Rampant, Volume 2

by Amy Lane

  Teague was driving. He came up to me as we were loading up, holding up his iPod, which was loaded just like mine.

  “Bleed It Out?” he asked hopefully, and I grinned. I don’t know what I looked like, but his grin back was ferocious and bloodthirsty, and nobody had better fuck with us because we were bad fucking business.

  “Bleed it out!” I answered back. We bashed closed fists together and got ready to roll.

  I don’t know when we had started the tradition of listening to head-banging music on the way to our ass-kicking runs—I think I just started co-opting the stereo and playing stuff that got me pumped. It didn’t matter, because when Teague joined us in November, the tradition became locked in stone. Now we even had a couple of playlists culled from iPods full of every metal, rock, or alternative CD produced in the last twenty years.

  Without a doubt, the vampires’ favorite was Adrian’s favorite—Linkin Park—and their hands-down, love-it-forever, rhythm-pumped-in-their-veins favorite kickass song was “Bleed It Out.” We’d built a four-hour playlist around that song, and on nights like this, it felt good to thunder that shit through our veins.

  We drove out of the campground with music blasting loud enough to shake the windows. Knowing that Annette was driving determinedly behind us, the guys let me drive. We left her in the dust before we hit the freeway. I knew she’d find us eventually—she’d heard us talking enough to figure out where we were going—but she’d have to use Google and her iPhone to get there, so away we went into the wild blue.

  Redding was a different town at night.

  The sun-bleached bustle of the day had been replaced by the heavy lassitude of an entire town too hot to sleep. The pump and buzz of air conditioners rode the air, and even at eleven at night, there were entire families on their lawns trying to catch a breeze as it limped down the mountains and onto the lower plain that was the city proper.

  There was a sense here—you couldn’t see it on the suburban streets, but there was always a knowledge that beyond the boundaries of the city there was… less humanity, maybe, than there was in Sacramento or in any of those suburbs. This was an island of people surrounded by flat, scoured farmland and brutal mountains. The houses in the suburbs seemed to huddle even in the heat.

  The squat brick building that housed Rafael’s club didn’t look any bigger or more imposing at night, but it did seem to be overflowing with people—a lot of them big, tattooed, and riding motorcycles. We parked the SUVs in the overflow parking lot, and the guys turned to me expectantly.

  Time to eat!

  “Are you guys going to be civilized about this,” I asked, turning to the back of the car, “or are you going to bicker like five-year-olds?”

  Sorceress and elf blood were both real delicacies—although I understood that elf blood was pretty damned intoxicating, especially on an empty stomach. Shape-shifter blood was more sustaining—and tasty—than human blood, but our guys had a steady diet of shape-shifter and not a lot of sorceress or elf. There was only one of me, and the elves tended to shy away from blood exchanges. I think Green and Bracken had been the only two elves ever to make years-long habits of being lunch. Any way you looked at it, more than one kind of fun was on the menu tonight.

  Marcus answered, but he was looking a little shy. “Uhm, we were actually sort of hoping… we could, you know, sample. I know it’s an imposition….”

  I slanted a look at Bracken and Nicky. They rolled their eyes and shrugged—why not? Lambent sneered and tried to look bored, but he was obviously hiding curiosity under that flame-haired nonchalance. Once upon a time, he’d refused a vampire’s bite, but now he’d seen the shape-shifters getting fed from all week. He wanted to know what the shouting—and oohing and aahing—was all about.

  “Sure,” I said with a good-humored smile. “But could you start with Nicky first?” He wouldn’t get as woozy with blood loss as I would, and Bracken and Lambent would make them drunk on an empty stomach.

  After some shifting in our seats, Kyle bit Nicky first, and I watched with growing arousal. The brief exchanges for bloodings were ceremonial in nature—they came nowhere near the excitement of a true feeding. As Kyle bit Nicky’s wrist and worked his throat, I heard Nicky’s discreet little sigh and tried to remember the last time a vampire had fed from me.

  Only one name came to me, and it had been more than a year and a half ago.

  “Andres,” Bracken whispered in my ear. I turned to him, flushing. Andres had wanted us both, but what he had gotten was a true taste of my blood to fulfill a contract with Green and a shared bite between Bracken and myself that still made me hot to think about. Andres was what Bracken had in mind whenever he thought of stepping outside our little circle—and maybe the only person I would consider taking into my bed who was not wearing our ring.

  “Andres might be helpful with this situation,” I agreed, trying to cover the fact that the slight, suave vampire still held a fascination for me. Nobody would hold it against me—I knew that. But just because I could do something—even with full approval of my lovers—didn’t mean I should… right?

  Kyle swallowed and then looked at me expectantly, and I held out my wrist. There was that pressure, and then the pain, and then it faded, replaced by the endorphins or whatever the Goddess put in vampire spit. That sweet numbness cruised up my bloodstream like a cocaine fish, giving me a buzz and a slightly dirty feeling, and as Kyle sucked and swallowed and sucked and swallowed, I started to feel like a party girl doing lines in the car before going clubbing.

  It was something that I’d never been.

  My head tilted back and I sighed and relaxed, and then Kyle released me and Phillip took his place. Next to me, Bracken made a soft grunt and then a long, drawn-out sigh, and my nervousness about tonight’s little performance drained away with my surplus red matter. Perform in a bar with a bazillion people watching me? No big deal. I was queen of the flying vampires, duchess of euphoria, countess of kink.

  I could do anything, as long as these guys kept pumping Goddess juice into me as they fed.

  I don’t know how high I would have gotten if Marcus hadn’t broken my concentration.

  “Uhm, Lady Cory?”

  I half opened bemused eyes at him, and he smiled a little through his feeding face. The expression was sardonic, as though he knew how good I felt.

  “May I….” he stammered and blushed—again, odd in that face!—and Phillip released my wrist. I sat up a little, adjusted my obscenely short skirt, and tried to remember who and where I was.

  “What do you need?” I asked reflexively. That’s what I did, wasn’t it? I met people’s needs?

  “May I feed from your neck?” he finally stated baldly, and I smiled and flustered. “Bracken can hold your hand…. It’s just….” He stopped stammering and met my eyes. His eyes weren’t whirling red yet—they were still brown and liquid—and I remembered his little crush from last year. “This is an honor we don’t get much. I was hoping I could do it right.”

  Next to me, Bracken traced his fingers ever so subtly down my bare arm. Why not? It was getting hot in the SUV anyway, now the motor and air-conditioning were off.

  We slid out of the car, and I winced when my back stuck to the leather—it really had been getting hot in there, and we hadn’t noticed. Bracken grabbed my hand, and Marcus advanced. He wasn’t that much taller than me, and he wasn’t that much broader, but for a moment, in the shadows, I remembered why people were afraid of vampires. Then the erstwhile schoolteacher smiled, and even with fangs there was something so gentle, so game in his liquid brown eyes that it was the most natural thing in the world to tilt my head back, feel his breath on my neck, and surrender.

  Bracken and Nicky were getting fed from too, but as I sank into Marcus’s gentle hug, I didn’t think they were having nearly as much fun.

  It was pleasant—and over quickly, since we were, in essence, just topping off the tank—but it reminded me of what I didn’t receive in a vampire feeding anymore.
Bracken’s pressure on my hand became my lifeline, my anchor to emotion, to love, to anything but this sort of detached pleasure that I felt in the arms of a man whom I cared about, but did not love.

  Bracken’s warm hand squeezed mine, and Marcus broke off from the feeding and smiled shyly. I kissed his cheek like the brother he was and stepped back.

  I was still riding the vein-wave, so I felt a bit of disembodied happiness, but the euphoria had disappeared. I was reminded of all the reasons I couldn’t succumb to that sort of high—there were too many people who could not afford to have me suffer the same fate as my beloved.

  It was with a sense of grim anticipation that I adjusted the little shawl on my back and put on the party-girl face I’d started out with, then grabbed Bracken and Nicky’s hands and ran for the door.

  The two bouncers were werecreatures—they must have been, because they weren’t vampires—but our pass in was to hold up our punctured wrists to let them smell the vamp whose bite vouched for us.

  We got some funny looks—we’d left my vampires near the car for a late entrance, partly so they could bite the others as they arrived, and partly because they knew some of the people here and didn’t want to tip anyone off. It didn’t matter. It was clear that while the species was recognizable, the individuals were unfamiliar. Strange vamps were in town—now they knew.

  Either way, it got us in, and no one stopped Bracken and Lambent for being elves, and I trotted down the short flight of stairs with the confidence of a girl out to have fun dancing all night.

  The club was—as we had thought—unpredictably large inside. Once you got to the bottom of the stairs, the building stretched out far enough into the hill to make the dance floor large and the speakers not overwhelming to the stage. It was dark but not smoky, and I guess that made sense too. Nobody here had addictions like nicotine—they’d all been cleared out of their blood at the change.

  But that didn’t stop the crowd from looking… well, out of my league as a college student, that was for damned sure.

  They were rough—many of the vamps had tattoos from before they died, and so did the shifters. A lot of them were big, beefy, and bald, or short and scrawny with tree roots for muscles and braking cable for sinews. The women were weed thin or cheeseburger plump—my leaning before sorcery had started burning all my calories—with deeply lined faces, even the ones who had been turned in their twenties.

  I didn’t need to look at the room with power in my eyes to see that these people had grown up together, turned together, and shared blood often and only in the tight little circle that claimed tables with the arrogance of long familiarity.

  They were like us in a way, I thought, trying hard not to be intimidated. The cast-out and cast-off, the aliens in their homeland, the underground members of a secret society.

  I watched as a beefy vampire, who had been in his sixties when he turned and sported long grizzled hair and only his fangs for teeth, walked up to a female shape-changer and casually backhanded her.

  The woman landed on her ass and bumped her head on a chair going down, but in spite of the clatter, the rest of the bar ignored them. The guy glared contempt at the girl as she stared stupidly back—she obviously didn’t know what she’d done wrong.

  “I told you, bitch,” the guy grinned nastily, “you need to eat with the other dogs.” He jerked his chin in the direction of a table in the shadows, and I raised my eyebrows. Apparently there was a shape-changer pecking order, and she’d violated it. Sucks to be her!

  “Rafael isn’t going to like that.” I turned at the grumble and saw a very young man standing behind the bar—or at least he’d been young when he’d been turned. Fifteen, maybe? Just beyond the age when we’d probably have to worry about him turning into the feral creature in our basement—but I wouldn’t have wanted to make that call.

  “Happen a lot around here?” I asked casually. The kid grinned at me, white teeth in a brown face—he must have had one hell of a tan when he went over. His hair was buzz-cut, and he appeared to be standing on a platform behind the bar—I estimated he wasn’t much taller than I was.

  “Not when Rafael’s out. He keeps trying to make us civilized, you know?” The kid vampire dropped his voice and jerked his head toward the big grizzled toothless vampire who was heading our way. “Guys like that, they want to make like being a vampire is just like being in their old riding gang. Rafael wants it to be better. Says the guy who made him wanted it to be better—he’s just passing on the favor.”

  I nodded. Change was hard—Rafael was working toward it. I could respect that. Green had needed to do a similar thing with the elves when I’d first come to the hill.

  “So what can I get you?” the young vamp asked, and I grimaced at the number of female shape-shifters who were eyeing Bracken before I replied.

  “Diet Coke,” I said and nodded to Nicky. Max and Renny had just walked in. Max looked like a cop, even in his jeans and sport coat—over a backless tank top, of course—but Renny, like all cats, seemed right in her element. Nicky saw them and nodded back at me, then made his way toward the karaoke moderator to drop off our request. A young shape-shifter with a very nice tenor was just finishing up Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home,” and I could only hope I hit all my notes as well as he did.

  “Are you shitting me?” the bartending vamp asked, jerking my attention back to him. “Diet Coke? You come into a dive like this and ask for a Diet Coke, and it’s likely to get you killed!”

  My mouth pulled up on the side in a crooked grin. “And losing focus in a place like this is going to do the same thing. I’ll take a diet soda, please.”

  I couldn’t think of him as anything other than a kid—he probably ate kittens for breakfast, but that grin made him fifteen forever. “I’m not serving that,” he said flatly, his front two teeth still showing in a partial smile. “You want to stay here, you have to order a real drink.”

  I eyeballed the interior of the bar again. Lambent had taken up a dark corner, where he sort of glowed ominously, and the werewolves had just entered. I had to look at the werewolves twice to recognize them—their appearance wasn’t any different, but the guys had developed what I could only term “heterosexual space” as they walked into the bar with Katy between them. It was possible, looking at them, that you might guess they were both Katy’s lovers, but you would never in a million years guess that they spent every night in each other’s arms. It was probably self-protective—and it definitely served them well here—but it made me a little sad. Those three still had shit to get over before they would rest easily on Green’s hill.

  “Kid,” I said cheekily, “what’s your name?”

  “Walter,” he replied, “and I’m probably older than you.”

  “Not by much, Walter.” I estimated he’d been turned maybe ten years ago. “Anyway, I’ll tell you what—you make rum and Diet Coke, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” One side of his mouth pulled up as he wondered where I was going with this.

  “Well, how about you make me a rum and Diet Coke without the rum.”

  “D’oohhh!” the kid chortled, amused that he’d been so easily caught. Next to me, Bracken choked back on a snicker, and I eyed my beloved with sour amusement. He was wearing his redneck glamour, which meant he had a short-cut mullet and saturnine lines around his forehead and cheeks, but no fewer than four women had licked their lips and widened their eyes in his general direction. Cute. One more woman did that, and I was going to rip her lungs out through her nostrils, geas of death or no.

  One of the women saw my glower and quickly grew sober, so I dialed back on the scowl a notch or two. I forgot, sometimes, that I had plenty of practice looking like a badass before I had the muscle to back it up.

  Turning back to Walter, I raised my eyebrows. “So, darling, can we do that?”

  Walter smirked and filled a tall collins glass with ice and soda from the soda gun. “Don’t see why not—but it’s gonna cost you the same as a rum and
Coke.”

  Mario and LaMark walked in, looking like buddies and, thanks to Mario, like nobody’s meat. The vampires were waiting to hear me announced, and Nicky nodded to me and held up ten fingers. Ten minutes—sounded good.

  I turned back to Walter, who had missed the byplay. “Tell you what, Walter,” I purred. “If your boss doesn’t offer to pay for my drinks by the end of the night, I’ll pay you double what we order and you can pocket the rest.”

  Bracken choked back another guffaw, and we smirked at each other for a moment. Neither of us had forgotten the danger, and we certainly didn’t think the evening was a wrap—but if we couldn’t get Rafael to spring for a virgin rum and Coke, we were doing it wrong.

  I wiped out the first soda and tapped the bar for a refill, and Bracken leaned over to whisper, “If you’re not careful, you’re going to give yourself the hiccups!” That got a burst of semihysterical giggles from me, which was probably a bad idea.

  Cocking his head at my laughter, Toothless the Badassed Woman Beater stalked over to me like he was going to pick his fangs with my bones. I sneered back and turned my head. His eyes narrowed, and I realized what a complete dumbass I was—oh Jesus, I had just shamed the bar’s resident prick. I could probably take him, Bracken definitely could, but the point was, we didn’t want to take him. Revealing ourselves in a bar fight would not be nearly as powerful as revealing ourselves when we damned well pleased—with the bar behind us and beneath us, so to speak.

  So I didn’t back down when Toothless got to me, but I didn’t pin him to the ceiling with power and let Bracken eviscerate him either.

  “What you doing here, little girl?” the guy growled, and I beamed up at him with my heart—and my power—in my smile.