by Amy Lane
“That went well,” Cory said loud enough to be addressing all of us. “Good job, guys.”
“What’s going to happen?” Kyle asked, the only one to break the silence. The deep-browed vampire was usually pretty taciturn—I think seeing himself surrounded by members of a group made him suddenly wish he was tighter with us.
“What’s going to happen?” Cory blew out a breath, and we exchanged bleak looks. “What’s going to happen is that in two days, we’re going to meet with Rafael again, and he’s going to try to stall, because this guy’s a friend and he feels like shit about having to kill a friend.”
“Wonderful!” Katy protested. “So why’d we just get all dolled up and pretty, for show?”
Cory smiled and turned around to grin at Katy, who was wearing a glossy plum-colored minidress with little cutouts at her hips and back. “Well, you look pretty spectacular, and the guys got to dance with you. I mean, isn’t that reason enough?”
Katy rolled her eyes and blushed, especially when Teague let out a suppressed snork of laughter. “You know what I mean!”
Cory nodded, and I finished the thought for her. “Yeah, we do.” I kissed Cory’s knuckles. “But there’s a… a rhythm to these things. Meet nice, shake hands, and then….”
“Let them betray you,” Nicky said darkly.
Cory snickered, but nobody else did. “It’s funny because it’s true,” she said into the stony silence, and there was a universal grunt. Every damned one of us had seen personally that it was true.
“What do we do then?” Katy asked, wide-eyed, and Cory looked behind her and smiled.
“Then you and Renny stay home,” she said, some steel in her voice.
“And Jacky,” Teague rasped. Jacky made a cross between a grunt and a growl, and then we all moaned and he subsided. Whether they liked it or not, the entire hill knew how Jacky’s last important run had turned out, and the lover’s bargain, sealed in desperation, that kept him from runs now.
“Why?” Katy asked, even though she knew the truth.
“Because,” Cory replied sweetly, “after they betray us, then we kick some ass. Now, whose trunk is whatserface locked in?”
“Nicky’s parents’ car,” Marcus grunted.
“Aww, shit—someone’s got to drive that back.” We all looked at the car—bright purple with yellow stars and olive fenders and hood.
“Ohhh!” Renny was suddenly half-naked girl and talking excitedly. “I’ll drive it! Can I drive it?” She looked at us, naked from the waist down, with her eyes wide and happy. “Oh, Cory—do you think Green would let me have it?”
I looked around at a dozen expressions just like mine—hands clapped over mouths while bright eyes peered over, keeping our amusement to ourselves.
We needn’t have bothered. Renny, being Renny, was oblivious to everybody but Cory and Max—and they could both laugh all they wanted, because she was secure in their love.
“You want that car?” Cory asked, looking helplessly at Max. “Why didn’t you say anything this morning?”
Renny shook her head and smiled shyly. “I’ve been looking at it all day.” She grabbed Max’s hand. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Max looked at Renny, the girl who was more cat than girl, and who had cemented the stoic cop into our midst more surely than his curiosity or his stolid sense of right. Her flyaway hair had escaped its pretty clip, and her bare bottom peeked beguilingly from under the long tank top, but her eyes were childishly bright and her smile was as winsome as a kitten humping a ball of yarn.
“Gorgeous,” he said roughly, daring the rest of us to say anything with his eyes. Our smirks faded, but our amusement remained.
Cory laughed fondly. “Fine, Renny-cat—if Green says it’s yours, it’s yours. But first check to make sure our ugly furniture is still there.”
She was there, a kerchief in her mouth instead of Cory’s power wad, glaring at us poisonously.
I didn’t want my beloved to deal with this shit anymore. She was busy making the world safe from monsters—the least I could do was make her safe from the world.
I stepped in front of Cory before she could say a word and hauled the girl out of the trunk by the armpits. Marcus had apparently used her own black panty hose to tie her arms behind her back, and her broken shoes made a clatter as they fell back into the car. If she had looked roughed up in the club, she looked worse now, and the little black dress that showed off her boobs was now almost ripped off of them. Her falsely blonde hair was a tangled mess falling around her face, and the raw hatred and contemptuous sneer that ravaged her features took away the illusion of prettiness that fine bone structure and full lips had once given.
The girl made to struggle, to scream, but I clamped my hand over her mouth instead.
“Look here, human,” I said, and something about the timbre of my voice made her eyes grow wide and the screams die in her throat. “You were not invited. We don’t like you. Cory here has been fending off offers to kill you for three days. We take that shit seriously, human, so you should get down and lick the dust off her toes.”
She looked outraged, and I thought briefly about flicking her on the head like a child. I sighed. I was stronger than humans—I’d probably crack her skull.
“We don’t want you to do that, but we would like you to not scream or make life miserable for Max and Renny, right? So we’re going to let you sit in the back of the car instead of the trunk. But if you fuck with them, or even don’t fucking shut the fuck up, Max here can turn into a giant cat and eat your throat. Or if he doesn’t feel like doing that, he’s got a giant fucking unregistered gun in the holster under that jacket. Either way, you’ll eventually be quiet. Do you hear me, human?”
Even in the best of times, I can be a grumpy fucker, and Cory has told me that when I’m in a bad mood, I am positively terrifying. I lost control of the pitch of my voice with that last sentence. I must have—she gave a whimper, and then there was a trickling splat into the mud and the unmistakable smell of urine.
“Oh Jesus, Bracken. We’re going to have to live with that all the way back to the cabin?” Max whined, and Renny made a little whimper. Her new car—she’d been so excited.
Mario broke into an out-and-out guffaw, though. “Keep your shirt on, cop, we’ve still got sweats in the SUV. I’ll be back in a second.”
It worked out. Between the sweats—uncomfortable in the heat—and the towel and the wool blanket we made her sit on, the car was saved, the nasty little human got let out of the trunk, and Renny’s new car—on loan, of course, to the Kestrels until we bought them a new one—was kept clean during the ride back.
The vampires rode back with us. There had been some talk of them staying when we were driving up—but given the way Rafael had left things, that had seemed impolitic at best and out-and-out defiance at worst. They hid their disappointment, and I felt bad. Of course we were their family, but we weren’t their brethren—and sometimes there’s a distinct difference. They would have liked to have gotten to know the others in the club, at the very least.
Marcus was driving, and we left the windows down for much of the ride, the night air moist and bearable in the low eighties. Cory’s “Bleed It Out” soundtrack had a winding-down counterpart, and the moody strains of Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” haunted the back seat as Cory snuggled in with me, and Nicky and Kyle kept up a desultory conversation in the midseat.
“Did you see the werewolves?” she asked, and I grunted an affirmative in her ear.
“Do me a favor,” she said quietly. “After we go sit and you have your swim, let me hang outside and knit for a while. I think Teague may want to talk.”
I didn’t ask her how she knew this. When most people came to the hill, they looked to Green—but not Teague. Maybe it was the way Cory had been there to talk with him when Jack had first been injured, or maybe it went deeper. The two of them had spent the first part of their lives so absolutely certain that neither of them mattered, only to find that
their lives mattered a great deal to many. Teague would talk to her when he would talk to nobody else, not even his mates.
At that moment, Nicky popped his head over the seat.
“Hey—what should I tell my folks about Annette?” he asked. Cory gave a groan and snuggled into my chest.
“Can you get them to put her on the first plane back to Montana before I have to kill her?” she asked while playing with the edge of my shirt placket.
Nicky snarked, but her body went still. It was, perhaps, the first time she realized she wasn’t joking.
She looked up, and I saw Nicky flinch from whatever was in her face. I heard the pain vibrating from her. “You get that, right, Nick? You understand that if she gets one of my people hurt with all that poison, I will kill her. Between the crowd in that bar tonight and the funky chaos thing, we’re not fucking around here. Tell your parents that. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to warm to me at this point, so be totally, brutally honest with them. If she gets one of my people hurt because she’s too fucking clueless to piss behind a goddamned tree, then I will kill her. See if you can get her on a plane, for everybody’s sake.”
Nicky nodded and then did something he wouldn’t have dared to do a year ago. He leaned way over the seat and kissed her cheek as she lay in my arms, then sat back on his knees.
“Lady Cory, whatever you need to do,” he said with more affection in his formality than I’ve heard in some people’s endearments.
When we got back to the cabins, not everybody was ready to go sleep—or make love, as the werewolves and werekitties obviously ran inside to do. A spirited card game started at the picnic benches under two bright kerosene lamps suspended from the trees. Lambent was unashamedly winning, but from the occasional shocked groans, I could tell that LaMark was doing well for himself and that Tanya, who had come out to greet us as we drove up, was amazingly good at hiding her cards. And that Mario was showing some interest in where the sylph might hide those cards if they truly disappeared.
Cory vanished for a moment to shower. Her bravery of earlier notwithstanding, she certainly wasn’t ready to be in the lake at night, and nobody wanted the stink of the club on them for long. I hadn’t been in the water for more than a few heartbeats before she came back out with a little camp seat and an electric lamp and, of course, her knitting.
She sat quietly, thoughtfully, and knitted, hardly looking at her stitches. It looked to be a hat, in the dark brown-purple she always used with me. I loved that color. She was so deep into her own thoughts that she almost didn’t look up when Nicky and his parents came out to speak with her. When she did look up, she shook her head and looked back down again.
Quietly, I treaded water into the shadows of the dock to listen.
“You can’t make us take her back,” Mrs. Kestrel was saying shrilly. She pulled the belt of her flowered wrapper tighter around her body, although it was still warm enough that Cory was wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
“No, I can’t,” Cory said softly, still looking at her hands. I saw her eyes flash in the moonlight, and she fixed Terry Kestrel with the same hard look she’d fixed Nicky with. “But you should. You should want to. She spent most of our time locked in the trunk of a car—”
“While Cory asked the nice vampires not to kill her, as a personal favor!” Nicky broke in, his voice hard.
“Kill her!” Terry’s hands fluttered, her robe temporarily forgotten. In silhouette she appeared… out of place. Ridiculous. Our people were at home during vampires’ hours; she was wrapping her shoulders against the darkness.
“She’s offensive, and she doesn’t understand what we are.” Cory sighed and stood, stretching muscles and shaking the mark of the camp chair off her skin. “I pitched her across the lake today, and she thinks I was kidding. If Nicky hadn’t spoken up, I would have let her smack into a boat head first, and we’d be having a very different conversation.”
There was a silence. Nicky’s mother didn’t even try to refute the possibility that Cory would have let the nasty little baggage die.
“What if we don’t?” Terry asked, when the stars refused to speak for her. “What if we don’t send her home? Are you going to punish us? Mind-wipe us? What?”
Cory snorted. “I’m going to call you responsible for the consequences. And why you’d want that on your head, I’ll never know.”
The woman’s body posture stiffened, and she leaned forward. I couldn’t see the lines of her face—but I think the darkness was merciful, because the voice was an ugly snarl. “You’re just afraid she’s going to take my boy back, that’s all. All this talk about ‘keeping her safe’—you just don’t want any competition.”
Cory’s laugh was surprised and truly amused. “Mrs. Kestrel, you are either too blind or too ignorant to see that competition is the last fucking thing I’m afraid of. Go to bed and live with your own pettiness. And let us know if you want to buy a new car now, or if you want to fly back and buy one when you get home.”
And with that she sat down, picked up her knitting, and broke out her iPod, making it clear with a crank of the volume that the audience was well and truly over.
I wondered if she knew how very royal she had been—right down to the dismissal at the end.
Nicky bent down to kiss her cheek and said, “I’m going to walk her up.”
“And call Eric?” Cory’s voice was hopeful, and Nicky’s answering laugh was affirmative. Good. He needed to hear his lover’s voice. I was certain that Cory had called Green while I’d been swimming as well.
There was a movement from the shadows of the woods after Nicky and his mom disappeared under the carport toward the cabins, and I stiffened as I made out the form of the boy who was in the odd-colored cabin.
I was going to warn Cory about him, but she looked up and waved openly. “Heya, Sam!”
The kid looked surprised and waved back, and then disappeared to whatever late-night wandering he was inclined toward. Given the fact that he was a teenager and he might find any combination of our people fucking in the woods on any given night, it was probably like the best scavenger hunt of all times, if you weren’t afraid of the dark.
I shifted in the water, and her voice drifted through the warm darkness like a cool breath of air on my cheek. “You ready to go in?”
I grunted. The water was so chill and alive, wrapping itself around my limbs…. “Not yet.”
“I want you,” she said simply, but her voice was so empty and tired, I was pretty sure she wasn’t trying to be seductive. “You’re… essential to me, beloved.”
Ah, gods….
“You speak poetry in the darkness,” I surprised myself by saying. The stars were shattered glass above us, the night sky so black around them you could almost touch it like you could touch the air. Even her weary poetry was profound under such a sky.
“You are my poetry. You and Green….” Her voice trailed off, and her needles clicked again. “I don’t think Teague’s coming….”
“Shhh….”
Because I’d heard his cabin door close, even from far above us.
“Are you just going to hide out there and listen?” She was amused, and I snorted gently.
“I think he expects me to by now.” Considering how many of their conversations I’d overheard while looking for Cory when she had crept out of bed to knit or to worry or to watch television with Grace, it was not an understatement.
“Shhh….”
Her needles clicked quietly as the werewolf approached the dock.
Teague: Knight’s Dilemma
HOW DID she do that? It was as though she had some sort of “Teague” sense that told her that he was awake and in need. Not sexual need—thankyoujesus NO! Because wouldn’t that just fucking complicate shit to all get-out? No, just need. Mostly, just need to talk to someone he wasn’t sleeping with, to make sure he was treating the two people he was sleeping with right.
She’d said once that he would want to hang around Green’s hill to s
ee how successful relationships worked. She’d said that maybe he’d want to look at Green, look at Grace and Arturo, look at Bracken’s parents—they’d be good examples. They would show him how it was done.
He was not sure he would ever tell her that his best example was her.
She looked up and smiled as he walked by. She looked exhausted, and he wondered at how much the evening’s performance had taken out of her. She had hidden it well, but his werewolf sense of smell had picked up the adrenaline even when she was practicing.
Performing tonight had been difficult. He never would have guessed, to see her sing.
“You look tired,” he said as he sank to sit, legs crossed, on the dock next to her chair.
“Shhh…,” she warned with a smile so faint, wolf’s eyes could barely see it in the dark. “Bracken might hear you.”
Teague grimaced. “Is he out here?”
“Somewhere, yeah.” She gestured grandly to the glittering silver-black expanse of lake in front of them.
He felt a little better. Odds were that Bracken would still hear, but he was fairly sure Cory would edit out the parts where he was a total bone-fuck loser.
They sat in silence for a moment, and Teague realized there was never total silence out in the woods. Insect noises, the whooshing of the dam out in the distance—even the occasional car, invisible on the causeway beyond the trees—all of it was there, a counterpoint to the background of this alien wilderness. Teague had smelled bears when he’d done recon. They’d cut the werecreatures a wide berth, but he’d forgotten about them until this very moment.
There was a ripple and a splash about fifty yards away, and they both watched as Bracken, sleek as an otter, pushed mightily out of the water, did a flip under the perfect moon, and cut cleanly back from where he’d come.
