Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “Yeah,” Cory said, some of her badass leader bitch queen seeping out. “Uhm, you know. Anyway—when I’m on the field, it’s usually much more in control than that.”

  “True the fuck that,” Lambent said. He liked to wear jeans so tight they were practically leotards, and long-sleeved shirts in bright, flame colors. “But speaking of control, what is it I’m doing?”

  Cory took a deep breath. “You’re our worst-case-scenario man. Our guys are in the center of a jail. Metal, stone, and high-impact Plexiglas. If we need to blow a hole in there to get them out, it’s you and me, buddy.”

  Lambent’s eyes hooded, and a replete, nearly postcoital smile graced his flame-thin features. “Beautiful,” he purred. “I’ll set shit on fire with you any day.”

  “You’re gonna blow the place up!” Cami squealed, and the entire room shook itself free of the magnetic spell of Lambent’s anticipation. “Dylan is in there!”

  “Yeah, he is!” Cory snapped back, but not too gruffly. “So are two of my husbands and my best friend. And Max, who’s mostly a friend. Do you know what iron and cold steel do to Green’s people? Do you have any idea what he’s risking by walking in there and participating? Max here is risking his life and his career. Everybody in this room is risking exposure, injury, or worse to make sure your boy gets out of there with his skin and his new friend intact, so just chill the fuck out. Colored walls happen, and so do fucked-up situations. We do what we can to clean it up. The only reason you’re going is to calm them down when we get them out, but you know what? We can roll their minds and put them under just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “So if you want to come along, you need to pull your shit together, Cami. Do you think you can do that?”

  Cami’s lower lip wobbled for a minute, and I almost thought my beloved had made a rare and fatal mistake in judgment. But then the girl firmed her lip and stood up, shoving her hands in her jeans pockets with a bit of misplaced bravado.

  “I can deal with anything you can,” she said, trying to be tough.

  Cory’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, good. I’ll remember that when I’m pushing watermelons out my cooter. Let’s roll.”

  A collective groan followed her out the door, but my beloved? When she was on a mission, she didn’t walk—she strode, and her back said clearly, “I don’t give a fuck.”

  I got hard again just watching her walk out the door.

  I looked at Green to see if he shared my excitement. What I saw was not reassuring.

  We were the last people down the stairs to the garage, and he hung back to make sure nobody got left behind.

  “You are looking awfully tense,” I said quietly. “Are you sure you’re up for this?”

  He shot me an evil look. “Are you sure you’ve been out of nappies long enough to ask me that?”

  I suppose anybody else might have been hurt, or angry, or offended. But I was the youngest sidhe in the hill, and I had lived a life of indulgence. I didn’t get hurt or angry or offended, because I was most obviously loved.

  “You’re not worried about her, are you?” I asked.

  “She can’t do this forever,” he said, mouth set mutinously. “Her body is going to grow thick and slow, and this isn’t going to be like carrying human twins. They’re far too large for her, and—”

  “And all the more reason to let her out now!” I said, panicked. I had tended our girl as she recovered from illness and injury more than once. She was the world’s prickliest patient, and she had—more than once—driven me to home improvement. More specifically, she’d driven me to fix the many things I’d destroyed in a fit of temper. “She needs to be the one to call it quits—and Teague needs to be here for her to do it,” I said adamantly. “I’m not telling her she can’t—”

  “I know, I know,” Green said, holding his hand up as though he was soothing me. Usually it worked, but the idea of dealing with our beloved, tightly wound and pacing during an op? Or, hell, going out on an op without her, and having her bitching in my head for the entire fucking operation?

  I shuddered. “Green, don’t worry about her. Not now. Afterward, yes. If one of us gets hurt, she’s going to need us. But she gets better at this shit every time we go out.”

  “I get it, I get it.” He sighed and kept walking down the stairs. “She’s a force of nature—we knew that. If it wasn’t for her fucking will, she wouldn’t be pregnant in the first place. I understand.”

  I paused him with a brief touch on his sleeve. “Then what’s wrong?” I asked. Oh Goddess, we couldn’t do this now—Green couldn’t do this now. He was our rock, our sweet brown earth and our promise of spring. If he was losing his shit before a rescue operation, we didn’t have a fucking hope.

  Green sighed and graced me with a small smile. “Bracken, you know human women lose their children all the time, right?”

  I blinked at him. This was not a problem with the sidhe. They conceived because they willed it. Something in their heart chose the child’s form and the genetic traits that child carried, often not even descended from the parents who conceived the child. With all of that magic floating around, a sidhe woman didn’t conceive a child without absolute certainty that she would deliver as long as she was alive when labor began.

  “Are you saying—” For a moment, my world turned black. These children in her womb—I had felt their cells multiply, and I knew that even now they were developing hearts and sensitivity to light and sound. She could lose them?

  “No!” Green snapped. Then he paused. “No. I’m sorry, Bracken. I’m not trying to frighten you, or scare her into quitting. I’m just saying—human women know that as soon as a pregnancy is confirmed, there are things that could go wrong with it. She probably hasn’t let herself think of that, but believe me, it will hit her, and it will be terrifying to her. It’s just….” He scrubbed his face with his hand. “I’m not a father yet, Bracken Brine. But before Adrian, before Mist, I almost was one.” He shuddered. “I will tell you both the story soon. It obviously—”

  “Didn’t end well,” I said bluntly, horrified. “I am so sorry, brother.”

  Green took my hand and kissed the back, the gesture both courtly and reassuring. “I know you are. I know you’ll both weep for me, and I don’t want that. But until I tell you, until you both tell me what I need to hear, it will haunt me well and thoroughly, and there’s not much I can do about that.”

  I grinned at him quickly. “You could make love,” I said. Goddess knows, the night before had helped me deal with our beloved as the bearer of our children. Her body had felt different—heavier, burgeoning—when I’d been inside of her. But instead of frightening me, it had excited me. That was our children who were wreaking that change.

  She was, as always, magnificent.

  To my relief, Green smiled back. “I could,” he said, his ageless eyes crinkling at the corners with the force of his grin. “In fact, I think that’s a brilliant idea.”

  “Yo! Guys! Move it!” Cory snapped from down at the bottom of the stairs.

  “But may I suggest later,” I said, feeling wise.

  “An excellent suggestion, Bracken Brine,” he said, releasing my hand only to stroke my cheek. Oh, good—whatever epiphany Green needed to overtake him, it would be delicious if he encountered it in our bed while I was there.

  A man never forgot the times he had lain with his leader, the most sensual sidhe in all of the Americas.

  The experience grew even deeper with our beloved in between us. Perhaps it could heal our healer—and it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

  AN HOUR later, sex was the last thing on our minds.

  “You can hear Green?” I asked nervously. Usually Green could drift in and out of all of our minds—but this time Cory was our nexus, to keep things clean. We were standing behind an abandoned business front not far from the jail. The others had parked in the lot and been buzzed into the jail not long ago. It was odd to see Green all done up in a cream-colored suit with his hair pulled into a knot a
nd held there by wooden chopsticks. It hadn’t been until he’d been shoving the sticks through his butter-colored hair that I realized each chopstick had the potential to be a weapon.

  Clever, clever man, I thought.

  And then Nicky had shown me the tiny wires that lined his shoelaces, and I’d been amazed.

  “Cory! Look! Did you see this? He’s got nylon wire in his shoelaces—”

  “Cool!” she’d said, watching as Nicky precisely made the knots on his Hush Puppies so you couldn’t see, carefully not cutting his hands. “What are you going to do with that?”

  “I’ve got no idea,” Nicky said cheerfully. “But they’re going to strip search us, and I was thinking that garrote, whip, handcuffs—there had to be a use for this, right?”

  Cory grinned, bloodthirsty as always. “So right,” she agreed. “But don’t tell the vampires. They’re all armed, just in case. They’ll feel bad if they know you’re walking in there with shoelaces and a shape-shifter’s weapons. It will hurt their feelings.”

  We’d shared a quiet smile then, and I’d felt much better about watching Green and Max lead the way into the blocky front building of the jail for their after-hours visit.

  I’d left Cory watching the entrance for a moment, and I’d had my own moment of pride as I’d clipped a wire to the camera feed and then sent force of will into all of the equipment attached. (I didn’t say I was going to do it without magic, just that taking the electrical and electronic-engineering courses helped me do it.) There hadn’t been a dramatic pop or anything, but I’d been able to sense nowhere else for my will to go, meaning all of the watching devices broke at the same time.

  Renny trotted up in girl form when I was done and rubbed her cheeks against my forearm. “That was clever,” she said quietly. “Do it again.”

  “I have burns on my fingers just from touching some of the components,” I admitted, pulling out the blessed saltwater “sanitizer” that Cory made for all of us and forced us to stash in our pockets. “Next time I’m going to remember some of Max’s gloves.”

  Renny wrinkled her nose, and if she’d had whiskers, they would have ruffled. “Next time, let me do it,” she said. “I can strip the wires and dial in, and then you can burn yourself.”

  I smiled at her, pleased. “Excellent! That’s a plan.” We both sobered. “I’m going to go see if she’s getting any transmissions from Green.”

  Cory looked like what she was getting wasn’t any good at all.

  “He’s letting me see with him,” Cory said, eyes closed. “And… he and Max and Nicky keep exchanging glances. Grace’s eyes are whirling red. There’s something off in there.” Her expression changed. “Wait… what do you mean, you can’t roll their minds? Marcus, goddammit—wait—the inmates aren’t what?”

  Renny and I steadied ourselves, and Renny whisked her T-shirt over her head and started to shimmy out of her jeans.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Cory snapped. Her words echoed off the cracked stucco of the abandoned building and bounced off the broken granite parking lot. It was past nine o’clock at night, and there were very few cars driving down Richardson Road. Nobody to notice the lot of us skulking, or even the three SUVs parked by the mini-mart on the corner. Nobody to see us gathering around Cory in a protective circle while she played dispatch central with the assortment of elves and vampires inside her head.

  “Okay. Okay. Lambent!” she snapped. “Arturo! Lambent! Everyone to me, goddammit, now!”

  The adrenaline coursed through my body. My hands were still but my breath came quickly.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, ready for the worst.

  “The guard led them to the conference room,” she said. “Green said the place reeks of werewolves, and Max just took off his clothes.”

  “Nicky?” I asked, fearful for our smallest, weakest mate.

  “He just took off his shoelaces.”

  “Oh, holy mother of fuck,” I muttered. I looked behind me when I heard Lambent’s almost silent footsteps on the gravel. “Shit just got real.”

  Cory: Flaming Balls of Real Shit

  OH, I did not like the look of this.

  Green and I had discussed this as we’d driven down Bell Road, and I was happy for the distraction. Bell Road used to be not much more than the occasional house set far back off the road, but it had become consistently stocked with housing developments, churches, and strip malls, and seeing that much human stuff made me a little sad.

  It also made me very wary of how many people were going to be about. Yes, the vacant strip mall near the jail was a great place to huddle in the closing dark, but still, Highway 49 wasn’t a lonely country road anymore. And as impressed as I was with Bracken’s little camera trick—and I was so fucking proud of my great brawny lover, I couldn’t hardly stand it—I was very aware that there would be policemen and prison guards coming and going from this location on a fairly regular basis. The AC/DC song didn’t happen because nobody had ever tried this before.

  So all things considered, talking about how much of Green’s consciousness I could use when he was dealing with the human world was really sort of a relief.

  “So usually we just do words, right?” he’d said, nodding at me. I looked back and nodded, wishing we were anywhere but on our way to do something dangerous. He was dressed in a linen suit that made him look lean and sinuous and sensual, with his butter-colored hair pulled up into a businessman’s bun (or a queue and a knot—I wasn’t going to argue), and he’d already shown us what the chopsticks could do. His wide-set emerald eyes were sober, and his kindness and intelligence just beamed down on me like magic light from heaven.

  There was not another creature on this planet as beautiful as our Green.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. “Words.”

  “Well, words are going to distract me. I’ve seen you when you’re hearing the vampires—you look like you’re playing chess with yourself. I can’t be doing that in there.”

  I was suddenly wracked with a shudder that almost made me vomit—and not because Bracken had taken that last curve just a little bit fast.

  “I hadn’t even thought of this!” I said, horrified. I held my hand to my mouth and tried—oh God, I tried—not to let the nausea take over for me.

  “Grace,” Green said evenly, “do you have the saltines I suggested?”

  Grace was sitting with Arturo in the seat behind us, and she passed the crackers to Nicky next to me. Nicky started handing me saltines on a semiregular basis as he listened avidly to Green.

  “Why do theh eben work?” I asked, crunching doggedly on two crackers at once.

  “Because your body needs simple carbohydrates, and when you get a shot of adrenaline—as you do from fear—you eat all of them up. So next time we offer to pack you a sandwich before an op, please don’t roll your eyes like a child,” he replied mildly.

  I had the grace to feel sheepish. “I really didn’t think I was hungry,” I apologized.

  “When this is over, you, Bracken, Nicky, and I are going to have a very, very long talk about your limits, do you understand me?”

  He was serious, and I’d been queasy enough to agree with him wholeheartedly. “Yes, Green,” I said, giving him my big-eyed, I-truly-do-worship-you-so-can-we-drop-it-now look.

  “You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown,” he said, trying not to smile.

  I swallowed a saltine whole so I could grin at him. “They’re not really brown,” I told him truthfully.

  “Neither is excrement. Now let’s get this done. I can’t relay all my information to you verbally, you understand?”

  I nodded and ate another cracker. Without looking I reached toward the drink holder, and Nicky gave me my soda. I took a sip and glared at him, because soda isn’t chocolate milk, and the surprise was unnerving. He shrugged and gestured to Green, and I got my head in the game.

  “So, what I want you to do is open your mind and ‘listen,’ the way you do when the vampires are going to be broadcasting. Ca
n you do that?”

  I nodded, sincerely wanting to be helpful, and set my brain on broadband so I could hear “radio vampire.”

  “I’m fine, dammit. Stop worrying!”

  “I’ll worry all I want.”

  “She needs you.”

  “She does. I’m shocked as fuck.”

  “You should be something as fuck, ’cause we’re not getting any.”

  “You want some?” Marcus sounded genuinely surprised.

  “I always want some.”

  “Then when this is over, I’ll come home and fuck you so stupid….”

  Phillip’s grief-sick mind suddenly burned gold with images of him and Marcus together, and I backpedaled fast and opened my eyes.

  “Uh, Marcus and Phillip seem to be doing fine,” I said, a little shell-shocked.

  “So glad to hear it. Now do it again—but tune the vampires out unless they’re thinking specifically at you, yes?”

  I did, and suddenly a picture appeared behind my eyes. It was similar to what I could see with my eyes open, because it was in the SUV and we were on Bell Road, but it was one seat over and the picture was of me.

  “Oh my Goddess!” I started waving my hands over my face. “I’ve got crumbs! And a booger! You couldn’t have told me I had a cliffhanger? Dammit, Green!”

  Suddenly two hands appeared, framing the square, freckled peasant’s face, made broader by the severe ponytail and plainer by the black T-shirt that went with the tight-fitting jeans. Gently, Green brushed at the mung on my nose, and it was unnerving as hell to see him doing it while I felt his fingertips on my skin.