Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  But then she said, “Are we clear, Green?” and the hurt in her voice was bare, raw, and bleeding. He could probably bear the difficulties ahead, but he couldn’t, under any circumstances, bear being the one to hurt her.

  “This will make things harder,” he warned, bending down because she was standing on tiptoe to press her lips against his. He wanted the absolution in that kiss more than he wanted breath or blood, more than he wanted his heartbeat to echo in his ears.

  “Hard I can handle,” she told him with a crooked little smile. Her hands came up and rubbed his bare chest, smoothing away imaginary wrinkles, sweeping imaginary dust off his high shoulders. “Something that hurts my Green will not be borne.”

  “I’m fine, luv,” he assured her soberly, but she shook her head, the tears she’d fought back so bravely running again.

  “This hurts you,” she insisted and kissed the center of his chest, around his sternum, where her lips met his skin when she stood flat-footed. “It makes you feel soiled. It rankles in your heart.” Sometimes he’d heard her poetry when she was with the men who went with her and Bracken on their runs, but mostly she only wrote voice poems on the pages of their hearts when they were alone.

  “Yes,” he confessed into the wildness of her hair, afraid of her censure more than he was afraid of the Goddess’s punishment on the fey who lied. Cramps and nausea he could live through—and he had. Having his beloved angry with him…. In her words, it was not to be borne.

  “Then let me cleanse you,” she begged, kissing his chest again, moving her hands up his ribs in a sliding whisper of skin on skin.

  “Yes,” he accepted, bending over her, putting his hands on her arms, fighting the temptation to lift her off the ground and crush her to him, protecting all that was precious in his soul with the barrier of her flesh alone.

  “Let me,” she ordered, pulling his head down to meet her in a kiss, and another, and another, using her kisses, her sex, her power, and her love to protect all that was precious in her soul with the power of her flesh alone.

  “Yes,” he pleaded, opening his mouth, pulling until he fell backward onto the bed, carrying her with him. She kissed him more, and kissed him, and touched his skin with her cheek and her tears, held his manhood and stroked it, rubbed her body over his and took him inside of her—touching, touching, cleansing him of the deception, of the pain, of his remorse, of the touch of the interloper on his skin.

  “Let me….”

  “Always….”

  “Oh Goddess… please, Green….”

  “Anything….” Her hair, hanging in her face, her intent expression as though polishing fine and tender silver with her sex. “For you, beloved, anything….”

  “I’ll do anything, Green….”

  “Anything…,” he groaned underneath her, lost, helpless, so damned grateful she would lead him to the sanctity of his own skin inside her. His palms on her breasts were reverent, her arched back and climaxing cries sacred. He spasmed and groaned and came inside her, cleansed and new and found in the harbor of her body, the sanctuary of her giving soul.

  Cory: The Body Politic

  I SAT with Jacky, Renny, Max, LaMark, Nicky, and Bracken at the campus picnic table under a glaring May sky. Bracken, who was across from me and at the other end of the damned table, met my eyes miserably, and I wondered sourly why there weren’t any bad guys to kill.

  It would be a serious improvement on my mood to kill something right now.

  Allergy season had hit Sacramento, and that was a bad fucking thing. About twenty years ago, someone with way too much time on their hands did a survey of cities with the most trees. Sacramento came in first. I don’t know if we’re still in the lead, but we’re up there, and while it made for some nice shade here at the college, the trees in the valley were every human’s worst fucking nightmare.

  You think I’m kidding? Howzabout take every pollen known to man, whirl it around like an allergen milk shake in an unholy blender using the winds off the surrounding farmland, add some serious smog issues because the city planners were high and forgot a couple of fucking freeways back in the day, throw in a forest fire within two hundred miles of the valley bowl, and you know what you get?

  You get air that has color, taste, and texture. You get an area that is known for full-grown people who have never had allergies in their lives getting off the plane to their new homes and then getting rushed to the hospital for a mongo-sized shot of Benadryl and an antihistamine drip. You get a place where even natives suddenly wake up in adulthood with red, itchy eyes, sore throats, clogged heads, and body aches when there’s not a virus to be found.

  You get me driving us to school about a week earlier, clearing the sphere of Green’s influence, and then almost killing us all with a sneezing fit that lasted three miles on a very scary road. They hadn’t let me drive since.

  We’d pulled over as soon as we could, my eyes and throat swelling like a big fat poisoned toad and my entire body starting to hurt, and pretty much everything went to hell after that. When we were on the hill, it was all hunky-dory—but as soon as we pulled off the hill, I became phlegm-zombie-bitch from hell. I couldn’t take anything for it either. After puking blood during the ibuprofen incident, I didn’t even want to guess what allergy drugs would do to me, so I stocked up on the aloe Kleenex and suffered in surly, bitchy irritability because I didn’t have a fucking choice.

  And to top it off, I had cramps that would have made a wolverine chewing out my ovaries feel like a Swedish massage.

  “Cory?” Jacky said next to me. I tried to turn my attention to him, because he was tutoring me in political science, and until this week, he had worked very, very hard to be nice to me. He had been working on his own version of public relations since he’d watched us put ourselves on the line for Teague, and it had made our situation here at school easier, that was for damned sure. I didn’t want to fuck it up by ignoring him.

  “I’b dorry, Jacky—I wandered off.” I’d been doing that a lot, and Jack was not the most patient of tutors.

  “Of course you wandered off,” he snapped. “You can’t expect me to take your tests and do your homework for you the way Bracken does—I’m not sleeping with you.”

  “I can kill you from across the table, college-puke,” Bracken growled from across the table. I squinted my itchy eyes and tried to focus on the two of them before Bracken did just that.

  “I dake by owd dests, Jacky,” I said as succinctly as possible. “I wouldn’d axe you to do dat.” I should have been angrier, but the truth was, Bracken and I had been trying not to kill Jack all semester. That last passive-aggressive masterpiece was actually almost livable.

  “Well, that doesn’t seem to stop Bracken….”

  I rolled my eyes. “Bwacken sdeaks indo by backpack a’d swaps out by hobework—iss not my fault!” Dammit, it wasn’t! I’d told Bracken I could do it, but Goddess bless it anyway, he needed less sleep than I did at night. I’d fall asleep in the middle of my English paper, and when I woke up my statistics homework would be annotated and rewritten so I could complete it on my own. He was like my own behemoth-sized live-in math tutor, and Jack seemed to think I was violating some sort of “royal codex” by taking his help.

  “No—and it’s not your fault that the thing in the basement tried to eat Teague for breakfast, is it?”

  “Teague went in there against her express wishes—”

  “Orders!”

  “Yes, orders,” Bracken finished for me. “Please let him take responsibility for his own actions, Jack. Cory does her damnedest to keep us safe, but she can’t do everything.”

  I sighed, gazing sightlessly at my homework. The were-folk had been taking turns feeding Gretchen—always with Lambent or Green or Sweet in attendance, in case she went round the bend and tried what she had with Renny. It hadn’t happened again until three nights before, when Teague went down in wolf form instead of Katy. I was about five minutes behind him, and I’d told him—I’d told him th
at we’d find someone besides Katy if he was too nervous to let her do it, but that he shouldn’t go down because he freaked Gretchen out. He might have made it work, though, because he was Teague and he was determined—but something horrid and dismal got in the way. I had just gotten down to her pink/fluffy cased-steel room in the middle of her dinner. Her eyes had glazed over and whirled red, and she looked up and smiled into my face around a mouthful of wolf ruff and said I smelled like candy.

  I was starting to hate those words.

  “Pweaze,” I begged now, not wanting to think about the fact that all of the headway we’d made with Jack and his piss-bitchy attitude had gone south in a hurry after I’d had to channel Green’s power again to pin Gretchen back against the wall and pry her jaws open so she would drop a dazed and unconscious Teague.

  Jacky turned to me, eyebrows raised, and I shrugged, wishing for death or an analgesic or alcohol or something.

  “Jacky, you doe id wadn our fault. Pweaze stob taking your wowwy oud on us—id doebn hep. Ad for da hobework, it doedn’t madder—I’b compwetewy wost.” The Canadian politics thing, and a “vote of no confidence.” Why would a leader want to call for a vote of no confidence? I totally didn’t get it—I mean, if my guys didn’t have confidence in me, I assumed they’d run away and leave me to face the bad things by myself. I looked up to where Bracken was glaring balefully at me from across the table and amended that thought.

  He’d step in front of me and get eaten first.

  I gave him a lame smile, and then an expression of horror as I saw who was approaching us from behind his right shoulder.

  “Sit,” I said, and Bracken’s handsome face scrunched up in puzzlement.

  “I am sitting,” he replied blankly, and I sighed and pulled out another Kleenex just as a cultured British voice spoke behind him.

  “Good afternoon, Lady Cory, afternoon, all,” said Professor Hallow, and Bracken closed his eyes and mouthed “Shit!” at me while I widened my eyes in agreement. That’s what I’d said, dammit!

  “Good abdernood, Professor,” I tried, and blew another phlegmwad into the Kleenex.

  “You’re sick?” he asked, puzzled—as he should be. People didn’t get sick on Green’s hill. The nonhumans didn’t get viruses, and Green could cure anything else.

  “Allerdzeez.” Ugh. I was relieved when Nicky supplied the actual word for me.

  Hallow looked a little bemused. “Allergies? Oh, my. I forget sometimes….”

  “I doh, I doh—my poow widdow fwagile human body. Gween cad heal da symdoms, but da allerdeez aw till deh.” Oh Christ—I couldn’t understand what I just said. I resisted the urge to bang my forehead against the table.

  “Cory,” Bracken said hesitantly, “I can’t tell your sarcasm from your snot anymore. Maybe we should just give it up and go home….”

  “We hab fidals next week!” I protested. “I cad take you awwl oud ob cwass wib fidals!” Auuuuuurrrggghhhh!

  Suddenly Hallow wasn’t behind Bracken anymore, he was in front of me, and I raised my face up to him and gazed at his handsome sidhe face with bleary eyes. As rotten as I felt—and as itchy as my eyes were—I could almost see him with his glamour and he was still damned handsome. To humans he looked to be in his late forties, with short silver-blond hair and a clean, to-die-for academician’s profile.

  To those of us at the table, he looked like a very handsome sidhe with a hip-length silver braid and the unfathomably beautiful triangular features that became his people. To me, right now, he looked like the uncle you’d avoid because he was the only one in the family with high expectations of you and you didn’t know how to deal with that.

  “You can’t take any medicine for this?” he asked kindly, and Nicky and Bracken both gave a heartfelt “No!” Nicky was right next to me, and I leaned against him in comfort. I missed his smell—when my head wasn’t clogged with crap, he smelled like vanilla and bird, and I liked it. It was comforting.

  “I boff bwood,” I tried. Nicky shook his head, rust-tipped bangs flopping in and out of his eyes.

  “Just let us talk, please?” he begged, and I shrugged and gestured for him to continue.

  “She barfs blood,” he translated. Hallow’s eyebrows met his hairline, and his expression grew… well, hurt, I guess.

  “How long has this been going on?” he asked, looking to Bracken, and then looking at the distance between us. “And are you and Bracken at odds?”

  Bracken and I were usually touching—always, we were touching. There had been days when he would hoist me up in his solidly muscled arms and not put me down until school’s end—and even when he wasn’t carrying me like a child, he was still touching me. My hair, my shoulders… I’d felt naked for the last two days because I hadn’t had Bracken on my skin.

  “No!” I protested, my own voice growing hurt. “We’re fide!” Frustrated and miserable, I put my face in my hands. Hallow crouched in front of me and took my hands in his, meeting my angry, swollen, unhappy eyes with his own gorgeous turquoise gaze.

  “Then why aren’t you touching?” he asked quietly, aware that his outburst might have just driven me further into the self-protective shell on my back that his presence seemed to be.

  I opened my mouth but closed it again. Renny, being the only girl at the table, rolled her eyes and chuffed, “Because she’s on the rag, Professor, and the last time he touched her when she was riding the pony, she bled out into the john.”

  I closed my eyes and wished for death. It had happened two days after we’d gotten back from Sugar Pine, and it had sucked large.

  In retrospect, I should have guessed something because of the way the vampires had treated me that night. It started when I was in the steel room with Gretchen, trying to convince her that just because I had killed her pet kitty didn’t mean I was a mean bitch out to spank her.

  It hadn’t gone well. She’s warmed to me since, but on that night she was irritable and pissy, demanding new clothes—the ones we’d gotten her were not frilly enough, apparently—and missing her mother and crying for her family. In spite of the fact that Phillip had tasted the clear memory of her killing her loved ones, she seemed to have forgotten that fact. About once a week, we had to gently tell her that her family was dead, and she cried—and then, within a couple of days, she’d forget again. It was like Alzheimer’s disease in a little kid, and it was baffling and tragic. Sometimes, when we couldn’t take the sadness of telling her one more time, we simply told her that they were on a trip and would be back soon.

  Two days after she’d arrived at Green’s, she still remembered they were dead and how they’d died. She had been edgy and restless, pacing and refusing to let me read to her or play dolls—she even ripped a few of them apart, looking puzzled and lost as she did so, as though she’d forgotten she had the strength to do it. I was just about to give up and let someone else take a turn when she stopped still and thrust her nose into the air like the consummate predator she’d been turned into.

  Her eyes closed and a very vulpine smile crossed her narrow, apple-cheeked face, and the look she gave me through her suddenly red and whirling eyes made my stomach cramp.

  “You smell like candy,” she purred delightedly, her fangs partway extended and her little behind moving like a lion cub about ready to pounce.

  I’d learned a few things in the last two years. I didn’t think twice as I threw a power barrier up between us and sprinted through the door.

  When I was out of the steel safe—complete with titanium lock—and closed the door behind me, leaning on it in relief as I did so, I looked up and realized that every vampire in the hill except Grace was in the common room outside.

  They were all looking dreamily at me, their whirling eyes half-closed and their teeth half-extended.

  Marcus gave a sweet, psychotic half smile and said, “You smell like hot chocolate…” and I decided enough was enough.

  I put power in my voice, everything I had, and commanded them all to stay downstairs in the l
ower darkling. And then, without running—to avoid pricking that whole predator thing they’ve got going—I walked with as much dignity as I could to the top of the stairs.

  Grace was waiting for me at the top, some serious control in place to keep her eyes from whirling.

  “Baby,” she said when I got to her, “I think your body has finally caught up to you.”

  I sent her a blank, puzzled look. She sighed and looped an arm over my shoulders, steering me toward my bedroom.

  “Cory, darlin’, you’re about to start your period. It’s like a vampire delicacy. Usually on the hill we don’t run into it, but….”

  “Oh,” I said numbly, thinking immediately that there went all my evening plans with Bracken. Then “Oooooh!” because I suddenly understood why I was wearing eau-de-tasty as far as the rest of the vampires were concerned. Then “Oh… ick!” because I was not without imagination and the word “delicacy” had finally hit me.

  Grace chuckled a little, but the sound was strained. “Cory, my girl, don’t ever forget that we’re not human anymore. Now, I’m going to rustle up some supplies for you, and then I’m going to make myself scarce. We’ll stay out of the hill or down in the darkling for a couple of days, and maybe next month we won’t be caught so unaware.”

  “A couple of months…,” I said numbly, and she looked at me with surprise. “I never was very regular. Two months, sometimes three….”

  Grace nodded her head with approval. “Well, that should at least make things easier. Now scoot—I need to send someone shopping.”

  I wandered back to my room in a daze. After sitting in fuddled silence and knitting for half an hour, I realized that I’d felt funky and crampy and tired since I’d left Green’s bed that morning, and the lightbulb went on. I’d known this was coming—it had just been so damned long, I’d forgotten what it was like.