Quickening, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  “Fuck the jeans!” Nicky begged, so Green threw him on the bed and ripped the jeans off his hips.

  They fell to the floor in two pieces—no underwear to speak of, no shoes or socks either. Green bent his head and swallowed Nicky’s erect, dripping cock to the back of his throat.

  “Yes!” Nicky arched off the bed, grabbing Green’s hair in both fists and thrusting his hips hard as Green sucked him down.

  Green had plans. He’d made promises to Nicky—to use him, to fuck him fast and brutally. He let some saliva slide down Nicky’s cock and spread it around his opening. Nicky loved to be penetrated, and even as he was gibbering for Green to suck harder, he reached down and spread his bottom, readying himself.

  Green teased Nicky’s rim as he sucked, thrusting one long finger in, then two, and he was relaxing into the rhythm, getting ready to ask Bracken to do the honors at Nicky’s mouth, when Bracken moved without Green’s plan.

  He moved behind Green.

  “Mmff…!”

  “Keep doing what you’re doing,” Bracken whispered. He tugged on Green’s hips a little so Green was bent inelegantly at the waist as he pleasured Nicky. He opened his mouth to explain his plan—he was the leader, yes, and between Green and Cory, they always had the plan—just as Bracken stripped Green’s slacks off, leaving him bare from the waist down.

  In sheer surprise, Green pulled harder at what was in his mouth.

  Nicky cried out, spurting just a trace into the back of his throat.

  And soft hands, smaller than a man’s, worked insistently at his sweater until he was forced to wriggle out of it. It hadn’t even been whisked away before Nicky grabbed his hair and jutted his manhood up again, begging without words. Green had just enough time to go back to work, fingers penetrating, mouth and tongue moving in concert, when….

  Bracken’s tongue, bold and obscene, began to pleasure his backside without mercy.

  Oh! Oh, dear Goddess!

  Green couldn’t remember the last time he’d been taken like this—surprised, surrounded by….

  “Ammmmffff….”

  The vibrations in his throat made Nicky scream again, and Green looked up to see the boy pinching his own nipples hard as Green used him. His head was thrown back and his eyes glazed, which was good, great, wonderful, because Green was in no position… because Cory was in exact position… because…. While Bracken was lubricating his entrance, probing, stretching, filling him with dark pleasure and utter abandon, their beloved was crouched at his knees, eyes luminous with joy as she pleasured her husband’s prick with her mouth.

  Briefly releasing Nicky to his own fist, Green took a moment to wink at her as she sat there, her giant T-shirt still shrouding her growing body and her mouth stretched wide with only the hint of a smile at the corners of her lips.

  Oh, she did love taking her lovers into her mouth. She loved to taste them, to give them sweet pleasure and great release.

  She craved them filling her mouth and her throat. She’d told him so. As she lowered her head and swallowed, a wave of black crashed behind Green’s eyes. He concentrated on his fingers in Nicky’s backside and his mouth on Nicky’s prick for a moment, pulling himself back from the brink of climax, enjoying being taken just a moment… just an instant… just an….

  He shuddered, losing his mind, his balance, his place in things completely. Bracken had positioned his mighty behemoth of a cock at Green’s entrance and begun to push slowly, inexorably in. Green’s palms grew damp, a sheen of sweat tracking down his back, and only Nicky, holding him in place, using Green’s mouth as Green had planned to use Nicky’s arse, kept him from just lying face down on the bed and groaning in preclimax repletion, the sound rising like an alarm or a siren or the tide.

  Nicky cried out, filling Green’s mouth with the sour-bitter taste of shape-shifter’s seed. Green kept milking him, kept thrusting his fingers inside until Nicky gave one last, almost pitiful whimper of orgasm and rolled to his side with his knees to his chest, clearly in recovery.

  Green had nothing left to ground him, keep him sane, and he abandoned himself, head buried against the comforter that still smelled of Nicky’s sex and musk. That dreaded, out of control sound emitted from his mouth so often that he lost himself in the sound, feeling his pleasure and climax surging and receding, building and pulling back and building, and again, like his helpless cries into the mattress.

  Bracken picked up the pace, slamming harder, using Green roughly, taking all the control that had so wearied Green and using it to give Green all of the pleasure, all of the body joy he could handle.

  Nicky’s hands, sticky with sweat, stroked his hair from his face, and Nicky’s breath puffed gently against his ear.

  “We’ve got you,” he whispered. “Look at him, Green. You should see him pounding you, possessing you. She’s sucking you, and it’s glorious. Let it go. Let it all go. Climax, Green—she’ll drink you down, and he’ll fill you up. We’re here, beloved. We’re yours. We’ll take it all. All of it… ours….”

  Oh! That was no fair! Green closed his eyes against the prickle of tears and the kind reassurance from a lover who was only to have been casual, only an inconvenience, until he found his place.

  His place was with them.

  Green pushed up on his hands, wanting to open his mouth and tell Nicky that he was beloved too, but Nicky took his mouth in a kiss, the same kiss he’d given Cory during their first combined tumble into joy.

  The kiss that set them both free to love the people in their bed in any way their hearts saw fit.

  Green’s cry of orgasm was lost into that kiss, but it didn’t matter. The ocean wind of climax washed over him, cleansing his body of worry, his mind of fear, and his heart of shadows. Nicky swallowed Green’s shriek of completion as Cory swallowed his spend. Green shuddered, convulsing in their embrace, taken over by their ministrations as he hadn’t been in a hundred years, since the lover three of them missed so keenly, since Adrian.

  He couldn’t bring that name here, not tonight.

  Cory’s mouth moved gently on him, cleaning him off, and then Bracken pulled out, leaving the mark of his spend inside Green’s body. Green would have fallen then, languorous, debauched, into the great bed, but Cory crawled out from between his legs and Bracken lifted him into his arms. Nicky pulled the covers back so Green could fall into it, naked, for once not on the outside edge but against the wall, Cory in his arms.

  Bracken took the outside, Nicky mashed up against his chest, and by the time everyone was settled, Brack was already growly.

  “You are ruining the mood,” he threatened. “If you keep grabbing at my prick, it’s going to get hard.”

  Nicky purred. “Then you’ll let me clean it up,” he said playfully, although Green seemed to recall a washcloth somewhere in all they’d done to get him to bed.

  “It’s quite clean,” Bracken reassured him.

  “Well, I could get it dirty,” Nicky teased, inexorable.

  “And I could fuck you until you screamed too,” Bracken said, sounding so matter-of-fact he almost made Green hard again.

  Cory let out a whimper against Green’s chest.

  “You don’t approve?” he asked in surprise.

  “I want to see it so bad,” she confessed, kissing his sternum between his nipples. She liked doing that to both Green and Bracken. Product of being so tiny in a household full of giants. “But I’m falling asleep,” she yawned. “I’ll miss it.”

  Bracken reached over Nicky and stroked her hair. “Sleep, beloved,” he ordered. “Nicky and I will wake up and play when you get up to pee.”

  For some reason that made her giggle against Green’s chest, but Green was too replete to ask why.

  Teague: Second Bananas

  THE FIRST time Teague had met Maxwell Johnson, Jacky had been dying in the back of Teague’s car as he’d sped toward Green’s hill and a new life.

  Max had been cordial, matter-of-fact, and no-bullshit then, and he hadn’t changed. Th
ey’d worked ops together as humans and run together as animals, and the cat/dog thing that could bother some people in the hill (or the cat/cat thing that Max and Charlie did on occasion) did not seem to bother Teague or Max.

  When Max was a cat, he was cocoa-colored, with crossed blue eyes and a rather placid disposition. If he’d been a house cat, he would probably have been the type who didn’t disturb the houseplants and groomed meticulously.

  When Teague was a wolf, he was just as tough, scarred, and no-bullshit as he was as a human.

  Teague didn’t let ego get in the way. He’d had no problems taking orders from Cory, and he had no problems taking orders from Max.

  This irritated Max for some reason. It was probably a cop thing, with all the vying for promotion and hoping to make detective. When Teague had been having problems with Jacky—and brother, there had been some fucking problems—the entire hill had gotten some use out of rebuilding the small house across the driveway that Teague had been given to keep his family in. But the house had been finished while Teague was recovering, so working shit out that way was not an option.

  Still, Teague was not surprised when Max greeted him with a shoulder bump as he came inside the kitchen of the hill proper.

  Teague grunted. “Milk and cookies.” Because he’d just run, goddammit, and now that he wasn’t eating with Cory, he could eat whatever his werewolf metabolism and deep-seated childhood issues demanded.

  Max grunted. “I’m tuning up my ’Stang. Come help me.” He grabbed a gallon of milk from the huge stainless-steel refrigerator that Grace and the pixies kept stocked to the brim, and Teague grabbed a package of Oreos—fresh, unopened, the double-stuffed chocolate kind—with green icing in deference to the holiday season.

  Grace kept an entire cupboard stocked with just cookies, because that woman was more than any man deserved.

  Teague stuffed three in his mouth while he followed Max at a trot down the stairs. The middle level housed most of the shape-shifters and some of the elves as well as the shape-shifter bar. Teague looked in and waved at Jacky, who was doing something on his computer with Nicky. They both waved, and he picked up his speed to keep up with Max.

  A breath of heat at his back told him he’d acquired a visitor.

  “I did not see you in there,” he grunted.

  “I was hiding in the corners,” Lambent said snidely. “Where I heard the most interesting thing from your mate.”

  Teague groaned. Jacky did not have a bone of empathy in his body. He would not have guessed why they hadn’t included Lambent in this op, and he would not have thought to keep silent.

  “You were fucking drunk last night,” Teague said through another mouthful of cookies. “We thought we’d let you recover.”

  Lambent’s hand on his shoulder was not surprising, but the hurt on his fine-boned, ruddy face was.

  “Recover? I’ve about full up on recovery, you manky prat. Full up on being holed up like a badger in the first home I haven’t hated, full up on being treated with kid gloves by a bunch of gestating daddies and a pregnant woman who could stomp out our enemy like a cockroach if she was ever let off the fucking leash—just fucking full. I want some bloody action, yeah?”

  Lambent was shaking Teague, his hand gripping hard enough to burn. But Teague saw the hurt, the desperation in his eyes, and didn’t snap at the hand on his shoulder in spite of the blisters forming under his new running shirt. He took a deep breath and held up the box of cookies.

  “Want one?”

  Lambent’s jaw dropped, and he flailed his hands. “Want one? Do I want a bloody—Oh. Fuck.”

  The charred black handprint at Teague’s shoulder flaked away to reveal the burned, blistered skin. The faint odor of cooking dog assailed them both.

  “Fucking sorry.” Lambent’s voice cracked. “Hold still.”

  Teague did as ordered, not feeling anything but the sympathy of a pack mate as Lambent bent over and breathed softly on his shoulder. The pain—and it had been considerable—faded instantly, and when Teague looked again, his skin was whole and healed.

  “Thank you,” he said soberly. “Please take a cookie.”

  Lambent did, closing his shiny blue eyes as he crunched down. “Tha’s good,” he mumbled. Teague threw a friendly arm around his waist, because Lambent was an obscene size, even for an elf.

  “It is, and Max is downstairs with a gallon of milk to share. He’s going to work on his car and talk about why I shouldn’t feel bad about not leading the op, and then we’re gonna fuckin’ plan. Want some goddamned cookies?”

  Lambent nodded and finished off the one in his hand, then leaned his temple against Teague’s in a way that Teague took to be companionable and not sexual. Well, his libido had pretty much locked itself against anyone not Jack or Katy over the summer, which was fine with him.

  “Sounds amazing,” Lambent said thickly. “Why don’t you feel bad about not leading the goddamned op?”

  “Because being the top dog doesn’t mean shit to me,” Teague told him. “The pack’s all that matters. Besides, Max can make sure we don’t get caught with this one, and that’s what’s important.”

  They had continued down the stairs and through the grand banquet room. If they’d taken an abrupt turn to their right as they got to the bottom, they would have gone into the heart of the vampire darkling, with their common room—mostly oxblood leather couches and blood-colored rugs, ick—and the vault where people kept exploding. Again, ick.

  They didn’t. Instead they turned to the staircase on their left, going down one more level into the garage, where Max was already bitching at the top of his lungs.

  “Goddammit, Teague, you looked into the common room—tell me you did not suddenly decide to get la—” Max stopped midrant as he saw Lambent and jerked so hard he hit his head on the trunk of his ’69 cherry-red Mustang.

  “Hi, Lambent,” he muttered, rubbing his head with one hand. In the other he had a box of tools, a drop cloth, and—God help him—a mechanic’s jumpsuit that some sort of creature probably kept pristine for him.

  Teague usually just wore his old T-shirts and jeans. Yeah, the creatures or sprites or pixies or whatever raided his laundry too, but since he didn’t ask them to, and since he tried to do his own laundry, when his shirts shredded from the umpteen-zillionth washing, he wasn’t responsible for cleaning up the carnage or a burial ceremony.

  But Teague was wearing neither T-shirt nor jeans today. Instead, he was wearing a new long-sleeved microfiber shirt and lycra running tights—the mortification was acute—given to him by Lady Cory for Christmas. Shit. A once-new long-sleeved microfiber T-shirt. Lambent had burned a hole in the shoulder, and now his Christmas gift was no more. He looked around the garage and grimaced.

  And then had a horrifying thought.

  “Hey, you’re not going to make me wear—”

  He caught the jumpsuit in the face and swore. Then realized that Max was already wearing one of his own, and Teague had gotten a spare one.

  “You’re terrifying,” he said on a note of pure loathing. “I can’t even begin to fucking tell you.”

  “Shut up and get dressed,” Max muttered. “You can’t work on the car wearing that shit—even if it’s melted. Lambent, do you want a jumpsuit?”

  “You do realize that cars make us sick unless we bless them with the equivalent of elvish holy water, don’t you?” Lambent asked acidly.

  Teague could scent Max’s embarrassment. “Yeah. Forgot about that. Was just trying to be—”

  “Don’t be considerate of my bloody feelings,” Lambent snapped. “I lost someone. Haven’t we fucking all?” Then he snorted. “No, of course not. You, Officer Max, have lost nobody. I’ll grant Teague grace because we’ve almost lost him, almost since he was born. But stop trying to tell me I should be so goddamned careful with myself. I want to kill something!” he snarled.

  Teague grunted. “Join the fuckin’ club. But not on this run. This run is about deleting shit off a computer
and keeping the damned doctor from tracking Cory down.”

  That brought Lambent up short. “Wait—this the git her mother took her to? And why haven’t we wiped that bloody woman’s mind, by the way? Just a little woop-blip and she forgets she even had a Cory, right?”

  Teague and Max stared at him in horror. “That’s fucking heinous!” Teague snapped.

  Lambent held up both hands in mock surrender. “Yeah, whatever, at least we wouldn’t have to worry about her practically throwing up whenever she realizes she’s looking at someone not human.”

  Teague laughed a little, suddenly sympathetic with Lambent. He’d spent most his childhood wishing his own father had forgotten his name and regretting when he didn’t. “Yeah, well, I admit to flashing a little fang just to freak her out, but we’re still not divorcing her from the family. Cory’s gonna pop those kids out—”

  “Like tomorrow, if her belly’s got anything to say about it,” Lambent said in disgust. “And it can’t be too fucking soon.”

  “She’s got until late April or early May,” Max muttered, pulling out a socket wrench. Oh, okay—tune-up. Easy. Well, on an older car, it was. Teague had needed to take some classes on the diagnostic equipment for Green’s fleet of SUVs. It was what he did when he wasn’t being an enforcer, and it was actually even more fun than the models of muscle cars he made during his “family” time with Jack and Katy. (They had discovered much more enjoyable and creative uses for family time. Teague approved.)

  “May,” Lambent said, his horror completely unforced this time. “Gents, that little thing isn’t going to make it.”

  Teague and Max looked at each other and swallowed. Nobody had wanted to say it. She obsessed over every bite of food, ate like an angel, had thinner ankles now than before she got knocked up—but it wasn’t going to change the fact that she was carrying two babies too big for her, and threatening to get bigger with every breath.

  “We’re going to have to trust in Green for that,” Teague said after a moment of hush. “We’re going to have to trust Green and Brack, and Hallow, even, to keep her healthy. And the rest of us are going to need to pull our weight.”