Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  I stuck my tongue out at him. “I could have said ‘execute a Teague,’” I defended weakly.

  Jack laughed so hard and so suddenly he snorted. “Executing a Teague,” he repeated, semihysterically.

  Truly hysterically.

  “Take him home,” I told Teague, my voice gentle. “You’re done for the night.”

  “Are you?” he asked. I knew he wanted to be there for me, but honestly, I wanted nobody but Green and Bracken.

  “We’ll be done when everybody gets home,” I said, and I saw him grimace.

  “Downstairs,” he urged his mates softly. “Let’s go downstairs and get some food. Goddess, I’m starving after that.”

  “We have Oreos for you,” Katy said, voice as shaky as her knees as they started to walk toward the stairs.

  “Jack, Katy?” I said, then waited for them to turn back toward me. “Thank you. I don’t know who asked you to tend us tonight, but we couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Katy’s smile was brilliant. “No one asked us, Lady. That was all me and Jack, thinking about you alone up here. You like?”

  I smiled back, feeling a little bit healed by just watching her get excited about contributing. “I’m putting you in charge of doing that every time we run an op like this. I’m serious—I would have passed out without the OJ and chocolate. Thank you.”

  Katy beamed, and as they disappeared down the granite staircase, in the midst of their concern for Teague and Jack’s wobbly composure, I heard her glee that she’d found her niche. She’d always worried about not being one of the people who got all “ninja bitch”—her words—during the operations to protect the hill. I’d told her that just being there for us was important. Maybe she was starting to see that it was true. If so, that was a good thing. Small, yes, but damn, we needed all the good things we could get.

  They disappeared, and Grace and Arturo talked quietly for a moment while I leaned against Bracken and stared moodily at the sky. My brain wasn’t hearing the vampire babble, but part of that was that everybody was keeping their thoughts to themselves.

  Grace touched my arm, and I saw with some shock that her leather jacket had been sanded off by the road. Her arm had healed—probably sped by her feeding from Arturo, and possibly Teague—but she was covered in blood and gravel. The other vampire, Angela, was probably the same.

  “Grace, are you okay?”

  She nodded sternly. “I’m fine, Lady Cory. But it’s been three hours—how’s your bladder?”

  I gaped at her and then straightened from my slouch next to Green. And whimpered. Oh, motherfucker, I was about to wet my goddamned pants!

  I went to stand up, and the next thing I knew, Bracken had me in his arms and was blurring me down to our bedroom. I literally found myself half-naked and on the can before I could figure out how I was going to get down there under my own power.

  “I could have done this on my own,” I protested.

  “The Goddess should give you stomach cramps and sweats for that lie,” he said mildly. I took a good look at him. His shorn hair was wild about his head, when usually it hung straight and layered around his pond-shadow-colored eyes.

  And those eyes were red rimmed.

  I had to stop talking for a moment, because the relief in my bladder was great enough to take my breath. When I was done, I wiped and stood up, barely supporting myself while I pulled up my jeans. I held Brack’s shoulders while he buttoned me up, and then he wrapped his arm around my waist while I washed my hands. Could I have done it on my own? Probably. But I was glad—so damned glad—I didn’t have to.

  I leaned my head back against his shoulder. “We have school tomorrow,” I said, knowing it sounded inane.

  “You know, we don’t have to—”

  “Yes,” I argued, a surprising passion in my voice. It was suddenly terribly important to know that everything was normal. If we went to school, I could hide under the normalcy, the babble, the silly, hoop-jumping goals of classes that had no relationship to losing a friend in a werewolf battle or RVs leaping off cliffs. “We do have to,” I told him, aware that this was probably unreasonable and irrational. “We have to go. Everyone else can stay home, but you and me, we have to go!”

  He agreed, probably just to keep me from freaking on him down there in the bathroom. Just when I was about to bitch at him for being a condescending dick who didn’t understand me—and yes, I was perfectly aware that was not fair, nor was it true in the least—I heard Green’s summons inside my head.

  Another team was home.

  Max and Renny looked none the worse for the wear, thank Goddess, because the escaped werewolves had been a very real danger. I clung to Renny for a moment as she came to greet me on the bench.

  “We’re going to school tomorrow,” I said, thinking that it was going to be a battle.

  Goddess bless girlfriends who got it. “Of course we are,” she said, with no irony whatsoever.

  “We can’t not go,” I told her soberly.

  “School is normal,” she said, nodding in total agreement.

  I smiled and clung to her for another hug, then accepted and returned Max’s hug.

  “School,” he said, sounding extremely skeptical.

  “Yes, of course.” Renny punctuated her agreement by tugging on his sleeve. For all I know they spent the rest of the night arguing over my sanity, but Renny? She had no doubts. You can’t beat friends like that, not even when they steal your yarn and put runs in your homemade socks.

  Nicky’s team came in next, and for them we had no words. Green checked on the others while Nicky sat on Bracken’s lap and quietly came unglued on me.

  This time I was in on the petting and soothing. When he was down to hiccups and whimpers, Bracken tucked him between us and gave him a pillow so he could sleep while we sat vigil.

  Marcus and Phillip were next. Phillip set Ben down, where he shifted from giant cat to human and executed a slow bow.

  “You were brilliant,” he said to Green and me, and we inclined our heads, because even if we could think of all the ways we’d failed, that wasn’t what he needed to hear. He nodded and yawned and wobbled away down the trapdoor, leaving Marcus and Phillip, who knew better than to tell me I was brilliant when I’d let one of us die.

  They fell to their knees in front of me and rested their heads on my lap. I stroked their hair, feeling the cool flesh of their cheeks and wishing for better words than the ones I had.

  I opened my mouth to say I was sorry for the millionth time, but Marcus spoke first.

  “We know it hurts,” he said, his voice raw. “But don’t forget who we are, Cory. This is our second chance. We don’t waste it worrying about shame, and certainly not about death. We know you worry, and you grieve, but you let us serve you. Please let that be enough.”

  Ah, Goddess. They’d been there from the very beginning. When I’d first surfaced after Adrian’s death, besides Grace, Marcus and Phillip had been the vampires I’d learned to love.

  I was horribly, unholily glad it hadn’t been them.

  There was no way to say that—no way to put into words that it was awful enough we had to lose people, but I didn’t want to lose my people.

  But something must have slipped out, some sense of my bond with them as their queen and their family, because Phillip raised his face to me, pale skin glowing faintly in the ambient light.

  “Thanks for letting me fight tonight,” he said, his voice as much gravel as Marcus’s. “I hate to lose Ellis, but it would have been worse if I’d been sitting here sunk in my own head.”

  “Oh fuck yes,” I responded with passion. Anything, anything was better than sitting on our hands and waiting to do something. Anything was better than letting other people risk themselves for us.

  “You were with us,” Phillip affirmed. “You were inside us. Nobody doubts that. If we’d gone down with you screaming power through us, you would have been torn apart. It was….” He shook his head, and his smile was wolfish and feral
and delighted. “There has never been a fight like that, my lady. That was a motherfucking privilege.”

  I must have smiled a little, given him some hope, because his teeth got a little pointier. “And we are going to be ‘pulling a Teague’ for as long as the hill stands.”

  Marcus let out a chuckle. “Oh hell, yeah. He is never living that down.”

  They went downstairs, hopefully to nail each other to the wall, because I thought they both needed it. We stayed out there, Arturo and Grace at our shoulders, bringing juice and chocolate and coffee until the last of the teams arrived.

  Of course Lambent and Kyle were the last, and they touched down on the grass uneasily close to dawn.

  Their clothes were shredded and they were covered in blood, but I’d looked like that while naked in front of the entire hill once, and I didn’t bat an eyelash.

  They both bowed deeply but said nothing. I couldn’t even apologize, not one more time.

  “My lady?” Lambent said, sounding a little drunk, whether on passion or vampire blood I had no idea.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You keep throwing these shindigs, we’ll keep marching to your tune.”

  A fist around my heart eased. “I’m so fucking glad to hear that,” I said, my voice cracking. “You have no idea.”

  Kyle shook his head. “No, see? That’s the thing. We do have an idea. It’s why it was worth it. ’Cause you didn’t throw him away. You fought to keep him alive. Fucking matters. All those poor bastards just got thrown away—nobody’s fighting for them, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said, throat raspy. “I know.”

  They bowed again but didn’t hug, because that wasn’t who they were. But I had no doubt that there would be some serious sex between the two of them until they got over their grief.

  They stumbled down the stairs, hopefully to a shower and some clean clothes, and still I stayed, leaning against Green in a silence punctuated by light snoring from Bracken and Nicky.

  “Cory—?” Grace asked hesitantly.

  I shook my head, forced to voice the one fragile hope I had for the rest of the night.

  “He might come tonight,” I said, feeling lost, like a child.

  “Try to get some sleep,” she said, squeezing my shoulder. “It was a good fight.”

  She bent down and kissed my cheek, and Arturo after her, and then I was left in the silence of the garden with the one husband who didn’t want to reveal anything from his heart.

  Or so I thought.

  Green: Upon Absent Lovers

  SHE WAS waiting for Adrian.

  Green had come out during the past weeks when she’d been learning the limits of her once-inexhaustible energy supply. Although he’d seen glimpses of Adrian looking wistfully at him as though through a veil, he hadn’t had so much as a word from their ghost lover since their conversation almost two months before.

  She was waiting for Adrian, and Adrian couldn’t come.

  Oh, that hurt, there was no denying it—but what was worse, he was going to have to tell her.

  Of a sudden, telling her about the painful thing, the one that had separated him from his lovers, did not seem like such a terrible risk.

  “I’m a rarity among my people,” he said, staring moodily into the predawn mist. The cushions beneath them and the blankets on top provided plenty of warmth, but when he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and felt her lean, sweetly and without resistance, against his chest, the tenseness in his throat and shoulders relaxed. She could still do that, still trust him, and he could tell this story now.

  “I know that,” she said throatily, nuzzling her cheek against his wool coat.

  “Yes. Yes, you do,” he said, bending down to kiss the top of her head. “Most of my serious lovers have been outside my people.”

  “Mm-hm.” Neither of them voiced the one disastrous exception. One hundred years of captivity and the loss of Adrian had more than paid him back for his lapse in judgment.

  “But you are not the first human woman I have loved,” he said, wondering if he should apologize.

  “I assumed,” she said dryly. Of course she had. His Corinne Carol-Anne had always possessed a sort of innate wisdom about people, about lovers. Even when she’d been Adrian’s lover for scarcely more than a week, she’d realized that the realms of love were boundless.

  “About two hundred years before I followed Mist around Europe—and right into Oberon’s brothel—I loved a woman….” He closed his eyes and tried to picture her, but it had been so long… and oh, so very much pain, for the first hundred years after her loss. He’d worked so hard at trying to forget.

  “Where?” she asked, and he blinked down at her. Her wide eyes, forest brown with depths of green and gold and sepia, were fixed on his face.

  “I forget, luv. You try so hard to see the wider world through where I’ve been.”

  “Which is a clever way of saying you don’t remember,” she said with a faint smile. Absently she traced the line of his jaw and up over the long pointed curve of his ear. He closed his eyes and fought the temptation to purr. It had been a while since their last quiet moment—and this story had lain between them.

  “No, I….” He laughed a little, still treasuring her touch on his ear. “Honestly, luv, I have no idea. I think it was Ireland. I know we lived in a tiny cottage against a hill, and her name was Hannah Breen—Irish enough, right?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she confessed. “I don’t scan baby-name books to see.” Then she gasped, as though it had suddenly occurred to her that, yes, she would have need of those very shortly, and he watched her eyes widen.

  “Later,” he said.

  “We should let Bracken do it,” she told him, a certain amount of exasperation in her voice. “He seems to be getting very excited about the whole thing.”

  Green smiled, sliding his hand under the blankets and between the flaps of her wool coat. She was warm under all those blankets, but his hand was only a little cooler, and as he pulled her sweatshirt up, the silky skin of her stomach didn’t flinch from his touch.

  He pressed gently with the flat of his hand and felt it, the hard mass of her uterus pressing against his fingers. They were in there—active, even, after all the adrenaline she’d poured through her body. Not sentient, not really, just aware in that way of all living beings that there was electricity in the air.

  “It’s a lot to get excited about,” he said, letting the energy of her life, their lives, permeate his flesh. His bones warmed in that glow, and a tight knot in his stomach gave way. So very much alive. “I know I was excited when Hannah conceived. She asked for a baby, knowing full well I would outlive her, outlive the bairn, gradually grow distant from my own bloodline as human time passed and I remained the same. She wanted me growing inside her, she said. She wanted a piece of my heart no other would have.”

  Cory’s stroking on his ear stopped. Instead she pressed the hand on top of his, both of them cupping the miracle inside her.

  “Of course she had it,” Cory whispered. “It’s why we love you—you love us like we’re your first and last.”

  He kissed her temple, and next to them Nicky made soft sounds in his sleep. Bracken folded his body over Nicky’s slighter frame, clutching him like a very small boy would clutch a large teddy bear, and Green’s heart ached with a terrible affection for the two of them. No, he hadn’t chosen them—in their way, they’d been thrust upon him—but now they were a part of his blood.

  “You are my first and last,” he said. “And so is Bracken, and so is Nicky, and so was Adrian.”

  “And so was Hannah.”

  “Yes.” He could see her now, blonde and green-eyed, so perhaps it really had been Ireland. Och! He couldn’t remember. “She was my first and my last, and she wanted my child. The night she conceived, I felt it, felt the babe start, a miracle explosion of cells, of her and me, of power the likes of which makes what you wield compare to a child’s flashlight. Beautiful.”

  �
��I can’t feel it,” she confessed to him, and he heard the agony there. “It’s… it’s supposed to be this big, enormous, earth-shattering thing, and all I know is that I’m exhausted, and I have to pee as often as I breathe, and my boobs hurt. I mean….” Her voice was cracking again, ripping the fragile peace.

  “Shh,” he whispered, stroking her stomach soothingly. “It will come, luv. It will come. You will feel them growing inside you one day, and you’ll be awed. It will be like….” He smiled. “Like Bracken and Nicky, neither of whom I planned for, but both of whom I love with all my heart.”

  “Except not like lovers,” she said practically, and he blinked. “I mean, not you and Bracken, anyway.”

  Oh—of all the things, he had not expected to talk about this tonight.

  “You’re wrong,” he said, feeling her wake up at the blatant contradiction. “I want him very much.”

  “But… but….” She was struggling not to talk with her hands, and he chuckled, feeling the perverse urge to weep with the relief of so many things being spoken between them that had needed to be. “You never… I mean, I know you used to, but….”

  “He was yours, lovey,” Green said softly. “Your choice. And remember, we were all uneasy with it at the first. It seemed easier, I guess, to draw that line in the sand. And then the line became habit, I suppose.”

  “Well, would you consider breaking the habit?” she asked, pure frustration in her voice. “Because from a strictly voyeuristic point of view, that would be fucking spectacular fucking!”

  Green threw his head back and laughed, his eyes burning with a sudden, unexpected sort of joy. “If Bracken is amenable,” he said when he could take a breath, “I’m sure that could be arranged.”

  “Yeah,” Cory added glumly, “and when I get too big for that sort of thing, you’ll probably need to just so Bracken doesn’t get horny as fuck, you know?”

  “You might not get too big,” he said reassuringly. “Not all women do.”

  “I’m five foot nothin’, Green. I’m going to be like a beach ball. We both know it. It’s going to be ugly. I’ll probably have stringy hair and giant volcano zits.”