Stone Cold Page 9

  Well, shit. It also sucked when you couldn’t stop letting the guy you walked away from know how completely over him you were, when the guy you walked away from was the one who’d gotten screwed, and had less than no reason to give a damn about you being over him.

  And it did nothing to reduce the suckage quotient when Josh gave him one of Josh’s trademark in-love-with-the-world grins, pure joy in a dark-haired dark-eyed gorgeously-inked happily-partnered package. “Good for you!—yeah, sure, get your bad self home, I’ll take care of unloading Bertha when she’s done steaming.”

  Josh was obviously happy, genuinely happy, that Terry had someone waiting for him at home. Terry wasn’t sure if that made him feel better about the whole situation, or worse. “Thanks, I owe you.”

  He was glad Josh didn’t respond with No, I owe you, the way he sometimes did. Josh was convinced that Terry showing up when he had, after Bryce threw him out, had been a lucky break for Raging Art-On. Or he’d spent the last six months trying to convince Terry it had been, anyway.

  Once out the door, Terry turned right, toward the Metro station… stopped, recognizing the sensation of his subconscious making a decision without him. Nodding, he turned and headed left instead. It was just a few blocks to the bus stop, and he could go down to Sunan’s Sea Palace, at 6th and C Street, just the other side of the Mall, get the best Thai take-out in D.C., and surprise Maelduin with it.

  He suspected nothing he could buy would be as good as the bagel he’d turned down this morning. He couldn’t have accepted, though. Bringing home take-out was nice, but it was impersonal. Eating breakfast made for you by the guy you just woke up next to…

  Woke up. That was it. He’d been caught up in the fairy tale last night, a dream of a chance encounter with a handsome—and endearingly klutzy—prince, and mind-boggling sex, and falling asleep wrapped in strong arms and feeling warm breath on the back of his neck and hair tickling his shoulder.

  And then… he woke up. A little surprised to find the prince was still there, and even more surprised to realize how good it had felt to be the outside spoon, to wake up holding someone who wanted to be held. But the spell had been broken. Mostly. Sure, the sex had been amazing, but not quite as—well, primal—as last night’s.

  Because last night had been different, from start to finish. He’d managed to forget he didn’t believe in fairy tales, at least for a while. Which wasn’t quite the same thing as believing in fairy tales. But he suspected it had made a difference.

  The bus was mostly empty, and Terry dropped into a window seat as it pulled away from the curb, watching but not really seeing the storefronts, restaurants, parking lots glide past and fade away into the darkness. It was as if they only came into being as he approached them, and stopped being when he couldn’t see them anymore.

  Kind of like Maelduin.

  Oh, Jesus, listen to me. Terry caught a glimpse of the face he was making, reflected in the bus window, which of course only made the face worse. Maelduin had come from somewhere, which meant he had somewhere to go. He must. A guy didn’t just appear out of nowhere, perfectly turned out and gorgeous enough to stop a heart.

  Or wake one up.

  * * *

  “Hey. You okay?”

  The words washed over Terry without registering. Nothing was registering, really. He wasn’t sure how he’d gotten to the sidewalk outside the Duplex, or why he’d come there in the first place. He sat on his hard-shell suitcase, the only one he’d felt like taking the time to pack—maybe Bryce would send the rest of his stuff along to wherever he found to crash, maybe not. He wasn’t even sure what was in the suitcase.

  He hadn’t needed a suitcase to pack Bryce’s parting shots, though. He’d be carrying those around with him the rest of his life.

  I need this place more than you do. And… I need you not to be here.

  He’d never heard Bryce sound like that before. His boyfriend could be cold, cutting—on second thought, there wasn’t any ‘could be’ involved. But he’d never sounded… lifeless. As if words that should have been angry, or cold enough to smoke, were just dead.

  I wonder how long he was that sick of me.

  People had been walking past him for a good half-hour, he guessed. Everyone going someplace, because everyone had someplace to go. Everyone but him.

  A hand waved in front of his face. “Are you okay? It’s Terry, right?”

  Terry made his eyes focus. He recognized the face of the man bending to try to look him in the eyes, though he wasn’t sure from where. Running a dance company, even a pocket-sized one, you met a lot of people. The whole dance company thing was also over, probably, because how was he going to run a ballet company out of a suitcase, with no computer, no records, no receipts?

  “What happened to you?”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Now Terry recognized him, though he couldn’t put a name to the face—the guy had been a bartender, at a piano bar he and Josh had enjoyed hanging out at, years ago. Rose’s Turn. What were the odds? “Boyfriend threw me out, I guess I’m still kind of shell-shocked.”

  “Josh did that?” Shock was plain on the bartender’s face, and even plainer in his voice.

  Terry winced. “No. The guy after Josh.” Now he was even more embarrassed about his bad memory, though he supposed bartenders had to have a better memory for faces and names than he himself would ever have. “Life happens, right?”

  “It does. It would be nice if every once in a while it happened fairly.”

  Terry was proud of how easily he pulled off a noncommittal shrug. “You play the hand you’re dealt.”

  The bartender—Kyle, he finally remembered—didn’t look as if he was buying Terry’s nonchalance. “Your dealer was a cheat.”

  “Even so…” There wasn’t much to say after that, so Terry shut up.

  Kyle looked past him to the door of the Duplex, where a cluster of people stood waiting to get in, then back at him, with a quick tight nod. “Look, I have a voice student who’s singing here in 20 minutes, and I promised her I’d catch her show. But if you can hang around till she’s done, I have a couch you can crash on, for a few days at least. I have a studio up in Hell’s Kitchen—it isn’t big, but you don’t look like you take up much space.”

  Terry was stunned. His ears were ringing, and he had a feeling that if he tried to stand up his knees would have their own opinion about it and it wouldn’t necessarily agree with his. “I don’t. Thanks—”

  * * *

  The squeal of the bus brakes brought Terry back into the present moment. No, he couldn’t throw Maelduin out. Not yet, anyway.

  * * *

  “Here you are, sir.”

  Bryce hardly noticed the cab driver, as he took the offered handle of his rolling carry-on bag. “Yeah, thanks.” He was already craning his neck, looking up and down Constitution Avenue. Why did he want to meet up here, instead of at the hotel?

  By the time he thought to turn back to the driver, driver and cab were both gone; Bryce thought he recognized the cab merging into the flow of traffic. He shrugged. At least I remembered to say thank you this time.

  Bryce Newhouse was living proof that just having a soul, after three decades without one, didn’t guarantee civilized behavior or even the ability to live up to what a man might want to be.

  A high-pitched yelping bark came from somewhere in the trees on the far side of the sidewalk, out on the edge of the Mall proper, and Bryce forgot all about being civilized. Grinning, he took off at a brisk walk, following his ears, ignoring the walkways, and cutting through the line of trees, coming out into a large open space with a walking path around it, and benches along the path. And next to one of the benches, a blond-haired man stood, holding on to a short leash, speaking sternly to a leaping dog.

  Like that’s going to do any good. Bryce broke into a run, picking up the carry-on bag so it wouldn’t jounce across the grass.

  Setanta leaped toward him, yelping in frustration as his harness brought him up short. The p
up hadn’t yet forgiven them, or Conall, for figuring out how to incorporate truesilver into a dog harness. But they really hadn’t had any choice—a blind dog needed a harness if he ever expected to go walking in Manhattan, or anywhere else. And Bryce and Lasair were both sure Lasair would have the Fade-hound pup trained to voice eventually, but until then they really needed a way to keep him from Fading off after one of the other of his masters any time he felt like it.

  Dumping the carry-on, Bryce dropped to his knees in the grass and let Setanta climb up onto him. Swarm all over him, more like. Funny how nothing made him feel more like a normal human than the unconditional over-the-top love of a dog.

  Almost nothing. He looked up, and closed his eyes as Lasair bent to kiss him.

  “Sumiúl. We missed you.”

  “It’s only been what, four hours?” The time it took for Bryce to catch a flight from New York to D.C., while his scair-anam and their Fade-hound puppy took a shortcut only Fae could take. Yet Bryce smiled. He couldn’t help it, especially not with Setanta crawling all over him, flopping on his back across Bryce’s thighs, and generally being a wriggling ball of adoration.

  “Four hours is a long time.” Lasair dropped to sit in the grass beside Bryce, and immediately came in for the same full-body love-up treatment from the puppy. Not surprising, since the Fae had been Setanta’s master first, before the two of them had left the Realm.

  Bryce couldn’t help laughing at the way the blind Fade-hound puppy—which looked a lot like an Irish wolfhound, but which had the genetic capacity to grow to the size of a stag and have six-inch fangs, which was going to be interesting to explain to Animal Control in Manhattan someday—couldn’t just wag his tail, but had to involve everything south of the ribcage. “Somebody sure thinks so.”

  Lasair turned his turquoise gaze on Bryce, and all of a sudden everything else around the three of them went away. “We both did.”

  Bryce did what he usually did when Lasair said inexplicable things like that; he took a nice, long slow breath in through his nose, and worked hard on not letting his expression say you’re shitting me. Because he knew his partner meant what he’d said—if the Fae race had ever produced anything close to a straight shooter, Lasair Faol would be that Fae. He, Bryce, was the one who couldn’t wrap his head around talk like that. People never missed him. Usually just the opposite, in fact; people tended to be disappointed when he didn’t go away.

  Of course, ‘people’ weren’t his SoulShare. And if only one person in the whole world grokked him, well, that was one more person than there had been before Lasair came along.

  Setanta flopped his head into Bryce’s lap, his dull-marble eyes not quite focused on Bryce’s face, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.

  The dog probably grokked him, too. Or at least made him want to be the kind of human worth a Fade-hound’s lavish adoration.

  “I missed you, too,” he mumbled. “Both of you.” The weird thing was, it was true. One of the few things he remembered from his time as the Marfach’s slave was a desperate desire to be alone. A desire he could never realize, not with a piece of the monster literally buried in him and the rest of it keeping Janek’s eye on him whenever it could. Since he’d been free… well, he’d missed having Terry around, but that was one of those things he was never going to be able to fix. And finally being alone, genuinely alone, had felt like a little slice of heaven.

  Only it wasn’t any such thing. Not any more.

  Lasair unwound a bit of Setanta’s leash from around his hand, and grinned as the puppy tried to burrow into Bryce’s lap.

  “Why did you want to meet up all the way on this end of the Mall?” Bryce started to brush dog hair off his trousers, but remembered the futility of such an action before he’d properly started; Setanta rewarded him by slobbering all over his hand, which he managed to find quite nicely without being able to see it. “It’s a hella long walk back to the hotel from here.” True enough — the Hotel Mandarin Oriental was at the other end of the Mall from the corner on which Bryce had gotten out of the taxi, and on the far side of it into the bargain.

  Lasair laughed, ruffling Setanta’s soft-wiry fur. “This vicious beast”—he paused to let the puppy thump his tail against Bryce’s leg in ecstatic acknowledgment—“is going to need some exercise before we go to bed. You know how he gets, his first night in a new place.” The Fae’s smile combined all the best features of naughty and nice. “Assuming you want to go for more than a few minutes at a time without him Fading into bed with us.”

  “Point taken.”

  Lasair’s fingers laced through his, and for a while Bryce was happy to enjoy Setanta’s antics and have some quiet time with his Fae. Genuinely quiet time—this wasn’t something they could do regularly in Manhattan. Rhoann was pretty cool about them spending time in the sheltered area around the Pool in Central Park, but he made Rhoann’s husbands Mac and Lucien uncomfortable, if they were around, which they usually were whenever Rhoann was in residence. He could see where he might unsettle the bartender and the bouncer, after the little incident when the motherfucking Marfach had forced him to try to blow up Purgatory.

  As usual, thoughts of the monster caused a sharp unsympathetic pain in Bryce’s gut. Also as usual, Lasair noticed, and squeezed Bryce’s hand tighter.

  “Why do you feel you have to do this?” The Fae’s voice was soft, but found its way into Bryce’s ears with unerring accuracy. “No one asked you.”

  “No one would.” Bryce shrugged. “They say they don’t want to put me at risk. Maybe they mean it. But I’m the only early warning system we’ve got. And if the Marfach is really loose… I’m at risk whether I’m in New York, or D.C., or on the moon.”

  “Maybe not on the moon.” Lasair leaned into Bryce, and Setanta took the opportunity to wriggle across two laps at once. The puppy was growing at a phenomenal rate, at least to Bryce.

  “Yeah, but the moon would just present a whole new set of problems.” Not the least of which was the possibility that it—she—might be as pissed off at the Fae as her children the daragin and the Gille Dubh were.

  He could feel Lasair’s chuckle where they touched. “We could have stayed someplace where you could be protected, though. Conall has wards around the Colchester.”

  Yeah, they could have gotten a room in the pocket hotel where Lochlann and Garrett lived, courtesy at least in part of Bryce’s management of the money Lochlann had amassed during his two-thousand-plus years in the human world. No Fae who still had his magick ever lacked for money, but Lochlann had lost his magick sometime during the Black Death.

  “I can’t stay anywhere there’s a wellspring.” Bryce grimaced.

  “Why not?” A thumb stroked the back of Bryce’s hand; Setanta squirmed around to rest his head in Bryce’s lap.

  Bryce loved Lasair. He truly did. He’d finally stopped arguing with himself, on that one subject at least. But there were times when his belovéd didn’t get him, and this was one of them. “The same reason I won’t travel by the good graces of the daragin. They’re listening to us through the wellsprings. Maybe even reading our thoughts. They’re trying to decide if their truce with the Fae is a good idea. And if any of us are caught in a lie—in anything less than what the daragin and the Gille Dubh consider to be ‘good behavior’—the treaty’s in the trash, and quite possibly Fiachra’s head blows up.” Which was another good reason for him to avoid the Pool, since there was a wellspring lurking at the bottom of it.

  “But you are not a liar.”

  Lasair’s evident confusion warmed Bryce’s heart. Yet it hurt, at the same time, because naturally Bryce had to try to clear things up for the male he loved. “I have been. Most of my life.” A lot worse than a liar, actually—the Fae and humans of the Demesne of Purgatory, along with more or less everyone who had ever encountered him, saw him for what he had been, the consummate cold-hearted bastard. Maybe it hadn’t all been his fault—the Pattern’s machinations had left him without a soul from birth
, until Lasair came through the Pattern and late delivery was made of that ethereal commodity—but even if it wasn’t his fault, it was still his responsibility. And how the hell did he make good a whole lifetime’s worth of thoughtless cruelty?

  Well, by not waiting to be asked before putting his life on the line by being a living Marfach detector, for starters. Before the monster had managed to incarnate, through some bizarre fusion of Janek O’Halloran’s physical substance and the magick Lochlann had been forced to pump into it, only humans had been able to see it at all, like the kind of hallucinations a person carried with him from sleeping to waking. Any Fae that tried to look at it was guaranteed to go rat-fucking insane. Now the Fae could see it—but only Bryce, who had carried a piece of it around in his gut for over a year, and had been permanently altered by the experience, could sense it from a distance.

  He had also demonstrated that he could use that altered part of himself to suck magickal energy out of the Marfach, but his lover had threatened to break both of his legs and chain him to the nearest concrete pillar with truesilver if he ever tried that again. “Lochlann will heal you afterward.” Lasair had smiled. Kind of. Bryce wasn’t keen on testing that particular limit.

  But here and now, Lasair was regarding him with the kind of anxiety one didn’t see in Fae all that often, and nodding. “Setanta and I will not Fade into or out of our hotel room, then. I promise.”

  Because there’s no telling how much magick it takes, these days, to call a wellspring. Bryce wasn’t exactly sure what was going on with the magick escaping from the Realm—no one was going to sit down with him one on one and explain matters to him, so all he knew was what everyone was told, and everyone else talked about, on those occasions when the Fae and humans of Purgatory all got together. He gathered that feeding ley energy back into the Realm, to replenish its depleted stores of living magick, had been a decent enough idea—saved the Realm—but things hadn’t worked that way before the Sundering, and the new arrangement was causing problems no one had anticipated. Apparently shooting raw ley energy into the Realm with God’s own fire hose was causing the Realm to spring leaks. Wellsprings. Any one of which the Marfach, cursed be it, could probably surf back to the Realm. And the one in the old nexus chamber was starting to break down.