by Amy Lane
However this ended, it was going to hurt.
“Bingo!” Nicky snapped, putting his own finger on his nose. “World-fucking-domination. So he starts preaching Avian-supremacy, and our people… well, we’re used to being alone, and insular, so we’re pretty much fair game. And those of us who just jumped off the hay truck from bumfuck Montana—well, we’re as blind and as prejudiced as anyone else, and we fall right in line.”
“We were all susceptible, Nick.” La Mark’s eyes were closed in pain, and Nicky touched his shoulder before he continued on. The bitter irony never even faltered.
“Yeah… you say that, buddy, but see—you just ran a blind attack on a fortress. I mean, that’s hero shit, right? You do a kamikaze suicide bird bomb on some place you’re told is pure evil—yay! Me? No… I’m a special kind of fuck-up. I take the girl I think I love… this… haunted, fragile, anorexic looking girl who’s all eyes and half-smiles, and I bring her home to uber-Daddy, and uber-Daddy says…” his voice choked up then, and La Mark filled in the blanks.
“I was there that night. He said ‘Mind-fuck her like all the other bitches. She’ll never know the difference.’”
There was a collective intake of breath, and suddenly Teague realized who the girl—the fragile, anorexic looking girl who was all eyes—had been.
Nicky rubbed his mouth. “Yeah. And I do—I steal her first memories of love. And she almost fried me into an oil spot.” His laugh was the first sign that he might have forgiven himself a little. “If I’d tried to do it now—hell, even a month later—she would have known how to do it, too.”
“You took her memories?” Teague asked, remembering her words. I was attacked.
“And after I dodged her power-blast, I threw her into a concrete pole and left her for dead,” Nicky said, a death-rictus possessing his face in place of a smile.
Max tried to lighten the moment. “You were so surprised when she showed up at school on Monday.”
Nicky shook his head. “Yeah—with two fuckers who would rather kill me than look at me. Thanks for not doing that, by the way.”
“Our pleasure,” Bracken murmured. “Besides—you came in awfully damned handy when it was time to save my life.”
Nicky shook his head. “No—that was all her. I was a battery—hell, until we found you, I was the only thing keeping her on her feet.”
It was Bracken’s turn to look away. “And by the time you found me, I was weak…”
“And she healed you,” Nicky said, although he and Bracken were both red-faced so Teague knew there was more to it than that, “and then, when she was sleeping it off, the uber-Daddy Avian-asshole tried to kill her.”
Bracken chuckled, but, again, the sound was nothing to inspire laughter. “And she stole back her first kiss.”
Max rubbed his face with his hands then. “And then there was the longest fucking week of…”
“All of our lives.” Bracken finished. “If Andres hadn’t crushed on her after one conversation, we’d be having…” he couldn’t finish that sentence.
“We’d be having the same bad-shit anniversary Mario’s having,” Nicky finished pragmatically, and they all sighed.
“Oh shit…” Teague said, putting things together. “He… he was with the people sent here.”
La Mark nodded, and he managed to smile—a little, real smile. “If it had been up to Arturo, we all would have died. Green was in San Francisco, trying to… you know…”
“Keep Cory alive,” Bracken’s voice was definitely choked.
La Mark nodded. “Yeah. Anyway, lucky us, he called Green in. But Mario’s wife… she… she wasn’t made for shit like this. Mario was going to get captured and she just flew in and…”
“She broke her neck.” Arturo was walking in looking behind him, to where two shadows were disappearing down the hallway. “Bracken, Nicky—you should go to Green’s room and help clean up that mess, since you’re apparently done gossiping.”
“Is it gossip when you’re the bad guy, Arturo?” Nicky’s face was pale and Max put a comforting hand on his shoulder. Teague sucked in a silent fist to the gut—he’d been the bad guy too.
“You’re not the bad guy when you’re young, foolish, and misguided.”
Teague closed his eyes and turned away under the pretense of reloading his gun, since the gloves and silver shot were on the living room table for the briefing. The task made it easy for him to reject that comfort as he’d been rejecting it in the two years since Green had healed his body and shown him the ignorance in his soul.
“That is the truth,” Arturo said next to Teague’s ear, and Teague looked up to see that everybody else had scattered, leaving him and the big South American sidhe alone in the living room.
“I’m not young,” Teague said gruffly.
“To my people you’re an infant,” Arturo said with a faint smile. “And now that you’re a werewolf, you’ve got another two, three-hundred years of living to go. Your heart is still young, Teague. There are many, many simple things it doesn’t know.”
“I’m getting a little long in the tooth to learn new shit.” His guns were loaded. Carefully he packed the silver shot and the cold iron tools for the gun into the vinyl carrying case Cory kept them in, and just as carefully disposed of the gloves. An elf touching the gloves would get a cold iron burn. A shapeshifter would get silver-poisoning. The gloves were double- Ziplocced and thrown into the trash, and a special solution of gelled brine and herbs was applied like hand-sanitizer, and used to wipe down anything the gun equipment had touched.
Teague applied himself to the task so studiously, he actually startled when Arturo spoke again.
“I was over three-thousand years old when I came here. I was planning to take over the place and kill the weak leader who led with love.”
Teague’s hand stopped their work, and even though he knew his eyes grew as big as a child’s, he still couldn’t seem to keep his expression impassive.
Arturo smiled a little, and patted Teague on the spiky blonde head. “Yes, little brother—we can all see how well that turned out, can’t we? You changed sides in the preternatural world with one night in Green’s arms. You changed species after a few hours in Cory’s company, worrying about your beloved. You can change the pain in your heart with a little patience—I have every faith.”
“That’s good,” Teague rasped, trying to fill the horrible blank of his mind with something, anything but the pain Arturo had just spoken of. “Faith is good. I gotta go get Jack. The vampires are almost up.”
He felt a hand on his shoulder and was suddenly swung around to face Arturo’s copper-lightning colored eyes. “Cory used to avoid my gaze too, Teague. But then, she never was any good at running.”
Teague tried to crack a smile and a joke at the same time. “Tell me about it—I’ve seen her on the track.” Cory was many, many things, but graceful and coordinated were not among them.
Arturo didn’t even blink. “You, my friend, run too easily. As a wolf, you’re fearless. But do you know how most wolves catch rabbits?”
Teague swallowed and shook his head.
“Their hearts beat too fast in flight, and give out. Your heart is strong, Teague—it’s not going to give out. You should be ashamed to be pretending to be a rabbit, instead of the wolf you were born to be.”
Teague swallowed, and made himself keep facing the man in spite of the rather personal nature of what he had to say. The silver caps in the sidhe’s teeth flashed, showing Arturo’s smile of appreciation.
“So what made Cory face you head on?”
Arturo laughed. “I dared her to look at me, and then I touched her palm. I had no idea she was a sorceress—she became elf-struck. I almost killed her.”
Teague’s eyes were going to bug the hell out of his head, they really fucking were. “Well, thank God you didn’t!”
Arturo grinned and turned to leave. “God has nothing to do with that girl, Teague—she’s pure Goddess.”
Teagu
e took a deep breath after Arturo had left, and thought about the little college student, the sorceress who seemed to hold half the hill together, and Green’s obvious dependence on her well-being.
“Thank Goddess,” he murmured quietly. “Thank you.”
If anyone heard, Teague never knew, but his heart felt curiously less burdened.
Jack
Don’t Look Up
Jack had forgotten how boring stakeouts could be.
He and Teague sat in the front of the black Ford Expedition, drinking a thermos of hot chocolate and talking quietly as the car idled in front of the airport terminal. As Teague said, when he’d pulled the vehicle out of a garage full of them, it wasn’t the Mustang, but at least it was a Ford.
Bracken sat in the back, his face remote and brooding, and Teague kept sending the guy sympathetic glances. There was something going on there—one more thing that Teague knew and Jack didn’t, but that didn’t bother Jack too much.
He was finally here—working with Teague. It felt like a tiny victory in a bitter war. Jack was a partner, an equal, a confidant…
Well, a partner, anyway.
“So why is there a whole carload of guys behind us, pretending we don’t exist?” Jack had asked this before, but he was trying to wrap his brain around the level of paranoia that the Lady of the House must be immersed in to think that picking up a bunch of werewolves was anything other than a taxi-job.
“We don’t trust these guys,” Teague said, sipping on his hot chocolate. Jack already had his--it tasted faintly of coffee, but mostly of cinnamon, vanilla, and chocolate. Jack was pretty sure that if you could put protein powder in it without changing the flavor, Teague would try to live of the stuff. “It seems like every brush up we’ve had with the So-Cal people has resulted in something bad. The only exception was a group of folks who came up alone to get away from the sinkhole, and ended up… sucked in by something bad.”
Teague’s voice had risen on the end of that ‘bad’ and he flickered a glance at Bracken. Bracken grimaced.
“Bad,” he said shortly.
“Gotcha.” Teague took another sip of the chocolate and Jack snorted.
“You’re just going to leave it at that?”
Teague shrugged. “I’ve had my fill of bad shit stories today, Jacky. I’ll pry into Bracken’s squishy underside some other time.” Then, pitching his voice to carry, “That okay with you, Goliath?”
“Fuck off,” Bracken said without heat, and Teague gave him a little one-finger salute.
They seemed comfortable with each other, and Jack resented the hell out of that.
“Don’t tell me you actually shared your bad shit stories with the class.” Jack sounded jealous and petulant and whiny and he knew it and couldn’t seem to do a damned thing about it.
Teague, being Teague, didn’t let it phase him. “Believe it or not, Jaqueline, my bad shit stories did not get top priority today. Not everybody has a pressing need to see what color my insides are.”
If Jack had ever doubted that Teague loved him, it was erased by the easy humor of that reply. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said mildly, not sure what he hoped for.
Teague’s face lost its easy expression. His cheeks hollowed, his cheekbones stood out, and even in the dim light of the airport, his skin went almost as pale as Bracken’s.
“Could you at least let me spare you that?” he asked quietly.
Jack blew out a breath and gave the question honest consideration. “Because what you put us through right now is so much easier?”
“Aw shit,” Bracken swore, bringing their attention to the task at hand. “What’s he doing?”
La Mark had stepped out of the following SUV and was walking stiffly towards the airport like a guy who…
“Oh Jesus—is he taking a fucking leak?” Teague snorted and Jack had to laugh too.
“Well shit,” Jack said after a moment—there must have been a kegger of caffeine in that chocolate stuff Grace had given them, “I think I’ll do the same thing. I can wait in there for the arrival—they should be in already and just getting their shit.”
Teague all but whimpered, and Jack’s temper flared. “What are they going to do to me in the airport, Teague? Holy shit, stop being a mother hen!”
Jack swore to himself as he stalked into the reception area, found the head and took a leak. Damn—it wasn’t like he was helpless, was he? He’d lived so far, hadn’t he? He was still fuming when he saw the four men grabbing small duffels from the carousel.
They were dressed a lot like gang members on a Friday night—supersized jeans, with even bigger T-shirts, layered on top of each other, and perfect, mint-condition baseball hats, all in coordinating brown and green.
Jack’s inner wolf sat up and bayed, and as neared them and smelled the gun oil and cold knives in their duffel bags, he suddenly understood why Cory had been so paranoid—and why Teague hadn’t wanted him to come into the airport alone.
He put on a smile though, and started working on how he could warn Teague and Bracken that these guys weren’t on the level. Even their smell was crazy off—werewolves and cologne… it was just wrong.
The young men were an eclectic mix of ethnicities—two Hispanic men, one white man, one black, and as they saw him approaching they had a meeting of eyes. The white guy was the one who approached him—he had dirty-blonde hair, buzz cut under the hat, and a scraggly goatee. Jack wondered what it took to make a beard look that bad on a werewolf—he knew Teague used to be able to skip a shave or two, and now he was shaving once a day to ward off stubble.
“You Mr. Green’s bitch?” The guy said, and Jack’s thin smile faded and died.
“I’m someone else’s bitch. I’m Mr. Green’s employee.” He couldn’t make himself extend a hand, but that was okay—one wasn’t offered.
The men grabbed their duffels, and Jack could see from the way they were patting them down that they were finding their weapons before they left the building. No amount of positioning was going to change the fact that these guys would have a knife on him as he walked out, so he didn’t try.
He led the way, jostled by hot-running bodies with cold intentions. The other men didn’t talk, and as soon as he went from the yellow light of the terminal to the sharp winter darkness, he felt dirty-blonde-guy’s switchblade digging into his side. He looked anxiously at where Teague should be, hoping he’d been spotted.
He was looking so intently for a sign from behind the darkened wheel that he almost missed another obvious sign of trouble.
The following SUV was gone. Dreamlike, he saw that La Mark was standing stupidly, staring at the empty space two cars behind Jack and Teague’s vehicle. As Jack was hustled past him, his group of ‘guests’ strutting hard in their over-sized jeans, he and La Mark met eyes, and La Mark looked skyward.
The implication seemed clear—La Mark would be in the air as soon as these guys passed him, and Jack took comfort in that thought. He also, strangely enough, took comfort in the fact that a sweet-faced, brown-eyed vampire named Marcus had fed chastely from his wrist before they’d left that evening.
Cory had watched the process impassively, and then clapped Jack soundly on the shoulder. “They can track you this way,” she said softly, with what she’d meant to be a reassuring smile. He’d been too busy fuming about being babysat to be reassured. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll know where you’ll be.”
Now as he was shoved roughly into SUV, he started to understand her concern. For the first time since he’d arrived at Green’s Hill, he took comfort in the fact that the Lady of the House stuck her over-sized nose into his affairs.
Teague looked at the passengers forcing their way into the car and sneered. “Jesus, Jacky—did you forget to flush? I think some shit just got into the car!”
Jack tried a shrug as he was shoved into the middle seat and up against the window. “Well, you never know what’s gonna stick to your ass when you’re not paying attention.”
Not paying attenti
on was right, he thought now. He should have taken one look at these guys and turned around and ran for the car. Something, anything, other than walk up and try to shake their hands.
“Yo!” One of the guys—not the blonde one who had challenged Jack but one of the African-American men with him—was sitting next to Jack and turning around. He had a big fucking gun in his hand and was issuing a challenge Bracken.
Who was apparently planning to be Green. “Hmmm, yes?” he said, a very Green-like smile on his face. “May I help you gentlemen?”
“Are you Mr. Green, asshole?”
“Green’s the name on my college registration,” Bracken lied smoothly. Teague jerked his head around in surprise. Maybe it wasn’t a lie?
“Who you talking to, when we got in? You were on the phone!”
Bracken smiled again, and even Jack, who didn’t know Bracken very well at all, felt the wealth of things not said in that smile. “The little woman,” he said simply, and Jack was pretty sure Teague almost strangled on his own tongue.
“Well, you make sure you hang up on the bitch, cause we got business to do!”
“And where are you planning to do this ‘business’?” Bracken evaded. Jack recognized the evasion—did the werewolf see it? The werewolf who didn’t know he was a dead man?
“Did you hang up?” Well, maybe not that stupid.
“Do you see me on the phone?” Bracken asked reasonably, and Jack revised his opinion just that quickly.
“It doesn’t matter,” the white guy who’d muscled into the front seat barked. “They’ll be dead by then anyway. You,” he prodded Teague with his knife, “get the fuck out of here and go north on highway five, you hear me?”
“Oh joy,” Teague muttered. “Redding.”
“Like you’ll ever see Redding. We’ve got silver-shot and we know how to use it. And don’t worry about your other carload of guys—they’ll be meeting us there.”