by Amy Lane
Because it was winter, the hills approaching the estate were green, but the sea wind was bitterly cold. Green had left the apartment down the stairs and through the parking garage and was wearing only the Aran sweater and jeans he’d been wearing inside. Shoes—a human convention that most of the fey avoided when they could—had been left in the hallway as he’d stormed out.
It didn’t matter. Green opened the wrought iron gates (built by humans, since only salt, spells, and upholstery could protect the fey from even the metal frame of the cars they rode in) with a wave of his hand and continued down the drive in the sturdy automobile that he’d bought and spelled to protect Cory and Renny from their own mortality. Obviously, he thought with some bitterness, it had been an empty precaution, since his own people had conspired to destroy his family. That anger stormed through him again, enough to give him the power to stride through the wood-and-glass doors at the entrance without opening them and to blow through the house as a wind of fury, finding with unerring accuracy the large living area where Morana’s lover was holding court.
Mist was the true leader of the coastal cities from San Francisco to Monterey, and the more central parts of California as well. Green took no small amount of satisfaction in the fact that in terms of area, his domination of the northern part of the state took in more than three times Mist’s amount of territory, and that the sheer number of supernatural beings that looked to him for protection at the very least, and livelihood should it be needed, tallied more than five times what Mist’s numbers were. More than that now, Green thought grimly, since over half of Mist’s court now claimed allegiance to Green through Clorklish. Of course, Mist didn’t count many of Green’s people as people, but Green didn’t care. He’d made a promise of safety, and he’d kept it, and good things had followed. Mist could never, not in a hundred years, not in a thousand, claim the same thing.
When Green held court, he held it at banquet with his seconds sitting nearby, and though there was usually a pecking order in who brought concerns to Green’s table, anyone in his hall was allowed to approach him with either a concern or conversation. It was often noisy and occasionally rude, but never disrespectful, and Green and Arturo and Adrian used to accomplish more in one banquet than governors of small states did in one session of congress. Now that Grace had taken over—temporarily, she insisted—as Adrian’s successor, the same still applied, and Green hadn’t thought of changing his system of rule since it had started, informally, when the people under his aegis could all fit under the roof of his hill.
When Mist held court, he sat in a high-backed satin chair, surrounded by his sprites to illuminate him, with Morana seated at his side and a bevy of sidhe seated on various-colored cushions surrounding him. The long-bodied, elegant, and beautiful sidhe were a useful chorus. They laughed when Mist laughed, mocked those who met with Mist’s disapproval, and applauded his every decision.
Today, as Green strode through the room, regardless of decorum and blazing with a frightening brilliance of power and anger, they could only stare in shock.
“Green!” Mist was so rarely taken unaware that Green might have savored the surprise on his face.
“Fucking bloodless traitor,” Green responded viciously, and felt even more satisfaction when he watched Mist—and his entire group of elegant courtiers—recoil.
“I’m sorry….” It was obvious that Mist was not sorry at all—in fact, it was the irony in his voice that kept him from the lying sickness that besieged all the fey. For Mist, that irony meant he was about to get nasty, which was fine with Green too.
“You’ve never been sorry about anything,” Green cut off, and for a moment he could hear his own voice, nearly three hundred years before.
“What do you mean I can’t leave? This isn’t what I came here for, Mist. You said if I didn’t like it, I could leave.” Green’s voice echoed in a tapestry-strewn room with no door and no window. Until this moment he hadn’t known the room was a beautiful prison.
Mist had smiled then, but it hadn’t been the kind smile Green was used to. “I’m sorry, little Green,” he’d said—this time truthfully. “I meant it at the time. According to Oberon, your talents are too… enjoyable to let you go….”
“Not true,” Mist replied, breaking into that unwelcome vision of the past. “I was sorry when you left Oberon’s.”
“Only because Oberon was so pissed that he kicked you out,” Green returned evenly. “And then you arrived here, and you got to stay in this place of mist and shadows and we didn’t give a shit about each other… until now. Why, Mist? All the fucking pain and turmoil—why?”
Mist blinked. Like most sidhe, his name was a fluid thing, evolving to fit the person he’d become. His name fit him perfectly—he was all about grays and beiges, right down to his hair, which hung in a thin, colorless queue down his back. Green, who had known him for nearly three hundred years, knew that blink. Mist was preparing to evade the question. Elves were physically unable to lie—it was one of the God’s limitations on their forms, since he seemed to feel that the Goddess’s get had been given so many other gifts that humans were not. Lying came with nausea, headaches, and physical body pains until the truth was either told, or made to come true. But as with humans, some elves learned to live past the discomfort. Mist couldn’t out-and-out lie—but he could make promises he didn’t intend to keep, and he could equivocate with the most practiced of the human lawyers. Mist and Orson had always gotten along well, Green mused, but there was no room for evasion today.
“Causing pain was not our intention,” Mist answered carefully, and Green knew that to be true.
“Only because you could give a shit about how you make others feel. Don’t fuck with me today, Lord Mist.”
Mist smiled faintly and caught the eyes of his hangers-on with a superiority that used to make Green quail, until he’d lived in this free land long enough for complete confidence. “Since I haven’t ‘fucked’ with you for quite some time, I could hardly expect to have that pleasure today, now could I?”
Green smiled grimly, knew what would hurt, and said it, just to make himself feel better. “Since it hasn’t been a ‘pleasure’ in more than two hundred years, I wouldn’t expect it anytime soon.”
Mist flinched as though struck. “So we’ve learned to lie, have we, little Green?”
“Say it.” Mist had never been cruel before they’d come to court, Green thought wretchedly. Green had lived for fifteen hundred years and never known his own kind were capable of this depth of callousness.
“If you need me to,” Green had answered proudly, but he knew his own bravado from his own capabilities.
“Oh, I’m not the one who needs to be able to say it, little Green,” Mist sneered.
“Very well, then.” Green swallowed. “I feel nothing but contempt for you now, Mist.” And this was true. “You’re cruel and wanton and ugly in places I didn’t know existed.” And this was also true. “In fact, I never gave a cockroach’s cock about you.” Nausea had rolled over him then, but he’d held his bile. Anything to avoid the humiliation of having his lover see how thoroughly he’d been beguiled.
“Now, Green….” Mist had been both kind and condescending, and his hand had been gentle on the side of Green’s face.
“I’ve never cared about you,” Green said again. His skin was clammy, and his palms were slick with sweat.
“Not even when we were in the woods together? Just you and me and the wood nymphs and pixies?” And for a moment, Mist’s confidence had wavered, a sadness passing across his sand-and-shadow colored face. “Not even when you allowed me to mark you with touch, blood, and song?”
“Not even then,” Green finished weakly. And then he had run for his chamber pot, where he was violently ill as Mist laughed mockingly by his side.
“I’ve learned to see the truth for what it is,” Green said now, pushing that memory away, replacing it with the look on Adrian’s face—Adrian, his beloved, Adrian, his beloved’s beloved, wh
o had loved Green and trusted him as no one had. Adrian, whose quiet faith in Green had made all of Green’s other accomplishments—including Cory’s love for him—possible. Adrian—who had swooped in to defend Cory, and Bracken, and Green, and who had died before their eyes, exploding in a sheen of blood and blowing his soul through Cory’s like summer wind through a dandelion, scattering her strength and her joy to the winds. A rumble of heartache thundered through Green’s chest. Eons ago, he had believed the best of the elf standing in front of him—and that mistake in judgment had cost him Adrian.
“Yes,” Green continued, his voice taut with pain. “I know the truth, and the truth is, you have exactly the sort of cold soul to have done what I’m accusing you of.”
“What is it I’ve done?” Mist asked, condescension dripping from his voice. But his gaze darted just a little too quickly to check on the appreciation of his court. Mist was afraid. And with that guess, Green could see through the glamour of insouciance that always cloaked him like his namesake, and could smell the fear rolling off him like fog.
Green smiled. “You tell me, Mist. What could you possibly have done to me that would justify me laying hands on you in your own home?”
“I’m sure I don’t….” And it was a lie. They both knew it. He said it anyway. “I’m sure I don’t know.” He kept his voice firm and his eyes fixed desperately on Green as sweat popped out on his brow.
“Don’t know what?” Green asked pleasantly.
Mist took a deep breath. “I don’t know what could have justified your….” He stopped and took another breath.
“My what?” Green insisted, keeping Mist’s eyes locked with his. “What is it I’m feeling right now?”
“Your grief!” Mist howled with triumph, because, Green knew, Mist honestly couldn’t understand grief. Grief was an honest emotion that had never gripped Mist, because he’d also never known love or loss.
“It’s not grief that makes me want to rip your heart out with my bare hands, Lord Mist,” Green ground from between his teeth. “Now tell me why I hate you at this moment more than I’ve ever hated another being, with all of the formidable power at my command.”
“We didn’t know Goshawk would attack your girlfriend…. I swear to Goddess I didn’t know…,” Mist cried out, and Green had to rein in his temper, because the truth was that Mist just hadn’t cared, not that he hadn’t known, but the other man was very good at splitting hairs. Green just stood and looked and waited, knowing intimately the nausea, the aching body pains, the thundering in the head that was turning his old lover, his old tormenter, a sickly shade of gray.
But Mist had never been strong, and Green didn’t have long to wait.
“It’s not my fault,” he cried at last, tears running down his face from the sheer agony of holding a lie of that magnitude inside. “We gave the little bastard the silver net and told him to go out and make your life miserable, but we didn’t expect him to attack other elves with it or kill sprites!” He fell to his knees then, arms wrapped around his middle, where, Green knew, the cramps would be subsiding enough for Mist to actually breathe. “Fuck it all, Green… I wanted you to come to me for help. I wanted you to come in and beg, and then I’d make you… we could have that… what we had at Oberon’s… and I didn’t give a fuck whether your piece of dead flesh was walking or prone, and I’m glad he’s dead, because now I have you in my city, and you have to deal with me and my court.”
It was the detail about the silver net that added the final flash to Green’s temper. Bending down he wrapped his hand around the silk shirt at Mist’s chest and hauled him up face-to-face. “I will never deal with your court,” he hissed. “And as Goddess is my witness, I will find a way to avenge my beloved.”
“It didn’t take you long to find a new one,” Mist said cattily, too arrogant now that he was only inches away from Green’s full fury.
“Do you seek death?” Green asked, incredulous. “You arrange for the death of my beloved, and my beloved’s beloved, and you laugh at me? What do you think can come from this, Mist? I don’t rely on your court for anything. And you rely on mine for things you don’t even think of.” He spared a glance around the room, confirming his first suspicions. “Everything in this room was bought from one of my merchants. Your food was grown in my orchards.” He smiled then, because Mist didn’t know this yet. “Your lower fey—they answer to me now.” And he enjoyed watching Mist’s surprise. “What do you expect to gain from making me angry enough to kill?”
Mist looked at him smugly. “You can’t kill me, little Green,” he said gently. “You still wear my mark on your skin—or don’t you remember?”
“What’s this, Green?” Adrian asked the second morning they had woken up together, happy in the cabin of the ship, before Adrian’s rape and Sezan’s death, when they’d believed that happy endings were easy. He was pointing to a small cloud, the size of a silver dollar, gray, indistinct, moving in an angry roil in its fixed position, tattooed on Green’s hip. Green looked at it in disgust and sent a course of will through his body. The little spot didn’t even pain him as it disappeared.
Green laughed then, and laughed and laughed and laughed, dropping Mist to the ground where he tumbled gracelessly to his hands and knees. With a grim sneer, he looked around the room to Mist’s court, every sidhe hanging avidly on the exchange between the two leaders. Everyone in the room was more than a thousand years old, and Green was quite sure that none of them had seen a struggle of powers like this in their entire lives. Fuck them. Let them see.
With deft fingers he undid the buttons of his jeans and dropped them to his knees, then turned his back on Mist, looking at the other man over the long, elegant line of his shoulder.
“I haven’t worn your mark in years, Mist,” he said quietly. “Since I woke up in Adrian’s arms.” He smiled faintly, thought about what Cory would say at this moment, improvised. “You can kiss my skinny white ass and fear for your life, Lord Mist. The only thing keeping me from killing you is the idea that your own self-denial might hurt worse.” With that, he swept his jeans up his hips, did the fly, and prepared to walk out of Mist’s hall with his head held high. But Mist had one parting shot, Green later thought bitterly. The other man had always been so much better at inflicting wounds than Green, probably because he took pride in it when Green took none.
“What kind of leader lets his second grab death with both hands, Lord Green?” Mist asked, as Green started walking. “I may have pointed Sezan in the right direction, but you’re the one who let Adrian die. Remember that, Lord Green! You’re the one who let him grab that silver net, not me!”
Mist’s voice followed him out of the waiting area, and out of the house, and it was still ringing in Green’s ears as he tore out of the driveway, ripping the BMW through the wrought iron gates using metaphysical power and momentum, and leaving them in a clanging pile behind him.
CORY
Bereft
I WOKE up surrounded by warm man and assumed for a moment that it was Green. I gave a groan and a snuggle, and my hands found their way under a T-shirt, and I dug my face into a strong chest and inhaled, just to smell the comfort of my beloved. But the smell was wrong. The chest felt lovely—smooth skinned, hairless, broad, hard little nipples that pointed under the spread of my palms, but the smell….
Green smelled like sun-warmed grass, or the foothills right after it rains in the spring before the grasses turn brown, and sometimes, when he was aroused or really happy, he smelled like a meadow full of mustard flowers and lupines. This man smelled like stone in the sun, or like trees growing over a freshwater pool.
“Oh, shit,” I said, startled, and tried to move backward. “Apologies, Bracken,” I said formally. “My hands started moving before my brain woke up.”
“By all means, stay asleep,” Brack rumbled above me. There was amusement in his voice, but arousal too, and I knew that the familiar feeling nudging me in the stomach was all male, all hard, and all ready for action. I b
olted up and out of the bed before my next heartbeat.
“Green won’t need to put us together again,” I said stiffly, scrubbing at my face and trying to wake up. The gentleness on Bracken’s face was enough to make me stumble and sit down abruptly. He moved around to sit next to me and cup my chin in his fingers.
“Hey,” he calmed, “don’t worry.” He smiled and used both hands to comb his fingers through my wild hair before taking my face in his hands and scenting the air lightly. “Can you smell that?” he asked. “That’s you and Green, making love in this room. I know that smell. It permeates Green’s hill—it’s around corners, it lingers in front of your empty room, and at the oddest times, I smell it in the garden, with Adrian’s smell mixed in. I love that smell. The scent of the two of you intertwined is home. I don’t want that to go away.” He leaned forward and put his face in the crook of my neck so he could smell the warmth rising from it. His nose touched my skin, just enough to make me shiver. When he spoke again, it was right next to my ear. His voice resonated, and his breath moved the fine hairs on my ear, starting a vibration deep within my eardrum. “But that smell right there,” he concluded, “that smell is all you. I love that smell too. I want to wear that smell on my skin and roll around in it. I want to live in that smell alone. But I don’t want the smell of home to go away.”
His words stopped my throat, and his hands on my face were so warm and sure. Goddess, I thought, feeling weak and liquid, I needed to touch him. Not in a sexual way, not now, but I needed to touch him. With a sigh I laid my head against his shoulders, and I felt my back muscles relax when he wrapped his arms around me.
“You used the magic word, big brother,” I said softly. “You said ‘home.’”