“I’m not usually this wired.Been having a slow-motion breakdown all week.Calloway’s been leaving me ‘presents.’I get the contract thing, I guess.It might help.He’s–Christ,I don’t even know.He wasfourteenwhen I last saw him.”A pause, a sidestep of duck shit, and a sidelong glance Declan felt like a brand.“Tell me about the sluagh thing.”
Ah.
Yes.
The sluagh thing.
“What do you know of aspects?”Declan asked, as he was a coward.He didn’t meet Antonio’s eyes when the human glanced at him.
“Calloway said they were, like, why you exist.Not just as people, but the…” Antonio waved his hand, the one not being picked at.“The ‘embodiment of ideas or phenomena.’Wisps being the unknown or something.”
Declan smiled thinly.Leave it to a bloody seelie.
“The lure of the unknown, as kelpies are the hunger of the river, watery deaths.Banshee, such as my mother, are the embrace of finality.Does that make sense?”
“Sure.”
“Sluagh are… We are the awareness of impending and inevitable death.Not of a death by fire newly set, but of a back to the wall, no windows, and flames licking close.”Declan smiled, bitter with it.“Few things are ‘fate’.Set in stone.Not even bonds, as we’ve talked about.There arepaths.We sluagh, we see the paths that have found a single ending.No more branching.”
“Right,” Antonio said after a long pause.“Okay.So, it makes people uncomfortable?”
“Oh, aye.Though I would put their discomfort down toward how our aspect manifests itself.Banshees sing for the person about to die.A warning.We–sluagh, of course, but others around us–are not so fortunate.”Declan slowed his steps, wings pulled in tight to his back.“Deathsight.It triggers when we’re near a person who cares for another, whose path has reached that single ending.A vision of that death.Those final moments.Sluagh see it once.The other will see again and again, until the vision’s fulfilled.”
And, because he was not truly as much of a coward as he accused himself of being, Declan forced himself to add, “Contact and time spent with us heightens the risk of deathsight triggering.It’s not an immediate thing.Not usually.”
Silence.
So much bloody silence that Declan went tight with it, fingers forced still, not tapping or shifting as they walked.
Then: “That’s why all the refusals?I’ll deal.Won’t say I won’t get really fucking wasted when it happens, but I’ll deal.”
Declan laughed, albeit acrid and just a bit choked.They always thought that, didn’t they?Every time, until it happened.
“I didn’t hear from my only friend for a century after a vision,” Declan said on another rough laugh, a not-smile with a flash of teeth, white and sharp in a smile as sweet as his laugh had been.“I’m grateful to Bo for breaking that silence.Yes, Antonio.That is most of the reasons behind the refusals.Bonds want to be in contact.Physical touch, even if just shoulders.”
“That’s– shit.”
“There are standard additions to oaths most employ when bonding sluagh.Stipulations to protect bonds as much as possible from them.”Declan didn’t have to tell him this.He couldstop bloody talking.Spin it.And still, he continued on, not quite able to keep the resignation from his voice: “Ten, fifteen minutes a day near one another, and the sluagh half to leave them be outside of that.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening.”
Antonio’s blunt, direct words brought Declan up short.Antonio stopped walking, his face set and hard, even when met by Declan’s monstrous stare.
“I’ll not get up in arms if you choose to,” Declan offered, confused.“Your protection will stand.My word on it.”
That was perhaps the wrong thing to say.Antonio’s jaw tightened, his anger the burn of sun-scalded metal.
“We’re not sitting awkwardly across the table from each other while someone runs a fucking stopwatch.Been there and brought back the goddamned t-shirt.Shit.What do you even get out of this?Don’t answer that.”Antonio lifted his hands as he had the day before, his barrage of words a blast of desert-baked wind.“Look.Here’s what I need.Keep me safe from Calloway.Make sure, if I’ve gotta be in Faerie, that there’s food.I can’t do the thing like other humans.Take me back home when I ask.That’s the fucking oath.Being around each other, the rest of that shit?We can figure it out like any other pair of assholes.”
Declan continued to stare, his eyes wide, arms crossed and hands curved tight at his elbows.Holding on to something.Or maybe he just needed something to do with his hands.
“I will protect you from any that might harm you or whom you want gone, up to and especially Calloway,” Declan heard himself say, confusion rich and careful.“You and yours alike, as much as I can.You’ll not want for food, shelter, or safety.And a ride with a trusted will-o’-the-wisp, so long as he’s not in the bath.Or eating.I know you and Everil have an unsavory history–”
Antonio laughed, cut off and ugly for it.“One way to put it.”
“...yes.He had just agreed to remove the curse when you called.I understand if you wish to not have him about, but if he must be near to do it.Would you abide that?”
The human looked at him as if he’d grown two more heads.And Declan couldtaste it, that confusion acrid and twisting on the edges of tanned hides, curling the seams black.
