look I couldn’t read and didn’t need to; the air around them crackled with smugness. I ignored them and ran down the bleachers, almost stumbling on the last step. I grabbed one of the rails, using it to whip myself around the corner of the bleachers, out into the open.
For a moment—only a moment, but long enough—my connection to Artie’s mind was still active, and I saw myself, pale, black-haired girl in yoga pants and an oversized teal sweater that hung to cover my hands and almost obscure my figure. It was designed to keep me from accidentally touching anyone, not to be flattering. That didn’t stop a feeling of intense joy from welling up and filling Artie’s thoughts, almost overwhelming me before it snapped closed, shutting me out.
Artie has always thought of me as a sister, something I remember all too well from when we were kids and I still thought it was okay for me to read his mind. Cross-species relationships are hard enough even when both participants are mammals. But when he looked at me like that, sometimes I could almost let myself forget how impossible anything more than friendship was for the two of us.
“Hi,” I said, like none of this was a big deal. Like I came home every day. “I would have called. I just got into town.”
Artie stared at me, the expression exaggerated enough that I could pick it up even with the distance between us and the limitations in the way my mind interprets human faces. Then he broke into a run. I didn’t move, at first because I was too puzzled to understand what was happening, and then because I didn’t want to. Instead, I braced myself and spread my arms a little wider and let him run right into them.
According to Annie and Elsie, who look at Artie the way humans do, he’s pretty good looking, for all that he checks a lot of boxes on the “average” side of the sheet: average height, neither fat nor thin, with the build of someone who works out because he has to, not because he wants to. He’s a noncombatant with natural abilities that will mostly keep him safe if he ever winds up in the middle of a fight. Natural abilities, and a really vicious family. He has brown hair and brown eyes and a smile that the minds of everyone around me say is sweet and kind, even if it’s rare.
He has one of the most soothing minds I’ve ever touched. Spending time with Artie is better than meditating, or napping, or almost anything else. It’s not the only reason I’ve been in love with him since I was a kid, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.
And now he was holding onto me like he never, ever wanted to let go of me again.
I pressed my face into his shoulder, breathing in the bright, faintly spicy smell of his skin. It was largely drowned out by the horrifying quantities of body spray he was wearing, as always when he needed to leave his basement. Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to smell it at all. He was usually better about getting even coverage—sometimes spread out across six or seven applications—before he left the house.
“How many speed laws did you break?” I asked, without lifting my head.
“All of them,” said Artie, and pulled away.
Regretfully, I let him go. Our big reunion was over, and odds were good he wouldn’t let me touch him again for days. Being half-incubus means his skin secretes pheromones that can cloud the minds of anyone who might be sexually attracted to him or genetically suited to making adorable part-Lilu babies. Women and gay men, mostly, and his own species, mostly, but not one hundred percent on either of those counts. Family members—blood family—are immune. I’m not blood family, which means I’m not covered in the catch-all immunity, so Artie has been reluctant to touch me ever since puberty first came stalking up and whacked him with its mighty hammer o’ suck.
I’m not blood family. I’m also not a mammal, strictly speaking; his pheromones don’t work on me, and never have. Even Uncle Ted’s pheromones don’t work on me, and Uncle Ted’s a full incubus, with none of that pesky humanity to get in the way and weaken the effects of his natural weaponry. And Lilu pheromones are a weapon. Incubus, succubus, it doesn’t matter. They attract mates to make breeding easier and less dangerous, and make it