Quickening, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  She wore robes the color of blood, and her hair was just as red spilling down her back.

  She faced the opposite wall, sitting in a rocking chair—one of those laminate ones that glides back and forth that you see in all the maternity stores.

  All of the furniture was wood laminate, and I frowned as I looked at it.

  “I didn’t pick any of this shit,” I snapped. Bracken glared at me as the elf queen whirled around. “Well, I didn’t!” I protested. “This isn’t my furniture! Who picked it?”

  Oh, Jesus.

  I glowered at Nimuetia. “You? You sneak into my house, you call me all the wrong fucking names, and you try to decorate my fucking nursery? Who in the fuck do you think you are?”

  She must have fed well enough. Her face was pure alabaster, and her eyes glowed ruby red. Gone was the desiccation, the flapping skin, the ruin. In their place was whole, healthy elf, with one exception.

  Green’s mark—our mark, the wreath of oak leaves, lime leaves, and rose trailers—twisted along her skin, on her face, up her arms. Her robes weren’t just the color of blood, they dripped with it as well, as the mark crawled along her body, doing its job.

  It was supposed to constrain her not to act against Green or his people.

  The blood, the sparkler burst of madness in her eyes, the defiance, the fucking war—all of it ripped its vengeance out of her skin and demented her even more.

  But even that dementia couldn’t contain her surprise.

  She took me in—swollen ankles, swollen face, swollen belly, bloated anger—and her mouth dropped open.

  “You’re quickening?” she hissed. “You’re the one who’s pregnant? How—I thought it was an elf concubine! They impregnated you? You’re trash, that little human sorceress—” She snarled. “—the singer we saw that night!”

  Oh, Jesus. We all knew she’d been there the night we defeated Green’s old lover. We’d known she must have been one of the overthrown elves.

  We just hadn’t counted on how much she still didn’t know us. Well, hell—that was something we should have exploited while we’d had the chance. No chance now, though, just pregnant me and the backup squad.

  And the monologuing villain.

  “Bitch, I may be white trash to you, but here I’m the fucking queen, so maybe stop trying to know me.” Bracken grabbed my hand like maybe he could hold me back.

  “I do know you!” Her face twisted—and you know what? She wasn’t all that attractive when she looked like she wanted to rip my throat out. I mean, I was bloated and swollen, and I had bags under my eyes and bad skin and greasy hair, but she was fucking scary.

  “Yeah?” I snapped. I realized that I wasn’t afraid. Maybe I should have been, but mostly I was just mad. She was in my nursery, with cheap furniture, as though she was taking over my house? “What do you know about me?”

  She snorted dismissively and gestured to the tacky furniture in the darkened room. “I know I picked better than I knew. I could feel the life building here—elf life. I didn’t know it was some half-breed abomination!”

  “So you teleported shitty furniture for a real elf baby?”

  Yes, yes I was stuck on the furniture. It was my fucking nursery!

  “I was trying to make a statement!” she snapped.

  “Make a statement? Terrorizing hundreds of innocent people to kill for you isn’t a statement? Tainting the water supply of the entire county wasn’t a statement? Big fucking orgies where you forcibly created werewolves—that wasn’t a fucking statement? Lady, you need to take an English class, because I don’t think you know what a statement is.”

  “No!” the woman snarled. “You don’t get to tell me what or what not to do! I watched you and your lover destroy my entire world. You’re upset because a few humans were marked? A hundred elves were marked against their will. You destroyed our leadership and just… just took over, forcing us to work with… with the… kymutxha of the universe.”

  “My mother wouldn’t even let me hear that word,” Bracken said in wonder. “So that’s what it sounds like. Talk about kymutxha!”

  As she’d spoken, Nimuetia had been throwing power spikes at me—subtle, invisible, but unmistakable. So the situation was grave—very grave—but that didn’t stop me from smiling at my beloved.

  “You were very sheltered,” I said cheekily.

  “I was,” he agreed with a modest nod. A power surge hit us—hard enough that Nimuetia glowed blue for a moment—and our hands tightened around each other.

  I turned to our adversary without a trace of levity in my expression. “We gave you an out, O lady of misplaced vengeance. Did you petition us at Imbolc? Did your brethren?” I had sat through those meetings at Green’s side, the very picture of the leader’s consort. We’d received five petitions, all of which we granted, provided the petitioners moved overseas or to Vancouver or hell the fuck away from us. This bitch had not been among those five.

  “Why should we petition?” she asked. “We lived there first!”

  “Well, we were doing just fine with that until your people sent some sort of mad fey hybrid to kill our lover!” I snapped. Adrian’s ghostly absence was a seven-month throb in my heart. “Did you think that shitstorm blew through your life because you were innocent?”

  “I had nothing to do with that!” Nimuetia’s cry bespoke honest anger. “My liege lords did as they saw fit, and I followed! Don’t your people follow you?”

  I couldn’t help it—I smiled. I’d been getting flashes of the battle with every power surge, and I’d seen Teague and Max, Renny and Lambent, and Green—my gloriously alight, gentle lover—wielding teeth, claws, blades, guns, and blinding power on the battlefield.

  They were covered in blood, in viscera, and in battle fury, and if I’d had my way, they’d still be in Green’s hill where we could have kept them safe.

  “Sometimes,” I said, my smile grim. “But not always.”

  “Then you’re weak,” she said with deep satisfaction, “and deserve to be destroyed.”

  Then she started to glow magnesium bright, emanating power like a charging phaser. I drew from Bracken, from Arturo and Grace, and kept my power shielded from Green and Nicky on the field. If I hadn’t been practicing power control in our marriage bed, particularly in the last month, I couldn’t have done it—I would have sucked them dry. They would have fallen in battle, and all would have been lost.

  But I managed. My knees may have wobbled a little, but my specialty, the power shield, clamped itself over her magical glow, forcing her to back off or self-immolate.

  “So, you’re a follower,” I said, panting a little. Well, I was out of shape. “That’s something to add to the résumé. You sat passive while people did bad things. You refused to take appropriate peaceful options when you found your situation was not to your satisfaction. You’re like a pathetic stalker, really. You want what you can’t have, so you try to terrorize the people who have it. Have I missed anything?”

  “You cunt!” screamed Nimuetia, her push against the shield frenzied and hard. “You—you’re a child! You know nothing of the world—nothing about love, about what you would do for your children. This room was vacant. Empty. And you—a woman with sidhe twins should be treated like a queen. Pampered, petted, worshipped. You were on a battlefield, a common soldier—I didn’t even suspect you were pregnant. You can’t even acknowledge you’re having these children. How would you know what a true sidhe mother will do to further her children’s cause?”

  In my head I saw them—as Cerise had described, as Green was seeing in battle. Two boys with hair like blood and rubies, white as alabaster, beautiful and cruel.

  “You sent your children into battle?” I asked, horrified. “You… how could you?” My power spiked, and Nimuetia cried out and hunched over, moaning. “How could you? Do you know what I’ve done, what my people have done, to make sure I can raise my children in peace? Do you think I let them put themselves in danger willingly? They left to protect m
e, because some rabid fucking… cum-pshaw or whatever kept trying to kill me and mine. My friends left to put their lives on the line for me. I fought in all those stupid battles to make my home safe for all my children, the ones in my home and the ones in my womb! My ou’e’hm is trying to kill your children right now because he wants to keep us all safe! You want to be a good mother? Stop trying to give your children territory and start trying to save their lives!”

  “My boys will win,” she said, very human tears trickling down her nose. “My boys will win, and your lover will die, and I will suck in all that released power like a sponge!”

  “How do you figure?” Arturo asked, surprising me. And thank Goddess—I was a breath away from bursting into tears myself. I was pretty sure I could have held the shield steady, but I might have constricted it until I squished her like a bug too.

  Nimuetia looked at him as if he’d sprung from the ground fully realized. She hadn’t even seen the people I’d come in with, and that was important too.

  “It will be free for the taking!” she sneered. “This one will simply melt into grief. Not even her children will keep her whole. Look at her—she’s human, weak. Her leader is all that’s keeping her alive, because her body can’t bear our kind!”

  “None of that is true,” Arturo said conversationally, and my heart tried to accept his words as real. She’d hit me there in the places I was most tender. Would I keep going to save our children? Would my body give out on me? We’d achieved such a crucial balance—what would these two lives inside me do to disrupt that? “She’s so much stronger than even she knows. But you’re funneling all of this power through a bone chapel—even if Green goes down, and our people become yours for the killing, how will that work? You could use our leader’s thighbone as a straw, and the ossuary would still scatter that power to your enemies before you had a chance to channel it. It was a terrible risk.”

  It was, wasn’t it? I thought about that battle and how it was all focused on the elves.

  “Marcus, Phillip, get some helpers to destroy the chapel. Dismantle it bone by bone if you have to.”

  They were startled—I’d caught them in the middle of… well, of eating an enemy werewolf, both of them ripping strips of flesh away from his throat to his heart. The taint in the blood was doing strange, rabid things to my vampires, goddammit, and I needed to split myself again.

  “My guys! Stop eating the poisoned werewolves, for sweet fuck’s sake, and destroy that fucking chapel stat!”

  I got to most of them. They responded sluggishly, dazedly—but still, they responded.

  “My children will protect it!” Nimuetia’s shout pulled me back from the battle just in time for her to try to burst out of the shield.

  For a moment she succeeded.

  Bracken and I were thrown backward, and only Arturo and Grace—anchored, grounded both physically and mentally—managed to keep us from being thrown back against the wall. Arturo caught Brack, and Grace, bless her vampire strength, caught me, levitating us both up and letting our upward momentum take care of some of the thrust without an impact.

  Before we were even stable, I threw that shield back over her, screaming with the effort.

  She started to chant my names.

  “Cory, Corinne Carol-Anne, Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick, Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick Op Bracken Green, Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick op Bracken (Get it right, bitch!) Green, student, weapon, tool, breeder, kymutxha—”

  “Oh, that is it!” I howled. “I’m so fucking done with this bullshit. You are Nimuetia, the mother who kills her children, the bloodthirsty bitch who would rather be right than protect her beloved ones, destroyer of the innocent, vengeance before mercy, blind follower, man hater—”

  “I am not!” she gasped. Oh, she wasn’t the only one who could hit tender spots, was she?

  “Oh, yes, you are. Look at Iris. You picked Iris and other strong women because you thought they were just like you. You hated men so much, you only picked weak ones—the uneducated, the frightened and hurt.”

  “The women were strong enough to do what I needed!”

  Had she looked beautiful when we’d come in? No more. Her hair tangled over her face, and every etched line of the tattoo was dripping blood. Her struggles against my shield made those lines bleed faster, and it occurred to me that she must be hemorrhaging power with every drop.

  I didn’t want to admit that I was too.

  My magic—yes, that was as strong as ever, but my body was… failing. My knees and legs could hardly support me, and my pulse was beating too fast, too strong—in my throat, in my eyelids, throbbing in my fingertips. The children were being unusually still given all this activity, and I wondered if my body was releasing stress toxins or something to put them to sleep while I worked.

  Well, good. I wanted them to sleep through this. I wished I could sleep through it as well.

  But I had no other course of action but to carry on. I let Grace hold me, support me, and sent her a little mental plea to set my feet on the ground but stay right where she was so I didn’t collapse.

  “But you couldn’t count on your men, could you?” I asked, feeling pity, actually. Green and Nicky were on the battlefield together. No matter what happened, I knew that they loved me, and they’d do their best to see it through.

  “What men? My men died at your little dinner party.”

  Oh, hell.

  “So you decided to wage war on my entire people using werewolves?” A year and a half. This woman had been trying to build an army for a year and a half. “How could you even think you were a leader?” I burst out, because my head hurt and my vision was getting spotty. “How could you even think this would work? You couldn’t confront us in person once? Let’s go back to the name thing, shall we? Coward. You’re a bloody coward, and you’re manipulative, and you hate your men for leaving you all alone with only this shitty, half-planned vengeance within your grasp!”

  “You’re weak,” she growled back, her face now a mask of blood. “You’re weak, and you depend so much on your men that your body is failing without them. You mourn everything, even people who should be beneath you—or would be, if you weren’t beneath everybody. White trash, fat, ugly little human bitch, so worried about her own worth she’d put her body and her children on the line to prove that she belonged in a faerie hill where she had no business—”

  “This is my home!”

  Oh, it was fucking on. Bracken replaced Grace to support me, but Arturo and Grace stayed on either side, and the rest was light show. Nimuetia threw her power out while I tried to keep her from blowing our entire fucking hill apart, and us with it.

  The nuclear ball, in the center of what would now never be the nursery, grew brighter and brighter and brighter. Even as Nimuetia screamed, I could feel the heat scorch my skin and my pulse throb from my feet to my throat. My vision grew darker and my knees grew weak, and I knew I would keep my grip on that shield until my heart exploded in my chest.

  It was coming.

  C’mon, Green, save my life.

  Bones and Battle

  Teague

  TEAGUE WAS getting winded, and he hadn’t thought that was possible. That damned elf giant—fucking fast, fucking merciless, and fucking armed. Teague had managed to cut off two more sections of that bone whip, each one accompanied by more blood, but the pain only seemed to spear both twins on. They both screamed when each cut was made, so Teague guessed they really were that close, but their shared pain wasn’t helping him now.

  In fact, the only thing helping him now was Green.

  They’d developed a rhythm, with Teague dodging in low and swinging madly while Green engaged both twins at once. Max was beating the hell out of the other twin at the same time, and they were winning, cut by cut by blow.

  But it was a war of attrition—and that, Teague wasn’t so sure they could win.

  The vampires were helping, but every werewolf they killed became a bloody temptation, and Teague had t
he feeling that vampires were falling out of commission with every corpse.

  And there weren’t nearly enough corpses on the ground for the shape-shifters not fighting the elves to be able to win.

  As far as Teague could see, between the enemy elves sucking the werewolves’ power as fast as they could and the vampires falling from the sky drunk and sick on werewolf blood, it was going to be a toss-up to see whose resources were exhausted first.

  That damned bone whip scourged another bloody strip from Teague’s sorry fucking ass. He howled, stumbling to one knee and holding the machete up to catch the blow he knew was coming.

  The bone whip curled around his throat instead, and Green turned his attention from the other elf (who was bleeding and bruised but still fighting like a fucking beast) to cut the hemorrhaging weapon right out of the redhead’s hand.

  Teague expected to be dead first. The whip was hauling him in. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t fucking gasp, and the bone spines were cutting into his flesh. His feet kicked, and he dropped his machete, grabbing futilely at the whip. Just as his vision started to go dim, he heard Max shouting, “Change, you dumb motherfucker, change!”

  And then two things happened at once—Green’s blade fell just in time to part the elf’s hand from his wrist, and Teague went werewolf, healed his wounds, and ripped a big wolf-sized hole in the twin’s stomach.

  That screaming moan of pain just urged Teague on, because damn, didn’t it feel good to taste the blood of his enemy! Damn, wasn’t vengeance a fucking fine wine! He ripped, tore, and shredded that elf’s belly while the elf screamed and beat his bloody stump against Teague’s head.

  Gruesome and horrible, but the rage driving Teague had been a year and a half in building and had only grown stronger, more acidic, as he’d watched the only home he’d ever loved fall further and further into danger. He was gonna disembowel this fucker, eat this chump’s liver, put his heart in a blender and drink it while the guy screamed! He was gonna—