Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  Don’t stress, due’alle—I’ve got this one covered.

  I might have broken something then, but there was a courtesy knock on the door and Nicky came in, slamming his cell phone shut as he did so.

  He was going to sit in her empty chair, but he looked… miserable. Sad. As alone as I felt.

  I took advantage of the odd closeness we’d built upon in the last year and grabbed his hand, yanking him into my lap. He laughed a little as he landed, but he was a small man—almost as small as our beloved—and he fit there, like a child.

  It was telling about both of us that he simply leaned his head against my chest and let me comfort him.

  “You have a secret,” I said after a few moments.

  He did me the courtesy of not trying to lie, even though his kind were perfectly capable of it. “Yes.”

  “So does Cory. She said she’ll tell me when we can touch. I hate human things.” I nuzzled his straight, rusty hair. Cory was right, he did smell good. Like dust and cookies—it was a happy place.

  Nicky laughed a little and patted my chest condescendingly. “You should like this one, big man—it means she’s healthy and can have children.”

  The thought of her body—small and with its fragile mortality—burdened with a child on my size scale terrified me, and I said so. “It will kill her! I would rather die!”

  Nicky looked troubled. “Believe it or not, that has occurred to me,” he said. “But I don’t think it will stop her.”

  I recalled myself. “But that has nothing to do with your secret.” I didn’t want to think about this—and an elf’s birth control was his will, so mostly I didn’t have to. Besides, I wanted to hear what he said. I wanted the secrets to end. If I couldn’t hear hers tonight, Nicky’s would do.

  It came out surprisingly easy. I think he was just waiting for one of us to ask him, while we had been respecting his privacy.

  “Mom and Dad—they want to visit.”

  I was surprised. That didn’t sound like such a bad thing. “They are welcome!”

  “No, they’re not,” he protested. “Not by me, anyway.”

  I blinked at him. My mother and my father were… essential to my life at the hill, I guess. I might not see them every day—I think, according to human standards, I might even have “out-classed” them. I ate at the leader’s table—I had since Adrian and I had been a couple. Even when we had separated, become mostly friends instead of all lovers, I still sat there, listened, gave my input. Da and Mom might have served differently, but we all still served. Was that the right word for what it was my family did? It didn’t feel like the right word. We loved unconditionally. We did what our skills gave us to do for the happiness of our home. Was that service? Was it patriotism? Was it cooperative living? I am not sophisticated enough to answer these questions, so I don’t normally bother asking them.

  “Why wouldn’t you welcome your family?” I asked, feeling thick.

  Nicky gave a little snort and rubbed his cheek against my T-shirt. I wrapped my arms around him feeling like a brother, perhaps? An older, often annoyed brother, but a brother. He was my beloved’s lover, and sometimes we touched in bed—but mostly, he was my family, and just like it was my family’s job to serve, it was my job to comfort him and see to his happiness. For the first time, I understood why Cory was so unhappy with those questions around the campfire—it was hard to put into words the things that simply sat beneath our skin.

  “My father may sprout wings,” Nicky was saying against my chest, “but he and my mother are both—I think they’re everything you loathe about humans.”

  I looked at him, surprised. It had not occurred to me that one of the Goddess’s folk could be….

  “Yes,” he said, nodding with a tired smile at the expression on my face. “They’re petty, ignorant, and prejudiced, and they base most of their impressions solely on appearance and gender.”

  I gaped. “Your parents?”

  Nicky rubbed my shoulder a little, in the same way I nuzzled his hair. “My parents, big man. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  “That’s why they wouldn’t come to the wedding?” I asked carefully. I had only been told that they hadn’t approved—I hadn’t been told exactly why.

  “Oh yeah.” He leaned closer. “And why they haven’t made it for Christmas, and why I don’t want them to come here. I mean it’s bad enough that they’re embarrassing and judgmental—but if they came here, Green would probably have to mind-wipe them. And then I’d have to disown them completely, and that would suck even more!”

  I looked at him in sympathy and disbelief. “But Nicky—surely all they want is for you to be happy, right? I mean, at worst, we introduce them to Cory, and downplay how often we all share a bed and just try to pretend we’re as ‘normal’ as they want you to be. They’re your parents, right?”

  “They….” He shook his head. I was not the only one who had difficulty finding words. “You know, Bracken, the thing is when I went away to school, if anyone had asked me where I sat on the hetero scale, I would have belted out ‘A ten, motherfucker’ and then beaten them into the ground. And then Green healed me the first time and I sort of had to admit that maybe being, say, a nine on the scale wasn’t so bad. And then the bonding thing happened, and I woke up. And he… we….” Nicky blushed, although Cory and I had seen him and Green together many times. But we had all been there too. The things Green did willingly to your body and his own in order to bring you pleasure—well, I’m sure in some states these things were illegal.

  “You made love to a man. You liked it,” I supplied, and he nodded gratefully.

  “And then I made love to Cory and it was good. I mean it was great, but I… I started to suspect—you know—and I thought that maybe it was because she wasn’t Green. Because, you know, there’s no comparison with Green, right? And then we all went to Texas to get Green, and there was a lot of fucking going on. And we got back, and you’d think I would have ended up with Leah, right? Or even Willow, I mean, if I was going to have my own lover, and I was a nine on the hetero scale?”

  “What in the hell is this scale you’re talking about?” I asked, annoyed. Fucking humans and their numbers.

  “It’s like a sliding scale. I don’t know—my friends and I came up with it in junior high….” And now he buried his head in my chest like a little kid. I kept up a soothing motion against his outer arm, and for the first time I wondered what Nicky and I had looked like in the shape-shifter common room. Had we had the same awkward, uncomfortable space around us? Or did we look as though we would cuddle on a chair and commiserate over missing the focus of our family?

  “So maybe adolescence is where you should have left it?” I asked sharply, and he nodded.

  “But you don’t, not in Bumfuck, Montana, you know? Everybody’s a ten in Bumfuck, Montana—especially bird people, because we have to be. Our survival depends on it. We’re like the Goddess’s own right-wing execution squad. But I didn’t come back from Texas a ten on the scale. I came back in love with Eric, and in love with Green, and still in love with Cory, and even a little in love with you. That’s three men I’ve loved, Bracken, and only one woman, and the more I love her, the more I think I wasn’t loving her like a man loves a woman in the first place. It was like a friend loves a friend, or a subject loves a monarch—but not as a man loves a woman. And maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe I can just tell my parents that she’s my wife and leave it like that. But… but I want them to meet Green. And Eric. And you. I want them to know who I am. I’m not a ten on the hetero scale—I think I’m barely a four.”

  He was weeping. Holy Goddess, our Nicky was weeping, and my beloved was not here to comfort him, it was only me. I rocked him for a moment and let him use my shirt as a tissue.

  “I love you too,” I said awkwardly. “You are my family.”

  He sniffled. “Dude, you don’t know how good that makes me feel.”

  Well, of course. Since he was planning to give up his o
wn family completely, it would be good to know we were there for him now.

  “You should meet them somewhere else,” I said thoughtfully. “We’ve got property—cabins, resort things—all over the state. Green will set up a vacation for you. Cory and I will come.”

  He was looking at me with a combination of gratitude and inward amusement. “I thought about it,” he admitted. “I just… I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

  I looked at him sharply. “Green would have understood,” I said.

  Nicky’s narrow, pretty face didn’t hold sadness well, but it did hold it. “Green is so amazing. I didn’t want to hurt him by suggesting he shouldn’t come.”

  “We are not made of glass,” I sniffed with dignity. “You and Cory should trust that we can hold your hurt too.”

  Nicky looked up and took the liberty of smoothing my hair back from my face. I glared at him, and he laughed. “We don’t want you to hold our hurt,” he said fondly. “That’s the point.”

  I rolled my eyes. Two years, Cory had been here at the hill, and I was no closer to understanding her than the day I’d been tussling with Adrian and had seen her through a Plexiglas window, wearing an ugly blue smock, counting Cheetos.

  Nicky yawned, and I sighed. It was probably time for bed. My usual gauge for that sort of thing was Cory, because although I didn’t need as much sleep as she did, my compulsion for touching her skin brought me to her bed as soon as she was ready. I wasn’t sure if I would ever tell her how much time I spent lying awake in the dark, listening to the precious music of her heartbeat.

  Fuck. She would obviously not be coming to my bed tonight.

  I looked at Nicky, dozing in my arms, and sighed again. “Go get your jammies, little man—you can come sleep with me tonight.”

  Nicky opened his eyes, and for a moment I thought he was going to refuse for the sake of pride. Then he remembered that he was a grown man who had just spent fifteen minutes pouring his heart out in my arms, and that he apparently didn’t have any pride to speak of.

  “Do I really need jammies?” he asked, sliding from my lap and stretching. It was a valid question—we both usually slept naked when Cory was in bed with us.

  I shrugged and went to my drawer to pick out the loosely knit bottoms she’d gotten me for Christmas in case her mother came over to visit while we were still in bed. It had only happened the once, but there was no telling Cory that.

  “Call it a precaution.”

  “Would it matter?” Nicky asked, curious but nothing more. “I mean, we’ve shared a bed—shared her—for a year now. You and I have, uhm, recently had, well, contact. Would you really… uhm… self-destruct? Melt, thaw, and resolve yourself into a goo, if we… uhm… did the thing?”

  I looked at him, surprised. We’d planned what he called “Cory ambushes”—came up with sexual techniques and combinations outside of bed so we could push her to her limits on the inside—and he hadn’t blushed once. He was blushing furiously now.

  “I don’t know,” I told him simply. Perhaps one day we would find out. He was very pretty, after all, and besides loving him as family, I liked him very much.

  “And would you know if we were doing something wrong?” he asked, suddenly wide-awake. “Would you feel pain, get a warning? Or would it be, like—” He put out his arms and pumped his hips suggestively. “—hoocha hoocha hoocha, eek, ouch, dead!”

  I do not know what my expression was, but it was enough to make him burst into surprised laughter. “Don’t bother!” he whooped. “Don’t answer that, big man. I’m going to get my pj’s now like a good boy.” He eyed my crotch with an appreciative roll of the eyes. “Because, you know, heaven forbid that thing have an accident and fall up my ass or anything.”

  I blinked at him, my lips curving into a predatory smile. “Should that ever happen, little man, believe me when I say you’ll know that it’s coming.”

  Nicky burst into another whoop of surprised laughter and chuckled his way out the door.

  IN THE morning, long before the alarm went off for school, Cory surprised us both by clambering over Nicky and into my arms.

  I opened my eyes, and she was there, light brown eyes twinkling, sunshine grin in place and her red-auburn hair amazingly riotous from sleep. Her breath was minty, and she jumped up and down on me like a small child at Christmas morning.

  “I’m done,” she giggled, kissing the bemused expression right off my face.

  I pulled back and blinked at her, feeling stupid and thick. “Done?”

  “Mmmm-hmmm….” She kissed me again and pulled back. “The stupid human bleeding ritual—all gone. Green said I’m done for this round. Now shut up and keep kissing me!”

  “Oh, Christ!” Nicky groaned from my side. “I may as well go shower.”

  With that he sat up on his knees and snuck his head in to kiss Cory’s cheek, so close I could smell his dust and vanilla smell and even his icky morning breath. Cory turned her head for a moment and kissed him back, reaching up and touching his cheek with her hand. They pulled away, and there was something dark in her eyes, deepening on his face. His gaze flickered to mine.

  “Later. You and Bracken, you catch up.” And then he slid away.

  She was going to say something, but she was warm and soft—so soft, I couldn’t stop running my hands along her lushening curves.

  “Later.” I knotted my hands in her hair and tugged her face back to mine again. She gazed at me with playful eyes. There would be things to say now that we could touch again, but for right this moment….

  “Later,” she said, the sound rich in her throat. Then she kissed me, and my arms engulfed her and folded her into my heart, and we dropped into a pocket of time.

  Cory: Garden Pleasures

  OF COURSE I ran for the garden. Adrian was there.

  I had to wait until sunset, of course, but that wasn’t hard. I had my knitting and my iPod, and since both my paper and Bracken’s were already finished, I had a historical romance for a little stress relief. I was driven, but I wasn’t stupid. If I didn’t get my brain off topic, it would be like feeding a hamster meth and putting it on a wheel—the damned thing would run until its heart exploded and ran out its ears.

  I needed to feel like something smarter than a dead hamster, so I hit the refresh button on my brain and chilled the fuck out.

  It worked so well that I had no idea how long Adrian had been sitting at the foot of his granite memorial bench, watching me knit and read and listen to music.

  “Bad day, luv?” he asked, and I closed my eyes and let his presence wash through me. If he had been alive, we could have felt each other’s emotions, talked easily inside each other’s heads. Seeing through the other’s eyes wouldn’t be a wrench like it was with Phillip, but second nature, like taking a breath.

  He wasn’t alive, but if I closed my eyes, I was close enough to smell him—the leather he used to wear, the coppery smell of blood, a light, spicy smell, like chamomile or citrus or both. Most vampires smelled like that, but Adrian’s smell had been special.

  “I started my period,” I said glumly. He had comforted me the first time round, no embarrassment needed. Of course, he’d also leered and pointed out that he was sorry he didn’t get to be there for me. I had called him a pervert and threatened to go back downstairs unless he dropped that subject right quick. I mean—and this can’t be said too often—uhm, ewie!

  “My condolences,” he said now, sarcastic and sincere at the same time. “How’s bloody big lummox fuckwit asshole taking it?” Ah, brotherly love.

  “He’s miserable, like I am,” I said with a little smile. “I… I needed you today, beloved.” We tried, Green, Bracken, and I. We tried with every meeting to pretend he was only gone for a moment, for a breath, and that seeing him as a hint of wind on the odd night in the garden was no different than his day death as a vampire.

  It wasn’t true. None of it. One day, he would come see me in the garden and realize that I’d aged and he hadn’t been the
re to hold my hand for it. One day, he would come out and I’d be pregnant with Green’s child, or holding the baby in my arms, and he wouldn’t have been there to feel it grow. One day, if the hill was lucky, he would come into the garden, and only Green would be there to greet him, and Green would have no one but a ghost in a garden who would love him for him and not for the leader he had become.

  Today, realizing that I had grown into the kind of person who would let Hallow sacrifice himself instead of just going to kill the motherfucker responsible for this bullshit made me nothing if not painfully aware: that day was creeping closer with every tick of the clock. I would never live as long as Hallow, to a day when his sacrifice, his atonement, was acceptable—but Green and Adrian had.

  So tonight I couldn’t pretend that I was still nineteen, and that I still believed in happy-ever-after. I couldn’t pretend that his ghosthood was just a temporary glitch, a new way to live.

  My beloved was dead. I needed him, and he wasn’t here to hold me. He could only listen to my troubles like the stove in the fairy tale, and offer his warmth in return for the story.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,” Adrian’s ghost said wistfully from his post at my feet. “I’m sorry I’m not there for you a lot.”

  Oh Goddess. I smiled for him, brilliantly, and met the startling blue of his transparent eyes. “Beloved, you felt my heart ache and came for me now. It will be enough.”

  “What triggered it, luv?” he asked, after a moment when our eyes met and it was only the two of us and the sound of the breeze in the trees. “Why the need?”

  I told him then about Hallow, about the sacrifice I wouldn’t let Green make, about everything but the snot and the cramps, actually, because that would just be whining.

  The look he gave me when I was done was eloquent.

  “Of course,” he protested, holding his face up to a breeze he couldn’t feel. “You couldn’t let Green do it, after everything else he does for us.”