Chapter 13
Previously: Obsidian: Crystal Heart – Chapter 12
It’s taken John some restraint not to quip at Arthur that he should relax, the biggest worry with the two dhampirs still being out is them forgetting to check in before they go on their date. For all he knows, they decided to stay in Hartlepool for the date because it’s bigger than Whitby. Although, what there would be in terms of semi-cultural attractions is beyond him.
And apparently beyond Miss Powlett, too. He didn’t expect it. but when they finally managed to walk far enough ahead of the chaperone on their little walk after lunch that there was a little bit of privacy for their conversation, he discovered her sharp wit and tongue about the local problems. They started out all appropriately discussing the potential things that could be done, only to devolve into quipping about how much of a shithole some parts were.
Yes, it feels weird to say, but John thinks he likes her. She’s intelligent and opinionated. He doesn’t think she’s a little country bumpkin of a noble damsel. Pretty sure she was still holding back on him. But, (and he can’t believe he’s thinking that,) if they go ahead and make some official engagement statement or something, maybe he’ll have more chances to get her out of her shell and talking frankly.
After all, he gets that she’s cautious. Her situation sucks, and maybe he’s arrogant, but the thought of protecting her from any more shitty gossip and bad future prospects makes him smile. He could do that for her. He could be a good man even if he’s not sure how the marriage would go. If he’d ever be more than her husband on paper. But really, in this household, maybe that’s okay.
Actually, there’s no maybe about it. After all, she would need to be okay with him being with Darcy. His heart belongs to his girl, and he really has no clue if he could split his heart between two women, so husband on paper and totally cheering her on if she wants an affair. Yeah. Yeah, he thinks if that’s okay, then they’ll both have a chance at a happy political marriage.
He’s even looking forward to all the hazing he expects to get from Quincy about, well, he’s not blind, that woman has knockers for days, and if there is one single, tiny little thing that could be even better about Darcy it would be, well, her rack size. Yes, John feels like a total arse about it, and he’s never ever going to complain about it or make his girl feel bad about it, but he also can’t help a dirty grin at the thought of, well, he still needs to make an heir with his political wife. Yeah, Quincy’s going to haze the shit out of him for that, and that’s okay.
There they are! Coming in through the patio doors of the library. Quincy’s clothes are covered in little water droplets, and Darcy is a bat in his hair, (or rather on his head, she’s not that small.) Did they fly in? Nothing wrong with that. Probably faster than the train, anyway, and he can all but hear Darcy’s happy bat chitter when imagining how much fun she had with it.
~
Arthur wasn’t really worried, because John is right, the dhampirs can take care of themselves, but he’s still glad when they return, safe and sound, on the library balcony after dinner.
~
Still, they didn’t just stay out there for fun, John wants to hear what they found, so he whistles for Darcy to fly over to him. “Culver, you’re wet, too!” When she just gives him one long, sheepish look before changing to her rat shape and starting to groom herself dry, he very nearly forgets about the whole reporting thing. His girl is the worst fucking puppy and he couldn’t love her more if he tried!
No matter what Miss Powlett turns out to be, there can be no other girl in existence that is even close to his girl. Taking his handkerchief out, he uses it as a towel for the rat on his shoulder and instead listens to Quincy recount what they discovered.
He ends up with Darcy on his lap as he eyes the tincture she handed him, while she adds what she found after she got into the house. “I agree. It sucks to leave her there, but that sounds like we found not just a buyer, but somebody who’s involved in this entire fucking selkie trafficking ring.”
Obviously agreeing with him, Quincy nods but asks what they think about the pharmacy stuff. “Is that extra income to finance the grooming, or just this guy?”
~
Arthur, also curious, leans forward to study the bottle of tincture. “Hey, this looks familiar…” It’s a smallish, brown glass bottle, like you’d get at a chemist’s, but he knows that label. It’s giving him a flash of a woman, an old, hazy memory- he doesn’t remember her face, and barely her voice. A blue-and-white-striped apron, and a sturdy figure, and a sun-lit room with clean wooden floors he feels terribly out of place in.
Gregory’s voice, whining.
It’s a memory so old, he forgot he had it.
“Gregory’s mum used to make him take that, I think!” he declares. “He hated it, he said it tasted really gross.”
It can’t have been long after they met, and he thinks six-year-old Arthur was glad he didn’t have a mum to make him take gross medicine.
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“Maybe it’s just cod liver oil?” Darcy wonders and sniffs at the bottle again. No, that doesn’t smell right. Maybe it’s because it was in the bag with the pelt, but she thinks it really smells of selkie.
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“Are there salesmen specifically for cod liver oil? Is that guy just specialising in ‘ocean wares’?” Even while Quincy wonders about it, he gives Darcy’s nose a look. She’s still wondering about something with the way her nostrils keep doing that adorable little aftertwitch they always do when his Cycy is pushing a thought back and forth between her senses and her brain.
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“But wouldn’t it just say ‘cod liver oil’ if it was?” Arthur asks. “Like… I don’t know how the medicine business works, uh, that’d be maybe a good thing to ask Dr Seward? But why obscure what it is with,” he squints at the label and reads: “‘goodness from the ocean’ if it’s something people know?”
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“Now there’s marketing talk if ever I’ve heard any,” John groans but takes the bottle back to hold it against the light, swishes it around, but really, he may have grown up in a harbour town but his experience in judging a product is not in medical supplies. Trying to read the fine print on the label, he scoffs because no, not even a hint of ingredients listed. Ergo, nothing they want to brag with being in there.
~
After having watched John do that, Darcy grabs for the bottle and uncorks it, takes another sniff, then sips on it. Licking over her lips a few times, sniffing at how the smell dissipates differently, and also how it feels against the inside of her mouth, she gives the bottle a very long look. “That’s not fish oil. It smells of selkie and it tastes mammalian.”
~
Why does his brain always jump to the worst possible option?! Quincy goes promptly very green when his mind wonders why all the selkies they got out of the horrid cave were girls.
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Arthur wrinkles his nose at the bottle in dread. “…That’s not good, is it?” After all, that sounds like it’s made from selkie, somehow. And making oil from living things… doesn’t usually happen while those things stay alive? He doesn’t know any details about it, but he thinks there’s something called ‘rendering’ involved which has to do with cooking, basically.
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“Fuck. No.” Suddenly keen to get away from the bottle, John’s stomach is turning. Their molly is green, downright green, and seeing that makes John’s own thoughts circle around the far-too-obvious if absolutely gruesome possibility of what is going on there.
Women forced to be sex slaves. Women forced to breed more sex slaves. But what if the child doesn’t fit the requirements?
When you are making money off of something, you wouldn’t want to waste fifty percent of your profit margin, would you? This makes too much business sense and far too little ethical sense.
Fuck… if his brain can go there, the people who do this, who treat the selkie women like farm animals… Why wouldn’t they have the same idea?
He’s been to tenant farms, he’s even talked to farmers complaining when their milk cows had too many male calves. Who, sure, some of them you want for more breeding, but what happens to the ones that are overflow? You process them into other products. And how that never before really translated to ‘killing babies’ in his brain is beyond him.
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Darcy is looking between her men and not entirely sure why they look so horrified, so instead, she holds the bottle out to Arthur. “Is there anything magic about it? Selkies are magical, so maybe this stuff works.”
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Arthur’s not sure what John and Quincy realised, but their expressions make him want to get further away from the bottle rather than closer. But still, he forces himself to lean forward enough to give it a sniff of his own.
There is a scent to it- an unfamiliar one. Something salty and tangy that makes him think of the coast, of the sharp winds coming off of the cold, grey sea.
“Um… there might be?” he admits reluctantly. “It smells more like ocean to me than it should if that was just a normal scent, I think.”
~
Hearing that and taking it as pretty much confirmation of what he was worried about, Quincy lets loose a string of curse words that makes Darcy blush but only gets John to groan again, run a hand over his face repeatedly while he shakes himself in revulsion, and agrees: “I didn’t think it could be worse than we thought. Serves me right for being so positive. Fuck.”
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“…They’re killing some of them for that, aren’t they?” Arthur asks, because it’s the only real conclusion.
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“There were no boys.” John’s voice is a growl. “They can’t sell the male babies as brides.” Maybe he shouldn’t laugh at that, but it hits so fucking close to home that his hands on Darcy’s waist grow tight.
That, she reacts to. He knew his girl has a drac’s mind, that she wouldn’t get what’s so bad, but she does care about him and him being upset, so she starts nuzzling up to him, and while he is not going to fucking flip out in front of everybody, he still is glad that he can let himself be distracted by her rubbing herself against his stubble. No, he’d also rather be dead than a sold bride. And she made sure that nobody would ever mistake him again.
~
“Ugh,” Arthur makes and is pretty sure he’s going just as green as Quincy.
It makes way too much sense. And it’s also way too horrible.
And Darcy’s question keeps rattling around in his head, of whether this stuff works or not. Because… because Gregory’s family died from one of the illnesses going around the East End that year they met. And Gregory, who was taking this stuff, didn’t.
~
Since everybody but her is all green and upset, Darcy corks the bottle again and puts it to the side before kissing John and kissing Quincy, tries to love them a bit better, then doesn’t want to exclude Arthur and puts a kiss on his cheek with a hug. “We’ll try really hard to find out more and stop them!”
~
Part of John’s mind wants to just scoff. They have one meagre clue and just about four people on the job. Four people against an obviously organised smuggling ring. Four people who still have a vampire crisis hanging over their heads that might go hot at any moment. Sure, his girl might think of this as one of the adventure stories he’s also fond of, but he’s a bit more jaded on how likely it is that ‘the good guys’ win.
“Even if this stuff does actually work, yes, I want to stop this,” Arthur agrees. “But that looks like a whole network to unravel?”
~
“Hold on, honey. What? Where did that ‘actually works’ come from?” Glad to have anything other than his imagination to focus on, Quincy wants to know more.
He’s the first person in this room to indulge in little remedies, and the Divine only knows what exactly goes into some of the creams and powders he likes to use himself, but he thought the worst there would be is some animal fat or maybe weird ground-up stuff.
He is a vain bitch, but not to the point where he’d like his cosmetics or even any medicines that he never really needed much to contain ‘people’. Well, what could have become people, he’s not convinced babies fully count.
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“Um… Like I said, Gregory’s mum was making him take this stuff, I’m pretty sure. It was over ten years ago, I don’t remember in much detail. But that must’ve been the year we met, I know he brought me home with him a few times when he still had one. They didn’t like me, of course, but he still did it.
“And there was some kind of illness going around the East End that year, I think that’s why Gregory’s mum got this stuff? And made him take it? Anyway, they all died- Gregory’s parents, and I think he might’ve had a younger sibling or something? But he didn’t. He survived. What if it’s because of this stuff?” Arthur nods at the bottle.
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“That doesn’t make it any less unethical to fucking kill babies for it!” John thunders and needs to pull Darcy right back on his lap before he explodes any harder.
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While she’s happy to soothe him, she’s not sure she sees the problem, because wouldn’t it be a question of numbers? If you kill one person so that, uh, how many bottles do you get out of one baby? She doesn’t know, but probably more than one, so the rate of death would be lower with it. Ergo, overall, it’s a good thing. She doesn’t say that out loud though, her poor John is way too upset. He likes children, she knows, so probably he just doesn’t like the thought of babies being hurt. And hm, couldn’t you make more oil out of somebody bigger? Would it be better to make it out of adults, she wonders?
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Arthur shakes his head in agreement. “No, it doesn’t, that’s what I’m saying.”
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“Agreed,” Quincy adds with a shudder of his own. “Which still leaves us with a whole network to unravel as Arthur said. Now, don’t get me wrong, social infiltration sounds like me, but uh, I somehow don’t think they’ll be all that susceptible to my normal methods.”
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“So… so far, we’ve found, and interrupted, one source of ‘supply’ of the chain, and now we’ve found one person in the ‘distributor’ side of things, haven’t we? Someone must be coordinating the movement of, uh… ‘goods’, and that’s probably the people we want?” Arthur muses.
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Putting what he has in stolen merchant training to the task, John adds a few more layers of possible involvement, and that really doesn’t convince him they can do anything, but it tells him that the next thing they should try to find out is how the doctor gets his wares. And then how that supplier gets their wares, and so on.
“This could take months. If we even can keep tracking each layer down. Molly might have the best chance if he can listen in on the unsaid parts. Or I could get at it if we can smuggle me close enough for invading dreams.”
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“We’d ideally want to keep an eye on that doctor, wouldn’t we?” Arthur offers, leaning back in his corner of the sofa to think. “But that’s not really logistically feasible. Besides the fact that we don’t have time for someone to lurk around and follow this guy all day everyday, there’s also still potentially a vampire out and about who might be after us.”
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Having done the logistics of the barony for months now and gotten quite good at planning how to combine rounds and tenant requests into daily schedules, Darcy thinks she’s got this one. “We’ll do it on days that we meet with Miss Powlett! Like… uh, what did Papa’s texts call it, right, a random sample of days. That still should give us a valid idea of how it goes, and we eventually have to find something out, right?”
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Arthur tilts his head. “Get a double use out of our time in Hartlepool? Yes, that sounds good, and we’ll be there mostly during daylight hours, too, which helps at least a little with the vampire side of things. Yes, that’s a good idea! I don’t have any better one, anyway!”
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“We’ll just leave John alone over there if it gets too dark.” Quincy snickers with an eyebrow waggle that raises exactly the kind of pout he wanted out of Cycy. So close, he’s so close to totally having her realise how much she wants John for herself!
Flipping him off for that comment, John agrees anyway. “Yeah, that might be the best we can do at the moment. This isn’t a quick-to-fix sort of problem, much as I hate doing so little.”
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Arthur grimaces. “Yeah, it sucks that we can’t just find and free everyone, but… if we want to end this for good, we’ll have to be thorough. Also, uh, well, we don’t want to get ourselves prosecuted for it…”
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“Silly human laws,” Darcy grumbles while crossing her arms. This isn’t how the stories normally go. No fair. She wanted to be the heroine in a proper adventure story, but it looks like she ended up in a political drama. Boring! Still, it’s better than the gothic fairy tale she had before, and this clearly means a lot to her men, so she’ll do her very best. She’ll start right now because with how upset John is, she doesn’t want to leave him alone, she’ll ask Quincy to go on their date tomorrow and instead spend the evening together with John. All three of them… That’s her favourite, anyway.
~
Darcy is kind of herding John and Quincy out of the library while Quincy complains about his lost date privileges and demands restitution, (but has his arm around John’s shoulders, so Arthur thinks he’s just being dramatic,) when Arthur remembers last night- which seems quite long ago by now.
He hesitates, because… because he doesn’t want to make a fuss, but he does want to ask Darcy about it, just to make sure. So he makes himself call out to her: “Can I just ask you something for a moment?”
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“Of course, Arthur-dear!” Going on her tiptoes, Darcy gives John and Quincy a kiss each, trusts Quincy to make sure that John is comfy until she comes after them, and bounces back to Arthur with a smile.
He smiles back, and says: “Um…” while he tries to figure out how to start and put it. “John showed up last night for some healing because, er… he said he hit you with his shotgun?”
“Yes, he did!” She beams and claps her hands before giggling. “But only that one time. I’ll be better next time! He’s always so sweet to train me.”
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“So, um… you don’t mind that you got shot?” he asks, because… well, he just wants to be sure. He wouldn’t want to get shot, by accident or not.
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Thinking it through, because if Arthur asks, it’s important that she gives him a good answer, Darcy finally shakes her head. “No, I don’t think it means I was bad for him by not managing to dodge. When I make a mistake, he always tells me so that I can learn from it, so it’s okay if I don’t get an exercise right the first time.”
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Arthur blinks, because… because what does that even mean? That’s not at all anything he was thinking about. “So… doing exercises with John shooting at you is fun?” he asks, because that seems to be what’s going on and what she’s saying.
Giggling again, she wiggles and bounces with a slight blush. “It wouldn’t be a date otherwise. Those are meant to be fun.”
That’s a date? Arthur doesn’t think that most people date like that, but Darcy is only beaming and bouncing and visibly happy, so really, it’s not for him to judge. Not like he has any knowledge or experience with the subject, anyway.
He smiles at her. “Then I’m glad to hear that. I, um, just wanted to make sure you’re okay?”
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“That’s so sweet of you! But don’t worry, I’m all healed up, and Quincy’ll take me out on a date tomorrow so that it’s not just John who I always nibble on. I’m trying really hard to be good and not get blood-obsessed again.” Leaning in to hug him, Darcy decides to put another kiss on his other cheek. “But it’s still kind of embarrassing.”
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That still wasn’t really Arthur’s concern, but if Darcy is happy with it, then he is. So he hugs her back, and repeats his offer: “Well, if you do need some extra blood at some point, you can also ask me.”
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“Thank you! I will, Arthur-dear.” Giving him another squeeze, she smiles but asks if that answered his question, her poor John looked upset, she wants to make it better.
He nods, confirms that that was all- but also, that sending John to him definitely was the right thing to do, and to make sure he doesn’t take being a tough guy too far!
Darcy’s not sure what Arthur means but she’s sure Quincy knows and is dealing with it. Her men are good for each other like that, so she wishes Arthur a lovely evening and then runs to her room, no, their room! Gregory hasn’t even been in it for days and days, but her men have. She knows they both have moved some of their things over, John especially, as is only right for her hidden husband. So there, it’s their room, it’s finally a proper wedding bed and she likes it. She likes that between all three of them, yes, she nearly has a complete love.