Page 39 of Inferno
“What?” Nerik seemed as confused about the request as Yorin was about making it. What did he want, exactly?
“I just… Does it feel like normal human skin? I’m sorry, I’m being horribly rude,” he interrupted himself. “This is just a lot to take in, and I… Well, I didn’t really… Um…”
Nerik stepped forward, slowly, so as to give Yorin plenty of warning, and held out his hand.
This was a stupid idea. Not so very long ago, Yorin had had Nerik’s penis in his hand. He’d touched Nerik quite thoroughly, and been touched in return. So what on earth was he trying to prove now?
Nonetheless, having asked, he felt compelled to try it, so he reached out and touched Nerik’s hand. It felt exactly the same as any other hand he’d ever touched. “Right,” Yorin said dumbly. “Yes. Sorry, I know I’ve touched you before. I mean, obviously,” he added, as heat flooded his face.
“You’ve had quite a shock in the last day or so,” Nerik said, sounding entirely too generous for Yorin’s comfort. “I’d expect you to have trouble dealing with this.”
“I’m not going to let anyone hurt you,” Yorin said emphatically. It was only after he’d said it that he realised it was true. “Gods, I didn’t… Fuck,” he said in the end, when words failed him. He rubbed his eyes with his hands, feeling the world slip sideways again. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
The question came out too raw, too honest, and they stood there, looking into each other’s eyes, a world of fear and hope and betrayal pouring out between them.
“I wanted to,” Nerik said eventually. “That was why I was asking you about the dragons, and the unicorns, and stuff like that. I wanted…” He stopped and sighed, and looked away. “I wanted to tell you. But everyone in Minia believes the demons are evil and the gate leads to hell, and I was trying to gauge how you felt about it all. And you seemed remarkably open-minded, but… Gods, Yorin, we’ve only been dating for about three days.”
“Four days,” Yorin corrected him. “But I’ve known you for over three years. And you held my dick in your hand, so there’s that.”
Nerik sagged in defeat. Yorin had been deliberately confrontational this time, too confused and overwhelmed to manage any better manners.
“I’m sorry,” Nerik said. “The simple fact is that if the wrong person learns the truth, I end up dead. And potentially, so do a lot of other people. So no, I wasn’t in a rush to tell you. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to.” He looked away, mouth turned down. “Do you want me to go?” he asked again.
“No. I have far too many questions.” All the ones that had sounded too confusing just a few minutes ago were surfacing now, demanding answers. Yorin stepped forward, putting his hands on Nerik’s forearms, then sliding them up to where the sleeves of his shirt ended. He put a hand on Nerik’s chest, feeling the level of heat through his shirt. It was negligible.
“How do you do that? You wereon fire. You were literally a living flame, and now you’re…” Yorin patted his chest, his waist. “You’re perfectly ordinary.”
“I can explain that,” Nerik said, not making the slightest objection to Yorin’s manhandling of him. “But it’s not a simple story. It’s… I mean… Damn it.” He shook his head, then tried again. “Most Chalandrians are a lot like you. I mean, they’re water-based, they have physical bodies that work much the same way, but their skin is a different colour and they might have horns, or a tail, or whatever. So when they ask a witch to make a glamour spell for them, it’s really just cosmetic. Make the tail disappear and the skin a different colour, and that’s it.
“For infernals, it’s very different. You can’t just slap a brown coating on living flame and think it’s going to work like a human. Before I crossed the Gate of Chalandros, I had to go to Incentino. It’s a huge city far to the north in Chalandros. That’s where the Major Coven of Witches used to live. They’re… well, most of them are dead now, but it was the powerhouse of magic, for a good few centuries.
“Witches don’t have a monarchy or a ruler, as such, but they did have a sort of a leader. Someone who was very powerful and had studied under the mages. She was called the Redfusio. I don’t think there’s an equivalent word in your language – or in mine, for that matter – so let’s just call her the Leader. The Leader at the time I went there was a woman named Vantasha. She was born to a very powerful bloodline. And she had a daughter. The daughter’s name was Kinario. Kinario had lived in Iddishmeil for several years and studied under the Stone King’s mages.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you just said,” Yorin interrupted him. “Sorry, do you want to sit down?” he offered, waving to a chair, and pulling one out for himself. This sounded like it was going to be a long story, and after the number of shocks he’d had that morning, he was feeling none too steady on his feet.
Nerik took a seat, then backtracked a little. “Okay, so Iddishmeil is one of the major cities in Chalandros. It’s the closest one to the gate. And the Stone King is the ruler of the city. He united a lot of the different species of Chalandros and established treaties for a peaceful existence for a large part of the land. He’s revered by a lot of people.
“There are two main species that use magic in Chalandros. The witches are the less powerful of the two, and they generally do health charms, or minor curses, or glamour spells and the like. The mages are a lot more powerful. They can control the weather, to a certain extent, or heal serious diseases, or read the energy off objects to find out information. For example, if a person was stabbed, a mage could read the energy off the knife to find out who did the stabbing.”
“That’s remarkable!” Yorin blurted out, unable to help himself. “By the gods, think how useful that would be! Unfathomable mysteries solved in the blink of an eye!”
Nerik smiled at that, the first time he’d done so since he’d arrived. “It has its uses,” he agreed. “But my point is, the mages are a lot more powerful than the witches, but the daughter of the Leader had studied under the mages. She was exceptional in her use and understanding of magic.
“So when it became clear that I was going to have no option but to cross the gate, I went to see her. I needed a spell that would make me look like a human, but a simple glamour spell was never going to work.
“Kinario spent three weeks putting a spell together for me. It cost me a small fortune in gemstones – literally everything I owned, in exchange for this.” He held out the obsidian gem that hung around his neck. “This magic doesn’t just change the way I look. It alters the fabric of reality. It bends time and space to mute the heat from my fire. That’s why you don’t get burned from touching me. It dissipates the smoke, it makes me far more waterproof in my human skin than I am in my native form, and it’s added a whole lot of extra details to my body that weren’t there before – hair, for example. Or the ability to taste food. Infernals don’t eat. We just absorb fuel. But as a human, I can actually taste things. It’s amazing.”
“So you don’t… I mean, you can… Sorry, I’m not phrasing this very well,” Yorin said, as he attempted to ask a question, or express some of his confusion. He took a slow breath and tried to get his thoughts in order. “I kissed you,” he said eventually. “And that didn’t burn me.”
Nerik nodded. “Yeah. I don’t know exactly how the magic works, but it makes it perfectly safe for me to be… um… to be intimate with a human, with no one getting hurt.”
Yorin stared blankly at him for a moment, as his mind turned that one over. “So I could… I mean, you could… Shit…” He shook his head. “What if…” Oh, fuck it, Yorin told himself finally. Just say it. “So you could have sex, with someone else inside your body, and that would be okay?”
“Yeah,” Nerik replied, far too nonchalantly for Yorin’s peace of mind. “That’s exactly the way it works.”
Yorin’s thoughts ground to a halt. Asking the question had been unnecessarily intimate. After all, he and Nerik had never actually… Hadn’t even really considered…
And yet, the image of it was firmly fixed in Yorin’s mind. And more than the image, a phantom sensation washed over him, of what it would be like to… Gods above, he was suddenly hard, sitting there at the kitchen table with a… what had Nerik called himself? An infernal?