by Amy Lane
“I’m not putting up with any of your shit, brother,” she responded darkly. “You don’t take a piss unless I say so. Is that absofuckinglutely clear?”
Apparently fire responded to cold force—I guess that’s only elemental physics, isn’t it? Lambent nodded, and Cory released him. He fell to one knee then, on his own, and bowed.
“My honor is yours, my lady,” he conceded, and for once, Cory didn’t wince or grimace or roll her eyes.
She regarded the fire elf soberly, saying, “I’ll hold you to that, brother. Your power is very, very dangerous in this part of the world. If you are not paying 100 percent attention, you could destroy everything we love in one incandescent tantrum. I don’t want to be in charge of that, but if I have to, you’re going to hear me.”
Lambent looked up from his bow, a faint smile flickering on his lips. “Many men tell you they’d follow you to hell, luv?”
And now Cory did wrinkle her nose. “Why do you all say that?”
There was a sympathetic silence then—even the men in the room who had never wanted her were all sworn to her. It was something she could never truly see.
Green broke the moment with a nod and a summation. “That’s about three SUVs worth of people and gear. We’ll make some calls and get you all let in there, since it’s still off-season, and start the lower fey packing for you today so you can leave tomorrow afternoon….”
“The vampires?” Teague asked, clearly confused.
“We’ve got a vampmobile one of us can drive,” Cory told him, “and if they don’t want to sleep in it, they can fly in.”
It was obviously a dismissal. Breakfast was over. We were all going back to our rooms to pack or to sleep. I planned to make sure that Cory did both, except when I looked to grab Cory’s hand and take her back to our room, she was tracking Green with anxious eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, coming behind her and rocking her reassuringly against my body for a moment.
She touched my hands as they knotted under her breasts. “He’s hiding something from me,” she said.
I had to agree.
“What could be so bad that he’d hide it from me?”
There was only one answer to that.
“Something he’s trying to protect you from,” I answered, and she nodded in my arms.
“And now I’m worried about him,” she sighed, leaning against me. “Bracken?”
“Hmmm?”
“I don’t want to be a grown-up anymore.”
“I never wanted you to be one,” I said truthfully. If I had my way, she would simply be one of the other lovely, dreamy creatures that floated ethereally in the apartments of the sidhe, like spider silk in a soft breeze. But then, the woman I fell in love with was more comfortable in my oversized T-shirts than she was in silk, and could order a hill to task with the authority of a general and then blush when others bowed. The woman in my arms was a grown-up long before she’d been grown, and what mattered was that she was mine.
Cory: Queen of the Fucking Night
ONE OF the things that I tried never to take for granted at the hill was the fact that there was a whole passel of little folks who liked to do all the stuff that drove me banana-shit. I never had to clean a toilet, mop a floor, do laundry, shop for my own makeup or clothes, cook if I didn’t want to, or, in this case, pack.
The downside of this was that I never knew what was going in the car either. I stood near the bottom of the stairs to the garage and watched a parade of brownies, pixies, and small trolls pack random and seemingly complicated things into the camper shells and the back of three SUVs and looked at Green in bewilderment.
“I don’t know how to use any of this shit!” I said, squinting at what looked like a group-sized below-freezing-temperature rated tent.
“You won’t have to,” my beloved smiled. “You show up, they’ll unload, it will be up when you get back from your first recon.”
I blinked. The brownies tended to have gorilla-width shoulders and three, five, or seven arms, even if they were only two feet tall. “Where are they going to sit?”
Green laughed and shook out his butter-colored hair. I stroked it with a hint of proprietorship, waiting for his answer, but he just shook his head. “Beloved, your people will be anywhere you need them,” he twinkled, and I shook my head again, remembering the reason Bracken had sent me down in the first place.
“Uhm, Green—Bracken wants to know if the road down to, uh, Sugar Pine has gotten any better.”
Green turned from his supervision of the loading, an unlikely, graceful figure in the oil-scented echoing darkness of the underground garage. “And why would he want to know this, beloved?” he asked with a playful smile that I returned gamely.
“The… the, uhm, general consensus seems to be that, well, maybe I might need some supernatural Dramamine or something, you know, on the road?”
Okay, that was an understatement so vast as to be a lie of cosmic proportions.
The truth was that, if I wasn’t driving, I would be puking my guts out. Something about the way my body handled the balance between its human needs and its supernatural functions gave me a hair-trigger stomach—and it was never so apparent as when I was stressed about a job and we were on a windy road. I’d volunteered to drive, but that had been greeted with less enthusiasm than I had hoped. Many of the men had turned pale, and there had been several exclamations of “No, thanks, I choose life!” In the end, Bracken had suggested delicately that I might want to ask Green to put me under. I believe his exact words had been “Oh for the sweet love of my foot up your ass, would you go ask Green to knock you out? For me, goddammit, please?”
And, well, here I was. All things considered, it felt a little like defeat.
Green could read me like I could read the plain sky for sunshine. He took my hands and kissed them, and grinned gently. “Beloved, admitting a limitation doesn’t mean you’ve lost anything—you’re no less our little warrior Goddess when you’re barfing from the bottom of your toes than a werewolf is when he ducks silver shot. It’s a check on your power, that’s all—it keeps you human.”
I was close to letting him jolly me out of my nasty mood, but I wasn’t going to give in easily. “I thought I’d spent the last two years learning I was anything but human,” I grouched, and he laughed, even, white teeth showing, his head tilted back in that lovely openness and astonishing beauty that I would always associate with the clean-lined wonder that was my beloved.
“We’re all human, Corinne Carol-Anne, even those of us with six arms or shaped like the root system of a drought-ridden tree.” Nobody could resist Green’s full-hearted kindness—especially not me.
“Really?” I asked shyly. “Who’s shaped like the tree root?”
Green’s face lit up with pride, for me or for his kindred I’m not sure, but those up-tilted emerald eyes were practically glowing. “Come look,” he urged quietly. “They’re very shy—they think you’re beyond beautiful, and they’ve served you since Adrian brought you to us, but they prefer to work for you in the shadows.”
I blushed. I hoped I never stopped being grateful for the hill’s little miracles. Green led me quietly to the front of one of the SUVs, and we peered cautiously around a corner to watch the lower fey work.
I recognized the brownies and the gnomes, the smaller swamp trolls, the pixies, the nixies, the sprites—in spite of the fact that they numbered in the thousands, the ones who liked to serve Green the best were starting to distinguish themselves from the magical, tentacled, winged, whiskered, multihued lot of them.
Then I spotted the critters Green was talking about—literal walking tree roots, barely clothed, with eyes and gnarled little faces in the thick top of what looked like root hairs. All of them—root hairs and individual root tendrils—were moving with prehensile intelligence, and it should’ve creeped me out, but it didn’t.
“They’re wonderful,” I breathed, conscious of Green’s warmth over my shoulder in the chill gar
age. His long yellow hair fell forward and draped over my shoulder, creating a veil between me and his shiest creatures. “What are they?”
“Earth gnomes,” he whispered back. “Sort of the earth version of the grindylow. They’re one of the few creatures we have that doesn’t really mind metal or oil—they do all the maintenance on the cars, you know.”
I smiled and turned into his chest, hiding under that magical hair. He smelled like wildflowers and open meadows, and I think I loved spring in the foothills specifically because that was when the whole world smelled like my Green. “I didn’t know,” I replied shyly. When I looked up at him, his face was shadowed by his hair, but behind him there appeared a halo of light.
“But I’ll bet they don’t get carsick,” I added, remembering my original topic of conversation.
Green’s mouth quirked and his hand came up, pushing my hair back from my face. The back of it was in a ponytail, and he pulled the elastic out so he could run his fingers through it. “It’s your body’s way of reminding you that you can’t do everything, luv,” he said, closing his eyes as though the feel of my hair between his fingers was something to savor. He’d been doing that lately—touching me as though my touch was sacred to him, as though he were afraid of losing it. I didn’t know how to pry, to yank open the lid on whatever it was he didn’t want me to see.
“I don’t want to do everything,” I replied, still enjoying his care. “I just want to ride in the goddamned car while I’m awake!”
He laughed again, low, and bent down to nuzzle my temple. Just that easily, every cell in my body was on full sexual alert.
“Think of it like pregnancy, luv.” His hands came up to my upper arms under my plain white T-shirt, and he rubbed, the friction of his palms warming me and, well warming me at the same time. The ticklish place between my thighs that only Green could touch started to throb, my panties grew wet, and then I actually realized what in the hell he had said.
“Like what?”
He laughed, and I knew he could taste my flooded panties in the scent of my skin. “Like pregnancy. Your body gets all sorts of pissed off at the miracles it’s creating, but ninety-nine out of one hundred women swear the results are worth it!”
I laughed and raised my face for a kiss. His lips brushed mine to tease, to notch all of that “good-bye sex” up a couple of degrees. “Well, we’ve got at least another year before we find out about that, now don’t we?” I sighed against his soft, sculpted lips. I raised my hands up to his ears, because Green loved that, and he pulled back for a moment, still leaning close enough to tangle me up in his warmth/scent/touch.
There was a reluctant expression on his face—a subject he hadn’t wanted to open. “So soon, luv? You’re so very young….”
I shook my head a little. “Yours first, then Bracken’s, then Nicky’s—Nicky only has nine years!” Nicky would wither and die—at least according to Avian lore. We didn’t want to take any chances, but damn the Goddess, anyway. I don’t know what howling demon from the religious right had her ear during her mating time with her favorite falcon, but the belief was that Avians died if their mate didn’t bear young within the first ten years of their mating. Since they also bonded with the first person they had sex with, this meant that there were a whole lot of gay Avians out at the Aerie waiting to see which couple would choose a three-way mating with the genderless sylphs who had volunteered to do a Big Brother meets The Bachelor Couple in the giant house. It was a risky experiment in preternatural dynamics, but it beat an automatic death sentence upon choosing a mate.
Green frowned, although his hands never did stop their lovely journey. Now they were spanning my waist under my T-shirt, and I shivered.
“It’s not necessary to have my—”
“Shhh….” I didn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps the only person who knew my plans was Nicky, and that was because I had blurted them out to him after I came out of a coma. But I had loved Green first, after Adrian. Every good thing in my life—including Adrian—had come to me because Green was seven kinds of wonderful, the magic of amazing, the pure, sweet water that sustained his children, allowed them to flourish, made them grow.
Giving him a child—our child—was the least I could do. Just once, Green deserved to come first.
But Bracken was a fiercely competitive second, and I wanted his child too.
“You’re young, luv,” Green protested.
I was not having this discussion here, not now in the forced intimacy of the garage, in the secret dark and the warmth in the space between our bodies. “I’ll be less young when it happens,” I told him, and his lips turned up, but he didn’t want to let it go.
“Your body hasn’t completely recovered,” he warned, and I shrugged self-consciously. After Adrian had brought me home and started snacking regularly, I’d dropped a lot of weight quickly. Then Adrian died and I’d dropped even more, and then I’d been wounded and gotten sick, and basically I hadn’t had a period in nearly two years.
“I’m gaining weight as fast as I can,” I told him truthfully. Then I smiled with a wicked twist. “I know my boobs are bigger,” I teased, and that teasing broke his last resistance. He bent over, his clean, masculine, triangular features beautiful even as his lips consumed mine and he began to blur in my sight. I closed my eyes and breathed him in, and we kissed and we kissed and then kissed again, and then that pure sweet water turned to steam.
Green lifted me up with one arm and fumbled for the latch of the car’s side door with the other hand. The latch snicked, and my feet found the floor of the car. I couldn’t stand up, and there were armrests and a height difference, and for a moment I couldn’t see how it would all work. Then Green shucked my jeans even as he leaned into my neck and whispered two magic words, right into the hot spot that was nerve-wired into the shell curve of my ear.
“Bend over.”
Oooooooooohoooooooohoooooooohoooooooo….
My body was slick and hot and tight and wet. I came savagely with his first invasion and then again as he pulled out, and then again as he thrust hard and deep. I screamed my orgasm into the car seat I was bent over, my knees on the floorboards, Green standing on the garage floor behind me.
He let me scream, and thrust again, then leaned over and cupped my breasts under my bra, enjoying the spill of them in his hands now that they were bigger. I whimpered, gasped, and screamed some more, and still he pounded, relentless, both of us a little high on the instant arousal. My body gave a huge convulsive shudder, bucking under his hands, and he groaned, deep and rumbly, and bit my shoulder, then buried his face in the hair at my nape and came.
We stayed there for a moment, joined, his cheek nuzzling mine.
“Proud of yourself?” I asked archly. I reveled in his chuckle.
“Proud of you. Always.”
Perfect moment. A good life together is made up of such small, perfect moments, dotted together like an impressionist painting—us, together, nude and lean, beautiful in the clean lines of his grace.
It was good that we took that time together, because no sooner had we fastened clothing and laughingly smoothed each other’s hair than Arturo came striding across the garage to tell Green he had a phone call. There was something significant in the way Arturo looked at Green that said this was an urgent phone call and I was not to know about it.
Abruptly that wall of secrecy slammed between us—the button he had asked me kindly not to push.
Green took one look at my hurt, miserable face and gave Arturo the “in a minute” nod, and bent over me again, that lovely yellow hair like a privacy screen for something not nearly as wonderful as what had just happened between us.
“Luv….”
“You’re protecting me from something,” I said starkly, looking him straight in the eyes. I could have had a tantrum, or pouted or sulked off—I could have made him feel horrible, but how could you do that to someone who was trying to keep you happy?
“Yes,” he conceded, as truthful
with me as I was with him.
“Will you tell me?”
He looked away.
“Eventually?” I begged. Please, Green, please. Please trust me with this, if only because it’s a burden in your heart.
“I will tell you when you return,” he agreed, and I could breathe again. “It’s sticky, and… morally complex. I want to know everything we’re dealing with before I lay it out for you.”
We. He’d said “we.”
I smiled, whole and real and honest. “We.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him again. His whole incorruptible soul was in his return kiss before he slid gracefully out of my arms and to his mysterious phone call.
Two hours and a shower later we were ready to go. The shower was necessary because the only bathing facility at the lake was the lake, and it was still fucking March. The elves might venture in because they were nature’s children, but I’d already gone swimming in an icy body of water once this winter and it wasn’t happening again! I checked my yarn bag, looking fretfully at the two extra balls of sock yarn in addition to the hat I was working on in self-striping wool—because you never know when your car is going to break down and you’ll be stuck there for ten to thirty hours with no food, no water, and no toilet facilities, but by God, you’ll have your yarn. I also made sure the gun was buried there under two of the ugliest balls of crappy worsted-weight acrylic I ever hoped to see, because hopefully all that cushiness would keep the harmful effects of the cold iron away from Bracken when the yarn bag bumped him—as it invariably did.
I was preparing to hop into the middle row because it was by the window but had easy access to the door for that fast break to the bathroom, when Katy slipped away from Jack and Teague and came to talk to me.
I always felt a little intimidated by Katy. She was extraordinarily pretty, and she had this air of “lived through it” wisdom that made me feel, frankly, like a green, dorky high school kid. But she had enjoyed working for Grace in the yarn store and seemed genuinely flattered when we asked her if she wanted to run the bakery housed in the same building when it came up for sale. She had made quiet attempts to join us in the front room on occasions when Teague had been gone and she hadn’t been able to take the quiet of the weres’ rooms without him.
