by Amy Lane
Lambent’s quick grin lit up the car, then disappeared. “Human things are always ugly. You’re lucky I don’t decide to take it down on general principle. This place is hideous.”
Green shrugged. The old courthouse was historic in its way, a marble and granite affair with arched windows and a copper dome surrounded by filigree. It could be seen from the freeway and had a certain stateliness that Green had often admired. It was an attempt to put the deepest civilization out here where people had been thin on the ground until maybe the last fifty years.
To Green, it all just spoke of hope. He hated to see that shat on, that was all.
“So go in, make an appointment for… who?” Teague asked, getting ducks in a row.
Green grimaced. “I’m going to say a representative of Green Enterprises and an assistant or two. We can send Nicky and Bracken as backup and let them make of our people what they will.” He looked out the tinted window to where that impressive ochre building loomed against the autumn-blue sky. “I have the feeling that the whole world in there is going to smell something amiss with the two of you anyway. Teague?”
“Yessir?”
“Try really hard not to tell a falsehood. Elf it up a bit. If they ask you what you’re doing there, say you’re running an errand for your employer. If they ask your job, say it’s assistant, but don’t say of what. Talk about your wife, but don’t mention your husband, and don’t say you don’t have one. You understand me?”
Teague nodded. “Yeah. I get it. You’re thinking spells or something, like the fairy tales. Cory gave them to me as homework.”
Green arched his eyebrows. Oh, his little sorceress. There were not many tricks she missed. “Good, then you understand. Just keep it cagey, but don’t lie. This… this is a very odd melding of both fey and furry. I think the more rules we stick to, the better off we are.”
Teague and Lambent looked at each other and then nodded at Green. They turned and with military precision stalked down the sidewalk to the courthouse.
Green leaned his head back against the car seat and closed his eyes. With an effortless little burst of power, he checked on Cory. She was concentrating on something complex—math, he could tell, because it wasn’t her strength—and Bracken was saying something irritable on her left. She shot him a glance, and through her gaze, their brutally handsome husband achieved a sort of glow and sheen usually found surrounding gods. Well, that was how Bracken looked at her, so Green was not surprised. She turned her attention back to her math, then paused.
“Lurking, beloved?”
“Checking on you. I miss you.”
“What are you up to?” The thought was tinged with suspicion, and he chuckled grimly. Well, he knew the consequences.
“Running an errand. We’ll talk at dinner.”
“Promises, promises.”
“Truth.”
He signed off with a mental kiss on her forehead and a nuzzle with Bracken, then one with Nicky, who was sitting on her other side. Both of them tilted their heads unconsciously and smiled a little. In their heads he heard a profound acceptance of his love, and its return.
He pulled his thoughts to the car with reluctance.
“I assume there’s nothing wrong in Sacramento?” Arturo said dryly.
“She’s having trouble with math.”
“I’m stunned. Now check on Teague.”
“Bossy, bossy, mate!” Green rejoined, but he was worried too. He leaned back again and closed his eyes.
Teague was walking purposefully, searching the bland government interior of the courthouse with wary eyes. Lambent clicked along a few paces behind him, the shiny shoes not fitting Green’s image of the young fire elf in the least. He strode up to a sign and searched out the Honorable Gregory Griffith on the third floor.
“Is that you lurking?”
“Do you mind?”
“I wish you could smell what I smell. You’d be pretty fucking comforted by a friend in your head too.”
What happened next was an exercise in mental synesthesia. Green could see a morass of dark, fetid, rotten green and brown, and for a moment, his mind was filled with the smell of rotting flesh in a swamp. Teague cut him off abruptly.
“Man, don’t even try. It’ll make you sick, and we’re riding home together. They’re all over the place. Their stench is so bad, I don’t know if they can smell us.”
Green looked around through Teague’s eyes for a moment and thought he might be right. Not a soul seemed to be looking their way, and nobody was checking out Lambent and his glamour or his excessive height next to Teague’s ordinary five foot nine.
In fact….
“They all know.” Green felt a little sick. “I’d say about a quarter of them are either furry or suggestible enough to be working with the furries. Get out now.”
“Nope—no need. We got ourselves a welcome wagon.”
A pretty dark-haired woman in a black business suit and sensible black pumps walked up to Teague, a cardboard smile firmly in place. At her elbow stood two men, sidhe, who managed to look bored and dangerous at the same time. Cheeky fuckers, too—they didn’t even try to mask their perfect skin or the ruby-colored hair that spilled all the way down to their hips.
“Can I help you?” The woman had a smirk on her face as though she knew Teague was checking out the hardware at her back.
“Yes, ma’am,” Teague said, all humble country boy. “My boss needs to make an appointment to see Judge Griffith. I was just making my way to the third floor to see his secretary.”
“Well, you can make the appointment with me,” she said brightly. “I’m Iris Masterson, his assistant.” She extended her right hand for a shake, and Green felt a harsh jolt of awareness when their flesh made contact.
“I’m Mr. Sullivan,” Teague said. Teague must have learned quite a bit from his reading with Cory, because he didn’t reveal his first name. “I’m here for my boss from Green Enterprises. He wanted to bring an assistant or two to talk to Judge Griffith about some of the people who escaped in the recent jailbreak.”
Iris’s smile turned cold. “Well, your boss will have to get in line. Plenty of people want to talk to Judge Griffith about that—”
“This involves two specific prisoners who were not supposed to be there,” Teague said, not cowed in the least. Well, he wasn’t subtle, but then they didn’t need subtle at the moment. He reached into one pocket and pulled out his wallet, producing one of the cards Green had made to represent his various businesses. The front read simply Green Enterprises, with the one cell number that anybody inside the hill gave out when they wanted Cory or Green as the contact. Clever, clever Teague. They hadn’t even discussed that possibility.
“Here. Take this. If we don’t hear from you within the week for an appointment, believe me, you’ll wish you’d taken care of this now.”
Iris’s gaze narrowed. “Is that a threat?” She bristled. Even the ends of her upswept hair seemed to shake, like tiny laminated swords. The sidhe at her back were suddenly paying very close attention.
“Sweetheart, there ain’t nothing about the people I work for that’s not 100 percent guaranteed. Now, show that to your boss and set up an appointment. We’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
With that, he spun on his heel with Lambent at his side, and together the two of them stalked out of the courthouse with the eyes of their enemies burning through their backs.
Green waited until they appeared on the courthouse steps before disengaging from Teague’s mind. Just as he did, a bit of movement off the corner of the lawn caught his attention.
“Look out!” he shouted in his head, and Teague turned to the scrawny, underfed wolf that was loping at him at full speed.
For a moment Green thought there’d be a bloodbath, but he should have known better. Teague bared his teeth—and allowed them to grow in, full-length adult wolf canines—and growled.
Green watched with interest as one in three people on the lawn turned their heads at the sound that was proba
bly vibrating from the alpha werewolf’s toes. Just when he thought Teague was going to need to either change and fight or get airlifted out, the wolf whimpered, turned around, and slunk off. The people who had heard or witnessed the entire thing watched Teague warily as he smoothed his finger across his now human teeth and sauntered to the SUV.
They slid into the idling vehicle, and Teague clicked his seat belt and pulled away smoothly. It wasn’t until they reached the freeway that the entire car let out a breath.
“That was fucking surreal,” Teague said with feeling.
“One-third,” Lambent growled. “I’d wager one-third of those people were infected. And some of them weren’t going to live much longer with that shit crawling through them. You could tell. I’m not sure how much you saw, Lord Green, but there were a lot of thin people who looked like meth addicts wearing really spiffy suits.”
“Wonderful.” Goddess, Green was frightened. “And we’re really sending Cory into that?”
“I don’t know,” Teague replied tersely. “I think we need to figure out what to do when we get that phone call, right?”
“As bad as it’s getting, mate, I don’t know if we can afford to say no.”
Cory: Two-Front War
GREEN WAITED until the next day to tell us what he’d been up to while we were in school. I listened with wide eyes and a slightly open mouth, trying to decide whether this was going to be a three-alarm tantrum, a five-alarm brouhaha, or a stunned, cold, and angry silence.
Just about the time I decided to start low and work my way to full-blooded tsunami, Bracken spoke up.
“You all put on suits?” he asked, his voice a little dreamy.
“With shoes,” Green said, the deep-seated loathing in his voice enough to break me out of my fury and sympathize a little. Whatever had been running through his head, it had been dire enough to get not one elf, but three into dress shoes.
Bracken grunted, and I relented just the tiniest bit.
“Was it worth it?” I asked, sitting up in bed. He’d greeted the three of us with a tray full of bagels, fruit, and juice, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I ate the bagel with the little bit of ham in the center, I might make it to the bathroom without passing out. I’d tried waking myself up the night before so I could visit the commode at o-dark-thirty. It must have worked, because while I could feel a little bit of pressure at the moment, I wasn’t (thank Goddess) running to the bathroom with threats of dire consequences burning in my crotch.
“Worth it?” he pondered for a moment, his clean-lined face breaking into furrows of trouble. “We know how big they’re getting, and we know they try to hide the uncooperative in prisons and jails. I think Dylan and Connor gave us a warning of a very big problem, whether they planned it that way or not.”
I nodded and took another step up the ladder of adulthood by letting my initial outrage go. Goddess, I was just too fucking tired to argue about minutiae now—it wasn’t like I’d been getting anything done, right?
“It was dangerous,” I said quietly. “I would have worried myself shitless about you. You know that, right?”
“It’s why I didn’t say anything,” he returned so soberly that I knew he was taking me seriously, which was about all I could ask for. “I didn’t want to mislead you, beloved”—he looked up—“any of you. Any of us. But you’ve been drowning, Cory. We’ve all seen you. And your idea to go talk to the lawyer was a good one. You just needed help with the implementation for a little bit.”
My mouth twisted. Well, there was no arguing that.
“So what are we going to do if this joker calls?” I asked, because suddenly the very real possibility of being summoned to the lion’s den was freaking me the fuck out. Teague had been scared—Teague—the werewolf who had taken a ten-story fall with not much more than a “Save yourself, Lady Cory, I’ve lived a good life!” (Well, not his exact thoughts, really, but a close approximation. He’d been awfully damned nonchalant about the whole thing. If I didn’t know him better, I would have been pissed.)
Green shook his head and pulled one loooong leg up to set his bare foot on the bed and rest his chin on his knee. “I’ve been thinking about that and thinking,” he said honestly. “Here’s the thing. At this moment, we’re talking about hundreds—literally hundreds—of people either turned to funky werewolves or suggestible enough to turn a blind eye to the goings-on of the werewolves. Given that they were all programmed, just resonating with hostility the moment they even scented Teague and Lambent, this is going to be an all-out war. And a costly one—one taste of bad werewolf blood, and our people become their people.”
“Oh God.” I felt queasy for the first time that morning. “I may have to throw up. That is bad news.”
Green nodded. “I’ve got worse news. Connor was infected on Litha, and we took out a bunch of their players a month or so later. Given that this is an elf, and we’ve got certain holy days that affect us more—”
“Equinox?” My urge to vomit fled. “Wait—that’s in just a few days!”
“Right you are,” Green said grimly. “So if we do get called back, we need you to show. Anything we can do to figure out where the next blood-fuck ritual will be held is a step closer to finding out how to stop it.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I hear you. A battle. We’ve been smelling it for a month. It’s damned near driven me batshit. And I agree—we need to bust their next ritual. If we get there late and she makes werewolves, we can break up the party before she fucks another victim to mind-bending jelly. It’s got to be done. But….”
God, I really didn’t want to remember Monterey again, or the big piles of bodies thrown against my shields. I really didn’t want to remember the way we’d had to incinerate them all, cleanly, as though they’d never been alive.
“We can’t kill all those people,” I said gruffly. “We can’t. Green, we’ve got to find some way to cure them. I mean, maybe not of the werewolf thing, but the evil blood thing. There’s got to be a way to fight that bullshit. I just….” I shuddered.
“The waste,” Nicky said from the edge of the bed, near the window. He was sitting up, munching his own bagel, the comforter sliding down to his lap. His narrow, lean body was appealing in the light from the window, and I felt a wave of weariness wash over me as I realized how long it had been since we’d all tumbled freely as lovers. Nicky, Bracken, and I had stolen moments together, but we used to be like a constant orgasm—and that had been good, because it fueled our hill and made our people strong and happy. But I wasn’t thinking about our people right now, I was thinking about me and how my skin ached for the whole of us together. I’d been so exhausted—and the one thing that gave me unreserved strength had always been making love, because for us, it was love.
I hadn’t felt so love deprived since I’d been a bitter adolescent with acne and an attitude.
My skin ached for them.
“Yes,” Green said, his voice tight. “War always ends in prodigious waste. Cory’s right. Besides the fact that eliminating all of these people would leave a terrible hole in the wall that protects us from the mortal world, there’s the waste. We should look for a cure.” He paused, as though he’d had an idea. “Cory, not to sound like your mother, but perhaps this can be a good thing. I know you’re tired, luv—your usual running around isn’t—”
I groaned, suddenly inundated with two things I’d been avoiding in a big way.
“What?” “Jesus, Cory, what?” Of course Green and Nicky were out of the loop.
Bracken was the one who replied smoothly, “You brought up running. And her mother.”
“I haven’t gone running in a week!” I moaned into my hands.
“And of course she’s avoiding her mother,” Green acknowledged. “Why am I even surprised?”
Bracken had been lying on his side, his head propped on his hand as he studied me in the honeyed sunshine through the window. Casually he reached up and tugged on my sleep braid until I gave up and leaned into him.
“Move the food, Green,” he ordered. My welfare was the only place he ever gave orders. “You’ll talk to your mother after the equinox,” he said softly into the hollow of my shoulder. “Then you don’t have to worry about the upcoming battle when you tell her. One thing at a time, okay?”
“Okay,” I whispered, comforted by the simple matter of establishing a timeline. When we were in the battlefield, I could do it, but in my personal life, I got confused by how much I didn’t want to do a thing.
“And you and Teague’ll go running when the temp drops this evening—”
“But dinner, planning—”
“We’ll do that after your nap. No more falling asleep during dinner. No more trying to get through your day without a nap. We’ll get it done, but we’ll get it done in a different order. Are we good?”
A hard knot lodged between my shoulder blades seemed to loosen. I could feel the relief in my shoulders, in my forehead, in my neck, my jaw, my face.
I swallowed against tears of sheer relief.
“Yeah,” I agreed, for once willing to just give it up, give it all up to the men taking care of me. “We’re good. For now we’re good.”
There was a shifting at my back and the food tray disappeared, to be replaced by Green’s lips on the back of my neck. I made a rumbling, purring sound of all pleasure, no stress.
“Keep your eyes closed,” Bracken ordered softly.
All in the dark, I allowed them to love me.
Gentle hands lifted my arms and pulled off my T-shirt. Green continued to kiss the nape of my neck, down my spine, behind my ear, along my jaw. Bracken kissed me too, then moaned into my mouth as he parted my lips.
I could feel the bed shift as Nicky undulated against Bracken, could feel the backs of Nicky’s hands as he ran them along Bracken’s ribs. His knuckle grazed my nipple, not enough to hurt, just enough to arouse, and I gasped. Immediately Green parted my thighs, and I lifted my knee to balance it on Bracken’s hip while Green entered me from behind.
So big, so warm, my body welcomed him like a slick fist. I shuddered as he thrust home. Bracken ground up against me, his own erection pressing against the swollen, sensitive little bud of flesh upon which so much pleasure and pain rested.