by Rhys Ford
The hounds growled and whimpered as they milled around and looked to their master for direction.
No. No. Bad! Kill bad?! Kill good? What if good goes like olds? Food?
One of them, bony and young, decided to take the risk. It lunged at Bell, teeth bared behind wrinkled back lips. Conri scrambled under and through a tangle of bush and briar that stripped chunks of hair out of his coat. He scuttled forward, low and fast, and skidded under the hound on his belly. Then he stood up abruptly and knocked the hound off its feet. He was shorter than it—he could have nearly run under it without stooping—but there was more of him.
The hound rolled over on its back, and Conri pinned it down with his teeth at its throat. The thorns ripped at his lips and gums, but he ignored them.
“Stop!” the hound’s master said in a low, anxious voice as they raised gloved hands. “Don’t hurt them!”
The hounds were driven mad, writhing over and under one another like leggy worms in a storm at the kindness of it. Whatever they’d been before the Otherworld overlaid dog on them hated the weakling sentiment, but at the same time, they wanted to show belly and get scritched by their master.
Fey weren’t kind.
Conri loved Finn, and he’d lived with Finn, and it had taken him fourteen years to bully the idea it wasn’t compulsory to be spiteful into the boy.
He let the cowed hound slide from under him and sidled forward a few steps to sniff at the hem of the hound master’s coat. It was old leather, cured with unicorn piss and too much blood, and it smelled of the thin ozone-and-infusions scent of the fey. In this case smoked salt and the nose-prickle stink of a lightning strike. Under it, though….
“What have you done, Nora?” Bell asked tightly. The gun didn’t waver, the muzzle aimed directly at the nondescript if darker-tanned face of the girl they’d come to find. “What were you planning to do?”
For a brittle second, Conri could feel the violence curdle in the air as the slough sucked in an anticipatory, metaphorical breath. This was what it wanted, all the dark, hot emotions that would stir the sluggish Otherworld into life. Conri put himself between them—old habits—and growled a warning at Bell. It made Bell’s eyes flicker down to him for an instant, but the gun didn’t waver.
Nora stared at Bell with faded blue eyes and a blank expression on her face.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asked abruptly, then scowled. “Did you hurt my dogs?”
THE CONVERSATION stuttered along outside the trailer. It had been a while since Nora had anyone to talk to but her hounds, and she frequently stopped only to splutter out a sudden stream of information when Bell prodded her.
Conri sat on the narrow cot with his head in his heads and tried to muster up the will to finish getting dressed in his scavenged gear and go outside. So far it hadn’t worked. He buried his fingers deeper into his hair until his knuckles dug into his skull and he half-seriously wished for the old days. Back then, with the threat of his master’s whip over his shoulders, he never dallied long, no matter what he felt like.
Cheer up, he thought bitterly to himself, we could still end up back there.
He didn’t register the silence outside until someone rapped their knuckles against the trailer door.
“You okay?” Bell asked. He probably thought Conri had fallen asleep or something.
“Yeah,” Conri said. He didn’t lift his head as he worked his hands down to the soft-furred points of his ears and traced them absently. “Give me a minute.”
The only person he’d had to answer to for over a decade had been Finn. All he would have done is make a disgusted noise and stomp off. So the creak of the door as it opened to let Bell scramble in surprised him.
“So far it’s like Jamie told us,” Bell said. All Conri could see of him without looking up was his boots, scarred and stained from the bog. “I figured you’d want to hear the rest of it.”
Of course, he did. He had to pull himself together and get up. It was all done and dusted now anyhow. There were no takebacks in the Otherworld.
“Is this…? I wasn’t going to shoot her,” Bell said suddenly. It didn’t sound like he quite believed that any more than Conri did. He might not have decided to shoot Nora, but it had been on the table as they stared at each other. All it would have taken was for one thing to fall differently, and it would have ended differently. “It’s just not the first time that I—”
Conri dropped his hands to dangle between his knees. “Not everything is about you, Agent Bellamy.”
“Yeah, that’s not news,” Bell said, a crack of old, bitter humor in his voice. He crouched down, the worn fabric of his trousers pulled tight over his knees and his lean, wiry forearms crossed on top of them. “What is it about?”
It was stupid to care. At this point what did it matter? Conri knew that the same way Bell knew not everything was about him. Painfully.
“It’s not every time,” Conri said. His voice was low and rough in his throat. “But sometimes when I turn back, not all of me turns back.”
He hadn’t cared about the hair, and he could live with the ears—nearly everyone had pointy ears—but it had been a shock the day he looked in a mirror and didn’t see his own eyes. To not even see human eyes in your face. He took a breath and was embarrassed to taste the salt and snot of incipient tears in the back of his throat. It was stupid. He couldn’t shapeshift in the mortal world. The laws of physics were enforced there, and he’d had time to forget this bleak, helpless fear.
Maybe this time what he saw in the mirror wouldn’t be something he could accept as him. Or what if, no matter how bizarre it was, he could? That almost seemed worse.
“What about this time?” Bell asked. He probably talked to victims in that low, steady tone, to confused kids and kelpie-nipped horse girls. Or maybe did. “Did you lose something?”
Ah, Conri thought dryly, just when he thought he couldn’t feel more stupid.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m scared to know.”
Bell reached between Conri’s braced forearms and pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger so he could lift it up for a look. Conri let his arms drop to his sides and clenched his jaw as he braced himself for disgust. Worse. Pity.
Serious, dark brown eyes searched Conri’s face for a second, from his hairline to the tightly set line of his jaw. His grip on Conri’s chin shifted as Bell slid his hand up to cup the side of his face.
“Nothing’s changed,” he said. “You look like you.”
A twitch of a bitter smile pulled at Conri’s mouth. “Only half dog, then,” he said.
Bell snorted and pulled him forward into a kiss.
Surprise froze Conri in place as Bell’s mouth pressed against his, soft and still bloody-sweet from the fight. He felt dumb as a virgin who’d realized that this was what all the fuss was about with girls… only not girls. It wasn’t that he hadn’t figured Bell wanted him, he just hadn’t expected Bell to make a move.
Either of them to make a move, since it was such a stupid thing to do.
He exhaled into Bell’s mouth and kissed him back, hungry and desperate in a way he vaguely knew he didn’t want to understand right then. It wasn’t the sex. Conri didn’t have any trouble there. LA had a whole subculture of people who wanted to bang changelings. Something else.
And hadn’t he already decided that knowing wouldn’t do him any good?
He buried his fingers in Bell’s dark hair, loose strands knotted around his fingers, and pulled him in closer. Bell made a low, pleased sound against Conri’s mouth and stretched up into the kiss. His free hand was braced against Conri’s thigh, warm through the stolen leather, as he bit Conri’s lower lip and flirted with his tongue.
Hunger flooded Conri’s body, hot as liquid sugar that stung his skin as it coated his bones. It was a heady, mortal rush that cast into sharp relief the empty, shallow pleasure of the Otherworld.
The phantom of a quick tumble on the floor of the trailer hung over them. It wou
ld have been easy. All one of them had to do was push the other down, wet kisses and hasty hands and stickiness. It would put the itch to bed once and for all. There’d be a grubby patina over any potential meetings in the future, the memory of dirty floors and messy distraction.
That would head off a lot of problems.
The possibility faded away as the hounds shrieked at one another over a length of unicorn leg outside and Nora yelled at them. None of the fey had quite decided what accent to adopt from America—so her thick, southern vowels were a blunt-weapon reminder that they had other responsibilities.
Bell was the one who pulled back. Dark hair tangled in sweaty curls around his ears, and the hard lines of his face had softened. He looked young and bemused, and Conri felt the old, seductive urge to do what he wanted and screw the consequences. He turned his head to kiss the inside of Bell’s wrist and felt the flush of blood under the thin skin.
“So,” he said. “This is a thing?”
Bell thought about that for a moment and then smiled wryly with a tight, crooked slant of his severe mouth.
“Yeah,” he said. “It is as far as I’m concerned, anyhow.”
“Huh,” Conri leaned over to press a quick, hard kiss against that dry smile. He rested his forehead against Bell’s when he finished, their breath tangled together. “For the record, everything shoulders down is still… you know… as God made me.”
Bell spluttered out a surprised laugh and pushed himself to his feet. He scraped his fingers through his hair to untangle the curls. “Good to know,” he said.
“Oh, you have no fucking idea,” Conri said as he reached over to grab the shirt some fey had left in the wardrobe—either when they fled or because it had gone out of style—and shrugged it on. The fabric pulled over his shoulders. Fey tended to be built along leaner lines. “That I checked.”
Bell shook his head and turned to head back to the door. His hand was on the doorknob when Conri cleared his throat.
“Look, thanks,” he said awkwardly as he stood up. It was easy to flirt, even roughly, but that touch of honesty felt raw. “It’s just… been a while.”
Bell stepped outside and turned to look at him, eyebrows raised curiously. “Since someone kissed you?”
No, but it felt like it had been. Conri’s assignations before he came back to Elwood had been satisfying, but compared to the tingle of Bell still on his lips, the memory of them was sepia and faded.
“Not exactly,” he admitted. “I do okay.”
“It has for me,” Bell said. “A good while. I’m glad it helped, but I didn’t kiss you to get you to pull yourself together. I did it because I’ve wanted to kiss you since I searched your car.”
The deal-with-it-later urge tickled down Conri’s spine to clench his ass. “Not before?”
“I don’t lust after bad guys,” Bell said. “It’s sort of a rule. I wanted to be sure you were a good man first. Get dressed. We’ll be at the fire.”
He jumped down off the steps and walked away to rejoin Nora. Conri absently straightened the shirt over his shoulders and buttoned it up as far as it would go.
He was a good dog. A good man, though? He didn’t know if he’d ever been that.
Chapter Eight
THE KISS lingered on Bell’s mouth.
He tried to ignore it as Conri dragged a log over to the fire to sit down, even though it felt like it had to be visible, bright pink and lemon sharp. The pale fire cast shadows over Conri’s face, picked out the heavy bones of his face and the russet patches in his hair as he leaned in to grab a skewer of unicorn meat.
“… I don’t know who they are,” Nora said. The almost-pretty girl in the photos had been pared down to raw bones and fierceness. Her hands were scarred and callused, and her face was lean and grave. She ate quickly and untidily with her fingers, every other bite of charred flesh shared with the big pack leader who sprawled at her feet. It licked Nora’s fingers clean as she glanced over at the sullen chain-line of prisoners. “They were here when we got here. Like these poor puppies.”
She turned her hand absently to scratch under the hound’s chin. Its ears went floppy with delight, and it leaned against her with a grunt of satisfaction. The bony whip of a tail thumped the ground.
Bell didn’t look at it. He knew what the hounds were, down to his bones, while to Nora they were abandoned dogs, dumped in the woods after hunting season like the spotted hounds that couldn’t tree back home. It was better the pack believed in Nora and didn’t remember Bell’s version of them.
“Why are they chained up?” Bell asked.
He rubbed his hands together, his thumbs pressed into the palms as though they could squeeze out the tense ache from his grip on the gun—a reminder of how close he’d come to shooting the girl they’d come to save. He hadn’t pulled the trigger, but for a cold, clear second it wasn’t Nora he saw, and he’d come close. Part of him hoped that Nora would say something now that would prove that if he had, he’d have been justified.
“I don’t want to kill them,” Nora said. She wiped her fingers on her trousers and scrubbed her hands through her hair in frustration. A frown pinched at her face under the unruly, sun-bleached mop. “I tried to talk to them at first, but they aren’t really people anymore. They’re just… they’re just him.”
Her voice broke a bit, and she shuddered. The hound stuck its long, beaky muzzle under her arm and snorted fretfully into her armpit.
“Robin?” Conri said.
Nora gave him a startled look and then laughed. Sort of. It was a bitter choke of a chuckle that caught in her throat.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” she said. “He’s not here. Your prince is in another castle.”
She scrambled up from the fire and walked over to one of the grubby, hunched figures on their hobble. The hound trailed at her heels with a snarl for the prisoners as one of them spat at her. Nora wiped her cheek on her sleeve and grabbed one of the men by the hair to yank his head up.
“They’re Keith,” she said, and she had the grace to sound bemused, as though it occurred to her how mad it was when she explained it aloud. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but they’re all him. Versions of him anyhow. Old him, one-eyed him, ugly him, pirate him—all of the worst bits of him.”
Not particularly imaginative versions, Bell guessed as he got up to look at the other prisoners and the slightly unique stamps of their faces. But nothing he’d heard about Keith suggested he was a clever boy.
“And the real Keith?” he asked.
One of the prisoners threw himself at Bell, only to strangle on the end of the chain. He fell back onto the ground with a grunt and glared up at Bell with burning, empty eyes. There was maybe the outline of a teenage boy under the grime and scavenger clothes, in the cheekbones and hairlines, but it was well hidden.
“You’ll never get him back,” he said. The words were garbled in his throat, almost there but not quite. “We’ll kill him first. You bitch. Fucking bitch. Whore.”
The hound snaked in low and mean to snap at the prisoner’s hands and face until he recoiled back into place, mouth shut as he hunched down, cowed before the sharp teeth and pinned-back ears.
“They don’t have a lot of words,” Nora said, unflappable and quietly cold. “They reuse and recycle what they have, cut and paste it together to try and talk. It’s kind of pathetic.”
Bell stepped back. The Otherworld was alien, fluid, and strange, but it was usually efficient. The line of half-made, halting clones was more unsettling for how half-assed it was.
“It’s wrong anyhow,” he said. “We’re not here to find Robin. We’re here for you, Nora. We’re going to take you home.”
She gave him the same blank, uncomprehending look as she had when he’d had a gun pointed at her.
“I’m not going,” she said. There was a clean, shocking purity to the passion that filled her face. “I’m not going anywhere without Robin. I love him.”
At least, Bell thought tiredly as he saw the
last chance to save the treaty fall apart in his hands, she still had the self-awareness to say “I” not “we.”
“NO ONE stole me,” Nora said irritably as she packed up her camp. “No one forced me to come here. It’s not illegal to go to the Otherworld. People queue up to get visas to go and work there. You’re here.”
“I’m an Iron Door agent,” Bell said. He glanced at Conri, who had stepped aside to study the prisoners. The tips of Bell’s ears felt hot as he looked at Conri, and his stomach tightened pleasantly, but he kept his voice businesslike. “He’s been deputized, and people know we’re here. You disappeared in the middle of the night, after a fight at a contentious party. It’s not the same situation.”
“Fine,” Nora said. She held her hand up beside her face and rattled off, “I hereby attest that I want to be here and that I’m here of my own free—”
Bell pulled her hand down and put his hand over her mouth to muffle what she’d been about to say. The theologians hadn’t yet agreed on where the Otherworld stood with regard to any gods—some theorized it was God—but it would take any oath or prayer for itself.
“You’re seventeen,” Bell said. “You legally can’t make that decision or swear to it by anything.”
Nora shoved him away and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “I’m not seventeen. I’ve been here—”
“Not quite a day,” Bell said.
That news rocked Nora back on her heels. She gawped at him and then turned away. Her shoulders hunched up to her ears, and Bell realized how skinny she was under the bulky duster.
“I thought it had been over a year,” she said. “That it had passed my birthday, at least.”
Bell would have been relieved. He had been relieved the first time he staggered back to the mortal world and found only a few weeks had passed. Nora sounded as if her world had fallen in.
“Why did you follow Robin through the border?” Conri asked as he stepped away from the clones. “What did he offer you?”
Nora wiped her face on her hands, sniffed hard, and turned to glare at him. The tears made her eyes look more of a watery blue, but her expression was fierce.
