Quickening, Volume 2 Read online

  And all the hope I had in the world was heavy and sweet in my arms.

  I turned and took her down the hall, knocking softly and opening the door when I didn’t hear Ellen protest. The shower was running, so I settled Cory down, stripping off her shoes and socks and jeans. When I was getting her sweatshirt, she woke up a little and frowned at me.

  “Don’t I have heavy-duty emotional shit to—”

  “To let us handle,” I said, smiling a little. “Not that you won’t have to do your share of it, but not today.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, okay. I’ll take the coward’s way out.”

  I smoothed back her hair. Since she’d pushed it out of her ponytail, it had flown rampant around her face, and I enjoyed seeing the curls and spikes of it.

  “Maybe not the coward’s way out,” I said, stroking her cheek. “Maybe, the prudent path is more like it.”

  She grinned, still sleepy but slightly more at peace. “Okay. We’ll go with that.”

  “Good. Now pretend you’re asleep when your mom gets out of the shower. Will solve so many problems.”

  She nodded and turned her head to kiss my palm. “I want to wake up with all of you,” she said plaintively, making a demand on our time as she seldom did. “I want to celebrate, even though it’s a small thing.”

  The shower shut off, and I leaned forward for one more kiss. “It’s a tremendous thing. It’s the world.”

  She slid down the bed and curled up, not having to feign falling asleep too much, and I stood and made my way toward the door. Just as I put my hand on the knob, her mother emerged, dressed in a rather sleek tracksuit that made her look decidedly more metropolitan and less country nurse’s aide. She’d dressed hurriedly, and damp tendrils of hair still clung to her neck. Her tennis shoes and a clean pair of socks were dangling from one hand, and she looked surprised to see me.

  “Oh, it’s you. I thought it was—”

  I held my finger to my lips and looked meaningfully at the bed. Cory wasn’t pretending to sleep—her breathing held an even rhythm I knew well.

  I opened the door, and Ellen followed me down the hall.

  Green was waiting at the end of it, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his golden hair braided loosely behind him. Between the bare feet and the friendly look on his face, he didn’t appear anything like the leader of thousands of people—but I’d followed him my entire life, now more than ever.

  “Ellen,” he said slowly, “I do recall, shortly before our wedding ceremony, you were witness to some things on this hill that we had rather you not be privy to. Do you recall that?”

  Ellen blinked, and so did I. Yes—I had forgotten that.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “I do seem to recall some strangeness here.”

  “I remember that at the time, I gave you an option—to walk away in full knowledge that this place was not your usual human residence, or to have your memories erased. You chose to keep your memories, and I recall being very impressed by that. Would you care to tell me what happened?”

  Ellen swallowed. “It just… it didn’t seem real,” she whispered. “The things I’d seen here—they didn’t seem real, compared to… to grandchildren. To what it would cost Cory if she was going to lose the babies.”

  Green nodded. “I can understand that,” he said. “The babies seem to make it all so much bigger. So much more real. But now you understand, don’t you? The ramifications of what you saw that day to the children your daughter is carrying. You understand?”

  There were four of us in the living room, all other souls besides Arturo having fled as we’d walked in.

  “I… those children I miscarried—those were… were elvish children?” Her voice cracked. “How can that be?”

  Green smiled at her, as gentle with her as he’d been with Cami and Connor during a recent fight, as gentle as he’d been with Jack and Teague or Phillip and Marcus when their tumultuous love affairs threatened to rip apart the hill.

  “You and your husband,” he answered. “You must have carried this blood in your veins your entire lives and never known. And then your DNA met and was determined to make a child of those parts.”

  “But….” She was trying not to sob. “But the babies I… I aborted, because the doctor said they wouldn’t thrive… but… I killed—”

  “No, no no no….” Green held out his arms, and she rushed in, as much a child as her daughter.

  “Ellen Kirkpatrick,” he said softly, “you need to listen to me, yes?”

  She nodded mutely.

  “When an egg is fertilized in a woman’s body, that is not the beginning of pregnancy for us. For elves, there is a moment—a few days, actually—when we can decide. Usually, Bracken and I simply tell that child not to be. And this time….” Green grimaced at me. “We did not, and so the children implanted, became, are growing and thriving. But if Cory wanted, she had days to tell them now was not the time. She could have asked me to tell them that, and I would have. It would have pained me, but I would have done it, knowing they would return at a better moment.”

  “She didn’t?” Ellen asked, sounding lost and a little hopeful.

  “No,” I said. I’d almost been waiting for it—which is why, as irritating as it had been, her denial that it was even happening hadn’t infuriated me. Much. “No, it didn’t even occur to her. She’s terrified, but she doesn’t back down from a challenge.”

  “So really,” Green picked up, “those children you lost, the children you banished from your body, they were waiting for the better time. And when they returned, they returned as your daughter. You are probably thinking that’s simple poetry, but I assure you it’s not. For years we have wondered where does that stunning amount of power come from. You saw it, did you not?”

  “Holy Jesus,” Ellen said, with feeling.

  Green nodded. “Indeed. And that—that was child’s play compared to what we’ve seen her do. She’s angry at herself because she did it out of temper, but even then she did it with control.”

  “Damned good thing, or we’d be dead!” Ellen snapped, pulling out of his comfort.

  “No,” he said soberly. “Do not under any circumstances underestimate your daughter. Even today, angry and hurt and feeling trapped, she didn’t attempt anything beyond her ability. You were not so much lucky she didn’t kill you, as you were lucky that she’s the girl you raised. The girl you raised, that we love, wouldn’t have risked doing that even in a fit of pique. And that’s the point. A human sorceress does not just happen out of nowhere. I assumed there were some hidden bloodlines that created her, but normally being even a half elf doesn’t guarantee anything near the power your daughter possesses.”

  “That’s true,” I said, our interactions with the half elves who’d been dying to hear they were not alone haunting me as we spoke. “Half elves have small things—psychic abilities, some small parlor tricks—but nothing near what she has.”

  “So what you are saying….”

  She was right to sound uncertain. This was a tremendous thing we were putting together after all these years.

  “The reason she has all this power is that she had to wait many times to return. Every time you miscarried or aborted, the core of her—the elvish magic of her—bided its time and grew. When she was finally born, she was blessed with a prodigious gift from all who had gone before.”

  Ellen nodded. Her mouth worked, and suddenly I understood her dilemma. She had held on to that pain for over twenty, perhaps thirty years. Time and time again, hoping for a child, being told that the ones in her womb could not thrive. And when she finally had a child, it was not the one she had been hoping for. What she was hearing now could heal so much—Cory was the child she’d been hoping for. She was all the children Ellen had been hoping for. Her very existence was forgiveness and reward, all rolled into one.

  But it’s hard to let go of pain.

  “She….” Ellen swallowed. “She was such a pretty baby, you understand?”

  And then she w
ept, folded in Green’s arms, until she too fell asleep.

  Nicky drove Ellen home before flying back. She didn’t say much after she awoke and before she left, but she thanked us graciously for letting her nap on the couch and for being “So very understanding.”

  We cautioned her to please not say anything else about her daughter or her pregnancy, and especially to not call her by name in front of her friends. It was a hard thing to explain, but she was humble and seemingly willing to let herself be schooled in things that—finally—she could admit she didn’t understand.

  As Nicky drove her away, Green and I were left in a strangely silent hill.

  “Do you think she understands now?” I asked tentatively.

  “I thought she understood last time,” Green said, irritated. Then he let some of that fall away. “Probably. Yes. But….” He looked at me honestly. “Women—human women—are complex. She is going to want a say in the raising of the children, and that will be complex. She’s going to forget, time and time again, that Cory isn’t human, and the children aren’t human. She’s going to want to forget.”

  “Even after—!” I flailed my arms, so certain this had been the final conflict that the prospect of going through it again left me a little nauseous.

  Green put a hand on my shoulder—and then, oh Glorious Goddess, pulled me into his body for some much needed comfort.

  “Bracken, my love, you and I and Nicky, we took Cory with all of the flaws. It doesn’t change a thing that not all of those flaws are her own.”

  I thought of Cory’s look as she’d fallen asleep, the vague sadness, the certainty that she hadn’t done enough.

  We loved her for so many things, and so many of those things she’d gotten from her mother, whether we cared to admit it or not.

  I snuggled into Green’s arms, remembering that we were going to try to regain that closeness, tumble in each other’s beds, each other’s bodies, once again.

  “The children,” I said, relaxing into him fully. “You had to see them. They were… simply being at the outset. And once they realized there was a third party involved, the little shits completely distorted the picture.”

  Green pulled back and grinned. “Did they? I had no idea that was a conscious thing! I thought it was something that hit when glamour hit.” In adolescence—that was our common wisdom.

  “Maybe as fetuses or embryos it comes to repel invasion. Perhaps it evolved,” I reasoned, suddenly liking the science very much. “I wish we could have taken the pictures, but we had to delete them instead.”

  Green sighed and kissed my temple. I made no effort to move from his arms.

  Cory: Fall-ing

  FALL ALWAYS passed so fast.

  Maybe it was because you were always looking at that dazzling sky, wondering when it was going to change, turn gray, dump snow on your head when you least expected it.

  Maybe it was that the days were so short. Everything was nighttime, and after an hour or so every night socializing with the vampires, it was time to go to bed.

  Maybe it was school, which pumped away with well-worn gears, oiled and smooth and massive, the assignments and lectures all bent on churning out a suitably indoctrinated little clone of Western civilization’s best and brightest. Okay, so maybe still a little bitter about school. Shall have to work on that. Maybe it was the wind, which blew long and short, sweet and bitter, and made every walk on the campus into either a slog or a game of tag. We were so preoccupied by the wind that the classroom was a brief respite, shelter from the ocean storm.

  I’m not sure what it was, really, but we always seemed to go from the end of September to Christmas at a dead sprint, and this year was no exception. In fact, this year was worse, because every day became a desperate race to see how much I could accomplish before my body absolutely demanded rest, food, and a bathroom break—and no, not necessarily in that order.

  During the first week of November, we spent some time strewing the invisible border that surrounded Green’s property with blood-seasoned steak. The next time the alarm went off, we all propelled ourselves above the hill to see twenty sleeping werewolves on the border.

  For a moment we entertained the notion of inviting them all into the hill and making nice, but Bracken, ever practical, put the kibosh on that.

  “Hi, hello, you’ve been trying to kill us for months, but now that you’re no longer addicted to sex, I think we should be friends?”

  Arturo, Green, and I all glared at him. Arturo turned his back and dropped out of the sky in disgust, and Bracken rolled his eyes and folded his arms, the wind whipping around his shorn black hair like it was getting vengeance.

  “You all know I’m right,” he said, then extended his arms over his head so he could touch down. Show-off. He’d gotten a lot better at flying in these past months.

  Green and I were left, feet dangling over thirty yards above the ground as we watched the poor bewildered werewolves turn into poor bewildered naked people and approach each other warily.

  “He’s right, you know,” Green said, but he didn’t sound happy about it.

  “Yeah. Prick.”

  Green laughed and extended his hand. Together we descended slowly, oh so slowly, until our feet touched, and then he draped himself over my back to still my shivering. I’d gotten really good at flying this autumn, but it still took a great deal of power, and when I was putting all that power into flying, regulating my body heat went right out the window. I often spent a good half hour trying to get rid of the shivering after we’d warded off the bad guys, and it only got worse as winter got closer.

  Iris agreed with Brack when we asked her opinion—looking surprised when we did so. Of course, Iris was constantly surprised to just be alive and well these days.

  She’d agreed to stay on at the hill as a sort of willing prisoner. She didn’t have much memory of her thralldom to Nimuetia, so she was little to no help, but we all knew that it would be a death sentence to send her off the hill. She’d been too close to the head of the snake—now that she was no longer envenomed, she’d probably be killed. We gave her a room and a bodyguard—an unattached female elf who was fiercely loyal to Green but very compatible with a dominator like Iris—and hoped they’d be happy during her stay. I’d seen her and Sky running the cross-country track together, and though Teague and I kept our distance, we’d gotten uncertain hand raises of acknowledgment when we’d seen her.

  So we didn’t ask the poor, lost, forcefully recruited werewolves in, but we did put Teague and Mario and the vampires on special alert for the new shape-shifters. Apparently they organized some sort of “bar watch”—and in an odd way, that reminded me of Adrian’s subtle, unstructured recruitment of the lost youth of our world.

  We were recruiting lost werewolves—it was a noble calling.

  But ultimately not one I was allowed to take part in, which was probably a good idea. Adrian had been the one who’d seen the good in everyone. I was not nearly the bitch I’d been before Adrian met me, but my world was… more centered now. The children were the core. I surrounded them, and the men surrounded me. Our friends surrounded us, and the hill surrounded them, and I loved everybody, but….

  But at the moment, it all came down to the tiny creatures in my womb.

  They were the center.

  I didn’t have the energy to debate it, not now.

  THANKSGIVING WAS… fast. I wish I could be ashamed at how much I slept, but it so wasn’t happening. I indulged myself with running every morning with Teague, because I missed that, and with helping Grace in the kitchen even though she complained that I shouldn’t put myself out.

  I love the kitchen during Thanksgiving. It’s warm and homey and social, and Katy and Renny were totally with me on that this year. Last year Katy had been consumed with Teague and Jack, so we hadn’t spoken much, but this year she was throwing herself into the preparations with all her heart. Apparently holidays hadn’t been a thing when she or Teague had been kids. Jack had the sense-memory gui
debook—he remembered stuffing and gravy and turkey and cookies and mashed potatoes and….

  For that matter, so did Renny and I. So did Grace and many other members of the hill. But for the people like Katy and Teague, or like Adrian had been, making Thanksgiving amazing and Christmas spectacular became a mission, something important, something sacred.

  I was proud to be a part of that this year.

  On Friday night, after the food coma had worn off and after my zillion-and-sixtieth nap of the week, I awoke between Bracken and Nicky in the early evening—happy, comfortable, and….

  Oh holy Goddess, was I primed.

  I yawned and stretched and turned toward Bracken, conscious of Nicky’s hands roaming my back in a desultory, skin-feeding way. Bracken was sitting up in bed doing our homework. I actually did my homework, but he had a thing about rewriting it in some sort of neutral handwriting. On the one hand, I felt bad about that, but on the other, it seemed to keep him out of trouble while I was sleeping.

  He turned to look at me, smiling slightly as he set the notebook on the end table.

  “Awake?”

  “Isn’t that a rhetorical question when my eyes are open?” I asked, sliding my hand up under his T-shirt. Oh… yes. The skin of his stomach was almost entirely smooth. Nicky had a happy trail, and I enjoyed that—a lot—but Bracken’s body, mostly hairless, pleased me no end. He was the reason I moisturized my hands in the morning—so I could feel every inch of his skin.

  Bracken gave a little purr and arched his back, bucking under my touch.

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s a rhetorical question. Are you happy now?”

  I thought about it. Were we still at war? Well, yes. A whole new wave of sleepy werewolves had awakened naked at our borders that morning, wandering away to try to find their cars and figure out what had happened to their lives.

  My parents hadn’t come to Thanksgiving. It was a blow, but not unexpected. Sometimes my mom was asked to a friend’s house, and that was where they’d gone this year. She’d thanked me when I called to ask her, but she didn’t mentioned shopping again. She had mentioned that Dr. Nieman had called her to ask why I hadn’t shown, and then called again to ask whose ultrasound records were in the monitor. Nicky had been furious—he hadn’t been aware that the machine backed up twice to the office computer—so we’d sent Sweet, one of Green’s lieutenants who might leave less of an impression than one of the male elves, to go wipe his mind again.