by Amy Lane
“I’ve been gone for three days, and I want to go back,” he admitted, stroking my hair from my face. “How can you stand it?”
“It’s so stupid,” I said, a weak tear trickling down my nose. “I’m old enough to go away to school. But I didn’t leave my parents’ home when I came here, I left Green’s home. I fell in love with Adrian there. I fell in love with Green. I mean….” I sighed helplessly and looked up at Bracken, and his expression was grim, as always, but compassionate too, and I tried to articulate what had spilled out so helplessly on Green. And even though it was Bracken, and I had tried to be so strong for him, I thought that maybe he’d understand. “I fell in love with home. And it’s so stupid!” I repeated, this time with passion. “I love this city. I love the clubs with the music. I love the stupid fog. I love the theater. My whole life I wanted to get out of the freaking foothills of California, but now all I can think of is going back, because I fell in love with Green’s home and Green’s people, and now I want to be there again. I mean I’m, what? A hundred and fifty miles from home?”
“Too far,” Bracken said. “You’re too far from home.”
“It feels like a hundred-and-fifty-mile hole in my heart,” I told him, feeling that hole heal a little just to say it. “Can you really fall in love with a life? With a… preternatural flophouse for the fey and undead, just by falling in love with its leaders?”
“Have you?” Bracken asked, kissing my hair.
“I guess so,” I answered, feeling a little humbled by his tenderness. Big brother Bracken—not a bad guy for someone I’d had to knee in the balls upon our first meeting. “I wish I could just ‘appear’ like the sprites, and that I didn’t even have to drive.”
He chuckled then. “Speaking of the sprites,” he said, his laughter brushing against the top of my head, “they’ve been whining to Green since we got here. It seems that you and Renny don’t give them enough to do.”
Crap on toast, I thought, I hadn’t known any sprites had come with us. But then I tried to remember the last time one of us had cleaned a toilet and I came up with a big fat blank, so I said archly, “They could always cook.”
“But then you’d stop feeding them junk food,” Bracken said sincerely, and I found myself giggling helplessly into his chest. “Nicky,” he said suddenly, and my giggles died a natural death.
“What about him?” I asked, feeling dumb. “We were friends all semester, Renny, Nicky, and I. We went to clubs, saw some shows, drank a shitload of coffee. He told me his family was in town, and he wanted a date to make them comfortable about him being here and going to school….” I felt so dumb about this. At first I’d wondered if he wanted a cover date—I had suspicions that he might be gay—and being surrounded by the fey and undead, almost bisexual by lifespan, curiosity, and lack of censure, I’d thought I’d be a good bet for that sort of thing. And a good friend.
“He wanted more,” Bracken said flatly. I wondered if he knew this, or if the thing he wanted to happen between us was speaking and not knowledge.
“I figured that when he tried to kiss me,” I said dryly. “I was going to say no.”
“I thought so,” Bracken said, all arrogance.
“You wanted me to take another lover,” I told him in irritation. He could be such an asshole.
His fingers cupped my chin again, more roughly this time, and my head tilted up to meet his gaze. “When Adrian was alive, an inconsequential lover would have made your life easier,” he said bluntly.
I bit my lip and stated the obvious. “Adrian is gone,” I whispered.
“And I will not be an inconsequential lover,” he told me firmly, and of a sudden, I felt a tingle through my body—one of those breathless, loin-gushing, nipple-hardening rushes that said Yes, Goddess, yes, I want this man to touch me everywhere. And I realized that he was right. Adrian gave his day to the Goddess. Green gave his life to his people. Bracken would give himself only to me.
“You scare me,” I told him bluntly, breathlessly, but before I could explain why, there was a tremendous ruckus in the front room. Even as we rushed out of my room to see what it was, I could feel an almost physical hurt where Bracken wasn’t holding me anymore.
What met our eyes when we reached the living room stunned us silent for a moment. Renny was in giant house-cat form, tawny brown hair raised at the neck and lip curled over her long carnivorous teeth. She was standing on her hind legs with her forepaws on one of the two huge bookshelves that flanked the front room, batting at a giant brown predatory bird with rust-colored tips to his black wing feathers.
I realized, when my shock had cleared and I got a good look, that the bird she was batting at was Nicky Kestrel. He was a lot worse for the wear, and I felt bad for him. Poor bird had gone home to Papa and gotten some feathers ripped out, if the blood on his wings meant anything. And Renny was about to make his situation worse.
“Renny,” I called. “Renny, sweetie, don’t hurt him—look, he’s been hurt enough.” But the only response I got from Renny was the growling in her throat that usually meant she was about to crunch on some poor pigeon. “Shit. Where’s Green?” I looked around the room. Max was standing near the couch, looking as though he was through with trying to get Renny to do anything at all. Bracken was behind me, and Green was nowhere to be seen.
“He took off right after you guys went down for your little nap,” Max said unhappily. “Renny and I were watching TV. Nicky came and knocked on the door, I answered it, and the next thing I know, he’s a bird and she’s right there. Have any of you ever thought of just putting a leash on her and forgetting the whole ‘girl’ thing?”
“Fuck you,” I shot back, and my anger made my next command far more authoritative. “Renny, goddammit, down,” I barked, and to my surprise she sat, her tail swishing and the growling in her throat mutinous. I gave a sigh of relief and went over to her, crouching on my knees to speak in her ear and burying my hand in the silky fur at her nape. “Remember Nicky? I know he hurt me, but it was a mistake. He’s a friend, remember?” Bracken made a sound in his throat that was similar to Renny’s, and I shot him a quelling look. “Don’t start, you,” I snapped, and turned my attention back to Renny. “C’mon, sweetie,” I cajoled. “Let him change into a boy again—we need to hear what he has to say.” The growling in her throat stilled as she lay flat on the floor, putting her chin on her forepaws. I scratched the top of her head and made a few clucking sounds to Nicky. I guess that’s how you call a falcon—like I would have a freaking clue.
Nicky apparently knew what it meant, because he swooped gracefully down off the bookshelf to land on my arm. Then, with a miserable shiver, because I could see that he was missing a lot of feathers, he was suddenly standing in front of me, fully clothed—and I would wonder at that later, because when Renny changed, her clothing didn’t go with her. (This was why she spent her days in public wearing things like the flowing, shapeless woolen dress that Max still had in his hands.) But there he was, and he was bleeding and sobbing and then stumbling into my arms. Ah, Goddess, I sighed. Poor Nicky. I wondered what hurt worse—the giant ripping wounds on his arms and chest, or the disillusionment of knowing that you’ve hurt people and you couldn’t take it back. Without a second thought, I wrapped my arms around him in comfort, and to my surprise, enough of the girl remained in Renny for her to change form and comfort him too.
“Stupid fucker,” she murmured in her slight voice. But there was compassion there and affection too, and I realized that my rage against Nicky had faded completely. As I rocked him back and forth, I met Bracken’s eyes, and between us was the knowledge that among us foothills folk, a whole new rage was starting to form, with an entirely different target.
“Fix him,” Bracken muttered gruffly. “Those wounds were made with power as well as talons, so you’ll have to wait for Green to have them heal completely, but there’s first aid in the darkling bathroom. I’m going to find out where the hell Green went.” And with that he grabbed Officer Max a
nd pulled him through the front door. Renny’s dress came sailing through the air to punctuate the snick of the lock, and I realized they wanted to give us a chance to talk to Nicky when he wouldn’t be intimidated. Of course this was a total laugh, because Brack hadn’t reckoned on his own capacity to scare Nicky shitless.
“Shh…,” I told Nicky a few minutes later when he hissed in pain. His upper torso had been entirely raked by what appeared to be bird talons of a huge size. He grimaced and apologized, but I waved him off. I was frequently known to turn my head and vomit when confronted with great pain—who was I to throw stones?
“So,” I began when I started the next bandage, “are you really a kestrel falcon? Because you look bigger.”
“I’m Avian,” he said shortly, then shrugged. “We’re really all one kind of bird that sort of evolved with family traits. We started taking bird last names through the years, sort of an Avian pride thing.”
“Ah…,” I said, taking a delicate swipe at the tanned skin on his upper arm with a cotton ball and hydrogen peroxide. The tan fascinated me for a moment, because you don’t get tan from the sidhe or the vampires, but then I saw how deep the scratch was and had to ask, “What got you?”
“Eyeass,” he muttered. “I always knew he had a mean streak, but he turned on me in a heartbeat.”
“What happened?” Renny asked, and because it was Renny it didn’t sound like prying.
“Goshawk…,” Nicky said and shook his head. His usually flawless rust-colored hair was a spiky mess, and he looked damned forlorn. “I told him—I told him that I’d taken something from you that you didn’t want to give. I asked to get it back. He got the weirdest expression on his face….” His own expression twisted, and he looked at me, searching for words. “It was like a junkie, remembering his best fix. He said that no, I couldn’t give that particular memory back. Then he got all sharp faced and said that he couldn’t give back any of them.” Nicky shook his head again, denying, I thought, his leader’s duplicity. I didn’t blame him. It would be like finding out that your own people didn’t give you the information you needed to save your beloved. Or like being date-raped by a friend.
“I asked him why,” Nicky continued. “I asked him why, if this was just to make our people strong, why couldn’t we only take what wasn’t needed… and I said ‘It’s not like we’re fighting for our lives or anything.’ Goshawk said we were. He said that the Goddess’s children would never let the Avians live—that they were too jealous of our God….”
Renny and I both laughed, the kind of snork you make when your tongue is glued to the roof of your mouth in concentration and then you spit air out through it and you’re not ready. “Your God…,” Renny snorked incredulously, but I shushed her, because Nicky was looking hostile.
“We were taught that all shape-changers were the Goddess’s get,” I said gently. “That the Goddess came down, frolicked a bit, and, well, bore the weres and made the vampires….” My voice trailed off with that one, because the story was unbelievably sad. “And that her adventures with the other are what created the fey,” I finished. “You’re a were—a shape-changer. We just assumed you were Goddess’s get.”
Nicky looked pained. “That’s what I was always taught too,” he admitted. “I was told that the Goddess came down as a male hawk, and lived out the bird’s life with one mate, and that’s why hawks mate for life and carry through the male line.”
I grimaced. “Then what was that crap you were just….”
Nicky grimaced too. “Goshawk. As soon as I came into the city, he was inviting me to his hall, feeding me, having deep discussions about how we’d been lied to and how we’d been deprived of the love of God by the lies of the Goddess….”
“That’s bullshit…,” Renny burst out. “There’s nothing in the stories about God not loving….”
“I know,” Nicky said tiredly. “I know. It was bullshit. But I was alone in a new place, and I didn’t know any other of Goddess’s get here….”
“You knew us!” Renny returned. “You had to know. If you couldn’t smell weretabby on me a mile away, you shouldn’t have lived this long.”
“You I knew about,” Nicky conceded. “But you were… you were hurt… you seemed lost, and Cory was your only anchor, and I never even guessed what she was until she nearly cooked me in the parking garage.”
“Not before you mind-raped me,” I pointed out grimly, giving a scratch on his back an unnecessarily rough scrub with the washcloth.
Nicky looked away from me, not even reacting to the physical pain. “You’ll never know my shame,” he said formally, and I sighed.
“So what did you say when Goshawk told you about the war?” I asked.
Nicky shrugged. “I said that I couldn’t fight that war, and that I’d do everything I could to repair the damage I’ve wrought on the women I’ve stolen from.”
“And then?”
“And then Eyeass and Osprey turned bird right there in the room and kicked my ass. And then I turned and barely got away.” He grinned then. “Kestrels do pretty good in cities as well as wide open spaces,” he said proudly, liking the play on his name.
“Well, I’m glad you survived,” I said at last, meaning it.
“All that,” he said, pulling away from me and slipping on the clean T-shirt that Renny had snagged him from Green’s drawer, “and I’ll be lucky if that ‘day lover’ of yours doesn’t kill me in my sleep.”
“But you haven’t met Gree…. Oh….” I figured it out after a moment. “You mean Bracken. He’s not my ‘day lover.’ That’s Green—he should be back soon.”
“Oh,” Nicky said, frowning. “I must be out of practice, but I could have sworn….”
“It wasn’t your imagination,” Renny said in disgust. “Bracken would have made his move this summer, but he and Adrian didn’t share well.”
“I didn’t know they’d ever tried,” I said, not as surprised as I might have been.
Renny shook her head, bemused by the antics of the other Goddess’s get. “They were close, you know? When they weren’t competing for the same girl, they were each other’s booty call.”
Nicky looked appalled, but I wasn’t surprised at that either. The first time I’d seen Bracken from a distance, I had guessed. “It makes sense,” I said mildly. “Adrian loved women. If his childhood hadn’t been so completely fucked up, he might have been a ladies’ man completely. But as it was….” I tried to put it into words. “As it was, women were something wonderful that he loved, but… but he could only relate to men as human beings, you know?”
“Until you,” Renny said gently, as though aware she might have hurt me by her earlier candor.
“Until me,” I agreed. “But,” I continued crisply, starting to clean gauze, tape, and hydrogen peroxide out of the spacious bathroom, “that didn’t last long, now did it?”
“How did he die?” Nicky asked into the sudden quiet.
“Adrian had enemies he didn’t know about.” And the bitterness in my voice had even Renny looking up, but then, Renny didn’t know. “And they started out preying upon the were-folk.”
“Mitch was the first to go,” Renny muttered, and I was surprised because I didn’t think she could even say it.
“And there were others,” I finished for her. “They started coming after me, because I was Adrian’s girl… but….”
“But you can cook people?” Nicky said as I tried to put that first awkward, terrifying, exhilarating use of power into words.
I nodded, painfully. “You don’t know the half of it,” I added aridly. “When they figured that out, they forced a confrontation by snatching Renny-puss here, and cop-fuck Max.” It was my turn to look away. “Sezan worked with sound. He had this organ hooked up to a big silver net….”
“I tried to warn him,” Renny choked out forlornly. That guilt had weighed heavily on her, no matter how hard I tried to comfort her.
“I know, puss, I know,” I soothed her, hugging her to me. She
was wearing that shapeless wool thing, and underneath it her ribs were clearly defined. Neither of us had been eating much this last semester. But I had to finish the thought. “So he flew into it and disintegrated.”
Nicky gasped, and I found that I was bright eyed, on the brink of falling apart, but I couldn’t just leave the story there. “So Green—he and Adrian had been, like, like….” I was making vague gestures in the air with my hands, because “lovers” was such a tame word for what Green and Adrian had been. Protector to protected, parent to child, oldest child to youngest child, brothers in arms, best friends, best lovers… not a single human word covered the span of their relationship, the scope of Green’s grief. “Anyway, they’d been together since the gold rush, and Green’s heart felt like it was ripped out, so he let his grief rip out Sezan’s and Crispin’s hearts literally. He held their beating hearts in his hands until they both barfed blood and died.”
Nicky’s face went a little gray around his pouty lips. “And you?” he asked in a tight voice.
“You know, in Star Trek,” I said musingly, “when you hear that phaser start charging to overload, and you know that it either needs to be deactivated or it will explode?”
“Yeah….”
“That was me. Green… well, he knew I was a weapon, so he grabbed my arms while I was charging, and I could still feel Adrian like baby’s breath in my face, and so it was the three of us again. We… I….” How to explain? “I do fearsome things when I’m touching people who love me.” Understatement. And there was more to it, but it was on the fringes of that big black hole that Nicky himself had left. Unlike that memory, though, this one was mine, and it was clear, and, Goddess help me, it was with me forever because no one else would want to claim it. “I charged. And I charged. And Green screamed at his people to move, and they moved, and like a good weapon, I fired.”
“What do you mean?”
I turned from Renny, who was holding my hand to her cheek, and looked Nicky in the eye. “I mean you were lucky, Nicky. I melted two acres of slag rock into obsidian that night. And I turned a hundred vampires to vapor and dust.” Then my voice choked on the few small details that always seemed to hurt the worst. “I almost killed Arturo, because he was rescuing Renny at the time. And Bracken’s hair….” It had been beautiful, like a black silk cloak. “Bracken too…,” I forced out. My throat was so tight I could barely speak, and suddenly I had to leave the room.
