by K. L. Noone
“The funny thing is it didn’t work.” Justin shifted more toward him; they ended up touching, pressed together, fire-sphere cupped in Kris’s hands between them. “Kelly’s an empath but Dad’s not really magical much—if he’s anything he’s a minor weather-reader, but he’s not great at that—and he couldn’t do a serious demon-summoning if anyone’s life depended on it. So he was just messing around, putting off writing a paper for his grad seminar, and my mom showed up because she wanted to. Because she heard the spell when he read it, and nobody’d used it in centuries, and it was obviously never going to work, and she got curious about who this ridiculous human even was…”
Kris could see it. The fairytale unfolded like a tapestry: scrollwork of mutual bewilderment and curiosity, a succubus who kept coming back and a bespectacled graduate student falling head over heels into love, bashful first dates and rock and roll concerts, mingled wonder and newness and the thrill and dread of the semi-illicit, knowing how the world viewed demons…
They’d built a life out of love. The proof of that love sat beside him, coal-smolder hair getting into one eye. Justin tucked it back under the hood and held a hand out over their fire-ball, warming it or himself. “I grew up hearing him talk about her. I could tell how much they loved each other. If I’m boring you I’m sorry. I don’t talk about this much. I guess I wanted to. And you already know the big secret parts.”
“Talk to me,” Kris said, and held the fire closer to him. “Go ahead.” He wanted to listen; he wanted to be whatever Justin needed from him, here between pond and flame and bending trees and New England sky.
“I was just thinking…I always sort of thought I’d never have that, you know?” Justin tipped his head back against the stalwart wooden post. The rowboat bobbled, distraught on his behalf. “That love story. I could never tell anyone what I was—Dad’s great, but he’s the exception, ninety-nine percent of people’ll get suspicious or want to use me or think I’m using them—and how could I love someone, how could I let them love me, anything more than casual fun, if I couldn’t tell them? It wouldn’t even be their fault. I mean, demons.” Claw-hands again: “Boo, I said.”
“But,” Kris said, once words regrouped from dissolving grief in his mouth, “but you can, you—you deserve that happy ending, every bit, you’re bloody brilliant, don’t tell me nobody’d see—”
“I knew I wouldn’t have a real love story,” Justin said, not exactly ignoring his interruption, “but I thought—maybe if someone wanted me enough, wanted me to be his badly enough—but I was stupid. It was stupid. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be feeling. Maybe I should hate him but I can’t. I don’t love him—I tried, but I’m not sure I ever did—but I miss who he could be. Sometimes. And sometimes I think—around you I think—but that’s stupid too. Everything’s confusing and it hurts.”
That last sentence, sad and simple as a child’s cry—it hurts, please hear me, please help—tore Kris’s heart to shreds. With claws.
They’d tumbled from the general to the specific; he knew who Justin had meant with that he. And Kris personally had no qualms about hating David Ross. Not when Justin hurt this much.
He held out the swirly sphere of flame. “Aren’t your hands cold? Here, share it with me…” Their fingers brushed; he laced his through Justin’s, keeping bare skin near heat. “I believe in love.” He’d not entirely intended to say so aloud; he meant it, but fumbled over what to say after. “I don’t know if that helps, and it probably sounds like a laugh coming from me, but I do. I might not be great at it, never was, but I’ve seen it, and I’ve felt it, and you deserve all of it. And,” he added—too close to revelation, and Justin had talked about being confused, being in pain, and did not need that final burden—“emotions’re complicated. Not straightforward. However you feel about him. And I’m an old empath, y’know, I should know.”
“Maybe,” Justin said, not quite looking at him, looking into fire and water under starlight. “Maybe I’m thinking too much about things I shouldn’t want. I told you I can’t think straight right now; I can’t. He used to get me to stop thinking. Out of my head. And also he could make me laugh. He could be funny. Sarcastic, but funny.”
Uncertain of what words might come out if he opened his mouth, Kris only nodded. Justin went on, “I know you didn’t like him. I know he was—he wasn’t perfect. But he brought me tea. He told me I was beautiful when we got dressed to go out. He held me at night when I got scared and couldn’t tell him why. I mean, I also know—now I know—he could hit me with a book. If he got angry with me. But it wasn’t all ugly.”
“There were good parts,” Kris ventured carefully. His heart disagreed. He told it sternly to calm down. “And you see them. Because you’re still a good person.”
“I don’t want him back.”
“Oh fuck no.”
Justin laughed, unexpected as a night-bird swooping, a diving comet, a flare of light. “You couldn’t sound more certain if you tried.”
“I’m trying to be rational and mature,” Kris said. “I’m imagining showing up at his office and abusing my personal gifts to persuade him that he’s always passionately wanted to clean subway toilets for a living. With his tongue.”
“Graphic,” Justin said. “I like it. Not for a living; that’d mean he at least got paid. As a volunteer, instead. You did say passionate. He’d have to quit the firm and devote every waking hour to his…passion.”
“He’d have to announce it in the middle of some important client meeting.”
“Not a client, that might not be fair to someone who just came in needing a tax lawyer. A meeting with the senior partners. All of them.”
“Diabolical of you.”
“Well, I am. You know the stories. Demons ruin lives.” Their fireball companion flickered once, dim and then coruscating anew once Justin poked it with a fingertip. “Sorry. Better?”
“Tired?”
“Yeah, but not like that. That’s fine. It’s been a seriously weird couple of days. Surreal.”
Kris, thinking of the last two or three days, thinking of love and realizations of love and fear and revelation and magic and wounds and music, said, “Yes.” He wanted to hold Justin in Midwinter moonlight; he wanted Justin to never feel pain again.
He wanted to write songs and sing them from rooftops. He wanted to come home and find Justin smiling and scribbling stories and lyrics into existence on his sofa. He wanted to not be nearly twice Justin’s age and more than that in cynicism.
He worried about fluttering fiery night-warmers and exhaustion, even though Justin’d said that was okay. He tried to keep an eye on both the fire and those weary eyes.
“Sorry about my little brothers, too. They’re great, but they’re awful.”
“They’re good kids.”
“Spoken like someone who hasn’t spent enough time with them.”
“They care about you. They wanted to ask me what happened. I didn’t tell them, not exactly.” They likely know, he added mentally. “Figured that was up to you. But you can’t blame them for caring.”
“No boyfriend—pretty abruptly—and I brought Kris Starr home, and you obviously know about the…” Justin glanced around the lake, pushed the hood back, slid into less human for an instant: smokier skin, translucent pointed horns, more crimson in his gaze. This vision didn’t last; it swam under the surface, and then dissipated, until only banked-fire hair and cinnamon irises remained. Justin pulled the hood back up. “They must be dying to know that story. How I told you, and why.”
“I’ll tell them you save babies if you want.” And other people. From a burning building. From washed-up lonely despair in a penthouse apartment. “Does that feel any different? When you, ah…”
“Not really. Still me. If I wasn’t only half I’d look like that all the time, unless I was seriously trying to hide it. If I spend any time over there—with my aunts—it gets more…more that. Harder to be human again. But I like being human. I like my
job and I like music and I like people.” Another brush of fingers to water; ripples of scarlet flowed outward, confetti-bursts sprinkled in concentric circles. Might’ve been a Midwinter decoration, might’ve been a scrap of purely human light-making talent. “It shouldn’t be this complicated. I sometimes think I can pretend it isn’t—that I can get up and drink coffee and go out dancing and find somebody to—but then someone in a meeting makes a joke about deals with devils, or there’s a fire at the hotel where we’re having brunch, and I can’t not do something if I can…do something…I don’t want it to be complicated. But it is.”
Kris thought this over. Holiday twinkles dazzled in the distance; voices from that party carried indistinctly across water. Laughter, storytelling, a toast, or a dare. Vibrancy in the dark.
He said, to Justin’s tired beautiful eyes, “I think that makes you human.”
Justin didn’t say anything: stillness born out of surprise, a baby fawn in a striped hoodie and jeans, startled by sound.
Kris wrapped hands around the fire, cradling it. “People’re messy. And mostly they don’t want things to get complicated, either. And you want to be human, fuck knows why, which means you’re at least halfway there, and you’re better at it than a good two-thirds of the rock stars I’ve met. Including me. You know everything I’ve done to people, on purpose and not, so you might be from the Realm of Perilous Sex Demon Whatever, but you’re a better person than I am, we both know that, so if anyone’s human here it’s you.”
“Perilous Sex Demon Whatever,” Justin said. “But…thanks.” When he put out a hand to rekindle the fire, he set it over Kris’s. His fingers felt pleasantly warm. “You’re good at that. Emotion.”
“I cheat,” Kris said. “Empathic talent.”
“That’s still you deciding to use it,” Justin said. “I used to like coming out here, you know? Just to sit here with the water, work on some writing, watch the leaves change color in the fall…I’m a city kid really, I love New York and I grew up in cities—Dad’s first full-time academic job was in Boston, and then San Francisco, which was where I got into music and also all the amazing sex—but I’d forgotten how much I liked this spot. Being peaceful.”
Kris had an idea about what’d happened, based on earlier comments; he shoved down smoldering fury and agreed, “I can see it. You with coffee, sitting out here, writing.”
“You’re not going to ask?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
“David wasn’t—isn’t? He’s still alive, I suppose—an outdoors sort of person. And I’m not going to run off and work on a farm or anything, but he’d get bored if I wanted to just sit here and talk. He always wanted to go find the latest club or more exclusive bar, and then he’d complain because this’s a college town and not the real city, so we’d end up going back early.” Firelight glinted through those eyes: eerie but familiar by now, known and generous and good. “Funny. I thought that’d hurt worse. Talking about it. I’m realizing what I’m not going to miss.”
“I don’t mind sitting here and talking to you,” Kris said, and then realized how this sounded, and tried to figure out how to travel through time and yank feet out of his mouth.
“You don’t, do you?” Justin tapped fingers against his. “Before I met you I thought you’d be all about the glamor, the Kris Starr and Starrlight lifestyle, the parties…”
“I was. We were. With carousel unicorns.”
“And you live in a penthouse alone,” Justin said, “because you don’t want to hurt anyone, like a knight with a sword doing penance, and you try your best to make things right when things aren’t right…you’re here because I asked. In general, and literally. On the end of a pier. By a lake. At night, with a demon.”
“I know you’re not going to hurt me,” Kris said.
Justin stared at him, shook that head—wayward strands of fire peeked out—and opened his mouth, closed it, and dove across the inches between them to hug him, which included a thump on the shoulder and a hand rescuing their fire-blossom from falling into the lake, and Kris’s arms around him. “You idiot,” Justin said into the folds of his borrowed coat, and poked his chest for emphasis, having landed more or less in his lap, “you know I could, you know what I am, how can you sit there and trust me—”
“I know exactly what you are,” Kris said, trying to rearrange a leg to fit emotional demon between them. “You’re someone who gets excited over rock music from before you were born, and you like distressingly filthy jokes about sugarplums. And anyway you trusted me first, which is even more idiotic, honestly, what were you thinking?”
“I’m not good at thinking.” Justin settled into his arms: being held. Lakeshore noises eddied around them: night-creatures chirping and calling, deep water, the sympathetic bump of the little rowboat. “I’m not James, or my stepmom, or even Dad. I like to feel everything. But if you’re going to say all those things about me I’m going to say them about you. When I thought about where I could go the first person I thought of was you. And I was right.”
“Justin,” Kris said. He did not know whether he meant this as a question, as a plea, as a vow: unvoiced emotions trembled in winter air, in the light and complex and wondrous weight of his demon nestled against him.
“I know,” Justin said, not looking up, face remaining hidden against his chest, words over collarbone and skin. “I mean—I don’t know. Not yet. I don’t even know if I’m feeling that right. What you want me to pick up. How much of that is me wanting to hear it. You—I said sometimes I think, around you, I think that you might want, and I would, it’d be like every dream I once had coming true—but I can also hear you trying not to want it. And I’m a fucking mess right now. I’m supposed to be your friend and your manager and instead I just want you to hold me. Can we just do that? For now? Please.”
“Of course.” Kris leaned back against the post, leaned his head atop that hood and escaping hair, rubbed Justin’s back through thin layers. The night wasn’t cold anymore. “Of course we can. Anything you need.”
Their globe of swirling conjured fire had landed between them, protected by Justin’s left hand. After a few minutes Kris moved to warm his own at it, to marvel at it and at the boy in his arms, and Justin reached up and threaded their fingers together, holding flame.
They stayed put after that, not talking much: a few murmured words about comfort and replies, a hummed snippet of song or two as night bundled them up and hid them away, private and protected and ringed around by reflections of magic and moon.
He noticed eventually that most of the family’d gone to bed; light glimmered from the study and from some upstairs windows, but less so downstairs. The party across the lake had continued going strong, boisterous and merry. Midwinter lights twinkled; Justin’s family had opted for scampering green and white and silver, elaborate moving displays no doubt designed by James, and shimmers darted across rooftop gables and along windows and around the rectangles of doors. New England ground, dusted by winter, lay like folklore under the celebratory moon.
Kris had started worrying more—not a lot, not yet, but more—about demonic overexertion. Their fire-flower had faded somewhat; Justin had said it’d take a few hours to get tired, but then had also had that self-described weird few days. Justin had done dishes and summoned books and teleported them both over here in the first place, and what if that’d been a lot, what if that’d been too much when the half-human slender boy in his arms had finite resources?
He thought about thick fluffy blankets, heaps of feathery and firm pillows, mountains of hot cocoa and whipped cream. He thought about food and energy. He thought about trying to build a fire the old-fashioned way if Justin needed heat. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d built a fire. He wasn’t sure he ever had. He’d try if it’d help.
He thought that Justin’s fingers felt colder even through borrowed gloves. Too much warmth put into their portable flame? Pulled out of himself?
He tried to hold that hand mor
e closely. “Is it getting late? Should we go back?”
“I felt that,” Justin said. “You’re lucky I’m not human. Might’ve started trying to gather logs or knit a blanket. Are you okay?”
Kris stared at their shared fire-orb until his eyes watered. The question was a good one. He’d spent a lot of years practicing control. “I don’t know.”
Justin sat up. More distance between them.
“No—” He reached out, caught that hand again. Definitely colder. “Don’t think it’s your fault. Don’t think it’s anything to do with you, not like that, all right?” A shot in the near-literal dark, but it went true; he could see Justin’s face, wearing pain at the thought of having caused more trouble. He tugged at the hand. He’d get on his knees again, right here on the dock, if need be. “It’s not you. I want to be here with you. I want to hold you.”
“But if you’re losing—”
“I’m not. Not like that.” Not losing that control, or he hoped not.
But he was feeling again. For the first time in years, he felt scared and he wanted and he hoped and he ached with love and he was writing new songs and he would give the world to make someone else happy. He’d forgotten how powerful it all could be.
Holding Justin’s hand while holiday music caroled out from the distant party, he knew it all again, for the first time.
He explained, “I know how to contain it. I used to work harder at it. I haven’t needed to. Until this. You.”
“But isn’t that the problem? If—”
“What problem?” He drew a breath, let it out: felt his empathy hum and quiver like ice on a tree-branch in spring, life returning. He could open up every channel, every stream, and pour it out; he’d filled arenas and stadiums with screaming ecstasy, once upon a time. Light and sound and intoxication, his own brash elation, the roar of music and conviction and generally a fair amount of alcohol beforehand. He’d known, then, how to channel it, to use it, to wield it like an instrument on stage.