Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  But she was my friend, and I did trust her with my life. Every day.

  “Renny,” I said firmly, “if that kid comes out of his cabin and sees you, you’re going to be dealing with a teenager with a hard-on that won’t quit for the rest of his life. If Nicky’s parents see you, I’m going to be the skank ho with the skank ho friends, and Nicky’s going to have to live with that for the rest of our lives. Please, for the sweet love of my foot up your ass, remember to put on some fucking clothes.”

  Renny stuck her tongue out at me and then opened the nearest drawer and pulled out a pair of my underwear and one of Bracken’s T-shirts that I had been planning to wear and got dressed.

  Then she promptly turned into a cat wearing my clothes, curled up into a little ball at the foot of the bed, and went to sleep.

  I looked at Max helplessly. “It’s a good thing you earn your keep,” I said sourly, and he eyed his wife with a grimace.

  “She… uhm….”

  I shook my head. “Yeah. That’s all I got too.”

  And then the werewolves walked in, Katy’s musical accent pattering in rapid-fire nag as they did.

  “I don’ care if you got work to do, Daddy. You don’t talk to her, you don’t look at her, she’s just furniture to you….”

  I blinked. Jack was a jealous bastard all the time, but Katy?

  “Katy,” Jack said soothingly. “She runs around naked all the time at the hill….”

  And now Bracken and I both looked at each other and blinked. Katy was jealous of Renny?

  “Katy, I thought you liked Renny!” I protested even as they walked in. Katy blinked like a sleepwalker.

  “I do!” she said, surprised, and to prove it, bent down to scratch the ears of a very puzzled giant pussycat. I think Renny’s confusion was the only thing that kept us from the cat/dog matchup to end all wars.

  Totally befuddled, we all turned to Teague, who turned red to his ears, widened his eyes, and shrugged. That helped. And then the Avians walked in, followed by Tanya, and we officially had a party in the big-kid’s room. Oh well, my turn to talk.

  I pulled my legs up so I was sitting cross-legged, and outlined the plan.

  “You all know Nicky’s parents get here tonight, right?” Nods all around. “So the night after tomorrow, we go meet up with the vampires. They don’t know we’re coming, or at least they don’t know we’re all going to descend on Rafael’s bar en masse. Today, I want to take Nicky and Bracken and scope out the bar and the surroundings—recon, I guess.”

  “We’re coming with you,” Mario said immediately, but Teague was close on his heels.

  “Guys….” I shook my head. “We’re not even getting out of the car. Or,” I amended with a grunt from Bracken, “we’re not getting out of the car after we stop at the store.” The units all had minifridges, so we were stopping for yogurt, cheese, soda, peanut butter, jelly, fruit… whatever. Grace would probably arrange to have the sprites beam in some dinner, and there was a strip about five miles away with some fast food, but otherwise we were on our own for food. I looked at the mass of faces around me and thought we’d probably need two carts. Renny sneezed, and I remembered that most of us were shape-shifters with killer metabolisms. Make that three.

  “So anyway—tell me if you want anything special, and we’ll get it. But you can’t come, because while we’re out there, I’ve got a job for all of you.”

  Ears perked up, and figurative tails waved and twitched. Mario and LaMark shifted where they stood like hawks on a perch, and Lambent leaned forward on his chair with hands clasped between his knees. I hadn’t realized we were itching for action—I’d been enjoying the peace.

  I laughed a little and ran my hands through my hair, stopping to redo my ponytail when it came out.

  “It’s not that exciting, people. All I really want you to do is take a piss!” That got me a few raised eyebrows, and I laughed some more and elaborated.

  The thing was, after the attack of the vampire critters from hell, I didn’t want to deal with anything else wild-kingdom style in our area—not by accident, and not by design. Besides that, we had been dealing with threats from the were community in Southern California since Thanksgiving. Teague, Bracken, and I had somewhat put those threats to rest, but you never knew when shit like that would pop up, so mostly I wanted more recon.

  More specifically, I wanted recon with urine markers all around our half of the lake. I figured the causeway would be a good cutoff line—the lake on our side of the freeway was ours, and the other side of the lake belonged to all of the other wild animals without day jobs.

  It would take all five of the furry people a couple of hours—even running with Goddess’s speed—plus Mario and LaMark up in the sky, coordinating with Lambent in a flatboat on the lake, to get it done. For one thing, when the critters were run out, they needed to be able to hop into the water and have someplace to rest. They needed to avoid the shoreline—because there was a gazillion miles of it, with a gazillion little tiny root-hair inlets—and concentrate on a rough half circle around the lake, and they needed to avoid actual humans. There were caves on the other side of the lake, and hiking trails and a bazillion things that could go wrong and….

  “Beloved?” Bracken called me to myself with a little smile before I could truly go off into the stratosphere with my fears. He was right—I would have to trust them to do their jobs.

  “In short, people, if I’m a satellite up in the heavens, I want to see a mass exodus of bobcats, bearcats, and polecats scratching their pits on the way out of Dodge, you got me?” Everyone nodded. “If you don’t think you can finish, though, don’t push it. We’ll be here for a week minimum, and it’s supposed to be six kelvin hotter than the surface of the sun today—”

  “Is that real math, Cory, or did you just make that up to make us feel sweatier?”

  I stopped in the middle of my nagging and blinked at Mario, who was looking at me with a quirked mouth and guileless brown eyes.

  “Don’t look now, people, I think Mario just made a funny,” I retorted. I didn’t let him dissuade me from one final nag. “And don’t forget we’ve got civilians in the last cabin, and after tonight, we’re going to have Nicky’s parents—”

  “Who are probably worse than civilians,” Nicky warned, saying his first piece of the day. I nodded in concession. If Nicky said they were going to suck, I’d believe him. People hadn’t believed me about my mother until she’d barged her way into our bedroom. Did I mention it was awkward? Well, let me mention it again.

  “So whether you’re done or not, we want to wrap this up in a couple of hours. By the time you get back, we should be back with the food and the skinny on the vampires, and we can have lunch here before we nap.” None of us had slept the night before. With the weight of the heat, even the elves would be tired by the time we were done, so I got no arguments about the nap.

  Everybody stood up to go, and I managed to snag Renny before she padded out next to Max—who had stripped and changed form so easily it was hard to remember that he’d been the highly uptight cop out to make my life miserable two years ago. I made her take off my clothes before she pissed all over them and/or dragged them through sixty stages of brushfire hell.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked in exasperation. “You haven’t been this feline since San Francisco!”

  Renny blinked, much as Katy had, and wrinkled her nose, even as she shucked my T-shirt and panties. “There’s a smell here,” she said dreamily. “A wild smell.” And then she was a giant cat again, following her mate out the door.

  I stared after her with an open mouth. If anyone would know about a “wild smell,” it would be Renny, who was more in touch with her wildness than most real cats. The question was, what kind of smell? Real? Imagined? Organic? Magic? Unfortunately for me, the thing that made Renny so in touch with the smell also made her the least articulate person on the planet. If she said there was a smell, I’d believe her—but I wouldn’t get her to describe
a flower from flatulence without a lot of effort.

  I looked up at Bracken. “Did you hear that, baby? There’s a wild smell out there.”

  “Well,” said Bracken, returning my bemusement, “considering that we just told a bunch of human-sized wild animals to go piss in the woods, I think it’s about to get a lot more pungent.”

  I laughed, but I could tell we were both a little unsettled. It didn’t matter—we still had shit to do, and the temperature was climbing with every breath.

  Redding is not a large town. It was larger than Loomis or Penryn or Ophir—which mostly consist of one “historic main street” apiece, built along the railroad with various shops grown up around them—and it seemed to cover a lot of hot, windblown territory. But mostly it looked to be a bunch of car dealerships, some hotels, and a really big Walmart.

  I knew I wasn’t seeing the best of the town at all. I know it has a museum, and in our wanderings we even caught glimpses of a lovely park and some riverfront businesses that looked a little too swank for me in my shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops. I hoped, at some point in time, to visit Turtle Bay and the arboretum—and even to get a better look at that really cool sundial thing that seemed to cross the Sacramento River off of Hwy 273—but that wasn’t what we were looking for, and it wasn’t what we saw this time out. So Redding may have been a “bustling metropolis” of 90,000 people, or so the sign said, but my first impression of heat and wind and brown space out beyond the manicured green of the homes on the little residential streets could never be fully reimagined.

  As in most small towns—and most big ones, for that matter—if you wandered the backside of the Redding business streets, you would find the not-so-swank places.

  These were the sorts of places vampires and shape-shifters loved.

  It didn’t take long to find what we were looking for. It was actually behind a small cluster of residential streets, backed up against the hills that surrounded Whiskeytown Lake.

  “Caves, you think?” I asked Bracken as we looked at the squat, dusty brick building—I knew from experience that such buildings often seemed much bigger on the inside than the outside. This one proclaimed itself Rafe’s Place, and even through the filtered air of the SUV, Nicky and Bracken had lifted their very astute noses and breathed in vampire.

  Nicky made a bird’s sound—a sort of affirmative squawk—and I looked behind me, amused. Nicky blushed and stammered, “That was supposed to be a yes. I can smell something—probably underground. There’re caves across the lake from us, I think it’s just what happens in volcanic hills.”

  Bracken and I nodded—it would make sense, especially in a place with such brutal sun in the summer. Underground would be the best choice for a darkling, and the brick building with one dusty green Dodge sedan parked in front of it would be a most unexpected doorway into vampire-land.

  “Hey, look.” Nicky pointed. “They’ve got karaoke the night after tomorrow!” He was laughing as he said it, but Brack’s eyes narrowed.

  “Hey, Nicky—run inside and get us a playlist, would you?”

  “Why? Who’s singing?”

  Bracken looked at me, and I flushed. “Oh, Bracken, no….”

  Brack shook his head. “It’s all about making an entrance, beloved. You practice a song, ham it up on stage, mark all the rest of us as your flunkies. You’ll have Rafael’s attention, and you won’t have to… negotiate… quite as much, right?”

  I shrugged, but it was clear that while I’d been worrying about Nicky’s parents and naked werewolves in public, Bracken had been fretting about more important things. And the good Goddess knew that negotiating was never my strongpoint. Nicky took my silence for a yes, and with a whoosh of oven-heated air was out of the car in a heartbeat, a little packet of papers ruffling in his hands on the way back.

  I studied the packet on the way to Walmart, and the song I should do was the topic of hot debate as we loaded up three carts with everything super-hungry shape-shifters could possibly want—including several packets of cookies, a couple of cases of chocolate milk for Teague, and beer for Teague and Max, neither of whom would have asked for such things even with a gun pointed to their heads.

  We were almost to the checkout when I trotted off and came back with a basic green one-piece swimsuit with the cool bicycle-shorts bottom and a high back and neck.

  Bracken eyed it with distaste. “What in the fuck is that?”

  I winced. “I think we forgot the one Green ordered for me.”

  Bracken shook his head. “It’s in there.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, we’re getting this one in case you’re wrong—okay, oh mighty domestic god?”

  “We’ll get it, but you’re not wearing it unless I get to rip it off your body!”

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t try it—elastic doesn’t rip for shit.” And I thought that was the end of the matter.

  By the time we returned, it was nearing one o’clock and more than one hundred degrees—Bracken took one step outside of the SUV and literally staggered. I sent him inside the air-conditioned cabin without argument and started to unload. The urinators, as we’d started calling them in the car, were there to greet us and help with the groceries—and to share some unsettling news.

  “There’s bodies out there,” Teague said bluntly, taking the bag with the dozen cookie packages from me without even looking inside to know we’d shopped for him. I handed a flat of chocolate milk to Jacky, who blinked and mouthed “thank you” when Teague wasn’t looking, and I remembered once again why we liked Jacky and how he could be a stand-up guy instead of a pissy little bitch.

  “Whose territory?” I asked, and Teague jerked his chin at himself. Okay, across the lake and under the caves. Good to know.

  “It was a kid,” he said roughly, and I grimaced. Okay, bad to know. “And parents.”

  Oh Goddess—so there was another family out there just like Gretchen’s. Which meant….

  “There’s probably more of Gretchen,” I concluded, and Teague nodded as he followed me.

  “Whoever does this, he’s still out there. These were three months old, at most.”

  I blinked. “Were they out in the open? Is there any way someone else can come find them? I don’t know… put them to rest or something?”

  Teague shrugged. “They looked like they’d been buried, but not well. Someone tried to cover them up, but it was a rush job.”

  “Like, say, a vampire in April?” I asked sourly. Teague nodded again, rubbing his hand through his short-cut dark blond hair.

  “Well,” I sighed, “we’ll have to arrange to have someone find them. And maybe tomorrow we’ll have Jacky go into town and look up the library, find out who they are. We can keep an eye out for the baby vampire, you think?”

  Teague frowned, and I followed him into his cabin with another bag of groceries. “Why Jacky?”

  “’Cause he’s good at it, Teague!” I told him with a laugh. “I mean, he wants to help too!”

  Teague nodded and shrugged, and I blew out a breath in exasperation. The first time I’d ever seen Teague—exhausted, worried to the death about Jacky—should have clued me in, but somehow, I thought he’d learned to let his boy fly a little.

  “It’s the library, Teague. What’s going to happen at the damned library?”

  Well, famous last words, really—but there were other worries that day, so they didn’t bite me in the ass until later.

  Nicky: Grooming

  BRACKEN WAS really beat by the time we got back—and frankly, it was a little scary seeing him so limp when usually he was a terrifying ball of vitality.

  Cory thought so too.

  “Cold shower, cold swim?” she asked brusquely, coming into the air-conditioned room and rooting through the bags we’d left on the floor.

  “Gawds…,” I groaned, looking at Brack on the far end of the bed. “Cool nap!”

  Cory blinked—and yawned. I had to laugh. Sometimes I could actually watch her brain remember that she
wasn’t superwoman, and this time I could almost see exhaustion drop from the heavens onto her shoulders.

  “Okay,” she yawned again. “Cool nap. But first… Bracken, where the hell is that swimsuit I bought at Walmart?”

  I watched curiously as he looked at her sideways from those big round eyes. “I left it in the cart when we unloaded,” he said sleepily. “On purpose.”

  Cory abruptly stopped her rooting, and I snickered so hard I woke myself up a little. I’d seen him do it, actually—he’d made eye contact with me, picked the damned thing out of the bag with his thumb and forefinger, and wadded it into a corner of the plastic cart. Getting between the two of them was like getting between two boulders rolling down two different mountains toward each other. It was better, really, to just run like hell, hold your arms over your head, and see what the fallout would be.

  “Bracken!” Abruptly she started rooting through the drawers and came out with two little amber-colored scraps of material. “This is the only suit in my suitcase. What am I supposed to wear in front of Nicky’s parents?”

  Bracken pushed himself up on an elbow and scowled. “That will do fine,” he said and then flopped back onto the bed with a sigh. Cory stopped and got one of those “Cory’s busy, call back later” expressions that meant she was talking with Green.

  She came back to herself with big eyes and a little bit of fury.

  “You bastards!” she shrieked. “You did this on purpose! How could you?”

  Bracken sat up in bed now, and some of his tiredness fell away. “You’re not a nun, you’re not fat, and you’re not wearing a unitard to go swimming in this heat,” he said unequivocally.

  “But…,” she stuttered, “Brack, I picked out the suit I liked! Why couldn’t we have had this discussion then?”

  Brack blinked and scowled some more, his eyes already at half-mast. “Because you’re exhausting, beloved, and you bitch a lot less when you know you don’t have a choice.”