Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “She’d melt the rocks and boil the seas,” he said quietly. He knew. If he’d had one iota of her power, that’s what he would have done. “She’d blacken the sun and put out the stars, light by light. I understand, Arturo. But that doesn’t mean we let her destroy herself because she won’t ask. Balance. This hill has thrived on balance. Well, the balance is now that we protect the queen. It used to be that the queen protected everybody else, but we need to put that aside for a bit. Not forever. I’m quite sure in two years she’ll be balls-out all over again, but not right now. It’s a visit to a lawyer’s office. I’m taking three bodyguards, and even if I leave two of them in the car, I’m not the only one with the magic radio to call them in, yes?” He tapped his head and maintained a steady gaze into Arturo’s copper-lightning eyes.

  After a minute, Arturo nodded his head. “Yes, leader. I hear.” He flashed a full grin this time, not just the caps. “We used to do this all the time—you, me, and Adrian. I just… the shape of the hill changed,” he said apologetically. “I became used to the shape.”

  “It’s changing again,” Green acknowledged. “And if we can find our balance, it will be an amazing shape, my friend. But we need to protect the corners.”

  Arturo let out a huff. “Those are some sharp fucking corners.”

  “Wait a minute,” Lambent said, as though finally realizing what he’d signed on to. “You want me to… to… defy Lady Cory?”

  Arturo’s jaw dropped. “You really aren’t that bright, are you? You’re lucky she hasn’t killed you, you know that?”

  “Yet,” Lambent said in a small voice. Like an old man, he hefted himself up off the ground and stood holding on to the back of the kitchen chair like he was too wobbly without it. “She hasn’t killed me yet.”

  Teague bustled in—lean, dangerous, and completely oblivious. “Who hasn’t Cory killed? Can we help?”

  “Us,” Green said. “She hasn’t killed us yet. You ready to put on a suit and sunglasses and be dangerous?”

  This time Arturo laughed, and Green started sending orders to his small army of sprites and pixies to scare up some bespoke suits in short order.

  The idea really was appealing. And it had been a long time since the people on his hill had so enjoyed their work.

  TWO HOURS later, as Green sat in the cluttered office and faced the man who’d been assigned to represent his two boys, he would have enjoyed his work a lot more if he could have killed with a look just like his beloved.

  They’d left Lambent and Teague in the car, both of them wearing suits and ties and sunglasses. Well, it wasn’t like he didn’t outfit his people with black SUVs anyway—perhaps somebody thought they were famous. Or connected.

  Teague had argued bitterly with the suit idea. Then he’d realized that he was going to run Cory’s errand without her permission, and then he realized that if he wasn’t on board, he’d be sending Green out without him.

  He was appalled with each scenario, but that last one decided him.

  “Fuck to the holy fucking no, you’re not going out without me. Jesus fucking Christ, you assholes, she will crisp you in your sleep. There’s probably something in the hill that thinks that’s a delicacy. I hope you wrote your fucking wills.”

  “Two years ago in June,” Green said simply. “But Adrian died first. Now are you coming with me, my darling boy, or are you just going to threaten us with what’s going to happen when Mom finds out?”

  “Mom is gonna fuck us all with a semiautomatic, but sure thing, boss. Anything you say.”

  Yes, after that Teague made bitching and moaning a masculine art form as the sprites dressed him—but he was there.

  Lambent had listened to the entire production with wide, wicked blue eyes and didn’t put up a single word of objection even when the sprites slicked back his flaming hair into a leather-bound queue.

  As they got into the SUV, Green looked at him askance. “You seem awfully docile, mate. What’s your deal?”

  Lambent’s smile was pure evil. “Oh no, guv’nor, I’m just waiting for her nibs to get home and raise the fucking roof with your head. I’m the hired help—all I have to do is watch the show.”

  “That’s the worst English accent I’ve ever heard,” Teague accused. “And aren’t you supposed to be from there?”

  Lambent looked at Teague with banked heat in his eyes. “I don’t know, wolfman, where do you want me to be from?” Teague stared back, nonplussed, and Lambent sighed. “You were a lot more fun to tease when you weren’t bonded.”

  “You teased me before I bonded?”

  Lambent stared back. “No,” he said, voice dripping with irony. “No, why would I tease you?”

  “Buckle your seat belt, asshole, or we’ll get pulled over.”

  Which made for a lovely, stress-reducing quiet in the car on the way over the bridge and through Auburn so Green and Arturo could discuss a plan of action.

  As it turned out, they probably overplanned.

  The graying, fiftyish little man with the drinker’s nose and loose skin about his wrists and neck was neither awed by his visitors nor surprised that they were there.

  “You want to know about Dylan Cormier and Connor Lutz?” he asked, rooting through the toppling pile of briefs on his desk. “What about ’em? They were small-time thugs doing small time.”

  Green and Arturo exchanged glances. “Except they were neither thugs nor guilty,” Green said, concerned. “And they should have been given to the public defender’s office, because their assigned officer would have seen to their release.”

  The man had little blue eyes that were watering constantly, whether from drink or allergies, Green couldn’t tell. He darted those eyes between Green, who was seated in the vinyl chair in front of Mr. Corliss’s desk, and Arturo, who was standing slightly behind Green. There wasn’t a seat for Arturo—but, resplendent in a bronze suit with brown-and-white saddle shoes and with his hair gelled back behind his ears, Arturo wouldn’t have sat anyway. Green knew he was enjoying looking slick and terrifying far too much to squander the moment on a seat.

  “Their guilt or innocence isn’t the issue here—”

  “Of course it is,” Green said, and although his tone was smooth, he heard the hard oak in his own voice. “They’re innocent, but somebody wanted them in jail—and later on, in prison. Somebody wanted them far away from help for as long as possible. Why is that?”

  Corliss’s lined features took on a sudden rictus. When he could swallow again, he attempted a smile. “I did my best to get those boys—”

  Green stared at him—just stared—his face hard and his eyes narrowed in on Corliss.

  He swallowed again. “I was just hired by the county,” he said hopelessly after a moment. “I can’t tell you more than that. I didn’t get any special instructions—I just, you know, got them and pleaded them out and told them to hold tight. It’s not my fault the trials weren’t until later!”

  Green continued his unyielding expression and lifted an eyebrow for emphasis.

  “And I didn’t even look for those cases!” Corliss continued in response. “I just—I got a directive—”

  “From?”

  Arturo’s heat intensified at Green’s back.

  “Uhm, you know, Judge Griffith. There’s only a handful of judges that sit in Placer County. When one of them tells you you’ve got to take care of someone, that’s your job, right?”

  “So you didn’t fuck them over on purpose?” Green asked, just to make sure. “It happened through sheer incompetence?”

  Corliss sputtered for a moment, and his flailing arm knocked over one of the piles of files on the desk. He looked like he was about to go down on hands and knees to clean it up, but Green stood instead.

  “Give me the files we need, please,” he said, keeping his voice even. “Then you may clean up however you wish.”

  Green hadn’t been aware of putting any power into his request, but judging by the alacrity with which Joshua Corliss, Esq., moved
to give him Dylan’s and Connor’s files, there must have been something. In a flurry of briefs, the wizened alcoholic in the cheap suit whirled around the room, periodically pausing to shove stacks of paper into Arturo’s waiting hands. When he was done, he paused by his desk to shake his head, and Green used that opportunity to turn for the door.

  “Thank you,” he said, pulling power for certain this time. “And now we will get out of your way, and you shall forget we were ever here.”

  By the time Green and Arturo walked out the front of the tiny office, the unfortunate man was staring into space eliminating all memories of the past half hour.

  Arturo opened the door for Green, bowing a little and ignoring Green’s look of disgust, then slid in the other door.

  “Where to, Don Corleone?” Teague asked, starting the car immediately. Lambent could endure heat—he was a fire elf—and Arturo came from a region near the equator. The soul-sapping heat of mid-September wasn’t bothering them at all. But Green needed the air conditioning as soon as possible, and he didn’t object to a little pandering to his comfort.

  As the air fanned over his heated skin, he held out his hand. “Let’s have a look, Arturo—what does it say?”

  Arturo grunted. “Well, one thing it says is that our boys aren’t the only ones who were stuck in jail when they shouldn’t have been.”

  Green frowned and then took the stack of folders from his hand. “Oh,” he said, lips quirking. “I said give us the briefs we need, and the obliging fellow apparently turned over all the cases that Judge Griffith passed on to him as pro bono work. Well, doesn’t that make things nice and tidy.”

  Green looked at the first folder, squinting at the picture. Blurry. Sidhe had an unfortunate inability to be photographed—film or pixels, both seemed to warp sidhe features, blur them, sometimes to something terrifying. A picture of Green might render the demon of a mortal’s most terrifying nightmares.

  But the features blurred in this particular photo were delicate and pointed, and the eyes seemed to glow.

  Green would wager that, in addition to minor theft and vandalism charges, the poor boy had a lot of blurry pictures in his past.

  But not in his future.

  The word DECEASED was stamped in red block letters across the front of the file—apparently he’d been sent to Folsom Prison for spray painting on a vacant building and killed very shortly thereafter in a knife fight. Green looked at the photo of the graffiti with a pang—it was beautiful, a rendering of a garden that must have lived in this young man’s heart, if not his memory. A talent that would never be realized now.

  In fact, of the five folders Arturo had been given, the only two folders without the dreaded red stamp were Connor’s and Dylan’s. As Teague sat at the curb, idling and cooling down the car, Green scanned the detritus of three young lives cut short by graft and incompetence.

  Someone had wanted these young men hidden.

  And with the exception of Connor, they all had faintly blurry, out-of-focus photographs and pointed, delicate features.

  “To the courthouse,” Green said quietly, glad Cory couldn’t see this, not now. What an appalling waste. Green’s stomach roiled with the thought of it—Cory would be nauseated in the extreme. They’d have to put her under.

  Arturo took each folder from Green as he examined it. They saw the same pattern—it wasn’t magic.

  “You’ll have to make an appointment,” Arturo said quietly. “If he’s not in a trial, he’s in jury selection. These men are very visible. And—” He grimaced. “—and Teague should be the one to go in and make the appointment. There are cameras everywhere. We’re going to need him, Nicky, and Cory. No elves allowed.”

  Green nodded and looked pointedly at the incriminating stack of death warrants. “The thought had occurred to me,” he said, thinking of the wasted half-elven lives.

  “Do you think that’s why they were targeted?” Arturo frowned as Teague negotiated the midday congestion of Highway 49. “Because they were half elves?”

  “Well, that would be bloody useless,” Lambent snorted from the front. Green didn’t reprimand him for eavesdropping this time—he wanted to hear what Lambent had to say.

  “Why’s that? They are, indisputably, half sidhe.”

  Lambent’s shrug could be seen from the back. “Aye, be that as it may, guv’nor—I’m not arguing. But our sort, we drop babies like gumdrops. Any mortal who wants a roll in the hay, if she’s willing, we’re able, yeah?”

  Arturo choked on a laugh.

  “It’s not quite that simple,” Green said, appalled.

  Lambent chuckled appreciatively. “Not for you. You’re royalty, whether you like it or not. But peasants—us common sidhe who maybe go wandering on a Litha or equinox, yeah?—I mean, it used to be SOP. It’s what we were there for, to put a bun in an oven. I’ve read the stories, Lord Green. We all have. Poor wives, pining for a sprout, and then they put a flower under the bed or some such crap. That’s us—you know it, I know it. We get in and play patty-cake. Their will alone makes the tyke, it’s nobbut a thing.”

  Green was apparently not the only one who let his past creep into his speech. That was all right, though—Green could listen to those accents forever.

  “Yes,” he acknowledged. “We’re promiscuous by nature, right up until we go monogamy-or-die. I have a hill teeming with sidhe, and regardless of our history, they have an injunction not to overpower anyone’s will to create a child. Most of the half-breeds spawned by my people are known about. Cared for. But there’s not that many.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. These are foundlings. Probably not your people—because, well, you frown on that sort of thing. But they’re like our poor innocents back at the ranch, yeah? Not quite human, definitely not wanted. They’re going to end up in the human justice system because they have no other place to go.”

  “Oh, Goddess!” Green understood his point now, and it was a damned good one. “They weren’t killed because they were half-elven. They were killed because they got entangled in the system.”

  “Right!” Lambent said excitedly. “Our boy Dylan—he was at a poker game reading minds. The poker game gets busted, and someone on the inside sees the blurry picture or—if it’s one of them werewolves—just takes himself a deep whiff of sidhe, and suddenly Dylan’s someone who might know their secret.”

  “Connor’s the only anomaly,” Green reasoned. “He was taken because he was supposed to be part of the secret, but he got away before he succumbed.”

  Teague grunted. “Connor was healthy,” he said bluntly, then let that sit in the air like a rock.

  Green took a deep breath. “And…,” he hinted.

  “He was healthy. A lot of the werewolves we recruit aren’t. I mean, if I was recruiting for an army, I’d get big strong guys to make scary badass werewolves. Connor was healthy. But most of our guys, we recruit the ones with the… the ones who are dying as humans but don’t have any sidhe blood to send them over to us or help them find their way to the hill. I mean, we can’t adopt the whole world, I get it, but our dogs and cats have to recover from being drug addicts and having blood diseases and all the shit that comes from living under the radar, including bad nutrition. The last guy we called over almost died at the full moon because he didn’t have enough body mass to sustain the change. I mean, I’m glad we did it, because he might have OD’d the next day, and he’s a good soldier now. But Connor was recruited young and happy and ready to party. That’s who they’re looking for. Which is a real double fucking shame.”

  “Yeah, why is that?” Lambent asked curiously.

  Teague was silent for a moment as he turned off 49 to find parking for the courthouse building. A meter opened up, and he parked the vehicle but didn’t turn the ignition off.

  And then, as if the others weren’t waiting with bated breath, he threw his arm over the backseat so he could look directly at Green and continued.

  “Because I’m not sure about the guards in the ja
il, or the prisoners, for that matter, but the wolves we ran into down in Monterey—hell, the ones who came up here last Thanksgiving—have been dying from whatever it is that bitch feeds them. I mean, we see junkies and homeless kids all the time. It’s where we’re getting our recruits. These werewolves looked like that. Desperate, like something in their body was starving, and whatever they were taking wasn’t giving them what they needed. So these wolves they’re breeding, I can see why they’d create them and then infiltrate the jail and go for the politicians all in one quick go. They’re being created just to die—and die badly, I’d suspect. I mean”—he shuddered—“you guys weren’t there at Monterey. I was. Cory gave them every chance on the planet. They threw themselves at the shield mostly so they’d die to get away from it. It’s bad.”

  The silence hung in the car for a moment, and then Green blew out a breath.

  “And on that note, which one of us wants to go out with our wolfman here? I recognize that we may get spotted, but I think it’s worth it not to leave Teague unprotected.”

  Teague glared at him. “You’re not it,” he said grimly.

  “Yes, yes,” Green said while rolling his eyes. “I am well aware that I am too pretty a princess to expose my poor powdered nose to the sunlight. But given how much they seem to want to see any interlopers dead, I would appreciate it if you’d take somebody.”

  Teague grimaced then, his eyes flickering to Arturo. Well, yes, Arturo would be Green’s obvious choice too.

  Lambent sat quietly, pretending to be bored and obviously shelving any hurt he was about to feel in the back of his mind.

  Teague grunted—which, coming from him, was the equivalent of hearts and flowers. “C’mon, Mr. Heat Miser. You can always burn the fucking place down if it gets ugly, how’s that?”