Chapter Text
Lucy sat on a low garden wall across from the Guppy House in Ealing. George sat on the wall a few feet away, a pile of kit bags between them. The job was over and they had been entirely successful. Yet Lucy felt a gnawing ache in her gut that had nothing to do with ghosts and everything to do with seeing her old team again.
They were the same and also different than she remembered. Holly was as lovely and put together as ever, yet she seemed warmer, more open than she had been, at least where Lucy was concerned. George was taller now, and furious with her, though there was really nothing new about that. And Lockwood… Lockwood was himself, the same he’d always been. Wasn’t he? He’d always been reckless. He’d always been effervescent and mercurial, breezing through the most difficult and dangerous situations with hardly a care.
She closed her eyes and remembered the weariness on his face as he said goodbye to her, taking the Source to the furnaces with Kipps and Holly. There had been a heaviness to him that she couldn’t remember seeing before. She tried to tell herself he was just tired. It had been a long winter for all of them.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
George looked over at her, his eyes piercing. “For what?” he asked sharply.
“Yes, Lucy, for what?”
Lucy started. The skull had been so quiet this whole time, she’d almost forgotten he was there, sitting in the rucksack at her feet. She chose to ignore it.
“For the way I left,” she said to George. “For not saying goodbye.”
“Good,” said George. “Anything else?”
“Oh come off it,” said the skull. “You have nothing to apologise for, Lucy. You did what you had to do.”
Lucy chewed at her bottom lip. She’d certainly thought that at the time. Now, after seeing them, after the accusations George had thrown at her, she wasn’t so sure.
“For not calling to check in,” she said quietly. “I should have… I saw you guys in the papers all the time. So I knew you were doing alright.”
George made a disgusted sound.
“See? This is what you get for trying. Ingratitude!”
“You weren’t in the papers,” said George shortly.
“What?” Lucy asked, confused.
“We couldn’t read about you in the papers. We had no idea how you were doing, or even where you were. You could have called and told us that at least.” He shook his head. “We had no way to know if you were okay.”
There was a stinging in Lucy’s eyes that she thought must be from the cold air.
“Holly would bring home tidbits from the gossip train sometimes. When Lockwood found out you’d gone independent… Lucy, you know better than anyone how tightly he holds his feelings in. I’ve never seen him so upset.”
“Why? I thought he’d be happy I hadn’t gone to Fittes or another big agency.”
“Mister control freak was upset that you were doing things your own way,” the skull grumbled from near her feet.
George turned that sharp gaze on her again. “Do you know the mortality rate for independent agents? It’s not good.”
“Yeah, but none of them had ME. I’ve got your back Lucy. You don’t need those blockheads…”
“Would you just shut up for two seconds!” Lucy burst out.
For a moment, George looked offended, then he glanced down at the glow emanating from her backpack and rolled his eyes.
“You stole that, you know,” he said.
“So did you!” snapped Lucy.
“Of all of us, I never would have guessed that the skull was the one you cared the most about.”
“That’s because you’re a blockhead with delusions of intelligence.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Lucy said, her anger boiling over. She thought there might be steam escaping from her ears any minute. “You know what? Take him.”
“What?”
“What?!”
“You’re right, I stole your precious skull. I bet you’d love to be able to test all your Rotwell Institute contraptions on him. Well, now’s your chance.”
Lucy hopped off the wall and opened up her rucksack, pulling the ghost jar out of its confines. The skull was making a truly horrid face, but Lucy ignored it. She held the jar out to George, who took a moment to clean his glasses in a considering way, probably buying time to think through his options.
He shoved them back on his face, then deliberately reached out and took the jar.
“Thanks,” he said. “I… would like to run some new tests. But you can have it back when I’m done.”
“What? You’re going to share custody! This is humiliating.”
“You would prefer to stay with him all the time?” Lucy asked. That shut him up.
“Lucy…” George looked up at her. “ Are you okay?”
Lucy sighed. She wanted to snap at him. To tell him that she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself, as she’d clearly proven. But her anger had burned itself out and she was left feeling empty.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” she said hollowly.
George looked like he wanted to say something else, but the night cabs had finally arrived. Lucy helped George load the mountain of kit bags into the boot of the first cab, ignoring the skull’s increasingly unhinged protestations.
“I’ll call you when I’m done,” said George, not looking at her. “With the skull, I mean.”
“Oh sure,” said Lucy. “Take your time.”
George nodded. “G’night, Lucy.”
“Good night, George.”
He climbed into the cab and she grabbed her own kit bag, along with her sadly deflated rucksack, and climbed into her own cab.
As the cab made its way to Tooting, she replayed her conversation with George in her head. She really was okay. But that was the thing, she was just okay. Seeing them again, George, Lockwood, even Holly, had reminded her that just okay was nothing compared to what she’d once had.
She sighed and let her head thunk against the window of the cab, watching the lights of London slide by outside her window and trying not to think anymore.
Lucy awoke in the quiet of her little bedsit in Tooting. Well, relative quiet. There was the rumble of a truck passing that rattled the windows of the old building, and the creak of the pipes as someone flushed the toilet on the fourth floor, and she could hear the crazy old lady next door talking to her cat. All familiar, comfortable sounds.
She went through her usual morning routine on autopilot, throwing on whatever clothes were handy, and heading out to pick up breakfast from the Thai place on the corner.
She wasn’t gone long, but when she returned, nothing was as she’d left it.
Her door stood ajar, the wood around the lock splintered. She listened for a long minute, but heard nothing out of place, beyond the pounding of her heart. She took a deep breath, then another. She set the bag of takeout down on the landing and cautiously pushed her door open.
The place had been ransacked. Lucy wasn’t the neatest, and living alone had only exacerbated the issue, but her flat looked like a bomb had gone off in it. Drawers were pulled out and cupboards opened, spilling their contents across the counters. Her bed and chairs were overturned. Her kit bag had been ripped open, equipment scattered helter skelter across the floor. Even the dustbin had been dumped out on the linoleum in the kitchenette and kicked around.
Lucy felt numb as she catalogued the damage. Then she frowned as something caught her eye. A silver net twinkled at her from inside the kit bag. She pushed it open with her foot, examining the contents. Salt-bombs, iron canisters, Greek Fire. Those items weren’t cheap. Whoever had tossed her flat wasn’t looking for money or valuables to sell.
Valuables…
She dove for the wardrobe, feeling along the bottom for where she’d stuck… yes! She ripped the envelope from where it had been taped to the wood. Inside was her DEPRAC paperwork, a few hundred pounds in savings and… the silver necklace fell into her palm, sparkling in the dingy light.
She hadn’t meant to take the necklace. She’d left in a hurry and forgotten she was still wearing it. She’d meant to return it to Lockwood, but had never found the courage to go back to Portland Row. She heaved a sigh of relief. For all that her flat had been violated, they hadn’t found the one truly irreplaceable thing she owned.
Lucy stared at it for a long moment. Then, for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate, she clasped the necklace around her neck. The metal was cold against her skin at first, but it slowly warmed, as though it was remembering her. The familiar feel of it steadied her nerves enough to face the job in front of her.
She started with the kitchen, which was the most dire. She had just finished sweeping all the old takeout boxes and soggy tea bags back into the bin and was scrubbing the linoleum, when she heard a quick step on the stairs that made her pause. That certainly wasn’t the cat lady, or the construction worker across the hall who trudged heavily and only came home a few minutes before curfew each night. Hell, if she didn’t know better, she’d think that sounded like…
“Luce?”
Lockwood pushed her broken door open and stopped. A look of shock spasmed across his face as he surveyed the disaster that used to be her flat. His eyes found her, standing in the wreckage of her kitchen, and he let out an explosive breath.
“What happened?”
A tightness caught in Lucy’s chest at the sympathy in Lockwood’s face. She turned back to the kitchen, picking up a handful of scattered silverware and dumping it all in the sink. She started slamming drawers shut and didn’t hear Lockwood moving until he was standing right next to her, looking down on her from a great height.
Had he grown over the winter? Or had she forgotten how tall he’d always been.
“Lucy?”
“It’s nothing Lockwood. Someone broke into my flat, made a mess. That’s all.” Her voice sounded odd in her ears, like it belonged to someone else.
Lockwood looked her over with concern. “Where were you when it happened? Are you alright?”
“I was out. Just getting takeout from down the street.” Lucy swallowed thickly, and when she spoke again, her voice was a small, quavering thing. “I was only gone ten minutes.”
“Luce,” he said softly, reaching out to put a hand on her arm.
The trembling in her body that she’d been trying to ignore for the past hour was impossible to deny against the steadiness of Lockwood’s hand. Suddenly her body felt too heavy, dragging her down to the floor with the rest of the rubbish. Her head swam dizzyingly and only Lockwood’s hand on her arm kept her from swaying dangerously.
“I’m fine,” she said weakly. Lockwood’s hand squeezed her arm. She couldn’t bring herself to look at his face. “I’m fine,” she repeated, stronger this time. There, that sounded more convincing.
She straightened up and after a moment, Lockwood removed his hand. She returned to the kitchen cabinets, restoring her meagre provisions to the shelves inside.
“I can help you clean up,” he offered. Lucy just nodded.
Lockwood turned and started working on the other side of the room. Having him there had been weird two days before. It had felt like an invasion of her space. Now he felt like the only thing that felt normal in a world turned upside down.
“They’ve slashed through your mattress with a blade,” he said. “What, did they think they’d find some lost treasure in there?”
She glanced over to see that he had righted the bed. “They weren’t looking for money,” she said absently. “Or at least, they didn’t seem to take anything valuable. My seals, my sword, it’s all still here.”
“Huh,” Lockwood looked down at the bed contemplatively. “Either they were looking for something specific or they were sending you a message. Make any enemies lately?”
He asked the question lightly, but Lucy sensed there was a serious purpose behind it.
“Believe it or not, most agents don’t make enemies with other agents they might have to work with in the future,” Lucy said, trying to match his light tone.
“Hmm, I’m not sure that’s true,” Lockwood said. “But even if it were, I’m not talking about most agents, I’m talking about you, Luce.” Lucy caught a faint smile playing on his lips out of the corner of her eye.
“Fine, I don’t make a habit of making enemies. Sure, I’ve worked with some idiots…”
“Like who?”
“Lockwood, this isn’t about who I have and haven’t worked with.”
“No, I just want to know who you’ve worked with that were idiots.”
“Oh gosh, I don’t know. Most of them, I guess. Galworth’s crew from Tendy’s. Pretty much everyone at Bunchurch. Mr. Farnaby from Rotwell’s.”
“Toby Farnaby?”
“Yes,” Lucy sighed. “I may have showed him and his team up in front of some stuffed shirt who was observing the case for some reason. Johnson something.”
“I don’t know, Luce, that sounds like you might have made an enemy there.”
“Oh come off it. Farnaby is all bluster. He yelled and sent me off by myself to the furnaces at four in the morning, blast him. He already got his petty revenge. I was so tired I fell asleep in the…” Lucy trailed off. A recollection had bubbled its way to the surface of her brain and left a nasty taste in her mouth.
“What?” Lockwood asked, drifting towards where she stood. She realised she was standing there slack-jawed, looking like someone had just knocked her over the head with a cricket bat. She closed her mouth with a click.
“Nothing,” she said quickly, “I just remembered something is all.”
“Lucy, out with it,” Lockwood said, crossing his arms.
Lucy turned to face him fully for the first time since he’d arrived. “Okay, first of all, I don’t work for you anymore, so you can’t just bully me into telling you things. Second, this is my flat and my problem, not yours. And third…”
Lockwood put his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean to bully.”
Lucy stared at his hands, with those long, elegant fingers that she remembered so well. For a moment her train of thought derailed, taking a quick detour through the misty moors of memory. Lockwood reading a magazine in the library. Lockwood writing up case notes on the Thinking Cloth. Lockwood buttering toast in the morning and sliding it across the table to her.
She shook herself, scattering the memories like sugar spilled across the counter. She really needed to wipe that up if she wanted to avoid getting ants. But first…
“Why are you here, Lockwood?”
“What?” he asked, apparently thrown by the change of topic.
“Why did you come here today? You can’t have another job for me already. And you didn’t know about my flat because it hadn’t even happened yet.”
“Oh,” Lockwood said, shaking his head. “I just had a form I needed you to sign. Forgot to have you do it yesterday. To say that the job was finished according to our contract so we can pay you.” He pulled a folded up piece of paper from his pocket.
Lucy crossed her arms. “I usually prepare my own invoices, thanks.”
“Yes, of course,” Lockwood said with his client-charming grin. “Just trying to keep things a bit better organised than we used to.”
Lucy glared at him. Lockwood rubbed the back of his neck, his ears turning slightly pink.
“Look, it’s not a big deal. Just some paperwork faff. But Lucy, I really am concerned about this situation.” Lockwood took a deep breath. It reminded Lucy of the moment just before they’d jumped into the Thames together. “I don’t think you’re safe here right now. Someone is out to get you. Would you… you could stay at Portland Row, if you wanted. It’s still just me and George and your… the attic is just as you left it.”
Lucy stared at him. She’d known he would try to suck her back in, but this was beyond the pale. Did he really think he could lure her back with promises of safety and companionship and all the little things that had made Portland Row the best home she’d ever known?
“Lockwood, I can’t,” she said firmly, shaking her head. “You know I can’t.”
“Do you have somewhere else you can go?” he asked. “Somewhere safe?”
“I don’t need to go anywhere,” she said stubbornly. “It wasn’t me they were after.”
Lockwood cocked his head. “How do you know.”
“I think… I think they were after the skull.” Lucy sighed. “Look, let’s keep cleaning up and I’ll tell you the whole story.”
So they did and she did. She told him about the witch’s head that Flo had seen and Harold Mailer poking around her rucksack.
“So they found it?” Lockwood asked, looking around.
“No,” Lucy sighed again. “They didn’t because… Because I gave it to George.”
“You gave it to George?”
“Yes,” she said testily. “I was trying to apologise for walking off with it and anyways, the skull was useless at Guppy’s and was being a jerk the whole time. George said he’d give it back after he ran some experiments on it. He didn’t tell you?”
“No,” Lockwood said, staring at the wall over her shoulder.
“Right, so you see, I’m in no danger as long as the skull stays at Portland Row. I doubt anyone will think to look there.”
Lockwood was silent as together they picked up the chairs and righted the little table. He put her equipment back into her torn kit bag—she’d need to buy some duct tape to repair it—while Lucy shoved her clothes back into their drawers.
The flat was starting to look liveable again and Lucy was beginning to feel like she could breathe once more.
“It’s looking much better,” Lockwood said, roaming around the little space. It didn’t take long, two good strides were enough to take him from one end to the other. “And hey, it looks like the kettle is in good nick,” he said from where he’d ended up in the kitchenette.
“Are you angling for tea?” Lucy asked, hiding a smile.
“No, obviously not,” he scoffed. “Though if you’re offering, I certainly wouldn’t say no,” he smiled at her and it was like the sun had come out for the first time in days.
Lucy rolled her eyes and put the kettle on. “I suppose it’s the least I can do to thank you,” she said. “It went much faster than I expected with your help.”
“Happy to,” he said. “Speaking of which…”
Lucy looked up at him. From this close she could see the glint of amber in his irises and the faint tinge of pink that was creeping into his cheeks.
“I know you think the danger is past, but we can’t know that for certain. And I understand you are unwilling to come h—back to Portland Row. But I think it would be taking an unnecessary risk for you to stay here by yourself. Your door won’t even close properly, let alone lock.”
Lucy could see where this was going. If he insisted that she ask Holly to stay over with her, or, God forbid, Flo, she was going to…
“I think I should stay with you,” Lockwood said firmly. “At least until you get your door fixed and reinforced.”
“You?” Lucy asked, startled.
“Yes, me.” He sounded very calm about the whole thing. Though Lucy noted that the pink in his cheeks had grown a shade or two brighter.
“Lockwood…” Lucy stared at him. “Where would you sleep?” A picture of Lockwood wearing his striped pyjamas and red dressing gown in her flat presented itself to her mind’s eye and her brain promptly lost all traction, skidding off into the brush.
“Don’t worry about me, Luce,” he said airily. “I’m used to staying up all night, anyhow. If I need to kip, I’ll sit in a chair or lay on the floor.”
Lucy looked down at the two square metres of floor that weren’t occupied. Technically it was possible.
That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard and you can’t possibly be serious.
It was funny how sometimes the voice in her head sounded remarkably like the skull. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of a better argument against it. She knew there must be a hundred. But it had been a tiring afternoon and she’d never managed to eat her Thai food.
“Fine,” she said. “But don’t expect me to share the bed.”