by Amy Lane
Disappear. Explode. Disintegrate like a popped balloon. His blood covered the upturned faces of Cory and Green as they watched the vampire they both loved more than life explode in a tragic burst of sorcery before they even realized he was coming to save their lives.
Marcus kept thinking, She’s barely nineteen, as Adrian’s beloved, soaked in the gentle rain of her first lover’s blood, started sucking in power for a terrible scream.
Marcus knew what she was doing. They’d all watched her learning what her sorcerous power was and what she could do with her will and emotion. Her emotion now was terrible, terrible destructive grief, and a cold, rational part of him expected her to destroy.
Marcus felt the loss—in his chest, in his head—of the man who made him, of the friend who had succored him, of the vampire who had created his beloved because of Marcus’s desperate plea. In Marcus’s despair, he wanted Adrian’s beloved to destroy him, so Marcus wouldn’t have to wake up to a bed without a lover and a life without a leader and a heart without a purpose.
Green called out in a mighty voice, “My people, move!” and Marcus did not. It was Phillip, swooping down from the sky and knocking him practically into the next town, who saved him from that destruction. It was Phillip who pinned him to the side of a tractor with main force as the little girl with the punk haircut and the piercings and the power and the broken heart killed every enemy on the battlefield with the power of her heartbroken sunshine scream.
It was Phillip who yelled into his face, “If you won’t live for yourself, goddammit, then live for me, asshole! Live for me!”
Marcus forgot pride then, and shame, and who it was that was supposed to lead the two of them when they were together. Instead he broke, weeping in his lover’s arms until they had to either fly from that place or die by the sun.
They learned something about grief after that night, watching Cory and Green grieve.
Adrian had given Cory the third vampire mark as he’d died, and with it came the maker’s bond to the entire kiss of vampires. Every vampire in Green’s hill felt the power exchange, and every vampire in Green’s hill refused to talk to her about it, not even to hint to her that their leader, their heart of the hill, didn’t even realize she was MIA.
It was hard enough watching her grieve herself to death.
She’d been such a solid little person when Adrian had first spirited her into his room. Her hips had been wide and her thighs chunky, and her semiperpetual scowl had been fortified by a plain, wide-cheekboned face, and she’d seemed invincible.
After Adrian’s death, she had become almost transparent with pain, and as lovely and fragile as a blown-glass sculpture of a warrior with sharp and tiny spires and clear and deadly swords.
Green held her together, and together they held the hill together as the entire hill drifted about in a white-fog sea of shock.
When Green sent her away to school, in the hopes that living in a place where not every heart beat with the same grief might give her a chance to recover, there was a certain relief, coupled with a frightening despair. Maybe, maybe their leader would become stronger with a break from the wall of grief the hill had become. Maybe, maybe the vampires could keep it together.
It was at this time that the “blood/sex/magic room” became more and more necessary to survive.
Adrian had been the one to name it and probably the one to make sure it was built. Marcus had asked him about it once, and Adrian, creator of vampires, beautiful boy and demigod in bed, had blushed.
“They had one in the kiss where I was brought over,” he mumbled. “It… it just feels like part of a healthy kiss to me, mate—but not something I’m comfortable talking about, to tell the truth.”
Adrian had rarely gone into the blood/sex/magic room.
It consisted of a giant bed, and someone must have changed the sail-sized sheets during the day, but Marcus had never seen them. It was, quite simply, the site of an ongoing vampire blood orgy, and a night spent in the room was a night of shifting, groaning bodies biting, licking, sucking, fucking, feeding, and rolling about in the excesses of sex and blood and come.
It was the vampires’ equivalent of the full-moon dog run of the shape-shifters, and although most vampires did not spend a lot of time in that room, all of them spent some time there.
As Adrian had said to Marcus shortly after he’d been brought over, when he was nearly despondent at the idea that he’d never again see the sun, it was impossible to despair after the full-throttle release of sex and bloodlust in a room where no one could hurt or be hurt by anything you did.
The term “endorphins” had not been in vogue then, but it was now, and that room had become the sanctuary for the vampires to get high off their own blood/sex endorphins; and when Cory left the hill, there wasn’t a vampire in its environs who didn’t spend a night a week there.
Marcus resisted at first.
Phillip had slept in Marcus’s bed since the night Adrian died. There had been no sex between them at first, no making love, just a simple body-contact desire—cold or not, there was someone there to anchor them both in reality, to keep them from simply staying out on the front lawn and physically disintegrating with the sunrise.
After the first week, Marcus couldn’t take it anymore. He awoke with Phillip in his bed, looking at Marcus with expectant, frightened eyes, that lean mouth flat and grim, and his body reacted. He took that mouth in a punishing kiss, and Phillip groaned, then growled, and Marcus had him flat on his stomach and was pounding into him with fury and despair within moments.
Afterward, Phillip did an unexpected thing—he held Marcus to his chest and whispered nothing, simple comfort words, into Marcus’s hair as Marcus broke and wept blood all over his bare chest.
There was sex in their bed after that—lots of wordless, intense comfort sex—that helped ease the loss of Adrian but did nothing to assure Marcus that he would not be mourning Phillip the next time a pretty shape-shifter walked by.
After Cory had been gone for a month, coming back from school on weekends for stressed, unsatisfying visits, Marcus rose one evening to find Phillip standing naked at the side of his bed.
“Where are we going?” he asked muzzily, wondering how the guy could have been awake long enough to get naked.
Phillip took his hand—an unusual gesture in itself—and pulled him up out of bed. Marcus was… rumpled. He looked down at himself next to Phillip’s pale beauty and realized he hadn’t showered in several days and hadn’t changed clothes either.
“Look, man. I don’t know what you and me are, but you’re fucking falling apart, and I can’t watch and not do anything.”
Marcus looked back at him, mute agony vibrating from every still vessel in his body. “You don’t know what we are?” he asked, a second away from hysterical, vicious laughter.
Phillip shrugged. “Look—whatever relationships are here, we’ve got one. And just like you wouldn’t let them kill me, I’m not going to let you die of grief, okay? Now come on. You hate going here, but it’s better with a big crowd, and there’s a full moon tonight, and half the hill is going to be there, and I think Green will be too.”
Goddess. Green? Marcus had needed Green’s healing for so long. He hadn’t wanted to ask. He hadn’t wanted to bother. Marcus was the stable one, right? The one who could keep the young ones anchored, the one who kept Phillip from flying beyond the pale. Marcus was the one Grace depended on, and the whole world needed Green, and why would Marcus need him more than anyone else?
“Green?” he asked hoarsely, and Phillip stroked his hand. The gesture was self-conscious, but Phillip’s high brow was wrinkled, and he looked sad beyond measure.
“I know I’m not enough,” he admitted.
“You’re waiting for someone else,” Marcus said gently. He didn’t even let his voice get bitter when he added, “Someone real.”
“You’re real to me now,” Phillip said decisively, still frowning and stroking his hand. “Do you think some rand
om woman could mean more to me than you do right now? Come on, brother—let’s go heal.”
Maybe it was the promise of Green, and maybe it was just enough that Phillip cared, that he acknowledged he cared, but Marcus felt a sudden, bright, ripping slash of hope through his miasmic armor, and he clung to the red pain of it. Goddess—if there was hope, he would suffer the pain of healing.
He didn’t like to think of those hours in that big bed, with the smooth limbs and voracious orifices of the other vampires there with him. But he did remember that first night, because his initial disappointment that Green wasn’t there was acute, and he felt cheated. Then Phillip took his mouth in that mass of bodies, and then he was penetrated by slick fingers, and then, oh Goddess, Phillip was inside him while others kissed him and suckled from him, fingered him, and stroked. Those other mouths, breasts, cocks, hands—those were not what mattered. What mattered was that Phillip looked at him, truly looked at him, while moving inside his body. Under the cover of the orgy, Phillip seemed to see him as a lover in need for the first time in twenty years.
Phillip heaved and spent, and the moment was over. Someone was licking Phillip’s spend from his thighs, and Phillip was licking Marcus’s spend from his stomach, and Marcus simply closed his eyes and allowed himself to be rolled from body to mouth to body and joined the writhing, heaving, groaning orgy of communal vampire bodies trying to fill the void their leader had left when he left them.
They went back to that room a couple of times before Cory came back from school. She came back at the end of the semester, both triumphant and weakened. She had truly grieved herself almost to death, and then she had been attacked when her mourning was the most acute. Marcus and Phillip had gone down to the Bay Area to help when she’d been healing, and Marcus remembered the moment she had looked up and seen them both and realized that they were her people.
He’d been so terrified that she’d reject them, his hands had been shaking. She hadn’t, though. She’d smiled, the expression huge in her peaked, pale face, and nodded a little, accepting the faith and worship they had both given Adrian but was now hers by right. Before they’d left the Bay Area and come back up the to the hill, she and Green had claimed that power, blowing their combined mark through everyone who owed them blood fealty, and Marcus and Phillip had looked at the magic tattoos that had sprung up on their left and right wrists and felt hope. (The tats were inked so that when they clasped hands, the tattoos mingled. Marcus noticed this. He was not sure Phillip did.)
So Cory returned to her kiss and started making the small ritual blood exchanges that marked the vampires as hers. Her sorcery—and her own special person—made this exchange amazing. She seemed to have the ability to taste the things each vampire had cherished in life. Marcus tasted of “dry-erase marker and coffee,” and Phillip was “computer paper and hot chocolate.” In the end, they had loved similarly, and it gave him hope of a different sort.
But Cory wasn’t just bound to the kiss of vampires. Through accident, divine fuckup, and Bracken’s intense possessiveness as a lover, she ended up ritually bound to two other lovers besides Green—Bracken and a shape-shifter she did not love, who had been bound by accident. Bracken seemed able to deal with the situation, but Nicky, the other lover, was having a hell of a time fitting in.
She returned at Christmas, and so six months after Adrian’s death, Cory and the vampires had begun to find a balance. To the intense amusement (and sometimes discomfort) of the entire hill, she spent the next six months after that trying to find a balance with the lovers in her bed as well.
The big bed, the one with the red lights and the crimson sheets, was a place that Marcus and Phillip visited less and less often, and for a moment, a brief moment, Marcus began to feel even more hope. He began a quietly optimistic friendship with Cory and came to love her as much as he’d loved Adrian. Some of it may have been sexual—she had that plainly pretty thing going that had always made him search for the beauty underneath, and the hill’s little Goddess had it in spades. She was strong enough to survive heartbreak, smart enough to be the best student he’d ever had, and kind enough not to laugh when his infatuation made some of the moments between them heavy enough to cause blushes.
She was also off-limits, because she was in love with two men, one of them Green, and even Marcus, with all of his Phillip-doesn’t-love-me bullshit, wouldn’t put that weight on her shoulders. Perhaps the off-limits thing made it easier to love her—there would be no complications if he just thought of her from afar, right?
By February, Phillip had begun to bring girls to Marcus’s bed, one at a time, in an obvious, unspoken attempt to find a third lover to bind them together, and all of that peace disa-fucking-peared.
Ultimatum
“WHAT THE hell, Marcus?” Phillip was puzzled and pissed off, and Marcus didn’t care, fuck it all, not this time.
“She giggled like a hyena!” Marcus snapped, fighting the urge to kick his bed. Their bed. The bed they kept sharing with women who did nothing for him but showed Phillip’s increasing desperation to have one in their bed. Phillip’s bed hadn’t been fucked in for months, but Marcus’s bed? No. That bed got the sheets changed every day.
“She giggled like a hyena,” he repeated, because the noise had made his teeth grind. “She had no sense of humor, she was dumb as a rock, and she gave the worst blow jobs in history!”
Phillip shrugged. “To you, maybe.”
“To anyone, Phillip. It’s hard to give a decent BJ when you keep talking while you’ve got the guy’s cock down your throat.”
Phillip fought off a smirk. “Well… yeah. That was sort of annoying.”
“It was really annoying, and I’m not sure how Nicky decided to recruit that woman, but I think some village is missing its idiot, okay?” Nicky, Cory’s third and accidental lover, was still struggling to find his place at the hill. He’d become, by default, a shape-shifter recruiter who was, possibly, the worst judge of character ever.
Or that could just be Marcus’s opinion after Madison “Call Me Dissy” had bitten his prick while Phillip had been banging her from behind.
Marcus sank down to the bed, which was covered in a new black and burgundy quilt that Grace had made him for Christmas. He loved it a lot—and he also noticed that Phillip’s quilt was store-bought. Grace had made Phillip an Aran sweater for Christmas, but Marcus’s bed had been blessed by their head-mama vampire herself. Of course Phillip didn’t get it, in the same way he didn’t get the tattoos or the fact that the girls Marcus liked were too serious for Phillip and the girls Phillip liked were too… too… too goddamned stupid to live!
“Jesus, Marcus, when did you get to be such an asshole?”
Marcus glared at him. “When you decided to make being a threesome a pet project! Dammit, does there have to be a woman in here?”
“You like women!” Phillip reminded him snottily. “I like women! We both get off with women! What’s so bad about having one here? I mean… shit, Marcus. You keep acting like we’re human or something! You took care of that little problem twenty years ago—why can’t we party a little?”
“Because I don’t want a party! I just want you!”
A year. Almost a fucking year. Here it was, nearly Thanksgiving again—Adrian had been dead for a year and a half, and their little Goddess had been married to three lovers for almost six months, and Marcus and Phillip?
Well, they were in the same place they’d always been. Marcus was longing, and Phillip was futzing around because he thought love came around every goddamned day!
Phillip stopped and looked at him. “Since when?” he asked honestly, and twenty years of romantic backlog effectively shorted out every brain cell in Marcus’s head.
“Since when?” Marcus echoed blankly.
“Well, yeah. You never said you just wanted me. Since when was that an option?”
“Since when?”
“I woke up in here in another bed. I assumed you didn’t do guys.”
&
nbsp; “Since when?”
“Well, you’ve only ever done me. I mean, I’ve never seen you sleep with Green!”
“And you take that to mean…?” Marcus was truly drawing a blank here—he could not seem to fathom the big thing that Phillip didn’t know. The thing Marcus wasn’t going to tell him, because the man wasn’t ready to know. Twenty years had gone by, and Phillip didn’t know?
Phillip shrugged. “I don’t know, man. It’s not like you’re in love with me or something.”
“Auuuuuggghhhhhh!”
He pulled back his fist and planted it in Phillip’s surprised face. Phillip had been a stockbroker—even as a fighter he tended to swoop and dive and tear with his teeth. He’d never broken up a fistfight or watched the werecreatures’ fracas in their common room, but Marcus had. When Phillip pulled back his arm to try to hit Marcus, Marcus caught his balled-up fist and pushed Phillip away.
“What in the hell, you jerkwad! Jesus, try and get a guy laid….”
“Auuughhh! You fucking idiot! Jesus fucking Christ, how can you possibly think this is about getting laid?”
Marcus’s fists bunched in Phillip’s shirt, and suddenly the two of them were crashing through the door to their room in a melee that Marcus couldn’t seem to stop. Phillip would block a punch, and Marcus would swing again and connect, and Phillip would swing and miss, and the whole time, Marcus was just willing him to come to his senses and figure it out.
And that was when someone grabbed him and Marcus by the shirt collars and shook them like misbehaving dogs.
“What in the fuck, you idiot fuckheads?”
Marcus looked down at his dangling toes and held very still. “Sorry, Green,” he whispered. He looked from the corner of his eye and saw that Phillip was doing the same thing. Green was six feet seven inches tall, and although he didn’t advertise the fact, stronger than human. And apparently the two of them had gotten on his last nerve.