Quickening, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  “Oh, well, that’s too bad. I hope you can talk some sense into her soon—prenatal care is really important!”

  “Yeah, it is,” my mom said numbly, and we charged ahead.

  Outside, the wind had picked up, and I grabbed the hoodie I’d taken off in the stifling doctor’s office and slid it back on while Bracken held my purse. When my head emerged, I stood for a second, staring at the merciless sun and gulping chill autumn air.

  “That’s gonna bite us in the ass,” I predicted.

  “Yeah,” Bracken confessed, grabbing my hand. “I’m sorry.”

  I turned to him, aware that he was apologizing for wanting to see our children, for wanting to hear their heartbeats. But I couldn’t blame him for that. “It was awesome,” I said, smiling softly into his pond-shadow eyes. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

  “Corinne Carol-Anne K—”

  Renny and Katy had been standing by silently, but now Renny clapped a hand over my mother’s mouth.

  “Don’t,” she said soberly. “You can’t say it. It’s important.”

  I stood, quivering, outraged—because dammit, that was a weapon, and it was unfair that my mother, the person who knew the least about my life, had what amounted to a nuclear weapon she could aim at my head, and she thought it was a wooden gun.

  “Mom, you don’t get to say it,” I ground out. I realized a vein in my eye was throbbing, and if I hadn’t just had my blood pressure taken and my heartbeat monitored, I’d wonder about my health. “What did you think you were doing, ambushing me that way?” Rhetorical question. Stupid. “Scratch that. I don’t want to know your motivation. In fact, I need you to know a few things about me.”

  “You don’t like authority,” she snapped. “I get it! What I don’t get is—”

  At that moment, Nicky came out and nodded. “We’re good to go.”

  “Jeez, are you sure you don’t have magic or something?” I asked, seriously impressed. I thought people only worked that fast in movies.

  “No, I just used your magic. The receptionist was still reeling from the mind-fuck—I had her delete your visit entirely.”

  “Nicky, you’re brilliant,” I said, grabbing his hand and kissing his cheek. He held me there for a moment and bumped his forehead against mine.

  “Did you see?” he asked quietly. “Did you see our children?”

  My eyes burned. Oh, yes—they were his too. “They’re beautiful,” I replied, kissing him softly. “Our babies are perfect.”

  “They were not!” Mom interrupted, almost in tears. “Cory, I saw those images—I know what you have to do! Don’t you know that’s why I did this? You weren’t my first pregnancy or even my third, you were my seventh. Seven babies, three ultrasounds like that one, three spontaneous miscarriages. With those features, I’m surprised they made it this long! Don’t you understand? Cory—” She was crying so hard that when she approached me I couldn’t stay mad or shy away. “—baby—sweetheart. Your children—they’re not going to make it.”

  I took her hands. “Mom,” I said, swallowing against the nausea. I didn’t want to imagine her pain. It made her too sympathetic, and right now my rage was keeping me upright. “Mom, I need you to look at Bracken. Right now. Close your eyes and think about how he looks, and then open them and look at him again.”

  I heard Bracken’s annoyed sigh and watched as my mom closed her eyes dutifully, then opened them, looking at my husband with fresh, tear-washed eyes.

  “Holy fucking Jesus,” she blasphemed. Then she passed out. Literally. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she would have fallen, but Brack was a full-blooded sidhe and was behind her catching her in his arms as she fell.

  He’d replaced his glamour already, for safety probably, but I bet also because he felt naked around my mother.

  Well, join the club. “Put her in the SUV,” I whispered. “Katy, can you drive her car? We’re going back to the hill.”

  “Yeah, mommy.” Katy kissed me on the cheek, and I leaned into it, comfortable as I hadn’t been with my mother.

  “Okay,” I said, letting out a shaky breath. “Renny, do you want to go with her? I think Nicky, Bracken, and I need to be in the SUV when she wakes up.”

  “Yeah, mommy,” Renny said with a crooked grin. She hugged me hard. “That was awesome, seeing your babies. But….” She sobered. “That’s rough with your mom. I’m sort of glad my parents don’t ever want to talk to me again.”

  I kissed her cheek. “Maybe they do—”

  She shuddered. “No, no. Don’t jinx it—it’s fine as it is!”

  Well, they’d been mad when she’d rejected school to move in with Mitch, and furious when she’d gone back to school and married Max. Sometimes, if you couldn’t win for losing, it was best just to leave the game.

  But I didn’t think that was the case here—that was what made it worse. Mom and Dad—I couldn’t believe he wasn’t complicit with this—actually loved me. In fact, I’d almost sort of thought they knew about Green and Bracken. The guys had kept their glamour minimal since their first meeting, and I’d thought… well, how could they not know? How could they not guess? But then, guessing, or having a funny feeling, or talking about your sons-in-law on the way home from dinner with a “Do you think they’re cousins or inbred or something?” might be one thing—but realizing your daughter had married two aliens out of three husbands was apparently sort of a shock.

  Renny hugged me again and hopped in the car with Katy. Before she shut the door, she looked out and said, “We’re going shopping on our way home, by the way! I mean, real shopping. For you. And the babies. So you know.”

  Then Katy drove off, and I felt a sudden pang. “Should we worry about them?”

  “I’ll text Teague and Jack and have them meet at the Galleria,” Nicky said. “But we’d better get in the car—they’ll start to snap out of the whammies in a minute.”

  Bracken shook my mother’s limp body meaningfully. “Aherm?”

  Fuck. “Okay, fine. Put her in the middle seat, and you and Nicky get the front. It won’t do our cause any good if you make her faint again.”

  Nicky sniggered. “But it would be hella fuckin’ funny.”

  I couldn’t help it. I smirked. “Well, yeah. Seriously. Goes without saying.”

  ’Cause, you know, making your mother pass out from shock? Every naughty kid’s dream, right?

  Bracken laughed evilly. “Perhaps we can make it happen again,” he said, depositing Mom in the middle seat and belting her fragile human body in.

  I hopped up next to her and did my own belt. Just as I was about to close the door, we all smelled it.

  Oh, hell. Playtime was over.

  Nicky gunned the engine but pulled out of the parking lot moving at an average speed. Nothing to see here, folks—an elf, a shape-shifting bird, and a pregnant sorceress got into an SUV and that’s all—no punchline, no fear.

  But as he pulled away, I saw them—a big, beat-up Ford F-350, originally blue but now covered in primer spots, pulling up in front of the survivalist shop at the corner of the strip mall. They were shaking their heads as though they smelled something off, but none of them looked up at us as we drove away.

  “Fuck,” Nicky breathed, driving like butter. “That’s… you just don’t think you can meet them in front of your local….”

  “Guns and ammo specialty store?” I asked dryly. “Yeah. Yeah, we should. But we were a little preoccupied.”

  Next to me my mom gave a little moan and eyelid flutter, and I wrapped my arm around her shoulders.

  Preoccupied. Yeah. Wasn’t going away.

  Bracken: Breaches and Breeches

  SHE WAS looking at me. I could see my mother-in-law—horrible phrase—looking at my profile as we drove. She might not have had any of Cory’s power, but I could feel her gaze sinking into me like teeny-tiny lead weights burrowing under my skin.

  “What?” I snapped just as Nicky took the exit to Foresthill. I usually loved this stretch of
road, loved the vast bridge spanning the canyon. And especially around this time of year, when snow could be around any corner, I loved the brilliant scarlet leaves of the trees on the hillsides. In the mornings as we drove to school, I celebrated seeing the hills come into being, emerging from the shadows to entertain features—crooked trees, rock formations, granite hearts beating in time with the mountains that were their masters.

  But right now I’d trade this stunning glimpse of autumn to be asleep in the back of the car with Cory in my arms.

  “I just….” Ellen waved her hands in front of her—a gesture that, had she known it, was very much like her daughter. “You… I mean, I kept thinking you looked different from other men,” she said, her throat working. “But… what are you?”

  “I am sidhe,” I said proudly, not willing to let her depersonize me with the word. “Green and I are high elves. We’re the most powerful of our people.”

  “By power you mean….” Ellen looked up at her daughter—

  And then jerked away to the other side of the car.

  “What did you do to those people?” she asked in horror. “They were my friends!”

  Cory sighed and leaned against the door, putting herself as far from her mother as possible. “They’re fine,” she said. “They just don’t remember that we were there. Although Nieman—Jesus, what a tool. Bracken, we may have to send someone to finish off the job. He was not going under easy.”

  I grunted. I’d seen that. I had also not cared for the way he shoved the ultrasound wand on her body. I knew a certain amount of pressure was necessary, but he’d been completely without finesse. She didn’t complain about physical discomforts much as a rule. It had better be somebody else who went back to finish the job. I would kill him, and that was—possibly—unnecessary.

  “Yeah,” she said, as though I’d spoken actual words. “We can send someone less homicidal. I hear you.”

  “What do you mean, homicidal?” Ellen asked suspiciously.

  “Figure of speech, Ms. Kirkpatrick,” Nicky said smoothly. I shot him a glance, and he glared at me narrowly. Fine.

  “Look,” Cory said, sounding like the young leader I had followed since Adrian had brought her to Green’s hill, “Mom. Bracken and Green aren’t human. Nobody at Green’s hill is human—”

  “Nicky—”

  “Nope,” Nicky said cheerfully. “If that had been my baby, you probably would have seen feathers and a beak.”

  “That’s a lie.” I laughed, because Avians didn’t come into their shape-shifting abilities until after they could walk.

  “Happy exaggeration,” Nicky replied. “For effect.”

  “Nobody,” Cory repeated calmly, ignoring us. “Including me.”

  I lost track of the conversation at that point. I heard a lot of Cory’s mother insisting it wasn’t true and Cory trying—and failing—to finish a sentence. There was a lot of faulty reasoning on Ellen Kirkpatrick’s part, and there was a lot of devolvement of my beloved to the frustrated, angry, inarticulate child she must have been before Adrian had met her.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised about that. Not really. When my mother or father spoke to me, I became the happy, obedient child I’d always been. My nearly eighty years on the planet were forgotten, and I was again the boy who fetched things, ran errands for Green, or needed to be reminded to do his chores before he fucked. But my parents had been indulgent, happy every moment I drew breath—excited even with my missteps, to have a chance to love me in any way possible.

  Cory’s mother, though—she had apparently been twisted by sorrow. She’d wanted a child so badly, she’d become too attached to the idea of Cory as that perfect image in black and white on the doctor’s monitor. She’d spent a lifetime trying to cut off Cory’s wings because she believed wings were an anomaly, a birth defect, by nature dangerous to her child’s welfare.

  Cory had learned that she needed to shriek in order to fly.

  My beloved was certainly shrieking now.

  “Mom, just because you can’t see it and hear it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist—”

  “You’re just playing with words, Cory. I think I should have skipped the ob-gyn and taken you straight to the shrink! Or certainly tried to talk you out of joining a cult or—”

  “This is not a cult!” Cory screamed. Then she did something truly terrifying.

  We were going around an outside curve at the time, and the road ahead of us was clear. I could feel the wraparound ball of magic envelop the car, fueled by her power and fury, and then….

  I could feel us fly.

  The car lifted—not in a slow or stately way, but going the same speed in the air as it had been going on land. It vaulted the space between one curve and the next, flying free, the whole of the canyon underneath us while Cory’s mother let out one ear-bursting screech.

  When the car touched down, Nicky, bless him, hit the gas smoothly, barely swerving as the tires gripped the road again. Cory wasn’t taking any chances, though. I could still see the shield sparking sunshine in a long autumn glare into our eyes until Nicky said, “Kill it, Cory, I can’t see.”

  Ellen’s screaming stopped when the glow did.

  The unmistakable smell of urine filled the car, and I was not entirely sure it wasn’t mine.

  “Beloved?” I said, keeping my eyes straight ahead.

  “Yeah?” She sounded frightened and small, terrified of her own uncertain temper and what she had tried so hard not to do with it.

  “Maybe we can finish the conversation back at the hill.” We only had fifteen more minutes to go, but I had no idea what she could do with that time.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Uh, sorry about that.” Tears threatened her voice, and I couldn’t be mad at her. She had everything so locked down, so often. Balancing the three of us, balancing the hill. Apparently being a mother and being a daughter were the two things she didn’t have in balance. Given that my mother still wept copiously over me whenever I helped her move something in Grace’s kitchen, I thought perhaps it was something that had no balance. There were no scales that could measure what was going on in the backseat, so Cory had, in one great tantrum, wiped the scales clean.

  I twisted around in the seat and offered my hand, which she took, squeezing hard.

  “So sorry,” she whispered.

  I wanted to hold her, let her cry, let her be remorseful, but we were in a fucking car.

  “No sorry,” I told her, all of my temper faded. “No sorry. We’re okay, you’re okay, the babies are okay. No sorry.”

  She smiled weakly and nodded, and by necessity I turned back around.

  “Cory—”

  “Not now, Mom.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

  In my head, I heard Green. “What. Did. She. Do?”

  “She showed her mother she could fly.”

  WE WERE a subdued lot getting out of the SUV in the garage under the house, and as I brought up the rear, I saw that Ellen Kirkpatrick’s jeans were wet. When we got to the top floor, Cory turned to her mother and said quietly, “My room is the first door on the left, the one that sort of sticks out into the hall a little. Put your clothes in the hamper and grab something of mine from the drawer.”

  I gave a little mental nudge to the sprites and bumped Cory’s arm.

  “Actually, there will be clean clothes your size on the bed,” she said without missing a beat.

  Cory’s mother nodded and ventured down the hallway on uncertain legs. As soon as we heard the door close, Cory turned to Nicky and me with a wobbly chin.

  “I am so sorry—”

  “Shh….” Nicky, for once, was the first one there. He always had this way of standing with her, eye to eye. I was the one who was her equal, but he was the one who lived the most in the mortal world. We’d had to deal with his parents this past summer, and it hadn’t been pretty. You’d think people who grew up to become big shape-shifting birds wouldn’t be so judgmental about other nonhumans, but that had not been
the case.

  “But… it was so stupid, and I let my temper get the best of me, and I made the SUV jump the canyon, and….”

  “Shh… shh…,” he calmed her, and maybe because he was the most human of her men, he was the one who needed the biggest apology but who understood the most. “I get it, okay?” He leaned back and cupped her face with his hands, wiping the tears with his thumbs. “Remember my parents? Brought my homicidal ex-girlfriend to visit so I could get a divorce? Have effectively cut me off? You had to deal with that. And you haven’t blamed me for it. Not once.”

  She sniffled and gave a wobbly smile. “Nothing to blame you for,” she hiccupped. “You didn’t almost….”

  She was about ready to lose it, fall completely apart, and Nicky had grown wise about her this summer. With a little nod of his chin, he invited Green to take over, and Green did, holding her as she sobbed hysterically into his chest—

  And then fell asleep.

  Suddenly, like a child.

  I looked accusingly at Green, and he shook his head as I reached to pick her up. “Not me, mate,” he said. “Not me at all. Given what I picked up in her head as she was fighting with her mother, it was a big fucking day, that’s all.”

  I grunted and shifted her weight, feeling guilt for this all over again. “My fault. I should have just walked away.” But I’d wanted to see them. I could feel them, but in the vague, generalized way of rerouted blood and dividing cells. Green could feel them—their particulars, even their moods—but I didn’t get those details. As much as I’d loathed this day, with the invasiveness and the hard human clinical curiosity, I couldn’t deny the deep satisfaction of those snowy images on the black screen.

  Green bit his lip, looking shy and not at all like our fearless leader. “When you get back, you’ll have to tell me,” he said, looking instead like a child asking about a glimpse of the Easter Bunny.

  I kissed Cory’s head gently and smiled at him, soft as a child myself. “It was wonderful,” I breathed. So much worry, so many enemies, so many ways for our people to be exposed, to die….