by Cal Matthews
“Fine,” he said vaguely. “Can I have some more water?”
I stood up and went into the kitchen, filling the glass straight from the tap. When I rejoined him, he looked at me with red, squinty eyes.
“You don’t look so good,” I told him.
“’M fine,” he said softly.
“So did the spell work?”
“Did it?” he asked, surprised. “Really?”
I stopped, a sinking feeling settling into my stomach. “Marcus,” I asked slowly. “Tell me what happened next.”
He gulped in a few breaths, breathing heavy until his chest was heaving. “When?” he asked haltingly. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Tell me what happened after you helped Corvin with the spell?”
He moaned, low and pained. He drew his lips back in a grimaced, sucking air through his teeth. “I don’t... I can’t – “
“Okay, okay,” I soothed, putting my hands on his arms and squeezing. The touch seemed to ground him and his breaths came steadier.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked carefully.
“Nothing, I don’t know.” His eyes went to mine, confused and bloodshot. “Maybe I remember running? That's all. Then there's nothing.”
“You don't remember . . . pain, or anything?”
“No. I remember being cold, and then I woke up and saw you.”
“Were you in pain when you woke up?”
“Oh, man,” he groaned, and I noticed his fingers straying to his belly, pressing subconsciously to the place where that horrible red smile had been. “Yeah, it was awful. Worse pain I think I've ever felt. It was like being squeezed, crushed, I don't know. The pressure - sorry, I can't explain it, Ebron. I want to stop, okay?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said and let go of him. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.
I thought hard, my mind racing. The concept of dream walking was not unfamiliar to me, but I had no firsthand knowledge of it. Had Corvin used the spell as a ruse, as a distraction to kill Marcus? Or had he actually succeeded, and somehow released Marcus’s soul? Or his own? Corvin’s smug face came into my mind, and I tried desperately to attach it to some memory. Did I know him?
“Okay, so here it is,” I said, turning back to him. “It's obvious to me that Corvin put some sort of spell on you. You get even close to the memories and you turn into a mess. So why’d he attack you? Why’d he attack Aubrey? And how does he know me?”
His eyes widen a bit. “If he attacked me, that must mean he attacked Jim and Shaina, too!”
“Maybe. We don't know that. Because the motel told you that they checked out. So they were fine at least up until yesterday morning. Whatever happened to you, they stayed the night and then checked out the next morning.”
“They wouldn't have left me,” he said fiercely. “They wouldn't have. They are my family.”
“Then we have to assume that they are in trouble themselves or that they knew you were dead.”
He looked at me hard, his dark eyes serious. I saw him swallow, his throat working up and down. “When did you find me?”
“Saturday afternoon.”
“So I was dead for almost twelve hours, and they didn’t come looking for me?”
“I don’t know, Marcus. There’s a lot we don’t know.”
Marcus started to say something else, but Johnny whined then, and we both looked to where he was pawing at his empty food dish.
“Your dog has the right idea,” Marcus said, giving me a tentative smile.
I stood. “Hungry? Want some lunch?” I said, rolling my stiff shoulders.
“That would be awesome.”
My mind skirted over the food I currently had on hand, quickly dismissing all the poor people food, like ramen noodles and boxed macaroni and cheese. “I'm going to make BLTs. Is that all right?”
“I would never say no to bacon.”
I nodded, and he smiled faintly back, still looking pale. He rubbed his hands together and settled back into the couch with a sigh. I left him there, rubbing Johnny’s head as I grabbed his dish. Kibble clattered loudly into the bowl when I filled it. The air seemed too thin. With the heavy conversation on hold, the feeling in the trailer felt fragile but peaceful.
“Can I use your laptop?” he yelled out to me.
“Yeah, it's there on the couch,” I called back with pang, wishing I had cleared my browser history.
Not that it mattered. It was the least of my problems. I began pulling supplies out of the refrigerator. With my back to him, it didn’t matter if the worry showed on my face.
Chapter Seventeen
The general freakiness of the whole situation faded into the background in the cozy warmth of my trailer. We ate BLTs in companionably quiet and then later, after we had eaten, Marcus insisted on showing me video clips on the Internet. Apparently, his coven maintained a fairly active YouTube channel.
“Watch this one,” he said, balancing my laptop on his knee and clicking. “We're casting a circle here. I'm calling the eastern energies.”
I watched, bemused. The grainy footage showed Marcus, Jim, and Shaina wearing robes and standing in a small windowless room, in front of what I thought was an altar. Corvin and Morgan were not present, and I glanced at the upload date, seeing it was from last year. Before Corvin and Morgan had joined them, it seemed.
The Marcus in the video was dressed in black, a white scarf around his shoulders. His face was almost comically serious. Jim and Shaina flanked him, the three of them forming a sloppy triangle. They each held their hands out, towards each other but not touching, their palms up. Jim chanted in a steady drone, with Marcus and Shaina adding their voices to his every so often.
“Huh,” I said, underwhelmed, and stood up to go grab a beer. I brought him one too, just in case, and I watched as his nose wrinkled when I handed it to him.
“I'm not really a beer person,” he said, and I chuckled.
“Let me guess. You like . . . Captain Morgan with Coke.”
He lifted his chin defiantly, his eyes still on the video. I peeked and saw the Marcus in the video lifting his arms solemnly, like Mickey in the Sorcerer's Apprentice. I snorted, unable to bite it back, and he glared at me indignantly, snapping the laptop closed.
“Fine, make fun,” he said, glowering.
“I'm not, I'm not, I'm sorry. I totally get it.”
“Get what?”
“I mean, okay, clearly you have these abilities, right? You did do something to me the other night. I felt that. So you can manipulate the Force or whatever. That's real.”
He nodded, the affirmations easing the tension out of his face. I took a sip of my beer, trying to wrestle my conflicting feelings for him into some sort of reasonable shape.
“What I can do – that’s real, too. And I have to dress it up with candles and herbs and shit. People can’t accept what I can do, not without making it into a big magical production.”
Marcus nodding along, muttering his agreement.
“So I’m not making fun of you,” I continued, sitting back and crossing my ankle over my knee. “I get the need for theatrics. But I’m just wondering – you don’t have an audience, so what's with the rituals and the costumes? Do you really think that there are watchtowers and guardians or whatever? I mean, who is that for?”
“It's for me,” he said immediately. “I like the rituals. Are you religious at all?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Really?” he leaned back into the couch, and tucked his legs underneath himself. He faced me, and I realized that I had been inching my way over to him bit by bit.
“Even with what you can do?”
“Especially because of what I can do.”
He looked at me for a long time, those beautifully shaped cat eyes fixed on me. They weren't just green, I decided. There was gold and amber in there, too, like a kaleidoscope of spring.
“There's nothing out there,” I said gently. “I ask every one of them,
each person. Where they were, what they saw. Nothing. They all say the same thing. There's nothing else. There’s just blackness, all the way up. It’s peaceful,” I added, seeing the stricken look on his face. “But there’s no heaven.”
“Did you ask me?”
“Well, no. You were different.”
“Why?” he scooted closer, laying his arm along the back of the couch, so close that it brushed my shoulder. I wanted to close my eyes at the sensation and just enjoy it, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from him. I focused on him and his lovely mouth.
“You came right back,” I said, remembering how his soul had returned immediately without me even having to search.
“Came right back? How do you mean?” His eyes were glittering a little. “Tell me how it works.”
I hesitated, the relaxed and cozy atmosphere dissipated as I began to squirm. Talking about it with the fresh memory of his guts splayed out and open was hardly the way I wanted this day to go.
He noticed my reluctance and twisted his bottom lip a little as he considered me. We gazed at each other for a few easy seconds, and finally I sighed a little.
“If you are asking about the mechanics of it, then sorry. I can't explain it. I just do it.”
He nodded. “To be clear, you can bring people back from the dead. That's what you are saying.”
“Yes.”
“Wow,” he shook his head wonderingly. “What an incredible world.”
“I guess.”
He smiled wryly and quipped, “You can bring people back from the dead. Like Jesus.”
I snorted. “No. Not like Jesus. And not just people. Animals, too.”
“Plants?” He asked, with a flash of humor.
I smiled a little. “Probably. I haven't tried with plants.”
“But definitely humans and animals.”
“Yes, definitely.”
“So I take it that you have . . . what? Have a lot of experience? Or you've experimented?”
I sucked in a breath. “Well. Both actually.”
He looked fascinated. “Really? How do you experiment?” His eyes widened. “Oh my God, do you kill people? Do you have a shed full of dead animals?”
He gave me a big grin, but I felt a worm of unease. Because that was uncomfortably close to the mark.
“No,” I said, but he evidently heard the strain in my voice and the grin faded.
“Leo and I - “ I stopped, looking at him directly, seeing his open and trusting face. What would it be like to still think that the world was a friendly place? That people were unthreatening, that they were good?
“Look,” I said softly. “I'm not used to talking about this.”
“I can see that.” he rested his fingers on the top of my shoulder and sort of tapped rhythmically. “It's all right.”
“When I was younger,” I said, resisting the urge to pull away from his touch. “Leo and I did some tests. We tried to figure out my . . . limits.”
“How?”
“Well, obviously, we - I mean, he -” I gave a helpless shrug. “It sounds bad, okay? But we needed to know what I was capable of.”
“So he killed things and brought them to you and you brought them back?”
“Yes. More or less.”
“Animals?”
“Yeah. Sometimes we used road kill.” I looked fondly over at Johnny, stretched out in his bed. “That's how I met this guy.”
“Hmm.” Marcus stared at Johnny, and then asked without looking at me, “People too?”
He looked a little too interested for my taste. A little too, I didn't know, into it. I shied away, moving my arm out from under his touch.
“I don't really want to talk about it,” I said. Something registered on his face that might have been annoyance or disappointment, but he covered it quickly with a smile. It was enough to make me suspicious though.
“Okay,” he said. “But you use it to help people? Like that girl?”
“Yeah, kinda. I mean, it's not like an official business, but yeah, people come to me when they need help and if I can, I take care of it.”
“How many have you done?”
“About twenty.”
“What's your most memorable one?”
I snorted. He didn't need to know that I spent half my time trying to forget what I had seen. “You were pretty memorable,” I said, trying to smile.
“Why?”
“Well,” I shifted on the couch, putting some distance between us. “You didn't go far.”
He smiled back and I pushed away my discomfort, trying not to think about his soul hovering in the twinkling lights, bobbing there mournfully.
'You were still so close . . .” I said softly.
“I'm close now,” he replied. His fingers brushed the back of my neck and I shivered. A wave of arousal uncurled down in my crotch and rolled up into my stomach.
He leaned in, his eyes very intent on me.
“Don't,” I said helplessly, just before his lips touched mine.
“Why?”
“I - I don't know.” I couldn't think of any reason not to, actually, and a dozen reasons why it didn't matter at all. Most resounding, of course, was that I wanted to, and wasn't that the damnedest thing? I wanted to and I could.
He waited a beat to see if I had any more protests, but I was done talking and he leaned in a little more, closing the distance between us just enough for our lips to touch. There was only the slightest pressure, his mouth gentle and soft against mine, and when he ended the first kiss, I was the one who started the second.
That one started soft, too, but one of us opened his mouth, and then our tongues melted together. “Oh, fuck,” I moaned and grabbed the front of his shirt, pulling him hard against me. Maybe too hard; he wriggled a bit and I released him, but he was just trying to squirm out of his shirt.
A voice in my head screamed, panicked at the sight of him, all lean and tight and covered with downy dark hair. I was sick of it, though, sick of listening to those voices in my head and I thought that maybe there were other things to consider, like how his bare arms felt when they slid around my neck. Or how he tasted right underneath his ears, as I licked my way down his neck and fastened my mouth on the tender spot between his neck and his shoulder.
“Oh, God,” he moaned, throwing his head back and letting me suck harder, nipping a little. He was squirming around again, nudging at my legs. It was almost annoying, how he wouldn't just stay still and fucking commit, but then he was kneeling up on my couch, pushing me back hard against the cushions and straddling me. All complaints went straight out of my head and I wanted to thank God and his angels and whatever weird witch God Marcus worshipped for the opportunity to have this gorgeous man wrap his legs around me.
We kissed again, our mouths clumsily joined, and I grazed my hands up and down his ribs, feeling lean muscle and smooth skin and wanted to taste it, too. It was fascinating, to see the paleness of my hands against the darkness of his skin. I dug my fingers in a little, just to watch him shiver. I wrapped one arm around his waist and leaned him back, ducking my head down to kiss at his hard brown nipples and he hissed with pleasure, thrusting his hips hard against my stomach. My erection was trapped firmly beneath his ass, and I bucked upwards in response, making him moan again.
“Is this okay?” he panted, his voice coming from somewhere above my head.
“Huh?” I didn't take my mouth away from his chest, my attention focused entirely on the ripples of muscle right underneath his breastbone, and the springy hair that ran down the center of his torso.
He ground his ass down into my lap in response, his hands tightening on my arms. That got my attention, and I looked up at him, trying to focus through the haze of pleasure soaking my brain.
“Is this all right?” he asked softly, and his eyes were concerned. He canted forward, relieving a bit of the pressure on my hard-on, and then pressed down again, making me see stars. “Say you want to.”
“I –” I swallowed hard, my
mouth thick with spit. .”You’re not – the spell?”
“No!” he pulled back abruptly, bending himself in half so that he could look into my face. “No, I wouldn’t. I would never.”
“But you did,” I mumbled, my brain still soggy, but coming around. He looked aghast, but I reached up to cup the back of his neck, pulling him down to kiss him again.
“I want to,” I told him gently. “I do.”
“Then let me...” I felt his fingers skate up the inseam of my jeans, and then he pressed the heel of his hand against my crotch. I groaned, wiggling a little to give him more room.
He sat up on his knees, and reached between to tug at the hem of my shirt. It was warm in the trailer, but I shivered when he skinned it off over my head. I had never been fully naked with anyone other Leo, and I spared a moment to worry about my extremely pale skin, the color of uncooked chicken, and my scrawniness, before he leaned in again and took my bottom lip between his. Whatever insecurities I had went right out the window then, because the next thing I felt was his hand, very lightly snaking down my pants and coming to rest right on top of my erection.
I panted out some mushy attempts at words, probably along the lines of “more please more” and he grinned, curling his fingers around my cock, making me buck forward. Our foreheads clonked together a little.
“C'mere,” Marcus said, laughing. He flopped to one side, landing on top of my laundry, and I pulled him back up to shove it all to the floor, dog hair be damned. Then I was back on him, nudging his knees apart and settling between them, the heat of our chests together making me moan.
His hands went to the fly of my pants, and I sucked in my stomach a little to help him, letting his fingers slide the buttons apart. He shoved my pants down as far as he could and just went straight for my dick, tugging it out of my shorts and squeezing.
I let out a harsh yelp, locking my elbows and letting my head drop between my shoulders. He stroked me hard and fast and I wanted to tell him to slow down, but whatever he was doing with his fingers was goddamn magic and I couldn't say anything other than vowels, panting into his ear.
“Do you want to come?” he whispered, all casual.
