We Have Seen Better Days

17 MARCH

Katy knew showing up in a town where everyone thought she’d been brutally murdered was not the best idea, but she was sick of the gilded confines of the penthouse flat, and Wes sounded serious.

It would have to be pretty serious, Katy thought, grim and sulky, for him to spend time with me.

She didn’t want to waste her energy Changing and showing up naked to a place where she didn’t have access to clothes, so Wes bought her train tickets to come down in the morning. Just because the Beast could travel through space and time didn’t always make that the most convenient option.

Pagham-on-Sea Parkway was the station outside the old town, serving the ‘new’ council estates – the Jubilee and Queen Mary developments now joined together with blocks of flats and ringed around by a high, well-lit wall, bristling with CCTV.

Katy could see the estate and its unwelcoming architecture from the platform, the lurid purple of the TravelInn towering in front. She tried not to think about her friends who lived on the estate, and how their lives were going on without her. She just wanted a tiny piece of her life back, before all she was good for was devouring her own family.

Ducking her chin into her pastel pink scarf, Katy hoped that, and the matching cap, would obscure her features enough from the platform cameras.

Charlie had taken her to a hairdresser, so her hair was now a nest of jaw-length ringlets in the same style as Charlie had, gelled and styled to within an inch of its life, but the sea air would have them dropping and lank in no time.

She didn’t think anyone would recognise her. She barely recognised herself.

Katy glanced at the opposite side of the tracks, at the platform from which her cousin had abducted her nearly three months ago, and shivered. January, and the person she’d been then, felt like a whole lifetime ago. Now she was supposed to track him down.

Closing her eyes, she focused on her oldest brother until she felt a tug in her chest. Wes was waiting for her beyond the gates.

Passing through the ticket barrier, she spotted her brother’s gleaming red monstrosity behind an ancient hatchback in one of the parking bays, and rolled her eyes. He stuck his arm out of the window in a casual wave, as if she could miss him.

Katy jogged over and slung her handbag down at her feet. “You’re still alive, then.”

Wes was just a suit in her peripheral vision, his expression impossible to pin down, his image invisible to her until she faced him.

He snorted. “Yep.”

“Are you… okay?” Katy side-eyed him, trying to get a read on his body language from the way his purple silk shirt creased, the movement of his trousers or the flick of his cuffs.

“Busy. Tired. Nothing to worry about.” He looked at her, and she remembered the shade of his foundation but not the shape of his jawline and rise of his cheekbones, the eyeliner smudged into a smoky glower but not the colour and size of his eyes.

Something’s up.

She feigned disinterest. “Do you think you ought to be buying a nightclub if it’s this much hassle?”

That was his latest venture; as far as Katy knew, that’s what had been occupying all his time and weekends for the past month and a half, although she’d noticed the mood swings were worse and his temper was on a shorter fuse. That is, when he was around at all.

“I’m getting a manager in. That’s not what’s bothering me right now, it’s our bloody cousin. Can you tell where he is? If he’s left town or… or what?”

His curtness bothered her. His tone slid out of reach like the details of his face, but left her with a defensive twinge, like Ricky’s disappearance was her fault somehow. Since he wasn’t in the mood for conversation, even though they hadn’t been alone together for over two weeks, Katy pursed her lips and let her focus seek their Soothsayer.

The Beast knew where to find any blood-kin of theirs, and seeking Ricky was child’s play to that instinctual part of her. Seeking their kin was like looking for individual maggots, while Ricky loomed in her consciousness like the whole carcass. She called out to him, heart to heart, and a shooting pain stabbed through her chest in response.

Katy gasped, pushing down on her chest – such as it was – the arrows firing through her breasts and leaving her breathless and sore.

“Fuck!”

“Language,” Wes retorted, and she punched his thigh, wincing.

Eyes watering, she tried a slower breath and the pain sparked up again. “Ow, ow, that fucking hurts. What’s wrong with him?”

“That’s a big question,” Wes muttered. “Any idea where he is?”

“Devil’s Drop,” she said, forgetting its real name for a moment, but Wes knew exactly where she meant.

He started the engine, and the car purred into life. “Brace yourself,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever known him this upset. Not upset enough to kill his mum and dad, at any rate.”

Katy kept quiet. She didn’t want to bring up that she could relate, but their dead siblings and parents hung between her and Wes in a veil of unspoken ghosts.

The road swept them through town and towards the coast, and along the narrow road to Unger Point, running parallel with the other train track. It came to a dead end outside a caravan park, eerily quiet with a few kids playing near the closed public toilets.

She broke the pregnant silence. “This is it. He’s down there.”

She hopped out and headed for the steps down from the cliff to the beach, Wes following at a short distance. The kids were silent, except for the ping of the plastic ball as they kicked it between them. Even the gulls were circling without calling, riding the winds out to sea.

The steps were slippery with sea spray and early morning drizzle, and steep enough that Katy had to navigate them slowly, clinging to the rail. She jumped the last few steps onto the shingle, converse digging into the loose stones and sucking into the wet sand.

The tide was turning.

She knew which cave to go for: the one everyone avoided. Unger Point was notorious for disappearances, and local legend claimed the scuttling noises from within the unwelcoming fissure was the ghost of a smuggler walled up by his own gang to die.

“Here,” she said, waving Wes over, and slipped into the roughly triangular entrance. The rock was slimy with algae, and she tried not to rub up against any of it.

The cave narrowed into a lower tunnel and honeycombed off at the back into rounder holes big enough to crawl through. Katy got out her phone and shone the flashlight at them. There were weird pockmarks in the sand like crustacean tracks, if lobsters were the size of Dobermans.

“Oh, fuck me,” Katy whispered.

She wriggled her low-rise jeans down a bit at the back so she could release her tail, and the band cut into her uncomfortably against the underside of her vestigial tail, from which her scorpion-stinger-tipped exoskeleton could be squeezed out.

It was too narrow for her tail to really do much, though. She couldn’t get a good swing and stab at anything.

Her brother’s voice hissed into the entrance.

“Richard? You in here?”

There was silence.

“It’s me,” she added, then realised that might be unhelpful. “It’s Katy.”

“Shine your light over there.” Wes was much closer than she’d thought. She bumped into him and he pushed her tail away, holding onto it so it didn’t swing back into his face.

She swung her phone over the rock and saw a long vertical crack off to the left that she could squeeze through sideways.

“I’ve got a good feeling about that,” Wes said behind her, with both hands wrapped firmly around the length of articulated bone, “And a bit of a bad one too, if you know what I mean.”

Katy shook him off and retracted the tail all the way to the wicked tip so she could slide through, choking on the dank air.

The place stank. It was a mix of ammonia and sulphur, sewage, and meat rotting in brine.

Katy braced herself. Her flashlight picked out a dirty sleeping bag, small bones, and bottles. She moved it around and it cast a pool of harsh light on Ricky’s unconscious form, slumped against the wall in his trademark hoodie and well-fitting sweatpants Carrie had probably bought him, now stained with dark bruise shades of wet filth and vomit. The pull-cord of his hood was on the floor, a discarded grey string.

Something rolled under her foot. She shone the light down and it picked out a plastic syringe, the needle still in place.

“Shit.” She stared at it. “Is this his? What’s he taken?”

Wes pushed his way through behind her, his own phone torch shining on the debris.

“I’m not a doctor, but I’m guessing it’s not paracetamol.”

“You should’ve told me,” Katy said, kicking the syringe out of the way. “You should’ve fucking told me it was this bad.”

Wes blew out a slow breath. “I didn’t know.”

She kept her flashlight trained on the ground, picking her way towards her comatose cousin and battling the smell. “God, this stinks. Can we move him?”

Wes set his jaw, nodding. “Yeah, maybe. We can give it a shot.” He scanned the cave with his own light and sprang back with a shout, making her jump and spin around.

There was nothing in the dark, but a frantic scan of the rock revealed a discolouration in the rough shape of a standing figure. Wes’s light lingered on it, but the corner itself was empty.

“Shitting hell. I thought there was a guy back there.” Wes sagged, panting hard. “Just had this feeling we weren’t alone, and— Fuck.”

“Okay.” Katy came a bit closer, but she was worried about Ricky’s tendrils and tendency to be violently unpredictable under the influence. “We’re fine. Come on, let’s try and get him out of here. Where did he get this shit from?”

Wes shot her a glance she couldn’t read, and then forgot anyway. She tried to focus on details like the stains on the hems of his designer jeans, the creases where his knees were bent, the way his silk shirt rippled from mulberry to black in the LED glare.

“It’s called Devil’s Drop for a reason. Where d’you think the dealers in this town get their gear?”

Drop, as in, drop off point. They pick it up from here.

Katy figured it out and grimaced. “Oh, yeah, of course you’d know that.”

“Less of the judgement, thank you. I’ve – okay fine, if you must know, I’ve not been around lately because I’ve been getting myself sorted out. Tina let me stay at her place while I, you know. Detoxed.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Now I’m the sober one. Imagine that.”

Katy couldn’t. He couldn’t even quit smoking for more than a few weeks at a time, and then he’d start again and lie about it.

She hoped he was telling the truth.

“That’s… wow. That’s huge, though. I wish you’d told me.”

“I didn’t really want you to know how bad it was to start with,” Wes said, and Katy’s heart skipped. It was the closest he’d come in months to saying he cared about her.

The moment was broken by Wes clapping his hands, the sharp retort cracking back at them around the fetid walls.

“Right, back to it, we’re here for him not for me.”

Ricky stirred and lifted his head. Katy didn’t get a good look under the hood but the glimpse she got made her wince.

“Ricky,” Wes said, more gently. “Can you hear me? Come on. Katy’s been missing you, too.”

Ricky bared his teeth. They were filed into points and stained. Under the stubble, his cheeks were sunken, eyes glittering and unfocused, deep bags underneath, heavy and bruised.

He ignited something visceral in her belly, but Katy wasn’t a kid anymore. She wasn’t scared of him now.

“Do we still even need him?” Katy asked, a cold tension knotting her stomach. Her tail clicked out slowly. “I mean, Carrie likes me. She’d let me in to use the Pendle Stone if we needed it, right?”

Wes made a swift chopping motion at neck level, indicating she should kill that line of conversation. “She’s burning a hole in my pocket right now, so you can always ask her,” he whispered, patting his jeans. He raised his voice. “Ricky, come on. I’ll get you whatever you want. We have to go now, though. Okay? You coming?”

Katy tucked her phone in her pocket so the light still peeked out over the edge, and grabbed Ricky’s other arm.

“How are we getting him off the beach?” she asked. “The steps are really steep.”

Wes sighed. “Let’s… One thing at a time, yeah? Let’s just get him out of here first. I can’t stand the smell anymore.”

Ricky was more tractable than she’d feared when they did get him up and mostly on his feet, but it took some manhandling to get him through the fissure and back into the entrance. The tide was creeping up the shingle.

Katy heard the scuttling behind them.

“What’s that noise?”

“No time, the tide’s turning.” Wes adjusted his grip on their cousin as Ricky slumped, a sudden dead weight across both their shoulders.

Katy popped her tail out, just in case.

“I don’t think anything’ll bother us,” Wes reassured her. “God, he weighs something, doesn’t he?”

It wasn’t his weight that Katy was bothered by. Her bare arm around his back was wet and sticky. The flesh underneath didn’t feel right.

“Is that blood? Is he bleeding?” Katy realised his hoodie was covered in stains, and they were worse on one side and across his back. She retracted her tail in case she injured him by accident.

Wes was distracted, trying to see if the coast was clear beyond the cave mouth.

Katy tried to regain his attention. “Wes. Wes. We need to get this off him and have a proper look, I think he’s really hurt.”

Ricky twisted in their grip and snarled viciously at her. Cherry red dots blazed in his dilated pupils. His rank, sour breath hit her full in the face.

Wes tugged him away. “You’re scaring her, man. Stop.”

“It’s fine,” Katy said, letting go of a nervous lungful of air.

“This is not fucking fine.” Wes dragged them forward, and Katy stumbled but righted herself. She must have hit Ricky’s back as she tried to readjust her grip on him, because he arched and let out a grunt of pain.

“Shit.” Wes pulled them out to the tideline and yanked on Ricky’s hoodie to lift it up.

Ricky bellowed as the fabric parted from a mass of deep, festering wounds. He stumbled forwards but stayed on his feet.

Katy nearly screamed. She cupped her hands around her mouth.

Wes froze. “Christ on a bike.”

The skin around the wounds was a mess of weeping burn blisters. There were dark maggoty things wriggling in the pus, which seemed to be the same as the things she’d seen pour from his head after driving a poker through it.

His side had a deep, jagged slash that wasn’t healing, puddles of green and white discharge collecting in the deeper recesses of it, reeking of something rotten.

“Oh my god, how is he alive?” Katy fought the urge to vomit.

Wes was visibly gagging.

“I – I don’t—” he paused, swallowing hard. “This… His dad did that. Uncle George did that.”

Ricky was crying softly, tears streaming down his face, gritting his teeth through the pain.

“Where’s Carrie?” Katy whispered.

Wes fished in his pocket and held up a chip of terracotta. He tossed it onto the beach. “No wonder he didn’t want to see her. Or – didn’t want her to see him. But this is… Fucking hell.”

“He has to Change,” Katy said as the terracotta began to swell and grow. “He has to Change right now.” She didn’t know where the urgency came from, why she suddenly cared.

I don’t, she told herself, trying to calm down. I don’t care. He’s only alive because I promised not to kill him.

But that wasn’t fair.

She’d be dead right now, or one of Uncle Barry’s experiments, if it wasn’t for Ricky Porter. She wouldn’t have lived long enough to Change if it wasn’t for him. Now she had fully Ascended, and the family cowered at the mention of her name, it was easy to forget that.

Katy swallowed, ashamed of herself, but still conflicted.

“Hey, King Richard, darlin’, you’re okay.” Wes braced himself, and Ricky dropped his forehead against Wes’s chest, putting his whole weight behind it. Wes squeezed Ricky’s upper arm with one hand and stroked the back of his head with the other.

Now his hood was down, Katy could see the second lips at the back of her cousin’s shaved skull were glued shut with some crusty excretion.

Wes stroked them as Ricky ruined the front of his shirt, and Katy watched Carrie sprouting from the chip of tile.

Her brother was murmuring gently, but his tone washed out of her memory leaving only a vague sensation of jealousy behind. He hadn’t spoken to her in forever, let alone held her and told her it was going to be okay. Now here he was, cosying up to the cousin he’d always told her to stay away from, as if they were best friends.

“You’re okay. You’re a god, remember? You’re okay.”

Something vaguely Carrie-shaped, what once had been a woman with a slender, underfed frame, not as athletic as Katy nor quite as tall, terracotta and gleaming with cracked glaze, formed.

It found its voice, melodic and resonant with a hint of panic.

“Oh my god!”

Wes shushed her over the top of Ricky’s head and kept supporting him against his chest. “Listen, listen to me. We’re here now. We came to find you.”

Katy hovered, feeling useless.

Carrie settled into a human shape about an inch taller than Ricky was, hair stiff and lacquered into a ponytail with streaks of silver wire threaded in the glaze.

Wes was murmuring low and soft in Ricky’s ear in that intimate way he had of making people feel special. Katy didn’t catch what he said, but it wasn’t meant for her.

Ricky pushed him away. “I can’t go home.”

“Sure you can. She’s already here. See?”

Carrie approached, exuding a soothing smell of homely comfort. Wes handed him over, and Ricky stumbled into her.

“Hey,” Carrie whispered.

Ricky recognised her voice, and his face went slack.

Carrie pulled him against her, avoiding his back, gripping his arm with one hand, and wrapping the other around the back of his head.

“I can’t come home,” he repeated, voice cracking.

“Yes, you can.” She kissed the top of his head, and Ricky broke down and sobbed into her like a child.

Katy turned away, an unwitting voyeur of something intensely private. She took a few steps towards Wes, shingle rolling under her shoes, and he put his arm around her. Just one arm, and not exerting too much pressure, but Katy’s chest warmed. She adjusted the waistband of her jeans to tuck her tail stub in more comfortably and stepped closer into her brother’s side.

“I killed ’em.” Ricky mumbled into Carrie’s clothes like she was a confessional. He gripped her hard, fistfuls of fabric squeezed out of shape in a sudden spasm. Carrie let him, keeping him close. “I killed ’em.”

“I know.” She kissed the top of his head again. “I know you did.”

Ricky shook his head. He half-turned to Wes and Katy, his lips peeled back in a grimace. “I’m a fucking god. What’s he want? I didn’t… I didn’t even know I was hitting him.”

Katy shivered. “We need to get him home,” she said, tugging Wes’s shirt. “Will he be okay?”

“Yeah.” Wes sounded sure, but Katy didn’t know how he was sure.

“Isn’t your car only a two-seater?” Katy asked Wes. “There’s… four of us.”

Wes grimaced. “I’ll drive him. Carrie doesn’t take up much space. You can do your thing to get there if she’s got enough food in. I’ll take your clothes in the car.”

Carrie nodded. “I can carry him up there.”

Wes shot her a glance while checking for his car keys. “You could always just leave him here to sleep it off, though. It’s not like he’s your master.”

“Very funny.” Carrie exchanged a look with Katy. “I want him home.”

Wes turned to Katy, raking a hand through his hair, reasserting his prickish ‘big brother’ attitude. “Katy, off you go, babe. Sort something out for when we get back, you can manage that, yeah?”

His tone made her want to throw something at him. Or stab him in head. Even though she forgot it as soon as he stopped talking, white-hot indignation flared and blazed in her chest, so she knew it must have pissed her off.

“I’ve managed pretty fucking well so far,” she spat at him, “considering you’re never even around to see what I can manage!”

She stormed up the steps to the cliff path without waiting for them, mood souring with the urgency of it all. She was the one doing the dirty work, she was the family’s god they all bowed to and feared, not Wes, and not that prick who’d killed Gran and put her in this position in the first place.

Her sympathy evaporated in the white-hot rage of how fucking unjust everything was.

She was a god, and now she didn’t even have any friends.

She took her clothes off without giving a shit if anyone saw, and the Beast jumped into the void.

Wes stared after his sister. “Jesus Christ! What was that about? What did I say?”

“I can’t imagine,” Carrie said dryly, supporting his cousin. “But it would be great if we could deal with one Porter crisis at a time.”

Ricky groaned as she lifted him over her shoulder, and began to climb the steps. Carrie lowered her voice, but Wes still heard her croon to him as she bore him upwards.

“Shh. We’ll patch you up, love. Don’t you worry.”

Wes squinted up to the top of the steps as Carrie reached the pile of clothes Katy had left behind. The gulls circled above them, white pinwheels in the grey blanket of sky.

He struggled up in her wake and found the car park deserted, his gorgeous baby in classic red exactly as he’d left her. The kids and their football were gone.

Carrie eyed his seats when he opened the passenger door. “How… how is this going to work? He needs to lean forward…”

Wes couldn’t look. Something wriggled out of the exposed rib on Ricky’s side, white and thick, then burrowed back into the necrotic flesh. Wes was sick in his mouth.

He swivelled away and spat up on the grass.

“Oh, God. I can’t. Holy Hell.”

“What did they do to him?” Carrie sounded close to tears, if a building could cry. She was less a person now, more a sculpture of vaguely sexy dimensions, Wes thought, if angles were your sort of thing.

I won’t stand a chance with her if this is my fault, too.

The day he’d left for London, high on Silver Lining and not knowing Katy was going to kill their parents and siblings that same morning, Wes had called in on Uncle George. He’d forced him to hand over something Granny Wend had concocted to keep Ricky docile, unable to Change. Now Wes had it, an innocuous jar of ointment, hidden away at Hugo’s. If they’d tried to make something else, they’d clearly fucked it up. It hadn’t protected them, but it had done him a lot of damage.

He caught a glimpse of his cousin’s wounds again as she put him in the car, and his libido died as quickly as it had sparked to life.

“I don’t know.” Wes got hold of himself with effort, regulating his breathing. “Can you drive? I don’t know if I—”

“No, I can’t.” Carrie got Ricky into the seat and strapped him in as best she could, but Wes couldn’t watch.

He let her diminish into a piece of terracotta and slipped her into his pocket for the drive back, with Katy’s clothes balanced on his knees in a folded pile.

It took too long, no matter how he focused on the road, windows down and fan on. He was nose-blind by the end, but the crusty, earthy stink of Ricky’s clothes, overlaid with sweet rot and pierced through with notes of piss and shit and God only knew what else, would take forever to get out of the upholstery. It had depth to it.

The peripheral movement – not of muscle, but things under the skin – turned his stomach. He threw up again on Fairwood House’s driveway as soon as he parked up and stumbled out into the fresh air.

Katy was waiting for them in Carrie’s dressing gown, a little short on her but covering her modesty, slick new skin towelled dry after her Change.

The house had unlocked itself upon her arrival, which Wes thought was pretty impressive when the collective consciousness of all its rooms and hallways was manifested several miles away at the beach.

“I’ve called Mill Street Surgery for an emergency house call, they said Dr Monday might be able to come out at three and to run a bath and take samples of the, of the, um, the wound area, and urine…” Katy said as soon as they got there. She barely glanced at Ricky’s body in Carrie’s arms, her eyes fixed defiantly on Wes’s face, as if she was trying to prove something.

“I ran a warm bath for him, you know, to try and clean him up and clean the wounds, I don’t know if that’s right… but just in case… I found some, um, some anti-bac stuff in the First Aid kit in the kitchen, I don’t know how old it is and I’m not sure if it’ll be enough, but I put it by the bath with some flannels…”

Carrie carried Ricky through the hall and up the stairs without a word, and Katy, with a last lingering look at Wes, followed. She was still talking.

Wes scratched his neck and sauntered away to the living room, bulldozed by his sister’s whirlwind efficiency.

Yes, you can handle things better than I can, well done. You don’t have to prove anything to me.

He didn’t think he could handle the next part.

He put his feet up and tried to shake the grim images from his mind, and the stench from his nostrils, unable to quite shake the feeling they had not been alone in that cave.

His phone rang.

Tina.

“Hey,” Wes said, leaning back against the sofa arm, feet over the edge of the other one. “What’s up, babe?”

Tina sounded anxious. “I can’t get hold of Carrie. I’m stuck in work piecing George Porter’s skull back together, and she’s not answering her bloody phone. Ricky’s really gone off the fucking deep end this time, can you go and see if—”

“Whoa, whoa, I’m there now, she’s fine.” Wes dropped his voice into a soothing tone, in the hope that its effect would remain with her after it had been erased from her memory. “She’s totally fine. He’s in a bad way, but nothing we can’t handle.”

Tina gave a quiet gasp of relief. “Thank the goddess. I was getting so worried—”

“He’d never hurt her, you know that, right?” Wes didn’t mean to get defensive on Ricky’s behalf, and the prickle of – was that indignation? – surprised him. He blinked. “Uh. I mean, I know you can’t stand him, but he’s really not—”

“He killed my puppy in front of me,” Tina said, her voice cold and flat. “A girl in my class went missing right after he said he liked her eyes.”

“Yeah, okay, he’s always been creepy—”

“Creepy? He’s a fucking serial killer. I know your family treat him like some kind of, of spiritual leader, or consultant, or whatever it is that has you all paying court to him—”

Wes burst out laughing despite the current situation unfolding upstairs. “Is that what you think? Oh God, Tee, you make him sound like the Dalai Lama.”

Tina waited until his chuckles died a death at her pointed silence, and he heard her slow, deliberate inhalation before she continued, words clipped. “Richard Porter has not got a good track record of caring for the things he loves. That’s if he does love at all. And if he hurts my friend…” She trailed off, and Wes felt the ominous weight of her unspoken threat without understanding what it was.

“Hey, come on, he’s pretty consistent. He looked after that ratty old taxidermy thing he made for years.”

Tina made a noise somewhere between a snort and a snarl. “Until he set it on fire? Reassuring. How well do you even really know him? You spent minimal time with him as a kid, you hung out when you were off your faces and then you fucked off to London and didn’t talk to him unless you needed to. You used to say if it took longer than half an hour, you needed to scrub your skin off in a hot shower.”

Wes cleared his throat over her, hoping the house hadn’t heard that. “Look, he’s not in a position to do anyone any damage, all right? His mum and dad fucked him up pretty badly. I’m amazed he’s still alive, to be honest.” He paused. “I feel bad for him, Tee.”

“God, it must be serious. Are you staying over to cosplay Florence Nightingale, or are you coming back to mine tonight?”

“Dunno yet. D’you think I can pull off the dress and the lamp?”

“Wouldn’t put it past you.”

Wes grinned. “How about I give you a preview?”

“Easy, tiger.” He had made her smile, he could hear it in her voice. “Last night was fun, but I don’t want it to turn into a habit.”

Wes blinked, tensing. “Look, that was – it wasn’t…” He lowered his voice, ears burning. “It’s not a, a thing that happens a lot, just more recently, you know, the past few – all right, the last six months or so, but I’m clean now, right, it’ll get better.” He cupped his hand over his mouth, checking there wasn’t anyone at the door. “You can get pills for it now. And there’s a doctor on Harley Street who specialises—”

“Oh for gods’ sakes, Wesley. Yes, you need to see someone, but it ought to be a fucking therapist. Not everything is about your cock, believe it or not.” Before he could protest, she added, with hurtful bluntness, “I wasn’t talking about you not getting it up, I meant sex in general. The whole friends with benefits thing. I just think… your family and mine don’t mix, and things are already complicated.”

“How d’you mean, we don’t mix?” Wes flushed hard, trying to recover. “All that’s ancient history. You’re not ditching me, are you? Tee, come on. I need you right now.”

There was a long pause and a heavy sigh.

Wes waited, heart hammering. He wasn’t sure he could stick to anything if he didn’t have the accountability, and Tina Harris was not only one of his oldest friends, but she could and would kick his arse into next week if he lied to her about anything, which often limited the scope of their conversations. He didn’t know how to tell her that he valued this, that it helped to have someone in his life he knew he could trust completely, who needed no explanations and understood his background and knew him much better than even his partners did, even if he couldn’t always be open with her in return.

“I can’t lose you, Tee.” He tried to backtrack. “Look, even if our families haven’t worked well together in the past, isn’t that more reason for you to stick around now? I’ll tell you what they’re all up to, and, and, look, how’s this, if I ever think he’s a danger to Carrie, you’ll be the first to know. I doubt Carrie would listen to me, anyway.”

He gave a quick glance around the room as he said that, but the avatar was still fully focused on her lodger, and the room wasn’t paying him any attention. At least, he didn’t feel a presence in it, or any indication the walls had ears, literal or otherwise.

“I’ll do regular check-ins. Like you’re doing for me. Yeah? How about that?”

“Do you mean it?”

“Absolutely.” He wished she could remember how sincere he was being. “So you don’t have to worry, you know? Or do anything… drastic.”

She made a little noise in the back of her throat that put him on alert.

“What? What was that? What have you done, Tina?”

“I didn’t want to do this, but I’ve… I’ve already taken precautions.”

Wes frowned. “What precautions? When?”

“A few weeks ago when she said he was getting moody. Things were bad with his parents, I was scared he’d take it out on her, and I’d hoped she’d throw him out before now, to be honest.” Tina gave a short huff of breath against the phone speaker.

“Tina, what did you do?”

“I just… called up an ancestor, one already bound to the family and the area, you know, to… keep an eye on things. Well, I say ‘called up’, I mean I asked. You don’t ‘call up’ something like him.”

Wes went cold. Something Ricky had said when they were about ten years old echoed back at him from nowhere, the sensation jogging his memory.

Don’t speak Welsh, a young Ricky had scolded Tina on a rare occasion they met after the puppy incident. Old words bring old things out, Gran says.

Tina had learned two Welsh words from her mother, who had a Welsh grandfather, and she said them just to piss Ricky off. It had been more than that, though. Now Wes thought about it with the eye of adulthood, Ricky had been really frightened.

“What old things?” Wes asked out loud under his breath. “I mean, what ancestor? What’s out there?”

“He’s… not exactly an ancestor. He’s not exactly a man at all. I think he used to be, but now he’s… something else. Like Carrie’s an avatar of the house, I think he’s become an avatar of – story. No, that’s not right. More like, of everything that’s ever been written about him.”

A chill crawled over Wes’s nape, and he watched the hairs on his arms pricking to attention as he shivered.

At least something still does.

“I presume you mean somebody dead?”

“Oh, he’s not dead,” Tina said, and Wes’s eyes watered with a sudden low-level dread that snaked up through the base of his belly, cold and insidious, to wind tightly around his lungs.

He glanced over at the view across the lawns and started.

A man was looking in the window.

Wes sprang off the sofa and nearly tripped headlong on the edge of the rug.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Wes? What’s happened?”

He shot a frantic look back at the man behind the panes, but there was nobody there. Just an ornamental shrub. The heavy brown curtains and bevelled glass of the large window were playing tricks on his eyes.

His heart rattled against his ribs.

“Nothing, I thought I saw… No, I’m seeing things. I’m fine.”

“Gods, you scared me.”

He gave a short laugh. “Scared myself.”

If he wasn’t careful, the stress would trigger his hallucinations again. Tina had warned him to take it easy.

“What’s up with you?” Katy asked from the doorway, making him jump again.

“Nothing.” Wes made a show of recovery. “I’m on the phone.”

His sister pulled an apologetic face. “Sorry.”

“No, no.” Wes steadied his breathing. “Tee, I’ll see you tonight, yeah? Talk later?”

“As long as everything’s fine…” She sounded unconvinced. “Are you drinking that solution I made up for you?”

Wes had forgotten all about that. “I… I actually – I’m at Carrie’s right now, I’ll take some when I’m back at yours. Okay? Look, I’ll let you get back to it, Katy’s here, Ricky’s in a bad way. Not violent, or anything, but it’s all going on. Talk tonight, yeah? Bye, love. Bye.”

He hung up over her wary goodbyes.

That’s all we need, to be stalked by a bloody dead guy. Thanks a lot, Tee. You bet your sweet arse we’ll be having words tonight.

He hoped his expression didn’t give Katy more to worry about.

“Sorry about that.” He pushed his hands into his back pockets. “Huh. How is he?”

Katy chewed her cheek and winced. “There’s like… sludge. In the… in the wounds. Like, some residue. Do you think that’s—”

“No idea.” This was not what Wes wanted to hear. Had they gone and made something to control their son, and botched it? If Wes hadn’t taken Granny Wend’s ointment off them for his own leverage purposes, this would never have happened.

Then again, maybe if they had been able to overpower him properly, Ricky would be dead right now.

Maybe Wes had saved his life.

He clung to this possibility, the version where he was some kind of hero. “Let’s see if the doctor can analyse it.”

“Do you know something about it?”

Wes hated the way she looked at him. He shook his head. “What would I know?”

Katy narrowed her eyes. “What if they did something to him that’s stopped him from Changing?”

“Could be.” Wes scratched his cheek, a headache flaring behind his eyes. “If we clean him up, wash it off, that might help, is that what you’re thinking?”

Katy shrugged. She moved by him to take a seat in the armchair, tucking her legs up underneath her. Wes swivelled casually, watching her.

“You’re not in contact with anyone here, right? Nobody saw you? You didn’t give your actual name on the phone to the surgery? You’re supposed to be dead.”

Katy’s jaw clenched. “Yeah. Don’t worry. I’m just a killing machine. Killing machines don’t have real lives.”

He shrugged this off, not knowing what to say. The pounding in his head was dull and persistent. “When it’s done, there’ll be other things to do. Think about that.” It was weak comfort, but he couldn’t think. “God, I think… I think, I think I need some water.”

Katy didn’t follow him into the kitchen, and Wes stumbled down the hall as spots burst in front of his eyes.

Not again…

He made it into the kitchen and nearly fell down the steps. The sink swam in his peripheral vision. Wes was overwhelmed by a dizzying wave of vertigo.

The kitchen shifted and disappeared around him.

One moment he was sure of the floor under his feet, and the next, he was somewhere else.

The world had changed.

He saw three futures, laid one on top of the other, strobing around him. As he tried to focus on a whirl of sunshine and shoppers, screams and smoke, they peeled apart for his clearer examination.

London, a street he recognised. Everything normal and fine. People going about their business. Shops and bustle and normalcy, nothing of note, nothing new. Why was he seeing this?

But then – a world of darkness and thick smoke blocking the sun, shapes moving, fragments of massive hulking forms, eyes blinking like fairy lights, the sound of distant screams…

Wes found himself in a world of swirling smoke, chemicals thick on the air. Far away, an explosion sent another mushroom cloud bursting into the sky, and a pigeon hit the ground in front of him, dead before it smacked into the street.

The road was full of dead things. Human arms poked out from beneath cars, and piles of uncollected rubbish spilled from bins and bags.

Some great shape loomed over a building, backlit by the flames of a chemical fire, and Wes saw a great eye searing its dispassionate disdain deep into his soul.

The vision shifted.

Now back to normal. The sun shining, a shopping day.

Wes stood in Fairwood House’s kitchen with the London bustle buffeting him on every side, disorientated and confused. He tried to focus on the Pendle Stone in the hearth, below the great range, but a woman with a burden of high-end shopping bags walked straight through it on her way to Harrods.

Wes blinked, and everything was fine. The sky was blue.

And then… A third vision overlaid it, disrupting his view of the street. He was plunged into another world entirely, where car horns blared and music blasted from everywhere, reverberating around his skull.

The shopper and her bags and the blue sky all melted and were replaced by a whirl of dancers, building fires billowing from broken windows, sirens, and an orgiastic celebration of chaos. Wes spun around as naked, screaming people wielding homemade weapons and covered in blood whooped and danced around a telegraph pole where posters of a face, only a face, and no writing, were stapled, covering the entire pole in a grayscale paper skin.

Everywhere Wes looked, the face winked at him, slipping in and out of his consciousness, and it was the only thing that people cared about. All around him were bloody bacchantes revelling in a drama of sacrifice and self-mutilation. Someone was screaming joyously on their knees before a billboard, ripping their designer clothes to rags, and cutting off chunks of themselves with what looked like a potato peeler as an offering.

No, no more, holy fucking fuck, make it stop!

The world spun back into focus, cold flagstones under his back, the fresh white of the ceiling greeting him as he regained consciousness.

Wes came to on the floor, gasping.

“I’ll take the shopping day,” he mumbled, rolling onto his side. “Jesus, fuck.”

Using the kitchen table to regain his footing, he tumbled into a chair, sinking his head into his hands.

Christ on a bike and Bacchus on the handlebars.

Wes raised his head a little, but the kitchen was still spinning slowly. He lowered it again into the crooks of his arms, seasick.

He needed Ricky to look into the future, and tell him for sure which one of the visions was real, or if it was all just some bullshit his brain was spewing out as it recovered from the cocktails he’d drenched it in.

“Wes? Are you in here?”

He closed his eyes at his sister’s voice. “Yep. Just feeling rough. Give me a sec, babe.”

“God, not two of you.” He heard her patter down the steps behind him, and then the sound of the tap. A glass of water was set on the table. “Shall I look for painkillers?”

“Yeah, babe, that would be brilliant.” Wes managed a few sips, and put his head back on the table. “God, I hate being sober.”

It was the most honest thing he’d ever said in front of her, and he instantly regretted it.

Katy patted his shoulder and put two ibuprofens into his hand. “You got this.”

It was a simple gesture, and three simple words, but Wes downed the tablets with a renewed confidence.

“In case you forget my expression, that meant a lot to me,” he said into his arms, not even sure if she was still in the room.

He thought he heard her give a small hm, and then the scrape of wood on stone as a chair moved closer. Her hand rubbed his back. Wes decided to keep his apocalyptic visions to himself for the time being, at least until Ricky could confirm them one way or another.

He rested under the touch of the girl who had irrevocably changed his life, trying not to hate her for it.