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They’ve got four silver nets, which is remarkably well organised for a Lockwood & Co job.
Unfortunately, there turns out to be five ghosts and, well, isn’t that just typical?
It’s been a disaster from start (where they were all slammed into a wall by a five-part psychic blast, leaving Lucy’s ears ringing) to end (Kipps has a black eye, George’s glasses are cracked and she definitely saw Lockwood wince when he got too close to a jutting piece of timber even though she hasn’t had chance to stop and check up properly on any of them).
George is hurriedly shoving their contained sources into his rucksack while Kipps holds off the final Visitor above him, shouting for Lucy to hurry up as she tries to light her last flare, and Lockwood is-
“Got it!” Lockwood is emerging from a dark corner, a dusty time piece trailing stringy cobwebs held victoriously in his hand.
“Great.” Lucy tells him, finally sparking her lighter and flinging the flare directly at the Visitor, which screeches and dissipates. She bends over, hands on her knees, panting as Kipps and George rush over. “We’re out of nets.”
“Oh. Excellent. Time to take a leaf out of your book then, Luce.” He slips the watch into his pocket, his jacket flaring open briefly at the motion and Lucy’s heart stops.
“Lockwood.” She says, breath catching. “Please tell me that isn’t your blood.”
He looks down at his formerly crisp white shirt which is now creased, sooty and – oh yes, she’s right – stained with a rapidly growing puddle of blood.
“Ah.” He says, before his knees buckle and he falls straight into her arms.
“Okay, it’s time to go.”
They’re in an old factory with a series of underground tunnels that several workers (five, as they’ve now learned! Fancy that!) got lost and abandoned in under the watch of a neglectful owner in the early 1900s. There’s a rickety old lift at the end of a corridor and Lucy hauls Lockwood into Kipps’ arms because he’s like twice her height and even skinny men she could probably bench press on a normal day are heavy when they’re a total dead weight.
“Fall on your own rapier, Tony?” Kipps asks genially, even as they all run for their collective lives.
“Oh, fuck off, Kipps.” Lockwood growls.
George slips in at his other side to help support Lockwood’s weight, Lucy taking the rear with her rapier aloft to cover their backs as they drag him down the corridor. The problem with taking a ghost’s source is that they tend to follow it due to the whole pesky ‘tying them to this dimension’ thing, which means their escape plan also has the unfortunate side effect of technically being chased.
She spots the Visitor’s whisps of plasm reforming at the end of the corridor as they reach the old lift, which creaks slowly down to them when George repeatedly jams his finger into the button. She hasn’t got Lockwood’s Sight, but she can just about make out the silvery threads knitting back together into the shape of a man as it advances towards them.
“Go.” She hears herself saying as the lift doors crank open and George and Kipps heave Lockwood inside. “Take the source and contain it back at Portland Row. I’ll hold our good pal number five off.”
All three boys look at her with horrified expressions and she wishes they’d brought Holly or Flo with them so she could have someone with a bit less emotion and a bit more common sense to back her very sensible plan up. She’s the only one of them not bruised or bleeding right now by sheer luck, so she has every reason to believe it’ll last another hour or so to give them a fighting chance.
“No way.” Lockwood says, shoving away from Kipps so he can stumble towards her, one hand pressed to the wound on his side. “You can’t take it alone.”
“If we all get in the lift, it’ll only follow us and then we’ll be trapped in that tiny space with it. I’ll buy you enough time to get the Source out and the further away you get the weaker it’ll be.”
“I’ll stay with you.” He insists even as he sways on his feet.
Lucy rolls her eyes so ferociously it almost hurts. “You can barely stand, you anaemic idiot-“
“You can’t face it on your own, that’s not how we do things anymore-“
“-and you’re wasting time arguing with me.” She all but shouts in his face.
“Lucy.” He’s breathing hard, skin pale from blood loss or fear or both. “I will not lose you.”
She blinks at him.
“No.” She whispers. “You won’t.”
And, because she’s got to convince him somehow, she grabs the lapels of his stupid coat and yanks him down to kiss his stupid mouth.
It is not a good kiss.
She closes her eyes too early so she can’t see his astonished expression and talk herself out of kissing him, but it means they kind of bump faces in the general mouth region because she’s short and he’s tall and that requires more careful planning to meet in the middle than she expected it to. He tastes like blood and soot and both their lips are chapped and dry from the night’s exertions. She kind of misses his bottom lip entirely, actually, until his mouth parts in surprise and it has a chain reaction of sort-of nudging hers into a more suitable position. Her nose is smushed against his, which is her bad because she didn’t really give him enough warning to angle his face better and her own brain hadn’t caught up with her intentions quick enough to tell her to tilt her own head until it was too late.
His teeth catch against her bottom lip in a decidedly not-sexy and actually kind of painful way, and she draws back just as quickly as she dove in because, uh, what the fuck.
But then his eyes flutter open and looks into hers with such naked adoration that she almost thinks to hell with it, let’s try that again.
“Luce…” He breathes her name like a prayer.
And she grimaces at him in response because, oh yeah, there’s a ghost about to come kill them all.
“Sorry.” She says, then gives him an almighty shove, sending him sprawling back into Kipps and George, who obediently smashes his fist into the close doors button, eyes wide and face red, which is what makes her realise with an acute sense of mortification that they will have seen that whole face-smashing debacle.
The doors slide shut but not before she catches a glimpse of Lockwood’s gobsmacked expression which she tries to shake from her mind as she turns back to face the ghost with her rapier aloft.
“Come on then, dickhead.” She murmurs to number five. “Literally nothing you can do to me will be worse than that.”
When she makes it back to Portland Row a few hours later, Lockwood, bandaged and furious, drags her into the library and proceeds to give her the loudest rollicking she has ever received promptly followed by their second kiss (which, she might add, is far better than their first, although she didn’t set that bar particularly high).
It blends into their third. And then their fourth.
And then she loses count.