Chapter Text
* * *
Preferably before Mrs. Arryn arrived, Jaime thought. Somehow she managed to magnify by fifty times every scrape, every incident involving her only child. He spent far too much of his time as principal of Crossroads Elementary dealing with overprotective parents as it was.
The nurse got Robin a glass of water and gradually he calmed down.
Jaime thought the process would be sped up if they weren’t distracted by the program showing on her tiny portable television. “Could you turn that off—whatever it is?”
“It’s Blackhaven Hospital,” the nurse informed him with quiet dignity. “I just had it on for the background noise while I was doing the inventory. Robin, slower sips, all right?”
Between gulps and shudders the story came out. The usual contingent of bullies had been after him and he’d taken refuge in the locker room.
Jaime had to admit it was a sound strategy. Absolutely no one would expect Robin to voluntarily go anywhere near the gym.
Eventually, the boys had given up or gone home and Robin had emerged from his hiding place.
“It came out then,” Robin blubbered. “The Thing.”
The nurse and Jaime exchanged looks.
“It looked just like everyone says. The . . . the teeth.” Robin started crying in earnest again, just in time for his mother to come rushing into the office.
“The teeth?” Miss Tarth asked, plainly bewildered. She hadn’t been at Crossroads Elementary very long.
He supposed it was a good that his staff members were obeying his orders not to discuss the problem in the locker room, but it also meant that he would need to have The Discussion with Miss Tarth.
Mrs. Arryn’s arrival fortunately allowed him to steer the conversation away from the boys’ locker room and onto Robin’s run-in with the other boys. She was a nervous woman and an overprotective mother by nature; widowhood had exacerbated these traits, but Jaime honestly couldn’t blame her in this case. Crossroads had a zero-tolerance policy for bullying. Robin may have been a sniveling little boy, but that was hardly an excuse.
Jaime assured her he was on it. The other boys would be disciplined. They had very good counselors for this sort of thing as well.
“The teeth,” Robin whispered.
“Sweetling?”
“Robin was just about to tell us about the locker—”
Jaime shot Miss Tarth a glare. “—Robin hurt himself in the boys’ locker room.”
“I don’t want to go in there anymore,” Robin whimpered. “And I didn’t hurt—”
“—He’s fine, though, aren’t you, lad?” Jaime patted the boy on the back. “Mrs. Arryn, I want to assure you that I will personally see to it that the situation in the locker room is fixed.” He saw Robin opening his mouth, probably ready to spill everything about Biter. “We may need to suspend physical education classes for a while.”
Robin absorbed this and said no more about the teeth.
More assurances were needed to placate Lysa Arryn, but eventually she too was satisfied.
“How long can we keep them out of the locker room?” the nurse demanded after Mrs. Arryn and her son had left.
Miss Tarth had her arms folded across her chest. “What’s going on? What’s wrong with the locker room? Robin isn’t that imaginative. What is this business about ‘the teeth’?”
Jaime sighed. He was so sick of having to have The Discussion.
* * *
As painful as it had been to watch the soap opera then, it was torture now. Sansa was old enough to remember a time when you could go to the gate to meet someone—a time when you didn’t need to be stuck between a woman whose nose was dripping non-stop and a little boy who was relentlessly kicking his sneaker-clad toe against the chair leg. The last thing she needed was to have to watch some aging soap opera actor who had been killed off and brought back to life almost as many times as Erica Kane had husbands.
To the far right, sitting facing her, was her ex-boyfriend’s somewhat terrifying uncle, Tywin Lannister. Sansa knew he was semi-retired, which explained what he was doing babysitting Tyrion’s little girls, in the airport at 1:00PM. She had met them a few times, but it had always been in a crowd of their relatives and she doubted they would remember her. They flanked him. One had her nose in a picture book and the other was babbling nonsense to her doll. Thankfully, Mr. Lannister (in contrast to his brother, Kevan, Tywin Lannister was not a man you addressed by his first name easily) was reading a financial newspaper and didn’t seem to have noticed her. Not that it would matter. In all the time she was living with Lancel, he had never remembered her name, not once.
It was good he didn’t remember or recognize her. Sansa had already been through two uncomfortable discussions each with Lancel’s parents. She had liked both Kevan and Dorna and would miss having them in her life, but nice prospective in-laws were not a strong enough reason to stay involved with a man who hadn’t believed her when she had needed him to and who really, when she thought about it, didn’t have all that much in the way of backbone.
One of his granddaughters pulled at his blazer and Mr. Lannister bent over to help her identify a word. Sansa found herself thinking that he was quite a handsome man, even if he was now handing them juice boxes and seeming very disturbed that he was doing so.
But now Mr. Lannister had her in his sights and he was furrowing his brow.
Sansa smiled politely and inclined her head in acknowledgement. The frown on his face deepened and there was the faintest look of disdain to his expression. He probably either thought she was some opportunist or if he did remember her, thought the worst of her for dumping Lancel. Sansa decided to appear to be engrossed by Blackhaven Hospital and was relieved when Margaery’s flight arrived soon after.
“Oh, thank goodness!” Margaery dumped her carry-on unceremoniously at her feet. “I thought that plane would never get here.” She enveloped Sansa in a hug that went on slightly too long.
Sansa extricated herself and removed Margaery’s hands from her bum. There had always been an odd kind of attraction with Margaery, but now she was married to Sansa’s brother, Robb, and if Margaery’s definition of acceptable sexual behavior with a sister-in-law was very fluid, Sansa’s wasn’t. She was happy, though, to be out of sight of Lancel’s uncle.
* * *
“You got it,” he responded brightly. He had his hands clasped behind his head, and despite the grim nature of the discussion, looked very pleased with himself and his perfect golden hair.
“Haunted?” Brienne wondered how much time Jaime Lannister spent in front of a mirror every morning.
“Pretty much.”
Hours, she thought. He probably rose at 5:00 to start a haircare regimen. “There are no such things as ghosts.”
He sighed, unlocked his desk drawer, and pulled out a key ring. “I am so sick of having to do this.”
“Do what?” Up until now, Brienne’s dealings with the principal had been minimal. He was a hands-off administrator and seemed to her comparatively inexperienced eye to be fairly flip about most problems. Too flip, she had thought.
“I’m going to introduce you to Biter.”
* * *
Two elderly women settled in a few seats down from him. “They brought Dr. Beric Dondarrion back from the dead? Again? How many times does this make?”
“Six, I think,” said the lady with the sweater patterned with cats. “I forget how he they killed him the last time.”
“Knife fight with the alcoholic burn victim. And the time before that the psychotic mercenary shot Dr. Beric Dondarrion with an arrow in the jungle when he was helping that blonde freedom fighter, the one who had Anguy’s baby.”
Tywin cursed himself for ever letting Kevan talk him into limiting use of the corporate jet to official business only. In the old days, there would have been none of this mixing with the great unwashed. He would have been treated like a king. Tywin had been in this grim little waiting area with his granddaughters for hours now and there was still no indication that Tyrion’s flight would ever arrive.
“Grandfather, who is that lady with Cousin Sansa?”
Tywin looked. Sansa. That was her name. Eddard Stark’s daughter. “She isn’t your cousin.” He watched as Margaery Tyrell draped herself all over the girl.
“But she lives with Cousin Lancel.”
“Not anymore.” And judging from the way Margaery Tyrell had her arm linked through Sansa Stark’s, it was perhaps fortunate. He turned his attention back to the monitors and sighed with relief. “Ah. Your father’s flight has arrived.” Finally.
* * *
“What was that?”
“Biter.” Jaime yanked open his bottom right desk drawer and fished out the bottle in the brown paper bag that he kept on hand for emergencies such as this. He poured the liquid into a red plastic Solo cup and gave it to her.
Miss Tarth gulped it down and then immediately started to spit. “What in the seven hells is this?”
“Bourbon.”
“I’ve had bourbon. This is not bourbon.” She coughed violently.
“Scotch?”
“It’s blue.”
Jaime looked. It was not, in fact, bourbon. He pulled the bottle out and groaned. “Qarthian absinthe. I must have gotten the bottles mixed up.”
She made a face. “Isn’t that illegal?”
He got another cup and some water for her. “Possibly,” he hedged. “It’s not illegal in Qarth.”
“The teeth . . .”
He was almost relieved to be back on the subject of Biter. “It’s a long story.”
Brienne stared at the two cups. She set the water down and took a sip of the absinthe. “Tell me.”
* * *
“Like I wrote when I emailed you, it’s complicated.”
“Well, I brought some Qarthian absinthe. We’ll get drunk and you can tell me all about it.”
* * *
“I would never have taken the position if I had known. They did warn me that Crossroads was unusual,” Jaime was saying—they had been on a first name basis since she’d thrown up into his office wastepaper basket. “We have to do something. Some of the parents are starting to suspect and I can’t keep closing the locker room.”
“How long has . . . Biter . . . been down there?”
“No one knows. Or will say.” Jaime rummaged around his kitchen cupboards and unearthed some Saltines. “I’m really sorry about the absinthe. My brother gave us each a bottle when he came back from his honeymoon in Essos. Tyrion said it’s supposed to open the mind through prophetic dreams or visions and provide clarity. Oh, and it’s a gateway to past lives too, I think.”
She thought she had all the clarity she required. It felt like her mind was open already—open as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. “Us?” As far as she knew he wasn’t married. “Maybe I should go.”
“I live alone.”
Brienne didn’t like the flutter in her stomach that his statement produced. He was the principal. He was full of himself and very cavalier about how he ran Crossroads Elementary. He was extremely handsome. She was not. Men like Jaime Lannister did not pay attention to women like her. Besides, she still wasn’t ready for a relationship. It was too soon after the divorce.
Jaime pushed the package of crackers toward her. “I meant my sister and father. I think we all had the same reaction and just shoved it in a drawer or a cupboard. I’ve had it for years. I’m not even sure how it wound up at the school. Tyrion is my younger brother and he likes to joke around a lot.” He showed her a picture of his family.
They looked happy. She listened as he named everyone: his twin, her husband and kids, his brother, his brother’s wife and children, his parents.
“My mother passed away a few years ago. Father is still not over it. He’s semi-retired. I think that was a mistake. I’m not sure my father knows what to do with himself. What about you? I am guessing you’re from Tarth, but . . .”
He was very easy to talk to, Brienne realized. As she was telling him about her father and then her ex-husband, she remembered something. “Are you related to a Lancel Lannister?”
“First cousin, why?”
Brienne found her phone. “I may know someone who can help . . . with Biter.”
* * *
Margaery laughed. “Yes. You don’t drink Qarthian absinthe for the taste. So tell me: what happened with Lancel?”
She was saved from answering by the sound of an incoming text on her phone. Sansa read it, frowned deeply, and tapped out an answer to Brienne.
“What is Crownlands Paranormal Investigations?”
Sansa looked up to see Margaery peering over her shoulder. “You promised you would stay on your side of the sofa.” She shook Margaery off.
“Robb wouldn’t mind. We have an open marriage, Sansa.”
“I would mind. He’s my brother.”
Margaery pouted, but she slid back to her original position.
Now her phone rang. It was Brienne again. “I have to take this.”
* * *
“It’s called ‘Biter?’” Sansa’s eyebrows had shot up.
Robb’s generous nature was one of his best and his worst qualities. While Sansa was apparently enthralled by what she was being told over the phone, Margaery found the pdf copy of the agreement the Celtigars had signed, forwarded it in an email where she copied Robb, expressed their joint regret and extended best wishes for a happier future to the daughter, while stating that they had a policy on non-refundable deposits, which was further outlined in the agreement. She also included a link to The Crossing’s web page where this was reiterated.
“In the boys’ locker room? Wow.”
Margaery then texted Robb and told him not to bend. The Celtigars were loaded and could afford it. Robb and she could not.
“I didn’t actually meet the paranormal investigators, Brienne. I had packed up before Lancel even hired them.”
There were a few emails from prospective customers. Those Robb could handle. There were also two from businesses with whom they regularly dealt. One tersely promised a formal letter would be coming. Another stated they’d be moving to a cash-up-front basis from now on.
“Oh, I would say Lancel was pleased. He’s sleeping with one of the partners of the company.”
Margaery’s phone buzzed. She read Robb’s text and immediately tapped out: “non-refundable means we keep their deposit.”
That done, there was really nothing to do but wait for Sansa to finish talking to Brienne. Margaery waited until Sansa had hung up. “Tell me about Lancel.” She was honestly more interested in this business about Crownlands Pararnormal Investigations, but it appeared to be tied up with Sansa’s ex. She might as well begin there.
* * *
“No, I believe you. It’s just . . . but you said the ghost is gone.”
She decided to give the Blue Fairy another try. It tasted slightly less vile the second time around. “He says yes. He found this company that gets rid of spirits or something. And afterwards, when I went back to get the rest of my stuff, the whole house felt entirely different.”
“Does Lancel want to get back together?”
“He told me so over the phone, but he . . .” She sipped again. “He’s now involved with one of the people from this ghost hunting firm. He’s not good enough for me.” Actually, it felt good to be talking this out, and with Margaery in particular. Margaery had never liked Lancel and the Lannisters weren’t all that crazy about any of the Tyrells. And Margaery and Robb had been so focused on their business that she and Sansa were not as close as they had once been. But now it felt like the old days when they would confide in each other.
Margaery twisted her lip. “Crownlands Paranormal Investigations,” she said slowly. “Is that the same company?”
“Yes.” Sansa swallowed some more. This time it went down easily. “It’s so weird. Brienne Tarth, you remember her from college?” She saw Margaery nod. “She asked for their name.”
* * *
Brienne was shuddering.
Jaime suddenly wanted the situation dealt with as soon as possible. As he answered questions about the frequency of incidences, it was chilling to realize they were increasing. “How soon could you get out here?” There was a pause, so long that he said, “Hello? Are you there?”
“Yes. Sorry, we were supposed to go out to Dragonstone, but they’ve canceled so we’re available.”
“Wonderful!” He eyed Brienne. She was yawning.
“But . . .” Another long pause. “Sorry, I’m looking at flights. It’s just that with the urgency of your request, we’ll need to charge above our normal fee and I’ll need a deposit up front.” He named a figure.
“Oh.” This could be problematic. There was only so much money he could claim under the amount budgeted for “pest control.”
“Is that a problem?”
He would have to call Father. Then Jaime thought about what Father was going to say if he ever got wind what his son had spent the money on. “I need to be absolutely certain of your discretion. It’s an elementary school. I cannot have this getting out.”
“It’s not a problem, Mr. Lannister. If you can just make the deposit, we’ll send a team out on a flight tomorrow.”
Jaime turned to share the good news with Brienne, but she had stretched out her endlessly long legs on his couch and was dead to the world.
* * *
“That’s enough. You’re alarming your grandfather. We don’t want to make your favorite babysitter have a stroke.” Tyrion tugged and they mercifully let go. “Thanks for taking care of them.”
Tywin nodded and returned inside. He ate the meal the housekeeper put in front of him, read his paper, watched the financial news, and perused the division reports. Tywin didn’t need to work anymore. He had more than enough money; Kevan and Cersei would be perfectly capable of running the company if he wanted to step down permanently, but he was unwilling to do that. As it was, he felt like he was going slowly mad having as much free time as semi-retirement afforded him. He could not imagine what he would do if he didn’t work at all.
Finally at ten, he moved toward the bar, intent on pouring himself his evening nightcap only to find that the decanter with the cognac was empty.
Before scaling back from work, his staff had done their utmost when it came to serving him. This would never have been allowed to happen. He had been the Tywin Lannister and no one wanted to brook his displeasure. Now he was his granddaughters’ walking, talking teddy bear and every one of his servants and underlings had lost respect for him as a result.
He was in the process of opening the cabinet below the bar, when the phone rang. “Hello?”
“Father!”
“Jaime.” He balanced the receiver on his shoulder and reached back for a bottle.
“I have a small problem and I’m wondering if you could see your—”
“How much?” Jaime seldom called and it was usually when money was needed. Tywin was only half listening as he absently poured out a measure of alcohol into his glass.
The figure Jaime named was insignificant, but he was being less than clear about what this “small problem” entailed. It was tempting to tell his eldest son that if he had just gone into the family business, money would not be a concern, but the boy had always wended his own slightly odd way through life and Joanna had encouraged Tywin to accept it.
“Father, I really cannot go into specifics. If you’ll just authorize it, I can withdraw from my trust.”
Tywin took a large gulp and nearly choked. “What the . . .?” He coughed violently and then stared at the remains of a gelatinous liquid coating the bottom of the rocks glass. It had the consistency of Pepto-Bismol, but was a glowing blue color. Absinthe, Qarthian absinthe.
“Father? Are you all right?”
“I’m . . . yes.”
“You’re sure?”
Tywin hacked a few more times. “Yes.”
“Oh, good. It’s just that I need the money immediately.”
The relief in his son’s voice was probably because his death would have necessitated a lengthy period of probate. “I’ll give orders to the bank tomorrow.”
“Great. Talk to you later.”
Tywin consulted the bottle, swore, and then deliberately poured the rest of the bottle of Qarthian absinthe down the drain of the wet bar. He downed a large glass of water and headed upstairs.
As he settled into bed, he turned on the television. Joanna had liked to watch it in the bedroom; he had not. There were far better things to do with her in this particular room. But after her death, he’d kept the habit of occasionally watching a television show or an old movie. He found it helped him fall asleep. He was just flipping through the channels when Tyrion called.
“Jo lost Mr. Zorse. Is it at your house?”
“No.”
“Father, can you just look? She won’t go to sleep without it.”
“No.” He hung up and then remembered something. He phoned Tyrion back. “Her backpack. It’s in there.”
“We’ve already looked there.”
“It’s the pink one with that idiotic cartoon cat. Check there.”
“Hello Kitty? Oh, it is there!”
Once upon a time, he had been able to bring men to their knees just by looking at them. Tywin hung up and focused on the television. He had no idea what the program was, but then he seldom did; he’d always been a man far too busy for entertainment geared at placating the masses. It appeared to involve space aliens and parallel universes, but it didn’t matter. He would doze off quickly enough.
* * *