Rampant, Volume 1 Page 3

  “It’s Da,” Bracken sighed. “Apparently they’re having trouble stringing lights for the ceremony tonight, and they want….” He flushed.

  “Oi’anga,” I supplied with a smile, and he nodded. I was having one hell of a time learning the language of the fey, but this word I had down cold. It meant “the tall one.” Bracken’s mother and father were lower fey—they were not only less humanoid looking than their gigantic offspring, they were also much smaller. Bracken frequently got called into service as a walking ladder. As my husband, he had also become a reluctant and baffled liaison between the lower fey and Green, the leader of the sidhe—the high elves. Bracken had spent much of his seventysomething years of life avoiding any responsibility that didn’t get him laid. He’d been horrified to realize that being my lover made him a corner in our little triad of power, but he hadn’t been able to leave his new status any more than he’d be able to leave me.

  “As long as they remember you’re my due’alle first,” I threatened direly, and he grinned.

  “I’ll make it a priority to remind them, due’ane.” Bracken pulled back so I knew what was coming, and I stopped him before he made an accompanying gesture.

  “If you bow to me, you’ll be best friends with your fist for a week,” I warned, and he grinned unrepentantly and did a full-fledged, head-at-his-knees bow with a flourish, and I was suddenly in my complete, leather-stewing funk again even as he dodged lightly out the door. (Sidhe always moved lightly—it didn’t matter that he was over six and a half feet tall. I couldn’t move lightly when I was fifty feet in the air. Bastard.)

  I sighed and scrambled over Renny’s cat-chuckling body onto the other side of the bed, where I got on my knees and yanked out a big clear-white Lexan container. I scanned through the plastic lid, decided what I wanted wasn’t in that one, and then yanked the other one out from under the bed.

  Renny was suddenly a naked young woman kneeling next to me. She’d opened the first box and was sorting through the elbow-deep pile of lovely hand-dyed fiber within.

  “Jeez, Cory, it’s a good thing you work at a yarn store, because you might run out of this shit and that would be a shame.”

  I looked at her sideways. Her flyaway brown hair was sticking out all over her head like a lion’s mane, and her eyes were their usual dreamy, unfocused brown. “It would help,” I said mildly, “if skeins wouldn’t just walk out of the boxes sometimes when I thought they’d be where I left them.”

  Renny didn’t have the grace to flush. “You have the best taste,” she sighed, taking a blue-gray wool/Tencel/cotton blend out and stroking it. Her bare shoulders did a sinuous little dance, and she reached into the box for the other five skeins. It didn’t take a genius in color theory to know she was planning a sweater for her husband, Max. Max had blue eyes and dark hair and would probably look awesome in that yarn—I’d thought so when I’d recommended it to Renny while we were working, and she’d refused.

  Bitch, I thought affectionately. It was like it was more fun to hunt and kill the little yarn cake herself when it was under my bed.

  “What are you making?” she asked, her yarn carefully hoarded against her bare breasts. It was funny how, in a place like Green’s where everything was so very sexually charged, Renny and, hell, almost anybody, even Green and Bracken when they felt like it, could run around naked and inspire nothing but curiosity as to whether or not they were cold.

  I pulled out a black-, brown-, and red-speckled yarn and eyed it with satisfaction. “Apparently I’m making a pair of socks that says ‘I’m a big strong bundle of hypersensitive testosterone who can eat small animals raw for breakfast but who wouldn’t mind touching another man’s bare ass.’”

  Renny smirked and was opening her mouth to make a retort when the door opened again. There was only one other person who would open our door without knocking, and that was the one person Renny would leave the room for as a sign of respect. In a morphing flash of bare white skin and fluffy brown fur, she streaked out of the room, leaving me to clean up. Bitch.

  Unhurriedly I put the lids on the yarn boxes, leaving what she’d picked out for Max on top as I pushed the two boxes back under the bed. Then I tossed Bracken’s ball of sock yarn on top of the bed and launched myself at my beloved Green with enough force to surprise him.

  “I’m fine,” I reassured, rubbing my face against his white linen shirt. “I’m fine, I’ll live… don’t worry about me.”

  Heaven was in Green’s arms. They folded around me like I was a shattered bird, and his job was to put me back together again without disturbing a single hollow bone.

  “I know you’re fine, luv,” he said into my hair. “You’re stronger than letting something like this shake you. I just wanted to comfort you, that’s all.” He backed up, and I smiled besottedly into his clean-lined, masculine, and lovely face. His sidhe-pale skin was flushed and warm from an armload of little ol’ me, and his green eyes were glowing for me alone. It had taken a long time for me to accept that he could love me with all of his heart, and I took this moment to bask in that affection for a moment like a kitten in the sun.

  Playfully he unbalanced us so we sprawled upon the bed, and I grinned at him sunnily. He held his fingertips to my plain mortal face, and I leaned into his touch like lightning in a ball. I didn’t know what everyone else felt when he touched them—I imagined it was the difference between what a high school teacher feels for her students and what she feels for her teenaged children. She might enjoy the company of all those others, but she would lie down in traffic and die for her own.

  That was how my Green loved me.

  My small, mortal body often felt as though it would peel back and split from the gigantic swelling of my soul when he touched me like this, tenderly and with passion. How could something as stupid as another year of school overwhelm me when I was loved like this, by this man-god? It was impossible. Small things could be overcome.

  “You may comfort me any time you want,” I said softly, rubbing the curve of his pointed ear. He smiled and leaned into that touch—I thought it was a sidhe weakness, because Bracken liked it too.

  When he lowered his head to kiss me, the tears I’d been ruthlessly squashing back trickled forward, and he stopped in the middle of my best kiss and wiped them away with his thumbs.

  “See, luv, you are upset!” he chided. I shook my head. I wouldn’t be upset, not when I had him, and Bracken, and Nicky.

  “I’m happy,” I told him gruffly. “I’m happy—I’m so happy that our disasters can be measured in headaches and not heartaches.” And then all that mattered was his lips on mine, the taste of his tongue, his hands, warm and sweet, touching my stomach under my sweatshirt.

  I sighed, sinking into him with the eagerness of an addict sinking into euphoria, and he rushed through my skin with my fix. My hands went to wriggle under his sweatshirt and jeans, but he sighed and pulled away. I’d seen that expression in his eyes before, and this time I didn’t need to rack my brains to know why we had to stop.

  “The ceremony….” I didn’t need to finish the thought, and he nodded apologetically. Our recently appointed (shanghaied!) alpha werewolf and his chosen mates were being formally bound on the top of the hill tonight, in the Goddess grove. Besides the fact that the entire hill would be there and it would be rude to be late, Green and I were sort of officiating.

  “If it was our own shindig, luv….” He trailed off meaningfully, and I managed a grin. If it was our own shindig, we’d have our own quickie and make the world wait for us. If it had been our celebration, we might have been late and unapologetic. If it was a good friend’s party, we might be late anyway, and they would understand.

  But it wasn’t ours and it wasn’t anybody else’s; it was Teague’s. And while Jack and Katy would forgive us, we wouldn’t do that to Teague for all the world.

  So it was someone else’s shindig, and not just any someone else—it was someone we’d come to care for, and someone who so often expected to be overlo
oked or abused.

  “Goddess!” I groaned, throwing my head back against the mattress. “Are you sure he’s back already?”

  Green blinked at me. “Back from where? Where would he be going right before his wedding?”

  I blinked back at him. I thought Teague would have told him. Sometimes I forgot that people treated me like I was exactly equal to Green. I never knew what to do with that. Green was 1800 years old; I would be twenty-two in July.

  “He went to see Lloyd and Spider,” I told him now, hoping I hadn’t done anything wrong. Teague had left early this morning—before the vampires went to sleep, actually. I didn’t realize that he had slunk from his lovers’ bed like a con man from his virgin mark until Jack had come looking for him right before I went out to practice flying.

  “Really?” Green asked, a quirk of private amusement on his lips. “I wonder what his tattoo will look like.”

  I shook my head. I had no idea, but I did know that it would be very private to the three of them. Since my little visit to Lloyd and Spider, Green had marked all of his people with an insignia—mostly through one big blast of magic that we had performed together with a whole lot of help. Anyone joining us, either as a were or a vampire or just a friendly human, came through their transition with some sort of mark on their skin.

  The werewolves were no exceptions—Teague’s was on his right wrist, Katy’s was on her ankle, and I had no idea where Jack’s was. Whatever Teague was doing right now, it was something different, just for his lovers, and that was his business.

  Green looked distant for a moment, and then he came back to me. “He’s just hitting the driveway now. It really is time.”

  I covered my eyes with my hands. “Aw, crap—Bracken was going to help me get ready!”

  Bracken was good at that sort of thing. He had good taste, and I privately had to admit that he knew how to make me look like the Lady of Green’s House when often I would have just blown off the occasion in jeans and a T-shirt. Yes, Bracken was good at picking out the clothes and the makeup and choosing the hairstyle, but looking at Green’s grin now I remembered who bought the clothes and told the sprites to buy the makeup and suggested the hairstyles to the sprites who did them in the first place.

  “You planned this!” I accused, not upset in the least. Green and I got so little uninterrupted time together that even having him help me get ready would be a treat.

  “I didn’t, I swear!” he denied, holding up his hands and laughing. His playful grin faded, though, and he gazed at me fondly. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t appreciate every second of it, if that’s good with you.”

  Of course it wasn’t a question. Green was in my arms and he loved me. It was all good with me.

  Green: Master of Ceremonies

  GREEN CAUGHT Cory’s eye as she stood next to him, trying to look like being part of the “officiating party” didn’t chafe her like wet underwear. They were surveying the gathering in the winter twilight: sidhe side by side with lower fey, side by side with were-folk—all of them in human skin, all of them showing only happiness and well wishes for the three mates about to be bound as Cory and her lovers had been bound, in front of their people. It was what he had always believed was possible on his hill, and he was pleased.

  Tonight Cory was dressed in a cream-colored, full-sleeved, full-skirted dress with an old-fashioned tabard that she had knit herself, although not for this occasion—she had been speechlessly flattered when he pulled it out of the closet to go over the new dress. Her hair was up in a complicated knot accented with myriad tiny braids—and although she had complained that simplicity never hurt anyone, he’d been the one directing the sprites, and she had finally conceded that yes, she did look a little more Lady Cory–like with the delicate hairstyle. Besides, he’d told her, with her riotous reddish-brownish-blondeish hair, about half an hour after the ceremony, the hairdo would be toast anyway.

  Right now, she was casting reassuring glances and making soothing conversation with the fidgeting werewolves about to be publicly married on the hill. Public bondings were as rare in the shape-shifting world as they were in the fey and vampire worlds. The Goddess loved her children, but her willingness to become other forms had led to a fickle and bizarre set of mating rules for almost every species. Werewolf couples could, presumably, mate for life—but the werewolves often got along better as wolves than they did as humans, and so they chose not to. The fact that Jack and Katy had loved Teague long before any of them had become werewolves was probably what made this ceremony possible. The fact that the trio planned to eventually live next to the main house and not in the sexually and emotionally charged melting pot—and that they were hometown human to the core of their damaged and recovering psyches—was probably what would make the bonding successful.

  Teague, the new alpha, had an innate sense of what should be respected. Without being asked, he had suggested having the ceremonies after the vampires awoke, so that was who they were waiting for. The dark blond, hazel-eyed, bandy-legged Irishman had passed up being short by a few bare inches, and now he held on to his nerves between his lovers. He stood more than half a foot shorter than Jack, his dark-haired, blue-eyed first beloved, and only a couple of inches taller than Katy, the determined young woman who had beguiled them both.

  On this night, his palpable relief upon seeing Green and Cory more than made up for what they’d had to give up to be there on time.

  “Glad you made it, brother,” Teague muttered with his characteristic gruffness.

  “You say that like you didn’t just come skating in at the last fucking gasp,” Jack chastised sourly, and Teague flushed.

  “Gifts,” he said shortly, and Green looked sorrowfully at the terrible fear that surrounded the man’s body like cotton wool. Oh, if Green could give Teague any one thing for a wedding gift, it would be the ability to believe he was truly loved, so the padding of fear that vibrated around his tightly muscled shoulders might never have to be resurrected.

  “What?” Jack was saying blankly, as aware of that terror of rejection as Green.

  “Gifts, Jack-ass. You needed gifts.” Teague turned his head away. Katy and Jack met eyes, and then met hands—around Teague’s taut, shivering body.

  “You are our gift, you dumb motherfucker,” Jack said grimly and then winced when Katy kicked him in the ankle.

  “He’s right about one thing,” she said, rolling her eyes. Katy was a pretty girl on most days, with dusky skin and blue-black hair layer cut around a heart-shaped face. Tonight she was more than beautiful in a cream-colored wool dress with a dramatic blue shawl that Green knew for certain Cory had knitted for her just for the occasion.

  “You are our gift, Teague. Nothing else was necessary.”

  “Bullshit.” The word was gruff, but his chest seemed to grow with their touch, and in a moment he was again the strong, brave man that Green had seen through years of abuse and self-hatred.

  At that moment, the last sword of sun was sheathed at its source and twilight dappled through the trees. Cory’s body suddenly went on alert, and she turned her head with preternatural grace, as though listening to her favorite song from a radio in the house. There was a fluttering, and lovely pale shadows, dressed in their best and often most dramatic clothing, sprang from the dark of the grove.

  The vampires arrived.

  Cory snorted in private amusement. “You know they flew out the front door so they didn’t have to lift the trapdoor, right?” she whispered into his ear.

  Green chuckled. “But of course.” Vampires—well, their vampires, anyway—loved to make an entrance. Odds were good they had all gotten ready before dawn broke and then arranged themselves in a position least likely to rumple their clothes when they arose so they could arrive as close to the moment of darkness as possible. It had worked—their entrance was spectacular.

  In a moment there was a flicker of pale faces in the ambient light of the Goddess grove, and the collective denizens of the hill let out a littl
e sigh. The sprites rose gently into a halo of light-flickering color-spangled bodies, and every person—from the small naked nixies in every color from dark blue to coffee-brown to star-white, to the elegantly dressed, aloof and beautiful sidhe, some much older than Green—regarded the three werewolves in the center of the grove with reverence and joy.

  Teague’s shoulders straightened, and he readied himself to pledge protection over the two people who protected his delicate and fragile heart, and Cory smiled at all of them reassuringly—she’d done this too. They would live through the ceremony and rejoice.

  When the mass inhalation of anticipation stopped and hovered for a moment, Green began to speak. He spoke simply and from the heart, and watching Cory’s face in the twilight, he couldn’t help but wonder what his beloved would make of the wedding vows. Her heart was filled with unexpected poetry, as much as she still tried to hide it.

  Jack began to speak, and then Katy, as they had planned, and Green’s attention wandered a little to the very young, very mortal woman next to him.

  She was completely enraptured by the proceedings, her eyes never leaving the lovers’ faces and especially lingering on Teague. Both of them had a soft spot for Teague—he reminded them so much of Adrian, the vampire they had both loved beyond death. Watching Teague get the happy ending they had been denied was cathartic, somehow, and this wedding was important to both of them.

  But there was something troubling her—something she would not vocalize, even to Green—and he was damned if he could figure out what it was.

  He’d been proud of her this afternoon. She’d worked so damned hard for that human piece of paper, at one point sacrificing her health to do so. To have it pulled back from her, like a carrot on a string, had just been too fucking cruel for words.

  And his beloved had always had a temper.

  They’d expected fireworks, all of them, and she’d given them socks. On the one hand, it had been a sign of maturity—and she’d been forced into maturity, like a lush cabbage rose into a daisy’s box. To see that she had simply changed, become a tighter, more complex version of herself instead of simply a squashed one, had been heartening.