by Amy Lane
We’d been talking in the shape-shifter common room, which Green had outfitted like a dive bar with hardwood floors and pedestal seats around shiny wooden tables. They even served alcohol for the people who still enjoyed the taste, and dinner. Cory usually ate dinner in the front room of the hill and held court there—this meeting was later and almost subversive.
She knew we were planning something, but she didn’t have details and was too exhausted to track them down. Our logic in defying her was simple—if she’d been well enough to come with us, she would have already had us pinned to the wall and confessing. She wasn’t well enough, so we needed to protect her.
It was logic I could live with. Apparently so could everybody else, because the only one not here was Green, and Arturo had told us he approved.
But we still wanted this done before he got home.
“What do you mean, the shields aren’t up?” Teague asked. I knew he wasn’t the only one who felt a shiver of fear right to his bowels.
“They’re up, but that… that bug the girl brought in changed them. Someone with definite evil intent will get caught in the shields. They’ll get lost, they’ll fall asleep, they’ll wake up at the edge of the territory and maybe find their way home or maybe stay there forever. It’s a crapshoot because the shields have been fucked with so many times. I like it that way. The randomness makes me very happy—I’ve found some of those werewolves who were lost in the borders, and they were shitting their pants. The more random we keep it, the less manpower she’ll throw at us that way. But.”
“I knew it would be coming,” Lambent muttered. Of the all of us, he seemed the most afraid to do this without Cory. Well, he had another vampire to lose, didn’t he?
“What’s the ‘but,’ Arturo?” Teague asked seriously. “I’ve got my teams all set up to go. This could be a pretty big ‘but.’”
“But with so many people out of the hill, and that thing inside it, the shields are going to be trying to shield all of you. I can’t guarantee we’ll be insulated and safe in here.”
All of us sat, paralyzed with indecision.
Teague was a wise man—he must have been—because what he said next was damned smart.
“Ask Green what he thinks.”
The next night when we met in the common room, Arturo had news. “He says go on the night of the full moon.”
We all gasped.
“But the shields!” Lambent said for all of us.
“Lambent—you, me, Hallow, Whim, Twilight, some of the others—we’re going to try to fix them in the morning.”
“Do you think you can?” Teague asked. We all held our breath. He was one answer away from calling the op off, and we knew it.
“Cory is powerful,” Arturo said, nodding at Lambent. “But even without her, we’ve got one of the strongest groups of sidhe I’ve seen gathered in one place in my entire long life. Talk to us tomorrow night, and we’ll tell you if it’s a go.”
The next night I’d passed Cerise, and her arm had been bandaged. Apparently she’d woken up with a searing pain where her old bite had been—a burn had just appeared out of nowhere. None of us told her it was a side effect of Arturo’s amping up the warning system around the hill. Lambent had healed it, and that had been that.
But that night Teague had told us that if Arturo said we were good to go, he’d take it on faith. We’d made plans to move out the next night, vampires by air, shape-shifters on the ground. The vampires would hover nearby, the better to rescue the shape-shifters if they got caught in the shit, and the Avians would fly recon.
Besides elf queens and their entourages, we also had some new crazy people in the hills with shotguns trying to declare racial purity for Planet Earth. I sort of wished they’d get caught in the crossfire myself, but I knew that was probably not charitable of me.
It didn’t matter. If they hurt me or my people, they were fucking going down.
The night of the attack, as we streamed quietly down the stairs and out the garage, I felt a moment of remorse. We weren’t flying out of the hill proper. That would alert the angels, and so far they hadn’t even been able to tell a social lie, similar to the elves but without the puking. That could cripple our covert operation, and nobody had wanted to put them in that position. We’d sent Cerise up there under the pretext of delivering some dinner and asking them how they were doing. (They were doing great! Fucking like minks and enjoying the company of anyone who came to visit. If word got out that falling from heaven could bring all the angels a sweet gig like this, pretty soon we’d be ass deep in angels who only wanted each other’s asses.) Cerise didn’t know that two-thirds of the hill was leaving, and hopefully we’d be done by the time she figured it out.
So we ghosted out from the base of the hill, going northish to Colfax. Mario, the other Avians, and I turned bird pretty much as soon as we got to the invisible border that separated Green’s lands from all the rest of Placer County. As we darted under the full moon, I could see the other shape-shifters leaving their clothes at that border and turning furry before trotting into the mist.
The mist was actually perfect—just thick enough to muffle our movements, not too thick to steer through. We thought “Gee! What a stroke of luck!” as we trotted, flitted, and flew through the shadows under the moon.
We would figure out later that the enemy had been waiting for us to cross that border in the mist so they could cross in the opposite direction. Too much movement, too many people, too many different people—not even magic could account for it all.
But we didn’t know that until later.
All we knew right then was that we had fifteen miles to travel cross-country, and we needed to be quick about it. The vampires needed to be back at the hill an hour before dawn, and it was ten o’clock already.
Just like we knew when our feet touched Green’s earth—we could feel the vibrations in our bones—we could feel the desolation, the earth-sucking destruction, the corrosive purpose and villainous intent when our feet touched the enemy’s land.
The wolves, cats, coyotes, wolverines, badgers, deer, pumas, Labrador retrievers, mountain lions, and Goddess-knew-what-else down there let out a collective whine as soon as they crossed from Green’s land to the enemy’s.
Arrows came out of nowhere, and at first dodging them was no big thing. They got thicker, though, a hail of them, and when one nicked me, I could feel some sort of astringent coursing through me.
Not silver, thank fuck, but something—a toxin to vampires, perhaps, but not to shape-shifters.
Then I saw Marcus get hit by an arrow and rip it out of his shoulder without a problem, and I realized who the arrows were for.
“Guard the elves!” I shouted—and bless our people, we did. The vampires formed a midair phalanx, taking the arrows grimly because the arrows could hurt but not injure them. After I shifted and flew behind them with the other Avians, I got a good look at the three big stables Cerise had described. All of them had ports for firing weapons.
I was pretty proud of us as we flew through that hail of arrows, heading with the vampires to rip apart the outbuildings beam by beam. Then I got a look at what the arrows were guarding. Oh, Goddess. We’d known. We’d known they were out there, but hells—not how many. Phalanx upon phalanx of werewolves, stacked out on the lawn, ready to charge into the brush and take out the shape-shifters—and possibly any elves who were left untouched by the arrows.
A trap. Jesus, this was a fucking trap. We’d walked right in—and as far as I could tell, not a one of Green’s people were ready to turn around and run with their tails between their legs.
The arrows were getting thicker, and my attention turned to dodging them. Left, right, up, down, almost like a drill, except… ouch! One of those fuckers got through! My attention narrowed. I lost the global sense of what we were doing and settled into the rhythm of every soldier, probably since ever—keep going, stay alive, keep going, kill. Keep going, stay alive, keep going… kill…. Mindless, just sentient
enough to keep from getting skewered, I didn’t even wonder what we were going to do with the fury at the end of the tunnel.
It wasn’t until the vampires started to glow that I realized that we could take the fight away from the girl, but there was no way in hell the girl was going to let us take her out of the fight.
Cory: The Joys of Raising a Family in a Two Front War
“THEY’RE UNDER attack!” I snarled, and the voice—the one calling my name—suddenly ceased to fucking matter.
“Call Green first!” he snapped.
Bracken grabbed my hand, and together we sent out a big psychic distress call to the elf we loved most.
At first, it was like screaming at a wall.
We both opened our eyes and looked at each other, trying not to panic. Then Bracken, of all people, started to laugh wolfishly.
“What?” I asked, taking deep breaths and shoving a pillow under my lower back.
“They’ve obviously never seen you break through a wall,” he said.
The panic, the pounding in my ears, the fear for my physical person and for the children I bore, all of it faded away.
I was remembering me, Bracken, and Arturo tucked inside a magic bubble while we crashed through a brick wall.
I knew that feeling—whether it was made of psychic energy or concrete, I did know how to break a wall.
First I needed help.
“Arturo!” I called out loud. “Grace! Get your asses in here!”
I could hear their feet pounding from outside so quickly I knew they must have been there all along.
“Why couldn’t we feel them?” Bracken asked. I slid my reply into his mind because I was afraid to say it out loud.
“She put psychic blinders on them—rendered them insensible to power. That doesn’t mean they weren’t right there!”
He smiled at me, nodding. At that moment I heard the call again.
“Cory. Corinne Carol-Anne. Beloved. Due’ane.”
Bracken jerked and looked startled, and I was swept with an overwhelming sense of relief. It wasn’t just me. Finally, he could hear it too.
“No more with the psychic thing,” I said, and he nodded.
As Arturo and Grace broke into the room, I held a finger to my lips. My phone was charging next to the bed, and I grabbed it and opened a text box to Green.
They’re in the house.
Psychic thing bad.
She’s calling my name.
The vampires are under attack YOU ASSHOLES and I need us to hold hands so I can do shit.
I looked at the text box for a moment, hoping Green would reply, but we were so good at the mind-link thing now, so adept, that phone texting seemed superfluous.
Well, teach me to depend on magic when I had tech, right?
“Kk,” I said, swinging my legs over the bed. “Grace, you stand watch. I can draw from you anytime. Arturo, think sexy thoughts about me. Bracken, hold on tight, we’re gonna pull a jailbreak with our minds.”
I wouldn’t say it was effortless, but it did feel familiar.
Bracken’s hand was comfortable in mine, and a corner of my mind realized I should never take that thrumming, the joy in me that drove my power, for granted. Arturo’s hand was sturdy and capable, and while I’d joked about him finding me sexy—as if!—the fact was that it just needed to be the potential for sexual attraction. Arturo had been attracted to my person from the very beginning—that enjoyment of me, that personal love, that turned my key as well.
I closed my eyes and let myself fill up with that power. It was heady, whirling, and tremendous, and we were only three.
I spooled power like copper wire around a magnet and visualized us as a glowing steel ball. Bracken and I kept coming up against that force, the hard blanket that stood like an insulating shell around the hill, making us psychically dead to each other and separate when we were used to communicating effortlessly.
I charged… charged….
And I punched us up through that wall, exploding our consciousness beyond the crown of the hill and into the night.
“GREEN!”
My mind found his driving down Foresthill Road, the silhouette of the double-lane bridge in his rearview.
Oh, sweet Goddess—he was ten miles from home.
Green: Terrible Choices
HE HAD only told them he was coming home early. He hadn’t told them when.
Green and Eric had prepped hard for the meetings Green was supposed to make in Colorado—both in the lovemaking that helped Eric heal and in the actual business dealings that Green was leaving Eric to proxy.
With every other thing going on in their world, the last worry they needed was losing the hill to the government.
It was their home. It was home to nearly an entire city of full-sized humanoid people, and hundreds of tiny cousins who filled in the corners.
The government could never know that.
As far as the government was concerned, Green’s hill was the residence of Green, his wife, Corinne, and their two friends Brack and Dominic. Explaining why those four people couldn’t just up and relocate had, in recent months, become one of the many banes of Green’s existence.
Putting the future of his hill in the hands of the young man who had once been his protégé was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.
Part of it was that Green had managed to do his people proud in sheer honest duplicity. He couldn’t just fund his household expenses from his business profits—that would be a tremendous amount of cash to pay for four people, no matter how rich. No, he’d labeled the entire hill “Green’s Hill Enterprises,” and everything from food to electronics to Cory’s special organic flour was funded as an expense in product development, which was paid for by Green’s legitimate businesses.
It was a tricky dance between what was true, what was legal, and what Green could get away with to keep his people in their home.
It was a good thing Eric was damned good at what he did.
The night before all hell broke loose at Green’s hill, Eric bought Green the plane ticket himself.
“You’re driving me batshit,” he said frankly. “Green, you can’t even settle down to make love!”
Green—shirtless and sitting at Eric’s glass table, a bowl of ice cream in front of him and his laptop open and more than warm—managed to pull himself out of his distraction long enough to groan.
He’d left Eric in bed on the pretext of getting a glass of water, and here he was again, making sure he could leave his life in the hands of a friend—and that nothing they did would be irrevocable.
“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling as lost and vulnerable in that moment as he had the day… oh Goddess… the day Adrian died. “I’m not there for them,” he said, looking up at Eric and swallowing hard. “I left them at war, do you understand that?”
“No,” Eric said, cupping his cheek. “But then, that is why you’re the leader. You make the hard decisions. I….” He looked away. “Someday, Green, when not being with Nicky doesn’t hurt so much, I will come back to you.”
Green stared at him, surprised. “Why would you do that, mate? I thought you were perfectly happy—”
“My mother, my sisters, they’re glad to have me back. That’s fine. But….” He bent and dropped a kiss near Green’s ear. “I’ve only ever had family in one place, Green, and it’s not Texas. So, yeah. Someday, after my family has drifted apart, when I’m feeling the sting of living so very much longer, I’ll find my way to your hill again. I’d really love for it to be where I left it, yeah?”
Green smiled, his eyes closed, and allowed himself to be comforted by Eric’s animal warmth.
“Absolutely,” he agreed.
And that was when Eric had bumped him aside and made his travel arrangements, brooking no argument. “If you can, meet me in Colorado in a week. If you can’t, I think I’m prepped.”
That had been the end of it.
Green had already made his phone call for the night—he knew
everybody would be in bed, and if they weren’t, they should be. And by the time he could tell them about his arrangements, he was already on the plane. He’d figured that just about the time Cory was thinking he should be calling the next evening, he would be arriving home.
And then she, Bracken, and Arturo all screamed in his head and he almost wrecked his specially prepared rental car.
He got it back on the road—after rubbing fenders with the guardrail over the canyon, not that he’d ever tell them that—and did what he did best.
“I’m here.”
“Green, Teague made the raid tonight. It’s an ambush. They’ve got poisoned arrows aimed at the elves, and they’re going to need help.”
He tried to remember to breathe.
Chest, diaphragm, there was a whole working-in-conjunction thing, and then….
Then he touched his beloved’s mind and did some thinking.
“Why the three of you?”
“The enemy is here.”
Oh, Goddess. He actually thought his vision was going to go dim. He kept his eyes furiously focused on the road ahead, on driving at a reasonable pace, at not flooring the gas and driving into the canyon and on being safe. They needed him.
“And you want me to go help the battle?”
“We’ve got this locked—”
“Shite!”
Oh Goddess, he’d couldn’t do this, not again. He’d left her—he’d left her once, and she’d been broken, violated, stripped, and bleeding, their dead child on the floorboards between her knees. He’d left her again and invading forces had taken over… were inside his home, threatening his lovers and their young, and she was telling him not to go help?
“Calm down.” She sounded irritated. But Hannah was never angry. It was Cory who sounded irritated. And pissed off. And capable. “Look—they need you on the field. I almost took this bitch out by myself….”
He heard it in the back of her mind, because they were so closely linked.
“Cory. Corinne Carol-Anne. Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick. Slut, tool, weapon, ou’e’eir, due’ane—”