Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  So there I was, arms spread like a psychotic bird—because Nicky shrieking about in his bird form wasn’t psychotic enough for both of us—and Green and Bracken just freaking out whenever my flight plan deviated and it looked as though they couldn’t even hyperspeed it fast enough to catch me, and I was trying not to have too much fun.

  I mean, it was sort of fun, even if it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a female Yeti (is that a Yetina? I have no idea), but I was terrified, and I’m not that great at driving fast so what in the fuck made me think flying would be such a swell idea? Besides, my life was so intimately tied with the three men helping me that getting hurt or killed with what was, essentially, a training exercise, was absolutely unriskable. So I was having fun, but I was working very hard at being in control of myself—hovering, swooping, diving, and unintentionally scaring Bracken enough to make his sidhe-pale skin blanch almost green. Green, on the other hand, was handling the panic well. The occasional frustrated “Beloved…” would waft up on a warning breeze, but mostly he had faith that I wouldn’t put myself in more danger than necessary.

  But I guess you can’t help but buzz a little when you’re, well, buzzing, so it was a definite distraction when Hallow, my professor-cum-shrink, pulled up in a rather spiffy white Lexus, looking as though someone had died.

  Dammit, you don’t look like someone died in my world unless the news is pretty fucking dire, right? I mean… people do die around us, all the time.

  I came dropping out of the sky like lead shit from a helium duck.

  Green and Bracken both screamed, “Fuck!” and then scrambled to find a place below me, but I beat them to it, putting a big fat slice of power below me and sort of skimming off it like one of those giant bounce-house slides. I whooped up for about ten feet at the end and then set another cushion of will beneath me, coming to a rest about two feet off the ground on all fours before sinking slowly until I hit grass, like a Labrador on a punctured air bed.

  Bracken collapsed next to me, his haggard face buried in his hands, his onyx-black hair in disarray around his perfect, inhumanly beautiful triangular features.

  When his eyes met mine, they were murky and dark with hints of green like a pond in shadow, but when he opened his mouth, all of that murkiness disappeared.

  “I cannot fucking do this. It scares the piss out of me every fucking time.”

  I sat back on my haunches and scooted into him, leaning my head on his shoulder. “At no time was the subject in real danger.” I grinned, mimicking the humorless voice of a TV documentary narrator. He grunted and jerked away, and I looked up to Green for help.

  Green smiled and blew out an exasperated breath, shaking his hip-length butter-colored hair down his back. “Really, mate—after everything else we’ve done, you can’t take a spin in the garden? Your mother let you do this when you were four.”

  No one could resist Green when he was determinedly good-natured, and Bracken was no exception. He looked up, the corners of his sour grimace quirking upward, and shook his head. “It’s a good thing I’m mortal, mate—I don’t think I could take scares like that for a millennium.”

  And now I wanted to smack him. The big hoser had given his immortality up for me, because I was mortal, and he’d just rubbed salt in that wound. Typical, for Bracken.

  I smacked the back of his head for real, and felt much better.

  “Oww….” And then, also typical Bracken, he realized how badly he’d screwed up before he could get mad. By the time Hallow walked up, he was repeatedly smacking his forehead with the heel of his hand, and Nicky had landed in the open patch of green I’d fallen on and was rolling barefoot on the frost-melted grass.

  I was about two breaths away from ripping into Nicky like a kid into a Christmas present for losing his handmade woolen socks when I remembered why I’d fallen out of the sky in the first place.

  Hallow had the same preternaturally beautiful features as Green—triangular bone structure, clean lines, and overlarge eyes—but his were blue. Unlike my beloved, though, Hallow’s beauty had never moved me. I liked the guy, but that didn’t keep me from spitting venom at him now.

  “Who died?” I demanded, and for all his professorial dignity, Hallow managed to look sheepish.

  “I’m so sorry about that—I do have bad news, but it’s not that dire.” He wore his hair long, like Green’s, but his was plaited and pulled back from his aesthetic features. He was playing with the end of the braid.

  So no one died. But someone was about to. “Cough it up, dammit!” I growled. I had been doing so well this time around—some of my other flying attempts had rewritten disaster movie scripts—and if he was going to drop in and make me just drop, well, he’d better have a damned good explanation.

  Have you ever heard bad news that made your eyes glaze over and your brain black out? I understand it doesn’t happen for really bad things, like death or dismemberment or even cancer, but I knew a girl in high school who swore that it happened whenever her current boyfriend broke up with her. Apparently it made the next ten minutes after each breakup horribly awkward, because she would deny all knowledge of the preceding conversation.

  When I came to, I was staring at Hallow with eyes that were dried by the wind and with a little bit of drool tracking the corner of my lips. The men were all staring at me as though I were a rabid bear, and I had to ask Hallow to repeat what he’d just said.

  I swear to the Goddess I was listening the second time, and it still didn’t make any sense.

  “What do you mean, I’m not going to graduate?” This much had seeped in, but it was like getting cold maple syrup through the baked hardpan of a planetary desert.

  Hallow grimaced uncomfortably. My sudden-onset senility was worrisome to him, but since I’d been working my ass off for nearly the last four years through both junior college and state college to try to get my BA ASAP, I had to admit that the 180-degree mind-fuck was leaving my cortex a little sore.

  “You will graduate, Lady Cory—”

  “Would you stop calling me that like it’s going to calm me down?” I snapped, and he gritted his teeth and continued.

  “It’s just that you have too many units right now to graduate with a bachelor’s degree.”

  I blinked slowly. “How in the fuck is that even possible?”

  Hallow took another deep breath and waded in again. “You took so many units last year that you have more than enough to graduate. But you don’t have them in the right places. If you take the classes you need in the right places, you will have so many units that you will have enough for two bachelor’s degrees. If you apply for the master’s course and take the nine units of thesis work, you’ll have enough for two bachelor’s and a master’s degree. Which I suggest you do. But it means that—”

  “I don’t graduate this year.” Okay. I was finally starting to understand.

  Hallow sighed and let out a whole lot of tension from his shoulders. “That’s right, my lady, you’ll have to wait until next year.”

  Now, two years ago I would have pitched a fit of cosmic proportions—six zillion light-years from here, some species that registered emotional sound through its skin would have shuddered, turned brown, and said, “What in the fuck was that?”

  But I was older now. I was more mature than that. I was the leader of my fucking people, and I did not pitch fits over bizarre twists of bureaucratic insanity, I simply… I just…. Oh Jesus… I was going to be the first person in my family to ever graduate from college. I’d about worn my impending letters like some sort of badge of triumph over the ignominy of white-trash-dom that I’d been trying to shake my entire life.

  “Uhm, Cory?” Bracken said gently, throwing himself under the bus of my potential meltdown. He was used to it. Our relationship had the passion of a sailor addicted to the sea—the storms were exhilarating and the smooth sailing was a thing of beauty, and he could weather the rolling thunder of my bitchiness like no other lover.

  “Beloved?” Gree
n asked, even more gently. Of the three of them, his sweetness, and the kind and even keel of his beautiful soul, could be the only things that would calm me down.

  Nicky, my shape-shifting accidental lover, had no such finesse. “Well hell, Cory, what are you going to do?”

  I turned to him and blinked rapidly, trying to slam this bit of unwelcome news into perspective. I mean, shit, hadn’t I just thought someone had died? I’d been prepared to deal with death, for crap’s sake, couldn’t I take a change in my goddamned plans?

  I growled, grunted, and tried again from behind grinding teeth, finally finding my outlet.

  “I am going to go knit.”

  And with that, I turned on my heel and stalked through Green’s glorious gardens, blind to their loveliness, and pounded up the stairs to the landing and into the living room, leaving my three husbands wincing in sympathy behind me.

  Renny, my best friend and part-time giant tabby cat, had a built-in radar as to whether or not I needed a girl friend or a kitty when I was upset.

  She was curled up in a big purring tabby-cat blob on the olive-turquoise-violet colored quilt at my feet as I sat cross-legged on the gi-freaking-normous bed I shared with Bracken, knitting Nicky another goddamned pair of socks.

  Nicky actually stuck his head in first, but I glared at him, and he cringed when he saw the burgundy, brown, and lime-green yarn I was working with. He knew they were his, because always trendy for Nicky, and he ducked right on back out. One of the things that made our polyamorous marriage work was that Nicky had learned to recognize when I needed my man friend with the nice body and comforting smell and when I needed one of my beloveds who could steady the world when it rocked beneath my feet.

  I should have been ashamed that this was one of those times, but what the fuck. Sometimes even Lady Cory, beloved to Lord Green and queen of the goddamned vampires, could get stuck in a petty, shit-kicking funk about dumb fucking bullshit that complicated her life, right?

  Well, not for long.

  Bracken stalked in after about half an hour, so lost as to what to do for me that he was actually squinting in puzzlement.

  “What are you making?” he demanded—and he was probably unaware of how arrogant he sounded. He was trying, honestly, to make conversation.

  “Socks for Nicky,” I replied mildly, and his frown deepened.

  “Little fucker lost the last pair in trans,” he said, and I nodded glumly. It happened sometimes. Nicky was an Avian, a bird shape-shifter, and they were the only species that didn’t have to strip naked to shift. They carried their clothes and stuff on the oil in their feathers—except when a bird is stressed or tired, that oil gets a little thin, and something has to go. I freaked Nicky out by almost plummeting to my death, and he lost his socks.

  “You like Nicky,” I reminded him. It had not always been so, but Bracken had finally accepted Nicky’s accidental and unintentional place in my bed and my life. Still, it didn’t hurt to remind Brack that Nicky had his place. Besides, there were things we could do with three people in a bed that we couldn’t do with two, and Bracken had been raised with enough sexual diversity and privilege to enjoy those things.

  We were bound. If either of us took our pleasure outside our marriage or any of my preexisting bindings—like, say, Green or Nicky—Bracken would die horribly. Not me. Bracken. There is always a flip side to the passion of the Goddess’s magic, and this was one of them. Marriage? Fabulous—but you’d better make good and damned sure that you were in it for the long haul. If I had been a sidhe instead of a human sorceress, Bracken and I would be locked inside this binding for a lot more than a mortal lifespan—not that either one of us would have minded then either, not even a little teeny bit, but like I said, he’d been raised with some freedoms.

  In the context of those freedoms, Nicky had gone from being a nuisance to a perk—even if he was only my perk. Bracken was bound to me and Nicky was bound to me, and the two of them had learned to tolerate each other, except in bed.

  In bed, Bracken had taken to being my primary lover like sex was a competitive event. It was like a sweet lovers’ game, except the stakes seemed to be the increasingly colorful state of Green’s once pristinely finished wood-paneled walls. My losses of control—even small ones—in bed tended to change the state of the world around me. Sometimes it was cute—olive, turquoise, and lavender paneling in the living room, for example.

  Sometimes it was huge. Green and I, with our beloved vampire, Adrian, had completely reformed the crown of Green’s hill, complete with trees doing erotic things with their trunks, if you can believe that bullshit. Bracken and I had created a hotel.

  Sometimes it was terrifying. The things I had done upon Adrian’s death were an object lesson of why power shouldn’t be allowed to run rampant.

  So Bracken strategized and Nicky accepted—and I treated their efforts with affection and passion and as practice sessions to control my body, my mind, and my magic.

  No—I loved my husbands, all three of them, but no combination of us would ever be what Green and Adrian and I had been, and I knew better than to try.

  Right now, Bracken was wishing that he didn’t like Nicky quite so much, because it was much easier to use my lesser lover as a scapegoat than to figure out a way to comfort me. Not knowing how to comfort me was item number 2657 on the list of things that made Bracken cranky—and per usual when he was cranky, he found some way to purge that emotion from his extremely passionate system.

  “You never make me socks!” he accused, perfectly serious, and I fought the urge to laugh.

  “You hate stuff on your feet!” I responded. It was true. All elves did. Even outside just now, in the chilly February, Bracken and Green had been barefoot. “Besides, I just finished your sweater for this year!” I fingered the gray wool on his arm. The yoke of the thing was a dark, masculine green and purple over a cream background. My first venture into Fair Isle patternworking—I was very proud.

  “Well, I wouldn’t hate it if you made it!” he protested, a little panic in his voice. Really bad shit happens to elves if they lie, and he was obviously hoping he really felt this way and wasn’t just saying this to make me feel better. He brightened when the nausea and cramping didn’t start, and he continued on, a little more confident. “But I wouldn’t want them in….” Bracken wrinkled his nose, and I held out my hands. Those colors. Enough said. “And they’d need to be strong. But not plain.” He stroked the smooth fingering-weight wool between my fingers. “And it needs texture… this is ordinary. If I’m going to wear something on my feet it needs to press your fingertips into my flesh.”

  I nodded, completely bemused, and unbidden, a pattern for Bracken’s socks began to emerge in my head. “Man’s colors, lots of texture, not plain….”

  “And not feminine either,” he emphasized, and I stifled the urge to chortle. From his square shoulders to his frequent glower, there was not an effete inch to Bracken’s bisexual skin. I could make these things in pony-puke pink, and on Brack, it would be the next navy blue.

  “Not a problem,” I told him, straight-faced. “Bracken… love… you really don’t have to….”

  Bracken stood up and paced a little. If this were a death, a true tragedy, he’d know how to deal—he dealt very well with me when I was upset or unhappy, or feeling inadequate. But something like this—something that was frustrating and admittedly self-inflicted—well, he was at a loss.

  “Of course I want you to make me socks,” he said softly, coming to a halt in front of me. An elegant hand with blunt, square fingers appeared under my chin and tilted my face so I would look at him. “You know I love the things you make for me.”

  “I meant,” I told him, feeling a helpless, foolish little smile steal across my face, “that you don’t have to come with me for one more year.”

  He looked honestly surprised, and then he looked honestly pissed. “You think you’re going there without me?” He backed up, eyes flashing, and I grimaced. Any little hint that
I might possibly feel unworthy, and he acted like I had stomped on his damned-near-prehensile big toe.

  I laughed, shaking my head and wondering if now was the time in our relationship to stand up and soothe over that powerful, vast body with my own little hands. “I’m just saying that you don’t have to live with my own personal fuckup, okay?” I tried to smile winningly, and he was almost buying it, almost in my arms, when it suddenly occurred to him that now I was the one calming him down.

  He shook his head and kissed me hard, literally leaning over Renny-the-cat’s body to take my mouth with his, until I whimpered just a little in surprise and arousal.

  Renny reached out with precisely extended claws and flexed those large crescents into Bracken’s leg.

  He jumped back and yelped, and she gave a cat chuckle and settled down into her paws again. “What was that for?” he demanded. Renny, being the supreme bitch-kitty that she was, made a show of cleaning the pads of her front foot with a rough pink tongue.

  “You almost squashed her, Brack!” I protested, my funk almost completely gone.

  “I was just trying”—he glared at Renny, who continued cleaning undisturbed—“to tell you that I….” He shook his head sheepishly. “I like school. It’s fun. Some of my favorite Cory moments come when we’re working together like that.”

  My mouth quirked up, and I wondered why my chest didn’t explode. “And that you wanted socks,” I added, wondering if he was going to back down on that.

  “Absolutely,” he said, and once again he looked surprised when he didn’t double over and barf.

  I leaned into him over Renny, and I was about half a heartbeat from kicking her out of my room when a tiny sparkly pink creature popped into thin air about two inches from Bracken’s face and started speaking in Bumblebee or whatever. Sprites: the fey equivalent of the cell phone.

  “Now?” Bracken asked reluctantly, and even I could interpret the emphatic little foot stomping that went with the little person’s sparkling tinkle. Bracken scrubbed his face with both hands and nodded, and the sprite disappeared.