Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  The vampires flew all the time.

  The elves would learn.

  So for a couple of weeks, we pretended.

  We pretended my boobs didn’t hurt all the damned time and pretended I didn’t have to throw up every goddamned morning. We pretended the wolves weren’t out there approaching, encroaching, and that someone wasn’t driving them toward us with a sure and malevolent purpose.

  And pretended that elves were just born fliers who could naturally swoop and dive like the vampires and the Avians, and none of the natural rules of gravity applied.

  Ha!

  For two weeks nobody mentioned the babies, not even Nicky, and he shared my bed often enough to have to scoot out of the way when I ran to the bathroom in the mornings. Not even the vampires—they just pretended that blooding with me was suddenly not a big deal when it used to be like their favorite thing.

  For two weeks I went out to the yard in front of the house and, under Green and Arturo’s able tutelage, summoned my power and lifted off the ground like I’d been flying all my life. And I watched Bracken, Lambent, Sweet, and a host of other elves lift off the ground like chipmunks wearing jetpacks in a Looney Toons short.

  “Holy Goddess, Lambent, you are gonna fuckin’ kill—” I was flying backward to avoid him.

  “Me!” Bracken screamed, and we collided midair and went tumbling to the ground in free fall.

  I managed a power cushion under Bracken, and he bounced like a kid in a balloon house, rolling off the cushion and landing neatly on his feet. I went surging off the damned thing like Tigger on a trampoline, and by the second midair flip, I knew I wasn’t going to be okay when I hit the ground.

  I poinged off the cushion until I lost momentum, then finally slid ungracefully to my knees and proceeded to throw up ignominiously on a giant azalea bush that was probably one of the lower fey’s great-grandmother or something.

  I let the cushion die behind me and could have kicked myself when three other elves dropped out of the sky and plunged to the earth. I would have yelled at them for not warning me, but oh, hey, hello, there was something I’d eaten in the fifth grade, taking a hard exit.

  The chorus of “Fuck!” “Jesus!” and “Godsbedamned cuntwhacking bitchtree!” (from Lambent) was lost in the sound of my own retching.

  I was too tired by the time I was done to even apologize.

  Green had to carry me back to the bedroom and clean me off and spell me to sleep. When I awoke, it was just Bracken and me.

  I almost wished it was everybody. That might have made me feel better.

  “Did anybody break something?” I asked, hiding my face.

  “No. They were all wankers anyway—they shouldn’t have tried riding your power without warning you.”

  I smiled weakly at Bracken. He was trying to be nice to me. Fantastic.

  “Brack?”

  His pond-shadow eyes were focused exclusively on my face, and I felt the soreness in my body from getting so violently sick. “We’re going to have to tell everybody I’m pregnant.”

  “Beloved, we told you before—they all know.”

  Ugh. God. Yes. I just kept trying to wipe that fact from my mind. “I mean, we’re going to have to let them know I know.”

  He grimaced and passed his hands over my stomach. It was bigger than it had been two weeks ago, and I had the tight clothes to prove it. My breasts were just as tender—and straining against the flowered cotton of my bra. If I hadn’t spent most of the summer in giant T-shirts and men’s gym shorts, my body would have been a dead giveaway.

  “It doesn’t have to be a big announcement,” he said quietly. “Just, you know—”

  “One of those conversations you can have behind my back so you all can decide what to say without pissing me off?” I hazarded.

  He had the audacity to grin. “Whatever works, beloved.”

  “No, that’s not what works,” I snapped, my mood shifting mercurially.

  “Well, flying isn’t working either,” he said, unperturbed. “And you’re still doing that, right?”

  “It’s going to work eventually!”

  “But it’s putting you at risk!” And for the first time in my bitchy funk, he showed some temper. “And Green and I haven’t protested, not once, so maybe let us deal with the troops in a way that everybody’s comfortable with. We have good ideas too, you know?”

  I took a deep breath and got hold of my hormones. “You’re right,” I conceded. “I’m sorry.”

  He took a deep breath too, and for a moment we were back to the friction we’d had when he and Green had first told me about the… the physical changes I’d be undergoing.

  That’s right.

  The physical changes.

  Then he relaxed like the peaceful zen we’d achieved afterward had never receded.

  “Am I going to need a neck brace?” he asked sweetly. “For all the times you downshift that fast?”

  I opened my mouth to say something suggestive—as well as filthy and rude—and in that moment, I got a flash of Green, skin to skin with someone I didn’t know. I frowned. “Who’s Green with?”

  Bracken actually looked like he’d rather talk to my parents than answer this. Tough.

  “One of the shape-shifters brought in someone who needs our help.” He shook his head and looked at me as though he was trying not to be mad. “We’re going to need to go on a run. Jack and Teague are still in Monterey, so you’re going to have to wait until the vampires wake up, and maybe snag some of the elves.” He sighed and ran his hands through his cropped, pine-tar-colored hair. “Just try really hard not to get hurt this time out, okay?”

  And I realized that, worry or not, he’d already conceded I’d go.

  His words about taking care of myself for me returned, and I threw my arms around him, hugging tightly before he could swing his legs off the bed.

  “I hate being hurt,” I said quietly into his ear. “I’ll do my best to stay safe.”

  He melted into me for a second and kissed my temple.

  “Thank you, due’ane.” The lover who was his equal. There were four of us bound together by blood, love, and magic, but Bracken was the only one who could yell at me and fight with me and dig in his heels with me like an equal.

  He was asking me to make my own welfare equal to his.

  “Love you, due’alle.”

  Maybe I could do that after all.

  For him.

  I STOOD up and went to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth again, asking for an update as I went. Bracken complied—mostly—but he summoned a snack for me to eat as he talked.

  The sitch was not promising.

  “How di’ she find uth?” I asked through a mouthful of corned beef on sourdough. No mustard. Mustard made me queasy.

  “She’s apparently half-fey. She’s telepathic—it’s the one power she inherited—but she doesn’t know that.”

  I squinted. “She doesn’t know she’s telepathic, or she doesn’t know she’s half-fey?”

  Bracken grunted and grabbed a brush, apparently trying to make me pretty for the half-starved, half-panicked kid who’d pretty much grabbed a werepuma by the collar at a bar and said, “I know you’re different like me. Please fucking help.”

  “I only got part of it before Green had to mind-roll her to calm her down. I think that she doesn’t know she’s half-fey. And her brother doesn’t know what he is, either—”

  “Wait,” I said, licking corned beef off my fingers and wondering when that had really started to turn my key. “Is this her brother like brother-brother, or her brother like Teague’s my brother?” Teague wasn’t really my brother, but it was as close as I could get in labeling my affection for the guy.

  Bracken wrinkled his nose. “Mm… I think it’s her brother like Adrian was my brother,” he said with a meaningful raise of his eyebrow.

  “Oh! Okay. That’s a whole different brother.” My first lover and Bracken had apparently fucked like monkeys during Bracken’s
adolescence. I’d known almost from the first moment I’d seen them together. In the beginning it had made me love Adrian more, because I knew that he took love seriously enough to be friends with a lover afterward. Now it made me love Bracken more, because his loyalty to Adrian had been unswerving enough that he gave up the dream of me when he realized his brother’s new love interest was someone he could love forever too.

  “Yeah. Well, whatever kind of brother he is, they were running cons in San Francisco until about a year and a half ago, when suddenly social workers got all over their asses. They migrated up here, and they got busted. Her brother is in lockup in Auburn, and his cellmate is….” Bracken trailed off and twisted my unruly, weirdly colored hair into a ponytail. He set the brush on the counter next to the sink and bent down far enough to drop a kiss on the top of my fuzzy red head. When he stood up, the top of the mirror cut off his image. “Well, she’s confused. Apparently her brother likes the guy, but he’s terrified about the full moon.”

  Oh fuck. “Which is in three days?” Yeah, I knew when the full moon was. A third of us often turned furry and got irritable during the day after, the day of, and the day before. The werecreatures didn’t have to—but it was damned uncomfortable not to. It was like living in a dorm with a bunch of girls with really strong pheromones, except usually girls on their periods only fantasized about killing people. (Maybe that was only me.) If he was afraid of the full moon, he was afraid of losing control.

  Oh, dear Lord. “So, her brother….” I didn’t use the term ironically—and wouldn’t until she gave me a reason to. “What did he get busted for?”

  Bracken grunted. “See, that’s the thing. She’s not sure. They keep saying ‘theft,’ but….”

  “But….”

  “Cory, you need to talk to her. That’s all I got. Green took her into his room, and I think he’s calming her down, but in the meantime….”

  In the meantime, there were all sorts of things I did not understand about preternatural creatures in jail.

  “Bracken?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Where’s Max?”

  “Just got home from a hard day of being exactly what we need right now,” he said, grinning.

  “Excellent.” I swallowed the last of my sandwich and wiped my mouth with my napkin, making sure I got my teeth a little too. “Where’s Nicky?” I paused and turned around to him.

  Brack winked and touched my nose. “Scoping out the shifter community to find out where these guys came from.”

  “You don’t need me,” I needled. He rolled his eyes.

  “Turn around and look at yourself,” he commanded, and it was my turn to roll my eyes.

  I turned and smiled at myself in the mirror—brown/green eyes, freckles, bold nose, and all. I was wearing a giant purple T-shirt that went down to my knees, and bicycle shorts underneath. So, you know. Normal.

  “How do I look?” Automatic question.

  He closed his eyes. “Can we, uhm… you know… maybe… I mean, you’re sort of wearing exactly what she’s wearing, and she’s homeless and desperate.”

  I blinked suspiciously. “And I am….”

  “Her queen, whether she knows it or not. Stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve got a knit summer dress that won’t wrinkle, won’t be tight on your stomach, and won’t show your ass when you bend over. Let’s do that.”

  I was going to argue with him, because we’d managed to make arguing a highly enjoyable and sometimes extremely sexual sport, but inside, I was still a little off-balance. I was barely comfortable with the idea of myself as the queen of the preternatural, and now I was about to become big and fat and gestating, like some sort of grotesque bug squirting out worker babies in between administrative duties. I pretty much needed as much help in the self-image department as I could manage.

  “Yeah, okay,” I conceded with no grace whatsoever. With a sigh I shucked my loose, comfortable T-shirt and my stretchy, comfortable bike shorts and put them in the hamper. I turned with resignation to where Bracken was rifling through our closet.

  He was staring at me, face all lax and stupid with happiness, and I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “What?”

  “Look,” he said, looking at my chest and then back at me.

  Half-afraid of what I would find, I looked down at my breasts, burgeoning around the elastic edges of my bra. My jaw dropped, and I rolled my eyes at him.

  “I don’t even believe….”

  He nodded, as gleeful as a cat in a mouse factory. “Oh yeah.”

  “Don’t say it.”

  That joyous grin was not going away, and I couldn’t really blame him. Two and a half years ago, when he’d first seen me, I’d been a hip-heavy, chunky teenager replete with baby fat. The time between had honed me so thin and knife-edged that for a while I hadn’t even been able to menstruate, much less conceive.

  But now I had muscle mass and some fat, and was apparently getting fatter by the minute, and….

  “Oh, yeah,” Brack repeated with emphasis. “Cory’s got her boobs back.”

  I threw a pillow at him.

  He dodged it neatly and came back with a sundress I could swear I’d never seen before, slipping it over my head.

  “It’s stretchy,” I said, not admitting that the pale brown with green accents actually looked good on me.

  “It’s lovely,” he said firmly. “Now go out there and be regal and reassuring and tell her you’ll kick the ass of anyone who tries to hurt her brother.”

  I grinned at him and kissed his cheek—on tiptoe, of course—and both of us walked out the door. I didn’t have the heart to remind him that I didn’t have shoes on. Elves didn’t wear them, anyway.

  Green: Human Houses

  GREEN WAS actually done with his business with Cami and in the front room before Cory arrived. She was still skittish, still a rabid, snarling little kitten, even after what Green had done with his body to settle her down and give her some grounding, but at least she would listen to reason.

  “Here, luv,” he said gently, settling her in the vee of his legs on the couch. “Let me braid this. It’s pretty, yes? Needs to be pulled out of your face, which is pretty too.” All truth. Her hair was honey blonde, and she kept it long—he assumed for the ease of simply tying it back when she was on the run. Her features were delicate, as was fitting for a descendent of the sidhe.

  “We don’t have—”

  “Lots of time,” he soothed, because that had been her constant refrain. Dylan was in jail and he was screaming in her head!

  Green’s first order of business had been to intercept the young man’s panicked thoughts and send back some basic peace, some reassurance that Cami was all right and getting help and that he and a young man named Connor were going to be safe come the full moon.

  The minute Dylan calmed down, Cami calmed down, and Green thought the entire hill might have breathed a sigh of relief. The two might not have been brother/sister—and Green was getting passing thoughts of frantic comfort sex, so he was thinking not—but they were definitely trapped in a psychic feedback loop.

  When Bracken and Cory came padding in, Cami was just calm enough not to bolt. Cory put on her most reassuring smile, and Green blessed Bracken (Cory wouldn’t have thought of it) for making her put on the pretty dress and doing her hair. Cami wouldn’t respond to out-and-out authority, Green thought, but she very much needed a… a grown-up, for lack of a better word.

  She needed someone she could identify with, who looked like she had it all together. Sometimes, clothes just helped give that impression—that was all.

  “Hiya,” Cory said, a sweet smile on her face. “Have they fed you yet?”

  Cami stiffened and cast a half-frightened gaze over her shoulder.

  “No, luv,” Green said, patting her shoulder reassuringly. “She’s had a bit of a fright, and we were getting the details out first.”

  Cory nodded. “I so hear you. So, Cami?” She smiled and h
eld out her hand. “Did Green braid your hair? It looks awesome. I know he wishes I’d grow mine longer. C’mon over to the table here, and I’ll feed you. I always think better when I’ve eaten.”

  Green held his breath, because it had taken the girl half an hour of simple touch for her to relax and give him details, but sure enough, a friendly female—a maternal female, whether Cory wanted to admit it or not—was something this girl desperately needed.

  Cory had needed the same thing when she’d come to Green’s hill, and Grace, the maternal vampire, had neatly fit the bill. But Cory had been at ease with vampires before she met Grace, and Green was reasonably sure they’d only make this girl more skittish.

  Cory and Cami retreated to the kitchen, Cory keeping up a determined patter as she moved around and served the girl a corned beef sandwich and a big glass of milk. While she was doing that, Bracken stood closer and spoke quietly.

  “Nicky’s chatting up the shape-shifters to see what they know about these two. She needs me to go talk to Max to see how long her friend’s been in jail and who’s his cellmate, and why.”

  Green nodded, keeping even his body language soft and low key. “Good idea. How’s she?” And there could be no mistaking who he was talking about. He’d gotten used to seeing her fly by now, but watching her tumbling about had been a bit of a shock.

  Watching her getting violently ill after the fall had been difficult as well. He’d healed her nausea before he’d spelled her to sleep, but the last two weeks had been… emotionally void. She wasn’t responding at all to the knowledge of what her body was doing, and it was worrisome.

  “She’s glad we’re not fighting her need to work,” Bracken said softly. “But remember—we still haven’t spoken about school.”

  Green grunted. God. He and Brack had been keeping mum about this too. School would start soon, and he was really hoping he could talk her out of a full load of units before it did. They’d had this discussion before, but now? His disapproval of how stretched-thin she was could no longer be dismissed as overprotective. If she was going to immerse herself in the affairs of elves, vampires, and shape-shifters, the affairs of human education were going to have to take a backseat. But even Green would concede that they shouldn’t be tossed out of the Green’s hill vehicle entirely, if for nothing else than Cory’s peace of mind.