by Amy Lane
Teague turned bright red from the pale flesh of his bare stomach to the roots of his hair. “It’s a plan,” he defended weakly.
I snorted and turned back down the hallway. “It’s a sucky one. For one thing, even if you could do it—and I don’t think you can—it’s not going to work.”
“Sure I can do it,” he said, his voice hard and flat. He was trying to convince me he was a badass. I already knew he was a badass—that wasn’t the point.
“Look, I know physically you can do it, and I could really give a fuck how you kill that shitbag. That’s not the point. The point is, Teague, we both know you’re a better man than that. You’ll kill, yes, out of necessity, and in this case I’m willing to concede this guy has to die, and there has to be some theater so his buddies will go home and tell their buddies to leave us the fuck alone. It’s gone that far, and I don’t have to like it to see that we need it. But you’re not into torture. And even if you were, just for this one time, just to drive Jacky away, you wouldn’t do it, because it would be a lie. You’re a better man than lying to him to get him to do the right thing. You’ll let him see the real you and make his own decision, and that’s why the plan won’t work.”
His voice was thick with all the emotion he hadn’t let loose with his mates. “And why’s that?”
“Because he loves you, dumbshit. You could probably eat the bad guy a piece at a time while Dumbfuck watched you and screamed for mercy, and Jacky would be there with a napkin and ketchup. So do what you have to, be all manly if you have to, but be out in the front room in forty-five minutes for dinner, movies, and fattening shit, or I’m having Green drag you out.” I stopped in front of Mario’s door and gave a courtesy knock.
“Did you hear that, birdman?”
The door opened, and Mario arched his eyebrows in disgust. His blue-black hair was combed back from his high forehead, and he was wearing a tight shirt and loose jeans. He was looking mostly none the worse for wear after his showdown with a rabid werewolf two nights before.
“Yeah, Princess, I got it. Don’t worry about bothering Green. I’ll drag wolfboy out and watch with you, ’kay?”
I smiled at him gratefully, glad he’d read my cue and admitted he’d heard the whole conversation. “Sounds like a plan. Don’t be late!”
“Who says I don’t want to be alone?” Teague demanded, once he’d found his tongue and his bearings there in Mario’s doorway.
“Who says you get to be?” I snapped back. “As fucking if!” Then I turned around and kept walking, enjoying his grunts of irritation as I went.
Nobody was alone at Green’s hill. Ever. That was my new goddamned law.
Solace of the Hill
TEAGUE DIDN’T remember that Cory and the others had school until he woke up the next morning.
Good to her word, during the evening she and a revolving throng of people Teague had gotten to know in the last couple of weeks had come and gone. They would sit down, put a new dessert in Teague’s hand, actively watch television for a while, and then move on.
It didn’t occur to him that he was being “handled” in the same manner he’d seen the hill “handle” Cory or Green until after the vampires had woken up.
Phillip and Marcus had walked in—they were rarely far apart from each other—and Marcus said, “Holy Goddess! I haven’t seen one of these since the last time you threw me over.”
They were standing behind the couch as Teague squinted at them over his shoulder, the pieces falling into place. Phillip cast the love of his life a sour look from under the black fall of hair from his widow’s peak. “If you don’t learn when to shut the fuck up, I may still throw you over.”
Marcus caught Teague’s eyes apologetically. “You wish,” he returned, bumping shoulders with his beloved. “I’m like flesh-and-blood Velcro.”
“There’s an appealing thought. You couldn’t come up with something better than that, you bastard?”
Marcus shrugged and looked wicked, then leaned over and whispered something in Phillip’s ear that made him look even more so. Teague watched them, his heart breaking into small, bruised, dripping, bloody pieces, and Phillip saw his expression.
“Brother, we’ve officially become a breakup party liability.” And the two of them made themselves scarce in quick time.
Teague turned back to the movie—they were watching Mad Max: Fury Road, because there was nothing like a good postapocalyptic adventure to put things into perspective—and saw Cory looking at him with wordless sympathy. He shrugged silently and slipped into the colorless, emotionless void that had comforted him for the last few hours. Cory was leaning against Bracken, her knitting in her hands and her feet in Teague’s lap. It was a familiar, sisterly pose, and with the vampires’ prompting, it occurred to him that it was very deliberate. She was touching him in a way that had nothing at all to do with sex. She was touching him like a mother or a sister—or a friend.
That was where he stayed for another half hour, conscious that Mario had tilted his head back and started to snore in the chair next to him and that Nicky was crouched at Cory’s feet, pretending to play air guitar with the Dooph. That’s where they were when a vaguely familiar female voice spoke up behind him.
“Oh my God! Whose breakup party?”
Teague might have smiled a little. He didn’t look behind him, but he recognized a werepuma—was it Leah? Was that the name?—and someone must have elbowed her in the side and clued her in.
“Are you shitting me? Naww… really? Them? Impossible. That’s like asking two asscheeks to ride home in different cars and making the sphincter drive.”
Teague’s eyes bugged out. Looking to his left, he saw Cory’s and Bracken’s eyes were pretty damned huge as well. Then they all made the mistake of meeting each other’s bulged-out eyes and cracking up. Teague laughed in short breaths, little blasts of happiness in between painful moments of self-denial. He wasn’t sure when the first little burst of breath went from laughter to sobs, he really wasn’t. He would have sworn it couldn’t happen. He’d been avoiding thinking, avoiding feeling ever since Jacky had burst in by the vampire vault, and it wasn’t like he had a whole lot of emotional reserves anyway. By the time he’d spoken to Green, he’d already been emotionally exhausted. Green’s soothing presence had been a balm, an aloe bandage on his shredded soul.
By the time he’d walked out of the room he’d been sharing with Jack and Katy for the past weeks, he hadn’t thought he had any tears or pain left. He’d been relieved. He figured maybe he’d never have to cry again.
But something about laughing… God… something about letting an emotion—any emotion—register on his radar cracked his heart wide open.
Within moments the room had cleared of everybody but Cory and Bracken. Cory was holding Teague’s head in her lap as he cried, and Bracken was holding her.
He wasn’t sure how long it lasted. When his sobs reduced to little hiccups, he looked at the television and realized that Captain America: Civil War was playing. Not one of his favorite movies, but then, he’d been out of it for a while. He was glad if someone was happy with what was on TV.
He cleared his throat and made to move—God, these people were going to think he couldn’t keep his shit together in a copper pot—but Cory’s arms tightened around his shoulders.
“Stay, wolfman. You need to know that you’ll never be alone here, okay?”
“Jacky—”
“Will love you as much tomorrow as he loved you yesterday. But in the meantime, you don’t need to be alone. We’ve got your back, baby. It’s what we do.”
He didn’t remember falling asleep after that. He must have, and one of the überstrong superbeings in the damned hill must have carried him back to Mario’s room like a child. He knew he woke up from a dream—it didn’t matter which one, they were all saturated with blood and ended with him, alone, covered in his lovers’ blood—and the flannel sheets were a different color and smelled like someone else.
A light
tap on his shoulder eased the scream in his throat.
“Easy, wolfman. Orders are to sleep in. You’ll be doing the gladiator thing when everyone gets back from school.”
“Oh Christ!” Teague scrubbed at his eyes and glowered at the thin yellow sunlight coming in through Mario’s full-sized window. The room he’d shared with Jack and Katy had a small skylight, stealing sun from the only corner of the room to face outside. “They have school today. I forgot. Don’t you have school too?” He glared at Mario, who was sitting up on the bed in jeans and a sweatshirt, working on what looked like a law text as it sat in his lap.
Mario held out his phone. “Yeah. LaMark’s gonna send me my homework and drop off my papers. It’s all good.”
Teague’s head felt heavy, and his neck felt too slender and no good at all for holding the damned thing up. He fell back against the pillows and fought the temptation to pull the blankets over his head. “Why didn’t you go with them?”
Mario pulled the covers up over Teague’s eyes for him and then went to the window and pulled the heavy curtains shut. They were green, like the sheets, Teague noted mournfully. His and Jacky’s stuff was blue and red and cream.
“Exactly why you think I didn’t, wolfman. I’m here to watch your back. Now go back to sleep. It’s only seven in the morning.”
“Jesus. What time do they leave?” Teague grumbled. Mario answered him, but Teague fell back asleep before Mario finished speaking.
He dreamed again, but it was a very different dream this time.
This time he heard Green’s sharp cockney cutting through the wool in his head until he could dream the story he’d heard the previous afternoon. He saw it like a movie, like pictures, and was able to read the expressions on the faces of the players with detailed accuracy, thanks to Green’s pitch-perfect narration.
“Adrian had just finished doing his bit with the other vampires to learn self-control, right? And we decided to move up to a part of the state that had as few people as possible. But you’ve got to remember, we were limited. The coffin wasn’t as lightproof as it should have been, so we could really only move by night….”
It was night, and two men made their way across the twisted landscape of gold country in a little buckboard pulled by a single indifferent horse. The buckboard was light and carried only a few items: a store of bread and dried fruit, wooden tools—some with metal edges, carefully wrapped—woolen blankets, a few changes of clothes, and an empty coffin covered by an oilskin tarp.
The road the men were following wasn’t really a road—it was more of a narrow path that followed the American River from the split with the Sacramento to hills near El Dorado. They’d slept in the valley’s shadow the day before, but now it was time to take the slow, winding road up the side of the cliff to the hill where their lime trees were planted.
The lime trees had been Green’s ticket from England. Salt water negated magic of any sort, and crossing the sea was usually lethal for any kind of land elf. Green had hoarded power for a hundred and fifty years while held captive in Oberon’s faerie hill, and he’d fed it, driblet by orgasm, into those trees. Oberon’s hill had been so saturated in power anyway that no one noticed Green’s subtle power signature or caught on to his plan, at least until he had disappeared through the quarried stone walls and into the night.
When Green and Adrian arrived in San Francisco, Adrian had immediately converted. His last sunrise had been spent in Green’s arms, staring at the ocean from a tiny hotel room and yearning for the moment when they could be together as equals, immortal to immortal. Adrian had spent ten years locked in the hold of a ship, being raped and abused as sort of a privilege and reward for the ship’s crew. From their first touch, Green had become all the sunshine and daylight Adrian would ever need.
While they’d been in San Francisco, and it had become apparent that Adrian would need a good couple of months to become accustomed to his new life as a vampire, Green had given three lime trees to a yunwi-tsunsdi—the fey counterpart in this part of the world back then—to take the rest of the trees up north and plant them somewhere they might thrive with a little help from Green. They’d sworn on it, by touch, blood, and song, and a month later Green had received a map leading him to this place with the warning to be done with the “blood-eater’s business” by early spring—otherwise his beloved trees might not survive long without Green’s help.
Until then, Green and Adrian had only seen San Francisco. It had felt a lot like England, although Green knew enough about the taste of dirt in the air to know that there were dry grasses and dust on the wind even in the winter. He had a feeling that the world beyond the Bay City was probably more inhospitable than he’d imagined when he was coming up with a plan using nothing more than desperation and barely heard rumors of a new world.
In the five-night journey in the horse and trap, Green didn’t see much to revise his opinion. The first two nights were easy enough. Once they cleared the rolling hills around the bay—Green and Adrian had pulled the damned trap more than the horse—they’d had a hell of a time finding sheltering trees beyond the long stretches of fairly flat lands. They followed the river, grateful that it was not salt, and always quit an hour or two before dawn for two reasons.
The first was that they needed to find a place for Adrian to sleep. Even in early April, the sun was fierce, and the coffin and the tarp were not enough for Green’s peace of mind. More often than not, they dug out a place to put the coffin inside, making sure there was at least a foot of insulating dirt on top.
The second was that they were still honeymooning, and even if it was only bathing each other in the river shallows by the gray twilight of predawn, Green needed to touch Adrian.
Letting him die had hurt—oh Goddess. It was a subject he didn’t even talk about with Cory. He had stayed to watch because Adrian had been afraid and he’d had to—and the absolute, stomach-dropping, stark, painful fear of watching the pale, lovely boy become a pale, lovely corpse was something that awakened Green for years afterward with a scream in his throat and rank sweat stinking his body. After the terrible betrayal of his last consensual lover and the mind-numbing, body-killing horridness of being Oberon’s favorite concubine—oh Goddess—Green had finally found a lover who made him love, who made him feel again. And he was letting Adrian die?
When the stirring of Adrian’s soul wind had ruffled that white-blond hair and opened those sky-spangled eyes again, Green had fallen to his knees, clasped that pulseless, cold hand to his cheek, and wept.
Adrian had blinked around Lucian’s dark-suited shoulder and smiled wanly at his only true lover. “No worries, luv—didn’t even hurt.”
The next few months had been an education in sexual insatiability and fearsome bloodlust, but Green had clung to that sky-blue optimism, and it kept him sane.
The stolen moments by the river before dawn were lovely. On one night, after Adrian had fed chastely and minimally from an unwary—and now very happy—husband and wife they had met on the road, Green had him stand, naked and starlight white, in the ankle-deep shallows. He took a bit of cloth and, simple touch by simple touch, bathed Adrian from his wiry, muscular calves up to his groin and the crease of his thighs and his buttocks, up his concave, taut stomach, and into the hollows of his tender neck—and even behind and in his ears. Adrian stood quietly, arms raised above his head, being as marble still as a vampire could—but he couldn’t sustain that sort of tranquility for long.
He started little unwilling grunts as Green bathed his thighs. He let loose a whimper as Green paid gentle attention to his privates and the sensitive places between his creases and the entrance into his body that was only used for sport now. He started panting when Green reached his chest and his pearly little nipples. By the time Green moved to his neck, Adrian was wiggling, vibrating, emitting a series of wordless words that all but begged for possession.
When Green claimed his mouth with warmth and strength and passion, Adrian groaned, clutched him close, a
nd spent himself against Green’s taut, warm thigh—and then Green truly took him, body and soul, in the waning starlight.
But that had been before the hills, before the oaks thickened to become difficult, before the land had given in to pine trees that dug into granite or slippery shale. As the two of them clawed their way up the side of the hill on some sort of joke of a path and the night raced by on a cougar’s swift paws, Green was seriously wondering if either one of them would ever see a moment like that again.
Green could smell the lime trees, but he couldn’t see them yet when he saw the first deadly ray of gold reach across the horizon.
“Fuck!” The echoes of the oath hadn’t stopped dying off the hills before Green shoved Adrian into his coffin, threw the tarpaulin over the damned thing, and found a crumbling, red-dirt crusted spot in the east-facing cliff wall they had been trying to negotiate.
Then he used all the sidhe power he had in his bones and literally vibrated the casket into the side of the bloody hill with main force and a fucking lot of desperation. Adrian was still complaining in shock and surprise and a bit of discomfort—if it hadn’t been for the quick healing of your average vampire, his brain would have splattered like an egg inside his skull from all that vibration—when the sunlight hit their mountainside and his day death shut him up.
Green was left gasping, exhausted, shell-shocked, and still quivering with fear. He’d seen Adrian die once—he wasn’t sure if he could survive seeing it again. The whole reason he’d agreed with the transition to vampire was that he, oh goddammit, he didn’t want to lose another lover to the merciless spiked boots of Time. In particular, he didn’t want to lose Adrian.
As he stood there, leaning against the hill with rocks and stray earth falling around his shoulders, he heard a sound above his own heartbeat.