by Amy Lane
“We should stay,” I said, hating myself. “We should stay, but—” I couldn’t. I couldn’t trust anyone but me and Bracken to take care of someone who had tried to hurt my Green. Was I choosing vengeance over love? Was I?
“No,” he said sternly, probably to both questions. “No. I am fine. And you are my beloved and my vengeance. You’re the only one who loves me enough to keep my hill inviolate, beloved. You’re the only one who can do what must be done.”
I nodded, but my panic was slow to recede. I might have stood there forever, torn between staying and going, but he held my face in his long hands and forced me to breathe. “Peace, beloved.”
Deliberately he inserted the image in my head of the two of us making love that morning. I saw myself through his eyes, and besides smoking hot, I was also strong.
I was strong enough to live with Green alive, here on the hill. I was strong enough to go back out in the world and avenge our wrong.
That was how he saw me. It was who I had to be.
I stopped my silent sniveling, and we shared one last sweet good-bye kiss before he belted me in and shut the door. With a rev of the engine and a sedate crunch of gravel, the SUV left home in a melancholy, aching silence.
Eventually, though, Max started the “Bleed It Out” playlist, Renny handed me my knitting—which she’d brought from the cabin as we’d left—and Bracken rolled down the windows, letting the humid summer air cleanse the melancholy and fill us with electricity. We had serious, bloody work to do tonight—I could miss Green once I was sure I’d kept him safe.
We were an hour and a half out of Redding when the sun went down and I called Nicky.
“What’s the news?” he asked, and I gave him the plan. It was pretty simple, all things considered. There were no prisoners, there was no forgiveness. No one hurt Green and lived.
“Right,” my accidental lover said decisively. “What time should we be there?”
My heart stuttered in my chest. “Nicky…,” I stammered. “Nicky… uhm… you know what we’re doing tonight? I’m thinking Marcus and Phillip….”
“Not Kyle?”
“No.” Kyle was still hurt. He might not want to live here, but I didn’t want to give him these memories either. “But maybe Teague and Mario….”
“Not Lambent?”
“We need some fighters back at the ranch, Nicky,” I said, sure of this at least. “I don’t want our people unprotected.” I grimaced at Max and Renny. “If I had my way, I’d send Renny back to you before we got there, but I don’t see how that’ll happen—”
“Wait a minute,” Nicky interrupted, outrage in his voice. “What do you mean ‘back to me’? Why in the name of pissed-off fucking birds would I not be there?”
I swallowed and looked sideways at Bracken. He was leaning so that the wind from the window hit his face, his mouth open so he could taste the dry dust, and the moisture, and the smell of cows and mulch and growing things in what was more desert flatness than anything else.
“We’re going to be doing terrible things tonight, Nicky,” I said softly. “Do you really want to face your parents with blood on your hands?”
There was a silence, and I couldn’t tell what kind. Was he accepting? Was he angry? Did he understand, at least, why I was trying to spare him?
“I’ll be there, ou’e’ane,” he said at last, quietly. “I love you and our ou’e’hm.”
I swallowed. Wasn’t it weird how a word you didn’t have in your own language came to mean shit you would never think of?
“We love you too, ou’e’alle. Meet you at the lion’s den—wait for us. Brack and I will go in first.”
I rang off and put the phone in my pocket, then leaned back against Bracken and picked up my knitting to ease the nervousness that wanted to vibrate me across the seat.
“He’s coming, isn’t he?” Bracken asked against my ear.
“I wish he wouldn’t.” I gazed sightlessly at my sock, and my fingers kept doing their happy little dance to make it grow.
“I know you do, but he’s a good fighter, and it looks good if he’s there.”
I scowled at my beloved, which he probably didn’t deserve, but, well, he was there. “I don’t give a shit how it looks. I didn’t want him to have to tell his parents he was going out to murder someone tonight!”
Bracken looked at me mildly. “I don’t see why he’d have to do that, Corinne Carol-Anne. I thought that was our job.”
I blinked at him. He was right, of course. I thought of Green—lying in a pool of light, naked on his own earth, his skull misshapen, his limbs shattered, blood coating his skin—and my rage threatened to boil up and consume me.
“How silly of me,” I rasped through crimson vision. “You’re right—Nicky will get to watch.”
Max cranked up the music, and I knit furiously on.
There were clouds over the plains as we drove. They’d turned a sullen pink at sunset, and as we approached the sprawling huddle of Redding, they seemed to spread out like a Bela Lugosi cloak to muffle the stars. The cloud cover gave a weight and heft to the heat as we got out of the car, but that didn’t stop me from tucking the two guns Max gave me into the back of my cutoff jeans and throwing a denim jacket on to cover them up. I patted down my ass and applied that special saltwater/aloe/sidhe-magic gel stuff that I kept in a Purell bottle in my purse. A cold iron burn on an elf was no joke, and I was damned if Bracken was ever going to get so much as a singe again because he wanted to hold my hand or help me with my gun.
Marcus, Phillip, Teague, and Nicky got out of the SUV, and Nicky managed not to rush too badly to hug me breathless.
“Here,” I said, lifting up my chin, because he’s a bird in his other life and he could stick his nose into the hollow of my neck and breathe in Green—his health, his warmth, his want—all from that last kiss and embrace before we had left.
Nicky’s nose bumped against my shoulder, and he groaned and shook in my arms. “He’s okay,” he whispered.
“He’s fine,” I whispered back. Nicky didn’t need to know how badly Green had been hurt or how long it would have taken him to heal if I hadn’t been there. I couldn’t do much for Nicky, but some things I could spare him.
“How are you?” Nicky asked, stepping back and taking stock.
“I’m ready to kill someone,” I said calmly, and there was a low bass rumble from the men surrounding me. I’d just made their day.
“Renny?” I asked, just to make sure. She was, after all, a cat, and they weren’t known for their “See Spot” obedience.
“I got it,” she said with a little bit of bitterness. “I’m good in a fight, you know!”
“You’re brave in a fight, sweet,” I said, stroking her hair back from her face. “But you’re small, and nothing we’re trying to kill is mortal. Please, Renny-cat? I don’t want to worry about you, not tonight.”
Renny’s lips curled back to reveal her teeth, still a little pointed from so much time in her cat form. I opened my mouth to get all stern, but Max gently elbowed me out of the way. Renny knew what that meant. She would obey Max, her mate, as she would not obey me, and her disdainful sniff told us all plainly that this time, at least, she would mind.
“Never mind, I got it. Assholes. Stay in the fucking car. I’m good.” She rolled her eyes and looked away in purely feline dismissal.
“You in car, yes,” Max said, his narrow, stoic face tough with worry. “Fucking is optional, and hopefully later.”
She hissed at him. “Fucking is a dream of the past,” she growled, and Max narrowed his eyes and kissed her hard. When he backed away, the cut on his lip was bleeding even as it closed—but we had all seen Renny respond after she bit him, and it was hard for her to look sullen when her face was all dreamy and smooshed.
“We’ll be back in a minute,” Max said with a smile on his bleeding mouth. “In fact, you may want to keep the motor running.”
“Wait a minute, Max,” Bracken called as everybody started forwar
d. “I didn’t get mine yet.”
His handsome, scowling face neared mine, the murky green-brown of his eyes intense. I took a moment, and the humid night faded, and our grim task faded. I breathed in and smelled a hard boulder in the sun, with the soft darkness of earth and growing things beneath. It was an honest, strong, and brave smell, the kind of smell that anchored your feet into the earth and brought you peace.
“I’m not going to bite you,” I said mildly, willing to fall into his eyes and draw the strength to fly.
“Right now,” he added, his hard lips curving up wickedly.
I nodded, caught the soft chuff of his breath on my face, and closed my eyes as his lips descended. The kiss was quick, hard, and lingered just long enough for him to capture my lips gently with his teeth as he pulled away.
“For Green?” I asked, treasuring Bracken’s shoulders under my reaching hands.
“For all of us.”
We turned, separate but together, and stalked to the front of our group, then headed for the entrance.
The bouncers knew us and, even more, seemed to know we meant business. They didn’t try to stop us—instead, they held the door. We stepped inside the red-lit club, still pounding with music, and I scanned the crowd with hard, angry eyes.
She wasn’t hard to spot. In other circumstances, she could have been me.
She was short and squat, just as I had been before I came into my power and started burning calories like a fusion reactor. Her hair was dirty blonde at the roots and bright blonde at the ends, and she probably went through a pound of Dep in a day. Although my hair had been black, it was an obvious attempt to look like someone else, and the resemblance didn’t stop there. She’d had piercings before she died, and she’d kept them—skulls, crosses, that whacko symbol from Blue Öyster Cult, a lip ring, an eyebrow ring, and a nose ring—and she had no chin, and acne scars, and a look in her eyes like the world fucking owed her and she was going to rip exact change out through the balls.
She also had a bleeding lime tree ripping its way through the flesh of her cheek. It was growing, spreading like a rash, every line shredding skin and flesh like a decorative wire pressing its way through blood-dripping clay. She touched the mark nervously as we watched, then winced and wiped her hand on the napkin at her table.
I bumped my shoulder against Brack’s bicep. We met eyes, and then I looked in her direction.
He nodded as though he didn’t see any resemblance to me at all, then put his hand on my shoulder to stop me—I’d raised my hand and was about to announce our presence in a big way.
Our friend, Toothless Badass, was leaning near her, putting his hand on her shoulder with enough pressure to crumple her sleeveless button-up denim shirt into her shoulder. Blood from his own mark was ripping its way up his arm.
I hadn’t seen another vampire, but this guy tended to backhand the newbies until they pleased him. And since he wasn’t going to try to attack something he thought was defenseless… it added up. Toothless Badass obviously had his own part to play. I met Brack’s eyes, and he nodded. Both of them, unless they could give us a reason otherwise.
I squared my feet and clenched my diaphragm and pitched my voice loud enough to carry over the music and the chatter—loud enough to carry to the back room and bring Rafael out to see what was doing.
“Yo, Bitch and the Badass!” I cried. My grin might as well have had fangs. They looked up at me immediately—they knew who they were, and they knew why I was there—and without more than a twitch of my hand and a charge of my will, I slammed them back against the wall, both of them suspended about three feet above the floor, their eyes bulging with the pressure of the power field I’d used to imprison them in front of most of the population of Redding’s underworld.
The music stopped abruptly. One of the bouncers hit the lights, and when I called out next, I didn’t have to shout quite so loud to be heard.
“Rafael! Rafael, you get your ass out here, because we have housecleaning to do.”
Rafael was pissed off as he rounded the corner out of his office—narrowed eyes, fangs bared in a scowl, a roar of protest on his lips—and then he saw the two people slammed up against the wall. His eyes widened, and his hand flew automatically to his own cheek in sympathy for the dripping infection that was forming on the girl’s dead flesh. I held my hand up, keeping them pinned, and his eyes flew to mine.
He swallowed—a very careful, human gesture in a man who had been dead for nearly fifty years—and, making eye contact with his people, inclined his head stiffly in my direction.
“And what can I do for you, Lady Cory?”
There was a mass intake of breath. He’d conceded control over these people, and now all of them knew it.
“Don’t bow to her, Rafael!” the girl shrieked. “She’s weak! We killed her lover—that pansy-assed faggot barely put up a fight….”
My people and I laughed harshly, a sound as ugly as twisted chrome and breaking glass, and Rafael winced.
“You think you killed him?” I asked, derision coating my throat and pulling my snarl back until I was all teeth. “You think any of you would be alive if he were dead?”
I’d unconsciously increased the pressure of the power shield around them, and Toothless Badass could barely force air out to speak. “You’re all talk,” he hissed. “Look at you—just a kid with a gun. Probably shoot yourself in the head if you tried to kill us….” He tried a laugh, but I constricted his throat and the sound stopped.
I looked at Rafael and shook my head sadly. “You didn’t tell them, Rafael?” I asked in disbelief. But I knew. We both knew. But Rafael and my people were the only ones here who did.
“I… I thought it best kept private, my lady,” he said with a ghastly attempt at sheepishness.
“Tell us what?” the girl gasped. She was starting to look afraid. Good. I’d been in Green’s head, and the fear that he’d never see me again had washed my body in cold, aching sweat and barbed-wire pain. I needed to see fear dripping off her body like gore.
“Tell you all what happens when I lose a lover, sweetheart.” I showed my teeth. “Marcus, do you remember the last time someone killed somebody I loved?”
“Until God comes back to kick our asses, my lady,” Marcus said softly.
“Do you remember, Phillip? Max? You were there.”
“Till death and beyond, Lady Cory,” they said, hard voices in tandem. To my right I saw Teague close his eyes as though this hurt him. Well, it hurt us all.
“And you, beloved?” I turned to Bracken. “What do you remember about that night?”
“You almost killed me, beloved.” Bracken looked positively gleeful about this horrible fact—a thing I never understood. “You almost killed us all.”
I nodded my head sagely, meeting the eyes of the two vampires pinned against the wall. They were starting to look very, very uneasy.
“I did,” I told them conversationally, moving laterally so that I was looking at them squarely from the same distance back. “I almost killed a lot of our people—but I didn’t. Would you like to know who I did kill?”
Their eyes were bulging against my power shield, but the girl was nodding in spite of herself. I looked at Toothless, my eyes wide and quizzical. “And you, Badass? Would you like to know who I did kill?”
He nodded reluctantly.
“Why don’t you tell them, Rafael, since, you have to admit, it’s a story they might have wanted to know before they tried to kill Green last night.”
“Tell them?” Rafael sounded lost, looking at the proof of their treachery and their complete confusion and knowing they were doomed.
“Tell them,” I said, my fanged, bloody smile in place, “who I killed, the last time someone carried out a threat on someone I loved.”
Rafael looked away from Badass and Goth-girl and stared blindly out to the room filled with his people. “Everybody,” he said clearly. “You killed everybody who wasn’t you. All the vampires in Folsom. All of them.
Over a hundred vampires, their shape-shifters, the people who came with Sezan… all of them. The entire kiss. You killed over a hundred people with your grief….” His voice trailed off, and his gaze finally fastened on me as though I was his worst nightmare come to life.
“A hundred people,” I repeated—and for the first time, I wasn’t ashamed of the fact. Hell, I was thrilled. “I killed a hundred people with my grief.” I shook my head. “Well, aren’t you all glad they didn’t succeed in killing Green, so I didn’t have to grieve again?” It was a smile like a death rictus, but it was a smile. It didn’t seem to bring the people in Rafael’s club any comfort.
Badass and Goth-girl were looking at me now as though seeing me for the first time—and I was finally damned scary. Goth-girl started to babble.
“I’m sorry, Lady Cory. Jimmy said it’d be easy, said it’d be protecting our family. I didn’t know about you—I never would have tried to hurt him if I’d known who you were….”
My gaze grew colder. “So what you’re saying is that you only try to kill those you think are weak and helpless? Well, doesn’t that make you a prize? Tell me, sweetheart—how weak and helpless was he?”
She swallowed. “He wasn’t,” she whispered. “He fought like a son of a bitch. My face hasn’t stopped bleeding.”
“Do you know why?” I asked, my voice deceptive and mild. I looked around at the stone-cold-sober dance club and saw a lot of alarmed, whirling eyes staring back at me blankly. “That thing on her face is our mark. Our mark. You all swore blood loyalty to Rafael, and Rafael swore it to us. We hold your marker, people—you betray us, you betray the people who hold your life and death in their hands, and that mark will rip you apart slowly. Eventually, it’ll kill you. I’ve seen it happen—it’s an awful, painful death. But you don’t have to worry, because these two aren’t going to be suffering much longer.”
“You fucking twat,” Jimmy Badass shrieked, and I crushed him with power again until he couldn’t speak anymore.
The time had come.
“Rafael,” I said softly, “what are their names?”