by Amy Lane
“Goddess, let this work,” he prayed fervently.
“So may it be,” we all replied.
He moved, and Shepherd approached. For a moment I thought his wings would get in the way, but then I noticed that his wings did this thing—this magic thing—that sort of just made them not touch anything they were near.
No matter how crowded we were.
This close I could see the outline of every storm-purple feather on the wing in front of me, but I was reasonably sure that if I reached out to touch it, the feather would be too soft to even register against my skin.
And that I’d never remember the feel of it on my palm.
Yeah, sure, the guys had fallen from heaven, by their own report willingly, in order to experience the joys of being human.
But they weren’t human, not entirely, just like the elves weren’t.
And I wasn’t.
Shepherd didn’t close his eyes or savor the pain as Bracken traced a respectful line of blood across his wrist. He looked at the wound with an old familiar sorrow that had apparently been his burden in heaven without the blood, as it was now on earth with it.
The blood dripped freely onto Iris Masterson’s next meal.
God, Goddess, perhaps somebody would have mercy on her soul.
Arturo took the plate down, insisting that if the pain let up, the four of us should be the first people to find a bed and use it in whatever way we might find convenient. The entire hill knew when she swallowed the first bite.
By reports of the two at the monitors—Jack and Katy, actually—by the time she’d finished the entire steak, she was simply a wolf. By the time she’d taken her fifth breath, she’d turned human again, falling into an exhausted heap on the ruins of what had once been her bed.
We didn’t know any of that.
The pure fucking psychic relief was so great as it passed through the hill that Green, Bracken, and I felt our knees buckle. Nicky, who had been our patient psychic battery as we’d supported each other and kept the hill sane and reinforced the shields and continued to function in spite of the steadily crushing exhaustion, actually moaned as the four of us passed out in a heap on the carpet of Green’s living room.
We awoke naked, skin to skin, on my and Bracken’s bed, nearly six hours later.
Of course I had to pee.
GRACE HAD the vampires sneak into the vault the next day and replace the furnishings as well as bring a big bucket of water and some soft knit clothes for when Iris woke up.
She didn’t wake up that night—thank Goddess.
Instead we all ate a leisurely, peaceful meal in my room, in various stages of undress. Then, after the sprites had cleaned up (and the poor dears were brighter now—they’d dimmed to half wattage during the terrible psychic werewolf incursion), we made love.
As sex goes, it did not change the shape of the hill or send color washes through the walls or even reinforce the Cory Detection Shield we’d put in place earlier.
But those were sorceress things and elf things and shape-shifter things—they were not necessary this night.
What it did do was allow us to be naked and touching, whole and together, laughing while inside each other, joyful while holding our lovers in our mouths, our bodies. Nothing new happened, but nothing new needed to happen.
Oh, holy Goddess, thank you for quiet interludes when our skin is being touched tenderly and pleasure is our only agenda. These are the moments that feed our soul and give us the strength for what is to come.
WE WENT to school the next day, and Thursday morning started out with my phone buzzing angrily about two hours after my early morning pee. I reached over Green and Nicky to answer it, not even surprised that Green and Bracken were still in bed with me and still asleep. It would take another two days for even them to recover from what we’d just endured.
And speaking of enduring….
“Mom?” I mumbled. “Whyzitphone? Whaswrong?”
“You still in bed, sleepyhead?” she chirped at me. “You haven’t even been in the shop! I mean, I know you’re going to school and all, Cory, but being pregnant doesn’t give you a free pass.”
Wonderful. I was now fully awake and really fucking pissed off. Parents. I couldn’t believe I was going to be one of these schmucks.
“If you’d had the month I’d had, you’d kill yourself and take out a building with you,” I snapped. Wow. From asleep to bitch in two sentences—world record. “Can I help you with anything? Or are you going to tell me how I’ll never get a man once I get fat and pregnant?”
There was a wounded pause and an audible swallow. Oh, hell. But I’ve got to hand it to Ellen Kirkpatrick—she backed off for no bitch.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her contrition forced but sincere. “I probably started that off wrong. Let me make it up to you. How about we go shopping?”
Shopping? “Shopping?” We didn’t do shopping. “Sure. While we’re at it, let’s go tour a monkey factory and get chocolate-covered carrots for dessert,” I mumbled. “Because we’ve never done that together either.”
Another hurt silence. “We used to,” Mom said, as though trying to remember. “Before you hit high school—”
“And you couldn’t buy me a pair of jeans without telling me my ass was getting big,” I said savagely.
“That’s not—”
Oh, yes it was. “That’s exactly true,” I said, my voice stony. “I remember the shopping trip.” Jesus, Cory, if your ass gets any bigger it’ll block the sun. Could you maybe lay off the ice-cream sandwiches a little so we can get the less expensive jeans? I hadn’t had the words then to point out that it wasn’t ice cream I was eating, it was unarticulated rage, but oh, I sure did now.
The silence on the other end of the phone wasn’t hurt anymore. It was, in fact, purely defensive.
“I’m a health care professional, Cory,” she said, her voice placating and humble. “It’s my job to make sure you grow up as healthy as possible. I see people with weight-related illness all the time. Did you think I wanted you to grow up like that?”
I took a deep breath and thunked my head against Green’s solid shoulder. This was why women ate their rage. It all started when the person who was motivated by love did the thing that hurt you the most. Oh, Jesus, why would anyone want to actually be a mother?
“Shopping?” I asked skeptically.
“Yeah, sweetheart. I mean, you can’t expect the men to take you, can you?”
I didn’t point out that the men picked out what I wore anyway because they cared more than I did and because it made them really happy to see me dressed prettily. I didn’t tell her that even if Green went colorblind, Bracken lost his sense of my shape, and heaven forbid Nicky lost his sense of fashion, I still had Grace, Renny, and the ever lovely Katy to help me find my sartorial groove. I certainly didn’t tell her that the sprites had been quietly altering my favorite clothing—including my underwear—so we could all pretend not to notice that my stomach was getting progressively larger while the rest of me stayed still.
No. I actually took my mother at her word and told her I’d meet her at the Target off Bell Road at two o’clock that afternoon.
Because I am apparently the dumbest, blindest, most oblivious heifer on the face of the fucking planet.
I WAS the one who took food down to Iris for lunch, although Bracken and Teague flanked me as I walked it into the vault.
Our captive and tormenter was wearing comfy sweats with a hand-knitted blanket around her shoulders as she leaned back against the frame of the new bed and watched the newly wall-mounted plasma screen. There was a sign next to the television that read Just tell us what you want to watch.
Apparently she wanted to watch the Gwyneth Paltrow version of Emma. Go figure.
“Wait,” she whispered, her naked pink mouth bowing in the middle and her shadowed eyes going round. “It’s about to….”
And then Emma said, “I may call you my Mr. Knightly!” and the three of us watched i
n stunned horror as Iris’s bruised-looking eyes watered over.
“It never gets bad,” she said, sounding like an awestruck kid. “No matter how awful your life is, that line… it’s always beautiful.”
Oh. Now I understood. Comfort movies—we all had our own special movie that made us feel better, right?
Mine was The Avengers, and hell—all of the Marvel superhero movies, including Thor and Thor 2.
But Iris was older than I was, and her comfort movie was Emma, and I wasn’t going to dick with it.
“No,” I said gently. “Nothing bad can happen when that line still makes you happy.”
She blinked away from the movie and fixed her eyes on my face. Although she was in her early forties, she suddenly looked young—younger than me even when I had been a scared clerk at a stop-and-rob.
“What happened to me?” she whispered, her voice raw and husky from the screaming. “I was at a party at the judge’s house, and it was so weird. We all drank the wine, and then… then a woman came and told us what to do… and it was….” Her eyes welled over. “Horrifying,” she said. “So horrifying. I didn’t think I could do what they asked. The judge—he’d always been so decent, and I’d respected him, and suddenly we were….” She shuddered, hugging her knees, and I patted her hand.
She just looked at me, big brown eyes limpid. Then suddenly she hissed and snatched her hand away. “It burns!” she complained.
I looked at her, frowning. “Uhm… my hand?”
“Your skin,” she said, staring at me in horror. Well, go figure. I was a little unnerved myself.
“Uhm, can we have the guys touch you? I mean, just your hand. I’d like to see if it’s me, or women or sorceresses or….”
Bracken, for all his great height and breadth, knew how to be gentle. He extended a single finger and brushed the back of her hand. She actually let out a breath.
“No. In fact that feels better,” she whispered.
Teague did the same thing, although he moved awkwardly, as though afraid she would burn him.
She shook her head. “No. Only you.”
Teague was a good-looking guy—cheekbones, pouty mouth, little square of a face, nice nose. She was looking straight at me—with hunger in her eyes.
I swallowed, suddenly a little flattered. “Uhm, hate to ask here, but, uh, do you… I mean, do I sort of turn you on?”
Seriously. Have never had to ask that question in my life.
She flushed and looked away. “It’s been a while,” she said apologetically. Then she looked at me critically, as though suddenly seeing the connection. “Physically you’re not my type,” she said honestly. “But I’m… I mean….” She shook her head. “Women in power,” she said, forging on. “Always been my thing, you know?”
Ah. Oh. Well, then.
“So. Okay. We’ll send down a guy and a girl next time,” I said, trying not to squirm. “See if it’s women you’re attracted to. We want to make sure. I mean, for one thing, we don’t want anyone to accidentally hurt you, but for another….”
“We need to see what’s going on with her,” Bracken said, finishing my sentence as we did on a regular basis.
Iris caught it too. “Why do you do that?” she asked me sharply. “Give him your power. You have the right to finish your own goddamned sentence.”
I jerked my head back, suddenly sort of sick of my own gender. “I finish my sentences all the time,” I said.
“God, do you,” Teague seconded, and I slugged him in the arm.
“Bracken and I just work well together—we think on the same page when we’re not screaming at each other from across the room.” Something we hadn’t done since my blood transfusion, mostly because I think Bracken was trying to live up to Best Spouse of the Year and breathe or meditate through all the times he wanted to strangle me—and since that battle, I’d been doing a decent job of not pissing him off.
She glared at Brack dismissively. “I find that men do that when they want to control what you’re saying.”
The three of us burst into raucous laughter.
I couldn’t help it—it was just so… so the opposite of what that meant to Bracken and me.
“He couldn’t control what I was saying if he stuck his hand up my ass and used it to move my mouth,” I said when I could breathe.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake….”
“Holy Goddess….”
Both men looked at me, horrified. I stuck out my tongue, suddenly feeling playful and relieved and a little bit like we might be able to win.
“You’re young. Men want you to think that—” Iris began with dignity, but I didn’t have all day. Apparently, I was going shopping.
“Sweetheart, I don’t have time for gender politics, okay? Maybe over the weekend? But right now, we’re still trying to figure out if we broke the hold over your mind.”
“Nothing controls my mind,” she said, her full lips compressed tightly into a line.
“Would you like to see the footage?” I asked, a little horrified. “Because we taped it. Part of you obviously remembered me from our last encounter, or you wouldn’t really have seen me as a woman in power. Seriously—we know my touch burns you, and you got sucked into an orgy with a man you thought was safe. We need some more details, Iris. Right now you’re the first werewolf we’ve managed to get to not be bugnuts psychopathic crazypants.” My voice shook for a moment, and some of my brashness faded. “The rest we had to kill. Give us something to go on—you’re our best-case scenario and we need to make sure we can do it again.”
“Wait,” she said, looking lost. “The judge—Judge Griffith—weren’t we together? Why did you have to kill him?”
Bracken and I exchanged glances. “We didn’t,” Teague said, speaking for us. “Whoever you’re following did. Don’t you remember your capture at all?”
Iris narrowed her eyes, thinking.
“So… so there was the party… erm… orgy,” she said, blushing. “And then….” She shook her head. “That’s too awful—it must have been a nightmare.”
And hello, that was a twenty-first-century gal thinking about turning into a wolf and licking enchanted sacrifice blood off the body of a reconstituted elf woman.
Then Iris blushed. “But… not all of it was bad.”
And that was a twenty-first-century gal thinking about having some fantastic sex with a reconstituted elf woman.
“What was her name?” I asked softly. We needed that name. “The woman who was the ‘not bad’ part of the equation.”
Iris thought. “I… I never asked. But there were other….” She looked at Bracken, for the first time not angry. “There were three of them, but she was the leader. They looked like him—the ears, the eyes. You know. Like space aliens.”
Bracken arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow over an overlarge eye. “Space aliens?”
I seized his hand and kissed the knuckle. “I prefer to think of it as anime,” I said gently, and he grinned at me.
“I know you do,” he said. “I can hear your thoughts when you’re dazzled.”
I grinned back. I didn’t mind that he knew I was dazzled. He loved me—I was safe being lovestruck by him.
“Are they always this… ulg…,” she asked Teague.
Teague snorted. “Her and Bracken, her and Green. It’s a real barf-o-rama. You want to cut this interview short, there’s one way to do it.”
Iris laughed soundlessly. “There were three of whatever you are. The woman I was with was the leader—they called her Nimuetia, which I thought was… vulgar and way too flowery for her, honestly.” Iris shrugged. “Hey—not like we get to choose, though, you know?”
Bracken’s eyes met mine. Because Vernal Green was Lord of Shadows, Lord of Leaves, Lord of the Silver Canyon’s Fall and the Gold-Dazzled Sun today, but he could also be Dire Green of Darkest Oak tonight. Bracken Brine Granite op Crocken was as steady as a granite rock in the sun, but should he ever choose another identity for himself, he could become Kelp
Spray Wave Dash op Crocken by his will and changes in his behavior alone. (He would not—not and be the elf and man that I loved—but theoretically anything was possible.)
“Not entirely true,” I said carefully. “In fact, she chose to name herself partly for one of the most infamous elves of all time. That’s….”
“Disturbing,” Bracken said quietly.
“Who the fuck is Nemo-esha?” Teague asked suspiciously. “I swear, if you give me one more goddamned book to read—”
“You’ll fall on your knees and kiss my ass,” I said dryly. He’d always insisted that Jacky was the reader, not Teague. But I got the feeling Teague was enjoying the idea of “homework”—and it gave him something he could talk about with Jack that helped him feel less like he’d dragged Jacky into this odd twilight life that we lived.
“Possibly,” Teague grunted. “So….”
“Well, Nimue is the elf that seduced Merlin,” I said thoughtfully. “She’s really fuckin’ famous. I’m thinking if this was her, she would have kept the name—you don’t give up a name with that much power.”
“It’s a name!” Iris protested. I looked her in the eye.
“And you in no way resemble a stately, sturdy flower that blooms in the spring and represents resurrection, do you?”
She blushed. Of course she’d thought about it. Everybody thought about his or her name during adolescence. If a person discovered that his body didn’t fit her soul, the name was the first thing to go. If we hated our names, we shortened them, changed them, invented new names, new people to be.
“So hush up and let me think.” I closed my eyes for a moment. “Nimue is powerful, and evil. The thing at the end… that sounds modern. Sounds like she tacked it on. It’s a false diminutive, right? Oh, I’m not badass, I’m just little ol’ me, having blood rites and fucking werewolves and growing an army….”
I let out a sigh.
“This is so bad,” Bracken said, pretty much reading my mind.
