CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DINNER WITH A WITCH(’S HEAD)
S ome time later, Percy stood in the pub kitchen, half naked, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “Fuck you!” he shouted at the pan as his delivery of cognac resulted in a much larger flame than he had anticipated.
Joe, also half naked, sitting atop a bench, took a sip from the bottle of exceptional wine Percy had brought with them, adjusted his grip on Molly, who was tucked under his spare arm, and reflected that perhaps pub life would suit him after all. There didn’t seem to be much of anything but horror in the world outside, while inside it was warm, Percy’s stupidly thick, aged, expertly cut (supposedly) steaks that he’d bought from ‘the best butcher in Scotland’ smelled spectacular, and after an evening of incredible sex, Joe was very close to perfectly content.
For all the cursing and sparks, Percy had no trouble keeping several pans boiling, with the oven crisping dangerously thick chips all the while. When it was time, he plated the food as beautifully as a chef might, nodded for Joe to follow, and carrying two heavily laden dishes, settled them atop a table in front of the fire he’d been feeding throughout the entire process, until it lit the empty pub with a roaring warmth. He filled their wine glasses, then paused. “Should we put shirts on? This feels undignified.”
Joe placed Molly in the centre of the table and dropped into his chair. The steak and wine and firelight said formal, but the line of Percy’s adonis belt rising up behind the table, his abs and chest being licked by cosy orange light, screamed to Joe that formality was wildly overrated. “Sit.”
It wasn’t only the ungodly beauty of Percy that allowed Joe to reach the decision so quickly. The fact was, this first home-cooked meal felt right. It felt like this moment was the natural order of things. It held a promise of mornings in their kitchen together, after waking up together, after years together. Joe didn’t want another night of starched shirts and expensive restaurants. He wanted a life with Percy—just Percy—and that was the moment Joe began to think he might be close to ready to go home.
Joe had agreed to marry Percy at least partially because he was caught up in the moment when Percy asked him to. And because he wanted Percy to be happy. And, well, who wouldn’t want Percy for a husband? Only mad people, surely. But getting married had never, ever, been on his radar before. It wasn’t even legal, so there had been no point in thinking about it, as far as Joe was concerned.
But there was Percy, fussing, adorably, about the amount of garlic in the sauce, the seasonality of the asparagus, something about the grain of the beef, and Joe wanted a gold band on his finger that would flash in firelight just like this for the rest of their lives. A million meals explained in excruciating detail until they were old and grey and just as in love as they were now.
Percy gave an apprehensive nod, so he must have finished his explanations around the time Joe finished his reflections, and accordingly, Joe sank his knife into the steak. Percy had cooked it exceptionally rare, and pale blood and oil mingled with the creamy sauce in a swirl that looked as delicious as it smelled. Joe bit into it, Percy watched on tenterhooks, and Joe, eventually, said, “When are we moving in together?”
Percy’s face lit. “Really? It’s good?”
“Good?” said Joe, trying to maintain the power of speech as the meat melted on his tongue, which he didn’t know until that moment beef could do. He shoved more in, only this time doused in the perfectly garlicked sauce, mumbling around it, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
And that comment, coincidentally, was perhaps the best thing that had ever happened to Percy, because he had wanted more than anything, as usual, to impress Joe. “Move into my place. I can do breakfast too.”
Joe shook his head over a sip of wine. “I’m supposed to live in the rectory. Come live with me.”
The rectory where Joe, when possessed, had cut the priest’s head off and left it sitting in the centre of the dining table… Percy wasn’t especially squeamish, but that mental image might enhance the dining experience there for some time to come. “My kitchen’s brand new. State-of-the-art. I can do amazing things for you there.”
“We’ll get a new kitchen put in,” Joe pushed. “Anything you like.”
“But I have a dungeon at my place.”
A good point. Joe had no dungeon. “But have you seen my courtyard? I’ve got grapes. And the cottage is adorable. Can you imagine brunch out there in the summer?”
Yes, Joe’s place was all doilies and china and very old-fashioned everything. Quaint. In the extreme. Fine for a holiday. “I just don’t see where I could keep my weapons. And I’m not sure the art would go with the rest of… it…”
Another convincing argument. Goya’s Disasters of War etchings would look a little out of place next to the tacky ‘art’ Joe’s predecessor loved, that Joe now refused to part with, all kittens and rosy-cheeked children. And it was probably cruel to inflict that on Percy full time. And, to be fair, Percy’s place, a refurbished church, was custom designed for Percy. Every inch of it, he had chosen himself, from the rugs to the ‘borrowed’ paintings to the antique chandeliers. His golden bathtub was something to behold.
Percy watched Joe quietly mulling everything over, and said, as casually as one might ask someone to pass the salt, “You know, if you quit the Church, you wouldn’t owe them a thing, and you could live wherever you wanted. With whoever you wanted.”
Joe relaxed his cutlery, a warning settling over his eyes. “That’s the second time tonight you’ve asked me. The answer’s the same.”
“It was worth a shot.” Percy threw back some wine with a deliberately calming smile and refocused. “Where would you keep Molly? Would she get her own special doily?”
He easily pulled a laugh from Joe. “I wasn’t planning to keep her.”
“Hrrrrrr,” said Molly.
Joe and Percy locked eyes across the table, and a second later, she was in Percy’s hands, his rich baritone speaking smoothly to her. “Would you like to come and live with me, darling?”
Molly kept her silence.
Percy turned her around to look at Joe. “Or do you think we should live with him instead?”
Joe rolled his eyes, and again, Molly didn’t make a sound.
“Odd,” said Percy.
“You’re odd,” Joe responded helpfully. He went back to his meal, though he kept half an eye on Molly as he ate. “I can’t believe they wouldn’t take fifty thousand for her. And I can’t believe you offered it.”
Percy shrugged. “We got a lot of money for stealing that Edvard Munch.”
“You think the buyer will be satisfied?”
“I do. You saw. My artist’s fake is just as good as the real one.”
Perhaps Joe shouldn’t have been surprised, by that time, that Percy had a regular professional forger on hand, but he still was. “You always have an artist for this sort of thing?”
Percy put his glass down excitedly. “Lakshmi. She’s absolutely gorgeous. She’s a proper criminal, and there isn’t a thing she can’t do. I’m in awe of her, truth be told. I could tell you of half a dozen paintings on display in prominent galleries right now that are hers. She’s never dropped the ball on me once. Absolutely trustworthy, and a complete gem.” He went back to his steak, a pleased gleam in his eyes.
“Hm.” Joe ate. Joe drank. Joe couldn’t bite his tongue. “And she’s just a professional associate? Nothing more?”
Percy looked up brightly. “She is.”
“A ‘gorgeous’ professional associate?”
“Well… I don’t mean…” Five fingers tapped across the table. “I meant it in a—a gorgeous personality sort of way.”
Joe studied him. Too carefully. “But is she gorgeous?”
“Gorgeous on the inside.” Percy smiled. He wasn’t giving an inch.
“And that woman tonight? Debbie, was it?”
The pleased gleam in Percy’s eyes morphed into tired patience. “That was a one time only thing. And she knew that before we got into anything, so she really has no right to be upset with me.”
Joe’s cheek ticked with irritation. “Must have been memorable.”
Percy let the comment go.
Joe did not let Percy’s silence go. “You did say we were done with secrets.”
“Are you sure you want that?” Percy sliced the meat slowly, and he kept his eyes on the glistening incision. “It’s irrelevant to what we have now, and you’re a very jealous person.”
“I’m not a jealous person!” No response from Percy again, so Joe, a little more softly, prodded, “Was she… special?”
Percy’s lips gave a little grimace. He let out a sigh, put down his cutlery, and said, “It wasn’t remotely memorable for me. Not until the next day when she told me I was her first. And how was I to know? The woman was twenty-seven years old. She’d been chasing me for weeks, in that dull, stand-offish way some people do. I noticed, but I wasn’t particularly interested. Then, my last night here, she threw herself at me. I told her before we hooked up that I had to leave the next day, and she still wanted to, so…” He twisted the stem of his wine glass. “It was something to do. Nothing more, nothing less. She played it off like it meant nothing, and I went with it. But in the morning she told me she loved me, begged me to stay, told me she’d given me her ‘gift’. I suppose she thought telling me that would make me change my mind, but in all honesty, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I did try to keep in touch and be chivalrous about the whole debacle, but she just kept crying every time she called, begging me to come back, as though we’d had anything to begin with. So I eventually stopped answering.”
Percy expected to be reprimanded for just about any part of the confession other than the bit that Joe actually latched onto. “She chased you for weeks ? I didn’t know you’d stayed here for weeks.”
Recommencing dinner, “I was here for three solid months.”
Joe very nearly spat his wine. “Here? With Cleo?”
“Hrrrrrrr!” said the skull.
Percy scowled at the skull for the interruption. “Not with Cleo.”
“Hrrrr!”
A little louder to drown out the unearthly rasps the bony mouth made, Percy continued, “She came and went while I was here, but I needed a place to get away to, so she let me stay at the Hall. I spent a good deal of my time in Lerwick, or travelling around Shetland. Between both of our comings and goings, not that much of it was spent with Cleo.”
“Hrrrr!”
Joe turned the skull’s face to the fire, his stomach doing that thing it always did when he thought of Percy with anyone else. “Were you two much closer than you’ve told me?”
“No. Maybe.” The glass twisted a little faster and Percy’s knee began to tap beneath the table, but he pushed on with the truth, just as he’d promised Joe he would. “I told you she was my friend. I told you we had a history, and I told you I wouldn’t have thought her capable of the things she’s accused of had I not witnessed the change in her myself. I got to know her very well over the years. We were close, but she was never my girlfriend. She was married before I ever knew her, and yes, I was her affair partner when the opportunity presented itself. Her husband’s a bastard who will sleep with anyone in sight, so fair’s fair. The marriage was a farce from day one. And everything that happened between us happened before I met you.” Percy gave a little click of his tongue and glanced away with a small sigh. “I’m honestly still very fond of her. I miss her. And I still want proof of what she’s supposed to have done. It’s not that I don’t believe Althea, because of course I do, but Cleo?—”
“Heeeeee!” squealed the skull.
“I can see why they keep her in the fridge,” Percy muttered, placing Molly’s skull on the floor. “Cleo, as I was saying, was a nice person. She was sweet, and she was dreamy, occasionally caustic—often caustic, in fact—and I genuinely liked her. And that’s all there was to it. I never fell in love with her, I never imagined a future with her, and I certainly never asked her to marry me.”
Succinct.
Painfully succinct.
The last comment took the bitter edge off the pill, just as Percy had intended, but then Percy kept talking. “Oh, and I slept with Charlie and Vaila, too.”
“What!” Joe actually did spit his wine this time, just a little.
Percy, mildly miffed, watched the trickle of red swirl into his carefully crafted garlic sauce, yet he held himself together admirably. “Would you like to swap plates?”
“Both?” Joe blustered. “At the same time? What are they, sixty?”
With an infuriatingly judgemental head tilt, “Ageism? I expected better from you, Joe.”
“But—”
“And don’t slut-shame me either. I can’t entirely trust that they won’t mention it, because Vaila looked like she wanted to invite you over, so I thought I should probably tell you before they do.”
“But…” Joe’s mouth did a silent wobble, before, “Charlie and Vaila? As in… From this afternoon?”
Percy shrugged. “Three months is a long time in Twatt.” Joe was lost for words, so Percy helped him out. “Is all this honesty making you happy, darling? I’m doing my best. I could go on if you’d like more details?”
“No.” Joe swallowed. Joe frowned. “I think… I think maybe we’ll… We might stop doing that. With the honesty. To that extent, at least.”
Percy smiled back proudly. “Just tell me anything you want to know. I’ll give you all the details you like. I’m an open book now.”
“Yes. You are. And I appreciate it.” It was on the tip of his tongue to ask Percy exactly how many people he had slept with, but Joe was smarter than that. It was one thing to be forced to imagine gorgeous Percy with gorgeous Giordano, particularly if Joe was in the middle, but… No. He would let his mind wander no further than that. Ever again, if he could help it. “Maybe from now on, you just judge if it’s pertinent for me to know something. And I’ll trust you to make the decision whether to tell me about it or not.”
Percy nodded, perfectly unsure which of the things he’d told Joe he should or should not have said.
“So, back to Cleo’s place,” Joe redirected.
“Herrrrrrrr,” Molly moaned.
Joe glanced down at her. “Maybe we should give her a cigarette or something?”
“No smoking until after steak. What about Cleo’s place?”
“Herrrrr!” said Molly.
“How terrifying is it?”
“Utterly. For a normal person. It was always clearly haunted. Lots of banging, creaking, things going missing. In truth, I never liked being there alone, though I felt safe enough to do it. But there’s definitely a very dark feel in a few spots. One in particular. Cleo always talked about knocking through a sealed fireplace, restoring it.”
Here the skull received a soft tap from Percy’s shoe for an especially loud interruption, and he and Joe resolved silently to ignore her from there on out. “That fireplace, as I was saying, was sealed long after it was built. You could see the bricks were newer in that spot. Still old, though. I told her no, don’t knock it through. Everything felt all wrong in that part of the house, but particularly there in that spot. Funnily enough, she’d always had the same feeling there, which is why she asked me and other guests about it. Everyone sensed it.”
He bit the tip off an asparagus spear in a meditative sort of way, appearing to be sorting through hazy memories for anything else of significance. He hit on, “Oh, and there’s a girl that wanders outside at night. A ghost of some sort. She weaves around between the graves. I watched her from the window, but she didn’t notice me. Seems harmless enough.”
“Graves?” Joe gasped out. “There are graves now?”
“Oh, yes. That’s where we’ll steal our replacement skull from.” Percy dragged the long, green stem back through his sauce, explaining, “The place was abandoned, as you know, and I guess at some point another local cemetery filled up, so they needed a new one. The ground there doesn’t freeze in winter due to some sort of microclimate around the lake, so it’s a sensible option. There were already some dead buried there, anyway. They simply added some more.”
“Ah. Good,” said Joe. “So we’re going to go to the haunted house you have a bad feeling in, to investigate murder, where there’s a ghost wandering around the graveyard, where we’re going to dig up a grave in that graveyard to steal a skull?”
“Mmm, and maybe more than one. Because if what Althea said is true, and Cleo’s killed a bunch of teenagers, well…” He snapped a crisp chip in half and assessed Joe. “What would you do with the bodies?”
As though Percy needed a reminder as to why he adored Joe so desperately, Joe immediately responded, “I’d definitely bury them in the old graves.”
Percy stifled the burst of butterflies in his stomach. “So we may have some rather grisly finds out there if we don’t find the remains in the house. They should be relatively well-preserved from the cool of winter, depending what she did to them before they died. If she drained their blood first, I’d imagine there are fewer gases to build up in the bodies, so they?—”
“Can we talk details after dinner?” asked Joe, also moving for a crunchily salted thick-cut chip in preference to what was left of his very red steak. He cracked it open and a veritable cloud of pillowy potato burst free.
“Sorry. Dreadful manners.” Percy topped up Joe’s wine and took another chip for himself.
Buying the exorbitantly priced, flaked sea salt had caused a minor argument at the shop, but as it crunched between Joe’s teeth, he had to admit to himself, yet again, Percy had been exactly right to buy it. “The real question is, what did she want their blood for? If it was a spell, why did she need so much? And if she was feeding something… It’s either very dead or very hungry by now.”
“A worrying thought. And why only girls?”
“They’re much easier to kidnap and overpower,” Joe suggested. “And much less likely to be taken seriously by police if they look a certain way.”
“Like Althea,” Percy agreed. He softened the sentiment with a defeated chuckle. “My god, she has ghastly taste.”
Joe laughed, too. “You’re very good to buy her all the hideous things.” Once he had accepted that Percy would spoil Althea and there wasn’t a thing Joe could do to stop him, it had become its own entertainment to watch Percy’s reactions to her choices. The yellow bikini in Sicily had very nearly pushed him over the edge, and it was just as well a bottle of wine arrived to keep him occupied about three minutes after she unveiled it at the beach. In front of Leo, of course, who didn’t look half as disgusted as Percy had. Quite the opposite. Swallowing down a mouthful at the memory, Joe said, “Tell Leo to stay away from her, won’t you.”
Not that it was a question, but Percy supplied an assenting nod, topped with the news, “I told him I’d fire him if he makes a move within the next six months.”
Subduing the eye-roll that came naturally, “I’m sure he’s terrified.”
Percy spoke in that rather soft and charming way he did on occasion where Leo and Althea were concerned. “He’s a good kid. And when I’m done with him, he’ll be the most eligible bachelor she’s likely to meet. She’d be wise to throw her lot in with someone like that. But he knows he needs to let her get herself together first.”
Joe raised an eyebrow. “He knows that, or you told him?”
“Both,” said Percy. “But do give the boy some credit. There’s a reason I made him my assistant.” Joe took a breath to delve a little deeper into that mystery, but Percy was back to the last thing. “I think you’re right about Althea’s selection. On paper, she’s a perfect victim.”
“Interviewing her as a potential nanny would have allowed Cleo to ask more personal questions than any other job, I’m guessing. She would have known Althea was alone overseas and unlikely to be missed. That she had no family nearby.”
“All true.” Percy, finished his meal, pushed his cutlery together, and leaned back in his chair with his wine. “You’re smart and pretty.”
A perfectly unsophisticated giggle was carefully controlled by a deep-voiced, “Thank you.”
Percy watched him a little longer, then decided aloud, “Let’s do the first month at your place.” It was worth it just to see the way Joe’s eyes brightened.
“What? You’ll move in with me?”
“We’ll trial a month, if that suits you. Then, if we haven’t been caught living in sin by your parishioners, we’ll reassess the situation. Does that sound okay?”
Percy was a dream. An absolute dream. To have been a priest, with no hope of love for so long, and now to have a man who cooked like this, who was willing to make a sacrifice like that, who looked the way Percy did, who adored him and would do anything for him, who was about to go dig up bodies with him for no reason other than basic altruism—it was beyond logic. Beyond luck. Almost beyond reality. “That sounds more than okay. If you think you can put up with the décor.”
Percy’s eyes dipped over his exquisite fiancé. “There’s only one thing I’m going to be looking at. If I’m with you, I don’t care about the rest of it.”
Joe squeezed Percy’s hand across the table. “Explain to me how I got so lucky.”
“Not everyone would call it luck to have a madman obsessed with them.” Percy lit three cigarettes, passed one to Joe, and place another beneath Molly’s white teeth, after he planted her back in the centre of the table.
Joe breathed in Percy’s dangerous gorgeousness along with the toxic smoke. Blue eyes he would die for one thousand times over. His one true love. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Table of Contents
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