Chapter Text
The Evening Kingdom stretched into Gotham.
It should not have been possible; Evening could not pass into the mortal realm. But Gotham could not be called entirely mortal. She was not Fae, to be certain. She was too gritty, too filled with midnight and daylight and the harsh stink of humanity. But if she was not Fae, neither was she wholly mortal.
And so, the Evening Kingdom stretched into Gotham.
Not always, but there were nights, sometimes, when it did. Nights when the dusk lingered past its time, hours upon days of dim twilight sheltering the city in its silky caress. Nights when the shadows grew sentience and danced upon the streetlights. Nights when the Evening People crossed over the threshold into the land of mortals, then back to their own world before the dawn. None ever stayed past sunrise.
For neither Fae, nor memory of Fae, could survive outside dusk.
The city of Gotham, as she was, did not distinguish between the Fae and the Dead: they were one and the same, long-lost shadows of the Living that wandered her dusky streets and were thence forgotten.
So it was, and so it always had been.
It was such a night—midnight darkness stretched too-thin into a murky dusk—when Janet crossed into Gotham, panting and bleeding. She stumbled, pitched forward onto concrete. The asphalt ripped her stockings and scraped her knee.
She had not been wearing stockings before she fell.
She had not been wearing a body with knees before she fell.
But now she stood, a young woman, human, in a mussed skirt and torn stockings, with a graze on her knee, bleeding red blood, and a ring of perfectly matched pearls hung around her neck.
“Miss? Are you alright?”
Janet turned towards the voice, hands curling around the heels of her newly-formed stilettos.
The voice belonged to man. He was perhaps thirty, red-faced with drink and flush with the scent of leather and cash. His suit was expensive, but not correctly fitted, and one gold-and-amethyst cufflink had wormed its way halfway off his cuff to dangle carelessly from his sleeve.
Janet blinked. Then she smiled. Her teeth glinted, perfect pearls in the moonlight to match the choker circled round her throat.
The man froze. His breath hitched in his lungs—at her inhuman beauty or her unnatural grace or her predatory stance, he didn’t know. “Miss?” His voice cracked. “Can I get you anything? Do anything for you?”
Janet frowned, took stock of herself. She had been running, but now she was not. She did not need to keep running, but she should move. She could not remember why it was important that she kept moving, but she knew it as sure as she knew she was standing in a street. She nodded at the man.
“I could call a cab? Get you something to eat?” His appraising look grew more suggestive. “Something to drink?”
Janet took the offered hand. She knew that accepting food and drink and transport from strange men was not advisable. She also knew, on some instinctual level she could not name, that she was more dangerous than any man walking through these too-thin shadows.
The man blushed and stammered as she drew herself closer to him. “I’m Jack, by the way. Jack Drake.”
“Janet,” she said. She was not sure there was more to it, though the man obviously expected more. “Janet Lin,” she added—but that wasn’t quite right, was it? “Janet Lin Carterhaugh.” Yes, that was it.
“It’s lovely to meet you, Janet Lynn Carter.” The shape of her name changed in his mouth, and stood in the air between them, becoming real.
“Do you travel, Jack Drake?” she asked him.
“Do I travel-?” The question seemed to confuse him. “Well, yes, of course. For work. Drake Industries, I’m sure you know it. I’m the CEO. And for pleasure. Archaeology, that’s my passion. Probably one of the only CEO-archeologists in the world.”
Janet nodded. “That’ll do. I am one of those too.”
“What, a CEO? Or an archaeologist?”
Janet hummed in response. “Yes.”
“Really?”
“Mm.”
They got in the cab. They ate and they drank, and they remembered each other. Things that never had been. Things that always had been. They had met in business school, found they had a shared passion for archaeology. Jack took Janet to the Met for their first date. Janet’s parents hadn’t approved of the match, seeing Jack as too nouveau-riche, his family fortune only established by his great-grandfather a century ago. They ate and they drank, and they remembered things that had never and had always been.
When that long evening finally broke into dawn, Jack Drake stepped out from the taxicab and onto the gravel of his driveway. He held open the door, and the woman in the cab took his proffered hand. She wore a perfectly-tailored business suit and untorn stockings. She sported no scrapes and two finely-crafted rings on the third finger of her left hand. She bore a new name.
Janet Lynn Drake stepped out of the cab and into her manor, husband following in her wake.
No memory remained of scraped-up knees, or too-thin shadows, or tooth-like pearls glinting in the moonlight.
So it was, and so it always had been.
Dawn broke over Gotham, and Evening receded.
“We should have a kid.”
“No.”
“C’mon, Jan. It’ll be great! I can teach him how to play baseball, you can teach him that scary thing you do with your eyes—”
A pause.
“Yup, that’s the one!”
“No kids,” said Janet.
“Why the hell not? Everyone’s getting kids nowadays. The McKenzies just had twins, and the Brightons-”
“How would we travel, with a child?
“What the hell are we supposed to do, then? Just leave the company to some stranger? This is family, bloodline, inheritance. It’s important.”
Janet was silent, considering. Her parents—who had disapproved of Jack up until their deaths despite Drake Industries’ sudden financial turnaround—would have wanted her to have a child nevertheless. That was how things were Done. Bloodlines and inheritance. Family above all else. Those were old oaths, bound in iron and salt, and they called to her bones. Still, she resisted. “I’m not a mother,” she said.
And if some whisper in the back of her mind laughed—mother? you’re not even a person—she swept it aside with practiced efficiency and a Xanax or three.
“You won’t have to be.” Jack, bless him, did not notice his wife’s distress. “We can get nannies to do all the actual work of it. But we need an heir. Someone to carry on the family name.”
“Mm.” Janet took a sip of wine. It circled around the Xanax in her brain. The Family Name. Even she could not deny the draw of that duty. Blood calls to Blood, Name calls to Name, and Death calls to Death. And if she did not have to raise the child herself… “Fine.”
They went to the finest doctors, of course. Nothing less for the Drakes.
“…Huh.” The doctor frowned at CAT-scan images.
“What is it?” Jack Drake grasped his wife’s hand anxiously.
Janet was not so uncouth as to let a wince mar her face. Or any kind of expression. “Am I unable to carry?” she asked. Her voice was unbothered, bored. If she was anxious—or hopeful—it didn’t show.
“No, no, that’s not it at all.” The doctor brushed off perceived concerns. “You are in perfectly good condition, Mrs. Drake. Perfectly good, actually. I’ve seen anatomy textbooks with less picturesque organs than you have in here.”
“Of course,” she said, taking it as her due. She was, after all, Janet Lynn Drake, and had never been less than picture-perfect in all her existence. It was only fitting that her insides were the same.
And the same would hold true, she was sure, for any child she birthed. Janet Lynn Drake did not suffer anything less than perfection.
Timothy Jackson Drake was born in the middle of the day, under a burning sun. He was small, barely three pounds, with big blue eyes and wrinkled bald skin and a wailing scream that seemed to never end.
Jack Drake grinned, sweaty and nervous, as he showed off his infant son to the nurses in the NICU. “Look at him,” he crowed. “He’s perfect!”
Janet Drake lay in her hospital bed, and did not reach for the child. He was not hers, she knew that much. She was not a mother. And that? That was not her son.
There was something…wrong with the child. She could not touch it.
Changeling, the word whispered through her mind. She brushed it aside. Changelings were things out of fairy-tales and myth. They did not belong in daylight and rationality. And Janet was a woman of rationality. She wondered if it was too soon after the epidural to pop a Xanax. She asked for morphine instead.
Timothy was taken home and placed into a crib. He screamed.
Jack took him out of the crib. Timothy screamed. Jack put him back in the crib. Timothy screamed. Janet did not touch him.
They tried nannies; they tried different formula; they tried rocking him; they tried leaving him be; they tried everything they could possibly think of. Timothy did not stop screaming.
He grew, but only barely, as the months passed. At three months old, he was barely five pounds, with big blue eyes and a head full of downy black hair and a scream that could wake the dead.
“Shut him up, shut him up, shut him up!” Jack lay in bed, pillow held tight over his head. It did not block out the screaming.
He turned to his wife. “Fucking do something! That demon-child won’t stop screaming!”
Janet looked at him, and said nothing. She did not move.
“You brought that cursed creature into this fucking world! God fucking dammit, Janet, do something about it!”
She closed her eyes.
“Fucking fine. If you won’t do something…” his mumbling devolved into something incomprehensible, but his point was made. Jack strode over to the crib, lifted the child out. “Shut up,” he told it, shaking for emphasis.
Timothy screamed.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
Timothy’s neck snapped back on the last shake, and his wail was cut off. His face grew purple and a small gurgle escaped him.
Jack backed up, eyes going wide. “Fuck,” he swore. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
He dropped the baby, sprinted back to the bedroom. “Janet, Janet—I-” he choked on his words. “I don’t, fuck, I didn’t mean—”
Janet sighed and rolled out of bed. She marched over to the crib. There was a dead baby inside it, corpse-pale and unmoving.
“Oh shit, what do I do, Jan. This isn’t a-”
Janet tuned out her husband’s panicked babbling. Blood calls to Blood, Name calls to Name, and Death calls to Death.
She reached a porcelain-white hand out and touched the child. Skin on cold skin. Flesh on dead flesh. She pulled him from the crib and held him to her breast. She hummed a song that had no tune, and walked down to the water.
It was dusk. Jack stumbled after her. “Janet, what are you doing? He’s—we need to call an ambulance! Or a doctor, or, or…a lawyer, probably. Actually, yeah, a lawyer. We can say—we can say…” He tripped on a branch and fell to the soft bed of needles on the ground.
Janet strode sure-footed through the shadows until she came to a creek that wandered its way across the Drake properties. She plunged the child into ice-cold water, and held him down beneath the stream. She piled mud and silt atop his corpse, and held him down beneath the earth.
“Janet? What the hell are you doing?”
Evening stretched across Gotham, and Janet Drake pulled her son from the creekbed.
Dead blue eyes stared into dead blue eyes.
She held the child to her shoulder and pat his back. It was a strangely domestic scene, uncharacteristic of Janet. If the child had not been dead, Jack Drake would not have believed it possible of his wife.
She pat his back, and water dribbled from his mouth. Just a drop, and then a stream, and then a torrent—water and clay—streaming from his mouth, from his eyes, from his ears, from his nose, until the babe was covered in clay, until the babe was nothing but clay.
Janet held the muddy lump of clay away from her body, although it was too late to avoid stains. There was blood and muck and clay soaking through her white pyjama top; dark soil staining the knees of her matching white pants. She kneaded the clay into the earth, formed a simple body, a simple head, drew a thumb across its face in a cruel approximation of a smile. She pressed her nails into the spot where eyes would go, and laid the clay-child on the pine-covered earth.
She kissed his forehead.
Blue eyes stared into blue eyes.
In the morning, Jack and Janet awoke to soft sunlight streaming through their windows. Jack groaned, rubbed his face. He’d had a horrible dream…Timothy! He shot out of bed and ran to his son’s crib. The child was there, awake and unblemished. Blue eyes unblinking and strangely aware. He reached for his father, but Jack stumbled backwards. There was something…wrong with the child. He could not touch it.
Janet followed behind her husband at a more sedate pace. “What’s wrong, dear?” She stood on her tiptoes to whisper in his ear. Her cotton pyjamas were blindingly white and impeccably clean, the sweet scent of fabric softener pressed against him.
Jack frowned.”I was worried…” Why had he been worried? “It must’ve been a dream, or something.”
“Mm.” Janet withdrew from her husband. “Those things always go away with the dawn. Breakfast?”
“Yeah,” said Jack. “Yeah.” He turned to go. “Does he seem…off to you?”
Janet creased her brow in question.
“The kid. He’s quiet, today.”
“Timothy?” Janet laughed, and caressed the boy’s cheek. A pine needle stuck into her thumb. She frowned, then brushed it away. “He’s always been quiet, dear. Such a good, obedient child. Perfect.”
Timothy stared back up at her, silent, eyes all too knowing and aware.
Jack chuckled, rubbed his neck. Of course his son was quiet. Of course. He shook his head and followed his wife down the mahogany stairs, looking forward to his morning Bloody Mary, all memory of murdering his only son forgotten in the light of day.
Timothy Jackson Drake was born in the evening. He was small, barely five pounds, with wide blue eyes and a head full of downy black hair. And he never once cried.
So it was, and so it always had been.