Chapter Text
Augustine had never gone to the corner shop that once sold ice cream.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have much of a sweet tooth—he didn’t, but that was beside the point—it was that it had been closed since he and John had moved in. As far as Augustine was aware, no one had made a bid on the place in that time, either.
It was the sort of place that sat like a scraped-out, skeletal corpse—a memory of times long-gone and half-forgotten. The original name had been worn off with time and age, leaving nothing but boarded-up wrap-around of windows. Augustine swept around the building, his eyes raking over every possible point of entry. A few of the windows were broken, a shattered-glass grin blockaded with pieces of cardboard taped up to keep vermin of all varieties out.
None of it appeared to have been recently replaced.
The only thing that caught his eye was a piece of metal gleaming in the low light. It was stark and shining against the rusted out, filthy expanse of metal.
“Really?” He asked the howling, empty night around him. “A fresh-cut lock. Come on now, darling, that’s hardly like you.”
He knelt beside it, procuring a handkerchief from his pocket. The padlock looked like it had been cut through by a pair of particularly sharp bolt-cutters.
New, if Augustine had his guess.
“Now this is really unlike you, my love, are you so eager to see me again?” He turned the lock over in the handkerchief, the gash so even and sure. It reeked of desperation. “You are, aren’t you? What time limit are you on?”
He set the lock back down where he’d found it, left like a gift. Just in case.
But it did mean the door was unlocked.
The interior of the little shop was a wasteland of dust and debris. The counter that might have once been lovely and crowded was long-cracked and coated in a heavy, unblemished layer of dust. The vinyl stools stood like tiny soldiers; a few fallen brethren had snapped under the weight of time and age and littered the floor.
The light of the street lamps bled through the occasional breaks in the boarded-up windows, leaving the interior cast in little more than a dull glow.
“Love?” Augustine asked the dark, dust-choked room. “Come on, now. I know you’re in here. You were never a coward. You were never afraid of confrontation.”
He breathed in the smell of decay and moldering leather, head tipped back as he tried to pick any other scent out of the air. Like he could draw her atom by atom from the space around him and build her anew from nothing at all.
“Are you sneaking up behind me?” Augustine snapped his head around to find the empty space behind him, and then back again to find the rest of the room hollow around him. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Do you think I’m afraid of you, my dear? Do you want me to wait for you to approach me on your own, kitten? Is that it?”
He tucked his hand into his pocket, fingers brushing delicately down his own side for just a moment before he stepped forward. The echo of his footsteps bounced off the walls. He peeked around the counter, eyes skating over the dusty, abandoned cash register and the rack that only held the shattered remnants of an array of glasses.
Nothing.
Nothing but the long-lost memories of a lifetime that Augustine never lived.
“Did you like it, Professor?”
Augustine’s back snapped upright at the sound of an unfortunately familiar voice behind him.
One heel click followed another—a sound that must have been intentional, knowing how carefully she must have walked to reach the point that she was but a few feet behind him. His back was to her; a dangerous place to be for anyone who isn’t the Anatomist.
Which, as Augustine turned to face Ianthe Tridentarius, he was still tremendously certain she was not.
There was no controlling his expression as it collapsed into a smarting irritation. “How clever do you think you are?” he asked, tucking his hands into his pocket. “Really? I’ll admit, pet, you did have me for a moment. I didn’t think anyone knew she was leaving me notes, let alone knew enough about the notes to know how to leave them.”
Ianthe shrugged one thin shoulder. She was wearing the same flowing, bustier-cinched, oversized button-down style that she’d been in the majority of the times that Augustine had seen her. “I’m smarter than you give me credit for.”
A breath huffed through his nose as he took a step towards her. “Listen, duckling, I know you’re obsessed with me. And fair—there’s a lot to be obsessed with. But this is getting to a bit of an excessive point. What is it that you want? You’ve got an autograph, is it another? You want a pair of panties?”
Her nose crinkled. “I want to work with you. I want you to mentor me. You have no idea what I’m capable of, you have no idea what I can offer you.”
“What? A shit cup of coffee? Maybe if you pranced around in—”
“You’ve already made a maid dress joke if that’s what you’re thinking about saying,” Ianthe said, her tone artfully and pretentiously bored. She gestured, the dull light catching with a glimmer on something in her hand.
Augustine raised a brow. “You brought a knife,” he said, easily. “Well, forgive me, I wasn’t aware I was being threatened into taking you on as an apprentice.”
“I’m not threatening you. If I was threatening you, you would know it,” Ianthe said.
She stepped closer, each movement swaying and loose in a way that Augustine could read the calculations into. She was nervous in the way that young women were so often nervous in the face of what they want—standing on the precipice of what she craved.
It was a game to her.
Augustine hummed as she invaded his personal space, the delicate scent of a floral, powdery perfume wafting off her. It smelled familiar in the way that had haunted his dreams. He had to have been dreaming. The scent didn’t match the woman. Ianthe always looked like a young woman who smelled like the metallic tang of blood, or of cherry and almond and preserved corpses and something deep and dark and hungry.
He had to have been dreaming.
There wasn’t any other reason that Ianthe would be wearing the same perfume that he had smelled in the bedroom, buried in the shirt that was tucked between the cushions of his sofa and no—no it wasn’t—
It couldn’t have been.
For a moment, a flash-bang of fear gripped his chest and squeezed. The idea of Ianthe, leaving the smell of some old, incongruous scent.
There was only one other option.
Augustine didn’t know which one was worse.
“Why Naberius?” He asked, his head tipping to the side as Ianthe pressed the flat of the blade against her lips.
“Why not?” She asked. “Babs was always annoying. He was always complaining, always following at Coronabeth’s heels like a puppy. He was strong, sure, strong and pretty and all of those nice things.”
“You killed him because of your attachment to your twin sister,” Augustine said, too flat to even pretend it was a question. “You preferred to keep Coronabeth’s attention on yourself. Interesting.”
Ianthe’s gaze flicked up to him, a flash in the amethyst-burn eyes that stared up at him. “No! Babs was there. I wanted to try, I wanted to leave you a message. I wanted to show you what I could do. Coronabeth saw his body! She knew I did it, she knew I killed him and she helped me. Did you put that one together? Did you know how much work went into that? I shoved my fingers down her throat to make her throw up. I wanted it to be perfect to show you what I was capable of. I wanted to show you that I’m just like you.”
Augustine’s lips pressed closer together. “Like me how?”
“I know,” Ianthe said. “I read your books. The way you write about them. You’re like me. You’re like us.”
A heavy sigh built up in his chest and dripped down into the space between them. “Alright. I can tell you’re busy projecting on me. I don’t know what happened with your parents but I’m truly sorry for whatever it is your father did that made you cling to me like an ill-formed zebra mussel and lie about why you killed that boy whose name I have, actually, forgotten again. But you and I are nothing alike.”
“I’m not lying about why I killed Babs!” She said, her voice teetering on the edge of an increased flare of a temper.
Interesting.
Not fascinating.
But interesting.
“Yes, you are. You didn’t kill him because he was convenient. He wasn’t convenient. Unless it was easy to seduce your sister's boyfriend. That might have been easy; he seemed like quite the easy target for that one. You really did have an ulterior motive.”
“Then why?”
“You don’t want me to say it, my little pet psychopath. Come on now, you know what I mean. You’re obsessed with your sister—you need her attention and, quite frankly, she needs yours. One day she’s going to kill you, or one day you’re going to kill her.”
There it was.
A flash of steel nudging up—horrifyingly close to the bandage at his throat where Mercymorn had already cut him once.
Psychotic bitches and slitting my throat, was his only thought as he tipped his head back to avoid the press of her narrow blade.
“A kitchen knife?” He sighed. “Trite.”
“You’re important enough to me that I won’t kill you.”
“Of course not,” Augustine said, sounding only half as bored as he felt. He adjusted his hand in his pocket. “No one is as important to you as your sister is, Ianthe, but do you think she’s going to stay? Do you think she’s going to stay knowing that you’re one step away from snapping? What happens when she leaves you too, chickadee? Are you going to break her legs to keep her there? Or rip her heart out and put her on ice and—”
Augustine watched the muscle in her arm flex in the prelude to a swing.
At once, the room lit, beautifully, in a flash-bang of sound and the scent of two things in equal measure.
Blood—
—and gunpowder.
Ianthe’s eyes were open. The knife hit the ground a handful of seconds before her knees did.
“Well,” Augustine said, his eyes still bored when they inspected the burnt hole in his jacket pocket. He flicked the safety back onto the gun he’d kept secret in his side holster and slid it out properly in anticipation. The hand that had threatened him was pressed to Ianthe’s side, fresh blood leaking from between them. “That was exciting.”
Augustine surmised that, based on when he called Pyrrha—and based on the voicemail he was forced to leave—he had a few more seconds to make his way outside.
“Never been shot before have you?” He asked, clicking his tongue as he stepped around the spreading puddle that was threatening to stain his shoes. “Tsk. Might want to work on that. At least two detectives are going to be here awfully soon, so you’re either going to die or rot in prison. Pick well, I suppose.”
He made his way towards the exit. “I look forward to never seeing you again, Ianthe.”
###
It was a little under a minute before Pyrrha’s car screeched around the corner—and another fifteen seconds before she was there.
“Quinque,” she snapped, her weapon drawn as he took a lazy drag on the cigarette he’d lit while he waited. “We got reports of a gunsh—”
She cut herself off as he tipped his head towards where his pistol lay a respectful distance away from himself. “She tried to stab me. Your copycat is inside, by the way. Ianthe Tridentarius—not so terribly surprising, I suppose. She has a chronic obsession with her twin sister and was–my assumption–terribly jealous. Not that she enjoys being told that.”
Pyrrha stared. And stared. And stared.
More cars arrived.
Someone took his statement between drags off his cigarette. Someone called John—probably Pyrrha, given everything—and John called him. Augustine sent it to voicemail and shot him a text, a quick: I’m alive, love, I’m talking to Pyrrha’s people. It was all just some kid.
John returned his message quickly: an array of questions, asking if he needs anything, if he’s going home, if he’s okay.
Augustine answered each of them in turn.
By the time the smoke cleared and by the time Pyrrha returned, her face was grim.
“Augustine,” she said, voice even. “The blood.”
“Quite a bit of it. Is she still kicking? I don’t think I got anything important, I was aiming out of my pocket.”
“It’s not yours?”
“The gun?” It was already taken by one of Pyrrha’s men, but he glanced in the general direction it had disappeared down. “Yes, of course it was mine. And I would like it back eventually, my dear detective.”
Pyrrha took two deep breaths, the steadying things that made Augustine offer her a cigarette. She took it with a grumble of noise that sounded slightly akin to the thank you she’d never give him. “The blood, Quinque,” she said, stiff around the cigarette. “It’s not yours?”
“No?” It came out more as a question than an answer as Augustine offered her his lighter. “I presume, my dear brains-over-brawns detective, that it belongs to the unsightly blonde girl in the middle of the puddle.”
She plucked it from between two narrow fingers. “There wasn’t a body.”
Augustine froze—the air around him all but crystallizing in the sudden wash of a thick June-freeze. It settled around him, slowing him down to the atoms as he threatened to get frost-bite in the space between his lungs. “Please, please, tell me that’s because you’ve fished her out of it and are in the process of arresting her.”
Pyrrha looked at him with a completely unique expression—one that Augustine had never seen written across her features. She’d looked at him, over the course of their long pseudo-friendship, with any number of expressions: rage, fury, frustration, anger, irritation, wrath, vexation, violence, displeasure, seething resentment, and—once—mild amusement.
Now, she looked at him with a near-genuine fear. Not of him, no.
For him.
“We’ll take you back to the station tonight while we canvas the area for her but…” Pyrrha stared down at the ember-fire cherry of her cigarette. “I heard you giving your statement.”
I heard you giving your statement meant a lot of things at once. It meant she heard him talk about the notes she left, the places she left them, the secrets she’d known about him. She knew where he lived, where his bedroom was, where he’d hidden every inch of himself.
She was clever in a way that Augustine would have loved had she not been so obsessed with him. Infuriatingly so.
“I’ll be fine.” Augustine said. “Any chance I could have my—”
“No.”
“Is that a no you won’t let me go or no I can’t have my gun back?”
“Yes.”
Augustine scowled. “Detective Dve,” he pressed. “I’m perfectly capable of handling myself. As we just saw.”
“Congrats, you shot a twenty-four year old girl,” Pyrrha deadpanned. “I’ll send a few cars.”
Silence reigned for a few moments longer.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Augustine said, with no small measure of sarcasm. He stubbed his cigarette out in the concrete and swallowed twice around the knot in his throat. “I’ll call you in the morning, barring my imminent murder.”
Pyrrha didn’t wave. She didn’t look up from her own half-gone smoke.
After a few moments, she tossed it down beside his, grinding out beneath her heel.
###
Ianthe was not the Anatomist.
She couldn’t have been.
Logically—that did not mean that Ianthe was’t the one leaving the notes.
Augustine’s knuckles were stark against his skin, as the sweat of his palms slid slick over the leather of his steering wheel. The blinding lights of two police cars were lazily sweeping every turn behind him, following incessantly like Pyrrha’s borrowed pups down the lazily winding roads that led back to the isolated little cottage that John had fucking insisted on.
If Augustine had his way he’d live in the city.
He wouldn’ actually—but it was good to pretend.
John had texted him a dozen and a half times since he’d left, filling his phone with desperate pleas for updates, for a conversation, for literally anything that would give him comfort and ease. They were nothing. They were meaningless in the long, aching movement of time sliding over time, water sliding over ice as if they were anything more than atoms suspended in different configurations.
It made perfect sense for Ianthe to have been the one leaving the notes. It made perfect sense for Ianthe to be the one talking to him. Augustine would have recognized her voice, he would have known it was her if she hadn’t used the blasted contraption to blare his ears out with the endless yes-no.
It made far more sense that it would be her than it would be the Anatomist—lying in wait for him, watching him, wanting him.
It was stupid to contemplate, it was stupid to have ever contemplated it.
Distantly, Augustine considered a host of realities—one in which it was the Anatomist, and one in which it was Ianthe.
Less distantly, Augustine considered yanking the wheel of his car as hard as he could to the left and seeing exactly how slowly his mother died.
The worst part about suicidal ideation was the fact that, rather unfortunately, John still wouldn’t be home for another fucking day and someone had to feed the fucking cats and someone had to tell Mercymorn why he left in such a rush after fucking her inside out.
Fucking infuriating.
Augustine parked, safe and whole, in his empty drive and didn’t blink an eye at the miserable array of cop cars that followed.
One of them—young and spotty enough that Augustine was nearly insulted by how fresh the blood he sent to protect him was—tried to offer some comforting words, but Augustine merely waved him off.
The door fell shut behind him, heavy and loud in the darkened empty room of his darkened empty house with nothing but the idle mewing of confused cats and the ticking of the clocks that he couldn’t fucking stand and the stupid fucking work that he’d been doing laid out across the stupid fucking table.
“I hate you,” he told the greyscale pile of work. “Were you real? Were you ever real? Or were you just some fucking ghost here to haunt me? Is that it—you’re some spirit of malcontent?”
Augustine picked up his own book—the one he’d splayed open like an autopsy of his own theories—and dropped it with a clatter to the floor. “Go on then,” he said, as the notebook filled his hands for the briefest moment before it spread itself over the living room floor. “Haunt me. If you want to show me everything you are, if you’re fucking real then haunt me.”
For a long, aching moment, silence thundered around him.
“That’s what I thought.”
Augustine crouched to pick the book up, knowing he ought to clean up the mess of research he’d made before John came home with questions. He collected a bin from the kitchen and started sweeping the papers at once—handful after handful before his fingertips landed on the folded newspaper piece she’d left him.
His stomach soured and he wondered, briefly, if he was going to lose the dinner he’d made of Mercymorn’s cunt.
Beneath it, a piece of paper he’d never seen before was neatly folded and labeled with an angry dash of his own favorite pen: READ ME!!!!!
Loathe as he was to follow the instructions on a piece of paper, Augustine opened it.
I HATE YOU!!!
I HATE EVERY PART OF YOU, I HAVE EVERY SINGLE THING YOU’VE DONE I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU
I’VE ALWAYS HATED YOU, I HATE YOU SINCE BEFORE I KNEW YOU!! I HATE YOU SINCE BEFORE YOU KNEW ME!!
I WAS RIGHT
I’VE ALWAYS HATED YOU!!!!
GOODBYE FOREVER YOU USELESS, SPINELESS, PILE OF FETID ROTTING MEAT IN A TERRIBLE AND AWFUL SHADE OF BLUE (AGAIN!!!! STOP!!! WEARING!!!! DARK!!!!! BLUE!!!!!!! I HATE IT!!!)
— YOUR ANATOMIST
The vitriol that spilled from the note itself was ignored in favor of the line she scratched over and over and over again until it was bolded out against the paper she’d stolen off his desk.
His paper.
His pen.
I’ve always hated you.
I’ve always hated you.
I’ve always hated you.
It rang in his mind, bouncing around itself again and again and again.
I’ve always hated you. I’ve always hated you.
With numb fingers, Augustine folded the note. I’ve always hated you. He fumbled for his phone, ignoring the array of messages from John to find his brief text conversation with her.
With her.
With her.
Those four words stared back at him from the screen.
“I’ve always hated you.”
His mouth tasted like rainwater and skin and he could feel the rain from that same morning running in thick rivulets down his back and soaked fabric under his hands and a mouth and a mouth and a mouth and—I’ve always hated you.
I’ve all but told you and you can’t see it.
There was a man who I thought understood me, and I thought he understood everything about me.
It was as if every single nerve ending in his body died and was reborn at once—dull and numbed and sparking up across his skin in a livewire dance.
He sat behind his computer, pulling up every database he was certain he wasn’t allowed access to.
He searched Mercymorn’s name, the date on the article, and started printing.
###
By the time the sun threatened to rise, churning the night from a cool, comforting darkness into the delicate cast of an early dawn, Augustine had burned through a quarter-pack of cigarettes and nearly an entire cartridge of printer ink.
But he was done.
And he had never felt more alive.
He didn’t bother texting Mercymorn before he called her.
She was awake.
He knew she was going to be awake.
“It is dawn,” she hissed, picking up on the first ring—as if she had been waiting for him, his mind helpfully supplied.
Augustine hardly entertained her mewling complaints for a moment. “Come over.”
“Excuse me? Might I remind you of the fact that immediately post-coital you left the house without so much as a polite excuse and didn’t come back for hours? You’re a pathetic excuse for a man, Augustine, and I, quite frankly, hope that not only do I never see you again, I hope you rot. I fed your cats, by the way, they were making a terrible racket.”
“Mercymorn, you and I both know you don’t care about that. What did you want? Aftercare? Darling, come here and I’ll pet your hair and make you tea and make sure you come down nice and slow and—”
The click echoed with a perfect familiarity. Augustine had to bite his cheek to keep from grinning when, against his face, his phone buzzed.
[From: Mercymorn]: I’ll be over in ten.
[From: Mercymorn]: I hate you.
[From: Mercymorn]: AND WE ARE NOT HAVING SEX!!!!!!
Augustine didn’t text her back. He had work to finish.
###
The door creaked open ten minutes later, followed by the sound of Mercymorn’s shrill, irritating voice. “Thank you for warning me about the horde of police outside your house, by the way. It was tremendously helpful when I was trying to park! I had to explain that I was not here to murder you in your sleep and in fact I had an invitation to come. Though, quite frankly, after having to talk to one of them for more than thirty seconds I was ready to—”
Mercymorn’s voice had grown in volume and pitch as Augustine heard her take off her coat and shoes and turn to face into the living room properly where—immediately—her voice caught in her throat with a muted, delicate gasp.
When she spoke again, it was trembling. “Augustine. What is this? Have you gone insane? Oh my God, this is it. You’ve gone insane!”
Augustine stood in the center of a web of papers—fresh-printed and hung up with an elaborate series of pins and strings connecting them. He’d scrawled across half of the images, faces crossed out and notated with the date of their death, the cause of their death, and the connection they all had back to the central image.
It was a beautiful array, considering the time that he had. There were graduation reports, medical reports, arrest reports, intake forms, discharge forms, death records, obituaries, the notes she had left him and photographs upon photographs upon photographs.
All of Mercymorn.
Everything was connected with a soft, red thread.
Like a spiderweb.
Augustine crossed over to her, taking her shaking hands in his own.
Her storm-rage eyes were wide, reflecting the soft glow of the endless lamps that John insisted on filling the house with. Augustine had always thought they were ugly before he saw them like this.
His smile felt fucking manic.
“You were the first person in your family to graduate college,” he said, his voice sharp and eager and hungry. “You started medical school on a scholarship. You wanted to be a doctor more than anything—you wanted to help women like your mother who felt trapped in a relationship she hated because she had a child, something you never let yourself forget and never forgave yourself for—and you loved Cristabel more than anything.”
“Do not say her name.” Mercymorn bit out, as she tried to wrench her hands back.
But Augustine was stronger. He’d always been stronger. “Were you on your way home when they called you, is that why you did it? Or did you plan it, Mercymorn? Did you get the phone call telling you that Cristabel had shot herself and then did you get in your car and know that you were going to drive yourself into a telephone pole? How long did it take you to die? Come on, Mercy-girl, how long did you bleed out on that dirty road? How long before your heart gave out and that medical team had to bring you back around?”
Mercymorn stared through him, at the medical report he’d hung so carefully, at the newspaper article detailing the accident. Single-Vehicle Accident on Deadly Stretch of Road Nearly Claims Local Medical Student.
When she didn’t respond, he kept pushing. “That was why I couldn’t find you, you know. I spent so long looking for accidents with fatalities, but you? You died but you came back, Mercymorn. You weren’t listed as a fatality because they brought you back. Was it twelve seconds? Did your heart stop beating for twelve seconds so you saw fit to take twelve lives? Did you think God did it? Did he put your wretched soul back on this planet to kill the twelve people that took your Cristabel from you?”
“Thirteen,” Mercymorn said, her voice placid and hollow. “It was thirteen seconds.”
“Thirteen people,” Augustine said, breathless and giddy. “The priest she talked to, the one who told her she was hearing voices from God–you carved him to pieces, didn’t you? You killed him and you killed that pathetic fucking graduate student who worked at the crisis center because no one helped her, you killed the hotel worker who booked the room, you killed the man who sold her the gun she used to kill herself. You killed all thirteen people who you thought killed Cristabel.”
Her fingers tightened in his. “They did,” she said, her voice thick and wet. “They killed her. So I killed them. I killed all of us.”
“And you killed yourself,” he said, freeing one hand from hers to cup the curve of a soft cheek. “For not being enough to save her.”
He didn’t thumb away the tear that streaked down from a wide eye.
“You saw,” she said, her voice fracturing but not yet shattered. “You see me.”
In the light, and in the nest he’d made of evidence and proof and her and her and her, she had never looked more beautiful.
Augustine tipped her face up to his, tearing her eyes off the gift he’d made. “I see you, Mercymorn, I see you.”
She tasted like bitter salt when he crushed his mouth to hers.
And nothing had ever been sweeter.