* * *
Should he feel sorry for the Andrastes? For their losses? For following daft Gods who might have no idea what they were doing? Because Paddington couldn’t quite muster that. They’d perverted another town, destroyed another community, all to manipulate him into killing his brother. A brother they’d kept from him. A father they’d ushered out of his life. A mother they’d forced to lie to him.
Spiders in the centre of their web.
And here were all the flies:
The Team: operating as always with mechanical efficiency. Truman had relieved Paddington watching the castle; Mitchell was inspecting weaponry, laid out carefully on the kitchen’s centre bench; Skylar was presumably guarding McGregor, who was diligently translating their latest Book of horrors.
The werewolves: barely recognisable without their beer and singing. Where were the louts? The trouble-makers? When had they been replaced with this sagging group of hollow warriors? Should he say something to them? Probably. He couldn’t think what, though; he’d never really understood them. He’d never empathised with anyone on Archi.
His wife: off in one of the other rooms, shocked and terrified at Ianthe’s death and the wolves’ betrayal of the truce. Paddington wished he could find her and take comfort in her presence, but knew she didn’t want that right now. When she was ready she always came to him; she only got mad if he tried to talk to her before that.
Paddington himself: dislodged from his spot staring at the stars and mulling over his abnormality. What he’d thought was perfectly normal – that he could feel the wolf in him even when he was human – was a weirdness to others of his kind. Was its absence the reason Lisa had so much trouble readjusting when she turned human again? Was it why he’d found being a wolf so effortless: because he retained his humanity where the others lost theirs? Was that significant? Was it of use somehow? Three-God knew.
The missing fly, Clarkson: also abnormal. A vampire in sunlight. Was that significant? Did it make him the more likely than Beck to be Paddington’s brother?
The last fly in the web was Beck. “Looking for somewhere to belong?” Beck asked from the couch as Paddington wandered past.
“Yeah. I seem to have isolated every one of my friends. I have a talent for it, I think.”
Beck smiled. “Don’t take it to heart. I’m no better.”
Paddington shrugged and took a seat in front of the couch. It was hard foam and thoroughly designed, its sweeping curves elegant but deeply uncomfortable. “You just come off as nervous.”
“I’m not nervous, I… I suppose I never really expect people to think of me. I’ve always been a bit… absent. Stuck in my own head because no one else cares what’s in there. No one to vent it at, I suppose.” He grinned, but his eyes wouldn’t meet Paddington’s. Add in the stark overhead lights creating pools of shadow in his deep sockets and the impression was of a grinning face that wasn’t seeing. A blind smile. “No escape, so it all built up in my brain. One ever-expanding monologue.”
“No family?” Paddington said. Of course there wasn’t. “No friends?”
“A few acquaintances. No chums or mates.”
“Girl?”
“Hah! That’d be the day.”
Paddington shrugged. “Maybe today is. I landed my wife the last time Adonis tried to fulfil a prophecy. Maybe this is your turn.”
Beck’s fingers twisted and curled around one another. “That would require me making some kind of move, which would require her noticing that I exist.”
“You’re not as invisible as you think,” Paddington said. “You think your life is boring or forgettable? You’re fighting vampires. With werewolves. That’s a camp-fire story that will last you a lifetime.”
Beck flicked the flop of hair away from his right eye. “Maybe I’ll do something when this is all over. Assuming I’m still alive, that is.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“It’s okay. Really.” Beck looked right at him. “Better me than you, anyway. You have a whole life. Wife. Career. All that. I only have hopes. And that’s okay.” He smiled and averted his gaze. “It really is. I’ve never been extraordinary or… great in any way. If one person has to die so that everyone else lives, well… I don’t mind if that person is me.”
Was Beck serious? Sure, Paddington had been through tough, friendless times in his life. Years of them. But he’d never thought so little of himself as Beck did.
“You just want to lie down and die like that?” Paddington asked.
Beck blinked and darted his head as if Paddington had tried to slap him. “What? No, of course not. But it would be nice to think my death might do some good. Does that make sense?”
“Not really.”
Beck sighed and he seemed old, so much older than the thirty-one he must be. “Sometimes, I just get tired. Of living. It’s like… everything’s so hard. Getting up. Going to work. Smiling. Caring. Sometimes drawing breath… doesn’t seem worth the effort. I savour those moments as I’m drifting off to sleep because I might not wake up. And what would the world care? What difference would it make?”
What was he supposed to say to that? Anything? Nothing? This speech wasn’t spur-of-the-moment, this was almost rehearsed. Beck had thought this before, maybe hundreds of times, because – as he’d said – he’d never had a chance to let it out. It had rumbled around in his head, unable to dissipate.
“It’s not that I want to die,” Beck continued, “I just… don’t care whether I live.” He smiled, a genuine smile all the way to his eyes that was fond and bitter all at once. “I doubt anyone will miss me.”
“They would.”
“Maybe, now that I’m in a prophecy.”
“They would have before.”
“You’re basing that statement on… what evidence?”
That was, strictly, true. He didn’t have a shred of proof. Before Paddington could think of a reassurance, McGregor burst into the living room. “The results are in!”
“Results?” Mitchell asked.
“Genetic test,” McGregor said, “to see if Paddington and Beck are in the same family.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Need to know,” Truman said from the window, as if that explained it all. “What’s the result, doctor?”
“It’s, uh, not.”
“We’re not related?” Paddington asked. Surely that couldn’t be right. They were bonding so well.
“No, I don’t know if you’re related,” McGregor said. “I can’t tell one way or the other. With Clarkson either.”
“Wait, you tested all of us?” Mitchell asked. One of his hands inched toward the weapons he’d been cleaning on the kitchen bench. He’d been screwed over enough times by Paddington’s secrets to warrant a little paranoia.
Provided he didn’t actually pick up one of the guns. At that point Paddington would find cause for worry…
“Not all of us. Just Paddington, Clarkson, and Beck,” McGregor said. “Well, I ran control tests against me because I wasn’t sure if werewolfism or vampirism would affect the results.”
“What did you find?” Truman asked.
“They do. Humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes; Clarkson has twenty-one and Paddington has thirty-one.”
“So you can’t tell if they’re related?” Truman asked.
“I can, but I’ll need samples from Adonis and one of his sons, and from one of the werewolves and his non-werewolf brother. Without that, I’d have to research wolf and cat genetics and I doubt anyone has ever tried to match fathers between species before, so it will take time. A lot of it. Which is… not something we have.”
“Go translate your Book,” Beck said. “We can see what’s plain in front of us.”
McGregor scurried off. “Hurry,” Truman called after him. “We’ve waited too damn long already.”
“You okay?” Beck asked Paddington.
Somehow, having no confirmation made it seem more real. This relatio
nship wasn’t being forced on them. They could deny it, but if they chose to accept it then it was theirs. Not only a thing of birth, but a thing of choice.
Their parents had chosen to hide this. They had chosen to embrace it.
“I’m great,” Paddington said.
“Even though you’re going to kill me?” Beck said, a twinkle of mischief in his eyes.
“I’d be more cut up about it if you actually seemed to care,” Paddington said. “Nonetheless, I shall do my utmost to hold at bay my murderous impulses.”
“Don’t be like that,” Beck said. “It might not be deliberate. It could be your ineptitude that does me in.”
“Or Adonis might trick me into it.”
“You do keep falling for his tricks.”
“Glad you’re both having fun,” Truman said, “but you might wanna take this more seriously.” He returned to watching out the window; Beck made an oops-we-made-daddy-mad face to Paddington.
“I’m going to check on Lisa,” Paddington said. She might still want more time, but it was possible she wanted comfort as much as he did.
“Are you okay?” he asked the curled-up form on the bed. A nice, neutral question. Surely she couldn’t take issue with him not giving her space with a question like that.
She glanced around at him, standing limply at the foot of the bed. “With what? Watching a man die in front of me, or seeing the wolves tear Erato to pieces, or the whole murderous vibe? Or… what happened to Ianthe.”
Paddington approached her side of the bed and squatted. “Any of it. All of it. Us.”
Her eyes sought him out. It was too dark to be sure, but there may have been red rings around them. “Us?”
How to phrase it? “We haven’t been that good lately,” he said. “There’s been a lot on and we haven’t really agreed how to approach it.”
Lisa sat up. “So, what? You want to talk about our feelings?”
Why did she always make that sound like an offence or a weakness? “I want… I wanted to keep you out of this not because I don’t think you can handle it, but because I wanted to spare you all this. Both of you. Spare you—”
“Spare me meeting your brother?”
“We didn’t know about him—”
“No, we thought your father was out here. We didn’t know he’d died of cancer in the interim.”
Stranded on Archi, she could never have met his father, but Paddington had never even considered that as a reason to come. Was she more concerned with family dramas than apocalyptic ones? Had she risked war and death just to be with him for his family reunion?
“You don’t have any other family, Jim. For thirty years you thought your dad was dead; you weren’t close to your mother until her last month. So maybe family isn’t important – or you’ve told yourself it isn’t – but I think it is.” Her accent attested to that: she was old enough when she met the MacBeans that her Archian accent should have been set, but she’d adopted the Edinburgh accent of her kin. Paddington didn’t blame her – as a child he’d practiced an Estuary accent from the wireless rather than accept the rounded tones of simple Archi folk.
Just another way he’d made himself different; an outsider.
“Yet you thought you needed to face this alone,” Lisa said. “Even now that I’m here you won’t let me help.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess I just… I’ve always had to deal with big stuff myself, not with someone beside me. It was just me, last time. I’m not used to having a support network.” Was her expression softening? Hopefully. “How did you do it?” he asked. “When you met your family? How did you… adjust?”
“I had my mum with me – my adopted mum. And I… I think I was quiet a lot of the time. Let them talk. They liked to talk: places they’d gone, famous people they knew. All lies, no doubt, but entertaining lies. Good lies, to make me feel at home.”
Home? There was a concept. He’d always hated Archi; told himself he belonged on the Mainland, that he’d love it here. Now he was here, though, and all he wanted was to be back on Archi. To see familiar faces and deal with their petty problems.
At some point he’d taken her hand. It was nice, being here with her. Being a couple again.
“So Joel is your brother?” she asked. “I heard McGregor yelling up a fuss.”
“The test was inconclusive, but it fits. Our parents even gave us matching names: James and Joel.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Oh, so now we are talking about feelings?” he asked.
“James. Be serious. Your mother lied to you your entire life. I’m not proposing we hold hands and chant, but yeah – we should talk about this.”
Paddington shook his head. “I don’t know how I feel, really,” he said. “Happy to find family, excited, sad at the lost years, but I’m not mad at my mum. It takes a heck of a will to stand up to Adonis; I can’t blame her for bowing to his threats. That said, a few subtle hints or warnings would have been nice.”
“She did want you to tell Adonis that she was right for believing in you.”
He smiled. “Yeah.” Except… that implied the two of them had talked about him. About this. Which implied that Adonis had told her what was in the prophecies. That she’d known what he was destined to do. How long had she known?
And how did she believe in him – that he would murder his brother, or that he wouldn’t?