by Amy Lane
Cory spit on her hand first, and then they met in the middle of the circle and shook hands like shipping magnates. “You promise you’ll be here?” she said softly. “There’s a lot to talk about.”
“I promise, Lady Cory,” he said solemnly, as only a teenager could. There was a brief glow of light around their hands, and she stepped back.
“I’ll meet you by the lake around nine,” she said softly. “Night, young Sam.”
“Night, Lady Cory.” He walked quietly out of the circle, which collapsed on itself as people started demanding details and reassurance and news on Green.
“He’s fine!” Cory said after the furor died down. “He’s fine. Nothing’s bleeding anymore, nothing’s broken, and I think if that bitch hadn’t blindsided him like a coward, he could have taken her.”
“How’d you take her out?” Katy asked, her snarl as close to wolf as Katy got in human form.
The bunch of us got quiet, and Cory quirked her eyebrows enigmatically. “Bracken threw and I caught,” she said softly. There was a moment of silence, and then Lambent started swearing.
“Goddammit, my lady. All I ask—all I have ever asked—is to be of service to you. Are you telling me you’re so mad for your own violence you couldn’t let me do that? Is my only job here going to be catching dumb-arsed cows getting buggered in the woods?”
The shock on her face showed that she hadn’t even thought of asking him, and only her hand on my arm stopped me from rounding on the arrogant bastard and taking out his lungs.
“This one was ours,” she said at last, so low that only our preternatural hearing would register her voice. “Me and Bracken. This one threatened our Green. That’s why Nicky got to come—he’s ours. Believe me, Lambent, the next time someone gets their ass cooked to ashes, you can share in the fun.”
Lambent blinked and looked mildly ashamed. “Of course, lovey,” he said thickly. “I… I just want to help.”
Cory looked up at him, a keen speculation in her eyes. “You think you didn’t help? Folks, you do realize we’ve now got walking, talking proof that this funky bullshit here isn’t just us? My Goddess, Lambent—if that’s not help, I don’t know what you want to deliver!”
There was a generalized chuckle, and Renny curled up at Max’s feet and started purring.
A weary sigh went through us, and Cory suddenly leaned fully on me. “Anybody up for that swim we were talking about? Because if not, I’m going for a shower and bed. If nothing else is going to shit on us from above, I want a clear head when I talk to Sam tomorrow.”
She went on the swim for me, I was sure. Her body was boneless, her heart almost too weary for the fear she’d been fighting all week. For once—maybe it was the dark—she forsook the now silt-stained white T-shirt hanging over the cabin’s shower and simply wore her swimsuit and flip-flops, discarding the shoes at the lake’s edge.
She padded into the lake quietly. When the water was up to her waist, she dove in, forcing her arms to haul water and her feet to kick by an act of will alone. I treaded water and watched her, looking beside me when I saw Jacky at my elbow.
“He said she saved his life tonight,” Jacky said quietly. “Everybody else says it’s true. I get so used to thinking of him as invincible that it always surprises me when he says she does that.”
I raised my eyebrows. Jack had been in good form this trip—no pointed remarks about how she was using Teague, no complaints when she took him out on this run. Something had happened—maybe something permanent—to make his attitude less irritating, at the very least.
“Why would you ever think differently?” I asked, completely out of patience.
Jack shrugged. “You’ve got to understand—the only people who ever saw him for who he really is were me and Katy. It took a while for me to think you didn’t see him just for what you could use.”
I tilted my face up to the stars and wished a little for the sun. “You want to see a user, you look at… at….” Oh Goddess, none of us could even say her name! “That thing screeching out her lungs in the cabin up there.” We could still hear her. In fact, there seemed to be a general consensus that we would all stay in the water until she’d worn herself down.
“I know,” Jack said quietly. “Just like I know that you wanted him there tonight not so much for muscle as… as representation. I’m starting to get it now. It’s… it’s like the politics of keeping us safe, you know?”
I let out a little puff of air and watched her startle at the sound her foot made as it broke the water. Her hair had come loose and was in her face, hampering her attempts to breathe, and her expression while fighting her fear of the water was nearly as fierce as it had been when yanking the half life from the vampires we’d killed.
“Do you know why she’s out there?” I asked, my jaw setting almost angrily.
Jack shook his head, still treading water. “No. She’s terrified. We can all see it.”
“That’s why she’s out there. She’s got all of us to worry about, so she can’t afford weakness—and that’s a weakness.” I swallowed hard against the lump in my throat. Damn. It was so unfair—we would only have a mortal life span together, and I was pretty sure it would take an eternity for her to cease to amaze me.
Jacky snorted and nodded toward Teague, who was literally doing laps across the entire lake. Yes, he would know about someone who drove himself to be worthy—and what a damned hard thing it was to live with.
“They’re so damned much alike,” he said, and I looked at him and smiled.
“Too much alike for you to worry about her like that.”
Jacky grunted. “So he tells me.”
“Believe him. I’ve seen them together when they talk. You know who they remind me of?”
“No idea.”
“Green and Arturo.”
I remembered this morning—was it really only this morning?—Arturo, who had never desired a man, not in three thousand years of living, and his desperate happiness to sit on Green’s bed and assure himself that Green was safe, was well.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jacky said quietly. Cory gave a muffled shriek as an imaginary hand grasped her mortal ankle, and I didn’t even nod in Jacky’s direction before I took off toward her. She knew the drill now, and I positioned myself behind her and pulled her back up against my front.
She was shaking.
“We’re done with this,” I said gruffly. “We’re going back to the cabin to call Green, and then you’re going to bed.”
She nodded, her trembling abating just enough for her to turn around and start hauling herself back to shore. Abruptly there was a wet, furry presence between us, and she must have been tired because she took Jack’s offer and looped her arm around him so he could tow her to where she could touch.
“Thanks, Jack,” she said quietly, trying to stand. Her knees were wobbly, and I picked her up before she could fall down.
“I’m fine,” she said mildly, but she laid her head against my chest anyway.
“Of course you are. Nicky!” I called out to the water where he was still swimming. “Could you get her flip-flops?”
“I hear you, mighty hunter!” He was not that far out in the lake, and his voice barely echoed off the shiny black water.
“I’m still dripping wet,” she said. Her hand rose up and she petted my chest as she spoke. She rarely did this anymore, tired herself out beyond exhaustion. I was glad the days when she did this all the time were gone, but I still treasured the moments when she needed me physically. I knew she needed me emotionally, but there was something satisfying in holding her like this.
“I’ll undress you,” I told her, ignoring the gravel under my feet.
“It’s only a little bikini.”
It looked charming, even in the dark. Where not scarred, her bare skin, pale and freckled, was smooth and sweet and innocent over tarnished gold. She might look appealing with a tan, but in the moonlight, her paleness gleamed with all she was to me.
“Then that’ll make it easier,” I said.
“Mmmm….”
I thought she meant to keep complaining, sparking the banter we had raised to an art form, but I was warm and she was sleepy, and she felt safe in my arms as she perhaps felt safe nowhere else in this alien place. This was who I was to her—the lover she could lean on, the lover who would shelter her in my clasp. I did not do politics, and the only poetry I’ve ever known are the words we’ve spoken to each other.
I took her to the cabin and put her in one of my T-shirts, then undressed myself, throwing our wet things in the small bathroom. Although I was given to understand that it was bigger than most bathrooms of its sort, the shower could barely fit two people. As I was in the bathroom, she said something about calling Green, but I could smell the wildflower scent even as she said it—he’d come and kissed her good night.
I slid into bed next to her and remembered how she’d looked in battle—fierce and feral, power burning a halo around her body, her dark eyes narrow and flat and sparking with fury, her lips drawn back in a snarl of revenge.
She’d been beautiful.
Tonight, softened by moonlight and sleep, her gold lashes fanning her cheeks and her expressive mouth relaxed like a child’s, she was helpless in my arms and relying on me for protection.
She was just as beautiful.
Cory: All the Players on the Board
NICKY SLID in, cool and welcome, and I said something about setting the alarm. I’d told the kid nine—I didn’t need touch, blood, and song to help me keep that promise.
Mornings camping always feel too early until the sun arrows through the dusty green tops of the trees like the light of Apollo. Since our little spit of land was mostly night people, it was even lonelier, especially since we faced west and our area would be in shadow until at least eleven o’clock.
Still, it was in the seventies when I flip-flopped out of the cabin, and that warranted a hoodie over my cutoffs and T-shirt. I dropped my knitting in one pocket and a bottle of water and my iPod in the other. Hey, a girl had to be prepared.
The lake was so still and clear in the angled light that the surrounding hills were reflected clearly in its surface, and the trees over my shoulder were long deep shadows against the blue sky in the water.
Sam was there ahead of me—more, I think, because he was young than because I was late. He was dressed in cargo shorts and a white T-shirt that might be big on Bracken, and doing that thing that boys do—finding shit at the edge of the shore to hurl across the lake. He skipped a stone for more ripples than I could count, which impressed the hell out of me. I’d never been able to do that.
Just watching him there, he looked like what we had all assumed he was—a kid. A civilian. Nice enough to accept us for what we were, but still… waiting… to be someone to really pay attention to.
If we hadn’t been guided by Green’s principles, he could have had us all at each other’s throats in a matter of hours.
This was a very dangerous young man.
“Morning,” I said. I brought a peace offering, an entire box of Hostess chocolate cupcakes. Just what every growing boy needs, right? I held up the box, and the kid brightened. Then I shuffled around the iPod and water in my pocket and came up with two small bottles of milk that we’d been keeping with our supplies. That brought out a grin, and I nodded him toward the dock so I could dangle my feet in the water, because I wanted to.
As we were making ourselves comfortable, I heard dog noises. When I looked up, there was a splash and Teague was paddling through the water toward the little inlet behind the cabins. The wolf was wearing shorts, his tail poking out through the legs, and I wondered what he was up to until he shifted in the middle of the water and became a human man, floundering to fix his clothes for a moment and then continuing his workout in the lake. Teague wore a T-shirt, same as me, out in the water, and it wasn’t for his Irish-pale skin.
Well, weren’t we a sorry piece of damage, right?
Sam tore off a wrapper and tucked it into the box, then devoured his first cupcake in one gulp. He looked at me for permission, and when I nodded, he ate two more in quick succession. My stomach got twitchy just looking at all that sugar for breakfast, but then, I wasn’t a fifteen-year-old boy.
I decided to drink my milk instead. There would be oatmeal waiting for me up at the front, and I’d save the sugar for a slice of the pie we kept in the minifridge at all times.
He finally slowed down, and he was nibbling at his sixth cupcake in a desultory fashion when he spoke up.
“I don’t know what I am.”
I looked at him, wisely and—for once—silent.
“Weird shit just happens around me. Sometimes good, lots of times bad. I feel a… a tingle—” He put his hands in that little dent between his sternum and stomach. “—right here. And sometimes it guides me, and I’ll go somewhere, and then the shit that happens is usually good. If I ignore it, then it’s usually….” He swallowed, and his voice cracked, and a terrible look of guilt and sorrow made his features look pinched and young. “Bad,” he whispered. “If I ignore it, the shit that happens is bad.”
“Does it always guide you?” I asked, curious.
Sam shook his head. “Nope. Seventy-five percent of the time, it just. Fucking. Happens.”
I looked at him in dawning horror and terrible sympathy. “Oh. My. Fucking. God.” The implications—it was scarcely a gift, more like a curse. It was staggering and horrible. The kid wasn’t a sorcerer, or anything that could direct his will. He was a plague, a potential natural disaster, an agent of chaos. Hello, wait a second. That was ringing some bells….
“Sam, who is your father?”
If anything, his expression got bleaker, the color and animation washing away from his face and leaving a blade of a nose and acne spots against white skin.
“My… my stepfather di… was killed about six months ago. I have no idea who my real father was.”
I had to breathe deep with this one and remember I was a human first and a big bad sorceress second—at least I hoped that was the case.
“I’m sorry about your stepfather. How’d it happen?” Because although it clearly hurt him horribly, he was also dying to get it off his chest.
Sam shook his head, and for a moment I thought he wouldn’t tell me, no matter how painful the infection bursting from his heart. “I… I had a tingle. I tried to tell him to drive another way, and he laughed it off. He was a good guy, you know?” Sam kicked water at no one in particular, and we both watched as the droplets glittered in the sun and then spread dark ripples over that happy mountain sky in the heart of the lake. The kid shuddered and kept talking.
“Good to my mom, nice to me. Liked to watch basketball—we’d sit on the couch during the games and eat popcorn and drink sodas and talk during the commercials. He… he loved us. But… if we’d gone the way I told him, we would have been in traffic for two hours watching a parade. But he went his way and caught a golf ball in the ear from a shooting range we couldn’t even see on the other side of the freeway. It… it was freaky. They said it caught a wind gust or something, but… all I know is one minute he was telling me not to be so superstitious, and the next minute there was glass everywhere and he was dead.”
Aw Christ. What a fucking disaster. Awkwardly I put my hand on his shoulder, but I wasn’t hurt or surprised when he flinched away.
“It’s not your fault,” I said inanely. It wasn’t—not by intention, anyway. Not judging by the pain that was shining in his black-fringed blue eyes.
“No, I’m just a walking… earthquake, or hurricane, or something, waiting to happen, but it’s not my fault. I’m just, you know, fucking chaos! And my mom…. Whoever my real dad was, he didn’t stick around, and now I kill the world’s nicest husband? I’m surprised she can even look at me. And she does, she keeps telling me she loves me, but she just… she just stays in her room and… drinks….”
Oh Jesus. “Sam. Sam, why are you here?
”
The kid wiped his face with the back of his hand, and we both pretended he hadn’t. “I got a tingle,” he said gruffly. “We’ve both… both learned not to ignore those, right?”
A tingle. The son of chaos and man walking around with a tingle, right into our arms. Spiffy.
I swallowed. “Chaos doesn’t always have to be bad, kid,” I said after a moment. I was desperate, I guess, to lighten shit up, to make this kid feel better.
“Yeah, give me one example.” He was angry and affronted, and I didn’t blame him.
“The Christmas before last,” I said, because it was the best example I could think of. “I mean, it should have been a shitty Christmas, right? I—we—we’d lost Adrian. He was my boyfriend… Green’s too. Brack’s best friend. He was just, you know, loved by a lot of people. I… I was really sick. But Green, he wanted the whole thing done up right. There were lights around the house and the gardens, and a million presents. It….” Now I was getting teary. Fuck. “It took us half the day to sort them out, because the front room was so full with them that you couldn’t walk through it, and about a thousand people live in the hill. It was a mess, you know? But all the little people at the hill—you know, sprites, nixies, pixies—those guys?”
“They’re real?”
“You’ve seen werewolves, elves, vampires, and a chick who can shoot out of water. You really going to draw the line?”
The kid laughed a little through his misery. “No.”
“Well, they all wanted to give me a gift—but they’re, like, anywhere from two inches to a foot tall, so it’s got to be something special but small. So they all gave me seeds. Thousands of seeds, all of them with teeny-tiny bows made out of gold thread.”
Sam nodded. “That does sound like happy chaos,” he said thickly.
I nodded, sniffling a little. “But wait, it gets better! Because the thing is, they planted them as soon as the snow melted, and there were all these littles—and you haven’t seen them, but they’re like a thousand different colors and shapes, and some of them look like tiny animals, and some of them look like tiny bugs, but they’re human-shaped—anyway, they all have their one seed. But that seed’s for me, and it’s for Green, and they love us, right? So they’re zooming in about a gajillion different directions—man, they’re all over the yard—and they’re all looking for their spot, and it’s total chaos….”