Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “Done.” I didn’t say “I love you” or “Good luck!” or anything else sappy. Dammit, if Green didn’t know that by now, then I had failed at being a wife and a lover, and my words wouldn’t mean jack shit.

  “Grace—you get Max the fuck out of there. Marcus and Kyle need to take the new guys.”

  “What about Green?”

  “I assume he can fly!”

  Green’s wicked chuckle in my mind reassured me, and it was time to roll.

  “Renny,” I said tersely, “we’ll meet you at the SUVs. You’ve got a key, so go power up the parked one—Whim’s got the other one ready. We’re going in T five and counting.”

  “Five!” Brack wasn’t that great at flying on his own yet, but I wasn’t going anywhere without him. He turned and cupped each hand down by his thighs. I stepped up and wrapped my legs around his waist, and he grasped me around the bottom. It was only stable because I was short and he was a fucking behemoth. As we were, if I leaned forward against his neck, I could hold my hands up and surround the two of us and Arturo with a cannon-shot thick, iron-heavy transparent shield of pure fucking magic.

  I looked at Lambent and shouted so he could hear me over the hum of the massive power I’d gathered. “Make it look good, and try not to set the county on fire!”

  He nodded his head in a brief salute.

  “Four!”

  I wasn’t great at flying, but I didn’t need to be great. Arturo had started up a low hum of power on his own. It wasn’t as strong as mine, but it was equal to Green’s, and he could fly too.

  And he knew which side of the room was the west side and which was the east.

  “Three!”

  Bracken let go of my butt and put one hand on Arturo’s shoulder. I felt the thrill of his charge under my fingers and then let it go, concentrating instead on the heft and weight of magic making us a cannonball of magic and flesh. I wrapped an inner layer of power around the lot of us, so we would be cushioned on air when that cannonball hit.

  “Two!”

  Please Goddess, let this work!

  “One! Lift off!”

  I made us fly. Arturo steered us. Momentum equals mass times velocity. Our magical heft was roughly the equivalent of three SUVs, between Arturo and me. By the time we crashed through the roof of the Placer County Jail, the surrounding trees and the earth under our feet were whizzing by like the earth under a plane before takeoff. Please, Arturo, please—

  Blam!

  The concussion of our projectile smashing into the building leveled trees immediately near us. It shook down phone lines and blew the windows out of the vacant strip mall.

  The jail was built tough—concrete, steel, rebar. It was built to withstand blasts from inside and out, but it was not built to withstand us.

  We punched a neat hole in that roof. Then Arturo and I instinctively spread out our force as we crunched through the metal and concrete of the conference room, making sure we didn’t plow right on into the levels below us.

  The three of us in the bubble fell heavily to our knees, because not even magic could protect us completely from the destructive momentum. Above us, Lambent initiated a concussive explosion for cover, an improbable blasting upward of all the rubble we’d just created in our crude but effective jailbreak.

  I stumbled to my feet and looked around, slightly wild-eyed. The conference room we’d crashed into was now a gaping half-moon staring into the sky, and I’d turned around twice before my ears stopped ringing and my vision cleared well enough to see the human forms of the people we had jumped in to save.

  “Connor!” a voice shrieked, and I squinted into the dust in time to see a figure in what was probably an orange jumpsuit hovering over a prone figure in the same attire.

  As we watched, the big gash on the prone figure’s head began to heal, leaving only blood behind.

  “Connor?” the other boy said uncertainly.

  “Dylan,” Green said, taking his arm. “In about two minutes, every werewolf in the jail is going to be scrambling over the gap in that wall.”

  Brack and I looked behind us and saw the space we’d crashed through. Sure enough, the bank of cell doors behind it had been electronically opened, and there were figures scattered across the hall.

  Breathing figures, pulling themselves awkwardly onto all four feet.

  “But… but Connor…,” Dylan protested. Green served me well—he soothed Dylan while I went and checked out Nicky, Grace, and the others.

  “What were you going to do with the shoelaces, Nick?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.

  “They’ll come in handy someday,” he said with dignity.

  “But not today,” Bracken intoned. “Change, little man, and meet up by the SUVs. We need to get the fuck out of Dodge.”

  Nicky blurred into the graceful form of what could have been a very large kestrel falcon—or a condor or a vulture, really, except for the ugly head. Avians weren’t technically any bird but Avian, although families did evolve certain characteristics.

  As Marcus, Kyle, and Grace were dusting themselves off, I heard some whining and movement outside the conference room. In the corner of this room, someone gave a groan, and when I turned my head, I saw a guard in a blue uniform passing out completely, a lump and a minor gash on his head.

  “He’ll be okay,” Grace said.

  “Good. Grab the guys, and let’s boogie!”

  Green may or may not have completely convinced Dylan that it was okay to go, but it didn’t matter. Marcus grabbed Dylan, Kyle grabbed Connor, and I called, “Meet by the cars!” before they vaulted into the air. Nicky followed in an explosion of wings, and Grace put her hand out like a grand dame, ready to escort Green.

  “I can fly on my own,” he said, arching an eyebrow.

  “But I so rarely get to play the lady,” she protested.

  “And I’m chopped liver?” Max asked acidly.

  Grace turned and bowed, then pulled him into a hug like a favorite nephew, and they zoomed away. Green winked at me, and I didn’t even need to do a countdown.

  The world went by much less quickly on the way to the cars—and when we got there?

  Well, the air conditioner was on full blast.

  Which was great, because it disguised the shaking that took me over the minute Renny hit the gas.

  RENNY’S DRIVING might have terrified me on any other day. Given what we’d just done, though, having her little lead foot haul ass to pull us out of there was a true blessing. I glanced behind me and saw the other SUV hard on our tail, Charlie at the wheel, and had a moment to check on the vampires.

  “All good?”

  “Yup. You guys need to take the long way—dodge 49 if at all possible. It’s about to be ass-full of cherry tops and uniforms.”

  I relayed the message to Green, who had gotten into the other car, all the better to deal with what-the-fuck-ever was going down there.

  “Cops. Excellent. We’ll dodge down Richardson, then. Grace is in here with us, luv, so don’t worry about us, yes?”

  “Why’s Grace….” I looked around and realized Arturo was missing. “Okay. Headcount. Tell me who you have, I’ll tell you who I have, and if we need to go back, I’ll—”

  “Calm down. Everybody is accounted for. The boys, Cami, Whim, Charlie, Arturo, and Grace are in here. Fucking crowded. Hooray for SUVs.”

  I laughed and looked around. “Me, Renny, Bracken, Nicky, and Max.” I looked to the front of the car, where Max was trying to slip on a pair of emergency gym shorts we kept in the back. “Max is naked.”

  Green’s chuckle in my head almost but not quite reassured me. Werewolves. Funky werewolves. Worse than not good. This was crossing-the-streams bad.

  In a terrible rush, all of the fear I’d kept at bay when I’d realized that our people had walked into a trap—that Green had walked into a trap—assailed me. If I thought I’d been shaking before, I’d been mistaken. In one power-slam of delayed adrenaline, I was shaking, clammy, and—surprise!
—queasy as fuck.

  And Renny was blowing through the back roads of Auburn like she was driving a stealth jet instead of a black Navigator.

  Green tried to calm me down—but there was something going on, something loud, in the car with him. I gave him the equivalent of a kiss on the brow and pulled out of his mind.

  Bracken was holding me, rocking me back and forth while I tried to control my breathing and fought not to whimper—or throw up.

  “Jesus, do we still have any fucking crackers?” he snapped.

  Nicky draped over the backseat, which he had to himself, and rummaged. I stared at his bare ass for a minute before it dawned on me that there was more than one kind of full moon going on in the world.

  “Holy shit, Nicky, what happened to your clothes?” Nicky’s people were the one shape-shifter that kept their clothes through a shift—but sometimes, if the stress was high enough or they lost feathers or something, not everything showed up.

  Nicky popped up and threw a box of crackers at me. Bracken caught it neatly and handed me a package, which I pushed away. He grimaced.

  “One minute,” he growled at Nicky. Then, to me, “Eat them. Don’t be stubborn. If we have to pull over for you to puke, someone’s going to put us together with the big hole in a government building, and we’ll be fucked.”

  I nodded, resting my sticky forehead against his bicep. That fear for Green hadn’t faded, and adding to it was the fear for Bracken, who’d picked me up, no questions asked, and let me fly us both into a building.

  The cold picked up a notch—where was a thermometer for Kelvin?

  “Goddess,” I whispered, feeling tears burn at the back of my eyes. “That was close.”

  Bracken’s big hand reassured me, stroking my hair from my forehead and down my back. As he did it a few more times, I started to feel the warmth of his hand seeping through my hair to my skull, my neck, between my shoulder blades.

  I reached out a shaky hand, and Bracken handed me the open packet of saltines. I munched on one doggedly, not tasting it, just feeling as the carbs slid into the roil of my stomach and calmed it the fuck down.

  “It’s like Green’s talking to my tummy,” I mumbled, still clinging to Bracken. “Nicky, why are you naked too?”

  “Because I was scared shitless,” he confessed, leaning over the seat into the little Bracken/Cory confab that was going down. “Seriously—you couldn’t smell it, because, you know, concrete dust and demolition rubble—but it was bad. The wolves smelled sickly sweet, like they did in Monterey, and….” Nicky shook his head. “Jesus, Cory, what were they doing in there?”

  I slid my hands under Bracken’s shirt, and he yelped. “Goddammit. Every time—your freezing hands are killing me!”

  “I’m sorry if my sheer stinking terror inconveniences you!” I snapped. Bracken reached under his shirt and trapped my hands against his skin.

  “Calm down,” he said softly. “You don’t get this scared on a run. You don’t. You’re a little upside down right now, but—”

  “But Green and Nicky were inside, and you, me, and Arturo were becoming a big people-ball,” I said, that fear throbbing through my voice. “Don’t you get it? It was all of us. It was our entire family in there.” I shuddered hard. “Jesus, I miss Teague.”

  Bracken grunted and dropped a kiss in my hair. “You would have killed yourself to save him anyway,” he said, but the humor in his voice only rubbed my fur with electricity.

  “Not when I’m pregnant with your baby,” I said, grim and hard and rough as a tumbled concrete block. “Not when I’m carrying Green’s.” Equal. Green’s and Bracken’s children in my belly. “Not when our entire family is at stake in there.”

  Oh, God. Didn’t this whole thing start with my insistence that my life was mine to give as I wished? Wasn’t that the battle I’d been fighting when I’d lain with my lovers and “won”?

  And now I had three lives to worry about in my own person, and three outside of me, and for a second, the terrible responsibility broke me.

  I spent the rest of the ride home leaning against Bracken, shoving saltines in my mouth and crying softly. No amount of comforting from Brack and Nicky could calm me down.

  Being right—isn’t that something we all want to be? Isn’t that the thing we all strive for?

  Fucking lawyers and politicians could have it. If this was what being right was about, I’d trade it all in for a broom and a mop and a janitor’s outfit. I’d rather clean the university floors than learn this lesson the hard way.

  Green: Funky Wolf Machina

  GREEN COMPLETELY missed Cory’s breakdown in the other SUV—he was too busy trying to stop the catfight that had broken out in his own.

  For a moment there was nothing but tense silence as Charlie maneuvered them the hell away from the jail. They were lucky to be going in the opposite direction of all the emergency vehicles, and Green and Arturo sent out a fierce cloud of magic confusion, hoping that nobody would remember the two black Navigators as they pulled away. On the one hand, they were fairly common vehicles—but on the other hand, Green had watched enough television to know they looked like some sort of underworld organization. Goddess, it would be great to escape in the general bedlam.

  They had cleared most of the chaos and were winding their way back toward the freeway when the two shell-shocked, rubble-covered young men sitting in the middle row finally said something.

  “What in the holy fuck.” The muscle-bound one, Connor, spoke first. “Dylan, who in the hell are these people?” He was starting to get a growl in his voice, not unlike Bracken’s or Teague’s when they were irritated or frightened, and Green grimaced. Please let Dylan be a little more like—

  “Cami? Cami, what did you do? They’ll be pissed now! The whole fucking jail, they’ll come after you—Jesus Christ, I thought you were going to do something legal! Couldn’t you just tell the lawyer—”

  “The lawyer was crooked,” Cami snapped, her voice rising in hysteria. “He was crooked, and even if he was clean he couldn’t have done it before you…. Dylan, you sounded so scared, and I wasn’t sure if you were scared of him or scared for him, and I went looking for help, and these people said they’d help us, and—”

  “What did you do to her?” Dylan turned backward in the seat, and Green caught a hot flash of very strong, but very unfocused sidhe power rolling from the young man. Oh, dear. Cory had been like this when Adrian had found her. Angry, surly—oh yes, she could be tender if she cared for someone, but Goddess help you if she was pissed.

  Charlie was the first one to speak.

  “Guys, you have no idea what he just risked to get you out of there. Maybe take a deep breath and think about how you want to go about this.”

  “That was very good, Charlie,” Whim said in the ensuing silence. “You deal with human children very well.”

  “We’re not fucking children!” Connor snarled. Then he inhaled sharply from his nose. “And what in the hell… why do I smell….” He growled and his teeth started to show, and that’s when Green cut off his conversation with Cory.

  “Enough,” he said from his place in the back corner.

  A cacophony of shrill voices interrupted him. He looked grimly at Arturo and nodded.

  Immediately all three voices stopped, as though a tight gag of supernatural fluff had been shoved in their mouths.

  In fact, Green could see the copper-green glow of Arturo’s work from the back, as the tendrils of his power waved in the air.

  “If you can all hear me, nod,” he said, blocking out the sound of Cory’s panic meltdown in the back of his mind. The three young people all looked at one another and tried to open their mouths some more, then turned around to look frantically at Green….

  Who regarded them impassively.

  “Yes, then,” he said after an eerily quiet moment. “I have your attention. Camigwen came to us terrified for you, Dylan. She seemed to feel that something horrible was going to happen to you tomorrow night. A
nd you as well, Connor. So, while she may have pulled you three from under the radar to right in the center, her intentions were good, and she pulled a cavalry from literally out of her ear, and perhaps you should calm down and in a quiet moment say thank you. Cami, my darlin’, you’re going to have a chance to speak in a moment, but for now, don’t worry, I’ll explain. Can you live with that in silence?”

  She met his eyes and nodded.

  “Good. Arturo?”

  The faint glow about her mouth eased up, and Green nodded to her. She nodded back and dashed tears from her eyes. Poor girl—doing her best, yes, but she’d had no idea who she was dealing with when she’d grabbed that shape-shifter’s arm and asked for help. If you asked Green’s people for a rescue, you got a fucking rescue, and Green would make no apologies.

  “Excellent,” he said. “We’re making progress. Now, Dylan, I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need you to answer truthfully. Before you think you can evade me, let me remind you of a few things. I’ll bet, your entire life, you’ve had difficulty lying, haven’t you?”

  Dylan looked at him in sharp surprise, and Green nodded sagely.

  “Yes, yes. It’s because somewhere in your bloodline, and Cami’s too, is a gene that takes all the things your body does when you’re telling a falsehood and turns them into sheer fucking misery. If both your parents were like this, you’d be subjected to nausea, cramps, and general body aches—none of which is pleasant. And now, among three full-blooded people of your kind, you’ll find that the effects are even worse. So when I ask you to swear or agree to something, know that if you break your bond, the consequences will be serious, yes?”

  Dylan and Cami both nodded as Charlie continued to pilot them through the warm summer night. In the front, Green saw Charlie and Whim exchange a glance of shared recollection and sorrow. He wondered what lie Whim had told that Charlie regretted so very badly.

  “Good,” Green said. “Now, Dylan, I’m going to run my fingers through your hair, and Connor’s as well, to get some of the rubble out of there so it doesn’t fall into your eyes when you shake your heads. Okay?” It had happened already since they’d gotten into the car, and quite frankly it was driving Green a little mad. It was also important because it would allow him to touch them—and very subtly convey reassurance, peace, and the honesty of his intentions, which would also be nice.