by Amy Lane
“I didn’t have words,” I whispered at last. “I still don’t. But I told him he couldn’t… and he let me. And now this fucker’s back, without even Green’s power to check him… and I can’t even kill him.”
Bracken’s chest vibrated under my cheek. “Who says you get to do the killing? Your way’s too quick.”
I whimpered a little laugh for him. Of my three lovers, Bracken’s way was most like mine. Green would love the enemy into submission. Nicky would fight a bloody fight with his talons, but he wasn’t a killer. Bracken and I would leave no bodies, but they’d be dead just the same.
“Your way’s messy,” I told him, wishing with all my heart that we could be alone. Bracken and I did the best making up after fights—and although the sex was spectacular, it was the closeness that I missed.
“So what are we going to do, Professor?” I asked Hallow, who hadn’t let off his gentle grip on my neck. “We can’t have these pictures show up in the tabloids, and we can’t have this guy stalking us. Keeping him off campus will work for a little while, and once summer begins we can hole up at the hill for a while, but until then….”
Hallow nodded. “I know, I know. Uhm, both of you, may we continue walking for a bit?”
I looked over my shoulder and realized that we had stopped at a nexus between the math, English, and education buildings, and we were getting more than our share of curious glances. So much for tender moments. We resumed walking, and I began to willfully steer us toward the bookstore—mostly because there was a staircase beyond it up the levy so we could walk over the bicycle bridge, and it was one of my favorite places on campus.
“We need to know when he’s planning to release those pictures,” I said after a silence. Bracken and Hallow switched positions, so I was holding Hallow’s arm and Bracken had me pressed against his side. Bracken dropped a kiss in my hair and mumbled agreement.
“Do you think we could get someone to mind-fuck him?” he asked.
“It can be done,” said Hallow, as though he’d thought about it a lot, “but it’s going to have to be someone he doesn’t have his sights on. When humans are as ambitious and focused as this man, changing their minds with power doesn’t always work. It’s got to be someone he doesn’t expect. I’m afraid, Lady Cory, that he knows you’re important. You’re the only one who shows up in his photos, and we don’t hide the fact that everybody else defers to you. Anybody in your inner circle is right out as well—he knows you by sight. He calls Bracken ‘the enforcer’ and Nicky ‘the best friend,’ and although he’s never seen Renny change, he calls her ‘kitten’—he’s not stupid or blind, and he’s intuitive or he couldn’t be successful at what he’s doing. He likes getting to the truth of things. Last year he took a picture of a party leaving early from a funeral, and he thinks he’s found gold.”
“Truth is overrated,” I mumbled, flushing with guilt. Green hadn’t told me how susceptible we’d be when he agreed to go sing with me at the funeral of a friend. I knew now, and I cursed my innocence. Not even the most innocent gesture was free from danger—not where my worlds collided.
“You would say that,” Hallow snorted, and I looked at him sharply.
“We’re going to have to talk, aren’t we?” I asked suspiciously, and he gave me an incredibly bland look.
“Why on earth would you want to talk to me, Lady Cory? I’m just some git Green hires out to be your shrink.” I could swear a seagull flying overhead plummeted to the ground, killed by the bitterness.
“Aww, fuck.” The shit you broke when you weren’t paying attention. “Bracken….” I so didn’t want to squander this chance to hold his hand, but apparently I had inflicted more than one wound here, and it was mine to heal.
“I’m gone,” he volunteered, bending down and kissing me one passionate, torturously short time. “I’ll be at the student union, buying those… female things, and some of those half-short things.”
Oh, shit.
“I’ve got a blood spot on my ass, don’t I?” Fucking menstrual cycle. Oughta be a fucking law.
He made a noncommittal noise that translated to Yes, beloved, the size of Texas, and vanished—figuratively—leaving Hallow and me to promenade up the bike path like old and good friends.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Hallow said mildly, and I rolled my eyes.
“The fuck I didn’t. You think I’m going to ride up the hill with my cutoffs this messed up? Besides, we need more sweats and shorts for the back of the SUV.” Sac State sweats were our regulation gear after our clothes got fucked up on a run. Green told me he could tell how badly or how well the whole thing had gone by how many of us were sporting obnoxious green and yellow.
“My poor feelings aren’t that fragile,” he told me, trying to make his voice hit the “amused” octave, but I wasn’t buying it.
“Bullshit. What’d I do? You’ve got to tell me, Hallow, or I can’t fix it. I mean, I know I’m a pain in the ass, but I’m not a total bitch. I don’t hurt people for kicks, or if I can avoid it, but how can I avoid the big pothole in your heart if you won’t give me a goddamned flashlight?”
Hallow laughed in spite of himself. “Eloquent,” he commended, and was met with another eye roll.
“Again, bullshit. So are you going to tell me, or are you going to be really petty and show me all the avoidance tricks I’ve taught you in the last year?” I smiled winningly at him—or as winningly as I knew how to. I wasn’t really a flirt, but I figured at this point Hallow deserved my best effort.
“Heaven forbid,” Hallow laughed. Then we stopped on top of the suspension-style bike bridge and leaned up against the side. I liked to watch the river, lazy as it drifted by the campus, wandering along beneath us in the shade of the campus-side trees.
“So?”
He sighed and watched the river with me. “You’re very self-sufficient, Lady Cory. Even when you need me, you could probably survive without me.”
I blinked. This was a bad thing? “Don’t you want me to be able to survive?” I asked, confused. “I mean, my biggest concern is that I’m too much of a weak human pain in the ass….”
Again that bitter laugh. “Hardly. One hundred and fifty years I’ve been waiting for Lord Green to ask me something, do you know that? And when he finally does ask me… when I finally have a chance to put things square between us, the task he gives me is….”
“Insurmountable?” I asked, panicked. One hundred and fifty years? That was a helluva long time to pay back a debt. That was also a suspiciously familiar number, and while I spoke to Hallow, I also tried to do the math and come up with a connection. My nearest and dearest will assure you that this was much harder for me than it should have been.
“What do you mean?” he asked, genuinely surprised.
“Oh please, Professor Hallow, don’t tell me I’m too fucked-up to help. I mean, Green told me to behave, and I’ve been trying, I swear. I know I missed the last couple of weeks, but I just didn’t have words for you. I won’t miss again, not even in the summer when you come up to the hill. Just don’t tell Green I’m a lost-cause psychopath, please?” Oh Jesus, it wasn’t fair! He hadn’t even told me yet what I’d done to hurt his feelings like this!
Hallow’s amused laugh helped put me at ease, even if it did make me feel about twelve years old. “You’re not hopeless, my dear,” he said, sounding charmed. His hand, which had been resting at my waist, came up to my back, and he patted me fondly. “It’s just….” He shook his hair back and stared down the river to where the bend at the horizon cut it off.
“I grew up with Titania and Oberon. You know who they are, yes?”
My eyes narrowed and my teeth gritted. Oh yeah. I knew. “Yes.”
He nodded. “You know, then—they’re not very nice people.”
I’d kill them if I ever saw them, legends of the fey or no.
“No,” I said simply.
“A very wise sentiment,” he said with a little smile. “But still, there is something c
omforting in having a monarch. There is something reassuring in the idea that you don’t have to worry about whether your world is wrong or right—it is simply as the king would have it. And….” He shrugged a little, embarrassed. “And some of us loved to serve. It didn’t matter—much—if we received no praise, or if the things we were asked to do were abominations. Serving someone who controls the fate of a people, that can give a great deal of satisfaction.”
Click. Now I knew why that date was important.
“You knew him,” I said, my heart suddenly jumping in my throat like some sort of possessed frog. “He was locked in that horrible place, and you knew him….”
Hallow flushed and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I did,” he confirmed. “And I was told to go take my pleasure with him, and I did. But there were no rules against talking afterward. Or before. Or when we were supposed to be in bed.”
I looked sharply at Hallow, trying to decide if I should be angry at him for this, even though it had been two hundred years ago.
“And I liked him.” Hallow gave me a lost smile. “Not like a beloved. You know how that feels—I’ve seen it in you, and in Bracken. Goddess, I even saw it in Adrian, and for a while I had the same prejudice every one of my kind did about vampires. So I wasn’t Green’s beloved, but I liked him. He was pleasant to me when he didn’t have a cause to be. He enjoyed my visits—he even covered for me, when we became so engrossed in talking about literature and science and the way the human world worked that we lost track of time and what we were supposed to be doing.”
With a sigh, Hallow continued his perusal of the horizon. The sky was nearly cloudless, an eyeball-searing smoggy-azure blue, and the sun was a punishing white, but tilting, just a little, with the afternoon. Soon, it seemed to promise—soon, the relentless spring heat might cool down, and then we would breathe again.
“You loved him,” I said, feeling dense. “Not like a lover. You just… loved him. Like a friend.”
Hallow nodded, pursing his lips. “Except, you know, the greatness in him. The thing you see in ‘your’ Green now—I saw that too, and I loved that too. All of my time squandered, serving beings who were petty, and corrupt. Full of shining words and nasty, dirty snakes in their hearts. What they did to Green—tricking him like that, taking him prisoner just because he could please them—it was despicable. The more I spoke to Green, the more I realized that maybe the reason they looked down on him was that he was greater than they were, more noble than they could ever be.”
His hand on my back stilled, and he unconsciously put it on the concrete railing in front of him and leaned on it, lost in the past in a way I’d seen the older fey do. Just like with Green, I was content now to let the past spill out of him. As with most of the high sidhe, the really, really old beings, he would get to his point when he was ready.
“I was the one who begged Oberon to let us go to the garden. When we got there, and I saw Green’s comfort, his happiness there, I knew. I knew exactly what he was planning. But he never told me, and I never had to lie.”
No, I thought, looking at the way Hallow’s jaw clenched, but he must have walked one hell of a fine line in that treacherous place. I abruptly decided that I forgave him. No matter how he had started out, he had ended up a friend and an ally.
“Did you get in trouble,” I asked, “when he escaped?”
Hallow shrugged. “Not to speak of.” Dumb men. Hallow was the last guy I would ever have accused of machismo, but I could make another direct translation. Not to speak of obviously equaled Torture beyond your wildest dreams.
I grunted and quirked an eyebrow, and he shrugged and conceded.
“One year of what I endured? It was nothing compared to the two hundred years of what your Green endured with a whole heart. If your Green could come here, begin his beautiful hill, and not hold any grudges? I can forget a year of a very long life.”
Fair enough, I thought sadly. No wonder he could counsel people, though—was it just an elf thing to be damned well-adjusted? “Why didn’t you come with him?” I asked Hallow instead. The well-adjusted thing would just be rhetorical.
Hallow shrugged, and his face grew remote and cold—an iceberg gazing at a Caribbean island. “Green is very brave, for our kind of sidhe. Do you know that?”
I smiled, feeling a breeze off the river, or maybe just the refreshment of thinking about something beautiful that I loved. “I know he’s so incredibly brave,” I answered. “To have lived for so long, and be hurt so often, and to still love us…. He’s braver than I am. I know it in my bones.”
Hallow let out a sardonic laugh. “Don’t be too sure of that, my lady. But he is brave. He was brave enough to go out on his own, to found his own hill. I didn’t understand that—I didn’t get it when this country was founded, and I certainly didn’t get it when Green levitated those damned trees through the walls of Oberon’s garden. He asked, but I was less afraid of Oberon’s wrath than I was of being on my own.” Hallow snorted softly.
“It’s just as well,” he continued. “If I had been there, he never would have made the deal with Sezan, and then he never would have met Adrian. The world would have been a sadder, less vibrant place if the two of them had never been.”
I couldn’t argue, so I said nothing. He slanted me a look then, amused and self-deprecating.
“You’re very good at this counseling thing. Are you sure you don’t want my job?” he asked with a smile.
“Are you kidding? If I had to deal with bitches like me, I’d kill myself. And them.”
He laughed outright, and in that neutral way of a sexually driven people, looped a completely sexless arm around my shoulders. “You’re not that bad, my lady—and remember, I can’t lie.”
I laughed then and leaned against him companionably, thinking that it was going to be a lot harder to ditch out on my therapy sessions after this odd, lazy afternoon.
“So I was too afraid to come with him, but that didn’t stop him from sending word.” Hallow shook his head, his silver-blond hair shaking out of his braid and around his face. “I can’t even imagine what he had to do, the strings he had to pull, the people he had to sleep with or kill, to get word to me in Oberon’s hill. But he did it, and he offered me a way out and a hill to come to, and I did. He gave me someone worthwhile to follow, someone who didn’t run rife with power, someone whom it would be an honor to serve.”
He was so passionate, I thought, looking at his remote face. This touched him deeply, hit to the core of who he was. My shoulders drooped suddenly with how badly I must have let him down.
“And then he had to go and bring me home.” The arm around my shoulders tightened considerably.
“I was worried, yes,” Hallow conceded. “Especially after Adrian died, and the consequences of his death.”
I tried to pull away, feeling like I was not worth being touched, but his arm tightened around me and kept me there—hot and sweaty, but comforted, so it was worth it.
“Are you worried now?” I asked, dreading the answer.
Hallow bent and took my chin in his fingers—a surprising, tender gesture from a man who had tried very hard to maintain his personal distance from me for more than a year. “Not at all, little Goddess,” he said kindly. “When I do worry, it is about you—your heart is surprisingly fragile, for all that we love you for your strength. Now that I’ve met you, I will never again worry that you will run roughshod over all of those who have come to treasure Green.”
I smiled then, shyly. “I’m glad.” I was grateful for his reassurances, even though I didn’t share them. “But why tell me all this?” I asked, not wanting the silence between us to become awkward.
Hallow dropped his hand but kept contact with my eyes. “For one thing, you wouldn’t trust me unless you knew me. I tried to do the human ‘professional thing’—for a year, I’ve tried. But you wouldn’t buy it. I couldn’t do my job, dammit, and it was irritating me no end!”
I laughed a little. Well, I had confessed to
being a colossal pain in his ass.
“And for another?”
Hallow sighed. “Because I will do anything, my lady, just like you, to keep Green from humbling himself again. This… nuisance cannot be allowed to run rampant, exposing us, blackmailing us. Not after all Green has done to make our people united and happy and safe. Don’t worry about Nolan Fields for the moment. He will need killing, but I can control him until we find out how to get the rest of the negatives.”
I blinked. Hallow was a healing elf. Not the sexual kind, but still, the sidhe were sexual creatures. There was only one way he had to control somebody for certain.
“No,” I mumbled, surprisingly embarrassed.
“I’m sorry?” he asked, feigning surprise. He’d known—he had to have known—that I wouldn’t agree to this.
“No,” I repeated, my voice stronger this time. Asshole kept calling me “my lady”—well, he was going to have to live up to it.
“No, what?” he asked neutrally.
“You can’t, Professor. You can’t do it. I wouldn’t let Green, I won’t let you. Green wouldn’t want it, and I certainly don’t. That’s the reason you told me, right? You like authority—you figured I’d be your authority, and I’d give it the okay and Green would never have to know. Well, bullshit. That’s crap. You can’t do it. We’ll find another way. You want to hurt Green more already? You go and hurt yourself in a way I told him he couldn’t. He loves you—you’re his friend. It will rip him up to know you did what he wouldn’t.” I found myself getting mad. Dammit, I loved these guys, and I loved that they asked questions first and killed painfully later, but Jesus, did they have to sleep with it even when it was slimy?
Hallow laughed a little—a cacophony. “My lady, have you ever heard the expression ‘It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission’?”
Aww, fuck. I buried my face in my hands. I didn’t want to see the beautiful day anymore. “Professor…,” I whined. Oh, this was so uncool. The tears I had pushed back with my physical misery broke now, and his arm tightened on my shoulders.