Chapter Text
Evee had never been one for half-measures, at least outside of her love life, but I still hiccuped softly at the sheer vindictiveness of the letter she’d written for Felicity to sign.
‘My patient, Evelyn Saye suffers from crippling panic attacks in confined spaces as a result of the abuse she suffered as a child, which resulted in the loss of her right leg .’
There hadn’t been a cover letter, or instructions, not so much as a Post-It note, and none when it came back in the mail two days later either, just Felicity’s shaky signature on the dotted line and a few slightly wavy patches where her tears had hit the enveloppe. I reminded myself that she was a terrible person who had disregarded her duty to report child abuse and that she wasn’t the one who deserved my compassion here.
‘Oh God, Evee, you didn’t tell me your letter touched on… on what she did to you. It’s my fault you had to revisit those memories, this trip was a bad’-
‘Oh come off it’, Evelyn snapped, and I couldn’t help but notice Twil’s spirit-flesh ears snap to attention at her tone. ‘If you want to help, you can start by not treating me like I’m made of bloody spun glass. It was glorious. I had tremendous fun writing that letter, and you’d better believe I’m not done making that psychopath squirm.’
‘’S true’, Raine said, ‘saw her smile the whole way through. Besides, you know if it were up to me, Felicity would be in a shallow grave.’
‘Eyes on the road, Raine’, Evee muttered morosely. ‘And Heather, give me back the letter now please.’
Raine was trying to distract me by mentioning violence she knew I found attractive, and Evee would rather choke than admit she kept giving Felicity ways to partly atone for what she’d done, so I decided to gaze at the spirit life outside for some normalcy.
A group of misshapen fluorescent jellyfish let their tentacles drift lazily onto the hard shoulder, almost like otherworldly hitchhikers. A humongous spider monkey thing -emphasis on the spider- hung upside down from its web in between the cooling towers of Ratcliffe-upon-Soar power station. It watched the cars drive by on the motorway with polite interest. The bulk of the power station, the way it seemed to block the valley, its uncompromising Brutalist design, made it difficult to believe it had been designed by architects who belonged to the same species as the one who’d designed 12, Barnslow Drive. Like much of the architectural output of the 1960s, it seemed much better suited to creatures on the larger end of the pneuma-somatic fauna than to us humans. I closed my eyes for a moment and wondered if they’d look different in Italy.
***
While I found the idea of Evee supposedly smiling while writing about her trauma… concerning, even I had found it difficult to suppress a smile as I read the end of ‘Felicity’s’ letter. After a few more sentences designed to rub salt in her wounds, the document finally reached something approaching a point.
‘Evelyn is unable to function normally or travel without her service dog, Twil. ’
This had been Twil’s idea. The only other person zany enough to consider it was probably Lozzie, who still struggled with the fact that going from point A to point B involved passing through intermediate points for most people. After the near-miss at Carcosa, Twil was unwilling to let ‘her girl’ travel anywhere without her. Evee had snarled that she could buy her own ticket if she wanted to come. Zheng had remarked that in her days, ferrymen didn’t charge dogs for passage across a river. Twil’s face had lit up. The rest, as they say, was history.
***
‘East Midlands Airport’, Raine announced with a huge grin as she pulled the parking brake. ‘Passengers for EasyJet flight 69 to Lesbos, please proceed to gate now.’
‘R-Raine… Just… Don’t do anything stupid, yes? Don’t fight Zheng, don’t get shot, don’t…’ My voice caught. Raine still walked with a limp and her foot had slipped off the clutch pedal a couple of times on the drive to the airport. From the bullet she’d taken to the leg. The bullet she’d taken for me.
‘Hey, hey,’ she said as she cupped my face with both her hands. ‘It’s just three days. I’m not going anywhere. Besides, I was afraid you might start taking my rakish good looks for granted if we’re together all the time.’
‘Never’, I said and turned away brusquely before she could see me tear up.
‘Alright, you take good care of er... Lassie, yeah?’ Raine called after Evee.
‘Woohoo, vamos a la playa! ’ Twil chanted. Sometimes a silly werewolf was exactly what you needed.
‘That’s Spanish, Twil, not Italian, and there’s no beach in Rome,’ I reminded her patiently.
‘I’m so glad you won’t be able to speak during the flight’, Evelyn muttered.
This trip was going to be fun.