by Amy Lane
“Not an option,” Andres acknowledged. “Who is she feeding from?” he asked thoughtfully. “Can just anybody give her strength?”
“Only the men,” said another voice from the floor. Renny picked herself up and, much like Nicky, dragged herself to the table. Her hair was actually tame, but that was only because she was the one who shopped for them all and Grace practically dragged her into the bathroom to groom every morning before dawn. She was wearing one of Mitch’s old T-shirts, which went down past her hips, and a pair of men’s boxer shorts over her own cotton panties. When she went out she put jeans over them, but she hadn’t had the energy to leave the house today. She stopped at the refrigerator on her way to the table, and soon she and Nicky were dumping cubes of cold steak on cold tortillas and eating steadily.
“So the only requirement is that it be a man?” Andres asked, and Green thought he sounded semi-amused. Renny had been quite bitter.
“They have to touch her skin to skin and they have to want to get in her pants,” Renny said through a mouthful.
“Renny!” Max argued, the last body on the floor. He might have blushed, Green thought, but he had no strength left for shame.
“Well, it’s true!” she said, looking at him and shaking her head. “Pretty much every man in here has wanted her—yes, Max, even you.”
“I wasn’t denying it,” he said, humor glinting dully in his eyes as he pulled himself up. “I was just saying that maybe it doesn’t have to be sex—maybe it’s just because she’s our friend.”
“Then I could heal her too, and I can’t, and it’s not fair!” Renny burst out, still eating. She swallowed and looked up at Green for validation. “Mitchell died, Adrian died—I swear to Goddess, Green, I was looking at my own open goddamned grave. And she made everything so fucking normal. Go to class. Chase some pigeons. Bail me out of the park. Call you. Go visit home. And normal day to normal day, I walked away from that fucking grave and all I can do now is….”
“Keep us alive,” Max said gently. He too had migrated to the kitchen for food, and now he wrapped his arms around Renny. “You cook, you feed us, you shop for Grace, you keep us dressed. You haven’t been a cat for days. We would have fallen apart without you, puss,” he said, and Renny leaned into him. “I could feed you too, you know,” he murmured kindly in her ear, just loud enough for Green’s hypersensitive hearing to pick up, and Renny smiled weakly. Max wasn’t talking about food, and maybe he had learned something after all.
“I want her,” Andres said into the suddenly still room.
Green laughed outright, and everybody else looked at Andres in surprise.
“She saved me, she saved my kiss, she’s lovely and brave—I’d take her on any fog-lit night. Do I qualify?”
“What will you want in return?” This came from Bracken, who was stumbling in from the hallway wearing a pair of sweats and nothing else. He looked, if possible, worse than Green. His shorn hair was sticking out in clumps, and he was having trouble focusing his eyes. “Grace is bathing her,” he said to the others, who looked at him accusingly for leaving Cory alone. Then, “What would we need to give you to save her?” he asked again, looking at Andres like a drowning man might look at a rope made of straw.
“That’s a fair question,” Green said. “I love you, brother vampire, but we are lords of our people. You and I both know that. Your strength would save us all. What can we offer you to gain it?”
Andres nodded his head. “One thing—a permanent alliance between us. No more treaties. I want to be part of you.”
Green laughed. “Of all you see here?” he asked ironically, indicating the cheerless apartment and its exhausted, anguished denizens.
“You are alone here, brother,” Andres said gently. “This is not your faerie hill. And yet you’ve managed to save my kiss, save Orson’s folk, acquire the loyalty of the lesser fey to the extent that they mutiny against their employers—yes,” he added, because Green looked surprised, “the sidhe wait their own tables and do their own laundry these days. No sprites will attend people who betrayed the man who fought their enemy. Alone, you have shaken our communities to their core. Surrounded by your own people, you are a power no one has reckoned with. I will stand or fall with you.”
Green inclined his head, moved. “How will you seal this alliance?” he asked.
“With your sorceress’s blood, of course,” Andres said.
“Done,” Bracken broke in, and Green looked at him sternly.
“No,” he said. “You cannot bargain with her blood when she can’t speak for herself.”
“I’d bargain her into marriage with the other himself, if it would save her,” Bracken said brokenly, sinking into the chair next to Green’s. “She’s dying.” His voice fractured, and Green pulled Bracken’s head to his shoulder and kissed his temple, comforting them both. “She’s dying, and I can’t…. Goddess help me, I can’t seem to give her more of me.”
“She won’t take it, Bracken,” Green told him, knowing it was hard truth. “She’s just strong enough to not strip us to nothing. We may die of grief because of it, but she won’t let us die because of her.”
“Take my blood, then,” Bracken offered. “Take it all, if you must, but…. Goddess, I can’t lose her—not so soon after….”
“And she can’t lose you after Adrian,” Andres broke in bluntly. “No. I would not hurt your people, Green, for all the world. I owe you a debt of gratitude for my life, if not the lives of my people. We will bargain to seal the alliance when your sorceress is whole and well.”
Green knew there were tears trembling in his eyes, but he did not care. “Goddess bless you,” he said, his voice shredded and bleeding. He stood and gave Bracken a hand up.
“Come, brother, let’s see what he can do.”
Green led the way to Cory’s room, knowing that between Grace and the sprites there would be no sickroom smell. But there was no joy in Cory’s room either, with its bright movie posters and tumble of stuffed animals. The old-fashioned Irish chain quilt that Cory loved was there, and her hands moved over it restlessly as she lay, half dreaming. Grace had asked Arturo to send it after Cory had been brought back to the apartment, still bleeding and feverish. She lay against the sheets, freshly bathed and dressed in one of Green’s old white T-shirts. Grace had kept her in Green’s or Bracken’s cotton shirts—it seemed to calm her down when the two of them weren’t there. She was so thin, she was almost transparent. Her hair, clean now, lay lifeless against her still face. The strands free of the dye she’d worn until Adrian had courted her, it was a color between red and blonde, and still pretty for all that she looked nearly dead.
Abruptly her eyes opened, unfocused hazel. “You can’t have them,” she said to no one. Her eyes closed and she whispered to herself, “They’re mine. He can’t have them. Adrian, come back, you’re mine… he can’t take you….” She continued muttering quietly, but her body was too weak to toss back and forth.
Grace was next to her, smoothing her hair from her face and stroking her forehead with a cool cloth. When the men walked in, she looked up briefly and took in Andres’s presence. For a vampire who’d been eating regularly, she looked nearly as bad as the others. Worry had worn her long-boned features even longer, and anger that her people were under attack etched a fierce look in the bridge across her eyes. But her mouth quirked when she saw Andres, and something softened in her, and her canines, which had been prominent with her anger since Green had brought Cory home, retracted for the first time in days.
“Another conquest?” she asked wryly and looked back down at Cory, smoothing her hair from her face. “Good,” she said. “Cory can handle another man, if another man can handle her.”
Cory responded by speaking again. “Mine. They’re mine.”
Andres bowed slightly at Grace. “I will do what I can,” he said modestly—but when he looked at Bracken and Green, he must have seen something hard and painful in their faces, because his own expression changed.
> “What is she saying?” Andres asked gently.
“When Goshawk gave Nicky the power to attack her the first time,” Green said, steeling himself for the explanation, “what Nicky did was take her memories. Apparently Goshawk has developed the power to let his people feed on those memories like a robin feeds on worms—it’s human essence, pulled from its native element. According to Nicky, Goshawk’s people fed very well.”
Andres thought. “But Avians can’t usually do this?” he asked.
Green shook his head. “Not so far as we know. There is something… off, about Goshawk. Not just the subterfuge and attack—but he’s different from the other Avians.”
Andres was quiet for a moment, processing, and then he asked an unexpected question. “So that magic wall—the one that not even forty vampires could crash out of—that was just memories?”
“Not just any memories—special memories. The important ones. And like I said—and you know—we’re sexual creatures. Sex memories are going to add power.”
Andres grunted. “That’s… well, naïve, for one thing, to think that’s the only memory that counts. But are you serious? That energy was—”
“The lost virginity of over two thousand women,” Green said bitterly. “Nicky was only one soldier out there stealing for Goshawk—we sat down and did the math the other night. I don’t know what happens to the memories after they’re released from Goshawk’s power. At this point, as awful as it is, I don’t much care. But for Cory, when they took her ‘firsts’ from her, they took Adrian.”
It was Andres’s turn to close his eyes. “Ah,” he said, wiping a bloody smudge from the side of his nose.
“Adrian was her first kiss,” Green continued, inexorable. He had thought this through in his head during the long hours of watching her life trickle out of her wasted body, but he had never reasoned it aloud. “He was her first sex. And the night she came into her power—all of her power—was the first night she spent with the two of us. When Nicky stole her memories last week, he had no idea what it was he had done.”
“But Goshawk most certainly did,” Andres said grimly. He looked at Grace and asked politely, “Allow me?”
“Good luck,” Grace wished him sincerely. She looked up at Green and Bracken. “I’m going to go make something really tasty, like feta-ricotta lasagna. And you two are going to go eat every last fucking bite of it—do I make myself clear?” she asked firmly.
Bracken and Green nodded dumbly, and Andres chuckled as he moved past Grace and sat down to take Cory’s hand. He looked at her tenderly, and of course Green knew why. Anyone who had been beloved of Adrian would be beloved of Andres.
“Yes,” said Green roughly, responding to Andres’s earlier statement, “Goshawk knew exactly what he had gained from her memories—Nicky said he looked like a heroin addict getting a hit when he took them from Nicky. And the other night, if, as you said, she took out his captain when she took down the building, he wanted revenge—and he wanted more of her.”
“So he came looking for the other memories of her firsts,” Andres supplied. “How did he get into the building?”
“He must have been there already,” Bracken spat. “The lower fey checked out the hotel. There’s a giant garage—they think it was a basement before Cory did her….”
“Terraforming,” Green muttered, choking on his own hysterical laughter. “She calls it terraforming—it’s from Star Trek or something.”
“Anyway,” Bracken went on, “the gnomes think Goshawk was under the warehouse, maintaining that magic wall. After Cory blew through it and then transformed the building, he… he crept up into our room like a fucking cockroach and attacked her while we slept.” His legs folded beneath him, and he sat angrily on the deep brown carpet of Cory’s bedroom. “I don’t think she was awake for half of it. Her eyes were unfocused, and she was talking like some sort of old-fashioned book hero…. She didn’t really wake up until he stabbed her with his….” Brack swallowed. “With his bone stump, after she broke off his arm….”
Andres listened, amazed. He had not heard the whole story—nobody had. That Goshawk had been wounded badly, that they all knew. But that Cory had fought him off in her sleep? That was a story worth telling. “Goddess!” he exclaimed, and Green saw him squeezing Cory’s tiny hand in his as he stood by her bed. “I can feel her feeding from me, even from my hand. She’s so tough.”
“That’s what almost did her in,” Bracken said, his voice tinged with bitterness. He moved next to the bed and reached out to take her other tiny-boned hand. “Goshawk came not just for memories of Adrian and Green, he came for me too. She fought him back, and took back Adrian’s first kiss as well, but it cost her. She was defending the three of us, at least in her mind, and she kept saying….” His voice broke and Andres looked at him, wanting to hear the rest.
“What?” he asked, looking between the two men.
“She kept saying she’d die before he took us,” Green supplied, heartbroken, saying what Bracken couldn’t. It had probably been what Adrian had been thinking when he swooped in from the sky and clutched his death. “We’ve spent the last three days trying to convince her body that it’s not necessary.”
Andres let out a shuddering breath. “She’s extraordinary, your little sorceress,” he said at last. “And she smells so much like Adrian that I can almost taste his skin.”
With this, Andres gently released Cory’s hand, stood, and began unbuttoning his shirt. His chest was pale gold—his natural skin tone, deprived of sunlight for more than one hundred and fifty years—and covered with dark, curly hair. Green thought that, as cures went, waking up next to Andres wouldn’t be the worst thing that ever happened to Cory. With a minimum of fuss, Andres stripped down to his silk boxers, draping his suit gracefully on the chair. When he was done, he bent to place a tender kiss on her hot forehead, inhaling lightly and smelling Cory and her lovers. The two who weren’t Adrian had loved him, and Andres could smell that too. He closed his eyes and Green could see it all—pleasure, pain, and remembrance.
Andres shook himself to the present and looked up to Green and Bracken kindly. “Go, my brothers,” he said gently. “Shower. Eat. Be with your people. Sleep.” He pulled back the comforter, slid in next to her painfully tiny body, and pulled her into the shelter of his arms. “Let me see what I can do.”
Don’t miss this sneak peek at
Wounded Vol. 2
Coming in
August 2015
http://www.dsppublications.com
ARTURO
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch….
THERE WAS a thick coating of frost on the ground around the protection of Green’s faerie hill, and Arturo had to stomp through it with authority or he would find himself on his ass. It was hard to stomp with authority and still move quietly, but Arturo had been an Amazonian god 3000 years before, and he could handle a little frost. He didn’t like it—in fact, the frost pretty much reminded him of why he missed the jungles of South America badly on occasion.
He looked around. Green’s place dwelt on that invisible line that separated the Auburn scrub oak and straw grasses from the red dirt and pine of Foresthill. Past the confines of Green’s hill, the Northern California landscape reverted from a fairy-tale English garden, capped with the Goddess grove, to the native growth—red dirt, straw-colored grasses, and sugar pine trees on the eastern side, and the occasional scrub oak to the west. He was standing to the northwest, behind the sprawling house that dug into the hill itself, where the view from the side of the hill was unencumbered by houses in any direction. He was in a thicket of trees, and his bait was in the clearing itself.
She didn’t look like bait—she looked like a tall, pretty, dark-haired woman. She was one of Adrian’s saved. Since Adrian’s passing, Arturo had truly begun to tally the number of these people. Drug use was fairly high among the bright, uneducated young in Northern California—too often, promising lives wasted away in that quest for a little rent and one more hit.
Adrian had looked the part—he’d been pale in life and almost marble colored in death, and he’d appeared handsome and wasted and lost. He had often slipped under the radar at parties—both the rich ones and the poor ones—and collected lovers and broken hearts by the score. But he’d had a weather eye for people like Leah, the girl in the clearing. He’d come to the parties, chat up the lost, and occasionally he’d offer them a choice.
Vampire or were—which would you be?
The logistics were simple, even if the choice was hard. You are dying, he would say. You are spilling your life with every hit, with every drink, with every puff. I can help you change. Because the blood process that changed a person into a were-animal or a vampire cleansed the body of the drugs and kept it clean. Instant sobriety. Your life was your own again, with a few teeny tiny wrinkles that it was up to you to iron out. Mitchell Hammond would have been the first to say that besides Renny, the infected needle that had made him a were-animal was the best thing to happen to him. Leah, the werepuma in the clearing, prayed to the Goddess every morning in thanks, and very sincerely referred to Adrian as her patron saint.
Every one of Adrian’s saved under Green’s command did.
And Adrian had a talent for spotting the ones who could be saved. Arturo would suggest this one or that one from his own wanderings through the foothills underclass, and Adrian would say, sadly, “No, brother, he would go mad” or “She would waste away without a child… she may pull herself out yet” or “That one, that one would eat our throats as we slept.” And as Arturo watched, frustrated, he would eventually see that Adrian was right. In the matter of saving the lost, Adrian had always been right.
Arturo had been hard on Adrian for over forty years. He’d seen the playboy, the partier—the little kid that Green had never asked to grow up since his actual childhood had been so, so cruel. Arturo had even forbidden Adrian from seeing Cory until she’d lied to the police for him and he’d realized that the two of them were inevitable. To this day, Arturo marveled that Cory—little Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick, who’d had the dyed black hair and the five thousand earrings and the massive hostility—had possessed the wisdom to see what Arturo hadn’t seen until she’d showed him Adrian’s fineness through her own eyes.