an inconspicuous way.
When he reaches them, one of the human boys—the one who’s not the son of the Nephilim—is talking nonstop about something that he doesn’t quite catch, but it seems to be boring Crystal to tears. Even Charles is stifling a yawn—even though ghosts don’t sleep, Thomas has to bite down on a smile at the realization that they can get bored. The Nephilim’s son casts a glance towards Charles and it’s then that Thomas realizes one of the flaws in their plan.
The Nephilim’s son can see ghosts.
He must be a professional in hiding it, since Charles doesn’t seem to have noticed and Crystal definitely isn’t aware. Thomas knows her well enough to be sure that she’d be much more protective of her friend if she felt that the Nephilim’s son was very much aware of his existence.
“We have arrived,” Monty interrupts the human unceremoniously, his voice almost harsh. Thomas loves that wild side of him—the side that Monty only shows when he feels the need to defend himself. Or when he’s fed up, which seems to be the case here. “These are the buildings I was telling you about.”
“It was certainly more entertaining than whatever this jerk was saying,” Charles jabs, earning a chuckle from Crystal and a weird look from the Nephilim’s son.
“This one,” Monty continues, expertly ignoring Charles, “is a museum that caught fire a few days ago, apparently from supernatural causes. And that one,” he gestures to the house Thomas has just exited, “is rumored to be haunted by a ghost. So tell me, which one will we be braving today?”
“Both sound scary,” one of the girls accompanying them whispers. “I’d rather not enter either.”
“Don’t be such a pussy,” the talkative boy says. “If you’re scared, you should stay outside.”
Monty’s eyes widen as he steals a glance at where Thomas is now waiting for them, by the steps of Edwin’s family home. His message is clear—they need all of them inside the building so the butcher can follow them with Edwin and the Sprites unnoticed.
Crystal comes to their rescue—like she always does, even if it pains Thomas to admit it.
“Don’t let Peter fool you,” she says, elbowing the girl softly. “He’s just fishing for an excuse to stay outside because he is the one who’s terrified.”
Thomas doesn’t quite believe it when the girl all but giggles and takes a step forward. “We can’t let Peter scurry off!” she declares, although the slight tremor in her hands betrays her forwardness as she grabs her friend’s arm and walks towards the museum. Thomas slips through the ajar entrance, preceding them on his four legs before climbing up the stairs, Monty and the group hot on his heels.
When he enters the room, it greets him with the smell of smoke and something else—something like defeat laced with evil. The scent hits him like a freight train, and he only has a split second before he recognizes what it is.
The Nephilim is here.
Thomas realizes what a huge misstep it is for him not to have cleared the space before. If the Nephilim is already around, he may not have enough time to protect everyone from his powers.
Thomas turns around, still in his cat form, frantically moving his tail so Monty can understand.
Instead, the girls squat to his level and coo, “Oh, such a beautiful cat? Who’s a good boy?”
Thomas can’t waste any time, not when he spies Jenny sliding into the room, tugging Edwin along and keeping the Sprites safe in their jar. At the risk of traumatizing the humans forever, he makes the executive decision to send it all to Hell—no pun intended—and shapeshifts into his human form right in front of an audience. The girls, he finds out, don’t seem to find him especially appealing, if their gasps are anything to go by.
He doesn’t really care.
“He is here,” Thomas warns, bringing his hands in front of his chest and muttering a spell. Some of the debris that was gathering dust on the floor comes together in a heap under the force of his magic. “Everyone who’s not supernatural, behind that makeshift fortress!”
Monty is quick on the uptake, as he pushes everyone following Thomas’s instructions. Edwin looks like a deer caught in headlights, but Thomas can’t soothe his confusion, for the Nephilim shows up all of a sudden, out of thin air.
“Who dares disturb my peace?” he bellows.
Thomas knows that ghosts can’t see Nephilim, but he’s not so sure they can’t hear them. The gasps behind him, coming from the humans that Crystal and Monty have brought, mix with Charles’s disgruntled protest.
“We come in peace,” he begins, trying not to be intimidated by the size of the Nephilim. Thomas has only ever heard of them, never faced one, after all.
But the Nephilim isn’t having any of Thomas’s explanations. Swiftly, he lifts one hand towards Thomas and speaks in a tongue Thomas hasn’t heard in centuries. It takes him a hot second to comprehend exactly what is going on.
They are being cursed by a Nephilim.
Thomas has only ever heard stories of the consequences of a Nephilim’s curse—the case of Edwin and Charles being the last of those tales to scare kitties at night—but he has the feeling he’s about to be on the receiving end.
He can’t let anything happen to his clowder—and that includes, much to Thomas’s chagrin, the butcher and Charles. They’re here to save Edwin, and Thomas will forfeit another of his lives before he even thinks of giving up.
He positions himself between the debris fortress and the Nephilim, ignoring the sounds that come from the place where Monty has herded the humans. A soft sound of feathers lets him know that something’s not quite the way it should be. When he lifts his gaze from the Nephilim, he sees a crow drawing circles around the supernatural being.
“Monty!” Crystal cries out, but her voice doesn’t stop Monty from attempting to claw the Nephilim’s eyes out of their sockets.
The Nephilim disregards him like he’s an insect, thankfully not hurting him in the process. But it gives Thomas enough pause to compose himself and find the correct counterspell.
And then, when Monty finds his way back to the group, the Nephilim strikes, voice roaring in Aramaic, giving Thomas little to no notice.
Everything happens so fast that Thomas can barely register half of it. While he is trying to deflect the Nephilim’s spell—hands outstretched, counterspell silkily spilling from his tongue—he sees, out of the corner of his eye, how Charles pushes Edwin out of harm’s way. Crystal falls to the floor, bringing the butcher and Niko down with her. The humans are cowering behind the debris Thomas conjured to protect them while the Sprites yell expletives at the Nephilim from the safety of their enchanted jar.
“Stop!” says a voice, strong, louder than the ruckus caused by the Nephilim. “You have no right to hurt them!”
For a moment, Thomas loses his focus, his eyes drifting to the place where the voice has come from. Standing tall in front of the debris, Thomas sees the Nephilim’s son—Nathan, a murmur in his mind—staring directly towards his father. From the low fuck that Charles exhales behind him, Thomas infers that, somehow, the Nephilim has managed to make himself visible to ghosts too.
“Nathan!” one of the human girls shrieks, panic evident in her voice. “What are you doing?”
Before the boy can reply, the Nephilim flicks his wrist and all the humans behind the debris flop down to the ground as though they’re puppets whose strings have been cut. Thomas quickly checks that his humans are still conscious; Crystal barely moves her hand, spreading two fingers on the floor to let him know that they are fine. He sees Niko crawling out from beneath Crystal, and lets out the breath he was unconsciously holding. Close to them, Monty is poised on Charles’s shoulder while the young ghost shields Edwin with his incorporeal body.
Once his head count is complete, Thomas focuses back on the Nephilim. He thanks his centuries of practice for the fact that his protection spell has held. The Nephilim would have killed them all otherwise.
The Nephilim allows his arms to fall gently to his sides, shoulders slumping forward ever so slightly.
“Son,” the Nephilim says, his voice dropping until it’s almost inaudible. “I’ve finally found you.”
Chapter 17
Notes:
edwin's pov
Chapter Text
The Payne-Hoverall Memorial House-Museum, London
May 2025
Everything happens faster than Edwin’s mind can catch up. One second he is standing in the middle of the living room where Mother used to play with him—although this place seems to have burnt down—and the next Charles is pushing him down onto the floor without warning.
Edwin followed Miss Jenny here. He doesn’t even know how Miss Jenny knows where he lives, or that this room is his favorite in the whole world because of the big painting that hangs on one of the walls. It portrays Mother and Emmett and Edeline, and Edwin himself—no trace of Father whatsoever. Miss Jenny seemed to know what she was doing, holding his hand as they climbed the stairs slowly.
However, once inside the room, Edwin barely has time to take in his surroundings before being unceremoniously shoved towards the ground. As he falls, his head a swirl of thoughts and fears, something clicks inside of him—something primal, something that feels ancient enough to be part of himself.
Edwin feels the push of Charles’s hand against his back, a protective gesture, and then he remembers. He remembers the long nights learning how to be a ghost and the sunrises shared together and the petty fights. He remembers the night he met Charles and the day they met Crystal, and everything that seemed to be fractured in his mind mends itself as his incorporeal body touches the floor. Memories from the first time he died laced with images from his latest stint in Hell and these past few days when he thought he was seven again. Against the floor, Edwin shudders and cringes in shame. There will be time to reflect on what’s been going on, he thinks; right now, they are facing a Nephilim.
Edwin keeps his head low, hands sprawled at either side of his head. He listens intently, and when the Nephilim speaks in a quiet voice he rejoices in the fact that, somehow, they have managed to soften the monster.
He chides himself—he hasn’t done anything. He’s been too busy regressing to his seven-year-old self while the rest of the gang has been working to find a cure for him as well as a solution to Mariella’s case.
As the Nephilim keeps talking—something about having found his son at last, but Edwin can’t really be sure, for he is kind of distracted by Charles’s hands on his back—Edwin inches closer to Charles. It’s almost imperceptible at first, but at some point Charles notices the movement and presses his hand harder against Edwin’s back.
“Mate,” he hisses, voice strained. “I know it’s not a comfortable position, but you have to stay still, okay? I promise it’ll pass soon.”
Maybe it’s the way Charles talks to him, as though he’s talking to a young kid, or maybe it’s Edwin’s own feelings about his inability to help with the case, but he hisses back against his common sense, “I know perfectly well how dangerous a Nephilim can be when angry, Charles.”
That earns him a surprised look from his friend, who appears to be both elated and aghast. “Not the best timing to come back to your senses, mate,” he mutters. His hand moves from Edwin’s back to cover Edwin’s fingers on the floor, a gesture similar to the one they shared when they were facing Esther Finch’s interdimensional monster—one gesture that betrays the harshness of his words. “I’m glad you’re back.”
“Me too.”
“As happy as I am not to have to babysit you anymore,” Jenny tells them, her voice barely a whisper coming from Charles’s other side, “either shut up or figure out a way to get the hell out of here. No pun intended.”
Edwin swallows the chuckle rising in his throat. He knows she is right, they should try to escape this dangerous situation, but he doesn’t need to lift his head to know that he can’t leave. Even though he can only see Monty, Edwin can feel Thomas’s magic lingering around the air, binding them to safety with a strength only he is capable of harboring.
“We can’t leave, not now,” Edwin says. “We need to regroup, and that means finding a way to keep safe without having Thomas protect us.”
“Can you please keep quiet?” Crystal mutters harshly before she seems to realize what’s really going on. “Oh my gosh, Edwin, you’re not seven anymore!”
“Lovely reunion we have here, I see,” comes the voice of the Nephilim from above them. Edwin knows he can’t see him—Thomas’s magic isn’t powerful enough to make Nephilim visible to ghosts—but he lifts his head all the same.
Surprisingly enough, he can actually see the Nephilim. “Everyone supernatural, on your feet,” the Nephilim commands. “Don’t make me make you,” he threatens when none of them move.
Slowly, Charles and Crystal rise, Edwin following suit. Monty imitates them, and even Niko and the Sprites rush out of their haven. Thomas is still standing, but when Edwin looks at him he sees the toll the magic has taken on him—the repercussions of trying to bring him back to normal—in the paleness of his face and the slight tremor of his hands.
“Why does she not move?” the Nephilim asks, his feet nudging Jenny who’s still on the floor. “You, on your feet too.”
“I’m not supernatural,” Jenny mumbles, but she moves. “I’m just a butcher.”
“A butcher who can see ghosts and interact with supernatural beings,” the Nephilim retorts. “I’d say that makes you at least special. You know who I am, right? Not like those humans there,” he continues, pointing at the heap of unconscious teenagers—Edwin guesses they are the Nephilim’s son’s friends.
The Nephilim clicks his tongue, arms still around the shoulders of another teenager. Edwin frowns as he takes in the scene—the boy is taller than any other teenager Edwin has ever seen, and his eyes are the color of honey in summer. He wonders how Crystal didn’t notice the supernatural traits in him. Now that he can properly see the Nephilim—although there’s still a chance he might curse them all over again—Edwin can see the resemblance between them.
“You can lower your defenses,” the Nephilim orders Thomas. “I won’t attack you. I even made myself visible to your little ghost friends.”
Thomas exhales as he lowers his hands, the trembling in his arms subsiding as he rubs his fingers over the junctions. “I can put them up faster than you think,” he threatens, eliciting a hearty laugh from the Nephilim.
“Let me doubt you’d do it fast enough,” he says. “You have my word. I won’t harm you. Not with my son here.”
“You keep saying that.” The only human teenager awake finally speaks. “But I can’t be your son. My father is—”
“The man you call father adopted you when your mother abandoned you to keep me away,” the Nephilim spits. “She lied to me.”
“It was to keep Nathan safe,” Crystal speaks up. “Mariella didn’t want her son to—”
“She kept him from me,” the Nephilim says harshly, his eyes still trained on the teenager—Nathan. “She knew she was pregnant and she knew who I was. She kept my son from me.”
“And who are you?” Nathan questions bravely. Edwin will give him that—he has guts. “You keep talking and talking, but you haven’t told me your name.”
“I am Gabriel,” the Nephilim says easily, voice softening as he smiles. “I am a Nephilim, son of one of God’s sons. And you are my son, Nathan, and that makes you—”
“God’s great-grandson,” Nathan mumbles, shaking his head. “This is insane.”
Edwin has to agree. The whole situation is not ideal, and if he weren’t a ghost he’d also be overwhelmed by it. In fact, he’s a bit spooked by the outcome of his encounter with the Nephilim—he was cursed to relive his first death over and over until someone broke the spell, and even then he was able to come back as himself. He can’t imagine what this poor kid must be feeling.
The Nephilim, however, doesn’t seem to be fazed by the palpable hostility oozing from Nathan. He is still smiling down at the boy, his eyes lit up with something akin to paternal love. Nathan, for his part, is staring up at the Nephilim; Edwin believes that his glare could bore a hole in the Nephilim’s skull—were it not for the fact that that stares can’t really kill. He feels like he’s standing in the middle of the final match at Wimbledon, gaze jumping from Nathan to the Nephilim like he is watching a ball being tossed between Norman Brookes and Anthony Wilding during the challenge round on a particularly hot July Sunday.
He notices Thomas inching closer to them, step by step, as if trying to regroup in case the Nephilim decides he is fed up with this game. Edwin smiles softly at the Cat King, in an attempt to convey everything he needs to communicate—I am fine, I am back—but there’s no recognition in Thomas’s eyes.
Maybe Edwin is just bad at playing charades.
“It’s not insanity,” Gabriel is saying when Edwin focuses once again on the situation at hand. “That woman didn’t want you to be brought up as the spawn of God.”
“And, from what I see, she had good reasons.” Nathan doesn’t hesitate as his words are fired with purpose. He doesn’t back down when Gabriel takes a step closer, his looming presence an unspoken menace. “If all the tales about this place are true, and you’re behind them all—”
Gabriel lifts a hand, as though asking for permission to speak.
Edwin doesn’t have any recollection of a Nephilim ever asking for anything—in his experience, God’s offspring give and take as their hearts desire, never taking into account anyone else’s feelings. Not that he’s encountered many Nephilim in his life—or his afterlife—but Sa’al’s words echo in his mind as if he spoke them seconds ago.
God’s spawn are real sons of bitches.
Nathan trails off, giving Gabriel the chance to intervene. “I was trying to find you,” he explains, voice pitching higher as he speaks. “I brought young ghosts here with their babies because I know babies never go on to their afterlives without their mothers. I tried to—”
“You mean you hunted them down,” Nathan interrupts, face growing red with anger. “You lured ghosts here who couldn’t see you. They were probably terrified because they didn’t know what was going on. And then what? When you found out they weren’t me, what did you do?”
The room falls silent after Nathan’s last words, left lingering in the air like heavy rain clouds.
“How do you know all of that?” Gabriel asks, brows furrowed in confusion, his face a mirror of what Edwin—and, he guesses, everyone else—is feeling. “How is it possible that you—”
“What happens to ghosts that face a Nephilim’s wrath?” Nathan counters with another question, deliberately ignoring Gabriel’s inquiry. Edwin is also trying to understand how Nathan has been able to acquire such knowledge about Gabriel’s activities when the Agency and its members have barely reached those conclusions, when Nathan shakes his head and continues talking. “What happens to ghosts,” he repeats, “that face a Nephilim’s wrath?”
“His wrath obliterates them,” Edwin says before he can stop himself. “They get effaced off any plane. No Heaven or Hell or in between. Just—complete destruction.”
His words manage to bring attention upon him—all eyes trained on him as though he’s an alien from another world. Crystal gasps somewhere behind him, chorused by Niko’s delighted squeal—Edwin needs to hug her properly now that he’s back to usual, since her return happened while he was still regressed to his seven-year-old self. In front of him, Thomas’s back tenses, but he doesn’t look over his shoulder. Ever the caretaker, Edwin thinks, even when Thomas just wants to appear like a predatory king.
“Not that we have experienced it,” Charles quickly amends. “We’ve had our fair share of Nephilim’s nightmares to deal with, though. We saw it first-hand, while investigating.”
Nathan nods. “So you’ve been sending ghosts into a black hole for the sake of finding me,” he sums up, arms crossed. “Well, now I’m here, and I’m telling you I want nothing to do with you. I don’t want to be associated with a monster.”
“Even if you are one yourself?” Gabriel retaliates, not missing a beat. He gestures towards the heap of human bodies lying unconscious on the floor. “You’ve partaken in the accosting of innocent people, if what I feel is correct.”
Edwin shudders. It takes him a moment to remember, through the haze his mind is still in, that Nephilim can read people—and ghosts—like books. Their feelings, their thoughts, their past and their present. He doesn’t want to know how much fodder they have collectively provided.
“And I am ashamed of that,” Nathan replies. He turns to Crystal; Edwin dares to mimic him and faces his friend, who looks torn between watching him agape and paying attention to Nathan. “I’ve been wanting to apologize for that. Not the best timing, though.”
“No, not really,” Crystal admits. “But we may never have any other chance.”
“I am growing tired of this game,” the Nephilim interrupts. Edwin turns to him in time to see how he wiggles his fingers, and suddenly everyone who’s not out of it is floating in the air. “You’re coming with me, son.”
“Never!” Nathan complains, twitching in the air.
“You don’t have a say in this,” Gabriel insists. “We’re going to start anew, and you’re going to learn to respect me.”
“And them?”
The Nephilim laughs at Nathan’s question as if it’s a silly one. “They’re going to understand what it means to be actually obliterated. Last time I simply cursed them, but now I don’t feel so forgiving.”
He stretches his arms, fingers pointing at the gang, and he mutters something in Aramaic. It’s so quick that Edwin doesn’t pick up on it. He reaches out, hand blindly finding Charles’s. Edwin’s fingers intertwine with Charles’s, and he squeezes tight, trying to convey everything he feels.
He only regrets that Niko has come back to find herself wished off the Earth again. But he wouldn’t change anything else.
Not even the pain and the grief and the strife.
He closes his eyes and braces for the definite end.
Chapter 18
Notes:
crystal's pov
Chapter Text
The Payne-Hoverall Memorial House-Museum, London
May 2025
Crystal never thought she’d die at seventeen at the hands of an angry Nephilim. And yet here she is, sheltering behind Edwin and Charles, with the Cat King trying his best to deflect whatever attack Gabriel might be thinking of shooting.
She bets this wasn’t what Niko thought she’d be coming back to—surviving an alternate plane only to find Death lurking over them in this one.
Crystal can’t imagine what Jenny must be thinking—Jenny, who survived Maxine’s attempt at forcing her to start a relationship, who moved halfway across the world to take care of two dead boys and a psychic. And yet Jenny is standing tall, her tight ponytail swaying at her back as she looks toward the Nephilim, brave and unafraid.
Crystal wishes she could be more like Jenny, more like Niko, more like Monty, who’s morphed into his crow form and is currently flying overhead. Crystal wishes some of Edwin’s stubbornness to keep being alive rubbed off on her. Maybe even some of Charles’s recklessness. They are the most alive ghosts she’s ever met, and she’s even dated a demon.
That’s the only perk of her dying right now—she gets rid of David once and for all.
Her thoughts are interrupted by Gabriel’s bellowing, his voice echoing in the burnt walls, tearing through the remnants of Edwin’s childhood. Crystal’s heart aches for him, for the terrible loss he’s facing over and over again.
The words in Aramaic cut through the haze of the room. Crystal braces herself for impact, not sure if she’s going to feel anything when the curse hits. She’s going to die like she’s lived—surrounded by people she loves and yet somehow disconnected from them.
She closes her eyes, unable to face her destiny right now, and waits. And waits. And waits.
Nothing happens.
Gabriel’s expletives make her open her eyes, soul pulled by the way the Nephilim is cursing them and their bloodlines. It takes half a second for the situation to sink in; when it does, she doesn’t know what to feel.
They’re all still on their feet. Edwin and Charles are still holding hands, and Jenny’s fingers have found Crystal’s arm and are squeezing her tightly. Back inside the jar, Niko and the Sprites are cheering on, Monty poised on top. Nathan is still on his feet in front of his father, valiantly showing them what standing up for what you believe looks like.
And, a few steps forward stands the Cat King, with his arms outstretched and his head cocked to the side. His whole body is trembling, and there’s a translucent wall separating their group from the Nephilim. As she stares, thin rays of light keep coming out of the Cat King’s fingertips, adding to the reflection in front of them. The light changes and the wall becomes iridescent.
Crystal can’t help but think there’s a whole rainbow casting its protection over them.
The Nephilim is still cursing them, his words spilling through the iridescent wall but dissolving into thin air as they trespass Thomas’s protection. Crystal has never seen anything like this. There’s something washing over her skin—something soft and supple—and it takes her a moment to realize what it is, since it’s a feeling she isn’t accustomed to.
It feels like love.
The Nephilim takes a step back, and the force of his words lessens. Thomas doesn’t give up his protective wall, but Crystal can see how the effort is taking a huge toll on him—ihis body is not just trembling under the pressure of keeping up whatever spell he is casting over them; his head is starting to bob uncoordinatedly, as if he’s having a stroke. Crystal doesn’t rule out that option; the magic he’s casting seems to be powerful enough to make God’s spawn back off.
“Stop!” comes a howling voice from the entrance, a few feet behind them. Crystal cranes her neck, body half-turned as she watches Mariella float into the room, her bloodied dress armor around her soul. “Stop right this instant! It’s not them you’re looking for, Gabriel!”
The Nephilim stops cursing them, and, as the words get silenced, Thomas drops his defense wall, just briefly. Crystal can see, out of the corner of her eye, how his hands are still tense and twitching, displayed in front of him like a shield. She chooses to move forward, breaking the stillness that has taken over them, and places her own hand on the Cat King’s shoulder, applying a—hopefully—reassuring pressure into the knots she can feel underneath the clothing. Thomas visibly relaxes at the touch, as though he knows that she’s a friend and not a foe, and allows his hands to fall to his sides. He sags against her, almost collapsing into her arms. Crystal stumbles slightly under the unexpected weight but she manages not to fall to the ground, instead cradling Thomas in an embrace while Edwin and Charles come to her aid. Monty comes back to his human form to help. Together, they place Thomas lying on the floor, filthy and greasy and burnt out as it is, so he can rest.
“Why did you do it?” Edwin mutters, fingers caressing Thomas’s forehead, brushing Thomas’s fringe away. “You could have died, you silly, silly cat.”
“Couldn’t stop myself,” Thomas mumbles back, voice hoarse. “You know me. I crave the attention.”
Crystal wants to cry. The scene reminds her of the past—of a sinister living room and a devious machine and a witch ready to kill and a friend lying on the floor.
But this time it feels different. This time it feels like they have a chance to win.
“Now rest.” Edwin is still talking in hushed tones, soothing Thomas with his voice. “I’ll be here when you wake up. I promise.” The Cat King visibly relaxes under Edwin’s words, and he closes his eyes. There’s a lull in the air as his human form blurs around the edges until all they can see is a black cat, purring under Edwin’s touch.
Crystal notices how Charles gives Edwin a weird look, but she files that information for later—along with her questions about Edwin being back to normalcy without any apparent reason. They have more pressing issues at hand, and with Thomas reverting to his feline form they now can focus on Gabriel and Mariella, who are quarreling in the middle of the room.
Crystal gets to her feet, dismissing the way her joints complain after having been thrown across the room by a Nephilim. Nathan gives her a confused look as she steps close to him, the rest of his friends still unconscious on the floor.
“What’s going on?” Nathan whispers. “Who is that woman?”
“Uh,” Crystal replies, eloquent as ever. “That’s Mariella Wilkins.”
“Wilkins as in—” Nathan gestures towards the heap of humans behind them, and Crystal nods. “Wow.”
“Peter’s mom is her sister-in-law. She’s also, you know,” she continues, shrugging. It doesn’t feel right to be the one disclosing such information, but apparently Nathan hasn’t picked up on the obvious situation. “She’s also your mother.”
Nathan falls silent, gaze following Mariella as she positions herself in the middle of the room, facing the Nephilim. Crystal knows that she can see him because of the spell Thomas cast over Gabriel; it amazes Crystal that Mariella is managing to stand in front of her murderer—a powerful, giant supernatural being descended straight from God—when merely a few days ago she was terrified of the presence that lurked around and tortured ghosts.
“Why are you doing this, Gabriel?” Mariella demands, her voice rising strong. “Why are you doing it now? You had sixteen years to track down the spirit of your son.”
“You kept him from me!” Gabriel roars. He straightens up, head almost touching the ceiling as he rises to his full height. “I had a right to take my son to where he belongs!”
“And where is that? Heaven?” Mariella laughs, but it comes out sadder than anything Crystal has ever heard. “I didn’t want to believe you when you told me you’d been banished from Heaven for longer than you’ve roamed this Earth, Gabriel. I thought you were a liar, but then you started acting so violent that I wasn’t about to let you bring my son to damnation with you!”
“That wasn’t your choice to make!” Gabriel takes a menacing step towards Mariella. “I gave you what you wanted! What your useless excuse for a husband couldn’t! You owed me my son!”
Crystal fears for their safety, because Thomas is in no shape or form to protect them anymore, but Mariella doesn’t seem fazed. She stands her ground, hands on her hips.
“I owed you nothing!” Mariella raises her voice to match Gabriel’s, even though her words fizzle out in the air. “I sure as hell didn’t owe you a son!” She moves forward, and the impossible happens—Gabriel takes a step back. “You fooled me, threatened me and my family, killed me! And you still have the nerve to come back sixteen years later claiming the right to a son that shouldn’t have been yours in the first place!”
Gabriel cowers under Mariella’s harsh words. She doesn’t move, but her presence looms over them as though she is seven feet tall. Her spine is tense from where Crystal can see her.
“You promised me a son,” Gabriel insists, but his words lack the heat from before. “And you took him from me.”
“That’s not reason enough to torture ghosts in your quest to become a father,” Mariella tells him sternly. “You’ve been haunting this place, you’ve been killing innocent souls—”
“I’m God’s spawn!”
“You’re a murderer, Gabriel!” Mariella screams, her ghostly form morphing as she becomes more and more distressed. Crystal can’t see her face, but she witnesses as the stains in her dress deepen their red color as she floats higher up in the air. “And you didn’t even have the guts to come back to where you killed me, you coward piece of shit!”
“I couldn’t!” Gabriel bellows, his voice reverberating inhumanly. “I wished nothing more than to set foot back there and find what I was looking for, but I’m banished from every place where I have committed a blood crime!”
The air becomes charged with something that Crystal can’t pinpoint, but she knows it’s not safe to remain in the room. It’s probably not safe to even remain in the same building, not with what is growing between Mariella and Gabriel.
Whatever it is they will start fighting over, Crystal doesn’t want to be in the same plane as they are. She has never seen Mariella behave the way she is right now; admittedly, they have only known each other for a few days, but Mariella never really struck her as the type to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Maybe, Crystal thinks, when it was just Mariella’s fate hanging by a thread she didn’t think she needed to scratch to defend herself. And now, with Nathan’s life on the line, Mariella seems to find enough strength to fight tooth and nail.
“We need to move, now,” Crystal says, hopefully loud enough for everyone else to hear.
“Why?” Nathan asks, not budging at all.
“There’s no time for that,” Crystal urges. She can feel the tension building up in the room around them. “We need to get out of here now!”
She grabs Nathan by his sleeve and tugs at him to start moving.
“What do we do with them?” Nathan asks, pointing at Peter and the two girls—Crystal realizes that she never learned their names.
“Boys?” Crystal calls out as she’s dragging Nathan across the room. She is aware that she can’t carry those dead weights; not even Jenny, who’s snatching the mason jar and making a beeline for the door, can pick three bodies up. The most reasonable thing is for the supernatural beings in the room to help them.
“On it!” Charles calls back.
He moves from his spot beside Edwin towards Peter and the girls. Monty shapeshifts back into a crow and tests his strength by grabbing the girls by their shirts. When he deems that he can carry them outside, he flaps his wings furiously and flies out of the door. Charles picks Peter up while Edwin cradles Thomas in his arms. They all rush away and out of the room, Crystal running before them, until she can feel the tension subsiding once she’s taken a few steps into the corridor and away from the room.
She turns to help Charles with Peter, only to find that Edwin is kneeling on the threshold, allowing the cat in his arms to roam free on the ground.
“C’mon, mate,” Charles urges him. “You can let Whiskers run around when we’re all out of this damned building.”
“I can’t walk out. I can feel the painting pulling me in,” Edwin tells them, a finality in his voice Crystal has never heard before. She remembers that Thomas tied Edwin’s soul to the painting to bring him back from Hell, but she would never have thought that fact would become Edwin’s downfall. “Get yourselves to safety. I will be fine.”
“Like Hell you will,” Charles retaliates, dropping Peter onto the floor. Crystal shudders at the thumping noise that fills the air. “I’m not leaving you behind.”
“You have no choice,” Edwin insists. “Please, Charles.”
“Edwin,” Charles says, but he gets interrupted by the rising noise coming from inside the room. “You can’t stay there. You won’t make it out.”
“It is what it is,” Edwin tells him. Crystal sees a tear falling down his cheek. Knowing Edwin, Crystal fears that he is losing whatever grip he has on his own feelings.
“Crystal,” Charles says, not even looking at her. “Go on. We’ll be right behind you.”
“I’m not leaving you two here,” Crystal argues. Behind her, Jenny calls out to them. It seems like nobody else has noticed the hitch in their plan—how Edwin wouldn’t be able to follow. And it pains Crystal to no end to realize, just now, that she feels at home with the two of them—with Charles’s golden retriever energy and Edwin’s pettiness, Crystal has found her family.
And family isn’t left behind.
“You have no choice,” Charles parrots Edwin’s words as he steps closer to the threshold where Edwin is being pulled backwards. “I’ll figure it out, I promise.”
Before Crystal can say anything, Charles reaches Edwin and they both stumble into the room again, right as a huge ball of light emerges from within the walls where Edwin’s painting has called him in. Crystal is forced to lie down on the floor, on top of Peter, and when she looks up, all she sees is rubble and devastation.
And not a sign of Edwin or Charles.
Chapter 19
Notes:
charles's pov
Chapter Text
The Payne-Hoverall Memorial House-Museum, London
May 2025
Charles barely has time to flip the flap of his backpack open before the explosion hits them. It’s always amazed him, the way time seems to warp around them whenever they need it—in a way it never did when he was alive. Right now, he’s just thankful for that little bit of supernatural working in their favour; this way, he’s got a chance to put them away from danger in the nick of time.
The backpack isn’t exactly bright, nor is it tidy. He only hides in there when in dire need, and he knows Edwin loathes it here. Before raiding Hell to rescue him, Charles thought that it had to do with the darkness. Now that he knows part of what Edwin faced during his time in Hell, Charles isn’t so keen on making light assumptions—he knows Edwin’s fear is rooted in the knowledge that what lives in the shadows is more dangerous than whatever peril they might go through on Earth.
And yet, they keep getting in the way of danger over and over again.
Charles hates himself for forcing the Cat King to bring Edwin back instead of trying a solution himself—but the spell he cast was what unraveled this whole debacle. Now is not the time to dwell on past decisions, though, not when a supernova has exploded around them.
In the darkness, Edwin’s hand finds his and squeezes it reassuringly. Charles is not sure whether Edwin is reassuring him or trying not to panic inside the backpack. It’s true that his best mate has always avoided small or crowded spaces—again, Charles imagines that it has to do with his time in Hell, but he’s only witnessed the last of the three kinds of tortures Edwin has been through.
“It’s going to be alright,” he whispers. “We’ll find a way to get out of here.”
“Not without the painting,” Edwin whispers back. “I am tied to it, after all.”
“Yeah, that’s a bummer.” Charles sighs. “How come you’ve come back to yourself all of a sudden? Before the Nephilim’s attack you still believed you were seven.”
“I am not sure yet,” Edwin replies, doubt clouding his words. “I believe something clicked in my mind when you pushed me out of the way to keep me safe. It triggered some memories, I guess.”
“Yeah, I am always getting you out of trouble,” Charles jokes. He knows it is usually the other way around—it’s often Edwin who keeps him on track and prevents Charles from making a mess of things. He doesn’t always succeed, though.
“But wasn’t there any other solution, really, Charles?” Edwin asks pointedly, his usual primness shining through his words.
“It was the backpack or being obliterated because you are tied to a painting,” Charles tells him. “I won’t apologize for saving your soul from nothingness.”
Edwin squeezes Charles’s hand tighter. “I know. And I am thankful. It’s just way too dark here for my liking.”
Charles remembers how Edwin always brought his oil lamp with him, everywhere, until Charles lost it in Hell. He always wondered why Edwin never seemed to part with it. And now he is ashamed of having mocked Edwin for being scared of the dark.
“I’m sorry I lost your lamp,” Charles apologizes. “And I know I promised to replace it and I haven’t had the time in the past year but—”
“Charles, you’re rambling.” Edwin cuts him off with a soft chuckle. “It’s okay. At least I am not alone here.”
“I promised you that you would never be alone anymore. And that promise I have kept.” Charles nods, more to himself than anyone else, and he focuses on his knowledge of the microcosmos inside the backpack. At some point, his mind supplies the exact location of a torch he keeps there for emergencies. He wills it closer to them and, in a few seconds, he is holding a lit torch in his left hand, his right hand still holding Edwin’s. “Better now?”
He checks in on his mate. They are both disheveled—Charles can’t see himself, but he believes that, after rushing into an exploding room, he does look similar to Edwin with his perfectly coiffed hair completely tousled—but they are still in one piece. Since he hasn’t had the time to think of a comfortable place for them to wait out the apocalypse, both of them are floating in the nothingness that the backpack usually presents to those who aren’t daft in navigating through it.
“I hate floating,” Edwin mumbles. It’s evident that he doesn’t want Charles to hear, but he does anyway.
Charles doesn’t think he’ll ever stop listening to whatever Edwin has to say.
Swiftly, he wills a cozy living room around them, with twin sofas so they can sit down, and a fireplace. They can’t feel the warmth of the fire, but it casts a soft, orange light that brings peace to the whole ensemble. Edwin smiles at him as he sits down, holding Charles’s hand in his the whole time, as if letting go is an unspeakable sin.
“Now what?” Edwin asks. “It’s comfortable here, but I doubt we can stay in this place for long.”
“The backpack’s laws are inscrutable,” Charles explains. “Maybe we could. But it’s true that we haven’t needed to stay hidden in it for long.”
Edwin doesn’t say anything. Instead, he holds on tighter to Charles’s hand like he’d do to a lifeline. Charles squeezes it reassuringly; he also searches Edwin’s face for any signs of distress—he’s got a tell in the way his right eyelid twitches whenever he’s nervous—but there’s nothing there. Only open trust.
There’s a pull there, right where his heart should be, urging Charles to lean over the arm of the sofa, to lean closer to Edwin. It’s always been there—always a dull ache whenever Edwin wasn’t around—but Charles has never dared to give in to it. He’s always made up excuses to hide the fact that he’s been attracted to Edwin Payne probably since the moment they met, all those years ago back in St. Hilarion’s attic.
Today, Charles thinks they deserve a happy ending to their adventures, even if they don’t know what they will be facing when they get out of the backpack. And even though he can never be sure about Edwin still holding a candle for him, Charles can only hope.
And hope, that he has in spades.
He moves closer, willing the sofas to morph into one larger couch. He doesn’t miss Edwin’s surprised oof as he sits more comfortably on the cushions, but Charles can’t dwell too much on it. He’s a man on a mission—and that mission is making sure Edwin knows how Charles truly feels about him.
Even if Charles has barely acknowledged his own feelings.
He doesn’t close his eyes as he slides against the leather, hand never letting go of Edwin’s. He can feel the tension building up, a throb in his chest.
He’s so close he can almost taste Edwin’s lips, the air around them electrified.
“I’m sorry to interrupt your little rendezvous,” comes a voice from above them. “But I believe it’s time you came back to the outside world. It’s completely safe.”
Charles looks up to see the lid of the backpack open, light filtering through the gap. A friendly face is peering into the closed space, warm eyes calling at them, a smile inviting them to climb out of the backpack.
So they do.
It seems to him that they can never have nice things.
“Sorry about that,” Edwin apologizes, ever the most polite of them, as he steps out of the backpack and adjusts the lapels of his jacket. “We got—carried away.”
Charles follows suit, picking the backpack from the ground as he moves. Without saying a word—just a quick nod to the Black woman who called them out of the backpack—he scans the room. Old habits die hard, he thinks, as he makes sure everything is, in fact, safe for them.
He sees Gabriel standing against the wall opposite to the door, right between the two wide windows. He’s being kept in place by some artfully located curtains; Charles believes they come from the same room, since the fabric is torn and burnt, presenting holes in places. But they hold Gabriel as still as a trapped Nephilim can be.
In the middle of the room stands Mariella. She’s completely quiet, and on closer inspection—two or three steps toward her are enough for him—Charles can see that she’s frozen in time, mouth open as if she’s saying something but no sound comes out. It seems that the lady who lured them out into the open has somehow paralyzed her.
He turns to face her and demands, “Who are you?” in a tone that elicits a scandalized gasp from Edwin. But Charles couldn’t care less—he’s got a very bad feeling about this whole ordeal.
“My name isn’t important,” she begins with a small smile. “We haven’t met before, just like it was written.”
“Who the Hell are you?” Charles insists. The dread in his gut turns to ice when she doesn’t reply straight away but instead moves closer to Mariella.
“I guess most people know me as Death,” she offers plainly.
Cold trickles down Charles’s spine at the admission. It’s their first encounter with her; Charles has never faced Death before, only having heard of her from the nightmarish tales that Edwin has recounted. He tenses.
Beside him, Edwin goes completely still.
“I know your names even though we have never properly met,” she says softly. “The Dead Boy Detectives cast a long shadow.” She moves closer to them, and Charles tries to put more space between them. “Always the protector, Charles Rowland. Don’t be afraid. I won’t harm you or your friend.”
“Don’t you dare threaten—” Edwin starts, only to trail off when she directs her gaze to him, pinning him to the spot.
““I wasn’t threatening anyone, Edwin Payne. Rest assured that I will not be taking any of you with me today.”
“And him?” Edwin asks, looking at the Nephilim. Charles wants to smack him, but he also understands where Edwin is coming from.
He’s always had a thirst for knowledge.
“Nephilim are sons of lust, not love,” Death explains, voice even as she gestures towards Gabriel, still restrained against the wall with his limbs tied up in burned curtains. “Lucifer has been looking for this one for some time now, after he escaped his prison in Hell.”
“Why was he imprisoned there?” Charles asks, stupidly, apparently, since Edwin elbows him right where his ribs should be.
“He killed a human,” Death tells them. “As you already know. He was sentenced to an eternity in Hell, working for Lucifer and his minions, but somehow he escaped.”
“If a mere human could,” Gabriel spits out, “I knew I could too.”
Charles can’t help himself. He snorts, which attracts Gabriel’s attention to him.
“What do you find so amusing?” he demands, struggling to get rid of his restraints to no avail.
“Well, it is funny,” Charles says. “Because you have been outwitted by the same human whose steps you followed out of Hell. The same one who escaped Hell twice.”
“With help,” Edwin points out.
“Whatever,” Charles dismisses him with a wave of his hand.
“Are you meaning to say that you managed to escape Hell twice?” Gabriel almost spits out, firing a hateful glare towards Charles.
Before any of them can speak up again, a commotion explodes behind them. Charles turns around in time to see Crystal barreling into the room, followed by Jenny and Nathan. On Crystal’s shoulders he can see Monty in his crow form and the Cat King in his furry form; Niko is perched on Jenny’s shoulder while the Sprites ride on Nathan’s. Peter and the girls are nowhere to be seen but Charles doesn’t miss them.
It fills him with warmth to know that their friends would face Death for them.
“Leave them alone!” Crystal exclaims.
“I’m not going to do anything,” Death says in a conciliatory voice. “I was just explaining what will happen now.”
“And you are?” Jenny asks cautiously.
“She is Death,” Edwin says simply, Charles mimicking Crystal’s astonished look at him at his words. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s who she is.”
“Stay away from him,” Crystal commands. “I don’t care if you are one of the Endless. I won’t let you take him back to Hell.”
“That’s not my task here. It’s not his fate to come with me now. I’m here to take Mariella where she belongs. That’s what I was trying to explain.”
Edwin steps out from Charles’s shadow, closer to their friends. The Cat King jumps languidly from Crystal’s shoulder to Edwin’s, his bright eyes fixed on Death. Charles can see the tiredness in his movements but there’s determination in them too. He is sure the Cat King will defend Edwin with his life if needed.
“I see,” Death sighs. “It’s a shame that you think so poorly of me.”
“I believe you,” Jenny says loudly. “Why would she lie? If she wanted to take Edwin to Hell, she’d have swept him up without asking for permission. She is Death.”
Death casts Jenny an appreciative glance before nodding. “Such a pity,” she repeats, “that our paths won’t cross again for a long time, Jenny Green.”
To Charles’s utmost despair, Jenny laughs and winks at Death, pretty much as if she was flirting. “I guess you can’t pay a visit to humans without having to take them to Heaven, right?”
“I could make an exception here and there,” Death suggests. “But right now I need to get going. So, please believe me when I say I won’t harm any of them.”
“We will take your word for now,” Niko says, her voice rising.
Death looks at her and disbelief colors her features. Charles could swear she pales.
“I didn’t recognize you, Niko Sasaki,” Death speaks solemnly. “I apologize for that. Please, know that I intend no harm.” It’s the first time that Charles hears her words laced with something akin to respect, if not a tinge of fear.
He wonders why Death should be scared of Niko of all people. Sure, she’s come back from another plane, but even that was through the work of someone else.
“You are destined for great things, Niko Sasaki,” Death continues with a bow. “I ask for your permission to continue my job here.”
Niko nods, and Death sags. She shakes her head, wiggling her fingers in a fan-like movement, and Mariella comes back to life. Words die on her lips as she takes in the room around her.
“Mariella,” Death says with a soft smile. “I have come for you. Are you ready now to come with me?”
Mariella briefly glances at Nathan, who’s standing awkwardly beside Crystal. She visibly gulps. “I don’t know.”
“You can say goodbye,” Death offers. “It’s not customary, but it can be done.”
Mariella takes an uncertain step toward Nathan, who seems insecure as well. They share a glance—a moment in passing—before they rush into each other’s arms.
It pains Charles almost physically. He will never be able to hug his mother ever again.
Nathan is murmuring something in Mariella’s arms. She hushes him with a tut, and says, “I know you’ll be a great man, son. Don’t fret. You’re nothing like your father.”
Despite them not being addressed to him, Charles feels those words sink into his soul, biting away all the doubts he’s ever had about himself. Edwin’s hand comes to Charles’s shoulder, letting him know that his mate—the love of his afterlife—isn’t going anywhere.
Charles doesn’t know how he never realized he’s been in love with Edwin for decades now.
“I’m ready,” Mariella says, one last kiss dropped on top of her son’s head.
“I’d leave the room now,” Death warns them. “What’s coming for him,” she points at the Nephilim, “won’t be nice to any of you.”
And before anyone can stop them, Death grabs Mariella’s hand. A swirl of blue and warmth invades the space, and in the blink of an eye they’re gone.
The Cat King doesn’t miss a beat. He meows and pats Edwin’s shoulder until he manages to catch everyone’s attention. He jumps to the ground and runs to the door in a clear attempt to lead them out of the room. Charles picks up on what is going on quickly; he reaches out to Edwin and tugs at him. Before leaving the room, Charles approaches the wall where Edwin’s family painting still hangs and lifts it up without much effort—one of the perks of being a ghost. He wills it to shrink and fit into the backpack before turning around and walking into the corridor.
Everyone else follows suit.
They’re halfway across the street when a blast of red and screams fill the room where Gabriel had been held captive.
Chapter 20
Notes:
the night nurse's pov
Chapter Text
London’s Office
May 2025
London shines under a different light when the Night Nurse steps through her portal from Port Townsend. Perhaps it is because she’s spent the past two weeks with Kashi in Angie’s belly, trying to forget all about the Dead Boy Detectives she’s been forced to babysit. It worked, for the most part—she was able to relax and enjoy the finest things human existence has to offer with a wonderful man by her side.
He’s even given her a name. And she loves it, she truly does. There’s something about Asa that sits right with her. Like she’s finally found something she didn’t know she was missing.
Maybe this is what humans call love. She can’t be sure—she can’t remember if she ever was human, after all. Her whole existence as a transdimensional being up until this very moment consisted of her working for the Lost and Found Department. She has no experience with human feelings, but if this is love, then she wants to feel it every day for the rest of her eternal life. It’s as though she is drunk without having had a single drop of alcohol—not that it would have affected her, anyway—and she feels a constant need to smile.
She looks at her side, where Kashi is still gathering himself from the transdimensional trip.
“That was something I hadn’t experienced before,” he says, dusting off his jacket. “So this is London.”
“I knew I had to take you when you said you’d never been here in all your travels,” she smiles. “First things first, I need to check in with the boys. These teenagers,” she continues with an exasperated sigh, “cannot be trusted not to make a mess of things.”
“If you think they can’t take care of themselves, then why did you leave London for so long?”
Asa ponders the question for a moment. She remembers battling with the want—the need—to see Kashi and her duties as the minder of those ghost detectives. Her Superior balanced out her options when she gave her some time off, claiming that it was something humans would understand. Something about holidays. Asa didn’t really grasp the whole concept. Yet, she went on an adventure to find Kashi.
And she succeeded in making him fall in love with her.
There, again, that foreign notion. Asa is beginning to accept that maybe the humans are rubbing off on her more than she would like.
“The office is this way,” she commands, ignoring his question. Kashi doesn’t seem to realize it—or he doesn’t really care.
She wasn’t able to teleport them straight to the office—she can’t use mirror traveling while in corporeal form, and Kashi is still human. Her teleportation abilities have been hindered by the year she’s spent on Earth, since she hasn’t needed to fine-tune them.
They walk together in silence for a few minutes. It’s a nice day in London—at least, it’s not raining—and the office is in a building in a back alley close to a park. Kashi makes several comments about the scenery, and Asa can’t help but find his enthusiasm contagious. She’s almost disappointed when they reach their destination; she could have kept walking around the city with Kashi forever.
The building is old, but it already feels like home to Asa. She’s surprised that she got used to living on Earth so easily; everyone—even her, the first standard-bearer of the afterlife—bet on her giving up before the first month ended. Fourteen months later, she is happy to come back to London, even though she will never admit to missing the city or—all deities forbid—to calling the office home.
“Up the stairs,” she guides Kashi as she navigates the creaky steps with practiced ease. Kashi follows her readily, and when they reach the door with the worn-out sign on it—Dead Boy Detective Agency—he reaches out and grabs her hand. “You nervous?”
“Not especially,” he replies in a whisper. “But I thought you might need the extra reassurance.”
She doesn’t know how he does it, but Kashi always finds the right thing to say in the perfect moment. She nods, and opens the door with determination.
Asa doesn’t know what she was expecting to find, but it was definitely not this.
The office sits within its usual mess. Stacks of papers tower close to the desk by the window. The board of cases is overflowing with sticky notes and sheets. The door to the cupboard—the games closet, as Edwin keeps referring to it—is ajar, letting them glimpse at the chaotic order inside, the corner of a big frame tipping out of it. The disorder isn’t what surprises her the most.
The people in the office are.
Crystal is talking to some stranger human boy, tall and handsome by human standards—and by Asa’s, too. This boy Asa has never seen around before, but he has an aura about him that’s almost hallowed.
Edwin and Charles are in their usual spots—the former sitting at the desk, the latter taking up space in an impossible posture—but they are holding hands. The mere sight of them elicits a visceral reaction from her; on the one hand, she can’t help herself from cheering them on since she thought they’d been an item from the beginning. On the other hand, she feels way too self-conscious, so she drops Kashi’s hand on the spot.
“What’s wrong?” Kashi asks, attracting all eyes on them.
“Oh, the Night Nurse is back!” Jenny calls out as she sees her from her privileged spot on the sofa. “And she hasn't come back alone!”
Asa sighs exasperatedly, ready to tell them off for whatever reason, when she notices that Jenny isn’t alone on the couch. Beside her, there’s a presence she would have never thought she’d see anywhere, less than that in this plane.
“Death,” she breathes out. She scrambles to bow before the Eternal, but Death seems to have other plans for her.
“Please, don’t bother with any formalities. I’m not Death here. I just go by Morana.” She introduces herself with a smile, rising from the couch and stretching her hand to shake Asa’s.
“Nice to meet you.” Kashi rescues her when Asa doesn’t even shake the proffered hand. “I’m Kashi. And she’d rather be called Asa these days.”
“It’s nice,” Death smiles, “to have a name to go by that’s not your job, isn’t it?”
Before Asa can agree—because she does agree—the caw of a crow catches her attention. She diverts her gaze from Death—Morana, she reminds herself—to settle it on the bird looking up at her from the window sill.
“Do I even want to know?” she asks, resigned.
In the year she’s been working with the agency, she’s seen lots of strange things, stranger even than those she saw while at the Lost and Found Department. It’s not the first time she’s seen a crow inside the office, and this particular crow is an old friend.
“What happened that brought Monty to London?”
The crow morphs into a human before anyone can answer, the long strands of Monty’s hair sticking to his face as he tries to brush them off. “Thomas is here too,” he announces. “He’s still in cat form, recovering.” He bows his head. “It’s good to have you back. And nice to meet you, Kashi. I’m Monty.”
Asa watches as Kashi and Monty shake hands before asking, “Where’s Thomas and what’s he recovering from?”
Edwin looks guiltily down to his hand, still in Charles’s, but says nothing. Asa arches an eyebrow at Crystal, who’s remained silent with the unknown kid at her side, and after a few moments and some power play, Crystal reluctantly caves.
“We took a case while you were gone,” she explains. Before Asa can chastise her, she adds, “I know we promised we would stay put but it was a good case. It was interesting.”
“Do I even want to know?” Asa repeats. “Oh well,” she sighs as Kashi elbows her slightly, “I may not want to, but Kashi here seems to be dying to find out. So, please, enlighten us. What’s with this case?”
Her question seems to break all Hell loose.
Everyone joins in the explanation; Asa wants nothing more than to cover her ears to tune out the noise, but Kashi seems entranced by her side, listening to every word. So she pays a little bit of attention to what is being said, although the messages are confusing her even more. There’s something about a presence torturing ghosts and then something about humans bullying Crystal, and then Asa hears something that makes her nonexistent blood run cold.
“Did you mention a Nephilim?” she questions, managing to keep her voice from rising much. “Did you confront a Nephilim on your own?”
“We had Thomas and Monty and Niko and Nathan,” Crystal shrugs, almost nonchalantly. “In the end it was easier than it seemed.”
“Once we got the hang of it,” Charles supplies.
“But not before you all got caught in a supernatural blast,” Death—Morana—says. “At least I got there in time to prevent these two from getting obliterated,” she continues, pointing at Charles and Edwin.
“I couldn’t get out,” Edwin huffs. “I was tied to a painting and there was no time to move it.”
“That wouldn’t have happened if Thomas hadn’t tried to rescue you from Hell,” Charles points out.
“Hey, don’t blame someone who can’t defend himself,” Monty intervenes. “At least he was trying.”
Asa gets lost again as they all climb down a rabbit hole of accusations. At some point, she thinks she understands that the Nephilim was looking for his son—who is Nathan, apparently—and that he cursed the ghosts working the case to relive their dying moments. Then, she guesses Thomas showed up to bring Edwin and Charles back from their misery like the knight in shining armor he keeps denying being.
“I still don’t understand what this Nathan boy is doing here,” Asa dares to say during a lull in the ruckus. “Or Death, for that matter.”
“That’s easy,” comes a tiny voice from somewhere on the desk. “It’s called love. You should try it sometime.”
The whole room falls silent as Kashi approaches the source of the voice. Asa is too stunned to even move; she never thought she’d hear it again. “How come Niko is back?”
“Niko?” Kashi asks as he crouches to level with her and the horrible Sprites that stand with her on the desk. “Is that the name they’re giving you these days?”
“What do you mean?”
Asa doesn’t know if that question has come out of her mouth or of someone else’s, but it addresses the doubt looming over her.
“Don’t you recognize her?” Kashi asks, looking back at Asa with eyes filled with wonder. “She’s only the most powerful being of all time, even I noticed it.”
Asa splutters. Before she can say anything coherent, Death cuts her speech with soft words. “You know her as Her Finality, Asa. She’s the one to rule the universe of the supernatural.”
And that renders them all speechless. Asa wouldn’t have thought that possible—shutting Charles Rowland up is not something often witnessed.
It makes sense. As much as she’s been a nuisance, Niko Sasaki has also been a particularly enlightened human.
And it would explain Her Finality’s stubbornness about saving those ghosts from their afterlives. Asa didn’t understand it before, but it makes sense now.
They were her best friends, the ones to give her back her hope in humanity.
“How did I not see it?” she asks rhetorically, not expecting anyone to answer.
Nobody does.
Instead, they overlap each other again with questions to Niko that Asa knows she should stop. She can’t.
It’s Edwin the one to break the loop of neverending asking with a complaint, which is fitting coming from him. Asa has never seen anyone protest as much as this ghost does.
“So we’ve been in the presence of the most powerful being of the supernatural, the one who ensured I wouldn’t go back to Hell,and yet I am still bound to that fucking painting.”
“I may become that person you all talk about,” Niko says softly. “But I am not there yet. I don’t know how to break that spell. And neither does Thomas.”
Edwin sighs, defeated. The course of the conversation tells Asa that this isn’t the first time they’ve approached this topic.
“It’s way too big for me to carry around,” Edwin says. He allows his gaze to wander to the supplies closet; Asa can tell, from the part of frame she’s seen before, that the painting must be big. “And Charles can keep it in his bag, but that means he has to come with me at all times and—”
“—you know that isn’t an issue—”
“—and sometimes where I go is too boring for him. I won’t subject him to a whole evening at the library looking for books on herbs just because I can’t break a fucking binding spell.”
For a moment, he looks to Asa every second of the sixteen-year-old he’s supposed to be, and it fills her with warmth. Her gaze jumps from the frame to the breast pocket of the jacket Edwin almost never takes off, and an idea forms in her mind.
“I doubt it can be broken, since it’s a binding spell to bring you back from Hell,” Asa says. “But I may have a solution. Is that the painting?”
Edwin nods. Asa beckons Kashi and the boys to help take it out into the open, and once it’s placed against the couch, Asa positions herself in front of it.
It’s uncanny, she thinks, the resemblance she can see between his mother and his siblings and Edwin himself. Everyone in that picture died way older than the average ghost crossing through the Lost and Found Department—except Edwin, for obvious reasons—so she’s never seen any of them. Yet, she could single them out as relatives to Edwin in a heartbeat.
She brings two fingers to her temple and closes her eyes. The spell takes form in her mind, the words swirling around until they’re coherent and not just a string of sounds floating around. When she opens her eyes, she flicks her fingers and smiles.
The painting shrinks until it is small enough to fit in Edwin’s pocket.
“Here,” she says with a grin. “Now you have a painting that you can take with you anywhere.”
Edwin looks up at her in awe, the silence in the wake of her magic deafening.
But it doesn’t last long. All of them start speaking at the same time once again, voices blending into a cacophony. She sighs, shaking her head, giving up any pretense of using her authority over them any longer.
“I apologize for this,” she says, gesturing towards the mayhem that is the office. “They were supposed to be at school, or working or, you know, taking souls to their afterlives. It wasn’t meant to be so chaotic.”
“Embrace the chaos,” Kashi whispers in her ear, leaning over so close that his nose is brushing against her skin. His arms circle her waist, keeping her in place and grounding her in a way she inexplicably welcomes. “What did you tell me? Ah, I remember. These are your children now, Asa.”
As his words sink in, she watches the scene in the office—the cat lying in front of the wide windows while the crow keeps vigil on the window sill, Jenny and Morana perched on the sofa hand in hand, Crystal showing Nathan the Board of Cases, Niko learning from the Sprites how to become the powerful being she’ll one day be, Edwin staring reverently at the shrunken painting in his hands while Charles drops a soft kiss on his head—and she smiles.
“You’re wrong on one thing,” Asa tells him, turning slightly to kiss Kashi. “These aren’t my children. These are now ours.”
Kashi’s laughter adds to the noisy room, filling the space with even more happiness.
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