by Amy Lane
“I’ll take good care of her,” Brack affirmed with a respectful nod of his head. Bracken had lived on the hill since birth—he had loved Green all his life, and things like that nod were not things Green took for granted.
“I count on it, brother,” Green nodded back, and with a sigh he got out of the way. He regretted it, he thought, watching his people pack for a journey without him. He regretted not being the one to go out and find the bad guys and kick some ass. He hadn’t been great at it—mostly, in the early days, it had been Adrian and the other vampires who’d spilled the blood—but he had enjoyed it.
But now, watching Cory’s organized, well-lubricated product of personal engineering kick into action, he realized once again that when it came to leading his people, he had always had another part to play.
Cory: Midnight in a Man’s World
WHEN I woke up, it was nearly dark, I was cold, and all the men were gathered outside of the SUV in front of the firepit.
Bracken was shaking me awake with what amounted to a sheepish expression on his rugged, beautiful face.
“C’mon, Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “We need you conscious.”
“Don’t I get a kiss?” I mumbled, and Bracken Brine, my stone-and-shadow beloved, my due’alle, actually snorted.
“You’ve been sleeping with your mouth open. Here….” And he actually had the nerve to pop one of those god-awful breath-freshener tapes in my mouth. While I was sputtering in outrage—now very awake; Goddess those things are strong!—he kissed me, hard and fast, and pulled away while I was still reeling from being breath-freshened into consciousness.
“What in the fuck do you want?” I asked, trying not to gape at him like a stoned turtle.
“We need you to start the fire,” he said sulkily, not looking at me.
“What the hell is Lambent doing?” I asked, unhooking my seat belt anyway. “That guy could probably piss on those logs and start something.”
“Yes, lovey,” said that unmistakable Brit-transplant voice from over in the dark muddle of men’s silhouettes. “But since you told me I couldn’t take a piss without your express permission, I thought I’d hold off on that.”
I glared into the darkness and realized that even standing still, not releasing any power at all, the guy was a subtle glow in the shadows. I shivered, abruptly freezing my ass off in one of those sudden, teeth-chattering waves that happens when you fall asleep near twilight.
“I could always catheterize you with broken glass and see what kind of fire you pissed then,” I shot back through a tight, shuddering jaw. “Would you light the damned fire?”
“Are you sure I won’t burn the forest down, luv?” he asked, still snarky, and my temper snapped. A giant fireball appeared over everybody’s head and plummeted down into the log pile in the firepit.
I caught it, of course, and contained it, and it landed without so much as a puff of ash, but I had wrecked Lambent’s fun and I knew it.
“Spoilsport,” he muttered. I’m sure he would have called me something worse, but Bracken was there, the need for the guy’s blood throbbing under his fingers, and I don’t think Lambent wanted to take any chances.
“Next time,” I said sweetly, sticking my arms into the hooded zippered fleecy thing Bracken was holding out for me, “you’ll light the fire when you have a chance, won’t you?”
In the immediate orange glow of the pit I saw the flickery-thin, orange-haired elf stick his tongue out at me, and I stuck my tongue out back. But that was the end. He gave a little bow, a small concession that I had won the battle of wills, and abruptly he was the loyal—and humble—elf he had been in Green’s living room. Boundary-pushing asshole—Goddess save me from five-hundred-year-old toddlers.
“Now, children,” Bracken chastised, but he was wrapping a wool scarf around my neck and putting a Grace-made hat on my head and if he was going to baby me and Lambent was going to behave, I was perfectly happy to play nice with the other boys.
“He started it,” I retorted, and then let it lie. I looked around the campsite, noting that a number of tents had been put up on the flat spot reserved for them, and there was a supper laid out on the picnic table behind the guys.
“Did anyone bring a lamp?” I asked, and was met by seven blank stares. I shook my head. “Of course not,” I said to myself, making a glow like I had the other night. I made sure it was a cold glow—not the heated miniexplosion I’d used to light the campfire—and fixed it to a tree in my mind. It would stay there and, well, glow, until I told it not to. “The only one here with crappy human night vision is the stupid-ass human woman leading all the dumbshit men.”
Renny meowed and bumped my hand with her head. I scratched her behind the ears as I went up to the table and rooted through the containers holding the remnants of a decent cold supper.
“You don’t count unless you’re human, puss,” I told her truthfully, and she gave the cat version of a shrug and clawed my calf before sulking off to purr on Max’s feet. I glared at Max and he shrugged in return, and I threw together a sandwich and then looked around some more.
We had camped in the upper loop above the lake, which was probably good, because I bet the mosquitoes this time of year would really suck, in spite of the cold. Much of the shore by the lake itself was marshy, and I imagined the water was getting warm enough to make more of the little bloodsucking bastards, so I was just as happy to be up top.
The land itself was pretty—the campgrounds were set on the slope of a large hill, so the flat spot for the tents was mandatory, but the trees were tall pines, and as I stood and peered into the shadows past their silhouettes, I could see the last pewter shades of light glance off the small, mutant-eyeball-shaped lake. The air around me smelled like pine and damp red earth, growing grass, and clean, rain-washed stones—in fact, smells that reminded me an awful lot of Bracken and Green—and I pulled in great gulps of it, because it centered me in my new place.
I turned back toward the men and moved to the campfire, munching on my sandwich thoughtfully, and in a moment there was the creak and grate of metal as the specially designed trapdoor hidden in the floor of one of the SUVs opened up and the vampires spilled out. They flickered out into the twilight in sort of a dark counterpoint to Lambent’s faint glow, and ranged themselves around the campfire, eyes glowing red against the shadows.
“You guys going to eat?” I asked through a full mouth. Marcus and Phillip chuckled deeply, while Kyle nodded with some enthusiasm. “Then someone better bring Renny a blanket!” I reminded, swallowing my roast beef and sourdough and looking around.
“No worries, chica,” Mario volunteered cheerfully as Nicky was moving toward Phillip with a playful waggle of eyebrows. I shrugged—feeding could be a sensual experience or it could be a friendly one. Friendly seemed to be the order of the day.
Max grunted and trotted off into the shadows with the others, and I fought the urge to goggle—friendly or not, I always had a fascination with that gentle “snick” of the skin, and the pure look of blissful concentration as the vampires pulled blood from their food.
The look of pleasure on the food’s face did something for me as well. It had been a long time since a vampire had fed from me.
I gazed thoughtfully into the darkness, seeing only the shadowed forms of the men as one swooped and the other surrendered. Something about the helplessness of the food and the aggressiveness of the predator—and, let’s face it, the unabashed slurping—made me remember that moment in bed with my lovers, and the look in Bracken’s eyes as he’d taken Nicky’s body into his mouth.
As though thinking it conjured Bracken, he was there, his arms around me, the very press of his body as intimate as his words.
“You liked that, didn’t you?” he teased.
I shivered—and not just from the cold. “Stop it, you horny bastard,” I tried to snap, but I ended up whispering the last part, and Bracken’s thrusts through our clothing made me wetter than I was already. Then he leaned down
and whispered in my ear, but it wasn’t what I thought he’d say.
“Look at Teague,” he said, and there wasn’t a damned lascivious note in his voice.
I looked over to where the bandy-legged Irish werewolf stood, and he was looking into the dark with a sort of baffled, fascinated look and shifting his stance uncomfortably as he stood. Our poor little bisexual werewolf was fairly aroused, and suddenly a number of things about Jack and Katy’s behavior clicked into place.
I looked sharply over my shoulder at Bracken, his gorgeous face made ever darker and more brooding by the orange light from the fire.
“That’s not supposed to happen,” I said, surprised, and I felt Bracken’s nod as his chin brushed my ear. When werewolves mated, the urge for anyone else was supposed to go away. Unless a vampire was directly feeding from Teague, he should have been fascinated, but not aroused.
“Explains a lot,” Bracken said. “You’re going to have to talk to him later.”
“Me?” I asked, startled. Wasn’t this “Man Territory”?
“You’re his captain.” I could hear the shrug in his voice. “He may be the werewolves’ alpha, but you’re his. Besides, you know I don’t talk about relationships.”
That comment was so unlikely that I almost snorted roast beef up my nose, but Bracken nuzzled my ear. My attention wandered back to where the feeding was finishing up, and my sarcasm stayed my own.
The prey stood up and allowed the predators to lick the little puncture wounds on their necks so the holes would close. Because they were all shape-shifters, there would be no scars, but underneath my preternaturally glowing purple vampire marks, my scars stayed mine. Adrian had been a gentle feeder and an ardent lover, and I’d worn those scars with pride and watched sadly as they began to fade.
After letting the blood donors get some more food, we found ourselves gathering naturally around the firepit in what probably looked like one of those blissful dark-of-night conversations that can last into the wee hours of the glowing embers. Because we’d all worked together before, we all knew it for the strategy meeting it would eventually be.
Like magic, literally, there were lawn chairs ranged in a rough circle around us—but I’d been sleeping for hours, so I stayed standing. Bracken was snug against my back, which was another reason not to sit down, but Nicky took a seat next to me, leaned his cheek against my leg, and wrapped his hand around my inner thigh. I ran my fingers through his longish, spiky hair as conversation flowed around us like water babble.
Teague was the one who actually pulled the conversation into a focus—if not a useful focus—by bringing everybody’s attention to the one person who usually didn’t accompany us on jobs like this one.
“Hey, Max, what in the fuck is Renny doing here? She’s no fighter.”
Max scowled, but not at Teague, and rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask me, brother,” he replied in complete exasperation. “I packed, and then she dropped a bag next to mine, and when I would have said something, she turned into a cat. I had to drive the damned vampmobile—it’s not like I could turn cat and ask her!”
“Maybe,” I said with meaning, “she didn’t want to be left behind.”
Teague scowled at me. “I don’t like putting them in danger,” he growled for the millionth time.
“So I’ve noticed,” I said. Bracken suppressed a chuckle.
“Well, how do you do it?” Teague demanded from Bracken, and I had to smirk at the totally autocratic way he’d gone over my head to the hulking male behind me.
“As though I had a choice,” Bracken growled, his hands tightening around me. “You’ve seen her when she gets left behind!”
Urgh… please… let’s not drag that story into it. I took pity on the big inarticulate asshole. “The thing is,” I supplied, sticking a foot out to the fire so the sole of my foot would get hot when I stood on it, “it’s not like any of us had a choice.”
Max snorted, Phillip and Marcus made harrumphing sounds, and I saw that Kyle, Teague, and Lambent were looking at us with avid eyes. I guess a statement like that was bound to elicit a little curiosity.
I shrugged. “It’s just, you know, the bad guys kept coming after me, and I kept walking away.”
“That’s something of an overstatement,” Nicky observed leaning his cheek against my leg. I stroked his hair some more, and Bracken’s hands too, trying to comfort them.
“Fine,” I agreed. “The men kept carrying me away.”
Nobody laughed, not even a little. Teague’s eyes met Bracken’s over my head again.
“Man,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve only seen her when she’s leading. That other thing—that must have been rough.”
“What’s rough,” said Bracken gruffly, “is that I cannot count the number of times it’s happened.”
“Can we change the subject, please?” I asked sharply, but Teague, who never reached for anything, was suddenly a werewolf with a bone.
“No—I’m curious. If it’s been such a near thing—if you’ve been carried from as many battles as you’ve walked away from—why do you keep doing it?”
I shrugged again. “Because I’m the one who can,” I said, flushing in the firelight. Wasn’t it funny how we were all huddled around the bright orange light, but the darkness and the five billion layers of clothes kept us all drifting in our own little wool-padded worlds?
“So what is it, exactly, that you do?”
“Jesus, Teague,” I grumbled. “You couldn’t have asked me this shit months ago when we started making runs?”
“No,” he said, looking around at the others and their avid attention. Even the guys who’d been there wanted to know what I’d say. “No, this time’s about right.”
“Okay, fine,” I snapped, wanting this conversation to be over. He followed my orders, he ate at my table—all of them, in one way or another, had sworn this sort of outrageous, old-fashioned, knight-in-shiny-fucking-armor fealty toward me, for no other reason than, what? I was Green’s girl? I jumped in the car and said, Hey, let’s go kill something! and that sounded like a laugh riot? I was the only girl in the car, and they were all just too damned chivalrous to the bone?
“I’m a sorceress—I don’t know how it happened. Pretty much everybody who settled this area was from Wales and Ireland and Northern England back about a zillion years ago. Somewhere in my family tree, one of Green’s people got busy with a peasant, and hullo, a few shakes of the genetic milk shake later, voi-fucking-la! Here I am.”
“Does it run in the family?” Teague asked, perhaps a little fearfully. We knew—all of us—how much that question would mean to him. His body was covered in scars, but unlike my scars, his had all come from someone who was supposed to care for him.
“I doubt it,” Nicky answered for me, his voice as flat as he could make it. “Her mother could suck the magic out of a Harry Potter convention.”
Bracken, Nicky, and I all snorted, and Renny and Max let out something of a chuckle. “I don’t know,” Bracken said archly. “We had plenty of magic left over that one morning, didn’t we?”
“Yeah”—I remembered—“but she tried her damnedest, didn’t she?” There was another round of smirking, but Teague was waiting expectantly and the night was wearing on. When this conversation was over, we were going to make plans to put ourselves into some serious mortal danger. Exploring the memory of my mother walking in on me and my three lovers—thank the Goddess we were sleeping by that time!—after our first time together as a collective would probably have to wait.
“Anyway,” I continued, “I… when I came into my power, someone was after Adrian….” Well, we all knew how that ended, didn’t we? “They kept trying to attack me—to hurt him before they killed him, right? And my power was coming out, and I had no idea how to control it, and I kept… you know, killing bad guys, right?”
Bracken grunted behind me, and Max made a little sound as well. Even Nicky, who knew my body and the scars it carried from that time, shuddered a little
and clutched me closer.
“It wasn’t that simple?” Teague asked, eyes bright in the darkness.
“What do you want me to say, brother?” Bracken asked him harshly. “She wasn’t even mine to love then, but I got to watch her bleed, didn’t I? She’d go out and bleed, and Green would fix her up and she’d go out again.”
“Or she’d grind herself into the ground,” Nicky added forlornly. “Exhaust herself and get carried back, dying of fever….”
“And then refuse to let us give her life,” Max finished, and I was done.
“And you’ve all done the same for me, so fuck you all!” I snapped, my voice thick. “We do that for each other, and that’s just how we fit. You don’t get the gifts I have and just run around wild with them. If you don’t use them right, they’re just… wildness, waiting to destroy….”
“Wait a minute!” Kyle burst out, and I winced. The kiss of vampires I’d killed had been Kyle’s family. His beloved had died because she befriended me on a college track. The sandy-haired vampire had a broad, low forehead, and although I’d blooded him and trusted him, I still had a hard time meeting his deep-set, angry eyes.
“What?” I asked, wishing I could go back to the SUV and sleep some more. I hated talking about this shit—I barely spoke about it to Hallow, and Green made me see him because he was supposed to be my shrink! Spilling my guts out, even in the intimacy of the campfire, was an uncomfortable business. But these men followed me, and this subject was important to how they saw me as a leader. Goddess, sometimes this job sucked large.
“That’s not all you do with your power. We’ve seen you,” Kyle was adding rather sheepishly. “It’s not… wildness….”
“Yeah, what exactly is your power?” Teague asked, and this time there was no agenda at all to his curiosity. “I mean, that bubble thing you did the other night was awfully goddamned cool.” Fact was, I’d done the bubble thing with Teague before—but he hadn’t been in any condition to notice.
