AI RPS Fic: Chimera Part 4/?
AI RPS Fic: Chimera Part 4/?
Title: Chimera
Author: nymphaea1
Rating: R
Pairing: Adam/Kris, others
Warnings: Older sections may be triggering.
Summary:
In 1683 the first boat carrying fey landed in Virginia. Receiving ill welcome from the young American colonies, most of the passengers and the ones who followed after chose to go west, eventually establishing the new kingdom of Western Faerie in the Pacific Northwest. Distrust of Faerie persisted in the east and traveled outwards as the United States
and its ally, the Kingdom of Texas, spread west into the lands bordering those claimed by the fey.
Two years ago Kris Allen, lost to himself after a bitter three-year war, answered a newspaper ad and headed west to the chaotic borderland known as South California. He'd hoped, in a land with no loyalties, he could find respite from his own divided nature. What he found was something else.
Older Sections
Kris just kept them going vaguely eastward. He could see the cliffs of the Rim rising up above the buildings in the semi-near distance. He figured if they made it there they could walk north until they hit one of the paths up to the surface.
Adam traveled along beside him in a kind of daze. Kris left him to it. He kind of had problems of his own at the moment. He was pretty sure that their guide yesterday had been keeping them from the deepest parts of the Canyon and now he was slogging through the middle. The drilling pain had started up behind his eyes almost immediately and Kris was having trouble concentrating through it.
“Wait,” Adam said after Kris led them into yet another alleyway between taller buildings.
“I know you’ve had a pretty profoundly shitty day here, man,” Kris said, “but we do need to keep going.”
“Going where was my question.”
Kris gestured vaguely at the cliffs to the east. “I thought I’d head for the Rim and then we’d find a pathway out.”
Adam frowned. “The boundaries of this place don’t tend to stay in place-particularly from the inside. I think if we just kept walking in that direction we would never get there.”
Kris had feared that, actually. The borders of the Canyon were notoriously fluid. It was one of the creepier things about it. Usually it was content to stay confined within its original outlines. But then sometimes for no reason anyone could determine it would shift. It had stretched as far south as the Mexican border and reached up north halfway to Western Faerie. And on one memorable occasion in 1954 it had closed entirely for five days. When it had opened again the city and the fey were mostly still there-only twenty years older. The humans had been gone. It lent a little spice of danger to any trip down here, which is why it attracted some of the world’s more adventurous tourists.
“I’m guessing you don’t know where we are either.”
Adam shook his head. “I don’t normally come down here.”
“Any suggestions?”
Adam was quiet for a minute but then he nodded, resigned to something. “We’ll have to hire a guide.”
Kris looked around the still-empty streets. “That might be a problem.”
Adam cocked an eye-brow. “Don’t worry. They advertise.”
With that he knelt on the ground and shoved his hand into the dirt. It flowed around his hand like water and yielded with a slight ripple. He tilted his head to the side, moved his hand a bit and then nodded.
“There might be a possibility.” He lifted his hand from the street. It came away completely clean.
“They post ads in the dirt?” Kris said, following Adam as he moved at a faster pace through the alley and into a broader avenue.
Adam boggled at him. “Obviously not. They put out threads in the Current. The trick is just to find the right one and follow it back.”
Obviously.
They traveled along the avenue. Every half-mile or so Adam would stop and perform his little magic trick.
Kris was happy to let him take control for a bit. The headache was getting hard to breathe through.
He stumbled over pretty much nothing for the third time and Adam caught him with an abrupt hand on his arm.
“Something’s wrong.”
Kris made a vague gesture at their surroundings. “Not all of us are built for this. I’ll be fine just as long as we get out of here.”
Adam frowned at him. “You might have said something.”
“It’s not like there’s anything I can do about it.”
“I didn’t actually mean you,” Adam said, turning Kris to face him squarely.
He put his hands on Kris’s face in much the same gesture as the night before. Kris’s eyes fluttered closed and he felt himself leaning forward. Adam slid his hands to Kris’s temples and then held one there while he reached back to massage the nape of Kris’s neck with the other. Pleasure like the rising bubbles in champagne welled up inside of him and Kris felt himself just relaxing all over. The headache pulsed once more and then ebbed into something tolerable. Kris opened his eyes to find Adam’s face hovering above his, those perfect lips just a few inches away.
He leaned forward, stomach fluttering.
But Adam just leaned away and dropped his hands. Kris wobbled forward a bit, undone by the sudden loss of contact.
“Better?” Adam asked.
“Uh huh,” Kris said, blinking. He could feel the tension starting again in his temples, but it was better. Any better and he’d probably have lost the ability to stand.
Adam looked down at his hands, frowning. “My magic is a little tapped out, I think. You’ll just have to stay close.”
That was tapped out?
Adam took him firmly by the elbow and led them off down the street. They ran into their first group of fey of the afternoon, a trio of hobgoblins taking a smoke break beneath a large tree. The three of them ignored Adam and Kris, but Kris felt better for seeing some sign of life.
“Not that I am not grateful,” Adam said. “But what are you doing down here anyway? It doesn’t seem to really be your scene.”
“It could totally be my scene.”
Adam raised an eyebrow. “No offense, but you seem a little too-“ He pursed his lips and made a helpless gesture that encompassed Kris from head to toe.
“Human?” Kris offered. “Short? Dashingly heroic?”
“Plaid,” Adam settled on.
Kris looked down at his plaid work shirt and plain t-shirt. “There’s nothing wrong with plaid.”
It’s not like they could all just go around rocking leather pants and pirate boots like some people. And really, for the record, Kris thought it was completely unfair that Adam was managing to pull off the whole buccaneer/Kris’s too small wrinkled brown jacket combo with enough insouciance to make it look purposeful.
“Oh no, it can be a totally valid lifestyle choice,” Adam said, entirely earnest. “It’s just not one that tends to lead people down here.”
Kris gave up. “I work for some people in LA. They were unlucky enough to attract the attention of the Triad.”
Adam looked bitter. “What did they want this time - a captured sunrise? A genie’s last wish?”
Kris hadn’t actually known you could get those things. He didn’t know if he should actually trust Adam yet, but if they really were bound for a year and a day it probably didn’t matter much. “A vial of magic.”
“It probably doesn’t seem that way, but you got off easily then.”
“You’ve dealt with them before?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Adam said, looking unhappy at the memory. He did his little dirt reading trick again and then they were heading off in a new direction.
As they walked along the streets got more crowded until at last they’d rejoined the throng Kris remembered from the day before. From time to time Adam would lay a hand on Kris’s wrist or the back of his neck and he’d get a muted sense of warmth sliding over his skin again. But it got weaker with every episode and Kris could tell Adam was getting tired. It kept the headache at bay but Kris felt his energy rapidly draining. By the time they’d walked an hour he felt like he was swimming through warm molasses.
Adam eventually just slung an arm over his shoulders and tucked him firmly against the warmth of his side. Kris took a gasped breath, head clearing in what seemed the first time in hours.
“Change in plans,” Adam said, giving him a tight-lipped worried smile. “We need to get you somewhere safe.”
“Can’t we just go back to the Sanctuary?” Kris asked, leaning into Adam completely. He felt practically drunk. “I thought she was your friend.”
Adam shook his head. “You won’t be able to find her again so soon and I can’t open a portal here.”
They stumbled along nearly completely on Adam’s energy. Kris thought he saw a few of the fey giving Adam a second, surprised look, but he wasn’t sure.
They came to a store front with a vaguely familiar symbol over the door.
“Let me do the talking,” Adam said. There was something Kris didn’t like in his expression, but it wasn’t like they had a mountain of attractive choices here.
The bell over the door rang with almost offensive cheer as they walked in. Inside lay rows and rows of shelves crammed with everything you could imagine and probably a lot of things you couldn’t. A goblin frowned at something in one aisle and some large upright warthog-like thing stood in another. They both just gave Adam and Kris a bare glance and went back to their shopping.
“Sorry about this,” Adam whispered. Before Kris could ask him what he meant by that he’d slipped a hand up under Kris t-shirt a send a jolt up Kris’s spine so sharp it actually hurt. But it gave him a kind of caffeinated energy that let him stand on his own.
The beaded curtain behind the counter parted and the shop’s proprietor stepped forward. Kris suddenly understood exactly where they were. He’d recognize a llus-gorn anywhere.
This one had shining metallic gold skin in a face of classic beauty, with glittering jewel-toned eyes and long gold hair. But they took other forms. They tended to take the shape of whatever their clients most desired-beauty, money, magic, whatever was sought and found wanting.
They were peculiar to LA and one of its biggest curses. You could, occasionally, find them dealing in everyday items like an average pawnbroker, but usually people only went to the llus-gorn when they were more desperate than that. You could go to the llus-gorn and trade the memory of your first kiss or your ability to feel the sun on your face. The fey were hungry for human experience and would pay heavily for it-though to be fair, the trade went in both directions. But the hottest selling items were the darker ones-the memory of your husband’s last breath as he lay dying in the hospital or the last fading remembrances of flight from a pixie who’d lost his wings. People would go in there, thinking they were ridding themselves of their most jagged pieces, but they forgot that a llus-gorn always kept his word. They took the memories, but not the emotions that accompanied them. It left people lost in a depression they no longer had the context to understand and then had no possibility of healing.
More than a few of the people at the mission were former or current victims of the llus-gorn. Kris had sworn never to fall into that trap. He tensed, ready to protest, but Adam silenced him with a quick squeeze.
“Well, well, well,” the llus-gorn said, eyeing Adam with a kind of horrible want. Adam went tense all along Kris’s side and Kris would have given anything to be able to drag him away from that look.
“I never expected to see one of your kind here,” the llus-gorn said, his sharp, dagger-like teeth flashing in a wretched facsimile of a smile.
He stepped forward, almost panting in his excitement. “I am Mikshva,” he said, bowing. “How may I serve you?”
Adam impossibly tensed even further. He dropped his arm from behind Kris and stepped forward. Kris could see him take a deep breath and then he pulled off Kris’s jacket, baring the knife wounds to the room.
The warthog cried out in instant anger and Kris could hear the goblin hissing. Even the llus-gorn reacted-his face going feral in rage.
“Who is responsible for this?” he spat.
“A group of humans cast the spell,” Adam said. “I don’t know who they were.”
“Are they dead?” the goblin asked.
“The ones who wielded the knife are, but there were others.”
A slow smile spread across the llus-gorn’s face-a real one this time although no less horrifying. “The spell will still linger on them. You will let me hunt them, yes?”
Adam inclined his head.
The llus-gorn gave a sharp, barking command. The curtains parted again and an animal walked through.
In size and shape it most resembled a dog, but it was like no dog Kris had ever seen. Its body was covered by widely spaced green scales, with tufts of coarse green fir sticking out between. It had a long snout like certain kinds of hunting dogs, but its jaw was distended by a double row of three-inch long fangs.
Adam knelt on the floor and let the dog sniff at the marks on his arm and chest. It turned over its shoulder and gave its master a sharp yip. It whined then high in its throat and nuzzled at Adam’s face. Adam wrapped his arms around its neck and buried his face in its rough fur for a moment. The other three stood over them, still nearly shaking in rage.
Kris really needed to find out more about that spell.
Adam stood up and went back over to Kris, the llus-gorn trailing.
The llus-gorn eyed him up and down. It made Kris want to take a shower or twelve.
“What do we have here?” Mikshva said, sly look on his face. He reached up to touch Kris’s cheek and Kris flinched.
Adam clamped his hand on Mikshva’s wrist and pulled it sharply away.
“I don’t remember giving you permission to notice him,” Adam said, fatigue giving way to flat anger.
“I heard that you could be this way about your . . . boys,” Mikshva said, licking his lips.
“You can keep your assumptions to yourself,” Adam said. “You are going to respect him, and by that I mean you are going to leave him alone.”
He tightened his hold on Mikshva’s wrist and the llus-gorn gasped aloud.
“Do we have an understanding here?”
Mikshva made an awkward half-bow, arm still dangling from Adam’s grip.
Adam dropped his wrist. “You can wait for me in your office.”
Mikshva bowed again and scuttled off behind the curtain. Adam watched him go with narrowed eyes.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
Adam snapped his attention back to Kris, sharp and dangerous. Not human, Kris remembered.
“He’s not touching you.”
That was rich. “But you, you’re totally on the menu, right? That’s--”
“Necessary,” Adam said. He held up a hand. “And that would be true even if I were alone.”
He squeezed Kris’s shoulder. “It’s not anything I’m excited about-but there are ways of dealing with them if you know what you’re doing.”
“Everyone says that.”
Adam raised an eyebrow. “I’m not everyone.”
He left Kris standing there and went back behind the curtain.
Kris wandered down the first of the aisles, mostly to get out from the semi-pitying looks from the goblin. He’d known coming down to the Canyon was dangerous for humans. He’d just expected that most of the consequences of that to fall on himself.
The aisle was filled largely with rows upon rows of delicate crystal balls of varying size and color. Each held something that could be dimly viewed through the glass, though Kris couldn’t really make out their shapes. Before each bauble sat a card, but they were largely written in a spidery language Kris didn’t recognize.
He wandered over at last to the large case on the far wall. Inside were rows of vials. Kris couldn’t read them either, but he didn’t need to read some of them. On the second row sat a rack of clear glass tubes that held a gently glowing liquid. It could only be àillidh uisge. The little glass tubes looked too small and delicate to have been the source of so much trouble.
“We’ll take four,” Adam said over Kris’s shoulder. Kris startled and spun around. Adam had found a knitted blue-black hoodie from somewhere and was carrying a few bottles of water and what looked like trail mix. But his skin had gone a bit grey and he wouldn’t quite meet Kris’s eyes.
What the hell did you do?
Kris glared at the llus-gorn who hovered just behind Adam. He just gave Kris a reptilian smile and licked his lips.
“The àillidh uisge isn’t free,” Mikshva said. “Though I am of course always willing to bargain.”
Adam just made an impatient sound and took one of the glittering earrings from his ears. It sparkled in his palm as he held it out to the llus-gorn.
“You have worn it long?”
“Years,” Adam said shortly.
The llus-gorn took a shivery in-drawn breath and plucked it from Adam’s palm. And then, to Kris’s undying horror, he licked it, shuddering again.
“The vials?” Adam said. The llus-gorn took a key from its pocket and opened the case.
Adam took the bottles and slid them in the pocket of his shirt.
“If you have no further needs, my associate will see you to the accommodations I have arranged,” Mikshva said.
Adam nodded once.
Mikshva signaled to a hobgoblin who’d appeared through the curtain. He gave a command in some slithering language and the hobgoblin bowed in Adam’s direction.
“It has been a pleasure,” Mikshva said. Kris didn’t think he was imagining the stress on the last word.
~*~*~*~*~
Kris lay on his back in the middle of the bed trying to pretend he was sleeping. What he was actually doing was listening to Adam trying to have his mental breakdown in silence. Adam was being mostly successful about that-but every once in a while Kris would hear these little shivering hitching breaths coming from Adam’s direction that had him twisting his hands in the covers.
He’d come from the llus-gorn’s store frustrated and humiliated after being bundled up against Adam and basically dragged along like an inconvenient parcel. The hobgoblin had led them to a hotel-esque place with charms on the door that had cut the Canyon’s effects on Kris in half. Adam had taken care of the rest by unceremoniously dumping Kris on the bed in their suite and drawing a glowing circle on the floor around him with the àillidh uisge.
Adam still wouldn’t tell him what he’d paid the llus-gorn. Things had gone considerably more downhill when he’d taken the long silver knife out of his boot, slashed open his own hand and drawn one of the older protection charms on the door.
Kris had been so frustrated and feeling so basically useless he hadn’t bothered to protest when Adam had dragged a chair over to the doorway and announced his intention to stand guard.
“It’s customary,” he’d said to Kris’s stony silence. “This bond between us-there are rules to it.”
Kris hadn’t inquired further. He hadn’t asked for a stupid faerie servant. And if the idiot wanted to sit in an uncomfortable chair all night when the both of them were completely fucking exhausted and could use some sleep, it was on him. Kris was done rescuing him.
So Kris hadn’t felt too guilty about eating their paltry dinner and going to bed. He was tired after all. It’s what people who were not criminally stupid did when they were tired.
He’d stirred out of sleep about a half-hour ago, uncertain what had woken him. He’d been about ready to go back to sleep when he’d heard a half-choked breath coming from the door. He’d turned and seen Adam, shivering and pale and absolutely miserable.
Adam still sat in the chair in an inward-turned huddle, eyes shining as he stared at the things carved into his bared arm. His other hand was digging into his forearm as if it was the only way he could keep from tearing at the knife wounds.
The little golden dragon had climbed up his arm and sat perched on Adam’s shoulder. Adam eventually reached up and stroked its head. It made a kind of pleased burbling noise in response, but Adam only looked blighted.
Kris knew what it was like to bury friends. His mirror had shown him that exact look for months after the war. But even though the look had faded, Kris didn’t think he’d learned to deal with it so much as he’d just let it scar over.
Seven years ago he’d been in his sophomore year of college, unfocused and unsure what he wanted out of life. They’d come to his school looking to recruit human musicians for the Fey Division. The Division had been a brand new concept-one which attempted to pair the fey with humans and allowed the fey living in the east to serve in the country’s armed forces for the first time in American history. He’d had the kind of vocal purity they were looking for-and, more importantly, the kind of musical improvisation skills that would make him perfect for adapting the song-spells to counter the offensive spells of the enemy.
He’d been so proud-of his country for tearing down this final barrier, of himself, of his friends who’d been selected. His parents had always been outspoken on wanting greater rights for the fey. It felt good to know he was doing something they could respect, something that would serve something larger than he was.
And it had been perfect-at first. In the first year or so, they’d all known they were there for the PR. It had all been missions like acting as a part of Queen Eilín’s honor guard on her annual visit to Washington from Western Faerie or going on a disaster relief mission to Burma after an earthquake. Easy missions maybe, but Kris had still felt like they were doing good. In the second year they ended up in more routine postings in Germany and Hawaii.
It was during the second year that the first rumblings about the fey on the western borders started coming in. At first it had seemed like nothing-the fey out west had always been . . . odd. Unlike their eastern cousins they’d never attempted to assimilate, had never tried to join themselves with the human communities there. They formed their own towns-mostly dirt poor camps with little in the way basic amenities, let alone luxury. And so when they heard rumors about yet another disaffected hobgoblin complaining about fey rights to independence no one had paid any attention.
His name was Red Thistleleaf and he was anything but just another unhappy fey. It was only later, after the war started in earnest, that they’d finally learned just how wrong they were when they'd thought to unearth Thistleleaf's history. He had come over in one of the first ships from Europe. Unlike most of his fey cousins, he hadn’t gone out west, instead settling in Boston and starting what became a successful import business. When the war for independence had broken out, he’d fought for his new country on the front lines. It was there where he lost his left eye and part of his left hand. Noted in many of the battlefield writings of the time for his bravery, he’d eventually risen to the rank of colonel, the only fey ever to have done so. After the war, he’d gone quietly back to Boston and had simply taken up his old business. But then had come the new property laws, each one restricting more and more of the fey’s rights to purchase new land, to invest in new businesses and then, ultimately to be more than a silent partner in their own. Thistleleaf had disappeared sometime after 1800, lost to history like so many of the fey from that chapter in America’s past.
Thistleleaf’s plainspoken rhetoric had inspired more than just a few fringe communities in western Nebraska like originally thought. It was a movement that stretched from the Kingdom of Texas up through the plains states and into central Canada, and he’d been preparing for years. Many of the fey in the border regions were old, and they remembered the ancient, powerful magic their domesticated brethren in the east had long forgotten. Thistleleaf’s first well-coordinated strikes had been devastating. In the first year, the alliance forces formed against him had lost five major conflicts.
In the end, it was simple math that won the war, if it could be called a win. The rebel fey may have been powerful, but they were few. By the second year, the alliance forces learned that carefully charmed modern weapons could cut through the strongest of Thistleleaf’s defenses. His people, so long withdrawn from the modern world, didn’t understand the new technologies and feared them. By the beginning of the third year, they’d won back Canada and the northern plains states. By the end of that year, Thistleleaf dead, it had all come down to one last stronghold in northern Texas. The desperate fey, mostly the very old and younger families, resorted to their strongest most terrible spells. Kris and the rest of the Division had been called in to counter them.
After three days all of the fey inside the fort were dead and so was half of the Division. Of those that survived, at least half ended up like Mike, permanently separated from their former selves. In the wake of the war, with anger at the fey at an all time high, the Division had been quietly disbanded. They’d offered him a post in the army, or even one in the State department when he’d refused, but he was done.
Kris had gone back to Arkansas, but his newly jagged edges wouldn’t tamely fit into the space his old life had left. And then he’d seen Danny’s ad in the newspaper-they were looking for someone to handle security and maybe the odd job. But it hadn’t been the job, really, just the opportunity to escape to a place with no heroes, a place where he wouldn’t look into his family’s always worried faces and see a stranger looking back at him.
Texas had not been the only lonely desolate field in which Kris had left pieces of himself over the three years of the war, only the worst. He’d simply closed the door on that part of his life, only taking it out again to look at when old ghosts like Mike drifted out of history to remind him of his old obligations.
Adam made another hitched sound in the darkness and Kris lay there, still not moving. He didn’t know how to help Adam. Half the time he didn’t know what to do with himself. If there was a part of him that wanted to get up, put his hand on the pale vulnerable skin of Adam’s nape and tell him just to come to bed, it was easily suppressed.
All he could really give Adam was the space to deal with his grief in private. He stared up at the ceiling, eyes going dry and painful, and waited.
Next Section
Title: Chimera
Author: nymphaea1
Rating: R
Pairing: Adam/Kris, others
Warnings: Older sections may be triggering.
Summary:
In 1683 the first boat carrying fey landed in Virginia. Receiving ill welcome from the young American colonies, most of the passengers and the ones who followed after chose to go west, eventually establishing the new kingdom of Western Faerie in the Pacific Northwest. Distrust of Faerie persisted in the east and traveled outwards as the United States
and its ally, the Kingdom of Texas, spread west into the lands bordering those claimed by the fey.
Two years ago Kris Allen, lost to himself after a bitter three-year war, answered a newspaper ad and headed west to the chaotic borderland known as South California. He'd hoped, in a land with no loyalties, he could find respite from his own divided nature. What he found was something else.
Older Sections
Kris just kept them going vaguely eastward. He could see the cliffs of the Rim rising up above the buildings in the semi-near distance. He figured if they made it there they could walk north until they hit one of the paths up to the surface.
Adam traveled along beside him in a kind of daze. Kris left him to it. He kind of had problems of his own at the moment. He was pretty sure that their guide yesterday had been keeping them from the deepest parts of the Canyon and now he was slogging through the middle. The drilling pain had started up behind his eyes almost immediately and Kris was having trouble concentrating through it.
“Wait,” Adam said after Kris led them into yet another alleyway between taller buildings.
“I know you’ve had a pretty profoundly shitty day here, man,” Kris said, “but we do need to keep going.”
“Going where was my question.”
Kris gestured vaguely at the cliffs to the east. “I thought I’d head for the Rim and then we’d find a pathway out.”
Adam frowned. “The boundaries of this place don’t tend to stay in place-particularly from the inside. I think if we just kept walking in that direction we would never get there.”
Kris had feared that, actually. The borders of the Canyon were notoriously fluid. It was one of the creepier things about it. Usually it was content to stay confined within its original outlines. But then sometimes for no reason anyone could determine it would shift. It had stretched as far south as the Mexican border and reached up north halfway to Western Faerie. And on one memorable occasion in 1954 it had closed entirely for five days. When it had opened again the city and the fey were mostly still there-only twenty years older. The humans had been gone. It lent a little spice of danger to any trip down here, which is why it attracted some of the world’s more adventurous tourists.
“I’m guessing you don’t know where we are either.”
Adam shook his head. “I don’t normally come down here.”
“Any suggestions?”
Adam was quiet for a minute but then he nodded, resigned to something. “We’ll have to hire a guide.”
Kris looked around the still-empty streets. “That might be a problem.”
Adam cocked an eye-brow. “Don’t worry. They advertise.”
With that he knelt on the ground and shoved his hand into the dirt. It flowed around his hand like water and yielded with a slight ripple. He tilted his head to the side, moved his hand a bit and then nodded.
“There might be a possibility.” He lifted his hand from the street. It came away completely clean.
“They post ads in the dirt?” Kris said, following Adam as he moved at a faster pace through the alley and into a broader avenue.
Adam boggled at him. “Obviously not. They put out threads in the Current. The trick is just to find the right one and follow it back.”
Obviously.
They traveled along the avenue. Every half-mile or so Adam would stop and perform his little magic trick.
Kris was happy to let him take control for a bit. The headache was getting hard to breathe through.
He stumbled over pretty much nothing for the third time and Adam caught him with an abrupt hand on his arm.
“Something’s wrong.”
Kris made a vague gesture at their surroundings. “Not all of us are built for this. I’ll be fine just as long as we get out of here.”
Adam frowned at him. “You might have said something.”
“It’s not like there’s anything I can do about it.”
“I didn’t actually mean you,” Adam said, turning Kris to face him squarely.
He put his hands on Kris’s face in much the same gesture as the night before. Kris’s eyes fluttered closed and he felt himself leaning forward. Adam slid his hands to Kris’s temples and then held one there while he reached back to massage the nape of Kris’s neck with the other. Pleasure like the rising bubbles in champagne welled up inside of him and Kris felt himself just relaxing all over. The headache pulsed once more and then ebbed into something tolerable. Kris opened his eyes to find Adam’s face hovering above his, those perfect lips just a few inches away.
He leaned forward, stomach fluttering.
But Adam just leaned away and dropped his hands. Kris wobbled forward a bit, undone by the sudden loss of contact.
“Better?” Adam asked.
“Uh huh,” Kris said, blinking. He could feel the tension starting again in his temples, but it was better. Any better and he’d probably have lost the ability to stand.
Adam looked down at his hands, frowning. “My magic is a little tapped out, I think. You’ll just have to stay close.”
That was tapped out?
Adam took him firmly by the elbow and led them off down the street. They ran into their first group of fey of the afternoon, a trio of hobgoblins taking a smoke break beneath a large tree. The three of them ignored Adam and Kris, but Kris felt better for seeing some sign of life.
“Not that I am not grateful,” Adam said. “But what are you doing down here anyway? It doesn’t seem to really be your scene.”
“It could totally be my scene.”
Adam raised an eyebrow. “No offense, but you seem a little too-“ He pursed his lips and made a helpless gesture that encompassed Kris from head to toe.
“Human?” Kris offered. “Short? Dashingly heroic?”
“Plaid,” Adam settled on.
Kris looked down at his plaid work shirt and plain t-shirt. “There’s nothing wrong with plaid.”
It’s not like they could all just go around rocking leather pants and pirate boots like some people. And really, for the record, Kris thought it was completely unfair that Adam was managing to pull off the whole buccaneer/Kris’s too small wrinkled brown jacket combo with enough insouciance to make it look purposeful.
“Oh no, it can be a totally valid lifestyle choice,” Adam said, entirely earnest. “It’s just not one that tends to lead people down here.”
Kris gave up. “I work for some people in LA. They were unlucky enough to attract the attention of the Triad.”
Adam looked bitter. “What did they want this time - a captured sunrise? A genie’s last wish?”
Kris hadn’t actually known you could get those things. He didn’t know if he should actually trust Adam yet, but if they really were bound for a year and a day it probably didn’t matter much. “A vial of magic.”
“It probably doesn’t seem that way, but you got off easily then.”
“You’ve dealt with them before?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Adam said, looking unhappy at the memory. He did his little dirt reading trick again and then they were heading off in a new direction.
As they walked along the streets got more crowded until at last they’d rejoined the throng Kris remembered from the day before. From time to time Adam would lay a hand on Kris’s wrist or the back of his neck and he’d get a muted sense of warmth sliding over his skin again. But it got weaker with every episode and Kris could tell Adam was getting tired. It kept the headache at bay but Kris felt his energy rapidly draining. By the time they’d walked an hour he felt like he was swimming through warm molasses.
Adam eventually just slung an arm over his shoulders and tucked him firmly against the warmth of his side. Kris took a gasped breath, head clearing in what seemed the first time in hours.
“Change in plans,” Adam said, giving him a tight-lipped worried smile. “We need to get you somewhere safe.”
“Can’t we just go back to the Sanctuary?” Kris asked, leaning into Adam completely. He felt practically drunk. “I thought she was your friend.”
Adam shook his head. “You won’t be able to find her again so soon and I can’t open a portal here.”
They stumbled along nearly completely on Adam’s energy. Kris thought he saw a few of the fey giving Adam a second, surprised look, but he wasn’t sure.
They came to a store front with a vaguely familiar symbol over the door.
“Let me do the talking,” Adam said. There was something Kris didn’t like in his expression, but it wasn’t like they had a mountain of attractive choices here.
The bell over the door rang with almost offensive cheer as they walked in. Inside lay rows and rows of shelves crammed with everything you could imagine and probably a lot of things you couldn’t. A goblin frowned at something in one aisle and some large upright warthog-like thing stood in another. They both just gave Adam and Kris a bare glance and went back to their shopping.
“Sorry about this,” Adam whispered. Before Kris could ask him what he meant by that he’d slipped a hand up under Kris t-shirt a send a jolt up Kris’s spine so sharp it actually hurt. But it gave him a kind of caffeinated energy that let him stand on his own.
The beaded curtain behind the counter parted and the shop’s proprietor stepped forward. Kris suddenly understood exactly where they were. He’d recognize a llus-gorn anywhere.
This one had shining metallic gold skin in a face of classic beauty, with glittering jewel-toned eyes and long gold hair. But they took other forms. They tended to take the shape of whatever their clients most desired-beauty, money, magic, whatever was sought and found wanting.
They were peculiar to LA and one of its biggest curses. You could, occasionally, find them dealing in everyday items like an average pawnbroker, but usually people only went to the llus-gorn when they were more desperate than that. You could go to the llus-gorn and trade the memory of your first kiss or your ability to feel the sun on your face. The fey were hungry for human experience and would pay heavily for it-though to be fair, the trade went in both directions. But the hottest selling items were the darker ones-the memory of your husband’s last breath as he lay dying in the hospital or the last fading remembrances of flight from a pixie who’d lost his wings. People would go in there, thinking they were ridding themselves of their most jagged pieces, but they forgot that a llus-gorn always kept his word. They took the memories, but not the emotions that accompanied them. It left people lost in a depression they no longer had the context to understand and then had no possibility of healing.
More than a few of the people at the mission were former or current victims of the llus-gorn. Kris had sworn never to fall into that trap. He tensed, ready to protest, but Adam silenced him with a quick squeeze.
“Well, well, well,” the llus-gorn said, eyeing Adam with a kind of horrible want. Adam went tense all along Kris’s side and Kris would have given anything to be able to drag him away from that look.
“I never expected to see one of your kind here,” the llus-gorn said, his sharp, dagger-like teeth flashing in a wretched facsimile of a smile.
He stepped forward, almost panting in his excitement. “I am Mikshva,” he said, bowing. “How may I serve you?”
Adam impossibly tensed even further. He dropped his arm from behind Kris and stepped forward. Kris could see him take a deep breath and then he pulled off Kris’s jacket, baring the knife wounds to the room.
The warthog cried out in instant anger and Kris could hear the goblin hissing. Even the llus-gorn reacted-his face going feral in rage.
“Who is responsible for this?” he spat.
“A group of humans cast the spell,” Adam said. “I don’t know who they were.”
“Are they dead?” the goblin asked.
“The ones who wielded the knife are, but there were others.”
A slow smile spread across the llus-gorn’s face-a real one this time although no less horrifying. “The spell will still linger on them. You will let me hunt them, yes?”
Adam inclined his head.
The llus-gorn gave a sharp, barking command. The curtains parted again and an animal walked through.
In size and shape it most resembled a dog, but it was like no dog Kris had ever seen. Its body was covered by widely spaced green scales, with tufts of coarse green fir sticking out between. It had a long snout like certain kinds of hunting dogs, but its jaw was distended by a double row of three-inch long fangs.
Adam knelt on the floor and let the dog sniff at the marks on his arm and chest. It turned over its shoulder and gave its master a sharp yip. It whined then high in its throat and nuzzled at Adam’s face. Adam wrapped his arms around its neck and buried his face in its rough fur for a moment. The other three stood over them, still nearly shaking in rage.
Kris really needed to find out more about that spell.
Adam stood up and went back over to Kris, the llus-gorn trailing.
The llus-gorn eyed him up and down. It made Kris want to take a shower or twelve.
“What do we have here?” Mikshva said, sly look on his face. He reached up to touch Kris’s cheek and Kris flinched.
Adam clamped his hand on Mikshva’s wrist and pulled it sharply away.
“I don’t remember giving you permission to notice him,” Adam said, fatigue giving way to flat anger.
“I heard that you could be this way about your . . . boys,” Mikshva said, licking his lips.
“You can keep your assumptions to yourself,” Adam said. “You are going to respect him, and by that I mean you are going to leave him alone.”
He tightened his hold on Mikshva’s wrist and the llus-gorn gasped aloud.
“Do we have an understanding here?”
Mikshva made an awkward half-bow, arm still dangling from Adam’s grip.
Adam dropped his wrist. “You can wait for me in your office.”
Mikshva bowed again and scuttled off behind the curtain. Adam watched him go with narrowed eyes.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
Adam snapped his attention back to Kris, sharp and dangerous. Not human, Kris remembered.
“He’s not touching you.”
That was rich. “But you, you’re totally on the menu, right? That’s--”
“Necessary,” Adam said. He held up a hand. “And that would be true even if I were alone.”
He squeezed Kris’s shoulder. “It’s not anything I’m excited about-but there are ways of dealing with them if you know what you’re doing.”
“Everyone says that.”
Adam raised an eyebrow. “I’m not everyone.”
He left Kris standing there and went back behind the curtain.
Kris wandered down the first of the aisles, mostly to get out from the semi-pitying looks from the goblin. He’d known coming down to the Canyon was dangerous for humans. He’d just expected that most of the consequences of that to fall on himself.
The aisle was filled largely with rows upon rows of delicate crystal balls of varying size and color. Each held something that could be dimly viewed through the glass, though Kris couldn’t really make out their shapes. Before each bauble sat a card, but they were largely written in a spidery language Kris didn’t recognize.
He wandered over at last to the large case on the far wall. Inside were rows of vials. Kris couldn’t read them either, but he didn’t need to read some of them. On the second row sat a rack of clear glass tubes that held a gently glowing liquid. It could only be àillidh uisge. The little glass tubes looked too small and delicate to have been the source of so much trouble.
“We’ll take four,” Adam said over Kris’s shoulder. Kris startled and spun around. Adam had found a knitted blue-black hoodie from somewhere and was carrying a few bottles of water and what looked like trail mix. But his skin had gone a bit grey and he wouldn’t quite meet Kris’s eyes.
What the hell did you do?
Kris glared at the llus-gorn who hovered just behind Adam. He just gave Kris a reptilian smile and licked his lips.
“The àillidh uisge isn’t free,” Mikshva said. “Though I am of course always willing to bargain.”
Adam just made an impatient sound and took one of the glittering earrings from his ears. It sparkled in his palm as he held it out to the llus-gorn.
“You have worn it long?”
“Years,” Adam said shortly.
The llus-gorn took a shivery in-drawn breath and plucked it from Adam’s palm. And then, to Kris’s undying horror, he licked it, shuddering again.
“The vials?” Adam said. The llus-gorn took a key from its pocket and opened the case.
Adam took the bottles and slid them in the pocket of his shirt.
“If you have no further needs, my associate will see you to the accommodations I have arranged,” Mikshva said.
Adam nodded once.
Mikshva signaled to a hobgoblin who’d appeared through the curtain. He gave a command in some slithering language and the hobgoblin bowed in Adam’s direction.
“It has been a pleasure,” Mikshva said. Kris didn’t think he was imagining the stress on the last word.
~*~*~*~*~
Kris lay on his back in the middle of the bed trying to pretend he was sleeping. What he was actually doing was listening to Adam trying to have his mental breakdown in silence. Adam was being mostly successful about that-but every once in a while Kris would hear these little shivering hitching breaths coming from Adam’s direction that had him twisting his hands in the covers.
He’d come from the llus-gorn’s store frustrated and humiliated after being bundled up against Adam and basically dragged along like an inconvenient parcel. The hobgoblin had led them to a hotel-esque place with charms on the door that had cut the Canyon’s effects on Kris in half. Adam had taken care of the rest by unceremoniously dumping Kris on the bed in their suite and drawing a glowing circle on the floor around him with the àillidh uisge.
Adam still wouldn’t tell him what he’d paid the llus-gorn. Things had gone considerably more downhill when he’d taken the long silver knife out of his boot, slashed open his own hand and drawn one of the older protection charms on the door.
Kris had been so frustrated and feeling so basically useless he hadn’t bothered to protest when Adam had dragged a chair over to the doorway and announced his intention to stand guard.
“It’s customary,” he’d said to Kris’s stony silence. “This bond between us-there are rules to it.”
Kris hadn’t inquired further. He hadn’t asked for a stupid faerie servant. And if the idiot wanted to sit in an uncomfortable chair all night when the both of them were completely fucking exhausted and could use some sleep, it was on him. Kris was done rescuing him.
So Kris hadn’t felt too guilty about eating their paltry dinner and going to bed. He was tired after all. It’s what people who were not criminally stupid did when they were tired.
He’d stirred out of sleep about a half-hour ago, uncertain what had woken him. He’d been about ready to go back to sleep when he’d heard a half-choked breath coming from the door. He’d turned and seen Adam, shivering and pale and absolutely miserable.
Adam still sat in the chair in an inward-turned huddle, eyes shining as he stared at the things carved into his bared arm. His other hand was digging into his forearm as if it was the only way he could keep from tearing at the knife wounds.
The little golden dragon had climbed up his arm and sat perched on Adam’s shoulder. Adam eventually reached up and stroked its head. It made a kind of pleased burbling noise in response, but Adam only looked blighted.
Kris knew what it was like to bury friends. His mirror had shown him that exact look for months after the war. But even though the look had faded, Kris didn’t think he’d learned to deal with it so much as he’d just let it scar over.
Seven years ago he’d been in his sophomore year of college, unfocused and unsure what he wanted out of life. They’d come to his school looking to recruit human musicians for the Fey Division. The Division had been a brand new concept-one which attempted to pair the fey with humans and allowed the fey living in the east to serve in the country’s armed forces for the first time in American history. He’d had the kind of vocal purity they were looking for-and, more importantly, the kind of musical improvisation skills that would make him perfect for adapting the song-spells to counter the offensive spells of the enemy.
He’d been so proud-of his country for tearing down this final barrier, of himself, of his friends who’d been selected. His parents had always been outspoken on wanting greater rights for the fey. It felt good to know he was doing something they could respect, something that would serve something larger than he was.
And it had been perfect-at first. In the first year or so, they’d all known they were there for the PR. It had all been missions like acting as a part of Queen Eilín’s honor guard on her annual visit to Washington from Western Faerie or going on a disaster relief mission to Burma after an earthquake. Easy missions maybe, but Kris had still felt like they were doing good. In the second year they ended up in more routine postings in Germany and Hawaii.
It was during the second year that the first rumblings about the fey on the western borders started coming in. At first it had seemed like nothing-the fey out west had always been . . . odd. Unlike their eastern cousins they’d never attempted to assimilate, had never tried to join themselves with the human communities there. They formed their own towns-mostly dirt poor camps with little in the way basic amenities, let alone luxury. And so when they heard rumors about yet another disaffected hobgoblin complaining about fey rights to independence no one had paid any attention.
His name was Red Thistleleaf and he was anything but just another unhappy fey. It was only later, after the war started in earnest, that they’d finally learned just how wrong they were when they'd thought to unearth Thistleleaf's history. He had come over in one of the first ships from Europe. Unlike most of his fey cousins, he hadn’t gone out west, instead settling in Boston and starting what became a successful import business. When the war for independence had broken out, he’d fought for his new country on the front lines. It was there where he lost his left eye and part of his left hand. Noted in many of the battlefield writings of the time for his bravery, he’d eventually risen to the rank of colonel, the only fey ever to have done so. After the war, he’d gone quietly back to Boston and had simply taken up his old business. But then had come the new property laws, each one restricting more and more of the fey’s rights to purchase new land, to invest in new businesses and then, ultimately to be more than a silent partner in their own. Thistleleaf had disappeared sometime after 1800, lost to history like so many of the fey from that chapter in America’s past.
Thistleleaf’s plainspoken rhetoric had inspired more than just a few fringe communities in western Nebraska like originally thought. It was a movement that stretched from the Kingdom of Texas up through the plains states and into central Canada, and he’d been preparing for years. Many of the fey in the border regions were old, and they remembered the ancient, powerful magic their domesticated brethren in the east had long forgotten. Thistleleaf’s first well-coordinated strikes had been devastating. In the first year, the alliance forces formed against him had lost five major conflicts.
In the end, it was simple math that won the war, if it could be called a win. The rebel fey may have been powerful, but they were few. By the second year, the alliance forces learned that carefully charmed modern weapons could cut through the strongest of Thistleleaf’s defenses. His people, so long withdrawn from the modern world, didn’t understand the new technologies and feared them. By the beginning of the third year, they’d won back Canada and the northern plains states. By the end of that year, Thistleleaf dead, it had all come down to one last stronghold in northern Texas. The desperate fey, mostly the very old and younger families, resorted to their strongest most terrible spells. Kris and the rest of the Division had been called in to counter them.
After three days all of the fey inside the fort were dead and so was half of the Division. Of those that survived, at least half ended up like Mike, permanently separated from their former selves. In the wake of the war, with anger at the fey at an all time high, the Division had been quietly disbanded. They’d offered him a post in the army, or even one in the State department when he’d refused, but he was done.
Kris had gone back to Arkansas, but his newly jagged edges wouldn’t tamely fit into the space his old life had left. And then he’d seen Danny’s ad in the newspaper-they were looking for someone to handle security and maybe the odd job. But it hadn’t been the job, really, just the opportunity to escape to a place with no heroes, a place where he wouldn’t look into his family’s always worried faces and see a stranger looking back at him.
Texas had not been the only lonely desolate field in which Kris had left pieces of himself over the three years of the war, only the worst. He’d simply closed the door on that part of his life, only taking it out again to look at when old ghosts like Mike drifted out of history to remind him of his old obligations.
Adam made another hitched sound in the darkness and Kris lay there, still not moving. He didn’t know how to help Adam. Half the time he didn’t know what to do with himself. If there was a part of him that wanted to get up, put his hand on the pale vulnerable skin of Adam’s nape and tell him just to come to bed, it was easily suppressed.
All he could really give Adam was the space to deal with his grief in private. He stared up at the ceiling, eyes going dry and painful, and waited.
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