Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  Regretfully, I gulped the rest of my hot chocolate and swallowed what was left of my oatmeal. One more time, Nicky handed me a piece of bacon. I absentmindedly finished it, trying to work out who would go where—which really sucked, because I wasn’t great with math or maps.

  Bracken leaned over and picked me up by the middle, making me squeal and shriek. As I thrashed around helplessly in his ginormous muscular grasp, he chortled, “Give it up!”

  “What!”

  “Stop trying to give us a map, dammit!”

  “How would you know…,” I sputtered, still wiggling, and he laughed, full and hearty in my ear. I loved that sound. It wasn’t as rich as Green’s laugh, but that was because Bracken was younger. Where Green had richness, Bracken had sturdy heart and vigor, and I loved them both.

  “Because you only get that look on your face when you’re doing something map related. Confess—”

  “I was—”

  “Confess—”

  “Put me down!” I gasped with no dignity at all. He did, mostly because he felt like it, and I humphed and sighed and turned to him with a sheepish grin.

  “You all really do know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely,” he grinned back. Then he hefted me up again, this time facing him, and kissed me for no reason at all.

  By the time we were done, we were alone in the campground, and it was too late to give orders anyway.

  “You’re getting subtler, beloved,” I told him with a glance at the sky where Nicky and Mario were circling and shrieking and dividing the land between them.

  “You scared the raisins out of every jackrabbit for forty miles with your squealing,” he retorted, “and you think that was subtle?”

  I laughed and took his hand and remembered to watch out for his sturdy bare feet as I walked in my shoes. “Were we yelling at each other in front of the whole camp?” I asked him mildly. He shook his head, his grin conceding that maybe we actually had grown up a little in our stormy, take-no-prisoners relationship.

  “Then we’re getting subtle,” I declared, and hand in hand we began trotting toward the paved loop that led to the road around the lake.

  The walk was pleasant. We eventually had to stop holding hands—the man is more than a foot and a half taller than I am—but I had been running for more than a year, and the three-mile trek around the lake was no big deal. We talked. A lot of it was shop, since we worked together at Grace’s yarn store and attended the same classes together, and he was there with me through much of the hill business. I often heard humans complain that they needed a break from their spouses. I guess I got my breaks in Green’s arms, or when Bracken was off doing business on the rare times I was stuck at home. Mostly it was not a day unless we spent a great deal of it at each other’s side. He told me once that he would be the most human lover I would have. In this, as in pretty much everything involving my grim and great beloved, he was superhuman. I could be saturated in his strength and his temper and in his quiet conversation and still not need to be elsewhere for many, many days at a time.

  When we returned, after lots of little side trips into the brush on the side of the road to look for more kills or anything suspicious, it was a little past lunchtime. I’d had to incinerate a couple of desiccated corpses, and I found that, bacon or no bacon, I was ravenous.

  There were hot sandwiches waiting for us—mine had meatballs and marinara sauce—and I mentally reminded myself to leave something really heavenly, like pizza and ice cream, in the corner of my room when I returned. If I left the ice cream in an ice chest, the sprites, brownies, gnomes and so forth who kept invisibly serving us here would get high on the sugar and live well and happy for two days at the least.

  The others were back when we arrived, and after sending Mario to go take Teague’s spot, I went to my tent and got my knitting and a good hardcover book—the better to sit flat on my lap—and sat down in the peaceful quiet of the woods.

  It really was beautiful. The lake smelled fresh, the red dirt was moist and not powdery like it would be in the summer, and the trees whispered and roared quietly in the breeze overhead. Between my fleecewear and the fire, I wasn’t too cold, and for a sweet hour or two, while Bracken read a book next to me, I was able to actually relax. I mean, after all, this was my spring break, and I was hunting—I didn’t feel bad about a little real R & R.

  The R & R was interrupted when my chin nodded forward and touched my chest, and I ended up curled up in the tent with two big kitty cats who were napping in that self-satisfied way that only cats have.

  When I woke up, it was late afternoon, and the sun was slanting through the pine trees. The cat whose fur I’d buried my fingers into was now a naked young woman, disentangling herself from me.

  “Ewww….” She was laughing. “Cory, would you get off me?”

  I groaned. “I don’t know… could you turn back into a cat so I can get warm again?”

  “No way. I’m hungry, and I want a sandwich without dirt on it. Besides, Max has been waiting for you to wake up for half an hour so he can change too.”

  “I’ve seen him naked, you know. It’s no big deal,” I grumbled, standing up anyway and pussyfooting around the bedding. When Bracken had put me to bed like a sleepy infant, he hadn’t bothered to take off my shoes, and I didn’t want to get dirt on the sleeping bag. This could perhaps be why I wasn’t really fond of camping as a whole. It was that eternal dance between you and the dirt… and if you stepped wrong, it ended up in your underwear, and that would throw the whole trip in the shitter.

  I had barely cleared the tent door before an indignant Max hollered, “Thanks a lot!”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what his problem was, and since Renny was cracking up, I figured it wasn’t that severe.

  The sun had dipped behind the trees enough that the chill hit the air again, and I danced on my toes a bit in front of the fire. Bracken came up to me with a savory bowl of stew, and I ate without objection. Once dark hit, we were going to be all business.

  One by one the others looked up from what they were doing—talking, reading, or in Lambent’s case, making lovely apparitions dance in the flames—and stood with their own bowls of stew, ready for the powwow. I saw that Nicky was missing and realized that he must be the one in front of the cave. Good. Even though Nick was a good fighter and fearless in his own way, he looked pretty innocuous. I couldn’t say that about any of the other men in the camp.

  “Why didn’t you do that last night?” I asked Lambent thoughtfully. There was a pack of wolves running in the flames, frolicking as I’d seen Teague, Jack, and Katy doing. I could have stared at it, hypnotized, for hours.

  “Not my flames. Not my fire, not my place to play,” he said softly, and I nodded.

  “I’ll keep that in mind. That’s pretty—I’d like to see it again.”

  His face grew ruddier in the firelight, and I looked around. Renny and Max had bundled up, neither of them wearing half as much as I was wearing, and both of them looked considerably less cold.

  “Fuck it,” I groused. “I should just let something bite me.”

  I’d meant to be funny, but Bracken and Lambent both shuddered.

  “That would be bad, beloved,” Bracken said direly. I looked at him in surprise. “Your power, a shape-changer’s power… just….”

  “Don’t worry about it, Brack,” I soothed. “We saw what that can do. I wouldn’t risk it.” Last year around this time we’d run into a real nasty—a little bit of elvish power, a new life as a vampire, a lot of people dead, and a bitter taste on our tongues. “I wasn’t serious anyway. I just—” I rolled my eyes. “—I was just bitching about the cold.”

  There was a ripple of laughter, and that was as good a place to start as any.

  “Renny, did she eat last night?”

  Renny shook her head, her fuzzy brown ponytail bobbing. “No, but she’s getting hungry. She’s not going to be pretty when she wakes up.”

  I close
d my eyes. Shit. Phillip had told me, on the ride back, that he would try… but winning her trust had been so important. “Fuck. She won’t let any of the guys near her.”

  Renny shrugged. “No worries—”

  “The hell it’s not!” I shot back. Oh Goddess… she weighed about ninety-eight pounds, soaking wet, in fur. “The kid’s not Phillip or Marcus. She’s a little kid with an ice-cream sundae—she won’t care how ugly it gets, she’s just going to want more!”

  Renny grinned. “Well, kids who chase kitties get scratched. I’m not helpless, Cory!”

  I frowned at her. “I didn’t say you were. I just….” I looked at Max and made my own helpless gestures, and he shook his head grimly.

  “I was hoping you could do it, oh fearless leader,” he told me. Oh good—Max was weenieing out in deference to me. Wonderful.

  “She’s dangerous, Renny,” I said levelly. “And if I thought you were helpless, I wouldn’t have let you stay with her in the first place. But we’re miles away from Green. I know you guys can get sucked almost dry and still replenish with a beer and some chips, but if I’d be bad as a werecat, you can bet damned sure you’d suck as a were-vampire.”

  Renny grinned, her lips drawn back from slightly parted teeth, like a cat. “Yes, I would suck, but mostly on Max, so it’d be okay.”

  “It’s not funny, beloved!” Max snapped. He must have been rattled, because he wasn’t an endearments-in-public sort of guy.

  “It would be if I was nibbling on your neck!” Renny flirted, and I gritted my teeth.

  “Renny, you’ve got the guy. Stop trying to jolly him into bed,” Bracken snapped, and I looked at him gratefully. If I wasn’t the only one getting überprotective, I wasn’t the only one she’d be pissed at. Cats hold grudges. But Renny and Bracken always had a soft spot for each other—hopefully he could at least convince her to be careful.

  “He’s good in bed,” she said mildly, and then, because even Teague and Mario were looking annoyed, she held up a hand. “Look, she’s afraid of the guys. We can all guess why that might be, although no one wants to say it. And Cory bleeds out like anyone else. It’s just like you were saying last night, Cory—I’m the best one for the job, and the job keeps the family safe. It doesn’t only work if you can shoot fire out your ass, you know?”

  I looked at her sourly. “If I ever shoot fire out my ass, remind me to fart in your general direction—but yeah. I get it. But you need to know that if she gets ugly, we’re taking her out. No one chews on you without showing a little fucking respect, right?”

  “Absolutely,” she replied mildly. She turned away in that graceful way cats have and picked her way to the table to get more stew.

  “Shit.” Oh, I didn’t like this, and Bracken put his hands on my shoulders in sympathy.

  “I’m glad it wasn’t my call,” he said quietly. “Don’t worry—I’ll stay far away.”

  “And the hell of it is, you can’t,” I told him, unafraid to lean into his touch. Bracken’s chest against my back was as comforting as a sun-warmed slab of granite to a napping cat, and in the last year and a half, I’d learned to love the feel and smell of him, that rock-hard core of peace and strength in him. It was especially important now, when everything else in my head was such a barbed-wire maelstrom.

  “I can’t?” he asked, surprised. I shrugged, as unhappy with this solution as I had been with any other.

  “Phillip’s going to have to blood her, due’alle,” I reminded disconsolately, “and you’re going to have to help him do it.”

  “Shit,” he echoed, groaning, and I had to agree.

  HAVE YOU ever taken a gamble and had it pay off? Have you ever felt so fucking sick about how things wrapped up in the end that you had a hard time being all happy-skippy about the shit you did that went right?

  Yeah. For starters? If Phillip hadn’t blooded little Gretchen first, the damned kid would have ripped my best friend’s throat out—and that’s the best that can be said of the whole affair.

  About five minutes before absolute sunset I once again put my ass in a sling (Brack and I couldn’t get enough of that pun) and we went caroming through the damned forest toward the little girl’s cave of horrors. Having learned from the night before, this time I just kept my eyes shut and hoped for the best. It was easier than I’d thought it would be, actually. I’d spent the last two years, nearly, learning to trust the people I loved with my well-being. Believing that Bracken wouldn’t throw us into a tree or off a cliff was sort of like a final in Relationships 101, and I found myself wondering what the graduate-level project would be.

  I didn’t have too much time to wonder. Directly at sunset, Phillip, Marcus, and Kyle emerged from the bottom compartment of the SUV and zoomed for the cave, much as we were doing. Getting Marcus’s mental “She’s still here, Nicky’s in a tree, and she looks pissed!” was one item off of my list of reasons to panic. One of my biggest fears had been that, being young, she’d have that same hyper-kid ability to just wake up before everybody else in order to make the adults around her miserable. It was good to know that the same things that held true for new adult vampires held true for new child vampires—the newer they were, the more of the night they slept through.

  We hadn’t wanted to be in the clearing before the vampires were, and we hadn’t wanted her to be gone when we got there. It was good to know that at least one thing happened according to plan.

  We slowed our terrifying pace before we burst into the area around the cave like some sort of host of avenging angels, and hopefully it was a casual-looking group of people who stepped into the clearing to watch a clearly baffled Phillip argue with a little girl.

  “What if I don’t want to go with you?” she was saying. There was something about her voice that made me absolutely sure she was on her last legs of being ornery.

  “Of course you want to go with us!” I laughed, trying to be gentle, but about up to my teeth with this particular argument. “What’s not to like? There will be food, clean water, and a room all in pink with all of the toys you could wish for—”

  “Don’t lie to me!” she screeched suddenly, with enough passion to make us all step back and blink.

  “What makes you think we’re lying?” I asked carefully into the shocked and uncomfortable silence.

  “He lied,” she snarled angrily. I grimaced, pinching the bridge of my nose like that particular gesture, learned from Green, would do me a fucking lot of good.

  We’d known it—we’d all known it. Any vampire who would make a child vampire would probably be an all-around child predator. We were all—Renny included—warriors. We were the people that Green sent into situations where strength and cunning would be called for. I mean, if Green needed a diplomat, was he really going to send me?

  So this kid needed a rape counselor, and she got us. We’d have to do.

  “So he promised you ponies, and you got caves and corpses,” I said heavily. “It was a sucky deal all around, kid. But we’re not going to lie to you, and I can prove it, right?”

  “How?” she asked bitterly, her matted, dank hair swinging in front of her face because she wanted to hide behind it.

  “You and Phillip,” I said, fielding a glare from Marcus with more poise than I felt. “If you taste each other’s blood, you’ll know if the other one is telling the truth.”

  “So I’ll know if he means it, about a room and a bath?”

  “And he’ll know if you mean it about wanting to go there,” I told her. There was a lot I wasn’t telling her—like the fact that Phillip could control her actions to an extent, force her body to do things her mind didn’t want to go along with, like, say, keep her from killing her food or keep her in the boundaries of Green’s hill. He could also bind her—albeit indirectly—with me. But if we were going to—oh, my churning stomach—let this poor kid live, we’d have to omit a few truths and get her into the damned SUV and on the way home, because another abomination like the vampire bear or the vampire wildcat was
something we absolutely could not afford.

  But, for all I was leaving out, I was giving her some real truth, and maybe she could hear it in my voice.

  Maybe she was reassured that we had been there for her come the dark.

  Maybe she was just fucking tired of sleeping on the ground and stinking like blood and unwashed corpse.

  Either way, she narrowed her eyes at me carefully.

  “Would he have to touch me?”

  I shook my head. “No. Here, watch. It’s like magic.”

  I took out the little razor-sharp pocketknife I’d kept in my pocket since I’d been forced to hack through an enemy’s vein with a pair of yarn snippers last year, and touched it gingerly to the ball of my thumb. This was where our whole plan could fall apart, because if she figured out that I didn’t want to actually blood bond with her, she’d wonder why. She’d have a basic impression of my goodwill and my own wariness when she tasted my blood—as well as sort of a heartbreaking memory, if things held true—but if I didn’t taste her blood first, the bond wouldn’t be complete.

  With a ginger prick of the knife, I watched a little blood well up and looked at Bracken. Bracken nodded, something like greed in his eyes, and the tiny drops of blood coalesced and lifted themselves off my skin, glowing like rubies in the starlight.

  They were easily seen in the dark. As they flew toward the bemused little girl, her mouth opened slightly, and for a moment there was an expression on her face that was truly childish and truly enchanted. Bracken played to that. Sidhe adore children, and for all his gruffness, he was no exception.

  The globules swirled, chased each other, sparkled, and played, and when she laughed, their antics grew more complex. After one too many passes near her face, she let out a disconsolate and hungry little sigh. Bracken stopped playing and popped my blood into her mouth.

  This was, perhaps, his most wondrous and frightening ability. I winked at him as she swallowed, because my heart was suddenly pounding in my chest with how much I loved him. But we had business to do, and even as he took my hand to his mouth and sucked lightly on the wound, making it run a little with his power so he could swallow my blood like the creamy chocolate that goes cold on your tongue, I was watching Gretchen.