Irregulars: Stories by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara (60 page)

At last Jason came with a muffled cry into Henry’s chest. As if inspired by Jason’s exuberance, Henry’s own body climaxed, spilling semen across Jason’s belly.

Jason smiled and lifted his face to meet Henry’s gaze directly. He looked both vulnerable and proud, like he had just won a marathon and wanted to be congratulated. He’d looked the same way briefly last night, just after he’d patched up Henry’s chest…flushed and tender, like he was waiting for true love’s kiss.

It was only then that the stupidity of this entire thing struck Henry. He was nobody’s true love. Hell, he was hardly decent enough company for the hustlers in the Tenderloin. Jason was probably too inexperienced to recognize it, but a man like Henry would be worse for him than letting a vampire loose in his living room.

He should have known better than to even lay a hand on someone as kind, clean, and young as Jason.

Henry broke away from Jason’s gaze and sat up.

“What time is it?” Henry asked, though he could see the clock easily.

For an instant Jason just lay there, looking stunned. Then he too quickly sat up. He turned so that Henry couldn’t see his face.

“Six a.m.” Jason didn’t look back from his study of the clock.

“We should probably get a move on…” Henry commented, but without any real intention. He just didn’t want this to become some kind of a scene.

“Right,” Jason agreed. But he still didn’t look back at Henry. Bright morning light shone across the planes of his straight back and tense shoulders.

Henry felt like a bastard, but he couldn’t let Jason start thinking that they were having a romance here. Jason would only end up hurt worse.

“Unless you need to use the bathroom first, I’m going to take a shower,” Jason stated.

“Sure, go ahead.”

Jason stood quickly, snatched some clean clothes from the crate beside his bed, and fled into the bathroom. Henry heard him lock the door behind him.

“Well, shit,” Henry muttered to himself. This was exactly why Henry spent more time with the dead than the living.

From the windowsill a tiny meow sounded as if in agreement with him. Princess lay in a patch of morning sunlight, watching him from over her scarlet tail.

Henry tugged his sweatpants back up and then stood.

“Did you get word to Gunther?” Henry inquired of the kitten. She gave him a curt nod, then hacked up a damp wad of paper.

“Nice,” Henry commented and he thought that Princess looked embarrassed, but then she busied herself cleaning the unnaturally long toes of her front paws.

Henry unfolded the wet paper to find a note written in Gunther’s neat, cramped script.

Good to hear you’re ok. HRD looked nasty. PR division cleaned it up. News will report a biker brawl if anything.

Trolls posted bail for the brownie we nabbed. Ten minutes later the Tuatha Dé Dannan regent unleashed his ambassadorial corps. They went straight for Carerra’s throat—demanded disclosure of all properties and persons seized during the Phipps raid. Cethur Greine’s definitely after Shamir and he’s got legal on his side. Carerra’s still holding out. Keep him on the down low for as long as possible. And just a warning: the guys in R
&
D to want a look at Shamir before anybody else gets a hand on him.

Take care.

 G.

Henry didn’t like the idea of Research and Development getting involved with Jason, though he knew he should have expected as much. He certainly wasn’t any happier about the sidhe regent’s interest.

Absently he registered the noise of the shower running in the bathroom, but his thoughts were far away. Princess butted her head into the back of his hand. He scratched her and frowned at the note in his hand.

He’d already suspected that the attack on Jason’s father and this latest grab for Jason were linked and that both would lead back to the Tuatha Dé Dannan court. Though, it struck him as strange that Greine would bother to dispatch ambassadors when he’d already loosed assassins. And if he’d known enough about Jason to hunt him down at his favorite coffee shop, then why had he drawn attention by confronting NIAD and demanding information about Jason?

It wasn’t like the bronze-skinned sidhe regent to fuck around with two radically different tactics.

Cethur Greine threw everything into his ambitions, whether that meant amassing an army of snow goblin mercenaries to assassinate a legitimate king or shoring up his claim to the throne by dragging the murdered king’s daughter to his bed. Greine wasn’t the type to relent or rethink his approach.

That uncompromising character was also largely responsible for the fact that even now, nearly thirty years since he’d assumed power, his snow goblin mercenaries still had to suppress violent protests and enforce curfews in every city of the Tuatha Dé Dannan Islands.

Henry had dispelled the furious phantoms of hundreds of Greine’s enemies over the last twenty-five years. And he suspected that if Greine ever did lay his hands on the Stone of Fal and claimed the famed power of the high king he’d be dispelling thousands more. Only the theft of the Stone of Fal limited Greine’s hold over his subjects.

At the time of the stone’s disappearance, agents and sprites alike had suggested that Greine himself had been behind the theft, removing it to ensure that the stone couldn’t reject him. It was said that the relic would only answer to the bloodline of the true high king.

But Henry had never swallowed that line. The stone had responded to usurpers before and there were always ways to cheat blood magic—particularly when Greine kept the daughter of the true king on hand to bed and bleed as he needed. No, Greine would want the stone badly enough to kill for it without a doubt.

But when Henry thought of the attack in the coffee shop, he scowled.

He’d seen the ruins of Greine’s enemies. They were murdered with brutal efficiency. Killed in an instant by assassins as silent and merciless as shadows. Greine wouldn’t have dreamed of hiring the messy, rough thugs that Henry had dispatched at the HRD Coffee Shop.

Henry would have bet his right thumb that those boys had been backstreet toughs serving a cause. Talented amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless.

Which meant the real soldiers were still to come. Automatically, Henry felt for the wards he’d placed around Jason’s flat. All still in place, but not untouched. Something had brushed over them and then withdrawn.

Then Henry noticed that Jason was singing something to himself very softly. The melody just carried over the spit and hiss of the shower. He had a beautiful voice. Princess tapped her front toes in time to the tune and purred.

“You like him, don’t you?” Henry commented.

Princess nodded.

Henry shook his head.

“You don’t even know him,” he muttered. Princess gave him a dark, assessing look, which Henry decided to ignore.

He listened to Jason’s song, feeling almost as if it were waking something in him, then scowled at his own drifting attention. What was he, an infatuated fifth grader? So Jason had a nice voice. It wasn’t going to do him any good when Greine’s assassins showed up.

Henry needed to think.

He read Gunther’s note again and this time the implication that Greine held some legal claim over Jason struck him with greater force. That alone disturbed Henry, but coupled with the events of the previous day, it also made one thing very clear.

 If the law were truly on his side, then Greine wouldn’t have bothered to purchase Jason through Phipps. Greine would have done just what he was doing now—manipulated the NATO Irregular Affairs Division do his dirty work and hand Jason over to him. So Greine hadn’t been the party Phipps had auctioned Jason off to, but whoever employed those angry goblin thugs seemed likely.

And if Greine had only just recently unleashed his ambassadorial liaisons, then he hadn’t known about Jason until after Phipps’s original deal had gone sour. Henry could think of only one person who possessed the time, knowledge, and character to have passed on information regarding Jason—for a fee, no doubt. He realized that he needed to get his hands on Phipps.

The water went off, and a moment later Jason leaned out from the bathroom door, looking a little shy and very wet.

“Would you mind tossing me a clean dishcloth from the kitchen? There should be two of them in the drawer.”

Then Henry remembered that he’d left Jason’s bath towels, damp and bloodstained, on the bathroom floor. He quickly located the dishcloths and handed them to Jason.

“Thank you.” Jason took the cloths and held one over his groin, still shy despite the fact that Henry had already seen and touched every inch of him. Or maybe shy because of that.

“No problem…” Henry felt an uncharacteristic heat flushing his cheeks. “Look, Jason…I need to go somewhere—”

The disappointment in Jason’s face stopped him as he realized how this was coming off, like he’d screwed Jason and was about to bolt.

“I guess you don’t have time to teach me anything, then.” Jason dropped his gaze and Henry silently cursed himself for fucking this all up and making the kid feel used.

“We’ve got a little time, but we’ll need to be out of here before noon.”

Jason looked up at him in surprise. His entire countenance lit up as he smiled.

“You want me to come along?”

“I wouldn’t be much of a bodyguard if I just left you on your own, would I?” Falk replied.

“I’ll get dressed right away.” Jason was already pulling on a pair of blue jeans. Henry had to suppress a laugh as he realized that the yellow T-shirt Jason shrugged on proclaimed him to be a “treble maker”.

“You want coffee?” Jason bounded out from the tiny bathroom.

“Sure. That’d be nice,” Henry said. He collected his trench coat from where it hung on the doorknob, and while Jason padded into the kitchen, Henry cleaned himself up and dressed in the bathroom. When he stepped out, Jason handed him a mug of hot black coffee.

“How did you get all the blood out of your clothes?” Jason asked.

“Enchanted threads—Gunther picked up the shirt and pants for me at a local goblin market ages ago.” Henry took a swig of the black coffee and wondered if Jason had added a little cinnamon to the grounds. “Blood dries, then flakes right off.”

“There’s still the bullet hole in the chest, though,” Jason commented over the rim of his coffee cup. “You sure you don’t want to borrow one of my shirts?”

Henry felt pretty certain he wouldn’t fit all that well into anything of Jason’s, not his clean shirts or his tidy life.

“Thanks for the offer, but when you’re known as Half-Dead Henry, a bullet-riddled wardrobe isn’t really a problem.” Henry glanced down at the tattered fabric of his shirtfront. “Anyway, the hole offers me a rare opportunity to tan my nipple.”

Jason almost choked on his coffee as he tried to stifle a laugh. Henry gave him a gentle slap on the back.

“Thanks,” Jason said, though he looked inexplicably flushed. Then Henry realized that his hand still lingered on Jason’s back, making the contact seem like a caress; the heat of Jason’s body radiated across Henry’s palm. He drew back, turning toward the cramped kitchenette.

“You don’t keep much of a pantry, do you?”

“There’s cereal and milk,” Jason replied, as if that constituted all the sustenance anyone could ever need. Henry supposed that, being a man who regularly ate cold chili beans straight out of the can, he couldn’t criticize. The shredded wheat cereal reminded him of old army mattresses, which probably meant it was good for him.

After he and Jason had both eaten, Henry decided to get down to work on Jason’s defenses. While he showed Jason a proper stance, Princess jumped down from the windowsill to lap the remaining milk from Henry’s bowl.

***

Henry wasn’t really the teaching type and his first few attempts to ascertain the extent of Jason’s power seemed to result in nothing. Whether he called a burst of cold blue flame or the tendrils of Lost Mist, he couldn’t seem to provoke the slightest magical response from Jason. Though, Jason certainly looked uneasy enough.

“Am I doing this right?” Jason asked. He eyed the guttering blue flames on his left suspiciously.

“You’re doing fine.” Henry tried not to sound annoyed. Normally, even the weakest nixie would throw off a few sparks in response to geysers of blue flame, but Jason demonstrated no discernable defensive reflex. If Henry hadn’t known better, he would have sworn there wasn’t a shred of power in Jason’s entire being.

He did note that each time he spat a blazing spell out at Jason he missed his mark by farther than he had intended. Henry’d never been one to miss his target, particularly not at this range and certainly not three times in a row. Some deft magic worked to deflect his assaults with a subtlety that aggravated him.

Standing at the foot of the futon, Jason looked nervous but utterly unaware of the forces surrounding him. He watched Henry with wide, dark eyes. His long fingers lightly tapped an uneasy rhythm against his legs.

“Let’s give it one more go,” Henry decided and Jason nodded his assent.

Just as Henry drew the burning power of an unformed spell into the hollow of his mouth—felt it flickering across the tip of his tongue—he saw Jason’s mouth move just a breath. Henry went still, straining to catch the word on Jason’s lips.