by Amy Lane
“Well, you know how, for a while, that time of the month, we all”—the vampires—“thought she smelled like candy?”
Teague nodded, embarrassed. He’d caught the other end of that with Jacky as well. Apparently not being able to touch Bracken—as well as a horrible case of allergies—had almost leveled the little girl with the indomitable will. “I remember.”
“Well, she doesn’t smell like candy anymore.” Kyle’s voice was intense, as though he was trying to tell Teague something, and Teague felt very thick.
“So, isn’t that a good thing?”
Kyle shook his head violently. “No, man, now she smells like flowers.”
Teague squinted up at the vampire and blinked. “So?” Really. He wasn’t getting this.
“So….” Kyle moved his hands while Teague continued to look at him blankly. Kyle finally gave it up. “So she smells like something good, right? But like something you’re not supposed to eat. It’s like a human protective measure… you know… to keep the species going?”
Teague was starting to wonder if he’d fallen on his head instead of his feet. “So why don’t all humans or sorceresses smell like that?”
Kyle just stared at him, and something in Teague clicked.
“Fuck. Oh fuck. Oh fuuuuuuuuuuuckkkkkk….” Teague shook his head. “No! No! Man, the elves use their will as their birth control! Why would they let that happen?”
The scowl Kyle leveled was truly a terrifying thing. “Because, asshole! She broke their will when she risked her life to save you.”
Fuck. Fuck. “Fuuuuuuuucccccckkkkk…,” Teague said again. “Jesus God, no! Whose? Which one of them let that happen?”
Kyle shook his head. “I’m betting it’s both. But think about it. It’s only been a couple of days. Odds are she doesn’t know.”
Teague frowned. “Do Green and Bracken know?”
“I’d put money on it. Man, Bracken has been building your fucking house like you could not believe. There are gardens in England that belong to some duke or shit that are less cared for than Green’s front yard. The two of them are doing everything they can to not take this to her and just ream her for it, and she’s all but stepping in time not to piss them off again. It’s awful. The whole hill feels the pressure. And to make matters worse, the whole place smells like patchouli, cedar, chamomile, and lavender.” Kyle shuddered. “It’s downright girlie!”
In spite of the fact that this was the last thing they should be worrying about, Teague had to laugh. And then he looked outside to the ocean, which was growing steadily grayer.
“Brother, as much fun as this has been….” He trailed off meaningfully, and Kyle nodded.
“Good thought. I’ll run down to the darkling, ’kay? Ellis is….” Kyle blushed. “Man, this vampire thing is so weird. I mean, I enjoy women, you know? My whole life I’ve never wanted a man. But Ellis’s blood just turns me on.” Kyle shrugged. “No shame, right? Besides….” He sobered. “It’s been so long since I’ve wanted anything. Anyone. I’m just grateful for him, that’s all.”
Teague watched him go with a faint smile. Then he collapsed back into the deep pillow behind him, and the smile disappeared. His body released all his tension in one big throb, and Cinnamon was right there before he could even say her name.
“Are you two done gossiping yet? Because, you know, I could make some popcorn, we could put in a movie. I’ve even got some makeup you could share, how’s that?”
“Fucking groovy,” Teague mumbled. “If I asked you nice, could I skip that part and just get the healing?”
Cinnamon’s disgusted sniff said that maybe, yes, she would relieve his pain, but he didn’t think he was going to avoid the lecture. She surprised him, though. Apparently peasants all had one common worry—what was going on in the big house?
“It’s probably true,” she said calmly. “You know that, right?”
Teague sighed and allowed the lack of pain to wash over him and ease his breathing and his sweat. “That girl sure knows how to make things hard on herself,” he said at last.
Cinnamon’s clucking sound seemed to concur. “No wonder the two of you are friends. The good news is, you’ve both managed to find mates who will move heaven and earth to make things easy. Now, I’m going to put you under for a few hours—just long enough so you don’t get your days and nights completely flip-flopped, because that will bore everyone to tears, yes? Now, give me the knitting…. Good.” She smiled gently as Teague handed over the mostly finished scarf made in perfect sea-blue garter stitch.
“Now sleep, werewolf. Don’t worry about your friend. There will be plenty of us to do that for the next year.”
Teague’s brain was getting fuzzy. He had just enough clarity to say, “Year?”
“Do you think the work ends with birth? I don’t think so.”
“Fuuuuuucccckkkk….”
It was the last thing he could remember before Jack and Katy woke him in the morning.
Believing
SHE TRIED to remember all the things we could do and she could not—but sometimes she forgot how good our hearing really was.
That was fine. It allowed me to sit behind her and hold her against my chest while she had a conversation with Teague that she forgot I could hear.
“The vampires got there okay? Good.” Cory laughed a little. “Kyle talked? With more than one syllable? Really? Ellis? You know, we have got to get more women around here. We just do. I’m making it a priority.”
Teague pointed out something unflattering but probably very true about his gender in general, and Cory had to concede.
“Yeah, well, young men do fuck up that way in bigger numbers. But there must be some girls out there that want to join up, you think?”
I did not point out that for young women, finding out that turning into a vampire eliminated the chance of having children—and that turning into a werecreature severely limited it—was often a deal breaker. It had been Adrian who told me that on the heels of a disappointing attempt to talk a girl out of the life he tended to recruit from.
And then Teague asked her something that made my whole body come to alert.
“No, I’m fine. Why do you ask? Yeah, still tired. Probably the transfusion or something. And I’ve always had a hair-trigger stomach…. Oh, sorry.” She turned around to me apologetically. “Sorry, beloved. Was I squashing you?”
“I was just getting up to get a soda.” It wasn’t a lie—I’d planned to shortly. But a sprite appeared above her head, looking at me questioningly—they tended to wait on me that way, even if Cory liked to do that shit herself. I shook him off with a meaningful look, and he winked out of sight.
Cory hopped up off my lap and said, “I’ll get it for you.”
“Thank you!” I told her pleasantly. “Can I talk to Teague for a minute while you do?”
So I had the phone while she wandered into the kitchen, and I spoke so quietly I could barely hear myself—but I knew Teague could pick up on it just fine.
“Stop asking her how she feels,” I growled, “or she’s going to figure it out.”
“Well, why don’t you tell her?” Teague snapped, and I sighed. Green and I had held this exact conversation, and until this moment, when I was forced to defend Green’s stand, I hadn’t really understood it.
“Because it’s been four days, moron, and she’s not going to believe it,” I said, frustrated. “And she hasn’t hardly found her feet. Seriously, could we let her recover first?”
Teague blew out a breath, and I looked across the room to the refrigerator. Renny was in the kitchen, naked and eating pie, and Cory was talking quietly to her, so I relaxed just a smidge. Nicky came in—he’d arrived from Austin this morning, and he and Cory were still making a point of touching every so many moments to make up for the absence. We hadn’t told him about… about what had happened, yet. Avians have an excellent sense of smell, but the other werecreatures and vampires have better. Renny was starting to sneeze around her. How soo
n would Nicky start asking questions?
“She’s got to know—”
“She’s human. Humans expect a month for their minds to catch up with what their bodies already know.” Green had told me this. I had not been aware. “And besides—” I looked over my shoulder again. She was putting ice in a glass for me, although I hadn’t asked and hadn’t expected it, and my chest swelled so tight I almost couldn’t speak. “—she’s still not… she’s not okay. All right? All of the things we love about her, and she’s afraid she let us down, and she’s not okay.”
As though sensing my regard, she flashed me an uncertain smile over her shoulder, and I returned it reassuringly. She was pregnant with sidhe twins, and she was still not certain of her own worth. I had to breathe hard through my nose in order to keep my anger from bubbling over and into her blood.
Teague sighed. “She needs to be okay,” he said gruffly. “That’s your job, hoss. You need to make sure she’s okay.”
“Goddess… fuck. I’m trying, right?”
That was all I could do. It was all I had.
She came back with a soda for me and one for herself, and I fought with the desire to tell her to sit down and stay off her feet and all those ridiculous things men tell women when they’ve always been the stronger sex and always been able to deal with the stresses the Goddess gave their bodies. Except she has the body God gave her, with its terrible curses and its frailties and its susceptibilities. And then, because my mother had told me this the night before—And fey women die in childbirth as well. It’s one of our few weaknesses, my darling boy. It’s why we needed Green’s help to birth you.
I handed her the phone without a word, but I made sure to brush her wrist with my thumb as I did it. She smiled at me and made herself comfortable against my chest. I busied myself pretending to watch television so I could listen in on her conversation without shame.
Teague clicked off for a minute, and Cory sighed. I made a questioning sound, and she looked behind her and mumbled, “Call waiting—it’s Jacky,” at me.
“What’s he doing away from the house?” I thought the whole reason for sending the vampires and putting Mario and LaMark in the car was to keep them safe.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I think Cinnamon needed food. Teague said something about the grocery store.”
Strange, isn’t it? How the most mundane of things can be our undoing?
The phone clicked again, and Teague’s frantic near hysteria buzzed through the phone. I didn’t even need to hear the panicked words to know what was wrong.
Jacky and Katy were in trouble, Teague was stuck in bed, and no one who could help was nearby.
“Teague, don’t!” Cory begged suddenly. Oh shit. “Don’t! Please, damn it. Mario and LaMark are already on their way. We’ll be there, Green will get us there. Don’t…. you heard what she said. Oh fuck… please…. Bracken, go get Green!”
I was already up as she said it, pounding down the hallway with every intention of breaking into Green’s room, appointment or no, when Cory screamed, anguish in every note, “Goddammit, Teague Sullivan, don’t you go wolf on me!”
Over the phone and two hundred miles away, we could all hear his scream as he disobeyed that order.
Running
WHEN CINNAMON sent them to the grocery store for some food “to feed all these damned shape-shifters with their love for meat!” neither Jacky or Katy actually gave much thought to the wolves who had been following them in and about Monterey and Salinas. Given that Cinnamon had the same sort of ownership over her tiny estate as Green had over his hill, they assumed this little section of land would be off-limits to the bad guys.
The crazy-elf-bitch-werewolf smell roiling through the grocery store was reminding Jacky of that truism about assumptions.
“Jacky…,” Katy muttered under her breath. Jack nodded. They could spot or scent the ten or twelve different men who had entered the store right after they had, and none of them looked friendly. They must have driven up, Jacky thought, trying to be calm, and they must have known where Cinnamon’s line of safety would work and where it would not.
“I see them,” he said tightly. “They’ve blocked all the entrances, but I don’t smell them back by the meat department. We can get out there. But first let’s pretend we’re stupid for another minute and let me call for backup.”
The call to Teague was short, and he tried to keep panic out of his voice. “There’s ten or twelve of them, and they’ve blocked the way to the car,” he said as a greeting, “and we’re going to make a run for it in a second. You remember when you were being chased by that thing at Sugarpine?” They were in the cereal aisle, and Jack looked unhappily at the big bag of fake Lucky Charms—it had been on his list of things to buy for Teague.
“Yeah?” Teague had his game voice on, but Jack could hear the thready blood of panic pumping through it.
“We could hear you bark for a good forty-five minutes before the birds saw you. Open the windows, open the doors, and listen, you hear me?”
“I will,” Teague said tersely. “We’ve got backup on standby. Run fast, beloved. You and Katy keep safe, right?”
“I hear you, beloved. You stay put, and I’ll trust in rescue, right?”
“Right.”
And with that, Jack hung up, put his phone in Katy’s strappy little purse, and knotted the strap to make it stay on her neck. Their eyes met as they passed the meat department, and both of them took an immediate and abrupt right through the double doors, ignoring the cries of the butchers in the back as they passed and shedding clothes as they went.
“What’d he say?” asked Katy as they rounded the corner to the dumpster bins behind the store and took a second to take off their pants and leave them in a puddle.
“I’m pretty sure he said he was going to do something stupid,” Jack panted. Then both of them were naked, except for Katy’s little tapestry purse, and there was another ruckus coming through the meat department.
Without another word the two of them changed form and ran for their lives.
In the past year, Jack had often despaired over his basic nature. He was not a fighter. He’d been told it often enough and had proved it more often than he cared to admit. He did not know when to fight and when to reason, when to be ruthless and when to back down. If he could he’d subvert conflict by moving around it, whether that was by sneaking up on Teague while he was sleeping in order to make him accept love, or by forming small conspiracies with Katy to keep their lover happy, or even by picking a fight with Cory to keep Teague out of danger because he knew Teague would never gainsay one of Cory’s orders, ever…. God, all the ways he managed to slide under the confrontation radar. He could go around or under or over conflicts, but he was not very good at going through them.
Katy was decent at both, but she lacked his passive-aggressive instincts. Later she told him flat out that those were the things that saved their lives over the next two hours as they fought their way toward safety.
He would see an obstacle, such as a giant fence or a concrete cinderblock wall, and Katy would start the charge over it. Jacky would run down the side of it to go around, and sure enough, they would scent their enemy waiting in the most logical place for them to emerge. Jack, who had deplored his own nature, often cursing himself as a skulking coward, ran his beloved through the streets of a strange town, going around corners, under culverts, through crowds where larger groups of wolves could not run, and over piers to jump from rock to rock in the jagged stepping stones left by low tide. He would cover a suburban shopping center, the side of a terrifying freeway, the busy sidewalks of Monterey’s tourist district, and the ragged, frigid coastline that flowed to the south of it, the whole time making one big oblong semicircle from right next door to safety, far into the depths of enemy territory, and back to where, please Goddess, God, Cory, Green, who-the-fuck-ever, Teague could hear them push air from their heaving chests and howl for help.
They almost made it.<
br />
They’d been running, flat out and crafty as, well, wolves, when they rounded the corner of an alley in Monterey that should have gone through but stopped at a cinderblock wall instead.
They skidded to a halt and turned around to try to get out of the trap they’d laid for themselves, and found that what looked to be a pack of twenty wolves—all of them smelling like crazy elf-bitch blood—had come in through the bottleneck, snarling and pissed off at having to run that terrible distance.
Katy whined next to him, and he stood in front of her and started the series of short, sharp barks that could, he knew, travel up to five miles, if someone knew to listen. He could only hope Teague was listening.
Behind him, he sensed Katy skin-changing, and he heard his cell phone being quick-dialed even as the wolves moved in menacingly. He kept his wolf form. Katy was the smart one—if they were going to negotiate, better have them negotiate with her and fight with him.
“Cinnamon? It’s looking bad…,” Katy said shakily. “Could you tell Teague….”
There was a moment of silence that was one of the most truly terrifying heartbeats of Jack’s life.
“He what?” Katy shrieked. From half a mile away at most, they heard it—the series of short barks that could only come from the throat of their winded, panicked, dumber than shit on crackers mate.
And then they heard the helicopter.
The helicopter gave everybody pause. All the wolves on the ground stopped and looked up, because it was flying really close for a vehicle that had no landing pad or even hope of one within a good four- or five-mile radius.
“Oh fuck,” Katy muttered. Jack saw what she saw and gave a wolf bark that meant pretty damned much the same thing.
Teague came around the corner—his hind end scrawny, lacking in muscle, and flopping uselessly to the side even as he laid teeth into his first wolf, snapped its neck, and threw it over his shoulder to heal slowly behind him.
“Teague, if any of us survive this, I’m gonna fucking kill you.”