Wounded, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “You can hold me accountable for nothing,” Mist said derisively. “Sezan was at least part water sidhe—he had a better claim to vengeance than your plaything and his lunch.”

  “If you don’t stop talking,” Cory said in a strained voice, “you will die as you sit.” And at last she had Mist’s complete attention.

  “That could be a formidable weapon,” Mist gasped evenly, obviously trying very hard not to be impressed by the brilliance of color and motion held in her cupped hand, “if you had the guts to use it against a full-blooded sidhe.”

  “Didn’t Morana tell you,” Green replied sweetly, “the reason there are no more vampires in Folsom?” The magical nuclear ball in Cory’s hand spun, so bright that just being in the same room with it left dark spots dancing across Green’s eyes.

  And at last, Green thought, Mist believed. “I thought she was mad,” he breathed, and his gaze flickered from Cory to Green. “She said you attacked her.”

  “I did,” Green replied. “And I would have driven you from my home in the same way. But you didn’t just kill my beloved. You killed my beloved’s beloved as well. Cory deserves a show of force, don’t you think?”

  “This power is beyond you,” Mist said stubbornly.

  “Goddess, you’re dumb,” Cory snorted, making her power dance and turn purple—Adrian’s color. Three purple spots glowed on her neck, pulsing with her blood and her anger. “With you it’s always the ‘you can’t’ and ‘I’m better than you.’ Don’t you get it? We can. You’re not better than us. We stay together because we love each other—not because we hate everybody else. That will make us stronger every blessed time.”

  And because Green could feel her drawing on him, he caught the minute flicker and instability in the whirling globe of light. “Close your fist, dearest,” he requested, and wasn’t surprised when she turned toward him with a plea in her eyes.

  “He all but killed them, Green,” she begged.

  “I know, lovey—but we want those memories back, right? They won’t come if we kill the opposition and frighten Goshawk away. He still thinks we’re weak.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, and he wondered at the terrible conflict that must be tearing at her—revenge or recoup? But she did him proud.

  “You’d better kiss our ass in public,” she said to Mist, closing her hand as Green and then Bracken let go of her bare skin. “You’d better get up and offer obeisance and apology and give back that fucking gas station in Vacaville, plus a few, or I will come back here without Green and I will cook you in your sleep like a fucking egg.”

  “Make your pets mind,” Mist snapped to Green, and was as shocked as Morana had been when a blast of fury from Green’s outstretched hand sent him spinning back against the wall and pinned him there, face forward.

  “You need a lesson in manners,” Green said mildly, loving the contrast between his seething anger and his calm voice. Goddess, he’d needed to do this, he thought exultantly. He should have done it in Mist’s own home, but he hadn’t been angry enough, not then. But Mist had insulted Cory, insulted his people, and a dark lust to see his old lover brought low coursed through him. He felt Mist struggle against him—the elf was five hundred years older than Green, and not weak. But Green was fueled by the love of his people and had been exercising his own form of power in force to keep them healthy and safe, and he had more of them under his protection. As a result, his magic muscles were honed and massive and quick. But he was willing to share.

  “Bracken, my red-capped darling,” he said pleasantly, “would you mind giving our friend a reminder of his visit?”

  “Anything special, leader?” Bracken asked formally, moving to where Mist was pinned and using a long finger to rip Mist’s coat and fine silk shirt in two down the center of his back.

  “Something creative—something that says ‘Green was here,’” Green asked with grim humor. He was not displeased when, after he had stopped Mist’s mouth with a stray tendril of power, Bracken drew his finger along the pale, pulsing skin of his kinsman’s back, drawing forth a welling of blood using his calling alone. A line, another, a flat-bladed leaf askant, then an oak leaf, point to point with the lime-tree leaf, then (bloody artistry) a plain rose at the base. Bracken had seen the Goddess grove that Green, Cory, and Adrian had created—this was a token of the power and love that had wrought it. “Lovely,” Green breathed upon its completion.

  “Thank you,” Cory said, her throat clogged. “That’s really nice of you,” she added, and Bracken made a formal bow to them both as his lord and lady.

  Green took a deep breath and continued with the penalty Mist would pay for insulting his dear ones in his own home. “Grace, my luv—keep that bleeding, will you? And mind you, don’t drink him dry.” And as Mist thrashed against the far wall, doing damage to the poster of Tyler Hoechlin that Renny had tacked up, Grace came forward and licked the line on his back, causing the ichor to run freely. She did this several times and came away licking her lips. She even gave a little belch for show.

  “Well done, lovely. Now, Cory,” Green commended, looking at her, enjoying the bloodlust in her eyes, “I think he’s bled enough, don’t you? A bit of fire might help.” And Cory didn’t need Bracken or Green to summon just the tiniest laser line of power in her newly discovered fist. She didn’t even flinch. Using her finger and thumb as though holding a pencil, from across the room she traced along the silently screaming man’s back. The scar stood out in perfect, angry red relief to his fog-pale, unblemished skin.

  “That will stay, Mist,” Green said firmly. “You may be sidhe, but we have all marked you, and you cannot heal from your own treachery. Do you understand? You will wear this mark forever, like we will wear what you’ve done on our hearts. And so you don’t get bitter, you need to know we’d trade places with you in a moment, if you could turn back time.”

  Mist struggled and his fury was obvious, but even as a gray glow of power encompassed him, the wound on his back grew no less red and no less raised. It was, Green knew, a shock and a defeat for the great and mighty Mist to be humbled like this. Held captive by someone else’s power and marked by a group of creatures he detested—Mist had become a formidable enemy on this night. Good. His humiliation wasn’t over yet.

  “Renny, dearest,” Green concluded, “make sure he doesn’t stop running until he gets to Market Street. Max will pick you up by the Orpheum shortly. Can we do that, Officer?”

  “Yeah. No problem,” Max breathed, and Green released Mist in the next heartbeat, keeping the man’s furious mouth stuffed with power. Mist sagged to the floor, almost blue he was so pale, and sweating with pain. He looked at the collective of people who had marked him, face showing pain and fear and surprise.

  “So, Mist,” Green continued conversationally, “you will show my people, all of my people, a little fucking respect. And so will your people, or soon all of you will wear my mark, and tithe to me, and lick my feet and kiss my ass—because we will vanquish this Goshawk because we have to, and then we’ll take what we gain from that encounter, the one that you’re too afraid to have, and we will come after you, unless you make a whole lot of changes in a merciful hurry. Understood, precious?” And even saying it, Green knew he had to make plans immediately to back his words up. If he didn’t make plans to defend his people now, Mist, for whatever reason, would always be a threat.

  And with that he took the power from around Mist’s mouth at about the time Renny bounded after him with a wildcat snarl that the smaller elf would probably hear in his nightmares for months to come. Grace had thoughtfully moved toward the door and opened it, or Mist would have shattered the new one in all of its finely carved glory as he fled from Green’s home with Renny tight on his flank.

  The people left standing in the room watched him go, surprised at themselves and at the stunning satisfaction that Mist’s overthrow gave them, and at the darkness that they hadn’t known they had.

  Cory summed it up when she said into the silence,
“Crispin and Sezan died too quickly.”

  “Amen to that,” Grace agreed, flopping down on the couch she’d left when Green had summoned her. Cory sat down abruptly next to Green, as though her strings had been cut. Green had known, when he’d let her summon power, that she was pretty much at the end of her rope. Too much, he thought bitterly. We ask too much from her.

  Max was moving to the door when he stopped and said, “I have no idea how to get to the Orpheum Theater.”

  “I’ll take you,” Nicky volunteered, and the two grabbed their jackets from the peg by the door. Nicky stopped at the doorway and turned around. “Goshawk has no idea about you,” he said after a moment. “If he knew who you were—how strong you are—he would have left Cory the hell alone.”

  “Pity poor Goshawk,” Green said without mercy, and Nicky nodded.

  “Amen to that too,” he echoed and followed Max out the door.

  There was a silence in the room then, broken by a nasal snoring sound. They all looked at Cory, who had fallen instantly asleep.

  “We let her do too much,” Bracken said, his words so much an echo of Green’s thoughts that Green almost laughed.

  “You’re right, brother,” he said instead. “But I don’t know how we could have stopped her.”

  “We should have,” Bracken insisted, going over to where she lay and picking her up, much the way Green had spent his and Cory’s first month together. She was much tinier now.

  “You figure out how, and I’ll back you up,” Green said in quiet amusement. It would be like wind in autumn, watching the two of them. He looked forward to it. “Wait—” he said suddenly to Bracken, who halted in the hallway and turned back toward him. Green turned to his resident vampire, whose fangs were extended and whose chest was heaving as though she were still human, she was so delighted with the elven ichor that Mist had given her. “Grace, lovey, do you need accompaniment tonight? I don’t know if I want to trust Orson’s kind, all of a once, to keep you safe.”

  Grace nodded, licking her lips in thought of a hunt. “I’m with you there—I’ll take Bracken. You need to be here to deal with any of Mist’s people. There will be aftermath,” she finished with satisfaction.

  She was right, there would be aftermath. But Mist was a planner—sly, underhanded in a way that was the worst of their people. There would be retaliation, but it would come later, in ways that not even he could predict. But he didn’t want to tell them that, Green thought sadly—they were riding a little victory high and he wanted them to stay happy, so he would simply let it be. Instead of bringing Grace down, he grinned at her wolfishly and said, “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “May it be,” Bracken agreed and turned back toward the hallway, Cory nestled in his arms.

  CORY

  Honesty, Power, and Time

  I WOKE up a little when Bracken was putting me to bed and said Green’s name as he pulled off my jeans and my shoes.

  “No.” Simply. “Not Green.”

  I struggled to get up, but he put a larger-than-human, long-fingered hand on my chest and pushed me back down.

  “Sleep,” he said gruffly. “You are so exhausted, you’ll make yourself sick if you keep using power like that.”

  “It was worth it,” I defended, my head on the pillow. I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I forced them open again, Bracken was sitting on the bed, putting his shoes on. All of the elves hated shoes—their feet were long and tough and capable, and hard to fit as it was. The shoes hit the floor in Green’s house practically before the door closed, and only the most comfortable ones with the most breathable materials made it on their feet in the first place. Bracken was putting on his favorite pair—sky blue Converse sneakers, size 17.

  “Where’re you going?” I muttered through the fog in my head. I was so close to sleep that I could feel myself, breath by breath, detaching from reality.

  “Out to look for the vampires with Grace,” Bracken replied. He finished with the shoe and knelt by the bed so we were face-to-face. His eyes, the color of a still pool in shade, were dark, but not brown or black or blue or green, or at least any one of those colors alone. You could see that even in the darkened room, I thought, feeling his breath against my face.

  “Be careful,” I told him soberly. “It’s dangerous out there.” We were vulnerable, alone in this city without the vampires, who were, I had gathered from Green, our only clear allies during regular, more peaceful times. And now the vampires were missing.

  Bracken nodded. He was beautiful, like all of the sidhe. Even the fey like Professor Cruikshank had beauty in them, something from which you could not look away, and the sidhe were inhumanly, heartbreakingly lovely as a matter of course. Their eyes were large—larger than human and more widely spaced, with delicate, impossibly high cheekbones. Sometimes I thought they were breathing anime characters, but only when I was feeling small and unattractive, like I didn’t belong to them or their world. Not tonight. Tonight, Bracken looked different, as though his high cheekbones and strong, pointed chin were that beautiful just for me.

  “Will you worry?” he asked quietly, after we’d breathed in the dark, looking at each other for a few heartbeats.

  “I always do,” I told him, because I would, because he was my friend, and because I knew now how easy it was to lose people.

  “Will you worry differently?” Goddess, I was too sleep-muddled to deal with this, I thought vaguely.

  “I will worry about my Bracken,” I said after a moment, “who kicks my ass and yells at me and makes me feel better all in a minute. How could I not worry about you?”

  A small smile played at his lips then, and a fierceness gathered in his eyes, and suddenly his lips were on mine and they were sweet, and his tongue was in my mouth and his taste was wild and hard and he was pushing me back into the bed, tasting me, hands on my face, in my hair, running down my arms. He finally pulled away from me, leaving me languorous and breast-heavy, loin-aching, sleepy, and terribly aroused and confused and too damn tired to sort it all out now. I made a sound, between a “please come back to me” and a “what in the hell are you doing,” but words were not an option.

  “Worry about that,” he said with immense satisfaction and then swept out of the room.

  I was asleep after that, but it was an aroused sleep, a sexual sleep, filled with dreams of Green inside of me, on top of me, and of Adrian, kissing his way up my thigh, using his tongue, his fingers on me and inside of me, and then biting the tender flesh of my thigh right when I climaxed and making me scream with the force of what ripped through me. I must have been making sounds in my sleep, because Green came to bed around midnight and slid next to me, his bare skin so cool and smooth that I couldn’t sheathe him inside of my hot silkiness fast enough. He pounded into me then, slick and fast and hard through one climax, then another, and then his own. I slept immediately after, soundly and dreamlessly, so much so that I didn’t notice he was gone until he slid in bed behind me once more.

  This time he was inside of me before I could even roll toward him, and I groaned because I was still ready and still wet from our earlier coupling. But this time he stayed still until I started to move restlessly against him, asking for more.

  “Mmmm… in a moment, dearest,” he promised. “But first, you need to tell me what has you so stirred up….”

  I was too sleepy and too desperate for him to be tactful. “Bracken kissed me,” I told him plaintively. “He kissed me and he left… asshole,” I finished under my breath.

  “Ahh….” Green sighed and then started to move inside me, and he was so big and so tight inside me that I almost wept with need, even now, even again. I groaned, but he was slow this time. “So Bracken did this to you…. How do you feel about that?”

  “I could smack him,” I panted, frustrated, needing more. But Green knew what he was doing—I wouldn’t lie to him like this, sleepy and wanting and needing more than I wanted to please the man I loved. “Asshole,” I groaned, meaning Brack
en, meaning Green for not giving me what I needed. “I need some fucking time…,” I gasped, because Green had rolled me under him and was now behind me, moving a little harder and a little faster but not enough, not nearly enough.

  “But it will happen, you think?” he asked gently—but breathlessly, and I was relieved to hear that, because it meant that he needed what I needed.

  “Oh Goddess, yes…,” I moaned, and that also meant two things. Green knew what both of them were, and suddenly he was moving, pounding, wanting me, driving me into the pillows, pouring himself into me while my world exploded, went white, and came to itself again, leaving me limp against the sheets.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered sometime later, when he had pulled the comforter around us and spooned me, our bodies damp and warm and chilling in the predawn.

  “Sorry for what, love?” He pulled the hair back from my face, a thing he had been doing since he’d come to pull me out of the hospital room. I liked it, I decided. Screw getting revenge on Bracken—I might let my hair grow longer just to feel Green’s hands on my face.

  “Bracken…. I didn’t want to… I was going to…. Oh, damn it Green…,” I wailed, and to my complete horror I realized I was crying again. Goddess, I must be weak. I sniffled, but Green never minded tears, and he rubbed my arms and whispered little hushing noises in my ear until I quieted.