Chapter Text
There is a raven staring at her on the boardwalk.
Hal is telling Rose something about New York and how it ranks against Cape Kennedy in the grand scheme of his life’s trajectories. He is very sweet and vulnerable admitting to a dream lost. Rose is being rude and half listening. She was 100% listening a minute ago, but the raven is suuuuuuper staring at her and it’s almost 2pm and her stomach hasn’t stopped hurting since about 1:30.
She’s contemplating her stomach-ache when she realizes that Hal’s stopped talking and she’s let the conversational lull go on too long. He’s giving her this look that is definitely a concerned adult look. The look older adults give young adults that are acting the way she’s acting right now, namely awkward and skittish.
“Um.” She holds up some of the missing person flyers, gesturing toward the pavilion. “I’m gonna put a few up over there. If you wanna…” She waves toward the people on the beach.
“Yeah.” Hal gives her a forgiving grin which she deeply appreciates. “Absolutely. I’ll catch up with you.”
Rose speedwalks over to the bird under the pavilion roof, encouraged when it doesn’t immediately flap away, and kneels down to squint at it.
“Matthew, is that you?”
The bird flies away. Fuck.
“No,” says a familiar, nasal voice to her left. “That’s a crow.” Rose turns her head in time to see a larger black corvid tilt its head at her from the other side of the pavilion floor. His beak clacks as he says, “I’m a raven. Common mistake.”
Rose shuffles over to kneel in front of him, hugging her flyers to her chest.
“Hi. Have you been watching me the whole time?”
“Kinda. Had to talk to the boss first. Work out details.”
“Is Morpheus watching right now?”
“He is.” The raven’s feathers fluff up a bit. “Ugh. I can feel him in the back of my head. It’s the weirdest feeling. Do you need him?”
“No. He said he’d be there tonight when I fall asleep and I already met the Corinthian.” Rose shifts her weight nervously. “He’s gonna try to get Jed’s file and meet me here. So, I’m okay for now.”
“Aw, jeez. Um.” Matthew hops a little closer, conspiratorially. “Look, I’ll be around if you need me. Just say the word, kid, and I’m there.” A pause. “About the Corinthian—"
“What about me?” says a voice, suddenly at Rose’s immediate left.
Rose and Matthew both jump-recoil away from the Corinthian who is suddenly crouched down by Rose so they’re a tight little triangle. He looks innocently at them, completely out of place in his nice long-coat and slacks, baseball-crouched with his elbows on his knees. Like Rose brought a Wallstreet broker to a barbeque.
“Stop trying to startle Matthew!” Rose scolds, mostly to recover from her own racing heart. “It’s mean!”
“Yes,” says Corinthian unhelpfully.
“It’s fine,” says Matthew, hopping insolently closer and flapping at the Corinthian. “He’s an asshole by default. Hey, did you actually help, or did you play hooky while Rose is out here working?”
“Fuck you, Not-Jessamy. I can get shit done and play hooky.”
Corinthian says all this while he gets his phone out. He thumbs something open on screen, then flips it around to show Rose a photo of what looks like a section of paperwork. He grins with all his teeth, perfect and white as Rose takes the phone from him, gently confused, to examine more closely.
“Barnaby and Clarice Ferrall. 8620 Wiregrass Road, Home Land, Florida.” He’s so visibly smug but she barely cares. “I found his fosters.”
Rose’s throat closes up. “What?”
“I found him. They’re just two hours away from here.” He stands up and hooks a thumb over his shoulder, smirking. “You wanna get outta here and go see him? Get this shit over with?”
Rose shrieks and lunges up from the ground, flinging her arms around the Corinthian, flyers going everywhere. She hits him hard enough at such an angle he stumble-steps back, arms closing around her ribs to take her momentum into a swing that spins them around. Her sneakers brush the pavement as he sweeps her in a little arc before setting back on the ground.
He chuckles, stepping back. “I said I’d get it, didn’t I?”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Rose is hopping up and down, so emotional that tears are warming the back of her eyes. “You’re amazing! You did it! I hoped you would but— Ahhhh!” She literally jumps to wrap her arms around the nightmare’s neck (jeez, he is tall) once more and this time he’s ready. He catches her with an effortless (but somewhat startled) hug before setting her back down to examine the phone again. “What is this? How’d you get it?”
“Picture from Jed’s file.” The Corinthian slides his hands in his pockets again, looking pleased as he moves to peer over her shoulder. “I just popped in while she locked up for an appointment. You happy, Rosebud?”
“So happy! Should we go right now?! Just two hours away. Oh my god. I can’t believe it.” She paces the pavilion floor, babbling. “This is incredible. I thought— It’s been so long. I didn’t think you’d find him so fast. God. I have to call Lyta. I have to call Unity. I—” She stops, turns to look up at the Corinthian (who she catches smirking insufferably at Matthew) and says with deadly sincerity, “Thank you, Corinthian.”
His expression startles, goes blank, then splits into a practiced smile.
“Hey, just doin’ my job, Rosie. Like I said, great at fetch.”
“You are the best at fetch,” Rose says with emotion.
Something posed slips into reflex as the Corinthian shrugs. “If you’re serious about going, I can book us a rental car pretty easy.”
“I can do that,” Rose says, going to open her internet app. “Unity is paying me to—”
She stops.
Rose’s thumb brushed the touchscreen in her hand before remembering it was the Corinthian’s phone in her hand, not her own. The photo library twitched back a few photos. She feels the nightmare beside her go still but he doesn’t protest as she blinks at the picture of a really fancy looking plate of sushi and an annoyed looking man across the table (slightly out of focus), flipping the bird to the camera.
It’s nothing. It’s literally exactly the kind of thing she’d expect to find on a phone; it’s just this phone belongs to a nightmare. She doesn’t know how to contextualize “normal man eating sushi” into all this.
She clears her throat and hands it back.
The Corinthian doesn’t comment and simply says, “So you want to book the rental car or—?”
“Um, if you have money to—?”
“I do,” he says, utterly unruffled.
How do nightmares work? Rose is realizing she has no idea.
“Um, if you can look up some rental places, I’m gonna go find Hal. Alright?”
He nods and turns away to make the call. Rose speedwalks toward the boardwalk, glancing at Matthew who catches her eye and hops after her before flapping up onto a garbage can beside her. She tries not to look directly at him while she says, casually and totally not to the bird:
“What were you going to say about Corinthian?”
“He’s got great hearing,” Matthew points out apologetically.
“I—” Rose feels her face get hot, realizing she didn’t get far enough away to have a covert Corinthian-related conversation. “It’s fine. I guess I’m not being secret.”
“Just reminding you he’s a nightmare doing a job, Rose. That’s all. I wasn’t trying to spook you and… well, he’s being helpful so it’s all good. Just remember: You’re the boss, boss-lady. What you say goes. Alright?” He bobs his head, bright eyes glittering as he looks sideways at her. “It’ll be fine. And like I said, I’ve got my eye on you.”
Then he flies away.
The Corinthian is at her side by the time Matthew is gone.
“Do you really think we should head right there?” Rose asks uncertainly, looking up at him. “Like right now? Is it a bad idea?” Her stomach is rolling a little all of a sudden. “Just getting in a car and going? Just like that?”
The Corinthian looks a little surprised, then shrugs. “Maybe. I could go ahead of you and look around if you wanted me to. See where Jed’s living, see if he’s even there or he’s off at summer camp or something.”
“See if he’s got a good living situation,” Rose murmurs.
“I can do that.” The Corinthian tilts his head. “If he does, are you gonna go?”
“Yes. I have to. I need him to know about mom and that I’m here even if he can’t live with me.”
“So go there, check it out, come back?”
Rose pauses. “You know, yeah. If you could do that, give me a moment to, like, call people. That would be perfect. I can start figuring out transportation and… I don’t know, process that we found him. Finally.” She smiles. “Thank you again, Corinthian. It really doesn’t feel real.”
That gets a shrug from the tall-ass nightmare man who just says, “Here to please, Rosie. How nosey do you want me to be?”
“Umm, just go there and make sure he’s okay. You don’t have to talk to his fosters or anything unless you really think you need to.”
The Corinthian grins. “So only eat them if they’re being mean to Jed.”
“Sure,” Rose laughs. The hastily, “Wait. Don’t actually do that—”
“I was joking,” the Corinthian says, still grinning.
Rose is pretty sure him joking and getting permission to murder someone are not mutually exclusive activities and becomes uncomfortably aware of him in a physical way. Like realizing there is a man following you in an empty parking garage or a figure standing at the mouth of an alley. (Or that the person you’re talking to is simply person-shaped and something else entirely.)
“What if they were hurting him?” the nightmare asks with a sudden curiosity. “What would you like me to do?”
Rose blinks. “I— they won’t.”
“Right. Because the foster system is so nice.”
“The social worker said that he was with a couple of my dad’s friends. They aren’t strangers.”
“Sure. But I’m curious. If they were hurting Jed, what would you want me to do?”
“Hurt them back,” Rose snaps. “But what I want you to do and what I’m telling you to do are two totally separate things.”
“I’m not trying to trick you, Rose.”
“Feels like you’re tricking me.”
“I’m not. I’m a nightmare. Call it professional curiosity.”
Rose doesn’t love that either, so she keeps her tone very level as she says, “That’s fine, but if you got there and Jed was in danger, then you do what a normal person would do: You call CPS. Or get him out of there, you know, in a safe legal way. Then you call me. You don’t break the law or hurt anyone. Is that super clear?”
The Corinthian thinks about that, then says, “Alright, Rosie. I’m clear. I can play nice.” He smiles and it’s so winsome and charming. “I’m even good at it.”
His canines are a little sharper, Rose thinks, than a normal person’s should be. She becomes very aware of how tall he is, looking down at her. She thinks of Lucienne, their tense expression – “The Corinthian is a nightmare of hunting and killing. One of our worst.” – and she has to remind herself that he’s under her command.
He cannot hurt her or Jed. (He, maybe, just wants to hurt her or Jed, but is not out of professional courtesy.)
“Who’s the man on your phone?”
The question is out before she’s consciously decided to ask it. The Corinthian’s smile drops immediately. He doesn’t say anything and for a moment he looks honest-to-God a little frightened. Fear sits so poorly on a nightmare; it makes Rose immediately nauseous.
Fuck.
“Sorry, you don’t have to answer. Sorry.” Rose covers her face on reflex, then drops her hands to rub her palms restlessly. “I don’t know why I asked that. Seriously, you don’t have to answer.”
“I don’t?”
“No.” Rose sighs. “I mean, if you want to, that might make me feel better, but you don’t have to if it’s private—” he’s giving her the weirdest look – “or whatever, you know, you’re entitled to your secrets.”
There’s a beat.
Then, “A friend.” He looks so uncomfortable saying it, Rose isn’t convinced he offered it up willingly. “Can I go now?”
“Yeah. Of course. Sorry—”
He’s gone.
“Fuck,” Rose says softly, pressing her fingers against her eyes. “Great job. Just… great.”
She walks off to find Hal.
The Corinthian gets a text message about five minutes after he appears on a dusty backwater road in rural Florida.
Hey, I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you that question.
Which, he doesn’t know what to do with. So, he ignores it and starts walking toward the house at the end of the dusty driveway.
The heat here is a little drier than it is on the coast, but not by much. Home Land isn’t a town, actually, it’s unincorporated territory on the edge of a county with actual schools and he can taste the kind of anxieties people have in places like this.
The privacy of tiny homes with no neighbors. It’s not his preferred terrain exactly – the press and roar of the collective unconscious are more wet and ready in big population centers. It’s harder hunting in some ways – the execution, if not the acquisition. Being a predator in a crowd takes a level of finesse that he likes.
But there is something to the simplicity of kicking in a door to a small house where no one for miles will hear the scream.
Not, you know, that he’s here for any of that.
The Corinthian reappears standing where he wants to be in the over-grown backyard, standing amid the discarded shells of a few different vehicles and a variety of beer cans left to become one with the tall grass. Because the grass is up to his knees, his clothing shifts into slightly too nice boots and jeans, a cotton button down and a light jacket.
He cants his head, listening to the interior of the house.
There’s the hum of an old AC unit lodged in in back window, the rattle and groan of the water heater in the basement, ticking from some mechanism in the ancient fridge in the kitchen. There is a car parked in the gravel driveway, but from here it doesn’t smell warm with use nor does its motor click with cooling metal. He listens differently this time and hears a man snoring, but lightly. The shallow sleep of a fitful drunk.
The Corinthian steps sideways and enters the man’s dream.
The Corinthian watches Barnaby Farrel – who is dreaming of the time he nearly killed a man in a bar fight seven years ago – beat that same man half to death. He can feel it he’s slipped the man’s skin on. The blood slick on his hands, the sting of his knuckles split on his victim’s teeth. How the blood whet a familiar appetite that makes the Corinthian think this guy needs to see him when he’s back on regular duty.
“That looks fun,” the Corinthian says, never moving from where he’s leaned against the dirty brick wall. “Why don’t you finish him off?”
At his suggestion, Barnaby does. Falling deeper into the violence and dream.
The Corinthian steps out through a door in the ally back into the real world where he walks out of a closet door in the hallway. He wanders into the kitchen, rifles through some mail, checks the fridge – full of food – and looks around for signs of homework, a backpack, a baseball glove, or a game console. Some indication that a twelve-year-old boy lives here.
Finding no such evidence in the living room or kitchen, he casually checks the bedrooms. Skips the room he knows Barnaby is snoring in, checks the spare room.
He sniffs experimentally. It’s an older smell, probably weeks old now, indicating the dreamer hasn’t been sleeping here for a while but he knows it well enough; even if it’s not his specialty – the less nuanced terror of children.
Well then.
The Corinthian is not exactly a hunting dog, but he’s got some of the hallmarks. He can follow the scent and now that he’s looking for it, this house smells like fear. Jed’s fear and the wife’s, Clarice, whose got the more complex terror of a hunted adult. Smells nice, if he’s honest, but he’s here on orders so he follows the acrid stink of adolescent dread down the hall to what he thought was another closet.
He undoes the knob lock and opens it to peer down into the dirt-floor basement below.
Lit dimly by a few naked bulbs, it’s just bright enough that the shitty camper’s sleeping cot and empty ramen cups on the floor are visible even to human eyes. The faint smell of blood and piss he can pick up because he’s a nightmare built to notice… and the other smell, more immediate, that tells him there’s someone still in this shitty little dungeon. Hiding behind the old water heater.
How to do this.
“Jed Walker?” he calls down, but softly. “Jed Walker, I’m a private investigator. Your sister Rose Walker hired me to look for you. Are you down there?”
There’s a scramble and an awkward little black boy in a threadbare hoodie and dirty jeans scrambles to the bottom the steps. In the light, his hair needs a proper barber to manage and he’s certainly not getting it. His dark skin is ashy with dust and dehydration. He looks thin and he smells like a narrative of neglect.
Despite this, he scans the Corinthian quickly, taking in his height, his race, his dress, and swallows.
“You’re not playing? You’re not one of Uncle Barnaby’s friends?”
Oh. Hate that. Rose is gonna be in a terrible mood if it’s that kind of story. But the Corinthian knows victim and he knows what safety looks like to one, so he produces one of a dozen laminated ID cards from his wallet and flashes it. He’s still crouched at the top of the stairs, one hand up, palm out like surrender.
“I’m a PI. You can see my license if you want.”
Jed glances at it. But he’s twelve and he scared and he wants this to be true so he’s already climbing the third step.
“Are you allowed in here?” he asks, wringing the hem of his hoodie in two hands.
“Front door was open, Jed. And I heard from some folk in town there was a little boy here they weren’t sure was okay. So I let myself in, but if you say you asked for my help. I can be a Good Samaritan and get you outta here. Alright?”
“I… I’m asking for help.”
Jed is halfway up the steps now.
“Okay then.” The Corinthian flips the ID card away and holds out a hand instead, smiling in a way that’s reassuring but edged with urgency. “You’re a smart kid. You’ve been really brave, and I want you to be brave for me and we’re gonna walk out that door real quiet. And if anyone asks, I heard you crying through the door and that’s why I came in, alright?”
Jed’s eyes alight at being conscripted into his own rescue mission by an adult. And the Corinthian is right. Jed is pretty brave for a kid because his expression resolves immediately with determination.
“Right. Okay.”
Jed hand closes around the nightmare’s palm and Corinthian makes a bit of show of leading Jed out the front door, moving quietly, like the fucking drunk upstairs isn’t so deep in REM it would take a car backfiring to wake him. He opens the front door and the Corinthian leads Jed Walker out of the miserable little house and down the road.
“You don’t have a car?” Jed asks, incredulous after about 200 meters.
“I had ride, but they appear to have ditched me,” he says with annoyance that is not feigned anymore. He’s winging this a bit on account of Rose making it very clear that she didn’t want her brother left in danger, so it’s not exactly his best work. “It’s okay. We’ll just walk. It’s not far—"
“But he’s gonna wake up! He’s gonna catch us!”
“Hey,” the Corinthian says turning to look at him. “I’m gonna call Ms Rubio right now. If he comes out trying to get you, I won’t let him because I’m just a confused bystander and he’s a weird white man with a kid locked in his basement.” He grins, trying to take some of the tension out. “So, frankly, I’m very reasonable for not kicking his ass. Alright?”
“He has a gun!” Jed says immediately, deadly serious. “And there’s no cell service out here, mister!”
Ugh. Aggravating.
“He’s not gonna shoot me,” the Corinthian says reassuringly, certain that Barnaby Ferrel is exactly the kind of stupid little predator who shoots a stranger on rural country roads to protect $800 a month. “We’re gonna get up the road and when I get service, I’ll call the authorities. And I won’t let him take you back no matter what. Alright?”
“But what if he hurts you!?”
That’s so fucking funny the Corinthian has to wrestle a sneer.
“I’m tougher than I look,” the Corinthian says instead. “And I think I look pretty tough to start with.” When Jed still looks worried, he adds, mock-offended, “You saying I don’t look tough?”
Jed blinks, glances at the house receding away behind them as they jog lightly away. He tries a grin. “I mean… maybe. I dunno.”
“C’mon. I look so tough,” the Corinthian cajoles. “What’s not tough?”
Jed giggles, a little breathless, emboldened by the presence of a comrade, even a stranger that broke into his house on thin pretense of legal Good Samaritan-ing. “I mean… I don’t know if that jacket is very tough.”
“What, cuz I’m not wearing a leather biker jacket, I can’t be tough?”
“No, just… I dunno.” He giggles again, but nervously.
The Corinthian figures out an easy lope the kid can keep up with and they get a good quarter of a mile up the road, past a curve that puts the house out of sight. It’s not until the half-mile mark that Jed seems to relax enough to remember he has no idea who he’s running away with. He lengths his stride to jog sideways, looking up at his mysterious stranger.
“What’s it like being a private investigator?”
“Boring until it’s not. Most of being a PI is having a camera and following people around to take pictures of them while they do stuff they aint supposed to do.” He speeds up his jog a little and Jed like-wise speeds up to keep pace. “I try to keep it interesting though. You know what a bail enforcement officer is?”
Jed blinks. “No.”
“It’s when you get paid to catch people who break their bail and drag ‘em back to jail.”
“Wait. Like a bounty hunter?”
The Corinthian gives the kid a little two-fingered salute.
“You’re a bounty hunter?!”
“I have been a lot of things to keep from getting bored.”
“That’s so cool! Rose hired a bounty hunter to find me?”
“Yeah, kinda. She must really love you, kid.” He keeps moving but checks his phone for cell service. He whistles to find it still at zero bars. “You weren’t kidding. We gotta get you out of here – whoa. Are you okay?”
Jed, who’s stumbled suddenly into the Corinthian’s side proceeds to collapse as his knees give out. He’s still conscious enough to flail for help and Dream’s very puzzled nightmare catches him at the elbow and under his opposite armpit to ease the kid down to sit in the middle of the dirt road. He doesn’t know shit about human health really, but the kid’s heart is racing so fast and his dark skin’s gone ashy from lack of blood. Kneeling with him in the road, he waits for the kid to catch his breath.
“Sorry. I… I’m really hungry,” Jed pants. His voice is strained with the effort of not crying. “I can’t run anymore.”
The Corinthian blinks behind his sunglasses.
“Okay. Well, I’ll carry you straight to a burger joint. How’s about that?” He arranges his face into an encouraging grin, a split on sympathetic but a little urgent, suggesting he needs Jed’s help to make this work. “Jed, can you hang on if we piggyback this thing? Tough guy?”
Jed calms as the Corinthian talks, nods, lips pursed with determination stands up just long enough to drape across the Corinthian’s back and wrap his arms around the nightmare’s neck from behind. The Corinthian hasn’t done this in over two-thousand years, but the reflex comes back easy enough – reaching back to hook his palms behind the boy’s knees and hoist him up a bit higher on his back. Jed closes his looped arms a bit too tight around his neck, pressing his face (probably dizzy) into his shoulder.
“You good?” the nightmare inquires, feeling a little strange.
“Yeah. I’m good.”
The Corinthian breaks into a bit of a jog, veering toward the ditch on the side of the road where there’s a little more shade from the trees. Jed smells kinda bad – like an almost teenaged boy who’s not been allowed to shower or change his clothes very often. Beneath that, he smells like slow-braised fear and while that’s nice it’s still adolescent enough to come across green to him – like biting an apple before it’s ripe. Slightly sour in his senses.
“I don’t feel good,” Jed mumbles after about two miles at a light jog.
The Corinthian slows to a fast walk. “How long’s it been since you ate?”
“A few days.”
The Corinthian feels a stab of irritation and checks his phone for bars. It’s not a fake phone. It’s a real one he bought and paid for in reality, so it follows the rules of reality in a way his other affectations do not. What magic he has is not for this and, frankly, the narrative doesn’t like him out of here easy and he can’t coax it in that direction. (It’s not his nature to enable escapes. This is not really what he’s for.)
“Just try to sleep, kid. I’ll get you there.”
Jed’s arms tighten a little more around the base of his throat. He doesn’t bother to mention that would be tight enough to start choking a normal man, figuring a nightmare can be for nothing if not slightly rough handling. Jed’s fist closes on the collar of his jacket – for comfort or for purchase he can’t say.
“Can you tell me about Rose?”
The Corinthian blinks.
“Rosebud? Sure. She’s short as hell, first of all, so give it a few years and you’ll be towering over her.” That gets a small chuckle, so the Corinthian presses gallantly on, “She’s got a rainbow color in her hair, and she lives in Brooklyn. Got her own apartment and everything. Real worried about you. Sent me out here the second I told her I knew where you were just so I could make sure you were okay.”
Jed says nothing, then, “Is she nice?”
“Yeah, kid. She’s the nicest. Not too nice to send a bounty hunter to find her brother, mind you, but that’s a kind of nice ain’t it?”
“Do you… do you think I could go live with her?”
“Dunno, kid. But I don’t imagine Ms Rubio is gonna let you stay with ol’ Uncle Barnaby after this.”
Jed is quiet before switching topics. “Do you track down lost kids a lot in your job?”
The Corinthian shrugs. “Kids aren’t really my area of focus. I used to be a bit more of a… freelancer, but I had a run of bad luck. Real bad. Had to sign back on with, uh, my old agency and my old boss.” A huff. “He’s had me doing scutwork hunting down runaway and missing persons mostly.” He turns his head, putting a grin in his tone. “You’re my first rescue operation. How am doing?”
“Pretty good,” Jed says, smiling back, but tiredly. “Sorry you have to babysit.”
“Ah, it’s fine.” The Corinthian shrugs to show he means it. “I used to babysit back in the day. Not much, but a little. Real famous poet had me on for a bit as a security for her son. He was a cool kid too. Loved music. I had to fight a trio of jerks who showed up to kidnap him and the client was so grateful she wrote a song about me. Not one you’ve heard. Before your time, but pretty cool.”
He can feel Jed grin against his shoulder.
“That’s so cool.”
The Corinthian makes a noise of agreement and is momentarily distracted trying to remember the words to the song. He knows he won’t be able to – Dream struck the memory in his head so hard it got wrong, bled like ink. He forgot whose song it was and repeated it at a court function some thousand years back. He never even saw Dream. Just felt it when his king reached into his head and crushed Calliope’s song about him like an origami flower.
“Yeah. I like my job, but it’s better when I call my own shots.”
Jed lifts his head. “Do you hear that—? Oh my god! That’s his car!”
“Huh?”
The Corinthian turns in time to see a red sedan – the one from the driveway at the house – speeding up the dirt road. Ah, fuck. He’d been so stuck in his head poking at old damage he’d completely stopped listening. It’s way too late to make a run into the trees and scampering like a rabbit into the bushes isn’t an option built into him. Not for this.
“Don’t worry,” the Corinthian says, turning around to face the oncoming car, already slowing down.
The car rolls to a stop about fifty meters away and Barnaby Ferral gets out, a shotgun in hand.
The Corinthian starts to back away purely because small children are not shotgun proof even if they’re mostly behind him and also because Jed immediately starts to cry, frantically, into the collar of his jacket and grip his shirt more tightly. His terror reaches and acidic fever pitch that is a little distracting here in the Waking World – like a whiff of whiskey to a drunk, but (again) still not aged enough to interest him.
“You should put that away,” the Corinthian says evenly.
Barnaby takes the rifle into both hands, into a more ready position, his boots crunching the gravel and dirt as he follows them up the road. He smells like violence. And the Corinthian retreating is reading – to a bully and an abuser – like fear. Ferral looks the Corinthian up and down as he plods steadily forward, closing distance between them. He spends a little too long looking that the tableau – unarmed, city-adjacent outsider, backing away from him.
The Corinthian is gratified when he senses the flicker of a vicious daydream off the man – one where Jed isn’t around and he has an excuse. It’s so fucking annoying, the Corinthian stops backing away out of spite and nothing else. Barnaby stops indistinctly daydreaming about pretty blonde things bleeding and begging and focuses on reality.
“Who the fuck are you?” he says.
The Corinthian casually kneels to let Jed off his back. “You go over in the trees for a minute while Barney and I have chat. Alright?”
Barnaby doesn’t like getting ignored and cocks the shotgun for effect. “I said, who the fuck are you?”
“Go on,” the Corinthian says to Jed.
Mute with fear, Jed dashes to the side of the road, eyes darting between the two adults and spinning with all the terrible possibilities. He’s got tears in his eyes already and the Corinthian tries to smile at him, gives him an encouraging thumbs up before standing back up to face the angry hick with the gun. He sighs at the trite stupidity of it all – a dime store story he could wipe off his boot frankly.
“I’m with the welfare agency. I was sent to look in on Jed Walker. Wellness check.” He smiles a little, lazily. “You’ve been keeping the boy locked in a cellar and beating him when he mouths off, right? You know, like your daddy used to do you, Little Barn.” He tilts his head, carefully monitoring the little unfurling confusion in the man’s face. “Aren’t you glad t’be the big man, now?”
“How the fuck do you—?”
“It was good work,” the Corinthian says, quietly now, just for the man in front of him. “Humid summer. Good day for a beer or twenty, like every day was, with him. But you were strong enough to deal with an old drunk by fifteen weren’t you, Barney?” He clicks his tongue. “Course the dumb bastard fell drunk off a roof. Hard to tell a push from a fall.”
The fear then. Real. Recognition as the Corinthian tilts his head.
“I know you,” Barnaby says. “I know you.”
“Sure.” The Corinthian steps a little closer. “And I know where you live now.”
Ferral panics and pulls the trigger. Of course, he does. But there’s a split second where he thinks about running instead of shooting, where he wonders who and what this blonde stranger might be and who he’s told already, whether Jed overheard and how hard it would be to kill him too. And in that split second, the Corinthian grabs the barrel of the shotgun easy and shoves it wide just as the weapon discharges.
It's loud. The barrel goes hot in the Corinthian’s grip, smoke and flash, but he just smiles at Barnaby when the man tries to pull the gun back and the Corinthian doesn’t budge and inch. The man stares, terror in eyes that tastes like honey, so sweet he could lick it and, enjoying himself now, the Corinthian tugs the gun from the man’s fingers like you twitch a toy from a toddler. Barnaby makes a sound – a whimper swallowed as the Corinthian tosses the gun across the road.
“Guns,” the nightmare says, “I’m surprised at you. You like the smell of blood up close.”
Barnaby breaks.
He runs the hundred yards back up the road to his broken-down sedan. The Corinthian watches, hands in his pockets, contemplating the shivering fork in the narrative as Ferral fumbles with the parking brake – the story where Barnaby just drives away. The story where the Corinthian punches through the windshield and rips Barney through the laminated glass at an angle that shears his face off his skull. The other stories.
He likes one of them very well.
The sun has sunk behind the tree line, so the headlights of the car are bright on the Corinthian. Bright enough to see him clearly in the dusk shade of the country road. It’s like a spotlight as he smiles.
And he lifts his shades.
Barnaby Ferral looks into his eyes, sees them fully and – like a creature irradiated to death instantly opening a door to a nuclear core – fully pisses himself and screams like a child lit on fire. Then he floors the gas and manages to hit forty miles per hour before the car hits the Corinthian at the hips… and stops there. Barnaby goes through the windshield. He hits the ground a good twenty feet up the road where his neck snaps at a right angle and the concrete rips his face off in a long strip of red.
He's too dead to appreciate it, but the Corinthian isn’t. He sighs a little, humming as he puts his shades back on because it’s been a long, long time since he’s tasted a kill… even one he doesn’t get to eat and one he didn’t butcher, so to speak. Still, it’s something, and the Corinthian is a little regretful of it being over as he extracts himself with lazy satisfaction from the crumpled wreckage of the front fender.
He stretches a little.
Then, “Oh my god.”
Shit.
The Corinthian looks over his shoulder in time to see Jed Walker step out of the ditch, his eyes wide. He takes in the car – half wrapped around the nightmare’s waist like it hit a telephone pool on the freeway. The hand-prints in the hood. The Corinthian’s untouched clothes. His very, very dead foster parent rucked up like a gory blanket up the street.
“Uh,” the Corinthian says.
Jed stares up at him, awe-struck. “You’re a superhero.”
Okay. Well… he can work with that.
Rose Walker gets a call from the Corinthian around 7pm, as she’s climbing the stairs to check on Lyta who has, apparently, slept the entire day away and Rose is officially worried her adultier-adult supervision has come down with something. She’s about to knock on the door when her pocket starts to buzz and she steps away to take the call near the window instead.
“Hey, did you do something?” Rose demands immediately rather than say ‘hello’.
There’s a beat and she can imagine Dream’s nightmare making a confused little face. Then, “Ah, I dunno, Rosie. Can you be more specific? 'Cause I was doing a lot of things this afternoon on your orders so….”
“I mean… something against the rules. I felt something like…”
“Like what?” The Corinthian sounds a touch on edge now.
“Did you think about killing someone?” Rose demands, checking over her shoulder to ensure no one is listening. She adjusts the phone against her cheek and steps a little nearer to the window. “A couple hours ago, I got this… this feeling. And I could feel that if you did it, if you broke the rules, I’d know and I’d be able to stop you. You know that?”
There’s a much longer pause.
“Well,” the Corinthian drawls, all southern charm and easy, “I didn’t break any rules obviously ‘cause you didn’t have to stop me.”
“Why were you thinking about killing someone?”
“Because I found Jed locked in a basement,” says the Corinthian.
Rose’s insides wither. “What?”
“He’s fine now. He’s with me. We’re getting McDonalds. You wanna talk to him?”
“What?” Rose sputters. “You’re what?!”
“Here I’ll put you on Facetime.”
There’s absolutely some vindictive glee in his tone as the phone boops and the call swaps to camera-on, a shot of the ceiling and fingers as the nightmare passes the phone to someone, the babble of customers in the background, followed immediately by Rose bursting into tears because her little brother’s face swings into focus.
He says, “Rose! Rose, I knew you’d find me!” Then, “I can’t believe you found a real-life superhero to rescue me!”
And it all gets very complicated after that.