Jack&Teague [& Katy] stories 1-5

by Amy Lane

  It didn’t occur to him that he was being ‘handled’ in the same manner he’d seen the hill ‘handle’ Cory or Green, until after the vampires had woken up.

  Phillip and Marcus had walked in (they were rarely far apart from each other) and Marcus said, “Holy Goddess—I haven’t seen one of these since the last time you threw me over.”

  They were standing behind the couch as Teague squinted at them over his shoulder, the pieces falling into place. Phillip cast the love of his life a sour look from under the black fall of hair of his widow’s peak. “If you don’t learn when to shut the fuck up, I may still throw you over.”

  Marcus caught Teague’s eyes apologetically. “You wish,” he returned, bumping shoulders with his beloved. “I’m like flesh and blood Velcro.”

  “There’s an appealing thought… you couldn’t come up with something better than that you Dago bastard?”

  Marcus shrugged and blushed, and leaned over and whispered something in Phillip’s ear that made him blush as well. Teague watched them, his heart breaking into small, bruised, dripping, bloody pieces, and Phillip saw his expression.

  “Brother, we’ve officially become a break-up party liability.” And the two of them made themselves scarce in quick-time.

  He turned back to the movie—they were watching Independence Day, because there was nothing like a good disaster movie to put things into perspective—and saw Cory looking at him with wordless sympathy. He shrugged silently and slipped into the colorless, emotionless void that had comforted him for the last few hours. Cory was leaning against Bracken, her knitting in her hands, and her feet in Teague’s lap. It was a familiar, brotherly pose, and with the vampire’s prompting, it occurred to him that it was very deliberate. She was touching him in a way that had nothing at all to do with sex. She was touching him like a mother or a sister—or a friend.

  That’s where he stayed for another half an hour, conscious that Mario had tilted his head back and started to snore in the chair next to him, and that Nicky was crouched at Cory’s feet, mouthing the lines to the climactic speech at the end of the movie. That’s where they were when a vaguely familiar female voice spoke up behind him.

  “Oh my God—whose break-up party?”

  Teague might have smiled a little—he didn’t look behind him, but he recognized a were-leopard—was it Leah? Was that the name? And someone must have elbowed her in the side and clued her in.

  “Are you shitting me? Naww… really? Them? Impossible-- that’s like asking two ass-cheeks to ride home in different cars, and making the sphincter drive.”

  Teague’s eyes bugged out. Looking to his left he saw that Cory’s and Bracken’s eyes were pretty damned huge as well, and then they all made the mistake of meeting those bulged out eyes and cracking up. Teague tended to laugh in short breaths, little blasts of happiness in between painful moments of self-denial. He wasn’t sure when the first little burst of breath went from laughter to sobs, he really wasn’t. He would have sworn it couldn’t happen—he’d been avoiding thinking, avoiding feeling since Jacky had burst in by the vampire vault, and it wasn’t like he had a whole lot of emotional reserves anyway. By the time he’d spoken to Green, he’d been emotionally exhausted. Green’s soothing presence had been a balm, an aloe bandage on his shredded soul.

  He didn’t think he had any tears or pain left by the time he walked out of the room he’d been sharing with Jack and Katy for the past weeks. He’d been relieved—he figured maybe he’d never have to cry again.

  But something about laughing… God… something about letting an emotion—any emotion—register on his radar cracked his heart wide open.

  Within moments, the room had cleared of everybody but Cory and Bracken, and Cory was holding Teague’s head in her lap as he cried, and Bracken was holding her.

  He wasn’t sure how long it lasted. When his sobs had been reduced to little hiccups, he looked at the television and realized that Knight’s Tale was playing—not one of his favorite movies, but then, he’d been out of it for a while. He was glad someone was happy with what was on TV.

  He cleared his throat and made to move—God, these people were going to think he couldn’t keep his shit together in a copper pot, but Cory’s arms tightened around his shoulders.

  “Stay, wolf-man. You need to know that you’ll never be alone here, okay?”

  “Jacky…”

  “Will love you as much tomorrow as he loved you yesterday. But in the meantime, you don’t need to be alone. We’ve got your back, baby. It’s what we do.”

  He didn’t remember falling asleep after that. He must have—and one of the uber-strong super-beings in the damned hill must have carried him back to Mario’s room like a child. He knew that he woke up from a dream—it didn’t matter which one, they were all blood-saturated and ended with him, alone, covered in his lovers’ blood—and the flannel sheets were a different color, and they smelled like someone else.

  A light tap on his shoulders eased the scream in his throat.

  “Easy, wolf-man—orders are to sleep in. You’ll be doing the gladiator thing when everyone gets back from school.”

  “Oh Christ!” Teague scrubbed at his eyes and glowered at the thin yellow sunlight coming in through Mario’s full sized window. (The room he’d shared with Jack and Katy had a small skylight, stealing sun from the only corner of the room to face outside.) “They have school today—I forgot… don’t you have school too?” He glared at Mario who was sitting up on the bed in jeans and a sweatshirt, working on what looked like a law text as it sat in his lap.

  Mario held out a little palm-pilot-something-or-whatsis. “Yeah—La Mark’s gonna send me my homework and drop off my papers. It’s all good.”

  Teague’s head felt heavy and his neck felt slender and no good at all for holding the damned thing up. He fell back against the pillows and fought the temptation to pull the blankets over his head. “Why didn’t you go with them?”

  Mario pulled the covers up over Teague’s eyes for him and then went to the window and pulled the heavy curtains shut. They were green like the sheets, Teague noted mournfully—his and Jacky’s stuff was blue and red and cream.

  “Exactly why you think I didn’t, wolf-man. I’m here to watch your back. Now go back to sleep—it’s only seven in the morning.”

  “Jesus—what time do they leave?” Teague grumbled, and it turned out to be around six in the morning to make their eight-o-clock class, but he found that out later. As it was, he fell back asleep before Mario finished speaking.

  He dreamed again—but it was a very different dream this time.

  This time, he heard Green’s sharp cockney, cutting through the wool in his head, until he could dream the story he’d heard the previous afternoon. He saw it like a movie, like pictures, and was able to read the expression on the faces of the players with detailed accuracy, thanks to Green’s pitch-perfect narration.

  Adrian had just finished doing his bit with the other vampires, to learn self-control, right? And we decided to move up to a part of the state that had as few people as possible. But you’ve got to remember—we were limited. The coffin wasn’t as light proof as it should have been, so we could really only move by night…

  It was night and two men made their way across the twisted landscape of gold country in a little buckboard pulled by a single indifferent horse. The buckboard was light, and carried only a couple of items—a store of bread and dried fruit, wooden tools, some with metal edges (carefully wrapped), woolen blankets, a few changes of clothes for each man, and an empty coffin, covered by an oilskin tarp.

  The road the men were following wasn’t really a road—it was more of a narrow path that followed the American River from the split with the Sacramento to El Dorado hills. They’d slept in the valley’s shadow the day before, but now it was time to make the slow, winding road up the side of the cliff to the hill where their lime trees were planted.

  The lime trees had been Green’s ticket from England. Salt wate
r negated magic of any sort, and crossing the sea was usually lethal for any sort of land elf. Green had hoarded power for a hundred and fifty years while held a captive in Oberon’s Faerie Hill, and fed it, driblet by orgasm, into those trees. The place was so saturated in power anyway, no one noticed Green’s subtle power signature or caught on to his plan—at least until he had disappeared, through the quarried stone walls and into the night.

  When Green and Adrian arrived in San Francisco, Adrian had immediately converted. His last sunrise had been spent in Green’s arms, staring at the ocean from a tiny hotel room, and yearning for the moment when they could be together as equals, immortal to immortal. Adrian had spent ten years locked in the hold of a ship, being raped and abused as sort of a privilege and a reward to the ship’s crew. From their first touch, Green became all the sunshine and daylight he would ever need.

  When they’d been in San Francisco and it became apparent that Adrian would need a good couple of months to become accustomed to his new life as a vampire, Green had given three lime trees to a Yawknapsatani (the name of the sidhe in this part of the world back then) to take the rest of the trees up north and plant them somewhere they might thrive with a little help from Green. They’d sworn by it, by touch, blood, and song, and a month later, Green had received a map leading him to this place with the warning to be done with the ‘blood-eater’s business’ by early spring—otherwise his beloved trees might not survive too long without Green’s help.

  Green and Adrian had only seen San Francisco. It had felt a lot like England, although Green knew enough about the taste of dirt in the air to know that there were dry grasses and dust on the wind, even in the winter. He had a feeling that the world beyond the bay city was probably more inhospitable than he’d imagined when he was coming up with a plan using nothing more than desperation and scantly heard rumors of a new world.

  In the five-night journey in the horse and trap, Green didn’t see much to revise his opinion. The first two nights were easy enough. Once they cleared the rolling hills around the bay (when Green and Adrian had pulled the damned trap more than the horse) they’d had a hell of a time finding sheltering trees beyond the long stretches of fairly flat lands. They followed the river—grateful that it was not salt—and always quit an hour or two before dawn for two reasons.

  The first was that they needed to find a place for Adrian to sleep—even in early April, the sun was fierce, and the coffin and the tarp were not enough for Green’s peace of mind. More often than not, they dug out a place to put the coffin inside, making sure there was at least a foot of insulating dirt on top.

  The second was that they were still honeymooning, and even if it was only bathing each other in the river shallows by the grey twilight of pre-dawn, Green needed to touch him.

  Letting him die had hurt—oh, Goddess… it was a subject he didn’t even talk about with Cory. He had stayed to watch, because Adrian had been afraid and he’d had to, and the absolute, stomach-dropping, stark, painful fear of watching the pale, lovely boy become a pale, lovely corpse was something that had awakened Green for years afterwards with a scream in his throat and rank sweat stinking his body. After the terrible betrayal of his last consensual lover and the mind-numbing, body-killing horridness of being Oberon’s favorite concubine—oh Goddess. Green had finally found a lover who made him love, who made him feel again, and he was letting him DIE?

  When the stirring of Adrian’s soul wind had ruffled that white-blonde hair and opened those sky-spangled eyes again, Green had fallen to his knees, clasped that pulse-less cold hand to his cheek and wept.

  Adrian had blinked around Lucian’s dark-suited shoulder and smiled wanly at his only true lover. “No worries, luv—didn’t even hurt.”

  The next few months had been an education in sexual insatiability and fearsome bloodlust, but Green clung to that sky-blue optimism, and it had kept him sane.

  The stolen moments by the river before dawn had been lovely. On one night, after Adrian had fed chastely and minimally from an unwary (and now very happy) husband and wife they had met on the road, Green had him stand, naked and star-light-white, in the ankle deep shallows. He had taken a bit of cloth and had, simple touch by simple touch, bathed Adrian from his wiry, muscular calves, up to his groin and the crease of his thighs and his buttocks, up his concave, taut stomach, and into the hollows of his tender neck—and even behind and in his ears. Adrian had stood still the entire time, arms raised above his head, being as marble still as a vampire could—but he couldn’t sustain that sort of tranquility for long.

  He’d started little, unwilling grunts as Green had bathed his thighs. He’d let loose a whimper as Green had paid gentle attention to his privates and the sensitive places between his creases and the entrance into his body that was only used for sport now. He’d started panting when Green had reached his chest and his pearly little nipples. By the time Green had moved to his neck, Adrian was wiggling, vibrating, emitting a series of wordless words that all but begged for possession.

  When Green had claimed his mouth with warmth and strength and passion, Adrian had groaned, clutched him close, and spent himself against Green’s taut, warm thigh—and then Green had truly taken him, body and soul, in the waning starlight.

  But that had been before the hills, before the oaks had thickened to become difficult, before the land had given in to pine trees, digging into granite or slippery shale. As the two of them clawed their way up the side of the hill on some sort of joke of a path and the night raced by on cougar’s swift paws, Green was seriously wondering if either one of them would ever see a moment like that again.

  Green could smell the lime trees but he couldn’t see them yet when the he saw the first deadly ray of gold reach across the horizon.

  “FUCK!” The echoes of the oath hadn’t stopped dying off the hills before Green shoved Adrian into his coffin, threw the tarpaulin over the damned thing and found a crumbling, red-dirt-crusted spot in the east-facing cliff wall they were trying to negotiate.

  Then he used all the sidhe power he had in his bones and literally vibrated the casket into the side of the bloody hill with main force and a fucking lot of desperation. Adrian was still complaining in shock and surprise (and a bit of discomfort—if it hadn’t been for the quick healing of your average vampire his brain would have splattered like an egg inside of his skull) when the sunlight hit their mountainside and his day death shut him up.

  Green was left gasping—exhausted, shell-shocked, and still quivering with fear. He’d seen Adrian die once—he wasn’t sure if he could survive seeing it again. The whole reason he’d agreed with the transition to vampire was that he, oh goddammit, he didn’t want to lose another lover to the merciless spiked boots of Time. In particular, he didn’t want to lose Adrian.

  As he stood there, leaning against the hill, rocks and stray earth falling around his shoulders, he heard a sound above his own heartbeat.

  Slowly, he looked up and found himself face to face with a really angry brown bear.

  He didn’t know—or care—about the difference between bears back then. In fact, he wasn’t so clear on them now—he didn’t know that a brown bear was smaller than a Grizzly, or that a black bear was bigger than a brown bear. At this precise moment, he discovered that a California bear was a damned sight bigger than the little buggers they had back in England, and this monster was far taller than he was, had mass, reach, heinous, hideous claws, and seemed to have an entire bee’s nest shoved up his arse over something.

  Green didn’t wait for the bear to swipe first—he charged the damned thing, and together, they tumbled down the cliff. Green burrowed into the bear’s fur, fumbling for his skin. They rolled off a ledge, the bear (thankfully) on the bottom, and landed—hard—on the path below them. The bear was dazed—but not for long—and Green took the opportunity plow his hands in through that dense, thick pelt and grab the loose skin with both hands.

  Then he ripped it open. The bear reared his head back and roared i
n shock, and Green used the sidhe strength he so rarely relied on to punch his hand through the thing’s ribcage and yank out its heart.

  He had no idea how long he laid there, splayed over the twitching corpse of the bear, but eventually his breath caught and his heartbeat returned to normal, and he pulled himself out of the bloody pit of the thing’s chest and took stock.

  Bloody hell. He didn’t eat meat—Adrian didn’t eat anything—and here was a life that would be wasted completely if someone who didn’t know something about dressing a dead animal didn’t emerge from the woodwork.

  And then—oh Goddess. He was covered in blood.

  He’d killed before. He was not pretty or skilled at it--he’d swung into a human regiment once, drunk on grief and a berserker’s rage, and emerged dripping in viscera and completely alone. He knew it was in him and knew when to use it and for the most part was unashamed of the violence that could pulse in his veins.

  But it was something that Adrian had never seen.

  Adrian had relied on Green’s compassion, his tenderness. Green had been the gentle healing to a violence-rent soul. It was irrational (although Green knew he was often ruled by emotion) but suddenly it became imperative that Adrian NOT see him covered in blood.

  He gave a grunt and looked below him, over the ledge of this portion of the road, and saw the river, ripping it’s way through the canyon. He was an elf—he could move at amazing speeds—but not on terrain such as this, where every footfall was rife with the possibility of slipping on loose shale and crumbling red dirt. He gave another grunt and looked above him—Holy Goddess, he’d fallen a long way. He gasped and looked at the fallen corpse of his enemy and gave it a vicious, irrational—and highly satisfying—kick in the side. Bloody fucking thing—he was in the thick of it now, wasn’t he?

  And then, to make matters worse, there was a bloodthirsty monster stalking him. Hurt beyond madness, maddened by grief, it slunk in the shadows, just waiting for a moment to rip out an innocent throat, to feast on the sweet ichor of…