Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  He started with Dylan, smoothing his hair back from his forehead and letting the dust fall backward. The boy tilted his head back and closed his eyes while Green dusted him off, heedless of the rubble that fell to the floor of the car. He had an army of lower fey who actually really enjoyed having something novel to do. And yes, detailing the Navigators after Cory’s little adventures was a task they lined up to perform.

  “There we go,” he said soothingly, brushing the dust from the boy’s cheeks with light fingertips. “Good. So let’s assume Cami didn’t get you deeper into trouble, but instead went to great lengths to get you out of trouble. What kind of trouble were you in? Because we were certainly surprised that you were surrounded by werewolves.”

  “They—Connor said they were some sort of mafia, you know? They’d been changed. Most of the guards had been changed against their will,” Dylan said softly. “He protected me from them a lot, told them that he would lay low tomorrow when everyone was changing, as long as they kept me out of it.”

  Green hmmed in his throat. “My boy, what if I told you that, given what I know of your heritage, he probably saved your life in more ways than one? Awful, truly awful things happen to people like you and Cami—or even myself—when we’re subject to conversion by the Goddess’s children. We’ve seen the worst of it, and it’s bad. So, when you get a chance, I’d say you owe your friend here a long, deep apology and some thanks, don’t you?”

  Dylan nodded, casting a guilty glance at Cami, and Green nodded back.

  “Okay, so you may keep your voice, but only on the condition that you don’t use it until I ask you to. Am I clear?”

  Dylan nodded again, chastened as a schoolboy, and Green’s heart twisted. Cory would have asked questions, would have raged, would have tested her boundaries—much as Cami had—but Cory knew when to stop. These children had suffered no adults in their lives, no boundaries, no calm voices telling them, with affection and concern for their welfare, what to do. They either snarled and yelled and raged, like animals locked in a cage, or were instantly cowed, terrified and ignorant of how true authority worked.

  He could not let these children out of his hill—not like this. They were a danger, the both of them, to themselves and to others. He hoped they’d be satisfied with the sanctuary they’d find at Green’s hill, because he was going to have to keep them there whether they liked it or not.

  And as for the third?

  Green let out a sigh. “Connor?” he asked civilly. The young man raised his shaggy blond head and looked square at Green, not angry—not anymore—and not afraid.

  Well, that was a relief.

  Green thought maybe, just maybe, Connor could be the leader the other two needed.

  “Okay, my boy, I’m going to have Arturo release your gag—but only if you’re polite. Brief answers unless I prod for more, do you understand me?”

  Connor nodded, the movements measured, and Green risked a look around them. They’d gotten off the freeway at Foresthill and were currently driving between the canyon walls and getting ready to cross the Foresthill Bridge. The sight was always rather spectacular at night, and Green was only sorry he couldn’t afford to look around. If these children weren’t going to spend their first few weeks frightened and locked in the vampire’s vault, where the new vampires were thrown until they could manage their bloodlust, then they were going to have to come to some sort of an understanding.

  “Okay, excellent. Now the first, most obvious question—what were you in for? I know Dylan was in for a poker game—and he was getting railroaded into a much longer sentence than a poker game justifies, so that’s a concern we need to investigate. Now tell me truly, what was the nature of your arrest?”

  Connor grunted and looked away. “You won’t believe me.”

  “Grace, take his blood.” Green spoke briskly. Connor looked at her, fangs extended, and recoiled, his eyes enormous and his limbs flailing as he almost went fetal there in the middle seat of the Navigator. “You were doing fine,” Green said, wondering where that could have come from. “Grace will be able to sense a lie in you—so you can be sure that we believe you, and we can be sure you are telling the truth. Surely you’ve given blood to a vampire before?”

  Connor glared at Grace as though she were the lean-faced, blood-dripping, fanged apparition of his greatest nightmares, and Green sighed.

  “Okay, then. How’s this—let’s start with why you’re so afraid of vampires, and then we’ll move on to how you got put in jail.”

  Connor nodded, and Grace looked at Green and shrugged. “Do you need me to leave?” she asked matter-of-factly.

  Green grimaced. “Lovey, if you wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all. Charlie, would you do me a solid and hit the moonroof?”

  “No problem at all. Arturo, you going too?”

  Arturo grunted and looked out the window wistfully. “Would be a lovely night to fly,” he acknowledged. Then he kissed Grace’s cheek and said, “Not sure I trust these three tonight.” He sounded genuinely put out, but Green wouldn’t gainsay him. He was right—these three were volatile.

  Grace unhooked her seat belt and stood up, actually graceful when she ordinarily strode about with a housewife’s swagger. She sucked in a real breath, as though she were afraid of getting stuck—when there was more than enough room for her—then leaped into the air and disappeared.

  Everybody watched her go with a sort of awe, including the three new recruits.

  “It’s a shame you didn’t give her a chance,” Cami said, sounding sad. “She likes to cook for us—she’s really sweet.”

  “Yeah, well, the last motherly sort I dealt with wanted to suck my life force and mind-fuck me into submission,” Connor snapped. “Excuse me if I’m not all happy with that whole earth-mother routine!”

  “Huh,” said Charlie from the driver’s seat. “Are you sure she wasn’t the vice-principal from my last high school? Because that sounds really familiar!”

  “You worked with a mind-fucking life-force succubus?” Whim said, sounding enchanted. “How exciting—what was she like?”

  “Well, she was a fifty-year-old alcoholic who could drop the air temperature twenty degrees by walking into a room, and made you want to jump off a bridge after five minutes in a staff meeting. The administration adored her.”

  Green glanced up at the front to see Whim nodding, totally captivated.

  “Was your administration made up of trolls?” he asked, completely serious. “You’ve spoken of them before, and they sounded very trollish.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Yeah, why not. I didn’t see anything to prove otherwise.”

  Green’s eyes met Arturo’s, and they managed to keep each other from breaking into gentle laughter.

  “God, I hope you people are fiercer than that guy,” Connor said under his breath. “He’ll get torn apart.”

  “Don’t worry,” Whim said cheerfully before Green could reprimand Connor for speaking out of turn. “They’re terrifying in battle. I can tear the heads off of live vampires if I need to. I’m very proficient.”

  “Are there such things as ‘live vampires,’ Whim?” Charlie asked. “I thought they were dead first.”

  “Oh Goddess!” Arturo stuffed his hand in his mouth.

  “Well, they were definitely dead when their heads were ripped off,” Whim said seriously. “It was dreadful, Charlie. I’m glad Cory said I could stay out of the fighting this time. It didn’t make me happy to do that at all.”

  Like that, the tension of the backseat was gone. Whim and Charlie continued to play with stories of trollish administrators and life-sucking succubi in the front, and Green clucked and pulled the attention of his young people back to the very back.

  “So, Connor,” Green said patiently, “are you going to tell me the story of your life-sucking succubus?”

  Connor looked to the front, and his mouth twisted almost in sympathy.

  “They’re so sweet,” he said with a sigh. “How can
you people bust through a jail for us and be so sweet?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that,” Green said honestly. “But I can tell you some things that I know. Are we ready for story time?”

  At that moment, Charlie pulled into the magic-hidden driveway and started down the long, winding track toward the house. The road was fairly smooth, but Green checked the children, as he thought of them, for signs of carsickness. He knew that Cory would have thrown up twice, given the amount of time they’d spent looking backward.

  Three sober sets of eyes regarded him. All three of the young people had undone their seat belts and were sitting sideways or on their knees in order to peer at Green over the back of the seats.

  “Okay, children, here’s what we know. For many months, we’ve suffered from incursions—” They all squinted at him. “—invasion attempts,” he clarified, “from werewolves coming up from down south. The incursions have been disorganized but growing in scope. Whoever is behind them has been recruiting, and not wisely. In fact, one of our first warning signs was an obviously mentally ill homeless man who had been turned wolf and then abandoned. The change was not gentle. It turned him from someone who was perhaps a little bit lost into a serial killer, and we had to put him down. Some other recruiting tactics have been to attempt to take over existing packs. Those have ended badly as well. Just a few weeks ago, some of our people vacationing in Monterey were attacked. We got there in time to save them—”

  “Monterey?” Cami asked, obviously impressed. “That’s, like, hours away.”

  “Well, there was a helicopter and a daring rescue involved,” Green said dryly. She would never know the panic and terror that had led to that rescue, and he found himself reluctant to share those things anymore. For the past two years, he and Cory had been forging a tight inner circle. He could minister to his children, but those emotions, that fear for his beloveds’ safety, even his joy in impending fatherhood—those things, he felt a need to keep quiet and close to his heart, and to share only where he knew those memories would be treasured. He could not explain this new selfishness, but he knew it felt precious to him—a thing he’d never had before, a newly forged place in his soul.

  “But you saved them?” Cami clarified. “I mean, you went out—”

  “Not me,” Green said, making sure credit was given where it was due. “You’ve met Cory, Bracken, and Nicky. There were a few others—but who faced down the hundred werewolves in a daylight alley shouldn’t matter to you. What should matter to you is that not one walked away—and that was not our choice. Those wolves were driven against a shield they knew would kill them, and our people spent useless tears begging them to stop.” The sound of Cory’s voice in his head, pleading to be able to stop with the shield and just kill the wolves in a fair fight, would haunt him for a very long time.

  “That’s horrible,” Connor said hoarsely. “That’s… that’s truly awful. But I fuckin’ believe it. I saw it in action. I saw the recruiting, I saw the… the mind-fucking. And it terrified me. I fuckin’ ran away, right? And on the way out of town, I stopped at a fuckin’ gas station. There was a cop there—”

  “A sheriff or a policeman?” Green asked. Unlike Cory, he well understood the difference between the two.

  “Aw, fuck, I don’t know,” Connor snapped. “It was a fuckin’ cop. All I know is that one minute, I’m getting a tank of gas and a fuckin’ Slurpee, and the next minute….” Connor shuddered. “He just shoved me up against the freezer wall and cuffed my hands—with silver cuffs.” His voice throbbed and nearly broke. “I’d been bitten two nights before. I thought it was just a party—a toke of weed, a drink of beer—and the next thing I know, I wake up and what looks like a big fuckin’ dog is biting my hand!”

  Green regarded him in horror and swallowed. “We are going,” he said deliberately, “to need details about this party.”

  Connor opened his mouth, closed it, and swallowed too. His face grew redder, and for a moment Green feared he was going to choke, or vent in anger, or do something equally horrible.

  And then the first tear fell.

  “You believe me,” he said, shuddering all over. He grasped the back of the seat so hard his knuckles turned white and the fabric ripped before he rested his forehead against it. “You believe me. Oh fuckin’ God. Someone believes me.” His shoulders started to shake, and muffled sobs rattled him. Dylan threw an arm over his shoulders and kissed his temple as the SUV came to a halt.

  The sudden silence was punctuated by Connor’s sobs and Dylan’s murmurs. Green glanced at Cami and saw her looking forlorn, excluded from the little family she’d gone to such lengths to save.

  “Cami?” he said gently. She turned to him, chewing gamely on her lower lip.

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you care for your own room, dearest?”

  Cami looked sideways again. Dylan was crying softly now too—and not searching her out for comfort at all. “Yes, please,” she whispered. She wiped under her eyes. “Could I… I mean, I know it’s stupid, but you made me feel so good, and… and I didn’t even know it could be like that. And I’d really… I mean, I’ve been so scared for so long, and—” Her shoulders started to shake too.

  Green suppressed a sigh. He’d wanted so badly to stay with Cory tonight, to lose himself in her, and in Bracken and Nicky too. He was ready to talk to them now. But if they weren’t ready to hear—and judging from Cory’s reaction to their little adventure, no, they weren’t—he was at least ready to comfort and be a part of his family.

  But that’s why they called it a job.

  He cupped her cheek tenderly, smoothing his thumb over her wet cheekbone as she leaned into his touch.

  “Of course, lovey. Anything you need, yeah?”

  She clutched at his hand and nodded, and Green set about soothing the boys with his other hand, whispering to them, calming them, reassuring them that there would be a better tomorrow.

  LONG NIGHT—desperately long, in its way. Charlie and Whim took the boys first, talking quietly to them, leading them up the outside stairs and into the great room, while Green took Cami’s unresisting hand and led her up as well. Arturo parked the car, and Green caught his rolled eyes and the occasional bored sniff as he did, indicating that he had no patience for the young and foolish.

  Well, Green much preferred the older and cleverer, but people came to you as they were, not as you special ordered them.

  Green took Cami to his room first. After closing his eyes and remembering the joy he took in healing, he kissed her softly, rubbing his hands over her bare arms and thinking comforting thoughts. She melted into him, and the magic of his sensuality began to hum through their skin.

  This was who he was, and as his blood began to sing and the space between their bodies began to glow, some of his alienation and unhappiness melted away.

  He was a healer—he took pain and uncertainty and replaced it with pleasure. Humans would find a reason, an explanation replete with endorphins and synapses and dendrites interacting in concert, but Green didn’t.

  He was very comfortable with the idea of magic.

  As he and Camigwen shared flesh, and she poured out her last bitter hope that Dylan could love her as hopelessly and helplessly as she loved him, he folded her in his arms, comforted her with pleasure, and knew that the healing between them would endure.

  HE LEFT her asleep and curled up in his bed, but with the understanding that she’d be awakening in her own room. The lower fey heard—he’d seen a few sprites wink out as he’d stood up and changed, and he knew they were spreading the word.

  He was grateful.

  He made his way to the kitchen, where what he’d started to think of as “the away team” had gathered. Cory was perched up at the island with a whole-grain bagel and lox. Nicky sat next to her, trying to get her to eat some pan-fried rice. Bracken leaned on the counter behind them, arms crossed, glowering, while Grace flitted behind him making some sort of comfort food—presumably for the two res
cuees. The vampires had returned, and someone had moved the couch to face the kitchen, creating a conversation pit in that direction. Kyle and Ellis sat on one end with Ellis perched on Kyle’s lap, and Marcus sat on the other end, Phillip huddled between his knees on the floor.

  Once upon a time, Green would have said Phillip didn’t have it in him to do anything but sprawl across a piece of furniture and dominate a room, but not now. Marcus leaned forward, forearms resting on his lover’s shoulders, and nuzzled the top of Phillip’s head from time to time. Phillip closed his eyes when he did that, seeming to fall into Marcus’s touch like a kitten fell into a feather bed.

  Arturo and Lambent leaned on the island counter along with Max and Renny, all of them deep in discussion with Cory, Nicky, and Bracken—hashing out the night’s events, Green would wager. Their two rescuees were nowhere to be found, and Whim and Charlie were conspicuously absent as well.

  Lambent let out a chortle just as Green approached.

  “Well, all I can say, lovey, is that if you’re going to be throwing any more people-cannonballs through a building, I want to be there. That was a right tricky bit o’ work I performed! The world might not know it, but you people all saw it, am I right?”

  “Yes, Lambent,” Marcus said dutifully. “It looked like a bomb, complete with smoke and sparks and a big mushroom cloud. No one who saw it from a distance will know any better.”

  The tone of his voice was such that Green was pretty sure he’d said this several times over, and he ruffled Marcus’s hair as he passed the couch to let him know it was a job well done. Lambent was an asshole, cocksure and full of himself, and he could be a snarky bastard as well. But he was also loyal to a fault, and in spite of his constant complaining, he’d gone on too many missions with Cory—and spectacularly pulled through too many times—for them to give him anything but respect.