by Amy Lane
He turned to look at her then, his pretty blue eyes direct and clear, which they weren’t often. “But not you.”
Katy looked back and smiled. It wasn’t a sad smile or a resigned one. She tried very hard to put every bit of contentment and happiness she had felt in the past months into her smile so he would know what was truth and what was guilt, and why guilt should be allowed to wash out to sea.
“Have I ever told you how grateful I am? Yeah, I’m afraid for Teague. I think you and me, we’re going to be worrying about that boy forever. I’m just so damned happy to have a friend—a mate—to help me, you know?”
Jack reached out and took her hand. She brought it to her lips and kissed it, smiling faintly. Then she finished the thought, the terrible one they’d both been terrified to complete the morning before when they’d awakened in each other’s arms and devoured each other in lust and fear.
“And I’m glad that if he ever falls from the sky again, it won’t be just me alone. I couldn’t live if it was just me alone. But I could live for you, Jacky, you know?”
Jack nodded and pulled their twined hands back to his chest. “I could live for you too. But you know the hardest truth, don’t you?”
Katy closed her eyes. “Yeah. Do we have to say it?”
His voice was choked, and there was something hot on the back of her hand as he held it to his cheek. “We have to. You and me—if he’s going to be the front line, the guardian of the kingdom or some shit, we’ve got to look at it square and know it’s the truth. You’re the one who started telling the hard stuff today, Katy. We need to see it to the end.”
“’Kay,” she whispered. They both turned away, looking at the almost barren sky before them. They had to. Looking at each other when they said this would just hurt too much.
“We’ll make it without him,” she said quietly, hoping it was mostly true.
“But he won’t….” Jack’s voice stalled.
Katy picked it up, because she could and that’s what they did for each other. “He won’t make it without us. Or without Cory.” She could feel him shudder with that last hard admission. It was something he hadn’t wanted to hear and hadn’t wanted to admit, but it needed to be said. Teague had enough damage to need certain things to live. One of those things was apparently an extended list of people to die for.
They sat in the quiet, with the sea whooshing beyond their little car, long enough for the tide to recede a little and for some late-afternoon cool to seep through the windows.
“We need to tell Green,” Jack said tonelessly.
“Yeah. All right. Can I tell Cory I kicked ass? I think she’ll be proud of me.”
Jack disengaged his hand from the tangle theirs had become and lifted it to her cheek. “I think we’re all proud of you. Always.”
It was the sort of thing Teague would have said, but it didn’t sound forced at all coming out of his mouth, and Katy gave him a grin.
“You’re growing up, aren’t you?”
She got a quick smile as a reward, and a faint glint of his blue eyes behind dark lashes. “I’ll try to keep up with you.”
She laughed. “It’ll never happen. I’m just glad we’re in it together is all.”
He nodded and then leaned over the seat to give her a quick, warm, breathy kiss on the lips. She closed her eyes for it and soaked in his smell. Jacky had always smelled like dessert to her, cookies and innocence. He still smelled that way, but now the cookies were a little darker. No more sugar-cookie Jacky—he was all chocolate chip now.
Good. It was her second-favorite kind.
Sadder now, but content, they pulled out of the parking lot and toward the house on the cliff where their beloved awaited.
Knitting
TEAGUE REMEMBERED Cory telling him about when she learned to knit. She told him she’d just come out of a coma in which she’d spent a week having a conversation with Adrian—about six months after he’d died.
Teague had seen her cling to the sticks and string when she was angry and holding on to her temper by a strand of sock yarn. He’d seen her knitting furiously when she was frustrated or thinking hard or trying not to strangle Bracken with her bare hands.
He’d seen her knitting meditatively when she was sitting in front of the television or reading, each tiny stitch as perfect as the last.
Finally, after spending a day stuck with daytime television and his knitting needles, he began to see the magic.
Normally, in the rare moments he let himself sit still, he was a model cars sort of guy, but he couldn’t right now. For one thing, he couldn’t hunch over the minute details, and for another, all the strong paints and solvents would be bad for him to inhale and to spill on the sheets. Knitting was Cory’s solution for him because it had been for her, and now he knew why.
He would have been tempted—terribly tempted—to try that shape-shifting thing if he hadn’t been making a scarf the color of Jacky’s eyes when Jacky was mad. He just kept touching the yarn—it was soft but substantial—and making stitch after stitch, and before he knew it, an hour had passed and he hadn’t looked longingly out the window, his wolf’s heart fluttering like a rabbit’s to get out of the trap of healing.
The needles Cory had sent were bamboo, and something about them was warm in his hands. He liked that too.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t have to set them down when Jack and Katy came in with their story about crazy-assed elf-werewolf motherfuckers. He was, in fact, half a breath away from breaking the damned things, when they’d all but saved his life.
Fortunately Jack and Katy had thought ahead. Green and Cory were on speakerphone when they told their story, and Cinnamon was standing by the bed with a firm hand on his shoulder. He thought darkly that this was what it was like to be ‘handled,’ and he finally understood why Cory hated it worse than brussels sprouts.
“You what?” he asked Katy again.
“I slit his throat and got away.” Katy looked a little defensive. “I didn’t kill him. You know—I just made it hard for him to get up and come get me, that’s all.”
Cory’s disembodied voice crackled over the speakerphone, dripping with admiration. “Nice move, by the way.”
Teague grunted. “It would have been better if one of us had ripped his throat out for touching her!” Someone had touched her. Someone had touched his mate. He didn’t need the preternatural bonding bullshit for that to boil a fever under his fur.
Cory’s snort on the other end of the speaker was reassuring, though. “Oh, cool your jets, wolfman. If Bracken had killed every joker who laid a hand on me, the pile of bodies would be seen from space.”
“And mine would be one of them,” Jack pointed out, his chin locked on stubborn. “Bracken, if you’re listening, thanks for not killing me, by the way.”
There was an uncomfortable pause after Jack dredged up that old business from the difficult early days of Jack and Teague’s relationship. Then Bracken’s disembodied voice came through clearly on the speaker.
“No problems, Jacky. You earned your keep eventually.”
“Charming,” Green said dryly, then got back to the matter at hand. “And I think Katy did exactly right. She sent a message not to fuck with us, and I think that’s exactly what we needed.”
“It’s not enough,” Teague growled, his body screaming with tension. Sweat was popping out on his brow, and it wasn’t until Cinnamon put a warning—and soothing—hand on his shoulder that he realized he was hurting himself with his drive to go kill something.
“I agree.” Green’s voice had a similar soothing effect. “I’m going to send some vampires out at sunset. They’ll have to drive quickly to get there. Cinnamon?”
“Yes, sir?” Cinnamon’s deference to Green, when she seemed to have no deference to pretty much anybody else, was not as surprising as it was moving—true love and true service from a rather prickly individual.
“You have a basement, I trust?”
“Yes, sir. Joshua and I
will have it set up for them before they get here.”
“We can help,” Katy offered. Cinnamon rolled her eyes.
“Please. You need to stay up here and make sure your man doesn’t burst a bone through his skin out of worry.”
“Teague!” Cory’s voice crackled through the speakerphone. “Damn it! We will take care of them! No worries, you hear me?”
Teague had to work not to jump. “Cory, it touched her….”
“Yeah, Teague, and she walked away. They’re strong, they’re smart, they can handle themselves in a fight, and you need to work at not freaking the fuck out, do you hear me?”
Katy folded her arms and glared at him. He sighed and held out his hand, and she took it and came in to kiss him on the forehead. She smelled good; Katy always smelled good. She smelled like vanilla and bread and wolf—his wolf—and he realized he missed the smell of his mates against his skin.
“I hear you.”
At the same time, Cory said, “And we’re going to need some dayfolk over there too. Bracken and I can—”
“No!” Everybody jumped a little. Nobody there had ever heard Green speak sharply to his beloved. Until now.
“Not you,” Green snapped, his voice implacable, and Bracken was right behind him with “You promised.”
“Guys….” Cory sounded hurt and uncertain. “Guys! It’s not a war. Not yet. I just thought—”
“Not so soon.” Green’s voice was taut. Jack’s and Katy’s eyes met. Then Jack flushed and nodded, and Teague wondered what his own beloved had just realized. “The scar is still red on your throat, beloved, and you’re still exhausted. If something goes down, you and Bracken can fly out. I’ll have a helicopter on standby. In the meantime….” There was a terrible silence in two living rooms as they listened to their leader, the man Teague had sworn to die for, pull himself together. “In the meantime, beloved, I would appreciate your presence here.”
It was so quiet, they could all hear Cory swallow. “Okay, Green,” she said softly. “Absolutely. You and Bracken are right. I promised.”
Green cleared his throat. “I’ll send Mario and LaMark, then. Mario will be an asset, and they work well together. They should be there sometime tomorrow morning, and you all can go out as a group and scent the wind. That good for you, Teague?”
Teague closed his eyes, suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude. “That’s great for me, Green. I appreciate it. Cory, you stay where you are and get strong, you hear me?”
Cory’s voice on the other end of the phone was lost and hurt. “Backatcha, wolfman. I’m, uhm, going to go knit, ’kay?”
“Yeah. Me too.”
It seemed they both had some things to put together in their heads.
Green rang off, and Cinnamon left to go prepare for more guests in her tiny personal faerie hill. Jack came up to sit by the window, and Katy stayed where she was, holding Teague’s hand.
“We’re fine,” she said gently. “No worries.”
He smiled tightly. “I’ll always worry.”
They were quiet for a moment, until Katy picked up the two-foot length of scarf on his lap and put it back in his hands with the needles. He smiled a little, but oddly enough, he felt neither like a girl nor a grandmother as he started making one painful stitch after another. He simply felt at peace.
Surprisingly it was Jacky who broke the quiet. “They’re still really mad at her.”
Nobody had to ask who “she” was. “Yeah,” Teague grunted.
Jack sighed. “I can’t be,” he said after a moment. He stretched out full length on the bed next to Teague and kissed his bare shoulder. Teague put down his knitting and turned his head to drop a kiss in Jacky’s hair. Jack raised his pretty, open child’s face to meet Teague’s lips, and Teague breathed him in like air. Jack pulled back, though, and finished the thought.
“I can’t be mad at her,” he said again. “I can’t. But I’m starting to see why they are.” His mouth quirked up. “See? Jack can learn. Somebody throw a parade.”
Katy reached over to the coffee table and grabbed Jack’s book, handing it over Teague’s body as though she’d read his mind. “Later. When Teague can walk again, we’ll have our very own ‘Jacky Grows Up’ celebration. How’s that?”
“I’d rather just have a ‘Teague Can Walk Again’ parade,” Jack said, and Teague kissed him again. Then he turned and kissed Katy’s temple and, settling in with his knitting, was content.
He was not used to being still for long periods of time. Although he was dozing off around ten when Jacky and Katy got up and wandered off to bed—where they made noisy, sweetly scented love that warmed Teague to his toes—he was wide awake at 3:00 a.m. when Kyle and another vampire he didn’t know walked quietly in the door.
Kyle came up almost shyly and extended a hand to shake. It was a little too firm, and Teague had to suppress a wince. Kyle was a fierce fighter and apparently as loyal as a retriever, but he’d lost his beloved a year and a half earlier and was not the most outgoing of vampires.
Teague was surprised to see the honest relief in Kyle’s eyes as Kyle assessed his still-warm body where it lay in the clean sheets and healed.
“You’re warm. Everywhere.” That red, slightly whirling, vampire superpower glare was a little unnerving, and Kyle had the deep-set eyes and Neanderthal brow to make it even creepier. But the sandy-haired vampire had been solid and dependable and a fellow warrior, and he’d survived a loss Teague knew he couldn’t. Teague admired the hell out of the guy.
“I hope so,” Teague rasped. “Good to see you.” He didn’t say he was surprised to see Kyle, but Kyle knew anyway.
“I know. Marcus and Phillip usually take the big shit, don’t they?”
Teague twitched his shoulder. It was as close as he could get to a shrug. “I was wondering why they sat this one out.”
Kyle looked over his shoulder. “Ellis, you fed before you came, right?”
Ellis looked at him and nodded. “Do you think Jack and Katy might be up for a little snack tomorrow night?” he asked Teague hopefully. Ellis was young—young for a vampire and young for a human—and the grooves of Teague’s mouth deepened. It was as close as he got to a smile most days.
“Yeah, one of them will be good for you. Cinnamon said you guys are staying in the basement, if you want to stow your gear.”
“Could you get mine too?” Kyle asked casually as he tossed the keys to what was probably the converted SUV with the secret vampire compartment underneath. Ellis disappeared to go shift their gear, and Kyle pulled up the bedside chair.
“They’re not doing great,” he said quietly. “I think they might make it through, but Phillip needs to blood from Lady Cory every night or he’s just going to lose his fucking mind. That kid… that vampire Phillip blooded with? Man, when she went, she took a chunk of his soul with her.”
Teague blinked. “Wait a minute—when did Gretchen die?”
Kyle looked at him with undisguised pity. “Has no one filled you in on what happened after you checked out?”
Teague shook his head. “It’s like living with the eggshell brigade. Hell, even Cory won’t give it to me straight.”
Kyle grunted, and Teague liked him even more. “I’m not surprised,” Kyle said bitterly. “Had to be one of the worst fucking nights of her life, and I’ve seen some of the bad ones.”
Then he gave Teague the details. Teague started to feel physically nauseated as Kyle neared the end of the story, and he realized his whole body was tense again and that was exacerbating the pain. He took a deep breath and consciously relaxed himself so Cinnamon wouldn’t come bustling in and interrupt the one person willing to give him the whole unvarnished truth.
Kyle was right. The story of the night Teague was hurt didn’t get any prettier.
When Teague had been dropped from the sky, Green’s people had been engaged in a battle with a vampire kiss up in Redding. The Redding vampires had been protecting the worst sort of predator—a vampire who molested children
and then turned them.
Child vampires were truly frightening creatures. Unlike their adult brethren, there was no human left inside them, just frightening, all-consuming need. Teague had fallen from the sky—and that had been the end of his night. But after that Cory had subdued the vampire kiss, mind-raped the predator before killing him—messily, because her powers weren’t up to par—and discovered his hidden cache of four other children, gnawing their own wrists in cages that kept them from loosing their hunger on mankind.
“She had to ask Lambent to kill them,” Kyle said unhappily. Cory could pretty much fry off a gnat’s testicles—or a jet plane—from two miles away. If she’d had to ask Lambent, a fire elf, to take care of that job, it was because her power had been more off from Bracken’s blood transfusion than she cared to admit.
“And after all that….” Teague trailed off. Oh Christ. The entire altercation had started because they’d found a child vampire in the woods near Green’s hill. And after all that pain, she and Green had taken the girl up to the crown of Green’s world and let the girl conflagrate under the sun while she still was a girl and her death could be peaceful and not violent.
“That’s horrible,” he said at last. “That’s just….” He shook his head. “Jesus. No wonder Green and Bracken won’t let her out of their sight.”
Kyle went very still.
“What?”
He got a shrug and evasion, and after just hearing what nobody else would tell him, Teague was tired of that shit.
“C’mon, man, what gives?”
Kyle looked over his shoulder to make sure Teague was truly the only one in the room. “Look, you know what she spent the next day doing, right?”
Teague blinked, then flushed. “Crying? Sleeping?”
“Getting her brains fucked out!” Kyle interrupted, and Teague blushed harder.
“It’s not nice to gossip about friends,” Teague grumbled. But yeah, he’d assumed.
