Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

“Wha’?”

  Phillip and Marcus blew out twin breaths they hadn’t needed to take and looked at each other, then at me. “We have vampires there. Rafael is the leader up in Redding.”

  I blinked. Well, shit. Feeling like I’d forgotten to do my homework for my entire life, I gestured numbly for Marcus to proceed.

  “He’s not a bad sort,” Marcus said, running his hands through his curly black hair. “But he’s got sort of a….” Marcus grimaced, searching for the perfect word. His mate found it for him.

  “A good-old-boy mentality,” Phillip supplied with a slight sneer. “A friend is a friend is a friend. A great trait in a friend, not so great in a leader.”

  I blinked and fought the urge to whine But you guys are my friends. At one time or another, I’d done things to piss off everyone in this room. Phillip had a point—and it was sharp and jagged and spilled blood.

  “So,” Green was saying, oblivious to my uncomfortable self-realization, “he’s the type of bugger to shelter a mate, even if he’s doing something like this?”

  Phillip nodded absolutely, but Marcus shifted and shook his head. “He won’t be happy about it,” Marcus said thoughtfully. “And he’s probably tried measures to make it stop. No—if he knows about it, it’s simply gotten out of hand and he doesn’t know what to do.”

  “What if he doesn’t?” Nicky asked. “Know about it, I mean.”

  I let out a whistle. “That’s bad too.”

  Everybody looked at me. I shrugged. “Hey—if someone walked into my turf and told me that one of you needed to be put down, I might let them live long enough to hear their reasons why.”

  There were nods, but then Grace spoke up, my mother defender with pointy teeth and whirling eyes. “But sweetie, if one of us were doing something like this, you would have put us down before anyone had to tell you it needed to be done.”

  I scrubbed my face with my hands and fought the clenching in my stomach against the dinner I’d just finished. She was right, but it didn’t feel like a good thing.

  “So what do we do?” I asked randomly. “I assume Hallow will let us know if Fields steps up his activity, and until we know his contacts and where his computer files and prints have been sent, none of us can kill him, or we’ll suddenly be put on the exposé pages. But this other thing…. We can run up to Redding on a weekend—hell, right after finals next week—”

  “No,” Green interrupted ruminatively. He looked at me and shook his head. “No, luv—not a quickie. You remember the werewolves this winter?”

  I blinked and nodded. Almost immediately after Jack and Teague had been turned, Teague’s induction into leadership had started with a werewolf invasion of sorts. One of the results of that had been a sort of royal parley that had ended in both triumph and disaster. The original plan had been to do it up right. Pick the representatives up from the airport, big dinners, a tour of the digs, that sort of thing. It hadn’t turned out that way. There’d been blood, death, bruising, and general mayhem that had left us gobsmack in the middle of a giant werewolf turf war over California that was still going, off and on. We were lucky to be in a peaceful moment now, but the whole thing had started with a rabid werewolf serial killer and escalated into the king-and-queen thing to help de-escalate tensions. And then it had escalated again into Lambent’s six acres of scorched earth, Teague’s duel to the death with one of the “diplomats,” and, yes, a shitton of dead werewolves.

  And suddenly the import of Green’s question hit me.

  “Oh, hell no!” I burst out and looked around wildly for some support. “Green, you saw what happened in November—”

  “All due respect, my lady, that had nothing to do with you,” Teague said with a grimace. I waved him off.

  “I suck at it,” I said, not able to meet anybody’s gaze. “I can’t do the holy queenship shit. Guys—you’ve seen me!”

  “What I’ve seen, Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick op Crocken Green,” said my beloved, the thunder of my real name vibrating the floorboards and making us all pay attention, “is a child barely of majority by human standards facing down an entire roomful of sidhe, some of whom pre-dated the age of Roman emperors. I’ve seen her overcome the ultimate corruption of greed with a few drops of her blood. I’ve seen her cleanse the soul of innocents by a simple act of will. You can do the royal queenship shit, and you will do it admirably—” He paused and gave me a grin to take some of the formality out of his words. “—if not in an entirely predictable manner.”

  “Why?” I asked, still obstinate. “Why is it so important?”

  Green glowered at me. “Because. Rafael is a good old boy—and if we go storming in there, we’ll not only have a bloodbath on our hands, we’ll have lost the trust of every surrounding tribe of leadership. Yes, we have a bloody big lot of power here—but part of the reason we’ve only seen one grab for that power is that we don’t really throw that shit around.”

  God. The werewolves were still out there. And there was something so wrong with whatever was coming out of SoCal. The events of November had left a scar on us all, and Green was right. Yes, we could hold on to our socks if we had another incursion—but wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to fight a war every six months just to keep our seat? Trust indeed. Who did we think we were, the US government?

  I flushed and looked at my hands like a guilty child. “Fine.” I did not have to be gracious.

  “So,” Bracken asked, “when are we going to send out the entourage, and who is going to be in it?”

  There was a sudden chorus of “I’m in!” from around the room, and I looked at everybody sourly. “Of course you’re in.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m going to suck so bad at this, you could probably charge admission.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world, lovey,” said Lambent smugly across the room. “But where and when are we going, exactly?”

  “When?” I turned searching eyes toward Green. “How long will this last, beloved? A week? Two? Three?”

  “I don’t know,” he said quietly, seeing where I was going with this. Finals let us out right before the first day of June. “And whatever happens, there may have to be some follow-up. It could take up a bit of your summer.”

  “I need….” I swallowed, uncomfortable even though everybody in the room knew why this was so. “We need to be here during Litha, and a few days after.”

  Bracken went still next to me, and Green’s breath fanned my temple in the silence.

  “Of course,” Green conceded. He was the one who had schooled me on “bad shit anniversaries” in November. There are some times in your life that are so black they leave a scorch mark on time. Superstitious? Yes. But as a whole, the entire hill believed that part of the debacle of November had happened because it was the anniversary of the time I’d almost died. We couldn’t go up and do the queenship shit while the lot of us were still grieving. The mission would end in disaster before it started.

  At my feet, Nicky shifted uncomfortably. “Did you think we would make you work on our anniversary?” he asked, trademark impudence in place.

  I ruffled his hair and stopped to squeeze his hand when it grasped mine.

  “I was worried for a minute,” I teased and moved our twined hands to his cheek. He hadn’t even known Adrian, and he was comforting me. How could you not treasure Nicky?

  “As for where,” Green said, trying to crisp up the atmosphere, “we own some vacation cabins out at Lake Shasta. We can rent a boat, you all can make a holiday out of it….”

  “And we can invite Nicky’s parents, so they can come meet Cory and get off his back!” Bracken supplied excitedly.

  As I blinked in surprise, Nicky said, “Fuck you, brother,” and Green covered his eyes with his hands.

  “Oh, shit,” Bracken said in complete horror. “I am such a fucking asshole.”

  Nicky released my hand to bury his face from the rest of the world, and I used it to cover my mouth as horrified giggles escaped me.

  “Jesus H
umphrey Christ, beloved!” I managed to gasp. “You could always shuck his shorts and make him streak around the campus. It would probably have felt better, you know?”

  Bracken was hiding his face in his hands. “I know… I know, I know I know. Christ, Nicky, I’m sorry.”

  Nicky’s shoulders were shaking with horrified laughter, and I felt a breeze around the room as I bent and wrapped my arms around his shoulders and buried my face in the hollow of his shoulders. When I looked up from behind him, the room had cleared out, and it was only the four of us, the ever-shifting balance of protons and neutrons that made up our little family nucleus.

  Nicky’s laughter faded, and we were left in the aftermath of Bracken’s little emotional bomb.

  “When were you going to tell us?” I asked into the silence. “I mean… I’ll be honest, Nick—I knew it was your parents, because you can’t keep too much of a secret around here, but I didn’t know it was about meeting them.”

  Nicky shook his head and rested it on his knees. I slid off the couch to sit on the floor next to him. Green did the same on his other side, and I wasn’t too surprised when Bracken slid in right behind him and spooned him, sheltering our most fragile proton with the mass of his shoulders. I had found them sleeping in our bed, pajamas on, cuddling like children this morning. Nicky was ours, all of ours, enough Bracken’s for Brack’s dumbassed thoughtlessness to hurt.

  “I’m fine,” Nicky choked unconvincingly. “Really, I’m fine. I just… I’m so embarrassed! You guys—I can’t bring them to the hill, to where I live, because they’re so dumb and so rednecked that Green would have to brain-fuck them to let them leave!”

  I took his hand and leaned my head on his shoulder. “Honey, they can’t be worse than my parents, can they?”

  Nicky’s look was eloquent, and I had to laugh.

  “Okay, okay. Well, as much a dumbshit as Bracken was about it—”

  “I’m so sorry, I suck at secrets!” Bracken moaned, and Nicky patted his big hands where they wrapped around his chest.

  “—he probably had a good idea. We carry off two things here—we do the visiting royalty gig with the Redding vampires, and we do a meet and greet with your mom and dad. Green won’t be there,” I tried not to whine, “so they won’t get to see our best face—”

  “Stop it,” Green insisted. I rolled my eyes and continued.

  “—but they will get to see us. They can meet me, meet Bracken, see that we’re not some sort of freak show that sucked you into our evil clutches, okay?”

  Nicky looked at me and grinned shakily. “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” he said gratefully, and we bumped shoulders in the confines of our little group hug in perfect companionship.

  “Uhm, Nick, do you want to invite Eric?” I asked after a moment. Eric was his Bracken, his lover for him and only him. I knew that I wouldn’t have been happy if my parents had never met Bracken—or Nicky, for that matter, but especially Green and Bracken.

  Nick looked at me again, this time leaning away from me to where Green was offering a comforting shoulder as well.

  “You know I’m more gay than straight?” he said after a quiet moment, and I blinked at the phrasing.

  “I guess so, yeah.” It had occurred to me that, given that his one choice of a lover had been male, that maybe he swung that way more than he thought. “But we really don’t, you know, put shit into those words here.”

  Nicky nodded. “We don’t here, but I’ve had to, talking to Mom and Dad. I don’t think I could stand it if they were as awful to Eric as I think they’re going to be to you and Bracken. You guys—you’re my leaders too. I’d fight for you to the death, even if I wasn’t sleeping with you, and I think they’d get that. But Eric, he’s… he’s my boyfriend, and that’s not going to fly. If I still want them in my life after this summer, I’ll introduce them to Eric, but—”

  “But you want to protect him, because you can’t protect us,” Green said gently, and Nicky raised their now twined fingers to his lips and kissed them.

  “I love you all so much,” he said at last, his voice a little choked. “You… my life could have sucked so badly after we got bound. But it’s really wonderful. I want you to know that I love you—even Bracken, you loose-lipped asshole—and I’m so grateful you’re willing to do this for me—”

  He was getting all choked and misty, and I didn’t know what to do or say for him. So Bracken hugged him tighter and Green stroked his hair, and I sat there and leaned my head on his shoulder, and together we were the family we’d forged so strongly in the past year and a half.

  “We love you too, Nicky,” I said softly, and those were the only words in the room for a while.

  That night was a group bed night. We just sort of melted from our hug on the floor to the room I shared with Bracken as a way to reassure Nicky and cement our peculiar, many-faceted, and strange relationship. Bracken made slow, urgent love to me, and Green and Nicky did a similar thing next to us. Then Nicky and I were rolled together in the center and surrounded by big strong sidhe men who pattered our backs with kisses and stroked our hair from our faces as we drifted off to sleep.

  When I saw Nicky’s eyes glistening a little in the moonlight, I took his hands between my breasts and kissed his knuckles. “We love you, sweetheart,” I said softly, “but I think this sort of thing is a little hard to explain to Mom and Dad.”

  Nick’s sleepy grin was watery, but sound. “We don’t have to explain this,” he agreed, back-spooning into Green’s lovely warmth. “As long as we know it ourselves, no one has to know this but us.”

  It was a good way to close out the night, and a very good thing he knew his own mind before the whole thing cymbal-crashed the way it ended up doing. There was surprising strength and wisdom in Nicky. I was so glad he was ours.

  Bracken: Knight’s Restraint

  GODDAMMIT. WE were this fucking close to getting out of school without meeting up with the revolting cockroach responsible for so much angst.

  As it was, I barely escaped killing him.

  Cory was not allowed alone at school. She was peripherally aware of this, but she had no idea how tightly our days were orchestrated around not even letting her go to the bathroom without Renny in attendance to make sure she was not ambushed.

  The entire reason we continued to let Jack come with us to school was to facilitate this. He was one more person on campus who could take one more class that didn’t fit on anyone else’s schedule. The only reason I got to see Hallow was that Renny had an English class with Cory while I was in session, and Jack walked her from the English class to the poli-sci class that we all shared. I had the feeling that Green and Hallow had done a complicated dance of their own so that our schedules would mesh as well as they did.

  So when I forgot my backpack at Hallow’s, I felt comfortable knowing she was with Jack and ran irritably back toward the row of offices in the crappy old English building across from Douglass Hall.

  As I entered the glass doors and rounded the corner to the hallway, I barreled into a squat little man with a comb-over, thick glasses, and a scrubbed-shiny face, pink as a baby’s, with jowls and a pudgy chin.

  He bounced off my chest and looked up at me in startlement. Then the most abhorrent smile crossed his face.

  “I know you,” he crooned, and I blinked. We hadn’t been told what Fields looked like, but this little man was wrapped in polyester and stinking of sweat and too much cologne. The thought of him touching Green made me want to vomit. “You look just like the other two.” And the thought that he could see through our glamour made my skin itch.

  “You know nothing about me,” I growled and made to pass him. He was obviously coming from Hallow’s, and since he wasn’t in the office and I needed to be, I might as well get what I came for.

  “I know what I don’t get,” he said with a leer. I knew I’d regret it, but I turned to him anyway.

  “What’s that?” Ugh… could I not just keep this short?

&nbs
p; “Why her? Man, you guys…. I don’t know what you look like really, but in person, you’ve got it going on!” He talked excitedly, with his hands making random, useless gestures and his pudgy little face squinching up. His eyes practically disappeared in his squint. “If I looked like you, I’d be screwing some high-class women! Why do all of you gather around her like she’s some hot-shit queen bee or something? I mean, you should see what this professor guy is willing to do to protect her—it’s got to be illegal in half the sta—”

  He couldn’t finish, because my hand was around his throat. His little feet were kicking their shiny shoes against the cinderblock of the old wall of the English building, and his face was turning purple.

  I heard a meep behind me and realized that we had company. I dropped him abruptly but kept my hand suspended three inches above his heart. I glared power at the perky young woman in the miniskirt and fleeked hair who had spotted us, and she clapped a hand to her head with a whine. Wonderful. Wiped memory and instant migraine, and I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for her.

  “Do you have any other observations to make about my beloved, Mr. Fields?” I asked, wanting an excuse to suck his heart out of his chest with my blood power. “Would you like to call her plain? Perhaps comment on her lack of breeding? By all means, tell me she wasn’t worth sacrificing my immortality for. Because right now, I’m holding my temper by a thread. All I need—” I punctuated by tugging at the throbbing in his chest with my power, and I watched as his face turned white and a little trickle of blood came to the corner of his mouth. “—all I really desire at this moment” (tug) “is an excuse” (tug) “to cut” (tug) “that” (tug) “thread.”

  I let go of him and stepped back, smiling a little as he fell to his knees and coughed blood onto his short-sleeved, pointy-collared shirt.

  “Just—” He coughed. “—tell me why her! I’m trying to write a story here and she makes shitty copy. Why her?”

  “Because,” I said, looking down on him without any pity at all, “she would kill you to spare me the foulness of your sweat. You’re a fool if you don’t love a woman like that. You’re a fool if you think glory or fame will replace her.”