by Amy Lane
“I’m twenty-two,” I replied with as much dignity as I could muster.
“You’re still not old enough to be my mother.”
“Thank Goddess,” I snapped, tired of being schooled by an eight-year-old. “I don’t want to be your mother, I just want to get you someplace where you don’t have to suck down a poor—” I kicked at the nearest animal corpse. “—jackrabbit for food.”
“Well, what else am I supposed to eat?” she demanded. “It’s not like there’s any people out here, after….” She stopped abruptly, and I had a sudden, horrid, sick suspicion of what, exactly, had killed her family.
“Our werewolves and werekitties will feed you willingly,” I told her, swallowing hard at what damage we might have to fix in the poor child’s mind. Green might have been able to do it, I thought queasily—if she’d been an adult. But she wasn’t, and the things that usually worked for the hill weren’t going to work for her. I took another breath and got my head in the game.
“But you have to be gentle,” I added, thinking about Nicky and Renny and Max and Teague and all of the people I didn’t want to end up looking like the flat satchel of skin-covered bone at my feet. “They hurt easy.” Any one of them could pick me up and throw me so far I wouldn’t hit ground for a week—but then, so could she.
“Why should I trust you? You hurt my cat.”
Goddess. “Kitty was gonna eat me, honey,” I said, keeping my voice firm and not guilty at all, nope-no-way-nuh-uh. “I know that’s not what you had in mind, but I needed to get him away from me. I didn’t realize….” Well, that was a lie, wasn’t it? I did realize. I just didn’t put it all together in the spur of the moment. “I didn’t remember what my power did to vampires right then.” Oh crap, that only made me sound flaky. An eight-year-old vampire who’d been living in the woods for a month—it was like doing African tribal dancing on the ledge of a building. Sure, there was some really spectacular footwork—but when that was over, the free fall was a sonuvabitch.
“Who says you’re not going to do the same to me?” Her voice was echoing out from the little cave, but I could tell she’d moved closer to the mouth of it. This was good and bad, I thought edgily, considering how pissed she was at me right at that moment.
I took a deep breath and crouched down. “Honey, some of my best friends are vampires. You don’t see me cooking them to dust, do you?”
“Hey….” Her voice was suspicious, and we could hear her edge backward again. “What is that stuff glowing on your neck under your shirt?”
It must have been the complete darkness around us—the moon was still down, and the only light was starlight filtering down through the trees, which I could now see in silhouette, thank the Goddess. Usually, Adrian’s vampire marks weren’t visible unless you looked for them and my neck was bare.
“My….” I searched for the human word. “My first boyfriend, he loved me very much. He… he marked me. Made me his. Connected me with the rest of the vampires, even though I’m not one.”
Sudden, avid curiosity. “I saw that movie!” she said, poking her head out of the cave. “Were you like Bella and everything?”
I shook my head. Adrian had been around long before Twilight had become the rage. “Neither of us were as nice as Bella and Edward,” I told her now, honestly. “I was angry, and Adrian was… lost. Together we made one good person and one strong person, and that was different too.”
“Did you break up?” she asked curiously, and I shook my head, coming down to face her. Her eyes weren’t whirling anymore, and her fangs were only partially out—more in hunger, I would imagine, than anger.
“He died protecting me,” I said. “I miss him every night.”
“I miss my mom and dad,” she said nakedly. I had nothing to say to that.
“I can’t bring them back.” Oops—so much for honesty. With a huff and a pissy look on her little face, she burrowed back into the cave.
“No one asked you to. Now go away!”
I smacked my forehead with my hand and cleared off a spot of underbrush so I wouldn’t sit on anything dead, then plunked my fat ass down and settled in for a little vampire-queen-to-unwilling-subject chat.
“Gretchen, sweetheart….” And why do we always feel like we have to use endearments with children? “I don’t know what you’ve been through. I don’t know what happened to you. I don’t even know if I can say or do anything to make you feel better.”
“Then you don’t know much, do you?” Her voice was clogged and snotty. Wonderful. I made the baby vampire cry.
“You have no idea,” I sighed. There was a silence. After I got tired of hearing the men roll their eyes, I sighed again and broke it.
“Look, I’ll tell you what I do know.” My hands twitched with agitation, and I realized that I wanted my knitting. I could knit in the dark, I thought a little desperately. It would definitely make my maternal side a little more visible, that was for damn sure. I mean, at this point it couldn’t hurt.
“What?” Her voice was less muffled—and damn, she had to be scared. It was about time I offered her some fucking comfort.
“I know that you’re a vampire, and it’s about to get hot and sunny up here, and then you’re screwed.”
“That’s a bad word.” But I could tell she enjoyed hearing it.
“It’s a bad world,” I told her implacably. If anyone knew that, it would have to be the eight-year-old who had been savagely killed—and then, very possibly, did some savage killing herself. “And you’re in it alone right now. You saw all those men with me. You think they’re alone? They’re big and grown-up and scary, and the world would still suck if we didn’t all have each other. Now, you’re scared, and I get that. But we’ve got a house with rooms that are dark all day—”
“The sunshine hurts me…,” she whimpered, and I didn’t want to think about how she’d figured that out. I hadn’t had time to look for sunburns on her hands, but I was sure she’d had them.
“I know it does, honey,” I told her. “We can keep the sunshine away from you. We can give you werewolves and werekitties to feed you, and we can give you new clothes—”
“Can you give me a bath?” Her voice was both forlorn and hopeful. Who would have thought a bath would be the turning point?
“We sure can,” I told her with feeling. “A warm one, even.”
“Will the kitties become mine?” she asked, and there was something… avaricious in her voice. Covetous. Greedy. I recoiled, Green’s warning in the back of my head surfacing for the first time since I’d started this conversation.
“No,” I told her firmly. “The kitties are people. They can lose a little more blood more comfortably, but they will only be theirs.”
Her disappointment was palpable. It took a great deal of strength, and strength of will, to haul something back from the dead, even with the traditional near-death blood exchange, and that breath of fear fanned my heart a little warmer. She had made a vampire bear by sheer childish will. And she wanted another pet.
“I’ll have to think about it,” she said grandly, and I was surprised to find that I agreed.
“You do that, Gretchen. I’m going to leave a couple of guards at your door. You won’t even know they’re here. They’ll just keep you safe while you’re in there thinking, okay?” And keep us safe when we’re sleeping, I thought, that little chill walking over me again.
“Which ones will be there?” And I recognized craftiness when I heard it.
“You’ll have to go somewhere to find out,” I told her, but inside my head I was telling Kyle, Phillip, and Marcus that they were going to have to rotate in shifts with the weres, and that we’d pull the vampmobile up to the road so they could get into it as late and as safely as possible. And I asked Phillip what he thought the odds were that I could get Gretchen to agree to a blooding before dawn.
“None,” he said out loud, making sure I could see his red-glinting eyes in the dark. “And one of us will do it.”
My mouth opened, and
I was going to argue, but Gretchen spoke up wanting to know what we were talking about.
“We’re talking about a way to keep you safe,” I told her truthfully, and Phillip nodded his regal head in approval.
“Good.”
“We’ll talk about this at the campfire.”
“Fair enough.”
“Gretchen, hon—I’m going to leave now. I’m only human, and I’m freezing my ass off. I’m going to leave a werekitty and her husband here, and a vampire, okay?”
“The werekitty wasn’t the naked man, was he?” Teague’s nakedness had really bothered her, and I didn’t even want to dwell on why that might be.
“No, that was the werewolf. He had to be naked to turn, you know—otherwise he’d be a werewolf in a pair of jeans and a sweater, and that would be silly!”
I heard a reluctant giggle from the cave, and looked at Bracken. He nodded. The others had moved close enough to hear the conversation, so when we turned toward camp, everyone knew what was on the agenda for later.
“Be careful,” I told Kyle silently as he took up a statue’s vigil by the cave door. He nodded somberly, and something told me he hadn’t needed the extra warning. But…. “And keep Renny from going in there out of sheer stubborn perversity!” I added frantically. Renny liked playing “kitty.” I was hoping she realized that “kitty” here could end up being very different from what she had in mind. Renny bumped my hand with her head as though she’d heard me, and I scratched her behind the ears in reassurance.
Then I hopped up on Bracken’s back and stuck my ass back in the sling, and we blurred back through the terrible dark, my eyes streaming in his wind.
We were a somber group of supernatural creatures, gathering about the campfire this time. The pall of discomfort and misery that clung to us made my own personal evisceration earlier that evening look like a show-tunes review.
I wiggled out of my sling—I had now officially dubbed it the “elf-trekker”—and moodily dumped a bigger stack of sticks on the embers we’d left behind.
“I’ll blood her,” I said without passion, looking into the newly caught flame. “Green said this may turn ugly—”
“Which is why it needs to be me,” Phillip said from across the firepit. Marcus cut him an immediate glare.
“Or me!” he protested. “I know kids. I’m better equipped—”
“To get your heart broken,” interrupted Phillip again. My eyes widened, but Phillip continued before I could. “You do know kids, Marc. You care about them. I’m a heartless bastard who was planning on getting fixed before forty—I’m the best choice.”
“You mean besides the fact that you’re not the one who gets to take those risks?” I asked pleasantly.
“No,” Marcus contradicted surprisingly. “Jerkoff here—” A smack across Phillip’s head punctuated the, er, endearment. “—is kind of right. If ‘no shame’ is the vampire creed, making a vampire child is our one taboo. Nobody in Adrian’s kiss has done it. The closest any of us have come is Adrian’s friend from the mining camps, but she’d come into her adolescence before he brought her over, and I think that’s the cutoff line.”
I blinked, things slotting neatly into my groping gray matter. “Sexual maturity,” I said, seeing it. “You don’t want to make vamps before sexual maturity. That brain development shit that we got from Hallow last year….”
“I remember,” Mario said. He’d hated being in that class almost as much as I had. “There are brain chemistry changes—things grow, things shrink….”
Bracken and I met eyes too. “Vampires are so sexual…,” he said, and we both shivered. “I bet the changeover fucks large with their little brainpans.”
“Shit….” I scrubbed my face with my hands. “Guys… this could end really badly. You really don’t want a piece of this floating around in your brains if it turns south and craps, you know?”
“Not to bring up the obvious, Lady Cory”—Phillip emphasized my name and title. He never usually went in for that shit, so he obviously wanted my attention—“but I’ll have a couple of hundred years to put this in perspective. You don’t. Marc and I, we’ve been vamps for thirty years—we’ve got some distance from humans. You are one, mostly. And you wield a shitload of power. If she fucks with your mind and it bleeds over, we’re all fucked. So I’ll blood her. You and I can blood again and make our bond strong, but it’s probably not necessary. We’ve done power exchanges enough times that we’re pretty tight that way. You need to listen to me—that’s why kings and queens have knights and pawns, right?”
I squinted at him. “I really suck at chess, Phillip,” I told him in prelude to giving him a flat-out no.
“Phillip,” Marcus protested again, but Phillip gave one of those fierce gestures that I’d seen Green give me. It was the expression of the person who had the upper hand in the relationship—the expression of the most dominant party, laying down the law. “That’s not fair,” Marcus said, quietly conceding to that look and to nothing else that had been said, and Phillip shrugged.
“I’m an asshole—you know that about me, and you stay. Me. Not you.” And now I was reminded of Bracken, and I really didn’t want the dumb asshole taking risks that should be mine.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell the arrogant vampire that exact thing, but then Green, who must have been listening all along, whispered, “You promised, beloved,” and I swore again.
“Fuck.”
Bracken rubbed my neck. “He told you no, didn’t he?”
“Don’t be a smug bastard,” I snapped. “It’s not at all attractive.”
Brack bent forward and rubbed my cheek with his own. “Now, we both know that’s a lie,” he laughed softly, and I stuck my tongue out at him.
“Fine,” I grumbled. “If we make it through the night without that cute little urchin trying to make us pets in our sleep, one of you can blood her.”
Nicky caught the first thing I’d said. “Speak for yourself on the sleeping part!” he protested. “If there was ever a night to stay awake until dawn, this would be it!”
I sighed. “When we get her to the hill, we’re going to have to lock her in the steel room. You guys know that, right?” Marcus and Phillip nodded, and I made a quick trip into Green’s mind to ask him if he could have the newly redecorated room decorated yet again in “Little Girl Chic,” and he agreed.
“So I’m the one who’ll blood her, right?” Phillip asked without asking, and I looked from him to Marcus in a quandary. Phillip led—he always led between the two of them—but this time was different. They knew it could end badly, and they didn’t want their other half to be the one who ended up in the shit.
“You, Phillip,” I said after a long pause. I’d been a werewolf’s whisker from letting them decide themselves, but that would have been the coward’s way out. This way, if something went horribly wrong don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it then I could take all their blame.
“Lady Cory!” Marcus protested, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them, the sweet Italian schoolteacher was right up in front of me, having moved with that hellific preternatural speed that was so hard to watch.
“Not the easiest decision I’ve ever made, Marcus,” I rasped, refusing to let myself be intimidated by a friend.
“He’s not as tough as he thinks he is!” Marcus protested, and I nodded.
“Which is why he’ll need you to put him back together again.” I touched his hands with more ease than I’d thought the gesture would entail. “Besides, he’s right. He won’t see her as a sweet little girl—he’ll see her as the monster she might become.”
My words rang in the dark quiet. Before I could fight it, a jaw-cracking yawn sprang up, threatening to take over my entire face, throat, and neck.
Marcus smiled slightly. Then, because we knew each other, because we’d sat in the dark for months and told each other stories, he leaned forward and kissed my temple. “This could really suck,” he said with sincer
ity, and I had no choice but to nod my head. “Now go to sleep. Take Bracken with you. Make love. The lights alone should be enough to scare her off.”
A terrible blush washed my face and neck, hot enough to make the chill spring night steam around us. Bracken wrapped his arm around my waist, and Marcus backed away, bowing a little. Bracken looked at Nicky with a raised eyebrow in invitation, and Nicky flushed and shook his head.
“No?” I asked, mostly because I was cold, and falling asleep between two people with high metabolisms was really appealing.
Nicky blushed, much as I had a few minutes before. “Everybody can see… with the way you two glow….”
A laugh shook me, because since joining the hill it had seemed as though human squeamishness about sex had completely left Nicky’s psychological makeup.
“You’ll join us later?” I asked hopefully. Again, with Nicky it was not so much the sex as it was the compact human body of a good friend next to me in a strange situation. Bracken was long-limbed enough to practically embrace us both, but Nicky had a way of making me feel not quite so outsized by the world around me. It was a thing I treasured about him.
He stood and cupped the back of my head with his hand and placed a pleasant, mildly passionate kiss on my mouth, tangling his tongue playfully with mine. He pulled back with a peck on the lips, and I smiled at him, wondering if it was only the shadows or if there was something hiding in his bird-gold eyes.
“I might even wake you up,” he half promised, and I rubbed my cheek against his, reassured.
Bracken’s large hands spanned my waist then, with something like relaxed urgency, and together we ventured into the tent.
Nicky: Dark Musings
WE SAT in silence after that, watching the fire burn down and listening to the absolute ocean-roaring quiet of the night. After meeting that spooky-assed kid, I wasn’t sure there would ever be a quiet night I would listen to without the faintest taste of terror.
I glanced briefly at the tent and saw nothing. They had very possibly just undressed and gone to sleep, but I didn’t think so. I had followed them often enough in the last year to know that falling asleep is what she would expect them to do, and even what Bracken planned to do—but that their highly sexual nature would soon charge their gentle murmurings, her soft touches on his pale, hairless skin would soon turn hungry, and his large hands on her small body would become urgent. Of the times Bracken and I had arranged for me to be in bed with them both, he would wait until she was making unconscious, starving, whimpering noises in the back of her throat before he’d take my hand as it lay on her hip and push, urging me to something more adventurous, more erotic, something she wouldn’t mind now that she was completely lost in him and the last of her human inhibitions had fallen asleep, drugged by their rampant sexual chemistry.
