by Amy Lane
“Can I meet you again?” Charlie pleaded. “Not tomorrow.” Because Whim was going to say no. “Next Litha. I’ll be here. I’ll meet you here.”
“Will there be houses?” And Whim hated the trembling in his voice. He hated to see the hills run rife with houses.
“No.” Charlie raised his hand and cupped Whim’s cheek, wiping a tear away with a bony thumb. “I swear, there’s no development here. I know. There’d be signs. It’s not even for sale. No houses. I promise, Whim. I’ll be right there—by the trees. I’ll be waiting for you next year, okay?”
Whim nodded, feeling like a child. But he wanted to see Charlie, and he had to go. The pain… it was overwhelming. A detached part of him said that within half an hour, he wouldn’t be able to drive.
“I’ll be there before then,” said a voice in his head, and Whim recognized Green and almost wept. He was a child. He was Green’s child, and Green had heard his pain.
Carefully, Whim bent down and brushed Charlie’s lips with his own, trying hard not to wince when the movement jostled his arm. “I’ll be back at Litha, Charlie. Remember, you made promises tonight. I take those seriously.”
Charlie nodded and wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. “Jesus, Whim. The least I can do is be here when I promised, right?”
Whim smiled weakly and gave him one more kiss before straightening and turning toward his car. Sidhe could move extraordinarily fast when they wished, faster than mortal sight.
To Charlie it would have looked as though he disappeared.
TO WHIM, it looked exactly like he drove (badly) to the McDonald’s parking lot right off Interstate 80 and the Foresthill exit. Green met him there, butter-colored hair in a tight braid, with Bracken—dark to Green’s light, pine tar-colored hair whipped by the wind—on the back of the cycle.
Whim’s vision was going in and out by the time they pulled up, but that didn’t keep him from pulling his arm back as Bracken approached.
“Green!” Bracken complained, and Green wrinkled his nose in irritation.
“Tell him what you’re doing, brother. Words aren’t just for hurling insults, yes?”
Bracken growled. “Sorry, Green.” This time, when he bent down, he was much gentler. “Whim, I’m going to use my power to make it bleed. That way, when Green heals it, there will be no poison left in the wound. You feel me?”
Whim nodded and trusted, because Green was his leader and wouldn’t do him harm. And because Bracken was bigger than he was, and his power was terrifying.
But the wound didn’t hurt at all when it bled, and Green’s countertouch on his wrist made the skin grow back in gentle layers. Whim gave a sigh of relief and leaned his head on the car seat, and Green scooted in next to him to offer an arm and a shoulder.
“All better, brother. So, are you going to tell me what you were doing out of the hill?”
“Adrian said I could,” Whim told him. “I met a mortal.”
“And you stayed long enough for him to hurt you?” Bracken snapped, alarmed, and Whim pushed his head out of the car to retaliate.
“It wasn’t like that! He stole a kiss!”
And now Green was alarmed. “He stole a what?”
Whim had never heard that sort of panic in Green’s voice. “I stole it back,” he defended. He tried not to pout. “And that’s when things got out of control.”
“Is that when he pulled the gun?” Green asked, his voice tender.
“What gun?” Whim asked guilelessly, and Green pinched the bridge of his nose as though his head hurt.
“Whim, how did you burn your arm?”
“On Charlie’s pocket,” Whim said obediently.
“Is Charlie the man who stole a kiss?” Green asked again, trying to make things simple.
“No. Charlie is the boy I didn’t want to kiss,” Whim said. Then he humphed. “But he stole the kiss, and he tasted soooo good.”
Green took another deep, even breath. “Whim, please tell me you at least had your glamour on when you were out seducing mortal children.”
“No,” Whim said, missing Green’s frustration entirely. “But that’s not why he kissed me.” Whim knew Green and Bracken were exchanging glances over his head, but he couldn’t help it. They were his thoughts. He knew where they were going.
“I’ll bite,” Bracken said after a moment. “Why did he kiss you?”
Whim looked at his grumpy younger brother—at least as the sidhe reckoned relationships—and smiled giddily. “He kissed me because he liked me. We talked all night. He must have liked me for me.”
Bracken shook his head, as though blinded by something, and he and Green met eyes again. “Well, good, brother,” Green praised. “Are you going to see him again?”
Whim nodded enthusiastically. “Yes—yes. We will see each other next Litha.”
Bracken made an odd choke-gurgle, and Whim looked at him as he started coughing so hard, Green had to reach out of the car and thump him on the back.
“Goddess, Whim, do you think you’ll remember his name by then?” Bracken asked, and Whim was surprised.
“Of course I will,” he said. It was Charlie, after all.
“I’ll believe that when I see it etched in wood,” Green muttered, and then he gave Whim a gentle, one-armed hug. “Come, brother. Brack will drive you back, and I’ll take the bike. Let’s get you back to the hill before June tries to fry you like an onion, yes?”
The sun was already a skin-sizzling glare, and Whim nodded distractedly. “Yes. Yes, let’s get back to the hill.” A picture was forming behind his eyes, and he was trying to make sure the sugar-drunk butterfly that was his mind would land in this place and stay. It would be the perfect thing, he thought, barely hearing Bracken and Green talking around him, to make sure he never forgot Charlie’s name.
Charlie—Covenants
UNTIL CHARLIE saw the blisters on Whim’s arm, he’d never thought that the gun in his pocket would hurt anybody but himself.
But Charlie looked up and Whim was gone. Charlie was there, with come sticking on his crotch and the tatters of his ill-advised plan of killing himself and making the world sorry lying around his feet.
Somebody thought he was beautiful. Somebody thought he was worthwhile. A beautiful somebody—a somebody beyond the dream of anybody’s imagination.
And Charlie had just paid that somebody back with a fistful of pain.
Right there, standing in that wonderful, miserable dawn, Charlie made a particular resolution: never again would he take the good and give only the pain. He’d rather be the one eating the pain before that happened. He couldn’t bear that he’d hurt a kind, funny, generous person because he’d been stupid enough to think a gun in an empty field was a way out of a painful decision.
He went home, took a shower, and told his parents he was gay.
They didn’t take it well. But they didn’t throw him out, either. He still got to live at home. His college money was still there. His mother was going to be a weepy mess and his father might not talk to him for a year or two, but all in all, it was a hell of a lot better than lying dead in a vacant field. The lying dead part had been his plan before he’d looked up and seen this mesmerizing, beautiful, amazing… creature walking toward him in the light of the sliver moon.
And then that creature had turned out to be Whim. He was aptly named—he was sort of like a crazy uncle or a child with ADD. Getting the guy to stick to one topic had been impossible, so Charlie had been content to follow his thoughts like a playful breeze. It had been fun. Entertaining, insightful, and unexpectedly sweet.
It had been worth the weirdness and anxiety of living in a house where he was suddenly gay (at least to his parents). Of going off to school where he didn’t even have a small, tightly knit peer group to retreat to. Of allowing himself the luxury of smiling at other boys and flirting with them, too, when he’d been afraid for his life in high school. Of touching another boy’s hand and feeling his body respond.
That conversa
tion alone had been worth turning some of those boys down, just so he could let Whim be his first.
He studied art and music and acting and settled on acting. After hours, he studied sex. He studied grooming, hygiene, and technique, and experimented on his willing, panting body as often as he could get in his dorm room alone. He decided he liked sex very much—and would like it even more when someone else participated.
He really wanted his first someone to be Whim.
He had no illusions after that, really. Whim had made it clear that he’d only be found in that clearing on Litha, and as much as Charlie would like to indulge in the fantasy that Whim would come to that clearing one day and take him away from his life and to some magical place where creatures like Whim were commonplace and where they cared for each other the way Whim had seemed to care for Charlie on sight, he was realistic.
He might only ever have one other night with Whim; he wanted to make it count, dammit. If an elf was going to come out of nowhere and steal his heart, every blessed moment of the theft was going to be fucking magical. With only the slightest emphasis on fucking. Honest.
So Charlie learned how to flirt and taught himself how to come and allowed his heart to ache for the shortest night of the year. The night came, hot and muggy, and found him waiting in the clearing by the woods with what he deemed to be the essentials of the encounter—a picnic blanket, a sleeping bag, a basket of fruit, bottles of water, a pocketful of wet wipes, a box full of condoms, and a jumbo-sized bottle of lubricant.
The one thing he’d learned best from college was the value of coming prepared.
Still, that didn’t mean his smile wasn’t uncertain when he saw Whim ambling along the railroad tracks in the light the oppressive clouds let in from the half moon. But Whim looked up and saw him, and suddenly he smiled—and he literally glowed. Literally. He cast a shadow with his brilliance, and Charlie decided that casual anticipation was a joke anyway and hurtled across the clearing into his arms.
“You came!” he said breathlessly, Whim’s big hands cupping his bottom and his legs firmly wrapped around Whim’s waist. Whim gazed at him with something so close to adoration that it made Charlie’s heart stutter in his chest.
“I promised,” Whim told him gravely. “You packed fruit. I can smell it. What do you think they ate here before they grew fruit? Did you know things like peaches and oranges did not originate in California? How was school?”
Charlie laughed helplessly. He had forgotten that Whim’s conversation was exactly that—whimsical. He wiggled a little so Whim put him down, and then he grabbed Whim’s hand and led him to the picnic itself, ready to be the maître d’ to their first real date.
“You did not answer my question,” Whim said imperiously after he was seated with a paper plate of cut melon in his lap. He picked up the melon pieces between his thumb and fingers and scooped them elegantly into his mouth, and Charlie thought with admiration that Whim could make any act look sexual.
“Which one?” Charlie asked, his own mouth full. He really loved fresh fruit, and on a hot summer’s night, you couldn’t lose.
“How was school?” Whim closed his eyes as though to savor the taste of the fruit, but his head was still slightly cocked. It was clear that he was waiting.
“Fun,” Charlie said, thinking about it. He spoke then of getting on stage, of writing his own pieces, of the joy of knowing people he hadn’t grown up with—even, when Whim showed no signs of jealousy, of the few hurried kisses, the touches on the hand, the shy bouts of flirting that had taken place in between times.
“Did you take a lover?” Whim asked after listening with uncharacteristic single-minded attention. He almost sounded hopeful.
Charlie blushed and cast him a slantwise look in the moonlight. His cloak of hair—and Charlie wanted to see it in the sun, because he was pretty sure it had just shifted from chartreuse to magenta, but the moonlight made nearly every color a variation of silver—hung sideways as he balanced his lean torso on his elbow, and his face was rapt with attention for Charlie and Charlie alone.
“No,” Charlie said truthfully. If Whim couldn’t lie, he couldn’t either—at least not for the sake of pride. “I kept, uhm, thinking about solstice night, you know?” Nervously, Charlie began to pack up the picnic, putting the paper plates in a bag and the Tupperware container of fruit into the box he’d brought to hold it, but he needn’t have worried about telling the truth.
Whim’s slow smile had charm and heat behind it. “How very symbolic,” he said softly, “but I’m pretty sure they sacrificed virgins at Beltane, so we’re just going to have to make love instead.”
Charlie couldn’t help it. His grin literally hurt, it stretched so far, and a warm chuckle rumbled out of his chest. “I’m so glad,” he said when his stomach stopped shaking with laughter, “because I went to a lot of trouble to seduce you.” He sat back on his heels and began to sweep off the picnic blanket.
Whim grinned back and then sat up in a fluid movement that belied how totally relaxed he had been seconds before, scooting out of Charlie’s way so he could fold the thing up, leaving them on the opened sleeping bag. “You seduced me last year. I was just waiting until you were ready for consummation.” And suddenly he made one of those abrupt conversational shifts that had marked their time the year before, and Charlie had a little bit of whiplash following him.
“Here. I want to give you something. I started making toys this year. Tiny ones. They’re… they’re….” And now Charlie could swear Whim was blushing. He could feel the heat that big, powerful body put out under the oppressive summer sky. “Green and Adrian say they’re beautiful,” he confessed and reached into the pocket of his jeans.
What he pulled out was not what Charlie expected. It looked like a case for glasses, the kind that opens and shuts powerfully on a spring, but it was more square than rectangle, and it was made of finely etched wood. For a moment Whim paused, closing his eyes, and a glow from his hands surrounded the thing, making it easy for Charlie to see the details of the wood.
“That’s my name,” Charlie said, surprised. The letters were embellished with oak leaves and wildflowers and things, and he looked at Whim, moved. Then Whim smiled happily and opened the case, and Charlie’s breath caught.
It was a train, moving perpetually through the night, with a stand of oak trees below it and a clearing and a graffiti wall on the other side of it. There was even, carved in the tiniest detail, a family of rabbits venturing timidly from the bole of an oak tree. It was their time, their place, and Charlie had to swallow hard past a lump in his throat.
“Here,” Whim said excitedly. “Blow—gently.”
Their heads were together over the glowing toy, and Charlie puffed out his cheeks and made a tiny burst of wind. The train rocked and the bunnies wiggled and the trees swayed back and forth, and Charlie was caught up in the wonder of the moment.
“Wow,” he said in a shaking voice. “Whim… this is… this is amazing. You make these?”
“Yes,” Whim said, sounding shy and pleased. “This is my first one. Green has started selling the others. He owns many businesses, and one of them is a curiosity shop in the little mall on Main Street. I’m adding to the family income,” he added with obvious pride.
“Whim, who’s Green?” The name had come up before, and Charlie couldn’t tell if it was a parent, a lover, a boss, or what.
“He’s our leader,” Whim said distractedly, blowing on the little scene again to watch the train rock. “Adrian is his consort. They keep us safe.”
“Safe?” Charlie asked, startled, and Whim looked up at him, his face very sober as he closed the toy carefully and the glow around his hands diminished.
“Our world is secret, Charlie. And not all sidhe or vampires or werecreatures are friendly. The hill is sanctuary, but not everybody wants to stay there all the time. That’s what a leader does—keeps his people prosperous and safe. I make toys for Green to sell, and Green comes to heal me when thoughtless love
rs leave guns in their pockets. It’s a trade.”
Charlie blushed. “I’m so sorry about that,” he muttered, looking away.
Whim took his hand and pressed the toy into it firmly. “I am not sorry for anything about that night. I am certainly not sorry you decided not to use the gun.”
Charlie fiddled with the box for a moment, stroking the reverence of his own name. “I’m sorry that you were kind to me and I hurt you,” he said at last. “I was being a dumbass. I don’t even know if I would have used the damned thing. I just….” Charlie looked up and found Whim’s eyes, rapt on his face. “I hurt so bad last year. I hurt so bad, and you looked at me and thought I was beautiful, and some of that hurt went away. Enough of it to be brave. Meeting you was a gift. Having you show up here again, it’s more than I could ever wish for. I’m… I have nothing to give you back.”
Whim blinked and smiled. He was kneeling next to Charlie, and almost shyly he leaned forward and kissed the bare, pale skin peeking out from the strap of his tank top. Charlie shivered and turned to him, looking at his eyes in the moonlight.
“Whim, what color are your eyes?”
“Somewhere between blue and green and gray,” Whim answered. His smile curved down at the ends and became melancholy. “Like my hair—and my name. Inconstant. Childish. Even for a sidhe.”
“You showed up tonight,” Charlie told him earnestly. “You’re about the most dependable person in my life.”
Whim blinked rapidly as though surprised and stunned, and his eyes grew shinier under the cloud-lit sky. “I will show up next year, if you like,” he said, and Charlie grinned.
“We haven’t even had sex yet. What if it’s awful?”
