Jack&Teague [& Katy] stories 1-5

by Amy Lane

  Cory flushed and looked away. “Well, you’re Teague’s beloved, you know? I don’t like to use my shit against family—not when they don’t have the same shit to fight back with…”

  He didn’t hear her next words, because her bruises flashed in front of his eyes and her words, I’m mortal and weak rang in his ears, and he absolutely had to go to the bathroom to be violently ill.

  Katy

  Not One of the Mens

  Katy and Cory watched him run down the little hallway, and then winced at the unmistakable sounds coming from the bathroom.

  Cory grimaced. “Wonderful—I’m batting oh-in-a-thousand today—maybe I should buy a lottery ticket and see what else I can fuck up.”

  Katy was usually very shy around the lady of the house. Cory was smart, like Jacky—and she seemed to have her shit together in ways that Katy hadn’t even dreamed of when she’d been clawing her way through the back-alleys and smack houses of Angel’s Camp. But this hadn’t been her fault—it hadn’t. Katy, as much as she loved Jack, well, she’d slapped him across the face for a reason.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Lady. Jacky—he’s like…” she floundered for a minute and then said the first dumb thing that came into her head. “He’s like a little boy making a fort in his bedroom, you know? There he is, and he thinks, ‘Hey—I gots Teague in here, we have a fort together!’ and then I come and play, and he thinks, ‘This is it—this is the most people who can come into my fort!’ But the whole time, he doesn’t realize that the fort in his bedroom is also in a house, which is also on a street, which is also in a city, you know? It’s not just me and Teague and Jacky in his fort, there’s a whole world protecting the fort, and he just thinks that’s what it does, right?” Oh God… she was fucking this all up, she was sure of it until Cory gave her an out and out blinding grin. Katy, who knew that she was pretty and the Lady Cory was not, suddenly also knew that the Lady Cory was beautiful.

  “That’s awesome, Katy—you’re right. He doesn’t know how big we are. I guess…” she looked down to the bathroom again. The sounds of barfing had stopped, but Jack was making weak little sobs that echoed from the toilet and then down the hall, and she looked away again. “I guess we’ll tell him some other time, you think?”

  Katy nodded and sighed. “I should probably go make sure he’s okay… I know, I know he hurt you and all but…”

  Cory looked up and put her hand tentatively on Katy’s as it waved generally between them. “Katy, believe me—you don’t ever have to apologize for loving someone in spite of their flaws. Remember me? I’m the one married to a cave man?”

  Katy shook her head and suddenly Cory’s grip on her hand fluttered. Cory got a look for all the world as if she was listening to music in her head. She blinked then, and gave that tentative, shy smile.

  “Green’s back with Teague—he, uhm, he thinks that Jacky doesn’t love him anymore, so you should be prepared for… you know. Beating his stubborn Irish head in with affection, right?”

  Katy grinned at her widely and gave her a quick, exuberant hug. “Right—good point. He’s not so bright when it comes to love, no?”

  Cory shrugged. “None of us are—except maybe Green.” She turned to leave and then turned back, her pale, freckled cheeks washed with a blush. “Oh yeah—Bracken and I don’t go back to work until Tuesday, but Grace is having a sale on those samplers—the same artist as before, with the wolves. She wants to know if you want one?”

  And now it was Katy’s turn to blush. Lady Cory, all ninja-bitch and shit, going off to fight with the mens, and she was getting Katy needlepoint—this was a good place. A good place, with good family here. Jacky had to see it—he had to understand that you wanted these people to love you, and that it would only make your heart bigger and stronger to have them at your back.

  “That’d be nice,” she muttered, ducking her head shyly, and Cory said “Okay then,” and made her way out.

  Katy sighed and went back to help Jack out, because Goddess knew he would have been pissing his own pants for the last week if someone hadn’t helped him with the fly.

  He had just finished brushing his teeth when the door opened and Teague stumbled in. He was wrapped in nothing but a hand-knitted blanket, which he’d secured around his waist like a bath towel.

  Katy ran up to him, fully intending to hug him until he begged for mercy, but, like Cory had warned, he was too prepared for rejection to accept her.

  Keeping his head down, he started rooting through his dresser for clothes, and Katy took a deep breath and tried another tack.

  “Uhm, whatchu doin’ pappi?”

  Teague swallowed and kept his face turned away. His dark blond hair was slicked back against his head with sweat, and his hazel eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue and grief. “Figured I’d find another room.”

  Katy laughed and felt her spine shift into place. “No,” she said gently, and taking a page from his book, simply nudged him away from the dresser. “Now sit down, I’ll find you some clothes, and you can go shower and wash those nasty feets, but you me and Jacky are sleeping in here if I have to beat you, shoot him, and drag your bleeding bodies into that bed, you hear me?”

  She heard a puff of air from him that might have been a laugh, and then his hands came out and rested on hers, warm and still a little bit muddy from a long run as a wolf.

  “That’s… uhm… sweet, field mouse—but you and I both know it’s not going to work. I’m… I have to work here. I…” She risked a look at his face and if anyone recognized that terrible, fruitless struggle for words to name the maelstrom inside your heart, it was Katy. But she also knew Teague would never feel right unless he found those words on his own.

  “I’m too broken to love without the hill,” he said at last. “I… need a reason to think I deserve you. Jacky—he can’t live with that. I’ll just…”

  “Stay,” Jack said from the bathroom. “Please stay.”

  Teague’s face crumpled like a child’s, and Katy grabbed his hands hard and then moved forward to lean her head on his chest. “You don’t really want me,” he whispered, the voice so like a child’s that Katy thought she’d just burst into tears and then they wouldn’t get anything done. She womaned up though, and swallowed all that in her throat, and soothed Teague’s chest with her hands.

  “Of course we want you, pappi,” she murmured, just for form. She knew the person he needed to believe it from was Jack.

  “I’m stupid,” Jack said. Katy risked a look at him. He’d stopped at the end of the hallway and his hand was gripping the door frame so hard his knuckles were white, and he looked, if anything, even worse than he had when he’d just finished puking. His face was taut and pale, and the self-directed anger was burning through his blue eyes. “I didn’t know what I was doing—I was like a kid playing with a hand grenade. You threw yourself on the grenade for me, and I… I didn’t even know you’d saved my life.”

  Teague scrubbed at his face, his chin still wobbly, and Katy hoped that they could get through this because, dammit, something had to come from all this pain.

  “I wasn’t just saving you,” he said honestly. “Jacky, you were hurting someone…you were hurting her…and after all she’s done for us…”

  Jack moaned a little. “I know,” he said softly, and Katy believed him. Nothing like seeing the bruises of your bad deeds to make you know you’re the bad guy. “I’m… I’m aware of my complete stupidity, okay Teague? Please—don’t… don’t let this take you away from us.”

  “Why do you want me, Jacky?” Teague asked, his voice raw. “You don’t even know me.”

  And of all the sounds of hurt and disillusionment that she’d heard Jacky make in the last hour, this one was the worst.

  “That’s not true!” Jack rushed up to them, but Teague’s bubble of hurt, of self-containment was so perfect and inviolable that he stopped, just outside of the place of comfort for all of them.

  “What do you think you know?” Teague asked, a tinge o
f bitterness in the sound. “You know I’ve been hurt. You know I’m lonely. You know I love you and Katy. That doesn’t make me your ideal mate, Jack. It just makes me vulnerable.”

  Jack closed his eyes and swallowed. “I’d never…” Oh fuck, because he had. He’d done it more than once, each time more unforgivable than the last. “I’ll never hurt you again.”

  Teague looked up at him, everything in his eyes naked and bleeding. “I need to be sure,” he said softly. “I can’t… I can’t do this, if I’m worried. I can’t do this if I think I’ll go to sleep with you next to me one day and wake up alone in the morning. I need to know you can accept everything about me--including where my loyalties are.”

  Restlessly he turned back toward the dresser, where his clothes lay in a bundle. He picked up the T-shirt he’d been wearing that morning, the one with the hole and the dried blood on it, and he fingered the rent thoughtfully in the silence before turning back to Jack.

  “I have violence in me, Jack.” It was unequivocal—they all knew it was true. “I was a stone cold killer for a lot of years—that hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that now that I’m fighting for love and for people I can believe in, I’m going to throw my life into the battle with a lot more passion. You know I’d die for you, for Katy—you know that. You need to know that I’d die for Green and Cory and even that sonofabitch Bracken. Hell, I’d probably die for Nicky if I had to—anything, you understand, to keep this place alive. You need to get behind them, Jacky, because if you’re against them, that’s leaving me in the middle.”

  Jack blinked and swallowed, his face taut and pale. He was considering Teague’s words carefully, Katy could tell, measuring the rebelliousness of his own heart against what he needed to be for Teague.

  “I can do that,” he said after a moment, with complete certainty.

  Teague nodded, and pulled out some clothes, and then moved toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” Katy asked, because it wasn’t to the shower, that was for damned sure.

  “I’m… I need to sleep alone tonight,” he said, his voice empty. “I… I want you two to watch me fight tomorrow. Cory said I could take down the fucker with the knife in a one-on-one. I need you to see me do it.”

  Sleep alone? Oh God. “Pappi!” Katy’s voice was thick and broken. “You… who gonna make the night monsters go away? You can’t sleep alone—you’ll scream and scream and no one will kiss you better…”

  The thought destroyed her. They knew—they’d heard him, they’d soothed him in his sleep. That was their job—they kept him together. They patched his heart up because it had been ripped open too many times to hold together on its own.

  Teague pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eyes. “You can’t just love me when I’m weak, Katy,” he said after a moment of pulling himself together. “You can’t just love me because I need you. You need to love me when I’m strong. You need to love me when I’m an evil motherfucker, defending the shit I love. I’ll… I may die quicker alone, but at least I’ll know what’s real.” He put his hand on the doorknob and looked up at both of them, meeting their eyes so they’d know he was serious.

  “Please come tomorrow—the hill will tell you when.”

  And with that he was gone, leaving Katy alone with Jack, who was sinking to his knees, sobbing like a child.

  Cory

  Never Alone

  I admit it—I stood around the corner from their room and waited to see what would happen. But I was keeping Green company so that was okay.

  I ran into him after passing Teague down the hall, but Teague was so shell-shocked that he didn’t even see me, and I had a horrible skeleton-fingers-up-the-spine chill of fear.

  The last time I’d seen someone look that shell-shocked it was when I was looking in the mirror after Adrian died. Teague felt like someone had died. You can’t hold someone when you think they’ve died, and if anyone needed to be held, it was Teague. And since I’d been there before, since I knew that feeling of betrayal, of loss, I knew what was coming next.

  Green and I stood shoulder to shoulder and I read the bad news on Green’s face as he unabashedly used his super-elf hearing to listen in on their most intimate, most painful conversation.

  About midway through, he bumped me and I winced and he cast me a sharp look before putting his hand on my upper arm through my sweatshirt to heal me.

  Thanks, beloved.

  You should have gotten someone else to do it.

  I couldn’t let Bracken see.

  He caught my eyes then and nodded with a grimace. We both knew that this situation, as bad as it was, could be a whole lot worse. At that moment, the door opened, and we didn’t need to speak in each other’s heads for me to read his little shove at my shoulders.

  It was my turn.

  “Hey Teague,” I said, keeping my voice friendly and neutral—didn’t know anything, didn’t see anything, just a friend, walking down the hall.

  He looked ghastly—pale, red-eyed, dirty, and his bare shoulders drooped over his scarred chest—but he managed a roll of the eyes.

  “You are so full of shit,” he muttered, and I grimaced.

  “Brown eyes,” I replied softly. “Can’t help it. They won’t let you move out for long, you know that, right?”

  Teague shrugged—he wasn’t so sure. “How’d you know?” he asked seriously, and I could only give him the truth.

  “It’s exactly what I wanted, right after Adrian died. I figured it would hurt less to be alone, you know?” I bumped his shoulder with my own and nodded him down the hall.

  “No one died,” he said tersely. “Where are we going?”

  “I figure you can room with Mario—he’s got a king-sized bed, and no designs on your body. This way, you can go take a shower before you come and sit down and watch movies with me in the front room. And you feel like someone died, so don’t give me that shit.”

  “I’m watching movies with you?” he asked, genuinely surprised.

  “And eating ice cream and dancing to our favorite cd’s, just like girlfriends at a slumber party, now don’t change the subject.” I figured it would just be the movies and the ice cream, but I added the rest to see him roll his eyes and scowl, which was a damned sight better than his expression of bleak hopelessness, thank you very much.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he growled, but he was lying and we both knew it. I stopped walking and turned to him, my eyebrows raised.

  “Bullshit. You feel like you lost him, like he’ll never love you again. I figure, you’re probably planning to make him watch you off old Javier, as painfully and savagely as possible, and then you’re going to turn to him and say, ‘See—I told you I was a fucking monster, now go the fuck away!’—am I right?”

  Teague turned bright red, from his the pale flesh of his bare stomach to the roots of his hair. “It’s a plan,” he defended weakly.

  I snorted and turned back down the hallway. “It’s a sucky one. For one thing, even if you could do it—and I don’t think you can-- it’s not going to work.”

  “Sure I can do it,” he said, his voice hard and flat and he was trying to convince me he was a badass. I already knew he was a badass—that wasn’t the point.

  “Look—I know physically you can do it—and I could really give a fuck how you kill that shitbag. That’s not the point. The point is, Teague, we both know you’re a better man than that. You’ll kill, yes, out of necessity, and in this case, I’m willing to concede—this guy has to die, and there has to be some theatre so his buddies will go home and tell their buddies to leave us the fuck alone. It’s gone that far, and I don’t have to like it to see that we need it. But you’re not into torture. And even if you were, just for this one time, just to drive Jacky away, you wouldn’t do it because it would be a lie. You’re a better man than lying to him to get him to do the right thing. You’ll let him see the real you, and make his own decision, and that’s why the plan won’t work.”

  Hi
s voice was thick with all the emotion he hadn’t let loose with his mates. “And why’s that?”

  “Because he loves you, dumbshit. You could probably eat the bad guy a piece at a time while Javier watched you and screamed for mercy, and Jacky would be there with a napkin and ketchup. So do what you have to, be all manly if you have to, but be out in the front room in forty-five minutes for dinner, movies, and fattening shit, or I’m having Green drag you out.” I stopped in front of Mario’s door and gave a courtesy knock on the door.

  “Did you hear that, bird-man?”

  The door opened and Mario rolled his eyes at me. His blue-black hair was combed back from his high forehead and he was wearing a tight shirt and loose jeans. Mostly, he was looking none the worse for the wear after his showdown with a rabid werewolf two nights before.

  “Yeah, Princess, I gotchu—don’t worry about bothering Green. I’ll drag wolf-boy out and watch witchu, ‘kay?”

  I smiled at him gratefully, glad he read my cue and admitted he’d heard the whole conversation. “Sounds like a plan—don’t be late!”

  “Who says I don’t want to be alone?” Teague demanded, when he’d found his tongue and his bearings there in Mario’s doorway.

  “Who says you get to?” I snapped back. “As-fucking-IF!” Then I turned around and kept walking, enjoying his grunts of irritation as I went.

  Nobody was alone at Green’s hill. Ever. That was my new goddamned law.

  Teague

  Solace of the Hill

  He didn’t remember that Cory and the others had school until he woke up the next morning.

  Good to her word, during the evening she and a revolving throng of people whom Teague had gotten to know in the last couple of weeks came and went. They would sit down, put a new dessert in Teague’s hand, actively watch television for a while and then move on.