by Rhys Ford
“What about him?” Thistle asked nervously as he jumped down off the back of the truck and glanced over at Ned. He rubbed his scarred, still-swollen wrist in a fretful gesture. “Is he…?”
He trailed off without finishing the question, pale eyebrows scrunched together unhappily. There were plenty of options. Bell weighed them up.
“He came here under his own steam, of his own free will,” he said finally. “Until I’m told otherwise, he’s not my problem. Not today.”
Thistle frowned as if he didn’t like that answer. Bell could understand that. There were plenty of reasons Ned deserved to pay for what he’d done. The problem was the one reason he wouldn’t.
“We can’t fight him and the slough,” Conri said bluntly as he jumped down off the truck. “If you want revenge, wait until someone bigger and nastier comes along to oust him.”
“And until then,” Bell said, “he’s here with nothing but how much he hates himself for company.”
It wasn’t enough for Thistle, but it would do.
Ned drove them back to the ford. He reeked of animal—a ripe musk mixed with blood—and he didn’t talk much, not until it was Nora’s turn to go through.
“My dogs,” she said, one hand on Betty’s thin head and her voice thick with reluctance. After she’d mentally cut these ties, it stung to pick them back up for a favor. “Will you take care of them? They’re good dogs.”
Ned nodded his big, heavy head. “Farm’s yours now,” he said. “Sell the pigs or send ’em through to me. Whatever you want.”
“I can come… back. Visit?” Nora offered stiffly.
Ned turned his back on her and stalked away, back to the truck. “Don’t.”
After a thoughtful second, the hounds gave a distinct shrug and followed their new master, fluid and alien again as they shucked the dog game they’d played. Only Betty stayed, stubbornly pressed against Nora’s side as they crossed back to mortality.
“Felix will love that,” Bell said tiredly as the whip tail disappeared.
Conri shrugged and bent down to grab Keith’s ankles. “His problem,” he said. “Not mine.”
Or Bell’s. It was satisfying to shrug off that one responsibility as Bell bent down to grab Keith under the shoulders. He felt the flutter of breath against his cheek. Still alive. Maybe he’d last long enough for Bell to see what they’d brought back across after all.
They stepped through the ford together and out into a circus of Iron Door agents, paramedics, and panicked parents.
Robin, it turned out, had three changeling siblings and a heavyset human stepfather who alternated between threats of eternal grounding and relieved hugs. Nora looked bewildered as she stood to the side and watched her fey prince be treated like a wayward son.
“Dad!” Finn pushed his way through the crowd and launched himself at Conri. He hugged his father desperately for a second and then pulled back, his hand outstretched and dark in the moonlight. “You’re bleeding.”
Conri touched his hand and looked at his own bloody fingers. “Huh,” he said. “So I am.”
Bell caught him as Conri’s legs went out from under him.
TWO DAYS of debriefs, paperwork, and interviews with brittle, unhappy parents. Human and changeling—the one thing they’d be willing to admit they had in common was that they didn’t trust Iron Door.
Bell didn’t blame them, not this week. He tossed his jacket onto the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave under him and released a faint aroma of old linen and fresh lavender. Iron Door didn’t skimp on accommodations, but even the best hotel in Elwood was a bit shopworn.
He leaned forward, elbows braced against his knees, and dug his fingers into his hair. The tension had started to loosen in his shoulders when someone rapped their knuckles against the door. Bell groaned under his breath and lifted his head.
“I don’t need towels,” he said, his voice gruffer than he meant it to be. “And I don’t have any fey stashed under the bed.”
“Good to know,” Conri said.
Shit.
Bell bolted to his feet, surprised by the sudden buzz of excitement, and yanked the door open before…. Well, before anything. Conri was slouched against the door, back in jeans and a dubiously tasteful band T-shirt. His hair was damp, and he smelled of hotel soap and overtreated tap water.
“It’s later,” Conri pointed out. “Is it still a thing?”
Back on this side of the ford, all the reasons this was a bad idea were in sharp, unforgiving focus. Professionally. Personally. Whatever they’d wanted in a shabby, Otherworld approximation of a trailer, they couldn’t do this.
It was stupid.
They’d regret it later.
Bell supposed he should have brought that up before he kissed Conri, but hindsight was always twenty-twenty. He tangled his fingers in the old, washed-thin T-shirt and dragged Conri into the room with him. Conri’s laugh slid between their lips as he reached back, groped blindly, and slammed the door shut before they gave any locals—or Felix, who was a floor up and two rooms over—a show.
Later could fend for itself. Bell wanted to pretend he was the sort of man who made bad decisions for one night.
Or part of it.
He pulled Conri down onto the bed. The chintzy spread creased under them as they tangled around each other. Conri’s body was long and satisfyingly rangy under Bell’s hands—long muscle and warm skin. He ran warm, not quite fever hot but more than room temperature.
Bell entertained a weird, brief fantasy of cold months and warm feet tucked against his, when even if this wasn’t a one-time thing, he’d never been stationed anywhere cold enough to care about whose feet were hotter. The Otherworld definitely stretched to Alaska, but the colder it got, the weirder it got. Everyone had their own ideas why.
It was a nice thought now. Cozy.
He pulled away from Conri’s mouth and shoved the other man back down onto the bed when he tried to chase the kiss.
“I want you to fuck me,” he said.
Conri grinned and dropped his head back against the pillows. He grazed his hands down Bell’s back, over the long, wiry strips of muscle, until he filled his palms with Bell’s ass. He shifted under Bell and raised his knee so Bell’s already-halfway-to-hard cock rubbed against the hard-muscled length of Conri’s thigh.
“And you say I point out the obvious,” Conri mocked lazily.
Bell ducked his head down to grab another kiss and then caught the lush curve of Conri’s lower lip between his teeth. The bite made Conri groan low and deep in his chest, and his hands tighten.
“I want to have you on top of me,” Bell said. He pushed himself up, settled his weight on Conri’s hips, and pulled his jersey up over his head. The air-conditioned cool of the room made him shiver as it hit his skin. “Your cock inside me. People sometimes get the wrong idea about what I want in bed, because of what I do.”
Conri moved his hands to brush his fingers over the scars that lined Bell’s torso. Some of them predated his job and the trow’s healing ointment—an operation when he was a baby, the rib he broke so badly when he… fell off the roof of his house that it had come through the skin. And some of them had been bad enough that even the trow’s magic was only able to staple him back together.
Not that many scars, really. Four or five. Not compared to some of the Walkers and not many Bell wanted to talk about. Not right now. He caught Conri’s wrists and pinned them down against the pillows behind his head.
“So, do you wanna fuck me?” he asked.
Conri flexed his fingers, and Bell felt tendons move over heavy bone under his fingers.
“You think maybe this might be why people get the wrong end of the stick?” he asked. “Not the job?”
Good point, not that Bell planned to admit that.
“That wasn’t the question,” he said.
Conri braced his foot against the bed, hitched his hips, and rolled them both over onto the mattress. His shoulder hit the edge
of the bedside table as he misjudged the space, and the small bedside light wobbled and fell over. It hit the ground with the sharp, explosive crack of a broken bulb. They both ignored it.
It was Bell’s turn to be pinned down on the bed, Conri’s sweaty weight lazily sprawled over him. Lust cramped low and hard in Bell’s balls with a tug that dragged dully from his thighs up into the taut line of his stomach muscles. His cock thickened under his trousers, heavy and tight as it pressed against the zipper.
“I’m easy,” Conri said. The corners of his eyes creased as his own joke made him smirk. “In a lot of ways.”
Bell snorted and dropped his head back against the pillows. “Funny enough, no one’s ever said that about me,” he said. “My last boyfriend said I was impossible to satisfy.”
“Maybe he was bad in bed.” Conri kissed Bell’s throat as he made that suggestion, his mouth soft and his teeth sharp as he chewed his way along the long tendon down to Bell’s collarbone. Heat seeped through Bell’s skin, into his blood, hot with pleasure and impatience. “Or he didn’t want to try hard enough. Same thing, really.”
“Don’t think in bed was what he meant,” Bell said. “It was… everything else.”
Conri rested his chin on Bell’s shoulder and looked up at him. Scruffy hair hung over his face and threw his eyes into shadow, but it was still impossible to mistake him for human. His ears pricked forward through the tangled thatch of curls. “Oh, good. I was going to take it as a challenge.”
He waited.
“Oh, well, yeah,” Bell said with dry amusement. “You’re probably right, now you come to mention it.”
He could feel Conri’s smile against his skin as the changeling pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “I thought so.”
Kiss or bite. It was hard to predict what Conri was going to do next as he thoroughly kissed his way down Bell’s chest toward his stomach. He lingered over Bell’s nipples, his tongue and teeth equally occupied with the nubs of flesh. Bell groaned as the tight, wire-sharp pleasure that knotted through the nerve-rich flesh slid toward tight, wire-sharp pain. Both of them tugged on threads of want that thrummed all the way down into Bell’s cock.
He writhed under Conri and tangled his free hand in the scruff of his hair. It was coarse against his palm and thicker as he worked his fingers down toward the skull.
“I’ve never slept with another Walker before,” Bell said. He wasn’t entirely sure of the relevance. The storm of sensation under his skin had thrown his thoughts in the air like a deck of cards, but it was true. Not for lack of trying when he’d been younger, but Felix had shut that down without compromise. “Is it different?”
“No. Yes?” Conri said slowly. He rested his chin on Bell’s lower stomach and thought about the question, his warm breath cold as it brushed over spit-wet skin. Bell bit his tongue on the urge to tell him not to bother. “You can tell, but it’s not… better? It’s just sex. It’s not….”
“Like fucking the fey,” Bell finished for him.
“Don’t know. Never did that,” Conri said. He shrugged, and Bell felt a small, wary knot loosen in his gut. Sex with the fey was meant to be… altering… and even if it was stupid, Bell didn’t want to have Conri weigh his ass against that experience. “Tell you what. It’s easier to show you than it is to explain.”
Bell knew that was the moment to pull the plug. He was Agent Dylan Bellamy of Iron Door, and he’d sacrificed a lot to get there—relationships that mattered to him, lovers he’d left behind when he was sent to new cities, and friends who’d never quite understood that yesterday for them was a month for him. That guy didn’t risk his career and reputation for a tumble with a changeling with mismatched eyes.
But apparently he definitely would for Conri.
They shed their clothes quickly, suddenly impatient with buttons and zips and laces, and explored their bodies with eager hands and mouths. Bell ignored the white flag of a gauze dressing taped to Conri’s ribs as he mapped the hard lines of muscle in Conri’s shoulders and back with his fingers.
It was a practical body. Bell had been honed to swing a sap and take a beating. He was fit, but he was a tool designed for a specific task. Conri wasn’t so specialized. The Otherworld’s influence? Or his life before? He supposed it didn’t matter. That was the joy of a one-night stand.
He wrapped his fingers around Conri’s cock. It was thick and hard against his palm as he gripped it. The skin slid under his grip as he stroked the length of it, thin and delicate as wet silk. Conri swore, words thick in his throat, and sprawled back over the bed with a fistful of pillow clenched in one hand. All that long, workmanlike muscle was stretched out tight and lean under his tanned skin.
“If you keep doing that,” he said roughly, “you’ll need to spend the night if you want me to fuck you.”
That idea was… surprisingly appealing. Bell ignored it as he reached over the bed and fumbled at the drawer. He’d bought the lube that morning on the off chance he’d stop being a coward and go knock on Conri’s door. If Conri hadn’t bitten the bullet for both of them, it would have gone in the garbage.
It was slippery and cool on his fingers as he squeezed it out of the bottle. He smeared it along Conri’s cock, from his balls to the flushed, taut head, until it was wet and gleaming and Conri’s breath was ragged in his throat.
“My turn,” Conri said as he snagged the bottle off Bell.
He pulled Bell down on top of him and kissed him, breathless and intent, as if this were their first kiss, while his cock pressed eagerly against Bell’s thigh and his fingers spread Bell’s ass wide. Bell wasn’t sure which of the three dragged the raw whimper out of his throat. It was sweetly, painfully intimate as he drank in the taste of Conri’s mouth and his ass squeezed around Conri’s fingers.
“Fuck,” Bell groaned finally as he pulled his mouth away. He rested his forehead against Conri’s, so close that if he wanted, he could have let the changeling blur and pretend he was human. Could have but didn’t. “I want you.”
“I know,” Conri said. It was probably arrogance, but there was something grateful in the way he said it. He worked his fingers deeper in Bell’s ass until his index finger grazed the prostate and Bell nearly lost track of what they were talking about. “It’s why I’m here.”
It was the sort of statement that invited either offense or complication in equal measure. Bell could take it at face value and told Conri to go fuck himself, then, or he listened to the hint underneath and let this turn into a mess.
He went with neither.
“Get on with it, then,” Bell ordered. He felt Conri’s low, amused laugh rumble between their bodies.
“You sure you don’t want to be on top?” Conri asked.
Bell took Conri’s face in both hands, a hint of stubble rough against his fingers, and kissed him until both of them were breathless.
“Good idea,” he said as he braced his hands on Conri’s shoulders to push himself up. His ass twitched as Conri slid his fingers out and propped himself on his elbows instead. “If you want something done right, after all, do it yourself.”
Usually he’d have insisted on a condom, but so far, only the common cold had proven able to survive the trip to the Otherworld. As many times as both of them had crossed over in the last week, it wasn’t worth the bother.
Conri’s cock was thick under his fingers, the skin pulled taut around the girth as Bell reached back to hold it in position. Blood pulsed thickly in the base of it, fast and hot, and the head twitched against Bell’s hole. He slowly lowered himself down onto it, the dull ache of pressure cut through with preemptive jolts of pleasure that twitched down his thighs and tightened his stomach.
Color flushed over Conri’s cheekbones, dull under his tan, and he stroked wet, slippery hands up Bell’s thighs. He traced the taut lines of muscle with his thumbs and folded his lower lip between sharp, white teeth as Bell took the length of his cock down to the balls.
Bell paused for a second to admire the view. All
that heavy, hard muscle was laid out for him under that smooth tawny skin. There was only one scar, a coin-sized whorl of white, shiny skin under his armpit. It had been a brand once—or ink; some of the fey had marked their changelings in silver or gold—and cutting it out was a statement.
But of what?
“You could ask,” Conri said, his voice uneven and ragged with strain. “I’ll tell you.”
Bell touched the scar and watched Conri twitch. “Do you want to tell me?”
“… no.”
Bell folded over awkwardly and brushed a quick tease of a kiss over Conri’s mouth. He dodged the hungry attempt to prolong it as he straightened back up.
“Then don’t.”
He braced both hands on Conri’s shoulder as he rode him, the long muscles in Bell’s legs trembling as he lifted himself up and then thrust back down. His cock ached with each stroke, tight with the need to be touched, and his balls felt heavy and thick with the buildup of pleasure.
Close.
Each thrust that stretched him wide, his ass clenched tightly around Conri’s cock, pulled the threads of pleasure tighter. It roiled in his pelvis, a knot of nerves and liquid pleasure that needed a little more before it would spill over.
Bell’s mouth was dry, and he felt each thrust jolt with sticky, honey pleasure along his spine. It dried his mouth and spread hot, tingling flicks of pleasure over the nape of his neck. Then Conri thrust up to meet him, his hands tight on Bell’s thighs and his balls pressed hard against his ass. Bell felt the tangle in his gut tighten until he was about to scream at the sensation… but it held. He swore between clenched teeth, his fingers digging into Conri’s shoulders as he scrabbled for the threads of control.
Apparently Conri had other ideas. He slid his hands up to grip Bell’s ass and flipped him over in one smooth movement that ended with Bell on his back and Conri between his thighs and still mostly inside him.
“Let me,” Conri said. He licked sweat off Bell’s throat with a slow, savoring kiss. “Pretend you still trust me. And now’s when to pay attention.”
As if his mind were about to wander?
