17. Fix
Chapter 17
Fix
H e was beautiful. That was all Fix could think as he held a sleeping Liam in his arms.
The day and eventful night that they’d pushed well into the next morning had finally caught up to him and he’d slumped against Fix, dead to the world. He seemed calm and content and Fix couldn’t help but preen in pride, because he was the one who had made it so.
He couldn’t believe they were here. In his bed. Together, after the best sex Fix had ever had. He could barely believe how well they fit together. How much their needs and wants complemented each other.
One thing was for certain: Liam was his forever.
He turned his head to kiss Liam on the forehead, inhaling his scent. It made his cock stir again because Liam smelled like their cum and sex and lust and there was only the barest trace of his clean lavender scent beneath all of that. He angled his hips away so he wouldn’t wake him up and settled in to try and get some rest too.
He was close to falling asleep himself when the door to his room creaked open just enough for King to come bounding in. Fix smiled when he saw him, figuring it was most likely Wren letting the dog in.
King bounced around the bed a few times, clearly waiting for permission to hop up, then decided he’d do whatever the hell he wanted and that he didn’t need permission. He jumped up and settled across Liam’s covered legs. He huffed at Fix once, then promptly fell asleep.
Fix closed his eyes again, willing sleep to take over, but Liam whimpered, brow furrowing and lips pursing and Fix shushed him softly, hoping any nightmares that plagued him would go away.
He couldn’t believe how much Liam had endured. How much strength and resilience it took to exist the way he did. Cursed nearly every day for years.
Fix had never come across anything like it in all his time as a cursebreaker. He didn’t know what to make of it. The notebook he’d found at Liam’s place had nearly taken him to his knees. It didn’t contain any of the recent curses he’d been under. Liam had clearly given up trying to keep track of them.
Despite that, the lists he’d kept were extensive. Dates, number per day. They included how he’d managed them and whether they’d reoccurred. Some had been objects he could toss in the trash. Some were bigger and he’d had to move apartments multiple times. A few times he’d managed to save up enough to get them broken. And then some had been serious enough to make him move towns completely.
Day after day. Year after year. Curse after curse. So many of them.
Hundreds of them, it seemed.
Thousands.
His eyes snapped open.
No.
He heard a door bang somewhere in the house, Black’s cheery voice echoing after it as he sang the latest pop hit at decibels previously undiscovered.
Liam remained undisturbed, his exhaustion rendering him deaf to the world. Fix was grateful for that, at least.
Carefully, Fix extricated himself from Liam, bundling pillows around him as a substitute for his own warmth when Liam frowned and reached out in his sleep. It hurt his heart, but Fix couldn’t lie still anymore, not with his thoughts spinning and dread gathering like a storm cloud.
King lifted his head from his spot warming Liam’s feet and gave Fix a baleful stare.
“Take care of him for me?”
King snorted, as if telling him he’d been here way before Fix, so he could get in line. The pit bull wiggled up the bed and slotted himself happily between Liam’s searching arms, and the frown eased from Liam’s forehead.
Fix couldn’t even be mad.
He pressed a parting kiss to golden hair before he slipped from the room as quietly as he could. He located Liam’s bag and the notebook he’d put inside.
It wasn’t hard to locate Black anywhere. You either followed the trail of destruction and glitter or found the noisiest room. It was the former in this case, and Fix picked up littered pieces of card in neon shades until he reached the end of the rainbow.
Black was a bright pastel pink spot at the dining room table, scrapbooking supplies strewn over all ten seats. A pot of purple glitter had already been upended and Black was brandishing a glue gun carelessly, strings of glue already stuck to the wood.
He’d been in the house for five minutes.
“I think you dropped these,” Fix said, laying the bits of card on the edge of the table.
“Oh. That’s where they went.” Black barely spared it a glance before going back to his gluing, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
“Quick case this time?”
Black pouted but nodded. “Drowning. Some office worker offed his boss. He’d had enough and cursed him to drown in the fountain outside their building. The guy who cursed him confessed before Cyrus did the bad cop thing or I could even investigate properly.”
Only Black would be sad about a murder case ending early.
“But I got a good picture. Lookit!”
He picked up his scrapbook, glitter falling like snow as he turned it to face Fix. There was a picture of a fountain Black had drawn a cartoon man onto, his eyes crossed out.
Revenge is best served wet! was scribbled over the top like a title for the case.
“It’s…definitely something,” Fix said, clearing off a seat and sitting down next to Black.
“I asked Cyrus if he could let the guy off with a warning. The boss was probably a jerk, right? But Cyrus told me to get lost, so here I am!” Black said brightly.
Fix shook his head. He didn’t know how Cyrus handled Black every case, but somehow he managed.
“Where’s Liam?” Black asked, laying his scrapbook back down.
“Sleeping. We had a rough morning. It’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Black raised a brow under his unruly curls. “About the stalker or the curses?”
The confident way he asked clued Fix in that he knew more than the basics. “You’ve heard about it already?”
“Cyrus has been working on it in his downtime and I maaaay have peeked. He’s been tailing a guy called O’Malley the last few nights, but he hasn’t made any suspicious moves. Is he suspect number one?”
“I have no idea.” Fix rubbed a hand over his face. “They have a history and he has motive, but Cyrus doesn’t think it’s in his wheelhouse, and from the info Cane gave me, I agree. The other option is someone from Liam’s work. One of the people who watch his streams.”
There was no point playing coy—he wasn’t ashamed of Liam or what he chose to do—he’d only ever been cautious because he didn’t know if Liam wanted his information on blast. But things were so dangerous now that Fix couldn’t mince words.
Black hummed as he mulled it over.
“That wasn’t what I wanted to ask you though,” Fix said.
Blue eyes flicked back to him eagerly. “A curse?”
He laid the notebook on the table resolutely. “A thousand of them.”
Black went wide-eyed, understanding his meaning immediately as he grasped for the book and flicked it open. His eyes moved over it intently, poring over the words.
“Not all of these were cast on him directly,” he said, and Fix shook his head.
“No, some of them were on things around him. Things he uses. Stuff he needs.”
“Objects?” Black asked. “How come Midas isn’t in on this?”
“Intent,” Fix said simply. “All of these were cast intentionally to mess with Liam.”
“Interesting.” Black’s eyes glazed over the way they always did when someone dangled something he found fascinating in front of him. “The other cases didn’t have this much info…”
“Others?” Fix asked.
Black burst from his chair, moving over to one of the cabinet drawers, yanking it open, and pulling old scrapbooks and notebooks out to dump on the floor until he reached one in particular.
It had a black face.
He brought it over to the table and slid it toward Fix. “This is everything I know about it. There isn’t much, just enough for me to believe it’s real.”
Fix swallowed, heart sinking to his toes. “That’s what I was afraid of. Something in me just knew as soon as I saw that notebook.”
Black wasn’t so callous as to excitedly dive into gruesome explanations like he usually did. Instead, he waited patiently for Fix to flip open the cover before beginning a slow explanation of its contents.
“There’s not much I could find on the first case. It was too long ago. Just excerpts about a Tina Bouvier, who was ‘the most cursed woman in the world.’ She was suddenly found dead in her home with no explanation.”
Fix flipped through the pages, seeing the headlines and Black’s bubble handwriting as notes.
“But seventy years ago, a Kevin Peterson comes in for his first recorded nuisance cursebreak, escorted by his mother. From there there’s a slew of documentation throughout his lifetime. Curse after curse. They even had someone come in to check the home, to make sure he wasn’t being…you know…but his parents weren’t casters.”
Fix glanced over the child protective services report and then a news clipping Black had cut out of an obituary.
“He was twenty-five when he died. They couldn’t identify the cause of death,” Black said.
Fix felt ice in his veins.
That was the exact age Liam was.
“In both cases no one could name the cause of death definitively. That’s where the myths come from. There was no definite proof so Nexus refused to acknowledge it and write it into textbooks. Instead it was told as a scary story to budding nuisance cursebreakers.”
“I remember it.” Fix laughed without humor, laying a hand over his eyes. “I told it to a classroom of kids the other day.”
He felt Black’s small hand touch his knee. “You couldn’t have known. I didn’t even know it beyond a cool-ass conspiracy theory.”
“Is there anything else you know?” he asked desperately.
“For those who have speculated, the exact number of curses needed is unknown. The ‘thousand curse’ name comes from the practice of a thousand cuts, which is what people have likened it to. The curses build up slowly in increments until they prove fatal in the end. It’s more sinister than most deadly curses. It’s torture.”
“And there's no way to fix it?” Fix asked.
Black shook his head, biting his nails. “The only recorded cases ended in deaths. If it happened to anyone else, well…”
“They didn’t live to tell the tale.”
“No.”
“It could all still be a myth.” Fix was grasping at straws, but his gut told him this was real and he had years of trusting his gut under his belt to just ignore it now.
“I mean…sure, I guess.” Black squirmed in his seat.
“You don’t think so,” Fix stated.
Black shook his head.
Fix took a shaky breath and clenched his fist on the table before standing up abruptly. The chair upended with a clatter. “I need to stop the curses. If he doesn’t get another curse then he won’t be at risk and we can figure something out.”
Black followed him out of his seat, eyes wide. “But how?”
“By any means necessary. I’m going to catch this fucker,” Fix growled, prowling out of the room.
“I approve of plan A,” Black said, hot on his heels, hopping so his voice could reach Fix’s ears. “But maybe we need to brainstorm said catching? I can call Cyrus? I can call everyone? Wren can bring vicious predators for backup? We can rig a contraption? Morgan can play porn as a distraction and then we can nab him?”
Fix stopped dead in the hallway and Black let out an oof as he ran into the small of his back.
“I need to call Morgan,” Fix mumbled, whipping his phone out.
“Porn plan for the win!”
Fix held it up to his ear as he listened to it ring.
“This better be important,” Morgan answered. “I have a guy about to bust on my screen and soft mood lighting to apply.”
“You still okay with looking into Liam’s channel?” Fix asked without reacting to Morgan’s usual crassness.
“I thought you’d never ask.” Morgan didn’t miss a beat.
“I’ll text you his username as soon as I have it.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Fix hung up and braced himself on the wall.
He’d have to ask Liam for his username. Given their previous conversation, he’d have to explain to him why he needed it too. Fuck, he didn’t want to scare him even more but…
“I’ll have to tell him, won’t I?” he said, mostly to himself, but Black was standing next to him, huge round eyes boring into him without blinking.
“Do you not want to?” Black asked.
Fix shook his head. “Not really, no. He’s scared and exhausted from years of this bullshit hanging over his head. I just want him happy.”
“Well, put it this way,” Black said. “He’ll be happy once Stalker McStalkerson is dealt with.”
“And until then he’ll be terrified?”
“Probably.” Black tilted his head. “But he thinks you’re the shit and keeping things from him will ruin that. You don’t want that, do you?”
“I wasn’t planning on keeping it from him.” Fix ran a hand over his face. “I have his permission to protect him from things he doesn’t need to worry about. Sadly, this isn’t one of those things. He has the right to know. But fuck, I wish I could just take all the bad away from him.”
“Yeah, well…sometimes you just gotta face the ugly, y’know?”
“When did you get so wise?” Fix asked, trying to delay the inevitable.
Black scoffed. “I’m literally the smartest. Now shoo. You’re sucking out the creative juices.”
Fix nodded and walked back up the stairs slowly, legs heavy, trailing a hand over the banister and letting the cool wood soothe him. He was stalling, he knew. Trying to buy himself time. Trying not to let the fear and panic overflow.
He wasn’t losing Liam. Not when he’d only just found him. Not when he made the world so much brighter and more beautiful just by being in it.
Fix would figure this out. He’d…well, he’d fix it. It was what he did.
He entered his room slowly, quietly, taking in the sight of Liam still cuddled up with his arms wrapped around King, who was snoring softly. He didn’t want to disturb this. He didn’t want to take away the peace Liam was finally wrapped in.
But he had no choice.
Steeling himself, he walked to the bed, sitting down on the edge and leaning closer to run his fingers over Liam’s slack cheek.
“Honey,” he called, voice barely above whisper.
Liam stirred and nuzzled Fix’s hand but didn’t wake. Fix leaned down to place a kiss on his forehead.
Liam scrunched up his eyebrows and the corners of his lips pulled up. He was awake.
“Cheeky boy,” he said with a smile, and Liam cracked his eyes open.
“’M not,” he said, voice rough.
“Playing games with Daddy,” Fix said.
Liam rolled closer, dislodging King, who growled and glared at Fix before going back to sleep. He threw his arm over Fix’s lap and hid his face in his thigh.
“You were gone?” he mumbled.
Fix ran a hand down his back, feeling each vertebra under his fingertips. He counted them to settle his mind.
“I had to talk to Black,” he said and felt Liam stiffen under his touch. Clearly Black was still on Liam’s shit list. “He helped me figure something out.”
“Oh?” Liam asked, still buried in Fix’s leg. Fix looked up at the ceiling, looking for strength before proceeding.
“Can you sit up, please?” Fix asked. “I have something to tell you.”
Liam sprang up like he’d been burned, trying to move away from Fix, his eyes wide and his walls already lifting around him.
“No, no.” Fix shook his head. “Come here.”
He hoisted himself up on the bed, back against the headboard, and pulled Liam into his arms, blanket and all. He wrapped himself around him protectively, kissing the top of his head.
“I need you to tell me which platform you’re using to stream and your username,” he said.
“Why?” Liam asked. “Changed your mind about watching?”
“No, no I didn’t. I have the real thing and it’s all I need.”
“Why then?”
Fix sighed, pulling his phone out. “Can you give that to me first?”
Liam nodded, rattling off the name of the website and his username. Fix sent the information to Morgan then dropped his phone on the bed.
“I want you to listen to Daddy, Liam,” he said. “And I want you to keep in mind that I won’t let anyone or anything hurt you again, okay?”
“Fix,” Liam said before pausing. “Daddy, you’re scaring me.”
“I know, honey. I’m doing my best not to, but apparently it’s not working.”
“Just say it.” Liam clenched his jaw. “I can handle it.”
Fix took a deep breath and nodded, cheek brushing against Liam’s hair. “Do you… Have you ever heard of a thing called a Curse of a Thousand Curses?”
“Um, no,” Liam said.
“It’s a cursebreaker myth. It’s supposed to be a myth. It says that if a person gets cursed a thousand times, they…”
He swallowed, unable to say the word. Liam wasn’t dying. He wasn’t.
“They what, Fix?” Liam asked, body rigid in Fix’s arms.
“They die.”
Liam’s head sprang up, eyes terrified as he met his gaze. He knew what Fix was insinuating. King woke up, startled, pushing his nose into Liam’s side and whining as if sensing Liam needed support.
“You can’t be serious,” Liam said, voice cracking. “They’re nuisance curses, everyday things. They’re not even all cast on me. I feel fine! I’m fine…”
Fix sat up and held his shaking body tighter, watching tears start to form even as Liam tried to talk his way out of it. He knew. Deep down he must have known, and it broke Fix’s heart.
“There’s only so much one person can take,” Fix said quietly. “There’s hardly any information on it, but that’s the theory…”
Liam drew in a hitched breath, a single tear skating down his flushed cheek. “So I…I’ll die?”
“No, honey.” Fix shook his head and cupped Liam’s face, making sure he was seeing every bit of conviction and determination he had in his body. “I promised I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you. We’ll find whoever is doing this. I have friends at PUMA looking into it and Morgan, Ash’s boyfriend, is willing to look into your streams to weed out suspects. He has experience with stuff like that. We’ll find them.”
“I don’t…” Liam trembled, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not leaving me, Liam,” Fix said, pulling Liam flush against his chest. He stroked his heaving back, Liam’s misery wetting Fix’s shirt. He closed his eyes against his own. “I won’t let it happen. I’ll do anything for you. Everything.”
“Daddy,” Liam whimpered—a plea for solace, a plea to take it all away.
Fix could only hold him closer, hoping against hope that his presence was a comfort. “I got you,” he whispered. “Daddy’s got you.”
“I only just found you,” Liam cried. “And what about King? I can’t leave him, I can’t—”
“Shh. Breathe, Liam,” he said, even though his own chest felt tight. “You’re not leaving anyone, honey. You hear me? I’m going to fix it. Just breathe.”
“UHH, FIX?” Black suddenly shouted from downstairs. “WE MAY HAVE A PROBLEM. OR TWO. DID OUR DISHWASHER ALWAYS BAKE OUR DISHES? AND I’M PRETTY SURE OUR BLINDS DON’T OPEN AND CLOSE ON THEIR OWN?”
King barked at the intrusion and Fix turned his head toward the door as he felt his veins turn to ice.
More curses.
“They’re back, aren’t they?” Liam said. Fix looked back at him and found his eyes glassy with panic, his fingers clutching the fabric of Fix’s shirt so hard he could feel it straining. “They followed us here and cast more curses meant for me. They’re just going to keep casting them until I’m dead—”
Fix could feel Liam’s heart slamming against his ribs through his clothes. It felt like he was about to have a heart attack.
Fix gathered the blanket and pulled it over Liam’s head, muffling the world as he pulled Liam to his chest. He laid them back against the headboard and pressed their foreheads together, rocking Liam back and forth, murmuring assurances to him under his breath.
There was a banging noise from outside the door, but Fix ignored it and the deadly implications as he concentrated on what Liam needed.
Liam sobbed until there was nothing left, until he exhausted himself and went limp against Fix.
He was quiet. Eerily so.
Fix held him through it. Soothed him and calmed him as best as he could. He talked about random things. Ash’s reckless behavior, Black’s glitter, Hart’s rules. He talked to him about his boring cases and Wren’s gerbils. He told him stories of Midas walking out mid-conversation and went as far as to show him a few signs for when he met him.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, Liam settled. He listened without a word, but Fix could tell he was there with him. Hours later he ran out of things to say, voice hoarse and mind empty.
So he just held him, promising things with his hands around his waist and lips on his damp cheeks.
“I’ll fix everything.”