by Amy Lane
I watched that angular, half-grown figure ambling away, and suddenly he looked so alone it made my chest ache. Poor Sam. I hoped really hard he’d get those phone numbers. Oh Goddess—if anyone needed someone at his back with good intentions, it was the son of man and chaos, now wasn’t it?
I went back to the cabin to change—we had plans to go hiking before it got really hot—but Sam stopped by for our numbers before I had a chance to show Bracken and Nicky the handprint of stars on my shoulder.
Just as well. After the kid had taken the paper and made a show of entering the info into his cell phone and then bobbed his head nervously away, I did show them. They almost crapped live baby chickens.
“You let him what?” Bracken roared, and I scowled at him.
“I didn’t let him, he just did. He was a nice kid, and he wasn’t grabbing anything important—it happened.”
Bracken blinked and then squinted, mouthing the words “anything important” as though they were heavily accented Latin. And then he figured out what I was talking about and got really pissed.
“You are important, Corinne Carol-Anne! I could give a shit if he groped your boobs!”
Oh jeez, not this again! “I’m fine!” I pulled my hoodie sideways to show them the mark. “See? Even Green agrees that it’s not binding—it’s just protection, right?”
“I didn’t say it was wise, Corinne Carol-Anne, I just said it was a protective spell.”
“Oh, for the love of crap!” I glared at Nicky. “You’re not going to use my given name too, are you?”
“Would it help you see that it was a stupid thing to do?” he answered, scowling right back.
“You all suck when you gang up on me!” I snapped. Then—“Hey!” Because, argument or not, Bracken was looming and fondling, his touch warm and feathery on my shoulder. My mouth went dry and I remembered that we—I—had been too tired and heartsick to make love the night before, and that this was sort of a rare occurrence for me.
“It’s pretty,” he grunted, and I tried to keep my glare in place. He could be really adorable when he was pissed off.
“There’s something weird about your touch…,” I said, suddenly ramping up at a thousand miles an hour. I’m a fast starter, I’ll admit it, but his hand on the skin covered with those stars… it was like I could feel how he felt about me on my skin. There’s some part of touch that’s always elemental—a touch is a touch. It’s why some people end up having affairs with people they hate—the person’s touch is skillful, and the results feel so good that the body gets fooled into thinking the heart’s involved.
This was like the exact opposite. It was Bracken’s touch that was making me hot. Like I could feel his soul through his skin.
“Wait a second,” I said before my eyes closed and my knees buckled and I came right there from the feel of Bracken’s love on the front of my shoulder. “Nicky… dude… touch that spot.”
Nicky’s touch was good—whoo boy, was it good. But it wasn’t Bracken’s. It was… it was a high school boyfriend’s touch, or a good movie buddy. It was how we’d always felt about each other, and circumstances had forced more. The more was nice, but it wasn’t vital and overwhelming like Bracken’s touch was, and like I suspected Green’s touch would be.
“Okay, okay. Hey… someone go get Max or Mario or LaMark….”
“Why?” Bracken asked, using his hip to muscle Nicky out of the way and touch that spot in fascination again.
“Because I want someone who doesn’t feel that way about me to touch me. I want to see what it feels like….” With an effort, I backed up and broke away from Bracken, who blinked at me with slow, dreamy, shadow-colored eyes and a smile that made me wet all over again. Oh yeah, we had some unfinished business. We always had unfinished business, and my smile must have been dreamy as well.
We didn’t even notice that Nicky had left the room until he came back, practically hopping up and down to see what the little experiment would turn up. He had the entire camp at his heels, and the look I shot him was eloquent.
“What—you couldn’t go across the lake and get some stray hikers to feel me up?”
He grinned unrepentantly at me as the room filled up. “We’ll leave and let you have your thing with Bracken in a minute. I just want to see what this is, because right now, it’s looking hella cool.”
And it was. Mario’s touch felt like a bird’s—sweet, but asexual. Max’s touch felt like a gun—but I was comfortable with guns, so it was reassuring. Renny’s touch felt like her whiskers and a cold feline nose. She rubbed the spot with her thumb, and it felt like her tongue when she’d tried to exfoliate my shins with it. Katy’s touch felt like a silk scarf, and Jacky’s… I frowned. Jack’s felt like wolf fur or a cold wet canine nose. I looked at him carefully—I’d been expecting teeth. In fact, I was half-braced for some sort of pain.
“You like me?” I asked baldly, and he flushed.
“You’ve grown on me,” he said neutrally. “You keep on keeping him alive, I might even love you like he does someday.”
I smiled so hard my eyes watered, and he didn’t seem prepared for the hug I launched at him. Oh Goddess, it felt good.
“You’ve hated me for months,” I sniffled, “and you didn’t have to like me, you know, but it hurt.”
“Oh Jesus,” he said, his narrow face crumpled in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I… I was just… you know. I wanted me and Katy to be all he needed….”
Teague came walking in at that moment, still drying off from his prolonged swim and curious as to why our room was bursting with people.
“All who needed?” he grunted, and Katy twined her arm around his waist.
“We’re all touching Cory’s mystery spot!” Katy said, excited. “The boy gave it to her—seems he wasn’t so much a civilian after all.”
Teague scowled when he saw the handprint of stars on my shoulder. “He put his hand on you? When in the hell did that happen?”
I winked at him, trying to get him to put his back down. “When you were on the other side of the lake. I think it was for protection. It’s… it’s sort of helping to sort out the chaos right now, you know?”
“Well, that would fit right in with who he is,” Nicky said thoughtfully. Then I had to explain to everybody who the kid was again.
The whole time, Teague was looking at me with a wrinkle between his eyes and his pouty lower lip thrust forward. “Let me touch it, will ya?”
I wasn’t sure if that was such a good idea, but I certainly wasn’t going to say that now that Jacky didn’t hate my guts anymore.
Teague’s skin was rough and chill from the swim, but that’s not what I felt against the star handprint. What I felt on the little place of magic was… touch. It was a father’s touch, or a brother’s, or an uncle’s, and there was love—so much love. But it wasn’t sexual love, not even a little. He thought I was beautiful—sexy even—but…. I had an old-fashioned vision of Teague, in a frock coat, asking me in a Scarlett O’Hara dress to dance. My suitors were waiting behind me, and I couldn’t wait to get back to them, but this man was a guardian and a family friend, and I loved him too.
I wrinkled my mouth. “You’re too complex to describe,” I said thoughtfully. But he wasn’t going to make me come in my pants as he stood there—not the way Bracken almost did—and that was a great relief to both of us, I’m sure. “It’s like my Dad, dressing a wounded knee.” It was the best analogy I could think of, and it seemed to please Teague immensely, because he bowed slightly and backed away, leaving the room full of innocent speculation about the nature of the thing itself.
It wasn’t until later that I realized the most reassuring thing about the exchange was I hadn’t seen a wolf at all. Teague’s wolf was reserved for Teague’s mates, and that was exactly as it should be.
“It’s a chaos filter,” I said after a moment, when the “ooh” factor had worn off and nobody knew what to say, but they all wanted to check out this new anomaly I was cursed with anywa
y. “I think that’s what it does. It takes away all the extraneous, weird-making shit about other people, and you see exactly who they are to you.”
“So,” Katy said thoughtfully, “it’s like, you know who wants you for you and who just fucks anything that moves, right?”
“Right,” I said, a little taken aback by the analogy. Katy blushed, and I remembered her past and felt like a moron, but somebody else spoke up.
“Or,” Bracken said with emphasis, “it might tell you who’s being motivated by what they really feel, or who’s being motivated by whatever that big-titted human bitch is carrying around inside of her.”
I grinned at Bracken, none of my desire for his skin on mine dissipating. “Yahtzee!” I cried, putting one finger on my nose and pointing at him with the other hand. “That’s why he did it!” I was excited now, jumping up and down and looking at everybody.
“Don’t you see? He said he wanted to help me, and then he followed his ‘chaos tingle.’ This was the one way his power worked!”
“Awesome,” Max observed. “But I’d like it better if it made her explode as we drove away.”
“If she’s going to explode,” Mario added with some deep disgust, “I’d rather she do it where we can watch!”
That made us all laugh, and people left to go find whatever they had planned that morning—some of them were going across the lake to hike the caves, some of them were going out on the boat, and Bracken and I were going to touch and touch and touch, because our smoky, painful desire for each other had only grown more intense as he’d had to watch every man in our little group come up and touch my bared skin.
Nicky filed out discreetly with the rest of the crowd, telling us that he’d be back in an hour.
He was back in two, and we were barely done.
And after that, it was barely one o’clock, and it was too late for Bracken to hike, and we had nothing to do.
I understand that some people live for this, the ability to hang out quietly for days on end. And maybe if I had a zillion kids and a full-time job and a house that wasn’t self-cleaning, I might appreciate another day with nothing to do—but as it was, in the summer my life was in a pretty sweet balance between a side job I loved, responsibilities that challenged me, and enough leisure time with the people I loved to balance the whole rest of my life.
I missed my job, I missed my home, and I missed my Green.
Right now, I missed something to do. I wasn’t used to being bored—it made me itchy.
“I can’t even go to the yarn stores like I’d planned,” I grumbled to Bracken, pulling the sheet up to my breasts as he dressed. They’d been on my to-do list, but we’d left the preternatural community so rattled that I didn’t even want to try to walk down the streets of this alien city just for yarn. What really sucked was that my itchy, unfocused dissatisfaction with what we’d done last night might have been assuaged—or at least made less onerous—by some honest work. Right now, my mind was too pumped up with shit I didn’t want to think about to even read.
“I wouldn’t even mind going to the outlet stores with Renny and Katy to shop,” I said at last, admiring his fine long hairless body, even in a tank and pair of cutoffs, “but that’s probably not such a good idea either.”
Bracken nodded wanly. Now that we were no longer making love, his skin had grown clammy, and I’d seen fine tremors in his hands even as he put on his clothes.
I sighed and flopped backward, looking at my pale, heat-exhausted beloved, who smiled back and stroked my cheek in sympathy. He really couldn’t be out in the heat—even in the air-conditioned car, taking him that far from the lake would be a cruelty.
“You want to go swimming?” I asked gamely, and Bracken’s limpid gaze of sheer gratitude was enough to get me in the water. His gentle nagging even got me far out into the depths and back without my heart bursting from panic.
But we couldn’t stay in the cool forever—not even a T-shirt and SPF rating of “Flannel Shirt” was enough to keep me from burning after too long in that brutal sun. Eventually we came back to find that Renny and Katy had taken over our cabin—and, apparently, bribed our little flitting buddies to bring some more yarn from home.
The table and chairs by the bed looked like a wool-and-dye works had gone out of business and exploded over our stuff, and as Bracken crashed onto the bed to recover from the scant walk from the lake to the cabin, I went and showered and came back out to chat and knit. We managed to set my laptop up with a DVD of The Princess Bride and sat and chattered and knit and quoted the movie until late afternoon, and it was perfect. Their funny, sarcastic chatter—and our helpless devotion to the silly, sentimental, lovely movie—turned out to be like diaper ointment for my chafing mental ass. I spent a few hours in peace, with no emotional demands whatsoever, and I felt like I could breathe again.
We didn’t know what Mrs. Kestrel and Annette were doing, and we didn’t care.
In fact, we could have been perfectly content to do that up until evening, when we would all meet for dinner, but the sound of a strange—and large and powerful—car crunching up the gravel of the cabin driveway interrupted our next movie, The Italian Job, so we set down our knitting and wandered outside to see who it was.
It was a stretch limo—no shit. The back was so completely blacked out, and so completely dark, that there was a limited number of people who would actually want to ride in it, and all of them had been dead for quite a bit.
But the identity of the occupant was sealed by the identity of the driver. He was medium height, with brown hair and blue eyes, average looking, and slicker than lube on a chrome anal probe. He looked like a lawyer because he was one, and he didn’t look anything like the alpha werewolf of San Francisco because he looked exactly like a lawyer.
“Orson!” I said in surprise, and he flashed me a grin heavy on canines and got out of the car, wilting like an old cabbage in the heat. My heart started pounding in my chest like a kid who got called by the teacher for fighting in class, and I had no balance at all to order it down.
“Lady Cory,” he said with a bow, brushing his khakis straight like someone used to wearing a suit.
“Holy Goddess, Orson, what in the hell is Andres doing here?” I was dismayed and embarrassed—but judging by Nicky’s delight and Bracken’s dreamy-eyed speculation, I was the only one.
Bracken: Wants and Needs
ANDRES WAS the last man I’d kissed on the mouth.
Before my bonding with Cory—which I wouldn’t take back, even if I could—I had, in Cory’s words, slept with anything that moved. Male, female, or anything in-between.
I’d enjoyed men in my bed, and Andres had been a particularly aggressive lover—a thing most people wouldn’t know lurked underneath his urbane exterior.
It was a thing Cory knew.
One blood exchange, one frenzied kiss, and Cory and I had been left hanging with that chapter of our lives unexplored. Judging by the expression on her face, she was not nearly as excited as I was to have that book reopened.
“So,” she said, her forehead wrinkled and an unexpectedly wounded look in her murky eyes, “why are you here? Did, uhm—” She swallowed. “—did Green send for you?”
Orson’s eyes widened—he was obviously surprised. “No, little Goddess—this was, in fact, Rafael’s idea. He… he seemed to feel as though a neutral party here to enforce your ruling would make it easier for people to obey.”
“In other words, he thought Andres’s presence might stop an all-out war,” I said thoughtfully. Cory’s eyebrows went up.
“Dammit, that’s not fair! One guy. One gnarly pedophile—that’s all we want. Does this really have to be an international incident?” The pleasant, happy glow that had brightened her pretty-plain features when we’d been alone together dimmed abruptly. Her freckled forehead seemed to have developed a permanent scrunch, and her full lips were pulled in and pursed.
It hit me then, how much pressure she had put on herself—and how uncertain
she was that our actions the night before had been the right ones.
“We couldn’t have let them live,” I said quietly. If anything, her expression hardened to galvanized steel.
“I know that,” she replied. “I know it.”
Orson was the alpha of the San Francisco area because he was known for being ruthless in the boardroom—a shark of a businessman, yes, but not a gladiator who shed actual blood. So he was almost titillated when he said, “Okay, I give, who’d you kill?”
“Rafael’s enforcer,” she grumbled. “And the—” Her face worked, and she turned and spat, having no words for this particular person. “—who attacked Green.”
“Puta,” Katy said from behind us. “Sometimes it just sounds nastier when you say it in Spanish.”
Cory turned around and grinned at her friend over her shoulder. I had heard the three of them chattering as they’d knit and I’d napped. It had been comforting, like the constant sounds of people in and out at home. It was too quiet here—beyond the occasional ocean sound of the distant cars on the causeway, there wasn’t even any breeze to stir the pine trees overhead. Even the boats out on the water had a void, echoing, alien sound.
Her look at Katy was almost nostalgic for the familial comfort of home, and my heart ached—all of that quiet, and there was still something weighing terribly on her. Even in this godless heat, I could see the waves of tension that had begun their slow burn from her body as Orson pulled up.
Her grin stretched tautly over her cheeks, and she tried for courtesy over her worry. “Well, Orson, you’re in luck. The last cabin on the end—”
“The one with the reverse paint job?”
Her grin relaxed a fraction. “Yeah, that’s the one. That one opened up this morning. Let me talk to Tanya, and we’ll see if we can get it fixed up for you.”
Orson nodded gratefully. “Here—let me park this monster in the shade, and then….” He looked around furtively. “Lady, who else is here?”
And that grin cranked tight a few more notches. “Most of the cabins are filled with family,” she said meaningfully. “The one that isn’t has people who know about family, but be careful. They’re Nicky’s parents and a guest. The parents don’t really approve of us, and the guest….”