by Amy Lane
“It’s perfectly safe—I asked Grace. She said if I were going in for tests every week, they’d take between one and five vials of blood a week. A small bite tonight, one tomorrow, a few days of rest. Repeat. They’re pining, beloved. They haven’t been able to fight since October, their friends are in danger, and their queen is… just fucking absent. They need attention, or they’ll start to go rogue.”
I was overstating the rogue thing. But they were lonely and lost—that much I could feel.
Bracken grunted. “I’ll go round up some shape-shifters to fill in the real hunger,” he protested, pushing himself up from the floor.
“Bracken….” I grabbed his hand and looked up, biting my lip. He sighed and bent down, kissing me softly and sliding his tongue between my lips to taste.
“You’re right,” he conceded. “Was just… nice, this past week. Only sharing with Green and Nicky. We….”
“Were a family,” I said, feeling the loss of that privacy too. This was why people had their own rooms or, like Teague or the Avians in the Eyrie in Sheraton, their own homes. Because the hill was lovely, yes it was, but spending every day at the pool party was exhausting. Sometimes you just wanted your own room and your own people.
We didn’t always get what we wanted.
“We’re still a family,” Bracken said, rolling his eyes. “Just, you know, we’ve got a fuck ton of cousins and they’re all next door.”
A subtle knock sounded, and he dropped my hand and let out a breath.
“Or at the door,” he amended, then strode to the door.
Grace came first, bearing food, of course.
“I just ate,” I protested sleepily, pushing myself up on my elbow.
“It’s a protein smoothie,” she said, “and stay down.” She set the smoothie on the table—all thirty-two ounces of it—where it chilled in a little container of ice.
“Well, at least let me fix my shirt,” I grumbled, and Bracken yanked it down from under my armpits as I wriggled up from the bed.
“Now stay down.” Grace smiled and pulled up a chair. “Thank you for this,” she said softly, brushing my hair back from my brow. “I’ve already fed today—I just need a drop. And I’ll share with as many people as I can.”
“I know,” I said, catching her hand. “Sorry I didn’t think of this sooner. I could have been doing this for a month—”
“We’ve all been preoccupied,” she said firmly, squeezing my hand. “But this was… kind. And timely.” She smiled slightly. “Now that Christmas is over, they realized how much they missed you on movie nights.”
“I miss them too,” I said with a lump in my throat. They were my last link to Adrian. I blinked back tears. “We can’t forget this—not even after the babies are born, okay?”
She kissed the back of my knuckles softly. “Of course not, my queen.”
I swallowed against an irrational yearning, a terrible fear. “You’ll help me, right?” I asked. “After they’re born? I mean….” My mother would come visit—I had no doubt—but she wouldn’t understand. The things I knew in my bones because I’d lived in Green’s hill for so long would need to be taught to my mother, and she still wouldn’t always see.
Grace laughed. “My darling, you will have so much help. You will never be alone if you don’t want to be.” She bit her lip, one canine popping out as she did so. “But you will want to. Silly songs, nonsense games, plans, worries—you’ll want to tell your children everything while they’re tiny. You’ll want to hold them forever, just so they know they’re yours.” Her eyes watered with crimson tears. “There is not enough time in the world. There is never enough time in the world. But when you need it, there will be help.” Her grin was starlight bright. “If nothing else, Bracken’s mother is dying for a shot as a daytime nanny.”
I laughed. My one mother-in-law had spent an hour the day before flitting from one corner of the room to another, talking about the things we could put there, if I wanted them there, and the things I’d want to put somewhere else, and maybe, just maybe, could I go look in the nursery and see what we could do there?
I promised that I would. I really wanted to. But at the moment, if I so much as veered a little to the left on my way to the bathroom, the guys would lose their fucking minds. If I didn’t want to be carried in to pee, I would have to put the nursery off until later.
“Yeah,” I said fondly. “She’s exhausting. I hope she can keep up with two elvish children, because I’m a little scared now.”
“You know, I think pixies are the reason the human race survived,” Grace said. She’d wiped the blood from her eyes with the back of her hand, and the sudden melancholy lifted from the room.
“Really?” I was charmed. “Why?”
“Because! If they liked a human family, they’d keep their eye on the babies—keep them entertained, keep them out of trouble when Mom got too busy, that sort of thing. And those babies, they’d grow up to be poets and artists and musicians, because their childhoods were full of wonder.”
Oh, it was beautiful, this bit of whimsy—or maybe history. This was, after all, Green’s hill.
“These children will grow up full of wonder,” I said, feeling complete peace about the life in my womb for the first time since I’d conceived.
“And our vampires are growing hungry,” Grace said briskly. That was it, our moment of quiet bonding. That was okay—I was pretty sure we’d have more.
I offered my wrist, and she punctured so smoothly that I didn’t feel it until she’d pulled her mouth away and swallowed. Her first grimace told me the taste of flowers and patchouli hadn’t gone away, but the look on her face after she swallowed….
Oh, Goddess.
She let out a groan, her face tilted upward toward an invisible sun. For a few moments, she just sat there and shuddered, until the door opened and Arturo ventured in. Quietly he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and led her, still inarticulate, out of our room.
Marcus and Phillip came next. Marcus pulled out the extra chair and gestured for Phillip to sit, then sat himself. Bracken had been hovering at the foot of the bed the entire time, but now that the boys were making themselves comfy for a visit, he tapped my feet. I curled up just a little tighter to make room at the foot of the bed, where he sat with one hand cupping my calf comfortingly through my sweats.
“You guys look great,” I said, resting my head on my hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you on Christmas, but—”
Marcus held up a hand. “No worries, Lady Cory. We stayed away on purpose.” His cool hand touched my brow, much as Grace’s had, and I realized it was unconscious. They needed me—and if they could not have my blood, they would settle for my touch. “They’re our babies too,” he said, tapping my cheek with his knuckle.
I raised my hand up to seize his and Phillip’s too. “Don’t stay away if I’m well,” I told them. Phillip’s hair was clean and pulled back into a half queue. He was wearing black jeans and a turtleneck with a black leather jacket over it—new, and probably from Marcus. Marcus’s curly hair was a riot, as always, but he was dressed neatly and casually in jeans and a ski sweater.
“How did you do it?” I asked them quietly. “In August….” I bit my lip. We’d put them through battle after battle, when Phillip had needed to recover, and he had just kept rising to our need and beyond. “We thought we’d lose you.”
Phillip smiled his thin-lipped smile. No one would consider it kind—but there was kindness there, nevertheless.
“You gave me something to fight for, my lady. You trusted me to fight.” He smiled and used his free hand to ruffle Marcus’s hair. “I had to stay sharp to keep his dumb ass out of the heat, you know?”
Yeah. By all reports, Marcus had been a sturdy second to Grace. But Phillip really was back to full speed, and apparently love really was the answer.
Well, and kicking a little werewolf ass as well.
I offered my wrist to both of them, relieved and joyful. They were very considerate
and scalpel swift, and both of them screwed up their faces like a human drinking pure lemon when they took their one swallow.
But the slow roll of ecstasy that passed over their faces almost had a sound.
This time, since they were men and we hadn’t spoken as Grace and I had, I closed my eyes and allowed myself to link with the two of them.
I saw darkness and two SUVs taking off—one with Teague, Lambent, Mario, and Kyle, and the other with my two vampires, Max, and Renny.
I saw a covert break-in, a frantic search, and—
They both snapped their minds shut just as my eyes popped open.
I felt my mad hurtling through my chest.
“Bracken?” I asked, my teeth gritted. “Could you possibly fetch Green and a few other folks for me? We’re going to need to have a little powwow when I’m finished with the other vampires.” I remembered a face from the images I’d seen, a vampire who might give me more information. “And make sure Kyle is among them.”
I glared at my lieutenants, who looked back blandly.
“Somebody has been very, very bad.”
I TRIED not to hurry through the next five blood exchanges—and some of them had to be true blood exchanges, as I was getting a little dizzy by the end. The effect of tasting a vampire’s blood was always disconcerting—I usually got a rush of the best moments of their lives, and my recitations of who they’d been when their hearts were beating and they’d had loved ones and living families was usually something people looked forward to during the exchange.
But this time the vampires who could manage to sit still for that first bitter/sour painful swallow were mostly too blissed out to appreciate the recital, which was a relief for me. Their images were so crystal clear they cut my soul, as though their experiences were somehow amplified by the children in my womb.
The thought of them experiencing my vampires’ lives was both reassuring, as though I were passing a blessing on to my young, and disturbing.
Very often our vampires’ lives had not been pretty before they’d become ours.
But then, my own parents had done so much damage trying to shield me from the world I’d inherited. How much damage would I do to all of us if I refused to take my vampires’ blood in return?
So I did what so many mothers have had to do as they made their way in an uncertain world—I hoped for the best.
And when I was done hoping for the best, I watched as the last two vampires were led away, slack and dazed and stoned to the gills, then turned to the crowd that had been gathering in my room as I’d finished up with the vampires.
For a moment I was embarrassed. The bed was rumpled, and as of an hour ago I’d been lying in my pregnancy sweats watching my stomach move. Everything about this situation spoke of casual and intimate, right down to my hair, which was only partially pulled back in an elastic.
But then I remembered what Kyle’s blood had revealed—how Teague and Mario had burst out of the good doctor’s house where they’d been trapped, and how Kyle and Lambent had clenched hands so tightly as Teague had driven them home, half-naked, that Lambent’s fingers had turned blue.
My mad hit me all over again, and I surveyed my group of primary offenders. As I was glaring, trying to project a presence, Phillip, who was sitting sideways with his back against the closet, belched softly and fell into Marcus, who giggled into his hair.
Then Kyle gave a replete groan, toppled forward onto the carpet in front of the bed, and just lay there twitching, apparently as baked on pregnant sorceress’s blood as any stoner on the finest Colombian Gold.
Everybody in the room looked at the tripping vampires and burst into giggles.
Including me.
Dammit. When we subsided, I looked at them all again and shook my head.
“You assholes.”
“I told them to do it, beloved,” Green said patiently.
“You’re included,” I snapped.
“We weren’t!” Bracken and Nicky protested almost in tandem.
“That’s a real fuckin’ shame,” Teague said frankly. “We could have used your help. Lambent and Kyle were having no luck at all wiping that guy’s mind.”
Augh!
I was suddenly tired.
“Okay, that’s frightening,” I admitted, wishing I could stand up and pace. The dull ache in my lower back—the one that had been there persistently since I’d been laid up in the first place—told me I couldn’t. “But so is you guys going out on a run without me! Couldn’t you have waited?”
“Until you had the babies?” Teague asked, apparently the only one who wasn’t afraid of me. Renny had been a cat since she first walked in, and she just sat there in front of the bed, hind leg extended, licking her own asshole directly in my line of sight.
Bitch.
“I’m not going to be on bed rest forever!” I protested. “Green said I should be up and about just fine by the end of the break. I’ll be able to go to school, so I should be able to help plan runs—”
“Their plan was excellent,” Green spoke up, apparently taking one for his team.
“Did you see the same op I did?” I asked suspiciously. “Max and Renny burned down a clinic.”
Renny looked me right in the eyes and licked her whiskers.
Did I say “bitch”?
Green nodded. “And yet there were no casualties.” He said that. My beloved said that with a straight face. “And we have valuable information, and young Kyle there—” Kyle twitched, still facedown on the carpet. “—managed to throw Nieman off the trail, hopefully for long enough to figure out how to break the hold his obsession with you has on his mind.”
“We were sort of hoping to kill him,” Max said apologetically.
Green grimaced but then reconsidered. “Yes,” he said, absolutely okay with that. “It might come down to killing—which is fine.”
“Fine?” I squawked.
“Yes, beloved,” he said, his patience fraying. “If he’s obsessing about you, killing is fine. This is not just you and not just him finding his way to the hill. This is our children he is thinking about hurting.”
That drew me up short. I looked at Teague and Max for backup. “Was he really thinking about hurting us?” I asked, feeling the shock of it already starting to penetrate.
Teague looked uncomfortable. “Not… hurt,” he said, looking at Max for confirmation. “That’s not how he’s thinking about it. He’s thinking he’s rescuing you. You have imperfect babies, and he wants to be your savior—the guy who delivers those babies and makes you see they weren’t supposed to live.”
I wrapped my arms around my middle—which was jumping madly, by the way—and snarled. “Okay, fine,” I conceded. “If he doesn’t back off, kill him. But you couldn’t have asked me?”
“Dad knew,” Teague drawled. “And you know what? That’s all who needed to know.”
My mouth dropped. Then I closed it and tried to swallow, and then it opened, and then Bracken handed me a glass of water and I gulped frantically trying to get my thoughts together.
“You will explain that,” I said, eyes narrowed.
“Yeah, sure.”
Oh, I should have known giving someone like Teague some self-worth would be a mistake. The cocky bastard plopped down next to me and clasped his hands between his knees.
“See, the thing is—in a good relationship, Mom and Dad only get half the info in a day as it is. I figure Mom talks when she’s taxi service, and Dad worries about the kitchen and finances and whatever. And then they meet in the middle and tell each other their halves of it. That’s what you guys do, anyway, right?”
I gaped at him, completely at a loss. “Teague,” I said, knowing this was going to sound bitchy as fuck. “You, uh… you never had a mom and dad.” I didn’t count his progenitor. Motherfucker.
Oh Goddess. The look he gave me—for a bantam-tough, cynical, cocky asshole, it was the purest look of faith I had ever received. People had put me on some scary-assed fucking pedestals
, the kinds surrounded by soft lights and perfect chords, the kinds it was impossible to live up to, but this look put the look we gave the angels in the trees to shame.
“No,” he said, that look never fading. “But I imagined. You think people with shitty childhoods don’t imagine?” He looked away, past the people in the room, past the walls surrounding us to the walls of his own heart, maybe. “Ever since I first saw Jacky, I tried to imagine what parents would do—real parents, a real family. When I saw Katy again, I tried to fix her into it. When we got together, all that fighting, all that fear, it was all because I didn’t have a clear picture—what does a mom do, what does a dad do, how do they talk without fists and screaming.”
His attention suddenly fixed exactly on me. Really me, not the me-on-a-pedestal that I found so frightening. “You and Green, you and Bracken, you and Nicky—you’re our mom and our dad, and we learn from you. It’s okay if you let the dads take some stuff. You’re busy being the mom. Being the mom doesn’t always mean kicking ass.”
I must have looked stricken, because he did something remarkably un-Teague-like and tapped my nose. “Not that you have to retire for good,” he said soberly. “And not that we don’t miss you. But you got more important things to do.”
I nodded, feeling forlorn and left behind. “You couldn’t have even told me?”
“Yeah,” Bracken grumbled. “You couldn’t have even told us?”
“So you could have gone with them and she could have worried?” Green asked acidly. “Because that worked so well a year ago.”
Nicky cackled, the sound incongruous with the waiting hush of the room. “Didn’t Bracken call that a domestic dispute of epic proportions?”
“Yeah,” Lambent reminded us. “Right before we killed all the wolves!”
“Almost all the wolves,” Teague and Mario said with extreme satisfaction. Well, they got to kill some people in mortal combat.
“Lambent got to set shit on fire,” Max said brightly. “I mean, seriously. It was sort of a win.”
And part of me wanted to cry, because it hadn’t been a win, it had been a prelude and a bloodbath, but that wasn’t what my guys needed to hear just then. They needed to hear “Good job!” and “All win!” and I didn’t blame them.