by Amy Lane
She looked behind us, and she and Bracken probably spoke volumes with their eyes. “Why not?” she said after a moment.
I made a pleased sound—they could probably be alone, I thought muzzily. I had no doubt about it. But this would be our last night together before shit went down, and went down hard. This was the reason we called her “Lady Cory”—a real queen wouldn’t go nuzzle her beloved on the night before a battle, a real queen would stay and play Uno with the troops.
As Bracken rounded up a towel for her to sit on and another one to throw over her shoulders, I figured I knew what made her a real queen. And then she proved to me what made her a real lover.
My parents saw her sitting down and getting comfy, and they stood up and made awkward noises to leave. Cory met my eyes meaningfully and nodded her head in that direction.
“What?” I asked grumpily. I hadn’t been particularly nice to them—none of us had. As far as we were concerned, they were the reason Annette was here, the reason she’d had a chance to fuck with that poor kid, and a ginormous thorn in Cory’s side when a thorn in her side was the last thing she needed.
“They’re leaving tomorrow. So are we.” Her voice was soft and meaningful, and I shrugged. So? She sighed, the sound suspiciously frustrated. “So go talk to them—it might be your last chance in….” She swallowed and shook her head. We’d all been in the thick of it. Nobody liked to talk about it like soldiers, but there was a reason she worked so hard to have our backs. Tomorrow night promised to be… interesting.
“Please?” she asked at last, after an awkward silence that permeated the entire table. “Please, just go talk?”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Bracken can take my hand,” I grumbled before I left.
It was weird how still the night was in the mountains—as soon as the light disappeared behind me, the voices at the table became distant and disembodied. I hurried to catch up with my parents, thinking that the gray light of the waning moon did a good job of making things look melancholy and lonely.
“Mom, Dad!” I called, and they turned to me warily. Well, part of that was their fault, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t have to yell if they didn’t have to judge, right?
“If you’re going to apologize,” Mom sniffed, “it’s too late. I already told you, Annette spent all day in the cabin crying her eyes out.”
I shook my head, feeling my temper rise again. What was it about family? “Mom, if she keeps threatening us, we’ll kill her. If crying keeps her out of trouble, let her snivel her way through life, right? I didn’t come to talk about her anyway.”
“Then what?” Mom snapped, and I sighed.
“I….” Oh Goddess. My anger and my love bottled up hopelessly in my chest. I love you both… please don’t leave angry vied with I’m sorry you two fucked this up beyond repair, and I couldn’t bring myself to say either thing.
“I hope you have a safe trip,” I finished miserably, shaking my head. Bad idea. This had been a bad idea. I turned to go, and my dad made a frustrated grunt.
“Nicky….”
I turned back around, and he shrugged, his almost delicate features crinkling in discomfort. “You guys don’t have to pay for the car,” he said at last, and Mom rounded on him in outrage.
“The hell they don’t!”
“We don’t mind!” I said at exactly the same moment. I glared at her. “Green has money,” I said irritably. “We don’t mind spending it—”
“Well, if he has so much money, why can’t you pay to send poor Annette home?” Mom asked in frustration, and I felt my face harden much like Cory’s did before she killed.
“Because Annette isn’t family. She’s not a friend. And Cory has done plenty as it is, keeping people from killing her.”
Mom gave an angry laugh, and I just shook my head. “Did you see Cory last night, Mom?”
“She just shoved Annette in the cabin—”
“No—did you see her?”
Mom blinked. “She was a mess,” she sniffed. I shook my head.
“She was covered in blood, Ma—vampire blood. Because she went out to get revenge on people who tried to kill our lover. And I went with her, knowing exactly what she was going to do, and you know what? My only regret is that I didn’t get to make a kill, and that’s the Goddess’s honest truth. Dad and me, we’re not human. And the thing we are, it’s a predator—and predators don’t have any use for rabbits who think they’re birds. When I say Cory has kept her alive, I’m serious. Every person who’s offered to kill her has been serious. And after what she did to that boy, I’d be first in line. You keep telling me the people I’m with are evil because of the sex—well, I’ve got to tell you, not once have I been covered in spunk and dropped like a used condom, and that’s what she did to that kid!”
Oh God. I just used the word spunk when talking to my mother. I was going to hell, and I didn’t even believe in the place.
“That’s disgusting!” she snarled, and I was already in it, hell or no hell.
“That’s what’s been sniveling in your room!” I snarled back. I looked up at Dad and shook my head. “Dad, I’m sorry. I… I wanted to see you guys. I wanted you to know I was happy—truly, truly happy. The people I’m with—they’re good people. They don’t live in the human world, but they’ll kill or die for me, and I love them.”
“You said they killed people!” Mom shrilled. I shook my head, grabbed her shoulders, and kissed her on the cheek.
“I love you, Mom. You want to help Annette, put her on a bus.” And then, convinced that this was Cory’s worst idea ever, I turned away.
I was unprepared for my father’s hand on my shoulder, and that resonant voice—the one that used to put me to sleep as a child, listening to him talk quietly to my mom at the end of the day—saying, “Son, I haven’t gone flying yet up here. You want to come with me?”
I don’t know how bright my eyes were, but I know my smile was my very best. “Absolutely. There are some great air currents over the dam, Dad—it’s better than cliff diving!” I’d forgotten, or stopped caring, that we weren’t supposed to tell my mom about jumping off the butte near our house as humans and changing in midair. It didn’t matter.
Dad gave a grin and left my mom, standing uncertain and miserable, to walk with me shoulder to shoulder as I made my way to our cabin. I needed to leave my sandals on the mat. No sense in tempting fate, right?
We stood together, my dad and I, and looked up into the sky.
“It’s a smaller sky here,” Dad said, and he was right—Montana sky was as big as the ocean, as big as a god.
“There’s more trees,” I pointed out. I liked trees—places to play, places to perch, and they hid game. They also hid predators, and those were fun too.
“You like the trees?” Dad asked, and I had to admit that I did.
“Trees are complicated,” I told him. “Complicated can get crazy—it can make you tired—but it’s always interesting.”
Dad chuckled, and I watched as he stretched his back, listening to the crackle of a middle-aged spine. Anton, Montana, had fewer than fifty thousand people in it. I once tried to do the math, and I figured that maybe 2 percent of us were Avians. Until I’d left home, I’d never met another species of the Goddess’s get. Dad had married a town girl because that’s what our people did. There were rumors throughout Anton that we existed—it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for one of the girls in our town to realize she was in love with one of us. I’d heard the talk in the high school—we were a source of rumor, speculation, and glamour, much like vampires, except, in Anton, people knew we were real.
Mom had probably felt like she won the lottery when Dad had shown interest. Dad had probably never imagined a larger world where a girl like Mom wasn’t his only choice. I would never be middle-aged like my father—I would always be as young as I was now, as young as Green, and together we would watch Cory grow old and beyond us.
I tilted back my head and let the slight breeze off the lake ruffle my
hair. I stretched out my arms, and with a faint pulling sensation, my feathers spilled out of my flesh. My bones hollowed and my mass became sinew, muscle, stretched skin.
As a human I’ve stood, arms extended, in a windy alley or on a wind-scoured plain and I’ve thought of other humans who couldn’t just let the wind take their feathers and lift into the ether. I don’t do that often, because it breaks my heart.
Tonight, Dad and I let a breeze pick us up and surfed the wind, climbing for the boundless indigo, plummeting from the windless height like stones to extend our wings again and soar from the ground at the last moment. We sighted fish from above the lake and arrowed down, shrieking in challenge to our prey—who could not hear us, or did not care.
It didn’t matter—we had fed already. We lifted out of the water and released the flopping victims to continue on their fishy ways.
A human son might have talked sports or boats some more. A human child might have talked movies or cars. But Dad and I are not human. Together we flew at night, under stars that did not judge, and we played tag with the wind and flirted with gravity, and we made our peace.
IT WAS just as well we had found some equilibrium, because the next evening, after the vampires awakened and fed, Mom came knocking at my door as I was packing.
She had Annette in her wake, with fresh hair spray, a fresh outfit, and a freshly painted smile.
Mom smiled at me tentatively, and when I raised my eyebrows at her, she pasted a smile just like Annette’s on her face. “Now, honey, Annette just wants to make some amends, that’s all.”
I grunted—a thing I’ve been picking up from Bracken—and looked at the suitcases. I was trying to pack for Cory and looking for something small to put a change of clothes in. If we all survived the night, we’d all want some spares that weren’t Sac State gold and green.
“Now, Nicky,” Annette said sweetly. In high school, that’s what had attracted me to her—she had always sounded so sweet. Of course, when you’re in high school, you tend to confuse “sweet” with “genuinely good.” Annette was neither, but she could fake “sweet.”
“You want to apologize, you track down that kid you fucked and dumped and apologize to him,” I grated, refusing to even look at her. “I could give a shit what you do with your own asshole, but that kid was a friend of mine.”
I’d shocked them both, badly, and I didn’t care. Damn Mom. The night before, I’d come in after my flight with my father feeling good. We hunted well together, our body language communicating all the simple things that human words fucked up. Cory had rolled out of Bracken’s embrace—they always slept tangled—and hugged me before he reclaimed her, and I’d thought that my life was good. And then Mom had to try and pull this shit again.
“Dominic Kestrel…,” Mom tried, her voice burdened with tremulous indignation. I spared her a look.
“Mom, I’m not going to marry her. I’m not going to fuck her. I’m not going to like her. I’m not even going to forgive her. You want to get mad at me and leave, please do. I would have liked to have spent some time with you, but you’ve been so… weirdly obsessed with this dumb bitch being a ticket to a normal life that you can’t even see that I love the abnormal life I’ve got. Which is a good thing since I’m tied to it by mating bonds anyway. I mean—seriously? You want me to go home with her and then come back here and fuck around once a month? You know that’s the life you’re trying to plan for me.”
“No one would have to know,” she said unhappily.
“I’d know. And I’d fucking hate it. If you really loved me, if you really wanted me to be happy, you’d just fucking drop this. If you had any judgment whatsoever, you’d drop her.”
Mom swallowed and dashed her eyes with the back of her hand, then shrugged helplessly and walked out. Just walked out—leaving Annette to stand there glaring at me, that poisonous snarl that she’d been aiming at Cory all week finally out in the open between us.
“I’m not a dumb bitch,” she fumed. “I’m not. I’m a good Christian girl, and you’re being stupid and stubborn.”
I looked sideways at her and then walked around her to get Bracken’s clothes and pack them. Bracken was swimming, his last chance to charge his energy with the earthen electricity that the lake offered, and I was pretty sure Cory was meeting with Renny, Katy, and Jacky. They had to be there at the battle—they had to. We weren’t just going to leave them somewhere, unprotected, while the people they loved went to war. But there were ways to minimize the danger to them. She’d talked about them with me, with Bracken, and with Green, Max, and Teague, and she was giving a third or fifth run-through to make sure the three of them didn’t dart into the open or shoot off their mouths or do anything to put them in the sort of danger their teeth and claws couldn’t get them out of.
Losses were unacceptable—we knew that now.
“But at least I’m not fucking strangers in the woods,” I said cattily. Mostly I just wanted to hear her admit it. Not once had she admitted she’d done anything wrong. She wasn’t going to now either.
“I was trying to get closer to you!”
I blinked and then laughed. “Honey—you could actually be an Avian, and I still wouldn’t want to touch you. You could be a male Avian, and I wouldn’t want to touch you. Banging that kid to get whatever warped version of his nightmare power isn’t going to get you anything but an STD, if he hasn’t been careful.”
“You just wait and see!” Annette sniffed. “I got more from that little bastard than he even thought to give me! And your precious Cory—that bitch slept with that vampire last night! You can’t tell me she didn’t! It’s not like she’s pure, and it’s not like she’s even nice—and you’re going to see what a total cunt she is in about five minutes, and then, if you’re nice to me and sorry, I just might take you back.”
I ignored the part about Cory sleeping with Andres. For one thing, I knew she hadn’t, and for another, I wouldn’t care if—or rather I wished that—she had. But the threat…. I narrowed my eyes at the girl who had dropped me because I wouldn’t sleep with her, and who apparently thought I was the one that got away.
“What did you do?” I asked, disturbed.
Annette smiled smugly. “I just tried to get along, that’s all.” Her smile amped up a notch. I took a good look at her false blue eyes and wondered how I had never noticed that they were as deep as a bucket of crazy.
“Oh, Goddess…. Annette—what did you do?”
“Just tried to make sure you ended up with someone who really cares about you, that’s all.” She smiled that empty, insane smile again, and I shook my head, trying not to panic.
“When did you get the idea that I’m the one? Why can’t you just move on?” My voice shrilled, loud enough to catch the attention of anyone around. There was something bad happening, and I needed to keep Annette busy enough to trap and question her without her knowing.
There was a terrified wildflower flutter in my stomach, and I kept my expression as neutral as I could as I waited for Annette’s answer. Her eyes were hooded, and I wondered what sort of endorphins she’d released when she’d taken whatever gambit she had—she looked both crazy and drugged, and Goddess if I could figure out what her move had been.
“You’re my ticket out, Nicky,” she said, walking her manicured fingers up my shirt. “Everyone wanted one of you, and I almost had you. All those dumb fucks going away to college, they didn’t know about you. They thought you were a myth. But I knew….” She shook her head and turned her closed eyes toward a warped future only she could see. “I knew, you see… if I could just have you, have an Avian, I’d have my ticket out. I’d be queen forever, just like your mama.”
I stared at her in outrage. “You want to sleep with me because studying was too hard?” I was so not making this connection, and for the first time, Annette showed some frustration at my complete obtuseness.
“I want to sleep with you because you’re royalty,” she said slowly. “And if I’m your wife, I’ll be
the closest thing Anton, Montana ever had to a queen!”
Then I heard a ruckus that snapped me out of my horrified fascination with Miss Queen Crazypants and made me turn my head to listen. Katy and Renny were in their critter forms, howling their whiskers off, and I couldn’t hear Cory’s voice at all.
Shit. Annette put her hand on my arm with a meaningful look and smile, and looked stunned when I shook her off. Apparently whatever mojo she’d used to inspire this little turn of events hadn’t followed her into my room, for which I could only be grateful.
Casting Annette’s fate to whatever hells I could think of, I went shouting out the door, screaming Bracken’s name and heading three doors down to see what in the fuck was going on. I had barely cleared my door when, in an explosion of drywall and wood, Marcus the vampire came shooting out of the ceiling of the cabin in a cannonball trajectory that would carry him smack dab into the darkened, oil-black waters of the lake.
The expression on his face was surreal in its clarity—he looked like a sleeper awakening from a dream or a drug addict abruptly coming down from a high.
The glow of Cory’s power surrounded him, propelling him out toward the lake, and Cory—looking pissed off but in control—was wrapped firmly in his arms.
Annette watched them go as they arched spectacularly over the lake and then plunged deep into the depths, and made a sound of impatience.
“Do you think she’ll survive that?” she asked unhappily. As streaks of black lightning that could only be Phillip and Kyle zoomed overhead toward the two of them, I felt my own unholy, insane smile twitch at the corner of my lips.
“Oh, you can count on it.”
Annette’s eyes widened, and for the first time she looked afraid.
Cory: Bloody Moves
THE BRIEFING in the cabin was actually scaring me shitless.
The thought of Renny, Katy, and Jack in the fight made me a little ill. Not so much because I didn’t think they could fight—I knew they had all been in the thick of it and done well. It was the “dispassion” thing that they didn’t have going for them.