Chapter Text
Caleb woke slowly, staring up at the exposed vermaloc wooden beams of his ceiling. The beautiful stained glass window had barely caught any light, but his internal clock told him it was indeed morning, just about 7:30. A tree outside shifted in a cold wind that felt more like winter than fall with how it rattled the house, and the light shivered in strange shapes over the depictions of the night sky in the window.
The stylized stars and moons didn’t keep Caleb’s mind occupied for long.
The alarm clock he wouldn’t ever need would go off at 8:00.
He didn’t need to be at the bookstore until 10:00, but he was slow moving in the cold.
Everything he learned yesterday came back to him in a rush.
People from the Cerberus Assembly, the cult he’d been running from for years, had been in his house. He’d spent so much time convincing himself that they were just a very rigorous, nationalistic, abusive program that he’d gotten tangled up in at a young age. That Ikithon had recognized Bren’s delusions and fed into them, using them to keep him loyal, keep him obedient.
Maybe his initial paranoia was correct, and the Vergesson Sanatorium had ties to Ikithon. Maybe he hadn’t just been imagining seeing Ikithon, Wulf, or Astrid out of the corner of his eye in those white walls with all the therapists who told him he was broken.
Maybe it was all real.
They’d interrogated someone, Nott’s husband, in this house.
They knew the house was haunted.
Caleb groaned and covered his head with the thick secondhand quilt that Beau had found for him at the local flea market.
Maybe this was all just some terrible dream. He’d had his fair share of those over the years.
Frumpkin was curled up at his feet, disgruntled by the movement of the blankets and moving to start his morning routine of bathing before begging for breakfast. The sight of his little pink tongue and outstretched orange leg was a comforting reality. Not everything was turned up on its head, even if Caleb’s emotional state felt more fragile than a teacup perched on a cliff.
Hauling himself up and letting his joints crack and snap, Caleb looked at his face in the mirror. He certainly looked like he’d woken up in the middle of the night and rediscovered the truth of it all, judging by the dark circles under his eyes.
Still, having a dream about a psychotic break might be just as exhausting.
He held up his hands, taking a deep breath.
The soot coating his fingertips could have just been dirt. If he’d been in the garden at all. Or washed dirty vegetables the day before. Or been near dirt at all.
He swallowed.
He knew very well what soot looked like.
Caleb walked into his bathroom and carefully scrubbed the black stains from underneath his fingernails, wincing as they very tangibly stained his white washcloths. There was no denying it.
There was also no denying the goblin sleeping on his couch.
For a moment he watched her sleep, breathing deeply. He really ought to call someone to keep him in check, to let him know where his delusions started and where they stopped.
He wasn’t exactly sure what would be worse. The Cerberus Assembly and magic and goblins and crystals and secrets all seemed so illogical, but the thought of having a relapse this big, of needing to be hospitalized again, was just as awful to consider.
So he pulled out a box of cereal and two bowls with a loud enough sound to rouse the goblin from her slumber. “Do you like cheerios?”
“Are they the sweet kind or the gross plain kind?” she said, one yellow eye open under the mess of blankets.
Caleb looked at his apparently gross cereal. “I have sugar?”
“That’ll do,” she grumbled, smoothing down her rat’s nest of hair back under what seemed to be a torn green hoodie. Her gray child’s coat was resting on the edge of the couch, folded carefully next to her large backpack.
Nott clambered up onto the stool while Caleb poured her a bowl of cereal and pushed it towards her.
He watched her pour a ridiculous amount of sugar over the milk and cheerios, starting to eat his own. Around a large bite he asked, “Did you sleep alright?”
“After the ghost?” she asked, scrunching up her nose. “Yeah, I guess. It’s warm in here.” Nott swallowed her own spoonful. Her teeth were so sharp.
“That’s why I’m here,” Caleb said.
Nott’s bright yellow eyes scrutinized him, looking up and down, but she didn’t speak again, just taking another large bite of cereal.
“Winter in the north isn’t best spent outside,” Caleb said with a shrug, still grateful for the shelter of this house, even with the danger it now posed. Maybe he should run, but he didn’t think he needed to, not just yet. Another winter season on the streets didn’t exactly sound appealing to him.
The goblin on his kitchen stool just nodded. “Thank you, by the way. You’re being kinder than most.”
“I can imagine, unfortunately,” Caleb said. Anyone who thought she was an intelligent creature was more than likely to call the police or try and catch her. Goblins didn’t just walk around in the light of day, out of storybooks and television shows.
She bit her lip and looked down, picking up her bowl to drink the rest of the milk. Caleb did the same, ignoring Frumpkin begging for it at his feet.
“I still have to go to work,” he said, putting both their bowls in the sink to wash later.
Nott hopped off the stool and put on her coat. “That’s okay. I don’t need to stay here.”
“I won’t get off until six. What will you do all day?” Caleb asked, pulling on his scarf.
She sighed softly. “I guess I’ll keep looking for Yeza. I’ll just keep an ear out. It led me to you at least.”
He nodded. “Perhaps we can find something about the Cerberus Assembly in the Marble Tomes Conservatory. They have extensive records on many things.”
“You can get in there?” She raised an eyebrow.
“I visit the public sections frequently, though that information might be somewhere restricted,” Caleb said. “I could check at some point this week, after talking to a friend.”
Nott frowned up at him. “Okay.”
“And… And you’ll come back?” Caleb asked timidly, hoping she wasn’t about to disappear. Having someone to talk to about this was good, it felt good. He’d been hiding this part of himself for almost his entire life.
She took a deep breath. “You really want me to?”
“Yes,” he said, too quickly. “I–Yes. Don’t leave me with all this alone please.”
Her expression softened. “Right. Yeah, we’ll help each other out, okay?”
“Good,” he said, letting Frumpkin hop into his coat to settle in for their walk to work.
Nott came out with him as he locked up and when he turned to wish her a good day, she was gone.
He swallowed, taking a low, deep breath.
The sooner he got to work, the better. He needed to talk to someone who he knew was normal. Or at least mostly normal.
Someone who didn’t know what magic was and might be able to tell him if he was crazy or not.
But as soon as he got to work, Beau asked him a question about the computer software and he lost his nerve. How was he supposed to ask her? Just mention that there was a goblin in his house, and maybe a ghost, and probably Caleb could do magic?
He’d be thrown back in an asylum before he could establish anything as truth or otherwise.
What he needed was a way to show her something that shouldn’t be real. If it was a delusion, she wouldn’t see it, and he could work through it. Unfortunately his head was a tangled mess and nothing concrete was coming to mind.
“Could you get me into the Marble Tomes’ restricted sections, if I asked?” he eventually asked, tired of staring into the middle distance and trying to organize his thoughts.
Beau didn’t look up from her computer. “Are you asking?”
“Maybe,” he said, still cagey. He didn’t know how much he wanted her to know, even if he mostly trusted her.
“Well, then maybe I’d need to know why.” She continued clicking away on the computer.
Caleb took a deep breath. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me, Widogast.” she shot him a look, eyes flashing with curiosity. The kind of light in Beau’s eyes that flared up when she wanted something and wouldn’t let go. She was stubborn when she needed to be, almost as bad as Caleb himself.
He swallowed. This was important. He would need access to some kind of records to have any idea of what Ikithon’s latest movements were. The Cobalt Soul had sent Beau here to study, and they had started trading information with the Marble Tomes. The library was likely the only place in the city where Caleb could find out anything current about the goings on of Empire politics. It wouldn’t be extensive by any means, but something was better than nothing.
And nothing was what he and Nott had at the moment.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, hoping he could get somewhere on his own. He was also avoiding telling her about Nott. There had to be a better way to test his theories without showing Beau what he claimed to be a goblin.
His fire was probably the best thing to test.
It felt real last night, but it had the first time too. Maybe it was all real, maybe it was all fake, but it was the not knowing that was driving Caleb up the wall.
What he finally decided upon was burning up one of their complementary bookmarks. If Beau thought it was weird that he slipped one in his pocket before going to the bathroom, she didn’t mention it.
He was about to act much weirder anyways.
Caleb stood in the small bathroom in front of the dirty, spattered mirror, trying to figure out a safe way to do this.
The flames were easier to call to his fingertips the second time.
They flared up, bright and eager, like there had been fire running through his veins this whole time. His face and hair were illuminated in oranges and yellows, a stark, warm contrast to the cold blue fluorescent light flickering above him.
He took a deep breath and watched the paper catch and burn in his hands, perfectly controlled and not even singing a fingernail. Soon he had a small pile in his hand, it certainly looked real enough. But that wasn’t the real test.
Caleb left the bathroom with soot and ash still clinging to his hands, intending to ask Beau if she could see it when she spoke up.
“You smell that?” she sniffed the air. “Is something on fire?”
“You smell smoke?” he asked, a little breathless.
Beau nodded, “Yeah, did you burn something?”
“Yes,” he said, swallowing sharply. “I need to go.”
“Whoa,” Beau said, standing up behind the counter. “You okay?”
“Ja,” he lied, still breathless, still stuck in this small shop that smelled like smoke–his smoke.
Beau could smell it.
It was real.
He needed to get out.
If it was real, that meant that Trent Ikithon wasn’t just looking for him with local police connections and technology–the man had magic.
There hadn’t been a freak accident at his house when he turned 16.
Caleb’s fire was real.
Ikithon might have manipulated it, might have made it flare up, but it was still Caleb’s magic that burned his parents alive, that ruined everything. All the memories he convinced himself were delusions came rushing back, and the screaming filled his ears.
Beau called after him even as the bell to the shop door jingled. The door was closed and he was running before he could properly register that this was more suspicious than anything else he could have done. But he was seconds away from a complete meltdown, and upsetting his colleague and losing his job were the least of his worries.
Beau’s voice called after him for a few blocks, but he could hardly hear over his gasping breaths and the pounding of his feet on the pavement.