by Amy Lane
Bracken came in then, fresh from helping Teague and Jack remodel their refurbished barn/garage/cottage, and as he started stripping, I made a dash for the bathroom so I could be done before he took his shower. It didn’t matter. He moved too quickly, and the fact was, the elves had no shame and no disgust over bodily functions. Taking a piss was taking a piss—everyone did it, and it didn’t really faze them. Bracken had walked in on me once when Adrian was still alive, and he was so casual about it, I don’t think he even remembered me freaking out.
So on this day, as I was sitting on the potty staring stupidly at the stained crotch of my underwear, neither of us even flinched as he brushed my leg on his way to the shower.
And that was when my uterus turned itself inside out in a frantic attempt to get closer to him—because, hello, it was saturated with blood, and that was Bracken’s element.
When I came to, Bracken was crouched in the corner of the shower, looking like powdered death from shutting off his power in a helluva hurry. Green was hovering over me, propping me up on the toilet, and everybody in the hill who wasn’t a vampire was crammed into our tiny bathroom, staring at me as I dumped three days’ worth of blood in two and a half minutes.
Fun times. Remembering them now made my face flush and seemed to have some sort of magnification effect on the goddamned cramps.
Lovely.
Hallow read the wealth of what I was not saying as it trotted across my face, and if anything, the look on his face grew more hurt than it had been before.
“This is a good thing, right?” he asked, as though struggling to be positive about something. “Your body is functioning correctly. It hasn’t done that in a very long time, right?”
“Righd,” I said, trying to forget the ashen pallor of Bracken’s face as Green had healed me and then cleaned me up in front of fifty-gazunga people. Besides cutting himself off from his source of power—which was potentially deadly for him if he did it too long—Brack had felt as though he had done something wrong.
“Tell dat do Bwacken,” I added, looking at him now. His neck was drooped over his textbooks, but he was looking at me intently. I was completely unable to fathom the expression in his dark, pond-shadow eyes, so I turned back to Hallow. “Wah deh sombdig you wandid, Pwofeddor?”
“Isn’t your menstrual cycle enough reason for me to be here, Lady Cory?” he asked with that inexplicable hurt.
I looked out over our little table with a pained expression. Jacky, Max, LaMark, Renny, and Nicky looked right back with undisguised interest, and I suppressed a groan. Not a one of them hadn’t trusted me with his or her life—or worse, the life of a loved one.
“Pwofeddor, cad we nod talk aboud my pewiod wight dow?”
“Why not?” he muttered, seemingly to himself. “Apparently we can’t talk about anything, can we?”
Oh, Jesus. “Wad I do?” I asked, so exhausted by this conversation that I was on the edge of tears.
Fortunately, Prof Hallow was not nearly as repressed as I was.
“Is this why you missed our last three sessions?” he demanded, and I winced as Bracken and Nicky both said, “Three sessions!” practically in tandem. I shook my head.
“Doh!” I’d missed the last three sessions because I didn’t want to talk about Green. My period had nothing to do with it.
“Then why in the name of trees in summer didn’t you ask me to heal you?” he demanded, standing to his full height. I blinked at him stupidly.
“Heal be?”
“Yes. I’ve done it before, remember?”
“Heal be?” I asked again, feeling dimmer than a dark star.
“You don’t remember?” he asked, the hurt and exasperation easing up in his lovely features and his habitual, neutral-friendly “counselor’s expression” resuming its place.
“I do dow!” I wailed with some emphasis. He laughed a little, kindly, and sat back down on his haunches and took my hands.
“Would you like me to heal you, Lady Cory?” he asked. At the promise of no misery, the tears I’d held back threatened to spill over.
“Da cwamps too?” I asked, hating my weakness, and Bracken let out a hoarse little groan. I hadn’t complained about the cramps—he hadn’t known.
“The cramps too,” Hallow said with gentleness. “In fact, sir knight,” he said to Bracken, my lover/protector, “if you wish, you and your lady and I could take a walk. If we take much care, you two may even hold hands. Would that be acceptable, Lady Cory?”
“Pwease?” I begged pathetically. Bracken stood up, shoved his books in his backpack, and started issuing orders even as Hallow took my hands and kissed my forehead. Jacky got to take our notes, Nicky and LaMark took our backpacks, and Bracken would get my yarn bag and the SUV keys. We’d all cut our night class and head for home early. The class was Film as Literature—we’d all seen Lone Star already. Since most of the elves had, at some point, gotten busy with a much older/much younger/much separated by time/space/genetics half sibling, they really didn’t get it. In this case, I was doing Bracken’s homework for once instead of the other way around.
Within five minutes, I was walking across campus with Hallow’s companionable arm looped around one shoulder and Bracken holding my hand on the other side. We were all eating chocolate/vanilla swirls. The ice cream was Bracken’s idea—it was hot, I’d been miserable with phlegm, and ice cream had been a forbidden treat. That was why he’d packed up his stuff so quickly—so he could run across the campus to the student union and get me a soft serve.
I took a lick of my chocolate/vanilla swirl and looked at our twined hands, enjoying the sight of his long, blunt fingers wrapped around mine and feeling like my body was taking its first full breath in two days. I raised his hand to my lips, kissed the back of it, and pressed it against my cheek.
Oh, the humiliations I would endure, just to have his skin against mine when I needed it.
“Thank you, Professor,” I said quietly and sincerely to Hallow. “This is lovely… thank you.” I smiled at him, my heart in my smile, and the oddest expression flirted across his face. It was an odd mix between a child getting praised by his favorite teacher and the baffling hurt that he’d shown earlier. I looked at him in confusion and then looked at Bracken. Bracken’s gaze was level and kind. He knew what this was about—I didn’t. Wonderful.
I kissed his hand again anyway, because I could, and then asked the obvious question.
“So why were you looking for me?”
“Mmm?” Hallow asked, taking a go at his own ice cream—it was hot, and he looked droopy and distracted in the heat. Bracken did too, truth be known, but I’d been so immersed in my own misery that I hadn’t noticed until now. One of the benefits of Green’s power was that his hill didn’t get much warmer than seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit, even when the foothills really started to cook round about July and August. Bracken could still come to school with me, but it was really a good thing finals were in the last week of May.
“You were looking for me. You know, before you got all mad because I was sick. Why were you looking for me?”
“I wasn’t angry because you were sick, my lady,” Hallow corrected. “I was angry because you didn’t ask for help.”
I flushed and looked at Bracken, who managed to look sheepish. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it should have occurred to me too. But….” Bracken’s eyes narrowed, their pond-shadow color seeming to burn. “But if you had visited him when you were supposed to, he might have suggested it himself….”
I was scheduled to see Hallow every two weeks, but Hallow talked about things. And he didn’t let me get away with shit. And I wasn’t ready to talk about Green.
“I had something on my mind,” I said, and Bracken rolled his eyes. Of course he knew I had something on my mind—he had known since the morning I’d come from Green’s room.
Green and I were solid now. Of course we were—we had been from Let me and Please. He hadn’t done anything that needed forgiveness. Well and trul
y, I felt that with all my heart, and that evening we had told the others about Nolan Fields and the danger to our little community. The entire hill knew to watch for the douche-bag photographer, and they knew that even if the guy had never been to the hill, we were in danger when we went out. The vampires had been scrupulous about flying out the back way from the hill and only frequenting places that were owned and operated by Green’s people. The shifters had been running the property and the woods only. We asked the elves to keep to Green’s properties—even though we knew it wasn’t entirely possible, at least they knew the danger. The other fey—the trolls and brownies and redcaps and others who liked to wander the backwoods and unexplored crannies of the foothills—well, we figured Nolan wouldn’t have noticed them before, and he probably wouldn’t notice them now. Most of the time, they blended in with the homeless and the discarded. People like Nolan Fields wouldn’t be looking there if there wasn’t a story.
So, no—although I had never cleared up the problems in Teague’s love life, and Nicky was still getting mysterious phone calls and pretending they didn’t hurt his heart like knives, there were officially no secrets between Green and me.
But still… there was something. It wasn’t a secret. It was more like an unresolved feeling, one without human words to give it wings and get it the fuck off my chest.
“Aren’t you supposed to see me when you have something on your mind?” Hallow asked, a long-suffering note in his voice, and Bracken snorted.
“She’s stubborn,” he said, taking a slurp of his own ice cream.
“And you’re not?” I shot back.
“Name it!” he retorted, smiling a little. “When was the last time I gave you grief?”
“How about the last time I wanted to see Gretchen?” I asked seriously. It had been four days ago. He’d insisted that it was too dangerous, but I’d promised the little girl that I’d be in to read to her that night. It was true that she was getting more and more vague, more and more like a trapped animal. Taking her outside to fly in the garden was getting to be a job for ten or more vampires, because she would test the boundaries we’d set for her with increasing ferocity until the outing ceased to be fun and started to become a test of wills.
We had managed to get something from her, though, via her blood link with Phillip—a license plate with “a mountain on it, and letters, not numbers, except for an eight.” With a little more digging, and some quick sketching, we’d managed to come up with the word BLUDEF8. Bloody Fate. Get it? Fucking pedophiliac vampire. Max was in the process of tracking the plate down in the police department—but it would take some doing and a visit from one of us who could give a mind-fuck power whammy, and we hadn’t been able to schedule it in the last week. Besides, Bracken and I were talking about a whole other incident.
“As I recall,” I accused, “you ended up hefting me around the waist and hauling my ass out of the darkling!”
“Phillip told me you smelled like candy!” he retorted. I blinked and took an absent cleanup lick of my neglected ice cream.
“I did not know that,” I said with dignity and a little sniff. “You could have told me, you know.”
“It’s hard,” he mumbled dejectedly. His grip slackened on our hands, and I tightened them up. We had been able to sleep—Green spooning me, and me spooning Bracken—but we all had tasks to do, our jobs outside the hill, and homework, and dinner…. I was not getting my quota for touching Bracken, and I was not going to squander this precious, cramp-and-allergy-free walk through campus.
“We don’t talk when we don’t touch,” I mumbled, and Hallow gave an amused snort at my side. I rolled my eyes at him. “And we’ve gotten off the point. Why did you come to see me, again?”
“Because,” Hallow said with a sigh, like he was letting go of something important, “Nolan Fields has been on campus asking for you.”
I stopped short, my ice-cream cone halfway to my mouth.
“Fuck!” Bracken and I both said in tandem, and Hallow shook his head.
“You knew this would happen when you stopped Green’s original plan, right?” he chided gently, and I flushed. Bracken and Nicky hadn’t known about Green’s original way to stop Nolan—but Brack was going to get a crash course in it now.
“This is my fault,” I said numbly. “I should….” I stopped that thought. No, I shouldn’t have. I’d die before Green humbled himself again, and I could give a rat’s ass whether he was willing to do it. “I should have known this was coming.”
Bracken was looking at me oddly. “That wasn’t what you were going to say.”
I swallowed. “No, it wasn’t. Can we keep Nolan off campus?” I asked Hallow.
“For the moment,” he said cagily. “I’ve already marked a perimeter with sprites and touch, blood, and song. We’ll know when he’s here, and I guarantee his cameras won’t work. We’ve already fried a considerable and costly amount of his equipment, so he might try another tack. I’ve taken other measures to keep him away from you, but you need to know he’s here.”
Unconsciously I leaned more fully into Bracken’s embrace, but he took a step away from me and regarded me levelly.
“What?” I asked him, hurt, but I already knew.
“I am tired of secrets.” His voice was quiet, but his eyes were literally spitting sparks.
“Glamour, Bracken!” I hissed, and he glared even more sharply.
“Fuck that!” he snarled quietly, but his eyes toned down. “Green was hiding something, and now you’re hiding it, and Nicky still hasn’t come clean, and the only one without some dark bird fluttering in their chest is me, and I’m sick of it. If you can’t tell me, then you need to at least tell Hallow, because this is bullshit. You don’t get to be lonely at Green’s hill—that’s not why we had that little ceremony last year, and it’s not why we band together and share a bed and share comfort when we need it. Your heart is lonely, and you may think you’re helping Green by keeping it close inside, but what hurts you hurts him, and I won’t let you do it anymore!”
I stared at him, feeling a freight train of resentment pile up in my chest as he spoke. It isn’t fair, I thought desperately, trying to halt that damned derailing locomotive, because Bracken hadn’t done a damned thing but be too open and too honest in every emotion he had, from anger to lust, to keep this feeling in his heart like I had.
“What do you want me to say?” I demanded. We’d released each other’s hands and were confronting each other. Hallow was still at my back, touching my shoulders, and unconsciously I shrugged him off, because this was between me and Bracken as so little was between us alone, and nobody else got a say.
“I want you to tell us what you’ve been hiding!”
I took a vicious bite of my ice-cream cone and nursed the cold blob in the roof of my mouth. “Wha’ d’you tink—” I swallowed. “—I’ve been hiding!” I burst out, wishing I could talk some other way besides pissed off. “Green knew about this first. How do you think he dealt with it, Bracken? I’ll give you three guesses, but since you know as much as I do about my ou’e’hm, you’ll only need one!”
Then Bracken got one of those looks. I’ve come to recognize them—they’re a hazard of my living situation. It was the “I’m sorry you don’t understand this cultural difference, but you’re really overreacting” sort of look, but I wasn’t buying it. Not this time. Not with this.
He reached out a conciliatory hand, and I glared at it. “Beloved….”
In a fit of temper, I chucked the rest of the ice cream at the nearest trash can. I missed, and it splatted against the side.
“No.” I relocated my glare and met his eyes. “We don’t get to do that—not with this. There is no ‘We’re fey, so we do things differently’—not with this. If it was about sex and about healing and about kindness and binding people to me with power, I’d get that. You know I get that. I get that, and I deal, and I don’t complain, and I accept and I love and I enjoy. This isn’t about that. This is about Green touching s
omething he loathes. This is about Green lowering himself to protect us. And I’ll let Green protect us about anyway he can… but Green doesn’t get to humble himself. Not my Green. Not for me, not for fucking any-fucking-body. We’ve had this discussion before, he and I. He’s not a warrior elf. I get that. He’s a sexual elf—I get that too, and most of the time I’m so damned proud of him that I could almost grow an inch or two. But he’s not… not…. NOT”—and here’s where my voice, which had been low and intense and furious, finally started to crack a little, finally started to crumple, leaving my heartbreak raw and bleeding for both of them to see—“he’s not anyone’s victim anymore. Not Myst’s, not Oberon’s. Not this scum-fucker’s. I would rather kill this guy with my bare hands than let Green do that to his own heart, and I know you think I’m foolish,”—oh Christ, here they came, fucking tears—“and I know you think I’m naive, but I’m supposed to be his weapon. I will rip this miserable ass-fucker’s throat out with my teeth and savage him like a dog rather than let Green hurt himself that way.”
It’s a good thing Hallow was quicker than Bracken with that hand on my neck. Bracken couldn’t let me cry like that for all the world, and I would have bled out with the first touch of his hands on my arms, the first crush of his wide chest engulfing me, welcoming me home.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” he whispered, his breath so good on my ear that I gave it up and whimpered. “Why just let this sit on your chest, pressing you down?”
“I couldn’t have you think… what you thought…,” I babbled. “I don’t think worse of him. I could never think worse of him. I didn’t want you to…. You’d be disappointed if I….” So hard to put into words. I was Green’s. I was the hill. There were no ugly words in my heart for what Green had done—there was only my conviction that he was too good, too golden, too shining and perfect and beloved to be allowed to do it. Bracken and I, we were too passionate, too quick with our words. And Bracken idolized Green—I would never threaten that or kill that or fuck that up in any way, shape, or form.