Archive of Our Own

Lying in hospice care, Noble James had time to reflect on what had brought him to this death. A part of his mind needed to continue to focus on ensuring that the Night Enthusiasts could not find him, but he otherwise was free to ponder.

It was simple enough. He had been caught up in the tides of returning sentiment and made his last mistake, choosing to save a girl from the dangerous people he was embedded among. But his path to that error had been anything but simple.

It could have gone so differently. If he had truly become a Night Enthusiast when they originally recruited him, rather than Mr. McGillicuddy intervening and giving him the reprieve he had done...

His thoughts ventured down a path untaken, imagining what might have been. What if he had refused to go with the old man to that peculiar funeral home wherein he had laid eyes on what looked to every sense like his own dead body, no matter how alive he could tell he still was, which was not entirely; the emotional deadness for the first time ever, feeling his heartbeat slow to an even sixty beats a minute, because the anxiousness he had felt for so many years about being caught where he should not be, where Londoners felt no black man should ever be, for what he might have to do to them or else have to suffer them doing to him, vanished from his breast replaced by iron cold disinterest.

If that feeling had, instead, been achieved by his own murder of a part of himself, and made permanent? Then he would not be here dying right now. The curse would never have happened.

He would still have been through the ritual, with less early warning, in fact. Mr. McGillicuddy had not told him too much, only that the part of himself that he would be told to kill would already be dead, was in fact the corpse he had seen, but it would return to him when the corpse's time elapsed.

The Night Enthusiasts had taken him to their meeting place. They had kept watch over him and put a skull spell on him so that they would know where he went, should he try to escape rather than do their bidding. Then they had taken him to the undersea depths and left him there.

His doppelganger had been supposed to appear, but nothing like that happened. No dead self, no ghost, nothing at all. Where was it? He had thought it should appear already dead, but not that it would fail to reveal itself entirely.

After what felt like hours, Noble James felt he had no other option but to teleport himself back to where he had met with the Night Enthusiasts.

They seemed unconcerned by any discrepancy, as they escorted him to a doorway that Noble was almost certain had not been there before. "You will only be able to step through if you are truly now one of us," the short woman said. She was their leader, he realized, knowing it was true by how she spoke for them all at that moment.

Was this true? Would he be unable to step through, not truly being one of them? But his heart was so cold that he did not feel anxiety at this thought, only a calculated curiosity about whether they were correct about their assessment of their magic. It would be helpful to him if they were wrong, but he would find an excuse if they were not, teleport away and be unable to be found. It was only at that moment that he understood that his innate Magic Unusual ability was not to be found if he did not want to be, and he knew it by the sureness he felt that even if they were right, and he could not step through, they would not find him to do anything to him.

Noble James had stepped through. The Night Enthusiasts had been wrong. Having part of himself dead temporarily had been enough to fool their magic.

And, lying on his death bed, he realized that he also had been wrong. Not being able to be found had not turned out to be enough to save him.

But then the thing that was enough to save him happened. Someone found him. Melinda Maudie Merkle found him, to be exact, and wished him well, ending the spell that was killing him.

Though neither of them realized that at the moment, it was not long after she left that Noble James understood that something had healed him, and then he knew: saving her had not been his last mistake after all. It had not even, it turned out, been a mistake.