Chapter Four #2
The mirror was still there, though where Eric had previously thought it had cracked turned out to be a crackled rime of frost instead, covering the entirety of the glass so no reflection could be seen now.
He described what it had looked like previously in as much detail as he could remember, hoping that would help.
The healer examined it closely with a frown, tracing over the black markings visible through the ice with her finger but not touching it.
“I don’t recognize these, I will have to consult my more learned colleagues. But thank you for your assistance.”
Eric left her drawing a diagram of the mirror and went back to Ixthan. Even though the room was stiflingly hot, Ixthan was cool to the touch when Eric gingerly pressed the back of his hand to Ix’s forehead. He patted the beads of perspiration off with a towel, and settled back into his seat.
“What did you do, you boneheaded lunatic?” murmured Eric.
This was his fault. He was usually the one who cut Ix off at the knees whenever he started to do something ridiculous.
All their friends knew, they all joked about it.
Eric was Ix’s real mother, Eric was Ix’s keeper, Eric was Ix’s matching angel to his demon.
Eric was the only one Ix would listen to.
Usually, he took pride in that. If he hadn’t been distracted by his father, he might have said something earlier.
They’d been six when Eric’s father and King Ruben – still friends, then – had sat them down and charged Eric with a secret responsibility.
They’d had encouraged them to spend their days together, to become fast friends.
They came up with ways that Eric could signal to Ix, subtly, if he was going too far.
In private, his father had told him about the king’s previous experience with Prince Ceronzar.
The other demon prince was barely a year older than Ixthan.
Ceronzar was, though no one would admit it publicly, a failed experiment.
Ceronzar never managed to integrate himself into human life, let alone court life.
His behaviors were too shocking, his empathy too lacking, his strength too overwhelming.
Even though his mother was the Demon Queen of Untempered Violences and Ix’s mother was the Demon Queen of Unyielding Hubris, the king could not risk that Ix would turn out the same way.
And so, they’d made sure to take precautions as soon as Ixthan started exhibiting demonic traits.
Eric was Ix’s conscience. And yet, Eric had failed. He’d gotten distracted, had even told Ix not to tell him details about whatever magic working he was performing. If he’d performed his duty better – no, that wasn’t right either. If he’d been a better friend, he’d have known to pull Ix back.
He pressed his hand over Ix’s, and then frowned.
That wasn’t the shape of Ix’s hand. Ix’s hands were larger than this, some effect of the demon blood giving him unnaturally long fingers.
The voice in Eric’s head remarked on how it was odd for a man to know the shape of another man’s hand so immediately.
Alone in his bed at night, Eric had imagined those fingers before, touching him, stroking him, taking them into his mouth.
And yet, now… Eric pulled Ix’s hand out from where it was tucked under the covers and stared at it.
Ix’s fingers were usually blackened from the knuckle to the tip, as if permanently dipped them in soot, but that coloration was gone.
Eric reached out and placed his hand on Ix’s, matching their palms up.
They were almost the same size. Either Ix’s hand had shrunk or this wasn’t Ix.
“Why are you stroking my hand?” The voice, though hoarse, was Ix’s.
Eric snatched his hand away, rearing back so fast he nearly stumbled over the chair. He didn’t know how long he’d been staring down at Ix’s hand but Ixthan was awake, looking down the bed at him with squinted eyes. Still pale, still gaunt, but definitely awake.
“Ix? Is that you?”
Ix’s dark brows furrowed together. “Who else would it be?”
Some impostor demon who took your form, but Eric didn’t say that out loud. “Your hand is different.”
“What?” Ix lifted his hand, curled and uncurled the fingers, and turned them around. He sounded genuinely surprised. “You’re right. What happened?”
“I should be asking you that!” It came out harsher than Eric intended, and he cut himself short. Sat down on the chair abruptly.
“Now you understand,” said Ixthan. He laughed, then gasped, and wheezed like laughing required too much effort.
Ix was still looking at his hand, examining the way his fingers flexed curiously.
If a demon was impersonating him, they probably wouldn’t be acting like this, but neither did this seem like Ix.
“Now I understand what?” asked Eric.
“You’re angry. But actually you’re worried. But you don’t know how to be worried, so you’re angry instead. It’s very tiring,” murmured Ixthan dreamily, “to not understand emotions.”
“I understand emotions just fine. I can be worried and angry at the same time,” said Eric mulishly.
“Yes, yes, that’s right. You understand my emotions for me,” said Ix, putting his hand down as if it was too heavy.
This wasn’t like him at all. Eric had never seen him this out of sorts even when they’d got into all sorts of scrapes over the years.
Ix had been bucked off horses more times than Eric could count because horses hated demons.
When they fenced, Eric used an untipped rapier because Ix found it amusing to get lightly stabbed.
He’d jumped out of a second-story window when they’d been fifteen and practically bounced off the grass below.
“Ix. Concentrate. What happened?” asked Eric urgently.
That sobered Ixthan up. He scowled, eyes visibly snapping back into focus. “I failed, it seems. I don’t know why, the spell was perfectly constructed.”
Under his disgruntlement, Ix sounded exhausted. Eric instinctively reached up to press the back of his hand against his forehead to check the temperature. Ix frowned, rolling his eyes upwards, and Eric could feel his forehead furrow under Eric’s palm. “What are you doing?”
“You sound… sick. But your temperature is normal. But for you perhaps that means you are sick, since your temperature is never normal,” said Eric, flustered as he snatched his hand back. His voice shook. “Your eyes are different.”
“I hadn’t noticed that you noticed my eyes,” said Ixthan. It was an attempt at a joke, because anyone who had ever met Ix had noticed his cat-slit eyes, some more obviously about it than others, but it came out flat.
Eric hurried to Ix’s vanity table, rooting around the drawers until he found a hand mirror and pressed it in front of him. “Look.”
“What!” Ix sat up this time, and Eric noticed that his nightshirt was damp and clung to his body in places. He let his eyes slide away, and tried not to think about it too much. It was sweat, because Ix had taken ill, what was wrong with him for such thoughts to intrude at this time?
Ixthan touched his face lightly, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Even Eric hadn’t noticed at first, what with the dimness of the room and the being distracted by the oddness of his hands, but the vivid amber color was muted into a honey brown, and the vertical slits that made Ixthan’s eyes so striking were simply gone. They were normal now. Human.
This wasn’t the Ixthan that Eric had fallen in love with, the slightly feral child that had grown into a statuesque beast of a man.
He was still tall, still handsome, that hadn’t changed.
There were others who certainly would consider him more handsome now, but Eric’s chest tightened.
Grief. He almost laughed, because why did he feel it more keenly for the missing tips of Ixthan’s fingers than he had for the death of his own father?
Ix examined his hands again, flexing the fingers, and then ran his tongue across newly flat teeth.
He brushed the hair back from his face to touch the tips of perfectly rounded ears.
They were mostly hidden under his thicket of hair so it wasn’t as immediately obvious as the eyes, but normally his ears extended upwards into a point.
“I look human. How is this possible? Is this what it’s like for you all the time?
My fingers are so short, how do you reach anything,” said Ix as he wiggled his fingers.
Throwing off the rest of the covers, he got up and immediately wobbled.
That was the most startling change for Eric.
Everything else was a small thing but Ix had never had feet.
As he lumbered across the room again, catching himself against the door, Ix scowled. “Relearning how to walk is going to be very cumbersome. This is ridiculous.”
Ix extended one leg. He never wore hose or shoes, owing to how his legs usually ended in lion’s paws, instead opting for altered breeches that ended at the mid-calf.
He rotated his ankle so Eric could see the flex of his well-defined calf and flexed his toes.
It was bizarre to see them on Ix, it didn’t feel right.
It was also deeply unfair that even in some magic mishap where Ix had his body parts replaced, he somehow ended up with such shapely calves and ankles.
“You’ll need socks and boots. I’d lend you some but I don’t think they’d fit,” said Eric, rather than voice any of that aloud. He was impressed with how even his voice came out.
Ix pressed a hand against his stomach. “Hells!”
“What else has changed?” asked Eric with alarm. As far as he knew, those were all the telltale signs of Ix’s demon blood: the ears, eyes, the teeth, the hands, the feet.
“My cock.” Ix was shaking; it took a moment for Eric to realize that he was laughing in disbelief. It took another moment for him to register what Ix had actually said; when he did, he immediately choked on his tongue.
“It’s – I, um,” said Eric with supreme eloquence, and then shut up.
He wasn’t going to be able to say anything useful about that one.
It wasn’t as if he’d noticed, he’d been very careful not to look in fact.
Ix walked across the room, swaying his hips ridiculously, thankfully ignoring whatever crisis of self Eric was having at his bedside.
“So light now,” Ix murmured quietly. Eric pretended he didn’t hear that.
And then Ix stumbled, seemingly over nothing, and Eric swooped in, ducking himself under Ix’s arm the way and took the brunt of his weight with a grunt. “Stop walking around. There’s something seriously wrong with you, get back into bed.”
“I need to go see the mirror. See where I went wrong. Getting back into bed isn’t going to fix it,” said Ix.
He was right, but Eric didn’t have to like it. “Fine. Can you at least put clothes on? And walk slower, I can’t keep up with you like this.”
“All right, nurse,” said Ix with some amusement.
Eric deposited him into an armchair and went to his wardrobe, refusing to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of clothing some poor servant had no doubt managed to fit into there and pulling out the first items he could find: shirt, breeches, waistcoat, there, that would do.
No, wait, he needed an overcoat too given his abnormal swings in temperature right now, no doubt the healer mages would want him to stay warm.
Eric turned around with his arms full of clothes to find that Ix had peeled off his nightshirt off, and froze.
Eric knew, immediately, that his reaction had given him away. No matter how much he managed to recover, walk forward and pass Ix the clothes while making a normal amount of eye contact, he couldn’t hide the instant bloom of red across his cheeks and neck. Blast his mother’s delicate skin.
Usually, Ix did him the honor of pretending not to notice but this time, he caught and held Eric’s gaze.
Grinned and waggled his eyebrows. Eric turned away hastily, willing the heat to dissipate from his cheeks.
It wasn’t as if he made a habit of watching men as they got dressed, but being in Ix’s bedroom where he never went made the silence hang so thickly in the air that he wanted to throw himself into the fireplace.
“Would you tie the laces?” asked Ix in what would have been a perfectly polite, neutral tone from anyone else, except Ix didn’t do polite or neutral. He brushed his long hair over one shoulder and waited with one eyebrow arched for Eric to come to him.
“Yeah, I – yeah,” said Eric. It was his own fault for plucking out a shirt that laced in the back, he hadn’t even taken any notice.
Ix was taller than him, so he had to reach up to tighten the laces up to the nape of his neck.
He moved some stray strands of hair out of the way without thinking, the side of his hand brushing the soft skin of Ix’s neck, and Ix hummed a sound that Eric’s mind helpfully described as a ‘seductive rumble’.
“Sorry,” said Eric.
“By all means, carry on,” Ixthan drawled.
Now Eric understood what Petra’s friends meant when they talked about just needing to lie down and fan themselves off for a moment.
Even though Ix was the one who had just undergone some kind of magical trauma, somehow Eric was the one acting strange.
He was all too aware he should stop reacting to Ix’s shenanigans, but he couldn’t seem to stop making a fool of himself.
Thankfully, there was only so long lacing up a shirt could take, and Eric exhaled as soon as he was done. “There.”
Ix let his hair fall, a curtain of it brushing against Eric’s hand when he was too slow to draw back.
It was always well-kept and thick, the envy of half the ladies at court, but Eric hadn’t known it could feel so luxurious against his skin.
And now he knew. He already craved the touch of it again.
He bit his lip, hard, the burst of pain clearing his head.
Ix was sick, he needed to get himself under control.
Eric took a steadying breath, and plastered a smile onto his face. Better.