by Aiden Bates
He blinked up at me, but didn’t respond.
Cautiously, I spun out psychic threads to probe at the surface of his mind. Almost immediately, something there struck at me like a snake hidden beneath a bush. I flinched, and caught it with my will. It was oily, slick. Something abyssal, perhaps, or maybe a fragment of the mage from before. Baz’s ‘night monster’.
If I had been in better shape, I might have seen it before now. Guilt stabbed at me, but I ignored the bite as it sank into my chest. I closed my eyes, and pressed into Baz’s mind, apologizing silently for the invasion.
Distantly, I felt Tam’s hand on my shoulder, heavy and hot. “Vance? Is he...?”
I couldn’t answer. I needed every scrap of focus to seek out the root of the parasite. It was deep, down through layers of thought and memory. The world around me faded. Everything grew distant. The darkness shifted behind my eyelids, and then even that gave way to the mindscape of Baz’s unconscious.
It was a house. Baz’s house. I stood in the kitchen. Haval and Sophia sat at the table. Baz sat between them, a plate of food in front of him.
And next to him, a twisted reflection of the man who’d taken him the first time. He smiled, and his teeth were broken bits of glass. He held Baz’s shoulder, his fingers digging into the boy.
“Uncle Vance!” Baz chirped. He tried to pull away.
The fragment, or echo, or whatever it was held him fast. “You don’t belong here,” it said.
I took a step toward the table, my eyes on Baz. “Baz, I’m not alone. Your Uncle Tam is here, too.”
“Your uncles don’t care about you,” the fragment said. “If they did, you’d be home already, and they wouldn’t have let your parents die, now would they?”
Doubt crept into Baz’s little eyes like a shadow. Magic. Repression, keeping him complacent and weak. “That isn’t true,” I told him, pushing against the fragment’s influence. “We love you. And we’re going to get you out of here and back home.”
“I don’t have a home,” Baz whispered. He looked to his father and mother, or at least the illusory memories of them. “Not anymore.”
From the pain that gripped my heart, I couldn’t imagine what it must feel like in his. I walked slowly around the table to his side. The fragment watched me, but didn’t move. It needed every bit of focus to keep Baz controlled. If this had been the tactic to subdue him in the first place, it had limits, and it was designed to keep Baz sedate. Not to fight.
And it was easier to convince someone to stay down, than to hold them down. I knelt at Baz’s side and held my hand out. “That thing,” I said, looking pointedly at the fragment, “is just shadows and whispers. It doesn’t know anything. It can’t do anything except lie. Baz, what happened to you is horrible. And it will hurt for a long time. But you have a home. With me and Tam. We’re mates now. And we are going to take good care of you, and love you, and tuck you in every night, and make sure that you are never alone. All you have to do is take my hand.”
Baz looked down at my hand. Tears welled up in his eyes. He looked to his parents again.
“Leave here,” the fragment whispered, “and you’ll never see them again. Stay here, and you’ll have them always.”
“Baz, listen to me,” I said, drawing his attention again, “these are just memories. And you will always have them. Your mom and dad will be with you forever, watching over you always. They would want you to grow up, and be happy, and loved, so that you can always remember them. That’s up to us now, buddy. It’s up to us to remember them. You can’t do that in here. And if you stay here, Uncle Tam will be so sad. Because right now, he’s remembering your mom and dad all on his own. He needs you to help him remember. Believe me, memories... that’s where the love comes from. Come home. Come home, and remember.”
One little hand reached hesitantly for mine.
The fragment hissed, and dug its fingers deeper into Baz’s shoulder.
But Baz’s fingers reached mine. He had one moment of resolve, one little window of hope. I poured my will into it, pushing back against the fragment’s influence. And I let my love flow into it, and reached for Tam’s as well, drawing it down with me into this place, so that Baz could feel it.
His grip strengthened. The fragment gnashed its teeth, but I folded it up in my will and wrapped it in magic, and held Baz tight as I drew him up and away from that place. His eyes lingered on his parents as the house dissolved, and the fragment became a writhing shadow, and then we were in the cavern again.
Baz convulsed, and coughed. A roiling black shadow poured out of his mouth, and hovered like weightless oil over him. I grasped it with my magic, and spun out a jar of psychic energy to stuff it in, until we could find something else to do with it.
Baz coughed again, and then sat up a little in my arms. He blinked around, and his eyes flashed gold as he shifted his eyes. He barely had time to say, “Uncle Tam,” before Tam had scooped him up and crushed him to his chest.
“Baz,” Tam breathed, his voice strained. He kissed his nephew’s head, and shook with relief that I could feel across our connection. Relief, and love, and an iron resolve that he would never lose the boy again.
Or me, I realized, as his eyes caught mine. And a new feeling grew and rang between him and me, and even Baz. A feeling I didn’t have a word for, I thought. I’d never felt it before, and wasn’t sure what it meant.
Not until Tam reached a taloned hand out for me, and drew me up to him, and pulled me in to hug both me and Baz.
I knew then, and felt like the saddest idiot in the world for not knowing what that feeling was.
Family.
There was movement from the side of the cave. I sensed a familiar mind, the second I turned my attention that way.
Mikhail stood in one of the entrances to the cavern, looking around with a deep frown on his face. “What did I miss?”
25
Tam
Little feet came stomping down the stairs. A second later, Baz went flying across the living room, his backpack swaying as he sprinted for the door.
“Hey!” I called after him as he pulled at the doorknob.
He looked frantically over his shoulder.
I held up the bag with his lunch. “Forgetting something?”
Baz grinned and ran to me. As he passed, Vance dipped and scooped him up into a tight hug. Baz groaned dramatically. “I’m going to be late for school, Uncle Vance!”
It was morning, almost a week after everything had gone down. We’d kept Baz home for a little while, doing some in-home counseling at first. But he was anxious to see his friends, and get back to normal. I couldn’t blame him. I handed him his lunch as Vance put him down and ruffled his hair. “Make sure you eat all of it,” I warned him. “Uncle Vance put a lot of work into it.”
Vance snorted. “A lot of love, anyway.”
Baz sniffed. “Peanut butter and jelly?”
“And a banana,” Vance said, “and broccoli and cheese which you have to eat.”
My nephew’s face pinched with distaste. “Gross. Are you sure dragons eat vegetables?”
Vance lifted an eyebrow, glanced at me.
“Dragons do eat vegetables,” I assured them both. “You want us to walk you to school?”
The kid grimaced and put his hands up. “No. I’m not a baby. I’m eight. I can walk to school.”
“Maybe just part of the way,” I offered.
Vance cleared his throat quietly, and gave me a patient smile. “He’ll be okay.”
He was right. Security throughout the weyr was unobtrusively heightened, with Liana’s team in plain clothes as they patrolled not only the border but every street in the neighborhood. There were guards at the school as well. When there wouldn’t be, I hadn’t decided yet.
But, the whole point of all of that was so that Baz wouldn’t have to be cooped up and sheltered for the rest of his life. Which I was sorely tempted to do.
“Okay,” I said, dejected. “Your Uncle Tam isn’t co
ol enough to be seen with you. I get it. Go on, scamp. Catch up with your friends.”
Baz gave me a sympathetic look, and came to give me a hug. A long, tight hug that made my throat tight. That is, until he pulled away and gave me a critical eye. “It’s not that you’re not cool, Uncle Tam,” he said. “You’re just kind of old.”
I watched him jog to the door, pull it open, and slam it behind him as he rushed to hang with the younger crowd.
Vance choked on a laugh, and gave up stifling it.
I poked him gently in the ribs, earning a louder bark of more shocked laughter as he swatted at my hand, then grabbed it and held it, pulling it to his hip as he draped his arms over my shoulders. “Hear that? You’re old.”
“Don’t you start, too,” I groaned. I glanced at the door again, and then at my phone on the kitchen table.
Vance tugged at my neck. “He’ll be fine. Liana’s got someone watching him all day. DuPont is dead. Like, extra dead, Mikhail’s master made sure of it.”
It wasn’t just DuPont that I worried about, although it was comforting to know that he wouldn’t be making a surprise return from the underworld again. I didn’t understand exactly all the things Mikhail explained when he visited to let us know that it was taken care of, but I knew it boiled down to there being different definitions of ‘dead’ when it came to necromancers. DuPont had been upgraded. Or downgraded, maybe, depending on your perspective.
“I know,” I said reluctantly. “He’s safe. He’s going to school, hanging out with his friends, making fun of his apparently elderly uncles.”
Vance pursed his lips, squinting. “Well... one uncle, anyway. I didn’t hear him say anything about me. I’m the youthful, fun uncle.”
“Make him broccoli for lunch a few times and I’m sure that will change,” I quipped.
He grinned, and shrugged. “We’ll see.”
I kissed him, and for a long moment we just stood like that, in each other’s arms. No one to save, no evil mage to fight. The most pressing matter in our lives now? Dishes from a late dinner the night before, when we’d opted to snuggle up with Baz on the couch to watch Frozen instead of cleaning up.
Or maybe, not the most pressing matter.
“If I recall,” Vance said, trailing a finger down my chest, “and, I could be mistaken—you know how my memory is—”
I snorted at the joke. “Too soon.”
“—but I seem to remember you owing me a certain favor.” His fingers found the band of my PJ bottoms, and tugged at them.
My eyebrow rose, and I bent my head down to kiss him. “A favor, you say,” I murmured. “Funny, I don’t remember—”
His hands slipped into my bottoms and found my balls, skating right past my swelling cock. He held them tight, but not painfully—not yet. “Sure about that?”
My pulse sped up, and my breathing followed with it as I grinned. “It’s all a bit foggy. Maybe if something jogged my memory I might—ah… yes…”
With a broad smile on his face, he gripped my nuts tight and pulled, twisting until I nearly doubled over. “Anything ringing a bell?”
“Fuck,” I gasped as my cock hardened, and my head swam. “Oh… yeah, I… I think I remember now.”
He chuckled, and eased his grip, massaging my tender balls gently. “I promise,” he said, “one day soon, I’m going to wreck these just the way you like.”
I swallowed, aching for more of it already. But it was his favor to call in. “I’ll remember that,” I told him. “But if not a few hours at your mercy, then…?”
“Oh,” he said, his touch trailing up from my sore boys to my cock, gliding lightly so that it flexed and bounced against his hand, “I do want you at my mercy. You’re gonna give me that knot, mate. For as long as I want it.”
My next exhale was shuddering as he wrapped his fingers around my cock and tugged, covering the head of my dick with my already slick foreskin and twisting before he stroked down, and moved closer to press against me. “We’ve got hours before anyone needs anything from either of us.”
“Vance,” I husked, “you can have all of me as long as you want. That—” I looked down to see my cock in his hand, already weeping with excitement, “—is all yours, mate.”
He grinned up at me. “I love it when you talk like that.”
With a firm grip, he tugged, pulled me from the kitchen into the living room. “My cock,” I told him he as he led me, “my balls, my knot—they all belong to you, Vance.”
He bit his lip, and drew me toward the couch. “Mmm, tell me more.”
“I’m your pet,” I murmured as he sat down, putting his head level with my hips. His tongue slipped out, teasing at the tip of me, slipping inside my gathered foreskin to swirl around. “My cock is your toy. You… gods… you own me, down to the core of my soul.”
His lips parted, and the warmth of his mouth engulfed me. An explosion of pleasure shattered my next thoughts, and all I could do was lean my head back and groan as I felt his tongue dancing over my nerves until the back of his throat opened and swallowed me, his nose pressed into the patch of hair at the base of my dick.
My knees trembled, and I rested my hands on his head, tangling my fingers in his hair. “Fuck, Vance,” I breathed. “Fuck… you feel… gods, your mouth is where I want to die…”
He reached his hands around, gripped the flexed mounds of my ass, and dug his fingers in as he sucked. His mouth moved slow, burning me alive one moment and leaving me cold and lost the next, his tongue lashing me like I deserved to be punished in the sweetest way, until my balls began to draw up. I’d have warned him, but I couldn’t speak.
And I didn’t need to. He pulled back at the last moment, and watched with interest as my cock throbbed and bounced. I clenched, my jaw wide open as I watched as well, waiting to see if I would ruin the moment.
But the moment of pleasure receded, grudgingly it seemed. Vance looked up at me. “Well done. Would have been bad for you if that thing went off too early.”
I laughed. “Oh? Feels like a matter of perspective…”
“An hour of merciless polishing,” he said, grinning. “You did say it was mine to play with.”
Just the suggestion made my knees week. “It’s not too late,” I murmured, and reached for my cock to give it a tug.
He scoffed, and took my hand away. “Hey. No playing with my toys. What I wanted…” he pressed his fingers to the root of my dick, milking along the swollen tube until a thick, healthy trickle of frustrated precum oozed out the tip and onto his palm “…was all of this.”
His eyes on me, he lifted his hips and wriggled free of his PJ bottoms with one hand, then reached between his thighs as he spread his knees, and began to work his ass with his fingers, his cock standing ready.
I got slowly to my knees, and watched closely as his fingers prodded and stroked, eager to get inside him. But his cock bounced with impatience, as if asking a question. I glanced up at him. “Mind if I help?”
Vance bit his lip and nodded, and then kept his eyes on me as I leaned in between his knees and licked him from his balls to the tip of his cock head before I caught it between my lips and worked it into my mouth. The taste of his skin in the morning, before a shower, was so purely him that it was almost like being enveloped myself. His scent filled my nose, thick with desire and excitement that matched the echo of him in my mind. He combed his fingers through my hair, sighing contentedly at the feeling of my mouth around him.
“You’re good at that,” he groaned. “I don’t give you enough credit.”
I paused long enough to smile up at him. “You really don’t.”
He chuckled, brushed my face with his knuckles. “Keep going.”
I did, happy to do this as long as he wanted, exploring the softness of his skin with my tongue and tasting the sweet droplets of enthusiasm that I occasionally extracted from him. In a moment, his presence in my mind grew, and seemed almost to coalesce into something more concrete. I wondered what he might be up t
o, but got my answer before I could ask with words or thoughts.
My next descent onto his cock startled me. An invisible mouth seemed to swallow me down in the same moment. I paused, swished my tongue, and shivered as I felt the same ghostly movement around my own dick. That was new—a sharper, clearer sensation in his sharing than I’d ever felt before. Maybe because of the bond, reinforcing the connection between us, making a new level of sharing possible.
I moved carefully, slowly, unable to keep myself from moaning quietly as each pass of my lips and tongue, the heat of my mouth, even the slickness of it teased over my own cock in real time. With it came a giddy tingling in my ass, and a kind of empty, anticipatory need that was raw and physical, as if there were something missing from me that ought to be there, that belonged there. I was incomplete without it.
When I felt the cusp of orgasm start to rise, I paused, Vance still buried to my throat, and waited for it to pass. When I moved again, drawing back, I had to pause twice when I—he, or maybe we—almost shot.
For his part, Vance continued to work his hole, each stroke shared between us, each dip of his finger giving me a slight shock before I reminded myself there was no one back there. By the time I finally got him safely out of my mouth, my heart raced with his, and sweat even beaded on my forehead like it did his.
“How do you like that?” he asked.
“It’s… you’re right.” I kissed the inside of his thigh, and reached to tug at his hips. “I am good at that.”
He gave a delighted laugh as I pulled him toward me. The sudden spike of anxiousness to be filled blossomed in my own body as he took his hand from his ass and hooked his knees over my shoulder.
I propped his legs up with my hands, and raised him just enough that I could lean back some and looked down at the now glistening, pulsing opening that waited for me. “Wonder what else I’m good at,” I muttered as I pushed his knees further back, almost to his shoulders, and leaned in to taste him.
