by Amy Lane
Iris grimaced. “Awesome. Best relationship I’ve ever had, and I might blow it by getting too needy. Nothing like being stuck with someone for life.”
I smiled softly, thinking of Nicky. Hell, thinking of all of them, including the two new loves in my stomach. “Nothing wrong with being stuck with people you love,” I said.
“How stuck are you?” Iris asked soberly.
I winked, suddenly feeling playful. “Lady, I’m knocked up—I’m as stuck as you get.” I sobered then, because I had other things to do. “Everyone here stays from their own free will. When Nimuetia is gone, you’ll be free to stay or free to go. If you stay, Green can find a job for you—or not, if you’d prefer. It’s nice if everyone helps.”
Iris’s eyes grew red and shiny, and she wiped under them with her hand. “That’s… that’s stupid, you know? Offer someone a chance to stay and leech off you, and—”
“And usually they’ll throw themselves in traffic for you,” I said, shrugging. “I mean, they’ve done studies on it and everything. You know that rat in the cage who’d kill himself on cocaine?”
Iris’s lip curled cynically. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Well, apparently if you give him a better cage, he’d rather drink water.”
She blinked. “You’re bullshitting me.” Her voice hitched on the last syllable of “bullshitting.”
“No,” I said, feeling sympathetic and wise and, quite frankly, really damned glad I hadn’t made her wear the orange jumpsuit.
“I stay away from my computer for a couple of months and I miss all the good fuckin’ spam,” she sniffled.
I sighed and leaned forward—which was harder than it sounds because, hello, stomach. “Hon,” I said quietly, “we’ll be happy to let you call your father. And yeah, we’re not stupid, we’ll monitor the call and check the number before we dial, and even make sure you have a father since he wasn’t mentioned in the jacket we’ve got on you. But if he’s there, I promise you can talk to him. But that’s not why you called us in here.”
Iris nodded and sniffled some more, and I looked at Green helplessly. A tiny sprite appeared above her head and dropped a package of Kleenex in her lap, and she smiled in sort of a pathetic thank-you.
“So what was it?” I asked. Christmas was in a few days, and my shopping was only partially done. And dammit, I had to call my mother.
Iris wrapped her arms around her knees. “I… I was supposed to call you in here and kill you,” she said baldly. Before the last word dropped from her mouth, Green and I were completely encircled with a shield and Iris was thrown across the room and plastered against the door. A thin trickle of crimson leaked from the corner of her mouth—I guess I had been a bit rough.
She laughed sadly. “Don’t blame you,” she rasped. “It wasn’t a very nice thing I was supposed to do.”
“Then why mention it?” I asked, standing with eyes narrowed and face hard.
“Whenever we went outside, she whispered it—‘Kill them. Just kill them. I’ll give you the power. Just kill them.’ And it was… it was relentless.” Her body shook, and I released the tiniest bit of pressure. “But you gave me Sky, and… the calling my dad.”
“That was a test,” I said, realizing it.
She nodded. “But… but I really want to talk to him. ’Cause I don’t think this is going to end well, and now you’re going to kill me, and….”
I released her, and she fell to the ground. I kept the shield around Green and me, sick to the teeth of this madness.
“We’ll have Sky get you in contact with your dad,” I said, standing wearily. “Iris, the next time you hear her in your brain, tell Sky, or whoever is guarding you. Most of us have some sort of telepathy—we can kick her out of your head, man. Just….” I waved my hands and scrubbed my face with them. “Just don’t think you’re all alone, doing this shit all alone. That’s why we asked Sky if she wanted to be with you. Trust me, if she hadn’t liked you, she would have said no.”
Iris nodded, looking pathetic, and part of me wanted to go hug her. But most of me was standing with my arms crossed over my stomach, feeling very unfriendly.
Green bumped my shoulder. “Luv,” he said firmly, and I glowered up at him.
“No.” No, no, no, no, no.
“She needs me,” he said softly, brushing my hair back from my face. It had fallen out of its ponytail because it had gotten thicker during pregnancy, and I couldn’t keep it back with anything.
“I need you more,” I said, feeling mutinous.
He nodded. “I understand that, beloved. But it’s not in us to let our people suffer. I’ll call her lover, but right now she needs comfort. Do we want to be people who won’t comfort someone in pain?”
“Urgh!” I was feeling very protective today. Gee, I wonder why?
“Don’t drop the shield around you personally,” he cautioned. “And by all means stay in the room until Sky gets here.”
“We have shit to do today,” I hedged. He’d promised to take me shopping in Old Town Auburn. It had become tradition.
“We do, and we will. But you’re being childish, and I know that’s not your intention.”
I nodded, completely serious. “Oh, yes. It is totally my intention. She was going to kill us!”
“She doesn’t even have a weapon!” he said. Then both of us got it at the same time.
Together, we looked to Iris sobbing on the floor, and I felt the surge of implanted magic throbbing deep inside her. With a hollered “Get down!” I threw Green on the ground and covered his body with mine, feeling the thump on my stomach when it took my weight first.
For a moment there was nothing. I looked up at Iris just in time to see her glaring at me, eyes filled with tainted blood, and then I ducked my face against Green and reinforced my shields with all of my fury.
When she exploded, her bone shrapnel alone might have killed me, but it was her tainted blood—tainted with the elf queen’s mind magic, apparently from a distance—that would have poisoned Green.
Both things dripped off my shield like it was a big Plexiglas bubble. I looked up in time to see her shredded sweater peel off the ceiling and hit the bubble with a “whump,” where it slid down thickly.
Oh, Goddess. No shopping today.
The last of the body bomb fell to the floor, and Green said, “You okay, luv?”
“Could you get me the fuck out of here?” I begged plaintively. “I’m gonna puke.”
YOU’D THINK the throwing up would get easier with time, but it didn’t.
Green held me and then bathed me, and we had elves in hazmat suits clean up the vampire vault. No, it wasn’t the first time someone had exploded in there, why do you ask?
“We need to start recruiting new vampires,” I said weakly during the refueling process that happened after cleanup (i.e. sitting at the island in the kitchen with my nose in the trough). “Because that room is getting a bad rap.”
Green was looking at me in admiration. “You were amazing,” he said, sounding besotted. “You were so canny in there, luv. I’m so impressed.”
I pushed my ramen noodles around moodily. I’d avoided those things for my entire childhood, but now they were the only things I could eat when my stomach was like this.
“Is it horrible to say I never saw a happy ending for Iris?” I said, feeling glum. “I wanted her to have a happy ending. I wanted her and Sky to be living in our basement forever. I just… you know. I didn’t feel that ending in my bones. I mean, I know I say that about everybody—Marcus and Phillip, Renny and Max, Whim and Charlie—but I had hope for them, you know? Even when it looked bleak?”
“But not Iris?” Green asked softly, stroking the arm I wasn’t using to feed myself.
“She had no hope,” I reasoned. “Probably from before the elf bitch got to her. I think she saw one too many stupid kids imprisoned, lost one too many lovers because of her job, and lost hope. I think her heart was dead by the time Nimuetia got to her. But it does make me t
hink.”
“That we should call Connor in and see if he’s hearing voices?” Green asked, as though he was sure I was on that page.
I stared at him in horror. “No, that’s not what I was thinking, but by all means do that, because now I’m fucking terrified!” Connor, Cami, and Dylan had been attempting the ménage thing. Connor had bonded with both of them—now we had to see if that meant they were going to live happily ever after or kill each other.
Green nodded, thought for a moment, and said, “He’ll come visit shortly. Now what were you thinking?”
My heart was still pounding in my throat, but I tried to hold on to my breath so I could grab Green’s hand. “I was thinking that… that… I mean, it’s not like everyone has to have a baby, you know? Iris might not have ever wanted a baby, and that’s fine. But she didn’t even have a cat. Hell, she didn’t even have a plant. Her father will need to be told, but he obviously hasn’t heard from her in months. It’s just that… that you have to find a reason to have hope, and that sometimes, having someone to… to give yourself to can be your reason. She thought I was weak because I give my men my power, but it was like she didn’t understand how strong you all make me. Loving the three of you isn’t… it’s not all getting my toes licked while someone feeds me grapes, you know? But it’s worth it. It’s just… sometimes the more we do for other people, the more hope we have for the world.”
Green’s smile was a fragile sunrise, growing bolder with every word.
“Have you started knitting for the children, luv?” he asked, and I sort of wriggled in my chair a little.
“I was, you know… gonna finish Christmas stuff first.” Suddenly I glared. “Because you and Bracken aren’t small, you understand that, right?”
That sunrise smile didn’t flicker. “I understand,” he said, kissing my cheek. “But when you start picking out yarn and colors and patterns, do me a favor. Let me in on that, okay?”
Usually Bracken and Nicky had to listen to my grand design plans, but, well. “Okay,” I said, liking this idea very much. “After Christmas. I’ll start then.”
“What are you doing now?” he asked. “Since I need some time with Connor and all?”
I looked up in time to see Teague trot in, and smiled. “I’m going running!” I said, excited. I’d been getting two runs in a week. Between that and walking around campus, I wasn’t feeling too out of shape, even though the extra weight was killing me.
Green nodded. “Do that, luv, before you get too big, okay?”
I thought about that terrible pressure when I’d fallen on top of him. I hadn’t told Green about that moment of fear, because I had read Bracken’s pregnancy books. All of them said that a fall like that wasn’t necessarily a dramatic thing, and my stomach felt fine. I pushed away my half-eaten bowl of noodles and wiped my mouth. “I’ll eat the rest when I get back,” I told Green, kissing his cheek.
He stopped me with a real kiss. I fell into it, and for a moment both of us stopped pretending that we hadn’t had a close call. Nicky and Bracken were both out shopping as we’d planned to do. While we’d shielded them both so far from the body bomb and the fallout, I knew that as soon as they got back and the gossip made its way through the hill, they’d both be as freaked out as Green and I had been when we’d emerged from the vampire vault floating in a combined shield to avoid the blood and bone shrapnel on the floor.
“Stay safe,” he said. I nodded, my throat suddenly tight.
“You too.”
“I’m calling Arturo, Lambent, and Whim and Charlie,” he said soberly. “And we’re going to have a wall of magic between us when we’re talking. No,” he said when I would have offered to be there too. “If this ends badly, I don’t want you anywhere near it.”
The unspoken understanding, of course, was that it would only end badly for Connor, and I appreciated the hell out of that.
The truth was he was shielding me from having to stand in the middle of another explosion, and I was letting him.
“Will you do it downstairs?” I asked, and Green nodded.
“Good.”
“Still have hope, beloved?” he asked.
I thought about Connor and his consistent, unyielding work to do better for himself, for Cami, and for Dylan.
“I don’t think he hears her,” I said seriously. “I think….” I grimaced, because this would sound not nice. “I think Iris was always listening for someone to tell her she’s special, that she’s a hero. I think Connor has always sort of been his own hero. I think he’s impervious to voices in his head.”
Goddess—with all of the shielding I’d done in the past year, all of the magical safeguards, there was only one way Nimuetia could have gotten anything in here. And she had.
I really hoped Connor was his own barricade, but even if he was, he was still too spooked by women in power for me to be part of that meeting in any way.
I really would have to trust the people around me.
Which was why it was just as well I was going for a run.
TEAGUE AND I talked in shorthand as we went. We’d just hit the part of the trail with steps carved out of a hard place in the red dirt when I felt Green show me what “all clear” looked like.
It looked like Connor, very confused in the vampire vault, telling the elves on the other side of a glowing shield that he’d never heard voices in his life, and could he please go to the bathroom in peace now.
I laughed a little, then turned to tell Teague it was all good….
And twisted my ankle and fell down for the second time that day.
This time, as my stomach hit the ground, I felt a distinct pain in my abdomen.
I sank to the ground, pulling back from Teague’s generous hand up and trying not to panic.
“Teague, uhm, I’ve got a little bit of cramping, and you know, we may want to call—”
Teague was not a big guy, but he had werewolf strength. I hadn’t even gotten that far when he reached under me and picked me up, then trotted me back to the house. I clung to his neck and tried not to think of the absolutely worst thing that could happen.
Green: Small Celebrations
GREEN COULD feel the thinness in Cory’s membranes, the temptation of her cervix to expel everything in her womb—because things were getting a wee bit tight in there, and her stomach had taken two blows in the same day, and she was exhausted in general.
He prescribed bed rest through New Year’s Day, with no running until the end of her pregnancy.
“But… but… exercise!” Cory complained, horrified. “Green, I’ve been reading the rule books—they say exercise is a good thing!”
He nodded, sitting on the edge of the bed as she sat up under the covers looking frightened and vulnerable and trying hard not to be distraught.
“After your body is quite certain you’re keeping everybody where they belong to cook for a bit longer, we can sign you up for water aerobics at the college,” he allowed. “It will do you good to be in the water between the long car rides, especially as you get bigger, and you’ll get your cardio in too. But no more running, beloved.”
He regarded her soberly, hoping she’d take that as medical advice and not trying to run her life.
She nodded back, and he let out a sigh of relief. That was the hard part.
Sort of.
The real hard part came when Christmas rolled around, and instead of being part of the grand celebration in the front room—with the tree (still living, of course, its roots carefully nursed under a carpet of sod by every dryad on the property) to the ceiling and the swarm of sprites and pixies and lower fey lining up to give small trinkets to the queen—she was stuck in her room, literally propped up on pillows in bed, knitting.
Green had needed to take a turn out in the living room to supervise the revels—not because they got out of control, but because it was only mete their lord should be there as at any holiday feast.
Nicky had gone out to relieve him for an hour, and then Bracken,
but when they weren’t out in the main room, watching as groups of people wandered in to exchange gifts and eat and celebrate and then wander back out to their own quarters in the hill, they were in here.
Right now Bracken was presiding in the living room. Cory was knitting, with Renny and Katy sitting in the chairs next to the bed working on their own projects. Katy was doing needlework across a precut broadcloth that looked distinctly babyish, and Renny was making a series of tiny rainbow-colored socks.
“How many pairs is that?” Cory said, looking in disbelief at the pile of brightly colored wool booties. “I mean, I know I think they each have six legs, but I’m pretty sure they’re regular humanoids.”
Renny pulled up a lip. She was festively dressed in one of Cory’s gold sweaters—from before her pregnancy—and Katy had braided her hair special and lent her some sparkly green earrings. But nothing could change the fact that she was all cat.
“Babies don’t have pairs of socks,” she said disdainfully. “Babies have socks. I could make you twelve or thirteen or twenty-one, and it wouldn’t change the fact that every time you reached for a pair, all you’d come up with is rainbow socks. So just don’t worry about how many I’m making. I’m making socks until the yarn runs out, and then I’m getting another ball and making more.”
Katy finished a tiny perfect stitch in a lovely color of mauve. “And even if the ball is another color,” she said, nodding as if this was law, “that’s still okay. Mommies are too busy to care about perfect pairs. All that matters is that the feets are warm.”
Cory grinned at her, and Green, watching from across the room, was charmed as he always was by how charmed Cory was by Katy. Feminine and soft, Katy was almost the antithesis of Cory and Renny, but it was that difference that seemed to bring the girls together. He appreciated that. It wasn’t as though he needed his beloved to appear traditionally feminine—and he’d never in a million years imagined her doing something as domestic as sitting in a knitting circle—but seeing her talking with her friends, being creative and productive and so uniquely female, that made him feel as though his home was a better place. Of course, if she’d been into building cribs instead of knitting blankets, he would have felt the same way—but then somebody would have had to teach her to knit anyway, because you couldn’t build a crib when you needed to stay flat on your bottom.
