Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  His erection hovered near my mouth—red, throbbing, humanly sized but still lovely—a tiny clear drop of spend at his cleft, just from being in the same bed with us. As many times as the four of us had been in bed, tending to Cory, I had never touched him with more than the necessary friction for the two of us to service and be serviced by our beloved.

  He was so patient, and she was wrapped up in Green and in me. A memory of the night before intruded: her screaming at the enemy from the side of the hill while she drained Nicky, Green, and me weak because she thought it was her job to do it all.

  Without warning, I stretched out my neck and took him into my mouth, gratified by his surprised “Unnnnnnngggghhhh….” and the way he fell limply forward, catching his weight on his elbows on the other side of my head.

  Oooooohhhh…. I had not had a man’s cock in my mouth since Adrian’s, and I had forgotten the taste, the texture, the fullness at the back of my throat.

  I liked it very much. Not enough to regret my binding with Cory, but enough to appreciate it now.

  Another sex sound—there were many of them from all of us, and they all aroused, inflamed, made a terrible fire out of the quiet warmth of the beginnings of our sex—but this one from Cory.

  She was watching me with Nicky’s cock in my throat.

  We locked eyes then, every thrust from Green making her moan, making me moan as he dragged himself against me, seated and thrusting in the warmth of her, and Nicky began his own rhythm in my mouth.

  I made a show of it, watching her mouth open and her eyes grow wider with desire. I allowed him to pop out of my mouth and slap my cheek and then sucked him back in, closing my eyes with the pleasure of it all.

  Green leaned over, whispering in her ear. We could all hear him, but the whisper was the thing. The whisper rubbed her pleasure places, made her sounds deepen, grow higher pitched, frantic. The fact that he was whispering sex things—fantasies she wouldn’t share because it would be asking too much, erotic ideas that we knew she loved but was still shy about voicing—only made the whisper more potent, and it started to affect us all.

  Green’s thrusts came faster, her groans became more frantic, and I had to squeeze against the blackness that threatened my eyes before my body exploded within her. I stopped playing with Nicky and took over. He no longer fucked my face—I fucked him with my mouth and enjoyed the helpless noises he made into the pillow in front of him. I moved my hand to his backside, letting one finger, then two go where it would.

  Nicky screamed, spending into my mouth, and although I loved the bitter-salt-musk of it and could have swallowed it all, I let some of it drip out the corner. He flopped weakly into the pillows above my head, his member brushing my ear as he went, his stomach cradled around my head. I leaned up, and with a helpful thrust from Green I could reach Cory for a kiss—and kiss me she did, tasting Nicky on my tongue, licking the spend from the corner of my mouth, from my chin, sucking on my neck for the last drop—and for me, that was the end.

  At the pressure of her small teeth on my carotid, I roared, and Green bit her shoulder on his own cry, and she shrieked and moaned and shuddered in the circle of our arms….

  And released the sexual power that had been building in her loins, her womb, her heart at our sensual assault, the sheer sexuality of it causing us all to twitch for a final burst of orgasm even as she did something secret and controlled with her sexual weapon.

  We lay there, breathless, for several moments, before Nicky spoke.

  “Thank you,” he said softly to me with a rusty voice. His hand moved from his hip to my hair, and I reached up and took his hand firmly, rubbing the back of his wrist with my thumb.

  “Anytime,” I told him truthfully, and Cory looked up at me with gleaming eyes. I’d keep that promise for the expression on her face alone.

  Green chuckled and was the first to slide out of Cory, rolling to the side and peering up at her as she perched on my chest. “So, beloved,” he asked, pushing her wild autumn hair from her face, “the walls seem to have remained the same color. What was it you just did?”

  Usually she would have blushed and turned away, embarrassed by what her body did naturally when the lot of us touched together, but this time her face grew tense and somber. I knew that look—it was the look she’d worn last night as she was standing on the hillrise being a general to our people.

  “A perimeter warning,” she said after a moment of putting words to it. “If anything we don’t know crosses it, we’ll hear something and see lights.”

  Nicky’s snort of laughter echoed my own surprise. “I’m coming out my toes and you’re setting security measures. Goddess, Cory, can’t you just put up curtains?”

  “I’ve already redone the curtains,” she sniffed, smacking my chest a little when she saw that I was laughing too. “Twice.”

  Green’s deep laughter resonated through the bed then, and he rolled to his stomach, putting his face close to hers and forming a cocoon between the two of them on my chest. “I think you’re brilliant, beloved.” He nuzzled her temple, and she grinned at him, even as she rested her cheek near my nipple. Green lowered his head, and I felt his cheek against me too as they kissed. He broke off the kiss and gave my nipple a quick nibble and suck before rolling off the bed.

  “As lovely as this has been,” he said with raised eyebrows toward us all, “I think it’s time to wake up. We’ve got some planning to do.”

  “How about you and Cory go conquer the world,” Nicky suggested cheekily, stroking my shoulder where he could reach it. “Bracken can stay here and give me another blow job.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Are you planning to reciprocate, little man?” I asked archly, and Nicky gave a dreamy “Please, Goddess, yes!” that had Cory laughing a little too.

  Still she waited, unmoving, keeping me inside of her until Nicky slid off the bed and went to shower with Green.

  Since she obviously was not going to rip me the promised new asshole, I assumed that this was the next best thing.

  “You scared the hell out of me last night,” she said, and I stroked her hair back from her face again. She leaned into my touch, still looking at me unhappily.

  “Are you telling me not to fight?” I asked, because there would be a fight then, but not between me and some bizarre vampire-bear thing.

  She shook her head reluctantly. “No.” A smile, also reluctant, twitched at her lips. “But it’s a good thing Teague and Mario were there too—I don’t think Nicky alone could have held me back last night. I didn’t expect you to do that.”

  I blinked. “The moment we met, beloved, I was a warrior. You saw me with the spear—did you think it was decorative?”

  “The moment we met?” She laughed. “I thought you were naked and sniffing my crotch. And last night, I saw you heading for the battle with your people. The spear was irrelevant.”

  “Apparently not,” I said. My voice turned stubborn, and she gave me the serious consideration that made her so very necessary to so many of us.

  “I’ve always thought of you as a warrior, Bracken Brine,” she said seriously. “But thinking it and seeing you in the middle of battle are two very different things. You and Green do all but lock me in a gilded cage. Forgive me if I’m not sanguine about you risking yourself, even when I understand that you need to do it.”

  “Sanguine”—it meant “happy.” It also meant “bloodthirsty,” and it was a fancy word, the poetry of her heart.

  “I’ll be—”

  “Fine,” she finished for me. “I count on you being fine every day, you realize that? The moment you’re not fine, my world falls apart and my strength fails me. We go on a job and you choke on your tongue if I so much as get wet….”

  “You were floating down a freezing river!” I protested, remembering our first run with Teague. There had been a rogue werewolf and silver-poisoned blood—and very real danger.

  “I got wet!” she laughed. “And I guess that’s my point. Fine. You grab a spear and g
o attack the vampire bear and almost get your tender bits cooked to, well, tender bits… but you get to put up with me being just as fussy and overprotective as you are.”

  “But….” That wasn’t fair! She was mortal and I was… well, I guess I was mortal now too—but by choice, not because I was as fragile as she was.

  “The end,” she said smugly, seeing me strangle on the complexity of my own thought.

  I glared at her, and she smiled and kissed me, and I was reminded all over again of the touch of her lips on my body, the warmth of her skin, the feel of her breath against my neck.

  “We’re going to miss Green and Nicky in the shower,” she reminded me sweetly, and I was just happy enough from the morning’s lovemaking to let that distract me.

  The shower was… well, it was like the morning all over again, but quieter. Cory’s power didn’t escape her this time, but most of the time, we don’t want it to. Our girl did a good job at keeping herself all contained, and as hard as it was to watch sometimes, we all knew that there was a reason she had to do it.

  Breakfast was far less comfortable.

  The werewolves met us—per Green’s request—along with Arturo, Mario, Max, Renny, and an assortment of the upper and lower fey. Cory spoke for the vampires, of course, and for the most part, everybody was well represented.

  Our people had been put in danger by a vampire bear. Who makes one of those things?

  “Well,” Cory said, pecking unhappily at her granola, “at least we know it’s not one of ours.”

  It had taken her nearly a year, but she had managed to blood every vampire in Adrian’s kiss, plus three she’d helped pull over since Adrian’s death. If one of our vampires had gone rogue, Cory would know.

  “We went there to find what killed that family,” Mario said thoughtfully. “Maybe whatever got them made the vampire bear.”

  “Or most of them,” Teague grunted, scowling at Jack as he got in between Teague and his food. Jack and Katy were both being almost amusingly overprotective of their mate as we sat in Green’s living room and ate the food that had been left in the kitchen for us. Cory was used to being cosseted by now—she took the extra bacon Nicky put on her plate, she drank her milk as Green gave it to her, and generally, she simply let us care for her in these small ways so she could fight the larger battles on her own.

  When Teague had first arrived, he wouldn’t reach for a cookie that had been put forcibly in his hand and that he wanted with all his heart. He was better now, but still not happy about being fawned over. That didn’t stop Jack and Katy from trying to break him in.

  Cory chewed her bacon quickly and then frowned, as though wondering how she’d gotten bacon in the first place. “I’m going to get fat,” she said to Nicky. Then she rejoined the conversation. “Who was missing?” she asked curiously.

  Teague, who had his own problems with his own mates, was frowning at the sausage biscuit Katy had just given him, and he and Cory met disgruntled eyes in perfect simpatico. “The little girl, eight or so. They didn’t find her body—assumed it had been dragged off into the woods or something.”

  Cory chewed her lip, and I brushed it with a thumb. She scrubbed her face and then looked at me and Green sideways. “There are just so many bad things that could mean,” she mused. She waved off more food from all of us and stood from her spot on the floor, gathering plates from anyone who was done. Teague tried to give her his, and she shook her head.

  “I’m on their side, brother—it’s a relief to have someone here who needs to eat more than I do!”

  We watched her moving quickly and efficiently to put the dishes in the sink, and then one of my mother’s friends—a pixie, blue from head to foot, including hair and skin—cleared her delicate little throat and fluttered over to take the dishes. Cory gave a grateful bow and returned to us, her body obviously not having worked through her dilemma.

  “I don’t want to think about it,” she said eventually. “But there is something very rotten and very hinky out there. I’m thinking we need to go out there—not a two-man recon, but a whole hunting party. Me, Brack, Nicky….”

  “Me!” spoke up Mario—he had been missing honor guard duty since he had taken this last semester off school.

  Cory smiled at him and nodded. “Yes—you and Nicky and LaMark, and maybe two more vampires to cover the sky….”

  “And me,” Teague insisted. Cory’s raised eyebrows suggested that Teague might not have the last word in his little family.

  “No,” Teague growled, pinning Jack and Katy with a gimlet, alpha-dog gaze. “Me. Not you. No arguments. No exceptions.”

  Katy didn’t mind not charging into danger—she gave a human equivalent of rolling over on her back and offering up her stomach. Jack, who could be a pissy little bitch for a tallish human male, glared at Teague sideways, and Teague pinned him down with another glare. “Dangerous. I will not put you in this sort of danger.”

  Bark. Howl. Teague wins.

  Cory shrugged. It was Teague’s family. “Right, Teague, you’re in….”

  “And me!” Max protested. “Ouch, Renny, goddammit, you don’t get to do that to me when I’m human!”

  Renny had turned into a cat in the time it took for Max to volunteer, and was currently letting her beloved know how she felt about not being included with a splayed paw and extended claw.

  “Oh Goddess,” Cory swore, counting heads and frowning. “We can’t have too many, we’ll scare them away!”

  “You’re right, beloved,” Green said mildly behind her. “We can’t have too many.”

  Her eyes narrowed mutinously, and Green simply smiled in that kind, accepting way that made us all love him.

  “I don’t want us tripping over each other,” she protested.

  “It’s a big hunk of land, beloved,” he rejoined. “You and Bracken might even get some alone time. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  Her lips curved up, but I recognized the melancholy behind the smile. She loved her alone time with me, but she so rarely got alone time with Green. Even I, normally a jealous asshole, had begun to try to negotiate some quiet moments between the two of them. There was a reason Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot hadn’t worked out, and it wasn’t just that there were three of them.

  “You could come with me,” she said brightly, but we all knew that couldn’t happen. Green was needed on the hill. Since our power had expanded, we’d become scrupulous about making sure the two of them were never gone at the same time, at least when there was any sort of danger. Everything about our way of life—our secrecy, our unity, our power—it all depended on the survival of at least one of them. Of course, I thought, watching her mask her disappointment at what she must have known to be a doomed request, we all knew that none of us would survive another loss.

  “Someday, when it’s not a danger, I will,” he ceded. “Besides, I have some business to take care of here.”

  She blinked—the word obviously plinked a sour string in her head. “Business?”

  “Are you really going to take Teague without us?” Jack complained, and everybody, Teague and Katy included, looked at him in exasperation.

  “It’s Teague’s decision, Jack,” Green said calmly, his eyes never stopping their intimate conversation with Cory’s. “He’s your leader as I am his, and you will abide by his wishes as I will abide by his judgment.”

  Cory’s eyes remained locked with Green’s. “However, that doesn’t mean you can’t ask Teague to come on the next run,” she added to Jack, and then she blinked first.

  Ou’e’hm. Her equal who was her leader. Green didn’t want to elaborate, and no amount of intimacy between them would change it.

  Green nodded—a thank you, I guess, that she didn’t try to argue—and then spoke to the rest of us, but mostly to her.

  “We’re not done yet, beloved—you need to take a healing fey with you. You’re not going out of my sight without someone who can stop your bleeding before Bracken touches you.”

  She
wrinkled her nose and scanned the room. There were three full-blooded sidhe whose specialty was healing. One was Green, another was Sweet….

  “Nope,” Sweet refused serenely, her lover’s head on her lap. Ellen Beth had been a “healing project” the year before—and although, like Green, Sweet could never be truly monogamous, Ellen Beth shared her room, shared her stories, and her life. They were as close to being bonded as Sweet might ever possibly be.

  “I hate the woods, Green, you know that!” The delicately featured little sidhe tinkled now, and Cory closed her eyes.

  “Aw, shit,” she said, and a raw cockney voice spoke up from the back of the room—our newest import, and perhaps Cory’s least favorite denizen of the hill.

  “That’s me, luv!” Lambent broke in cheekily, and Cory looked at Green in honest supplication. He’d been with us since October—and still hadn’t told us his story. But he’d served on the field, scorched the field, and healed in action during the werewolf problems during the fall. Lambent was a pain in the ass—sarcastic, sardonic, misogynistic, and absolutely positive that he was always right—but he was also a good elf to have around.

  “I’d rather bleed to death,” she said loudly, not even bothering to turn around to him. To Green, since they were still having eyeball wars, she added, “Really?”

  Green nodded, but he broke off eye contact to pin the fire elf to the back wall with both his gaze and his power. The elf was pushed three feet off the ground, his arms and legs spread-eagled in absolute helplessness.

  “You are to obey her in all things, Lambent. She is the reason you’re going, and she is my ou’e’eir, and she is the one person here who can literally fry your ass for breakfast. If you give her too much grief, she has permission to do just that.”

  “Roight,” Lambent replied. His rebellion was clear in his tone, but he couldn’t break the power bond that had him pinned, and the tattoo at his neck—the mark of Green and Cory’s power that he had accepted with his free will—pulsed.

  Cory raised her hand and squeezed, and then turned around to look at the flame-haired, ruddy-complexioned elf as he turned a little bluer than was really healthy for his type of sidhe.