by Amy Lane
“I’m not going to school,” she said gruffly, laying her cheek against his chest again.
His heart, young and lost, suddenly found itself, the ground solid beneath his feet. “No?”
“No,” she whispered. “That was me being a little girl, thinking I could make it all normal by having a normal school day. But Hallow can drop off our assignments, and our next work is online.” She gestured limply to the light around them. “Sun’s coming up in a few minutes. We should have been getting ready about an hour ago.”
“No normal school day for you?” he said, hugging her tightly to his side.
“It’s not all normal, Green,” she said seriously, looking up at him. “We’ve both lost too much to risk anything by pretending life’s normal. I won’t do that to us—I won’t do that to you. Not anymore. Me, pregnant, it’s the new normal. Our children, safe—that will be our lives.”
More tears, simple gratitude this time, leaked from the corners of his eyes.
“We’ll make that happen,” he vowed. “Oh, Goddess. Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick op Crocken Green, for you we will make that come to pass.”
She didn’t say anything—probably still grappling with what she’d just said—but she didn’t need to.
Together they sat watching the air around them brighten and turn white with the sun on the mist. Bracken awoke and shifted so Nicky rested in his lap on one side, and his other arm wrapped around Cory’s shoulders.
Nicky grunted a little and sat up, resting his head against Brack’s, and together they watched as the hills burned pink, then red, and the horizon turned to gold.
And a new, hard-won day began.
Cory: The New Normal
MY MIND wouldn’t stop.
We made it downstairs, and I showered with Bracken’s help. Then Green was needed. Lambent, who had been so stoic for Kyle, felt the vampire’s day death in his darkling and was so undone he came knocking on my door to beg piteously for Green’s company.
I couldn’t deny him. I came to the doorway in my T-shirt while Green finished his own shower and simply held his hand while he stood leaning against the doorframe and shaking. He couldn’t look at me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
His wild blue eyes shifted to me and then darted back, staring at the space behind me where Bracken was laying a sleeping Nicky into bed and doing something magic to make the brutal morning sun stop streaming through our window.
“Not everyone gets the happy ending,” he said after a moment, and it was my turn to look away.
Adrian hadn’t shown.
Green hadn’t said anything—the thing he’d needed to say was too necessary, too profound as it was—but I’d begun to guess.
I was starting to be afraid of the answer. Would Adrian come back to us when the alien invasion of my uterus was over? Maybe Green didn’t want me to be pissed off at the little swimmers for taking Adrian away. Well, too late. I was pissed at them for the sore boobs and the empty stomach and the full bladder, I could be pissed at them for this too.
Didn’t mean I wasn’t starting to hold my arms protectively over my stomach when things hurt too much—things like the empty, hungry look on Lambent’s face when Green stepped out of the shower.
“Oh,” Green said softly.
I smiled at him faintly. “I’m dead on my feet,” I said, because I was swaying in the doorway, and wasn’t the new normal being honest about things like this?
He walked toward Lambent, and with a tender buss on my cheek and a nuzzle, we parted for the night. Lambent clutched Green’s hand as his lifeline, and Green led the devastated elf to the door of his own room across the hall, where all good healing happened. I watched them go, feeling as empty as Lambent had looked.
So much… so much to process. And all of it was big and frightening, and I felt small and alone.
Bracken’s body draped over mine from behind, and he spoke quietly in my ear.
“Come to bed,” he ordered softly. It was an order, and once upon a time, that would have made me bristle. But not right now. If I had learned nothing else since Adrian had first chatted me up, I had learned the value of allowing myself to be cared for.
“He didn’t come,” I confessed, my chest aching.
Bracken let out a breath that ruffled the loosely hanging hair by my ear. “No.”
My throat closed. “Does that mean… not ever?”
“No,” Bracken reassured me, although I wasn’t sure how he knew. His hand, broader and thicker than Green’s, slid down and cupped my stomach. “They’re alive in there,” he whispered. “So alive. The vampires are almost afraid to touch you—but the bravest who take your blood or your power, they understand life as they’d forgotten how to. What do you think it would do to a vampire who has died twice?”
I nodded and swallowed past that tightness, trying to remind myself that I had three lovers—three husbands!—and that I had long ago reconciled myself to not ever touching my beloved, kissing him, feeling him inside me, ever again. I was so blessed. So very blessed. I had been Lambent and Kyle. I had mourned like them, had needed so badly that I had hurt the people I imposed upon with my terrible, selfish grieving.
But it didn’t do any good.
“I need him,” I confessed, my voice raw and aching in my swollen throat. “I need him. He knew me when I was young and terrified, and I’m that same girl. I’m worse, because now I know how much I don’t know, and….”
I had comforted Green, and now Bracken comforted me, whispered to me, told me it was all going to be okay. And I guess the difference between that terrified child I had been back when Adrian had first courted me and the woman I was now, nearly three years later, was that now I knew how to accept comfort and healing from a soul that loved me.
Brack held me and rocked me and lifted me in his strong arms, all when he must have been as frightened as I was, as frightened as Green.
Until that moment—that moment right there, when his hands shook in my hair and I heard his uncertainty as he kissed my temple and asked me if I would trust him to put me under to sleep—I’d never realized a simple truth about grown-ups.
Yeah, sure, we pretended we had it all together. I ordered people into action, ordered poor Ellis to his death, ordered the hill to defend itself, and I sounded like I knew what I was doing.
But in the end, it all came down to that moment of the jailbreak when I jumped on Bracken’s back and said, “Oh, fuck, let’s just do this!”
We were all making it up as we went along, whether we were running to get our lover forbidden fruit or drifting in an endless cycle of pleasure and loss.
Or comforting the people we loved the only way we knew how.
“Don’t put me under,” I whispered. “I trust you, Bracken Brine, but I want to feel your heartbeat against my cheek as I fall asleep. I need to feel it. Please, Bracken, please.”
He nodded and rolled over, arranging us just so.
The music of his breathing lulled me to sleep.
WE ONLY slept a few hours. Besides the inevitable tyranny of my new body, there was the simple need to not get our days and nights switched. We woke up at noon, and I knew that Nicky and I would be back in bed by eleven after we made sure there would be no terrible equinox rituals, no new werewolves, inculcated in blood.
In the meantime, we spent the afternoon in sort of a hungover fugue state, drifting from the kitchen to snack, to the living room to do homework, or to the bay window. All of us—Nicky, Green, me, Teague, Katy, Jack, Lambent, even Arturo—any of us in the main room. We would drift like wraiths to the great picture window, staring out over the canyon beyond the hill to where the sun was slanting thickly over the brilliant orange and rust of the deciduous trees.
Out there.
They were out there.
They’d been coming for some time. We’d fought them back last Thanksgiving, and they’d regrouped. We’d fought them off in Monterey as they’d been moving up from Southern California, and
damn, they’d had their next move in place.
What we’d done last night, that did nothing more than buy us time. Lambent had burned all of the RVs and bodies so cleanly, Max said the forestry service simply reported a small wildfire that had burned itself out. It was a blip on the radar of the humans and not crippling to the forces of our enemies. We needed to find the leader, the woman who fucked and killed and birthed abominations, and we needed to stop her.
The sixth—or six-hundredth—time I wandered up to the window, Teague burst out, “Oh, for fuck’s sake! I’m going running!”
“Jesus, that’s the best suggestion I’ve heard all day!”
Green and Bracken scowled at me, and they might even have gotten their way if Nicky hadn’t said, “Oh please, can I come?”
The scowls went away, and I was so grateful I didn’t even complain about their “oh for fuck’s sake, we’re not doing this again” looks.
As runs go, it was awesome. Nobody went too fast because we were all beat, and nobody talked—because, Goddess, who had anything to say. It wasn’t until the end, as we turned the corner that led up to the hill and into the garden, that Teague of all people broke the silence.
“I say we go after them,” he said. “I mean, we made one foray into their territory, and they couldn’t touch us because it was public. I say we dress our people up in suits and go meet them at every office we think they’re in. Different people. Go up, shake hands, say, ‘I think we need to talk.’ What do you think?”
I grunted and slowed to a walk in the cooling dusk so I could talk. “I think they’d start killing us off one at a time.”
Teague and Nicky both sucked in air.
“Jesus, Cory, way to kill an idea!” Nicky laughed.
“No, she’s right,” Teague agreed. “It’s a shitty idea. I just get… God, so fucking impatient!”
I started to laugh with whatever air I had left. “Join the club. It’s called the ‘I’d rather kill myself than wait for a plan’ club. I’m a charter member.”
Nicky started to laugh too. He wasn’t winded, because, well, bird, but I could forgive him. “I think we all sort of drew up the bylaws, Cory. The point is, we need to find a standard game plan until we have a way to stop this bullshit.”
I sighed and pulled my hair back from my eyes. I remembered that thought, that worry, about killing children and parents and brothers and sisters.
“We need to see the human collateral damage,” I said after a minute. “Maybe that’s what we could do while we wait. Let’s figure out who they are and see how they’re interacting with their families now. Let’s do some detective work. That jail was full of bad guys—let’s see if they started out as bad guys, or if the blood change made them that way.”
Teague’s and Nicky’s eyes met. “Good plan, for someone who didn’t have a clue forty-five minutes ago. Anything else?”
I grunted. “We need to capture one. Hopefully an obvious bad guy, because I’m just not that excited about kidnapping some poor beguiled lawyer with a family. I want to… I mean, we cured a guy who’d been poisoned by something like this.” The sun fell beyond the canyon, leaving a chilly, humid silence in its wake. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we didn’t have to commit mass murder anymore?”
Both of them grunted.
“Yeah,” Teague said, swinging his arms in an effort to not cool down too quickly. “Gotta say, that got old after the first time.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been doing it longer than you,” I said sourly. “I’d really like to find a better fucking way.”
We had a banquet that night, not so much in celebration of killing as in celebration of living, but it wasn’t long or involved. Conversation started pretty much the minute the last course was pulled, although Grace left some extra vegetables and fruit out for me to nibble on.
For once I didn’t argue, didn’t resist, didn’t question. Feed the body, keep the soul from shriveling. I could deal.
The plan was adopted—encouraged, even—and Teague was left to implement it. Arturo and Lambent wanted in on it too, and Marcus and Phillip agreed to do the Internet research required.
When the meal was done, and the vampire patrols out among the foothills had sounded the all clear, Green ordered Bracken to get Nicky and me to bed. I kissed my ou’e’hm on the cheek.
“Proud of yourself?” he asked, his voice pitched so only I could hear it under the babble of his great hall.
“I love the view from your window,” I said truthfully. “It would be wonderful if it didn’t feel like a prison grating.”
He grimaced. “Too nice and yet too true.”
Macbeth—we knew that play by heart. It was a sidhe favorite.
“To face it like a man I must feel it like a man,” I mangled, making him laugh.
“Feel it like a woman, beloved. That is, after all, what you’re best at.”
Praise—what can I say? It’s my favorite drug. I kissed him, openmouthed, and let him know he’d be welcome in our bed, then allowed Bracken to lift me into his arms and carry me to my room with Nicky jogging behind.
AN UNEASY quiet fell over the hill—the day of rest had given me a chance to catch up on my homework, so I spent the next day working at Grace’s fabric and yarn store. Bracken actually loved working here with me—and we abused him unmercifully, since he had the height to stock shelves and retrieve stock from the loft storage space that didn’t see much daylight.
During the evening, after the vampires were awake, we started a file on the people we suspected of being werewolves. We sent out our people with the specific purpose of gleaning names and family information from anyone who smelled of the blood taint (because funky was just not a good name for them, not after we’d killed so very many), and we went to work on building profiles.
The good news was that there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of middle ground. Our typical blood-twisted werewolf was male, but not always. He was usually a blue-collar worker—someone who wouldn’t mind having a few beers with a buddy after closing time and who didn’t spend his off-hours going to foreign film festivals.
Not a bad guy—a guy who might have to live with his parents into his thirties, or work two jobs to keep his family in a trailer park. Someone unattached or slippery with the monogamy concept. Someone easily led.
A soldier.
But that wasn’t every person who ended up on our profile.
About one in eight of the people who pinged our senses were single professionals, middle-aged, getting ready to do something important politically—the leader of the local rotary, the leader of the Elks, the principal who sat on two boards of education. And, of course, law enforcement—every branch, from cops to lawyers to judges.
A commander.
By our own counts during the fight, we figured that each of the RVs had probably held about ten werewolves—one leader and eight to twelve good little soldiers.
“This is a different strategy,” Teague said thoughtfully, looking at the little jackets we’d gathered on each of our suspects. “In LA they were recruiting homeless people and gang members. In Monterey, it was mostly blue-collar. What do you think changed?”
“They kept losing,” Green said pithily. “If she was coming after us, she needed people who could fight against our people, and our people are well trained and well cared for. Smart.”
“But those people are difficult to recruit,” Arturo said, looking at the jackets as well. “We have them because Adrian spent a long time looking for them. She’s trying to do this in a matter of months, so she’s going for obvious targets.”
“You’re overlooking the obvious,” Grace said, taking her own turn.
We all looked at her—any opinion was welcome.
“The women she’s got here are the lawyers, the judges—not the soldiers. That’s her working. She wants men to protect her, and men to fight, but women get to command. She’s got an axe to grind.”
The men around me grunted. “Wonderful,” Teague growled.
“Yeah, it is,” I said, feeling a shaft of optimism for the first time in forever. “It means she’s going to underestimate us. Because our guys are all smart and educated too, just like our women. It’s an edge.”
And that carried us through.
But working in Grace’s store—even a few hours after we got home early on Fridays—that was the time I got to interact with humans as humans. It was something I used to hate, but after spending time bonding with people over yarn, I’d grown to enjoy it very much. At least when I was at work the soothing illusion of normal crept over me, and it wasn’t until shift was almost over on the evening of the third day that I realized I’d forgotten one teeny little detail.
Grace’s store is cleverly laid out with shelf upon shelf of cubbies, each cubby filled with yarn. The yarn was grouped by fiber company and organized by color, and while we bickered endlessly about doing it either exclusively by color or exclusively by weight, or even by texture, right now this was what worked for us. It wouldn’t have mattered—I was living in a furry, fuzzy, sleek, tightly twisted, loosely wound, sequined, labyrinthine rainbow, and I spent a lot of my shifts running back and forth between the walls of yarn, unable to see any part of the store but the two shelves I was sandwiched between.
So imagine my surprise as I was bustling down one aisle, trying to find rose and green in a variety of textures for a young woman making her first afghan, when I rounded a corner and ran straight into my mother.
I don’t know why I was so surprised. She’d come to find me in the yarn store before when she hadn’t been able to reach me, and she’d started to stalk Grace’s few shelves of specialty quilting fabrics. I’d started looking forward to seeing her because the craft store was neutral ground, and usually only one husband was there at a time. This meant she didn’t have to fixate on my weird personal life or on how it was really cool to go to your daughter’s wedding when she was marrying three guys at the same time, but now hanging out with your friends and explaining that sitch to them was just not as comfortable as you thought it would be.
