As Nat held Chaz, Chaz knew they were in love. The night before, when Chaz was given the good news about leaving, they’d fucked like they’d both been given a gift. When Chaz fed off of Nat, it had been the best postorgasm bliss he’d ever experienced. Nat would never turn from Chaz’s blood, but there was a special connection they shared through that intimate act. But while Chaz would walk through the door after this strange birthday party a free man, Nat would stay behind, labeled a firestarter and an arsonist.
“There’s always probation,” Nat had said the night before after Chaz had gorged himself from his body. “I could get out on good behavior, especially when you’re not around.”
“I’ll visit.”
“That’ll just make me mad again,” Nat said, laughing. He soon grew serious. “I’ll get out. I have to get out.”
“You will. I believe in that.”
Chaz thought of those words again as he stood over his large birthday cake. It took up nearly half the table and would feed the entire program. Chaz wasn’t sure if he could even eat any of this without getting sick from the sugar or excitement. He had to get used to eating in public, though. Ever since his forms had declared him normal, he’d been given dinner like clockwork.
The crowd started to sing “Happy Birthday.” It was so strange to hear—Chaz’s birthday was actually in January not in the summer when he was being released—but the song still held some kind of hope inside. As they neared the end, Nat squeezed his hand. Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go seemed to echo in his eyes. Chaz loved him with all his heart, but he could only think I have to, I have to, I have to.
“Go on,” Gretchen, a counselor, said. “Blow out your candles. Make a wish.”
Chaz didn’t have to think long before he knew exactly what he wanted. Nat will get probation. He blew out his candles and was shocked when all of them went out on the first try. The smell of smoke mixed with the scent of birthday cake.
“You got it,” Gretchen declared. “Whatever you want.”
The party was easier after that. Chaz ate way too much cake and then grabbed Nat to sit on his lap. The two of them talked and made out until the nurses told them to stop, and then Chaz was ushered out the door by lights-out. Given a bus ticket and told to go.
By the time Chaz got to the bus, Atticus was there. And the rest of the horrible plan had come out around his snide smile. Nat would get probation within the next week and Chaz would appear on Divine Interventions’ doorstep as his guardian.
“You can do that now, because you’re normal,” Atticus reminded Chaz. “You’re normal so you can do whatever you want. Your record is sealed. I can even give you a new name and a new career. Anything you want. A glamour will protect your looks, so even if someone thinks they recognize you, there’s a spell that will cast just enough difference that they’ll doubt themselves. And your debt—poof. Gone.”
Chaz’s stomach sank. He needed that. He needed all of that. And so he’d done the worst thing imaginable and sold out Nat. When the next week rolled around and Nat was waiting on the doorstep of Divine Interventions, Chaz was there to pick him up. Nat cried with relief, saying it was a miracle. Chaz drove him away in the brand-new car Atticus had gotten him, fucked Nat in the backseat, and let him fall asleep. By the time Nat woke up, Chaz was gone and Atticus had him again.
A week passed before Chaz became Chip MacDonald and enlisted in the police force. But it was a week filled with dead cigarettes as he smoked in shitty motel rooms and blue diners, hating himself for what he’d done. Everything from that point on, being Chip MacDonald and cleaning up Toronto’s streets, was done out of guilt.
As Chaz awoke, the tinge of his old life and regret came up inside of him like a wave of sickness. He scrambled across his bed and reached for some kind of bucket he could throw up in. He heaved and heaved, but nothing came out. He blinked a couple times, trying to reorient himself. He wasn’t twenty-five anymore, but thirty-three. He was in Toronto, in his shitty apartment in Little Jamaica, and in bed.
But Chaz still smelled cake. Not vanilla or the terrible coconut cake from the police party, but… red velvet. The kind he and Nat had gotten at a diner at the side of the road when he was free, so they could celebrate his birthday from the program too.
“More like unbirthday,” Nat had said. “They try to make me celebrate each day they’d taken away from me and call it healing. But now, at least, we get to pick better cake.”
Chaz shook his head, trying to push the memory of Nat away. His entire body thundered in pain. The pain turned his brain to mush. He sat up on his bed and rubbed his hands over his face. He opened the drawer to his nightstand and saw the gun, his cigarettes, and condoms. Keeping the gun with him, Chaz gingerly got up from the bed. His side hurt as he walked and so did his arm. The big bruise on his wrist made him queasy, but he couldn’t pay attention to it right now. He walked to his bedroom window and looked out. Rain pelted it, thick and heavy. His car was in the front, but he had no memory of driving it home.
When he heard the humming of an opera in the kitchen, the pieces of the night came back to him slowly. Sully. Explosion. That had been what knocked him out. Not the anguish over Nat and his death, but that was still there too. That was something he was always going to have to live with.
Chaz walked out of his bedroom and to the kitchen, moving toward the smell of vanilla bean and red velvet cake. Sully swayed from side to side as he worked, his dark hair tucked behind his ears. He wore a white T-shirt that was threadbare, along with his jeans, and iPod headphones in his ears. He’d just taken a cake pan out of the oven and set it down to cool.
“Oh wow,” Chaz said. “It wasn’t a dream.”
“Shit! You scared the daylights out of me.” Sully hung the iPod headphones around his neck and tilted his head to take in Chaz. Chaz realized then that he was only in his boxers and that his body was still covered with small marks. Recognition of his own limbs and corporeality came over Chaz like a wave.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t hang out here.”
“Hey, no, it’s fine. It’s your place. Walk around naked for all I care. The gun’s throwing me off a little, though.”
“Shoot. Sorry.” Chaz put it in a drawer and shut it tight.
“Thanks.” An alarm sounded on Sully’s phone, and he laughed. “Well, that was my alarm to wake you up, anyway. Sit on the chair. You don’t have a couch or I’d tell you to go there.”
Chaz gestured to his set of chairs lined with blankets in the living room, about to say that counted as a couch since it was facing his TV, but he didn’t bother. He sat on a chair Sully pulled into the kitchen. The hard surface against his spine made it ache. Sully seemed to sense each flinch and he left the room, coming back seconds later with more pills. Chaz swallowed them without a word.
“I know you heal faster than average,” Sully said, “but that arm looks horrible and if you don’t go to an ER for X-rays, I’m going to demand you at least wrap it up or let me feel it.”
“Feel it.”
Sully huffed, but he took a step closer. His hands were soft and the smell of vanilla grew even stronger as he massaged the bruised area on Chaz’s wrist. Though it hurt, it wasn’t a searing pain.
“Not broken, just sprained pretty bad,” Sully said. “Thank God or whoever the hell watches over people like us.”
“I know. I’m fine.”
“I’m still wrapping it in something.”
Chaz didn’t argue. This time, Sully came back with a small first aid kit that looked brand-new. Everything else in the kitchen looked new as well, right down to the pan and bowls that were now marked with red velvet cake mix.
“Wait,” Chaz said, spotting the deflated Betty Crocker box. “There’s a boxed version of red velvet cake mix now?”
“Oh yeah. You don’t expect me to be a culinary expert, huh? Says the guy with no food?”
“Says the person with a first aid certification and a random mystery BA and the knowledge of multiple lang
uages? I’ve learned to not underestimate you.”
Sully smiled. “So you do remember some things from last night. How much do you recall? I should have asked you right after you were struck, but I was… scared, truthfully.”
“I’m sorry. I should have never brought you.”
“Shut up. Let me make my own decisions. I’m glad you did, because I learned a lot. I know… your victim’s name.”
“Darcy? We figured that out. I remember it.”
“I know who the other one is too. It’s a long story, but I will tell you. Right now, I want you to take it easy on your hand.”
“Please tell me what you know. I can take it. A lot worse has happened to me.”
“You know, I believe that.” Sully sighed. “Well, Darcy’s full name is Darcy Chariandy. A sex worker. But he was trying to leave the sex trade. He was actually on a safe passage out—not in a trafficked ring.”
“Safe passage? Like Underground Railroad for sex workers?”
“Yes. And Artie, or one of her sisters’ houses, is the end goal.”
Whatever was in the pills made Chaz’s attention sharper, even as it blurred the pain’s edges. “What do you mean?”
“Those arrows are marks of safe passage. So are the saints. They’re not associated with a gang or cartel, but many times, these workers are coming out of gangs or cartels or we use their old hangouts as the first meeting point. So the confusion is understandable. I didn’t know for sure when I was at the crime scene, but I suspected when I saw the Saint Sebastian card. The vamp was helping the water shaper get out. Not keeping him in. I checked with Artie and she confirmed. The water shaper was coming in from the territories. She was going to take care of him, then give him freedom. Same with the Cupid too.”
“Freedom? Artie runs a brothel. How do you know she wasn’t just grabbing people to increase her own operation?”
“Because I know Artie,” Sully said, his voice sharp. “She saved my life, Chaz. You have to trust me on this. Artie isn’t the bad guy here. She’s saving people. She always has been.”
Chaz wanted to argue, but then he was struck. Sully called me Chaz. Not Chip. Chaz remembered being naked with him, hard and wanting, and telling him the name. But Sully was using it now, not as a sex nickname, but as his real name. As if he saw right through him.
“I… I don’t know what to say. You called me Chaz.”
“You told me that was your name.” Sully loaded a new pan with batter and put it in the oven, using buttons Chaz had never seen before. When Sully was done, he sat down at the kitchen table with him. “So tell me, what’s your last name? I doubt it’s MacDonald.”
“It’s not. It’s Solomon.”
“Solomon. Huh. I didn’t expect that.”
“Because I don’t look Jewish? I am. Half. My mom was Jamaican and my dad’s parents were German immigrants. No one really liked to bring up my dad’s faith and his parents’ history, so I always defaulted to my mom’s heritage. Even now. I live in Little Jamaica because I suppose it’s easier.”
“Than what?”
“Telling people.”
“You told me.”
“Yeah, but now I expect you to share the favor.” Chaz smiled, trying to joke. But Sully’s face was serious. He linked hands with Chaz across the table, leaned close, and kissed him. Chaz was so, so glad his mouth wasn’t injured in the blast. His jaw smarted a little, but it didn’t affect kissing Sully. Nothing would, he was sure.
“I was part of a sex-trafficking ring,” Sully said as he pulled away. “Ages ago.”
“How long is ‘ages ago’?”
“Over a decade.”
Chaz’s stomach sunk. “And how old are you now?”
“I turned twenty-seven in July.”
“Oh… shit.” Chaz hated hearing this. He didn’t want to hear it. But Sully’s face was so earnest, and Chaz had asked to know, so he couldn’t turn away.
Sully seemed to sense the recoil in Chaz. “Do you want me to stop talking? I can exist in only the present moment for you.”
Chaz shook his head. Sully only existed in the present moment for people to give them pleasure. To spare them the burden of his past and the precarious nature of his future. Chaz understood the words with a new kind of clarity. Desire only existed in the present moment; it couldn’t extend forward or backward, only from one moment to the next until it was spent. Chaz didn’t want to use Sully that way. Chaz believed they’d stopped using each other like that the moment they agreed to help each other beyond getting off. Reggie. Czech. The crime scene.
And now cake.
“No, tell me. Whatever you want. I’ll listen.”
It took Sully a long time to speak again, but when he did, he sounded as though he was narrating someone else’s life. “So, my parents sucked. I was introduced to the underground world when I was a kid because of them. No one ever believes that your own parents can sell you out, but hey, drugs change people. No one really caught on that anything was happening until I was in junior high, maybe around eleven or twelve, and a counselor asked me about some marks she saw on my legs. I said something suspicious, so we had another appointment. She told me to confess, so I did. The next thing I knew, I was removed from my home. Which was great, right? Except that once in this game, always in this game. I was shuffled off to a foster home and the first time I met the foster dad, I’d already seen him before. In my parents’ house. The system is corrupt.”
“The monster system? I know you’re human but maybe the foster parent—”
“No, that’s the thing. Everyone around me doing these bad things was always human. This was before the supernatural uprising and awareness, before Canada became New Canadiana, and every single talk show wanted to interview famous werewolf Frank Ignacio about his new book. So yeah. When I was a kid, going through all this, I never thought monsters were real outside of metaphors. My counselor had said that if I didn’t confess what was happening to me, then it would follow me around like a monster living under my bed or sitting on my chest. Monsters were… bad thoughts or memories. At the time, it made sense, and I thought she was right. But she was wrong. The worst monsters aren’t metaphors—they aren’t even werewolves or anything like that. It’s always people. Humans with no regard for anyone else.
“But anyway,” Sully said, shifting from impassioned speech to bored reflection in a second. “I was in foster care while my parents were arrested for drug charges. When my foster dad ended up being busted for drugs as well, I was shuffled around. I ended up in a ring. But like—a fancy ring, if that makes sense? They advertised in those magazines. That’s how I know the terms. Because I was still a ward of the province and there was a record of me, I could never entirely disappear. I just started to get old. And that’s when I had to start to find my own way out.”
“How old were you?” Chaz asked, though he dreaded the answer.
“Um. Fifteen? Sixteen?” Sully shrugged. “It all blurs together, and I always looked younger than I was. But I remember it was around the time of Frank Ignacio’s book—so the start of awareness and people clamoring for monster rights. I started to hear rumors about the Saint System. It was supposed to be a bunch of women who ran all these houses where people were safe from the sex trade while also being part of the sex industry. They marked their pathway with arrows to show people home.”
“Why arrows?”
“Saints and martyrs are often killed with arrows for the greater good. When you follow enough arrows, you get to a safe house marked with a saint. It’s not the end of the line, but it’s an area where you’re supposed to wait and meet someone who’s going to show you the way out.”
“Like the vampire woman we found?”
“Yes. And Hector Juarez too. Usually a group of people will go at once, wait in these houses, and someone will show up with the next set of arrows. The arrows were also supposed to represent the sisters who run the final houses. All of them have one breast, since that was how women archers made a bet
ter shot.”
Chaz nodded, suddenly remembering Artie. “She has one breast.”
“Exactly. That’s how I know she’s safe. She’s the end goal, part of the network. But when I was seventeen she was just a rumor, and I was still in a human network where no arrows and no fairy tales ever existed. So I had to get out. I tried to run away, but that never worked, so I finally just saved enough money to take out a magazine ad. I literally sold myself so I could leave.”
“Oh, no. Oh….”
“Yeah, it sounds awful. But it was the best solution to all of this because I had control. I interviewed the guys and I had final veto power. The money went to the ring I was in, not to me, but I could at least decide something. That’s how I met John.”
“Was that his real name?”
“Yeah, actually. I thought he was lying, but he showed me his ID right away, and that was how I picked him. He was willing to show me that, even though I could have reported him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Hmm?”
“Report him? It sounds like you were underage, so he broke the law.”
Sully’s expression was hard to read. It was sad, but he was smiling too. “A lot of people break the law, Chaz, but not every one of them goes to jail. At this point in my life, John seemed like my only option. So I went with him.”
“I’m sorry,” Chaz said quietly. “I shouldn’t interrupt.”
“No, you shouldn’t. When I was with him, I was seventeen. He said he only needed me for first aid, since he was a diabetic and terrified of going into a coma, though there was no need to worry. I knew he was a liar and that he wanted me for more, but I appreciated the fact that he also had practical concerns. He started to send me to school the next year, as well, paying for all of my university and GED. He was Slovak, and his parents were still in the country, so sometimes I’d have to talk to them.”
“They knew you? They didn’t suspect…?”
“I was eighteen at that point. He was forty-eight. And sure, it was odd, a guy like him being with someone as young as me, but most people chalked it up to a sugar-daddy situation. Which isn’t illegal, and again, a lot of people break the law. Only some get caught,” Sully said. “He took me to a lot of work parties as well, where I could wow people with my political references and art history knowledge. I was never allowed to take anything practical in school—only stuff for conversation starters. He was also in business, so I think he was worried about me one-upping him. Anyway. I feel like I’m talking too much and saying too many random details. What does it matter that I learned to cook from John, too, since he really liked some weird French meals?” Sully fidgeted with something on the table. “I could probably have left half those details out.”
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