“What has the Kelyndar house got to do with it?”
Nothing. Nothing, when Gideon thought about it. His mind had simply dropped a fire curtain to save the theatre from bursting into flames, and on that curtain was painted the final happy outcome of the last time he’d found Lee lying unconscious and bleeding, flat on his back in a hole. “Shut up, Zeke, okay?”
“You don’t get it.” Zeke scrabbled back a little way, sending shards of broken concrete bouncing into the pit. “I’m a coward.”
“Of course you’re not. You are a bloody nuisance, though, yapping on when I’m trying to think.”
“When we were all out at the Cheesewring last summer, and Tamsyn stopped the rock from falling with my little lads underneath it—when she held it in the air, and you walked right underneath it to rescue them...”
“You don’t need to think about that. It’s all over.”
“I think about it all the time. I couldn’t go in and save my own kids, and I can’t go down there now.”
Gideon understood. He’d have been racked with shame every day, in Zeke’s place: there were worse things to life than ending it under a falling rock. He saw a place where he could land without hurting Lee, and the rest of it didn’t matter, not really. He jumped.
The floor of the narrow space was scattered with little metal discs. Lee was lying in a heap of them, the shards of a shattered packing crate all around. Gideon’s feet shot out from under him. He thumped to the ground at Lee’s side, hauled up onto hands and knees and leaned over him. “Lee? Lee, darlin’, wake up.”
No change in the colourless face. This was better than Kelyndar, Gideon decided. That time, Lee had been bleeding from a terrible head wound. The impact of his fall had been bad enough to knock his psychic gifts into abeyance for a while. This was nothing like so fearsome. There wasn’t a mark on him. Gideon laid a hand to his cheek. “Lee.”
“Is he all right?”
Gideon flinched. Ezekiel was kneeling opposite him, eyes wide. “Jesus, Zeke. I thought you were too scared.”
“I was.”
“And yet here you are.”
“I... I slipped.”
Gideon clapped a hand to his mouth. He didn’t want to burst into a gale of laughter here, not in a crypt with his poor husband lying hurt and unconscious. “Oh, my God,” he managed at last, voice strangled. “I swear, it must’ve taken more balls to admit that than it took me to rescue those kids.”
“Is Lee all right?” Zeke demanded with severity. “What is he lying on?”
“Gold coins of some kind, I think. Can’t really see in this light.”
“Have you checked him over?”
Yes, of course. He’s fine, just out cold. Gideon couldn’t say the words out loud. If he did, he’d be faced with their blatant untruth. Instead he began his assessment, the procedure drummed into every junior copper upon finding a fallen body. The first step was to press your fingertips against the big artery under the jaw.
And that was why he hadn’t done it. Because he knew—had known from his first glance down into the crypt—that the crucial difference between Tregear’s place and this one was that, down in the Kelyndar pit, injured and broken as he was, Lee had had a pulse. “No,” he whispered. “No.”
“What?!” Zeke jolted forward. He knocked Gideon’s hand away. Urgently, gently, he too carried out the check at Lee’s carotid. He picked up one wrist—Gideon observing, from galactic distances out, how the strong, elegant hand fell lifelessly back—and searched for a beat in the vein. Lifted one of Lee’s eyelids: at last pressed an ear to his chest, listening. “Oh, Christ,” he said, sitting up. “Oh, Christ, Gideon.”
“No.” No was the only word left to Gideon now. The floor was falling out from beneath him, his innards turning to cold sludge. “No,” he said again, and this time his brother seized him by the neck of his jumper, big fist twisting hard. “Damn right, no,” Ezekiel rasped. “Gideon! This isn’t how it happens, not for him. Make it not be true!”
So Gideon detached Zeke’s grip on him, then lifted his husband into his arms. God only knew what spinal injuries Lee might have, but they hardly fucking mattered if he was dead. Gideon pushed one knee beneath Lee’s shoulders, raised him so that he was cradled, held tighter than Tamsyn when they comforted her after a scare, as close and completely as a kid in the womb. He took the poor cold hand and tucked it against his own cheek, pressed his brow to Lee’s. “Come back now,” he said, a growl of command in the words. “I know you have to help people cross, but you don’t have to bloody go with them. I’m here. Come back to me.”
Lee’s hand twitched. Gideon didn’t feel him take a breath, didn’t pick up a reanimating jolt in his chest. There was a pure, keen eeriness in the touch of one chilly fingertip to his cheekbone. “There’s a tunnel,” he said, suddenly seeing it. “One of them’s real as can be, and it starts in the corner over there and goes down in a coil, and it meets one of the old smuggling tunnels from Polmenear Cove.” A chuckle shook him. “God almighty, the old pastor of this place was involved with it! Up to his hips, he was, making deals and passing on the goods. All these coins are his, the profits he hid away down there. And... the land’s called Underhill, not the house, because that’s where all the action was. Under the hill.”
Zeke cleared his throat of the concrete dust hazing the air. “How can you know all this?”
“He’s showing me. It’s nothing to do with what happened to him, but he’s down there now with all the layers of time and the memories, so he can see.”
“You said one tunnel’s real. What about the other?”
“Oh, the other...” Again came the brush of Lee’s fingertip against his cheek. “The other’s where he is. You take one step out of this place and you’re in it, one turn and you’re lost forever, unless someone brings you back. I’ll bring you home, my lad. Take a fix on the light of my mind. Put a hook in my flesh if you need to and pull yourself home, hand over hand on a rope to me.”
The moth-wing touch described an arc. Gideon read it—this hieroglyph, this sweep of a wing to his soul—with perfect clarity. The first weary movement of Lee’s journey back to him. Gideon slackened his grip a little so the hieroglyphs could continue: another arc, and another, and then the unsteady outline of a kind of labyrinth curve. In and round, a delicate caress of Gideon’s lower eyelashes, down to the corner of his mouth...
Lee sucked a huge breath and sat up. He flung his arms around Gideon’s neck, loosed a yell that sounded like death or the world’s best come, and burst into tears.
Gideon held him fast. “Fucking hell,” he said against his ear. “What a fright you gave us! Where have you been?”
Lee couldn’t answer. Instead he turned his face to Gideon’s, fastened as much of a grip as he could in the short hair at his nape, and pulled him down into a kiss.
Ezekiel sat gazing at this reunion for almost twenty seconds. “Really,” he rumbled disapprovingly at length. “Do I have to remind you that this is sacred ground?”
Two pairs of startled eyes met his. “Are you bloody serious?” Gideon began, with a dangerous rumble of his own.
But Zeke was grinning from ear to ear. “Course I’m serious,” he said. “Honestly, the pair of you. Get a tomb!”
Chapter Eight