Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  He laughed and moved his hand so he could cup her face. Yes, her complexion had changed—but spots were nothing more than tiny infections, and with a pass of his hand he cured them. He would have to remember to do that every day so she wouldn’t fret. He didn’t even see them when they erupted—but then, he wasn’t human.

  “You’re lovely,” he said with feeling. “You will always be lovely, and no, I can’t lie—you’ll be especially lovely as you willingly carry my children.”

  She grimaced and rolled her eyes. “Only to the three of you,” she grumbled.

  “Especially to the three of us,” he corrected.

  “Was she?”

  The words “of course” died on his lips. She needed him to think, to remember. He closed his eyes, and the faint picture he’d allowed to form took on depth, luster, detail.

  By human standards Hannah been stunning—perhaps a bit fey, if truth be told. There had been more intermingling of the worlds back then, less technology to get in the way of the glamour. An elegant oval of a face, those great round eyes, and thick dark lashes and black brows.

  She’d been young—or at least Green had met her young—because she’d had clean, even teeth, and simply lying with him had cured the gum disease that had plagued humans for years. Buxom. Cory would have hated that, but Hannah had been full and busty, with soft hips. She hadn’t shied away from bread and fruit, and Green had grown her a garden as had been the envy of mortals for all around. Back then, of course, a soft, round woman had been proof of wealth, and in their snug cottage with ready food, she’d been the wealthiest girl for many, many miles. Green had sprites and pixies at his ready—not that Hannah had been ready to see them. To her, the fine clothes and sturdy shoes had appeared by magic and only magic, and Green allowed her to think that. She hadn’t had Cory’s need to know, nor her curiosity or involvement in her world.

  But then, Green had only been a wood elf back then.

  He’d been so fascinated by mortals.

  Their vitality, their intense interest in living, the stories they told themselves to make their brief stint on the planet worthwhile—he’d been in love with all of it, and watching a simple woman, a peaceful woman, squat in the dirt and pick turnips seemed serene and beautiful. Green had wanted to be part of that moment.

  He had a thousand human lifetimes to live. Spending this brief moment with Hannah, that had been a lovely thing.

  And the idea of a child had thrilled him.

  Sidhe parents are not always involved in their offspring’s lives. The children are raised by the hill, and so it had been with Green. He’d lived and played and grown and played and generally enjoyed a rather impersonal childhood in a small rural hill.

  So much space back then, he mused sadly. He’d avoided the mortals in their petty territorial disputes, and the nature of violence had hardly bothered him, like a stinging fly or a mosquito in a cool evening.

  “What happened to her?” Cory asked, her voice barely intruding on his memories. He sighed, rubbing a lock of her hair fretfully between his fingers. He was adept at letting mortals dream his memories—should he do that now?

  “I could give you the—”

  She jerked back. “No. Just tell me, Green. Having me live the memory would be great for me—but telling something, that takes the burden off the heart, you understand?”

  He shook his head. “She never fought me,” he said, voice breaking. “Not like you. I suggested something, and it was law. She never questioned, never argued, just… I was a man, and I was older, and I was fey, and she simply smiled serenely and….”

  “And that didn’t bore you stupid?” she asked, horrified.

  He stopped his litany of self-loathing and stared at her in shock. For a moment she had trod harshly on the hallowed ground of memory, and he felt an irrational anger. Then he looked at her, honestly perplexed, and remembered all of the times she’d fought him.

  Right up to the time she’d won, and ended up carrying his child.

  And even when she was still questioning that decision, she’d still fought him at the jailbreak.

  “I was young,” he said, a silly smile breaking through the pain. “I wouldn’t dream of wanting such a thing now.”

  Cory nodded seriously. “Oh, thank Goddess. I almost thought you’d made a terrible mistake with me. That was a bad moment!”

  He laughed, because she wasn’t being serious, and because—“Never,” he whispered, needing to kiss her just once. Her mouth opened, sweet from the chocolate she’d been drinking, and warm and dark too. He cupped her cheeks beneath his hands and captured her, fleeting, solid, smart, pugnacious, and then he had the strength to finish.

  He pulled back and smiled at her, stroking her cheek.

  “She wanted fruit in the middle of winter,” he said, lips quirking. “Just like the fairy tales, yes?”

  “Oh, yes,” Cory said, nodding. “I’ve heard the cravings can be fierce.”

  “Well, we had no supermarkets, and we were out of preserves. She was probably craving the vitamin C, but we didn’t know that then. I just knew that Hannah needed something, and it was my job to provide. Our fruit trees had closed up shop, and bringing one to flower in winter would kill it, so I made plans to travel down south.”

  “Blur,” she said. “Move, as you put it. Hyperspeed.”

  He nodded. “Yes, exactly. A day’s journey, two if I stopped for breath, and in those days not such a bad thing. No cars—everything far away was a day’s journey.”

  “And she didn’t argue?”

  Green shook his head and looked away. “No. We had no fences—and no defenses. We’d been alone there for a couple of years, and nobody had ventured by. She’d gone to town to visit her parents and kin, and everybody simply knew her as the woman who lived in the woods. I left the pixies and sprites with her, and some brownies, but she didn’t see them—not like you. It seemed so ordinary.”

  “What happened?”

  Green shuddered. “I paid little attention to war back then.”

  She pulled in a breath, and he knew she was ready for what was coming next. “So you’ve said.”

  “Well, a war had broken out, and we were living near a territory line. Soldiers—I don’t know whose, lovey, and I didn’t care, not then nor now. My home was violated, my beloved….”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Violated,” he choked, feeling the loneliness and horror of that moment, walking into the darkened cottage around the bodies of the soldiers. His sprites and pixies had done their jobs—at the expense of their own lives—but not before Hannah had been raped repeatedly, bloodied, destroyed. “She miscarried the baby before I arrived, and died in a pool of blood….”

  He saw those details then, the burlap bag of peaches hanging useless in his hand, the tiny form in the blood pool, his beloved covered in blood and other, worse things….

  “Oh, Green.” She wrapped strong arms around his shoulders, and there in her arms he wept the confusion, the bereftness, the terrible loss of innocence.

  “What did you do?” she asked, her lips moving softly against his ear.

  “I….” His memory stopped there. It grew cloudy, tainted scarlet and black with bitter streaks of white light for clarity. Oh Goddess… what had he done then? Had he run away from the cottage, their snug little home, left it to rot?

  No—there was a grave. He’d felt the earth rasp against his hands, shed blood in the digging of it. He could remember the weight of her, heavy with blood, with the child he’d placed in her arms as he’d carried her to rest.

  He remembered that he hadn’t been able to think of her as Hannah when he’d buried her. He’d thought of her as in the past, though the blood had still been warm. Oh Goddess—waking up to find Adrian had died, that had been bad. Adrian had been there for 150 years—and he’d been vampire, so he’d been a dry, sweet voice in Green’s head for much of their lives together. He’d lost Adrian—and losing that voice, that part of him, had made his loss real.<
br />
  This was a different loss.

  Two years ago, Cory had lain barely breathing, tossing in a ravaging fever between life and death, and Green had known that if she died, his heart was too shredded to take the loss. He’d lost Adrian—he couldn’t lose Cory, or he would lose himself. The losses were greater, more terrible and frightening. More unimaginable.

  But he’d had no other lovers, no other friends, when Hannah died. She had been his first true taste of grief, even though he’d loved several humans until their hearts failed them and they passed away in their dreams. The feeling had been new, and he hadn’t known how to defend against it, hadn’t known how to hold on to his own soul while mourning his lover and their child.

  He could remember the graves. He’d buried his little followers too—the pixies, sprites, and brownies who had defended his beloved—and he remembered standing for a terrible, fraught moment, looking into the woods.

  Where would he sleep? In the blood-spattered cabin that had no meaning anymore? His eyes wandered across the trampled garden, the violated home, and his gaze sought out the darkness beyond the trees right in front of him. His heart roiled in his chest, the thousand knives of bitter self-recrimination leading it in a macabre dance until he wanted to scream, wanted to vomit blood, wanted to melt into flesh on the bones of the simple peasant girl who had sung so sweetly in his ear as they’d been going to sleep….

  Ah, Goddess! He’d wanted to get away from the pain!

  And the woods had beckoned. They’d practically called his name.

  The rest had been… glimpses. Beguiled flesh, fevered moans of passion, bereft cries he could not respond to. Oh, who had Green become when his soul went walkabout in the forest?

  “I lost my way there,” he said roughly, ashamed. Cory loved him. Could she believe in who he’d been? “I… you wouldn’t have known me. I….” Oh, she would understand this, she would, but how could he tell her? It was bad enough he’d been a captive, a sidhe whore, helpless and compelled. She hadn’t cared, because his heart had still been strong. But this? This was weakness—this was a man who hadn’t been able to defend his family and had forgotten the taste of love. “I wandered,” he said, not sure how to put it. “For a long time—”

  “How long is long?” she asked, wrinkling her nose. “’Cause for me, a long time is, you know. A month.”

  He was forced to smile, even if it was a twisted thing. “For a century or two,” he whispered. He heard her intake of breath and knew he’d shocked her. Elves throwing away their time because they thought it was inexhaustible. Yes, humans wasted their planet, but they were not the only ones with that sin, were they?

  “How can you be lost for a century or two?” she asked, eyes opened as wide as a child’s.

  He framed her face with his hands, stroked her humanly freckled cheeks, nuzzled her hair. She was so real, so immediate. How do you explain two hundred years of being a ghost in your own heart?

  “I don’t know,” he said, holding on tightly to his voice, his composure. She needed to hear this. “I… I became a boggart in the woods—seduced highwaymen, left them naked and alone. I took young maidens from their husbands with a look under my brow and a flick of my hair.” He swallowed. “I just… I pleasured and was pleasured by, but I was never satisfied. Every fairy story you hear with the creature who has no human compassion, that was me. I… did not connect to a living soul, you understand?” He swallowed bitterly. “I was not… not a good person then, you understand? I didn’t actively seek to destroy, but I didn’t actively seek to help. I was… like the other. Chaos and mindless want. Not a good sidhe.” Oh, the bitterness of that confession. He’d worked so hard, since Adrian, to be the best of his people and not the worst.

  “Oh, Green,” she said, turning her head to kiss the palm of his hand. “You were grieving. You had nobody. Bracken and I—we had you, but you had nobody.” Oh, Goddess, she was weeping against his hand, her eyes wide and shadowed, her face bereft.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this now,” he said belatedly. “You need to rest—”

  “Shut up.” Her voice was thick. “This has been sitting between us like a fucking planet for weeks. After tonight…. Goddess, Green, if telling me this lets us be closer, then by all means, fucking tell me!”

  “I….” As Green’s voice fractured, Bracken gave a grunt and folded Nicky a little tighter. “I….” He’d been afraid. The last time he’d faced the joy and the potential for loss that were locked in Cory’s tiny, fragile body, he’d been destroyed. He needed her to know what it was she was risking, what he had become when it went so terribly wrong. She already knows I will fade without her. What else can I say?

  She rescued him from the inarticulate mess that was his heart. “What pulled you out?” she asked curiously, turning her reddened, shadowed eyes and wet face up to him.

  He grimaced. “Mist….” Oh, the ironies—his most perfidious lover, the one who had betrayed him to Oberon, who had been the death of Adrian. Of all the people to be grateful to, it rankled to be grateful to the man he’d later mastered and killed. “Mist saved me, as awful as it is to admit. He bedded me one night, and the next, and the next. I was wild, feral, running around the woods in a scrap of linen. Like a cock on feet, yes?”

  She laughed softly and then choked a little, then recovered herself. “Quite a picture,” she said, making a face.

  “I think they’ve made animations of the phenomenon,” he said with a straight face, astounded that she could bring a laugh, a joke out of him now.

  “So you fascinated him, and he wanted to know you more.”

  “Until he betrayed me,” Green said bleakly.

  “Yes, but even then….” She sighed and patted his chest, then astounded him with her capacity to forgive. “He didn’t mean to, you know that? From what you said, he brought you to court to show the world his new lover. There’s no harm in that. But Titania and Oberon wanted you, and he probably wanted to show off for Morana, and Mist was—”

  “Too weak to say no,” Green conceded bitterly.

  “It’s easy not to hate him so much now that he’s dead,” she acknowledged sagely.

  “Goddess, you’re ferocious.” He leaned his forehead against hers, and it wasn’t his imagination—the mist in the garden was glowing softly. “You… I’m afraid for you sometimes, because you are so determined to do it all, but you awe me. You must know that.” Young. When had she grown so womanly, so mature, and when had he reverted back to that wandering, feral creature lost in grief?

  “Is that why?” she asked after a moment, and now, now she showed her hurt from the last weeks. “Why you let this… this separate us the way it has? Because you’re afraid for me?”

  He took a deep breath and tried very hard to hold himself together. “I….” Oh Goddess. “I had that picture,” he said after a moment. “That future, the three of us. Me, my lover, and our child. It’s….” He swallowed past the absurd tightness in his throat. “It’s a powerful reality, this dream you’ve given me,” he said, hoping she’d understand. “And I had it ripped away, and I didn’t just grieve—I lost myself. I became someone else. I’d rather die—I’d rather fade from grief—than do that again. And how am I supposed to just lay that on your shoulders? You can’t even admit you’re having these babies, and that they may kill you yet, and—”

  “Shh….” She must have gotten it, must have understood, because her hands were smoothing back his hair as he clutched her to him. His body locked around her, convulsed with shudders of long-suppressed fear and a grief never fully addressed. Oh, it was so hard to grieve a dream without escaping into another one to avoid the pain. Tears, bitter ones, fear that he could no longer deny. She’d come unglued on him not hours before because of something real, something now, and he’d held her. Now he came unglued for the past, for dreams long since dust, and she comforted him with just as much tenderness. He couldn’t quantify that exchange, not in a hundred years, not in a thousand.

  “I
’m not Hannah,” she said, her voice tight.

  “You think I don’t know that?” he asked, the contrast enough to make him laugh. “You’d never send me out for fruit—”

  “You would have gone anyway,” she said. “But I would—”

  “You would have come with me. You would have made do without. You would have done something, anything, other than agree to what I said like it was law. And sorceress or no sorceress, those soldiers wouldn’t have stood a chance. I know this—”

  “But it’s still in your head,” she said, touching his forehead softly. “I get that. I get why you needed to be there for the jailbreak. I even get why I wasn’t out there tonight, and that had very little to do with my pregnancy and everything to do with logistics. It’s not two people in a cottage anymore.”

  He closed his eyes. “I know this too.”

  Bracken choked on a snore then, and Nicky whimpered and burrowed deeply. For a moment they both looked over her shoulder at them—warmth, beauty, fierceness, all of it vulnerable in their presence with sleep.

  “I’m glad,” she said, turning to him with a faint smile. “I wouldn’t trade them, Green. Not in my life or in my bed, not to make this simpler. Not for anything.”

  “You’ll feel the same about the babes,” he said, needing some acceptance from her, needing the seeds that had been planted in her womb to plant themselves in her heart.

  “I have no… okay, I have some, but you know, one thing at a time. I have only a few, neurotic, soon-to-be-overcome doubts.” She nodded seriously, and the tightness in his throat eased and allowed him to smile, loving her without conditions.

  “You’re amazing,” he said, meaning it.

  “I’m exhausted,” she retorted with a semihysterical laugh. “And you know what?”

  Oh, he knew the answer to this. “You have to pee,” he said pragmatically. “And get ready for school.” What an abominable decision. But he couldn’t fight her—not now. Not when every fight they’d ever had was there in his memory, reminding him that her judgment was just as good as his.