by Amy Lane
I marked where she fell and hovered a few feet away, my wings flapping madly against the stiff, hot breeze. Then I changed, remembering to keep my shorts on this time, and let myself fall like she had into the chilly green madness.
The water closed over me in a whoosh of quiet noise, and my hands and feet flailed to push me to the surface. I gasped when I broke water, because even prepared, the chill was something frightening. The sun was overbright when it hit my closed eyes, and I cleared away the water with my fingers as I looked for her. Thank the Goddess, Bracken had gotten there first.
He was behind her—his large hands splayed over her stomach and, I assumed, his knee under her bottom—keeping her afloat as she bent her will and her fist and her power in the direction of my parents’ boat.
Dad had killed the motor, but the boat was still wallowing on inertia, and Mom was leaning over the railing, casting stunned looks over her shoulder at Annette. Annette was holding her hands over her mouth, her eyes sparkling with an evil glee—right up until Cory raised her hand, focused her power, and ripped that bitch heifer out of the front of the boat, throwing her across the water like a screaming skipping stone.
Cory’s outraged yell of triumph echoed off the surrounding hills and bounced off the water, even louder than Annette’s helpless shrieking as sheer momentum carried her over half the lake.
Our people in the nearby boat let out a tremendous cheer, and I looked at Cory with a shocked laugh.
“Bitch,” she swore. “Bitch bitch bitch bitch… fucking bitch….”
“Uhm, Cory?” I tried, seeing that Annette was heading for one of the big two-story boats with the wet bars and the slides off the top.
“Bitch cunt whore heifer trash-fucking shitbag….”
“Cory?” I ventured again, a little more panicked.
“Beloved,” Bracken cautioned.
She snapped “Fine!” and held up her hand again even as she treaded water, then squeezed her fist tight.
Annette’s body whooped up an invisible power slide, like a kid’s at a water park, and sailed over the boat. She was splayed crazily, with no dignity whatsoever, and she all but belly-flopped back into the lake with a splat we could hear even from where we sat.
I gave a kick up so my torso cleared the waterline and pointed at the bitch’s flopping, floundering body with meaningful energy while looking at my dad. He nodded, the boat’s motor revved again, and they puttered off to go clean up their mess. When I turned back to Cory, she was taking deep, angry breaths as she kept her head clear of the lake. Bracken was behind her, chuckling into the chilled hollow of her neck and ear, and she sent him a disgusted look.
“So much for taking shit for the team,” he chortled, and her pissed-off snarl eased up as she fought the urge to chuckle with him.
“Cory,” I sputtered, “I’m so….”
She shook the wet hair out of her eyes and smiled at me, the lines at her mouth telling me she was still fighting panic but getting better at it. Her lashes were spiked around her murky green-hazel eyes, and her hair was half out of its ponytail and plastered down her neck. She was so beautiful. “Don’t say it, ou’e’alle. You don’t have any reason to be sorry.”
I blinked, and not just to clear water from my eyes. Cory and I rarely used our titles, although she and Bracken frequently used them as terms of affection. This one was loosely used to a lover who owed his allegiance. I was not her equal—I would never be.
But, sputtering laughter in the cold lake under the bright, hard sunshine, she told me very plainly that she never doubted me and that she trusted me with her life.
I wanted a quiet moment with her and Bracken and swore I’d tell them both that I’d die for them.
It was the best and the least I could do.
“My pleasure, ou’e’ane,” I told her tenderly. I loved the word as it touched her ear.
Cory: Black Velvet
AND AFTER all of that, the bitch still insisted on coming with us to the damned vampire bar. It’s a good thing I’d had a few hours to cool off, or I might have killed her—literally and for good and forever—just for suggesting it.
But I did have a few hours to cool off, and good hours at that.
After our boat picked us up—precariously balanced with far too many people on it, but we didn’t care—we puttered around until we found a deep inlet, one with a narrow neck so none of the passing boats could see us. Lambent asked permission and then set a geas on it, a sort of “vague feeling” or repelling spell to keep the other campers away. Everybody stripped naked—Renny and Lambent, mostly—or shape-shifted, or did a combination of both, and either jumped in the water or took turns sunning on the boat, and generally we hung out as a big, rowdy, happy group. Bracken had brought an iPod and a speaker jack, and we plugged it into the boat and played that puppy as loud as we wanted. I sat in the shade and knitted with Katy and Renny, pleased that my waterproof bag had kept the water out during its little adventure. The fact that the yarn was double bagged in a ziplock helped too.
Green visited my mind as I sat—he’d been there when the water closed over my head, his presence keeping me from panicking completely—and although we did little more than bump telepathic noses, that soothed me too.
When it got too hot, I put the knitting down and Bracken came to my side and helped me in the water. No judgments were passed as I took deep breaths and clung to his hand, and the splashing and horseplay toned down even when I sighted a spot on land and took off in determined strokes to a place where I could feel, however fleetingly, slippery mud under my toes. Bracken evenly kept pace beside me, and every now and then he would go upright and extend his feet or go under to tell me how much farther I had to go.
I felt accomplished—absurd, because I’d been swimming in lakes since I was very small—but the feeling stayed with me nonetheless. I’d conquered a fucking fear, no matter how irrational. Go me!
When we returned to the boat, it was time to go back to the cabins and rest, then rehearse. The iPod jack came in handy then too. I practiced matching my voice, my pacing, and my blocking to the music, positioning people randomly and then moving seductively around the men to strip off their breakaway clothing and reveal their marks.
I could do it when the music was on—but when Bracken killed the sound to tell us to take a break for crap’s sake, I was right in the middle of tiptoeing my fingers up Jacky’s chest and crooning the throaty opening line. As the music died, we looked at each other blankly, and then personal space reasserted itself and we almost killed ourselves trying to get away. We heard a bizarre snorking sound, and together we looked down to see Teague, sitting on his ass in the dust, cracking up as though he’d never laughed before.
I blinked.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard him laugh like that,” I said. Jack and Katy looked at me in complete bemusement.
“Man, it must be that random thing,” Katy said, “’cause I ain’t never seen it either.”
“Two years,” Jack said, shaking his head with affection as another round of laughter shook his beloved. “Maybe chaos isn’t such a horrible thing after all.”
That made me laugh, and then Annette walked up and shit all over our mood.
“You all practicing for a show or something?” she asked brightly, ignoring the wall of icy hostility radiating at her from the eleven of us.
“Go back to your cabin, Annette,” Nicky said seriously. She tried another sunshine-and-sugar smile.
“Now you aren’t going to hold that against me today? It was a joke—you know, like the way you were laughing just now?”
I turned toward her with a hint of laughter in my own eyes—the nasty, corrosive kind of laughter that reminds you that everyone can be fucking evil.
“Yeah, Annette, it was hella funny watching you skim across that lake. Did you want another demo? Because I think if I tried that here, you’d have some serious road rash before you hit the water.”
She blanched, and I amped that
evil smile up a little, willing her to go away. Instead she tried a game smile and ignored me.
“I was just thinking,” she said, trying to make eye contact with Max and Jack, “that maybe I could come with you tonight when you go to meet the vampires. It sounds like fun.” Max bent down and scratched Renny behind the ears, and Jack deliberately helped Teague up—and then hauled that bandy little Irish body into his own long embrace, just to squick her out.
Teague went, though. I wondered if he’d been afraid of the force of his own laughter, because there was that almost shivering air around his body that spoke of a man who needed comfort. The two of them became their own island, a bubble in time, as Jack whispered in his ear, and I turned back to our enemy, daring her to say anything.
“You can’t even look at our vampires!” I was stunned—not just by her boldness, but by her stupidity.
“Well, if I’m going to be a part of Nicky’s life, maybe I should.”
I blinked at her slowly, and Nicky started to laugh—loud and long and as violently as Teague had. He walked up to her slowly, still chuckling, and bent a tender head toward her while she watched with enchanted eyes. He didn’t touch her, just leaned into her space, and she smiled sunnily up at him as though he was about to answer all her maidenly prayers.
“I’d sooner fuck a garbage pit,” he said succinctly. She took a step backward.
“You don’t mean that,” she said stubbornly. He nodded, looking at me with sincere exasperation.
“You can bet your bubble ass I do,” he said and then walked past her, meaningfully headed for his parent’s cabin.
I looked at her as she stood alone, her face a study in naked hurt, and I tried not to let any of my pity leak through. I loved Nicky, but that had been harsh. I shook my head. Forget my pride. I’d pulled back—I could have hurt her, really hurt her, but I hadn’t. Those were the boundaries on Green’s hill, but they weren’t the boundaries here, and they certainly weren’t the boundaries in a kiss of vampires that was sheltering a predator.
“You’re so mean,” she said, sounding like a lost second grader. “He can’t like you better when you’re plain and mean. You’ll see. If we could only get someplace with normal people, he’d see you’re not much at all.”
“Vampires,” I said carefully, talking to the child she apparently was, “aren’t normal people. What I did to you was playing. It was nothing. It was swatting at a fly. What the people we’re going to see will do to you will be for real. I can’t offer you protection.” I looked around at the people I cared for, the people who had “handled” me all afternoon to make me happy because they knew I’d put it on the line for them, and my face and voice hardened and my power leaked into it.
“I will not offer you protection. I can’t stop you from following us tonight, but you can’t ride with us. When you walk into that bar, it’s going to be naked and alone. Nobody here will look out for you. You’ve been protected here. You’ve been associated with Nicky—but you are no longer a part of his family. He’s made that clear. My people will not put themselves out to keep you alive. We have real business here, and we can’t afford to let you fuck it up.”
When I stopped speaking, an honest-to-Goddess chill breeze swept over us, and I realized my power had leaked into my words. Oh, crap—it was a binding. I’d lost control of my power, and it had become a binding. I looked around with almost wild eyes, and my people—all of them—were looking back with bemused, besotted expressions on their faces.
They wouldn’t help Annette pick up her fork, much less look sideways at her to save her life. I had actually bound them from any action to help her.
I looked at Bracken, who was squinting through the binding with a pained look, and I knew I was right. “Oh, shit.”
“Don’t let it bother you, beloved.”
“But Green, I… I just bound them to let her die in traffic, or some shit like that….”
“And I said leave it be. If she suffers from her childishness, she suffers. This way you don’t have to worry that any of our people will endanger themselves making that decision. You’ve made it for them. Well done.”
If it had been anyone other than Green, I was pretty sure the “well done” would have drowned me in sarcasm sauce. But he meant it, and my stomach roiled in misery. Another plate in my armor, another chink in my humanity.
It didn’t matter. It was done. Nicky had felt it in his parents’ cabin as he’d been hauling his mother out to order her angrily to talk some sense into Annette and clean up this mess, and even his parents had asked what the breeze meant.
Tanya, who had been watching us rehearse, said it felt like her first clear breath since the bitch had driven up.
So, since there was very little we could do about it, we ignored it and tended to our business. We took a break, took another swim, and practiced until sunset. The vampires woke up, and we had dinner with a fervent prayer, watched skeptically by Nicky’s parents and their intruder. They were still not invited to eat—and Grace had really outdone herself, with tri-tip and salad tonight for me and the shape-shifters, while the elves got pasta with garlic pesto sauce. I couldn’t even make myself feel guilty.
Phillip eyed them nastily as he and Marcus walked toward us, hand in hand. Of course, Phillip’s mood lately had been unpredictable at best—Gretchen had been seeping through in a more and more corrosive way. Last night, as they’d woken up, I’d gotten a flash in my head from him. She’d been frenzied, screaming and bound by three other vampires as she tried to fly off into the dark night sky. No wonder he and Marcus had gone straight from feeding to having happy romping sex in the forest. It was probably Marcus’s one weapon to keep his lover even-keeled when his mind link with the little baby monster made his own head a personal hell.
“So,” Phillip asked briskly, while we both pretended I wasn’t getting glimpses into his head showing everything wasn’t all right, “what’s the agenda for the night?”
We powwowed with the vampires and eventually acted out the dress rehearsal, then went to shower—where Bracken and I had a little wardrobe dispute in the privacy of our cabin.
You’d think I’d get used to walking into my room to see that the clothes laid out on the bed weren’t the ones I had been planning to wear.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, staring curiously at the green lamé halter nightmare Bracken had apparently pulled out of his lemon-scented ass. I picked it up gingerly and tried not to tangle the gold chains that held it together.
“That is what you’re wearing tonight.” Bastard looked way too pleased with himself.
“What am I wearing under it?” I asked. “I don’t see any leggings….” My eyes widened. “No.”
Bracken didn’t even bother to ask No what? He just came up behind me and grabbed my ass. “It’ll cover you just fine—you’ve even groomed. If you wear black underwear, you’ll be okay.”
I looked at him, mortified. “Groomed?”
This puzzled him. “Groomed—isn’t that what you told us you were doing when you shaved your—”
I stopped him with a hand over his mouth. “Yes. That was grooming. And no, I’m not wearing this without a skirt… or pants… or a goddamned circus tent!”
Bracken raised his eyebrows, perfectly aware that in matters of clothing, costuming, and makeup, he generally came out the winner. It wasn’t even that I was weak, dammit—it was that he got his taste from Green, and screw it all if the elves weren’t whip-spiffy dressers from the get-go.
About that time, Nicky wandered in from his own shower and gave a low whistle at the thing hanging from my fingers. “Swwweeeeet!” he whistled. “That’ll show off your tattoo and your legs!”
I sourly stuck my tongue out at him. “My legs are squat and average,” I said truthfully—we all knew it for a fact. How I had lucked into a culture that thought I was attractive was one of the big mysteries of life, and I was done with examining it too deeply.
Nicky shook his head. “With all tha
t running you do? Your legs are toned!”
I shook my head, remembering why I had dated Nicky in the first place. But still the gauzy, chainy thing in my fingers was not one bit more appealing. Again I looked at Bracken, who was looking smugly back, the smirk he customarily wore when we were waltzing this number in place and his grim, pond-shadow eyes twinkling.
“Where did you get this?” I asked carefully, and his smirk widened to a full-out blinding grin.
“Green sent it with the sprites while you were in the shower,” he all but crowed.
I didn’t even have to smell the wildflowers and sweetness to know I’d lost. But it was lovely to feel Green’s touch on my face anyway.
There was a gold-colored wrap that came with the gauze-chain-halter nightmare. It had been hand knitted, it buttoned at the shoulder so I could drop it at the appropriate time, and it was made with some weirdo rayon/linen mix so it wouldn’t schwack to my skin in the heat. What it would do, however, was hide the mark on my back until we were ready for the world to know who I was. The big-assed triple-diamond tattoo I sported was pretty distinctive. We’d blown power and a matching tattoo through every loyal follower in Northern California, and from my understanding, that included Rafael. It would ruin my chance to see how Rafael operated on his home turf if everyone knew the boss—ha!—was in the place before I was ready.
I also got gold strappy sandals. Oh yay.
Bracken did my hair—something up off my neck, thank the Goddess—and all in all I was grumpy, uncomfortable, and ready to rip something apart by the time we emerged from our room and met the others by the cars.
But it was all good.
We gathered together by the SUVs and commented on how everybody cleaned up well, even though I’d seen most of the guys’ outfits at the dress run-through, and they returned the favor. Lambent, Bracken, Nicky, and I were going with the vampires—that way we’d smell good and vampy by the time we walked in. I was hoping that a bite on the wrist and eau de undead would let us clear the bouncer I knew would be at the door, because I really didn’t want to pull the “I’m your queen” card before the right moment. I assumed shape-shifters would be welcome in any vampire bar—yum, right?—so I had no worries about the people in the other SUV getting into our destination.
