by Amy Lane
“Well done, beloved,” he said with his mouth full.
Grace shrugged. “I have a finite skill set—it’s good when it comes in handy.”
And Arturo laughed so hard he almost spit pasta out his nose. “Woman,” he choked when he’d recovered, “what exactly is it you think you can’t do? ‘Finite skill set’ my painted ass!”
Grace rolled her eyes. “Can I? Please?”
Arturo grinned at her. “You, woman, can do anything you please with me—I await your command.”
Grace blushed, but her wicked brown eyes met his. “Okay, for starters, you can get naked.”
Oh, yes—there was not much this woman couldn’t do.
Arturo was always fascinated by her skin. It was vampire pale, with freckles all over—but mostly on her shoulders, where she had burned as a human and the skin had never repaired. He especially loved her skin when it was exposed and slicking up against his, when he could touch as much of it as possible, when he could make it pucker and slicken and tremble.
Their first time was always quick. Then there was a breath and a slow, easy time, when he swore he saw her fingers shaking with tenderness and want.
He was reasonably certain that moment would never get old.
They were taking their breath after their first round of lovemaking, laughing and playful, when the lights in the house flickered and turned a brilliant blue, and a keening wail that sounded like the very molecules of the air shrieking in pain pierced their eardrums.
“What in the blue fuck?” While Arturo was still scrambling up in bed, Grace had fast-forwarded into her T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
“It’s Cory’s perimeter system,” she gasped. “Someone’s out there—shit!”
Because the lights had returned to normal and the noise stopped.
“It warned them off?” Arturo said hopefully, still following his beloved out of bed and into some clothes. He was unprepared for Grace to still be in full panic.
“Don’t you get it!” she yelled, pounding down the hall as though she knew he’d follow. “Green’s not on the fucking hill!”
Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit…. Green.
But he was probably blocking them out of his head.
“Call the vampires!” Arturo called, fishing his cell phone out of his pants and wondering about the odds Green would get the call before whatever it was got Green. “Get them out there, get the weres on perimeter….”
Arturo thought about whom he would call from his own people, and realized with a faint shock that he was barely close with any of the sidhe or other fey. When had that happened? When had his entire being become about those who had been or were still mortal? With the exception of Bracken and his—
“Crocken!” he roared. “Blissa! Get the fey! Get the sidhe! Goddammit! Everybody out on the perimeter fucking now, fucking now, fucking yesterday, do you hear me?”
He was pounding down the stairs in his bare feet, glad he still had keys in his pocket for his blue Cadillac and wondering whom to get to ride with him. He saw black shadows lifting from the hill like hurtling planets from a nova sun and gave thanks for the vampires, then saw bright bodies doing the same from every window and every landing and even the crown of the hill. His own people, off to find their leader. Thank the Goddess.
He was scrambling to the car when a werepuma passed him, then a young vampire who was not particularly adept at flying, and then one of Teague’s young werewolves—not a fighter, but still a finder—and as he unlocked the car, they all streamed in and changed, some of them struggling back into the clothes they’d been wearing when the alarm had first gone off.
He had barely turned the ignition when his cell phone rang.
It was Nicky, distraught and panicked, with Cory in the background, her voice fractured and raw.
They knew where he was.
Cory: Queen’s Defense
AFTER OUR little meet and greet with Rafael, I slept past the cool part of the morning and woke sweating in sympathy with the heat outside. The sun was roaring in through the skylight, rough textured with ferocity, and framing a laser-like square around my thighs. Bracken was next to me, pale and limp, his breathing shallow, his body sodden with the same sympathy sweat. Nicky was moving around in the shower—avoiding his parents, if the row they’d been having as we’d neared the cabins was any indication.
After the still moment of establishing where I was and who I was with, I was suddenly missing Green with so much force it stopped my breath.
Ah gods… I closed my eyes, and I could smell him, taste him, feel that lovely yellow curtain of hair protecting me from the world and from the weight of our people, all of them looking to me for something I felt so inadequate to give.
A moment from the night before nagged at my heart like a foxtail, penetrating one barb at a time.
Kyle had been sitting—just sitting—under the sodium lamp above the cabins, looking into the night sky.
I’d had his blood. I knew he was looking, somewhere, for some proof that his beloved, my friend, was out there in the universe.
I stumbled. Bracken caught me, and as we walked by, I reached out and grasped the vampire’s shoulder and squeezed. He captured my hand and squeezed back.
“I like it out here,” he murmured, staring at the stars. “It’s so quiet. I could live here.”
Oh Goddess. I’d known—I’d known since we’d taken him in. Our kiss had too many bad memories for him. He loved me, he loved us, but he needed someplace where the vastness of the sky could soak up some of his pain.
“I’ll try to make it safe for you to stay.”
“No, that’s okay, Lady Cory. But I’ll love it while I can.”
Which was just as well, because the fact was, I couldn’t make that promise with any degree of certainty, and it sucked.
I felt so foolish and lost. My little entourage, my kingdom of lucky thirteen—I couldn’t barely keep them, even.
How did Green do it?
“Practice, and you.”
His voice in my head was so welcome I felt tears slide weakly down my eyes and into my hair. “Simple formula, beloved.” I stretched out the word in my mind, as though spending more time thinking it would put him there within touch.
This was always hard. I had gotten better at dealing with it in the last year and a half, but not being able to touch Green, trace my thumb along that clean, narrow jaw, and breathe in his peace and passion was never going to be easy.
“It’s not a simple formula?” I could almost hear the wryness in his tone. I closed my eyes, and he drifted in front of me—pushed up on his elbow, his green-pale skin translucent in the sunshine, his yellow hair swishing down over us like a satin-stranded curtain.
“It’s hard to have a plus b plus c equal x when a is in another part of the state,” I whined.
“Try being a,” he complained forlornly, and I found a small smile in my head. Green could do that for me. When we’d talked on the phone both before and after Bracken and I had returned to the cabin, so much of it had been business. Here, lying in bed and talking like this, it was all silly stuff—our hearts speaking to each other.
I lay there and glowed with Green for a few moments, but eventually he had to go, and he left me in a hot, sweaty funk with Bracken, who was not much better. Finally I swore and rolled out of bed, kicking Bracken out too.
“C’mon, dammit. Let’s go get in your precious water before you melt into goo!”
“The water scares you,” he said, but there was no heat behind it—no real emotion, really—and given how tempestuous Bracken usually was, I was spurred into action.
“Move it, damn you!” I snapped, truly alarmed. “Up. Get. Up. Get. The. Fuck. Up. C’mon—into your trunks, we’re going swimming!”
I thought the walk to the water in the hundred-plus-degree heat was going to be the death of both of us, but I bitched at him until he snapped back at me and still we held hands as we walked into the water. I could feel the rush
through his body as soon as it hit his midthighs, which was about my waistline. Then two more steps, and we hit the drop-off.
I was ready for it this time, so treading water was no big deal—especially since I was watching Bracken for signs of improvement.
He perked up like a dying plant in a rainstorm, and I blew out a sigh of relief.
He stared at me with sober eyes. “You were really worried,” he said softly.
“I don’t get to worry about you?” I asked, although he knew I did. Like I’d told Teague, we were broken that way.
But the words haunted me throughout the day. Worried—would we ever stop worrying about each other? It didn’t seem so, and by the time the sun disappeared behind the volcanic hills in a harsh smudge of tarnished peach and purple, I thought maybe that was a good thing.
I didn’t realize how much we needed each other as a group until Bracken and I looked up to the purple sky of the day’s closing. We had all spent the day scattered—swimming, playing cards, napping, eating, running through the woods wearing fur, flying—whatever we did best. But the sunset ended, and here we were, my whole little kingdom away from home, gathered together reverently watching as the first of the stars glimmered on the black water.
Nicky was on my other side, leaning on me after a day spent fighting with his parents, and I stroked his arm softly. This, I thought incoherently. This was why Green and I worked so hard. This breath of peace from people who looked to us for guidance.
We stayed together after that. The vampires fed, of course, and then we all played cards together under the lanterns. Nicky’s parents asked to join us, and we let them, although they kept a careful distance from me, and that was fine. The young man, Sam, did the same, and I asked him where his mom was. He smiled that charming teenager smile and said she was sleeping, and I made a mental note to ask Tanya to make sure she wasn’t dead. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the kid… I just didn’t trust his smile. But we let him play, and the giant round of Uno/Trivial Pursuit that Renny and Max had made up the night before continued with a whole lot of laughter.
Annette tried to join, and we all pretended she didn’t exist, even Sam-the-teenager, although he cast her dark, speculative looks that had too much adult in them for my comfort.
We played and ate, and for a moment Rafael’s vampires were forgotten, the domestic quarrels were tabled, and it felt like a real vacation—something I had not actually had since I was young enough to be Sam, awkward and uncertain, and enjoying the profanity and ribald laughter of the adults who let me hang around.
I stood up and moved restively away, letting Bracken take my place at the table as I wandered outside the illuminated circle that marked the game area. Turning toward the lake, I leaned against a convenient tree, watched the glimmer of the stars off the pewter-obsidian water, and thought of Green.
In a roll of sun-warmed wildflowers and clean earth, I was there inside his head, and he was welcoming me in. I could feel the wind in my face and hear the roar of Adrian’s motorcycle—not Green’s monster cycle, I thought, Adrian’s—which meant he was feeling nostalgic. The foothills there smelled different than Redding and Lake Shasta, with not as many cows, more people hidden in the crevices of the hilltops, more ozone from the city seeping into the stratosphere. There was manzanita here around Lake Shasta, creating a creosote air, sharp and acrid and tangy, that Green’s senses didn’t register. He, in turn, smelled more rose bushes, blooming in hidden yards behind mysterious driveways.
Either way, it was different—and I settled contentedly into his mind and enjoyed the stately, passionate kindness that was my Green. I had never questioned the ability that gave us access to each other’s minds—it had happened so naturally, so wonderfully, as easy as thinking about your boyfriend and knowing the phone about to ring is him on the other end. Tonight it was a comfort, and I looked at the world with my beloved’s kind eyes as he roared through the humid, warm dark with me on his shoulder.
And maybe what happened next happened because I was relaxed and happy in his mind. Maybe it happened because he missed me, and his concentration was not what it should have been. Maybe the heat had sapped him more than either of us knew.
And maybe we were just not prepared for the utter snake-shit, lizard-barf, amoeba-puke lowness of our enemy, and that was both our faults, because the enemy took us unaware.
A whirling pressure smacked into his/our body, torqueing Green’s shoulder and shoving him to the ground. In a black-rubber squeal of tire and concrete, the bike slid sideways from underneath him and he went skidding… ah Goddess, skidding, his leathers disintegrating and then his skin, scoured away by the ragged blacktop, and then the thing attacked again.
We got a clear picture of the vampire, her fangs extended, sneer in place as she scooped a struggling Green up in her arms. I don’t know how high she would have carried him, or how far she would have dropped him—there are some things even Green wouldn’t have survived—but he fought. Oh Goddess, my gentle lover fought, kicking out at her, making her scream. Finally a bit of his bare skin came in contact with her cheek, and I could feel the resistance of flesh as he pulled our mark of power to the surface. As it cut through her skin like wire, she screamed, and her grip on his tall, struggling body loosened. He threw his palm forward into her nose, cracking it, slamming it back into her brain—a death blow to a mortal—and as it was, it sent her spinning into the ether and Green plunging onto the steeply descending hillside to the canyon below.
It was a long way down. Oh Goddess, it was a long way down, and it wasn’t until he took a breath and prepared to take the fall on his legs that it occurred to me that of all the skills my beloved had, flying from a surprise drop was not one of them.
“Love you.” And then he hit the ground with a crunch of bones and rolled down the hill at a terrifying speed, rocks and earth and sky spiraling past our consciousness as we tried to control the fall.
The tree came as a complete surprise, and my head exploded in pain as everything went black.
Abruptly I was back in my own head, surrounded by my people and screaming his name until my throat bled and the hills echoed with my sobs.
Bracken grabbed my shoulders and shook me deliberately, twice, until I took one deep ragged breath and then another. I gazed sightlessly into his frantic pond-shadow eyes and said, very clearly, “We need to call Arturo.”
I don’t remember much after the phone call, where I gibbered landmarks to Nicky while he translated over the phone. I remember grabbing car keys and hitting the car door with the force of my hurtle, then having Bracken pick me up by the waist and haul me out of the driver’s seat so Max could drive.
“Get out of my fucking way!” I screamed, but he used his considerable mass to pin me to the car and yell back at me.
“You’re too busy panicking, and I’m too busy keeping you from bolting out the window, dammit. Let him drive!” He was roaring at me, his face twisted with anxiety and the same panic I felt. Green. Oh Goddess, neither of us could survive….
“I am not panicking!” I retorted with something less than a sob, and to prove it I turned to Nicky, who was getting ready to get in the car with us, and actually slowed down to think.
“Nicky—Nicky, honey… no.” I took both his hands in mine. We were both shaking, but the shaking stilled, and my breathing calmed down a notch. Okay. This was not panicking. I could do this. “Nicky, you have to stay here.”
“Because of my parents? Fuck that!” he snarled. Someday I might spare a moment of regret for the fact that they were in the crowd hearing that, but not now. The betrayal on his face ripped me open, and I shook my head against it.
“Think, Nicky. It’s just like when he was in Texas. One of us needs to go to him, and the other needs to keep things running. I need you to keep things running. The bad guy is still out there. Green… Green’s an elf. He can heal about anything—I’ll make it happen faster, but he can do it. We….” My voice warbled, cracked, shattered. Oh Godde
ss. Oh Goddess. The alternative to what I was saying was unthinkable.
My words next were as clear as individual stones plopped into a still pool. “Nicky, if this doesn’t turn out well, I’m coming back here to murder the fucking world, and I’ll need you for that too, do you hear?”
Nicky took a deep breath and let it out, shuddering. The betrayal eased from his face. He understood. He’d always been reluctant to acknowledge that he had a place in the leadership ranking—that people would look to him if I or Green or Brack or Arturo weren’t there—but it was sinking in abruptly and painfully now.
“You and Teague are in charge,” I said rationally—so hard, so hard to do when my insides were being dragged naked over gravel and broken glass. “Keep people to the cabins, keep them safe. Nobody outside without a vampire nearby, not even Lambent to swim, dammit. We need one shifter changed at all times to smell intruders, and… and….”
And that was it. That was the limit of my ability to be rational. My breaths were coming faster and faster, and my face felt cold, and white and black spots that had nothing to do with the suddenly feral night were dancing in front of my eyes. Nicky’s hands were warm on my face, and his lips on mine helped to soothe some of my panic.
“Call us,” he said roughly, “the minute you hear anything. I will always love you.”
“I love you too,” I whimpered. Then Bracken, who knew me, who knew my limits, pushed me into the car before I could lose what was left of my composure. I had led our people enough to keep them from panicking, and that was enough for now. Renny came hauling ass out of our cabin with an armload of shit and threw herself in the passenger seat, and then we were on our way.
We were on the causeway, the lake heaving on either side of us like a prehistoric monster, when there was a sudden physical pain in my head, splitting enough to make me scream. While I was gasping in pain and surprise, holding my hand over my eyes and trying not to whine in reaction, my cell phone buzzed, and I was so shocky that Bracken had to fish it out of my pocket and answer it.
