by Leta Blake
Xan wondered if his father would speak so fondly of him if he were gone. He imagined not.
He was relieved to shove aside morbid thoughts when Urho’s voice came on the line. “Xan, is all well?” Urho sounded troubled.
The rasp of his voice was enough to make Xan relax and breathe a sigh of relief. This was a man who loved him. This was an alpha who’d take his demise very much to heart. “No,” Xan murmured, collapsing into his father’s giant leather desk chair and rubbing his forehead. He was so damn glad to have Urho in his life. “My brother isn’t being well-tended here. It’s not the staff’s fault. Everyone is gone except for old Joon and the cook. They’re trying to hold the place together.”
“Wolf-god. Do you need me to…” Urho trailed off, and Xan knew he’d bitten off an offer to come down to the city. His commitment to Vale and the baby prevented that. And as much as Xan wanted him here, to feel his steady presence and have his support—not to mention get his help in caring for Ray—he understood the promises Urho needed to keep.
“Ray’s fever is very high,” Xan went on. “They’ve given him elderflower tea and tablets, but there must be something else I can do to help him. I think he’s been hallucinating from the fever.”
“Isn’t there a doctor who—”
“No. None. The epidemic here is beyond what we realized in Virona. Every doctor is occupied.”
Urho was silent for a long minute but then he finally said in a no-nonsense tone that gave Xan strength, “Go to my house. Upstairs, in my bedroom, there is a cupboard with medicines inside. The tin with the willow-tree label has tablets normally reserved for doctors alone, and given for only the worst fevers. Take the whole tin with you, but only dose Ray and your pater twice a day. There’s also a bottle with black elderberry on it and a dark star on the brand’s label. That’s a prescription strength whole system booster. It also relieves congestion and over-production of mucus. Give it three times daily, with or without meals.”
“Will your servants let me in?” Xan felt doubtful that the men he’d glimpsed in Urho’s house would trust his word alone, and they shouldn’t. No doubt they’d be protective of Urho’s place with the city turned upside down with sickness.
“I’ll call them.” Then Urho added, a hint of worry in his voice, “Hopefully they’re well.”
“Surely they would have called you if they weren’t?”
“I’d like to think so,” Urho said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “But you’re safe?”
“So far,” Xan replied with a snort. He didn’t know how safe he’d be if his father discovered him in the house.
“Wash your hands in hot water, as hot as you can stand, after visiting the sick rooms and any time you can. Please, Xan, for the love of wolf-god, stay well.”
“I’ll try.” His stomach fluttered, and a tender fondness that he wanted to roll up in like a blanket washed over him. “You too.”
“I’m not worried about me.”
Xan smiled. “I know. That’s my job.”
Urho huffed softly. “You should go. The sooner you get the medication into them, the faster the fever will drop.”
Xan hesitated another moment and then confessed, “I’m not sure if I leave the house that I’ll be granted access back inside. My father doesn’t know I’m here. Our oldest beta servant snuck me in to see Ray.”
“I believe in you. If you want back in that house, you’ll find a way.”
Xan pondered the problem once he hung up, not wanting to further involve Joon in his mission. He closed his eyes and considered. The answer presented itself almost immediately. Jason had always called him a wily thing and smarter than his grades suggested.
At the moment, Xan was willing to think he might have been right.
At Urho’s house, the door swung open door before he’d even rung the bell.
“Mr. Heelies, I’m Mako,” the tall, casually dressed, middle-aged beta servant said, with a kind, welcoming smile. “I’m Dr. Chase’s cook and, unfortunately,” he clucked his teeth, “the only servant not ill.”
Xan shook his head in amazement. The more he heard about this flu, the more he marveled at the intensity of it. Maybe he should be more frightened. “I’m so sorry to hear everyone has taken sick. Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” Mako said, waving him inside. “I’m caring for the others and Dr. Chase has given me permission to use some of his medications. All in all, we’ve been lucky.”
Xan scooted by him and into the posh foyer. He gazed up at the vaulted ceiling as he had the first time he’d come, and let Mako take his coat. Once it was hung neatly in the foyer closet, Mako gestured at the staircase.
“His room is up there, at the back of the house. I’ll let you find it on your own, sir. He’s private and I don’t normally go in there. That’s normally the housekeeper’s job and since he’s sick…” Mako shrugged helplessly. “I did go in earlier, though, and take the medication he said we could have.”
“I’m sure that’s find. And, it’s all right. I can find it myself.”
“It’s the last room, sir. Make yourself at home. Dr. Chase said to give you free reign of the house.”
Xan smiled at Mako. “Thank you.”
The banister was cool under his fingers. The entire house smelled like Urho’s clothing usually did, or at least had before he came to Virona. It was warm, a little spicy, and somehow there was a hint of old pipe tobacco. Though, as far as Xan knew, Urho didn’t smoke.
He followed the curve of the stairs up, and then around. The hallway was dark and cool, and he spotted the door near the end that must lead to Urho’s bedroom.
Reaching it, he hesitated. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized he’d hoped for something very different the first time he was granted access to Urho’s bedroom—something more intimate, and sexier for sure. But this inner sanctuary, which even Mako admitted was special to Urho, seemed like such a revered place now that he had his hand on the door.
He wished Urho was here with him and that instead of fetching medicines for his brother and pater, his lover was bringing him to this room to share it with him.
Shaking off his disappointment, he opened the door and paused inside. The room was beautiful, but it looked nothing like Urho’s tastes to him. On one wall there was a large painting of the ocean, full waves flooding over white sand and blue skies colliding with blue water.
Urho loved the ocean; that much was true. Xan had walked alongside it with him every day since Urho had arrived in Virona. But he didn’t seem the kind of man to want the ocean in his bedroom, especially this cheerful, lively rendition of it.
The other wall was a mirror, reflecting the bed and the windows. Blue, gauzy curtains floated over the sparkling, clear panes of glass, light and airy. It was a gentle room, a youthful one, full of air and water, and a sense that laughter should ring tirelessly in the air around him. It was nothing like the staid, serious, intense man Xan had come to love.
For a moment, Xan wondered if he’d misjudged Urho so deeply, that this would be his bedroom. How was it that he understood so little of his lover that his most personal space would seem foreign and strange to him?
And then he realized.
The room had been decorated by Riki.
He sucked in a breath, shocked by the sharp pain he felt. No, he didn’t want to have this reaction. It wasn’t generous. It wasn’t loving. It wasn’t even kind.
He frowned, shook himself, and headed toward the medicine cupboard Urho had told him about. Ray and Pater were sick and there was really no time to lose in unwanted self-pity and silly jealousy. He opened the wooden chest carefully and looked inside for the tin with the willow-tree branding. He found it easily and pocketed it. Then he took the bottle with the black elderberry and the dark star.
As he turned back to the door, his eyes lingered on the bed and, against his will, his nose wrinkled. He couldn’t imagine Urho taking him here, fucking him on this bed that was still so obviously Riki’s.
His heart knotted up, tangled between emotions, useless and strange.
His eyes landed on another door, half-open and, oddly, already lit from within by a lightly glowing electric lamp. He hesitated, something inside telling him that he’d only been granted permission to look in one cupboard.
And yet…
He had the door to the smaller room open before he’d fully made the decision to invade Urho’s privacy in this way.
The painting above the desk of a pregnant Riki was, at first, all he could see. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the handsome, happy, blond man, with his hand on his bulging belly. Pregnant with Urho’s child—something Xan could never be. Bitterness filled his mouth.
Xan’s hands shook slightly as he stepped deeper into the room and recognized it for what it was: a shrine. Urho’s Érosgápe was forever worshiped here as his other half, as his soul mate, as the completion that Urho’s very cells longed for day in and out forever.
The photos of them as young men burned into Xan’s eyes. There were several of a baby-faced young Riki with a pipe in his mouth. He touched the picture with his index finger, smudging a subtle layer of dust.
“So that’s where the lingering tobacco scent comes from,” he muttered to himself.
Even all these years later? Did it truly linger so long, or was Riki’s ghost present in the house, here for Urho in death as he’d been in life?
Xan shuddered. He didn’t belong in this room. It wasn’t his. This was a part of Urho that he didn’t have permission to know about, and could never, ever fully share. He backed out of the chamber of grief—the shrine to two lives cut short, a joy that was never to be—and into Riki’s bedroom again.
Xan couldn’t think of it as Urho’s bedroom at all.
He turned around, taking in the evidence that Urho had never moved on, and he girded himself against the rising tide of feelings. He didn’t have time for them. He didn’t want them. They were useless and ugly, and he wasn’t going to give into them.
Hustling out of the room and down the stairs, he called to Mako over his shoulder as he grabbed his own coat from the closet. “Thank you, Mako. I have to go. I have what I need.” Then, belatedly, “Please contact me at…” he didn’t know where to say. “Please contact my house in Virona if you need anything. Urho will make sure you have it.”
Mako stepped from the gloom behind the stairs and smiled at him. “Thank you, Mr. Heelies. You’re always welcome here.” Then he pressed a bag into his hand. “Food, sir. You look hungry.”
“Thank you. I am.”
“Anything for Dr. Chase’s friends.”
Xan smiled but didn’t wait for Mako to open the front door for him. With the bag in hand, he dashed out, the frosty wind of lingering winter stinging his eyes, and he climbed into his father’s silver new Sabel-made car. He quickly stuffed some of the sandwich Mako had given him into his mouth as he started the engine.
He drove back to his parents’ home with the keys to the garage—and thus the house—hanging from the keychain. Whether his father liked it or not, Xan would not be denied.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ray was asleep when Xan let himself carefully back into his brother’s room. No one had seen him enter from the garage, and when he crept past his parents’ wing, he’d heard only coughing and the light sounds of his pater’s favorite music drifting down the hall. It’d touched him to imagine his father bringing the record player up and playing the soft, lyrical songs his Érosgápe loved best.
But as he stood by Ray’s bedside, a glass of cold water in one hand and the pill from Urho’s tin in the other, he frowned at the fear that kept him from simply stalking down the hall and demanding to see his pater immediately.
He took a deep breath, steeled himself, and determined that he was going to see his pater that night. It was only a matter of when and how bad it was all going to be. In the meantime, he had Ray to help.
“Ray,” he whispered, trying not to startle his brother. “Wake up. I have medicine for you.”
Ray stirred and stared at Xan, brow furrowed. Confusion marred his usually perceptive gaze. “I thought you were a dream.”
“No. I just had to get a prescription filled for you.” Filled from Urho’s private stock, but that seemed too complicated to explain. “Some new medicine. For the fever.”
Ray was too weak to sit up by himself, so Xan helped him. The pill went down easily and Ray drank most of the water as Xan encouraged him. “That’s it. You’re doing so well.”
“I miss Vince,” Ray whispered when he was done, collapsing back and staring at the ceiling.
“Who?” Xan asked.
Ray shook his head. “No one. Never mind.”
Xan sat with his brother, cooling him with a bowl of cold water and cloth, dosing him again, and waiting through the morning and afternoon for the medicine to take effect. He knew the moment it really started to work because Ray’s eyes grew less hazy, and he narrowed his focus on Xan curiously.
“Did Father let you come home, then? Is Pater…?” He swallowed hard and looked away, but then back again, searching Xan’s face for the truth before he might speak it.
“Pater is very sick,” Xan admitted. “But I haven’t seen him yet. Joon told me Father is with him night and day, every second, though he comes to visit you in the mornings.”
Ray looked toward the open curtains, taking in the setting sun. “Father doesn’t know you’re here.”
“No,” Xan said, standing up and taking the bowl of water and cloth into the bathroom. “But he will. Soon. I just needed to see you on the mend. This medication Urho…” He stopped himself just in time. “This medication my friend Dr. Chase sent seems to be doing the job.”
Ray coughed as Xan returned to the room. “You’re taking a risk. You might get sick and then everything will be left to Janus.” His lips twisted half-heartedly into a sickly smile. “You don’t want to leave me and the company to Janus’s not-so-tender mercy do you?”
Xan smiled, so relieved to hear Ray teasing him again. He left the topic of Janus aside, not wanting to say too much until he had more information on how his cousin was faring. “Let’s get you in the shower. You smell disgusting and you’ll feel a lot better.”
“Well, so long as a I smell nice enough not to offend you, little brother,” Ray said with a wry smile.
But he was far too weak to get out of bed on his own. Xan helped him into the bathroom and under the spray of the shower. He steadied him and washed him, his heart aching at finding the older brother he’d always admired as weak as a baby.
As he dried off Ray, his brother’s eyes went distant again. “Xan, I need you to do something for me.”
“Anything. Of course.”
“I have a friend, an omega friend…” Ray frowned slightly, and then cleared his throat. “A lover. I know it’s not as big a deal for uncontracted omegas to be involved with betas, but he’s ashamed. We aren’t…” Ray waved a thin hand around. “I care for him. But he…” He sighed and seemed to lose the thread before coming back to it. “I need to know if he’s all right. He was with me when I got sick.”
“This is Vince?”
Ray nodded. “Vince Ross. He lives in the Calitan district.”
Xan’s surprised expression must have reached Ray through his exhaustion and worry, because he said, “Yes, he’s a prostitute.”
“There are a lot of folks who live in Calitan that aren’t prostitutes.”
“Well, Vince is.” Ray seemed drained as he let Xan lead him back to the bedroom.
Xan pressed him into a chair next to the open window. “I’m going to change the sheets and bedding.”
“Joon does that.”
“Today I’m doing it.”
Xan left Ray coughing hard into his fist and found the linen closet right where he’d left it the last time he’d needed to change his own bed sheets after inappropriate dreams of Jason back before he’d moved out.
“Will you make sure Vince is al
l right?” Ray asked again when Xan returned.
Xan stripped the bed of the dirty sheets. “Do you know his telephone number?”
Ray shook his head. “He doesn’t have a phone. He doesn’t live like we do.”
“No, of course not.” He pushed the pile of dirty bedclothes out the door and into the hall with his feet before coming back in to put on the fresh sheets.
“He works the corner by the Lincoln Deli. If he’s healthy, he’ll be there,” Ray said, almost pleadingly. It was a tone Xan had never heard him use before. “Can you check on him?”
Xan finished up the pillowcases and fluffed the fresh duvet. “If he’s not healthy, then what?”
“Ask around. The owner of the deli lets him sleep in the apartment over the shop sometimes if he doesn’t have a client. He’ll know if Vince isn’t well…” Ray coughed violently and hacked up a large wad of mucous.
Xan shuddered but grabbed a handkerchief for him to spit it into. Then he gave him a dose of the black elderberry syrup Urho had said was for congestion and worked as a whole system booster.
“If he’s not well, can you see that he gets some help?” Ray coughed again, but not so deeply. He wiped at his eyes and sighed. “I feel so much better since that pill. What was it?”
“I’m not sure. My friend Dr. Chase told me to give it to you. He said it was a new drug reserved for the worst fevers.”
“Your friend Dr. Chase, huh?” Ray said softly, his tired eyes gone gray in the descending twilight coming in from the windows.
“Let’s get you back in bed.”
“But Vince—” Ray said, breaking off with a deeply earnest plea written on his face.
“I’ll check on him soon.”
“Lincoln Deli,” Ray said again.
“Right. I’ll remember.”
