Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  Today she looked pensive—unhappy about something, uncertain about unburdening herself. I tried my best smile on her and was a little dismayed when her eyes grew large and she took a step back. Shit, how bad could I look?

  And then she sank to one knee on the fucking garage floor, and I almost swallowed my tongue.

  “Oh, for sweet Goddess’s sake, sweetheart, get up! No garage is that clean, and those pants are white!” See? White pants. I could think of a thousand reasons why my ass was never meant to be graced with white denim, but Katy looked like a queen.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, still on the floor. She took my hand when I extended it, but I was almost distraught that one other person had done the goddamned lady-of-the-fucking-house thing in front of me.

  “Sorry for what?” I yelped. “Jesus—what is with that bowing thing?”

  Katy laughed, low and charming, and shook her head. “I… we work together, you know? And you always seem to know what you’re doing, and you go to school, and you’re like, hella smart, so hella smart—smarter than Jacky, and that’s sayin’ something—and I just thought….” Katy shrugged. I tried to make sense of this weirdness, and I wondered how long I would need to listen to her before I could stop being lost in the music of her accent. Not even Arturo had that much South America in his voice, and he’d spent a couple of thousand years there!

  “I thought you were like, you know, Lady of the Manor. That you, you take Teague’s service but you don’t, like, appreciate him the way me and Jacky do. That just because you don’t love him like us, that means you don’t love him, right?”

  “Right.” I blinked. “I mean, you know, wrong.” Hella smart? Really? If I was so goddamned smart, then who in the hell had broken her nose falling down a hill two nights ago?

  Katy nodded. “I know. Wrong. I was wrong—you’re smart and all… but you saved him. He been going out on runs with you, and you have his back. You made him go with Mario because you have his back. I….” Katy started bouncing on her toes. She was only about four inches taller than I was, but it made me feel even shorter when she did that.

  “I don’t go on adventures. I don’t carry a gun. I stay here, I’m the good little woman. I listen to Jacky bitch about not getting let to go on adventures… but that don’t mean I don’t worry. Just because I’m not out there with him like you and your men, that doesn’t mean I don’t worry. I just want to say thank you, that’s all. You take care of my man—not because you want him for your own, but because he’s one of yours, right? That’s probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me that wasn’t Teague or Jacky or, you know, Green.”

  What in the fuck was I supposed to do with this? I had decided last year that I wasn’t good with my own species. In fact, I pretty much sucked at dealing with them. It’s why Renny and I got along so well—she was more cat than girl, and we dealt with each other just fine. But this was one of my people, and she wasn’t taking orders or being “shepherded into the fold,” she was thanking me for… for… doing my job?

  Awkward. Just fucking awkward.

  “We take care of everybody, Katy,” I said, wishing desperately for Green. “You included. I just… I wish you and Jacky would take Teague’s word for it, you know?”

  Katy managed to look sultry and sheepish at the same time. “It’s not like that man talks too much, you know?”

  I was forced to laugh. Teague and I communicated just fine—but that was because on some deep cellular level, we both agreed that sometimes words were overrated. The only difference was that I was supposedly good with them, and he believed that talking about his feelings was some sort of minimalist art. I could only be glad fate hadn’t brought us together before we’d met our beloveds. Because we were so much alike, odds were we would have ended up in bed together. And then we would have killed each other.

  And then our ghosts would have gone out to wreak some serious shit upon the unsuspecting human race.

  Yeah, every now and then I really did believe things happened for a reason.

  “The vampires say more at dawn,” I told Katy now, meaning it, and she laughed. It was a good laugh, low and earthy, and I was suddenly aware this woman could be my friend.

  “This is true,” she nodded. “So why’re you not over there, kissing Green bye?”

  I looked over and saw Nicky shyly, blushing to his toes, kissing Green enthusiastically, and I smiled. Nicky had never expected to love Green when they’d become bonded accidentally, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love him wholeheartedly now.

  “He’s coming to me,” I said, flushing. “When he kisses me bye, I’m not waking up for a while. So it would be better if I’m sitting and belted.”

  I think I honestly shocked her.

  “He’s putting you under? Why for?”

  Oh Goddess. I found I was blushing furiously. “I… I’m sort of a freak show of spew on a winding road,” I confessed, feeling useless. “It was this or Dramamine, but it seems like the longer I’m… I’m in this world, the less the human shit works on me. I tried to cure a headache with a Motrin at school once and ended up puking blood for two days.” It had scared the blue fuck out of Bracken and had not done much for Green or Nicky either. It was, in fact, the sole reason I’d agreed to bring Lambent, the jerkoff—I didn’t want them fretting over my dumbassed human/supernatural translation difficulties.

  “So Green gonna put you under? Who’s gonna put you under on the way back?”

  I shrugged. “Bracken, maybe, or Lambent. I’d ask one of the vampires, but….” I shrugged, because this just sounded like I was bragging.

  “But what?” She was honestly intrigued.

  “But I, you know, boss them around. I’m sort of their leader. Green doesn’t think they can spell me anymore—not even willingly.” I shrugged again, wishing I hadn’t felt compelled to spill all my weaknesses to this poor werewolf. “So I’ll take Bracken and have Green cure the headache when we get home.”

  Katy was still flummoxed, although I don’t know why it should surprise her. I was pretty much still a deeply fucked-up college kid—with a supercharged sexual atomic ray gun and three vampire marks. Vomiting human fuel for ballast was par for the fucking course.

  “You look all embarrassed and shit,” Katy half laughed. “Why’s it bother you so much? I mean, you go out with the men, you get to be all ninja-bitch and shit—why’re you worried ’bout one little glitch?”

  I shrugged. “I just don’t want to be a pain in their asses, that’s all.” Before this damned conversation could continue, I said, “Hey, Katy, you make sure you come into the common room when Teague’s gone, okay? Bring Jacky too, even after you guys move to the cottage.” They still had a little bit of work to do in what used to be a barn/garage on the property. It had been a Christmas gift from Green, and Teague couldn’t be careful enough remodeling it.

  “I get why Teague wanted to live in the cottage, and everything,” I continued, “but when he’s gone, you’re both still ours. Grace is here, and Arturo, and Renny—Renny misses Max something fierce when he’s on duty—and everybody. You don’t need an invitation. It’s your place too, ’kay?”

  Katy smiled at me, and again I felt grubby and unattractive—but this time, I felt like she probably didn’t give a shit and just might like me anyway.

  “You think Grace’ll give me another one of those needlepoint kit things? I liked the last two you give me,” she asked shyly, and I grinned. I’d actually picked them out special for her.

  “Go see Grace when you’re at work tonight,” I told her. “I’m sure she’d be happy to.”

  And then all my men came over, and we moved on to other things.

  Green hopped into the car beside me, and I leaned my head against his arm, savoring his smell and his warmth and the love that he wore for me on his skin. He took my chin in his fingers and looked seriously into my eyes.

  “No unnecessary chances, luv,” he insisted.

  “No unnecessary chances, Green,�
�� I affirmed.

  “You’ll let the others do their jobs, beloved?” Except it really wasn’t a question.

  “I’ll let the others do their jobs,” I answered solemnly.

  “Even if it puts them in danger.” The clean line between his brows was all scrunched up, and he put some serious warning into his voice. I reached up and eased that line with my thumb, and tried not to wince. I hated this part.

  “Even if it puts them in danger,” I conceded, but I rolled my eyes and shook my head and generally made my displeasure clear.

  Green chuckled and kissed my temple. “Very good. Now let me kiss you before I have you promising to play nice with the other sorceresses.”

  “I love you, Green,” I told him, loving the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled like that, and the way the dimness of the car, dark blue and clean to the point of disturbing, disappeared behind the halo that was my sunlight lover, my beloved, my ou’e’hm.

  “Love you too… sleep tight.” And with that, he kissed me and I slid into sleep like a swimmer slides into warm water.

  Green: The Damage Done

  GREEN DIDN’T mind dealing with greedy men—greedy men could be manipulated, and he had money to spare. He didn’t mind dealing with petty men or corrupt men—he’d spent a hundred years as Oberon’s captive wood-elf whore, and he’d seen enough corruption and pettiness to be able to manipulate those emotions in his sleep. And fuck them in his sleep as well. Nothing had been as boring as the sex in Oberon and Titania’s famed damned cold faerie hill. Pettiness was easily soothed by a willing body, and corruption easily danced away with hedonism, money, and some mental manipulation.

  Hell, if nothing else, petty, greedy, corrupt men were easy vampire marks, and Green would have had no problem asking Cory to borrow one of her people do a complete brain-wipe in order to eliminate this problem.

  So Green could deal with greed, pettiness, and corruption. He could even kill when the occasion called for it and the damage got out of hand.

  But Nolan Fields was not greedy, petty, or corrupt, and his damage had gotten out of hand long before those damning, surreal photos had ended up on Green’s breakfast table.

  “You’ll give me more of the story?” Nolan had a raspy, whiny voice—the sort of thing that went with his receding hairline, weak chin, and penchant for white polyester button-up shirts. Polyester…. Green shuddered just remembering his last meeting with the man. Ugh… did they even make those shirts anymore?

  “Within reason.” Green managed to make his voice urbane and charming, when what he really wanted to do was spark into emerald lightning, zap through the phone lines, and kill this motherfucker with a bald-faced sweep of the formidable power his people had given him to wield in his clenched fist.

  “I want pictures. The last ones didn’t come out!”

  Of course they hadn’t come out—Green had flashed supernatural power at the camera whenever it had gone off. Green had met the little turd at a cheap hotel in Auburn—if the damned device came onto the hill, it would probably melt into a miniature pile of slag.

  If only the sloppy, ugly little zealot would do the same.

  “You were taking pictures of a person that cannot be photographed, and you were taking them without my permission,” Green told the man coldly. “I’d leave your camera at home tomorrow, if you want it to work again.”

  “Yes, Lord Green.” The little man’s voice was surprisingly meek. Of course it was—Green controlled the information, the truth, the story. Nolan Fields had literally bent over and waggled his bare ass in the air, thinking that was what it would take to lure Green into telling him the truth behind the creatures in the photographs.

  Green had taken him up on his offer—not because he’d wanted the (ugh!) sex, but because absolute contact made absolute control that much easier, and Green needed some measure of control. Nolan had more than one set of photos, and he had an editor and friends and a safety-deposit box. Green needed a line on all of his safeguards before he wiped the man’s slate clean.

  “Is there anything else you want from me, Lord Green?” Nolan Fields was practically salivating in his willingness to satisfy what he thought of as “unholy Satanic lust,” and for a moment Green was tempted. One hundred years in Oberon’s court, within fifty miles of the seething hells of an unrepentant British gentry—Oberon had learned of toys and restraints, of chains and clever devices that made pain a pleasure and pleasure painful, not just for the once but to wreak the perversion on the victim’s psyche for the duration of the body’s ability to feel hunger.

  It would serve his blackmailer right if Green twisted the man’s desires into something that tormented him, but Green couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Sex was sacred in his hill—“consensual and sensual” was and had always been the rule. What Green was doing was already close enough to breaking his one cardinal rule—he wouldn’t pervert his beliefs any further, not even in the name of petty revenge.

  Green sighed. “All I want from you, my friend, is to not tell another soul about this conversation.”

  Before Green’s first visit to the cheap hotel in Auburn, his voice would have had no power over this little man. But now that Green had touched him—and touched him with power, whether or not the man knew it—Green could get him to do at least that much. But getting him to reclaim his negatives and destroy them?

  That was going to take a little bit more… finesse. Definitely some finesse.

  Green was usually great with finesse—it was his specialty—but the more time he had to spend with this obsessed reporter, the more he wished he were Bracken. Bracken would have clubbed the guy on the back of the head and made him bleed out. He would have regretted it, and would have chased his tail or made Cory chase it for him as he stomped around in pissed-off boots to clean up the mess it would have left, but he would have felt a lot less—Green shuddered—compromised.

  “I won’t tell a soul,” Nolan toadied, and Green grunted good-bye into the phone and hung up.

  “Brother, that man is bad news. You need to tell her about him, or this is going to bite you on the ass.”

  Green turned to face Arturo with his expression still pinched from the call itself and nodded, feeling an unfamiliar surge of temper—but not aimed toward Arturo.

  “If this next visit doesn’t solve it, I will,” he agreed, enjoying Arturo’s surprised lift of the brows. Green gave a distracted grin and shrugged. “Well, what do you want from me, mate? She’s stood by my side for nearly two years now. It feels wrong to have a secret from her, even when I’m trying to protect her.”

  “So why didn’t you tell her straight off?” Arturo asked with a glance over his shoulder. Green was talking from the phone on the breakfast-nook table, an old-fashioned kind of phone with an actual cord. There were too many creatures in Green’s hill who could disappear or fly off with a portable hand unit, and after losing an embarrassing number of them, Green had finally gone back to the one from the eighties movies. The one drawback was that Green couldn’t disappear into his room with the phone—and given the open nature of the hill, that wasn’t usually a problem.

  But folk were moving in and out today, trying to pack for the hastily planned camping trip, and Arturo didn’t want Cory among them. It would be one thing if Green told her what he’d done himself—quite another if she found out by mistake.

  Green scrubbed his face with his hands. “I miss the days when she was innocent,” he said. “I love her more than ever, but… it would be nice to protect her from the worst of the nastiness in the world, you know?”

  Arturo gaped. “Brother, you’ve been sending her out on runs all winter… and did you see her the other night?”

  Green waved him off and met his second’s eyes frankly. “Arturo, her ability to handle the supernatural world has never been in question. She’s always been our weapon—I think she’s learned to live with it.” He paused, remembering that echoing conversation in the wee hours of a wedding
celebration. “In fact,” he mused, “I think she has enough control now to be even more than that.”

  “Then….”

  Green grimaced. “You know as well as I do that the one thing our little Goddess has the most trouble with is the world she grew up in.”

  Arturo scowled, copper lightning shooting from his irritated eyes. “Fucking humans,” he growled.

  “It’s not as fun as it sounds,” Green replied with a completely straight face.

  Arturo’s eyes bugged, and Green had enough perspective to chuckle quietly as he turned back toward the garage to continue with the packing.

  But it was hard, seeing her sitting in the SUV as meek as a child, trusting that he would do the right thing for her. She was his ou’e’eir, his equal, his beloved, the one person who could stand next to him and help him shoulder the responsibilities of leader, and who would love him through the decisions he would have to make.

  If anybody would understand, it would be her.

  She slanted him one of her masking looks, trying to show him that giving her control over to him didn’t bother her in the least. He knew that it did, and he shook his head.

  She didn’t need this extra thing, this extra problem in the human world. She was happy dealing with the supernatural, the dangerous, the paranormal. He would shoulder the burdens she was least comfortable with—anything to earn that implicit trust she gave him as she raised her face and waited for his kiss.

  When she slumped forward into his arms, he tucked a pillow behind her head and leaned her back, rubbing her cheek with his own. He backed out of the car, and Bracken was there, waiting to get in and take over in the oddly satisfying tag team they’d developed in the last year and a half.