Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  But I hadn’t expected to see her now.

  “Cory?”

  “Mom!”

  Funny how I lived in this weird world of danger and violence and death, but until we’d started looking at people whose lives had fallen apart after one bad encounter, I hadn’t ever considered that my parents lived in the same world.

  “Mom,” I said again, going in for the hug when I hadn’t been particularly demonstrative with my parents for most of my entire life. “What are you doing here?”

  Mom looked sheepish. “Well, you know—wanted to work on a new project, and I hadn’t seen you in a while. How’s things?”

  Oh crap. “Uhm….”

  “I mean, I know you went to Redding, you called us afterward, but we usually hear from you once every so many weeks. You know—we worry.” She smiled that especially ingratiating smile that said she wasn’t trying to pick a fight but she had left me in a relationship with three men in a commune that confused and puzzled her and my father, and she would like to know I wasn’t being forced to do things against my will.

  Well, love was love, right?

  “Well, you know—school, work, an unexpected trip to Monterey. Things got hectic.”

  “Are you still exercising?” she asked, worried. My parents might not have been particularly enlightened, but nobody could say they didn’t work their asses off. Mom was a lean, sun-browned woman, with graying hair held back in a perpetual ponytail and lines on her face from squinting into the sun. She worked as a nurse’s aide, but she came home and worked, keeping the land that she and Dad had bought on the cheap thirty years ago in pristine condition. Refinancing that one-acre parcel was their retirement. Exercising, staying active, being lean—those qualities were my mom’s benchmarks for a life well lived.

  “Yeah, Mom. I run most days of the week, you know that.”

  “Are you sure? You’re getting a little plump, honey. I’d hate to see you put your baby fat back on.”

  Oh hell no. “Yeah, well, you know Green’s place. Nothing but bonbons and pie for breakfast,” I said smartly. “Hold on while I get this customer the rest of her order.”

  I tried not to seethe while I finished up, and I gave the young woman—a new knitter with a new husband and a new home and a perky outlook on life—a nice assortment of yarns that could be combined in order to make something arty and haphazard. She smiled and burbled at me and told me how wonderful it was that my mother came to visit me at work.

  I bared my teeth and tried not to be a bitch.

  What I really wanted to say was that if my mother saw me in the middle of my real job, she’d scream and run away like her ass was on fire and her hair was catching. But that would neither endear me to my mother nor ensure repeat business.

  But then Bracken—who both knew me and could hear everything—met me while I was wandering the labyrinth, trying to find Mom. He stopped me with his hands on my shoulders.

  “You’re not fat,” he said, his voice gravelly. He really had problems with my mother. It was one of the things I loved best about him.

  “You’re biased toward my boobs,” I growled, and he nodded emphatically.

  “Damned right! I have never had Cory boobs—they’re nice. I understand they shrink when the babies come, so I’m taking advantage. But your body is fine. Ignore that, and tell her the truth.”

  I whined. I’m not proud either. “Bracken! Why? Why do I have to tell her? Why can’t she just find out the way all my old friends from high school will—when I send the birth announcement?”

  Bracken grunted and rolled his eyes. “Because it would be nice if you think your relationship with our children didn’t end when said children turn eighteen and start getting laid!”

  I gaped at him in horror. Part of me was like, You mean it doesn’t? And part of me was like, Oh hell no, it doesn’t! And most of me was horrified because I was suddenly imagining the hard spot in my abdomen as two grown, faceless teenagers, arguing with me and hating me and being disappointed in me and reluctantly accepting overtures of love from me from pure social obligation.

  I must have stood there for too long, allowing my past and my future to horrifically implode in my little tiny pea brain, because Bracken cupped my cheeks and whispered a kiss on my forehead.

  “One crisis at a time,” he said with the dash of humor I needed. “Go tell your mother you’re pregnant first.”

  “There is so much bad here,” I whispered, still horrified.

  “We can be eaten by rabid werewolves literally at any moment, and this is what you’re worried about?” Bracken—he’d been married to a human for a while now, and yet he was still nonplussed.

  “Yes,” I said, not ashamed in the least. “Yes, Bracken Brine, this is what I’m worried about, because if we survive the werewolves, this relationship will be like a fish we left in the car while running from the serial killer. It will not only still be there, it will have stunk up the whole fucking car!”

  “Cory, you left a fish in your car?” Mom asked, rounding the corner.

  I looked over my shoulder and smiled greenly. “No, Mom. No, it was a metaphor. Brack and I were just—”

  Bracken turned me around so I stood in front of him facing my mother. Then he squeezed my shoulders—none too gently, I might add—and shook me once.

  “Cory has something to tell you,” he said grimly.

  “You’re getting a divorce?” She didn’t even try to hide her excitement.

  “No! No, I’m still frickin’ in love! I’m pregnant. Jesus, woman, try to be supportive!”

  Silence.

  So. Much. Silence.

  Mom stared at me—eyes wide, mouth gaping, and… oh no… no, Mom, don’t do this to me… if you love me, don’t…. Hell.

  Her lower lip was wobbling, her eyes were filling over, her chin was crumpling….

  “Bracken, I hate you,” I whispered.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, sounding excruciatingly sincere.

  And that’s when my mother, the least demonstrative woman I’ve ever met, fell apart on me, clinging to my shirt and bawling on me in the middle of the craft store.

  IT TOOK an hour to calm her down. An hour. Renny and Bracken had to take over the store, and I went back into the break room and got her a soda and some tissues. I was expecting… I don’t know. Disappointment? Gloating? I’d always been so disdainful of those girls who got knocked up right out of high school, and hello, here I was, the mighty. Falling.

  What I got was this weird, mooning smile.

  “Really?” she kept saying. “Really?”

  “Yeah, Mom. Due in, uhm,” okay, split the difference, “end of April, beginning of May.”

  “So you’ll have to quit school?” To her credit, she sounded sad for me.

  “No,” I said adamantly. “I’m taking twelve units this semester, six next semester—I’ll graduate a little after I’m due.”

  Oh, that didn’t make her happy. “But is it really necessary?” she asked as though, once again, she knew everything about the world that I did not. “You have a good job and a… a stable home, even if I don’t understand it. I mean, what is that degree going to get you that you don’t have already?”

  “Mom, there is a lot I can do for Green with that degree. He needs a representative for his outlying businesses. Right now he has to leave the hill for business trips, and that puts me and Bracken in charge. He needs to stay at the hill because he’s needed.” In fact, I knew he had some pressing business trips that had been put off because of Redding and werewolves and the mutant alien invasion that had apparently brainwashed my mother. Fortunately those particular trips had been solved by representatives—I wasn’t the only one at the hill who thought higher education was important—but I was one of only four people who could seal business with touch, blood, and song. And although Nicky would be getting his degree next year, I was the one of us who could lead a mission—and hopefully direct a boardroom.

  “But honey, you’re going to
be the mother… a mother….” She floundered. “I, uhm, hate to ask….”

  I stared at her for a moment, not understanding the question.

  “Uhm,” she waved her hands and looked uncertain. “I mean, there’s three of them… and… well, do you know who the, uhm, father… uh….”

  “Green and Bracken,” I said, not sure how this could be more awkward.

  “You’re, uhm, sure—I mean, you don’t know for sure, I mean….”

  Oh, hell. Time for me to be human and quantitative. “I know one child was conceived with Green, and the other one was conceived with Bracken. When Nicky knocks me up, I’m pretty sure it’ll be a little less ambiguous.” Probably because Green would need to be there to make sure sperm met egg.

  “Twins!” she practically wailed. “Are you sure? You mean, you’ve had an ultrasound and everything?”

  Oh, Lord… an ultrasound? With the way our guys looked on film?

  “Mom, Green’s a healer. Hasn’t lost a baby yet.” For all I knew, he’d delivered Bracken, but no. I didn’t go there. Yes, there it was, the final frontier.

  “That’s not good enough!” Mom said fiercely. With some purpose, she pulled out her smartphone and started punching buttons with the same zeal I remembered from when she’d tried to make me drop out of choir in school because it wouldn’t get me anywhere. “You can’t just… just go barefoot and pregnant in a commune these days, Cory, you need prenatal care and a doctor and—”

  “No!” I snapped, wrapping my arms around my middle with a protectiveness that should have surprised me. “No. I do not want a human doctor anywhere near me or my babies. I hate human doctors—their hands are cold, and they’re all condescending, and it’s like you’re on a conveyor belt for how many kids they can assess in an hour. Remember, Mom? That one guy who kept telling you I was brain-damaged because I didn’t talk to him? I didn’t talk to him because he was a schmuck and I hated him—and I told you that on the way home, and you still had me assessed for functional brain damage. Remember the thing with the probes in the hair? We had to shave my head, Mom, remember that?”

  Mom swallowed hard and glared at me. “We thought you had oppositional defiant disorder,” she snapped. “You were not an easy child to deal with!”

  “You know what would have made it easier? Talking to me like I was a person.” I was shaking, I was so angry. And so scared, I had to admit. A human doctor, near my babies? “Like, you know, not making a doctor’s appointment without my permission!”

  Reluctantly I put my hand over my stomach and pushed lightly enough to feel the tension there. Maybe it was my own specialness, but I could swear I felt a thrumming inside me.

  Mom glared at me unhappily. “You have to go to a doctor, Cory. And they’re all human, you know, so I don’t know why you keep using that word!”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” I said grimly. We’d danced around it, my parents and I. They came to the wedding and just didn’t notice that most of the people there weren’t… well, normal. That I wasn’t normal. “I want you to be happy about the… impending event, but please, please don’t worry about a doctor. Green’s hypervigilant, I swear.”

  “But he’s not a doctor!”

  “Well, not officially… but, uhm, you know. He’s from another country. He was, uhm, like a doctor there, but, uhm, you know, he’s like all the other immigrants who sort of get screwed over because they were doctors in their native countries but they get here and end up doing something else until they can get recredentialed.”

  Mom stared at me. “Is that even a thing?”

  “Yes!” I sputtered. How was it I lived on the fairie hill but she was out of touch with the real world? “Jesus, Mom, would it kill you to watch something besides FOX News?”

  “Cory, I don’t even know what you’re talking about half the time. Is Green a doctor or not?”

  “He’s a healer,” I said staunchly. “And he knows if the babies are okay.”

  “But how can you tell without a blood test or an ultrasound?”

  I took a deep, cleansing breath. “You’re just going to have to trust me,” I said, hoping against hope, but pretty sure it was the one thing she could not do.

  “But Cory, what if you’re wrong?”

  “Then tell me ‘I told you so’ at the funeral.”

  She snorted. “Not a chance, because you probably wouldn’t invite me!”

  For a moment I was outraged—and then I remembered that Adrian had been dead for five months before I told my parents my boyfriend had died.

  “Fair enough,” I grudged. “But if they go, I go, and Green’s got better manners.”

  I’d shocked her. I could tell. In an adolescence fraught with arguments a lot like the one we were having now, I had actually said something that she couldn’t stomach.

  “That’s horrible,” she said, her eyes getting big and shiny. “How can you even… how could you?”

  I snapped my mouth shut before I could say “I face death all the time—why’s this so different?” and sighed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said instead. “Look, Mom, I was going to tell you… I don’t know, gentler. Maybe when you could feel the babies kicking and know they were okay.” If I were an elf, I’d be doubled over with cramps for that whopper, but right now I was a victim of my own humanity. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings… uhm, more… but I really wanted out of this break room and this horrible, uncomfortable, emotionally messy conversation.

  “Just because they’re kicking doesn’t mean they’re okay,” she said, looking miserable. “Just because they’re born doesn’t mean they’re okay. Or in junior high, or high school, or… or married to three different guys in some sort of hippy commune that apparently doesn’t believe in modern medicine, none of it means they’re okay!”

  She was crying again, and I found myself squeezing the bridge of my nose the way Green often did.

  Oh Goddess. Oh other. Oh Christ, oh crap, oh holy fucking mother of hell.

  “Green!”

  I’d caught him in the middle of some intense “counseling” with one of the other elves. I think he actually choked on somebody’s cock.

  “What!”

  “I’m just like my mother! Oh holy Goddess—I’m going to throw up.”

  “Mom?” I whined. “I’ve got to pee. Or blow chunks. Or both.” And then I ran away.

  The craft store was in a large indoor “mall”—three stories, with glass-fronted windows that faced the street and natural wood trimmings. The nearest bathroom was in the coffee shop next door, which, thankfully, was also owned by Green’s people.

  I hid in there for fifteen minutes while Green tried not to let some well-deserved recrimination seep through our mental shields and Bracken waited patiently outside without once saying “Cory, you’ll have to come out sometime.”

  When I did come out, he had an iced coffee in one hand and a chocolate croissant and a ham-and-cheese croissant waiting for me.

  “She’s gone,” he said quietly. “She told me she’d call you next week.”

  I sighed and took a long drag of the coffee, then a grateful bite of the chocolate croissant. “Is it wrong that I hope the bad guy calls us first?”

  Bracken shook his head without any irony at all. “Nope,” he said soberly. “The bad guys we can kill.”

  I finished both croissants and the coffee, and we went back to work.

  That night, after dinner, I sat out in the Goddess grove next to Bracken until I fell asleep. Green had quietly confirmed Bracken’s assertion that Adrian wouldn’t come out while I was pregnant, and proved that Bracken was pretty damned canny by seconding the reason. I’d been tired—both from work and from the encounter with my mom—and I’d taken the news quietly, at a remove.

  He was dead.

  We knew that.

  But sitting out in the grove, I remembered the teenager I’d been when I’d met Adrian—how angry I’d been, how much I’d despaired of ever impressing the woman I’d made
cry today.

  I wanted Adrian back. He knew that part of me. He’d understand what small wounds mothers and daughters gave each other without even trying. Arturo did too, but Arturo hadn’t loved me like Adrian had, hadn’t eased those wounds just by knowing them and wanting to touch me anyway.

  Bracken didn’t say a thing. At one point, as I was half-asleep and staring into the darkness with terrible longing, I mumbled an apology, and he wrapped his arm around me and held me tighter.

  “I miss him too.”

  “I should go inside,” I rasped. “I should let you—”

  “Not without you.”

  I loved him so much for that, I couldn’t even argue.

  But I woke up the next morning, sandwiched with Nicky between Bracken and Green, and realized that I was on my own. I wanted to hate myself for the tears—having the ghost of your lover in the garden was only supposed to be a painful luxury, not something you depended on to make it through your life—but I couldn’t.

  We were back to gathering intel and waiting for the bad guys. In the meantime, Bracken had taken to begging the goblins not to let their young out into the world, because they were disappearing and it was breaking his heart. Three more of our shape-shifters had dropped off the face of the planet, and we’d warned every shifter and fey who didn’t live on the hill to stay out of the South Placer city water. The warning had come with cases of drinking water and a free invitation to the hill, but you can only do so much if you claim to rule a free-willed people, and we’d done what we could.

  Lambent’s work with our missing shape-shifters’ IDs and cell phones couldn’t reveal if they were dead or alive—but they weren’t ours, certainly not anymore.

  Wonderful.

  And the conversation with my mother set a pall on everything. I started hoping the bad guys would call and put us out of our misery. God, it would be awesome to put our lives at risk and fight something we could see.

  The bad guys waited until Monday to call. They even waited until school was out, although I didn’t think that was their intention.