Green's Hill Werewolves, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  “Come in,” Katy said automatically. Maybe it would be Teague, or Green, or someone to make them feel better.

  But it wasn’t. Jacky was beginning to learn that atonement didn’t come cheap or easy.

  It was Cory.

  “Hi,” she said, looking over her shoulder as though she was expecting someone she didn’t want to see. She closed the door behind her and dumped an armload of clothes on the dresser next to her—Teague’s, left on the floor of the anteroom. When she was done, she turned to face them, smiling weakly. “Look. I need to do this and then find Green before Bracken sees, okay? I just….” Her voice firmed. “Jack, I really think you need to see this. It might make dealing together easier, okay?”

  Jack looked up at her, his eyes still unfriendly. God, he hated himself for everything he’d done, he really did, but he resented her. He couldn’t help it. He looked at her and saw the person who put his beloved in danger. It wasn’t rational or kind, but there it was.

  Her mouth quirked up on one side as though she knew exactly what was going through his head.

  “Right. See, here’s the thing.” She unzipped the hooded green sweatshirt she was wearing, revealing a plain, oversized man’s blue T-shirt underneath. It was, Jacky realized, way oversized—it was bunched at her middle and hung nearly to her knees. It must have been Bracken’s or Green’s, and she looked so much younger in it.

  “How old are you, Lady?” Katy asked, echoing his very thought.

  Cory wrinkled her nose. “Why does everyone ask me that? I’m old enough to drink—how’s that?”

  Barely, Jack realized in surprise. Then she took the sleeve of the shirt—it went nearly to her elbows—and raised it up to her pale shoulders, and he forgot about how old she was.

  There were bruises on the back of her arm—four swollen, red-purple, blood-filled hematomas exactly the size of his fingers. The one from his thumb on the front was especially heinous, and he moaned a little in his throat. She lowered her sleeve and pulled up the other one, and there was an identical set of marks—but he must have pinched her flesh in his hand, because the hematoma was raised in a wedge shape behind the finger marks.

  Jack stared at her in horror.

  “I’m not a werewolf,” she said unnecessarily. “I’m not an elf. I can do some pretty cool stuff with my power, and I really do function as an excellent weapon. But there’s a reason Bracken and Nicky guard me. I chafe under it, and I give them shit, but the fact is, my physical body is just not that strong. I….” She blushed and shrugged. “I’m mortal, and I’m weak. Bracken would have killed you just to keep me safe from something like this, you understand?” She quickly put her sweatshirt back on and zipped it up, then put her hands in the pockets like an ordinary street kid using all that extra fabric as defense against the world.

  “Teague’s spent the last month getting used to jumping between me and anything threatening. He… he saved your life today. He jumped between us to keep me safe and to keep Bracken from killing you. It was all about keeping his family from being hurt, okay? You’ve got to forgive him for that.”

  Jack’s mouth was dry, and he fought against darkness in his vision and bile in his throat. He’d done that. He’d laid hands on someone weaker than he was and….

  “Why didn’t you defend yourself?” he rasped, knowing he sounded petulant, but God… she could have pulverized him. She could have squashed him against the wall like a bug!

  Cory flushed and looked away. “Well, you’re Teague’s beloved, you know? I don’t like to use my shit against family—not when they don’t have the same shit to fight back with….”

  He didn’t hear her next words, because her bruises flashed in front of his eyes and her words I’m mortal and weak rang in his ears, and he absolutely had to go to the bathroom to be violently ill.

  Not One of the Men

  KATY AND Cory watched him run down the little hallway and then winced at the unmistakable sounds coming from the bathroom.

  Cory grimaced. “Wonderful. I’m batting oh-in-a-thousand today. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket and see what else I can fuck up.”

  Katy was usually very shy around the lady of the house. Cory was smart, like Jacky, and she seemed to have her shit together in ways Katy hadn’t even dreamed of when Katy had been clawing her way through the back alleys and smack houses of Angel’s Camp. But this hadn’t been Cory’s fault—it hadn’t. As much as Katy loved Jack, well, she’d slapped him across the face for a reason.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Lady. Jacky, he’s like….” She floundered for a minute and then said the first dumb thing that came into her head. “He’s like a little boy making a fort in his bedroom, you know? There he is, and he thinks, ‘Hey, I got Teague in here, we have a fort together!’ Then I come and play, and he thinks, ‘This is it. This is the most people who can come into my fort!’ But the whole time, he doesn’t realize that the fort in his bedroom is also in a house, which is also on a street, which is also in a city, you know? It’s not just me and Teague and Jacky in his fort. There’s a whole world protecting the fort, and he just thinks that’s what it does, right?” Oh God… she was fucking this all up, she was sure of it—until Cory gave her an out-and-out blinding grin. Katy, who knew she was pretty and Lady Cory was not, suddenly also knew that Lady Cory was beautiful.

  “That’s awesome, Katy. You’re right. He doesn’t know how big we are. I guess….” She looked down to the bathroom again. The sounds of barfing had stopped, but Jack was making weak little sobs that echoed from the toilet and down the hall, and she looked away again. “I guess we’ll tell him some other time, you think?”

  Katy nodded and sighed. “I should probably go make sure he’s okay. I know, I know he hurt you and all, but….”

  Cory looked up and put her hand tentatively on Katy’s as it waved generally between them. “Katy, believe me—you don’t ever have to apologize for loving someone in spite of their flaws. Remember me? I’m the one married to a cave man.”

  Katy shook her head, and suddenly Cory’s grip on her hand fluttered. Cory got a look for all the world as if she was listening to music in her head. Then she blinked and gave that tentative, shy smile.

  “Green’s back with Teague. He, uhm, he thinks that Jacky doesn’t love him anymore, so you should be prepared for, uhm, you know. Beating his stubborn Irish head in with affection, right?”

  Katy grinned at her widely and gave her a quick, exuberant hug. “Right. Good point. He’s not so bright when it comes to love, no?”

  Cory shrugged. “None of us are, except maybe Green.” She turned to leave and then turned back, her pale, freckled cheeks washed with a blush. “Oh yeah. Bracken and I don’t go back to work until Tuesday, but Grace is having a sale on those samplers. The same artist as before, with the wolves. She wants to know if you want one?”

  And now it was Katy’s turn to blush. Lady Cory, all ninja bitch and shit, going off to fight with the men, and she was getting Katy needlepoint. This was a good place. A good place with good family. Jacky had to see it. He had to understand that you wanted these people to love you, and that it would only make your heart bigger and stronger to have them at your back.

  “That’d be nice,” she said, ducking her head shyly.

  Cory said, “Okay, then,” and made her way out.

  Katy sighed and went back to help Jack, because Goddess knew he would have been pissing his own pants for the last week if someone hadn’t helped him with the fly.

  He had just finished brushing his teeth when the door opened and Teague stumbled in. He was wrapped in nothing but a hand-knitted blanket, which he’d secured around his waist like a bath towel.

  Katy ran up to him, fully intending to hug him until he begged for mercy, but, as Cory had warned, he was too prepared for rejection to accept her.

  Keeping his head down, he started rooting through his dresser for clothes. Katy took a deep breath and tried another tack.

  “Uhm, whatcha doin’?”

/>   Teague swallowed and kept his face turned away. His dark blond hair was slicked back against his head with sweat, and his hazel eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue and grief. “Figured I’d find another room.”

  Katy laughed and felt her spine shift into place. “No,” she said gently, and taking a page from his book, simply nudged him away from the dresser. “Now, sit down. I’ll find you some clothes, and you can go shower and wash those nasty feet, but you, me, and Jacky are sleeping in here if I have to beat you, shoot him, and drag your bleeding bodies into that bed, you hear me?”

  She heard a puff of air that might have been a laugh. Then his hands came out and rested on hers, warm and still a little bit muddy from a long run as a wolf.

  “That’s, uhm, sweet, field mouse. But you and I both know it’s not going to work. I’m… I have to work here. I….” She risked a look at his face, and if anyone recognized that terrible, fruitless struggle for words to name the maelstrom inside your heart, it was Katy. But she also knew Teague would never feel right unless he found those words on his own.

  “I’m too broken to love without the hill,” he said at last. “I need a reason to think I deserve you. Jacky, he can’t live with that. I’ll just—”

  “Stay,” Jack said from the bathroom. “Please stay.”

  Teague’s face crumpled like a child’s, and Katy grabbed his hands hard and then moved forward to lean her head on his chest. “You don’t really want me,” he whispered, the voice so like a child’s that Katy thought she’d just burst into tears and they wouldn’t get anything done. She womaned up, though, and swallowed all that in her throat, then soothed Teague’s chest with her hands.

  “Of course we want you,” she reassured just for form. She knew the person he needed to believe it from was Jack.

  “I’m stupid,” Jack said. Katy risked a look at him. He’d stopped at the end of the hallway. His hand was gripping the doorframe so hard his knuckles were white, and he looked, if anything, even worse than he had when he’d just finished puking. His face was taut and pale, and the self-directed anger burned through his blue eyes. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I was like a kid playing with a hand grenade. You threw yourself on the grenade for me, and I… I didn’t even know you’d saved my life.”

  Teague scrubbed at his face, his chin still wobbly, and Katy hoped they could get through this because, damn it, something had to come from all this pain.

  “I wasn’t just saving you,” he said honestly. “Jacky, you were hurting someone… you were hurting her… and after all she’s done for us….”

  Jack moaned a little. “I know,” he said softly, and Katy believed him. Nothing like seeing the bruises of your bad deeds to make you know you’re the bad guy. “I’m aware of my complete stupidity, okay, Teague? Please—don’t. Don’t let this take you away from us.”

  “Why do you want me, Jacky?” Teague asked, his voice raw. “You don’t even know me.”

  And of all the sounds of hurt and disillusionment she’d heard Jacky make in the last hour, this one was the worst.

  “That’s not true!” Jack rushed up to them, but Teague’s bubble of hurt, of self-containment, was so perfect and inviolable that Jack stopped just outside the place of comfort for all of them.

  “What do you think you know?” Teague asked, a tinge of bitterness in the sound. “You know I’ve been hurt. You know I’m lonely. You know I love you and Katy. That doesn’t make me your ideal mate, Jack. It just makes me vulnerable.”

  Jack closed his eyes and swallowed. “I’d never hurt….” Oh fuck. Katy winced, because he had. He’d done it more than once, each time more unforgivable than the last. He must have realized it too, because he stopped midstream and changed it. “I’ll never hurt you again.”

  Teague looked up at Jack, everything in his eyes naked and bleeding. “I need to be sure,” he said softly. “I can’t do this if I’m worried. I can’t do this if I think I’ll go to sleep with you next to me one day and wake up alone in the morning. I need to know you can accept everything about me—including where my loyalties are.”

  Restlessly he turned back toward the dresser, where his clothes lay in a bundle. He picked up the T-shirt he’d been wearing that morning, the one with the hole and the dried blood on it, and he fingered the rent thoughtfully in the silence before turning back to Jack.

  “I have violence in me, Jack.” It was unequivocal. They all knew it was true. “I was a stone-cold killer for a lot of years. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is now that I’m fighting for love and for people I can believe in, I’m going to throw my life into the battle with a lot more passion. You know I’d die for you, for Katy. You know that. You need to know that I’d die for Green and Cory and even that sonuvabitch Bracken. Hell, I’d probably die for Nicky if I had to. Anything, you understand, to keep this place alive. You need to get behind them, Jacky, because if you’re against them, that’s leaving me in the middle.”

  Jack blinked and swallowed, his face taut and pale. He was considering Teague’s words carefully, Katy could tell, measuring the rebelliousness of his own heart against what he needed to be for Teague.

  After a moment he said, “I can do that,” with complete certainty.

  Teague nodded and pulled out some clothes, then moved toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” Katy asked, because it wasn’t to the shower, that was for damned sure.

  “I need to sleep alone tonight,” he said, his voice empty. “I want you two to watch me fight tomorrow. Cory said I could take down the fucker with the knife in a one-on-one. I need you to see me do it.”

  Sleep alone? Oh God. “Teague!” Katy’s voice was thick and broken. “You can’t sleep alone. Who’s gonna make the night monsters go away? You can’t sleep alone. You’ll scream and scream, and no one will kiss you better….”

  The thought destroyed her. They knew. They’d heard him; they’d soothed him in his sleep. That was their job. They kept him together. They patched his heart up because it had been ripped open too many times to hold together on its own.

  Teague pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eye. “You can’t just love me when I’m weak, Katy,” he said after a moment of pulling himself together. “You can’t just love me because I need you. You need to love me when I’m strong. You need to love me when I’m an evil motherfucker defending the shit I love. I may die quicker alone, but at least I’ll know what’s real.” He put his hand on the doorknob and looked up at both of them, meeting their eyes so they’d know he was serious.

  “Please come tomorrow. The hill will tell you when.”

  And with that he was gone, leaving Katy alone with Jack, who was sinking to his knees, sobbing like a child.

  Never Alone

  I ADMIT it. I stood around the corner from their room and waited to see what would happen. But I was keeping Green company, so that was okay.

  I’d run into Green after passing Teague down the hall. Teague had been so shell-shocked he didn’t even see me, and I’d had a horrible, skeleton-fingers-up-the-spine chill of fear.

  The last time I’d seen someone look that shell-shocked was when I was looking in the mirror after Adrian died. Teague felt like someone had died. You can’t hold someone when you think they’ve died, and if anyone needed to be held, it was Teague. And since I’d been there before, since I knew that feeling of betrayal, of loss, I knew what was coming next.

  So Green and I stood shoulder to shoulder, and I read the bad news on Green’s face as he unabashedly used his super elf-hearing to listen in on their most intimate, most painful conversation.

  About midway through, he bumped me and I winced, and he cast me a sharp look before putting his hand on my upper arm through my sweatshirt to heal me.

  “Thanks, beloved.”

  “You should have gotten someone else to do it.”

  “I couldn’t let Bracken see.”

  He caught my eyes and nodded with a grimace. We both knew this situation, as bad a
s it was, could have been a whole lot worse. At that moment the door opened, and we didn’t need to speak in each other’s heads for me to read his little shove at my shoulders.

  It was my turn.

  “Hey, Teague,” I said, keeping my voice friendly and neutral. Didn’t know anything, didn’t see anything, just a friend walking down the hall.

  He looked ghastly—pale, red-eyed, and dirty, with his bare shoulders drooping over his scarred chest—but he managed a roll of the eyes.

  “You are so full of shit,” he called. I grimaced.

  “Brown eyes,” I replied softly. “Can’t help it. They won’t let you move out for long. You know that, right?”

  Teague shrugged. He wasn’t so sure. “How’d you know?” he asked seriously, and I could only give him the truth.

  “It’s exactly what I wanted, right after Adrian died. I figured it would hurt less to be alone, you know?” I bumped his shoulder with my own and nodded him down the hall.

  “No one died,” he said tersely. “Where are we going?”

  “I figure you can room with Mario. He’s got a king-sized bed and no designs on your body. This way you can go take a shower before you come and sit down and watch movies with me in the front room. And you feel like someone died, so don’t give me that shit.”

  “I’m watching movies with you?” he asked, genuinely surprised.

  “And eating ice cream and dancing to our favorite CDs, just like girlfriends at a slumber party. Now don’t change the subject.” I figured it would just be the movies and the ice cream, but I added the rest to see him roll his eyes again and scowl, which was a damned sight better than his expression of bleak hopelessness, thank you very much.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he growled, but he was lying and we both knew it. I stopped walking and turned to him, my eyebrows raised.

  “Bullshit. You feel like you lost him, like he’ll never love you again. I figure you’re probably planning to make him watch you off old Dumbfuck MacShitsyerpants as painfully and savagely as possible, and then you’re going to turn to him and say, ‘See—I told you I was a fucking monster. Now go the fuck away!’ Am I right?”