Wounded, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  The bodies had been harder to account for—but even then, Max had come in handy by saying that they had been caught in an explosion caused by improper chemical storage. It was a weak story, and it never would have been believed if Max hadn’t dispatched several vampires to the morgue with the ambulances (and the unconscious drivers) to smooth things over with the mortal world and its need for times, dates, and paperwork. There would be holes, certainly, but Max had dealt with those holes as a cop before he knew what caused them.

  “People will believe in incompetence, in freak chance, in brutality—but a magic hole in the wall and vampires?” He’d shaken his head, slightly crossed blue eyes weary and cynical. “They’d rather believe in human monsters than inhuman ones.”

  Grace had fed from one of the grateful weres, although she’d been in better shape than the other vampires, having only been captive for a day. But she was shaken from her face-off with an entire kiss of older vamps, from the attack at the beginning that had nearly killed Brack, and from finding the bodies of the were-folk in the first place. Grace had only been dead for twenty or so years—not nearly long enough to grow accustomed to seeing life thrown away so casually. She was also heartbroken for Nicky, and for Green, and even for Bracken and Cory. “It hurt to watch them,” she told Green later, leaning into him for comfort. “They weren’t ready for this dance, neither of them. Last night, Green. Last night, she actually thought about it, thought about this new relationship. Tonight, she’s….”

  “Balls deep in it,” Green had supplied dryly, and Grace rolled her eyes and gave him a weary smile.

  “Do you ever have to remind yourself that she’s not old enough to drink legally?” Grace asked at last.

  “It only occurs to me when she’s not here,” Green told her honestly, wanting the night to be over with so he could curl up in a corner with this thought to keep him warm. “I can’t imagine making the choice she made tonight.” He shook his head in wonder. “What was it like, the fountains of dancing blood?”

  Grace laughed, shook her head as he had. “It was pretty fucking amazing,” she said with some satisfaction. “In a thousand years, I wouldn’t have thought about feeding vampires like that.” Suddenly she giggled. “You should have heard them bragging about who they got….” And without warning she sobered again. “Poor Nicky—not even the vampires were happy to have him.” She reached over Green then and kissed the sleeping Nicky on the forehead with all of her maternal instincts at the forefront.

  But the ordeal—and the exhausting day—had taken its toll on everybody in the car. Renny and Max were curled against each other, sleeping soundly. Even Green was nodding off, dreaming of his own home instead of the San Francisco apartment and thinking, in his haze, that all of his dear ones needed peace, desperate, desperate peace.

  They had a few scant hours of peace in the end—enough to stagger out of the car into the apartment building and make it to their rooms. Max went with Renny, Green noted, for comfort, not sex—but he was sure the other would come in time. Grace went to the darkling, but he saw the light blinking on the apartment phone when she left, so he was pretty sure Arturo was getting an earful. Nicky went with Green.

  The boy was traumatized, Green knew. A borderline homophobe, he’d been aroused not just by seeing Cory and Bracken make love, but by Green’s highly sexual presence as well. His first sexual experience had been bizarre and careless—Nicky had been introduced into the world of sensuality by brutal necessity and bitter remorse on the parts of all parties involved. And unlike others in his situation, he wouldn’t have the luxury of finding a soul mate to make that initial pain go away. He was stuck, for better or for worse, with Green and Cory—provided she was willing to take yet another man to her bed. If anyone needed healing at this moment, it was Nicky Kestrel.

  And, Green had to admit, he was feeling a little bereft himself. Healing was what he did. Healing Nicky would help heal the ache in his own heart that came with sharing what had never been wholly his to begin with.

  Nicky was awakened gently, with hands on his body, a whispering voice, pleasant sensations in sensitive areas. He was so wounded, so heart-weary and aching, that when he finally came to his senses enough to question gender, he was deep in Green’s mouth and spasming euphorically, hands clenched in Green’s hair, body rocked with honest passion and sweet desire. After, Green held the boy, spoke to him lowly about being cared for, about being loved, about what it would mean to be a part of Green’s household and with people who would die before they failed him. Nicky wept a little, talked about Cory a little and his hopeless, pure, adolescent love for the girl with the sarcastic sense of humor and haunted eyes that he’d met in computer class at college. Green told him about his first meeting with Cory, about Adrian, about loss, about love. They fell asleep together, Nicky curled up for solace, and Green thought, as he listened to Nicky’s gentle breathing, that yes, they had their peace.

  Just after dawn Cory cried out again. She was exhausted, sick, and under siege, and once again nobody in Green’s place could help her.

  CORY

  Wounded: Redux and Backatcha

  WE SLEPT a little, Bracken and I, and I awoke rolled to my side. As impossible as it sounds, Bracken was still inside of me. Both of us were covered with a blue-and-red comforter richer than anything I’d ever seen.

  “Uhm, Brack?” I ventured. “Bracken….” He muttered something and clutched me tighter, and I would have indulged in his heat and his smell a little before I started fretting with trivialities, except… “Bracken—who in the hell is Dewey Anne, and where in the blue fuck are we?”

  “Wha’?” And suddenly, naked from the waist down and half-asleep, he was standing on the mattress, crouched in a fighting pose. I was so surprised I fell off the bed. Note to self—don’t wake this man in midsleep or he may kill you with his bare hands.

  “Where the hell are we?” Bracken asked from his crouch on the bed.

  “That’s pretty much exactly what I asked you!” I giggled. Bracken looked down at me, flushed, and hopped off the bed so lightly I couldn’t hear his feet thud on the floor. He bent down and offered me a hand, and I stood, clutching the comforter to my chest. It was stupid, really, because I was still wearing my sweatshirt and my bra, and even my jeans weren’t off entirely, but wrapped around one foot—the one with the tennis shoe still on it. We were in a well-lit, spacious, beautiful hotel room instead of the icky, grimy, filthy warehouse. The walls were done in light oak paneling and burgundy and forest green wallpaper—the kind with the raised velveteen curlicues—and there was matching burgundy carpet under my feet. We were in a freaking rich man’s paradise, but I was still dressed in the dusty, stained clothes I’d put on that morning.

  “We just made love,” Bracken said, stripping off his ruined sweatshirt. There were giant bloody rips in the back where one of Goshawk’s people had almost rent out his life, and my eyes fixed on those in fear for a moment. Bracken took my attention gently back to his living self by reaching his long-fingered hands out and covering my own hands with his. Then he gently pried my clenched hands away from my chest and forced them to relax, so that the comforter fell to the floor. Moving quietly, he bent down and took off my shoe and then helped me step out of my jeans and panties. I stood and let him, but I couldn’t stop myself from clenching my hands under my arms when he went to take off my sweatshirt.

  “Where are we?” I asked stubbornly, and a smile quirked at his hard, thin-lipped mouth.

  “If I try to figure out where we are, will you take off that damned shirt?” he asked patiently.

  “That depends on where we are,” I told him, not meeting his eyes. The smile bloomed, and he bent and took my mouth with his. His hands ran up my hips in one smooth stroke, and as I put my hands on his ribs (his shoulders were pretty high up, no matter how he bent down to kiss me), he continued the caress under my shirt and deftly removed it when I was too lost in his kiss to demur. He broke from me briskly, grabbed the comforter and
wrapped it around my shoulders, sat me on the bed, and then walked toward the windows, which were shaded with heavy green drapes and tinted glass. Carefully he looked outside and then turned to grin at me.

  “What?”

  “We’re still in the warehouse,” he said, incredulous, admiring.

  “We’re not in the warehouse,” I told him patiently. “This is obviously not the warehouse.”

  “Okay, okay. We’re not in the warehouse, but this building is where the warehouse used to be. Come look, Corinne Carol-Anne—they can’t see us.” Probably because I continued to stare at him as though he were speaking Old Elvish.

  Still dragging the comforter behind me, I got off the bed and did as he told me, peering gingerly around the thick velvet drape. The building was beautiful—I could see from the sides that it was clean beige marble with brass and wood trim. In front of it was the now familiar warehouse/dot-com district, and distantly, over three blocks of squat brown buildings, I could see the faint twinkle of the Bay Bridge off the water. Our room was a corner suite, so we could see the alley where the entire kiss of vampires we had just freed was crowded, but they were feeding in an extremely civilized fashion from a group of what I presumed to be were-folk. On the other side of the window, standing across the street, I could make out Green carrying Nicky like a baby and standing next to a smaller, slightly built dark-haired man that I thought might be Andres. Next to them stood Renny, Max, and Grace. They were grouped together, looking slack-jawed toward Bracken and me, staring up at my new building in awe. In front of them in the street, a mass of cop cars was converging with ambulances as well, but it looked like we were about five stories up—in a penthouse suite—and we couldn’t hear the sirens at all.

  Abruptly I sat down.

  “We’re in the Ritz-Carlton?” It came out as a question, but I knew the answer.

  “How do you know it’s the Ritz-Carlton?” Bracken asked, looking down at me.

  “Because the last thought I had, after I knew Green was there, was that I wished we were doing this someplace nice like the Ritz-Carlton hotel.”

  Bracken chuckled appreciatively, and then the laugh grew and became a full-throated whoop. He laughed so hard that he slid down the wall next to me and looked at me, his eyes twinkling, to see if I saw the joke. I was giggling weakly, but something in my face must have been sobering, because he quit laughing and bent and kissed my bare shoulder.

  “You wanted us to be together someplace nice,” he said softly. “That’s sweet, Corinne Carol-Anne. There’s no shame in that.”

  “It’s frightening,” I said, leaning against him. This I knew how to do—I leaned against Bracken all the time. “I didn’t know I could do this. I could have hurt somebody.”

  “You didn’t know….” He trailed off, incredulous, thinking. “Of course you didn’t know,” he said at last. “There’s been no time to tell you. You know that Goshawk stole three firsts from you. Your first kiss with Adrian. Your first sex with Adrian. And your first time with both Green and Adrian.”

  “I did this before?”

  “With Green and Adrian.” He smiled then. “You don’t remember the Goddess grove?”

  I could see it in my mind—oak trees, lime trees, thornless rose trees, twisted into figures, graceful, erotic people. I knew one of them was me.

  “I do remember,” I said soberly. I had to. It was how I could respect the mark that Bracken had placed on Mist—the oak leaf, the lime-tree leaf, and the rose. “I just don’t remember making it.”

  Bracken blew out a breath. “It was something, that night, to be there. The whole house glowed with the three of you. I swear, by the end of this year there will be a litter of sprites the likes of which the world has never seen—it’s why they’re so devoted to you, you know.”

  I smiled a little at him. “I could have hurt someone,” I repeated, still horrified.

  He shook his head. “You waited for Green,” he reminded me. “You waited until it was safe. Eventually, you’ll be able to control it yourself.” He kissed my shoulder again, and in spite of everything, I shivered. “Don’t worry, due’ane,” he murmured lowly. “Trees will still grow, rain will still fall, and you will have lovers again.”

  It sounded like a song. “Who’s Dewey Anne?” I asked him, voice gruff. He was so familiar, this Bracken, but so strange, naked next to me. I could touch him, I realized with wonder. I could run my hands from his flank to his shoulder, and he would welcome the touch because he was mine.

  “You are,” he whispered, and I met his eyes. “It’s Elvish, the feminine noun for ‘other equal half.’ You are my other. My everything.”

  I stared back at him, heart in my throat. I couldn’t claim the same thing, I knew. I would always want Green, in my heart, in my bed. But now I would always want Bracken too. I swallowed, and it hurt. “Is there a masculine?”

  He nodded. “Due’alle.”

  I felt a pressure in my chest, in my eyes. “Can you be that, my due’alle, when I have another? You can be my due’alle, and then….” And then Green could be my Green, and all that he was in my heart. Except that I couldn’t say it out loud, not with Bracken, who had just made love to me and called me his everything. I couldn’t bring Green into our bed, or it would never be ours.

  “There is a word for you and Green, in Elvish,” Brack said, taking the burden from me. “The leader you share your bed with, who also shares with you—the sidhe lord to his beloved.”

  Fair enough. “What’s the word?”

  “O’ue’hm.”

  It sounded like owe we him, and I couldn’t think of a better word at all. “Okay.”

  He raised an attenuated finger to trace my collarbone delicately from the center of my neck to my shoulder, and I shivered once more.

  “I’m filthy,” I demurred.

  “So am I.” And in one smooth movement, he stood up, then bent and gathered me in his arms.

  “Why do you people insist on carrying me?” I grumbled as he made his way to the bathroom.

  Bracken grinned down at me, and I touched a grimy finger to the divot in his cheek that I had never noticed because I had never seen him this happy. “You make it so easy for us,” he said, “when you waste away to nothing but chicken legs and cherry pits.”

  I blew a raspberry, and he frowned at me.

  “No—I am serious. I told you once that you’d miss your boobs eventually.” He stopped in the doorway to what could only be described as a truly palatial bathroom, and swung me down so my bare body took that long slide against his and my naked feet touched the blue-tiled floor. I shivered from his body, which I had never felt all soft and hairless against mine. New. Everything about him was so new. Curious, I leaned forward to see where my mouth would touch, and found that it met in that hollow between nipples where chest met stomach. His skin was like soft gold marble, and his muscles were smooth underneath. He shuddered when I kissed him, and I felt his sex rousing again, growing heavy against my stomach. I blinked. Looked down. Stepped back.

  “God and Goddess,” I said, my eyes huge. He arched his eyebrows and turned toward the golden tap of a red-tiled bathtub that could have sat six. Well, six of me—maybe two of Bracken. If he was erect, one and a half.

  “What?” I was still wrapped in the comforter, and he pried gently at my fingers. The comforter fell, and he scooped it up and tossed it out the door toward the bed. I stood there, naked, torn between holding my hands up to shield myself and putting them behind my back like a schoolchild to stare at the floor. I did neither. Instead I reached out, and my grubby fingers brushed the line between his stomach and pubis. I tickled the furz there. I could see that even lower, his hair grew no coarser than that on the back of my arm. It was not an elvish thing, I thought, because for all that most of his body was absolutely hairless, Green still had some curly blond hair at his groin. It was a Bracken thing—distinct to the species he descended from.

  He was perfect. He was huge. If I had really looked at him, th
e few times I had seen him naked, I probably wouldn’t have in a million years gotten near him naked again, because all reason said he couldn’t fit. He was beautiful and unblemished. I moved my hand to his hip, and before he could hold me, moved behind him and touched the shoulder I had healed. Faint, and fading even as I looked, I could see three scars from where something with a talon had raked him deeply.

  “The scar will be gone by morning,” I said.

  “That’s not what you were going to say,” he observed and turned, this time taking me in his arms before I could move away. He picked me up against him, my toes dangling, and stepped into the tub, then sat down on the step under the foaming water. I looked determinedly behind him and saw that there were bottles of bubble bath—not the tiny ones you usually see in hotels, but big ones. It was cedar-rose—my favorite scent.

  “I thought of everything,” I said, a smile in my voice. I was held against him, my knees on the bottom of the tub and my head against his chest.

  “That’s not it either,” he returned in grim amusement. He pulled a burgundy washcloth from the side of the tub, lathered it up, and started to rub my back. I shuddered against him, and he turned me and slid down to the bottom of the tub, so that the water was up to my chin and I was leaning against him. His erection was pressed into my lower back, and I found I almost couldn’t breathe, knowing this.

  “I don’t see how you fit,” I told him baldly, after a minute of feeling it throb against me in time to my breathing. “You weren’t lying about being super-sized….” I leaned my head down so he could lather my neck, and he rinsed me and tipped my head back, scooping water onto my hair, which was probably a complete disaster anyway. A little soap, and eventually long fingers massaged my scalp. I sighed and relaxed a notch more.