by Amy Lane
“I don’t give a fuck,” he said back smartly. “I’m sorry, Cory, but I’m lying here when I should have been dead. That was a long-assed fall. I had plenty of time to get used to the idea of being dead, and I was at peace with it. Now I don’t mind—” Ouch. He must have done something, because he cringed over the phone. “Okay, I can live with the pain, but I’ve gotta know… what sort of price did you pay to keep me here?”
Oh shit. I leaned my forehead on my knees. Teague would so not appreciate this. But… but I had such a short list of people I could save, really. Bracken, Green, maybe Nicky in a pinch. Everyone else had made it perfectly clear that I was supposed to make my life a priority. I hated it. I had all this shit I could do, all this amazing, wonderful, perfectly useless shit. If I couldn’t save a guy like Teague, a guy who reminded us all of Adrian, a guy who deserved a happy ending like nobody fucking else, I should turn in my queenship card, and that was just all there was to it.
“Cory?” He sounded like hell. He deserved to know why I had failed, and how I had succeeded.
“He had a knife against my throat,” I said roughly. “And he didn’t know I had a gun against his side. I shot him, he slit my throat, and before I bled out, that’s when I caught you.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line, and I shivered.
“Teague, buddy, you still with me?”
“You fucking bitch,” he hissed. I winced. Teague was a gentleman down to his bones. He must really be pissed to pull out the bad word.
“I’m sorry.” I’d been saying that since we got back. Green and Bracken seemed to accept it, but… but there was something… something they weren’t telling me. Something that was getting in the way of forgiveness.
“I’m sorry I let you down,” I said, miserable. “I’m sorry I let that guy take you and I couldn’t hold on long enough to keep you from getting hurt.” I didn’t remember the rest of the fall. I’d been visiting Adrian at the time. He’d been pissed too.
“That’s what you’re sorry about?” he demanded, his voice crooked. “What you should be sorry about is that you didn’t let me die!”
“That’s the one thing I’m not sorry about!” I snapped back, pissed. “How many friends do you think I’ve got?”
“How did you survive that, Cory? Jesus fucking Christ! If you were bleeding enough to pass out—”
“Green knit me back up,” I interrupted, not wanting to relive those aching nonheartbeats in Adrian’s arms. “And Bracken gave me his blood.” Ouch. Pain. Yes, my bones were intact, but I remembered pain.
“Is that even possible?” he asked, all interest.
“Apparently so,” I told him dryly. And then, because he deserved it—“But not really comfortable.”
“Explain?” Teague’s voice was guarded.
“I broke Nicky’s jaw when I came to, because I sat up screaming and he was right over me.”
Teague’s low whistle sounded a little forgiving. Maybe it was the idea that I hadn’t done this foolhardy thing without consequences. It was like—if I’d suffered for my dumbshit decision already, he didn’t have to hold it against me.
“When Bracken’s angry at me, I shiver. You know, like a fever? We thought it would go away, but apparently not. It hasn’t faded at all in the last two days. I may be stuck with it.” Well, hell. If knowing I suffered made him less mad at me, I’d roll with it.
Teague grunted.
“So, uhm, you gonna forgive me?” I hated the plaintive note in my voice.
“What’s wrong?” he asked bluntly. He’d seen me in the middle of my worst spats with Bracken—he could probably read that note in my voice from three hundred miles away.
“Nothing,” I lied, my throat dry. I’d told him all that so he could be not mad at me, but I didn’t want to unload my bullshit on him either.
“Look,” he said. “Just talk to me.”
“He’s still mad at me,” I whispered. “It comes and goes. We’ll be in the same room, and I’ll be happy, and he’ll look at me all soft, like he does sometimes, and then his look will change, and I start shivering, and he’s got to leave the fucking room.”
Teague blew out a breath. “He’ll forgive you,” he said after a moment.
“How do you know?”
“Because I think I just did.”
“Thanks,” I told him, relieved because it mattered.
“You’re welcome. Thanks for saving my life. Please don’t do it again.”
“Save your life?” This was not the first time I’d saved his life.
“Risk your own,” he said bluntly. “Look, Lady Cory. You play chess. You suck at it, but you play it. I’m a knight. I’m not a bishop or a king. I go in, I bump people off the board, and sometimes I get sacrificed. It’s my job. My job doesn’t mean shit if my queen falls, you hear me?”
“I fucking hate fucking chess,” I told him sharply. “Okay? Lesson learned, but don’t fucking throw chess metaphors at me. I fucking hate them right now.”
He sighed, and I kicked myself mentally. He was hurt and tired, and I was being… difficult. All my lovers knew I could be difficult, and now all my friends knew too.
“Man, I’ll let you off the pho—”
“No,” he said quietly. “Look… they’re outside and I’m in here, and….” Oh, his heart broke to say it.
“I’m lonely too,” I whispered. I was. Green was with someone, and Bracken was outside working on Teague’s home so the werewolves could come home and move in. It was a joint venture with Bracken and all the other avians, werecreatures, and even vampires I’d irritated with my little act of dumbassery—it was like they all went out there and sanded drywall and got out their issues so they could come inside and be overly sweet and solicitous to me. Quite frankly, it was making me a little bit batshit.
“Where are all your people?”
“Working on a surprise for you,” I told him. I didn’t tell him they were avoiding me, but he figured it out.
“They’re still really mad, aren’t they?”
I blew out a breath and looked around. A giant chocolate-brown cat was sleeping in a sunny spot in the corner. “Charlie still likes me,” I said wryly. Charlie looked up lazily and twitched an ear.
“Who’s Charlie?”
“Whim’s beloved, remember? The high school counselor turned werecat?”
Teague grunted. Whim—a sidhe Bracken had once described as more flutterbrained than a drunken grasshopper—had apparently been carrying on a twelve-year affair with a human whom nobody had known about. When Whim realized Charlie was dying of cancer, we’d all heard about it right quick, and the group rescue operation had been fairly impressive and resulted in Charlie’s new werecat status to make healing him easier. In the end, though, it had all come down to Whim, pulling power he hadn’t known he had to heal the boy he thought of as his. Well, not so much a boy now, but apparently Charlie had been barely eighteen when they’d met.
“I remember. I’m surprised Whim let him out of his sight.”
I looked over at Charlie. Surprised out of his nap, Charlie was now doing that cleaning thing cats do where they stretch out their hind legs and lick their own privates.
“I don’t know. Maybe Whim got lost in his workshop. He does that sometimes.”
Charlie, hearing his lover’s name, shifted abruptly to human form, in a position most human men would have to do a lot of yoga to achieve. My eyes got huge, and Charlie made an urk-snork sound that defied description, promptly let go of that thing in his mouth—thank Goddess—and shifted back into a cat. His fur was sticking up all over, and he danced on his toes and hissed at me before disappearing down the fucking hallway like a streak of furry lightning. Leaving me, all big eyes on the couch, trying not to swallow my own tongue.
“Holy shit.”
“What? Cory, remember, I can’t see what in the fuck is going on there.”
“You know that thing cats can do with their tongues that men can’t?”
&n
bsp; “Lick their own balls?”
“Yeah. Well, Charlie just tried it as a human. It was an accident. I don’t think it will happen again.”
Teague didn’t laugh often, but when he did it was a dry, chuckling, rumbling sound, and now it was pained. “Oh Jesus,” he gasped, but he didn’t stop laughing. “Oh fuck—”
“Teague?”
“Christ….” He kept making that sound. “Goddess, do you have any idea how much it hurts to laugh?”
I started to giggle helplessly. I mean… oh Goddess. Here we were, surfing the after-tsunami of life and death, and, well, there were some things in this world that were still hysterically funny. That’s what made it worth it to stay.
The giggles eventually faded, and I think the endorphins did Teague some good, because when we could talk again, he sounded a little happier and in a little less pain.
“Hey, Cory….”
“Yeah?”
“How did it all turn out? The pedophile, the baby vampires, the kiss in Redding, hell, even the blackmailer? I mean… I got taken out in the first half. How did we win the game?”
He was tired—I could hear it. He didn’t need the total recap. Hell, just thinking about all of it made me both queasy and exhausted. I’d been in that state pretty much since we got back from Redding—I didn’t need any help feeling that way now!
“Same way it always does,” I told him. “One play at a time.”
“Cory….”
I smiled. “You’re whining, wolfman. I think if you’re whining like a big girl, then it’s time for this big girl to get off the phone and let you sleep.”
“I deserve to know!” Whine, whine, whine.
“Of course you do. And when you feel better, I’ll give you a play-by-play.” Well, I’d leave off the part where Bracken, Green, and I had apparently realigned our own personal lovers’ politics in the passion of the marriage bed, because I still didn’t understand that part. “But right now? Right now you really need to sleep, and—” I half giggled. “—I need to make sure Charlie doesn’t run away and get hit by a truck, and—” Shit. “—and I really need to go make nice with Bracken.” I’d just make sure to put on a sweater before I went.
Teague sighed, and the sound made me ache. “Cory?”
“Yeah?”
“If I said I loved you, you’d know it’s not how… you know.”
“I love you too, wolfman. And nobody is happier that it’s totally platonic than I am.”
“Talk to you tomorrow.” I wondered if he was dropping the phone as he said it.
“Damned straight.”
I clicked End and put the phone in my pocket. I’d started to get up when Whim wandered by. His ever-changing cloak of hair was a muted raspberry color at the moment. I assumed that meant he was amused. And he was wearing a shirt, which was something he’d never done the first year I’d met him.
“Charlie is still very human,” he said apologetically, without any more explanation.
“No worries,” I told him.
He looked at me happily, but of course the only thing it really took to make Whim happy was knowing that Charlie would be happy. “He is afraid you were offended. He was also worried that he had hurt something, but I rubbed it, and it was all better.”
Once again my eyes got big as bowling balls. Whim blinked and then smiled wickedly.
“His leg, Lady Cory. That other thing is just fine. I’ll probably rub it later, but we weren’t worried about that.”
My relief must have been palpable, and the other shit weighing on my shoulders must have been too, because he reached to the table, picked up my knitting, and put it gently in my hands.
“It’s never as bad as we think,” he said softly, and I looked into his pretty, color-changing eyes and smiled. “You taught me that,” he said to my smile. Then he kissed my forehead and wandered out, hopefully to rub that other thing. He and Charlie were still making up for twelve years of only seeing each other once a year, and they seemed to be doing it with style.
In the meantime, I picked up my knitting—a sock for Bracken that I’d started the day we got back—and went back to knitting my fragile nerves together with sticks and string. I’d been listening to music as I worked before Teague’s call, but I didn’t go through the pain of swapping out the iPod for the phone and putting on the earbuds. I needed the silence of my own head for a while.
I must have buried myself in my own thoughts, because as I was turning the heel for the sock, I felt hot tears on the backs of my hands. I wiped my face, and again, and again, and kept knitting blindly until suddenly there was a set of hot, sweaty arms wrapped around my shoulder and a distinct earthy smell surrounding me as I sat on the couch.
“Don’t cry, beloved,” Bracken whispered in my ear, and I turned a wet cheek to him. He kissed the tears away, and my shoulders started to shake.
“I don’t want you to be mad at me,” I cried. “Not anymore.”
“Shhh….”
“Please, Bracken,” I begged. “Please, Bracken, please?”
I normally saved this sort of begging for bed, for pleading to be ravished—and not gently. For something that felt urgent and dire and pressing. How could I explain that finding peace with him when it came to deciding on my own safety, that was urgent and dire and pressing?
He took my chin in his fingers and tilted my mouth to meet his. I opened for him completely, wanting nothing between us—not his anger, not the strange, constrained thing that had fluttered uneasily between us since I’d forced his capitulation during lovemaking—nothing. I gave in. I surrendered. I gave up. Anything, I’d give anything for him to give me his love without reservations.
“I’m not mad,” he murmured. “Not anymore.” He pulled back, and I turned in the corner of the couch and looked at him, waiting.
“I’m terrified,” he said at last, baldly. “I’m so scared, beloved. You are fearless, and honorable… and if you won’t let our love keep you safe, I don’t know if there’s a force on the planet that will!”
I closed my eyes and nodded. “I’ll try not to scare you,” I promised. I would have promised him anything at this point. Two days—two days feeling cold and at odds with him. Two days of wondering if it would ever be right between us. Two days was a lifetime when Bracken couldn’t hold me. Two days was a lifetime when Green was mad at me too.
“That will have to be enough,” he conceded. I’d expected an argument, a fight, something, but as I met his murky, pond-shadow eyes, I saw an awareness there. He loved me, but he would never again try to control me, not even when I was out of control. I had broken something—a figurative rein or brain-matter control chip or something. Whatever there had been in our relationship that meant he could at some point shout me down or beg me and I would have to concede, it had been vaporized, and the only thing left to keep me from violating his trust was my more than questionable good judgment.
“Whatever I did,” I said after a moment, “whatever happened in our hearts between the two of us, it scares me too.”
With that, I buried my face in his neck and started to sob. His big hands came to cup the back of my head and span the space between my shoulder blades, and his massive biceps surrounded me on either side. Suddenly I wasn’t caged, I was protected, and even while I sobbed myself stupid into his chest, I gloried in the difference.
Suspecting
“JACKY, YOU smell them, right?”
Jack nodded. They’d caught the scent the day before, when Teague had first sent them out to walk the beach and enjoy the sunshine for him. It smelled like wolf and man and… alcohol.
“I thought we couldn’t get drunk,” he said, wrinkling his nose expressively, and Katy shrugged. They were walking up a hill to the parking lot. They’d just spent the day in the aquarium, which had been amazing and colorful and deep—and not something they thought Teague would particularly enjoy.
“Maybe it makes them feel tough,” she said, trying not to sound uncertain. She turned arou
nd as they neared the car. She could see the ocean from this spot in the small tourist section of town, and she loved it. All that fathomless blue. “You think maybe we should take Teague to the aquarium, just in case?”
Jack grunted a negative and swiveled around to where she stood, walking up behind her to put his hands on her shoulders and pull her backward into his body.
“What are you thinking?” he asked into her ear. A group of tourists came up the walk and surged around them like the tide. Jack held her tight, and they stayed there, gazing into the overcast sky over the bay.
“I’m thinking that they’ve known we’re here. They knew we were here when we were out at the beach yesterday. They know we’re here now. But no one’s come to make an introduction. No one’s even let us see a tail, or let us know where that smell is coming from. It’s like they want us to know they’re here, but they don’t want to get friendly.”
Jack hmmed and then sighed into her hair. “Think we should tell Teague?”
Katy cringed. Teague had been trying very hard to be a good boy and a good patient, but good boys admitted when they hurt and ate when they were supposed to and didn’t ask their healers if maybe, just in case they needed to, they could change their form in order to facilitate healing.
I don’t know, werewolf—only if you want the pain to stop your heart.
I’m tough. Don’t assume it would.
Katy had put a stop to that conversation right quick. She’d burst into tears and screamed at Teague about how he’d rather die than be still with his own goddamned self for more than a couple of days, and he’d promised her, after making her lie down beside him so he could stroke her hair, that he wouldn’t do anything desperate.
That night a pair of knitting needles and a skein of sea-gray yarn had appeared on Teague’s lap, dropped there by tiny creatures with bodies that appeared to be flickering lights. They came with an instruction book too, which included a few hastily scrawled lines from everybody’s favorite queen.
It’s just like following a model diagram. You’ll do fine. Now stay still and stop freaking out your mates. If we have to come down there and sit on you, it will only piss Bracken off, and he’s finally over being mad at me and that would suck. So sit still. I mean it!
