by Amy Lane
Nicky smirked. “Yeah, right up until you knocked Jacky out of his socks.”
“Unfortunately,” I added, “Jacky wasn’t wearing any.” There was a ripple of laughter, and Teague flushed. Then I went back to the topic. We tended not to dissect or categorize in Green’s hill—we accepted things as they were—but I’d been living with the bizarre, wonderful, and sometimes terrifying things that erupted from my body for coming on two years now, and I had some theories.
“Energy,” I said thoughtfully. “My body converts emotional energy to… kinetic energy, like chlorophyll. And like any energy, there’s a couple of uses. Destructive, defensive—”
“Creative…,” my lover whispered huskily in my ear, and I flushed.
“Creative,” I acknowledged and then added, “Which can also be destructive if you don’t direct it right. And that’s the key, I guess. It took me a while—I’m still learning—but it’s all directed by my will.”
“Which is pretty fucking indestructible,” Bracken said out loud, and I shrugged modestly.
“I get pissed off a lot,” I said, and there was another ripple of laughter.
“Yeah,” Teague said, and one of the reasons he fit right in with us was that he might be curious about my power, but he’d let me be pissed off if I wanted to. “But what do you get out of it? I mean, Jacky, Katy and me, we get superspeed and superhearing and superstrength…. What do you get? Besides extended life, I mean.”
I blinked. “What do you mean, extended life?” I asked blankly. We all turned that blank look to him, and Teague gaped at me in stark shock.
“But… the werewolves… we age at, what—One-quarter? One-third?—the normal human rate. Don’t you… aren’t you like us? Or the elves?” The dismay on his face was eloquent, and I couldn’t figure out where it came from.
I shrugged, trying to be casual. “Nope. I’m pretty much like you were before Katy bit you. Just a really well-armed redneck, who knows a little more than most.”
“But then… how old are you? Like twenty-three?”
I sniffed, my dignity a little affronted. “I’ll be twenty-two in July.”
Teague was oblivious to my irritation. “Awww… aww, fuck.” He shook his head in disgust. “Goddammit, I’ve been telling Jacky he’s too young. How am I supposed to keep him away when you’re younger than he is?”
This had gone on long enough. “You’re not, Teague. You started out as a partnership, you’ve got to continue on as a partnership and live with it. And you’ve got to live with it on your own time—because right now, we’ve got an op to plan.”
Everybody stood at attention, which reassured me a little—I was really hoping I hadn’t lost everybody’s confidence by all that confessional shit, and sure enough, we looked good to go. Except….
“Wait a minute, lovey,” Lambent called out, and I almost said, What the fuck is it now? except he’d been pretty decent after I stole his fire, as it were, so I just turned long-suffering eyes to him and gestured for him to proceed.
“You didn’t answer his question, luv—what do you get from all of this?” Lambent’s flame-colored hair crackled around his face in the shadows, and the ambient light that radiated hotly from his lovely, lean elfin features was just bright—and red—enough for him to look mildly demonic against the velvet of the night.
“Unconditional love,” I quipped. Bracken snorted into the hollow of my shoulder, and none of the others were buying it.
“Oh, for the love of crap on toast!” I was fucking done with this. “I get to help Green. I get to be useful. I get to have a purpose and do something important with my life! And right now, because I say so, goddammit, I get to have my way and drop This Is Your Fucked-up Supernatural Life! Can we just, for the love of my foot up your asses, go out and fight some fucking vampire bears?”
I hadn’t meant to be funny, but for some reason that had them all laughing, and this time we really did get down to business.
And in this case the business was that I was a liability.
I couldn’t see in the dark for shit. I mean, I wasn’t night-blind or anything, but compared to everybody else, I might as well be. Even the Avians had superior night vision, which went so far against nature that I wanted to have a little chat with the Goddess and give her a piece of my habanero-hot mind. If I was going to run on the ground, I’d need to keep my little lantern up, and that would probably scare off the bad guys—even my vampires didn’t want to get too close to it, because it was way too much like the fatal sun for them to be comfortable.
Besides, I was the only one of our little tribe without some sort of jacked-up hyperspeed. And since my flying was still in the elementary stages, well, there was one solution, and it was pretty fucking embarrassing.
“Piggyback?” I asked my beloved unhappily, again. He chuckled, standing up straight after that extended period of draping over me like an oversized sidhe-coat. I was abruptly aware of how cold I was, but I gritted my teeth balefully and turned my ass toward the glowing firepit.
“It’s not like we don’t carry you all the time!” he laughed, and I just glowered.
“Not when I’m perfectly healthy,” I grumbled, but I decided to just leave it be. We had a plan and an agenda, and that was nothing to fuck with, so piggyback it would have to be.
There would be two teams. Lambent, Mario, Marcus, and Max (go alliteration!), with Renny and Kyle bringing up the rear, would take the east side of the lake with the campgrounds, the hillside, and the road loop that led to the levy nearby. Phillip, Teague, Nicky, and Bracken would buzz down the road and take the west side of the lake. We’d be passing the hidden cave Teague had investigated before the vampire bear had cut him off from the car at the lake parking lot. The two teams would scatter to sight-distance apart and run the land, hoping to catch a scent or feel or hear a sound that would clue them into something preternatural and wrong.
I, of course, would be along for the ride.
“You’re sure you can see?” I asked as he settled my legs around his lean hips. He’d slung a blanket around his back, sarong style, to use as a cradle, and even if my death grip on his shoulders failed, the blanket and his rather amazing sense of balance should keep me secure. I kept reminding myself that he was supernaturally strong, so I would be okay back there, but ask me how I felt to be putting my entire person at the mercy of supernatural strength, speed, and grace—in the dark.
“I can see,” he replied mildly, knowing exactly what was on my mind.
“You’re not going to trip, are you?” I whined, hating myself.
Bracken’s look was full of indignation. “Trip? Sidhe don’t trip!”
“The hell you don’t!” I argued. “I’ve seen you trip twice.”
“Those don’t count,” he responded with dignity, nodding toward Teague, who was now a big scary blond wolf. Teague gave a yip, and two distant mrowls resounded through the whooshing quiet of the woods as a reply. Mario and Nicky screeched from overhead, and Kyle, Marcus, and Phillip gave me the all clear between my ears. I nodded to Phillip—or where I thought he was—and he replied, “I’m almost behind you, sweetheart. Stop trying to see in the dark and just hold on.”
“Why don’t they count?” I asked peevishly, and his chuckle was lost in the whooshing of the wind as we started our hyperspeed trot through the underbrush.
My eyes teared up and were totally useless in about two seconds, so I gave in to the inevitable, closed them, and rested my cheek on Bracken’s back. I asked permission into Phillip’s head and was treated to the dizzying sight of my backside as Bracken trotted gracefully through the woodland, until Phillip did me a solid and looked elsewhere.
It was like being stuck in a real-life version of the Blair Witch Project. Phillip could see everything, but it was all strangely lighted in his vampire’s vision—the branches overhead appearing in an eerie, front-lit negative and the trees in the background turning even darker with an almost foggy ambience.
“Goddess, Phillip
, is this how the night always looks?”
I felt his wolfish, predatory grin in my head. “No, sweetheart, sometimes there’s the red heartbeat of prey.” Phillip had a pale oval of a face and a deep black widow’s peak—just picturing him saying those words was a cross between incredibly cheesy and chilling to the bone.
“Nice.” I concentrated on not getting dizzy as I tracked his vision and my own location through the wooded darkness.
The terrain grew terrifyingly steep, as though we were sticking out horizontally to the ground from the side of a sheer drop, and even Bracken and Phillip had to reach to keep their long bodies from overbalancing. Eventually things leveled off, and I realized we were on the hillside that overlooked the steep and winding road leading into the campgrounds.
Brother, looking at that road, I could only be glad Green had put me under. If I had barfed all the way down that, I wouldn’t have been able to stand, much less cling to Bracken’s bunching shoulders with bony, clutching fingers.
Then something startled us—all of us. We came to such a sudden stop that I think Nicky almost dropped out of the sky, and I was in some danger of being rocketed over Bracken’s shoulders.
But stop we did, and I looked through Phillip’s eyes, as frustrated as he was that I couldn’t see anything. Teague gave a low growl—a very frightening sort of sound in that elemental blackness—which meant that whatever it was, he could smell it. Bracken gave a very soft grunt.
Reluctantly I pulled out of Phillip’s head and peered around the forest floor of dead wood and dust, trying to see.
I still couldn’t see, but the three vampire marks at my neck gave a giant throb, and I shivered.
“Vampire.” My lips were close enough to touch Bracken’s ear, and his body tensed with the urge to make me quiet down. I felt his nod, and sent the thought to Phillip. He agreed, and Teague had obviously recognized the smell.
I aimed a thought to Marcus and Kyle and got a confirmation that they had turned around and were heading our way. Then I searched the darkness with Phillip’s eyes, still disoriented by the cold and white way in which vampires saw the night.
I spotted Teague’s blond wolf, glowing redly with all of that hyperthermic shape-shifter blood. He was all but chasing his tail in an effort to pinpoint the smell that was singing along his nerve endings. The nervous energy signature that vibrated from him was so very like the man’s personality—intense, bright forest green, and shimmering with movement.
His preternatural energy was so bright it almost blinded Phillip and me to the whirling red eyes behind him. But we both saw it in time to scream “Teague! Behind you!”
Teague whirled and snapped, and the fight was on.
I couldn’t fucking follow the action—I wasn’t a vampire yet, and I didn’t want to be—but whatever it was, it was big, Teague was howling and snapping at it, and its mrowls back sounded exclusively feline.
I swore and threw a light ball above the trees. The thing snarled and recoiled, but it kept its teeth locked around Teague’s ruff. Teague was practically breaking his own neck in an attempt to whip himself around and sink his teeth into it, a dirty brown animal with mud-matted fur.
“Stop them!” I hollered to Phillip. Phillip blurred to the thing and caught it under its compact, wiry body, yanking it away from Teague and holding it out by the scruff of the neck like a man would hold a dog who’d rolled in shit.
“All right, I give,” I huffed as Bracken slid the blanket out from under my ass and I wriggled my way down his body and around him. “What in the fuck is that again?”
“Watch it, dammit!” Teague called, naked and crouching back against a tree, blood running from a closing wound on his neck. “That thing’s teeth are fucking long!”
“Bracken, stay clear!” I called, running closer. A quick thought told me that Marcus and the others were getting closer—we’d been about fifteen minutes out, so we had another ten minutes before they got here. As I got closer, Nicky tapped down next to me and changed, and together we approached the big ugly thing in Phillip’s grasp. It was snarling with an insane amount of force. If Phillip hadn’t had the Goddess’s strength, he would have been fucked royally, and I made sure I stayed back.
I got close enough to stop and look at it, and my glowing ball came with me. The thing cowered and yowled again as the ball got closer. “Anybody got any ideas?” I asked, at a loss. It looked like a young mountain lion—about half the size of a grown one—and it was lean, with muscled legs and massive paws. Its teeth were three times the normal size. Fur that should have been bright and gold was covered in mud, twigs, leaves, and what appeared to be—urgh!—maggots, and from the smell….
“I think it’s dead?” A look of revulsion crossed Phillip’s face as it writhed in his grip. “Its flesh is cold enough to be a brass monkey’s nut….”
I stared intently at the poisonously glowing green eyes, looking for a hint of intelligence, a hint of drive—hell, even a hint of the power it had taken to completely annihilate the family of four that had brought us up here in the first place. We’d already figured that the vampire bear wouldn’t have done it—there wouldn’t have been anything left if it had been that monster—but, judging by this one’s size, it wasn’t looking like a good bet either.
“It’s weird enough to be a brass monkey’s nightmare!” I said, half to myself, aware that I was probably making no goddamned sense at all. The light got closer, the vampire puma—?—screamed, and Phillip put his hand in front of his eyes, saying, “Goddess, Cory, could you put that thing away?” Then a shrill voice jerked us both around, causing Phillip to drop the vampire critter at my feet.
The thing lunged at me, and I did what I do. I scooped it up in a glowing light ball to keep it from getting to my thighs, which is where it was about to leap and probably chew.
It did what a vampire would do inside one of my light balls. It caught fire, disintegrated, and died, and the little voice that had distracted us in the first place screeched, “No! No no no no no no you big ugly troll, you can’t kill him, he’s my friend!!”
We all turned toward the shadows and my ball got a little brighter.
“Stop it! It burns!” the voice whimpered. I dimmed my glow and said, as gently as I could, “Uhm, sweetheart—we hear you, and we’re not going to hurt you, but, uhm, could you step out of there so we could see you?”
I dimmed the light some more, and we stood in the clearing in silence as a child stepped into the blank space in the underbrush.
She was small, about eight or nine—eight, if she was who I thought she was. Her hair was probably dark blonde, but it was snarled and dirty and full of twigs. She was wearing a ripped and ragged pair of jeans, and a brown sweater that might have been purple once was hanging on to her neck by a thread.
She was angry, so her eyes were whirling red, and her fangs were out.
Most of us swore by the Goddess as she stepped into our midst, except Teague, who said, “Oh, holy fuck!”
The child vampire turned toward him imperiously. “That’s not nice—my Daddy said swearing gets you spanked!”
“I’ll remember that,” muttered Teague before he put his hand in front of his vitals and turned back into a bleeding werewolf in pure embarrassment. There was a hideous, hellific, awkward silence as we all caught our breaths and the implications crashed around our ears like freak waves.
Cory: Vampire Queen Dearest
WE COULDN’T convince her to come to our campfire that first night. She’d seen me kill her beloved pet (well, shit!), and I’d scared her with the big fireball, and Teague had been naked, and then a bunch of other men and scary animals came thundering up, and all in all it frightened the hell out of her. She zipped back to the cave like a spider monkey on speed, and I jumped on Bracken’s back and did everything but kick his sides. I called Marcus, Phillip, and Kyle with me, and made the others stay back.
She really wasn’t that far away. My sense of direction in the black of night was for shit
, but mostly it was up a hill, down a hill, around a hill, and in the side of a hill. I never would have found it during the day, but the vamps assured me that, eventually, they would have found it this particular night. As we neared it, I tried to formulate a plan.
Judging by the smell, it was probably the cave formerly inhabited by the deceased vampire bear, and judging by the desiccated animal corpses that littered the hills around the entrance, she had been there about a month.
I had so many questions. Most of them I wanted to discuss with the vampires while Bracken and Green were listening, but not the little girl. Not an option—contact tonight was necessary because we didn’t have much time.
“What was her name again?” I asked Green in my head as we neared the cave. I think I shocked the hell out of him—he was eating dinner at the breakfast table and talking animatedly to Grace. When my voice popped into his head, he swallowed his linguini badly and she smacked him cheerfully on the back. I laughed because he didn’t have to let me see him be “human,” and then posed the question a little more intelligently.
“The little girl from the family that was killed,” I specified. “What was her name again?”
“Mmmm….” He stood up, I think, and went to the computer to look up the article. The four of us looked at each other in the darkness with that head-bobbing thing that you usually do when you’re waiting for your computer, and then he said, “Gretchen, why?”
When I told him, the entire world went gray with the force of his anxiety. “Oh, luv.” He hesitated. “This is not going to end well.”
Before I could ask him why, or get details from the vamps, we heard that fearful, angry little voice call out, “Go away!” So I bailed out of Green’s head and put my attention where it needed to be for the moment.
“Gretchen?” I asked gently. “Gretchen? Is that your name, honey? I need to know it’s you so we can talk like grown-ups here, okay?”
“I’m eight,” she said stubbornly, “and you look about fifteen.”
