Rampant, Volume 2 Page 2

  “No, but they will by the time they come up to eat!” Then she dug into her plate—Lambent and I were eating vegetarian baked beans and salad, and she and the shape-shifters got some sort of sausage. Whatever it was, it must have been very tasty to carnivores, because they seemed to be enjoying themselves. I watched, though, as she stopped very deliberately after one serving.

  “All done?” I asked carefully.

  “All weirded out by wandering around in a bikini,” she answered, although she’d changed back into shorts and a T-shirt after we’d gone swimming and had yet to actually wear the thing without a T-shirt over it. I glared at her, but at that moment, Nicky’s mother came up and asked us if we wanted to sit with them for dessert.

  We’d been expecting the invite, and we got up without ceremony to sit at their table—and honestly, it felt less awkward than sitting in our happy group while they sat alone, exiled by their own thoughtlessness.

  They had bought some kind of chocolate cream pie from a store, and I thought wistfully of whatever it was that Grace had sent over via the sprites but dug in anyway. They’d better save some for me. I was halfway through when I realized Nicky’s mother had asked me a question.

  I swallowed and then swallowed again—it had been a big bite. “What do I do at school?” I asked, feeling dumb.

  “Yes, hon,” Terry said, bemused. “What classes do you take?”

  I stared at her in the lamplight, wondering whether she was being dense on purpose. “I take whatever classes Cory takes,” I said through another bite.

  Nicky’s father answered, “Well, son, that’s nice for kissy face and all, but it’s no way to decide on a living.”

  I blinked, and Nicky laughed. “You should see your face right now, Bracken!” he chortled. “It’s like they asked you how to split the atom!”

  I grimaced at him. “Well, what’s your major, bird boy?” I asked, and he flushed.

  “See? I’m right, aren’t I!” I crowed. “You do the same thing, but you take classes you’re interested in because you can!”

  “Why can’t you take the classes you like?” asked Jonathan Kestrel, and I could actually hear Cory roll her eyes in the semidark.

  “Don’t say it,” I warned. “Don’t even think it. I could give a f… damn about the human piece of paper. That’s your job. My job is to—”

  She held out her hand. “Yes, beloved.” Her voice was gentle with humor. “I know what your job is. I’ve made my peace with it. I just don’t think you ever put it into words before.”

  “I don’t get it,” Terry asked, genuinely puzzled. “What’s his job? Why’s he going to school and not worrying about a degree?”

  “He’s there to keep me safe, Mrs. Kestrel,” Cory said bluntly. “It’s the only reason he ever agreed to go to school in the first place. When Nicky and I first met in San Francisco… well, we were under attack and didn’t know it.”

  “That was my fault,” Nicky said quietly.

  “You were coerced,” she reassured. “Anyway, he tells me he enjoys it now.”

  “I do.” It was only the truth.

  “And I don’t think I could have passed physics or poli-sci without him.”

  “You could have.” I believed that—it just would have taken her a little longer.

  “But the whole reason Bracken started coming to school in the first place was to keep me safe.” She flashed me a smile that was just for me. “And so far, it’s worked.”

  “Except when you’ve gone haring off without us,” I grumbled, and she grinned back at me.

  “That was one time!”

  “Yeah,” Nicky added, “but you almost got killed!”

  “Which is why,” she reasoned with a quick nod at his family, “it was only one time!”

  “I don’t understand,” Terry declared. “I don’t understand any of it. You all talk like soldiers. How dangerous can your lives be?”

  Cory abruptly grew sober. “It depends on how you look at it,” she replied with poise. “The three of us can wield a tremendous amount of power—yes, even your son. There are things out there that will prey on that. We’re also part of the leadership of one of the biggest collectives of supernatural creatures in the area—”

  “Continent,” I corrected, and she raised her eyebrows and flushed. She didn’t like to think of that.

  “Okay, fine. Whatever.” She continued, “Green’s hill wields a lot of power. And because we have that power, we’re obligated to keep everybody’s power in check—our own included. Nobody likes the power police, Mrs. Kestrel—they’re pretty much everybody’s asshole. So we tend to travel in groups, and we take our family very seriously.”

  “You’ve got magic powers?” asked Annette from the other side of the table. “Bullshit! You’ve got to show me your magic, honey—I’m dying to see it!”

  Cory turned a miserable and cold glance at the woman. “Usually people who are dying to see what I can do end up dead. I don’t do demos.”

  There would have been an awkward pause then, but the vampires came up at that moment—dripping into dry clothes, as it were. Marcus, usually the best “public face,” led them as they came up to talk to us.

  “Evening, Cory. Evening, Nicky’s folks,” he said with a charming smile. The Kestrels and their guest gave a blank, frightened stare back. The night before had been that much of a disaster.

  “Heya, Marcus.” Cory smiled against the strain. “Good swim?”

  Marcus’s answering smile was dreamy. Everyone loved the lake. “Awesome. We should have Green make one of those in our backyard.”

  “We have one, genius—it’s called Sugar Pine,” she quipped. When Marcus’s surprised laugh had subsided, she added, “Hey, do me a favor?”

  “Anything, O Mighty Queen!” Accompanied by the requisite bow.

  “Oh Goddess….” I could smell her blush. “Anyway, could you feed from the Avians tonight?” She gave Nicky an apologetic glance. “If that’s all right with you, Nicky?”

  Nicky shrugged. “Me and Marcus are always good for a party, sure.”

  Cory nodded. “We’ll fill you in later, but there’s….” She gave a furtive glance at the civilians and flushed more, realizing she had been indiscreet. “Let’s just say that personal dynamics are a little wonky. No one’s fault, but thank you. This’ll make it easier.”

  Marcus gave a nod, and Nicky stood up to go find a very quiet corner with the others. He turned to us and waggled his eyebrows lasciviously. “Back in a flash!”

  Marcus snorted. “I’m better than that, and you know it. C’mon, breakfast.”

  The banter between the three vampires and the three Avians continued as they disappeared far beyond Annette’s censorious and prying eyes.

  “Well, I just don’t see why they’d do that,” Annette sniffed in disgust. Cory and I looked at each other with bittersweet memories of the same vampire vibrating between us.

  He’d bitten me in bed, in the yellow light of his yellow room, his profile so thrown into light and shadow that it seemed the shadows had grown cold breath to nip at my carotid.

  It was a sensitive place anyway, but with his cool, hard body printed against mine, with his erection pushing insistently at my hip, my neck was suddenly every hot spot on my sidhe-sensitive body, from the ticklish underside of my head under the foreskin to the crown of the dark place only Adrian, Andres, and Green had ever invaded.

  And just as I had this thought, I gasped, groaned in need, begging, for Adrian’s teeth had invaded me, and he’d pulled sex from that vulnerable place under my jaw just like he promised to pull come from my cock as he ground against me and fed….

  CORY AND I blinked slowly at each other, coming awake from our own sex-saturated memories, and Cory turned an unrepentantly sultry face to our bemused audience.

  “There are perks,” she said throatily. Then she cleared her throat and tried to sound all business. “The vampires protect us, and they’re formidable. And the bite… can be nice.”
<
br />   Suddenly Nicky’s father, who had been quiet for much of the last two days, squinted his eyes at Cory and sucked in a breath.

  “You’ve been marked!” he said in horrified fascination. “More than once! You have a harem of husbands, and you’ve been marked by a vampire? Wasn’t one good enough for you?”

  Just that quickly, the pleasant memories of pleasure and comfort were replaced by the memory of pain.

  “Your son fell in love with me when I was recovering from Adrian’s death,” she said tautly. “Nicky asked me to dinner, mind-raped me, and threw me against a concrete pole.” Her voice wavered and grew strong again, and I knew she was struggling to summarize a long, complicated happening into a few words.

  “And that’s just the beginning.” She swallowed. It was true—we usually boiled the entire happening down to “bad shit” stories. It was hard to resurrect them now. “But it doesn’t matter how we started, because we love him now. We care for him. We treasure him. If you can’t respect me or my choices because you don’t understand that sometimes the Goddess is a fickle bitch and we do what we can to survive her, you should at least respect the fact that, for all the reasons we had to despise Nicky, we chose to love him forever instead.”

  The silence then transcended awkward and breached painful. She stood up on watery knees and fumbled for my shoulder. I dropped my fork and stopped eating their goddamned pie.

  “Excuse me,” she said tensely. “I’m done with dessert.”

  I watched her stalk blindly into the dark of the surrounding woods, knowing she—literally—couldn’t see to save her life, and turned to the people who should have been a joyous part of our family.

  “We love Nicky,” I said after a moment, remembering the trusting way he had simply sat in my arms and accepted my comfort. “He’s going to stay with us—he’s happy with us. But you are under no obligation to stay in his life. Remember that when you try to hurt her.”

  And with that, I turned around to catch her before she gave herself a concussion by walking into a tree.

  I found her trying to step on moonlit patches of path between dark lengths of black shadow. Teague had been right—the moon was still bright, even though it wasn’t full. I came up to her side and took her hand, then walked along the clearest ways, knowing she would trust me to take her where she couldn’t see.

  “Maybe it was the… the chaos thing, or whatever,” I consoled her, although it seemed unlikely. Those words had been hers—and they were the words she should have said, not the words she shouldn’t have.

  “I doubt it,” she grunted, gasping as I took her around the waist and moved her over the pit she was about to fall in.

  “Me too,” I was forced to agree.

  “I’m getting worse at this,” she lamented after a couple of moments of walking toward nowhere.

  I caught a branch that was about to whap her in the face and said, “At walking in the dark? Damned straight!”

  “No, genius, at talking to my own goddamned species,” she snapped back. I steered her away from a big patch of poison oak before I replied.

  “You’re getting better at not taking shit,” I corrected. I was rewarded by her unladylike snort.

  “I’m pretty sure I never took shit!” she threw back, and I had to concede.

  “You never took shit from strangers—but humans you know? You try too hard.”

  I heard her slowly let out her breath between her teeth. In the dark glow of the moon, her expression was almost amused. “That’s part of being human, Bracken Brine—compromise.”

  “When you’re queen of every-fucking-thing, to compromise is to take shit. It’s not an option.” It seemed basic. I could swear we were speaking the same language. What part of She takes shit from no one was my beloved not getting?

  “I should be able to take shit from these people,” she said softly, almost to herself. “I mean, they’re not the enemy. I don’t have anything to prove. I should just be able to suck it up, eat their crap, and know it’s good for Nicky, you know?”

  “Nicky wouldn’t ask you to do that.” She hadn’t been there—Nicky had thrown his lot in with us in a way I admired. I could only thank the Goddess that I had never been asked to make such a choice.

  I heard her sigh in the slight breeze and wondered if she was sweating like I was. The sun was down, but the temperature was still in the mideighties. Maybe it was cooler down by the lake edge—but before I could veer her that way, there was another rustling and I looked up to see Nicky coming toward us. The vampires really had gone deep for their feeding!

  “I wouldn’t go that way.” Nicky waved in the general direction of where he’d come from. His face was flushed pleasantly, and he not-so-subtly adjusted himself in his shorts. From far off, we heard Kyle whooping as he dove into the lake much as the Avians had. Another whoop followed him, and I frowned.

  “It sounds like they’re swimming. What’s over there we shouldn’t see?”

  Nicky laughed, looking away in embarrassment. “Never mind. What are you guys doing out here, anyway?”

  Cory walked up and kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry, Nick—I fucked things up again. They… they….”

  “They hurt her feelings and all but called her a vampire’s whore”—I told the truth sourly—“and she defended herself.”

  Nicky scrubbed his face with his hands. “Oh Goddess…. Cory, I’m so sorry. I… I’ll ask them to leave. I thought we could do both these things at once, but my folks… they’re just….”

  She shook her head. “They love you, Nicky. They’re doing their best. I’ll apologize in the morning.”

  “The hell you will!” he shot back. “There’s no reason for you to apologize. They may think they’re Mom-and-Pop America, but they’re not. My dad turns into a bird, and my mom has been married to him for thirty years. If they can’t accept that the world is bigger than their big charade of being normal, that’s their fault.”

  Cory shook her head. “But your happiness here is more important than my pride. If they’re not insulting our people, I should be able to smile and take it. Losing my temper isn’t going to help.”

  And Nicky did us all proud. “You are our people, Cory. You’re our leader. You don’t take anyone’s shit. Not even the in-laws. No—you keep on losing your temper. They’re going to have to accept you or lose me. I may not like it, but dammit if we have worked for a year and a fucking half to have them fuck with you and our relationship. No. You swallow nothing. You are my lover and my queen, and you take shit from no one.”

  She laughed a little, then wrapped her arms around his shoulders and kissed him full on the mouth to make him stop his rant.

  “Except, sweetie, I can apparently still take lectures from my lovers.” She was laughing as she said it.

  “Damned straight. Here—go into the woods, be alone with Bracken.” He smiled up at me, and I raised my eyebrows in appreciation. My thoughts exactly! “I’ll stay up with my folks and try to talk some sense into them, but you don’t worry. Keep us safe from the bad vampires and safe from whatever the chaos generator turns out to be, but don’t worry about Terry and Jonathan Kestrel. I’ve got them covered.”

  “What about Annette?” I asked, having grim thoughts about using my grim power.

  Nicky and Cory both made purely human faces of sour distaste. “I’m sure she’ll find a way to completely fuck up her own life,” Nicky predicted. He and Cory nodded in complete agreement.

  “Well, if she doesn’t, I’m sure one of us will do it for her,” I grumbled. Cory laughed and took my hand in hers.

  “Remember we love you,” she told Nicky, and I took the lead again and pulled her deeper into the dark.

  We were a few steps in when I heard it—the sound of a man, aroused beyond endurance, the gasp and groan and plea in his voice… and the feral growl of his beloved tormentor, moving in to finish the dance.

  I was immediately hard.

  I stopped and put my hand over Cory’s mouth. She tru
sted me enough, could feel the tension in my body, to know that I wasn’t afraid. Her eyes darted nervously in the dark, looking for my expression, and I leaned close enough for her to see my wicked smile.

  I picked her up around the middle, and her body was fit and tight. She simply held herself stiff and still until I got to a rise that looked down into a little dip of shadows. I could see them right away, but Cory had to wait patiently, blinking in the moonlight, until she saw them across the clearing, moving brightly pale against the black-purple shadows of night.

  Marcus and Phillip hadn’t gone for a postfeeding swim after all.

  Phillip was the one making the groans. His back was to a tree, his leather jacket around his bare shoulders to keep the splinters out of his skin. His head was thrown back, and his dark hair fell sideways from his widow’s peak. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was half-open as he groaned again. His fangs were partially extended, his breath coming in pants—because that’s what a body did during sex, whether it needed oxygen or not.

  Marcus was on his knees in front of him, one hand wrapped securely around the base of Phillip’s engorged cock, one hand out of sight between Phillip’s parted thighs, moving. I could imagine busy fingers, lubricated in saliva or blood, invading and twisting, plunging and tormenting, drawing out the sounds from Phillip’s tortured throat. Marcus pulled his head back and opened his mouth, preparing to sheathe Phillip to the back of his gagless throat. But first his tongue came out, wickedly pointed, and he teased the head of that purpling, slickened cock with it until Phillip made little begging noises that might have been “Please, oh Goddess, please….”

  Cory’s eyes adjusted, and she caught her breath. Marcus turned his head, and his whirling red eyes caught sight of us watching with shock, with arousal—pure exhibitionism, surprised and breathless.

  The scent of the sudden flood of slickness between Cory’s thighs overpowered the scent of pine and earth and water for a sweet second, and Marcus’s lips drew back from his fangs in a feral, sexy smile. He wanted us to watch, and watch we did as he turned his attention back to Phillip, extended and exposed in the night air. Marcus widened his mouth again and wrapped his lips around his pointed teeth, sliding his mouth around Phillip tightly and wetly while his other hand kept up that teasing, insidious rhythm.