Ashes and Flame

by Aiden Bates

  “I need better shoes for the desert,” Amy said as we finished packing the car.

  I gave her a long, suspicious eye. “We won’t be hiking much,” I pointed out. “We’re gonna find a place we can drive to, go off road, and set up camp far enough from the car that it doesn’t get blown up or something. No offense, Daniel.”

  “Nope,” Daniel said with a sigh, “very smart idea.”

  “I may look younger than I am,” Amy said, her fists on her hips, “but I’ve got bunions and bad knees. I’m not trekking out to the desert in sneakers. It’ll only take a minute.”

  I rolled my eyes, and handed her my card. She wouldn’t get her full fee if she ran off with it. Like she said, I at least trusted her to be pragmatic. “Nothing too expensive,” I warned her.

  She snorted, tucked the card into her back pocket, and strolled away toward the store on the other side of the parking lot.

  “Can’t blame her for getting a new pair of shoes out of the deal,” Daniel muttered.

  I leaned against the car, arms folded as I watched her leave, and then turned my attention to him. “How you feeling? Do we need to stop so you can read, or something?”

  He shook his head, and patted his bag. “We’ve got an understanding, I think. As long as we don’t take too long getting there.”

  “An understanding,” I said softly. “Huh. Well, we’ll have plenty of time, I hope. You do much camping?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Mostly under bridges and stuff.”

  I winced, and hung my head briefly. “Right. Obviously. I guess I meant out in the wilderness. Away from… everything.”

  “I went a couple of times,” he said as he turned and leaned against the car beside me. “My dad loved the outdoors. Always wanted me to go camping, fishing, hiking, hunting… I never really wanted to go. Mom made me indulge him a couple of times. Now, I kind of wish I’d gone more often. Might have prepared me. Not that you can hunt or fish in most of the places I’ve been.”

  We didn’t have good information on his parents. I hesitated before I asked, and probably could have just not, but… I wanted to know. In case there was some chance that, when this was over, he could see them again. “Are they still alive?”

  He didn’t snap at me or break down, at least. But he wasn’t happy to answer, either. “Yeah. Far as I know. They’re in Washington, where I grew up. Just south of Seattle, on the coast. Or, they were, anyway. For all I know, they had to move.”

  “Had to?” I wondered.

  Daniel shifted a little, looked around the parking lot. It was dark, but last minute shopping apparently had people out and about. We were between two big trucks, just because it wouldn’t have been too far to run if we happened to get a visitor while we were distracted. Not that I ever really was. “How long before she’s back, you think?”

  Changing the subject. Fair enough. Maybe it wasn’t my business. Yet, at least. “Who knows. Took her long enough to pick out a tent. Like she thinks we’re on vacation.”

  “Mm,” Daniel hummed, and looked around again. He glanced up at me as he pushed off the car. A wicked grin spread over his lips. “Bet no one can see us here.”

  “I guess we’re a little hidden, but I think if it’s coming, it’s coming from—”

  Daniel knelt, and reached up to tug at the button of my jeans.

  “Oh,” I murmured, and gave a nervous chuckle as I took a turn looking around. “Ah… we’re kind of exposed here…”

  “That’s the point,” he purred.

  I probably could have stopped him. Probably should have. This was really obviously both a distraction from the conversation about his family, and likely one of those ‘hungry’ moments that Laleh had warned us about. An impulse to fill the wound that hadn’t healed inside him.

  But, well… the expression on his face was enough to get me hard—much less the way he leaned in once he unzipped me, and nestled his nose against my balls, and breathed in the scent of musk and sweat. Much less the way he gave a shuddering sigh afterward that turned into a quiet moan. We could have been in the middle of a crowd, and I probably couldn’t have made myself ask him to stop.

  So instead, I split my attention between the warmth of his breath against my quickly swelling cock, and the parking lot where, any moment, someone was going to come back to their truck, or walk by with a cart and three impressionable children, or a cop would drop in to arrest us.

  But it was damn hard to do that when Daniel’s mouth engulfed me, and his tongue started working to make it a quick distraction. He took me in until I felt the back of his throat, tried to push deeper but failed with the barest gag, and instead wrapped his hand around my shaft and began pumping me slow and sweet. His tongue flickered across the belly of my cock and played over the head when he came up. He slipped his other hand under my balls and gripped them gently, tugging as he took me in, his fingers rolling and squeezing.

  I’d been practically on edge since he woke up in Laleh’s work room, and I’d had him in my lap. I didn’t want to take long, because the gods were assholes and would definitely send someone to interrupt as soon as there was a chance for it. So I found myself watching him, and imagining his ass in my hands, my finger pressed against his hole. He gave soft groans of excitement and eagerness, and I remembered the sound of him howling and sobbing for me as I filled him.

  His grip tightened, and I watched his cheeks cave slightly as he sucked me down. He opened his eyes, looked up at me with a pleading sort of expression, his pretty eyebrows pinched with need. “Keep going,” I whispered. “Close, baby. Almost got it.”

  He sped up a bit, but not so fast that he made any extra noise. It was all tongue and lips, and that firm tug, and his growing hunger that became more and more evident. I bit my lip, looked around a last time, and combed my fingers through his hair. “Fuck,” I whispered, talking myself up to finish faster, “that mouth is fucking beautiful, sweet boy. Get me. Get my fucking come, suck it out of daddy’s big dick. Hungry, beautiful boy. Fucking fuck, you’re good at that. Drain it. Drain my balls, sweet thing. Almost… almost… ready? Swallow it all, beautiful. Swallow… every… fuck…”

  I had to cover my mouth. Daniel gave a whimper, pumped me tight, sucked at the head of my cock as it swelled. My knot flared, and he moved the hand on my nuts to squeeze it around the base. I grunted, bent, and fired into his mouth. He gave a delighted sort of choking laugh, and quickly swallowed. His evil fucking fingers clamped down behind my knot and pulled, just like when I was lodged inside him. He’d learned, the little devil, and the specialized nerves at the base of my dick went crazy for it. I gushed again, weaker but more intense than the first few shots, and had to brace myself against the car to keep my knees from collapsing.

  When the worst and best of it had passed, he remained on his knees, milking out the last few drops and licking them off my piss slit as they came, glancing up at me each time with a smile that glistened with spit and cum as he did. “Figured I owed you one,” he said.

  I couldn’t respond in words, so I gave him an affirmative grunt instead.

  “Oh, I see,” he muttered as he milked a final, tiny drop from me and eyed it. “A good blowjob makes you shut up.”

  I shrugged, grunted again.

  “Well,” he said as he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, “I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

  I stared at him, dumbfounded and drunk with afterglow as I finally made my jaw and tongue work. “Look at you, taking risks and being… fucking sexy as hell.”

  He grinned wide, his cheeks coloring a bit in the pale lamplight. “One life to live, right?”

  “You’re lucky you—”

  “Got ‘em,” Amy called as she approached the car. She held up a bag with what I took to be a box inside. “Told you I wouldn’t take long.”

  Now my cheeks must have flushed. Daniel gave me a secretive kind of smile, winked, and moved around me as he quickly tucked my flagging cock back into my jeans, zipped, and buttoned me.
“Good,” he said. “We should get moving. The desert calls.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered.

  Amy eyed us both as she opened her door to the back seat’s passenger side and tossed the bag in. “Everything okay?”

  Daniel beamed. “Just great. Let me see your shoes!”

  She indulged him as I got in, started the car, and pulled away. I put the car in drive at first, and almost plowed into the sedan parked in front of us.

  Daniel bit his lip. Amy narrowed her eyes.

  “All good,” I muttered.

  Fuck. One way or another, that boy was going to be the death of me.

  Though, honestly… not a bad way to go.

  20

  Daniel

  Of all the places that a person could go to be homeless, the middle of the desert was not even on the list. It was dangerous—hot, dry, no resources for a quick bite. Wandering through the desert with nothing was a very bad idea, so I had intentionally avoided ever having to do it.

  Consequently, it was a part of the country I’d just never seen. Once we found a place well back from the highway that crossed this part of Utah, the sun was rising and it was…

  “Stunning,” I breathed as I stared at the horizon in the east, a sleeping bag tucked under my arm. I’d never seen the sky painted in so many colors, and the morning heat created a distant curtain of shimmering air that made it uncertain where the earth ended and the sky began.

  “First time?” Rez asked.

  I nodded dumbly as I stared. There were clouds, far off on the other side, dissipating as they tried to reach the parched land and failed.

  “Mine too,” he said.

  I glanced up at him. “Oh, yeah?”

  “I never really left the weyr growing up,” he said. “We were isolated. I snuck out a few times as a teenager, I mean. But never to go very far. I used to dream about leaving one day but… Nix was there, and everyone I knew. So I just never did. This is wild, though. Kind of makes me think we should pick up and move somewhere more like this.”

  “Sometimes,” I said as I tore my gaze away and walked with him to the site where he’d already pitched our tent, “I dream about the beach back home. In Washington, I mean. All these years, and some parts of it just stay with me.”

  It had been a long time since I had that dream. I wondered with a sudden sinking feeling if I ever would again. But it was easy to brush off when Rez took my sleeping bag and unrolled it inside the tent before giving me a questioning look. “Should I… zip them together, or…? It’ll get real cold at night.”

  It was still chilly from the night before. I shrugged, and slipped into the tent. “I mean… from a tactical standpoint, we probably shouldn’t even sleep in the bags. Or take our clothes off. I mean, if the djinn comes at night when we’re not expecting it…”

  He grunted, and looked down at them with a trace of disappointment. “That’s actually a good point,” he muttered, and gave a sigh of resignation. “Well, probably best we’re focused on the task at a hand, anyway.”

  I snorted, and shook my head. “I’m gonna set things up the way Laleh suggested, Rez. Zip them together.”

  “You sure?” he wondered.

  I nodded, and snuck him a quick kiss as boots crunched in our direction.

  “You good to set up?” Amy asked, peeking in to look at Rez. “I should get started with the pyro here.”

  “I’m fine,” Rez assured her. “You two go, get trained.”

  The book at my waist pulled at my attention, as if reminding me that the only reason I didn’t have a splitting headache was because we’d made an agreement. “It’ll have to wait,” I said as I stepped out of the tent. Amy frowned at me as I did, and I spread my hand. “I have to read. If I don’t, it gets cranky, and then I get uncomfortable.”

  Her expression smoothed, and her eyes flicked down at the bag and back. She gave a tight nod. “Yeah. All right. When you’re done, though.”

  “When I’m done,” I agreed.

  Neither the cold nor the heat really bothered me much. One of the very few and very minor perks of at least having an affinity for fire magic, even if I didn’t have real control over it. So I hunted around for a spot on the basis of smooth ground and a decent-sized rock for a desk, rather than shade or sunshine. Not that shade was much of an option. There were cliffs in the distance, and shallow canyons where we could have set up, but Rez thought—and Amy agreed—that it would be best to be out in the open. Better sight lines. At night, I didn’t know how much that would matter, but if the sky was clear then we were promised a remarkable blanket of stars that would give away a shadow if that’s how it came.

  When I found a wide enough, relatively flat rock that was even sloped at a bit of an angle like a reading desk, I settled down beside it, checked the edge of the rock for evidence of scorpions or a rattlesnake or anything else that might be a problem, and took the book out when I was satisfied.

  It practically hummed in my hands. I set it on the rock, pulled out my notebook and pencils, and then for a few minutes just sat with it.

  One thing about the desert that Laleh had been right about—it was quiet. A slight breeze brushed over the ground, but with little scrub, all that sighed were rocks, and they didn’t make much noise. In the brief moments when the breeze died, it became utterly silent in a way that no other place I had been to ever got.

  I found myself closing my eyes, listening, hoping to catch some hint of this whisper she’d promised. I put my hand on the book, pressing my palm and fingers against the soft leather, silently praying that this would be the moment of epiphany. That out here, where there was nothing else, where generations of mystics and prophets and crazy people had wandered to hear a single word from the divine, I might finally break through whatever static was between me and the book. That it might hear me here, and speak to me.

  Nothing.

  I shook my head, opened my eyes, and gave a heavy sigh as I opened the notebook to a blank page. “You know this is pointless, right?” I asked the book. “I’m gonna die before I finish reading you. The next person will just have to start over. Why are we even doing this? Do you know? Do you have some plan? Of course you don’t. Gods—you’re just a glorified stack of paper, basically.”

  I reached for the cover, and felt a slight push against my fingertips.

  I blinked, tested it again. It wasn’t an unstoppable force, but there was definitely a kind of… magnetic push. Like the book and my fingers were the same polarity, unwilling to easily meet.

  My hand hovered, testing the feeling. It wasn’t just the corner of the cover—it was all over, along the spine, over the edge of the pages, on the top. I pushed experimentally and found that I could still touch it; but the push came from every part of it consistently. “I don’t… what are you trying to tell me?”

  “Trouble?”

  I looked up from the cover, then around the empty space. Amy and Rez and the camp were in the distance. Rez had dragon ears. If he heard a voice, he’d look over, but he didn’t. Maybe he just wasn’t paying attention.

  “It’s disconcerting, I know,” the voice said. It was a woman’s voice, I thought, or maybe a man’s? Or a very old woman who had smoked a lot. “Ask yourself this, Daniel. Where do gods come from?”

  I swallowed, and looked at the book. “I… is that… you?”

  There was no answer.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  I was alone.

  It wasn’t that hot, and wasn’t that cold. I wasn’t starving. I was a little tired from the drive. But not tired or hungry or thirsty enough to be hallucinating. Not unless the book was just fucking with me, making me worried to put off reading it.

  Carefully, I reached for the cover. The force that had gently repelled me before was gone, I opened the book, flipped to page seven, and let my eyes slide over the symbols there until I found where I had left off—a place where the ink was clearer, sharper. Darkened to almost black from the rusty, faded color of t
he parts I hadn’t yet unlocked.

  Where do gods come from?

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to even start thinking about that. If it was somewhere in the book, it was on a page I hadn’t figured out yet.

  In only a few moments, though, that question and all the thoughts that came with it evaporated like a night fog in the desert morning. The symbols absorbed me, and my hand began to move on the notepad, and then the book had me.

  It was a longer session than usual. After about four hours, I finally came out of it. I hadn’t set a timer, which was foolish. I knew better than to let the book set the terms of our sessions. Next time, it would want at least that much, and I’d be lucky if I could negotiate it down to three hours.

  When I finished, and had packed everything back up, I came back to camp to find Amy filling canteens by summoning a trickle of water from the air while Rez watched me approaching from a spot that I suspected he’d been sitting in since he finished setting up. Amy’s magic made a certain smell—like the air grew stale, and drier, until the breeze picked up. She eyed me as I joined them. “Almost done. Figured it can’t hurt to have some water on hand. Looked sort of… intense over there. Everything okay?”

  “You need food?” Rez asked. He offered me a canteen. “Water?”

  I took it gratefully and wet my mouth with a few swigs, then took a longer swallow before I handed it back. “I’m good,” I told them both. Describing my… event… didn’t seem like a good idea for some reason, so I kept it to myself. I looked at where the dummy tent was set up. It wasn’t staked down yet, and kind of swayed in the breeze but wasn’t about to run off. “I guess I should get that set up for tonight. Then… see what I can pick up from Amy.”

  Rez nodded, but his eyes said he was suspicious of something. “You were reading a long time.”

  “I know,” I said.