Those Words I Dread (Tales of the Tuath Dé #1)

5

Julien climbed the worn stairs to his apartment, pausing at the open landing when he saw a familiar figure leaning on the guardrail.

“Hey, you’re clean today,” the man chuckled as he glanced over his shoulder.

“Hello, Noah,” Julien answered without much enthusiasm. Noah was younger than him, only twenty-six, with a slender frame and a pretty face that made him look even younger than he was. His dark hair was too long in the front, always in his face and rarely combed, and his clothes were always well-worn and a week late for the laundry. He had silver piercings in his left ear and at both corners of his bottom lip—snake bites, Noah had called them. The hunter leaned against the railing beside him and lit a cigarette, pausing a moment until Noah nudged him for a handout like always. The younger man tucked the cigarette into his lips and leaned over to light it from the burning end of Julien’s, then returned his elbows to the rail and stared out over the rooftop below.

Noah had been an unexpected asset during Julien’s stay in Vancouver. They had met only a few days after Julien moved into the cheap apartment building where Noah lived. Noah had caught him coming home late at night with his torso covered in iridescent green muck, and instead of panicking or calling the police, he had touched it and smeared the blood between his fingers. “Is that from a lamia ?” he had asked. “I didn’t even know there were any here.” He had smiled while Julien stood stunned, then immediately demanded to know all the details of his encounter with the monster. Julien had found a fast friend in him, and Noah had been helpful to his hunts on more than one occasion. He had a fascination with monsters of all kinds and an encyclopedic knowledge of the traits, habits, and weaknesses of more varieties than Julien could count.

It was true the boy was a witch, and Julien was still adjusting to the idea that magic could be used for purposes other than evil, but so far Noah hadn’t given him any reason to be concerned. He kept to himself, never did magic in front of people, and had never shown any indication that he was dangerous. He was even a vegetarian. Still, Julien found his eyes frequently moving to the wine-colored birthmark just below the younger man’s ear. The stained skin was a common hallmark of a witch, said to feel no pain and shed no blood when stuck. He hadn’t had to test it on Noah, since he’d announced himself, but the mark was a constant visual reminder of who Julien was associating with.

“Work hard today?” Noah asked him as he exhaled a breath of smoke.

“Surveillance,” Julien muttered. “Whoever the fairy is staying with is helping it.”

“Not a woman, right?”

Julien shook his head. “No. Some Chinese kid.”

“Well that’s helpful, I guess.” He looked over at the hunter beside him, watching the pensive frown on his face as he pushed dirty blonde hair out of his eyes. Julien scratched at the stubble on his jaw and leaned back against the railing without looking back at him. “What are you going to do?”

“Think. And watch some more. Something will come to me.”

“What,” Noah smiled, “you’re actually taking the night off? We should do something,” he pressed, nudging the other man with his shoulder. “You don’t relax enough. We could order take out, watch a movie, go to a bar— ”

Julien didn’t seem to be listening. “If I break in by force, I’ll get police attention, and I don’t want to get the kid in the middle of it more than he is, if that’s possible. I’ll need to wait for the right moment.”

Noah deflated slightly, but a soft smile touched his lips as he listened to the other man plot. Once Julien put his mind to something, it was difficult to get him to focus on, or even talk about, anything else. That would have been fine, even a quality that Noah admired, if only it hadn’t meant that the older man had somehow completely missed the fact that the witch had spent the last few months falling in love with him.

It was completely stupid, of course. The man had devoted his life to killing people not very different from Noah himself, and didn’t seem to be very broken up about his body count. Julien was manipulative, he kept secrets, and he was obsessed with this fairy he’d been tracking. But Noah had seen the small smiles on the hunter’s face when he made just the right joke, or when he brought dinner after a long day of chasing shadows and asked nothing of him but his companionship. He thought Julien was probably very lonely, and Noah was glad to be his company, even if it meant he had taken up smoking again just to have an excuse to sit around outside with him. He didn’t even know if Julien was attracted to men—every flirtation and advance Noah had made seemed to have gone entirely unnoticed. Though he admittedly had been extremely subtle, only testing the waters for fear of scaring the other man off. He would almost have preferred an outright rejection to the complete indifference the hunter had shown him thus far. It didn’t sit well in his stomach.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” He listened to Julien talk to himself until he finished his cigarette, and then he turned to lean his back against the railing, tilting his head in an attempt to catch the other man’s attention. “Did you eat? Since yesterday, I mean.”

“I’m fine. I thought you were working?”

“I’m heading out in a bit. Those housewives aren’t going to stretch themselves.” Noah waited for some indication that Julien was listening, or perhaps even meant to speak again, but the older man only stared out across the street with the dying end of his cigarette between his dangling fingers. “Well,” he started after a few long moments, “just let me know if there’s anything I can do, Julien.”

Julien heard Noah leave behind him, but he didn’t look back. When the younger man’s door was closed, Julien gave a short sigh and pushed away from the railing to return to his own apartment. What he wanted to do was force his way past the doorman, break down the door to wherever the fairy was staying, and kill it while it was still weak, before it could do anymore harm. But that would only get him thrown in jail, and he definitely wouldn’t be of use to anyone there. The only person he even knew in Vancouver was Noah, and the yoga instructor wasn’t likely to be paying anyone’s bail.

He opened the window in his sparse living room and spread a black sheet on the floor, then set about arranging his small collection of handguns and sawed-off shotguns. He hadn’t cleaned them in some time. He sat on the floor and systematically took each gun apart, wiping the parts with a soft cloth and adding just a few drops of oil. He checked each as he finished them, satisfied with the click of the empty chamber, and began to reload them.

When he paused to have a drink and smoke a cigarette, he heard a soft scraping at his apartment door. He stood still to listen, and the scrape stopped, only to be replaced by a knock a moment later. Julien scooped up one of the handguns he had finished loading, tossed the excess sheet over the rest, and tucked it into the back of his belt on his way to the door. He put his eye to the peephole and saw a woman standing at his door, dirt smudged on her face and hugging her arms protectively around herself.

With a wary frown, Julien flipped the deadbolt and pulled open the door just enough to address the woman in the hall.

“Hello sir, I’m sorry to bother you,” she said in a weak voice. She looked up at him with wide, heterochromatic eyes—one brown, the other a yellowish red. Julien’s brow furrowed; that certainly didn’t look natural. “I live just above you, and my boyfriend kicked me out. Could I use your phone? I need to get to my mum’s but I don’t have any money for the bus.”

Julien hesitated. “I’ll let you use my cell phone. You don’t come in.”

“Oh, thank you,” the woman said, half sobbing, and Julien shut the door and turned to pick his phone up from the floor where he’d been cleaning. When he looked back to the door, the woman was standing just inside. Julien’s hand automatically went to the gun in his belt.

“I told you to stay outside.”

“I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “I saw my boyfriend coming down the stairs, and I just—”

“No. Out.”

The woman gave a dejected sigh, and her meek fa?ade seemed to fall away as she let her arms drop to her sides. “So suspicious,” she murmured. Her voice had taken on a strange, guttural quality it hadn’t had a moment before. “Smart boy.”

Julien’s hand tightened around the grip of his gun, and the woman in front of him melted away, her skin sloughing off in a fleshy heap to reveal a heaving animal covered in thick black fur. The dog almost filled the entire living room, baring its glistening teeth and watching him with one bright red eye.

“Ní bheidh tú teagmháil mac an cneasaí arís,” the creature promised in a ghostly, growling voice that sent a shiver up Julien’s spine.

The animal leapt at him, paws the size of dinner plates scattering his guns across the floor and crashing through his cheap sofa. Julien scrambled to get out of the way of the beast, feeling its hot breath on his back as he stumbled over a small side table. He wasn’t eager to fire his gun in his apartment, and he couldn’t be sure it would do any good. He had silver-tipped bullets loaded in it, but this wasn’t a werewolf. He watched the creature’s one red eye, waiting for it to snap at him, and he rushed forward to slide underneath its massive body toward his kit across the room. The dog turned after him in an instant. Julien snatched up a vial of holy water from his open bag and threw it in the animal’s face, but it was only a momentary distraction with none of the burning and howling the hunter had hoped for. Not a demon, either, then. That only left one option, under the circumstances. The iron blade.

Julien barely got hold of the knife in his bag before the beast’s jaws clamped down on his thigh, dragging him backwards and dropping him to the floor at its feet. The dog put one heavy paw on his chest to keep him still. Through the pain, he vaguely heard a thumping on the floor below him, followed by his downstairs neighbor shouting at him to keep the noise down.

“Anois tú bás,” the dog hissed, cold and empty, but it stopped short as it lunged at him, held just out of reach by Julien’s iron blade stuck deep in its throat. The creature snapped at him twice more, dripping saliva and black blood on his face before Julien twisted the blade and pushed it to the hilt. The dog went still, dropping with a final groaning sigh and trapping the hunter’s legs under its weight.

“Calice,” Julien swore, wincing as he sat up and attempted to roll the dog’s body off of him. At least he had been right about the iron. He growled in pain as he pulled his leg out from under the heavy corpse, then took a quick breath and removed the knife from the animal’s neck. That deadly a reaction meant that this creature was sent—it was a warning. The fairy might be wounded, but he wasn’t idle. He didn’t know the language the dog had spoken to him, but that red eye stood out in his memory.

The corpse didn’t seem to be disappearing, which was problematic. Some monsters turned to ash when they died, or mist, but this creature remained, a massive mound of muscle and fur in his living room. Julien wiped the dog’s black blood from the blade with his shirt and slowly pulled himself to his feet, gingerly putting weight on his injured leg and regretting it. He limped across the room to his bathroom and bent to reach under the sink for his first aid kit.

A knock on the door made him go still, and he cursed under his breath, gathering up his gun and his knife and taking the few hobbling steps back to the door. He kept his knife in his belt and his gun in his hand as he looked through the peep hole, then let out a sigh as he saw Noah standing in the hall in a worn tank top and yoga pants. He opened the door and stepped back with a grimace.

“Hey,” Noah began with a smile, “I know you said you were fine, but you never eat, so—” He stopped and almost dropped the bag of food in his hand as he took in the state of the man in front of him. “What the hell happened to you?”

Julien thumbed over his shoulder at the massive black dog on his living room floor. “Come in or get away from the door.”

“Holy—” Noah slipped inside in a hurry and let Julien shut the door behind him. “What is it?” He looked back at the hunter and frowned as he noticed the blood seeping through the leg of his jeans. “ Did it do that?”

“Ouais. I don’t know what it is; it showed up here looking like a woman.”

“A woman?” Noah set down his plastic bag and bent down to peer at the wound on the other man’s leg. “That doesn’t look great.”

“Doesn’t feel great.”

“Hang on. I’ll be right back.” Noah darted out the front door and back to his own apartment down the hall. He opened the box on his dresser, quickly sorting through the multitude of small Ziploc bags full of various herbs and resins and picking out the ones he needed. He scooped up the mortar and pestle from his kitchen, then rushed out again and let himself back into Julien’s apartment with supplies in hand.

He stepped over a large dog paw as he looked for the hunter, pausing near the bedroom doorway at the sight of him sat on the bed. Julien had stripped his bloodied clothes and left them in a rumpled pile on the floor, and he sat at the foot of the bed in only a pair of boxer shorts as he opened the first aid kit beside him. Noah paused a moment to look at him.

The hunter’s torso was littered with scars of every shape and size, from what seemed to be a wide variety of causes. There were claw marks and knife wounds and even a scar that looked like a bite where his neck met his shoulder. One long, trailing line went all the way from his chest and down his stomach, disappearing under the waistband of his shorts. Noah hesitated, taking a moment to remind himself that Julien was injured and probably exhausted, and that ogling his broad shoulders and flat stomach was inappropriate—even if he was desperately curious where that scar ended.

“Here,” he said as he stepped forward, “let me help.” Noah knelt at the foot of the bed and swatted Julien’s hand away from the wound to get a better look at it. The monster’s teeth had fastened all the way around Julien’s thigh, leaving deep gashes on the top and bottom of his leg. The hunter gave a slight flinch when Noah touched the skin, and he quickly apologized. “Well, let’s try some modern medicine first,” he said, setting his herbs on the floor.

Noah fished in the first aid kit and retrieved a bottle of saline, and he held the hand towel Julien had brought under his leg to catch the excess as he squirted the clear solution across the wound. The hunter hissed but stayed still while Noah cleaned the cuts. Noah couldn’t quite reach the open skin at the back of Julien’s leg, so he had him stand up so that he could tend to them properly.

Julien seemed even taller with Noah kneeling at his feet. The younger man’s mind strayed as his hand touched the inside of Julien’s thigh to steady him, but he bit his cheek and focused on anything but the firm muscle under his palm. He would have liked to have been in this position for a very different reason—he could imagine the way Julien’s stomach would feel under his hand and the way his breath would hitch as the younger man slid his boxers down his hips—but it wasn’t the time to think about things like that, and the right time might never come. He was just torturing himself. He finished up quickly and allowed Julien to sit down again, then took up his mortar and pestle and emptied the bags of herbs into the bowl. Noah could feel Julien’s eyes on him as he ground the herbs into a paste, but he refused to look up in case the other man could somehow read his mind.

“What is that? It smells like candy.”

“That’s the peppermint. It’s to help you rest. Also some arrowroot, eucalyptus, wormwood—”

“Wormwood? Isn’t that what’s in absinthe? It’s poisonous.”

“It fights infection. It’s only poisonous to eat a lot of it; it’s fine.”

Julien seemed wary, but he gave a short grunt of agreement. Noah sprayed a bit of the saline into his bowl and mixed it with the ground herbs, then set the pestle aside and scooted on his knees to get slightly closer to Julien. “This might sting,” he warned, and he scooped some of the mixture up onto his fingers and smoothed it over the open wounds, murmuring a quiet incantation as he pressed his hand to the skin. He looked up when Julien hissed and offered him a soft smile. “Don’t be such a baby,” he teased.

“How do you keep track of what all of these plants do?” Julien asked in an attempt to keep his mind off of the burning feeling in his thigh.

Noah shrugged. “It’s part of the witch job description, isn’t it? ‘Must know how to make magic with weeds.’ It’s second nature by now. Maybe we can sense it; I don’t know. ”

Julien leaned back on his hands while Noah smeared the paste into the cuts on the back of his leg, his stomach visibly tensing at the stinging pain. Noah held in his sigh, doing his best to push away thoughts of other ways he could make the hunter gasp. He had to force himself to keep his eyes on his work rather than sneak glances and imagine what lay beneath the thin cotton fabric, just begging to be touched and kissed. Noah bit his tongue; he could feel heat pooling in his stomach already, and the last thing he needed was to get an erection while wearing yoga pants.

“It’s not so bad, actually,” Julien rumbled softly, sending a shiver down the witch’s spine. “It’s a good sort of a hurt.”

“Glad you approve,” Noah said with a small smile. He set down his mortar, wiped his hands, and took a roll of bandages from the first aid kit. He kept his eyes on his task as he wrapped the gauze around Julien’s thigh, carefully covering every bit of his injury. He probably wrapped more than was necessary—anything to distract him from the slow movement of the hunter’s stomach as he breathed. When he finished, he tore off a bit of tape and sealed the end of the gauze, letting his hand linger against Julien’s leg for just a moment.

Julien hadn’t been paying much attention to him while he worked, but now he looked down at Noah with a faint, grateful smile. “Thank you. Much better than I would have done.”

“We can’t have you getting infected,” Noah agreed. Julien didn’t seem to mind the younger man’s hand where it was, but Noah couldn’t tell if it was because he was comfortable or distracted by his injury. Despite his better judgment, Noah inched across his thigh, his fingertips just barely brushing the skin underneath the hem of Julien’s boxer shorts. He watched the hunter for any sign of panic, but as soon as Julien’s gaze dropped down to his hand, he retreated, quickly getting to his feet and gathering up his mortar and pestle to be washed. Dangerous. He shouldn’t get carried away.

“Anyway, I brought you some food, and what are we going to do about the giant dead body in your living room?” Noah escaped the bedroom with a silent, resigned sigh, and he rushed to the kitchen to rinse his bowl.

Julien got to his feet, testing his weight on his leg before taking a few limping steps to the bedroom door. “That’s a problem,” he muttered.

“What do you think it was, anyway?” Noah called from the kitchen, happy to make conversation. “Not too many options if it’s a shapeshifting dog.”

“I know I’ve heard of something like this,” Julien answered as he looked down at the beast’s still jaws. “The iron killed it, and one of its eyes was red. Just the one.”

“One red eye,” Noah muttered, pondering as he wiped the inside of his bowl clean of herbal remnants.

Julien hummed an agreement. “And it spoke to me. I don’t know in what language.”

Noah paused, and he turned off the water as he looked across the room at the hunter. “Can you remember anything it said?”

“I was a bit distracted,” Julien admitted. He tried to give an approximation of the threatening things the animal had said, mostly butchering them, but Noah held up a hand to stop him.

“Cneasaí?” he repeated. Julien nodded, and the younger man frowned as he set his clean mortar and pestle on the counter. “That’s Gaelic, but it means a healer. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You speak Gaelic?”

Noah shook his head. “Only a few words. I’ve been…looking some stuff up, you know, since you said you were tracking a gean cánach.” He didn’t share quite how many hours he had spent poring over books and websites looking for anything that might have helped his favored hunter, taking notes and gathering ingredients just in case. He dried his hands on the stomach of his shirt and moved forward to inspect the dog’s body. “I think this might be a barghest. A cú dorchadas.”

Julien snapped his fingers. “Barghest. That’s the name. What did you call it?”

“Cú dorchadas. The same thing, but the Irish version.” He crouched by the dog and put a hand on the thick fur of its flank. “Think this has anything to do with your fairy friend?”

Julien frowned. “It’s pretty coincidental otherwise. The thing was clearly looking for me. The fairy must have sent it.”

“But what does a healer have to do with it?” Noah muttered. “A gean cánach doesn’t heal anything, and it obviously wasn’t coming to you to be healed. Curioser and curioser,” he hummed. The sound of crinkling plastic distracted him, and he looked up to see Julien digging through the bag of take out. Still hardly listening. They ate their cheap noodle bowls together in the demolished living room, both of them staring at the enormous corpse and neither of them knowing what to do with it.

“So, you ever consider a different line of work maybe?” Noah asked, smiling sidelong at him. “One with less risk of bodily harm? There’s a gym just around the block from my studio. Or, you know, a Starbucks. Whatever you’re into. We could commute together.”

Julien didn’t seem to be listening. He just stared at the animal’s body with a pensive frown, absently forking noodles into his mouth. Too focused to notice, as usual. Noah paused.