Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  Sorceress blood is pretty tasty and pretty filling—hopefully it would be like feeding a starving man hearty bread with some really awesome gravy on top. She took a gulp and smiled, just a little of the wildness easing from her eyes.

  “Sunshine…,” she said in awe. Perhaps she was too young to fathom that this taste of blood was the closest she’d ever get to sunshine again, because the memory of the sun didn’t seem to hurt her like it hurt the other vampires I’d blooded. She swallowed and smacked her tongue, like a wine connoisseur tasting for anise or lavender.

  “You like him a lot,” she announced, watching Bracken warily as he finished sucking on my hand and dropped it to my side to heal a little before he touched me again.

  “I do,” I told her sincerely. “And that’s the truth.”

  She nodded and then smiled shyly. Her eyes were whirling a little slower, and her fangs were not quite so pronounced, but that shy smile on that predator’s face was still pretty damned unnerving.

  “Can we?” she asked, and Bracken nodded. “Will you make the blood dance again?”

  “Of course,” he nodded, bowing slightly. From above us there was a bird sound that I could easily interpret as Oh, puhleez! but I didn’t dare laugh.

  “Bite your own wrist first, little one,” Phillip ordered. With his black widow’s peak, and his eyes whirling red with the prospect of blood, and his fangs held up to the inside of his arm, he really did look like a bad Dracula movie come to life, but that was okay too. Fake vampires are all over the media—this little girl wasn’t going to be afraid of Phillip, not now, not when the prospect of shelter was so damned close.

  Gretchen brought her wrist up to her mouth, and with a little rabbit nibble and scarcely a crunch and a pop, she opened a vein for Bracken to use. Phillip made a sizeable hole in the crease of his arm, and his blood flowed slowly and freely into the air as Bracken did his thing.

  Brack held his hands out at both sides and played with the blood for Gretchen’s delight again, but this time, he was extremely careful to make sure Phillip got his share of the blood first.

  Phillip made a noise—a hurt noise, with a grunt in it like a blow to the solar plexus—and then kept his face still and stony.

  Goddess.

  Gretchen’s noise, on the other hand, was considerably happier. Phillip had loved snow skiing and hot chocolate and steak dinners and plays when he’d been alive, and with the exception of the hot chocolate and steak, he still had a passion for those things now. Gretchen was getting a swirl of sophistication and joy, with a solid dose of the contentment Phillip had shown in his life as a vampire at Green’s hill.

  She made a happy grunt, in counterpoint to Phillip’s agonized one, and then sighed, her entire body relaxing into the taste of vampire. Suddenly, her attention sharpened.

  “You like him!” she protested, looking in horror at Marcus. The two had finally settled down into something approaching sanguinity—pun intended—regarding their on-again/off-again relationship, with the emphasis on “We’re on again, asshole, because I apparently can’t live without you.”

  “Yes, I do,” Phillip replied, his voice almost flat with suppressed emotion. “I love him.”

  “But that’s wrong!”

  “Jesus!” I said before I could stop myself. She glared at me, and I suppressed my complete irritation.

  “Not for vampires, Gretchen,” I told her sweetly. And like those explanations tend to do with children, this one worked.

  “God hates us anyway,” she pronounced, kicking the nearest tree with enough preternatural strength to make it tremble.

  “Maybe,” I conceded, “but you’re the Goddess’s chosen, so that’s good.” And then, before we could debate theology any more—and before she could see what her pre-death memories were doing to the usually stoic Phillip—I said, “Are you still hungry?”

  She nodded her head miserably. Like it happens sometimes, a little taste of something had totally whetted her appetite, and while her eyes weren’t whirling anymore and her teeth had receded, her face had become pinched and miserable, like that of a regular starving eight-year-old.

  “Okay,” I said, congratulating myself on the fact that no one was dead yet. “You see Renny over there? She was there last night as a big kitty cat?”

  The little girl nodded, and I took a deep breath.

  “She’s willing to be your dinner tonight—but it’s just like a regular kitty, Gretchen. You’ve got to be gentle, or she’ll scratch you.”

  Gretchen looked at me, her eyes suddenly crafty. “She was a pretty kitty. Does she want to be my pet?”

  I caught Renny’s eyes, girlfriend’s communication kicking in big time. Are you sure you want in?

  Renny swallowed and nodded, then started taking off her clothes in preparation to change. I shook my head subtly, and Renny caught my hint. It was less easy to think of her as a “pet” if she was a young woman.

  But Gretchen wasn’t stupid.

  “I want her as a kitty,” she said imperiously, and I wanted to smack my head with my hand.

  “She’s fuzzy as a kitty,” I said mildly. “How about you feed from her as a girl?”

  “Maybe a kitty would be best, Lady Cory,” Phillip said, and I risked a look at him. Oh Goddess, was he green around the gills—whatever was in her head, it was horrible with a capital H and squared to the nth power. He had a good reason for his request, or he wouldn’t have used my title.

  “Okay, Renny—go ahead and change.”

  “Phillip, you’d better be right about this.”

  “She killed her family, Cory.”

  “We knew that. Fuck.” She’d given him the images—confused, sunk in an abyss of black denial—and because we were linked, I got to share. Ain’t telepathy grand? Her mother had screamed when she’d run in, clothes torn, red-eyed, covered in blood. If she hadn’t screamed, maybe, maybe little Gretchen could have reined in her bloodlust. Maybe she could have seen her parents and her brother as family, instead of throbbing heartbeats, food, prey.

  Her mother’s skin ripping under her teeth had been sweet, and then… then—redness… screams… a confused mélange of shredding, tearing, the bitter, warm, rusty tang of blood… the purple of viscera, the crunch of bones….

  I must have made a noise or something, because Bracken’s hand was on my elbow and my tiny wound was running freely, dripping on the ground, and Phillip had snapped his mind away from mine mid-image.

  That was the last human….

  She’d ever talked to, fed from, loved.

  I looked at Renny again, thinking that I could stop her, but in the time it had taken me to get the message, Renny had put her clothes back on and dropped to her knees in front of the little girl. Gretchen wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a clean spot in a month’s worth of filth. I opened my mouth to stop them just as Gretchen closed her mouth over Renny’s carotid, punched in for the flowing blood, and began to feed.

  I breathed deeply through my nose, trying not to spread my panic. Renny, long accustomed to being dinner, relaxed limply into the feeding, drugged on the passive euphoria of allowing her life force to slip away.

  And I started counting silently in my head.

  Vampires can’t really drain a person. They can help—and a fully grown vampire can ingest about two pints of blood, whereas a fully adult human can only ingest one pint. Because, hello, if you’re not a vampire or some sort of being where blood drinking is a part of your sustenance, like Bracken, it’s really frickin’ icky! A child vampire could probably drink about a pint of blood—and that would be a lot, just the way a pint of milk shake would be a lot for a human child.

  How long did it take for a human child to drink a pint of milk shake?

  Kids gorge themselves all the time on cookies and cake and shit that makes them sick. If Gretchen drank too much from Renny—don’t think about how helpless Renny’s little face looks, peering up from Gretchen’s lap, how predatory and strange the little
girl with the whirling eyes looks with her fangs plunged into my friend’s helpless, white and bloody throat—then she’d probably puke it up in short order, but that would be a fucking waste of something my friend needed to live!

  Oh fuck it all, I couldn’t do the goddamned math. I pulled a bottle of water out of a pouch on the sling and started to gulp it. When I got mostways down, I thought, “Make her stop, Phillip. It’s gone on too long.”

  Phillip’s affirmative noise was coupled with some soft words to the little girl. “Gretchen, hon, that’s enough. Renny’s been more than generous….”

  Gretchen growled, the sound of a feral creature, not a human, and gathered her shoulders over Renny’s still body like a territorial wild dog. Renny whimpered, lay still, her breathing growing sluggish and far too quiet.

  It was a horrible tableau—all of these adults, all of them with preternatural strength and speed and some of us with supernatural powers, standing in the velvet breath-smoking darkness and watching this rabid brat from hell bleed our friend to death. Nobody wanted to hurt her, nobody wanted to lay hands on her, everybody was very aware that with one jerk of her dank little head, this Disney Channel nightmare could rip Renny’s throat out—but if we didn’t stop her, and soon, it wouldn’t matter.

  “Make her stop!” I screamed in our heads.

  Phillip replied, “I’m. Trying.” And he was. He was probably a master vampire, if our kiss worried about such things. Phillip loved power enough to pull the dead back to life with his blood kiss, but his formidable strength of will might not be enough against this braincheesed kid.

  He needed my help.

  “Green!” I called, because he was always there when we were out on a call, always listening with part of himself, always just the breath of a summer meadow away. My shock when he didn’t answer stopped my breath in my chest like the frigid fucking vacuum of space.

  But Renny was dying, and I didn’t have time to breathe anyway.

  “Phillip, can you hold just me?”

  Swallow. “I don’t….”

  A sudden flooding of Green, blessed blessed Green, my ou’e’hm, my equal, the growing to my sunshine, and I didn’t even let Phillip finish that sentence.

  Together, Green and I flooded Phillip with power, and he directed us with his will. In the dark, there was a subtle sparkle, like dust motes in a sunlit field, and it engulfed Gretchen, literally prying her jaws apart like a pissed-off crocodile’s and forcing her corpse-stiff arms to relinquish her hold.

  “Max, take her to Marcus and Lambent,” I gritted, knowing that Marcus would use the power the Goddess gave the vampires to close the wounds in Renny’s throat before they could bleed out anymore. Most of my will was focused on what Phillip was doing with that fearful collective of my power and Green’s.

  Gretchen was fighting us. I could hear the echo in Phillip’s skull. “She’s mine, my kitty, I want her! I hate you, you’re not my daddy, you’re a… a… a big mean jackhole, that’s what you are!” It was an out-and-out tantrum as she released the full force of her anger and self-pity and sorrow on the people who had offered her redemption.

  Phillip was too close to her.

  I could see it, could feel it in his head. He’d seen her transition, and it had been every bit as awful as we’d thought—pawing limbs, hurtful fingers digging into her private places… don’t touch don’t touch ow ow ow… Mommy Mommy Mommy Daddy Daddy somebody—and he felt for her, he felt for the poor kid, he really did, and—

  And goddammit all to a bucket of fuck, she had tried to kill my friend!

  With a yank, Green and I jerked our power from Phillip’s control and used it to encircle Gretchen like a second skin.

  Her mouth opened in shock and indignation as we bound her in power, my angry, deadly-to-vampires sunshine buffered by Green’s healing kindness. We wrapped her in it, swaddled her tightly like the abandoned newborn she was. Together, we trusted Green to keep that bond while I distanced myself enough to talk.

  “Guys, I can hold her, but you need to move us to the vampmobile. I’ll shove her in the bottom and keep her still while Renny, the vamps, and I fly down the fucking road home. You hear me?”

  There would be logistics, I thought hazily. Who drove in what car, how many people the SUV could hold, packing up the shit in the other two cars… and all of it was going to have to resolve itself.

  Renny needed Green to heal her, and the vampires needed shelter, and this kid needed a room with pony-puke-pink decor and three feet of steel between her and the rest of the world, and we needed these things sometime in the next—Christ!—three hours.

  I was pretty sure we could make it, but as Bracken threw me on his back and I towed Junior Vampire Barbie behind us with the combined-power-psychic-death-swaddle, I knew we were cutting it close.

  I have only vague memories of the ride, thank Goddess.

  We were crowded. The thing sat eight, and there were seven of us—but Bracken’s legs alone were the size of two of Renny or me, so I remember bruising my ribs a lot against his kneecaps. My mind was locked on the girl in the hidden compartment underneath the car, keeping her swaddled, because the car wasn’t the steel room and she was a newborn vampire. If I let go of her, she would shred through the bottom of the car, and then through us, and then through the entire population of North Placer County, for all we knew. It was absolutely imperative that my mind, my entire will, stay focused on keeping her bound and still—and on giving her light to see by, so she could see that there were pillows and blankets and (Marcus’s idea of a joke) a stuffed teddy bear that Grace had knitted for him with vampire fangs and a bunny victim in his paws.

  We hadn’t meant for this place to be a prison—she was making it one on her own.

  I knew that Renny was breathing and groggy and that Max had given her water and beef jerky from Bracken’s pack, and I knew that Marcus and Kyle had needed to drag Phillip into the SUV and that he’d been incoherent with the horrors of a little girl’s last worst nightmare and the terrible clash of wills.

  I knew that even though my mind was locked in a cataclysmic strife of mental versus physical, my body was still on that fucking winding road. I don’t know where Bracken got the waterproof bags, but I spent a good half hour filling them—and, I’m sure, the entire car spent at least a few brain cells praying that the damned things didn’t burst.

  By the time we fishtailed through the graveled drive to Green’s hill, my body hurt from the bruises, my stomach muscles screamed in agony, and my head was pounding with the effort of keeping her still.

  I was dimly aware of the car screeching to a halt in the garage under the hill, and of the vampires opening the compartment below us. There was a sudden touch of Phillip’s hands on my face as I rested it against Bracken’s thigh, and he peered into my eyes, trying to get my attention.

  “Cory… Cory….”

  I looked at him with vacant eyes. He shook me gently, and Bracken was saying something urgent to me, but it wasn’t until Green spoke directly in my head that I heard what they were saying.

  “Beloved… let go. She’s quite passive now that we’ve opened the car. Dawn’s close, and she knows it. Let the vampires handle her, yes? Grace will take her down to the room. You can start again tomorrow.”

  “Green?”

  “You heard me, ou’e’eir. Let go.”

  It was like unclenching a fist that had been knotted around a rope in the frost for hours. The slow, painful loosening of my will, and Green’s, from around Gretchen’s body actually hurt, and even as the wisps of power sparkled into the garage’s cool dark, the entire wash of it receded from my body, leaving me weak and sick and trembling.

  Phillip left my line of vision. Then Bracken was hefting me into his arms, and as I came back to the ouch, shit, ouchie ouchie ouchie physical world, I was aware that my hand was sopping in sticky blood even as Bracken cradled it in my lap.

  “Aw, shit,” I mumbled. My little bleeding wound hadn’t had a chance to close b
efore Bracken grabbed me, and apparently it had been dripping all over the floor of the SUV.

  “Second longest trip of my fucking life,” Bracken swore fervently. Since I knew what the first longest trip had been like, I knew exactly how awful he’d felt.

  “That. Really. Sucked,” I announced. Suddenly Green was there, taking me from Brack, closing the wound on my hand with a thought and cradling me against his strong, damp body.

  “Why is your hair all wet, Green?” I asked dreamily. He smiled a little, and I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t see the twist in it, but I wasn’t quite strong enough to ask where it twisted.

  “Because I got out of the shower, luv. Had to make myself sweet for you, didn’t I?”

  “Renny…?”

  “Is fine, luv, really. I gave her a little kiss. Now all she needs is a whole lot of steak, some juice, and a little time with Max, and she’ll be fine.”

  “I shouldn’t have—”

  “No… shush….” Green kissed my temple, and another wave of healing washed through me, this one taking away the muscle cramps that came with puking my guts out for an hour. “It was a good call, a hard call. All of them were hard calls, and if I’d wanted you to do any different, I would have told you—”

  “You did tell me.”

  He laughed then, all the twist gone from his smile, and the final healing washed through me, leaving me with the desire to be clean, and the desire to be held by him, and the desire to sleep.

  “Quite right,” he said now. “I did—and thank you, beloved, for listening.”

  I was being hustled into his room, into his shower, actually, which held six, and I was in that dreamy, hazy fugue state that I’d learned accompanied injuries and physical demands. It was a state where even the most basic words deserted me, and all of my attempts to be tough were as crappy and transparent as a dead fly’s wings.

  “You were gone,” I whimpered as he sat me on the bench in the shower and soaped my hair. My hair wasn’t that dirty, but it was his hands on me, being strong and gentle and kind and dependable and all of the things I loved Green for, and I wanted his hands everywhere.