by Amy Lane
“Ouch! Jems! You old bastard! Stop stabbing me, dammit. I’m trying to save your life!”
The sword cut had gone deep, and Torrant was bleeding enough to soak through his black breeches and coat his hands as he grabbed the counter. Still, he heaved his body up, catching another, shallower cut in his calf, slipped in his own blood, and sprawled to his stomach across the counter. His sword clattered on the tile floor, and he grunted, swore, and rolled until he fell painfully to all fours. He rolled again, ducked Jems’s last blow, and, as he came up, grabbed his sword—just as Jems, going after him over the collapsed wooden chair, tripped on the slats and fell forward heavily, impaled on Torrant’s sword to its hilt.
Torrant and Jems regarded each other, face to face, in a kind of horrible surprise, until Jems’s mouth opened for the vomit of blood that came after a stab through the heart and lungs.
“No.” The clamor of the guards forced Torrant up and got him moving by instinct alone.
“No.” He pulled his sword from the body of the old guard, refusing to believe that the harmless old man had actually died at his hand.
“No.” He turned, bloodied sword sheathed, his own blood mingling with Jems’s on the floor as he ran heavily toward the door, only to see yet another contingent of guards coming toward him. In desperation, he turned up the stairwell that ran from the main entrance and started leaping stairs two at a time, leaving bloody footprints in his wake.
“No no no no no no no!”
His screams of denial echoed behind him as he ran.
ELJEAN WAS standing on his tiptoes, wondering distantly at the lack of guards in the back alleys, when he heard a ruckus from the second floor. He had just pinpointed the source of the shouts when he heard a crash of glass and a terrible, inhuman howl of pain and anger, and then a thump and a second, more panicked scream.
He looked up just in time to see some sort of animal, running on all fours, hurtle through a windowpane and sail through the air while struggling with the drapery that had tangled up around its paws.
Its trajectory would bring the thing right on top of Eljean.
By the time Eljean’s brain had caught up with where the snowcat was going to land, his long legs were already trying to eat up the ground between him and the fence of the guards’ barracks, but it was too late.
The thing landed on all fours, rolled in a pattering shower of glass and blood, and ripped the curtain off its face as it came up crouching. It then rolled again to take some more of the momentum off that spectacular leap.
On the cat’s second roll, it caught Eljean up in its path, and the two of them tumbled about on the dirt and crabgrass of the back alley until the creature finally rolled free of Eljean’s entangling limbs. The snowcat stood and wobbled, looking surprised and stunned into Eljean’s face as Eljean looked up from his back, wondering what in the name of the star’s dark had just happened.
He couldn’t get his breath, not to pick himself up, not even to save his life from the dreadful, blood-soaked, white-tufted predator gazing at him in something like despair. Hazily, from the back of his mind, he heard the shouts of the guards as they did an about-face and made to run all the way around the complex and into the back alley. A dim alarm sounded in his head—he didn’t have much time to take advantage of that empty alleyway, and he was wasting it gaping like a fish from this undignified position on his back.
Then the snowcat began to move. Slowly, obviously trying hard not to stagger, it padded to the same corner of the wall Eljean had just vacated, and giving a whimper and a shiver, it managed to shake much of the glass that had tangled in its fur onto the walls around it with an ominously sharp tinkle. Then it looked at Eljean, and even in the dark, Eljean could see its eyes, which were such an uncanny blue they could still be seen by the light of Dueant, the only moon risen. They reminded him of someone, of a recent expression of embarrassment…. He couldn’t quite place it… and then….
And then the lines of the snowcat began to blur with terrifying quickness, and after some stretching and some popping where nothing should have stretched and popped, Ellyot Moon stood in the giant cat’s place, biting his own palm as he screamed pain into his cupped hand.
Eljean screeched like a girl and scrambled backward, bumping his head on the guards’ fence behind him. “Oueant’s blazing eyeballs!”
Ellyot Moon shuddered, let out one more terrible, whooshing groan of agony into his hand, and shivered with his whole body. Then he turned toward Eljean, his customary command coming to cloak his pain like the battered black cape at his shoulders.
“Be afraid of me tomorrow, Eljean,” he commanded breathlessly. “Right now, if we don’t clear out, they’ve got us.”
And Eljean knew him—his features were blurry in the dark, and his eyes were a frightening, preternatural blue—but that voice, although lower in range, was still the kind, capable voice of a man who had been commanding his own destiny for quite some time.
Eljean had no problem obeying.
“You’re hurt,” he whispered harshly, even as he scrambled to his feet. In the dark, the wet of the blood could be seen on Ellyot’s clothes, and Ellyot nodded curtly.
“Well, I can be hurt tomorrow too,” he whispered back. “Right now, can you make it over if you give me a lift up first?”
Eljean nodded. He and Djali had become much better at leaping this wall since that first awkward morning.
“Good. Your flat is closest. Do you mind if we head toward it?”
“Not at all,” Eljean told him, lacing his fingers. As Ellyot scrambled clumsily, with an unaccustomed heaviness, to the top of the wall, Eljean looked in fear at the blood that had dripped onto his hands. “Should I get Aylan?”
Ellyot grunted a “no,” and together the two of them scrambled down and then across the alleyway, conscious it was only empty now because it would be roiling with uniforms in a scant few moments. When they got to Eljean’s patio fence, Ellyot stopped and ripped his shirt off from under his cloak, then put it on the ground to step on.
“Go inside and get a sheet—something you don’t love,” he gritted. “If I leave blood on this fence, we’re as good as dead.”
Eljean gaped at him, his own skin hurting from what he knew Ellyot must be enduring.
“Now, Eljean! I’ve got enough blood on my hands as it is!”
After a breathless moment of ripping the top sheet off his own bed because he could give a horse’s shite about his Oueant-pissed sheets, he returned, and Ellyot climbed wearily over the fence, holding his shirt in his hand and making sure he left no blood trace behind him at all.
He used the sheet to walk on when he got inside, slogging through the piles of clothes on top of the carpet until he reached the tile of the bathroom. From there, he called for towels, which he was going to need to mop up.
Eljean arrived in a moment with the towels and looked in surprise into his cream-tiled bathroom to see Ellyot Moon, standing mostly naked in front of his mirror, pulling small bits of glass from his white fur-coated skin.
The fur was everywhere, dappled like a snowcat’s, and although it didn’t disguise the leanly worn muscles of his back or his chest or the taut line from buttock to thigh, it did make very clear the fact that there was much more to Ellyot than met the eye.
Ellyot caught Eljean’s wide eyes in the mirror and grimaced, rolling his slitted blue eyes a little. “See anything odd?” he asked, with grim humor, wincing as he pulled a particularly large piece from his hip. Besides the fur, his skin was covered in cuts, some deep, most shallow, but all of them seemed to be healing as they closed, leaving red blood, blackening in the lovely silver of his fur.
Ellyot had to twist toward him to get the last piece of glass, and Eljean made a sound like milk curdling early when he saw all of Ellyot Moon from the front. His voice hit an octave it hadn’t hit since boyhood. “Something odd?” he echoed.
Ellyot laughed, strangely enough as though he were truly, kindly amused. “Mmm… yeah. You know.
An extra head? Angel’s wings? A funny sort of mole on my arse?”
“Oh, that….” Eljean was trying to play the game, he really was. But his heart was hammering, and his breath was frozen in his lungs. “Well, Aylan’s right—you don’t eat enough.” Ellyot’s muscles were ripped and knotted from too much exercise on too little fuel, but they were still defined. With a horrible cross between reluctance and eagerness, Eljean’s eyes slid down Ellyot’s front once more, and that weird sound bleated from his throat again. “And other than that, uhm, your manhood seems to be almost Goddess-gifted in proportion.” Ellyot’s gurgle of laughter warmed him enough to continue. “And your eyes are a very peculiar shade of blue.”
Ellyot nodded his head in approval and then closed his eyes and ducked his head over the sink, where he scrubbed his dry hair with his hands to get out any hidden shards. When he stood again, he met Eljean’s eyes in the mirror, and his expression indicated they were all right to go ahead and mention the unmentionable.
“I’ll talk about my eyes in a moment,” he said softly, a look of weariness crossing his subtly altered and alien features. There were distortions there in addition to the fur—a too-thin lip that pulled up in the center and a wider, flatter, more triangular nose. “In the meantime,” Ellyot continued from that wider, fiercer face, “is there anything else?”
“You missed a piece,” Eljean muttered after dropping his eyes from the disturbing countenance to the fur-covered body, which was almost less disturbing by comparison. He moved forward and, after hesitating with his hand stretched out toward Ellyot’s backside, he got a grunt of approval and grasped the piece of glass between his fingertips and tugged. Ellyot didn’t flinch as it came loose, but Eljean felt a little sick at the blood trickling down over the curve of Ellyot’s backside and how the cut began to close up like a shirt being stitched from the wrong side.
Eljean’s dry swallow was loud enough to echo in the silent bathroom.
“And, uhm—” Eljean swallowed again. “—you seem to be wearing a really ugly shirt.”
“You don’t like?” Again Ellyot flashed what looked to be a genuine smile. “Aylan and Yarri have always thought it became me. Even Aldam thought it was useful.” Ellyot went back to his glass search. After a wince and more rolled eyes in Eljean’s direction, he turned his back and spread his legs to dig a piece out of the crease of his thigh.
“They’ve probably seen it a few more times than I have,” Eljean stalled, thinking quickly along the lines Ellyot was leading him. The entire family knew. It was, perhaps, their greatest secret, and Eljean had stumbled upon it like he’d stumbled upon so much of what he knew about Ellyot. By chance and freak accident. “When did you first have occasion to wear such a remarkable shirt?” And by its own volition, he found a long finger was moving toward Ellyot’s upper arm. Without asking permission or even acknowledging the intimacy of the act, Eljean stroked the skin and closed his eyes, finding the texture as gorgeous under his fingertip as it had been on the living, breathing snowcat Ellyot had just been.
Ellyot cleared his throat once, twice, and Eljean looked up to meet those Goddess-blue eyes as Ellyot watched him caress the leanly muscled, fur-covered bicep. His hand stilled, but Eljean couldn’t seem to rip his fingers away.
“We were crossing the mountain,” Ellyot rasped, his eyes flashing a surprisingly hot shade of blue, “and we were running short on food. I’d never been good at killing, but….” He looked away then, and Eljean found he could pull his hand away after all.
“We’d seen the snowcats—they were everything I wasn’t. Ruthless. Efficient. Predatory. My gift is truth…. I just had to truly wish I had those things and….” Dropping his chin, he shook his head, his face still averted. His hair, rarely trimmed most days and out of its queue now, hung over his face, his white streak evident in a sharp contrast against the darkness.
Eljean thought the tender curve of his neck against that iron flare of muscles at the slope of his shoulders was the most vulnerable thing he’d ever seen.
“And you became what they needed,” Eljean supplied, understanding just a little. He had never had the knack of being what was needed. His father had needed a man, not a man-loving boy, and Zhane…. Zhane had needed him to be someone who wasn’t tempted, wasn’t half drunk on arousal, wasn’t yearning for a naked witchman covered in the fur of a beast.
“It was all I could do,” Ellyot murmured, still looking away. He jerked his head up then as though listening, and his breathing quickened. Eljean realized he had whiskers, still, in the puff of skin over his thinned lips, and they crinkled along with Ellyot’s nose. He heard something. Something threatening.
“Listen, Eljean… they’re going to knock on the door in a minute. I’ll just be a friend, crashing on your couch, taking a shower. But when they’re gone….”
Ellyot’s head swiveled, and those frightening blue eyes bored into his.
“Eljean, when they’re gone, when I come out of the shower, my eyes… they’ll be normal. The Goddess… I can’t hold on to her for too long… not when I’m hurt. Not when I’m weak. She’s what’s keeping me on my feet right now. I’m about bled dizzy, if you must know the truth. I’ll need a change of clothes, maybe even just a blanket to roll up in for your couch…. I’m….”
And for the first time since he’d changed from an injured snowcat to a desperate human, Eljean saw embarrassment cross his features.
“I’m weak, when she leaves me.” Ellyot dropped his head again and shook it, as though trying to keep his thoughts. “I’m as bare as a naked five-year-old girl with a skinned knee, right? You… you might not know me. I need you not to worry. Let me cry like a child, mewl like an infant… whatever. I’ll come back. I need you to know I’ll come back. It’s nothing you did—it’s just one of the prices you pay for the Goddess’s gift, that’s all. Ye ken?”
Eljean blinked at the unfamiliar expression.
“Do you know, Eljean? Do you understand?”
Ellyot caught Eljean’s chin in strong fingers, forcing Eljean’s green eyes to confront that magically blue gaze. “Come on, Eljean… don’t fade on me now. You’ve been a real trooper tonight. I need you to acknowledge that for a minute here, I’m going to be helpless, right? You’re going to be the grown-up. Can you do that?”
Eljean cleared his throat, feeling the warmth of Ellyot’s fingers seep into the cold of his skin and his fear.
“I’ve been changing my own skivvies for years,” he said with some semblance of smartness and was rewarded by Ellyot’s tired grin.
“Good—I knew I could count on you. Now they’re coming. I put everything into the hamper, the bloody parts tucked as into the middle as I could get them. If you leave the hamper on the inside of the bathroom door, odds are they’ll be afraid enough of a naked man to leave me alone. Hopefully they won’t be going through your trash to see the glass in the waste bin.”
Eljean’s eyes strayed to the bin beneath Ellyot’s feet. The glass was all red tinted, and Ellyot had to shake him for a moment when it seemed as though Eljean’s knees wouldn’t hold.
“Are we good?” he demanded, and Eljean met his eyes, sure the blue was less intense than it had been, and nodded, wishing he was brave.
“Excellent….” Ellyot made to turn away.
“Should I go get Aylan?” Eljean asked again before Triane’s Son walked into the shower and lost whatever it was that was holding him together.
“No!” Ellyot barked, but his shoulders seemed to slump a little more, and that neck curve… it became heartbreaking. “He’s happy, and it’s dangerous outside tonight.” Ellyot’s face moved a little more toward normal, and his whole body seemed to sag. “There are things I’ve done….” He shook himself, hard, and Eljean knew he didn’t want the Goddess to slip away until the men were gone. “Now go!” he ordered at last, and Eljean backed out of the bathroom as Ellyot shut the door.
The water started just as a knock sounded from the hall.
Dealing w
ith the guards was quick and painless. They were looking for signs of destruction, not of collaboration, and so after a quick scan of the flat, and a rather puzzled question about whether or not it was always this much of a disaster, they quickly moved on to the next door.
What was not so quick and painless was waiting, pacing outside the bathroom, kicking the dirty clothes into a pile, stacking the clean ones he hadn’t folded on top of his armoire, finding clean sheets for his eviscerated bed… and still, waiting.
A half an hour later, his room was cleaner than it had been in the year since he’d moved to the city, and Eljean knew from experience that the water must have gone cold. What was taking him so long?
Images started flitting through Eljean’s mind—the sagging body, those sloped shoulders, that terrible vulnerability to Ellyot’s neck.
He was suddenly afraid for the man in the shower.
Eljean gathered his scant courage, his nonexistent boldness into both hands, and opened the door.
Triane’s Son Needing
TORRANT COULDN’T seem to get up off the tile floor, even though the water was getting cooler by the second.
He wrapped his arms around his knees and shivered and wondered how long he would have to be in the shower before he stopped seeing Jems’s blood on his hands.
By the time Eljean walked in, his toes were tingeing blue. Oh gods…. Eljean! Torrant looked down into his lap so he wouldn’t have to see the hunger, the half-ashamed, half-voracious yearning to touch more, hold more, be more to Torrant than Torrant had to give.
He was so tired of being strong.
He didn’t look up when the water shut off or when he felt the towel around his shoulders. Eljean was taller than he was and—like Aylan—he had no problem wrestling him up from the floor or drying him off like a child.
Unlike Aylan, who, when he had succumbed to the urge to touch, had always been sure, confident, and fluid, even in his reluctance, Eljean’s touches were uncertain. Torrant felt a thumb skip along his neck, along the knotted clench of muscle at his back, and then it stopped. He wanted to laugh at the uncertainty, at the delicate, butterfly hesitation. He wanted to smile at Eljean and make him feel accepted at the same time he told him regretfully “no.”