Page 65 of Garden of Poisoned Delights

Aleks started to laugh, then almost choked on his own tongue as Evander got to his knees.

He was practically wobbling when he left the civic building an hour later, dressed in a spare uniform from the storage units in the back. Evander walked alongside him at a brisk march, looking exactly as though he’d just wrung five orgasms out of his thoroughly worn-out submissive.

“You know what?” Aleks said, as they left the civic building for the residential houses a few blocks down. “You should be proud of yourself. You monster.”

“You’re welcome.”

The lights were on in Caius’s house, including the one upstairs where his husband stayed when he wasn’t feeling well. Evander stopped to look at it, brows furrowed, but when the front door opened, Caius’s husband was standing there with a sleeping Malik in his arms.

“You wore him out?” Aleks whistled low, but Malik didn’t even twitch. “How?”

A shrug.

“We had him playing keep-away with a lantern and the ribbon dragons,” Caius said. “He passed out in the middle of dinner after that.”

“He should…probably eat more,” Caius’s husband said. He looked down, not quite meeting Evander’s gaze, and tipped Malik into Evander’s arms. “And he made me give his stuffed dragon a medical examination.”

“Yes, he’s fond of it,” Evander said. “It’s a gift from his brother, Theron.”

“Ah.” It seemed that was enough socializing, because Caius took over, a fluttering, glittery butterfly to his husband’s hulking shadow. He gave Aleks the earrings—which really were interesting, actually, shaped like clouds with little dangling gems meant to represent rain—and a bag of something they were supposed to use to make their closet smell nice.

They walked in companionable silence to the house, with Malik passed out like a limp doll over Evander’s shoulder. Ribbon dragons snapped at passing lanterns and hovered around Malik and Evander, and the ordinary, familiar stars started to appear in the darkening sky.

Malik finally stirred, grumbling softly as he realized he was being held like a baby, and blinked up at Evander. “Dad. I chased dragons today.”

“That’s what I hear.” Malik settled his head back on Evander’s shoulder, and Evander kept carrying him, little legs dangling. How had he already grown so much? It seemed like a month ago, Malik had been just a tiny, little red-faced thing, helpless and small.

“Daddy got a picture on his arm,” Malik said. He turned his head with what seemed like great effort and peered drowsily at Aleks. “Did you show him? Did he like it?”

Aleks and Evander exchanged a look, and Aleks coughed into his hand.

“Yeah, Malik,” Aleks said, winking at Evander. “I think he liked it a lot.”

Immortals Descending

@natendo_art

CHAPTER 12

Knife’s Edge

The house had changed again.

After the birth of Elena, Evander, and Aleks Akti’s second child, a girl they’d named Kelta, Azaiah and Nyx returned to their home by the river of the dead. She was a healthy baby with equally healthy lungs, and watching the way Nyx had smiled down at the baby, the catch in his voice when he’d greeted little Kelta in the old imperial dialect, was a memory Azaiah would cherish. While Azaiah’s siblings and their immortal companions had become Nyx’s family, it was nice to see that he had connections in the mortal realm, too. They, more than anything else, burned away the last vestiges of Glaive from Nyx’s soul, and hearing the entire Akti clan call Nyx “uncle” was more than enough to keep Azaiah’s own dark mirror firmly at bay.

Now they were back, with the river running dark and quiet beside their little house, and it was Nyx who stood with his hands hooked in his belt and tilted his head, frowning slightly. He still stood like a soldier, Azaiah thought. “It’s happened again—the house. We’ve never had a hammock, have we?”

Azaiah shook his head, feeling the weight of his scythe vanish from his back, a sure sign his duties were complete for the moment. The hammock was simple, big enough for two, and strung up between two trees that looked very much like the pine trees in Lukos. “No. Perhaps it was Aleks.” His ferryman and future successor liked to do that sometimes. He would leave little gifts for Azaiah and Nyx, sometimes useful, sometimes comical, sometimes both.

“Maybe,” Nyx said, tumbling into the ropes with a soft laugh. “I forgot how much I liked these.” He maneuvered about in the hammock, then put his muscular arms over his head and waggled his eyebrows at Azaiah. “Want to join me, beautiful? There’s plenty of room.”

Azaiah knew his siblings sometimes thought of Nyx as a quiet, stern man who never smiled and took his duties as Azaiah’s Grief very seriously…and that was true, to a point. Nyx was reserved around Azaiah’s loud, colorful family, but he’d always been that way, even back when he’d worn the armor of a soldier and fought under a banner most had now forgotten.. Nyx was perfectly able to smile and be jovial when the mood struck, as it often did when they were at home. He’d told Azaiah that it was easy to be happy here; it was the one place where all his memories were good.

Azaiah smiled at him, then climbed a bit hesitantly into the hammock, though it held plenty of room and only swayed a bit under his added weight. That didn’t make it entirely comfortable, though, as Azaiah was taller than Nyx and had to shift a bit to find a position that wasn’t terribly awkward.

Nyx laughed. “Death in a hammock. Who would have thought? We should ask Cillian to paint you.”

“Hmm.” Azaiah pushed his long, silver-white hair out of his eyes and tried to look as dignified as possible. “Cillian is a dancer, you realize, not a painter.”

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