Chapter 18
Previously: Obsidian: Crystal Heart – Chapter 17
Quincy’s elaborate way of telling what happened makes it all sound a lot more glamorous and less awful than it was when John and Arthur walked in there, and Arthur isn’t complaining about that. It doesn’t answer why the hunters were there in the first place though, but it doesn’t sound like Quincy and Darcy were tailed from town, at any rate. Which… is maybe good news?
Seeing John return empty-handed from his search, Arthur gives him a questioning look- and ignores the blush. If Quincy was waxing so poetically about him, he’d blush, too.
~
“No gang leader anywhere I checked in the house. Probably wanted to just get away after he had no clue why he was here.” Setting the confiscated things down on a side table, John takes a moment to sip on his tea and maybe not think about what he did yesterday. Quincy can make it into a poetic retelling all he wants, he killed somebody yesterday. He’s pretty sure there is the faintest whisper of distortion in his hearing still. He doesn’t want to just forget about the horror, no, he’s not feeling much like being glorified. But he’s also not regretting it.
He can’t regret it. He could never regret helping to keep his dhampirs safe. He loves Darcy. And maybe, fine, to himself and nobody else he’ll admit it: He was about ready to implode with being emotionally overwhelmed at Quincy’s love declaration to him yesterday night but… he gets it. That’s his bro and he supposes it is a bit like love, brotherly love.
So no, he’d kill again for them, and looking at the crossbow he took from the scene; he might have to. These aren’t likely to be the last hunters coming after his dhampirs, and he will protect them to his dying breath.
For now, though, he shoves one of the little booklets he found in an inside pocket over at Arthur. “Something for you to research if we can find any clue who these people were.”
~
Arthur flips through the booklet. It’s in Romanian, of that much he’s sure, and it’s some kind of instruction manual, maybe? There’s a labelled sketch of a crossbow on one page, and someone’s written notes into the margins of a bunch of pages.
Arthur nods, puts it down again. “I’ll look into it. I wish Art were here,” he admits. “Um… actually, we really should tell someone, shouldn’t we? I could… try scrying Lucy again?” It worked last time… for a certain definition of ‘worked’.
~
Suddenly feeling his stomach drop, Quincy pulls Darcy tight into himself. “Mother was meant to keep us in contact.” Of course, now his mother isn’t here, either, and normally, he couldn’t care less about the lack of parents present, but Radu is still out there and now they have hunters in town, too. He knows his queen will protect him and so will his darling, but what if it’s too much? He can’t possibly lose them! He never before wanted to be around somebody without a fixed end date. But after yesterday night… No, he doesn’t just want to get them together and then leave. She’s his love, his wife, his everything! He can’t help with the fighting, but maybe he can help with the contacting the other vampires? “Mother left so abruptly, all her things should still be here, maybe there’s something that can help with the scrying?”
~
“Maybe,” Arthur agrees. “We really should’ve thought of that, and come up with a better system… Oh well.” He’ll just have to work with what they have. “Can we stay behind the wards today? Put off any town or barony errands until we have at least a bit of a grasp on the situation?”
~
“You two are on house arrest for dates.” John chuckles and elbows Quincy, who appreciates the levity, so just fires back: “You are on dreamscape date location duty, you mean, darling.”
~
Smiling because of her men’s typical hazing, Darcy nods at Arthur. “I agree. Let’s stay in. Maybe I can smell out something from the things John brought along? Hopefully we can contact my parents, they would know best.”
~
Arthur pulls out his notebook with a nod. “Okay, so you and John try and see what you can get from the hunter’s stuff, and me and Quincy go see what Mrs Harker left here and if I can use something for scrying, and then we see from there?” he suggests, starts making a list.
~
Even as Arthur starts writing, John snorts. “Eh, that’d be the efficient way, but good luck getting those two unstuck today. We’ll be moving in a pack, I’d say.”
“Bloody right we are!” Quincy agrees, finishes up with his tea, playfully shoves the rest of the sausage Darcy was chewing on into her face, then wraps his arms tighter around her and gets up. “To London!”
~
Even through her still stuffed cheeks, Darcy giggles and holds on tight as Quincy lifts her. She agrees, she doesn’t want to be away from him for even a second, and she doesn’t want John to feel like she wants to be away from him, either, so obviously they’ll all just be wonderful and spend the entire day together. Perfect!
She feels Quincy’s arms around her go slack and would have tumbled to the floor if she hadn’t quickly changed to her rat form to cling to his arm. But even that drags him down and with a loud squeak, she wolfs out to be a soft cushion for him as he falls forward, not reacting at all to the impending floor to the face. He impacts far softer on her than she thought he would, but then she spots that John threw himself out of his chair and grabbed the back of Quincy’s shirt, slowing his fall even as he curses loudly.
~
Arthur startles out of his chair, leans over the table to try and see Quincy and Darcy. “What? Quincy?!” he calls, alarmed.
~
Already turning him over and settling him down more comfortably on Darcy’s back, John checks for vitals and waves his hands in front of Quincy’s glassy eyes. That doesn’t really seem unconscious, but he tries to see if he can find him over in the dreamscape only to flinch back hard, withdraw his power as fast as he can, and he groans loudly. “Fucking fey! Really?! This shit again? He’s fine. He’ll be fine.” Sitting down on the ground and starting to pet Darcy’s head, he groans again. “I trust my bro to kick his own arse in there. It’s that vision fuckery.”
~
Arthur gets up and comes around the table to crouch by the others, and, yes, seeing that glassy stare- that’s familiar. “Now?” he groans. “Why now? Ugh, these things always happen with the worst timing… Of course, better yet if they didn’t happen at all.” He frowns, but they already know there’s nothing to be done, so he gets back up to let Katharina out, (all their moving around might’ve startled her off from where she was lying on his feet under the table,) and then finish his breakfast.
~
Quincy stares down at his dirty nails, his dirty and, worse, broken nails. Stares down at them through disgustingly stuck-together curls of his own hair. Matted, dry, and also dirty hair. He feels his entire body tingle with the sensation of his poor pores being greased over.
Oh Divine, eek, no, no no, did he just feel something crawl on him?!
He tries to jump up to flee, but the sudden movement makes him dizzy, makes the world swim into dark shadows for a moment. A moment it takes him to realise that there is nowhere to run to. All his futile attempt did was lose him the seat he had. There’s another dirty body filling it immediately. One of the many dirty bodies milling about in the gloom.
Quincy thinks he’s glad he can’t see them better, he can smell them all too well, can smell himself, which is immeasurably worse. Maybe, just maybe, even worse than the other things he can smell in this cell.
It has to be a cell. Not like the brink he’s been in before though. There are no manacles on him, there are no bars behind which the murmur of a precinct can be heard. No, the stones here swallow all sound that might exist behind the one door he can make out.
Divine have mercy on him. He’s in prison.
The only thing that keeps him from falling to his knees in terror and grief is that he doesn’t want to touch the floor. He doesn’t want to feel any more of this nightmare than he already does.
Prison… He’ll die. He’s dead. He’s just not carted out yet.
Tears sting his eyes and they feel real. Which tells him this isn’t a terribly cruel hazing from his darling in the dreamscape.
Wait… his darling. Over John’s dead body would anybody throw him in prison!
Over Cycy’s double-dead body would anybody throw him in prison!
What the hell?!
Shaking his tears away, he tries to march, no matter that he clearly only has the energy for a shuffle, to the door. He wants to talk to… to his lawyer! Get Lucy Jr Harker down here, there’s been a mistake! He’s with the Lady Rossmore!
When the guard on the other side of the door barely looks his way, Quincy finds himself snarling. Fine, then! If they don’t want to play nobility games, they’ll play dhampir games! He is not staying here a second longer!
This time his voice sounds different, this time he can feel that furry thing inside of him with every movement of his tongue. “Let me out. Now.”
If he has to command every single guard and then a cab driver to get out of here, he will! And then he’ll huff at Cycy for not finding him fast enough and she better reward him for coming back to her at all!
The door opens, he steps through… and is lying on something that is furry and warm and moving. Cycy? Say what now? What just happened? How did he… wait, how did he get to the prison in the first place?
~
“Huff at the fey, Molly. You just started your journey to being a grown-up sparkler, I guess. We’ve been here before. You’ll be fine as long as you don’t let the fucking story they show you get to you,” John soothes when he sees the expression on Quincy’s face shift from absent to confused. Is he fucking glad to have his bro back out so quickly. That looks like he isn’t totally shaken by whatever they threw at him. Maybe it’s a dhampir thing, and he refuses to let the insecurity at the back of his mind tell him he’s the only one who nearly fucked up. The important part is to be there for their molly, so he helps him get up and pats his shoulder.
“You bite those meanie visions for me!”
Yupp, that’s his girl on words of deep wisdom. He kind of has to agree with her though.
~
“That was quick!” Arthur observes, happy for it. “Yeah, it’s a fey vision thing, they’re going to try and scare you, show you the things you’re most afraid of. You’ve got to keep pushing through and you’ll be fine.”
~
Trying to play over his discomfort for a moment, Quincy jokes: “That would explain that terrible vision of broken nails I had.” But the moment he’s upright and can pull Cycy into himself, he shudders and admits: “Not that that was the worst part about being in prison. I knew you wouldn’t let me be there. I knew there must have been a mistake. And I knew that I could tell them to open the doors for me.”
~
With a proper drac growl, Darcy makes herself big even while she lets her sang du coeur wrap himself around her. “Nobody hurts you! They’ll go through me first! Through my drac… and John’s shotgun, too!”
~
Arthur shudders a bit, because prison is also high on his list of scary things. “And also my magic- or, if we had to, some kind of sneakiness to get you out!” he adds nonetheless.
~
“Thank you, my lovelies. Thank you, Arthur.” He surprisingly doesn’t feel one bit hissy about admitting that he’d appreciate the help. Still, Quincy is glad that all he has to do to get through these nasty vision things, (typical fey, he suspects Llew,) is not letting them scare him. He’s a coward, but he’s a well-protected coward, so he’ll keep throwing his lovelies at whatever they make him believe is going on. That should be easy enough, if annoying. There better be some nice reward at the end of this idiotic quest.
For right now, though, he refuses to face plant again, that must have looked undignified, worse, not graceful. So he huffs at Cycy to get him nice and safely to the closest lounging sofa they have, looks like they’ll have to work in comfort today.
~
Since apparently Darcy and Quincy extra-don’t want to split up today, (Arthur’s not sure why, but it’s not like he minds being with everyone,) they all end up in the library, of course, with the things that John got from the hunters, and Mrs Harker’s things brought over by the house, and Quincy on a couch. And maybe this isn’t even less efficient, because it means whatever they find, they can help each other with. Arthur’s busy re-reading the scrying instructions, studying back up on them, and trying to find something with a suitable link and reflective surface. Nothing has jumped out at him right away, because if Mrs Harker left the things here, she isn’t that attached to them, presumably.
~
He doesn’t want to admit to it, but Quincy enjoys rummaging through his mother’s things more than he should. Sure, there’s a bit of the ‘he knows he shouldn’t and he’ll get attention if she finds out’, but primarily these things are a reminder of her human life. Of the woman he knows and prays still exists. He doesn’t want to lose his mother the way he did his sister.
That possibility terrifies him, and that just might mean the bloody fey visions are going to torment him with it. So no, he refuses to give into that and instead lets himself enjoy the reminders of her humanity. The small things, like the hidden compartment in her suitcase he never knew about… and there being a photo of her probably about his age in it, with his father at her side. They must have snuck that photo while they were scheming together. At least he thinks so until John has to bloody point out that: “Aw, it’s a family photo. Look at her belly. You’re in that picture!” Gross!
Slapping at the laughing offender doesn’t do much, and Cycy looks way too interested now. Ugh! Those two are impossible. And that photo is not reflective, so it’s not helping, ergo give it back here!
Stashing it away, he feels something poke his finger. Something that just fell into the suitcase, and, oh, that just might work! It’s one of the dozens of hairpins he knows his mother has. He doesn’t have a specific memory of her having one in her hair when his father took her away, but he can’t remember a day when she didn’t. They aren’t very shiny, but they are metal. “Arthur, could this work? She definitely has some of them with her.”
~
Arthur takes some of the hair pins from Quincy, studies them. They’re certainly well worn, he can tell that, but… “D’you think they’re in any way special to her? Since we didn’t enchant anything especially- which is really something we should maybe get around to doing – I need something that she has a personal connection to. I mean, I can try?” he offers dubiously.
~
“Please, do…” Quincy’s words slur out on him and Darcy is adorable in how she makes sure to gently lower him backwards on the pillows they’ve stuffed the sofa full of for him.
“Culver, don’t look so worried. He’ll cut them a new one. That one is all bark, and that’s what the visions are about.” Despite his confident words, John drags his chair a bit closer to the sofa, just in case. Not that he plans to go in if Quincy runs into trouble, they know that’s a shit idea from last time. He’s willing to put a lot on the line for his bro, but not if there’s nothing to gain from it.
No, there’s only one thing to do, distract her so she stops pawing at Quincy. It makes him fidgety seeing her like that. He wants to do more, too, but they can’t, so he picks up the crossbow and tells her to go run and grab one of her daddy’s for them to compare them.
~
It is beautiful here. Wherever here is. The place is urban, in a surreal way. White blocks of houses on perfectly symmetrical streets with far too few seams and harsh contrasts between the edges. There are no cobbles, no bricks, no planks, everything is stark, geometric forms. More like an impressionist painting of a landscape than a real landscape. There isn’t even anything in the distance, on the horizon, just the direct surroundings and everything aiming towards the mansion up ahead.
Quincy feels oddly aware of being in a vision. None of the sudden sense of being in a different body. No, he feels like he stepped into a story, a production even. The lighting is superb, even if it seems otherworldly. Too perfect.
Not just the lighting, the very ground under his feet is sparkling with a sheet of frost so even that the only imperfections are his own footsteps. The gently swirling snowflakes, no, ice crystals, are dense enough to turn the world into a kaleidoscope of colours against that impossible light, but not so dense to obscure anything. As said, too perfect, and that should make him scoff at how overdone the production is, but instead… instead those cold whispers at the back of his mind seem to be sighing in relief.
He has the very worst feeling of being home.
And that’s idiotic because he’s never been here before.
He doesn’t know the path he’s walking along, or the beautiful landscape, utilitarian but gorgeous in its clean lines and purpose with every even decorative addition. He doesn’t know the mansion he’s approaching, but he wants it. He wants it badly.
The door is fortified. This isn’t a pleasure palace. It’s a seat of power, and every bit of beauty crackles with energy under his fingers. It’s not that furry thing inside of him that reacts, no, the crackles are against a sense of himself he hadn’t really felt like this before.
He feels so powerful, so calm, so confident.
No, he has no need for that furry thing. Not here. Not when the door swings open for him with a familiarity that is… what? Oh, that must have been an emotion.
He steps across the doorstep free from those, too.
No, he has no need for those. He is not the lord of this domain. Emotions serve him better, and Quincy can relax in the grid that knowing one’s place gives. Quincy, fifth, why should he waste his time with emotions that do him no good here? No, it is calmer without them, with handing them to the First when he enters into this house.
Hands them over, offers them to the Lord. So he nods at his sister as he strides past her and finds his way to the one who knows best. He kneels at his grandfather’s desk and waits to be acknowledged.
This is the proper way to do it.
This is the right way to this hierarchy.
Why is there a deep howling in his ears? What is this mockery?
He’s staring down at his fingers where he’s kneeling.
His fingers, his nails, wasn’t there something?
His nails are tinted. A soft red. They weren’t always. He didn’t always dare.
It wasn’t him who put the tint there.
He has the faint sensation of tiny fingers on his hands. Buffing his nails until they shine. Massaging the rose oil into his nails until they have a faint colour to them.
Cycy. The memory scratches at the inside of his skull together with the sensation of that furry thing. Howling. It’s howling.
Cycy’s drac would be howling.
Cycy… his queen!
No, this is wrong! This is all wrong!
He doesn’t have a lord!
He doesn’t sell his emotions!
Nobody but his queen deserves them!
And a queen demands them to be shown by a man! A man like him! The howling in his head turns snarl and he shows his fangs as he jumps up.
He doesn’t kneel! He cannot be contained!
And neither can his drac!
Even as his feet hit the floor, he can feel his drac stirring, can sense all the emotions it brings with it.
No, no matter what his grandfather would try to do to him, he is not like his sister! He’s a dhampir and he has a queen who would never let his heart run cold! No, he won’t lose his emotions! He won’t, Cycy, won’t let him!
Cycy makes his heart sing. Cycy’s drac is a flame against his senses. Cycy’s drac is pure emotion and it loves him! With Cycy protecting him, he can stand against anything!
He is free!
She set him free from fear and that is the only emotion he is fine being rid off!
Just about to fight his way out of this mansion of ice and unnecessary worries, the vision crumbles away in front of his eyes and, instead, he sees his queen’s face, right above him.
Oh Divine, but her eyes are portals to the passion of the heavens directly.
No, he’s safe. He’ll always be safe from the grey world and from cold fey with her.
He needs to let her know what she does to his heart, so he reaches up and pulls her in, puts his lips and fangs on her and rejoices at feeling the shiver going through her entire body as they let their emotions run amok into each other.
Yes, all of those emotions are his. All of her fire and raging river is his. And his heart burns harder for it.
~
John has the worst impulse to put his hand over Arthur’s eyes. The dhampirs are kissing the house down and that doesn’t look chaste in any sense of the word. The poor guy might freak out any moment at the sparks and floating hearts and desire swirling around that bundle of redhead emotions.
For his part, good, that makes two visions for their molly. Nice progress.
Going back to the crossbow in front of him, he isn’t really any the wiser than before he tried disassembling it. Sure, it’s a slightly different type from the one Godalming left, but that is neither here nor there. So instead, he focuses back on Arthur, also to distract him from the dracs slobbering on each other.
“Any luck with the scrying preparations?”
~
Arthur feels like his face is on fire and like he’ll spontaneously combust with awkward embarrassment at how Darcy and Quincy are kissing, so he’s more than happy to keep his attention firmly on Mrs Harker’s things, and to answer John’s question.
“I really do think the hairpins are too small, but I found this.” He holds out a hair clasp for John’s inspection. It’s a smooth curve of polished silver with a hinged, sideways comb at the back for sticking into hair, he assumes. It’s still not huge, maybe half the size of his palm, but at least that gives him a square inch or so of surface to work with. “I guess it’s a long shot that she’s got another similar one, and that she likes them enough for there to be a connection, but… worth a try?”
~
“I’d ask for you but frankly, I doubt Molly can remember any other woman right now.” Even while John says it he snorts, because clearly, Quincy can still hear him, at least he’s getting flipped off, right before Quincy also waves at Arthur to go ahead, with Darcy giggling. Leave the dhampirs that, they can be locked at the lips and still perfectly expressive. Okay, fine, he’ll admit it, they are kind of adorable.
~