AIMÉ

“It feels wrong, getting you to do this with me,” said Aimé as he passed another pile of books to Asmodeus to pack neatly into a box. His clothes were already packed and moved to the new place, and more importantly, his paints, canvases, and computer were already gone too.

Asmodeus had not helped much in that, as Aimé had unscrewed the custom-built shelves for his canvases and paints with a power drill borrowed from Mr Delaney, but he had driven Paddy’s van once they’d packed all the shelves and his equipment into the back of it.

They’d been spending a lot of time together in the past few days, whenever Asmodeus wasn’t working, and Aimé almost felt bad for enjoying it so much in Colm and Jean-Pierre’s absence.

They’d gone over to Pádraic and Bedelia’s for breakfast, and they’d mostly actually talked about De’s work, about dancing and music. Bedelia and Asmodeus had talked – Aimé and Paddy had listened.

“What would be right?” Asmodeus asked as he trailed his thumb down the spines of the books in his hands, a stack of Proust, then settled them into the box. “If I just sat down and watched you pack?”

“I kind of feel like that’s right for you,” said Aimé. “Me doing the work, you just watching.”

“Because of my imperious nature?”

“Because you sit places and look pretty,” Aimé said.

“Pretty isn’t exactly the word,” Asmodeus murmured, not without a slight catch in his voice as Aimé handed him another stack.

“People admire you,” said Aimé. “No offence, De, but if you want to get into an deep discussion about looking pretty versus looking handsome, you should probably pick someone who’s one or the other.”

“Now, why should I be offended by that?” Asmodeus asks in cool, amused tones, and he packs the rest of the books into the box. “Do you like Proust?”

“I read him when I was sixteen,” said Aimé. “He pissed me off at the time – when I was getting into existentialism I reread some of his work, some of his essays. Resonated more with me the second time around.”

“And now?”

“Is this where you tell me you slept with him?” Aimé looked at Asmodeus’ face, at the slight curve to his perfect lips, at the green shine of his eyes, and after a second passes, he says, “Fuck off.”

“You think only Jean-Pierre has had his share of famous novelists?”

“Do you miss him?”

“Marcel?”

Aimé had asked the question almost laughing, the first question that had come to mind – he hadn’t been prepared for the soft way Asmodeus said his name, the affection in it, the curl of his tongue on the L. Aimé suddenly felt sick, his chest aching, and he crumpled slightly, holding the next stack of books loosely in his arms.

“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Asmodeus laughed quietly, and he reached for Aimé’s hand, squeezing his wrist, his fingers warm against Aimé’s skin. “We were passing acquaintances, Aimé, and we ran in similar circles, that’s all. Jean-Pierre knew his father.”

“His father?”

“Adrien, he was an epidemiologist – he and Jean-Pierre despised each other, naturally. He makes a great habit of feuding with every other doctor he meets, he enjoys the sport of it. Jean-Pierre still has his letters in bundles, I expect.”

Aimé slowly handed him the next pile of books, and Asmodeus slotted them into the top of the box, packing the flaps of the cardboard box down and grabbing another of the ones they’d unfolded and reinforced with tape earlier.

“You weren’t like, in love with him?”

“With Marcel Proust? No,” said Asmodeus. “But we met a few times, had cause to socialise when he saw me perform. We’d talk about romance, books, slept together once or twice. I wasn’t in love with him.”

“With Hamish MacKinnon?”

Asmodeus frowned at him, his brows furrowing together. “If you’re going to aim below the belt, I’m going to leave you to keep packing on your own.”

“I don’t understand your thing about that man,” said Aimé, and Asmodeus laughed suddenly, louder than he usually did.

“You sound like Jean-Pierre,” said Asmodeus. “Or like Colm.”

“You never talk about him, that’s all,” Aimé said quietly. “I know he’s an antiques dealer in Scotland – I know he’s not your boyfriend, and that you don’t have a relationship, exactly, not like mine and Jean’s.”

Asmodeus’ tone was casual, but he was as guarded as he ever got when he asked, “What more do you need to know?”

“What does he look like? What is he like? Am I going to meet him?”

“Meet him?” Asmodeus repeated. “Why would you?”

“I could meet every angel on the Earth, but I can’t meet him?”

It wasn’t often that he got Asmodeus on the defensive, but it seemed like he was feeling defensive now, his shoulders drawn back, his lips shifted into the slightest of frowns, his eyes hard but looking as if they couldn’t decide if they wanted to be, if they wanted to be soft instead. Aimé studied him, the subtle signs of emotion in Asmodeus, the careful and limited way he showed them.

He reminded Aimé of a queen sometimes – he wondered if it was really natural to him, to display so little emotion, or if it was something he’d learned like they said some monarchs did, to keep their faces frozen because it was just too gauche and too revealing of weakness to let them do anything else.

“It’s not like I’m gonna run and tell Colm and Jean,” said Aimé quietly, and he heard how gentle his voice sounded, thought about the fact that he’d become very gentle in the past few months – any time he used to be gentle, things would go wrong for him, and it had come back to bite him. “You can trust me.”

“I know,” said Asmodeus. Aimé could see the tension in his body like someone was holding tight to his strings – he was standing normally, but Aimé could see it, could see how stiff he was, how he was tensing his muscles the same he did on the stage. “I don’t distrust you, Aimé.”

“Who do you talk to about him?” Aimé asked.

“Who says I need to talk about him?”

“Now you sound like Jean-Pierre or Colm,” Aimé said wryly, leaning back on his heels and crossing his arms over his chest, looking at Asmodeus as challengingly as he could, raising his eyebrows too. “Who says any of us need to talk about our feelings or our relationships?”

“I’m a dancer, aren’t I?” Asmodeus retorted, but there was a slight smile tugging at his lips, a richness in his expression that at the same time made Aimé feel warm inside and also made his fucking heart ache. Asmodeus’ eyes were downcast as he pulled another box closer even though his lips were smiling. “Can’t I dance out my feelings?”

“Only as much as I can paint out all mine,” said Aimé. “You can’t do that will all of them.”

“No,” Asmodeus agreed after a few beats of silence. “Not all of them.”

They settled into the quiet for a few minutes, and Aimé let it hang. Jean-Pierre didn’t always do well with silence – it made him uncomfortable, was something he wanted to fill with activity or discussion or sex or all three; silence was more Colm or Paddy’s thing, Aimé thought. There was a vulnerability in being in silence together, not filling the gaps with talk or frenetic activity. You didn’t just become aware of the other person – you became aware of yourself.

After they’d packed another box and started on the next, Asmodeus finally said, “He’s not in Scotland. He is Scottish, he came from a small village in the Highlands, but he hasn’t been back to Scotland for many, many years. He has an antiques shop in Nottingham.”

“He’s an antiques dealer,” Aimé said.

“A master enchanter – he does trade in antiques, furniture, and art, but he repairs it as well, makes custom pieces for certain clientele.”

“Did you teach him to enchant?”

Asmodeus looked abruptly so stunned that Aimé almost couldn’t believe his face could be so expressive, his head tipping fractionally back, his lips shifting apart slightly – he didn’t just look surprised, but almost aggrieved, maybe, or offended. Aimé wondered if this was why Hamish MacKinnon was a topic that couldn’t be brought up, because it stripped so much protection off him.

“No,” said Asmodeus, his voice extremely quiet, and then he cleared his throat, because his voice had cracked just slightly. “No, I never… I didn’t.”

“He’s human, right?”

“He is.”

“He grew up in magic? Like me?”

“No,” said Asmodeus. “No, he was, ah… Hamish grew up in a village, and his father was a carpenter there. One day, he was walking in the forest and he saw a very beautiful man, a man who was… Hamish was twelve or thirteen, perhaps a little younger or a little older. The sodomy laws were still in place at this time – sodomy was punishable by death.”

Aimé took this in, trying to think when exactly it had been made legal – it was different in Scotland than in England, different again to Ireland, but for the punishment to be execution? Hamish MacKinnon was older than he’d thought. He couldn’t remember if Asmodeus had ever said how old he was.

“He was seduced,” Asmodeus said. He had a pensive look on his face, his eyes distant as they worked together, still packing things away. “Not physically, at the outset, but he… He followed him deeper into the woods. Deeper still.”

Aimé felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, a cold tremor running down his arms, his shoulders, as if ice water had just been dripped down his shirt. The look in Asmodeus’ eyes confirmed it when he met Aimé’s gaze.

“He was fae,” said Aimé. “That’s why he was— MacKinnon is much older than he should be, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Asmodeus, “although it’s not quite as simple as fae time differences. But he was amongst fae for many years, until he was a young man – when he was released, he was bound to certain magics that… “ Asmodeus trailed off. He had a smooth, easy way of speaking most of the time, and that was largely because he’d said almost everything a hundred times before, with how old he was, with how many people he talked to. With Aimé, some stuff was more unpredictable – he hesitated more, stumbled more, Aimé thought.

Aimé got the impression from his hesitations here and the length of his pauses that he’d barely ever spoken about Hamish MacKinnon to anybody, if at all.

“I met him, then. He was almost wholly disabled by it.”

“By the magics.”

“Yes.”

“A curse? A jinx, a hex?”

Asmodeus was silent for a moment. “What has Jean-Pierre told you?”

“That he keeps paintings by for Jean-Pierre sometimes.”

Asmodeus blinked – he hadn’t expected that. “Paintings?” he repeated.

“Paintings of Jean-Pierre as l’ange de la mort – paintings of the assassination. MacKinnon keeps them aside so that Jean can decide what to do with them, to destroy them, or not.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Asmodeus, his voice a good deal softer, almost wondering as he sank down in one of Aimé’s chairs, setting his knees to one side, his hands folding delicately in his lap. “You understand that demons are wholly unrelated to angels and the Host, don’t you?”

“Demons?” Aimé repeated. “Yeah, of course. I didn’t really study magical zoology, but they’re… They’re like big bugs, right? From a different dimension, the same as fae animals are different, but demons are from Avernus, and they’re like… bugs. People. But bug-like.”

Asmodeus looked like he was trying not to laugh, a fond expression writ on his face, and Aimé exhaled, rubbing his fingers over his cheek.

“They’re not like bugs?”

“It’s a close enough comparison. What I mean to communicate is that demons are not the root cause of possession – possessions are spirit-based.”

“Okay.”

“Nonetheless, Hamish is arguably possessed by demons.”

“… Like, a— Like, six feet tall, horns, shiny eyes, leathery skin like a beetle, demons?”

“No, no,” said Asmodeus. “Not sentient demons – not people. Alastora. They’re typically regarded as a pest, depending on the variety. As one last practical joke, one last torture, he was bound, body and soul, to a colony of sixty-six alastora. They’re about six inches tall, six-armed, winged, sharp-toothed. They’re not intelligent creatures – smart enough to cause mischief, not to understand its consequences. Imagine a man being bound to a murder of crows, but crueller.”

“Like Prometheus.”

“Not wholly unlike. They were ripping him to shreds when I came across him. He was emaciated, cut and marked all over, crazed by them. They didn’t understand what was happening to them, didn’t trust this large, human thing they’d been tied to. He was learning to live with them, to extend some communication to them, and them him. Not to control them – he still can’t do that now.”

Aimé didn’t know them by name, but after Asmodeus had described them, he thought he had a good handle on what sort of demon an alastor was – they were in chimneys sometimes, and some people used the hives they made to harvest magical gems and diamonds, although they weren’t the same as the regular pest variety. They were colony animals that shared a kind of hivemind, anyway, sort of like bees or wasps or hornets – they moved in swarms.

“How does he go places?” asked Aimé.

“Well, that’s just the thing, Aimé. He doesn’t.” Asmodeus spread out his hands, facing upward as he looked over his own long fingers and his paler, more delicate palm. He wasn’t looking at Aimé again, kept his gaze on his own hands and wrists as he went on: “It was several hundred years ago when we travelled together, from further south in North America to New York. He settled in London, and once he had his shop established there he lingered for a long time, and we lost… we lost touch. When first we met and travelled together, you understand, between us, there was never any… We reconnected later on. He moved up to Nottingham during the Renfrew Strike, which was a very fraught political time for a man like him, and he’s been there since, but in London, and then in Nottingham, he’s been in isolation. He scarcely leaves his flat, his shop – once every few years. I travel everywhere, Aimé. I rarely stay in one place for more than a few weeks at a time, and there is Hamish in one building, bound in it, jailed there. He is so unspeakably lonely, I one of the few who truly understands him, he someone who understands—”

Asmodeus’ breath hitched in his throat, and his green eyes looked wet, but it was only for a passing moment before the shimmer to their colour was gone, and his eyes looked as normal as ever.

“I am sorry,” he said, raising his head, his face a mask. “That isn’t what you were asking.”

“It’s exactly what I was asking about,” said Aimé. “You’re fucking in love with him.”

Asmodeus suddenly looked at Aimé like Aimé had slapped him. There was too long a pause before he said, “Love is hardly the word for—”

“You’re fucking in love with him,” Aimé repeated. “No wonder you can’t fucking stand it when Colm and Jean take the piss. Doesn’t he love you back?”

“It’s complicated,” said Asmodeus.

“How complicated?”

Asmodeus was looking at his hands again, had turned them over now so that he could examine the perfect sheen of his nails, their pink beds. “When we met, Hamish was in a vulnerable position, I myself was… I was unwell, mentally, emotionally. I told him things I wouldn’t otherwise have…”

Aimé slowly came closer, and he was careful about sinking down to sit on the arm of the armchair next to Asmodeus, looking down at him, their legs touching with how close the two of them were to each other. He could feel the heat of his body, feel how solid he was.

“What did you tell him?” he asked.

“I don’t feel things as other angels do,” said Asmodeus softly. “Have they told you that? Colm and Jean-Pierre?”

“You’re not Fallen like they are,” said Aimé, filling in the unspoken gap. “You’re not, um… You’re still part of the Host, right? That’s why you feel— Colm says you feel cold to him, sometimes. He can’t feel you like he can someone else – and that’s why. There’s a connection between you that’s already, um… that’s already severed.”

Asmodeus had his hand over his mouth, and now there really were tears shining in his eyes, fat droplets beading along his lower lashes, thick and shining, reflecting the light in the room. He was trembling with it, his shoulders shaking, and Aimé reached out and carefully rested his palm on the back of one of Asmodeus’ strong shoulders, squeezing gently.

“You know,” he said in the barest of whispers, trembling like he was freezing, “it’s— Sometimes, I practice in auditoriums. I step out on a stage before anyone else has arrived – no other dancers, no one backstage, no orchestra, no audience. A room made to hold hundreds, thousands, and I stand in it all alone, and it’s as if I’m suspended in space – there’s a surrealism to a space made to host so many souls, inhabited by only one.”

Aimé’s stomach churned, acid burning at the back of his throat. The whole of his chest ached with feeling, a thickness heavy in his nose, his eyes feeling like they were going to tear up too.

“I’m so sorry,” Aimé said. “I’m so sorry, Asmodeus.” He was rubbing a circle on the back of Asmodeus’ shoulder, not sure what else he should do, could do. “You told Hamish that?”

“Not exactly. But I communicated the— the distance I experience the world with, the feelings I feel.”

“So?”

“So now when I tell him how I feel about him, he doesn’t believe it’s true. That I’m saying it for his benefit, that I’m…” Asmodeus dropped his head into his hands, and the sob that came out of him was so broken that Aimé couldn’t help the way he leaned forward, clumsy and not knowing how to go about things, how to offer some kind of fucking comfort.

Asmodeus turned his body into Aimé’s and clutched at the paint-stained jumper he was wearing, sobbed so loudly into Aimé’s chest, his shoulders shaking, that for a horrible moment Aimé couldn’t believe there’d ever been a moment where he hadn’t known, hadn’t realised, that Jean-Pierre and Asmodeus were brothers, and he wrapped his arms as tightly around the other man as he could, squeezed him close, buried his face against the top of Asmodeus’ hair.

“I’ve got you,” he said, and Asmodeus took in a ragged, aching breath, his hands trembling where they gripped at him. “I’ve got you,” I said again as the angel let out another cry. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

He said it until it seemed like he didn’t need to say anything else – until he could stop saying anything.

“Let’s stop packing,” he said after they’d sat in the quiet for a while, “and open some wine.”

“Thank you,” whispered Asmodeus. “Your friendship means a great deal to me, Aimé. I hope you know that.”

“I hope you know it’s mutual,” Aimé murmured, and squeezed Asmodeus’ hand before he went to get the wine.