“Jab… Jab… Jab, now hook! You’re flagging, come on!”

Lucy’s mind was elsewhere as she trained, but at that insinuation her body had no issue snapping out,

“Hook again, now jab, ja- Ow! Fuck me, Granger!” Matthias peeled himself off the ground and rubbed his ankle with his boxing pad.

“Shit, sorry, sorry.” She wiped sweat off her forehead and blew away a strand of hair that had stuck itself to her cheek.

“It’s fine, I needed a break anyway,” he slipped out of the ring, holding one of the ropes down for Lucy, “Just maybe not my tailbone next time.”

“I make no promises.” Lucy gripped her bottle between her wrists and drank.

“You’re a million miles away, Luce. What’s going on?” Matthias stripped off his pads and went for a fresh lucozade.

“It’s nothing, I’m fine. Just daydreaming is all.”

“He’ll come round soon enough, he always does. You two just work too well together for him not to.”

“Matthias...”

“Okay, I get it. I’ll drop it”

“Good. don’t bring him up again.”

She knew he would, but on some level, Lucy wanted him to. She wanted to talk about Tim, just not now, but she couldn’t say that. Lucy Granger had, over the past four years, cultivated a very careful and very deliberate air of stoic roughness. Not mean, not harsh, but rough. Lucy Granger, senior RWHS operative, didn’t do emotions.

“Should I pick you up after work?” Matthias asked, yelling over the sound of his shower. There was only the one changing room in the base, the RWHS didn’t have enough people to warrant gendered changing rooms at each location, or maybe it was some morale thing, constant physical closeness, purge any issues of modesty, shyness. In any case, Lucy didn’t feel uncomfortable, these were familiarities to her. She’d stapled her friends’ intestines back into place, a stray penis wasn’t much in comparison.

“I need to pick up some stuff, can you get me from the city centre?” Lucy replied from her shower, “toss us the conditioner?”

“Yeah, I can do the city centre.” a travel-size bottle of conditioner flew over the stall door and nearly slipped out of Lucy’s hands as she caught it.

Ten minutes later, Lucy got in the lift. It shuddered slightly as it took her up into the police station. The people in the police station above never seemed to notice people randomly exiting out of lifts they’d never gotten into, or vice versa. Maybe they were instructed not to ask questions, maybe they were all secretly RWHS. More than a few of their ranks, or so she’d heard, had come from police officers wandering into the wrong place. More likely, Lucy thought, they were all just inept.

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Lucy got to the pub around nine thirty. Matthias had, thankfully, avoided the urge to talk feelings with her. Instead they reminisced about the job. Old missions, old friends. Everything old reminded Lucy of how long this life of hers had been.

Callahan had bought the place out for the night. No civilians, no bartenders. Instead, a small-looking man that Lucy had seen once or twice was pouring drinks, clumsily trying a few tricks and laughing whenever he dropped something. In one corner, Katie Simpson and Nathan Crossley strained over an arm wrestle, a small pile of five pound notes hung in the balance. The place was packed full, and eight framed pictures were arranged on the bar. Intermittently, people would come up and leave some trinket, some memory shared between the living and the dead. Then they’d go back to enjoying themselves, their remembrance complete.

Lucy went up to the pictures. All various selfies or clippings from group pictures, they couldn’t get official headshots made, or make requests for old ones, too many operatives weren’t legally alive The other main source of new blood to the RWHS. She knew most of them by name, she hadn’t been close with them all, but she knew them. Names written in sharpie on the frames designated each of them. Charlotte Kent, riding a bike; Bruce and Fiona Davies, Lucy had never asked if they were twins or cousins; Max Harris, in a wetsuit on some rock; Booker Barton, which had always sounded like a fake name to Lucy; Jared Cantrell, his arm around a woman who had been cropped out; Nick Crawford, all dressed up for what looked to be a funeral, which was exceedingly ironic; and Janelle Stanford, standing next to a girl dressed like spider-man. Stanford had never talked about her daughter, but then again, none of them really talked much about their lives before. Military lives, maybe, but it was easier to forget family and friends that you often couldn’t ever see again.

Lucy remembered talking with Harris a few times. He’d been a bit bland, like he was constantly in a job interview, but here he looked… animated, fun. A whole different side to the man. Were they all like that? Lucy could imagine Crawford bombing at stand-up, or Barton writing poetry. The clinking of a spoon on a glass woke Lucy up out of her daydream, and everyone turned towards the other end of the bar.

Callahan was a large woman. She'd been involved in the RWHS for nearly a decade, Lucy had heard, and some undisclosed military operations for a while before even that. She was white, but looked like she’d either been aggressively tanned, or had a grandparent from south-east asia. She didn’t look natural in a grey suit with grey trousers and a greyish shirt, but exuded an air of control nonetheless.

“I want to thank all of you here for taking the time out of your nights to come here, I know you’d all rather be training or working,”- a ripple of polite and slightly drunk laughter came from the crowd “But we’re here today to say goodbye. Kent, the Davies’, Harris, Barton, Cantrell, Stanford and Crawford, all died bringing London- bringing the country- closer to safety from witches.” a slight murmur as a silent toast was drunk, whispers of ‘here here’ from some of the older people. “I’m not going to give you all platitudes, tell you that directly because of their sacrifice we’ll eradicate every last witch in the city, because that job’s a long time coming and you’re big boys, girls and kids. What I am going to tell you,” she picked up a budweiser, “is that we owe it to those eight to kill the bastard that did this, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Nobody fucks with our ranks and gets away with it.”

There was a second of silence as she ended her speech, Lucy lifted her glass and toasted, “Malleus Maleficarum.” The name of King James’ book had become their unofficial motto, it was latin and easy to remember, that was all it needed, and the room chanted it back. Callahan nodded at Lucy and repeated, after the crowd, “Malleus Maleficarum. And memento mori, memento to fucking mori the witch that did this.” Another ripple of laughter came, this one genuine, came as people returned to their drinking.

Lucy looked over at the people, Katie Simpson had clearly won her arm wrestle and was paying the makeshift bartender to try ever-more complicated tricks. Nathan Crossley had gone to the bathroom. It had taken weeks to resolve the various funerary rites for all eight people, they couldn’t order funerals for people that were already supposedly dead and buried, so the RWHS worked with cremations, scattering ashes mostly in short, small services, that fulfilled the technicality of a funeral to let them pass on. This night was an excuse to let loose slightly. ‘Memento mori’ Callahan had said. There was an irony in that, Lucy thought, joining her compatriots in another drink, that there wasn’t a person in the building not trying their hardest to forget.