“But they changed the rules for you.”
“Hardly. My brother told me everything so I wouldn’t tattle on him.” He leaned back against the table with a sigh. “I was seven. He was thirteen. Most Bookkeepers ensure they have only one son. From the first, I was a mistake.”
Alyce tightened her lips. “I heard your father’s voice over the phone. He loves you.”
“And I worshipped him. Which is why it hurt to watch him and Wes disappear together for hours into their workshop. So when Wes told me to come with him one night, of course I went.”
“He told you all their secrets.”
“He snuck me through the back door of a liquor store, shoved a flask of whiskey down the front of my pants, and told me to run.” Sidney clenched his hand in his lap. The place where he’d stabbed himself as a test had faded to almost nothing.
She studied the gesture. “And your clever escape marked you of interest to a devil who would one day—tonight—recruit your prowess in the fight against evil.”
He snorted. “The clerk caught on instantly. Wes vanished. I panicked and fell down in the parking lot. The glass sliced my femoral artery.” He flattened his palm over his hip bone, fingers resting where a bottle would have nestled. The blood spatter echoed the swirls she had seen of his hidden reven, as if the old wound had bled through the years. “But I suppose that was my penance trigger. That instant marked a change of course that set me on the path to where I am now. Didn’t appreciate it at the time since I was bleeding out in the parking lot.”
“One way to get your father’s attention,” she said. “He must have been furious with your brother.”
“He never found out. Wes told me if I shut up, he’d show me the workshop. He had a novice Bookkeeper key by then. After I recovered, Dad gave me a whipping and an excruciatingly boring lecture on alcoholism. But I kept my word, and Wes kept his.”
“Was it worth the whipping?”
He spread his hands, taking in the lab, and for a moment the drab white walls and sterile technology glowed with his reflected enthusiasm. “It was everything I dreamed. The best fairy tale with all the monsters come to life. And it was my secret.” He lowered his hands. “Except it wasn’t really mine. It was my brother’s.”
“Still, your father must have been pleased with your dedication.” She wished she’d known that boy. The strong, blunt shapes of the man he would become must have been present in the child who had known his own mind so young.
Sidney shook his head. “No one found out, not for a long time. When I was twelve, I wrote the papers Wes needed to make journeyman. He was eighteen then, and trying to balance university—regular classes, with girls and everything—with his Bookkeeper duties. He liked the real world better. The journeyman work was hard, and I wanted to turn in his application research with something that would really make the Bookkeeper masters sit up and take notice.”
“That would make your father notice you.”
His lips curled without humor. “You know me better than I knew myself.”
“You were so young.” Now she wished she’d known that boy so she could wrap her arms around him, to meet his gaze and reassure him someone, sometime, would see him for himself.
“Which is why I completely buggered the attempt to sneak into a feralis den and collect tissue samples.”
She straightened so abruptly, her chair rocked. “Why would you think—?”
“I wasn’t thinking.” He stared down as if the square floor tiles held an answer. “I crawled out my bedroom window in the wee hours of the morning. I planned to rifle the den—Dad had maps of nesting sites all around London—before the feralis returned and be home for breakfast with none the wiser.”
She slipped off the chair and crept up next to him. She boosted herself onto the counter but didn’t touch him. She just leaned a little closer to share her presence. “What happened?”
“If I’d not always had my nose buried in a book, I would have noticed how my mum kept watch. Her husband and her eldest were always gone about their own business; she wasn’t going to lose another child to strange activities she wasn’t allowed to share. Maybe after the liquor store, she suspected I’d do any stupid thing to get Dad’s attention.”
“She followed you.”
He jerked his head once in a nod. “And while she lectured me on my various sins—sneaking about, stealing pin money for bus fare, breaking a mother’s heart—the feralis returned.”
“Oh no.” Unable to stop herself, she leaned her forehead against his shoulder—his feralis-bitten, teshuva-healed shoulder.
“I’d studied these things and knew what they were. Even then, I couldn’t believe it—not the awful reality of it.”
He closed his eyes and touched the center of his forehead, as if he could push the memories down again. Her demon had tried to do that for her. But it was too late—then and now.
He continued. “I don’t know what she saw. My father never told her anything about demons. She thought he worked for a covert government agency with some code of secrecy. Whenever she got down about it, he’d joke that if he told her what he wanted for supper, he’d have to kill her. That always made her laugh.”
He took a deep breath that bumped his arm into hers. “It was just one feralis. Husk composition, mostly gull and crab. Stank worse than the Thames low tide. When the barnacle’s feeding fans started to eat her, she screamed at me to run.”
“I hope you did.”
“I’d brought forceps to collect the samples, so I stabbed those into the barnacles. They snapped shut. Almost bit my fingers off. One slap of the wing knocked me senseless. At least I didn’t have to watch her die.” Though Alyce couldn’t see his face, half-obscured by his hand against his head, she felt the shudder rip through him, telegraphed to her through the press of his arm where he hadn’t pulled away. “I woke up in league headquarters. Until then, I’d only read references to it in Dad’s notes, and I would’ve done anything to see it. But not like that.”
“A talya saved you?” Had his teshuva summoned one of its brethren to save him, just as she had been drawn to the alley? Was it even back then watching over him, a fallen guardian angel? She didn’t think Sidney would appreciate the possibility, not now.
“Everyone said it was dumb luck they found me.” He finally lowered his hand and rubbed at the bloody streaks across his knuckles—all the evidence that remained of where he’d cut himself. He obviously was unconvinced what sort of luck it had been. “There wasn’t enough of Mum to bury, and the league couldn’t allow a human investigation. So Dad put it around that she’d gotten tired of his long hours and left him. The ladies she talked to over the fence had heard her complain often enough about Dad, so they believed it.”
He grimaced. “She was snipped out of our lives so neatly, as if she’d never been. And I realized Dad had married her for exactly those reasons. I wondered if I went through his notes, would I find a checklist: acquire long-suffering wife; spawn future Bookkeeper; preserve world in formaldehyde and three-ring binders. …”
Alyce folded her hand over his to still the obsessive chafing. “You remember her, though.”
He pushed to his feet. “Not that it mattered.” He tossed the soiled scalpel in the sink and washed his hands. “My brother took it hardest. He left his Bookkeeper key behind and just … left.” He rested his dripping hands on the edge of the sink. “Dad was devastated. I went after Wes, of course, to pick up the pieces as I always did. He told me there were no more pieces. I had them all.”
“Is knowledge like that? Only one person may possess it?”
“Knowledge, no. Secrets, maybe.” Back at the exam table, he yanked the paper sheet loose from the end and unspooled a fresh length across the surface. He crumpled the old piece. “I was young, but I was ready to take his place. I knew everything he should have known. The senior Bookkeepers came down hard on my father for missing our trickery. But Dad was popular with the other masters, and by then his cancer had been diagnosed, which made the question of succession more problematic.”