Vision Quest (15 page)

Warm breath. White skin. Freckles. "How much ..."

The thud of Blaze's heart from inside Blaze's chest. The way Blaze's grip dug into Arik's muscles. The slow rise of both of their bodies. "I think I'm ..."

Blaze caught a breath. Arik's eyelids fell, and he kept away Blaze's impending speech with a light kiss. He pulled back, only enough to let his words tickle Blaze's lips, "... falling in love with you."

"Arik. No."

A flash of brilliance slashed across the inside of Arik's eyelids. Blaze choked. The spark of sensation between their touches snapped into a sizzle that stung skin; an elastic band sharpness that was so intense it hurt. Arik opened his eyes with a start. Blaze pulled back and away. They stared at each other in stunned silence.

A single drop of onyx liquid slipped from Blaze's left nostril.

The sound Arik made surprised him—like the mewl of a child getting candy yanked away. With a slow hand Blaze reached up, dragged his fingertips along his upper lip, and drew them back again to stare at the smear that stained them. Blaze lifted his gaze, caught Arik's eyes with his own, and there was more pain than could possibly be associated with physical agony in Blaze's expression.

"Aw, Arik." Blaze's voice was so tired. So defeated. "God damn it."

Blaze rushed for the sink, praying in a silent chant of,
No, no no,
that the drops wouldn't become a deluge.

"Holy shit," Arik panted behind him in the tone of the thoroughly stunned stupid. "You're bleeding."

"What did you think would happen, exactly?" Blaze muttered, more to himself than Arik.

"But it's ... black?"

Because it's old.
"So I've noticed."

"Holy shit," Arik repeated, in awed horror.

Turning on the tap and shutting his eyes, Blaze splashed water on his face. He wanted to be angry at Arik for that little psychology Quest experiment, but he was too tired. And even this bit of theatre was old news; a bad magic trick. It wasn't the first time someone pushed the boundaries just to see what would happen or if Blaze was lying. One of the many reasons Blaze kept information to himself was the damnable temptation some men had that involved testing the edges of razors to see if they would still slice.

"Are you ... is it stopping?" Arik asked, hovering, now, and flapping his wings. Blaze snatched a wad of toilet paper off the roll and shoved it up to and into his nose. It came out mostly clean, if damp, and Blaze and Arik breathed a sigh of simultaneous relief.

"Well," Arik said, after a moment of silence punctuated by dripping sink water. "I guess there are worse ways."

Blaze reminded himself that he had sworn long ago only to use his powers for good or for what the Universe required, but his look still made Arik flinch. "Worse ways, what?"

"To find out that one's boyfriend loves ... one?"

"Boyfriend," Blaze said dully.

"You have a better word for it?"

Inmate. Stalker. Bitch. Punchline in the Universe's Eternal Bad Joke.
"Maybe." Blaze's head ached, and there was simply too much shit to comprehend. He thought about renouncing his Visions and the Quests right then and there, just to die and get it over with, already. "What the fuck, Arik?"

"Hear me out," Arik said, quickly.

"Do I have any choice?"

"Not really?"

Blaze rolled his eyes, snatched up a towel off the floor, and brusquely dried off while gathering up his clothes. Arik followed him out of the bathroom. "Everything was fine until you said, 'No.'"

"It usually is," Blaze retorted, tossing aside the towel and starting to get dressed.

"No, listen, please, I think we can ..." Arik paused. "You going somewhere?"

Blaze realized he'd been reaching for his shoes. He realized he'd been about to run out the door and not stop running until he was a pile of shining, stinking, stale goo to be scraped off a sidewalk by some poor fool with a shovel and a gas mask. And he realized that there was exactly no point. Where the hell would he go? How far did he think he could get before he dissolved? One pace? Ten? And what about Arik? What about holding him in the shower and being the one whom Arik trusted? Talked to? Cared for? What about feeling the strength in his arms, the heat of his skin? What about the fire poker of desire that had speared Blaze when Arik had promised dinner, dancing, and then to make a blissful ruin of Blaze's body? The Vision came back—of Blaze with his arms held and their joined cries to heaven. That one, and a dozen more that may be Visions or might be simple daydreams, of bedrooms and the interior of cars and shaving together and holding hands and seeing where Arik lived and worked and what color he'd painted his home's walls and where he stored the pans in his kitchen, if he
had
pans in his kitchen, and ...

"Does it ... do you hurt?" Arik stood directly next to Blaze, his dark eyes wide and full of concern. It was real, that affection, and Blaze knew it. He started to reply only to discover he'd been making soft sounds of distress. He clapped a hand over his mouth.

"Blaze?"

Blaze shook his head. "Not in the way you think."

Arik rested a hand on Blaze's back, and Blaze wanted to tear off the shirt he'd just put on so that he could feel the spark between skin-on-skin.

"What I meant was that you haven't bled the entire time we've been together until you said, 'Arik, no' when I told you that I'm falling for you."

Knees weak, Blaze sank onto a convenient sofa. "And?"

"And ..." Arik knelt in front of Blaze. "I think you know what it means."

Arik was wrong. Blaze didn't have a clue. Or, if he did, it was buried beneath too many years and too many deaths. He stared intently at anything that wasn't Arik. "I think I'd rather hear your version."

"You're going to make me say this, aren't you?" Arik complained.

"It's your damned theory. Speak it."

Arik took a moment to gather wit and balls. "Okay. You believe—no.
I
believe that we're together for a reason. I believe in the Visions, that you have them, and I have my own version, too. I believe that not all of my father's crazy was ... actually crazy, though what he did with it and how it drove him made him an asshole. I believe the seeing-shit thing is hereditary, just like you seem to think, but I have more control over what I see and how I use it than you think you do."

"Know," Blaze corrected. "I know you have more control over it than I do, and that's a good thing, Arik."

"I agree, and I can see how you or ... whatever happened to ..." Arik took a breath. "There've been too many coincidences that aren't, actually coincidence that have happened since we've met for me to think anything other than we're supposed to be doing something together. Fixing something, solving something. And I believe you when you say you think it's your fate to wander the earth helping people out by using your gifts."

"By going where the curse takes me, yes," Blaze said, and he flinched when he realized he'd used the word 'curse.'

"What is it?" Arik asked, hushed and glancing around.

Blaze touched beneath his nose and put the other hand to his throat, feeling the steady thud of his pulse. "Oh, nothing, just dodging lightning. Go on."

"Yeah. Okay." Arik swallowed and didn't, in fact, continue.

Blaze glanced at his current lover, who was managing to look pale and ashen beneath a dark flush brought on by half an hour of hot water and by embarrassment amassing by the second. "Arik?"

"Your belief in what you do is so strong that when you believe you deviate from the course, it presents as a physical ailment," Arik said in a half-yelled rush. "And since this Quest is about you being able to love someone again after you got hurt so badly by whatever or whomever it was that made you like you are now, when you said you didn't, in fact, love me or denied it or whatever you started to—"

There was a metaphoric axe in Blaze's torso, its blade hovering over the pounding wad of muscle that was his withered heart. "
What?
" he asked, and Arik flinched, staring up at Blaze as Blaze got off the sofa. "
What are you saying, this love that hurt me? What do you know of it? Of Doru? Have you seen Doru?"

"Blaze—"

"
Answer me, damn it!"

Arik sprawled on the rug in the sitting room, towel loose, eyes huge, and legs akimbo. "Blaze? I don't speak ... Is that Romanian?"

Blaze's lips smacked shut so hard and so fast that his jaw popped. He'd been speaking the homogenized Romanian that was his native tongue and hadn't even realized he'd been doing it. He was scaring the shit out of Arik, and it was only going to get worse from here. There'd been a corner, somewhere, that they'd rounded; a line, at some point, that they'd crossed, and from here on out, there'd be nothing but pain and anguish and suffering. Misery, decay, blood ... loss. Death. Grieving. Weeping.

Blaze took a step toward the main door, reconsidered, and spun, taking strides to the balcony. When he heard Arik hot on his heels, Blaze rounded on the other man. "Do not follow me,
Ves'tacha.
Not now. Not like this. A moment, give me. A moment."

Arik's face was so full of wonder and shock that it hurt Blaze to see it, and he spun away from that handsome face, those tender hands, that young and vibrant and unmarred body. He yanked open the door and stepped onto the balcony off the bedroom. By all rights, it should be well into nighttime, but it was not even twilight. The sun shone, the clouds rolled, but the stretch of private beach was nearly deserted. The roof overhead offered Blaze's fair skin some shade, and he sank into a wicker chair made plush with striped cushions.

He'd thought he'd come out here to think and organize his overtaxed brain, but Blaze's mind was blank and quiet. For long moments of endless lapping waves, he wondered if he was in a kind of shock or denial, but realized, at last, that he was resigned.

Arik was right. About everything. Blaze had known it the first time Arik made his crazy proposal about being there for Blaze, and Blaze had been fighting the truth tooth and nail, fang and claw. And now that the panic had passed, Blaze understood that Arik didn't have to know about Doru to understand Blaze had been hurt by love, though the details were not exactly accurate. Arik was even more sure of Blaze's feelings than Blaze, himself. Arik was braver than Blaze had been. And truer to self.

With a heavy sigh, Blaze glanced over his shoulder. Arik was not in the bedroom, nor in Blaze's line of sight, which was fortunate. Blaze didn't want Arik to see what Blaze had to do to prove to himself what Arik already knew. Blaze pulled off his shirt, wadding it up and already mourning its loss. He stared at the worn fabric and hunched over it. He took several deep, cleansing breaths.

"I, Blaze, of the Zaituc
Vitsa,
son of Oraj,
Rom Baro
of our tribe, long dead ... do not ..." Blaze buried his face in his shirt. "I do not love one Arik Bel—"

Blaze didn't get to finish. A horrible chill stole through his insides, hollowing him out, and he gagged, heaving up a mass of black blood bile that he caught with his shirt. For a horrible second, he didn't think he'd get the chance to breathe, but after the next spasm that left him coughing and hacking, Blaze managed to gasp, "I love him ... I love him, gods and ancestors help me ..." The chill was dissipating, the pain vanishing as though it'd been a bad dream. "I love him with heart and soul, as I have loved none other since Doru Machwaya, son of Tritin, brother of Meerna, my ... long-dead betrothed."

The blood dried. When he could, Blaze sat up, and he wadded his befouled shirt into a ball. He wiped his mouth with a sleeve, dropped the ruined mess onto the boards below his feet, and collapsed back into the chair. He let himself wallow in the unfairness and the insanity of it all. He said all the things to himself that he thought he should say—how unfair this was to Arik, how Arik deserved better and more, how much of a bitch the Universe was for afflicting them both with a fate that had been Blaze's to earn and Blaze's to suffer without having to share it with a good, sweet man.

And when Blaze was done uselessly denouncing the Universe on both his and Arik's behalf, he stood. It was evening, now, and cooler, and it was a relief to feel the relative warmth of the hotel room after he slipped inside. Arik was in the sitting room at the table with a laptop, clothed now in a robe instead of a towel, and he leapt to his feet when he saw Blaze. Arik touched his own chin, frowning at Blaze, and Blaze diverted into the bathroom. Blaze washed the dried muck off his face, swished with mouthwash, and, after thinking it over, stripped and grabbed his own robe. He put it on and was tying the sash on the way out when Arik met him in the bedroom.

"Hey," Arik said.

"Hi." Blaze tried a smile. "Where'd the laptop come from?"

"Jakob. He brought whiskey, too."

Blaze took, squeezed, and kissed Arik's hand. "Good." Blaze headed for the table, passing by the computer and seeing the sealed bottle of imported Scotch. "What were you doing?"

"Trying to learn Romanian. Or, well, Roma, I guess, right?"

Blaze didn't answer, fetching a pocket knife out of his bag and going for the bottle. He cut the seal and poured two glasses.

"Because it's like ... a dialect? Slang, sort of, I found a few words." Arik blushed and fidgeted with the back rung of the dining chair.

"It's a lot of things now that it wasn't, then," Blaze said, handing Arik a drink. "To me, it's just my mother's tongue. My father's. My people's."

"Where are your people?" Arik asked.

"Dead." Blaze drank deeply. "They're all dead."

"How?"

"Let's sit."

Blaze checked the lock on the main door and sat on the couch next to Arik, facing him. Like mirrors, they put their arms on the rear of the sofa, and their fingers touched briefly. Sparks flew, and Blaze inched away. He wouldn't be able to concentrate on what he had to say if they were connected like that. "You're a sweet man," Blaze began, "for thinking that my urge to avoid love is a simple one."

"I never said it was simple," Arik protested.