Wounded, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “No, what?” he asked, trying to look all innocent but obviously amused. Asshole.

  “You will not read anything into what happened yesterday,” I snapped. “It was a power anomaly. It was a fluke. I was upset, and there were two different creatures touching me. It was a simple metaphysical battery thing. It was….”

  “Exactly what happened with Green and Adrian, smartass,” Bracken finished smugly, and he sounded so much like himself that I relaxed enough to make a face at him.

  “I was going to say that it was queasy,” I told him truthfully, because it had been, and I was now legitimately afraid of releasing my power at all. An image came to me, apocalyptic and terrifying: over a hundred people in the bowl of a slag heap, looking surprised as a blast of sunshine burned them to ashes. Maybe I should be afraid of using my power at will, I thought, feeling a little ill. But Bracken hadn’t seen the memory cross my face.

  “Blame that on cop-fuck Max,” he was saying, and now he was pissed off again. Huzzah.

  “He didn’t know it would happen,” I told him, defending Max on principle. The man had driven all the way out here to make sure I was okay, after all. Why shouldn’t I defend him?

  “He taints the air you breathe,” Bracken hissed, and then we were at my humanities building—which was just as well, because I had no words with which to answer that.

  I took some kidding from my classmates about having my very own stud taxi, enough to make me take a good look at Bracken to see what glamour he was employing to pass as human, and the answer was “not much.” Pretty much the only thing missing today were the pointy ears and unusual, pond-rippling-in-shadow eyes, which made me glare at him through much of the class. I’d seen him when he went with humans up in Placer County, and he was 100 percent gen-u-wine redneck. He was good at it—he even had a mullet. Of course, now it was a shorter mullet since I’d melted the lovely dark length of his hair up to his shoulder blades that summer, but it was an honest-to-Pete Joe Dirt mullet. He also usually put on deep, saturnine creases at his mouth and his eyes to make himself look prematurely bitter, like so many of the once-young men up in the foothills. But not today.

  I wasn’t prepared for the envious, speculative looks that my classmates gave him, both male and female, and I felt oddly protective. It was irrational to see Bracken as a country elf in the big city, but what can I say? I wasn’t used to seeing any of my guys out of our home place. It seemed wrong, somehow. Almost as wrong, I thought miserably, watching a sweet-voiced queen named Bryan flirting with Bracken for all he was worth, as I felt here in this lovely, old, deadly city. I was so tired by the end of class that I almost didn’t notice my professor signaling for my attention as everybody else left. I moved to talk to him and realized that Brack moved with me. I shot him an irritated look, and he gazed back, unrepentant. Asshole, I thought, but suddenly the word seemed affectionate.

  “Are you feeling all right this morning?” My Industrial Revolution professor wanted to know. He was a short, stout man with a broad, homely face and a bemused, puzzled air about him.

  “I’m fine, Professor Cruikshank,” I lied. “I got hit by a little something hinky, that’s all. I’ll rest when I go back home.” Now that was the truth.

  “Glad to hear it,” he mumbled. Prof. Cruikshank was one of the nicer professors I’d encountered—not a great teacher, because he tended to get lost really easily, but he always gave you the benefit of the doubt with late papers, and he knew all of our names by the second day of class. Now he was looking a little embarrassed, and a little guilty, and a little frightened, and a little… little. In fact, he was looking decidedly shorter and grayer, and he kept shrinking and turning colors before my eyes.

  I blinked, and Bracken said, “Hell—I can’t believe you’re this surprised, Einstein.” But I was, and now that I looked at Professor Cruikshank with power in my eyes, I saw that he was, in fact, a redcap/sidhe mix and looked much like Brack’s father—only where Brack’s father’s body was a misshapen pile of rock-colored slabs, the prof’s body was simply, well, stout.

  “Well, I am surprised,” I said unhappily. “Jesus, I’m surprised I’m still alive, if I can be stupid enough to sit in this room all semester and not even see.”

  But Professor Cruikshank was looking at me kindly, his squat, smooth face the color of eucalyptus bark and his suit crumpling in weird places around his shortened body. “I wouldn’t be too hard on myself, Cory,” he reassured. “After all, I had the cloak of respect on my side—never underestimate how much natural glamour comes with being an authority figure. Very hard to shake, that aura. But I had to ask you truly if you were going to be all right. Your leader has been raising holy hell this morning about one of his people being assailed, but it wasn’t until you were carried in here, glowing with power, that I realized that my favorite student had been in danger.”

  I winced. “Jesus, Bracken—why didn’t you tell me to tamp it down!” I demanded. Satisfyingly enough, Brack looked surprised, and the professor assessed us both, tsking as he did so.

  “You are both too innocent to be let out of the faerie ring,” he said after a moment, and I had the pleasure of seeing Bracken flush and look uncomfortable. Since Cruikshank wasn’t looking at me, I risked making a face at Bracken over my shoulder and was rewarded with a sour look in return.

  “What Bracken is not telling you, my dear, is that he is feeding you power as he taxies you around, and I have the feeling he’s not telling you because that means something in particular to the both of you. But, as important as it is that you tone that down, it’s not nearly as important as what I broke my cover to tell you.”

  We both looked at him in surprise, and I know that I, for one, was pleased as bleedin’ Jesus to not have to deal with all of the implications of being some sort of supernatural sex beacon when held in Brack’s arms.

  “If you are here on campus looking for Nicky Kestrel, he’s here. I believe the two of you have class in less than ten minutes, am I right, Ms. Kirkpatrick?”

  I nodded, my mouth dry, and reached a hand blindly for the table I’d been standing by. I was so undone that I didn’t protest when I felt Bracken’s arm under my fingers, nor when he hoisted me back into the traditional stud-taxi position. “Renny will be there too,” I said from my place safe in Brack’s arms.

  “That lost little werecreature?” The sympathy on his face made him instantly my friend for life.

  “She’s out for his blood,” I said.

  “And you, dear?” he asked.

  “I just want my memories back,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure I was telling the truth. I’d decided this morning I was too emotionally exhausted from the events of the past year to go on a vendetta. I’d be content with what little of Adrian I’d started with in the first place. However, that entire rational decision thing didn’t stop me from dreaming of beating the living shit out of Nicky.

  Cruikshank was shaking his head. “I can’t get involved here,” he said regretfully. “In fact, I was told by my own leader to tell you and your friends here that you are on your own.”

  I gaped. “But… but Green has treaties here. Isn’t that important? Sacramento is a bedroom community to your people. It’s surrounded by running water on both sides—it’s impossible to access unless you’re welcome there—why would you risk that? Why….” Water was a big furry deal to the fey. Their power didn’t travel well over water, and if a sidhe—what Green and Bracken were, the most powerful of the elves, who were the most powerful of the fey—managed to cross water and sustain his magical/physical power base, he pretty much had run of the land. Green’s hill sat a vague distance from Foresthill, about forty miles northeast of Sacramento in a land of jagged hills and granite outcroppings. Sactown sat in a delta—the American and Sacramento Rivers made a V—and Green had managed not only to cross the whole Atlantic Ocean, but also to sail down and around the Isthmus of Panama, into the San Francisco Bay, and then cross over those two rivers. In an unguarded moment, he once
told me it had taken him a hundred years to hoard the power to keep him alive during that trip, and he had anchored it in forty lime trees, which he’d shipped with him. And all of that power he had planted up in Foresthill, in his hill, and he used it to keep his people as safe as he could.

  “Why would your leaders cut your people off from half the state, when all they have to do is help us?” I asked, exhausted, puzzled, unable to fathom how I was going to get to my next class, much less the weird politics of the fey.

  Regretfully, Cruikshank held up his hand. “I’m sorry, Cory, I know my own leader would like to change things, but until he talks to Green, my hands are tied. We’re at war here. If we’d known what was going to sail into our harbor this past September, we would never have guaranteed safe passage for your people. Clorklish—my leader—would like to make a stand, but until he gets some backup with this particular enemy soldier, we can’t step out of our glamour or our shadows to help you.”

  I stopped talking, my mouth open in surprise at the turn of this entire conversation, and rested my head on Brack’s conveniently strong chest. I had been tired when class ended. I was exhausted now, and I had four more classes to attend. And, apparently, one werecreature to apprehend. Cruikshank saw my desolation, and his expression softened. He reached out and, regardless of Bracken, pinched my cheek gently. There was no flare-up of power, no electric shock of anything, just a bone-deep comfort that took the edge off the weariness and made me feel as though things weren’t so hopeless after all.

  “Don’t worry, little sorceress,” he said gently. “I may not be able to march to your rescue as a redcap, but as your professor, I can offer you the comfort of an open invitation to my office for tea, and—” He laid a finger aside his nose, just like Santa, to seal our conspiracy. “—don’t worry about that final, dear one. Consider it taken and aced.” And with that, he grew again in stature, form, and pinkness before my very eyes. When he was back to his full glamour as a sweet-faced, dumpy-but-human history professor, he turned to leave.

  “Wait!” I said, a sudden question in my mind. He turned. “You were alive, then, in the Industrial Revolution?” I asked. He nodded, looking kind. It made sense—it explained why he couldn’t give a lecture without muddling through a haze of nostalgia. “You didn’t happen to know… a vampire named Adrian, did you?”

  “No, my little sorceress, I didn’t,” he replied. “I’m sorry. But you will not always be as heartsore as you are now.” And the compassion on his face was devastating. I buried my face into Brack’s chest, and wished with all my heart for the day to be over. Bracken, wisely, simply turned and started toward the library where my next class was to be held. He was quiet all the way there.

  When we entered the library, I wanted to giggle helplessly. When you enter on the ground floor at the west entrance, there’s a large room of tables and a bank of couches filled with mostly sleeping students. I couldn’t imagine anything sweeter than sleeping on those couches at this very moment, but I told Bracken to keep walking, past the couches and down toward the east wing, where the small classrooms and research computer rooms were.

  Renny and Max were already there, and they looked marginally more comfortable with each other than they had earlier in the morning. On a usual day, Nicky, Renny, and I all parked ourselves in the back seat of the computer cubicles. That was how I first got to know Nicky—and why Renny felt just as betrayed as I did when he attacked. We had been fellow students and strangers in a new city, since Nicky claimed to have grown up in Montana. We had eaten at the student union, seen movies together, and signed up to use the lab at the same time. We had been friends.

  “Nicky’s here,” I said to Renny as Bracken set me down as gently as though I were a toothpick sculpture without glue. “And you wouldn’t believe what happened in history class this morning!” I didn’t believe what had happened during history class. I was pretty sure it would blow Renny’s mind. Max looked at me and rolled his eyes, and I could feel his dismissal from three feet away. Bracken turned and glared at him so horribly that he looked down at his shoes and shifted farther away. And the four of us were so involved in this odd byplay that none of us noticed Nicky until the arrogant son of a bitch came to the back as usual, and without even looking around slid casually into the seat between Renny and me.

  He did an honest-to-God double take. I thought those were just for cartoon characters. I almost laughed as Max and Bracken flanked Renny and me from the back wall, and I could see Nicky trying to decide whether to bolt or to smooth it out.

  “Cory!” he said greenly, in a sick attempt at pleasant surprise. “Did you get your paper done? Because mine sucks.”

  “My paper was done last week, Nicky,” I said calmly, the fury burning my throat. “You should remember that. I remember everything from last week, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Yes. I remember everything.” His pretenses dropped then, just like Professor Cruikshank’s glamour. “I didn’t want to… give you anything bad to remember,” he said, finally meeting my eyes. “I…. You were just supposed to wake up in the morning and forget the whole thing.”

  “Forget the whole thing?” my voice rose to a squeak. “Does that include my boyfriend? I was just supposed to wake up and pretend he never existed?”

  Nicky shook his head, confused. “Nobody ever notices,” he said, almost to himself. “I know you’re different, but that one first…. I mean, it’s such a small thing—how is it you know it’s gone?”

  I felt Brack’s body burning behind me with the effort not to backhand the slightly built man next to me, but he needn’t have worried. My mad was coming on—and unlike the queasy power that Max had sent through me and Bracken, this was a clean, true fury.

  “Not a big thing? That one first? You stole him from me.” And even I could see wisps of sunshine leaking from my breath as I spoke. “We had a handful of days—barely two months together—and you stole Adrian from me, you dirty rotten fucking thief!”

  Nicky bobbed to the side and looked horrified as the computer in front of him melted cleanly into a puddle of plastic and glass, so evenly heated that even the vapors were consumed by the combustion of my anger. We were all huddled around it—nobody even noticed, but I’d grown used to people not seeing what should be perfectly obvious.

  “Cory, calm down.” And if Nicky had said it, I might have killed him then and there, but it was Renny, and as she had been for the last few months, she was the one odd element in my life that could balance all of the mad emotions that seemed to rule my destiny these days.

  “I didn’t realize,” Nicky said in a small voice. “You and Renny—you’re both so closed mouthed about everything—you never told me your lover had died.”

  “Would it have made a difference?” I asked bitterly, and Nicky’s look back was surprisingly sincere.

  “Of course it would have,” he said earnestly. “I never would have asked you out—I never would have risked that Goshawk would ask me to borrow from you. I like you, Cory. I wouldn’t steal something that important to you, not if there wasn’t any way to replace it!”

  “But you’ve stolen this thing from other women?” I asked, calm enough now to realize how totally naïve Nicky had been all along. He nodded, looking somewhat abashed. “Most of them… well, it’s something they’d rather forget. I just help them out—and the power we get from it…. I mean, we’ve doubled in people, just from the boost Goshawk can give them, feeding off the memories alone.”

  I shook my head in disgust. “You are so fucking stupid, Nicky, I can hardly believe you’ve lived this long. You have no idea what you’ve done—not just to me, but to everybody else you’ve touched. You need to give them back.”

  “I… I can’t…,” he said, dazed, and at that point something in his melted computer gave a gush of smoke and the alarm went off. The class practically ran the professor over going out the door. Renny and I stayed toward the back, and Max and Bracken flanked Nicky as we exited. The p
rofessor was hollering something about putting our papers in his boxes as we entered the quad, which was just as well, I thought, because I didn’t think I could make it to another class today. I was already regretting giving Brack up as my stud taxi, and I was certainly regretting melting Nicky’s computer with my mad. I had been tired this semester, and sad, and lethargic, but this was the first time I realized how weak I had made myself in my mindless, selfish grieving. Last year I would have come back from this attack way the hell more quickly.

  When we got outside, we separated ourselves from the milling crowd, all of whom were turned, almost herdlike, toward the library to see if it was going to spontaneously conflagrate or anything nifty like that just because the alarm had gone off.

  Now that nobody was watching us, Bracken could unleash some of the fury that had been quivering through his body like a plucked bowstring. “What do you mean you can’t give her back her memory?” he ground out, catching Nicky’s throat in his hand and pushing him against the nearest tree.

  “Goshawk’s got them!” Nicky squeaked. “He says we can’t spare any of them if we’re going to be strong as a people.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, confused. “You keep talking about all this power for your people. Do you have any idea what this power is going to be used for?” Because Nicky was talking like a religious zealot—one of those types who doesn’t believe that his life savings is going to the preacher’s stretch limousine and special “companions.”

  “To make us strong. Give us unity,” Nicky said earnestly. Goddess, he needed to be slapped.

  “To go to war?’ I asked pleasantly and was rewarded by his big-eyed blink.

  “Why would Goshawk want to go to war?” he asked blankly.

  “I don’t know,” I replied sweetly. “Why don’t you ask the other preternatural communities in San Francisco and find out why they think there’s a war on—and while you’re at it, why don’t you come talk to our leader and explain to him why you’re assaulting his people and you can’t even make an attempt at mangeldt, recompense, even a freaking apology? Okay? How about that?”