“Come on, baby. Come on. A few more steps. Come on. I’m anchoring us here, keeping us connected to them. Come on, come on—”
Their fingertips fumbled for a moment, but at the breath of a touch, Cully threw himself into Dante’s arms, and Dante let go of the charm to hold him tight.
A brutal wind ripped around them. The whirl of stars from the vaulting firmament that had been his bedroom ceiling surrounded them, taunting voices filling their ears, the touches of old lovers brushing like wax upon their skin.
You’ll never be enough.
Just settle for friends.
He can’t love you for who you are.
You can only trust yourself.
Come home and marry a nice girl.
Get a real job.
Only the lucky get to do the bold things.
Who said you were lucky?
You’ll never keep him. He can’t possibly love you.
Those frightening words sounded loudly in both their ears, Dante knew, but Cully, the man in his arms, was the only thing that was true.
“Jordan!” he cried. “Barty, Alex, Kate, Josh! Come get us. Cully was my word. He’s my world. He’s my everything!”
The wind grew stronger, more personal, but also warmer, less icy, less inclined to draw blood.
“Guys!” Cully cried, his voice loud although he’d partially buried his face against Dante’s neck. “I love you. I miss you. I never told you enough how much you mean to me. Come get us. Dante is my word. He’s my world. He’s my everything. We were so dumb to never tell you, to never tell each other. Please don’t give up. We love you.”
“Please,” Dante added. “Don’t give up on us like we almost gave up on each other.”
His eyes were still mostly shut, but through his slitted lids he could see the black-and-silver night whirling around them. Like his vision of the bonfire pentacle in the faraway universe, the black was turning purple, the silver turning orange and gold, and the iciness of the wind gave way, more and more, to the warmth of a fire on a chilly autumn night.
Closer and closer to the fire they whirled, until Dante buried his face against Cully’s neck and held on, trusting in fate, trusting in his friends, trusting in his love for Cully to land them safely. And hoping Cully trusted too.
Abruptly the wind stopped, and the heat from the Samhain fire warmed their skin as they were dragged from the void to a flat sandy space.
As Dante fell to his knees, Cully leaning weakly against him, he heard Jordan sobbing in relief, and another, unfamiliar, masculine voice telling him he’d done it.
Dante tilted his head back and opened his eyes to see where they were.
Above him, he saw a chilly autumn sky, as cold and void and diamond dazzling as the one he’d seen from his room.
Behind him was a great bonfire, warm enough to keep the chill of the night from shocking them too badly. The bonfire at his back sat in the bottom of a small valley surrounded by five gentle hills, each one a darkness against the starlit void beyond.
At the tip of each hill, like a nipple on a breast, was a bonfire.
Dante looked around and clutched a shuddering Cully tightly to his chest.
“Someday,” he muttered hoarsely to Cully, “they’re going to have to explain how all of this came to be.”
But Cully could only sob, and Dante was too exhausted and too dizzy to think of much else after that.
Apparently traveling across an existential void to meet friends in the here and now could really take it out of a guy.
HE had little memory of what happened after that. Jordan and that unfamiliar guy—Jordan called him Mack—gathered him and Cully up and stashed them into an SUV with one of the cats that haunted the witch’s cottage Jordan had been living in.
What. Ever.
They slept on and off while Jordan and Mack cleaned up the bonfire, taking pains to see that the dry hills of Plymouth and Jackson weren’t set on fire by their little adventure into existential teleportation, and then they were driven to, well, exactly what Jordan told him it would be.
A double-wide trailer in the wilderness.
But as Jordan and Mack—and Mack may have been a little shorter than Jordan’s six five, but he was strong enough to carry Cully like a damsel in distress while Jordan supported Dante’s weight on his shoulder—poured them into the trailer and then into bed, he had a moment to look around and appreciate what his friends had done.
With the exception of the bed—which looked like his and Cully’s bed frames pushed together and topped with a king-size mattress—the rest of the trailer was set up with their stuff, in their places. It was like their lives together had been magically moved to this new home, and the one thing different was that everybody expected them to be a couple now.
Dante could live with that.
But it wasn’t like he had words to argue about it at the moment. All he could do was gather Cully to his chest and cuddle under the bright bargello quilt that had been brought from Cully’s bed.
Somehow the colors and Cully’s craftsmanship worked a spell of their own, and Dante fell asleep, Cully in his arms, feeling safer and more protected from evil than he had in a long time.
Pieces Like Falling Leaves
CULLY woke up in an unfamiliar place, comforted by the sound of a small toy train buzzing by his ear at regular intervals.
“Where—”
Zzzzzzzz….
“Am—”
Zzzzzzzz….
“I?”
Zzzzz….
Cully struggled to sit up, but he was being held tight by the safest, strongest arms he’d ever known.
And then it hit him, and he started to giggle.
“Dante? Dante, wake up.”
“Zzmmmnn?”
“Baby, you’re snoring like a freight train. It’s time to wake up.”
“Cully? What’re we doing here?”
Cully tried to wiggle out of his arms and look into his face, but he realized that whatever had happened the night before, he was wrecked. His muscles ached, his joints popped, and without warning, his eyes closed.
“Sleeping, love,” he responded. He was wearing a T-shirt and sweats, he thought muzzily. So was Dante. Sleeping clothes. They could sleep forever.
“Lez do zat smore, kay?”
“Yeah.”
When he fell asleep again, Dante’s snores had eased up, and Cully had no impediments to dreamland.
When he woke up again, someone was kneeling by their bed, scooping Dante’s hair back from his brow.
“Jordan?” Cully asked, feeling only slightly less out of it.
Jordan looked more wrecked than Cully felt. His lean, high-cheekboned features were nearly gaunt, and his wide arctic-blue eyes had deep circles underneath. Nevertheless, at Cully’s voice, he smiled warmly and stood, leaning over to smooth Cully’s hair back from his forehead as well before leaning over to gently kiss him in the cleared space.
“You’re awake,” he said softly, and Cully’s eyes burned. How could he have ever thought Jordan didn’t love them—didn’t love him? It had been there all along, in every adventure Jordan had ever led them to, and in every meal they’d ever eaten together. Oh, Cully had been so very blind in so many ways.
“Dante did all the heavy lifting,” he admitted, remembering those last terrible moments in the house, and how Dante had needed to fight both Cully’s fear and his own. “But I could still sleep for a week.”