Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “I have a few things to say here,” he told her, and she nodded in return.

  “Just make sure one of them is ‘I’m happy you made it okay,’” she said. His shoulders shook in a laugh that contained no humor at all.

  “I’ll try, darlin’—I really will.” And then he kissed her, as he’d kissed her in bed this afternoon, and not even his sun-blind parents could miss that they honestly cared for each other. When they parted I ruffled his hair with my free hand. Together we started for the shore, but not before she turned and added one last cherry to what apparently had been a giant shit sundae of a meeting.

  “Mr. Kestrel, we’re really sorry about your luggage. Teague totally dropped that bag on accident, and we weren’t sure if you’d want us touching your things.”

  As we walked away, we heard Nicky, as angry as we’d ever heard him, saying, “Annette, I’m not sure what the hell you’re doing here, but you may want to go shower—and I’d leave those shoes at the door before you go in. Dad, I bet if you ask Tanya, she’s got a hose somewhere….”

  I could hear their unhappy replies, but by now we were far enough away that Cory couldn’t, and I opted not to give a ripe flying shit.

  Since everybody in the lake was naked, I was on my way to dropping my own trunks when Cory rolled her eyes in the direction of the hill.

  Crap—there was the civilian, and he’d just seen all of the were-people doing their changing thing. The kid raised an ironic eyebrow at me, and I shrugged. Lambent and I would probably have to do a mind-wipe on the kid and his mother anyway, but I’d keep the shorts on so he didn’t get too “damaged.” Humans and nakedness—another thing I would never get.

  With a sigh I hopped onto the dock and ran to the end, stopping a few feet short of the floating bait shop and running off to plunge into the blessed coolness that was Lake Shasta.

  Goddess, I loved it in the water. There was enough stirred-up powdered red dirt in it to feel as though I was not just walking the earth, as I did almost daily anyway, but rolling in it, drawing power from the iron and from the organic, peaceful heart of the Goddess herself. Besides the fact that it was a relief from the thrice-damned heat, it was like a rolling, massaging energy bath as well, and I was suddenly glad for the shorts. My erection was big enough for Cory to sit on like a park bench, if she’d been so inclined.

  But Cory wasn’t in the water. She was sitting on the edge of the dock, her oversized T-shirt tucked under her bottom and her feet dangling in the water where they could touch. I squinted at her against the glare, and she smiled back from under her sun visor. Her ponytail was wet, hanging in a snarled point over the back of the visor, and her white T-shirt hung stretched out and still a little transparent with damp—she’d been swimming already.

  Why wasn’t she in the water now?

  “Get in!” I glared at her, and her lips twitched.

  “Bossy, ain’t ya?”

  “Your face is turning red from the heat. Why aren’t you getting in?”

  She stuck her tongue out at me. “I think the T-shirt is stuck under my butt. I’m not sure how to get unstuck, and if I just hop up from here, I’ll fall face forward. That’ll be fun!”

  I ignored her bright sarcasm. The sound of our people playing in the deeps of the crooked lake faded behind me, and for a moment I could only hear her heartbeat.

  It was accelerating.

  I knew it! Dammit, I knew this morning that there was something wrong. Damn humans and their casual ability to throw lies into the wind. She was getting good at it—between the human ability to lie and what she was picking up from the sidhe about bending truth, she was becoming almost opaque. But not to me.

  “Stop lying and get in the water,” I said darkly, and she made a face. Her heartbeat got threadier as she stuck out her tongue and laughed at me.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “I’m happy here.”

  “Bullshit. It’s a… a… a bajillion degrees out there. It’s not comfortable, and you love the water!” She did—I’d seen her playing in Lake Clementine, although that was almost unfairly called a lake. It was more an extra-wide spot in a lazy river—most of the time, even Cory could still touch bottom.

  “I like the water at home,” she said. I squinted at her. An evasion. Like I said, she was getting sidhe-slippery when she wanted to be.

  “What’s wrong with the water here?” I thought it felt glorious.

  She swallowed and gave me that false sun of a smile. “Nothing. Here, I’ll jump in.”

  This morning when she’d jumped in, there had been a wealth of childish glee in her movements. Now she stood and squared her jaw, like she did for any op we’d run, and ran the short width of the dock with a concentrated scowl. While she was in the air, prepared to hit the water, her face was twisted into the same expression a human might wear at the dentist’s office, and she plunked heavily into the lake.

  Her rise to the surface was a grim struggle of tightened muscles and shivering self-control. She flung water from her face and hair and proceeded to tread water next to me with a face so tight and jaw so clenched, it looked like her snarl of battle.

  “You’ve gone swimming before!” I exclaimed, appalled. She closed her eyes breathlessly and then opened them, rolling them almost wildly. Her heart was pounding like a tympani in her temple, and I’d had enough of this shit.

  It was so deliciously easy to maneuver behind her and catch her midriff with my hand. She gasped, and I pulled her back against me, trapping her thrashing legs with my own and maintaining a lazy, balanced paddling with my other hand.

  “Bracken…,” she choked. I leaned down and whispered in her ear, knowing it was a sure way of getting her attention.

  “Now I’ve got you, due’ane, do you hear me?” She let out her breath and nodded, and I continued on. “I need you to calm down and remember that you could probably kill every fish in the lake, plus us, with your fear alone.”

  “Do you think I don’t know—”

  “And then remember that you won’t.”

  “Why aren’t you sinking?” she asked in a stony little voice. That was my beloved, practical to the bone.

  “Because I’m a sidhe. Our blood and our bones aren’t iron and stone….”

  “Honey and sunlight are your blood and bone,” she supplied, pulling the rhyme from her busy mind. I laughed appreciatively, keeping my mouth and my breath in the hollow of her neck. Her body was cool against mine in the water. I remembered her lying on the bed playfully, accepting Nicky’s touch, and the urge came again to make her tremble and scream.

  “That’s right,” I urged, letting my hand rise and fall with her stomach. “Now that we’re singing nursery rhymes, I want you to tell me a story about why you’re so frightened.”

  “I can’t see my feet,” she said baldly, as though that would mean something to me.

  “So….”

  She shook in my arms, but not the way I wanted her to. “You remember, don’t you? The last time I couldn’t see my feet?”

  “Ahhhh….” Oh yes. Oh, Goddess… I remembered. “Green had to put me under,” I told her humorlessly.

  “I didn’t know that,” she said, her body still vibrating like one of those little dogs with the big eyes.

  “Mmmmhm,” I told her bleakly. “I told him I’d never move on Adrian’s girl—but seeing you hurt, seeing you be so amazingly brave… oh, it hurt to know I’d never know you.”

  “Mmmm….” She was using the memory to fight the fear. I could feel it in her—she was leaning her body back on me—and her muscles were loosening, becoming liquid, delicious and refreshing around me. “You would have known me,” she said, surprising me. I’d said the words before, to the phantom of our lover in the garden, but I never knew if she’d believed them or if she’d even thought them possible.

  “I pray every day that’s true,” I said. She shivered again, convulsively, in my arms, and then the last of the adrenaline seemed to bleed out of her and into the water aro
und her.

  “I can’t swim like this for the next week,” she said on a breath of laughter. My hearing broadened, and I realized that the others had drifted off, leaving us here in the shadow of the bait shop—privacy when there should have been none. It was a gift, and I was grateful.

  But she was right—it was a gift. She would need to be able to relax. There was nothing to do out here, which wasn’t a bad thing. We weren’t a frantic people as a whole. We were happy with activity—swimming, studying, building, reading, running, being a part of Green’s businesses, these were our day-to-day, and they were good ways to spend our time. But it was hellishly hot here in this alien place, in this amoeba-shaped bowl of a valley looking over the scorched green of hardy trees and red earth. If she couldn’t swim, it would actually become a weakness.

  There was a sudden breath of wildflowers, and she sighed, relaxing a little more in my arms. When the scent was gone, she spoke.

  “Green says I should be able to feel out with my power,” she said. “Want to try it?”

  “Promise not to boil me like rice?” I was kidding, of course. I had great faith in her.

  “Promise.” There was a subtle glow there around us. I was pretty sure that none of the others could see it or even feel its tingle where they were.

  “Can you feel anything?” I asked, burying my nose in her wet hair. It smelled very animal, and I found I liked that too. Would there be a way to get her alone on this trip? Not that I minded Nicky’s presence and participation, but oh, Goddess, did she come undone in my arms when we were alone.

  “I can feel that there’s not a suicidal vampire down there,” she laughed. “But other than that… well, I’m not going to be catching any fish with my prodigious mind.” Her body regained some of its normal tension—not the relaxation of sedated panic, and not the initial panic either.

  “Why do you think he did it?” I asked, because now that she had brought it up, it was something that had always bothered me. “To hide down there, staying awake in the day, hoping one of our people would come by?”

  “Mmm….” Cory thought carefully before she answered. “Crispin wasn’t letting them feed—I don’t know why. Maybe because Sezan was just… just crazy and controlling. I’ve wanted to ask Kyle forever, but….” Her shudder was purely sympathetic.

  “Yeah, not a subject we want to bring up.” Speaking of suicidal vampires—if we hadn’t brought Kyle into our kiss after his beloved had died, he would have greeted the flesh-scorching dawn with maniacal delight. Some memories shouldn’t be resurrected, but we did it on a regular basis to keep our people safe from the same things. I’d have to think about that. Slowly. Like a giant tractor with gear problems. But I’d think.

  “Anyway….” She shifted away from me naturally, so she could look in my eyes while she treaded water on her own. A puzzle. A puzzle would keep her occupied, keep her mind off of what could be lurking under her feet. I respected irrational fears and phobias—they were what had kept my people living in solidarity for many millennia before my birth.

  “Anyway?”

  “Yeah, maybe it was just that. Maybe—maybe he hurt, watching his kiss become twisted and horrible. He’d been told I was the enemy—maybe it was worth it to let his flesh rot and risk being flambéed like dessert in order to take us out. Maybe it was worse to live, when your code for living was insane.”

  Oh Goddess… I knew what she was talking about. Her fear made me cold, when I’d finally been comfortable for the first time in a month.

  “So,” I said, remembering that cursed play, “if Banquo had lived, are you saying he’d kill himself rather than serve?”

  She shook her head, an appreciative smile on her face even as her arms paddled and her legs treaded. “I’m saying he’d do what Macbeth asked him to—he’d just die in the doing.”

  “You’re not…,” I started grimly. She looked honestly surprised, and then the lake was my gloriously cool and nourishing friend once again.

  “No!” she laughed. “Not even. It’s just something to think about. Hey, Nicky!” She looked up, shading her eyes even under the mint-green visor. “Hop in, yeah?”

  Nicky smiled, a weary, harried smile, and nodded. If anyone looked like he needed a dip in the lake, it was Nicky.

  “Shit, yeah!” Instead of hopping, though, he changed abruptly into a bird and flew out to about where Mario and LaMark had gone. Then he shifted back, whooping happily as his body arrowed into the green blankness of the lake.

  “Shit,” Cory laughed next to me, and I had to concur. “Please tell me he’s got another set of trunks in his suitcase!”

  I hoped so, because the pair he’d been wearing when he’d stood over the dock and talked to us was most definitely gone when he turned back into a young man and plunged into the water. So was the casual button-up shirt he’d been wearing. Judging by the hysterical laughter of the rest of our people, we weren’t the only ones to notice.

  Cory laughed again. “And I thought I was stressed!” With that she extended her body and started a no-nonsense freestyle to the center of the party, and I joined her. In a place like this, the middle of a cool lake was as good a spot to have a parley as any other, and I had the feeling that we wouldn’t have to worry about civilians overhearing.

  Her face was taut and controlled by the time we reached the others, and I wondered how odd we looked, gathered around her and listening to her talk like a tiny general. I looked around and tried to figure out whether anyone else guessed that she was tamping down on her new anxiety of the water, but I couldn’t do it. I was finely attuned to my beloved but not as good at gauging everybody else.

  “Okay.” She smiled gamely and kept up the pretense that she was enjoying this little swim. “Here’s what we know.”

  Within five minutes, Max and Renny were scheduled to take the cave tour on the other side of the lake the next day—and to get “lost” on the trail and “find” the remains that Teague had spotted earlier. Cory also covered our meeting with the vampires the next night and, blushing as much as she could for someone whose face was pale in the chill of the water, how she planned to make an entrance.

  “You do realize this could end up being the single most humiliating moment of my life!” she growled at me, and Nicky and I met gazes.

  “What we did in San Francisco was a lot bigger,” Nicky said, and Max and Renny had to agree.

  Cory shook her head. “Yeah, but that was the whole lot of us singing. This is me, doing the ass-wiggling slut-bitch thing, and… well… guys, I don’t know how much theater is in me!”

  Katy was chewing her lip. “It will help if you can get the men into your damage path, you know?”

  I watched Cory translate that for a moment, and then a slow smile flowed across her tightened face. “Yes. Exactly. Guys, how hard would it be to wear something… I don’t know, cutaway or removable over your tats? Cover your marks so I can come by in the song and pull them off?”

  She looked at me and I held up my wrist, with that twined vine of oak and lime traveling around my arm from wrist to elbow. “I think we’ve got something at home that can do it,” I said thoughtfully, then looked at everybody else. Teague held up his wrist with the impressive stylized oak tree, and the others showed an assortment of bicep, wrist, or forearm tats that could be easily costumed. Even LaMark’s was a Day-Glo nest of limes on the front of his brown/black shoulder. The only exceptions were Max and Jacky.

  “No can do,” Max sighed. Then he did one of those things that puppies do when they’re chasing their own tails, except he did it in the water and ended up on his back in a full roll. “Mine’s on my back,” he sputtered when he came up, his eyes crossing even more than usual.

  Renny looked sideways at her husband and burst into a peal of giggles so passionate that she actually dunked herself and came up sputtering. In a heartbeat she was a cat again—but she was sneezing through wrinkled whiskers, and Max and I were laughing hard enough that we were having trouble staying afloat
.

  Cory let out an honest laugh, the deep chuckle calming things down a bit. “You’re still not excused, Max—you can wear a sport coat over a backless tank, and we’ll put Renny, wearing something backless, next to you. Her tat won’t be so noticeable until everyone else’s is revealed. What about you, Jacky? Nothing we can see in public?”

  “No!” Jacky and Teague both shouted in tandem. They were suddenly the focus of the entire group’s attention, and now Katy was the one laughing.

  “No, Lady,” she shook her head between guffaws. Now she was having trouble staying afloat, and her two lovers were doing their best not to look at each other. “I don’t think the world is ready to see all of Jacky’s shit just flappin’ in the breeze!”

  Cory blinked. “Oh, yeah,” she laughed. “I’d forgotten that!”

  We all looked at her and she shrugged, the water rippling over her shoulders. “I saw it when he stood right over my head buck naked during the vampire-bear attack.” She let out a prodigious yawn and covered her mouth with a pruny hand, speaking through the yawn. “I was thinking about other things, but yeah—” She grinned up at Jack. “—you actually are excused, Jacky. That’s just a little TMI.” Jack blinked, as though he was surprised it had been that easy, but before he could say anything, she yawned again. I shook my head.

  “Did you nap at all?” I asked, and she managed to look sheepish. “And you’re getting cold. Here, let’s get you out of the water.” I looked at Max, who nodded, and in a minute he was a cat just like Renny. Together they moved under Cory’s arms, in spite of her awkward attempts to bat them away.

  They ignored her, and we left everybody else to play as Nicky and I followed to make sure she got to the room okay. She stopped when she reached a place she could stand, and turned to call, “Dinner at dusk, at the picnic tables behind the cabin!” When everybody waved, she nodded and let me take her arm back.