The black glass doors to Purgatory swung open at Conall’s touch. Josh crowded close behind him, no doubt anxious to give his eyes a chance to adjust to the faint light of the safety telltales.
Conall enjoyed the crowding, enough that he waited a few seconds longer than he needed to before whispering the word that channeled magick to bring the house lights up.
Much to his delight, Josh didn’t step back when the lights came on. Instead, his scair-anam wrapped beautifully-inked arms around him from behind and rested his chin on Conall’s shoulder.
“This looks a little... off,” Josh murmured, nipping gently at the curve of Conall’s ear as a kind of punctuation and waving a hand in the general direction of the decorations hanging from the ceiling over the dance floor.
Conall grinned. “I’ll take your word for it. I have a hard time telling human holidays apart.”
He was teasing, of course. Even if he’d been inclined to mistake “Happy 2014” and “New Year’s Resolutions Broken Here” for Christmas decorations—which, given Josh’s passion for filling their apartment with season-appropriate pine boughs, angels, tiny lights and popcorn garlands, was completely impossible—Cuinn had been after him for at least the last week to commit to attending Purgatory’s grand re-opening dressed as Baby New Year. In a twinkling diaper, no less.
So far, he’d managed to keep from breaking out the invisible ball gag. He was proud of himself.
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing down here?” Josh let Conall go, but slid a hand down his arm and laced his fingers through the mage’s. “Or is it a surprise?”
“No surprises yet, your Christmas present is still under the tree.” Conall didn’t bother to hide his shiver of delight; he’d caught Josh shaking the wrapped cylinder, and even human hearing couldn’t have missed the clanking of chains and the heavy shifting of the suspension bar.
If he’d needed any confirmation of his suspicions, Josh’s smile gave it to him. “Okay, so what are we doing down here?”
Conall tugged gently at his SoulShare’s hand and led him over to the bar. “I want to give this one more try.”
He rested his free hand on the bar’s thick glass surface. They’d found a specialist in effects lighting—probably the closest D.C. had to an actual wizard, apart from Conall himself—but even the justly renowned Helmut Lustig hadn’t been able to re-create the spectacularly hellish lights of the old Purgatory’s bar.
Josh leaned over, peering down into the bar. It was a hollow shell now—Lustig’s mechanism was sitting on the floor behind the bar, having been removed to await some fine-tuning from the master in a couple of days—but they’d both seen it in operation. Strategically placed mirrors did a reasonably good job of hiding the lights, and when the display was switched on, it was hard to see the hardware unless you knew what you were looking for.
But that wasn’t good enough. Not for Conall, and not for anyone who remembered the old Purgatory.
“If it’s fire you’re looking for, wouldn’t it make more sense to ask our Prince?”
“I talked with Rian about it a couple of days ago, actually. He’s not comfortable with setting up a permanent cold-fire channeling—his control is getting better, he says, but he’s sure that sooner or later, it would go hot. And he really doesn’t want to burn the place down, even accidentally.”
“Is that what they call noblesse oblige?”
Conall couldn’t help laughing. If there had ever been a Royal less concerned with the privileges and perquisites of royalty than Rian Sheridan, that individual had been blotted out of Fae memory long ago. Although, now that he thought about it, the young Prince Royal had looked a bit wistfully at Mac, Lucien and Rhoann, the one time the subject of human droit du seigneur had come up.
Josh squeezed Conall’s hand gently. “So you’re going to give it a try, I take it?”
Conall nodded. “It’s about time I tried to figure out what happened to living magick in the human world when we... um, when the Pattern unraveled and the wellsprings went away.” When we sent the Marfach wherever it was we sent it. When we lost Tiernan.
When he, Conall Dary, specifically and personally, had done all that.
He’d thought about reminding Kevin of that simple fact—that regardless of what the human had or hadn’t done during that last battle, it had been Conall’s hand and Conall’s magick that had sealed Tiernan into a reflective coffin with every Fae’s nightmare and a bloodthirsty zombie—but it probably wouldn’t have helped.
Josh’s arm slid warm around Conall’s shoulders as his kiss nuzzled its way into his thick, wavy red hair. His partner knew exactly where his thoughts had gone—and, probably, why he hadn’t tried a single channeling since his reluctant demonstration for Thomas Almstead.
“Let me know what you need.” Josh’s voice was soft, low—the intimate tone that reached straight into their shared soul and touched Conall where no one else ever had or could.
“Just you.”
“Always.”
Conall closed his eyes, sighing unsteadily as Josh kissed his neck. Gentle warmth, and the promise of more, brought his own magick to surging life within him—he could feel it, hurling itself against the walls of his flesh, stubbornly willing to be free.
I can’t.
He couldn’t let go, any more than he’d been able to for all the centuries he’d lived in the Realm. He didn’t trust the magick, of course—but that wasn’t the problem. No mage in his right mind ever trusted the wild caprice of living magick, any more than he would trust a tornado.
Conall didn’t trust himself.
How could he?
“You’re shaking, baby.” Josh closed his arms around Conall from behind, enveloping him in sweet strength. “Need to come inside?”
“I... I think so. Yes.”
Normally, the moment Conall let go of corporeality to Fadewalk was tense. A normal Fae wouldn’t even attempt it unless he or she was in extremis and had no other choice, and even Conall had a healthy respect for the risks involved. Most Fae never returned from their first Fadewalks—Fiachra had found that out the hard way.
Right now, though, letting go and stepping back into Josh was pure relief. Safety was Josh’s gift to him, whether it was the safety of ropes and chains keeping Conall’s power in check or the comfort of his human’s body sheltering his own.
“Better?” Josh murmured.
“Much. G’ra ma agadh.” Conall didn’t speak aloud, of course—they’d tried that a few times, sharing control of Josh’s mouth, but the resulting confusion had been epic.
“At your service.” The truesilver chain tattooed around Josh’s wrist responded to the presence of Conall’s magick, becoming solid and real and jingling as Josh reached down to adjust his already semi-hard cock.
Conall allowed himself a faint groan at the shared sensation. Arousal was going to make this much easier—assuming what he wanted to do could be done at all, he reminded himself.
Again the magick rose up in him, stronger than before, wilder. But Conall was more than he had been. He feared nothing—not even himself—with Josh’s strength around him.
He knew what he wanted the channeling to look like, the mesmerizing swirling flames of the old Purgatory’s bar, deep red shot through with occasional flares of orange and rare, eye-searing bursts of blue-white.
The knowledge alone would be enough to shape a one-time channeling, but Conall needed more to make the flames self-sustaining. He had to tie them into a local magick source.
And that was going to be, as they said, the rub. He couldn’t link directly to the raw ley energy under their feet the way Lochlann could. He could have linked the channeling to a wellspring, but the wellsprings were gone.
And while there was apparently enough background magick in this reboot of the human world to satisfy the resupply needs of the less magickally gifted members of the Demesne, Conall had his own peculiar issues. Once he’d spent his own internal store of living magick, he was tapped out until he took a ridiculously long time to restore himself or got help from Lochlann.
“Need a hand?”
Conall could feel the wickedness of Josh’s smile from the inside, as his scair-anam unzipped his jeans and freed his cock. His breath caught sharply at the doubled sensation, Josh’s arousal added to his own, as Josh started a slow, firm stroking. “Um... I’m not going to be doing a major channeling... what are you... oh, fuck...”
Josh laughed. “I’m priming the pump, d’orant.”
“You,” Conall pronounced as clearly and precisely as he could, “are a fucking genius. Literally.”
The magick was awake. And not only the magick within Conall—Josh’s touch was an invitation, and the living magick all around them couldn’t resist such a perfect enticement. Any more than Conall himself could.
It was easy, now. Easy and delicious and decadent. Conall closed his eyes, focusing on the touch of his lover’s hand, Josh’s low groans, the heat and heaviness... the sweet tension that held his magick in check as the trickle of power flowing into him grew to a stream, and then a flood.
“Say ‘when,’ baby.” Without slowing his strokes, Josh used his other hand to run a fingernail lightly over one hard-puckered nipple through his shirt, grinning as Conall swore. “Better make it soon, though.”
“If you’d just let a Fae think...”
Fire. He needed fire. Cold fire. Flames twisting like a drumbeat, a heartbeat, the pulse that was going to be flooding from him any second now if he didn’t get a grip on himself. The fires of the humans’ Hell, but holding a promise of heaven.
The image began as the ghost of a thought behind his closed eyelids, gradually taking form the way a Fading Fae did, more vivid with every pull and twist of Josh’s busy hand.
At last, he could see it in his mind, whole and entire. He could almost touch the flames, almost hear a soft siren call that twined around the flames the way the flames twined around his arousal. All he needed now was a word, to name and catch and bind the living magick in the form he’d created for it.
“Ca’ain,” he whispered. When.
Josh heard. And the magick heard.
Josh staggered with the force of doubled orgasm, barely catching himself with a hand on the bar. Conall released his new-fledged channeling, letting the magick flow out of him, through Josh, down into the empty space under the glass top of the bar.
The fire flared—the exact same dazzling white flare that was all but blinding Josh as his cock and hand became slick, as wet as that first time in the shower with Conall on his knees and—
“Jesus, are you trying to kill me?” Josh groaned as their shared memory came into sharp relief—seen from both of their perspectives at once. By now, this was a familiar strangeness, given how much they both loved to remember that moment.
“I don’t think so. But you might want to consider breathing.”
Josh opened his eyes. There was still a white heart to the fire in the bar, but it was shrinking, cooling to blue and then orange.
“Problem solved—”
A wind whirled around them, heard but not felt.
The wind formed words.
What am I doing here?
* * *
What am I doing here?
The darag’s answer was a few moments in coming. YOU SHOULD BE AT THE FAR END OF THE LOCH, NEAR THE RIVER MOUTH. The daragin had few words to describe a thing that was not as it was expected to be, mostly because daragin had few, if any, expectations of reality. Reality was what was, and expectations changed almost nothing about it. ARE YOU NOT?
Not exactly. Josh was putting his trousers to rights, and blushing. His astonished expression sat oddly with the blush, but Coinneach suspected the astonishment was Conall’s. I am in Purgatory.
The darag’s silence spoke louder than any rush of wind or creak of branch.
Conall was taking form beside Josh—more quickly than was his wont, Coinneach thought. And it seemed he spoke even before he was fully corporeal. “How did you get here?”
Coinneach forgave the abruptness. He was feeling more than a little abrupt himself. We have discovered that I can travel outside the circle of my darag’s roots without need of a wellspring. I sought only to cross the loch on the far side of our grove, to test the limits of this new thing.
“You’ve discovered...” Conall blinked. “Seriously?”
The Fae’s incredulity gave Coinneach no choice but to laugh. Seriously. Although I am unclear as to how I came here. Neither I nor my darag intended to... interrupt anything.
Conall’s brilliant green gaze went, not to his lover, but to the bar, where white fire was slowly fading to orange and a deep red that even a creature of wood found sensual.
“I might understand.”