by Ginn Hale
“What? Of course not. And neither is anyone else, for that matter. No one has the right to collar free mages unless they’ve committed a felony. The Mage Liberty Act passed five years ago.” Dalfon just shook his head. “I suppose it didn’t serve Pa Spivey to tell you that, did it? Not when he had you under his thumb, dowsing fresh-water wells for him.”
“No. I guess it didn’t,” Lucky admitted. “Though I wouldn’t have bet on him keeping abreast of the law himself. He never troubled himself too much with those sorts of details. Not once he’d convinced himself that his newest scheme was going to win him a fortune.”
“There were a lot of schemes?” Dalfon asked.
“Oh, yes. And we never knew where he’d get his next bad idea,” Lucky said. “Seemed like the more far-fetched or ill-advised, the better he liked a plan. Before he passed, he read a newspaper story about that millionaire, Louis Moreau, dying. Just like that, he dreamed up a harebrained scheme to lay claim to the Swaims’ western property as well as this here island. It didn’t matter to him that everyone for miles around knew he wasn’t any long-lost grandson of Mr. Moreau’s. He kept swearing that he could prove he had a closer relation to the Moreau family than the Swaims did. Nothing came of any of it. Pa Spivey died as poor as ever…”
Dalfon cocked his head and seemed to consider Lucky in an almost concerned manner. Lucky could all but see the wheels turning in his mind, but Dalfon just said, “Can’t say I liked him, but I’m sorry for your loss.”
Lucky shrugged. It wasn’t that he hadn’t felt a sort of sadness at Pa Spivey’s passing, but it hadn’t neared the anguish he’d suffered learning of his mother’s death or the hell he’d felt when he’d fought so hard and still lost Effie. Pa Spivey’s demise had only seemed sorrowful because neither he nor Molly had worked up two tears between them at the man’s graveside.
“Thank you, but he wasn’t…” Lucky tried to think of the words. “I suppose that if I hadn’t been able to remember my real parents, it would have been easier to care about him.”
Dalfon reached out and put his arm around Lucky. The weight and warmth of him felt comforting. Leaning up against Dalfon came as a relief, like drawing in a breath after too long underwater. He hadn’t wanted to be mad at Dalfon before and was relieved for a reason to give it up.
“You never did tell me about your life before you were shipped out here,” Dalfon commented.
“You didn’t say much yourself either,” Lucky replied, but with a smile. He knew Dalfon had left his family home when he was only fifteen and that he’d run with very rough company up in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains. But Dalfon always embroidered his stories with so many jokes and tall tales that Lucky wasn’t quite certain of how much to believe—though he’d found it all charming.
“I poured out my whole sad story of growing up as the spoiled son of a California rabbi and then skipping town to ride with a troop of degenerate rangers.” Dalfon’s grin undermined his attempt to appear affronted. “Probably bored you too much for you to remember it.”
“I remember everything you ever told me. I just didn’t believe it all. It’s hard to imagine you out riding the range with a yarmulke pinned under your cowboy hat and two sets of dishes in your saddlebags.”
Dalfon laughed at that. “Well, perhaps I led you to believe I was a hair more devout than I might have been, but I promise I told you most everything just as it happened…more or less.”
“You actually waited out a snowstorm playing checkers in a cave with a grizzly bear? And you rode a triceratops into Fort Arvada with two bandits tied across its back?”
“The bear was hibernating, and the triceratops had been raised and trained by a mountain mage, but yes, it’s all true.” Dalfon placed his hand over his heart. “I swear.”
Lucky almost wished it wasn’t, because compared to Dalfon, what had he done with his life? Dowsed about a hundred fresh-water wells to earn the Spiveys money, fished the salt marshes and tangled once with One-Eyed Pete. For the most part, he’d fought his own urge to run off on grand adventures, for fear of the price his sisters would pay for his freedom. By the time he’d been free of Ma and Pa Spivey, he’d felt too broken by loss and failure to aspire to anything but surviving in the same rut his life had already become.
Belatedly he realized how perverse he’d turned out, taking comfort in the reliable emptiness of his desolate existence.
“I ain’t rightly done nothing compared to you. Anything I tell you will be dull as dirt.”
“There isn’t a thing about you that I find dull.” Dalfon shook his head. “You just can’t see how fascinating you are because you’re used to being you. You’re like that star up there. He’s always flying in the glow of his own brilliance, so he can’t even suspect how barren and black the rest of the sky is.”
Lucky felt a flush rise through him. “You sure know how to butter a fellow up, don’t you?”
“I know how and where to apply sweet oil to make things slide in nice, if that’s what you mean.” Dalfon grinned, and Lucky felt his face heat with embarrassment and excitement. He was quite aware of how skillfully Dalfon could administer oil and a massage before he eased himself inside a fellow’s body.
“I don’t suppose you got any of that sweet oil on you now?” Lucky asked in a whisper, despite there being no one but saltwater crocodiles to overhear him.
“Sadly, I was not quite so presumptuous as to bring it to confront the Swaim brothers. But I think we might be able to entertain ourselves in any case, don’t you?”
Anticipation thrilled through Lucky as he quickly worked open the buttons of Dalfon’s vest and shirt. But he pushed the fabric aside slowly, like he was spreading the curtains of a theater stage. Firelight glinted across Dalfon’s blond chest hair and shone bright across the tender scar tissue and dark bruises at the center of his chest.
“Those from the curse?” Lucky asked.
“That curse wasn’t quite a match for my Magen David.” Dalfon lifted his hand to touch the silver star pendant that lay in the hollow of his collarbones. Tiny lines of foreign script decorated each of the six points, but only a charred crumb sat at the center of the star. “I used this to drain their curse and heal the worst of my hurt. It’s burnt out now, but it did the trick.”
“Those bruises and that scar…” Lucky could hardly look at them without thinking of how very close they lay to Dalfon’s heart. “Don’t they hurt?”
“Nah. You put all that out of my mind.” Dalfon smiled at him and ran his fingers along Lucky’s jaw and caressed the tender curve of the nape of his neck.
Then he bent and kissed Lucky so deep and sure that his lips and tongue seemed to send a thrill all through Lucky’s body to the core of him.
Dalfon was so at ease with this, so experienced. Lucky felt like a greenhorn. But then he lifted his face and met Dalfon’s desperate gaze. He felt Dalfon’s heart hammering beneath his fingers. Knowing all the yearning was just for him sparked Lucky’s confidence and made him feel entrancing.
When Lucky bowed his head and worked his tongue across Dalfon’s nipples, Dalfon made soft, pleased sounds. But his entire body tensed when Lucky knelt lower. Dalfon couldn’t seem to keep himself from helping Lucky remove his gun belt and work open the buttons of his denim trousers.
Dalfon’s hot, flushed prick jutted up against Lucky’s fingers. For a moment Lucky indulged himself in the sight. Dalfon was the only man he’d ever known who was circumcised—it lent him a sleekness, a kind of defiance. Where other fellow’s pricks hung sheltered and hooded, as if ashamed, Dalfon stood bare and brazen. Lucky kissed him once lightly for that.
A quiet gasp escaped Dalfon. He curled his hands through Lucky’s hair and traced the back of his neck with restrained, gentle strokes. His touch grew more desperate as Lucky sank down taking Dalfon’s taut shaft deep. Lucky savored how every lash of his tongue and vibration of his throat
shot through Dalfon’s body. At last he won a desperate cry and an exuberant splash of ecstasy.
Dalfon sagged there for a moment like he’d met his match. He lifted his head to gaze at Lucky through the loose curls of his sweat-damp hair.
“You look so pleased with yourself. So damn beautiful.” Dalfon kissed Lucky’s swollen lips. He pushed Lucky back onto the ground. “Let’s see if you can take as good as you give.”
Lucky did his best to last, but he was already hard and ready for release. And Dalfon surely knew his way around a fellow. Within a minute the pleasure grew too powerful for Lucky to contain. He came like a geyser. Dalfon grinned up at him and wiped his mouth as if he’d had himself a slice of the best cake in the bakery. He lay down beside Lucky and closed his eyes, still grinning.
They dozed briefly and woke together. Dalfon pulled his discarded coat over them. They gazed up at the night sky. The big yellow moon stared back down at them. The night air gusted off the Inland Sea, but the glowing embers of the fire continued to radiate warmth. Lucky felt almost afraid to admit how happy he was, as if the moment he actually gave himself up to bliss it would all fall apart.
“How did a treasure like you end up in a backwater like this?” Dalfon wondered aloud.
“Just lucky, I guess,” Lucky replied, amused to make a pun of his own name before Dalfon could.
“I’m asking in all seriousness. How did you end up here?” Dalfon asked.
No one had concerned themselves with his history before. Generally, people simply nodded in a sad understanding way when Pa Spivey admitted they’d adopted Lucky because it had been cheaper to adopt as a son than to hire him on as paid labor. If he possessed a history before he’d come to the folks of Edgewater, they didn’t care to hear about it.
“I lived in New York originally. Ma mère stitched leather gloves and mon père drove cabs for the Hansom Cab Company, at least until he went back west. Then it was just ma mère and me, though he sent letters. He and his brother were going to make their fortunes in the gold fields.”
Lucky could still remember his mother holding one of his father’s letters out to him so that he could smell the fragrant ponderosa pines saturating the pages. He didn’t want to recollect beyond that, but Dalfon waited, watching him curiously.
“Just after my tenth birthday ma mère contracted consumption—tuberculosis, the doctor called it. We weren’t wealthy. Ma mère had been when she was a little girl, but after she wed mon père most of her family wouldn’t even speak to her. She eloped from these parts to New York before I was even born so I never met any of them. But when she fell ill, one of her aunts arranged for her to be treated in the sanatorium at Saranac Lake. Ma mère entrusted my care to a cousin of hers here in Riverain County.” Lucky absently tugged up a blade of grass and folded it between his fingers. “Before the flood, ma mère’s people owned property all across the county and some of them stayed, I suppose. Anyway, the woman never came for me.”
Lucky hadn’t cast his mind back to those early days for so long that now the memories seemed strangely dull and faded, like oil paper when it yellowed, and all he could see through it were the faintest shadows. He wasn’t certain how long he must have stood, anticipating the arrival of his mother’s cousin outside the coach station. Had it been two days or three? He’d been lightheaded from thirst and hunger by the end, he remembered that. And he’d tried not to cry but had failed when night fell and only stray dogs seemed to wander the streets.
Now he wondered if that hadn’t somehow added to his sense of inevitability when he’d feared himself abandoned by Dalfon and once again waited under that creaking wooden sign and watching people come and go as the sun sank.
“Something wrong?” Dalfon’s question brought him back to the moment.
“No. Not now.” Lucky pressed his body closer to the heat of Dalfon’s naked skin. “Eventually someone noticed that I was standing around the stagecoach station, and Mrs. Margot Swaim took it on herself to arrange for the Spiveys to adopt me.”
Dalfon nodded like he’d guessed as much.
“And your father?” Dalfon asked.
“El Chino.” Lucky supplied the nickname that his father had so proudly used and often teased his mother for mispronouncing with her strong French accent. “He was born out west and headed back there to win us a fortune from the gold fields. I don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he’s still out there panning for gold and thinking that ma mère and I are waiting for him in our apartment above the Gauntier Boutique.”
“You remember either of your parents’ legal names?” Dalfon asked the question casually enough, but that didn’t make it any less odd.
“Why’d you ask that, of all things?” Lucky crushed the grass blade between his fingers. A sweet green scent drifted from it.
“Well, you have to have a name other than Spivey,” Dalfon responded, though it didn’t answer Lucky’s question. “Is it so strange to wonder what it was?”
“Not exactly.” Lucky studied Dalfon’s face. He looked sly, but that was hardly new. “It’s strange that you would ask about it when Pa Spivey was digging after the same information from my birth certificate just a few months before he passed.”
“Maybe not so strange as you’d think. Did he tell you that he hired a detective from the Pinkertons to look into your mother’s background, to see if she—or you—were entitled to property and money now that Louis Moreau has dropped dead?”
Lucky studied Dalfon in the embers’ glow.
“Are you telling me that Pa Spivey hired you to find out about ma mère’s family?”
“Not me, no. Can you imagine how awkward that would have been?” Dalfon replied, with just a flash of a smile. “Jerry Buck took the case. I was working out in the Nevada territory at the time. But Buck knew that I’d been down here, and so he contacted me. I put him onto Margot Swaim, since I remembered old man Brewer once mentioning that Margot was distantly related to the Moreau family. I also asked Buck to look in on you for me when he made the trip down here.”
Uneasiness passed over Lucky. Pa Spivey and Margot Swaim were both dead, and there had been those rumors about the Swaim brothers killing a Pinkerton. Had Pa Spivey actually convinced a bunch of folks that he was sitting on the heir to the Moreau lands—convinced the Swaims so well they committed murder to protect their claims? Lucky couldn’t see how something like that could be possible. He didn’t exactly resemble any of the old families from hereabouts.
“But my family name is Song-Garcia, not Moreau,” Lucky objected. “Says so on my birth certificate.”
“Yes, but digging back to your parents’ marriage license clears the matter up. Moreau was your mother’s maiden name before she eloped with your father.” Dalfon rolled up on to his elbows, looking far more awake then Lucky felt. “It’s all in Buck’s notes. Including the fact that Louis Moreau had a change of heart on his deathbed and altered his will to favor his estranged daughter and her child over his deceased wife’s relations—the Swaims.”
“The Swaims?” Lucky asked. “That’s not a coincidence, is it?”
“It’s not. Louis’s last wife was aunt to the Swaim brothers.” Dalfon gave Lucky a particularly knowing look. “I think Margot was the cousin your Ma contacted to take you in.”
Lucky had no idea what to make of all this. He couldn’t imagine prim, condemning Margot Swaim as a relative much less summon any feeling of family for a stranger like Louis Moreau. Moreau was one of those names he’d read in papers and thought little of except that great riches hadn’t seemed to bring the man much joy, judging by the arrogant, sour visage of his portraits. This talk about inheritance and a grandfather he’d never known—never could know—disturbed him. He’d felt so much more relaxed before, when it had just been him and Dalfon lying here together. An unwanted thought occurred to him.
“Is all of this really what you came back to Riverain County f
or?” Lucky asked.
“No. I was always coming back for you. But all of this, as you say, came along with me. Maybe solving it is something I’m supposed to do—maybe that’s why I had to lose you for three years.” Dalfon’s gaze lifted again to the evening star. “Do you believe in destiny?”
Lucky glanced to the stars but returned his attention to Dalfon. All that light in the heavens moved steady as clockwork, but Dalfon? He presented a riddle with almost every word he said.
“You mean like when the preacher talks about the end times coming and how nobody can escape the lake of fire?” Lucky scowled. “I’m not inclined to believe in that. Mon père taught me that no matter how sinful we may be, we are always reborn with the opportunity to redeem ourselves. Life never ends, it simply takes on a new form.”
“Maybe that’s what makes you such a sympathetic and forgiving soul.”
Lucky just laughed. “I was hardly forgiving when I thought you’d run out on me.”
“I rode with a man who got himself hanged after shooting a woman on her wedding day all because she resembled the girl who threw him over years before,” Dalfon said. “Trust me, vengeful you ain’t. You might have been mad, but you still shared your food and heard me out. You’re just the sort that old Shakespeare was chasing after when he wrote, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’”
“That ain’t got a thing to do with believing in fate,” Lucky said, though he felt oddly flattered by all the thees and thous Dalfon quoted.
“Sorry, you distracted me. And for the record, I don’t hold with all that hell and eternal damnation either,” Dalfon agreed. “But I do believe that some things—some people—are so important to each other’s lives that they’re drawn together over and over. I think that’s how it is for me and you. No matter how far I wandered from you, I kept thinking of you, and everything I did always brought me back to you. You may think I’m spinning some far-fetched story, but I’m not. Hand to my heart, even I didn’t believe it at first but now I’m sure. Dante got it right when he wrote, ‘Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.’”
