04. weird, world.
She had wondered what he would be like-this brother of hers. If he would be like their father, or more like his mother, or wholly his own person divorced of them both. If she would recognize any bit of herself in him. After years of curious speculation, here he was: just within arm’s reach. And she had to stop herself from stretching out her hand to touch him, had to remind herself that she was nothing but a stranger to him, an interloper, an albatross bearing ill news. She had no right to intrude further than she already must; she would leave him his barriers, would step over no threshold until he gave her permission to. So she locked away her gift and kept her hands to herself, giving him plenty of time to size her up as she stood on the front step while he decided to either let her in or bar the door against her.
The conflict was clear in his pale eyes, eyes that were so like her father’s. And he was tall like him, too, broad shouldered with the same sharp jawline. Akiko wondered if that would be any source of comfort for him-to hear that the man he was echoed the man their father had been once upon a time. Or perhaps it would only anger him, or disappoint him. She had forced back her gift, but she still knew that Christopher Robin Beechum must have thought himself abandoned; how could he have felt otherwise?
It seemed as though several minutes had passed, but it could have hardly been one, when he finally took a step backwards and held the door open with one large hand flattened against the screen. “Come in,” he said in a voice unusually rough. “We’re about to have supper.”
Googling him had given her a vague idea of what to expect-and this apartment did not meet those expectations. There were no bundles of incense or visible Ouija boards; no stacks of Tarot cards or divination stones or Voodoo dolls. There was a large Star Trek poster over the modestly sized television, and a Dawn of the Dead poster on the adjacent wall. Mismatched throw pillows. A hand-woven rag rug. An old guitar leaned on a stand beside the couch. There was a dragonfly statue of carved jade beside a Doctor Who action figure on a shelf of the bookcase. A framed photo of a young family-the man with shaggy brown hair beside a woman with a long blonde braid draped over her shoulder, a small black boy with expressive brown eyes in her arms and a pale baby in a green onesie in his-rested on the side table next to a lamp.
“Rob, what’s going on?”
Akiko’s eyes widened as she took in Charlie, standing in the yellowed light of the kitchen with arms crossed across her rounded chest, bare feet planted on the faded tile. The sleeves of her grease-stained overalls were tied snugly around her waist, the white of her t-shirt making the vivid colors of her tattoos all the brighter. Her first thought in the initial glance, as glittering eyes met hers, was here’s a tiger with claws.
“Charlie. This is Akiko… Beechum. My sister.”
Charlie’s eyes flashed to him before pinning her again. “...Robbie, I think we should have a word.”
She stood awkwardly on the mat beside the pile of shoes as they disappeared into the bedroom, the door left cracked open behind them. The voices were muffled, the words indistinct, but the tone was abundantly clear. As they argued, she could feel the weight of the past twenty-four hours bearing down on her: all of the fear and anger and loss, the acrid taste of panic in her mouth, the paralyzing knowledge that anyone on the street could be a threat to her life for reasons she still wasn’t fully certain of. If they sent her back out alone, what would she do then? Where would she go? She knew they had every right to turn their backs on her; she meant nothing to them, after all. And how could she drag them into this bloody mess-they were innocent of everything, and ignorant as well. To take them into her confidence would be as good as painting targets across their chests. But…
She was twenty-six years old. Newly orphaned. For all that she had plotted and planned an escape route, she was not made of nails and fire. She had a finite amount of money in her bag and was hardly confident enough to create an entirely new life severed from everything familiar. Dad had been adamant: trust only your blood. And she knew this lost brother of hers was far from average. He had come through the crucible before, knew fear and pain and death. He could understand, he could help…
The bedroom door swung open with enough force to bounce against the outer wall. Charlie barreled out, red hair a fiery nimbus around a face sharpened with suspicion. She stopped short inches from her and jabbed a finger towards her chest.
“You. Full name.”
“Akiko Michi Beechum.”
“Your father’s name.”
“Ramsey Collins Beechum.”
“Your mother’s.”
“Kasumi Rei Hayashi.”
“Why are you here?”
“Because my dad was just murdered and I can’t finish his work alone,” Akiko gasped out, head swimming. It was difficult to keep her gift under control; this aggressive woman was too close, her emotions were too wild, and she was far too tired and strained after that horrible flight. She felt her knees buckle, was sure she was going to fall-
“Charlie, stop,” Robbie’s sharp voice cut through the fog, just as his hand closed around her arm. “Let her breathe, let her sit down.”
“I’m sorry,” Akiko said, feeling her carefully constructed mask slipping. “I… I wouldn’t have come if I had any other choice…”
Charlie’s expression shifted, the edges of distrusting doubt softening. She stepped back and let Robbie lead her to the recliner. Akiko sank into it gratefully, settled the messenger bag in her lap, and tried to recompose herself. A heartbeat later the oven timer went off shrilly, the alarm doing nothing to soothe her frayed nerves, and she did a fair imitation of a startled hare, half-leaping out of the chair before her brain could identify the noise.
“It’s okay,” Robbie said, sitting on the edge of the couch with reassuring hand stretched towards her. “…It’s a tuna noodle casserole, if you’re hungry. Can I get you anything to drink? Water? Orange juice?”
“Water would be great, thank you.”
“Don’t bother,” Charlie told him shortly as he moved to stand. “I’ll get it.” Akiko kept her eyes on Robbie as Charlie prowled behind her, banging open cabinets and turning on faucets.
“I’m truly sorry for coming here,” Akiko began, voice becoming firmer and stronger as she continued. She was drawing her armor back on, tightening the laces. “All I ask is that you hear me out-then you can tell me to leave and I will. No argument.”
He stared at her with a focus that was unnerving, all the more so with such pale icy eyes and sharp features. There was a great deal about him that was otherworldly, and not just in terms of the physical. Perhaps it was because she already knew some of it, or because she knew what to look for, but it felt obvious enough that others must also be able to see it at a first glance: this was a man who knew of things beyond the normal world. Those eyes had looked into both darkness and light, and had been blinded by neither. For all of the tension he carried-no doubt from the day’s unexpected developments and revelations-there was also a reassuring sense of confidence and capability that surrounded him like an almost tangible aura. This was someone who had done difficult things, who would not hesitate to offer a helping hand to another in dire straights. It was a sense that her father had worn occasionally; it had always put her in mind of the ideal knight, someone who lived by a code of honor and justice, who would sacrifice much for others less fortunate. It was arresting and it was reassuring all at once.
“I have a sister,” he said in a strangely flat voice. It felt too unreal, too disconnected; the day had assumed a surreal and dreamlike quality. Charlie thought her a sham, and while that was highly probable… There was something about her that felt familiar. Like a snatch of a chorus to a long-forgotten song, remembered in an unsettling instant.
“In some societies, half-siblings don’t rank much higher than cousins. They’re seen as bastards, regardless of how they were got. I don’t expect open arms-I didn’t come here for that. Just to be clear.”
“So you don’t want to crash on our couch, mooch money off of us?” Charlie asked, handing her a glass of water brusquely enough to spill a few drops onto her jeans.
“No,” Akiko said firmly. “And we haven’t actually been introduced yet.”
“This is Charlie, Charlie Hawthorne,” Robbie said.
“The girlfriend, the mechanic, the girl who knows how to pin a fly to the wall with a knife from across a room-”
“Red.” Robbie’s voice had the telltale rumble of warning to it.
“Charlie, I understand why you don’t trust me. You have no reason to. And you’re right-how can I prove I am what I say I am? Obviously there’s little family resemblance. A DNA test would be expensive and time-consuming-and right now time is something of a premium for me. So I’m going to be as blunt as I can be, and as honest and open as I can be. I won’t lie to you, but there may be things I can’t tell you the full of just yet. So if it seems like I’m hiding something, know I have good reason to.”
“Huh,” Charlie scoffed, bending to pull the casserole out of the oven.
“And since you won’t take my word, I’ll show you how truthful I’m being.”
She straightened, crossed her arms, and met her eyes steadily. “Alright. I’ll bite. How will you do that?”
Akiko held out her hand, face smooth as a porcelain mask. “May I see your hand?”
“What, you gonna read my palm?”
“Something like that.”
With a careless shrug, Charlie stepped around the kitchen table and took Akiko’s hand in a firm handshake grip.
It was like the sting of static electricity. Charlie’s teeth clamped down on the edge of her tongue as a welter of sensations, emotions, and half-formed images tingled through her skin. In less than a heartbeat she felt the cold burn of the bullet, smelled the grease and gunsmoke in the air, tasted fear and blood and adrenaline. She pulled away, swaying unsteadily, and rubbed her hand furiously, the images lingering as echoes behind her eyelids.
“Jesus wept,” Charlie cursed, voice shaking as she blinked furiously. “That was your-”
“Yes. How he died. Exactly as I experienced it this morning. He went into the city last evening, to meet someone. He didn’t tell me exactly who, but I knew what it was about. I fell asleep waiting for him to come home. And I woke up when he died. When I felt it all. As if I were him. The damp street, the bullet…”
“…You’re an empath,” Robbie said quietly.
“That’s the term I prefer. Leech is another, less favorable, one.”
“So it was through him. I’d wondered, once or twice, which side of the family I’d gotten it from. Was he-”
“No. He wasn’t like us. It skips generations sometimes. Or maybe in some people it just always lies dormant.”
She met his eyes steadily enough, but her fingers began to twist the ring she wore on her left hand. Her entire body was stiff, straight, unwavering-except for those traitorous fingers. So determined to wear a brave face, to prove that she was strong; but he had seen her already falter. And there, in the nervous movement of her fingers, was the chink in her armor. It made her human. It made her real. It made him feel even more rudderless and adrift.
When she had dropped that initial bomb, the first thing he’d felt-even before the surprise-was an irrational stab of anger. It wasn’t enough that he’d been abandoned or ignored or forgotten; it wasn’t enough that he was left confused and off-balanced by the man’s unexpected and violent death. No. His father also had another family out there, one he’d never tried to, at the very least, inform him of. He had a sister-did he have other siblings out there? A bigger family that could have been more supportive, more understanding, in the wake of Danny’s death and the manifestation of his terrifying abilities? He knew logically that family rarely had anything to do with blood. Family was what you made of it, and he had a family now that was more than precious to him. Charlie was family; Ben and Liv and the littles were family. And yet…
Akiko was like him. And perhaps there was still something to be said for the ties of blood.
“How long have you known?”
She hesitated. “About you? Or about my gift?”
“Either. Both.”
“The empathy started around puberty, but it didn’t fully manifest until my mother passed. Breast cancer. I was nineteen. That was also when Dad told me about you.”
“And what did he tell you about me?”
“Just that you were out there. That you’d been living outside London, last he knew. That your mother was a barrister. Mom apparently made him promise to tell me everything, after she’d gone. He didn’t know you were gifted-I found that out later, on my own. Your name’s popped up in a couple of articles online. I read about The Vampire Killer in Seattle. The Wild Man of Yellowstone.”
“You never wanted to seek me out before now?”
“I figured… You have a life of your own. And I’m a complication. I didn’t want to stir up old ghosts if I didn’t have to.”
And how could he blame her for that? If their roles had been reversed, would he have sought her out? Knowing that she had been the family left behind? She had had both a mother and a father in her life-a whole family. Perhaps she had worried that he would have seen her as a thief, an usurper, taking what he had never truly known. To be fair, wasn’t there a shade of that now, in the way he viewed her? Ramsey Beechum had walked out of his life and into hers; had chosen to be a presence in her life and a ghost in his. And for all that he had never truly mourned the loss of his father, perhaps there was still a shred of jealousy left.
“You said he went into the city to meet someone. You said you didn’t know who but you know what it was about. So what was it about?”
“It’s something to do with what you’ve got in that bag,” Charlie said, sitting down beside Robbie. “The way you’re holding it, it has to be something important.”
“Yes. He didn’t mean to leave this for me,” she said. “This was something-he was committed to this. Determined to see it to the end. I’ve never seen him so fixated, so obsessed about something. But, well, we both know why he won’t make good on this particular quest.”
“The little I remember, the little Mum’s told me, Ramsey Beechum wasn’t the best at finishing things he started.” It could have been an accusation. But his expression was more melancholic than angry. She said nothing to defend him, or excuse him. Robbie was right, after all. She loved her father, but that didn’t make her blind to his faults. “He got into something too big, got in over his head, and he left you in that same boat without a paddle.”
“Oh, I’ve got a paddle. I’ve got a paddle and a shotgun,” she said, face hard as marble. “Figuratively speaking, anyway. The people who killed Dad, they don’t know that I’ve still got an ace up my sleeve. Something Dad didn’t have.”
“Your empathy may not be a good enough weapon against guns,” Charlie said bluntly.
“It will be with enough practice.” It was said so grimly, with such cold determination, that Robbie felt a chill shiver through him. Empathy should be used to heal, not harm-and she was willing to weaponize it if it would save her own life or avenge their father’s. In that brief moment, she ceased being an enigma, or a stranger: she was simply a woman floundering for firm ground, terribly out of her depth and just as confused and lost as he was. A daughter who had to carry on without the support of her father, a daughter forced to carry the weight of that father’s actions and decisions. For all that he was feeling, her suffering must be greater: she was utterly alone now. He had lost something he’d never known while she had lost a parent. At least he had Charlie to turn to-she was forced to come here like some desperate beggar, to hope for kindness from someone who had no obligation to give it beyond some flimsy blood ties. And even though it was irrational, even though he’d only just met this girl who may or may not be his kin, he felt an obligation to keep her from sinking into that despair.
“Akiko, why didn’t you go to the police?” he asked gently. “If you know anything about why he was killed, you can take that information to them. They can track the killer down. Keep you safe in protective custody.”
“Going to the police would be pointless. The people who did this, the reasons Dad was killed-what police officer would believe me? And we didn’t know how far this stretched. Who all was involved. I couldn’t run the risk of trusting someone who might be connected. ‘Trust only your blood.’ That was Dad’s last message. And besides you all I’ve left are my grandparents. They’re utterly unequipped to handle this. But you-you would understand. You would believe. And how could they know about you? You’re another ace, Christopher. I need all of the tricks I can manage.”
None of this made any sense. This was something out of a spy movie, one of the more implausible outings with laser grid security systems and guns hidden in lipstick tubes. If not for Akiko’s somber face and dire words, he’d almost be tempted to laugh.
“What the hell did he get you into, get himself into?” Robbie demanded. “Jesus, the man I remember used to buy books from estate sales. Owned a couple shops in London. What could he have possibly been mixed up with, for someone to shoot him in an alley? For someone to come after you?”
“He found something no one was supposed to find,” Akiko said slowly, unbuckling her bag with slightly shaking fingers.
“A book?” Charlie said, staring at the large leather volume she drew out. It looked old, the edges frayed and flaking, a long strap tied around the covers to keep loose pages from spilling out.
“Some books are more dangerous than bombs,” Akiko said quietly. She held it as if it was both precious and detestable, her grip firm and knuckles white. “Think of how many people have been killed over the contents of a book. Entire wars have been fought over such things. Crusades, genocides…”
She sighed, visibly shrinking in on herself.
“Dad bought the contents of a minor lord’s library not far from Wales. There was a trunk. This was inside, and a bunch of strange stuff. Teeth, bones, maps. Dad got curious. Started digging. And he uncovered things… This is a journal. The first entry was made almost a hundred years ago. The last entry is dated May 22nd, 1991. It was passed down through the generations, each new owner adding to it. A family legacy-and a cursed one at that. When Dad bought the library, when he found the book, that curse became ours.”
“God, I hope you’ve just got a flair for the dramatic,” Charlie muttered, rubbing at her face. “I really hope you’re just giving me the shivers out of spite.”
Akiko looked up with haunted eyes and for the briefest flash Robbie thought of Danny-of how scared he had been, how lost and lonely and bitter, trapped in a web of strange powers and creatures and dangers they had hardly understood.
“The people who wrote in this journal were like us. They knew there was more to the world than the mundane surface. They explored, they investigated. And they wrote everything they discovered and experienced in here. This could be the Holy Grail of supernatural research. But more than that, they kept accounts. There are names in here, witness testimony, of everything from corruption to murder. The family who owned this crossed paths with a very powerful group on several occasions, and that group will do everything they can to get their hands on this.”
“Wait a minute-wait a fucking goddamned bloody minute,” Charlie said, raising her hands. “You’re talking conspiracy theory shit here. Secret societies?”
“At first, Dad thought it was all some elaborate hoax, or a work of fiction. A sort of bestiary from a time when people didn’t know better, before science fully explained the world. But he knew the world wasn’t so black and white-he knew my gift was real, so it stood to reason that there were others out there like me, and things beyond science and cold logic. And then a man came in to one of his shops and offered to buy the journal. Offered him twenty thousand pounds for it, which was as much as Dad had spent on the lord’s entire collection. Dad didn’t trust him; there was something off about him. So he feigned ignorance, pretended he didn’t know about the journal and that it hadn’t been in the library. The next night someone broke into our house and ransacked it while we were out to dinner. There was a note left on the kitchen table: give us the book and no one will be hurt. The next night, one of Dad’s shops was torched-an employee who had stayed late to catalogue a new shipment barely escaped.”
Akiko sighed and lifted a hand to rub at her temple. “By the end of the week, we’d left London. Did our best to cover our tracks and disappear. Ended up in France. And Dad started to work on tracking down the names in the most recent entries. He thought if we found enough hard evidence, then we could go to the police. But… We didn’t know exactly why they wanted the book. To hide evidence of their crimes? Or because of what it contained in terms of knowledge? If they were truly that powerful, how could we stop them? How could the police?”
There was a pause of uneasy, taut silence. Something was twisting and coiling about them, invisible but sensed at an uncomfortable, subconscious level. It set off warning bells in Charlie’s mind, like too deep water or the abrupt edge of a cliff seconds before the foot stepped into an infinite nothing. It was something she had felt before, several times, on that fraught road trip years ago, a lifetime ago: the moment the Boo Hag had swept down at Ben, the first glimpse she’d had of a transformed Remy tied to a tree with duct tape, the loathsome touch of the black-tar creature lurking toadlike inside an old blind woman in Seattle… She glanced at the man beside her, knew that he felt it as well, and knew that at this point there would be no easy extrication for either of them. Akiko had stepped into their lives draped in the silk from a dangerous spider’s web-and now they were caught inside it, too.
“According to the journal, they call themselves the Societas Draconis. Order of the Dragons. They’ve existed since the Dark Ages. …How the hell am I supposed to survive against something like that?” Akiko’s voice cracked, light pouring through the chinks in her armor. “Dad thought he could, and one of them put a bullet in his brain. I’m twenty-six and all I’ve got is a college degree in Japanese history and empathy-”
“And us. You’ve got us,” Robbie interrupted firmly. His hand slid from his knee and fell onto Charlie’s hand, the larger fingers squeezing hers together so tightly they ached. “You’re not alone, Akiko.”
Relief warred with panic across her face. “If you help me,” she warned, unable to accept their offer until everything was clear. “You’ll be on their radar. They’ll come after you, too.”
“Ah, hell,” Charlie said loudly, so abruptly it made her jump. “It’s been a fair few years since we had some real excitement. I’m up for an adventure. So where do we start?”