He grinned at her. Soon, they were kissing. Noisily. I hadn’t put on my protective headphones earlier, but I did now.
When the door finally opened, August and Watson came slowly through it, followed by a small number of Milo’s men. Watson had an ice pack against his face. He was sporting several bandages and a limp, but I was pleased to see he still moved with his usual stubborn determination.
“Are you fit to travel?”
“Yeah,” he said. I had to read his lips, with all the noise. “Nothing happened to you in that warehouse?”
“I happened to that warehouse.”
He smiled, and then he winced in pain.
“Try not to move your face,” I advised. “Do you remember what I said, about Prague?”
“About us going there?” Watson said it with some difficulty.
I nodded. The pilot was motioning for us to hurry up. He’d take us to the airport, and we’d hop on Lena’s father’s company jet. Commercial travel wouldn’t do, not this time. We were a strange group of people, and I didn’t want us to be conspicuous.
That would come later.
“What’s the plan, Holmes?”
The stirring in my blood when he asked me that question. Nothing in the world could replace it.
“Well,” I told him, “I have a mask for you to wear.”
I’D HEARD IT SAID BEFORE THAT PRAGUE WAS A FAIRY-TALE city. Watson repeated it now as we made our slow progression in from the airport. Steepled roofs, pastel buildings, cobbled roads and switchbacks. An astronomical clock that stood stories high in a public square. I’d been there once before with Milo when we were children. Our Aunt Araminta had decided we needed “culturing.” I think she may have mistaken us for bacteria.
“It is a fairy-tale city,” Watson insisted. “Look at those doors.” Our cab was descending a bumpy brick road, and every few feet we passed one of them. Medieval-looking metal doors, reinforced with spiny rows of hammered-in nails. “I wonder what’s behind them.”
“On this street? Souvenir shops.” I disliked it when the term “fairy-tale” was bandied about. Most often it was used to mean “whimsical.” This is inaccurate. In fairy tales, the forest swallows you up like a dinner. Your parents wrap you in a cloak and set you loose in the dark. Everything happens in threes, and only the oldest child survives. As a younger sister, I particularly resented that last implication.
“We can buy you a commemorative shot glass, if you’d like,” I told him.
He rolled his eyes, but I could tell he was pleased. “Where are we staying?”
“Somewhere far away from all this madness. Someplace sensible.”
“Define sensible.” The nurses had stuffed him with enough painkillers that he was able to talk without pain. He was, it seemed, taking advantage of that fact.
“My brother found us a bedsit flat near the auction house.”
“A bedsit.”
“It was quite expensive.”
“Holmes, we’ll be on top of each other.”
“It doesn’t have any windows, either, so it’s entirely safe.”
“No windows?” He flung an arm toward the window for emphasis. “The city’s all lit up like a storybook. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. We’re in Prague. And you rented us a studio apartment without windows?”
I frowned. “I think it was originally a maintenance closet.”
It was only the two of us in this car; Lena and Tom had gone on ahead to their hotel. Though we’d flown in together, we’d arrive at the auction separately. For his part, August said he’d find his own place to sleep. He was aware that Watson and I had fought, and I imagine he was giving us the chance to kiss and make up.
“I hate you,” Watson said to me, emphatically. “What is it with you and closets?”
“They’re often quite clean. And if they aren’t, one can usually find cleaning supplies in them.”
“Holmes—”
“Actually, I booked us a room in an Art Deco hotel,” I said, and moments later our car pulled into its circle drive. I’d always prided myself on my timing.
“Hats on,” I said, handing him his, “and sunglasses. Let them think we’re film stars.” I wanted no chance of our being seen.
“You’re awful,” he said, laughing. “I can’t believe you made me think—”
“You just had yourself beaten unconscious. I thought we might as well get you a comfortable bed.” Watson had laughed. His eyes had crinkled at the corners. Hours ago I thought he might have been dead. “There’s also a view of the river,” I said, and like a miracle, he laughed again.
Oftentimes, I withhold information from Watson for this very reason. He resents this, I think. My “magic tricks.” I don’t know if he’s understood yet who the reveals are really for.
Inside, the desk clerk raised an eyebrow at Watson’s battered face. “Lawn-mowing accident,” I told her, and she averted her eyes.
“Wouldn’t there be blades if it’d been a lawn-mowing accident?” he asked in the elevator. “Wouldn’t I be, like, sliced open?”
“It could have been a riding mower. You could have fallen off it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Please continue stripping my heroic act of all its heroics.”
“You did throw him to the ground,” I allowed. “Before he knocked you out, of course.”
The doors on our hall were all appropriately medieval. Hammered nails, stained glass, that sort of thing. When we found ours, Watson smiled to himself, and let us in.
We talked that night. It wasn’t so different from these sorts of talks when we’d had them before—I want this, and What you want isn’t possible, and What’s left for us, then, to be to each other? I always felt as though he wanted us to reach a solution, as though he and I were a mathematical proof that simply needed to be balanced. For a very long time, I thought he considered me to be the problem, and then I worried he thought that I was the solution. I’m neither. I’m a teenage girl. He is my boy best friend. We would be everything to each other until we couldn’t. The room had two beds, but we slept on opposite sides of the same one, and if I woke in the middle of the night in his arms, I can tell you that he slept through it.
He slept through it, too, when I disentangled myself from him and went to sit alone on the bathroom floor until the screaming in my head subsided. I am in control, I reminded myself. I am in control. I took fourteen breaths. I thought about the kit I had hidden away in my bag for emergencies, and then I forced myself to stop thinking about it. I am in control of this, I repeated, and felt better, and then I got back into Watson’s bed.
I had never wanted him to see me vulnerable. But what if showing vulnerability was a decision I myself made?
“Wake up.”
He stirred the smallest amount.
“Wake up,” I said again. “I need you to answer a question.”
This time, he sat up. His face was a mottled wreck. Eyes blackened, lips cut and bruised. Empirically, I knew that he needed sleep to heal, and if this wasn’t so important, I would never have woken him up. I wasn’t my great-great-great-grandfather. There was no pleasure to be had in ordering him into danger, in waking him before dawn.