Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  Still, he focused on the message. “I know what you are. I know who you want to protect. Give me an exclusive or I tell the world about her.”

  The red Sharpie blurred in Green’s vision, expanded, distorted, filled his eyes, filled his mind, filled his chest with crimson rage. Dimly he became aware that Arturo had two hands on his shoulders and was ordering him to “Breathe, brother, in, out, repeat as needed, you hear me?”

  Green looked at the crumpled photos wadded in his hand, then pulled oxygen into his lungs and let it out on a snarl. Arturo nodded with him, and when their anger had receded enough for reason, he said, “So, who you want should do the job?”

  Green squinched his eyes closed and opened them in icy shock, Arturo bringing home to him the things he was and the things he was not. “We don’t know this person, Arturo,” he rasped, shaking off his second’s comforting hands. “We don’t know if he’s good or evil or in a corner—or even if he’s just blinded by purpose, or if he’s given the negatives to anybody else. He doesn’t ask for money, remember? He just wants his precious ‘story.’ If that’s true, we can meet with him. We can reason with him… hell, if nothing else, we can wipe his bloody fucking slate clean and not have a body to hide. Bodies leave tracks—mind-fucked arse-fuckers just irritate their bosses.”

  Abruptly, Green stood up and started pacing. “We have a contact number, right?”

  Arturo picked up the glossy photograph between his thumb and forefinger as though he were picking up something dead, then nodded. “Yes, but I really think we should just kill this guy.”

  Green paused in his worry and pacing to shoot Arturo a wry grin. In one form or another, they’d had this discussion before. “Let’s see if we can do this with a mind-fuck or a tumble in bed before we fuck him for real, shall we, Arturo?”

  Arturo shook his head in frustration. One of Green’s great strengths and great weaknesses was that killing was always his last answer. Arturo had killed before and lived to regret it—but in the jungles of his homeland, where the gods had competed fiercely for their share of virgins, wine, and tribute, he had managed to live.

  “Whatever you say, brother—but either way, we’ll know who he is and how this is going to go down by the end of the week.”

  Green’s grin widened again at his second’s obvious reluctance, and he bent over the kitchen table, cleaning up the offending pictures and looking to see if there was any more sweet cereal left for seconds. There always was.

  “Either way, my friend,” he said, taking a bite of cereal between cleanup efforts, “it’s going to be a busy week.”

  Arturo rolled his eyes and then sat down to his own bowl of cereal. When he wasn’t eating oatmeal, he was partial to anything with marshmallows. No matter what was for breakfast, it was obviously going to have to last them awhile.

  Teague: Hawk and Wolf

  TEAGUE SURE did like having Mario as a partner—now if he could only convince Jacky that the guy was straighter than a redneck’s rifle, his life would be damn near perfect.

  He hadn’t been particularly excited when Green had suggested he partner off with someone else besides Jack. In fact, he’d flat out told Green “No!” But then Jack had suggested that maybe, since he was going to be on break soon, they should make the run out to Sugar Pine together.

  Teague had looked at the newspaper article with the wild animal attacks and dead family and said, “Can’t. Green’s got me a partner for when you’re in school, and this needs to be handled now.”

  Jack had sulked, but he hadn’t damaged any walls, doors, or furniture, and after the debacle after Thanksgiving involving all the dead wolves and the torched acres of land and the death match with a rabid wolf, Teague was all for calling this one a win.

  He’d loved being partnered up with Jack. Jacky could follow his thoughts, jolly him out of his dark moods, and read his cues in conversation like no one Teague had ever met. But Teague’s need for those things in his job had stopped abruptly when he’d picked Jack up out of a pool of his own blood and made like a screaming hurricane for Green. Twice.

  He’d figured that Jacky’s need to follow him in the hunting life would have eased up once Teague had followed Jack into the werewolf life and they had followed each other into bed. He’d really been hoping that binding to Katy would have made Jack see the joys of domestic bliss, and to some extent it had—Jack had gone back to school, and he enjoyed helping Katy at the bakery, and for the most part, all was well.

  Which was great, because Jack might be up and around and whole and healthy, but Teague was pretty damned sure he’d never recover from seeing his friend, his lover, his goddamned other half, lying on the ground bleeding. Twice. Yes, he knew that werewolves healed faster than humans and that the same wounds today would barely faze Jacky as he scrambled up to kick some righteous ass. The question was, did Teague give a ripe shit?

  The answer was, in order for Jacky to never be in that sort of danger again, Teague’d probably get along with Satan himself, if the fucker would let him play his own goddamned music in the car on the way to the run.

  Seeing that he was willing to do all that, it was just as well and good that Mario liked Linkin Park and old Metallica almost as much as Teague, and that he seemed to be able to read Teague’s mind too. The fact that the brother had never looked at a man sideways—much less fucked him frontways or backways—should have set everybody’s mind to rest, but everybody wasn’t Jacky, who had a whiny, girlie, possessive streak almost the size of his damned caretaker’s heart.

  Fortunately Katy was too levelheaded for that kind of shit, but since Katy had a couple of assets that Mario didn’t, her place in Teague’s life was relatively safe from that perspective. What Teague couldn’t seem to convince Jacky of was that it wouldn’t matter—his heart was fragile, it could only take so much uncertainty. Offering it to Katy and Jack about met his lifetime quota of self-doubt, and he would, God and Goddess willing, not have to ever offer his heart on a silver platter for another fool blind-stupid enough to take it.

  And of course it would help if his body would hurry up and mate already.

  He was supposed to. After werewolves spent enough time in company with a chosen lover or two, their bodies were supposed to stop responding to other people forever—barring the death of a mate, of course. The fact that Teague’s body wasn’t doing that—and fuck-it-all-to-hell, he didn’t know why!—was driving jealous Jaqueline up the fucking wall.

  Teague couldn’t seem to explain that wood was wood. He certainly wasn’t going to go out and club someone else over the groin with it. He didn’t want anyone else, dammit, and what his body did when vampires fed off him had nothing to do with where his heart was. It was bad enough that he hadn’t been able to scare the two of them off—another lover, male or female, would ’bout kill him.

  Which was what had brought him on this steep, winding road with Mario in the seat next to him, both of them with windows down in the evening chill, scenting the wind with its promise of a good run in their other skins. Like Jack, Mario didn’t need to talk much in the car, and what he did say was either funny or to the point, so right now they were silent and companionable. Teague could deal with a companion who didn’t have a bone of drama in his Avian body.

  Lake Sugar Pine was a small recreational lake a good fifteen miles as the hawk flew from Green’s hill. It was good for fishing if you weren’t depending on your catch to eat, and good for swimming if you didn’t mind the mountain chill even in July. A lot of folks apparently didn’t, because the campgrounds around the lake were pretty full in the on-season—and even people who spent no time at all in the out-of-doors the rest of the year spent a week at the lake to track the dark red dirt into their homes in triumph of, for once, valuing some time outdoors over a housecleaning disaster.

  Mid-March was too early for campers—the unfortunate family who had been killed earlier in the month had been there with special permission from the owner of the private campground. Teague had left
his cherished Mustang back at the hill for Jack and Katy to use, so when he arrived he parked Green’s SUV in the parking lot next to the murky green water. The egg-shaped lake was cold this moment just after sunset—he only had to look at the chilly emerald heart of it, rejecting the last few rays of sunlight, to get the shivers. Since he was stripping off his clothes and putting them on the front seat of the SUV, Mario shook his head in sympathy.

  “Brother, I’ve got to tell you, I feel for you skin-changing boys. Nothing like going natural for the tourists, right?” Mario had a compact, muscular body and could have given Arturo a run for his money in a masculine beauty pageant, complete with dimples and curly hair. The look in his brown eyes as Teague stripped had been devoid of even the slightest bit of speculation, thank the Goddess. There was a certain relief in knowing the guy watching your back wasn’t watching your ass.

  Teague grinned at him fiercely. “Yeah, well, some of us are proud of our genes, and some of us just fold them on the car seat and get on with our lives.” Mario chuckled, and Teague gave an inward sigh. After a year and a half of sexual tension with the guy who had his back, Teague wistfully hoped Jacky would let him keep Mario. He was pretty sure the two of them might live—especially now that he had a Goddess’s-get edge.

  He’d never paid attention to the moon before he started working for Green. Now that he’d been bitten by a werewolf—by request—he lived and died by the light of her face. He looked into the sky and let the waxing crescent vibrate with his heartbeat at his temples, and he found a still, sweet place inside him. It was, curiously enough, a place devoid of lovers—there was no room in this place for anything but the demands that Teague usually bottled on principle. However, it was also devoid of pain. Just a perfectly round, silver space filled with the strength of Teague’s heart. He loved this space—it was one of the few places besides Jack and Katy’s arms where he’d ever found peace.

  In a moment he was on all fours, his muscles dancing to the moon’s music, and his own heartbeat goose-stepping over his liquid bones in painful time.

  And then he was a wolf, and he was free. Mario locked up the SUV, put the keys in the magnetic locker under the wheel well, changed form, and powered his way into the sky in short order. Teague stuck his wet black nose into the air and sniffed delicately, tasting the wind on his tongue behind his palate. His dark blond fur prickled around his ruff and his back—there was something… alien… in this particular wind bouquet.

  He gave a little yelp and went trotting off into the darkness, Mario keeping watch overhead.

  Teague had been to Sugar Pine many times before as a human, but never as a wolf. As a human, the sheer red-shale hills that the road carved on its way down to the lake had simply been a part of the scenery—a place he knew for certain that no enemies could hide.

  As a wolf, he could smell the dimness of deep places in those hills, the damp musk of caves. He had been trotting in a focused direction, heading up from there for a place where the land became uneven enough to support caves for the bears and wildcats that were steadily being edged out by daring developers. He knew where the wild animals were—he was looking for something amiss with them.

  Mario screeched above him, and he whuffled in agreement.

  Something was clearly amok with the smell of the world.

  What was that? He sniffed, and shook his head like he’d gotten thistles up his nose. No, seriously. What was that? It was… there was something both right and wrong about that smell, like the garbage dumpster behind Denny’s or something. Because, honestly, that dumpster shouldn’t smell bad—it had good stuff in it, right? All the stuff that went into making food? What, a little bit of metal and some water and it had to smell worse than shit warmed over?

  This smell was like that—like chocolate and tuna fish or ham and fabric softener. It should have been a good smell. In fact, it should have been two of them. But the two smells were so wrong together that they were an abomination against every pore, fiber, muscle, and capillary in Teague’s husky, shaggy body.

  Mario shrieked again, this time in panic, and Teague had one of those moments of clarity that had saved him as a child.

  As a child, he’d developed an uncanny ability to know which direction the old man would be swinging from. It was a damned good thing too. More than once, Teague had woken up blinking and nauseous and beat-the-fuck-up, with the gut-level belief that if he’d zigged instead of zagged, he would have woken up dead. The strange clarity that controlled his actions during those times felt a lot like the peace he found in the moon when he changed.

  And right now it was dreaming him through the darkness to an even darker silhouette against the black of the hill in front of him, cut off from the light of the moon and the stars.

  What was that?

  Teague blinked, saw it move—quicker than human, quicker than animal, turning a massive, shaggy head toward him with the fleetness of a robin, and that too was abomination.

  That thing was between Teague and the car.

  Mario cried again, furiously, and that clarity sailed Teague’s body in a complete U-turn. He bounded over the edge of the road and again over a massive log with all of the preternatural grace of one of the Goddess’s chosen ones.

  He was a werewolf. He could move pretty damned fast when he wanted to, and right now his gut was telling him to run like a fucking bullet train through the wilderness.

  Mario shrieked again, and Teague heard a sound behind him that felt like the wrenching asunder of metal, the ripping in half of trees at their bases, the shattering of the air above his head with destruction.

  Teague hurtled with a terrible focus toward Green’s house, toward his lovers and safety and life. He wished he could at least see what was riding his ass with the same uncanny speed that he was using to devour the woodland in his way.

  What in the fuck was that thing?

  Cory: What in the fuck is that thing?

  MARCUS AND I were getting religious, sort of.

  Marcus had been a history teacher before he was a vampire, and if you do it right, that sort of thing doesn’t just go away, even when the blood runs thick and black with death. We both had an affinity for the old stories—the crushingly sad story of the first vampire, the story of the Avians and why they were different from the werewolves and why they were both different from every other werecreature in creation—basically, any of the stories of the Goddess folk that hadn’t made it into Yeats or Arthur Rackham or the Brothers Grimm. These were the things we wanted to record.

  We made a good team of it. For the most part, I’d always gotten along with my teachers, mostly because I sat in the back of the room, took in what they said, and didn’t make eye contact. Marcus had been the sort of teacher who would have forced me to make eye contact, I think, and once he got over his little crush on me, we worked well together. The crush had worried me at first—it wasn’t as though my love life wasn’t complicated enough—and Green, Nicky, Bracken, and I had to work really hard to keep ourselves sane.

  Of course, Bracken had made it clear that he was always open to a third party, but I wasn’t so sanguine about just letting another man into our bed. Even Nicky got his own night most nights, unless it was a special occasion and all four of us were tumbling about like ducks in a whirlpool.

  Marcus was a good-looking guy. That wasn’t a problem. He was a whole lot of Italian—dark hair, dark eyes, swarthy skin that still registered a blush, provided he had eaten recently. He was also a whole lot of taken, although his tempestuous relationship with his roommate/lover Phillip had been, until just this last year, notoriously open. Both of them had been completely het until death—but Marcus and Adrian had brought Phillip over after they’d both been caught in an avalanche while skiing, and that bond, coupled with the blood-and-flesh bonding that most new vampires endured, had forged a relationship that neither of them wanted to leave but nobody knew how to deal with.

  Their taste in women was diametrically opposed; the fact that Phill
ip had never found me remotely attractive while Marcus had spent some time last year giving me a power zap through a simple handshake with the force of his crush was pretty much par for the course. Their taste in each other, however, had been as constant as the storms on Mars for twenty years now—or so I’d been told.

  So, obviously, it had been a relief when Marcus’s blushing adoration eventually boiled down to a combination of the deference a good subject pays his liege, as embarrassing as that is, and the affection a really good teacher shows to a slightly gifted student. On this whole “Goddess mythology” thing, we pretty much partnered up nicely.

  I collected the stories from the older sidhe, and he helped me bring them to some semblance of order. If we were working in the grove, Green would come up to our little sessions occasionally and help with things the other sidhe didn’t remember, and sometimes he’d come up to look meaningfully at Marcus until Marcus got the hint and vamoosed. Then we’d sit in the moonlight, talking softly together about our day, waiting to see if Adrian would visit.

  Our beloved visited rarely, usually when we missed him so acutely our pores bled from wanting him. We were always grateful for that glimpse of him, the ghost with the autumn-sky eyes and the white-blond hair. We tried so very very hard to miss him in secret, so we could cherish the time we spent with his memory given flesh of light and wind and moon. Adrian had been there, he told me, the night of the werewolves’ wedding—the date itself had been a painful anniversary for the two of us. He’d enjoyed watching my dance with Bracken very much, but unspoken in that sentence had been the awful fact that Adrian and I had never had the chance to dance.

  That’s how it came to be that, at dark thirty a.m. on a fucking cold and clear morning, I was sitting in the Goddess grove with my laptop working quietly with Marcus, discussing the offspring of the gods. If God had created humans, and Goddess and the other—the chaotic one—had created the sidhe and all the fey, and Goddess and God’s creatures had created the shape-shifters, we wondered (or rather me, I was wondering) what happened if the other paired up with humans. After the vampire debacle, the Goddess declined to do it—she bore God’s son and called it quits. The other, though… well, given the proclivities of the fey, he must have been one horny son of a bitch… what happened when he boffed Betty Cheerleader and had himself a ripsnortin’ good time? Considering he was the “other” precisely because he was chaos in god form, I was reasonably sure he’d leave the rubbers in the desk drawer—but what then? I mean, I didn’t think the little bastards popped out and screamed “I’m the son of chaos! Change my diaper, bitch!” But other than that, why hadn’t we heard of more little demon spawn running around setting the nanny’s hair on fire?