Arc 2

by RoAnna Sylver

Pixie almost smiled. “Figured you would.”

  “Tell me what’s on your mind. If you want to.”

  “I do want to, it’s just hard to think about, or get to make sense,” Pixie said, and the confused look was back, the bafflement he’d had upon opening the lunchbox to find it empty. “But I keep going back to the night he disappeared, and—I knew he was dead a long time ago. He had to be, he’d never just shove off without at least saying goodbye. But nobody ever found a body and for a while I told myself that meant he might be alive, but not anymore. Now I’m starting to think, what if he didn’t just die? What if he’s out there somewhere—with fangs? Which isn’t fun, sure, but he’d still be somewhere! And I can’t think that, starting to hope like that is so dangerous. He’s dead, I know he is. But there are a lot of ways to go, and... vampires, man. You saw what Cruce did to me, he was a fucking vicious monster.” His eyes dropped to his hands, gray skin, white scars, small claws painted black. “But I guess, now so am I.”

  “No,” Jude said forcefully. “No you’re not. You might as well be from different planets. Cruce was a monster, but not you—and he’s gone. He can’t hurt anyone anymore, and we won’t let his boss hurt anyone else either. Especially not you. He is never touching you again.”

  Pixie’s smile looked weak and not at all convinced, but it was there. “I really hope you’re right. Just… don’t give up on me, okay?”

  “Never,” Jude said, more softly now. Had Pixie heard Felix say those words exactly? Did he know how Jude’s heart had ached to hear them then, as it did now? “I know exactly how you feel. When I—when we lost Felix, it was like our entire world collapsed.”

  “Thanks, but… it’s not exactly the same,” Pixie said, smile dropping away and voice coming out dull. Dead. “You got your boy back. I didn’t get mine back. And you had some answers even if they weren’t the ones you wanted, you saw him die, I didn’t even get that much. Just a whole lot of not knowing, and wondering, and no way to move on. We’re not the same.”

  Jude felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. Something about that knocked every bit of wind out of him, and he stared at Pixie, mouth working but unable to make any sound come out at all. And he wasn’t the only one in shock—Pixie’s eyes widened, a hand going to his mouth, and a look of horror spreading across his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Pixie said in a shaken whisper. He stared at Jude as if he’d accidentally stabbed him, and would now do anything to take back the blade. “Jude, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean…”

  Pixie cut himself off by stepping forward and reaching up to touch Jude’s face, bringing him into a kiss Jude only had to lean down slightly to return, which he did without hesitation. Even here, in this desolate place full of memories he could feel like cold water, even if he couldn’t guess at them, Pixie’s kiss was a wonderful, welcome thing.

  They hadn’t done this for a long time, Jude thought as he leaned in and shut his eyes. He’d tried so hard to forget their first kiss, and the possibility of any others. But Pixie wouldn’t let him, and by now Jude was sure it was on purpose—with his sweet face, his bright eyes and easy smile, his perfect, round belly, all of him made of soft curves, the only sharp thing about him his tiny little fangs. The way that, even now, he loved life in ways Jude could hardly imagine, so freely and with such unreserved joy. Pixie was so alive even without a heartbeat, more alive than Jude felt sometimes.

  He’d chased these thoughts deliberately away, because every delight he took in Pixie’s entire existence made him feel guilty. What right did Jude have, when Pixie himself was so sad and obviously hurting? Jude could never do something that would make his burden remotely worse.

  But yes, oh yes, he thought, while he still remembered words, and anything else besides Pixie existed. This was what was missing, what he’d been missing sorely.

  “Jude,” Pixie said in a low, slightly throaty voice, pulling back just enough to let Jude catch his breath. Lucky vampires, he thought dizzily, they could kiss forever and not have to worry about little things like breathing. “Do you want me to touch you?”

  “We are touching,” Jude said, puzzled, eyebrows coming together. Pixie’s hands were still cupping the sides of his face, slipping into his hair, and his own had slipped into place to mirror them automatically.

  “No, Jude, no,” Pixie said with a little laugh that sounded more sad than amused. Something close to a sob, but without the wet crack to it. Heavy with fatigue, as if Pixie didn’t even have the energy to cry. “I’ve seen the way you’ve been looking at me lately. You want to get closer, but you’re holding yourself back. You don’t have to do that. I think… you’re the one who wants to touch me.”

  Jude’s brain ground to a halt. His mouth fell open, then closed, then open again; he felt like a hooked fish yanked up onto dry land, breathless and just as helpless. “Touch…?”

  Pixie didn’t answer in words. Instead, he took Jude’s hands in both of his, and guided them to his round hips, placing one there, sliding the other down to his thigh. Jude’s mouth fell open and his stomach jerked in surprise, and for just a moment, nothing existed except for the perfect, full heat that filled the palms of his hands and seemed to radiate through his entire body, a fluttering in his solar plexus.

  He’d imagined this many times, what it would be like to touch Pixie like this, and other intimate places, feel his warm, fat, beautiful body move under Jude’s hands, hearing him sigh and whine in a good way—but that had always seemed so abstract. So distant, an idea rather than something that could be true. Even when they’d kissed, even knowing that they had something between the two of them, and even wanting there to be nothing—space, clothing—between the two of them at all, Jude had never actually expected it to happen. There was just too much going on and too much healing to be done before he could even consider touching much of anything besides Pixie’s fragile heart.

  But here they were. Jude’s head swam, and the warmth inside him grew until he couldn’t feel the night’s chill at all, his hands tightened their grip without his instruction, gently squeezing Pixie’s wonderfully soft flesh and starting to move automatically, feeling, wanting to feel more, feel everything.

  Then, feeling a thrill of both excitement and shock, Jude looked back up to Pixie’s face, just to see, just to make sure—and found Pixie not looking back at him. He was staring at the ground again, eyes dull with the same unsettling blankness he’d had after seeing the empty box. Suddenly Jude felt just as hollow inside.

  “No, wait,” Jude said, yanking his hands back and taking an involuntary step away as reality crashed back onto him like a tidal wave that soaked him to the bone and doused any fire that had barely begun to spark. His heart pounded, and adrenaline surged through his veins with an almost-painful sting, but not for the reasons he’d anticipated when he’d imagined his hands on Pixie’s skin. Not like this. This was all wrong. “Stop. Stop, what are you—what are we doing?”

  “I’m sorry,” Pixie stammered, pulling his own hands back like Jude was a hot stove, and he’d just now registered the burn.

  Pixie’s eyes were wide, pupils narrowed to slits, and although vampires didn’t really sweat or turn pale or red the way humans did, his gray face looked waxy and drawn, somehow closer to death.

  Along with everything else, that hit Jude hard. Pixie wasn’t alive, not like he was, but even death hadn’t been enough to free him from whatever terror coursed through him now.

  “I thought—I was just trying to—I thought that’s what you wanted!” Pixie stammered.

  Jude’s brain skipped again. Complete freeze, mind and body; static snow filling his head, he held perfectly still as if someone had hit ‘pause’ on the playback of his life. Still, he was sharply aware of everything around him, including the fact that he’d stopped breathing. He made himself breathe, then speak, finding both acts uncomfortably difficult.

  “You thought I wanted that? Why would I—I mean, not that I don’t—it’s not—why?” His voice r
ose in both volume and pitch, and Jude tried frantically to get a grip on himself and his words. He was floundering as badly as Pixie, and if neither of them could form a coherent sentence, they’d never get anywhere. “But why now? Here?”

  “I don’t know, I’m sorry, I don’t know,” Pixie said, words falling out in the jumbled rapid-fire of someone waking from a bad dream, or trying to, only to find the nightmare had become reality. “It’s just that you’ve done so much for me, and I haven’t done anything for you except be a total leech, and I keep talking about Jeff, and holy shit can I stop talking to you about my ex-boyfriend for two seconds? It’s not fair to you, it’s not fair to anyone the way I’ve been acting like a sad-sack drain on everyone, and I just thought I should try to pay you back somehow but even that was the wrong thing, and I can’t do anything right and I just—I don’t know what to—”

  “Pixie,” Jude cut in, and Pixie didn’t exactly gasp, as vampires didn’t need to, but he did give a startled little jump, as if Jude had shouted. Jude opened his arms wide, the kind of gesture to show one was unarmed and coming in peace, and one that would hopefully remove all ambiguity of his intentions. “Can I touch you now?”

  Despite his waterfall of words a second earlier, Pixie couldn’t seem to speak now. Instead he nodded, stepping into Jude’s arms which immediately wrapped around him.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Pixie whimpered, trembling in Jude’s grasp and pressing close against his chest, but seeming grounded enough now to form words again. Each one hurt to hear, though, and Jude couldn’t decide which condition he hated more, Pixie speechless with panic or Pixie crying and spilling his guts and generally falling apart with only Jude to hold him together. “I just thought I should—I have to pay you back somehow for crashing into your life and ruining everything! Please don’t be mad!”

  “I’m not mad at you,” Jude said, tone much more level than he felt. “And you didn’t ruin my life, but even if you had, that’s not the way to fix it! You don’t owe me anything, especially not that! Even if I wanted it, you wouldn’t,” he added as a quick, important afterthought. “Even if I were entirely allosexual, and had everything figured out and knew what I wanted for sure, you wouldn’t owe—”

  “Oh God,” Pixie whispered, pulling back enough so that Jude could see an entirely new panic dawning on his face. “Oh God that’s right, you’re freaking ace, oh no, I just saw you and thought—looking, the way that men—when men look at me like that, it means they want—”

  “Stop,” Jude shushed him, a hand on Pixie’s neck, which seemed to both ground and calm him at least a little. “Yes, I am, but you… weren’t wrong, either. I think ‘demisexual’ is the word? Demi-aro. You’re right, I don’t want any of that, from almost anyone in the world. But I do want to kiss you, and—and I don’t even know what else. Which makes all of this that much more confusing, I don’t know how to handle any of this, but I know it’s not the time. Not with everything that’s going on, and you in the headspace you’re in. Or me either. That’s why I’ve been holding back. Anything else would be a mistake.”

  “Okay,” Pixie said, burying his face in Jude’s chest again and clutching at his shirt. It was going to wrinkle, Jude noted dimly, but that certainty was matched only by the extent to which he didn’t care, not now. “I’m… I’m so…”

  He trailed off, but there was no doubt about what he’d been trying to say. Jude was sorry too. Pixie’s shoulders heaved with every sob, and Jude could do nothing more than hold him as he cried, chin resting on the top of Pixie’s pink head. He didn’t know what else there was to do. Pixie clung to him like a drowning man with the last life preserver, but Jude was struggling himself. Helpless—that most-hated of feelings—and fighting panic of his own, Jude forced himself to keep breathing steadily, take it moment by moment, and just get through until they were both back on solid ground.

  “I shouldn’t have come back here,” Pixie whispered, after the worst of his breakdown had subsided, at least outwardly. “I’m so sorry. I know I keep saying that but I am.”

  “It’s all right,” Jude said, instead of what he wanted to. Telling Pixie to stop apologizing would be like telling himself to stop overanalyzing and obsessing over details and uncertainty. It would do nothing but make both of them feel bad when he failed. “I’m glad you told me.”

  “Thanks,” Pixie mumbled, pulling back from Jude and wiping a forearm across his face. He’d left several damp spots on Jude’s shirt, but Jude was far past worrying about that by now. “Can we go home now?”

  “Yes,” Jude said with a rush of relief. This, at least, he could do. “Let’s go. Do you want to—?”

  Before he’d finished the question, Pixie was gone, replaced by a fuzzy pink bat clinging to his hand. Jude carefully gathered the little creature up and stroked its head with one finger—somehow even its tiny bat face looked sad.

  Jude tucked him into his regular inside jacket pocket, stepped around the broken glass, and headed out the door. Even if the memories weren’t his own, he could feel the weight of what Pixie had left behind, hopefully lessened by the fact that this time, they were leaving together.

  Sanguine looked terribly out of place, standing in the center of the opulent living room and trying not to drip blood onto the carpet.

  Wicked Gold enjoyed the finer things in life and death, and Sanguine was hardly ever allowed into rooms with anything nice in them, except on special occasions, which he never tended to enjoy. Now he stood awkwardly, bruised and filthy, and clearly trying to take up as little space as possible. Both to avoid sullying the baroque-looking, creamy white sofa and rosewood coffee table that probably cost more than he’d ever seen in his life, and out of deeply-ingrained habit. It never paid to provide the vampire with a reason to strike. As if he ever needed one.

  The vampire himself wasn’t at home. He liked to go out after he’d had his fill with Sanguine – to do what, he didn’t know or want to know. It could be nothing good.

  The air was now free of screams or the tang of blood. But before Sanguine stood Owen, surveying the young man’s bloodied face and torn clothes. He was impeccably dressed in a suit that looked exactly the same as the one he’d worn at the circle the previous night. He must either own multiple identical suits, or have them fastidiously cleaned on a daily basis. This, at least, he and his vampiric rival had in common.

  “Yes, I can fix this,” Owen said, sounding detached but certain. “If your master comes home to you still a mess, he may raise a fuss, and he’s hard enough to work with as it is.”

  Sanguine said nothing, but his shoulders dropped a little as obvious relief overtook him. Owen reached out to move some matted hair away from his raw, not-quite-scabbed neck, and Sanguine flinched

  “Why do you make him treat you like this?” Owen asked, then swatted Sanguine’s shoulder to make him hold still. Not enough to hurt an uninjured person, but from the wince it elicited, it was obvious Sanguine wasn’t one. Sighing, he placed his fingertips between the spots of dried blood on Sanguine’s forehead, murmured a few arcane words under his breath, and began a simple regeneration spell. “Hold still. Your lord will quickly lose patience with a broken doll.”

  “I don’t make him do shit,” Sanguine muttered, but did as he was told. “If I could control anything, do you think I’d make him beat me to a pulp whenever he feels like it?”

  “No, I suppose you’d just free yourself again,” Owen said, tone disapproving, but healing magic steady. “You and that other little traitor never seemed to have a problem abandoning your sacred duty. Why not now?”

  “You could have come with us, you know.” Sanguine fixed him with an unblinking gaze. “The invitation was open. Still is, even after all the shit you’ve pulled—and you can thank Milo for that, not me. If it was up to me, we’d be done with you forever. But you don’t really need us traitors, do you? You’re a witch, so just witch yourself out.”

  “I serve the Lady. But even if I didn’t, my only magi
cal gift is to heal mortals,” Owen said bitterly, and removed his hand from Sanguine’s head. “Which is not generally… harmonious with my desires, or where I could be of best use. Speaking of, how does that feel?”

  “Better,” Sanguine said, sitting up straighter and tilting his head experimentally. “Thanks. But screw thinking about ‘best use.’ They only have one use for us in mind, and they’ll use you until you beg for death.”

  Owen didn’t answer. His face revealed nothing, but that didn’t stop Sanguine from zeroing in.

  “It bothers you, doesn’t it?” Sanguine continued, taking one step closer to Owen’s limit. He’d reach it soon, he knew, but until then he had some words. “You can’t throw fireballs or turn people to stone, only healing, and healing bloodbags like me at that. Having to rely on your big bad Queen for protection, and even having to work for Wicked Gold.”

  “I do not work for—”

  “Whatever. Must just eat you up inside, watching that miserable bastard, itching to set the world on fire so her Majesty will give you a second look. Must really stick in your craw that she’ll never love you the way she loved Mil—”

  “Shut up,” Owen said, but not in the fiery tone Sanguine had come to expect from him. He sounded more tired than anything.

  “No thanks,” Sanguine scoffed, pleased to feel that it didn’t hurt to do so. “I don’t answer to you—I answer to the guy who hates you way more than I ever could. So you can go ahead and take your little superiority complex, tie it up with a pretty, pretty bow, and blow it out your ass.”

  Owen withdrew his hands and his magic, leaving Sanguine healed but colder than he had been before he’d begun. He’d never particularly wanted Owen’s hands on him, but it had been so long since he’d felt another human’s touch, one that didn’t inflict pain. Losing that small point of contact was still enough to leave him feeling bereft and empty.

  “Oh, yes, you really pulled one over on me,” Owen said with a roll of his eyes, but nothing more pointed. “You’re living it up. I’m so envious.”