Page 12

12

MERCER

Mercer was doing an outstanding job of nothing at all.

He was at the tail end of a migraine, having laid in bed with Kat slumped worriedly against his legs for an extra hour until the worst of the light sensitivity faded and his stomach stopped flip-flopping. At that point, Kat had begun casually licking his face. He dragged himself up and into the kitchen to refill her bowl for the day, only to find it already done and Lydia miraculously awake and alert, sitting on the counter eating Cheetos from the family sized bag. She’d clearly been at it for a while, based on the thick coat of cheese on her fingers and the smear of it along her phone. She was swapping sparkly skulls around her screen, but one look at the bright, colorful display made Mercer wish he’d stayed in bed.

“Morning, Puck,” Mercer muttered.

“Morning,” she grumbled right back through an orange mouthful.

He eyed her drearily as he fished yesterday’s mug off the drying rack. Something seemed… different. She was too peppy for 8:30am. And there was an inch-long brown thing stuck in her braids.

Mercer prodded it, trying not to open his eyes too wide lest he accidentally resurrect the worst of his migraine. “Is that… a dead leaf?”

Lydia shook her head and shoulders, dislodging his touch and pushing the tangled ex-greenery off. “My god, Dad, why do you have to be like that?”

How could someone so small and precious sound so incredibly snippy? Mercer couldn’t decide if he wanted to hug her or strangle her. Instead, he bit his tongue and went for a gentle, “I was just asking a question?”

“Are you?” Lydia snapped back, clearly mocking the indecisiveness of his tone. She rolled her eyes. “Yes, it’s a dead leaf. It’s fashionable.”

She was lying to him. Mercer wasn’t entirely sure why or about what, but she was. His instincts told him to push for more—leaves were from the outside—if she had been outside this morning—if she’d left the house without him knowing, and she’d forgotten her meds, or a seizure had hit unexpectedly—

But no. She was fine. She was alive and well and here, and she was fine . Mercer forced himself to breathe. Lydia didn’t need his anxiety, particularly when she was clearly in some kind of mood—maybe she’d been having insomnia again and not told him? If she wasn’t sleeping, it would put extra stress on her body and—

And he could not fix that by making accusations.

Mercer forced himself to breathe and smile. “Well, I suppose you are Puck , after all. Leaves are your natural habitat.” He fished a handful of Cheetos out of her bag.

“Hey!” She tried to pull the entire package away from him far too late, but her posture relaxed, a tiny quirk coming into her lips.

He ruffled her beanie. “Finders keepers.”

Lydia’s nose wrinkled. She leaned forward suddenly, and like a great white coming in for the kill, she chomped down on the ends of the Cheetos poking out of Mercer’s fist. The effect was to squish far more of the crispy orange sticks against her chin and cheeks than into her mouth. “Abort! Abort!” she coughed, spewing crumbs in her wake.

The sudden motion made Kat spring up from her post-breakfast lounging, her tail bursting into waggles as her ears perked. She barked once, jumping at Lydia’s legs like she could save the day if only she was tall enough to lick the crumbs off her face.

Despite the subtle pounding still lighting pain through one side of his skull, Mercer cracked up. He rubbed Kat’s head with one hand and smeared an extra line of the orange dust across Lydia’s cheek with the other, giving a maniacal cackle.

“Child abuse!” Lydia shouted, waving her hands in front of her face. But she was laughing—really, truly laughing, the kind of reckless giggling that he’d barely seen from her in months.

The sound made Mercer’s heart swell. Ignoring the orange dust, he wrapped his arms around his daughter, snuggling her against his chest. She made a disgruntled noise and wiggled as Kat bayed excitedly at them again.

“Daaaaad. I have to wash my hands!”

“And your face!” he laughed, letting her go and stealing another handful of Cheetos from her bag. Kat gobbled up the pieces that dropped from his fist.

Lydia bumped her shoulder playfully into his side, but as she moved to the sink, Mercer’s attention caught on the way she washed her fingers, awkwardly avoiding getting a brand-new band-aid wet.

He could feel himself scowling in the sudden pressure that built behind his eyes. “Did you get cut?”

Lydia flinched, her momentary joy dropping away. It hurt Mercer to watch it go, hurt him more to know that he was taking it from her. “I’m sorry, Puck. I’m just—”

“Worried, yeah.” She slid her wet fingers over his hand. “But it’s a tiny scrape. I’m fine , Dad, really.”

That was another lie. It made Mercer’s heart ache and his throat tighten, but it was all he could do to flip his hand around and squeeze hers. “Okay,” he forced out, quietly. “I believe you.”

An untruth for an untruth; was this their relationship now? But Mercer didn’t know what else to do.

As she strolled back toward her bedroom, Cheeto bag still in hand and Kat trailing happily in her wake, he wondered: did they even own band-aids with stars on them?

No matter how his relationship with Lydia twisted and turned, at least he now had his days with Rahil, if only for the moment.

Every time Rahil joined him in the shed, he had to remind himself that it was a business transaction. A momentary blip of touch and laughter that Mercer was, very decisively, not going to keep, for Lydia’s sake most of all. But, God, after nearly three straight weeks of working with Rahil, he was certainly enjoying their time together in the moment.

Though he’d never tell Rahil that.

Mercer grabbed the vampire’s wrist as clinically as possible, raising it to the silver cord awaiting him. It slid tightly into place.

Rahil watched him with a casual expression, one eyebrow lifting. “Do you really need to keep doing that? You should know by now that I can simply be asked to stay put.”

“I do know.” Mercer lifted an eyebrow right back at him, adding flatly, “But you enjoy this more.”

“Oohhh,” Rahil replied, and his grin was so outright devilish that Mercer had to turn away to keep his face neutral. “My pleasure is your command now, is it?”

They were not flirting. Of course, Rahil was still flirting with him , but it took two to tango and this was, at best, a dance in which Mercer had allowed himself to be momentarily pushed around on a gym class roller-board. “If that were true, I wouldn’t keep wasting our time together by staring at a chunk of golden metal.”

“You’re forgetting the bits where you probe me with that metal and ask how it feels .”

“Oh, no,” Mercer chided, already lifting his unfinished gold—which he’d taken to calling unholy gold, in direct contrast to holy silver—out of the safe box. “I do that because I enjoy it.” He graced Rahil with the smallest of smiles, taking a quite-definitely-unholy amount of pleasure in it; he could pinpoint the exact unholiness of it by how aggressively his unconscious tried to shame him for the impropriety. Which was, frankly, silly, since these particular pleasure responses didn’t even involve sexual thoughts… At least not anything more sexual than Rahil already seemed committed to perpetrating, with his innuendos and open shirts. Mercer was pretty sure he wore so many of the old-fashioned ruffles just to taunt people into grabbing onto them. That was one scenario Mercer had spent far too long imagining just before bed last night, shame be damned.

“Do you also enjoy edging?” Rahil asked. “Because I think that’s what you’re doing to our poor unholy gold.”

Mercer nearly choked, recovering with barely a hum in the back of his throat as he forced himself to nonchalantly glance up at Rahil. “ Our unholy gold?”

“You wouldn’t have it if not for me.”

“As you so eloquently assured me, I technically don’t have it at all yet.” Mercer was trying to hold out hope. Every improvement had been followed by a sudden nosedive, if not a full-blown crash that required a brand-new piece of metal. They were, at least, finally making Rahil feel things.

Though, as he kept putting it, he’d felt things from the moment he laid eyes on Mercer. Mercer would remind him every time that he was fairly certain Anthony Hilker had no use for an erection-inducing metal.

“To reiterate—”

Rahil cut in, “You have nothing but me and my pleasure.”

Mercer continued regardless, concealing his desire to smile by scowling pointedly at the metal he held. “—when the current alloy is pressed to your skin, you experience ”—maybe that was better than feel —“a slight tingling at the site, and some minor dampening of your abilities?”

“More like a very minor throbbing, the slight sense of exhaustion, and a delightful fluttering of butterflies in my stomach—though I think you’re the cause of that last one.” He winked.

Mercer narrowed his eyes skeptically. “Exactly how long ago were you in middle school?”

“No one is too old for crushes.” Rahil shrugged. “I should know, I’m… sixty-four? God, am I sixty-five now? Time is a construct anyways.”

Sixty -five? He didn’t look a day over forty—or act a day over twenty-three, for that matter. “You…” Mercer started, then the facts hit him. “Vampire,” he grumbled.

His brain presented him with the unwarranted thought that considering the slightly extended vampiric lifespan, they’d die around the same time. Unless Mercer’s fae blood also gave him a few extra years—he hadn’t known his own fae parent long enough to know whether or not to expect that—or something other than age took one of them first, an accident or illness for Mercer, or vampire hunters for Rahil. Not that it mattered, since they would only be working together for a few more weeks or perhaps months at the most.

Rahil bared his fangs proudly. He leaned forward, giving them a little predatory snap in the vague direction of Mercer’s throat.

“Oh, you don’t dare.” Mercer stared at him— hard— half hoping he wouldn’t take the bait and half hoping he would . Not to be bitten himself; he had no interest in that, surely. But if Rahil felt like pushing… Well, Mercer could push back. He would give the obstinate flirt something to moan about, if he could justify pulling the item out of storage.

The vampire didn’t push, but he did pull, twisting as he made a show of examining Mercer’s neck. “You know with muscles like those, you’d be a delight to sink a fang into…”

Mercer stepped forward, his mouth a line, his eyes narrowed. “Would I?” He was goading Rahil now, he knew, and he didn’t know why he was doing it—this wasn’t exactly the time—but he couldn’t help himself, like he couldn’t help the ways his body reacted as Rahil leaned closer, tongue glancing over the tips of his fangs.

Rahil’s throat bobbed. As he stared at Mercer’s neck, he made a sound of desperation. “It would be nice,” he pleaded.

“For you , I’m sure it would be.” The little shudder that ran down Mercer’s spine wasn’t exactly fear, but it wasn’t void of that either. He took the tiniest step back.

Rahil’s mouth moved with him, his brow begging as his lips hung open. He whimpered.

Mercer held up a finger, not quite touching him. “Don’t move. I have something that might solve this problem for you.”

“What—” Rahil started, but Mercer pressed his fingertip to Rahil’s lips.

“No questions. This is yes or no only.”

Rahil seemed to contemplate that for exactly 0.03 seconds. “For you? Yes.”

“Good.” Mercer turned back to the bench, digging through a drawer until he found—ah, he had one premade still. Without explanation, Mercer took hold of Rahil’s chin and nudged open his jaw. The round insert of pliable material was the perfect size to slip into Rahil’s mouth, forcing his tongue down as the vampire’s brow tightened with confusion. His eyes were alight still, curiosity clearly outweighing his worry. When Mercer instructed him to bite down, he did so, and released on a second command.

Mercer pulled the mold free: a perfect array of teeth imprints with two long, lean fangs. One of them curved slightly inward. It seemed oddly familiar, but since Mercer had gotten into the business of vampire kink, he’d taken a dozen similar modeling sets before, and they never ceased to remind him of the fangs still sitting in his holy silver box. He hadn’t properly looked at those for so many years that he wasn’t quite sure his memories of it were even accurate. He could probably have modeled the same vampire’s teeth since and not realized it.

The thought sent a shudder through him.

Rahil interrupted it with a clearing of his throat and an awkward laugh. “I thought for a moment you’d decided you’d had enough of my flirting after all.”

“Really,” Mercer said, flatly. He lifted his gaze, giving Rahil a purposeful stare before pulling out a case of his working fang caps. Of the four differently sized sets, none of them fit close enough to the measurements in Rahil’s mold. Rahil’s fangs were fairly unique after all.

Perhaps he could make Rahil’s a custom set later, if he ignored how much effort he’d be putting into something he was only doing for a chuckle. Maybe Rahil could enjoy them with whoever he decided to obsess over next. The mix of reassurance and distress Mercer had at that thought was too bizarre for him to dwell on.

He turned his attention to the elaborate kinky muzzles of metal swirls and lace, picking one that could clip into Rahil’s hair and around his ears.

Rahil’s nonchalant manner slid a little. “You’re not planning to gag me, right?”

“I think you might die if you can’t speak, so no.” Mercer turned back to him, holding up the muzzle. “Lift your chin.”

“What—” Rahil started again.

Mercer pressed a thumb beneath his jaw and hooked the muzzle carefully into place. With the tiny gaps between the metal and fabric, it didn’t entirely hide the sight of Rahil’s fangs, but as he twisted his face, the cage concealed by the elegant design butted against Mercer’s arm, keeping Rahil from catching it with his mouth.

“Cruel,” Rahil muttered.

“But not a gag.”

That didn’t stop Rahil from pouting. “You lock away my fingers and put my other best asset in a cage.”

“And at no point have you refused,” Mercer reminded him, having far too much fun for his own good. If Rahil was going to taunt him so purposefully, it was only fair that he got the chance to retaliate.

“People pleaser, remember.”

“So you’d let anyone torment you like this?”

That made Rahil’s mouth shut entirely. He finally grumbled, “Only anyone with hands like yours.”

“Hmh. Compliment accepted, I suppose.” Mercer turned toward his metal workbench, scowling at the unholy gold.

What to try that he hadn’t already? Over the last three weeks, Mercer had gone through every step of the holy silver process forward and backwards, tracking results and comparing them to the way the holy silver reacted to Rahil’s body. If he really wanted to be sure his creation was working, he’d need a vampire who wasn’t immune to test it on, but at this rate, it would be months before that happened.

Anthony was already sending him questions about his progress, though his emails had been getting buried in the threats from William Douglas. At least, up until yesterday afternoon, when those threats had suddenly ceased. He hoped that meant the man had given up.

Mercer glanced back at his phone just in case. Still nothing. That should have comforted him, but somehow no sign of William was worse. At least when the emails had been coming, his fear had a target; now he had all those same anxieties, but they built pointlessly in his chest, so amped up they were prone to start eating him alive soon.

Mercer began heating the gold a little aimlessly, hoping something might occur to him as he played with it.

He still hadn’t gotten anywhere when Rahil butted into his thoughts. “How are you still single, with your good looks and all these glorious arts and crafts to use as leverage? I know your wife’s passing was hard, and it takes time to feel ready for a new partner after a loss like that, but surely you have enough life left that you want someone to spend it with?”

“For the record, I am only forty-one, which is plenty young still. But I’ve been happy on my own thus far, thank you.”

“All alone?” Rahil sounded hesitant—no, not merely hesitant, but worried for Mercer, as though at the wrong answer he was prepared to assign Mercer a companion.

Mercer’s mind flew to Lydia, his beautiful sharp little girl with all her fresh barbs and the growing dryness of her humor, and he wanted to tell Rahil that he was the farthest thing from alone. But that wasn’t quite true. And he found he didn’t want to tell Rahil about Lydia—not for her protection, but for—for—he wasn’t sure. It felt like if he knew about her, it would be a reason for her to know about him ; and Mercer couldn’t have that.

Regardless of what context they were introduced in, with Rahil’s fangs out, Mercer could not predict Lydia’s reaction: her fear, all that trauma from Leah’s death pulled back to the surface. There was a good reason why Mercer kept his customers away from his daughter, and this was no different.

“Not always,” was the answer he went with. And then, nudged out of him by an unwarranted ache in his chest, he asked, “Do you have anyone?” He had not thought his own voice could still sound that gentle when talking to someone other than Lydia, and the shock of it almost caused him to fae-spark the nearest atoms into his molten metal. He could not bear to check behind him for Rahil’s reaction, but by the mirrored softness of his voice, it seemed to have done similar things to his vampiric associate.

“I could,” Rahil said. “There are people living with me—friends, I suppose you could call them, though I’m more like their benevolent landlord who charges them nothing and occasionally eats their food—and my family never fails to include me in their group chats. I still have some contact with my ex-wife’s family too, on occasion.”

“Ex-wife?” Mercer glanced back then, unable to stop himself from meeting Rahil’s gaze. “How long were you together?”

“Almost twenty years.” Rahil looked so weary, a deep, settled sadness that Mercer understood, born from a love profound enough that it never quite went away. “Our divorce was… well, not amicable, but not surly either.”

“You loved her still?” Mercer guessed.

“Very much. We just… we didn’t know how to turn that love into something that would help the other anymore. We did try again, finally, years later, but…”

“Are you still in touch?”

“She, um.” Rahil’s voice broke, barely returning as he averted his gaze. “She died of lung cancer about a decade ago, right after we got back together.”

“Ah. I’m sorry—for all of it.” It wasn’t quite his own story, but Mercer understood parts of it, nonetheless. There was nothing for him to protect or mend here though, and he didn’t know what more to do except to either wrap his arms around Rahil, or else change the subject. He cleared his throat. “Were you a vampire before you met her? If that’s an intrusive question, don’t feel as though you need to answer.”

“No, no, you’re good.” Rahil seemed to pull himself back together as he said it, his lightly forced grin revealing the tips of his fangs behind the muzzle. “I turned the year after we met. It threw a slight wrench in our engagement plans—vampires were only considered marriageable material in certain states at that point—but we worked it out. Both our families were unusually kind about it, though hers needed coaxing. Mine I had to coax into backing off , if you know what I mean. But I’d rather that than the alternative. It could have very easily gone worse.” He looked thoughtful as he said it, a little forlorn and almost… conflicted? The expression passed too quickly for Mercer to be certain. Rahil chuckled. “At least you didn’t have to have that awkward ‘Hey Mom, Dad, I’m a fae,’ conversation with your family.”

“Ha, well. My parents weren’t in the picture for long. It was my human grandparents who raised me. That conversation had far less sitting down and talking and a lot more of Grandma shouting about the changes five-year-old me had made in her favorite porcelain bowl.” He smiled at the memory, his grandma half-dressed in her Sunday best, staring in shock at the stones now molded into her dishware. “They had their flaws, but they were good people. I wish they were still here for—” He cut himself short before saying Lydia . That was the exact can of worms he’d already opted not to open.

His shortstop seemed less sudden, though, as Kat immediately began baying from inside the house.

Usually he’d disregard her barking—most likely targeted at whatever small animal she’d noticed on the lawn—but with all the threats from William Douglas of late…

Mercer stepped toward the shed door. Immediately, Kat went quiet again.

Just a visiting rodent after all, then. That was fine. Everything was fine.

Mercer forced himself to shake off the twist in his gut. William Douglas had stopped contacting him yesterday, and no other holy silver solicitors had found his home; and he could hardly check on Kat every time she barked. He turned back to his workbench. Fighting to regain his focus, he skimmed his fingers aimlessly over the supplies he’d gathered before Rahil’s arrival, still uncertain what to try next. He settled on simply the prototype metal, scowling at it. Maybe he needed a different approach…

“It sounds like you were always working toward this kind of craftsmanship then?” Rahil asked, clearly referencing their original conversation.

“Ever since I learned how to spark,” Mercer replied. Between the conversation and the metal in his hand, he could feel his body finally relaxing. He glanced at Rahil with one eyebrow purposefully raised. “I was properly good at it, too, until you arrived.”

Rahil outright smirked. “Distracted by my many fine attributes, huh?”

“And your terrible flirting.” Mercer bounced the metal up and down a few times, feeling the subtle pressure differential he assumed had to be his fae abilities interpreting a transfer of energy with each touch and toss. He was getting nowhere.

Maybe he needed a reminder of where they’d left off.

“Give me your hand,” Mercer instructed.

“Well…” Rahil teased, opening and closing the one bound up in Leah’s cords.

Mercer stared at him flatly until the cheeky bastard finally extended his free arm. Carefully holding Rahil’s hand with only his fingertips, Mercer pressed the metal to the vampire’s palm.

A little shudder went through Rahil that Mercer worried had nothing to do with their attempt at unholy gold.

When Mercer laid his own palm over the metal, he could sense the subtle radiation emanating off the gold, the tiny shifts in Rahil’s cells because of it. Rahil slid his fingers between Mercer’s, squeezing them gently. His smile was so soft it hurt.

It was just nonsense flirting. Just—

Mercer inhaled sharply, half the unwarranted tug at his heart and half the feeling of the ways that the gold’s radiation was subtly influencing Rahil’s body, transformed by whatever molecular processes kept him safe from the influence of regular holy silver, then refracting back in far smaller quantities into the metal. There was something there, something—

Mercer pulled away so quickly that Rahil swayed, giving a little whimpered sound that was probably just surprise filtered through this playful persona Rahil had chosen to adopt with him. Mercer ignored him—ignored the stupid thing his own heart was still doing—and put his mind to the shift he’d felt in the metal. If he could just mimic that, they might actually have something.

Alone, no amount of Mercer’s fae spark could shift the atomic arrangement in the exact way he needed it, but he retrieved a few other compounds that felt right and set to work. This was art as much as it was chemistry and physics. Asking the universe to change for him did not come for free; he had to give something to the process: love and understanding, a nurturing touch with a desire for beauty, for creation and not destruction.

It was a little like being a father, he thought, as he pressed his golden alloy into the first of its transformative helpers, feeling the hopeful transition of it under the influence of his spark.

He could barely hear Rahil’s questions behind him, but somehow his brain picked up on the distant slam of a car door, just distinct enough to trigger a leap in his chest as hope collided with worry. The subtle rumble of a portable speaker followed, blaring one of Lydia’s favorite songs.

She was early.

Mercer’s spark snapped out, the transformation he’d triggered stopping with it. The softball practice he’d hesitantly let her join on a trial basis just for the summer training season wasn’t meant to end for another hour—which meant something had happened. She’d been hurt. Or her heart wouldn’t stop palpitating. Or they’d sent her home because she’d seized, and—

They’d have called him. If there was an emergency, someone would have called him; someone would be coming to his door, not just the meandering sound of Lydia’s music and her off-tune singing beneath it. But if she was here already, that meant…

Mercer’s gaze shot toward Rahil, and despite all his practice shielding his true feelings, Rahil must have seen the panic in his eyes.

Rahil’s brow lifted. “Who’s that?”

“No one,” Mercer answered, as the music very obviously moved toward his house.

“I bet you tell that to all your vampires.” There was an edge to Rahil’s saucy tone, but he didn’t seem upset, so much as offended. Hurt.

Mercer couldn’t let himself be swayed by that. “It’s not important for you to know,” he said, trying to keep his voice free of emotion. Lydia’s music was still getting louder—which meant she’d diverted around the front door, maybe when she’d realized Mercer wouldn’t be inside.

In a guttural, sing-songy voice, Lydia shouted, “Daddyo?”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Mercer shoved his metal back into its lock-box and latched it as he called back, “Coming, Puck.”

Rahil was staring at him now, his eyes big and his brows high. He hissed under his breath, “You have a kid ? Why didn’t you mention you had a kid !”

A million reasons, Mercer wanted to say, but he knew they all boiled down to a couple that he, frankly, didn’t feel much like putting words to. He retrieved his phone to disable the trap cords. “We’re done for today.” His fingerprint reader misaligned on the first try.

“You—”

From the side yard, Lydia’s music volume lowered. “They double-booked the field,” she said, voice closer with every step. “So we did some stretching and got let out. Mx. Tanner says we’ll reschedule.”

Not a sudden and terrible injury then. Good, good.

The relief Mercer felt was contrasted in Rahil’s face, though, as shock, then panic transformed across it. He pulled aggressively at the cord on his trapped wrist.

Mercer was so confused that it took him an extra second to actually hit the trap’s unlock. Rahil was free and across the barn in a blink, pulling himself onto the tables and toward the cracked window above the shed door, his muzzle already discarded.

What the…

“So, can I, um, can I help in here?” Lydia called in, knocking on the side of the shed as she moved toward the door.

Mercer wanted to be overjoyed that she was asking at all—she was asking and Rahil was leaving, doing his best to stay out of view of her—but the speed at which he was attempting to abandon the space seemed so peculiar that Mercer just stood there in shock instead, watching as Rahil slipped on his first attempt through the window. Rahil thudded against the wall, scrambling back up just as Lydia strolled through the doorway. She stopped, squinted, and pushed her beanie back a hair from her forehead.

“What’re you doing here, Ray?” she asked.

Rahil’s throat bobbed. His lips pulled back in an uncomfortable grin, and said, “Hey, kid.”