Chapter Text
Raylan Givens has always had questionable taste in women, and now that he's thinking about it, his track record with men might not have been a whole lot better.
Normally that wouldn’t have bothered him because up until about three minutes ago he thought all that had changed with his new beau. Tim was different from anyone he’d been with before. With Tim, Raylan thought he’d left the short-lived romances with slightly shady women and one-off gay-bar hookups behind. He actually thought he was working his way through the clichés of falling in love: the tide had turned; he'd met his match; he'd found “the One.”
An equal. A partner. And at the moment, an idiot.
Raylan shook his head and held out one finger—unsure if he was censuring Tim or gesturing for him to repeat himself.
“Run that last bit by me again?”
Tim took a long chug of milk out of the jug before putting it back into the fridge, then he pulled out a bottle of water before hip checking the door more forcibly than he needed to. “I’m thinking I should turn.”
“Into…” Raylan waved his hand.
Tim’s face was set in stony defiance where it had been hopeful a few moments before when he came back in from a morning run. They’d flown into Santa Fe from Lexington the night before, and Tim got up to run at six-thirty in the morning Kentucky time—which was two hours ahead of the local time. His giant dog Sheeba trailed in the door after him, lapped up a bowl of water, and flopped in front of a hearth in the bedroom to escape the tense mood building between them.
“Into a vampire,” Tim finished, tightly. He twisted the cap off the water.
Raylan nodded. Yep, vampire was what he thought he’d heard.
“You do remember we hunt vampires, right? They call you Death, they call me the Executioner?”
Tim stopped just short of rolling his eyes and propped his butt against the kitchen counter. “This is so not going how I thought it would.”
Raylan scowled. “And how was that?”
“A lot better than this.”
Raylan half-laughed, then shook his head. He could smell Tim’s anger in the air—the ability to scent emotions a gift from Boyd Crowder’s laying the first two of four vampire marks on him that would lead to Raylan becoming Boyd’s human servant. That night, Tim informed him he needed to be prepared for the day when Tim would put Boyd down—as soon as he figured out how to free Raylan. Maybe Raylan shouldn't have been surprised when his lover, a vampire executioner with a kill count that rivaled his own, informed him that he wanted to become a vampire himself. Up to that morning, Tim’s anger had been a cold, determined undercurrent.
This morning though, Raylan tried not to think about the taste of Tim’s anger in the back of his throat—like a burnt marshmallow held too long, too close to a flame. Black and crunchy, gooey and sweet.
“Why would you even consider that an option?” Raylan asked.
Tim had a pained expression on his face, and he shifted against the counter, swallowing a swig of water. “Well, you, that’s why. Even after I kill Boyd, what’s to stop some other vampire from stepping in and marking you?”
“Shielding, right? I thought that’s why you dragged me out to the far ends of the Earth,” Raylan said. A chunk of their time in New Mexico had been set aside for Raylan to work with Nahtoo on strengthening his mental shields. It was a necessary defensive move but a long shot for how effective it would be in the long run once they’d freed Raylan of Boyd. And Raylan thought that Tim suspected that, too.
“How do we even know if that will work against vampire marks? You couldn’t stop Boyd or Bo from putting the first marks on you,” Tim said.
Bo Crowder had forced Raylan into becoming his human servant and killing Bo had nearly killed Raylan because of the metaphysical connection between a vampire master and his human servant was symbiotic. Raylan would have died had another vampire, Bo’s son Boyd, not stepped in and marked Raylan the same way—only stopping at two of the four marks required to seal the bond. Raylan had no intention of letting Boyd get the other two marks in, but was at a loss as to how to free himself from the connection the vampire had created by marking him. Maybe Tim had a point, he thought, taking a deep breath.
Raylan sighed, still not liking the idea. “And you think that your becoming my vampire master will just fix everything?”
“It’d get us a lot closer than we are now,” Tim said. “Better to be bound to me than to keep risking your death when we put down the next vamp who thinks all that’s missing from life is a pet necromancer.”
Raylan didn’t reply, but raised his eyebrows. “That’s not how I imagined someone proposing to share his life with me.”
“At least I asked first,” Tim muttered.
“What was that?” Raylan said.
“You seem less upset about being bound to Boyd than you do about the prospect of…” Tim stopped and waved his hand back and forth between them. “Us,” Tim finished.
“Because what you’re proposing isn’t ‘us.’” Raylan fanned his hand mimicking Tim’s gesture. “It’s you playing hero.”
“You don’t typically complain about that.”
Raylan fought a smile. “As I recall, Miami comes to mind.”
“That turned you on.”
“And you think this should have that same effect?”
Tim might have been weighing an answer. Raylan wasn’t sure, but he pushed ahead. “For what it’s worth, it does—just not for the reasons you think,” Raylan admitted.
“Oh, yeah?” The crease between Tim’s eyebrows was pinched and deep.
“Beside the point,” Raylan said. “What if you didn’t survive the process? Even if you do, you have to put down a master vamp to steal his powers.”
“I’ve taken down master vampires before.”
“Not by drinking them.”
Raylan watched Tim’s forehead scrunch up and perpendicular creases deepen over the dimple between his brows reflecting the level of his partner’s frustration.
“See? Do you even want to have to drink… people? Every day?”
Tim pushed off the counter leaving his water bottle behind on the counter and wandered out the front door to the porch, standing rigid with his arms crossed. He was wearing a pair of those black Ranger PT shorts that haunted Raylan’s dreams, a long-sleeved Henley, and running shoes. Raylan followed him out cringing at the cold stones under his bare feet. The floor tiles in the guest house were heated.
He tucked in behind Tim, wrapping his arms around his pissed-off lover to both calm him and burrow into his body heat. The early morning air was cool… maybe in the mid-forties. Raylan shivered, his body still acclimated to years spent in south Florida where the temperature only hit that low in the dead of winter.
The sun had painted a golden-red to the underside of the few clouds that rode over the mountains to the east side of the valley where Tim’s ranch sprawled. The rest of the sky brightened to a brilliant blue and light spilled down over the mountains. Tim told him the night before they weren’t far from the Santa Fe National Forest. Raylan thought the mountains smelled different in New Mexico than they did in Kentucky. The elevation was too high for the terrain to be called desert and too low in places on the property to be considered wooded. In truth, Raylan liked mountains here for their differences. He pushed away a sense of dread that they’d eventually be going back to Kentucky. He thought these mountains felt masculine with their sandy-brown earth speckled with dark green conifers overlaid with the smell of sage and piñon. And suited Tim.
“Nice view,” Raylan murmured.
Tim grunted in agreement. Raylan buried his nose in Tim’s neck breathing in the warm salt of his perspiration. He’d gone for a long run that morning.
“I like you alive and all warm,” Raylan said. He traced his tongue over the two moles on the right side of Tim’s neck aligned against each other like a vampire bite, then he sucked on the span of skin between them drawing a bruise to the surface.
“What’re you doin’?” Tim’s tone seemed a protest. But he tipped his head slightly to the left, stretching out the curve of his neck to give Raylan better access.
Raylan sucked harder, tracing his tongue in a figure eight around the two moles until Tim started to squirm, then Raylan placed a chaste kiss behind his ear, letting his left hand fall to Tim’s hip. He slipped his fingers up under the outer layer of Tim’s shorts, his fingers searching along the edge of their liner. “Mad smells real good on you for some reason.”
Tim turned in his arms, facing Raylan down. “I’m serious about this. About turning.”
“I know you are,” Raylan said. “But I don’t want this for you. Or me. Or us.”
“I just don’t see how—”
“There’s got to be another way.”
Tim shook his head, his eyes bleak. Raylan realized that Tim’s hopelessness smelled so much like an unripe persimmon that his mouth puckered. Raylan was six again for a moment, hearing his mama in his ear tell him he had to know the taste of that particular kind of bitterness to learn patience. He never pulled a wild persimmon from a tree branch again, but waited for them to fall, walking the fence line each autumn with an old pie plate picking the ripe ones up from the grass. Raylan shook off the memory.
“Please just wait,” Raylan whispered. “We’ll figure something else out. Just wait.”
Tim didn’t answer, but he also didn’t argue.
“C’mon. It’s too early,” he added, changing the subject. “Either back to bed or show me where you hide the coffee.” Raylan snagged the front of his shirt and pulled him back toward the house.
“They’ll have breakfast down at the main house…”
“It’ll be there when we get ’round to it?”
Tim followed him instead of answering. Sheeba gave up the bedroom to them, not any more interested in their new mood. Eventually, she abandoned the little adobe house altogether, making Tim leave Raylan waiting in the bed while he padded to the door to let her out.
“She’s probably off to the stables for breakfast,” Tim said before Raylan found a way to shut him up.
***
Raylan didn’t dislike Peter, the man who ran the ranch, but he couldn’t own to liking him either. It wasn’t because he was clearly someone important in Tim’s life. Before Raylan fled the ranch house the night before, he’d seen pictures of a younger Tim with Peter on a mantle: some with other men, all dressed in Army fatigues, and another with just the two of them somewhere on the ranch, Raylan assumed.
The night before Raylan claimed exhaustion and escaped to the little adobe house up the hill from the main ranch house where he and Tim were staying.
But the truth was Peter made Raylan want to panic. He was less than excited when Tim grinned and tugged him along toward the horse stables that morning saying, “Pete said he’s working with puppies this morning.”
Raylan didn’t understand his reaction to Peter, but Tim didn’t smell like anger anymore. Maybe it was the big breakfast. More likely it was the extra hour in bed. Either way, the anger was gone so Raylan followed him down to the stables where Tim said Peter trained their brood of Trollhound crossbreeds to work as K-9 police dogs with preternatural units.
“Sheeba was our first,” Tim explained. “She’s kind of an accidental rescue. Rangers sent me to assist on a stateside hunt down in Louisiana—rogue werelions. Her trainer— Denis-Luc St. John—had a pack of Trollhounds purebreds and crossbreeds he used to track wereanimals—still does, in fact. Standard police dogs and scent dogs get too spooked to track preternatural beings. But Trollhounds’re fearless.”
“Heard of St. John. Word is he holds the record for the highest number of kills for wereanimals,” Raylan said.
Tim scowled. “Yeah, well, I don’t know how many of those are his kills or because of his hounds. He dumped Sheeba after she was injured tracking one of the werelions. Just tossed her away.”
Raylan knocked his shoulder into Tim’s as they walked in the direction of where the stables and K-9 training facilities and courses were set up further down into the valley. If they were in Kentucky, they’d have called it a holler. “But you picked her up?”
“She was pregnant. It’s why she didn’t heal,” Tim said. “So me and Pete had a pile of Trollhound puppies in a one-bedroom condo.”
“Close quarters.” Raylan had guessed there’d been something between Tim and Peter.
“Condo association didn’t view Trollhounds, even mixed breeds, as acceptable domestic pets.”
“How’d you get this place?” Raylan said, curious.
“Family money that I really didn’t know what else to do with. My father died before we made it through basic. Pete lost his leg and was discharged a few months before. My furlough was dwindling. By that time, the will had been argued over and dispersed,” Tim said.
“How did he lose his leg?” Raylan said, he’d noticed Peter’s limp but didn’t realize the extent of the man’s injury.
“We served together.”
Raylan nodded, figuring that was answer enough. “Where’d the family money come from?” Raylan had been taken aback by the size of the ranch and the fact that Tim not only had money, but apparently a lot of it.
“Texas varmit laws were… let’s just say expansive thirty, forty years back. He made a lot of money hunting down people we’d leave in peace today,” Tim said. “My father hated that I enlisted. He never understood why I would kill for a higher purpose than money.”
“A fan of Thomas then, your dad?”
“Thomas only took contracts on bad monsters,” Tim said, indignant. Raylan knew that. Tim had been on a contract as “Thomas” after Tommy Bucks in Nicaragua when they met. Tim told him Thomas started as a deep cover persona created by the government for assignments they’d rather not associate with the Rangers. Raylan thought that joining the marshals service had been Tim’s way of retiring Thomas. That was until he watched Tim use the cover to call in a favor allowing them to place Nahtoo at the ranch.
“This is a lot of land just to train dogs,” Raylan said.
“The way the terrain changes between the valley and the mountains gives us options to vary training without freaking out people by taking the dogs out in public every time we want to teach them something new. We have grass, desert, mountains, a couple different water features—a stream and a pond. Pete’s built up training courses around the property.”
They were approaching the stables and Raylan spied a line of broken-down cars lined up side-by-side. “Demolition derby cars?”
“Vehicle course for training search dogs.”
“Nice.”
“Dual-purpose trained K-9s with at least one specialty in preternatural tracking or attack run fifty grand to start. That includes putting up the handlers for a month-long training.”
“You’re going to have people running in and out with Nahtoo here?” Raylan said.
Tim waved him off. “She’ll have to encounter people wherever she lives, Raylan. I had Pete put her in the North Casita. No training courses on that end of the property. The dorm house and classroom are at the other end. Pete’s real picky about who he sells the hounds to. Besides, the handlers we let in are all vetted LEOs.”
“Some things don’t show up in vetting.”
“Well, good thing Nahtoo can read minds then,” Tim said, tugging Raylan by the wrist toward a horse barn.
They found Nahtoo working with Peter and a group of five puppies in a barn where horse stables had been converted into dog kennels. An adult German Shepherd was herding puppies back into the fold when they wandered too far away from where Peter was teaching Nahtoo how to train them to sit.
“What kind of puppies?” Raylan asked.
Peter waved them forward. “Trollhound and German Shepherd. We crossbreed the hounds with a domestic dog breed with strong tracking or protective instincts. They bond with their handlers better and still hang onto the Trollhound’s preternatural senses.”
Raylan nodded and squatted down to pet a pup with a green collar.
“Teem!” Nahtoo said, and went over to hug him, grabbing his face to kiss his cheek. “I love mi casita.”
Peter was forcing another puppy to plop his hind quarters down into a sitting position—using something between his fingers to make the puppy stretch up, then back into a sit, rewarding the dog with whatever was pinched between his fingers.
Raylan’s stomach turned, and he stood up backing away, feeling intensely like he no longer wanted to be there. Tim’s head turned, focusing on Raylan.
Nahtoo held her hand out to Peter and he handed her a chunk of something from a pouch around his waist. She broke off a small piece and coerced a puppy with a red collar into a sitting position.
Raylan inhaled and smelled liver. Until encountering Peter, he hadn’t been around any since Bo’d held him against his will.
“I’m… uh… think I’ll look around?” Raylan muttered. The tan German Shepherd with a black saddle patch that had been herding the puppies back to the center of the group changed courses and zeroed in on Raylan, leaning into his legs stretching up to be touched, petted.
“What?” Raylan asked—unsure if he was asking the question of the dog or Peter and Tim. But he stroked the dog’s head.
Peter’s expression was puzzled watching the interaction, then his face relaxed. “Good boy, Rufus,” he said. “There’s a training course behind the stables that’s worth a look, Raylan. Rufus take a walk.”
Raylan found himself being herded toward the door by the tan dog. Tim followed Raylan out to one of the training areas. Some of it was built with wood, while other structures were constructed with what looked like PVC pipes. Ladders, seesaws, tubes. Raylan stroked the big head of who he guessed was Rufus.
“You okay?” Tim said.
“The liver got the better of me.”
“Ah gotcha. Organ meat has the strongest scent for the dogs. Good for training treats when they’re first learning commands.”
“I never liked the stuff. When Bo kidnapped me, I ate it because it was all that was available. Bo’s connection made me enjoy it… which now makes me want to throw up.” Rufus whined again and leaned into Raylan’s leg.
“Something to talk to Dr. North about, ” Tim said.
“Finally, a trigger. She’ll be thrilled.”
Tim half-laughed. “I doubt that.”
“What’s up with this dog… Rufus is his name?” Raylan said.
“He’s probably a service dog, PTSD by his response,” Tim said. “You had a reaction and he acted to either calm you or get you out of there.”
Raylan scratched behind Rufus’ ears.
“I thought the ranch specialized in preternatural search dogs.”
“Yeah… we tend to use male German Shepherds with different strengths to sire puppies with our Trollhound bitches.”
“Bitches?”
Tim scowled. “Girl dogs.”
“I know that. I meant why only Trollhound mamas.”
“We found out the hard way that domestic dogs can’t carry Trollhound crossbreeds to term,” Tim said, “and live.” His lips were pressed tight and his browed furrowed. “A PTSD service dog would be a good match with a pureblood Trollhound.”
Tim moved closer and Raylan stiffened. “You smell like it too.”
“What? Oh… Nahtoo must have had liver on her hands when she touched me.”
“Can’t stand that smell on you,” Raylan said, his stomach tightening and his big breakfast threatened to revisit him.
“Let’s go back up to the casita, and we can take a shower. I need to head into the marshals’ office in town. Wanna come with?”
“Always up for checking out another marshals’ office. Won’t be working with Nahtoo today with her smelling like that anyway,” Raylan said.
***
Since she needed a full night to recover from shifting into her weredragon form and then back, Raylan and Nahtoo decided on a few days broken up over Raylan and Tim’s ten-day stay when they would work on his shields.
Their first day, Nahtoo wanted to work on the back porch of the little adobe casita she was staying in. As they progressed, they spread out around the valley on the north end of the property. Another day was next to a pond and the last day they took a picnic and Raylan hiked up the rocky outcroppings overlooking the Nahtoo’s casita. She along behind or ahead of him, trying his shields. Her reasoning was if she tried to break into Raylan’s head to pick through his thoughts while he was doing something other than trying to stop her, he would be better able to defend himself. The trick for Raylan had been finding the happy medium where he could keep her out of his thoughts and still hear when she was thinking something in his direction.
“I think you are stronger now. I could only break through twice on the hike up,” Nahtoo told him when they stopped to eat. “And I was trying hard.”
Raylan opened a plastic container of sliced grilled chicken breasts and put it out for Nahtoo. They’d figured out over the week that the more protein they gave her during the day, the less she had to sleep to recover from their day together on top of two shifts.
He took a bite of one of his turkey sandwiches. Something about New Mexico made Raylan ravenous. “Do you really think this would stop a vampire from trying to mark me?”
Nahtoo didn’t think anything in Raylan’s direction for a while.
“I think you can stop them from trying to enter your thoughts. This marking. I think you need to talk with someone with your own kind of magic.”
Raylan locked down on his thoughts, but not quickly enough.
“Why does that makes you sad, Necromancer?”
Raylan sighed. “My Aunt Helen is the only relative I know from the Grant line, and she helped Arlo hand me over to Bo.” He was more upset by her betrayal than Arlo’s.
“Maybe there’s someone else? If you want to know your kind of magic, you need to learn from someone who knows it.”
It wasn’t what he’d hoped for, but he knew it was something he had to pursue when they went back.
***
Working with Nahtoo didn’t just drain her, it wore down Raylan’s energy too. The nights when he finished working with her he went to bed not long after dinner.
While Raylan was sleeping off a session with Nahtoo, Tim finished going through his weapon cache in the main house packing what he wanted to take back with him to Kentucky.
Peter’s shadow crept across the floor from the doorway.
“Hey Pete,” Tim said, not bothering to look up.
“You’re so creepy when you do that.”
“I heard you coming—pattern of your steps.”
“You’re packing like a man who’s moving out.”
Tim nodded. “Yeah.”
“Are you coming back? To live here? To visit?”
“Well, a lot of my arsenal is still here…” Tim started and when he didn’t hear a reply, he shifted his eyes to Peter’s face and realized he’d misstepped. “You mean, am I coming back here to live?” Tim sighed. “No. But you knew that.”
“I did.”
“I met with the chief in Kentucky… going to stick with Raylan for now and bring back Sheeba as a K-9 preternatural patrol dog. I put in a request for a transfer in Santa Fe the other day.”
“What do you want to do about the house and the ranch?”
“Nothing. Keep it as it is. It’s yours, too.”
“It’s really not.”
“We’re business partners. The business is here. It’s yours.”
“Tim, I can’t just keep your ranch—”
“Don’t keep it… just run it then. You spent more time here than I ever did. And the K-9 program has a good rep now. Besides, just because we’re not together anymore doesn’t mean someone wouldn’t try for you. There’s still a small country or two where Thomas is a wanted man. It’s safer here than anyplace else you’d find. The wards are top-notch. You’ve got the guard patrol dogs at night. Just… do me a favor and let Nahtoo stay as long as she wants to.”
“Like that’s a hardship,” Peter said.
“She’s a beautiful woman,” Tim offered.
“If you like that kind of thing,” Peter said.
“Don’t care either way, but you do,” Tim said and hiked an eyebrow at his ex.
Peter blushed.
“You know, she’d be able to talk to the dogs in her were form.”
Peter’s attention shifted focus. “You should have led with that when you asked me to take her in.”
“Getting slow there Pete, what did you think she and Raylan were doing to work on his shields?”
“I hadn’t thought about it like that. Be interesting to see how she could work that into training the K-9s.”
“Well, you’ll have to see if she’s willing,” Tim said.
“Uh-huh. She was into training the puppies.”
“Just no more liver ’til we’re gone.”
Peter cringed. “Sorry about that…”
“No need. We didn’t know. You can’t predict when shit comes back on you. You know how it is.”
Peter nodded, unconsciously shifting his weight more firmly on his good leg.
“Listen, I’m not sure when or if I’ll be able to get back here,” Tim said. “The lawyers have had something in place for a while if something happens…”
“Tim, what would happen?”
Tim didn’t answer. “On the job… or something.”
“Tim.”
“And… I’m sorry. I know I was a shitty boyfriend when we were together. Always gone. Even after the Rangers, I was gone a lot—no, too much—on Thomas jobs, then it was the marshals P-SOG assignments. I didn’t really do shit to help with the business…”
“Don’t. Don’t go there.”
“Need to say it.”
“Not really. So, the cowboy… is he all you thought he’d be?” Peter asked, pushing a topic change.
Tim tried not to smile, but the way he pursed his lips gave him dead away. “Yeah.”
“Easy on the eyes,” Peter said.
Tim nodded and did smile. “Yeah.”
“Got some wear on him though.”
Tim scowled. “I like the… mileage.”
“I didn’t mean his age.”
“Me either. He’s tough. I like that about him, too.”
“Uh-huh. Well, you’ll always have a home here if you need it,” Peter said. “Even if you do own it.”
***
Raylan watched Tim run through an obstacle course with Sheeba. After spending a week around the hounds and dogs on the ranch, he could recognize the Trollhound in Sheeba. She had the long snout and tall pointed ears of a German Shepherd. When she signaled something to Tim, her alert stance caused the mane around her neck to thicken and the dorsal crest of long hair that ran down her spine stiffened to stand straight up, like a Mohawk running down her back.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Peter said, joining Raylan at the fence.
“What’s the point of the hair standing up on end?” Raylan asked.
“Researchers think it makes them look bigger and more threatening.”
“She’s already huge,” Raylan said. Sheeba’s back came up to Tim’s waist when she stood at a heel.
Peter nodded. “She weighs about a buck-eighty.”
“Sheeba looks like she’s part German Shephard.”
Peter nodded. “We ran DNA on her once we started training her line to place with K-9 units—came back a quarter. Three-fourths Trollhound.”
“I had a dog once.”
“Once.”
“As a kid.”
“What happened?”
Raylan didn’t answer. “So you’ve known Tim a long time?”
“We met in basic,” Peter said. “And you’re the Miami cowboy I’ve heard so much about.”
Raylan shot Peter a look. “Good things, I hope.”
Peter snorted. “Too good. We broke up after that trip.”
Raylan winced. “Sorry if I stepped on any toes.”
“No, not at all. He’d been pulling away a while before that,” Peter said, pausing. “Since some job in Central America. He came back wanting to join the marshals service.”
“Oh.”
Peter must have noticed his tone because he side-eyed Raylan.
“I am sorry then.”
“Oh, that was you too?” Peter asked.
“Not intentionally. Listen, nothing happened…” Raylan said.
Peter shook his head and smiled a little. “Nothing would. Not with Tim.”
“Good to know.”
Peter eyed Raylan. “When Tim worked as Thomas… he changed.”
“You know about Thomas?”
“As much as a civilian can.”
Raylan nodded.
“Being Thomas changed him. Not for the better. He became closed-off, cold, empty when he wasn’t on the job. If he didn’t care so much for the dogs, I woulda sworn he’d become a sociopath or something.”
Raylan turned to Peter, shocked and more than a little put out at how casually he’d thrown the word around. “That’s a hell of a thing to say about a friend. Tim is not a sociopath.”
Peter gave Raylan measured look.
“No. Always kept his moral compass, but he got harder and harder to reach emotionally. After central America though, Thomas went away and Tim started being Tim again.”
Raylan wasn’t sure he agreed with Peter’s take. He’d met Tim when he was working as Thomas, and to Raylan—there’d been no difference. Besides he wasn’t sure Peter understood what a sociopath really was compared to what it meant to put down any kind of man or monster—not just once but the many times Tim and Raylan had killed to fulfill writs of execution. Raylan squared his jaw.
“Whatever you’re doing cowboy, keep it up. He’s not been this open since basic training.”
“Is that your blessing?”
“If you thought you needed it.”
Raylan nodded. He decided in the last few minutes he, personally, hadn’t needed it, but it might matter to Tim.
“I’ve seen him getting ready to go to war more than a couple times, and he’s never acted like he wouldn’t be back. For some reason this time, Tim thinks he’s not coming back. You know what that’s about?”
Raylan sighed. “Think so. I thought we came to an understanding.”
“Don’t know what kind of monsters you have in Kentucky, but I do know he’s big on being there to have your six... the thing is you need to remember that goes both ways.”
“Oh, I know.”
***
The Sunday before they were supposed to leave for Kentucky Raylan went looking for Tim. He found him in a bedroom in the main ranch house pulling clothes out of a dresser and packing them into a deployment duffle bag.
“Is this your room?”
Tim shrugged.
Raylan walked the room. It looked bare and empty. “If this is your room, why are we staying in the little house?”
“Thought we could use some privacy.”
Raylan nodded. “Well that has been nice.”
A quick, suggestive lift of Tim’s eyebrows indicated he agreed. Raylan half-smiled back.
“Tim, where’s all your stuff?”
Tim held up a T-shirt. “This is my stuff.”
“Where’re your books, your porn stash, that kind of shit?”
Tim smirked. “On my laptop. Both, actually.”
“For a rich man, you don’t own much.”
“Have what I need. Just don’t need much,” Tim said. “I’ve been living out of an Army duffle or go-bag since I was seventeen.”
“No hobbies?” Raylan leaned against the dresser blocking the next row of drawers Tim was moving toward.
Tim’s brow furrowed scrunching up his forehead.
“You know… I know you read and run. What else?” Raylan said.
“I collect weapons and kill monsters,” Tim said.
“For a living. What about the rest of the time?”
“Well, I helped with the K-9 training when I was around, vetted the handlers—”
“Same thing as work.”
“Raylan, what are you getting at? It’s not like I see you do anything besides chase monsters and fuck. Who are you throwing stones at here?” Tim countered.
Raylan held out his hands. “Fair enough. I was just curious.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
“Is this about the vampire thing?”
Raylan rolled his eyes. “No, this is about the ‘us’ thing. I love you but I don’t know what you like to do besides kill things and fool around. Color me curious.”
“Oh.”
“That all right with you?”
Raylan watched Tim’s lips twitch and figured it was. He turned around and slid open one of the drawers he’d been leaning against. “So where’s your stash of Ranger panties?” Raylan asked, giving Tim a sly look.
***
Raylan, where have you gone off to?
Boyd was reclining in what looked like a church pew, sitting in the row in front of Raylan. Boyd had his elbow on the back of the pew, sitting sideways to talk with Raylan.
Raylan recognized the dream immediately for what it was and felt himself shielding his thoughts—much like he communicated with Nahtoo. He could hear her and talk with her mentally, but he could keep her out of his mind when he wanted to. Of course, that worked both ways. Shielding so hard, he couldn’t pick up anything from Boyd.
Raylan looked around the plain white room with opaque stained-glass windows. It looked like the barest church he’d ever seen.
Boyd. What do you want?
You’re not in Kentucky, Raylan. I was worried. I can barely feel you, Boyd said, a hint of fang showing as he spoke.
Good. Maybe I don’t want you to feel me.
Well, Raylan, I’d think you’d understand my concern. Your health is my health and vice versa. It goes both ways.
Boyd, I didn’t ask you for this. I am sure as hell not gonna be at your beck and call. I’m a US Deputy Marshal, if you hadn’t forgotten.
That’s not a very charitable attitude Raylan, or grateful.
Never claimed to be either Boyd. Now get out of my head.
Raylan woke easier than the last time he dreamed with Boyd. Then he smiled, because he’d learned that he could shield his mind in his sleep from Boyd and distance weakened their bond.
For the first time in almost a week and a half, the idea of having to head back to Kentucky seemed a lot less daunting.