· GIDEON ·
He had opened his eyes that morning to the low bleed of early sun, the way the waves of Nico’s hair had spread across his pillow, knees curled into his bare chest, one hand below his cheek. He was facing Gideon, his eyes closed, his breathing steady. Gideon didn’t move, didn’t breathe. He had never had a very good handle on the line between dream and reality, but it was especially thin in moments like this, tinged with unexpected sweetness. He felt a heaviness in his chest, a longing for something. Nostalgia for a moment that hadn’t yet passed.
To Gideon, time felt especially theoretical. Like something he would always chase and never really have. He wished he could say that the feeling was a portent, that it was knowledge of significance, but it was something terrible, something worse. Dread. Hope. Two sides of the same desperation. Belief that if a moment was perfect, it was surely undeserved; it wasn’t meant to last. Cosmic significance dictated that light would fade; that something gold could never stay.
“Stop staring, Sandman, it’s weird,” said Nico without opening his eyes.
Gideon felt himself laugh, and the moment, the possibility that he might have correctly intuited it and done something differently—might have chained Nico to the bed, maybe, or dared him to do something truly unpredictable, like stay inside and read a book—evaporated. Time moved forward. It was what it was. “You stole my pillow again.”
“You say stole, I say gentlemanly borrowed.” Nico was fully awake then, looking at him. “You seem restless.”
“I’m trapped in a haunted house, Nicky. Not too many ways to fill a day.”
“Not haunted. No ghosts.” Nico’s hair had gotten lighter from his week on holiday with Max. He took to luxury so beautifully, wearing it like a summer tan. It was no wonder Libby tried her best to hate him. Also no wonder that she failed.
“What is it? Dites-moi.” Nico was peering at him now, perhaps because Gideon had taken too long to answer. Too distracted, he supposed, by the spoiled man in his bed. Well, this was Nico’s bed, though Gideon occupied it more often. Like a strange captive at Nico’s idea of camp.
Maybe if Nico hadn’t looked at him so . . . plainly. So openly. Perhaps if Nico had not looked at him like that—like Gideon’s next words had the ability to ruin his day—he might have told Nico the truth. Maybe if everything hadn’t been so fresh and painfully, terrifyingly pleasant, Gideon would have said to hell with it, things are bad, Nicolás, I told you this whole thing was a mess, I told you this was a disaster waiting to happen.
But you know what Nico de Varona did not like? I told you so. And also, things were beautiful, and Gideon did not know what to do with this ability, this new tool he seemed to have picked up somewhere without noticing, where Nico’s entire mood seemed to hinge on the degree of happiness that Gideon outwardly expressed. Nico had always said that, obviously, that Gideon was his problem, that Gideon was his, but that was before Gideon had understood himself to be a plausible outcome for Nico, not simply a possession. They had always been built on a platform of shared omission, but now it was different, the highs higher, the potential for lows more distressing.
It was both security and vulnerability, this new shape their relationship had taken. There was so much joy. There was also so much fear.
“I just want you to know,” Nico began at the same time Gideon said, “Nico, I think—”
They both stopped.
“Yes?” said Gideon, because they both knew Nico would want to talk first.
Nico took Gideon’s face in his hands. “I think you should probably know that I can be much better at devotion than you think I can. I’m generally unpracticed,” he acknowledged with a shrug, “but I feel, on a very deep spiritual level, that I will eventually become unbeatable at it, and when the day arrives that I have once again exceeded all expectations, I hope you will consider ample praise.”
There was a moment of silence for both of them to process what had just been said.
Several moments, as it was layered, and insane.
“My god,” said Gideon eventually, with very real astonishment, “the ego—”
And Nico had kissed him and he had laughed, and so what Gideon had not relayed was this:
“We meet again, Mr. Drake.” The strange, masculine voice from somewhere just outside the jail cell of the Society’s telepathic wards. Gideon dreamed as frequently as he always did, but not as freely. With very rare, very critical exception—the excruciating effort, for example, he took moments after that particular visit to the subconscious of Libby Rhodes—Gideon’s wanderings were limited to what he could accomplish from the space inside the telepathic jail cell. “You should know that I never expected someone so young.”
Gideon, who knew very well what it took to enter the Society’s wards, did not take this greeting to be anything less than the threat it so obviously was. “Are you going to tell me who you really are this time?”
The Accountant, Nico had said, or perhaps Gideon had said it first, muttering it in his sleep. Unclear and unimportant now.
The voice stayed conspicuously out of sight. “On the subject of our mutual friend. Perhaps you’ve heard.”
Knowingly, Gideon’s heart sank. “I take it my mother wasn’t able to pay her debt.”
Money, he prayed. Please be money.
“Eilif never mentioned you were her son.” The voice took on a note of amusement. “Well. Then I suppose she had a soul after all.”
Had. The past tense put Gideon’s heart in double-time.
“You’re aware that it has not been difficult to find you,” the voice continued. “Not without its challenges, of course, but you do understand that your face and name are known. You are known, Gideon Drake.”
Known was not the same as caught, but Gideon understood the line was growing thinner.
Gideon had not asked what that particular visit was about, because he already knew. He’d been in hiding for two years and now there were no significant options, nothing to come to mind aside from the only thing he’d recently done. Or not done, as it were. The job Eilif had recruited him for. Breaking someone out of their own conscious mind. The significance of that particular person had never been an issue for Gideon, who had learned long ago not to ask too many questions about who or what Eilif came by. But according to Parisa Kamali, Gideon had failed to deliver the Prince from his captivity, and it appeared that Eilif had paid the price for that.
Or rather, the price remained unpaid with a job unfinished. A task left undone.
“Let me see her,” Gideon attempted, and the silence in reply was deafening.
“No” eventually sufficed.
Gideon felt a strange sadness, one that was tinged with relief. He had lost a defining piece of his life. A bad one, but a defining one nonetheless, and he supposed that in his mind Eilif had always been unkillable, unbeatable. Perhaps one always looks upon one’s parents that way, and in Gideon’s case, his sorrow was in part a disillusioned one. If Eilif could lose this gamble, then the world was so vulnerable, so at risk for being robbed of its magic. The more Eilif’s absence became reality, the more human it became—tone, as Nico would say, derogatory.
“You can’t reach me here,” Gideon pointed out. “Not in any way that matters. You already know that, or you wouldn’t keep coming here just to talk.”
“Perhaps not,” replied the voice. “But someday, Mr. Drake, you will no longer be behind the safety of those wards, and believe me when I tell you that I have the time to lie in wait.”
Great. Grand. So it was written on the wall, then, or in some kind of invisible ledger. Gideon’s mother’s debt had passed to him, and now there was no escaping it. He could spend his life in servitude or he could spend it on the run—in which case, what life?
So Gideon did not need to know who this was or what they wanted. “Fine. What do you want me to do about it?” was what he asked instead, not knowing the answer would present itself so coincidentally. Without Gideon even leaving the house.
Because Gideon had recognized him immediately. The hair, the punchable face.
The Prince.
Here he was in the flesh, and surely he’d recognized Gideon, too—impossible he hadn’t. Gideon wasn’t a genius physicist, he wasn’t a cynic and he was barely even an archivist, but he was very much someone who knew a problem when he saw it. He hadn’t been born to a mother like Eilif just to not realize when trouble had walked in the door.
So the telepath had lied to him about his success in retrieving the Prince’s trapped consciousness. No surprise there, Gideon supposed, but what to do with that information? That here was the Prince, perfectly whole, his consciousness repaired, or at very least reunited. Was that normal? Was that safe?
He thought Dalton Ellery would be the problem.
He was very, very wrong.
