by Amy Lane
Twenty years sounded like a long time too, but in Phillip’s company, they’d sort of flown right by.
“So that news makes you happy?” Leah asked, grinning unrepentantly in the face of his extended canines.
“Does that make me a bad person?” Marcus asked innocently, and her grin widened.
“Not if you’re willing to go down on me again, baby—you do it sooo… mmmm… yeah… my God… oh fuck… oh…. Jesus, Marcus, fuck me through the goddamned floor!”
Leah was a screamer too, and Marcus didn’t mind—not this time. Not one bit.
And so things continued, and might have continued to that one-hundred-year mark, but then Adrian brought Cory home and their lives were turned upside down—and run through a meat grinder, resized, reapportioned, and served up raw.
That Adrian brought a human home was no big deal—he did so all the time, especially when he was recruiting and worried about the recruit (the people Adrian tended to recruit were often living dangerously). He brought them home and let them wander the hill and find the place they fit best. He did not make love to them in the hill—and he didn’t make them exclusively his.
Cory looked like a standard recruit—five zillion piercings, dyed black hair, so much makeup you could barely tell her gender.
But something was different about her, and it was clearly apparent from the first night Adrian brought her home. Phillip and Marcus had watched from around a corner as he all but spirited her into his room, his tongue so far down the girl’s throat that it was a wonder she could breathe.
“Oh good,” Renny said softly, rounding the corner and ignoring the fact that the two of them were trying to look invisible. “He finally talked her into it.”
“Talked her into what?” Marcus asked. Renny was a little werekitty, brought over by her mate. Renny weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet. She could curl up in a corner as a kitten or as a girl, and right now, Renny seemed to be the one person who could answer any questions about Cory and would talk. Marcus had tried asking Adrian’s best friend, Bracken, one of Green’s elves, the week before. Bracken—characteristically—told him to fuck off and then shoved Phillip toward him and told Phillip to fuck him off.
“We don’t work that way!” Phillip snapped with wounded dignity, and Bracken nodded in satisfaction.
“And I don’t bear tales.” With that, the grumpy fucker stalked off, and Phillip had been left looking after him in admiration. It was true. Adrian, for all his sweetness, was best friends with a guy who made Phillip look like Dr. Seuss.
“He talked her into coming here,” Renny said now, looking at the two of them like they were stupid. “He’s been courting her for months.”
“Courting!” Marcus exclaimed—in a fierce whisper, of course. “What about Green?”
Renny shrugged. “I’m sure they’ll all end up together somehow. You have to know Cory. She’s….” Renny gazed off into space for a minute, her demeanor as distracted as her flyaway, static-charged, fine brown hair. Marcus and Phillip looked at each other, wondering whether to prompt her or not, when suddenly Renny shook herself and said, “Bright,” as though that pause had never happened. “I knew her in school. She was bright—so bright, people would refuse to look at her. She’s so bright, she can’t see the darkness around her for the brightness. You’ll see. Green will see it too. It’s really amazing.”
With that, Renny spotted Mitch at the end of the hall and trotted away.
Marcus and Phillip looked at each other dubiously.
“Really amazing?” Phillip muttered. “I’ll have to see that for myself—holy Goddess! What in the hell?”
There was… a force. A terrible, wonderful, blood-saturated magic force being unleashed in the hill. Phillip reached out both hands to Marcus’s shirt and clung, simply whimpering, and Marcus leaned up against the wall. Both of them had come in their jeans, just from that one sweep of sex magic, and their crotches mashed wetly together as they held each other and shuddered.
The next wave was starting to roll; they could feel it.
Marcus was the one with the presence of mind to haul Phillip to their room, and after that, about all they could be sure of was that Marcus topped, because he always topped, and that they frequently didn’t have room to do more than bite each other and scream before the wave of magic rolled through the room and they were coming again, coming and coming and still hard.
Eventually it ended. It had to end. And when it did, they lay tangled in their blood-and-come-soaked sheets and shivered, and that was where they were, wondering what in the fuck had happened, when the dawn came.
And that was their first introduction to Cory.
THEY’D GIVEN Adrian hell the next night—taking a virgin sorceress in a hill already saturated with blood and sex magic? Lunacy, incredible lunacy. Adrian had been embarrassed, until Marcus had stepped forward, literally, and stood in front of their leader like he was protecting someone innocent.
“You guys—have you seen her?”
Grace joined him and nodded for him to continue, and he figured that she at least knew where he was going.
“She dresses like she’s got nothing to lose. He couldn’t read her mind, right?”
“Right!” Adrian spoke up and moved out from behind Marcus, flashing a wry smile. “And she doesn’t know what she is, either. I don’t know the whole of it. But I know I’ve tasted human, shape-shifter, and fey for a hundred and fifty years, and she’s an entirely different breed of bird. And….” He made the last word meaningful and suddenly looked as stern as any of them had ever seen him. “She’s off-limits, you hear? She’s mine.”
They all looked at him uneasily. None of them wanted to ask how this would affect that tender, timeless bond that Adrian had with Green, but no one wanted it to end either.
The next few weeks were fraught with terrible unease among the vampires: shape-shifters were being murdered, including poor Renny’s mate, Mitch; there was an enemy stalking Adrian’s people, and Cory was a target. But she fought off the enemy well enough on her own on a few occasions, and although her pale, freckled skin gained a few scars, she gained an absolute beauty in the eyes of Adrian’s people and the shape-shifters.
One night, Cory and Adrian made love, except bigger, down on the front lawn in full view of anyone who cared to watch. (It was Green’s hill—they all cared to watch.) Phillip sank to his knees in front of Marcus and took him inside his wet mouth, right there at the hall window, while Marcus fought to stay standing.
After Marcus had clenched his hands in Phillip’s hair and spent everything, including his soul, Phillip came up and kissed him, a totally unsolicited, tender kiss, and then turned his attention to the two lovers out on the lawn. He leaned back into Marcus’s arms, and together they watched a sort of magic happen that they’d only ever seen in Green’s bed.
“She’s healing him,” Marcus muttered. He couldn’t explain it—what she was doing really was magic—but there had always been a cloud, a pain, a well of aching melancholy in Adrian’s heart, and Cory was filling it, making him whole.
Phillip grunted and snuggled into his arms, and Marcus closed his eyes and savored. There must have been some spare magic from all that healing out on the lawn, because it had given them this moment, this sweet, unforced moment, when Phillip wasn’t trying to find someone else and was simply, quietly, right where he belonged.
Marcus would have died for Cory for that moment alone.
It really was such an odd time—there was the enemy and the fear, and at the same time, there was the amazing love. The night that Green joined Cory in Adrian’s bed was another moment that Marcus wouldn’t forget. Luminous, beautiful, the wave of sensuality that washed the hill spawned an entire generation of lower fey and drove the vampires into a lovely, sexual, sensual frenzy that they would use as a watermark for relationships for years to come.
Phillip spent it with his girlfriend. Marcus spent it alone, in the next bed, aching—right up until he felt Phil
lip’s girlfriend’s mouth on his cock.
Marcus had no choice but to fall into the threesome, the woman in the middle, just like the one that was happening in Green’s room. It was sweet and wonderful, and Marcus didn’t know when his heart had ever hurt with quite so much passion and pain.
Phillip was in his bed, but he thought having someone else there with them was the way it should be.
The night afterward, he went up alone into the garden to see what Cory had wrought in the throes of sex and sorcery.
It was amazing. Fully grown trees had erupted from the earth—thornless oak trees, and lime trees—all of them grown and twisted into the shapes of the three lovers who had coupled and tripled in the hill the night before.
His throat grew tight with the beauty of it. Erotic, yes, but… but lovely. Loved. He saw Adrian, in all of his haunted beauty; Green, in all of his kindness; and this new person, this teenaged child, as a powerful force of nature. Marcus had spoken to Adrian’s lover before this, but he’d never really thought of connecting that vital, aggressive little person with the woman who could love two immortal beings at once.
It’s such a grand sort of lover to do that. All I’ve really ever wanted was one lover who would love me alone.
The thought made standing in that garden intolerable. He had just turned on his heel to go back down the stairs and join Phillip in the vampire common room to plan what they were doing that night, when he ran into the little person in the flesh.
“Jesus,” he swore, darting backward with such preternatural speed that he hit the tree behind him.
The grand lady of the manor, the woman with two vampire marks, and the lover of Lord Green and his consort Adrian, burst into giggles.
“Crap!” she swore. “For crying out loud, I didn’t mean to scare you!” She giggled some more, and his vampire senses picked up the scent of blood under her skin.
“You’re blushing!” he accused, and she turned her head around, taking in the erotic pictures of the grove with one jerk of her chin.
“Wouldn’t you?”
Marcus remembered all those years Phillip screamed fit to bring down the rafters. “I have,” he said dryly, and she stopped looking embarrassed and grinned at him. His stomach clenched a little, and he realized that she was a younger version of Grace and a human version of a geode—plain and dusty on the outside but with a beautiful, precious center—and stronger than she looked.
“Phillip?” she inquired delicately, and he rolled his eyes.
“God—even you know, and you just got here!”
“What is the deal with you guys?”
Marcus looked away. “We’re… us,” he said after a minute. “He wants us to be….” He gestured vaguely. “He wants us to be this. But we’re not. We’re us. But only when he’s between girls.”
“Ouch,” she said softly. “It’s hard, I think, when your beloved doesn’t know how you feel.”
A part of him flared to anger. She should talk. The whole world knew how Bracken looked at her, and she never saw. But then, he thought, as she looked at him with compassionate eyes, that it was not entirely her fault. Bracken wouldn’t reach for Adrian’s beloved for all the lovers in the world.
“I like that word,” Marcus said softly.
“What word?” she asked curiously.
“Beloved,” he told her. “It’s a good word.”
She smiled a little, looking embarrassed all over again. “It’s Green’s word. It’s one of the things you have to learn, being here, you know?”
He nodded. Yeah. All sorts of ins and outs to this place, that was for certain. This little girl was doing better than he had, and that was also a fact.
“I was just on my way down to Phillip,” he said after an awkward silence, and she stepped to the side as though to let him pass.
“I was just on my way to look at the stars and pray for clarity,” she said dryly. He stopped on his way past her to ruffle her hair, and the sound of her throaty laughter followed him down the stairs.
“What kept you?” Phillip asked as Marcus walked into the vampire common room. This was the only place in the hill with leather couches, most of them black, hardwood floors without carpeting, the better for cleanup, and the biggest television available in any given year. Most of the vampires were gathered, along with the shape-shifters who were good for feeding duty. Phillip was feeding from his girlfriend, but he pulled away from Tina’s throat as he spoke and caught her body as it fell limply against him in ecstasy. His face was covered in blood, and as Tina practically purred (she was a werepanther), he wiped his palm across his mouth and flickered his tongue over it to catch the last drop.
“Nice table manners, dickhead,” Marcus snapped, and Phillip rolled his eyes.
“I’m dining casual.” He shrugged. “Wait a sec—gotta clean up. Look at me, darlin’. We’ve got somewhere to be.” Tina met his eyes with a vapid, somnolent gaze of her own, and with one mighty swing of his vampire will, he whammied her into sleep.
Phillip set her down indifferently in the corner of the black leather couch, pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and cleaned his face up, then threw on the leather jacket and turned around. He looped an arm over Marcus’s shoulders as they walked.
“Seriously, man, where the fuck have you been? She’s not big on conversation, and I was a half a swallow from having to take her to bed.”
“And wouldn’t that be a tragedy?” Marcus fell in step with him, their bodies syncing perfectly. They’d been walking together like this, in perfect compatibility, since Phillip had emerged from the vault.
“Jesus, don’t be a dick. Where were you?”
Marcus shrugged. “I went up to look at the garden—it’s pretty fucking spectacular. Have you seen it?”
Phillip rolled his eyes. “It’s trees. What’s to see? And that took you so long?”
“I met with the lady of the house. We had a chat.”
“Well, isn’t that cozy? Is she still plain as a potato?”
Marcus turned aggressively to him, thrusting forward with his shoulders until Phillip was backed up against the wall of the hallway looking surprised and turned on at the same time.
“Don’t talk about her that way,” he growled. “She’s perfect, Phillip, and we need to treat her with respect, you hear?”
Phillip sighed and surprised Marcus with his sadness—and his remorse. “She’s like Grace,” he muttered, and Marcus nodded, letting his sarcasm show.
“You think?”
Phillip looked away, and Marcus was suddenly aware that they were in a darkened corridor that led from the bottom part of the darkling to the upper level. They were alone and their bodies were pressed together. Phillip arched his hips against Marcus, and in addition to being embarrassed, he was very, very aroused.
“You’re good at that,” Phillip whispered. “So good at knowing the goodness in people. You sure you want to keep taking me along for those recruiting missions?”
Marcus swallowed and pressed his groin forward. “I don’t want anyone else by my side.” It was the truth, in all ways, incontrovertible and absolute.
Phillip let a little smile slip through that pouty, disdainful façade he usually wore and thrust his face forward. His eyes closed, and Marcus was stunned to realize that he was asking for a kiss.
Marcus had never been able to deny him anything he wanted. Phillip’s lips parted and Marcus’s tongue entered, tasting the shape-shifter Phillip had sampled for dinner. And that was when Adrian’s voice sounded in both their heads.
“Family meeting, boys. All vampires, front lawn.”
Marcus groaned and deepened the kiss for a moment. Dammit. Damn Adrian. How many chances would he get where Phillip was willing and soft and admiring one of the few things Marcus could actually do better than he could?
How many chances would he get where he could think the word beloved and expect that someday it might be returned?
Tragedy and Hope
IT HAD bee
n such a lovely night, a night of such promise of peace, of such lovely things to come. It had fooled them all, lulled them into complacency and into a belief that all would be well, simply because the leaders they loved to follow also loved to love. It left them totally unprepared for the night that destroyed their hearts—everybody’s hearts—and Phillip and Marcus had a front-row seat.
The enemy responsible for the unsettling shape-shifter deaths had finally revealed himself. He’d been after Adrian, poor, tortured Adrian, the whole time. They’d established a meeting to parlay—and to fight. No one fooled themselves that there wasn’t going to be bloodshed, but Goddess… the terrible things they lost! As long as Marcus was sentient, he would never forget the jumble of images from that night.
They had awoken, angry and ready for battle, and Adrian had given a fierce smile as they launched themselves off the top of the hill. They had flown out over Gold Country, then over Folsom Lake toward the gravel pits where the enemy—a half elf from Adrian’s tortured past—had decided to confront Adrian once and for all.
Adrian was so… so full that night. He was full of his beloveds, Green and Cory; full of his friends; and full of his people, the vampires. He was full to bursting with a complex, brilliant mixture of fear for them, pride, and that intense, charismatic spark of leadership that he had always been capable of but had never let burst forth.
Until Cory, until his healing in the garden, he had never believed in himself enough to lead his people into battle. Now he did.
Marcus had hovered, waiting for his orders, as Adrian descended for a moment to talk to a shape-shifter who had been there and get the lay of the land. Beyond the rise where they hid, Marcus could hear Cory herself bandying words with the enemy, and he smiled with fangs. She was fierce and sarcastic and bloodthirsty—all the things Green and Adrian were not—and he loved her for it, just like the rest of the hill.
He was not prepared to watch Adrian leap into the sky in a moment of panic that every vampire in his head could feel. He was certainly not prepared to watch Adrian, their gentle Adrian, fly into a magic trap and….
