Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  I went to turn away and almost ran over Hallow, who was looking at the revolting little cockroach with a pained expression on his face.

  “Bracken,” he complained. “You couldn’t just walk on past him, could you?”

  “He insulted her,” I said stonily. “Nobody talks that way about her.”

  Hallow’s eyebrows met his hairline, and his expression as it centered on the irritating human was all disgust. “Nolan—we tolerate you, do you understand me?”

  Nolan Fields’s eyes widened as they fell on Hallow, and Hallow’s expression was all theater. I’d seen it in humans who liked to wear leather and chains in bed, and I was not fond of those games. “Yes, Professor,” he said eagerly, bending his head and averting his eyes.

  I fought the urge to make a gagging gesture, because that would spoil the game, and asked politely if I could get my backpack from the office. Hallow rolled his eyes and sneered at the little man who was, for all intents and purposes, groveling at our feet.

  “Nolan, I tire of you. Leave us.”

  The flirty little leer that writhed across Fields’s face almost made me gag for real, but he picked up the briefcase I’d made him drop and simpered down the hallway.

  Sometimes my beloved’s vernacular bleeds through.

  “Gross,” I said with feeling.

  “Too nice and yet too true,” Hallow quoted, leading the way down the hall to his office. I grimaced.

  “What is it with you people and that play?” I asked rhetorically, but I knew. It was all about leadership and what not to do—sort of the anti-handbook for effective faerie hill administration.

  Hallow knew I knew, so he didn’t even bother to answer as I grabbed my pack—which was weighted down with seven tons of her stuff that she didn’t know I snuck out of her pack as the day revolved. She might think she was healthy and strong, and I certainly worried about her less than I had, but she was still fragile and still mortal, and I got to carry some of her burdens—it was my privilege to do so, dammit if it wasn’t!—and went to walk out the door.

  An unsatisfied sound from Hallow stopped me, and I turned.

  The elegant-looking sidhe seemed to be uncomfortable, and upset.

  “She won’t look at me,” he said out of nowhere, looking into outer space somewhere beyond the end of his desk. I regretted not sucking Nolan Fields’s heart out of his chest and into my hand.

  “She feels like we failed you,” I answered baldly, and it surprised him enough to look up.

  “Goddess,” he swore softly. “A year and a half I’ve tried to be her counselor, and I still don’t know her.”

  I rolled my eyes. Join the club. “She’ll kill him for you,” I said, knowing—I hoped—how to comfort our people.

  It worked. His smile was cold and wolfish and almost as gleeful as a child’s.

  “And that,” he said happily, “is what makes it all worth it.”

  I grabbed my pack, bobbed my head, and ran for political science. I was rather amazed that my beloved had such a hard time with this class—she seemed to have mastered the practical exam, after all.

  Cory: Queen Forward

  LITHA CAME and went, a celebration of the most awful hole in our souls, the gaping rip in our chests that would never stop bleeding.

  The morning of the day before Litha, one of Green’s favorite sidhe burst into Green’s room, his heart overspilling about a man he’d apparently been courting for the last thirteen years, and who was now dying of cancer. It almost killed me to send Renny, Max, and Lambent out to help Whim—but even I could feel the terrible psychic drain of the anniversary pressing against my soul. But I helped them come up with a solution and prayed for the best. Whim—who was aptly named—had such a pure heart in spite of his fickle sense of concentration that I thought his best might just be good enough for his beloved Charlie. But the plan and the resources were the best I could do.

  As it was, Green and Bracken and I sat up on top of the hill that night in vigil, the one night Adrian would never be there for us—the excruciating, cathartic reminder that our beloved was really gone and that his ghost was one step removed from an illusion, conjured by our screaming hearts.

  And then, like Eid after the lunar month of Ramadan, the next evening we strung lights across the garden, played faerie music and rock and roll until the canyon rang with it, and partied and made love and celebrated the lives we had, the precious binding that supported our hearts and our hill.

  Whim and his beloved Charlie even came out of their room to play a bit. Although Charlie stayed werekitty the entire time out of shyness in such a new place, Whim’s color-changing hair moved from brilliant sunshine to blinding turquoise in a rainbow spectrum of pure joy.

  Three days later, we packed up what felt like half the hill and took off for Redding.

  It was hot—blazingly, body-meltingly, skin-scorchingly, stick-to-the-upholstery-even-in-the-air-conditioning, can’t-move-until-nine-at-night hot. The sun was a white blinding cloud of distortion waves in a sky bleached yellow by its fury, and the entire state quailed and wilted under its ire.

  Elves don’t do well in the heat.

  When Green had been in charge of his faerie hill and his faerie hill alone, he’d been able to regulate the temperature with no problem, but once we’d expanded our power sphere so far and the four of us became bound, that ability had grown more complex. Green and I were all charged and amped and shit before we left, so Green was able to keep the temperature on the hill somewhat tolerable for the more delicate fey, but with me gone… well, just like a lot of my power came from Green, a lot of his power was bound up in me. I liked to think that as I got older, he would be able to bind up some of that power in Nicky so the hill wouldn’t be left completely defenseless should I die, but Green, for all his strength…. Whatever. I refused to think about that now, but I did worry.

  “It’s a hundred and five in the shade, beloved,” I said fretfully, watching as the vampire’s SUV was packed during a sweaty midnight. Outside the hill, it was easily ninety-five degrees. Inside the hill, Green kept it to eighty, but it took a toll. He’d needed to sleep as long as I did since the beginning of June, when the heat had taken over and blanketed NorCal in a suffocation of sweat and dust.

  Without me, he would be taxed to his limit, and there were so many things to maintain. The weather, the secrecy, the geas that made people forget where we were—all of it depended on Green, who, for all his greatness, was just one sidhe, a one-man umbrella against the broiling fury of a fucked-up Mother Nature.

  “Maybe we should postpone, you think?” I didn’t want to whine, but I had been dreading this for a month.

  “No,” he said softly, a smile on his face like he knew what I was doing.

  “At least don’t let me take everybody. Please….”

  “You’re not taking any of the sidhe,” he said quietly. “Only Lambent and Bracken—and Bracken would be going with you anyway. I’ll be fine.”

  “We could leave Teague and the werewolves….” Jacky and Katy were coming, for intricate, convoluted interpersonal reasons that not even Teague could explain. It had something to do with Teague just about to maybe let Jacky out of his crystal box to go out on some runs, and Katy not wanting to be left behind while I went to “be all ninja bitch and shit!” In short, it had something to do with the fact that Teague still hadn’t completely bonded to his new family—and after some awkward conversations with Hallow, I didn’t have the heart to tell them that he might never bond completely.

  Apparently Green and I were his alphas. He owed his allegiance to us so completely that it was like being married to his job. It didn’t mean he loved his people any less. It just meant—and it was so infuriatingly, typically Teague!—that he needed a higher cause to find himself worthy of them, and we—our little collective, Green’s hill and its royalty—were it. And so he still got involuntary hard-ons at inappropriate or, really, appropriate times, and no amount of us telling him to talk to them would make
it any better.

  He had to tell them. They had to believe in him. It was that simple.

  And now we all had to put up with their funky/hot/sexy/dysfunctional dynamic in the middle of trying to be a royal entourage.

  Lovely.

  Add to that Max and Renny—because Renny apparently said so, dammit—and Phillip, Marcus, and Kyle, who had begged for a chance to go. Lambent, Mario, and LaMark were happy to be in my entourage again. Nicky had to be happy, since it was his parents we were meeting, and, yeah. We took up three SUVs and a hearse, since the hearse was doubling as a darkling in the middle of the salted frying pan that was Shasta County in the summer.

  “I don’t need all these people…,” I tried again. I was used to going out with one SUV’s worth of people. If too many wanted to go, they usually all did Rock-Paper-Scissors or kick-him-in-the-shins until it was down to one vehicle. Now we were taking three SUVs and a hearse? “I mean, Goddess, Green, I could pack up the entire cast of Lord of the Rings in less than four cars!”

  “You are the queen of a small-sized country,” he said quietly, “but it’s a dangerous country. If you’re dealing with a vampire island in the middle of your country, you need to look both threatening and respectful, and you can’t look threatening and respectful without a tremendous amount of pageantry. You know that, luv.”

  “I know this is fucking ridiculous, that’s what I know.” I scowled. “You need us here. The weather is our enemy, and we’re kiting off to someplace where the weather is worse, the people hate me, and there’s an entire kiss of vampires who would rather kill me than the pedophile in their midst.”

  “We don’t know that for certain,” he said reluctantly, and I pulled in my temper, because he was right. It would probably be best that I walked into an unknown and unblooded kiss of vampires with an open mind. As my little exercise in menstrual chaos had proved, vampires were predatory creatures, incensed by blood. I was lucky that all of my vampires still behaved like humans, or at least appeared driven by human motivations and a willingness to keep their vulnerabilities in spite of their strengths. I didn’t know what these vampires would be like, and I shouldn’t make assumptions.

  We both knew it was a very real possibility that these people—who were sort of mine because of Green and sort of not because I hadn’t established any authority there—wouldn’t be thrilled to see me. That’s why I hadn’t grumbled about the three vampires in attendance. Grace had wanted to come too—in fact, she’d wanted to come very badly. Only Arturo’s gentle insistence—and, I suspect, some rather spectacular moves in bed—had managed to convince her that the odds of being recognized in the town she’d grown up and died in were too great.

  I was both sorry and glad he’d succeeded—if I was ever going to need a mother figure, it would be when I faced Nicky’s parents.

  The very thought made my stomach churn. Green, who had listened this past month to the things I didn’t say, knew exactly what my sour expression meant.

  “They’ll adore you, luv,” he reassured, bending down in the thick air of the garage and nuzzling my hair.

  It was a tribute to how much the man loved me that he didn’t bend over with cramps and sweats when he said that.

  “They’ll call me the whore that seduced their son,” I said with pursed lips, and then I glared dourly when Green burst out laughing.

  “That’s unlikely!” he chuckled. I just shook my head.

  “Green, these people are just like my parents, except my parents said ‘Fuck it’ and made it to the wedding. This is going to be seven buckets of fugly, and about all I’m confident I can do about it is scrape Nicky back up and put him together at the end.”

  And there they were, my worst fears, splat out on the pavement between us. I hadn’t spoken them aloud since this plan had been conceived, but something in me wouldn’t let us go, wouldn’t let me leave the hill unless Green knew all of my heart before I left.

  He pulled me in quietly, bathed me in his blessing, let me touch his strong chest and bury my nose in the skin of his neck, and comforted me with all of that love, all of that lovely confidence that I could do no wrong.

  Of course I could—I mean, we both knew I could fuck this up in unfathomable ways—but he believed in me, in my intentions, and Goddess, if that wasn’t worth giving your soul for, I didn’t know what was.

  “I don’t want to go,” I said at last, childishly, because the time when either of us could make that sort of decision was past.

  “I know you don’t.”

  And that was all he could give me, but it was his, so it was enough.

  GREEN HAD left me a lot in the last year and a half. At least once a month, he was gone from the hill for a span of days, if not a week. It sucked. Really sucked.

  Now I got to see it from his side of things as we put the last goddamned thing in the last goddamned car.

  “You can always send the sprites if you forget something, luv.”

  “But not yarn, Green—they won’t know which one I’m talking about.”

  “Are you really going to use all that?”

  “Doesn’t matter if I use it. What matters is that when my nerves are about to break, I have exactly the project I need!”

  And suddenly I knew—knew even before they loaded me in the passenger seat and I clung to Green trying to be stoic and failing horribly; knew before Green kissed me too soundly to cry, before he kissed Nicky brief and sweet; knew before he shook hands and did the “man embrace” with Bracken; knew just then, at that conversation, that leaving was worse than staying.

  Leaving wasn’t just leaving Green. It was leaving home, leaving every reminder of Green—the smell of his clothes, the knowledge of his room just down the hall from mine, the grove we had created with Adrian….

  Leaving was leaving everything I loved except the people I took with me.

  And Green left without me and Nicky all the time.

  Sucked for him—sucked for us all.

  I heaved a sigh that threatened to sink the car into the pavement and looked over at Bracken as he drove. There was something in his expression as we cruised through the night, the silver canyon to our left and the hard face of the filleted hill to our right. His lean mouth was parted slightly, and his lips curved up. His pond-shadow eyes were wide in the starlight, and his face thrust forward eagerly.

  Bracken was enjoying this.

  I blinked.

  “You’ve never been beyond San Francisco, have you?” I asked curiously. Bracken, with his great size and great heart, flashed a child’s grin at me, all eagerness and excitement.

  “No,” he said with a smile. “You?”

  I had, actually—LA, Oregon, Canada—school trips, camping with parents. It didn’t make me a world traveler—in fact, it had mostly made me want to get farther away. Funny, because now a simple trip to Redding felt like exile.

  “Didn’t Adrian take you to Redding?” I asked with a little smile.

  Bracken shook his head. I couldn’t be sure in the dim light, but I think he flushed. “You have to understand—when we were… uhm… exclusive, I was barely old enough to be let out of Green’s hill. And even when everybody lightened up a little bit… well, Adrian said that if two men walked down the street in Redding touching like we’d touch, they wouldn’t need to be nonhuman to be chased by pitchforks and torches.”

  I grinned at him. “Sort of like now,” I said brightly, and he shrugged.

  “Since I’m probably not going to be touching any men in public this time round, I don’t think it will be a problem,” he stated with a lift of his eyebrows and a quirk of his lips, and I laughed.

  “So you’re excited to go,” I marveled. His grin lit up the inside of the car.

  “It’s an adventure,” he said simply, and much of my misery fell away.

  “We do okay on adventures,” I said thoughtfully. Behind us, Nicky shifted a little in his spot in the middle of the car, so deep in his iPod and his own thoughts that it was unlikel
y he even knew we were talking. Max and Renny were taking the wayback, and they were having a soft conversation I couldn’t hear.

  “We do fucking fabulous,” my beloved said with a smile.

  “And we do fabulous fucking,” I told him, because he’d given me a sweet setup and he wanted to hear me happy.

  We crossed the Foresthill bridge then. Its terrifying height and double-lane span looked alien and fragile in the moonlight—a green metal spiderweb to transport steel scarab beetles. I plugged my iPod into the sound system and looked at Bracken. He didn’t need music to stay awake at this odd hour, and he was driving.

  “Preferences?” I asked, thinking I’d like to hear some old redneck rock, myself.

  “Green Day,” replied my beloved, reading my mind as he did so often. I loved his eyes in the moonlight—they promised mystery and magic, and they always delivered.

  I whirled my finger around the controls and settled the thing in its holder just as Billie Joe’s first syncopated notes filled the car, screaming about an entirely different holiday.

  All right, then.

  AFTER YOU passed Sacramento and took the sharp V-turn up the state, much of I-5 looked like some idiot put a ruler between Sacramento and Redding, drew a straight line, and said, “Og put road there!”

  Much of the road was a simple straight shot between two points, through big square-cut acres of farmland and horse country and big flat expanses. Nope, not a curve or hardly a hill in sight—straight as a Kansas virgin. Which is why I got to drive.

  People hauled ass on the road to Redding. We stopped for gas about half an hour after Sacramento, and after loading up on quickie-mart cuisine—because, you know, you can’t get enough Diet Coke and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, ever!—I parked myself behind the wheel, put the iPod on some Dropkick Murphys and AC/DC, and took hold of our little convoy for the next two hours.