I ploughed on, determined to finish this. “I should have helped. Icouldhave helped. Maybe offered a kind word here and there. It wouldn’t have taken magic to be even vaguely decent. But no, I was repulsed by those shadow-men.”
“Shit.” James’ murmur echoed Edwin’s.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “You remember the part where I told you I was a shallow, vain, self-obsessed arsehole? I wasn’t exaggerating.” I kept going, because it was never going to get any easier to admit this. “Well, one day, I passed a small group of folk. One man was being quietly fussed over by his friends. He looked up as I passed and caught my eye. He was…” Hot tears of shame threatened to spill over. “…horribly disfigured. Probablyburns, or maybe shrapnel. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is it wouldn’t have killed me to offer a smile or even a tanner for a pint of beer to take his mind off his afflictions?—”
“A tanner?”
I turned my head towards James, my eyesight blurry. “Sixpence. Old nickname for the coin. Anyway, instead of showing the barest hint of decency, I acted like the worst of my kind and sneered at him, then said he should have been put out of his misery like a lame horse.” I hugged my torso. “I spat out my vitriol in Fae, which I shouldn’t have done — we’re specifically forbidden from speaking it amongst humans — and although the poor man realised I was saying something hateful, most people wouldn’t have had a clue what language I’d spoken or exactly what I’d said.”
Edwin sat up. “Then what happened?” He sounded strangled, disbelieving.
“One of the group he was in was his mother. A Fae. The poor lad had been brought up on Earth and had refused to leave for our world to avoid conscription. He’d been badly injured and not even Fae magic could cure him, or not on this side of the Glimmer. His mother had been given permission to take him across the border to try, which is why she was there that day. Glamoured, of course.”
“Shit,” James muttered again. “That was bad timing for you.”
“It felt like it at the time,” I confessed. “But I’d like to think I’ve become a better person for being caught and punished. I deserved to be punished.”
“So you were what, taken back to your world and…?”
“Imprisoned until my trial. I’d not only broken Fae law by speaking my language aloud in your world, but I’d deeply insulted the son of a princess.” I winced. “More than insulted. I’d as good as said he shouldn’t have been allowed to continueliving.Notmy finest hour. I was lucky to avoid execution. The Fae can be swift when they demand retribution.”
“They might have killed you?” James sat up too, so I did the same. “That’s…I guess I still have a lot to learn about the supernatural world.”
We both looked up as Edwin began pulling on his clothes, his face grim. “What are you doing?” My voice broke.
He glanced at me, his expression bleaker than I’d ever seen it. “I need to be alone for a bit. This is a lot. James, babe, please get some sleep before you fall over.” He cupped his cheek and pressed a swift kiss to his lips. “I love you. I just need some time.”
He was out the door before I could beg him to stay.
“Fuck.” The tears broke free. “I’ve…I’ve…” I had no more words. The pain in my chest watching Edwin walking away like he couldn’t bear a single second more in my company was more than I thought I could live with.
James wrapped his arms around me. “You know Eddie fought in that war? Maybe he’s thinking back to how it could have been him. Flashbacks are a thing with war, right? Give him some time. He’ll come around.”
I wasn’t so sure. At least Edwin’s love for James seemed secure, which right now was something to hold onto. I urged James down again and pulled the covers up, tucking them around him. “Now you know and you’ve not run screaming from me, d’you think you couldpleasetry to sleep?”
He nodded. “You did something awful, Trace. You paid for it. More than paid, I’d say. I won’t run.” He hesitated. “Will you hold me?”
He was asleep within minutes, the creases in his forehead ironing out as his body relaxed and took him deep. I lay there for what seemed like hours until finally exhaustion claimed me too.
43
EDWIN
I saton the edge of my bed and tugged open the bottom drawer of the chest. At the back under a pair of pyjamas was a photo album. I slid it out and set it on the cover next to me. I knew the contents as intimately as if they were tattooed on my skin, but sometimes I needed to reassure myself they still existed other than in my memories.
I peeled back the tissue paper covering the first page and couldn’t help smiling. I’d been an angelic-looking child. No more than four, maybe five in the picture, seated on a stool by my mother’s knee, I stared out like a little doll from whatever studio background she’d been able to afford, my blond curls tamed into a semblance of neatness and my white sailor suit starched to within an inch of its life. Mum looked serious, but the grasp she had on my shoulder I recalled as firm but loving. This couldn’t have been cheap; heaven knows what she’d gone without in order to afford it.
Smiling as I smoothed the tissue down, I leafed carefully through the album. There were a couple of older ones of Mum, as a child herself, then a family group with her older sister, my Aunt Irena, whose name I’d have surely forgotten had it not been neatly inscribed on the back of the card.
Dalziel had taken control when he’d turned me and, after my initial adjustment, had left me in the care of Baxter while he waltzed right up to my front door, politely informing the neighbours I’d had a ‘brush with Himself Upstairs’ and would now be staying with friends from across town in order to recuperate. He promptly boxed up anything of sentimental value and arranged for the parcels to be sent to await me at his own London residence. He divided up and gave away any of Mum’s meagre possessions I’d agreed to that could benefit any of our neighbours, earning himself some respect after the suspicion with which he’d been viewed on arrival. Two days later, he left the empty flat after having placed a letter for the landlord and the solitary key on the mantlepiece, and I’d never gone back. Several years later, the entire block of flats was condemned and demolished.
As well as my medals, the photos were something I always kept with me. Baxter had made increasingly good copies for me over the years and kept them safe, digital and paper versions, for reasons I couldn’t explain, because who the heck apart from me even knew who these people were? The originals were all I had left of people who’d once loved me.
I paused when I got to the images of Bertie. His mother, possibly sensing my utter despair at his funeral, had sent me a sweet letter, the ink smudged where I presumed she’d cried over it, enclosing a snap of him she thought I might like as a keepsake. I wondered now as I traced the worn edges of the sepia, if she would have been disgusted by our love, or perhaps she might have grown to accept and even encourage it. I’d never know.
Suddenly, I didn’t want to see the pictures of us in uniform, or the others. Unless someone asked me directly about him, I would keep my memories of Bertie locked away now, because although I knew what we’d had was real, he’d been gone for acentury. It was time to let his memory rest. Also, I had found someone new.
Two someones.Fuck,my chest ached. Trace couldn’t have known, but the fact he’d saidthatburned a hole in my guts like acid. I wasn’t even angry with him, not really — he’d more than earned his parole — but damn, it hurt. I couldn’t stay and risk saying something I’d regret.
