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The police are notorious for workplace affairs. It’s one of those jobs where you spend a lot of weird hours with your colleagues, bonding over really horrific events. Sometimes you see more of them than you do your family, especially if you’ve gone and done something daft like married someone with a nine-to-five job. In the abstract this is deeply frowned upon and can result in official censure if you’re stupid enough to take up with someone in your direct line of management, up or down. In practice, these things tend to get overlooked or tolerated as long as it doesn’t result in problems at work. Besides, mostly they don’t last long – they’re about the heat of the moment more than anything else. I say this from observation of my colleagues, you understand, as well as the numerous crimes I’ve investigated which have peripherally involved people who are breaking their marital vows. Having never been married or managed a really long-term relationship before now, I haven’t exactly had the opportunity to have an affair, was I so inclined to be that much of a wanker.

In a strictly technical sense, however, you could say I had recently entered into a workplace affair – being as I was having a definitely sexual and probably romantic relationship with my direct supervisor. I say probably because neither of us is very good at articulating stuff like that. Although I knew how I felt about it, and I could interpret Nightingale’s non-verbal communication pretty accurately by now. But we’re both coppers, so neither of us takes much for granted.

I thought he might even have said something like once, on no particular occasion; just an ordinary weekday morning when we were waking up. I’d been three-quarters asleep at the time and maybe it had been a dream. But I thought not. Either way we’d been a unit, working and living together, for so long now that I wasn’t really sure how you’d differentiate between us carrying on as usual while also having it off on the regular and us being in love, anyway. Given as neither of us was prone to soppiness. So there we were. Best stupid thing I’d ever done, in my opinion. And his too, because he had told me that, once, when I’d been awake to hear it. The best stupid thing either of us had ever done.  

The thing was that no matter how we saw it, or that I was a proper wizard in my own right and nobody’s apprentice anymore – however hard I still found that to believe some days – it was, technically, not supposed to be happening. Now, we were a department of six, and between the two of us we constituted the entire chain of command, so there wasn’t really anyone to give us grief about it. That being said, the balance of power in the Metropolitan Police Service can be a delicate and tenuous thing and I wasn’t much minded to give anyone the opportunity to give us grief about it. Besides which, the rest of our department lives in the same building as us, which really screws up the concept of keeping your personal and work lives separate. No-one needs to see their senior officers’ PDAs, whether or not they’re on duty. And especially not when their senior officers aren’t supposed to be demonstrating affection at all, publicly or privately.  

So it was a workplace affair, sort of – we couldn’t go around holding hands in public, if either of us had been the type to do that, which we weren’t, or letting it be generally known that we spent nights together. Which was a frequent enough occurrence that Nightingale – I can call him Thomas, these days, but I don’t think I’ll ever get used to thinking of him that way – had accumulated a pile of stuff in my room, nightshirts and slippers and so on, as well as clothes which hadn’t made their way back to his own room yet. That would have been more of a concern if I hadn’t known for a fact that Molly, who could do your laundry before you knew it needed doing, was perfectly aware of what was going on. She seemed to have no opinion on it, apart from that one time we’d maybe sort of got a tiny bit carried away in the mundane library, back when it was a new thing, and Molly had walked in on us. To what extent I wasn’t sure because my attention had been elsewhere at the time – we’d been alone in the Folly aside from her, okay, we weren’t stupid – but Molly had ways of making her disapproval known. I’d tried apologising. Nightingale had been too thoroughly embarrassed even for that. He’d ended up with cold tea for three days, and I’d had to make up something for the apprentices, who had been here long enough to know what an earthshattering thing that was. Luckily, they’d bought it. At least I was pretty sure they had.

For the first few weeks, even months, I’d been tense with caution about not letting this new and extremely non-platonic aspect of our relationship spill out where someone else could see it. It had gotten to the point where Stephanopoulos had actually asked me if we were having a fight about something. This was bad. Firstly, it meant I’d gone too far in the other direction. Secondly, the tone with which she asked it was pretty close to – well, the tone with which you’d ask if someone was on the outs with their spouse.

Now, as I said, we’ve worked together for a long time and it’s pretty well accepted in the Met that this makes for at least as close a relationship as marriage, and possibly closer, depending on your marriage. But if anyone was going to make us, my money was on Stephanopoulos. She’d known both of us for years and was unburdened by the usual sort of presumptions about sexual orientation. (Mine, mostly. Even if Nightingale hadn’t been exactly as far up the Kinsey scale as he was generally assumed to be, there was no way most of the Met wouldn’t have thought he was anyway. It was the suits. I happen to know they have far more to do with most of a century of habit and a certain amount of vanity than who he likes to shag, but people will assume.)

So I’d muttered something to Stephanopoulos about it being stressful with all the new people and let her think it was a difference of opinion about teaching or something stupid like that. Actually, we did have some genuine differences of opinion about how to handle Wizard Apprentices: The Next Generation, but we’d sat down and put together an actual plan before they’d come on board. The majority of the arguing – sniping, really - had actually been over safety equipment, of all the silly things. Nightingale saw it as encouraging slackness, I saw it as encouraging a lack of serious injuries. But he restricted himself to grumbling in approved “kids these days, get off my lawn” fashion when they wore their riot gear to play Pocket Quidditch or safety goggles in the lab. This really unnerved the apprentices – the ones who weren’t Abigail – because Nightingale could do a good “in my day” speech and at first they’d been under the delusion that his day had been the early two thousands. After all, when you didn’t know better he looked like your average middle-aged guy. I was really looking forward to their faces when they learned he’d recently outstripped the Guinness World Record for the longest-lived human – not that said record was in any way accurate, of course – but Abigail must have gone and told them, because it never came up. I was a bit disappointed.

In case you’re wondering, I wasn’t too bothered by the age thing myself. Nightingale had asked me once, a few months in. We’d gone and got dinner – a habit we’d been in for years, not a date or anything, except insomuch as we would definitely be going back to the same residence afterwards for coffee and/or coffee – and Nightingale had got a look from a guy two tables over.

“He’s just envying you and your slightly ethnic younger boyfriend,” I’d said, which was in point of fact the first time I’d used that term, but it was intended purely as a joke. I didn’t actually know what I’d call Nightingale, if we set aside all the other complex things we were to each other, but ‘boyfriend’ wasn’t it. Abigail had once scathingly described us as ‘work husbands’ – not to me but to Matt, one of the other apprentices, in my hearing – and it was sort of accurate, in a very strictly metaphorical sense.

“Well, ‘younger’ isn’t really in it,” Nightingale said. It wasn’t a loud restaurant but it was noisy enough, and we were in a corner, so I wasn’t too worried about being overheard.

“Okay, maybe not,” I said – because I was about a quarter his age, which was less May-December and more January-December. “But some of the happiest people I know have age gaps measured in centuries, so there you go.”

This was perfectly true, even if none of them were precisely human, per se, though certainly people. And human under the Human Rights Act, because I’d actually managed to get a Met policy opinion on that, if a very abstractly worded one. Which was close enough as far as I was concerned.

Nightingale smiled, only a little wryly. “I will grant you that.”

“Besides,” I added, “if you limit yourself to the half your age plus seven rule we’ll be good in…let me see…sixty-six years. No time at all.”

“The what rule?” Nightingale asked, so I explained it to him, and he laughed, but it was a little wistful; he wasn’t aging backwards or forwards these days, insofar as we could tell, and we still didn’t know why. And I’d gotten older since I’d taken up this whole magic thing, no question. Those of Nightingale’s colleagues who’d survived Ettersberg had died of old age. I’d been to some of the funerals. On the other hand, you never knew, and if we’d not done this because of that – all we’d have got out of it was a lot of senseless pining. Well. On my part, definitely. And what good would that have been?

Which I said, more or less, in fewer words.

“What good, indeed?” said Nightingale, and he didn’t take my hand or anything soppy like that, because we were in public, technically, but the tips of his fingers brushed mine.

Not that the lack of hand-holding was likely to have mattered if, say, Alexander Seawoll had chosen that moment to walk into the restaurant. But Seawoll would probably have accused us of being on a date, except in much cruder terms, whether or not we were; that was just the way he was. He wouldn’t have meant it, either, just wanted to get a rise out of Nightingale. And the Met only has rules about actual shagging and/or doing your job poorly. Gazing into each other’s eyes in a restaurant – not that I’m saying we were doing that, because we weren’t – was definitely not forbidden anywhere.

I knew. I’d checked.

*

But that conversation had gotten me thinking again about the unsolved question of Nightingale’s lack of aging – and not just his. To the best of my knowledge one Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina was still her usual dryly dangerous, apparently middle-aged Night Witch self, and she’d just passed her first century. Her, I had no fucking clue about. Nightingale, I had a theory. Half a theory. A plausible suggestion.

I floated it to Dr Walid one day. We were doing tea and pathology, with a side-order of Exciting Unanswered Questions About Magic. Normally he came to the Folly for these things, but he’d got the ‘flu badly this winter and had actually been sick off work for a week and a half, so Nightingale and I went to him in the nice Victorian villa he had in Finchley. None of the apprentices had volunteered to come, and technically their presence wasn’t required, so I’d let them skulk off to do whatever. It was Sunday, I supposed. Annie was actually at church – she went when she could. I wasn’t sure how she reconciled the many very real alleged deities and other supernatural beings she encountered on a weekly basis with the fundamentals of Presbyterian theology, but that was her problem, not ours. It never seemed to have bothered Walid, who took his own faith with the seriousness of the adult convert, so maybe it wasn’t so hard to work out. I wouldn’t know; I’d never really had any to start with.

Walid was still coughing at the slightest excuse, but Nightingale had taken over both making and pouring the tea through sheer force of will, so he didn’t have to lean over.

“See, Abdul,” I said, “this is why you’ve got to start letting someone else in on the autopsies. If you get hit by a bus where will we be?”

Dr Walid had been in his fifties when I’d first met him, and his hair was greying rapidly now. I wondered how it was for Nightingale, seeing his old friend aging like this. Not that he was in his dotage or anything like, but he was undeniably getting older, and being sick wasn’t doing him any favours. So far as I could tell, most of Nightingale’s friends hadn’t made it to old age, the first time around; now people like Walid and Harold Postmartin at Oxford were getting on. Postmartin was two breaths from retirement, and retirement in his case would be out the door of the Bodleian feet-first. Then soon enough it would be people in the Met like Seawoll and Stephanopoulos, and Nightingale’d be left with a bunch of us who barely remembered the century he’d been born to. And then it would happen again, and again.

Immortality sucked, I thought, not for the first time. At least the Rivers all had each other, and their assorted spouses – however that worked.

“I’m not planning on it, but I do take your point, Peter,” Dr Walid said, cradling his mug in his hands. The heat was up higher than Nightingale was really comfortable with – especially with his strict regimen of suits – but Walid still looked cold. He was much better than he’d been the week before, though. Influenza is a real bugger, as several million corpses from 1919 can attest to, not to mention tens of thousands more every year. It kills far more people in this country than HIV, for instance. Or road accidents.

“We’ll need to clear it through the Commissioner,” he went on, “but I have two people I’d like to bring into the more esoteric aspects of pathology. One’s a graduate student of mine – she’s already a qualified doctor, she’s doing her PhD now – and the other works in the mortuary at Westminster. He’s helped me out with several of the autopsies in the last year or two, the – less obviously different ones.”

“And you trust they’ll take it seriously?” Nightingale asked, keeping a beady eye on Walid.

“I do,” Dr Walid said. “They’re both steady enough. Kyung-hwa’s been helping me with the brain collection, too. I haven’t gone into the thaumaturgical aspect of hyperthaumaturgical degradation, yet, but I want her to start look over the MRIs. It feels like there’s one of you in there practically every week, these days.”

“Well, we did triple our numbers,” I said. “These two, can you give us their names?” Not that I was going to do anything as crass as a full-on background check…oh, don’t be silly, Peter, said a voice in my head that I still thought of as Lesley, even now. Of course you should do a background check. A proper one, mind.

I wondered what Lesley thought of us, having all these new apprentices. I wondered if Lesley had one of her own, or more. If she’d think it was worth it. We hadn’t noticed even one but the demi-monde was a big place, and we had a sort of uneasy arrangement with Lesley wherein she didn’t go doing anything we’d absolutely have to arrest her for and we didn’t go looking for her too hard. The DPS would have had fifty fits if they figured it out, but they hadn’t asked and we hadn’t told. And more than one wasn’t out of the question; she wasn’t a Sith Lord, there weren’t any rules against training more than one apprentice, or any rule they had to overthrow her when they were done. Fucking Geoffrey Wheatcroft – I could never think of him without the swearword attached – had raised a whole school of Little Crocodiles to trouble us. (Actually it was a bask of crocodiles, because I’d got curious and Googled it once, but that just didn’t sound as good.)

I wondered what Lesley would think of me and Nightingale, together, if she’d be angry or confused or amused or just not give a shit. When it came to Lesley, I was always going to be left wondering.

Back to business; Dr Walid’s protégés in cryptopathology were called Kyung-hwa Park and Sunil Alakija. His parents must have a story, I thought. Or they’d just grown up near each other in any of half-a-dozen London neighbourhoods, or elsewhere in Britain. It wasn’t any weirder on the face of it than my mum growing up in a jungle village in Sierra Leone and marrying a jazz-playing Cockney twice her age. And making it work as long as they both had lived, too.

Not that my mum wasn’t still among the living. Although she’d peculiarly stopped giving me grief about my unaccountable failure to provide her with grandchildren two or three years back. At least, at the time it had been peculiar. Now I wondered. Nightingale had shown up for a Christmas party or two and I knew at least some of my extended family had had ideas about why, although at the time they’d been wrong. But there was no way I was asking my mum whether she thought Nightingale and I were a going concern, not now that she wasn’t going to be wrong about it. Whatever level of faux outrage I summoned wouldn’t fool her for a second. And given what had happened the last time I’d brought home someone functionally immortal, I wasn’t too keen to press the point. 

“It would be an excellent idea to start bringing them into things now,” Nightingale said. “Not that I expect you to cease coming up with new experiments for Peter to distract himself with for many years yet, Abdul, but these sort of institutional transitions are best when they aren’t transitions at all.”

“At least that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” Dr Walid replied.

Nightingale shrugged. “I could be hit by a bus just as well as you could. And I’m sure we all remember that I’m perfectly vulnerable to violence. I have no river to return to, or anything like that.”

“Do you think that makes him a Tolkien-style elf?” I asked Dr Walid, as an aside. “Can’t die unless he’s stabbed?”

“Hmmm.” Walid sipped his tea and thought about it. “Well, he’s got the thinking-of-higher-things face down. And he’s tall enough. Needs pointier ears, though.”

Nightingale gave us the dirtiest look – as he always did when we made popular culture jokes about him that he understood. Although I’d learned recently that he’d been trolling all of us for years about not understanding Harry Potter references, beyond the mere existence of the series. I was still a bit miffed about that. Not miffed enough to let on to the apprentices, you understand. Though I had told Dr Walid. And Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos had gotten the joke.

“I’ve got a theory, though,” I went on.

“That he’s a demon?” smirked Walid, and we clinked mugs. Nightingale loftily ignored this, mostly because I’d worked on books and the occasional movie – he’d enjoyed Alien and its sequels – but he just wasn’t much for TV shows, and so didn’t have the first idea what we were on about.

“Not quite,” I said, although a really, really inappropriate joke did occur to me. Which I kept to myself. “It’s to do with something you said once, Thomas – about that friend of yours and the Scottish god of telephones.”

“Wait, what?” Dr Walid frowned.

Nightingale explained it as he once had to me – his long-dead colleague Walter’s theory about systems developing genii locorum. “But I don’t see how it’s relevant in this case.”

“The magic of systems,” I said. “The Folly was the centre of Newtonian magic in England for nearly two hundred years. And then suddenly half of all British practitioners died in a stroke, which releases magic in a powerful way, and the rest ended up retiring or dying anyway, over the next three decades. And then it was just you, the last British wizard, and you started getting younger…”

“But I wasn’t,” Nightingale said, though his frown said he was considering the idea. “I wasn’t the last – there was Wheatcroft, and all his students, little though I knew it at the time. And Varvara Tamonina, of course, not that she was trained in the British tradition, but a practitioner in England nonetheless, and…I was just the only practitioner anyone officially knew of.”

“But none of them were official, exactly,” I said. “By the seventies – when did the last practicing survivor of Ettersberg break his staff, or die? Who wasn’t you? You were the last representative of the Folly, as a unit – as a system. All that history, all those practitioners…focused down to one person.”

Dr Walid hmmmed. “As a theory, it has its merits, Thomas.”

“As a theory, I dislike it intensely,” Nightingale snapped. I didn’t like to bring up Ettersberg to him, even tangentially, but there hadn’t been much of a way around it. “But – that isn’t a reflection on its merits. Sadly enough.”

“So, what,” Dr Walid said, “you’re suggesting the events of the war somehow made Thomas here the, er – patron saint of British wizardry?”

Nightingale looked deeply unimpressed by this, and I snorted. “I wouldn’t call him saintly.”

Not by half. He was a cool head in a crisis, it was what had earned him the name the Nightingale, and not emotionally demonstrative by anyone’s standards - but by now I’d seen him pissed off, close to tears, exhausted, exhilarated, in the throes of passion and on the edge of despair, some of those in little flickers but there nonetheless. He was the Nightingale but he was all-too-human to me. Which was good; it’s a terrible practice to go thinking the people you care about are perfect. It only leads to disappointment later on.

I rather thought Nightingale was thinking much the same thing, because the look I got was so entirely affectionate, if you knew what you were looking for, that it made me hide my face in my teacup so as not to grin at him like a total idiot.

“Thank you, Peter,” he said, and it was drier than dust, but – the affection was still there. “It’s essentially an unprovable theory, however, so I’m not sure how much good it does us.”

“Well, there’s your brain scans,” Dr Walid said thoughtfully.

“I thought they were fine,” I interrupted perhaps more sharply than I should have.

“Oh, they are, they are, no need to worry,” Dr Walid told me. “And so are yours, Peter, as I know you know. But the thing is – I’ve had a chance to look at few practitioners, now. Scans and autopsies both. And there seems to be some evidence of hyperthaumaturgical degradation in all of them, even if it’s very minor, if they’ve practiced long enough. Even if they gave up the practice long ago – like your bloke from Herefordshire, Oswald, when I got his brain. Which was very kind of him and his granddaughter. He broke his staff in the forties, I believe, and the signs were still there. They don’t heal. You, Thomas – you did a lot of magic back then and you still do it now, and there’s nary a sign of it. Much like the Rivers, now I have one or two of them for comparison.”

And, boy, had that taken some sweet-talking. I was still hopeful we might get Molly to stick her head in the MRI one day, get a handle on how it worked for fae, or at least one particular type offae, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

“So maybe Peter’s right,” Dr Walid went on. “Maybe you’re drawing magic from the environment, somehow, as they do – the vestigia of the Folly itself. And that’s what’s keeping you going.”

“It seems – terribly unfair,” Thomas said quietly. “I never would have made such a trade.”

“I don’t think anyone would,” I said. “Well. Not anyone who wasn’t a total fucking sociopath. But you weren’t asked.”

Any more than I was asked whether Lesley or I should fall victim to Mr Punch, on a January night long ago. He probably wouldn’t have found me a suitable Pretty Poll, anyway. But if I had been asked – if I had – if the cost had been not even possession followed by death or disfigurement, but merely never learning magic, never meeting Nightingale - if Lesley could have kept her pretty face and her golden career, and I’d just gone off quietly to the Case Progression Unit – if I had been asked, what would I have done?

We’re never given to know these things, for all the magic in this world. I don’t think any of us would be up to it.  

“None of us ever are,” Dr Walid said. “Now – did you want that report from the week before last, or no?”

We were there for work, after all, and the moment passed. As these moments always do.

As we got up to show ourselves out, Nightingale reminded Dr Walid to take care of himself. He was still looking peaky, and talking to us had clearly tired him.

“I’ll be back at work next week,” Walid said in his rolling Glaswegian accent. The cough made it much harder to interpret, but between him and Annie I had all the practice I needed. “Just you two try and look after each other – no knocks to the head or bullet wounds before I’m up and about, you hear me?”

“We never do it on purpose,” I pointed out quite reasonably.

“And sure you don’t,” Dr Walid said, but he didn’t sound totally convinced.

“We’ll be quite all right,” said Nightingale.

“It suits the pair of you,” said Dr Walid, unexpectedly. “D’you know that?”

“What does?” I asked, not following him.

“The pair of you,” he said clearly, and I was going to ask again what the hell he meant by that when I caught Nightingale’s eye, and then I knew perfectly well.

“Oh,” I said. Nightingale didn’t say anything at all, just cocked his head at Walid as if considering something. Then he gave a fractional half-smile, and nodded.

I gave Dr Walid a considering look, too. “What made you decide to bring that up?”

“Well, likely I’m delirious with the flu,” he said cheerfully. “And don’t be thinking that you’re acting like a pair of lovebirds, because you’re not and I don’t think you could if you tried. But I’ve known the both of you long enough, and I thought I might do you the courtesy of letting you know I’d noticed.”

“Oh,” I said again, because I’m eloquent when I’m side-swiped like that. “Thanks.”

“Yes. Thank you,” said Nightingale, nodding again, a slower and more definite motion. And on the way out of the room he took my hand and squeezed it. Just once.

I knew what he meant by that, and it was to say that he wasn’t sorry about this, or ashamed for his old friend to know about it, and wanted me to know that.

That was – well. That was nice.

*

After that it was sort of a flood. As I said, by this point we’d been working together – and incidentally living in the same place - so long that if you didn’t know us very well, or weren’t privy to our current sleeping arrangements, I really don’t think you would have noticed some radical shift in our behaviour. I was confident the apprentices hadn’t, because I had a fair idea what their chief concerns in life were and “are our bosses shagging” wasn’t on the list. And they did live in the same house as us.

But apparently something was noticeable if you did know us very well, because I kept getting little – jabs. Here and there. Like Stephanopoulos, who moved up from the are-you-two-fighting discussion to having a roundabout talk with me on the topic of getting caught shagging your colleagues, emphasis on the caught. And I think she had a similar one with Nightingale, because he came away from one conversation with her that was nominally about the case we were currently co-operating on looking very nearly frazzled. And Nightingale doesn’t do frazzled.  

Or Beverley Brook. We try to catch up every now and then, do some Folly-riverine diplomacy, moan about what’s going wrong in our lives with someone who isn’t one of the people we want to complain about (her family, my colleagues) but still knows the dirty details of magical London. That sort of thing. I also know she sees Lesley now and again and that’s a back channel we might need one day. And if we do we’ll need it badly.

“Okay, I have to ask,” she said one day. We were at a café in Richmond – I’d been out in her manor on a case, so it was also a checking-in-with-the-local-goddess thing – and she had her youngest with her. The older one was at nursery. I liked her kids, on the whole, and I only wondered what my life would have been like if they were mine, oh, once a year or so. Usually they’d oblige me by throwing a temper tantrum or spilling something on themselves and I’d stop wondering very quickly.

“You and the Nightingale,” she went on. And then didn’t say anything more.

“Me and Nightingale…what?” I prompted, but I had a sinking feeling I knew where this was going.

“You know,” she said. “Are you?”

“Are you serious?” I managed, but it wasn’t nearly high-pitched enough for genuine surprise. Fuck.

Her eyes went wide – I think she really hadn’t believed it until then. “No way. Peter. Really?”

“Well, why not?” I said aggressively, which was of course the stupidest thing I could possibly have said.

Beverley rolled her eyes. “Because he’s your governor? And he was your master? And he’s the Nightingale?”

“D’you have a problem with it, then?” I pushed, because if she did it was going to be my problem fairly quickly.

She snorted. “No. I just want to know why.”

“He…” I waved a hand, aimlessly. Little Olivia, on her mum’s knee, burbled and pointed at it. Babies, I don’t know. Especially Thames babies. “He…I…it makes us happy.” It sounded thin and meaningless but it was all I knew how to say. “It makes me happy. And I like – I like seeing him happy. But it’s not just that, it’s not – it’s something that’s ours.”

Because that had always been my problem, hadn’t it? Everyone I’d ever cared about had always had something they cared about more than me, when it came down to the wire. My dad had had his heroin, and my mum had had my dad, and Lesley had had her career and then – all the rest of it. Beverley had had her river, although if we were pointing fingers in that one they should probably be pointed in my direction. Nightingale had his job, sure, but it was my job too, and I’d realised a while back that the job somehow always came first for me, no matter how I tried. So if it was a race he and I were coming in tied for second, and we were both okay with that. And that was – different, somehow.  

Beverley smiled. “That was all I wanted to know.”

I eyed her suspiciously. “Why?”

She rolled her eyes again. “Because I care about you, you massive idiot. Because I know you looked up to him, and I’d hate it if you were letting yourself get tangled up in this because of, of – because you were grateful, or you admired him, or something utterly stupid like that.”

I thought of Nightingale, Thomas, clawing a pillow over his face and making grumpy noises when he’d had a bout of insomnia, which he did now and then, and chosen to crawl into my bed sometime after midnight, and then I went and got up at six to walk the dog. (Not Toby - the new dog. Molly might leave the Folly on occasion now, and I might have got the dog for her sake, but dog-walking was still my problem. She had made that abundantly clear.) I thought of him muttering when the apprentices put on their riot helmets to play Pocket Quidditch. Helping me clean up when one of my experiments went wrong, but not without giving me grief for my fascination with them in the first place. And then suggesting half-a-dozen improvements for the next go-round. I thought of him smiling quietly at me when he thought no-one else was watching.

“No,” I said. “No. It’s not anything like that.”

“Yeah, I get that,” she said, and joggled Olivia a little when the baby’s face started to pucker up. Seriously. Babies. “Just thought I’d ask.”

“You’re not going to, you know…” and I made a gesture intended to say ‘spread it to all and sundry.’ “Because it’s all right you knowing, and you’re not even the first, but I’d rather it wasn’t a general piece of gossip, yeah?”

“Peter.” Beverley rolled her eyes yet again. She was going to give herself a strain. “You and Nightingale, you’re joined at the hip as it is. No-one cares if you’re fucking or not.”

I might’ve gone a bit red. “Hey, small children present.”

“She’s not old enough to know what it means,” Beverley said carelessly. “Now I’m not saying people won’t gossip, because they will. And it’ll make its way around sooner or later, though not from me, I’ll promise you that. But we’re not the Met, it’s not an – an ethics thing.”

“Fine, whatever,” I said. “Do me one favour, though?”

“Yeah?”

“Promise you won’t tell Lesley.”

She went a bit quiet at that. “What makes you think I’d have the chance?”

“Don’t give me that,” I said. “And I know it might get to her eventually. But I’d like the chance to tell her myself, if I can.”

“Why?” Beverley asked, and the curiosity in her voice was real.

“Because,” I said. Because she was my mate. Because I loved her, I think, even if I wasn’t in love with her. Because maybe I always will, the way I’ll always love you a little bit, Beverley Brook. Because there are people you go to the wall for and I would have. I would have. “Because I reckon she’d take it better from me. Or Nightingale, but. He needs another few decades to cool down, or warm up, or – pick your metaphor.”

“When’s the last time you even spoke to her?”

“Last year. No, the year before, now.”

For a very loose definition of ‘spoke’, sure, but words had been exchanged. Some of them had even been fit for little Olivia’s ears.

“So no guarantee she won’t hear it before you see her, whenever that is.”

“Just not from you?”

Beverley sighed. “Fine, then. Just not from me.”

*

As it happened it was only another three months before I saw Lesley, which the way things went these days was nothing. It might have been three years. She was walking into a pub in Shepherd’s Bush – the fae one Zach had taken her to back when we were undercover in Skygarden, back when she was working up the courage to betray us, back when. It was a total coincidence; she was just opening the door as we walked past on our way back to our car, we being me and Malini Choudhury. Well, it wasn’t a coincidence we were passing that particular pub, but it was Lesley being there. I know because we rounded a corner and there she was, her back to us.

She had a new haircut and was wearing a rather nice sundress, white with blue flowers, but not frilly. Her face was turned away from me, and the straps of the mask were hidden under her hair, but I’d know Lesley anywhere, in my sleep, in the tunnels of the Quiet People. She had her hand on the doorhandle and if I’d kept my trap shut she would have walked in there and never known I’d laid eyes on her.

“Lesley?” I said, letting my very genuine surprise carry – it might stop her running. And if she went into that pub, I’d never catch her. Not that I was trying to catch her catch her, but even so.

“Peter?” she said, sounding just as surprised, and turned. These days she wore a mask that left everything above her eyes bare, which meant some of the scarring was visible. Beside me, Mal took in a breath; we hadn’t had the conversation about Lesley with the apprentices yet, having wanted to save it for when it was relevant, but I’d thought Abigail might have told the other three. Or it might even have percolated through the Met, when they’d agreed to join the Folly. God knew it was a juicy enough tale. But apparently not, or Mal would know what the mask meant.

“Meeting someone?” I asked, nodding at the pub. It was four o’clock on a rather nice May afternoon. Somewhat like the one of the Covent Garden fire, if anything minded you of that. Like Lesley, before me in the flesh for the first time in – some time.

“In a bit,” she said. “Who’s this, then? I heard you had apprentices, now. God, that’s terrifying, if anything is.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” I said. I was trying for casual and missing; I could see Mal edging her fingertips towards her mobile phone, and flicking the battery interrupt. Of all the apprentices, Mal had the best instincts for a fight. It was probably all that field hockey she’d played at secondary school. “Lesley, this is Mal Choudhury, constable and apprentice wizard. Mal, this is Lesley May. Not a constable. Or an apprentice.”

“You learned magic outside the Folly?” Mal asked, frowning a little. They all did know there were Newtonian practitioners who weren’t us, hedge wizards and witches, all the possible Little Crocodiles we hadn’t tracked down. And that they were, technically speaking, on the wrong side of the law. Mal’s eyes flickered over the mask, wondering.

“Mostly,” Lesley said, sounding amused. “Mostly.”

“D’you have time for a drink?” I asked her. “Before you meet – whoever it is.”

She tilted her head, considering. “But, Peter – this place is strictly fae plus one.”

“Always happy to be the plus one,” I said.

Human, not human, who did I know who was human sensu strictu, anymore? Maybe not even me. Born different, chose to be different, made different, Zach Palmer had told me once. I’d been born normal enough, but so had Lesley, so had Nightingale. Where was the line between made and chose? Who the fuck knew? Even Dr Walid didn’t, for all his studies.

Lesley gave me a long stare. “Okay, then.” She opened the door. “Are you coming?”

I turned to Mal, and pulled out the keys to the car we’d driven here – the latest in a long line of well-used Fords, though this one was electric, it being a reasonably new model. “You might as well get back to the Folly, Mal. Tell Nightingale I ran into Lesley, and that he should send out the search team if I’m not back by six, or I don’t call and say I’m on my way by then.”

Mal looked at the keys, then me, then Lesley, and her stance firmed. “I don’t think I should leave you alone here, sarge.”

“That wasn’t a request, constable,” I said with a bit of steel in my tone, and, god, after all these years I was starting to sound like him. Talking of terrifying. “Six o’clock. You hear me?”

She took the keys and nodded, but she wanted to protest. Like I said – good instincts. Most people wouldn’t look at an average-size woman in a sundress and think, threat. Or even if they knew it, they wouldn’t feel it like Mal clearly was, right now. “Yes, sarge.”

So I followed Lesley into the pub. I had actually been in there once or twice, long story, so it wasn’t a total shock. Lesley didn’t get a single turned head but boy, did I get some looks. It was mostly empty but I thought the bartender was about to refuse to serve me; well, I was an Isaac, after all. I got a Red Stripe, in the bottle, because you can’t be too careful. But these days I could be confident that all hell would rain down on this place if Lesley managed to kill or abduct me in it, and not even solely in the form of Thomas ‘Tiger Tank’ Nightingale.

Also, I was pretty confident Lesley didn’t want to kill or abduct me, or that if she did I’d get at least one warning. I still had the edge on her, magically speaking. And not just because I had a staff modelled after Hugh Oswald’s old battle staves tucked into a long inner pocket of my jacket. You’d never know from the outside; Molly had made the adjustments for me, and a neat trick too considering the thing weighed more than a kilo. Look, I may walk into dangerous situations but I don’t do it blindfolded. Not if I’m given half a chance about it.

Besides, I could never pull off the cane thing like Nightingale does. Pity.

“What is it, then?” Lesley said once we were seated.

“Oh, nothing in particular,” I said. “It’s been, what, nearly two years? Thought it might be nice to catch up.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. The mask was off, of course, in here. These days, when I remembered her old face – her beautiful face – it was like thinking of a stranger. This was Lesley, in front of me. There wasn’t anything else. There never would be. It felt like there maybe never had been.

“Don’t give me that. We don’t just catch up, Peter. Not anymore.”

“Maybe not,” I said, taking a swallow of my beer. “You heard about the apprentices, then. Abigail, of course, and the other three. Good kids. Give a lot less lip than we did, but I think that’s because they just complain to each other. It’s really motivational.”

“Teaching them to blow things up, then?” Lesley asked.

“When the situation calls for it.” I liked letting her think I was still in the making-everything-explode phase. My tricks these days were a bit more sophisticated, and better if Lesley didn’t know that. Well, explosions were still involved when necessary. But they were very controlled explosions. After all, I’d learned from the best. “Have you ever thought about taking an apprentice? You know, keeping the old skills in hand?”

Her expression didn’t waver. “As if I have time for that.”

“I don’t really know what you’ve got time for, these days.”

“This and that.” She drummed her fingertips on the table. “Is there anything else, Peter?”

“You don’t want to hear how everyone is, how the place is doing?”

She shrugged. “I hear enough. The Nightingale’s still watching over London. As is the starling.” She lifted her pint glass-with-straw to me, in a slight and ironic salute. I was never going to get rid of that nickname, apparently. “I hear Dr Walid had the flu over the winter. I sent him a get-well card. Not signed, so don’t be surprised if he didn’t tell you. You dealt with that murder in Chiswick. That was good work, proper policing – I’m glad I managed to drum something about it into your head. Is there something else I should know?”

I thought about whether I really wanted to tell her, and if it was safe, and if I even owed her this, but why was I here otherwise?

“Me and Nightingale,” I said finally. “We’re sort of – a thing, these days. I figured you should hear it from me.”

It’s hard to choke when you’re drinking through a straw, but Lesley managed it in the most satisfying way. Although if you think it’s gross when someone manages to get whatever they’re drinking out their nose in the normal run of things, you’ve not seen when Lesley does it. I offered her my handkerchief, and she even took it. I shook my head when she offered it back. “Keep it. Really.”

And I know you’re wondering but what about the law of contagion and all that, but that’s not how real magic works. If Lesley had ever wanted my DNA or fingerprints, for more mundane applications, she’d had a million opportunities to get them. I didn’t need the damn handkerchief.

“You’re joking, right?” she said when she was recovered. “Or – no, you’re not. Like, what, you’re both so terrible at going out and meeting people you’ve just given up and started shagging each other? God, Peter, you could do better. Beverley would have had you, you know, if you’d given it half a chance -”

“No,” I said patiently. “Like – you know, I’d tell you we’re dating, except that’s rubbish, and we already live together, because the Folly, so – just, we. We’re – yeah. And I couldn’t do better, are you mad?”

I was really tempted to say something about Zach Palmer at this point, if we were going to start on could do better, but I didn’t because Zach’s not that bad and they’d been broken up for god knows how long at this point, anyway. And I’m a better person than that.

“Oh my god,” Lesley said, in total and utter disbelief. “You’re in love with him, Peter, you idiot.”

“Well – yeah,” I said, because, well. Yeah. As it happened.

She actually banged her forehead on the table a couple of times. “Peter, Peter, what the hell am I supposed to do with you?”

“You know the deal,” I said. “You want to run my love life, you turn yourself in. Otherwise you don’t get to complain.”

Lesley sighed. “You know what? I give up. I completely give up. You and Nightingale, Jesus Christ. At least you waited this long.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, giving her a look.

She sighed again. “You know, you always – the way you used to look at him, god. No, I’m not saying it was that way then, because it wasn’t. You were too busy trying to decide whether it was me you wanted more, or Beverley. You never could make up your fucking mind, even after my face fell off.”

I said nothing, because she was right.

“But – if he’d said you were making a march on the gates of Hell you would have wanted to know why, and how, and borrowed some fire-resistant gear off Frank Caffrey and his boys. And then you would have marched straight there with him. And if you’d got stuck there, he would have barrelled in to rescue you. It was never that way with me, he didn’t ask for me as an apprentice. But – oh, Christ, I don’t know. I wish this was really a surprise. That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. I figured – I mean, it’ll get around, sooner or later; the demi-monde, I mean, not the Met. I hope not the Met. The DPS might give up and quit en masse. But I’d rather you heard it from one of us, and you need to give Nightingale another decade or three before he wants to speak with you.”

“Please tell me you don’t call him that in -” Lesley started, and I cut in before she could finish.

“No, Jesus, can we not have this conversation?”

“You started it,” Lesley pointed out. “Okay. Thanks. I don’t know. I’m going to need several more drinks to stop thinking about it. But I do have one favour to ask.”

It was my turn to narrow my eyes at her. “Yeah?”

Lesley was my mate, after all, but my well of favours was so nearly dry, for her. There was too much between us and the probationers we’d been, time and grief and all the rest of it. She’d been sequestered that night in Covent Garden and I’d wondered once if I’d ever had a real conversation with her since. How much had been Lesley, how much Henry Pyke, that murderous spring? Or afterwards – when had she really gone over to the Faceless Man? I’d sent her that list of potential Little Crocodiles a few days after seeing her that first time in Brightlingsea. It could have been any time after that. That first visit, when I’d shown her the werelight, was the only thing I was sure of. That had been Lesley, nothing but Lesley, Lesley hurting and angry, but Lesley all the same. And she hadn’t even been able to be sarcastic at me like I’d deserved – just that ridiculous iPad voice.

If she wanted a favour, she’d owe me for it, and I’d claim when the debt came due. That was how it was, now.

“If you’re ever daft enough to let Seawoll find out about this,” she said solemnly, “I want pictures of his face when he does.”

I stared at her for a few seconds, and then we both cracked up, real laughter. I couldn’t even think of the last time Lesley and I had laughed together.

My mobile buzzed in my pocket, and I had a fair suspicion who it was. “I think my ride might be here.”

Lesley raised what remained of an eyebrow. “Your ride? Thought you gave Constable Choudhury the car keys.”

“Oh, I did,” I said. “But if you think there’s any way he didn’t come barrelling over here -”

Lesley looked at her watch. “There shouldn’t have been time.”

“I guarantee she called him the moment we walked in here,” I said. “Mal’s a bright girl. Way too bright to let me wander off into a fae-only pub with a mysterious masked lady and a deadline for a search party without calling base right away. And you know how he can drive.”

“Well,” Lesley said. “Best go put him out of his misery, you terrible person.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t even flinch. “Be well, Peter.”

“Don’t make me have to come and find you, Lesley,” I said, because that was how it was. That was how it was always going to be.

“No promises,” she replied. No. No promises. Of course not.

I exited the pub to the sight of one Thomas Nightingale leaning on the Jag right outside, parked totally illegally. Well, he couldn’t have been there more than a minute or two.

“How much trouble did you think I was going to get into in half an hour?” I said by way of greeting.

“On a sliding scale? Say, Kew Gardens,” he replied. “Possibly Oxford Circus, but you needed rather more lead-up for that, as I recall.”

“Mal on her way home?” I asked.

He nodded. “It didn’t seem necessary for her to wait around.”

He opened the passenger door for me, in a gesture of uncharacteristic chivalry – at least when aimed at me - and I let him. It’s not like I was feeling fragile or anything. Any more than seeing Lesley normally makes me.

We’d pulled out into traffic before either of us said anything again.

“What I’m trying to figure out,” I said, “is if you thought I was going to do something daft, or Lesley was? It’s not her style, you know, and it was a coincidence – she wasn’t expecting to see me there, I’m sure of it.”

“You know what you’re doing,” Nightingale said, squeezing past some parked cars a little closer than I’d have been comfortable with, even after the driving course – and a refresher or two, by now. So maybe he was a touch on edge. “But Lesley is less predictable than you think. It seemed prudent to ensure you had backup closer than she knew about.”

“I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but you showing up wasn’t exactly unexpected. Although you made good time – did you use the spinner on the way here?”

Nightingale frowned, but didn’t answer my question. “Wasn’t it?”

“You were that worried?” Of course, I’d be worried, too, if I’d heard he’d stopped for a drink with Lesley, but –

“Peter,” he said. “Naturally.”

And – well. Okay.  

“Um,” I said. “It was – I just owed her an explanation to her face. I told you that, after Bev cornered me. And there she was, and it’s not like I see her that often – especially not when I can actually talk to her, instead of having a knock-down drag-out magical duel. She broke my bloody wrist last time, if you’ll recall. ”

“I do recall. Hence – backup. How did she take it?” Nightingale sounded almost nervous. I mentally revised that estimate of when he’d be able to stand to be in the same room as Lesley down to maybe fifteen years. Two decades, tops.

“Well,” I said. “First she snorted beer through her nose. Then she asked if I was serious. Then she called me an idiot and said she wished she was surprised. Then she asked for a favour.”

“Oh, really?” Nightingale said. We were stopped at a red light, so he looked sideways at me dubiously.

“She said if, by some horrific mischance, Seawoll ever gets wind of this, us, we have to send her pictures of his face when he finds out.”

Nightingale didn’t laugh but he was trying so hard not to he missed the green light and got honked at, which never happens.

“Let us pray,” he said, once he’d recovered, “that that particular eventuality doesn’t come to pass.”

“Forever and ever, amen,” I responded.

Mal had made it back to the Folly before us – the Ford was in the garage when we got there. Half of it was marked off, in preparation for the renovations that were going to give us some extra technology-safe space. Given the way these things dragged on the actual work wouldn’t start for a few months, but we’d had to clear out some of the old cars, so we were trying to get in the habit of using the space that would be available during and after the renovations, instead of the space we’d had previously.

The garage was otherwise empty of people, however, so once we’d gotten out I walked around and kissed Nightingale up against the door of the Jag, just briefly. Because I could. And I’d always wanted to do that. I’m not saying I was with him for his car because that would be ridiculous. And these days I got to drive it fairly often, anyway. But.

“I love you,” I said, quietly, as we drew back. You have to say these things out loud now and again. Ask the question, make the statement, put yourself on the line. Just in case the chance passes you by.

Lesley had taught me that, a long time ago.

“What brought that on?” he asked, but he was smiling, and his hand was still on my neck, curling into the base of my hair, what there was of it at this time of year.

“It just seemed a bit daft,” I said, “that I could manage to admit it to Lesley, of all people, and I’d never said it to you.”

He didn’t say anything, but he kissed me again, and he was smiling, smiling, smiling into it, and to be honest I felt like an absolute arse for not having made it plain before now, whether or not it should have been. Because, you know, Lesley had been right, but not entirely: I’d follow him to the gates of Hell, obviously, no questions there. But I’d do anything to make him smile. Lucky for both of us he has such a finely-tuned moral code.

And then I heard footsteps. Which stopped. And then started again, really quickly, but in the opposite direction. We broke apart and looked up, but whichever one of them it was, was already gone. And it wasn’t Molly, worse luck, because if it had been we never would have heard footsteps in the first place.

“Shit,” Nightingale said, very quiet and very intense, and you have to understand I’ve been around while he’s had a full-on no-holds-barred magical duel with a Night Witch, and faced down the Faceless Man, and listened to me tell him that his apprentice has just tasered his other apprentice in the back and gone over to the enemy. And I had never heard him use that sort of language.

“We are so fucked,” I said, because I, on the other hand, use that sort of language at the drop of a hat. “Are you absolutely sure there’s no memory-wiping spell you just forgot to mention?”

Nightingale gave me a look, so I shrugged. “Worth asking.”

“What are we going to do?” he asked me, and I was astounded to realise he meant it – he really wasn’t sure.

“With any luck,” I said, “it was Abigail. And even if it wasn’t – believe me, if I’d caught two of my bosses kissing when I was a PC, my main goal would have been finding enough alcohol to make myself forget again.”

Also, and this was a bit cruel and a bit hard and a bit that Lesley-voice in my head, by this point I knew all of them were well and truly hooked on this, on magic, on the whole weird world we dealt with. If keeping on with it meant overlooking the fact that they’d seen the chief inspector and the sergeant snogging in the garage, they would damn well overlook it. And they were all bright enough to do that calculation for themselves – else they wouldn’t have been apprentices in the first place. I mean, I would have, if it was me. And it had been Nightingale, and he’d had a sergeant he’d been snogging in the garage. Except the idea of Nightingale kissing some nameless sergeant in the garage, even back then, made me bristle in a way that was stupid because this was all perfectly hypothetical. But Nightingale wasn’t hypothetical; he was mine.

“We can only hope so,” Nightingale said. “Shall we, then?”

I looked over at him, and reached out to straighten his tie, which was just the slightest bit crooked; I might or might not have been responsible for it. And so we went on.

Except we hadn’t even made it out of the garage when Abigail burst in, panting like she'd been running. “Are you guys okay?” 

“Ye-es?” said Nightingale.

“Only,” she was getting her breath back, “only Mal said you ran into Lesley, Peter, and Nightingale went to be your backup, then she came back to get something she’d left in the car and she said you two were – and I thought – Lesley didn’t, like, glamour you? Or something? Do I need to call someone? Who should I call, if that happens?”

We stared at her, open-mouthed – at least I was – and she started to get suspicious. “You’re…really okay?”

This was a golden opportunity, but it would also involve lying to our subordinates in a way that would be really damaging, and we couldn’t do that. There was a difference between lies of omission, like “we are definitely not stupidly in love and we have never even once made it on the sofa in the tech cave, it got that squeak all on its own”, and lies of commission, like, “it’s completely possible to glamour people in order to make them kiss even though they have an otherwise totally platonic professional relationship, and our maybe-nemesis-slash-my-former-best-mate did that to us and that’s why we were engaging in inappropriate conduct in the garage.” Because if nothing else Lesley would shred us mercilessly if she ever found out, and I really didn’t need another reason for Lesley to be mad at us. She’d be totally justified, too. For once.

“No-one put any spells on anyone, Abigail,” Nightingale said. “We’re quite all right.”

“But -” Abigail said, and just blinked at us. “But.”

I opened my mouth, to say what I didn’t know – probably something really dumb about Nightingale having something in his eye – and she held up her hands. “You know what? No. I don’t want to know. Whatever it is, I do not want to know. Or it’s going to be Bev and the cosmopolitans all over again. Just – I’m going to go back to admiring your close and strictly platonic working relationship. Okay?”

“Fine by me,” I said.

“Very well,” said Nightingale.

“Aaargh,” said Abigail, and left.

“See?” I said once she was gone. “They don’t want to know. Just pretend you don’t notice the hangovers at practice tomorrow morning.”

“I do hope you’re right,” he said with a sigh. “Come on, then.”

I caught his hand and squeezed it, because that said what I needed to. He held on right back. And then we let go, because getting caught kissing by your apprentice constables is one thing, but holding hands is something else entirely. That’s how it works, when you’re having a totally inappropriate workplace affair.

I should know – I’ve been having this one for a while now. It seems to be working out okay.