Episode 119: Tour with Spence (Greg)

He looked at the specimen in front of him. The son of his target. Gay, and he dressed like it which meant those stereotypes held true across realm boundaries. It made him feel like he had his footing a little better than he really did.

Because once Aadya left – and he watched every step of her gorgeous journey across the garden to her conspiracy theorist bodyguard ex lover coparent guy – he was alone, in a strange realm.

With a job to do.

He looked at Tidy McGaypants. He didn’t get how anyone could be straight and then just decide to be gay, or be gay and then just decide to be straight. “So you’re with Heir Twin Two, but you used to be with Heir Twin One?”

The security apprentice, Spence, gave a little tight nod of his head. “Yeah. It’s complicated.”

Sounded simple to him. He bet it would have caused a lot more trouble if Spence had upgraded along the heir line instead of downgrading, but that was just a hunch. He suspected people were probably a lot more protective of the Crown Princess than her twin, even if they didn’t realize it.

Stealing something from her would be a fabulous challenge.

“Everyone on board with the switch?” he asked Spence.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Everyone was. No hard feelings.”

Bullshit, there were no hard feelings. He didn’t believe for a second that this guy was oblivious to all the subtle conversation and body language going on at breakfast. He had to know it was going on, which meant he was lying to Greg. Lying politely, just because Greg was an outsider, but lying nonetheless.

Greg almost said something about how he felt about liars, but Spence was talking again already: “We share a big apartment with common spaces.”

“Your parents must be good people,” Greg commented. This kind of research always fell into place so easily for him. A little bit of commentary, a little bit of personal opinion, a little bit of flattery… “Some parents, dads especially, would struggle with something like that.”

“I thought he would,” Spence said. He started walking, interrupting himself once in a awhile to point out architectural features of the palace.

Screw the architecture, Greg wanted to know the secrets, and he didn’t think Spence would share those. Not even drunk. He’d have to keep fishing for the subtle things Spence didn’t realize would be secrets, to an outsider.

“Sylem,” Spence went on, “my realm, has been anti-gay with jail sentences for a long time. My uncle changed the law when I announced I was running.”

Running a marathon? Running for a leadership role? Running away from the police who wanted to arrest him for having a boyfriend?

Time would tell.

“Close-knit family,” he commented.

“Everyone here is,” Spence said. They were in some kind of enormous room with stained glass windows and painted walls and a platform at the front and benches all down the building. A church? Spence had said what it was, but Greg was too busy listening for the things Spence didn’t know he was saying. “We look out for each other,” Spence added.

Speaking of looking out… “How bad was her divorce?” Greg asked under his breath. Spence would know, she was practically his mother-in-law and she was his boss.

“It was silent,” Spence said. “There was a big meeting – we have one weekly – and then the next day they were divorced and he was with someone else.”

He imagined Aadya crying in her quiet, brief, moments alone. Crying just to herself because she was a queen and divorces probably were frowned on. That would be worse than the president getting divorced because at least the president would be gone in zero to eight years.

“What she may avoid telling you,” Spence said after they’d gone through another hallway and stepped out onto some kind of viney terrace, “is that she was divorced and dumped in the same week.”

His mind flickered to Aadya walking over to the head guard. Slow, careful steps.

He shouldn’t have let her do that alone. Except…he was just Mr. Temporary. However protective he wanted to be, she had a kingdom to run and whatever the head guard wanted to talk about was probably none of his business.

Yeah. Temporary. That was the way he wanted it. No strings attached, fun.

“She doesn’t seem like someone who would be capable of being in that situation,” he pointed out. That at least was truthful; she seemed like the loyal type, especially with Mr. Waiting-For in the picture.

“She got the gancanagh curse. It did a lot of good, but it attached her to Konrad.” Spence led him past another building, which he explained was the school for kids ages eleven and up who could get in. Free.

That was asinine. He bet they missed a ton of smart kids just because they didn’t know how to read or had traditionalist parents.

Not his business.

He asked Spence whether the college was nearby too, and got an even more annoying answer: No college. They sent kids to other realms for college.

Which was dumb; outsourcing, losing the culture. They probably lost kids who never came back, not to mention the expense of sending them elsewhere.

Greg’s wheels were spinning. He put the brakes on and then the parking brake too. He was temporary. No one had asked for his opinion on this stuff. If it worked for them, it wasn’t his job to fix it.

He turned the conversation back to Aadya. Temporary or not, he wanted their time together to be the best it could be and he wanted it to be memorable.

“So she was with Mister Butterfly?” he asked.

Spence laughed like he hoped he would. “The one and only,” he said. “If she hadn’t found a cure, Konrad or his son would have had to move. There’s only one talisman.” Then – and Greg could have hugged him for this – he added, “His son just showed up somehow, but he has the curse. You can tell by their eyes.”

Things to do: Ask Spence more questions, find out about this curse, research Zero, find out where Konrad’s son came from, give Aadya a good time, have fun. And above all of that, find his sons.

“Is there anything else you would want to know if you were me?” he asked Spence.

They walked across a garden area and down some stone steps, past other buildings, but Spence was lost in thought. After a couple of minutes, he said, “Ach is protective. He wasn’t trying to be mean. And Meldrick has been with Aadya for most of a thousand years.”

He heard the sharp intake of his own breath as he processed those words. That timeline, what it meant about Aadya, about Mister Divorce.

“What changed?” he asked. “Just Mister Butterfly? Or are you guys prone to a thousand-year slump?”

“She’s been through some things,” Spence defended. Looked like Ach wasn’t the only one who was protective of the queen. “I don’t know what happened to end it. Probably all of the things that happened before that day.”

“Probably,” Greg agreed. He decided to make sure Aadya was just monumentally distracted, right up until she got rid of him. It sounded like she needed it and he was temporary enough that he could keep up the intense fun as long as she wanted him around.

“Anyone to worry about?” he asked next.

Queens, by definition, had enemies.

“A woman named Ionia. She isn’t around here, but her spies are.” Spence led him across a cobblestone path and toward a cluster of buildings in the distance. Shopping. Greg knew he was running out of time.

“I’ll be careful who I talk to, then” he said. He wondered if she was a former queen, or maybe a former queen’s daughter or something, or if she’d been a contender for queen before Aadya had taken over. Or maybe she’d been in love with Mister Divorce and he’d chosen Aadya.

Usually, in Greg’s experience, women to worry about had a personal agenda.

“Anything else you want to know?” Spence asked him. So Greg was right – they were almost to the end of their walk.

“Probably,” Greg said.

If he wasn’t temporary, there were so many things he’d do. He’d open a college for kids from the school who wanted more. If they already had teachers, experts in subjects, it would be a cheap enough transition and bring more ambition to the kingdom.

He’d start a traveling school for adults, especially for the traditionalists, maybe that used religion to teach reading and writing. You couldn’t go wrong with traditionalists and religion, if this place had any.

Most importantly, he’d start a newspaper. There was nothing traditionalists loved more than gossip. They could have updates on Aadya’s family, local news, a few cultural or historical facts, maybe a simple reading lesson for those just starting, maybe a crossword or something for those who could read already. It would take off, it would encourage reading, it could be a way to spread propaganda and important news if it happened. It would be a way to keep people informed so that this Ionia woman couldn’t stir up as much trouble.

People, especially traditionalists, liked to be the first ones to know gossip. No one wouldn’t want the paper, and that meant revenue. He could get a press, a budget, hire a couple of recent graduates…

What the hell happened to his parking brake?

“Is your dad a good OB?” he asked Spence. Focus on the here and now, on what Aadya needed, on being temporary.

“Yeah,” Spence said. “He’s handled all the royal babies for seventeen years, and anyone else at the palace.”

That didn’t mean he was good. Greg loved arrogance bred of familiarity.

“He doesn’t seem like he picks favorites, either,” Greg prodded. More flattery. With a kid as arrogant and doctory as Spaden, there was no way they had the best sibling relationship in the world. “That’s a good dad to have,” he added, for the sake of pushing a response.

“Yeah,” Spence replied, all sarcasm. “I’ve never met a parent that does.”

Greg laughed. “Not you, then? I wasn’t either.”

He’d call it the Dragon Digest.

Brakes!

“He has a favorite long lost son, a favorite adopted sister, and a favorite son,” Spence ticked off on his fingers. “But I have another dad too. He just moved into his house today.”

Those would have to be the first birthdays he tried on any safes or other security codes.

“You’re close to him,” Greg observed. But not close enough. Something, in a life full of doctors and arrogance, had put this kid’s head on his shoulders and given him enough gumption to do something besides medicine with his life. He sounded too uncertain about his other dad for it to be him.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Spence said.

They’d reached the last set of buildings now, a cluster of little single-story shops with decorative signs and cobblestone streets. It looked like a Santa Village, in the middle of a desert.

He was running out of time. “Who, then?” he pressed. “You’re way too self-actualized not to have someone.”

“Konrad trains me,” Spence explained, and joked, “outside of the butterflies stuff. And my mom.”

Ah. The way he said mom said mountains.

He was someone’s favorite, whether he guessed it or not.

He was also dating the son of the ex of his proxy-dad.

“Close-knit family?” he said again, joking this time.

“I told you,” Spence said.

Yes, he had.

Maybe the Dells Digest.

Spence opened the door to a shop full of clothing Greg decided was probably for men, even though the shirts were very flowy.

In the middle of the room, by a wooden pillar covered in sale signs, was a chair. And in the chair…there she was.

Even from behind, little more than a silhouette, she was sexy. She had a stack of papers in her lap and she moved the top one to the bottom of the stack. She took a pen from behind her ear and wrote something on this piece of paper, in a sloping, elegant hand.

Not just sexy, smart and playful too.

His entire body felt like it salivated at once.

“You look too busy to shop,” he teased, walking to where she could see him. “I’ll leave you alone.”

She smiled at him, the same smile he felt just by being near her.

He was so broken, when it came to her. Like she’d put a leak in his common sense and in his temporary.

“How has the tour been?” she asked him, but she looked at Spence too.

“Spence is a good, informative guide,” Greg told her, still grinning that dumbass grin. She’d know he got something usable off him, at least.

She raised her eyebrows. Yep, she got it.

Even her eyebrows were sexy, like twin ballet dancers on her forehead, artful and erotic. Next time they were alone, he was going to kiss her eyebrows, if he remembered.

“Are you ready for a busy afternoon?” she asked him, one eyebrow arched in invitation. “Or would you rather I work alone?”

“Miserable and alone,” he decided. He stepped towards her, barely aware of what he was doing.

“Alright,” she teased him. “I’ll get rid of your surprise.”

He laughed and kissed her, and then because kissing her wasn’t enough he spun her a little and kissed her again.

He’d never get enough of this. Temporary was agonizingly short, and then what would he do with all that forever she gave him?

On the last spin-kiss, he saw Spence out of the corner of his eye. He’d forgotten he was there.

“Thank you for all your help,” he said. Thanks, as in, you go now.

“Anytime,” Spence promised. He looked at Aadya, not Greg.

Asshole. Respectful asshole, putting-Greg-in-his-place asshole.

Aadya nodded her head, and Spence left.

God, watching her give orders like that…she had no idea, the effect she had on him…

“So,” she said. She pushed her hands together, interlacing the fingers and then weaving them in and out of new shapes. She was nervous. Was something wrong? “You need clothes,” she finished. “The festival starts in a few hours.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “What is it?” he asked. He wanted, above all else, for her to have someone to talk to until Mister Waiting-For came home. She deserved that, and she needed it.

“Just a guard wants to speak to you, details to go over in my mind.” She was lying. He reminded himself that it was her job to lie. He was temporary; kingdom business wasn’t Greg business.

“Cursed Konrad?” he joked, and took her arm so they could walk together and look at all the clothes. “What would you recommend?”

“His nephew, Sennae,” she corrected.

That was too bad. He’d be less intimidating, but he’d also give Greg less useful information about Aadya, just by being someone who wasn’t ever her lover.

“Blue?” Aadya suggested. “Maybe some silver? It might look nice together.”

Blue and silver. Those must be the royal colors or something. It explained the anxiety in her voice – she must want him to appear to be part of the family during the festival, but she didn’t want to ask him directly.

Fine, he could wear blue. He’d wear any color, for her.

“That will be good at the festival?” he asked, rhetorically. “Blue and silver. Sapphire blue?” he thought that was probably most regal, but the desert made him think of turquoise. “Or another shade?”

“Sapphire,” she said. She had her eyes on a shirt that hung from the wall so that the pattern of silver inlay would show.

“Okay,” Greg agreed. “And you’ll have to tell me what’s fashionable.”

She reached for the shirt on the wall – all long arms and legs and that scent that made him want her, right here and right now.

She was a queen, right? She probably had the authority to close the shop and make the owner go hide somewhere.

“This?” she asked, holding the silver-gilt shirt towards him. It was a stunning blue that, on Aadya, would have brought out the depths of her eyes.

“I like it,” he said. He had the festival covered, as long as these pants were acceptable. “What about everyday stuff?”

She gestured around the shop. “Anything here is fashionable,” she told him. She held the shirt up to him to check the size and pulled it away with a smile. “My kids wear jeans often. It’s just a formal evening.” She walked over to a rack of plain tunics of different colors. “Whatever fits you best.”

He browsed, running his hand over her back as he looked. He wanted her now, but he also knew she had a reputation to uphold. Too hands-on with her could cause problems with her later.

Besides, he liked building the anticipation. By tonight they’d both be dying of wanty need for each other.

He held out a tunic he liked, with a plain leather drawstring that reminded him of a bolo tie. Once it was off the rack, he realized it had no back – just leather laces.

No way was he wearing that in public, except as a joke.

“What is this?” he asked.

The Digest needed a fashion section too. And probably a religious page, to draw in anyone who was too pious for anything without that aspect.

“Those are designed for pixies; wings,” Aadya told him. She had something between a smile and sadness on her face. That was right, that guard had wings.

Divorced and dumped in the same week. Spence wasn’t kidding.

“You lace them between the wings,” Aadya explained.

That would make sense if there were two to four laces, but these shirts had at least a dozen strands on each side. He wondered what the purpose and meaning of so many was.

He imagined her, in a candlelit room, tying these threads against someone’s back. Not just someone, the butterfly guard.

He shrugged off the imagery. “Not for me, then,” he teased. Next he was going to start comparing himself to Mister Divorce and Mister Butterfly, and he didn’t need that. “The fashions,” he told her, putting the pixie shirt back on the rack, “remind me of my realm’s medieval period.”

He wondered if he could find some pictures in history books, drag the fairy fashions all the way forward to the renaissance some century.

“Does it?” she asked. She didn’t want much of an answer because she followed up right away with, “What do you think of everything so far?”

“I’ve learned a lot,” he told her, aware that it wasn’t very descriptive. They could talk more later, when they were ready to plan. “Spence is a nice kid. Very in love.”

“You could tell?” she asked. Of course he could tell. Spence might be good at closed and deadpan, but he needed to work on controlling the inflection in his voice when he said names. “Anything about our target?” she asked.

Again, they’d have to talk later. Messing with Zero would be fun but he didn’t want anyone else overhearing the security weaknesses at the palace.

See, he’d gotten too protective and involved already.

It was just because he didn’t want anyone else to get to the blue magic first. Zero was his mark.

“I got some leads,” he said, deliberately vague.

She grinned anyway.

To hell with it. Propriety, queenhood, whatever. To hell with all of it. He leaned across the space between them and kissed her, and drew her to him. Hungry.

Gah, he was so hungry for her. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. No one had ever done this to him before, made him feel this way, distracted him this much.

She pulled away from the kiss with a little smile on her face. “I have something for you,” she told him. She kissed him again, briefly, just lips. “Before we go speak with Ko- Sennae.”

He thought she was working, but apparently she’d been multitasking during his tour. He frowned. “I didn’t get you anything.”

“This is more of a something to borrow,” she explained, pressing her hips against his. He pressed back.

“Like we’re borrowing each other?” he teased.

She frowned and let out a puff of air. “Yes.”

And what the hell was that? Was she frustrated about temporary? What happened to Mister Waiting-For.

He didn’t know what to make of the mood shift, so he went off and paid with the money she’d given him before the tour. When he got back from paying, all his clothes wrapped in brown paper packaging (yes, it was tied up with string, no he wasn’t ever going to admit he liked that musical), she seemed to be back to normal.

“You definitely have my curiosity,” he told her.

“I would suggest waddling to the barn, but I think we should transport,” she joked. She reached for his hand, and a second later they were in the barn.

The scene of the crime. He looked around for traces of his blood outside the blue dragon’s stall, but there wasn’t anything. Something had probably eaten all of his blood.

“How early does the waddling start with twins?” he asked her.

He could remember all of Molly’s pregnancies – the secret one, and the other three. She usually didn’t waddle until the third trimester, but that was just one baby. He bet Aadya would waddle sooner.

A graceful, alluring waddle.

“When you notice,” she requested. “Don’t tell me.”

He laughed.

He…nope. He was temporary.

She led him to the blue dragon’s stall, where there was another dragon, silver and almost as big as the blue dragon’s enormous red mate. “Here he is,” she said.

Wow. Borrow. She was giving him a dragon to borrow.

“Am I dinner?” he joked.

She laughed again. “He’s agreed to let you ride him. His name is Alum.”

Alum. Like aluminum. Like the dragon’s tinny scales. It was a fitting name, and he could see why she’d decided he needed to borrow this particular dragon.

“You promised to take me flying,” he reminded her. “How safe is it?”

“Safe,” she promised. She had a little glint in her eye, that spoke of fun and challenges and interesting pages of the kama sutra. He wondered if the Elesarian version of the kama sutra had pages that involved flying. “Do you want to fly him alone, or fly together?”

He laughed again. “You’re asking a question with an impossible answer,” he told her. He stepped closer to her, imagining sex on her great blue dragon. “You, first; alone, later?”

“That sounds perfect,” she said. She had that sandpapery cat voice back again. He wanted to taste her tongue. “Why don’t we let them decide which?”

Oh, no, he wanted hers. The symbolism, her blue eyes against the dragon’s blue scales… “We should ride yours together, if I’m borrowing this one There’s more of a connection to yours.”

She bit her lip, that same glint in her eye. “That is a good point. Apa?” she called.

The blue came out, with footsteps that left subtle vibrations along the floorboards of the barn.

“She’ll eat me again,” Greg said, laughing.

“There are worse things than being eaten,” she countered with a laugh of her own. Even though the dragon was there, she hadn’t stepped away from him. “You wanted her.”

He looked into Aadya’s eyes. Yes, he wanted her.

Not yet. In the air, he wanted her.

He stepped away. “Yeah? Name one thing worse than being eaten alive.”

“Have you ever eaten kedgeree?” she asked, with a grin.

Kedgeree. He tried to place the word. Victorian British breakfast food, made with curry, if he remembered right. Probably still eaten by masochists the world over, just because. Misery and all that.

“No, thank God,” he said.

“It’s worse,” she challenged.

Well, now he had to eat kedgeree, just so if he was ever eaten alive he could compare the two experiences and see if she was right.

Challenge accepted.

She climbed up onto the dragon, sitting astride it facing forward.

“How often do you eat it?” he asked her.

He climbed up behind her, astride. She had all the control, but he got all the sensations and touch. He kissed the back of her neck, arms on her pelvis bones, ready to fly.

“It’s served at breakfasts, in honor of Drey. I don’t usually.” She leaned against him as the dragon made its way out of the barn and into the side yard, which stank of flies and manure and who knew what else.

“Does anyone?” he asked.

She laughed. “Yes. One of my missing children, Terren, likes it. Talise, too.”

There was no accounting for taste.

Terren.

She had his Jay, he’d find her Terren if he could. It sounded like he’d have ample free time once this festival was over, and it would give him an excuse to bug Zero more anyway.

The dragon lit; on the ground one minute and in the air the next. All the breath in Greg’s lungs surged downwards and his belly button seemed to drop several hundred feet as the dragon soared toward the clouds.

Then it leveled, and Greg breathed again.

Yes, he was riding a dragon! Why hadn’t he brought a camera with him?

He wasn’t just riding a dragon, he was riding a dragon with Aadya.

He wondered how sex on a dragon worked. Whether the dragon could do stunts, whether it would catch him if he fell, how high it could go, whether he would run out of air before the dragon did as the atmosphere thinned.

He wondered how many exes she’d gone flying with.

“Who was he, besides what he did?” he asked her.

“Drey?” she sounded surprised by his question. “He was a philosopher in many ways. He loved learning new things. Underneath anxiety, he was a dreamer. It made him fun to be around most of the time.” She turned so she could see him, but her body still faced forward. “Our marriage was forced on us, to marry with a permanent attachment and never be with another, or die.”

What kind of psycho would do that?

He thought about that Ionia woman Spence had mentioned and wondered if there was a connection. He had so much to learn.

“So he improvised,” he joked.

She laughed, her body bubbling against him. “He had a husband, other children.”

Gay. He’d forgotten, she’d mentioned that last night. Was it him, or was there a disproportionate number of gay men in this place?

“How do you know he won’t come back for the husband?” he asked, and then wished he hadn’t. Temporary. He was Mister Temporary.

“He didn’t say that,” she said. “And the husband is married already.”

Didn’t say that? What did she mean, he didn’t say that?

He needed to talk to other people, to see what else he could do to help her through this divorce period until she was ready to move on for real. Because that sounded just a tiny bit insane, and she didn’t feel insane to him.

He wondered about the butterflies, the magic tampering, the idea that a long-dead man was somehow coming back to her…

He needed to talk to Zero.

He might be Mister Temporary, but he was falling for her hard and he didn’t want to see her struggle…and yet she believed it, so steadily, with a realistic level of doubt.

Lips against her neck, he breathed in her scent. If there was a way for him to help her get Drey back, if that was what she needed, he would do that, for her.

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