The Arch-Mage’s Firebird

By K.L. Noone

Published by JMS Books LLC

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Copyright 2020 K.L. Noone

ISBN 9781646562664

Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States of America.

* * * *

This story takes place more or less around the same time as the events of the first Kitten and Witch story Port in a Storm.

* * * *

The Arch-Mage’s Firebird

By K.L. Noone

The wizard’s apprentice came sprinting into Tom’s Seaside Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor on a Wednesday morning, dove over the counter, and pleaded from behind double-cherry chip and butter-rum refrigerated tubs, “Hide me.”

“From what,” Tom demanded, looking down, “why are you on the floor, and that was my favorite scoop you made me drop—” and then looked up automatically as the bell rang again.

Two men ambled into the shop. They did not look like men hunting strawberry-cheesecake swirl, unless they planned to trap it with binding-spells and compulsion collars. Knotwork and herb-pouches dangled at hips; their expressions might’ve come out of a badly-scripted low-budget Western film. Sunshine and ocean breeze peeked in behind leather jackets, curious and incongruous.

Please, Nicholas mouthed from the floor. Hair fell into his eyes, dark red—ember-red, the color of banked coals—and his golden-coin eyes were wider than Tom’d ever seen them.

Tom had, in fact, had too many inappropriate thoughts involving those eyes over the last three months. Ever since the first day they’d sauntered in from the ancient wizard’s ramshackle shop next door, ordered a wild-honey-and-ginger-cream milkshake, and glinted at him with unabashed appreciation over a straw.

The appreciation’d felt good, in a rather startled way. Tom, being lean and gawky and generally sort of light brown, skin and hair and eyes, had never thought of himself as unattractive, but also not especially interesting either. Ordinary. Medium. Unremarkable.

He was aware that those adjectives were all lies, of course.

He’d definitely earn remarks. Attention. Comments. If people knew who he was. If someone knew that secret.

It’d been nice to have Nicholas, who did not know, look at him. Just him, just Tom the friendly ice-cream person. Someone with no responsibilities, no other life.

Nicholas at the moment was trying to make himself even tinier behind the counter, on the floor. Tom did not glare that direction—no giving him away—but wanted to. A problem. To be dealt with. One of the reasons he’d fled here, that’d been: lots of problems. Requiring that he deal with them.

He said, “Can I offer you any samples today?” to the visitors as pleasantly as he could, mostly to be irritating.

The taller and marginally less unpleasant-looking new arrival suggested, “We’re looking for a Nicholas Incandesco,” in a tone that fully expected immediate compliance.

Tom put on his best helpful smile, said, “No, sorry, haven’t seen him today,” and kicked Nicholas in the shin out of sheer annoyance. He hated lying. Another reason he hadn’t been good at his former role.

Nicholas poked him in the calf with what was probably the knocked-over ice cream scoop. Tom considered this to be highly unfair, and added, “Why do you want him, anyway?”

“He comes in here every day,” said the other magical bounty hunter—Tom was guessing, based on scruffiness, paraphernalia, and the general aura of roughshod but focused competence—and smiled.

The smile was not friendly. Neither were bounty hunters, generally, with a few exceptions; the current North American Arch-Mage had tried to put a stop to the capture of escaped familiars and therianthropes for money, and it’d partially worked. Not completely. Not immediately.

The man went on, “Asked around. Found out. He likes your place.”

“I work next door to him,” Tom pointed out. “Difficult detective work, was it?”

Nicholas poked him again. This probably meant don’t antagonize the bounty hunters; Nicholas, Tom decided, was in no position to comment on rhetorical choices. “And we make an excellent double-fudge vanilla swirl, can I convince you to—”

“Hand him over,” grunted the taller one, returning from a leisurely perusal of the shop. Fortunately the morning’d just begun; nobody had yet wandered in for peach sherbet or delicately frosted cakes. No other bodies in the place. Only the intruders, and Tom himself, and the wizard’s apprentice currently huddled at his feet behind a frosted counter.

“Fugitive,” explained the shorter one. “Reward. A lot. Maybe you want the reward.”

“I really don’t. What’d he do?”

“More what he is.” The man was trying, with a fair amount of stealth and some skill, to weave a locator-spell out of red thread between casually lowered fingers. Tom let him expend power for a few more seconds, and then sighed mentally and tapped a fingertip on the counter.

The bounty hunter blinked. Broken thread snarled around his hand.

“What,” said his partner, “are you doing over there, get this search done, he’s just some guy in an ice cream parlor—”

“About that,” Tom said, “you’re not entirely wrong. What did you mean, what he is?”

“He has wards up,” snapped angry behemoth number two, and then, glaring at Tom, “why do you have anti-hex wards up, how are they this strong, who’d you pay to—you are protecting him, you—”

“Who says I paid anyone to do it for me?” Tom flicked a hand through a sunbeam. The sign on the door flipped from open to closed, potentially of its own volition but almost certainly not. “Quit trying to see over the counter, by the way. There’s no one here.”

“There’s no one here,” echoed the man, bemused. The tattoo on his knuckles proclaimed danger; the ink-spiral across the back of his hand was a more or less standard strength-building spell. This provided no challenge.

Tom had always been good at illusion. Coaxing the world to play along, to weave those threads in a particular requested direction. He still loved the world. He hadn’t given up that much.

“Who are you?” demanded the man’s partner, hands poised.

“Some guy in an ice cream parlor. As you said. Now. What did you mean?”

“We don’t have to—”

“No,” Tom agreed calmly, “you don’t have to answer me.” Frost bloomed across glass for emphasis.

“Um. You know he’s not human, right?”

Tom did not glance down, though he hadn’t been expecting that; he felt Nicholas wince, leaning against his leg. “Go on.”

“He’s not just a familiar, either. Not somebody’s pet with some gifts, some enchantments, whatever. He’s a real shapeshifter. Proper rare one. One of the original bloodlines. That’s valuable, man.”

“If he is, he’s also a person. And as of last month you’re only licensed to capture and return familiars, not therianthropes.” He hoped his voice was steady; he hadn’t been able to process it all yet. Nicholas? A therianthrope—a properly naturally born kind, a descendent of the original Twelve shapeshifters? Someone with that kind of connection to innate bone-deep power? Someone not a wizard’s apprentice, not even human, despite appearances?

Nicholas, who liked marshmallow-fluff sundaes and cherries and blatant flirtation with cherry-stems? Who was currently hiding behind his counters and being stone-silent?

The bounty hunters traded looks.

“He’s allowed to go where he wants,” Tom pointed out levelly, “unless he himself freely enters into a contract with a witch or wizard, of his own volition, his power in exchange for whatever benefit it’ll bring him.” Nicholas shifted position; a hand or a knee brushed Tom’s ankle.

They traded looks again. “You a witch? Or something?”

“I’m…something. You need to leave. And leave him alone. You’re lucky I haven’t reported you for violations.”

“He’s a murderer!”

“He’s a what?—Even if he is, you don’t have the right to collect him. We have the Wardens for that. And why haven’t you officially reported it?” Nicholas, sitting at Tom’s feet, had gone extremely tense. Motionless. Giving nothing away.

One of the hulks began, “We can’t prove he—” His partner stepped on his foot, and said, “We were gonna. Right now.”

“Or I can do it for you.” Tom pushed up one sleeve, then the other, thinking very hard indeed now. “And you said you were leaving. Do that. This instant.”

He was thinking as well about the life he’d left behind, the arguments left unfinished, the proposals never completed. Trying not to think about the ways in which, after all, he could never run away.

He knew what they saw: a tanned slim unassuming thirtyish man with no visible sorcerer’s tattoos or medallions. No order affiliations. No visible specializations, drawing-supplies or music or growing herbs. Only the sugared whisper of ice cream in the air, here in a sunlit seaside tourist village, as far from the ritual and bustle and stubborn infighting of the Arch-Mage’s Great Hall as a life was possible to be.

He drew an idle circle in the air. Not a spell. But every pair of eyes followed the motion.

The Wardens remained understaffed in the ways that mattered and overstuffed with incompetent bureaucrats, but they got on well with standard human law enforcement; the working relationship existed in an uneasy state of begrudging mutual need. The North American Arch-Mage in theory consulted with human heads of state about issues affecting both realms, and took responsibility for magical beings and creatures across his—presently a him, anyway—region but relied fairly heavily on local magical alliances and covens for self-policing.

The community was small enough, if scattered, that this generally worked, in a somewhat haphazard way. The current American President had been more excited than anything else when the most recent Arch-Mage, who’d happened to be living in Los Angeles when the mantle’d landed on his shoulders, had popped into her office.

That particular Arch-Mage—the youngest in history, brilliant and promising and enthusiastic about change and collaboration—had been missing for three months. Or at least exceedingly difficult to find.

“We, ah,” said the bounty hunter who seemed to be in charge. He kept watching Tom’s hands. “We might’ve had a buyer…”

“Ah. Thank you for being honest. A practitioner, I assume, someone who wanted the power? Or just a collector?”

“I don’t know, man. Didn’t ask.” The man was starting to sweat. “Can we go?”

“Not yet. I’m not done with you.” Nicholas hadn’t moved a muscle, either petrified or fascinated or both. Tom took a breath, let it out. “Who do you think—without proof, evidently—he might’ve killed?”

He’d wanted Nicholas, in a wistful lazy way, like wondering about the taste of sunbeams or the caress of a rainbow. He’d appreciated long-legged beauty and the way those lips wrapped around a milkshake straw. The way those odd golden eyes danced at him when he slid an experimental brown-sugar-bourbon waffle bowl over for free.

He’d thought that maybe the wizard’s apprentice wanted him as well. He’d been flattered and delighted: Nicholas flirted with everyone in the shop, from small girls holding balloons to ninety-something grandfathers, but kept coming back to where Tom stood and lounging against countertops as if he belonged there. Kept saying, smile curling around those lips like an invitation, hey, let me tell you this story I just heard, or can I buy something for you this time, or don’t take that away yet, I was licking the spoon.

Neither of them had moved to make anything more of it. Tom had been rather breathlessly enjoying the flirtation without any real hope anything’d happen—Nicholas was gorgeous and funny and charming and in all likelihood too young, certainly eighteen in order to be a wizard’s apprentice but indeterminately exuberant beyond that, and the exact sort of person who by all rights should’ve never looked twice at a too-tall apron-wearing ice-cream shop owner with chocolate on his left sleeve.

Except Nicholas wasn’t a proper apprentice. Might not even be human.

Except the attraction’d been true. He knew it had. Some stray bit of enchantment twining around cones and cookie-crumbs, tangling them together. Both of them looking.

Nicholas had been flirting with him on a near-constant basis for the past three months. Nothing’d progressed beyond that: beyond the chime of the parlor’s bell, the sparkle of presence sliding onto a bar-stool, brightness in the day. Sometimes he came in early, sometimes he wandered by for lunch, sometimes he didn’t turn up until evening—Tom had assumed that this depended on clients and how busy old Ian, his wizard, kept him—but he hadn’t ever missed a day. Not since that first day, that first smile.

“We think he killed his wizard,” offered the second bounty hunter helpfully, and Tom said “What?” The freezer shrieked, a squeal of icy air and shock. He got control back. “What? Why?”

Nicholas tapped at his leg. Wrote, with a fingertip, NO.

“Well,” the man explained, “he’s dead. The wizard. Has been for the last four weeks.”

Tom resisted the impulse to glare down at the floor and demand answers. Nicholas took the hand off his leg, which was disappointing for multiple reasons. The spot tingled, warm. “We’d’ve known.”

Would they? Ian had been something of a recluse: grumpy, elderly, making the most of his small amount of power, a fixture of the casual sunny seaside town for decades but never socializing. Tom, despite having grown up in and around the area—the ice-cream parlor was his uncle’s, and named for his grandfather, also a Thomas—had never been in need of a local wizard’s services, and had never known him beyond polite nods. The shop had been opening as usual, and Nicholas hadn’t been acting any differently…

“Nah. The guy never went out anyway, real hermit type, that kinda magician. Kid’s been seeing clients, filling orders, makin’ charms and spell-bags, like nothing out of the ordinary ever happened. Real cold, you ask me.”

“That doesn’t even make sense! Why would he—”

“Magical creatures,” said the man sagely. “They get out of compulsion spells, bindings, they get pissed, they take revenge, man. Figure he deserves gettin’ caught.”

But why would Nicholas have stayed? That was the part that didn’t make sense. One of the parts. None of it made sense.

Nicholas, all bright eyes and kindness and love of marshmallow-fluff, deserved a chance to explain. If he were somehow involved, deserved an investigation, a trial, official procedures being followed.

He did not deserve to be handed over to a buyer like an object, given to a sorcerer seeking a magical power-source to drain. Not to mention the illegality of that, in the first place.

Nicholas might have secrets—oh yes, absolutely had secrets, and annoyance skittered down Tom’s spine like spider-legs, betrayed and angry about it—but wouldn’t’ve killed a man.

Tom knew that. Or he thought he did.

He’d literally seen Nicholas help a shuffling blue-haired old lady across the street the day before. Cliché, he’d thought, and wonderful; he’d stood in the doorway smiling, foolish and fond.

He would have known. His own magic—wreathing parlor walls with safeguards against ill intent, tangerine-sunny and tidal-blue and swirling—would’ve told him.

He’d always hated those assumptions about magical creatures, shapeshifters, therianthropes. Had once upon a time tried to change them.

In that other life. When he’d presided over magician’s gatherings and once kissed a beautiful feline therianthrope, the wild and reckless only son of a wealthy feline family, under moonlight. They’d drunk starflower wine and danced: part of the night, at the afterparty with the powerful and magical, the heads of families and covens, warlocks and white witches. Showing off, playing with sparks and bonfires, new to everything and plunging headfirst into everything and believing that everything could make a difference…

“If magical creatures are being mistreated,” he said, “if they escape, they have a right to be angry. And you shouldn’t be hunting a sentient person at all.” Sparks stirred, rising, eager. Humming under his skin.

Odd how familiar that felt: wanting to do something. He’d forgotten that sensation.

He’d been trying not to do anything for so long. He’d been sure that he couldn’t, that everything was futile, for far longer than that.

But he could now. He could protect Nicholas. He would.

The smarter of the two intrusions glared. “Because you say so?”

“Yes,” Tom agreed, “because I say so,” and set the imminent fire-flare aside and instead reached into thin air—actually one of his favorite pocket-spells, useful for holding ingredients or pens or recipes—and fished around for a second, found what he was searching for tangled in an ancient Roman recipe for baked pears, held it up. “Because this says so. Go away.”

Both bounty hunters got abruptly speechless. Staring.

“I expect I’ll have to do something about your buyer, too,” Tom told them. “Don’t go far. I’ll be watching. But go. Go now.” Nicholas, on the floor, couldn’t actually see, and was making small impatient movements. He managed to put a knee on Tom’s left foot, which hurt.

The bounty hunters swallowed as one, nodded simultaneously, and left. Still soundless. Looking dazed.

Tom tossed the ring up reflectively, caught it, slid it onto his finger, and let the empty-floor illusion drop. “You can come out now.” The gold felt heavy and cool and mocking, as it always did. He curled fingers in around it.

Nicholas got up, brushing dust off clinging skinny jeans. He was more than a head shorter than Tom, compact and lovely, and his hair was falling into his eyes, a dark swoop of red; his lips were parted slightly, wondering, as if unsure how to ask.

“I think,” Tom said, “that we should talk.” Nicholas sighed, an incredibly human resigned sound, and nodded.

They ended up heading upstairs, to the studio apartment over the shop that served as home and book-storage and test-kitchen. He’d left the window-shutters open, and sunshine poured in, sprawling like a litter of kittens across treasurewood floors. Plush leatherbound texts and fifty-cent paperback volumes mingled on most available surfaces, not minding that he’d never built proper shelves; he’d been doing some reading for fun, some history and kitchen-magic and ideas for the shop. The laptop in the kitchen had been, he remembered guiltily, ready to experiment with candied-bacon recipes. He wordlessly promised it some attention later.

Nicholas was looking around, hands in pockets as if afraid to touch, but with some measure of confidence returning to those shoulders: he’d figured out that Tom wasn’t going to turn him in. “Is that a thirteenth-century spell for getting live blackbirds out of a pie? Can you actually do that? Why blackbirds?”

“Yes it is, I haven’t tried, and I have no idea why blackbirds. Here…” He moved a stack of books, found bread and cheese and an apple. Sustenance. Food. Comfort.

His parents’d always fed people too, everyone invited in to join that schoolteacher’s table, anyone who needed a place to stay or eat or find refuge. They’d been so proud of their son, and then so baffled when he’d fled the Great Hall and the office without a word in the wake of yet another interminable day and another raucous night. They loved him, and they’d said so, but he could tell they didn’t understand.

He found it hard to talk to them, these days. All the days. All the days of the last three months. His uncle and aunt had been surprised by and appreciative of the sudden gift of a vacation to tropical beaches as an anniversary present, and had assumed Tom would hire someone else to take over here while they’d be gone. He’d said he’d take care of it, after all.

He’d needed somewhere to go. He’d first landed in the kitschy Seashell Motel here in familiar hometown sleepy Shoreside; he’d huddled among covers and sea-damp air and breathed, having taken nothing, not even a change of clothes.

He’d spent the night awake and trembling, clutching the signet ring, trying to calm his heartbeat. In the morning he’d gotten up and made arrangements. A gift vacation. A place that’d need a caretaker. Some meticulously worked spells to hide his trail, some twists and turns of friendly shimmery world-threads.

He’d needed to. He’d had to. He didn’t know how to explain. Too immense, too impossible. A stone on his shoulders. No, in his stomach. On his chest. Pressing down.

It’d gotten better, here. The space. The slow idle beachfront pace. The coastline and the rhythm of waves, and no demands larger than extra toppings.

Until now. When someone needed his help. Someone he’d thought he liked, or could like, or had been drawn to.

He wanted to help. He eyed bread and cheese and apples: maybe not enough. Not when Nicholas looked so thin and tired. In fact, Nicholas looked thinner than Tom recalled; now that he was looking, he saw it. He hadn’t, over the gradual march of weeks.

He did now. He didn’t like it: too many implications about whatever’d been happening as far as power-drain or overexertion, in that wizard’s shop.

He suggested, trying hard, “I can make coffee. Or pie. Not with blackbirds. Or sandwiches. Or—”

“You,” Nicholas said, “can sit down and stop hovering. And tell me why the Arch-Mage lied to two men whose biceps outweigh my head, on my behalf.”

Tom—who three months ago had been Tommy to his little sister and Arch-Mage Thomas Richard Caelus East, High Wizard and Most Resplendent Sorcerer and nominal head of the North American magical population to a lot of other people—rubbed a thumb over his signet ring, said, “Because you didn’t kill anyone,” and sat down because maybe Nicholas would relax too if he did. Maybe they both would.

He picked up a piece of bread. His hands needed to fidget.

“I won’t bother asking how you know,” Nicholas said dryly, but his eyes held more emotion: amusement and gratitude and something that might’ve bordered on impressed flirtation. He sat down also, perched on the edge of a chair as if ready for flight, but not flying. Not yet. “Heart attack, if you were wondering. He didn’t have any family or friends I could find, no one ever came looking, and I handled everything, all the rites and ceremonies…um, quietly.”

“So no one would find you.”

“So everyone would believe he was alive and I was still just his apprentice, and not—” That sentence stopped too fast; pain flickered through old gold, before Nicholas turned that gaze on the table instead. “He took me in. Ian. When I needed someplace, after—that part doesn’t matter. He grumbled about me not knowing how to mix headache cures, but he knew what I was, and he promised I’d never have to wear a collar or a chain.”

“He sounds like a good man.”

“He complained about my music and my favorite skinny jeans. Like having everyone’s stereotypical dad around, making bad bird-related puns.” Affection glinted bright as sunshine over the Pacific, in the words. “He said I’d be safe. He said I could handle customers for him, because people were generally nuisances who weren’t worth his time. He helped them, though. Is that blueberry goat cheese?”

Tom handed it over wordlessly. Nicholas nibbled, sighed again, looked up: by far the most open and honest expression he’d ever worn, not disarmingly cute or purposefully dazzling or glinting as a distraction from secret depths. Tired but hopeful, maybe; and very real. And Tom’s heart did a small flip at the idea that the hope might be his doing. “It might’ve been wrong. Pretending. I didn’t technically lie, though. I only let everyone go on thinking he was alive and nothing had changed, and I wasn’t an escaped magical creature in hiding…I can hear how it sounds. I’m sorry. Seriously. Very sorry?”

“Why’re you apologizing to me?”

“You’re the Arch-Mage!”

“If we’re talking technicalities, are you—”

“Oh no,” Nicholas said, hand over his mouth, eyes suddenly comically wide, “you are the Arch-Mage, should I—I don’t know, kiss the ring or get on my knees or swear to be a better person or something—”

“What on earth do you think I make people do?” Tom said, and took back the blueberry cheese. Tried not to think about those antique-coin eyes looking up at him, kneeling. “Go back to the bird-related pun bit.”

“Wait, why is the Arch-Mage—the missing-person Arch-Mage—running an ice cream parlor in a California tourist town?”

“Mine first. Rights and privileges of the Resplendent Sorcerer and all that. No, I’m not serious, I’m not throwing that around, I hate it, stop looking at me like that. I’m only curious.” He added defensively, “And I’m not really missing. Some people know where I am. The ones who need to. I answer email. And long-distance mirror-calls.”

True, though he somehow felt worse saying it aloud. The universe had kept spinning in his absence, but the decisions, the meetings, the updates….those kept piling up. And he kept not being able to face the work of it all again. Insurmountable. Looming. That stone again, crushing his chest every time he thought about it.

He shoved away those thoughts now. Deep breaths. Focusing on Nicholas. Right.

“Oh,” Nicholas said, “so you’re completely available, then, easy to find,” and flicked a bread-crumb at him. “I know who you are, you know. Not in person—I never knew what you looked like—but most of us approved of you. Shapeshifters, I mean. Therianthropes and familiars and the inhuman crowd. You and the equality advocate movement. You and the whole believing in fairness thing. Though you didn’t have to show it by getting drunk and publicly licking Colin Rue’s face at a coven gathering. Like, we get that you were…new to the job, let’s say. The role. The position. But Colin. That reputation. Even leaving aside the whole ancient feline bloodline part, which, I mean, cats. Why.”

“I like cats,” Tom said, poked by a twinge of conscience, mildly curious about the cat-versus-bird rivalry. The families descended from the original Twelve didn’t always get along, he knew; he was amused that it seemed to be true here, though he got the feeling Nicholas disapproved of Colin Rue and the hedonistic playboy lifestyle specifically, rather than the genetic inheritance. “And…that wasn’t really me.”

“Who was it, then?”

“I mean…it was. Back then. When I’d just—when it all felt so—I didn’t know what I was doing.” He met Nicholas’s eyes, offered truth for truth. “I was scared at being elected and surrounded by all those names I’d heard of in stories, and they all wanted something from me, I could tell, and—and I drank a lot of mead and went to a lot of parties and tried to make connections and do what I was supposed to—and I met Colin and he felt like the ocean, all deep and dangerous and full of magic and not wanting anything from me except that night and that party and feeling good.” Honest, as was the next part: “I hated myself in the morning.”

Nicholas took this in. “Not because of what he is. By which I mean the shapeshifter part, not the pretty party-cat drink-anything-and-sleep-with-anything disaster. You should feel bad about that. But you mean because of what you did.”

“He deserved better than me using him to forget. Anyone would’ve deserved better.”

“He disappeared,” Nicholas said. “Colin. Everyone says he ran off to Italy with a handsome older warlock, you know, being someone’s pet. Or maybe he did let someone use up all his power. For good. If he just didn’t care anymore. If you were wondering.”

“I could try to find out.” He should. Should’ve been checking. Should’ve cared. The guilt ate at his bones like acid. Colin might’ve been an escape—a delicious one, seductive and experienced and tantalizing, rich and bratty and powerful—but hadn’t deserved the Arch-Mage running out of his bed in the middle of the night, either, and never bothering to check in.

And therianthropes were valuable. Such glorious furnaces of magic. Innate wellsprings. And Colin had been…careless, reckless, if not outright self-destructive.

A good Arch-Mage would’ve cared. Would’ve taken care of every single one of his people. Would never have given up and collapsed under the expectations and the futility and the newfound decadence at fingertips. Would’ve never run from it all.

He breathed again, “I’ll try to find him. If he’s in trouble. I can do that.”

“Him.” Nicholas smiled, brief and wry. “I like that.”

Tom blinked, puzzled.

“You think about us as people. Not legends to revere, not power sources you can use, just…” One fingertip traced a semicircle on the table, leaving invisible lines. “People.”

“Aren’t you?” And that invited even more questions, but surely no one—not even the Arch-Mage—could expect to entirely randomly run into another child of living breathing enchanted history. Their numbers weren’t that large, and even a magician’s luck couldn’t stretch that far. If Nicholas were anything it’d be one of the diluted bloodlines, more common, less power. The bounty hunters must’ve been wrong.

“I like to think so. Why’d you leave?”

At some point, Tom realized, he’d stopped being in charge of this conversation. Which was also more or less the answer to that question, left hanging in the air. “Frustrations. Not important. So…some sort of avian shapeshifter? Seagull, pigeon, what?”

Nicholas gave him the world’s most offended eyebrows, said, “Pigeon—!” with cheerful outrage, and held out a hand.

Coruscating color burst into life in the apartment. Red and gold, scarlet and primrose, sunspark yellow licking tongues and fluttering veils of crimson. They raced around and scampered and swirled through air, along bare arms, into inhumanly vibrant suggestions of shape-change.

“Oh,” Tom breathed, astounded, thrilled to the core, watching innate inborn magic at play.

Nicholas didn’t bother holding a proper shape-change, only the hints of one: sharpness in features, the ruffle of feathers, a billowing shadow of wings. He tucked it all back into himself after a second or two and sat demurely gazing across the kitchen table, over apple-slices.

“Phoenix,” Tom said, softly. He could taste sun-gold and heat and scorching winds like burning glory.

“Firebird,” Nicholas said. “More northern, more Russian, not that I am, I was born in Chicago. Don’t ask the question, everyone asks that one, honestly, how old do you think I am?”

Tom promptly shut his mouth on Great Chicago Fire of 1871-related topics. Thought, with secret wild glee: he’s real, he’s real and he’s here, he’s here in my kitchen—!

Nicholas licked apple juice from a fingertip, studied him, smiled. The air in the kitchen got hotter. Literally so, obviously. But also thick with awareness: they had been eyeing each other, on and off, for those long months.

And they’d tumbled into this together, lied to bounty hunters, told secrets.

They trusted each other.

Tom, gazing at his firebird, could not recall the last time he’d trusted someone. Someone with no agenda—at least, no apparent one, aside from self-protection—and who heard the words he didn’t say, confessions with pain behind in the gaps, and who nevertheless picked out a word or two—a pronoun, a consideration, compassion that should be commonplace—and echoed them back as if gazing at treasure.

He wanted to say the thank you. He wanted to apologize for everything he hadn’t done. He wanted to keep Nicholas safe.

He wanted to do something. Like waking up. Like stepping from fog into sun. He had protected Nicholas, at least for now.

He wanted to lean over and feed his firebird another apple-slice, maybe from his own fingertips, maybe skin that could be licked clean.

He managed, “Not over a hundred, then? Your age?” and Nicholas laughed. “It’s not linear and I always hate doing the math…twenty-three. I think. Your years.”

“Oh.” Most therianthropes didn’t age the way humans did; another one of the ways they were different from humans, and someone like Nicholas would be different again, versus the more diluted strains. Rare. Special.

Special; and that meant desirable. Desired by people like whoever’d been planning to collect a firebird, one with no options, on the run and suspected of a crime.

Tom’s heart ached with the anger of it: a physical kind of mute rage at this comprehension. Magical creatures, witch’s familiars, the not quite human—

They all deserved better. From the not-exactly-intelligent created familiars, to the glittering ancient families who moved between animal and human: all of them. They’d been treated as less than human for far too long. Registration laws. Bindings and compulsions, sometimes; in older crueler centuries, that’d happened without consent. In newer and supposedly more equal times, with mutual agreement—but that agreement could involve pressure, intimidation, intoxication.

Magical creatures in general—natural, extraordinary, woven into the fabric of power—were sources. Familiars could store a witch or wizard’s magic, hold it, reinforce it. Proper shapeshifters, those fluid embodiments of protean rippling possibilities…

Those were the most rare, and the most powerful; the oldest families, some of them, but also the most targeted by the dark or evil or selfish practitioners. The most vulnerable if trapped. Like Colin. Like Nicholas.

Tom had pushed for reform bills. He’d argued for equality. He’d won a few concessions about standards for establishing legitimate agreements versus coerced bindings. He’d lost other arguments to traditionalists and unscrupulous bastard warlocks who depended on magical creatures as living batteries. He’d gotten very tired of losing.

A stray thought kicked his head. “How’re you running Ian’s shop? You can’t—”

“Do spells? No.” Nicholas made an annoyed expression, scrunched-up nose and rumpled hair, that shouldn’t’ve been as attractive as it was. As a creature of innate natural magic, he couldn’t touch and manipulate power-lines the way human witches and wizards could; it’d be like constantly manipulating his own soul. “I am a power-source, though, and I have all his recipes for amulets and herb-packets and so on. I can’t pull it out of the air the way you can. But I can put myself into whatever people need. My own magic. Little bits.”

Those words sank into the afternoon and cracked it in half. A seaside breeze drifted past and rattled salt through the air.

Tom flung out a hand and grabbed the closest slender-fingered one. Held on. “I thought you were too thin.”

Nicholas lifted eyebrows at him, ironic and entertained. But did not pull away, and instead only smiled more, oddly small and sweet. “Thanks for the concern.”

“Shut up,” Tom said, “I’m trying to help,” and reached for vibrant quivering world-threads and opened up a rushing spill of power between them, a wave-swell deep and green and healing.

Nicholas felt like fire, tasted like fire, shone like fire, to magical senses: a rippling ecstatic coil and flare of sun and stars and hearths and coals. The fire welcomed without burning; Nicholas felt him but didn’t want to harm him. And also felt exhausted. Weaker than flames should’ve been. Burning and present but more diaphanous, a ghost of fire made almost translucent in places.

Nicholas had been peeling off bits of himself for months now. For Ian’s clients. For the shop. Tom pushed more strength that way, infusions of green and gold into scarlet and topaz and citrine, and nearly shouted, “You absolute idiot, you were slowly killing yourself just to stay hidden, that’s the stupidest—”

“Wow,” Nicholas said, laughing with the influx of power, eyes the merry gold of holiday bells, “I can see why you stopped being the Arch-Mage, such tact, incredible—and no, not for that. I wouldn’t have. Not for myself.”

“Then—”

“You know Ronald from the antique car showroom down the road? You know he lost his wife last summer and he’s got four daughters and needs some soothing herbs and sleeping-spells for himself,” Nicholas interrupted, “or, um, Miss Lucy, who sells her paintings on the boardwalk, and the way she forgets things these days, and she needs those memory-aids, those little enchanted rings or brooches or whatever, to help her around the house? Or any of the lost tourists. Or the surfers who want safety-charms. All of them. I’ve been doing that.”

“Those sorts of spells,” Tom said, “need renewing every…oh.”

“I couldn’t just leave,” Nicholas snapped, someplace between affectionate and dismayed: justifying his choice to them both, and annoyed about his own impulses. “Ian helped them, he helped everyone, and I—I like them. Even the tourists who can’t read maps. It’s important.”

“I was honestly only thinking you were amazing,” Tom admitted. True; and he was still holding fine-boned elegant fingers in his across pale tabletop wood. Nicholas looked up. Their eyes met.

Nicholas said, “I didn’t run from anything in particular. Or not the way you might be thinking. I’d had a bad break-up with a boyfriend, my mother’s just willingly entered into a contract with the sorcerer she fell in love with—he’s a good person, a professor of classical Indo-European magical archaeology—and they’re leaving for some historical dig site, and they said I could come but I felt…I’d be in the way. And I hadn’t lived on my own for…ever, really. I’d moved in with Lowell after college and I thought I’d be his assistant while he went on to study healing, I could’ve done that, been a power-well for him if he was helping people, and then that didn’t work out…and then my mother’s so happy, and I’m happy for her, I am, I just…”

“You felt alone.”

“I did, and I…” Nicholas shrugged a shoulder. “I like nests. Feeling safe. And then I didn’t feel safe, because I was a shapeshifter on my own and I don’t have any real skills that aren’t being a magic source and everything in our apartment was Lowell’s, really, and it all reminded me of him saying he just didn’t feel the same way but I could stay if I agreed to be part of a study on therianthrope abilities. So I said I wouldn’t stay, not like that.”

More anger. Flaring. Sudden and shocking. Directed at that ex who’d dared. “He wanted to study you?”

“Not like that! All, y’know, consensual medical healers’ trials and whatever.” Nicholas swung a foot, tapped a chair-leg. “Probably good for the profession. Nobody knows much about us. Maybe I should’ve. But I just…I couldn’t. Not with him. Not then. And nothing felt right and everything felt too empty and I wanted to run away, so I flew. And I ended up here. California. The edge of the sea. It’s just where I landed.”

“In a wizard’s shop.” Tom rubbed a thumb over that hand, in his: feeling the heat of it. “And then my ice-cream parlor.”

“You felt like…something different. Something I wanted. I don’t know.”

“I’m glad.”

“And then you saved me.”

“I would again.”

“You keep saving me.” Nicholas turned his hand a fraction: fingers met and slid together, fitting, learning each other. “Over and over. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“You don’t need to.”

“Don’t I? Is there anything you need? Anything a firebird could get for you? Magic, gifts, something I could bring back from a floating island, even a slice of pizza from that place down the street?” Nicholas studied their hands, studied the table, let shoulders slump. “There’s probably nothing you need. Arch-Mage. Genius.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“I suppose what you need is me leaving you alone. Not drawing attention. You were trying to feel safe, too.”

Tom had opened his mouth to answer, and couldn’t, at that.

“I know about nests,” Nicholas said, wry and hurting and kind, “and needing to fly.”

“I do answer if there’s an emergency…”

“Of course you do. You’re a good person.”

“Do you want to go? To leave?” He held his breath; the world held its breath. Sun streaked through windows, and the refrigerator let out a sudden creak, not an answer.

“No,” Nicholas said. “Not yet. I should but I want—I want to kiss you, and I know this is like the worst timing, all the adrenaline, everything we’re in the middle of, but I’ve wanted to since the first time you smiled at me and put an extra cherry on that first sundae. When you didn’t know anything about me. You were just being nice. Just because.”

“I thought you were beautiful,” Tom explained, “and I’d never seen you in here before, and you looked nervous—” When he got up Nicholas stood up too. When they moved, they moved together, closer, still holding hands.

Nicholas glanced at entangled fingers and smiled. Tom lifted his other hand and touched the curve of a cheek, pale skin, glowing-ember hair. Strands fell over his palms like, yes, feathers: soft and weightless.

Nicholas tipped his head back, turned on that grin—fearless and radiant—and said, “Well, do something about—” and Tom kissed him mid-sentence, lips coming together with splendid clumsy joy.

The kiss tasted like berry goat’s milk cheese and apples and fresh bread; sunshine tapped at their toes. Nicholas smiled while being kissed; smiled and gave himself unhesitatingly, wholeheartedly, as if nothing else mattered in the world. He walked hands along Tom’s back; Tom’s hip collided with the table and one of them kicked a chair out of its position, and none of that was important. Only the discovery of mouths and hope and a crackle of coruscating elation in the air.

When he snuck a hand under Nicholas’s clinging shirt—relentlessly casually stylish, showing off that slim waist, bearing the logo of a band Tom had never heard of—those bewitching eyes went even more gold, vivid and saturated with want. Nicholas’s skin was warm, even hot, to the touch; he was thinner than he ought to be, even at his pocket-artwork size. He needed care, energy, replenishing.

Nobody did know much about therianthrope anatomy, medicine, healing. That study might’ve been legitimate, if ill-timed. Not that that mattered right this second; Tom, who had power to spare, traced a sigil of healing, of warding, of woven shields like musical notes, across a firebird hip without thinking. He wanted Nicholas to be well.

He did not mean to push quite so much power into the lines. Overexcited. Shaky with it.

Nicholas caught breath, blinked at him.

“Sorry!” He’d never needed ink or wands or rune-stones or recipes; after all, he’d been able to cast spells without focus-lenses since the age of twelve. The best and the brightest; and he sometimes forgot that not everyone could, and startled people. That wasn’t the part that worried him now. “Was that okay? I didn’t mean to—not like that—if you didn’t want a reminder.”

Of the past. Of possibilities. Of compulsion-spells, chains, binding-charms. This one hadn’t been that, only a glowing wistful wish for care and safety; but the act might’ve been too much like possession. Like what people did, or might’ve done, or wanted to do.

“Fine.” Nicholas blinked again. Eyes rounder, an owl with flame-feathers. “I feel…good. Better.”

“Good?”

“I didn’t realize how tired I was, I think. Thanks.”

Not just tired; giving out power faster than it’d slowly refill, charging charms and gifts more swiftly than magic would rebuild itself in his blood. But Tom didn’t say that. Only gathered him in a little closer. “Tell me if you want more.”

“You don’t need to. Mine’ll come back.”

“If you stop draining it.” But Nicholas did already look better: more color in those cheeks, for one. The thinness might take longer. But Tom did at the moment work in an ice-cream parlor. Hot fudge and cinnamon-churro crumble might help.

“You want me to be safe,” Nicholas observed, and wriggled obligingly against him. Arousal pressed against arousal, blatant. Nicholas, being shorter, fit against Tom’s body in tingling new and perfect ways. “You want me.”

“You can have every cherry in the shop,” Tom told him, and traced the upward quirk of those lips with the just-kissed finger. It’d been a while—not since that ill-fated night, in fact; he’d been hiding in a lot of ways—but his body remembered how to want a man. Especially a gorgeous enthusiastic man, here in his arms.

Nicholas raised eyebrows at him and then wrapped his mouth around the finger, and sensation plunged all the way down Tom’s spine like molten honey, liquid and delicious. “Got a bed?”

“I absolutely have a bed,” Tom agreed, and they fell into it: shedding shirts and belts along the way, tripping over discarded shoes, laughing, touching every place that got revealed.

Nothing had been solved, or maybe everything had; bounty hunters remained two blocks over at a dilapidated seaside motel awaiting an Arch-Mage’s decision, and some sort of buyer awaiting an illegally captured therianthrope would have to be dealt with, and he should really do something about that…a kindly old wizard had died and they’d have to officially handle that too…Nicholas would have to come clean about the last few months and not really being an apprentice…Nicholas still felt too thin, depleted and generous to the point of self-sacrifice, even wrapped around him…

You want me to be safe, Nicholas had said. As if that were an answer; as if that were one certainty to hold onto.

Certainties, Tom thought. He rolled them over so he landed on top, hands in fluffy red hair, bodies aligned on his too-small mattress. Sheets, white as vanilla cream, ruffled up around them.

He’d fled the politics and machinations for the tangible chilly sweetness of boardwalk desserts. For sunshine and beach-town tourism and the crash of waves. For the simple knowledge of flavors and smiles.

Nicholas was grinning at him, lying comfortably beneath him. Obvious desire, male and ready, tented those skinny jeans; Tom knew his own must be palpable too, hard and hot and breathless. He balanced on top, looking down at that happiness, which was real.

Nicholas blushed under the attention, but transformed the blush into teasing squirms in place. “If you’re planning to stop here…” His voice made the words mostly a joke, but his eyes were serious, asking. “Wouldn’t want to push. You might turn me into a newt.”

“Too hard to kiss newts,” Tom countered, “and I like kissing you,” and did it again. “Why’re you even thinking about newts during sex?”

“Was I? When was that again, I forgot, too many distractions…”

“Want help focusing?” He opened up those clinging jeans with a flick of fingers; Nicholas groaned as his erection arched up, freed from pressure. He was beautiful here too, nicely proportioned and thick and dark with want, head fat and shiny with it. Tom wanted to explore, but first trailed fingers over his firebird’s flat stomach and lower, following a trail of light red hair down.

“Oh come on,” Nicholas tried. “Please? I want you, I do, I’m saying yes, please.”

“Behave.” Tom set the hand over that straining shaft, but only lightly: fingers, palm, grazing heated skin. “Think of this as revenge for every time you ate a banana split.”

This was real, he thought once more. Nicholas in his bed was real. Touchable, sex-flushed, delectable reality: someone he hadn’t let down, someone who gazed at him and thought he saved people.

“Remind me,” Nicholas muttered, “to bite you later,” but stayed put, unexpectedly genuine compliance. “You like being in charge, then? On top? Writing your protection-spells all over me?”

Tom paused halfway through getting up to tug down his own pants, aware that he no doubt looked ridiculous, frozen by the words. His signet ring, which he’d forgotten to remove, lurked fat and solid on his finger.

“Of course I trust you,” Nicholas said, and kicked him, not hard, a maneuver which required some flexibility given respective positions. “You keep saving me, didn’t I say? Write anything on me you want. Cast spells if you want. Do anything you want, with me. Do it faster.”

Tom started laughing, helplessly; flung away his pants and boxers, bent down, pressed kisses over naked skin until his firebird started laughing as well, ticklish and aroused and overjoyed. He let one hand draw invisible spirals and runes and hearts across a hipbone, a thigh: luminous fireworks of shared sensation, a stab of desire so clear it throbbed through both their bones, hearts that came out lopsided and meant nothing at all in terms of enchantments.

“I like that,” Nicholas said, and looped legs around his waist: unafraid and glorious, messy red hair and pale skin and wide eyes, shimmering contrasts against Tom’s darker skin and hands and taller frame. “You—this feels good, you feel good, I want—”

“I like making you feel good,” Tom whispered, and got a hand around his shaft; stroked and sped up and rubbed a thumb over the tip where wetness built; he let a single spark of power crackle between fingers, and Nicholas gasped his name, back arching, head thrown back.

Tom grinned. “Good?”

“Yes,” Nicholas moaned, “yes, more, that…” and tiny answering bits of fire flickered at his fingertips, in his eyes, in the suggestion of wings and brightness.

Tom did it again. Stroking. A grip and sensation and the pulsing throb of power, a knot in the threads of the world, a bundle of light he could rub right there—

Nicholas shrieked aloud, wordless, a bird’s cry, and came apart for him, shuddering. White heat spurted out over his stomach, his chest, Tom’s hand; his back arched, body tensing in rapture.

Tom barely got a hand around himself, managed one or two clumsy tugs, panting, kneeling between those spread legs—and the peak hit like a thunderstorm in spring, heartpounding, all-encompassing, flooding his body with liquid light, alive. His release splashed across the bare skin below him, joining more spills of white; Nicholas murmured his name and shivered, eyes unfocused and blissful.

Tom kissed him again, tender and swift and impulsively deep. Nicholas opened up into the kiss, willingly languid, being claimed. Stickiness lingered, tugging them together; Nicholas wrapped arms around Tom’s back and pulled him down, holding him close, breathing into his shoulder and neck.

Nicholas’s hair, when it got into Tom’s mouth, tasted like cinnamon and smoke. In a good way, though. Like fire and heat and complicated swirls of layered dessert.

Companionable sunbeams, plump and indolent, traveled across the end of the bed. Met sheet-hills of white froth and plopped down, content.

After a few resplendent minutes, Tom made himself sit up—not without another kiss to ruffled firebird hair—and find tissues for cleanup. Nicholas made a sleepy sound of protest and stretched out an arm to touch him; Tom came right back and did more touching. Tender, careful, caring, cleansing. Not magic, just his hands. And the glorious sight of a thoroughly pleasured firebird—a thoroughly pleasured adorable man—in his bed.

He moved to dispose of clean-up tissues. He caught sight of his right hand.

The ring glinted back at him. He hadn’t noticed he’d still been wearing it.

He didn’t mind it somehow. He’d left it on while making love to Nicholas; he’d used it to help Nicholas. Didn’t seem so ominous anymore. Felt like, well, a ring. Just a decoration he might choose to wear.

A piece of himself. Not the only piece of himself. But present. And not unpleasant.

Settling back down, he tucked his face into Nicholas’s hair and Nicholas himself into long arms and legs. Nicholas let out a sort of muffled squawk and wriggled around enough to be able to talk, but flopped obligingly into being held. “Hi.”

“Hi, yourself. Good, you said?”

“Spectacular.” Toes rubbed against his calf, a casual gesture of intimacy that nevertheless made his heart race: Nicholas liked touching him. “You do that without thinking, don’t you? Magic.”

So they were going to talk about it. Tom might’ve grimaced but couldn’t summon the energy. His body thrummed, replete and satisfied; he couldn’t find the ability to be truly irritated. “I always have. Natural talent, everyone said.”

“Which would be why they wanted you to run things. That and the charisma. Being likeable. You are.”

“That part’s not true. I was never good at…” He waved a hand, let it drop onto a sleepy firebird back. “People.”

“I think you are. Impressively good.”

“Not at politics. Everyone—maybe not literally everyone, but enough that the Council elected me—thought I should be the next Arch-Mage. I was young and stupid and I thought it’d be a chance to change some things, so I said yes, but I was also a kid from a tiny beach town who’d never run anything in his life, not even a book club. I wasn’t ready.”

“Which was why the partying. And the frustrations.”

“Which was why everything. I didn’t know how to be what everyone wanted me to be. I couldn’t do it all. And the way people looked at me…”

“Like you ought to be able to?”

“Yeah…even other magicians. Maybe especially other magicians. It’s the sort of…” Awe. Fear. Hesitance. “When they can’t tell when you’re casting spells, when you’re not any particular discipline because you’re good at them all, when it’s so easy for you and they know it’s easy for you, but you can’t explain how it is or how to do it…” He’d always seen the world that way: a luminous enticing web of light, so simple to touch, to gather, to manipulate. He’d been able to hear it, to taste it, to twirl it around a finger. So many senses, so many choices, not just one or two. “I’m not trying to sound arrogant.”

“No,” Nicholas said. “I know. You’re not. It’s harder than people think, being brilliant.” He might’ve said it sarcastically; he didn’t. Sympathy laced those inhuman eyes. “You’re not like other people, and they know it and you know it. And they wanted you to solve all their problems, but it doesn’t work like that.”

“No…I’m sorry. I should be trying to help you. I can, you know.”

“I know you can. And you don’t have to be sorry.” Nicholas drummed fingers over Tom’s chest. “You’re allowed to feel what you feel.”

“I am, though. You’ve been through—you don’t need to put up with me complaining.”

Nicholas scowled at him, leaned down, and bit Tom’s shoulder. The way a bird would, quick and nipping, though not hard.

“Ow,” Tom said anyway. “What are you, a seagull? I’m not food.”

“No, you’re my Arch-Mage who needs reminding that you’re human too.” Nicholas kissed the same spot, soothing. “Because you are. I might not’ve made exactly the same choices, in your place, but I’m not you. And I get why you’re here. I like you being right here. In your bed, with me.”

“I was a terrible Arch-Mage.”

“You weren’t, though. You aren’t. Present tense.” Nicholas tilted that head at him. Fiery hair fluffed up in whimsical post-sex agreement about this. “You proposed reforms for sentience definitions, more equal rights for both familiars and shapeshifters—”

“Which got argued out of existence—”

“But you tried. Someone cared. Someone thought about us.” Nicholas thought about this, and added, “Even if you were human, and the sort of human who’d quote Star Trek during public addresses. Honestly, what made you think that was a good idea?”

“The Star Trek future’s about optimism and diversity and—that’s not the point!”

“It sort of is, you giant nerd, but never mind. Yes, I’ve just called my Arch-Mage a nerd. Let’s pretend I didn’t so I don’t have to add it to the list of terrible life choices. So, after everything, you…I don’t want to say you quit. Because you didn’t. You’re still answering, sometimes, you said.” Nicholas bit his lip, let it go. “You flew.”

“You can call me whatever you want. I didn’t know what else to do. Nothing ever changed. I didn’t want to resign—that would’ve felt worse—but I couldn’t…I don’t know.”

“You are,” Nicholas said, in the tone of someone carefully explaining an obvious fact, “the Arch-Mage. Change things.”

“I just got tired. Of paperwork. Of bureaucracy. Of meetings that went around and around. Of being responsible for the welfare of everyone—witches and wizards and magical creatures and interaction with human governments and—and I couldn’t do enough. I couldn’t save everyone enough.”

“You saved me,” Nicholas said, and then glanced away: a penitent bird-quick movement, gaze averted. “You did save me. I shouldn’t—I won’t push.”

“Firebird,” Tom said, with affection, “of course you will, you can’t help it,” and held out an arm.

Nicholas sighed and put that head back on his shoulder. “Sorry. Again.”

“No need.”

They held each other for a minute, in the bed with the tangled ocean-foam sheets, in the quiet.

Change, he heard again, an echo. The word didn’t demand, but didn’t leave, either. It meandered around the bedroom like a pet: along bed-posts, in the sea-breeze and salt of exertion and ecstasy, in the smooth skin behind one of Nicholas’s shoulder-blades. You’re the Arch-Mage. Change things. You saved me.

He could, he thought, go back. The idea arrived like a blooming moonflower, a kindling bonfire: not all at once, but slowly opening up to reveal possibilities. He’d been hiding; he’d known as much. He’d been happy, but he hadn’t been himself. He’d known that too.

Nicholas had looked at his power with neither fear nor awe. Only sheer delight and desire. Trust.

He’d hidden in the ice cream parlor mostly because it’d been in the family already and because he liked dessert. Because he felt too young and too old: a boy who’d never grown up enough, who liked Star Trek and optimism, who wanted to lick hot fudge off a spoon and experiment with recipes instead of arguing with hidebound regulatory committees in austere marble rooms.

That marble-lined ancient Great Hall moved around with each Arch-Mage, following the position like a puppy from Toronto to Seattle to Washington D.C. Right now it sat on a rolling hill above Los Angeles and fretted, official residence chambers uninhabited. He knew it felt emotion, in a dim semi-sentient fashion born from centuries of magic practiced there. He thought now that he’d been unfair to it, leaving.

He trailed fingertips over Nicholas’s back. Nicholas said, half-asleep, “You know I won’t tell anyone where you are, I know about hiding…” and nuzzled his face further into Tom’s collarbone.

Tom’s heart snapped like a sugar-stick, at that. Snapped; and put itself back together, finding some new core of resolution, a new shape, melted and mended.

He wouldn’t let Nicholas face consequences or run from consequences or fear consequences alone. He wouldn’t let either of them be alone.

And that made the rest simple. Or if not simple, clear.

He could change the world. At least he could try.

He’d tried once. He hadn’t known anything. Hadn’t been face to face with giddy tourists or seaside regulars or weary single fathers and four daughters who liked sprinkles on their sundaes. Hadn’t held a firebird in his arms.

Magic, he thought. Yes.

He nudged Nicholas’s head with his chin. “You awake?”

“No. Unless you’re asking about round two, in which case enthusiastically yes, if you give me a minute to recover.”

“How do you feel about paperwork? Scheduling meetings?”

“If this is foreplay,” Nicholas said, yawning, “I’ll try pretty much anything, but I prefer pirate and helpless captive scenarios, just so you know…”

“No. What? Really? Would you want to—later. Definitely later. I mean I’m offering you a job. Sort of. I think. Yes, I am.”

“Huh?” Nicholas shoved himself up on an elbow, batted hair out of his eyes, did it again when the first time failed. Adorably so. His toes brushed Tom’s leg; Tom’s leg enjoyed this. “What, here? Something ice cream related?”

“No. Why’d you end up here, specifically, anyway? Ice cream. Oceans.” Me, he added silently as Nicholas sat up more. How’d I get so lucky, what unknown magic was it, that brought you into my life?

“Um…that’s why. I wanted something completely different. I like sensation. Opposites. I’m never properly wet or cold. What are we even talking about?”

“If I go back,” Tom said, and reached out to take confused hands into his; they held his right back, so that was a good start. “If I go back—if I try again, work with people, try to compromise—I’m awful at being tactful, you were right, and I hate scheduling and paperwork, and I never know who’s actually important to talk to, and—and you’re so good with people, you know Ronald’s kids and you care about the tourists and you fit in here like you always had, and—and I just thought—would you come with me?”

“With you—you said back—are you thinking—”

“If I do this.” He looked at the ring. The symbol. The weight. So did his firebird. “If I try.”

“If you—what would I do? A shapeshifter, someone who pretended to be an apprentice, someone who lied—I’ve never even had a real job!”

“You were keeping track of Ian’s clients. All of them. Remembering what they all need. I need—I could use someone who—”

“You want me to be the Arch-Mage’s secretary?”

“Um. Personal assistant?” He tacked on desperately, “Or whatever title you want. Chief of Staff. Supervisor of the Great Hall. Anything. Please.”

“I’m not human,” Nicholas said. Tom couldn’t read his tone, couldn’t tell what labyrinthine golden eyes were thinking. “Those regulations—”

“Can change. And I can have anyone I want on my personal staff. It’s not perfect. It’s a start. But you’ll be safe and, um. And I’ll be safe. With you. With me.”

“This can’t actually be real.”

“You like nests.”

“I don’t think the Arch-Mage’s Hall counts as a nest!”

“Then make it one. Yours. Whatever you need. Whatever I can do.” He took a breath, let it out. “I want to do this, I think. But…I want to do it with you.” Please, please.

“A start, you said.” Nicholas sat very still, holding Tom’s hands, voice soft. The mattress really wasn’t big enough for two people; they’d stayed close together. “Visibility. You and me, working together. Being together. If…if that was what you meant.”

“I did.”

“You’re serious.”

“I am.”

“Chief of Staff might be kind of ambitious. Since I’ve never had a job. Like I said.” Nicholas considered this. “The Arch-Mage’s Personal Assistant, though…”

“Or any title you want.”

“I’ll have opinions about things.”

“I know. I want to hear them.”

“I do like being organized…and I do like people…”

“You do.”

“But you’ll be criticized for it.” Nicholas’s eyebrows tugged together: apprehensive small flames. “Scrutinized. Insulted, even. Favoring the inhuman population over the human. Sleeping with your staff. With me in particular, being who I am. Whatever happened to those bounty hunters?”

That was all true. But—

“That was already true. The first parts. I know what to expect, now. And this time I’ll have you with me. About the staff part…I’m allowed my own personal retinue. People I need.”

“You need me.”

“I think,” Tom said, “maybe I do,” and they looked at each other for a minute. The refrigerator muttered some more creaky approval, from the kitchen space.

“About the bounty hunters,” Tom finished finally, remembering, “they’re staying in a motel five blocks away. They’re not going anywhere. We can deal with them. Together. I’ll call the Wardens if you want.”

“You said,” Nicholas said, turning their hands slightly, looking at fingers laced together, fair and darker, magic running under skin, “that I can keep you safe.”

“Sane,” Tom said, “and safe, and—not scared,” and he meant it, every word, and his heart felt too big to contain, dizzy with emotion.

“I’m scared,” Nicholas said. “This is absurd. We’ll have to talk about—about so much. Job titles. The position. Expectations. Money. Until six months ago I’d never earned my own income, and even that was off the books, that was Ian looking out for me. If I say yes—”

“You might say yes?”

“I’m thinking about it. You’ve known me for twelve weeks—we’ve just had mindblowing sex—”

“We could do that again.”

“You don’t know me. Not really. I am a criminal, technically. I ran Ian’s shop without proper credentials. I lied.”

“I do know you,” Tom countered, and lifted one of those hands and kissed the back of it. “You like cherries and sensation and the ocean. You have wings. Which I want to see sometime. You make me smile. You make me want to—to be the person who saves people.”

Nicholas laughed, though his cheeks got pinker.

“Please,” Tom said this time. “For the mindblowing sex. For all the Star Trek jokes I promise to make so you can call me a nerd. Please.”

Nicholas was laughing more. A stray sunbeam fell into his hair and stayed there, crowning the moment. “I’ve never seen an episode. You’ll have to introduce me. Speaking of introducing me…what am I? I mean what would I be? Not your familiar or your power-source or your working arrangement. Your…boyfriend?”

“Yes,” Tom said, “yes, yes, so much yes—” He leaned in, through the sunbeam. Nicholas leaned in too, and the kiss landed to the accompaniment of a feather-rustle, an ethereal suggestion of wings. “You’re you. Whatever you want to be.”

“One more thing, then.”

“Anything.” Because they could have anything, together; he believed that, for the first time in a very long time.

Anything might be possible. A future ahead. A magical world to change for the better. A naked firebird currently being tumbled into his lap for kisses and caresses. He wanted to find out where they could go. “Whatever you want. I’m the Arch-Mage.”

“You are,” Nicholas agreed, tipping his head back for easier kissing, “and you’re Tom the ice cream person, you’re my ice cream person, and I think we should keep this place, don’t you? For vacations.”

“Not a problem,” Tom said, champagne and sugar bubbling up in his voice, his chest, even his toes. “It’s my uncle’s place anyway.”

“Should’ve known. You don’t really run, even when you do.” Nicholas swung around and swooped a leg around Tom’s waist, getting them face to face. “You still care. About your family, about your people. You can never not care. Of course it’s family.”

“I want you,” Tom said. He did. In every conceivable way. Like sparks, like kindling, like cleansing light. Like magic. “I want you. Nicholas.”

“Sounds perfect to me,” Nicholas agreed. His arms’d gone around Tom’s neck; his eyes were pools of dark gold, and a murmur of wings shifted and faded, a contented susurration. “We can go and sort out your Great Hall and your appointments and your bureaucracy. I’ll bite people if I need to, if you need space to think. And we can come back here when we need to. For us. For everyone. For your marshmallow fluff sundaes with all the cherries on top. The ocean. And your bed. Starting tomorrow, because I have plans for you and that bed I just mentioned, for the rest of today.”

“All of that,” Tom said, gold on his finger, gold in Nicholas’s gaze, hands sinking into ember-red firebird hair, that tomorrow stretching out on ocean-waves and wings and potential around them, “yes.”

THE END

Author’s Note

I’ve had this story in the back of my head for a long time—I knew who Tom was, and I knew he and Colin from Port in a Storm had a past one-night-stand, and I knew he’d be a good Arch-Mage, after some working out of things.

This story takes place more or less concurrently with the events of Port in a Storm—maybe just slightly before. Tom appears in Colin’s story about himself, though not by name. And both Tom and Nicholas will reappear in the third Kitten and Witch story, which is tentatively titled The Warlock Affair and will be more of a murder mystery, when Colin’s accused of a crime…

The Southern California beach town where I grew up has a marvelous ice-cream shop on the pier, and I have fond memories of mint-chip and pistachio and butter pecan, and wandering down to watch the ships, and riding the carousel. I imagine Tom and Nicholas sometimes holding hands and doing exactly that, when they need an escape: breathing in the ocean, licking ice-cream from dripping cones in sunshine, being happy.

Like all my stories, this one has a playlist! Here’re some of the songs I was listening to while writing about Tom and Nicholas:

Buzzcocks, “What Do I Get?”

The Front Bottoms, “Summer Shandy”

that dog, “Bird on a Wire”

Jason Manns and Jensen Ackles, “Simple Man”

Tegan and Sara, “All I Have To Give The World Is Me”

They Might Be Giants, “Birdhouse In Your Soul”

ABOUT K.L. NOONE

K.L. Noone loves fantasy, romance, cats, far too sweet coffee, and happy endings! She is also the author of Port in a Storm and its upcoming sequel, available from Less Than Three Press, and numerous short romances with Ellora’s Cave and Circlet Press. Her fantasy fiction has appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies.

With her Professor Hat on, she teaches college students about Shakespeare and superhero comics, and has published academic articles and essays on Neil Gaiman’s adaptations of Beowulf, Welsh mythology in modern fantasy, and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.

For more information, visit twitter.com/KristinNoone.

ABOUT JMS BOOKS LLC

JMS Books LLC is a small queer press with competitive royalty rates publishing LGBT romance, erotic romance, and young adult fiction. Visit jms-books.com for our latest releases and submission guidelines!