by Amy Lane
Copyright
Published by
DSP PUBLICATIONS
5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA
http://www.dsppublications.com/
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Wounded, Vol. 1
© 2015 Amy Lane.
Cover Art
© 2015 Anne Cain.
[email protected]
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact DSP Publications, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dsppublications.com/.
ISBN: 978-1-63216-953-2
Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-954-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014920706
Second Edition June 2015
First Edition published as Wounded: The Second Novel of the Little Goddess
by iUniverse, 2006
Printed in the United States of America
This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For Mate? Oh yeah. Because releasing these books was my Christmas present for six years. And because you believed they were important. And for Mary, who never, ever, ever lets me disrespect my craft. And for my oldest two children, who were actually really young when Mom started writing, and who didn’t mind if I wept over my keyboard periodically.
I’d be lost without you.
And for Lynn and Elizabeth. Of course.
PREFACE
I REMEMBER this moment really clearly.
I was in my husband’s friends’ kitchen, and the women were talking, like we do, and these two women had read Vulnerable. And one of them turned to me and said, “So, are you writing the sequel?”
And I said, “Uh, sure.”
And inside I was going, “Somebody wants more? OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!”
And in that one question, I suddenly had it. Green misses Cory, Cory’s not doing well without Green, bad things ensue, and…
Oh, hello.
Bracken was a surprise.
Bracken was a huge surprise.
Bracken was an “I have to go back and edit Vulnerable because it’s so obvious that he’s been in love with her since the beginning!” surprise.
And their relationship…
Oh man. I had never dreamed of writing a relationship with that much friction—or that much passion. Bracken was my first realization that a character could grow way beyond who I was, and beyond any of my experiences as well. Bracken just was—elemental and grumpy and immovable.
And the world! The world got bigger and more involved, and it was as simple as exploring the world I lived in. After all, I had gone to San Francisco State for a year—I loved that city too. (It’s changed, by the way, since I went to school, since I wrote the book—nothing about that city is the way I remember it. *sigh*) So when I took a trip to the city, because I was writing it, and I realized that the buildings were so tall that if you weren’t walking toward a particular building, you might not notice the building itself had changed, even if you walk by it all the time.
And I noticed that there is an energy that comes from being by salt water, and that if you were a being whose energy was contained by salt water, odd and dreamlike things might happen.
And I remembered my own time at San Francisco State, when my Mate was far away, and how every day was a struggle to wake up and greet the world.
So Wounded was a lesson in so many things. It was a lesson in how a work can take on a life of its own, and how a story is waiting in every word of what was written before. It was a lesson in taking the real and the fantastic and twining them together, and in how my own peculiar worldview—that of strange and magical happenings that I just wasn’t aware of—was something I could write, and that others could embrace.
And most importantly, it was a lesson that someone besides me would want to know what comes next.
And that writing it would always be an adventure.
Who will staunch
This river of blood
This river of blood
This river of blood?
Who will staunch
This river of blood
That pours from my heart to my soul?
Because if someone won’t stop it
This river of blood,
The breach in the dam will just grow.
So who can heal
This tear in my heart
This tear in my heart
This tear in my heart?
Who will heal
This tear in my heart
From whence my life and pain spill?
My bonny bright lover
Dreaming immortal dreams
Can heal me,
If only he will.
GREEN
Healing
THE BOY was young and plain, with sandy hair and a smattering of freckles that hadn’t disappeared although he was more than twenty-one. But in the sunlight of the bedroom, he was beautiful. With reverence he reached out a hand to the inhumanly lovely sidhe next to him, looking as he did so at the over-wide-set eyes the color of new emeralds in shadows, the clean-lined, narrow nose, the strong jaw and sensual mouth. After touching Green with his eyes, the boy used his hand to touch him languorously, his hand on Green’s elongated stomach, his semihard manhood, his flank—smooth as marble—and back again.
Green thought fondly that Owen didn’t really need this anymore—he was seeking Green’s comfort more from habit than from need. But that was okay, Green realized fretfully, because his power as a sidhe was in healing, and so it comforted him to be Owen’s habit. And he didn’t want to look at Cory’s empty room one more time.
“Where are you?” the boy asked, and Green was truthful.
“I miss her,” he said, and there was no translation needed.
“It’s only one weekend, Green.” And in spite of Green’s immortality, Owen was the one who sounded like the exasperated parent.
“It’s more than one weekend,” Green said after a moment, turning on his side and starting a slow, lazy, skilled stroke of his own. “She’s been gone as long as Adrian has… except she comes home. She comes here, she crawls into our bed and shivers, and shivers, and begs me to make her warm.”
“But you do,” Owen said quietly, arching his back, his breathing beginning to quicken. They had lain silently in the big oak-framed bed for a long time. It was a good-bye, Green recognized now. Owen was saying good-bye to this part of them—Owen didn’t need him anymore, not like this. “You… do…,” the boy hissed, and Green moved down, taking his shaft into his mouth. It was a tight fit, a pleasurable chore, a skill Green had always enjoyed.
“Come,” he whispered, his breath tickling the head of Owen’s cock, wanting to see Owen’s face this last time before he let his fledgling out into the world—healed, happy, ready to love on his own.
“Say it first,”
Owen insisted, fisting his hand into Green’s hair, pulling it back to expose the pointed ears, the faint green cast to the delicate flesh behind the ears. It was a demand, a surprising one from a lover who’d been so scarred by sadism, by drugs, by a corruption of the sex act, to ask such a thing without causing or receiving pain. He took his own body from Green’s control, stroked it in his fist, running his thumb over the glistening end. Green felt a hunger for the boy then, and enjoyed that.
“Say it,” Owen said again. “Tell me that you make her warm, that she needs you like you need her…. Say… it….” He was close. Agonizingly close. Green almost wept with the wanting of the purple head in his mouth, and the taste, and with the boy’s touching refusal to believe that there was a wound that Green couldn’t heal.
“She needs me,” he said, praying it was true. “She needs me so badly she doesn’t know how to ask….” And Owen pressed the back of Green’s head, and Green devoured him, his prick, his kindness, his seed, because Owen had asked, and Green could only do his best to make his people happy.
LATER THAT night, he met and greeted his people, taking bread with them in the vast hand-carved downstairs dining hall and letting his leaders and captains report to him—Arturo, the second-most powerful sidhe at his hill and his second-in-command, and Grace, acting head of the vampires now that Adrian was gone. While he listened with half an ear, Green reflected on Cory, and Owen’s assumption that Cory would let him heal her.
She was more than wounded; she was bleeding and numb. When she had gone off to college, he had assumed that some distance, some space between herself and the preternatural community that had caused her such joy and such heartbreak, would do her good—it would give her time to grieve and time to come to terms with her new role in the world. Because her life had changed. She had gone from being a gas station clerk with hopes of college to the head vampire’s lover, and his elven lover’s lover, and to being perhaps the most powerful mortal sorceress Green had ever encountered. And then Adrian, the one who had set the whole thing in motion, had gone and gotten himself killed, marking her with a third vampire mark and leaving her the queen of the Foresthill undead as well.
It was a lot to take in, Green had thought at the time, when, after a month, Cory didn’t seem to be any less lost than she had been the morning after Adrian’s blood had covered them both like summer rain. Maybe she needed to be normal. Maybe she needed to be free. So he had packed her into a brand new BMW, shipped her off to the college of her choice, and held her to him only with the solemn promise to visit whenever she could.
She came back every weekend, and it was all Green could do to pull her out of bed when she was there. Not in a good, can-we-make-love-all-afternoon way, either, but in a frantic, stay-here-and-be-inside-of-me-so-I-won’t-feel-empty kind of way. Green’s worry for her sanity was not quite eclipsed by his certainty that the decision to let her leave had been terribly, terribly wrong.
Her decision to stay in San Francisco for a party had actually been a relief—he longed to see her again, but he also longed for her to feel happy, complete, and confident once more. That confidence was a part of her, and he missed it. It was a good sign, the desire to meet other people. He almost hoped she’d take a lover that night. He’d asked her if she would want to. He could not afford to be monogamous—too much of his preternatural power lay in being worshipped in bed, and too many of the people who fed that power depended on him for safety. He had no right to ask it of her. But Cory had begun to cry when he’d mentioned it, saying that he was never unfaithful to her or Adrian in spirit, which was true, and that she didn’t think her heart could bear another lover after Adrian, which, unfortunately, was also true. So he could hope she spent her night sweating, demanding, getting fucked beyond her wildest dreams, so that when she came to him it would be for companionship as well as for a mate, but mostly he could hope that she had a good time.
At 2:39 a.m. she cried out for his help, and he was one hundred and fifty miles away.
GREEN WAS out the door and down the long, mazed hall before the cry in his head had faded. He crashed into Arturo’s room to find his second—and Grace, his other second—naked and sweaty, and both facing the door.
“Holy fuck…,” Grace choked, separating from Arturo and covering her lanky, broad-hipped form with a blanket. The red-haired vampire and Green had made love before, it was true, but until she’d died, she’d had only one lover, and that had been her husband. She was not quite as casual as Arturo, who sat back on his heels, panting, looking at his large erection in frustration and then glowering at Green. He cleared his throat in the shocked moment of silence, but Green stepped into it first.
“Cory’s hurt… worse…,” he said, closing his eyes, thinking about her. “Something preternatural….” He opened his eyes, looked frantically at them, not seeing their nakedness or their shock, only seeing his lieutenants, whom he needed. “I’m leaving in ten minutes.”
“Take the Suburban,” Grace choked out as she tumbled to the floor in a bundle of plaid sheets. “I’ll come with you and put Phillip and Marcus in charge.” Phillip had been a stockbroker when he was alive—he’d love to be in charge. Marcus had been a schoolteacher—he’d hate it. Between the two of them, they’d be both fair enough not to stir up trouble and autocratic enough to keep any of the vampires—already lost and puzzled from the loss of their leader—from going on a blood rampage. Adrian had been the only vampire in his kiss old enough and powerful enough to turn a living human into a walking receptacle for the Goddess, and without him, the others couldn’t channel enough power or sheer, stinking will to bring the dead back to life. Of course, with Adrian gone and Cory carrying three of his psychic marks on her neck, Cory should have led the vampires. But she’d been Adrian’s girl for less than two months before he’d died, and as powerful as their love had been, her connection to his world had been tenuous. The vampires loved her. They were dying to follow her. But many of them had been dead for decades, and they could wait patiently for their beloved living queen.
“I’ll wake Bracken,” Arturo said decisively. “He’ll want to go too.” He looked at Green calmly. “Don’t worry, leader, we’ll all be here when you get back. We always are.”
“I’m always grateful,” Green said before he turned to walk out the door. Without bothering to get dressed, Arturo followed him, moving down the hall and up the stairs to wake Cory’s self-appointed big brother, her other favorite elf.
GRACE MIGHT have been five feet ten of mama vampire, but Bracken was six feet six inches of freaked-out elf. As they shouldered their way through the late night hum of the city hospital, both looking grim in sunglasses (at night!) and trench coats, it was no wonder that patients, nurses, and doctors dodged out of their way. Green, emanating a glow of calm and forgetfulness to counter the terror the other two were instilling, trailed after them like the reigning monarch he was. The admitting nurse would have protested the invasion, but Grace removed her glasses and rolled the little girl’s mind. In less than two minutes, they were through the waiting room and in the elevator, headed for the trauma ward. Oddly enough, no one wanted to board the elevator behind them.
They continued to sweep through the scored taupe corridors, Grace following the directions unerringly as she saw them through the nurse’s memories. Anybody who thought to stop them simply forgot that they were there. Green would have told Bracken to tamp down the glamour, if he hadn’t been responsible for at least half of it himself. And a left, and a right, and around a cart of linens and past a darkened room shadowed with sobbing, and another right into another room, and abruptly there she was.
She looked small, Green thought. All people looked small on hospital beds—they were wide and white, and rumpled because the sheets were thick and had no elastic to keep them in place. But Cory was five feet two on a good day—and this wasn’t a good day. She’d lost more weight, too. She had been plump once. That night Green had first seen her, hosing off her parking lot to cover for the
death of one of his people, she’d been plump and substantial. Experience—stress—had honed her, and by the time of Adrian’s death she was still substantial but leaner, more muscular—powerful. Now she was tiny. Delicate. The bones of her face stood out, and her chin pointed where it hadn’t pointed before. Her nose was not small, but now it looked knife-edged, and her cheekbones—peasant low, but charmingly placed—made her face look stretched, pinched, unhappy even when lax with drugs. Green closed his eyes against her there in the hospital bed, trying to summon an image of Cory as vital, vibrant, strong, and sexual, to fight the tearing sensation in his chest. With his eyes closed, things were worse.
Brack saw it too, and made a swooshing sound in his throat, and Green could not stand in the doorway anymore. He moved, so quickly the curtain around the vacant bed in the front of the room blew back, spewing little metal clips that hit the floor long after Green had taken her in his arms.
Grief poured from him. Grief, and love, and his own particular magic of sex and healing and need that stirred a spark on her skin, moved the blood quicker in her veins, and had her back arching and her thighs clenching even under the murkiness of morphine. Within the circle of his arms, she convulsed gently, whispered rawly, and went limp against him. When her breathing recovered, it wasn’t the shallow breathing of the drugged sleeper, but the deeper, more animated breathing of the waking lover. Her bruises faded, the pinched look between her eyes eased, and her body, which had been taped and bandaged, relaxed against the sheets. Some wounds are easier to heal than others.
She took one look at Green, her moss green eyes moving over his face, and her own face broke out into a smile, weak but full of sunshine.
“I knew you’d come.” She smiled, and Bracken and Grace, because they were awake and had sat in the Suburban with him during the fraught trip to the city, could smell remorse that rolled off of Green and through the room like sweet perfume.
