Quickening, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  Nicky

  SO I just turn around and she’s gone? That’s it? What in the hell?

  I went hauling ass through the fucking store, my panic so great that Green popped into my head right before I grand jetéd over a toddler in the toy aisle.

  “What the fuck—”

  “She’s gone! We left her sitting in Baby Essentials, and I can’t see her!”

  That pause… was worse than the fall from the sky, the paralyzing knowledge that part of what made me me had been ripped off my body forever.

  “She’s… she’s under. She’s been drugged. Meet Bracken and Renny in front. Now!”

  Goddess help me, I forgot about Cory’s mother until I almost plowed into her standing at the curb.

  “Nicky, where’d Cory go?”

  I swung open the front door to the SUV before it even came to a stop. “I’m going bird. Green will relay directions.”

  “I saw them load her into the car. Brown Toyota Sienna, heading up 49, probably toward Grass Valley. I’ll ask Green to get directions from Teague.”

  “Goddammit!” I snarled, because if anyone would know the self-loathing that came with letting someone down like this, it would be Bracken. His hand on mine stalled that, though, and put it into perspective.

  “Not your fault. We underestimated him, and he underestimates her. Be careful, birdman. Stay over the roads, because her shit’s gonna come exploding out the fucking roof.”

  Ooh… good point. I squeezed his hand back. “Drive safe.”

  Cory’s mom had been throwing bags of baby clothes and baby wipes and plain cotton diapers—which she claimed you could never have too many of—into the back of the SUV. She swung into the backseat and leaned forward, forcing Bracken to turn toward her and release my hand. Renny ghosted in after her.

  “Where’d Cory go again?” she asked, puzzled. I winked at Bracken in spite of the grimness of the situation.

  “Good luck, brother. Don’t kill her before we get there.”

  With that, I shifted into a bird right before her eyes and launched.

  I scanned the horizon desperately, going in the direction Brack had suggested. Fucking cars. Fucking hyper-clear bird vision. Brown Toyota Sienna my feathered ass. I was all movement, all prey to my predator, all….

  Hello.

  “I see her, Green. Glowing power burp, north on 49, past Bell Road, continuing on toward Grass Valley.”

  “Keep following her, Nicky. We’re all on our way.”

  Bracken

  “SHE WAS abducted by who?”

  I was going to kill my mother-in-law. Would that be matricide? If I wore her blood like skin, would she be a blood relative then? These were questions I might just answer if the wretched woman didn’t shut up and let me fucking drive!

  “She was abducted by the doctor you took her to against her will,” I said not so patiently. I tried very hard to forget that I had been the one to suggest the ultrasound, the one who was guided by his curiosity and heedless of the consequences. “He’s been obsessing about her, do you understand?”

  “But… but don’t you people have mojo or something?”

  I ground my teeth. “Mojo? Yes, we have mojo—but not every human is susceptible to ‘mojo.’ Some of them are curious or practical or fucking obsessed. We used our mojo, and we ended up burning down the clinic and breaking into the guy’s house to erase her from his memories.”

  “You’re the ones who burned down the clinic!” she crowed. “I knew it!”

  I breathed heavily through my nose. “He had a stalker’s board, Mrs. Kirkpatrick. He had her pictures, from birth through high school. He even had her driver’s license picture, and he didn’t get that legally. He had her schedules, her whereabouts on what day, and a fuckton of long-range shots highlighting the baby bump and estimating how far along she was compared to how far along she claimed to be. He estimated her weight gain, her baby-weight gain, her actual physical weight loss… it was a nightmare! He even tried to estimate what minerals she was getting through her diet by her skin tone—”

  “Stop!” Cory’s mother sounded close to tears. “Why would he do that?”

  “Because she’s not human!” I shouted. “Our children aren’t human! And he is, and he’s curious and dedicated, and he’s going to fucking die!”

  “Die?” she said blankly. “Die?”

  I thought I’d recovered from the night of the battle. I thought I’d regained my equilibrium. Nearly three years—wasn’t that what it had been? Three years in June? I’d lost my brother, my lover, my friend, and for three years I’d been trying to recover from that loss.

  But I’d held Cory’s failing body in my arms, had seen Nicky fall from the sky, heard the stories from Teague of Green—Green—struggling for breath and dying by the heartbeat.

  I was not okay. My beloved was in danger, our children were in danger, and whatever polite fiction Cory had told her mother for the last three years was done.

  “Nobody puts my beloveds in danger,” I ground out through clenched teeth. “And nobody puts her beloveds in danger. If she doesn’t kill him, I will. And if I’m late, Nicky will—and so help me, if the three of us fail, Green will. And I don’t care if he’s misguided or well-intentioned or fucking insane. We’re not human, and we don’t live by human rules, and if you’re not ready to be a part of that, then you need to get out of the car when we stop and run like hell.”

  Tense silence roared in my ears like the ocean. I couldn’t even hear Renny breathe.

  “Would she really?” Ellen Kirkpatrick asked. “Would she really kill?”

  In my mind I saw a hundred vampires vaporized by a thought. I saw piles of werewolf bodies heaped in front of her lethal shields. I stood back to back with her as we fought with guns and blood, surrounded by shape-changers and vampires who wanted us annihilated. I watched her flying through the snow fearlessly, determined to destroy a threat to all she loved.

  I sat, a quiet passenger in Green’s mind, as she held a little girl in the sunlight and comforted her before she conflagrated into ashes.

  “Can she kill?” I asked, my voice breaking. “She’s glorious at it.”

  “Teague’s given me directions,” Green said in my head. “Are you ready?”

  “Hit me,” I ordered—and just before Green could start giving me pictures, I flashed a glower at Cory’s mother. “Don’t you dare.”

  But Ellen Kirkpatrick was busy staring out the window, her face bleak. “What am I supposed to do with that?” she asked, half out loud.

  “Be proud,” I told her, concentrating on Green’s pictures, grateful the route was simple. “She’s a warrior.”

  “Left, straight for two miles, left, and there… got it?”

  “Got it, Green. How are you getting here?”

  “GTO.”

  “Call Max to meet us there.”

  Because if it was Teague’s Mustang, that was Teague driving like a bat out of hell—and Teague was great if we needed a part-time criminal, but Max was awesome if we needed a part-time cop.

  I didn’t even want to guess who was in the backseat, because… oolf! We were there.

  We rounded the final corner in the little rural suburb, and I looked around with dazed eyes. It appeared quiet, unassuming. It was Saturday, right? Shouldn’t there be kids in that neighborhood? Something?

  The For Sale signs on half the lawns barely registered before Nicky flapped down across the street and landed in the tree in the yard across from us. His wings looked… singed—and when he turned human while still seated on the branch, his bare feet dangled, and about the only clothes he had left were the now holey jeans that barely covered his ass.

  “Oh, thank God,” I said, getting out of the SUV. “We’re here.”

  A car, a tiny Ford Fiesta, tore away from the front of the house so quickly I had to leap back as it roared past me. Cory’s mother said, “Hey, was that Janine?”

  The nurse. Great. I looked at Cory’s mother and said, “If
she talks about this, we’ll kill her. You make sure she knows that.”

  “I’m pretty sure she knows,” Nicky said, dropping out of the tree, and that was our signal. Together we started jogging across the lawn.

  Cory

  BY THE time I came to, they’d put the IV in with the Pitocin. I could tell because I was puking all over myself, and because the pain that slammed up my body, from my thighs to my ribcage through my cervix, was huge and all encompassing.

  I was surprised the foundation of the earth didn’t crack.

  Janine offered me water, and I swished out my mouth gratefully while she tried to clean me up. Oh, great—my wardrobe was reduced to giant empire-waist muumuus, and this green one had been a favorite. Now the neckline stank of vomit, and I’d never wear it again without remembering what it felt like to be restrained on a gurney in what looked to be a converted garage.

  I looked around, saw the scrubbed walls, the vinyl flooring over the concrete, the newly tiled sink and what looked to be a fully equipped delivery room surrounding me, and I realized I was right. It a was converted garage, and I was stuck in a bed staring at the connecting door to what was probably the kitchen, with my knees propped open and my weehoo facing whoever walked in through that room.

  Somebody had cut off my giant pregnancy underwear.

  I turned to Janine in a black fury as another contraction slammed up through my thighs.

  I could deal with pain.

  I breathed long and deep while that fucker moved through me, and let my consciousness ride the wave. When I looked at Janine again, she was about to inject something in the IV. I managed to shout “Stop!” loud enough for her to startle before the needle punctured the injection port.

  “It’s just a painkiller,” she said soothingly. “It won’t hurt you—”

  “It all hurts me,” I panted. “Don’t you understand? That’s why no doctors. Your shit—it’s not good for me!”

  She looked at the needle in her hand, confused. “But… but Cory, your chart didn’t say anything about allergies—”

  A wave of black nausea chased through my body, but this time I managed to keep it down. “I’m allergic to mankind right now!” I snapped—and oh, Goddess, that condescending smile.

  “Oh, honey, I know it feels that way, because inducing labor isn’t a joke, and—”

  “Holy mother of fuck!” Oh, Goddess, those contractions felt like muscular train wrecks, giant steel balls transferring energy up from the thighs, straight through the weehoo, cracking my cervix open like a walnut and ending at the grand finale of uterus, diaphragm, taint, asshole, and lower intestine.

  And this woman was not listening.

  As the contraction receded, she went to inject the painkiller again. I reached out with the motherfucking force and slammed the hypodermic across the garage, where it lodged in the wall and stuck like a dart.

  “Listen to me!” I snarled as she turned startled eyes toward me.

  I let the glow of power coat me as a shield, and her eyes got even bigger.

  “Is he paying you?” I asked, feeling guilty about the people we’d put out of work, in spite of my anger.

  “What?”

  “Money, Janine. Are you doing this for money? Because you could lose your license, and I know it.”

  “Yes,” she whispered, voice broken. “I need the job, Cory, and the insurance. I’ve got two daughters, and one of them is in college. I’m—”

  “Desperate. I got it. Well, listen….” Oh, fuck. Another one. They were coming fast and they were coming hard, and my hold on myself, on the power that seemed to up in amperage with every roll of muscles, grew looser and looser. On the hill, I’d have Green and Bracken, I’d have Nicky, and Grace and Arturo and Katy and Renny—so many people to calm me down, to help me hold my power, to catch it when it exploded. But not here. Not in this converted garage with this terrified nurse who didn’t know what she was in for.

  I almost let power slip through this time. Almost. My hands were bound to the fucking gurney, and it had nowhere to go but up and out—right up until my body turned into a giant electric fence with nowhere to ground.

  “Janine,” I gasped, making eye contact again. She was holding her hand in front of her face, so I tried to tamp down on the glow and maybe partially succeeded. “Janine, I am going to kill whoever is in this room with me that I don’t love. Do you understand? Kill. Dr. Nieman is a fucking dead man—if I don’t do it, my husbands will.”

  “Husbands—”

  Oh… fuck… not yet. “Focus, bitch! We will kill him. If you’re here, so help me, I won’t be able to stop….”

  Mother of fuck!

  I opened my mouth and silently screamed, sunshine pouring from me up through the garage roof, turning it black and charred and unstable—and from there, I had no idea. I was spending all my energy trying to save the goddamned nurse and none of it trying not to kill the whole neighborhood.

  At that moment Dr. Nieman burst into the garage, partially gowned and looking as cool as any country-club doctor in his own examining room.

  “Janine, can’t you sedate her? I’m trying to get the incubators warmed up and prepped.”

  “I… I….” Janine held her hand to her mouth and flicked her eyes from the charred ceiling to my glowing body and back. “I… I can’t do this…,” she announced finally. Then she bolted. I heard the garage door slam as she took off for parts unknown, leaving me with the obsessed doctor and twins on the way.

  “Miss Fitzpatrick—”

  My eyes bulged. “Stay the fuck away from my babies!”

  “Now calm down—”

  “You have until my next contraction to get out of here before I fry you like bacon,” I snarled. Oh, I felt it. Fucking Pitocin. It would have happened slower than this—and fast was bad, fast was so bad with twins, and nobody there with a hand in my hoo-ha to make sure they were coming out okay, and nobody ready to open a seam in my belly and lift them out gently.

  Oh, Goddess… they were early. They were early by elf standards, and they would need Green—they would need the whole collective of us to care for them, to make sure they could breathe, could think, could eat.

  I didn’t let this one come. I couldn’t. “You’ve got to go,” I sobbed, fighting for all I was worth. The force of the contraction grew bigger even as I tried to stave it off. “If you touch my body to deliver them, somebody is going to die. I’m not human. They’re not human. Why do you think you’re so obsessed? What do you think is going to happen when I give birth without my family around me?”

  Oh… Oh hell…. He had me on my back. On my fucking back. I felt the contraction recede as I squashed all the oxygen along my spine, another wave of black fucking nausea chasing up my body. I turned my head, tilted my shoulders, and threw up, so miserably queasy, so dizzy with cut-off blood and fear and the horrible fucking allergy to whatever was in that IV that all I could do was whimper.

  It hit me for the first time that if I didn’t kill this man, I was vulnerable to him, as vulnerable as a woman could be, and that he could let me die in childbirth and cut the babies out of my belly without remorse, if that’s the way his obsession ran. With a heave, I cocked my hips, letting the humongous pregnancy belly flop to the side and screaming with pain as my sinews snapped and pinged and muscles tore.

  The oxygen rushing my spine made me dizzy—and I couldn’t control it, couldn’t anticipate it as the next contraction roared through me like a nuclear freight train carrying a coal car of death.

  I screamed in pain, in fear, in panic, power pouring from my mouth. And deluded or not, the doctor was caught in the power wash, thrown against the door to the garage, and cooked—the way I’d once cooked a computer in a library, the way I’d always feared to cook the men in my bed if I did not learn control.

  His body shook, the fat ran down, and his skin shriveled, went black, and flaked off, all before the next contraction passed—but he did not scream.

  His neck had snapped a
t the first impact, and even as my vision blackened with panic and pain, I knew true fear. I was secured spread-eagle, contractions roaring through me, and I had no way to get loose.

  “Shh, beloved. Nicky and Bracken are here.”

  “Green,” I sobbed, my fury transforming to tearful relief in less than a heartbeat. “Green, where are you?”

  “On my way. On my way.”

  “Cory!” Bracken shouted, crashing through the side door. “Cory!”

  “Oh, thank Goddess. Bracken… Bracken, let me out of here. Get rid of the Pitocin. Please, Bracken, please….”

  I was dimly aware of Bracken and Nicky working on my restraints, and my mother too, but mostly I was aware that Bracken was there, touching my face, whispering soothing things in my ear, and that Nicky was holding my hand and they were there, my men were there, and I wasn’t going to have to have my babies in this terrible place after all.

  Green

  THERE WERE bats in hell eating Teague Sullivan’s dust and wondering what had happened to their lives and reputations by the time the Mustang pulled up to the little suburb in Grass Valley.

  Green had been inside her mind for the past five minutes, since Bracken and Nicky had crashed into the converted garage, and after talking to Bracken and Nicky, he was certain of one thing.

  His children were coming, they were coming right now, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

  Green slid out of the front seat of the car, not even registering the cramps in his legs from the small space, and Katy slithered out right after him. Before Teague could kill the motor, Green slammed the door and stuck his head back in the window.

  “Car carriers,” he said crisply. “Two of them. We’re going to need them on the way back.”

  Teague’s jaw dropped. “Holy mother of fuck!”

  “Yes, that’s what Cory said—but you’d better get a move on, because the minute they’re stable, we’re getting the hell out of here. Now call for Lambent to finish the cleanup, yeah?”