Len winced, experiencing a strong negative reaction to that revelation on a number of levels.
“Okay,” he said. “No offense, but subjecting kids to that kind of psychological manipulation is... pretty far along the spectrum of creepy behavior. Not to say abusive.”
The Fae rubbed both hands over his face, stretching the skin. It was an oddly human gesture. “Such tales were doubtless intended to turn young boys back onto the proverbial straight and narrow, in a society already dealing with growing sterility and low birth rates.”
“Uh-huh. Sure. And did it work?” Len asked, echoing the question Albigard had asked him once, after he’d mentioned that his family had tried to scare the gay out of him with horror stories about burning in Hell for all eternity.
Albigard let his hands drop, and the expression on his face looked like resignation.
“Not in my case, certainly,” he murmured. “Rather the opposite, in fact.”
And... with that quiet admission, a whole lot of things from the past few weeks suddenly made sense. It was also the kind of moment where Len knew it would be far too easy to destroy another person with a single careless word. That Albigard had admitted such a thing to the irritating blue-haired human who tied sex demons up for fun was... surprising, to put it mildly.
“Yeah,” Len said after a thoughtful pause. “That definitely seems like an approach that would backfire in a significant number of cases. Telling a bunch of impressionable kids about a scenario where they could get exactly what they wanted while having no choice or moral responsibility in the matter? I imagine there were a lot of guilty adolescent abduction and bondage kinks born from those attempted brainwashing sessions.”
Albigard didn’t reply, but the line of his shoulders relaxed. Apparently, Len’s reaction to his quiet confession had passed muster.
They sat in silence for a long time afterward, watching the fire and occasionally feeding it more wood. Despite his earlier disinterest in sleep, Len felt his eyelids starting to droop, as physical and emotional exhaustion gradually overcame the nagging ache of hunger that had been creeping up on him over the course of the day.
Maybe Albigard was in a similar boat, because he tossed the twig he’d been fiddling with into the fire and said, “Perhaps I will rest for a while after all.”
Len lifted his folded cardigan. “Sounds like a plan. Sure you don’t want this?”
“I do not. But thank you nonetheless,” Albigard replied, and curled onto his side with his back to the fire and his head pillowed on his arm.
With a shrug, Len moved a bit closer to the warmth of the flames. After taking the cat-sidhe’s dagger out of his belt and setting it safely out of the way, he awkwardly settled onto his back, using the wad of folded cloth as a pillow to keep his head off the sand. He lay there for some time staring up at the misleading night sky. The heat of the fire baked his right side, while the cool night air nipped at his left.
Len could see stars twinkling above them, obscured by the occasional cloud. Idly, he wondered if those clouds were inside or outside of the dimensional boundary. He eventually decided that since there had been plants growing here, that must mean it rained. So apparently there was enough clearance above them to allow for weather systems, at least.
As time slipped slowly by, his thoughts turned inevitably to Albigard’s confession. On one level, it broke his heart. On another, it made him want to find these so-called elders, and beat them repeatedly over the head with something heavy until they stopped being cruel to little queer Fae kids.
Too bad he was stuck here with no prospect of ever getting out.
Eventually, he drifted off, his throat aching with someone else’s melancholy... his mind conjuring hazy images of a tragically beautiful blond-haired boy locking his desires away for a thousand years.
ELEVEN
IT WAS STILL dark when a low cry of distress jerked Len from his restless doze. He scrambled to a sitting position and looked around wildly, disoriented in the unfamiliar surroundings.
His gaze landed on the embers of the campfire. Its presence brought him back to an unwelcome awareness of where he was—and with whom. His first thought was that something had attacked the camp... but there were no animals or people here. His second thought was that the Hunt had returned while he and Albigard were both sleeping at the same time like a pair of idiots. But if the Hunt had come for the Fae, he would already be dead. Len could just about make out his tightly curled form in the faint glow of the dying fire. His back was still to Len, but nothing was attacking him.
It’s a dream, Len realized belatedly. He’s having a bad dream.
His panicked heartbeat slowed a bit, now that it was clear they weren’t in the middle of a life-threatening emergency. Needing better light, he tossed more wood on the remains of the campfire and used a length of branch to stir up the embers. Flames sputtered into life, catching at the fresh fuel and casting flickering illumination over the scene.
Another soft sound of misery reached Len’s ears. He knew that sound intimately—he’d woken on too many occasions with something very much like it being wrenched from his lips as the past tried to swallow him whole. For a moment, he hesitated. The Fae was living his own personal nightmare in the real world, not just in the world of dreams. It was an open question whether waking him would be an improvement or not.
The hopeless, hitching noise of pain that followed made the decision for him. Maybe Len was about to make a fool of himself—hungry, sleep-deprived, and still with echoes of a younger, more vulnerable Albigard swimming in his head. Maybe he’d end up making things worse by intervening. But he wasn’t going to let someone suffer alone like this.
All is not well right now, Albigard had told him, when he’d melted down after the catastrophic battle in St. Louis. But I am still with you. You... we... are not totally alone in the darkness. Not yet.
Only now, they truly were alone in the darkness—the pitch black barely held at bay by their puny little campfire. But they were at least alone together. Len knew his judgment was questionable even at the best of times. With hunger and lack of sleep chipping away at his reserves, that judgment was probably a complete dumpster fire under the current circumstances.
He approached Albigard and knelt in front of him anyway.
The Fae was curled into a fetal position, his body twitching with small, jerky movements. He was backlit by the flames, but Len would have bet money his eyes were flickering from side to side beneath closed lids as whatever dream images tormented him played across the theater of his mind.
“C’mon, Blondie,” he said. “Up and at ’em. I guess I can see now why you and sleep have been on a relationship break recently.”
Albigard only curled more tightly into himself.
Len blew out a breath and reached a hand out, clasping a bare shoulder. “Hey—”
An invisible explosion blew Len backward, putting him flat on his ass in the sand. The Fae rolled into a crouch, the movement almost too fast for Len to follow. Swirls of magic sparked and sputtered around Albigard’s raised right hand, illuminating the space between them. There wasn’t a single glimmer of recognition in the Fae’s wild green eyes.
“Whoa!” Len exclaimed, crab-crawling backward to put more distance between them. “Take it easy there, Sparky!”
The expression on Albigard’s face was a mix of utter terror and blank incomprehension. He held the magic swirling around his hand poised, ready to hurl it. His chest rose and fell in a rapid rhythm; the ragged sound of his breathing was loud in the night.
“Albigard,” Len said, trying to calm his pounding heart. “Hey. Stop. You were having a nightmare. We’re in the pocket dimension. You brought us here to get away from the Unseelie guards, remember? And if you accidentally blow my head off, then you really will be alone.”
The wary standoff continued for a few more seconds, the Fae’s expression morphing from fear and confusion to something more like hopelessness, as the manic glint in his forest
-colored eyes faded. The swirling light coiling around his fingers extinguished abruptly, and he collapsed back into a heap in the sand as though his strings had been cut.
Len crawled over to him and warily took him by the arm again, mostly because he looked like he was in imminent danger of passing out and faceplanting into the sand without some kind of direct physical support. The Fae was still breathing in ragged gasps, and, oh, Len had been there.
He’d been there so many times...
“I’m sorry,” Albigard gasped, dipping his head. Some of his long hair had slipped free of his makeshift hair tie, and it hid his face from view like a curtain. “For all of it. I’m sorry.”
Len took a deep breath and held it for a second before letting it flow out—trying to shed some of the tension in his body at the same time. Since Albigard hadn’t flinched away from the touch on his arm, Len shuffled over on his knees and slotted himself behind the Fae’s shoulder. He wrapped his other arm around Albigard’s chest and flattened his palm over Albigard’s thundering heart, just as he had in St. Louis when the Unseelie contingent from Dhuinne had captured and bound him in preparation for sacrificing him to the Hunt.
“Easy,” he said softly, easing Albigard’s body back and taking some of his weight. “We’ve been here before, all right? A few times now, I guess—if you add my various PTSD meltdowns to the mix. Breathe for me, slow and deep. I’m right here with you.”
He regulated his own breathing carefully, aware of the Fae trying to mirror him, his chest hitching painfully on each inhalation. Albigard’s skin was chilled from the night air, but it warmed quickly where they touched. As he had once before, the Fae relaxed into Len’s hold by increments.
Unfortunately, Len had not taken into account how different it would feel to hold a half-naked Albigard while they were alone in the dark and the quiet, as opposed to Albigard in full leather battle armor while they were surrounded by other people and in imminent danger of death.
Goddamn it, why did the blasted man have to be so beautiful?
Beneath his splayed hand, Albigard’s chest rose and fell in a full, unhindered breath, as the last of the jittery panic drained out of him. And... since there was really no way to extract himself from the close embrace that wasn’t horrifically awkward, Len just sort of... stayed where he was. So did Albigard.
They were quiet in the stillness of the night—listening to the crackle of the fire, their breathing perfectly synchronized. To Len’s surprise, it was Albigard who eventually broke the heavy silence.
“I... believe I am gaining a better understanding of your occasional desire to lose yourself to chemical oblivion when life becomes too much,” he said, the words barely more than a whisper. “I would give much right now for such an escape.”
Len closed his eyes, thinking of young Albigard, the repressed adolescent who’d just wanted a gang of handsome gay villains to carry him off and have their way with him, far away from the suffocating gaze of Fae society. The little voice in the back of his head that usually warned him when he was about to make a terrible life choice was screaming at full volume—and Len knew he was about to ignore the frantic calls for sensible decision making.
Why? Because they were trapped, and they were alone, and they were both going to die anyway.
He nudged Albigard forward until he was taking his own weight, but kept the hand over his heart to keep him from moving away completely. With his other hand, Len unbuckled his braided leather belt and slid it free of his belt loops. Albigard craned around, trying to look at him. “What are you—?”
Len showed him the belt. “Hush,” he said. “Look... I know you could snap this leather as easily as I could break a rubber band. And I also know you could throw me off with magic if you wanted to, because you did exactly that a few minutes ago and you weren’t even properly awake at the time. So... I need you to keep both of those facts firmly in the back of your mind for me, all right?”
Wariness crept into the Fae’s tone. “Why?”
“Because I’m about to do something ethically questionable that would get me immediately thrown out of any reputable sex club in the country.” Len ran his hand down the Fae’s arm and eased his right wrist behind his back, looping the belt around it. He repeated the action with Albigard’s other wrist, sliding the loose end through the buckle and tightening it into a snug figure of eight before wrapping the excess length around the center of the makeshift handcuffs several times and tying it off.
Albigard froze, his body going stiff. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, just a hair too breathlessly to be properly intimidating. Len felt the muscles in the Fae’s forearms flex.
“You asked for oblivion, and this is the closest I’ve got for you right now,” Len told him, half expecting to be hurled across the camp by a blast of magic in the next instant. When it didn’t happen immediately, he let out the breath he’d been holding. “Hundreds of years, and no one’s ever just taken you in hand and given you exactly what you needed, have they?” he asked.
Albigard sucked in a sharp breath.
Len cupped his fingers around the Fae’s throat—not squeezing, but using the light grip as leverage to pull Albigard back against his body again, holding him tense and off-balance.
“No one ever saw past the prickly exterior,” he continued, murmuring the words directly against the shell of the Fae’s ear. “No one saw through to the repressed teenager who just wanted someone to tie him down and take all the hard decisions away from him.”
The heady power trip of watching someone decide whether to struggle or submit to bondage rushed through Len’s veins, banishing the hunger pangs and brain fog like mist beneath the sun. Some people liked to fight against sexual restraint and fail, Len knew, while others liked to sink into it and lose themselves. Of course, if Len had guessed wrong about which category Albigard fell into, he was about to end up in a whole world of hurt. Somehow, that risk only made the rush of anticipation sharper.
The Fae seemed balanced on the cusp. His bare heels scrabbled in the sand as he sought to regain his center of balance and failed. His pulse rabbited beneath Len’s fingers, but the makeshift bindings stayed in place. No blast of power threw Len backward.
Albigard’s throat bobbed beneath Len’s cupped palm—a hard swallow. “Unhand me,” the Fae whispered unconvincingly.
Len settled into the role of Dom like pulling on a pair of old, broken-in gloves that still fit perfectly after months hidden away at the bottom of a drawer.
“No,” he said, reveling in the welcome sense of control over something—despite the fact that it was every bit as illusory as Albigard’s helplessness.
He ran his free hand over the Fae’s smooth chest, following the tattoo down the midline of his abs. “Tell me... how does it feel to know that I could do anything to you when you’re like this”—Len cupped the erection now pitching an obvious tent in Albigard’s thin cotton pants, giving it a slow squeeze—“and you can’t do a damned thing to stop me?”
Albigard made a noise like he’d been punched. His hips stuttered, pushing mindlessly into the contact.
“Yeah—that’s pretty much what I thought,” Len told him, and shoved the Fae’s waistband far enough down to free his cock.
Albigard had already spent god-knew-how-many centuries being a hopelessly repressed prude, so it seemed cruel to drag things out with games. Len took him in hand—as promised—and jerked him, slow and steady. The Fae panted and writhed against him, all sleek lines and soft, desperate noises. He lasted longer than Len might have predicted under the circumstances, but it was still only a couple of minutes before his muscles locked. His spine arched in a perfect bow as he came silently, spurting all over Len’s hand, not to mention his own chest and stomach.
Len worked him through it, dragging out every last spasm until the powerful, magic-wielding Fae warrior was a limp, shuddering mess in Len’s hold. When he was thoroughly wrecked, twitching and oversensitive, Len slid his hand away from Albi
gard’s throat in favor of once more covering his heart as the Fae slumped against him. With his other hand, he swiped up as much of the come coating Albigard’s skin as he could reach and licked it unceremoniously off his fingers, even though that had never been a particular kink of his.
It tasted pretty indistinguishable from human, honestly.
When he was done, he tucked Albigard’s dick neatly back in his pants. The Fae blinked into the darkness, his expression dazed and slack.
“Wh-why...” He swallowed. “Why did you...?”
Len groaned in mild embarrassment. “Oh, come on... cut me some slack, here. A gay man cannot live by jizz alone—but it’s still got a handful of calories and some decent electrolyte content, so I’m not about to waste it under the circumstances.”
There was a beat of silence. “No,” Albigard tried again. “Why did you do... that?”
“Oh,” Len said. “That. Well... no offense. But in twenty-eight years, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who needed to get off as badly as you do.”
Len’s own erection was pressing uncomfortably against the fly of his jeans, hard and throbbing for attention. He ignored it in favor of shifting Albigard’s weight against him until he could reach the looped belt and unwrap it from the Fae’s wrists.
Again, there was a noticeable lag as Albigard processed the words. It seemed he still wasn’t done, though.
“But you didn’t...” he trailed off.
When he didn’t continue, Len took that to mean, ‘but you didn’t try to rape me, sodomize me, or otherwise use my body for your own pleasure.’
“Uh... no,” he said firmly. “Definitely not. There’s ‘ethically questionable,’ and then there’s ‘ethically reprehensible.’ Anyway, this wasn’t about me. And—I’m just saying, here—but you’re way too talkative right after you’ve busted a nut. Stop asking questions and enjoy the afterglow, okay? That was kind of the point of the exercise, after all.”
Forsaken Fae: The Complete Series, Books 1-3 (Last Vampire World) Page 26