by Amy Lane
“And you’re perfect,” I sighed, able to speak now that I couldn’t read his reaction to my words in every expressive line of his grim face. With difficulty I held my left ankle out of the water. A jagged, wide white band of scar wrapped around it where a combusting vampire had nearly charred my flesh in two. “I scar.” I lowered my ankle and closed my eyes, and warm water washed the line of my hair. And again, until my clean hair lay against my scalp. I felt a shadow over my eyes and opened them to see Bracken, upside down, leaning over me. He had a tiny, sober smile at the corner of his lips. “I was there for that one,” he said. “And this one too.” And he straightened and touched my shoulder with warm soapy hands. I shuddered. My shoulder looked like a grenade had exploded through it and then the flesh had been reconstructed by a mad scientist. Bracken had almost killed me when I was wounded that time, because after the bone shrapnel had ripped through us both, his talent had called to my blood and I had almost bled to death. He had almost killed himself then as well, when he’d cut off his connection to his talent—and his own life force—in the effort to keep me alive. It seemed like a bad omen for our relationship, this scar.
He bent, pulled me up, and placed his lips to the back of my shoulder, where, Goddess knew, things could only be worse.
“You learned your power from these scars,” he said reverently. “I was fortunate enough to be there. Never apologize for being mortal, and brave.”
His white arms were around my waist, and my own hand rested, tiny and trembling, against the massed muscle of his thigh. Beautiful. Everything about him was beautiful. “I’m not particularly brave at the moment,” I confessed, feeling foolish and small.
“I fit just fine,” he said into my ear. Our skin was touching, I was surrounded by wet, soapy, hot, tender man, and I could barely breathe with the perfection of our touch. I could tell, even though he wasn’t facing me, that the corners of his swamp-colored eyes were crinkling. “I’ll prove it to you after you wash my hair.”
I turned and wrinkled my nose at him, because I didn’t want my awe of him to go to his head. “You’re still perfect,” I accused, and he tipped his head back and laughed.
“I thought I was an asshole,” he told me, and I smiled reluctantly.
“You are an asshole,” I assured him. “You’re just built like a god.”
“I,” he said, all arrogance, “am built like a sidhe.” He maneuvered us some more, and I let him, feeling very content to be passive now that we were safe and speaking civilly, and maybe not going to rip each other to shreds with our sharp and pointed love. I sat now, up on the step, with my chin resting on his shoulder. In spite of the scented water, I could still smell stone and pond and sun. Bracken.
“And I am built like a human,” I whispered into his ear. “A flawed, scarred, frightened human, with too many great big lovers in her bed.”
“Adrian was not that big,” he said levelly, running his hand up my calf. So now we had spoken of the other thing that would always hurt.
“I guess he was plenty big to be my first,” I responded, dumping shampoo in his hair. I massaged it in for a long time, because it had felt soooo good when he’d done it. “And more than big enough to leave a shadow,” I finished after a moment.
Bracken tilted his head back as I rinsed his shorn hair. “He was my first too,” he told me unexpectedly, then grimaced. “My first love, anyway.” He turned his head sideways to let me look in his eyes. “I let him think he was my first man besides Green. Adrian was… reluctant… to compromise our friendship at first. But I was relentless—I had to be. He was my first love, and my friend, and my rival, and my brother. When we had nothing better to do, we made love. When we had someone better to do, well, we usually competed over her. And when he died, I wasn’t sure what hurt more.” He paused, his voice growing gruff and clogged and sad. “I wasn’t sure if it hurt more that he was gone, or that I was so, so glad that you were still alive.”
My fingers stilled in his now clean hair, and I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and my legs around his waist. “I would never have known,” I told him, overwhelmed.
“I would have gone to my grave before you did,” Bracken said seriously.
I tightened around him, wanting to take him in my heart and make sure nothing ever hurt him again. “Trees will grow,” I said at last, “rain will fall, and we will be lovers again.”
And so we were. And it was wonderful. He touched my scars deliberately, first with his fingers, then with his mouth. His tender hands cupped and rubbed and smoothed over me, making that skin-slick sound that makes your sex shiver when you’re in bed and the lights are dim. And when the time came and he poised his body over me again, I ran my hands over his amazing chest and felt tears start that he would want me.
“Due’ane,” he said roughly, capturing my mouth, ravaging me breathless.
“Due’alle,” I returned, and the word had grown, and now meant more than lover, more than friend, more than all, and was now synonymous with Bracken. It was his name, his title, his being. He sheathed himself in my flesh and the world ceased to move, and it was only the two of us, moving, moving, the blessed dark within us and the light of each other without.
He fit just fine.
I WAS dreaming. Bracken’s fine long body was wrapped around me, and I dreamed that a man came into our room. He was swathed in dark robes in the style of the Middle East and I could not see his face, but he was not that tall—not as tall as Adrian, certainly not Bracken’s height, and very much shorter than Green. Adrian lay, sleeping and senseless, in his arms.
I stared at Adrian, hungry for the sight of him even in a dream, and my hands hurt, wanting to run my hands through that soft, fine white hair. Open your eyes, beloved, I thought, open your eyes and see me.
“Give him back,” I told the man in the black robes, and my voice sounded brave and noble and proud—everything we want to be in our dreams, but somehow don’t sound like in real life.
“Mine,” he said, and I couldn’t really hear him. He cradled Adrian in one arm, as though he were a package, and reached for me with the other. Except he wasn’t reaching for me, he was reaching for Bracken, whom I was now (in the way of dreams) clutching with one arm. I stood—no longer naked, but wearing a swirling sky blue robe that glowed with the magic coursing through my veins—and held Bracken tightly, and knew without looking that Green slept behind us and that they would sleep and I would never give them up.
“Mine,” the man said again, and I was suddenly furious.
“They’re all mine,” I told him clearly, and I could feel myself putting power into my voice. “They’re all mine, and you can’t have them.”
He didn’t seem to be listening to me. He kept reaching, and I knew that if I didn’t wound him, he would take them all—Adrian, Bracken, and Green.
Fuck him.
I did what Green taught me—I forced my power into my hand, and then I reached that hand toward the hand that was reaching for me. The scream that reached my ear was not dreamlike at all—it was humanoid, and it was real, and it was furious and in pain and I didn’t care. Adrian was still sleeping in the stranger’s arms as the man struggled against my nuclear-fusion hand, and I reached for Adrian with my other arm. He came, and yet he didn’t. I held him, and yet I didn’t. And then the stranger broke free by breaking off his arm in my grasp, so that I was left holding charred flesh and bone and a jagged end of bone protruded from my enemy’s robe. He wielded it in front of him like a lance and I deflected him with my arms, clutching my lovers before me, but not before he scratched my chest, leaving a poisoned, bleeding wound.
I hurled what was left of his flesh at him as I screamed obscenities, and my voice was just my voice, and I clutched them all—Green, Adrian, and Bracken—to my heart, and only my death could have torn them away.
I was abruptly awake, standing on the bed, screaming “You can’t have them, motherfucker, I’ll die first.” Bracken had rolled off the bed and was crouched forwa
rd, his hands out, and I could feel him using his talent toward the smallish dark-robed man bleeding in front of us. He was waving the charred, broken stump of his hand and shrieking in pain and horror. It was real. Goshawk was real, even though he looked very different than what I remembered of him from when I’d met with Nicky. Goshawk was here—he’d snuck in here as we’d been sleeping and had tried to steal them from me. My power was there in my hand, and it was real, and my blood was real as it seeped from a brand-new wound from my shoulder to my chest. All I could think was “you fucker,” but I was wounded and still half dreaming, so I screeched at him like a broken gear, which was all the warning he needed.
Abruptly he launched himself at the drape-covered window, and in a crash of safety glass and an explosion of feathers he flopped awkwardly away, part of one wing missing, his body spinning until it disappeared. Only a half-hearted ball of light followed him, because I knew that he’d escaped and I didn’t want to hit anything out there—including the Bay Bridge and all of its oblivious innocents.
When he was gone, I crumpled like a soda can in the now freezing room. “My Goddess, that fucker was strong,” I gasped, surveying the damage.
The air was rushing in through the window, and it was ice-fucking-cold, and there was glass all over the beautiful room, and blood, and some of it, I thought, feeling toward my aching, raw, and bleeding chest, was mine. Bracken closed his hands and stopped calling Goshawk’s blood and gathered me in his arms, and even though my wound spilled as soon as skin met skin, the touch of his flesh was like the smell of blackberries from home, Green’s home, and I closed my eyes and….
I was standing in the Chevron station, perched on top of a blackberry-covered hill. Adrian was looking at me, his bright blue eyes so, so serious, his head lowering toward me. He was going to kiss me, I thought, thrilled, or kill me. Either way, I was his. I was lost. I was in love. And then his mouth touched mine and it tasted like summer nights, and blackberries, and a little like blood, and a lot like bubblegum. I was drowning, drowning in his kiss, and I wanted him to bite me, take me, make love to me then and there, and I quivered because I knew that it would come….
I came to again, and Bracken was shaking me and calling my name.
“Bubblegum,” I sobbed against him. “I have him back—our first kiss…. I remember now. Oh, God, Adrian… how could I ever forget?” And I wept, weak and inconsolable, until Bracken shifted me in his arms and I felt—really felt—that charred rip on my collarbone. I whimpered, a low, keening grunt, and felt what I always felt when I was hurt and broken: nausea. Bracken knew the drill—he turned my head and I threw up with the white pain of the wound, and a long-fingered hand went to my face to pull my hair back as I spilled stomach acid and not much else on the pretty rich green. I could have stayed like that, I thought blurrily, for a little while longer, but Bracken’s hand had touched my face, and now he was running his cold skin all over my forehead in fear and he was making me shiver.
“Goddess, Cory—you’re feverish. You’re bleeding all over the place and you’re burning up. Where the fuck are my pants, dammit….” How the hell should I know where your pants are? I wanted to ask, but he’d set me down gently on the bed and it felt both queasy and freezing to be under the comforter in the spinning room and I didn’t want to have to say anything because Bracken and I were so new and what if what I said was wrong?
One of the last things I heard before I lost consciousness the first time was Bracken, his voice broken and desperate, calling Green on the cell phone.
“Green’s coming,” he said to me after a moment of darkness. He had found his pants and was cradling me against him, stroking my hair and pressing his forehead to mine.
“Goshawk can’t have you,” I said distinctly. “He can’t have any of you. You’re mine.” This seemed important—it seemed vital that Bracken know this. I repeated it again and again while Bracken held me close against him and whispered shushing noises at me, but he had to know that I’d fought for him. That I’d fought for all of them. There were more dark moments, and then both of them, Green and Bracken, were peering down at me, and my eyes were hot and dry and both beloved, beautiful faces seemed to grow and distort before me. “I’d die for you,” I said distinctly, and then I had to close my eyes altogether.
GREEN
Deals with a Kiss
THE EVENING knock on the door was not entirely unexpected, but Andres’s first words were.
“Goddess, Green, you look like hell.” Andres himself was neatly dressed, his hair coiffed and gelled, and he smelled lightly of cologne. He had obviously fed well recently—his cheeks were warm and rosy, and the only sign of his adopted species was the hint of canine that he flashed with his smile. If it weren’t for the honest concern on his face, his very health would have been insulting.
Green was not quite too weary to grin at the thought. His own hair was unwashed, dragged from his pale face in a disheveled queue. Even he knew there were hollows under his eyes. He didn’t have the heart to tell Andres that he himself looked better than any of the other people in his impromptu embassy. “Good to see you too, Lord Vampire,” he said formally. However, he didn’t step back. “Honestly, Andres, I’d let you in, but we’re knackered. I have no hospitality to grace you with, and my people are too weary for politics and strategy.”
The concern on Andres’s face was real. “I have dined tonight, my brother. Do not worry—I am in your debt, and I’ve always been a friend. The word is out about Goshawk’s attack. Please, let me in. Any help I can give the wounded is yours to have.”
“How do you know….”
“Goshawk?” Andres’s expression was fierce and triumphant. “Your people killed one of his captains at the warehouse—did you not know that?”
Green remembered the condor rent in two by the exploding sheet metal, and nodded.
“And Goshawk himself was wounded, badly,” Andres continued. “He’s been sending people in to make treaties with all of us. Only the elves have been receptive.”
Green’s face went taut. “I will drink his blood first, my brother.”
Andres nodded. “And I will pour it for you,” he said with equal force. Then, knowing the answer simply by reading Green’s face, he asked quietly, “Who was hurt?”
Green backed up, and Andres entered. The sprites were efficient—there were no dishes in the sink, no dirty tissues, no clothes on the floor. But there were three exhausted people crumpled on the pillows in front of the couch, and whimpers coming from the room down the hall.
“Goddess,” Andres said, blowing out a breath. “What happened here?”
“She’s sick” came a voice from the crumpled people on the floor. It was Nicky, with his head on Renny’s stomach and his own stomach covered by Max. “Goshawk wounded her, and…,” he trailed off, as though the words themselves had wandered away.
“Can’t you heal the wound?” Andres asked Green, still uncertain how one sick sorceress could so badly damage what should have been a thriving household.
“I did cure the wound,” Green said, sitting exhaustedly down at the table. “The wound is closed and scarred—but….” He looked away, his expression desolate. “She turned twenty in June, you know,” he said after a moment. “She turned twenty, and came into her power and lost her lover, all in the span of about six weeks. And she was shredded and wounded and weak. And Friday night, Nicky attacked her. Monday afternoon, she could barely walk. Tuesday, she was tearing across the damned city, trying to find Bracken. She found him, she saved your people, and then the fucker attacked her again.” He looked at Andres, rubbing his face with a trembling hand. “She won the attack—but she’s feverish and weak. It’s Friday again, and the only way we can keep her alive is to lie down with her and feed her our life force, and she’s so weak, she’d kill us all if she let herself, but she won’t.” And that, perhaps, hurt most of all.
“Goddess,” Andres swore, stricken. “And you’d do it, all of you—you’d kill yourselves
to keep her.”
Nicky dragged himself out of the people pile, and Max and Renny shifted to lie on top of each other. His dark rust-colored hair was lank and flat to his head, and dark freckles stood out on sickly white skin. He wore a pair of boxer shorts and one of Green’s T-shirts. Nicky had been living with Goshawk’s enclave since he came out from Montana—everything he owned, including his textbooks, was now gone forever, and he’d been wearing other people’s clothes all week, but he hadn’t complained once. Slowly, like his muscles ached, he made his way to the table, and Green automatically shoved a bowl full of trail mix his way.
“There’s meat in the fridge, brother—eat it,” Green said, tired authority still ringing from his voice.
Nicky nodded. “She forgave me for attacking her,” he said as he moved, trying to explain to Andres and even Green why he’d give his life for her. “She welcomed me here, with her people.” He sat, putting a hand in the bowl. “She even tried to save me from falling in love with her,” he said through a mouthful of trail mix. “She practically threw me out of that warehouse—she tried so hard to keep me from bonding with her.” He swallowed hard. “It’s one of the things that weakened her to this. How do you repay that kind of love?”
Andres nodded, not really understanding, and Green met his eyes. “If we could, we’d bring her over to you, but we can’t,” he said after a fraught moment. “She’s so weak, I keep thinking that converting her may be the only way. She’s got three of Adrian’s marks still riding her—she’s a hair’s breadth away from being one of yours.”
Green could see Andres digesting this.
“Would she welcome that?” he asked.
“The cure might be worse than the disease,” Green said bluntly. “I’m afraid that if we cut her off from sunshine, it would be like cutting Bracken off from blood. She’d grieve away her immortality,” Green said bluntly.