Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “You needed your space!” I threw back at him, forgetting my earlier vow.

  “Indeed I did,” he conceded. “But maybe I need to recognize that I don’t get that luxury right now, just like you don’t get sex without me here to shield it.”

  I grunted. “That’s probably best.” I sighed. “Green?”

  “Yes, luv?” He stroked the hair off my brow.

  “I’m exhausted. It was a weird, fucked-up day, and tomorrow is going to be a big furry deal. If I promise not to intrude on your space, can we just… you know… be us?” I was almost asleep again. I’d spent the past few weeks pretending that I was recovering from our adventure in Redding, and it was finally starting to hit me that maybe my body was involved in something entirely different.

  “Absolutely,” he agreed. He shifted slightly and slid me to the side, next to Bracken. God, I loved touching their bodies—both of them—before I fell asleep.

  But I was the queen, and I still had one last moment of queenliness to go.

  “How’s Cami?” I mumbled against his bare chest.

  “Asleep in my bed,” Green answered. “The walls changed color, she burst into tears, and I said ‘Fuck it all’ and rolled her mind.”

  I chuckled weakly. “Aces. We’ll deal in the morning. We’ve got a jailbreak to plan.”

  I barely felt Green’s kiss on my brow before I fell asleep.

  Bracken: Weapons

  I WATCHED incuriously as Max, Cory, and the two vampires cleaned, oiled, and loaded their guns from kits laid out on consecrated canvas on the kitchen table. I’d once burned myself badly holstering Cory’s gun, and I felt no inclination to see how they worked. Cory was wearing gloves—a thing she’d had to don since our impromptu blood transfusion because, although the effects had faded so she didn’t get blisters anymore, the touch still burned.

  This worried me. As did watching Kyle and Ellis, the vampires, fumble with deadly weapons.

  “Okay,” Cory said, taking a deep breath and cupping her hands over Ellis’s to still the shaking. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. You said you’d had some experience shooting on a range, but this whole ‘mission’ thing seems to be making you a mite nervous. Howsabout you—” I cleared my throat and met her eyes. “—and Kyle just use a vampire’s natural gifts this time around.”

  Ellis—a thin, fidgety vampire with too much dark hair in his hatchet-thin face—smiled weakly. “Lady Cory,” he said softly, “I… uh… I’m so sorry. I know I said I was up to this. I mean… I thought I was such a badass when I was alive, and I was a complete punk when you first came back to the hill, but….” He shook his head. “I could march into battle, you know? But I just don’t think I’ve got the nerves for this.”

  Cory took a deep breath and touched his cheek. “Okay,” she said quietly. “I get it. I think you’re wrong, personally, because I think you’re braver than this. But I’m not making anybody go out into the field who’s afraid. There’s no shame in that.”

  She looked up at Kyle, and her face softened further. Kyle once had a mortal beloved, Cory’s friend at school, and she’d been killed in an attack. He’d come to Cory—broken, bereft, and ready to face the dawn—and Cory had given him a home. It was characteristic of her and of Green, and it was a blessing he’d come to them.

  I would have put him out of his misery, but then I’m shortsighted that way.

  “Are you up for this?” she asked. “It’s going to be hell on him, knowing you’re out there by yourself.”

  Kyle had a blocky face, a stocky body, and short blond hair that would have been thinning if he’d lived a few years more. His eyes darted to Ellis surreptitiously, and I rolled my eyes.

  “If you would not like the entire darkling to know you are sleeping together,” I said, bored, “perhaps you would consider a hotel room?”

  Cory winced. “Bracken! Jesus, fucking really?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I am not in the mood to deal with their inexperience and fear,” I said bluntly. “I miss Teague.”

  Oh, Goddess, did I. The newly minted werewolf had been raised in a crucible of hatred and fear—personally, he was a bloody disaster. But Goddess, was he good on a run. Quick thinking, fearless, unfazed at the possibility of dying on the field. Cory had nearly died trying to save his life, and while I hadn’t been excited about her close-to-bloodless body—or about the aftermath of our battlefield transfusion—I had certainly been pleased that he had lived.

  For one thing, his hands wouldn’t have been shaking as he loaded his gun in the middle of Green’s living room.

  “I’m sure Ellis misses Teague too,” Cory said, leaning into Ellis’s shoulder and winking.

  I knew that she missed him as well. I didn’t have to read her mind to watch her correct herself every time she gave an order.

  “Are you sure Marcus and Phillip can’t make it?” I asked. It was the first time I’d asked it, but for damned sure it wasn’t the first time I’d thought it. I didn’t want to bring up the obvious—that she was pregnant and she wasn’t running this op alone—but I didn’t want her to… to… run this fucking op alone, either!

  “Phillip cannot,” Phillip said quietly, coming up from the stairway that led to the lower levels of the hill. “But Marcus can.”

  Phillip looked ghastly—which, for a vampire, was saying a lot. He normally wore his hair back in a tight queue that revealed his high cheekbones and severely handsome, narrow face, along with sharp, high-finance clothes, usually in black. Tonight he was dressed in worn denim-colored sweats—Marcus’s worn sweats, actually—and a stretched, dingy white T-shirt.

  Marcus didn’t look much better. While he was dressed casually, in jeans and a T-shirt as usual, his normally combed curls were in disarray all over his head, and he hadn’t quite wiped the red smudges off his cheeks where the bloody tears of a vampire had marked him.

  Cory ran directly into Marcus’s arms with a breathless little squeal. “Really?” she asked, practically pleading. “Really? You can come?” She looked up at Phillip and hugged him tight as well. “You don’t have to do this,” she said belatedly. “You… I mean, I know he’s holding you….”

  Phillip scrubbed his face with his hands. “He’s in my head,” he said after a moment. “We’ve fed from each other so often… I can hear him, in my head. And it’s all worry and sadness….” Phillip swallowed hard and ruffled Marcus’s messy hair some more. “Go kick some ass,” he ordered. Marcus leaned forward, heedless of Cory, and touched foreheads with the man it had taken him a night to fall in love with but twenty years to love. “Go fly and roll some minds and beat up some assholes and kick some ass. I’ll see it all, okay?”

  Marcus nodded and kissed him. Phillip returned the kiss, and Cory slid out of his hug to let the two of them say good-bye.

  “Ellis,” she said quietly, “could you keep Phillip company? Get him some dinner—he still likes pretty female shape-shifters, right?”

  “Yeah,” Marcus said quietly, coming up to us at the table. “He hasn’t lost his taste for pretty girls.” It was a lame sally, but we all laughed just the same. Ellis touched Kyle’s hand briefly and got a nod and the brush of a thumb across his wrist in response, and then he began to follow Phillip down the stairs into the lower darkling and the shape-shifter levels.

  Phillip paused at the top of the stairs. “I know you’ll take care of them,” he said quietly, “but… but we both know you come first. Don’t worry, my queen—that’s both of us protecting you.”

  And then he was gone, leaving Cory looking like she’d swallowed a bug.

  “Fucking aces,” she snarled. “He still hasn’t lost his way of killing a goddamned conversation.”

  “Nope,” Marcus said, rechecking the gun that Ellis had just left on the table. “He’s the same asshole who’s made our life hell here for twenty years.”

  “I’m so relieved,” Max deadpanned. “I don’t know what I would have done if he’d sprouted from the coffin all hearts and flowers and shit.”


  They took a collective breath then, because everybody had said their piece and given their best shot at not admitting that Phillip might have given his mind—and his usefulness as one of Cory’s lieutenants—in defense of his queen that summer.

  And that the love of Marcus’s undeath might never be the same.

  The conversation around the table stilled, and the room began to fill. I looked around, doing a quiet count as Grace, Green, Arturo, Renny, Whim, Charlie, Nicky, and Lambent all ranged about the room. Cami emerged from her new bedroom down the hallway, looking extremely uncomfortable.

  “God, I miss Teague,” I actually said out loud. Cory glared at me, giving one of those head shakes that indicated she completely agreed but I shouldn’t have said it out loud again. “Well, fuck, if you can’t say the shit that matters out loud, what can you say?”

  “We’ll try to measure up, mate,” Green said dryly, and I looked over him in complete helplessness. Yes, sure, he’d originally agreed to sit in the SUVs with Whim and Charlie while the rest of us went out and did what needed to be done, but that hadn’t been the plan Cory had come up with, and I didn’t like how very involved Green was going to be now. Especially because, in spite of my comforting words to Cory the night before, I didn’t think his mind was completely in the game.

  Cory and I had done this a couple of times—we knew the dangers and how to keep them from hurting us. Green’s best work was always the grand plan. I admired the hell out of him for it, but the long plan had nothing to do with what we were doing tonight.

  “Okay, folks,” Cory said, clicking the safety on her cleaned and loaded weapon and sliding it into the holster at her shoulder. “Let’s go over the plan, right?”

  There was a general nod of the heads.

  “Our buddy Max has pulled some strings, and he’s got himself a nighttime visit with Dylan and his cellmate together. Green is posing as their lawyer, Grace is his assistant, Nicky is his paralegal, and Max is the cop who needs to ask them some questions. Together they’re going to make their way through the prison to the conference rooms. We couldn’t get ourselves any floor plans on such short notice, so me, Green, and Nicky are going to be”—she tapped her skull—“inside each other’s heads. When the inside doors swing open to let them in—vampires?”

  Grace, Marcus, and Kyle all looked at her and nodded.

  “Grace, you’re going to bring up the rear and make sure the guards let the other two in. Your job after that is the high-level mind-fuck. I need you to lightly roll the minds of everyone to let them in and out. It needs to be lightly done, so they’re not helpless when we’ve gotten the boys out. It would be murder to leave them minding the store when a lot of the inmates can get dangerous. So you roll their minds, make them amenable to our suggestions. Bracken, Renny, Lambent, Arturo, and I will be outside, breaking cameras and keeping the outside security busy.” She wrinkled her nose. She’d wanted badly to go on the inside, but while lawyers and cops came and went all the time, it was slightly more noticeable if they were tiny and female. Also, she would have had to wear a pantsuit and take off her gun.

  “This should be easy. Walk in, roll everyone’s mind, walk out. Get the boys to Whim, Charlie, and Cami, let them take off, and then we’re off in the other SUV. If something goes wrong, we need to disable and not destroy, do you understand me? This isn’t Folsom Prison. This can be a violent place, but for the most part, these are drug offenders and thieves—the inmates don’t usually try to kill each other, and the guards are the good guys.”

  Given how antiauthoritarian most of our people were, it was a good thing she’d included that.

  “What if the rescuees won’t cooperate?” Max asked, legitimately concerned.

  Green’s and Cory’s eyes met. “Green can give Dylan proof that Cami trusts him. And our mystery cellmate is a shape-changer. Use your imagination, Max and Nicky—although I suggest Nicky goes first, since his clothes change with him.”

  Bird shifters—go figure. It was probably the one reason Max didn’t feel the need to shift first just to prove himself. Max would need to take off his clothes—and he was still not comfortable with doing that in public.

  Poor, poor little man.

  “Vampires,” Cory continued. “As little bloodshed as possible. But, everybody?” She tapped her head. “Keep in touch. This seems really easy, and I don’t trust that. I don’t trust that at all. Now—we’re parking Whim, Charlie, and Cami on the corner of Bell and Richardson, and going that way we only have the one SUV with all the ‘legitimate’ people in it. They’re the ones who are going to be seen on camera going into the jail—”

  “But won’t their pictures show up distorted?” Renny asked.

  “Not for long,” I said, “because as Cory said, she and I are going to disable the cameras while they’re inside.”

  Cory looked at me hard. Yes, I’d been taking classes as she had. But while she was taking “queenship” classes in psychology and history and sociology and literature, I’d been sneaking in the odd engineering class as well as some computer courses. Yes, I was pretty sure I could disable the cameras at the circuit box outside the prison.

  But given that I’d never done anything like this before, and that our other resident electronics expert, Nicky, was going to be inside, I could see why maybe she was a little anxious.

  “Yes,” she said dryly. “That bears repeating. So we’re going to be working magic outside—”

  “Where all the guards have guns,” Renny said sweetly.

  “And the rest of you are going to be inside the jail—”

  “Where all the inmates have knives!” Max quipped. Cory sent him a glare that should have shriveled his thick black eyebrow hairs, if he’d had any sense at all.

  Max shrugged. “Hey—I’m the one who could get fired, or arrested!”

  Cory let out a pent-up breath. “No,” she said quietly. “If this goes right at all, no one will remember you had anything to do with this. Arturo?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  Cory scowled at him. “You don’t get to do that. That’s a fucking order. Now, you’re responsible in particular for going in after the vampires to pull any reference—on paper, electronically, or in memory—of our boy, okay?”

  Arturo nodded sagely. “Yes, little Goddess. I have no problem with that.”

  Max looked embarrassingly humble. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “I mean, I guess the job would be the first thing to get chucked, but it’s nice not to have to choose yet.”

  Cory grimaced at him. “Well, I can’t promise we can put it off forever,” she said, then checked the clock on the microwave. “’Kay, guys—we’re going to have to motor. I need to find something to cover the holster that won’t make me broil. Any questions?”

  “I’ll get a vest,” Renny said, taking off for her room, where most of Cory’s best and most stylish clothes ended up. Cory would pretend to get mad about this sometimes, but given that we were all glad that Renny had taken to giving a fuck about her appearance—mostly—when she wasn’t a cat, it was all for show.

  “Thanks, puss,” Cory said absently, double-checking the holster. It was a recent gift from Green, and she wanted to make sure as little of the gun showed as possible. She lived in fear of one of us touching the damned thing and getting hurt.

  “I’ve got a question,” Max said. He was wearing his blues, and he holstered his own police issue with absolute ease—as well as his Taser and radio. “Do we bring silver shot?”

  Cory blinked. “Hmmf.” She pondered for a moment, then caught my eye, looking for my opinion.

  “Yes,” I said unequivocally.

  “But we don’t know if the cellmate is hostile,” she complained. I shook my head.

  “Who cares if he is or not? Monterey was just a few weeks ago—how much would a gun with silver shot have helped us out then?”

  Cory grimaced. “Ah, yes. I was trying to block it out.” Her mouth tightened as she thought of something else. “
Besides, it’s always best to be prepared,” she conceded. “Yes,” she said to Max and Marcus. “Everybody brings at least one clip of silver.” The three of them went to their gun kit on the table and pulled out the necessary equipment. Max still wore his disposable gloves, and Marcus used an unworn glove like a hot pad to store the gun clip in a borrowed holster of his own. Steel and silver—a complex melding of metal and vulnerability, and it had taken Cory and Max a couple of long discussions to figure out how to use that weapon wisely in this household.

  As if to punctuate this thought, Cory slid her clip into the holster and looked around again. “Okay. Silver shot question answered. Any other questions?”

  “Why’d the walls change colors?”

  All eyes in the room turned to Cami, who was perched on the couch, watching over the goings-on in the kitchen over the back. Her eyes, a pretty shade of gray, were enormous, and she stared around at what had been—once upon a time, before Cory’s sex magic had grown beyond our wildest imaginings—white walls.

  And Marcus, who had been somber and melancholy since he walked in, started to giggle.

  “Yeah, Cory. Why’d the walls change colors?”

  “Shut up.”

  Nicky joined him, then Max and Arturo. Cory and I shared the long-embarrassed glare of two people whose sex lives were very much on display.

  “That’s enough, children,” Grace said when the laughter had reached its height. “Poor Camigwen thinks she’s done something wrong.”

  “So how did the walls change color?” Cami asked again, and Cory, bless her, answered.

  “My, uhm, power, magic, whatever—it’s sort of whimsical sometimes,” she said, blushing. “It, uh… you know. I get excited and it… does strange and bizarre things.”

  “Like builds nurseries where no room existed before,” I said smugly. She closed her eyes. We hadn’t spoken of it that morning. Nicky had gotten up and gone scampering into the adjacent room, babbling the entire time over the space and the windows—where no windows should be, given the placement of the darkling and how our rooms were on the inside of the hill—and the fact that he couldn’t figure out if there were two doors or four leading to the nursery. (It changed randomly, depending on who was looking at it. More fey things do this than Cory or even the vampires and shape-shifters ever recognized. It was fun to watch them get lost in the hill when the hill itself changed shape.)