by W. J. May
The taste of blood sobered him, and the use of his ink left him white with fear. He took a deliberate step back, raising his hands innocently as he stared out at the bewildered bar patrons. All of whom were staring back at him with wide, unblinking eyes.
“I don’t want any trouble,” he said shakily, spotting Simon in the crowd and edging his way towards him. “We’re just going to go, okay? We’re just going to go.”
For a split second it looked like it might be working. Like the bar was too stunned to lift a hand to stop them.
But then there was a wild cry as one of the men launched himself at Tristan from behind, a rusted switchblade clenched tightly in his hand.
Simon didn’t think. Didn’t care. Didn’t pause to consider the consequences. He simply launched himself into the air, the warlock burning wickedly on his arm.
“Simon—no!” Tristan called.
But this time it was Simon who was beyond reason. Their temporary role-reversal could only last so long, and they were both back on their original sides—both fighting—but for completely different reasons. While Tristan was fighting to get out of there, Simon was fighting to fight. What was more, he was enjoying it.
A wild sort of laughter bubbled out of him as he took down man after man, felling them like dominos as he spun around in a deadly circle in the middle of the bar. It was as easy as riding a bike. As effortless as parking a car.
How weak they were. How pathetic. It had been a long time since Simon had fought against people without any additional powers, and the decrepit nature of them stirred a feeling of deep-seeded loathing in the pit of his stomach.
These were the people they were hiding their skills to protect? he thought as he snapped one of their spines with a spinning roundhouse kick. These were the people for whom they worked tirelessly in secret, only to go out every night and pretend they were less than what they really were?
“Simon—”
Tristan tried to reach him, but he was grabbed by the back of the shirt and thrown sideways into the crowd. Simon glanced up for a second, but wasn’t worried. Tristan could take out the room full of them with one hand tied behind his back. The only reason he let himself get pulled away was because he was afraid of doing something he shouldn’t be able to.
Well, Simon was no longer crippled by that fear. In fact, he was delighted to be rid of it.
He burst out laughing again as Abel—one of the only men still standing—pulled himself up off the floor and limped forward. His jaw was crooked from where Simon had already punched him in the face, and two of his teeth were mixed in with the glass somewhere on the floor.
“That’s it, kid,” he growled, pacing forward. “Now you pay.”
Simon froze perfectly still, every muscle poised like a predator waiting for his prey. His eyes followed every movement like it was in slow motion as the man raised up his massive hand, curling each finger into a fist before launching it through the air.
There was an audible gasp as Simon caught it in his hand.
The size difference between them alone was staggering. Then there was the age difference. Then the fact that Abel was known around those parts as a recently retired bodybuilder.
No matter how many ways they looked at it, what the bar was seeing just didn’t make sense.
Simon’s lips twitched up in a smile as his fingers closed around the man’s fist. Abel’s eyes grew wide with shock as his hand froze in the air, then was slowly forced backwards. His arm began to buckle, and the next second he fell to his knees, gasping in pain.
Simon stood above him. Merciless. Heartless. A cruel smile twisting his face.
Then, although the fight was clearly done, he decided to teach one last lesson. His fingers clamped together with a sickening crunch, and Abel’s hand shattered in his own.
A gut-wrenching cry filled the room, but Simon barely had time to enjoy it. The very next second, he was being tackled by someone strong. Someone strong enough to move him.
“I’m sorry,” Tristan panted to the bartender. The man stared back at him in shock as he dragged Simon out into the cold. “I’m so sorry.”
The second the door closed behind them, it was like the entire world melted away. All that was left were the two of them, bleeding and breathless, glaring at each other in the rain.
Simon burst out laughing. What a glorious night!
“What the hell was that?!” Tristan yelled, killing Simon’s bubble of joy. “Why did you have to do that?!”
“Me?!” Simon threw an exasperated hand into the air, scattering dots of crimson blood on the ground between them. “You were the one who started it. I was only trying to protect you!”
It sounded like a reasonable defense, but both of them knew it wasn’t true. Both of them had heard the laughter. Both of them had understood the look in Simon’s eyes.
“You wanted to protect me?” Tristan panted, his face pale in the darkness. “Stop doing these things, Simon. You scare me...sometimes. You scare the hell out of me.”
It was a confession neither one of them had seen coming. One that cut right to Simon’s core. But the confessions were just getting started. One snowballing into another.
“I can’t...I can’t keep going like this.” Tristan ran his fingers back up through his hair, inadvertently smearing his forehead with a streak of blood. “She was right...I can’t do this.”
Simon’s eyes shot up sharply, and he cocked his head. “Mary? Are you talking about Mary?”
Tristan sank down into a sudden crouch, bringing both hands up to his face, still shaking from the aftershocks of the fight. “Every time I leave, I come back broken. She’s right.”
A wave a genuine fear rippled through Simon, setting his teeth on edge and chilling him down all in the same instant. He paced two steps forward, and roughly jerked Tristan to his feet.
“She’s not right. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about,” he spat. “This is who you are, Tristan. That, back in the bar, that’s who we are. It’s what we are. Mary can’t possibly understand any of that, and you can’t go uprooting your entire life for your damn girlfriend.”
Tristan bowed his head, his shoulders trembling with each breath.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” he said softly.
Simon paused a moment, all his comebacks freezing on his tongue. He took a full second to consider it, but the words still didn’t compute. “What...what does that even mean?” he finally asked. “Did you two break up?”
A part of him almost wished they had. He wanted Tristan to be happy, sure. That being said, he wanted his best friend back even more.
But Tristan shook his head, his eyes locked on the ground. “No, we didn’t break up.”
His voice was no more than a whisper.
“We got married.”
Chapter 8
NEITHER OF THEM BLINKED. Or talked. Or even moved.
An automatic sarcastic smile lit Simon’s face, but it faded the longer he stared at Tristan. It was replaced instead with a look of sheer confusion.
“You...got married?”
The words were simple enough, but when strung together in that order they made no sense. He shook his head and tried again.
“To Mary? You...married Mary?”
Tristan pulled in a deep breath. “Yes.”
There was a pause.
“Are you trying to make a pun here, or are you actually telling me—”
“We got married, Simon.”
The air between the boys abruptly thickened with the weight of the confession. For his part, Simon was merely stunned. He had no idea how to react. No idea what to do. Or even say. To be honest, he kept waiting for Tristan to retract it. For him to blame it on the liquor, or simply laugh it off like it was the world’s best joke.
But Tristan did none of those things. Nor did he look like saying the words aloud had done him the slightest bit of good. Quite the contrary. He was wrecked. It was like a door had opened. A secret compartment that
had been between them for months. Driving an invisible wedge even though only one of them knew it was there. Now that it was open, Tristan couldn’t stop the rest.
“That’s not all...”
A wild look came over his face. The same kind of look that Simon got when he had done something he shouldn’t. When he was about to confess it to Tristan.
For a second, Tristan’s courage wavered. The words that had been building in his chest died in his throat with a belated shiver. Then he looked up into Simon’s eyes. “I’ve—We’ve got a nine-month-old baby.”
The night around them was dead quiet. Like all the sound had been sucked into the void.
A kid?
It was impossible. It was unimaginable. But Simon somehow knew it was true.
In a strange way he almost wasn’t surprised. It explained everything. The sleep loss. The absences. Spending every second possible with Mary. Right down to that strange orange stain that had ruined Tristan’s shirt.
The guy was a new dad. Shit like that happened. Shit literally happened.
That being said... it didn’t explain why Simon was hearing about it for the first time now. He wanted to be mad. Why hadn’t Tristan told him sooner? Why hadn’t he been invited to the wedding? Shouldn’t he have been Tristan’s best man? What about a stag night out?
When the silence had gone on so long it threatened to crush them both, he asked the only question that mattered. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Damn it Simon!” Tristan threw up his hands and stormed away, circling back after a few steps with a look of panicked fury in his eyes. “Of course that’s your first question!”
“What is that supposed to—”
“Why do you think I didn’t tell you?!”
Simon’s eyes flashed with equal rage. “That’s a damn good question, Tris! Why the hell didn’t you tell me?! I’m supposed to be your best friend! How could you not—”
“What? Talk to you?!” Tristan demanded. “How the hell could I talk to you, when every time I tried you spouted off with one of your damn theories!”
A charged silence fell between them, filled their panting breaths.
Tristan was pacing manically back and forth, looking like the world was about to end, but Simon had remained very still. He watched his friend with silent, glittering eyes, and a sudden connection was made.
“It’s a boy, isn’t it?” he asked quietly. “You have a son.”
There was a hitch in Tristan’s step, and his eyes fixed painfully on the ground. Simon continued on softly, sure that he was right.
“You wouldn’t be so upset otherwise. You would have told me.” This time he paused himself, thinking over the ramifications of such a tiny new addition to the world. “You have a son, and he’s going to carry on your ink. It’s in his blood. Nothing you can do.”
“Simon, stop—”
“And Mary is never going to know. And when he wakes up on his sixteenth birthday, his entire world is going to change. The entire cycle is just going to repeat itself.”
“I said stop it! You don’t—”
“And you have to realize...that it’s ALRIGHT, Tristan!” Simon’s voice echoed in the cold night. Harsh, but comforting nonetheless. “It’s done. You have the kid already, nothing you can do to change that now. What you need to do now is to stop freaking out and come to terms! It’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s nothing to try to hide away!”
Tristan’s eyes flashed up, alight with an emotion Simon didn’t understand.
“Is that what you think this is? You think I’m ashamed of my son?”
Simon clenched his jaw. “I don’t know why else you would have kept it from me. I’m your partner—”
“I didn’t need my partner; I needed my friend, Simon!” Tristan’s whole body was shaking now, beyond his control. “Not this...this thing you turn into sometimes.”
Each word hit like cannon fire, and that invisible wedge they kept buried between them was suddenly clear. It was as if all their problems—dating back to Guilder and the creation of the HOC—had been thrust into the light. Those essential differences that made them fundamentally different men were glaringly out in the open.
The only difference was that they weren’t schoolboys anymore. They were playing in the big leagues now. And Simon had his eyes on leagues even bigger still.
“Ask me his name.”
Simon forced his eyes up as Tristan’s quiet voice broke through the silence.
“What?”
They shared a long look between them.
“Ask me my son’s name.”
Simon’s shoulders wilted with an inaudible sigh. Then he looked at his friend’s broken posture, standing on the edge of a cliff, and he, too, decided to go out on a limb. “It’s not Simon, is it?”
One of the best things about Tristan was that, no matter the circumstances, he could always find a reason to laugh. It was a lightness that had saved them on more than one occasion. A bright effervescence that Simon admired, while admitting it was something he could never understand.
He was counting on it now.
Sure enough there was a beat of silence, then Tristan’s lips twitched up in a tired smile. All the walls he’d built to fence himself in came tumbling down as he moved a few steps away and collapsed on a nearby park bench. “It’s not bloody Simon,” he laughed.
A second later, Simon joined him.
“It’s Devon.”
Simon glanced at him from the corner of his eye. He liked it. Simple. Strong. When Tristan saw him watching, he shrugged indifferently.
“It’s not bad. I probably would have gone with Simon myself, but...” he trailed off as Tristan laughed wearily into his hands.
Sitting on a darkened street corner in the middle of Budapest, it was suddenly easy to see how truly exhausted his friend was. The old Tristan would have gone seventeen rounds with Simon on every little detail. Overanalyzing and over-discussing every single thing until there was no room left for negotiation.
But the man sitting beside Simon was tired. Tired, and frightened, and panicked beyond the point of speech. He didn’t need a lecture. He didn’t need a speech. He needed a friend.
With more than a little hesitation, Simon reached out and put his hand on Tristan’s back. He patted it gently, feeling his friend’s frantic breaths as his mind whirled away in thought.
It was strange. Even with all the experiments Simon had done with Cromfield in the catacombs beneath the church, even with all the different combinations of ink the two of them had mixed together to try...Simon had never once considered having a child of his own.
It wasn’t something he was actively avoiding; it was honestly just something that, for whatever reason, had never crossed his mind. Perhaps it was because he had no idea how Beth would react to such a thing, now that she understood the rules of their secret world. Perhaps it was because his compartmentalization was so great he couldn’t imagine his own offspring as experiments.
But whatever the reasons had been in the past...Simon found himself suddenly very interested in what kind of ink a child of his and Beth’s would get.
It would be a boy, obviously. One who could carry on the tatù. And what a tatù it would be!
Never before had the world seen such powerful ink as his and Beth’s. Everyone was always saying it. From the boys at school, to Jason, all the way up to Masters himself. That warlock on his arm represented nothing but unbridled potential. And the sun on her back was pure radiant strength. It was almost impossible to imagine anything that could combine such power.
There was a broken sigh under Simon’s hand, and he glanced back down at Tristan. His eyes were red, but he wasn’t crying. His hair dripped blood and rainwater into his face.
As much as Simon would have been thrilled with the possibility for himself, his heart went out to Tristan. Out of all the people he’d met since entering the world of tatùs, Tristan was the most fiercely protective of the rights of an inked child. He remembered bei
ng surprised by the passion with which he spoke about it. Caught off guard by the rush of emotions that followed.
Like so many others, Tristan’s life may have started the day he got his tatù, but in a way it ended as well. His gift took away his family. His home. Each one unable to withstand the weight of the secret thrust upon its shoulders.
And now he was placing that same weight on a child. His child.
In Tristan’s mind...there couldn’t have been anything more terrible.
“It’s okay...you’re okay...” he murmured as Tristan started to silently cry.
He kept his eyes graciously on the street, but his hand kept rubbing comforting circles on his friend’s back. A surge of emotion was coursing through him—a feeling of vengeance.
A vengeance so powerful he had never felt the likes of it before.
This was not Tristan’s fault. He should not be sitting there, weeping on a park bench, terrified as to what he was going to have to tell his son. Terrified as to what that son would then have to tell his mother. Terrified as to what would happen next.
No. This was not Tristan’s fault. But there was an obvious blame.
Simon gritted his teeth as he pictured the iron gates of Guilder. The immaculate training room of the Privy Council. The polished floorboards hidden just below.
This was their fault. Their mess. Their blame.
Their secret to be kept.
That protective anger coursed again through his veins, and he struggled to find it a target.
It would not be enough simply to uproot the evil inherent in the Privy Council itself; he would have to create a new system altogether. A new organization of pure power—one that would never limit itself to hide in the daylight. One that would walk openly, without fear.
The HOC had been a good start, but the HOC faded out when he left Guilder. Professor Lanford still came to see him sometimes. In fact, he got the feeling that Lanford would do just about whatever Simon told him to...
But there were other things that had to be put in place first. Other people who needed his attention. Some more than others...
“It’s been killing me—not telling you,” Tristan breathed, face in his hands. “It’s been absolutely killing me.”