Chapter Text
The first time Charles and Edwin said something at the same time, Charles had proclaimed, “Jinx!”
“Jinx?” Edwin had paused to ask him. Nevermind the ghoul they were trying to outrun, he’d wanted to know why his new friend had uncharacteristically declared a curse upon them.
“It’s what's said when people both say the same thing at the same time,” Charles had explained.
“Oh,” Edwin had said. “That’s not at all what my grandmother taught me. You have to put your little fingers together, like so,” he’d curled his little finger around Charles’s little finger—shockingly only feeling mildly apprehensive of how intimate an action it was with someone he was not related to, perhaps due to the adrenaline from outrunning said ghoul. “Then you say this wishing poem. Let’s see if I remember… What comes out of the chimney? Smoke. May your wish never be broke. There,” he pulled their little fingers apart. “Then you each make a wish.”
Charles’s eyes widened as he looked over Edwin’s shoulder. Then he grabbed Edwin by the arm and shoved him ahead of him as they ran down an alley.
“I wish that we don’t get eaten by a ghoul on our third job!” Charles had yelled after him.
Edwin watched a giddy smile spread across Charles’s face as Edwin tossed him the spell sachet that would incinerate the ghoul.
I wish , Edwin hadn’t said out loud, that I could have this forever .
Privately, much later, after the ghoul was vanquished and they’d returned to their first of many offices, he had thought that the practice of pronouncing “Jinx!” when one said the same thing at the same time as someone else, was rather barbaric. To Edwin, a jinx was a malediction. It was inviting death and destruction upon an enterprise.
He worked very slyly to break Charles of this habit, until Charles himself would link their little fingers together and repeat Edwin’s grandmother’s rhyme by heart. They’d had quite enough misfortune in their lives, they didn’t need anymore.
All this being said, it was without much surprise at all to discover the precise moment at which Edwin’s forever ended: On a train while exorcising a demon.
They’d waited until the train car they were on was empty but for them and the possessed girl. Once they were alone, Charles met Edwin’s eyes and then jumped up from his seat. He threw his arm around the girl’s neck and yelled, “Now, Edwin! Draw the rune! We need to trap the demon!”
He needn’t have bothered with the instruction, as Edwin was already crouched to draw a hasty circle on the ground with chalk. But perhaps he was narrating for the demon’s victim, so she wouldn’t be frightened if she was present enough to see what they were doing. It would be a very Charles-like thing to do.
The demon roared and thrashed in Charles’s hold, but Edwin did not look up from his work, scribbling the runes as quickly and accurately as he was able.
Charles was shouting something, but Edwin could barely hear him over the screeching of the train, the expletives the possessed girl was tossing at them, and the sudden kick to Edwin’s face as she used his nose as a ramp to jump clear out of Charles’s grip—luckily not before Edwin had scrawled the finishing touch on his last rune.
The girl kicked Charles once, twice, and then as she, in a feat of unearthly strength, leapt up and kicked Charles in the chest with both feet, she inadvertently fell directly into Edwin’s rune circle. The runes reached up to lock her in place, smoking as they struggled against the demon’s iron will.
They would hold yet, but the demon they were dealing with was a mite stronger than Edwin had anticipated.
“I’ll fucking gut you!” the possessed girl screamed as she struggled against the restraints.
“See? My disguises always work,” Charles said. He sounded cheeky until he had to rise from the floor where the demon had kicked him, groaning in discomfort.
Edwin looked back at him briefly to make sure he was all in one piece, and when he turned around there was a portal forming on the ceiling. The train’s garishly bright lights began flashing a variety of colors, but Edwin couldn’t take his eyes from the portal. It was pulsing with an inner warmth, like a charcoal nestled in a fire. He stared into the depths of it, trying to see if anything was coming through. Maybe the demon was calling for help.
But before he could see much, the train began to tilt. If he was still alive, Edwin was sure the movement would have made him ill.
“Whoa!” Edwin gasped at the same time as Charles.
Before Edwin could worry about any inopportune “Jinx’s!” Charles exclaimed, “It’s trying to escape!”
They were forced to hold onto handrails as the train tilted further, flipping entirely onto its roof, all along the portal pulsing angrily. Edwin could practically feel the heat of it, reaching through his trousers. He had no doubt now that the portal led straight to Hell.
Before Edwin could properly panic, what looked like a bucket of fish poured through the portal. Wet and writhing, they began to wash away the runes Edwin had drawn—the only things preventing the demon from tearing their heads from their shoulders.
“Get a head on, Charles!” Edwin yelled. “The fish are washing away the runes!”
Charles, having seen that for himself, was already digging around in his infinite backpack for the sheet needed for the exorcism. Once in hand he threw it over the possessed girl’s body. The runes Charles had carefully transposed on its surface rippled as if they might float away on a stiff breeze.
Almost immediately, the train began to right itself.
Edwin carefully stepped across the ceiling as the center of gravity returned itself to the floor. He could feel Charles at his back, both of them carefully watching the possessed girl’s unmoving body for the moment the demon would be pulled out of her.
Edwin was watching the girl so intently in fact, that he didn’t notice the tentacle creeping out of the slowly closing portal until it had wrapped around his ankle.
“Charles—” Edwin said, on a gasp, but he was cut off by a firm yank. He lost his grip on the handrail he’d been holding and only managed to grab hold of the edge of the portal by the light fixture on the ceiling.
“Edwin!” Charles yelled, scrambling towards him and wrapping his fingers around Edwin’s forearms. Edwin gripped his forearms right back, his nails digging into the buttons on Charles’s sleeves. “Hold on, mate, I’ve got you. That’s it, just hold on to me—”
The grip on Edwin’s ankle tightened exponentially. Just as he realized it was no longer one errant tentacle that had a hold of him, but several dozen squeezing and pulling like he was caught up in a briar bush, an all too familiar giggling echoed throughout the train car. Edwin locked eyes with Charles and he could picture it perfectly: Charles following him to Hell, Charles being hunted by the Doll Spider, Charles's corpse joining Edwin’s in the hallways of the Doll House.
Edwin wanted many things. He was quite selfish, in point of fact.
And the thing he wanted most of all was to never see Charles in that place. Out of all the things he’d endured, he couldn’t have endured that.
“Edwin, Edwin! Look at me,” Charles demanded.
When Edwin obeyed he realized he’d been so lost in his own thoughts that he’d lost track of the reality of the situation. Charles was nearly on the floor now, hanging onto Edwin’s arms with his feet dangling off the ground. It would have looked rather like Edwin was the one holding Charles up from falling, if anyone but the formerly possessed girl, staring up at them incredulously, could have seen them.
“It’s going to be alright, I’ve got you. Just don’t let go,” Charles ordered. He was trying to get a foothold, Edwin realized, so he could pull Edwin free.
More aberrant giggling echoed throughout the train, but Charles nor the girl seemed to notice.
The portal was closing around Edwin’s chest. It was only an inch or two wider than his body at this point and closing further around him like a vice.
Charles wouldn’t let go, Charles wouldn’t let go even if it meant he got dragged through with Edwin, Charles wouldn’t let go even if the portal ripped his arms clean off his body.
There was no time for Edwin to be selfish.
“Charles,” Edwin said. Then, louder, when Charles only nodded in response, “Charles! I’m sorry. I—”
“Edwin, don’t. Don’t you dare—”
“I sincerely wish we could have been friends for longer,” he said.
Charles looked crushed before he’d even finished speaking. He tried to get a better hold on Edwin’s suit jacket, but he had no footing, dangling in the middle of the train as he was.
Edwin let go.
The last thing he saw before the portal closed behind him was Charles's mouth opening to scream.
+
Crystal had zero idea what she’d just witnessed.
She’d woken up from what felt like a dream, to two boys dangling from the ceiling of a train car. One of them had been pulled most of the way through a hole that looked like it was an honest-to-God portal to Hell, but could have been a completely normal train stop to Kent, for all she knew.
One moment, she was watching them shouting at each other, and the next the boy on the ceiling let go of the other one, practically shoving him so they wouldn’t both get sucked through the hole.
The boy who’d been left behind landed almost on top of Crystal, screaming in frustration. He punched a fist against the floor and then, before Crystal could react, jumped up on the seats so he could pat the ceiling, as if he thought if he could only find the edge of the tear in the fabric of reality he could force it open again.
There were other people on the train car now, they’d stopped somewhere and people had filtered in, barely sparing a glance at the girl sprawled in a chalk circle on the floor or the boy now pounding his fist against the train’s fluorescent light fixture. She supposed they’d probably seen weirder. Or, maybe, they couldn’t see the boy at all, she realized, observing him.
There was something about his energy, or lack thereof, something familiar. Ethereal, translucent—ghostly. That was it. He was a ghost.
Now if only she knew how she knew that.
“Hey kid!” she yelled at the boy.
He whipped to look at her, his eyes looking suspiciously red-rimmed. She was not in the mood to deal with a strange boy blubbering all over her, but there was no one else in the vicinity who had half a clue what was going on.
“What the hell was that?” she asked, ignoring the looks she was getting from the other riders.
“That was— That was— God, where the fuck to start,” the boy said, dragging a hand down his face. He jumped down from the seats so they were foot to foot. “You’re Crystal, yeah?”
“Yeah, um,” she stood on shaky legs. “My name’s Crystal Palace, um— Something,” she pressed a hand to her head. “There’s more to my name, but I can’t remember. Why can’t I remember?” She flung her hand up at the ceiling. “And what the fuck just happened? Who was that? What was that? And who even are you?”
“I’m Charles Rowland. That was a rescue,” the boy, Charles, said. “We’re— I mean, I’m— My partner and I—”
“I get it, you and that other boy, you’re, like, together. What else?”
“We’re the Dead Boy Detectives,” Charles said. “We were hired to exorcise the demon who was possessing you, but during the exorcism the demon opened a portal to— I’m pretty sure it was to Hell, and something got a hold of Edwin—” Charles closed his eyes and swallowed. “Look, I’ll explain everything, but maybe we should go somewhere else? Before you get dragged off to the loony bin.”
Crystal looked around the train car, she was getting a sizable amount of alarmed looks now. The boy was right. She would really rather not get sidetracked by a stay in some Scotland fucking Yard holding cell.
“Yeah, okay, lead the way,” Crystal said.
Charles shot one last look at the ceiling of the train car, his jaw tightening with something like grief as he took in the unblemished paneling. He took a step around her towards the doors and hit something with his shoe. The object he stooped to pick up looked like a small notebook. It was as unfamiliar to Crystal as anything right now, but Charles seemed to recognize it. He pressed his forehead to it, briefly, then tucked it inside his coat.
“Come on,” Charles said, his voice rough. “We’ll regroup at the office.”
And, for better or worse, Crystal followed the distraught ghost boy off the train and into the evening traffic.
+
The tentacle creature did not bring him directly to the Doll Spider, but Edwin could still hear it giggling. Even when he was on a different level entirely—Heresy, if he could venture a guess—watching as anthropomorphic tentacles fed screaming souls into fiery tombs, the Doll Spider’s grating laughter reverberated in the nooks and crannies of his mind.
Edwin didn’t protest as the tentacles did what they were wont to do to him. Anything was better than the Doll House. And Hell could always find something worse if his current torture wasn’t suitable, he’d discovered that after many years of torment. There was always something worse to come.
So, yes, he screamed, and, yes, he pleaded, the demons and monsters of Hell preferred it that way, but he didn’t question his circumstances, he didn’t draw undue attention to himself. He allowed his body to be buffeted from one affliction to the next as if he was a small piece of flotsam caught in a harrowing storm.
And, eventually, as was always eventual in Hell, his tormentors became distracted by a victim who was in the throes of debasement, and Edwin was able to slip through the cracks.
He dragged his aching body between two tombs, cowering in the shadows cast by the hellish flames, and assessed his condition. He decided, after cataloguing the abrasions on his legs and the deep puncture wound on his shoulder, that all in all it was not as bad as it could have been.
If he’d been missing a limb he might have thrown himself back into the fray just so he could be reincorporated with all of his parts. He’d done that many a time with the Doll Spider. But he had all of limbs accounted for, he was only bleeding a moderate amount, and he could run. Running was the most important piece of the puzzle.
He peeked out from between the tombs, scouting for a crack between levels that he could slip through. He’d been quite adept at finding them by the end of his tenure in the Doll House, and even though it had been some time he knew what to look for. Even on Earth he sometimes found himself looking for an exit, especially when he was tense, his spiraling mind clocking windows and doors and small passageways others might overlook.
He’d just about found a promising path—a broken door hidden behind a pit of roasting corpses—when a very large leg turned a corner and blocked his view.
“Hey you!” the very large newcomer grumbled—they were of a stature and uniform to be one of the higher ranked demons, perhaps even an attendant to a Prince of Hell. “There’s been a report of stolen property. Where’s your master?”
Edwin realized the newcomer was likely speaking to the tentacle creature. Even though he’d spent well over four times his lifetime in Hell, he was still unable to understand all of Hell’s creatures' thousands of languages.
So when the tentacle creature responded in a cadence that sounded somewhere between breaking glass and nails on a chalkboard, all Edwin understood was, “MINE, I FOUND. MINE.”
“Just because you found it doesn’t mean it's yours, you know the rules,” the newcomer said—which Edwin found practically comedic considering where they were. He no longer found anything at all funny when he heard what the newcomer said next. “The soul you found belongs in its master’s lair, between Gluttony and Avarice. Its master has demanded its expedient return.”
Between Gluttony and Avarice. The Doll House. They were talking about Edwin.
The giggling he still heard occasionally in the back of his head wasn’t just him going round the bend, then. It was the Doll Spider, calling him home.
Before he could succumb to panic the tentacle creature lashed out at the newcomer. Their ensuing scuffle knocked over several blazing tombs and the newcomer’s kilt caught fire rather quickly. Roaring with anger, the newcomer drew a black sword and speared the tentacle creature in its center.
While they were sufficiently distracted, Edwin backed slowly on hands and knees all the way to the broken door he’d seen earlier. He reached behind himself for the handle and it fell off in his hand.
The newcomer disappeared in a cloud of writhing tentacles, so Edwin took a chance standing so he could put the door between him and the melee that had broken out in Heresy. Then there, in the dark hallway between levels, he took a bracing breath and began to run.
+
“So, okay, let me get this straight,” Crystal said, pressing a hand to her head. The pressure in her skull was becoming excruciating, she needed coffee, aspirin, and sleep, but she didn’t think she’d be getting any of the above anytime soon. “You and Edward—”
“Edwin,” Charles corrected her.
“Edwin,” Crystal emphasized. “Met in the eighties and started this dumb dead boys detective agency—”
“The Dead Boy Detective Agency,” Charles said, gesturing at the front door of his office where the sign proudly pronounced the agency name.
The office itself both was and wasn’t what she might have expected two sixteen-year-old boys to come up with if they were in charge of decorating a detective agency. There were thick, old books on every shelf and even some stacked on the floor. The closet that was slightly ajar was full of more books, and about two dozen versions of Clue. There was a lamp shaped like an eyeball, a ball of string with a top hat on it, assorted sporting equipment, and various knick-knacks—all of which Crystal was wary to touch, lest she get a horrifying vision of the objects origin, or, like, a horrifying vision of Charles making out with best mate Edwin, or whatever.
As for Edwin himself, his absence was like a blackhole in the center of the office. The chair behind the desk sat unoccupied. There was a book open in front of it as if someone had gotten up in the middle of reading, and Crystal had a hard time believing it had been Charles, who gave the entire back of the desk a wide berth. There was a fancy coat on the coat stand that didn’t look like Charles’ style and an incredibly old-looking record player with a brass horn that was decidedly not a relic from the eighties.
Since they’d arrived at the office, Charles had done nothing but pace and run his hands through his hair. He looked like he was coming apart at the seams. Crystal had only known him a few hours, but the thin line of his mouth seemed wrong somehow—like he was meant to be smiling.
He was with her, as physically as he could be as a ghost, but in his head she knew he was still on the train feeling Edwin’s hands slipping away.
“No, I knew that one,” Crystal said, before she could think better of it. “It’s just a stupid fucking name.”
“Sure,” Charles said, skeptically.
“And you were recently hired to get David out of me. Only while David was fighting your spell, or whatever, he opened a portal to literal Hell and your buddy got sucked in. So now David is still out there somewhere, I’m missing my memories, and you want me to help you get to Hell to find your friend. Does that sound about right?”
“Listen,” Charles said. “I know this must be scary, waking up to a strange bloke asking you to get in contact with the demon who was recently wearing you round—”
“Scary is one word for it,” Crystal said. “Brazen is another. Audacious, even.”
“Right, well, whatever you’d call it, Edwin is my best mate. He was trying to save you when he got taken back to—”
“Wait, taken back,” Crystal interrupted.
“Yeah, he, well, he spent a bunch of decades in Hell. But he wasn’t bad or anything,” Charles said, shaking his head. “It was a— clerical error.”
“Sure,” Crystal now found herself saying skeptically. “Listen, Charles, I appreciate the assist, really. But I don’t remember who I am. How am I supposed to help you find your ‘best mate’,” she emphasized with air quotes, “if I can’t even remember where I come from? Listen to me, I’m freaking American. What am I doing in London in the first place?”
“Edwin knows loads of spells, okay, and he’s all read up on demons. If you help me get him back I’m sure he’ll be able to help with your memories,” Charles said.
She was angry suddenly, the emotion bowling her over like a blanket had been thrown over her head. Here she was, memory-less, alone, nothing in the bag she’d had on her to tell her who she was, not even a contact list on the stupid fucking burner phone David had been toting around, and the only person who knew anything about her was looking for someone else. He was looking right through her, like she was the fucking ghost.
“What, and you can’t?” Crystal shot back. “I thought you were hired to help me. Not the other way around.”
“Whoa, we did help you,” Charles said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Got David out of you, didn’t we?”
“I never asked you to do that!”
“No one wants a demon wearing them around like a meat suit, right? Even if you’d gone daft and invited David to possess you—”
“Guess I’m daft then! Because I did,” Crystal shouted.
Charles’s eyes widened at her announcement, all the righteousness leaving his face in favor of incredulity.
“Why the bloody hell would you—”
“I thought he loved me, I thought— I don’t know what I thought, okay? I don’t exactly remember. All I know is whatever he was offering felt better and more real than what I had,” Crystal said.
“Crystal, he’s a demon. He was manipulating—”
“God, I know that Charles,” Crystal said. “You know what? I don’t have to listen to this. You got David out of me, bully for you or whatever the fuck you’d call it. We’re done.”
Crystal gathered her bag and ignored Charles calling after her as she shoved through the agency door and slammed it shut behind her. She stomped down two flights of stairs before she sat down heavily on a landing, tears burning the corners of her eyes. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her sweater. She felt gross and desperately wanted a shower, her mouth tasted like stale cigarettes, and her head was still pounding so hard it nearly blurred her vision.
Charles wasn’t wrong was the thing. David had manipulated her and when he was done she’d said yes to letting David inside—she remembered that part very clearly. In turn, Edwin and Charles had gotten David out of her, ending weeks of her consciousness being shoved to the back of her mind like an afterthought.
And Charles hadn’t said this part out loud, but part of the fault of Edwin’s current location wasn’t not on her shoulders. If she hadn’t been with David, if she hadn’t said yes, if she had been at all cautious, if, if, if. Maybe Edwin wouldn’t have been dragged to Hell and be currently experiencing what she could only imagine was unfathomable torture.
Someone was currently experiencing unfathomable torture because of something Crystal had done.
That was a lot for someone who couldn’t even remember her own birthday to wrap her head around.
She took a shaky breath and then another, gathering herself on the landing like someone might rake leaves into a pile.
When she reopened the door to the agency, Charles was still not sitting. Instead, he was crouched in the middle of the floor with his head in his hands. His head shot up as she entered.
She did not comment on the rivulets of eyeliner on his cheeks, or the stunned glaze to his eyes.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Crystal said. “So, could we, you know, start over?”
“Yeah, brills,” Charles said, standing. He ran the arm of his jacket over his face, smearing his eyeliner even further, but the smile he wore when he pulled his arm back made him look oddly beautiful. He offered her a hand to shake. “I’m Charles Rowland. Welcome to the Dead Boy Detective Agency.”
“Crystal Palace Something-or-Other,” Crystal said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Right, take a seat, why don’t you? We can sort you out, while we find my partner,” Charles said. He magnanimously gestured to the seat for clients and leaned himself against the desk, looking right at home.
Crystal sat and in a show of humoring him said, “Okay, where do we start?”
Charles made a hand gesture as if a light bulb had lit up above his head. “I thought about that while you were— Well, anyways, Emma gave us a rare book on demonic identification that might point—”
“Who’s Emma?”
“Right, right, no memories,” Charles said. “Emma is the little girl ghost who hired us to get David out of you. Gave us this to find you. Said she took it.”
He sifted through papers on the desk for a moment, coming up with a Polaroid picture of Crystal. She looked about the same as she did now so the picture couldn’t have been taken very long ago. Charles handed it to her.
She expected to be hit with a vision, but as she held the picture in her hands she felt nothing. No, less than nothing.
“I don’t know an Emma,” Crystal said.
“Course you don’t, that’s why we have to get your memories back in order.”
“No, I mean,” Crystal said, running a thumb over her own face reflected back at her. “I took this picture. I would be able to sense if someone else was attached to it, even a ghost. There’s nothing, no one, just me.”
Charles stared at her, his jaw working. He looked over his shoulder, as if he was expecting to find Edwin there to share a glance with. When he turned back to her, his smile was gone again. His expression graver than ever.
“Well,” he said after a long moment. “In my professional opinion that’s a bit fucked, innit?”
+
Edwin came out of the dark corridor and listened closely for the sounds of rushing water. Behind him the door slipped shut with a zipping sound, and when Edwin turned to look the door had disappeared. That happened occasionally. He had a theory that there were a finite number of doors in Hell. if one was needed elsewhere, it simply moved. He wouldn’t be needing it anyways, he wasn’t planning on retracing his steps.
Back on task, he continued listening for water. He’d only been on the level above Heresy a handful of times, but the level of Wrath and Sullenness was never dull. The wrathful fought themselves on the surface of the River Styx while the sullen gurgled for air at the bottom. He’d closed his eyes once while he’d been beaten by a denizen of Wrath and found that if he ignored the pain lighting up his entire body like an inferno, it had almost sounded like a day of sport at the beach.
This time, however, no matter how much Edwin strained his ears he could not hear the river. No, all was quiet and oddly glacial. He shivered, tugging the sleeves of his nightclothes lower down his arms. When there was finally a shaft of light to see by, Edwin stopped still in his tracks.
His toes were stiff and frozen but he was so consistently in pain in Hell that he’d barely paid them any mind. Now that he could see, he realized why. It was because he was walking barefoot across a river of ice.
But that couldn’t be right. A river of ice was not the fifth circle, that was—
He took another step forward and his foot came down on something sharp. He pulled his foot away with a hiss, his own dark blood freezing as soon as it made contact with the sheet of ice beneath him.
He leaned down, peering closer at what he’d stepped on. When recognition hit him, he nearly fell backwards as he scrambled away.
It was a person, submerged in the ice up to their shoulders. Their entire body frozen in place like winter had claimed the water while they’d been out for a swim.
Edwin had stepped on a stalagmite of ice that had formed on their bent elbow. There was now a hole in his foot as wide as Charles’s telescope.
Edwin looked out beyond the victim he’d stepped on and saw another frozen body and another, as far as he could see into the murky mist there were denizens of this level frozen with just their head and shoulders peeking above the ice. Some of the ones furthest away appeared to him as dark mounds, like an endless array of tombstones.
He was in the ninth circle. Treachery. As far away from Charles as he could possibly be.
He’d had a naive hope that if he escaped the fifth circle, he could wind his way out of Hell the way he’d gone before. But he must have taken a wrong turn. He was on the lowest level now, where they put those who betrayed those close to them.
He’d been here once. He’d seen the Devil, half-submerged in ice, his three heads eternally chewing on the worst traitors in the history of humanity.
At the time, he’d remembered reading Dante's Inferno at St. Hilarion’s and he’d remembered Virgil leading Dante out of Hell by climbing the Devil’s back. He’d made a run for it, dodging his captor—the one that had come after Sa’al whose name he was afraid to so much as recollect—and dodging around frozen corpses until he’d made it to the Devil’s side.
But there had been no exit. The Devil had three heads and they all followed him no matter which direction he turned in. One unspeakably large mitt had crushed him flat and he’d woken in a new body on the seventh circle, to his captor already skewering him with an iron poker.
The Inferno was a load of tosh. There was no exit to be found in the lowest reaches of Hell. The only way out was up and from here he had the furthest to go. He was as far away from Charles as he possibly could have been.
Maybe he’d gotten turned around because he belonged here. After all, he had betrayed Charles. He’d abandoned him, after he’d promised he would never let Death separate them. He wouldn’t be surprised if Charles had already summoned Death and taken her hand. And even if he was still on Earth, who was to say he wanted anything to do with Edwin, after this.
Who would want to run a detective agency with a friend who had messed up so badly he’d ended up in Hell for a second time?
Yes, maybe he belonged here after all.
He hardly noticed he’d sat down and he definitely didn’t take note when the ice began to creep up his legs like moss grew round a tree trunk. He hardly noticed that his breath was slowing and his arms were relaxing around his knees, the river closing around his body like the tide coming in. No, he didn’t think he would have noticed any of it until it was too late, until he was trapped halfway under the ice, frozen and complacent as the river consumed his soul, like a fly caught in a spider’s web.
The only reason he did notice was because before the ice closed over his chest, a warm hand wrapped around his arm and pulled.
A voice whispered in his ear, “Hey, c’mon, get up! Don’t let her take you. You have to think about other things, happy things. What do you like? I like love stories and ramen and walks in the woods. She couldn’t take me because I wouldn’t stop talking about this one manga— Have you heard of manga? You look kind of old-timey. Hey, hello there. Just look at me.”
Edwin looked up and his eyes found a peculiar sight. A slight girl with hair as white as the ice they were surrounded by, was blinking down at him. She had maneuvered an arm under his elbow and was pulling him upwards, but not making much headway.
“There you are!” she said brightly. “I’m gonna need your help.”
Edwin looked down and saw thick patches of ice covering his legs, already cracking under the effort of the girl yanking on his arm. He levered himself to kneel and then, with much labor, got one leg under him and then another. Ice fell off him and clattered onto the frozen river like teacups shattering on the ground.
“Great job, you escaped much faster than I did,” the girl said.
“I had some help, it seems,” Edwin said, looking down at her in awe. “Who might you be?”
“Niko Sasaki,” she said with a nod. “Nice to meet you. I would love to know your name but, first, we should probably hide.”