by Amy Lane
Renny had fought after Mitch had died and she’d been kidnapped. She’d been brutal and mindless and really scary, but that doesn’t mean she’s someone who can make an informed decision in battle conditions.
Katy had killed the guy who put her in a silver cage and whacked off to her pain. If you couldn’t kill that fucker, you really hadn’t earned your right to be a werewolf.
Jack had launched himself at a group of werewolves who had lured our people into a gunfight. He’d done it to protect Teague, and he’d even fought well, but it had been one of the stupidest moves I’d ever seen. I got his reasoning—brother, if anyone understood it, I did—but getting Jack to see it from Teague’s perspective sucked.
“I’m not just going to skulk in the shadows while he goes out and gets killed!” Jack fumed. My patience for this was almost at an end.
“I’m not asking you to!” I shot back. “I’m saying have his back—not his flank, not his front. Guys, your men are our best fighters, but not when they’re worried about you. Go out there, kick ass—I know you can—but don’t make your guy so worried about you that he gets himself hurt, do you hear me?”
“Fine,” Jack sneered. “You go ahead and plan the battles, and we’ll hang in the back like stupid cattle who freak out at wolves.”
Andres had awakened in my head at dusk, telling me that he and Rafael were being “tended to” inside the bar along with the 75 percent of the kiss and the shape-shifters who were still loyal to Rafael. Trap? Traps were, by nature, subtle. This was a medieval battlefield, complete with captive kings.
My temper, frayed by anxiety, finally snapped with impatience.
“Are you saying my beloved was stupid, Jack?” I shouted, and it showed how freaked out I was that this place, right here, was where I went. “Are you saying Adrian was ‘cattle’ as he came flying out of nowhere to save my ass? Because all he had to do was… was fucking stop and think, use just a little bit of planning, and he’d be here right now, right? Hell—he wouldn’t be here right now, because none of this would be fucking happening if he were still around. Because Adrian wasn’t just respected, right? Adrian was loved. But he saw Green and Bracken and me being threatened and his brain just shut down, and now I’m fighting vampire wars from the fucking ground!”
Jack had blanched at my first sentence, but as I rounded at him and pressed him back against the bed with the force of my frustration, he flushed with shame.
“I’m sorry,” he said into the sudden silence in the room. “I didn’t mean to imply….”
“Of course you didn’t,” I sniffed, passing the back of my hand over my eyes. “I went there because that’s where I go. But you need to know—you need to know what sort of devastation you’ll leave behind if you freak out and fuck up. Teague and Max are warriors, people. If they’d been born a thousand years ago, they would have gone out with swords in their hands and taken over countries. You guys are fierce, but you’re not… clear, in a battle. There’s a heartbeat between ‘think’ and ‘do,’ and you just blaze on past it. Max and Teague think in it—it’s what makes the difference. I need you to give them that heartbeat. Fight, fine—but stay out of their way.”
We all drew a shuddery breath, and I flopped down on the bed and scrubbed my face with my hands, then looked up at all of them and smiled shakily. They smiled back the same way.
“This is as close to nerves as I get before a job,” I apologized. “I… the others, we’ve worked like this before. We’re getting damned good at it. You guys, I just worry about you, that’s all.”
There was an awkward silence, and I was actually pretty relieved when Marcus walked in. Phillip had been on edge and bitchy since they’d awakened. Marcus had been keeping him on an even keel as he had been all month, and I wanted some reassurance that our brother wasn’t just going to fucking lose it on us when we hit the bad shit. Of course, given Phillip’s ability to kick bloody ass, that might not be such a bad thing. I just wouldn’t want to be there when we ran out of enemies.
“Hey, Marcus. You guys all fed and packed?”
Marcus’s eyes were whirling oddly—each eye out of sync and a slightly different color. His mouth, which was usually compressed in a little Italian Kewpie bow, was open and slack. I tilted my head and squinted at him, wondering what the hell was wrong with him.
“I fed,” he said. “I fed? Yeah… I must have fed.” He shook his head—hard and fast enough to blur in my vision, like an elf running in hyperspeed—and I stood up warily and exchanged glances with the others. I jerked my eyes toward the door and was rewarded with three adamant glares. Well, I’d known they were brave, but I had to say my opinion about their clear thinking hadn’t changed one teeny-tiny bit.
“Who’d you feed from, Marcus?” I asked softly, but we knew. We all knew.
“Annette?” he asked. “Well, isn’t she the last person I’d want to eat….”
Of course. There we had it—the reason he was creeping us all the fuck out.
“What did Annette ask you to do, sweetie?” I asked gently, standing up and putting my hand on his. His claws extended, flexed, retracted, and extended again. I tried to slip inside his head, but there was nothing going on there. Whatever had been done to him, his own consciousness had checked out, to be replaced by the chaos-puppeteer’s.
But, I thought slowly, we’d been given a weapon to fight that sort of thing, hadn’t we?
Moving quickly so he wouldn’t resist, I took his hand and thrust it under the loose neck of my T-shirt to my shoulder, onto the chaos filter that young Sam had given me. Abruptly I was assaulted by twin images. Both of them featured Annette looking in through an open ceiling, laughing in childish glee. The first picture showed me flat on my back on the bed with my throat torn open.
The other featured me in the same position naked, with Marcus on top of me.
Wonderful. She’d asked him to kill me—but with Green’s people, “fight it” could turn to “fuck it” on a dime.
I pulled Marcus’s hand out of my shirt, looked at Renny, and mouthed “Get Brack” at her. Finally, finally she took the hint, turned kitty, and darted out of the room through the open door. I met Katy’s eyes and mouthed “Phillip” at her, and she took the hint too.
Marcus was so intent on me—his drives so conflicted and so all-consuming—that he didn’t even flinch.
I tried reason.
“Marcus, hon—remember, you got rid of all this. It was a crush, that was all. We all get crushes, but you didn’t really want to follow through, right?” Of course not. This last month we’d all seen that he was all that held his beloved together. I’d never been more than a fascination for him. Maybe just that—the memory of a crush—was enough to flip the direction of his want.
His eyes were still whirling, but now they were in sync, and the image his mind was blasting on all frequencies resolved itself to a single frame. Okay… I’d apparently shifted his drive to the single-minded urge to mate. Of course, if Marcus fucked me, Bracken would die horribly, and then I would die of a broken heart, and then Green would go the same way—and really, kill me or do me, we were all fucked, weren’t we?
“You smell delicious,” he said, and I exchanged rolled eyes with Jack. Jack started to advance, his arms outstretched, but I shook my head firmly. Marcus was a vampire. Our people tended to forget this, but vampires were stronger than were-folk, and this was not our sweet scholarly vampire who sat and did research with me in the garden. This Marcus might rip Jack’s throat out and turn back to rape me as Jack bled to death. Shit.
“I smell off-limits,” I replied firmly as I pulled enough power into my body to light up the entire town. If he was in there—if anything but chaos was in his brain—I could override this with my bond to him.
Marcus moved closer, and I sorted through any response that might keep me from frying him into powder if he got close enough to be a threat. Oh Goddess, anything but that—because it wouldn’t be one death, but two. Phillip would not survive the
death of his lover. Not now, not when Marcus was the only thing keeping his grip on sanity tight. Unlike, say, Marcus’s.
He hadn’t replied, and I tried an awful grin. “Dude, you know who smells really good right now? Annette. Annette probably has sirloin boobs and chocolate spinal fluid—why don’t you go snack on her?”
Marcus didn’t say anything, but his eyes stopped whirling and started a laser-straight murky red glow. He got close enough to touch, and I put a hand firmly on his chest and shoved him back, only to be met with the cold, unyielding force of reanimated flesh. Oh Goddess, please let him come back enough for me to control. Don’t let it come down to brute force.
“Marcus,” I said dangerously, “you need to get back. You need to think about this. What will Phillip think?”
Those slowly glowing eyes closed, and his smile became childishly sweet. “Phillip loves me,” he said. I met Jack’s eyes hopefully and nodded.
“Phillip needs to talk to you!” he said urgently, and my eyes bugged. Dammit, did he not know that Marcus could check that lie out in his head?
“I’m not supposed to talk to Phillip before I ki… fuck her.” The sweet look was gone, and he was advancing on me like he had a purpose—but his movements were stiff. Auuughhhh… fuck Annette and her dumbfuck grudges. She must have held a whole lot of hate to push her random chaos will on Marcus like this, and he was fighting it. He had to be fighting it, if he’d changed the drive from death to sex.
“Jack, go get Teague,” I said. Marcus was on me, chest to chest, and I was a moment from falling back on the bed, my mind scrambling for a way to get out of this without killing the guy. What would it take to snap him out of it? Pain? Water? Phillip hauling him back and having the bitch-slapping festival of all time?
“Teague would kill me if I left!” Jack replied. I glared at him from around Marcus’s shoulder.
“Teague will kill me if you get hurt—and you might, because I’ve got a plan. Now go!”
“A plan,” Marcus repeated blankly. I let myself fall back on the bed, with Marcus on top of me. His arms came out automatically, clasping my shoulders, dragging me next to his compact body like a lover—which is the last thing we would be, one way or another.
“This is a plan?” Jack yelped, and I gathered my power, closed my eyes, and hoped I remembered something about directionality and learning how to fly.
“It is now,” I replied grimly. Just as Marcus lowered his head to my neck, I shot us through the ceiling.
Water, I’d thought. Well, it so happened there was a big fucking lake not a hundred yards away, if only I could control our arc.
Marcus took the brunt of the impact through the ceiling, but a few fragments still got through. I could give a shit. He clutched me tighter in surprise as we went arcing together—up, up, over, the wind howling through my hair and Marcus’s puzzlement looping through my head, the sky with open arms to receive us and….
I dropped us right solid square in the middle of that big black lake. The first time I panicked was when the water closed over my head and Marcus’s cold skin and bones tightened around me like wet sailors’ rope.
Fuck.
Bracken: Knight in Darkness
I WAS almost in the middle of the lake when Renny and Katy came howling down the shoreline, so agitated that I was halfway to them before Marcus and Cory came shooting out of the cabin roof.
Renny stopped her yowling, and Lambent, Teague, Max, and I simply treaded water in shock as we watched their trajectory and splashdown. Cory was pushing against Marcus even as they hit water.
I was swimming back toward them before the others even had time to say “Holy fuck!”
There were still ripples from their plunge when I got there and started diving. I could see the glow and bubbles from Cory’s power, growing dimmer and dimmer as Marcus’s dead weight dragged her deeper and deeper, and I kicked hard and furiously to reach her. Oh Goddess, she’d been so brave, trying to fight this demon. Whatever had driven her here, she must have been desperate.
The glow grew closer, and I tried to force the earth in the water to breathe through my skin. My lungs were bursting, screaming at my chest for oxygen, but I wouldn’t go back up without her—until a hand seized my foot and literally threw me up out of the water.
I splashed back down and furiously rounded on Phillip and Lambent, who were shouting at me even as I made ready to dive back down.
“Listen to him!” Lambent screamed, seizing me around the waist before I could physically brawl with Phillip in the middle of the damned lake. Phillip turned a frantic, pale face toward me and yelled, “Marcus has her! You’ll need me to grab him to get her out!”
I nodded tersely and calmed down to as close to icy as I could manage. Then I hauled in a lungful of air, and pumping hard with my legs, I used the Goddess’s own speed to get me right back down, Phillip a darkening torpedo at my side.
Fuck, they were deep. I could move preternaturally fast—but I was still slowed by the water, and no matter how hard I kicked, it looked as though the azure-orange glow that marked the two of them was going deeper and deeper. I almost despaired until I got close enough to see her flailing in Marcus’s grasp. Then I realized she wasn’t going deeper, she was getting weaker. Oh, fuck despair—it was time for some good old-fashioned panic, and it was a good thing Phillip grabbed his lover, or I might have ripped Marcus’s arms off just to get Cory to the surface.
As it was, as soon as the two vampires made contact, Marcus turned instinctively into Phillip’s arms. The two of them sank together, lost in a lovers’ comforting communion, and I grabbed Cory under the arms and started to kick for all I was worth.
I was going fast enough that our feet cleared the surface of the water when we broke through, and the feeling of her chest exploding in inhalation as we broke the surface was the one thing that let me breathe.
We fell back to the water, and I kept hold of her in spite of Teague and Max’s offers to tow her back to safety.
She gasped a couple of times and then shook her head hard, cleared the water out of her eyes, and took another deep breath.
“Let them, Bracken Brine,” she said when she could, her breath cold and ragged against my cheek. “We’ve got to get back up there before Phillip does!”
“Why?” I demanded. I could only see her face in profile, but I recognized the set of her jaw and the struggle she was pitching against herself to speak.
“Annette—he’s going to kill her!” She tried to take her own weight, but I seized her around the middle and kept her pinned against my body.
“Fucking let him,” I ground. “Whatever she did, she deserves it!”
She let out what might have been a laugh. “No shit, Bracken Brine. I just need to clear away the bystanders before he does.”
Oh. Well, then. Max and Teague paddled closer, their four feet churning efficiently under the surface, and I helped her loop her arms around them. Between my preternatural speed and her shape-shifting escorts, we hauled ass to the shoreline, giving Renny and Katy a reassuring pat even as we stood up. Then I ignored Cory’s protests and picked her up to blur up the incline and meet the others in the driveway in front of the cabins.
Terry Kestrel was standing in front of the walking dead woman, weeping. “Now, Nicky, I’m sure she didn’t mean it—”
“Nicky, move her,” Cory commanded as her feet hit the ground, and I let go. Nicky executed a full bow and then did what his leader requested. He picked his mother up bodily and forced her to the outer edge of the circle. When she opened her mouth to protest, her own husband clapped his hand over it.
Max, Katy, and Teague had changed form—Katy’s T-shirt was wet and askew, but still on—and Kyle had flown back as soon as we surfaced. All of us were there, surrounding Annette with implacable faces. Jack and Katy were on either side of Teague, clutching his hands. Renny sat panting and hissing next to Max, who fondled her ears reassuringly. Mario and LaMark stood near Nicky and his parents—Avian solid
arity, something we all appreciated. Even Tanya was there, standing next to Mario, her face sober but her loyalty absolutely unquestionable.
Annette finally—finally—had the grace to look afraid.
“Now, you’re not going to hurt me…,” she tried with a ghastly smile. Cory looked at me, and we exchanged a grim laugh. Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick op Crocken Green looked like shit warmed over. She had minor cuts on the sides of her face and arms from the wooden roof of the cabin, and my touch had started the blood mingling sloppily with the lake water. Her hair was lank around her face, makeup had run into her red-rimmed eyes, and her bloody white tee and basketball shorts clung to her body. Still, if Annette couldn’t see the grim warrior in my beloved’s face, she had truly never deserved to draw breath in the first place.
“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” Cory said.
Annette showed hopeful teeth. “Thank you,” she babbled. “You know, I really didn’t think it would work, and I’m sooo glad you’re okay, and—”
“Phillip will.” The words were a bare-knuckled rap on a raw wood floor.
Annette blanched. “I… I’m sorry?”
“You attempted to murder Marcus—”
“I did not! I told him to kill you!” There was a restive movement among our audience, and Terry stopped fighting and turned a stricken glance to her husband. Oh, yes—Annette wasn’t the only one who finally had her eyes opened.
“Yes, Annette,” Cory said slowly, as though teaching a parrot to speak. “You told Marcus to kill me. Marcus didn’t want to, but you’d bound him with your blood. He had to do something, so he was going to rape me instead.” Her voice rose on the word rape, and I could tell how distasteful it was to think of a friend that way. “Except, Annette, do you know what would have happened if he’d succeeded?”
Annette tried a game smile. “You would have liked it?”
I wasn’t even aware I’d blurred until my hand cracked across her face. Her neck snapped sideways and she fell to her knees, her face swelling immediately. I’d probably shattered her cheekbone and her eardrum. As I stood there looking at my hand, Cory said softly, “Baby, you’re going to need to move—if we don’t finish this before Phillip gets here, he’ll go through you.”