The kitchen smelled of coffee and strawberry jam, and Tenrael stood at the stove, gently moving his wings, dispersing the good scents more widely. He was naked, of course. He wore trousers only when necessary, and never shoes or a shirt. He looked over his shoulder at Charles and gave a broad, sharp-toothed smile. “Have some tea. Warm yourself up.”
Sometimes Tenrael called him Master, and in most matters—inside the bedroom and out—Charles made the decisions. But not when it came to the kitchen. Although demons didn’t need to eat, Tenrael liked to cook. And he also liked to dote over Charles, making sure he ate regularly and took good care of himself.
Charles poured a mugful, but before he sat at the little round table, he paused to rub Tenrael’s muscular ass, which bore faded red marks from the night before. “There are better ways than tea to get warm.”
“Eat first. Besides, you have news to tell me.”
Unlike Charles, Tenrael didn’t possess particularly acute hearing. “Were you listening in?” It wouldn’t bother him if he had, and it would save him from having to repeat what the Chief had said.
“No,” said Tenrael, busily flipping pancakes. “You have that look about you.”
“What look?”
“The look that says you have news.”
Charles snorted and stirred three portions of sugar into his mug. He’d always considered himself poker-faced, but Tenrael never had difficulty reading him. At first Charles had resented that and maybe even feared it a little. He’d never wanted people to know what he was thinking. But of course Tenrael wasn’t people—he was Charles’s lover. As Charles grew to trust him, he realized that being understood so easily by Tenrael was, in fact, a gift.
Charles sipped his tea, feeling the heat travel through him, and a few moments later Tenrael set down a plate containing a tall stack of pancakes slathered thickly in jam and topped with maple syrup. When Charles was a boy, he used to eat sugar by the spoonful; his mother would sigh and shake her head. Sometimes she’d smooth the white feathers on his small wings. “I’ll make you some carrots and peas,” she’d say, and he’d dutifully eat them, mainly to please her. She knew better than to feed him meat, which made him violently ill.
Tenrael knelt on the linoleum floor next to Charles’s chair, his hair barely brushing against Charles’s left arm. “Your news has made you pensive.” He had a rich accent but spoke English fluently. As well he might—he’d been speaking it since the language was born, the bastard child of Germanic, French, and Latin parentage. Because Tenrael’s use of English had evolved along with the language itself, he occasionally slipped in a word or phrase that had nearly gone extinct. That always made Charles smile.
“Have you ever been to San Francisco, Ten?”
“A long time ago, before whites were there. I brought the people dreams of waves washing them to sea or of bears chasing them.”
“I imagine today’s residents have different nightmares than that.”
“I would not know. I no longer carry nightmares.” Tenrael sounded only slightly wistful.
“No. But that’s not why I’m asking. Townsend wants us to stay there for a few weeks to keep an eye on things.”
“He does not have agents there already?”
Charles shrugged and took a bite of pancake. It was delicious. “Some are off to war. One of the others—a fellow named Donne—was injured, and Ferencz is taking care of him.”
“Injured?” Tenrael looked concerned. He tended to worry about Charles who, unlike him, was burdened with mortality.
“Busted leg.” He took another bite and washed it down with tea that was now barely warm. “I used to work with them sometimes, Donne and Ferencz. They joined the Bureau roughly when I did, although they’re older than me. Before that, Ferencz was a magician and Donne was a private dick.”
“Did you enjoy working with them?”
“I guess. I prefer you, though.”
“Good.”
The pancakes disappeared almost like magic, and then Charles had a second mug of tea. There were some things he should do if they were going to leave town in the morning, but he felt too caught up in memories to do more than sip. “I guess I owe Donne and Ferencz a debt.”
“How so?”
“They….” What was the word? Inspired? “When I decided to quit the Bureau, Donne gave me some tips on going solo. But also…. They’re a couple, those two. I mean, they never said so directly, but I didn’t need to be a detective to figure it out. And I’m sure the Chief knows. Nothing gets past him. But he never seemed to care, and I suppose that gave me hope that someday….” He took another swallow of tea instead of finishing the sentence.
But Tenrael finished it for him. “Someday you would have a lover as well.”
“Yeah.”
Tenrael leaned in closer and shut his eyes. “I never dreamed of a lover. Well, I never dreamed at all. Demons do not. We do not love either. We fuck, but there is no affection there, no care for the other. Humans believe Hell is made of hate, but it is not. It is made of indifference.”
Charles nodded in complete understanding, even though he knew that Tenrael couldn’t see him.
Then Tenrael rose to his feet very suddenly and pushed Charles’s chair away from the table. Facing him, Tenrael straddled his lap and sat down. He tilted his head, resting his horns against Charles’s forehead. They were as hot as his skin, and he liked when Charles stroked them, but now Charles set his hands on Tenrael’s hips. “You’re not indifferent toward me,” he said.
“I am not. I do not know if any other demon has managed to find love, but I have. And finding it was worth everything that came before.”
“They tortured you,” Charles said through gritted teeth. “For decades.”
“Worth everything.” Then Tenrael laughed and began to recite:
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge,
The dredful joye, alwey that slit so yerne,
Al this mene I by love, that my felynge
Astonyeth with this wonderful werkynge
So sore iwis, that whan I on him thinke,
Nat wot I wel wher that I flete or synke.
Charles tried to shake his head but couldn’t with Tenrael’s pressed against him. “I only understood a few of those words.”
“It is Chaucer. He found love so wondrous that he suspected it might be a dream. A good one, not one of mine. I find it wondrous as well. Sometimes I fear I will wake up and discover myself still in the horror of that cage. Perhaps I am in that cage and in my desperation and despair I have learned to dream after all. If so, I am very glad I am dreaming of you.”
“I’m real.” Charles dug his fingers hard into Tenrael’s flesh as proof of his existence. Tenrael’s cock, which had been soft and warm against Charles’s lower belly, began to lengthen, its hardness snug between them. But Charles needed to say something more. “That part at the beginning, I think I caught that. Life is short. And it is—mine anyway.” Because as far as he could tell, he aged the same as any normal human. Demons, on the other hand, lived forever if nobody destroyed them.
“Which is why I wish to be near you every minute, if I may.”
“I’ll get old, Ten. Bald. Wrinkled. And you’ll remain beautiful.”
Tenrael laughed again. “I am beautiful only in your eyes. And you will always be beautiful in mine.”
Charles sighed. There was nothing he could do about his own mortality, and it was foolish to waste whatever time he had mooning over it. He twisted his head slightly so he could capture Tenrael’s lower lip between his teeth. He gave it a sharp nip and then licked it. So sweet.
“I don’t think I’m ready yet to face the day,” he announced. “Let’s go back to bed.”
Tenrael’s eyes flared, and he leaned down to whisper in Charles’s ear. “Yes, Master.”
Preparations for their trip could wait.
Tenrael wouldn’t sit still, and that was distracting. Charles had opted to drive up Highway 1 rather than use the more inland 101 or 99. This way was slower but more scenic, with the Pacific usually in view to their left, often far below, and trees towering overhead. He’d thought they might as well make a sort of vacation out of the journey, and Tenrael—who rarely traveled by car and mostly flew at night—had been enjoying the scenery.
Charles, however, had to keep a close eye on the road, and that was difficult with Tenrael squirming beside him.
“Is it the movement that’s bothering you?” Charles asked. “Or the clothes?” Tenrael wore gray trousers and a pale-blue collared shirt. He'd owned the trousers for some time, but Charles had bought him several shirts the day before, along with some socks and a pair of shoes that Tenrael still hadn’t put on.
“No. My wings.”
Charles’s back ached in empathy. “They’ll come back when you take off the ring.”
“I know.”
Yesterday Tenrael had slipped the ring on and off several times, and they’d both marveled to see his wings and horns disappear and his eyes turn from glowing red to a warm dark brown. At the time, Tenrael had seemed fascinated by his transformation and maybe even a little amused. But he’d only kept the ring on for a short time. Today he’d been wearing it for hours.
Now he rubbed his back against the car seat. “Did it take a long time for you to adjust when you lost yours?”
“I didn’t lose them—I had them chopped off.” By a disreputable surgeon who patched up gangsters or performed abortions if paid well enough. He’d wanted to keep the severed, bloody things, but Charles had taken them and burned them, not saving a single white feather.
“When you lost them,” Tenrael insisted.
“Mine weren’t like yours. They were… stunted. Useless. I didn’t miss them.”
Tenrael snorted at this obvious lie. For a while he remained still, staring inland through his window. But then they passed through a grove of trees so thick that little light shone through, and when Tenrael saw his reflection in the glass, he rubbed his head where his horns should be.
“They’ll come back,” Charles repeated.
“What if they do not?”
“Then I would have a very serious discussion with Townsend, and he’d find a way to restore them.”
Tenrael turned and faced him. Charles kept his gaze on the road but saw in his peripheral vision the frown creasing Tenrael’s brow. “I mean,” Tenrael said quietly, with a rare note of hesitation, “what if I chose to remain like this. Ordinary.”
“You’d never be ordinary.”
“But I could look ordinary. Look human. I could walk or drive as you do instead of flying.”
The conversation was making Charles uncomfortable, and he wished he could walk away from it. If they’d been at home, he would have gone to the beach and traversed the band of wet sand, carefully keeping his mind as gray and blank as the fog that rolled in at sunset. But he was trapped in the car, so he sighed instead.
“If you’d rather pass for human, then that’s what you should do.”
Charles used to dye his white hair dark and wear sunglasses to hide his odd green eyes, but even then, people had sensed something odd about him. Anyway, he’d abandoned those efforts when he left the Bureau. Let people think what they would.
“Do you want me to be human? Master?”
The last word made Charles realize that Tenrael was asking a very different sort of question than he’d originally thought. His heart twisted painfully. How could Tenrael—magnificent, powerful, eternal—renounce his own nature just to please him?
“I want you to be yourself,” Charles replied quietly.
It was the truth, and it was also a good answer. Tenrael stopped squirming and instead settled one big hand just above Charles’s knee. Then he leaned back in his seat and smiled.