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

6

As it turned out, a barghest corpse fit neatly into six large black garbage bags. Both men were covered head to foot in black gore by the time they arrived at this realization thanks to a surprisingly enthusiastic artery in the creature’s neck, but the job was done regardless. Julien let Noah rinse himself off in his shower, which he took as an opportunity to linger under mildly hot water and smell the hunter’s shampoo. Sometimes he could get just a hint of it when he stood beside Julien outside, both of them leaned against the railing to smoke, but he never got to lean close and breathe it in like he wanted to. Even if Julien had been remotely aware of his affections, it would still be a creepy thing to do.

Noah snapped the bottle shut and returned to washing the oily blood off of his skin, watching it spiral down the drain at his feet. His clothes would probably need to be thrown out, which was annoying—thrift shops only carried limited amounts of yoga-appropriate clothing, and he definitely couldn’t afford to buy them anywhere else. He turned off the water and shook the excess from his hair. Julien had a single ratty towel hanging over the edge of the counter, and Noah wrapped it around his hips before he poked his head out of the bathroom door.

“Here,” Julien said, anticipating his question. He gestured to a pair of pants and a shirt on the bed without looking at him, too focused on tying up the last garbage bag to pay the witch any attention. Noah was glad for once for Julien’s distraction; he wasn’t positive how he would react to the hunter’s eyes on him while he was mostly naked, but he was reasonably sure it would be embarrassing.

He snatched up the clothes and retreated into the bathroom. He let out a soft snort as he held up the pants; the waistband came easily up to his middle. He would have to roll up the bottoms. They were a bit baggy around his hips, but wearable. Noah paused with the worn t-shirt in his hands, rolling the soft fabric in his fingers for a moment. He could smell Julien on it before he even put it on—cigarettes and salt and mint shampoo. He resisted the urge to bury his face in it and just slipped it over his head, lifting his arms experimentally to confirm the large size. Julien was much broader than he was, and the shirt hung awkwardly on his shoulders, but in the back of his mind, he wondered if he would be able to claim it was lost when the time came to return it.

Julien had satisfied himself with changing clothes and washing his face in the kitchen sink, so he still smelled faintly of barghest ichor when Noah emerged from the bathroom.

“Are you ready?” the hunter asked. When he looked up, Noah caught the brief look of amusement on his face at the sight of his companion in the ill-fitting clothes. “Don’t trip on those.”

“Because it’s my fault you’re some kind of mountain man.”

Julien smiled at him and lifted one heavy bag over his shoulder, hiding his wince as he put weight on his injured leg. “Sure you can manage these? I don’t think I ever noticed before quite how little you are.”

“Fuck off,” Noah laughed as he scooped up one of the bags. “I can do a one-arm handstand in full lotus; I’m pretty sure I can take out the garbage. Ass.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I’ll act impressed if you think it’s appropriate.”

Noah stared him in the eye and snatched up a second bag, hefting it over his shoulder with an unpleasant squelching sound. “Just tell me what dumpsters you want these in—ass.”

Julien chuckled and picked up another bag before limping his way to the door. The trip down the stairs was slow, but Noah didn’t comment, only let him take his time until they got to the street. He waited while the hunter lit a cigarette, heaving both heavy bags over his shoulder to keep a hand free as they walked. None of the bags could go in the dumpsters for their building, of course, but they were lucky to live in a run-down neighborhood littered with cheap hotels, grimy bars, and alleyways covered in graffiti, so dumpsters full of horrible refuse were quite common. Nothing they could add would seem out of place among the used needles and broken glass. Julien tossed his first bag into a bin behind a nearby liquor store, and Noah’s load was lightened a block away at a restaurant.

A man with a shopping cart full of junk eyeballed them as they passed by, so Julien flipped him a toonie from his pocket and gave him a pointed look as they turned the corner. He dropped his bag in the next dumpster and paused to press a hand against the wound in his thigh.

“Why don’t you go back?” Noah suggested. “I’ll come back for the last two bags. You shouldn’t be walking on that.”

“I’m fine,” he insisted. “Let’s keep moving.”

Noah gave a small sigh as he watched Julien walk ahead of him, trying not to show his limp. Tough guys. Why did he always go for the dumb tough guys? He trotted to catch up and walked briskly ahead, tossing his last bag into a bin and turning back to face the hunter. He made a spinning gesture with one finger to urge Julien to turn around, and they walked together back toward the apartment building, following a different route than the one that had brought them.

“So you think the fairy sent that thing after you? How could he do that?”

“It’s a killer, Noah,” Julien said simply, and the witch shook his head.

“No, I mean actually how. A barghest is a serious spirit; they aren’t at the command of any one fairy—or fairies in general as far as I know—and they definitely don’t make house calls. So how did he get it to go after you? Maybe it owed him a favor? How do you even do a favor for a barghest?”

“Does it matter how?” Julien grunted. “It didn’t work.”

“Well, it worked pretty well on your leg.” The hunter snorted. “And anyway,” Noah went on, “information always matters. Knowing is half the battle, as they say.”

“Who says?”

“What? G.I. Joe says.”

“Isn’t that a cartoon?”

“What are you—of course it’s a cartoon! You never watched G.I. Joe?”

“No.”

“What did you do while you ate your cereal on Saturday mornings when you were a kid?”

“Target practice,” the hunter answered without looking at him, and he started up the stairs at their apartment building. Noah hesitated, watching him climb the steps. Julien never talked about his family much, but the witch had suspected for a while that the other man’s life hadn’t been what anyone would call normal. He’d clearly been on this road for a long time, but Noah hadn’t realized quite how long. Noah had caught Julien reading a worn paperback a couple of times, but there wasn’t even a television in his apartment. How did he function with nothing in his life but fighting and putting body parts in dumpsters?

He followed Julien up the steps and tried to grab both remaining garbage bags, but the hunter stared him down until he released one with a resigned sigh.

“When you’re still limping tomorrow, I don’t want to hear any shit,” Noah said. Julien ignored him. They carried the bags to separate dumpsters and threw them away, taking a trip around the block before starting back toward their building.

At Julien’s apartment, Noah gathered up his dirty clothes and his collection of barghest parts and lingered awkwardly near the door. Julien never seemed to mind him being around, but he never exactly invited him to stay, either. Noah waited while Julien settled himself on the tattered sofa, but all the hunter said was, “Don’t worry about the clothes. Get them back to me whenever. And I’ll owe you for the laundromat. ”

“Nah, I was just joking about that,” Noah said softly. He shifted his weight and knew he should be leaving. He wanted Julien to tell him to wait, to move over on the couch and offer him a place. He wanted to curl up beside him and lay his head on the larger man’s shoulder, maybe even feel Julien’s thumb brushing the back of his arm as they sat together. Julien would lean over and kiss his hair but pretend not to be paying attention when Noah looked up at him.

The witch shook his head. That was never going to happen. Even if, by some miracle, Noah ever got the courage to tell Julien how he felt, it would never be like that. The hunter was too tense, too focused, too…straight. At least Noah seemed to have a consistent type.

“You need something?” Julien asked, startling him out of his thoughts. He was kicking him out.

“No,” he answered quickly. “I’ll see you later. I’ll…make some more of that poultice, for your leg.”

“Merci, Noah. You were a great help tonight.”

His stomach fluttered at the hunter’s slight smile, but he tried to crush the feeling. “No problem,” he said, waving off the other man’s gratitude as he opened the apartment door. “Later, Julien.”

The other man gave a small grunt of recognition as Noah slipped out of the apartment. The witch hurried down the hall in case anyone caught him outside with an armful of bloody clothes and body parts, but he made it to his door without incident.

Noah’s apartment was sparse and dingy, but at least he managed to avoid the lingering scent of mildew that permeated the building with the judicious use of incense and oils. He dropped his armful of clothes on the sofa and set his bags and vials on the coffee table, then set about lighting the charcoal for his incense burner.

Alone in his home, he could burn the small black disk in the palm of his hand without worrying about outsiders seeing him conjure flames out of nothing. He whispered soft incantations to himself as he dropped the disk into the settled sand at the bottom of his incense bowl, protecting his fingers from burning, and he chose a vial of resin from the nearby rack. As the smoke started to rise and fill the room with the thick scent of sandalwood and cloves, Noah changed into a fresh set of his own clothes, though he held Julien’s shirt in his lap for an inappropriate amount of time. He was hopeless. The hunter was beyond his reach and he knew it, so why couldn’t the butterflies in his stomach get the memo from his brain?

Noah had a bad history of falling for the wrong people. When he was fifteen, it had been Abby Greenwood, who, as it turned out, had entirely the wrong physical makeup for them to be compatible. That had been an awkward weekend. Later in high school, after he’d managed to sort out what the problem was, it had been Josh Parker, who was sweet and handsome and turned Noah’s legs to jelly with his kiss, but who had moved across the country before the end of the school year. Then there was Travis. The witch’s chest still tightened picturing his face. They had met one day while Noah was covering a friend’s yoga class at a nearby gym. Travis was tall and muscular, with a hard jaw and piercing blue eyes, and he was adventurous and commanding and all the things a man’s man was supposed to be. He had been a forceful, exhausting lover who frequently left Noah lying helpless on the bed long after he had gone home. He was friendly and charming, and it should have been perfect.

It was perfect, at first, when it was just the two of them. The problems had come when Noah had run into him in public for the first time. He had seen Travis across the street with some friends and gone over to greet him but had been stopped short by the larger man’s hand painfully tight on his arm. He pretended not to know him; he said they were acquaintances and brushed him aside with insulting jokes when Noah had tried to question him. Noah had thought it was his way of saying it was over between them, that it had just been a brief interlude, but Travis had still shown up at his door later that night and pressed Noah against the wall with his body. Travis told him that he couldn’t be affectionate in public. He said that he wasn’t Noah’s “boyfriend,” saying the word with distaste. He wasn’t some faggot, he said. They were just having fun. When Noah had objected, Travis hit him. He should have kicked him out of the apartment right then and never seen him again, he knew. But the other man had seemed remorseful, told Noah he hadn’t meant it, that he’d been pushed to it, and Noah gave in.

Once the first blow had been struck, it was so easy for it to become normal .

They stayed together—if it could be called that—for three years. They never went out together, never stayed at Travis’s apartment, and when they did see each other outside of Noah’s apartment, Travis treated him like a stranger. Whenever Noah tried to show some kind of affection outside of the bedroom, Travis snapped at him or told him to lay off. When they argued—and they argued about everything—Travis shouted. He told Noah frequently how useless he was, how stupid and irritating, and still Noah had stayed. He shoved Noah and hit him so often that now he bore the scar through his right eyebrow where the piercing had been dislodged during one of their fights about nothing.

Noah had only broken free when he showed up to work with a black eye, and his boss had demanded that he skip his class that day and come home with her. She had put him up and spent the next two weeks bolstering his courage with kind words and promises of support whenever he needed it. Because of her, Noah had blocked Travis’s number in his cell phone, and the next time the other man had shown up at his door, Noah had threatened to call the police. That had been over two years ago, and he hadn’t seen Travis since.

He hadn’t ventured back into dating since, either, and he didn’t seem to be off to a good start with Julien. The hunter was clearly dangerous, but Julien had never shown even the slightest hint of violence toward him. He had a violent job, but he didn’t seem like a violent person. In his own quiet way, he was almost sweet, and more than once he had kept Noah from harm when they had worked together on one of the hunter’s cases. Noah smiled in the quiet room, remembering Julien’s hand on his chest, pushing him backwards and out of the reach of the frenzied werewolf so that he could face it himself. When it was dead, Julien had offered Noah his hand to help him up and asked him if he was all right. That had been the moment that cemented his feelings, he thought. Julien had been so gentle, with a soft, worried wrinkle in his brow and a frown on his thin lips. Only concerned with the witch’s safety despite the deep gash in his arm.

Noah sighed and clutched Julien’s shirt in his lap. None of that mattered anyway. He could never tell Julien what he felt. It would make things too awkward, too strained between them, he could tell. Julien wouldn’t feel the same way. At best, he would tell him they should be friends and then disappear one day, on to the next hunt. Noah wouldn’t make the mistake again of putting his heart and his privates ahead of his brain. He wanted the hunter to stay close to him, and he would put that in danger by confessing. So he wouldn’t. It would be better this way.