He’d stayed smoking until Sam’s eyes got heavy and he rested his head on one arm to sleep. The firelight. It was just the firelight. The shadows flickered across that lean body, dancing over shapes and cavities that Calvin wanted desperately to touch. That’s all. Just to touch and stroke. Not to hurt or dominate. No, never that. He loved that boy, and he just wanted to feel that warm brown flesh beneath his own fingers, and maybe for a moment, softly cup that swelling between Sam’s legs in his hand.

Calvin was sweating with excitement and he got up and quietly lay down behind the boy. At first he had just watched the rise and fall of Sam’s shoulder as he breathed, tracing the outline of his back and hips with his hand an inch away from that elegant body. And then it had been too much. Calvin had slipped his arm round the front of Sam’s waist, and running his fingers lightly over that hard flat belly, he had arrived at and caressed the part of Sam that was making Calvin’s heart beat in his ears. He closed his eyes with the pleasure of what he felt there, and then it was over. Sam woke.

The violence of his reaction was intense. He threw Calvin’s hand off with a strength that nearly broke the shaman’s wrist and leapt to his feet with his teeth and fists clenched, eyes ablaze and his breath panting from him like a caged beast.

‘Sam. I only …’

The boy was close to tears through his rage.

‘You dirty scum!’

‘Sam. Please!’

Calvin held a pleading hand out to him. Sam kicked it away with a foot.

‘You gonna teach me ’bout that next? Huh, Calvin? You gonna tell me that this be part of the magic?’ Tears spilled down his furious face. ‘I should have known it all be bullshit. You be just like my pappy, don’t ya! You be makin’ up all that stuff ’bout the Trickster and the key an’ all that crap, and now I know it’s all fuckin’ shit so you can get up my ass! Huh? Is that it? Is it?’

Calvin had sobbed then, clutching at the ground in his misery.

Sam held him in his tearful glare, then he grabbed his clothes from the ground and ran off into the dark. Calvin heard a wail from the boy, like an animal in pain, receding into the woods. And then there was no sound nor sight of him.

Calvin was crying now as he dropped the second last stone on the flames. It had been the firelight. That was all. He loved Sam.