by Amy Lane
Teague was the leader. Katy was the anchor. Jack was the emotional drama queen who could fuck up a wet dream if someone didn’t throw a rein over his shoulders and pull hard, but he’d been the one giving all the orders and doing all the thinking since the three of them had been shoved on the medevac helicopter and taken to the hospital where Teague had been plastered and then—oddly and surrealistically enough—taken here to a house on a cliff, overlooking the redwoods and gray-blue surf of Monterey.
And for the last twelve hours or so, he’d… he’d sat, here in this spacious, darkened room, looking out at the ocean below them. He’d petted Katy, kept her calm, and listened above the sound of his own heartbeat for Teague’s breathing and the occasional grunt as he tried to turn sideways and curl up in a ball, only to be thwarted by the gazillion layers of plaster and fiberglass that covered him from the balls of his feet to the top of his balls and above.
Somewhere above Teague’s breathing, Jack could hear the sea.
Teague didn’t whimper—not even in his sleep—although the pain must have been breath-stopping. He just lay there and twitched, the weight of the plaster and all the pulleys and things keeping him from curling into that psychologically necessary self-protective ball. Jack had been torn between going to lie down with him, bed be damned, and staying with Katy. But Teague was unconscious, and Katy was holding on to herself by a thread, so he’d made the hard choice and stayed where he was needed instead of going where he wanted to be.
About an hour before Katy fell asleep—and two hours before she woke up so spectacularly—the phone had rung, and that proved a welcome distraction. It was Green.
“Hullo, Jacky. You lot settling in?” Green sounded… tired, Jack thought. Weary and a little bit ragged.
“He hasn’t woken up yet,” Jack said plaintively, and Green was not so weary and so ragged that he couldn’t soothe an emotional wingnut werewolf’s frazzled nerves.
“He will. Lambent said the push he gave to send Teague under would have sent a mortal into a coma for a week.” Jacky remembered that moment, and how the push had seemed gentle and effortless. Apparently Lambent—a fire-haired elf with a wicked-evil tongue—had a soft spot for Teague as well. “Teague will wake up eventually,” Green continued, “when his body’s not working quite so hard at putting itself together, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Jack said with some relief. It was nothing he hadn’t thought of himself, but… but he was a beta wolf. He had been his whole life and had known it from the moment he met Teague Sullivan in a bar and wanted his first man. He needed confirmation that it was going to be all right. Good beta wolf, right?
But then, even Jacky could grow a little beyond being a beta wolf.
“How is Lady Cory?” he asked reverently. The leader he’d resented for taking so much of Teague’s time. The woman he’d been jealous of, because so many men seemed to fall at her feet. The little, smart-mouthed college student who could barely hold on to her patience most days when Jack was being his queenie, possessive worst. She’d almost killed herself to save Teague’s life.
There were not enough ways to show his loyalty after that.
“She’s….” Green sighed. “She scared us. Is still scaring us. Her clambake wasn’t over by a long shot when you three left. She’s sleeping now, but she’s got some more grim business to do in a bit.”
Jack sighed. So here he’d been, freaking out and resentful because he had to be the head of his werewolf household for half a day, and the kid—she was younger than he was, goddammit, she was nearly three years younger than he was, she was younger than Katy!—the woman who’d slit her own throat on her enemy’s knife to keep Teague from falling from the sky without even a little bit of a net, she’d been saving the world during that time. And now she was going to wake up from a little nap and do it all again.
“Tell her….” He breathed out hard, knowing no words were enough. “Tell her I’m grateful. Tell her that. Jacky’s grateful.”
For once, Green didn’t ask if Jacky was going to be okay. It would hit Jack later—and hit him hard—that this was as close as Green ever came to being self-centered, and that what had happened with the little sorceress beloved by so many had shaken the tall, self-contained, and joyous sidhe to his sound and wholesome core.
“I’m glad you’re grateful, brother” is what Green did say. “I’m profoundly glad that the lot of you will be okay. But don’t get me wrong. What she did for your mate, she can’t do again. Ever. There’s more here than you know, Jacky, and her life is much bigger than her life. Teague won’t let her do it again—he’ll likely be hard-pressed to forgive her for it now, ye ken?”
“I’m sorry?” Jack didn’t understand the expression.
Green sighed. His accent had slipped. It did that sometimes, took a little memory surf around England, depending on the mood he was in. When he spoke of Adrian, it was damned near cockney. Jack had once heard him speak of the old ruling structure, and then it had been pure aristocrat.
“Do you understand in your bones, Jacky boy?” Green said softly. “Do you feel with all your breath that what she did was wrong?”
Jack tried hard to remember. It had all been so confused. He and Katy had been on the fringes of the battle, picking off vampires and shape-shifters who had entered ground zero for the fight. And then Cory had screamed, “Teague, get him!” and something huge pursuing Jack had disintegrated—with a little help from several silver rounds out of Teague’s shotgun.
Then Cory had been tackled. Jack had seen that part. He had been watching in slow motion, along with everybody else, to make sure she made it to her feet, fought her attacker off, and lived to lead them some more, when she looked up in the air and screamed Teague’s name.
Jack saw Teague lifted into the air by the vampire. Jack changed into a human to stand on two legs and squint at the sky to see his beloved—the tough, bandy-legged little dumb motherfucker of an Irishman who had been so sure he wasn’t worth loving. Teague was hauled up… up… two tree lengths, three tree lengths beyond the treetops at their high horizon, and Jack thought he would simply drop dead when Teague was released to fall back down.
He looked helplessly at Cory, who had been seized while she was distracted by Teague’s capture and was standing with a knife to her throat, watching with the same horror Jack was feeling. Jack cringed as he remembered how he’d begged her silently to do something, anything, to save his beloved.
What she’d done had been spectacular—and spectacularly stupid. She shot the guy. Nobody knew she had a gun still clenched in her hand, and he was a vampire. Even if she’d gotten him with silver shot—which she did—he would still live plenty long enough to jerk the knife at her throat.
Which he did.
Jack hardly saw the blood gushing from her pale, freckled skin as she stepped forward, bleeding mortally, and used her sorcery to slow Teague’s descent, but Jack sure as hell took note of it when she collapsed from blood loss and Teague dropped the last tree length to shatter the bottom half of his body.
He remembered rushing to Teague’s side, although others got there first. He barely remembered Bracken ripping the dripping hearts through the flesh of anyone who still opposed them on the gore-spattered, bloody battlefield. Jack could barely pinpoint the moment he glanced behind him to see how Cory was doing, assuming she would be fine. He had finally gotten over his unfounded jealousy. Teague wasn’t her lover; he was merely her friend and self-appointed protector. Who risked their life, truly, for a friend?
Apparently a girl with more lovers than friends. Or a leader who needed badly to believe she deserved to lead.
Teague was trying not to scream in agony, and Jack was forced to look away. What he saw had nearly made him nauseated, and it had definitely made him rethink his entire place in the scheme of Green’s hill.
Bracken had slashed his own wrist and, using that spectacular power he had, was feeding her his blood through the wound in her throat. For a moment even Jack could see th
at she’d stopped breathing.
Oh Christ. Oh Christ. Jack couldn’t look. He couldn’t watch that tableau—he was too busy watching Teague bite his own lip until it bled, trying so hard to be stoic and hardy and all the things he’d had to be just to survive childhood. Jack was too busy watching Katy turn into a girl and beg, beg with every fiber of her being, for Teague to be all right.
Both of them had flinched, absolutely cringed, when Cory came to, screaming in pain because Bracken was a sidhe and his blood did not belong in her body, and because she was armed to the teeth and now all that cold iron burned her too.
Jack remembered her staggering over to see if Teague was alive. He remembered she had been coated in her own blood, and she had been the one to convince Teague to let Lambent put him under so he might sleep beyond the overwhelming pain.
He remembered her mental conversation with Green, the one that had led to them being flown far away—far away from rogue vampire kisses, far away from battle, someplace sweet and isolated, someplace where they could have a little peace.
Monterey, of all places. It seemed like such an odd choice. But Teague, rolling around in pain, trying hard not to scream or pass out, had mentioned that he’d never seen the sea. Green would give his people anything he possibly could, and apparently a mansion on a cliff overlooking the Monterey coast had been one of his gifts to give.
Cory gave them Teague’s life. Green gave them their peace. At this point, Jack would follow them into hell.
But that didn’t mean he understood any of it, not Cory’s sacrifice and not Green’s weary, simmering anger.
“No,” Jack said roughly. “I don’t understand. I don’t. I wish I did, Green. If I understood why it was wrong, I’d understand why Teague follows her the way he does. If I understood why it was wrong, I would have been a better mate these last months, because right now my mate has a part of him that I barely understand. So I don’t. Teague is here. Teague’s all right. I’m just a beta wolf, Green. All I understand….” Jack’s breath caught, and his hands clenched. “All I understand is that he’s alive.”
Jack was sitting on a couch. He and Katy had slept and eaten there since they’d arrived. Teague was on one of those hospital beds you can rent for the short term. They’d set him up with a view to the sea. As the orderlies and paramedics had hustled about getting his plastered, immobilized body set up in one of those complicated getups that held his healing limbs exactly in place, that had been the one thing clear in Jack’s head.
Let him see the ocean. He’ll feel trapped. It’ll give him a place to run in his head.
Now, as he spoke to Green, he looked hungrily over at Teague to see if he was close to consciousness yet. He just… just….
Jack interrupted what Green was saying. “I’d just understand better if he was awake.”
Green’s indulgent, weary chuckle was enough to pull Jack back to the present and away from that twitching figure with the unnaturally still, bulky hips and legs. “There will be time to get it, Jacky. It sounds like you’re done in. You need to sleep too, boyo. Do me a favor and just… that’s it. Put your head down on the pillow….” How Green knew he was following orders, Jack would never know. “That’s right. Katy’s still a wolf, you said?”
Jack grunted. Hurt too much for real words.
“Well, make sure your hands are in her fur, right? You can touch, she can touch… you both need it. Now here, mate. I’m just going to hum to myself for a minute, yeah?”
“Yeah…,” Jack mumbled. “You do that.” Green had a lovely singing voice. Every now and then, he and Cory would sing with Bracken as backup, and the entire hill would resonate with joy. Jack lay back with the rough silk of Katy’s fur and the panting rhythm of her breath under his fingers, and when he woke up, it was early afternoon.
He stood and stretched. Someone had brought out sandwiches, and he realized he was starving. He wolfed (literally) down a couple of submarine sandwiches—lots of meat and cheese, only a little bit of veggies—as he stood and watched Teague sleep.
Teague had never been big.
He looked even smaller in the big white bed. His skin looked stretched thin over his sharp cheekbones, and his mouth was pressed with worry even though he’d been rendered unconscious by a first-class healing elf.
Jack shuddered.
Teague had always been a little shorter than tall and a little skinnier than broad. He had never eaten enough to let all those painful workouts bulk him up, and that hadn’t changed since he and Jack had started sharing the same bed. It hadn’t even changed since the wedding ceremony in February, the one where he’d surprised everybody with the indelible mark on his back to show his love for his mates.
No—Teague was still, would always be, a man with demons.
But living with Jacky and Katy, being their mate, their lover—those things had given him a measure of peace. Jack swallowed painfully; so had being Cory’s knight protector and friend.
Jack had barely come to acknowledge that when they were up in Redding facing the rogue kiss. He’d barely brought himself to thank Cory for saving Teague’s life, and….
He remembered more clearly what she had looked like covered in the gore of her enemies and her own blood. She had looked… grim. Like a soldier who’d seen twenty years of war. And she had looked defensive, like a girl who had accidentally injured her lover and did not know how to make it right. It had taken Jack twelve hours to realize that she looked like hell because she’d just been scolded by a lover who had been dead for over two years. By the time Adrian’s name had permeated his brain through the chaos and the haze, Jack had learned for sure that Teague would live and his relief had drowned out the world.
Staring at his beloved’s face in the gray light of the wraparound window, Jack felt the terrible wonder of that knowledge resurface.
He’d seen Adrian’s ghost—he and Katy both. They’d seen the transparent presence wandering Green’s garden disconsolately looking for his beloved while Cory had been out putting herself at risk for Green’s people. Jack’s throat closed, and he laced his fingers with Teague’s, gratified when Teague’s cool, dry fingers gave a squeeze. Green and Adrian had done the same, although Adrian’s fingers had been made only of moonlight.
That, he thought helplessly, that is what it would be like to live without Teague.
Teague’s fingers tightened, and Jack felt a sob, a leftover of a night of fear, bubble up from somewhere around his groin.
And that was when Katy sat up and started howling.
“Shit!” Jack snarled and launched himself at her with a full body slam.
They were not the only ones in the house. Jack had dim memories of two exceedingly… odd elves who had answered the door and welcomed them into their home. One of them had probably brought the sandwiches, and both of them….
The closest Jack could come to was an analogy about old hippies, though he knew elves weren’t susceptible to chemicals the way humans were. But… something? Blood/sugar/sex/magic, whatever! Somewhere along the way, these two had done too much of something, and he wasn’t sure they could deal with Katy when Katy couldn’t deal with the world.
Katy howled in Jack’s arms and squirmed and fought, and Jack held on to her and tried his best to be soothing, tried his best to be… to be strong.
But he was going to lose her. Holy God, merciful Goddess, she was going to become more wolf than girl….
“Katy?” The voice was weak and confused, but it was still the voice of an alpha wolf. “Jesus Christ, Jacky, what in the fuck is all that noise?”
Katy changed just that quickly, sobbing in Jack’s arms, and Jack folded her up on his lap and wrapped his overlong arms around her, rubbing his wet face against her tangled hair.
“Don’t mind us,” Jack laughed/cried against her. “We’re just a puddle of goo over here.”
There was a grunt of pain as Teague put his elbows under his body and tried to push himself up. It wasn’t going to happen—the hip cast
and catheter made sure of that.
“What’s got you two so worked up?” Teague grunted. “What in the fuck is this thing?”
Jack choked on a sob and wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. In his arms, Katy gave a small, convulsive shiver.
“Jesus, Teague, you dumb motherfucker! That’s a cast, and we’re just fucking glad you’re going to live, that’s all!”
Teague grunted again, and Jack hauled himself to his feet. Looking around a little dazedly, he found an afghan on the couch and wrapped it around Katy’s shoulders so she wouldn’t feel exposed or, heaven forbid, cold in the chill of the beach in late afternoon. She didn’t say anything, though. She just hid her face in Jack’s side as the two of them made their way to the bed.
Fretting
THEY WERE crying and he couldn’t reach them, and that fucking pissed him off.
“I’m fine,” he grunted, looking at the horrible blocky thing that immobilized his lower body. “Seriously, didn’t anybody think this was overboard?”
Jack was there, looming over the side of his bed with a face crumpled and red and swollen eyes the same color. “No,” Jack snapped, wiping a hand across his face. “No, asshole, we did not think it was overboard. We thought it was just the right amount of board. We thought it was superior judgment in board, and fuck you for asking about it.”
Teague scowled at him and stretched out a hand to cup Katy’s face. She didn’t say anything, and the look in her eyes was still… wolfish.
“Jesus, Katy, how long were you under?” he asked tenderly. He felt… muddled. Muddled and incapable of dealing with Jacky’s hysterics and… oh yeah. There it was. Apparently a freight train was still plowing over his body, in the damned cast and everything.
