The Green's Hill Novellas

by Amy Lane

  “That was priceless, you two. Thanks for that!”

  “We didn’t do anything, did we, Shep?” Jefi sounded so sad, so insecure. Shep wrapped his arm around Jefi’s shoulders and squeezed reassuringly. He knew it was only his energy, but it felt more solid than usual. But that didn’t matter.

  “No, Jefi. I think Adrian was just surprised, that’s all.” Shep glared at Adrian, daring the vampire’s ghost to contradict him. To his surprise, Adrian was instantly contrite and instantly kind.

  “Yeah. No worries, Jefi.”

  “Jefischa!” Shepherd growled, surprising them all.

  “Jefischa,” Adrian corrected smoothly. “No worries. I was not aware that you were not aware, that’s all.”

  “We thought… you know… that….”

  “Sex gets left behind with the meat sack?” Adrian filled in, and he rolled his eyes when Shepherd and Jefi both started to look shocked again. “Well, physically, yes. Sex is a physical thing. But… but it’s also a connection. When you do it right, it’s all energy, just like the two of you.”

  Shepherd grew very still. “I don’t hear about that kind in my travels,” he said softly, and Jefi squeezed his hand reassuringly. Shepherd squeezed back before he realized they didn’t really have hands. “We’ve heard about it in general,” Shepherd admitted, “but… those people are very often happy when they get here. Not a lot of time for….”

  “Serene souls, content to wait on their mates?” Adrian supplied with some irony, and Shepherd nodded. His throat felt dry, and in sheer irritability he conjured a glass of water, which he raised to his lips with shaking hands. Jefischa, who was clearly capable of conjuring his own glass of water, took Shepherd’s glass from him and finished it off.

  “Well, I’m not one of those,” Adrian said sharply. Then, looking at them, he seemed to take pity on them. He crouched down and rubbed at the frosted froth of the floor like he was wiping a dirty window with his hand.

  “Here, look at this, would you?”

  Shep and Jefi both knelt on the floor of heaven and looked at the clear window Adrian had made for them.

  “How do you know how to do this?” Jefi asked, and Adrian shot him a scornful look.

  “I’ve been here for over two years, humanwise. Do you know how many nights that is, longing for a look at them? Now here: I’m about to share some serious shit with you gits, and you’d best not blow it off.”

  “You don’t have to,” Shepherd said seriously. He was almost afraid to learn more about Adrian. In a few moments of conversation, the man… vampire… whatever! had managed to completely discomfit the two of them, and they were a pretty serene duo, all things considered.

  “No, you have to guard me. You’ll have to deal with me. And the first thing to understand is that I’m not human. I haven’t been for over a hundred and fifty years, but it’s okay. Because until about six weeks before I got blown into a powder, I thought the human race was pretty fucking overrated, if you want to know the truth. Now look at them. Look at them!”

  They looked. Shep saw three… well, people, for lack of a better word. Two of them weren’t really human. “They’re elves,” he said to Jefi, who peered at them curiously.

  “You don’t see a lot of elves, do you, Shep?”

  “Elves don’t really have anything to repent,” Shepherd said honestly. “And if they do, they’re not talking to us. In fact….” Shep squinted through the little window. “That entire place—I know that place. There’s over a thousand souls there, but it’s like a penitence vacuum. Hardly anyone there has any true regret.”

  “It’s a faerie hill,” Adrian agreed soberly. “Except it’s got more than just the fey. It’s got vampires, were-folk… and her.”

  “Wait a minute,” Shepherd said, his eyes widening. “I know what they’re doing together. Do you know how many people I’ve had repent that particular position right there?”

  Adrian chuckled, the sound oddly gentle. “These three have never been your penitents, Shepherd. And certainly not for what they’re doing right now.”

  Jefi cocked his head to the side, and then his eyes got wide. “Whoa….”

  Shep smacked him lightly on the back of the head, and Jefi recovered himself and remembered his job. “Is that your lover?” he asked with respect. “She’s….” He faltered. And well he might, Shep thought with surprise. She wasn’t beautiful. Adrian—well, Adrian sort of oozed human sex and human beauty, but this woman was plain as a potato. And she was young. Even by human standards.

  But Shep was an angel, and he was used to looking at the heart of humans. “She’s lovely,” he said, and his voice was reverent, because she was. Seeing that, he looked beyond the inhuman (almost angelic, if he’d admitted it) loveliness of her two companions in the garden by the light of a waning summer sun.

  “They’re all beautiful,” he whispered. “They’re… bright. Even the one with the dark energy, it’s intense and grounded, practically growing granite roots.” He looked up at Adrian. “These were all your lovers?”

  “‘Lovers’ is an easy word. I was lovers with most of the hill,” Adrian admitted without even a blush. “Two of them were my beloveds. The third, Fuckface there”—the dark energy—“he was my friend.”

  “But now you hate him?” Jefi asked, appalled, and a flicker of a smile passed over Adrian’s pouting, pretty, palely pink mouth. Shep wondered if Jefi longed for that pouting mouth to be open and laughing again.

  “Still love him—just not like I love Green or Cory, my beloveds. Not any less, mind you. Just different. Do you see them? All of them down there?”

  Shep and Jefi nodded.

  “Now you—Shepherd—that’s the angel of penitence, right? You can listen to people’s hearts. Now listen. What do you hear from them? What’s the one sin that they repent?”

  Shepherd swallowed and wished for another glass of water, but he didn’t conjure one. “They repent that they let you die.”

  Adrian nodded. “Yeah, mate. That’s right. So there they are, and at night, when their longing for me gets too awful, when they can’t stand one more minute of knowing they can never touch me again, they reach out with their souls and let themselves miss me.” Adrian’s hands grasped the cord at his chest. It was thick and almost hurtfully bright. “You see that? That’s low ebb, people. They try… oh Goddess, I can feel them trying. They know it hurts me. They know it leaves me weak. Hell, they probably know that this is bad—and I mean just plain bad—for all of us. So they stomp on it, and they love each other, and they forge a life together and go on. But sometimes… I can’t even blame them. It’s agony. It’s bloody, excruciating agony… but I live for it, you hear me? I’d give anything—the weakness, the pain in my chest that feels like claws, the knowing time is passing and I’m not even there to share—I’d give it all and take it all right in the pie hole, just to be near them again.”

  His voice was shaking, and Jefi—Jefi was always so compassionate. “Well, they won’t be there for long,” he said, and Adrian turned a vicious smile at him. Jefi quailed, and even Shep shut his eyes.

  “They’re elves, Jefi,” Shep rasped, embarrassed. “They live forever, or they fade away. They don’t get to come up here. That’s part of the great quarrel. The God’s people and the Goddess’s people are apart in eternity.” Shepherd couldn’t imagine why Adrian would have agreed to this terrible half life in the anteroom, and he was going to ask when Jefi just had to try to make it better.

  “But the girl… at least she….”

  Adrian shook his head bitterly and dashed at his cheeks, where black-scarlet tears were dripping in a horrible death mask on the face of a man who had died twice. “She tried, Goddess knows. I’ve had two face-to-face talks with her already, because she’s reckless and foolhardy and brave. But… don’t you get it? The whole reason I’m here, mates—this entire perversion of life and death—it’s all to keep them on the face of the planet. They almost died when I died. One of them goes, the other tw
o topple like dominoes. I was crap under my beloveds’ heels, or I should have been, but my death alone, and the entire works goes. You’re so fucking sharp, mate”—he gestured at Shepherd—“what happens to the power in that hill when those three people go? What happens to the sanctuary, the peace—hell, the fucking weather?”

  Shepherd’s breath caught—he was getting used to it. The energy signatures of the three of them were woven into the soil, into the blood, into the souls of every creature on the hill… and beyond.

  “Your people will die,” Shepherd whispered. “They will scatter to the winds, naked and alone. That place, their power, it protects every soul in the hill.”

  “But the girl,” Jefi protested, devastated by this much pain.

  “You heard the row same as I did,” Adrian said flatly. “Her High and Mighty-ness has some plan for my beloved. She’s not coming here. She’s never coming here. No matter how brave she is, the Royal Bitch isn’t going to let her die.”

  “That’s….” Shep met Adrian’s eyes with naked sympathy. Even an angel, with no concept of human feelings, knew the absolute pain of Adrian’s dilemma. “I’m so sorry, Adrian.”

  “I don’t want your pity, mate. I’m good.” The first part was the truth. The second part was a blatant lie. “And I’m sorry I made your bloke here feel bad.” And that rang with sincerity. “But here’s the thing. If something makes me laugh, I’m gonna fucking laugh. And if I want to sit in my little illusion of a room there and toss off until my wanker bleeds, you two don’t have a fucking thing to say about it, you hear me?”

  Jefi let out a little moan, and Shep held his hand and stroked it. Poor Jefi. He liked bedtime stories, and those always ended so much happier than this one. But Shep never dropped Adrian’s gaze. “I hear you, but you remember something too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We minister to everybody, even you. If you want anything—even company—we’re here.”

  “Bloody nice of you to offer,” Adrian conceded. He ran an arm over his face and stained his white T-shirt with blood brine from his tears before he wandered off. Shepherd wondered how long it would be before Adrian—or the part of him that controlled his reality in this place—remembered that the body wasn’t real. The blood-vampire tears weren’t real. The white T-shirt wasn’t real. They couldn’t be. All that had been real about Adrian had died months ago, probably going up in flames when the sun rose. Everything, of course, except his pain. That alone would make the heavens weep, wouldn’t it?

  Jefischa was disconsolate, so Shepherd guided him to the nearest cloudbank and pulled him up carefully, wrapping an arm around him and pulling him against his chest.

  “C’mon, Jefi. He can deal. He looks pretty, but damn, I think he was made to do this. Did you hear him laugh? It’s like when he died the first time, only the best of humanity came back and walked his skin.”

  Jefi was an angel. He was supposed to cry prettily. Silver tears were supposed to track down unblemished golden skin and give an air of delicacy to an angel’s inhuman beauty.

  Jefi’s nose was swollen and red, and his eyes were swollen and red, and his chin was wrinkled and quivering in an alarming way. Shepherd was appalled. Not at the unattractiveness, but that Jefi should be so distraught. He rubbed Jefi’s back and dropped kisses in his hair. He noticed as he did that Jefi was starting to look… different. Not bad, and not solidly, but… but sometimes, he would see a sharper line at his jaw or his nose, or a different highlight in what was supposed to be chestnut hair. But when Jefi gave a little grunt, a new sound, Shepherd forgot all about what he looked like.

  “Mmm….” Suddenly Jefi arched his spine, undulating into Shepherd’s touch like a cat. “That feels different, Shep. Mmm….”

  Shep stopped his gentle stroking and looked at his partner curiously. “What feels different about it?”

  Jefi paused. “It…. My back tingles. Why does my back tingle?” Jefi frowned, some of the terrible grief easing from his face. He turned his head and then stood up and began turning circles like a cat with tape on its tail, and Shep had to laugh.

  “Here—stop moving, dammit, and let me see!” He lifted Jefi’s traditional “robe” from the hem, and Jefi giggled.

  “You’re looking at me naked, Shep.”

  Shep rolled his eyes. “It’s not like angels have…” What was the current mortal word? “…’junk’ to get in the way, Jefi.”

  “I wonder what that’s like?”

  Shep frowned at Jefi’s back. “What what’s like?” he asked absently. There was a handprint on Jefi’s back. And it looked… solid. Real. Angels looked real. Inhuman beauty or no, they were supposed to look real for the humans. But this handprint…. Shep was staring at it curiously, splaying his own hand out to match it, when Jefi interrupted his thoughts.

  “What it’s like to have external genitals?”

  It was a common topic in the heavens, actually, and Shep shrugged. “How do you know you wouldn’t have breasts instead?”

  “You mean, like his female lover? There… touch… there….” Jefi wiggled, and Shep kept touching him just because it made Jefi happy.

  “Yes, Jefi. Women traditionally have breasts. Men traditionally have external genitalia. Which one would you want?”

  Jefi shrugged, making his skin, his angel skin and the disconcerting, hand-sized patch in the middle, ripple. “I don’t want breasts. I think they’d get in the way.”

  “Well, genitalia certainly give a man a weakness,” Shepherd observed. He’d seen it often enough. Nothing made a man repent quicker than a solidly placed blow to the gonads.

  “Does that mean you’d want breasts?” Jefi asked, shocked enough to turn around. It left his robe all rucked up around his plain, smooth lower body, and Shepherd shook his head in certainty.

  “No, Jefischa. I’m pretty certain I’d be a man. I wouldn’t worry about the breasts getting in the way, but I don’t deal well in the ‘acceptance and reformation’ department. I don’t think my personality is equipped to come with a vagina, if you must know the truth. Testes, scrotum, and a penis are probably the way to go.”

  Jefischa succeeded in turning all the way around and looked Shep in the eye. His eyes were lighter, Shep thought randomly. They were supposed to be an all-purpose hazel, but they weren’t anymore. Jefi’s eyes were gray, and they were rounder than they used to be.

  “Adrian was lovers with a man.”

  Shep smiled a little. “Yes, Jefi. I know. Lots of them. Women too.”

  “Which would we be? Would we be like… Fuckface and Adrian, or would we be like….” Jefi frowned to remember the name. “Green and Adrian? Would we be friends, or would we be beloveds?”

  Shep swallowed then and swallowed again and wished desperately for some more theoretical water but couldn’t remember how to conjure it to save himself. “I don’t think I could ever call you ‘Fuckface,’ Jefi, so I guess we’d have to be beloveds.”

  The anxious look eased a little, and the lines of tension around Jefi’s newly gray eyes relaxed. Shepherd put his hand out to rub Jefi’s back some more, but Jefi shrugged away.

  “I thought you liked that.” Shepherd felt inexplicably hurt.

  “I do,” Jefi said, swallowing too. He looked so sad. “It feels like humans do, when they go to sleep and something really big is going to happen in the morning.”

  Shepherd raised a tentative hand and rested it on Jefi’s shoulder. “Then why don’t you want me to keep doing it?”

  “Because we don’t sleep up here, Shepherd, and the morning won’t be any different for us than it has been since the world began.”

  With that, Jefi threw himself on the misty ground and rubbed a clear space to watch the people below. Shepherd didn’t have to check over his shoulder to know Jefi was looking at Adrian’s friends and trying to fit himself into the mysterious, complicated patterns of love that still bound Adrian into their midst. He’d wanted to keep Jefi from the frightening possibilities that this vam
pire had held from the very beginning. He’d known Adrian was dangerous even when all they’d known about him was that he seemed to make angels want to free-fall into gravity and humanity like the humans themselves liked to free-fall from airplanes with only silk and cords for safety.

  As it turned out, the vampire’s biggest evil was that he was more human than most of the humans who came to heaven. Who knew that being human would make a vampire such a danger to the two of them?

  It didn’t matter.

  What mattered was that Shep had set out to keep Jefi from getting hurt. What really mattered was that he’d already failed.

  Part II: Falling

  AS IT turned out, Adrian liked to play chess. In fact, he was better at it than most angels. He was so good at it that it took Shepherd a while to figure out that he was letting Jefi win.

  When the vampire asked the two of them if they’d like to play, it was almost like he was offering them something, throwing them a bone. Well, these two blokes don’t seem too inept, maybe I’ll go play with them and make them feel better. The really pathetic thing was, Shep and Jefi just sort of jumped at the chance, waggling their tails and turning their puppy-smiling muzzles up to him in supplication.

  It sure beat making him cry, that was for damned sure.

  He talked to them as they were playing, and they learned more and more of the complicated life that made up Adrian’s past. They learned that his passionate love affair with the little human girl (who was not so human, he assured them) had lasted a terribly short time before he’d died. They learned that he and Green had been lovers for nearing two centuries and that he and Bracken had been lovers but had never really meant to be forever that way. They learned that the beginning of his life as a vampire had marked the end of his life as a victim and the beginning of his time as sort of a supernatural social worker. He often brought the humans who were floundering in their world into the realm of the Goddess as either vampires or shape-shifters. They thrived there, it seemed, and he confirmed Shep’s silent leanings toward the Goddess’s side of The Great Quarrel. Shep heard a lot of people in pain; it was nice to know that someone out there was working to alleviate worldly pain instead of letting heaven be an all-purpose panacea, like a carrot on a stick.