Tenebrism

And it really was okay. Maybe sudden noises got me on edge and people moving too fast or too close startled me, but after the week I’d had that was probably normal. Sure, I was jumpy, but walking across campus didn’t throw me into a panic and send me crawling back to my car like a spooked fucking animal. Even going by the library was fine. Just a prickle at the back of my neck that I could shake right off.

And at least darkroom class wasn’t gonna make any demands out of me. Half of us had our projects due this week, and half next week. Professor Kowalski never had us do write-ups on our projects; she always wanted to hear us talk about them because she thought essays were confining and unartistic. Which had always worked for me, and why I kept trying to get into her classes every chance I could. Well, one of the reasons. She was also just pretty cool and laid-back, and looked like the 70s had never stopped; long grey hair in a braid, acres of dangly earrings, and lots of those drapey shirts with bright patterns on them. Her classes were always real popular, and crowded.

So the entire class period was just sitting through a bunch of presentations and critiques, and thinking about the fact that I hadn’t developed my own project yet. Really needed to get on that if I was gonna keep pretending I was gonna pass any class at all this semester. By the time the second guy was winding down a really fucking long talk about what his grainy out-of-focus incomprehensible blobs represented, I was playing around with a pen and spacing out on the blue-streaked hair of the girl sitting a row ahead of me and not hearing a damn word about anything. Not because I was bored, but...after everything that’d been going on in the last week, a couple of hours of student photography just wasn’t gonna grab my attention. Especially when it was clearly bullshit. His blobs were blobs.

I slouched back in my chair, trying to get in a comfortable position that looked like I was paying attention but also wouldn’t be real obvious if I did actually, you know, fall asleep. I was a little short on it these days.

Actually. Better idea. Something that would keep me awake and make this class time more useful.

I rested my hand on my leg under the desk, balancing the pen across my palm. Closed my eyes, and focused on that constant hum that sat deep in my chest, pulled it to the surface. It was easier this time, way easier. That bright string tugged up my spine again, like what I’d felt when I’d tried meditating. It seemed like it didn’t take as long this time to feel the energy, and get a clear sense of it and what I could make it do. I dragged it down my arm and pushed it out around my hand. I hadn’t tried this since doing the meditation, and maybe that was making it easier.

The pen did a shaky jerk in my hand, once, twice, and on the third time around it tipped itself off the ends of my fingers and dropped to the floor. I huffed and slid down in the chair, groped around on the carpet until I found it. Okay, so it hadn’t spun, but hey. It’d still worked. Set the back on my palm, tried again. Dropped it again, tried again. Got a half spin before it rolled off my thumb. Picked it up, tried again. And again.

Somewhere in the distance I heard Professor Kowalski urging a student to wrap up their presentation since there were more people who needed their time. Probably someone spending too much time on more blobs. Or maybe someone with something actually good, but I started refocusing and all the voices turned back into a nice pointless drone up at the front of the room.

Something scraped across my shoulder, the bottom of someone’s backpack going by. I looked up, startled, and everyone around me was packing up or already gone.

How the hell had class ended so fast? Had I really been sitting here for almost three hours, trying to spin a pen around? I’d never focused on something that hard in my entire fucking life, not that I could remember. That was actually kind of impressive. And weird. I hadn’t taken anything out of my pack but the pen, and I tucked it back into a pocket as I got to my feet and followed the girl with blue streaks in her hair out the classroom door and into the noisy hallway.

So, that was it. I’d gotten through a whole class just like normal and...now what? Well. I could go home, do homework, get ready for class tomorrow. Because that’s what I’d been doing every day since the start of the school year, and pretty much my whole damn life before that. I knew how to do school.

And it sounded so boring. I’d been doing fucking magic all class, not like it was real impressive stuff but it was still magic. Did I really have to go home and do math problems? I could just keep practicing what I’d just been doing. Maybe I could get Rysa to take me out training again. That’d be useful, helpful, and fucking relevant to my life right now. Calculus was never gonna be relevant past the grade I could scrape out of it and plug into that slot in my graduation requirements.

I headed out to my car and back to my apartment with a more determined feeling than I’d had for the past few days.

#

Martin was there when I let myself into the apartment; the TV was on and I could see the back of his head over the couch.

I’d barely said ten sentences to the guy since Halloween, and and I was pretty sure he’d been stretching out his weekend stay at his girlfriend’s place on purpose. But Martin really was my friend, not just a guy I lived with and tolerated or had scrounged up from Facebook or Craigslist to make rent cheaper. He’d been my friend since freshman year when we’d sat through the most boring as shit history survey class together and started passing notes like we were in high school, making up stupid translations for the Chinese tattoos the girl in front of him had on her back.

I sat down on the other couch and leaned over my knees. For a couple minutes I just watched him play some kind of gritty sci-fi FPS, sneaking around in some dingy cluttered maps and shooting at zombie-things that kept getting up again even when he blasted them to pieces.

“Gonna go over here,” Martin said. He wasn’t talking to me; this was just what he did. “Knock knock, aliens! Oh, nobody home. ‘kay, gonna take aaaall your shit.”

While Martin was busy picking up all the items in the map, I wedged my hands between my knees and sucked in a breath. “You been at Claire’s place this whole time?”

“Mmh. Kinda wore out my welcome though, so, hey. Back here.”

I was the shittiest roommate ever. “You didn’t have to do that. You pay rent here too.”

“Naw, man. No big deal.”

He meant it, because that was the kind of guy he was. Which kinda made it worse.

“I’m serious,” I said. “It wasn’t fucking cool of me, you know that.”

Martin paused his game and chucked the controller to the side. “Just seemed like you’d be less stressed out if there were less people around, y’know?” He squinted at me, shook his head. “And you definitely don’t look like you got a new girlfriend.”

“I—” don’t, I managed not to say, and made a barely passable recovery, “—don’t think that’s working out real well.”

Martin squinched up a corner of his mouth. “Oh. Dude. That’s a bummer.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I muttered. “Just—look, don’t go back to Claire’s place, okay? You’re gonna make me feel worse if you try and give me space.”

“‘kay,” Martin said easily. He flipped the game off the pause menu, went about six steps in the grimy map, and then paused it again. “Right, hey, also. Law’s been on me to talk to you,” he said, and it took a second for that to sink in.

“Seriously? The hell’s he want?”

Martin lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “Dunno, man. Just call him back I guess.”

I hadn’t looked at my phone in at least two days. Maybe more. It might not even be on. But not a lot of people ever called me. I’d’ve known if I’d missed a call from anyone in my family, because it’d’ve been followed up a few hours later by an email asking if everything was okay, why wasn’t I answering. So I just had Law, back to acting like a fucking weirdo.

“He knows where I live,” I muttered. “If it was really that important.”

Martin laughed and kicked my shin with the flat of his socked foot. “Yeah, I think even he knows that wouldn’t work out real well. ‘s’not like it’s a secret you don’t like the guy.”

“He fucking started it!” I said, startled. I’d had no problem with Law until about a month or two after I’d met him; he’d actually seemed kind of bland and uptight and more into studying than anything else at first. Then, out of nowhere, he’d started being a raging douchebucket and hadn’t quit for the next three years. Since he’d been Martin’s roommate at the start, I’d tried to keep it civil, but there was no reason to now. Avoiding him was my best strategy, because no matter how cool and controlled I tried to be, Law always found some perfect button to press.

“He’s not that bad, dude,” Martin said. “Really. I dunno what’s up with you two, but he doesn’t act like that when you’re not around.”

“I—” Okay, no. Martin was not gonna make me feel bad for ignoring Law. If the guy really had something important to say, he could pass it along via Martin, or leave a fucking voice mail. Maybe he already had. And then I might listen to him. If he acted like a regular human being. That wasn’t much to ask for.

“Is that your phone?” I said instead, because coincidentally there was a muffled jangly tune going off somewhere behind the wall.

“Ah, shit!” Martin jumped up, tossed the controller my way as he vaulted over the back of the couch and thundered down the hallway. For about three seconds I thought about playing his video game, but I wasn’t even sure what it was and definitely didn’t know the controls for it. I tapped the smooth plastic edge of the controller against my knee, listening to the quiet unsettling noises coming from the pause screen and Martin’s muffled voice coming through the wall.

A couple minutes later, he came back out shrugging a jacket on and half-humming, half doo-doo-doo-ing in place of any lyrics. It was something familiar I couldn’t place. He noticed me giving him a look from over the back of the couch.

“Just going out with some people,” he said, grinning. “I’ll totally be back, mom.”

“Hah hah.” I waved the controller and my middle finger at him. “You need me to save this?”

“Naw. You can play if you want. Shoot summa dem undead alien bitches for me.”

“Sure,” I said, with no intention of doing that. Didn’t really want more aliens right now, dead or alive.

Martin starting humming again as he scrounged up his phone and his keys and a baseball cap from all the places he’d dropped them, and this time he threw in a couple of lyrics that I definitely, definitely recognized.

“Oh c’mon, seriously? Now s’gonna be in my head forever!” I complained at him as he strolled out the door.

“I had to watch Claire watch that movie like three times while I was over there; payback, buddy!” Martin called back. “I don’t even get it man, it’s got the worst ending ever. Duckie was way cooler.” Then the door bumped shut behind him. I didn’t even know what movie he was talking about, all I knew was that I was gonna have an 80s song stuck in my head for a while.

I sank back into the cushions, tossing the controller onto the other couch. Something dug into my back, and I fished around and pulled out a mechanical pencil that’d gotten wedged in there. I tapped it against the palm of my hand and whistled the dumb song Martin’d been singing, not sure what the hell to do with myself. I didn’t think Keyd and Rysa were here, otherwise I’d’ve suggested more training. I was in the mood, but I was kind of bored of spinning a pen around in my hand.

But maybe I could try something new on my own. What if I could spin the thing without holding it? If I stuck a little bit of energy on it, maybe I wouldn’t have to touch it at all and it’d still work. Like the way Keyd put his tracking spell on my glasses. Assuming he did it with that second kind of energy, the kind I had, I should be able to do something like it. Logically.

I set the pencil on the coffee table about a foot from me. Sat back, shook out my shoulders, then pulled up a little glob of energy into my fingers, and plopped it onto the pencil. Which ended up a lot easier to do than I thought. I could still feel it, the same way the shields felt like an extension out through my skin, this time aware of a thin connection stretching out through my fingertips.

Okay, now spin.

The pencil twitched, tipped against the pocket clip, rocked back. Aw, fuck, come on. It’d moved, so I could do it. It was just a lot harder when I couldn’t feel the actual thing, didn’t have a sense of it and its weight. I just had that thin little connection to the energy I’d fixed on it.

C’mon, c’mon, focus. It was just a little piece of plastic, it didn’t take that much force to move. I could blow on the thing and it’d probably roll around.

I leaned back, braced my feet on the carpet and my hands on my knees, thought about all the spinning things I could and just shoved down that thin line. With a little plastic clatter, the pencil fucking took off. It didn’t spin, it just shot across the coffee table and sailed across the room into the patio door blinds.

Whoa, okay, too much focus.

I found the pencil under the blinds, brought it back, tried again. Less forcefully. This time, I got it to do a big sloppy spin a couple times around the table before the blob of energy I’d put on it fizzled out suddenly, the connection broken. Well, okay, fine. I stuck another bubble of energy on it, and when I touched the pencil it felt really warm, like it’d been out in the sun for hours. Had to be because of burning all this energy on it.

While I got the pencil spinning in pretty good loops and longer twirls, that dumb fucking song was still stuck in my head. “Mhhm-hmm-hmm, do-doo-do...always said we’d meet again...somedayyy,” I hum-sang because I didn’t even know most of the words, mildly hating Martin. Then—

“You’re improving,” said Keyd’s voice, right above my head.

“Whoa, fuck!” I lurched sideways and just about fell off the couch. Keyd shot a hand out and snagged my shoulder, hauled me back. Apparently as a reflex, because he looked just as surprised as I was about it. And then we were just staring at each other like stupid startled idiots. He’d sat himself on the arm on the couch, almost right next to me. I hadn’t even known he was here.

“Jesus,” I said faintly. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“I’m sorry.” He still hadn’t let go of me, and all my skin under his hand tingled. Even though my shirt. “I didn’t intend—”

“It’s fine, fine.” I huffed out a breath, sank back in the cushions. Keyd’s hand slid off me. “No big deal.”

He flicked his eyes away, focused on the pen that was still sitting on the table, rocking lightly. “Did Rysa teach you that?”

He’d obviously been watching me. “Yeah.”

A little wrinkle creased in between his eyebrows. “That’s all you’ve been learning?”

“Hey. We’re gonna work our way back up to the big stuff. I’m not real good at this, okay?” I pretty much mumbled the second thing. My being bad at this shit had affected him the most and he didn’t need to get a reminder about that. “But I’m really tired of feeling like I can’t handle any of this. I’m gonna do whatever it takes.”

Keyd didn’t say anything to that. He just looked at me for a couple of long seconds, giving away absolutely nothing in that perfect poker face. Then he stretched forward towards the table, giving me a big unexpected facefull of his chest and a sudden hit of that smell of him, the earthy-leathery-rugged-outdoorsy thing, and I keeled back just a little. Keyd picked up the pen and sat back into place, twirling it around his fingers. Slowly, that little eyebrow-frown came back. And it stayed around this time as he turned the pen over in his hands like he’d never seen one before. “You ought to use something else. This will make it much harder.”

“What?” I said. “Why?”

Something in his expression closed off. “Rysa should expl—”

“C’mon. Give it a shot, man.” Maybe he’d have a new angle on this stuff, something that’d give me a different picture. Rysa was great, but hearing an explanation from someone else couldn’t hurt. I twisted to face him, leaned an arm on the back of the couch. He was still perched on the armrest and didn’t look like he was gonna move.

“You—” Keyd flipped the pen around his fingers again, then curled his hand into a fist around it. “It would be easier with something that was living, or had recently been. This—I assume it’s...artificial.”

Rysa had had me try this with a twig, before. I just hadn’t thought the actual thing mattered. That was interesting. “Why’s that?”

“Our energy, the entities—” Keyd frowned towards the wall, still gripping the pen like a lifeline. “They’re most effective, and useful, when they have a source of energy themselves. Natural forces; growth, change, life, death, heat, cooling. Almost anything. They take and give back equally.”

“...and that’s why they need to live in you,” I said, and Keyd nodded. “Shit, that makes sense.” It was like some kind of symbiotic thing; the entities needed them and they needed the entities. Or at least got a huge advantage out of letting them hang out in their bodies.

“The shields,” Keyd suddenly added. “You’ve experienced that they’re temporary—they weaken until they collapse.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Because they are supported by nothing. Once their energy is used, it’s gone, and can’t draw from anything else. They are only as much as you put into them.”

Keyd brought his arm up, and a whole bunch of glittery shards spun right off his wrist. They whirled themselves in a big loose pattern in the air in front of him, humming lightly and brushing a soft static over my skin. All the hairs on my arms pulled up, and the back of my neck prickled.

“With the entities, it’s different. This can last as long as my will and my body can support it.”

I really had to hold myself back from poking at one of the pieces. They still creeped me out, but I hadn’t been this close to them when they weren’t tattoos before. Unless I counted Rysa slapping me with a whip. “Yeah, but I don’t have that option.”

Unexpectedly, I got a little hint of a smile out of him. I knocked the side of his knee. “You explained that fine, you know.”

He let out a little breath, like he’d actually been worried. “I don’t often think about how they work. We learn the limits and strengths because we have to, as part of our training, to know what we can and can’t do, the best approaches. But then it becomes habit, instead of knowledge. Explaining that made me think of being very young.”

So he...wasn’t young. But he did seriously look my age; him and Rysa both. I just about asked, but then a part of me didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to know if he was ridiculously old and just looked like a college-aged kid, and if that was because he was an alien or because of the magic parasites living in him. Just gonna let that one slide.

“Alan,” Keyd said, and that snapped all my attention to him again. Him saying my name was so...something. Weird. Unusual. Nice. He still said it with way more h’s than it needed. “What you said about not handling this well. You are.”

“Heh.” I tapped my fingers against my temple. “You wouldn’t say that if you could see in here.”

Keyd did something else unexpected—he came around and sat down on the coffee table right across from me. His knees bumped into mine and then stayed there and that was kinda...should I move away or something? But trying to do that only made it really obvious I was trying not to touch him, and maybe that came across as rude, and—you know what, fuck it. So I stopped, and just let warmth from his leg soak into mine. It wasn’t even that weird.

“When you train with Rysa again, tell her you can do more than this,” Keyd said, like he wasn’t aware of the huge crisis I’d just had about knees. The pen flipped back into his hand out of nowhere with a little plasticy sound, and he held it out towards me. “You can.”

“Just Rysa?” I took the pen back, knocked it against my knuckles. “I wouldn’t mind you being part of this too, you know.”

Keyd was quiet for a second, staring down at his hands. “It would be better if I didn’t,” he said.

Disappointment hit me pretty strong, and that was unexpected. “You got a reason for that?”

He lifted his eyes to mine, and nodded. And maybe I was getting better at reading him, or he was just getting more obvious, but I could tell he wasn’t gonna tell me that reason. He just had that nope sort of look going on in his face. But it wasn’t a closed-off or unfriendly thing. It was just clearly the way it was gonna be.

“Okay,” I said. It was sorta disappointing, sure, but...I’d been doing fine with Rysa. And I liked Rysa. But Keyd was plenty decent too. It just...took a while with him. He wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met, and I could say that real honestly. He’d taken getting used to, but now I actually liked the guy.

But he was just as exhausting as Rysa was, and right now I was just...wiped out. I let myself keel over until I was flat on my back, head cricked up against the arm of the couch. I groped for a blanket and dragged it up over me. Mm, yeah, crashing here was good. Nap, sleep, whatever, I wasn’t moving for a while.

“Are you sure?” I heard Keyd say above my head. “I don’t need—”

“Naw, man, I’m beat. S’fine here. Take the bed.” I waved my hand around at him, then pulled the blankets up to my chin and burrowed into the cushion.

A small sound that sounded like throat-clearing. “Thank you.”

“Mm-hmm. Night.”

He stood there for a couple more seconds; I could literally feel the sense of his energy just hovering there. And then it moved into the hallway, back to my bedroom, and I never even heard the door close.

#

When I woke up in the morning Rysa’s couch was empty and I could hear tiny bright noises, like metal clinking together, in the kitchen. I yawned, stretched, rolled over and threw an arm over the back of the couch, blinking sleepily over it into the kitchen.

It was Keyd in there. The maps were out again and he was leaning over them, hands braced on the edges of the kitchen table and shoulders hunched up towards his ears. And he was in his full armor—all of it, shoulder plates, chest plates, arm guards, the works. What serious shit was going down that he needed to be decked out like this? I mean, he looked fucking cool, but it seemed like overkill.

I nestled my chin on the couch back, watched him for a second. He was so damn focused, hardly even blinking, tension wound up hard through his whole stance. His hands were bare, so I could see the tips of the marks on his wrists, heavy black and dark like always, and the memory of what they felt like tingled up through my fingers. I clenched my nails into my palms just as Keyd snorted and shoved away from the table, pushing part of the map up against the wall as he did. Then he turned, and saw me.

“Oh. Hello,” he said, all serious and formal like usual. But that’s exactly what I’d expected, and it made me smile.

“Hey.” I clambered off the couch, yawning again and raking my hands back and forth through my hair. “What’s with the armor today?”

“Oh.” Keyd glanced down at himself as I came shuffling into the kitchen. “Nothing to worry about. It’s necessary to do.”

This guy was still shit at explaining stuff. “Necessary for…?”

Keyd slid his fingers along the dark metal plate on his shoulder. “The energy.”

“There’s entities in your armor? ” Was that fucking needed, seriously? They had to have those goddamn things everywhere? “I thought they had to have living bodies to be in.”

Keyd did that doorknob-twist hand move he and Rysa seemed to do a lot. “It’s not exactly the entities themselves there, it’s...well. I’m actually not sure how it works. But the armor does need some source of energy to sustain it. Our bodies can provide that simply by wearing it frequently. And the armor is stronger, better, more effective against attacks.”

So it was like the twig working better than the pen. Sorta. And their armor’d all been sitting in a dark corner of my room for a week, untouched. “So...you’re a battery for your own armor.”

I got a smile out of Keyd for that and felt a little flush of accomplishment. “You could say so,” he said.

Out of just...curiosity, I touched one of the overlapping plates that ran down Keyd’s upper arm. Yeah, I could feel that soft buzz that I was getting pretty familiar with. But it didn’t feel the same way Keyd’s felt, or the way Rysa’s felt. It was a whole new pattern and tone, like it was from a completely different person. Keyd watched me feel up his arm, even tilted it toward me so I could get my hands on it better. I was hyperaware of his eyes on me, even when I let go of him and turned my attention to the maps on the table.

“So. Still with this stuff?”

Keyd nodded. “We’ve covered most of the areas we marked out. Of course, those places were only guesses in the first place.” His eyes flicked away, and I was reading a lot of frustration and disappointment in the tiny movements in his face.

“Yeah, but…we’ve got another place to look now, right? The cathedral—I mean, seemed like Ahieel took you there on purpose.” I had to grit my teeth a little to get those words out. It’d still been a huge fuck-up on my part, still could’ve gotten him killed.

Keyd shook his head. “He won’t be there.”

I braced my hands on the back of a chair, raised my eyebrows at him. “You’re sure about that?” Keyd nodded once. “Why? And why’d he drag you all the way over there in the first place then?”

“The mirrors,” Keyd said, unhelpfully. But then he actually explained. “Or...the glass, I suppose, of those buildings. He would think that it added to his power, yet do nothing for ours. Only light reflects.”

That was not what I’d expected to hear. “You mean like...a literal reflection of light could make him stronger?”

Keyd’s eyebrows were raised to a no-it’s-total-bullshit level. “Some think so. Others don’t. If it is true, it’s a very small benefit. But Ahieel believes it enough.”

And if Ahieel believed it, didn’t matter if it was actually true. He’d act just like it was.

“And Ahieel would not bring me directly to wherever he or other members of his garrison, if he is with one, were,” Keyd added. “He’s, unfortunately, more intelligent than that.”

“So that really is a fucking dead end then.” I shoved at the map the same way he had earlier, crumpling a corner of it up against the wall.

Keyd glanced at me, and it almost looked like he wanted to smile again. “Unfortunately.”

“So do you guys have any new ideas, or…” His darkening expression made me trail off. No, didn’t seem like they did.

“Not one that we can do on our own,” Keyd said, much more quietly.

I let out a slow breath. “...then you guys are gonna leave soon, huh.”

Keyd only looked at me for a long couple seconds, which was enough of a yes as anything. The weird swoop of disappointment in my gut was pretty fucking unexpected.

“Whether Ahieel is here alone or not, we will bring some of our forces back to make sure there is no threat to your world.” Keyd sighed, and continued so softly it was hard to hear. “It is what we already should have done. But…”

“But Ahieel’s personal,” I said, and Keyd blinked at me. “I get it, man. I really do. Not the war-magic-alien-fighting stuff so much, but wanting to see something through yourself. I get that. If I were you I wouldn’t want to let anyone else take Ahieel out for me either.”

Keyd actually laughed. It was a small sound, mostly under his breath and aimed down at the table, but he did do it. He flattened his palms to the table on either side of the taped-together maps.

“Perhaps this would have ended long ago if we had allowed exactly that to happen.” Keyd shifted his weight, and a couple metallic clinks echoed around the kitchen. “I’m not sure Rysa can bring herself to end it as it needs to be. And I cannot do something that she might not truly want done, or never forgive me for doing.”

“Whoa, what?” I said. “I thought this whole thing was like kill-or-be-killed, but neither of you guys wants to kill him? ”

“I never want to kill anyone.” Keyd’s voice was sharp and brutal in a way I’d never heard. His fingers were suddenly curled hard against the wood of the table, and his eyes had gone hard. Then, “it must be done, in war, but there is never any wanting to it. Ahieel would need to die, because that is the only way he can be stopped. But that is the only reason.”

“You don’t want to kill anyone ever, no matter what,” I said, just to make sure I’d got it right. Still staring down at the table, Keyd shook his head. “Buddy, you sure picked the wrong job.”

“I did not become a soldier to revel in killing. Anyone who would do so should not be allowed it.” Keyd took a breath, pulled his shoulders back, met my eyes. “I am a soldier to protect my people, above everything else. Whatever doing so requires, I will do it, but only by necessity.”

“...okay.” I got what he was saying, I really did. But it was just unexpected; this kind of thing coming from a big brutal warrior guy standing in front of me in full armor. But now I was thinking about how his instincts had been only defensive when I’d tried to punch him a while ago, how last night he’d said he wouldn’t’ve actually hit me, how he didn’t even want to train me. Ahieel’d nearly killed him, twice that I’d seen, and he still didn’t want to kill the guy back. Only if he had to, if it was necessary.

Jesus, I was probably more violent than this guy was, and I’d hardly ever been in a fight.

Before I could come up with something else to say. Keyd reached across the table and caught my hand. Firm, but not an unbreakable grip. I could’ve pulled away easy, if I wanted. I didn’t. Sure, it was kind of weird, but it wasn’t like we’d never held hands before—done a lot of it when I’d been pulling all that energy out of him. If he wanted to stand here and hold my hand and talk to me, then, sure. Not a big deal.

“I did not mean to seem harsh,” he said. “I didn’t want you to misunderstand what we do, how we are. What I think about all of this.”

“I definitely don’t now,” I said. If Keyd’d actually thought he’d been harsh, he really had a weird idea about what harsh was. And on top of the whole non-violent thing—for a soldier, he really didn’t seem to have a goddamn aggressive bone in his body.

The marks on his wrist buzzed lightly against my fingertips. I moved my hand around in his, just so I didn’t have to feel it. Just some part of me was still kinda not the most comfortable with these fucking entity things. It was gonna take some more time. Keyd turned his own hand around so his thumb was right against that soft spot right at the base of my palm, and my pulse beat against the pressure. I was feeling my pulse a lot stronger than usual, actually, thudding through my neck and stomach. Like nervousness.

I cleared my throat a little. “In a perfect situation, how would you want this to go? This Ahieel thing, I mean.”

“I only want it to stop,” Keyd said. His fingers moved against mine, his pinky tucking underneath my thumb. “All of it. The war and the hate, what caused him to believe these things in the first place. It’s not only him I want to stop, it’s all of it.”

“Do you think that’s—” Fuck, my voice sounded all weird, kinda low and raspy. The hell was wrong with me? I cleared my throat again. “Is that something that could happen?”

“I don’t know,” Keyd said, and the exhaustion in his voice was unexpectedly strong. I tightened my grip on his hand, and all of a sudden he added his other hand to the finger-tangle, gripping both of mine like a lifeline. “This fight is old. It’s—”

And then—fucking suddenly and with no warning—he completely dropped my hand and pulled right back to his side of the table, like he couldn't get away fast enough. But he didn’t break eye contact.

It still felt like he’d pulled all the air out of my lungs at the same time, and I took a hard step back, head reeling. The fuck. The fuck had that been. My pulse was pounding from my ears down to my stomach, like I’d just run a fucking mile. I was hot all over for no goddamn reason, and Keyd’s eyes bright and burning into mine wasn’t fucking helping.

It was like a tiny miracle when Rysa walked into the living room the next second. She was also all up in her armor, her hair pulled tight to the back of her neck.

“Boys,” she said, and I gave her a weak wave while Keyd shoved himself completely away from the table. Clearly he wanted to get away from the weird fucking tension between us, too.

“You guys heading out?” I said, more to Rysa than Keyd. I couldn’t really look at him right now.

“Likely not,” Rysa said. “Ahieel is probably still injured, and we’re less likely to find him if he is in retreat.”

“Injirau hrapre entajo ro ashonjar,” Keyd muttered. Rysa sighed and waved her hand at him, like she was shooing his words away.

“Utenle atka,” she said, and clearly I wasn’t part of this conversation anymore.

“Oh. Well. I’ve got class,” I said. I really did, just not for a while. But I had to get out of here, I needed space to breathe, to just...be away. Somewhere else.

“All right,” Rysa said, and then something else in reply to Keyd that he’d said almost as the same time I had. Yeah, I’d leave the aliens to their alien business for right now.

#

When I got to campus, I wandered around the open lawn area between the library and the business center, eventually setting myself on a bench and watching people go by. Normal people. Everyday, average, normal people. Strolling around the concrete paths, drifting between classes, greeting each other, walking around holding hands, goofing around. Normal people who didn’t know about aliens, or magic wars, or two races trying to kill each other to death, none of it. I’d been just like that, not even two weeks ago.

Even though I’d gotten to campus way early, I still ended up slightly late to motion graphics. Some dude had already taken the seat next to Chelsea, but she caught my eye and made an unhappy face, so she clearly wasn’t real thrilled about it. The guy was kind of spread out all over her space, his backpack practically on top of her mouse pad. I felt bad for her, but couldn’t do much about it since our seats weren’t assigned or anything, so I threw her an apologetic look and just found another workspace on the side of the room.

But Chelsea had been my missing-lots-of-class cheatsheet, and I was pretty lost without her. And it was pretty obvious by glancing around at the other workstations that we were on a completely new project. The first half of class was a lecture on the next step of it, which totally flew over my head, and actually working on a project I hadn’t started and didn’t know how to do was pretty impossible. I kept my head down and buried in the textbook most of class, and got out of there pretty quick once class was over. This constant feeling of being in over my head, about everything, fucking sucked.

I got about ten steps out of the building before I heard someone calling after me. “Al—hey, Alan!”

I turned around. Chelsea was jogging down the sidewalk after me, hiking her messenger bag up onto her shoulder and waving. She came right up to me, smiling and brushing her bright hair back off her face.

“Hey!” she said, twiddling with the ends of the bronzy strands.

“Hey,” I said back. And that was it, I was out of words. She was just a cute girl who was a Delta Gamma and some kind of art major. Outside of class, I had no idea what to say to her, what to talk with her about. All our conversations had been about school work. Or that one time she invited me to a frat party I didn’t go to.

I realized that Chelsea was looking back at me hopefully. I had the feeling she’d just asked something, and I’d been too busy having a mild crisis to hear her. “What?”

“I said, d’you want to go get something to eat?” she said, and there was pink in her cheeks that hadn’t been there before.

Oh. Shit. Well. Fuck.

I should’ve seen this coming, because of Martin. He’d been sorta trying to hook me up with Chelsea before my life had gotten busy with aliens and magic and danger instead. Actually, the last couple of date-like things I’d done had all been because of Martin being the most unasked for wingman in the world and kind of throwing me into the path of girls he thought I’d like, or vice versa. Especially after he’d gotten pretty serious with his own girlfriend, he’d turned into super matchmaker. Wanted to share the love, I guess.

That’d never annoyed me before, but suddenly it did. He was obviously trying to help me out, but was I really turning into That Guy, the one that couldn’t snag a date on their own and everyone thought needed help? I didn’t even want a date right now, but if I did, I could definitely find somebody interested on my own. There was someone in front of me right now.

“Yeah,” I said, and Chelsea’s smile got a lot brighter. “Yeah, I do.”

#

Chelsea and I walked off campus together, down the street to the little hamburger stand on the corner across from campus. It was actually kind of weird, walking and talking with someone shorter than me. I’d been getting used to looking up all the time. The top of Chelsea’s head only reached my chin, and her hair was so bright and bronzy-blonde and she smelled like some kind of coconut shampoo or soap and she was just so normal and I didn’t know how to handle that anymore. She smiled a lot and talked with her hands and wasn’t anything like a cool composed alien warrior. And that was kind of freaking me out.

“Are you okay?” she asked me, once we were sitting down at a table in the sun with our food. “You seem really….out of it.”

Probably the nicest way to put it. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“You still have that family in town?”

“Yeah,” I said, relieved to have an excuse. Probably a little too relieved. “It’s, uh. Stressful. They’re from…Europe.”

“Oh, that’s neat!” Chelsea said, swirling her straw around in her milkshake. She had about four bright neon rubber bracelets around her wrist, and they flopped around against each other. “Is that why you’ve kinda been, you know, missing some class?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Gotcha.” Chelsea gave me a little smile. “Where are they from?”

Fuck, I really shouldn’t start telling lies when I hadn’t figured them out yet. “Poland,” I said. It was the first really far away place that came into my head.

“Really,” she said, her eyebrows sliding upwards. “You’re Polish?”

“I’m not, just my cousins are,” I said, and then realized that didn’t make a lot of sense, and shoved a bunch of fries in my mouth to avoid putting my foot in there again.

“Okay,” she said. She was smiling in a way that crinkled her eyes up at the corners, and leaning forward on her elbow all interested and everything. Fuck. I’d never been into Chelsea, and I really shouldn’t be here doing this just because I gotten randomly annoyed at Martin’s matchmaking habit. I mean, this wasn’t exactly a date, but it was a lot more of something than having lunch in the cafeteria with every other regular Joe College who had a meal plan.

But maybe it wasn’t even anything. I could’ve been misreading it. Just because Martin thought she was into me didn’t mean it was true. Chelsea’d always been friendly, always talking to me in classes we had together, inviting me to stuff—frat parties I didn’t go to, for instance—and maybe she was just doing that now. Being friendly. And I was just too bad at this kind of shit to be able to tell if it did or didn’t mean anything.

“Are they cool?” Chelsea said, and I stared dumbly at her for a second before she laughed and said, “your cousins.”

“Oh, yeah. They’re...cool. Pretty foreign.” Understatement. “Really foreign. One of them, he—” I laughed a little, because I could tell this story and it wouldn’t actually be a lie, “we went to the grocery store, and he didn’t recognize anything there and he can’t even peel an orange.”

“They don’t have oranges in Poland?”

“Not where he’s from.” That was also probably true. “He’s kind of a huge dweeb anyway,” I added. “Not what you’d expect looking at him, I mean, the guy’s kind of big and scary looking but he’s not even, at all. Kind of sweet, really. But he’s pretty decent. Both of them are. But they are really foreign.”

Chelsea laughed again and raked a handful of hair off her face. I could see those freckles of hers again today, speckled all over the bridge of her nose. “They’re like our age?”

“Close enough.”

“That sounds really cool. My family’s pretty small and real American; definitely no cool foreign cousins,” she said.

“I’ll loan you mine,” I said. “I could use a break.”

“I don’t know...” she said, drawing it out in a joking way. “Are any of them hot?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then—what? How was I supposed to answer that? “I don’t know. I guess. If you like tattoos.” Alien tattoos that were actually alive.

“Well,” Chelsea said, and her eyebrows went up all teasy. “Sounds pretty hot.”

Was this flirting or was Chelsea actually trying to size up a cousin I didn’t have that she’d never met? God, this was confusing and stressful. Couldn’t she just tell me what was going on? I was gonna mess it up somehow. I always got like this with girls in this kind of situation, like there was some expected way I needed to act, something I had to get right, or everything was just gonna fall apart and reveal….something. How bad I was at this, I guess. And right now I didn’t want to be all assuming she was into me, but I didn’t want to be a big fucking dope about it if she was. I just wanted it out in the open so I could know what the hell to do about it.

And in about two damn seconds, I got what I wished for.

“Maybe we could go to a movie together sometime. When you have time again. Or, you know, something like that.” Chelsea said, kinda quickly, swirling her straw around and looking at a spot on my right shoulder. Yeah, okay, that was a lot clearer. But I still wasn’t prepared for it.

“I can’t,” I said, like a total dipshit. Chelsea’s eyes came up to mine, blinking through stray golden hair that the breeze had brushed across her face.

“You…can’t,” she said back, tilting her head to the side. That little move just reminded me of Keyd, because he did the same damn thing all the time, and I got even angrier at myself.

“I—yeah, no. I mean…I’m really sorry.” I couldn’t do this. I’d have to tell her something that wouldn’t make me come off as super mega-asshole. The regular asshole part I’d already got covered. “I really shouldn’t’ve—you’re nice. You’re really nice. I just don’t—uh. This. It isn’t...I can’t.”

“Oh,” Chelsea said. She fiddled with one of the rubber bracelets on her wrist and looked out at the street, frowning a little. A couple of long seconds went by. Cars wooshed past in the street, and a kid clattered down the sidewalk on a skateboard. Somebody at a table behind us laughed, and I flinched at the unexpected sound.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, uselessly. I ate half a fry and then tossed it back in the greasy basket. I wasn’t really hungry anymore. Chelsea wasn’t saying anything. I’d just wanted something normal so badly, but now normal had turned into upsetting. I didn’t want upsetting. I’d had enough upsetting for the next couple of decades.

“Look, it’s really nothing to do with you,” I started, because the silence and her soft little frown were getting too awful. “It’s not because of you. I mean, it’s not your fault. Fuck. It’s me, and that’s not just the bullshit excuse I know it sounds like.”

“Oh, yeah?” Chelsea said, but she didn’t seem that upset now, just kind of curious, and I really did owe her a better explanation.

“I’m trying to deal with—there’s just some personal stuff happening with me that’s…not really easy, right now,” I said, even less helpfully. “It’s just...kinda taking over my whole life. It’s not just the family stuff, and it’s just that you’re—great, but I’m—and it’s just that I’m not really…can’t—ugh. I’m explaining this so fucking bad.” Mostly because I couldn’t. Not the actual truth.

There was another couple seconds of silence from her side of the table, and I couldn’t even look at her. And then; “Oh, okay,” Chelsea said on a breath, relaxing back across the table. “Okay, then. That’s okay.”

“Okay?” I echoed. There was no way I was off the hook that easy. “That’s it?”

“Well...yeah.” She sent me a tiny crooked smile that still seemed kinda disappointed, but in a different way. “There’s nothing wrong with that, you don’t have to feel bad about it. I really hope you don’t, you know, I mean, other than this right now.”

Wrong with….what? About Rysa and Keyd and magical goddamn abilities I suddenly had and creepy alien tattoos and blond guys? She didn’t know about any of that, what did she think I was talking about?

And she was still going. “And I won’t tell anybody, if you’re not—if you don’t want me to. I get that it’s really personal, and—”

Oh my fucking god, what was happening right now. “Tell anybody what? ”

“That you’re—” she cut herself off, squinted at me. “Aren’t you? Isn’t that what you meant?”

“I have no idea what you think we’re talking about right now,” I admitted, and Chelsea suddenly went so pink her freckles almost disappeared.

“Oh, wow, I’m sorry, I thought you were saying that—never mind!” She waved her hands at me like she was trying to erase the entire conversation out of the air.

“Wait, hey, what did you think—”

“Nope, nope.” Chelsea shook her head and bright hair flashed everywhere. “I just misunderstood. You meant...you have personal stuff going on right now and this is a bad time.”

“Yeah, basically,” I said. “But seriously, what did you think I meant?”

Chelsea eyed me for a couple seconds, like she wasn’t sure how I’d handle the answer. Then, “I thought you meant that you were gay.”

“That I—” Wait, what.

“See,” Chelsea said, but the word kind of bounced uselessly around my head and didn’t really stick. “Just what you were saying sounded like...that kind of thing, like you were dealing with that, and it actually did kinda sound like you have a crush on your cousin. But that’s not what you meant, so. Never mind.”

A crush on my cousin. I didn’t have a cousin, it was just Keyd. How’d I been talking about him? I couldn’t even remember. Except maybe I’d said he was sweet. That was...yeah, that was weird. No reason to say that. No reason to focus so much on him the way I did, either. I hadn’t—all this weird shit with him, how we dealt with each other, it’d kind of been...it’d been something, something unexpected and unusual and weird, but I’d just been putting it up to the alien thing. The easiest explanation; things between him and me were like that because he wasn’t from this planet. What Chelsea’d just said hadn’t...crossed my mind. Ever.

“Alan?”

“What?” I said stupidly, blinking hard and raising my head. I’d been staring down into my soggy basket of fries.

Now Chelsea looked really worried. “I’m sorry, you don’t want to talk about it, I shouldn’t—“

“It’s fine. You’re fine. It’s just—hearing someone else say it.” Or hearing at at all. The words were still ringing in my ears, I almost couldn’t breathe around them. Was it true? I didn’t...didn’t even know.

“It’s just, you seem really upset,” Chelsea said nervously. “I’m really sorry, I had no idea.”

“It’s been an upsetting week,” I muttered, and scrubbed my hands back through my hair.

“You could talk to me,” Chelsea said, and then, “Wow, I kinda sound like a creep right now but I didn’t mean—just, my major’s pysch and I want to be a counselor, you know, for people, and…I’m a good listener. If you did want to talk. You don’t have to.”

“I thought your major was art ” I said, and she shook her head and laughed lightly.

“Oh, no, I just like doing it on the side, kinda,” she said. Christ, and she was way better at it than me. And it was supposedly my career focus. It was really time to rethink a couple of major things about my life.

Chelsea leaned forward over the table suddenly. “Alan, are you really okay? You kinda look like you’re gonna throw up.”

“No, no. I’m okay. Really.”

She saw right through that bullshit, because suddenly she was getting up off her side of the bench and coming around to mine. She slid onto it so that her back was to the table and her legs were off the other side of the bench, so our shoulders bumped and she was sort of facing me. I could smell her shampoo or perfume or whatever it was, that sweet smell like coconut.

After a couple of seconds of her just sitting there, her shoulder pressed to mine; “You really…feel like that about your cousin?”

No, I wanted to say, but it would’ve been just one more goddamn lie and I was so sick of that. And it was easier now that she wasn’t sitting across from me and staring right at me, she was just a little bright presence in the corner of my eye and up against my arm, and the weird tension that had been building up in my chest suddenly unlodged and shoved itself out of my mouth into the word, “yeah.”

Admitting it felt…good. I hadn’t even known I needed to admit it until like five goddamn minutes ago, but fuck, it all just made so much stupid sense now, everything. That one thing had just made all of it click, made a whole goddamn picture, and suddenly it was nice that it wasn’t all packed away like a bad confusing secret. I breathed in a little and sat back, unclenching my hands out of my jeans. I must have been doing that for a while, because I could feel weird ridges molded into my skin.

“Yeah,” I said again, and it felt just as good the second time. I hadn’t realized how bad the pressure in my gut had been until right now, when it was loosening up just a little. “I mean, he’s—” an alien, “—my cousin, so it’s not like...” It got a little harder to take my next breath. “Nothing’s ever gonna happen.”

Chelsea stayed quiet for a couple seconds while I let out a long breath and rubbed my hands down my face. Then she said, “feel any better?”

“….yeah, actually.” Though I really should have been having this conversation with someone more—well, more important—like my sister or even Martin, but there was something kind of safe about Chelsea. I’d have to deal with it for the rest of my life if I told my sister about this, and telling Martin would definitely be a big deal, but there weren’t many consequences with Chelsea. Because we barely knew each other. I couldn’t even remember her last name.

“I’m pretty sure this isn’t what you wanted out of me today,” I said to her. “I’m real sorry.”

She waved her hand. “It’s okay. I’m sorry I kinda forced it out of you. But you’re a really good guy, you know,” she said. “I wouldn’t have tried to ask you out, otherwise. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t like you.”

“I—thanks.”

“We could still go to a movie sometime.”

“Uh,” I said.

“What?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “This doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, right? I already said you’re a cool guy, and I like hanging out with you, and it’d be stupid if I didn’t still want to just because we’re not gonna date or whatever.”

Where’d this girl been before all this? She was pretty damn cool herself. I felt bad that I’d judged her about being a sorority girl and kind of written her off. “Yeah, okay, that’d be cool. To hang out sometime. Sure.”

Chelsea smiled for real then. “Awesome,” she said. Then she pointed at my basket of fries. “You eating those?”

“You’re being really cool about this,” I said, pushing the basket at her. She took three fries and popped them in her mouth before she answered.

“Well, yeah, I mean—sure, I like you, but it’s not like the end of the world or anything that we can’t date. It’s not like you’re telling me twenty years and three kids down the line, kinda think I’m actually gay. Then, I’d be upset.” Chelsea grinned and took another fry, and I had to laugh.

#

Chelsea and I actually hung out for a couple hours after that. We ended up walking down to the plaza—most of which was roped off with yellow tape and under some major construction, which hadn’t made me feel any better. I hadn’t even wanted to go over there in the first place, because fucking PTSD or whatever, but I couldn’t come up with a single excuse not to. It wasn’t like I could accidentally play the gay card this time. But it did mean that I could ask Chelsea what’d happened, and she told me that there’d been some kind of bust in the water main that’d torn up the street and a couple of stores and how the heck hadn’t I heard about it, it’d been on the news and everything.

Rysa’d been right; people had explained it away as something else, something that made sense. I still felt like shit about it. But there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even own up, because how would I explain what’d really happened?

It was almost dark by the time I got back to my apartment, streetlights just starting to burst on across the parking lot. The lights were off inside my place, so Martin wasn’t here. My glasses slipped down my nose as I juggled the keys out of my pocket, and I nudged them up with the back of my hand. Then stopped, knuckles wedged against the frames. My glasses. My fucking glasses still had the tracking spell on them. The one Keyd could hear and see through. It’d been on me this whole fucking day.

He could have heard every goddamn word of that first conversation with Chelsea. Maybe he wouldn’t’ve understood her half of it, but mine would’ve been clear as anything.

But I hadn’t actually said his name, maybe he wouldn’t put it together.

Yeah, right. The guy wasn’t stupid. Wasn’t real hard to figure out the foreign cousins meant him and Rysa. Jesus. Fuck. If I went inside and he was right there, I wouldn’t even be able to handle it it. But the lights were off. Probably no one was here. Probably.

I was half right. Martin wasn’t here, but Rysa was. She stepped out of the bathroom just as I was dumping my backpack by the door, rubbing a towel through her wet hair and spilling a chunk of yellow light into the dark hallway. At least she was dressed.

“Alan,” she said, a tone that wouldn’t’ve sounded friendly if I wasn’t familiar with her by now.

“Hey, hi.” Casual, just be fucking casual about this. “Keyd around?”

“He’s asleep,” Rysa said, and something in my stomach swooped.

“For how long?”

A slight frown. “A while. He’s still not as recovered as he wants to believe.”

How long is a while? “Okay. Good. I mean, good that he’s...resting.”

Her expression kept getting more and more incredulous, and I already felt so raw and exposed after that whole thing with Chelsea that I just...couldn’t do this. Not now. Now that I’d finally clued in about what the fuck was going on.

“Is he—” I said, waggling a thumb in the direction of my room, and she nodded. Yeah, just what I wanted to hear, that Keyd was back in my bed. It sure didn’t help the heat down low in my gut. “I won’t bother him.”

“Alan—” Rysa started as I turned away.

“Yeah?” I said, a little sharper than necessary, and Rysa’s expression hardened.

“Is there something wrong?”

“No, it—no. It’s fine, s’all good. No problems.”

She softened just a little, and draped the damp towel around her neck as she came closer to me. “He’s fond of you,” she said, and I just about fled the fucking room. “I know he can be...difficult, but I’m glad he’s made a friend in you.”

Jesus fuck shit goddammit fuck. “Yeah. Me too.”

She still saw it, she still saw something was up. “Alan.”

“No, it’s fine, it’s all good, Keyd’s great, we’re great, I’m gonna go take a fucking shower,” I mumbled, and skirted past her into the hallway. The apartment had the world’s tiniest water heat so since Rysa’d just showered I’d be left with lukewarm water at best, but maybe a cold shower was what I needed right now.

Once I was was stripped down and braving the water back in the master bathroom, I scraped shampoo fiercely through my hair and scrubbed myself down fast so that what was left in the water heater wouldn’t completely run out. When I got down to cleaning the whole dick area though, I kinda...slowed down. Everything was kind of sensitive and eager down there, halfway to wanting real attention and not far from standing up to beg for it.

Fuck, I almost didn’t want to, but I could test something here. About Keyd.

Because, so I liked the guy. So I’d got a little crush on him. But was that it? I mean, was I attracted to him? That was a whole other thing. A man-crush was one thing, every dude was allowed one of those. Maybe two. But actually wanting…something else. Physical. Real. That was different.

No, an instant voice piped up in my head. Of course you don’t want that.

Shut up, I snapped at it, because I knew that voice real well. That same voice that was always telling me to be careful, to watch out, to do and say things in the right way, to hold myself back from girlfriends because getting too close would make me too vulnerable, too open, too... something.

That voice was what made me nervous with girls. Girls had always made me nervous, starting right from the time you couldn’t be friends with them anymore because all your friends were telling you that you had to date them or fuck them or drop them. What to do, what to say and when to say it, where to touch, how to touch. Even in jerk-off fantasies, I still felt like I was being judged by some part of my own imagination, by this stupid voice in the back of my head, telling me I was doing it wrong, it wasn’t right, wasn’t enough.

So shut up, I told myself again. Just think about it. Actually think about it.

I leaned my head against the plastic wall of the shower, let the warmish water pound down on my shoulders, and thought about it.

It was...well. Just different. Really different. If Keyd’d been a girl, he wouldn’t be my type. He was just this serious intense guy, but kinda sweet and loyal and awkward with this unexpected smile, nothing like he’d originally seemed, and—yeah, shit, he definitely wasn’t lacking in the whole looks department—and….nothing about him made me nervous. Not anymore.

I thought about that smile. That big boyish smile that was so rare, that was like a shooting star flashing across the sky when I got it out of him. His hands, real familiar to me now, all the warm dry skin and the calluses on them—he’d only ever touched my own hands and my face, but god, I could imagine them in other places. I put my own hands there, a nice firm grip that wasn’t anywhere near as good as what the real thing would be like. But I could make it work, nice and easy, one hand braced against the wall and the other sliding in a good rough rhythm though water and leftover soap.

Hell, what else? I’d seen the guy bare-ass naked, and he did have that crazy set of abs. And I knew what it felt like to be shoved right up against that wall of muscle, how he smelled when he was that close, like leather and sweat and earth and sometimes, when he used his magic, like ozone. And then, god, his voice. Not as deep as you’d expect, but the way he used it—so serious and intense and quiet, something you just wanted to stop and listen to it for hours. Didn’t matter what he was saying, that voice just got inside you and did something.

Then just like that, it was over, done, and I was watching white mess drip off my fingers and swirl away down the drain, breathing hard and flushed all over. The water was seconds away from being completely cold, but I barely felt it. I shut it off and stood there, dripping, braced against the wall and breathing like I’d run a fucking mile.

Shit. It was kind of startling at how fast that’d worked. And...how comfortable I was with everything about it. Honestly, it’d felt more right than a lot of goddamn things in the past couple years of my life. More right than that dream I’d had, because I’d controlled this and decided to do it; I’d had a question and wanted an answer. It hadn’t just slammed me out of nowhere. Plus, I hadn’t had a fucking clue back then.

I did now. And I definitely had the answer.

And it was gonna make dealing with Keyd from now on real fucking weird.