by Kim Fielding
Fuck. He probably owed Des an explanation.
“There are certain requirements for magic to work. It has its own laws, just like physics or chemistry. One requirement, especially for strong magic, is blood. It’s… not a fuel, exactly. More like a catalyst. It ties the magic to the person who uses it so they can draw on each other.” That was a simplistic description but good enough. Honestly, Kurt didn’t understand the mechanics of it that deeply either. He was a field agent, not a lab guy.
“Larry used my spunk….”
“Instead of blood. Easier to collect without having to explain himself, I guess. And it works just as well. HIV can be spread via semen as well as blood. Magic can too. It’s just rare for wizards to do it.”
“But… why?”
“Why you? Dunno. You were younger and stronger.”
Des was pulling on his hair so hard it must have hurt. “He told me he was infertile. He had the mumps when he was a teenager. Do you think that’s why he… it was me?”
“Maybe.” That was an interesting theory—one that Kurt would bring up while he was throttling the Bureau wonks for overlooking this entire facet.
“Oh, God.” Des’s eyes were haunted. “I killed those people. Not just by helping Larry when he was on the run, not just by putting the boxes where he told me. I… I allowed him to use me. I let him make me into a weapon.”
Kurt didn’t argue, mostly because Des was right. Even if Des hadn’t known the specifics of what Krane was doing, he knew enough that he should have backed off. He let himself become the bullets, just as Kurt had let himself shoot the gun in Vietnam. But there was one important point he had to make.
“Last night when the box called, you said no, Des. I think it took a good deal of strength for you to resist, but you said no.”
Did some of the horror in Des’s face lighten? Maybe. But he remained stricken, and Kurt realized that aside from the little scene in the cemetery, it had probably been a very long time since anyone had offered Des comfort.
Sometimes a single course of action could be both very foolish and the absolutely right thing to do. Kurt stood and walked around the table to Des, then offered him a hand. As soon as Des was standing, Kurt grasped his upper arms and pinned him with his gaze. “You made mistakes once. Big fucking mistakes. But last night you could have killed me and run free, and you didn’t. You steered your ship well, Desmond Hughes.” Then he wrapped Des in a tight embrace.
Des immediately clutched back, a low moan escaping him. “I wouldn’t have killed you,” he whispered.
Oddly, Kurt believed him.
It was funny how good a simple hug could be. Letting someone lean into you, feeling his heart beating so close to yours, smelling the hotel shampoo in his hair. Unlike Des, Kurt had friends and family to draw on when he needed them—and Christ, they’d truly been there for him when things got dark—but he didn’t get much physical contact. Now he closed his eyes and drank it in, taking as much from Des as Kurt was giving to him.
Des moved his head slightly and so did Kurt, their lips aligned for a kiss.
No, dammit. Hadn’t he been lecturing nonstop about control and responsibility? Own up to it, Powell.
But then Kurt found himself kissing Des. Softly, because Kurt wanted to savor the moment. Des threw himself into it at once, cradling Kurt’s skull with his palms and brushing the pads of his thumbs across Kurt’s cheekbones and up to his temples. They continued like that for a long time, leisurely enjoying the taste of each other. Heat built slowly, beginning in Kurt’s belly and spreading up his spine, making him woozy as it reached his brain. Or maybe that was just a lack of oxygen.
And then for reasons Kurt couldn’t fathom, an invisible switch flipped somewhere inside him, and he suddenly needed Des—as desperately as he’d once needed booze and pills. Kurt made the kiss more urgent, tangling his tongue with Des’s and moving his hands down to grab Des’s wonderfully meaty ass.
Des pushed against Kurt, using his greater mass to propel Kurt backward until he was pinned against a wall. Willingly trapped by his own desire.
They never broke the kiss for longer than a second, and now Kurt’s attention was split between the soft pressure at his lips and the hard, urgent one at his groin. The thin fabric of their pajama pants provided no cushion between their rigid lengths, but it was still a barrier.
Skin. Skin would be so much better. Kurt worked his hands under Des’s waistband and yep, that was infinitely better. Hot flesh, solid muscles. It was almost too much. Kurt wanted to urge Des to slow down but couldn’t find the words, not when his body was urging more, more, more.
“Des,” he gasped, “I need—”
Before he could finish the sentence, Des dropped to his knees and pulled Kurt’s sleep pants down to his thighs. He wrapped one big hand around the shaft of Kurt’s cock, leaned in close, and—
The phone rang.
“Mother fucker!” Kurt shouted, meaning it most sincerely.
Des sat back on his heels with a laugh. “You’ve quite a mouth, Agent Powell. But I agree.”
It was Townsend on the phone, of course. Who else would it be? “It’s been a few days since an update, my boy.”
Shit. Now Kurt felt guilty as well as frustrated. “We’re in Arkansas. Yesterday we found the box in Roebuck Springs, and I destroyed it per instructions.”
Townsend paused very slightly before responding. “You had no problems?”
“No.”
“And what have you found in Demeter?”
“Nothing yet. It was late when we got here, so we’re in a hotel about twenty minutes away. We were just about to head over there.”
“All right.” It was impossible to gauge Townsend’s mood from his voice, which was, as usual, well moderated, a touch patronizing, and slightly jocular. “Please call tonight and let me know how it goes.”
“Yes, sir. Have you found out who might have tossed the car and cottage?”
“I’m afraid not. Keep an eye out, son.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kurt hung up and saw Des staring at him. “What?”
“You didn’t tell your boss everything.”
“You think I should tell him we were just now getting way too personal?”
“No. About last night, and my connection to the box.”
Kurt shook his head. “He’ll get it all in my report at the end.” He brushed imaginary crumbs off his pajama pants. “Let’s get dressed and get this over with, okay?”
Demeter made Roebuck Springs look like a major metropolis. The tiny town sat in an area of flat horizons, rice fields, and small stands of trees, punctuated by little white farmhouses. Main Street consisted of nothing but a red brick building that housed a post office and general store and, across the way, a diminutive yellow building that claimed to be city hall. A water tower loomed behind it.
“Not even a bar or gas station,” Kurt noted. “How the hell did Krane even find these places?”
“He had a big atlas.”
For no good reason, that made Kurt hate him even more. Even though he passed little houses on big lots very slowly, it didn’t take long to cover the entire town. Des peered out the windows but didn’t see anything he recognized. After a bit, Kurt parked near a rusty metal building. “Nothing?”
“Sorry. It was a mobile home, I remember that much, but we didn’t go out much.” His hands were worrying each other in his lap again. “This was… the first place we killed people.”
“I know.”
“Orlando, Roebuck Springs… he was just getting ready there. I think maybe Mississippi was a fallback in case we had to run quick. That’s why he left the box there. But when we arrived in Demeter….” His voice, already strained, broke. He had to clear his throat twice. “I knew something was up. Larry was wound especially tight. We’d fuck three, four times a day, and after that he’d yell at me over little things, like leaving my shoe in his way. But we’d already been together for four years by then. I kept thinking tha
t if I was extra good and extra careful he’d go back to how he was when we first met.”
How did abusers learn to play that game so well? Twisting things up so tightly that victims felt as if the abuse were their fault and that losing the sons-of-bitches would be worse than anything else.
Des cleared his throat again. “He told me to stay inside. I tried to cook stuff sometimes, but I’m no good at it and he’d yell over that too. Usually I watched TV. He spent most of the day in a little shed next to the mobile home.”
Kurt knew this already. It was in the briefing papers, and Des had told him the first time they’d met. But Kurt hadn’t known Des then, and now he cared about him. So he let him continue, more to ease Des’s stress than in hopes of learning anything new.
“One morning he woke up before dawn—which he hardly ever did—and was practically bouncing off the walls while I made coffee and toast. He told me to get dressed. It was summer and already so hot and muggy that it was hard to move. But he dashed into the shed and then back out, and he drove us to the next town over. Templeville. We’d been getting our groceries there.
“Templeville had three bars. I don’t know how he chose which one, but he took us around the back and told me to break down the door. It was easy—just a few kicks and putting my shoulder into it. It was dark inside. We were in a storage area that smelled like stale beer and cigarettes. It reminded me of my dad. He handed me the box wrapped in a towel. Told me to unwrap it and hide it on a shelf behind a cardboard box. Then we left.”
Not a single car had passed as Kurt and Des sat there, but an airplane buzzed overhead, hidden by gray clouds. It might rain later, Kurt thought. Or maybe a cold front would come through—the air held a hint of that possibility.
Des tipped his head back and closed his eyes. “We came back that night. Larry had spent half the day in his shed and the other half sticking his dick in me. I was sore. I just… just wanted everything to be done so we could move on. We went to the bar. The people there just stared at us. Not used to strangers, I expect. We ordered beers. His was halfway gone when he stood up, pointed at a skinny old man, and said something. I think it was in Latin. Sounded like the priests, anyway. And that skinny old man? He….” Des swallowed before continuing in a voice so quiet that Kurt barely heard him. “He turned inside out.”
Kurt, who had seen the crime-scene photos and witnessed worse on some of his own missions, shuddered. “You don’t have to tell me this.”
“Yes, I do.” A few breaths in and out. “I could have taken Larry down—he wasn’t paying me any mind. But I just stood there. Everyone else in the bar was screaming. That man…. Jesus Christ, Kurt, he was still alive, making sounds…. Someone tried the door but it wouldn’t open and everyone was piled there while Larry pointed three more times. A man about my age. A middle-aged woman. The bartender. Then he grabbed my arm and dragged me to the back. Told me to grab the fucking box. We went back to the mobile home and… shit, I lost track of the box, dunno what he did with it. All our things were already packed up and Larry told me to put them in the car. We left.”
It was an enormous thing, this outpouring of emotion. Kurt had to roll down the windows to let some of it out, but still he felt nearly smothered. He couldn’t tell how much of the grief was Des’s and how much was his own.
Twenty minutes passed in silence. A few cars and trucks went by. Then Des sat up straighter. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. I expect the mobile home’s long gone and the shed besides. But perhaps that’s not where Larry put the box.”
“Oh?” Kurt’s brows were raised.
“There was a house behind us. I don’t think anyone lived there, and I never saw Larry go inside, but he could have.”
“What did the house look like?”
“White.” Des laughed drily at his own joke: all the houses in Demeter were white, as if it had never occurred to the locals that color was a possibility.
“Let’s do another drive. This time I want you to look at the backs of houses we pass. See if any of them seem familiar.”
“All right.”
They were two blocks north of Main Street and at the westernmost city limits when Des inhaled sharply and then in a strangled voice said, “Stop!”
He seemed to be looking at a modern Quonset hut, its shiny corrugated metal a sharp contrast to a few pieces of rusted farm equipment in the gravel driveway. Behind it, a one-story house—perhaps once white but now faded to gray—peeked from between trees. Old, weathered plywood covered the windows, and the roof had acquired an accumulation of moss and debris.
“Is that it?”
“Maybe. I don’t think this metal building was here then.”
That made sense; it definitely looked newer. Kurt drove around the long block and parked in front of the house. He would have preferred to use the driveway, but that might catch people’s attention. He and Des were conspicuous enough in a hamlet where everyone could probably map everyone else’s birthmarks. Seeing the house up close, it was clear that nobody had lived there for a long time. The porch had fallen away, leaving the boarded-up front door quite a distance above ground level. Somebody must have mowed the lawn periodically, because it was reasonably short, but shrubbery and weeds choked the foundation. A few piles of lumber and other debris sat in the side yard.
“Bit of a fixer-upper,” Des observed.
“Yeah.”
“You certain that ghosts aren’t a worry? It looks haunted.”
“I told you. It’s living people you have to beware of.”
After looking around to make sure nobody was watching, Kurt retrieved his small toolbox from the trunk. Of course the neighbors might have been spying from inside their houses, but there was nothing he could do about that. He had a story ready if they were confronted: he and Des were Hollywood scouts on the hunt for a horror-movie shooting location. It wasn’t a great cover story, but just the mention of the film industry often filled people’s eyes with stars and smothered their common sense. Besides, even the local cops would have a hard time deciding what else Kurt and Des might be up to. There was probably nothing in the house worth stealing.
Des followed him to the back of the house, where the door was both more accessible and better hidden than the one in front. “Stay outside,” Kurt said. “In fact, stay in the car.”
“Why?” Comprehension turned Des’s expression into a scowl. “You think I might accept the box’s offer this time?”
“No, I don’t think you will. But it’ll be stronger with you nearby, and I’m not completely sure it won’t lash out if you keep refusing. Plus, you were pretty drained last night.”
“Last night I was surprised. Now I’m ready.” Des crossed his arms. “I’m not leaving you alone with it.”
Although Kurt was slightly annoyed by the rebellion, it was also heartening to see Des take such a forceful stand. And having someone at his back would be kind of nice. Jesus, who’d have guessed he’d end up here, grateful for the support of a mass murderer? Whom he’d very nearly had sex with this morning.
Suppressing that thought, Kurt took out his tools and set about breaking in. The door was secured with a heavy padlock, so instead of dealing with that, he simply pried the hasp from the weakened doorframe. The door swung open easily, albeit with a noisy squeal.
They stepped into what had once been a kitchen. Part of the plywood covering the windows had rotted away, letting in enough light that Kurt put away his flashlight. Someone had taken anything of obvious value, leaving empty maws where appliances had once stood. Most of the upper cabinets had collapsed, and the bottom ones dipped and gaped, their doors and drawers gone. Several layers of wallpaper peeled scabrously from the walls. The overhead light had crashed onto the linoleum floor, scattering pieces of broken glass and plastic.
“You take me to the most charming places,” Des said.
Kurt didn’t dignify that with a reply.
He took out the Bureau’s little plastic device and began his search. His
mind wasn’t really on the work, which didn’t require much concentration. Instead he thought about the kiss he and Des had shared earlier that morning and how it had felt so much more momentous than any kisses from his past. It felt as if it meant something, although he had no idea what. He also thought about how soon the mission would be over and that he’d have to return Des to that miserable fucking prison. Not that he’d ever promised Des anything else; not that either of them had ever expected anything else. But Jesus Christ, how could he do that now?
Still puzzling over that thorny issue, Kurt finished the kitchen and moved into the adjoining room—a dining room, based on the remains of a hulking china cabinet against one wall. Pieces of the ceiling had fallen, forcing Kurt to fumble his way along the perimeter. He closed the kitchen door and started his circuit of the room. Des followed, helpfully holding a flashlight to illuminate the path. There were a lot of spiders, and one poor dead bird must have blundered in through a hole somewhere and not found its way back out.
Kurt turned to Des, intending to tell him it was time for the next room, when he heard what sounded like a stealthy footstep in the kitchen. Shit. He wanted to draw his gun, but that would only make a local cop antsy. They might draw a weapon too, and seeing a black man obviously trespassing, they might shoot.
“Kurt...?” Des began. He would have asked more, but the door to the kitchen swung open.
Kurt recognized the woman who stood in the doorway, silhouetted by muted sunlight before being illuminated by the flashlight. He’d last seen her with a male companion in Sisters’ Diner in Roebuck Springs, and he assumed that the figure behind her in the kitchen, whom he couldn’t see well, was that same man.
“Agent Powell?” she asked with a faint New York accent.
Although Kurt let his hand hover near the holster, he didn’t draw his gun. “Who are you?”
“I’m Agent Lori Canfield and my partner’s Brian Finch. We’re from the East Coast Division.”
Kurt let his hand relax, although he was pissed off. “What the fuck are you doing tailing me?”