Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  She did not look like the polished mean girl who had tried to make me feel small.

  And she did not look like what was in the vampire vault right now.

  “Let me the fuck out of here!” It was her constant refrain. Muffled by the steel vault, her voice was still clear and distinctive. I think it was the werewolf power in it. Green had installed fiber optics as soon as they’d become available—the better for the older, more-powerful vampires to know what they were walking into when they were trying to surprise the newly fledged, violent vampires that we kept in there. So I could actually see what was screaming like that, and it wasn’t human.

  She’d ripped off her clothes within an hour of waking up and had spent the first twenty-four hours as pure wolf. She broke off her claws on the steel walls and the metal bedframe in that time.

  There was a slot on the floor—prison style—from before the fiber optics. Pretty much every hour, we’d been shoving raw meat in there as well as water.

  She devoured all of it and howled for more.

  After her first day, she’d changed partway back into a human. Just enough to stand upright and scream.

  And scream.

  And scream.

  When she wasn’t screaming, she was lying fetal in the destroyed room, shaking and moaning and cursing us all. I really couldn’t blame her. Man, if I’d known how horrible it would be going without the blood or magic or whatever it was that kept the elf witch’s followers so tightly twined to her purposes, I would have killed Iris instead.

  We never left the room unsupervised. Ever. There were always two people watching the aging monitor—but only in shifts of two hours or so. To watch her longer courted madness.

  It didn’t matter if we watched or not. At least not to me.

  I couldn’t eat, and I could barely sleep. Bracken, Nicky, or Green had a hand on my body at all times when we were on the hill, whether it was in the small of my back or the back of my neck, just to keep me from shuddering and twitching my way through the day. Green was needed—as were the other elves—to provide the same touch sympathy for everyone else, so it was mostly Brack, and he was starting to need as much sleep as I did. When we were off the hill, he was too drained to keep it up, so Nicky took over unless we were in class. And speaking of class?

  The one good thing was that, for once, our professor laid the fuck off. I’m not sure if it was the little bowing exhibition or the fact that I threw up in his trash can one morning because I couldn’t make it to the bathroom—but I’m thinking it was that last one.

  “Must have been some party,” he commented acidly as I dragged the trash can around the corner so he could call the custodian with the hazmat gear.

  I was tired, cranky, sick, and worried. Watching my mouth was the last thing on my agenda. “I’m not hungover, asshole, I’m pregnant,” I snapped, glaring at him through swollen eyes.

  “Oh, Lord. Are you going to be hysterical for the rest of the semester?”

  I pinned him with a glare. “You. Asshole. Make one more crack about female hysteria, and you are going to know what it feels like to have ovaries. Now do us all a favor and try to teach, okay?”

  His eyes got really wide, but Bracken was glaring at him from his sprawl at the undersized desk. The guy looked from him to me in confusion.

  “Wait—that’s the father of your baby?”

  I tried hard to focus my eyes. I needed to brush my teeth—oh yeah, that was why I’d been heading for my backpack. “Yeah?”

  “Really? I mean, you’re such a tiny thing, and he’s so….”

  I grabbed my toothpaste and the little travel-brush kit from my backpack pocket and stalked away, muttering about dumbasses and mean girls and werewolves. It didn’t make any sense, but I was just sure this guy and Iris Masterson should get together, because she was probably in this fix because she needed to get laid, and this guy needed to be bound and gagged naked in front of a woman wearing nothing but leather straps and wielding a riding crop.

  The image made me giggle, and I must have sounded deranged because he left me alone for the rest of the period. On our way out the door, Bracken and I leaned on each other for strength, and I felt his shadow kiss in my hair.

  “This can’t go on forever,” he said softly. “Even a werewolf’s body has to give out.”

  I grunted. “Hers or mine?”

  I was starving, queasy, parched, and full. My boobs hurt, my muscles hurt, and oh my fuckin’ God, I had to pee. I was starting to see that this sleep thing people kept pushing on me was no joke, but I could feel her, inside the hill, her psychic vibrations screaming at me, and sleep was not to be had.

  “If she doesn’t snap out of it,” Bracken said calmly, “I will put her out of her misery myself.” We had just entered the quad. The sunshine slanted like syrup through the trees, and the October breeze whipping in our faces was just cool enough to be refreshing.

  I gasped, at first from the breeze and then from what Bracken had said.

  “We can’t,” I told him brokenly. “Curing her… it’s our only chance, besides….”

  There had been more werewolf attacks—and more of the wolves themselves attacking—over the last two weeks.

  This time I did throw a batch of them into the canyon. Well, not far enough to kill them, but far enough that climbing back would be a bitch with broken legs.

  The next time, as I scooped them up in my shields, Lambent—who was grieving, sleep deprived, and fucking cranky—set them on fire just as I threw them in the lake.

  It took a week for them to regroup, and by then Bracken had pretty much had fucking enough. He’d looked at me grimly, grabbed my hand, and called their blood.

  It was nearly impossible for a werewolf to bleed to death, but we’d dumped a great deal of blood into the trees as that batch of wolves sailed through the air and into the lake. The vultures had been circling for the days since then, and we were pretty sure the wolves who’d barely dragged themselves out of the lake that time weren’t recovering after being set on fire and then bled almost to death. Some of the ones in the last attack had still looked a little singed from the week before. I could almost have pitied them if it weren’t for Iris Masterson mewling in the vampire vault and sucking me dry!

  “No,” I mumbled, thinking of those poor wolves with one stupid directive. “I mean, they’re probably only distracting us from what’s coming next, but it’s not fair. Man, all they did was go out and get laid, and now they’re stuck in this… this hateful thrall to this woman and her filthy stinking wretched dumb blood and sex and whatever. I hate that. And you know what?”

  “I got no idea,” Bracken mumbled, chivying me along toward the library. We were so not going to do homework. We’d spent our last study sessions asleep in each other’s arms, and not a soul had bothered us.

  “There’s a reason she’s using Green’s mark, and it pisses me off.”

  Yeah, that was another thing.

  Our mark—oak leaves, lime trees, and the thornless rose—and we’d seen it etch its way along Iris Masterson’s body and then heal, like her nails and her teeth and the chunks of flesh she kept tearing out of her own body in her pain.

  “What’s the reason?” Bracken asked, genuinely curious. He was also a little drunk on exhaustion—but, hey, join the fucking club.

  “I think the elf bitch was there,” I snarled, because that’s what happens when you’re out of your mind. You start seeing the stuff on the edges of your consciousness instead of the center. This had been taunting us on the edges, and now I saw it clearly. “She was there that night we blew power through all of Northern California. She got our mark, and she hated it. And instead of petitioning us like a grown-up and begging to go somewhere else, she nursed it and festered it and allowed it to rot out her soul. And when she planned her revenge, this is the shape it took.”

  I was so heartsick and furious, I felt my hands clench as if her neck were in my grasp. Iris Masterson—we might not ever have been friends, but
she didn’t need to become this… this thing.

  And I remembered what we’d had to do to the other people who’d become things this summer, and I didn’t know if I could put Iris out of her misery like that.

  I was so fucking sick of killing.

  How could I bring children into a world where death was my only solution?

  Bracken had led me unerringly to the napping couches—erm, studying couches—in the back of the library, and neither of us made even a pretense of studying. He kicked off his low-top Converse and stretched his legs out in front of him, then pulled me on top to stretch out along his side.

  For a moment, the buzzing in my head stopped.

  I must have made an mm sound, because he made a hm? sound, and the melted chocolate of his presence sweetened the chafes in my soul.

  “You…,” I whispered. “So wonderful. Have I mentioned you’re wonderful? I don’t think I tell you enough that you’re wonderful.”

  “You know what would be wonderful?” he asked dryly.

  “Sex,” I replied without hesitation.

  “Goddess, I miss sex.” He finished that thought on an inhale that was actually a soft snore. Yeah, we all missed sex. It was one of the reasons we were exhausted—because sex was power for us, and we weren’t having any. I was seriously thinking of having Nicky take us to a hotel on the way up the hill so we could all get it on and charge up.

  In fact, that was a nice idea, even though it would be making love off the hill. But it wasn’t like we hadn’t done that a lot this summer.

  Unbidden, mine and Bracken’s and Nicky’s summer adventures started streaming behind my eyes. At first it was lovely. For a brief moment, my body ceased to be my enemy and became my pleasantly aroused friend.

  But then my worry about Iris must have leached in, because the last thing I remembered thinking about was the silk of Gretchen’s hair. She’d trusted Green and me, and we’d sat on the hillside and told her pretty stories about seeing her murdered family again even as the sun rose and turned her to ash.

  Would Iris’s hair feel as silky under my fingers?

  More, I told myself. She has a fully functioning heart pumping blood to her skin, and….

  I fell asleep on that thought.

  I woke up with an idea of what to do.

  “BLOOD,” I said as we swung into the front room. Everybody there—Max, Renny, Connor, Dylan, Arturo, Teague, Jack, Katy—turned surprised and haunted eyes toward me.

  “Blood to you too!” Green saluted, coming to me from the kitchen and wrapping me in his arms. I allowed myself to go for a moment, disappearing into the haven of his skin and muscle. I took several deep breaths, sustaining myself, and then thought, We so very much need to have sex again.

  It was that thought that made me straighten up.

  “One of us needs to bleed on her steak,” I said bluntly.

  Green’s eyes widened. “Duh,” he said. “We were just going to take down her food. Bracken, you care to do the honors?” He extended a wrist, but I clasped it gently and pulled it down.

  “Not you,” I said, looking at him and nodding so he’d agree with me. “You’re our leader, yes—but Iris… she’s a leader. She wants to be a female leader. She’s going to hate your blood on principle, and yeah, I’d lay money she’ll know the difference.”

  Green massaged the bridge of his nose. “Beloved—this will link you to her. You should know that by now.”

  I nodded. “I do. I do, Green. And if she needs to be taken down because this doesn’t work, well, I’ll be the one to—”

  “Tell her, Shep,” Jefischa said, pushing his lover from behind so he almost stumbled down the granite steps.

  “Okay—Jefi!”

  “But she’s going to connect them with blood! You heard her! She can’t do that—she has the puppies!”

  “Babies,” Shepherd said sternly.

  “Little, cute, blind, nuzzling puppies,” Jefischa replied. “Puppies. She’s going to have two, they’re a litter. Anyway—”

  “But we can’t connect her with Green!” I argued. “Elf Bitch… she already has his blood—”

  “And yours,” Bracken said soberly. “Don’t you remember?”

  I closed my eyes and saw blood whirling up from all of us, wielded by Bracken’s power, a whirlwind of blood and song that passed through everyone within Green’s reach.

  My blood.

  “No,” I said, grimacing. “No, I didn’t, because I didn’t count it, but Jefi’s right.” I hated that he was right. “Puppies. I’ve got puppies, and—”

  “Shepherd and I,” Jefischa said, nodding excitedly. “It could work. Shep’s first—he’s the Angel of Repentance. He’s not a leader like Green, and his blood can watch over her.”

  We all looked at Jefischa. “Really?” Renny said delightedly. She’d been hit hard by Iris’s withdrawal—this was the first time I’d seen her in the hill while not a cat in the last two weeks. “You guys have duties? Like departments? What was your department?”

  Jefi grinned, that open grin that had probably sent Shepherd on a four-thousand-year fall. “Fourth Hour of the Night.”

  We all blinked. “Fourth Hour of the Night?”

  He nodded, that California-boy hair blowing around his face. “Oh, yes—I watched people at four in the morning.” He looked very seriously at Green. “It used to be sort of a quiet post, you know, but with the invention of electricity, it was actually almost as busy as the ten p.m. shift.”

  “I would imagine,” Green said politely. “So why Shepherd’s blood?”

  “Because I have power she doesn’t know,” Shepherd said simply. “I’m a powerful angel, and that’s God’s blood running through my veins, not the Goddess’s. It’s like….” He grimaced. “Drug addiction—very often, they use a sedative to counter a stimulant. She’s withdrawing from a stimulant. I’m the sedative.”

  Well, it wasn’t something we dealt with much at the hill—but we did use the blood change that came with the vampire or were transformation to help the addicts recover from their physical addictions.

  “Okay,” I said, not looking at Green. I was taking Shepherd’s offer—I wasn’t going to question it, or the fact that Adrian and God had dropped two perfect dispensers of the antidote to our problem in our lap.

  I just couldn’t.

  I was exhausted. I needed to touch my lovers without the taint of despair and torture that had permeated Green’s home for the past two weeks.

  I wanted to remember that, for a whole nanosecond, I had almost gotten excited about my pregnancy, because, yeah, that train was not going any slower.

  “Wait!” The voice came from an unexpected source. As a whole, we turned to Lambent, who had been sprawled on the front couch with his arms crossed in front of his chest, staring broodingly out on the canyon.

  “You have something to add?”

  The fire elf turned toward us, bruises under his eyes from grieving and being locked in this hill like the rest of us, under siege from within and without.

  “Half a pint, lovey. You said the queen bitch has already tasted most of you?”

  I looked at him and shrugged, but it was Bracken who answered.

  “We think she might have been there when Green took over power. We gave everybody a chance to petition, to be let out of the binding, but we’re thinking she didn’t take it.”

  Lambent grunted. “Wonderful. I’ve got no patience for that shite, do you, Green?”

  Green moved back over to drape across my shoulders again. I realized that he was taking strength from me. Well, hell, he’d been stuck in the hill with… I shuddered. We couldn’t hear her screaming with our ears, but through this entire conversation, her psychic withdrawal symptoms had been resonating in some sick pit of our stomachs.

  “No,” he said gruffly, rubbing his cheek against my hair. “I’ve got no patience with this. If she had a grievance, she had a voice.”

  Lambent pushed himself up from the couch in a sudden burst
of movement. He stalked across the living room and into the kitchen where, as Green had said, the plate of raw meat sat on the counter waiting to be delivered. Without ceremony he held out his wrist and glared half-defiantly at Bracken.

  “But he’s male,” I said, remembering my earlier words about knowing the difference.

  “But I’m not a leader,” Lambent replied grimly. “You’re right—she’ll know. She might even hate it. But human children will eat broccoli and turnips when they’re starving, and I don’t think she’s different. What’s the worst that can happen? She doesn’t eat steak?”

  I half laughed. Sure. There were female elves too. This was a good idea—we could try more than once. “Go for it. The more the merrier. If the entire damned hill has to bleed on her food, we’ll do it for a chance at peace.”

  “Can she spare you a minute, mate?”

  Bracken nodded. “Shepherd?”

  Shepherd’s wings tended to crowd any space, so Bracken did Lambent first. His touch on Lambent’s wrist was almost sweet—Bracken had come to care for the fire elf since we’d been working with him. It showed in his touch. Without breaking contact from Green, I sidled over to Bracken and snaked an arm around his waist.

  Ah….

  That now-familiar circuit of love and power thrummed between us, and Lambent tilted his flame-gilt head back and hissed through his teeth as though Brack’s touch on his wrist was just too delicious.

  A thin red line opened up in the wake of Bracken’s finger on his flesh, and Lambent allowed his ichor to flow freely onto the two pounds of flank steak. After a moment Lambent shifted, and Green caught his hand. Lambent’s body had to cross right in front of me, and I smelled the essence of wood fire and steamed roses that Lambent always sort of emanated, before Green licked his wrist delicately to close the wound.

  Ah….

  The shudder of completion rippled through all of us, a moment of pleasant sensuality in the midst of the despair that had permeated the hill. Lambent placed a brief kiss on Green’s cheek, then Bracken’s, and then, surprisingly, mine.