The Green's Hill Novellas (26 page)

His voice was shaking, and Jefi—Jefi was always so compassionate. “Well, they won’t be there for long,” he said, and Adrian turned a vicious smile at him. Jefi quailed, and even Shep shut his eyes.

“They’re elves, Jefi,” Shep rasped, embarrassed. “They live forever, or they fade away. They don’t get to come up here. That’s part of the great quarrel. The God’s people and the Goddess’s people are apart in eternity.” Shepherd couldn’t imagine why Adrian would have agreed to this terrible half life in the anteroom, and he was going to ask when Jefi just had to try to make it better.

“But the girl… at least
she
….”

Adrian shook his head bitterly and dashed at his cheeks, where black-scarlet tears were dripping in a horrible death mask on the face of a man who had died twice. “She tried, Goddess knows. I’ve had two face-to-face talks with her already, because she’s reckless and foolhardy and brave. But… don’t you get it? The whole reason I’m here, mates—this entire perversion of life and death—it’s all to keep them on the face of the planet. They almost died when I died. One of them goes, the other two topple like dominoes. I was crap under my beloveds’ heels, or I should have been, but my death alone, and the entire works goes. You’re so fucking sharp, mate”—he gestured at Shepherd—“what happens to the power in that hill when those three people go? What happens to the sanctuary, the peace—hell, the fucking weather?”

Shepherd’s breath caught—he was getting used to it. The energy signatures of the three of them were woven into the soil, into the blood, into the souls of every creature on the hill… and beyond.

“Your people will die,” Shepherd whispered. “They will scatter to the winds, naked and alone. That place, their power, it protects every soul in the hill.”

“But the girl,” Jefi protested, devastated by this much pain.

“You heard the row same as I did,” Adrian said flatly. “Her High and Mighty-ness has some plan for my beloved. She’s not coming here. She’s
never
coming here. No matter how brave she is, the Royal Bitch isn’t going to let her die.”

“That’s….” Shep met Adrian’s eyes with naked sympathy. Even an angel, with no concept of human feelings, knew the absolute pain of Adrian’s dilemma. “I’m so sorry, Adrian.”

“I don’t want your pity, mate. I’m good.” The first part was the truth. The second part was a blatant lie. “And I’m sorry I made your bloke here feel bad.” And that rang with sincerity. “But here’s the thing. If something makes me laugh, I’m gonna fucking laugh. And if I want to sit in my little illusion of a room there and toss off until my wanker bleeds, you two don’t have a fucking thing to say about it, you hear me?”

Jefi let out a little moan, and Shep held his hand and stroked it. Poor Jefi. He liked bedtime stories, and those always ended so much happier than this one. But Shep never dropped Adrian’s gaze. “I hear you, but you remember something too.”

“What’s that?”

“We minister to everybody, even you. If you want anything—even company—we’re here.”

“Bloody nice of you to offer,” Adrian conceded. He ran an arm over his face and stained his white T-shirt with blood brine from his tears before he wandered off. Shepherd wondered how long it would be before Adrian—or the part of him that controlled his reality in this place—remembered that the body wasn’t real. The blood-vampire tears weren’t real. The white T-shirt wasn’t real. They couldn’t be. All that had been real about Adrian had died months ago, probably going up in flames when the sun rose. Everything, of course, except his pain. That alone would make the heavens weep, wouldn’t it?

Jefischa was disconsolate, so Shepherd guided him to the nearest cloudbank and pulled him up carefully, wrapping an arm around him and pulling him against his chest.

“C’mon, Jefi. He can deal. He looks pretty, but damn, I think he was made to do this. Did you hear him laugh? It’s like when he died the first time, only the best of humanity came back and walked his skin.”

Jefi was an angel. He was supposed to cry prettily. Silver tears were supposed to track down unblemished golden skin and give an air of delicacy to an angel’s inhuman beauty.

Jefi’s nose was swollen and red, and his eyes were swollen and red, and his chin was wrinkled and quivering in an alarming way. Shepherd was appalled. Not at the unattractiveness, but that Jefi should be so distraught. He rubbed Jefi’s back and dropped kisses in his hair. He noticed as he did that Jefi was starting to look… different. Not bad, and not solidly, but… but sometimes, he would see a sharper line at his jaw or his nose, or a different highlight in what was supposed to be chestnut hair. But when Jefi gave a little grunt, a new sound, Shepherd forgot all about what he looked like.

“Mmm….” Suddenly Jefi arched his spine, undulating into Shepherd’s touch like a cat. “That feels different, Shep. Mmm….”

Shep stopped his gentle stroking and looked at his partner curiously. “What feels different about it?”

Jefi paused. “It…. My back tingles. Why does my back tingle?” Jefi frowned, some of the terrible grief easing from his face. He turned his head and then stood up and began turning circles like a cat with tape on its tail, and Shep had to laugh.

“Here—stop moving, dammit, and let me see!” He lifted Jefi’s traditional “robe” from the hem, and Jefi giggled.

“You’re looking at me naked, Shep.”

Shep rolled his eyes. “It’s not like angels have…” What was the current mortal word? “…’junk’ to get in the way, Jefi.”

“I wonder what that’s like?”

Shep frowned at Jefi’s back. “What what’s like?” he asked absently. There was a handprint on Jefi’s back. And it looked… solid. Real. Angels
looked
real. Inhuman beauty or no, they were supposed to look
real
for the humans. But this handprint…. Shep was staring at it curiously, splaying his own hand out to match it, when Jefi interrupted his thoughts.

“What it’s like to have external genitals?”

It was a common topic in the heavens, actually, and Shep shrugged. “How do you know you wouldn’t have breasts instead?”

“You mean, like his female lover? There… touch… there….” Jefi wiggled, and Shep kept touching him just because it made Jefi happy.

“Yes, Jefi. Women traditionally have breasts. Men traditionally have external genitalia. Which one would you want?”

Jefi shrugged, making his skin, his angel skin and the disconcerting, hand-sized patch in the middle, ripple. “I don’t want breasts. I think they’d get in the way.”

“Well, genitalia certainly give a man a weakness,” Shepherd observed. He’d seen it often enough. Nothing made a man repent quicker than a solidly placed blow to the gonads.

“Does that mean you’d want breasts?” Jefi asked, shocked enough to turn around. It left his robe all rucked up around his plain, smooth lower body, and Shepherd shook his head in certainty.

“No, Jefischa. I’m pretty certain I’d be a man. I wouldn’t worry about the breasts getting in the way, but I don’t deal well in the ‘acceptance and reformation’ department. I don’t think my personality is equipped to come with a vagina, if you must know the truth. Testes, scrotum, and a penis are probably the way to go.”

Jefischa succeeded in turning all the way around and looked Shep in the eye. His eyes were lighter, Shep thought randomly. They were supposed to be an all-purpose hazel, but they weren’t anymore. Jefi’s eyes were gray, and they were rounder than they used to be.

“Adrian was lovers with a man.”

Shep smiled a little. “Yes, Jefi. I know. Lots of them. Women too.”

“Which would we be? Would we be like… Fuckface and Adrian, or would we be like….” Jefi frowned to remember the name. “Green and Adrian? Would we be friends, or would we be beloveds?”

Shep swallowed then and swallowed again and wished desperately for some more theoretical water but couldn’t remember how to conjure it to save himself. “I don’t think I could ever call you ‘Fuckface,’ Jefi, so I guess we’d have to be beloveds.”

The anxious look eased a little, and the lines of tension around Jefi’s newly gray eyes relaxed. Shepherd put his hand out to rub Jefi’s back some more, but Jefi shrugged away.

“I thought you liked that.” Shepherd felt inexplicably hurt.

“I do,” Jefi said, swallowing too. He looked so sad. “It feels like humans do, when they go to sleep and something really big is going to happen in the morning.”

Shepherd raised a tentative hand and rested it on Jefi’s shoulder. “Then why don’t you want me to keep doing it?”

“Because we don’t sleep up here, Shepherd, and the morning won’t be any different for us than it has been since the world began.”

With that, Jefi threw himself on the misty ground and rubbed a clear space to watch the people below. Shepherd didn’t have to check over his shoulder to know Jefi was looking at Adrian’s friends and trying to fit himself into the mysterious, complicated patterns of love that still bound Adrian into their midst. He’d wanted to keep Jefi from the frightening possibilities that this vampire had held from the very beginning. He’d known Adrian was dangerous even when all they’d known about him was that he seemed to make angels want to free-fall into gravity and humanity like the humans themselves liked to free-fall from airplanes with only silk and cords for safety.

As it turned out, the vampire’s biggest evil was that he was more human than most of the humans who came to heaven. Who knew that being human would make a vampire such a danger to the two of them?

It didn’t matter.

What mattered was that Shep had set out to keep Jefi from getting hurt. What really mattered was that he’d already failed.

AS IT
turned out, Adrian liked to play chess. In fact, he was better at it than most angels. He was so good at it that it took Shepherd a while to figure out that he was
letting
Jefi win.

When the vampire asked the two of them if they’d like to play, it was almost like he was offering
them
something, throwing them a bone.
Well, these two blokes don’t seem
too
inept, maybe I’ll go play with them and make them feel better.
The really pathetic thing was, Shep and Jefi just sort of jumped at the chance, waggling their tails and turning their puppy-smiling muzzles up to him in supplication.

It sure beat making him cry, that was for damned sure.

He talked to them as they were playing, and they learned more and more of the complicated life that made up Adrian’s past. They learned that his passionate love affair with the little human girl (who was not so human, he assured them) had lasted a terribly short time before he’d died. They learned that he and Green had been lovers for nearing two centuries and that he and Bracken
had
been lovers but had never really meant to be forever that way. They learned that the beginning of his life as a vampire had marked the end of his life as a victim and the beginning of his time as sort of a supernatural social worker. He often brought the humans who were floundering in their world into the realm of the Goddess as either vampires or shape-shifters. They thrived there, it seemed, and he confirmed Shep’s silent leanings toward the Goddess’s side of The Great Quarrel. Shep heard a lot of people in pain; it was nice to know that someone out there was working to alleviate worldly pain instead of letting heaven be an all-purpose panacea, like a carrot on a stick.

And it seemed as though Adrian’s hobbies translated into the afterlife as well.

While Shepherd and Jefischa watched, passively at first, Adrian would disappear for a time. They knew where he went—to the lower levels, the place in heaven reserved for people who hadn’t quite come to peace, either with who they had been when alive or with the manners of their deaths. Shep and Jefi weren’t allowed there. It took a special sort of angel to work that section, and Lucifer and Gabriel pretty much had it locked. But Adrian would go (although he scornfully pronounced Lucifer “a git wank of the first order” and announced that Gabriel would be “a great bloke without the pretty blue stick up his arse”) and return, usually with a smuggled refugee on his arm.

It was Jefischa who pointed out that the cord anchoring the refugees to earth was often a mix of pale gold and rabid, angry vermillion.

It was Shepherd who first noticed that Adrian seemed to be having unlawful heavenly relations with the refugees as soon as he closed off his “room.”

And both noticed that the more time the souls spent in Adrian’s company, the less angry the red—until finally, all that was left was the gold.

“What do you suppose he’s doing in there?” Jefischa asked one day, after Adrian had given one of those insouciant, inviting grins and disappeared into his room with a very plain girl and her beautiful boyfriend on either arm.

Shepherd managed a droll look. “Playing cribbage.”

“Ha-ha—I
see
humans having sex, Shepherd. I have a pretty good idea of what he’s doing physically, or imaginary physically, or whatever. I just want to know what he’s—you know
—doing
with them, to make them so much less angry and so much more able to accept the love that will make them happy here.”

Shepherd had wondered that himself. In fact, he’d wondered enough to listen in to their hearts, and he’d been surprised. “He’s turned penance into an act of love,” he said at last, not wanting to explain any further. Fortunately, he was friends with Jefi for many reasons. One of the principal reasons was that Jefi sometimes got exactly what he meant and didn’t make him say any more. Jefi’s (pouty, round) mouth made a little O and he nodded. He got it, and the conversation was tabled for the moment.

But not forever.

“What I don’t understand,” Shep said later, while Adrian was there, “is why you don’t feel unfaithful. You
have
lovers. Even if you’re waiting—”

“A millennium or so,” Adrian supplied dryly.

“But still! Won’t it make them jealous?” Shepherd knew it would make
him
jealous.
He’d
be furious if Jefi was with anyone else. Jefi was
Shepherd’s.
It was a solid, irrevocable, permanent forever. Four millennia in each other’s company gave him dibs, dammit—he would
never
share nicely.