by Rhys Ford
There just wasn’t any guarantee that I was going to heal from this.
Ryder brought a bowl of grapes and a package of arare with him, an odd accompaniment to the whiskey, but I probably didn’t have a lot in the refrigerator or cabinets. I didn’t think I had grapes, but Dalia must have dropped them off while I was out. He tore off the plastic wrapper around its neck, cracked open the bottle, and handed it to me.
“You can go home.” I took the bottle and slid my hand down its neck until the edge of my palm rested on its square body. “Thanks for driving.”
“I am going to ignore the insult you just gave me, thinking I would leave you at a time like this,” Ryder murmured as he sat down on the couch next to me.
My first mouthful of whiskey was bitter and harsher than normal. The sour mash wasn’t the top of the line, but it was my go-to when my life felt rocky beneath me. I liked the smokiness of its amber wash, the hint of charcoal beneath its sting. The second swig went down smoother, but my throat was raw from the fire, and the burn went all the way down to my belly.
I was overwhelmed, which seemed so very strange considering I’d been through much worse. My own father periodically skinned me, sometimes even going so far as to debone my torso, and at the moment, that kind of pain seemed preferable to what I was experiencing.
Having Ryder pressed up against me should have been a disturbing, erotic sensation, but not this time. My skin still tightened over my flesh, and there was no question my body knew he was there, but I didn’t want to crawl into him. Leaning against his long, hard form was enough. I needed to feel the life coursing through him, anchoring myself to the world with his every breath and the rustle of his hair against my cheek when he reached for the bottle and took it from me.
He took a sip. Then he gasped and coughed at the strength of the sour mash. He was more of a wine-and-brandy person—elegant alcohols served up in pretty glasses—another sign of how disparate we were. I liked drinking from a bottle, the realness of it, the gritty reminder of days spent on long, unsuccessful runs where there was nothing to do in the evening but drink and talk.
When Ryder passed over the bottle, Newt mewled at him and offered up his nose for Ryder to scratch. I cradled the whiskey in my lap and sat as still as I could while the cat climbed my shoulder and butted Ryder’s jaw when he was finally in reach. Ryder’s soft fingers brushed my neck as he attended to the cat’s needs and worked Newt into a drooling stupor.
After about the seventh or eighth swig from the bottle, the anguish burning in my heart flared as the bright prickles in my brain subsided. It was too early in the day to get drunk, but I didn’t care. I’d never felt more adrift than I did at that moment. Still smarting from the past few days, I’d been blindsided first by Dempsey’s unwillingness to forge on, and then to have Duffy taken… it was just too much.
My tongue loosened, and I leaned my head back and turned it so my cheek rested against the couch and I could stare at Ryder’s pretty mouth.
I really did like his mouth.
I liked a lot of things about him, and I also hated how he affected me, but having him against me made me feel better. There were too many things spinning out of control, and even though I knew I couldn’t have done anything to save Duffy, a part of me wished I’d had a solution of some sort. There were quite a few if-only scenarios going through my head. I’d spoken to her not more than five hours before we drove up to the back of her house, and from what the department captain told us, the fire was started by an incendiary device set to go off hours after it was triggered.
She was dead long before I headed over, and there was nothing I could do to change that. I could feel vengeance and hunt down her killers—I still might—but I wouldn’t stop her from dying, even though I did stop myself from forcing her to live.
That was going to have to be enough. It was all the satisfaction I would get.
Now I was sitting on the couch with a cat I’d rescued from the underbelly of the city and the lordling who sometimes yanked on the leash he put around my neck. But damn me if I didn’t want to spend the night pressed up against him just to feel the warmth of another body on mine.
It really didn’t hurt that I liked his mouth.
“Talk to me, Kai,” Ryder purred along with Newt. “Tell me about Duffy. Tell me about your friend.”
“She was my first, you know?” I mumbled as I held up the surprisingly depleted bottle. I liked how the burnt-gold liquid played with the light and folded over into lighter tones, much like Ryder’s hair. “Well, not my first first, but she showed me it didn’t have to hurt. Hell, she showed me sex didn’t have to be so serious, that you could have fun with it.
“But it wasn’t just sex. I mean, there was a lot more to her than that. Some of the best times I had with her were when we would spend the entire night on her couch watching movies, old ones from before the Merge, and she would teach me how to cook.” I snorted, recalling some of the more outlandish things we’d thrown together. “She was a horrible cook. Anything past the bare basics and we probably would’ve given somebody food poisoning, but Duffy showed me how much better some foods were if they were crispy around the edges—like grilled cheese sandwiches and marshmallows, and peanut butter cookies. Okay, practically every cookie, but mostly peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies. Mostly she taught me how to feel normal and how to laugh.”
“I’m glad she was there for you.” Ryder took the bottle from me, swallowed a long sip, and then gave it back. Newt remained perched between us, half on his shoulder, half on mine. “I would’ve liked to have met her. You told me once that you didn’t sleep with people whose names you knew. Clearly she was an exception.”
“Yeah, that was a lie because you get into my brain.” The bottle went down a little bit more, keeping pace with the increasing numbness of my limbs and tongue. “I just didn’t want to care about anyone I slept with. I mean, I was friends with Duffy, but that was different. She was different. Everyone else was physical.
“I can’t even tell you when we stopped having sex, because it really wasn’t important. It was more about being her friend—her being my friend—than anything else. I love her,” I confessed with a slur I couldn’t shake. “Not like Cari or Sparky, but something else, something I can’t explain.”
“The first woman I had sex with was an older cousin,” Ryder whispered as he ran his thumb over the back of my hand. “It’s common for the Sidhe to initiate sexual relations with a younger man or woman on the edge of adulthood. It’s a very formal, ritualized encounter.”
I snorted and muttered, “Of course the Sidhe would go out of their way to fuck up something as simple as sex.”
“That’s not how it is.” He laughed at me. “Our races are very sensual people, and it’s important to understand what brings pleasure and not only how to ask your partner to be aware of what you like but also to learn how to listen to their needs, whether those are vocal or subliminal. My cousin Chela was my initiator into the pleasures of the body, and I have an immense fondness for her memory. There is nothing like the first of so many things, moments you can only experience once, and if someone you like or love brings you that moment, you cannot help but equate their presence in your life with that pleasure—much like you equate Jonas with your first taste of chocolate. He will forever be associated with that mind-opening experience.”
“Yeah, there’s not much difference between sex and chocolate,” I agreed. “Do you see your cousin? Chela?”
“No.” His voice dropped, and his expression was somber. “She was one of the first casualties in the war. We lost her when humans attacked the Sidhe’s first contingent of envoys to the governmental hub of San Francisco. They were unarmed and defenseless, bringing a message of peace that no one was willing to listen to until too many died. Her insistence that we could live harmoniously with one another is what drives me. Up until that point—up until the day she died—I sat with Sebac’s philosophy that humans and the Unsidhe were little more
than animals who could talk.
“I’d planned on marrying her. Or at least I wasn’t immune to the idea, but her schism from set Sidhe beliefs was difficult for me to swallow.” He wistfully smiled at me. “She was older than I was by a thousand years, but at the time, I believed she was thinking like a child. After they brought her body back, I finally understood that she’d expected her death—anticipated it—and was still willing to die so our people could live. That was the beginning of my break from Sebac and my awakening to the realities of this world.”
I handed him the bottle. He seemed to need it, and I was at the point of not being able to feel my lips.
“I tried to cut the tips of my ears off once.” I chuckled at Ryder’s rueful grimace. “It made sense at the time. I was just learning how to work the job, or at least Dempsey felt like I was big enough to hold a gun and shoot it. So he took me on a contract with a couple of other Stalkers to hunt down a large pack of ainmhi dubh in Arizona.
“On the third night of this trip, one of the guys told Dempsey I would probably get shot on a job one day because people hated my kind, and there was no way I could be a Stalker because I would always side with the monsters… because I was a monster.” I didn’t remember the man’s name or even his face, but his words resonated and stuck with me over the years. “I’d been skinning black dogs for several years by then, so I had my own knives. Dempsey caught me before I sawed my way through the left tip, but I still got a couple of notches there. Never healed. Which is weird because I’ve always healed.”
“I’ve got a theory on that but tell the rest of your story.” Ryder patted my leg. “How does Duffy fit into the story? I assume you met her later.”
“Yeah, a lot later. There was a long time between that guy having to pick his teeth up out of the fire from Dempsey’s punch to when she took me into her bedroom for the first time.” I fingered the triangular piece missing from my ear tip. “She asked me what happened, and I told her about the time I believed I could make myself look more human because I didn’t want to be elfin. And she told me it didn’t matter what I did to my body. It wouldn’t change the person I was inside—that no matter where I went, there I’d be. I couldn’t run from what I was any more than I could run from who I was. And then she made some noises about me being pretty. But by then, I was done talking.”
“Well, you are extremely pretty,” Ryder teased. “And you are the most human of humans I’ve ever met. I like who you are, Kai Gracen. Today you were faced with an impossible decision, brought to you on the heels of wild magic and a bloodline you cannot control, but the choices you made were good ones. You let her go.”
“I don’t know what happened back there any more than I understand what happened in the mountain. I called those ainmhi dubh to me.” The whiskey suddenly tasted like the ash I’d gotten in my mouth while I ran through Duffy’s house. I wasn’t just battling with grief and sorrow. Fear had a hold on me and was digging into recesses of my soul that I thought I could protect, but I was wrong. “I’m going to tell you something, Ryder, and if you speak about it to anyone, I’m going to deny it and then gut you.”
“Anything you say to me is kept between us,” he reassured me, his shoulder pressed into mine, the heat of our bodies warming my cat.
“I don’t know what I’m more afraid of—my father hunting me down to reclaim me or me becoming him without noticing.” The bottle was nearly empty, but there was enough for me to take another short sip. “Today I could see how to keep Duffy’s body going, even though she wasn’t quite there. I knew for just a minute how to fix everything to keep her alive. I promised myself I would work on restoring her soul to her, but that didn’t matter, because I would still have a piece of her. The entire time those thoughts were going through my head, I was getting sicker and sicker. I was torn between restoring her and killing myself for wanting her to exist in that shell. I had to let her go because she was already gone, and I hated myself for making a decision.”
“It was the right one to make,” Ryder whispered. He placed a soft kiss on my temple, and I didn’t pull away. On some level I needed that contact, that affection to quell the disturbances roiling through me. “I promise you this—just like I took up Chela’s cause, I will assume Duffy’s fight. Anyone fleeing the Dusk Court will be welcome in mine, and I will use everything within my power to ensure they make it safely across.”
“Then you better reconsider me getting rid of that cousin of yours, because Kerrick isn’t going to go away.” I drained the bottle when Ryder shook off my offer for the rest of it. “And the last thing San Diego needs is one of Sebac’s puppets leading the Southern Rise Court. If there’s one thing I know for certain, the only elfin worse than my father is your grandmother, and that’s not someone I want in my backyard.”
Ten
“IESU, THIS thing’s ugly.” I walked around the vehicle Sparky and Jason had hauled down from her place up north. “What did you do? Let a rhino fuck an old Jeep?”
“Look, you know what your problem is?” Jason grumbled at me as I inspected the monstrosity he’d backed down the ramp of the flatbed hauler. “You want your cars to be like you—pretty, fast, and can take a beating. That’s just not how shit works, Gracen.”
“Dude, there’s ugly, and then there’s… this.” I rolled my shoulder, trying to work out a kink in my arm. “Convince me that thing can outrun a dragon.”
“It can take a dragon hit.” Sparky spat out a bit of sunflower shell. “And it’ll run for three weeks at full bore without any sunlight, so you won’t have to worry about being underground for too long. Nothing’s shittier than running out of juice when you’ve dropped down a gulch. So shut your yap, Kai.”
Jason sniggered, so I punched him on the arm and went to inspect the latest of Sparky’s hybrids.
I owed both of them a hell of a lot. Sparky was one of the few people Dempsey hadn’t driven off with his winning, toxic personality, and she’d done me right by spending a few long, excruciating days removing all of the iron bars and geegaws from my back. She understood me from the moment she almost ran me over to right now as I nitpicked my way through one of the rugged creations she built up at Sparky’s Landing, a refueling and storage depot on the edge of Pendle’s boundary. I stored the Mustang there in preparation for my runs through the lava fields. Rebuilding it took time, so parking it in the warehouse meant I could work on it when I had a couple of hours.
Not being stupid, I still paid Sparky to hold my storage bay, which was a prime enclosed spot with cooled air and access to a cell-fueling port.
They were an odd pair, but at the heart of their relationship was a love for all things mechanical. Sparky was Dempsey’s age, maybe even older, and like the old man, her rawboned whipcord body had seen its share of bumps and bruises. Weathered from sun exposure, her nut-brown skin was wrinkled around her sharp eyes and thin lips, and her silvery-white long pixie cut framed her narrow, hard-boned face. Dressed in slightly grimy overalls and chewing through a handful of sunflower seeds, Sparky looked nothing like anyone would expect an energy-conversion engineer to look, but at her heart, she was a motor head, and tinkering with engines was her greatest love.
Jason was her brawny, shaved-pated bruiser of an apprentice and one of the best tattoo artists I’d ever met. He’d laid down more than a bit of the ink I had on my body, rendering gorgeous dragons across my hips and thighs, but like Sparky, his true loves were a Frankenstein rough-bodied hauler, powerful engines, and the human woman who used to break my heart every time she smiled—Dalia Tanaka.
I didn’t begrudge their relationship. Hell, I encouraged it. Dalia and I had flirted with the possibility of being more than close friends, but the reality of a human-elfin relationship was a painful one, and I’d gladly stepped aside to give Jason room to woo her. Dalia deserved a happiness I could never bring her. Children, Sunday picnics, and romantic evenings on important days were things a Stalker wouldn’t deliver on a consistent basis, and Dalia couldn’t spend
her lifetime watching time eat away at her body while I remained young.
“It’d be unnatural,” Sparky scolded me when I told her of my crush a few years ago. “A woman might not want a house, kids, and sunsets, but she does want someone to grow old with. Besides, you think anyone wants to sit at home for weeks on end wondering if you’ve left them for someone else or didn’t come back because death got you on a run and there was no one to bring back the news you’d lost your damned head? Walk away from all of that, boy. Girl’s too good of a person to spend her life in that kind of pain.”
I liked Jason. A lot. He was the kind of solid guy Dalia deserved, and he adored the hell out of her. I couldn’t ask for a better partner for one of my best friends, and she loved him to the point of being sickeningly sweet. It was hard sometimes not to hate them both, seeing them move on with something I’d never have—which only emphasized Sparky’s point.
“Do you want it or not?” Sparky elbowed me in the ribs and chortled under her breath when I winced. “Sorry. Forgot about the hits I heard you took the other day. Shit, that reminds me, Jase. We’ve got to stop over at Jonas’s place on the way back. He’s got some smoked cuttlefish for us. Says it might stink like angry pissed-off cat, but it tastes good enough.”
“Funny,” I growled back at her. “Why don’t you show me what this thing can do? You know what happened the last time I pushed a button you didn’t tell me about.”
“Shit, I drive by that crater every time I make a run up to Rainbow. Almost lost a tire to it the other day,” Jason groaned. “I want to put a sign up that says ‘Kai Gracen is an asshole for making this.’”
“Mark the buttons.” I shrugged and took a few short strides toward the monstrosity that squatted in front of my driveway. “And always tell me when one drops ten concussion grenades.”