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Gerard had a knack for tracking things down. Usually books, but sometimes people. He inherited or at least learned the trait from Mum, a fact that would normally make him distance himself from the skill, the way he’d neglected his Sanskrit once she was gone. But it was helpful for his own ends even when she still hung over him, so he couldn’t complain.
He didn’t know how long he’d been following Leitner. The February night carried a strong chill, so Gerard kept his hands in his pockets as he followed. His right hand fiddled with a hair tie, while his left altered between a lighter and a pocket knife. The latter was a newer addition to his daily inventory. He found it was useful to have a weapon in case you found yourself next to a chanting cultist, even if he had no plans to use it tonight.
Excursions like these rarely bothered him. He was so familiar with having an aching stomach and sore legs that they hardly registered, but tonight there was a pebble in his boot. It pressed up first against the socked flesh of his heel, then creeped along the outer edge of his foot. It slid beneath the balls of his feet, opening every step with the barest hint of a sting. Not enough to be painful, but still annoying. Removing it would be a simple affair, less than a minute to unlace his boot, shake it out, and relace, but it was a minute he could not afford.
He could see nothing but Leitner and that which served his immediate pursuit. Leitner’s path turned onto darker and quieter London roads, movements increasingly erratic. Gerard could not recall the words nor the colors on postered windows they passed, but with an upward glance he knew there were no cameras trained on the residential street they had just entered, so quiet the crunch of their footsteps could be heard at either end.
The street was narrow, with tall, brown brick apartments packed together like cigarettes in a pack. No one besides the two of them stood outside, but many windows still glowed a warm yellow from those still winding down for bed. Even those lights, however, were diffused by blinds or curtains preventing anyone below from seeing inside. And conveniently for Gerard’s purposes, prevented those inside from looking out.
Gerard stopped trying to be subtle. He quickened his steps, gaining on Leitner’s feeble attempt to pretend he wasn’t trying to run. Near the end of the road, there was a gap in the brick, so narrow most would have missed it among the shadows from this distance. Timing both of their paces, Gerard caught up to Leitner just as they reached it. It was a dark alley, empty except for a trash bin and some scattered cans, and blocked with a high brick wall at the other end.
Gerard surged forward, turned Leitner around, and slammed him into the wall. Leitner dropped his briefcase, shoulders hitting the grimy brick with a satisfying thud.
“Scream, and I will kill you.”
“Who are you?” Leitner wheezed. He reached for something in his inner coat pocket, surprisingly deft, but Gerard was quicker. He pulled out his lighter just as Leitner pulled the book from his pocket. Before he could open it, the book was ablaze. Leitner dropped it with a yelp. It continued to burn on the small patch of cement along the wall, shielded from the grey slush on the rest of the ground. Gerard paid it no mind.
He tucked his lighter back into his pocket. Leitner took it as an opportunity to run, but Gerard held his arm with a cement grip. “You’re awfully predictable. Did you think your books were going to save you?” Gerard bared his teeth. “What makes you think you’re above their bloody damnation?”
He took in Leitner’s appearance. He was balding, wrinkled, and thin, a deflated version of the self-assured businessman Gerard had seen in an old photograph in the Institute’s records. Leitner was visibly human, both then and now, without a single Mark to show for his occultist tendencies.
“I don’t—” Leitner began, but Gerard cut him off with a blow to his cheek. He staggered sideways, then backed away, deeper into the alley. “Please, I don’t know what you want.”
His voice was high and breathless. It grated on Gerard’s ears. Rather than gracing him with a response, Gerard surged towards him, punching his other cheek.
“Please,” Leitner gasped, blood spilling from his lips.
“Save your breath.” He advanced with a flurry of punches, gloved knuckles slamming into flesh and bone until Leitner collapsed onto the cold pavement.
“I am not your enemy,” he pleaded.
“No?” Gerard challenged, towering over him. “It wasn’t your name printed on the inside of every bloody book that ruined my life? Bet you thought you were leaving behind a legacy.”
He crouched into a squat and rolled Leitner over until they were making eye contact. The old man’s eyes were blue, wet things. He breathed in shallow gasps, and each breath sent a visible puff of air into the crisp night air, inches away from Gerard’s face.
“Guess what?” The hot air of his breath came out in wispy curls that dispelled Leitner’s own. “You won’t have a legacy. Want to know why?”
Leitner didn’t respond. The silence stretched between them, unbroken except for his shaky breathing and Gerard’s own heartbeat pounding in his ears. His eyes bored into Leitner’s, searching— for what? Hate? Evil? A seed of remorse? Anything other than the terrified, pitiful, human eyes that looked back at him.
A cold drop of doubt trickled its way into Gerard’s chest. He ignored it.
With a sigh, he put his hands on his knees, pushing himself to his feet. “I’m going to burn it all,” he promised. “I won’t rest until I’ve destroyed every last book that bears the name of Jurgen—” he punctuated with a kick, the steel toe of his boot meeting Leitner’s ribs with a crunch he wished was satisfying— “fucking—” another kick, weaker this time— “Leitner.”
The wet crinkle of plastic on snow interrupted his monologue.
Gerard whirled around. A shadowed figure stood at the mouth of the alley. A plastic shopping bag spilled its contents on the thin layer of snow beneath their open hand.
A witness. Perfect. Gertrude was going to fucking kill him.
“Is that— you said Jurgen Leitner?” they finally asked, taking a hesitant step forward. It was a man, scrawny and a few inches shorter than him. Taking him in a fight would be easy, though he supposed it was always possible that toned muscle hid beneath all those layers of clothing. The man’s coat and scarf practically swallowed him whole. His eyes were wide behind his rectangular glasses, one of his only visible features.
Gerard warily noted his Marks, the Web and the Eye. One was rare enough. Two was almost unheard of outside of the small circle of occultists that dominated his life. Did he serve one of them, or was he just absurdly unlucky?
“Are you a friend of his?” he eventually replied, for lack of anything else to say.
The man let out something that might pass for a laugh. “The opposite, I’d say.”
“Welcome to the club.”
At that, the man’s posture relaxed. He strode forward, now close enough that Gerard could touch him. His dark eyes swept over Gerard’s frame, and a snowflake fluttered onto one of his lashes. Gerard didn’t notice it was snowing.
The man’s gaze dropped to Leitner, and he sucked in a breath. “Good lord,” he mumbled, so weakly Gerard almost expected him to faint like a Victorian maiden. “Are you, er, going to finish the job?”
Gerard was so startled he laughed. He joined the man’s gaze to the beaten figure of the man he thought was Leitner. He had curled into a looser fetal position than before the stranger interrupted, but at Gerard’s gaze he tightened back up again, bringing his knees to his chest and clutching them with a shaking arm. The dim moonlight that reached them exposed a bloody and likely broken nose to join the dribble at his lip, a swelling eye, and a few oddly bent fingers, those which were in the way of Gerard’s earlier assault on his ribcage.
Gerard had been mugged once in his teens. He was a young, lanky thing, the meat on his bones not yet caught up to his first growth spurt. He was on a work trip with Mum in Edinburgh, chasing down an artifact, one of the rare occasions they hunted something that wasn’t a Leitner. In those years, his esoteric knowledge gave him an ignorant arrogance. He knew all about what there was to fear in the world and how it got people, so he had nothing to be afraid of.
It was an early summer evening, and they were walking from dinner to the next location on their list. They were about to pass Old Tollbooth Wynd, a small, cobbled tunnel branching out from the Royal Mile. The name reminded him of a book he read as a child, one of the few he liked. It suggested an impulsive adventure. He knew how to be quiet and how to get lost in a crowd, something he figured would afford him at least an hour of reckless freedom before Mum caught up to him. Nothing as serious as his recent runaway attempt, but a bit of casual rebellion on a holiday he deserved.
Despite the congestion of tourists and college students along the Royal Mile itself, the roads beyond it were almost empty. Occasionally, he passed a couple or a stray cat, but it wasn’t difficult to follow the most secluded roads he could find, alone with the waning sun. The aimlessness was freeing.
They found him outside of an old graveyard. A damp patch on his shirt cooled his back where he’d been lying in the grass, watching the last traces of orange and purple fade from the sky behind the carved headstones that surrounded him. He’d been dabbling in landscape paintings, only Mum didn’t let him bring his supplies on this trip, so he committed it to memory instead. He was good at that.
It was an embarrassing affair. Two grubby twenty-somethings leaned into his space, demanding he turn out his pockets. Gerard refused and tried to throw a punch, like an idiot. He fell over instead, and their kicks made sure he stayed down. Between the bursts of pain, his own thunderous heartbeat, and his mortification over the tears running down his face, he didn’t even notice them reaching into his pockets, but they were empty when Mum finally found him. She pursed her lips, and Gerard was grateful he hadn’t been carrying a Leitner to steal. She didn’t raise her voice, maybe because they were in public, but her hands weren’t gentle when she hauled him up by the arm and dragged him back to their hotel room. He washed the blood out of his hair and treated his bruises and busted lip with practical efficiency while she observed with a critical eye. He had a black eye for the rest of the trip.
The experience didn’t discourage his future runaway attempts, nor his more serious attempts at rebellion in his twenties, much to his mum’s irritation. But it did teach him that knowledge, even secret knowledge, was sometimes useless. He also learned how to fight.
Seeing Leitner’s sorry state, Gerard wondered if he remembered the face of his assaulters. Faces were finicky things. Would this man— Leitner?— remember the steel eyes that gazed at him with apathy, or would he recall nothing but the taste of blood and a black-clad figure in the dead of night?
The old man flinched back from Gerard’s returned gaze. “Please, spare me,” he wept, and all Gerard could think of was how scared he looked.
“I was so sure,” Gerard muttered to himself. “But he looks so…”
“Pathetic?” the man beside him suggested. His shoulders brushed Gerard’s as though seeking protection from the miserly sight before them.
“I pose no danger towards you.” The old man’s eyes were wide, childlike in how they blinked away tears.
Gerard hummed. “You know, I think you’re right.” The only reason Mum survived their trade was her nerves of steel. This old man had none.
For a minute, no one spoke. Then, slowly, the old man picked himself up, letting out a low groan. He took a single step forward, and the stranger beside him stumbled back, pressing himself into the cold brick wall. “What, just like that?”
Standing, Leitner— the old man— was no more intimidating than he’d been on the ground. He glanced back and forth, as though expecting the shadows to rain down blows on his balding head.
“It can’t be him,” Gerard stated, as though saying it aloud would make it certain. A fact, not a decision.
The stranger, still pressed against the brick, gawked at him. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he sighed, taking a step back. He didn’t look at either of them. “He’s just some… pathetic old man.”
Taking this as permission, the old man scurried past him. His breath came out in wheezes. He paused at the alley’s entrance to grab his briefcase from where it had fallen. Then he was gone, hobbling away into the night.
The snow fell in swirls now. The biting wind whipped at Gerard’s hair and snuck into the gap in his coat collar. He stuck his hands back into his pockets and tucked his chin to block out the chill. He needed to go. In a second he reached the alley’s entrance, stepping over the forgotten shopping bag on the ground.
“Hold on.” The man in the alley chased after him. “You can’t just leave.”
“Yes, I can. And if you had any sense, so would you.” He jerked his head towards the alley. “Unless you want to be seen near a crime scene. You’re now an accessory to attempted murder.” Then, stupidly, he added, “or helpless bystander, if you want to spin it that way.”
“What? I don’t—” the man caught up to Gerard, who hadn’t stopped walking. “I’d hardly call it murder. Assault, perhaps.”
“You going to report me?”
“No, of course not.”
“Great. I’ll be off then.” He made his strides even longer.
“Now just wait a second!” The man caught up, keeping pace at a jog that tried and failed to mirror Gerard’s leisurely stroll. “I have questions.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t they always.” Which wasn’t true, strictly speaking. Most people wanted to put their supernatural experience behind them, so they rationalized it with whatever bullshit explanation their brains cooked up. Those who did ask never really believed him, and he eventually gave up on convincing them.
“You know about Leitners,” the man pressed, admirably still keeping pace. “You can explain things. You must.”
Gerard scowled. “I don’t have to do anything.”
“Please,” he begged, and Gerard paused. The man stepped in front of him. “I’ve been trying to understand for so long. I need to know.”
He snorted. “Course you do.”
“So you’ll tell me?”
He could see why the Eye claimed him. The Web, not so much. The man’s persistence was blunt and bordered on rude, far from the subtle manipulations of string he’d studied and faced. But hell, he was curious. “Hm. What do you know?”
“Well, there’s books from Leitner’s library— mostly variations of existing texts— and maybe other things that are… supernatural.” His mouth twisted around the word, as though he hated to admit it. “They can do things that shouldn’t be possible. Hurt and… kill people in unexplainable ways.”
Gerard waited for him to continue until the silence became awkward. “That’s it? Two Marks and you don’t know anything, do you?”
“What marks? What are you talking about?”
“You don’t want to know.” He couldn’t decide if this short, bundled twig of a man was lucky for getting this far knowing almost nothing, or remarkably unlucky for stumbling his way into this world like a baby deer.
The man jutted out his chin from his loosened scarf. His face was long, high cheekbones forming a triangle with his sharp, clean-shaved chin. Gerard became aware of his own stubble. “I think I’ve made myself quite clear that I do.”
“Even if you do believe me, which you won’t, knowing won’t help. Trust me.”
“I don’t care. I just need to know.”
“Yeah, you said.” The Eye probably found him delicious.
“So?”
Gerard tilted his head, considering. “Yeah, okay.” Gertrude wasn’t going to be happy, but there were things she could live without knowing.
“What, really?”
“Having second thoughts?” Gerard teased.
“No, of course not.”
They stared at each other. Now that he was still, the wind whipped at Gerard’s hair again, and he shivered. “You want me to explain everything here, or…?”
“Right of course, I was just on my way—” The man looked around him, then scurried back to the alley entrance. When he returned, he held the same plastic shopping bag he’d dropped, now wet. “We can go to my flat,” he finished, breathless.
Gerard raised his brows. “I nearly killed a man in cold blood, and now you’re showing me where you live?”
“Assault, and well, you thought it was Jurgen Leitner. I think that makes you a good Samaritan, actually.”
“Right then,” he said with a chuckle. “Lead the way.” There was a decent chance he was marching right into the middle of a spiderweb, but the man didn’t seem the type the longer he talked to him. Besides, webs were susceptible to fire.
They traveled in silence for a minute, snow crunching underfoot and wind whistling in their ears. The wind in his hair occasionally obscured the man from his view, so Gerard tied it into a bun.
It was now late enough that he didn’t spot a single window emitting light. Their only source of illumination was faint moonlight and streetlamps that gradually grew brighter and closer together as they walked towards a safer part of the neighborhood.
“Soo, you got a name?” he prompted his strange host.
The man startled. “Oh! Yes, I’m Jonathan. Jon. You?”
“Gerard.” He paused. “You got a cigarette?”
“Uh, oh, yeah.” Jon set down his bag to dig through his pockets. He pulled out a pack of Marlboro’s, half empty. “Here.”
“Thanks.”
Jon’s gaze followed his lighter as he pulled it from his pocket, the eye design illuminated in the moonlight. It continued to follow the lit cigarette as Gerard brought it to his lips.
“A fan of eyes, I take it?”
“What?” Gerard glanced at his covered hands in confusion, then remembered the tattoos on the seam of his jaw. “Oh. Not exactly. They’ve got a… spooky explanation.”
Jon scowled. “Not you too.”
“Hm?”
“My coworkers call things ‘spooky’ sometimes,” Jon explained. “I find it… trivializing. Unacademic.”
Gerard’s lips twitched. “Unacademic?” he repeated.
“I’m a researcher with, er, the Magnus Institute.”
“‘Course you are,” he muttered. He took a drag of his cigarette. Warnings in Gertrude’s voice, phrases like needless risk and incredibly dangerous, floated through his mind. Though he supposed it did explain the Marks. A decent number of the staff joined the Institute seeking answers to whatever entity they’d faced. There were even a small handful that gained a Mark “in the line of duty,” as Gertrude once put it.
Jon crossed his arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” Gerard lied. “Just, small world.”
“Oh! You work there too?”
“Sort of.” He hardly had a contract or a paycheck, but sharing a flat with Getrude and spending most days in the archives should count for something.
“Really? I’ve never seen you. I would have remembered—”
“My ominous presence?”
Jon rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t say ominous. Maybe… distinct?”
“I’m flattered.”
Jon spluttered. It brought a smirk to Gerard’s lips. “I just meant— you hardly dress to blend in.”
“I was trying today!” he argued. He looked down at his outfit. Black leather coat, black jumper, black trousers, all plain. Outside of his piercings, he even left behind his jewelry. “I wanted the police tracking me down to try at least a little bit before they found me.”
“Police?” Jon repeated nervously.
“I meant if I got caught. If we got caught. Which we haven’t, unless you’ve decided on the bystander story? You could even make a case for hostage now.”
Jon huffed. “I’d like to think I’d be a little more resistant as a hostage.”
“Then partner in crime it is.” He elbowed Jon playfully, but Jon startled at the sensation.
“You aren’t worried Leit— the old man will report you?”
Gerard hummed. Considering the last time he got arrested, he was keen not to repeat the experience. He doubted the courts would be lenient a second time, not that they’d been kind when he was reeling from witnessing his own mother’s suicide. He Knew there weren’t any cameras where he’d attacked, but he supposed there was always the chance of a witness besides Jon. Even then, the dark and the snowfall concealed everything from their features to their footsteps, so he couldn’t imagine how they’d find him even if he was reported. Unless Jon turned on him. “I dunno,” he replied. “Guess we’ll see.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” Jon said dryly.
“Relax, it’ll be fine. I’ve gotten away with worse.”
“You, ah, do this often?”
“What, beat up old men?” At Jon’s side eye, he grinned. “Nah. Leitner is… personal. Most of the time, it’s B&E, destruction of property, stalking— what academics like you call ‘unorthodox research methods.’” At least, that’s how Gertrude had phrased it once. He elected not to mention the handful of murders. It was hard to explain how stabbing a man in his hospital bed constituted self-defense.
“Well, I’m hardly one to judge. Ah.” Jon paused in his steps and nodded at the building before them. It was classic for the suburban blend of the greater London area— a two-storey stone structure with a slanted roof and a tiny balcony facing the street. “My flat’s on the first floor.”
Gerard discarded the end of his cigarette into the snow. “After you,” he said, and together they climbed the interior steps to the first floor landing. Jon unlocked the door and Gerard followed him inside, getting a faceful of warm air. Following Jon’s example, he removed his coat and hung it in a narrow entryway closet, though he still pocketed the knife and lighter. After shaking out the pebble that had been bothering him all evening, he lined his shoes beside the door. His chunky combat boots looked out of place next to Jon’s minimalist collection: two pairs of oxfords, a pair of trainers, and the simple boots he’d just been wearing.
Without his layers, Jon was just as scrawny as Gerard had imagined. His hair was streaked with grey, and small wrinkles traced his brows and the corners of his mouth. Jon would look older to most, perhaps approaching middle-aged, if he didn’t also seem so terribly young.
Jon gestured to the round dining table in front of them. It sat in the middle of the room, separating the kitchen on the left from the living room on the right. A door stood behind the table at the far end of the room, which Gerard assumed led to the bedroom. “Please, take a seat.”
No position allowed Gerard a full view of his surroundings, so he chose the seat with his back to the door. It gave him a direct view of the front door and the tiny balcony along the wall of the living room. “I was planning on making myself tea, do you want some?”
“Sure.”
While Jon bustled around his kitchen, Gerard looked around from his seat. He started with the ceiling, scanning for spiderwebs, but he couldn’t spot a single strand in the orange glow of Jon’s scattered lamps. Satisfied, he lowered his gaze to eye level to take in the rest of the room.
From the small collection of shoes and coats, he’d taken Jon as a minimalist, but the room burst with possessions. A worn sofa and armchair outlined a colorful Persian rug. On top of it, scattered papers, a laptop, and an abundance of stationary covered the round wooden coffee table, the only real mess in the space. Where most would place a TV, a dark bookshelf extended to the ceiling, filled with books and binders. Some kind of decorative item covered every other available surface. He counted three different framed embroidered pieces hung on the walls, along with various art prints and a carved wooden block depicting a cat. Souvenirs littered the side tables, and even the napkin holder on the table in front of him, the metal outline of an austere stone building, looked like something from a university gift shop.
Gerard did not enter homes often. He entered plenty of houses, sure. He was familiar with stark living rooms or places where a line of fishing wire carrying sheets of human skin was part of the ambiance. Sometimes, he entered houses that were once homes, but by the time he got there to fish a soggy book out of a pool of blood in the bathtub, they tasted like death. Jon’s flat was a home, though, and Gerard’s first impulse was to hate it.
“Cozy place you’ve got,” he finally said.
Jon turned from where he’d been steeping his tea to offer a sheepish smile. “Sorry, I know it’s a bit cramped.”
“No, I like it.” He willed it to be true. “It’s very… homey.” He cringed as the words left his lips, but he didn’t know how else to express the living, suffocating warmth of the place.
“That’ll be my grandmother’s influence,” Jon explained. “This place was mostly bare when I moved in, but then she passed two years ago and I took in a lot of her things.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” he said instead of good for you, because most people probably had positive attachments to their family members. When Mum left his life for good, Gerard took his meager belongings and trashed whatever wasn’t dangerous enough to burn.
Jon shrugged. “It’s alright. I, well—” he suddenly flinched back from the counter.
Gerard was on his feet in a second. “Jon?”
“Sorry it’s just, er— spider.”
“Hold on.” He grabbed a napkin from the table and joined Jon at the counter. Jon stood frozen besides the small tremble in his fingers. On the underside of the wood shelf above the sink sat a small house spider, brown and easy to miss if Jon wasn’t staring at it.
He cleared his throat. “It’s fine,” he began, even as he inched behind Gerard. “I can—”
Gerard slammed the napkin against the spider. It came away flattened and very dead. He folded the napkin and swiped it one more time over the wood to catch any blood or stray webs.
Behind him, Jon let out a shaky breath. “Thank you, Gerard,” he mumbled.
“Gerry,” he corrected, surprising even himself.
“What?”
He flushed, turning towards the sink so Jon didn’t see the red creeping into his cheeks. “Please, call me Gerry.”
This time, Jon spoke clearly, and the smile in his voice was unmistakable. “Thank you, Gerry.” Gerry cleared his throat and drummed the fingers of his free hand along the edge of the sink. It was getting warm. He should remove his gloves.
As Jon approached the counter again, Gerry remembered the napkin in his hand. He dug out his lighter and set the napkin on fire in the steel sink.
Jon eyed him. “Is that really necessary?”
“Probably not, but better safe than sorry.” The Mother of Puppets did not let her victims get away easily. Or maybe Gertrude’s excessive caution was getting to him.
“Let me guess, another thing with a ‘spooky’ explanation?”
Gerry chuckled bitterly. “It usually is. I’m afraid you won’t find me all that interesting once you’ve gotten the Supernatural 101 talk.”
Jon frowned at his tea, brows furrowed. He seemed to do that often. No wonder he had wrinkles. “I find that hard to believe.”
Gerry didn’t know how to reply to that, so he returned to his seat.
“How do you take your tea?” Jon inquired.
“Whatever you’re having is fine. I’m not picky.”
Jon came over with two mugs. One was decorated with tiny shells, and the other was covered in muddy paw prints with the text “You are A-Meow-zing!” printed along the bottom. “Here,” said Jon, pushing the former towards him.
“Thanks.” Gerry took off his gloves and unraveled the makeshift wrap he’d used beneath them, two strips of black cloth he’d cut from an old t-shirt. As he lifted the mug to his lips, Jon’s eyes raked over his tattooed knuckles. The tea was a bit strong and mildly sweet. It was loads better than anything Mum had ever made him, but that was an easy bar to cross. Getrude’s tea was superior, of course, but she was hard to compete with.
Their ensuing conversation earned Gerry a few tidbits of information. Jon joined the Institute a couple of years ago after graduating from Oxford with a literature degree. He was only twenty-six and couldn’t help that he’d started greying in his teens. He liked Gerry’s days-old eyeliner but never took the time to learn how to do it on his own. When their conversation reached a natural lull, mugs nearly empty, Gerry cleared his throat. “So,” he said. “You want to know about the supernatural. The Dread Powers, how they manifest, and all that.”
Jon’s eyes widened behind his mug, and he set it down carefully. “The Dread Powers?”
Gerry began to recite from memory, lessons drilled into him not long after he’d learned to read. He started with the concept of fear itself, but it was hard to take a backseat in his own mind when Jon filled every pause for breath with a thoughtful question, a philosophical argument, or a sarcastic quip. It was tiring and invigorating all at once, pushing Gerry to reach for metaphors he’d never voiced outside the confines of his own mind, but they seemed to click in Jon’s in the span of a blink. It was new. It was fun.
He overviewed Smirke’s taxonomy, how the fears manifested through artifacts and worked through avatars, and eventually admitted the Institute’s role as a place of power, everything he knew except the rituals.
When he mentioned the Institute, Jon seemed to shrink in his seat. “Surely not,” he denied, raking a hand through his hair. “Elias can’t possibly be—”
“Evil?”
“Well, you work there too!” he argued.
“I’m hardly the head though, am I?”
“Still, you could just leave.” It was awfully ironic, though technically true. Getrude would have chuckled.
“Are you going to?” He didn’t know if Jon actually could. Getrude never specified whether her shackles were limited to the archives or extended to the rest of the Institute.
“I— I don’t know.”
“Yeah, I thought so. Listen.” He tilted his chair back, then released it with a dull thud. “I’ve been in this world," he gestured around them, “my whole life. I’ve tried to leave before, trust me, but I couldn’t. Everyone was just so ignorant. I’ve made my peace with it, found ways to do what little good I can, but you don’t have to. You’ve only been here a couple of years, maybe read a single Leitner. You’d live a normal life just fine. You could leave.”
Jon clenched his jaw, staring down at the table for a long moment. “I… I need a cigarette.”
“Mind if I join you?” Gerry asked. Jon shrugged vaguely, which he interpreted as a yes.
Jon’s balcony was more of a glorified windowsill with a railing. Standing together in the narrow space, their arms brushed with every minute movement. Jon gave Gerry a cigarette and pulled one out for himself. Gerry lit both.
It took Jon a moment to notice, as he had a faraway look in his eyes. He gave Gerry a small nod, then stared down at the street below, which was empty except for some snow and pavement and a few cars. It had stopped snowing sometime during their conversation indoors, but the night was colder than ever, warmed by nothing but the smoke in their lungs and their shared body heat.
When their cigarettes were burned halfway, Jon cleared his throat. “I quit, you know.”
“Hm?”
“Smoking, I mean. I quit two years ago.”
“Why do you have these, then?”
“I… don’t know. For situations like this, maybe.” He let out a humorless laugh. “I guess I just couldn’t bring myself to throw them out.”
They finished their cigarettes in silence. Jon pulled out another two, and Gerry lit them again.
“I read my first Leitner when I was eight,” said Jon after taking a drag. His voice was hoarse. “It was supposed to kill me, but it got someone else instead.”
An unfinished meal. “The Web?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.” He could imagine it easily, a small Jon with a book too large for his hands, caught in a web he barely understood. It made him nauseous.
“No one believed me. Of course they wouldn’t. I don’t know if I would even believe that child if I met him now, knowing what I know.”
“I believe you,” said Gerry quietly.
“I don’t— I don’t know what you meant, when you said you’ve been here your whole life. But I reckon I’m the same. I… can’t just leave and pretend, knowing what’s out there.” He took another drag and exhaled slowly. “You were right, I think.”
“Hm?”
“I don’t know if the knowledge really helped.”
Gerry looked at Jon, his first proper look at him since he lit his first cigarette. Jon’s expression was unreadable. “Do you regret it?”
“No, I—” Jon met his gaze, then looked away. “Just… it’s good to know that I didn’t hallucinate it all. That I’m not alone.”
Gerry hummed, hoping it got across his agreement and the blooming feeling in his chest that he didn’t know how to put into words. Jon was far from the first Marked person he met that wasn’t an asshole or an Avatar trying to kill him, but something about the way Jon looked at him, the way he held himself with his arm wrapped tight around his stomach, dark brows permanently furrowed, made Gerry want to bare open his heart in a way he hadn’t to anyone before.
“Mum was like Leitner, sort of,” he began. Jon’s eyes latched onto him, but Gerry continued to look ahead at a tree across the street. “She was a rare bookseller, and we owned a few from his collection. She wanted to study the entities, use their power, and she wanted me to be just like her. Before I could even read properly, she gave me weird lessons and took me to meet the local monsters in town, or more often we travelled to them.”
“Good lord.” The phrase threatened a smile to the corner of Gerry’s lips, but he tampered the urge.
“I started doing ‘field work’ as a teenager, fetching her Leitners to study,” he continued. “Then I grew up enough to realize it was all bullshit, and now I burn them instead.”
“You burn Leitners,” Jon breathed. The horrified expression had melted from his face, replaced with an unabashed wonder that made Gerry fidget with his cigarette. The reflection of the moon in his pupils dotted his eyes like stars. Gerry’s fingers itched to paint them.
He shrugged. “Or stick ‘em in cement if they like fire a little too much.”
“The Desolation,” said Jon, looking pleased when Gerry nodded. “That’s amazing, Gerry.”
“It’s really not,” Gerry dismissed, flustered. The appreciation was new and uncomfortable. He’d gotten approval, sure. A simple “good work” from Mum when he did particularly well in his lessons or fetched her a Leitner, and more recently a nod from Gertrude. But even then, they both expected something from him. It was fine with Gertrude, since he never did anything for her that he wouldn’t have chosen to do on his own, but Jon looked at him like something worth admiring. And, well, Gerry was hardly a role model.
“Your mother,” Jon inquired. “Does she–”
“She’s dead now, thank fuck.”
“Good.” Then, tentatively, “I hope it hurt.”
Years and miles away from the bloody scene, arm pressed against a warm body, Gerry laughed freely. “Oh, it did.”
They chatted on the balcony for another minute until their cigarettes burned out. The low rasp of Jon’s voice failed to conceal the growl of Gerry’s stomach, and he laughed awkwardly. Jon trailed off mid-sentence to fix him with a wry smile. “Not a lot of time for dinner when you’re chasing an old man across London, I take it?”
Gerry rolled his eyes. “I’m fine. I’ll eat when I get home.”
“My grandmother would rise from her grave to haunt me if I let you do that. Come on.” He bumped shoulders with Gerry, squeezing past him to go inside.
“You really don’t have to!” Gerry called after him, but Jon pretended not to hear. In the few seconds it took for Gerry to duck through the balcony door and join Jon in the kitchen, he already had a pot on the stove.
“It’s nothing much,” said Jon when Gerry approached. “Just reheating some leftover soup, if that’s alright.”
“Sounds great. Do you cook often?”
Jon tilted his head in a so-so motion. “I make dinner a couple times a week to last me a few days. Otherwise it’s a granola bar or whatever I can throw together.”
They chatted about Jon’s cooking habits until the soup warmed up. They took their bowls to the sofa despite Gerry protests, Jon reassuring him that he’d been learning about stain removal techniques that he’d be eager to try out. These techniques he proceeded to outline in great detail as they ate. Aside from Gerry recalling a great number of dye and blood-covered shirts he could’ve salvaged with this information, he was more enraptured by Jon’s excitement about the topic. He interjected with his own questions, and the conversation wandered aimlessly from hair dye to Jon’s dubiously legal university escapades to research for an essay, describing his methods as “unorthodox” before scowling at Gerry’s knowing grin.
When Gerry finished his bowl, Jon whisked it to the sink before Gerry could place it on the coffee table, because “stains on my sofa are one thing, but I draw the line at my papers.”
Gerry squinted at them. “These look like Institute records.”
“Yes. I take work home most days.” Jon returned to his spot on the sofa. He took off his glasses and set them on the table, barely giving the papers a glance. “You were talking about that museum in Genoa?”
Gerry launched into a ramble about the various art museums he explored in his travels. Jon listened with rapt attention, jumping in to ask questions or offer a fact he knew whenever Gerry brought up an artist he recognized.
He was in the middle of musing about a tattoo he was considering based on Gustave Doré’s rendition of “The Raven” when Jon’s eyelashes fluttered. Gerry paused his words to check the time on his phone, causing Jon to stir.
“Is something wrong?” Jon yawned, and the corners of his eyes glittered with unshed tears of exhaustion.
“It’s four in the morning.”
“Oh.” Jon blinked a few more times, then sat up. “Really?”
“I should probably go,” said Gerry, reluctantly standing. Jon wilted back into the sofa. “You probably want some sleep before you go to work in—” he ran the math of Jon’s commute in his head— “four hours.”
Jon yawned again. “I’ve survived on less,” he said, to which Gerry couldn’t say anything because he wasn’t one to talk. “I guess I’ll see you around?”
Gerry crouched in front of the coffee table. Grabbing a pen and a sticky note from the mess of papers on the surface, he scribbled his number and stuck it out to Jon with two fingers. Jon squinted at it in the low light, and Gerry snickered and passed Jon his glasses from the coffee table as well. “I’m at the Institute most days unless I’m traveling. Give me a text when you’re free, yeah?”
Jon beamed at him, and the lines on his forehead seemed to disappear. “Of course.”
Gerry left Jon’s flat with an uncharacteristically shy wave. He felt like a hot air balloon rested beneath his ribcage, and it would have carried him upward if his boots weren’t anchoring him to the ground. The strange sense of elation carried him through the hour-long journey to his shared flat in a haze.
He sobered at the familiar sight of the living room when he entered. It was so empty and impersonal compared to the vibrancy of Jon’s flat that his chest ached with the loss.
He almost didn’t notice Gertrude’s missing things at the entryway, but he paid it no mind. Both of them came and went at odd hours as they pleased, and sometimes they left for days— Gerry more often and Gertrude without explanation unless she thought it practical for him to know.
Peeling off his leather coat, Gerry cringed at the familiar feeling of dirt and sweat accumulated from two days’ worth of stalking on foot. He grabbed a fresh change of clothes from his room, newly aware of how bare it was. Due to his life of traveling, whether with Mum or with Gertrude, he’d never bothered to decorate or accumulate belongings besides a few sketchbooks. His house had always just been a shelter. He supposed it wouldn’t hurt to put up a poster or two.
He hopped into the shower and let the hot water soak through to his bones before he emerged. The combined steam and exhaustion left him dead to the world as soon as his wet hair draped across his pillow. He stayed in that sprawled position long after the front door creaked open hours later.
____
Gertrude rarely received phone calls at night. Besides a situation with the Spiral a decade ago and a warning from James Wright following a risky move with the Dark in her younger years, the Entities and their avatars generally respected her human need for a decent amount of sleep. So, she would not call herself surprised by the call from an unknown number at two in the morning, but she was certainly disgruntled.
“Still alive, I see,” she told Jurgen when she arrived at one of his safehouses an hour later— an improvised basement beneath an old parking structure with the help of a Buried artifact. He looked terrible. Slumped against a cardboard box in the corner, he raised his bloodied head to watch her out of his good eye. Whoever his mysterious attacker was certainly did a number on him. If he wasn’t in hiding, she would prompt him to A&E, but he knew as well as she that her well-stocked first aid kit would have to do. As she unpacked her supplies, she continued, “I never took you as easy prey.”
“I don’t know how he found me,” he bemoaned.
She frowned. “You were using A Disappearance?”
Jurgen attempted to shake his head, then winced at the motion. “No, no. He didn’t give me time to pull it out.”
“Do you know him?”
“I’ve never seen him before. Some kind of goth. He seemed prepared though. He even burned my copy of Charlotte’s Web.”
Gertrude pursed her lips. She had hoped that her cautious tendencies finally rubbed off on the boy, but evidently she underestimated the depth of Gerard’s grudge. “I suppose we’ll keep an eye out,” she lied. It wouldn’t be the first time her allies disliked each other, to put it mildly. She would just have to keep them separate and distracted.
The next day, and indeed in the next few weeks, Getrude waited for Gerard to hint at his late-night excursion, or even to bring up Leitner at all, but his demeanor was the same as it had always been. Cheeky, talkative, willing to help mostly without question. He still spent most days at the Institute with her, or out on his usual book-hunting escapades. He hunted down most Leitners on his own, but he occasionally requested her help, whether in terms of manpower for more dangerous situations, or more often access to resources and information she possessed. He came and went freely, but he usually offered comments that enabled her to infer about the day’s adventures along the lines of another dead end, or bloody cop wouldn’t leave me alone— took me an hour but I think I lost her, or the tea at that new cafe might just put you out of business.
Nowadays, however, he often left and returned in silence, and sometimes with a stifled smile. This was new; Gerard adopted a stone facade well enough in public, but he was otherwise expressive around her, especially after the first few months since she burned Mary’s page. She suspected something to do with his search for Jurgen, but Jurgen himself never reported anything new about “that goth.” Of course, if Gerard snuck up on him the first time, the boy was likely subtle enough to not get caught on a second round either, a useful skill for her purposes until it wasn’t.
The only other noticeable change was the amount of time he spent on his phone. Without service at the Institute, he was normal enough, though he still sometimes left and returned without so much as a word as to where he’d been. At home, however, his phone vibrated periodically when it had previously been silent, and he looked at it with the same grin.
It was at the Institute some weeks later, after Gerard glanced at his phone then randomly stood up with a casual “I’ll be back in a bit,” that Gertrude decided she couldn’t help herself.
“Chasing down a new book?” she called after him, and he paused at the doorway. He turned to her with furrowed brows, another expression she saw more often lately.
“No,” he said. “Just meeting a friend.” He said the last word defiantly, titling his chin upward a little, though his eyes didn’t quite meet her own.
Gertrude was ready to dismiss this as a lie— a disappointing one really, since Gerard had never so much as uttered the suggestion of a friend or any sort of social life in the year she’d known him— but the flush spreading across his cheeks gave her pause. He had always been a good liar; it came with the trade. She had handed him a lie on a silver platter, after all, and he had pushed it away.
A friend, then. It wasn’t an entirely unwelcome surprise. Social connection was an important barrier against the Lonely, and she expected her company fell short of sufficient for a young man, but she was always wary of such attachments as pointless complications in her own life. Allies were necessary; friends were a liability. She had always assumed he shared a similar attitude, considering his upbringing, but she supposed he wasn’t seeking discouragement if he bothered to tell her.
“Well,” she said. “Have fun.”
Gerard studied her for a moment, then he gave her a small smile. He always had Mary’s features, but sometimes Gertrude was struck by how similar his expressions were to Eric. “Thanks,” he replied, and shut the door.
Gertrude listened to his footsteps fade down the hallway. She returned to her notes, alone with the scratch of her pen and the tick of the clock above the door.