I Am Alive, They in Their Graves

12 APRIL

The dance of ash and sparks dazzled him, and he forgot about the wounds his father had made, the deep gashes scoring through to the bone, the pain that seared him like flame.

It wasn’t just the cottage that was burning.

It was everything. A whole world on fire.

“I warned you,” the man said, now invisible and only a disembodied Welsh accent out of place in that memory. “I told you what would happen if you weren’t up to it.”

It wasn’t Bramble Cottage at all. It was Fairwood, and she was nothing but a shell. Something roared in the sky, the clouds a mass of writhing, articulated worms.

(Let me die with her,) he thought, unable to speak. He leaned into the blooms of fire, bloody and open-armed.

The flames licked Ricky’s skin, but he didn’t burn.

“Ricky?”

The touch on his shoulder pulled him back and he woke up with a start in the cellar. He was in Fairwood, intact, un-singed, and relief crashed through him.

(Just a dream. Shit me.)

She was crouched beside him, so close that his breath misted on her ceramic cheek. Ricky mustered a smile with a slight shudder. His weeks-old wounds ached with cold. He ignored them and scratched the patchy stubble on his jaw.

“Fell asleep, did I? What time is it?”

“Ten-ish. I like you here, but I don’t think it’s good for you.”

He unfolded himself and his hamstrings spasmed painfully. His muscles twanged and ached with disuse and sleeping on stone. He’d slept in his clothes, which he ought to change.

(Bloody hell, she’s conditioned me.)

She offered a hand to help him up. “How do you feel?”

“Never better.” Ricky avoided her hand and did it the hard way, muscles and joints protesting.

The mistress put her head on one side. She had that teasing look in her clear eyes, but there was a worried crease between them. “Love. You come down here and stare at the wall. You can do that in bed. It’s more comfortable up there.”

The cellar light picked out his needle and knife collection on the trestle table, a reminder of things left unfinished.

Ricky scowled at himself and started towards the steps, his back twinging. “I like this part of you.”

“Flattering,” Carrie said, drifting silently in his wake, “But you can heal up in a softer part, you know.”

Ricky stretched to try and fix his protesting back, and a line of pain shot through his side.

“Shit me.” He gave up for a moment until it subsided, leaning on the handrail.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, frowning.

Ricky shook his head, gritting his teeth. “Nothing. Stitch.”

He pressed his hand to his new skin, where the dead flesh had fallen away after his Change and been reformed into a new body. It should have worked. He’d come back from brain-death before, healed completely. Why wasn’t this working?

The cold feeling stole over him again, and he battled it with a tightness in his chest. “What day is it?”

“Friday. Wes is here to see you.”

“Better go up and see him, I s’pose.”

She kissed his cheek. The cold press of her ceramic lips lanced through his skin, needle-sharp. His eyes watered on command, but unlike his mother’s affection in exchange for his tears, this kiss was for free.

He blinked them away.

(She forgave me,) he told himself, stretching again, but more carefully this time. (She wanted me home.)

But no matter what she told him, he couldn’t shake the fear that he’d smashed everything to pieces.

Gran was right.

That’s just what he did. Couldn’t be trusted.

He stalked moodily up the steps hounded by the criticism of the dead, all hissing in his own voice.

Wes was waiting for him in the entrance hall.

“Richard, sweetheart! Up at last? It’s gone dawn.”

Ricky snorted uncomfortably. “Not an ascetic anymore, I can sleep in if I want.”

“Ten o’clock, and all’s well.” Wes had all the bouncing good humour of a champagne breakfast at the country club, trussed up in vibrant sunlit green. “God, you’re looking good.”

Ricky suffered his cousin’s air-kisses but didn’t side-step in time to avoid his cousin’s arm snaking around his waist. Before he could move out of reach, Wes squeezed Ricky right on the scar.

Ricky let out an involuntary hiss of agony and shoved his cousin away.

Wes dropped his cheerful façade. “What’s wrong?”

“Naun wrong wi’ me, just need to—” He couldn’t find the words. “Upstairs. Won’t be long.” Ricky jerked his head at Wes to follow him.

“You’re starting to worry me.” Wes followed him up to the bedroom.

Ricky retreated into the dark hollowness in his chest, where words didn’t exist. If Wes wanted reassurances, he was shit out of luck. He peeled off his hoodie and dropped it in the mistress’s laundry basket, showing off his bare skin.

(There you are. Take a good look, cousin dearest. Feast your eyes.)

They weren’t scars, not really. They were raw pink lines about the width of his index finger, burrowing through his new flesh where they had no right to be. The one on his side was starting to split open.

Wes remained in the doorway, uncharacteristically quiet.

Ricky stalked around the remnants of Carrie Rickard’s old life to find the gauze to keep it clean, and something to change into. The mistress had laid out a cream vest on the bed.

Wes let him get on with it without comment.

Ricky bound his side and pulled the vest on, not bothering to glance in the mirror. It didn’t show him what he wanted to see.

“Well, there it is,” he said to Wes, who still hadn’t moved.

Wes found his tongue. “You didn’t Change. I thought you were going to.”

“I bloody well did.” Ricky crossed to the bed and sat on the sunflower-patterned counterpane, hunching his shoulders. The mattress didn’t feel right, and he remembered it was brand new.

She’d replaced the old one after—

He slammed the brakes on this, cheeks reddening.

Wes brought him back to the present. “Why didn’t it work?”

That was what Ricky wanted to know, too.

“Mum had something on her hands when she came at me. Sewing machine grease, I thought. Don’t remember if Dad… Well. I misremember most of what happened, to be honest.” He shrugged. “Reckon they tried to make more of Gran’s stuff, and it didn’t do the job. Didn’t overpower me, anyway. But whatever they used, it just won’t bloody heal.”

“You mean… you Changed, and then those wounds, they came back? As scars?” Wes’s tone slid in and out of his memory, as intangible as his face, but Ricky found himself swallowing, as if it had been gentle.

“Yeah. Didn’t stick.”

“Fuck, man.” Wes shook his head. “I didn’t… I didn’t think about that. I had no idea—”

“Why would you?” Ricky shrugged, and his side twinged but subsided. “Anyway. I’m alright.” He found himself flushing, cheeks warm under Wes’s stare. “Getting out of condition, though.”

“Nah, you’re looking much better.” Wes came into the room and sat beside him, leaving a narrow gap between them. He put his head on one side and appraised Ricky with a long glance Ricky deliberately avoided. “Genuinely.”

Ricky stood up to put distance between them. He didn’t like how Wes seemed at home there, oak-leaf green against the sunflowers, lounging back on one hand as if he had been invited.

“Got any ideas?” Ricky wasn’t hopeful.

Wes shook his head. “Uncle Barry might have had some, but Katy ate him.”

Ricky winced. “So much for that, then.”

“All right, so do you know what they used? Any clue at all?”

Ricky chuckled darkly. “Well, I might have done if I hadn’t burned the bloody cottage down an’ let everything go up in smoke.” He shook his head. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Wes grunted.

Ricky took him in for as long as he could remember him, that pensive pose, the sinewy hand and long fingers (were they long? What were his knuckles like?) resting between his thighs.

He’d wanted Wes’s attention so badly once he’d have done anything for it, had done anything for it, but it had turned out that charisma and popularity didn’t rub off the way he’d imagined, and it hadn’t been worth what Wes wanted in exchange.

Wes didn’t move. “You’re not doing well, are you?”

(I’d be better if you weren’t sat on her bloody bed like it’s yours,) Ricky thought.

“I mean – not just the scars. You’re not all right.” Wes stood slowly, a blur of colour and cologne. Ricky blinked, trying to focus on him. “What does the future hold?”

“Who for?” Ricky turned his back on him and swallowed, hoping the sudden burning over his neck and cheeks wasn’t visible.

“You’re not looking.” Wes was closer, Ricky could feel him, prickles spreading over his back. “You’re not looking, are you? Do you know what’s going on out there? Or are you just – are you just leaving the family to it?”

“I’ve been ill,” Ricky snapped, misliking the barb. “If they’re going to die, there’s nothing they can do about it. Nor me, come to that.” He didn’t want to get into all this. He was too tired. “We’re alive. They won’t be. That’s all.”

“She’s not killing all of us,” Wes said. “It’s a cull, not a genocide.”

“Semantics,” Ricky retorted, starting for the door.

Wes hooked a hand under his arm and held him back. “Jem messaged me the other week. Jem Foreman, do you remember him? He says some of them are killing each other. Some of them are killing themselves. Offering sacrifices to her to make it all stop, appease her. Do you know about that?”

Ricky didn’t even have the energy to be surprised. “No.”

“Do you care?” Wes’s fingertips dug into him, hard and pulsing with weird energy.

Ricky shrugged him roughly off, ditch-eels of unfamiliar guilt stirring in his chest and buffeting his stomach. “Do you?”

Wes paused, as if unsure of what to say. Ricky shook his head and strode into the corridor.

Wes followed, too close behind for comfort. His cologne, something floral and spicy, hung in the air like marsh gas.

“Hey, while you’re feeling better, I need to talk to you about something else.”

(Of course you do. Only come here when you want something, isn’t that right, Cuz? You didn’t come here to see my scars.)

Ricky clenched his jaw and started down the staircase, gripping the smooth wood to ground himself. She was warm under his palm, varnish soft as skin. She cared. He didn’t need Wes’s faux concern when he finally had the real thing. He was never giving this up. He didn’t need anyone else when he had her.

Wes was right behind him, vibrating with anxiety. “Kind of related, but… not exactly. It’s hard to explain. I think— How do you know if you’re seeing the future?”

“Shit me, Wes.” Ricky stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned to face his cousin. “You told me you weren’t taking those bloody pills anymore.”

Wes raised his hands, joining him in the hall. “I’m not! I swear, I’m not. I’m off pretty much everything. Not everything, but I’m not… Look, that’s not the point. I’m seeing things.”

“I’m not bloody surprised.”

Wes rolled his eyes. “I’m having – episodes. Trances. Seizures. I don’t know. I’m seeing… visions.”

That was a new one.

Ricky cocked his head. “Come again?”

“Yeah. Do you fancy getting out for a bit? Country pub, bit of fresh air? I’ll stand you an orange juice.”

Ricky tried to remember the last time Wes had invited him anywhere and drew a blank.

“Yeah. Yeah, alright.” His response surprised him; he wanted to stay basking in Wes’s attention, but preferably somewhere Wes wouldn’t be fawning over the mistress every chance he got.

Even Wes seemed surprised. “Oh, right, okay. If you’re sure. If we drive out of town a bit, we’re bound to find somewhere you’re not banned from.”

Ricky hadn’t left the house for weeks, or however long it had been since the mistress brought him home. The garden called to him, luring him out into the fresh air, and Ricky followed Wes outside with a suspicious saunter, hands in his pockets.

“Hop in,” Wes said, opening the passenger door of his sports car like a chauffeur, and Ricky reluctantly obeyed.

He didn’t want to drive by the cottage, or see the police tape and the burned-out shell. He wasn’t ready for that confrontation, no matter how brief.

They exchanged a glance as the engine purred into life, and Ricky looked quickly away. He didn’t remember Wes’s expression, but it left a feeling of kinship between them that he hadn’t felt with anyone but the mistress before; a silent understanding.

They eased out of the gates and Ricky’s chest tightened, but Wes indicated right instead of left without being asked to. The fields and trees rolled by in dappled green, and Ricky released the tension in his shoulders.

Wes drove towards the town on purpose, circumventing The Chase and going miles out of their way just to return to the A-road. He didn’t complain about going to long way around, or driving at twenty miles an hour in something that could easily top a hundred and sixty given a chance.

Eventually, once they’d shed the town’s straggling grip and were somewhere past the Long Man of Wilmington, they found a fifteenth-century gastropub with beams that Ricky thought would suit the mistress.

Wes got them a round and ordered food. They sat outside, out of earshot of the bar staff, and Ricky breathed in the quiet of unfamiliar woodland.

When his breakfast came, which Wes had told him was gourmet, Ricky regarded it with suspicion. He’d had his doubts before, but now he was sure ‘gourmet’ was just a foreign word for ‘bloody tiny’.

“Is this it?”

Wes choked into his pint. “I’ll stand you the whole sodding menu if you fancy it.”

Ricky stared at his plate. “It’s quail’s eggs on toast. Did they charge you for this?”

“Right. If that’s not good enough for you, I’ll get you something that is.” Wes got up and went back to the bar before Ricky could protest, only to return a few minutes later with another pint of real ale and a gleam in his eye. “When it all comes, you bloody well eat it.”

Ricky doubted that would be a problem. Lately, he ate without tasting things, and the results were starting to show. “You didn’t actually order—”

“And a pint, but don’t tell your missus. Just one.” Wes passed him the creamy-headed brown ale and carried on with his overpriced mushrooms on fancy bread.

“I shouldn’t,” Ricky murmured, the glass halfway to his lips. The malty smell hit him first, then the biscuit-sweet taste shot through with notes of liquorice. Before he could think about it, he was gulping it down, savouring the taste as it washed over his tongue in illicit waves and settled heavy in his empty stomach. He put the glass down, licking the foam from his lips, and saw Wes grinning at him.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Wes returned his attention unconvincingly to his fungal plate. “Just nice to see you enjoying something.”

Ricky snorted. “You’re trying to keep me sweet, I ain’t stupid. Taking me out to a pub where the mistress can’t hear us, standing me a pint at half past bloody ten—”

“—Ten to eleven.”

“Posh food…” Ricky scratched his chin. “What have you done?”

“Nothing. I just want to ask you about how you know if you’re seeing, you know, visions. Of the future. I’m having these—”

“Yeah, you said.” A worm of suspicion bored through his gut. “What have you done?”

Wes was silent for a moment, concentrating on his food. Ricky was already feeling the good few gulps of his ale, with a low pleasant buzz spreading between his eyes.

“All right,” Wes said. “I’ll level with you. I saw the end of the world. But, not for certain. Possibly. And I keep – okay, I know how this sounds, but I keep thinking there’s this man following me. Not in London, I mean, not that I’ve noticed, only when I’m here.” He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “I asked Tina if it’s… you know, a dead man, and she, uh, doesn’t think it is, but he’s not exactly alive, either.”

Ricky blinked heavily. “Tina Harris, the medium? You know who she’s related to?”

“The old hedgewitch who cursed Fairwood House, yes, well aware.” Wes shifted on his bench as if bracing for a telling off, but Ricky wasn’t interested in his long history of sucking up to anyone with a bit of influence.

“Not just her. You know where Eglantine Pritchard got her powers from? They’re an old line. Go all the way back to battle-bards and mad prophets in the woods, Romano-British bollocks. All of that.”

Wes tapped the table. “Have you… have you seen someone? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Ricky was well aware of the legends and myths. Eglantine Pritchard’s poetry had weakened the veils between worlds, her blood binding had protected Fairwood House and the Pendle Stone within from his kinfolk for over sixty years, and if Carrie hadn’t given the house free will, he would still be locked out of it, unable to so much as touch the fence. He also knew that for all his gifts, he wasn’t as good as that bloody old bitch and her ancestors.

“I’ve seen him. In The Chase, when I was a kid. He wanted me to use my farsight better, said I wasn’t ready.” Ricky shook his head, the memory hazy now. “Wet myself.”

Merlinus Sylvestris had never needed to read entrails and organs to see the future. His sight wasn’t dependent on the seasons, it didn’t ebb and flow with the fertility of the soil. Ricky knew better than to think about his name in Welsh, or he’d appear in the dappling green of the leaves, a wandering, bearded prophet-poet with the wildness of war in his eyes, bloodthirsty as a river eagle, feasting on scraps of fate as the tapestry wove around them.

“Seriously?” Wes leaned in. “You never said anything.”

Ricky snorted into his pint. “To you? Why would I say anything to you? Done my best to forget about it.”

“Fair.” Wes’s knee was bouncing, knocking against the table. “What happens when he’s around? Is it – is it a sign of something?”

“Something pretty big.” Ricky eyed him. “Like the end of the world, maybe. Tell me about that.”

His cousin hesitated, shiftier than usual.

“In your own time,” Ricky said dryly, but Wes’s silence just gave him longer to enjoy the beer.

“I saw three things at once.” Wes tapped his foot against the table leg, making it wobble. Ricky nudged Wes’s calf, and Wes stopped. “One, everything was fine. Which, you know, is great. There was one where… where I think Grandad came through. That can’t happen.”

Ricky released a troubled breath, thinking about the time Myr— Merlin had appeared to him as a child, had fed him, had given him a taste for something greater than Gran would ever have allowed him to grasp at.

Grandad hadn’t liked that. The Voice in his head, promising him greater glories than his first Change and everything he ever wanted, had been set on winning his loyalty.

He drummed his fingertips on the table. “Go on, this future. What was it?”

Wes shook his head. “Fog. Mist. Fire. Screaming. Shapes that you can’t quite make out, destruction…” He trailed off and Ricky remembered his own dream. He didn’t need to remember Wes’s expression or his tone to know Wes was telling the truth.

“Why am I seeing this?”

“If we’re integral to stopping that happening, that would explain why Grandad wanted us on side.” Ricky stopped as five more plates were brought out to them.

Wes, the bastard, had ordered him five whole meals, mostly consisting of meat and bread.

The regulars who brought them out reacted to the scar tissue on display at the back of Ricky’s head, but Ricky was used to that. He sharpened his grin, and they beat a hasty retreat.

Wes burst out laughing. “That enough?”

“I only – they were bloody quail eggs.” Ricky shook his head. “That’s all I said.”

“Get cracking, soak up the beer before I take you home.” Wes clapped his hands and rubbed them. “Can’t bring you back half cut, can I? She’d go spare.”

Ricky bridled. “I’m nowhere near—”

“Anyway, there’s no chance of our old sire coming through, is there?” Wes cut him off. “Not when you control the Pendle Stone.”

Ricky stabbed a sausage. “Theoretically. You’d have t’ be a real fanatic to prime a shrine for that sort of thing.”

“Right. Well, that’s what I thought, but do you think you should… I don’t know, look ahead a bit? Just to check?”

The sausage was spiced with black pepper, and it had been years since Ricky had tasted well-cooked deer. This was better than seeing the future.

“You can see, right?”

Ricky nodded with his mouth full. He was sure he could if he tried. “Yeah.”

Wes hesitated. “Richard, are you lying to me?”

That stung. He swallowed. “No!”

“You can see when you Change, right?”

“Obviously.” Ricky attacked another sausage. “But I don’t need to. I’m fine.” He wasn’t sure that was true, but he didn’t know for certain that it wasn’t. He’d look soon. “What’s the third future?”

Wes stiffened. “What?”

“You said you saw three.” Ricky released his tendrils, letting them slide over his shoulders. His tongue tingled with a spectrum of savoury tastes. He dribbled silvery mucus over everything, but that didn’t bother him. His tendrils sucked and devoured, filling his belly while he sipped his ale.

Wes glanced around, shifting in his seat. “Cut that out,” he hissed, “Someone’ll see.”

“Good for them.” Ricky didn’t care.

“Seriously, stop it. What if someone comes? What’re you going to do?”

“Who’s going to believe them? Anyway, how often do they get to serve a god?” Ricky slipped a tendril into Wes’s pint and started to drain it.

Wes flicked the tendril away. “I don’t fucking think so, Richard.”

“Bloody well drink it then, it’s not ornamental.” Ricky put his own ale down, nearly finished. “Go on. Third vision. I’m listening.”

“Yeah. No, that was… also not good, but for a different reason.” Wes seemed reluctant to say.

Ricky waited.

“I – I think it’s me.” Wes shrugged it off, but Ricky sensed his discomfort. “I think I end the world.”

Ricky regretted the alcohol. “Give over.”

“No, really. People were – dancing in the streets as everything burned. And there were posters and billboards of a face I can’t remember, which…” He waved his hand in front of his own face, and Ricky understood.

He nodded, and Wes looked down at the ground.

“Sounds like you get your cult after all.”

Wes looked up sharply. “What?”

“The vision. Sounds like a cult. Which implies intention, doesn’t it?” Ricky folded his arms, withdrawing his tendrils from the empty plates. His belly complained, tight against his waistband.

Wes was quiet for a moment. “So I can just… avoid that myself, you think?”

“People generally have to mean it when they start a death cult, yeah.” Ricky blinked and yawned, the food and April sun hitting his system with the malty alcohol. “Not that I’ve had personal experience, I don’t ask them to lose their minds, just give me their eyes.”

Wes winced. “I think you’re massively overestimating how sane some of them were to begin with.”

Ricky couldn’t care less how any of them were. “Well – you’re doing better’n me at the moment with, ah.” He gestured at the table. “Temperance.”

“Temperance.” Wes burst out laughing. “God, Gran was always banging on about that. What did she call us that one time? Intemperate… fuck, what was it?”

Ricky giggled. “I misremember. Was I high?”

“Oh, yeah, you were seeing God, mate. Intemperate… it wasn’t pricks, she wouldn’t say that. Was it lackeys? No.” Wes shook his head. “It’ll come to me.” He downed some of his beer and left it unfinished. “Right, speaking of temperance, and me getting you home in a decent state, d’you fancy walking that lot off? We could go up to the Long Man?” He stood with a smirk. “It’s not the one with a giant cock, you’re all right.”

“Piss off.” Ricky didn’t fancy a trek up a hill with a parade of regular arseholes and their dogs to see some antiquated chalk graffiti. “Are you going to finish that, or not?”

“No, and neither are you.” Wes moved around the table and tapped Ricky on the arm in a familiar way. Ricky almost liked it. “Come on. I paid when I ordered. Let’s go.”

“We’re not really going for a walk, are we?” He’d eaten and drank everything too quickly. Standing up was its own challenge.

Wes looked over his shoulder and laughed. “God, you’re a legend. I can’t believe you finished it all.” He jerked his head. “No, we’ll go for a drive, and I’ll drop you off when you’re feeling better.”

“I’m fine,” Ricky mumbled, following more slowly, everything catching up with him at once.

“Yeah, course you are.” Wes opened the car door for him. “Hey, listen. I’ve got a couple of other things I want to ask you.”

Ricky nodded, drowsy and uncomfortably full. The leather engulfed him in a smooth, soothing hold, and when he opened his eyes again, they were in a quiet, leafy layby.

He blinked awake, looking for the time.

The radio was on, playing something gentle.

Wes glanced at him. “You only dozed off for twenty minutes.”

“Where are we?” He didn’t recognise the trees, or the pattern of the sunlight through the leaves.

“No idea. Just drove for a bit, parked up.” Wes put his book down, which Ricky also didn’t recognise.

“Didn’t know you read.” He eyed the cover. “Who’s Margaret Thatcher?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Wes put the book away. “How are you feeling?”

Ricky rubbed his belly, unbuckling the seatbelt Wes had clipped around him while he slept. “Yeah. Fine. What did you want to ask me?”

Wes leaned in a little closer, the teasing flash of whitened canine flickering in and out of memory as Ricky tried not to blink too many times.

“What would you like?”

Ricky registered it as a purr, the kind he didn’t know what to do with, and stiffened. “Naun-else.”

“No?” Wes’s hand rested on Ricky’s stomach, fingers splayed, warm, and buzzing slightly with a faint internal resonance.

The worst of it was, it helped.

Ricky resisted. “What d’you want, Wesley?”

“Nothing you don’t, I swear.” Wes raised his hands and placed them deliberately on the wheel. “Ten, two. There you go.” He gave Ricky a sidelong look. “Don’t tell me you didn’t like that. It’s my fault. The er, latest bout of intemperance.” He smirked, and Ricky recalled the cut-glass grin from the Outside, where Wes stuck in his memory like a rusty tack.

Wes gave a careless shrug. “I want to do this again. Take you out for a meal, a drink, a drive. We don’t have to talk much.”

“Four months ago, you were still blaming me for your face,” Ricky reminded him. “You pushed me through a fucking portal for Throne-bait.”

Wes shook his head. “I apologised for that.” He twisted in his seat but didn’t take his hands off the wheel. “Come on. Let me make you feel better.”

Ricky wished the mistress was here. She could make him feel better without asking.

“How would Carrie do it?” Wes asked, as if he’d read his mind.

Ricky shifted in his seat. “She’d…” He hesitated, then realised he was rubbing his stomach involuntarily.

Wes snorted. “Thought so. God, you’re like a big cat. A fucking panther. What’s the small one? Fucking… ocelot.”

“Piss off.” But it made him giggle. He hadn’t found anything funny for weeks.

Wes chuckled too, taking one hand off the wheel and letting it hover between them. “Can I?”

Ricky shrugged, trying not to let on how good it had felt, looking out of the window. Wes took this as consent, and his corruptive touch sank deep into Ricky’s gut and soothed him to the bone.

Ricky closed his eyes, making the best of it while he could, wondering if this was what living in the present was like. He could see the appeal.

But he knew his cousin.

“What do you get?” he asked, turning his head.

Wes was too close. Had he forgotten how close they were, or had Wes moved? Ricky tensed, one hand on the door handle.

“Relax,” Wes murmured, unfazed. “I’m not going to kiss you. Promise.” He ran his tongue over the edges of his teeth. “I know you don’t like it on the lips.”

Ricky flushed. “What do you get out of this?” he repeated.

“So suspicious.” Wes’s strokes were expert, the pressure perfect, like he was reading Ricky’s body with every movement of his palm. It wasn’t just soothing, it filled Ricky with desire for the grotesqueries of decadence, long denied him.

A small sound of indecent pleasure escaped his throat, and Wes grunted softly in satisfied response, his hand working its magic, until Ricky opened his eyes and realised how mundane and seedy it all was, even if the car did have leather seats and the layby was quiet and green. He batted Wes’s hand away, tingling with the last vestiges of enjoyment, head deliciously clouded.

“Better?” Wes asked.

Ricky couldn’t lie, so he didn’t say anything.

Wes sat back in his seat, flickering gaze sharp as a cutthroat razor. Ricky misliked the way Wes could make him feel pared down to the bone with a glance he couldn’t even remember.

“Do you ever worry that Katy will turn on us one day?” Wes asked, as if he were asking Ricky’s opinion on the weather. “There won’t be many of us left when she’s done as it is.”

Ricky grunted, the true cost of Wes’s courtship now coming into view. “Oh, I see. You think I can protect you?”

“I think we should stick together,” Wes corrected. “We only have each other now.”

“You mean, you only have me,” Ricky said, getting it. “Shit me. Times change.” He chuckled bitterly. “Time was you made me think all I had was you.”

Wes stiffened. “What?”

“Yeah.” Ricky shook his head. “Told you I remembered it different to you.”

“I didn’t make you think that.” Wes was frowning. “Did I? Not on purpose.”

“You don’t do anything ‘on purpose’, that’s your bloody problem.” Ricky shook the memories off and breathed deep. He paused. “I take back what I said about the cult thing, in fact. Maybe you don’t need to be intentional, maybe it’ll just turn out that way.”

“Is it too late to say I’m sorry?”

Ricky snorted. “I don’t think it matters much now, does it?”

The past was a foreign country anyway, as far as he was concerned. He didn’t know how to navigate a history he only recalled in shadowy fragments, until random shards of it became mirror-clear and glass-sharp, stabbing him when he wasn’t expecting it.

Wes shook his head and put his hands back on the wheel. “If I hurt you, that matters.”

Ricky wasn’t sure if this was all part of the performance, but it felt real.

Maybe he just wanted it to be real.

“We were kids.”

“Sure. So’s Katy. She’s the same age we were. What she does now matters. It doesn’t make it any better that she’s only seventeen, she’s killing real fucking people, and that’s leaving a mark on her as much as everyone else.” Wes flexed his hands around the wheel. The leather protested in his grip. “I know you don’t have any reason to like me. You’re dead right, I pretty much ignored you for years, until I wanted something. But you are all I’ve got left now, and I don’t know how to fix this.”

He released the wheel to gesture between them and took a breath, staring fixedly through the windscreen.

“So, yeah, I’m taking you out. And I’d like to do it again. I miss – I miss having brothers. I miss being part of… us. Not being a pariah. I miss having more than like, three or four relatives who will talk to me. That’s my big bad ulterior motive.”

Ricky caught something off in Wes’s tone. He seized on it before it wriggled away.

“What d’you feel so guilty about?”

Wes sputtered. “Guil—Why do you think? This is all my fucking fault, isn’t it? This is all my fault. I sided with her, not even by choice, but because I’m too cowardly to fucking die, so she’d take me off the List. And now almost everyone’s stopped talking to me, I’m seeing things I really don’t want to see, and the only person who might possibly understand a fraction of what I’m going through is you.”

He gave a bark of mirthless laughter, but Ricky had more to worry about than what Wes was saying. Something was happening to Wes’s face. It was fracturing as Ricky looked at it, abstracting into fractals.

Wes seemed genuinely unaware. He was still ranting.

“Even Katy doesn’t want to talk to me, and I’m a pariah because of her. I got clean for her. Mostly. Good God, the end of the world might be my sodding fault for all we know. What do I do about that? You’re the farsighted one, you tell me! What the fuck do I do?”

Ricky tried blinking, but that made it worse. It was like pieces of his cousin were boring into his brain, and he couldn’t physically look away, a passenger in his own body.

Wes finally noticed something was wrong. “Fuck. Ricky? Ricky. Richard.”

Ricky tried to respond, but there was only Wes’s fractals spinning around him, and he could feel the car’s interior, but couldn’t see anything properly. Everything was obscured by an aura of repressed power.

He fought it, and deep within him the Thing-That-Was-Ricky opened its third eye, and the truth of the cosmos flooded him with other images. Everything was refracted through splinters of Wes, and Ricky found himself opening to a myriad of possibilities he’d never seen before, the certain thread of fate lost in a tapestry weave that rippled before him like an Escher drawing.

Ricky couldn’t stand uncertainty. His chest tightened, lost in that feeling he hated but couldn’t identify, the one that felt a lot like fear.

(Fuck this.)

He focused closer on the threads he trusted, pushing everything else to the periphery, and let them explode in dancing sunspots.

“Richard.”

Wes was shaking his shoulders, and everything was back to normal.

Ricky stared at him. “What the fuck was that?”

“Buggered if I know.” Wes sat back, sagging with relief. “You – your eyes went… I don’t know, like you were sleeping. Flickering from side to side, really fast. Like a – shit, is that from the scars?”

Ricky shook his head. “Not sure what that was,” he said, honestly. He didn’t think it was the scars.

“I’ll take you home.” Wes started the car.

They were silent most of the way back, Wes probably not knowing what to say, but that suited Ricky. He needed to think.

“Let’s do this again,” he said when they were nearly home. “Go out. You and me.”

Wes glanced at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Make it a weekend thing. You know. When you’re not busy.” Ricky wondered if Wes would follow this through, but Wes nodded enthusiastically.

“Sure. Thought I’d blown it.”

(You did, Ricky thought. But things just got int’resting.)

Out loud he said, “Best not mention any of this to the mistress yet, let me.”

Wes nodded. “Yeah, of course. Won’t say a word.”

Ricky rubbed his chin. “You weren’t thinking of asking her out for dinner as well, were you?”

“Well, it’s not like you’re her master,” Wes returned, joking, and they turned in through the gates.

Ricky blinked. The words settled in his mind like a pin in a pin cushion, driven in up to the head.

“Here we are,” Wes said, and Ricky forgot.

As he got out, Wes leaned out of the window and waved at the house. “Stay alive,” Wes shouted after him, and turned in the drive.

Ricky jogged up the steps, never so glad to be back, but there was something stuck in his mind that made the embrace of her porch and welcoming open door feel hollow.

It’s not like you’re her master.

The words came out of nowhere.

Ricky stroked the door absently, giving the wood a pat. “Alright, old girl?”

The house whispered to him, and everything was as it should be.

Except…

It’s not like you’re her master.

No. He wasn’t. And now he’d burned down one building and broken all his promises to her, he never would be.

The idea dug in, feeding on his insecurities, growing tick-fat in his head, and he couldn’t dislodge it or remember for the life of him how it had got there.