by Amy Lane
“I’m sure there are some of those,” Angel said, her new, feminine voice soothing as Tucker lay there and let the sweat dry from his body. “That… that was not easy.”
Tucker closed his eyes against the terror, the violation, and the fucking resignation they’d felt at their lot in life. “I want to think of them somewhere peaceful,” he said. The kitten wandered up and started licking the salt from Tucker’s hairline. Tucker let her, still lost in the poignancy of two lovers, running from the world that had booted them so rudely in the kidneys.
“Where would they be?”
“The ocean,” he said automatically, although the ocean might terrify Sophie. “No, a riverbank. One that doesn’t flood. They’d have a cottage. They’d have a garden and chickens and do their own laundry, and nobody would bother them.” Or peer into their personal moments like a voyeur, but he didn’t say that.
He just waited for the fine trembling to stop while he put together the things he knew and the things he had.
“The snuff box,” he said, his eyes still closed.
“It’s here,” Angel said, as if she recognized the significance.
“The rat fucker—”
“Her father-in-law?” Angel clarified, since Tucker had obviously lost her with the swear word.
“Yes.” Tucker opened his eyes and was overwhelmed by Angel’s bright green eyes within inches of his face. “Augh! Ohmigod, you’re close.”
Angel scooted back on the bed, swinging her hair over her shoulder as if she’d always had long hair and it was no big deal. “Sorry,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t mean to startle you. But you were referring to her father-in-law?”
“I can’t even call him by a name,” Tucker snarled, loathing ripping from deep inside him. “I mean… poor Sophie!”
“Yes.” Angel dropped her eyes and petted the kitten disconsolately. “That was horrible. I’ve…. Your aunt Ruth and I have seen that. Not often. But enough.” She shivered. “I don’t understand how people can be so awful.”
“Well, this guy was obviously… okay, crazy. And drug addicted. And sort of a dick anyway. But worse than all of that, he was here.”
He and Angel met gazes, and for once they were on completely the same page—that snuff box had belonged to Thomas Conklin Senior. “He was here. And somebody needs their story told.”
“God,” Tucker muttered. “I really hope they got away.”
Angel dropped her eyes, concentrating on the orange stitching of the quilt. “Tucker, people here…. If their ghosts are here, on the grounds, that usually means….”
She couldn’t say it, but Tucker knew. It was very possible that Sophie and Bridget had died here—but perhaps not. There was always the other possibility: that the ghosts he saw here were just what remained of two women whose time here had been pivotal in their lives.
Tucker shook his head and tried to rid himself of the bitter disappointment filling his heart. “It was a nice dream,” he muttered, pushing himself off the bed. He staggered over to the dresser and looked at the objects there with dead eyes and leaden limbs.
“I can’t finish this tonight.” When he had sex with someone, he would feel a drain, a pull, something bigger than the normal energy expenditure during coitus. It was one of the reasons he couldn’t hold down a job—it wasn’t just that he didn’t know when he’d be subject to someone else’s body, but he had to sleep off the hangover the next day.
This was worse.
“I’ll start work on the room tomorrow,” he promised, not that Angel had a vested interest in the remodeling. Tucker looked around at the old-fashioned wallpaper, which was starting to give him the creeps, and the dusty splinters of hardwood. “I’ll see if I can move the furniture out while I’m fixing stuff up. It’ll be a pain in the ass in the hallway, but then, you and me are the only ones who’ll be coming in.”
Angel nodded, looking as tired as Tucker, and then reached for Squishbeans.
The animal slipped right through her incorporeal hands.
“Oh dammit!”
Tucker found he had enough strength to laugh. “Don’t stress yourself, sweetheart. I can carry her.”
Tucker reached for the kitten, but instead of looking grateful, Angel glared.
“Are you being condescending because I’m a woman?”
Tucker was tired enough that he actually had to think about that one. “I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure it’s because you’re a ghost. And you’re being sort of cute.” He held out his hand and thought some more—it was a valid question. “I think if you were being cute as a man, I’d be just as condescending. Except, you know, I’d be thinking I was being playful.”
“Well, it sounded like you were being sort of a condescending prick,” Angel muttered, eyes narrowed. “This is a problem with incorporeality, not a problem with internal genitalia.”
Tucker did a slow blink, and then his head did a slow throb.
“Okay. Fine. I’ll examine my chauvinistic tendencies tomorrow, okay?”
“What are you going to do for the rest of the evening?” Angel asked plaintively, following him out the door.
“Oh God—is it only eight o’clock? This has been the longest day! Well, I’ve got my computer, and I’ve got a Netflix account. Do you have any preferences?”
“Netflix?” Angel said curiously. “What’s Netflix?”
Tucker laughed softly. “Wow. I think it’s time you learned about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And another guy named Angel. And a guy named Spike. I think this will make our evenings very pleasant together, you think?”
“Sure, Tucker,” Angel said, trusting as a child. “If you want to spend pleasant time together, I would love to be your companion.”
“That’s a little formal,” Tucker muttered, but still he led the way down the corridor with rooms (more rooms—oh my God, more rooms) flanking either side, then down the stairs. A companion. That was actually sort of nice. Margie, with her assumption that they were lovers, had missed the best part of that, really. Having Angel here meant he at least wasn’t alone.
True to his word, Tucker set up the computer on top of the dresser and turned them both so they could watch from the bed. He left Angel and the kitten watching the first episode and visited the shower, grateful for the modern, if basic, amenities of hot water and shampoo.
It would have sucked going to sleep wearing that fear sweat on his skin, especially if Angel was going to be sitting on the edge of the bed while he slept.
He paused for a moment to figure out why that should bother him. Was it, like Angel said, because she was a girl now?
But when he thought of Angel, he wasn’t really thinking about gender. He was thinking about his/her prissy little speech pattern and the gentleness that her weird agenda seemed to hide. He was thinking of green eyes, almost like a cat’s, watching a kitten with a sort of desperate affection.
He could, simultaneously, think about the sweep of blond hair across a pink cheek and the gruffness of stubble across the edge of a square chin.
Huh.
He’d been cheerfully bisexual since his first and second sexual encounters—but he’d never thought about this before. Was there a difference between bisexual and gender-transcendent?
He groaned as the water pounded his chest. No. He was not going to ponder this now—but he was going to mind whether he actually condescended to pretty, plump blonds, because Angel was right. If he only called her “sweetheart” when she looked like a Barbie doll, that should stop right now.
And he had so many things to think about—things that weren’t gender-transcendent, shapeshifting ghosts.
“Hey, Angel,” Tucker said as he came out of the bathroom, one towel wrapped around his hips and the other drying his hair. “What do you say we take a look at the graveyard tomorrow. Maybe if we’re together, it won’t look like a soul-sucking vortex of….”
Angel was sitting cross-legged at the end of Tucker’s bed, her attention focused on his computer screen, green ey
es wide, mouth pink and wet and surprised into an O.
“Do we like?” he asked, laughing a little to himself. If she liked Buffy, wait until she got hold of Supernatural and The Flash and Smallville and iZombie.
“This is so exciting,” Angel said, completely without irony. “The blond cheerleader is really a slayer!” She wrinkled her forehead. “Is this real?”
Tucker shrugged. “Probably not. How’s this—everybody else thinks nothing like Buffy can possibly happen, and just because we know better, that’s no reason for us to assume this is anything more than entertainment.” It was like crime shows with serial killers. If you did the math, there were more serial killers in all the crime shows combined than real people. So yes, serial killers existed, but no, ninety-nine out of a hundred times when they showed up on television, they weren’t real.
Angel frowned at him for a moment, and then allowed herself to be pulled back into the action. “I would rather believe it’s real,” she said, with a sort of touching ingenuousness. “At least in Buffy, they don’t condescend to the cute blond girl.”
“Oh God.”
Tucker reached into his dresser and grabbed a pair of boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and just as he was about to drop the towel….
He remembered he was naked.
In front of a woman.
Being nude in front of a man didn’t bother him—bisexual or not, he’d been undressing in locker rooms since junior high. But Angel was a girl now, and unless he was making love to a woman, being naked was just not… not acceptable! He turned his back to her and hoped his bare bottom got minimal exposure while he dressed.
Angel noticed, though.
Tucker came back and sat on the bed, pushed himself into the far corner and picked up Squishbeans. The kitten apparently didn’t have a partial bone in her body. She plopped on Tucker’s chest and began purring, and the exhaustion that had so sapped Tucker after his vision settled onto his shoulders like an old sweater.
“I’ve seen you naked before,” Angel said while Netflix geared up for the next episode.
Tucker sighed. “So sue me. Women are different somehow. I don’t know what to do about that.”
“I have seen human behavior, past and present, up close and personal,” Angel mused. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been quite so aware of how different they are treated.” She cocked her head, limpid green eyes regarding him soberly. “Do you think it’s a biological thing? Is that why women are expected to be submissive?”
Oh God! “No!” Tucker said shortly. “I’ve known some very strong women in my time. It’s not biology—at least, not most of it. It’s… it’s sociology. I think, you know, women need to be protected sometimes. They get pregnant, that’s hard, they need help. And men… just confused that shit and made it about who’s better and stronger and who’s weaker, and things got toxic somehow. And now we’ve got all these set-in-stone social rules, and some of them are just politeness, and women have been sort of shit on for so long that it comes across as condescension, and—augh!” He thunked his head back against the wall. “Look,” he said at last, “I’m sorry I called you sweetheart, but no, unless we are sleeping together, I will not change clothes in front of you while you’re a girl.”
“Huh.” Angel shifted position on the bed, lying on her stomach and swinging her feet over her bottom, exposing curvy calves and plump thighs.
“Huh, what?”
“I wonder what Buffy would think of that?”
After two episodes? Buffy probably didn’t want to see anybody’s naked body yet either. She hadn’t gotten busy with Angel until season two, right?
“I think she’d think I’m too old and not hot enough for her and then shut down whatever is happening in the graveyard immediately.”
Angel rolled her eyes. “It’s not killing anybody right now. Hush!” That last was probably because Netflix was done buffering and the next episode had started.
Tucker grunted and settled back to watch comfort television, but the part of him that always worried was not going to be appeased.
That graveyard needed to be looked at. There was something very wrong there.
Squishbeans purred on his chest, and Buffy did her thing on his computer, and for a moment he could forget about graveyards stretching into alternative dimensions, two people he was starting to care about who had probably been dead for over a century, and gender-bending ghosts with perceptive, vulnerable green eyes.
Gateway
“DO WE have to?” Angel asked, not sure why this made her so uncertain.
“Take apart the bed? Yes.”
Tucker stalked around the thing, taking a look at the way the frame was put together. In the last two days, he had moved the desk into the corner, stripped the windows, removed the light fixtures, and—in his words—“felt up the creepy-assed wallpaper.” But it was now time to move the bed.
Angel wasn’t so sure it would ever be time to move the bed.
“What if something awful happened there!” Angel asked, feeling a little desperate.
Tucker grunted. “Yeah, well, I’ve been there, done that. It was horrible. I don’t look forward to doing it again. But right now, it’s either feel up the rest of the stuff on the desk—”
“You slept for twelve hours,” Angel said humbly. She was beginning to think that Tucker was a much more powerful empath than his aunt Ruth. Angel’s involvement in his visions was far more immersive—both in the pleasure and the pain.
The fact that Angel hadn’t noticed that, had simply been swept away by them, had felt more connected to Tucker than she ever had to Ruth—that was part of the power.
It hadn’t felt like a vision. It had been real.
And what it had done to Tucker had been real too. He’d been exhausted, sleeping for twelve hours and wandering the house like a zombie for eight hours after that before going back to sleep. Angel had ordered groceries for the next morning, wanting there to be fresh eggs and cheese—lots of protein for Tucker, to sustain his work as an empath. But that had only been the surface reason.
The truth was, Angel saw Tucker as needing her, far more than Ruth had ever needed her. Ruth had treated her as a friend, a nemesis, an irritant, and Angel had responded that way. Of course, it hadn’t been until the old woman had passed away that Angel had realized humans don’t always ask for what they need.
Tucker was an object lesson in this idea.
He didn’t ask for anything, but when Angel gave him something unexpected, the gratitude, the relief on his face, told Angel far more about what he had grown to think life would give him than any plea for help.
So now that Tucker was ready to move on with the cleansing of the house—literally—Angel found she was unwilling to let him. Not when they both knew the cost.
“Tucker, you don’t have to do this,” Angel begged. “Please.”
“Aw, Angel,” Tucker teased, “are you worried about me?”
“Yes,” Angel said, and then backtracked, because that had sounded far too enthusiastic. “If you were to be unable to carry out your duty, the house would fall to ruin. The spiritual excess—”
“Is already forging a psychic void to a hell dimension,” Tucker said dryly, obviously referring to the graveyard. “When are we going to check that out again?”
Angel whimpered. Honest to heaven, whimpered. “Do we have to?” she asked, sitting down on the old mattress and picking reluctantly at the blue-and-white striping. Tucker had stripped the bed completely and taken the bedclothes to a laundry service, asking them to treat the linens as delicates to help preserve them as long as possible and to simply steam the quilts and spot-wash them.
“Angel, it’s terrifying over there. You have to see.”
“But….” Angel choked, a little abashed. “We’re working as fast as we can. This is the only way I know to do this task. How do we—”
“Well, for starters, you let me take apart the bed.” Tucker winked at her, and Angel bit her lip, afraid and frustrated�
�and tingly.
He was so damned irrepressible.
“Fine,” she said, running her hand over the bedrails. She felt the waves of it, thundering through her energy field. “Are you wearing clean underwear?”
Tucker wrinkled his nose and thought about it for a moment, tunneling his fingers through his hair. “No,” he said after a moment. “I mean, they were clean this morning, but we’ve been mucking around a lot in the heat and the dust, so yeah, in an hour or two, I’ll be grateful to shuck them and jump in the shower.”
Angel rolled her eyes. “More grateful than you can ever imagine,” she muttered, then stood. Four old pillows graced the bed, and she gestured toward them. “You may just want to get naked and lie down, because we both know what’s going to happen after you lock your hand around the metal.” Because what he’d felt from the bottle that had sent him down to his bed to masturbate in all his glory had been only a fraction of what Angel was getting from the bedframe.
Tucker’s eyebrows went up. “Really?” he asked.
“Yes, really,” Angel retorted.
“Well, if that’s all that happened here, do I really have to—”
“Yes.” And this was what was pissing her off. “Because it wasn’t all Bridget and Sophie. There were a lot of different energies there, and you never know if those people are going to pop up somewhere else.”
Tucker started to laugh uncomfortably. “So I’m going to have an orgy in my head?”
Angel wondered—was she blushing? She wasn’t supposed to feel anything physical, but her “body” was hot, the heat pulsing under her energy shell in a peculiar, supple way.
“Something like that,” she conceded. “I don’t feel any violence here. Just lots and lots of….” She wrinkled her nose. “Fluids. Fluids and lust.”
“Oh God,” Tucker muttered. He looked around the room with purpose, his gaze landing on the giant pile of cleaning rags he’d brought upstairs. He’d used maybe three of them on the room, getting rid of the grime and dust that had settled everywhere, and what was left was a mostly clean bucket of water, mild hand cleaner, and a still-giant pile of clean cotton cloths.