I just glared in response.
“Oh, come on, do you really want me to just tell you?”
I glared harder.
“Fine, fine. Sheesh. Way to take the joy out of it. If I had shown up and said, ‘Hey, Vic, I need your help to take out an authoritarian regime that’s making people’s lives miserable, because I’m a deity that can’t manipulate things directly,’ would you have said yes?”
I wanted to just keep glaring, but instead I sat down on nothing, and crossed my legs while sighing profoundly.
“So you sent me on a personal quest that was almost guaranteed to help you get what you wanted, because it would put me in direct conflict with MOME?”
“YES! Oh, see, it is more fun to guess!”
If I could glare any harder, Gwen’s hair would have been on fire.
“In the times that you showed up to help, sometimes you barely did anything. Sometimes you just made things harder, like when we had to haul your ass out of MOME’s dungeons. What was up with that?”
Now Gwen just scoffed, and did a bit of her own glaring.
“Honestly, Vic, keep up. Outside of transportation, I generally can’t affect things directly, unless it’s down to saving just your ass. To make that battle go the way it needed to, you had to walk out those doors at exactly the right moment. The stakes were too high not to nudge you.”
I thought about that for a moment, and was glad I was already sitting down in the void, so my legs couldn’t give out on me.
“You mean, you… that… Dryer would have taken out the whole Earth if we had arrived earlier or later?”
Gwen nodded.
“The universe likes to remain intact. It pushed me very hard to go interfere with you. Luckily, Rhelia needed a ride anyway, and the dungeons suppress dark matter enough to make me a useless lump. Thanks for not leaving me there, by the way.”
I sighed, rubbing my hands over my face and feeling like all the fight had left my body.
“I still don’t get why you chose me, of all people, to help you out.”
Gwen cocked her head to one side, raising an eyebrow at me.
“That’s simple, Vic. You’re one of the most naturally lucky humans I’ve ever met.”
AND, AS I finally shifted myself to the place I’d been aiming for when Gwen hijacked me, I found it difficult to disagree.
It turned out that place was more of a person than anything else.
Or people, if you want to get technical.
A week ago, I was pretty certain that person had been Trev. A year ago, the people would have been my parents.
Instead, I found myself materializing in the middle of a cozy living room in the Andes, where Seamus and Sol were leaning casually, back to back, apparently laughing at something one of them had said.
The second I appeared, they both jumped to their feet, smiling and throwing their arms around me. I threw my arms right back around them. Sol’s lips found mine first, and the kiss just about set fire to my skin, but we pulled apart after a moment, and when I turned to Seamus, I found a longing I couldn’t name in his eyes.
“Are you always going to ask first?” I asked.
He nodded.
“My Moms really drove that lesson home,” he said.
“Well, the answer is an enthusiastic yes,” I replied.
And then Seamus’ lips were lighting me on fire just as Sol’s had, but with a bit more tenderness. Sol’s affection was always a bit more assertive than Seamus’ and… I found them both just as enticing.
When Seamus’ kiss broke off, the three of us all still holding each other, part of me wanted to retreat to the bedroom with them, but a larger part of me just wanted to collapse on the couch and talk. Maybe have a couple of Sol’s amazing sandwiches.
Judging by the fact that nobody stopped me from swinging my weight towards the couch, and the fact that they both collapsed with me when I did, I suspected the suggestion might be a popular one.
“Should I make us sandwiches?” I asked, honestly willing to make them, even though I was fairly certain I knew what the answer would be.
“Absolutely not,” Sol replied, jumping up. “The thin abominations you call sandwiches are not allowed in my kitchen.”
I laughed, though I didn’t think my sandwich skills were that low.
“Fine,” I agreed, starting to get up from the couch. “I’ll make tea to go with the sandwiches.”
Seamus leapt to his feet before I could get up, and pointed emphatically back at the couch.
“You will stay and rest. I can make tea. If Sol lets me.”
He glanced sidelong at the kitchen, but Sol made no objection, so he headed into the small portion of the cabin that housed the teapot and tea collection, and then quickly returned to the “living room” in order to put the kettle he’d just filled on top of one of the burners that crowned the wood stove heating the whole place.
I sat on the couch and watched them both at work. I considered reading, but didn’t think I’d be able to focus on printed words if I tried right now. Instead, I watched Sol sway expertly through her tiny kitchen, moving plates, bread, and sandwich fixings in a graceful dance. Periodically, I would glance at Seamus, who was also watching Sol, with a look I didn’t quite understand in his eyes.
“Did you guys ever sort things out?” I asked. He had said something to that effect once, but I never really got the whole story. Not that it was entirely my business. We were all in a relationship, but that relationship was as open as it got. With the ground rules we’d laid out, none of us were beholden to each other for anything, really. Not now, at least. The relationship could change as we did, but we’d basically just decided that we were all too young and restless to offer each other more than sex and friendship. It was the friendship piece I was wondering about now.
I had intentionally asked the question loud enough for Sol to hear. I was asking both of them, although I’d directed the question mostly to Seamus. Sol had been… slow to warm up to the idea that he was a canine half the time.
“If you’re asking if Sol apologized for being a bit of a bigot when we first met, the answer is yes.”
I looked at Sol, who was smiling, and decided that was probably a good sign.
Probably.
“Why are you smiling like a bag of poop is about to drop on my head?” I asked, after a moment.
Sol actually cackled.
“Because I decided that to truly atone for my pigheadedness, I would introduce Seamus to my family as the man I was in a relationship with.”
I could feel my eyes widen and I stared back and forth between them, wondering if I should laugh, or cuddle Seamus to protect him. The grin that went all the way to his eyes told me I needn’t bother.
“And… why was that a good thing?” I asked.
Sol laughed again.
“My family, 100% werepanther for generations, according to Abuelita, considers themselves very progressive. No one batted an eyelash when I told everyone I was only interested in women. To be honest, I wasn’t even worried about telling them, because I knew they wouldn’t care. Tio Javi is married to Tio Rico, and Abuelita herself married a woman after she lost her husband in the war. But being involved with a wolf…”
I frowned.
“So how did that help?” I asked.
“Gatita, they consider themselves progressive. I led with the fact that I was in a poly relationship, and Abuelita just nodded like it was perfectly normal. Tia Rosa made one little huffing noise, but Primo Carlos actually applauded, and said ‘That’s only sensible in this day and age.’ So how would they all look if they said anything negative when I introduced Seamus, and said he was one of the two people I was with? I could see Abuelita’s face turn red, even as she smiled and welcomed him to the family. It. Was. Glorious.”
This time Seamus laughed, and I finally felt the tension drain out of my shoulders. I was worried that Sol had put Seamus through an awful experience just to make a point, and maybe she had, but Se
amus’ eyes were glittering with mirth when he turned to me, so I didn’t think so.
“Oh, don’t worry, Vic, it was fine. Her folks are lovely. Her Abuelita was raining compliments on me by the time we finished dinner. Said I was a delightful young man.”
“Did she add ‘for a werewolf?’” I asked, with a barely restrained growl. People could compliment you all day and still insult both you and your heritage. It happened with damning frequency.
“Not once,” Seamus said, looking earnest enough that I decided he wasn’t just trying to placate me. “And I don’t even believe she was thinking it, by the end. And even if she was, they’ve clearly been raised with a shitty mindset, and every single one of them was doing their best to just talk to me, actual me, and not their idea of what a ‘werewolf’ was.”
“Like I said,” Sol continued, “we consider ourselves progressive. Luckily, my family is actually progressive enough to admit to their own bullshit when they are called on it.”
She paused for a moment, as she picked up a tray laden with some truly epic-looking sandwiches and brought them over to the coffee table that took up most of the space between all the couches and pillows.
“To be honest, I’m pretty damned ashamed that my family has believed that shit about wolves for so long, and that I believed it at all. I’m not sure who in my family had a falling out with a wolf at some point, but I sure as hell want to go back in time and slap them.”
Then she looked up into my eyes and said, “Holy shit. Could we do that?”
And that had the three of us laughing uncontrollably as we dug into a feast of tea and sandwiches of historic proportions, and began a conversation about the myriad dangers and complications of time travel.
AFTER TWO MORE languid days of R&R with Sol and Seamus, I didn’t really want to go visit my parents. Not only was I reluctant to leave Sol and Seamus—after all, those two days were the first time in our entire relationship when we’d had more than 24 hours without anyone trying to kill us, and it had been a wonderful haze of delicious sex, deep conversations, and ridiculous laughter. To me, the fact that were able to spend that long in a one bedroom cabin without wanting to fight each other (quite the opposite, in fact) was proof positive to me that our relationship was about more than just the crazy three-way mating bond that had kicked things off.
Nothing about those two days made me want to leave the quiet coziness of Sol’s cabin and the stark beauty of the Andes that surrounded it. Part of me was quite certain that I deserved much longer than three days of solace, after everything else that I’d been through.
But another part of me was worried that my parents were going to slip quietly back to Hel’s realm before I could talk to them, despite Trev’s reassurances via e-mail that Mom and Dad were planning to give me all the time that I needed before I spoke to them again.
That rankled too, to be honest—the idea that Trev was close enough to my parents that after ten years of abandonment and a few hours worth of catching up, he could confidently proclaim to me that they’d still be there when I was ready to talk to them. Especially in place of them getting in touch themselves. As if Trev had some special insight into both their minds and mine? Even if he did, even if my parents were just respecting my boundaries by getting in touch via Trev…. The whole thing just felt contrived and stupid and… THAT was why I was shifting myself into Rhelia’s home in the dragon realm, interrupting what looked like a perfectly boring round of Hearts.
“Vic!” Mom and Dad exclaimed together, dropping their cards in unison and standing up from the small, square folding table.
For a moment they looked like they were going to rush to me and embrace me, and then they stopped, at the last second.
I knew it was because they were worried it wouldn’t be a welcome gesture, the rational part of my brain knew that, but it still hurt. The hesitation hurt, and maybe it was just a year’s worth of pent-up grief and anger talking, but I lashed out.
“What, don’t like the scars?” I asked.
It was an odd choice to bring them up; I’d rarely noticed the scars in the weeks since I’d gotten them. Sometimes they caught me off guard when I saw my reflection in passing, or when the skin on my shoulder felt tight when I pulled on a shirt, or did certain poses in yoga, and yeah, I was a little self-conscious about them when I was getting intimate with people—things that had really only come to my attention in the past few days, because honestly, my life had been way too much about running to survive another day and stopping the destruction of the known universe lately, and that didn’t leave time for noticing well-healed scar tissue. So it was weird to use that as a barb against my parents, but it must have been a barb that caught, because their faces crumpled.
“How could you think that?” Dad asked, his voice a low whisper.
“Oh, I dunno,” I said. “Maybe because you couldn’t be bothered to come see my face in person after I risked my damned life again to save everyone, and was recovering in a remote mountain cabin.”
Mom still looked hurt, but she’d regained her steel a little bit faster than Dad. “Trev told us you were healed, uninjured, that you just needed time to rest and spend time with your…friends.”
“You mean my partners?” I asked, starting to feel anger on behalf of Sol and Seamus now. Hoping my parents were going to hand me an argument about being in a poly relationship instead of me taking everything else they said and using it against them. “The ones you haven’t officially met yet, because you wouldn’t come to visit? Those ones? Has being dead for a year set your thinking back twenty years, as well?”
It hurt to see Mom and Dad flinch with every accusation that passed my lips, but there was so much anger inside me in that moment that I felt like shifting to my dragon form and incinerating half the countryside.
“Vic, sweetie, what is this really about?” Mom said, as Dad just stood there and silently held her hand.
Oh good, at least they were in solidarity against me.
“What do you think it’s about, Mom? You left me. You pretended to be dead to get away from me. You abandoned me for a year and left me alone to pick up the pieces. Do you have any idea what that was like for me? Do you? I was alone. With no one but Uncle Algy for a guardian, and an empty fucking house in Flagstaff as my inheritance. What did you expect when you decided to end the charade? A fucking party? Welcome home, Mom and Dad! We sure are glad you’re back from your one year vacation of not giving a shit about your child!?”
Mom and Dad just stood there, silently, their throats bobbing, but no noise escaping them, as I continued.
I noticed that Trev and Rhelia had discreetly abandoned the card table and they were standing quietly a few meters away. I couldn’t blame them, really. I was fuming, and even letting all of this out didn’t feel like it was helping—I was only getting angrier.
“Of course, I suppose I should be grateful that you only abandoned me for a year, shouldn’t I? At least you didn’t do to me what you did to Trev. Abandoning him to MOME for a decade!? Forgetting he even existed!? Making me forget him!? My own brother? My twin? How could you?”
Tears were pouring down my cheeks and I was so far past caring that I didn’t even swipe at them. I wasn’t sure if they were from anger, or grief, or some horrible mix of the two—probably all of the above. I hadn’t come here to yell at my parents. That really hadn’t been the plan, but I was suddenly full of so much rage it felt like it was going to swallow me whole.
I didn’t say anything else, because I wanted answers. None of the questions I’d posed had really been rhetorical, but Mom and Dad just stood there, gripping each other’s hands like two people shipwrecked, afraid that their floating logs would be torn away from each other if they let go for even a second.
“How could you?” I repeated, since they didn’t seem to understand that I wanted an answer. A real fucking answer.
When they remained silent, I turned and walked out the door.
TO MY SURPRISE, it was Rhelia w
ho came to find me. I mean, I had reached for my dragon form and flown away the moment I’d cleared the door to Rhelia’s house, so I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised. But Trev had wings too, and he was learning his way around the ragon realm, so I’d kind of expected him to show up.
Plus, you know, he’s my twin.
“Your twin is unssssure of hissss welcome, at the moment, Living Cat,” Rhelia said.
She was speaking with her human voice, probably because I had flown myself up to the cliff ledge that topped the dragon’s prisons, then shifted back to human form in order to drape my legs over the edge and stare forlornly into the middle distance.
Somehow it just didn’t seem appropriate to stare forlornly in dragon form.
I guessed she thought it was only polite that she talk to me in the form I’d taken. She stepped up beside me and gestured to the ledge to my right, as if asking for permission to join me. I nodded. She sat down.
Then we both just stared at the deep blue sky of the dragon realm, watching a few small wisps of cloud scuttle by. The drop beneath our feet was over a thousand meters, and the valley stretching out below us was unlike anything I’d seen on Earth. The grassy swath stretching out from the cliff was dotted with giant pillars of land that stood up like nails tacked into the green valley below. They were topped with tall grasses, just like the land behind me, but the pillars themselves were composed entirely of an almost yellow stone. Each pillar was the same height as the cliff that I sat upon, but while the ledge I was on stretched out to either side of me, running into the horizon, the pillars were just small islands of land, most of them no bigger than a small dragon, some as large as football fields, but all of them balancing precariously on single cylinders of stone. Hundreds of them dotted the valley that stretched a few kilometers in each direction, and ended on the other side with a cradle of low, sloping mountains that embraced the majority of the dragon city. I had no idea what lay beyond that view, but the whole thing was entrancing enough to keep me from thinking about anything else for a while.
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 66
