Swordfall (The Fall Trilogy, #2)

by Devaux, Olivette

  “Being out there made you feel very foreign.”

  Asbjorn’s voice was so soft, Sean barely heard him over the noise of the aircraft. He froze. “How did you know what I was thinking just now?” Sean asked, bewildered.

  Asbjorn gave his hand a tentative squeeze. “I remember that feeling all too well. And the point when I could pick out words in English and wasn’t sure if they meant what I thought they meant.”

  “That’s right, you came to the US as a kid,” Sean said, and now his voice was full of interest. This was a part of Asbjorn he had yet to discover.

  “It wasn’t bad. And, I knew we had moved for good, so I had no choice, really. It was sink or swim, and the faster I adapted, the better.”

  Sean eyed Asbjorn, observing the way his calm, relaxed expression warred with the tension in his shoulders. “It must have been hard,” he finally said.

  “It was an adventure, sunshine, and it was worth every bit of effort. And now we’re going home, all relaxed and side by side. We left the apartment sparkling clean, the clean sheets are ready to be broken in, and school starts in two days.”

  Sean smiled, his other hand wandering up to the round piece of amber seated under his throat. “I’m glad we went. It just... it’s time, you know?”

  Asbjorn squeezed his hand back. “Yeah. I know. It’s time to take care of business.”

  HOURS LATER, SEAN SAT in his seat, unable to sleep on a daytime flight. He didn’t want to watch a movie and he didn’t want to play games, because the little screen before him kept freezing. Boredom reduced him to idle browsing through an in-flight catalog while Asbjorn doodled on a notepad next to him.

  “This is so boring. If we could at least make out, or something,” Sean hissed under his breath. He slid his eyes over to Asbjorn and caught a hint of a smile. A jean-clad leg pressed against his.

  “We could’ve moved to the empty section in the back of the plane.”

  “Yeah, right. I bet they have cameras everywhere,” Sean said, turning a page of the in-flight catalog. “Look, you can buy a staircase so your little doggie can make it up to your bed.”

  Asbjorn raised his eyebrows. “Why, you have trouble making it to bed?”

  “Only when you make asshole remarks,” Sean bit off, turning the page to a display of fake topiaries.

  “I thought those are the sort of remarks that lure you in, actually,” Asbjorn said. “Maybe we could commandeer one of the bathrooms and join the mile-high club.”

  Sean gave it a thought. “Those spaces are so small. And they smell like that blue chemical. And they’re noisy.”

  “Noisy is good,” Asbjorn commented as his pen drew a series of interconnected spirals. “You can be really loud.”

  “Hey... so what would you do, ideally?” Sean whispered as he tilted his head closer.

  Asbjorn huffed. “Ideally? If you weren’t a chicken and would come into the back section with me?”

  “Yeah,” Sean said on a breathy exhale.

  An attendant bustled by. “Would you like anything to drink?” she asked.

  “Two beers, please.” Asbjorn waited until they were settled with their drinks and she was gone. Then he leaned his head toward Sean. “I’d take you to the middle row and flip all the arm guards up.”

  “Yeah?” Sean said and drew on his bottle.

  “Yeah. I’d have you lie down and buckle your legs down and your arms up overhead.”

  Sean drew a shallow breath and pressed his leg against Asbjorn’s.

  “And then I’d open your fly, and you’d be hard by then, naturally, because I am just that awesome and irresistible.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Sean whispered. He felt his pants grow a little tight and his face was hot and flushed. He stroked his cheek with the cool beer bottle.

  “Well, yeah. Of course I am. But then I’d kneel down for you, and I’d lick you up and down, and I’d suck you into my mouth!”

  “Shit.” Sean stirred in his seat. He was afraid to look down. There was a blanket on the floor, though, so he worked his way down and pulled the thin, blue blanket over his front. “It’s getting a bit cold here.”

  Asbjorn blew on his cheek. “You look flushed. You sure ’bout that?”

  “You’re gonna pay for this, you jackass.”

  “The bathroom’s right that way,” Asbjorn whispered. “But anyway, it would feel so incredibly good, you’d try to thrust up, and I’d have to hold you down. And you’d start getting loud, so I’d give you a seatbelt to chew on!” He leaned back in his seat with a grin on his face.

  It was obvious Asbjorn was aware of Sean’s state, all riled and hard, but there was no way Sean could let the challenge go unanswered. He leaned closer to Asbjorn’s ear. “And then I’d beg you to fuck me.” Asbjorn stiffen next to him and Sean suppressed a chuckle. “And I’d turn over for you, still all tied up and all, and you’d be so hard, it would be tough to get your jeans undone.” Sean glanced at Asbjorn’s face. His eyes were shut, his jaw was tight, and his nostrils flared out in an effort to get more air. Sean grinned. “And then you’d pull a packet of butter from your shirt pocket, since you’ve been planning all this since lunch, you see – and you’d use the butter instead of lube. And you’d cover us with this blanket and push your way all the way in, and it would feel so hot and tight....”

  “Sean,” Asbjorn bit off. He looked like he would hyperventilate soon, so Sean decided to up the ante.

  “And then you’d see the attendant walk past, and you’d have to remain entirely still, pretending we are just napping. Which would be horribly frustrating. I’d feel you all tense on top of me....”

  Asbjorn slid his hips lower under his already open seat tray.

  “...and you’d just explode so hard, you couldn’t move afterward.” Sean grinned. “So... do you need to step out for half a minute?”

  “I’m gonna get you back for this,” Asbjorn hissed, but Sean saw his firm lips twitch as he tried not to smile.

  “Hey, you started,” Sean said. “Besides, now I know what I want to do when we get home.”

  “Try having a nap,” Asbjorn said and propped his head against the window. “You won’t get much sleep tonight. I guarantee it.”

  Sean angled himself to get more space, leaning his head onto Asbjorn’s shoulder. “Is that good?” he whispered.

  “No,” Asbjorn hummed. “It’s perfect.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Sean woke up two hours later. They were given one more drink and one more snack, and a US Customs form to fill out. He looked at the instructions and snorted.

  “What?” Asbjorn said next to him.

  “It asks whether we were in contact with farm animals.” Sean nearly howled with laughter.

  “So?”

  “Your family, Bjorn. Sorry, sorry... they’re like a pack of wild wolves!”

  “Your Auntie Iveragh slipped me some dried wild mushrooms. You think I should declare them?” Asbjorn wondered.

  “Well....” Sean pondered the issue. “They are dead, right? They are a food product.”

  “Yeah, sunshine, but if the spores get loose, it will be like one giant fungal ejaculate all over the Boston Metropolitan Area!”

  Sean stared Asbjorn right in the eye. “I know, love. And that’s why we’ll have to swallow.”

  “To save the people,” Asbjorn quipped while trying to maintain a straight face. “Save them from being contaminated!”

  Sean dissolved in peals of laughter. “Contaminated by the Curse of the Fungi. ‘Fun-guy?’ Get it?”

  THE TAXI MADE ITS WAY through the darkened Boston streets. They passed under the city through the Big Dig tunnels, crossed the Charles River, and weaved through the MIT campus on the Cambridge side.

  “Hey, Sean! We’re almost home.” Asbjorn straightened in the backseat and grabbed Sean by the arm, trying to shake him awake.

  “Never again,” Sean said again. “I abhor air travel! Home sweet home.”

  “Yeah, you’re right
.” Asbjorn sighed happily. “But... tell me honestly, did you have that bad a time?”

  “No. I loved Ireland and I loved Denmark, just not the travel to get there. Other than that, it was great! Thank you for inviting me to come.”

  Asbjorn wrapped his arm around Sean’s back. “And now we are just few blocks away from our house, and we’ll shower and go to sleep, and tomorrow we resume our life as originally scheduled, yeah? We will implement security procedures again until that asshole’s caught – it will be fine. Everything will be okay.”

  Sean’s shoulders softened as he leaned into Asbjorn. “Home....”

  Asbjorn could hear the smile in Sean’s voice.

  “I cahn’t get any closer ’cause the roahd’s closed,” the cabbie said in his Boston twang, making his words almost unintelligible after two weeks abroad. “If youh cahn walkh fro ’ere, it’ll be only forty-fihve buhcks.”

  “We’re close enough,” Asbjorn said as Sean fished the cash out of his wallet. They hiked their backpacks up on shoulders and carried their book bags in their hands.

  “Wonder what happened? Looks like an accident,” Sean said, gesturing at the police cruiser up ahead.

  “Hey, that’s by our house,” Asbjorn said, his strides gaining in length and speed.

  Soon they got close enough to see the yellow tape.

  The house where Asbjorn had rented his apartment was a dark, burned-out wreck. Its windows were broken, and the aluminum siding was smudged with smoke. The acrid stench of burned wood and plastic permeated the air, and Asbjorn could taste the metallic tang in the back of his throat. He stopped and stared for a while, as though he couldn’t comprehend what happened in his brief absence.

  “Bjorn?” Sean stood right by him, with his packs on the ground and his hand on Asbjorn’s elbow. “Hey... Bjorn!” Sean’s voice came as though from far away. “It looks like the fire was mostly on the second floor. At your place!”

  “My apartment. My stuff!” Asbjorn stirred to life with a stubborn toss of his head. He shook Sean’s hand off and slipped under the yellow tape stretched between the blue police sawhorses.

  “Hey, whatcha doin?” The policeman lowered the window of his cruiser, yelling at him.

  Asbjorn turned around. “I live here. I guess I used to live here before it burned out. What happened?”

  The policeman exited his cruiser and approached Asbjorn. “First I’ll need to see some ID. Then we’ll be asking you some questions.”

  “FIREBOMBED? WHAT DO you mean, firebombed?” Sean’s voice rose almost an octave, filling the space of the police station conference room with the sound of his indignation. For a short while, he was just unable to comprehend.

  Mark exchanged a glance with his uniformed colleague before looking at his friends with pity in his eyes. “Look, Sean, that guy you put away. Frank Pettel. He’s some bad news. He’s got it in for you, and he’s trying to get at you by getting at your buddy here. It appears that he made or obtained an old-fashioned Molotov cocktail and tossed it through Asbjorn’s bedroom window. My question is, did you make the place look unoccupied, or was it all dark while you guys were gone?”

  Sean watched Asbjorn sip the thick, police-station coffee out of his Styrofoam cup, and took in another mouthful himself. Its bitter taste didn’t quite erase the last vestiges of the acrid fire smell, but it distracted and concealed it, and he was grateful for its warmth.

  Asbjorn paused for a moment before he replied. “I had all the lights on timers. They were programmed to be random, so it didn’t look like an obvious security system. The last light would have gone off between ten and midnight. I had a radio go on and off too.”

  “You seem to know the drill.” Lieutenant Hastings remarked dryly.

  “I travel a lot. Just as well, too – with this guy out of jail and after Sean, it was a basic security measure. I guess it didn’t do us any good this time around. And, before you ask, no. We didn’t tell many people we were gone.” Asbjorn shot Sean a crest-fallen look, and Sean knew what it was all about. Asbjorn’s apartment, his wonderful, clean, welcoming love nest – Sean had just moved in, and the made sure it was pristine before they had left. Now it was all gone. “I guess we can take a hotel room for tonight,” Asbjorn continued. “I’ll call the insurance company in the morning.”

  Mark shook his head. “Nope. Don and Adrian would like to invite you to stay with them until all of this blows over. Their place is almost walking distance from MIT – or it would be, in the summer.”

  Asbjorn’s and Sean’s eyes met in awkward silence. Sean did not forget that Asbjorn had a colorful history with the two men – a history acquired fair and square, during a time when the two of them had broken up. Still, the thought of Asbjorn with anyone else, let alone with two of their mutual friends, made his gut twist. He bit his lip, afraid the next sound coming out of him would be a possessive growl.

  “We don’t have to.” Guilt was written all over Asbjorn’s face.

  Sean took a deep breath and sighed. “We’ll be fine,” he said once he trusted himself not to do or say something stupid. “It’s nice of them. Let’s try and see.”

  “You sure?”

  “No. I fucking don’t know anymore, Asbjorn, but it’s either that or the Holiday Inn, and I can’t stand the idea of a Holiday Inn right now.”

  Sean paused and looked around. He needed a distraction. His mind was cluttered and off-center. He let his eyes skim over the institutional walls with their cracking beige paint, and the calendar hanging off a hook, and the projection screen rolled up at the end. The carpet smelled of mildew and rubber boots. They would need boots... their own boots.

  Scattered thoughts finally connected into the semblance of a pattern, and Sean met Asbjorn’s tired eyes again. “Your boots! Your books! Your... your stuff!”

  “All gone, probably.” Asbjorn gave a philosophical shrug. “We could have been in there, you know. We’re okay, alive, and in one piece. Stuff – I’ve been moving pretty much all my life. Stuff is just stuff. You can’t take it with you and it’s replaceable, sunshine, but you’re not. I’d rather have all our stuff go up in flames than see you injured trying to rescue any of it.”

  Sean let Asbjorn pull him in and buried his face in the taller man’s shoulder. Asbjorn allowed the contact, even though they were inside a police station. Mark was their friend, and he trusted him to field any off-color comments, should they arise. They didn’t, though, and Sean was heartbroken to feel the waves of grief and anger roll off Asbjorn like something palpable. Despite his brave talk and the stoic attitude, the firebombing was an intrusion, a violation, an outright declaration of war. Sean didn’t know how Asbjorn planned to handle something so overt, so threatening.

  A less urgent, but not less important, fact was that Asbjorn kept only the things that were either practical or had personal meaning for him, and the contents of Asbjorn’s spartan apartment had been a concentrated essence of what mattered to him in life. Sean wondered what items given by Tiger or Nell were still up there, soaked by firefighting efforts and charred beyond recognition.

  THE KITCHEN OF ADRIAN’S and Don’s house was warm with dry winter heat, cooking, and company. It helped Sean suppress the occasional shiver as he came down from his adrenaline high.

  Adrian put water on to heat and loaded a French press with decaffeinated coffee. Sean watched his lithe, well-muscled form own the space around him. His Hispanic ancestry gave him sultry eyes that peeked from underneath impossibly long eyelashes, and his background made him a cagey and tough fighter. Adrian had been Sean’s first fight at the Warehouse, and Sean suspected the depth of his ability was concealed to the casual observer. He saw a small, previously invisible tattoo peek up his back, its edge slightly above Adrian’s Henley shirt. The graceful rhythm of his hands was mesmerizing, and Sean shook his head and blinked through the fatigue that dragged his lids down.

  Asbjorn had been with this guy.

  The thought was no more comfortable now than it had
been weeks ago, when he and Asbjorn reconciled their differences and Asbjorn reported his activities with the brusque and forthright honesty that had hurt as much as it had comforted. Sean had not wanted to know the details of their one-night sexcapade, and now he was glad he hadn’t asked for minutiae.

  His gaze was on Adrian’s hands as five regular glasses received a shot of whiskey and a spoonful of brown sugar each. Sean glanced at Don, who was watching Adrian fix their drinks. And he was worth watching. His economy of movement spoke of deliberate intent as he poured cream into a one-pint Pyrex measuring cup and frothed it with a balloon whisk.

  Sean inhaled the smell of coffee as it brewed. He felt himself relax the smallest bit, sank against the back of the bar stool, and looked around some more. The house was large and well-appointed. Both Adrian and Don were well past their starving student years, and Don looked several decades older than he really was, if one was swayed by the illusion of his prematurely gray hair. It gleamed almost white under the halogen lights of the modern kitchen, as white as the half-whipped cream.

  And Asbjorn had been with this guy too.

  Sean watched Asbjorn not watch Adrian. His blue eyes were averted, almost on purpose, so he didn’t have to see the graceful hands place an inverted soup spoon over the mixture of coffee, whiskey, and brown sugar – very delicately not mixing the layers – and allow the rich cream to float on top of the hot, fragrant brew.

  Sean’s and Mark’s eyes met. The detective was part of the fight club at the Warehouse, but Sean had seen him run the fights more often than participate.

  “Here you go, gentlemen. Irish coffee. Sans the caffeine – no need to throw Asbjorn and Sean off-schedule any more than they already are.” Adrian distributed the hot, whiskey-laced beverage to Asbjorn and Sean and to Mark, who had driven them to their house, and settled down next to Don.