Chapter 38 - Part 2: The Truth (Patreon)

The doorbell went, sharp against the quiet.

Daniel stood. "I'll get it."

I stayed on the sofa, nails already tucked back to human blunt, glamour settled over my horns and skin like a coat I'd learned to shrug on without thinking. Voices reached me from the hall, muffled by the door frame.

"Are you actually okay?" Faith's voice, low, that particular flatness she got when she was working hard not to sound worried.

"I'm fine," Daniel said. "Come in."

Footsteps. A pause longer than it needed to be—the kind where someone's deciding whether to trust their own legs.

Daniel came back through first, and Faith followed a step behind him, arms crossed tight over her chest. She didn't sit. She looked straight at me.

"So." Her jaw was set. "Explain yourself. What did you want to tell me?"

Daniel gestured at the armchair he'd vacated. "You might want to sit for this one."

"I'm fine standing."

He rolled his eyes and dropped back into the chair himself, elbows on his knees, watching us both like a man settling in for a long match. "Suit yourself."

Faith didn't move. Didn't uncross her arms. Her eyes stayed on me, black and steady, the same look she used to give a room before she cleared it.

"Soo?" she said.

I took a breath I didn't strictly need anymore, out of habit more than lungs. The lamp threw its small circle of light across the carpet between us, and neither of us stood inside it.

*

"I'm Liam."

Faith's arms stayed crossed. Her eyes went flat, the way they did when she was deciding whether something in front of her was a threat. "Is this some kind of demonic joke. Because if this is—"

I stood. "Stop." The word came out harder than I meant, and I softened my hands even as my voice stayed firm. "I'm dead serious."

She didn't move, but her weight shifted back onto her heels.

"I didn't disappear," I said. "Not really. Well—I did. But the day I vanished, I woke up in this body instead. Since then I've spent every day trying to find a way back to my own. That's why I knew Liam. That's why I was looking for him." I held her gaze. "Because Liam is me."

"Tell me the truth." Her voice cracked at the edges. "Just tell me the fucking truth, Lily, or whoever—"

"I wouldn't lie to you. Not really." I kept my hands loose at my sides, no theatrics, nothing seductive in it, just a body standing still. "You've got a scar under your left breast. I used to think it was from a bicycle accident when you were twelve. Now, knowing what you do for a living, I'm not so sure that's actually what happened."

Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"We missed our flight back from Edinburgh," I said. "Sat in that coffee shop by the gate for six hours. Didn't speak to each other for two of them. Our first real fight. Then some man at the next table started singing along to whatever was playing on the radio, completely tone-deaf, and you laughed so hard you snorted coffee out of your nose."

"How do you—" Her hand came up to her mouth. "Wait. Is it—" Her voice dropped to barely anything. "Liam?"

I nodded. "It's me."

She crossed the space between us in two strides and threw her arms around my neck.

I stood there, arms half-raised, unsure where to put my hands on a body that used to be shorter than this one, used to fit differently against her. After a second I closed my arms around her shoulders anyway.

"I thought you were dead," she said into my collarbone, muffled. "I thought—God, I thought it was something I'd brought into your life. I never told you the truth, and then you were just gone, and I thought—" Her breath caught. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I never told you."

"It's fine." I rubbed a slow line between her shoulder blades. "It's not your fault. I'm okay. As okay as I can be right now, anyway. We've got time to sort the rest of it out."

She laughed, wet and short, the kind of laugh that comes out sideways when someone's crying and doesn't want to be. "Yeah."

She pulled back, stumbled slightly on the rug, and looked me over properly for the first time—horns hidden, human face in place, but everything else the same as it had been for the past month.

"Well." She wiped under one eye with her knuckle. "That's going to take some getting used to."

"I'd rather you didn't get used to it."

"I know. Still." Her gaze dropped and came back up, deliberately. "Knowing it's you, looking like that—"

Daniel cleared his throat from the armchair. "Told you you might want to sit down."

Faith shot him a look.

He raised both hands, all innocence.

She exhaled, squared her shoulders, and the field agent slid back over her face like a visor coming down. "Right. Let's get back on track." Her eyes found mine. "Did you find anything? About what happened to you?"

Of course. Straight back to work. I almost smiled. "Not much. A trail, a shady detective who might know more than he's letting on. What about your side?"

"Nothing substantial." She hesitated. "We might have a problem, though."

"What kind of problem?"

"The agency's probably going to break down the front door in a few minutes."

Daniel sat up straight. "What!? Can't you call them off?"

"Not exactly. Not when it involves a succubus. Protocol assumes anyone in the room is charmed until proven otherwise." She looked between us. "We've got five, maybe ten minutes."

"So what do we do?" I asked.

"There isn't anything we can do. Not unless you turn yourself in first." She looked genuinely pained. "I'm sorry. Both of you. If I'd known the truth—"

Daniel let out a breath. "I get it." He looked at me. "Do you want to go back? Before everything turns to shit?"

"Back where?" Faith asked.

"To where I've spent most of the last month," I said. "No. If I leave now, you both end up answering for it."

"Actually," Faith said, "you staying might be better. Tell them what you told me. It'll hold."

"I went through a great deal of trouble specifically so no one would know I'm stuck like this."

"The Agency could be our best chance of finding your real body. If they know the truth, they'd actually prioritise it."

I weighed that against every reason I'd had for staying quiet, and found the scale tipping faster than I liked. "Fine. But I choose who I tell. Only the people who actually matter there. And you and I are having a very long conversation after this."

"I know."

"Can we hurry this along?" Daniel said, already moving toward the hall. "I'd rather not replace a door tonight."

Faith went first. I followed her out into the corridor.

*

The moment we stepped outside, they were already there. Six of them, spread in a loose arc across the pavement, two with pistols angled down but ready, the rest carrying an assortment of items I couldn't name—a rod, a censer, something that looked like a rosary made of bone. The religious ones made my skin want to crawl backwards off itself. Not painful. Just wrong, the way a wet sock feels wrong, a low hum of don't that had nothing to do with sense.

"Don't move." Faith's voice, barely above breath, close to my ear. "Let me talk."

She stepped forward, hands visible, voice gone flat and procedural. "Agent Clarke. Target's cooperative, I made contact an hour ago, this is a voluntary hold."

A man near the front—broader than the rest, a comms bud in one ear—didn't lower his weapon. "Field Operative Reyes. We'll take it from here, Agent. Step back."

Faith held her ground half a second longer than she needed to, then walked backwards toward him, turned once to look at me. "Just listen to what they say."

They walked her off to the side. She didn't look away from me until someone put a hand on her shoulder and turned her the rest of the way.

"Approach," Reyes said. "Slowly. Hands out, together."

I did it. No point testing physics against six people with hardware I didn't understand.

One of them stepped forward with a pair of cuffs, silver, runes cut fine along the band, and closed them over my wrists. They caught the light strangely, the way my ring did.

The runes flared—a thin gold line chasing itself along the band—and then there was nothing left to hold my wrists at all. Just dust, sliding free in two soft grey ribbons, pooling on the pavement below.

Nobody moved.

I stared at the grey smear on the concrete, turning my hands over, half expecting the dust to reassemble into something I'd understand. It didn't.

I raised my hands, palms out, dust still clinging to the creases. "I didn't do anything."

That did not help. The whole arc took a step back in unison, weapons coming up half an inch, as they'd rehearsed it.

Reyes barked into his earpiece, low and fast. "Containment failure. I need a specialist down here, now."

"Stay exactly where you are," he said, not to me exactly, more at me, the way you'd address a gas leak. "Do not move."

I looked at the six of them, and the dust, and Faith standing off to the side with her jaw tight and her hands loose at her sides like she was fighting the instinct to come back over.

"Is this going to take a while?" I asked. "Because if it is, I'd like to sit down."

Nobody answered that either.

"I'll take that as a yes."

I sat, right there on Daniel's front step, knees together, hands folded in my lap like I was waiting for a bus. The concrete was cold through the fabric. Somewhere behind me the door was still shut, Daniel presumably watching all of this through the front window, deciding whether interfering would make things better or worse.

Reyes kept talking into his earpiece. Two of the others hadn't taken their eyes off the little grey smear of dust on the pavement, like it might reassemble itself and try again.

I glanced up at the sky, grey and flat and entirely uninterested in any of this, and thought, mildly, that I hoped whatever came next didn't eat the whole day. I had things to do.

*

Ten minutes is a long time to sit on cold concrete with nothing to look at but six people who won't lower their weapons. My spine gave up on dignity somewhere around minute four, one hand sliding back to prop against the step behind me, hip cocked, one knee drifting sideways. Comfortable. I stopped tracking it after that.

One of the pistol-holders shifted his weight and stopped looking at me, instead looking at a point beyond my shoulder. The bone-rosary man cleared his throat twice, then found something urgent to study on his own boots.

"Reyes." One of them, low. "Is she—"

"Eyes front," Reyes said, without turning around, which was an odd thing to say to someone whose eyes were already front.

A car door somewhere down the street. Footsteps, unhurried, the kind that don't need to hurry because whatever's coming has already decided how this goes.

The whole arc split like a curtain. Every one of them snapped a short salute, weapons lowering as one motion, as they'd drilled it.

"—that's actually him—"

"—thought he only worked the Continent—"

Reyes turned on them with a look that ended the whispering faster than any order could have, then jerked his head down the street. The six of them peeled off without another word, dust and cuffs and censer and all, leaving the pavement embarrassingly empty.

I lifted my head. Interesting.

The man who'd arrived was tall, dark-haired, dressed as he'd stepped out of a meeting rather than a containment op. He crossed the last few feet and extended a hand toward me, palm up, patient.

I took it before I'd decided to, reflex outrunning thought. His grip was ordinary. His eyes were not—too still, like a held breath that never let go.

"Lancelot," he said. "Apologies for the wait." He didn't explain further, just turned and started walking, and I followed him because I genuinely could not think of a better plan than following the man who'd just made an armed response team evaporate.

The car was black, unremarkable, parked at a boring angle to the curb. He held the door. I got in. He came around and sat beside me, and the door shut with a sound too solid for the exterior.

"A minute ago," I said, "I was a chemical spill. Now I'm getting doors held."

"HQ asked for a specialist. I happened to be in the area." He said it the way someone reports the weather.

"That doesn't answer my question."

"No," he agreed. "It doesn't."

I waited.

"I'm strong," he said, like that closed the file.

"I see." The non-answer said plenty on its own, and kicking up a fuss in the back of an Agency car, seated next to someone I couldn't yet read, ranked fairly low among my better options.

"Where's Faith?" I asked instead.

"Agent Clarke will have cleared screening by now." The car pulled away from the curb, smooth, no engine sound worth mentioning. "You'll have your chance to talk once we're indoors."

I looked out the window at Daniel's street sliding past, at the ordinary hedges and ordinary bins, and decided indoors could wait exactly as long as it needed to.