Happiness in Numbers Page 2

  Keith hesitated, staring at the faux-Tudor-style front, his feet suddenly turned leaden.

  "Keith?"

  "It's nothing," Keith said. "It's stupid. I know his son isn't even there yet, but you know, just—"

  Lucas wrinkled his nose at Keith. "It's not stupid. I'm nervous too."

  "—You are?" Keith swallowed around his dry throat, searching Lucas's face. Lucas almost never seemed nervous about anything; he was about as chill as a ghost could be, calm and determined, a rock in a world Keith always found to be stormy.

  A bit bashful, Lucas rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah. I mean, my relationship with him is still finding its feet, and yours got started while I wasn't around. I mean, it's good, but a bit different. You're, you know, levelled up on dating him compared to me, and—and what's his son gonna think of me?"

  "Lucas," Keith began.

  "I'm just a shadow, a memory and spirit clinging onto reality tooth and claw so I don't become a mindless monster. Hiraeth might like me, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna be welcomed into his entire family." Lucas looked dubious. "Plus, you know how they feel about other things going into the vessels they've claimed as their bodies. The fact I possess him sometimes so we can bang you together is gonna… well. If it comes up at all, you know most Others are gonna find that real freaky."

  "Still probably better than being just some kind of human loser," Keith said dryly. "At least ghosts are literally as close as humans get to being Others. Me, I'm just some guy—"

  "With psychic powers that let you experience the world the way they do, yeah—?"

  "With PTSD and anxiety—"

  "—who is alive—"

  "Boys," Hiraeth's light, lilting voice said from behind them. "I think you're both pretty."

  Keith jumped, and they turned as one to see Hiraeth, the Horned Boy, standing behind them with a bag of takeout in his hand.

  As always, he was a gorgeous enough sight that Keith's stomach gave an almost involuntary flop. Hiraeth was pale, with platinum hair that he'd let down from its customary ponytail to fall around his shoulders, his silver eyes reflecting the streetlights like a cat's—or, well, a deer.

  That much alone would be enough to captivate even the humans who couldn't see the rest: his antlers, which he'd shed for the winter, were regrowing and had already begun to branch to their usual, tree-like shape—if only just begun. They were covered with a soft velvet that Keith hadn't been able to keep his hands off lately.

  Hiraeth huffed a breath of air inelegantly upward to flip some of his hair out of his eyes. "Going to stand on my step arguing all night over which of you is more tragic, sweethearts, or shall we head around back together?"

  "Uhhh," Keith said. "I. Actually. Yeah, don't think we need to keep arguing."

  "It's me," Lucas said.

  "Yeah, it's definitely Lucas," Keith agreed.

  Hiraeth laughed at that, juggling his dinner and keys as he led the way around behind the shop, opening the door to the narrow wooden stairs that led up to a small studio apartment over his store. Keith felt his shoulders relax as they entered, the familiar scent of wet leaves mingling with a fresher smell—Hiraeth's springtime scent—and he kicked his shoes off, wandering over to Hiraeth's bed and taking a seat there so Hiraeth could use the desk to eat. Lucas leaned on the desk, watching them both.

  Hiraeth unpacked his dinner—Tibetan Kitchen, from the logo stamped on the bag—and slid into his seat, reaching up in a successful demand that Lucas high five him.

  "How were your parents?" Hiraeth asked, already digging in.

  Keith flopped back onto Hiraeth's bed, breathing in the scent with a little thrill. "Same as always. Overly worried about me. I guess not entirely without reason, but…"

  "But the things you see are actually there," Hiraeth provided. "That's rough. For Lucas too."

  Lucas shrugged. "I'm resigned, yeah? Keith went to my funeral and I don't think any of my own family could see me then. Doesn't much matter if his don't see me at dinner." His good humor had clearly dried up, tone a bit dull, but at the stricken look Keith felt on his own face, Lucas managed a grin. "But enough of that. Back to an entire family who can see me. Your son?"

  Hiraeth, whose expression had also grown pained, seized on that. "One of them, yes," he said. "He's mostly stag, like me—a little more branchy, his mother's all leaf, but we're pretty closely aligned."

  "I didn't think…" Keith hesitated. "I mean…"

  "I wouldn't have called you for the child-rearing sort," Lucas said, when it became clear that Keith wasn't going to finish his sentence.

  Hiraeth wrinkled his nose at both of them, taking another big mouthful of food and chewing it loudly with his flat teeth before continuing. "I don't know that he'd say I was much good at it, but we grow up fast."

  A bit embarrassed, Keith mumbled, "More like, how? You already told me that Others are traveling souls who take over vessels you find and… convert them into actual bodies somehow. Flowers or bones or…" In all honesty, he didn't know if the deer would have been alive or dead when Hiraeth moved in and reshaped it.

  "Where do you think those souls come from?" Hiraeth asked lightly. "We're low viability, for sure; something has to balance out how hard we are to permanently kill. But just as we eat and sleep and all other things, some of us can have children. Those of us who are fertility-aligned—rabbits, flowers, stags—" He winked at Keith. "—have an easier time than others. Though, I mean, I mostly have sex for fun, I'll admit it."

  Despite himself, Keith blushed. "I guess, but where's the body come from for a new soul…?"

  "Where'd yours come from? Cells and essence slowly growing once the conditions were met. Same for us, though the way our cells and essence grow… well, it's the same thing we do when we take over a body, just put to other ends."

  Keith still didn't fully get it—he knew that if Hiraeth's body was killed, so long as it wasn't through some method that would destroy his spirit, he would find some other 'compatible' vessel and slowly mutate it into a new body for himself. If he had to settle into an incompatible vessel, it would be bad for his nature in some way. Again, not something he fully understood the meaning of. Their mutual friend Marion had been forced into an incompatible vessel, and she didn't seem much different than before.

  Then again, he hoped he'd never find out, not since it would involve seeing Hiraeth get hurt. "Well… I mean, I'll take your word for it," Keith mumbled. "Why's he coming? Just to visit?"

  Hiraeth frowned a little, chasing the last of his food around the container with his wooden chopsticks. "That's… well. He's bringing his boyfriend with him, and his boyfriend's girlfriend, as I understand it. He didn't go into too many details on the call, but something's happened to his boyfriend, some kind of curse, and he wanted to see if anything in the shop might help. I mean, I've got an awfully big collection, so maybe."

  Lucas said, "Hiraeth, my man, are you actually some kind of Otherly arms dealer?"

  "I'll never talk," Hiraeth said, closing his container and grinning up at Lucas. "No, no. I just find old items that carry some kind of aura, and see who wants them. Half the stuff I'm still figuring out what it even does—if anything. As I'm quite sure Keith knows, a lot of things just carry memories."

  They did; antique stores were a pitfall of strong impressions. "Yeah," Keith said. "I mean, if I can help find whatever the item is…?"

  Hiraeth's smile gentled. He pushed his container aside on his desk and rose, padding the few steps over to the bed and flopping down next to Keith. "You'll help. I know." His hand came to Keith's cheek, fingers running down to his jaw. "You look nervous."

  "I'm always nervous," Keith grumbled, earning himself a laugh from Lucas.

  Eyes glittering, Hiraeth hooked his fingers behind Keith's neck, tugging him a little closer. "Let me distract you. You don't have class tomorrow, right?"

  "Yeah, but I didn't bring spare clothes."

  "I've got some of your underwear here already," Hiraeth said
, smirking a little. He glanced up. "Joining us, Lucas? You can feel through me, if you like."

  Lucas drifted a little closer. "I'll keep you company," he promised. They both knew what it meant for Hiraeth to offer his vessel up, even a little. It went back to having to having to be compatible with it; Others created bodies around themselves that fit them, hosted their souls and protected them. Putting another person in there was beyond intimate, something some of them might even find profane.

  "Mm, good, good…" Hiraeth pulled Keith in for a kiss.

  Keith kissed back, tasting the strange wilderness of Hiraeth's mouth under the familiar taste of take-out, and let himself not think for a while.

  *~*~*

  As Hiraeth had promised, he'd held onto the clothes Keith had left there. Ultimately, he only had to rewear his socks and jeans—both of which he'd be likely to do anyway. Keith ran his fingers down the front of the flannel shirt he was wearing; it was his own, but had been laundered with Hiraeth's things, and smelled like him now, wet and wild, some sort of hidden forest mystery worn on his body.

  Keith kind of liked that.

  Hiraeth cooked breakfast on his kitchen hotplate, and brewed his own coffee, and they ate that while sitting together on the bed, leaning against each other. Hiraeth had gotten down one of his books for Lucas, who, when he focused, had just enough energy to flip pages, and he was seated at the desk, reading.

  Keith swallowed his gulp of sweetened coffee and said, hoarsely, "This is really nice."

  And, as though he'd called down some kind of curse with the words, the shop bell rang downstairs.

  "I thought you didn't open until eleven on Saturdays," Lucas protested, looking up.

  "I don't. Doesn't stop customers," Hiraeth said thoughtfully. "But, also, it's probably my boy."

  All at once, the tranquility vanished. The next sip of coffee tasted strangely acidic, twisting in Keith's suddenly-tense stomach. "Oh," he wheezed.

  Hiraeth hopped up. He was still just wearing sweatpants and a pajama t-shirt top—a cat clinging to the ceiling with a cartoon alarm clock ringing next to it—but somehow they didn't make him look any less ready, bright-eyed and eager. "Well, I'm heading downstairs. You want to come with me?"

  "Should I?" Keith hedged. "I can wait—"

  The doorbell rang again, more aggressively, and Hiraeth shrugged. "I don't want to leave him on the doorstep, m'love." He bent, kissing Keith's cheek, then crossed to Lucas and buzzed a hand gently over the top of his head, as though he were ruffling that tightly-curled hair. "Come down whenever! I'll host them in the shop. It's larger there anyway."

  He clattered off down the stairs to enter the shop floor from the back way, and Keith looked at Lucas in an embarrassed panic, unsure of what to say.

  "Big step," Lucas said, seeming flustered himself. He got up, beginning to pace over the floor. It didn't creak under his insubstantial weight. "I guess, finish your coffee first…?"

  "What if he hates me?" Keith wheezed.

  "I mean, then he's a dick?" Lucas said. He came over and sat next to Keith, a cool comforting presence that Keith leaned into at once. "Right, though, me too. Weird ghost. Strange human. But maybe he's like Hiraeth and will be chill about us? I mean, Hiraeth did say they were closely aligned…"

  "Maybe," Keith said. "I. You know, I never thought I was going to have a boyfriend. Let alone two boyfriends? And one of them has kids?"

  "Keith, your life is weird as shit."

  A nervous giggle bubbled up in Keith's throat. "Don't I know it," he said. He finished his coffee with a swig. "All right. Let's just… give them enough time to say their hellos and then head down there, I guess. Worst case scenario, I can never show my face here again."

  "Right. No big."

  *~*~*

  Keith crept down the stairs as if he were once again trying to sneak into some kind of haunted mansion without getting caught. There were similarities: the stairs were wooden, they creaked, and he was terrified of the creature on the other side.

  Hiraeth, still in his pjs, was perched on his service counter, mid-conversation with the pair of people in front of him. He interrupted his sentence entirely seamlessly: "—and there's the two lovelies I wanted to introduce you to."

  The pair turned to Keith and Lucas with two very different expressions, and Keith wheezed out a breath.

  "Hi," he managed, just as he ran out of air.

  The woman was wearing snakeskin patterned jeans and a tunic-style dress over them; her hair was long and thick, a mottled honey golden-brown that hung ruler-straight down past her hips. She was built lean and long, around six feet tall. To his second sight, overlaid on her form, he could see small scales catching the light on her face, neck, and hands. Her lips split a little too wide in her face, her eyes flat and unblinking gold, but her smile seemed genuine enough as she bobbed her head to him, careful not to overly disturb the small fish tank she was holding.

  The young man—

  Well, he was definitely Hiraeth's son. His hair wasn't the same platinum white as Hiraeth's, but a more standard tannish fawn color, and freckles covered his tanned face. He was wearing black jeans and a t-shirt under a dramatic souvenir jacket—satiny, black and white but embroidered with pale pink flowers across his shoulders, flowing down into the hem and seam details. His antlers were much more plant-like than Hiraeth's unnaturally branching but still clearly bone ones, and cherry blossoms clustered around their tips. He didn't look more than a few years younger than Hiraeth himself, but given the near-immortal nature of Others, that didn't mean much.

  The expression on his face was clearly challenging as he sauntered up to Keith and Lucas, glancing them both over before he said, "A ghost and some human kid? Seriously, Dad?"

  "Oh, I'm very serious about them," Hiraeth called from his perch. "They're lovely, be nice."

  It was pretty clear that the Cherrytree Boy had no particular desire to be nice, but Keith swallowed around the pit in his stomach and held a clammy hand out to him anyway. "I'm Keith," he said. "This is Lucas, my, uh, our boyfriend—"

  "Hey," Lucas said, lifting a hand in greeting. His brows were already lifted.

  "—And it's nice to meet you. Do you have a name you'd like me to use?"

  Others had at least four layers of names that Keith knew of—fake names they'd use among humans, descriptor names based on known details that Others would use for each other when they weren't close, familiar names that they would use for each other when they were, and personal names that, as far as Keith knew, they kept completely secret. In Hiraeth's case, 'Hiraeth' was his familiar name, given in secret to Keith and Lucas; the descriptor name Keith used for him before that was 'the Horned Boy', and his human name was 'Henry'.

  The Cherrytree Boy glanced Keith over again and then shrugged. "Avi's what I go by when talking to people like you," he said. "Or you can call me whatever."

  His human name, then. "It's nice to meet you," Keith said. He left his hand out a little longer before letting it drop.

  The Snakeskin Girl eyed Avi—she was Avi's boyfriend's girlfriend, he remembered from Hiraeth's description, meaning that she probably wasn't Avi's girlfriend too—then stepped forward. She shoved her goldfish bowl into Avi's hands.

  "Be nice," she echoed Hiraeth, then smiled too-wide at Keith, literally cheek-to-cheek, as she took his hand before it could quite sag entirely away. "It's nice to meet you too. Go ahead and give him a descriptor instead of Avi, we're among like kind here. His dad already explained that you can see things."

  Keith swallowed. Even if she'd given him permission, Avi hadn't. Her hand was dry and cool and he focused on shaking it. "Among other abilities, yeah," he said weakly.

  "Other abilities? Even better," she quipped. "We're in a bit of a pickle here so it'd be a real nuisance if we had to talk around it."

  "Right, uh," he glanced between the Snakeskin Girl and Avi, and decided to just use a descriptor for Hiraeth, just in case she didn't know his familiar name. "His, uh, dad menti
oned that something had happened to your mutual boyfriend?"

  "Yep," she said. She pointed.

  For a moment, Keith genuinely thought she was pointing to Avi for some kind of explanation. But he was scowling down into the fishbowl he was now carrying.

  "The fish?" Keith asked.

  The fish—a fantail guppy, Keith believed, almost betta-like with its rainbow of colors and long tail, but lacking the snub nose or length in its other fins—swam a little loop-de-loop in his bowl.

  Keith found himself flashing back being a kid, and how he'd failed to keep his own guppies alive.

  "He's such an idiot," Avi muttered. He shook his head over the bowl until one of the cherry blossoms came loose from his antlers and drifted down, where it rested on the surface of the water.

  The fish swam up and ate it.

  "He got himself cursed," the Snakeskin Girl said with stressed good humor. "I guess he somehow got sealed into his body, which reverted into the original vessel's shape. The two of us took care of the guy who did it, but it didn't undo the curse. We were hoping the shop might have some kind of curse remover."

  Lucas made an unhappy noise, his face a little more shadowed than it had been previously. "He's still him, though?" He had reason to be concerned; the last time they'd dealt with things that forced Others to take new vessels, it had involved some very unpleasant cases of amnesia.

  "He is for sure," she said, nodding to Lucas to acknowledge the point. "He responds to things perfectly well, he's just…" She held her fingers up a few inches apart. "You know. Silent, water-breathing, can't do much but swim in circles. It was only funny for the first hour."

  "Dad, c'mon," Avi said. He put the fishbowl down on the desk and rested his face against Hiraeth's shoulder. "What do you think?"

  Hiraeth hissed breath out through his teeth, considering. "I might be able to get you a better setup for him? A little bowl like that isn't much good for a fish."