by A. R. Moler
Dale slid lower. He licked across the leaking tip of Riadh’s prick.
“So good,” Riadh murmured.
Dale nuzzled against Riadh’s balls, licked a finger, and teased at the opening behind. His own body was gradually getting with the program and he paused a moment to jack himself a few times.
“I would be happy to do that for you,” Riadh offered, eyes heavy lidded, pupils blown wide.
“How ‘bout you grab the slick?” Dale gestured toward the nightstand.
Riadh obligingly handed him the tube. Dale squirted a fair amount out and fingered his lover until Riadh was squirming and moaning on the bed. There had been a condom discussion the last time they’d done this, about how Riadh’s supernatural existence made him unable to carry or transmit disease. After a lifetime of habit that he’d only ever broken with Colin, Dale thought about doing it again. The risk was somewhere between low and non-existent, right? He hesitated only another few seconds before he buried himself into the tight slick heat of Riadh’s body, and thinking pretty much stopped. Dale groaned. The feeling was intense and delicious. He rocked back a little and thrust in again, Riadh’s knees hooked over Dale’s shoulders.
“More.” Riadh begged.
Dale thrust hard and measured, wanting the toe-curling pleasure to last and already feeling the build toward climax. He looked down into Riadh’s eyes.
Riadh smiled. His eyes were heavy lidded, pupils blown. “Close.”
Dale nipped the inside of Riadh’s thigh with his teeth and then licked the same spot. The sound that drew from Riadh was a breathy moan and Dale felt Riadh’s body tighten as spurts of semen jetted up Riadh’s belly. The warm clench of muscles tipped Dale over his own edge and he came inside his lover. Pleasure spiked through him and washed twinkling grayness across his vision.
Gasping, pulse racing, he eased out and lay down beside Riadh, an arm curled around Riadh’s body.
* * * *
Riadh rolled toward Dale and dragged his fingertips along Dale’s temple. The relaxed, blissful set of Dale’s features flooded Riadh with contentment. There had been few masters he had cared for the way he cared for this one. “That was amazingly good,” he murmured.
“From my end, too.” Dale nibbled at the side of Riadh’s thumb. “I wasn’t sure if…”
“Even if we hadn’t done this, any time I spend touching you is well spent.” He snuggled closer against Dale’s body. “That said…I do have to recharge.”
“Kiss me before you get in the box.”
“Absolutely.” He indulged in a long sensuous kiss with Dale before climbing out of bed. He could have simply discorporated while he was still curled around Dale, but he had a suspicion that would create an uncomfortable sensation for Dale. Standing beside the bed, he gave Dale a smile and let his form dissolve to the smoky swirl that returned him to the box.
* * * *
Dale stared at the ceiling above the bed for a while. Wouldn’t it be nice if Riadh didn’t have to spend parts of many days in the damn box? Some nights Riadh lingered, holding Dale as he slept, but depending on what he did during the day, it couldn’t be every night.
On the other hand, getting shot hadn’t killed Riadh. Well, not permanently anyway. There was that benefit. Without Riadh’s help, dealing with Aunt Mildred’s eclectic mess of magical items and a lifetime of clutter would be a hell of a lot more difficult, too.
The phone rang. Dale heard it and spent a good minute trying to find where he’d tossed it. He managed to grab it off the counter in the bathroom right before it flipped over to voice mail.
“Hey, Mom.”
“How’s the house cleaning coming, dear?” Dale’s mother asked.
“Not bad. I’ve still got quite a way to go. I’ve been selling off some of her extra stuff a little at a time.”
“Antiques? I know she collected some very odd things.”
“You have no idea,” Dale was tempted to break into laughter. “But it’s fine, even interesting at times. Aunt Mildred’s assistant has been invaluable.”
“Assistant? Do you mean that nice foreign exchange student that did her yard work? I met him once.”
“His name is Riadh. He did a lot of miscellaneous jobs for her.” Lord that was an understatement and a half.
“You sound fond of him.”
“I am.”
“Does that mean you’re dating him?”
“I’ve…yes, sort of.” Dale didn’t want to get into details. Jesus, the embarrassment.
“He seemed like a nice enough boy when I met him.”
“When you come home at Christmas, maybe you should bring him along.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Take care, honey. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Chapter 2
How come putting necromancer into the search engine produced nothing but websites about gaming and bad movies? Dale rested his forehead against his palm. He was hoping for hints about what he had done to the hummingbird. It seemed more and more like Summer was going to be the only one who had a clue. But would she tell him? After her cryptic comment about “time will tell,” he suspected she would only reveal whatever it was she knew, when she thought he was ready. On the other hand, maybe it was all about her whims. Your answers depend on the mood swings of a dragon. Maybe the only solace in that was the probability that she did actually know the answers.
He glanced at his watch. Riadh had been in the box close to twelve hours. That should be more than enough to fully charge his magic. Dale went to the bedroom and gently lifted the lid on the shoebox. Blue-gray smoke swirled up out of the container and formed into Riadh, a step in front of Dale. Today, Riadh was wearing a long sleeved green t-shirt and a battered pair of jeans, no shoes. He seldom ever wore shoes.
“Back up to speed?” Dale asked.
“Yes.”
“I need a hand with a batch of Aunt Mildred’s business records. There’s boxes of client itineraries, and travel arrangements. I’d just dump it all into recycling except when I started looking through it, I found names and phone numbers and credit card information.”
“Do you want me to destroy it?”
“Magically?”
“If you like.”
“But that would leave you depleted again wouldn’t it?” Dale said.
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll use the shredder. If the boxes have been in the house for years, it’s not like it’s going to make a serious difference if it takes us days to destroy it.” He didn’t want to admit that he wanted Riadh’s company as much as was feasible. God, that made him feel brittle and needy.
Riadh cupped his hand along the side of Dale’s face. “You didn’t sleep well.”
“Average.”
“Which translates to poorly, accompanied by nightmares and prowling the house in the middle of the night.”
Dale stared at the floor, hands shoved in his pockets. “Kind of.” Dr. Milton would be proud of him. He hadn’t denied the problems or lost his temper.
Riadh slid his arms around Dale and kissed him. “Let’s get shredding then.”
They spent the next few hours digging files out of banker boxes. Along the way they found some ancient hardware. Well maybe ancient was stretching the point. An external 5 ¼” floppy drive was jammed in with zip disks and cassette tapes.
“Wouldn’t it have made more sense to put the floppy drive in with the floppy disks?” Dale commented. “Oh, here’s instructions on how to sync your Handspring PDA with Windows 3.1. This is apparently where old tech has gone to die. Why didn’t she ditch this stuff when she upgraded?”
“Look around you. Was she the type to discard anything?”
“Ok, point taken.”
Later in the day, as Riadh was toting some bags of shredded documents out to the garbage bins outside the house, curiosity got the better of Dale. He wanted a closer look at the “pickled demons.” He went down into the basement and opened the cupboard that held the large collection o
f filled jars. Running his finger along the top of several different ones, he squinted at the contents. That one looks like pickles. That one might be green beans. Was the next one tomatoes or peaches? The color was so weird, he couldn’t tell. Then he came to one that “felt” completely weird to the touch. It didn’t really have the “tingle” that he was coming to associate with magically imbued items, but it did have a sensation. What would he call it? Sluggish? Simmering? With an undertone of…dark? Oh, hell that just made no sense. He did pick up the jar though, and carried it toward the center of the basement where the lighting was better. It had a reddish hue and if he sloshed the contents a little he thought he could make out a shape. Assuming the top was a head and the lower part a body…just exactly how many legs did that thing have? It was stretching the point to call them legs. If a squid and Lhasa Apso had a love child, except there wasn’t fur. Staring at the weird blobby mass in the jar, Dale suddenly thought he saw it blink. Wah! He flinched and promptly dropped the jar. It shattered on the concrete floor, spraying pinkish liquid and glass. Shit. The semi gelatinous mass that had been contained…wiggled. What the fuck? Weren’t they supposed to be dead? Wasn’t that what pickled meant? It made a jiggly flop with several appendages. Dale jumped back. Should he stomp on it? Gather it up and throw it away?
He resorted to shouting for Riadh. “Riadh! Oh shit, I need help. Riadh!”
He must’ve sounded panicked enough that Riadh popped into existence a single step in front of Dale.
“Are you okay?” Riadh sounded concerned.
“I, uh, I dropped a…demon.” Dale pointed to the floor.
“Oh.”
“What do I do with it?”
Riadh held out his hands. A mop and a very large dustpan popped into existence. He nudged the gelatinous mass into the dustpan with the mop. “I’ll go put it in the compost pile out back. Just, a word of warning, though. If we have to dispose of another one, it’s not a particularly good idea to place more than one in about ten square yards of space.”
“Why?”
“It could attract…things you aren’t equipped to deal with.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“An adult demon or lesser elder god.”
Dale stood there blinking. “Er, um, what exactly was Aunt Mildred planning on doing with them?”
“Selling them.”
“So does that mean the people buying them were planning on summoning demons?”
“Perhaps. They can also be used for certain levels of compulsion spells and curses.” Riadh started walking in the direction of the stairs, carrying the dustpan full of goo.
Dale followed him, once again uncertain how he felt about some of the items that his aunt had traded in. “Did my aunt ever refuse to sell to someone? I mean if she thought they were going to do something evil or destructive?”
“She…didn’t ask a lot of questions.”
“That feels creepy and yet I don’t have a solution to how she would reliably tell what people wanted supplies for.”
* * * *
Out in the backyard, Riadh dumped the pickled demon blob into the compost pile, grabbed the shovel leaning against the fence, and neatly chopped it into pieces. It would have been easier just to vaporize the mess but Riadh understood Dale’s desire to have him available and outside his box for as long as possible.
“Thanks,” Dale said. “Did Aunt Mildred have you do things like this? Or was she generally less of a fuck up than I am?”
Riadh gave him a half smile. “It varied. Sometimes she’d leave me in the box for a few weeks at a time. And you are not a fuck up. You’re new to all this.” He set the shovel down and pulled Dale against him. Curling a hand behind Dale’s neck, Riadh pulled him into a long slow kiss. He hadn’t cared this deeply for a master in centuries, possibly ever. “Magic is never as black and white as you would like it to be.”
“Kind of like war.”
“Just a bit.”
He suspected Dale was thinking of the partner he’d lost. “You get to make the choices. If there are people you don’t want to sell to, because you don’t like what they claim they’re using items for, so be it.”
That drew a smile from Dale. “I might decide to get you to help me destroy the rest of the pickled demon collection.”
“Anything you want.”
“That sounds both tempting and naughty at the same time.”
“As I said, anything you want.” Riadh placed a fingertip on Dale’s lips. “I want you to be the last master I ever have. At some point in the future, if you ever decide you’re done, I want you to destroy the box.”
“Riadh! No! I won’t kill you.”
“You’re going to age. Eventually you will die. I don’t want to be traded to one of your descendants or sold. I want my existence to end with you.”
“Riadh, please, don’t ask that.”
“You would rather I chanced being owned again by one who tortured me to unconsciousness and then recharged me in my container so he could do it all over again? Been there, done that.”
“No…God…Just…I mean Aunt Mildred was kind wasn’t she, and there had to have been others.”
“Being kind is not the same as being treated like, well, being treated like a human. You essentially treat me as if I had an independent existence.”
Dale took hold of Riadh’s hand. “I love you. The thought of…Riadh, I already lost one person I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. I don’t want to think about losing you.”
“Consider how that sounds from my end. I could exist for millennia, missing you, remembering what I had lost.”
“I’ll think about it, but I won’t make you a promise, not right now.”
Chapter 3
Henning watched Edinger pull his car out of the driveway. He was alone in the car and Henning made the careful presumption that the djinn was still in the house. Breaking in shouldn’t be too difficult. Archimedes had provided Henning with several magical charms for neutralizing booby traps. A midnight scout of the house a few nights ago hadn’t revealed any wiring that appeared to be an alarm system.
The locks to the back door took less than five minutes to pick. No alarm sounded but Henning felt a distinct resistance to being able to step through the now open door. Ah, that implied magical warding. He took a walnut from his pocket. Why the hell Archimedes used a walnut for the charm baffled Henning but whatever suited that crazy dude’s purposes. Henning cupped the nut in his hand then smashed it against the doorframe. Voila, no more resistance.
He went inside and shut the door. It seemed likely that the cardboard box Edinger had been seen carrying was the container for the djinn. Wasn’t that a lame thing to imprison the djinn in? Henning began searching. He did the main floor first, a quick survey turned up nothing obvious. Upstairs, it took less than ten minutes to spy a box sitting on the dresser. He guessed Edinger wanted the djinn easy to get to.
Henning lifted the lid from the box, because if he arrived back at Archimedes office with the wrong box, there’d be hell to pay.
A funnel of blue-gray smoke emerged from the box and materialized in the form of a dark-haired man in jeans.
“Oh…hell,” the djinn whispered.
“Not who you were expecting apparently. Get back in the box,” Henning ordered. The djinn dissolved and spiraled back into the box. Henning hastily put the lid back on. “Bingo.” He jogged down the stairs and out the back door. No sense in tempting fate by running into Eddinger, who he presumed would come back in the front.
At his car, Henning carefully placed the box in the foot well of the front seat and drove away.
* * * *
Three grocery bags in his hands, Dale went into the kitchen. It would only take a few minutes to put away the frozen items, then he’d go upstairs and let Riadh out. Lately, they’d fallen into a habit of fixing dinner together. Even though Riadh didn’t actually need food or drink, he did often like the tastes and textures.
He walked into the bedroom, going in the direction of the dresser. The box wasn’t there. He cast a hasty look around, double checking the bed. No, no, no, he always put the box back in the same place. Could he have set it elsewhere? Bathroom, hall, another bedroom? Nothing. Panic began to set in. He’d suggested Riadh go back to the box for a partial recharge while Dale went shopping.
Archimedes was the first suspect in Dale’s mind. That self-important ass would never do his own dirty work though. He had to have hired someone. Dale had no idea where Archimedes lived or worked. He didn’t even know the man’s legal name. The one time they had met had been at a restaurant. Neutral territory.
Dale slammed his fist into the wall, devastated by Riadh’s kidnapping. He left a dent in the wall board. How in the hell would Dale find him? Fuck there should have been some way to LoJack Riadh, so he could be traced.
The only resource Dale could think of was Summer.
* * * *
Summer sat on the front porch of her house, smoking. That probably should have involved a cigarette. But it didn’t.
Dale slammed the car into park and leaped out. “I need help. Someone took Riadh.”