by Amy Lane
Dark hair, hawk-like nose, slightly crossed blue eyes—damn! Maxwell Johnson was the last person I’d expected to see, and from the look of surprise on his face, the feeling was mutual.
“You’re okay!” And he sounded like it was a good thing.
“And you’re in San Francisco!” I shot back, a little bowled over. But deep down, I was touched. Yes, he’d dismissed me as white trash, and maybe, yes, he’d judged me as a whore, and then he’d been at a loss as to what I was, but he knew he wanted me to himself like a big Neanderthal baby wanted a club made of candy. But he seemed genuinely happy to see me up and about.
“But Arturo said you’d been….”
I nodded and gestured him in. “I was,” I said, and padded back to the table and the food.
Green was still naked when we wandered into the dining room, although I knew he could have done that blurry thing and been dressed if he wanted to. But it was Officer Max, and there was that male thing in Green that said “Mine is bigger than yours, see?”
“Nice place,” Max said grudgingly, and I warmed to his presence. “Now what the hell happened to you? Arturo sent me to the hospital. But when I got there, they looked at me blankly, so he gave me directions here.”
I sighed and padded back to the kitchen. “Pizza?” I offered him with my mouth full, and to my surprise he accepted. He sat down at the table and sent Green an unfriendly, then uncomfortable, look over his pizza, but he was appropriately grateful for the food. I moved to sit on Green’s lap, and what would have otherwise been a very comfortable and welcome intimacy suddenly became embarrassing. What can I say? A year ago I’d been working in a gas station, determined to avoid men like a supermodel avoids fried cheese—and now, even through the awfulness of Adrian’s death, I needed Green’s skin against mine like I needed my next breath. But Max was here, and he was being nice to me, and I didn’t want to offend him by being that thing he disapproved of so badly when he’d apparently just driven through the rain to see if I was okay. The look I sent Green was both apologetic and pleading, and he stood fluidly and kissed me on the forehead. Our bodies were close—we were lovers, how could we stand together and not be close?—but he kept enough distance to not do more than suggest what we had spent our morning doing.
“I’ll go shower, Cory luv. I’ll be back in a few, and you can catch Max-the-cop up on current events.”
I watched him pad down the hall, his bottom long and lean and muscular and his hips narrow. His shoulders swayed in time to some music that had been forgotten before my ancestors came to America, and his long, straight yellow hair swayed in counterpoint, and I couldn’t believe the Goddess had given him to me. Max made a disgusted, snarky noise next to me, and my attention was drawn back to my all too mortal companion.
“I was attacked,” I said abruptly, plopping down on Green’s empty seat and savoring his warmth on the chair cushion. I was blunt, partly to keep Max from saying anything rude about Green being naked in the kitchen and partly because he was starting to look mad about driving down to the city. I couldn’t blame him.
“By what, pigeon shit?” he asked sourly.
I met his eyes sympathetically. “The birds nailed the Mustang, didn’t they?” There wasn’t a car for miles that hadn’t been practically smothered in pigeon shit. It was weird, actually. “Yeah—they’ve been really bad this year. Renny’s been a walking target.”
His face softened a little and he grinned back, and suddenly we were both reminded of the big “if only.” If only Max hadn’t judged me from the very beginning, then Adrian might not have been a shoo-in. Except my life would have been very colorless if I had never allowed myself to love Adrian, and hence, had never met Green.
“But it wasn’t a pigeon,” I said into that softened silence. “The thing that attacked me, it wasn’t a pigeon. It was a… well, he wasn’t human….” Max blinked in surprise, so I continued on into the silence. “I had a concussion, some bruised ribs, and a bruised kidney.” I could barely remember the doctor telling me this as I lay there, wanting Green so badly it was all I could do not to whimper his name. The doctor had asked if there was anyone he could call, and I’d said “He’s coming” under my breath until the drugs kicked in. Yup—them’s good times.
Max was a little stunned. “You look fine,” he said in defense.
I nodded. “Green,” I said simply. Green had healed me before—I had a scar on my leg and one on my shoulder from wounds that should have ended my life but didn’t. Max had seen them both—he should know this.
“He healed all that with a little… fucking?”
I shivered. When Green said that word, it had all sorts of good things attached to it. Max only carried contempt. Suddenly Bracken was up by my side, touching my shoulder and glaring at Max.
“He heals with love,” Bracken spat, and I covered his hand with my own to calm him down. He had never liked Max, and I hadn’t realized until this moment how very worried he’d been for me. Big brother Bracken—so gruff and so kind at once. “And even Green couldn’t heal everything,” Brack finished. Damn. I looked away then, embarrassed suddenly that he would mention the entire “hole in the memory” thing. These wounds were personal, humiliating in a way my body’s hurts had not been. That little fucker had been inside me, where I had never invited him, and it hurt that I hadn’t been able to stop him.
Max saw my look—embarrassed and ashamed—and he leaned forward in sympathy. I felt a breath of something then, something static and tight, that I should have paid attention to, but I thought the tightness in my chest was due to my anger, my mortification, and not to anything else.
“What happened?” he asked gently, so obviously concerned that I had to answer him, but I couldn’t. He moved to cover my hand with his own across the table, and I moved restlessly away. Bracken wrapped his arms around my shoulders and answered for me, which I wouldn’t have let him do if I had been feeling whole and myself.
“He mind-raped her,” he answered, and I shuddered in his arms.
“What does that mean?” Max wouldn’t understand, I thought miserably. He couldn’t. But I had underestimated Brack’s anger and his willingness to defend me.
“It means he thrust himself into her mind and took what she didn’t want to give,” he barked out succinctly.
“I don’t…. What did he take?” Max asked, and I felt my face crumple. I had been so brave the night before, but here, trying to explain to someone who wouldn’t understand, I hadn’t known how much admitting this would hurt. I felt stupid and violated, and as though nothing I could say would make anybody understand. Mind rape. Body rape. There were a million victims out there who could identify with what I felt, but at the moment I felt like I was the only one.
“He took her firsts,” Bracken told him softly, rocking me against his arms, where I could feel safe and protected. “Her memories of firsts. First kisses. First time with a lover. Firsts.”
“But…,” Max said in confusion, and what he said next warmed me, because I knew that for a time he had thought the worst of me. “But there couldn’t have been that many.”
“Two,” I choked brokenly into Brack’s skin. “There were two—and he took one.”
“Oh, God,” Max was stricken. “Let me guess. Adrian,” he figured, with Bracken as an echo, and then his hand actually reached mine in sympathy. And then all hell broke loose.
There was a spark at first, as his hand covered mine, warm and rough and mortal. Then the spark grew, traveled through me and bounced off Bracken, gaining power and momentum. It whirled through me again, hitting Max with enough force to make him clench his hand around mine, and again through me, fueling itself through my body and then through my power. And it built and grew, like water thundering into a valley toward a dam—it heaved, pushing my will and my inhibitions and everything I knew about what my power could do, out of my way. Goddess, I thought, Goddess, I can’t breathe… I can’t….
With a surge of strength that knocked both men to t
he floor on their asses, I came to my feet and threw myself at the sink where I trembled over the plumbing for that one awful minute you have before you know you’re going to be sick. Then my body convulsed and it came vomiting through me, out my mouth, and into the drain, pouring, spattering, cleansing through the pipes and onward and onward, into wherever the water went. The small part of me left for humor hoped it wasn’t the Bay, and as the power finally waned and trickled into a little hiccup of sunshine, a vision of thousands of fish belly up in the brass-monkey cold waters of the Bay added a little extra giggle to my weeping when I collapsed, spent and exhausted and sobbing my heart out onto the hardwood floor.
GREEN
Blood Dance
GOD, GODDESS, and other, what in the blue fuck had just happened?
Green raced out of his room with wet, tangled hair and a pair of faded jeans that had fit him just fine in June but were coming off his hips now. When he got to the kitchen, Cory was whimpering on the floor by the sink, Renny was hissing and growling in front of her, and Bracken was, by turns, swearing viciously at Max and trying to calm Renny down enough to get to Cory. He had a deep scratch the length of his arm, dripping precious elven blood on the floor. Jesus, how had that girl gone so far from human in such a short time? And why would she want to protect Cory from Bracken?
“Renny, down,” Green ordered, and he hoped she would. Adrian would have been able to calm her down in a second—the werecreatures had been his specialty—but with the exceptions of Adrian and Mitch, Renny had always pretty much only listened to the noises of her own heart. This time her heart must have been on his side, because she retreated a bit from Cory and he was able to move in and scoop her into his arms. Renny sat panting, a soft growling sound emitting nonstop from the back of her throat, and Green straightened, glaring furiously at the other two alpha males in the room, sniffing the air as he did so.
“Power,” he said speculatively, smelling the yeast and ozone of it. Risking a glance into the sink, he found himself blinking at warped silverware and plastic glasses melting into the drain like a Salvador Dali painting of the trivial. “Power down the sink?” He looked at Cory, truly at a loss.
“Green…,” she said plaintively, “I think I killed all the fish in the bay. Isn’t that where pipes go? Into the Bay?”
“No, lovey,” he said carefully, nuzzling the top of her head. “There’s a water treatment plant, I’m pretty sure…. At most, what you did was save the city a couple hundred thousand in processing expenses. Feel better?”
She nodded and sighed like a sleepy child. “I’m so tired, Green,” she muttered. “I’d forgotten what that could do to me. It didn’t used to be so queasy….” And like that, she fell asleep.
“Right,” Green said, shaking his head. Then he looked back up at the others. “I’m going to put her to bed. Renny’s going to change back if I have to turn into a vampire and take her blood to make her, I’m going to heal that obscene gash on Brack’s arm, and you people are going to tell me why I can’t leave the fucking kitchen without something hellacious happening to the woman I love.”
He padded into Cory’s room and put her down, only to have her wake up suddenly. “Don’t let me sleep until morning,” she ordered. “If I go to class, I can catch Nicky.”
“We’ll catch him later,” he told her, smiling. She had a preternatural sense of vengeance, he thought—much like his own kind, in some respects. It promised well for the years to come.
“But I need to drop off my papers,” she insisted, obviously fighting for coherence. “Finals are next week.”
“I’ll think about it,” he promised. “Now, enough. Sleep. I’ll wake you for dinner. We’ll discuss it then.” Grace awoke in two hours, so dinner would be ready by seven. That was four hours of sleep, he thought, hoping it would be enough. But Cory seemed satisfied, because she had already fallen asleep before he left the room. He stopped by the room he had stayed in before the girls moved in and snagged two extra-large T-shirts, one of which was over his head before he made it back to the kitchen, and the other of which he threw at Renny as he padded in. It was a good thing, too, because Max was straining his neck in an effort not to look at the naked young woman who was spitting anger from the middle of the kitchen.
“Wha’d you do?” she growled, mostly at Max, but partly at Bracken as well. He was saying patiently, “It was an accident, Renny…. He touched her hand, that was all. We wouldn’t hurt Cory—you know that.” Renny took the T-shirt as Green threw it and then hissed at them all in a very nonhuman way and sat down abruptly on the floor, her knees drawn up on either side of her while she sucked the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. Green sighed at her, then turned toward Bracken and gestured to his hand.
“Give us your wound, mate, I’ll do for it.”
“Thanks, brother,” Bracken said wearily, and held out his arm. He was dripping blood steadily. Elves healed very quickly and could sustain massive injuries before their bodies stopped their self-sustaining regeneration, but Bracken was a redcap, and his very power pulled blood from bodies as easily as breath moved in and out of them. Broken bones, fractures, road rash would all heal in a few moments; a deep bleeding scratch like this one might bleed for days before it closed.
Green slid his hands up the other elf’s arm and took a deep breath, pulling from that place where his healing came from—his heart, his sex, his loins—and touched his tongue delicately to the crook at the inside of Bracken’s elbow, savoring the other man’s shiver of reaction. Slowly—delighting in the contact, as was his nature—he ran his tongue along the wound, down the inside of the sidhe’s elongated arm, and ending where the cut got wide, where he sucked at Brack’s palm. Bracken, in his turn, tilted his head back, sighed, and shivered in the tiny completion that healing brought. Green shivered in his turn, and the men shared a small smile. Sex, healing, love: Green’s brand of elf.
Max snorted in disgust, and they turned to him wearily. “What?” Green asked with a taunting kiss at the crook of Bracken’s arm, knowing the officer’s uptightness wouldn’t even let him speak without this prompting.
“You said you loved her,” Max snarled. “You said you loved her, and you’ve probably boned every woman and half the men in Northern California, and here you are, and she’s hurt in the other room, and you’re… you’re….”
Green shook his head wearily, sad that Max had risen to the bait so easily. He let go of Bracken’s arm and ran his hands through his tangled hair.
“I’m healing my brother,” he said succinctly, and Bracken held out his whole hand and wiggled his fingers. “And, mortal, your understanding of us is not the issue here. What’s at issue is what happened, and you’re obviously ignorant, so I’m going to ask the only coherent being in the room.”
“It was the damnedest thing,” Bracken said, glad for his moment to talk. “She was telling Uptight Bumfuck here about her attack….” He looked away, unhappy. “It was hard. It was hard for her. It was hard for me to watch. I wrapped my arms around her to comfort her, and… I felt a sort of static thing… like a cloud gathering lightning. Then….” Bracken’s mouth, which held a fell and grim line just as a matter of his own warrior’s character, took on an even leaner twist. “Well, even Cop-fuck here can have a moment of compassion. He touched her hand while I was holding her… and….”
“What was it?” Max asked abruptly. Renny hissed at him even in her human form, and he glared back. “And what in the hell is wrong with her?”
“She’s grieving,” Green told him shortly. “Just like Cory, except Renny didn’t have another lover to step in and take up some of that pain, now did she?” With that he turned to Bracken again and was met with a shrug.
“I’ve seen her do it before,” he said, not meeting Green’s eyes. “Except then, she was touching you and Adrian.”
“Ah…,” Green said, and then the full impact hit him, and he fought against the slugged feeling in his solar plexus. It had worked with Green and Adrian
because they had wanted her and loved her, and their emotions buzzed through her like power—power she couldn’t contain. They all knew Max felt an unwilling attraction for their little sorceress, but in order for her to overfill like that, it would have to mean…. Well, hell. There was only one thing it could mean. Taking a deep breath, and feeling bitter and kind at once, he asked, “Even so, Bracken Brine Granite op Crocken?”
Bracken looked away, then back at his leader defiantly. “Even so, leader.”
Green nodded. “As it will,” he conceded. He’d been wishing that she would take another lover—even when Adrian was alive. But Green had thought, in the back of his mind, that she would choose someone unsubstantial. Someone he could ignore or overlook, secure in the knowledge that she would be monogamous if only Green himself could be. But Bracken was not such a man. Bracken would be a real lover if she would take him, someone who would vie for her attention, and she would receive his full concentration in return. Green tried to tell himself that it was all in the nature of the Goddess. She was known for coming to earth in several guises, taking lovers in each guise. Cory was one of the Goddess’s creatures—a sorceress of more power, and more female power, than Green had seen since the Middle Ages. It only followed that she would need more than one lover to match the different parts of her—Green for her kindness and her protectiveness, Bracken for her fierceness and loyalty. It fit. And if he could not relinquish his position as leader to be all to his little mortal goddess, then she would need others to fill what he could not. So, he was a leader, and a healer. Bracken was a warrior, and they could work together to keep her safe.