by Amy Lane
Marcus had choked on his own fangs when I’d asked him this question verbatim, but then we’d started talking about it—and here I was, nodding off as dawn thought nasty subversive thoughts about an hour away. All this discussion, and all we had to write was, “Well, what about an incubus?”
We were about ready to give it up, so this little day-dweller could go whine at Bracken and get laid, when Jacky hauled his ass up to the grove with Katy trotting behind him.
“Where in the fuck is he?!” Jack snarled. I blinked at him, keeping my temper and my bewilderment to myself.
“Which ‘he’ would you be referring to, Jack?” I asked pleasantly, although I had a pretty good idea. Jack only got unreasonably frightened for one “he” that I knew of. “If you’re asking about Green, he’s downtown doing business, and Bracken is off being oi’anga in the lower Goddess grove. Is that to whom you were referring?” Ooh—look at me being all proper and shit.
Something in my tone must have sliced pretty fine, because Jack took a step back and then made a restrained bow in my direction. What in the fuck was it about Jack and Teague that they responded to me like that?
“My apologies, Lady Cory,” he said, both sincere and appalled at his own outburst. “Teague—he was supposed to go on a run with Mario. He told me he’d call as soon as they got out of the canyon. It should have been hours ago. We just got a call from the ranger who let them in, and the SUV is there but they’re not.”
And like that, my need for a title disappeared.
“Marcus?” I said, but what went from my mind to his, via our blood link, was a vision of every fucking vampire in the hill, spread out and flying toward Sugar Pine.
“We’re there,” he responded crisply, placing the laptop on the granite bench and standing with that scary, stop-action vampire speed.
“Watch for Mario—he’ll be in the air!” I ordered—and like that, he launched, his black bomber jacket flapping in the considerable wind of his flight.
Jack blinked, surprised his concern seemed to be taken so seriously so quickly.
“Jesus, Jacky,” I growled, “didn’t it occur to you to say something sooner? We could have been out searching an hour ago! You two need to go get the werecreatures. Have them out on the green behind the hill, and I’ll be out to organize. The first person who sees Bracken and Nicky, tell them what we’re doing, and I’ll meet you ba….”
Jacky and Katy were frozen, noses pointed in the air, the hair on their heads spiking up like a dog’s ruff. Their eyes were so big I could see the moon in the whites as Jack let out a high-pitched whine.
“That’s Teague!” he yelped, and just like that, I wasn’t talking to a young man anymore—I was watching a humongulous gray wolf tear-ass down the hill dragging his clothes with him, with a smaller white-fringed black wolf in his wake.
“Fuck!” I was wearing sneakers, which made the next part easy. I started sprinting toward the cross-country track that Green had given me as a birthday/wedding present this last summer. I loved this trail, and I knew it down to the last granite rock and sap-dripping tree. At least I hoped I did, because the ambient light left off at the crown of the hill and suddenly I was hauling ass in the dark.
I’d tripped twice and gone sprawling on my face, and then run into a couple of trees, before Green snapped “Beloved!” in my head and I bounced off another tree and stopped.
“Teague….”
“Will not live if you fall down the hill unconscious. You’re a sorceress, dammit—make something glow.”
Have I mentioned I’m not particularly bright sometimes?
“Sorry, Green.” With that, I opened my palm in front of me and forced some of my power through it. The glow—which I usually used to either destroy things or shield them—illuminated the path nicely, and with some prodding from Green in my head, I made it rise above me and to the fore so I could tear down the path in full daylight. If I wasn’t scraped all to hell with a bloody nose and what felt like a swollen eye—fucking trees—I probably would have been a little more triumphant as I got down to the lawn below the hill where everybody else was gathering. Green was an amused fulmination in my head too, so my sheepishness was hard to keep to myself when I arrived.
“What in the fuck did you do?” Bracken asked as we gathered, and I rolled my eyes and shrugged.
“I went jogging in the dark—can we leave it alone?” Bracken’s first instinct was to touch me. My blood pissed him off on several levels—the first being that if he did touch me, I bled more. Such was the life of a redcap.
“Grace?” I asked, pleased that I could speak to a vampire in person. Having the vampires I blooded able to talk in my head had completely changed the meaning of the word “psychobabble.” For the most part, I could tune them out, but in an emergency, I didn’t really want to.
“What’ya need, sweet thing?” Grace: nearly six feet of lanky redheaded mama vampire. If it were not for Grace and her lover Arturo, odds were good I wouldn’t have survived my first year in the preternatural world.
“Some of you have to stay back and get ready to catch,” I gasped and looked at Bracken. “And we need people on the ground to take out whatever is the problem, right?”
Bracken grinned wolfishly. His father’s people were all built like granite quarries. They didn’t get to fight much these days, and Bracken had been raised on stories of the redcaps fighting bravely in Scotland and Ireland when the British got out of hand.
“Da’ will be thrilled,” he said with satisfaction, and silly me, I didn’t think to ask him what he’d be doing in the fight. “I’ll go arrange them at the tree line.”
In my head, I asked if anybody could see Jack and Katy. I got the affirmative—they were heading for the most northern path from Sugar Pine, and I wagered that wherever Teague was coming from, something had thrown him off track. I relayed this information to Bracken, and he blurred into hyperspeed to go get his kin.
I didn’t need to ask what Jack and Katy were heading for—the truth was, under the right circumstances, one wolf could hear another’s bark from miles away. The werewolves could hear their mate bark in either form. Whatever had happened to Teague, he had just run a very long way over the course of the night, and he was headed here.
Suddenly there was a shout in my head from one of the vampires. Nicky was up there—I could see him through Marcus’s eyes—and he was screeching at the tiny speck that was Mario hauling giant-bird ass over the pine trees that made up the higher elevations to our east.
Marcus swore, the wind tearing away his words, and the two birds dove down, taking my heart with them.
I stumbled in my own body, and Bracken returned in time to catch me, ignoring the flood of blood at my nose. Nicky and Mario emerged from the tree line, their wings pumping, both their asses a few tail feathers short. They evened out and hovered in the quickly diminishing distance, and as they held out their wings and caught a current, Marcus and the other vampires arrived and looked down.
The view down was complex with trees and brush, but I could make out the glimmer of a big blond/brown wolf in the fore, running for all that he was worth, and behind him….
Abruptly I was myself, looking at Bracken in perplexity.
“Jesus, what is that thing?”
“What is what thing?” Bracken asked, and I shrugged and tried to think. Teague needed help and fast, because whatever that massive, hairy nightmare was behind him, he’d barely kept ahead. He had been moving with all his supernatural speed just to live.
“Marcus!” In his head I put an image of him swooping out of the sky to scoop Teague out of the way. Before I could even blink, he tried to comply.
I could barely keep my berth in his brain as he dodged tree branches and underbrush, coming up behind the thing in its brown shaggy vastness and flashing around it. In a heartbeat, a panicked, exhausted wolf was caught up in his arms….
And then the world spun on a crazy axis, the sky and the trees and the dark of the earth blurr
ing together with nightmare glimpses of long teeth in a dark animal face. Marcus went tumbling up into the air like a deranged rubber ball, and Teague went flying across the forest to land on his feet, running again—but this time he had a few more feet of clearance.
I came to myself, looked at my beloved, and swore. “We need fighters there so we can clear Teague and trap that thing,” I gasped, trying to think, dammit, think! I couldn’t run through the fucking underbrush without killing myself, and now I had to save Teague’s life?
But Bracken had no doubts—he set me firmly on the ground and said, “I’ll take care of it!” And then I went back to the vampires, asking them if they could harry that thing, slow it down, and give Teague a chance to break through the trees to safety.
I was, of course, planning to be safety, but Jack and Katy had other ideas.
This time I shared head space with Kyle, who was closer to the center of the hill than Marcus, and when I looked down, I saw the two wolves running uncertainly in Teague’s direction. They had no strategy, I thought in a panic. They were just going to Teague without thinking of how they were going to help him.
The idea of Jack and Katy facing that thing was enough to make me wet my pants. With a quick flash back from Marcus’s eyes, I saw that Teague had heard them coming, and it was enough to make him stumble over a log. The thing was closing in with paws the size of soccer balls when Marcus dove down, hand extended, and grabbed a big chunk of cold, matted fur and then hurtled away, shaking the fur from his fingers as he went.
There was a terrifying howl as the thing stopped and reared, trying to get ahold of whatever had attacked it, but Marcus was safely out of the way, and Teague had gained a few more steps through the hills. I barked an order into Marcus’s head and then one into Kyle’s and Ellis’s, and Marcus hollered, “They’re safe! Keep running!”
Kyle and Ellis dove down and scooped up two pissed-off werewolves and zoomed them back to me, depositing them on the grass wiggling and furious and out for my blood.
Jack quick-changed, shouting at me even as I tried to put myself back into the battle. When I ignored him and went back inside Marcus’s head to gauge the time it would take for Teague to burst through the woods to the clear meadow surrounding the hill, he grabbed my shoulder and swung me around to face him.
“You bitch, we were trying to help….” His voice trailed off as I blinked my eyes at him, and I wondered if they had been glowing. Bracken told me they did that sometimes when I was vamp-surfing.
“Back the fuck off! I’m doing something!” I snapped without heat, still trying to establish that link with Marcus. Something about my frantic, distracted air must have penetrated Jacky’s panic, because he did take a step back, and I put my head back into the battle.
I heard a passing thought from Marcus and looked toward my right, trying not to just let my jaw drop like an enchanted child as an entire contingent of fey warriors—most of them no taller than four feet or so—went marching double-time toward the edge of the hill. The foot soldiers of the fey were redcaps. They were built like forgotten corners of old quarries—granite skin, joints like stacked rocks, spiderwebs, and all. Bracken’s father was in the lead, and Brack himself was at the end, both of them carrying wicked looking spears with silver heads. I assumed Bracken’s was ceremonial—because as I might have mentioned, I’m not that bright—so I dismissed him from my mind after an admiring glance at him in his jeans with no shirt, and had a sudden idea about how to get Teague the fuck out of there.
“We can do this,” I declared and gave an urgent call to Green. In a gentle cloud of wildflowers, he was there in my head, like he always is when I need him. Then Marcus’s lover, Phillip, hearing my side of the psychobabble, gave an urgent shout for me to pick him.
Phillip, the perverse asshole, loved this part of my power—and well, hell, the dumbshit volunteered.
We had practiced this on occasion after we’d been forced to do it in an emergency last year, and it demanded three things—my power aimed with my will, a vampire who was a willing receptacle, and Green’s power acting like a plastic coating between live wires and skin. My power was sunshine, fueled by emotion, and we’d seen firsthand what it could do to vampires without some sort of buffer. Green got to be my buffer, and now he slid silkily in between Phillip’s consciousness and my raw telekinesis. Together, we shot a sunshine-shield around Teague as he burst into the clearing that marked Green’s hill.
Phillip picked up the bubble containing one very freaked-out, splay-legged werewolf and threw it toward me with enough force that I caught it midway, breaking off my connection with Phillip and taking Teague the rest of the way across the clearing. I managed to scream, “Jacky, catch!” at the top of my lungs as I hurtled his beloved at him and dropped my shield.
Jack caught a wide-eyed, yelping Teague in both strong arms, wrapping them so tightly around his lover that I heard Teague growl and snap, and then a fully human “Jesus Christ, Jacky, you’re gonna fuckin’ break somethin’!” before I was back in the action, watching things from Marcus’s eyes while Phillip plopped limply out of the sky at the edge of the tree line, drunk on the power blast. Goddess love him, it’s why he volunteered.
“Holy Goddess, queen of cats!” I swore, and inside his brain I could hear Marcus swearing too. “What is that thing?”
It burst out of the trees and blurred toward us at a tremendous speed. Behind me I heard Jacky breathe, “Christ, Teague, you outran that thing?”
“He had my help, brother!” Mario panted, coming to a rest behind me in a flutter and drip of ravaged feathers and bleeding skin.
“Thanks for having my back,” Teague added tersely, in what was, for him, an overabundance of emotion. Nicky landed next to me, partially naked and bleeding as well, and I fumbled for his hand. I focused completely on the giant, furry, lumbering thing nearing the center of the clearing, and the redcaps coming to meet it.
Before the two forces could collide, I broke off my link with Marcus and screamed with effort and exultation as I slammed a glowing shield in front of it, a foot thick and solid with angry sunshine. That fucker caromed off my shield with a hollow, gut-churning, cathedral-bell ringing that had all of the were-animals rolling on the ground with their hands over their ears in agony. I shrieked and screamed and held out my free hand, spitting curses like that thing should have been spitting long, pointy teeth.
“Come on, motherfucker, come on and dick with me!” Wham! It hit my shield again, and beside me Nicky fell to his knees as I pulled energy from him in an effort to stop this thing. “Ya wanna play, you colossal supernatural prick? Bring it, cocksucker, I’ll fucking murder you….”
Nicky gave a little mewl next to me and I released his hand, jumping up and down in fury. “Attack our people? Come after our alpha wolf? I’ll fucking show you who’s your fucking mama….”
“Beloved?” Green intruded politely, and I stilled midbounce at the restraint in Green’s tone.
“Little busy here, Green.” Wham! It howled…. Oh, Goddess, its howl practically peeled the skin off my eyeballs. I set my feet solidly on the ground, gritted my teeth, and squared my shoulders.
“Corinne Carol-Anne” came the sweet but firm reply, “our warriors haven’t had a reason to fight in nearly fifty years. You wouldn’t want to hog all the glory, would you?”
There was another reason he wanted me to stop—I could feel it in my buzzing bones—but he was right on this count too. The redcaps—now ringed around my shield, waiting impatiently for their turn—were singing some sort of blood song, with lots of “hhhrrrrmmmms” and “ccchhhh” sounds and gnashing of teeth. I liked it!
“Are you ready, guys?” I called, and the battle rage that roared from them actually covered the howls of fury from the creature inside the cage of light.
I dropped my shield and felt the rage-strength adrenaline flood out of me like blood from a wound. My body plonked to the ground like ice cream in July, my eyes still fixed avidly on the battle.
It was like something out of a Lord of the Rings movie.
The redcaps formed a circle, like a giant mouth with gnashing teeth of savage spears, and then proceeded to advance and recede, chewing the enormous creature in the center. The werecreatures were in a loose layered circle around them. Giant tabby cats, giant wild cats, giant feral dogs, wolves, and the occasional selkie in horse form ranged in a ferocious furry rank around the general action. They were probably trying to be backup, but every time the thing opened its mouth to howl, the were-people close to the damned animal abomination screamed and rolled, some of them transforming in and out if the sound was particularly shrill or painful or especially long.
At least I thought it was an animal roar.
“No, seriously,” I said to no one in particular, watching as a spear took the big hairy It in the side. The thing reared up, taking the spear and its short, stocky spear carrier with it. The redcap got shaken off, spear and all, up and over the heads of his fellows, shrieking in what sounded like a berserker’s laughter. It let out another eyeball-peeling howl and turned around to bat at another soldier, who ducked, laughed, and caught It in the chest with his own weapon. As far as I could see, there was no blood anywhere—not from the redcaps, because their skin really was like granite, and not from the enemy, because apparently it didn’t bleed.
