The Agency, Volume IV

by Dianne Sylvan

  Jason grinned. “Very. The elevator’s around the corner.”

  They managed to get to the apartment without making a spectacle of themselves, but in the elevator Jason felt practically dizzy from the heat emanating from the Seraph beside him, and it was all he could do not to hit the stop button. As it was, he fumbled for his badge and nearly dropped it unlocking the door, a sudden loss of grace that wasn’t like him at all.

  Lex watched his clumsiness with a wry half-smile. “It has been a while for you, hasn’t it, Agent.”

  “Too long,” Jason muttered, all but shoving him into the room and shutting the door firmly behind them.

  Neither of them asked the important questions, and neither brought up the objections he should have. Neither voiced any hesitation whatsoever.

  “This room is small,” Lex noted. He took hold of Jason’s arms and pulled them back together, the contact drawing a gasp from Jason’s lips. Lex bent his head and kissed the hollow of Jason’s throat, driving most remaining coherent thought a hundred miles away.

  “There’s always the cafeteria,” Jason replied.

  Lex reached out with one foot and pushed the coffee table out of the way, giving them more space. Mouth sought mouth, and they sank to the floor together, the fever from the hallway returning to claim them both.

  They knew each other’s bodies, yes, but it had been long enough, and enough had happened in the interim, that Jason forced himself to slow down a little and reacquaint himself with the lines and curves of the Seraph’s muscles, taking the time to draw his fingertips along one wing, enjoying the shiver and soft moan that arose from the touch.

  Lex’s hands moved over him with equal attention, parting him from his clothes with practiced ease. Jason didn’t remember Lex being so sure of himself…but he wasn’t about to complain. He had tried so hard to deny what was between them—he suspected they both had—but whatever emotional distance had grown, the desire, the need, had never faded, only gone into hibernation awaiting the first blush of warmth to emerge…and emerge it did.

  Lex had a good point—the living room was way too small for him, and it was difficult to maneuver the Seraph’s wings so that they weren’t in the way or bent painfully. In the end, Jason sculpted the Seraph up onto his knees, hands buried in the couch cushions, and knelt behind him, sliding against each other on a sheen of sweat, the ridges of muscle and skin where wing joined back bruising Jason’s ribs with the force of their bodies colliding. His arms wound around Lex’s chest, hands searching, nails leaving long violently red lines.

  Perhaps it was mere minutes, perhaps hours, before they collapsed onto the ground, Jason landing on the Seraph’s back with a grunt while every cell in his body quaked with wave after wave of dark, honey-sweet release. Lex, too, was shaking, as much from the effort of staying upright as from anything, and his fingers clenched the carpet in time to his heartbeat.

  Jason ran his own hands along Lex’s damp arms and twined their fingers together. They lay panting while the apartment’s cool air dried their skin and the sounds of groaning and gasping faded into peaceful silence.

  Lex turned his head and rested his cheek against the carpet. “That,” he breathed, “was a really bad idea.”

  “The most enjoyable things usually are.”

  “You’re the one who broke us up…has something changed, or were you just horny?”

  Jason nipped the back of his neck, then sucked the sweat from his shoulder, letting his tongue trace the black lines of the tattoo as he’d wanted so desperately to do since first laying eyes on it. “Turn over.”

  “Jason…”

  Lex looked back at him, or rather up, and they held each other’s gazes for a moment before the Seraph acquiesced, or tried to. “You’re going to have to move first.”

  Jason sighed and shifted his hips back, disengaging from Lex’s body, both groaning softly and then, slowly, moving apart. Lex had to push himself back up on all fours to turn around, and Jason helped move his wings without knocking over the lamps.

  He stared at the drenched, slightly sticky naked angel on his living room floor, and found himself smiling.

  “I forgot how beautiful you are.”

  Lex smiled back. “Did you?”

  “I forced myself to.”

  Jason came back to him, returning to his exploration of the symbols on Lex’s torso, remembering that they were symbols of protection. Yes…protect him. Whatever he’s here for, if there’s anything in this world that’s holy, it’s here.

  His lips roved over Lex’s chest, pausing now and then to bite—as he had expected, the Seraph was still hard and wanting, and arched his hips up to meet Jason’s hand, then his mouth, whimpering.

  Jason lifted his head and grinned wickedly. “You were saying something about this being a bad idea?”

  “Oh, for the love of god, shut up and get back to work—“

  He chuckled and obeyed enthusiastically. About five minutes later, he was laughing again, as Lex fell back with a cry, spasms rocking through his body, and cracked his head on the edge of the coffee table.

  They both dissolved into laughter, curling up against each other face to face with Lex halfway on his stomach to allow for the wings, one of which he let fall over Jason’s side.

  “You okay?” Jason asked quietly, looking in his eyes for signs of a concussion.

  “Definitely,” came the slightly slurred reply. “No worse than hitting a headboard.”

  They held each other for a while, neither speaking, until finally Lex asked, hesitantly, “So…”

  Jason heard the volumes of meaning behind that one word, and answered, “I don’t know.”

  “What about Rowan?”

  Jason closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against Lex’s, trying not to give in to the sorrow that arose at the mention of the Elf’s name. He wished that, for once, he could simply feel some measure of contentment for more than two minutes.

  “I don’t think he’s coming back,” Jason said.

  Lex touched his face. “Then you should go get him.”

  “Why? I can’t force him to want to live with me.”

  “No. But you can make him remember you. You can tell him he’s being an idiot, which he is, if he’s willing to give you up just so he can hide from the world.”

  Jason buried his face in Lex’s neck, breathing in the layered scents of immortality, sex, and Austin. “I…”

  “I’m not a substitute for your husband, Jason.”

  He looked up in alarm. “No, of course not. Did you think—“

  The Seraph shook his head. “I don’t know what brought this on, at least not for you. I’ve been thinking all this while that I was over you but apparently parts of me aren’t. I can deal with that. Can you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. Everything’s…just wrong. And I wish I could believe that it will work out, but in my experience nothing ever really does. We have each other’s hearts for a while, but something always gets in the way. Other people, death, life. Everything ends, and usually long before you’re ready.”

  Lex considered that a moment before he said, “I have to tell you the truth…I care about you, a lot, but I’m not in love with you like I was. Whatever it is you’re looking for, I’m not it.”

  Jason nodded. He’d known that. As much as it hurt to hear, he’d known. “That’s all right.”

  “And there’s…there’s actually…someone else.”

  He hadn’t been expecting that. “What?”

  “I’ve been seeing someone. I don’t know where it’s going, if it’s going anywhere. The idea was we were going to be friends with benefits, but I think there’s more than that, and I don’t want to hurt her.”

  “Her? You’re with a woman?”

  “That’s generally what ‘her’ means.”

  Jason took a deep breath. “Do you love her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So you’re saying that this…what happened her
e tonight won’t happen again.”

  The Seraph sighed and sat up, running his hands back through his damp hair. “I don’t know that either. We’re certainly not exclusive, she and I. I just don’t know how she’d react knowing I was here with you right now, or that we were going to do this again.”

  Jason followed suit, groping for his clothes but not putting them on yet. “So we won’t.”

  Lex reached over and ran his fingers along Jason’s lips. “Are you sure?”

  He took Lex’s hand in his and held it, kissing each knuckle lightly. “Are you?”

  A smile, touched with regret. “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  “So…what do we do now?”

  Jason pressed the Seraph’s palm against his chest, thinking and trying not to think, wishing and trying not to wish. “Right now, we take a shower, and I find something clean for you to put on. Then we have something to eat, and get some sleep. We’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. For tonight, I think you should stay with me and let the rest of the world take care of itself.”

  Getting the Seraph into the shower was another opportunity for laughter, as well as some strategic lathering that turned into something more intimate; by the time they made it to the couch with the last of Jason’s store of blood, they were both exhausted, so much so that Lex didn’t seem to care that he had to fold himself onto a sofa with one wing wrapped around the front of the cushion and the other hanging off onto the floor. It looked hideously uncomfortable, and after a few minutes Lex made an irritated noise and shifted position, trying in vain to set himself right.

  “Here,” Jason said, moving back into the corner and beckoning to the Seraph to lay his head in the vampire’s lap. Lex did so, facedown with his head turned sideways as he had on the floor, wings trailing down his back, past his feet. “Better?”

  “Mmm.” Lex closed his eyes and smiled at the feeling of Jason’s fingers in his hair, stroking the strands back away from his temple and behind one ear. He could feel Lex drifting off to sleep, and let himself be pulled along as well, the easy rhythm of the Seraph’s breathing lulling him toward peace.

  That—the two of them curled up together like longtime lovers, hands curved around thighs and fingers in hair—was how Beck found them an hour later.

  Part Eight

  She had no idea what she was looking at, but Frog was certainly excited about it.

  “Okay,” she said in her best kindergarten-teacher voice. “Why don’t you tell me about your picture, Froggy?”

  He shot her a look that said “don’t call me Froggy,” but a raised eyebrow from her kept him from actually voicing the thought. “This is the residue we got off the knife.”

  “I thought it was blood,” Beck replied, stepping back from the massive microscope while he fished a printout from his desk. “I could smell it.”

  “Well, it was blood. But not just blood. The tests came back with both A-negative and O-positive human blood, but also a variety of essential oils—myrrh, cinnamon, cassia, and calamus, in a carrier of olive oil.”

  Beck frowned. “An Abramelin formula? Not exactly rare these days, with all the occultists in Austin.”

  “No, but it reinforces the idea that our guy is into Enochian ritual, which overlaps a lot with Thelema, where Abramelin is most widely used. But that’s not the point. The oil isn’t the only thing on the knife besides blood.”

  She rubbed her forehead tiredly. “Frog, it’s been a long night and I need to report to SA-7 about our progress. Please, put it in Vampire Dummy Talk for me.”

  He nodded. “Okay. Here’s the thing. There’s blood, there’s Abramelin oil, and there’s soot. The blood most likely comes from the human host that the Seraph was invoked into, along with a drop or two from the summoner to bind the spell. The oil would have been used to anoint the blade beforehand.”

  “And the soot?”

  “The soot would have come from an open flame—the blade has to be purified with fire before the ritual. We analyzed the soot. There were over four hundred constituents, which I won’t list—“

  “Praise Jesus.”

  “—but put all together, we got a profile on the wood’s most likely source. It was mountain cedar, and it came from Southeast Austin. We’ve got it narrowed down to a neighborhood.”

  Beck leaned back against one of the worktables, crossing her arms, wishing her headache would go away. She’d be off shift in half an hour, and she’d planned to go check up on Lex, but she was going to need to feed first. “That’s great, but not very helpful,” she pointed out. “He could have gathered the wood and taken it anywhere.”

  “True. But it just so happens that the Eyes picked up an energy spike the day before Joshua Cohen first saw his Seraph. Same neighborhood. Coincidence?”

  Beck grinned. “That’s more like it. Anything else?”

  “The address that lines up with the energy spike is the home of one Samuel Pierrault, a direct descendant of the man who created the Seraph-invocation ritual.”

  Beck whooped and punched the air. “Frog, I could stick my tongue down your geeky throat! Let’s have the address and I’ll get a team out there lickety split.”

  Frog, who was a bit pink around the ears, had anticipated the request, and handed her a sheet of paper. “Have fun.”

  Beck tapped her Ear on the way out of the lab, but Jason had already coded off for the night—he’d said he was going to take Lex to see the Jesus kid, so he was probably already home in bed by now. She could have had him paged overhead, but it would be easier, not to mention less annoying, to just go down to his quarters. That way they could decide who to send, and whether it could wait until nightfall; if it could, then they could go, but if not, they’d have to send an all-human team, and she wasn’t thrilled with the idea.

  She was practically bouncing with excitement as she got off the elevator on the lower level. Finally, a break—Lex would be glad, too, to learn more about what was going on. It might even be a good idea for him to come along so he could take a look at Pierrault’s house. There was the possibility that the bastard had conjured more than just a single Seraph to do his dirty work.

  Beck ran her badge over the scanner of Jason and Rowan’s door, and opened it.

  She froze just inside the threshold.

  Her brain seemed to shut down, unwilling or unable to comprehend the sight that awaited her on the couch: her brother, and her lover, asleep in each other’s arms, the Seraph dressed in Jason’s clothes, his own folded over a chair. The air in the apartment reeked of sex, and from where she stood she could see long scratches down Jason’s upper arms, already healing.

  The sound of the door opening woke them both, and Jason blinked, yawned, and looked over at her sleepily. He didn’t seem at all upset by either her intrusion or discovery…but then, why would he, if he didn’t know about her and Lex?

  Was there a her and Lex? God, had she been fooling herself this whole time? That’s what it looked like--

  The Seraph, too, opened his eyes and looked over at her, but where Jason’s reaction was little more than faint chagrin, Lex’s was decidedly more intense. He sat up abruptly, gasping, and pulled away from Jason, who looked confused at his behavior.

  Jason looked at Beck’s face, then at Lex’s, and his mouth dropped open in shock.

  Beck started to retreat from the room. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I’ll come back later…”

  “No, Beck, wait,” Lex called, at the same time Jason said, “Oh my God.”

  She groped behind her for a wall to sag against, one hand still on the doorknob. “I…”

  Jason’s expression would have been priceless in any other circumstances. He looked like he’d just lifted a shirt to find tits on a man. He turned an accusatory glare on the Seraph and demanded, “How long has this been going on?”

  “How long do you think?” Lex snapped through his bewilderment.

  “You said you were seeing a woman, and you conveniently left out it’s my sister?�
��

  Beck tried to drum up outrage, but her heart was too fixated on the image of Lex’s head in Jason’s lap, and the peaceful smile on his sleeping face. They had looked so right together…and the thought made her want to throw up.

  There was an awkward, nightmarishly tense silence, before Beck asked in a low voice, “So, you two are…back together?”

  “No,” they both said firmly, but Jason added, “Except…” and Lex said, “But…”

  “It’s okay,” she told them, forcing herself to straighten, her whole body shaking from the inside out. “It’s okay, I mean, it’s not like we’re a couple or anything, it was just for fun, right?

  “Beck, I—“

  “No, really. I’ll just go. I’m glad you worked things out.”

  Seraph and vampire exchanged a glance. Jason looked from Lex back over at her, and something in his face changed; the anger bled out of his eyes, and some kind of understanding dawned. Inwardly, she cringed—she knew what he was thinking. Of course she did. Just like he knew why her voice was so unsteady.

  “Here,” she said, foisting the sheet of paper Frog had given her off on her brother. “This is the address for our sorcerer. If you want me to be on the team just let me know before tomorrow’s shift. I’ll just go. It’s okay.”

  Beck yanked the door open and bolted.

  She made for the elevator, cursing herself the whole time, letting her body carry her blindly toward the locker room where she could officially go off shift.

  God damn it. God damn him. Why was she acting like this? She felt like a fool, and worse, like a silly little girl with a crush.

  But the thought of them together like that, of Lex touching Jason the way he had her…pain stabbed through her gut. She’d never wanted to cry so much in her life.

  Stupid, stupid. You knew better than to get involved like this. Since when have you ever gotten this messed up over a man?

  Behind her she heard a door open and shut, then footsteps and the swish of something brushing against the wall, like fabric.