He Was So Perfectly Restored
Ricky’s chest ached with the effort of the summoning, and his head ached from being in a strange city.
They were at the Blue Rose, in the office above the nightclub’s main dancefloor, and he’d Changed in order to get there. Wes had ordered food, and Ricky didn’t want to admit he was curious. There were dishes he’d never heard of before, never mind tasted.
Wes’s hard, long fingers dug into the knots in Ricky’s shoulders, easing the tensions out of him. He hated being away from everything familiar, the raucous streets of concrete and glass assaulting every sense he had, including his sense of direction. Pagham-on-Sea at peak season was bad enough, but this place reeked of perpetual humanity.
“How can you live here?” he complained, leaning into Wes’s ministrations. “It’s bloody awful.”
“‘The man who is tired of London is tired of life,’” Wes quoted, patting Ricky’s shoulder and letting him go. “God, your shoulders are like fucking rocks.”
Ricky reluctantly stretched and heaved himself into a better position next to Katy on the leather couch in Wes’s office. “This ain’t life, it’s a bloody cesspool.”
“It’s not that bad,” Katy said, yawning.
To Ricky’s great surprise, she tucked her legs up under her and used him as a back rest, the way the mistress sometimes did. He wasn’t sure staying with Layla had been good for her.
He shot a swift, silent appeal to Wes, but Wes smirked and shrugged, leaving them to it. He took the high-backed desk chair, swivelling around to face them.
“What d’you think of the office?” he asked, gesturing expansively at the goldfish bowl of a room, the bug-eyed curve of the tinted window behind them looking out over the main dancefloor and bars, his large mahogany desk with monitors and minimalist set up, gold inlay in its centre in the shape of an Ace of Hearts, the kitchenette in one corner and frosted glass of a spacious shower in the other.
“It looks like a Bond villain lair in here,” Katy complained, fiddling with the frayed fabric of her ripped jeans. “You’re repainting this, right?”
“It is repainted,” Wes said, indignant. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Ceiling’s nice,” Ricky said, making an effort. It was a dark purple, the colour of a midnight sky, with a metallic glitter finish. Spotlights were clustered in the centre in the shape of the constellation of Cancer, Wes’s birth sign, with pale gold dashes connecting them.
“Thought you didn’t like astrology,” Wes said.
“I like the stars.” Ricky didn’t know what to do with his cousin leaning against him like this, or where to put his hands, or if he could move. As soon as she shifted, he changed position and made her sit back up. She didn’t comment or seem to mind.
They were waiting until the last minute to conduct the ritual, as the effect would be most potent the first few hours afterward, and they knew everybody wouldn’t arrive at the same time.
“Are you really okay?” Katy asked her brother, narrowing her eyes.
Wes – dressed to kill, Ricky assumed – gestured to his outfit, skin-tight like he’d been syringed into it, makeup hiding a multitude of things he clearly didn’t want Katy to see.
“Don’t I look it?”
“I don’t care how you look,” Katy retorted. “How are you actually?”
Wes rolled his eyes, an unguarded flicker of misery chasing the exasperation. “I’m fine,” he said, and Katy scowled.
“You look miserable.”
“Blink and you won’t remember.”
Ricky winced.
Katy fell silent.
They watched the moment Wes’s brain caught up with his mouth, and the slump of his shoulders decided things.
“Right. We’re pretty much ready now, right? Katy, you got the knife?” Ricky let one of his tendrils out, tensing. “Close to the lips as you can.”
He leaned forwards, catching Katy’s grimace as he tilted his head. “Wes, hot water.”
Wes straightened slowly and went to fetch the porcelain tea set from the marble worktop of the office kitchenette, replete with coffee maker and microwave, and Ricky wondered if his cousin was sleeping here when he wasn’t at Fairwood.
That thought cut off sharply with the unexpected slice of steel through the root of his questing tendril and the violent sting of pain as he lost his sense of taste.
“Ew,” Katy said, as the tendril bumped against his back, but he couldn’t feel or taste what it landed on. Recovering from the loss, Ricky bit his own tongue on purpose and balled up his fists.
“Shit me.”
He breathed through it, other tendrils coming to the rescue with numbing mucus. It burned going on, which was momentarily worse, and then, mercifully, stopped hurting.
“I’m not eating all that,” Wes said, putting the tea tray down and producing the tea egg. “How much do I need?”
Ricky objected to the lack of appreciation for his mutilated glory. “From the root,” he managed, and Katy milked his beloved into the tea pot, globs of black, wriggling things slipping into the water.
“Not the mucus, that’s just a – a whatsit, anaesthetic.”
“Huh.” Katy handed the tendril to Wes, who coiled it up and wrapped it in clingfilm.
“Delicious,” Wes said, then gave Ricky an evil grin. “Not the first time I’ve had you in my mou—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Ricky growled, concern not extending this far.
Wes mimed a zip across his lips and Katy stirred the tea pot.
“Now what?” she asked.
Ricky had memorised the scribbles in Grampa Nathan’s journal, perfected over time as he’d distilled the unluckiest of his numerous offspring into restorative tonic. He’d adapted it a little to account for the fact Wes would be drinking an undiluted post-Change concoction in hot water, rather than a pre-Change tincture of newly-spawned infant with added placenta in a large glass of mulled wine.
Grampa Nathan had had no qualms about consuming his own children, but he’d objected most strongly to the taste.
He handed Katy a page so that she could arrange the table properly, setting it up as if for a transmutation ritual. She shoved her brother off the end, and Wes settled himself back into his winged leather chair, rolling himself over to Ricky out of her way.
Ricky took him in as quickly as possible, before Wes’s image was ripped from his memory again.
“Nice of you to let her do this,” Wes murmured under Katy’s focused chanting.
Ricky shrugged. “She said if we went through with it then she wanted something to do.”
Wes gave him a long sideways glance through lowered lashes, darker and thicker than Ricky thought they should be. “You’ve gone soft.”
“She got to learn.” Ricky didn’t see how letting Katy do a ritual on her own was ‘soft’. “How’s she going to learn this now Gran’s gone, if we don’t—”
“No,” Wes interrupted with a low chuckle, eyes creasing at their smoke-painted corners. “No, that’s… that’s not what I meant.” He leaned close to Ricky’s ear, those sweetly filthy lips grazing his earlobe. “I mean, you’re getting fond of her. You’ve started to care. And you care about me, too, don’t deny it.”
Ricky’s stomach churned, but all he could manage was a shrug.
Wes made a throaty noise of amusement. “I know I promised no first cousins, but I’m not really bound by that anymore, am I?”
Ricky forced himself not to smack Wes in the mouth and joined Katy in the chant, forcing his concentration onto the task at hand.
(Concentrate, bloody hell, focus.)
He could sense Wes staring at him, and his tendrils disgorged with anxious thrashing, shielding him from view.
Behind him, Wes started to chuckle louder, and Ricky assumed the last part had been a joke. His cheeks warmed, and he nearly lost the flow of the chant, but Katy kept it going.
When she finally stopped and lifted the lid of the teapot, the water had become a honey-brown colour, with some viscous drops of black oil swimming in it.
“Is this right?” she asked. “Is it meant to look like that?”
Ricky closed his eyes to recall the journal passages.
Wes did one better – he dug into Katy’s bag and plopped a leather-bound journal on the table.
Katy snatched it up before Ricky could react, and flipped to a bookmark.
“Careful, that’s old.”
She ignored him. “You just had them shoved on the shelves in the cellar. Okay, is it this bit? Where he Changed for the first time, and Gran made him tea?”
“Read it from the second paragraph on that page,” Ricky said, closing his eyes again.
Katy stumbled over the looping script but got into it after a few lines. Grampa Nathan wrote with stiff formality, and had been what his peers might have called ‘priggish’, but at least he’d documented things that otherwise would have died with Gran.
“I took my cup, mirroring her, and nodded. The tea was fragrant and bitter, hot steam filling my nose with bouquets of something dark and strange. It was black, as she had not asked if I took milk or sugar, but that didn’t matter. It had the feeling of ritual, not pleasantry. Floating in the centre of my cup was a dark viscous swirl, and it seemed to move as I stared at it, even though my hand was steady. As I watched, it broke apart into circular droplets like oil, spreading out across the surface of the liquid so that I could not help but drink it – if or when I finally did – and I knew that I must, regardless of what was in it. Mrs Wend’s eyes were upon me, and so were Deirdre’s.”
Ricky opened his eyes. “Yeah, so that’s about it, then.”
She closed the journal and peered into the teapot. “Right, so, just down it.”
“Great.” Wes waited for Katy to pour him a cup of it, and sipped it without hesitation. “Tell me when something happens.”
“You’ll know,” Ricky muttered, watching him.
Katy flipped through the journal with an irritating carelessness. Ricky clenched his jaw as she flicked through the yellowed pages.
“Did you… did you get this right?” she asked, frowning. “This looks like it didn’t work on him for days.”
Wes downed his cup and nearly choked. “Days?”
“No,” Ricky said with forced patience, gritting his teeth, “It took days the first time. After he was already a kinsman, it took a lot less time than that. I know what I’m bleedin’ well doing.”
“Do I really need another cup?” Wes asked, looking to him for advice.
Ricky nodded shortly. “One more.”
Wes fidgeted. “Now? Or do I wait? I feel weird. That tasted fucking weird.”
“Katy.” Ricky gestured to her to pour another one.
Wes was looking up at him like dogs sometimes did before Ricky ripped them open, hunched over his knees as far as his jeans allowed without cutting him in half, and Ricky felt a rush of power.
He hoped he’d remember that forever.
He bared his teeth and passed Wes the fresh cup.
“I really appreciate this,” Wes said, licking his lips without a trace of sarcasm.
“Get a room, you two,” Katy muttered just loud enough for them to hear her, and pointed to the monitor on Wes’s desk that Ricky had completely ignored until now. “The family are forming a queue outside, so this better work.”
“It’ll work,” Ricky said, and drank down Wes’s trust and appreciation with a thirst he hadn’t realised he had.
hour for it to kick in, during which they made Wes lie on the sofa with the hot-chills ravaging him, sweat beading on his bare chest in defiance of the makeup and lotion clogging his pores.
Katy took Ricky aside to the kitchenette and kept her voice low, the radio playing something to distract them.
“Can we talk?”
Ricky wasn’t sure that was a good idea, but her long face was earnest and serious. He shrugged, rubbing the piece of brick in his pocket for reassurance.
“What about?”
“I’ve just – I’ve been thinking a lot about stuff,” Katy said, pulling herself up onto the countertop. “While I was at Layla’s, you know, just… thinking about family stuff, and what I want to do, and she said – she says she wants to leave. Like, exile-leave. Banishment.”
“Yeah, you said.” That had been another thing on Katy’s agenda, once they’d decided on this particular course of action.
“Yeah, and I can protect her and whoever else wants to go.” Katy shrugged. “Can I do that? Like, be a guardian or a protector?”
She swung her legs, feet grazing the floor.
Ricky pulled a face, wondering if she’d thought this through. “Theoretically. Yes.” He paused. “There would need to be a formal rite of banishment. Everyone who survives tonight should get a chance to leave the family, or witness the departure of those who do.”
He looked at Wes, shivering on the sofa, and thought of the visions of Ricky’s own death seen through those selfish eyes. The plan he and the mistress had thrashed out would still work, if fate put all the pieces in place for him. He wondered how it would all play out, and if they could mitigate Wesley’s inevitable betrayal. He wanted to think better of his cousin, but he wasn’t daft. He wasn’t even angry anymore.
“We’ll do it in the open air,” he said, half to himself. “Give ‘em a fighting chance.”
“What?” Katy thought he was talking about the exile.
“Nothing. Anyway, that’s a fair idea. I can put it in their heads when I’m taking stuff out.” He paused. “Look, being a guardian of the banished is all very well, but that’s not the only role you have to play. Where does the Throne come into this?”
Katy frowned. “The…”
“You have to sit on the Throne. You can’t put that off forever. That’s your second Ascension, same as mine. That’s where you’ll get your sustenance, after the cull’s finished, I think.” He wasn’t clear on this, but Grampa Nathan had had a lot of theories.
“But the Throne’s in the Outside,” Katy said quietly. “I’m not staying there.”
“You’ll have to go for periods of time,” Ricky said, trying to recall the stilted, pompous phrases of the journals he’d read. “You’ll be the keeper of the family’s memory, an’ they’ll all be a part of you, and you’ll be part of us. Symbiosis, you know? You build your Throne from our dead, but then you have to take it. You can’t put that off forever.”
She shuddered, and he knew they were picturing the same thing. He remembered the lumbering thing in the wasteland-world, jointed limbs of the clan crawling mindlessly across the anthracite desert, heads on antennae stalks seeking more family, more prey, to absorb into its tessellated anatomy. He couldn’t think of a worse afterlife.
“The one in the weird desert room thing, that was Hector’s Throne,” Katy pointed out slowly. “He killed all of them, and then destroyed himself, and he’s in there too, I saw him. So does that mean I’ve been adding to it? So it’s bigger?”
“Or you’ve got another one, and they’ll need to merge,” Ricky said, unsure on the specifics. “I’ll need you with me to open the portal if you want to take a look.”
“No.” She answered too fast. “No way.”
“You have to.” He was trying not to get annoyed, but resistance to fate was pointless, and it irked him. “That’s your manifest destiny, if you like. You can’t change it, or get out of it. You have to go back eventually and claim the bastard thing.”
“I was thinking, at Layla’s, I just want something normal.” Katy’s gaze slid past him to the sofa where Wes was shivering and twitching. “Like, maybe I need to rethink my uni choices, and maybe I should think about, you know, how I relate to the family who aren’t all fucking monsters, and still want to talk to me.”
Ricky rolled his eyes, pinching the brick hard.
The mistress warmed up in his hand.
…She’s young, love. Reassure her a bit.
“Oh yeah?” He didn’t have a clue how to ‘reassure’ her. “Like who?”
Katy picked at the frayed threads on her jeans. “Like you, I guess.”
That took him aback. “You said you hated me. You got over it, just like that?”
She gave a slight shrug, face clouded and troubled. “No. Maybe. It’s… it’s complicated, I guess.” She looked very young for a moment, and very lost.
Ricky took a step back, not sure what to do but braced for an unsolicited, aggressive embrace of some kind. Katy didn’t move from her perch. She kicked her heel against the cabinet door below her.
“I think I forgive you.”
That was unexpected. Ricky resisted the impulse to ask what the fuck for, and kept his mouth shut.
She squinted at him as if this was unexpected news to her, too. “And I think we get on, and at least you don’t resent me. Do you?”
Ricky shook his head, out of his depth. “Uh – no. No, why would I?”
“I just really miss my friends, you know? Having people to talk to?” Katy teared up. She shook her head and looked away, working her jaw and blinking away the tears until she was back in control again. “Sorry.”
…Hug her.
The prompt was like a possession – the mistress took over, pushing into his brain, and he found himself giving Katy a warm embrace the way he’d held Carrie once. He rubbed Katy’s back, letting her lean on him.
…Tell her you’re sorry.
(What for? What’d I do?)
…Just say ‘Sorry’, it doesn’t matter for what. I’ll explain later.
Ricky sighed heavily. “Sorry,” he said.
Katy squeezed him. “Thanks.”
He had no idea why that worked, but it seemed to.
Ricky gave in. “Well, if you do go to uni,” he said, shifting his weight, “Can I still read your books when you’re done?”
This coaxed a broader smile out of her. “Sure. Yeah.”
He changed the subject, cycling back to something she’d said at the start. “So the Wend-McVeys want to cut and run, do they? If they step out of line, you’ll have to eat them.”
Katy took a second to catch up. “Oh. Oh! Yeah. Yeah, I had to chat to Layla about it. She’s going to talk to the rest of them, see what the uptake is. We can get to that after this, though, right?”
“One cataclysm at a time.” Ricky glanced over at Wes, who was groaning a little louder. “Look out, it’s happening.”
Wes was beginning to flicker. Slivers of him came apart as if he’d been fed through a horizontal meat slicer, breaking him down into layers and blurring him back together. It was an optical illusion, Ricky was almost sure, because when he moved his head and kept Wes in his peripheral vision, his cousin only appeared to be shivering violently rather than actually coming apart.
“Whoa, that’s – what the fuck is happening to him?” Katy grabbed Ricky’s sleeve, pressing close to his side.
“Let’s not get too close,” Ricky advised, not sure what would happen if they touched him at this point. “Try not to look directly at him.”
Katy pushed her forehead against his upper arm, and he found he didn’t mind the pressure of her there.
He gave her an awkward pat. “He’ll be fine.”
“How long does this take?” Katy asked. “Why does he always get the painful shit?”
Ricky cocked an eyebrow.
“He does,” Katy said, releasing him. “And you don’t lay a finger on him after this. I swear to God. I don’t care how much of a prick he is, he’s still my brother.”
The brick in his pocket warmed up, concurring. He knew better than to probe for loopholes and exceptions.
“He’ll be touched,” he said, and she pulled a face.
“Don’t tell him I said that. He keeps thinking he has to take care of me.”
(You’re still a kid, that’s why,) Ricky thought, glancing up at her face, seeing what Wes saw – the cocky sullenness in that balance of familiar features, masking a legion of insecurities, some of which were still unexamined and invisible to her.
“Maybe cut him some slack there,” he muttered, as Wes groaned and arched, gave a strangled gasp, and sat up. “Hold that thought. Wes? You alright?”
Wes looked – Ricky blinked, and forgot.
The erasure was as much of a shock as the lack of it had been. He couldn’t remember a single detail of what he’d looked like before, not in the way he remembered fragments from the Outside, or some details from the glamour in the Otherworld.
“Did it work?” Wes asked, heaving himself up to check his reflection in the monitors on the desk.
Katy tugged his arm to follow her and crossed the room with her quick, long strides, and Ricky wondered what the pest Layla had said, and how long this was going to last before she went back to not wanting anything to do with either of them.
This was the most she’d ever touched him in hell knew when, and he wasn’t convinced it was an improvement.
Katy hovered by Wes, looking from him to the CCTV monitors. “How do you feel?”
“On fucking fire,” Wes said, stretching as far as his skin-tight outfit let him, and Ricky found he could barely remember the colours, let alone the shape.
“Let’s wrap this up by midnight,” Ricky advised, although his sense of time was tenuous at best with no natural light to give him a clue.
Midnight was easy to remember, and he was pretty sure that this dose would last well into the next day as well, but it wouldn’t hurt for Wes to have an early deadline.
“Call me Cinderella,” Wes said, flicking the cuffs of his open shirt. He was a column of different shades of purple and bare skin, smoky eyes and glitter, the sharp flick-knife smile leaving nothing behind but the cuts it made in Ricky’s confidence. “They’ll all be in by eleven, and we’ll get this done by then. Easy.”
“Should we go down now?” Katy asked. “Are your guys letting them in yet?”
“Uh, you’re not going down there,” Wes said, suddenly serious. “Nobody needs to know you’re here yet, and besides, you’re underage.”
Katy and Ricky stared at him.
“Underage, are you joking?” Ricky had already been banned from three bars and four pubs by the time he’d been seventeen, and the rest of his lifetime bans in Pagham-on-Sea had been served on his eighteenth birthday.
“No,” Wes said, cold as a star, “I’m not.”
Katy gaped. “What am I supposed to do, wait up here by myself?”
“Yeah.” Wes handed her a remote control. “You can keep an eye on things, and you’re the secret weapon, remember? There’re soft drinks in the fridge. Make a coffee or something.”
“That’s not fair,” Katy protested, appealing to Ricky. “Why can’t I just—”
“Have a drink with us after,” Ricky said, unsure how they’d got to the point where he was mediating. “When it’s done. I’ll bloody well want one.”
“Not in my bar, she’s not,” Wes said.
“Oh my god, I’m eighteen next month.” Katy glared at Wes with fists balled by her sides. “The ID you got me says I’m already eighteen. Literally nobody will know or care.”
“I know, and I care.” Wes folded his arms, fitted sleeves straining at the elbows, and dropped them to his sides, shifting his stance instead. “Can we just get on with the task at hand, please?” He admired his forgettable figure in the reflective tint of the curved window and clapped his hands, turning to Ricky. “Ready when you are, Princess.”
Ricky narrowed his eyes, sulky.
“Wes,” Katy hissed.
“What? This lad’s bloody royalty.”
There it was again – a flicker of sincerity, a note of respect, that came and went in Ricky’s ear leaving only the impression of it behind, and he wasn’t sure if it was real or wishful thinking. He chose to believe it was there.
He gave a curt nod.
Wes tossed his sister a bag of cashew nuts and she fumbled it but didn’t drop it. “Don’t forget to tell them about the exile, when you’re messing with their heads,” she said to Ricky, and he nodded.
“Showtime,” Wes said, and Ricky couldn’t have been less enthused.