by Amy Lane
“I killed a hundred people that night,” I said evenly from the doorway, clinging to the shreds of my composure. I looked back at Nicky, sitting forlornly on the top of the toilet, all of his wounds neatly bandaged. “You know, Nicky, I would have given you that memory for free.”
I would have liked to run into my room to fall apart, but Bracken was down the hall standing very still so we couldn’t hear that he was back. We looked at each other levelly for a moment until he realized that I wasn’t going to cry on him any more that night, and then he spoke, his voice irritated.
“You make too much out of the hair,” he said gruffly. “It will grow back.”
“It’s not your hair that hurts me, genius,” I snapped, walking by him. I was tired of crying, because I was tired of remembering that no matter how hard I cried, there was always more hurt waiting for me when I was done. And if I touched Bracken, I might fall completely apart, but it was oh, so tempting. Remembering my earlier skin-hunger for him, the way my palms still tingled from his smooth chest, I thought that maybe I needed to clear my head, and so I was very careful not to touch shoulders as we passed in the hallway. “It’s that I almost killed you.” Whew, I was past him without feeling the pressure of his actual touch.
“You did worse than that,” he said bleakly, reaching out to me and brushing my own wild hair with his fingertips. I didn’t have an answer there. Knowing that he and Adrian had been lovers and rivals for lovers made our fate together seem almost more certain, but right then, he didn’t sound very happy about it. “Green’s in the front room,” he sighed at last, when I didn’t launch myself at him and go all soft in his arms. Then he went down the hallway, I assumed to tell Renny and Nicky. I rounded the corner and sagged against the wall out of his vision. I wondered vaguely if I had ever known that love could hurt this much.
Green was in the kitchen with Grace, and I don’t recall ever seeing him so very much in need of me as he was at that moment. I rushed into his arms almost before he could put down his kitchen knife and carrots, and did my very best to wrap myself around his body and give him everything I had to take that strain and weariness off the clean, lovely lines of his face. He managed to put the vegetables down, and he picked me up with my legs wrapped around him and took what I was offering, giving his own warmth in return. We stayed like that for a moment, but eventually he had to slide me down. He leaned back against the counter, touching my chin with his fingers.
“Where’d you go?” I asked, worried. He looked so tired.
“To the leader of the elves in this city,” he told me, then, drolly, “except they live out by Seal Rocks, and there was traffic.”
I frowned at him. “You need to stop taking off on us like that,” I admonished. That summer he had taken off in a panic once, after I was attacked, and stormed right into the enemy’s lair. Adrian and I had laid into him for days after that, but eighteen hundred years of living don’t necessarily make your learning curve level. “Have us flunkies go—delegate or something,” I told him. Behind us I heard Grace make a harrumphing sound that meant she’d lectured him on this same thing, and I winced. Mothers lecture. Lovers accept.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and buried my face into his neck.
“My lack of leadership must be showing,” he returned, and his voice was subdued. What had they said to him? Suddenly I wanted to fry every elf in San Francisco almost more than I wanted to cook Goshawk and have Grace truss him up for dinner.
“What did they say to you?” I asked, and Green just shook his head.
“We have history, Mist and I,” he evaded after a moment. “Mist knows where to hurt, that’s all.”
“I hate him,” I whispered fiercely. “Whoever the fuck he is, don’t let him make you feel like this,” I ordered. “You are everything that is good about a leader, everything that we love. Don’t let them use that Old World ‘We’re so fucking superior’ bullshit to make you doubt yourself. We need you to be you.”
Green smiled at me, all that compassion in his eyes, and he cupped my face in his hands as though it were delicate and precious. “You must never leave me,” he said solemnly. “You may take as many lovers as you want, but you must promise to always be here to make me feel like I can do all that needs to be done.”
“Even till I’m old and wrinkly,” I told him, both seriously and lightly. Goddess, I wanted to see him smile some more.
“You will never be old and wrinkly,” he returned, smiling some more, and I grinned back until his mouth closed over mine. Our kiss deepened, lengthened, made me want and ache, and then Grace cleared her throat again and we separated, giggling a little. His expression grew serious again, but it was his usual, capable seriousness, and I was reassured. “So, lovey,” he said after a moment, keeping the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, “Bracken tells me that little Nicky is back. How is he?”
I grimaced. “Sadly disillusioned and about a pint low,” I told him, and he nodded, thinking.
“Well, there’s not much I can do about the disillusion,” he said truthfully. “But tell me—have you forgiven him truly?”
I sighed. “Yes,” I said after a moment. “He was lost—truly lost—even from the faith that he knew he believed.” I shrugged. Even in the depths of my grief, I had never been as lost as Nicky had been, a stranger in a strange city, without kin or kind. “Yes—I think Nicky has paid for what he did,” I said, and like that, my anger against him evaporated. I had so many other people to want to make pay for those gaping holes in my memory.
“Well, then,” Green responded, breaking away from me and squaring his shoulders. “Let’s see what I can do about him being a pint low.”
“He’s pretty homophobic,” I called to him as he started down the hall. “Be delicate.”
Green turned to me and smiled brilliantly. “We’ll cure him of that, now, won’t we?” he said wickedly and then vanished down the hall.
There was silence in the kitchen then, for a moment, until Grace, ever practical, slapped the vegetable peeler and carrot that Green had left on the counter smack into my palm. “Dinner doesn’t make itself,” she said crisply, and I turned toward the sink. We worked in a comfortable silence for a few heartbeats while I tried hard not to think about Bracken.
“So will you?” she asked after a moment.
“Will I what?” I asked, lulled by the whole food-preparation bit and not prepared for conversation.
“Will you take another lover?” Her voice was nothing but curious, in that way that girlfriends are curious.
I looked at her as she deftly chopped garlic to add to the mashed potatoes and then moved to toss some pine nuts into the salad. She was tall, redheaded, and lanky, with wide-set cheekbones and skin that had been tanned and freckled when Adrian had brought her over as a vampire. I knew she’d been suffering from breast cancer, but her hair had grown back since her conversion—only for vampires is that myth about hair and fingernails growing after death true. She had a kind, gruff mother face, I thought. Adrian had told me that she had visited her daughters in their dreams for years after she had died, and I wondered how hard that had been, to choose to live but to have to let your children keep going without you.
“I… well….” And I was having trouble answering her question.
“I’ll take that as an ‘I’ve got someone in mind but my insides are so muddled I can’t give you a straight answer,’” she improvised dryly.
I shrugged, laughing a little. “I was planning to stay faithful to Green,” I said after a moment.
“But…,” she prodded.
I shrugged again.
“But…,” she prodded again and then finished the sentence herself. “But Green needs to lead his people, and most elves are a little fuzzy on this ‘monogamy’ thing.”
“Boy howdy are they ever,” I agreed emphatically.
“There’s no law that says you have to take your lover’s lovers,” Grace replied, and there was sympathy on her face.
I thoug
ht about it. “If Adrian hadn’t died,” I thought after a moment, “it never would have occurred to me.” Really? A little part of me remembered the first time I’d seen Bracken, through the window at the minimart. Even then, I’d thought he was beautiful.
“Sure it wouldn’t have,” she said gently, giving me room for a clean conscience. “That doesn’t mean it’s not right.”
I squeezed my eyes shut tight for a moment. “You were mortal,” I whispered. “Do you remember when any of this felt strange and right at the same time? Do you remember when you were supposed to have one lover, a husband, and live happily ever after because love could do all that?”
“Oh, yes,” she sighed. “I watched my family, after I died,” she went on, trying to pretend her voice was not thick and choked. “And I kept expecting my husband to date again, find a girlfriend, find someone else to share his life with… I did. But I watched, and he kept bumbling about the house and gruffly loving our daughters…. Goddess, he was so tender to them, it made me weep blood… and I thought, ‘He’s doing okay… he’ll be okay….’ And I thought I was good with that. I had been feeling all bad about my darkling lovers, and I started enjoying taking men to my bed when I was taking my blood—it was wonderful and tremendous and free, after those clumsy human couplings that he and I clung to, you know?”
She turned to me for understanding, and I nodded, but even as I nodded, I realized that I didn’t know. My own two lovers had been preternatural, both of them, and they had been everything she was saying—wonderful, tremendous, and free. For a moment, as she was speaking, I wondered if I had ever been mortal at all, but then, this moment was not about me.
“And then one day,” Grace was saying, “he was moving the entertainment center with one of the girls’ husbands, so they could hook up a DVD player, and this craft-store receipt fell out.”
I must have looked confused, because she elaborated. “You know—yarn, fabric, whatever? It was my addiction, craft stores. Still is.” This I knew. In fact, Grace ran a store just like that called A Yarning For Crafts. She made quilts, beautiful, lovely quilts, filled with the colors of the night sky and moonlight on water and green meadows. She worked in hypertime, the super-accelerated speed that most of the Goddess’s children could use when they needed or when they really concentrated on something and their nerve endings began to run on magic instead of electricity.
“And that summer,” she continued, “that summer I knew I was dying, I made a thousand things for him and the girls. I didn’t tell them about the cancer, you know. We had no health insurance—and it was pretty far advanced anyway—so I just made things for them all summer and tried to say good-bye. But I hid my receipts. It was stupid, really, because he….” And now she could really no longer pretend that her throat wasn’t thick with unshed aching. “Because he never gave a shit how much my craft things cost. It made me happy, and that was all he cared about. But I’d hidden that last receipt, the one I used to make all those last projects with, and it slipped out from behind the television.”
She looked away, ignoring the spatter of briny blood that fell on the back of her hands. “And suddenly the man I thought had borne everything so well, who would survive and prosper without me… suddenly he sank to the floor, sobbing these deep hulking sobs that just ripped out my heart. Ten years I’d been dead to him. Ten years I’d been watching them secretly, missing them with all my heart but thinking, like everybody in Green’s place, that mortals are used to death and that they could grieve and live, and then that man sank to his knees and died of grief as I watched from a corner in my daughter’s mind.”
Grace wiped her face on her shoulder, leaving a smear of red on her shirt and not really taking care of the mess on her cheeks. I turned toward her, not knowing what to do. She didn’t look like she wanted a hug. She looked like she wanted me to go away and leave her with this horrible sadness pressing on her, because there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it anyway. “So, sweetie,” she said, facing stoically into the back wall, “when the elves look at you like they’re afraid you’ll die of grief, you need to know it can happen. And when Bracken looks at you like you are his absolute everything, and Green is willing to hold your hand and let you be just that while you hold his beating heart in your hands, you need to know how rare it is, and how frightening a thing it is for anyone to lose their everything, and how wonderful and precious it is that your everything might not be tied up in the beating of only one man’s heart.”
There was nothing to say to that. She didn’t want me to say anything. I squeezed her shoulder tentatively, and she nodded and patted my hand. We continued to work then, in the aching silence of the kitchen, until everybody else came in ready for food.
GREEN
Embittered
GREEN COULD smell the copper brine of vampire tears as soon as he, Nicky, Renny, and Max walked into the kitchen. He stopped and looked from Grace to Cory, but Grace was tossing salad and staring stoically at the wall behind the sink. There was a silly print of cows tap-dancing there, but it could hardly have been as absorbing as Grace’s fixed attention would have suggested. Cory was setting the table and looking determinedly as though she couldn’t see Grace weeping. As soon as the group walked into the kitchen, Grace turned, her face averted, and put the salad on the table, then slid by Green. Green moved toward her, but she waved him off, leaving Cory to finish putting the platter of steaks on the table. The others stopped talking abruptly and looked at Cory, who shrugged.
“It’s funny,” she said, her voice rough, “that no one thinks they’re strong enough to live with pain. But we all have to, don’t we?” She didn’t expect an answer, and so she shook off their stunned silence. “Never mind, everybody,” she told them, and looked around. “Where’s Bracken?”
Green shrugged in his turn and took his cue to ignore what had been going on in the kitchen before he came in. “He said something about cleaning up before dinner. We can sit down, but I’d like to wait for him before we break bread, yes?”
Cory smiled. “Absolutely—Max, Renny, were you actually being civil to each other when you came in?”
Max shrugged uncomfortably, following Green’s example and sitting down. “I apologized,” he said gruffly.
“What’d you do now?” Cory asked, getting milk, soda, and juice out of the refrigerator and setting them on the table. Green noticed the giant cream pie in there, and Cory’s semisweet smile when she saw it. He knew something of Grace’s grief, and he thought maybe he could guess what they had been talking about.
“It’s not what he did now.” Renny spoke up, rolling her eyes as she pulled out her chair. “He just didn’t remember what he did two years ago.”
“What’d he do two years ago?” Nicky asked, taking his own seat while Cory reached around him and put the salad on the table. He’d been being healed when Renny and Max had started this conversation, and he still looked completely infatuated with Green. As Green had been delicately lapping at his wounds in a way that still made them both tingle all over, he’d said that no one had ever used power to heal him—he hadn’t realized that the Goddess’s children could do that. Green had just smiled at him, and when the healing had rippled through them both, Nicky had been embarrassed, aroused, and starstruck.
Renny grunted in disgust. “You tell them,” she growled, and to everybody’s surprise, Max looked ashamed.
“I didn’t know,” he said again and then shook his head. “I rousted Renny and Mitch one night,” he said. “I didn’t remember until she came out of the bathroom just now—I mean….” His voice rose in pitch. “She’s been cat more often than girl since I’ve known her….” He shrugged. “Anyway, I thought they were coming down from a high.”
“Werecats can’t be drug addicts!” she said indignantly.
“I didn’t know that!” Max burst out. “All I knew was that the two of you looked like you were coming down from a three-day bender. Of course I threw you in detox.”
“It was
the night before the full moon!” Renny spat, and it was obvious that the memory still hurt.
“Like I knew there was any such thing as giant shape-changing kitty cats!” Max defended, flailing with his hands, and Green saw that he was not the only one hiding his smile—Cory was also looking suspiciously bright eyed as she put a bowl of pasta with mushroom sauce down on the table. “Anyway,” Max was saying, “I said I was sorry.” There was a quiet then as the two of them glared at each other. Suddenly Renny smiled, looking very feline.
“Don’t worry, Officer Max,” she said in a sensual, threatening way that only a young woman could manage, “I’ll find a way to make it up to you.”
Nicky looked at the two of them and raised his eyebrows. “You people are nice,” he said after a thoughtful pause.
“We have our moments,” Cory agreed.
“I mean….” Nicky looked at all of them. “You’re nice to each other, the men and the women. There’s respect here….” He shook his head. “It’s hard to explain.”
“It’s hard won,” Max said unexpectedly. He carefully avoided everybody’s eyes. “I still don’t understand why… why Green’s people interact the way they do. But I’m starting to get that there’s a reason.”
Green realized his mouth was open, and Cory’s was as well.
Max looked at them both and shrugged irritably. “I’m not stupid,” he said after a moment. “I’m just human.”
“And on that note…,” Green said, “I’m not sure if we should wait for Bra….”
Except Cory’s eyes had moved to the hall, and what Green could only describe as a boo-boo face moved over her expressive features. He turned his head to see what she was looking at and felt his own heart constrict. Cory came over to Green and put her hand on his shoulder, and they exchanged looks of surprise. Green took her hand and pressed it, then gave her a little push toward Bracken, because he knew that was who she really wanted to go touch.