by Amy Lane
Phillip laughed too and rested his cheek on Marcus’s knees. “God, I love you.”
“I love you too, dickwad.”
“Asshole.”
Marcus’s voice dropped, and the hill’s sacred word, the one Adrian had used for Green and Cory, sounded loudly in the quite room. “Beloved.”
“Beloved.”
It echoed there as they sat, Marcus running his fingers through Phillip’s hair, for a very long time.
Better and Worse
THE RUN the next night was semisuccessful. It was successful because they got the bad guy and the new werewolf didn’t freak out and nobody got hurt. It was unsuccessful because Marcus and Phillip were a little bit giddy, stoned on each other and not quite as serious as they knew how to be. As they were watching the gruesome death of the bad guy from what Phillip called “Upstairs Recon,” their little sorceress and new alpha werewolf ended up floundering down the American River. Marcus and Phillip started laughing so hard they literally fell out of the sky and into the water with them.
They recovered and bailed their people out, and the whole party worked to get them warmed up and safely back into the SUV they’d traveled in, but Marcus caught Phillip’s eye as they were fetching blankets and sweats, and their mortification was obvious and mutual.
“Way to impress the boss lady,” Phillip muttered in his head.
“Way to feel like a complete asshole,” Marcus muttered back.
Phillip’s mouth quirked. “Yeah, well, I still love you, asshole.”
Marcus chuckled wryly, greatly cheered. “Yeah, well, twenty years didn’t change how I feel, and this won’t either.”
Lady Cory must have caught something going on between them. She didn’t pry, but when Marcus was assisting her into the SUV, she ruffled his hair.
“You know what your punishment is, right?” she asked, and he rolled his eyes. They’d already talked about this when he was fishing her out of the river.
“Cleanup?” The mess left by the dying werewolf was of the epic variety. Cleanup was punishment enough.
“Yup. You know what your reward for cleaning up is, right?”
He caught her eyes shyly. “Flying home with Phillip?”
And the chilled hand that had been in his hair patted his cheek. “Enjoy it—but get back early. Do you want me to send Nicky with you just to make sure you have enough time before you leave?” Nicky’s alternative form was a giant bird. On another night, Marcus might have said yes, because Nicky was fun to fly with.
But not tonight.
“We’ll be fine,” Marcus reassured, and she narrowed her big brown-green eyes.
“Fine isn’t good enough, baby. I want you to be great.”
“Please, Lady Cory? Phillip and I….” He sighed, and she nodded.
“You’d better get back with two hours to spare. Are we good?”
“Yeah. We’re good.”
He and Phillip both bowed before launching into the air and over the trees, the better to pick up the mess left by the bad guy.
Cleanup was pretty awful—lots of blood, and much of it tainted by silver. They ended up washing most of it down the American River, using buckets they found by the riverbank, and finished up with a bottle of bleach that Phillip had flown off and returned with. At last it was done, and the two of them washed off in the cold waters of the river, not minding the chill and calling it a job completed.
As they stood and looked at their handiwork, Phillip grabbed his hand, which surprised the hell out of Marcus, as did the kiss on the back of it.
“I’ve never been a fuckup before,” he said, humor touching his lean Dracula mouth.
“Yeah, me neither.” Marcus would be embarrassed about that for a long time.
“You’re like… like all my firsts, then,” Phillip said quietly, and Marcus forgot his embarrassment for the first time in hours.
“Did you really mean it?” They both knew what he was talking about. On the drive over, with an audience, where Phillip couldn’t take it back or blow it off, he’d said, “I always expected the love of my life would have tits instead of pecs.” For Phillip, it was damned near hearts and flowers.
“That you’re the love of my life?” he confirmed now.
“Yeah.”
“Who the fuck else would put up with me for this long? That’s what I want to know!”
Marcus had to chuckle. “You know, you could have just answered yes.”
Phillip’s hand tightened on his, and he lifted it to rub on Marcus cheek.
“How about this: I love you, asshole! Will you leave it alone now?”
Marcus took his face between his hands and said, “I love you too, dickwad.” He went in for a quick, passionate kiss, enough to leave Phillip wanting more, and then broke away. “Now keep up with me, ’kay?” he said, before launching into the air.
Phillip did, of course.
“Last one there fucks the other into the bed,” he crowed in Marcus’s head.
“As long as it’s our bed, I don’t give a shit!”
“No losers in love?”
“Not ours.”
And the hell of it, the best blessing of all of it, was that it was all true. They loved each other. It was their bed. And breaking up was not an option.
As far as Marcus could figure, it was the third time for them that the end was only the beginning.
Later, after separate showers to wash away the grit and gore and river water, Phillip took Marcus to bed and seduced him.
It shouldn’t have mattered—Marcus had loved him for twenty years. Marcus was a sure thing, and he fully expected quick and dirty sex, but that wasn’t what happened.
What happened was long slow kisses, whispers across his jaw, hot words in his ear, nibbles down his neck. What happened was that Phillip spooned him from behind, nuzzled the back of his neck, rubbed his chest, and played with his hot spots from his nipples down to the flutter of his clenching stomach, palming his upper thighs and touching all of him with a tenderness that Marcus had only glimpsed.
Marcus had to breathe. He had to. His chest beat up and down as he gasped for something, anything, to ground him, make him catch that elusive, terrifying will-o’-the-wisp of orgasm at the peak of this terrifying slow burn of arousal.
“You want me, right?” Phillip whispered, and Marcus half whimpered, half howled.
“Don’t be an asshole….”
“Not my asshole we’re worried about,” Phillip whispered. He thrust two fingers into Marcus’s mouth, and Marcus sucked on them, hard, making them slick and smooth.
Those treacherous fingers made their way down an obvious path. Marcus shuddered when the first one breached him, softening, probing, stretching….
“Yesss….” It had been so long since those few days of rolling in the group bed, and even then, that had been hallucinatory, grief ridden, and far away. Marcus had wanted to be wanted, wanted to be taken, wanted Phillip to love him for so long….
“Auuughhhh….” Two fingers, scissoring, stretching, burning….
“You like that? How long have you been waiting for that?”
“Too long!”
“You want some more?”
“Please?”
“You sure?”
“God, Phillip, please….”
“I like it when you beg.” Phillip’s canines tickled his neck, and he moved his invading fingers long enough to haul Marcus’s thigh up. Marcus kept his leg propped, and Phillip positioned himself, thrust a little, felt the resistance, retreated….
His fangs did the same thing, and Marcus was delirious with need.
“Phillip, please…. Phillip…. God. Fuck me….”
And Phillip thrust inside, wrapped his arms around Marcus’s shoulders, and anchored him as Marcus howled in joy.
“Like that?”
“Yes….”
“Want more?”
“Yes….”
“Love me?”
“Goddess, yes!”
“I love you too
.”
Phillip thrust harder, faster, as quickly as he could, and Marcus hunched down and met him, thrust for thrust, and still Phillip continued to whisper.
“I can’t reach it from here…. Grab it.”
“Phillip!”
“Grab it—I want to see you stroke it.”
“Ah, God….” It was so deliciously dirty, so amazingly hot to grab his cock and stroke, pull on it, harsh and fast and…. “Phillip!”
But Phillip beat him to it, coming cold and slick in his ass at the same time those fangs punctured the skin of his neck, and he sucked hard as he came. Oh God… the pain, the exquisite pain, the heady draining in his neck and the feel of Phillip’s spend sliding between his ass cheeks and down his thighs was all he needed. Marcus shot, coating his chest, stomach, and abdomen in a chilly spatter of semen. Phillip shuddered again and again, finally licking the puncture wounds in his neck as Marcus’s eyes rolled back in his head and the final spurt hit his skin.
Dawn hit just then, their bodies still locked together, their sex still sliding on their skin, and when the sun fell behind the horizon, Marcus awoke with Phillip hard inside his body and they did it again.
They showered after that and fell into bed, just because that was where they wanted to be. Phillip propped his chin on Marcus’s stomach, and Marcus played with his hair. Like real lovers. Like forever.
“We could have been doing that for twenty years,” he said moodily after a moment, and Marcus shook his head.
“No, man. I think it took us twenty years to be able to do that.”
Phillip rolled his eyes. “God, you’re a girl.”
“God, you’re an asshole!”
“You love me, though, right?”
And for a moment, his eyes were worried. Marcus smiled a little.
“Yes, asshole, I really love you.”
Twenty years? Twenty years was nothing. Twenty years was that breath before a first kiss. Twenty years was the stroke of a knuckle down a cheek. This moment, together, all of the moments that followed, no matter how many there were?
That was forever.
Prologue: A Brief Window into the Great Quarrel
THE ROW that allowed Adrian, vampire prince and consort to Green, Lord of Green’s hill, in Foresthill, California, to be allowed into the Realm of Heaven caused two major earthquakes and a tsunami. Nobody in the Realm of Heaven was sure how it happened—it violated all of the laws that had been set down since the split of the God and the Goddess (or She Who Would Not Be Named), and it was just flat-out wrong.
Vampires were not supposed to end up in heaven. They were the Goddess’s creatures, along with the elves, sorceresses, were-folk, and the sons of man and the other. These folk should end up with the Goddess in their afterlife—that was the rule. But Adrian had gone out in a shower of blood defending the people he loved best—two lovers and a brother of the heart among them—and suddenly the Goddess was there petitioning for him to be allowed where vampires should not be.
More specifically, she was petitioning for him to be allowed in the antechamber.
“His lovers need him,” she’d sniffled. “You know they’re important to me—and they might not make it without some assurance that his spirit continues.”
Of course, God had put up a front about faith and belief, and the resulting crack across his face had resulted in one of the earthquakes and the destruction of a mini-mall that night, and that particular line of reasoning had been dropped right quick.
But in the end, it didn’t matter. The Great Quarrel (as the angels called it) could only be resolved by the Goddess’s plan, which involved Adrian’s lovers and his best friend, and this meant that she had God over a barrel. The deity hadn’t had his Goddess by his side in over two thousand years, and the state of the world showed that he was hurting. He’d give her almost anything to help her plan come to fruition—a vampire in the anteroom to heaven was really no big deal.
So the details didn’t matter. What mattered was that an accident of divine politics put a vampire in the anteroom to heaven, and now he was the angels’ problem.
And the angels really didn’t know what to do with him.
Part I: Failing
SHEPHERD, ANGEL of Penitence, looked at Saint Peter unhappily.
“Us, really? Me and Jefi? We’re the best people for the job?”
Saint Peter looked Shepherd blandly in his angel-hazel eyes.
“All of the host of heaven are more than qualified,” he said dryly, and Shepherd gave him a pointed look. They both knew what he wasn’t saying, and damned if Shepherd was going to let it slide.
“Yeah, but you usually give this assignment to people you’re trying to get rid of. The Angel of Chickens? Seriously? You think we didn’t notice that he—”
“She—she chose a gender when she fell—”
“Yeah, when she fell with the Angel of Oak Trees!” Who was now an actual “he” and not just the gender neutral sort of “he” that sounded more definitive than the sexless “it.”
Saint Peter shrugged. “Some angels are simply ready to fall. It’s not permanent exile, you know. They can restore their grace whenever they repent.”
But they didn’t. And neither had the two angels after them or the three angels after them! There was something about this assignment that seemed to send angels tumbling down to earth like baby birds out of the nest. The last three angels had landed in Las Vegas, and they were currently organizing a brothel. Shepherd was understandably upset.
“But… but, Peter… it’s Jefischa!”
And that was the crux of the matter right there. Jefischa was the Angel of the Fourth Hour of the Night. It was sort of an unstable time—and Jefi was just like it. He could be quiet and big-eyed, all contemplation and expectation, or he could be playful, like a child escaping before bedtime. He could be melancholy and sad, like a mother after hearing a poignant story before sleep, or raucous and rowdy, like a young man on his last beer. He could be all of these things at once. Shepherd knew, because they’d been partnered since forever. Literally. The fourth hour of the night was an excellent time for repentance. Shepherd got a lot of calls in Jefischa’s company, and the dour, placid Shepherd was grateful for the one angel in heaven who didn’t roll his eyes and groan when Shepherd walked into the room.
“Jefischa is perfectly capable of maintaining the integrity of his own soul,” Peter said mildly, and Shepherd glared at him.
“Jefischa,” he said fiercely, “is an innocent—”
“So whatever unholy wiles the vampire is working on him should not have any effect at all.” Peter’s voice was firm and growing firmer, and Shepherd usually would have stood down, but… Jefischa! Sweet, mercurial, melancholy, playful Jefischa. He needed to be protected, even from himself.
“So he’s more easily led astray!” Shepherd countermanded, and Peter glowered at him until Shepherd finally did stand down.
“Have a little faith in your partner, Shep,” Peter told him, gentleness in his voice. “Lord knows, being his partner is something you’ve not once had to repent.”
Peter disappeared, and Shep glared at the white fuzzy halo where the archangel used to be. “Ha-ha,” he grumbled, but then Jefischa appeared at his side. It was serene, “retiring for bed” Jefischa, and he smiled at Shepherd and asked him what was wrong.
“We’re guarding the vampire,” Shep said, keeping it short. Maybe if he didn’t give Jefi the details, he wouldn’t find out anything that could make him fall.
“Ohhh….” Jefi was suddenly all big eyes and child-at-a-bedtime-story. The fourth hour after dark, indeed. “We get to guard him? Wow! Do you think we’ll find out why all those people fell? Why do you think they fell, Shep? I mean, I knew Anpiel—she was the sweetest thing. And she and Zerachiel—they were always fighting! I have no idea how they ended up down on earth together.” Jefi gave a mock shudder. “Weird.”
Shepherd raised a sour eyebrow. “Yeah. Weird. Look, Jefi. You’ve got to promise to
follow me on this one. No….” If Shepherd hadn’t been a vague form of personified energy, his hands would have waved in the air. “You know how you get. No acting human, okay?”
Jefi bobbed his head and then stopped, puzzled. “Do I act human, Shepherd?”
Shepherd looked at him, feeling helpless. “You act… compassionate, Jefi. Empathetic. You… you forget, sometimes, that our job is to be a beacon of guidance for them. You seem to want to be their friend.”
Jefi’s energy—his “wings”—turned an unbearable color. It was a murky sort of brown-orange-green, and Shepherd hated it. He suddenly found that he would say anything, do anything, to make that color go away.
“You… you don’t like me when I do that, Shep?”
“No! No… no, I like you fine. It’s one of the things that makes you—well, um, you, Jefi! No. Don’t change that. Just, I don’t know… keep it in check this time, okay? There’s something about this guy. We’re falling like mortals around him, Jefi. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Jefi’s wings brightened up a little, but they were still a troubled brown-green. “Okay, I guess. You’d… you’d let me fall alone, Shep?” There was a moment of absolute shock, and then Jefi covered his eyes. “Ouch, Shep… that color hurts. Make it stop—whatever you’re thinking, make it stop!”
Shep was thinking of Jefischa alone on the cruel, barbaric surface of the planet below. He was thinking of him being abused and suckered into the worst of what humanity had to offer—the drug hells, the brothels, the places where humans routinely threw away their lives, their souls, their humanity. He had no idea what his wings looked like, but the painful terror of Jefi left alone was enough to paralyze his very being for a moment.
“No,” he said roughly, after a moment of getting himself under control. “I’d never let you fall alone, Jefi. No worries. That’s why we need to be careful on this one. We like it up here, right?”
Jefi smiled, his wings going bright and iridescent, and Shepherd knew his own appearance brightened up considerably. “Absolutely, Shep. Anything you say. Besides, what do we have to worry about? He’s not a human. He’s a vampire. I’m sure he’ll be very different.”
