All the Rules of Heaven

by Amy Lane

  He could hardly see through the pain-blossom in his nose, and he was having trouble breathing as well, but each blow filled him, invigorated him, gave him purpose.

  “You like causing pain, motherfucker!” He threw a hard right to Conklin’s ribs. “I’ll give you pain you’d fucking die to escape!”

  James Beaufort laughed heartily at that, the hysteria in the sound reminding Tucker that he’d lived over a hundred years with the pain of killing this asshole.

  “And this one’s for Sophie!” Kick. “And this one’s for Bridget!” Punch. “And this one’s for James!” And he came down hard on Conklin’s kneecap.

  It worked as well on ghosts as it did on humans, and Thomas Conklin Senior went down, writhing in pain. Tucker pumped his fists and howled, because God, he needed this win. Just once, he needed to come out on top, to finally not be karma’s fucking whoring bitch again.

  Conklin’s screams let off, and his body went still. Tucker stopped crowing long enough to see that the blood he’d drawn was disappearing, the bruises he’d inflicted fading, and whereas Tucker’s nose, bleeding and swollen, was not going away, Conklin’s dislocated knee was relocating, fixing itself as if it had never been injured.

  With a smile and a dry laugh, Tucker’s antagonist pushed himself to his feet, and the terrible implications hit Tucker hard.

  This would never end.

  If Tucker took off the pentacle that apparently made him a part of Conklin’s world, he’d be vulnerable to possession.

  If he left it on, Conklin could come attack him at any time. This ghost lived in his house! Now that Conklin had seen him, and they’d touched, Tucker could never sleep. Never rest. And even if he left Tucker alone, others were vulnerable. Angel. Was Angel open to Conklin’s attack? What about… oh God. This fucking sadist. He wouldn’t!

  Tucker’s panic overrode reason. He stared at Conklin, terrified for the one helpless being he knew.

  “You monster!” he cried, “You stay away from Squishbeans!”

  Conklin looked baffled for a moment, mouthing “Squishbeans” in puzzlement, and Tucker took hope. Maybe the cat was too small a thing for the ghost to bother with. Maybe it had no bonding symbol around its neck. Maybe it was safe.

  Tucker relaxed, and Conklin took that moment to charge again.

  At that moment, a fluttering darkness passed over them all, and Angel stood in front of Tucker, his back toward their enemy, arms out to pull Tucker close.

  Conklin fell back with the sound of a tolling bell, and Angel gazed at him over his shoulder. “Nobody hurts him!” he thundered.

  Tucker found himself tucked into Angel’s embrace, some sort of shield wrapping around them both as Conklin tried one more time to get at him.

  Tucker felt this charge ringing in his bones, and he closed his eyes and clutched Angel tighter, his body, neatly muscled, solid as the ground, filling Tucker’s arms like the lover he’d never been able to hold.

  The supernatural ringing stopped, and night fell.

  Angel made a whimper—a hurt sound—and his arms slid away, hanging at his sides. Tucker had buried his face against Angel’s neck, but they’d stood chest to chest. Angel brought his hand up to the side of his throat, where Tucker’s pendant had been mashed between them, and Tucker gasped.

  “Oh, Angel,” he whispered, running his fingertips around the pentacle-shaped burn right above Angel’s white T-shirt. “How did that—”

  “Did he hurt you?” Angel asked, upset. His fingers whispered along Tucker’s face, skirting his swollen nose, the cuts on his cheek and chin. “Tucker, why would you let him hurt you?”

  Tucker shrugged. “I hurt you!” The pentacle had. Angels and pentacles didn’t mix—perhaps that’s why the pentacle had burned Tucker in the first place. Angel had put his mark on Tucker’s heart, even then. The more human Angel had become, the more the pentacle had been compatible with Tucker’s skin.

  Tucker refused to think of the implications of this. He hovered his finger over the burn at Angel’s throat, hurting for his… his lover. Oh God. This man had loved him the night before.

  Tucker turned his face up slightly in confusion and supplication.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he whispered.

  And now it was Angel’s turn to shrug. “As long as you’re not doing any more bleeding for that man’s crimes, Tucker, I can live with the pain.”

  Tucker half laughed and looked around them. The black veil had disappeared, but that didn’t stop the purpling night shadows from looking otherworldly. Tucker and Angel didn’t belong here at night. They were barely tolerated during the day—they knew that now.

  “Inside,” Tucker urged, turning toward the door. Angel’s hand, tugging at his, stopped him. “What?”

  Angel shook his head, looking absurdly shy. “Just….” He tugged Tucker closer, and Tucker’s heart, which had slowed down a bit since the ghostly attack, sped up now as Angel wrapped his arms around Tucker’s shoulders, sliding his hands into Tucker’s back pockets.

  “The twilight is beautiful,” Angel whispered.

  Tucker smiled and turned his head into the kiss….

  And Angel dematerialized, the kiss landing on Tucker’s lips like a cool mist of fog.

  With a groan of frustration, Tucker stomped into the house, Angel drooping dispiritedly after him.

  HIS NOSE wouldn’t stop bleeding, dammit.

  But Tucker decided to use that.

  “Tucker, why won’t you just sit and put some ice on it?” Angel asked plaintively.

  “Angel, come here,” Tucker said, scraping his finger along the threshold that led from the hallway to his room. “I need to know this doesn’t trap you too.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have a degree in ancient religions and defunct languages,” Tucker muttered. “Seriously. I know school was a long time ago, but I had to wait to get beaten up by a ghost to figure out how this works?” He turned toward Angel and gestured to the blood he’d scraped on the threshold as a protection spell. “Here, see if this bothers you.”

  Angel frowned and moved his hand over the Enochian symbols that Tucker had drawn using the thick blood pouring down his face.

  “No. I can feel the symbol tingle, but I’m fine with it. It bothers me that you’re bleeding. It bothers me that I couldn’t hold you, but this doesn’t bother me much at all.”

  Tucker smiled at him wearily. “You know, I thought the fact that you could hold me was the plus side of the bleeding. I don’t get it myself.”

  “You were happy,” Angel said glumly. “I think the blood means something else when your heart aches.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Tucker finished off the symbol and looked around the room. “If I pour some salt on the windowsill and put another one of these there, do you think that will do?”

  “What exactly are you doing?”

  “Thomas Conklin and I just beat the crap out of each other and he’s been dead for a hundred or so years. I would really like for him not to come into my room and slit my throat as I sleep!” Tucker’s ribs hurt from the ghost’s kidney punches, and his nose and head were one giant throb. At least the exhaustion was physical—mostly. Dealing with the dead was a lot harder on his energy levels than fucking the living; he was getting used to feeling like the cat’s breakfast.

  Angel sat back on his haunches and put his hand in front of his mouth, clearly horrified.

  “No,” he said. “Tucker, take the necklace off. He’ll kill you!”

  “The necklace that means protection? I don’t think so. Better he beats the hell out of my body than takes it over!” Tucker finished the rune and stalked over to the window, blowing his bleeding nose into his hand to use as a painter’s palette.

  “Gross,” Angel muttered, shrinking back.

  “You are telling me.” Tucker didn’t even want to think about it. But that didn’t stop him from dabbing his finger in it and starting to draw. “Do you think I need to do this on the s
hower walls? Can he come through the walls now and attack me physically? Have all the rules of metaphysics just gone down the fucking crapper in this place?”

  “I will watch over you when you bathe,” Angel said virtuously.

  Tucker sputtered blood all over his shirt with his burst of laughter. “Glad to know that’s a hardship for you. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “I could be naked too, if that would make you more comfortable.”

  Tucker stopped drawing for a moment and stared at him. Her.

  Two green eyes in a triangular face, with lush lips, high cheekbones, and a sweet buttercream complexion, stared back. Angel had a riot of red curly hair piled on top of her head, drooping ringlets around her eyes and down her neck.

  Tucker swallowed. Most of it was blood, and he sighed, going back to work on the rune so he could bathe, put his head back with some ice, and stop his damned nose from bleeding any more.

  “Either form,” he muttered. “Either form would make watching me naked a really bad idea.” And then, dammit, he thought about that. “Can you be naked in either form?”

  Angel appeared to think about it. She was wearing a scoop-necked T-shirt—sort of the feminine version of what Angel always wore—and jeans cut for generous hips and round thighs. Curiously, she pulled the neck of her T-shirt out and then fiddled with her bra.

  “My nipples are the color of cinnamon,” she proclaimed, and Tucker groaned.

  Forcing himself to concentrate, he finished the damned rune and stood, still cupping his hand.

  “Is there anyplace else I can draw a rune?” Runes in blood—crude, basic, the oldest protection spell in the book.

  Angel stopped looking down her shirt and shook her head. “No, Tucker—the entrances are where you need to worry, and you got those. And besides….” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think you have to worry about him violating you in your sleep.”

  Tucker shuddered. “I’m anxious to hear why.”

  “You wore the pentacle and he saw you. It made him capable of attacking you. Outside the house. But the house has thresholds—human sanctuaries do. Ghosts often stay inside the confines of a house even if it’s burned to the ground. They recognize boundaries. They’re hungry for rules, since the basic rules of humanity have deserted them. I think he will—consciously or unconsciously—shy away from violating the rules of the world as it’s set up inside the mansion.”

  Mm. “Interesting theory,” Tucker muttered as he walked to the bathroom and washed the gunk off his hand. “But he didn’t seem all that happy about rules when he was alive.”

  “I disagree,” Angel said thoughtfully. “I think he was actually locked into the rules of his time. Women were believed to be inferior creatures. He subscribed to that rule. His wealth gave him privilege. He believed that too.”

  Tucker grimaced at his black eyes and swollen nose in the mirror. “I guess, yeah. Even the drug use would make sense. Cocaine was a big thing back then—and not particularly illegal either. Not yet. So yeah, he was a monster. But he locked his monstrousness behind social rules. I guess I get that.” He met Angel’s eyes in the mirror, marveling at how, in the middle of that lush beauty, those eyes were still perfectly green with luminous gold flecks and still perfectly Angel’s. “So we’ll hope the old rules of hospitality don’t desert him, now that we’re supposed to be sleeping under the same roof. Still….”

  He grimaced, not sure whether he felt better or worse about asking for help from a beautiful redheaded woman than from a ruggedly handsome auburn-haired man.

  Maybe he just didn’t like asking for help from a potential lover, period.

  “You are going to stay with me when I sleep, right?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she agreed, those green eyes as wide and as earnest as they had always been. “I… I wish I didn’t have to rest as well. When Ruth was here, I’d dematerialize—float in the aether, waiting for Ruth to call me. I did not feel time there. Sometimes she wouldn’t call me for weeks.”

  There was a plaintiveness, a forlornness in her voice, something that made Tucker ache.

  “I’m glad you’ve been there for me,” Tucker told her, smiling gently so she’d know he meant it. “I don’t think I could go a week without hearing your voice—any of your voices—so I’m just as glad you stay with me.”

  “But I need to rest too. That’s when you see me sleeping. I can’t stand eternal watch over you, Tucker. I’m not that kind of—”

  “Girl?” Tucker supplied sweetly.

  “Apparition,” Angel said with dignity. “All things wax and wane.”

  Tucker frowned. “Hunh. Interesting. Strength and weak—” His nose dripped. “Fuck me. I’m tired of blood.”

  He started to strip, throwing his clothes in the hamper, and then he turned sheepishly toward Angel. “Could you, uh, you know, milady, maybe…?”

  The smile that tilted those full lips was whimsical and knowing. “Still the same person.”

  “Forgive me for long-ingrained sexist mores,” Tucker replied stubbornly. “And don’t watch my naked ass, okay?”

  He heard Angel’s low and womanly laugh as he hauled his sweaty, blood-crusted body into the shower. He kept the water cool, and as it sluiced down his body, he tried to imagine that sound as a manly chuckle—and failed.

  Whoever—whatever—Angel was, the two genders fit her as easily as Tucker’s one gender fit him.

  Tucker managed a smile, thinking that he was exceedingly lucky that being attracted to all of Angel was not going to be a problem for him.

  Following through on that attraction? That was going to be a problem for both of them.

  TUCKER GOT out of the shower and looked around, realizing that he was alone. “Angel?” he called.

  “In the other room, Tucker. Giving you your ‘space.’”

  That was sweet. “Thanks. Augh!” His nose was still dripping. He wrapped a towel around his waist, then grabbed a clean washrag from the shelf. Holding the washrag up, he bumped the door open. “Uh, Angel?” Again, this was horribly embarrassing to ask. It was one thing when Angel looked like a clueless guy his age, but right now, she was about as intimidating a woman as Tucker had ever known, and he’d had sex with a lot of judges and high-profile attorneys—and one congresswoman. And a congressman for that matter. But none of them had been as stunning as Angel was in this body.

  “What do you need?” she asked, stepping into his view like a regular flesh and blood person.

  “An escort to the refrigerator,” he said sheepishly. “We didn’t paint any runes there.”

  “But it’s a modern part of the house. I don’t think he’d go there.” Angel tapped a long scarlet fingernail against vermillion lips. “And he thinks the kitchen is beneath him.”

  “Yeah, well, brawling in the garden should have been beneath him. Could you just walk with me and keep an eye out while I get some ice?”

  “Of course. Aren’t you going to get dressed?”

  Tucker dabbed at his nose. “Not when I’m still dripping like a faucet. C’mon, let’s go.”

  It all went smoothly… until he was bent over the freezer, scooping ice into a bag, and his towel dropped.

  Angel’s throaty laughter drew an allover body flush, though Tucker just kept scooping ice.

  “Like what you see?” he asked, his words muffled by his swollen nose.

  “Even the skin of your bottom is turning pink!” Angel chortled.

  “Wonderful.” He refilled the ice cube tray, staying almost defiantly naked. To his horror, his cock started to wake up in the open air, and once he put the tray in the freezer, he grabbed the towel off the floor and hiked it up around his waist again, then tied the knot as securely as possible.

  “A shame,” Angel said, the wicked enjoyment in her voice as mortifying from a woman as it would have been if he’d been a man.

  “I’m flattered,” Tucker muttered. “Okay—I need ibuprofen. Did you stock some in the cupboards, or do I need to root throug
h my boxes?”

  “Second cupboard to the right of the refrigerator,” Angel said softly. “It’s left over from your aunt, but it should still be good.”

  She sounded so contrite, Tucker relented. “It would have been okay, you know. If I’d had to go through the boxes.”

  “No,” she said shortly. “Just… just no. I’m tired of watching you hurt today. I would just as soon you fix your nose and go watch some TV.” The perpetual smile at her lips turned wistful. “I wouldn’t mind watching Buffy too.”

  “Of course,” Tucker conceded gracefully. He grabbed the ibuprofen, washed it down with water, and then snagged a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels from the same cupboard. He held them up and shook the bag. “These are great—thanks!”

  “When you were downtown, getting your stuff, I wired the grocery boy extra money if he’d come in and put the groceries away,” Angel said modestly. “He didn’t try to steal anything at all. I was very impressed.”

  Tucker chuckled. “You don’t trust much of humanity, do you?”

  “I helped Ruth for a very long time,” she responded. “Very often the dead who won’t leave are the ones with the most to regret.”

  Tucker hmmd and grabbed his ice, his pretzels, and the towel around his waist. “Like Sophie’s brother. That’s interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “It just is,” Tucker said thoughtfully. “I think he killed Thomas Conklin—and good for him, because wow. Just wow. Conklin was a bad guy. But it left James Beaufort with a mountain of regret. I think it’s the regret that haunts the paperweight as much as the violence.”

  “Oh,” Angel said in a very small voice.

  Tucker nodded because it was something to chew over as he padded through the kitchen and made the abrupt left into his bedroom. For a moment, he started, but nobody was waiting for him, nobody had broken his runes.

  Thank God. Because Tucker would bleed all night if it meant Thomas Conklin’s ghost would leave him the hell alone.