Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  And Green felt that it was time, finally, for him to play grown-up and intervene.

  “Bracken, make another sandwich for Renny, because what Cory doesn’t eat, Nicky will. Max, she’s not a child, and there is no dress code here, so pulling a power trip on Renny because you want us to pull one on Cory is petty and beneath you.”

  Renny smiled with all her teeth, but Green wasn’t done yet.

  “And Renny, precious, stop needling him. You’ve been more girl than cat for a good long time—why are you backsliding now?”

  Renny sighed and turned around, apparently heading back for her bedroom. “I don’t know, Green—like you said, he was trying to get Cory not to fight. The whole hill could hear it. I want him to know I’m on her side.”

  With that she disappeared, leaving Green to pinch the bridge of his nose. “And you couldn’t have had that conversation not in front of us?” he asked nobody in particular. Then he turned back to his wife and their two husbands, who were all grouped around the pedestal table.

  “Okay,” he said, fairly satisfied. “Cory, I know you went to the bathroom and planned, but before you launch into your plan, I’m going to throw a wrench into your works, okay?”

  Cory looked up from a delicate nibble on a spare piece of corned beef. “Okeydokey,” she said, smiling faintly at him as though she was pretty sure she could take anything he had to dish out.

  He didn’t think she could take this.

  “Yes, you are perfectly capable of running a jailbreak or a rescue or a giant tunneling operation or whatever you have planned in that very clever brain of yours. I’ve seen you put together a team and accomplish great things, and I’ve seen you walk into a battlefield in a high dudgeon and stalk out victorious and destroyed in the same breath.”

  Cory set her food down on the plate in front of her and regarded him soberly from her enormous green-brown eyes, her head tilted to one side, and the entire room fell silent.

  “Yes, Green?” she said carefully.

  “I have no doubt you can and will do so again—this time too, so don’t start the fight I can see brewing in you, because you won’t need it.”

  “Yes. Green?” she repeated.

  Green nodded. He had her complete attention. “Good. That being said, you’re going to be taking along one person who does not usually accompany you in the field. You can do it with a minimum or a maximum of argument, but it will happen.”

  Her eyes widened, and Arturo turned around and regarded Green with eyes that shot literal copper-lightning sparks. “Fuck no,” Arturo breathed, as at the same time Cory’s mouth formed a perfect, plump little O.

  “Me,” Green said, then held firm as chaos washed the room.

  LATER THAT evening, after the fighting—which had been intense—and the explanations and watching Cory’s stubbornness come out full force and then recede as she was made to see reason, Green sat in the garden that sat on the top of the hill, closed his eyes, and thought of peace.

  Granted, he hadn’t seen nearly as much peace as he would have liked in the past eighteen hundred years of living. But then, if he’d been too fond of peace, he never would have fallen in love with Cory—or, for that matter, with Adrian.

  Neither of them was at all good for his peace of mind.

  “Rough day?”

  Green heard the voice, and his heart stuttered. Oh Goddess, he wasn’t sure which was crueler—Adrian’s death, or his ghostly visits in the garden.

  “Little bit.”

  “Is she giving you grief?”

  Green opened his eyes and smiled slightly. Adrian was clearly outlined, this night at the end of summer, his pale hair stark against the darkness, his heartbreak-blue eyes bright in the ambient light of the grove.

  “Of course,” Green said with a tired smile. “It’s her nature. Protect! Protect! Protect! Protect the children who need our help, protect the sidhe who can’t fight, protect the soldiers who fight under her—”

  “Protect the leader who needs to protect her?” Adrian asked dryly, sprawling his transparent form on the bench next to Green.

  Green turned his head sideways and smiled. “She tried to do this to me the night….” His voice dropped. Over two years later, and he could still barely say it.

  “The night I became a ghost in the garden. Yeah, mate—I hear you.” Adrian winked. Green was pretty sure that if there’d been a mini-mart in whatever afterlife Adrian spent the bulk of his time in, he’d be popping a ghostly bubble around his fang too.

  “Yes,” Green said softly. “That morning she wanted me to stay home—or at least nearby, so I wouldn’t be in the fighting.”

  Adrian sucked in a breath. “I wouldn’t have minded that myself,” he said. “Because I know you two dream about what happened next.”

  Adrian there one moment, a shower of blood the next.

  “Yes,” he repeated. “That. But see… if I hadn’t seen it, she would have had to tell me, and that would have been worse, except….” Oh, that night. Cory, covered in Adrian’s blood, pulling breath and power and breath and power until….

  Until she’d unleashed Armageddon on vampires who’d been tricked and drugged and magicked into fighting.

  “She wouldn’t have come back,” Adrian said, voicing what neither of them wished to.

  “She would have destroyed everybody she cared about that night,” Green said. “And then her heart would have broken, and she would have destroyed herself.”

  His words rang into the cool night air of the garden. Around them lime trees, oak trees, and rosebushes without thorns danced sinuously, taking the shapes of three lovers, two men and a woman, engaged in the most blessed of acts. This place had been created out of the magic of Green, Cory, and Adrian during their first night together, and if anything could convince Green that the three of them had been good and holy, it was the Goddess grove Cory had unleashed while her lovers had moved inside her.

  “But you didn’t bring that up during the argument,” Adrian said, a thread of irony in his voice.

  “No.”

  “Perhaps you should have.”

  Green looked at him. Adrian’s transparency was startling, because what he had said was so very purposeful. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Don’t get all snotty with me, mate,” Adrian said, manspreading his ghostly body over the bench with an insouciant shrug. “I mean, I’m all for treating the past with reverence, but you three are healed. You, Cory, Bracken—you’ve moved on. And that’s good. That makes my heart feel better. But I’m not the worst thing you’ve ever lived through, Green, Lord of Leaves and Shadows, and I know that.”

  Green took a deep breath and tried to contain his panic. A small wooden box in his heart threaten to pop open and spill a terrible murder, and he needed his thoughts in the here and the now of things, not in the then.

  “I don’t like talking about that,” he said, trying hard to keep his breathing steady. Failing.

  “I know you don’t,” Adrian said. “I never brought it up when I was there.”

  “Then why do so now?” Green felt ambushed, violated in the place he thought most sacred.

  “Because she needs to know,” Adrian said, his voice harder than Green had ever heard it in life. “You’re going to be obsessing about this during her entire pregnancy, beloved. Her womb will quicken, and you will grow more and more frightened, and she is not going to understand why if you don’t spill your secrets to her. And it wouldn’t hurt if Bracken knew too, given that he’s going to be the sane one in this little triad of gestation and pain. Do you hear me?”

  Green glared at him, angry as he’d rarely been angry with Adrian in life. “You tell her, then!” he snapped, feeling hundreds of years of serenity stripped from him in one sentence.

  Pain rippled across Adrian’s transparent features like a vast wave under a smooth, clear sea.

  “Actually, mate, I’m here to chat with you about that. Was right relieved when she and Brack weren’t out here, yeah?”


  Adrian’s cockney was the same as Green’s—it grew thicker and easier to recognize when they became stressed or upset, or when their memories took them back to when that was the voice that came naturally without thought.

  In this case, it was definitely because Adrian was upset.

  “What’s wrong, beloved?” Green moved, crouching at Adrian’s feet: a man supplicating his lover. Adrian’s fingers ruffled his hair like breeze.

  “Sometime soon, perhaps already, I’m not going to be able to come to her here—”

  “Wait—you’ll….” Oh Goddess. Green hadn’t realized how dependent he’d become on Adrian’s ghost to give him solace until this moment. “You’ll be gone?”

  Adrian’s low laugh was reassuring. “No, not from you. But possibly from Bracken—and not forever from her.”

  But…. But….

  “Why?” Oh, no. Cory depended on him as much as Green and Bracken did! “Why, Adrian? She’ll need you!”

  Adrian’s expression was that of a serene sorrow, and Green wanted to irrationally smack it off. Adrian, you asshole—go and die on them, and then… then leave them—leave her—again?

  “I can’t….” He stopped, tilted his head, and obviously made another go at rewording it. “The thing that brings me here,” he said after a moment, “it’s your love. That odd mix of love and magic and faith—that’s what brings me here, yeah? I’d follow that out of the bowels of the humans’ hell, I would, and it’s much easier coming from where I’m at. But… with the quickening, yeah?”

  Green closed his eyes for a moment and tried to remember everything he’d ever known about touch, blood, and song.

  “All her energy is going into her own body,” Green said, feeling dense.

  “Yeah!” Adrian’s face lit up, and Green remembered how much Adrian had hated explaining things. Always afraid, was Adrian, that the things in his heart weren’t valid, weren’t worthy. Always. “That’s it,” Adrian added after a thoughtful pause. “And much of yours and Brack’s as well, I would imagine. So all of that, focused into her—nothing left for me. I… it’s as it should be, yeah?”

  And Green’s own uncertainty slipped away.

  It was Adrian, and he needed his lover.

  “Yes,” he said, aching with the absence of touch. A hand to a knee, a knuckle down his cheek. Anything. “She’s growing people in her body, if you think about it. All of her strength, our strength, needs to go inward, right?”

  Adrian nodded, and Green saw a translucent blood tear slip down his cheek. “So not today, but soon. A week at the most, I think, but I don’t know time when I’m there. She’s already starting to….” He waved his hands. “Repel me a bit.”

  Green pulled back, surprised. “Repel you?”

  Adrian’s shrug was casual and ironic and all things Adrian. “I’m twice dead, mate—you think I belong anywhere near a bird who’s three times alive?”

  An interesting thing happened then.

  All that time Green had been worried about Cory’s reaction to the children, Cory’s ability to even carry sidhe twins, or her propensity for getting herself hurt when there was work to be done, and he had never once thought of what was actually going to happen at the end.

  “Three times alive,” he said in wonder. “Three times alive!”

  “Right, then,” Adrian acknowledged. “Yes. Yes, your babies—both of them, because I know you and I know Brack, and there will be no difference in how you love the other. But yes. It will hurt to give me up, right? But think of it, Green. A thing no one has tried to give you in….”

  Adrian swallowed unhappily—a characteristic that should have left him as a vampire, much less as the ghost of one. Of all the people at the hill, he did know that story, after all.

  “Over six hundred years,” Green answered bleakly. “Yes, it’s been that long.”

  Adrian let out a long sigh, and it felt as though a breath of autumn rushed through the heat of the Sierra Nevada foothills in August.

  “So, see?” he said after Green had shivered a moment. “We need to tell her—”

  “Which part?” Green asked, feeling inadequate to the task. “The part where you go away and leave her, or—” Oh, he couldn’t finish that.

  “She needs to know about it,” Adrian said, his voice soft. So soft. Green looked up and saw that he was fading away. “You need to tell her. Your heart needs to let go of that moment and live for the next.”

  Green narrowed his eyes, disgruntled by a ghost. “You got all fucking wise in the last two years, didn’t you, mate?”

  Adrian shrugged, insouciant, cavalier. “What can I say, beloved. The afterlife is really fucking boring without you.”

  “Then stay a while,” Green whispered. “Talk to me up here. They’ll have hashed out a plan in a little bit, but right now, I’ve got nowhere else to be.” It wasn’t a lie, because elves couldn’t lie, not without great physical discomfort. But it was only a truth because Green willed it to be—and they both knew that. He had, in fact, several duties tugging at him like tiny children demanding his attention.

  But for Adrian, there would be all the time in the world.

  Cory: What’d I Miss?

  PLANNING SESSION: Over.

  My people: Briefed.

  Status: Waiting on intel.

  Plan A: Mind-fuck county employees to spring our people.

  Plan B: Bust the boys out of jail discreetly.

  Plan C: Bring the wrath of the Goddess down on the unsuspecting law enforcement of Placer County.

  Implementation: Pending intel, tomorrow night.

  Mood: Low hum of excitement.

  Things for Cory to do: Brood.

  Well, I don’t actually plot it out like that. Not really. We talk, we discuss, we come up with a plan or two, we send Max and Nicky out into human land to have a few conversations….

  Okay. Then we wait.

  And then I brood.

  “Where’d he go?” I asked Bracken as soon as the kitchen emptied out. Lambent, perhaps the most violently inclined elf in my little coterie of killer/rescuers, was dragging up the rear, his brilliantly red hair afly in six different directions and his bitchy, snarky voice trailing behind him.

  “Yeah, she was a right bloody bitch before she was knocked up. D’you think she’s gonna get all sunshine and roses now—ow!”

  For a moment I was going to reprimand Renny. Then I realized Max was the one who had turned into a cat and clawed the back of his thigh as he was walking past. Max took off down the inside stairs that led to the lower levels of the house—and, I assumed, to the shape-shifter quarters and then outside—and Renny followed him. Their clothes remained in little puddles, and as Lambent bitched and threatened to burn the items as they sat, I could hear Charlie’s soft voice in chastisement.

  “You need to be nice about her,” Charlie said simply. “People are going to protect her, whether you mean it affectionately or not.”

  I caught Bracken’s eye and winked just as Lambent began to protest too much that he hated me and would sooner follow a stoned monkey than do one more nice thing for me.

  As their voices faded down the corridor, I leaned on the kitchen island again, facing the giant picture window that looked out from the living room and showed that utter dark night had been upon us for around two hours.

  As if to prove it, Grace bustled around the kitchen cleaning up, a host of sprites in her wake, as Arturo stacked dishes and flatware in the dishwasher.

  “Where’d who go?” Grace asked, bringing me out of my musings.

  “Green,” I said quietly. “I keep trying to….” I pointed to my head. “But… he’s being sort of opaque.”

  Bracken looked at me strangely. “He’s up in the garden—Adrian is there.”

  I blinked, feeling stupid. “He’s here?”

  Bracken thought about it for a moment. “Well, not anymore. He left a little while ago. I….” He frowned and looked at me funny. “I thought you were avoiding him.”


  “Now why would I avoid….” The ghost of our dead lover in the garden? When I was pregnant with children he never could have given me? I rethought that answer. “Well, I didn’t think of a good reason until now,” I admitted. “But why wouldn’t I feel him?”

  I did, usually. When he was in the garden looking for me, I could feel that ache in my chest, the space he left, throbbing with his absence. But then, from what he said, I was the one who called him to earth with my need.

  I hadn’t needed him tonight—but I wasn’t the only one who could call him, was I?

  “Green needed him,” I said into the silence. I looked up to see Grace looking back worriedly. “Why would Green need Adrian? I mean,” I shrugged, remembering my irritation when it had happened, “he won the argument, right? He’s going.”

  For once, Grace—my surrogate mom, and one of the few grown women I knew who would talk openly about being with a mate and what it would do to your heart—shrugged her solid shoulders and wrinkled her freckled nose.

  “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I mean… you four are going to have a lot to hash out in the next few months. Tonight’s big fuss is like… the tip of the rubber.”

  In spite of the odd melancholy of the moment, I snorted. “Other women would have said ‘iceberg.’”

  “Other women don’t need to go scare up a shape-shifter to feed,” Grace retorted—and Arturo perked up.

  “A shape-shifter?” He looked at Grace with soft, dreamy eyes. “I don’t suppose you’d consider a female this time?”

  Grace looked at him sideways and pulled her curly red hair out of her face. “Just to satisfy your prurient interest while you watch?” she asked archly.

  Arturo looked sheepishly back. “You feed from the male shape-shifters for your preference,” he said a little plaintively. I was reassured by Grace’s chuckle in return.

  “Oh, poor baby. Are you feeling the lack of another woman in your life?”

  “No! No, no, no, no, no, no….” Arturo backpedaled, no grace necessary. “I’m fine with you, my goddess, it was just a suggest—”