Page 8 of Dark Stars

Housekeeping? That was…strange, to say the least. Bobby glared at the door, then scooped Alejo into his arms and hurried through the connecting door. Setting Alejo on the bed, he then quietly closed the door and locked it. Lifting a finger to his mouth before Alejo could speak, he then turned back to the door and peered through the peephole.

Just moments later, a woman came into view, wearing unremarkable khakis and the world's most generic green polo. She looked like she should be taking tickets at a mini-golf place, and nothing at all like housekeeping.

The woman stood in the middle of the room for a moment, as if weighing decisions. Eventually, she started moving around the room, poking through the desk and dresser, then the closet, bathroom, and finally she thoroughly explored his bed.

What was she hoping to find? He didn't recognize her, but a faint hint of a familiar miasma clung to her, the very same he'd sensed at the church. Still not enough to pick out which relative, though in the end it probably didn't matter; they were all bad.

The more immediate problem was that clearly the cult was on to them, somehow. At the very least, they'd noted there were strangers in town and wanted to investigate them, though nothing should have stood out about them. Hmmm. She hesitated again, then strode from the room.

Slowly and carefully opening the door again, Bobby beckoned to Alejo ,and they switched rooms again, like something out of a TV comedy, just barely getting into place as the woman gave up on knocking and entered the room.

Alejo huffed as Bobby claimed the peephole again. "Jerk."

"Shh,"

Bobby chided. As before, all the woman did was poke and prod through Alejo's things, which wouldn't tell her much of anything because neither of them were stupid enough to leave telling arcana items just lying around for anyone to find.

When she'd gone, he waited a few beats before withdrawing.

"Think it's safe to say they don't trust us."

Alejo prodded him in the chest.

"What happened? Why do I feel different? How did I get here? The last thing I remember, we were searching the school."

"You should have told me you were engaged to a demon and your protection was failing."

Alejo recoiled as though struck, face flushing scarlet.

"It wasn't any of your business."

Bobby folded his arms across his chest.

"You collapsed in the middle of our search, and I barely got us hidden away in time to avoid getting caught. I also had to fork over some of my blood to Leviathan in order to transfer the bond to me, and I'll have to do plenty more work later to break it once and for all. So yeah, it's my business."

"You did WHAT!"

Alejo slapped both of his hands over his mouth, though it was too late now to make himself be quiet. Dropping his hands, he curled one over the back of his neck, breath hitching.

"You really did it. I'm bound to you."

His face went even redder.

"Don't worry, I'm hardly going to keep the bond in place, unlike the rest of my family, who would love to have a human like you enslaved so."

He made a face.

"Not that they ever have to try very hard to get humans to do what they want anyway."

"Are you going to tell me what you are, finally? Speaking of things I should know while I'm bound to you."

Bobby made a face.

"I suppose that's fair, but you probably won't like me much after."

"You're not a demon, and they're pretty much the only creatures I one hundred percent hate with extreme prejudice."

That made Bobby laugh, even though his stomach twisted, because he was much, much worse than any demon. Scrubbing a hand through his hair, he went and dropped onto the edge of the bed, resting his elbows on his knees before finally dragging his gaze back to Alejo, who watched him intently.

"Have you ever heard of the Great Old Ones?"

"The Gods of the Primordial Dark. The most well-known of them is Cthulhu, the High Priest of the Old Ones. They're said to be older than everything else in the universe, and to look upon one in their true form brings instant madness."

Alejo waved a hand in the air.

"Anything is possible, including monsters older than stars, but they're largely considered myth, if not outright fabrication."

Bobby laughed again and pushed to his feet, walking right up to Alejo, forcing him back, until his back hit the door and he was caged by Bobby's arms.

"No myth, no fabrication, child of the dark stars. I am the grandson of Cthulhu, born from his daughter Cythlla, the Secret One, who against all instinct, fell in love with a human man."

He loosed his power by the barest bit, allowing his eyes to fully glow, the same vibrant green as the glow of a firefly, of distant stars that no mortal would ever see.

"There's no way…"

Alejo whispered, the glow of Bobby's eyes reflected in his own. He worried his bottom lip, and it took everything Bobby had not to surrender to an impulse to taste those lips himself.

"You're really a Great Old One?"

Stepping back, Bobby cast out an arm, and behind him on the wall, across the beds, a shadow rose up, bulbous and tentacled, twisting and pulsing.

Alejo drew a sharp breath.

Bobby snuffed his arcana, once more appearing as a perfectly ordinary, unremarkable human.

Delicate shivers ran through Alejo, and he reached up to wrap fingers around the pendant Bobby had given him.

"That's why you gave me this, why you said…"

"It's protection from me, yes, though mostly it's protection from my relatives."

He made a face.

"Like whichever one is skulking around here creating yet another cult."

Alejo frowned, pressed fingertips to his head, eyes pinching shut before he slowly opened them again.

"Did you…before…I mean…"

He shook his head, huffing in frustration.

"Does the name Ctheldush mean anything to you?"

"You remember that?"

Bobby asked, pleased for no good reason.

"That's the name I was born with, bestowed by dark stars. But my dad named me Bobby."

Alejo gave a small, sad laugh.

"I'm used to flirting hopelessly out of my league, but trying for a primordial being I didn't even think existed is a new low. Or high. Hmm."

Before Bobby could say anything, Alejo yanked open the connecting door and vanished through it.

Bobby sighed. He was starting to truly appreciate his family's obsessions with humans, especially his mother's. If she'd been this intrigued by his dad from the start…

Turning away from the door, from temptation, Bobby went to get a shower. It was time to get back to work, and once this area was safe, once Alejo would be safe once and for all, he'd break the binding.

In the shower, he cranked the water to as hot as it could get, then scrubbed and soaped himself to death. Climbing out, he dressed quickly, glancing out the window as he strapped his watch on and pocketed his wallet.

Not quite dusk yet, so he had time to go into the woods for a bit, resettle himself. Grabbing his keys, he rapped on the connecting door. It opened a moment later, to a flushed and clearly frustrated Alejo, who had his phone pressed to his ear, with very loud, very colorful Spanish coming out of it.

"Mamá, give me a minute."

Bobby laughed as Mamá immediately launched into what she thought of that request.

"Sure you wouldn't rather have the demon?"

Giving him an exasperated look, Alejo yanked the phone from his ear and said, "What did you need?"

"I'm going out, first to the woods and then to do some more investigating."

"I'm coming with you!"

"No, you should stay here and—"

"Absolutely not,"

Alejo said.

"Wait there."

He spun away before Bobby could reply, and resumed speaking to his mother, almost shouting as loudly as her to be heard, as he shrugged into a jacket and gathered up his things.

"Mamá, I have to go, I love you, I'll call you tomorrow, bye."

He hung up the phone and shoved it into a pocket. They hadn't even made it out the door when it started buzzing again.

Bobby grinned as he made sure the door was locked behind him, though recent events had proven he may as well just leave it wide open.

"Are you really sure demons are your biggest problem?"

Alejo made a face.

"Mi mamá is always number one, believe me. So why are we going to the woods?"

"I like to do it when I need to regroup, so to speak. You'll like this."

He hit the button for the elevator, and the doors immediately slid open. He chucked Alejo under the chin and then stepped into the elevator, enjoying entirely too much how the move made Alejo blush.

This was a stupid, foolish thing to do, but the more time passed, the less he cared. Alejo was a child of dark stars, and fireflies harkened to him, and he hadn't run screaming into the night when learning what Bobby really was. Not yet, anyway.

They took his truck, and Bobby headed off, following his own senses rather than any GPS, until they reached a park. Alejo kept shooting him curious glances, but Bobby refused to say anything. Not for any good reason, just to be a brat.

Climbing out of the truck, he waited until Alejo joined him and then led the way into the woods, walking for several minutes until the tug on his heart pulled him to a perfect clearing. Dusk was just settling in when he reached the center of the field, Alejo barely an arm's length away.

Only a few at first, but in rapidly increasing numbers, fireflies filled the clearing, winking in and out of color, a light show that nothing manmade could ever match. Alejo's breath hitched as the fireflies surrounded them, some of them landing in his hair, one on his cheek. Several others flocked to Bobby, brushing against him before flitting off again.

Tears ran from the corners of Alejo's eyes as he took it all in before slowly shifting his gaze back to Bobby.

"Why does this feel more right than any other single moment of my life?"

Bobby's eyes glowed as he reached up to caress Alejo's cheek with his fingertips.

"Because despite my attempts to be good and do what is right, you are meant for me, child of dark stars, though it is for you to decide the shape our relationship takes. I am a dangerous creature to be close to, in any way, whatever the protections I bestow, forged by my mother in a time and place beyond human comprehension. My father was born in 1413 by the metrics of humans, though if you factor in…a lot of things…he's a few thousand years old by this point. Those same complicated metrics mean I am much, much older than that, born and raised in a place where time is not so easily gauged. More trouble than is probably worth dealing with."

Alejo kissed him.

His hands were warm as they cupped Bobby's face, callouses dragging pleasantly across his skin. He tasted of cinnamon and petrichor, and felt dangerously fragile as Bobby wrapped his arms around him, pulling Alejo flush against him. He kissed shyly, hesitantly, as though expecting to be rejected.

Bobby was rarely ever that selfless. He deepened the kiss, tongue lapping at those soft lips before pushing into his mouth, tasting and claiming. Alejo moaned and shivered as he dropped his hands to twine his arms around Bobby's neck.

When they drew apart, though only barely, Alejo said softly, "I never get this lucky."

"You might yet come to think of it as bad luck,"

Bobby said, and kissed him again, because not in all the thousands of years of his existence had anything been as delightful as kissing Alejo.

They drew apart again as the last of the fireflies faded off into the night. Bobby lifted one of Alejo's hands to kiss the back of his fingers.

"Tell me how you came to be bound to a demon. Your family said only that a friend betrayed you."

"The man I thought I was in love with betrayed me,"

Alejo said bitterly.

"We'd been friends since we were children, despite the ages-old cliché of rich-poor between us. Not really surprising I'd fall for him, I guess. Pathetically predictable is more like it. When I told him how I felt, though, he all but laughed in my face and avoided me for like two weeks. When he called saying he needed my help…"

He jerked one shoulder in an angry shrug.

"Still don't know why he was fucking around with demons in the first place, and I wish I could hunt him down and kill him myself." He rolled his eyes and shrugged again.

"Kind of a lame story, in the end."

"The man sounds like a fool, and I hope he gets what he deserves."

Bobby kissed him again, not stopping until Alejo was clinging to him, all traces of sadness banished as he fed softly whimpered pleas into Bobby's mouth.

Reluctantly drawing back, Bobby sighed and said, "I suppose we must get back to work."

Alejo grinned shyly.

"I suppose."

Hand-in-hand, they returned to Bobby's truck, and he got the heat going once they were inside.

"So Wilcutt's house next?"

"Yeah, and if we don't turn up anything there, we can try the other teacher. We'll also need to visit the principal's house, but that might have to wait for tomorrow."

"Sounds good. Did you get Wilcutt's address?"

"Yep,"

Alejo replied, and directed him to it as they left the park.

As they got closer to town, Bobby reached out to the dark, once more asking for its help in keeping them from being noticed. As ever, the dark was happy to assist.

"What did you just do?"

Alejo asked.

"I felt you do something. Why did I feel you do something?"

Bobby smiled and reached out his free hand, twining his fingers with Alejo's when he took it.

"I told you before, I speak to the dark, ask it nicely to do things for me. My kind have always been close to the dark; it's more or less what we are, in many respects."

He pushed the barest trickle of his power, of his senses, into Alejo, so he could see and feel the way Bobby did.

Alejo gasped, the shock jolting through him like electricity.

"How…how do you handle this."

"It's normal for me, the filtering is as instinctive as breathing. But you can see why we primordial drive humans insane."

Bobby kissed the back of his hand, enjoying the way Alejo flushed and muttered something in Spanish too low to catch.

A couple of minutes later, he parked at the curb not quite in front of Wilcutt's house. They watched it for a bit. No lights, no movement, though Bobby thought he could hear the faintest heartbeat. Something small, maybe a pet. No other vehicles were around.

"No arcana that I can sense,"

Alejo said.

"It's like they killed her and forgot about her."

"Wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly what they did. I mean, they didn't even bother to clean up the blood after they killed her. Not unusual behavior for cultists like this, but still damned cold."

He climbed out of the truck and circled to join Alejo on the grass, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket.

"So what do you think? Just go through the front door?"

"I think we should scope the yard first. Could be traps, cameras, anything really."

"Fair enough. Let's go."

He headed off, and Alejo caught up a moment later, huffing in annoyance.

Bobby hopped over the low chain link fence that blocked off the backyard, and strode down what remained of an old gravel driveway. The backyard was overgrown, like it had been left to run wild over weeks rather than the mere days Bobby had expected. Strange when the front yard had looked pristine.

There wasn't much. A large patio with loungers and a firepit. An old shed in one corner, an even older car at the end of the driveway. Beyond the backyard was forest, right up against the fence and already encroaching.

"Where do you want to start?"

Bobby asked.