abit_unsettlin

At some point, they would have to go back to the doing the restaurant thing. The restaurant business, and all of that. At some point they would wind up going back into the world because the world wouldn't stay away from them forever. The wilderness was shrinking day by day. They had to find new places to fit in, slip between the cracks, live on the fringes. They couldn't just keep wandering for very much longer, not with Guy having his monthlies, as he called them when he wanted to piss off the wolf. Some people might be able to live their lives as vagrants, but not them. And they didn't have the advantage of expecting to be gone long before the advances of technology made even that freedom difficult. They had this land for a while longer, maybe another couple hundred years. Eventually someone would want to buy it, bulldoze it, and make a bunch of identical instant houses.

There were times when he thought maybe he should have taken that stranger up on his offer. Just because it might give them some place to go.

He didn't have to look very far to remember the reasons why he didn't. Because what he was interested in, what he needs to survive, was right here and can't be brought into fairyland so easily. Because what keeps him alive didn't have anything to do with his supposed nature. His friend couldn't come with him, and that settles that issue. So, no. Even with some place to go, and that would be far from certain if fairyland was any place to go. If the stranger was that desperate it might mean that fairyland wasn't so safe anymore.

This was safe. The cabin, out in the middle of nowhere, with enough private land surrounding that they could be alone. There was no worry about mortality, so no worry about the next generation and what they would do with it. Hell, right now there was no next generation. They could keep passing it on from name to name so someone didn't get suspicious and live there as long as they liked, unless someone got interested in buying it. And, hell. If that happened, he or Guy could run them off easy, just by being themselves.

They were safe.

( Read more... )

It was dark. It was night, so of course it was dark, but this was a starless and moonless night. No source of illumination for miles around but what he could make for himself.

That was a rare thing, these days. At least for him, for the places he went and the places he stayed, cities. Most of the time night time meant streets lit with the hissing electric lamps, yellow and soft white lights everywhere, the colored cast of neon. Night time meant that people needed the safety of their lights to keep from being robbed or assaulted, raped or killed, or so they thought. Not that it much mattered in cities these days. You could be lit up like Christmas and people would still walk by you, even if you were in trouble, if they thought it would be better for their own health and well-being.

Some things hadn't changed about humanity in nearly a thousand years.

( Read more... )

"Stop picking at that."

The wolf leaned in the doorway, staring at him with as much of a blank expression as he could manage. Anonyme winced, whether at the pain of pulling at his stitches or because of the attitude in the room, barely leashed animalistic anger at something upsetting the natural order of things, it was hard to tell. Nothing was right, right now. Nothing seemed right or okay.

He wasn't supposed to get hurt in a damned whorehouse. Whores were for fun. They weren't for getting murderized.

The stitches itched, too. Instead of picking at them and making the wound seep worse he tucked his hands under him and threw his friend a pointed look. Yves turned without saying anything further and stalked out of the room.

He sighed, bringing his hands up again to rub them over his face.

( Read more... )

She was really damn gorgeous. More beautiful than most of the women who had been out on these border towns for any length of time.

Black hair spilled down her back, just tanned enough to give her an even coat of gold tinge to her skin. Even coat meant she tanned nude, too, which gave him lovely images in his mind of her stretched out on someone's roof. Her breasts were large and pert, deep pink nipples taut and glistening where he'd been paying special attention to them earlier. Her stomach was smooth and mostly flat, with only the faintest impression left of the whalebone corset she'd been wearing until recently.

She had pretty eyes, too. Dark. They laughed with her, warm and copper and inviting him to explore the rest of her even when they'd both been dressed and downstairs.

( Read more... )

He hadn't slept in two days, and it was starting to wear on him.

The hunt had led him off into the woods of the Carolinas, and those were not even-landed woods. Hills, and many of them, and after decades, even centuries in the relatively flat lands of France he was not used to these hills. Running up and down, panting, wheezing. Heaving chest.

It would have worked better if he'd known who he was chasing.

( Read more... )

The first time he stole food from a place where people gathered, he was caught around the arm by a man in black. He remembered the word for black because someone had shouted it at him and because he heard it in the songs that she sung. He understood that his hair was as black as the night sky but he did not know what the word meant.

The man took his arm and took the food from his hand and shook it at him, and made sounds. Shaped sounds with intent and thought behind them. He knew the patterns that some of those sounds made, words like 'brother' and 'holy' but he didn't understand. All he could do was stare at the man in dark robes with his eyes wide and uncomprehending.

The man sighed. He squeezed his arm twice, the way he himself had checked an animal for meat to see if it was fat enough to eat. Was this man planning to eat him?

No, this man was planning to drag him. Into the building. Larger than any building he had been in before, with bells that rang loud above his head. He didn't want to go. People cooked things in buildings this large, they cooked and they would cook and eat him. He resisted, but not very well. He was too hungry for that.

The man in the dark robes dragged him in despite his best efforts to escape. It wouldn't have been difficult. The other man was as tall and broad as the shack in which he'd spent his childhood, and though he was a grown man he was still young and terrified. His knowledge of fighting was limited to getting out of the way of incoming blows, mostly by the expedient of running. He hadn't the first idea what to do to break the hold on his arm. And he expected to be beaten, abused or thrown into the pot.

No such thing was forthcoming. He was sat on a hard bench behind rows and rows of people whose heads turned to stared at him, and under whose varied gazes he shrunk down into himself. The man seemed about to admonish him in some way, but he crawled under the bench to hide. Under the bench was dark. He was alone, and safer.

All around him there was the drone of words he didn't know, voices and people were talking about things he couldn't picture in his mind. The words strung together like stars in the sky or beads on a string (though he didn't know what those were, either) but they had no meaning for him. They were sounds. Beautiful sounds. Sounds like she had made when he was tired or as they ate or when she mended his clothing. When they were out picking leaves to eat and drink. One of the songs he knew. One of those, she had sung. His mouth moved to make the words but he did not give them breath to remind the people that he was there.

Then there was the sound of many feet on the packed dirt floor, and there were voices less pleasing but louder, and many of them. He put his hands over his ears and wanted it to go away.

It did, in time.

Then he was alone. With the cool dirt packed solid and clean, more clean than he was used to. A solid plank of wood over his back, enclosed and safe in darkness as long as he didn't look over his shoulder or turn to his left. He closed his eyes so that he couldn’t look and tried to make it all go away.

He woke because the other side of the bed was empty, but he didn't get out of bed until the indentation in the sheets had cooled and he could smooth his hand over the soft Egyptian cotton sheets and not feel where the other had been. Then he levered himself out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom.

Something clattered downstairs. Guy was up, making breakfast, or getting things out to make breakfast. Man was fussier than any wife in the kitchen. Didn't let him near his pots and pans, didn't let him make anything but the simplest of cooked meals, but that was all right. He ate better if he let the werewolf cook, anyway.

( Read more... )

[from this]

This time, he doesn't drive Dean to a hotel room. This time, he drives him outside the city, to a hill. Probably privately owned land but he doesn't exactly give a shit. It's obscure. It's out of the way.

It's private.

He isn't sure what Dean expects of him, tonight. He thinks he's made it clear enough that he isn't putting out for the kid, so if Dean starts trying to get into his pants he'll have another few thoughts coming his way. But he isn't sure what else the kid expects of him. Hell, he isn't sure why he's doing this. He's never been entirely sure.

Creature of whimsy, he is. Something of a wild creature. Not entirely human. But Dean should know that by now.

Every so often Murphy asks him something. It's only natural; there's a lot of history there. He doesn't even know how old he is, but he's damn old. Only natural for people to get curious.

That, he hadn't expected. That kind of question seemed natural once she'd asked it, sure, but he hadn't expected it. Didn't know what to say to it. There were reasons he didn't mingle among high society, lots of them. Most of them stemming from the fact that he was an uncouth bastard, didn't know when to keep his mouth shut sometimes, had no problem saying things that would make a sailor blush.

The deep-down reasons were like that, only worse. The deep-down reasons were because he was an uncouth bastard who didn't know how to behave among people, who spent the first fifty, a hundred years or so of his life faking it. His best friend had been literally raised by wolves and he was still more civilized than the man Murphy knew as Alan Donnelly. That man didn't even have a name of his own. Hadn't learned to speak until he was full grown. Barely knew what the difference was between one human being and another, man or woman, apart from looks. Which, hell, birds all looked different from one another, he knew that. Didn't know why.

He damn well hadn't known the difference between a rich man, a poor man, beggar, thief. Between a priest or a crafter or a trader or any of that sort of thing. Those were the kinds of imposed ideas that came with being raised among people. He'd been raised by one woman, crazy woman. Never told him anything of his life. Never told him anything at all.

He's grown up some since then. Grown up a lot. Hundreds of years of living will do that to you, now it's impossible to tell he ever grew up rough at all. Looking at him, hell, it's impossible to tell he ain't quite human. But he remembers. He remembers real well; it's the difference between him and everyone else, and he's never managed to get over that.

He went straight over to Murphy's, still wondering what the hell was up with the kid, still roiling around inside from what her friend had given him. Still missing Guy harder than he had when the wolf had actually left. He just wanted his friend around to talk to him, make things be normal again. Not like he was going to call Guy up and say so. That really would be being a pussy.

Still. He finished his cigarette in the car on the way over, clothes thrown on, windows down. Music off, still. Distracted, still. Goddammit. His thoughts were running around in circles and he hated that, he hated when the noise inside his head was greater than the noise out.

He pulled up, saw the smoke rising. Smiled slightly as he walked up to the door. Fire in the fireplace, huh. And whiskey waiting. Now he really was glad he hadn't done anything with the kid. Some girls were worth the trouble, worth keeping.

He still wasn't too sure what he was going to do with this kid, but he was a firm believer in the idea that actions had consequences. And if the kid was going to call him out and give him a put up or shut up ultimatum, well. No skin off his cock to put up.

He grabbed the boy by the fabric of his sleeve and dragged him out to the parking lot, to an old but well cared for blood red Trans Am, a relic of the early 80s. Couple pop cans in the front passenger seat, but remarkably clean nonetheless. And smelling of tobacco smoke. Not cheap cartons of cigarettes, real tobacco.

"Get in," he told the kid as he walked around to the driver's side.

6. She was laughing. He liked it when she laughed. He liked to look at her when she laughed, all jiggling above him with soft flesh over curvy muscle. She really was a damn fine woman, and somehow she'd agreed to come along with the likes of him. Not that he was looking too closely at it. Not when he had better things to look at.

"Now what are you smiling at, old man?"

( Read more... )

1. He laid her to rest under the rock.

After three days he had decided she wasn't going to get back up again, like the beast they had had once, and some of the birds and beasts he had seen. He laid her in a shallow place on the earth and piled rocks over her like she done with the beast, and then he pulled the house down around her. This place would not let him live. It had barely been enough for the both of them.

He chose a direction at random and started walking. After two days of eating nothing but berries and leaves he came across his first village.

( Read more... )

The light was blinding when they brought him out. Something like an approximation of daylight; he wondered if he was in the world again or still in the Never Never, as they called it these days. Or whatever half-realm he'd been dragged to.

They'd knocked him out again, and when he woke up he still couldn't move, limbs weak and unresponsive as though he was still asleep. They dressed him in something that felt homegrown, homespun. Soft, but handmade. Spun from real sheep or real cotton plants, spun by human hands (or non-human, but the point was, not by machines) and woven on looms. Cut, sewn. Not tailored. Parts of it hung loose and it was tight across the chest and shoulders; built for someone not as broad as he was. Someone slightly taller, too. He wondered if that was just what they had on hand or if they'd meant this for someone else. He wondered what color it was. All he could see was blinding whiteness.

His vision adjusted slowly. They came out to trees standing in the sky, a sky that was kind of blue but darkening fast. Night was falling. An unnatural night, judging by how fast and the lack of stars coming up, the lack of a moon. Even if it was a new moon, he'd seen night fall often enough to know what it looked like out of doors in a wooded area, and this wasn't it. They were still in the fae lands.

Goddammit, Guy, where are you.

He was being carried by something big. He was starting to be able to move his hands, too, twitch his fingers, toes. Not enough to be able to do anything, but it was more than he had a while ago. He was being carried on some kind of make-shift stretcher. By two big ... things.

And they weren't the only ones. He was surrounded by fae, most of them smaller and goblinoid, chattering in a language he didn't understand, the few words he could make out sounding mostly like "Mine! Mine!" or "Yes!" or "Now!" One of them sounded something like "Blood." One of them like "Fight." He wasn't sure what they were talking about. There were others. A couple humanoid-looking ones, and one that might have been anything in a cloak and cowl. And from the looks of the pillars looming in front of him they were taking him to a stone table.

He'd heard stories of stone tables. They're not good. They're used for sacrifices and nothing else, and the only one here who's trussed up like a Christmas turkey is him. He tries to struggle. The best he can manage is opening and closing his hands.

They slide him off the stretcher and onto the stone table and he lays there, one leg kinked up under his body, unable to shift. His head is rolled to one side and he can see the little goblin things pacing back and forth along the side of the table. One of them glared at him and looked like it was going to spit on his face. The other cuffed it upside the head.

The sky went dark just before the droning and chanting started. He still didn't know what was going on but he could feel the power seething along his skin, like ants crawling. He didn't feel the first cut but he felt the body-heated liquid running down his arm and it didn't take him long to realize what was happening. They'd opened up his wrist. They'd opened up both wrists. He was going to bleed out if they'd done it the right way, but he couldn't tell, there was no sensation. Just the heat and the liquid dripping down and the impending sensation that at this point he would likely be dead by the time anyone got to him.

He was clean again. Sort of. He'd been scrubbed down by someone who had only a vague notion what they were doing, cleared of all the surface dirt but his hair was still greasy, and there was still dirt under his fingernails. It was like someone had turned a hose on him, and he didn't remember it.

They'd done it when they'd left the food, while he'd been unconscious. That question of how exactly they were going to feed him and if they intended to at all had been answered by his abruptly feeling woozy and tipping over, followed an indeterminate amount of time later by waking up with a metallic taste in his mouth and a plate of bland on top of bland food in front of him. They did that four more times, which would have told him something if he had any idea what schedule the feedings were taking place on. Twice daily, three times daily. Once a day probably wasn't it, he wasn't hungry enough by the time the food came around. Then again, time was going wonky here. He was going wonky. He was going stir crazy.

He knew the number of paces across the room lengthwise, widthwise, and diagonally. He knew the number of paces to every pillar from every side of the room. He had dug deep into the dirt with his hands and nails until he wore his fingertips red and hit what felt like stone. It wasn't worth digging any further. He'd probably be dead before he got anywhere with it.

What did he know so far? Not much. He knew this was magic. He knew they wanted him alive for something, they were feeding him and cleaning him like livestock. He knew ... they had minions shaped like goats. Beyond that... nothing.

So much for dream-Murphy's helpful advice. Though the rest of her stay...

No, that wasn't true. She hadn't given him any reason to think he could get out on his own, probably because he couldn't. But she'd reminded him that he had friends. And he had faith in his friends. Friend. Guy would move heaven, earth, and all the realms in between to get him back. And he would do the same for the wolf.

Guy might bitch and moan endlessly about it, but he would. They'd gotten each other out of war zones, prison colonies on islands, even the Crusades once, or was it twice. They'd gotten each other into and out of more trouble than he could conveniently think of; he could probably spend the rest of the time until he was taken out and killed remembering all the times they'd saved each other's sorry asses. I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry to put you through this. If he managed to get killed before the wolf got there.

"You're not going to die," he muttered. He'd given up trying not to talk to himself by now. "Dumbass." He would have tried to say it in Guy's voice but their voices didn't match up and it didn't much matter anyway. It was the kind of thing Guy would have said.

Poor Murph. She was caught up in their crazy life now, and she didn't have to be. Shouldn't be. They should talk about that when he got back. If he got back.

He paced up and down the cell some more. Leaned against the wall, cool against his skin, and banged his head slowly on the wall. This ... walls closing in, no doors, no contact with anyone, nothing to do but pace and thing and pace some more, sleep and eat and he was going mad. Hallucinations. Nightmares when they knocked him out. Thoughts going in circles ranging from the suicidally maudlin to the homicidally deranged. The urge to scrabble his fingers against the stone walls was driving him mad. He wanted out. He wanted to feel the wind on his skin, see the moon over his hands, hear the sounds of the world again. Not this, not ... not this.

He wanted out. He wanted out, out, "I want out!" Roaring. Banging on the wall with his fists. "Let me out you pig-fucking sons of bitches!" He wasn't even sure whether he was speaking English or Irish or French or what. "Let me out!"

Silence. Of course there was silence. He could beat his fists bloody against the walls, the stone wouldn't care. He bashed his fists and then he bashed his head and then he dropped to the floor, crying, shaking, cold and unaware of just how bad he was because there was no one there to show him if only in the reflection of his madness in their eyes.

He'd managed to wrench his shoulder out of the socket for absolutely no-goddamn-thing. His wrists were bloody and raw and the rope stung when it rubbed against them. He had planted his face in the dirt twice. His jaw hurt where his chin had slammed into the ground.

"Sonofabitch," he muttered, staying still and quiet in place while he tried to think of what else he could do. These were damn good knots. And the beer he'd had not long ago was making its presence felt in a big way. This wasn't the best position to be in when a guy had to piss. "Stupid sons of bitches..." The walls were smooth. The floor was smooth, there was nothing to cut the ropes on.

"What the hell do you want from me?!"

He wanted to pace. He should have been pacing, up and down, up and down. He would have been pacing if he hadn't been fucking hogtied and dropped on the ground like a sack of potatoes. He started to struggle, feeling the ropes cut into his wrists further, his ankles, falling over sideways and writhing in the dirt. His shoulder ached and moved in ways he knew to be unnatural.

In another few minutes he felt it before he smelled it. No matter how many times he'd been thrown into jails, into pits, pissed himself or worse from the conditions he was kept in, it just wasn't something he'd gotten used to. Now there was that mixed with the blood and sweat and filth, and even he was starting to get sick of the smell. Hell, he was getting sick of the smell, the position, the...

... rope. The rope was finally slick enough to give way.

He struggled further. There was a trick to the way he struggled, there was an angle in it, he knew which way he had to pull to slip the rope off his wrists and when he finally fell over with one wrist free all he could do was lie there and pant. Breathe.

The other wrist came free with much less effort, and then he could twist around and undo his ankles. He tried to stand, almost toppled, remembered as he dropped to his knees that his muscles needed time to come back to life. Dammit. The second time he stood it was leaning against the wall, and shaky.

"All right," he muttered. "Let's see what I got to work with."

Not much, as it turned out. The room had no door as far as he could tell, though it was big. Really big, the size almost of a high school gymnasium, a rented out ballroom for a discount bargain bin wedding. The walls were stone, the floor hard-packed dirt all around. There were, there seemed to be four pillars of petrified wood or stone towards the middle of the room, but other than that there was nothing. No sign of how he got in there. No sign of how he could out. No light. No food. No water, which was now starting to be a concern.

No idea how he had gotten in there. No idea how he was going to get out. Fucking magic. He didn't have magic, centuries of Guy calling him fairy boy hadn't told him what he was, he had no magic and therefore he had no way out of here, and no idea if they were going to feed him or what they were going do to with him or even if they were going to do anything with him ever again, whoever they were in the first place.

For the first time in a very long time, he was starting to feel the edges of panic.