Prince Heath stood in the open doorway of the apartment Perry and Matt shared on the premises of the Hearth Motel and Suites—Simone Horan, Proprietor—and studied his scarred knuckles. With Matt leaning against the kitchen counter acting as something of an energy buffer between Perry and the powerful royal, Perry could breathe somewhat normally. He’d almost forgotten what that felt like before Matt joined the crew.
Perry had been working in Prince Heath’s crew for decades—since not long after his parents had their troubles, and his father was tossed into the queen’s dungeon. Due to the circumstances surrounding his family’s disruption, Queen Rhiannon had developed a new notice of Perry, and she’d decided that she needed to do something with him before he decided to do something with himself.
Perry wasn’t unique in his conscription. Every fairy in the realm had been pressed into a service period of some sort, but most generally didn’t work so near the royals. The most reasonable Sídhe people knew that the ring of safety started just outside of the queen’s awareness of them. If Prince Heath hadn’t intervened and volunteered to take Perry under his purview in the fugitive retrieval crew, Perry would have probably been mashed under the queen’s thumb like his father.
At the time, Perry had no way of knowing that Prince Heath and Princess Siobhan had defections in mind. Possibly, they didn’t then, either. But learning that they vehemently rejected their parents’ authoritarian philosophies had been a balm to his anxious soul. He was glad, too, that he was already on Prince Heath’s side of the Horan conflict when the prince decided to choose his new wife and her human world over his mother.
“You never told me he was after you, Perry,” Prince Heath said.
Perry tipped his head back over the secondhand sofa. It’d come out of one of the renovated motel rooms, and the price had been right. Most of his and Matt’s furniture were hand-me-down fixtures, in fact. Perry didn’t mind because he had no one to impress, and the items were all perfectly serviceable.
He closed his eyes, not wanting to respond.
He didn’t know when Matt had had a chance to tell the prince what he’d gleaned.
During dinner, probably.
Matt had disappeared thirty seconds after they’d entered the fairies’ private dining hall to get a drink. Perry hadn’t thought anything of the departure. Matt was always up and down during meals. His appetite was ravenous, and he wasn’t lazy about curing the discomfort.
“To be honest, Prince,” Perry started, pondering how much he should say, “I didn’t understand that was his motive. I still don’t understand, really.”
“After being around the likes of me and the rest of the crew for all these years, do you ever have anything float in your mind that makes you realize some unrelated thing from back then went over your head?”
“Sometimes. Probably not frequently enough.”
The prince grunted. “I think you lack sufficient cynicism. I don’t know how that’s possible. Your granny has skepticism in spades. How has none rubbed off on you?”
“She tells me not to pay attention to her.”
“Whenever anyone tells you that, you should wonder if you should instead do the opposite. Hmm?”
Perry didn’t even want to consider that as a possibility. His granny was the only family he had on their side of the realm veil. Though he didn’t want to believe hope was lost, there was a greater than zero chance his parents were stuck forever in the other place. His mother had emerged briefly during one of the first of the prince’s campaigns to rescue their families from the realm, but she’d gone back in hopes of finding a way to break the magical barriers holding the queen’s prisoners in their cells. The last thing he wanted was to sour his relationship with his grandmother in any way. But there was perhaps a chance that a bit of resistance wouldn’t hurt. His granny tended to coddle, and whether she liked the idea or not, Perry was a grown fairy capable of making the occasional decision.
When Perry completed the misguided action of looking in the prince’s direction, Prince Heath stared him dead in the eyes and asked, “Are we killing him or just making him hurt?”
Perry scrunched his brow. “Pardon me? Who’s getting killed?”
“Gods.” Matt pinched the bridge of his nose and emitted a tight guffaw. “Why do you ask him questions like that knowing that his maiming instinct is mangled? If there ever really is such a thing as light fae, he’s the only one who can check off all the requirement tick boxes. The rest of us would fuck someone up on any given day for something as minor as the seams of our underwear not being flat enough against our skin.”
Perry supposed he should be flattered by Matt’s defense of him, but it’d been an age since such comments felt like compliments. They were reminders that in a crew of capable and experienced foot soldiers, Perry was the only one whose service was most effective behind the screen of a laptop. Why they kept him around, he didn’t know, really. Although he had some useful magic, and he was occasionally called upon to use it in service to their fae peers around the world and also the witches in New Mexico where Matt’s family now lived, he wasn’t fearsome like them. At best, he was “supportive.”
“Alcindor,” Prince Heath said. “Am I killing him, or should I merely have Simone open an endless portal to throw him into?”
“He’s asking if he actually propositioned you, Perry,” Matt said.
Oh.
That was easy to answer, so Perry gave his head a hard shake. “Assuming he actually wanted to, he didn’t have a chance.”
If Perry had had a kingdom of his own, he would have given it up for a change of subject. He didn’t want to think about that time. None of them ever really wanted to talk about their times before being conscripted into Prince Heath’s crew. Queen Rhiannon’s delight in misery wasn’t a recent thing. She’d been terrorizing the realm for an age and had even assassinated her parents to get an earlier chance to do it. They were the first of the fairies she’d permanently stolen magic from. Most of her power wasn’t even hers. She taxed a little magic from every subject in the realm, and in exchange, had done them the honor of keeping them trapped there long after the gods had given them the ability to create doorways to the outside. She’d tasked Prince Heath and his crew with snatching back anyone who left without her permission. If too many people left, she couldn’t keep her thieving magic fed.
“Did you get anything off him?” Matt asked the prince.
Prince Heath scratched his knuckle then raised and dropped one shoulder lazily. “A bit. Had to take a break to make sure I was still in control of myself. Saul’s down there with him now. I don’t think Saul’s going to be able to get any good words out of him, but at the very least, he’s not going anywhere. Going to try to finish up in the next couple of hours. Simone wants Alcindor off the property. She says he’s been dabbling in so much dark shit that his aura is reading to her as poisonous, and from what I’ve felt, I’m inclined to agree. It’s good you didn’t try to drain anything off him, Matt. Taint like that would have been hard to shake, even for me, and I’m a fuckin’ professional.”
“If I may be so bold to ask…” Perry started when the other two men seemed to be falling into meditative silences. The sooner Prince Heath left, the sooner Perry could feel free to move about. He was certain there had to be at least one frantic “Are you still alive, Perry Geer?” voicemail from his granny on the landline phone. Her awareness of how time passed outside the realm was still somewhat skewed and her panic tended to descend with unreasonable rapidity. “What do you think the whole of Alcindor’s mission was?”
“The two men he was with are known hitmen,” the prince said. “Siobhan’s intel was that they likely had no previous knowledge of fae, or of any sort of supernatural beings at all. That means both Alcindor and Mum are running out of people willing to get close to us. If she gets desperate, she’d likely try to send one of her palace guards out again knowing they’ve got the best training and have the highest stakes if shit with her goes sideways. She’s looking to form alliances to buy herself some relevance. Second, Simone pulled Alcindor’s contact list out of his phone. There were a few unverified numbers in there possibly belonging to shifter group leaders. That’s what we’re guessing based on his coding system we managed to crack. We don’t think he’s contacted them yet, but it’s just as likely he wasn’t the only one tasked with trying.”
“To what end, Prince?”
“Building up her numbers on this side.”
“Because if she can’t snatch back the Sídhe who abandoned her, she needs to have a backup plan?” Matt asked.
The prince nodded. “There could be some shifter groups willing to cast their lots with her, and that’s what we need to try to get ahead of now. We need to do some outreach and investigate just how likely that might be.”
“Ask the Wolves?” Matt murmured.
One of the prince’s dark eyebrows lifted. “Aye. We could.”
“Want me to call my father?”
“Aye. Catch him up on what’s happening. See if he can coordinate something with Adam.” Prince Heath backed toward the door, and Perry took a deep breath.
Finally.
“Let me know what shakes out,” the prince said. “You know where I’ll be.”
Matt grunted. “Yeah. I know.”
The prince left without another word and closed the door behind him.
Matt swung his head in a dramatic arc toward Perry and lifted his sable eyebrows. “You know, he’s going to develop a complex if you always insist on being a room’s distance away from him.”
Perry suppressed a grimace. He’d assumed Matt didn’t notice what he was doing, which seemed silly of him, in retrospect. “You’re immune to the energy he puts off. He’s your cousin and you have some magical similarities.”
“You should be immune by now, too. You’ve worked for him for longer than I’ve been alive.”
Indeed, I have. Perry closed his eyes on that reminder and let out a breath.
He didn’t feel old. He wasn’t old, for a fairy, at least, but Matt’s periodic reminders about his age made him anxious. In his mind, he wasn’t any more advanced emotionally or developmentally than Matt was, but Perry fretted that Matt felt otherwise. He worried sometimes that Matt felt like he was living with an out-of-touch old man.
That was a problem for a lot of reasons.
Matt plopped onto the sofa beside him.
Perry opened his eyes and watched Matt dial his father’s number. Being nearby when he called had become Matt’s routine because Perry always wanted to say hello to Oliver. Long before Matt had joined the crew, Oliver had occasionally been a valuable volunteer. Prince Heath had sulked for weeks when Oliver explained that he had a baby at home to worry about and that he wouldn’t be returning.
Fate works in mysterious ways, I suppose.
“It’s nine o’clock there. Who died?” Oliver asked as his image caught up to the lagging video call. “Oh, hey, Perry.”
“Hello. How are you, Oliver?”
“Fantastic. I hope you’re well.”
“I am. Any troubles?”
Oliver scowled and shook his head. “None beyond the usual. I just saw your granny in the bakery. She was shooting the shit with the old hens.”
“Oh. Good. I’m glad she’s made friends. I worried about the language barrier. She didn’t bother learning English until my parents married and she couldn’t figure out what my mother was saying. Granny’s side spoke Gaeilge.”
“Oh, they’re thick as thieves. Don’t worry about her.”
Perry was continuously struck by how similar in appearance Matt and his father were. They were both tall and broadly built, with Matt having nearly caught up to his father’s size since joining the crew. There’d once been a point when Perry and Matt could swap pants, but that had passed. Perry had to figure out his own fashion sense again, which he found incredibly frustrating. Matt was more dialed-in to human trends.
Matt and Oliver had the same sun-kissed brown hair, strong jaws, and chiseled cheekbones. Both had blue eyes, more or less. One of Oliver’s had a splash of brown in it.
And Matt would never admit that the two of them had the exact same repertoire of facial expressions that they deployed for the same exact set of reasons.
Perry had no way of knowing if that was where the similarities ended, and he didn’t really want to. Matt tended to air dry after showers. Perry had seen ninety-eight percent of his body, and much less of Oliver’s. Even being a fairy who was designed for embracing the natural state of things, that would have been too much information to know. Matt’s nude state was already treading the line of too much information to know. For reasons.
Perry took a deep, bracing breath and crossed his legs at the knees.
Just pretend he’s a very large mannequin.
Matthew was going to be the death of him. Of that, Perry was certain.
“We keep waiting for some problems to pop up here,” Oliver said. “Force of habit. We were in code red for so long here that we almost don’t know how to be any other way. We’re working on it, though. The ladies have been doing amazing work the past couple years getting the community soothed and rewoven. So, what’s up? I’m certain you didn’t call at this hour just to see my face.”
“I resent the implication,” Matt said with a laugh. “And I called to see my little sisters’ faces, actually.”
“Junie is in a milk coma and probably won’t get back up tonight. And it’s April’s bath time. The old lady insists on her routines. You know that.”
The “old lady” Oliver was referring to was the child’s long-distant forebear Ótama. She was an ancient Viking princess who’d died in childbirth and allowed back into the living realm after a thousand years in an in-between place. She was the bonded mate of one of Queen Rhiannon’s defected palace guards. Although she claimed that she couldn’t possibly wrap her brain around having another child being that an entire community of witches—the Afótama—had been named after her by her offspring, she treated her many-times-great-granddaughters as her own children, and their parents humored her.
“What do you really want?” Oliver asked.
Perry swallowed a chuckle. He got his entertainment wherever he could and watching the two Gilisson men interact was always reliably amusing.
Matt’s expression went a bit more somber. “Fairy shit.”
“Yeah?” Oliver’s brow creased as he leaned in more toward his phone. “You need me to come out there?”
“No. It’s nothing urgent. Heath thought it’d be a good idea to loop you in, though. Perry and I picked up one of Rhiannon’s courtiers up in Virginia Beach today.”
“And by ‘picked up’ you mean—”
“I don’t mean we gave him a ride home.”
Oliver grunted. His gaze shifted incrementally toward the left of his screen, likely where Perry was. “I know your parents had a lot of peers among that ilk.”
“Yes. They did,” Perry said.
“Anyone you knew?”
“Yes.”
“Anyway.” Matt tilted his phone camera so that Perry was mostly cut off. “Heath couldn’t pull a whole lot of information out of him, but we suspect that Rhiannon may try to form an alliance with whatever supernatural groups out here that would let her plead her case. I think she’ll probably have a particular interest in larger shifter communities. Heath and I thought it would be a good idea to ask if any of Norseton’s Wolves could be spared as an emissary so we can go talk to some.”
“Huh. I like it,” Oliver said. “And I think that tracks with how my great-aunt would think. She won’t fuck with witches of any sort unless they dabble in the dark shit, and she knows they’re likely to stab her in the back when she becomes inconvenient. Shifters won’t get the same kind of predator reading on her unless they’re mixed with something else. Let me talk to Adam and see who he can refer over. I can fly them out myself if it’s within the next few days. Does Heath want me to call him?”
“Yeah, but give him a couple of hours. He went down to work on him a little more.”
“What’s his name?”
“Alcindor.”
Oliver’s forehead creased, or at least, Perry thought it did. Matt tilted the phone a little bit more toward him. “Uh…name seems familiar, maybe. Might have been written in one of my mother’s journals. She wrote a lot down soon after she self-deported because she was afraid her aunt planted some magic on her to make her forget everything. I’ll thumb through some pages later. But I’ll get April into bed and check Lyman’s homework before I call Heath. Oh.” Oliver snapped his fingers. “Do me a favor and call your brother when you get a chance. I can’t deal with both his crying and your sisters’. One of them has to dry up the tears, and if you’ll recall, the girls are both under four. You decide which is more likely to be successful.”
“What the hell is Lyman crying about?”
“It’s the hormones,” Oliver said deadpan. “Things were more typical for you because you started puberty when we were still living in Fallon. You had the luxury of slowly maturing into the magic you have now. He’s living right in the epicenter of weirdness, and his close association with Tess is making his magic erratic.”
“What kind of magic?” Matt asked in a tone of alarm and sat rigid on the edge of the sofa cushion.
Perry straightened up, too, simply by reflex. He didn’t think he’d ever heard Matt use that tone before. He was generally unflappable, even when he was in a brutalizing mood.
“Who the hell knows?” Oliver asked. “I can’t imagine it’ll be any different than yours. I think he’s a little stronger telepathically than you are, though, and that’s what’s messing him up.”
Matt grimaced. “I guess it’s hard to filter out all the head chatter. He probably can’t tell which thoughts are his thoughts and which belong to other people.”
“Yep. Anyway, let me get going. I’ll kiss Junie and April for you.”
“Okay. Tell Harvey and Tess I said hello, too.”
“Will do. Love you. Bye.” Oliver ended the call.
Matt slid his phone onto the table and quickly got to his feet. Reaching behind the sofa, he closed the curtains and then flicked on the lamp.
Perry started to stand because whenever Matt moved with such urgency, he felt compelled to do the same. He tended to take Matt’s lead because his own instincts for danger had gotten him harmed numerous times in the past.
“Okay, before you move, do me a favor.” Matt’s tone wasn’t urgent so much as inquisitive.
There was no imminent danger, apparently.
Perry took a deep breath and forced his shoulders down from his ears. “A favor?”
“Just a small one.”
The last time Matt had asked him for a favor, Perry had ended up waiting in a thirteen-hour line with him to buy a limited-availability video game console. Matt had been afraid if he’d left the line to relieve himself, the crowd wouldn’t let him back into his place.
He’d been correct with that suspicion.
One of Perry’s more useless fairy tricks was being able to suppress his urges for long periods. He managed to get the console for Matt, and it was currently set up on the living room television. They spent many evenings playing games only to arrive bleary-eyed at crew meetings the following mornings. Prince Heath’s lieutenant, Thom, frequently lectured them about their mental fitness for duty, but that didn’t stop them from playing. Perry always thought the trouble they got into was worth the mild defiance. He enjoyed spending the hours with Matt. Matt was the only person who ever had time for him.
And that was a problem for a lot of reasons.
Inhaling deeply once more, Perry gestured him forward.
Standing directly in front of Perry, Matt unfastened his jeans, and dropped them to his thighs along with his boxer briefs. “You see anything weird? I want to think it’s just chafing. Spent too many hours going commando in my jeans last week. Fucking laundry…”
Perry’s vision drifted in and out of focus as Matt drew his cock up against his belly and raised his balls with the other hand. “Can you see?”
Unfortunately, Perry could. In living color and crisp, fairy-vision detail.
It was sheer hell, and that was a new awareness for him. He’d been oblivious to that level of punishment until very recently.
There were many problems with being a grown fairy, and a large one was standing in front of him with his pants pulled down, flashing him with clinical detachment.
“It…has a bit of redness beneath,” Perry said hoarsely.
Absolute hell.
Perry no longer had the luxury of being as clinical as Matt, and he’d been trying to be.
For weeks.
“While you’re there, do you see any festering?” Matt shifted his sac at different angles, ostensibly to give Perry a more complete view. “I mean, I’ve been safe, but my immune system isn’t like yours. If I picked up a little something from someone, it wouldn’t get obliterated on impact. My body has to work a little harder.”
“No festering. Just…tenderness, it looks like.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely tender. I guess I’ll just lube it up until it heals. No antibiotics necessary.”
“Lube is…useful, I suppose,” Perry murmured through clenched teeth because he couldn’t think of Matt’s penis or the fistful of lube he’d be spreading onto it in clinical treatment contexts, only lewd, inappropriate ones.
“Do you have any? I ran out.” Matt grimaced as though he’d heard the ridiculousness of the query.
And normally, it would have been ridiculous because Perry didn’t have sex, and everyone in the crew knew that. That part of the Sídhe brain was one of the last to mature. Nudity was merely a practical thing before then. He could appreciate that a person was beautiful, but they couldn’t spark anything in him. He couldn’t get erections or have orgasms.
But that had changed.
He’d known his brain would be just like everyone else’s in the crew sooner or later and had been vigilant about minimizing any potential embarrassment a surprise rush of arousal would bring. He’d worn a concealing strap for a year just in case.
Blessedly, the change started in the middle of the night one evening when Matt wasn’t there, but Matt was the reason Perry knew it’d arrived.
Matt had ridden down to a concert he’d deemed “too loud for you, Per,” and in an incident of mistaken identity, had his tires slashed.
Matt’s laughing voice as he relayed the story to Perry over the phone had made his temperature spike. Perry thought, at first, he was feeling anger at having his sleep disturbed, but it wasn’t that. And he knew it wasn’t that when Matt’s command of, “Borrow Sully’s truck and get your fairy ass down here and rescue me, man,” sparked the dynamite.
Perry had sat there for five minutes in cold, sticky boxer shorts after Matt disconnected wondering how it could even work like that—how he could erupt without being touched.
He was semi-aroused nearly all the time, which was supposedly typical of the switching-on period. The only reason the crew didn’t tease him about it was because he’d taken new protective measures. The strap was useless. He was wasting magical energy on disguising his constant discomfort so the crew couldn’t ask him about it and tease him endlessly like they’d certainly been teased during their wilding weeks.
The shower was his only true respite. That was the only place he could slake his urges without Matt hearing.
“I’ll go see if I can find some powder or something,” Matt muttered to himself, oblivious to Perry’s distress as he fastened himself up. “Actually, let me run over to Dasha and Ethan’s. Too late to go to the store, and they’re bound to have a stockpile of shit left over from when the twins were tiny.”
Matt washed his hands in his bathroom and hurried out of the apartment.
The moment the doorknob latch clicked into the strike plate, Perry made a beeline for the shower. He didn’t know what else to do when he had to live with a man who acted and looked like that.
Except stay away from him as much as he could.
We should buy a second sofa. That way, we won’t need to share.