Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “She’s gonna be tough to take down,” I admitted. But I wasn’t going to express fear that we couldn’t. Not having hubris was one thing—being defeated was another.

  Bracken grabbed my hand and kissed my knuckles tenderly. “Have faith, due’ane,” he said, and for a moment we were the only two people on earth.

  “Rain will fall and trees will grow and you will have lovers again,” we said together.

  Iris screamed—shrieked—until my brain rattled around in my head and blood ran down my ears. I slammed a shield around the three of us, and the link between Bracken and me kicked into effect. I grabbed his strength, and strength from Green and Nicky who were watching from the vampire’s living room, and threw that sound back at Iris with all our might.

  The scream shut off abruptly and Iris sank against the coverlet, still and blue.

  We stared at her in horror, but it was Teague who surprised me the most.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he growled, then threw himself on the bed, shoving her down on the bed and propping her head back to open her airway.

  CPR.

  Every schoolkid learned it, right?

  “Green, get in here!” I called, both out loud and in my head. If my touch burned her, I didn’t want to be the one trying to jumpstart her heart. But Green….

  Green burst in and shoved to the back of the room, and for a moment I wondered what had taken him so long.

  Then I remembered—stainless steel. The vault wasn’t a great place for the elves. It didn’t burn them as badly as gunmetal or engine metal, and it had been blessed and consecrated many times, but he’d needed to shove his feet in some shoes or he wouldn’t have had the strength to do what he did next.

  Which was to pick Teague up from the middle and deposit him on the floor and then bend over and give Iris one very healing breath.

  One breath was all she needed.

  She didn’t cough or look around or anything dramatic. Her eyes popped open and Green stood up, looking very pleased with himself.

  “Do you know how tired I am of having people do that to me?” Teague said from his place on the floor and on all fours.

  “That was damned cool,” I said, eyes big.

  Bracken stood up on his Converse-covered feet and nodded. “Very damned cool,” he croaked. I looked at him and realized that, like me, his ears and eyes were running with blood. My head was throbbing so fiercely that my vision blurred. In fact it blurred red, and my eyes stung, and my ears ached into my throat and up the back of my neck and into my sinuses and….

  Both of us swayed on our feet, and I reached for Bracken’s hand to keep him upright. Green said, “Teague, get her.”

  Green got Bracken, and both of them hustled us out of the goddamned vault and upstairs.

  I was cleaned up and ensconced on my bed with Bracken almost before I knew what had happened. Green sat between us, pulling our hair back from our foreheads and humming, and Nicky was on my other side, head cuddled under my arm. Teague sat in what was usually Bracken’s chair, reading a copy of The Mists of Avalon.

  I realized I had probably dozed off while Green healed me, because the clock said I had forty-five minutes to meet my mother.

  And I didn’t want to move.

  “What happened?” I mumbled. I wanted to say “I’ve got to go,” but I didn’t want it bad enough to actually say it.

  “Arturo called your mother and told her you lost your breakfast,” Green said, smiling softly. “We didn’t tell her you almost lost your brains with it.”

  I closed my eyes and remembered, yes, tossing my cookies in the shower. Oh Goddess. “So no shopping?”

  “No—but she rescheduled for Friday at three. We told her you didn’t get back from school until two thirty and were usually exhausted. She said she’d come pick you up this time. Be ready.”

  “She’s a woman with a mission,” I rasped. “And speaking of….”

  “Iris is fine. I think what happened in there was… was the final gasp. Remember when you touched her?”

  I nodded. “Burned.”

  “Yes. Well, the blooded steak helped let her gain control of her mind—her personhood, as it were. Substitute blood—like Shepherd said, it helped her overcome the withdrawal of being addicted. But Nimuetia had a deep hook in her mind. And something about what you and Bracken did or said—”

  “It was the song,” Bracken said from Green’s other side, surprising me.

  I looked at him unhappily. He’d been cleaned up too, but we’d both been bleeding out the ears, nearly shaken apart by that psychic shriek.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “The song we used to take over—remember?”

  Green let out an uncharacteristic grunt. “Really?”

  “Oh yeah,” Teague supplied from over his book. “You guys said that poem, and I could feel it. And you probably didn’t notice because you were getting your brains scrambled, but Iris’s skin had….” He grimaced and held up his wrist, where his mark from Green—a single oak tree, bearing limes with deep roots—was bright and shining as though freshly inked. “Except she had the wreath, like on Cory’s back. It surfaced on her skin like… like a whale, and then it got really dark and… bled away. Like, say, if my tattoo was suddenly no more.”

  I swallowed. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I growled. “She was there—it’s her power song too. She’s… she’s mirroring us, you see?”

  “Yes, I bloody well see,” Green returned. “And it makes sense. Teague wasn’t affected at all, you know. It’s a purely elvish blood thing. Bracken, the children—”

  I was so ashamed.

  I hadn’t thought about them.

  I should have thought about them. My hand flew to my abdomen, and I pushed, even knowing they were too small to respond, knowing that if they’d been shaken to jelly by that terrible scream I wouldn’t know it, I wouldn’t feel it until my stomach cramped and the blood showed and….

  I was making inchoate little sounds, terrified grunts as I pushed my hand against my stomach, and Green breathed softly into my hair. “Shhhhh…,” he whispered, and my frantic movements stilled.

  “They’re fine, ou’e’eir. They’re fine, my darling. I would have told you if they weren’t.”

  I let out a moan, and a promise of grief threatened to undo me. I knew this fear, I thought in panic. It was my fear when I saw Bracken bleeding, my fear when I crashed through a jail to get Green. It was my fear when Nicky went out to fight, or when I’d seen Teague dropping from the sky.

  It was my fear that once again I’d have to live through a terrible, terrible grief, one that would leave my chest carved open, my heart at the mercy of every breath of wind and every stray thought.

  I was growing that fear, day by day, in my body.

  And it had almost come to fruition. She could have screamed my bones to jelly. Those two tiny futures—the ones I had refused to think about, the ones I had tried so hard not to embrace with my imagination or my acceptance—could have been washed from my body before I could even feel them move against my palm.

  And the awful part was that all my denial, all my pretending I was just getting fat, the guys were just being protective, my life was not about to change—for fuck’s sake, I’d created a nursery and hadn’t even gone in it to look!—none of that changed the tremendous horror of the retroactive fear-adrenaline rush charging through my heart, blocking my lungs, screaming through my brain like a terrible race memory of the tragedy that might have been.

  “Oh, Green,” I whispered, afraid in the core of my being. “Green, how do you live with the fear?”

  Nicky draped himself over my back, and Green bent and framed my face with his long-fingered hands.

  “You think about other things,” he whispered. “The same way you do when it’s any one of us.”

  “I tried to avoid this,” I wailed. Then I lost it, lost my tears, lost control of my iron-hard grip on what I was going to believe.

  I was crying—sobbing—out of fear of what h
ad almost happened to people I’d tried so hard to not believe were going to become people.

  Oh holy Goddess, it was like I was getting punished for my denial.

  The thought made me cry harder, and I was aware of some shuffling on the bed. Then Green gave a little hum and he was gone, leaving me between Bracken and Nicky and barely down to hiccups and Kleenex.

  “Holy wow,” Nicky said, grabbing a Kleenex from a box that was floating over the bed held by sprites. He handed them over, and I tried hard to clean myself up while Bracken hugged me tight enough to his chest to hear his heartbeat.

  Its solidity reassured me, and I wished heartily for Green’s quiet touch as well.

  I needed them both. Oh, I so did. But even as I pulled myself together, the grown-up I now was and the queen I’d worked so hard to become recognized that this was why we had the three-husband system in place. I couldn’t question it now—not when everything in my soul felt weak and trembling and small.

  “Bracken?” I said. My voice was so low that the only reason he could hear me was probably the long pointy ears.

  “Corinne Carol-Anne?” he said back.

  “Bracken, I’m pregnant.”

  Nicky snorted softly from my other side, and Bracken shook his head.

  “Yeah, dumbass. We’re pregnant.”

  “It’s really fuckin’ scary.”

  His hands, pushing my hair back from my face just as Green had been doing minutes before, and Nicky, breathing soft exasperated laughter into the nape of my neck—those two things grounded me.

  “You are tellin’ me,” he muttered.

  Teague grunted from the chair. “She’s a laugh riot. When’s she going to admit she’s in labor? Their first birthday?”

  Asshole. All of them, total assholes.

  “You just wait,” I snapped, pushing up to glare at him. “Katy’s going to get knocked up, and Jack is going to have to haul you out of a tree!”

  The look of horror on his face was enough to placate me, and I went back to falling apart in the arms of my lovers.

  We had about five minutes before Green burst back in.

  “How are we doing, my loves?” he asked, his voice kind but with a sort of suppressed urgency in his manner. “We up for round two?”

  Bracken groaned. “Oh, for sweet fuck’s sake. Don’t tell me….”

  Teague growled, low and lupine in the back of his throat. “Oh yeah. I can fucking smell them now.”

  And that quickly, I climbed out of the emotional well of epiphany and back into the fight. I couldn’t defend my family, my home, and my children lying in bed and crying about my problems—I had shit to do.

  Exclusive Excerpt

  Little Goddess: Book Five

  Volume Two

  By Amy Lane

  The elf queen who infected the werewolf population isn’t going away—and neither are the two heartbeats that will soon be the children in Cory’s arms.

  Cory’s used to throwing herself physically into the fray, but as their enemy gets closer and more dangerous, she’s forced to choose between her safety and the people sworn to protect her. Her guardians are tired of worrying about Cory and her unborn children, and Cory is getting plain tired.

  The preternatural world isn’t her only worry—basic human birthing rituals are going to be a pain in the ass for a woman whose children will be sidhe. Cory’s mother is still fuzzy on the concept of a polyamorous multispecies marriage and sets her up with an OBGYN obsessed with the inhuman silhouettes of her babies.

  Cory doesn’t want her children born in the middle of a turf war, but the people she and Green have nurtured and fought for aren’t about to let her face this enemy alone. This battle is for queen and home, and the babies quickening in Cory’s body are a symbol of hope. Cory’s going to have to give up the idea of being a weapon and embrace the idea of being a mother, or she’ll let down those depending on her most.

  Coming Soon to

  www.dsppublications.com

  Cory: Mothers and motherfucker!

  “RENNY AND Nicky,” I said, making sure this was the final head count.

  “And me,” Bracken said darkly.

  “And me!” Katy interjected hurriedly, rushing in from the outside stairway. “You weren’t going to invite me, mommy?” She sounded so hurt that for a moment I panicked. I’d worked so hard to woo Katy as one of my few—three!—female friends that summer, and I was terrified I’d fucked it up.

  “She was going to forget me!” Renny snarled in disgust. “I can’t believe you weren’t going to take me shopping.”

  I stared at her helplessly. “I can’t believe all of you want to come shopping—with my mother, no less.” I grimaced at Bracken. He hated my mother. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded adamantly. “She’s not going to get you alone,” he promised, his expression still thunderous.

  “Well, obviously not!” I laughed. “Look, Bracken, I’ve got Nicky and Renny and Katy—”

  “And me.” His eyes narrowed, and for the first time in quite a while, I shivered.

  The shiver snapped me out of it. Oh, yeah. I wasn’t just going shopping with my mom. I was going shopping with my mom when I was pregnant and there was a war on.

  “Fine,” I conceded with little grace. “Just remember—she’s the grandmother of our children, and you can’t kill her and hide the blood spatter like you can with anybody else, okay?”

  He managed to look affronted. “I don’t just hide the blood spatter. I hide the entire body!”

  I blinked and looked at Nicky in exasperation.

  Nicky shrugged. “He does!”

  “You’re just saying that because you want him to get inside your pants.”

  Nicky nodded with some enthusiasm. “Well, duh. But also because he’s a damned effective killing machine. Give the guy props where they’re due.”

  I shook my head, refusing to not be irritated. We could be home. We could be home, doing homework and eating whatever luxury protein-and-vegetable masterpiece Grace had cooked to entice me to eat today while making plans for how to make sure there was enough blood-drugged hamburger along the perimeter of the hill to last the bad guys until Thanksgiving.

  We could be home having amazing sex.

  In fact, we could be home doing any number of things that didn’t involve my family talking to my blood relations—but now?

  We were going shopping.

  With my mother.

  There was not enough divine mercy in the universe.

  MY MOM looked nonplussed as we all piled out of the SUV in the parking garage at the Galleria.

  “Cory, you brought… brought….” She was wearing a flowered peasant tunic over tight jeans, and she shifted from one comfortably soled brown leather shoe to the other and checked her graying brown hair with nervous gestures of thin fingers.

  Oh, she was not happy with this arrangement. That was clear.

  “Two of my husbands and my friends? Yeah. They wanted to come.”

  “Well, okay,” she said, sounding… well, funny. Odd. “We, I mean, I didn’t want to go here. I, uh, looked up a place nearby, in Lincoln, if that’s okay. It’s a strip mall by a Target, so even if they don’t have clothes in the boutique, we can go to Target afterward.”

  “Well, uh, sure, Mom.” There was a Target right down the road, right? And a Baby Gap in the Galleria and a pregnancy boutique in there too. “Uh, why don’t we just go here for the day? I mean, we’re here. If you wanted to meet us somewhere else, we could have met somewhere else.”

  “Well, that’s okay,” my mom said, giving a patently fake smile to the rest of the group. “Your friends can just stay here and shop. We’ll go look there and come back. It’ll give us time to talk.”

  My mother was lying about something. I mean, I thought my mother was lying about something. The truth was, she’d never lied about anything, to my knowledge, which would mean that if she tried it, she’d be really bad at it.

  And brother, did this seem l
ike somebody being bad at lying.

  “I’m coming in the car with you,” Bracken said unequivocally.

  “Me too,” said Renny.

  “I’ll drive and follow,” Nicky said, sounding serious. “Renny, you and Katy talk on the cell phone in case we get lost.”

  Katy nodded soothingly, and I felt marginally better about getting into my mom’s little Sportage. In the back of the little Sportage, because Bracken’s legs were just too damned long.

  “Well, heavens, Cory,” Mom said, sounding weak. “It’s not as if you need a bodyguard or anything.”

  Bracken and I exchanged looks, even though he was busy stretching out his legs as much as he could in the front.

  “She doesn’t go off the hill without accompaniment,” he intoned.

  Mom’s eyes darted from Bracken to me until she had to concentrate on backing the Sportage out and getting out of the garage.

  But it wasn’t like conversation just picked up after that. After a couple of sallies about the weather and school, Mom pretty much clammed up and kept her conversation to darting nervous glances my way, then asking if I was sure I was going to graduate before the babies were born.

  We’d done the math, and I’d had to be honest. “No—but lots of women have their babies and then go back to take their finals. I think that’s what I’ll have to do.” I finished saying that—as painful as it was—then looked in dismay at the strip mall Mom had brought us to.

  “Mom! This isn’t Target!”

  Mom cast an apologetic look back at me and an apprehensive one at Bracken.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she nonapologized. “It’s just that you didn’t seem to be taking this baby thing seriously. In our family we need to make sure the babies are okay, do you understand?”

  I looked in dismay at the little collective of ob-gyn doctors occupying a four-office suite.

  “No,” I said stonily. “No, I do not understand. Renny, how far away are Katy and Nicky?”

  Renny texted violently next to me—hopefully something like Abort! Abort! Abort! Mother is not friendly! Her phone beeped, and she spat softly.