“I was a regular enough visitor there that I saw it a few times. There were a couple of markings on there of interest and one was the Royal Lodge. So when I decided to leave, I took the key and stopped there for a while when I traveled to Aurumnia.”
“It’s unguarded?”
“It’s been abandoned for years. Timothy prefers to move around when he is hunting—better sport that way, and it’s harder for the wolves to mount an attack. I moved in and fixed the place up.”
Tynan tapped his fingers nervously on his thigh. “And it's four days walk?” he asked.
“Yes. It means longer in the forest, but it’s still only half a day’s walk from Belmon. Better than joining the road for two days, surely?”
“Alright,” Tynan said, letting out a long breath. “Show me the way.”
***
The first day passed almost without incident, at least as far as Kai was concerned. They’d encountered no more wolves or bandits, and hadn’t run into anything else that might upset matters. Most people would consider that a good day. But there had been a moment when Kai, hungering for physical contact, had felt the first change.
It was subtle enough that Tynan wouldn’t notice, Kai was sure of that, but he was well aware of the changes being wrought within his body. Everything was becoming more sensitive. Gentle breeze felt like a lovers caress, the brush of his shirt made his nipples ache for attention, and being within pouncing distance of Tynan left Kai’s cock swollen and leaking.
Eventually he’d be in an almost permanent state of arousal and be fighting the urge to feed by force. But he was confident he’d get Tynan before that happened.
It was early evening and they’d be making camp soon. This seemed as good a time as any for Kai to try. Crossing his legs and squeezing his thighs together, he turned his attention to Tynan who appeared to be half asleep as he held the reins.
“Let’s play a game,” Kai said, nudging him awake.
Tynan yawned and stretched, scratching his head, then his balls. “Let’s not.”
Balls. Tynan’s balls. Kai would have bet his own money that they were low hanging and hairy. Probably in desperate need of being emptied too.
He took a deep breath. “I’m getting hungry, and I need to stop thinking about feeding and sex. So please. Let’s play a game.”
“Fine,” Tynan muttered, though it clearly wasn’t. “I spy something tall and brown with leaves on it.”
“No letters? I can read, you know. Can’t you?”
Tynan huffed. “It begins with the letter T.”
“A tree,” Kai said looking around and hoping he didn’t have to be specific about which one. “Right, I spy something beginning with… there’s a lot of trees in this forest, isn’t there? Why don’t we play a different game? How about strip charades?”
“Is this a game to get me to fuck you?”
Kai turned his face down and looked up at Tynan through his lashes. “No,” he said innocently.
Tynan narrowed his eyes at Kai. “Liar.”
Apparently Tynan could tell white lies as well as malicious ones. Kai would just have to be completely honest about how much he needed to fuck Tynan.
“Alright,” he said, “we’ll play that. Truth or Dare. I lied, so now I have to do a dare of your choosing.” He dropped his voice, turning up the faux-innocence and hoping Tynan liked that sort of thing. “You know how these games go, don’t you?”
“Not happening.” Tynan was staring straight ahead again and making a point of ignoring him.
Kai flexed the muscles in his thighs again, feeling his cock twitch. He would need to cum tonight, whether Tynan was involved or not. “Let’s play Guess the Lies then,” he said. “Ask me something. Anything.”
Tynan muttered something about asking him to shut up, but after a bit more prodding came up with, “How old are you?”
“Just turned twenty-one.” No reaction. It seemed Tynan couldn’t even be bothered to muster up a bit of contempt for that lie. “I’m two-hundred-and-thirty-six,” Kai offered trying not to let the disinterest get to him. He shouldn’t have to work this hard to get a man into bed. “My turn now. Do you want to sleep with me?”
“Yes,” Tynan grunted.
“That’s a lie! That’s definitely a lie and you—wait.” Had Kai heard what he thought he’d heard? “Hold on a moment. You did say yes, didn’t you?”
Tynan shrugged, but the corners of his lips turned up slightly. This was funny to him. Kai wasn’t sure whether to be offended or relieved.
“I’m not going to fuck you. That is unethical and unprofessional. I have to keep this strictly business.”
“But you want to?” Kai pressed. That was the important bit.
“Don’t see much point lying about it. You’re generally pretty honest with me. Only fair to be honest with you.”
On the one hand, Kai thought, sure, honesty is the best policy. On the other, this was probably the only thing more frustrating than total disinterest.
“No. No, that is not fair. You can’t tell me you want me but that you won’t touch me. That’s not fair at all.”
“Why?”
“Because that makes this ten times harder! You find me repulsive, fair enough, you’re a strange, strange man, but I won’t pursue it. You find me fuckable, that means you’re playing a game.”
“No game,” Tynan said, looking him over briefly with a lustful eye. “My consent has nothing to do with you making my dick hard, and you know it. We wouldn’t be having this conversation at all if you didn’t. You’re nice to look at. Doesn’t mean I want to fuck you.”
“I guess not,” Kai muttered. Sex meant nothing to him, it was just something he did three times a day to keep himself fed, and he’d do so in any circumstance in which everyone was consenting. Given his job, he wasn’t often sought out by people who weren’t looking for a good time in bed, but he fully respected Tynan’s right of refusal. At any rate, his brain did. His balls, not so much.
“Perfect,” he said as they made their way up the path. “Bloody perfect.”
Chapter Eight
They rode on. There was a path, but it wasn’t like traveling on the road. They had to get out and push the cart through mud and move between watering holes for the horse rather than head in a straight line to the lodge. Even Tynan, who thought he could put up with this shit until the cows came home, was beginning to tire by the third morning. He wasn’t used to avoiding the roads.
Kai complained loudly of the cold, the wet, and the fact that he was just as stinky as Tynan was now. He wasn’t physically too dirty, though his clothes were bedraggled. He kept his hair and teeth clean enough, and he hadn’t grown even the scruff of a beard. He just smelled like what he was—a man that had slept outside in the same set of clothes for the last two nights.
Then there was the hunger. Kai was very vocal about that.
“Cock’s hard again,” he would say at various intervals throughout the day. His eyes had darkened slightly, and he was more inclined to press his leg against Tynan’s when they sat up at the front of the cart, but he didn’t ask for sex and hadn’t since Tynan had admitted he wanted to sleep with Kai. Tynan half resented him for it. It would be easier for him to resist when he was asked if he had to deny himself regularly. He could feel pious about it then. Now it was just a pervy little fantasy in the back of his mind all day and half the night too.
By the time the fourth night had come round, Tynan was beginning to question the ethics of leaving Kai hungry for sex. The fact Kai hadn’t set the wolves on Tynan suggested that he was innocent and wanted to stay that way, and while it wouldn’t be alright to watch him suffer even if he was a criminal, this must be adding insult to injury. Tynan wasn’t quite ready to give in, knowing his dick had too big a stake in his reasoning for him to consider giving in that evening, but he did feel needlessly cruel.
They had made camp. Fire was still off limits, so Tynan used his magic to warm a large rock up. It wasn’t hot enough to
cook with, but it radiated enough heat to keep them both warm while they ate some dried meat and crackerbread in silence.
The quiet was the biggest sign that things were becoming very difficult for Kai. His incessant chatter was a pain in the ass, but it was normal. This wasn’t.
There were two solutions to their problem. The first involved Tynan spending the better part of the night with his cock in Kai’s ass. Tynan had been giving that a long and careful consideration as he lay next to Kai each night, and it certainly had its advantages. The disadvantage was that Tynan was in a position of power over Kai. It just didn’t seem right, no matter how much they both wanted it.
But the second solution made him feel even more uncomfortable. He could distract Kai by being sociable.
Clearing his throat, Tynan asked, “You got any good stories?”
Kai stopped eating abruptly and looked at him. His mouth was open, and he had a piece of jerky half in and half out of it. Letting it fall from his lips, he said, “You’re starting a conversation? With me?”
Tynan would like to have told him not to sound so suspicious, but he wasn’t about to get into an argument while he was making an effort to help Kai. He wasn’t about to flatter him either, though. “Wouldn’t go that far. I’m just getting used to having a bit of talk with my dinner.”
Kai put his food aside and made a show of thinking about it, leaning his chin on one hand while he looked off into middle distance. Eventually he said, “I’m an incubus. A lot of the stories involve sex and its procurement. I don’t need to think about stuff like that right now. You tell me one.”
Tynan had started the conversation. He hadn’t expected to be the one to have to keep it up. “Most of my stories are the same if you swap out sex for criminals,” he said dismissively, thinking it seemed a bit unfair to Kai as he was the current captive. “You wouldn’t be interested.”
“So we’re going to sit here in silence?”
The beautiful bastard wasn’t going to talk. Tynan groped about in his mind for something that wouldn’t involve catching people, but there wasn’t much material from the last few decades. “I could tell you about my landlady I guess,” he mumbled. She was an unusual person, and he’d not had to arrest her yet.
“Go on,” Kai said with a sigh.
“Her and her wife are illusionists. So one day they’re doing this trick in the marketplace and Abigail—that’s my landlady—announces she has got this box that is going to make them both disappear.”
“Impossible,” Kai butted in. “Even genuine real life magic can’t do that.”
Tynan took it as a good sign that Kai couldn’t keep himself from commenting. “That’s what I thought,” he said, trying to keep himself from smiling, “but her and Lillia—that’s her wife—they want the crowd to think the trick is going to fail.”
“It is going to fail,” Kai said with absolute surety. “It's nonsense.”
“Right. So they get in the box and whip the crowd up until people are booing.”
“Interesting technique.”
This was working. Tynan felt the corners of his mouth rising, and he couldn’t force them down again. “And then suddenly, boom!” he said. “Bright light, smoke everywhere. No one can see a thing.”
“And?”
“And when the smoke clears the box is open and empty. They’re gone.”
Kai rolled his eyes. “Amateurs. It’s obvious. They created a distraction and then they ran away amid the chaos.”
“That’s what we all thought. But then, just when people are beginning to chant for their money back, there’s another flash of light, and they’re back in the box. No smoke this time to hide them, just a second when they’re not there and then another when they are stood in that box. And it wasn’t a spell. I asked her, and she wouldn’t tell me, but I know it wasn’t real magic. It didn’t smell right.”
Kai frowned. “So how did they do it?”
Tynan probably should have thought about that before he started talking. “I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Well, that was a great story. Guess you had to be there.”
Tynan remembered what an annoying little shit Kai was and at least felt a bit better about not fucking him. “Stopped you thinking about sex for three minutes,” he muttered.
Kai closed his eyes. “It did.”
“Best story ever then.”
“Yeah.” Kai opened his eyes and gave Tynan half a smile. “That’s true, it did. Why don’t we try and work out how they did the trick? What was the box like?”
Mission accomplished. Tynan opened his mouth to describe it when Kai interrupted him.
“Thank you, Tynan.”
Tynan nodded his acknowledgment, not trusting himself to speak aloud about it without asking Kai to kiss him. He nodded a bit, then finally managed, “Let me tell you about that box.”
***
By the next morning, Tynan was fully committed to releasing Kai when they reached the cabin. Kai considered himself innocent, and Tynan hadn’t seen any behavior that would indicate he was anything other than what he claimed to be—an honest demon who put the lives of humans above his own. Kai’s growing hunger confirmed that.
If Kai’s description was accurate, the cabin would be close enough to the edge of the forest that Kai shouldn’t feel the need to stay if he didn’t want to, and if something happened then it happened. Neither of them would hold any power over the other.
Most importantly, it would get the whole business over with, and Tynan could stop thinking about bedding Kai. It would be much easier to move on after that.
Probably.
He could make some crap up about Kai running away and the Guild would either believe it or they wouldn’t. He might be out for half a century but record keeping was terrible there, and new blood would forget. He’d be able to wheedle his way back in at some point.
Maybe it was time for a new career anyway. Tynan wanted to retire, but he was aware people said that change was as good as a rest. He didn’t exactly agree, but he was ready to take either.
A little slither of guilt crept into his heart. Here he was thinking about losing his career. Kai was probably thinking about losing his life.
But Kai was halfway through a monolog about his preference for things that were savory rather than sweet, so who knew?
They were on the final stretch towards the lodge when Tynan’s attention was drawn to a tiny thing with a loud voice.
“Want to buy a watch?” it said.
Tynan swatted the air as it buzzed around him with a small pocket watch in its grasp. He leaned back to get a look at the thing, which turned out to be a cute little creature in an orange rose petal dress. It looked a bit like a fairy but smaller and had the typical fae features: large eyes, a small mouth, and its skin was tightly drawn over an angular nose and cheeks.
“No thank you.”
It nodded its head in Kai’s direction and asked, “What about one for your sex slave?”
Kai was now talking about some fancy bed he’d slept in once and ignored them both completely.
“Sorry,” Tynan grunted and swatted at it, “Now, kindly fuck off.”
“What about a charm?” it said, swooping out of the way. It tossed the watch, which was caught midair by another pair of the creatures who flew away with it. “Pixie magic is the best in the forest. Ask anyone.”
Ah, a pixie. Tynan had heard of them but never seen one before. After hearing Kai was half pixie, he was surprised to find they were so small.
“Have you got anything that keeps pixies away?”
“Actually yes!” the pixie said, eyes lighting up. “There’s a magic stone in a glade not far from here. Some bastard put it there to stop us getting to the Buckweed. We’d love to get rid of it. You can even have it for nothing. Follow me.”
It seemed a perfectly reasonable suggestion, so Tynan nudged Kai a few times until he had his attention. “Your turn to walk the horse,” he said.
“Walk it
where?” he asked. Then he saw the pixie. “Oh. Hello. Remember me?”
The pixie rolled its tiny little eyes. “Oh great, you’re paying attention now. How could I forget you, cousin? Or are you claiming to be full blood now.”
“Still don’t believe me?” Kai said, wrinkling his nose in distaste at the little thing. Wait until you meet an incubus born from a human. They make him”—he pointed at Tynan—“look like me.”
“Right,” the pixie said, drawing out the vowel sound.
“Can we just go get this bloody pixie repelling stone?” Tynan asked. Half a pixie was quite enough. He didn’t need a whole one giving them sass for the rest of the afternoon.
Kai snorted. “A pixie repelling stone?” His distaste was disdain now. “That was the best you could come up with? You’re losing your touch… whatever your name is.”
“Says the man that didn’t even notice I was here leading his owner astray. It’s Aethelmir by the way.”
“Oh yes, Aethelmir, that’s it. There’s two hundred of you, one of me. You know what it’s like. Anyway Aethelmir, take me to whoever is in charge these days.”
Tynan wasn’t entirely sure what was happening, but he had an uneasy feeling that he had fallen for something he would have regretted if Kai weren’t here. “Careful,” he said. “It might be a trick.”
Kai and Aethelmir both rolled their eyes at the same time, and Tynan realized they really were related in some distant way. There was a resemblance, despite their wildly different scale.
“It’s fine,” Kai said. “We’ll get lunch at the camp, and this will put us on a better path to the lodge.”
“Better in what way?”
“Wait and see.”
They rode on for a while and when they finally left the path they only had to walk the cart for five minutes before they reached the pixie settlement.
It was like a miniature city in the center of the woods, with small houses, shops, and even taverns. The little pixies were going about their everyday lives and didn’t even blink at them as they worked their way around the city’s perimeter.
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