Shepherd was left with all of their regret, but he got to see them find their way in life, and it seemed to be a good trade. He watched now as the healing that was his trademark began to work and looked up at Adrian with bleak eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said, and then he felt the tug of something painful. That was a lie. He
did
know, and now he was obligated to tell the truth. “I told him that I didn’t want us to fall because I was afraid I couldn’t protect him from the world.”
Adrian raised his eyebrows. “Well, no wonder,” he said shortly, and Shepherd frowned at him.
“Why? What’s he doing?”
There was a sardonic snort. “He’s attending every children’s choir practice for every religion known to man. I would too. What you said, that’s bloody insulting!”
“What did I say?” Shepherd wailed, but Adrian had stalked off by that time. He was still looking transparent and un-Adrian-like, and apparently he didn’t want to deal with Shepherd’s ignorance any longer. Shepherd was left alone again, healing another brothel, and now he was
really
wishing Jefi would come back.
Jefi did, eventually, right about the time Shep was thinking he should check on Adrian. Unlike the other times he’d flounced off over the millennia, this time Jefi didn’t pretend that nothing had happened.
“Has it occurred to you,” he asked, startling Shepherd by appearing next to him out of the clear blue, “that all I’d ask for if I fell would be you? Adrian and his lovers and his friend—they’re heroes. It’s obvious. They’re the stuff of story and legend, and they’re scary fearsome, but they don’t have to be us. We’re not leaders up here, or at least I’m not. They’d find a replacement for me soon enough. There’s no reason I’d be any different down there. And I’d be happy with that!”
Shepherd was affronted. “Replace you? Jefischa, they couldn’t
replace
you!”
There was nothing childlike or starry-eyed about Jefi’s smile then. It was, in fact, frighteningly adult. “No, Shepherd.
You
couldn’t replace me. Heaven will do just fine on its own.”
“You don’t fall for a second-rate human,” Shepherd sniffed with dignity, and Jefi took his hand and kissed it. There was a mild tingling on the back, and Shepherd was acutely aware of Jefi’s breath and lips on his skin.
“Why not?” Jefi asked softly. “You fell for a second-rate angel.”
Shepherd scowled. “You’re the best, Jefi. There is no better angel. You have the biggest heart and the biggest sense of wonder. You are what storybook angels should be.”
“Michael’s stronger.”
“Michael’s vain.”
“Rafael is purer of purpose.”
“He’s dull as dirt.”
“Lucifer is more dangerous.” Jefi’s eyes had started dancing, and Shepherd smiled into them, saying exactly what Jefischa wanted him to.
“I have it on good authority that Lucifer is a git wank,” he finished with a quirk of his lips. He and Jefi were very, very near, their faces almost touching, their miraculously colored eyes close and mysterious to each other. There was something Shepherd wanted to do… something burning at his skin. He’d seen the humans do it, but he was pretty sure it would be the beginning of the end for them both.
Abruptly he pulled back, suddenly understanding the curse of the blush that had been haunting him since Adrian’s arrival.
“I should go check on Adrian,” he muttered, and Jefischa, whose gray eyes were big and round, nodded agreement and swallowed hard. Shepherd looked at his face, bereft and flushed, and swallowed too.
The act of walking away felt like an act of penance.
Shepherd presented himself at the door to Adrian’s “place”: his room, which had taken on the color and grace—or lack thereof—of any college dorm room on earth. Or any college dorm room that came with really nice leather couches and a king-size bed. Shepherd knocked casually and opened the door, and then stopped short, staring.
He hadn’t been aware that Adrian had company—at least, he and Jefischa hadn’t seen anybody go in. It took Shepherd a couple of moments to realize that the man in Adrian’s bed wasn’t someone who belonged in heaven. He was… a mirage. A memory. A physical manifestation of a memory. A ghost in heaven of someone living on earth.
It was Adrian’s lover, the elf, Green.
He was beautiful, with long gold hair that rivaled an angel’s, wide-set emerald eyes, and pointed ears. That’s about all Shepherd got to see of him, because at the moment, he was kneeling between Adrian’s splayed knees with Adrian’s engorged cock in his wide mouth. He was bobbing his head and making vacuum-locked slurping noises around Adrian’s flesh while Adrian lay back in the large bed, one arm flung over his closed eyes and the other hand reaching to clench in Green’s long hair.
Shepherd’s whole body tingled in that way he’d come to know was humanity overtaking his angelic form, and he must have made some sort of sound in his throat. Adrian looked up at him with half-hooded, knowing eyes and that devil-may-care grin.
“Stay,” he mouthed. “Watch.”
And Shepherd was powerless to move.
Green spent an eternity pulling Adrian’s tender flesh into his mouth, and when he was done, he reached up and grabbed Adrian’s hand, laced fingers with him briefly, and pulled that hand down to his cock. Adrian squeezed himself and pulled up, and Green grasped his bottom in both hands and shifted Adrian’s hips up, separated his bottom, extended a pink tongue, and began to lick.
Adrian seemed to forget all about Shepherd frozen at his doorway, and Shepherd forgot all about pretending to breathe. Adrian’s face contorted, and his hand began to move up and down, sinuously stroking. Green moved his tongue up to Adrian’s scrotum and penetrated his body with long thumbs, and Adrian’s stroking became faster and almost brutal. He started to gibber, “Please… oh God… damn…. Please, Green. Shit… need you… need….
Please
!”
Green’s face peered over Adrian’s long body, and he grinned. “You want me?” The voice was far away and distorted, but Shepherd felt the joy, the humor of this act, of their bodies together.
“Fuck me now, you bloody git!” Adrian snapped.
Green’s response was to delve deeper with his thumbs, and Adrian hissed and whined, and his hand tightened on his cock to the point where Shep could see it was purple and spend was starting to leak from the top. “
Please
?”
he begged, and Green laughed softly.
“Since you asked, beloved.”
Green moved up then and fitted himself against Adrian’s entrance. Shepherd sucked in a breath just watching—Green was bigger than most mortals. His body was longer, his shoulders were wider, and his cock, marble pale and uncircumcised, was perfect and perfectly proportioned. He didn’t see how it could….
Adrian howled, lifted his hips off the bed with a flex of his legs, and drove himself desperately, impaling his body
hard
on Green, who closed his eyes and thrust deeply.
“Hard, Green,” Adrian whispered. “Fuck me hard.”
Coarse words—earthy words, used in a purely carnal act.
But looking at their faces, Shepherd didn’t see only carnal, physical sex—although there was that. Shepherd saw love. The things they were doing with their bodies were… painful. Awkward. But the love, the joy he saw as Green framed Adrian’s face with his hands and Adrian sucked a finger into his mouth and then let it trail down his cheek, as Green’s hips began to piston, as Green lowered his head to kiss his lover before he was moving too fast to make the gesture graceful….
All of it, all of it, made this an act of love.
Green threw back his head then, his gold hair falling like sunshine rain over his bare white body, and Adrian—whose hand had never stopped moving on his own cock, even when their stomachs were mashed together—screamed just as Green howled in arousal.
“Do it, mate,” Green panted. “Do it now!”
Adrian came off the bed, clasped his lover to his chest, brought Green down with him, and….
Bit his neck.
Shepherd hauled in a breath—and it actually felt like he needed it. He hadn’t even seen Adrian’s fangs extend, but there they were, long and lethal, and they buried themselves in Green’s slender neck and soft white skin. Scarlet ichor pumped up, and Adrian opened his mouth and suckled, and Green… Green kept fucking him, the keening in his voice amped high and desperate as terrible, excruciatingly pleasurable aftershocks rocked them both into quivering nerve endings, tender and sensitized and beyond replete. They collapsed onto the bed, and Shepherd thought for a moment he could actually smell them, the collective odor of body fluids—sweat, blood, and come—that made up sex with a vampire.
“You don’t always like that,” Adrian rumbled, nuzzling Green’s pointed ear.
“Sometimes,” Green mumbled back. His body was still deeply entrenched in Adrian’s, and Shepherd had the feeling they might stay like that for hours, if the rules of physical contact could be bent to do something like it. “When I love you so much it feels like my heart is bursting through my skin.”
“So every day, then?” Adrian joked with a slight but still familiar smile.
“Every goddamned night,” Green affirmed.
“Love you too.” They snuggled, and Shepherd might have broken the spell and retreated, but Adrian met his eyes and gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head. And then Green fell asleep in his arms, his body fading from their reality as he did so.
Adrian flung his arm over his eyes again, but this time not to hide a grimace of pleasure. He stayed there, panting, for a long time. When he finally spoke, Shep realized he’d been studying Adrian’s sex-flushed, come-spattered body with interest and… hunger.
“Elves remember when they dream,” Adrian said softly, pulling Shepherd’s attention from his splayed thighs. “True memories. Sometimes, he lets himself dream of those moments… and then….”
Adrian’s voice was choked, and Shepherd passed the back of his hand over his cheeks.
“That must be really awful,” he said gruffly.
Adrian turned a blood-streaked face to him. “No, mate. It’s really wonderful. You see? I
lived
that—I lived it, and it lives in my heart still, and sometimes Green visits and makes it real. It’s a gift, and I’m forever grateful. That’s why you spend time on earth. So you have memories like that in heaven.”
Shepherd felt his heart slow down at the words, and his body, which hadn’t stopped tingling, thumped sluggishly at his groin, and again, and then painfully. His groin swelled, engorged….
Shepherd sucked in a breath and, completely unconscious of how he looked, grabbed his crotch.
“Holy shit,” he muttered. “I have balls.”
Adrian swung his legs over the edge of the bed and wiped his face on the rumpled sheets. “Yeah, mate? Congratulations.”
“Congratulations on what?” Jefi asked, and Shepherd almost groaned. Damn, Jefi. He must have gotten impatient.
“Nothing,” Shepherd said miserably at the same time Adrian—still naked to their gaze, his body glistening and still slightly erect—walked over to Shepherd and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Well, mate, let’s see. If you’re going to fall, let’s see what equipment you’re going to fall with!”
“You’re going to fall?” Jefi cried unhappily, and Shepherd turned to him, confused and beleaguered. “I wasn’t planning to!” he snapped back. “Dammit, Jefi! I caught… I saw… and then my body… it just….”
Adrian glared at him seriously. “Own up, mate. It wasn’t what you saw. That’s not when it happened.”
“When did it happen?” Jefi asked curiously.
Shepherd shook his head. “Look. Nothing’s permanent. They can go away. I can make them go away—”
“C’mon, let’s see!” Jefi took liberties. Well, if anyone was going to, it was Jefischa, right? He gathered the folds of Shepherd’s heavenly robe and pulled it aside, and gasped.
“Oh my,” Adrian said with a smirk, and Shepherd looked down at himself.
“They’re… it’s… sort of… um….”
“Jesus, mate, you’re hung like a fucking bear!”
Complete with rust-colored pubic hair. Jefischa reached out a tentative hand, but Shepherd realized that Adrian was watching and flinched away. Jefi looked up, hurt. “I just wanted to see. Are they the same as Adrian’s? I don’t think so. Yours isn’t completely human, yet—see, Shep? Adrian’s has veins and—”
And Jefi reached out that questing hand to actually
touch
Adrian’s lush playboy body. Shepherd forgot all about trying to stay in heaven for Jefi, and a single word roared through him.
“
Mine
!” he snarled, and he grasped Jefi’s hand inches away from Adrian’s most personal parts.
Both angels gasped and looked at their hands as Shep held Jefi’s.
Their hands had been… well, anatomically correct, but smooth and featureless. As they watched, Shepherd’s hand became broader, harder, his fingers blunt and no-nonsense. Cinnamon-colored hair sprinkled the back of his wrist and—very, very lightly—the backs of his knuckles, and his skin was slightly rough. Jefi’s hand in his was long-boned, finer, narrow, with long, tapered fingers and blond hair on his wrist only. And the skin was much softer than Shepherd’s.
Shepherd watched as his thumb—almost independent of his will—caressed the inside of Jefi’s wrist. Jefi sucked in a breath, and his body gave a wiggle and a convulsive little hop, and he looked closely at Shepherd. “I’ve got them too,” he whispered.
Shepherd closed his eyes then, and in a heartbeat, a wish, pulled his wings up around his shoulders and used them as a canopy over himself and Jefi. The wings pulsed around the two of them, wearing sort of a bright, embarrassed fuchsia color, but they still did their job: instant privacy.
The men stood absolutely still. Shep’s robes swung back into place, but still the two of them were as naked as either of them had ever been in multiple millennia of existence. Shep raised the hand not holding Jefi’s and caressed his beloved’s cheek. His thumb, blunt and hard, with a slightly scratchy cuticle, painted a swath of blushing, fair skin under his touch, complete with a light sprinkling of freckles. Jefischa closed his eyes, as though the slight touch was too exquisite to bear. Shepherd raised his thumb again and traced Jefischa’s closed eyelid, and then the other, and saw lashes appear, dark at the root and pale at the ends.