Of the Mortal Realm

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  “Do you know why Hansa might be dreaming of the lord of the Abyss?”

  “Images from you, if you remember Modigliani?” Alizarin suggested.

  Umber frowned, scratching at his own memory. “I don’t think Sennelier ever met him. Does that make sense?”

  Alizarin pondered for a moment., “Sennelier returned to the second level court around the time I joined the third. He is cautious for an Abyssi, and prefers the higher levels. He might never have met the Abyssi of the low court.”

  That still left the blazing question of Hansa’s dreams, which Umber suspected couldn’t be answered unless Umber took a closer look at them.

  “I’ll take Hansa now,” he told Alizarin, before reaching forward to lift the still-sleeping man. To a passer-by, the image might have looked comical, since Hansa was larger than Umber, slightly taller and broader in the shoulders. If Umber were at his full strength, he could have lifted him easily despite the difference; as it was, it took a bit of stumbling and help from Alizarin to get him upstairs, where Alizarin padded into Cadmia’s room and Umber continued to his and Hansa’s room.

  I’m sorry, he thought, as he lay Hansa down on the bed, then curled behind him. He had hoped to get to Amaranth and free Hansa of all this.

  If Hansa wanted to continue a physical relationship once the bond was broken, Umber wouldn’t object, but damn it, the man should have a choice. Hansa was the one who demanded the second and third boon and created this bond between them, but he hadn’t known what he was doing. He hadn’t known the danger. He still didn’t understand what he had tied himself to.

  Chapter 21

  Hansa

  When the shackles were finally removed, he had to bite back a whimper at the pain that bit through his shoulders as they were allowed to move for the first time in days.

  “You don’t need to be there, Hansa.”

  The voice half roused him, shaking him out of the dark dreams without fully waking him. Familiar arms wrapped around him, turned him, until he rested his head against Umber’s shoulder and found softer, hotter dreams.

  He slept restlessly a bit longer, then woke to Umber nibbling his way down Hansa’s stomach.

  “I thought that would wake you up,” Umber said.

  “It’s a good way to wake up,” Hansa agreed blearily, before blinking with confusion. “You’re back.”

  “I am. I’m sorry I left so long.” Umber moved back up to meet Hansa’s lips, gently, holding himself just above Hansa’s body as if afraid of breaking him.

  “I’m sorry,” Hansa said, for what felt like the five-hundredth time in—how long had it been? The sunlight streaming through the window seemed the same angle as it had been the last time he had been in this bed, as if the last day or so—Umber’s note, Hansa’s trip to Amaranth Farms, going to the Quin Compound—had all been a dream. “You had to come back for me, didn’t you?”

  Umber shook his head. “You’re an enjoyable sight to come home to,” he said, with a grin that didn’t loosen the tense knot in Hansa’s belly as he remembered where Umber had been, and who with. It wasn’t fair that Umber had Hansa for a leash, dragging him away from his lover.

  “If you want to—”

  He broke off with a yelp as Umber bit him on the rise of muscle on his chest, hard enough he knew it would bruise.

  “Cupric,” Umber said, the word sharp, “Is. Not. My. Lover. Never was. Get that through your head.”

  “Well, I’m sorry!” Hansa shouted, shoving Umber back to make space for the argument they were apparently about to have. “Apparently your leaving me sleeping and going to Amaranth to tumble into bed with him gave me the wrong impression. Maybe he’s just a really good lay—Abyss knows he has more experience than I do. But if that’s the case then—ow!” That last as Umber shut him up by biting him again. “Then tell me! Tell me what I’ve misunderstood.”

  Umber sat up, anger hot in his blue eyes, but an expression of sadness on his face. It was enough to make Hansa draw a breath, and say more softly, “Just tell me what’s going on. Please.”

  Umber started to stand up, and Hansa couldn’t stop himself from reaching for him and pulling him back down to the bed. For once, sex was one of the furthest things from his mind; he refused to let Umber walk away until they had figured this out.

  Umber didn’t fight him, but put his head down on the bed and closed his eyes to draw a deep breath. Hansa wished he had Umber’s ability to read minds, and could pull from Umber’s head whatever was bothering him.

  He started at another angle. “How did you and Cupric meet?”

  Umber’s eyes half opened, just enough for him to glare. “I don’t remember, and why do you care?”

  Because Hansa was trying to imagine the riot of conflicted emotions that could come to the surface in this situation. For the first time in a decade, Umber had been confronted with the man who had been his first—whatever they had been. Maybe not lovers, but according to Cupric, Umber hadn’t wanted to leave. Maybe that was normal. Maybe, to a kid who was only fourteen or fifteen, it had felt like love; recognizing it as something different now didn’t mean old wounds instantly disappeared.

  “If you really want to console my poor, trampled heart, can we have sex now?” Umber asked, the tone too tight to be properly teasing.

  “Are you going to bite me again?”

  Umber gave one of his half smirk, half smile expressions. It was a little forced, but the effort was there. “You might find that you like it.”

  The quip was enough to bring Hansa’s Abyssi dreams to mind, which made him blush, which made Umber laugh. Suspicious, Hansa asked, “Can you see my dreams?”

  Again, that mostly-smile. Umber nodded. “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Can I ever see yours?” He could use a little variation from his recent selection of nocturnal terrors.

  Umber froze. It was just an instant before he shrugged and suggested, “If you’re enjoying the Abyssi dreams, I can give you new things to dream about,” but Hansa saw it and recognition left a cold lump in his stomach.

  More firmly, Hansa asked, “Can I ever see your dreams?”

  Umber sighed, as if bored with the academic discussion. “I’ve heard people say the bond can allow that, yes. But right now, sleep is not the highest thing on my—”

  “Have I ever seen your dreams?”

  Again, there was the briefest moment where Umber’s impatient but sultry expression cracked. “Hansa—”

  “Have I?” Too many pieces were beginning to settle into place, and forming a picture Hansa absolutely needed to fully see and understand. He squashed the guilt he felt at the panic he could see in Umber’s gaze in that unguarded instant, his guilt at pushing a question upon someone he knew couldn’t lie. Not outright. Umber could evade and he could manipulate words and he could twist the truth, but like Abyssi and Numini, spawn couldn’t lie flat-out.

  “Drop it, Hansa,” Umber said, all pretense gone now.

  Hansa dropped that question because he didn’t need Umber to answer it; his refusal said enough. Instead, he went back to an earlier thought. “How did you meet Cupric?”

  “I told you, I don’t remember,” Umber snapped. He rolled over, set his feet to the floor, and started toward the door.

  Hansa followed. The dreams made sense now—as did the fact that he never dreamed of the Abyssumancer except when Umber was with him. In Hansa’s mind, “Abyssumancer” had translated to the only mancer he had ever been intimate with, but the base of the dreams—the situation and emotions—weren’t his.

  If those dreams had been Umber’s—and they had started as soon as he had seen Cupric again . . .

  “Dear Numen, Umber,” Hansa swore, slapping a hand to the door to hold it shut before the other man could disappear through it. “Why didn’t you tell me? I—”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Umber shouted.

  “Nothing to . . .” Hansa trailed off, horrified. “I left you with him! I thought maybe you loved him, maybe you were jus
t looking for variation, I thought a thousand different things but I left you with the man—with the monster who chained you down, tortured you, and raped you, when you were fifteen years old.”

  “It’s none of your business. And it’s over—”

  “How over can it be, when just yesterday you were back in his bed?” Hansa asked, horrified. The visions of blood in his mind at that moment had nothing to do with dreams of the Abyss, and certainly weren’t sexual. No, they involved Cupric, drawn and quartered, dying slowly. Hansa was pretty sure he could do it with his bare hands.

  “Stay away from him,” Umber whispered. “Hansa, please. I’m begging you here. Begging. I will get down on my knees if you need me to. Stay away from him.”

  Hansa might not be morally and legally aligned with the 126 anymore, but he had spent several years hunting mancers professionally. He knew what he was doing. If he prepared properly, he could—

  “No!” Umber shouted, hearing the thought before Hansa had even completed it. “Hansa, stop and think for a moment.”

  Oh, he was thinking all right. Thinking of all the ways he could murder that man.

  Umber caught both his shoulders, and pushed him back against the wall hard enough to knock his breath out. “Cupric may very well be the strongest Abyssumancer in Kavet right now,” he said, voice low and cold. “Assuming he didn’t kill you outright, which he might not only because it would kill me and he does still want Terre Verte’s favor at the moment, if he finds himself in genuine jeopardy—especially at the hands of someone trying to protect me—what is he going to do?”

  Finally, the dangerous truth sank in. Hansa could hear Cupric’s voice in his head, saying, I had two boons of Umber once. It was years ago, but the connection lingers . . .

  “Numendamned Abyssumancer,” Hansa whispered.

  “I got away from him once because the Quin came around and he panicked,” Umber said. “I changed my name—not just the name I was using. I went through the necessary ritual to bind my power to a new name—so he wouldn’t be able to summon me by blood. He doesn’t want a third boon and a permanent bond any more than I do, but he’s powerful enough that, whatever form the bond takes, it won’t be one-sided. It might lean in his favor. If you force him to, he will risk it.”

  Hansa tried to swallow the lump of his heart that had wedged in his throat. “I won’t do anything stupid,” he said.

  “I notice you’re not promising to just leave him alone,” Umber said. “Remember even if he doesn’t have time to demand and seal a third boon, his calling me by blood would probably be enough to renew the second one. If you kill him, it might kill me. And you.”

  “If I see an opportunity to kill him, quickly enough and surely enough that I know he won’t have a chance to call you, I’ll do it,” Hansa said. “I don’t think I could stop myself. But I won’t seek him out.”

  Umber nodded, slowly. He could read Hansa’s mind; he knew that was all he was going to get.

  “Will you agree not to tell the others?”

  “We don’t have to tell them everything,” Hansa said, “but you have to tell them something. I trusted Cupric because I thought you did. They need to be on their guard. Alizarin and Cadmia especially need to know that bastard is dangerous.”

  “Fine, then,” Umber said. “Tell them whatever you think you need to, as long as they know they can’t go after him.”

  “You don’t want to tell them yourself?” Hansa asked. “I won’t share anything you don’t want me to, but if it’s vague, it will sound stronger coming from you. I’ll come across as the jealous lover.”

  Umber sighed. “Hansa . . .”

  For a moment, Hansa thought Umber was objecting to the self-description Hansa had used, and then his common sense came up with the rest of the answer.

  Even knowing the danger Cupric could pose, Umber hadn’t told anyone. Maybe he just didn’t want to share; Hansa could understand not wanting to talk about these things. But what if—

  “Don’t,” Umber said, before Hansa could ask, “What were the first two boons?”

  “Okay,” he said instead. The painful compulsion caused by the magic of the boons had been enough to send Hansa down to the lowest level of the Abyss, and Hansa knew from personal experience that a boon could come with many caveats and provisions. If Cupric had included in his demands a clause about what Umber was or wasn’t allowed to tell others, then Umber couldn’t break that silence.

  Again, Hansa thought about killing the Abyssumancer.

  “Can we talk to Cadmia and Alizarin later?” Umber asked, voice dull with fatigue. “Right now, I want to go back to bed.”

  Hansa nodded. “Do you want to be alone?” Given the nature of the memories he had just dredged up, Hansa could understand Umber needing some time without another man in bed with him.

  In response, the spawn looked at him with tired resignation. “What? No,” he said bluntly. “Stop thinking that way about me. If you need alone time at some point, I understand, but that’s not what I want when I feel like shit. I want sex. A lot of it. With you. Now. Idiot Quin.”

  At least the last bit was back to its usual good-natured teasing tone. Even so, Hansa asked, “Are you sure you’re up to it?” Umber looked exhausted.

  “I have faith we’ll find a way.”

  While Hansa sometimes agonized over his emotional state when he was with Umber, it was no metaphor to say the touch of the half-Abyssi’s skin was magic. They started slow and leisurely, each of them aching with fatigue, but each caress was a spark set to kindling. Where their bodies came together, power flowed, and as if waking from weeks of famine to find a banquet before them, they devoured each other.

  At one point, Umber hesitated, looking at Hansa with eyes that seemed to glisten wetly. Hansa opened his mouth to ask, then closed it and instead reached up his hand. Umber tensed as Hansa brushed a thumb over his cheek, acknowledging the tears without challenging them.

  Then Umber ducked his head, as if the moment of honesty was too much for him.

  No matter what his horny body voted, Hansa’s first instinct was to stop and try to talk it out before anything else. Remembering Umber’s words earlier, he instead pulled the other man’s lean, trembling frame down snugly against his own, then rolled them both until Umber’s head lay on the pillow and Hansa braced above him.

  “This okay?” he asked.

  Umber nodded sharply and pulled him closer.

  Afterwards, as they collapsed against the pillows, waiting for their breathing and heartbeats to calm, Umber breathed, “Thank you.”

  It was Hansa’s turn to feel awkward with words. “My pleasure,” he managed to say.

  His head tucked down against Hansa’s shoulder, hiding his face, Umber murmured, “Spoiling me. What will I do when we get the bond broken and you realize your life would be simpler without a half-Abyssi pervert in it?” Umber spoke with the joking tone he used for most potentially-emotional declarations, and the words shot through Hansa, hot and cold at the same time.

  At another time, Hansa might have made a joke of his own in response—something like, Probably find a partner with fewer hang-ups and more experience. Instead, he asked honestly, “What will I do, if we get the bond broken and I feel exactly the same way about you as I do now?”

  Umber had used the word when. Hansa saw him flinch at the word if.

  “Don’t you want to know?” Umber asked, lifting his head. “Don’t you want to know you’re making your own choices because they’re yours, not because there’s magic in your brain telling you what to do?”

  “People change,” Hansa replied. “They change because circumstances change, or they learn something new. They change because something scares them or because they lose someone—or meet someone. One way or another, I’ve changed, and if losing the bond undoes all that’s happened the last few months, how is that any more real? How is erasing everything I’ve gone through and everything I’ve thought about it, and perhaps digging out of my heart th
e people I’ve come to care about, any less the magic manipulating me than the original bond might have been?”

  He could feel Umber withdrawing emotionally even though the spawn didn’t move away physically. In fact, his fingers tightened in Hansa’s hair, like an unconscious desire to hold him closer even as his words tried to do the opposite. “You don’t understand,” Umber said.

  Hansa pushed himself up, putting a few inches of physical distance between them. Then the image came to him of a fourteen-year-old boy, stalked and trapped by an Abyssumancer. And before that, of a much younger child, who never felt he needed to question why his mother walked away from him and never returned. In Umber’s earliest experiences, magical compulsion and Abyssal drives were the only reason anyone had ever claimed to love him.

  Hansa knew better than to say any of that aloud, but his thinking twice about saying something never made any difference.

  Umber bristled, and as if on a cue they moved away from each other, reaching for clothes like armor.

  Hansa pushed to his feet—then stumbled, feeling as if the ground had shaken under him. Umber likewise seemed off-balance, and had to catch himself against the bed.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” Umber hissed, dropping his head as if dizzy.

  “What?” Unchecked emotions hadn’t taken their feet out from under them. It was magic.

  “We must still have something feeding from us,” Umber said. “We might not have noticed it if we had both been in good shape to begin with, but after Cupric—” He broke off, shook his head, and tried again. “I thought it was just him, that he had taken too much power from me and drained you in the process, but if that were the case we would be doing better now.”

  Contemplation of their relationship, future, or lack thereof could wait. Unless they literally wanted to spend the rest of their lives in bed to make up for lost power—something that only sounded pleasant as an idle fantasy—they needed to figure out what was going on. “If not Cupric, who? Or what?”