“The State does not seem to be paying attention. I admit, it’s a pattern that others might miss.” Bel did not even say it with scorn. If anything, he was gentle, allowing Nicodemus to make faces over his beer as he digested this horror. “Holt contacted them. They are ‘sending someone to look into it.’” The Bureau had an office in town. They didn’t have to “send” anyone. As usual, they were insisting their existence was necessary while doing nothing to show it. “In the meantime, there is me. But I have time enough to walk a little lamb home.”
The beer and the warmth in the bar combined to make Nicodemus so hot that he shivered. A drop of sweat must have gone down his spine.
“And that is why the note about the weather?” Nicodemus asked, only to cringe and set the beer down for good. He stood up, surprisingly not wobbling. He straightened his coat but did not button his collar. “Then I believe I will go. There is no need for….”
Bel got to his feet, a broad tower of a figure, extremely close.
Nicodemus would have flushed if he hadn’t been burning up for most of this conversation. “I don’t need an escort. And,” he hesitated, gaze fluttering to a scarlet tie, a well-chosen vest, a warm throat, “I did not have plans to return home for some time.”
Bel released a long, slow breath. “I had expected you to remain there, waiting for Holt.”
Nicodemus darted a look up, but of course, though Bel’s eyes were steady on him, they told him little. “Holt,” and why Nicodemus struggled to form the name, he did not know, “has been delayed.” He thought he ought to say something else, offer an explanation, a lie, but why should Bel care if Nicodemus had been bored at home alone or wished to find a night’s companion?
For just a moment, Bel’s eyes widened, and Nicodemus wondered rather bitterly if Bel could not imagine Nicodemus having such desires, or if Bel could not imagine anyone having such desires for Nicodemus.
Nicodemus stepped back. “As everyone in here has noticed, I am of the Realm too.” He pushed his spectacles up so his weak glare would not be lost on its way to Bel. “Why should it harm me?”
Bel set Nicodemus’ heart to pounding by actually glaringback. “You are from nowhere near the Realm, whatever your parents got up to. There are creatures who claim the Realm who would think only that you are delicious.”
Nicodemus suspected they had attracted the bartender’s attention, who might have worried they were going to start trouble. He could not seem to look at her. He had never seen Bel’s eyes with fire in them. They were dark and bright and fierce.
Nicodemus wet his lips but had no other control over them. “There are lovely things in the Realm, they say.”
Bel inched down and seemed to growl his words. “And there are lovely things on Earth. And also monsters, who come in many forms.”
“I’m a monster,” Nicodemus reminded him softly, watching lights dance in Bel’s eyes.
Bel replied just as softly, as though he had never growled. “You are a secretary and a keeper of homes.” There, he paused, then lifted his head. He turned to the bar, nodded to the bartender as if perhaps he was a familiar face with an account there, and picked up the glass of beer to empty it. “Come with me.”
He did not take Nicodemus’ arm or even touch him on the shoulder. He walked to the door, stopping only to grab his long gray coat from the back of a chair where Nicodemus doubted anyone had dared to touch it. Nicodemus followed him without thought, then realized it and held back in the bar’s doorway. But the humans inside were staring, so he finally stepped out in the darkened street with only a small shudder of relief.
“What most don’t know about those who live in the Realm, about those from the Realm who come here in this way, is how hungry they are.” Bel talked as he moved, staying on the side of the street, passing beneath street lamps yet leaving no shadow. The wind was strong, sending papers and refuse into the paths of those still out, tipping more than one hat back or off entirely, only to carry it far out of reach. Bel walked in front of Nicodemus, blocking the wind, but did not let Nicodemus fall more than one step behind. “How hungry theycan be,” he corrected himself. “The Realm is everything you might want but not always what you need, and some cannot tell the difference. They are forever unsatisfied, given cake but not vegetables or meat. Their need cannot be filled. In the Realm—” He stopped with no warning beneath a street lamp and turned to Nicodemus.
“The Realm is different to others, of course,” he clarified, as if this lesson was equally important. “Even just across the river, those who live and trade around the mounds and all their Rings do not regard them as we regard ours. The dangers are real and constant, and so are the blessings. But who you are…what you’re supposed to value, changes how you view the Realm. What someone in a castle across the ocean will fear in the Realm is not what would make someone like Burton wary. Humans, by which I mean the humans you grew up with, humans like who Rosa or especially Holt grew up with. The civilized types.” Bel did not quite sneer. “The people who try to wall off the Rings and who live in terror of those who don’t. The ones who think the State is right, and or at least don’t mind it, and who think we should all be Bureau hounds. The people who like to think they are respectable and good. Those people nonetheless step into Rings, and so do their children.”
Nicodemus realized he had not blinked and that the cold air was making his eyes sting.
Bel was almost calm again. “Their fate is their fate and not my business. But they go to the Realm because they are not what they are supposed to be. Because they are hungry to know what they really are, or to find something that will make them into what they think they ought to be. Some of them learn how not to be hungry. They are safe. They are strong, in this world or that one. Here, for everyone else, the only protection would be to not want, and humans always want, especially humans like that.”
Belwashuman. But Nicodemus did not nitpick his word choice. He was too busy trying to understand what he was being told. He had asked these things once, as children did, and been chastised for the curiosity.Be curious about the Earth, he had been told,but not the Realm.
He supposed that made sense. Curiosity was a hunger too.
Nicodemus was not human, not entirely. But Bel thought he was, or enough of one to want as they did.
Bel must have wanted once, must have wanted badly to have gone into a Ring. The others talked about him, admiring but careful. Lewis Belasko went into the Realm often, possibly more than the others knew. He used its powers freely. He did not seem to acknowledge fear. But he was taking the time to warn Nicodemus now, and though it meant he likely saw Nicodemus as the lamb he sometimes called him, it also meant Bel was worried about him.
Nicodemus nearly asked if Bel considered him civilized, if he would say it with a sneer for Nicodemus as well. If he would regard Nicodemus’ careful respect for Holt’s parents, and his starched and ironed collars as things to scorn because Nicodemus was still, in the end, an asterion—a male asterion with a passion for men, who quite obviously would never be accepted into fancy drawing rooms or even schools like the one Holt had attended.
It was galling enough to be the naïve, innocent lamb all the time. Something in Nicodemus recoiled from the idea that he did what he did to be respectable. But then, he couldn’t say why he did it, only that he needed to.
“Fine,” Nicodemus whispered finally into the wind, “I will return to the manor.”
“You can sense it now?” Bel asked, confusing Nicodemus all over again.
“Sense what? The coming storm?” Nicodemus raised his head, letting the air cool him and stir his hair. He trembled at the chill but still did not button up his shirt. “Winter will come early…unless you think this is magically influenced as well.”
“There is nothing better for creating wants and leaving despair behind like a long, bleak winter.” Bel’s eyes were dark in the lamplight. “Empty bellies, cold hearths, and lonely beds send more into the Rings than anything but war.” He turned his head to frown into the street. “I should have thought of that.”
