Chapter 38 - Part 1: The Truth (Patreon)

Daniel lost the ninth game in a row around half eleven. He set his controller down on the cushion between us with deliberate care, the kind that meant he was deciding not to throw it.

"I'm done," he said.

"Sore loser."

"It's not fair, and you know it." He gestured at me with one hand. "You've got inhuman reflexes."

"I'm not exactly human anymore." I dropped my own controller into my lap. "Neither are you, though. Your reflexes shouldn't be that much worse."

"You still beat me nine out of ten."

"I was reading the back of the crisp packet that one time."

"That," he said, "genuinely makes it worse."

I put the controller on the cushion and picked up the empty crisp bag from beside me, turning it over for no reason and setting it back down. Outside, a car passed. The lamp on the table beside the bookshelf cast the room in a low amber that had been comfortable an hour ago and was still comfortable now.

"Speaking of inhuman." I pulled my knee up onto the sofa. "How are you handling your side of things?"

Daniel leaned back. He looked at the ceiling for a moment. "Honestly? I'm not sure. Most things are the same. Some aren't."

He turned his head toward the window. A second car passed, slower.

"Walking down the street feels strange now. I can hear everyone's pulse. And sometimes I'll just—" He stopped. Started again. "Sometimes I catch myself looking at someone's neck and wondering."

"Yeah." I understood that precisely. "It's more or less the same for me. Different category, same problem."

"I can imagine."

"I'd actually rather you didn't."

He let out a short, genuine laugh and rubbed the back of his neck.

I stretched my legs out toward the low table. "What's the actual difference, then? Between a vampire and an ancestor?"

Daniel sat up slightly. "Vampires are undead. I'm not. So I don't have the weaknesses, no burning in sunlight, no holy water problems." He counted on his fingers. "I still age, just slowly. And I do need blood. Not to survive, exactly, but without it, things start to feel off. Like having an unbalanced diet for long enough that everything becomes slightly worse."

"What else?"

"Apparently there are only twelve of us at any one time. When one dies, another one is born somewhere."

I considered that. "That actually sounds cool."

He chuckled. "Not everything about it was cool. In the beginning, I thought I was losing my mind. Voices. Memories that weren't mine. Coming in at random."

"You? Going crazy?" I put my hand to my chest. "Impossible. Unthinkable."

He pointed at me without looking over. "You're hilarious."

"So I've been told."

The corner of his mouth moved. "It calmed down eventually. Now it's more like—you know that cartoon, the one with the elements and the kid who talks to his past lives?"

"Yeah."

"Like that. I can have actual conversations with them. Except instead of bending elements I can do things with blood."

"Talking to your 'past lives'." I made the air quotes with both hands. "Completely normal. Very sane."

He ignored that, but the smirk stayed. "Either way, I'm not complaining. I've got at least a thousand years before dying becomes a real concern." He paused. "I will have to figure out switching identities every few decades, though."

"Faith would probably help with that."

"Yeah." He picked at a loose thread on the sofa arm. "Speaking of Faith. You going to tell her what we got out of Tristan?"

I looked at the blank television screen. Our reflections sat in it, slightly warped. "I don't know. Our eyes met right before I went back to Hell last time. I don't know if that was enough."

"You could just tell her the truth."

"I could. But Tristan wouldn't love me sharing what he gave us."

Daniel turned and looked at me properly.

"What?" I said.

"You're just making excuses not to talk to her."

The room was quiet for a moment. The lamp hummed very faintly. I looked at the ceiling.

"You're right," I said. "I'll try calling her tomorrow before I leave."

"I'm holding you to that."

"I know." I dropped my gaze back to the room, to the scattered crisp packets and the two controllers sitting between us on the sofa. "I know you will."

*

I took the phone out of my ring and set it face down on my knee.

"You said you'd call," Daniel said.

"I said I'd try."

"That's not going to work with me."

I turned the phone over. The screen stayed dark under my thumb. "I'm building up to it."

"Build faster."

I pressed the button and held it. The screen woke, cycled through its little animation, and then the messages started coming in one after another, small chimes stacking on top of each other until the sound blurred into one continuous note. Most of them had Faith's name at the top. A few came from numbers I didn't recognise.

Before I got through the first line of the first one, the screen changed. Faith's name, filling the display. Ringing.

I looked at Daniel. He didn't say anything, just watched me with his arms loose on his knees, waiting.

I answered. "Hello?"

"Miss Succubus Witch." Faith's voice, flat and precise, the way it got when she'd already decided how the conversation would go. "Thank you for gracing me with an answer. I wasn't sure you had the nerve."

"Hold on. Hold on. What's going on?"

"You know exactly what's going on." A pause, just long enough to make the point. "I saw you. In the circle. Before you vanished into thin air. Then I checked the paperwork, just to be thorough, and it turns out the succubus the Agency 'employed' shares your name."

"I never explicitly told you I wasn't a succubus," I said. "You did that particular bit of maths yourself."

"Fine. Fair." Something shifted in her breathing, sharper. "What I don't understand is why a succubus is looking for Liam."

I let a breath out through my nose. "I can't explain that over the phone."

"Why not?"

"It's complicated. It's a conversation for somewhere private."

"Private how?"

"Private enough that the whole Agency isn't listening on the other end of the line."

Daniel's eyes stayed on me, steady, unreadable in the ordinary sense that people are unreadable when they're trying very hard not to react.

"Come to Daniel's place," I said. "You've probably already got my location from this call anyway. I'd rather not have a squad kick the door in because I picked up a phone."

"There is no—" She stopped herself mid-sentence. "Did you do something to him? Because if you touched him—"

"Calm down."

"Don't tell me to calm down."

"Daniel's sitting right here. Alive. Perfectly himself." I glanced at him, and he raised his eyebrows at the description. "I've already told him everything you're missing. But if we're doing this part, I want to do it with just you. No recorders. No backup listening from a van outside. Just a conversation."

Silence on the line, long enough that I checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't dropped.

"Fine," Faith said finally. "But first, put Daniel on."

I held the phone out. "She wants you."

Daniel took it, pressed it to his ear, and said her name in the tone he probably used for calming down every difficult conversation he'd ever had. I sat back against the sofa cushion and listened to half of it, watching the crisp packets on the table, waiting for whatever came through the door next.

*

My nails caught the lamplight.

I turned my hand over slowly, spreading my fingers. Black, sharp, tapered to a point that could score glass. My hand knew where they ended, as if they were always mine.

Daniel's voice carried from two feet away, patient and very deliberate. "For the last time, I'm not mind-controlled." A pause. "Faith. You know vampires are immune. You know that."

I turned my hand the other way. The nails really were elegant. I hadn't chosen them, hadn't grown them, hadn't painted them. They'd been there on the morning I woke up in this body.

"Yes," Daniel said. "I trust her."

I set my hand down on my knee and studied the ceiling instead. One hairline crack ran from the cornice toward the light fitting—Victorian plasterwork, original by the look of it.

"Because she's right," Daniel said. "This is something only you should hear."

A shorter pause this time.

"Fine. Just don't be late." He lowered the phone.

"Sounded rough," I said.

He handed the phone back without comment. I switched it off and pressed it to the ring. The band warmed briefly, and then it was gone.

"She thought you were mind-controlling me," he said. "Or that you'd seduced me."

"Seriously." I pushed myself upright against the sofa arm. "As if I ever wanted to seduce my best friend."

"In her defence, she doesn't know you're Liam."

"No." I pulled one knee up and rested my arm across it. "Do you think she'll come alone?"

Daniel leaned back in the armchair and turned the remote over in his hands without switching the television on. "Probably not. But she'll keep whoever she brings outside. Down the street, most likely."

He said it without hedging, the way you'd state a bus route. I watched him for a moment.

"You sound pretty certain," I said.

"Becoming an ancestor gave me some time to get to know this side of her." He set the remote down on the arm of the chair. "Longer than you had."

"Is that why you were so insistent on me calling her? Back when I was—" I stopped, recalibrated. "Back before all this."

"You're still yourself."

"Is that a yes?"

He nodded. "She told me why she ended things. More accurately, she vented at me for forty-five minutes, and I listened. I thought it was a rubbish reason." He paused. "I still think it was a rubbish reason. But she wouldn't hear it. She's more stubborn than you ever were, and I couldn't just sit there watching both of you miserable when I knew you still—" He stopped himself, picked the remote up again, set it down again. "It wasn't fair on either of you."

I looked at the crack in the ceiling. "I don't know what to do with any of it anymore." The lamp on the side table put a warm circle of light on the wall and nothing else. "But you're probably right. Telling her the truth is better. Even if it doesn't fix anything between us."

"It won't," he said. "Not straight away."

"No."

"Still better to figure it out without secrets between you." He stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankle. "Common ground."

"I'd find common ground considerably easier in my own body."

Daniel looked at me. One corner of his mouth moved. "Beggars can't be choosers."

I picked a loose thread off the knee of my jeans and dropped it on the floor. Outside, a car passed, its headlights sweeping briefly across the front window, and then the street went quiet again.