7. Chapter 7
Chapter seven
J essica
"Your family lied," Freya says.
I look up from a photocopy of a marriage certificate so faint I've been reading it at an angle in the light.
"Could you possibly sound less delighted about that?"
"No," she says.
We've got the small study room on the third floor of the library, the one with the bad radiator and the table you have to prop with a folded index card so it doesn’t wobble.
It is currently covered end to end in paper.
The Council sends copies through Falken every few days now — not the sensitive material, and not anything from the private-collection side, but the ordinary stuff.
Civil registration. Census pages. Church records. Passenger lists.
Two weeks ago I would have said that a table full of photocopies was the least interesting object in the world.
Freya has been in here every evening since Tuesday. She brought a lamp from her room.
"Come here," she says.
I come there.
She has four documents lined up in a row, squared to each other, because Freya cannot leave paper crooked.
"This is your father's line," she says. "You, your dad, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, and so on back.
All of it ordinary. Farms, a foundry, a lot of people who stayed in the same three counties for a hundred and forty years, which is enormously helpful for me and says nothing interesting about you. "
"Thanks."
"And then here." She taps the end of the row. "1856. He comes off a ship."
I look at where her finger is.
It's a passenger manifest. Ruled columns, a clerk's slanting hand, forty names on the page and most of them illegible.
"Emil," I read.
"Emil. Twenty-three years old, at least according to him.
" Freya slides the next document across.
"Marries in 1859. Two children. Works, builds a house.
Buried in 1893 exactly where you'd expect a man like that to be buried, next to his wife.
" She looks up. "Everything after that boat is completely normal.
That's the whole American side of your family, and it's boring, and boring is good , because boring is traceable. "
"So what's the problem?"
"The problem," Freya says, "is that Emil doesn't come from anywhere."
Here's what Freya has actually found, and it takes her twenty minutes to walk me through it, and I understand about eighty percent.
The name is wrong first. Not wrong — untraceable .
On the manifest it's written one way. On the marriage record it's spelled another.
There's a land document where somebody's put down a third version, and by the time his eldest son turns up in a census in the 1880s it has settled into Miller and stayed there ever since.
Moller. Moeller. Muller. Miller.
"Okay," I say. "So he changed his name."
"Probably. That isn't strange."
"It's a bit strange."
"It's the least strange thing on this table.
" Freya sits back. "Half of everyone who came through in that decade came out the other side with a different name.
Clerks wrote what they heard. Half these men couldn't write it down themselves to correct anybody.
Families anglicised deliberately because it made life easier.
If a changed surname were suspicious I'd have to suspect about nine million people. "
"So it's nothing."
"On its own it's nothing." She squares the papers again. "That's what I need you to understand before I show you the rest, because otherwise you'll get excited about the wrong thing and I'll have to talk you back down."
"I resent that."
"You've been excited about a stone this week."
"It was a nice stone."
She pulls two more sheets out and sets them side by side.
"Here's where he says he's from," she says. "This document. And this one."
They don't match.
"They're different towns," I say.
"Four hundred miles apart. And here—" a third sheet, "—he gives no town at all. Just Europe. Which a clerk would accept, because a clerk did."
"People misremember."
"One different hometown wouldn't bother me.
People give the nearest big place. People give where they sailed from instead of where they were born.
People say whatever gets the queue moving.
" Freya taps the stack. "It's the pattern that bothers me.
And that's the part I could still argue with you about. This is the part I can't."
She puts down a fourth.
"His marriage record names his father. Here."
"Right."
"His youngest daughter's record, thirty years later, names his father as well. Different name."
I look at the two documents.
I read them twice, because I want to be sure I'm looking at what I think I'm looking at.
"That's not a spelling," I say.
"No."
"That's not — those aren't versions of each other. That's a completely different man."
"Yes," Freya says.
Somewhere down the corridor somebody drops something and swears.
"And the towns?" I say. "The two towns."
"Both exist. Both have surviving records.
I've had the archive request back on one and the Council's people have done the other.
" She looks up at me. "He isn't in either of them.
There's no birth. No baptism. No family under any spelling of that name, in either place, in any year that would fit a man who was twenty-three in 1856. "
"He's not there."
"He's not anywhere," Freya says. "That's what I've got.
Emil exists, completely and coherently, from the moment he steps off that ship.
Before it there's nothing that connects to him — no parents I can pin, no parish.
Every record after the crossing agrees with every other one.
Every record about before the crossing disagrees with something. "
I sit down on the edge of the table, which wobbles, because of the index card.
"So he made himself up."
"I didn't say that."
"Freya."
"I'm not going to say it because I can't prove it, and if I say it you'll repeat it to Sophia, and by Thursday it'll be a fact." She stacks the papers. "What I'll say is this. I don't know that somebody hid where they came from. But if somebody wanted to, this is exactly what it would look like."
I sit there for a second with that.
"Is that suspicious?" I ask. "Like, professionally. Is that a suspicious amount of missing?"
"Interesting isn't the same as suspicious."
"Interesting like bad handwriting, or interesting like extinct wolf royalty?"
"Currently somewhere between," Freya says.
And then the date catches my eye.
"Wait," I say. "1856."
"Yes."
"The war's way before that. It's not even close."
Freya nods slowly, and I can see her waiting again, the way Wren waited, the way people apparently do when they want to know whether I'll get there myself.
"So he's not the one," I say. "Emil isn't the survivor. He's generations later."
"He is."
"So whoever actually got out of the Fourth House was still in Europe.
And then their children were. Maybe their grandchildren, maybe more than that — living somewhere, having families, being wolves or not being wolves, for however long that took.
" I push my hair back. "And then eventually one of their descendants got on that ship. "
"That's it," Freya says.
"We haven't found the family. We've found the door they possibly came through."
"That's the first useful sentence you've said all evening."
"I'm going to remember that."
"Please do."
She starts putting things back in order, which takes her another ten minutes because Freya's version of putting things in order involves labels.
And that's when I see it.
It's near the bottom of the stack the Council sent through — not a genealogy record at all, just an academy document that's been included because it's part of my file. Two pages. Standard form. Candidate identification and contact report.
There's a name at the bottom.
J. Matthias.
Dated the March before I ever heard the word Luftis.
"Huh," I say.
Freya looks over. "What?"
"He had a file on me."
"Who?"
I hold it up.
"Before I knew any of this existed," I say. "Before I knew wolves existed. There's a form with my name on it and his signature at the bottom and it's dated three weeks before I met him."
Freya considers this.
"Ask him what sources he used," she says. "If he was verifying you before contact, he saw something. It might be nothing. It might be a document I don't have."
"You want me to go and ask Professor Matthias what he found out about my family."
"Yes."
"Right now."
"He has office hours until seven," Freya says, and goes back to her labels.
His office light is on.
It's a small room, third floor, one window, and it looks exactly the way you'd expect: too many books for the shelving, a coat on the back of the door, a mug on the desk that I recognize from a lecture hall.
"Jessica." He puts down his pen. "Come in."
I put the form on his desk.
He looks at it and then he says, "Ah."
"You had a file on me."
"I had a form on you."
"There's a difference?"
"About four hundred pages," Jon says. "That's a contact report. It's what we file when the academy asks someone to go and verify a candidate."
I sit down without being asked. "So verify what?"
"Whether you existed." He turns the form around and reads it upside down, which is a skill I resent.
"I was given your name. That's all I was given, and I don't decide who's on the list — I've never decided who's on the list. My part is confirming a candidate is real, and reachable, and then going to reach them. "
"So you turned up in England because someone handed you a piece of paper with Jessica Miller on it."
"Yes."
"And what did you do with it?"
"What anyone would." He shrugs slightly.
"I confirmed you were where the name said you were.
I found out enough to know I'd be knocking on the right door and not frightening a stranger.
Where you worked. That you'd moved over from the States.
That you were over twenty and not fifteen, which matters a great deal.
" He pushes the form back to me. "That's the whole of it, Jessica.
I wasn't tracing your ancestry. Nobody asked me to and there was no reason to.
If I'd tried, I'd have got precisely as far as your parents, and I'd have thought it was ordinary, because it is ordinary. "
"Okay," I say.
"I'm sorry you were worried enough to come and find me."
"No, it's — okay. That's fine. I just need to find all of the answers."
And then I don't leave.
I sit in his office chair with a form in my hand and I don't leave, and the room goes quiet.
Jon sets the pen down again.
"Was there something else?" he says.
Of course there fucking is.
I know what it feels like now. I didn't a year ago — a year ago it was just a pull I had no word for and no explanation for and filed under strange things about Jessica.
But I've got Luke and I've got Torres now, and I know exactly what that particular warmth is and exactly where it sits, and I have felt it every single time this man has come within three feet of me.
I felt it in a clearing when every wolf in the world stepped back from me and he walked straight in.
I've been pretending I don't know what that is since April.
I'm done.
"Are we ever going to talk about this?" I say.
Jon goes completely still.
Not startled. Not confused. Still — the stillness of a man who has been waiting for a long time.
"Jessica—"
"That's not an answer."
He's quiet for a second.
"No. It isn't."
"So say it."
"What do you want me to say?"
"I want you to say what I feel." My voice comes out steadier than I expected.
"Because I have spent a year being held at arm’s length by you.
And you — you're the one who told me you'd rather make me wait than tell me something you'd have to take back, and I let you, because you were right.
" I put the form down on his desk. "But now I know. Is it real?"
Jon looks at me.
"Yes," he says.
Something in my chest lets go so hard it almost hurts.
"Say what it is."
"Jessi–"
“No.”
Swallowing, he leans forward and stares directly into my eyes. "You're my mate," Jon says.
The radiator ticks.
I knew. Of course I knew. It still feels like getting hit in the chest.
Jon hasn't moved from behind the desk.
"I am not trying to ignore you."
"Then what are you doing?"
His jaw shifts.
"Because I want you," I say. "And now I know you want me too, so I'm having a really hard time understanding what exactly we're pretending isn't happening here."
"We aren't pretending."
"Then how long?"
He goes still.
"How long are you going to wait before you do something about this? Until I'm out of your class? Until I graduate? Until I'm thirty?" I shake my head. "Or are you planning on never acting on it?"
"Jessica."
"No. I actually want an answer." I stand up. "Are you waiting, or are you trying to ignore this until it goes away?"
"It isn't going away."
The answer is immediate.
"Okay."
He looks at me, and for once there's absolutely nothing professor about it.
"I ache for you."
Every thought in my head disappears. Jon closes his eyes for half a second.
"When you walk into a room, I know it before I see you. When you leave, I know exactly how far away you've gone." His voice is quiet. "I have spent a year wanting things from you I had no right to ask for."
"You have the right now."
"No." His eyes open. "I don't."
"Because you're my professor."
"Because I have power over you."
"That I don't give a shit about."
"I do."
That shuts me up.
He comes around the desk again, but this time he stops on the other side of it. Close enough that I could cross the space between us in two steps.
He knows it too.
"I'm not waiting for the bond to disappear," he says. "I'm waiting until wanting you doesn't come with the ability to affect your grades, your placement, your housing, or your future at this academy."
"And then?"
His eyes drop to my mouth.
Just once. But I see it.
"Then," he says, "you can ask me that again."
My entire body goes hot.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I'm giving you tonight."
I stare at him.
"You're incredibly annoying."
"I've been told."
"Mostly by me."
"Almost exclusively."
I should leave. I don't.
"Jon."
His eyes come back to mine.
"When I ask you again, you better not fucking answer me with words."
His expression finally breaks.
His eyes close. His hands curl into fists at his sides, and his jaw locks so hard I can see the muscle jump.
"I won't."
His voice has dropped to something just short of a growl.
Jesus Christ. The man is holding himself so tight he's practically vibrating.
And suddenly I know exactly what happens if I take those two steps.
Goddamn him.
If I don't leave now, I'm going to climb him like a fucking tree. I grab my bag.
This time I actually make it through the door.