Sunset ^beta

Chapter Text

Gideon arrived at the designated meeting place ten minutes before midnight. There were the usual crowds milling around the east entrance to The Mithraeum Hotel & Casino and Gideon found an empty bench and sat, her elbows propped on her knees and her eyes on her phone. She pulled up her text messages, double checked that she had the right time and the right place. It would be just her luck, wouldn’t it? A date with the most beautiful showgirl in the Gilded Halls of Ida and Gideon Nav was waiting at the wrong door and, oh hey, she was half an hour late too.

No, the time hadn’t changed since the last time she looked. The place was the same: I’m always out by 11:30. Meet me by the east entrance at midnight. I pick the spot. Don’t dress up 😘

After shoving her phone into Cam’s face and demanding a translation to the last bit (”It means don’t dress up”), Gideon did not dress up. The second time Gideon got dressed, she did not dress up. Cam had to work the night of the date, so Gideon staged a dress rehearsal before Cam had to leave. Camilla vetoed her jacket and then Dulcie both blushed at and then vetoed her vest. But the third time—Third time’s the charm and Gideon eventually found housemate approval with her second favorite pair of jeans, a brand new and very black tank, and a white shirt, untucked and unbuttoned with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She looked good. She hoped she looked good. She felt—fuck, her palms were really sweaty.

Gideon checked her watch. Midnight.

She leaned back against the bench, ran a sweaty hand through her hair and tried to calm her nerves. Her right leg was bouncing, a nervous jitter that drove everyone that knew her nuts. She stood and turned toward the door just as Coronabeth pushed her way out of the casino. Gideon let out a breath. The tension in her shoulders drained, just slightly.

After the whole ‘don’t dress up’ debacle, after Cam knocked her upside the head and convinced her she didn’t need to wear an entire suit, Gideon half expected Corona to show up in a dress and sky high heels, but no, Corona had not dressed up. Her hair was pulled back away from her face and her cheeks looked a little red, like she’d recently scrubbed them clean of makeup—which, yeah, of course she had. Not that—Corona was very obviously still wearing makeup, just not the stage makeup of the Hall.

Okay, another deep breath. The point was, Corona was wearing jeans and tennis shoes and Gideon was fine. She had permission to calm the fuck down. She licked her lips and tried a smile. Corona’s entire face lit up as she returned it, as she pulled Gideon into a perfumed embrace.

If only no one had told Gideon! This would just be a date with the hot girl she met in the employee lot. But no, turned out this was Coronabeth, the most talked about showgirl in the Gilded Halls of Ida.

“This seems like something you would have known,” Camilla pointed out days earlier on their long walk to the floor. “You’ve been working at the Mithraeum what? Six months now? The girls from Ida are plastered on every wall of this place and you’re you.”

It was absolutely something Gideon should have noticed, but when she mentioned it to Corona, when she said, “I had no idea who you were when I asked you out,” Corona laughed and said: “I know. I loved that. It’s why I said yes.” She looked Gideon up and down. “It’s part of why I said yes.”

Corona slipped her arm through Gideon’s as they walked. She kept close, as though they’d known each other for ages, as though they hadn’t bumped into each other a couple times in the employee parking lot, once literally, before Gideon asked her out on this date.

The thing was, Camilla was right. (Typical.) Coronabeth really was plastered all over the Mithraeum, Corona’s face and Corona’s jewel-covered tits. Her smile was the same and the shine of her eyes was the same, but beyond that the posters looked nothing like the Corona from the parking lot, nothing like the Corona that walked beside Gideon now.

“Where are you taking me?” Gideon asked, as though the date was all Corona’s idea from the very start. Maybe it was. Maybe she’d planned it all after that first encounter. That was a fun thought: Gideon Nav manipulated and pursued by the most gorgeous showgirl at the Mithraeum. Gideon fell right into her well-manicured hands.

Corona squeezed Gideon’s arm. She hummed in surprise and squeezed it again.

“Hot tonight,” Gideon noted, helplessly. She pulled at the collar of her already unbuttoned shirt.

“Mm,” Corona agreed. “We won’t be walking long. Where we’re going isn’t far and it won’t be too crowded. We can have a drink and we’ll be able to hear each other speak.”

Gideon was familiar with this area. She used to work not far from here before she got the job at the Erebos, before she met Cam and Palamedes and Dulcinea. Long before she started dealing tables at the Mithraeum. When Corona turned down the very street that housed Gideon’s former employer, Gideon felt a sudden chill in the air. It was the sort of chill that puffed up from cracks in the earth, around entrances to gaping caves. Deep earth chill. Gateway to hell cold. You’d think hell would be hot, right? It wasn’t. It was as cold as the fucking grave. Gideon racked her brain for every other possible destination that might require them to walk in this direction. By the time Corona stopped outside the discreet stone-grey door to The Locked Tomb, Gideon’s heart was in her stomach, but she wasn’t surprised. There was nowhere else it could have been.

“This is it,” Corona said. She reached for a button to the side of the door. The Locked Tomb fancied itself an exclusive speakeasy. In truth, it was a wannabe-goth cocktail bar in a basement that anyone could access if they just visited the website and wrote down the password on the splash page.

“This is it,” Gideon repeated. Corona turned toward her with a sly smile, and Gideon realized that she must think Gideon didn’t know there was a bar at this location. “No, I mean, I know it’s—I used to work here.” She worked there for years and she didn’t remember ever seeing Coronabeth, star showgirl, down in its depths.

Corona’s eyebrows went high. “Oh, small world! If you worked here, you must know my sister.”

“Harrow?”

Corona laughed and shoved at Gideon’s arm gently with her fingers. “Funny! I meant Ianthe, of course.”

That wasn’t a better response. That was—Gideon squinted. Corona stood back and held out her arms. She gestured to herself, her hand waving vaguely at the entire package of Coronabeth. Gideon shook her head, and Corona rolled her eyes and pressed the button for the intercom a second time. “Come on, you must have realized. We’re twins.”

No way. Gideon knew Ianthe, and Ianthe— “You look nothing alike.”

“We look very much alike. That’s how it works.”

It’d been years now since the last time Gideon saw Ianthe, but she was certain they were not identical. There was no way Gideon could mistake Ianthe Tridentarius for hottest-girl-at-the-Mithraeum Corona.

“No offense to your sister, but I’m not sure I believe you.”

“Gideon! I think I would know.” The speaker buzzed with static and Corona leaned in to state the password—”I pray that the Tomb is shut forever.”

The door clicked in response and they were greeted by a rush of cold air, by a dark and upsettingly familiar set of stairs. The gateway to hell. Gideon hesitated at the entrance a moment, watched Corona descend into the gloom. Corona paused at the landing, just before she faded into the dark.

“Gideon?”

Right.

Gideon pushed up her sleeves, took a deep fortifying breath, and followed Coronabeth down into hell.

Gideon startled awake at the slamming of a door. Her eyes snapped open and her body twitched toward the sound, ready to take on the sudden threat. And then the entire room began to tilt.

“Oh, fuck.” Gideon groaned as she fell back against her pillows and the sudden movement sent her head spinning. No, she was unfit to take on anyone or anything. She blinked, eyes watering, until the late afternoon light became bearable and the room slowly shifted into focus. Her bedroom door was shut. The house was quiet and unmoving.

Great. Perfect. Startled awake by her own dreams of slamming doors.

Gideon reached for her phone on the bedside table and her hand landed on a bottle of pills instead. The bottle fell. It rolled off the table and onto the floor.

“Shit, what time is it?”

No response from the empty room. Unsurprising. Gideon fished around on the floor for the pill bottle, found it and then stared at it blearily until she deciphered from the color of the label, then the words printed on the label, that it was ibuprofen. She took three, sucking them down with big gulps from the glass of water conveniently waiting on the table, undisturbed by her flailing hand. No phone to be found, but there was a folded sheet of paper on the table beside the glass, and on the paper someone had scrawled a ‘G,’ as though they’d started writing her name but stopped abruptly when they realized they didn’t know how to spell. The pen was there too. It was an awful pen, a pen that Gideon recognized instantly, black ink, black pen. The only adornments were a printed white skull beside a printed white key.

It was a calling card.

Gideon snatched up the paper. She unfolded it and, as was becoming a theme, stared at it uncomprehending for a very long time. As she stared at it, and then past it, other details of the room came into focus. The grey smears of paint on the pillows. The stretch of rumpled vacant space in the bed beside her. Her clothes from last night’s date discarded in an uncharacteristic heap on the floor.

Most damning, there was a shiny black metal band on the fourth finger of Gideon’s left hand.

Gideon returned her attention to the folded paper. It was a note written on a receipt from a wedding chapel. Gideon recognized the name, and knew it wasn’t far from The Mithraeum. The receipt was dated ten after eight that morning. She moaned, a low and pitifully drawn out “nooo.”

The note was written with a curt and aggravated hand, the letters tighter and tenser than Gideon had ever seen them before. The note was signed, but the signature was unnecessary. Gideon would recognize that handwriting anywhere.

We never speak of this again. Do not come find me. Do not call. — Harrow

Harrow.

Last night Gideon met Coronabeth Tridentarius for a date outside The Mithraeum. She had a date with Corona, that date led her right back down into The Locked Tomb, and now she was—

Gideon closed her eyes and tried to work back through the events of the evening. The sound Corona made when she squeezed Gideon’s arm. The soft press of her lips to Gideon’s cheek. Booming bass and the roar of a crowd. Harrow Nonagesimus smiling, her teeth bright and weirdly blue beneath a black light, every hair and speck of dust illuminated on her black shirt. Juniper on Gideon’s tongue and Harrow’s hot little hands digging into Gideon’s shoulders, Harrow pulling Gideon’s head down into a kiss.

Harrow’s hot little hands digging into Gideon’s shoulders, Harrow pulling Gideon’s head down into a kiss.

No, that was—This was the slamming of a door. It was a dream, a nightmare. Had to be. There was an alternate explanation for the note, for the paper, for the kissing. Harrow was just messing with her. That was what Harrow did. It was what she’d always done. Someone else got married and this was their receipt and if Gideon slipped the ring off her finger, she’d discover it was some cheap trinket from a tourist shop. That was why it was black—one of those awful ‘game over’ jokes men made when they married the women they supposedly loved. Black like the decorations for a fortieth birthday party. Black like life as Gideon knew it dead and gone.

Gideon slipped the ring off her finger. It was metal and heavy. Fuck, it was nice. There was no jokey inscription, no cheap tourist shop sticker. It felt good in her hand. It felt legit.

Okay, so maybe some of it was real. Gideon asked Harrow to go dancing after her date with Corona fizzled. That was a miscalculation and very uncharacteristic, but it should have been fine. It should have been fine, because Camilla was there.

Camilla was there.

Cam, Gideon’s very responsible and unflappable friend. Cam would never let a thing like this happen to Gideon on her watch, which meant she’d be able to explain, put the pieces together in a way that made sense and set Gideon’s life back on its correct course. Gideon would go to Camilla and Camilla would pull Gideon from her nightmare and set everything right.

**

Gideon did not have to go far to find Camilla. She didn’t have to wait long to discover that Cam couldn’t save her this time.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Gideon was standing in their living room in her tank and her boxer briefs—and imagine how thankful she was to throw back her sheets and find she was still wearing those!—with her arms folded across her chest and the note clutched tight in her hand.

“Well, you ditched me,” Camilla said, evenly, from her spot on the couch between Dulcinea and Dulcinea’s cat. “You asked me to get you a drink and when I turned back the two of you were gone.”

Dulcinea scrutinized Gideon, taking in all of her details. Dulcinea was so damn good with details. “You slept in that paint?”

Okay, she was starting off easy.

Gideon wiped her palm against her cheek and shrugged.

Dulcinea’s sleek black cat, Mia, eyed Gideon now too, taking in all the details Dulcinea might have missed. Mia turned up her white-striped nose and settled back into her nap, unconcerned with the state of Gideon Nav.

Fine, okay. Gideon turned her attention back to Camilla. “Why would I ditch you? I’ve never ditched you.”

Camilla mimicked Gideon’s earlier shrug. “You ditched me last night. I called you five times before you started sending me straight to voicemail. Palamedes called you and you sent him to voicemail. So I called Dulcie, woke her up, and then you sent her to voicemail too.”

Great, so on top of everything else, Gideon was an asshole to her friends too. Marriage to Harrow had already turned her into an asshole to her friends. Gideon groaned and it sounded pathetic even to her own ears. “Fuck, sorry.”

“What’s that?” Dulcinea asked, seemingly unfazed by Gideon snubbing her early morning check-in calls. She reached for Gideon’s hand. Gideon gave it to her without a fight and waited as Dulcinea examined the ring. She turned it on Gideon’s finger, then held Gideon’s hand up toward the light. “This is nice. Not for me, obviously, but it looks very nice on you. Handsome.”

“She gave you her ring?” Camilla asked. Dulcinea brought Gideon’s hand closer so that Camilla could get a better look. Gideon was fairly certain she reeked of last night’s booze and a casino full of cigarettes and should not be in close proximity to anyone, but she leaned in anyway, letting herself be yanked back and forth between the two.

“I think it’s my ring, actually.” Gideon pushed the note into Camilla’s hand.

Camilla’s face was neutral as she read it. “Okay.”

Dulcinea’s eyes went wide. “Oh, Gideon. You should have picked up your phone.”

“I really should have,” Gideon agreed. Dulcinea made a small surprised sound and pressed a hand to her mouth. “What are you doing? Are you—stop smiling! Cam, make her stop smiling. This is on the opposite side of the planet from cute and amusing. This is disastrous, it’s—”

Dulcinea was downright grinning. “You unexpectedly reunited with the girl you spent two entire years telling us you hated more than anyone else in this entire world, and then you married her.” She turned to Cam. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

“No,” Gideon said. “It’s not like that. I actually hate her more than anyone else in the world.” She snatched the paper back and crumpled it in her hand. Then she thrust it forward again to emphasize her point. “This is her. It’s what she does. I let Corona take me into The Locked Tomb and now this is Harrow being desperate, trying everything she can to drag me back down. I don’t know how yet, but she did something, planned this whole thing to bind me back to her and that damn bar.”

Cam frowned. “The note says she doesn’t want to see you or talk about it ever again.”

Gideon threw up her hands. “Exactly! This is how it starts.”

“Sometimes words mean exactly what they mean,” Cam reasoned.

“No.” Gideon shook her head, adamant. “You were right about Corona, but Harrow is an entirely different beast.”

“Maybe she’s changed,” Dulcinea suggested. Her face was bright, practically glowing. She was loving this. “After all, she’s only a very little beast.”

Gideon eyed the stack of novels on the table beside Dulcinea and then shook her head again. “Don’t romanticize this. It isn’t one of your books; it’s a nightmare.”

“If it helps, she didn’t seem completely nightmarish and evil this morning. She refused to sit with me for a cup of coffee—I don’t think she realized she might run into other people on her beeline toward the door—but she was nice about it. I assumed it was a bit of friendly hate sex and there I was interupting her walk of shame. She was more pleasant than I might have been in her shoes.” As Dulcinea spoke, she wriggled back against the cushions of the couch, leaning heavily against Cam’s side. Cam took the hint and slipped an arm behind Dulcie, pulling her closer. Cuddled up on the couch with her big bright blue eyes, it was hard to imagine anyone hating Dulcinea enough for hate sex to ever enter the equation.

Gideon snorted. “You’ve always been a terrible judge of character.”

Dulcinea looked pointedly at Gideon as she slowly set a proprietary hand on Camilla’s thigh. With her other hand she gestured back toward the bedroom she shared with Palamedes. “I’m an excellent judge of character, in fact, and you know it.”

“So what are you going to do?” Camilla asked, skipping ahead to the real questions.

Gideon was going to ask Palamedes for the name of one of his lawyer friends, but first: “You know what, fuck it, fuck her, fuck the note. I’m calling her. She can’t just do this and get away with it. Not anymore.”

**

We never speak of this again. Do not come find me. Do not call. As though Gideon could. She found her phone in the back pocket of her discarded jeans, but she’d deleted Harrow’s number as soon as she escaped the Tomb and knew she wouldn’t need to call any of her former ‘tomb mates’ to cover her shifts ever again. An internet search was no help, not even with a name as unique as Nonagesimus. Gideon was about to call the number for the bar, about to risk asking Ianthe or Ortus or, God forbid, Crux himself, when she remembered the pile of old phones she’d tossed in a box in her closet, the old phones she kept meaning to get rid of through the appropriate means and methods. The chargers should be in there too, which meant twenty minutes later she had an old phone with a busted screen plugged in and running long enough to find Harrow in her contacts. She was listed, very appropriately, as ‘The Cryptkeeper.’

Now, sitting on the floor of her bedroom surrounded by her personal museum of cellphone relics, Gideon held the newest least-banged-up model tight to her ear. Her entire body felt tense, ready to snap, and she pressed her elbows hard into the muscle above her knees. She bit at the skin around her thumbnail as the phone started to ring. One ring and Gideon’s heart was pounding. Two and she was sure she’d be sent to voicemail. Three and she was ready to hang up and shrug her shoulders; at least she’d tried. Four and—

Silence on the other side of the line, then faint breathing.

“Harrow? It’s Gideon.”

Another moment of nothing, and then finally: “I told you not to call.”

Harrow’s voice was hard, irritated, and Gideon felt herself relax just slightly at the tone of it. She shifted until her back was settled against the side of her bed and pushed a hand through her hair. “Yeah, I got your note, but I have questions and you’re the person with the answers.”

“What questions.”

Gideon shrugged to her empty room. “I don’t know, like, what the fuck, Harrow? Like, you never fucking change! You really think I’m going to fall for this shit?”

More silence. Gideon could hear a dog barking in the background. “Say something.”

“What’s there to say?” Harrow asked. “You’re right, Griddle. I planned the entire thing. I certainly had nothing better to do with the last two years of my life than to spend it thinking about you. It was so easy, pulling the strings, getting Coronabeth Tridentarius to bring you back to the Tomb. It was so easy, forcing drinks down your throat and convincing you we should go to that club. It was so fucking easy, I—”

The longer Harrow talked, the more Gideon felt herself relax. There was audible panic in Harrow’s voice, like actual barely concealed horror. Harrow didn’t plan shit. Harrow was in the same damn nightmare as Gideon.

Gideon waited until Harrow finished and then said: “So how much do you remember?”

Harrow took a deep breath, a loud rattling suck of air that she let out right into Gideon’s ear. “Some.”

“Cause I don’t remember much,” Gideon admitted. “I remember seeing you, obviously, and dancing, and um, I remember kissing, but most of the rest of the night is just gone.”

“Mm,” Harrow said on the other end of the line. Gideon didn’t need to see her to envision the face she was making. Tight. Pinched. “Well, we got married!”

“Yeah, I got that,” Gideon pushed herself up off the floor. She tucked the phone against her shoulder, paced to the door and then back, and found herself standing in front of the pile of her discarded clothes. “Did we—you and I—um, we didn’t make it official, did we?”

Harrow sighed heavily. “If that’s supposed to be a euphemism for sex, I think we passed out before we got that far.”

“Good,” Gideon said. She scratched at her ear and frowned at the layer of grease coating her skin. Her fingers came away black with paint caked underneath the nails.

Harrow lapsed back into silence. She stayed that way while Gideon left her bedroom and slipped into the bathroom across the hall. Gideon stared at her paint-smeared face in the mirror, at her disheveled hair and the tired red tinge to the whites of her eyes. She looked like a sad pathetic clown. Gideon turned on the shower and then leaned against the sink and said: “What now?”

Harrow made a sound that might have been a huff but was probably more like a scoff. “Nothing now. Lose my number, don’t come by. We don’t talk about it ever again.”

It was Gideon’s turn to make weird breathing noises into the speaker, and she did, an awkward combo of a sigh and a laugh. “But like, what if you want to marry someone else? Or I do? We’ll have to get divorced, or like—annulled? Is that a real thing?”

“Are you planning to get married soon?”

“No, but—”

“Email me when you’re engaged to the showgirl. We’ll deal with it then.” And with that, Harrow hung up the phone.