by AM Riley
The small children that sat on the divans around the room, rustled and whispered as they waited with their mother, and that was another concern. This entire affair could affect their futures.
Finally, though, and most importantly, May worried about her son.
The maid came in and bowed. “Lyre of the Gianes,” he announced, lisping slightly.
May drew herself up. She was the queen of the Gianes social registry and accustomed to almost all situations that required diplomacy and tact but she really wasn’t prepared for the appearance of the man who strolled through her doors.
He was hideous, really. Way too tall for a man, with grotesquely wide shoulders. He stood at least several inches taller than she. He strode, rather than walked; long muscled thighs unbecomingly encased in leather pants very much like her own. His fair hair was the iridescent silken gold of the good families, but he kept it cut far too short, to just above his ears, the ends barely curling.
His eyes were far too small, and his brows far too heavy. He would have had a becoming mouth, if it weren’t set in such a grim and serious manner. He strode right up to her, as if her were her equal, and extended one of those huge, ugly hands.
“Lyre,” he said. And his voice was lyrical enough, if a little rough. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance.” He bowed over her hand.
Well the words were correct, although his bow lacked in grace. May glanced worriedly at her two younger sons, who sat transfixed and staring at the stranger. She hoped this wouldn’t influence them in an adverse manner.
May called upon her centuries of breeding and indicated a seat for the man, elegantly seating herself near her sons.
“Tea?”
Lyre looked at the tea things and his brows rose in surprise. “Yes? Thank you.”
Her sister poured. “We are really at our most desperate hour,” she said, handing a cup of tea to May as well.
“I surmised as much,” said Lyre honestly. Why would anyone call him, invite him to their home, FEED HIM TEA if they were not desperate?
“My son, Maeebsef,” said May. “Has disappeared. He was last seen…” she pressed her lips together in grief. “He was last seen following a human from the Ramble.”
Lyre could feel the blush warming his ears. Of course they’d called him. “How were you hoping I could help you?”
“You…” May looked at a loss and her sister intervened again.
“We know you consort with them,” said the sister bluntly. “We hoped you would ask amongst the city folks. Perhaps, there are places these humans gather?”
Lyre would have gaped at her stupidity, but he was still astonished by the tea and didn’t want to be rude. “There are many humans outside the Grove,” he said. “That could be difficult.”
“The folk might help you,” suggested May.
Lyre regarded May. She seemed somewhat intelligent. And willing to treat him with respect. “They might.”
“He is a Gianes,” said May. Her eyes spoke of the secret. Just a flicker of the lashes, then looking away.
“Yes.” The boy would crave sustenance of a particular sort. Lyre set down the teacup. “What does your son look like?”
May brought out a gold locket with a portrait inside. The boy portrayed was beautiful. Long blond hair, huge violet eyes encircled with thick black lashes. A mouth like a small human girl. Even amongst his own kind, where male beauty was cherished, Maeebsef would be memorable. If any of the Folk had seen him, and were inclined to be helpful, he should not be impossible to locate.
“May I keep this?” At May’s nod, Lyre pocketed the locket. He stood.
“You’ll seek him then?” The sister rose, reaching into her greatcoat. She brought out a large wallet.
Lyre’s ears turned red again. “Payment is unnecessary.”
The sister looked a little put out. Well of course, thought Lyre. If they paid him he was no more than the carpenter, the handyman. Some servant or hired person to whom they need not feel an obligation. Feeling a little malevolent, Lyre turned instead to May. “It will be my honor,” he said, bowing as beautifully as he knew how.
He left behind a disgruntled and uncomfortable company but he smiled to himself as the maid let him out
***
Before Lyre left the Grove, he visited the folly. He wouldn’t enter it now, the humans had defiled it. The hand-hewn timber benches, crumbling granite walls, and small manmade fire pits gone. The place where they’d lain together, gone.
All Lyre had were his memories.
They’d both been innocents. Lyre, because that was the way of the Gianes. A man’s virtue protected like a secret glade. Joseph, because… well because he was Joseph. Sensitive, alarmingly sweet, a man who had to love to feel lust.
Innocent and full of the wonder of what they found in each other’s touch.
“Will you let me see you?” Joseph unbuttoned Lyre’s shirt slowly, hands seeming to tremor as the pads of his fingers touched the skin of Lyre’s chest. Lyre shivered with the cold and with the burn of Josephs touch. Joseph bent so that his lips followed his fingers and Lyre heard a low moan issuing from his own mouth.
“Do you like that?” whispered Joseph, and Lyre pushed him back on the ground and opened Joseph’s shirt to see an expanse of pale skin, freckles scattered across the pectoral muscles like seed thrown across the snow. He fed at it. Lips and teeth making a path from one nipple to the other.
Joseph writhed and moaned beneath him.
“Do you like that?” growled Lyre, and sucked at Joseph’s belly, raising a mark. The scent of Joseph rose, male and rich like the earth. Lyre bent and rubbed his face against Joseph’s swollen crotch, drunk on the odor.
“Oh! Oh Gods!” cried Joseph, clasping his head.
Lyre knew quite suddenly what he wanted. He opened the placket of Joseph’s trousers, finding his organ, hot and wet, pushing out of the man’s pants, leaping almost into Lyre’s mouth. He suckled at the tip, tasting for the first time but feeling somehow like he had always known this flavor, always longed for this bitter liquid on his tongue.
Joseph moaned and cried out and thrashed beneath him. Hands restless across his head, cock swelling, balls drawing up almost immediately until Jospeh was spending great surges into Lyre’s mouth.
Lyre crawled up and cradled Joseph’s stunned face with one hand. The moon lay in Joseph’s eyes. “I will always love you, Lyre,” he whispered. “You may believe in that.”
Lyre bent to Joseph’s mouth. Tasted the salty humanness of him. The want. Felt the strength of the human as he held his face in his hands, caressed his skin, ran the palms of his hands over Lyre and down, to cup his organ and squeeze.
Lyre cried out in an agony of need as Joseph took his turn, rolling Lyre over and pressing him into the blankets.
Beneath the moon, in the sanctity of the place, Joseph and he entwined in the ancient ritual of joining, the oldest magick there was and Joseph swore oaths to Lyre, perhaps not even knowing what he did. “I will always love you, my one,” his fingers finding places inside of Lyre that sang and burned. “I will never leave you.”
Lyre guessed he never had. Since Joseph walked with him everywhere, his memory a living wraith beside him.
No one knows better than the Folk that oaths and promises are dangerous things and seldom lead to good.
Lyre trotted down the hillside and found one of the warren holes that the humans used to leave the Grove. He descended the stairs, hopped nimbly over the turnstile. Then he stood amongst the unseeing humans, avoiding contact as much as possible, until a train came that would take him to his first destination.
He stood, legs apart, balancing with the bounce and sway of the careening vehicle. He’d never experimented with touching the silvery, smudged railings and posts. Better not to try and make a scene. Around him, like melted wax, the lumpish humans sat, green light slicing rhythmically across their skin as they rushed through tunnels and stations.
Humans mystified and repelle
d him. They were so unappealing. And yet, Joseph had been everything to him. Lyre imagined how Joseph might have been if he’d lived to old age. Perhaps that elderly man, bald, freckled and sallow sitting with his paper bag on his lap.
Lyre watched the old man and suddenly realized, with a deep stab of pain and longing, that he would have loved Joseph still. Who knew the magic these creatures held inside them? How could he ever understand it?
Finally, the appropriate circle of light on the destination map lit up and Lyre disembarked. It was two blocks down, he remembered. The neon aglow even in daylight. “O’Neill’s Bar and Grill”.
***
SEAMUS
Lieutenant Seamus Brady, first Detective of the sixth division, NYPD sat contemplating his immaculate desk.
There was so much noise in the squad room that Seamus only knew his phone was ringing because he saw the red light blinking on its face.
“Detective Brady.”
“This is doctor Pearle’s office calling to confirm your appointment this afternoon, December thirtieth at two pm,” said a computerized voice. Seamus nodded along with the recording until prompted, pressed the appropriate button, and then rang off.
Then he sat contemplating his immaculate desk.
“Heads up!”
He snatched the crumpled paper out of the air before it could hit him in the head and grinned at the approaching patrolman.
“James, how’s it going? Anything on that burg suspect?”
“Not yet.” James perched his ass on the edge of Brady’s desk, dug a pack of gum out of his shirt pocket and offered Seamus a stick. “We did a knock and talk with some priors but nothing clicked.”
“Wish I could help.” Seamus was able to keep the longing out of his voice, but he knew James knew how he felt, anyway. It was sheer Hell to be off duty for a month, and then have to sit at a desk for three weeks waiting for his psych report to clear.
“Me too, buddy.” James clapped him on the shoulder. “You see the new guy yet?”
Seamus shrugged nonchalantly, purposely not looking at the unoccupied desk that faced his. James chewed his gum and studied him for a second, then stood, stretching those big arms up over his head. “Well. I guess it’s gonna roll to the next shift. I got a hockey game to go to.”
Seamus pasted the grin back on his face where it belonged. “Masochist.”
“Hey, a man can dream. If the Red Sox can win the pennant…”
Seamus laughed in an appropriate manner until James had walked off.
Then he sat contemplating his immaculate desk.
He had half an hour until the appointment he didn’t want to go to and he knew from that light-spinning sensation at the top of his skull that he should eat something.
He settled for a couple of nutrition bars from the vending machine. Popped in a dollar for a mealy apple and headed over to the stables.
“Hey, Lieutenant Brady.” Bobby, the stable boy was so used to him hanging around he didn’t even look up from the newspaper he was reading. “He’s in number ten now.”
Seamus stopped, a bad feeling in his belly. They never changed the horse’s stalls. “Why the move?”
Bobby turned a page of the paper. “Nobody tells me nothing, Lieutenant.”
“Right.” Seamus found his way to Finbar’s new stall. Fed him the apple and loved on him for a while. Seamus wondered if Finbar knew Riley was really gone, or if he just thought he’d abandoned him. Seamus rubbed at that bit of velvet between the gelding’s nostrils, and some tenderness rose up in him that was just too much for him to take, and he had to go.
“See ya tomorrow,” said Bobby as he passed.
***
“So, Seamus, how was your week?”
“Boring.” Seamus sat up straight and didn’t fidget with all the crap doctor Pearle kept on his coffee table for nervous, agitated, upset patients. Because Seamus wasn’t nervous, agitated, or upset. He was fine. Good to go.
Pearle had cop eyes, thought Seamus. Steady, unblinking, they seemed to observe everything Seamus did. He wondered if that was a shrink thing or if it was something Pearle’d picked up at the Academy. “I hear you’ve been assigned a new partner. A young man from Jersey?”
Seamus caught his own fingers tapping at the arm of his chair and instantly quelled them. “Yeah.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Seamus rolled his eyes. “I just love it, doc. Gimme a wet idiot with a loaded standard issue over a pro with a brain any day.”
Pearle’s mouth smiled, but his eyes didn’t. “I mean how do you feel about Lieutenant Riley being replaced?”
“He’s not being replaced,” snapped Seamus immediately. “He was a man, not a fan belt.”
“Of course.” Pearle just sat there looking at him. What the fuck? Was there some secret answer that Seamus just wasn’t getting? Because, really, what did the doc want him to say?
Well, whatever it was, Pearle seemed to let it go. He looked down at that pad of paper of his again, as if going through a list. Seamus sometimes wondered if the right answers to the questions Pearle asked were on that piece of paper.
“They haven’t found the man you spotted, have they?”
It was a statement. Pearle probably had instant access to everything Seamus did, said, or touched these days. He’d know all about the crazy artists rendering Seamus had directed. He’d know what everyone thought of it.
“They still got an APB out.”
“An unusual face. Surely someone will recognize him and step forward.”
Pearle didn’t have to say it. Christ, half the guys in the squad room had already said it. Seamus, nobody, even a cop, is thinking straight when something like that happens. You SURE you saw this guy? I mean…he looks like some kind of cartoon.”
Seamus squelched the impulse to rub his suddenly damp palms against his thighs. “Anybody can disappear in a city this size.”
“And aside from this… citizen. You haven’t recalled anything?”
Seamus gritted his teeth. “Nope.”
“Have you given much more thought to hypnosis, Detective? I guarantee you’d be fully cognizant of…”
“Sure, yeah, I been thinking about it,” said Seamus, a bit too quickly. “Uh, still considering it.” Like hell he was gonna let Pearle at his ‘subconscious’. “Might set that up with you.” When pigs flew.
“Are you still having the nightmares?”
“Nope,” lied Seamus immediately. Because he knew the answer to that one. Nightmares were always a bad sign. Well-adjusted peace officers did not have bloody violent wake-up-screaming-your-head-off nightmares every night.
Pearle looked a little satisfied at that answer. “Those sleeping pills are helping, then?”
“You betcha.” Yeah, his toilet had been sleeping just fine since Seamus had flushed the pills down it.
Pearle referred again to his notes. “Sergeant Carlson has asked me to put you back on patrol.”
Seamus almost screamed. Yesyesyes. But he kept his features bland. Kept his breathing under control.
Pearle sat back in his chair. His eyes drilling into Seamus. Seamus held his gaze, thinking pure thoughts. “Well, I’m going to say yes,” said Pearle. He smiled again. And Seamus allowed himself to smile back. “But I want to see you two more times.”
“Absolutely,” said Seamus, barely stifling the desire to whoop with joy. “These sessions have really helped me, doc.”
Pearle looked amused. It occurred to Seamus that the doc had been through all sorts of colleges and was probably smart enough to see through the patented Brady Bullshit. “Thank you, Seamus.”
They both stood. Seamus could feel himself vibrating, like a racecar waiting for the flag to drop. He held out his hand. “Thanks, Doc.”
He took the stairs down to the squad room two at a time.
After the doc had stuck that psychiatric gold star on his papers, Seamus had thought maybe he’d be able to go straight home and have something like a norma
l night. Just the thought of being back on the beat tomorrow gave him a glow, a buzz.
But he was halfway home. Reading some graffiti ad about a trade college on the subway walls, when the light for Bowling Green lit and rather than stay on until his transfer to Queens, he found himself stepping through the sliding doors.
Well, one more time couldn’t hurt him.
***
“Master Daniel is not available this evening.”
Seamus had thought coming back to the place was a whimsical impulse. Sort of like going for a pizza, or renting a video. Hey, let’s go to the local leather house, shall we? Now that it seemed he might not get what he came for, though, his mood sank and the familiar depression rose up, bleak and frightening.
