Quickening, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  But Mom hadn’t said anything else about seeing me, or about my children, or about my husbands.

  Maybe Christmas.

  And my stomach, which had been gently swelling, suddenly popped out. I wasn’t grossly tremendously huge yet—but I was obviously showing at twenty-one weeks.

  I had not, as of yet, felt anything resembling a kick, but Green assured me they were in there and moving. He seemed to think I was confusing their movements with gas. I told him if that was the case, they were training for the Olympics in backstroke.

  He’d nodded sagely and said that yes, I was feeling kicks—but as of yet I hadn’t identified them as kicks, so I thought that didn’t count.

  But my stomach was tight and my body was fit, and my men seemed to enjoy touching me as much as ever. And the tenderness in my breasts had eased off and so had the nausea, just a tad.

  And I’d eaten well, surrounded by people I loved, and finally, after five days of vacation, I felt like I had enough sleep.

  Was I happy?

  “I’m so very happy,” I told Bracken. I’d had enough of thinking. My hand drifted up to his nipples—he had tiny, pointy nipples that perked up with my touch. He grunted, stretching in a leisurely way, and I pushed up on my elbow. “But you know what would make me even happier?” I teased.

  Nicky rolled over and started to kiss the nape of my neck. I dropped my head and let him, hissing with how good it felt.

  Nicky was someone I should be worried for, I thought vaguely, appreciating his touch. I’d asked him if he was going to invite his boyfriend, Eric, to Thanksgiving, and his response had been oblique and a little troubling. I had the feeling they’d broken up, even though they’d seemed so very tight in the summer, but I hadn’t pushed.

  Right now, it didn’t matter. Nicky’s focus was on me, and for once, I wasn’t embarrassed to be the focus and the center. Both of them had their hands on me, and that was all I craved.

  Bracken’s hands cupped the rise of my stomach, and his eyebrows arched.

  “Did you feel—”

  “No,” I complained. “No, I felt nothing. Now stop trying to make me feel bad about it and kiss me!”

  His chuckle rumbled low in his throat, and he slid down on the bed to wrap me up completely in his bulk. He left just enough room for Nicky to keep kissing as he lifted my shirt and stripped off my sleep pants, leaving a warm trail of smooth kisses against my skin.

  I moaned, my thighs growing wet almost immediately, and when Bracken cupped my breasts and massaged gently, I brazenly propped my knee up, exposing me to the both of them, hungry for whatever touches they wanted to give.

  Nicky took the touching-the-naughty-parts job today, and Bracken took touching everywhere else.

  It was hard to think with Bracken’s lips nibbling my neck and Nicky’s evil fingers gliding around my most sensitive flesh, but then, thinking wasn’t what I’d wanted in the first place. What I’d wanted was sort of the opposite of thinking. What I wanted was….

  Oh… hello….

  Nicky’s clever, clever fingers had slicked themselves in my sex and were using the moisture to penetrate the other opening displayed by my propped leg.

  My eyes went round, and Bracken chuckled, low and ruthless, against my ear.

  “Is he playing with the forbidden, beloved?”

  Oh, yes he was. “It’s never been forbidden before,” I panted. Bracken’s cock, fully engorged and ready, thrust up between my thighs, and Bracken adjusted his position so I was eye level with his chest….

  And he was fully seated inside of me.

  I moaned, my mouth open against his ribs, my body shuddering at his intrusion.

  “Bracken…,” I whined, because Nicky was still toying with me.

  Bracken arched his hips and thrust again, and Nicky’s clever finger embedded itself deeper.

  I groaned, beyond words, biting softly into Bracken’s pale skin at the overwhelming of my synapses.

  Bracken kept thrusting, but there was a fumbling at our bedstand that didn’t usually need to happen. A part of me was put out that he’d be bothering with anything but me, but most of me figured out what he was doing.

  Nicky didn’t have a magic self-lubricating penis. And Nicky was about ready to put his penis where one should only go with lubrication.

  Bracken made the handoff successfully, and the coolness of lubricant followed. I clung to him while Nicky positioned himself, thrust carefully, ahhhh….

  I lost the thread of myself, used passionately and well between the two of them. Bracken controlled the speed, the fierceness, the rhythm, and Nicky clutched me to him and held on—and held himself inside.

  My power slammed through me like a hurtling meteor slams through a planet. One minute I was traveling the stately orbit of sex that I knew and loved. The pressure in my backside was dark, bordering on pain but not crossing over, and Bracken’s cock inside my body was huge and welcome, home and amazing in every slam into my cervix. I expected a build, a climb, a series of them to a plateau, because that was the way my body worked during sex, but that wasn’t what happened.

  What happened was orgasmic Armageddon slamming up through my pelvic floor and taking over my enlarged uterus.

  It boiled up out of me, an underground explosion popping the lid off a manhole, and I was terrified of hurting either of the men with the fury of my power. I closed my eyes and let it rock me, holding my hand up to the ceiling and trusting that Green, who was on the hill as he always was, would catch the fallout.

  Bracken’s shout of climax was surprised, while Nicky’s was stunned and indignant. We’d been riding the wave, still surfing the joy of it, and now suddenly we were cresting and exploding in tumult?

  But it didn’t matter. The power rippled through me, a planet twitching its skin, and I had to scramble to align my thoughts, give it a shape before it took a shape of its own.

  My body contracted around their bodies, and my sunshine magic shot through my palm and fingertips, penetrating the crown of the hill and interacting with all of the elements I knew so well.

  It continued to interact as my body’s spasms—not content with one orgasm or two—continued to ride me as the men stayed locked inside me, milked into the same extended climax quaking through us all. I half sobbed against Bracken’s chest, closing my fist and keeping the remaining power inside before I exhausted myself, and abandoned my body to the miles-long orgasm that was not going away.

  The last of the convulsions were still pulsing along my abdomen when Green walked in and surveyed the scene. He used Bracken’s body as a cushion as he leaned over to brush the hair from my face.

  “You about done?” he asked, his accent thick with exasperation.

  “Goddess, I hope so,” I gasped. “By all that’s holy….” Oh fuck, again? One more hard shudder passed through me. Bracken and Nicky each gave a reluctant moan, a final spurt, and tightened their arms around me.

  And that was the end.

  Oh, hell. I melted into their embrace—limp, dazed, and destroyed.

  Our breathing filled my ears, filled the room, filled the world.

  “That,” I said hoarsely, “was really fucking unexpected.”

  Green nodded soberly, his oval face half-shrouded by his loosened plait of yellow hair as he leaned. “I’d say, beloved, that we should have no more unexpected fucking after that.”

  Bracken chuckled weakly around me, because he could never resist a good pun, and Nicky let out a chuff of laughter behind me.

  I was unhappy.

  “Make a… a plan?” I might have propped myself up to argue with him, but even if I could summon the energy, Bracken’s and Nicky’s arms lay across my body, limp with their exhaustion. “Like… like… a schedule to have sex?”

  Green surveyed the tangle of us with beleaguered amusement. “Arturo?” he called. I made a half-hearted attempt to cover myself, even though Arturo had seen me naked and worse before and honestly didn’t give a ripe shit.

  Gr
een flipped the comforter over the lot of us, and Arturo popped in as though maybe he and Green had hauled ass down the hall together but Green had been the only one allowed in.

  “Yes, oh leader mine?”

  “Do you have any idea what we just did?” He sounded seriously interested in the answer.

  Arturo closed his eyes, and for a moment an aura the color of his copper-lightning eyes glowed around his body. He opened his eyes and nodded.

  “We are now officially a beacon of fucking hope.” He glared at me.

  I squinted muzzily back over Bracken’s shoulder. “Clarify the use of the expletive?”

  He gave a short laugh. “Okay, yes. A beacon of hope. As in, friendly preternatural creatures will be drawn to us—will, in fact, see a sort of glow around us and find their way here.”

  “We sort of had that before, right?” Because otherwise we’d have people wandering the property and, say, into the pond, or into the overgrown parts of the lower hill, or… well, there was a distinct lack of morality among the lower fey. It was just as well humans had to be invited to see us.

  “This is more extensive,” Arturo said gravely. “And a little more deadly. Say someone like Cami or Connor or Dylan are looking for us—someone friendly. They will actually see us. Say Iris was looking for us before her connection to the elf queen was broken. She will think she sees us, but then she will wander around in a sort of no-man’s-land between our borders and what you just did with our shields until someone here has pity on her and helps her out. So, on the one hand, the lost supernatural peoples will have some recourse. That’s fantastic. On the other hand—”

  “Oh hell.” Because I got it. “We’re something out of the… the fucking grimmest fairy tales. Rip Van Winkle, or….” I fluttered my hands weakly between the bodies blocking me. “I can’t even remember. But… we can find them, right? And, you know….”

  “Tranquilize them and drive them to the courthouse to shove them out on the lawn?” Green asked dryly.

  Nicky began to snore softly into my hair. Bracken did that big shuddering yawn thing with his body that meant he was stretching just prior to falling asleep. I could barely focus my eyes.

  “You know,” I whined, “you’re really harshing my afterglow!”

  Green laughed soundlessly. “Understood, little Goddess. Just remember—no sex without me nearby from now on.”

  “I’ll be sure to text,” I said crankily. Instead of smiling or rolling his eyes, Green placed a sober kiss on my forehead.

  “If that is an unsubtle reminder that I need to not work so much, then point taken.”

  Oh, this was so unfair. Yes, I wanted him in our bed more. No, it wasn’t fair of us to ask him. Yes, I understood that he was needed to heal and bond people to our hill through his bed. No, I couldn’t do anything about that now!

  I whine-grunted. The men got to fall asleep immediately, didn’t they?

  He smiled—and no, there was no irony or regret in the smile at all. “I’m working on it,” he said softly. “Now go to sleep. You’re going to wake up hungry in a few, so I’ll be sure there’s leftovers just for you.”

  “Thanks, Green,” I mumbled. “Sorry ’bout the wild magic.”

  His laugh this time was really quite kind. “It’s always the best kind of magic from you, luv. No apologies.”

  Then he disappeared and shut off the light, and he was quite right—I slept until around ten o’clock that night, then woke up to potty and have a snack.

  The angels were the only ones in the front common room, where they were playing Mario Kart. Jefischa usually won those games, but Shepherd was usually watching Jefischa.

  The angels….

  Puzzled me. They were friendly, yes, but Green had built them a great treehouse, which they could enclose to keep the weather off and just as quickly remake to reveal the sky. Most often they slept there—but sometimes they preferred the noise and closeness inside of the hill, and then they came in and mingled. Their wings didn’t seem to take up much more room than the height and breadth of our largest sidhe, and every day they looked more and more… average. Everyday. Manlike.

  But as I sat at the kitchen island and ate my cookies while quietly watching them, they suddenly stopped playing the silly, absorbing video game and stood up. As one they wandered to the great wraparound window that surrounded much of the hill and stood, shoulder to shoulder, staring out at the mist-shrouded canyon beyond.

  Their wings rustled, unfurling slightly and looming over their backs. For that moment, as they stood vigil over what parts of the night I did not know, they ceased to be Shep and Jefi, new lovers and occasional blood donors. They became instead something great and mythic and dangerous, their wings casting a shadow and projecting an aura, their vigil sacred against all evil.

  “Do you see it, Shep?” Jefi asked, almost bouncing in his enthusiasm.

  “Yes. She made it with her sex.”

  “That’s pretty cool. Adrian didn’t tell us about that. Don’t you wish we could do that?”

  Shepherd cleared his throat and looked away, seeming supremely uncomfortable. “Enough of the world moves when we have sex as it is, Jefischa. This would frighten me.”

  Jefi rustled his wings so they merged and stroked as the angels stood, faces pressed against the window.

  “Yes, I think you’re right,” Jefi said after a moment. “Right now all our world is filled with wonder.”

  I dropped my cookie in my milk.

  All our world is filled with wonder.

  I could make magic things happen with my sex, and often even without it.

  My hand flattened almost instinctively on my no-longer flat abdomen.

  Look what I am making in my body.

  All of our world really is filled with wonder.

  I managed to make it back to bed and found that Green was sitting up in one of the stuffed chairs waiting for me.

  “Please tell me you ate something besides pie.” He pointed to the space on the bed left by Bracken and Nicky, who had gone to have a drink with the shape-shifters as they often did when I was sleeping.

  I crawled back into Bracken’s space and relaxed into his warmth. Green smiled at me as he worked on his laptop, and I smiled back, truly ready for some sleep now.

  “Whatcha doing?” I asked, feeling the comfort in our work to keep the hill safe.

  “Just paperwork,” he said, yawning. “I press Send, it ceases to matter.”

  “You’re a good leader.” I yawned in response to his yawn, dammit. “You know what, Green?”

  “What, beloved?”

  “All our world really is filled with wonder.”

  He paused as his fingers flickered across the keyboard and stopped to cup my cheek. “Indeed it is,” he whispered. “Indeed it is.”

  The next week I found out he’d implemented “training” sessions with some of his most promising sidhe captains—Lambent included—in how to heal with one’s body. Since the healing required subsuming all of your needs to your partner’s, Green seemed to feel that the elves who could successfully do this of their own free will wouldn’t want to rival Green for power. Of course Green would “collect” from his captains as well, and make sure all his people were being treated fairly.

  But what it amounted to was that Green was working less. And I also realized that he hadn’t been taking any business trips off the hill, although previously he’d been forced to do that.

  “Andres is helping me there,” he reassured me. “You bound him to us quite tightly, and I’m very comfortable with him taking over some of my business ventures. But yes, I’ll be forced to leave for nearly three weeks sometime after Christmas. Some things have been put off too long.”

  “Well, we’re still sort of fighting for our lives,” I observed, because it did seem to hang over our heads. Even though it appeared we’d wounded the enemy badly and she needed time to regroup, she’d had weeks already. We knew she was planning to augment her numbers and probably plotting to a
dd another engine to her siege since the werewolves weren’t working anymore. We weren’t counting her out—in fact, I was more than a little wary of her next move.

  “Yes, yes we are,” he said assessingly. We were having this conversation sitting kitty-corner to each other at the kitchen island while he fed me sausage and fruit for breakfast. It was Sunday morning the week after Thanksgiving, and the rest of the household was still asleep. Just this once, Green and I were at the breakfast table together and alone.

  “I can deal with a business trip,” I said into the silence. “I have before.”

  He shrugged and nodded. “This is different.”

  I shrugged and nodded back. “Yeah, but….”

  It wasn’t like either one of us would be changing jobs.

  He covered my hand with his. “Beloved, you know what you can do for me while I’m gone?”

  I grimaced. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll have to go into the nursery sometime.”

  He winked, because my reluctance to go in there and admit it was a room was a Green’s hill punchline by this point. “Exactly. I think it will give you comfort to go in there when you’re missing me.”

  I couldn’t argue with him. In fact, after the madness that would be Christmas and gift giving, adding the finishing touches that the sprites wouldn’t have thought of would be a very legitimate project to fill my time when I was down to six units next semester.

  “Do I really have to not have sex while you’re gone?” I asked plaintively. Because… well… three weeks. Sex. “Isn’t it dangerous for me to get… you know… depleted?”

  He arched one butter-blond eyebrow with so much irony it practically dripped off.

  “Yes, luv, you can die of sex depletion. It’s a terrible risk—how could I not have seen that before?”