Chapter 20

20

Darcy draws his travel array on the top of the Foxilys’ kitchen table after breakfast, but he doesn’t make me climb up there to get on it, rather he guides it to the floor when it’s done and I sit on it, pulling my crutches up with me. Romily gestures to indicate his desire to accompany us, and the array expands big enough to include Romily and Fox. Fox calls up the stairs before we leave, “Son! Are you coming?”

Darcy moves the array to the landing and Bellamy appears at the top of the stairs, looking down at us. “What are you doing?”

Darcy cackles, cracking his knuckles. “We’re gonna go reacquire Elijah’s personal effects from the demons who stole them.”

I hold out my short leg. “I’m hoping we find my leg. If we stop by my apartment, I can get my other one and ditch the crutches.”

Bellamy reaches into a closet at the top of the stairs (I hadn’t even noticed that it existed when we came down earlier) and pulls out a duffle bag that hangs heavy in his hand. He descends the stairs and joins us on the array. Instead of braids, he’s sporting a thick ballet bun, and he’s wearing a turquoise silk top with loose chinos and a pair of boat shoes.

“Anything to avoid the office,” he confesses when he sees me checking out his clothes.

I nod, completely understanding the sentiment. “I’m not looking forward to growing up and getting a real job.” Darcy takes my hand, and I thread my fingers in with his. “I’m a bit of a lazy bastard. If I could justify becoming a professional student, I’d do that instead of graduating next spring.”

“How old are you?” a mechanical voice asks.

I look over to Romily, who holds up his phone with a grimace.

“Yeah, that voice is the worst. Make Darcy talk for you if no one else will,” I volunteer. “I’ll do it when I get a phone. I don’t mind it, but I don’t think I can pull off the same voice acting Darcy does.”

Romily smiles happily and leans into Fox, who puts his arms around his partner and says, “Thank you. Everyone here gives me a voice when I need one.”

I love that for Romily. “Sweet. Telepathic connection to your partner? That’s awesome. I’m twenty five.”

Romily huffs a laugh, nodding to confirm the magical connection between him and his beau. “I’m still the youngest,” Fox says for him.

Fox kisses his cheek.

“Age is just a number. Darcy’s over seven thousand years old, and I'm not about to stop the old man from taking me to the stratosphere, you know?”

Darcy nips my arm with his teeth. “Experience is sexy.”

“Seven thousand? I guess that is between Fox and Tag,” Romily ponders via Fox.

“Oh, he’s older than that, but—” I stop, turning to Darcy. “Is that private information?” He didn’t tell me not to tell anyone, but he didn’t like talking about it either.

Darcy grimaces, but waves toward them. “Go ahead.”

Romily looks like he’s dying of curiosity, so I alleviate that itch. “He doesn’t have memories of his life before about seven thousand years ago. No clue how old his body is—do you remember before you were incarnated?” I ask, wondering if he lost his memories from when he was a djinn.

“I was young. Only a few centuries. I remember them, but only vaguely. It’s fairly common to lose all but the most important memories as you grow older,” he replies as we land in my apartment.

I smile, nodding, but it falls off my face as I look around my place. It’s trashed. My books have been torn apart and left scattered all over the floor, my coffee table is in three chunks, and someone shredded my couch. There’s a pile of feces on what’s left of it, and someone wrote a bunch of misogynistic, homophobic slurs on my apartment walls in what looks like blood.

Eesh. That’s not good. Someone got aggressive in here.

“What the fuck?” Darcy growls. He hands me my crutches and waits for me to get to my feet before jumping off the array.

The others must expect the array to disappear, because none of them fall like I did the first time he did that to me.

“Who the fuck has the audacity to come in here—” Darcy cuts off the rant he’s gearing up for, marching to the window that’s smeared with something I don’t want to know about. He shoves the window up and chimes out of it like a real church bell and just as loud. I bet people three blocks over can hear his chime.

A few seconds later three little gargoyles land in my living room, and the sound of their church bell language fills the apartment. They sound distressed.

I’m not looking forward to the clean up, but whoever did this isn’t going to enjoy what happens when Darcy gets ahold of them, so I hop toward my busted front door grimacing at the way it’s barely hanging on the hinges. We’re going to have to call Chet again. I’ll just have to make sure Darcy isn’t around for that. Gotta keep my promise.

“Romily, you want to come help me get my leg out of storage?” I ask, leaving Darcy to deal with the break-in.

He’s already pulling things out of his utility belt and combining them into a little bowl. If it didn’t smell like actual shit in here, I’d love to watch him, but it’s gag-inducing, and I need to get my leg anyway.

Romily smiles as he joins me, stepping over broken glass and what looks like a puddle of piss. Smells like it too. I’m not sure I’ll be able to live here after this.

“I’m not getting my deposit back,” I sigh, leading him to the elevator that will take us to the basement. That’s a bummer.

He gives me a sympathetic look, nodding in understanding. He makes a complicated gesture that tells me he’s curious about who would do this to my place—no, he’s asking if it was Stalker Steve.

“Oh. I guess it could be Stalker Steve. Darcy already warned him off, but it could be anyone. One of the neighbors tried to kill me the other day because I gave Darcy a BJ. It was so weird. I don’t know what’s wrong with people. They really get attached to me in unhealthy ways, you know?”

Romily’s eyes go wide. Really? he asks without words.

I nod. “It’s been a problem in the past. I can only think of one person I dated who wasn’t a problem afterward. She’s the girl I dated my freshman year before I realized that I was super gay in a no-thanks-to-girls way. She’s a good friend now. She murdered someone for me the other day.”

Romily presses his hand over his heart.

“I know. She’s super sweet.”

The elevator opens into the basement, where about half the lights are always out. It’s creepy down here, which is one reason I invited Romily along. He’s probably wondering if I’m leading him to his doom, so I pat his back. “It’s creepy but harmless. Probably. I mean, I’ve never had any issue down here, but it's fucking creepy.”

Romily follows me to my locker, and I tell him the combo to the lock so he can open it. My leg is behind the box with a fake Christmas tree my mother sent me last year, and he helps me by grabbing it and the little bag with the sock for it. I lock the locker back up, and we head back to the elevator.

I come to an abrupt stop when a black mass of writhing darkness grows out of nothing and hovers in the air between us and the elevator. Dread descends as I look at it, and I get the feeling that approaching it would be unsafe. “That’s never happened before,” I tell Romily so he knows I didn’t invite the malevolent spirit or whatever.

Romily holds his phone up to my face, pointing out that he has no bars.

I take the phone and check to see if my wifi reaches down here. Barely. There’s a single bar on the wifi that belongs to me. I connect to it and hand it back to Romily. “Wifi’s spotty, but maybe you can climb up on something and get a better connection to it.”

Romily pats my butt and moves away, climbing up on top of a dryer that’s been hanging out in the basement, abandoned and unused, since I moved in here. There isn’t even a laundry room in the basement; someone just brought a dryer down here and left it.

I watch the writhing mass for a minute while Romily contacts someone to come rescue us. Hopefully the people who deal with magic all the time know what to do with malevolent spirits.

The thing gives me the impression that it’s about to do something drastic, and then a tentacle thing shoots out, grabbing me around the waist and dragging me toward it. I lose my balance and my crutches. The only thing keeping me from face planting is the grip of the tentacle thing around my waist. Romily jumps off the dryer and grabs my hand, pulling me against the thing dragging me toward it. He’s not strong enough, nor does he have the mass to fight against the inevitable pull of the tentacle. He slows it down, but it ends up dragging us both toward a maw that opens up full of baby tentacles.

This is bad.

I could use a baby flink teleport right about now, but I’m not going to call a baby into a dangerous situation. That’s just wrong. It would be helpful, but I’m glad they left before we got into this situation. I wonder if my dragon would be helpful right now, but considering we’re in a basement, I think it would be better if I don’t chance shifting into a creature that might be bigger than the room I’m in. I don’t know how big my dragon is, but I’d be sad if I shifted and ended up accidentally killing Romily.

“Let go,” I tell Romily, because we’re getting too close to the writhing tentacle mass, and he doesn’t need to end up where I’m going if rescue doesn’t arrive in time.

Romily snorts and shakes his head.

My foot enters the tentacle mouth, and fear hits me all at once. I do not want to lose my other leg. I jerk it out of the mouth and kick at the tentacle holding me around the waist.

“No, no, no, no,” I whisper, panicking about losing my other limb.

Something inside me snaps, and then I’m not a person anymore. I’m also not a dragon. I’m…

I don’t know. I’m floating at the ceiling and perceiving the entire room in three hundred and sixty degrees. Romily lands on his butt, looking up at me with surprise etched in his face. The tentacle thing no longer looks like a tentacle monster thing. It’s just a person, staring up at me with rage on their face. Not like a human person, don’t get me wrong. They’re more like an alien person, but identifiably a person with a ragey expression on a face too small for the giant head—you know, they look like one of those elongated head people, but with super spindly arms and four legs instead of two. Like I said, an alien person.

They screech at me and fling their hands toward me, but nothing happens. If I stay away from their hands, they can’t get me.

Darcy appears on an array with Fox and Bellamy, and Fox jumps off, swinging a massive sword toward the person and dragging their attention away from me (still up here, hovering at the ceiling with a three-sixty view of the room). They fling their arms out over and over, and Fox seems to be fighting something I can’t really see. I assume it’s the tentacles that had me before this whole hovering situation happened.

Bellamy and Darcy join Fox in fighting the imaginary tentacles, but they don’t seem to be making much headway. It’s weird watching them fight something that’s not there, and it occurs to me that they might run out of steam before figuring out the tentacles aren’t real. I mean, sure, they caught me up, so they have some substance, but they’re just a disguise for the spindly creature hiding behind them.

I think it might be ok to show them that it’s not real, and the thought moves me from the ceiling toward the fray. I dash straight toward the spindly guy’s head, hitting him in the cranium pretty hard. It knocks him off balance, and he topples to the floor, legs up. That’s the problem with having stick thin legs holding up a super heavy head.

Fox rushes past me to the overturned guy and decapitates him.

Darcy saunters past him, stabs the guy in the chest, and rips him open from sternum to tail with his fancy dagger.

The guy’s insides become his outsides, and Darcy reaches in, pulling the intestines out. There’s not that much viscera, but he empties the cavity one organ at a time. Fairly quickly, he pulls the heart out. It’s still pumping in his hand when he holds it up, finally turning to look at me.

“Oh Peach, you’re the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen in all yer gorgeous forms. Look at you. Ain’t no wonder so many people want you. Never seen one of your kind outside the swamp.”

“What is he?” Bellamy asks, pointing to Romily to indicate he’s speaking for him.

Darcy reaches out with his bloody hand (not the one holding the heart), and runs it over my whole self. I feel him everywhere all at once and a shiver of pure, unadulterated want shakes me from the inside out.

“Feu follet,” he answers, rubbing me everywhere again

I don’t even know what that is, but this feels like I am one stroke away from a full body orgasm.

Darcy proves that I am when he rubs me again and I explode outward. It’s better than an orgasm, different and the same all at once. It’s want, desire, pleasure, and completion. I become an entire universe of bliss for a split second and an eternity, and when my self pulls itself back together, I drop to the floor back in my human body.

I stare up at Darcy with a silly smile on my face. “We’re doing that again,” I inform him.

He arches a single eyebrow at me, offering me a hand. “Are we? Do we have to include the”—he makes a disturbing clicking sound—“or is it ok to skip the battle for your life?”

I take his hand and let him help me to my foot. I’m naked but my clothes are on the floor and they look intact. “We can skip the battle for my life. Is that clicking noise the thing that just tried to eat me?”

Darcy nods, holding up to me a shriveled heart the size of a ping pong ball. “Usually I eat them, but you can have it. It’s a permanent boost to your inherent magic. Eat enough of these and you’ll be able to shift on command.”

“Is that a person’s heart?” I ask to make sure the clicking noise thing is sapient like I thought it was.

Darcy looks at it and the corpse. “It’s a—” The clicking noise he makes sounds like that terrifying sound effect used for aliens in sci-fi horror TV shows.

“Can the terrifying clicking noise be classified as a person?”

He shrugs. “Yes, I think so. They’re an intelligence so foreign to this universe that I think it would be difficult to classify them as sentient and sapient, but I fall on the side of yes, they’re people.”

The heart beats in his hand as I look at it, considering my moral stance on this. The person is already dead and they’re not using their heart. If I don’t eat it, Darcy probably will, and how much do I want to be able to shift on command?

“I’m the Avatar of Good, and I think you should eat it,” Bellamy interjects, reminding me that Darcy and I are not the only people in the basement right now. He hands me the crutches, and I get them situated under my arms.

I slide my gaze toward him. “Sorry about the nudity. It wasn’t planned. I didn’t even know I could turn into whatever Darcy called me.”

“Feu follet. It’s the American swamp version of the will o’ wisp,” Darcy explains. “Different creatures; evolved from a common ancestor, though, and have similar abilities.”

“I’ll have to do some research into that,” I decide thoughtfully.

Bellamy reaches down and hands me the pants I borrowed when I got dressed this morning. I’m guessing since of the three men in that house, I’m most similarly sized to him, they’re probably his pants. “I’m used to seeing Darcy’s partners naked,” he says with a sly little smirk.

I chuckle as Darcy takes the pants, hands me the heart, kneels, and helps me into them. “I bet threesomes with this guy are fun.” A swell of affection hits me in the heart as Darcy pulls my pants over my hips and tucks my junk into them. “I’m not interested in that. It’s hard enough getting naked for one guy at a time, more than one and it might feel like I’m being fetishized or judged.” I wiggle my short leg to emphasize the point.

Darcy chuckles deep and dark. “Peach, th’ain’t no way I’m sharing.”

Bellamy huffs beside me, but whatever he’s thinking he keeps to himself, toeing the clicking noise corpse. “Will the gargoyles eat this?”

Fox and Romily join the small circle around the corpse, and Fox answers his question. “They won’t eat the corpse, but they’ll dispose of it. They usually return them to their dimension.”

Romily pats Fox’s shoulder affectionately, and I get the impression that he’s proud of his partner for using more words than usual. They’re cute.

I take a deep breath and pop the heart into my mouth. It’s the second most disgusting thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, but if I could get through Big Jim’s nasty Rocky Mountain Surprise, I can get through anything. I don’t gag on the heart. I chew it into swallowable pieces and get it down.

I give a full body shudder, horrified by the whole experience. “I might become vegan after this,” I admit, shivering again.

Darcy nods. “I considered doing the same after my first one. Fortunately they’re rare enough that you’ll probably never come across another one.”

That’s a relief. “You said if I eat enough of them I’ll be able to shift on command,” I remind him.

Darcy nods. “That’s true. We won’t know how many it takes until your body processes that one and we see how it changes your current magic. There are ways of finding the—” There’s that shudder-inducing clicking noise again. I don’t know if I’ll ever not feel like prey when he does that. “We can even summon them if we’re desperate.”

“We are not summoning beings from a different dimension just to murder them. I’m drawing the line there. That one attacked me first, so he brought the natural consequences of his actions onto himself. We’re not summoning them to harvest their hearts.” That’s a limit for me.

Darcy slides a hand around my neck and pulls me down, meeting me halfway. “Whatever you say, Peach,” he promises and kisses me, igniting the memory of the orgasm that brought me back into my body a few minutes ago.

I pull back before my dick can do more than chub up. We’re hours away from time for a fuck, and I don’t feel like edging myself today. “Grab my leg, will you? I want to go find all my shit so I can get you back in bed.”

A wicked smile splits his lips. “I’m very reward motivated.”

“Awww, you two are so fucking cute!” Bellamy deadpans, pointing at Romily.

My brow scrunches in confusion as I turn toward the man. “Are we?”

Darcy sighs, stomps over to my prosthetic and the bag, grabs them up, and stomps to the elevator. “We’re not cute.”

I frown at him. “I’m cute, and you’re sexy as fuck, and it’s fine if other people think we’re cute. They’re allowed to have opinions.”

Darcy struggles for a moment, but a smile lifts the corners of his mouth. “Come on, Peach, we’re burning daylight.”

I laugh, rolling my eyes and hopping into the elevator car. I’m pretty sure Hell doesn’t even have a sun.