“Dinner,” his mother called.
Adam wished very much at that moment to have his own place, to be alone with Vic, that there could be less space, and clothing, between them.
“What are you thinking?” Vic asked, smile bending into a smirk.
“Nothing.”
“Right,” Vic said. Standing, he gestured toward the kitchen. “Lead on.”
“Would you care to say grace, Vincent?” Adam’s mom asked when they’d taken their seats at the small table in the dining room.
It wasn’t where they usually ate—at the little table in the kitchen. Adam’s mother had decided to use the actual dining room. Adam figured Annie had chosen the long table of beautiful hardwood. It looked just right for entertaining a doctor’s guests.
Annie had quit working at the hospital after she married Bobby. Adam reached back, but couldn’t remember a time when Tilla Mae had only kept house. Dad had been the one to stay at home, and he didn’t cook or clean. After he left, their mother only worked harder.
There were weeks when the only times Adam saw her was when Bobby took him to town, to the corner store where she worked. They’d look through the comic books, careful not to fold the corners, and never buy them. Bobby would buy Adam a pack of gum, or a little candy, sometimes. The cash register dinged when Mom rang it up. It spit change into a little cup if you paid with the rare bill Bobby could scrounge up. Adam loved the little slide, the shine of the rolling coins.
Adam wondered if that was when she’d taken up her twin addictions, smoking and bitter coffee. All of his memories from back then were tied to her dark-ringed eyes. Her hair had been a sandy blond, like his, though a bit more straw and less mud. His mother didn’t smile often. Dad had smiled a lot, but she didn’t yell or threaten or spank him either.
Vic prayed aloud, his accent a little stronger as he spoke with confidence and easy familiarity.
Religion and Adam’s mother went hand in hand. It was a background thing, her faith. She didn’t make it to church often, not with her work schedule, but they read the bit about the wise men on Christmas Eve, and every Easter she forced the two boys to scrub and shine before she dragged them to an annual sermon, the contents of which he tuned out.
Adam peeked at Vic as he prayed. Catholic, which was really foreign to Adam, but how much of it did Vic believe? Adam was used to being called a sinner, an abomination. Backwoods magic and condemnation went hand in hand. Plenty of the practitioners he’d met had blended the two. Some kept bibles on their little altars.
Aunt Sue hung a cross in the kitchen where she read tarot. She told Adam it let people feel better about visiting her if they saw that Sue didn’t hate their faith.
He wondered how Vic would feel if things between them went somewhere real. Adam realized that what he’d done, binding them as he had, had deeper implications. He’d saved Vic’s life, but Adam hoped he had not broken him somehow, that the magic hadn’t made him think he was someone he wasn’t.
Sensing Adam’s turmoil, Vic said Amen and looked at Adam with a knowing, worried face. Vic shook his head.
You worry too much.
The thought passed between them.
“What are we eating?” Vic asked Tilla. “It smells amazing.”
Adam’s mother actually blushed a little.
“Macaroni,” she said.
Adam cringed. He hated macaroni and cheese, had since his mother had fed it to them for months straight. Bobby had learned to cook it, tried to make it palatable for Adam by adding pepper and basil, leftover hot sauce from the fast food tacos Bobby bought them when he started working at the corner store. In the end it had seared his taste buds. Even now he used a lot of Tabasco sauce.
Vic, sensing that, too, looked at Adam. He leaned forward, opened his mouth as if to ask Adam what he was feeling, and why.
Adam forced a smile and reached for the bowl of canary-colored elbows.
“It looks great, Mom,” Adam said. He didn’t want his mother to know how much he hated it, even though she’d fancied it up with bacon and spinach. It wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t afford to feed them anything else back then, though he wished she’d been able to default to something else now that Doctor Binder was footing the bill.
Vic exhaled. Adam saw him shake off his curiosity. He nodded for Adam to pass him the bowl. Adam did not doubt that they’d talk about it later.
Adam couldn’t shake the strangeness of it. If anyone had asked him if his mother would be all right with a guy dropping by for dinner, he’d have said no. Adam watched her out of the corner of his eye like she might be the possessed one. She’d surprised him, and he didn’t think she had anything up her sleeve but interest in Adam’s well-being. She’d changed, he realized, or she’d never been who he had thought she was.
She smiled at him, as if she could read him the way Vic could. It felt normal being with them like this, and Adam found himself smiling back.
32
Adam
“Is this thing safe?” Vic asked as Adam drove. He took the long way. “It doesn’t feel safe.”
“It’s fine,” Adam said. He felt what little was left to the padding beneath his ass and did not sigh. It wasn’t nice like Bobby’s Audi or even Jesse’s SUV.
“Still, you need to let Jesse look at it.”
“I don’t want charity, Vic.”
He meant it. It was bad enough that he had to shop for shirts at thrift stores, that he was used to hunger. Pity, especially from a guy he liked, would be too much.
“He wants to help you. It’s okay to ask for things, Adam. It’s okay to need or want things for yourself.”
“I just—I don’t want to be the white trash guy you feel sorry for.”
“White trash?” Vic asked. “You’re not white trash.”
“I grew up in the woods, Vic. I live in a trailer park. I’ve never had a new pair of shoes, you know that?”
“That’s poor, not white trash. Your mom worked hard. Your brother works hard. You’re only white trash if you’re lazy. And I know that’s not you.”
It made him bristle that Vic was right. Everyone in their family hustled. Everyone always had, except for Dad. He couldn’t be bothered to do the simplest things, not even put garbage where he was supposed to. Long after he’d gone, Bobby ran over a discarded spray paint can with the lawn mower. It exploded and destroyed the mower. They’d been lucky Bobby hadn’t been hurt, or even killed, by the shrapnel.
Shaking his head, Adam pulled to a stop in front of Vic’s house.
“You don’t know me that well,” Adam said.
“I know you’re a good person.” Vic reached over to put his hand to the back of Adam’s head. He made a little motion with his fingers. Adam pressed into the touch. Vic raised an eyebrow. “Or do you have a Confederate flag tattoo somewhere I haven’t seen?”
“No,” Adam said. “Just a monster truck. Oh, and a cow munching grass on my ass cheek.”
“Left or right?” Vic asked.
Adam paused, breath held, palms itching.
Vic leaned across the bucket seats. So close, his face inches from Adam’s, he paused. Vic kept up that slight pressure, that little movement of his fingers on the back of Adam’s head.
Adam wondered if this was how Vic had been with the girls he’d dated. He shut that down, let the sensation carry him until, unable to wait any longer, he closed the gap between them and pressed his lips to Vic’s.
The thread, the connection between them, sizzled. It hummed as if to say Yes. Finally.
Adam paused to gasp and Vic let him take a long breath before he pressed them together again. Vic parted Adam’s lips with his tongue. Their hands moved over each other, down arms, inside Vic’s denim jacket. Vic skimmed his fingers under the hem of Adam’s T-shirt, brushing skin.
Their eyes stayed locked the whole time.
The blood rushing in Adam’s ears and downward cut off all thought. Pausing, he asked, “Am I hurting you?”
“No,” Vic said, leaning in again.
Adam believed him. He did not think either of them could lie in that moment, in that strange pretzel twist of bodies, lips, and life threads.
Adam risked a glance out the window as Vic kissed his neck, the tip of his tongue darting against soft flesh. The Reapers were gone. Adam wanted to know more, but he was a bit distracted by the tightness everywhere. He kissed Vic, over and over, their eyes open and seeking. Adam found it then, the bit of doubt layered under all that confidence. He tried to wipe it away with a kiss so long he thought he might pass out. Vic broke first. He ran a fingertip over Adam’s lips.
“I’d better go,” Vic said. “Before we get too . . .”
“Sweaty?” Adam asked with a laugh. He felt like everything between them was balanced on a knife edge, like he and Vic could drop at any moment into bed or back into their separate lives. He forced himself to exhale and redirect his blood back into the rest of his body.
“Sweaty,” Vic agreed.
“Are you sure?” Adam asked, leaning away until his back touched the door.
“Yeah. Don’t want to bust a stitch.” Vic smiled and ran his eyes down Adam’s belly to his jeans. “Either of us.”
“Okay,” Adam said with another laugh.
“Walk me to the door?” Vic asked.
Adam nodded with a long inhale and moved back to the driver’s seat. He climbed out, felt the night breeze cool his hot skin. He stiffened when Vic took his hand. The street was as busy as ever.
“What?” Vic said.
“What if your neighbors see?”
“We just made out in front of my mother’s house,” Vic said. “You didn’t care if they saw that.”
Adam blushed so hard he felt it burn his ears.
“Look,” Vic said, pausing halfway up the narrow concrete walk. “I don’t know where this, us, is going. But I want to go there. With you, okay?”
“You’re not worried what people might think?” Adam asked.
Vic shrugged. “Small neighborhood. Jesse has a big mouth. People are going to find out, if they just didn’t.”
“You’re not scared?”
“I’m a cop. This is my neighborhood. I know everyone on this street, and they know me.”
Adam shook his head. “It’s not like that where I come from. Holding hands with a guy, shit, just anyone even knowing I’m gay. Let’s just say it wouldn’t go over so well in the trailer park.”
Vic wrapped his fingers into Adam’s.
“It’s not like that everywhere.”
“And—what if it’s not real?” Adam asked, his voice quiet. There. He’d asked it. “What if it’s just the magic?”
What, he thought, if you don’t really like me? It felt too pathetic to say it aloud.
“Liking you is magic,” Vic said, smiling. “What’s more magical than a first kiss? Everything doesn’t have to hurt all the time, Adam. There is good. There are good guys. Like you.”
What about Silver? A little voice asked. Adam crushed it. Silver wouldn’t stand up to his own father. Vic was willing to walk down the street with him. Vic was willing to walk with him, holding hands, to his front door. There wasn’t a comparison.
“You’re thinking again,” Vic said, dragging Adam onto the porch. He leaned in to give Adam a quick peck on the lips. “Go home. Think there. You’re making my bullet-hole hurt.”
Vic sauntered inside. Adam waited a moment before heading back to the Cutlass. He’d driven about two blocks when a voice in the back seat asked, “Do you love him?”
After a yelp higher in pitch than Adam would have preferred, he looked in the rearview mirror to see Argent in the back seat.
“How long have you been back there?” he asked.
“Long enough,” she said, climbing over the seats in a lithe, but still awkward way to drop into the passenger seat.
“I was on my way to pick you up,” Adam said.
“I got bored. Hospitals are quite dull. Your television shows make it seem like it’s all explosions and illicit sex in closets.”
“You could have waited.”
“Answer the question,” Argent said.
“I don’t know,” Adam said. “I just met the guy.”
“Yet you wove a strand of your life force to his?” she asked.
“I didn’t want him to die,” Adam said. He remained adamant in the decision, and yet it had felt like peeling off a piece of his heart. Remembering it now, he realized that was what he had done. “He didn’t deserve that.”
“Still.” Argent sighed. “It remains a most impulsive way to marry someone.”
“Marry?” Adam asked. “I didn’t marry him. That’s not what I was doing.”
“Adam Lee Binder,” Argent said, drawing out his full name. “You might possibly be the most ignorant, most arrogant mortal practitioner I have encountered in twenty centuries.”
“Is that how old you are?” he asked.
“It’s impolite to ask,” she snapped, eyes closing to slits. “But yes, Adam, when a boy likes another boy very much, you tie a strand of your life to theirs. You share their pains, their gains, their rise and fall. In sickness and in health, all that.”
Argent grew quieter, looked around as if to make sure no one could overhear, and said, “Which is why we do it when we take a mortal mate. It extends their life, lets them stay with us longer, though not forever.”
“Does that happen?” Adam asked, trying to sound neutral, wanting to ask if it had happened to her. He remembered what Silver had alluded to, that she’d defied their father, stood up to him once, and been imprisoned for it.
“Rarely,” she said. She looked so sad that she answered his unasked question. He wondered who in those long centuries she’d loved and lost. “And not for a long while. We are traditionalists, preservationists. And we are so long-lived. It is painful to see our mortal lovers or children die.”
Adam shrunk into his seat. Hands gripped to the steering wheel, he asked, “Is that—Silver. Is that why it hurt him when I saved Vic?”
Argent raised an eyebrow at Adam.
“Quite,” she said, examining herself in a small compact. “Silver is more traditional. He fit well in your Victorian era. He knew he’d lost you, that father would never allow him to keep you, but that does not mean that he wanted to see you bound to another.”
Adam groaned. “I don’t know what to do about anything, not Vic, not Silver. I don’t know what to do about the damned spirit.”
“For now,” Argent said. “Drive to the Clock Tower. We have an appointment with the Gaoler, and a chance to free your marriage sister.”
“Then what?” he asked.
“When this is done you must decide whether or not you love him.”
Adam nodded. He wanted to, but did not ask Argent which him she meant.
*****
Adam could not find an open parking space large enough for the Cutlass.
“Stupid SUVs,” he groaned.
“There,” Argent said with a wave, shifting them and the car, to the Spirit world.
“Thanks.” Adam smiled as he pulled into an empty spot. The parking meters had mouths where their coin slots should be. They undulated like hungry snakes, begging for coins.
“How many of you can do that?” he asked. He fed the meter a few quarters. Contented, it tried to lick his face before closing its eyes and drifting to sleep like a cat in the sun. “Move a whole car over?”
Argent arched a plucked eyebrow at him. “Adam Binder, are you trying to be clever with me?”
“No, I’m just trying to learn.”
“Asking questions is a start,” she said. “But do better.”
&n
bsp; “How?”
“Ask better questions.”
Adam could not think of a follow-up as they kept walking. It seemed the elves would teach him, if he could prove his worth through asking the right questions. It was like taking a test to prove you could take tests.
No wonder I never made it to college.
They’d parked in the theater district. A trolley car snarled past. Curtis Street sported ancient theaters, their signs comprised of light bulbs set to make the letters, shone through the bit of haze that had settled over downtown. They had names like Chop Suey and the Isis.
Tonight the atmosphere felt like a carnival. The spirits walked on stilts or bicycled through the air, suspended by balloons. Dressed in pinstripe suits and evening gowns, everyone seemed headed for the shows. Adam wondered what he’d find within, especially as a pair of well-dressed octopuses tapped their way by, each sporting eight walking sticks.
Adam made a note to come back and look at them more closely. Maybe he could bring Vic somehow. Like a real date.
“What are you grinning about?” Argent asked him.
“This,” Adam said, waving a hand as a bear in a fez danced along the street. Argent didn’t ask him to expound, and he was glad. He wasn’t sure he had the words for what welled up in his heart. She returned his smile.
They neared the clock tower. It stood just north of them, its face glowing like the moon.
A wave of force broke from the building, a cloud of dust and debris. It knocked Adam to the ground.
“Da fuck?” he asked, looking up.
“Language,” Argent said before turning to see what he had.
The cloud froze. It hung, unmoving over several blocks. Even the fire, the smoke and flames, stood fixed in place. Then it reversed, compacting before it expanded again.
“Da fuck?” Argent echoed him.
The explosion’s pause didn’t stop the spirits around them from panicking. They screamed. Adam heard a roar, some beast large enough that its call echoed off the bricks.
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