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Harrowhark Nonagesimus and Gideon Nav were two of the weirdest people Palamedes knew. This was saying a lot, because most of the people he knew were librarians, or morticians, or psychics, or Cam. He didn’t know many normal people, but Harrow and Gideon were outliers even amongst his crowd. This was why, when he got a text from Harrow at three in the morning after two weeks of absolutely no contact, he started shoving whatever books and clothes he could reach into a bag before his phone’s screen had gone dark.
The text read: Going to Pent’s. Bring blood.
Harrow was a shockingly literal person for someone who spent all of her time— voluntarily, not that she would ever admit it— with Gideon, who had never met a sentence she couldn’t innuendo, and so Palamedes had no doubt that she meant exactly what she said. Even so, it was hard to believe. The last— and only— time Harrow had been to Abigail’s house, it was only thanks to Abigail’s precognition and Gideon’s reflexes that no one had died, and even then she’d had to be tranquilized to get her into the car and safely into another state so as to avoid a real catastrophe. Harrow had, evidently, something of a prejudice against psychics.
He was just zipping his backpack shut when Cam came into the room, a huge black duffle bag over one shoulder. She appeared to have actually been sleeping, because underneath her jacket and bullet proof vest he recognized her favorite nightshirt. He hadn’t even left his desk yet, for which he was now grateful. She’d probably have made him change if he tried to leave the house in pajamas, and that would lose them time that they definitely didn’t have if Harrow was already en route.
“Gideon sent a message,” she said with no preamble, setting her bag on the floor near the door with a very solid thud and taking his own from his hands. She pulled out the wad of semi-worn t-shirts that he’d stuffed in on top of his stack of books and gave him a frown, and then began to neatly empty his dresser drawers into the suitcase he hadn’t realized was tucked under his bed. “Pack whatever notes you think you’ll need, and Gideon says bring lots of chalk.”
“Harrow said blood,” he answered, shuffling all of the papers on his desk into a neat pile. He put the pile into a new folder, labeled it DESK, and tossed it into his bag before turning with much more care to the ingredient case sitting on his nightstand. He’d restocked the previous week, so there weren’t any shortages in his standard supplies, but he added two more boxes of his favorite chalk, and a pint each of goat, lamb, pig, and human blood. By the time he’d finished, Cam had arranged all of his worldly possessions to her satisfaction, and he had no doubt that if they were on the road for the next six months, he wouldn’t run out of anything.
“Ready?” she asked, and didn’t wait for a response, swinging her own bag back over her shoulder and grabbing his suitcase with her other hand.
He collected his ingredient case and his bag of notes carefully, along with some spare pens and blank folders, and followed her out to the car. It would be a long night, but if he kept his notes with him he’d have a good chance at organizing the mess of it all before Cam noticed that he was still awake and swapped his coffee for a mild sedative. Perhaps the disorder would even spark some new connection in his mind. He was already looking forward to it.
They made it in time, but only because Cam’s relationship with the speed limit was tenuous at best. She was also a much better driver than Harrow or Gideon, who he couldn’t believe ever passed a driver’s test, so she could take advantage of highways and freeways during the day without endangering the other drivers on the road.
Once he’d asked Harrow for her license in order to do some very impressive and only mildly illegal record changing in the federal database, and she’d looked him straight in the eye and said, “What’s that?” He still wasn’t sure if she’d been joking.
In any case, they beat the chaos-mobile to Abigail’s house, though not by much time at all, which meant that either Gideon and Harrow had done some much more dangerous speeding of their own, or they’d sent the messages several hours into the drive. As he unfolded himself from the passenger seat, wincing as he stretched, and Cam went around to the trunk to unpack, with only the slightest tightening around her eyes to show that she’d been driving for sixteen hours straight, he heard a familiar horrible rumbling noise. Cam’s head jerked up from where she was inspecting their bags, and they both braced for impact.
The car that swung recklessly around the corner, spinning out slightly and only just missing a mailbox belonging to one of Abigail’s neighbors, matched the grinding death rattle of its engine perfectly. It was an old car that probably had started out as a nice family-sized four door sedan at some point in the sixties, but life had not been kind to it. It was a currently painted truly alarming shade of puce, and looked as though someone had sent it rolling down a cliff or two before picking it up, dusting it off, and handing it to the least cautious drivers in the world, who’d then proceeded to fight monsters in it— and very likely with it— for years on end.
He was perpetually amazed that it was still standing. He couldn’t prove it, but he was almost positive that Harrow was doing something to keep it going, though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it might be. He’d done his best, but Cam had confiscated his books on enchanted machines and combustion engines after the third explosion.
The car shuddered to a stop in Abigail’s driveway, halfway into the space that Cam had so thoughtfully left for them, with its rear bumper hanging out fully across the sidewalk, and its owners emerged, already arguing.
Gideon burst from the driver’s seat and marched around to the passenger side to hold the keys over Harrow’s head as she dragged herself out of the car, jangling them obnoxiously and saying something about how some people just couldn’t measure up to a challenge. Harrow’s pointy face was screwed up in fury. She was wearing an expression that would have spelled death, or at least extreme pain, for anyone else. Rather than ripping her teeth out of her skull, however, Harrow simply kicked Gideon’s shins and, while Gideon was looking down in bewilderment, grabbed the keys. She waved them victoriously in Gideon’s face, and then thrust them into the pocket of her hoodie, looking smug.
Gideon, for her part, seemed immensely pleased by her own loss. “Look at you! Using physical violence! What an achievement!” she cried, and wrapped her arms around Harrow’s head, dragging her towards her chest in what looked more like a headlock than a hug. Harrow struggled in her embrace, snarling and slapping, but Gideon was both stronger than her and also clearly accustomed to ignoring flailing limbs aimed at her face. She held on determinedly, and smacked a very wet sounding kiss to Harrow’s forehead, which made Harrow screech with rage and fight harder, albeit still fruitlessly.
At the same time, Palamedes could see Gideon’s hand drop down to Harrow’s pocket to retrieve the keys. She released her with a triumphant yell, and plunged the keys into the open neck of her own shirt, while Harrow righted herself furiously, using the open car door as a lever to stand as straight as possible, quivering with barely contained wrath.
“People who sleep for eighteen hours straight don’t get to drive,” Gideon chided, waggling a finger in Harrow’s face. Harrow’s eyes crossed to look at it, and Palamedes wouldn’t be surprised if she tried to bite it off.
Instead, she snapped, “People who don’t sleep at all for forty-eight hours shouldn’t get to drive either, Griddle.”
Gideon shrugged, unrepentant. “Guess we’re stuck here until I get some sleep, then.”
Harrow’s back went rigid, as if she had only just remembered where here was, and Gideon took the opportunity to shut the car door with a decisive slam, catching Harrow’s shoulder as she stumbled with the loss.
Right on cue, the door to the house burst open, and a woman stuck her head out, beaming at them all as they turned as one to face the new threat.
Abigail didn’t even blink at the knife that appeared in Gideon’s free hand, or the ominous rattle of what was almost certainly bones coming from Harrow’s pockets. “Welcome in, everyone!” she called down to them cheerfully. “Bring your bags right on up, we’ve got dinner on the table! Does anyone need any help?”
She paused, looking around at them expectantly, and Palamedes glanced over at Harrow. He’d heard enough about the last ill-fated meeting that he’d already tucked a hex bag in amongst his most important papers to protect them from any explosive repetitions, but Harrow just looked pale.
Unusually pale, in fact, even for her, now that she wasn’t flushed with anger and glaring up at Gideon. Gideon’s hand was still on her shoulder, where it had been hovering, he realized, the entire time, since Harrow had heaved herself out of the car, and he suddenly reassessed their entire argument in light of the fact that, spitting vitriol or no, Harrow clearly couldn’t quite stand on her own.
“Great,” Gideon said, equally cheerfully. “I’ll need a hand with our bags, because Harrow here needs to be seen by a brain doctor, sooner rather than later.”
Harrow gave a little jolt. “I do not. And don’t let them touch my bag!”
Gideon shrugged, the manic grin on her face softening to something embarrassingly tender as she looked down at Harrow’s sweaty forehead. “It’s either they carry your bag, or they carry you, and I figured you’d prefer it be your bag. But if you’d rather—”
“No,” Harrow said quickly, and then scowled up at her. “And I do not need to be carried.”
“You need to be air-lifted,” Gideon agreed, “but hey, let’s make a deal. If you can walk to where Cam is, you can get yourself into the house.”
Harrow’s eyes narrowed as she judged the distance between herself and Cam, all nine feet of it. Cam turned around to face her fully, giving up on even pretending to be busy with their own bags. Palamedes had passed out in front of her enough times to recognize the way she spaced out her feet and squared her shoulders, subtly preparing to catch eighty pounds of deadweight necromancer, should it come down to it. He was rather relieved. He didn’t want to know what would happen to the person who dropped Harrow in front of Gideon.
Harrow cleared her throat. “I would rather not,” she said with dignity, and turned back to Gideon. “If you try to pick me up, I will call up a wraith, and then I’ll really have an aneurysm,” she threatened, and Gideon snorted.
“Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Who would even want to carry you, you’re all sharp and bony,” she said as she moved smoothly around to Harrow’s side, slipping Harrow’s arm over her shoulders and gently tucking her own hands around Harrow’s waist to take her weight and help her balance. She had to stoop to do it, and Palamedes would bet that if she stood up straight, Harrow’s feet would leave the ground entirely.
Cam relaxed, released from the duty of Harrow-catching, and went back to gathering up their bags. Palamedes went around to the trunk of Gideon and Harrow’s car to help with theirs.
“Palamedes,” Harrow intoned from where she was enveloped in Gideon’s protective embrace, “the duffle bag, in the back seat. It’s my gear. Don’t break anything.”
He was amazed that she was going to let him touch it at all, and more touched than he expected to be. He promptly went around to the side door, leaving the trunk and its mishmash of plastic bags and old backpacks to Abigail, who’d come down the stairs after Harrow’s striking display of critical reasoning regarding her own health.
On Gideon’s instruction, Abigail took out two of the least decrepit backpacks and the heavy leather wrapped package that almost definitely contained Gideon’s terrible bloodthirsty sword, and then the whole party moved towards the stairs, with Gideon and Harrow in the lead, setting a slow pace but ensuring that the rest of them were at their back, waiting to catch Harrow if Gideon couldn’t.
It turned out to be entirely unnecessary, but he thought they probably all felt better for it. Gideon swung Harrow easily up the stairs, and no one made a peep about how it didn’t look like Harrow’s feet touched the steps at all. They got through the open door without incident, and Gideon managed to move them both through the house quickly enough that Harrow was past the entryway and into the living room, settled down onto one of the soft, plush couches, before she went rigid and bone-white.
Palamedes didn’t like to give credence to Harrow’s more demented and homicidal tendencies, but he had to admit, Abigail’s house creeped him out a little too. Her presence was almost smothering within the walls of her immediate domain. He could feel her power and her will permeating every inch of the house, from the furniture to the ridiculous knick-knacks which Magnus collected to line the shelves in all of their rooms. It wasn’t a malevolent presence, it was kind and genuine and good, right to the core, but it also made it hard to move, hard to even breathe, without feeling acutely like he was disturbing something that ought not to be disturbed. In his more maudlin hours, often when he was tossing and turning and generally finding it impossible to sleep in her guest room, he thought it was exactly like wandering around inside someone else’s body: an overwhelming violation, imprisoned within someone else’s will. He wondered if it was how demons felt when they possessed a person— or perhaps how the person felt, when the demon possessed them.
Harrow might not be a psychometrist, but he knew that she experienced the world with a similar sensitivity. He wasn’t entirely sure what Abigail’s home felt like to her, but given what he’d heard of her previous reaction he suspected that she couldn’t even read the kindness and generosity that sat at the heart of it. The only thing that kept him sane, on those nights when he felt like he was being suffocated underneath the heavy blanket of Abigail’s power, was the feeling of her good intentions towards him and towards Cam threading through the place like currents of fresh air. If Harrow couldn’t parse the emotions that came with the suffocation, it was no wonder that she’d gone a bit crazy.
“Gideon,” Harrow said unsteadily, a thin trickle of blood running from her nose, and that was all she needed to say. Gideon dropped to her knees in front of her, blank faced and calm, and Harrow took hold of her hands and pressed her head into them.
Gideon allowed her hands to be commandeered without question. She leaned forward to press her forehead gently into Harrow’s hair, and breathed in and out, loud and even, until Harrow’s ragged breathing began to match hers.
Harrow shuddered, once, and then pushed back. Her face was still too pale, and her nose was still dripping into Gideon’s palms, but she no longer looked like she might vomit, or call up an impossible number of spirits to rain punishment on them all, perhaps tearing herself apart in the process. It was reassuring.
“Right, then,” Abigail said briskly from behind him. Gideon and Harrow both jerked around, and Palamedes tried to pretend that his own flinch was merely a stretch, and not because he’d completely forgotten that anyone else was with them. Cam alone remained impassive, with her back to the wall and her arms crossed, always within reach of him if necessary.
Abigail smiled sunnily in the face of their surprise. “What do you need?” she asked Gideon, and Harrow promptly answered.
“We’re fine, Pent,” she said imperiously, with bloody tracks running down her face. Gideon made no motion that Palamedes could see, but Harrow glanced at her for a second, and then amended, “We could use a towel.”
Abigail nodded, and disappeared from the doorway for a moment. She must have prepared for their arrival, however, because she was back before anyone else could move, holding a packet of wet wipes and a roll of paper towel that she offered gravely to Harrow.
Harrow took a few squares of towel, and bent first to dab at the mess in Gideon’s hands, and then handed over the wet wipes so that Gideon could do the same for her face. Abigail took in these proceedings patiently, without even a flicker of impatience that Palamedes could sense, as Harrow took back the wipes to clean the blood off of each of Gideon’s fingers, and Gideon handed her a ripped piece of towel to hold demurely under her nose to catch any last drips.
When they were finished, and had returned both the roll of towel and packet of wipes to Abigail, she smiled at them both, and spoke again. “Is there anything else I can get you? A blood infusion? MRI?”
There was something about her tone that made Palamedes believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if Harrow agreed that she needed an MRI, Abigail would be able to acquire one as easily as she did the paper towel and wet wipes.
Unfortunately, Harrow was quite possibly the worst person to convince to have any medical procedures whatsoever. Once, when she’d stumbled into his house with a six inch gash across her stomach, Gideon half-carrying her and looking both entirely unhurt and also like she might pass out from worry, Harrow insisted on healing herself instead of letting him do a few quick stitches, or even clean the cut out and put a bandage on it. Using power that he still didn’t completely understand, she’d zipped the cut closed, and promptly passed out for twelve hours, while Gideon paced restlessly around his halls and tried to goad Cam into a rematch of their last rematch, and he hovered around her bedside and hoped beyond hope that she hadn’t actually killed herself through stubbornness.
Harrow waved Abigail’s offers away, and pushed herself to her feet, still swaying gently. Gideon stood with her, clearly ready to catch her if she fell. “No,” she said with dignity. “I did a working before we came here that took a bit out of me, but I’ll explain that later. I am fine,” she insisted, and strode wobbly off to the kitchen.
Gideon made a face at them behind her back, and continued to shadow her through the doorway into the hall.
Abigail watched them go, and then pressed her hand to the wall beside her after they were out of view. Palamedes could feel an invisible wall slam down between the three of them and the house beyond, and all of the clinking sounds of Magnus cooking were suddenly muffled. She turned to him with a serious expression on her face. “Have you gotten a chance to touch her?”
“No,” Palamdes admitted.
“Try to, during dinner,” Abigail said. She looked past him, through the doorway. “I know she won’t go to the hospital, but from what I caught of what she did, she shouldn’t be able to hold a conversation right now, let alone walk. I’m still not convinced she’s not having an aneurysm.”
“What did she do?” Cam asked, and Palamedes nodded in agreement. They’d both gotten very vague texts to begin with, and neither Harrow nor Gideon had been forthcoming about anything else.
Abigail sighed. “From what Gideon said on the phone, she summoned and trapped a knight of hell in order to get information out of it, and then she held it in place long enough for them to get away.”
“Ah,” Palamedes winced, and Abigail’s attention swung directly to him. He should have known that that would come back to bite him at some point.
“What happened,” Abigail said, with no inflection.
“It was a hypothetical scenario, a way to invert a protection ward to make it into a trap,” he said, and Abigail grimaced. “I didn’t give her the name, though,” he was quick to point out, but Abigail waved him away.
“No, that was almost definitely Ianthe, I can feel her fingerprints on it, even from this far away.”
Cam huffed softly. “You’d think living on the opposite side of the country would keep her out of causing any trouble for us.”
Abigail rolled her eyes. “I don’t think living on another plane of existence would keep Ianthe out of causing trouble.”
“Given the number of times she’s gone to Hell and come back, I’d say not,” Cam said dryly, and Abigail gave a rueful chuckle.
Palamades didn’t offer any defense for his erstwhile colleague, because though he found Ianthe a stimulating research partner when she was at her most sane, she’d also tried to talk him into selling his soul enough times for him to appreciate why caution was important.
“Right, well, I suppose there’s nothing else we can do at the moment,” Abigail said briskly. “Best not to keep them waiting, I think.”
She released the wall, and walked through the doorway without even the slightest hitch in her step, which was impressive, even if she was in her own domain.
Palamedes glanced over at Cam, who was already looking back at him. “We won’t let them do this alone,” he said quietly.
Camilla glanced through the doorway thoughtfully. “I don’t think they intend to.”
He blinked, and then smiled. “You know, I think you just might be right.”
Dinner was beautiful. Magnus was a fabulous cook, and he had clearly pulled out all of the stops, perhaps in hopes of smoothing any ruffled feathers that might occur at a table full of occultists and psychics. It was completely lost on Harrow, of course, who only ate plain bread and water, and as much unsalted broth as Gideon could force down her throat, which was approximately half a cup, in Palamedes’ most generous estimation.
He did his part to make up the difference, however, as did Cam and Gideon, and Magnus looked very pleased by the end of the meal. Palamedes suspected that Magnus had known from the start how the meal would pan out, given their current company, and had planned accordingly. The fact that there was unsalted broth in the kitchen at all was proof of that.
When Magnus, beaming around at all of them, leapt up to get dessert, Palamedes half stood as well and, under the pretense of stacking everyone’s dirty plates, brushed against Harrow’s hand.
She jerked back as if she’d been scalded, but a single touch was more than enough. She was dangerously weak, exhausted, profoundly dehydrated, and all the broth in the world wouldn’t make up for her malnutrition. She needed electrolytes badly, though he suspected that anyone who even thought about giving her a gatorade would die a miserable death.
This was all generally what he expected, however. He rarely got a chance to explore the inner workings of Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and usually only when she’d worked herself into unconsciousness, but she’d been teetering on the edge of half a dozen mundane kinds of death for as long as he’d known her. The first time he’d examined her, he’d nearly had a heart attack, but now he understood that, sensible or not, she would maintain her current state of health— or lack thereof— no matter what anyone tried to do.
More importantly, she wasn’t actually bleeding into her brain. There were several popped blood vessels in her nose, which accounted for the blood they’d seen, and probably more from the last twenty-four hours that had healed enough that they weren’t calling out for his attention yet. She wasn’t in dire need of hospitalization, however— at least no more than she always was.
Most interestingly, however, was a brief, tantalizing glimpse of something he couldn’t quite place his finger on, hovering on the farthest recesses of his mental map of Harrow’s body. It wasn’t an illness, or anything even remotely malignant, which is one of the reasons he was having a hard time getting a read on it. It hung, shimmering and amorphous and yet somehow giving the impression of a massive steel wall, draped all around Harrow like a shield. It hadn’t blocked him from his brief investigation, but he got the sense that if he pushed farther, or attempted anything remotely invasive, it would get a lot less distant and a lot more dangerous very quickly.
He hadn’t felt anything like it before, even when he’d dealt with Harrow in the past. It was completely new.
He withdrew to his side of the table, staring at her. She stared back, black eyes narrowed and mouth pursed, hand drawn protectively up to her chest.
Gideon looked between them both sharply. “Well? Is she going to pass out in a pool of her own blood any time soon?”
He blinked his way back to himself. “No,” he said shortly, and then, when Gideon frowned, “She’s exhausted, depleted, dehydrated, and so malnourished she shouldn’t be cognizant, let alone functional, but she’s fine otherwise.”
Gideon sat back with a small sigh of profound relief. “What a shame,” she said cheerfully, clapping a hand to Harrow’s shoulder. “Guess you’ll live to terrify another day.”
Harrow flapped at her in disgust. “Shut up, Griddle,” and then she turned back to Palamedes. “Do not go through my body without permission, Sextus, or I shall have Gideon chop off your head.”
She must have been in a remarkably good mood, Palamedes reflected, as Cam leaned forward with narrowed eyes to defend his honor, and the table erupted into good-natured chaos as Gideon retaliated, Abigail goaded them on in her own subtle way, and Magnus emerged from the kitchen with a massive trifle in his hands. Harrow usually threatened people herself, with bones or blood or ash. She rarely let Gideon have the fun of coming to her defense unless they were actually in a life or death fight, but today she was in rare form.
He watched the chaos at the table unfold for a moment, sitting in his own bubble of stillness. Harrow had done an impossible summons that they’d devised one sleepless night as a completely theoretical thought exercise, using a name that, if he guessed right, would bring the full wrath of Hell and Heaven alike down on her head if anyone got wind. She was still standing, after that, and not only standing, but walking and talking and giving a very brief almost smile at Gideon’s antics beside her, and she was doing it all inside Abigail’s house, even though she’d gone absolutely crazy the last time she’d spent more than five conscious minutes there.
It was a puzzle he couldn’t work out, with so many missing pieces, and now he could add some protective veil hovering around Harrow and her mind that was so slippery and elusive that he couldn’t get any read on it, just that it was there, and that it was benign.
Not to mention that thing that had happened in the living room, whatever it was. Harrow had been on the brink of a meltdown, and then something had happened, and she’d stopped.
He looked at Gideon for a moment. Gideon Nav was even more of an enigma than her gloomy, secretive partner. He understood Harrow as a scientist and a genius first, and then a complete supernatural mystery second. Gideon, for all her wide smiles and easy laugh and open expressions, was a book he’d never learned how to read. Cam vouched for her, enough to say that he was safe with her, which was the highest of praises coming from Cam, but all that told him was that Gideon was a fundamentally good person, which didn’t tell him anything at all about what she was.
He’d never seen her with so much as a scratch, even when Harrow was bleeding out on his floor, though he knew full well that Gideon would throw herself in front of dragon fire if it meant Harrow would go unburned for five seconds more.
Gideon didn’t have a drop of mystical, psychic, or magical potential. She didn’t even rank against the dullest of hedge witches. She was always healthy, and by all reports phenomenal with that ghastly sword of hers, but that wasn’t enough to go on.
Harrow loved her, but that didn’t tell him anything either, except that there must be more to her than met the eye, or the psychometrist’s most intensive examinations.
He would keep looking. One day, he would find enough pieces to put together the puzzle of what made Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus, devil-killers and world-rippers, tick.
Until then, Magnus was serving trifle with a generous hand, and it looked like there were strawberries involved. Palamedes turned his attention to dessert.