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“Fuck,” Tristan blushed.
“I don’t mean to frighten you. I know I am intense. And I know what we did last night was a fresh intimacy. But I want you to know now, while you have the chance to know, that you are loved.”
Tristan was stunned. Absolutely fucking stunned.
“Uh. Uhm. Er. I’m, uhm, loved? By…. you?”
Mort’s smile was soft. “Yes, Tristan. By me. I love you.”
“Well, fuck,” Tristan said. He didn’t know what to say to that. Definitely didn’t know how to accept it, let alone process it, let alone return the sentiment.
Mort’s smile let him off the hook. “I don’t need you to say it back. It’s not an obligation. I just want you to know, because it’s important.”
“Do you think that demon will come back?” Tristan changed the subject.
Aside from the confusing confession of love, whatever that meant practically, Tristan couldn’t stop thinking about the Punisher. What he had done, what he hadn’t done. What Tristan had thought and felt while it was all happening. He didn’t want it to happen again. He didn’t want to feel all the shame he’d felt in his life concentrated under the lash or palm of some stranger, a creature that only existed to bring pain to those who deserved it.
He knew he was a pathetic creature, and he knew he deserved to hurt. He was fairly certain he didn’t deserve the pleasure Mort had brought him after. And he was absolutely sure he did not deserve Mort’s love.
Instead of processing any of that, Tristan did what generations of men in his family had presumably done before him: he worked out somebody to blame and something to kill.
“I think something will eventually come,” Mort said. “It might be better if you were not here when it does. So far, our guests have been benign, but eventually my father will send less temperate mercenaries to persuade me back to work.”
“We go on the offensive then.”
“You mean I should not do my work even harder?”
Tristan smiled, and the smile was reckless. “I can see demons. And last night, one touched me.”
“Did more than touch you, but yes, I understand.”
“If they can touch me, I can touch them.”
Mort caught his drift immediately and was not encouraging.
“Have you ever won a single fight you’ve ever been in, Tris?”
“No. But there’s always a first time.”
“Not against a demon, there isn’t. Don’t try to fight what may come. Stay out of the way. I can handle myself.”
Tristan felt himself grabbed, one cold hand at the back of his head, and pulled into a kiss. This time it wasn’t just a kiss of passion, though there was still that charge. This time, it was a kiss of dominance. A do what I say kind of kiss. What Mort got back was a make me kind of moan, but Mort didn’t seem to pick up on that.
7
Though he didn’t argue at the time, Tristan had no intention of staying out of the way. He had never been loved before, and there was no way he was going to let the forces of Hell snatch away the one person who loved him.
He was going to keep Mort. He had experience clinging to death, and he had a lot of experience causing chaos. He would do whatever it took to keep Mort in his life.
Nobody came that night. Or the next night, but that was fine with Tristan because it gave him time to move things into place.
Mort thought Tristan was tidying the house, and he was, in a way. He was constructing defenses based on designs long ago downloaded from the Internet back in the 1990’s, when the recipes of anarchists were freely available.
Mort didn’t ask a lot of questions, because Mort wasn’t a person, not really, and Mort didn’t have typical human curiosity. For all he knew, it was quite normal for someone to be creating small caches of metallic objects.
“So,” Tristan said. “Demons. Do they have any weaknesses? Like vampires are supposed to be afraid of crosses?”
“Demons are made of many different things, and depending on what they are made of, they may be sensitive to certain things, but…”
Tristan almost zoned out while listening to Mort’s non-explanation.
“Demons aren’t made for the mortal realm. They come for me because I am not made for it either. They are beings of energy. The Punisher punished you because you have so much latent energy, Tris. You’re so strong. But it makes them strong against you too.”
“So I make them more physical, and then they’re vulnerable to physical things?”
“In a way… What are you up to?” Mort’s gaze and tone had both become quite sharp.
“Learning,” Tristan said. “I can’t stay stupid forever.”
“You have never been stupid.” Mort lowered his head a little and gave Tristan a stern stare. “Neither have I.”
“Uh huh. Awesome. Aren’t we a pair of smart boys.”
