The Wind City (38 page)

There was Tony all taniwha, and Hinewai, and Ariki-who-he’d-burnt, and others, more than he’d been expecting, a whole crowd of patupaiarehe and one of those shadow beasts and a few bird things and others, ranks and ranks of them. He was a little taken aback by how many people were there, actually. Surely they knew it wasn’t a good idea. There was a
murderer
around, after all.

He looked at Tony. Properly, like he should have when he first met her. There was the cheerful girl he’d seen without bothering to really see, and there was the monster that had chased him and swept him into the sea, both at once. She was both of those things. He looked at what was left of the Hikurangi, unwillingly, looked at all that it was. He could feel the death on it, still, he could taste death on his tongue. But there was nothing where it had once been, just empty space, a walkway,
nothing
.

He grinned at the atua gathered there. “Run!” he suggested.

They didn’t run. Brave of them, he guessed. They didn’t run, and he didn’t run, couldn’t run, now, far too late for running. He held out his hands with fire sparking from the tips, and the patupaiarehe – they just stood there. Strange. He’d been expecting them to attack him. Tension was thick in the air, like mist, like ashes.

“Now would be good,” Tony said, and Saint glanced at her, confused. None of the warriors seemed to pay it any mind, so after a moment he didn’t either.

There were other things in the crowd, true, but mainly it was made up of patupaiarehe. So many sharp beautiful people. It was strange how he wasn’t scared of them any more.

They started to chant dark and menacing, stamping at the ground. He rolled his shoulders. Breathed in, shakily.

Started forward, and then Tony stepped between the main body of the patupaiarehe and Saint, formed a barricade with her body. She was immense, but none of the patupaiarehe even tried to get past.

Why weren’t they attacking him? Tony had stepped in between him and them, but not to stop
them
, they were still just standing there, what…

It didn’t matter, none of it mattered. Saint rolled fire in his hands in readiness and laughed at them all, at them and mainly at him, reeled back and laughed and laughed and laughed, laughed until his ribs ached.

Tony said something, but he couldn’t hear it over the laughter and over the pounding in his head, and then – then she fell silent. Everything went silent.

Someone was stepping forwards, past the barrier of Tony’s body, out into the open space. There was no noise, no nothing. Just the patupaiarehe gathered watching, and Saint standing alone, and this man walking slowly towards him through the mists.

It was Steff.

The laughter froze in Saint’s throat. Everything froze. It was
Steff
. Strange he hadn’t recognised him instantly considering that he knew Steff off by heart, the lines and the likeness, the shape of his smile, his scowl, his face, his everything, the curl of his hair and the way he shuffled a bit when he walked and
everything
. When they’d talked at the café Steff had looked at him like he was a stranger for most of the conversation, and Saint had half thought he’d never see him again, but that was Steff, Steff standing there looking a little startled and wearing glasses again and, and, and an utterly ghastly waistcoat thing, and that was just Steff all over, wasn’t it? Saint should be thankful it wasn’t made out of tweed.

Tony was talking now, some nonsense about atua, but Saint couldn’t hear her if he tried. He took a step forward. Stopped. There was something about Steff’s face that –

“Saint,” Steff said.

And he wasn’t greeting him like an old friend. He was distant and – oh, gods, oh
Christ
, what had they been telling Steff about him? Or maybe Steff had figured it out; he’d always been a clever one but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered. Steff
knew
.

The flames died out. It felt like everything died out.

Ariki shoved his way past Tony; she held out a claw, stopping him, so he stood there and yelled out a challenge. “They are all in league with each other, you see? We must kill them,
all
of them!”

“No. Wait,” Tony said.

“Kill him at least,” Ariki said. “At the very least, give me that.”

And Steff said, “No. You don’t need to. I told you, you don’t need to.” He was scared. Saint had never seen him look that scared before. “I can stop him.”

Saint staggered back under the weight of those words. Because Steff was scared, but he said that anyway, and what if – what if he
could
? What if he could fix things somehow? It was damn unlikely but Steff was clever, maybe it wasn’t too late, maybe he could be saved –

Then common sense took over, bitter and real. He jutted his chin and spread his arms and laughed. “Can you?” he said. “You’ve gotten confident all of a sudden.” He grinned. “I’m going to kill every damn one of these things and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“No,” Steff agreed. In the background, Ariki grinned.

Saint grinned broader, stretched his face broad and rigid enough to hurt. “What are you going to
do
?” he said, more of a yell really, and he laughed again. “Sweetheart, Steffan, you precious stupid man – what could you possibly do to me that’s worse than what I’ve done?”

“Nothing,” Steff said.

Saint was laughing so hard he was almost crying, could barely speak. “What’s to keep me from killing
you
, huh? Tell me that! I’m a monster, everyone knows it. Wouldn’t put it past me! Wouldn’t put anything past me these days – really, though,” and he was serious now, deadly serious, “what can you do? Can you stop me? Stop me from –” He cut himself off, and bit his lip until it bled. He hadn’t meant to sound so pleading.

Steff shrugged and Saint noticed bruises on his neck, above his stupid collar.
We match
, he thought, absurdly. “I can’t force you, no,” Steff said. “But I can ask. Saint? Could you stop this, please?”

Saint stared at him.

“You need to stop this,” Steff said, gentling his tone a little, which was when Saint realised that until then his voice had been bitingly acerbic. The kind of voice he normally only got when he was really tired, when he’d been working too hard for too long. “Please, Saint. I mean I understand why it might seem that you can’t, not any more, but you can, honestly, and it’s… I know you must think you’re irredeemable but you’re
not
, and you’re not the only one at fault here. Everyone’s been dying and it doesn’t make any sense and I just – I’m sorry for not believing you earlier, I should’ve, I should’ve said – fuck, it doesn’t matter. We can talk about that, everything, just. Please stop?”

Saint considered him.

Saint was… hopeful. Steff’s little speech made him feel
hope
, and wasn’t that a laugh, that he could still feel hope after all this. He sure didn’t deserve to.

He had thought, when Steff first stepped out… he’d thought he’d find himself with a knife between his ribs, Steff had looked so disgusted with him. He still did, but maybe it didn’t matter. The atua watched them, sullen and silent, they weren’t attacking him and he didn’t understand and his thoughts were a storm and in the end there was only really one thing that mattered.

“Will you catch me?” Saint asked.

Steff just frowned.

Saint’s breath caught in his throat. He ignored it. “Cool, okay then, thanks for that,” he said, straightening his back to stand proud, spreading out his arms ready to burn and burn and burn and
burn
. Tony’s shoulders bunched in tension. She was still forming a barricade between him and the patupaiarehe, but those gathered around the outer edge were stepping forward, now, and he’d burn every damn one of them to blood and ashes and nothing could –

Steff grabbed him and pulled him into a hug, of all things. It was an immensely awkward hug, because neither of them was very good at it. Steff’s glasses were pushed up by Saint’s head and Saint’s nose got smushed into Steff’s collarbone a bit and it was kind of the awkwardest hug he’d ever experienced. But it made up for that in intensity; Steff gripped him almost painfully tightly, and after a moment’s pause Saint decided to hell with it and gripped him just as tight back. This was his best friend and he was
never fucking letting go
.

“Yes, you miserable cryptic bastard,” Steff said irritably, the annoyance in his words countered by how tightly his fingers curled at Saint’s back, “whatever it is you’re asking –
yes
.”

Saint buried his face in his waistcoat, which smelled of fancy washing powder and hope.

“Why didn’t you
say
anything,” Steff said, into his hair. “You idiot, if you just said, if you’d just
asked
– right back at the start, with the nightmares, you said you were fine, why would you say that?”

“That was blatant lying, pet, come on,” Saint said, and he stepped back, he spread his arms out wide and laughed. “Don’t you know not to trust me, by now?”

Saint would take what he could get, of course, but that didn’t mean he was deluding himself into thinking this was anything more than what it was: Steff saying things he didn’t, couldn’t mean. Sure he was here
now
, when Saint was explosively self-destructive, but he’d never spend time with him after this, let alone be there in his worse times. He was so busy and they’d barely even talked for months now and this couldn’t possibly –

Steff shrugged. “I don’t trust you,” he said. “Not even slightly. But I don’t really need to, I think? If you trust me that’ll be enough for a start. I just prefer my life with you in it.”

Well.

Right, then.

“You have been,” Saint said very seriously, “and always shall be… a
terrible
judge of character,” and Steff snorted out a laugh and, eyeing him critically, fixed his hair. Saint swatted his hand away. The exchange was comfy, familiar, like a hundred conversations they’d had. The atua were watching, the patupaiarehe murmuring amongst themselves, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

“Want to go get that drink now?” Steff said. “We can watch old episodes of
Buffy
or
Doctor Who
or something.”

“You are so immensely geeky,” Saint said, “you’re, like, Geeky McGeekface, sole resident of Geekville, Silicon Valley. But,” he added, magnanimously, “I suppose so. As a favour.”

Steff rolled his eyes. “You love those shows as much as I do or more, come on.”

“Blasphemy! I am entirely too excellent to like lame person shows for lame people.” Saint paused. “Is
Firefly
on the table?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll condescend to join you, then. Entirely out of pity, mind.”

Steff’s mouth twitched upwards at the corners. “Damned decent of you,” he said.

And the killing stopped, then, the bloodshed and hate and all-but-war ended with a hug between old friends, of all things, as the patupaiarehe stood whispering and the city’s guardian was not forced to be unkind.

She shrank back down to her human form, and leaned heavily against Hinewai. She hadn’t done much because there wasn’t much she could do, but she was on edge, still, at how close that had come to being outright bloodshed. There had been a moment when Steffan seemed like he would fail, and Tony, when she closed her eyes, could picture that far too well, Saint fighting and the others fighting back and all of it escalating, fire and blood and war.

“This was a fool’s bargain,” Ariki whispered to her, savage.

Tony looked at the two men standing there, Saint all broken and Steffan shivering, a little. She wondered if Saint knew how close he’d come to consigning the both of them to death.

“A bargain all the same,” she said, “and don’t worry. Saint still needs to be punished, and he will.” It pained her to say that, but there had to be some kind of balance to these things, it was just how life worked. And she doubted the vengeful masses of fae would settle for anything less. “But not the others – no one else, it’s his fault alone. And not yet.”

Ariki slowly, grudgingly, nodded, and Tony at last could breathe again.