Arc 2 Page 24

  “I hear you,” Pixie said gently. “Like I really, really do. But even if we’re not totally one-hundred-percent on everything else, we know we love you. In whatever way you need. I’m pretty sure you’re stuck with us while we figure it out.”

  “I just wish we could figure it out now,” Jude almost whined. “So I could stop worrying. I know that won’t make any of us safer or better, but…”

  “But brains are weird and sometimes really bad at existing,” Pixie finished sagely.

  “Especially very autistic, PTSD-having brains,” Jude muttered.

  “Eh, I still think yours is really cool. I’m sorry I can’t make everything go faster. But here’s one thing I know for certain.”

  “Wh—” Jude didn’t have time to get the word out before Pixie kissed him, warm and soft and with only a vague sharpness from careful fangs.

  Jude leaned into the kiss and gave back as good as he got, letting all his accumulated tension fade in a soft sigh as he wrapped his arms around Pixie’s chubby waist and the small of his back, hugging him close and letting everything else disappear except for the sweet boy in his arms, all of him wonderfully warm and soft in a cold, sharp-edged world—and his vaguely spicy, sauce-flavored kiss.

  “I don’t know what comes next,” Pixie said quietly when they parted, but left their foreheads gently resting together. “But I know that I wanna figure it out with you.”

  “Now who’s smooth?” Jude said, and now he found it very easy to smile indeed. “I think I’m okay with not knowing, as long as you’re here. That’s what makes it an adventure, right?”

  “Well, look at you, with all the personal growth,” Pixie giggled, and his large ears gave a big, happy twitch. “I’m so proud, I really am.”

  “Thank you. Oh, by the way,” Jude said, studiedly casually, and reached over to his nightstand drawer. Pixie’s eyes followed, a mischievous smile on his face—which quickly turned to surprise when Jude revealed what he held in his hand.

  “These are…” Pixie whispered, reaching out to take the shiny things with careful fingertips. A pair of tiny, cartoon-looking metal bats dangled upside-down, their pink stone eyes seeming even brighter than usual in the low light.

  “I saw you looking at them,” Jude said, losing the fight to keep from smiling back. “But then everything happened and kept happening… and I figured you should still have them. Thank Milo too, they wanted to give them to me for free.”

  “You went into the Abyss…” Pixie stared at him in wide-eyed awe. “For me?”

  “Isn’t that what you do for people you love?” Jude cleared his throat, and his philosophical tone turned a little dry. “It’s not like that’s the first time we’ve done that. And I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

  Pixie didn’t comment, instead taking out some of his plainer earrings to replace them with his new, fancy friends. He let out a happy squeak that reminded Jude of the feeling of a soft pink bat snuggled in the palm of his hand, turning his head to show them off from all angles.

  “I love them!” he cried, flinging his arms around Jude and squeezing. “And you. I really love you, too.”

  “You heard that, huh?” Jude said, faux-chagrined and genuinely happy.

  “Jude, come on.” Pixie’s ears, new decorations sparkling, twitched again. “These things pick up everything. They look good on me, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, seriously and honestly. “Like they always belonged there.”

  “Like little bats finally finding a good home? I know the feeling.” Pixie’s eyes lit up again. “Ooh, ooh, now that you’re a free man, maybe we can go back again, and get you a real cool makeover this time! Some tasteful piercings, hair gel, maybe some eyeliner, you’d really rock the eyeliner, Jude—”

  “One step at a time.” Jude said, but laughed, and pulled Pixie in for another kiss before either of them could say anything more.

  Two nights after the half-botched ritual, Sanguine sat on the damp ground, face aching, hood up, and back pressed against one of the stones in the circle that had seen so much drama, and enjoyed the relative quiet. The fire had burned down to embers, but somehow not gone out entirely, hissing in response to a few scattered raindrops, but remaining.

  Sanguine—sweet as it had been to hear Felix say the name “Jeff,” he could still never think of himself as anything but this, as if his own name was worthy of being spoken by a friend, but not himself—felt a very rare feeling: safety, or at least the passable illusion of it.

  He was well used to Wicked Gold appearing from nowhere to drag him back into pain of some kind or another, but he’d never been able to find Sanguine here. Hurt him once they were both here, yes. But maybe something insulated this place from his sight as well as the rest of the world’s. Magic aside, it was unlikely Wicked Gold would deign to come anywhere near the place of his recent, unacceptably humiliating defeat.

  It wasn’t his first night on the streets, and probably wouldn’t be his last. He’d carefully tucked his summer-memento shirt into a plastic bag, replacing it with one he’d dug out of a dumpster that didn’t look too horrible. The precious sun and text remained faded but mostly clean. But that was about the only upside here.

  He knew what he’d implied to Felix—‘nobody else is getting hurt because of me, I’ll make sure of that.’ The ideation under those words was obvious, and Sanguine felt the urge wholeheartedly, so deeply and purely that by this point it was almost like being in love. Infatuated with the possibility of oblivion. Head-over-ass for the thought that all this could be over, his pain and that of anyone connected to him. Every time he’d told Felix to disappear, he’d been telling himself, too. Remove a possible vector for more suffering and death, not necessarily in that order. Shuffle off the mortal coil to keep anyone else, mortal or not, from getting hurt in the crossfire.

  But some things were easier said than done. And some other, better things, like eternal summers and stubborn, boneheaded hope, and now Sanguine himself, refused to die, even when maybe they should.

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  The word, one of the only self-expressive indulgences left to him, tasted metallic; a healed cut on his lip reopened and started to bleed. He would need to leave the circle sometime. And once he did, Wicked Gold would find him. The vampire always found him when he tried to run. No matter where Sanguine went, his master always, always found him. If he was smart, he’d run back right now, apologize, beg for mercy, and swear to never disobey ever again.

  “Fuck me.”

  Sanguine weighed the risks in his mind, measured death against a continued existence like this, in the service and hands of a monster. Added up the pros and cons of staying alive, and like always, came up in the negative, but something kept him from dropping all the way into a decision he could never take back.

  It was what he’d said before on a cold, damp night like this one, at this circle. Wicked Gold had asked if he still had something to live for, and he’d said yes. Sanguine had meant it then. He still meant it with all his heart. His life might be made of winter now, but he lived for the hope of summer, and if he wanted to live, first he had to survive.

  “Fuck it. And fuck him.”

  With a grim, resigned, but determined smile on his thin face, Sanguine got up and started walking, every step taking him farther away from a painful past, a hopeless future, and Wicked Gold. Maybe now, with the monster distracted by his own embarrassment, Sanguine could try to survive again. Maybe this time things would be different. They rarely were, but hope sprang eternal, even in a heart as battered as his. Hope, or at least, one last defiance.

  Sanguine allowed himself one crooked smile. “Fuck yeah.”

  Then he stopped, freezing mid-step, shivers rushing up and down his back. Electricity filled the air again, sweeping over Sanguine like an ocean wave, every hair on his body standing on end until every inch of skin seemed to vibrate.

  A silvery keening filled the air, like the high hum of an old television, and Sanguine slo
wly turned around to see the circle come alive once more, each spire glowing with a strange, unearthly light that came from the stones themselves—

  And there was someone inside that light.

  Paralyzed with fear and confusion—what the fuck?—Sanguine could just make out a silhouette. Thin, long-limbed, somehow listlessly graceful, they hung suspended in the air, and he thought, near-panicked, of stories and iconic 90s TV shows about alien abductions, terrifying accounts of people being raised high into beams of light, paralyzed and helpless, until they disappeared. This seemed like witnessing an alien abduction in reverse, but just as strange and terrifying.

  Sanguine stared, feeling as if he was caught in the light as well; he could no more run than he could vanish into thin air, or turn into a bat and fly away. The light was so bright it should have hurt his aching, battered head, but it didn’t. That almost made everything more strange, more unearthly. Part of him wanted to run very much—a sensible part that knew this was something nobody else on Earth had ever seen, maybe something he wasn’t supposed to.

  But a bigger, louder part of his brain, the one that hadn’t yet been ground down into the dirt under Wicked Gold’s boot, told him that this was exactly why he should stay. He should see this. He should be right here, and nowhere else. So he stayed, and waited, until the light went out entirely.

  It didn’t fade, instead simply turning off like someone had flipped a switch. For a disorienting moment, Sanguine couldn’t see a thing, until his eyes re-adjusted to the darkness.

  Now he could see the person from the light again. They lay on the ground, having been dropped unceremoniously several feet, and now struggled to push themself up to all fours. Sanguine carefully stepped closer, not at all sure he was moving in the right direction. But they didn’t seem dangerous, more weak and confused—and hurt. He could hear the soft gasps from here.

  “Hey... are you okay?”

  The stranger didn’t answer. But, slowly, they raised their head to look at him, long black hair streaked with white falling around their shoulders. Their face was thin and pale but bruised, smudged with ash and sweat, features long and angular in a way that reminded him of a Tolkien elf. They might have been considered elegant if pain and terror hadn’t been so clear in their fever-bright black eyes.

  They wore what looked like a simple, rough-hewn white dress, but the edges were jagged and torn as if by claws, blackened and scorched like they’d endured a run through fire. Maybe they had, as awful, painful-looking burns stretched across large swaths of their skin. But that wasn’t what hit Sanguine hardest and gave his blood a chill, not the strange injuries, but the familiar ones. All down their exposed arms and legs, their throat, collarbone and shoulders, were bite marks. Fresh as the ones on his own neck.

  Finally, Sanguine said the only thing that came to mind. It really was such a versatile word.

  “…Holy fuck.”

  The stranger—escapee?—sucked in a ragged breath that sounded painful. When they spoke, their voice was faint and shaking. It was also in a language Sanguine didn’t understand. Maybe it really was aliens, he thought wildly, bordering on a hysteria he worked hard to push down.

  “I’m sorry,” he managed to say relatively calmly, which he considered a huge accomplishment given the circumstances. “I don’t know what you just said—but I want to. Do you speak English?”

  The person on the ground shut their eyes, face tensed into an expression of exhaustion and pain. Clearly gathering their thoughts and strength, they took in another slow breath that made their thin shoulders rise and fall.

  “Where is he?” they asked, with an accent Sanguine’s rattled brain couldn’t immediately place. Spanish? Italian? Their voice was a bit stronger, but still unsteady as the rest of them. Still, they stubbornly pushed the words out, each one seeming to take a monumental effort. “Is he all right?”

  “I... I, uh...” Sanguine tried to answer, tried to say he didn’t know—who ‘he’ was, why he wouldn’t be all right, who this person was, where they’d come from, what any of this was at all. But he was all out of words; they’d been driven out of his head by confusion, concussion, and lingering vampire-induced anemia. All he could do was stare, and that was apparently all the stranger could do as well, until the silence bordered on awkward. No matter what kind of first contact this was, they weren’t doing a very good job of it. “I don’t know. But I’m gonna help you if I can. My name’s—”

  He stopped. Came so close to saying what he wanted to say, burned to say it when faced with a blank slate, a fresh chance—but, as in so many things, backed out at the last second.

  “I’m Sanguine,” he said at last, words heavy and bitter but right-feeling on his tongue. Solid, like words written in stone, a contract signed in blood.

  Yes, he was. He hadn’t chosen it, but he couldn’t go back now. The boy he’d once been was dead. And he had to stay dead, if Sanguine and the people he loved were to stay alive.

  “How about I get you inside—somewhere?” he said. "Then we can figure out what we’re doing.”

  He was so wrapped up in the complexities of names, identities, and survival that he didn’t notice his own mental shift until the words were out and too late to take back. We. They were a we now. He’d had no idea what to do on his own, completely lost no matter where he looked, but now at least he had a direction: take care of someone else. It was something.

  The stranger nodded wearily and let Sanguine take them by the arm and gently raise them to their feet. They were much taller than he was, and he was still weary, but he put all his determination into letting them lean on him.

  “Thank you, Sanguine,” they said, words soft and floating atop a sigh of clear exhaustion. Their smile was weak, but clearly in a way that came half from trauma, half from relief. It was less from their mouth and more a crinkling of their dark eyes, and something about it made Sanguine think that maybe this wasn’t such a terrible idea after all. Probably, but that wasn’t the only possibility.

  “So what do I call you?” he asked.

  “Zadkiel,” they said, then watched him for a moment, eyes lingering on the awful bruise that still covered half of his face. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” he murmured automatically, but he knew it was a lie. He wasn’t even surprised when his knees finally buckled beneath him, or when he fell, or seemed to keep falling even though he’d felt his knees hit the cold ground, was dimly aware of the pain, but that seemed so far away. Everything did.

  Even the hands on his shoulders that kept him from falling completely; warm, much warmer than he’d expected, and steady, one of them going without hesitation to his face despite the blood.

  Miles became light-years, centuries, that’s how far away the hands felt, and their voice sounded. The stranger named Zadkiel was talking to him, saying… he couldn’t understand the words, if they were even in English.

  Sanguine was done here. Wasn’t he? Hadn’t he done everything he was supposed to? Surely he’d done enough. He’d tried so hard…

  He was almost gone when he felt it.

  Warmth and relief like slipping into a hot bath. Sun streaming in through an open window. The memory of sweat and chlorine and someone calling his name, his true, secret name; a laugh, a drumbeat, a power chord, a song he knew by heart.

  Every single reason to stay hit him all at once. All of them still real, even now.

  And himself, still here.

  Sanguine took a breath and it felt like the first one he’d had in years, since cold water had closed over his head. Now his lungs felt filled with light as vital, charged, rejuvenating magic and life flowed into him, taking away the pain and the cold both. Winter lost its hold on him. For one sweet, beautiful moment, the space between one heartbeat and the next that meant he was still here—it was summer.

  “Thanks,” he said just as quietly as before, but now his voice was stronger, his eyes clearer, and he no longer felt himself slipping away. He felt more himself now than
he could remember being. No matter what he was called by others. He knew who he was. He’d been reminded.

  “I believe I should be thanking you,” Zadkiel said, slowly, as if they were feeling out each word not because they were unfamiliar with the language, but with speaking, with using a tongue and lips at all. They turned a bit, glancing back at the stones. He saw no surprise on their face, more a dazed confusion, a sleepwalker shaken and finding themself in a strange room.

  “I have… questions,” they said at last, and Sanguine thought he detected a note of deadpan irony. He liked it.

  “Same. I dunno if I have all the answers,” he said. Then he smiled. He liked that too. “But I got nowhere to be. Come on. Let’s get somewhere warm.”

  Sanguine was alive. He forgot everything else.

  All his attention was on his new maybe-friend-maybe-mistake, wondering how long it would take Wicked Gold to find them the second they eventually left the protective circle, what they would do then.

  So he didn’t notice the last, subtle, vital change.

  Silence had fallen, uninterrupted by normal forest noises, or the ever-present energetic hum that had once permeated the air in this place, the continuous background noise between its powerful, ancient surges.

  The low energetic buzz that had once saturated the circle was gone. The air was still, the sounds of the city muffled, like the circle was on its own isolated island under a dome of glass.

  As the two of them slowly, carefully left together, Sanguine—unlike Zadkiel—had no way of knowing, but for the first time in a century and a half, the stone circle was truly, entirely at rest. The stones themselves almost seemed relieved. As if, after far too long, the old and magical place had wearily set down a burden, sighed a long sigh, and fallen asleep as Zadkiel had opened their eyes.