sanctuary | on hold indefinitely

eight | remains

The bookstore was empty and bathed in darkness when Greer passed by the window to open up the next morning. She hated opening up. It was always bitterly cold at this time and the streets were eerily still, the city still asleep. The sun had barely risen, leaving the sky a strange shade of murky blue that tainted everything else around her with the same, dull colour.

The key stuck in the lock and she rattled the chain impatiently, the cold metal numbing her fingers. When it finally unlocked, the door, old and swollen in its frame, refused to move. "C'mon," she sighed, almost tripping over the threshold as it surrendered to the battle without warning.

Inside, the shop smelled of old pages and disrupted dust. Shyla loved it, but it always made Greer sneeze. She grabbed a tissue from the counter as she turned on the lights and unlocked the till with her free hand, sighing for a moment as she prepared herself for another day.

She was disturbed by the bell ringing above the door and looked up to find Shyla. His back was turned to her as he turned the open sign around for the customers to see, leaving Greer to wonder if he had forgiven her or not for yesterday. As he turned, his face was just as unreadable as the back of his head. He pulled his baker's cap off without looking at her, his tousled brown hair falling around his face in its refusal to be tamed, and marched towards her with a strange determination in his step.

"Shyla, look, I—" Greer began.

Shyla held a hand up, throwing down a newspaper that had been hidden under his arm onto the counter. "Have you seen this?"

Greer frowned, glancing down at the newspaper quietly. The headline was printed in bold, block letters: 

POLICE STILL NO CLOSER TO FINDING LEAD AS MORE HUMAN REMAINS ARE FOUND IN CUMBRIA.

A fresh wave of grief twisted in her stomach. She pushed the newspaper away, unable to bear reading about it again. "Why are you showing me this?"

"I thought you'd want to know." He was peeling his coat off and hanging it on the coat stand by the door. When he heard the crack in Greer's voice, he stopped, his visible eye soft with guilt. "I'm sorry. I didn't think. I just ... I thought you said something about going to a necromancer. Figured any information was helpful."

"My nanna doesn't really approve of the necromancer idea. Honestly, I'm not sure anymore, either." She thought of that word again: remains. Did she really want to see what remained of Clair? The thought made her shudder and she distracted herself by tying her apron around her waist and pinning her name tag to her shirt. "Maybe it's better to leave her to rest."

"But it's still happening, Greer," he said, tying his own apron much faster and tighter than Greer had with hers. His fingers were trembling, restless. "Whoever did it is still out there."

"I know that, Shy, but what are we supposed to do? The elders are the ones who decide these things. I ... I just want to move on from this."

Shyla nodded blankly, grabbing the paper from the counter and throwing it in the bin behind him. "If that's what you want. I'm sorry I brought it up."

"I'm sorry about yesterday," Greer said, finally meeting Shyla's eye. "My grandfather is unfair to you. I should stand up for you more. I want to stand up for you more."

Shyla softened, looking down with a solemn expression. "I know that, Greer, I do. I'm sorry, too."

"You don't have to apologise." 

"No, I do. I don't want to fight with you. I think sometimes I get angry at you when I'm supposed to be angry at other people. It's difficult not to feel alone when you're ... like me."

Greer reached up and tugged Shyla's eye patch gently, the elastic sliding off his head with ease. He blinked, watching her as she placed it down on the counter and looked up at him. It had been a while since she had seen both of his eyes, and the contrasting colours still surprised her despite the fact she always knew they were there. "Shyla, you're my best friend. I don't care about the colour of your eyes or what they mean. I never have."

He gave a small smile, a dimple burying itself in his cheek. Even though his eye patch only covered his eye, it felt as though she hadn't seen his face in years, and she was glad to find familiarity in the soft lines of his face, the way his lips curved into a smile and the coffee-coloured birthmark that stained his skin along his right jaw. "I know. Thank you," he whispered.

She nodded, pulling out a few sheets of paper from under the counter in an effort to break the silence that had fallen between them. She grabbed a pen, preparing for a morning of inventory. Shyla distracted her before she could walk away, though.

"Are you still going to help her?" he asked, his expression hopeful. His eye patch dangled from his fingers, ready in case a customer walked in.

Greer knew immediately who he was talking about and shrugged. "I don't know." Shyla's face fell, and she explained quickly, "I'm just worried that she's not the type of person I should be helping. She's Dark, Shyla. Who knows what she's involved in? Besides, you heard my grandfather. He could take all of this away from us if we disobey him."

"It's your choice."

"But?" Greer raised her eyebrows, sensing there was more he wanted to say.

"But I don't think you're the type of person who judges someone based on appearances, and you're certainly not the type of person who turns someone away when they ask for your help, even if it is against your grandfather's wishes."

"I don't know," she repeated, at a loss. The decision still felt no easier than it had before she had talked to her grandmother last night. "I need to do some inventory. Are you okay out here?"

He pursed his lips, unimpressed at her attempt to evade further conversation about the Dark witch, but slid his eye patch back on anyway.

"I suppose—unless your grandfather is on his way back to kick us out of his shop."

She laughed. "I think we're safe for now."

* * *

Greer's version of inventory was daydreaming in front of the old computer in her meetings room. The whirring of the monitor beneath the desk had set her in a trance that she hadn't particularly wanted to break as she tried to rid her brain of the headline she had seen in the newspaper.

Remains, she thought again. The bodies had been so damaged by the fires that they hadn't really been bodies anymore—more like rubble and ash. It was one of the things she couldn't yet comprehend; how Clair could have been dancing to the radio in her kitchen one day and cease to exist the next, with no body to bury or ashes to scatter. Nothing remained of her but an empty apartment and a pile of dust somewhere unknown.

The sound of something scraping pulled Greer from her thoughts. She hadn't realised she'd been crying until she felt a dampness on her cheeks, and she wiped her tears quickly, feeling embarrassed despite the fact that she was alone. The scraping was coming from behind her, on the table where she kept her notepad, only where it had been closed shut before, it was now flipped open. The light spilled onto the yellow pages as words written in a fine, grey pencil began to appear in a disjointed scrawl that was nowhere near between the ruled lines.

Greer Reid:

Tomorrow, 1pm.

53°58'32.7"N 1°48'38.2"W

Devan Lee.

"You couldn't have just used a phone?" she muttered under her breath, picking up the notepad and heading back to the computer. "Or given me a real address?" she added after noticing the coordinates. She typed the numbers into Google Maps with a sigh, realising soon enough why she hadn't been given an address: the location was in the middle of the Yorkshire woods, with nothing close by save for a brook and a village a few miles away.

"Great," she huffed, slamming her pen down and regretting, not for the first time, that she had ever agreed to help. 

"The middle of bloody nowhere."