Dreamlands (36 page)

“I should have―” Wolf stopped when one of the nurses walked in. I watched her do her thing and hustle out of there. Wolf continued like there hadn’t been an interruption. “I should have stopped him.”

“His choice,” I reminded him.

“They’re monsters,” he said.

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McGann walked in on that. “They were kind to him, something that we never were.”

“Thanks for having the balls to admit that,” I said. I saw a lot of regrets in her. I didn’t blame her. There was a lot about this I was regretting too.

“Keno,” Wolf said. “He acted like―”

“The kid had the hots for you once,” I said. I thought that shocked Wolf. “Shit, you and me were about the only people who were nice to him, and he was scared shitless of me. Besides the fact that he could be my kid at his age.”

“I didn’t know,” Wolf said softly. I wondered what was in his system for him to talk about this shit. “He… I never thought about him like that. Keno was just a nice kid. He didn’t seem old enough to want something like that.”

“He was twenty,” McGann said. “Though a lot of times he seemed younger. But he isn’t stupid. Keno Inuzaka managed to get his revenge on all of us.”

“What happened?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He destroyed the server room, all our databases, and a lot of GI information. Even knowing he was that good, I am amazed at the amount of damage that he did.” I opened my mouth to say something stupid, like “You sure it wasn’t one of the weirdoes with Tamazusa?” and then closed it. I didn’t think medieval demons would know how to do shit like that, not if their home was as low tech as it was.

“Man, we’re fucked, and not in a good way,” was all that I could get out.

McGann looked at me and nodded. “And we are all going to be debriefed in the morning. Good night, and I’ll see you then.” 271

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I’D have liked to say that we all lived happily ever fucking after. We didn’t.

We all survived debriefing without getting terminated. I thought that was because Mrs. Adams was the one who was running things. The place was filled with Trustees again and a ton of ’paths and magic guys. Most of them were interested in anyone else but me, fortunately.

Collins going missing was bad, but I thought there were a lot of people who were glad it happened. Not that I heard anyone come out and say it, but there was a sense of relief that no one ever found him.

The squad finding Fairinox’s body was a bad thing for me, but I could truthfully say I didn’t know how the asshole bought it. His head missing was a big clue, and we never found that. I was sure that it was someplace on Tamazusa’s estate filled with flowers.

Murphy’s accusations about me working with the intruders didn’t amount to shit. No one could prove anything. And there were a lot of people who didn’t want to remember what happened that night. Most of the lab techs who had been caught behind the blast door ended up transferring out to someplace else.

Most of them were willing to swear that I had been forced to help Fuse’s kids, that I had been dragged out of that room instead of going willingly. That saved my ass, along with Mrs. Adams remembering how I guarded Fuse from the assholes.

Murphy was eased over into working at the Cambridge branch.

He thought I should have been terminated, and nothing was going to change his mind. Me, I just didn’t trust him anymore.

Wolf got out of the infirmary and got to spend some time with his grandfather. That the old man was a Trustee saved his ass, as well as him being hurt. Wolf was still the golden boy around here, and that was a good thing for me. He took over Murphy’s slot for a while before getting transferred out to another Trust facility out in Waltham. Wolf didn’t like the fact that Keno wasn’t around anymore, but I kept reminding him that he was with people who cared about him.

McGann, luckily, managed to get out of this mess with her reputation being mostly intact. No one really had overheard our FELICITAS IVEY

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conversation, so she was safe that way. I also guessed that even the Trust wasn’t willing to terminate a ’path without cause. But I’d also heard some rumors that she was going to be transferred out someplace else, along with the rumor that the powers that be thought that shutting this place down for good was what was going to solve part of their problems. I didn’t think that it would, but no one was fucking asking me.

It wasn’t like life settled back into what it had been for me, either.

There was a Keno-sized hole in it, weird as that sounds.

I had seen the monsters that I was supposed to protect the rest of humanity from, and I wondered why we did it now, because those in the Dreamlands seemed better than most of the people―most of the humans―I knew here. Most of the Trustees were shitting bricks because Tamazusa seemed to be able to waltz in and out of Boylston Street. There was always someone on guard in the server room now. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell them that I didn’t think that was going to protect us from her.

Quite frankly, I didn’t give a shit.

KENO

I DIDN’T know how I felt, realizing that I had a family again. I knew I was surprised that Samojirou wanted me trained to be a magician. I had overheard the conversation in the garden between Inuyama Dousetsu, Inusuka Shino, and Samojirou. It made me feel funny that Samojirou had been in love with me before, in love with a man who others considered to be cold and a killer.

“Are you all right?” I asked Samojirou.

We were cuddling on the futon after spending some time exploring one another. We were sticky with each other’s seed, and in 273

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my case, satiated. Samojirou idly ran a hand up and down my stomach before he leaned over and kissed me. I kissed him back, boldly thrusting my tongue in his mouth as I wrapped my arms around him.

We rocked against each other for a couple of minutes, and I was hard and aching for him again.

“I am very all right,” Samojirou purred.

“I heard,” I said softly, tightening my embrace.

“I thought that you might have.” He sighed. “Keno―”

“You’re in love with me too,” I said. I didn’t know if it should be

“are” or “were,” and it didn’t matter to me. “I’m not mad that you loved him.”

“We had so little time together,” Samojirou said.

“And us?” I asked.

Samojirou laughed. “While you are human still, time will have no meaning for you here. We have all the time that there is.”

“That’s good,” I said. “So we have a lot of time for this.” Samojirou laughed and started kissing me again. Soon I didn’t care about time or anything outside what he was doing with me.

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FELICITAS IVEY is the pen name of a very frazzled helpdesk drone at a Boston-area university. She’s an eternal student even with a BA in anthropology and history, since free classes are part of the benefits.

She’s taken courses on gothic architecture, pre-modern Japanese literature, and witchcraft, just because they sounded like fun. She has traveled to Japan and Europe and hopes to return to both in the future.

She knits and cross-stitches avidly, much to the disgust of her cat, Smaugu, who wants her undivided attention. He’s also peeved that she spends so much time writing instead of petting him. She writes urban fantasy and horror of a Lovecraftian nature, monsters beyond space and time that think that humans are the tastiest things in the multiverse.

Felicitas lives in Boston with her beloved husband, known to all as The Husband, and the aforementioned cat, who the husband swears is a demon, even though it’s his fault that they have the cat. The husband also is worried about Felicitas’s anime habit, her love for J-Pop music, and her extensive collection of Yaoi manga and Gundam Wing doujinshi, which has turned her library into a Very Scary Place for him.

Visit Felicitas’s blog at http://[email protected]. You can contact her at [email protected].