Quickening, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  Oh, sweet Goddess. His own call to her was desperate and pitched. “Cory!”

  “Cool your jets. I just wanted to see how much she’d gotten.”

  “She doesn’t have it—”

  “Yeah, I know. Let her fucking guess. She’ll never unlock the whole of it, Green. She doesn’t understand. Just get your ass to go help Teague, because—oh shit!”

  For a moment his heart failed him, and he found the car hurtling dangerously fast as he contemplated whether there would be enough of him to scrape off the canyon floor if she’d just been killed.

  “I’m linking with the vampires now—all three of us. They need you, leader—”

  “I can’t leave you!” Oh Goddess! The whole reason he was here at all was that he couldn’t leave her alone—he couldn’t bear to have her hurt, violated, broken because he wasn’t there to keep her safe.

  “You’re here. Have some faith in me, Green. I’m not helpless. The whole reason you fell in love with me was that I could hold my own.”

  Oh, he wanted to call her names, to get her to listen. It was so automatic for them—the endearments had become part of their souls. But he couldn’t, because there were other ears, and he didn’t even want to think the words.

  “Beloved….”

  “I won’t leave you, Green. Now have some faith. Have some faith in us. We’ll do you proud.”

  All those times of sending her away from him into the field and believing she would come back whole and sound, and the hardest thing he’d ever do was going to be leaving her home.

  He came to the fork in the road, the almost invisible left turn that would take him to Colfax, to the place Nicky had told him they thought the current compound was located. Turn left, and help his people. Go straight, and ride to Cory’s rescue, being the knight in shining armor he’d always wanted to be.

  Turn left, and do what he’d promised.

  Turn left, and risk losing everything he’d worked for, yearned after, loved.

  Go straight, and lose friends, lovers, and his beloved’s faith.

  You had better be fucking right.

  The car—a Lexus—didn’t skid when he made the abrupt left, but he did come close to the trees on the side of the road.

  “Thanks, beloved,” she said clearly in his head. “Now go ahead and let me work.”

  Teague: Disasters and Mercies

  TEAGUE GOT hit in the heart with the first arrow.

  Good thing it was steel tipped and not silver, or he would have been dead. As it was, he turned human, ripped it out of his chest, turned wolf, and led the charge into the compound. It wasn’t until Nicky’s shout that he realized—the arrows weren’t really aimed at the shape-shifters, were they?

  He turned human again, naked and pale in the mist, feet sinking into the bed of pine needles and rotted leaves that made up the floor of the forest they’d hidden in, and shouted, “Shape-shifters, pick an elf and guard him!”

  Or her. Elves of all flavors were drifting into the night with the shifters and vamps, many of them with lethal silver-tipped spears. As he stood and watched, he saw scores of arrows blocked and destroyed by those spears, and he was grateful the elves were good enough to leave some space for his guys to work. His guys—and girls—weren’t doing bad in the working area either. The ones who were more comfortable furry were batting arrows out of the air. Many of them had strapped weapons to their bodies—Teague had a machete in an elastic harness around his back should he need it—and they were using those to defend the elves. Arrows—seriously? Gunfire, yes. They’d been prepared for gunfire, and Teague had spent the last week prepping plastic bottles of the herb water they used to counteract silver in wolves and iron in elves. But arrows stuck. Unlike bullets, which would cause damage that a shape-shifter could heal with just a little magicked herb water, an arrow shoved the poison deep inside the body—and it needed to be ripped out, which caused more damage too.

  Yeah, humans were more vulnerable to guns, there was no doubt about it, but in the supernatural world, arrows were a stroke of genius.

  Well, fuck. Arrows from people hidden in the outbuildings—what next?

  He gazed across the lawn toward the compound and saw enemy werewolves massing on the lawn.

  “Marcus!” he called. “See that?”

  “We got it!” Marcus called back. The vampires pulled together vertically, stacked on top of each other, taking most of the arrows and not caring. Jesus, that was scary. Teague watched one of them rip an arrow out of his eyeball, eat the fucking eyeball off the arrow like a shish kebab, and then chuck the arrow like a circus knife thrower—thunk into the heart of one of the wolves on the ground. The wolf yelped and ran away, but didn’t die.

  But neither did the vampire. In fact, his eyeball would probably regrow before the battle was over, but… hell. That was fuckin’ gross.

  And he didn’t have time to dwell on it.

  The enemy wolves had seemed disoriented and confused as they’d arrived on the field. Teague had a distinct vision of one of them shaking his head, uncertain as to what he was supposed to be doing on the moonlit field of milling bodies. But all that changed when the two glowing giants strode from the farmhouse in the background onto the field.

  The arrows stopped when the giant elves appeared, and Teague had to squint his wolfy eyes to figure out what he was seeing.

  Suddenly he yearned to have Cory next to him.

  He wanted someone in his head—someone to say the funny, frightened thing, someone to make it all better.

  Holy fuck, he thought to himself, those are the sidhe, clothed in naked power.

  No wonder Cory got amped fucking those guys.

  They weren’t six feet plus—they were eight, nine, ten feet tall, their size swelling and contracting with what seemed to be their heartbeats. Their skin was beyond pale, beyond white or glowing or marble—it was so bright it seared Teague’s eyeballs, every movement of the naked giants imprinted on his brain like a photo negative.

  They wielded whips above their heads, the whips glowing like blood or rubies or heartblood fire, and the hair they shook out past their hips was the same color.

  The enemy werewolves went insane.

  Snarling, snapping, yowling, they charged, and Teague flashed grimly on the quiet good-bye he’d bidden Jacky and Katy before he’d begun the march. They always knew—always knew—there was a chance he might not come back. This might be that—

  The vampires started to glow.

  Dammit. Just fucking once….

  Well, too bad. If she wasn’t watching over them, she wasn’t breathing, and apparently she was watching over them.

  Teague looked up in time to see Phillip, acting as the focus as he always did, laughing maniacally and holding his hands out as he channeled power into the werewolf pack, scattering the mass of them and cooking those in the center where they stood.

  Then the glow from the vampires increased and a shield formed, keeping the hill’s shape-shifters safe from arrows, werewolves, and apparently a stray breeze—but it couldn’t last.

  The younger vampires, the weaker ones, were moaning in pain—Cory’s power was not meant for vampire consumption—and even as Teague blinked, the glow around some of the outliers faded. Those vampires fell from the sky, taxed beyond endurance, even beyond the ability to fly.

  But not Phillip—man, that brother could fuckin’ kill—and he was doing it with glee, until Marcus started yelling, “The elves, asshole! Get the fucking elves!”

  Phillip turned the power on the giants with the whips. At their first howl of pain, a cheer went up.

  Then Phillip screamed—power, pain, it didn’t matter. Marcus flew behind him and grabbed him around the waist, screaming, “Enough, my lady, enough! We can fight!”

  There was a flicker in the shields, in the vampire ranks, and Teague wondered at the titanic struggle inside Cory as well.

  Hurt her friends, or leave them open for the enemy?

  Or have faith that they
could defend themselves.

  The shields shut off abruptly. Then Phillip and Marcus dropped out of the sky, landing about three feet from Teague.

  Teague could hear Phillip’s giggles and sobs as they landed, and he thought Green’s people could either break or rally.

  He changed to human again and decided to help them rally.

  “For Lady Cory!” he screamed and then ran—naked and joyful, bounding over the fallen vampires with his machete in his fist.

  The roar at his back nearly knocked him forward—loud, savage, fierce, and pissed the fuck off. These were his people and they’d been attacked in their own home, made to fear leaving it, afraid to drink the water outside their walls, afraid to get so much as a traffic ticket in case the invaders took them out.

  They’d been made helpless while the elves protected them, while their queen even at her most vulnerable fought for them, while the vampires lifted them out of the fray like house pets even though they were dangerous predators all.

  This was the cry of a warrior army, furious and angry, ready to fucking kill.

  “For our lady!” Teague cried again. “Ignore the werewolves—go for the fucking elves!”

  The two redheaded giants with whips paused for a moment and shrunk in a few throbs of fear, allowing Teague to get another good look at them.

  Not giants. Not gods. Elves. Powerful still, terrifyingly powerful, but dammit, Teague wanted some fucking elf blood!

  Elves flooded from the outbuildings. They were probably the ones who’d been shooting the poisoned arrows at the hill’s people—all of them armed with silver-and-wood weapons, their movements fluid and graceful as they made to stand by the twin giants.

  The werewolves, no longer driven mad by the elves, took one look at the screaming, writhing, furry mass of shape-shifters, yelped, and ran away.

  “You cowards!” screamed the giant elf on Teague’s left. “Get back to your ranks!”

  He cracked the whip again. Even though it didn’t fall on any werewolf backs, they must have been conditioned by the sound. Some of them yelped, others growled, and Teague could sense a general return of purpose, of hatred, to the rank soldiers of this lot.

  “Oh, fuck no! Fuck the werewolves—kill the fucking elves!”

  He was laying about with the machete, and he knew how to use it. Hack, chop, slash—yes, most of the werewolves would be getting up again, but not anytime soon. Even for a werewolf, it took time to reattach a severed limb, and time was something the enemy didn’t have.

  Teague wasn’t the only warrior making his way to the front. Max had strapped six clips of steel shot to his back, and when they got close enough for Max to aim, Teague heard the reports, sharp and wicked, rip across the clearing in front of the ranch-style house.

  Five elves went down before the redheads started calling for a shield. With a few cracks of the whips, the werewolves were driven to a frenzy again, tearing and ripping at the Green’s hill shifters.

  Teague found himself surrounded by werewolves—being one of six or seven lone naked humans in a werewolf fight did make you sort of fucking conspicuous—and he was one snap away from getting his leg shredded by a werewolf who was probably tainted beyond redemption when Teague felt that now familiar sensation at his middle.

  “No! No, no, no, no, no, no, goddammit, no!”

  “Too bad!” Marcus singsonged in his ear. “Besides—you and Max can do a lot more damage close up. As soon as we take these assholes out, the werewolves will curl up and sleep.”

  “Goddammit!” Teague groused. “Can we at least call it ‘Pulling a Max’ from now on?”

  “Not on your life, wolfman!” Marcus crowed, then dropped him just out of reach of the redhead’s whip.

  Teague jumped backward barely in time, and as he dodged out of the way of the whip’s crack, he realized the damn thing wasn’t made of leather as he’d first assumed. It was made of vertebrae, no doubt from the elf queen’s enemies. Those jagged bones crackled with power around Teague’s head as the elf wound up, but Teague pulled out his machete—sharpened steel, all the better to kill elves with—and slashed the air as the whip fell down.

  And then whirled sideways as the severed piece of whip flew from the rest and what looked to be elf blood spattered from the pulsing end. Teague screamed as it splatted his face, burning, and he thought he was going to have to use his handy-dandy herb gel to clean that shit off.

  Just as soon as he was done killing this guy and doing his part for the cause.

  But the battle wasn’t going as well for the other warriors as it was for Teague.

  The giant elves weren’t the only ones stoked with power.

  As the werewolves whimpered and fainted at the enemy elves’ feet, those elves swelled and grew. They were enormous—aliens, giants, gods—and if Teague hadn’t had the boiling blood of one of them eating at his flesh, he would have thought the fuckers were invincible, because none of his guys seemed to be getting in a decent blow.

  Max aimed his Glock point-blank at the other redhead, but the bullets skidded off and up—something impossible with a normal target, but then, these were elves. The freaky fuckers defied gravity, and Teague was done thinking about it. He had enough problems just staying out of the fucking way.

  Max was playing happy-dancing too—except his elf had a silver blade, and Max didn’t have anything to parry with. Teague saw a stave on the ground and jumped over the whip stump, rolling to come up with it in his hand.

  “Max, catch!” he shouted, tossing the stave over a couple of werewolf/werekitty skirmishes between them.

  “Got it, thanks!” Max shouted. “But do you got any other bright ideas?”

  “Kill them?” Not Teague’s smartest moment, no. But killing them had been the idea before he’d led this little shindig—it was just proving damned harder than he’d planned.

  “That’d be fucking brilliant, wouldn’t it?” Lambent snarled. He was hand-to-hand battling another elf, and for the moment it looked like he was winning. Lambent had cast off his own glamour and was standing seven feet tall with flames for clothes, his ruddy features lit up in blue fire. Hellific, furious, he could have been the Christian devil, and the elf blood spattering his mouth and hair didn’t make that any less likely.

  “Got any idea how?” Teague swung his machete again. This time it clanged off the shield covering his opponent’s body—preternatural body armor powered by demented werewolves. Where in the fuck was this in Teague’s battlefield strategy, huh?

  “Yeah!” Lambent shouted, face suddenly lit with unholy glee. “Get the fuck out of his way!”

  Was Lambent fiery? Were the enemy elves glowing? Were they giants among men?

  Green appeared—a brilliant flickering conflagration, an emerald holocaust of furious movement, a giant among giants—clothed only in the glory of his people.

  Teague saw him striding with nothing in his hands but a pure bolt of energy fueled by love, by sex, by loyalty—none of it constrained, and bright enough to hurt the eyes and feed the soul.

  Not sunshine, but life—love, lust, sex, touch, kindness, growth, spring, oak roots, lime acid, wooden thorns—crawled over Green in the flames of power given to him freely by the people fighting for him in that moment.

  With an energy bolt shaped like a sword—a light saber, Teague wanted to say, but it wasn’t, it was a power saber, but that sounded dumb—he cut a swath through the werewolves before him. Then he strode through the bodies—not healing, these bodies, not reconstituting or recouping—and came face-to-face with the twin Teague had been fighting.

  That twin lost some of his stature, and Teague saw a distinctly human swallow.

  “You ready, Green?” Teague asked, tossing his machete from hand to hand.

  “More than ready, sir knight,” Green snarled. He raised his voice. “You fight proudly, my people! Now fuck them all!”

  Lady Cory: Vacant Chambers

  I PULLED my power from the battle—partly because Marcus and Phil
lip had had enough, and partly because I was growing weaker with every heartbeat.

  But mostly because I had seen Green’s car about two miles away from the viewpoint of the vampires.

  We weren’t losing, and help was coming.

  And I had shit I needed to focus on a little closer to home.

  “Cory. Corinne Carol-Anne. Lady Cory. My Lady. Wife, slut, tool, student, menial crafter—”

  I grunted and looked at Bracken, Grace, and Arturo. “That last one was just rude.”

  Arturo shook his head. “Where is she—I mean, how did she get past us all?”

  “She just walked in, Arturo,” I told him. “When she’s not all skinny and shit, I’m sure she looks like every other elf. There’s thousands of people here—especially while people are filtering out, you’re not going to notice one figure, probably coming up the stairs, and….”

  I closed my eyes and listened.

  “Ou’e’eir, due’alle, slut, wife, tool, student, kid, menial worker, white trash—”

  “She’s close,” I said. “Is she in Nicky’s room?”

  A look of revulsion crossed Bracken’s face. “No, that’s not Nicky’s room,” he snarled.

  For a moment I was going to be sick. Then my mad charged into me like a rampaging rhinoceros.

  “She is getting the fuck out of that room,” I threatened. “C’mon, Bracken, help me up. This is you and me—”

  “And me,” Arturo said, matter-of-fact. Well, he was like my uncle, sort of. Grace cleared her throat grimly, and there you had it. Mommy, daddy, extended family—

  Everyone was going to visit the babies’ room.

  Bracken helped me up, my knees creaking grimly, and I waddled to the connecting door that I hadn’t opened since I’d created it, not even when Green had asked me to visit it in his absence.

  I’d thought I had another week.

  There was never enough time to prepare. I should have known that—I should have learned that lesson with Adrian. With Green. With Bracken and Nicky.

  I should have learned that lesson when I’d found out I was pregnant and couldn’t even say the word. But time was up—it was time to face facts, and time to see who was waiting for me in the nursery.