Page 14 of Against the Veil (Endangered Fae #3)

“How do I know?” Zack bit his lip as his shout echoed in the bathroom. He struggled to lower his voice. “I don’t remember anything. Would I know that?”

“You’d probably be sore.”

“Everything’s sore.” He heaved a shaky breath, hesitating over his next sentence. “I don’t know. I really don’t. Diego…that was my first time. With anyone. Doing anything.”

“ Dios . Oh, Zack, I’m so sorry.” He laid a hand on Zack’s shoulder. “I don’t think he knew, either. He really was just trying to keep you safe.”

A bitter laugh jumped from Zack. “Oh, yeah. Which is why I woke up with his spunk all over my back. Dammit. It’s just as bad as getting someone drunk and raping them.

I didn’t have any say in it, couldn’t tell him no or stop.

” His breath hitched and he ran a hand irritably over his stinging eyes.

“Why did I bother saying no all this time if it was gonna end up like this?”

“My love?” Finn stuck his head around the door. “I’ve changed Zack’s sheets.”

Diego looked at him in obvious surprise. “Did you? That was very thoughtful, mi vida .”

Finn shrugged. “One learns, living with humans.”

With Diego on one side and Finn on the other, Zack managed to towel off and to make the walk back to bed. The hallway had never stretched out so long. His legs had never felt so much like rubber bands.

He settled back against the pillows after a long drink of water. “I don’t want to hear that I have to talk to him, okay? I don’t think I can ever look him in the eye again.”

“No one will force the issue,” Diego reassured him. “You want Finn to stay with you? I have to go downstairs for a few minutes.”

“Yeah. All right.” He might have fallen into an emotional pit, but he was smart enough to know he shouldn’t be alone.

Finn curled up beside him. Weird how that felt completely natural and comfortable.

Maybe not so weird since he trusted Finn completely.

He had joked once that it was because he’d walked around with Finn’s hand in his pocket and the hand had been a perfect gentleman.

It had been a severed hand in a jar, but Finn still thought it was funny.

“Zack?” Finn watched him, black eyes unreadable. “The sidhe Champion has made me angry, too, at times. But is it truly such a terrible thought? To have lain with him?”

“You hear everything, don’t you?”

“You were not terribly quiet.”

“Yeah, well.” He heaved a shuddering breath. Shit, I am not going to cry . “It wasn’t the being with him, bud. It was how.”

Finn propped his head on one elbow. “Shall I call challenge for you? Go and beat him senseless for causing you grief?”

“Um, thanks for the thought. You’re still under the weather, though, and I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“Just as well, I suppose.” Finn stretched out on his back. “Diego most likely wouldn’t take it well.”

“Did you know he was a virgin?”

Lugh startled and his head jerked up. Diego leaned in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. “Pardon?”

“Zack. Did you know?”

“Virginal?” Lugh grasped after a hundred thoughts at once, all of them skittering away. “But surely…a human male at his age… How could this be?”

“So you never talked about it. All the times you kissed him and groped at him, you never thought to talk to him.”

“I wished to. The chance eluded us. I had made suggestions, certainly, proposed joinings. He always refused.”

Diego’s voice softened a hair. “Even knowing that, you still don’t really know why, do you?”

“Why he refused me? I thought…no.”

“You’re right. Most males his age would have had lovers.

Especially someone as hot and sweet as Zack.

But certain things are important to him.

Monogamy. Fidelity. Waiting for the right person to have that first experience with.

He knows your history, your reputation, and I guess he figured you couldn’t give him those things.

He wouldn’t have asked you to change for him. ”

Shame flooded through Lugh. He had acted on assumptions, on things he thought he knew about humans, and had stolen something precious from Zack, something he could not, even with all his power, return. “How do I make amends? How can I atone for this?”

“I don’t think you can, big guy. Zack needs to work things through himself. You need to give him time. And space.”

“Yes. Yes, by all means. Whatever he needs.” Lugh yanked a hand back through his hair. “I am a great fool, Diego. I fear I have damaged things beyond repair.”

“You do have feelings for him.”

It was not a question. A shudder raced through Lugh. He felt as if he might shatter on the next hard breath. “Yes. He is…very dear to me.”

Diego snorted but was kind enough not to press the question.

“I will go, then, so my presence here does not distress him. To the apartment in New York, I think. I will have appointments to keep in the city this coming week at any rate.”

He rose but Diego caught him by the wrist. “Don’t you dare translocate there. You take a security detail. Maybe a friend, too. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

“But I am,” he answered miserably. He pulled Diego into a hard embrace.

He needed something to fill the void in his arms or the emptiness would devour him.

“Don’t fret so, little man. I may feel as if I will die of grief, but I know I most likely won’t.

” Perhaps . “I’ll…speak to Carol. Make proper arrangements. ”

“Good.”

“Take care of him, please.”

“We’ll do everything we can.”

A scream jerked Mink awake. She looked across the room where Kara had sat up.

“Was that Will?” she whispered.

“Yeah, dammit. I wish Bran would muzzle him so we could sleep for once.”

“That’s not nice, Kara. Those dreams scare Will out of his mind. They hurt him.”

Kara’s eyes glittered in the moonlight. “Bran could wrap his lips around Will’s dick. That’d shut him up.”

“Ew! That’s just… Bran would do that?”

“Well, duh. He is Will’s boyfriend, you dork.”

“No, I mean…” Minky flapped her hands in embarrassment. “Bran’s, like, top, right?”

“Also duh. Bran likes the control. Likes to make Will squirm and beg and make those little seagull sounds when he comes.” Kara did an imitation that was a little too close to the mark.

“Oh, God! TMI, TMI!” Minky clapped her hands over her ears.

She hurried out into the hall, tugging her penguin-print pajamas straight.

What Brandon and Will, or anyone, did behind closed doors was their business.

She didn’t want to hear about it. Asexual, Kara called her, saying she was sex-averse, too. Maybe. Sex is just gross.

Her inhibitions were a little odd to some people, she knew, but they weren’t even the half of the weird situation.

At first, it had just been her and Kara—the only person in Minky’s physics lab who would sit next to her.

From lab partners, they’d become friends and later roommates when they’d both wanted to move off campus.

Kara was caustic, sarcastic and prickly, but she was a protective social shield for Minky.

Then Will had appeared one afternoon, coming to sit with them without invitation in one of the student lounges.

He was quiet and sweet and seemed terribly lonely, so even Kara didn’t have the heart to shoo him away.

Will’s elfin beauty drew plenty of eyes and eventually pulled Brandon in like a magnet.

Brandon arrived in their lives like a hurricane, arrogant and sure of himself, full of ideas and energy.

No one quite recalled agreeing to it, but he soon had them playing Dungeons & Dragons every weekend, old school, with paper and pencil, with calculations and adventuring done in their heads instead of, in Brandon’s words, “some lame-ass program.”

Others drifted in and out of this core group for several months, but no one else ever seemed to fit.

It always came back to the four of them.

Kara and Brandon bickered. Minky had conniptions over the increasing PDAs between Bran and Will.

But they had fun together. They felt like they belonged together.

Then Nate sat at their table one day. With his sleepy smile and his tousled brown curls, no one questioned his presence, and suddenly, though no one said it, they felt complete. Nate fit, as no one else had, as if they had all known him for years.

The magic, the real magic stuff, came out of the woodwork soon after. An accusation of cheating one day left Nate wide-eyed and shaking. He had been rolling all sixes for two hours and Brandon insisted the dice were loaded.

‘I’m not cheating,” Nate had said in a small voice. “I’m just thinking about sixes.’

Brandon narrowed his eyes and handed him a different set of dice. “So think about threes instead.”

Nate rolled, his eyes unfocused, and only threes showed topside for a full ten minutes.

After that day, they’d all begun to discover what Brandon jokingly called their superpowers.

Kara could find lost things. Nate could move things with his mind.

Brandon had a Voice he could use to influence people to do what he wanted.

Minky could fade into the background, distracting people’s minds from her so she went unnoticed.

Poor Will had the most powerful and terrible gift.

He had premonitions and vision dreams and they usually weren’t nice.

Lately, his dreams had gone from ominous to freaking scary.

Now, Minky raised a hand and gave a hesitant knock on Will and Bran’s door. “You guys okay?”

Another scream answered her. Nate joined her in the hall, yawning and scratching his stomach.

He completely bypassed her inhibitions and opened the door.

One quick glance and Minky retreated into the hall.

Brandon was naked, straddling Will. Never mind the fact that he was trying to pin Will’s flailing arms, she still wasn’t certain they hadn’t interrupted something.

“Christ, Bran,” Nate said on another yawn. “Quit fucking around and wake him up. He’s gonna have a coronary.”

Minky covered her eyes as a soft orange glow filtered from the bedroom. The others claimed they could never see it, but she could. Whenever anyone gathered power, she saw it. It scared the hell out of her. She willed herself to blend with the wallpaper. You don’t notice me. You don’t see me.

A roar like a dozen hurricanes gathered in the bedroom. Then Brandon let the power loose, using the Voice, his words huge and terrible as if they were written in twelve-foot scarlet letters in the air, impossible to disobey. “William! Wake Up!”

Scary, scary, scary…

“Where’s Mink?” Kara had joined them and stood staring straight past her.

“Practicing how not to be seen.” Nate waved a hand more or less in her direction. “She’s here somewhere-ish. Being a fraidy cat.”

“Not,” Minky muttered and consciously let go the veil of magic that distracted people from her. If they were determined and stubborn, they might still see her, but her apartment mates usually didn’t try too hard.

The sounds from the bedroom had shifted from screams to broken, gasping sobs. Brandon had passed out. Will wept on his chest.

“He overdid it again. No control.” Nate shook his head as he walked over to the bed, checked Brandon’s pulse then sat beside Will to stroke his back. “C’mon, man. You gotta tell it. Tough it out and let it go. Bran knocked himself out to call you back, don’t let him down.”

Will’s breaths shuddered and heaved. He stroked Brandon’s cheek. “I’m sorry, love. I’m sorry.”

“Save it for when he’s awake, idiot,” Kara snapped. “Give.”

Nate shot her a quelling look, kneading the knotted muscles at the back of Will’s neck.

Minky slid into the room and settled on the chair by the door.

Tangled in the sheets, his face pale under his shock of white-blond hair, Will looked so vulnerable, so young.

Hell, they were all young, Bran the oldest at twenty-one.

This was way too much to put on a bunch of college kids. Failed college kid, in her case.

“Cyclones. Black cyclones,” Will finally whispered.

“Wherever they touch down, they leave everything twisted and charred. Ruin and horror. There were small ones at first. They came out of…out of unsettled clouds. But these…these were made. A powerful being made them. So much power. He’ll kill us all. ”

“Was the being human or fae?” Nate asked.

“I don’t…don’t know.” Will clutched Brandon’s hand to his chest as if he needed one steady point in the universe. “He’s so dark. So terrible. He shines with blinding light but devours all the light around him.”

“You’re not making any damn sense,” Kara snapped.

Will swiped an arm over his eyes. “You wanted me to tell it. I’m doing the best I can.”

Brandon woke with an irritated grunt. “Holy fucking hells.” Will snuggled back into his arms while Brandon stroked his hair, staring up at the ceiling.

“Somebody get me the aspirin. We can’t just let it all happen.

People are gonna die. I have an idea but I’ve gotta be able to think it straight through. ”

Diego lay on his stomach in the meadow grass of the Otherworld, Danu stretched out beside him.

The sidhe queen could be regal and terrifying when she chose, but this was the side of her Diego cherished, this half-wild mix of age and innocence that allowed her to sprawl in the grass with him watching crickets.

“What does one do with a werewolf?” he asked as he chewed on a violet stem.

“Kill it,” she answered softly. “It is necessary for the evil ones and a mercy for the good ones.”

“You know I can’t, majestad . It’s Zack. He gave up everything for us, and we love him dearly, Finn and I.”

“We love him, too, Taliesin.” She sighed and rolled to her side. “This is a human matter. So long as you keep this matter in the human world, I will not interfere. But I cannot help you. I know nothing of human maladies.”

The way she said it implied that there was more. “Is there someone who might help?”

She stroked a curl back from his forehead. “Perhaps it is time to seek the advice of dragons.”