Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “But….” I so wanted someone to understand. Bracken might possibly, but he took this royalty shit for granted. Adrian hadn’t. Adrian had been there from the beginning, when it had been two guys and a coffin and an ungiving land.

  Adrian had loved Green as I had, and he had seen Green when he’d been left the most vulnerable after his escape. Adrian would understand, I thought almost desperately. He would know.

  “No one should have to do that,” Adrian said now, and I wanted to weep, because he did. He had always been more human than a vampire should have to endure. “Not even for atonement.”

  I wiped my cheek on my hand and saw a translucent thumb come up to my cheek. It didn’t work—I had to wipe my own tears—but I appreciated the gesture.

  “And that’s why I needed you, beloved.”

  “And that’s why I was here.”

  I watched as he faded away, because I’d called on him a lot in the past weeks, and he couldn’t stay long, not really. We lived as we had always lived—on borrowed time.

  I was still looking at the place Adrian had been when Green came up into the garden. He walked behind me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, something about his touch so honest and clean and sexy that I whimpered a little for the act itself, which I had missed after the last three days. Yes, I was spoiled—but it was where I charged most of my preternatural power. I was like a cell phone on my last bar.

  “Did he help, luv?” Green whispered in my ear. I squirmed a little more, because something about that dead-sexy British voice purring against my ear whorls just totally did it for me.

  “Yes….” But not as much as your touch on my skin. The things we never said, the lines of exposition we never crossed.

  “Care to tell me about your day?”

  “No, but I will anyway.”

  His sigh dusted my ear as well, but he moved around the arm of the bench and situated himself behind me. I leaned against him, warm and solid but not rough. Not the cold granite of the bench, but the earth-solid humanity of my Green.

  When we were comfortable, and my head was resting on his chest—our warmth, our love cocooning us in complete emotional safety—that’s when I told him about Hallow.

  When I was through, his sigh shook me to the ticklish soles of my cool bare feet.

  “He doesn’t need to do that,” Green mumbled, and I could almost smell the discomfiture as it poured off his body.

  “I think I said that,” I told him, scowling.

  Green’s chuckle was weak, but it was there. “So I imagine, beloved. I just don’t know how to make it any plainer. What we need to do is kill this cockroach—stomp him ’til his bones crackle, squash him on the concrete, and walk over his twitching legs!”

  I guffawed heartily as the indignation in his voice crept up. It took a lot to get Green truly angry, but the results were usually spectacular and, contrary to his normally even temper, very often unpredictable.

  “I’d like to see you do it, beloved,” I told him sincerely, “but don’t forget that I’m your weapon—I might have something planned for him as well.”

  Without warning, Green’s hands came up behind me, and I found myself hefted up by my underarms and turned deftly in his grasp like a child. Green pulled me close and spoke seriously into my eyes, and only his terrible sincerity kept me from rubbing his cheek with my own like a cat.

  “You, ou’e’eir, are more than a weapon,” he growled. I nodded seriously and replied with the assurance grown in nearly two years of the warmth and fine soil of his love.

  “And you, ou’e’hm, are more than just a sexually-triggered human resources arc welder.”

  His lips—lean, sensual, full where it counted—pulled up at the sides out of habit. “That was right brilliant, beloved. Did you practice that?”

  “Only all day,” I told him, flushing. Only since Hallow had told me he was whoring for our safety and I couldn’t think of a fucking thing to say.

  “Worth the practice.” He gave me a playful kiss on the nose, and I dropped my head onto his shoulder, taking most of my weight on my knees and giving him the rest.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked seriously. “Green… we can’t let him do this. I know he feels bad, but—”

  “He shouldn’t,” Green responded bleakly. I looked at him. His emerald eyes were staring off beyond the ambient light of our holy place and into the dark beyond the hill. “He was my only friend in a dark place, beloved. I never meant for him to feel obliged to me in any way.”

  I touched his face with my rough little hand, and he rested his cheek in my palm. “I’m so afraid, beloved,” I told him frankly. “I’m so afraid of becoming what you escaped in England, of becoming our worst enemy. People—Hallow, just doing this for us. It feels so wrong.”

  Green nodded into my hand. “I hear you—and I don’t know what to say about it. I’ve begged Hallow to come take the shelter of our hill for years. If this is what it takes for him to feel as though he’s earned it, I don’t know that it’s fair of us to say no.”

  I closed my eyes, rested my forehead against his for a moment, and longed for the brief, ephemeral times when Green and I alone could be Green and I alone, without the weight of the hill and half of California cramping at our shoulders.

  For a quiet, somber moment, I felt the thickness of the warm May darkness around us, the faint breeze that blew through the lighted Goddess grove, and Green’s breath dusting my face and shifting his chest beneath my palms. His eyes were closed, but his lips found mine anyway, and then my eyes were closed and we kissed gently, without urgency, and kissed again.

  We had so much to be grateful for in each other. Taking care of our people was really a small price to pay for that, wasn’t it?

  We necked like teenagers, kissing languorously, petting sensuously, touching without urgency, until, without warning, things became breathless and urgent and my frustration at not being able to go any farther made me growl in the back of my throat.

  Green pulled away, shaking his mussed braid to his back, and panted just a little. “Luv… your people have come up with a wonderful solution for this sort of thing.”

  “If you say ‘blow job,’ I’m going for a run,” I mumbled. He laughed softly, placing rough, glorious kisses at my temple, the corner of my mouth, my throat.

  “I was talking about a bottomless water heater and a shower with bench seats,” he replied from the top of the hollow between my breasts.

  Brother, I was so there.

  Something woke me early in the morning. I lay there, head pillowed on Green’s shoulder, feeling his hand stroking the satin of my stomach under his billowy white T-shirt and above the elastic of my cotton panties.

  “What time is it?” I mumbled, arching into his touch like a sleepy tabby cat.

  “An hour before you usually get up with Bracken,” he said back, nuzzling my hair. “Trust me, you’ll be happy I woke you.”

  “Sure I will,” I groused, and he laughed and shushed me.

  “But first—you and Brack working at Grace’s store tonight, luv?”

  A Yarning for Crafts. Many of us took turns supervising Green’s businesses. Arturo took Denny’s because that’s where many of the Hispanic immigrants gravitated, the vampires took the gas stations to keep them safe at night and to supervise the hard-partying were-folk, and I took Grace’s craft store because she’d taught me to knit when I was sick and I loved it there. Bracken took it with me because he loved me there.

  “Yeah,” I confirmed listlessly. It would suck working there if Brack and I couldn’t brush up against each other as we were stocking the aisles or working in the back, but the days were too long now for Grace to go in until later, so we were needed to pick up the slack in the early evenings.

  “We’ll have a late family dinner when you’re done, yes?”

  I heard him. Big powwow among the inner circle—the four of us, Arturo, Grace, Marcus, Phillip, Teague, Max, Renny, Lambent, Sweet—elves, vampires, werecr
eatures, and little ol’ me, the mortal cherry on the immortality sundae.

  “Yeah,” I sighed. Last night had been nice, but we needed to get to business now. Hallow, Gretchen, even Nicky and his not-so-secret little secret. Okay, I didn’t know all of it, but I did know his parents had called. What can I say? Were-folk gossiped worse than women in a knitting circle. I’d been waiting for him to come to me, but if he wouldn’t, well, I could listen. “I hear you,” I yawned into his waiting silence, “but I still don’t know why you woke me up early.”

  Green chuckled, which was really the world’s best alarm clock, and rolled over to his side and engulfed me in his long, lithe, moonlit pale satiny body. When he had me cocooned against his chest, safe in the warmth of his body and my breath, he said, “Your moon cycle, luv—it’s all run. You’re no longer bleeding, not even a bit. It’s good news, eh?”

  I pulled back and shot him a shining grin, fully awake now. “Oh shit, yes it is!” I crowed, almost vibrating from the bed in my glee.

  Green laughed. “It is indeed. Now, wouldn’t you like to go tell Bracken?”

  I nodded and, conscious of my morning breath, kissed his neck until he laughed and then scrambled out of bed. “Absolutely,” I sang as I danced to the bathroom. “But first I’m going to brush my teeth!”

  LATER THAT night Bracken and I closed the store and drove home with Bracken nagging me the whole way about the yarn I took with me. Men! They think the only yarn a girl needs is the yarn in the projects she’s working. How do you plan your next project that way, tell me that! Afterward we sat in various positions in the living room, eating dinner and dessert and whatever Grace had laid out on the big, solid wood coffee table between the couches.

  Teague was eyeing most of a chocolate cream pie with the serious covetousness that children usually reserved for toys at Christmas. Green sighed, grabbed a fork, stuck it in the pie, and handed the entire thing to our alpha werewolf, who shoved a largish bite in his mouth in sheer surprise.

  The day we could get that man to reach for something besides his lovers would be a moral victory for pretty much the whole damned hill.

  When most of the munching had died down and the pixies had started the cleanup, Green settled down on the arm of the couch next to me and waited politely for everybody’s attention. He didn’t exactly say “Report!”—but when we all looked at him quietly and he arched an eyebrow our way, that’s almost exactly what happened.

  I went first, and my news about Nolan Fields wasn’t welcome.

  “Oh, Christ,” Lambent swore. “You dumb wankers and that urge to work with the human world. All you’d have to do is have Hallow fake a piece of paper so she could graduate, and this git wouldn’t have the access to you that might sink us all.”

  “Fuck you, Lambent,” I said with narrowed eyes. “This kind of bullshit is going to put food on your plate and keep the property intact and consolidate our holdings forever and ever more. You wonder why you all aren’t still big in the old country? It’s because you didn’t own your land, and dumb assholes moved in and destroyed your hills. Nobody’s destroying this place. If I have to learn six languages and get three law degrees, Green’s hill is going to be safe.”

  The others in the hill had either made their peace with my goals or taken them for granted, but Lambent’s eyes got really big, like he hadn’t thought of that, and even Teague blinked twice and looked at me hard. There was something in his eyes like sorrow and I didn’t want to think about why that might be.

  “Anyway,” I grumbled, not able to look anybody in the eye for this part, “Hallow’s found a way to keep him silent for the moment, but the sooner we can… uhm… relieve him of that obligation, the better, right?”

  There was a digestive silence as this curdled bit of information dropped into place and started everybody’s bile working.

  I was sandwiched between Green on the arm of the couch and Bracken on my other side, and Bracken took my hand in his and stroked it even as Green bent and dropped a kiss in my hair. Nicky, who was couched at our feet, leaned back against me and let me run my fingers through his hair.

  None of us liked this, but we’d discussed it in the course of the day, and the only solution we could think of was to find Nolan’s contacts as soon as possible so we could kill him dead.

  “Anyway,” I said, recalling something that Hallow had told me as the lot of us had been on our way to our political science class—oh Goddess, I had barely been able look him in the eyes! “Apparently Nolan’s big break is coming sometime in July. We have until then to get this sorted out and locked down. Unfortunately, it’s going to be cut pretty damned close—we’ll be able to trace all of his contacts about two days before we get a big fat layout in some magazine with more clout than the Enquirer but less moral fiber. Once we know who has the photos, we go in, pull a mind-fuck on them, and eliminate every damned picture, and… and….”

  Bracken’s hand grew a little firmer on my shoulder, and I closed my lips over my bared teeth and stopped making maim-kill grimaces with my hands.

  “And squash him like the piece of living cat barf he is,” I finished with grim dignity. I got a nodded chorus of gimmehallelujahs and felt a little better.

  Renny, who was human and everything for this—she was even dressed in jeans and a shirt that fit—looked at me with slitted green eyes. “My fur balls have more integrity than that,” she growled, and Max stroked her back until she relaxed.

  From there we moved on to Gretchen. The news wasn’t good.

  Grace perched comfortably if not elegantly on Arturo’s knee and gave the grim account of the little girl’s deterioration.

  “It’s like she’s got Alzheimer’s,” Grace said at last. “Some days she’s perfect, she’s eight years old, she thinks her family is coming to get her tomorrow. Some days she remembers what she’s done, and she’s beyond terrifying and entering the land of ‘totally fucking evil.’” Grace gave Teague and me a measured look, and we both shuddered.

  Teague had gone limp in her jaws and trusted me to channel Green and get him the fuck out of there. We had—and then Teague had sprinted for the door with me and I’d thrown up a power shield between us and Miss Junior Lady Vlad, and we’d both made it out the door—but she’d been… vacant. Distant. Immune to reason, to humanity. Her only plan had been to drain Teague dry so she could bring him back over, just like that damned bear and wildcat.

  “And we never know whether the little girl’s going to be there or the nasty force of nature is going to try to take us out. We need a minimum of ten of us to take her outside at night—and we all need a blood tie to her, because otherwise she tries to get away.”

  We all shuddered. It had only been luck that we had brought her in before she discovered the entire rest of humanity. God, Goddess, and other—the horrors she might have visited upon all of us made Nolan Fields’s driving ambition look like a baby’s single-minded, innocent quest for a bottle.

  The entire room was looking toward me in a stomach-dropping silence, and I shuddered when I looked back at them.

  “Not yet,” I put off, heart breaking. “Maybe we can… I don’t know. If we find the person who did this to her, maybe he knows a way to… to fix what’s wrong in her head, right? I mean, we all watch the same crime shows—this can’t be the first time he’s done this. He must have seen how it turns out. And then we can stop him and… you know.”

  There was a silence then—a conceding silence, and I was suddenly angry and near tears. They couldn’t hold this against me—how could they hold the fact that I didn’t want to commit cold-blooded infanticide against me?

  “Don’t worry about it, Lady Cory,” Grace said gently. I turned unhappy eyes toward her. “We can hang on to her for another month or two. If there’s hope, there’s hope, right?”

  I didn’t miss that her hands were as tightly woven with Arturo’s as mine were with Green’s and Bracken’s.

  “She likes you!” I tried gamely, and Grace shrugged.


  “I’m a female, a vampire, and a mom—the deck’s stacked in my favor. She asks about you all the time—”

  “Yeah, when she forgets that I killed her pet kitty!” I snorted. I hadn’t been down to the “nursery” for a few days, and in spite of the fact that it was not my fault, I still felt guilty about my absence.

  Grace shrugged, unwilling to admit that this one young member of the hill did not appreciate me as Grace thought she ought to. The entire situation should have been amusing—as much time as I had spent reading that kid stories and knitting her doll clothes, and still Gretchen stared at me with that same squinty-eyed distrust she’d had from the very beginning. Blech! One more pony-puke-pink pint-sized acrylic poncho and I really would vomit, but in spite of my best overtures of mature patience—and don’t think that wasn’t a stretch—I would remain the authority figure to resent, to outwit, to overtly dislike.

  I wasn’t even twenty-two yet, and already I was “the man.” Fucking lovely. Bracken snorted next to me. I sighed, and Green redirected the conversation in the silence.

  “To that end, Max—you did some research. What did you come up with?”

  Max shook back his dark hair and stood officially, like a cop at report, and I raised a sardonic eyebrow at him. He shrugged as if to say Sue me, it’s the paycheck job, and took a manila folder from a bright-eyed, proud-as-punch Renny.

  “There’s a couple of places in Cali that put mountains on the plate,” Max said, pulling out pictures of license plates that had been run off from an old printer with a few lines missing. “We’ve got Lassen County, Shasta County, and up near the Oregon border—”

  “Wait a minute, brother,” Green asked quietly and reached out his hands for the printouts. “Shasta County… like maybe, say, Redding?”

  Grace and the other vampires caught their breath—even though they hadn’t been breathing—and I blinked, feeling as though a significant puzzle piece was just a big blank in my brain.