Homelands Pt. 07 Ch. 01

In between. Every damn thing here was in between. The place itself lay at the intersection of day and night, cold and warm, spooky and soothing. Dream and truth.

"When will you come home, Cahill?" the voice asked.

A woman stepped out of the nearest oak tree. She wore a green dress, trimmed with white ruffles and moist leaves. It barely covered her generous breasts or her shapely thighs. More fabric had gone into the sleeves, which hung nearly to her ankles, than the rest of it. A wreathe of brambles, berries, and leaves encircled her forehead. Straight brown hair fell past her shoulders. Except, if he looked at her in the wrong light, her hair appeared to be as green as her dress. Her full lips seemed even redder than they were, seeing as everything else about her was white or green. Her skin was shockingly pale, but not ghostly. Just beautiful.

Fiona.

The beautiful dryad wasn't the one who greeted him the most often, but he'd been coming here for so long that every one of the imaginary fey creatures he encountered here felt like they'd been a part of his life forever. Like they were really were a part of his family.

Hers was the deep contralto. Most nights, he was met by the soprano, which belonged to a busty nymph with black hair who always wore white. Wherever that one went, flowers sprung up behind her. Her name was Oona. She claimed to be his aunt. Just as this one, Fiona, claimed to be his sister. But Cahill didn't have any sisters. He'd never met anyone named Fiona, let anyone who lived in a damn tree. Cahill had a few aunts, but none of them were named Oona. Nor did any of them have such a special relationship with flowers, even though one was a florist.

"I can't," he told Fiona, for the thousandth time.

She approached him slowly, treading on bare feet. Always on bare feet. She swore that he would go barefoot too, once he remembered who he was. But that didn't seem likely to Cahill, who constantly tripped over the roots and vines, sticks and stones, brush and weeds. He'd twisted his ankle many a time in this place, though he always awoke without a sprain.

Cahill studied her silently. It was a damn good thing that she wasn't his sister, that she couldn't be, because he was intensely attracted to her. Had done things with her, many times, that brothers really shouldn't do with their sisters.

And that was the real reason women always left him.

He often woke smelling of sex, with another woman's natural perfume clinging to him, and the taste of her on his lips. The women of this world tasted unlike any other, and no two of them tasted quite alike, but there was no mistaking that what clung to him in the early moments of waking was a woman's juices. Even a woman who spent the night by his side, sleeping only intermittently, who knew that he couldn't possibly have snuck out on her, might come to doubt his fidelity.

None of his past girlfriends had actually said that they were leaving him for that reason, of course. Undoubtedly, they'd known how crazy it would sound. But Cahill knew the truth. There was always a look of betrayal in their eyes, and of disappointment. His friends complained of women losing interest. Of seeing the disgust in her eyes at the thought of having sex with him again. That never happened to Cahill. When they left, they left because they didn't trust him, not because they didn't want him. Or, rather, because they told themselves that they couldn't trust him, despite the obvious fact that their suspicions couldn't possibly have any basis in reality. Easier to believe that he was having an affair he couldn't have been having than to question their own sanity though.

He wasn't even sure he blamed them. He knew what it was like to doubt one's hold on reality. Not a pleasant feeling.

"Why?" the dryad who claimed to be his sister asked.

His eyes met hers, but it took serious effort. Her voluptuous body demanded attention. Her breasts were every bit as big as Oona's, though it was the latter he always thought of as "busty." They didn't define her figure the way the floral nymph's endowment did, since Fiona had a lower body to match her impressive chest.

As amply endowed as both women were, they could not compare to the redheaded druidess who so rarely graced him with her presence. The one who he was to believe was his true mother. Caronwyn. But it wasn't fair to compare any woman, real or imaginary, to her. She was the physical embodiment of beauty in its purest form. Femininity made flesh.

By any other standard, though, Fiona had an incredible body. Like all of the fey, she had a waist that was too small for her body, if not too small to exist on some woman. Her hips were broad and she had beautiful bubble butt. It was big, round, shapely, yet soft, the way Cahill thought a woman's bottom should be. All in all, the dramatic curves of the dryad's body made an hourglass look shapeless. And her skin was impossibly smooth. Thighs that thick should have been plagued by cellulite, but there wasn't the least trace of an imperfection anywhere on her body. Cahill had checked. Quite closely.

The fey were supposed to be slender and lithe, not impossibly voluptuous. And indeed some of the women here were. But there was no single type that prevailed among the fey. They came in a variety of shapes and sizes. Each and every one looked about as good as a woman of that type could though. None, to his mind, looked as good as Caronwyn. But he still recognized that men with different tastes would be equally impressed by the others.

His other aunt, Macha, had some pleasant curves, but her body was firm and hard, athletic and muscular. Aside from her breasts, of course. Those, Cahill would have been comfortable describing as big if he didn't have something of a big boob fetish. If nothing else, they were bigger than made sense for a woman with so little body fat anywhere else. Her legs were long, sleek, and shapely. Not too thick, but still laden with dense, powerful muscle. Many men would find her round ass attractive, but it struck Cahill as a little too small and much, much too hard. She had strong shoulders, sculpted bis and tris, and a perfect six pack. All in all, the blonde sprite didn't appeal much to Cahill, but any guy who liked his women sporty would have considered her nothing short of perfect.

His cousin, Teagan, was a slight little pixie. She had a stunningly beautiful face. "Cute" might have been a better term, given her round cheeks, youthful appearance, and sense of innocence, but that simply wasn't strong enough a term for her flawless features. On the other hand, her chest and ass were flat as a board. Diminutive in stature, with a beautiful face and golden hair that flowed all the way to her knees, and the body of a pre-pubescent even though she was a grown woman, Teagan alone had the look of a proper fey woman.

Yet all of them reminded him of the creatures he'd read about growing up. Their ears were slightly pointed. Their complexions were as fair as could be found among the living. Their voices were musical and their movements exhibited a preternatural grace. Most tellingly, impossible things routinely occurred in their presence.

All of that was equally true of the men, though Cahill paid somewhat less attention to them. You know, for some strange reason. There were fey who claimed to be his brothers and others who he was to believe were his cousins. That his subconscious had created them as well must have meant that his loneliness reflected more than a desire for physical intimacy. Or maybe it really did mean that there was more to his dreams than his doctors thought. He never could quite decide which made more sense to him.

"This isn't real," he said, for his benefit as much as hers.

"Maybe it is and maybe it isn't," she said, helpfully. "But it's still your home."

Cahill shook his head.

They didn't seem to think much of what was "real" or not, though they were very concerned with what was "true." Just like fairies in the old tales, they seemed to find differences in meaning that wouldn't occur to a mortal. Cahill hadn't yet figured out why, but he'd at least worked out that, for the fey, those two words were not synonyms.

And who was she kidding with that second part? At times, he could almost believe that she and the others were family, but how could she expect him to think of this place as home? There was nothing homey about it. No furniture or furnishings, no beds or bathrooms. Where did they sleep? Do their business? How could they call a forest home?

The one doctor he'd been foolish enough to tell about this world, back when he was still a teenager, had very nearly had him committed to a psychiatric hospital. As he probably should have, though even the doctor had agreed that Cahill posed no physical threat to either himself or others. What could be more ridiculous than the notion that he lived in a magical forest with a bunch of pixies and sprites, nymphs and dryads?

His mother had believed him, though. Her, and only her.

That might have been the problem all along. A few years ago, he'd cut her off completely, having become convinced that she was keeping him from letting go of the dreams. He'd known, even then, that she wasn't responsible for him having them in the first place, but he'd blamed her for his inability to move on. But leaving Boston and the woman who'd raised him hadn't worked. Cahill still feared that it would only make things worse to allow the one person who fanned the flames of his lunacy back into his life, but the pain of pushing away the only person who loved him unconditionally was not easy to live with.

"I always knew," she'd told him once. "When we brought you home from the hospital, I knew something was wrong. But I loved you as if you were my own child, and he wasn't going to come back to me, so I kept you. Won't you please forgive me?"

Like he was a changeling.

The day Cahill drew that connection, his skin had gone cold. He'd nearly asked his mother if that was what she believed him to be, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He knew the answer. The newspaper clipping she kept by her mail pile, where anyone could find it, told him all he needed to know. His father had died in a car accident. As had his mother's real son, whose name was also Cahill. What sense that made, he wasn't entirely sure, but he knew what his mother believed, and yet he couldn't take hearing it from her lips. Every night, women who claimed to love him, to share his blood, told him that he wasn't human. But to hear it from his real mother would have been devastating.

"Isn't this enough?" Cahill asked. "Every night. What more do you want from me?"

"You belong here," Fiona said. "With your family."

He cradled his head in his fingertips. "You said not to trust her," he said, changing the subject. "Liadan?"

His supposed sister nodded.

"How do you know about her?"

"She's one of us," Fiona replied.

Of course she was.

Granted, Cahill had thought so himself. She had the look, after all. The way her waist flared out into those enchanting hips. The flawless skin, hypnotizing eyes, and plump lips. The inhuman proportions and palpable air of sexuality that she projected around her.

The way the crowd ignored her despite her stunning appearance, and, despite ignoring her, nonetheless made room for her, would only have made sense if she'd used a glamour. And for her to use a glamour would only have made sense if she was fey.

And then there was the way the flute had come alive in her hands. For a moment there, it had seemed as if she'd pulled this world, the land of his dreams, into the real one.

But this was madness. Utter madness.

Silver flutes didn't break down the barriers between worlds. Dryads didn't live in trees, flowers didn't sprout up from the footprints of nymphs, and he didn't have any damn sister. He'd imagined the dancing shadows with their cloven hooves. Nothing had happened in the square that day that didn't make sense save for the things that had only happened inside his head. That Fiona knew about the woman he'd met that day didn't mean anything, because Fiona was part of his subconscious. She had access to all his thoughts and memories.

Why oh why had he let his mother fill his head with nonsense and fairy tales?

And do much worse besides.

No. No. He wouldn't think about that. Didn't want to, at any rate. But he'd already started down that path, and now he couldn't reverse course.

She'd insisted that it wasn't incest. That he wasn't really her son, so it was okay. But Cahill had known better. He wasn't even attracted to her. He'd only done it because she'd wanted him so badly. Because he'd hoped that it would somehow prove to her, or to him, that he wasn't a changeling, but a real man, of flesh and blood.

What surprise then was it that he dreamed of incest every night? After that?

But he wouldn't hate her for that. His mother was a good woman. Not a good influence, perhaps, but a good woman.

"Lemme guess," Cahill said, "she's our sister."

The brothers and cousins that sometimes joined him when his nymphs grew too excited for a single man to please looked like Cahill. Seamus, who was allegedly his older brother, looked so much like Cahill had when Cahill was younger that it was almost creepy. Granted, then as now, Cahill had been bigger than Seamus. He must have had a good forty pounds of muscle on his brother. But besides that and his eyes being blue where his brother's were brown, they couldn't have looked more alike.

He'd once asked his brother why he looked like a younger version of Cahill if he was supposed to be the older one. To his dream brother's credit, his answer had almost been compelling. He reminded Cahill that they were immortal, that they didn't age after reaching adulthood, but their appearances were fluid. They looked the way they did in part because of how they really looked, but also partly based on how they expected themselves to look, or what they wanted others to see. So Cahill looked older than Seamus because he'd dwelled in the mortal realm longer, all the while expecting himself to age the way mortals did. Even though this place made Cahill appear stronger and slimmer, and a good deal more handsome, he still wasn't quite himself. And wouldn't be, until he chose to believe.

They knew how to make it convincing. He had to give the fey that much.

Gallech, their oldest brother, looked quite a bit like Cahill too, only he was shorter, prettier, and more heavily muscled. His brothers, and only his brothers, looked so much like him that anyone who looked upon them would instantly guess that they were related. But even Fiona, Oona, and Caronwyn looked enough like him that if he was willing to accept their existence at all, he'd consider it more than plausible that they were of the same blood. Even Macha's children, Duncan and Teagan, looked something like Cahill, though Macha was a Dreamsmyth. And even though they had blonde hair, while his was coal black, the same as his oldest brother's and his aunt's.

But Liadan?

"Of course not," Fiona said. "She's a Dreamsmyth."

"Right," Cahill said, dripping sarcasm. "Because she's a Dreamsmyth."

As if it made any more sense for her to be Macha's child than Caronwyn's or Oona's. Macha, whose skin was not quite as fair as Caronwyn's or Fiona's but was still closer to pure ivory than he ever saw on most any woman in the real world, especially in Georgia. Whose blonde hair and blue eyes bespoke a Northern European ancestry.

"She knew who you were," his dream sister continued. "Named you a Walker."

Cahill's throat went tight.

She had said that.

At the time, it hadn't meant much to him. A bell had gone off in the back of his mind, but the true significance of it had been lost to him. Now that he'd returned to the dream world, though, he remembered what it meant. That Walker was the name of the clan of which Caronwyn was the matriarch. The clan to which he allegedly belonged.

"Were you there?" Cahill asked.

Of course she was, since she lived inside his head, but he still wanted to hear what she would say. To see if he could find a contradiction.

"Of course not," Fiona replied. "We're not allowed to return to that world. I've told you that already. But we do have ways of watching."

Cahill sighed. Neither of those claims were new. What had he expected, anyway? After fifteen years, there weren't a lot of bases that hadn't been covered.

He stepped closer to the woman who'd have him believe that she was his older sister, though she looked no older than twenty-two or twenty-three. Taking her hand in his, and doing his best to ignore the bolts of electricity than ran through him whenever his skin came into contact with hers, he said, "You've got to stop this, Fi. Leave me alone. Let me be with a real woman for a change."

"But she's not real," Fiona protested. "That world is no more hers than it is yours."

Again he wondered what the word "real" meant to his sister. It seemed as though they used the one to refer to the world in which he dwelt during the day and the other for all things fey. But was it that simple? And what was "true" about this place anyway?

Only everything, a voice in the back of his mind insisted.

His cock stirred. Being this near to the voluptuous tree nymph always had that effect. Her green eyes were breathtaking, her soft lips unbearably luscious, and her sometimes brown, sometimes green hair held a strange appeal. The sharp contrast between her alabaster complexion and her dark hair, long lashes, and thick eyebrows harkened back to an earlier era, when men did not obsess over women with bleached blonde hair and fake tans.

"She's real enough," Cahill managed, though his thoughts were turning to other things.

Fiona's hand went to chest. Then it slowly slid down over the mountainous peaks of his abs, heading for his swollen manhood.

He almost hadn't even noticed that he was bare-chested. That was how things worked here. One moment, he'd be fully clothed, and the next he'd be topless or even fully naked. It was almost like his sister had the power to banish clothes like a lamp chases away the darkness. She and all the other fey women, for that matter.

"Why won't you listen?" she whispered. "You're almost as stubborn as Gallech."

His oldest brother was indeed stubborn. But that seemed to Cahill to be as much a virtue as a vice. On those nights when the forest became a nightmare dreamscape, when he had to fight his way through a horde of monsters or slay a dragon so that he could rescue hiss damsel in distress before he was allowed to lie with her, his brothers and cousins often joined him. When they did, none were as reliable as Gallech. He never backed down, whether from a fight or an argument. There were worse insults than to be told he shared that quality.

Still, he didn't like being likened to his brother. He couldn't hear his brother's name without his mood souring, in truth. Cahill hardly ever saw Caronwyn, the woman he desired most of all, without his oldest brother showing up. And it wasn't even because Gallech was as obsessed with the red goddess as Cahill was. He was completely taken with Oona. And their aunt was almost as interested in him, from what Cahill could tell. So why couldn't his brother be happy with that, and leave their mother to Cahill? Why couldn't he accept that maybe their mother wanted a guy who was a little less pretty and a lot less little?

Oh, Gallech was plenty built. He probably weighed near as much as Cahill, though he was several inches shorter. But he was several inches shorter. And less well endowed.

Cahill tried not to be that kind of guy. When he was younger, he'd been really impressed with himself for having a bigger package than any guy he knew. And some of the girls his age had been impressed too. But the older he got, the more he realized that size mattered, but that was no less true of egos than penises. He'd long since let go of the belief that he was more of a man because he had a huge cock. Sometimes, though, Gallech made him remember the time in his life when it had seemed that way.