Quickening, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  From the center, where the joint of the shoulder would be, a tiny embryonic wing had begun to grow.

  I closed my eyes and felt the tears start.

  “Thank you,” I whispered to both of them. Ah, Nicky. Every silly joke, every game sally into the grim and terrible affairs of sorceresses and elves. “Oh, our darling Nicky—we’d be so lost without you.”

  Green wrapped his arm around my shoulder and kissed my temple.

  “Shall we go see our girl?” he asked, voice shaky.

  “Yes,” I said, holding Nicky tighter for a moment. “She needs us. She needs us all.”

  Cory: Little Acorns, Tall Trees, Inconvenient Motherfucking Squirrels

  I KNEW that healing quiet in the hill. Was it awful that it comforted me?

  Green, Bracken, Whim, and Hallow all ganged up on me and put me on bed rest for the week after the battle. Hallow gathered up all of my schoolwork and the lectures on YouTube with every intention of letting me do my own homework, but Bracken sat stoically and silently and did it all for me.

  He did Nicky’s too, but Nicky didn’t object to not doing his own work the way I did.

  Nicky was too busy trying to wheedle hand jobs from Bracken as he nursed his own healing body.

  “C’mon, Bracken,” Nicky cajoled on our fifth day in bed. “Look at it!” He flapped his withered, half-formed arm and hand as they tried hard to grow from his body using what the military calls PFM. “I need one hand to pinch my nipples and the other hand to grab my peter—how am I going to get anything done?”

  But no amount of Pure Fucking Magic could take away Bracken’s terror of something bad happening to the two of us.

  “I’ll go get you some water,” Brack said abruptly, standing up to rush out of the room.

  Nicky watched him go unhappily. “Is he repelled by it?” he asked, flopping it around for effect.

  I glared at him over my second baby blanket. “You are so stupid,” I snapped. “I can’t believe you could jack off when you had both hands.”

  “What’s wrong, then?” he asked, serious for once.

  “He was worried about you, asshole! You spend the last seven months changing your relationship, making yourself vital to everybody, dedicating yourself to the fucking family, for sweet Goddess’s sake, and you don’t think that’s going to deepen how much he cares about you? Jesus, Nicky. Grow the fuck up!”

  His wide, smiling mouth made a juicy, cherry-ripe little O as he got it. I leaned in and kissed him, because we were confined to bed and I could.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I murmured when the kiss was done. “Bracken’s growing up too.”

  He’d been… well, practically catatonic with worry when we’d woken up after the battle. Green had been pretty silent too. Neither of them said anything, but Nicky had come damned close to death on the field, and I hadn’t been doing so hot myself when Bracken had gotten all heroic as a caller of blood.

  “Yeah? What’s got him all nutted up?”

  I turned and stroked his shoulder and the skin of his regrowing limb. “Besides almost losing both of us? We all lost friends, Nick. And… and an enemy was here. In our home. He… he had to unmake the nursery. How do you think they’re going to replace that?”

  Nicky shrugged and winked. “I thought they were just going to use my room, since I’m mostly sleeping here or in Green’s room.”

  “I’m all for that,” I said, so glad he belonged. “But honestly, I think once the babies are born, nobody in this room is going to get much sleep.”

  “Well, why don’t we put them in bassinets in here and then move them to cribs when they start sleeping through the night?”

  I stared at him.

  “What?”

  “It’s… I don’t know. Sort of fucking brilliant.”

  Nicky grinned. “Thanks! And my room is damned big. And right next door. How about I keep a part of it with a bed and some drawers, and we put the squids in the rest of it. I mean jeez, all I have to do is tweak your nipples and we’ve got ourselves a partition with a door, right?”

  I laughed tiredly. “Someday I will have sex again.”

  He leaned his head on my shoulder in honest consolation. “Yeah. I know. So will I.”

  “Well, so will Brack.”

  Green didn’t have to wait. Green was up to his eyeballs in comfort sex, and so were Lambent and Sweet and Twilight.

  We had lost two elves, five vampires, and over two dozen shape-shifters on the battlefield that night.

  I had blooded with the vampires, had eaten with the shape-shifters, had learned poetry from the elves. Bracken and Green had expected me to put up a fight when they’d sentenced me to more bed rest, but I couldn’t. I was too heartsore to fight them, too sad to want to do anything but let my body heal, feel the children in my womb, and grieve.

  When Bracken returned to the room with the glass of water, I saw his own grief etched on his face. He thrust the glass at Nicky with a mumbled “Here,” but I took it and set it on the end table instead.

  “Here,” I whispered, cupping his cheeks.

  He stared at me—too surprised, I think, to cloak his sadness, his fear, his worry for the both of us anymore. He sank down on the edge of the bed, and I took his hand and rested it on my stomach. “Here,” I said. I looked at Nicky and took his hand too. “Here.”

  I held their hands over our children for a moment, and we closed our eyes and simply were. “A boy and a girl,” I said, and they hmmed in assent. “The boy, we’ll name Drian,” I said with decision, “until he decides on his own name. The girl will be….” I was going to say “Adria,” but that wasn’t what came from my mouth. “Silver,” I said, surprised by the simplicity, the perfection of it as the name issued forth. “Silver and Drian. Did you feel them, Brack? That night you talked to my blood?”

  “They’re sweet,” he said, voice filled with wonder. “So sweet. They know us. All three of us. We’re their fathers.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Their fathers. Who all kept their mother and their home safe when it was under attack. Their fathers are wonderful. Their fathers are heroes. Did you tell them that when you were in there?”

  Bracken turned and used the generous portion of bed I’d left him so he could slump against me, his head on my shoulder. “I told them they were loved,” he said hoarsely.

  “They are,” I told him. “They’re so loved that all of their people ventured out to fight a battle to keep them safe. They destroyed a temple of bone and set free bound werewolves to make sure they grew up free and happy. Some of them gave their lives for a free and happy home. That’s the story we’ll tell them.”

  “It’s a beautiful story,” Green said, standing in the doorway.

  I met his eyes, mine shiny and bright with unshed tears. “My children have beautiful fathers,” I said as the tears spilled over.

  “And their mother is mighty.” Green moved forward so he could crouch next to us. He leaned his forehead against mine, and his tears plopped down to brush my cheeks.

  I didn’t argue with him. I didn’t complain that I wasn’t up to the job. I protected my people and comforted my lovers. I would protect and comfort my children. I’d seen a blueprint for what not to do—I was pretty sure we would be okay.

  The next day, Bracken, Nicky, and I went up to the Goddess grove alone with Green. We watched him hold his hands over one of the twisted boles of a fused oak, lime, and rose tree. He passed his hands in a dance—like a bird floating on air currents, or a raft feeling the veins of a river beneath it—and sang softly. Our song. Rain will fall and trees will grow and we will have lovers… again.

  Underneath his hands, a shape began to form.

  It emerged slowly, the wood electing to peel back from his gentle persuasion. When I realized what he was doing, what it would be, I wept. Two feet by three feet, all of one piece, a cradle on two rockers, too sturdy to tilt unless it was flipped over on purpose. He gently separated it from the living wood and set it by my feet. />
  Then he turned to another likely bole and began to pass his hands again.

  It took him hours, and we stayed with him, silent and reverent, the whole time. After the first one, Bracken lifted me up and sat me on his lap as he rested on Adrian’s bench, and we watched as Green sang softly to the wood, smoothed it, cured it, made it silky under his hands. A sprite appeared with linseed oil, and he used that to finish the two cradles, then cleaned his hands off on a handy-dandy sprite-prepared cloth and left them to dry in the emerging late February sun.

  When I went back to school the next day, Nicky’s room had been cut in half as he’d suggested. While we were waiting on cribs that would be gifts from the lower fey, in Bracken’s and my room, standing waist-high and carved out of living wood, there stood two cradles—beds of safety and love carved for my children by one of their fathers.

  On each cradle, I’d placed one brightly striped, loosely knitted cotton blanket in a basket weave pattern with a lace edging.

  Grace had said they’d like to play with the lace on the edge.

  She’d made two cradle pads the night before, of simple white flannel, and two quilts, one in turquoise and purple and one in yellow and green.

  We would need other things, of course. Clothes, I was sure, and a dresser to put them in, as well as a changing table and a rocking chair.

  But when I went back to school after the battle for our home and our souls, I went knowing that if those babies were born the next day, my home and my heart would be ready.

  A MONTH later, I was more than ready.

  I could barely walk, and nothing stayed down. Bracken carried me more often than not, and even I had to admit that I was losing weight under the burden of the not-so-tiny bodies inside mine.

  But when your mother asks you—politely and as a peace offering—if she can take you shopping for little cotton onesies and T-shirts with bears on the front, it’s not nice to whine. Bracken and Nicky agreed to chaperone me, and Renny had just slid into the car without asking. Even though Nicky was just showing off his whole, hale, and very pale left arm, I was so grateful that I didn’t mind the way he posed and flexed with every garment he picked up.

  It felt good to laugh again.

  The night before, the boys had pretty much banged each other comatose—oh yeah. Every tab in every slot, and I lay on my side in the corner of the bed and said things that felt silly in the cold light of day but felt pretty damned good at the moment. (“Oh yeah, fuck him harder!” just sounded so porny in real life. In the bed, fine. In the baby department at Target? Oh dear Goddess no.) And when they were done, they had turned their attention on me.

  No, penetration wasn’t happening, and even orgasm was looking pretty risky, given how tired Green said my body was getting. But they weren’t touching me to stimulate me—they were touching me to sate me. From my toes to my thighs, over my flanks, over my stomach, gliding up my arms and over my neck, even massaging my scalp through my hair, every touch had been infused with love, with their own pleasure, with the sex that had pleased us all.

  I still waddled—and sat down a lot—and my hair was still greasy, and I was pretty sure elves were bumping me in the hallway on purpose to cure my acne, which would have just been all over the fucking place without them.

  But I had been well loved the night before, and even though my body was a giant gestating oven right now, I felt a promise of sexuality from that touch, a promise of selfdom, of being a fully contained person after I gave birth and had these two little people to care for.

  Yes, I wanted it to be done because I was exhausted and miserable, but more than that.

  I’d felt them dance against my palms, and against my liver. I’d sung to them, read them poetry, and told them to dammit, stop that!

  I had imagined braiding my daughter’s hair—and my son’s. I imagined them playing outside on the banks of the pond, terrorizing the kelpie and being tossed in the air by the vampires as Adrian used to toss Bracken.

  I imagined Nicky rocking them to sleep at night, and Bracken holding them in the morning, and Green remembering what it was to be young again and playing with them in the day.

  I imagined taking them to the garden and watching to see if they could visit the ghost who would, I just knew, return upon their birth.

  All of that imagining—dammit! I wanted to meet them now! They’d had a hell of a buildup, right?

  But according to Hallow, Whim, Lambent, and Green—who all consulted now, after touching my stomach and letting their eyes roll back in their heads—it looked as though I had a couple weeks to wait, if my body was holding up, and I wasn’t really known for my patience as it was.

  So shopping with my mom on a sunny Saturday in April was fine. The lower fey had carved two big cribs and then used cotton to tick hand-sewn mattresses for them. I might have said something about, hey, hello, plastic mattresses for leaky all-cotton diapers, but at this point, I figured what the hell. I hadn’t done my own laundry in nearly three years. If they wanted to wash the mattress pads, that was their business, and I’d leave them to it.

  But the all-cotton onesies—those, Mom and I could buy.

  She held them out for me—pink for girls, blue for boys—and even though I was supposed to be more evolved than that, I was still conditioned by Western culture. Sue me. Pink for girls and blue for boys was cute as hell.

  “Knock yourself out, Mom!” I said from the hard plastic bench that had become my throne. “They’re adorable.”

  Mom preened. I guess I wasn’t the only one who could flower under a little praise—it was nice to see that I had the power of dishing it out too.

  “I’ll just go get these,” she chimed, pushing a laden cart toward the register.

  Bracken bent down and kissed my cheek. “I’ll just go pull the car around,” he said. “Nicky?”

  “I wanted to go look at iPods,” Nicky said. I could see the electronics aisle from where I sat. “Will you be okay here for ten? I’ll come get you after Bracken has the car.” Bracken had needed to park in the farthest reaches of the parking lot—and traffic was fierce.

  “Where’s Renny?” I asked. I’d gone to the bathroom for the five hundredth time, and she’d followed me there and back but had wandered off as soon as I could see Bracken again.

  “On the other side of the partition—see?” Nicky waved his pale arm at the formal baby clothes my mom hadn’t bought, and I saw Renny absorbed in a teeny-tiny tuxedo.

  So I knew where everyone was. What the hell, right? I was still a sorceress, and we were no longer at war.

  “Yeah,” I said, tucking my hand behind the small of my back and leaning my head against the hard wall behind me. “I’ll be fine. Brack, buzz us when you’re waiting.”

  Nicky would be mostly in my line of sight—I wasn’t worried.

  “I want ice cream when we’re done here,” Nicky said pertly. God, he was so milking this arm thing.

  “Of course, my liege,” Bracken said, rolling his eyes. I grinned at him and pushed his dark hair from his face.

  “Don’t you forget it!” I murmured.

  He kissed the end of my nose, and he and Nicky lit out on their separate quests.

  We figured it out later—much later. Doc Nieman must have been stalking me for months. But the broken shields had been reinstated before I went back to school. How many times had he followed one of Green’s vehicles back to the driveway entrance and then driven away, baffled because he couldn’t remember losing the car in front of him? How many times had he seen me at school—demented to the point of alienating his family, distracted by the loss of his clinic, heartbroken by the loss of his chance to practice medicine, and disturbed by the things he’d seen the night of Teague’s abortive break-in?

  How long had he plotted to see, just see, just get to the bottom of what had started the whole chain of events? How long had he waited for me to be alone?

  This time he must have sensed victory, because he had Nurse Janine with him, and I wasn
’t afraid of her at all.

  “Cory! Hon, how you doing?” she asked, coming around the corner natural as could be.

  “Janine? Hey. I heard your clinic burned down—sorry to hear that.” I glanced around for Renny and saw her flyaway hair peeking out over the partition.

  Janine’s once open face closed, and later I would remember that she was wearing scrubs and that her clothes didn’t match what came out of her mouth next. “Yes, well, it’s been rough. Had to go back into the rotation, you know, and injured my back all over again. I’m out on leave now—we’re hurting.”

  Dammit. “Well, I understand the clinic is close to being rebuilt.”

  “Yeah. It will be nice to get back to work.” Without asking, she sat down next to me. I had to crane my neck to look at her, her hazel eyes guileless in her lean, tanned face.

  “That’s—ouch!” I turned, and there he was. Dr. Nieman, the man I’d set on the road to obsession and then blown off. As I watched, rubbing my arm, he palmed a small hypodermic needle and I felt the sudden urge to blow chunks.

  Oh, Jesus. I couldn’t even drink coffee out of a plastic cup these days.

  My body was taking the sedative hard, and my eyes were at half-mast as I told him the honest-to-Goddess truth. “Man, you’ve got one chance to save your own lives. My men will fucking kill you.”

  “Shh, Cory,” Dr. Nieman soothed. “We’ll get those babies out of you and to a nursery just as fast as we can. You’re at your due date already, and I’m sure your blood pressure is through the roof.”

  I tried to summon power even as I slumped over. “Well, it is now!” I mumbled. And then I was lost in a queasy, pukey, hallucinogenic darkness, dreaming about frying Doc Nieman’s testicles and serving them to him on a platter.

  The Child-raising Village