by Amy Lane
CORY
Wounded
“I SHOULD have been here,” Green told me, sometime after the three of them burst into my hospital room like angels of vengeance. Grace was holed up in the windowless shower of the hospital room, and Bracken was sprawled on the vacant bed in the next cubicle. Green had just spent a good hour pulling tape and gauze off my body, now that I didn’t need it anymore. The sun had barely risen, and it beamed a weak, fuzzy gray light through the Bay-area fog.
“Bullshit,” I said against his chest. I breathed in again, lightly, smelling him. He smelled like earth, and mustard flowers, and long dry grasses and oak trees and lime trees and roses. He smelled like home, and I could taste my yearning for home like I could taste the blood that had exploded in my mouth when that fucker Nicky had hit me. My first lover was a vampire—the taste of blood was sweet, life affirming, and noxious all at the same time. My homesickness was a swelling, aching balloon of misery in the pit of my stomach.
“You’re right,” Green agreed, burrowing underneath my hospital gown to touch me more. Green healed with his touch, and I craved it now, maybe more than ever, but I wondered if there was enough touch in him to cure us both. “You’re right,” he said again, after passing his hands along my stomach and my breasts and my thighs. “I shouldn’t have been here—you should have been home, with me, where you belong.”
I couldn’t argue with him. Oh Goddess, I wanted to—I wanted to tell him that I was strong enough, and smart enough, and that I should be able to exist in the big bad city on my own without a babysitter, but I couldn’t. All I could do was burrow my face against his flesh and let the salt tears make a soggy, face-stinging mess of his shirt.
“Yes,” I whimpered against him, shaking with the effort not to sob. “Take me home…. Please, Green, take me home….”
“Oh, yes…,” he said softly into my hair, and I was suddenly happy, as I had not been happy since that one giddy night when Adrian had taken me on a ride on the back of his motorcycle into the Placer County night, or that one, heart-stopping night when… when…. When what…?
“Green….” Don’t panic. Cory, don’t panic. I got socked in the face and thrown into a concrete pole, and anything is possible….
“What, luv?”
How could I ask this? “Green, is there something missing in me?”
“Explain,” he said flatly, as though he was not entirely surprised.
“There’s something I can’t… think…. It’s like, you know when you’re really tired, and driving somewhere, and suddenly you’re home, but you can’t remember because you drive there all the time, and two weeks or a month later you realize they put a stoplight in when you weren’t paying attention and you can’t tell for sure if you’ve been braking, looking both ways, and just blowing off the light because that time was just gone….” I was babbling. I was panicking. There was a hole in my mind somewhere… a big, important hole, and I couldn’t even place where the hole was because it had been stolen so seamlessly from the fabric of my mind….
“Hush…,” Green soothed. To my horror, as I reached for him and that well of sweetness that he’d given to me so often with his touch, he cringed, just for a second, from my touch. Oh, Goddess, had I sucked so terribly at him in my mortal grief these last months that he would need to brace himself against me? My own body started to thrum, in stress and panic and pain, and he murmured, “Hush,” this time with authority, and cocooned me again with his flesh, blanketing me with his skin and his spirit, and I forgot my resolve not to suck him like some emotional vampire and gave a baby’s whimper of contentment. Green could heal me. Together, we would be well….
“We saw it,” Brack said from the next bed, and I flushed uncomfortably, heating Green’s skin and my own with embarrassment. I had thought he was asleep. I didn’t even mind that he had heard us moving our flesh together—I’d had a concussion, bruised ribs, a bruised kidney, and a split lip, but even that crippled coupling had relieved me of those major pains. My first sight of Bracken had been buck naked, and yes indeed, he had a fabulous ass, among other things. But he was an elf. He’d been around for Goddess knows how many years—God didn’t pay attention. So it was not the sex that was embarrassing, but he had seen me cry, whimper like an infant, when I had taken such pains to be brave for Bracken and all his kin. I had told them that I could live with what I had done to protect them… to protect us, all of us… and I couldn’t let that knowledge destroy me now.
Green nodded, his chin rubbing in my hair. It was a mess, a curly red-blonde disaster that went below my ears. Green’s fairy sprites had trimmed it in June, and I needed their services again. “I had no idea what it could be,” Green murmured. Then he tilted my chin up to him and gazed kindly into my eyes. It was that kindness that had sent me spiraling into his eyes from the beginning, putting me into the odd and erotic position of being truly in love with two men who also loved each other. The kindness was no less powerful now, when I was huddled in his arms on a hospital bed, than it had been in June when I was comfortable and sated by Adrian. Adrian’s eyes had not been kind, but they had been beautiful, silver-spangled blue. They had pulled me in from the very beginning, but I hadn’t really fallen into them until… when? I was getting lost, I realized dreamily. Lost in Green’s eyes, drawn back to that brief moment in time when the three of us had snuck off at odd hours in the night like horny teenagers. Well, I was barely twenty, but Green was only a hundred years or so short of the memory of Christ, and Adrian had come over the oceans during the California gold rush.
It should have made them patient, slow, and even bored with love, but we had been urgent, and giddy, and drunk on what our bodies and magic could do. And what could we not do? A garden flashed before my eyes, with oak and lime trees and thornless rose bushes contorted into lovely, sinuous, sensual bodies, bodies I had been in the midst of… bodies I had been…. But I couldn’t remember when… had it been me? Had I been the model for those trees? I could see Green in the lime trees, could remember the stroke of his body on other occasions, but I couldn’t remember that moment…. And Adrian—I could remember Adrian in my bed—I could remember him in my body… but not this moment in time… not when the three of us had done that….
I whimpered a little, thrashed against the pull of those eyes, and saw Green nod a little, as though I had done well.
“Well enough, luv,” he said, but there was something choked in his voice, as though he were holding back tears. “Are you well enough to tell us how you got here?”
Now that should have been easy enough. “Kestrel,” I said, thinking harder than I should have. “His name was Nicky Kestrel—he was in my….” Think, think, think…. “European History 42—The Victorians…. No… no… after that class….” Green’s eyebrows rose. He hadn’t known I’d been taking Victorian history. That was Adrian’s time. The thought of Adrian made Kestrel stronger in my head—the contrast between the two of them had been so great… especially since Nicky had been trying unsuccessfully all semester to fill Adrian’s shoes. But Nicky was small, five feet six or so, where Adrian had been over six feet, and Nicky was pretty. Not that Adrian wasn’t beautiful—Adrian had all those planes and angles in his face that made every woman for a five-mile radius sniff the wind if he so much as blinked in their direction. Nicky, on the other hand, was an average, everyday sort of delicate pretty, and….
“He wasn’t human,” I said, “but he didn’t know I knew that. He’d been hitting on me all semester, and I was curious enough about… you know, if he was one of us… and I let him take me to….” Where? “To eat?” We’d eaten…. Why was this so hard to remember? “But there were other people there….” A thought—“It felt like Green’s hall,” I said abruptly, still looking into Green’s eyes. “People were there, and they were happy and laughing, and they all knew each other… and there was someone….” Who? I’d met him. He’d bent and kissed my hand and sent a look to Nicky, but his face was all in shadows, and only his eyes gl
inted tawny and orange in the dim light of the room. “He was dark—not like a black man, but like… like black wood, or feathers, or a lacquered car….” And he was like Green, for all Green was tall and pale and gold and lovely…. “Leader… and… he was a leader.” But… but Nicky hadn’t wanted to follow him, because he had looked sad when we left. Sorrow. Regret. I knew those two emotions so well I could practically smell them on another person, like a familiar cologne. “I know we were down in the parking lot, and he looked at me like he was sad… like he was sorry for something… and he tried to kiss me….”
Green smiled then, happy, I guess, because he’d been asking me to take a lover if I could. I couldn’t. It would be like trying to bandage a severed limb with sandpaper—but Nicky had been charming, and although I still didn’t know what he was, I had thought there would be nothing wrong with letting him steal one little kiss. I could see, and I let Green see, Nicky’s delicate features, the slight hook to the nose, the pointed chin, little, childlike ears, and the spiky, downy, rust-colored hair that jutted out from a cowlick at the back, swirling a little to the side. But there was a pain to his features as he lowered his head, a regret that he let me see.
Then I felt it. I’d had my eyes open, a pleasant smile on my face, a willingness to kiss and walk away, but something pulled at me—in a bad way. As though all my memories of all my kisses ever were pulled to the surface of my lips, rushing to my face like blood. I fought against it, hard, and Nicky had looked at me then, surprised, angry, as I put my hands on his shoulders and fought to keep my memories to myself. He used force then. I knew that until Green had healed me, I’d still sported Nicky’s fingerprints on my shoulders where he had bent his fingers like talons and pulled me against him, his body hard as a weapon when he mashed his mouth against mine. And that was when I’d felt my mad coming on.
I’d opened my mouth then and let the lethal sunshine that sex, anger, or any strong emotion could conjure up inside of me spin him back into the car behind him. He flew to the back of the garage and into a minivan, where his body broke the window and dented the door; then he rushed at me again. I opened my mouth again—to scream, to punish—and sunshine poured out. But it was a clumsy weapon, great for devastating small armies or terraforming, lousy for taking out one stupid asshole who had betrayed my trust and was trying to mind-fuck me—especially when I was trying to direct it across a parking garage. I almost stamped my foot when he ducked as my power came pouring out—and the Honda behind him melted instantly into goo on the blackened, scorched concrete. Nicky took advantage of my bad aim and stepped to the side before he rushed in as I recharged. He backhanded me physically, with a little bit of supernatural strength in the blow. I’d gone flying back into the wall of the garage and bounced forward into the concrete pole a little to my right, and all was darkness. When I came to, I’d been on a gurney having my clothes cut off and my ribs taped. My next memory after that had been of Green.
And there he was now, gazing into my eyes. I blinked, and then he blinked, and I saw silent tears slipping down his face. How had I missed them? I was drained, sweating, feeling as though I’d been wrung out like a wet towel and snapped against a wall. “Wha—” I tried to speak, but he shhed me again, and I felt his hands on me, stripping me out of my sopping hospital gown and sponging me off from a basin that smelled of herbs and clean water. Bracken must have brought it, I thought fuzzily, but not for long, because suddenly I was in clean sweats—too big—and a T-shirt, with Brack’s favorite Sacramento Kings sweatshirt over the whole thing.
“Where we goin’?” I asked groggily. How long had I been lost in Green’s eyes? I wondered. How long had I been back?
“To the apartment,” Green said briefly. “I called Renny—she’s ready for us.”
“What about Grace?” Hadn’t she been asleep in the shower? I remembered that. I’d made Bracken put an aura—and a sign—in front of it to make people go find the one down the hall.
“I’m right here, sweetie,” she said from beside me, and I looked out the window. Wherever I had been, pulled into Green’s eyes and into my own green pool of memories, it had taken me the day. It was full winter dark in the pink-lit fog outside.
“We can’t leave,” I said, trying hard to be here in the moment. “What will the cops say?”
Green chuckled weakly and looked at Grace. “I’m done in, lovey—would you do the honors here?”
Grace took my face in her hands and kissed my forehead, and suddenly I was six again, and my mother was giving me medicine for a fever, and I was safe and warm even though her hands were as cold as November, and I was asleep.
GREEN
Gathering
NOTHING IN San Francisco was very far away from anything else, and it didn’t take them long to get from the hospital on Mission to the apartment building on Bay and Larkin. It was a tannish, nondescript building from the outside, and not in the best of neighborhoods because the sidhe leader in the area was very careful not to let other elves take up residence near good earth—elves got strength from walking the earth, and Mist wanted his enemies weak within the city. So the Twin Peaks were out, and the lovely homes with yards on Portola were out, and anything near Golden Gate Park was strictly forbidden. But Mist hadn’t counted on Green’s canniness—and he thought it was beneath him to journey to the poorer parts of the city—so he was unaware of the odd little space of grass and eucalyptus trees across from Green’s building. Since none of the sidhe in his sphere knew about it, nobody else had enlightened him, and Green kept it that way.
And the outside might have been nondescript stucco, but the interior was pure Green. Light paneled wood on the floors and walls, ceilings as high as the building’s design would allow, and a large kitchen/dining room that opened into a vast living room/conversation pit made the space open and inviting. Green had bought four apartments and converted them to one large space, so the bedrooms, connected by a narrow hallway, were vast, and each one had its own bathroom and small sitting room space. There was a bedroom-sized darkling in the center of the space, hidden by a broom closet at the end of a deceptively small hall bathroom for vampire guests, and Adrian had stayed there often when Green had come to visit.
The living room/conversation pit had a decorative wooden railing and a brief set of stairs between the raised kitchen and the lowered living room. It was spacious and cozy at the same time, and he’d always found the San Francisco apartment restful, as far as living on the road went. But Renny and Cory had spruced up the place, Green thought as he sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. He’d had it done in blond wood and white brocade with dark green accents, but the girls had done better. There was a rainbow of throw pillows over the couch, pretty drapes in front of the four bedrooms, and a big cardboard trailer poster of How to Train Your Dragon as a backdrop of the living room. That made Green smile, and the effort made his face ache. Christ and Finn, what a day.
Grace slid a plate of food in front of him, then put her arms around his shoulders and pressed her face against his neck. He felt his shoulders start to tremble, and his whole body relaxed. Ah, comfort. Bracken came around the table and wrapped his arms around them both, and Renny twined around their legs in cat form, and they stayed there for a moment, giving strength and receiving it from the simple act of touch. Then, almost in tandem, they straightened, and Grace finished putting food in front of the others, seating herself at the only empty place at the table. Since becoming a vampire, Grace had no use for any food but blood; however, she’d been a housewife for fifteen years before her cancer had awakened the yearning in her to become part of the night. Feeding her family was a habit that never died.
As though to prove it, she gave a tsk-tut sound and glared at Renny, who morphed seamlessly from one-hundred-pound fuzzy, tawny brown cat to one-hundred-pound naked young woman with fuzzy, tawny brown hair. Bracken reached behind him, found the extra T-shirt hanging from his chair, and passed it to her without comment, and she wiggled into it
and sat down. They ate in silence then, and again as Grace refilled their plates, and finally they pushed the plates back and sighed as a whole. Brack broke the spell by looking at Green and saying, “Well?”
Green shook his head. “A shape-shifter of some sort, but he wasn’t acting on his own. He was under orders….”
Brack frowned. “That’s all? A shape-shifter? She should have been able to handle that easily—hell, she should have kicked his ass!”
“That’s not all he was, or all he was given to use….” Green frowned back. “He mind-fucked her—in a big way. And it would have been worse, too, but I don’t think he knew what she was….”
“Mind-fucked?” Grace interrupted. Part of her power as a vampire was the ability to roll someone’s mind—put a person to sleep, hypnotize someone, insert a false memory. These were a vampire’s stock-in-trade.
“Mind-raped—took from her mind something she didn’t want to give… and….” He looked away. He could feel her wound now, even when she was asleep. It was huge, and gaping, and the more she came to, the more she would miss what had been stolen.
“What did he take?” Bracken asked sharply, suddenly more concerned with what Green wasn’t saying than with what he was.
“Memories,” Green said simply. “Her firsts. Her first kisses, her first sex.” His throat tried to close with anger and grief.
“Like… like stealing a computer file?” Brack asked, eyes wide and horrified.
Green nodded.
“She didn’t have that many firsts to steal,” Grace said in shock and pity.
“And all her firsts were…,” Bracken trailed off, and the full import hit everyone at the table.
“Adrian,” Green finished for Bracken. He smiled bitterly.
