My name is Lee Tyack-Frayne.
My name is Lee Tyack-Frayne, and I live in the House of Joy, with my husband and my little girl.
Sometimes the mantras worked, sometimes not. Lee took a deep breath, accepting their failure today. He opened his eyes. In the mirror, his monsters continued their parade: the Fisherman, the Cornish Panther, Joe Kemp in tawdry costume as the Beast. Behind them, an infinite line, the smaller creatures who’d crossed his path all his life since his dubious gifts had come upon him—the cheats, the liars, the grieving and the lost, the wicked who wanted their hidden crimes unearthed so that they could believe in some power outside themselves once more, do penance and be free. The thousands who just wanted to be seen.
The mirror was an old one. He and Gideon had noticed it during their first visit to Chy Lowen—literally the house of joy, in the old Kernowek tongue—a year and a half ago. It occupied a huge space in the hallway, and its battered silver frame was full of shadows and mysteries at the best of times, even when it didn’t have Cornwall’s most reluctantly renowned clairvoyant standing in front of it, taking an unscheduled review of his ghosts. They’d talked about taking it down, but it was embedded into the plaster, and God knew it was beautiful, gathering what light there was even on a dark day and reflecting it out into the house. Their daughter loved it, and chattered away to her own unseen presences in its depths whenever she got the chance.
Lee pressed the palms of his hands to the table where he and Gid piled up their post. The mantras might not be working today, but still they were deep dear prayers, and they kept him connected to his world. The table was familiar, one of his own few contributions to their household furniture. For many years it had stood in the farmhouse kitchen at Drift, a favourite place of his dad’s to sit and muse with his newspaper and a cup of coffee. His uncle Jago had given it to them as a wedding present. Solid oak, worn to silk by time. In the House of Joy, where I live with...
One of the faces in the mirror parade was a blank. Not a mask: a silvery oval, into which you could fit any human face you chose. It shimmered and morphed like mercury, and all of Lee’s assembled monsters shrank away from it. Oh, I’m new, it said. I could be anyone, so you’d better keep looking, little prophet. I’m coming. I’m on my way.
He took two deliberate steps back. Sunlight from the open door to the garden swept across his field of vision, and when he looked again, all he could see was his own pallid reflection, and the hallway of the strange and beautiful house Dev Bowe had sold to them, accepting no offers but theirs—about a fifth of what the place was worth, and not a penny more. He and Gideon had talked to Dev’s solicitors, and sat up all through one long night debating the ethics of buying a house from a certified nutcase who persisted sanely on this point only. Finally they had accepted. The house was a piece of Cornish heaven, and they had a daughter to raise. Her childhood memories would be filled with orchards and sweeping moorland views. And if such a girl should ever need more space and privacy than the ordinary run of infants—well, a chance like Chy Lowen would never come again.
Lee and Gid had spent months now in a state of sheepish relief. Tamsyn loved her new home, but as far as her behaviour was concerned, they could have stayed in their flat in the middle of Dark. No storms of psychokinesis ever shook the cobwebs from the stately old ceilings. Books stayed on shelves, knives in their racks, and toys, even tempting ones...
Look again, the mirror said. Lee focussed on the reflected living-room door. In the sunny corner beyond it, he could see Tamsyn’s playpen, almost outgrown now but still in occasional use for containment purposes when her supercharged toddle began to threaten life and limb. She’d been worryingly late to walk, and these days seemed to be making up for lost time, stomping about the house as if she had a clipboard on her arm and a quota to meet. Occasional lapses into babyhood still overcame her: she liked her afternoon naps in the pen, facedown amongst her menagerie of stuffed animals.
Something was different. One of the animals was new. Lee turned away from the mirror and padded into the living room, breathing the mix of coffee and chrysanthemums and dog-hair that meant home, persuading himself by this and other sacred tokens that he was there, not trapped behind the mirror glass with the monster who could be anyone.
He leaned cautiously over the rail. There among the tangle of blankets, tenderly wrapped in a towel, was Gideon’s hideous replica model of the Bodmin Beast. Lee had only seen it twice before, both times briefly. Once in the parish house at Dark, on that Halloween night four years ago when Gid had first taken him home. The model had belonged to Gid’s former boyfriend, who’d set it up on the windowsill to frighten trick-or-treating kids. They’d both thought it had been lost in one of their moves, but somehow it had turned up during their unpacking here, and that had been the second time: Gid turning pale at the sight of it, ignoring Tamsyn’s hopeful grab and yowl. He’d stowed it away on the top shelf of the cupboard under the stairs, ready for their next batch of charity-shop donations.
The thing was made of plastic, and dyed phosphorescent green. Lee extracted it gingerly. “Well, little girl,” he said aloud to the empty room, “I suppose there’s just an outside chance that your dad gave you this to play with. But I really don’t think so.”
Laughter splashed into the room like bright paint. Two shades: his daughter’s manic sunshine, and Gideon’s rich gold. A moment later, Gid’s voice followed. “Lee, come on out here. You’ve got to see this.”
Lee pushed the Beast back into the cupboard and closed the door. His daily life asserted itself around him. Anything that made Gideon laugh like that, he couldn’t afford to miss, and he ran out into the light.
At first he couldn’t see either of them—just Isolde, ears cocked, panting as if in mid-chase. Then a strange little figure popped out from behind the most venerable and twisted tree in the orchard, which had rained down a treasure of sweet russet apples last year, so many they’d been giving them away by the bagful to Mrs Waite for her shop, and deeply wounded Daz Prowse’s feelings by catching him on the scrump and gladly sending him home with three times the weight he’d meant to steal. Another shriek of laughter rang out, and Tamsyn shot across the orchard again. She’d refused to be dressed that morning in anything but her Halloween costume from the year before, a tiger-striped romper suit complete with tail and ears. The dog bounded after her.
The trees rustled, and Gideon appeared from a patch of sunshine and shadows, his efforts to film the pursuit hampered by laughter. He saw Lee and stopped, holding out his phone. “You do it. She’s killing me.”
He was so perfect a sight there in the garden, like an orchard god in weekend jeans and shirt. Lee wanted to lift him and Tamsyn and the moment and bottle them somehow, keep them against rainy days. Poor Gid’s laughter and inborn sense of mischief had been thin on the ground of late. Lee went to him as if caught in his gravitational field. Obediently he took the phone. “What’s so funny?”
“She’s running. Look.”
Lee turned to watch. He tried to train the phone-cam on the moving target, but abruptly her side-to-side waddle struck him as hilarious, too. “Oh, my God. Should we stop her?”
“No, no. It’s too good. She looks like a duck.”
“Hush. You’ll give her a complex.”
“Oh, I’ll give her a complex? Do you know how long it is since I was allowed on my own in the bathroom long enough to have a—”
“Gid.”
“Sorry.” Tamsyn made an unlikely corner and commenced the duck-run again, obliging Gideon to prop Lee up. “But I wasn’t going to say sh-...”
“Gideon. Whatever word you use...” Lee paused to catch his breath. The laughter shaking him was fierce in proportion to his fears of five minutes ago. “She’s gonna grab it and repeat it full blast all through our picnic with the Zekes this afternoon, until Michael and Toby learn it too.”
“And then we’ll have the wrath of God on our hands, as represented by my brother. I know.” Gideon sobered, and put an arm around Lee’s waist. “Are you all right, love? You look a bit... visionary.”
“What? Oh, no. Just tired. Come over here a second—I need to talk to you.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Nothing bad. Just strange, and I reckon you probably know already.”
They settled on the bench by the back door. Like the mirror, the bench had been part of their strange inheritance here at Chy Lowen, an ornately wrought structure of cast iron, so heavy and perfectly placed that generations of moor-dwellers must have sat out here, warming their bones in winter sun or shaded from the dry heats of summer by the honeysuckle scrambling across the archway overhead. Gideon transferred his embrace to Lee’s shoulders, and Lee instinctively hitched as close to him as he could get. The mirror-world had no business pursuing him out here, but he was chilly despite the sun, the unmasked face flashing at him from random patterns in the clouds. He concentrated on watching his daughter, who was still testing her newfound powers of locomotion in top-speed spirals around the apple trees, Isolde dancing at her side. “Did you ever wonder why she started walking when she did?”
“Not really. I was too busy being relieved that she had. I know the docs said there was nothing wrong with her, but...”
“I know. It was just like she... couldn’t see the point, and then the next day she could, so she got off her backside and started.”
“Around about the time we moved in here. I thought it was just sheer nosiness—new rooms, new opportunities to scare us by falling down the stairs.”
“Did you notice that she stopped poltergeisting around that time?”
Gideon shifted to look at him. “Crikey. I’m not sure. I was distracted with starting the new job. She’d been good about it before then, though, hadn’t she? Ever since her big night at the Montol in Penzance.”
“Yeah, exactly. She was good, like she’d figured out she was complicating our lives even though we’d decided to let her freak flag fly. So she eases off, and then all of a sudden—maybe moving house, having familiar stuff in unfamiliar places—she works out a much simpler way of getting hold of things.”
“To get off her bottom and fetch them?”
“Mm-hm. And by simpler, I don’t mean for her. I mean for us. Like she knew the levitation thing worried us, even if we were letting her do it.”
“No wonder she didn’t have much motivation for walking before.” Gideon returned his attention to Tamsyn, who was making a beeline towards them at her new, unsteady gallop. “Could she possibly have thought about it in those terms, though? She was just a baby back then. She still is.”
“Well, she’s smart. And apart from the odd tantrum over normal things like bedtime and baths, I swear she sometimes tries to give us an easy ride. But just from time to time, she finds something irresistible, and...” Lee reached out and caught his tiger by the tail. Tamsyn jolted to a halt, and he grabbed her before she could fall over backwards. He hoisted her onto his lap. “I found your old model of the Bodmin Beast in her playpen.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Regrettably not.” He tugged the tiger hood back, revealing a mass of black curls. “Right, you. Time to come clean. Did you get the Beast out of the closet?”
Tamsyn looked back and forth between them. Her face was emerging from its baby plumpness into startling Cornish beauty. At times she took after her mother, but for the most part she was becoming her own fey self, the likes of which had never been seen before even in the wildest southwest. Only the silver-green eyes, changeable as the weather, betrayed her Tyack ancestry. She pointed at Gideon. “Dada.”
Gideon chuckled uneasily. “If this was an interrogation room, I’d call that an evasive answer. Hoi, Miss Tiger. That’s a bad toy, all right? Covered in bad stuff. Poisonous.”
Her gaze became reproachful. “Didn’t eat,” she said, as if that should be obvious to the two gentle gods who steered her around the hazards of her daily world. “Poor Beast, Dada. Poor Beast.”
“Poor Beast?” Gideon reached out for her and lifted her onto his knee. “Did you just want to give him a cuddle, then?”
“I’d say so. She had him all wrapped up in one of the tea towels she uses to dress her dolls.”
“Weird infant. Should we tell Uncle Zeke we’ve changed our minds about the exorcism?”
“Zeke,” Tamsyn echoed happily. She propped her orange-sneakered feet on Lee’s lap, amicably sharing herself out as she usually did when she got her parents together on this bench or the sofa. “Zeke, Mikey, Toby. Aunt Nell. Gammar.”
“That’s right. And it’s high time we got you indoors and cleaned up for the picnic.”
“Sarah, Lorna, Jenny, Wilf! Bradley! Sam!”
“Sarah can’t come today. She’s busy, and don’t change the subject. Tell me about the Beast.”
“Ofus.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“She means Rufus Pendower,” Lee clarified. Sergeant Weird-Shit was one of Tamsyn’s favourites, although Lee, for pressing reasons of his own, kept the shared pub lunches and friendly, casual dinners to a minimum. “Was he ever scheduled for today?”
“No, he and Daisy have a prior booking. Although he did get that yearning look when I said we were off to the Cheesewring stones. You know how he is.”
Lee did, although expanding on that for his husband right now would have been a bad idea. Rufus had transferred to CID at the same time as Gid, and despite the unpromising start to their working relationship, had become a good colleague, a familiar face on alien ground. Lee wanted them to stay friends. “Yeah. He’d be expounding on the likely Pagan origins until Zeke cracked and told him God piled the rocks up.”
Gideon chuckled. “Or the devil. At which point we would crack, and tell them—”
“‘For God’s sake, both of you, it’s a geological formation!’” Lee brushed a breeze-blown strand of hair out of Tamsyn’s eyes. “I suppose we’ve got to consider the possibility that she’s never stopped polting at all. She just makes sure we don’t notice—most of the time.”
“Is that bad? Have we just driven her underground?”
“I don’t think so. Look, if she has an instinct to hide this, or to be... I dunno, discreet about it, if you can say such a thing of a toddler—that’s a good thing, isn’t it? It’ll help her in school, and later on, too.”
Gideon drew breath to reply. Lee’s phone beeped, and Lee, who up until a few weeks ago would have rather chucked the device into a rainwater barrel than interrupt him, gave him an apologetic glance and picked up.
“Oh, Lee. Not another one.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Lee scanned the text. “Three, actually—this one’s bringing friends. She wants to come at... Oh. Two o’clock today.”
A silence fell. Tamsyn took advantage of the moment of distraction to wriggle down from Gideon’s lap and scamper off into the orchard again, as if her new gift for discretion might extend to getting out of the way while her parents settled a debate. “Look,” Gideon said gently, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “I know it’s been a bit tight, with just one of us on full-time pay and so much to fix up in the house, but we’re all right, you know. You don’t need to keep doing this.”
“It isn’t that.” Lee stared off after Tamsyn. His throat burned to tell Gid the truth. Something’s coming, something I have to put a face to. Something without a mask—just a blank, and I’m taking every cold-read customer I can to try and pick up a clue, because they don’t just come to me to get their fortunes told. Sometimes they’re messengers. “You know it’s not.”
“Yeah. Sorry. You don’t even charge nine out of ten of ’em.”
“Oh, I do.” Lee pressed his knee to Gideon’s and tried for a lighter tone. “If they come here to be told how great they are, how sensitive and misunderstood, I reckon they should pay for the privilege. But some of them really need me.”
“I know. Don’t let them drain you, though. Me and the rug-rat need you too.”
The remark was so typical of Gid. Gentle, straightforward, accompanied by the enquiring half-smile that could still melt Lee to butter after three years of wedded bliss. But the advice had come too late. Lee was already running on empty. “Are you saying,” he began, unable to keep a rasp of distress from his voice, “that I don’t pay her enough attention? Or you, for that matter?”
Gideon stared at him in shock. “What? No!” He put out an arm and reeled Lee in like an overtired fish. “Of course not. You’re the world’s best stay-at-home dad. But the point is that you get to stay at home and not work, or have your work come traipsing up the hill every day to you.”
With his brow pressed to Gid’s shoulder, the thump of that strong heart vibrating the bones of his skull, Lee could see the sense of this. When he closed his eyes, though, the parade of ghosts formed in a tightening circle around Gideon too. He pulled away with an effort that made him feel sick. “I don’t mind it. Really. Gives me a sense of purpose when I’m barefoot in your kitchen.”
“You’ll be asking me for your shoes back next.” Gideon brushed a kiss over his brow. “A sense of purpose? Aren’t you working on scripts for about a year’s worth of Spirits of Cornwall?”
“I am, but that’s a bird in the bush. My clients pay cash.”
“Okay, okay. But remember my spectacular promotion. We really can manage for now.”
A huffing from the bushes heralded the collie. Gideon had taught Tamsyn not to hang onto the poor beast’s tail, but Isolde had never minded being used as a walking frame, and she waddled up to the bench, panting happily, Tamsyn clutching her collar in one hand and a bunch of leaves and flowers in the other. “For Gammar,” the little girl declared, dumping the leaves into Gideon’s lap. “For bad leg.”
“Your grandma doesn’t have a bad leg,” Gideon said, examining the offering. “Your grandma’s scarily fit for a woman of her age. She’s doing the Pride march in Kerdrolla next week, unless I can persuade her not to.”
“And for Lee, when he’s sad.”
Lee’s eyebrows went up. Not only had the kid managed the L of his name, she’d almost formed a sentence, and the flowers she was poking up at him were St John’s wort from the patch that bloomed so abundantly in the garden at midsummer. “I’m not sad, poppet,” he said, rumpling her hair. “But these are lovely, thank you. Gid, you’ve got willow leaves, just in case super-Gran should turn out to have a bad leg after all. Salicylic acid, renowned for the treatment of arthritis. And I’ve got hypericum—the sunshine drug.”
“Just in case you should turn out to be sad after all.”
Lee turned away from Gideon’s penetrating look. Much good it did him: he immediately encountered his daughter’s. “Where did you learn about these, you witchy urchin?”
Her mouth fell open. Lee had seen the expression before, when the poor kid ran up against an unexpected failing in her elders. How can you two not know this stuff? After a moment she gave up and trotted off again, this time leaving the exhausted Isolde to flop down in the shade by Lee’s feet. The honeysuckle overhead gave off hot, ineffable scents, and swallows darted over Chy Lowen’s lichen-daubed roof-tiles, whipping hungry shadows across the grass. “Do you remember,” Lee said quietly, “when you got your promotion from constable to sergeant, and they gave you extra stripes to wear on your jersey?”
“You were stripping it off me at the time. Of course I remember. You had a kind of a vision about it before I told you—you saw the stripes as little birds.”
“Not much of a vision. They were right there in front of me, and I still managed to misinterpret the imagery. You were happy about that promotion, Gid. You really wanted it.”
“Yes, I... I did.”
“I don’t have to be psychic to know it’s not quite the same this time round.”
Gideon shifted on the bench. He clasped his hands together, and Lee longed to knock down the new, strange barricade between them, take the solid frame in his arms and hold him fast. “It’s early days,” Gideon said uneasily. “Too soon to tell if I like it or not. And you know, it’s not even a promotion, moving from uniform to CID—more of a sideways hop. I’m still a sergeant. The pay’s a bit better, that’s all.”
“Still, Detective Sergeant Tyack-Frayne sounds sexy as hell.”
“Does it?” There was something forlorn in Gid’s voice. “If you didn’t have your three birds in the hand this afternoon, and I didn’t have Zeke’s party, I’d take you to bed and make you prove it.”
“Bugger my birds. I’m not about to miss the family hoopla.”
“Oh, good. Thank you.”
“I’ve never known Zeke want a fuss made of his birthday, not to the extent of a picnic with the kids and the gay uncles. Is it a big one?”
Gideon paused, then shamefacedly counted on his fingers. “I’m thirty four, so he must be... No, he’s just turning forty three.”
“Well, whatever, let’s go along and help his good times roll. Then we can come back here, and I’ll prove anything you want to you.”
“Promise?”
“Absolutely. Here’s a token of my good faith.” Lee put a hand to the back of Gideon’s neck, drew him in and kissed him. Gideon’s response was immediate, electric, edged with a new desperation. “Oh, man,” Lee said, drawing back breathlessly. “Another couple like that, and I might just dredge up what’s really bothering you about your new job.”
“Stop it,” Gideon chuckled. “Nothing’s bothering me, and we both know if you really wanted to know you’d just pick my locks and look in. I’m the new boy, that’s all. And it’s very different sneaking about and gathering intel than it was knocking heads together on the streets of Dark.”
“I think Dark misses you.”
“Nonsense. Constable Ryde is doing fine here. He just...”
“Dada.”
Gideon jumped. Tamsyn had made her way to his side unnoticed, without the dog’s panting to give her away. “Oh. More flowers, sweetheart? Who are these for?”
“Dada.”
“Don’t think I’ve seen these ones before.” He turned to Lee. “Any ideas from the family botanist?”
“Yeah. Take them away from her. Fast.”
“Uh-oh.” Quickly Gideon swept the tall purple stems out of her hands. “Crikey, why do I get the stinky ones?” He coughed, eyes watering. “What’s wrong with them?”
“They’re aconites. Pretty much toxic from base to apex.”
“Where the hell did she get those from?”
“I’ve no idea.” Lee soaked a handkerchief in the water butt, drew Tamsyn between his knees and set about washing her fingers. Beyond the obvious precautions, neither he nor Gideon had gone to great lengths to child-proof the house or garden, both of them agreeing that the kid couldn’t learn about dangers whilst sealed off from them. But the aconites were deadly, their indigo spires so obvious a threat that Lee ought to have spotted them and weeded them out in their infancy. “Sorry. Can’t think how I missed them.”
“Nor can I, with that smell.” Gid uncoiled from the bench, holding the plants at arm’s length. “Jesus. That’s making me feel a bit sick.”
“Go dump them in the compost bin, the one with the proper lid. They don’t have a scent, though, love—not that I can pick up.”
“You’re kidding.” Gideon jogged across the lawn, dumped the flowers into the bin and screwed down the lid with emphasis. He returned, sniffing suspiciously at his palms. “Like rotting fish and bubblegum—makes me want to run a mile. Is she okay?”
“Fine. She didn’t get any of the sap on her, and I honestly think she’s too smart to eat anything she picks up in the garden... Oh, hey, sweetheart. Come here.”
Tamsyn, sunny nature briefly overwhelmed, had burst into tears. Lee picked her up and rocked her. Gideon, who could never bear to see her weep, crouched beside them. “Oh, Tamsie. Don’t.”
“She’s okay, you big softie. I guess it’s not nice having your floral offerings rejected.”
“Or being told that they stink. You really couldn’t smell that?”
“Not at all. Next time get your dad some nice flowers, all right? Not bloody wolfsbane.”
Gideon flinched. “What did you call them?”
“Oh—they’ve got a dozen old folk names. Monkshood, devil’s helmet—Zeke would like that one. We had them in the fields around Drift, and Jago would call them wolfsbane.” Lee spared a hand from his daughter and laid it to Gideon’s cheek. “You’re pale as a cod. Listen to me for a moment, all right? A long time back, you said to me I never had to do the clairvoyant thing again—the stage shows, the readings—if I didn’t want to, because you’d look after me. Do you remember?”
“I... Yes, I remember.”
“It meant the world to me, even though I didn’t want to give up. Having that choice. I want you to know that you have it too. I can go back to work—the marina, the bar, Friday nights at All Saints Hall, whatever, or all three, if that’s what it takes. And we don’t have to stay in this house.”
Gideon got up. He turned to look at Chy Lowen’s sun-drenched southern wall, wisteria shadows and the subtle rosy shine of Mellor granite. He folded his arms. “I love the house,” he said, voice oddly rough, as if he’d have liked to curl up in Lee’s lap and cry too. “I didn’t think I’d feel this way about it, but... I do. I feel as if I’ve come home.”
“We’ll keep it, then. But please remember what I’ve said. And please don’t stop talking to me.”
“I don’t want to. But some parts of this job—the way it is now—mean I can’t. We knew that before I started, didn’t we?”
“Yep.”
“And you still think it sucks. For the record, so do I, but...” He swung back to face Lee. “I don’t have any choice just now. Look, we’re gonna be late if I don’t take that tiger indoors and skin it ready for the picnic.”
“Okay.” Lee handed the little girl over. She’d recovered from her upset, and went into Gideon’s arms with her usual squirming delight. “You’d better not forget the hat, unless you think it’s finally got too hot for her to wear it.”
“Oh, no. She’s Ma Frayne’s granddaughter—she’ll wear the hat.”
Left alone in the garden, Lee rested his face in his hands. Promptly he regretted it: the featureless oval swam up at him out of the dark, somehow mocking in its emptiness. “Who the hell are you?” he whispered in frustration, but the sunshine and the orchard had no answers for him, and after a moment he sat up and got out his mobile. The chances of finding a face for this nonentity across his kitchen table were virtually nil. He had to keep trying, so instead of cancelling the hopeful Gemma and her best friends Rachel and Kate, he postponed them to the next day. Then he sat back, allowing real images from his own past to sweep in.
He remembered all too clearly Gideon’s last promotion. Gid had been pleased and proud to make sergeant, but was first to admit he’d been following a career path, moving up the ladder because, no matter how well suited to his task, how well-loved in the role, he couldn’t remain forever as constable of Dark. The move to CID had severed his ties with the village completely. He reported for work in Bodmin town, and spent his days in Truro, Falmouth, Kerdrolla, anywhere across the peninsula where his plainclothes skills were needed.
Little silver birds, the chevrons denoting his new rank, on the uniform jersey Lee had pulled off him back in their flat in the village three and a half years ago. The visions had been coming thick and fast that day, and out of his blissed-out postcoital sleep, Lee had warned him of a different kind of sign: a St Piran’s cross, white on a background of black. And Gid had taken it as the mark of a guilty man in a crowd after Jake Mandel’s murder, and gone running after a zoned-out junkie who’d very nearly killed him.
Gid would always listen. He’d given credence to Lee’s gifts from almost the very beginning. Lee’s word was good as gold to him, worthy of sincere attention even when his copper’s instincts were drawing him the other way. How could Lee expect him to deal with a featureless blank that any face could fill, when his hands were already full of tangible problems? What Lee was seeing had the potential to be every kind of wild goose under the sun.
Wild geese, red herrings, tinsel fish. Wheels that meant Wheal, boats cutting the water that meant prows, Prowse, Bill bloody Prowse, crucial link in the missing-child case that had first brought them together. Every time Gid saw Lorna Kemp playing happily around the streets of Dark, he’d look at Lee as though he held the keys to the universe.
And that was beautiful to Lee, like having a warm hand placed upon his heart, but Gideon was wrong. Until he’d met Gid, Lee had been nothing more than a relay station for echoes. What would his world be without his husband’s loving gift for making sense of all the dreams and ghosts? “I don’t want to know,” he said softly, and buried his face in the soft, fragrant leaves of the hypericum. “Oh, God. I don’t want to know.”