by Amy Lane
“When he becomes unsatisfied with pity, then he’ll be well enough to move on,” Charlie said with a combination of heaviness and hopefulness, and Whim had to concede. It was the best scenario this plan had to offer. He would have to hope.
“I brought your toy,” Whim said out of nowhere, because his basic nature had not changed in all these years.
“I thought the one at Christmas was my toy,” Charlie said, content just to lean on him.
“Yes, but I thought this would be good-bye,” Whim explained, reaching into his pocket. “I made you a special one, for good-bye.”
“You knew?”
Whim shrugged. “I… I felt something…. I felt you beg me for forgiveness, in the winter.” Whim looked away. “I couldn’t think of what else it would be.”
Charlie moaned a little and took the small wooden box from Whim’s hand. “I don’t want to look at it if it’s a gift of farewell,” he muttered, but he took it anyway. He opened it, and Whim summoned the light from his hands so Charlie could see. There was Whim, tall, loose-jointed, standing in their clearing, his arm poised to throw a stick across the green. Standing near him was a cat, a large one that came up to Whim’s thighs, getting ready to pounce as soon as Whim threw.
Charlie blew on it softly, and Whim’s arm extended and the cat’s legs moved, and for a moment, Charlie could see what Whim dreamed for them. Charlie could have been that shape-shifting cat, and he and Whim could have spent their days together.
“We’ll live this, Whim,” Charlie whispered, looking at it. “I swear. Tell me that it’s okay. Tell me you can make it another year. Tell me we can be this, this right here, someday. Please. It hurts so bad right now, being here with you and being so close. Tell me this can be us.”
“This can be us,” Whim said, believing it.
“Tell me you’ll be okay,” Charlie said hopefully, and Whim closed his eyes and murmured his first lie.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, and the first attack of stomach cramps was truly horrible. He kept his body still and breathed evenly, and Charlie didn’t even flinch against him.
“Are you sure?”
“If I know we can be together at the end, I’ll survive,” he said, and this was the truth, so the nausea and muscle aches eased back a little. But not entirely. Charlie must have heard something in his voice then, because he didn’t press.
“Then so can I,” is what he did say, and Whim used the opportunity to change the subject.
“Do we have the night?” he asked. “I mean, I know making love is out, but can we sit and talk? He’s right there. I’m not going to simply man-nap you into the night. Can we… can we talk?”
Charlie nodded and cast Daniel a weary glance. “I told him it would be boring. I told him that’s all we’d do. If he wants to fall asleep over there while we talk all night, I think that’s his choice, right?”
Whim had brought the picnic blanket and some food, and Litha was almost like it had been. Before they really started, Charlie ran Daniel a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and some melon that Whim assured him he wouldn’t be able to eat. Charlie told Whim about continuing with the job as a counselor but learning the workload so he could still work on his music and write, and Whim told Charlie about the year at the hill.
It had been an eventful year. Their little sorceress had proven herself again and again. Between her and Green and Nicky and Bracken, her other lovers, they had made the hill a place with hope again.
“Bracken bonded with her. Can you believe that, Charlie?” Charlie didn’t understand, so Whim had to explain about bonding. When a sidhe bonded with a lover, it was an awesome kind of magic—it literally bonded the two together for the lifespan of the most mortal of the couple. Bracken had bound himself to a mortal. He had sacrificed the potential of thousands of years, just to know that she wouldn’t leave the world without him. Bonding was also based on fidelity. Cory had previous bonds, so she would be allowed to keep those lovers. Bracken had only Cory. If he were ever unfaithful, it would be Bracken who died while she mourned him.
Charlie was overwhelmed. “That’s an amazing sacrifice,” he said, looking at Whim with awed eyes.
Whim blushed. “I’d make it for you, if you became a were-animal,” he promised, and Charlie squeezed his hand hard. Whim changed the subject then and explained how the combined power of Green and Cory and their lovers made their hill and their people strong.
“Not invulnerable,” he warned Charlie. “There are still threats sometimes.” But powerful. People were afraid to attack them now. All of Green’s followers bore Green’s mark, and to commit treason was to be punished horribly.
“Would you like to see my mark, Charlie?” Whim asked, and as Charlie looked, fascinated, Whim pulled down his T-shirt (another first) and showed him the tattoo between his neck and his shoulder. Most of the time a sidhe couldn’t tattoo. A tattoo was a wound, and they healed such things. This one had been blown through his body with magic, though, and his own permission, with the power of touch, blood, and song, the basis of all elven magic, and it meant that Whim belonged—truly belonged, in spite of his oddness and his time spent alone in his own head and his little workshop and his butterfly mind—to the hill that he loved.
His mark showed a gamboling cat with a bloody rose in its teeth, playing with limes and acorns. “All the things are symbolic,” Whim assured him, not wanting to talk too much about it. “But the cat is definitely you.”
Charlie had smiled. “You really want me to be a cat, don’t you?” he asked rhetorically, and Whim knew his smile was a little foolish, but he didn’t care.
“I really like cats,” he said solemnly, and that earned him Charlie’s first real laugh of the night, and for a moment Whim forgot that his stomach was going to explode. “Newcomers get a tattoo as they become a vampire or a werecreature… or a friend,” he added.
Charlie asked questions about the hill politics, and about Whim’s prince and his queen, and Adrian’s best friend and former lover, Bracken, the youngest sidhe at the hill. Whim’s tongue tripped as he tried to explain the marriage ceremony that would happen in two nights’ time, and he thought he was doing a horrible job of explaining all of it—but Charlie proved, as he had always proved, a quick study for these things.
“It’s like Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot,” Charlie said in evaluation, “but like they really worked it out instead of making a hash of it.”
Whim was delighted, and something in his heart righted itself in spite of the nasty, cramping nausea, and he began to hope again, truly hope, that he and Charlie would someday get to live that promised future. “Yes. Yes, exactly,” he said, a little bit of happiness bleeding into his voice.
Charlie took his hand and kissed it. “That’s awesome, Whim. It’s like, you know, if something that epic and big can happen and work, then maybe just you and me, we can work too.”
Whim nodded earnestly. “It works that way, Charlie,” he said, excited at the thought. “Renny, the werekitty who was so heartbroken after her beloved died, she found a new lover. It’s strange because he’s a policeman, but sometimes even the strangest things can work if there is big love magic surrounding it.”
“Big love magic,” Charlie said wryly, lifting his eyebrows. “Well, we’ll have to hope for that.”
Hope. Sometimes it was the driving force behind the oxygen pushing itself into a body’s lungs, wasn’t it?
They talked until dawn, and then Charlie stood and looked beyond the railroad tracks to the graffiti wall where Daniel sat, dozing in the gold light. Whim stood and took his hand, and together they walked to the clearing, the decision to part right before the railroad tracks unspoken and mutual.
Charlie turned to Whim when they got there. “Promise me you’ll be here next year,” he begged, and Whim nodded.
“How could I not be?” Whim told him sincerely. Charlie stood on his tiptoes and pressed his mouth hard to Whim’s, and Whim closed his eyes and savored the taste.
“Promise me you’ll be okay until then,” he whispered, and Whim nodded.
“I’ll be fine.” Then he gritted his teeth against the cramping, the sweats, and the pain.
Charlie’s eyes searched his face, not liking what he saw, but he still turned and left. He got to Daniel and shook him awake, and Daniel stood and blinked, scowling when he saw that Whim was still there. Charlie sighed and, after making sure the other man would follow him, disappeared through the gap in the graffiti wall.
As soon as he was gone, Whim fell to his knees and vomited bile onto the scorched ground at his feet. When his body was done with the first round of heaving—and after two such heinous mistruths, odds were good he’d be sick all day—he looked up and saw Daniel hadn’t quite followed Charlie. He was still there, looking with surprise and, to his credit, some concern as Whim humiliated himself in the middle of a vacant lot.
“What?” Daniel asked, almost against his will, and Whim didn’t have any evasions or half-truths in him.
“I lied,” he said achingly, feeling his stomach buck inside him again for round two. “I said I’d be okay….” And with that, he heaved again and again, and when he looked up, miserable and trembling, Daniel was gone.
WHEN WHIM later thought about that year, he thought of it as “the year of malaise.” He felt sickly, sad, and not himself from the moment he got up off the ground and staggered back to Green’s hill.
It was a hard year to feel like shit at Green’s hill. Cory, Green, Bracken, and their accidental lover, Nicky, were all happy, and the hill felt more secure—a safe place to bring a lover. Even the new and deeply troubled alpha werewolf managed to settle in with his family and achieve something like peace, and given how damaged he’d been, that was saying something. The hill itself was built like a vast apartment building right in the center of one of the smaller mountaintops in Foresthill, with a wraparound window on three-quarters of the hill, showing the side of the elves and nothing but hillside on the side of the vampires—so as not to let light in. Ever. It was hard to be alone in the hill proper. More and more, Whim found himself retreating to his tiny workshop in one of the buildings outside the hill, singing melancholy songs to himself while he poured all of his hope into his tiny toys.
He didn’t take a lover once that year, and this behavior alone was an anomaly among elves. His hair was a perpetually shifting shade of storm-cloud gray and mournful blue.
It wasn’t until June arrived, when his heart usually lifted and soared with anticipation at seeing Charlie, that this sickly sadness became ominous.
It wasn’t until the week before Litha that Whim realized it wasn’t just his heart that was sick about Charlie, but that something about Charlie was truly, physically sick.
Whim panicked. He had the realization while working on a toy just for Charlie, one showing a boy in a trench coat, dancing to music in his own head. He was thinking so deeply about his boy, his man, that suddenly he pictured him.
Charlie’s body hurt. His arms and hand were hooked up with tubes and wires. The hand with the biggest, clearest tube and the biggest, most painful needle was pale and thin, and the veins stood out like blue railroad tracks, carrying death to their destination.
“Charlie!”
It was the same way Whim had known Charlie was going to break his heart, but this time Whim needed Charlie to hear him.
“Heya, Whim. Is it Litha yet?”
The quality of Charlie’s reply let Whim know that he was drugged heavily and in pain.
“You’ll hold on till Litha for me, won’t you, Charlie?” Oh Goddess. Oh please. Three days. If Charlie could hold on three days. “I can’t heal you in that place, Charlie. I’m not strong enough. Please, Charlie. Hold on until Litha. I’ll be there. I swear I’ll be there.”
He crashed into Green’s bedroom, his hand tearing through the lock on the door and everything. Nobody opened that door. Nobody violated the privacy of Green’s sanctuary. For one thing, it took a lot of magic power to violate the lock itself, and usually Whim would have said he wasn’t up to the job.
As it turned out, Green wasn’t in there, but his little sorceress was. She was sitting cross-legged on the giant hand-carved bed in cutoff shorts and a white T-shirt so big as to be the sail on a large vessel, her neck drooped over a book. She’d been crying, and she looked up at Whim in surprise, the curly red ponytail at the back of her head bobbing like a child’s.
And then she’d smiled gamely through her tears, and for the first time since his frightening vision, Whim knew hope.
“What’s wrong, Whim? You look like shit.”
The words were coarse, but the expression on her freckled face was all concern, and Whim found himself on his knees, his arms propped up on top of the bed like a petitioner before his goddess, telling her the whole story. Litha, Charlie, his desire to bring Charlie to the hill—all of it tumbled out of him, and when he finished with, “Goddess, Cory… he’s so sick! I can’t heal him alone… how can I heal him alone? I don’t even know if he’ll survive becoming a werecat!” He dropped his head on the coverlet and sobbed softly, only vaguely aware that her hand was on his head, stroking through the tangle of his murky green-brown hair.
“Shhhh…,” she soothed. “Shh…. He’s still alive, Whim. We just have to make a plan. I’m supposed to be good at plans.”
“I’m not,” he said in a clogged voice. “I’m only good at stupid things—”
“Stop that!” Her voice was sharp enough to make him look up. “You’re good at joy, Whim. You’re good at joy, and kindness, and it sounds like that’s all this guy has ever wanted in his whole life.”
“I can’t heal him in a hospital, Cory,” Whim confessed miserably. “I’m not that powerful. The needle in Charlie’s arm alone hurt me.” And then he showed her the skin of his arm, which was reddened and swollen as though healing from a cold-iron burn.
Her eyes widened, and she laid a hand on his cheek. “Jesus, Whim, you’re already partially bonded to the guy. Touch, blood, and song—you’ve already got a link. We can do this. We can heal him. I’ve got an idea. Here. Here’s the plan.”
Whim trusted her. She’d saved her lovers on more than one occasion, and she’d saved the hill on every level that counted. Cory could do this. Cory could make the most of Whim’s gifts, even though he was the least powerful sidhe on the hill.
So Whim put his trust in his queen, and then she laid out a way to save his Charlie.
While she was outlining what needed to be done, Green walked in, his hand tender on the back of her neck as she spoke.
“Luv,” he interrupted at one point, “you know we can’t….”
Cory nodded and met Whim’s gaze with her own tear-reddened eyes. “We can’t leave the hill on Litha, Whim,” she said apologetically. Whim knew. Adrian had died on Litha. The entire hill mourned. That kind of grief carried a powerful magic all its own—and not the lovely, healthful magic that Green was usually so good at, and that Whim needed now.
“That’s okay,” she said, looking hopeful. “Green, I think I know the perfect healing elf for the job.”
“What about the werecreature?” Green asked. Charlie would need to be bitten—there was no doubt about that. Besides needing to fit in at the hill, the fact was, the bite of a werecreature would clean the sickness out of Charlie’s blood as he changed form. Neither of them offered a vampire’s bite, and Whim was grateful. He would rather Charlie be mortal and full of life than immortal and yet pallid and pulseless.
“Renny?” Whim asked hopefully. Renny loved Whim. Whim thought he would need all the faith he could get.
Cory’s face softened as she looked at him, and Green nodded behind her. “I’ll ask,” Cory promised. “I’ll ask. And you can do this, Whim. All elves can heal a little. You’ll make this work, okay?”
And then they finished planning how Whim was going to save his Charlie.
Daniel—Gifts
BY THE time the police officer, the elf, and the tiny gi
rl crashed into Charlie’s hospital room, Daniel had seriously grown the fuck up.
The past year had been hell. Charlie had been diagnosed with leukemia in January. Six months of feeling ill, out of sorts, and (even Daniel had to admit) brokenhearted had turned out to have a physical cause, and Daniel had panicked.
“I can’t do this!” he’d yelled. “I can barely care for myself!”
Charlie had nodded, accepting, and said, “Fine, Daniel. I’ve got insurance. I’ve got family. You do what you need to do.”
Daniel hadn’t made it out the front door. Charlie had saved his life—figuratively, literally, spiritually—in every way possible. He found that he wouldn’t be much worth saving if he didn’t hang in for the rough stuff.
And it had been very rough. Charlie had needed chemotherapy, radiation, long car trips to specialty clinics, and an up-close-and-personal relationship with a barf bag. It still hadn’t been enough. In May, he’d been diagnosed as terminal. By the middle of June, he’d been in the hospital, waiting to die.
Hanging on until Litha.
It had made Daniel’s vision go red at first, how much faith his Charlie had in that tall, alien-looking freak he’d met in the abandoned lot. But something about the way Charlie talked about Whim, something about their simple faith in each other, finally touched Daniel’s heart. Charlie had always loved Whim more. That he had given Daniel a year and a half of his life had been a true gift, a true sacrifice, and Daniel had been damned ungrateful.
He’d even started to think of ways to help Charlie escape the hospital, just so he could spend his last moments saying good-bye to his Whim.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to.
The door to the ICU room blew open, and a man in a local sheriff’s uniform said, “Dammit, Lambent, I’m supposed to be here to make it official.”
A tall man with fiery red hair and a ruddy complexion snapped, “Come off it, Max, I’ve numbed the minds of anyone we’ve run into. It took us three bloody days to find this bloke, and I’ll be damned if I let Whim down now.”