by K. L. Noone
“Of course.” He was now intensely interested, given the invitation, and was also feeling determined and protective, wanting Justin to have everything good and smile-worthy under the sun, knowing his own efforts to be ineffective at best. “Lay on, Macduff.”
“Shakespeare,” Justin said, “made a demon-bargain, once, did you know that? Not for his skill, he already had that, but for wealthy patrons who could see it. Or so I’ve heard. Um, here, this—” He hopped up, offered a hand; Kris took it and got pulled to his feet. They stopped in front of the dresser, where drawer-handles looped outward in fanciful wood-sprite leaves. Justin touched the blank spot on the wall above the furniture; the wall glimmered, dissolved, revealed a portrait in clear defined lines and exquisite color.
“It’s the only picture I’ve got of her.” Low and earthshaking as a revelation: an intimate truth given up, held out into focus. Kris did not know what to say, how to take that offering and cradle it close in words; he gazed at Justin’s mother, speechless.
Justin touched the frame, thin pale fingertips over black wood. “We keep it veiled if I’m not here. Just…you never know. In case one of Dad’s grad students wanders in from an end-of-seminar party, or a friend needs a place to crash, and we can’t have anyone asking why there’s a portrait of a demon on display…”
His commentary trailed off, unneeded. They looked at her: glowing in oil and canvas, glorious and alive, captured half-turning, laughing, poised by a window in what must’ve been a nursery: Justin’s nursery, white crib and starry-night mural on the left wall and a few not-yet-hung fairy-story pictures leaning on the right one, jauntily awaiting hands.
She had masses of flame-hair, old volcanos and glorious torchlight, red-gold molten curls and windy bronzed autumn leaves. She had thin swirls of that silky hair along bare arms, under a sundress: decorations of flame-feathers that danced in delight. She had Justin’s slim height and willowy legs, and those small scarlet horns, more solid than her son’s, peeking coyly through firefall hair. She’d dropped one hand to cradle her stomach: proud, nervous, excited, flushed with impending motherhood and lush curves and emotion.
She had Justin’s pointed chin and wide light-up-the-world smile. Filled up the nursery, the room, the painting. Tempted life in to celebrate along.
“I don’t remember much.” Justin let his hand fall. “Bits and pieces. Her voice, I think. Warm and sort of smoky, the way voices can be, you know? And scents—I always think of flowers, roses, carnations, and I don’t know why. The big floppy crimson kind of flowers, almost spicy, like breathing holidays. But I was too young to really…I don’t know her.”
The girl in the painting was young also. She’d forever be young. She’d’ve seen Justin in that crib, growing up in that small children’s room with the starry-sky mural, for only three years. Before a car and an accident, and minor demons were more or less as mortal as anyone else, faced with brutal unforgiving metal.
“Dad has one too,” Justin said, beside him, “he asked for them to be painted before I was born. Because demons—we don’t show up well in pictures. Snapshots. You know; you’ve seen the pictures people tried to take of me, on the street. And she wasn’t even as human as I am. He wanted me to have something of her.”
“She looks happy. Like someone who was happy.”
“Dad says she didn’t know what to do, how to pose. The artist—he was a friend of hers, someone from over there, not as if they could ask a human—asked her to think of what she’d want to say to me, in three more months.” Justin took a breath, let it go, finished, “Dad says she sang a lullaby. For me.”
“You look like her.”
“Do I?” Justin lifted a hand, touched his own cheekbone: a gesture of surprised pleasure. “I’m glad you think so. Even if I can’t tell people about her. I like to think we’d’ve had something in common.”
He did think so. Not only burning-ember hair and long legs. That smile. That tangible big heart, held out to embrace everyone who might drop by. Granting wishes, hugging friends, assuming everybody was a friend even if unmet thus far, and nobody’d dare to disappoint them. Some kind of enchantment, that, but not magical.
The girl in that portrait had left a demon-life, enticement and wild abandon and untold power, to live with and love a bespectacled history graduate student dressed in elbow-patches and human fragility. To paint a nursery and build a crib from white wood. To sing lullabies.
He said, equally soft, equally honest, “She loved you.”
“Yes,” Justin said, “I think so.”
“She’d’ve loved to know you. The person you are. Both…strong.” Stronger than Kris Starr ever could be. A candle in the night, a beacon, a hearth where other people could huddle for warmth. Justin did that for friends and his bands and his younger siblings; they’d’ve had that in common, he thought.
“Oh. Well.” Casual, head ducking away, but with that smile growing. “She was, she chose the life she wanted and fought for it, I’m not sure I’m good at—but thank you. For saying it. Even if it’s not true. Did you want lunch? Since we’re missing the university party? Come on, I can magically heat up the rest of the chicken soup, I can do that, I’m a demon…”
They moved toward the stairs and food. Justin tapped the wall beside the painting; it knew his touch and veiled itself again. Kris wanted to take his hand; did not know whether this would be presumptuous, too demanding, too much. Their shoulders brushed, though. And that felt right. Like closeness.
More recent photos and mementos lined the staircase proudly, displaying fascinating glimpses of family history. One waved Disneyland banners at Kris and captured his attention; he stopped on the step, drawn in.
Justin, front and center. Sixteen or seventeen, adorned with orange spiked hair and leather wrist cuffs and ripped jeans, plus incongruous Mickey Mouse ears and an enormous smile. He was holding the hand of a smaller sibling in front of the Cinderella castle; a younger brother, but no twin in sight. “You and James?”
“Which one? Oh. Yeah.” Justin came back up a step, regarded his younger self in the picture-frame. “Dad had an academic conference in Los Angeles, so we all came along and went to Disneyland. It was great.”
A random thought popped in. “Do you all speak, ah, sorry…”
“Tagalog? Completely no. Even Kelly barely does, mostly with her parents, she’s like third-generation, she’s from San Diego. I only ever learned a few words for food and family, James doesn’t practice enough to be fluent, and we’re still working on getting Belle to talk to anything that isn’t a cat. The twins’re the only ones who picked it up, and that’s because they like knowing things we don’t know.”
“Plus it’s easier when you share a brain.”
“That too.” Justin’s grin came and went like wind-tossed dandelion-fluff. “They’ll conquer the world someday.”
“And you love them.” Palpable, imbued in every sentence, every family photo, every egg roll. Real enough to touch, to nibble, to breathe.
“I’d do anything for them.” Justin considered the next picture. A family portrait, obviously a few holiday seasons ago, everyone dressed in shades of green with the smiles of a group nearing the end of an interminable photo session. The twins were poking each other, and Justin’s hair shimmered black and spruce and silver, long streaks of festive midwinter color falling into one kohl-outlined eye, though the spikes and leather’d been swapped out for black jeans and a politely inoffensive button-down with rolled-up sleeves. “My family. Not that Kells and I didn’t have a few epic fights, back when I started bringing guys home.”
“She didn’t like you dating men?” He’d’ve not guessed that one.
“Oh—no, I don’t mean she cared who or what I brought home, guys, girls, gender-fluid water-nixies, whatever, no, sorry. She never minded any of that. She was worried about the whole…” Fingers sketched burning devil-horns in the air: they sizzled in red-gold life, and faded. “She was afraid I’d slip up and let someone see, or f
all head over heels and stupidly tell someone, the wrong someone, which of course I guess finally happened, didn’t it…She was a hundred percent right, you know, she had her own kids to think about, and I was busy being a rebellious punk teenager and feeling misunderstood and unfairly persecuted. I think at one point I even yelled the terrible you’re not my mom cliché at her. Gods of grove and river, I was a brat.”
“She wasn’t wrong,” Kris said, watching his face, “but neither were you, not completely, yeah? You and your dad, you’d been keeping that secret for years, you had a routine, you knew what’d happen if anyone found out, not like you didn’t know. You weren’t just a dumb punk kid.”
“No, but…” Justin shrugged, more with voice and eyes than shoulders. “She couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t do something that was. Dumb. I really do look up to her, though. She fell in love with my dad, and she knew what I was and she took all that on without flinching, Dad and me, this guy and his half-demon kid who’d lost a mom, and she got her PhD and she runs that department and she raised four kids and she publishes research in fields I don’t even know how to pronounce. I couldn’t do half of that. I don’t know how she does.”
Kris’s heart quite awfully needed to put a hand on his shoulder. Settled for leaning casually against the wall. “No. You only take care of everyone you’ve ever met. Your siblings. Your bands, your friends. Me. And you save babies.”
“Yeah, and if I had a cape I’d be a superhero.” Justin let out an entertained breath, turning to face him, blithely dismissive. Winter light from the stairwell window caught in his hair: snow and fire.
“Teleportation,” Kris pointed out. “Summoning. Fire-art. Wish-granting. Being nice at everyone. That’s proper magic.”
“The twins would totally want to be sidekicks. Or my first supervillains.”
“And James could make you shiny gadgets.”
“Oh, I’m James Bond now?” They wandered downstairs, companionable, leaving family history behind. In the kitchen Justin got out soup and bowls, got out beer, handed one over, found a bottle-opener. “In that case I want a fancy suit and a good martini. And a scantily-clad love interest. Someone who—” His eyes found Kris’s; he stopped. Easy words fell across the room, lay like a wedding-veil, draped countertops and bottle-caps in possibility.
“Someone,” Justin finished, deliberate and reverent as a first hand-holding or final acceptance, “who would be there for me. After we save the world. Or babies. Someone who knows about emotion. And music.”
“You,” Kris said, slowly, and his voice shook, “you would want—Justin, if—”
Flames disemboweled unguarded kitchen air. Red and orange flared across his vision.
Scorching force shoved him back into the living room and landed sharp claws and hissing noises at his throat. He yelped, flailed, fell into burning demon clutches. His head hit the wall, backed up against it; a clatter suggested the dropping of soup-bowls in the kitchen, which they’d have to clean up, except that wouldn’t be his problem, because he’d be dead or dragged into demon dimensions, and Justin would have to explain the disappearance of Kris Starr to his family and the world—
“Aunt Mara!” Justin said, materializing at his side with an amount of alarm Kris considered insufficient for the fingernails digging into his neck. “Not this one, he’s my—my—he’s a good guy, all right? Stop.”
The fingernails and hair and glaring eyes took a step back at this, and resolved into a petite luminous woman-shape. She looked a lot like the portrait Justin’d shown him; she also looked much more obviously inhuman compared to Justin, with tiny flame-fronds dancing along delicate arms, and pointed ears, and lava-rock eyes. Her teeth, when she smiled, were also pointed, he noticed. “Sorry, pet. They all feel alike after a while. Which one did you want me to bite?”
“No one right now,” Justin said. “Kris, are you hurt? I’m so sorry, I can get her to heal you if—” His hand was warm, touching Kris’s cheek, concerned.
Kris coughed, waved away help, panted, “I’m fine.” He was, more or less. “You could let her bite David, though…”
“Ooh, I like him,” said the demon, and perched on the arm of the sofa, and lit a cigarette from nowhere at all. She was wearing trendy dark-wash jeans, and a red T-shirt that announced All The Devils Are Here. It matched the glints of red in her hair, along her forearms, in the air around her. “Introduce me, pet.”
And she was beautiful, so beautiful; she smiled at him, and ten years ago, fifteen years ago, he’d’ve wanted her without a second thought; he’d’ve followed her in dreams, and he could taste caramel and roses, wildness and dragon’s-blood resin; and he knew that if this gleaming flame-woman asked he’d be on his knees promising her his soul…
“You just tried to strangle him,” Justin snapped, “and now you want to sleep with him? No. Mine. Sorry.”
Both sets of eyes landed on him, with varying degrees of astonishment. Kris took a breath, and discovered that he could breathe, clear and cold. Hazy sensuous fog lifted; Justin’s hand rested on his arm. Justin’s cheeks were pink: being stared at in the wake of his declaration. “You heard me. Also no smoking. It’s not my house, and Kelly hates it.”
“Oh, fine.” She waved the cigarette into nonexistence. “Humans have so many rules. Introduce me, then, and we’ll chat.”
“Kris Starr,” Justin said, “you might’ve heard of the band? Assuming you care about human music over there. Kris, this is Aunt Mara. Sort of. Aunt’s the closest term. She’s a demon.”
“Such sarcasm,” Mara said delightedly. “When did you get so assertive, pet? You don’t run around claiming humans. That’s us. I like it. And yes of course we’ve heard of Starrlight. Your aunt Ylse and I were at a few of those concerts, you know, back when they were popular. Hello, Kris.”
“Hi,” Kris said, about as politely as he could manage under the circumstances. “Nice to…meet Justin’s family.”
“Oh, so nice. Proper recognition, too. You barely do that.” She made a face at her nephew, incongruous from a pint-sized fire-demon. “You could visit.”
“My mother had about, oh, fifty sisters,” Justin said to Kris. “They sort of…reproduce like cats, like a really big litter…that’s a bad analogy…so most of them don’t care much, they aren’t interested in anything but the present and the next meal—sorry—but one or two of them decided I needed to know about my heritage, so they show up every once in a while and set my apartment on fire.”
“Once. We did that once, and that was your aunt Ylse, not me.”
“Those’re probably the only two you’ll ever meet. Maybe Aunt Raissa at some point, if she gets tired of her current toy senator, but anyway this one’s Aunt Mara, hi, did you want something other than interrupting us?”
“Yes.” She waved at Justin’s open beer; it landed in her hand. “I was checking up on you. Ylse said she heard about a New York Demon on those gossip sites she likes, and we know you for some reason choose to live there, and when we dropped by you weren’t home and you felt like you’d been hurt, so we decided I should find you.” To Kris, she explained, “He’s not wrong, most of the sisters don’t give a damn, it’s not even that unusual—we’ve fallen for humans before, we even have babies with them sometimes—but it’d been, oh, eighty years or so since the last one, and everyone liked Ahla. So he’s our pet.”
“Ah,” Kris said.
“Normally the babies come home eventually, given how badly humans treat them. This one’s stubborn.”
“I am not—” Justin ran a hand through his hair. Gave up. “I like living here. And I get lightheaded if I stay in the demon dimensions too long. I’m human too.”
“You wouldn’t have to be,” Mara suggested hopefully, “if you’d only let us just burn that bit out—you could come on seduction parties with us, enter the dreams of any young man you—”
“I keep saying no,” Justin said, other hand remaining on Kris’s arm for no apparent reason. Although—he blinked—there mig
ht be a reason; Justin’s fingertips glowed very faintly scarlet, tiny sparkles that left smudges on Kris’s bare skin: a demon-mark, a magic-brand. He thought: mine, he said. So no one else can try to claim me?
“And we keep asking.” She waved Justin’s beer, a grand gesture. “Can’t blame us for trying. So what happened this time? Was it another kitten stuck in a storm drain?”
“I might’ve saved a cat once,” Justin admitted, half a grumble of reluctant altruism. Kris almost kissed him. “No, it was a baby. I thought—you know I don’t always have to switch aspects to do summonings, but it must’ve been big enough, or the adrenaline was—anyway no one knows it was me, it’s fine!”
“Hmm,” his aunt said, speculative. “Babies. You couldn’t be more human if you tried, pet. Are you certain no one knows? Only Ylse was hearing rumblings, some echoes in the air, you know, and if you’re going to go public—”
“I’m not!”
“—we wouldn’t object, if it means you’re coming home, but we want to make sure you’ve thought the implications through.” She glanced around the room, back to the kitchen. “Chicken soup?”
“I am not,” Justin said, “thrilled that you are here,” and got out a third bowl, and waved a guilty hand at the broken one, which repaired itself. “You can heat up your own.”
She patted him on the shoulder. The bowl sent up wisps of savory steam, touched by demon magic.
Kris Starr, sitting at the kitchen table with a demon and a half-demon, being handed chicken soup for lunch, wondered briefly what the punchline had to be. A rock star, a battered soul, and a soup-bowl. That half-visible red glitter on his forearm, the peek-a-boo mark he was trying not to think about.
But Justin sat beside him on the bench, close enough to touch. Thin and brave and unwavering: guarding him from harm.
“Someone does know,” Justin said finally, as if this were a normal conversation, a visiting aunt and a cloudy day and a confession. “Besides Kris, I mean. I told David. Which is what you felt. Me being hurt.”