Christopher rubbed his face, shoulders hunched. He looked terribly young. “I’m worried. And I... I haven’t known what to say. I thought about telling Father Zach, but I’m afraid he’ll say I’m possessed.”
“That’s also a possibility,” I said. “Unfortunately.”
“God, no. Please, not again.” He leaned against the edge of the bed, and covered his eyes.
“Again?” I sat forward, resting my forearms on my knees.
He didn’t reply, and it took me a few seconds to realize why. He was crying, stifling the sobs against his palm.
“I can’t. Something’s wrong, and I’ve tried, I’ve tried keeping my journal, and I’ve been doing all my therapist’s exercises, and praying and praying, but I just can’t stop it.” He was trying to hold it together, and failing. “I lose all this time and it’s been, it’s scaring the shit out of me, but I can’t stop it!”
The number of times I’d seen a man cry in my lifetime were few and far between, and of those instances, the general response around me had been other men telling them to man up. I froze up as Christopher broke down further, crushed under terror and weeks of built up stress layered over a lifetime of trauma. What the hell did I do now? What would… Talya do? Or Mariya?
“Hey, kid,” I said, haltingly. “Hang in there. It’ll be alright, okay? I can take a look at this for you in a couple days, once I’ve had some rest. If I’m still around, I’ll follow it up.”
The priest looked up at me, his pacific blue eyes even more vivid now that they were ringed with red. “I’ll p-pay you to, to do whatever it is you do. Just please, if someone’s doing something to me, I-”
Maybe it was the brandy, or maybe it was the cocktail of his eagerness and vulnerability, but I found myself doing something I’d never believed myself capable of. I reached out and put my hands on his arms.
“Seriously,” I said, meeting his gaze with my own. “We’ll sort it out. I helped stop a guy that liked burning people to death with curses, once. Don’t worry, alright?”
“This is... you, thank you, for helping me. I’m sorry, I’m not usually like this.” He sniffled, and before I knew what had happened, he had his arms wrapped around me, head buried against my shoulder. He was standing now, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed. It put him at just the right height that he didn’t have to bend over.
Uncertainly, I patted his back and waited, glancing down at my sleeping familiar before turning back and getting a lungful of male scent from Christopher’s shirt. Good cologne, nothing too strong, and the warm, woody-savory scent of his sweat. My pulse leaped as Christopher pulled back, his hips grazing the front of my pants. Before I quite knew what was happening, his mouth was close enough to kiss. His lips smelled sweet, his breath heavy with alcohol. The Yen liked it. It liked it a lot, and Christopher sensed it as only an experienced victim could.
“Are you okay?” The priest whispered against my mouth. He still had tears in his eyelashes.
I knew if I spoke, it would break the spell. I knew I didn’t want to break it, and I knew why even though it sickened me. He looked like Vassily, and with the Yen pumping venom into my psyche, it was enough.
I grasped him by the back of his head and pulled him toward me, but not toward my mouth. Instead, I pushed his head over my shoulder and went for his neck, pushing his collar away to bite down and suck. He cried out in surprise and pain, fingers clutching at my arms. There was a moment of resistance, of fear, and then he relaxed into my jaws and hands with a shudder.
“Please.” He got his hands between his body and mine, almost but not quite pushing back. “Rex, please-!”
I let go slowly, tasting salt, and licked it off my lips. Christopher was breathing quickly, eyes black and feverish as he stared at my mouth. He was rock-hard despite being drunk, a fact that became obvious as he swayed against me.
“I think that’s enough,” I said hoarsely.
“You know, it’s been a long time since a man looked that way at me.” The old Jersey accent crept out from under the Manhattan affectation as he fingered the bloody tatters of my shirt.
“Looked at how?” My heart stuttered in my chest. “I… what?”
“Like someone who can control me,” he breathed.
My pulse leapt, and I froze, bewildered, as Christopher pressed his hands flat against my shoulders and his mouth against my jaw. He was still shaking from the combat high, but he knew how to touch. No light, sticky fingers, no hesitancy. Firm, confident, as he exhaled hotly and let one hand slide down the front of my body. I caught his wrist before he got further than a feather-light touch over my fly. "No. You’re drunk."
“I’m a big boy.” He laughed, and slid down to his knees. “And you’re hard.”
And getting harder. Christopher was gazing up at me from the floor, and everything about it—his position, the fact we were in a GOD-damned church, the way he unselfconsciously yearned toward my body—brought on a hunger so real that I was stunned into stillness by it. I didn’t know him. I wasn’t ready. His eyes were the wrong shade of blue, and my cock was beginning to hurt with the familiar tearing pain even as it swelled with need.
“You’re drunk.” I squeezed his wrist until it creaked, and then let go.
“Please.” He leaned in against my knee. “Please… Sir?”
The word hit me down low, a thrill almost as intense as the excitement I’d felt being held at gunpoint in the parking lot.
"Open up your shirt," I was suspended in the disbelief of what I was doing. "Slowly."
Christopher blinked back at me, but after a breathless moment, he obeyed. His fingers fumbled on the buttons as he undid them, baring the lean, hard lines of his body. He had a decent amount of hair on him, but the old abuses of his past were written into the stretch marks and scars on his taut stomach. Half-seen words and symbols, layers of fine razor lines, probably self-inflicted. He waited on my word, vulnerable and uncertain.
"Pull your cock out," I said.
For a moment, I thought he'd refuse: fight me, say no, but then he reached down with trembling hands and unsnapped his belt, eyes dark with need, his mouth flushed with anticipation. He looked so much like a younger Vassily that my heart twisted.
"That's it." My mouth was very dry, hands papery hot.
Christopher pushed his open fly down, reached in and freed his erection, searching my expression for approval. He was circumcised, neither impressive nor disappointing, but the sight of his naked body was like another shot of liquor. My breathing was quick as I looked him up and down, and he squirmed like it was a real touch, like my hands were on his skin.
I licked my lip. “Stroke it.”
He looked almost as shocked as I felt. Slowly, haltingly, he obeyed, running his soft hand up and down the length of it. I reached across for my drink and took a long pull off it, watching him the entire time.
"Good." I set the can aside, and leaned forward to grasp a handful of his hair, twisting it to bring his head up as he tried to bend down around his fuck and focus in on it. Carefully, I drew him forward until his mouth was pushed against the outside of my fly. He huffed against it, the heat a shocking pleasurable jolt I felt all the way back into my gut.
"Please." His begging was muffled against the fabric of my slacks, voice syrupy with desperation. "Rex, Sir, please!"
Sir. It nearly undid my self-control. Christopher felt the kick, the way the word made my cock jerk and strain. Sensing weakness, he opened his mouth and pressed his tongue against the layers of cloth. I let him, but I didn't let him expose me, and as he worked himself into a froth over what he couldn't have, I heard and smelled and felt his excitement grow. He was fucking his own hand in earnest now, moaning softly in his throat, and I was drunk on it: every whimper, every breath of scent he gasped; the weak, submissive pluck of his fingers as he tugged needily at my pantsleg.
"Good." I ran my gloved hand through his hair and rubbed against his lips, and he shuddered, flushing darkly with humiliation
. "That's a good boy."
His breath hitched, and that was the only warning I had before he climaxed, gasping, wrapping his arm around my thighs and leaning in against my legs. He made a thin sound of anguish, panting open-mouthed as he looked up at me. The priest was an intoxicated mess, his brilliant eyes vacant with sullen ecstasy. He held his wet, cum-slick hand like he didn't know what to do with it, his erection still jerking spasmodically as it slowly softened.
Power. It had never occurred to me that there was power in sex. I was in a kind of trance, my usual prudish terror overridden by pure excitement. I’d had this kind of power, and never used it? My lips parted as I stared down, watching him squirm. "Now suck your fingers clean."
For a moment, I thought I’d pushed it too far. But then Christopher brought his hand up and began to lick and suck, face burning. The room was small, and my ears were full of the soft, wet sounds of his tongue and lips. My fingers twitched in time with them, thrills running through the nerves as the leather that covered them buckled and rubbed.
"Yes. Good." I struggled to keep my breathing regular as he twisted with lust and humiliation on the floor in front of me, hair damp with sweat. When he was done, I reach forward again, and stroked his hair and his ears and cheeks with gloved hands. Christopher was hot to touch, nearly feverish, and he shook like a bird against my palms. “Very good.”
"Oh no,” he whispered. “Oh no. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“No, no, no, it’s fine,” I said, trying to blink away the fog. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No.” He shook his head, breathing deeply and quickly, and fumbled with his clothes in awkward haste. “No, I-I… I’m sorry. Rex, please. You need to go.”
The bubble had burst, and with it, the illusion of power. I was a relative stranger in someone else’s church. Numb and still a little drunk, I watched him move to the counter and throw back the remaining brandy, gulping thirstily. While he drank, I eased up onto my feet. “Christopher-”
“Look, I just lapsed, okay?!” He raised his voice, a staccato bark that hit my ears like a whip crack. “Please, just go before I fuck up worse. I’m sorry.”
My skin crawled. Vampire or no vampire, I wasn’t any safer in this place than I was outside of it.
“Thursday,” I slurred. “I’ll look at this, this curse of yours Thursday. Try not get shot. Remember to call the police – there’s bodies downstairs.”
Christopher waved me away, shaking his head, and when I closed the door, I heard him sob, and then the shattering of glass as he threw the empty bottle across the room.
Chapter 16
I left the church in a state of deep confusion, delirious with fatigue. When I got back home, I went straight for the shower, turned it up as hot as I could stand, and endured the pain of it running over the cuts and bruises I’d taken in the fight with the Men in Black. I needed to sort out my head, and wash Christopher’s smell off my skin.
As the booze wore off, I found myself feeling used, burned out, and angry. Fear of Sergei and what he’d tried to do to me was a manic current underneath my thoughts as I ran over the chain of events, back and forth, trying to make sense of what had happened. Sergei was trying to enslave me. The Men in Black were real, and they were trying to kill Christopher. We’d gotten drunk, and… yes. At first, I thought I’d taken advantage of him—but when I picked it apart, that didn’t hold up. I’d just done what he’d wanted, hadn’t I? And what did that make me? A pushover? Gay? Not gay? Because it wasn’t like I touched him. After the rest of this ridiculous excuse of a week, it didn’t even feel real.
Once I was scrubbed clean, I sat on the edge of my bed with a street surgery kit and took stock of the night’s toll on my body. I had a number of deep impact bruises that were getting stiff. The bullet had skipped through the outer edge of my triceps and had torn a long track of skin, but I’d avoided penetration. I rubbed lidocaine into the long cut, hissing at the initial sting, then cleaned it out and stitched it up. After that, I got some painkillers and precautionary antibiotics into me, brushed my teeth, and stared at Angkor’s empty bed for a while before I lay down and passed the hell out.
I slipped into another world, flowing through the cracks of reality like sand: a technicolor, hyper-realistic vision that was too real to pull away from, but not real enough to convince the lucid mind that it was anything other than a dream.
It was Eden. I ran barefoot across the soft ivory loam, chasing a plume of shining white hair through a thick field of fleshy, shivering trees. It was Zarya, the Gift Horse. She was laughing joyously ahead of me, a sound that made my heart pound with raw, primal need. The hunger was erotic, a need so bad that I thought my stomach was going to turn me inside out. I needed to sink my teeth in her throat and bear her to ground, pin her as she struggled, her body arching against mine, and eat. She was fruit, THE Fruit, and I knew her heart ached for the knife as much as I ached to pierce it.
We plunged through a thicket of underbrush, and I cut around the path of the chase on instinct, a wolf heading off a deer. My blood was pumping, jaws aching with anticipation as the gap between us closed. I skidded down a hill and into a gully, knife in hand. It was little more than a long shard of fine, razor-sharp glass bound to a piece of carved antler.
Zarya flashed by, a ghost of pearly dappled skin and white hair, and I bounded from cover to catch her around her slender waist. She threw herself around with a cry of mingled surprise and delight, and we tripped and tumbled painlessly, dizzily down the hill into a soft bed of mother-of-pearl ferns. She was stunning, a face of all races and none, aristocratic and unearthly. Her skin was like nacre, rippling with subtle colors. Her eyes were Blue, the color of Earth seen from space.
I had the knife up under the edge of her jaw, the edge pushed against her pulse. She laughed, fearless, and pushed up against it to kiss me. Her mouth was shockingly sweet, an electric honeysuckle punch that coursed from my lips to the rest of my nerves in a wave of pleasure. I leaned into it, shifting from the hard tension of a hunter into the flowing closeness of a lover, but it was no longer Zarya who lay beneath me. It was Angkor.
His eyes were hooded with sensual languor, lips and cheeks flushed. My breath caught and my cock stiffened painfully as the nature of the hunger abruptly shifted from food to sex. I was between his legs, vaguely aware that I couldn’t see any part of my own body. Before I could think to move away, he reached up, grasped my wrist, and pulled the glass knife into his own throat.
Silver. He bled silver. At the core of Angkor's dark violet-gray eyes was a halo of intense, brilliant green light, and as the silver Gift Horse blood crept up along the glass and over my bare skin, his lips framed a single word, a question.
Zealot?
I fell to the bed from a great height, eyes flying open as my body jolted and then fell still. I was face down and clutching my pillow, and I was in a lot of pain.
"Ow, oww... akh!" My foreskin was stretched so tight it felt like it was going to tear. Breathing through my teeth, I shoved a hand down and freed the trapped flesh, exhaling only when the agony began to subside. "Good GOD."
The light from the window was hazy, the kind of uniform snow-sky gray that obliterated any sense of time without a clock. Once I had my bearings, I found that I felt... awful, really. Beaten up, seedy, heavy and stuffy, like my immune system was working overtime to clear itself of disease. I could hope that the MiB’s bullet hadn’t contained some kind of biological or radioactive payload. It was possible. Many paranormal researchers and UFOlogists had become ill after contact with the Silencers.
I wasn’t surprised to find it was close to 8pm when I got to the kitchen. Binah followed me in, meowing with the kind of tragic desperation that suggested a calamity had taken place. The calamity in question was that her food dish was empty in the middle. Not actually empty—there was plenty of kibble around the edge of the dish.
“Oy, what a crisis. What a tragedy. For God’s sake, Binah… there’s still food in ther
e.” I spoke over her air-raid siren wail, and shuffled the bowl so that the empty space was covered up. “See?”
Binah sat down on the kitchen floor and primly wrapped her tail around her feet, the very tip twitching over her toes. She glared at me with clear affront.
“There are starving cats in Rome that would fight you to the death for this kibble, Binah.” I made a sound of disgust and bent down to pick up the dish. Bad idea: when I stood back up, the world swayed. My head was pounding, and my vision pulsed.
The meowing resumed, pitched high with excitement as I pulled the kibble box from the pantry and made a volcano of food in the middle of the bowl. Binah was throwing herself bodily at my legs by the time I set it on the floor, wincing as my thighs cramped and my back seized. When I stood back up, I had to wipe my forehead clean of sweat. My muscles were shuddering, like I'd run a marathon. I’d overdone it, and needed to take care of myself. Food, water, coffee… and the seed packet I'd found, the one with 'Zealot' written on the label. The dream had reminded me of it, and I knew better than to ignore those kinds of dreams.
I ended up getting most of the way through making an open-faced sandwich when curiosity overpowered me. I poured myself a cup of coffee, went to the bedroom to get the seeds, then took both outside to the weedy, hard-scrabble yard that passed as our garden. There were a number of cracked pots with old potting soil in them, so I dragged one inside and took it to the kitchen sink, dug around in it, and planted the seeds in the dampened soil.
Then I waited, not entirely sure what to expect. Marijuana? A magical beanstalk? Nothing?
The pot sat there, dirty and mossy, the soil undisturbed. It seemed ‘nothing’ was the answer.
“Huh.” I drained my coffee, which tasted just as bad as the cup I’d gotten while I was out, then washed the cup and my hands before getting back to my sandwich. I’d found a Ukrainian deli where I was unlikely to see any of my old cronies and had gotten myself some salo[12], one of my few guilty pleasures: pork fat cured with salt and garlic, eaten raw on heavy rye bread. It was a Ukrainian stereotype and I knew it, but salo was at least part of why I’d never been motivated to take up my mother’s faith. I liked mine with sharp pickle, horseradish, thin slices of fresh raw garlic and parsley. I was most of the way through restoring some calories when a sweet, narcotic smell pushed through the strong savory odor of garlic and forced me to look back toward the sink.
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