Oliver relaxed a fraction and idly twisted the gold and black enamel band on his ring finger. Beside him, Gwen’s eyes lingered on the ring’s skeleton and the hourglass it stood upon.
“Ol, do you ever think about the future?”
Chapter Six
In Ink
Felipe murmured an oath under his breath as he condensed their lunch from three trays to two inside the cramped dumbwaiter. He had gone up to the kitchens to collect their food only to learn it had already been sent down, but no one had brought it to the door or sent a message to the lab to let them know it was there. Despite no one in the kitchens treating him or Oliver differently when they ate in the dining room or in their upstairs apartment, they still avoided the laboratory like it was cursed. It wasn’t the first time their food had been abandoned in the dumbwaiter, and he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. Felipe’s stomach growled painfully at the smell of meat and eggs wafting from his plate. After Oliver left for his meeting, he had gotten distracted and let his breakfast go cold, and the hunger had been gnawing at him ever since. As tempting as it was to take a bite now, he forced himself to wait until he got back into the lab. Balancing the two food-laden trays in his arms, Felipe slowly walked back to the lab. At least he had had the forethought to leave the hall door open.
He was about to call for a second set of hands when he heard Oliver and Gwen talking as they normally would. A small smile crossed his lips as he listened. It had been a rough morning for Oliver, and for Gwen, it seemed, but he had hoped that if he gave them a little time alone, whatever tension was left would fizzleout. Felipe was about to hook his foot around the bottom of the door when he heard Gwen ask, “Ol, do you ever think about the future?”
The tightness in Felipe’s throat mirrored the look on Oliver’s face as he watched him through the crack in the door. The future was something they pointedly didnotdiscuss.
“Why? Are you thinking about leaving the library or the society?” Oliver replied, his voice rising an octave in time with a dart of panic lancing through the tether.
“No, quite the opposite actually. I was just wondering what your plans for the future are.”
Before Felipe got to know Oliver better, he had assumed Oliver was the kind of person to have everything planned out, which he was, but there was the future, and then, there wasthe future. Oliver needed routine and structure with a small parcel of wiggle room for fun and spontaneity. He had a job he liked, predictability, and stability, and because his plans consisted of carrying on doing that, there was little need to think aboutthe future. Oliver had had only himself to worry about for most of his adult life, so he wasn’t subject to the whims or goals of others. All things considered, Felipe had slotted into his life smoothly, and while he had altered that routine to include Sunday dinners at Agatha and Louisa’s and more trips to department stores or restaurants, Felipe had never looked tothe futureeither.
It hadn’t made sense to plan anything when his entire life had been spent being at the beck and call of other people. His family had given him a role, heir to the Patrón, and trained him to do that. To them, he had been a pawn, or if Felipe was feeling generous, a future figurehead, and neither of those things had enough free will to want something beyond their goals. He hadn’t known how to plan too far ahead or how to get the freedom he wanted, so he had left their escape in Louisa’scapable hands. Once they got to New York, he threw himself into his work at the Paranormal Society, but the chaos of working on more than one case at a time or having to travel at a moment’s notice didn’t allow him to maintain a routine, let alone plan for the future. The best he could do was try to carve out space for his daughter’s birthdays or special events, but even then, they often got lost in the shuffle of cases. The only plans he had for the future were to survive long enough to finish the case he was working on and get home. It wasn’t as if he could even work toward a promotion. He didn’t want the responsibility of being the head inspector, and without any formal ranks, the only way to move up in people’s esteem was to have years of experience and skills that made you valuable. Luck and a self-serving power had led him to the top of the pecking order, and while planning for the future had started as an impossibility in a chaotic field, it had become something he pointedly didn’t do.
Felipe swallowed against the knot in his throat as Oliver chewed his lip and stared into his cup but still didn’t give Gwen an answer. For the entire ten months he and Oliver had been together, they had turned their attention to the pockets of space in their daily routines, but the specter ofthe futureloomed just out of sight. They both knew they were living like luck would always be on their side all while knowing their grand experiment could come crashing down around them at any moment. The unspoken fear of their life together rapidly coming to an end manifested in those moments when one of them became pensive or overly cautious and the other knew the cause without saying a word. He saw the way Oliver paused before reanimating a corpse because he feared Felipe’s tether might snap under the strain. There were times Oliver had to reassure him that his hunger wasn’t taking away his ability to heal, and if it ever did, they would find a way to get ahead of it. Felipe knew they had boththought about the myriad of ways things could come to an end while still skirting around the silent what-ifs.
If any of those things happened, Felipe hoped Oliver would go on living without him, but for him… Well, he wouldn’t have to worry about a future that never came. Felipe shut his eyes and steadied his shaking hands. Dying a second time shouldn’t have been easier than facing the fact that he was changing. He didn’t know if it was because of Oliver’s influence or being reanimated or both, but everything was getting harder. Coming to terms with his body no longer being infallible had been difficult, but it was nothing compared to the maelstrom of feelings suddenly rearing its head. He was losing his stomach for violence. The veneer of numbness that had gotten him through horrific cases was eroding away, and beneath it, there was only doubt and pain. Sometimes when he would go up to the training rooms to practice, he would try to picture a creature or person instead of a dummy only to stop mid-strike as if the life had drained out of him. It wasn’t even his body rebelling; it was his mind. It all felt pointless and wrong in a way he didn’t fully understand.
As much as he dreaded it, part of him wished that Oliver would decide he didn’t want to investigate cases beyond the lab anymore, so he wouldn’t have to make that choice. The problem was that he liked being an investigator. He liked being useful and making things better for other people. Working for the Paranormal Society made him feel as if everything he went through with his family hadn’t been for nothing. If he wasn’t an investigator, then what good was he to anyone? He was a healer who could only hurt, so what else could he do? Oliver would say he could work in the lab with him, but Oliver had managed for ten years without Felipe’s help. Besides, he didn’t know anatomy or forensics beyond what he picked up during investigations, and as well as they worked together, they couldn’t be equals in the lab.
He and Oliver had proposed to each other and pledged that they wanted to live their lives together as partners, however long that may be, but they had been dancing around whatthe futurelooked like for months. Felipe had heard people say that losing their job had felt like losing a limb for a time, but if Inspector Galvan no longer existed, he couldn’t imagine the parts that might be left. As Gwen looked at Oliver expectantly, Felipe swallowed down his answer for fear of speaking aloud a thought he could never take back. Choking down the heat gathering behind his eyes, Felipe wedged his foot into the edge of the door and threw it open before Oliver could reply.
“They left our food in the dumbwaiter,” Felipe called with as much feigned exasperation as he could muster.
As he hoped, Oliver and Gwen rushed to help him, and any question of the future was quickly forgotten.
***
“Are you going to show me this mysterious book, or am I going to have to find it myself?” Gwen asked as she took the last Fig Newton from the box.
Oliver inwardly groaned as he tossed the empty container into the trash and hoped Gwen hadn’t seen the look on his face. Over lunch, he and Felipe had told her all about their John Doe’s bizarre death and the strange book that had seemingly caused it. If they had told the same story to any of the other investigators, they would have eyed the book suspiciously and wished them luck before hightailing it out of the lab. Of course, Gwen wanted to see the murderous book. He didn’t know whether it was professional curiosity or knowing how much anxiety it gave Oliver that drove her to want to see it. At his hesitance, Gwen rolled her eyes.
“Oliver Barlow, I have faced down people trying to kill us multiple times and lived through the whole murder town thing. I think I can handle a magical book.”
“She’s right, you know,” Felipe said over his shoulder as he grabbed another pair of cotton gloves from the drawer and tossed them to Gwen. “Better to show her here than to have her or Reynard take it back to the library and look at it alone.”
“I don’t doubt Gwen’s abilities. I would just rather none of you handle it,” Oliver replied with a sigh. “If you saw what we saw, you wouldn’t be so eager.”
“I doubt that.”
At Gwen’s challenging look, Oliver relented and motioned for them to follow him to the other bench. Carefully unknotting the fabric bundle, Oliver was surprised to find how normal the book looked when it wasn’t sitting in front of a dead man. If it hadn’t been stained by black purge, he might have mistaken it for any old tome on the library’s shelves. Giving Oliver a nudge out of the way, Gwen levitated the book off the table and slowly turned it over. Her eyes narrowed as her invisible hands prodded it.
“I don’t feel any active magic on the outside of it. I think whatever is left is residual. There’s just a lot of it,” Gwen said.
Eyeing the book as it flopped open in midair, Felipe asked, “You can tell whether the magic is active or residual?”
“Active magic feels different. After I saw Oliver use his powers to feel out the creepy-crawlies from the Dysterwood, I realized I can do it too. If I run my powers over something with a lot of magic on it, I can sometimes trace it back to its source. Residual magic can sometimes feel random, disconnected, like dust particles or fingerprints. You would be surprised how often people leave magic stains on the books they borrow.”
Oliver grimaced and wiped his hand on his pantleg; he didn’t want to think about that.
“Purposeful magic feels structured and rooted. It’s like writing versus fingerprints. Both leave a trail, but one is more deliberate. Active magic feels like its shifting and moving.”
