by Amy Lane
“Nope!”
“Ready for round two?”
Nicky considered it. “Considering I pretty much came from my toes while giving a blow job, I’m gonna say ‘peace out’ for now.”
Bracken shrugged. “Then you have my permission to walk.”
Nicky picked himself up and dusted off his behind with his hands, then reached for Brack’s discarded T-shirt, which he pulled over his head.
Together they descended the stairs into the bedroom, where, yes, they all settled down for a nap with Nicky and Cory rolled in the middle, Bracken and Green on the outside.
But Bracken and Green were elves, and now that there was no longer a psychic parasite screaming agony into the vampire vault, they had caught up on their sleep. Both of them lay still for a few moments, until Nicky curled up against Green’s chest and Cory curled into Bracken’s and both of them fell fast asleep.
Green caught Bracken’s eye.
“You didn’t need to touch her,” he said, referring to Bracken and Nicky’s coupling in the grove.
“Thank Goddess,” Brack grunted. “He caught me unprepared.”
“It was bound to happen,” Green said pragmatically. “So much contact, so often. The Goddess believes in shades of gray, I think—especially for bindings like this one.”
Bracken nodded and very deliberately reached over to stroke Nicky’s rust-and-black hair from his forehead.
“It took a while,” he admitted, a corner of his mouth pulled back. “But yes, I think Nicky and I are included in the marriage bond now too.”
“Good,” Green said softly. Very deliberately he covered Bracken’s hand with his own.
Bracken closed his eyes, and his smile softened. “And you and I could be too?” There was a bit of longing in his voice. Back when Adrian had been alive, Bracken had been one of his favorite playmates.
“There’s no reason why not,” Green said. “We stopped when the two of you got together, because….”
Bracken grimaced. “Because she is all-consuming,” he said, the truth from both their hearts.
“Yes.” It couldn’t be denied. “But that’s not what she needs right now. This was nice”—Green grinned, because that was not nearly the word—“but it’s not going to happen as much, not for a little while. And if we can fill ourselves in that way, we can be there for her in the others.”
Bracken looked at him deliberately and licked his full and pouty lower lip. “Goddess should strike you down with cramps for that evasion,” he said, his hooded eyes twinkling. “It always was amazing.”
Green laughed, his heart full of something besides fear for the first time in quite a while.
“That it was, brother. Since the heart of our hearts approves, I think we should see if it holds up.”
Bracken turned his hand palm up, and Green laced their fingers together. The hum of Cory’s power breathed through them all, but it was a sleepy, sated sort of hum, and what it really did was prove to the both of them that no, two weeks of being depleted and depressed by a tortured soul could not be negated by one very passionate afternoon.
They would need another nap.
Their fingers parted in sleep. But as a family, they breathed as one.
Cory: Mothers and motherfucker!
“RENNY AND Nicky,” I said, making sure this was the final head count.
“And me,” Bracken said darkly.
“And me!” Katy interjected hurriedly, rushing in from the outside stairway. “You weren’t going to invite me?” She sounded so hurt that for a moment I panicked. I’d worked so hard to woo Katy as one of my few—three!—female friends that summer, and I was terrified I’d fucked it up.
“She was going to forget me!” Renny snarled in disgust. “I can’t believe you weren’t going to take me shopping.”
I stared at her helplessly. “I can’t believe all of you want to come shopping—with my mother, no less.” I grimaced at Bracken. He hated my mother. “Are you sure?”
He nodded adamantly. “She’s not going to get you alone,” he promised, his expression still thunderous.
“Well, obviously not!” I laughed. “Look, Bracken, I’ve got Nicky and Renny and Katy—”
“And me.” His eyes narrowed, and for the first time in quite a while, I shivered.
The shiver snapped me out of it. Oh, yeah. I wasn’t just going shopping with my mom. I was going shopping with my mom when I was pregnant and there was a war on.
“Fine,” I conceded with little grace. “Just remember—she’s the grandmother of our children, and you can’t kill her and hide the blood spatter like you can with anybody else, okay?”
He managed to look affronted. “I don’t just hide the blood spatter. I hide the entire body!”
I blinked and looked at Nicky in exasperation.
Nicky shrugged. “He does!”
“You’re just saying that because you want him to get inside your pants.”
Nicky nodded with some enthusiasm. “Well, duh. But also because he’s a damned effective killing machine. Give the guy props where they’re due.”
I shook my head, refusing to not be irritated. We could be home. We could be home, doing homework and eating whatever luxury protein-and-vegetable masterpiece Grace had cooked to entice me to eat today while making plans for how to make sure there was enough blood-drugged hamburger along the perimeter of the hill to last the bad guys until Thanksgiving.
We could be home having amazing sex.
In fact, we could be home doing any number of things that didn’t involve my family talking to my blood relations—but now?
We were going shopping.
With my mother.
There was not enough divine mercy in the universe.
MY MOM looked nonplussed as we all piled out of the SUV in the parking garage at the Galleria.
“Cory, you brought… brought….” She was wearing a flowered peasant tunic over tight jeans, and she shifted from one comfortably soled brown leather shoe to the other and checked her graying brown hair with nervous gestures of thin fingers.
Oh, she was not happy with this arrangement. That was clear.
“Two of my husbands and my friends? Yeah. They wanted to come.”
“Well, okay,” she said, sounding… well, funny. Odd. “We, I mean, I didn’t want to go here. I, uh, looked up a place nearby, in Lincoln, if that’s okay. It’s a strip mall by a Target, so even if they don’t have clothes in the boutique, we can go to Target afterward.”
“Well, uh, sure, Mom.” There was a Target right down the road, right? And a Baby Gap in the Galleria and a pregnancy boutique in there too. “Uh, why don’t we just go here for the day? I mean, we’re here. If you wanted to meet us somewhere else, we could have met somewhere else.”
“Well, that’s okay,” my mom said, giving a patently fake smile to the rest of the group. “Your friends can just stay here and shop. We’ll go look there and come back. It’ll give us time to talk.”
My mother was lying about something. I mean, I thought my mother was lying about something. The truth was, she’d never lied about anything, to my knowledge, which would mean that if she tried it, she’d be really bad at it.
And brother, did this seem like somebody being bad at lying.
“I’m coming in the car with you,” Bracken said unequivocally.
“Me too,” said Renny.
“I’ll drive and follow,” Nicky said, sounding serious. “Renny, you and Katy talk on the cell phone in case we get lost.”
Katy nodded soothingly, and I felt marginally better about getting into my mom’s little Sportage. In the back of the little Sportage, because Bracken’s legs were just too damned long.
“Well, heavens, Cory,” Mom said, sounding weak. “It’s not as if you need a bodyguard or anything.”
Bracken and I exchanged looks, even though he was busy stretching out his legs as much as he could in the front.
“She doesn’t go off the hill without accompaniment,” he i
ntoned.
Mom’s eyes darted from Bracken to me until she had to concentrate on backing the Sportage out and getting out of the garage.
But it wasn’t like conversation just picked up after that. After a couple of sallies about the weather and school, Mom pretty much clammed up and kept her conversation to darting nervous glances my way, then asking if I was sure I was going to go back to school after I had the babies.
“Yeah, Mom—lots of women have their babies and then go back to take their finals. That’s what I’ll have to do.” I finished saying that—as painful as it was—then looked in dismay at the strip mall Mom had brought us to.
“Mom! This isn’t Target!”
Mom cast an apologetic look back at me and an apprehensive one at Bracken.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she nonapologized. “It’s just that you didn’t seem to be taking this baby thing seriously. In our family we need to make sure the babies are okay, do you understand?”
I looked in dismay at the little collective of ob-gyn doctors occupying a four-office suite.
“No,” I said stonily. “No, I do not understand. Renny, how far away are Katy and Nicky?”
Renny texted violently next to me—hopefully something like Abort! Abort! Abort! Mother is not friendly! Her phone beeped, and she spat softly.
“They had to get gas,” she said unhappily. My mom looked hopeful.
“That’s great, because the appointment is in about two minutes, and it shouldn’t take long at all.”
“No,” I said, crossing my arms. “No. Nicky and Katy will be here in a minute, and we’ll take off. I’m not going in.”
And then, oh horror—had we not suffered enough?
My mother began to cry.
I didn’t notice it at first, because she didn’t sob, and her face didn’t crumple. No, that would be too dramatic for Ellen Kirkpatrick. She just… shed tears and wiped them off stoically with the back of her hand.
“Cory, please. I… I know you think you’ve got it all nailed down. You’ve always been so… so self-contained, you know? All I ever wanted to be was a mother, and you popped out, and it was like you didn’t need any mothering. What was I supposed to do with a kid who could brush her own hair at four? How was I supposed to protect you when you could talk to strangers and… and order them around by the time you were six? Your third-grade teacher—”
“Ms. Belcher?”
“Yeah. She quit because you kept correcting her, and you were right!”
I grimaced. “I didn’t mean to make her quit!” I had unclear memories of a harried-looking woman with a really vast bosom and fuzzy blonde hair who kept losing kids as they dodged out the door. Well, hell, congratulations to me for winning the pain-in-the-ass award.
“Well she wasn’t that bright anyway,” Mom said, looking a little pathetic. “But that’s not the point.”
“I’m dying for the point,” I said, scowling and remembering that I had been ambushed into submitting my body for care that was potentially detrimental to the unborn nonhuman children in my uterus.
“The point is, our family doesn’t have a great history with pregnancy,” Mom said, uncertainty wobbling her lip and crumpling her chin. “You were not… not my first pregnancy, Cory. I mean, we closed up shop after we had you, because… we just couldn’t keep trying. But my mom, her mom—a bunch of only children, and the babies….” She bit her lip. “Sometimes the birth defects are just too severe. I had to abort two pregnancies because the fetuses… that much damage….”
My stomach roiled. Partly because I was beginning to suspect something, and partly because… oh hell….
“Mom—you couldn’t have told me this before?” I shoved my hands through my hair, and my rubber band went splanging out the back and rebounded. I’m pretty sure it hit Bracken in the ear. “I mean… Jesus. This might have been something to know before… I don’t know, marriage? Sex? Conception? All of the above!”
Mom looked away and bit her lip, a gesture so vulnerable that my heart broke a little. “When do you tell your daughter a thing like that?” she asked, voice breaking. “I just… you didn’t go to the doctor, and you keep telling me that Green will take care of you—”
“He will,” I said gently. “Mom—”
“He’s not a doctor!” she snapped. “He’s not a god! He can’t do everything—”
Oh, but he could. Green, Bracken, and I had flown the day before. It took a tremendous amount of power, yes, but we could fly—could hover and swoop, could scoop up werewolves and defend the crap out of ourselves. I’d seen him heal heinous wounds—some of them mine—with a touch. When his palm slid over my abdomen, I could feel him communing with our children.
Green could do everything, but my mom—my mom couldn’t know that.
“Mom, we’re going to talk about how Green can know—”
“Just get in the goddamned clinic!” Mom screeched. I jerked and kicked the back of Bracken’s seat in surprise.
He turned in his seat and waved a finger very slowly in my mother’s face. “Don’t. Scream. At her.”
While Mom gasped for a minute, Bracken took his chance to calm me down.
“Go in, let the doctor listen to the heartbeats. They do that. I want to hear.”
I grimaced. “Bracken. Ultrasounds. I mean… pictures.”
“Let them make of the pictures what they will. Nothing will happen without your permission. Renny and I will go in with you—”
The SUV entered the parking lot full bore, then screeched into the spot next to the Sportage. Nicky and Katy hopped out, glaring at my mom.
She glared defiantly back.
“We’re going in,” I said. My hostility didn’t ease up. “Brack, you ready with the mind-wipe if we need it?”
He grunted. “How many years of med school do you want to delete?”
Oh, hell. “I’ll do it,” I decided. “These are not the space-alien babies you’re looking for.” I shot my mom a dirty look. “Mom, you’re lucky Brack’s in a good mood.” We got out of the car, and she came around to take my elbow and escort me inside. I shook her off, still pissed and hurt beyond measure. “Don’t. Just… just don’t. You couldn’t have told me this shit when I wasn’t backed into a corner? Just no.”
Her hand dropped to her side, and she opened the glass door nervously—and then held it while the whole stinking lot of us trooped in.
We must have looked like a royal entourage, except I’m pretty sure that not even the Princess of Wales walked into her doctor’s office with an extra husband and two ladies-in-waiting.
I didn’t care. I was fuming and hurt and angry with myself all in one go. My fault, I kept thinking. I’d tried to cut my parents out of the big parts of my life, but if they loved me—and I’d never doubted it—they wouldn’t be content with that. I wouldn’t have been content with that. I would have fought and kicked and begged and cried to be let into more of my kids’ lives than that.
But maybe first I would have simply asked them what was wrong and reassured them there was nothing they could tell me that would change how much I loved them.
Goddess knows it would be a change and a half from what my parents did to me.
Witness me and my four attendants crowding the anteroom and then filing down the mazed hallways into the exam room.
The nurse who led the way reminded me a lot of my mom, in fact. Lean, weathered, tough from gardening probably, or running, or horseback riding. Pretty in a tanned, strong way, and into her fifties. She and my mom talked like old cronies, and my mom asked her how she’d been since leaving the hospital.
“Oh, better, Ellen. You know how it is—nobody drops a 350-pound patient on you when you’re doing ob-gyn clinics. After my back surgery, this was the best way to go.”
Mom agreed, but she’d told my dad sometimes that she liked the hospital. Said a clinic would bore her to tears. I kept that in mind as I watched her deal with Nurse Rogers.
So we had all crammed into the tiny exam
room—Nicky in the far corner with Renny perched on his lap and Katy and Bracken and me sitting on the bed—when the nurse actually looked around at all of us, and her eyes widened.
“You know, I didn’t really think you meant all of you were coming in here,” she said, her voice taking on that adult timbre that suggested we weren’t going to get what we wanted.
“Well, lucky for us, that’s what we meant,” I said perkily. Her eyes narrowed in recognition.
“Cory? Oh, dear Lord. Ellen, I just didn’t put it together. I didn’t realize she was old enough. Cory, how’re you doing? You probably don’t remember me—I used to come out to your parents’ house all the time. You couldn’t have been more than two or three, but God, you were smart as a whip.”
I summoned up a social smile. “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “That was quite a while.”
“Oh, I know it.” She waved her hand and looked at the chart propped on her other arm. Apparently knowing me meant she would conveniently forget about my entourage. Awesome—sincerely, awesome. “So, this is your first pregnancy and your first visit to the doctor,” she said, hmming. “And is the father….” She trailed off and looked at Bracken and me. I was sitting on the exam table, toes dangling in front of me, with Bracken half sitting, half leaning next to me, his long legs and frame making standing the more comfortable option. As always, he had his arm securely wrapped around my waist, and he eyed her with unfriendly acknowledgment as she took in the two of us. “…here?” she finished, both eyes opened exceptionally wide.
“Mm-hmm,” I said, smiling neutrally. But I couldn’t make myself be a bitch to her. She seemed like a genuinely nice woman, and she was apparently doing a favor for my mother and didn’t know about the duplicity that had brought us there. “Uhm, Janine, this is my husband, Bracken.”
Bracken inclined his head with the naturally regal posture he got from being an only child with rock-awesome parents and the youngest sidhe on the hill.
“And you haven’t seen a—”
“She’s under the care of a doula,” Bracken said. I wrapped my head around the word. Yeah, I knew what a doula was, because I’d been a good little Easy-Bake oven and did the required reading, but to call Green a doula was… well, brilliant, actually. Hands-down brilliant. Because he was a trained healer, and his job, in this instance, was to make sure the babies and I were well. Wasn’t that the definition of a doula?