#anger tw

He genuinely hadn’t realized how stressed and upset he’d been until he walked into the Archives to find it decked out like it was going to be the site of Fezziwig’s Christmas ball. It must have taken Sasha—and, as he later found out, Gerry—most of the weekend to set up. Even then he’d held it together until Sasha told him why she’d done it, at which point he wasn’t particularly ashamed to admit he’d broken down sobbing and ended up at the bottom of a hug pile.

They were just lucky Elias hadn’t come down to be a dick.

Christmas was over now, or would be after today—Tim was adamant about that—but oddly, he didn’t feel as flat as he normally would when the lights and garlands started coming down. Normally he threw himself into planning for Valentine’s Day or Pancake Day, depending on which was earlier and how much he wanted to torment his coworkers, as a way to distract himself from the end of the season, but this year, there wasn’t a need for that. Partly it was that he still wasn’t entirely recovered from…well, everything. Partly it was that he didn’t feel so much like things were ending—only beginning. Mostly, though, it was that they were busy.

Cinnamon Rose Books still had a wreath hanging on the door, along with a few other decorations, and Sasha took one look at it, then stepped to the far side of the threshold before pressing the bell. Tim was about to ask her why when Gerry opened the door, glanced up briefly, then grabbed Tim, dipped him, and kissed him thoroughly.

“Hi,” he said when he let him up for air.

“Hi,” Tim said, a bit breathless and dizzy. Then he noticed the sprig of mistletoe directly over where he’d been standing. “Oh. How long has that been there?”

“Since we decorated. You just usually don’t stand under it when you knock.” Gerry smirked at him, then stepped back. “Come on in. The others are upstairs. Please get up here before they start playing their damned music.”

Sasha coughed. Tim was pretty sure it was to hide a laugh. “Sinner’s Gin again?”

“No, it’s that fucking steampunk space pirate band. Apparently they’ve got a new album or something coming out in a couple weeks, and Melanie’s heard some of it but Jon hasn’t. I kind of tuned the explanation out,” Gerry confessed under his breath. “They’ve been talking about it for the last twenty minutes.”

Tim couldn’t help but laugh himself. “Lead on, then. Let’s get this party started.”

Something smelled good—like someone was baking pies—and as they headed up into the living part of the shop, Tim noted the garland, tinsel, and small live tree still shedding its needles gently in the corner. “You haven’t taken the decorations down yet,” he said, with a note of triumph. Sasha rolled her eyes at him.

“That’s Neenie’s thing. Decorations stay up until the second of February. You’ll have to ask her about it. As long as she helps with the breakdown, I don’t really care, honestly.” Gerry led them into the kitchen. “Okay! They’re here. Can we talk about literally anything else now?”

“I’m just saying, the evidence is not on the side of a happy ending.” Jon spoke with the air of one scoring a point in some ineffable debate.

“Yeah, you’re right, but I can dream, can’t I?” Melanie looked up from where she was setting the table and offered Sasha a half-smile. “Hey.”

“Hey. Why do the decorations have to stay up until second February?” Sasha gave her a smile that was so obviously an imitation of Tim’s over-the-top flirting that Jon actually snickered.

Melanie shrugged. “That’s just how my mother did it. Decorations go up four Sundays before Christmas and stay up until Candlemas. Don’t ask me what Candlemas is, because I have no clue.”

“Presentation of Jesus at the temple,” Tim said automatically. “It’s the end of the Epiphany season and the start of Ordinary Time.”

“You grew up Catholic, right?” Gerry tossed that off over his shoulder as he headed to the fridge. “Beer, anyone?”

“Yeah, sure,” Tim said, a bit disquieted. He didn’t think he’d ever mentioned that to anyone, and he hadn’t set foot in a confessional since joining the Institute. He and God were on better terms than they’d been after Danny died, or at least he thought they were, but he didn’t quite know where he stood with the Church. “Uh, how’d you know that?”

“Guessed. You said your grandparents came over from Italy during the war. Balance of probability was that they were either Catholic or atheists, and you know too much about religion to be an atheist.” Gerry handed him a stout. “Always a bit jealous of people who had belief in something like that. Something good, rather than…” He waved vaguely, encompassing himself, Jon, Martin, and the general situation they found themselves in.

Tim raised an eyebrow at him and gestured pointedly at Melanie and Martin. “You don’t believe in anything good?”

Gerry smiled, if a bit reluctantly. “Yeah, okay, point.”

Martin shook his head, a fondly exasperated look in his eyes. “Sit down and eat.”

Melanie pulled a box of matches out of a drawer. “Anything come close to you lot lately?”

“Nothing in person,” Jon said, glancing around at the others. “At least not in the Archives.”

“Or the tunnels,” Martin said. “We’ve…been staying to the first level. Haven’t noticed the walls moving around so much.”

Sasha shook her head. “No new encounters for me. What about you, Tim?”

Tim thought over the last few days. “Can’t think of anything. Just the usual, then.”

Melanie nodded and lit four candles—one for the Eye, one for the Stranger, one for the Spiral, and one for the Hunt. They weren’t concerned about the Corruption so much these days, not with Jane Prentiss dead and out of the way; they hadn’t seen anything of the Web since the attack, and if Martin said he wasn’t worried about the Buried, Tim trusted him. Most of the other entities hadn’t really bothered them.

Tim still thought they should maybe be warding off the Slaughter, but both Melanie and Jon insisted they hadn’t seen anything of it since they got back from Sheffield, so he’d dropped that argument some weeks ago.

The gatherings had been Jon’s idea. At first they’d shared information piecemeal, in stolen moments here and there, hoping for times when Elias was distracted or talking around things they didn’t want him to know about, like that Melanie and Gerry were helping them. (It had been a long time since Tim had believed Elias’ nothing escapes my notice to be anything but literal.) After an attempt to have a hurried debriefing in the tunnels during which they all tried to talk at once and Martin came away with a headache so bad he had to lie down the rest of the afternoon, Jon had suggested they move the discussions to a time and place they could be sure of being unobserved, and where the whole group could participate. Gerry had offered up his rooms on the basis that the shop could provide a good cover if anyone wanted to know where they were going—it wasn’t so unusual for people from the Magnus Institute to go to a place like that, especially if they were doing research—and with the wards in place, they could be reasonably certain they were safe.

Melanie, it turned out, had picked up takeaway from a particular restaurant a few blocks away that was, or so she swore, the only place in London that did a proper char siu. Tim observed the way all three of them handled the chopsticks and asked, “Another tradition?”

“Hmm?” Martin frowned for a second, then his eyes cleared as he swallowed the bite in his mouth. “Oh, the meal? No, not really. Melanie just really likes Mr. Zhang’s recipes, so it’s kind of our go-to when none of us feel like cooking.”

“Just wanted to make sure.” Tim was still sorting out what the three of them did because it was helpful or protected them and what they did because it was comfortable and familiar. He was also finding that he liked being looped into their traditions. That, as much as anything else, had gone a long way towards soothing his anxieties and settling his anger over the last few weeks.

They lapsed into silence for a while, broken only by the clinking of silverware against plate. Gerry waited until Melanie and Jon were finished with a playful duel with their chopsticks over a particularly large snow pea before he said, “Right, who wants to start?”

Jon sighed. “I suppose I will. I’ve been going through Gertrude’s laptop.”

“How’d you get into it?” Sasha asked, surprising Tim, who had assumed Jon had asked her.

Jon looked slightly sheepish. “I, er, I posted on a few tech-oriented forums asking about statements. A woman came by yesterday to give one, and while she was there, I asked her to take a look at it. Pretended I’d locked myself out somehow.”

“Probably deleted a bit of code in the administrative permissions. Not hard if you know what you’re doing,” Sasha mused. She caught Tim’s look and added, “I’m the one who told him to find another way in, Tim. It’s not that I didn’t want to know, it’s just, well, I didn’t want to tempt myself to start digging for those secrets instead. Besides, the more Elias thinks Jon doesn’t trust us with his investigations, the more protected we’ll all be from his snooping, right?”

“Point,” Tim admitted.

Martin exhaled slowly. “Christ, Jon, I wish you’d told us…what was it? Her statement?”

“Ah, I’m—I’m not altogether sure, actually. S-something about a parser bot, um, Sergey Ushanka?”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that one,” Sasha said. “Guy who allegedly tried to upload his brain into a computer to cheat death, managed it, found out it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and now chats with people and slowly goes mad over the course of it, right? ‘The angles cut me when I try to think.’” She uttered this in a cartoonishly spooky voice, wiggling her fingers dramatically.

Nobody else laughed. Jon nodded, unsmiling; Gerry scowled. “I’ve heard that name. Where have I heard that name before?”

“Your dad’s notebook. The one you used to work out the wards and shanty combos,” Melanie said. She laid her chopsticks down, very carefully, like she was afraid she might break them if she didn’t. “That was on the last page he’d written on. Some shop in Soho he reckoned might have ‘the last piece of Sergey Ushanka’.”

“Right. We never understood what that meant.”

“It’s an old urban legend,” Jon said. “According to Ms. Winters, anyway. She says it dates back to 1983, to the early days of home computers. First the story said he coded his brain onto floppy disks, then CDs, then finally uploaded directly onto the web. I can’t help but wonder if they’re all true, in their own way.”

Martin drummed his fingers on the table for a moment, his eyes going vacant. “Ger, how old were you when your dad died?”

“Four or five. Don’t really remember all that well.” Gerry shrugged, but Tim could see how much it hurt. He reached over and squeezed his hand as comfortingly as he could; Gerry squeezed back before adding, “I don’t remember him writing in it for a few months before he died, though. Mostly I just remember him sitting in his chair. I think he might’ve been sick, which makes sense if he tried to quit.”

Tim cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

Gerry blinked at him. “Didn’t I ever tell you lot? Dad was an Archival Assistant. Worked with Gertrude. I didn’t know that until I met her, but…”

“You told us,” Martin said softly. “Neens and me, I mean, the night you…that first night. You probably just forgot we weren’t all there for that conversation.”

“Probably. Honestly, it’s hard to keep straight who was present for what conversation those first couple days, everything got so damned muddled.” Gerry rubbed his forehead. “Anyway, yeah, my dad worked in the Archives. I know he wanted to quit to raise me, but if you can’t leave…he was probably dying by inches even before Mum killed him. She probably waited until he was weak.”

Melanie snorted. “That doesn’t sound like Aunt Mary. I always thought she liked it better when they had a bit of fight to them.”

“Yeah, the problem with her ‘diversifying her portfolio’ was that she took away the bits from each one she liked, and I think that was the part of the Hunt she liked, was seeing how people reacted when they were cornered,” Gerry muttered. “Flight, fight, or freeze, yeah?”

“Yeah, and you’re an emu,” Martin and Melanie said simultaneously. Tim almost snorted lo mein out his nose.

Sasha coughed into her hand. “Anyway, Jon, you’ve been going through the laptop…what have you found?”

“Very little of any use. At least not about stopping the Unknowing…I gather Gertrude wasn’t much of a note-taker. But I’ve been sifting through her emails.” Jon pushed his mostly empty plate away. Martin silently slid it back, and he picked up his chopsticks again without complaint. “She’d requested a huge travel budget from the Institute, and she got it. Kept all the booking information and receipts for that. She also ordered a lot of, um, sporadic but unusually high-quantity purchases. Petrol. Lighter fluid. Pesticides. High-powered torches.”

Gerry snorted. “Sounds like Gertrude. Fire was kind of her backup plan for everything, but some things you can’t burn, I guess.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard the term ‘burning daylight,’ but I don’t think that’s literal,” Tim chimed in, earning groans from Martin and Sasha and a smirk from Gerry. “She didn’t travel with those, did she?”

“I doubt it. They’d be quite difficult to take through customs,” Jon said dryly. He hesitated, then added, “There is…one other thing. I suppose in retrospect it’s a bit obvious. Gertrude was buying Leitners. She was the one who bought that copy of The Key of Solomon Dominic Swain mentioned finding an auction for—grbookworm1818.”

Martin pinched the bridge of his nose. “Of fucking course she was.”

“I’m not surprised, honestly,” Gerry admitted. “She had me run one or two down for her while I was helping her out, but it’s kind of odd she would have bought any in a way that could be traced back to her like that. She wasn’t stupid.” He paused, then added, “Mostly.”

“Hang on.” Melanie pushed away from the table. “Is it still in the same place, Ger?”’

Tim didn’t know what it was, but Gerry seemed to understand—of course he did. “Yeah, I found it last time I needed it. Still there.”

Melanie slipped out of the room. Jon shot a glance at Martin. “Do I want to know?”

“We keep a ledger,” Martin explained. “Known books of power, whether they were his or not, what happened to them. That sort of thing.”

“We thought about calling it our ‘hunting record’, but, you know…” Gerry trailed off as Melanie dramatically flung the door open and dropped a red notebook and pen in front of him. “Why am I the scribe?”

“Because you worked with Gertrude. You find it, you list it,” Melanie shot back at him.

Gerry sighed theatrically. “Fine.” He opened the book, flipped through a few pages, and scribbled a line in the book. “Any idea what she did with it?”

“I’m hoping she burned it, but my luck cannot be that good,” Jon muttered.

Tim watched Gerry fill in the information in a surprisingly neat, practiced hand. He wasn’t one of those people who believed you could tell a person’s personality through their handwriting, but Gerry’s showed that he’d been well-trained and was well-used to doing delicate work with a pen, unsurprising if his mother had intended to teach him how to work her Book someday. “Was that the only one she got? A copy of one of the most famous demonology texts in the world that almost certainly actually worked? Which of the Fourteen would that be, by the way?”

“Probably more than one, honestly,” Martin said. “I really hope she burned that one. I also hope Leitner didn’t keep it too close to any of his other books.”

Tim paused as the possibilities of that filtered through his mind. “You think they influence each other?”

“I’m sure they can. Or at least…egg each other on, maybe? The more powerful the influence of the Fourteen is on a book, or an object, the more likely it is to affect the world around it.” Martin’s voice shifted slightly in tone. “Some will only draw those already Marked, some will draw anyone susceptible. Some will draw those affected by another of the Fourteen, and those are to be feared, because they—” He broke off with a yelp as Gerry leaned across Jon to smack him lightly on the forehead, and it was only then that Tim became aware of the static that had been crackling through the air.

His first instinct was to get angry. He knew Martin wouldn’t do that on purpose, but for him to even be able to accidentally channel the Eye through the wards meant his connection was getting stronger, and if that was happening, it was because Martin was building it, which meant he was drawing on its power and not telling them about it. From the way Gerry’s brows knitted in an expression of mingled worry and irritation, he was probably thinking the same thing, and it was just a matter of which of them was going to yell at Martin first.

Then something over Gerry’s shoulder caught his attention, and he stood, the anger abruptly draining away to be replaced with skyrocketing anxiety. “Shit, the candle!”

Gerry whipped his head around, and Melanie half-started from her seat, but Tim was already on the move. The point of the wards that marked the Eye sat directly behind the door to the kitchen. Somehow—probably when Melanie came back from fetching the ledger—the candle had toppled onto its side and broken in half. Fortunately it had extinguished itself without setting the counter on fire. Unfortunately, it had broken the wards and let the Beholding in without their noticing.

Tim grabbed Gerry’s lighter out of his hand without even consciously being aware he was holding it up, righted the candlestick, snapped the remainder of the wax off the broken candle, and yanked the top part away, leaving a wick too long to burn safely. Right now, though, he didn’t care about safe, just fast, so he doubled the wick over, flicked on the lighter, and lit it from the middle.

Someone was muttering under their breath, the familiar cadence of a Latin prayer, and Tim recognized it as the prayer to Saint Michael; he crossed himself, more out of habit than anything, and started to join in before his brain caught up to the fact that he was the one muttering it. As he reached the final words—divina virtute, in infernum detrude, amen—the long end dropped away harmlessly and the flame settled into a more reasonable level.

Tim took a deep breath, stepped back, and turned to face the others. He focused in on Martin, who was pale as a sheet. “You okay, Marto?”

“I—I think so.” Martin closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Sorry. I’m sorry, that—I didn’t mean to—”

“I know,” Tim assured him. “I’ll…admit I was about to get angry with you, but it wasn’t because I thought you did it on purpose, it was because I thought you’d got a strong enough connection to the Beholding that it overpowered the wards.”

“I was, too,” Gerry admitted. He held up a hand to Melanie, who had bristled. “No, don’t. You know it’s a valid concern.”

Martin winced, but nodded. “Wouldn’t be the first time I was sneaking around thinking I was keeping you all safe by not telling you what I was getting into. I really am trying to get better about that, but it’s fair of you to think…” He rubbed his face, then turned back to Jon. “We, um, we got off topic. Did Gertrude get more than one Leitner?”

“She got three,” Jon said softly. He reached out and squeezed Martin’s hand gently; Martin turned his hand over and squeezed back. “In addition to The Key of Solomon, she got a special edition of The Seven Lamps of Architecture, by John Ruskin. The other was a 1910 pamphlet simply titled A Disappearance.”

Melanie made a face. “Those could be anything.”

“Yeah, in that case, it probably depends on what they actually do. Last one might be the Lonely, but it could also be the Spiral, or maybe even the Stranger. No clue about the architecture one.” Gerry blew a strand of hair out of his eyes. “Anything else from Gertrude?”

“Not so far, but I’ll keep looking.” Jon sighed heavily. “I’m starting to think the important question is why Elias killed Gertrude, and I’m not sure I’ll find that in her laptop.”

Gerry and Martin exchanged glances. Tim, who flattered himself that he’d grown fairly adept at reading both of them in the past few months, looked back and forth. “You have an idea.”

“Gertrude’s whole…thing was stopping the rituals, right?” Martin said. “And Gerry said the Rite of the Watcher’s Crown was still coming up. Probably.”

“And the Archivist is probably important to it,” Gerry added. “Which means…”

“That whatever his reason for killing her was, it was probably tied to that,” Sasha completed. “Either he killed her to prevent her from stopping it…or because that was the only way to stop it. Maybe it was in progress and he killed her to disrupt it.”

“Or it’s a complete fucking coincidence,” Tim pointed out. “After all, he told Martin he’d kill Jon if he ever told him everything he knows. Elias might have killed her for some reason completely unrelated to the Watcher’s Crown, or any of the other rituals, and we still have to figure out what that is.”

“I agree with Tim,” Melanie said. “You can’t assume Elias even knows anything about any of these rituals, let alone the Eye’s.”

“I think it’s safe to assume he has some idea of that,” Jon said dryly. “He seems to know everything else that goes on in the Institute, just about. I very much doubt he didn’t know what Gertrude was up to by now, even if he’s only been head of the Institute for about ten years or so. But you’re right, that doesn’t mean he killed her for any reasons to do with them. It’s, it’s something I still need to figure out.”

Tim studied Gerry for a minute. “Hey, can I ask a somewhat off-topic question? I mean, it’s at least in the general area of the same topic, but it’s not exactly the same.”

Gerry laughed. “Go ahead.”

“You said Gertrude was trying to stop the Unknowing, and we’ve figured out it’s still coming up. You also mentioned the Watcher’s Crown hadn’t happened yet. Are there any other rituals we should be looking out for?”

“Just the Dark’s, I think,” Gerry replied. “Unless she managed to stop that one in the six months between me dying and her dying. She told me she’d disrupted eight in total in recent years, and since she reckoned they were all going to happen one right after the other…”

“Wait, but that leaves six. What are the other ones?” Sasha asked. “The Eye’s, the Stranger’s, the Dark’s…”

Gerry shook his head. “We’d been doing research into the Hunt’s ritual—she called it the Eternal Chase—and from everything we found, they weren’t exactly keen to start it any time soon. She also said we didn’t have to worry about the Risen War, which I assume is the Slaughter’s ritual, but she never really elaborated on that and I was starting to get really bad about then, so I never asked. And she never found anything on a Terminus ritual. And now that I am…well, you know…I’m pretty sure she was right. Death comes for everyone eventually, and in a world where there’s only death…eventually everything will die out and there will be nothing left at all, and then Terminus would starve. So no, I don’t think we have to worry about that.”

“Makes sense that the Hunt wouldn’t want to start, either,” Melanie mused. “I mean, it’s the anticipation, right? The thrill of knowing what’s coming.”

“We’ll have to keep an eye out for the Dark’s, then.” Jon sighed. “I don’t suppose she said anything about it.”

“Only that it was building slowly and she didn’t think we needed to be concerned about it yet. She also didn’t think it would be as destructive, even if it failed, as the Stranger’s ritual.”

“Would we know?” Sasha asked. “How can you tell if…I don’t know. If a power is rebuilding?”

Gerry pursed his lips. “I think, and don’t swear me to this, you can tell because anything that happens is going to be…lower-powered, and closer to the epicenter of the ritual. She dragged me back to the site of the Sunken Sky, which was the Buried’s ritual—no, it’s okay,” he added quickly, holding out his hands to Melanie and Martin, who had both tensed. “It happened like six or seven years before we went there, and it’s practically on the other side of the world. We just went back so she could get a…feel for how much power was building. She said she could sense that it was starting to spread, but it wasn’t very intense, so she reckoned it was fine. Probably be another century or so before it happens again. She said for sure it had been a hundred fifty years or so since the last attempt at the Unknowing.”

Tim exhaled slowly. “So you’re saying once we stop the Unknowing, we’ll be safe.”

“From the ritual. Not from the Stranger.” Gerry’s voice was gentle, but tinged with regret. “It might not try anything much for a bit, but just because the majority of its power gets dissipated or blown to kingdom come or whatever doesn’t mean it won’t have any influence.”

“Still. We won’t have to worry about it to that extreme.” Tim popped a water chestnut into his mouth.

Martin glanced over at Melanie. “You’ve been looking into the Unknowing, right? Found anything?”

Was it Tim’s imagination, or did Melanie look slightly guilty? “Nothing terribly useful yet. Jon talked to, um, Diana for me and got me a pass to use the library, so…I mean, I know you lot have probably scoured those books backwards and forwards, but—”

“The Stranger wasn’t on my radar until Gerry brought up the Unknowing,” Martin admitted. “Even when I worked in the library, I didn’t generally read many books unless they were relevant to something we had going on, or because I was trying to figure out a connection between seemingly unrelated books that a single person had checked out all at once.”

Tim bit the inside of his cheek. He’d probably read every single book the Magnus Institute’s library had on circuses, and he knew he’d read everything they had on Robert Smirke, but he hadn’t really known what he was looking for at the time, so he doubted it would be of much use. He wondered whether to bring that up, though. He hadn’t yet told anyone—not even Gerry—all the details about Danny; Sasha knew, or at least she knew the basics, but she probably wouldn’t have made the connection between that and his Stranger mark. Or maybe she had, he wasn’t sure. She was pretty smart, and she’d definitely got the hang of all this…crap fast. Still, he wasn’t sure how to bring it up without having to spill his guts at the table. He wasn’t ready for that.

“Anything the rest of us read would have been before we knew anything about the Fourteen,” Sasha said, and yeah, she’d definitely made the connection, something confirmed when he felt her foot gently press his under the table. “Not like we’ve had time since then. So yeah, Melanie, anything you can pull from those books is going to be a help.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Got a few leads, but nothing concrete yet.”

Gerry rapped his knuckles against the table twice, making Jon start slightly. “Oh—that reminds me. Got a shipment in this afternoon, blind lot I bought from an estate out Oxford way. Former owner either had a special interest in Arthur Conan Doyle or in Victorian-era theology and spirituality—there were two professors with the same surname, not sure which one this lot came from. Maybe both, they might’ve been related somehow. Anyway, there’s something powerful in the box. I haven’t really had a chance to deal with it yet, though, short of telling Umberto he’s not allowed to claw it. If you lot want to give me a hand tonight, we can see if there’s anything in it that might be useful in figuring out the shape of the Unknowing, and if we find whatever book it is that probably killed the former owner, we can burn it together, make a night of it. What do you say?”

It said something about how utterly fucked-up Tim’s life had become in the last year that that actually lifted his spirits and made him smile. “Okay, but someone is going to have to teach me a new shanty. I’d imagine you don’t use the same one every time, that’d get too predictable.”

“Well, we do have our standards.”

Melanie got a look in her eye that Tim found familiar in a way that made his heart inexplicably hurt. He didn’t know why until she flicked her chopsticks in Tim’s direction and said, “Debatable.”