17. A Little Blood, Between Friends
Time slows, Briar’s breath held, body braced for violence. Next to them, Tate is just as tense - but his focus is different, more calculated, and he’s mouthing something under his breath. It must be the Work. Good. Any moment now, all of this will come to an abrupt stop.
It doesn’t, though. The pip holding the scissors, now emboldened, reaches up and clumsily hacks off another piece of hair.
A few in the crowd laugh, so he cuts another, taking far more this time, and with less care.
The half-shorn boy swallows, hard, and scrunches his eyes shut.
Someone else grabs the scissors with a surer hand and keeps cutting, also not being particularly careful.
Pips surge forward, grabbing for the scissors, laughing, their spirits rising with a hysterical fervour.
Briar knows this feeling. Feeding frenzy.
‘Tate,’ they mutter urgently, and Tate just holds up a hand to beg for silence.
The boy is bleeding from the ear now, a crime-scene splatter of scarlet on his neck and shirt collar, and he’s leaning away from the blades as they dance around his face - but then something changes.
His face relaxes entirely, overcome with relief, a tiny lifetime of worries melting away in a moment.
Somebody notices, cuffs him hard on the shoulder, and he barely reacts.
He just keeps breathing in and out, chest rising and falling, the lines smoothed from his face, beatific and elsewhere.
Tate, whose eyes are fixed on the pip, hands Briar a sleek black phone with the camera already loaded and recording. Briar taps the screen to focus and tries to keep a steady hand.
In the pool, things are taking an uglier turn.
The pips are jostling their victim, shoving him, clawing at him, trying to force a reaction.
Somebody picks up the stick and hits him with it.
Somebody pinches him hard on the neck; someone else spits on him, a small, wet stain on his shirt.
Nothing works. Enthusiasm wanes, and confusion takes hold.
The attacks peter out, until someone rings a bell at the other end of the room, and everybody falls back. Time’s up.
What had Hadley said Tate’s specialism was? Ease.
Briar looks to Bastian, expecting to see . . . something. But he’s a wall of nothing. Unmoving, crossed arms. Just another day at the torture factory.
Alistair is easier to read, his arms also crossed, his foot tapping irritably.
He barks ‘next’, and someone’s pushed forward into the centre.
Another boy, taller than the last, south Asian with glasses.
A ripple of something moves through the crowd.
The sea of faces around him suddenly seems so overwhelmingly, blindingly white.
There’s no dancing around it this time. Somebody punches him, a wildly glancing blow that doesn’t do much damage, but does knock his glasses from his face.
The crack as they land reverberates around the belly of the pool.
Tate steadies himself with a hand on the wall, a shudder running through the taut line of his arm.
There’s no suffering at all. The pip sways, like he’s ensconced in the warm bubble of a high, or dreaming pleasant dreams. Someone shakes him, making his head rattle backwards and forwards, a maltreated doll.
Someone else picks up the scissors again, and slashes his shirt from throat to navel.
Briar can’t tell if they catch the boy’s skin, but it’s of no consequence - he tips his head back and laughs.
It’s contagious, the situation suddenly ridiculous. The other pips are laughing too.
Alistair strides over to the boy and slaps him, hard, across the face. The crowd falls silent, but the pip stays happy in dreamland.
‘What the fuck,’ Alistair says. ‘Who’s doing this?’
The other capes exchange veiled looks and shake their heads.
Alistair grabs the pip by the shoulders and gives him a rough shake. ‘Wake up. Stop fucking smiling! Are you all on horse tranqs or something?’
His voice is tight and too shrill; he’s lost control of the situation, and everybody knows it.
The other pips might not be laughing any more, but they’re not really afraid, either.
Briar uses their fingertips to pinch and zoom on Tate’s screen, capturing the moment Alistair turns to the other Mons and shrugs both palms towards them, a furious What now?
‘I’ll go next.’
It’s a blonde girl, her hair in two braids, and Briar sees the small, anticipatory smiles that some of the boys exchange.
Alistair bristles. ‘Nobody’s going next until I work out how the fuck you’re all cheating.
I - I don’t think I need to remind you of how poorly that reflects on your character.
It’s like you want to be sent home.’ He looks over at the other capes again and clears his throat.
Nobody moves. He jerks his head meaningfully, and Bastian breaks away from the flock with precisely one step.
‘Well,’ he drawls. ‘What do you want me to do about it?’
Alistair marches over to the edge of the pool.
Some sort of low, terse exchange occurs, Alistair leaning up to be heard, Bastian with his hands in his pockets, pointedly not crouching to catch what he’s saying.
Eventually Bastian shrugs, then starts walking the perimeter of the pool at a leonine prowl.
The pips below start muttering amongst each other, watching his progress like he’s on a high wire at a circus, about to perform some terrible trick.
When he’s level with them, he stops to consider them; all of them seem to discover urgent needs to drop their gazes to the ground or study the ceiling above, the lattice of supports and enormous blue pipework, the disgraced bunting on its filthy string.
‘Someone else is Working here,’ Bastian says, and Mons snap to attention. ‘Not one of us.’
‘Who’s on guard duty?’ Alistair snarls, marching over to the tarnished rungs of the ladder and beginning to climb. ‘If they’re not dead, they’d better have just as good a fucking excuse.’
Briar is backing away from the curtain already, but Tate is frozen in place, mouth no longer working, hand still braced hard against the tile.
‘Tate,’ Briar whispers urgently. ‘We need to go.’
Tate doesn’t move. Is it magic? Panic? Briar can’t tell. Footsteps are getting closer, the heels of leather dress shoes clicking rapidly on tile. Briar grabs Tate roughly by the arm, and he finally takes a few steps in the right direction.
It’s too late.
Bastian is standing on just the other side of the curtain.
Briar doesn’t have to see him to know. Even after all these years apart, Briar knows the new weight of his stride, the way he fills the space; they could reach out without looking and trace the edges of him, the curve of his shoulders, his clenched hands.
Laughable of them to think he’d ever feel like a stranger.
He’s exactly the same. He’s completely different.
He’s going to pull back the curtain and see them standing there in a matter of seconds, and then Mons will know that Tate is responsible for the disruption of their ancient and stupid rituals. It feels clear to Briar that this cannot be allowed to happen. Tate is part of this world.
Briar is not.
‘Go,’ Briar says, pushing the keys and phone into Tate’s hands. He does. Maybe he thinks Briar is right behind him. Maybe Briar should be.
You need to make up with Bastian Wolfe.
Briar pulls back the curtain and punches him square in the face.
It’s not their best work. Frankly, it’s sloppy. Bastian is wearing a mask, which complicates things. The best that can be said for this punch is that it achieves its goal: distracting Bastian from Tate’s retreating back as he exits the changing room.
It does also feel pretty good. That’s just a bonus.
Briar is expecting some sort of magical retaliation - to be thrown backwards, forced to their knees, microwaved from the inside with the sheer power of Bastian’s anger - but instead, Bastian recovers from the shock of the punch with surprising speed, and with a wordless rasp of breath, throws himself bodily at Briar.
They both go flying: Briar hitting their head on the edge of a wooden bench, pain blistering across their skull; Bastian following, using Briar’s body to break his fall, a surprisingly heavy weight above them.
From the ceiling, the dry crack of breaking wood - something soft and grey rains down, like the whole room is threatening to cave in.
Briar twists, grunting through the throbbing in their skull, wrenching both of them over until they have Bastian pinned.
His mask has been knocked aside, his hood, too, allowing a generous spill of silver-shot hair to fan out across the tiles.
His cheeks are flushed, his pupils enormous, and he’s got a small cut on his parted lips, newly bleeding.
Briar thinks, fleetingly, of that quiet, bloody kiss amongst the brambles. I loved you. I loved you so much.
Briar hates him now. It feels good to do something with it, to get it all out of their head and into their hands, which are pressed to Bastian’s inner elbow and shoulder.
He feels bird-boned and delicate despite his height, a specimen pinned, although his eyes are still burning up, his gaze inescapable.
Suddenly Bastian surges upwards, the movement so confusing Briar doesn’t react in time, and then they feel a hot burst of pain in the meat of their bicep. What the fuck.
Bastian’s biting them.
Briar pushes him off, rising up onto their knees, and when Bastian lunges again Briar punches him.
It’s a good punch this time, a quick hook to the jaw.
Bastian falls back, spits blood onto the tiles.
His blood. Briar’s blood. Fucker. A bite?
He can’t be trusted; Briar cages him with their arms, presses him into the floor, heart pounding.
Bastian’s heart is pounding too. Briar holds him fast.