Page 27 of Branding the Bat

Sero stepped aside and let him in. The apartment was clean, the Strip lights just beginning to paint the windows in its early-evening palette of rose and amber. Sero had been getting ready for his casino shift, uniform laid out on the bed, shoes by the door, a bowl of mango on the counter for the walk. He had forty-five minutes before he needed to leave.

Trevor didn't sit. He stood in the middle of the living room with his hands at his sides, his posture rigid, and Sero's whole body went cold. He'd seen this stance before. On Wade, the night Wade told him about the waitress. On the gecko, the evening the gecko said he'd realized he wasn't actually gay. On every man who'd ever stood in a room with Sero and prepared to deliver the words that ended things.

"Just say it," Sero said. He sat on the arm of the couch, because his legs had decided to be unreliable. "Whatever it is. I'd rather hear it fast."

"It's not what you think."

"You don't know what I think."

"I think you think I'm breaking up with you."

"Aren't you?"

"No." Trevor's voice cracked on the word. Actually cracked, the way a voice cracked when the body behind it was holdingsomething too heavy. "I'm telling you the truth. Which might make you want to break up with me, and if it does, that's—" He stopped. Swallowed. "That's your right."

Sero waited.

Trevor started pacing. Three steps toward the window, three steps back. His hands moved to his hair, his pockets, his hair again. Every line of his body said I don't want to do this, and Sero felt, beneath the cold, a small flare of respect. Whatever Trevor was about to say, he was saying it. Not deflecting, not charming his way around it, not disappearing. He was standing in Sero's living room, visibly miserable, and choosing to speak.

"The machine," Trevor said.

"What about it?"

"It does more than what I told you."

Sero went still. The kind of stillness he brought to the blackjack table when the count went wrong: total attention, zero movement, every faculty directed at the next card.

"The vibration, the rotation, the suction, all of that is real," Trevor continued. He was talking fast now, the words tumbling out in the order they came rather than the order that would make this easier. "That's what you experience. That's the toy. But the tubes, the ones I didn't explain, they run through the base unit to a sealed compartment. During the session, while you're, while the machine is working, the tubes collect... material."

"Material," Sero repeated.

"Your cum. Your sexual energy. Whatever you want to call it. There's a physical component and an energetic component, and the tubes capture both." Trevor stopped pacing and faced him. His eyes were bright, almost feverish. "I'm an alchemist. It's a rare ability, not connected to shifting, separate from it. I can take raw biological material and refine it into something else. What I collect is refined into a serum. A sexual-performance serum for older shifters whose bodies have broken down. I sell it."

The stillness became a sound. Not audible. Internal. A high, thin frequency like the whine of a bat's echolocation pushed past its range. Everything in the apartment looked the same, the mango on the counter, the Strip light on the windows, Trevor standing in the middle of his living room, but the meaning of everything had changed.

"You harvest my cum," Sero said. His voice was level. Devastatingly level. "Without telling me. And you sell it."

"Yes."

"While I'm in the machine. While I'm in the space. While I'm—" His throat closed. He opened it by force. "While I'm trusting you with my body. You're collecting something from it that I don't know about."

"Yes."

"How many times?"

"Both sessions."

"Both." Sero pressed his hands flat on his thighs. The pressure helped. It gave the sensation somewhere to go besides his face, which wanted to crumble. "And before me? Other men?"

"Dozens. Over three years."

"Did any of them know?"

"No."

The word sat in the air between them. Small. Final. A period at the end of a sentence that Sero hadn't known was being written.

He stood up. His legs worked after all. He crossed to the kitchen, put both hands on the counter, and stared at the bowl of mango. The fruit was bright and orange and perfectly sliced, and it looked like a thing from a different life, a life in which Sero had been getting ready for work and thinking about Wednesday and being happy in the specific, Trevor-shaped way that was now, in the space of three minutes, something else entirely.