Rampant, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  “I need to be up before dusk,” she grumbled, and I agreed. “And I’m sorry, Nicky, but we’re not going to invite your parents for dinner—not tonight.”

  “Can I still eat with you?” he asked mournfully, snagging a towel he’d found at the shoreline and wrapping it around his waist. She took his hand in her free hand and leaned her head on his shoulder.

  “I can’t imagine a thing you could do that would make you unwelcome at your family’s table,” she promised. He kissed the top of her wet, frizzy head and looked at me.

  “She’s really tired,” he told me. “I should have made her nap.”

  “Contrary to all evidence, I am a grown-up,” Cory sniffed, then stubbed her toe on a rock hard enough to start it bleeding. “Oh, fuck it all, anyway!” she snapped in exasperation. We all looked up in time to catch Nicky’s parents coming out of their cabin with their eyes open in horror.

  There was a shocked silence, and Cory turned a green smile to Nicky. “Swearing’s not so big in your house, is it?”

  Nicky shook his hair out of his eyes ruefully. “Not so much, no.”

  “Fuck…,” she hissed even as I swung her up into my arms, heedless of the blood running from her toe. “Bracken, I’m not helpless!”

  “No, but you’re mine and I get few enough chances to care for you. Besides, you can blame this on me and miss out on the social awkwardness you were about to walk into!”

  “Arrogant bastard,” she grumbled, and I didn’t argue.

  “Owwieee!” said Mr. Kestrel on the approach. “That looks like a bad stub—did you do that all by yourself?”

  “Bracken’s making it worse than it is,” she told him, watching the blood drip steadily into the dust. “But if Nicky helps me dress it, it’ll be okay.”

  The skinny young woman emerged from their room in time to hear this.

  “Well, here we were, thinking you were the help,” she said with a forced laugh, “and it looks like the whole world really does fall all over you when you stub your toe.”

  Cory smiled sourly. “Only my corner of it. Now, if you’ll excuse us—I’m bleeding, and it’s icky.”

  “Uhm,” Nicky’s mother interrupted apologetically, “I was wondering what you all were doing for food tonight? We thought there’d be… something nearby?”

  Cory nodded. “There’re some restaurants about fifteen minutes from here—you can eat there. We brought some food in today from Redding, snacks and things.” She glanced at Nicky with her own apology. “If Nicky wants, he can share his with you.”

  Nicky shook his head. “You’d better bring your own,” he said shortly, and Cory gave him an appreciative smile.

  “So, what—are you all eating some super-special weird people food now?” Annette—Cory had said that was her name—asked, her lips curled off her teeth like a ferret’s.

  I wanted to snarl in her face, but Cory answered first, and I was so proud of her in that moment it made me tolerate the repulsive woman’s presence for far longer than we should have. “My people take breaking bread very seriously,” she said clearly, “and I will not ask them to eat with someone they do not trust.” Another smile, this one sincerely apologetic. “And now we really do have to get in and take care of this. Darn it, Bracken, you’ve made me all dizzy.”

  As I charged through the door to grab a towel and deposit her on the big bed, I heard Nicky’s father say miserably, “Well, dear, I can’t say you didn’t earn that for us,” but I wasn’t waiting for Terry Kestrel’s reply.

  NICKY DID a fair job with the bandage, and by the time she’d showered to wash the lake out of her hair, put on a T-shirt, and settled down under our watchful eyes, the bleeding had stopped and I could lie next to her and hold her. We turned off the lights and left on the ceiling fan, and the paneled room was cool and restful.

  “She’s going to be awesome in front of the vampires!” Nicky enthused quietly in the cool dark even as she slept.

  I grinned at him. “Yeah, but she’s going to be a basket case until it’s over. You may want to go outside and take a ‘Cory break,’ or she’ll make you crazy.”

  Nicky nodded and sighed. “No more’n my folks.”

  I could only shrug in commiseration. “Well, do what you can, brother. You know I feel for you.”

  Nicky bent over the bed and kissed her cheek in the quiet. “You all do,” he said. “It may be the only thing that gets me through this while talking to them at all.”

  “Nick,” I said as he started to leave, figuring he’d need to know this. He stopped at the door and turned around. “She’s scared of the water. She’ll go out there, because she doesn’t want anyone to know, but keep an eye out for her.”

  Nicky blinked. He’d been out with us to Clementine and Sugar Pine before, so I could see his confusion.

  “It’s because she can’t see her feet,” I elaborated, nodding toward the scar on her ankle. “Something grabbed her when she couldn’t see.”

  Nicky’s eyes widened, and he nodded at the scar too. “I always wondered. What was it?”

  I grimaced. “A suicidal vampire in the middle of the afternoon,” I said, and he made an appreciative sound. He stood there for a moment, like there was something else for me to say, then shook his head.

  “Of course. You’re telling the story,” he said in disgust after a moment. “I’ll have to ask her for it later—she does a better job.”

  I snorted. “She flew out of the water and yanked off his arm, the damned thing combusted around her ankle, and she fell back in. Arturo went in and yanked off its head, same thing happened, but Arturo didn’t almost die of pain and shock.” I rolled my eyes. “Green healed her. It sucked. I almost lost my fucking mind. So did Adrian. Green yawed off to the wild-fucking-blue to get a bead on what in the hell was going on, but in the end it fucked us anyway. What else did you want to know?”

  Nicky blinked, and a slow grin warmed his pretty features. “Bracken, I truly love you. I’m not sure which box you’d put it in if we were human, but you are a fucking treasure.”

  “Fuck off,” I snapped, and he laughed his way out of the room.

  I lay there watching as the long tree shadows lengthened, tasting the melancholy of late afternoon in a place where the sun and the stars were that much closer to your face when you peered at the sky.

  The heat outside was horrible, deadening, life-sucking, unless you were submerged in the blissful water, but that muddy water was so worth it! I looked at my beloved—her cheek was pillowed on the back of one hand so she faced me, and her other arm was crooked behind her back. If she’d been sleeping in jeans, it would have been tucked into her back pocket.

  I felt a sudden whisper of our fragility here. She depended on Nicky and me for life force, but Nicky was distracted and I was… weak. I was too weak with the heat for many of the things she depended on me for. It was only her—now she was the one who needed to be strong for us, though we had always tried so hard to protect her even from herself.

  I gave a sigh and settled down in a position that mirrored hers so I could watch her sleep. Perhaps Green would have gotten on his laptop, and Nicky might have picked up a book. I might even do those things later, but not now. I was the only one who got to do this. It was my right and my privilege.

  Cory: Research

  THE SUN pounded down brutally on my back, over my shoulders, and in my face. There was no escaping it and no reprieve, and my lungs seared with every breath.

  Fucking Redding.

  It was wrong, I was sure, to base all of my assumptions about a town on the fact that the sun seemed to want to wipe it out with bad vibes alone, but there you had it. My animal self had felt the sun and decided that any solar wave that could cook food without benefit of a microwave sucked ass. It wasn’t fair, but neither was the feeling that my brain was poaching in my skull like an egg in a saucepan.

  Jack and LaMark stood on either side of me, throwing out their own animal heat, and I fought the urge to shake them off my sh
oulders like a dog would shake water. They were our best students and our best researchers, and their help would be invaluable.

  Besides—it was damned nice of them to leave the lake, where everybody seemed to be having such a swimming time, and come here with me to the Redding branch of the Redding Public Library.

  The building was modern, with some horizontal aluminum bars shading the west-facing entrance. Inside, besides the quiet, the carpeting, the wooden tables, and the suppressed hush that you can find in most libraries, there was the most important thing of all.

  Air-conditioning.

  With a big sigh, I blessed the innovations of my own species. We could be a pain in the ass sometimes—but dammit, could we build a machine.

  With the weight of the heat off my brain, I spoke for the first time since we’d parked a block down and walked.

  “I looked the library up online,” I said, “and they’ve got a newspaper database here. How about LaMark and I take the newspaper database, and Jack, you chat up the locals and see if there’s any buzz about a missing family, right?”

  Jack grunted and then looked at me with his mouth quirked in puzzlement. “Because my people skills have proven soooo useful to date?”

  I grimaced. “Oh Goddess, you’re right. We should have brought Katy.”

  Jacky shook his head. “Katy has no subtlety, and Teague was always the best interrogator when we went out on runs—which was why it was a good thing Green always did the groundwork first.”

  I grunted and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Damned straight. LaMark, how about you?”

  LaMark looked around at the mostly white population in the library. “My lady, I haven’t seen another black man in three days. I think you’re probably our best bet here.”

  I let out a sound that was suspiciously like a whine. “I’m not good with my own species,” I complained. “Haven’t we had a demonstration of that already?” I turned accusing eyes at LaMark. “You’ve seen that, right? Remember last year? Chloe, Max’s sister—any of this ringing the ‘runaway’ bell?”

  LaMark shook his head and tried not to laugh. “Now that’s who you should have brought with you. Max. He would be able to ask those questions—”

  “Just like a cop!” Jacky supplied for me.

  I nodded at LaMark. “It’s true. He is a cop. He’s the only guy I know who could manage to live at the hill and be a cop at the same time.” Besides, Max and Renny were out with Teague, “finding” the bodies that we’d discovered yesterday. I hoped they got a good look at the caves—just for the hell of it, actually, because the idea was so damned cool.

  “Okay, okay,” I finally said, in answer to their unvoiced conclusion. “I’ll do it. Cory and her native species shall engage. It’s gonna suck.”

  And with that, we went up to the desk to figure out what we had to sign to use their search engines.

  Three hours later—after offending one librarian by accidentally suggesting that Redding was chock-full of serial killers and completely titillating another one, who apparently watched too many crime shows—we had a disturbing set of facts and an overwhelming urge to get back to the quiet of the cabins on the lake. It was the closest thing we had to home right now, and after being bumped by strangers all day in an unfamiliar place, I could see all of us—even Jacky, who had taken a while to get comfortable at the hill—itching to be someplace home.

  The news itself was bad.

  “Three families in the last two years?” I asked again. We had each found one. It was staggering, and that didn’t count families in other parts of the state. Anywhere a vampire could drive in a night, that was this predator’s hunting ground—I wasn’t naive enough to think we were the only ones who’d come up with the special compartments in the bottoms of the hearse and SUV.

  “If he’s got a small plane,” LaMark theorized over my shoulder, “that could be a hell of a lot of territory.”

  Oh fuck. What kind of moron was I to not even think about planes?

  “Way to go, bird boy. There goes my good night’s sleep!”

  Jacky grunted. “And that’s only the kids with families.”

  Now that, I had thought of. “I’m thinking that’s part of his… you know, glitch.” The word was “pathology”—but that sounded like I knew what I was talking about, and I didn’t. “I think he likes to take kids”—because there had been boys as well—“from their families.” I swallowed. “And these are the families that got press. There are probably some poorer families out there that didn’t.”

  “You know what else this means,” Jacky cautioned, and I nodded grimly.

  It meant that there were more Gretchens out there.

  “Maybe they died with the sunrise,” LaMark said with hope. I nodded just to do something. Some of them might have, but all of them?

  “No,” I said, finding myself unable to lie, not about this. “Not all of them. Some of them are probably in the kiss. Tomorrow night we’re going to have to keep our eyes open.”

  We were feeling pretty grim and stern as we left the library, so much so that I almost didn’t recognize our “civilian” when he passed us near the entrance. He nodded and smiled, though, and as I was doing the automatic return nod and smile, his face clicked.

  “Hey!” I tried to add some brightness to my tone. It would be lonely, spending all that time at the cabins without friends.

  “You have no idea what my name is, do you?” he asked cheekily. I felt LaMark and Jack chafe at my side, but I ignored them.

  “Not a clue. But you know I look like a giant dorkfish in the lake and that I’m clumsier than a drunk prom queen on fuck-me heels, so I figure you rate a ‘hey!’”

  That earned me a near-blinding flash of some seriously impressive hardware. “I’m Sam,” he said, running his tongue across a spacer. He didn’t offer to shake hands, maybe because he was still a kid, but he did look at me expectantly.

  “I’m Cory Kirk….” I stopped, and I heard the guys on either side of me suck in their breaths. I’d almost spilled part of my name to him—the part I didn’t hardly give anybody. For one thing, in my world it could be dangerous. Names were power, and one of the few things I had in my puny mortal favor was that my name was so damned long, it was hard to know enough of it to control me.

  “Cory Kirk?” the boy asked slyly. “Like Captain Kirk, except Cory Kirk?”

  I nodded and figured that it was probably a better half name than my full name. “Pretty much!” I nodded brightly. “Did you get so bored you decided to read books?”

  The boy shook his head. “Libraries rent video games too, you know.”

  I blinked. “I did not know that,” I told him bemusedly, “and now I do. You have a good day, then. We’ll probably see you around.”

  The boy nodded. There was something sage and wise about it, as though he was a very youthful king or a very old and mischievous god. “I’m sure you’ll be wary of me, Captain Cory.” He smirked, which took some of the mystery away, but I squinted after him as he entered the library, and the guys urged me back into the glare.

  And I almost ran into two small boys I knew.

  “Gavin? Graeme?” Shit-a-fuckin’-fire, I really was running the Circus of the Damned, wasn’t I?

  “Are we in a bad Nick sitcom?” LaMark muttered behind me. Before I could tell him that he watched way too much television in the Avians’ aerie, I found myself the recipient of two enthusiastic hugs.

  “Hey, guys!” I said to Grace’s grandchildren as they peppered me with questions.

  “Hey, Lady Cory, what are you doing here? We’re still coming in August, right? Mama said that’s when we’re doing Camp Green, so we’ll be there. We’re still coming, right? Where’s Bracken? Is Green here? What about Nicky? Grandma’s not here, is she? Did you bring Arturo? What about the sprites? We miss the sprites—we never had to fold our clothes!”

  I didn’t have a chance to answer even one question before Graeme, the youngest, and the one with the clearest, most dire
ct reasoning, stopped short. “You’re not supposed to be here, right? We’re not supposed to…. Uh-oh.”

  Yeah. “Uh-oh” was little-kid speak for “Oh, fuck!”

  “Do we know you?” asked a thin-faced, lanky, freckled woman who looked like a bitter, sour version of the vampire we all loved so well.

  I smiled winningly and hoped that for once I could act like a human and not a complete freak.

  “We’re counselors from Camp Green,” I told her truthfully. “We just came up on a group camping trip. The boys saw us and said hi, that’s all.”

  Chloe eyed me distastefully, some vestige of her wiped memory telling her that I was undesirable around her children.

  “You’re not the only counselor, I trust,” she said after a moment, and I smiled widely.

  “No, ma’am, there’s a lot of us.” Damned straight, there was. Those two boys spent two weeks every summer on Green’s hill being spoiled silly by creatures whose existence was doubted by man.

  The boys weren’t stupid—they backed away innocently, trying to look more “publicly appropriate” as Chloe shepherded them away. They gave me one last glance behind their shoulders, when Mom wasn’t looking, and I waved and winked and treasured their secret grins as they walked inside the library with their mother.

  As the door closed behind them, we stood at the crosswalk ready to get back to the cabins with every fiber of our beings. I shook my head in wonderment and said, “Okay, LaMark, since you’re the expert on bad sitcoms, what’s going to happen to us now?”

  The light changed while he was still thinking about it, and we started across the street, where we were almost killed by a Dodge Caravan barreling through the intersection before he could answer.

  I saw it in slow motion—the fortysomething man behind the wheel looking panicked, stepping on his brakes fruitlessly—and I knew, knew without thinking, that the three of us could not get out of his way fast enough. Luckily the panic-shield of power I threw up around us stayed intact even as we dashed for safety, and it clanged like the gong of the damned as the car clipped it and careened into the intersection, where it smacked a green Chrysler in the rear quarter panel. The two vehicles spun, hit again front to front, and ground to a halt.