Quickening, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  A rending sound stopped everything. Everybody. Every sound on the battlefield ceased as the vampires, gibbering in glee, tore apart the tiny outbuilding that had been ignored in the general melee. Teague never got a look at the ossuary, but the vampires would describe it later, and it curdled his blood. Underneath the vinyl poly of the Tuff Shed sat an altar made of skulls and walls made of crossed arm and leg bones, a ceiling lattice of broken ribcages, a floor tile made of laced fingers and toes. The bones hadn’t been cured, Marcus reported, and gobbets of rotting flesh hung from them and from sinews that had been woven in and under the bones to tie the whole thing together.

  A monstrosity, an abomination, meant to pull power given by the unwilling from the constrained receptacles. Its presence should have made a hole in the universe.

  Its absence certainly caused a fucking commotion.

  Green

  GREEN FELT the wrongness of the ossuary’s power-funnel in his soul. The elves, supernaturally charged and lethal, were functioning on stolen power, bent to their use by an obscene instrument of magic and will.

  But he’d set his course when he saw Nicky, Max, Renny, Teague, and the other shape-shifters engaged in mortal combat with the power-mad elves.

  They were his. They were Cory’s. They needed to live.

  He threw himself into the battle with all of the fluid grace of the sidhe, and with all of the power and experience of nearly two thousand years on the planet. The love of his people fed him—many of the snarling, spitting warriors on the field had been the sweetest, neediest of lovers in his bed, and he had fed deeply from them. What looked to Teague like a fight between a sword and a whip was really a whirling dance of magics—the magic of anger, the magic of love, the magic of destruction, the magic of entropy—love and lust grown so great it could ravage all in its path.

  Green had no flaming sword in his hands—not to his own eyes. To Green, their battle was a liquid dance of raw boiling power.

  The destruction of the ossuary sounded like the shriek of a thousand tortured souls freed to afterlives of their own choosing.

  For a heartbeat Green was distracted, pulled in the direction of healing that torment, dying at the thought of those lost souls trapped into service.

  He didn’t see the flick of the bone whip that wrapped around his throat.

  If he hadn’t been sidhe, the ripping strength might have decapitated him. As it was, he had just enough time to fill his cells with full sidhe power before his air was cut off.

  He grasped at the whip, shoring up the tender flesh of his neck with all the energy he possessed, and locked eyes with the mad glare of the redheaded warrior who was going to kill him.

  And saw only grief.

  He expanded his perception and saw more of the battlefield than just the enemy in front of him. Teague was only a few feet away, snarling over the entrails of the other twin. Even as Green watched, that sidhe’s eyes lost focus and filmed over, and his body shrank to normal size, releasing his soul and magic into the universe for another Cory to find.

  “I’m sorry, my brother. We didn’t ask for this fight.”

  Green’s antagonist heard him. For a moment the pressure of the whip relented, and Green was consumed by sorrow for a soulmate, for the other half of a lost heart.

  “I know this feeling.”

  Ah, the wrong thing to say. The bereft elf let out a howl of rage and jerked back on the bone whip. Green was falling into dispassion, into void, his oxygen failing, his heart sore and aching. “Cory… love them well….”

  “Fuck that, mate!”

  Green smiled even as his lungs stalled and his heartbeat bulged in his ears. “Adrian—we’ve missed you.”

  “Well, backatcha—now get your ass up and fight!”

  Green beat feebly at the whip around his neck, but even he knew the movements were drunken and desperate. “Kinda stuck here. So much to do….”

  Adrian stood right in front of him, blue eyes blazing, white-blond hair a frenetic halo around his head. “I will come visit again, you wank, but now is not your time!”

  With that he pressed transparent lips against Green’s, and Green felt it—the bubblegum taste of him, the tongue, and then….

  Air. Or not-air? Ghost air? Something filled his lungs, pushed the darkness back, gave Green the strength to grab the whip and yank with all his might.

  The enemy elf faltered long enough for Green to pull real air into his lungs but then jerked the whip tight again.

  A streak of feathers and talons screamed from the sky, aiming a razor beak at the whip-wielder’s naked eyes. Just then, Teague turned from the dead elf at his feet to hamstring Green’s antagonist. The sidhe stumbled to one knee, covering his bleeding eyes with one hand and wildly flailing the bone whip with the other. Green fell to all fours, hauling air into his lungs as the whip curled around Nicky’s wing and yanked it out of its socket in an explosion of quills, blood, and bone.

  Nicky stalled and started his fall out of the sky as a man while Max leaped at the struggling sidhe’s throat, claws fully extended, teeth bared with rage. Green didn’t see the rest. He ran—lungs laboring, heart pounding, because Nicky….

  Oh, his darling Nicky….

  All that power floating through the air for the taking, so much of it meant for hatred, for vengeance, for anger and pride. Green threw open his arms for a moment—a single moment—of stopped time and pulled it all into his body.

  And blurred, faster than light, up into the air so he could clasp Nicky to him as he plummeted to the ground.

  “Nicky!”

  Cory’s scream in his head told him more than he wanted to know about her struggling heart and Bracken’s valiant efforts to keep her failing body together. In that moment of supreme fear, the link that bound them all snapped into effect.

  Nicky wailed in pain as Green’s feet touched the earth, and Green had no choice but to pour all that power into his maimed and savaged form.

  “Green… I can’t live if I can’t fly.”

  Blood poured out of Nicky’s body at the severed shoulder socket. Green turned his face to the heavens and roared, pleading for the strength to heal his most inconsequential, most accidental, so very much beloved lover.

  Bracken

  I CAN’T heal—I can’t heal! My body is made for blood, calls to blood, thirsts for blood—and as I wrapped my arms under her arms, it was that very element that was killing her. It pounded through constricted vessels, forced her heart to labor too hard for such a fragile human organ, throbbed in the delicate network of veins in her fragile brain.

  In desperation, we turn to what we know.

  Her body was failing her. I knew nothing of healing, but I knew blood.

  “Heed my call!” I screamed to her blood, her platelets, her cells, her iron. It knew me. Some of my own blood—a trace, a memory, however small—still ran through her veins from the last time I’d given her my life.

  “Slower, my lovely, slower!” I followed the rushing river of blood and sang to it. I flowed through her heart and soothed it, calmed it, eased its suffering. I threaded through the network of veins in her gray matter and whispered gently to move with ease, to—oh please, beloved—just once, just this once, don’t fight all the things, don’t fight the enemy, don’t fight your lovers, don’t fight your body, not all the things, oh please, Cory… please….

  “Hello there….”

  I found myself flowing through the umbilical into the tiny bodies of our children.

  “Father… Father… Father….”

  In this place I had only one name.

  “Rest, my children… sleep and be at ease. Your mother is keeping you safe.”

  Perfect touches, filled with wonder, like chubby fingers patting my cheek. That was the touch of their growing minds upon my own. “I can’t wait to tell Nicky and Green…,” I thought at them.

  “Father and Father and Father… Father and Father and Father… we shall love them too….”

  I emer
ged, chasing the next heartbeat through her arteries to her fingertips. How tightly her hands were clenched in mine. “Relax, beloved, be at ease…. I have your heart, your body, your blood. You do what you need to. I will care for you.”

  The grip remained, but the sweating and desperation softened. I kept a part of myself, my magic, within her, giving her the strength of my blood when her own human frailty would have betrayed her, giving her the rest so she might protect us both.

  The magic she channeled so effortlessly still flowed through us both, but her body, the precious receptacle for her vast and mighty soul, could survive the force now.

  I was weeping with the effort, with fear. I’d seen the transparent walls of her blood vessels, knew the ones in her brain and heart were growing thin. They were scarred from bulging and had so very nearly burst.

  And in one blowback of magic that was rotten to the core, all of that was forgotten.

  The elf queen screamed, both psychically and out loud, her cry filling our heads until I held my hands to Cory’s ears and blocked her eardrums with power, because I could see the blood running into her hair and felt my own doing the same.

  “Garnet! Oh Ruby, your brother! Ruby!”

  As she was screaming, Cory screamed, but only in her mind—and in the collective of the entire hill.

  “Green! Green! Nicky!”

  Oh, Goddess! I saw them, Green blurring across the battlefield, cloaked in a chaperon of magic to catch Nicky as he fell from the sky. His body was wrong… was wrong… was….

  “I don’t want to live if I can’t fly….”

  Cory, Green, and I—all of us, all of the hill, as a booming heartbeat, sang “Don’t you fucking dare!”

  Cory and I, a joined consciousness, could see the power floating like dust motes in the black of the battlefield. Together we watched them stream, a river of stars coming to Green’s call.

  Our lover, our leader, the father of our children, the father of us all, lay hands on our beloved and fed power into his maimed and bleeding body as I had fed blood into Cory’s—was it only seven months ago?

  Cory moaned in my arms, and I tightened my hold, but our hearts were on that field, over trees and brush, over a canyon, up a mountain, far away.

  And then Cory spoke, her voice echoing in the defiled nursery and startling all of us.

  “Holy fuck, Brack—what time is it?”

  I was sidhe. My blood surged with the tides, and I had loved a vampire for my entire life.

  “It’s nearly four,” I said, my voice far away. “Order them home.”

  I wanted to join her, mind to mind, on that battlefield, but I couldn’t. I had to attend to our home.

  I looked around the room first, only a little sad that Cory hadn’t taken this first moment of belief in who we were to become and made it beautiful. But we all knew that first joys, first loves, first pictures of what life should be, they were so rarely the truth of things.

  Nimuetia sobbed, a crumpled heap of grief on the floor, so broken that Green’s mark no longer twisted through her flesh. I hefted Cory into my arms, aware that she was struggling with the vampires in some way. She would win—but that was not my task, not right now.

  “Elf queen,” I said harshly. She looked up at me, her eyes as red as her hair, as her cloak, as the blood that dripped from the ends of her fingers and pooled at her feet. “Tell me now—do you want forgiveness or oblivion? You have this moment in which to speak.”

  She bared her teeth, the grieving mother gone. “I will murder you as you sleep.”

  “Oblivion it is.”

  I backed out of the room toward the hallway, nodding at Arturo and Grace to go first. When they were out, I looked at Arturo to see if he knew and could help me.

  “Arturo, how many rooms does Green’s hill have?”

  “One less,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. Together we looked into the testament to motherhood gone awry and watched as the walls closed in.

  Smaller and smaller, the integrity of the hill maintaining its shape just as the hill had remained the same when Cory built the room. The doorway shrunk before us—eight feet tall, seven feet tall, six feet….

  Nimuetia began to scream. She pulled her power to her, suddenly conscious of what was happening, but it did nothing. This was our home, mine and Arturo’s, Grace’s and Cory’s—hell, the new ones, Connor, Dylan, and Cami, could have done this, if only we’d told them how.

  But we would not.

  Because Nimuetia’s scream echoed in my ears long after the doorway shrank to nothing and the room ceased to be.

  And the elf queen, the tainted bitch, the bane of our existence for so very long, blinked out of creation with it.

  She got off easy. I had endured grief and fear and pain. Oblivion is a trip down a river of blood compared to what her heart would have done if she’d lived.

  Cory moaned in my arms. I took a step toward our bedroom door, realizing only then that the hall was full of people, terrified and needing guidance.

  This was usually not my job, but I thought I would do for the moment.

  “The battle is over,” I said. It was a testament to our people that they waited for me to finish speaking before they cheered. “Nicky has been gravely injured, and the vampires are… drunk on tainted blood. She’s trying to convince them to come home.”

  “Is that all?” Grace asked, irritated.

  “Brack, they’re not listening to me. They… they just roll around and belch.”

  Grace leaned over and kissed Cory’s brow. “Don’t worry, my darling. We’ll take care of it.”

  “We need drivers for every car in the fucking garage, and all those damned fire safety blankets I stocked up on last year,” she called. “Pixies, drop them in the cars. Drivers, meet me downstairs at the pegboard. Move out, people—we need to go pick them up!”

  And then the cheer—strained and tired, but happy. Everyone in the hill had someone out on that battlefield. They wanted to know how their loved ones were doing.

  Katy and Jacky pushed through the crowd, which was thinning enough for me to get to the door.

  “How is he?” Jacky asked, looking nervous.

  “Teague’s fine,” I reassured. I’d seen him, when Cory and I had been joined. He’d looked beat the hell up, but fine.

  Jack’s mouth twisted. “I meant Nicky,” he said softly. “She would have told us, Brack. I have faith.”

  I swallowed and felt tears start. I’d heard Green’s desperation, his plea. Darling Nicky. It had been his pet name for Nicky from the very beginning, when I’d hated Nicky and feared that he’d distract Cory from me. I’d finally been ready to bare my heart. How dare he lay claim to my beloved when I’d waited—had been ready to wait lifetimes—but needed her so badly once Adrian was gone.

  “We don’t know,” I said, my voice rough. “It’s all so tangled, everybody’s minds, and the vampires….” Their minds were a dark and twisted disaster. I shook Cory gently. “Beloved. Beloved, leave them be.”

  “The sun, Brack,” she complained, like a child wanting more sleep. “The sun will—”

  “Grace and the others are riding out to get them. We’ll get them home, okay?”

  “Okay,” she whispered. She was sopping wet in my arms, her body taxed and sweating from the battle. “Okay. But Nicky….”

  “What about him?”

  “My brain hurts,” she whimpered. “Oh, Bracken, it feels like my head’s gonna pop off….”

  I kissed her temple. “Shower,” I said, knowing it was something to do while we waited. “Jacky, did Hallow go into the battle? Did Whim?”

  “Whim did not,” Jack said, sounding relieved. “And neither did Charlie.”

  “Could you make sure they’re not driving to pick up the vampires? We need a healer here. She’s… her blood pressure. It’s bad.”

  Jack nodded grimly, and I staggered into the bedroom and started to undress us both without even closing the door.

  We were
in the shower. She was weeping with exhaustion, with weakness, with worry, when Green’s faint voice sounded in our head.

  “I swore he’d fly again.”

  Oh, Goddess.

  “Will he?” I asked. Avians—so many perks and so many fucking drawbacks. They didn’t regenerate limbs. They had healing, but only to a point. Almost as fragile as humans. And his wing had been ripped out from the socket.

  “It’s growing,” Green said with some satisfaction. “But I can’t do it alone.”

  Cory began to laugh against my chest, and I laughed with her.

  “What’s so funny?” Green asked, sounding offended.

  “Oh, beloved!” she said. “We’re never alone.”

  It was truth—all the truth I needed to give me enough strength to get her to bed and see her in Whim’s care.

  The vampires began to arrive by caravan scarcely half an hour before dawn. Grace and the lower fey put them in their darkling beds, cleaned them of the tainted blood, and threw their clothes into the incinerator as well. Arturo found Grace in the laundry room, fighting day death like no young vampire should have been able to and dodging into the shadows of the room. He swept her into his arms and blurred her to her room in the darkling before the sun could touch her.

  The shape-shifters and elves came straggling in through the trapdoor from the garden about half an hour after that. The pixies had met them in the Goddess grove with buckets of water, towels, and homemade glycerin soap.

  Teague, Renny, and Max were some of the last ones down, smelling faintly of lemon and hyacinth even in their furry forms. Jack and Katy met Teague and took him to the front room, where they fell asleep in a love seat with Teague across their human laps like the family dog. Max and Renny, for all I knew, fell asleep on the floor of their room, curled together like the cats they were.

  At the very end, with Arturo at his elbow and Lambent two steps behind, Green arrived with Nicky cradled in his arms.

  Green was naked and clean, and so exhausted the dark circles under his eyes were practically translucent. I took Nicky from him before he could protest, closing my eyes and nuzzling our boy’s temple in gratitude. He was asleep and breathing evenly. The hole where his arm had been was healed over, filled in smoothly with skin.