Rampant, Volume 1 Read online

  My face softened, just hearing his voice. I had pulled my knees up protectively to my chest, and I admitted, “Yeah, well, that too,” to the pink and black skull and crossbones on my pajama bottoms.

  “Beloved…,” he protested now, moving into the room, but I shook my head and met Teague’s appalled, empathetic eyes.

  “I’ve got a point here, Green, I really do.” I swallowed and touched his hand resting on my shoulder, then smiled greenly at Teague and soldiered on. “My point is that I melted Bracken’s hair off that night—it used to be down to the backs of his knees, and it was up at his shoulder blades the next morning. I almost killed Arturo, and Renny, and Max, and… and Bracken’s asleep in our bed, dreaming of me, and Arturo is my uncle and my father when I’m here. Renny’s my best friend—I can’t keep her out of my closet, much less my life. And even Max forgave me. And if they forgave me for….” My gaze dropped, and I clenched my hand convulsively in my working yarn, even as Green’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

  “For almost killing them,” I finished, voice rough, “then Jacky and Katy—their forgiveness is done. It’s accomplished. They don’t….” I met his eyes again, and he nodded, and maybe seeing how much this cost me helped him hear the words. “They don’t give a pig’s flying fuck about your past. They just want you warm and safe in their bed.”

  He stood up, and to my horror he sank to one knee in front of me like a knight from a storybook, and from this position, he bowed.

  “Oh Jesus, Teague….” I met Green’s eyes, and he raised his eyebrows philosophically. “Don’t,” I finished weakly.

  The bow deepened. “Why me?” he asked gruffly. “Why tell me?”

  Green wrapped his arms around my shoulders and said it before I could. “You are so much like him…,” he started, his own voice rough.

  Teague looked up. “Adrian?”

  And my ou’e’hm and I both nodded.

  “You already have your lovers, Teague. It’s not about that,” Green answered him, hopefully putting any doubts to rest on that score. “But you are fierce, and noble, and damaged, and we love you for living and being your best. We want nothing more than for you to be happy and whole.”

  Teague nodded and rubbed his eyes on his shoulder.

  “Goddess…. Teague, would you get up?” I begged, and to my relief he did.

  He came to the couch, kissed my temple, and said, “I’ve already said this, but I’ll say it again. I’ll defend you to the death, Lady Cory. You won’t ever have to be a big fucking laser cannon again.” And then he bowed and, swear-to-God, backed out of the room.

  I sighed and sank into my beloved’s arms. He was bare-chested, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans, and from experience I knew he’d be commando. Everybody wanted Green’s blessing on a wedding night, so the only time he’d ever managed to spend a wedding night with me had been when I was the bride.

  “You didn’t need to come out just for me,” I told him, finding solace in his bare skin and wildflower-and-earth smell anyway.

  “When I can hear your heart weeping from two rooms away?” he asked, a familiar irritation in his voice. “Luv….” He shook his head and kissed my hair, and I tried to make his smooth, sidhe-pale skin my own. “How many times do I need to tell you….”

  “My pain is yours, beloved. I know.” Oh, Goddess… he smelled so good, and his warmth was so lovely around my shoulders. Was this what it took to make him mine for just a night? Did I have to strip myself bare and bleed for a poor werewolf who had asked for comfort and gotten my lead-mercury emotional baggage instead?

  “I was doing something,” I defended weakly, taking my own solace and selfishly indulging in the pleasure that had been someone else’s when I’d started my hellific little trip down nightmare lane. “It was a story that would help heal him,” I finished, asking for approval, I think. Green was so good at making people feel better. I was supposed to be his mate, his ou’e’eir, his “queen,” I guess. I had an 1800-year learning curve to climb in a short mortal lifetime.

  “I liked it when you were singing better,” he said, and the warmth in his voice told me that I’d been doing okay.

  “You heard that?” I asked, shyly pleased. Green and Bracken loved to hear me sing. I was glad he’d heard something that would make him proud of me.

  “Beloved,” he protested, a weariness showering from him like tiny petals from a mustard flower, “what will it take for you to let that moment go? To simply accept that it is you, and to not be angry that it was you?”

  I sighed and tilted my head back, holding up my arms so he could lift me into his, because he so very much liked to carry me, and I would be less of a burden in his arms than I would be bearing my own weight.

  “I need to know it will never happen again,” I said simply, feeling the heave and lift. “Not that way. Not that horribly,” I leaned my head on his shoulder and gloried in how close we were when he held me like this. “I’ll do what I need to do to protect us, but I don’t ever want to spin out of control like that again.”

  Green nodded into my hair. “Okay, luv. Okay… we’ll see what we can do about that.”

  I laughed softly—I could laugh, from the safest place in the world.

  “Come with me,” he urged. “We’ll just lie together. We never have time to just lie together….”

  Bracken would know where I was when he woke up—he always did, and it never bothered him. Green took me into his room, with its vast bed covered in dark green and burgundy and brown, its lightly varnished oak paneling, and its big hand-carved bureau. My magic never touched Green’s room—maybe because it was sacred in my heart, just like Green. There were no mirrors in Green’s room, although the big bay window did look out at the canyon below us. The house itself was literally lodged in the middle of a hill in the Sierra Foothills, and beyond Green’s environs you could find oak trees and pine trees and red dirt. Inside Green’s hill was an English countryside, and inside Green’s room was peace.

  I lay there in his bed, my head on his pale shoulder, and played with his long graceful fingers in the moonlight, staring at that view over the silvered canyon.

  “How many nights,” I wondered dreamily, “did you and Adrian do this?”

  “Not enough, luv,” he replied sadly, and I rolled over in his arms and took his beautiful, kind face in my hands and kissed him, devoured him, took him into my soul, and our bodies moved and heaved and shattered in the night. When he crested inside of me and I flew apart into starlight, I came back laughing softly through my tears, so happy to have him inside of me that there was no human expression for the joy.

  When we woke up the next morning, the floors and the grounds above the hills were covered with mustard flowers and lupines in addition to the pinks and daffodils—and with the occasional ripe and tart lime in their midst, hidden like early Easter eggs and ready to be squeezed into the morning’s orange juice for taste.

  Bracken was curled up on my other side, and I was as content as mortal flesh could allow.

  Green: Between Winter and Spring

  GREEN AND Arturo had been having breakfast together at the sturdy oak table in the kitchen for more years than Cory had been alive.

  Arturo’s first welcome to the hill had been some of Green’s pixies and wood nymphs in his bed after a night of beautiful conversation and very good wine. The next morning, Green had been sitting at the table, doing his accounts painstakingly by hand, and eating oatmeal. He’d asked Arturo to join him and then asked if Arturo was still bent on taking over Green’s territory, which had been the reason he’d visited the hill in the first place.

  Arturo had taken a bite of oatmeal spiced with honey and nuts, noticed Green’s spreadsheets out on the table with headings like Clothes, Groceries, and Payoffs for Authorities, as well as income reports for businesses that Green owned, and recalled his rather exceptional night.

  “No,” he’d replied thoughtfully, licking his spoon and going for another bite. “But I wouldn’t
mind helping you out, brother. Have you thought about killing the policemen instead of paying them off?”

  Green had, but he’d decided against it—and in the ensuing conversation, a sixty-year partnership had been born.

  Arturo, being a South American fertility god from the outset, was not pansexual, as many of the creatures in Green’s hill were—but that didn’t stop him from loving Green with a purity of heart that transcended sex and bordered on friendly worship. Green could possibly do wrong in Arturo’s eyes—but Arturo would support him anyway, simply because his heart was always looking for the way to do right. Arturo had witnessed over three thousand years of petty human and sidhe behavior. Goodness for its own sake was not a thing to ever be taken lightly.

  On this day, a bright, windy mid-March morning with more than its fair share of chill, the two sidhe sat together and opened mail, making various comments that were both practical and amusing, in the way of couples who have lived together for many years.

  “Mmmm…,” Arturo grunted, looking at the paper. “You see this thing on the animal attacks?”

  “Sugar Pine?” Green frowned at a large manila envelope with his PO Box number in red Sharpie. He didn’t recognize the hand or the return address. “Yes. You think it’s important?”

  “Three people killed by a… a small cougar?” Arturo frowned. Wildcat attacks happened, but more often than not there were survivors. Lots of them. Wildcats could be vicious—but for the most part, they didn’t really like the taste of humans. And to kill all three?

  Green looked at him, concerned. “Wasn’t there another child in the family? Young?”

  “A little girl, eight or nine,” Arturo confirmed. “Something here, brother….”

  “Doesn’t smell right,” Green agreed. “Teague’s coming back from a job this morning. Give him a day or two to spend with his family, then send him. If you send him during spring break, he may take Jacky and Katy with him.”

  Arturo grunted and rolled his eyes. “And he may leave them sleeping to go check it out on his own. I’m all for higher education, but I’m not sure sending Jacky back to school was so good for Teague’s lifespan.”

  Green blew out his cheeks and took another bite of Reese’s Pieces. “Well, it wasn’t guaranteed even when Jacky rode shotgun. You’d think he would realize….” Adrian. Green and Cory could both see Adrian in their damaged alpha. They could see Adrian particularly clearly when Teague went out on hunting runs and left Jack and Katy home in the name of “protecting” his beloveds.

  Of course, Jacky had proved he needed more training in order to not be a danger to himself and Teague that winter. The last time the two of them had gone on a run together had resulted in, as Bracken had phrased it, “a domestic dispute of epic proportions and many casualties.” They’d needed to ask Lambent the fire-elf to torch acres of land in Woodland to hide the bodies. But Jacky was training up nicely, and being left home was not making his temper easy on anybody at the hill either. Every time Green tried to bring the subject up, Teague nodded and absorbed the import of Green’s words with sober eyes and then went off on his next run alone. Cory had been busy with school, and she’d told Green that whenever she actually tried to have a conversation with the alpha, he ran away like a feral cat.

  “What we need,” Green said after a moment, “is a partner. Because Teague is right about one thing—Jacky and Katy aren’t made for the runs. There was a reason I teamed him up with Jacky.” Arturo never asked how Green knew a pairing like that would work out—Green just did. “But now we need someone who’s quick on his feet, preternatural….” Green took another bite of his cereal and mulled for a moment.

  “Off-limits sexually,” Arturo said. Green looked at him, surprised.

  “He’d no sooner move on another lover—”

  “Than the moon would start orbiting another planet. I know, brother,” Arturo agreed. “But Jack and Katy…” were extremely possessive over their Teague. They would need the reassurance.

  “Mmm… yes, I see. You’re absolutely right.” Suddenly Green brightened. “Mario!”

  Arturo grinned broadly, his copper-lightning eyes crinkling at the corners and his silver-capped teeth flashing in the sun. Arturo was a little vain—but only a little. Unlike the European sidhe, he kept his raven-wing black hair cut to his shoulders for convenience.

  “Dead straight!” He slapped the table.

  Mario was one of the Avians who had once been aligned with Nicky against Green’s people. He’d lost his mate in the fight, and Green had given him back his will to live. The young man had appointed himself Cory’s personal knight errant since, and had been going to school with the other students. Green had detected a certain restlessness about him recently, and at Mario’s request had put him in charge of building the Aerie—the home Mario and his people had been living in, on a vast property out in Camp Far West. Avians mated for life, and if they stayed in the hill on a night like, say, Teague’s wedding night, there would be a lot of Avians stuck in relationships they hadn’t ever foreseen. Until they mated on their own, it was really best to keep them away from the hill’s seething sexuality, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t owe their allegiance—quite happily—to Green.

  Mario was butch, hetero, and had absolutely no designs on poor Teague, who couldn’t figure out what his spouses saw in him as it was.

  Green nodded and grinned back, pleased with himself. “School break’s in a week—we’ll send them before then,” he decided. “But first we need to make sure Mario comes to dinner on Sunday. He’s usually here, but it would be good to make it a solid.”

  Arturo stood and began talking about contacts at the campground and various theories as to what sort of problem it could be. In the meantime, Green reached out his hand to open the manila envelope.

  What he saw inside startled him enough to drop the envelope and scatter the contents across the crowded table.

  Arturo, surprised, picked up the eight-by-ten photos. The images would have been blurry anyway, because they seemed to be still pictures from a video, but besides that….

  “Man, we look like shit on film, don’t we?” he breathed, panic coating his voice like salted butter.

  “You weren’t even there, brother,” Green replied numbly. His hands shook as he picked up the picture nearest him.

  He remembered the day vividly—a funeral for a vampire’s beloved, for his beloved’s friend. There had been camera crews across the street—the young woman’s family had been prominent—but when they hadn’t been contacted then…. Goddess, it was a year ago, wasn’t it?

  Well, yes. Almost to the day.

  Green looked at the photo again. Cory looked… well, like Cory did to humans. Squat and plain and ordinary. She was dressed in black, with a black raincoat that she probably didn’t remember was in her closet, and she was scowling with both grief and purpose as they walked out of the church.

  Renny was a little behind her, looking catlike but still only human, and Nicky was next to Renny—again, merely human. Shape-shifters have always been good on film. The vampires—there had been four of them, including the grieving one—came out as dark mist, vaguely human shaped and ranged in logical, humanly spaced blurs around Cory.

  Bracken and Green, who had been at her sides, were not left with any human attributes at all.

  “I could never understand why this happens,” Green muttered, looking at the picture. He had been paired with Adrian as photography had emerged as an art form, and he had in his possession some very nice oil miniatures of the two of them that he planned to share with Cory someday soon, now that the pain of losing their beloved was more manageable and she wouldn’t cling to the trinket in grief.

  But he’d only needed his photo taken once to know that cameras were not the Goddess folks’ friends.

  Arturo grunted in frustration. “I never could figure out why it’s so different. You look like that… that character in that Tim Burton movie—except with an oval for a face!”


  “Jack Skellington?” Green mused, not sure if he had enough play in him for outrage. “Well,” he said, his mind still stumbling over the implications, “I guess that’s an improvement over Bracken.”

  Arturo knew very well how serious this was, but he couldn’t help smirking. “He looks like a grayscale version of that thing from the Fantastic Four….”

  Green looked up, his humor finally catching up with him. “The Thing?” Arturo met his eyes, a slow, real smile spreading between the two of them. Almost in tandem, they took a deep breath, squared their shoulders, and started to dig for the root of this particular problem.

  “You’d think it would happen more often.” Arturo sat down with a grunt. “There are videos everywhere, cell phones everywhere—”

  “Elves in hills or only visiting elvish businesses,” Green replied. “Or humans who just don’t want to look at the video film and see. I’ve often wondered if there’s not some sort of geas on the pictures—something we cast unknowingly, making the world look away.”

  Arturo thought carefully. “That would take a lot of unconscious magic, brother.”

  “Yes—but it would be another reason besides cold iron and tar that makes the world outside our hills so exhausting.” This was true—very often, the pureblood elves and sidhe stuck to the hill and pretended not much about the world had changed. Going out among the humans seemed to be a hallmark of the overly adventurous and the strong. Like Green or Arturo or Bracken.

  “Is there a note with it?” Arturo asked after a pause. Green shook his head, then checked the back of the distorted pictures.

  “Aha!” Green said brightly, downplaying the gravity of the situation. His people on film—it was a dangerous moment in time, this. “‘I know what you are.’ That’s original. Oh, wait….” He scanned the rest of the red Sharpie on the back of the photo that featured Cory the most clearly, in the center of the shot. She was scowling, and he was swept with a terrible distaste that a mere mortal would see his beloved like this. He resented that someone would see her as plain, as squat, as ordinary. It was a violation of all he believed to be true.