by Amy Lane
“Jimmy Reynolds and Missy Camden,” Rafael replied promptly, but his voice was still lost. I looked at him until he met my eyes, and he seemed to square his shoulders and stand up straighter. “They’re all yours, Lady Cory—we take our blood oaths seriously here.”
Missy Camden had begun to blubber, bloody tears dribbling off her quivering lip. “I’m sorry…,” she mewled. “I didn’t know. If I’d known who you were, we never would have…. I swear we wouldn’t have….”
She almost got to me. Not because I believed her, or even because she was just like me, but because she was so pathetic. How can you kill something that small, no matter how mean? But my beloved was there with his bloodlust, and he hadn’t been squashing the shit out of them for the last ten minutes.
“I throw, you catch?” he growled, delight in every syllable, and I found I wanted to please that bloodlust more than I wanted to reward that meanness.
“Batter up,” I hissed back.
Ribs crunched like crackers as he ripped their hearts out of their chests, and the squelching sound was like hauling a boot out of a puddle of sucking mud. The black-red blood spattered across half the club, but Bracken and I caught the brunt of it because we were standing right in front of the two shocked vampires, about fifteen feet back. I caught the hearts with my power, and they hovered, suspended between us, beating blackly with the slow old blood of the undead.
I looked at the girl, pity in my eyes for the inevitable consequences of treachery.
“I’m sorry,” I said uselessly.
“Go to hell,” she snarled, blood gushing from her lips as she spoke.
“You first.”
The hearts conflagrated hotly, blazing with sunshine, and the vampires all moaned and covered their eyes. The blood hadn’t blackened before the bodies caught too, and I reinforced my shields and made sure the burn was quick and clean and merciful.
Before I could breathe three times in and out quickly, pumped by adrenaline, the two traitors and their remains were reduced to ash and the club was permeated—not with the stench of burning flesh, but with the more subtle scent of graveyard ash fluttering in the wind of a strong, hot sun.
I was shaking with reaction and ready to just turn away and stalk out of the club on the horse I rode in on, trailing my people behind me, but Rafael interrupted, reminding me that I was not only myself, I was my people, and I was trying to avoid a war.
“My lady,” he said humbly, not meeting my eyes. “I gave Jimmy the order to… to deal with that problem we discussed before. I’m afraid the message might not have gotten through.”
I understood now. Jimmy had assumed that if he took out Green, they wouldn’t have to police their own. Rafael hadn’t suspected the treachery.
“Two more days,” I said through a raw and constricted throat. I couldn’t even look at Rafael—I had to gaze sideways. Nicky, Teague, and Mario looked grim and angry in the corner of my eye. “But after that, Rafael, I’m done. I’m amped, I’m pissed, and I’m a hair trigger away from wreaking fucking carnage on this place because I can. This needs to be taken care of, and it needs to—fuck!”
Someone—I never learned his name—had decided my people were fair game. He was lunging, a silver knife in his hand, and Teague was a heartbeat away from his ultimate sacrifice of service before I caught the guy—dark haired, shape-shifter, young—and destroyed him in a blast of sunshine fury.
The complete, appalled silence was broken by Teague, looking at near death with wide, inscrutable eyes. He bowed at the waist. “Appreciate it, my lady.”
“Anytime,” I rasped and turned back to Rafael, done with talking and done with threats.
“Two. Days.” And then, because I was a hair’s breadth from going nuclear, a darkened shadow from becoming the very thing I loathed and feared about myself, the thing I was still trying to atone for after two years of self-control, I threw my head back and screamed. It was a human scream—barely—but it was human, and not a sunshine scream. Anything, anything to bleed away the terrible surge of power and raw red wrath that was pulsing through my body in scorching, scathing, molten Valkyrie waves.
My people joined in—all of them. Heads back, eyes meeting the eyes of every vampire in the place, faces caught in terrible snarls—grotesque, furious alter-forms of the familiar, beloved men I trusted with my life—and the scream went on and on and on until every head in the place was bowed in grief and penance and fear.
The last echoes died down, and we walked out, a bleak, despairing silence in our wake.
Bracken: Pieces Moving Beyond the Board
AFTER THE adrenaline-pumped ride to the club, the ride home was tense, dysphoric, and depressing. Nobody liked what we’d had to do, nobody liked who we had to be—especially not Cory, who had pulled the trigger herself.
She moved restlessly on the seat next to me, leaning back against my shoulder and staring out the tinted window to the purple canopy beyond. The sky was vast here—long stretches of unbroken canvas before clay lumps of hills like children under blankets of earth—and I wondered if that sense of space oppressed her.
I knew I missed home as much as she missed Green, but I would not have missed seeing her snarling violent poetry of justice for the world.
I had known how she would feel, even as we’d made the plan over breakfast this morning. I knew about the self-loathing, I knew about the regret. I knew the part of her that was sweet and warm in my life was wailing, dying in the throes of what she had just done.
I knew the part of her that would fight to the death to keep me alive was still screaming that awesome, awful, primal howl.
I knew she would fight within herself until her heart was shredded and bruised, trying to reckon on the forces of love, the forces of power, and the forces of revenge that had created the havoc we’d just wrought, but I did not know which side would win.
Nicky drove back with us. He sat with Mario in the middle seat as she leaned stiffly on top of me in the back. The mood in the car was tense with unspent rage, and Max continued to play the hard, pounding sounds of Adrian’s playlist until Cory spoke up from the back.
“Job’s done, Max,” she said, just loud enough to carry. “Maybe we should wind down now.”
“Don’t know if I can,” Max replied, and the set of his shoulders said it was true. “Don’t know if any of us can.”
Renny made a tentative movement next to him as though to soothe the top of his hand where it was on the wheel, but something in his voice, the vibrating set of his jaw, discouraged her from it. She turned away then and gazed silently into the night. If she’d been a cat, her tail would have twitched.
Cory let out a shaky breath. “You’re right. I’m going to need to swim or something… something….”
“Swim at night?” Nicky asked from the middle seat, and Cory’s smile was close to normal.
“If I can’t do it with this much adrenaline pumping me up, I’ll never be able to.”
Nicky grinned, the type of grin that reminded us that carnivorous birds were fierce predators. “Then let’s go. Swimsuits optional, adrenaline a must!”
“Required,” she grumbled next to me. “For me, swimsuits are required.”
“Me too, mija,” said Mario from Nicky’s side, and Max added his grunt of assent. I would wear a swimsuit for her, I thought as I touched a strand of her hair and rubbed it softly. A part of me I’d never kept hidden started whispering that being inside of her while we were inside of that black electric water would be like bursting into star fragments in the center of a supernova, but I could let that pass. She almost needed to be by herself right now—but only if I was with her.
Sadly enough, even that was not to be.
As we drove up to the cabins with Marcus, Phillip, and Teague in our wake, the headlights picked out the figures of Kyle, one hand clamped uncomfortably around Annette, and of Lambent, who was gazing disgustedly at our young civilian.
Young Sam didn’t look in the least repentant, and Anne
tte looked decidedly mussed. She also looked furious at Kyle for detaining her.
Cory and I met appalled glances, and Nicky put his face in his hands.
“I am sooooo not in the mood for this shit,” Cory snarled grimly as she slid out of the car, but when she spoke to the youngster in Lambent’s care, her tone was decidedly lighter. “Heya, Sam. Good night?”
“Awesome night, Lady Cory!” he said with a grin. He still had braces on—a human thing, and one that made him look particularly young.
“Lambent, did you discover this fine young lad in the dark woods alone?” she asked, and Sam rolled his eyes.
“Discovered? Right, lovey. Alone? Sadly not.” Lambent looked in Annette’s direction and physically recoiled, as though the flesh of his face was actually crawling back on his skull to get away from her.
“So, Annette,” Cory said sweetly, “how’s that virginity thing working out for you?”
I had to hand it to the ignorant big-titted human—she had just enough of a complete lack of self-awareness to scrounge up some dignity.
“Everyone knows that kind of sex still keeps you a virgin,” Annette retorted snottily. Everybody there—including Sam—widened their eyes and looked at her twice.
“Really?” Cory blinked and shook her head. “Do you still feel like a virgin, Sam?”
Sam’s look was smug. “Well, if I was one before, I don’t think I’m one now!”
Annette’s sideways brush-off had enough contempt in it to make even a horny teenager feel used. “That’s not really how you do it, you know.”
Sam’s eyes grew a little unfocused, and his smile was uncomfortable and totally adult. “Well, I could say the same to you,” he said. Then Cory, Lambent, and I all made a yawning, ear-popping gesture as some sort of power fluctuated around us.
“Oh, fuck.” Cory gazed at the casual young man who had been in the periphery of our vision for the last week. “It’s you. The fucked-up colors on the house, the jealousy, the life in a Judd Apatow movie… it’s you!”
Everybody but Annette was looking at the kid in awe and a little bit of fear. He was shifting uneasily, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched over his chest.
“Sweetheart, what are you? And more to the point, what did you do?”
The kid shrugged. “I tried to take it back. She was being a bitch, saying it didn’t count. I just wanted to take it back.”
Oh, and now Annette was paying attention. “You can’t do that!” Her face twisted, and between the running mascara and the visceral hatred, she was uglier than toe fungus on a human. “I put out for you!”
“You used me,” he said simply. “And you got something, but I don’t think it’s what you wanted.”
The boy was not full grown yet—she was taller than he was—and she marched over to him, her flip-flops slapping against her heels, and grabbed him by the arm, shaking him hard. “You make it right, you little fucker! I let you touch me, and you fucking owe me! Ouuuuchhh!”
We were all strong men trained not to take advantage of the weak. There were really only three people in our group who would have felt comfortable touching the woman physically, and the one who got there first had claws.
Renny pulled back her claws, which were dripping red over the top of some sort of purple paint, and licked them daintily while Annette screamed and hopped up and down on a shredded calf. Cory snapped her head like a dreamer awakened and started giving orders.
“Sam, darlin’, I want to talk to you later. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble, and I’m not mad, but you and me….”
“We gotta talk. I understand, Lady Cory.”
“Oh, don’t you call her ‘Lady,’” Annette hissed, still nursing her bleeding calf. “I’m about sick to death of it—all these people kowtowing to you, ‘Lady Cory’—when all you are is just a white-trash whore, with your three husbands and your disgusting vampires. Nicky will see through you in a hot second, just you wait and see!”
Cory looked at Annette and blinked. After what she had been forced to do this night to protect her people, to avenge her Green, the other woman’s vitriol didn’t faze her in the least.
“I’m not the one getting ass-fucked by minors in the woods, now am I?” Cory asked, and the rest of us smirked. That was our girl. With an exasperated sniff, she turned and gestured to Annette in the same way I would gesture toward a rock or a tree. “Nicky, I thought your parents were going to take care of this?” She let her words come up in a question, and Nicky shrugged.
“I don’t know what to tell you, ou’e’ane—they don’t seem to be taking it seriously.”
Cory sighed with frustration and looked down at her blood-spotted denim jacket and then at me. We both had blood on our faces and spattered across our clothes, and our expressions were even grimmer than our accessorizing. With another sigh and a scrubbing motion of her hand across her face, she strode across the drive to Nicky’s parents cabin and pounded on their door. Without being asked, I took Annette’s arm in a cruel grip and hauled her after Cory, limping, bitching, and protesting the whole way.
Nicky’s mother opened the door and looked decidedly shocked by her chosen daughter-in-law’s appearance.
“Is this yours?” Cory asked shortly, indicating the squealing heifer I was dragging by the upper arm.
“You know very well she’s with us,” Nicky’s mother said guardedly, and Cory nodded once—the hard, decided movement of a warrior.
“The last three people who threatened my family are dead, Terry,” Cory snapped, and I took my cue and shoved Annette through the door so hard she fell to her knees when she hit the carpet inside. “You might want to make an effort to keep your trash in your room.”
With that she turned around. Nicky took her hand and I wrapped my arm around her waist, and together, in the stride we’d developed in the last year and a half, we made our way back to the circle. Where we really wanted to go was our own cabin so Cory and I could bathe, but the conversation with the kid could not be put off.
Lambent spoke up as we got there, and I noticed that everyone else had emerged from their cabins. LaMark was talking quietly to Mario, and Tanya was on his other arm, listening. The vampires had parked and were keeping an eye on Sam, and Max was happily scratching Renny behind the ears just to hear her purr. The werewolves were out, checking Teague’s body anxiously—Jacky was sheltering Teague’s face with his height and wide chest, and Teague was making “I’m fine, leave me the fuck alone, we’ve got bigger shit to shovel” noises. As we approached, everyone formed a loose circle with Sam roughly in the middle, and Cory went to join him.
Sam looked around apprehensively, and she shrugged. “You’re not on trial—we’re just curious, that’s all.” She looked up and found Lambent over her shoulder. “You felt the power surge? That’s what sent you out into the woods?”
Lambent shook his head. “Every boy has the right to shag something he shouldn’t, but yeah. They were lit up like a Christmas tree when I rounded the corner, and she was shouting as they did it. He’s not likely to take whatever he did back—not all of it. It was too firmly buried in her arse, if you know what I mean.”
Cory shook her head and scrubbed her eyes. “Sadly, I do—and where’s the toilet brush for your brain when that image comes around, that’s what I want to know!”
“So I’m in trouble because she screamed ‘Fuck me, Nicky’?” Sam asked. Next to me, Nicky gave a little wiggle of revulsion.
“Ewwwww! Oh Christ, I could have lived my whole life without knowing that!”
I patted his shoulder. “Join the club.”
Cory tried not to smirk, but it had been a long-assed day. “Sam—have you heard of ‘touch, blood, and song’?”
The kid looked completely nonplussed, and Cory sighed and scrubbed her hands over her face again. “It’s sort of how we exchange power, except you don’t really need the blood and the song, you know?” She looked at him meaningfully, and his eyes widened. Oh yeah, he got it no
w. Cory sighed. He was so young, and there was a lot he knew that he hadn’t told, but a lot he obviously didn’t know that he needed to be told. Doing it all tonight was possible, but it probably wouldn’t do any of us any good.
“Look, kid,” she said at last, “your mom’s not going anywhere tonight, is she?”
Hs shook his head slowly, and there was something terribly sad in the motion. A story there, I thought.
“Bracken and I are covered in blood—and man, I’ve got to get it off of me, or I’m gonna start screaming. You just got laid and got your heart broke….”
“I didn’t really love her,” he supplied helpfully, and Cory and I met eyes and tried not to grin.
“Well, did you get your ego stomped?” she asked, straight-faced, and he nodded, conceding that yes, maybe there had been some pain involved.
“Did you give her power and then try to get it back?” The kid nodded again, and the grim lines around Cory’s eyes eased up a bit.
“Would you like to continue this conversation later—hell, even later tonight—after you’ve had time to think it over and I’ve had time to fucking wash?”
The kid grinned, braces flashing in the sodium light, and nodded. “Yes, my lady.”
“Oh jeez…,” she whined, and the kid looked surprised.
“Everyone else calls you Lady. You are the queen, right? I mean, you’re a shit’s sight better than that heifer.”
We could all hear Annette shrieking through the walls of Nicky’s parent’s cabin. Cory closed her eyes.
“Yeah, whatever,” she said softly. “Either way, give us an hour….”
Sam yawned and shrugged, looking sheepish. “How about in the morning? I promise….” He closed his eyes, thought for a minute, and brightened. Then he turned his head and spit on his palm. “Touch, blood, and song, right?”
Cory cocked her head. “I thought you didn’t know about that?”
The kid shrugged. “I’m not stupid. If it wasn’t blood when we were—” He blushed. “—well, you know, then spit’s probably as good, right? So—touch, blood, and song. Here, shake my hand.”