Page 27 of Radiant

“Sorry. I’m not following. He had a Covid test? That’s an issue now why?”

Auris uncrossed and recrossed his legs. “Apparently, Jonathan would have taken care of such mundane things for Charlie, despite being a little shit who entranced the human he proclaimed under his protection in such a way that said human was left bereft of free will after Jonathan’s death.”

I pushed the comforter back. “Oh, you have opinions about that.”

“How could you tell, my sweet? I was trying so hard to hide it.”

I huffed. “What are we going to do now? Are you going to try to distract me from the Brit staring at Eva’s ass with a dramatic reading of the shipping manifest for my stuff and your photos?”

Auris looked straight at me. “I would love to read those manifests for you. If you ask very nicely, I might do voices for the total weight and shipping numbers. Eva is doing something very elaborate involving waffles on account of the fact that we have company. He’s not interested in her ass, per se, it’s more of a general stare.”

“Company you are allowing to stare at her.”

Auris narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re going to make me pay her a Christmas bonus, aren’t you.”

I nodded. “Yup. Maybe pay for a nice trip somewhere too.” I stretched my arms above my head, and yawned. “Hey, joking aside, you weren’t happy about what happened to Charlie, were you?”

Auris froze for a few heartbeats, then shook his head. “No, I was not happy. I told you about how Tove didn’t like entrancement. What you saw last night is one of the things that can happen if someone does it without putting much thought into it.”

“Look, I’m not exactly sure what I saw. I mean, Charlie seemed off? Scared, too. Why didn’t you entrance him?” I pointed my thumb vaguely in the direction of the kitchen. “Why are you not entrancing him now so he’ll make polite small talk with Eva instead of staring at her?”

“Those are two questions.” He nodded, hummed. “You deserve the answer to both, and it is important knowledge. Firstly, what you saw was someone who had been under a long-standing entrancement that ran contrary to their own wishes and in some instances their own well-being and creature comforts.

“You yourself only experienced entrancement very briefly, but you started fighting it right away. Yet, I only made you stay calm and not move. Charlie was forced to stay in a foreign country, one where he doesn’t speak the language, and even worse, he was on a short leash and couldn’t move too far away from the ossuary. Then a pandemic hit, and he was in a worse situation that he had no escape from.”

I nodded. Charlie had shown us his car when we’d walked past it last night—or Jonathan’s, he’d said—but it had been too dark for me to see inside. He’d said it was “a shitbox of a car” and to warn whoever was supposed to take care of it in the morning.

“You’re saying he was fighting, and it made him a little, uhm… Not sure how to be delicate about it. A little crazy?”

“That’s it in a nutshell, yes. The effects will be different for different people, but he turned into an anxious wreck who had his first good night’s sleep in seven years last night, even if it was only six hours or so.”

My eyebrows flew up. “He told you that?”

“He did. Which leads me to the second reason I didn’t and won’t entrance him. It might simply make him worse again, forcing him to perform actions instead of taking those actions of his own free will. You have to know that I showed off when I met you and took you to the restaurant. With the priests, it was necessary to keep them fully under my control. Gloria, Eva, Jan, everyone else who works for me and knows me personally, they don’t want to actively harm me because they like and respect me. A long-term entrancement on them makes that very much easier for them. They’re hardly even aware of it.”

“Right. It aligns with their baseline intentions.”

Auris shrugged. “Basically.”

“Eva might feel differently if she gets stared at while at work.”

“For the sake of—” He flew up from the armchair and was straddling me in seconds, cupping my cheeks. “You are so good when you are trying to be bad, my sweet. So very, very good.”

“I wasn’t trying⁠—”

“Shush. You were, and you know it.” His nostrils flared. “If you would like, we could shower together.”

“Are you…offering shower sex?”

“Yes.”

I blushed. “I’ve never done that.”

“Would you like to?”

I nodded. “But can I brush my teeth first?”

That made Auris chuckle and move off of me in the slow, human way. “By all means, not that I care. I don’t mind the humanness that comes with you being human, Ethan, never.”