by Amy Lane
“’Bout as long as you,” she said gruffly. Her voice was still wolfish too.
“Oh Christ.” Teague scrubbed his face with his hands, felt the stubble against his palm. “Okay, you two. I give. What day is it? How’d we get here…?” And the sudden thought of what had happened, of what they’d been doing when he’d fallen from the sky, tried to drive him upright. He howled, actually howled, because he’d only thought a freight train hurt when it was destroying your lower body. Turns out that trying to move all of a sudden while the freight train was carrying plutonium-lead weight from your spine to your toes was where the real pain was at.
“No, no… sh-sh-sh….” All Jacky’s attitude fell away, and he took Teague’s weight before he could slam it back down on the bed. His arm around Teague’s shoulders was firm and strong and all the things Teague knew Jack could be when he tried.
“Look, you dumb Mick,” Jack snapped, once Teague was settled back on the bed and spots had stopped swimming around his eyes, “here’s the deal. You fell out of the fucking sky. There you were, taking out a big motherfucking werewhale or something….”
“I remember that,” Teague mumbled. “Weretiger. Fucker was huge.”
“Yeah, well, thank you,” Jack snapped. “I’m glad I wasn’t kitty kibble, because that would have been fucking humiliating.”
“Cory gave me the shot,” Teague said modestly. Then his eyes really opened. “Oh shit, Jack! Cory! She was covered in blood!”
Jack sighed, and his grip tightened on Teague’s. “She’s going to be fine” were the words he said.
Teague squinted at him. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Jack shrugged uncomfortably. “A whole lot I don’t know myself,” he said with some honesty. “Green didn’t want to talk about it. He just said she’d be okay, and that you’d have to get the rest from her.”
Teague grunted, about ready to ask for the phone. His hand shook. His wide-palmed, big-knuckled, working-man’s hand actually shook as he stretched. He pulled his hand back to his side, trying not to let them see. Christ, he felt like crap.
“Later!” Jack snapped, so maybe Teague hadn’t been so sly hiding that tremor.
Teague frowned. “What’s the matter, Jacky?” he asked, both puzzled and frustrated. He couldn’t even keep his eyes open all the way, he was fighting the healing elf’s compulsion so hard. “You two… you’re really freaked out….”
The word that lashed out of Katy’s mouth was Spanish, but not the kind you learned in school. Teague gaped.
“You haven’t called me that since we were courting,” he said, shocked. As a reply, she growled at him, a real wolf growl from her human throat.
Then she crawled onto the big white space beside him and laid her head on his shoulder, whimpering and stroking his bare chest with gentle little pats.
“Katy,” he whispered, looking at Jack helplessly. “Katy, darlin’, where are your words?”
Jack groaned a little and sank his ass onto the foot of the bed where there was still room. “You fell out of the sky, asshole,” he said, his voice strained. “Teague… man, we watched you fall. You saw me unconscious once and thought I was dead, and you….” His voice was hanging by a thread, and Teague fought against the irritation of immobility.
“Jacky. Here.” Teague used the hand that wasn’t stroking Katy’s back to pat the space on the other side of him. “Here. Du….” Dude? Two years of partnership, eight months of sharing the same bed, and five months of marriage, and that was the best he could do?
“Beloved,” he whispered hoarsely, the endearment rusty on his tongue. “Beloved, come here. Lay down with me. Let me touch you. I swear… nothing will feel as bad as your voice if you just let me touch you.”
Jack swallowed and nodded. The next two minutes were horrible, hot, and tearfully awkward as he pushed the bed far enough from the window to make his way between them and then clambered into the space between Teague and the wall.
He tucked his head gingerly on Teague’s shoulder, and Teague stroked that long dark hair back from his hot face. “I’m fine, Jacky. No worries, right? Job hazard, right? You knew that going out?”
That winter Teague had suffered a complete tectonic plate separation of a nuclear emotional meltdown. It had been a ten plus a billion on the Richter scale, and his scream of desolation had shaken the entire hill.
He shouldn’t have been surprised that Jacky came unglued on his shoulder and sobbed. He shouldn’t have been. It was just that… well, hell. All this time Jacky and Katy had been trying to convince him that he was worthy of their love, and he had never understood that he was as vital to them as they were to him.
“I was fine,” he told them, lying. The last few moments of slowing through the air… oh, oh Christ. He remembered the slowdown with perfect clarity. He’d had enough time to miss them in his arms in those drifty, gauzy seconds of being lowered with the roughness of an airplane in turbulence. He’d had a heartbeat to pray for more time, for more moments of touching the two of them, for the right thing to say to make Jacky know Teague loved him first, would always love him, and the exact words to tell Katy she was the princess of his dreams.
“I’m fine now,” he lied again. Jack groaned and his big body was wracked with more sobs. Teague could do nothing but lie there, feeling his bones and tissues knitting together like steel needles and glass fiber grating along his nerves. He patted them both, stroked them both, but they were disconsolate, terrified, and shaking in delayed aftermath.
Jesus, it was like they hadn’t let themselves feel anything until they could feel relief.
He was uncomfortable. He was in pain. He didn’t want to move, didn’t want to shift the two of them off even though they were hurting him. Damn, they seemed to need him so badly, but… he’d spent his formative years learning that pain weren’t no big thing. He wasn’t going to hurt the two of them now by letting it rule him.
Turned out he didn’t have to.
Abruptly Jack and Katy were asleep, and a midsized woman—no, scratch that, a tiny elf—was bustling in, a redwood tree of an elf behind her. The woman was, well, odd. Her hair was cinnamon red, and she was dressed—well, “old hippie” would have been the most appropriate description. She had a brightly flowered bandana tied around her forehead, and a loose dress that went to midthigh made of the same floaty material. Teague would have bet his car, far more valuable than money, that she had nothing on underneath it, but in spite of that, her air was so medical-personnel-meets-earth-mama that he had a hard time thinking of her as a sexual creature at all. She wore a pair of round-lensed glasses just to prove it. They must have been for show—elves didn’t have problems with pesky things like bad vision.
“Joshua,” the woman ordered—no doubt it was an order—“get the girl first and take her to the guest room. You have their sleep spell covered?”
Joshua—as in tree, Teague presumed—grunted and scooped Katy into his arms just that easily.
“She was comfortable,” Teague objected.
Joshua was taller than Bracken and probably taller than Green, and he really was built like one of those redwood trees you could drive a car through. His skin was even tinged faintly red, and his hair was a thick, glossy greenish black. He looked at Teague curiously and grunted, then walked away with Katy in his arms.
“She was,” said the elf woman briskly, “but you were suffering, and that won’t do.” She moved to his side, and Teague tightened his grip on Jacky instinctively. They’d already taken Katy away.
The woman clucked. “No need to get all protective, sir knight. We’re just putting him in the guest room so you can sleep yourself. It’s late afternoon, and those two… well, they’ve practically worried themselves onto the crazy wheel. Neither of them have slept since they got here, and they got here at eight in the morning. It’s time.”
Teague scowled. “Yeah? You put them out pretty neatly. Why not do it while I was asleep?”
The woman looked at him ste
rnly. “We both know they wouldn’t have slept right until they knew you were fine. Green managed to spell them both a little when the big one was on the phone, but that was at my request. He just sat here and stared at you. It made me twitchy. I think it made the she-wolf twitchy too, tell the truth. Honestly? I’ve never met you, but I’m just as glad you survived. I wouldn’t want to be in charge of the healing of those two if you left this mortal coil without them.”
Teague grunted, but she rested a hand on the hard fiberglass of his hip casing and the discomfort eased a bit. Then she moved her hand to a bare spot on his stomach, and in a blissfully cool sweep from his back to his legs, it went away entirely. His shoulders relaxed from a tension he hadn’t been aware he’d been holding. The feeling was almost euphoric, and when Joshua Tree came back into the room to get Jacky, Teague didn’t have the backbone he should have had to argue. The most he could manage was a little whimper of protest, but the woman held the tree man back with a clearing of her throat.
“Let him kiss the man’s cheek, Joshua. They’re werefolk—touch is very important, right?”
Jack was swung around, his head vulnerable in sleep and resting against a clay-colored bicep. Teague could turn his head enough to nuzzle the longish dark hair at Jack’s temple. His narrow, lean-lipped, high-cheekboned face didn’t even stir, but Teague hoped his dreams would be less blood-tinted for that little touch. Oh… God. Teague wanted to touch him some more.
A completely irrational surge of desire swept him, and he shifted uncomfortably and glared at the elf woman who had touched him in healing.
She raised her eyebrows at him mildly, and he blushed.
“Interesting,” she said quietly, and he blushed some more. “They’re mated to you, but you’re not mated to them.”
Teague grunted and then realized she expected more explanation than that. “Cory and Bracken think it’s because I’m sort of—” What was the word? Was there a word? “—pledged,” he came up with weakly. “I’m pledged to my….” Oh God. Did he really have to say this? He longed for Cory just then, in a completely nonsexual way, because she could say this shit in her college student voice and it just sounded right. He swallowed. “I’m pledged to my lord and my lady,” he said at last, lamely. “I owe, you know. Loyalty. Fealty. Allegiance. What-the-fuck-ever. And that’s until death too, so I don’t get the mating bond.”
The thought process was almost as uncomfortable as the knitting of bones and flesh, and he’d gone to massage the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger when he realized his hand was heavy… so heavy… so weighty….
He scowled a little and shook off the lassitude. “Stop that,” he ordered. “Nobody has told me how she is yet. I’ll sleep then.”
The woman—what was her name?—looked unhappy.
“Cinnamon,” she replied sweetly, although Teague hadn’t voiced the question. “Just like the Neil Young song. And Lady Cory is, well, she is fine, but it is going to take some time for her to be right with her lovers again. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“No,” Teague acknowledged, knowing this was the truth and feeling like shit. “She should have let me die.”
“There are two exhausted werewolves in the other room who disagree,” Cinnamon said sharply. “And one exhausted sorceress in another part of the state who does as well. She saved you because you are worth saving, sir knight, and that is what it comes down to, isn’t it? It wasn’t for love, not the way she loves her mates, or you love yours. It wasn’t for glory—as if! It was possibly for friendship, because that is who she is. But mostly it was because your life was worth saving to her, and that was worth fighting for, and not just when it cost her most of her blood either.”
Teague suppressed a groan. He didn’t remember much after he’d fallen, but he did remember her covered in her own blood. He remembered her plaintive voice—Bracken, don’t be mad, or something close. He knew the tone she took when her big, frightening beloved was angry. Sometimes she fought him, but sometimes… sometimes she just begged him to understand.
He thought maybe the reason the two of them got along so well was that Teague understood that too.
“Bracken will never forgive me.” His statement was met by a raised, red-tinted eyebrow over that pair of round moon lenses, and a pillow under his shoulders that helped to displace some of the pressure on his lower extremities.
“Bracken is not even close to mad at you. It is his beloved he needs to forgive. And you need to forget it for now. You need to heal. You may not be able to bond for your mates, but the whole reason they sent you here in seclusion is so that you could heal for them. And with them. They are considerably damaged, same as you.”
Teague startled up, and the cool veil of elf magic gave way. He collapsed back onto the bed in serious agony, choking a whimper. “You said they were hurt!” he accused. Cinnamon rewarded him with a clucking sound. Her voice was high and gravelly and oddly accented. She almost reminded him of a redheaded Yoda, and in spite of the fact that the sidhe traditionally had flawless skin, he kept expecting to see freckles across her nose.
He also expected to see gray in her hair. But then, sidhe didn’t really age like that, did they?
“I said damaged, werewolf. They saw their mate fall from the sky. Don’t think you’re the only one who’s going to need to knit back together. The little she-wolf, especially. She could fracture easily, forgetting she’s a girl most of the time, if you’re not careful. You’ll need to reassure her a lot before she heals.”
Teague grunted, thinking about Renny the werecat. Renny’s husband had died horribly, right before her eyes. Cory had told Teague that Renny had been more cat than girl for nearly six months—and even now, more than two years later and happily mated to another werekitty, it was clear that Renny would never be completely human again.
The thought of Katy that far from herself hurt Teague on a whole new level.
“Here.” Cinnamon’s voice grew kind, and Teague realized she’d pushed a moveable tray with some soup on it up near him. “You need to eat. You need to rest. There will be time to make peace with your mates when that is done.”
Teague grunted. “Not hungry.” Although, truth be told, he was not really in touch with his stomach enough to know. His reward for the lie was a stinging smack across the top of his head. “Ouch!”
“You will eat, damn it!” the elf woman snapped. “You will eat and you will ask for more, even if it’s just for a cookie and some chocolate milk!”
Teague looked up in naked hope. Who had told her?
“After you eat your soup,” Cinnamon grumbled, seemingly mollified by his weakness for sweets. She glared at him until he took a taste of soup, and then another. It was good—tomatoes and beef, and very hearty. She shook her head. “Damn it, werewolf! Don’t you see? No matter what else results from last night’s confluence, the fact remains that our little Goddess almost died for you. If nothing else, that makes you important enough to be cared for. We won’t lose you now, not even from your own neglect.”
Teague’s sudden desire for cookies and chocolate milk deserted him, and he plowed silently through the rest of his soup until he was too weary to lift the spoon. He fell back against his pillows, suddenly too tired to keep his eyes open—almost.
“Can they come sleep with me now?” he asked, his own voice faint and far away.
“Next time” came that oddly accented woman’s voice. It was accompanied by a soothing hand on his brow and a kiss on his cheek. “Let them sleep without worry, sir werewolf knight. With you in their life, it’s not like they’ll get a lot of chances, now is it?”
“They shouldn’t worry. Not ’bout me.” Sleep was like a giant cat purring on his head, just one rumble from pushing him under. “Can do better.”
He was not so far gone that Cinnamon’s mutter under her breath didn’t reach his ears.
“Jackass.”
But he was too tired to tell her that “jackass” was Jacky’s nickname, and hi
s was “dumb Irish motherfucker.” He didn’t think she’d find it very funny anyway.
Waking
KATY WAS always so soft and sweet in his arms.
Jack had vague memories of the girls he’d slept with in college—and the one in high school. He remembered there being inconvenient bones—elbows, clavicles, shoulders, knees, hips and ankles—very often his, but more often theirs.
The first night he’d slept in Teague’s bed, it had been all about the compact, sleek, tightly wound packet of muscles in his arms. It should have made Teague into insomnia waiting to happen, but Jack found that when he wrapped his arms around Teague’s shoulders and powered the man into being sweet, it was a little like powering a feral cat into settling down for a nap—a little bit dangerous, very addicting, and surprisingly somnolent.
Katy had been a surprise in the opposite direction.
They usually slept on either side of Teague, partly because he was their focus. Katy had loved him first, and Jack had loved him hardest, and together they kept Teague anchored and kept his skittish, damaged heart taped together with love, good wishes, and as much Psych 101 as they could cram into his thick, stubborn head to try to make him see that he was worth their love.
Occasionally, when Teague was out on a run, Jack and Katy slept next to each other, and Jack was always surprised at what a sweet-smelling, beloved armful she was. Her breasts were full, fuller than any of Jack’s college girlfriends, and her hips were wide and lush. Her thighs were soft, and so were her arms, and all in all, there was a sort of velvet ice-cream delicacy to her. Jack adored all of her, from taste to smell to texture. In fact, he thought if any of his college girlfriends had been like Katy, it might have taken him a little longer—like, say, a week instead of a day—to figure out he was in love with Teague Sullivan.
As it was, he was truly in love with both of them.
