Page 10 of Real

I wrap my arms around him instead, bringing him in for a hug. I tell myself it’s to comfort him. I hug patients all the time. But I like how he feels in my arms a little too much.

He curls into me, relaxing his head on my shoulder. I like the way that feels too. It makes me ache for things I can’t have. When I was a younger man, I would have given anything to claim an omega for my own. It wasn’t just because I wanted to have sex. I wanted the winter nights cuddling in front of a fire and tender kisses before leaving for work. I wanted to raise a child with someone and grow old with them.

Now I only get to help children on their way to other families. Buddy is the only omega I’ve touched in a very long time.

I extricate myself from Buddy on the couch. “I should go make a phone call.”

Just because I’m advocating for Buddy, doesn’t give me an excuse to take advantage of him.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asks.

“No,” I assure him. “Not at all.”

Then I walk away from him before I’m tempted to reassure him in other ways.

4

H

The phone rings three times before Felicity answers.

“Hi, H. What’s up?” Felicity and I have been working together for a long time. She’s one of the few people I’ve spent time with outside of work besides my brothers. She and her mate have had me over for dinner several times.

“Hey, Felicity. I hear you requested to be removed from Buddy’s case.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “Yeah. I don’t think I’m a good fit for it.”

“Why? I think you’d be great.”

She sighs. “Buddy brings back a few memories I’d rather forget.”

That isn’t the response I was expecting. “What do you mean?”

“He’s too much like Gepetto’s children.”

I’ve heard that name before. There was a warlock in the nineteenth century who animated marionettes with magic and put on elaborate shows that people traveled from all around the world to see. I thought he had used some form of magical telekinesis or something. Buddy is very different.

“I’m still not following,” I say.

“My sister died of leukemia when she was five years old. I was eight at the time. My omega mother never got over it. A few months after my sister’s death, this woman with scarlet-red hair showed up at our house with a box. Inside it was a doll that looked identical to my sister. She even had a chip in her front tooth. I was taken away from the house for a while, and when I came back, the doll was walking around and talking exactly like my sister. Honestly? It was terrifying. It still is. Even after all these years, my mother tucks it into bed every night and reads it bedtime stories.”

I shudder. Felicity has to be thirty-five years old.

“When I got older, I did a bit of research and discovered there’s a warlock named Red who has reimagined a bit of old Italian magic. It enables her to recreate a dead child in exactly the same state they were before they died. It’s a messy process. Sometimes their memories get jumbled up or their muscle memory is slightly off. There’s a plastic child in Canada who twists his head a full one hundred eighty degrees when he wants to see something behind him, and a wooden kid in Brazil whose reactions are delayed by thirty seconds. But Red has no shortage of customers. A parents’ grief over their children can be immeasurably deep, and she takes advantage of it. I understand Buddy’s very endearing. If I didn’t know better, I’d want to help him too. But he isn’t human, H. He’s just an echo of someone Dorian Gray used to love.”

It makes a horrible kind of sense. Dorian must hate Buddy because he isn’t close enough to the man he wanted Buddy to be. The deep price he probably paid for the spell that created Buddy makes sense too. If Dorian was grieving, he might have been willing to pay anything to get the person he loved back.

I’m not real, though. So it’s different.

Buddy tried to tell me. I simply didn’t want to listen.

“So we just give Buddy back to Dorian?” Even if Buddy is one of Gepetto’s children, that doesn’t seem right. “Buddy is terrified of him.”

“Buddy isn’t a person. He can’t feel terrified. He can’t feel anything. He can just look like he’s feeling things. Red can’t create new people. She only revives small bits of people who are already dead. That’s what you’re seeing right now. You have to let it go.”

I peer into the den where Buddy is watching TV. The way he approached the couch, terrified of what I might do if he sat down beside me, was just an echo of a man who’s already dead. The way he cuddled close to me was too. I got emotional over a ghost.

Except… that doesn’t quite make sense.

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