by Aiden Bates
I reached for his hands before he slipped them into my pants, and held them back. “You really don’t have to.”
Vance sighed, and his arms went a little limp in my grip. “Tam, I know I don’t have to. I want to. Let me at least enjoy you, and enjoy sex vicariously. I like it. And believe me—you will definitely owe me when I’m back in shape. Don’t think I won’t keep score, I absolutely will.”
I laughed, and when he pushed a bit, I let his hands move, mine sliding up his arms as he slipped his fingers past the band of my briefs and down to find me already half-hard.
My eyes drifted closed, my lips parted as he squeezed and tugged, and finally pushed the band down to let my cock free. It swelled in his hand as he leaned in and kissed my chest. “I’ve needed this,” he breathed against my nipple. He kissed it, then caught it in his teeth and bit gently as he stroked me, drawing my foreskin slowly back and forth over the head of my dick, twisting and teasing each time. “I’ve needed you.”
“I missed you,” I breathed.
He hummed thoughtfully, and moved his lips to my neck. “Yeah?”
His fist pumped tighter, and his other hand moved to my balls. I shuddered as his fingers closed around them. “Yes,” I gasped.
“I can tell,” he murmured. The hand stroking me paused briefly to gather up a drop of precum on a finger. He raised it to his mouth and spread it on his lips before he kissed me, sharing the salty-sweet taste of it. His tongue lingered in my mouth, as if to steal the taste back.
Then he was sinking down, onto his knees. His mouth engulfed me. He groaned around my cock, and pulled at my balls as he took me deep, until I slipped past the back of his throat and down, swallowed whole until his nose was buried at the base of me in the short, thick patch of hair there.
I couldn’t breathe as his tongue and throat worked, lighting up nerves that, after a week of nightly teasing, were overprimed and sensitive.
He came up for air, and started on me with urgent intensity, his head bobbing, tongue flashing across my shaft, the hand on my nuts tugging and twisting, pulling me into his mouth each time. I groaned, and tangled my fingers in his hair. “Harder,” I rasped.
His chuckle buzzed along my shaft, and his fist tightened.
“Hurt me,” I begged as I felt my cock swell.
He hesitated, but sped up and shifted his grip to circle his fingers around the root of my nuts. When his hand tightened again, there was pain that bled into the pleasure of his mouth, but worry, as well; as if he might hurt me too badly.
“I heal, Vance,” I gasped, and reached for his hand. “Hurt me.”
He squeezed. Hard. Hard enough that my stomach clenched. My knees buckled. I dropped, biting back a howl of pain and pleasure both to keep from waking or alerting Baz. Vance followed me down, his mouth clinging to me, his fist crushing my balls. The pain twisted around, reversed itself, mixed with the sudden rush of pleasure, and Vance gave a grunt of excitement as I clawed at his back and gushed into his mouth. Keeping quiet only turned the sounds trying to get out of me into choked near-sobs of release. My body trembled. My knot swelled, and Vance grabbed it the moment it did, squeezing so that a second wave of release burst out of me, all of it swallowed down as he drained me.
When I was spent, he finally released me—from his hand and his mouth—and sat slowly up, wiping his lips. One eyebrow was raised. “Wow,” he murmured. “You’ve been saving up. And that was... uh, interesting.”
I laughed quietly, the potent rush of lingering pain and afterglow making my brain mush. “Yeah, I guess it was.”
He looked down, and reached for my balls with gentle fingers. “Sure you’re okay?”
I nodded. “Hurts,” I admitted, “but only for a bit. I heal fast. And I've been through worse.”
He snorted. “Ah, so I’m not the first to give the boys a bit of a beating?”
The afterglow cooled. I blinked, meeting his eyes. “You... uh, no. Not the first.”
He didn’t remember. I could see it, the conflicting amusement and worry in his eyes. That there was someone else out there that I’d shared something with that I hadn’t shared with him. I hadn’t shown him that memory, when we were in his mind, trying to put him back together. Somehow, it felt like ground we’d already covered when he dreamed it with me on the road.
Which made me wonder—what else had I overlooked? What else had I failed to give him? Was he my Vance, really, if he didn’t have all the parts that made him who he was?
Had I only given him what I was comfortable with?
“What’s wrong?” he asked, worry winning out over the amusement.
I waved it off. “Nothing,” I assured him. “Just a little dazed. That’s all. And sore. But in a good way.”
He grinned. “Okay. Well... I’m hard as a rock, and I think I have blue balls. But in a couple of months, I’ll call your debt due—and then you can work me over all night long.”
“It’s a date,” I said, and let him help me to my feet. I gave his cock a longing look, but kept my hands off. “And I’m gonna work you hard when I do. Just so you know.”
He pressed close, grinding against my hip, his cock leaving a cooling trickle of precum on my skin. “You’d better.”
We crawled into bed, but had only been snuggled up for a few minutes when I caught the sound of the floor creaking above us. Quiet enough that Vance didn’t hear. I started to sit up, my heart thudding in my chest although I surely would have heard if someone came in.
“Tam?” Vance asked.
I glanced back down at him. “Probably nothing,” I said, and looked at the ceiling. “Baz might be up or something. I’m just gonna check on him.”
He smiled, and ran a hand down my shoulder and arm. “Of course.”
I got up, and slipped into a robe before I padded out of the bedroom and up the stairs to Baz’s room.
There was no light on, I didn’t smell anyone, or hear any extra heartbeats in the house. But as I pushed Baz’s door silently open and peeked in, shifting my eyes to cut through the dark, I didn’t see him in the bed. I didn’t see him anywhere in the room. “Fuck.”
I sniffed, hunting his scent, and bent closer to the floor. It wasn’t necessary. A moment later I heard a small heartbeat speed up, and looked to the end of the hall. With my eyes shifted, I saw Baz at the end, near the window, facing away from me.
“Baz?” I approached him. “Buddy, you should be in bed. Come on, let’s get you tucked in.”
I stopped a few steps away from him when he didn’t respond or turn around.
“Can you see it?” he asked.
I frowned, and looked out the window. There was nothing except the empty field next to the house, and beyond that the next home on the other side of a thin stand of trees. “See what?”
He finally looked up at me. “The night monster.”
My blood went cold, but I didn’t show it. I pulled him away from the window, walked him back to the bedroom, and sat there until I heard his heart slow, his breathing go shallow, to prove he was sleeping before I left him and went back to my room, where Vance was still awake and waiting.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
I put a shaky hand on the door to close it. “No,” I said. “I don’t think it is.”
18
Vance
“I need a favor.”
Mikhail sucked in a breath, held it a moment as he studied my face, then closed his eyes and groaned as he put his pen down. “What is it?”
I slipped into the chair next to him in the study. I’d found him in the library, getting back to work on his thesis after the madness of the last couple of weeks. He had catching up to do, and I hated to bother him, but...
“I need to know more about Sophia,” I said. “What she was involved in, where she came from. She’s not from another weyr, she was flying solo when she met Haval. Except, of course, she wasn’t. But we need to know for sure why those people wanted Baz.”
“You got him back,”
Mikhail muttered, a note of desperation in his voice. “And you almost died in the process. Again. Hasn’t Tam updated security at Blackstone? He said you and he pretty much wiped out the cell, so are you worried about something else?”
The study was private, so no one could hear us, but I still grew uneasy as I explained. If anyone else heard, especially here at the cabal, it would cause problems for Tam. “So... when I was in here,” I tapped the side of my head, “and didn’t know who I was, I was obsessed with this... ‘night creature’. A bogeyman kind of thing that I couldn’t see or hear but I somehow just knew it was there. And right before I got out, it was. It showed up, and tried to keep me in my head. Maybe worse, maybe it wanted to take me over, or get out of me and into Tam, or something, I don’t know.”
“The thing Master Nkendi put in the jar trap?” he wondered.
I nodded. “I felt it there, but didn’t have the knowledge or experience in that state to know a name for it. It was... like a bit of this mage, the one that had Baz in the circle. I think. The thing is, Baz told Tam that he was worried about a night monster. That’s got to mean something, it has to be connected. We need to know how, and why, but the cabin’s been dismantled by Custodes Collis and if they know anything, they aren’t sharing. So, understanding Sophia is the only way I can think of to get some insight. Or at least find a place to start.”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I mean... I don’t know what you could find out. I can’t summon her again, it was bad enough the first time. Pulling her through the veil did more damage, and putting her back would have done even more. And she wasn’t in good shape to begin with. At best, we’d get some shrieking half-shade that would go all poltergeist and maybe kill everyone in sight. At worst, it’s just a pile of ectoplasm that evaporates the second it passes the veil.”
That had been one suggestion. “Okay, well, if we can’t do that then we need to get into the old rolls. The pre-war census. See if we can find out where she came from.”
Mikhail’s eyes widened slightly. “Uh... dude, seriously?”
The census documents were created just after the ‘Enlightenment’ of the early twentieth century. Back then, before things reached a boiling point, every shifter, mage, vampire and fae had been required to register with the Department of Paranormal Welfare, before it became the Federal Department of Paranormal Affairs. The cabals had been the first to cooperate, and even helped find and catalog paranormals in exchange for considerable leniency from the government. It was a black mark on cabal history, and one which was carefully avoided all these decades later.
“I know,” I said, putting my hands up, “but... think about it. A dragon shows up without a weyr, marries the leader of Blackstone, has a kid—and all that time, she’s been part of the D—the D-Dark...”
The Big Wall of Bad loomed at the back of my mind, interrupting my thoughts and words.
“I know who you mean,” Mikhail murmured. “And I know what you’re getting at but why would it matter who her family is?”
“My, ah, ‘night creature’ said something that I didn’t quite process at the time,” I said. “It said it needed ‘the blood’. Not mine, I think. The blood, not just ‘blood’.”
“You sure about that?” he asked. “Mage blood is a big commodity in some parts of the world, even today.”
“Not among mages, though,” I countered. “This man was a mage. He’d have known that was bullshit. He had to have meant something else, and what would he do with my blood? He was a... shade, or something.”
“Or,” Mikhail offered reasonably, “it was a fragmented bit of displaced id, with no concept of what it was even saying. It could have been just making words. Mimicking an old instinct.”
“And if so,” I argued, “then there is nothing to find and everything is... well, not okay, but at least it’s another problem. Just indulge me?”
He eyed me for a long time. He was on the verge of being accepted into the third circle. For research purposes, he had access to the restricted library, where the old census documents were kept. There was no easy way to get to them, and unlike many of the other books the libraries held, they hadn’t been entered into the computer systems. Like I said, it was a black spot. But mages don’t throw anything away, no matter how damning.
He knew what I needed, and why I needed it from him. He looked down at his notebook. “I guess... I could argue that the census rolls might give some context to my study, for the final presentation...”
“So you’ll help?” I asked.
He sighed, and rubbed his face. “Yeah. Of course I will. I always do, don’t I? Because you’ll just harangue me over it for days if I don’t.”
“I don’t ‘harangue’,” I said, feigning offense. “I gently encourage with consistency and patience until I get what I want.”
Mikhail snorted, and shook his head in disbelief. “All of this is definitely going nowhere good.”
“How are things with Tam?” Mikhail asked hours later, with the rolls stacked to either side of the study table. We’d been through dozens of the little books, deciphering handwriting and hunting for references to dragons unaffiliated with a weyr. There were plenty of them, but they didn’t have their own classifications, which meant they were mixed throughout each collection, and each of those was organized by region instead of phenotype or species, which meant there wasn’t much in the way of a shortcut.
“Good,” I said. “I mean, I think.”
“You think?” he asked. He closed the book he’d been looking through and put it on the pile to his right before collecting another book from the left stack.
I shrugged, flipping another page. “Yeah. I mean, it’s nice, being with him. A tiny bit frustrating sometimes; he thinks I’m fragile.”
“Which you are, currently,” Mikhail pointed out.
“Fair,” I grumbled, “but Master Nkendi says I’m progressing more quickly this time than last time. Sometimes, though, he just... I’ll say something, or do something, and kind of expect one reaction but get another. And then he has this look like I’m somehow not the person he expects.”
He shrugged. “Three years is a long time. People change. You’re both probably just expecting the old versions and getting the new ones.”
“For him, it’s been three years,” I said. “For me... I guess, the more I recover during my sessions with Master Nkendi, the more I remember, but so much is just... gone. For now, at least. To me it doesn’t feel like three years. It feels like it all just happened.”
“Don’t overthink it,” he said. “If Tam is serious about you, and if you’re serious about him, then you’ll just adapt as things change.”
“And if we can’t?”
He sighed, and flipped a page. “Then you’re only twenty-six years old, and you probably won’t be alone forever because you’re good-looking and funny and smart and—oh, here we go.”
I looked up from the page I’d been scanning. “What is it?”
He pushed the book across the table to me. “Three from the bottom.”
I pulled the book to me and checked the line. “Carolina Spader,” I murmured. “Mate: unknown. Unaffiliated, one child, female, age six. Sophia Spader. Huh. But, this would have made Sophia almost a hundred years old.”
“Sure,” Mikhail said, “but not if it was her mother.”
I tapped the page. “Spader. Spader. Why is that familiar?”
Mikhail shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, but I agree. We can look it up, see if there’s a reference to it in the system.”
I slipped a bit of note paper into the volume to mark the page, and did the same for my book just in case it turned up nothing, then followed Mikhail out of the room and into the main library to a bank of computers. He tapped in the name, and a fairly short list of results came up.
“That,” I muttered, pointing to one of the results. A book in the restricted section. “The Account of Robert Bedlam Monroe—why is that familiar?”
Mikhail sat b
ack in the chair, arms folded. “I’m not sure. I’ll get it. Meet me back in the study.”
I left him and went to the study, trying to recall where I’d heard the name Monroe, and why it gave me a queasy feeling. After a few minutes of waiting, my mind drifted to Tam, and to Baz. First, because I was worried for Tam’s nephew. Maybe a part of the mage’s psyche had latched on to him? Did he have a fragment that had somehow broken free, like the one that had been in my mind?
It didn’t seem likely. The only reason it was possible for me was because of how I’d attacked the man. Our minds had been connected when it happened. I’d been reckless, and hadn’t properly defended myself because I’d been preoccupied with taking him down fast and hard.
If it was something else, then what? And was it something we could fix? Or was it anything at all? It was possible—even hopeful—that Baz was just using common words to try and capture his trauma. Make sense of it. Something terrible had happened to him, and now maybe he was interpreting it as a kind of monster under the bed.
And maybe that was the same problem Tam had. He’d lost his brother, learned about a traitor in the weyr, and was basically a new father. Maybe what I saw in his eyes, that worry and uncertainty, was just that. Of course he must be worried, of course he’d be uncertain. He was formally taking over the weyr, as well, which meant new responsibilities, new pressures. It would be enough to make anyone a little stressed.
So, all of this could just be nothing at all, except the entirely normal course of events following what had just happened.
Then again...
Mikhail came back to the room with a thin book. No more than thirty pages, at the most. He closed the door quietly, cautiously, and gave me a nervous look as he approached the table. “Found it.”
“And?” I craned my neck. “What is it?”
“It’s an account,” he said. “Just like it says, written by Monroe, in 1902, after... after the Midnight Incident.”
The hairs on my arms stood up, followed by the ones on the back of my neck. The Midnight Incident had happened just weeks before the Enlightenment. It was the reason the Enlightenment happened at all—an event so devastating that there was no hiding after that, even though it was ultimately prevented. Six thousand people had died in the middle of Chicago before a group of mages, dragons, and fae had intervened. Publicly.
