by D. D. Miers
"You two are so weird," Cole said, shaking his head.
"I'm a necromancer and he's a werewolf." I shrugged, scratching Mort's ears idly. "Did you expect us to be like everybody else?"
"Everyone is like everyone else," Cole said, a cynical edge to his expression. "People's motivations can be complicated, but their actions all basically boil down to the same thing. And when you start taking things away from them—security, stability, independence—the more focused they are on just surviving, the more predictable their actions get."
"What about crime?" I asked. "Not like, need-based crimes like stealing food or breaking into an empty house to sleep in it. But like, vandalism, assault, and white-collar crimes where their needs are all met."
"That's the thing. Those are still need-based, you just don't see what the need is," Cole said, waving a finger at me. "I mean, in just this country, we get indignant about meeting people’s most basic survival needs for food, water, and shelter. Probably try to call breathing a privilege if they could restrict access to oxygen. But people need more than just that to live. We've got basic needs for socialization, for rest, for mental stimulation. And when those don't get filled, we get neurotic and lash out."
I raised an eyebrow.
"I hope you're not saying assault is a result of some asshole's 'need' for sex not being filled."
"God, no," Cole said quickly, waving his hands. "Sex isn't a need. Socialization is a need. Emotional intimacy is a need. Those are the needs that aren't getting met. The problem is complicated, but basically it comes down to telling people they should get all their socialization from one person, a romantic partner, and telling men specifically that they can only rely on a romantic partner for all emotional support. Being open and vulnerable and emotional with male friends or other people is a sign of weakness and femininity."
"And being feminine is the worst possible thing," I added, sarcastically.
"Exactly," Cole said, exasperated. "So a lot of men go around emotionally constipated, looking for a woman they can use to unload their emotional issues on because they won't talk about it with anyone they aren't fucking. When even the most accommodating woman in the world can't possibly fill all his emotional needs, because, you know, she's just one person with needs of her own, he projects his anger and frustration on her in particular and all women in general."
"I'm pretty sure at least part of that comes from the weird narrative that women exist to fix men's emotional issues," I added, thinking back on the piles of romance novels and movies I'd seen about women “saving” damaged men. "Like, there's a real issue with guys feeling they're owed a girlfriend and they've been cheated if they don't have one."
"It loops back," Cole said. "It's the need thing. They need socialization and support and they've been told women are the only place they're allowed to get it. So, obviously, they must have a woman to fix their problems, or they're being denied an urgent need. Or, you know, they could stop being assholes and go make some friends. Get a fucking hobby. There are so many miserable jerks out there whose lives would be infinitely improved by just joining a goddamn club."
I laughed, privately agreeing even as it surprised me to hear this rant from Cole. He wasn't usually talkative. Maybe it was an effect of this place, the way thoughts became words almost before you'd noticed you were speaking?
"So, what do you need?" I asked him, and he flinched a little at the directness of the question.
"I'm fine," he lied, trying for a disaffected shrug. I waited. He huffed, annoyed. "There's nothing I need that you can give me. At least not from in here."
"But there is something I could give you," I gathered. His jaw tightened, his ears red. He shook it off, but I could tell he was still thinking about something.
"Do you think—" he started to ask, then cut himself off. I leaned closer expectantly. He evaded my gaze, glancing at Mort. "Do you think, with the candle, you could perform a True Resurrection?"
My eyes widened. That wasn't what I'd expected. Even without touching him, I was starting to get flickers of his emotions anyway, and from the glimmers of memory of the last time we'd kissed, I'd assumed he was going to ask for something a bit more personal.
"Probably not," I answered. "I don't have the training for it. It's supposed to be the hardest thing a necromancer can do. I can barely do basic stuff."
"Maybe it's not as hard as it seems," Cole said, a touch of desperation around him. "Maybe it just requires a lot more power than most necromancers have. I mean, look at Mort. He's not a True Resurrection, but he's a lot closer than anything I've heard about in the last century."
I had to give him that. I frowned.
"I could try," I said, tangling my fingers in Mort's fur. "But . . . I'm worried messing something like that up would have really nasty consequences."
Cole contemplated those same consequences.
"Who do you want resurrected, anyway?" I asked, curious.
Cole's hands clenched into fists. He shook his head.
"I made some mistakes," he finally said. "Things I need to fix. That's all."
For a moment, I saw glimpses of a memory. Darkness, the screeching of tires on asphalt, the copper smell of blood. I tried not to look, pulling away for the sake of Cole's privacy.
"I'm not sure necromancy can solve problems," I said quietly. "I kind of think it's only really good for making things worse."
"No, this it would solve," Cole said, and I saw that old determination I'd seen in him before, a tree with deep, old roots. "Maybe it can't fix everything but . . . Trust me, it would help."
I thought about it for a moment before speaking.
"I do trust you," I said finally, sensing the spark of Cole's surprise. "And if that's what you really want, I'll do my best to resurrect whoever it is as soon as I'm out of here and that security hex is off the candle."
Cole's fists clenched tighter and he closed his eyes for a moment. The emotion from him was complicated and hard to define. Something like regret and relief and wary fear all rolled into one. He reached for my hand, hesitated, licked his lips, then took my hand in his, our not-quite-skin fizzing at the point of contact. I could still feel that complicated emotion, the fear at the forefront as he looked into my eyes, asking silent permission. He searched my emotions and I didn't try to hide anything from him. I didn't have any ulterior motives to hide, except perhaps I cared about him, worried about him, and wanted him to be safe. I hoped maybe doing this, solving whatever this problem was, would convince him to stay and not return to the life of struggle he'd had before. It wasn't pity, not really, it was more selfish than that. But I worried it would feel like pity to him. He searched for a long minute, then shook his head and gave up, letting go.
"I don't get you sometimes," he said quietly, not looking at me.
"What don't you get?" I asked.
He gave me a strange look, like he wanted to say more but wouldn't.
"You wouldn't get it," he said. "You're just . . . soft."
"Soft," I repeated, incredulous.
"You've never had to struggle," Cole said, defensively. "You've got everything. A job, a home, a family."
"Well, I have one of those, anyway," I said with a small, bitter laugh. "My work and my apartment just got flattened by a 'freak tornado,' remember?"
"You know what I mean."
"My family isn't really anything to write home about either," I said, realizing I was speaking my thoughts again but not bothering to stop it. "Aunt Percy is great, don't get me wrong. She taught me to control my powers. She was always there for me when my parents couldn't deal . . . but they only brought me to her when they were at the end of their rope. Thought she was a bad influence."
"They weren't jazzed about your powers, I'm guessing," Cole said.
I nodded.
"Mine were the same."
"It's not like they hated me or anything," I said, guilty about bad-mouthing my parents. "They just . . . really didn't like a part of me that I couldn't do
anything about. My dad doesn't have any powers. He cut off contact with everyone in his family when he was young. Only let Aunt Persephona back in when I got powers and he didn't know how to deal with it. It all just freaks my mom out. She's completely nonmagical and worries it's like the devil or something."
Cole snorted. "They ever try to have you exorcised?"
"Not the whole nine yards, but they had priests over to bless me and 'cleanse' the house a couple of times. And we went to a lot of church. Twice a week for a while."
"My parents were agnostic," Cole said. "Probably a good thing, considering. I got really fed up eventually and just started using my powers as often as I could. Real stupid, over-the-top shit. Just to piss ’em off. Remind them what I was."
"I never had the rebellious phase," I admitted, pulling my knees up to my chest and resting my chin on them. "I just tried really, really hard to be what they wanted. I barely used my powers at all once I learned how to control them. I think I figured that if I could just suppress them long enough, they might go away."
Cole nodded in understanding, picking at a stud on his jacket.
"I wish Ethan was here," he said, then turned a little red. He hadn't meant to say that out loud. I raised an eyebrow and he cleared his throat, looking away. "I just think he'd identify, you know. With hiding a part of yourself you can't change and wishing it would go away."
"He's talked to you about his parents?" I asked, hugging my knees.
Cole nodded again. "A little. I'm not sure why it took him so long to figure out what his curse was. It's pretty obvious."
"Denial is a powerful thing. Can't suspect a problem of being the cause behind your crazy werewolf curse if you won't admit you have the problem in the first place."
"You know the thing that really gets me?" Cole asked, reaching over to pat Mort. "It's a self-curse, right? Gil just boosted it. He didn't put in any extra clauses to make it turn Ethan into a werewolf. That's just . . . how he sees himself. Something monstrous and predatory that wants to hurt everyone he cares about."
I thought about the monster I'd seen Ethan become in the Undercity, the pure malice in its eyes, driven by nothing but bestial instinct and hate. A senseless, destructive animal. My heart twisted at the thought of Ethan imagining he was anything like that.
"And here's the kicker," Cole went on. "If that's how he sees himself because he's bi, what does he think of other bi men?"
The thought took me by surprise, but the wary hurt from Cole because of it was no surprise at all.
"I'm sure he doesn't think of you that way," I said softly. "He likes you."
"I don't want to be the exception," Cole said, looking me in the eye. "I don't want to be liked in spite of who I am. That just leads to the same shit as your parents. You can't love someone while hating a part of themselves that they can't change."
I wanted to argue, at least for my parent's sake. It didn't feel good, to think that they'd never really loved me. But it rang true. I'd thought it more than once when I lived with them. That they loved the idea of me— the idea of a daughter without evil magic—more than they had ever loved who I actually was.
"Still," I said. "I don't think he feels that way. I think the way we internalize that kind of shit, the way we put it on ourselves, it's different from the way we put it on other people. You know how I feel about necromancy or my necromancy, anyway. But I don't feel that way about you or Aunt Persephona."
"But you weren't surprised to find out Aethon was evil, were you?" Cole asked. "You weren't inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. You had no idea what his plans or his motivations were when he showed up. But he was a big scary necromancer, so he was obviously evil."
I paused, thinking back. Had I done that? If I hadn't assumed he was evil and tried to talk to him, would things be different? I shook my head. He threatened to kill me. He nearly killed Ethan. He was obviously not a good guy. But that didn't really make me feel any better about having assumed he was bad from the start.
"The way we feel about ourselves is always going to affect how we feel about everyone else," Cole said with a shrug. "It's just how we're built. So maybe Ethan doesn't think I'm a monster like he is. Maybe he just thinks I'm pathetic or misguided. Maybe he just pities me because he thinks I must hate myself as much as he does. Either way, when he looks at me, he doesn't see me. Just all his own fucked-up shit staring back at him."
"You sure you're not projecting a little yourself?" I asked. "Not everybody is as skittish and cynical as you are. And you may not be at self-cursing level, but anybody can tell you've got a good dose of self-loathing going on."
Cole frowned.
"The difference is I earned my self-loathing," Cole said. "My shit is one hundred percent deserved. He hates himself for being born. And you're one to talk, miss I-don't-hate-being-a-necromancer-I-just-think-necromancy-is-inherently-evil."
"I didn't say inherently evil."
"But you don't think it can do anything but make problems worse."
I started to say no again, then caught myself.
"All right, fair," I said, giving in. "I guess we're all just a big pile of mutual self-loathing then."
"I don't know, Gwydion seems to like himself just fine," Cole said, and I laughed.
"I wouldn't be so sure,” I said after a moment, shaking my head. “He’s pretty good at hiding it, but I don’t think he’s spent all this time pretending to be a Seelie pretending to be a human because he likes who he is.”
Cole gave a grudging nod of acknowledgment.
“Maybe,” I said thoughtfully, looking at him from the corner of my eye, maybe we can just like each other enough to make up for how much we don't like ourselves."
I glanced down at his hand on the floor between us and, tentatively, reached out to touch it, resigned to backing off if I saw any discomfort from him. But there wasn't any discomfort as I laced my fingers with his. Just a kind of bittersweet warmth.
"I'm not sure that's how it works," he said, and I felt the echo in his thoughts, the hopelessness of loving someone who can't love themselves, and the parallel longing to be loved regardless, and the fear of being a void others threw their love into pointlessly.
"Maybe we could try it anyway," I suggested, and his hand tightened around mine, sharing my tentative hope for something between us, and the slow glow of desire behind it. He swallowed, and I sensed the flicker of his doubts and anxieties. Then he leaned in and kissed me.
It wasn't like any kiss I'd ever experienced. Not even when I'd kissed Cole himself before. The added layer of our strange situation transformed the kiss into something completely different. The electric fizz of contact between our lips, like kissing warm, soft static. There was a strange echo—I could feel how he felt the kiss, and his reaction to feeling the kiss as I felt it, in a feedback loop of shared sensation leaving me breathless, though we'd barely touched. —could see myself through his eyes and the sight made my blood run hotter. But I could feel his fear as well, old and stubborn, a certainty reinforced by years of experience that there would be a catch, that something would go wrong, that he would be betrayed. I answered it with my own certainty without even thinking, wrapping it in the warmth of how much I wanted him, how much I admired him, how badly I wanted to be with him.
A memory rose in him, summoned by the arousal which was blooming between both of us. I tried to look away from it, for the sake of his privacy, but it snagged me despite my attempts to avoid it, because, I realized, I was in it.
It wasn’t a memory or not of anything real. It was a fantasy, a dream. Or at least I was fairly certain I didn’t remember ever being in the back seat of a car with Cole, the windows fogged by the heat of our kisses, obscuring the rainy night outside. The distant roll of thunder and the patter of rain on the car roof played subtle accompaniment to the mellow indie folk coming from the car radio.
When watching most memories, I’d either floated outside, a ghostly observer, or ridden inside the person the memory belo
nged to. But in this one I found myself behind the eyes of the fantasy version of myself and surprisingly aware. I felt the cold glass of the window under my hand, braced beside Cole’s head as I straddled his lap. I smelled his skin, tasted him as he kissed me, tongue shameless as it plundered my mouth. I definitely noticed the bulge of his cock in his jeans, grinding up against my ass, stirring a thrill of illicit excitement and embarrassment. This was clearly a personal fantasy that I shouldn’t be observing, but I couldn’t escape its grip on me either.
The fantasy version of me whispered something salacious in Cole’s ear as she unbuttoned his jeans, and his breaths feathered along my throat as he groaned in eager approval. The strange disconnect between the intense, immediate sensations and my inability to affect the action was at once disconcerting and strangely thrilling. After all, I knew I wasn’t in any danger. But neither was I in control, unable to even pull away from this strange fantasy. Anything could happen, and the anticipation had me hooked in a surprising way.
I let myself sink into the fantasy version of me, half nervous, half excited, as his hands slid under my shirt to palm my breasts through the thin barrier of my bra. My breasts were, I noticed, slightly larger than reality. Well, it was a fantasy after all. Fantasy-me slid my hand into the open front of his jeans and I wondered if the fantasy had made him slightly larger, too.
Fantasy-me had a filthy mouth. It must have been something Cole was secretly into, because I would never have said half that shit out loud. It was approaching porn dialogue bad, which would have been kind of hilarious if it wasn’t coming from, ostensibly, myself. I could never have been that direct if I were in control. But I couldn’t shut myself up if I’d wanted to. All I could do was lay back and let the fantasy play out, as fantasy-me stroked Cole through his underwear and told him what she wanted to do to him in very explicit terms.
She pulled his cock free of his underwear, stroking him to full hardness. He reached for the tight miniskirt fantasy-me was wearing (something the real me would never have worn) and pulled it up around her hips, stopping to squeeze her ass hard, sending a flash of heat through me. Though this had caught me by surprise, desire was growing fast. Though not as fast as in fantasy-me, it seemed, who was practically dripping and hadn’t worn underwear under the tiny miniskirt. Cole pulled fantasy-me— Oh, to hell with it, why was I distancing myself? This was great. He pulled me down into a burning kiss as he stroked my mound, fingers dipping into my folds to test how wet I was. I lowered my hips to slide against his cock, teasing both of us, sliding my lips against him, taking my time despite Cole’s guiding hands on my hips urging me on. The back seat of the car had become large to accommodate easy movement, but Cole and I didn’t notice the inconsistent size of the vehicle.
