Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  I loved that moment. The first few times, I’d believed it was because that meant it was my turn to touch her. Finally, the girl I loved was mine to hold.

  But time passed, and my longing for their bed grew, become an ache. I came to understand that it wasn’t that I yearned for her, although I did love the girl I’d met at school—the one who wore jeans and sweatshirts two sizes too large—the girl with the sad eyes and the haunted face, the horrid potty mouth and the terrible secrets. I loved her, but I didn’t yearn for that girl anymore.

  No. I yearned for them.

  And it wasn’t that I was in love with Bracken. I mean, I was pretty sure I wasn’t in love with Bracken. I’d started to like the guy, that was all. Hell, I’d even started to see in him what Cory saw in him—but I could never feel the same heart fever for Bracken that I felt for Cory and for Green.

  It was just, I had come to believe, that the light they produced between the two of them—the glow that encompassed her and Green when they made love as well—that light was not a thing a mortal, even a shape-shifting mortal like me, got to touch on a regular basis. The light that flashed off their sweating skin and sparkled with their urgent, crying moans, the sexual energy that radiated from their heaving forms, was to the sensual people of the Goddess what the light of the divine might be to a Christian. Except with Christians it was a matter of hoping the light existed.

  With me, it was a matter of slipping into the right bed, invited.

  Should sharing a bed with your lovers be a form of worship? Truth was, I didn’t give a shit. It felt worshipful to me, and I’d done too much harm following a “god” who’d told me that worship should be full of pain—self-inflicted and otherwise—to dismiss that feeling for something more “divine.” It wasn’t the nature of crawling into bed with my gods that bothered me.

  It was the nature of the people that seemed to attract me that bothered me.

  Last year, I’d spent a week rolling around naked with every species and gender under the Goddess’s watchful eye. It had been a helluva week, but it just wasn’t in me to sustain that sort of thing. Eventually you want companionship and kindness, and while I got that from Cory—and even from Green and Bracken—there’s a difference between your friends and your lovers and your gods. If it wasn’t for the sex, Cory and Green would be gods.

  If it wasn’t for the fact that he’d never look at me twice if we weren’t married to the same girl, Bracken would be my choice for a lover—and I was just as lucky that I’d met Eric, because as lovely as it would be to taste or be tasted by Bracken some more, Eric adored me and me only, and sometimes a person needed that.

  I’d come to accept my sexuality. It had been rough. The first time Green had taken my cock into his mouth and held my hips in his hands, I could almost hear my friends at school, my cousins, the people I grew up with shrieking in my ears about how faggots go to hell.

  It hadn’t felt like hell then—not Green’s mouth, not his tender hands, not the rain of kisses on my face afterward.

  It still didn’t.

  “Hey, Nicky,” Mario said softly from the other side of the fire. I jerked myself from that warm moment in the gray-lit city by the bay into this orange-lit black night, surrounded by pine trees and the smaller roaring of a smallish body of water nearby.

  “Yeah?” It had gotten terribly quiet. Even my voice sounded like sacrilege. I glanced toward the giant three-room tent that had been set up for us and saw nothing but a low-grade ambient glow. They were still talking, then—I could hear Cory’s river-running alto and Bracken’s canyon bass. When they sang with Green, it was everything the Bible said about angels and choirs. When they were whispering jokes to each other, soon to become bedroom talk, it was damned near the same thing.

  “You tell her about your folks?”

  His voice was soft, and I knew Cory’s hearing wasn’t hypersensitive like mine—or, well, like any of ours—but that didn’t stop me from glancing at the tent again.

  “No,” I replied. “I don’t know what I want to say to them.” Christ on fucking crutches, that was an understatement.

  “To your folks or to the family?” Mario asked perceptively, and I shrugged.

  “Either one.” My folks hadn’t come to the wedding. You’d think the fact that Mom was married to a giant shape-changing bird would have sort of opened her mind about certain things, but neither one of my parents had understood. They hadn’t understood about being bound to two people or entering into a family agreement with my lover’s lover as well, and they sure as shit didn’t understand about willingly entering into a relationship with another man.

  Eric, the one lover who was mine and mine alone, who loved me for me and didn’t sit at the table of the gods and would rather share a crust of bread—or a warm rabbit, when he was a coyote and I was a big carnivorous bird—with me anyway, might as well have been the engine grease under my dad’s fingernails.

  “Are they coming to visit?” Teague asked, and I looked at him and grimaced. He and Jacky had dealt with their own version of this problem around Thanksgiving time, with some pretty dramatic results. If anyone would appreciate my dilemma, he would.

  “They’re making noises about it,” I told him, glad to talk to someone about it. Our conversation gathered Kyle and Lambent as well, probably because even if you could see the world clearly in the dark, nobody wanted to be alone under the velvet sky if they could help it. Not even vampires, not even elves, certainly not birds or wolves. Over in the tent, the song in those quiet voices changed, went up a notch, and I had to smile. Certainly not human sorceresses who didn’t know their own worth.

  “Noises,” Teague grunted, his eyes darting to the flickering lights behind me.

  “Yeah, they want to come visit this summer. I told them it would have to be neutral ground if they didn’t want their minds wiped. They’re still bitching about that, but we might decide on a resort or something.” My mom had been the most horrified—I could picture her narrow vivacious face pouting in hurt, her streaked blonde hair perfectly coiffed.

  “Would Green really do that?” Lambent asked, surprised. Lambent had only been with us since October. Apparently he was used to a lot more bravado and a lot less honest action, because he still had trouble believing Green was really that fucking strong.

  “He did it to Grace’s daughter,” I told him, although from all reports it had been Grace herself who had done the mind-fuck. I could see that. If it came to protecting Green from my parents, I’d wipe John’s and Terry’s minds myself—even if I had to use a two-by-four to do it.

  “I was there,” Kyle said unexpectedly, and I glanced at him. “He was planning to do it himself, but Grace stepped in first.”

  “Why?” Lambent asked, speculation in his voice. He’d actually emigrated from Wales—from the original Faerie Ring—and everything with Lambent was about power and struggle. It wasn’t hard to figure out that he was trying to assess Green’s strength in this story as in all things.

  “Why’d he plan to wipe Chloe’s mind, or why’d Grace do it for him?” I asked.

  Lambent shrugged. “Why the exile? Even an elf can see Grace is summat special. You’d think her kid would be right fuckin’ royalty or something.” Like Green, when Lambent relaxed, his Cockney came out. When it did, Lambent became less abrasive and more charming.

  “Chloe liked to cause trouble.” I shrugged. “She talked shit to Cory, tried to make stuff happen. I don’t know, I think she was jealous or something. Three times she did something that put us in danger by being a bitch. The third time was….” I blushed, and Mario chortled.

  “The third time was Cory’s mother walking in on her in bed with all the men!” he filled in gleefully, rocking on the metal rim of the firepit without fear. “She had no idea—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled. “It was a laugh fucking riot. Why don’t we all try walking in on people while they’re doing the wild thing? The whole hill can have that much fun!”

  “Co
me off it, bird boy,” Mario chuckled, taking my surliness for exactly what it was worth. “All you were doing was sleeping. I was there, remember?”

  “Besides,” Lambent said thoughtfully, “not much point in walking in when they light up the sky as it is, is there?” His red-gold hair and matching eyes lit up hellishly in this light, but for once, without the mockery of challenge, the fire in his soul was as comforting as the literal fire we were hovering over.

  We all looked over our shoulders to where Cory and Bracken had truly begun. I didn’t try to look through the tent to voyeur—I got a front-row view of that on a regular basis. Instead I looked to the sky to see their colors—Bracken’s ochre/pond-shadow lights playing off Cory’s amazing azure and tropical sunrise, the lights resonating with the white-lit tent glow. It was the definition of magic.

  “Man, that’s pretty,” Teague breathed. I looked at him wryly. Teague didn’t seem to be the type to talk much, but he was moved, the same as we all were.

  “Yes,” I agreed, conscious of everything that wasn’t in my voice. No jealousy, no rancor, no yearning. I had finally found contentment with who I was and my place at the gods’ table. It was okay.

  “Why didn’t you go with them?” Mario asked softly, and I shrugged. The animal, erotic truth was that tonight, the part I looked forward to was slipping in when they were done and tasting Cory’s man on her thighs and in her body, listening to her moan as Bracken palmed her breasts and breathed in her ear.

  I went with the personal truth instead.

  “Because I didn’t feel like being a dark place in the light,” I said, and Mario hmmmmed in his throat. Both of us kept our eyes on the light ballet as it waltzed its way against the black stage of the night.

  Cory: Blood Sunrise

  I WAS fast asleep when Nicky crawled into bed and buried his head between my thighs. I woke up for a shocked, sleepy moment to gasp orgasm into Bracken’s chuckling mouth as Nicky lapped at the hidden slippery folds of my sex, and then again as he moved his fingers into position and thrust and played and penetrated.

  Bracken’s clever fingers worked, plumping at my breasts and pinching my sensitized nipples. My body, charged and humming from our lovemaking earlier, burst into a high, keening wail of finality. Nicky scooted up to rub his sticky face on the shoulder of my T-shirt, and Bracken fumbled with the underwear I had forgotten when I’d fallen asleep earlier.

  I think I mumbled something like “Take care of you, Nick?” only to hear him chuckle and thrust the wet front of his boxers against my thigh. Apparently taking care of me had taken care of him. I had just enough consciousness to be grateful before I fell immediately back asleep.

  The vampires checked in with me about ten minutes before dawn. I woke up enough to feel relieved—and to realize how badly I had been sleeping before that—and I pretty much passed out after that.

  I awoke to a day that was oddly relaxing.

  Bracken rose at the crotch of a slutty dawn—as Nicky called it whenever we had to leave early for school—and slipped away to walk this new earth—presumably with Lambent, since it was new territory and the rule was to not get separated. An hour or so later, I heard them talking to each other—or rather I heard Bracken’s mild, arrogant tones and Lambent’s snotty ones back. My stone-and-shadow beloved might be one of the few people on the hill that didn’t get rubbed wrong by the fiery elf, probably because of their basic natures. Stone was generally unmoved by short bursts of fire, and shadow did nothing to feed it. I’d seen them interact—Lambent would flare, Bracken would ignore him, and Lambent would subside.

  Goddess, I envied Bracken.

  Maybe it was because my power is in sunshine, and fire is always pissy because sunshine is brighter—or maybe it was because my mouth could sometimes be classified as a natural disaster, like Hurricane Andrew or something—but the day Lambent and I actually agreed on something and acted in concert would be the first day of my adulthood.

  So far, it looked like my twenty-first birthday had been a suggestion rather than an actual landmark, and my little temper display with the fire the night before hadn’t improved my opinion of my own behavior one little tiny ember’s worth.

  Fuck.

  Nicky tried to burrow his way through my chest, and although I’d been blinking and awake for a while now, I realized that the entire reason I wasn’t getting up was that I didn’t want to get cold.

  “Lambent…,” I called through the tent, trying not to sound like a weenie but trying to sound humble at the same time.

  “Yes, my liege?” came the cheeky answer, and I fought back the “fuck off” that the morning seemed to inspire.

  “Could you inspire my eternal gratitude and start a fire in the pit before we have to get up?” I asked, trying to be gracious while prone and trying to crawl right into Nicky’s warmth on the air mattress as he was trying to crawl into mine.

  “Is she serious?” Lambent asked Bracken, sounding stunned. “Was that a real request and not an order?”

  “She usually requests,” my beloved replied mildly. “She just expects us to do as she asks.”

  “Well, yank my bloody balls…,” Lambent replied in wonder.

  “I can hear you, you know!” I called back, enjoying the sound of him choking on his tongue. “And I’d rather not touch your privates. I asked nicely, Lambent, and you know I don’t have to—but could you please start the fire so the rest of us might at least have a reason to get up?”

  “Right-o.” His voice was still cheeky, but there was a muffled whump and the picnic space outside the tent grew orange and warm. There were sighs of gratitude throughout the three-room tent, and a gruff chorus of thank-yous. After a few moments during which I felt the shivers leave my bones a bit, I shrugged into my jeans, wiggled my bra on under my shirt—much to Nicky’s amusement—and pulled the three layers of fleece and wool that Bracken had stacked neatly in the corner into the sleeping bag and managed to get into those too.

  By the time I was ready to get out of the bag and tie my tennis shoes, Nicky’s laughter had thoroughly awakened the rest of the camp.

  “Thanks a lot, bird boy,” I snapped as I ducked out the flap. Nicky just rolled around in the sleeping bag like a dork, and I got to listen to the rest of the camp whine about not quite being ready to get up.

  “What was so fuckin’ funny?” Teague grouched as we stood around that lovely, cheery fire and ate. The breakfast had simply appeared before we got to the table, along with plastic mugs with our names written on them in Sharpie. I got warm oatmeal and hot chocolate—one of my favorites—but there was bacon and eggs for the shifters. Nicky kept putting bacon on the edge of my bowl and I kept giving it back to him. I was comfortable with my weight now—there was no reason to push my luck. If I wasn’t careful, my ass could become a national landmark.

  “I’ve just never seen anybody get dressed like that!” Nicky chortled. “She didn’t even break the surface of the sleeping bag!”

  The others at least broke a smile. Bracken brought his great big hypermetabolic body behind me like he did last night, and I got to listen to him chuckle as I leaned into his arms.

  “I hate being cold,” I grumbled.

  “You’re not so fond of being hot,” Bracken contradicted in my ear, and I arched an eyebrow.

  “That’s you guys,” I retorted. It was true—with a few exceptions like Arturo and Lambent, most of the other elves didn’t really do well in the heat. Even the high sidhe—like Bracken and Green—who were the most all-around powerful both physically and preternaturally, tended to wilt when the mercury cleared ninety. It didn’t stop them from going out and hitting the lakes—Clementine, Folsom, and the one glinting pewter sapphire through the dark green of the trees—but it did mean the elves tended to frequent the night in the summer. It probably added to their mystique—and, I’m sure, had cemented Bracken and Adrian’s friendship when they’d been a couple.

  Sigh. Speaking of doomed vampires, it was probably time to stop banter
ing and actually come up with a plan.

  “So?” Mario asked, making one of those feather-ruffling twitches that the Avians tended toward, and I rolled my eyes. It was like they could read my damned mind, wasn’t it?

  “Well, first of all, shape-shifters take turns—someone goes and lets Max and Renny come back and eat and sleep. The other two fly or run around looking for animal corpses. One or two dead things happen. The number of dead things I saw last night? That needs to be hidden. Bracken and I will hike around the lake on the road. Lambent, run where the wind takes you—we need to make sure there are no more vampire critters, and that all the dead things are hidden. The lake’s not that big, so between all of us, we should be done by lunch. Then we come back here, spell whoever’s on guard duty, and rest up. It’s going to be a long-ass fuckin’ night.”

  “I’ll take first watch,” Teague volunteered. “Let me get a book from the tent.”

  I nodded, thinking that I didn’t want him there at night—seeing Teague naked had really freaked little Gretchen out. He needed to be far in the shadows as we dealt with her this night. I was also thinking that, given how much Teague didn’t like to sit still, that was a pretty generous offer. We must have been thinking along the same lines for him to make it.