Release(39)

Adam looked at him warily, trailing forgotten fingers in the water of the Jacuzzi. “It would throw anybody.”

“Yes, I suppose it would.” He looked up. He was grinning. It was strange. “I gotta tell you, Adam, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but you’re the one we thought we’d never be surprised by. You’d think it would be Martin because he’s … Martin. Dependable, I’ll-give-it-a-try Martin, but you… I don’t think we’d be surprised by anything you did.”

“That doesn’t really sound like you don’t mean it in a bad way.”

“Adam–”

“So you wouldn’t be surprised if I robbed a bank? Or murdered a small town?”

“Or won a Nobel Prize,” his dad said. “Or saved a family from a burning house. I’m just saying… We’re predictable people, Adam. It’s what we depend on Christ for. It’s what He promised us, that no matter what this life is like, there’s something guaranteed to be waiting for us if we love Him and do His will. It’s the great prediction.” His father clasped his hands now, almost as he would during prayer. “But I think… I wonder if we take that too far into our lives. And put too much value on the predictable. And never find the value in the unpredictable.”

“Like me.”

His dad’s grin tightened. “I’m not getting at ya, Adam,” he said again. “I’m trying to tell ya…”

He trailed off. Adam attempted to break the little weird tension that had arisen. “Your voice has gone folksy. Remember, I know you’re not from Kentucky.”

But his dad didn’t so much as crack a smile. “I just wish…”

“What?” Adam asked, still idly trailing his fingers in the water, though his stomach was starting to knot.

His dad looked at him. “I wish we could be honest with each other. I wish that for all of us. I wish it for your mother. I wish it for Martin. And I wish it for you, son. I wish it for you and me. I wish you felt you could be completely honest with me. It hurts my heart that you’re afraid.”

For a moment, a long one, they just stared at each other, the rushing water the only sound. Adam thought each of them was hoping the other would break the silence first.

Once, at thirteen, Adam had perfectly innocently been kicked out of a friend’s house in the middle of the night by the drunk boyfriend of the friend’s mother asserting his authority during a sleepover. Adam had been thrown onto the street, barely even able to make a phone call to his dad. “Can you come?” was all he’d said.

Big Brian Thorn arrived with his sleeves pushed up, his eyes wide open, and an air of threat and menace that Adam would have felt terrified of if he hadn’t been absolutely sure it wasn’t for him. “Did he hurt you?” his dad had asked.

“No, I just want to go.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

They’d driven away, his dad even letting Adam cry from the shock of it all, rather than trying to get him to stop like he usually did. If the drunk boyfriend had laid a finger on him, Adam was fairly certain his dad might have beaten him all the way to death. If protectiveness was love, his dad was an avalanche of it.

But.

And it was a big “but”, wasn’t it?

The sermons, the fear and suspicion of Enzo (who, to be fair, they were right to be suspicious of), Marty telling him how much they all talked about him…

What was his father asking him here? What was his father telling him?

If it could be like this. If they could be honest with each other. If Adam didn’t have to be afraid.

But he did, he did, he did.

Didn’t he?

Big Brian Thorn was overbearing, punitive, capricious, not a big fan of the gays or anything alternative, but he clearly loved his sons, in his own flawed way. And if Adam would argue to himself that it wasn’t love if it altered when it alteration found, it was a kind of love. Fierce, ferocious, baffled. He’d be lying if he said he looked at what Martin – up until this morning, at least – had always had with his parents and was never jealous.

He found it coming out of his mouth before he even knew what he was saying. “Something happened at work today, Dad.”





There are ancient agreements with this world, agreements made before memory with the people who were first in this place, people who gave the faun and his Queen different shapes in their dreams and prayers, shapes that changed as the people did, shapes that become ever more elastic until he often doesn’t know what physical form he will take when he steps out of the lake until he has done so. Still, as changeable as both sides were, they had once agreed to put a war to its end.

He, for example, has not wilfully eaten the flesh of one of these creatures for millennia. The impulse to hunt him in return was removed from their thinking. Reciprocity.

All of which will vanish if the Queen dies. She is the keystone between the worlds. Should she die, the treaty will be only the first thing to unravel. The universe will soon follow.

And so he catches the bodies before she can hit them with her full force, he drags them out of her way when they try to stop her; he replaces the throat of a man who tries to physically restrain her. The man is breathing as the faun leaves him behind, and for now that’s the best he can manage.