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“Not a ghost,” Em said, lightly, one boot on the stairs, fingers tracing the inside of Aric’s wrist.
“Ghosts can wait,” Aric said, “we’ve got a real bed, for once,” and followed him upstairs.
Chapter 2
The bed was indeed real. The thunder and wind and rain were real. They formed a leaping beating counterpoint to the pace of Aric’s pulse, the heat in Em’s smile. Em’s hands were exquisitely real: sliding up under Aric’s shirt, tugging at trousers, getting them both naked so fast it might’ve been magic.
Gods, Emrys was beautiful. Steel and stone, strength and power, magic and mystery, tangled into a petite short-haired practical hero. Aric tugged him closer, kissed him, felt Em’s arousal, matching his own.
Em pushed him back onto the bed, not with too much force, and landed on top, straddling him. Aric reached up to touch, wanting, yearning; Em grinned and dove in to kiss him more, hips moving, cock hot and hard and pushing into Aric’s touch.
Aric said, “I love you, you know—” and marveled again that he could say it, that Emrys wanted to hear it. He had his other hand on Em’s arm, over a slim bicep; something about the sight, the next flash of lightning, the thought of ghosts, made him slide the hand lower, away from the latest scars, six weeks old and fang-shaped and silver-pink across Em’s shoulder.
“It’s perfectly fine,” Em said, understanding and comfortingly impatient about it, “it only left a mark because it was a magical creature, it’s healed, and I love you even if you worry too much,” and leaned down and bit his shoulder in turn, lightly. “There. Now you’ve been nibbled by a magical creature, too.”
“Not the first time.” Em, being human right now—at least, outwardly—did not have the sharper teeth, inhuman edges, inheritance, at the surface. Aric lay there gazing up at him, wholeheartedly in love.
“You’re delicious,” Em informed him, and performed an impressively flexible stretch over the side of the bed, to the side bench where scattered useful items had ended up the day before: a map, a soft winter apple, a bottle of helpful oil.
The bed creaked; the rain leapt, swirling. Aric looked at his other half, his anchor, and felt the tiny sharp pang again, rain sneaking into his heart. Emrys had picked up most of those scars from riding with him. Choosing to be with him, in this mercenary’s life. Taking on monsters and magic.
Em could not have stayed at the nunnery, of course—not after they’d tried to burn her as a witch—but she’d been educated, good at reading, writing, human history, the practicalities of managing a manor-house and scriptorium and estate. She—Emrys had been in the shape of a young woman, when they’d met, though it always depended on the day and the shapechange and what Em felt like—might’ve become a scribe, a bookkeeper, a chatelaine of a great house, a dancer or a poet. Anything she’d wanted.
Anything including magic. Because Emrys was, after all, half human. And the other world, that perilous glittering realm under grassy mounds and inside stone rings, peeked out from those smoky eyes sometimes.
But Em wanted him. Two years and six weeks in, with a growing shared history of quests and kelpies and giant snails and at least one rescued princess, Aric knew that was true.
He knew it even more when Em’s fingers, skillful and slick with oil, stroked the entrance of his body, opened him up, slid into him. He moaned Em’s name, and begged, and welcomed the fingers and the stretching and all the wonderful glorious sounds and sensations of Em playing with him, until Em laughed softly and moved atop him and thrust, hard length replacing fingers, and Aric said all sorts of desperate babbling words about yes and more and please and love, so much, always, while Em drew him into billowing white heat, hand stroking him and cock pumping inside him, until Aric was gasping Em’s name and coming all over himself, a storm-bright helpless spill of release.
Em’s expression—blurry, as Aric lay there panting and trembling—was soft and bright as well, almost wondering; he thrust one more time, another, so deep, and then was coming too, buried to the hilt.
Em collapsed across his chest in the aftermath, lightweight but heavy in the way of a satisfied fairy-cat. “I love how you feel.”
“The same to you,” Aric said fervently, “on this side,” and ran a hand over fluffy ink-blot hair, petting. Em practically purred.
They managed to move enough for some clean-up, with water and a spare bedsheet. Em melted back atop Aric’s muscles, after. “You’re not still thinking about starting out again tomorrow, are you?”
“Not in this weather.” They had loose plans to visit Aric’s brother, down in the half-constructed new capital; Berd had offered an open-ended invitation, though, no hurry. Taking jobs along the way, particularly jobs that meant they could afford the nicer sort of inn. They’d stayed in worse, across the various baronies and fiefdoms and squabbling towns of the wilds of Pretania. They’d occasionally stayed in better.
This one hadn’t been much of a choice. Lythos’ place sat squarely on their road down south, and the weather had demanded shelter. Aric, who’d been here before, suspected that Ly knew there weren’t many other options, could therefore get away with exorbitant prices, and was a moderately decent person who at least tried to make the beds and food worth something in the vicinity of said prices.
He said, “Warm enough?” Em’s skin felt chilly. “Here.” He found a thick woolly blanket, dragged it over naked fairy-light weight and limbs and prettiness.
“I don’t mind feeling the cold,” Em said drowsily. “Because you’re warm.” The edges shimmered, flickered, slid into less human. Unearthly glitter in pale eyes. Sharper cheekbones, sharper ears. Everything just a bit more: perilous beauty, resembling but not entirely human.
Aric said, “But I like you being warm,” and reached over to trace a cheekbone. Emrys bit his finger, not hard, then kissed it. Then sat up to peek out the small round window, eyeing the edge of the roof, the drip of water. “At least your friend’s stables are good.”
“More comfortable than most.” He’d checked. His reliable stoic mare Ginger and Em’s sleek dancing-footed filly Starlight had been happily settled in stalls with hay and oats and water and solid shelter.
Lightning flashed, flared, painted the sky in silver. The mountains, the pass, stood out for a blazing second: illuminated and hulking, framed by the window. Aric, getting up to find a second blanket in the chest at the foot of the bed, paused to look, and to shove a loose blond braid out of his face. The thought had not entirely formed, someplace at the back of his head.
Em sat more upright. The short hair stood up in rumpled dark kitten-fluff, younger and sweeter for a stolen moment. The bite-mark across that shoulder shone pale in the dimness; they’d not bothered lighting a candle. “You do. Believe in ghosts.”
“I was raised to.” Aric nudged the chest shut with a foot. “We both were, me and Berd. Our parents believed.”
Those memories rose like gold, like swaying lanterns under caravan silks, like the precision of his mother’s hands placing small tokens upon a shelf. Himself watching, listening, small and wide-eyed, as his mother tucked a long fair braid over her shoulder and told him about ancestors, watching, anchored by a carved stone or a ring or a preserved flower. Her smile had come and gone like quicksilver, a wry corner to it, a small grief and yet an equal comfort, a layered emotion that he hadn’t understood. She’d held the ring, turning it over, and said, this was your grandmother’s, my mother’s…do you remember, she went to be among the ghosts, two years ago?
Aric had nodded, though he barely recalled his mother’s mother, a hazy bustle of authority. His mother had smiled more, and said, I do miss seeing her here, but of course I know she’s listening; she’d never leave us…and put the ring back on its shelf. Later she and his father had made him memorize which ancestor belonged to which token, in case he ever needed their advice. They’d had him help Berd with memorization, too, when his brother had had a difficult time.
