by Anah Crow
Too soon, heat crept up from his belly and he had to struggle to keep control of himself, to keep from coming already. He wanted to hear Noah, didn’t want to lose a single word in the rush of his own pleasure.
Noah wrapped his legs around Lindsay’s hips and let go of Lindsay’s hair to grab the sheets instead.
When he came, he was still begging Lindsay for more, already babbling half-coherently about everything he wanted Lindsay to do to him and with him, tonight, tomorrow, and days after that.
Finally, Lindsay could let himself go. He let Noah’s words wash over him as he fucked Noah hard and fast, and came with a sharp cry. The force of it left him gasping and shivering, and he barely managed to keep from collapsing onto Noah as his hips moved instinctively, drawing more pleasure from his oversensitive flesh.
Noah held on to him, trying to get as close as he could. “That feels amazing,” he panted, pressing aimless, scattered kisses to Lindsay’s shoulder and neck. “Giving it up to you like that.”
Dipping his head to catch Noah’s mouth in a soft kiss, Lindsay admitted, “I want it to be like that all the time.” He wasn’t sure he had words for how it made him feel, but he’d experienced it with Dane too, that completeness.
“It will be.” Noah sounded like they were discussing gravity. “I’m yours.”
Lindsay loved that surety. He pulled out and Noah moved with him so that they changed places and Lindsay lay against his chest now, soaking up his warmth. Noah’s certainty reminded him of Dane, when Dane had first said Lindsay was his and couldn’t be taken away.
Dane. There was an empty place inside him aching for Dane to return. They’d gotten him out, but he still wasn’t back. Not yet.
All Lindsay could do was give him time. Meanwhile, he’d give Noah what Noah needed, and get a little of what he needed too. The warmth and contact were good, but the intimacy—knowing Noah had been inside his worst nightmares as much as he’d been inside Noah, that Noah knew him now—made being with Noah easy and comforting.
Anah Crow and Dianne Fox
Noah tucked them both in and curled up around Lindsay, cradling him in the crook of his arm and pressing gentle kisses to his hair. He was quiet for a while, but not asleep. He petted Lindsay’s hair and rubbed his back, the warmth of his hand easing away Lindsay’s aches and tension.
“He’ll be back soon,” Noah said at last, like he could hear Lindsay thinking. “He needs to be here, with you. This is his place. Try to sleep for now.”
Noah knew more about these things than Lindsay, and he wouldn’t let either of them lie there doing nothing if Dane needed their help to find his way home. That made it easier to relax, even if it hurt to do nothing. Lindsay kissed Noah’s chest, warm skin under his lips, and closed his eyes.
“Thank you for being here,” Lindsay whispered. “And for everything else.”
“This is where I should be.” Noah let his cheek rest against Lindsay’s hair and Lindsay felt as much as heard his sigh. “You have as much to do with it as I do.” The candlelight faded away into darkness.
Cyrus had chosen well, pairing Lindsay and Noah, for both of them. They fit together, better than Lindsay could have imagined. Lindsay owed the old mage a great deal; he had more reason than ever before to wipe Moore and her creations off the face of the earth.
Lindsay let Noah’s presence and the darkness soothe him into much-needed sleep. Noises from outside woke him again and again, but each time, Noah’s warmth let him drift off again.
If they’d taken Jonas’s collar off completely, Dane wouldn’t have been able to leave. As it was, he couldn’t make himself stay. This wasn’t his city, but he wanted to be out in it. The night was calling him; the scents and sounds would be enough to keep the beast in him from howling at the moon in grief.
Detroit smelled nothing like New York—less organic, more like dankness and iron. The cars were the same, the gunshots were the same, the raised voices were the same, but coming from different directions when he turned to face where the moon would be if the clouds would part. He breathed in and caught the faint taste of fresh water.
The empty wind blew sweeter, the closer he came to the water’s edge, then pushed the clouds apart to let the moon through. Every time it touched his face or tickled his ear, he turned into it, listening, before his rational mind could remind his instinct that there was no one there. Maybe if he’d stayed indoors, he would have had a little longer before he had to deal with it.
On a bridge, he stopped and leaned on the railing, staring down into the black water. It felt like he was still missing his magic, like he’d been shot through the chest and it wouldn’t heal.
He couldn’t waste time feeling like this. Cyrus would tell him to stop playing at being human, tell him that he didn’t have the luxury of regret. He’d done too much wrong to afford it.
He pushed away from the rail and kept going to lose himself in the soft, domesticated forest of an island that was a physical manifestation of relief from the grinding jaw of the city. His bare feet took him
Trammel
down toward the water. He had no idea where his shoes had gone, only hoped he’d had the intelligence to take them off before he left the house.
The lake, striated with moonlight and shadows, washed up against a narrow stripe of beach. The wind was full in his face and he made himself breathe.
Get used to it. It’s not going to change. He’d come back from death, but it was too late for Cyrus.
He’d seen the dead raised after the fact—it didn’t make them less dead. Cyrus would slap him for it anyway.
At first he thought he was hearing an owl in the trees, but the wings came closer and he could hear the serrated edge of them biting through the air, eating up distance. His mind argued with itself about what could or couldn’t be coming his way. A shadow blocked out the stars and the moon, wheeling about overhead and erasing all the answers but one.
Dane sat on a stone and waited. When the wings fell silent, he heard the faint sound of bare feet and the hem of a robe on the sand.
Ezqel. Dane waited for whatever it was the old fae mage had come to say, even if he didn’t want to hear it.
“I’m sorry.”
“Cyrus knew what he was doing.” Dane tried to keep his tone flat, but the clench of his throat betrayed him. He hadn’t expected Ezqel to give a damn one way or the other.
“Not for that. For the other. For what was done to you.”
That was even less expected. Dane stared out at the water, waiting for it to turn to blood, or for the moon to fall into it with a small plink. Neither came to pass, but everything was echoingly silent, as though the entire world had stopped what it was doing to watch. Ezqel sat beside him, not looking at him, long white hands folded in his lap.
“You were right to leave me,” Ezqel went on. “It was not my place to discipline you for doing what needed to be done, no matter what promises you broke. Cyrus was right to call you home.”
“How do you know?” Dane didn’t want an apology just because something had pricked the dried flesh of Ezqel’s heart. Ezqel had cursed him without conscience for leaving his place as Ezqel’s apprentice.
Ezqel was ill-accustomed to being refused, then and now. Only Dane’s magic had saved him from the full force of Ezqel’s wrath—half a lifetime crippled had been a light sentence for rejecting one of the fae.
“Everything is as it should be,” Ezqel said simply. Dane saw more than heard the shrug of one shoulder. “It would not have been, otherwise.”
That hurt Dane more than when Lindsay had told him Cyrus was dead. Cyrus dying was the most wrong thing Dane could imagine. Even losing Lindsay, he could understand, but his mind had no way to bend that would allow it to understand losing Cyrus.
“You came all the way from Germany to tell me that?” Dane made his hands unclench before the blood from his claws cutting through his palms stained his clothes. He got up and went down to wash his hands in the lake. He could imagine Ez
qel taking the time to come and hurt him this much.
“I thought being wrong was a momentous enough occasion to warrant the trip.” Ezqel’s words should have been light with the eternal indifference of the fae, but they sounded as tired and old as Dane felt. “I owed you an apology, anyway, and you know how I feel about debts.”
“If you wanted to say you were sorry, you should have come here a few weeks ago.” Dane dried his healed palms on his thighs and turned to face Ezqel. “That would have been useful.”
“I wasn’t sorry then.” By the light of the moon, Ezqel looked like he was made of white marble, his hair and robes painted on with blood.
“Are you sure you weren’t?” Dane had always wanted to know, and he’d take his restitution in answers. Ezqel’s glare was defiant, then he looked away.
“No.”
“At least one of us was sorry for it.” All those years under a curse, all for putting Cyrus first—that had been nothing. Dane would do it all again, without hesitation. It didn’t come close to the rest of his life without Cyrus. Dane had to shake his hair back as the empty wind pulled it across his face. “Was there anything else?”
“Only that.” Ezqel stood and straightened his robes. Dane was still getting used to being eye-to-eye with him, after the decades he’d been bent and deformed, trapped between beast and man. “And I brought you this.”
Dane knew what it was before Ezqel held it out. “I don’t want it.”
“It is yours. And you belong to no one now.” This close, Ezqel’s eyes were like emeralds, hot and glossy green. Yzumrud, the ring he offered, held a stone shot with that same green, and the red of his hair.
The right words would unleash a spear of power from its core. This wasn’t the first time Ezqel had forced it on him. Dane had tried to refuse it, but in Mexico he had needed it to save Lindsay’s life. “You betray no one by taking it.”
Only myself. Dane’s pride had done damage he couldn’t begin to fathom. Again, he took the ring from Ezqel’s cool fingers and tucked it away in his pocket. He could throw it away. Give it away. Once he knew he wouldn’t need it again.
“I have to get back to the boys,” he said, instead of anything else he wanted to say. None of it was good, none of it would help, and much of it wasn’t even true. But it was habit to hurt something instead of hurting.
“To...” Ezqel raised an eyebrow. “I was given to understand that the fire starter had met a sticky end.”
“The Quinns are fucking cockroaches.” Dane stepped around Ezqel and started walking back toward the path, one tired step at a time. Yzumrud bit into his thigh with each step and the wind shoved the clouds over the moon, making everything grim again.
“Said the devil himself.” Ezqel’s voice trailed after him. Dane turned back to see Ezqel looking over his shoulder.
“You’re one to talk about devils,” Dane said dryly. Perversely, he felt better now, like he could breathe again.
“For all my sins, how could I be anything else?” When moonlight slid through a rent in the clouds, Ezqel shone with a red halo. It could have been a trick of Dane’s eyes, but he was sure the bastard was smiling. “Tell the little one that Taniel and Izia send their regards.”
With that, he was gone, huge wings launching his raptor form into the clouds and beyond in a few beats.
Dane waited until he couldn’t hear the bird any longer, then he let himself drop to all fours, relishing the ease with which he slid from shape to shape. The wind was voiceless in his ears, but he listened anyway. Someday, the wind would speak again, when it was time for him to go. He wasn’t ready for that day yet. He had too much to do, and a place to fill in a bed somewhere in this new city.
The shifting of the bed woke Lindsay. It came with a curl of cool air on his back as the sheets were lifted and brought back down.
“Go to sleep, little bunny,” Dane grumbled. He rolled close, a warm, bare wall of soft skin over solid muscle.
Lindsay turned toward him, but caught one of Noah’s hands in his and laced their fingers together, drawing Noah’s arm over him as he put his back to Noah’s chest. Noah pulled him closer, and sighed against the nape of his neck, relaxing into deeper sleep again.
Headlights arced through the window, lighting Dane’s face as a car outside turned the corner. He looked older and wiser and infinitely sadder. It felt like months since the last time Dane and Lindsay had fallen asleep together.
Lindsay touched Dane’s scruffy cheek and leaned up to kiss him on the lips. “I love you.”
“I love you too. It’s good I told you,” Dane said roughly. “Couldn’t add that to the things I have to be sorry for.” He kissed Lindsay back tenderly. “Didn’t think you’d catch on this fast, mind.”
“It’s amazing what a little terror and loneliness will do for my powers of perception,” Lindsay muttered.
Noah had taught him as well, without either of them knowing it, every time Lindsay had watched him remember his wife. Lindsay had wished, all this time, that he had known to say the words. They were such
small words, but they meant more than he could explain. The chance to say them was a gift Lindsay would never take for granted.
Lindsay drew Dane in for another kiss, and another and another, until he couldn’t stay awake anymore. Dane held him and petted him—like always—and he fell asleep again, wrapped up in warmth.
For better or for worse, they were home.
About the Author
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