by Amy Lane
Mario’s face split in a grin. “Then maybe you should go bump that big lump of man out of your way, Hallow, and give her a soul gaze. Girlfriend’s hurting, that’s for damn sure.”
Hallow’s smile faded. “Green’s children,” he said softly, gathering them around him with his voice alone, “if she cannot find that comfort from her lovers, then there’s no one on the planet who can give it.”
Arturo’s face fell sadly with everyone else’s, but he knew he was not the only one cheered by Hallow’s next words.
“Come on, people. Can you imagine a day when Green couldn’t heal that girl’s soul? Especially not with Bracken to help!”
Arturo firmly believed that Green could do anything. “Absolutely,” he said now, his voice full of faith, and that faith awakened in the hearts of everyone in their little party as they jumped into their cars and headed home.
Cory: Changing the Board
I HAVE no idea what time it was when I woke up, but I did know that Bracken wasn’t on my other side.
“Where’s Brack?” I asked through a yawn. Green closed his laptop and placed it on the end table all in one practiced motion.
“I imagine he’s scaring up some food,” he said, lowering himself next to me and tucking my mussy hair behind my ear. “Would you like me to call him for you?”
Green’s beautiful, triangular, elfin face was only inches from mine, his hair cascading behind him and over his shoulder. I held up my hand and ran a thumb over his perfect cheekbone, living for his smile.
“No,” I whispered. “I’m perfectly happy right now.”
He feathered a kiss on my temple, and I closed my eyes to savor it. “Are you still mad at me?” I asked when I’d caught my breath.
“Yes,” he said, rubbing his cheek on mine. “And so’s Brack. I sent him out because you were shivering in your sleep.”
“I had to,” I whined, wrapping my arms and legs around his body and willing him to give up all distance between us. “Didn’t Adrian explain? Can’t you see? If people are going to follow me, there has to be some give….”
His arms came around me and he hugged me convulsively, crushing me to his lean muscle and warming me in his gentle anger. “I refuse to give you,” he rasped in my ear. “You may take that risk as often as it pays off—and I will never be in a forgiving mood when you do.”
I nodded. What I had to say next was so very painful that I couldn’t say it into his depthless green eyes. I had to whisper it into his shoulder.
“Beloved, my dedication to you and Bracken is not reason enough to lead people into what may be their deaths.” He made a sound of frustration, and I tried to make myself clearer. “Don’t you get it? People will follow anyone who believes what they’re doing is necessary. We… we’re going around being the fucking conscience of the entire community—we have to think we’re necessary. But if it’s not necessary enough to die for, then it’s not necessary enough to get other people to give up their lives.” It was hard, so hard to put words to this. I had to keep trying.
“I can’t defend my own survival with other people’s deaths—because if I do, I’m no better than that thing we killed last night.”
His hug tightened. Then he pulled back and looked seriously into my plain hazel eyes, and for the first time he made me feel bad about saving Teague’s life.
“That’s bullshit, beloved—”
“We don’t know that!”
“I know that. I know that you can’t risk death every time you go out and lay down the law. We can’t do that. We can’t live that way. And you, beloved, need to face the fact that you may not live to lead others to victory and salvation if you don’t choose your risks very, very carefully. And you’ll certainly be the death of me if that happens.”
He looked so worried—so worried and hurt—and he hadn’t looked worried or hurt even when he’d been lying broken in a puddle of light on his own earth.
I swallowed and felt tears start. “I had faith in you,” I said, trying to smile, but my expression twisted into tears instead. I buried my face in his chest. “I had faith in you,” I repeated. Then I sobbed and hiccupped, and then I repeated it again and again, and then Green was kissing me through our tears.
I returned his kiss. If anyone knew how to make love through pain, through anger, through distress, it was the two of us who had comforted each other with our flesh the morning we woke up and knew Adrian was lost.
Maybe it was because we were at odds—maybe because this issue would never be resolved, and maybe because I had been home only once in seven days and the circumstances were extraordinary—but every touch of his hands on my skin was glorious.
His palm skating on my upper arm made my breath catch, and his kiss on my collarbone made it quicken. His kisses between my breasts to my navel made me groan, and I arched my hips to let him slide my underwear down and off and then spread my legs in invitation.
Just the touch of his tongue on the center of my sex made me shiver, scream, see black, come. When he continued, I had to knot my hands in his lovely yellow hair to hold on to reality. Still he tasted me, and reality was jerked away, leaving me screaming in climax.
He slid up my body, sheathed himself inside me, and framed my face with his hands as I bucked underneath him, begging him for complete possession, begging him to move, to claim, to take. Oh Goddess, beloved, take me, take all of me—the things that scare you, the things that anger you, take me, give me everything, leave nothing back….
“Don’t leave me…,” he whispered harshly as I continued to buck underneath him.
“I can’t promise—”
“I don’t care!” he growled, pulling back and driving his body home inside mine with enough force to satisfy. But I wanted more than satisfaction. I wanted everything—even if it meant pain.
“I can’t promise…,” I almost sobbed. Then he moved slowly… so slowly that it was almost, almost worse than not having him inside me at all.
“Don’t leave me!”
“Give me!” I snarled in return, moving as hard and as fast as I could underneath him. It would have been a perfect impasse, we could have stayed that way forever, locked in wanting, locked in the pain of not having, except—except that Green’s hand, which had been on top of my unscarred shoulder, skirting the little star-freckled handprint on the right front of my shoulder, moved to cover the handprint, and the wave of longing, of need, and of sheer stinking want rolled over both of us. Then I knew. I’d known in my head, but now I knew in every atom of my body, immediately, like the certainty of oxygen in my quivering cells, the truth—it was the difference between seeing a picture of a lake under the moon and drowning in cold black water at night.
Oh, how Green wanted me too. There was a desperation, an emotional violence to the need with which Green wanted to take me. He wanted me enough to forgive me, and he was frustrated enough, angry enough, to pound me into the mattress with giving.
I wanted him enough to love it, and to demand more.
“Give me,” I begged, making high-pitched sex-sounds. “Give me, give me….”
“Don’t leave me!” he ordered, but he’d lost, he’d conceded, and I begged him for more. I reached, demanded… broke and wept and pleaded…. “Give me, give me, give me…. Goddess, Green, I’ll give you anything, immortality, my heart, my soul, anything, just give me back….”
He roared as he thrust, the sound probably cracking the foundations of the hill, and then raised his head, his body trembling in climax, and howled. I bucked underneath him, feeling his spend pulsing inside me, and knew that something… something irrevocable had happened.
I wrapped my arms around him, stroked his sweating shoulders, thought into the sacred space between us.
“Thank you, thank you. I’ll give you anything. I’ll stay for you. I promise I’ll stay. I promise. As long as I can, until dust and beyond… I’ll live for you, Green. I’ll live.”
I don’t know what he thought. He didn’t speak, but ho
t droplets of saltwater spattered on my chest until I clutched him closer, and then he turned his head and wept.
We wouldn’t shower immediately, not after that. He rolled to his side, taking me with him, and we simply stared into each other’s faces and stroked hands until our breathing relaxed.
“I will love you forever,” I promised as he brushed the hair off my forehead.
“I will hold you to that.” His face was grim, and his voice was sober. He touched my handprint of chaos as he said it, and I knew in my bones that it was a solemn vow and not a sweet or kind offering of love at all. Green would make me live if he had to crack the foundations of the world.
I had every faith that he could.
I must have dozed off after that, but the part of me that didn’t want my days and nights completely reversed spurred me out of bed. Green’s side was still warm, but he was out somewhere, so I put on a pair of sleep shorts and knotted them on the side, then threw on Bracken’s T-shirt—which had been lying by the side of the bed—and made my way out to the living room for something to eat.
I was starving.
I pattered out into the living room, and Green looked up from putting sandwiches together and smiled tiredly at me. I walked up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist.
“Thank you,” I said, thinking about how exhausting I must be to make him look like that.
“My pleasure,” he told me, dropping a kiss on my head. There was something wrong—something I didn’t understand—but at that moment, I looked at the clock and forgot all about what was bothering Green.
“Holy shit! It’s four thirty!” I danced back in agitation. “Dammit, where the hell is Arturo? He was supposed to wake me up!”
“Calm down, Corinne Carol-Anne. I’m sure he had his reasons.”
My head snapped up and I narrowed my eyes at Green, wondering what he very smoothly just hadn’t told me. “Where is he?” I asked suspiciously, and Bracken walked into the kitchen in time to ask, “Where is who?”
My quest for Arturo faded, and I looked at Bracken tentatively. I wasn’t shivering—either the effects of my impromptu blood donation had faded, or maybe…. For the first time, I acknowledged how frightened I had been that we could be cold with each other forever over this.
Green had just proved how molten his passion ran, but Brack and I were always hot. We were thrown into each other’s company constantly. We were more than husband and wife—we were coworkers too. If he got too angry at me for us to function in the same room….
I shivered, but this time the glacial cold was all in my imagination.
“Hey…,” I said uncertainly, and he walked right up to me and cupped my cheek.
“Hey yourself,” he said. “Jumped off any cliffs lately? Slit your wrists for sport?”
I scowled up at him and huffed, and he laughed.
“You’re so easy, due’ane. I could get a rise out of you by looking at you crossways.”
I rolled my eyes. “And I can get a rise out of you by shaving my legs.”
Green turned to us then, a quizzical expression on his face. “But it wasn’t your legs that you shaved!” he exclaimed. I had forgotten about my run-in with the scissors for the benefit of that damned bikini. Then I was off and running about making assumptions about women’s swimwear, and suddenly….
Suddenly we weren’t worried about being mad anymore. We were us. Bracken wrapped his arms around my waist, I brushed Green’s hand while taking the PB and J from him, and we were… easy. We were the happy family that kept me sane.
So Arturo’s timing was pretty damned fortuitous when he came thumping into the front room with his smug entourage behind him. I turned an indignant face to him, still upset in a good-natured way about sleeping until nearly five in the afternoon.
“Where have you been?” I demanded, although I was still smiling. “We were going somewhere today!”
Arturo grinned at me, something wicked and gleeful in his expression. “We’ve already gone,” he said with dignity, and I felt my jaw drop.
“You went?” I found myself stammering. “Wi… wi… without me?”
“We didn’t want to bother you,” Renny said smugly, walking between me and Green to get to the refrigerator. Bracken made a “hmmm” noise behind me, and I could tell he was as flummoxed as I was.
“So… uhm… where’s Nolan Fields?” I asked, not even sure I wanted the answer.
“Dead in his living room, lovey,” Lambent reported smugly. “Isn’t that what you had planned?”
Well, I really didn’t know what I’d had planned, and for a moment I thought about getting mad at them. They’d killed someone to….
“Why did you do that?” I asked, still completely blind inside.
“We didn’t want to bother you, Corinne Carol-Anne.” And for the first time, I realized that Hallow was here. Hallow was here—and, judging by the luggage and boxes in everybody’s arms, he was here to stay.
I blinked at him. “But, uhm… that’s my job, isn’t it?”
“No.” That was all—just “No”—but he smiled kindly at me, and I went with my first instinct to move around the counter and give him a brief hug.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said softly, meaning it. “Welcome home, Professor.”
“Thank you for making it my home, Lady Cory,” Hallow replied, and I realized that whatever this had been, for Hallow’s sake, I was going to have to not make a big deal over it. It was done. He was free. His loathsome obligation was over, and he had… his face wore a subtle look of power used, of the smug, angry satisfaction in knowing that he had righted something terribly wrong. Oh, yes. Whatever had happened, Hallow had exacted some measure of retribution—I would bank my life on it.
But I didn’t have to at the moment, now did I?
I looked at everybody else hiding shy and secret smiles. They were like cats who had just left a big ugly dead gopher on my doorstep. Do you like it, Mom? Are you proud? We did good, Mom, didn’t we? Renny cemented the impression by sticking her human nose in the air in a completely catlike gesture of smugness.
“So, uhm,” I asked, looking down at my feet, “if going to kill the bad guys isn’t my job, what… uhm… what is my job?” I was sort of serious. How did I earn my keep around here if I wasn’t the head gopher killer?
Bracken laughed before anyone could answer. He wrapped his arms around my waist and hugged, lifting me into the air squealing. “Making love to me!” he asserted. I laughed some more and struggled to get out of his arms—but not too hard.
He put me down as everyone laughed, and I looked at my friends—my people—out from the shelter of his arms.
“Thank you,” I said, and their sighs of relief eased my heart considerably. Oh, yay! Mom likes our dead gopher! We’ve done good! I swallowed hard and smiled at them all. “Thank you—this means….” And oh. Oh, it did. They’d done this for me. When my heart was so sore, so burdened, they’d taken this on themselves because they could.
I swallowed hard and tried a game smile. “This means the world to me.”
It was all I could say. It was simple, and it was the truth.
THERE WAS a lot to do that night to keep me occupied.
We moved Hallow into a room in the sidhe quarters that Green had apparently prepared many, many years before. I wasn’t allowed to do much of the box-schlepping or unpacking, but I was allowed to sit on the bed next to Green as Hallow stroked the hand-planed bureau, appreciating the aged and mellow oak under his fingers. The bedstead was made of the same wood, and the walls were paneled with it. The room itself was back near the darkling and the staircase that led to the sidhe apartments. It was, in essence, near the core of the house, one of the first rooms finished as Green and Adrian’s preternatural legacy had sprawled to take over the hill.
“You’ve had this ready for me for quite some time, haven’t you, brother?”
Green nodded, the look on his face poignant, welcoming. “Since I knew you’d received th
e invitation and left your home.” I stroked the back of his hand softly—this wasn’t my conversation.
Hallow turned to us, his narrow, aesthetic academician’s face radiant with a powerful joy. “It’s high time, then,” he said with understatement and shiny blue eyes. “I’ll just make myself at home.”
We left him quietly as he continued rubbing the bureau with his fingertips, and I turned my face up to Green tentatively. Something… something had changed between us since I had rampantly demanded from him in our bed. I did not know what it was—I didn’t know if it was good or bad, or if he was angry or sad with me, and I was uncertain.
“That was lovely, wasn’t it?”
He cupped my face with his fingertips, almost with the same reverence Hallow had used for the symbols of his homecoming.
“Lovely,” he said thickly. “That is a good word, ou’e’eir, but it doesn’t quite carry the right amount of pain to it.”
I blinked. “Please….” Please what? He didn’t sound angry. I put my hand on his chest, giving all I knew to give. “Please don’t hurt inside.”
He nodded, and his eyes never left mine. “You made a promise to me. Do you remember?”
Don’t leave me.
“Yes.”
“I’ll hold you to that. My heart will be fine, beloved, if you remember that what matters isn’t the nature of the promise, just that you will keep it.”
The message was clear. Nobody loses control the way I had. Not without a price.
I thought about that all night. I thought about it when the vampires pulled in around midnight with Kyle at the helm and Andres and Orson in the limo behind them. Marcus and Phillip had stayed in the vampire compartment for the entire trip. They’d told Kyle it was because they wanted privacy—but I saw the compartment in the following days as it was being repaired, and I thought that maybe privacy was the least of it.
