by Amy Lane
“You know,” he said conversationally, when I was down to hiccups, “I always thought Arthur was the worst kind of schmuck.”
“As in King?” I asked, so surprised I forgot my own muddle to focus on this one.
“Mmm, oh yes,” Green affirmed. He sounded tired, I thought. What had he been doing tonight, between bouts of coming in and keeping me happy? Did Green ever sleep when he wasn’t next to me?
“King Arthur was a schmuck?” There’s something they didn’t tell you in the lit books, I thought.
“Yes—and Guinevere was spineless, and Lancelot was… well, he was perfidious, but if he’d been candid in the first place, the worst of the perfidy wouldn’t have been necessary.”
“Okay, you’ve got me—explain,” I said, my voice growing lighter as his became weighted with sleep.
“Arthur was gone all the bleedin’ time….” Green’s voice became more and more down-country British when he was tired or angry—and pure Victorian cockney when he spoke of Adrian. His speech to Mist tonight had been a mishmash of California foothills colloquial and Lake County middle class. “And Guinevere—well, she wasn’t as strong as you, love, but she was a good queen, in her way. She needed help, moral more than administrative, right? But help all the same, and Arthur was gone. And Lancelot—he could have saved them all a lot of damned unhappiness if he had just made one request of the man who loved him like a brother.”
“Like ‘can I bang your wife?’” I asked, a little disbelieving. It had always seemed like an easy solution, but humans rarely let anything like that be easy.
“Why not?” Green asked. “It was custom in those days, if a visiting dignitary arrived, to offer him your wife. If Arthur had made it public and asked Guinevere if she consented, had offered her to Lancelot during his absences, the people would have agreed.
“But the whole ‘Christian King’ thing…,” I muttered.
“Is the reason Camelot fell,” Green said practically. “Arthur could never believe that the needs of a woman outweighed his own macho pride, or the dogma he was ramming down the peasants’ throats. A woman of strength, of purpose—she’s a mighty thing. And like you, my love, she is not meant to sit languishing, waiting for her king to finish his business before she becomes the focus of his world.”
“Women have been known to be faithful,” I said stubbornly, with dignity.
“Yes they have. But you can’t,” Green returned, matter-of-factly. “The only women of the Goddess’s get who have ever been monogamous have been women with limited forms of power, of limited uses to their people….”
“Blissa…,” I remembered, referring to Bracken’s little pixie-sex-kitten of a mother. I liked Bracken’s mother.
“Yes,” Green agreed, pleased. He had folded his arm over mine, and our clasped hands rested below my chin. “Blissa and Crocken chose to bind themselves, and with the exception of Blissa’s occasional attentions to her leader, they have been faithful to the point of nausea ever since. The weres can be monogamous, even unto death—most of them by choice, like Renny, and some by necessity, like the Avians.”
“Nicky’s people?” I replied, startled.
“Yes. You know the story, right?” Green was practically mumbling by now. “The Goddess came down as a male hawk and found a female so brilliant that she sported with no one else until the female died, and the Goddess loved her so very much that from that moment on, hawks and their like have mated for life ever since. Pretty much from the point of orgasm on, whomever the Avian mates with, he bonds with.”
“So when Nicky asked me out—asked me to Goshawk’s for dinner….”
“He was thinking about marrying you, sweet,” Green said. “And that’s saying a lot.”
“How would you feel?” I wanted to know, especially before Green fell asleep. “About Bracken, I mean.” Poor Nicky—he wasn’t even on the map.
“It will be hard, my love,” he told me candidly, his breath brushing my neck and his long arms tightening around my naked body as he did so. “It will be hard, because I’m selfish, and I’ve always needed my lovers to love me best. But you can’t do this—be our queen, be our sorceress, just do the things you need to do—without someone else to give you strength. In your case, literally. You need a man—a man you can love—to touch you to fuel your power.” In the silence I heard regret, and reconciliation. “I can’t be that man for you all the time.”
“Bracken will be… difficult,” I said, understating things in the extreme.
“You already love him.” Even asleep, I could hear the humor in his voice. “The rest will come.”
“I am so unremarkable,” I said to myself in the silent moment after, when I knew he was asleep and wouldn’t argue. In that moment I forgot about weird, sorcerous weapons and deadly, lust-fueled sunshine that periodically erupted from my body. In that moment I was the angry gas station clerk who didn’t have a chance at college. I was the plain, defensive virgin who had lost oh so much time making Adrian prove he could love me. I was the desperate kid about to flunk out of life. In that moment I had lost the life I was living, the life I loved.
“I am such a plain little person,” I said to myself. “How do I get to have two man-gods who worship me?” It was a question I didn’t think I would ever answer, except to know that I’d give my life for either one of them. Was that all it took?
A few moments later, the phone next to my bed rang and I answered it quickly, hoping not to wake Green.
The connection was horrible and dying as I picked up the receiver, broken into words like “darkness,” “ambush,” and “dead werewolves,” and the most awful phrase of all, “get us before they wake up.”
“Bracken…,” I said desperately into the line, “Bracken, what street are you on?” But the line went dead, and I was left shouting his name into the static void he’d left on the other end.
Whatever Green had been doing that night had exhausted him, because he slept for the next two hours as I frantically dressed and woke the household. Max, Renny, and Nicky were, surprisingly enough, asleep in the living room, Nicky on the couch and Max and Renny on the pillows on the floor, almost like puppies. It looked like they had been watching television, and I had about a half a second to wonder at the friendships that form around us when we’re not looking before I shook them awake at red alert. I wanted to come up with a plan before I woke Green from a sleep he needed and presented him with this next crisis.
And crisis it was, we decided when we’d sorted through the scattering of clear words I’d heard on the phone. “They wake up,” he’d said—that had to mean the other vampires, and if he and Grace had found them and been trapped too, the odds were the vampires were starving. I shuddered. Elf blood, especially the blood of a sidhe—that much power floating in their ichor—that was pretty potent stuff for a vampire. It would be like offering soft, sweet bread and pâté to a starving man. Except in this case it was a lot of starving vampires, and the soft bread and pâté was Bracken, and the only thing between Bracken and an almost certain death—even for an immortal sidhe—was Grace, brave, protective Grace, who would die before Bracken did, trying to save his life.
Over coffee, soda, and mouthfuls of trail mix and Reese’s Puffs cereal, we mapped out the city and made a plan. The idea was that we would split into groups, each group covering a third of the city on foot, and take a reading of every major crossroads in the city—until Max remembered that before he’d left, Green had been telling him that Andres himself lived on Market and Diamond, but that he had darklings scattered throughout most of the eastern half of the city. He especially liked the Theater District and North Beach, so odds were better of finding a vampire in the northeastern part of the city. I thought with despair that if we had enough people we’d search every alleyway, parking lot, or shadowed niche, but as it was, we only had three teams and a lot of cramped city to cover.
Those with heightened senses—either preternatural or preternaturally olfactory—should be able to s
ense or smell Bracken’s presence, at the very least. Nicky and Max made a big deal out of the walking—Nicky, especially, wanted to fly—but Renny and I both remembered the past summer, when half of Green’s people had canvassed every inch of Folsom by car. It wasn’t until Green had touched the ground with his own feet that he had felt the evil that even the mortal residents had known. Driving wouldn’t work and flying was out of the question, so walking it had to be.
Nicky and I would catch a bus to Nineteenth Street below the school and walk through Golden Gate Park toward the Embarcadero, through the Presidio and continuing steadily east, cutting to the Embarcadero as soon as we could. Practically every north-south street in the city bottomed out at the docks, so we should be able to feel something at the crossroads. We would follow the curve along the bay, hitting the crossroads south of Market as well. Green, who could move twice as fast as a human being and still feel evidence of his own kind, would start in the same place and walk Divisadero to Market and then cut northeast to Embarcadero. Between us, we’d turn the most likely parts of the city into a big slice of pie-shaped earth, and Renny and Mac would take Van Ness, doing some zigging and zagging to hit the streets that didn’t run straight and cutting that piece of pie awkwardly in half to give Renny a chance to smell what she could.
So that was the plan. It was simple, it was hopeless, but it was better than nothing, and after two hours of logistics and stalling to give Green more sleep, by eight thirty we had packed a lunch, showered, donned comfortable shoes, and were ready to roll.
It was not soon enough for me. Even though I had made the decision not to wake Green immediately, I found that after we’d drawn our search grid and discussed who would travel with whom, my hands were clammy and my breath shook in my chest with the effort not to bolt out the door screaming Bracken’s name.
Still, when I went to wake Green, I paused, watching the even fall of his chest and then tracing the curve and point of his ears with my sight alone. His eyelashes glittered—I’d noticed that this summer, but when was the last time I’d looked at them, awed? I loved this man, this ancient nonhuman—he was the world to me. But he was, as always, right. I would die if I lost Green. But my world would darken and wither without Bracken.
His eyes opened then, brilliant green, and his hand, inhumanly long fingered, captured mine as I stroked his cheek.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, immediately awake, although he stayed there, my hand in his, curled on his side in my bed.
“Bracken,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “He called at dawn. His cell phone was breaking up, but he and Grace are trapped in some sort of space. He said ‘before they wake up,’ which means, I think….”
“That they’ve found the other vampires,” he supplied, sounding weary and gentle. It almost undid me.
“And they’re hungry,” I finished, trying to sound grim. It didn’t work. Green unfolded himself from the bed and wrapped his naked flesh around me, and I suddenly felt less vulnerable.
“We’ll find them,” he said, sounding sure and with purpose. “We’ll find them, and you can tell him all that’s in your heart, and there will be time. Don’t worry, dearest,” he promised against my hair. “You are not meant to be abandoned at every turn.”
I nodded, squared my shoulders, and felt my panic subside. “Fair enough,” I said, just to say something, and he nodded into my hair.
“We have a plan, I assume?” he stated.
“Split the city up, walk the land, charge our cell phones, and hope for the best,” I said, knowing it was weak, but it was all we had. We had three maps highlighted, with known fey, vampire, or preternatural hangouts circled in red, but really, it was the same plan every parent with a missing child had. Look everywhere, ask everyone, pray.
“Good enough,” Green approved. “Who’s with whom?”
“Me and Nicky, Renny and Max, you by yourself.” My face twisted at this last one. I had fought, bitterly, to walk with Green, and the others had been kind but adamant that I walk with Nicky. Walking a third of the city by sunset at six would be exhausting and difficult. Walking half the city would be impossible, and Green was the only one of us strong enough, with enough power and clout, to walk alone. Max had put up a fight to be my walking partner, but Nicky told him that every bird in the city was still mating feverishly, so that would be a bad idea. Renny had rubbed her shoulder against Max’s arm and purred, “What’s the matter, Officer Max, afraid of me?” This had silenced a confused Max and allowed me Nicky’s restful company.
“Wise but painful,” Green agreed, reading my mind. “Lunches packed?” he asked on a lighter note, so it was easier to respond.
“Trail mix, peanut butter and jelly, milk, water, sodas—in backpacks and waiting at the door. We’re just waiting for you to shower, change, and lead us into battle,” I told him, and I was finally feeling as though all my self-restraint in not running screaming from the building in anxiety might have actually paid off.
“Good enough,” he echoed. He bent down—far—and kissed me on the temple. “Thanks for letting me sleep in.” And we were out the door five minutes later.
So we walked. And walked. And walked. At the beginning, Nicky and I passed the time by talking about our secret lives. Avians were largely monogamous by necessity, so Nicky’s parents were still alive and well in Montana, and Nicky’d had a glorious childhood. How many children could fly by the time their voices change? He spoke longingly of home, of big skies and fast game, and he talked hilariously about his first kill, a jackrabbit so large for Nicky as a fledgling that he had to turn into a boy to carry it home—but by the time he’d walked the twelve miles home, his hawk self wouldn’t touch the carcass. I laughed with him but spoke little myself until he asked me how I met Adrian and came to be.
“I was working in Green’s gas station,” I said briefly, “when Grace’s lover, Arturo, came in and touched my hand. And I spent the next two days clawing at my own skin because I was elf-struck. After Arturo touched me again, I started noticing… well, everybody.” Now I knew that they were mostly the lower fey, the ones who hung out by that gas station. But then, as now, they held the same exciting awe and fascination for me of beings so obviously not human.
“So you noticed Adrian?” Nicky asked, when I was quiet for over half a block.
“Hard not to notice a six-foot vampire with white blond hair and a Harley-Davidson glasspack,” I told him dryly. It was now two o’clock. Nicky and I were footsore and exhausted, sweating from exertion and cold from the fog chill that the city couldn’t shake in winter. We had stopped for lunch at a restaurant in Ghirardelli Square at noon, but when we finished, my hands were still shaking and Nicky insisted on buying me a hotdog at the wharf. And then another one, until I told him we had no time for me to eat, and Nicky had simply held my hand as we walked. I could feel his desire for me then, and if I’d had any part of me left that was still whole after all that had befallen in the last six months, I would have mourned that I’d have to break his heart. As it was, all I could do was tell him “thank you,” shyly, graciously, and understand that his reply of “you’re welcome” held all the sadness I seemed to hear.
“Goddess—I didn’t have a chance with you, did I?” Nicky asked, and all I could do was look away, embarrassed.
“You should have tried me last year at this time,” I told him lightly. “But I wasn’t nearly as interesting then.”
Nicky breathed through his nose, which, as winded as we were, was as close as he could come to laughing. “I doubt that,” he said sincerely. “You just needed someone to see it.”
“It would have been pretty hard to see,” I told him honestly. “I hid it under hair gel and makeup and about a pound of jewelry. Even I didn’t see it.” I blew out a breath. “Christ, I made Adrian pay for my blindness.”
“What do you mean?” Nicky asked.
“I just gave him a hard time.” I shrugged. I didn’t know how to explain this to him. “I didn’t know… I did
n’t know how he could be that sincere. He was beautiful!” I burst out awkwardly. “He was beautiful and exciting and desirable, and….” I shivered. “And he just smelled like sex and danger… and I was just… me. I didn’t know about the whole ‘Goddess’ power thing until….” I trailed off then, because I scented something—something magical, floating with the tattered fog toward the water.
“Until what?” Nicky asked.
“Until he made me feel powerful,” I responded, so preoccupied with the mental scent of sun-warmed granite in the air, the vibration of bedrock under my feet, that I could say honestly what otherwise would have made me blush to say out loud. “That’s him,” I said. “That’s Bracken.”
“What?” Nicky asked, alert.
“Can’t you smell that?” I asked, trying not to be rude because I was so wound up. We had rounded the curve directly under I-80 and beyond the Embarcadero. The neighborhood was a strange mix of warehouses, abandoned factories, and booming and busted dot-com industries. This weekday morning we were unsure whether we’d round a corner and bump into a young man wearing business casual or a young-man-made-old wearing bum chic. I stood still on the sidewalk, clenching Nicky’s hand, allowing all of the above to brush past us, and put my nose in the air. And there… beyond the smell of poorly washed humanity, beyond the smell of car exhaust, and even safe from the smell of the ever-present ocean and the diesel of the freighters, was….
“It’s sun on rain-soaked rock. It’s the cool earth under it…. It’s the overgrowth of brambles in the country…. Can’t you smell him?” But he was far away—trapped in a hole and far away from me. I stopped, turned in a slow circle, let the fog-laden breeze blow him against my face. There were empty buildings between us and a whole block of warehouses with broken windows in front of me. I agonized and turned in that direction.
Nicky was fumbling for the cell phone in my pocket and dialing Green’s number. “Green—we’ve got him… where is he? I don’t know—Cory, where is he?”