Quickening, Volume 2 Read online

  I stuck my tongue out. “Don’t be a smartass.” I wiggled a little, though, because after the big shield-refining thing with Bracken and Nicky, the four of us had rolled around and changed the wall colors again—and, much to the entire household’s horror, changed the colors of every vehicle in the garage to baby pink and baby blue. Including Arturo’s sky blue Cadillac, which turned pastel. Including Max’s red Mustang. Including (oh horrors) Teague’s precious candy-apple-red fastback. The only vehicle spared had been the one I’d “painted” over the summer in olive, purple, and gold.

  The bitching had been prodigious and bitter until Bracken and I had made a conscious effort—sort of the ultimate pity fuck, from my point of view—and changed the cars back. Green had said it was a nice exercise in control, but Teague, Max, and Arturo kept checking their cars in fear now. The sex car color fiasco was not going to be forgiven soon.

  “I just… I mean, we can’t have a sex moratorium while you’re gone!” I pointed out in exasperation. “I know scary things happen, but….”

  Green let out a hmph. “See, luv,” he said after a moment, resting his chin on his doubled fists, “our difficulty lies with the unpredictability of it. You can’t predict what the orgasm is going to do as it ripples up your body.” His fingertips danced along the side of my stomach through my T-shirt, and we both looked down at the bulge pressing against the worn gray fabric. Now, when I concentrated, I could feel the slight stretch in my uterus and the way my muscles and insides were rearranging themselves to host the parasites currently gnawing their way through sausage, eggs, and fruit.

  “Well, maybe,” I said archly, “if you’re going to be there more at night, we can practice some more so we know what will happen.”

  He tilted his head back and laughed. “Point taken.” His eyes danced. “But also—” He grimaced. “—we may want to consider that as you leave your second trimester, around February, you’ll feel less and less like ‘cavorting.’ In fact, the larger your womb gets, the bigger your orgasm will get. It could be that, by then, the full… ménage experience, as it were, might be a bit much for you.”

  I had the wherewithal to blush. “So you’re saying that (a) I’ll feel too crappy to get it on, and (b) if I do feel good enough to get it on, I might want to tone it down anyway, because the full monty is going to wear me the hell out.”

  Green thought that one over. “Yes, beloved. Once again, you have put your elbow on the pulse of the problem.”

  I blushed harder. “More like my big freaking burgeoning stomach, you know?”

  “That too.” He touched my stomach again, palm out, and his fingertips danced along my nerve endings.

  Except they were dancing on the inside, against my stomach or my diaphragm or something that most assuredly wasn’t my skin.

  I gasped and pressed his hand tighter against my stomach. I closed my eyes and just felt for a moment, the space behind my eyes blood dark until the flutters pressed against it in spreading spots of white, like handprints on a piece of black plastic.

  A slow smile spread over my face, squishing my cheeks up and letting my teeth dry out.

  “You felt that?” he asked, tender as always.

  “Mm-hmm. You?”

  “Luv, I’ve been feeling them for weeks. You’re late to the party.”

  I opened one eye and saw that he was teasing me—but he was also telling the truth.

  “Poor, poor, mortal-oh-me,” I said, but without any real venom. I could feel our children, and Green was there, Green whom I loved before all others.

  For once—just a peaceful slice of time in a quiet kitchen, with the tranquil dark sleeping around us—I was content.

  TWO DAYS before the winter solstice, in the late afternoon, Nimuetia threw everything she had at us. Later we would assume it had been so we wouldn’t interfere with her solstice ceremony to make more troops.

  It didn’t matter why.

  The minute we heard the psychic shriek of the alarm, those of us who could fly ran up the stairs and into the Goddess grove so we could levitate or fly up above the trees and see what was going on.

  We got there just in time to see a mass of werewolves—over two hundred people, from the looks of it—rush the borders of Green’s land.

  And disappear.

  Everybody grimaced. We could feel the push of bodies into our defenses—sort of like eating another cheeseburger when you were constipated. (Pregnancy—so very many new experiences, so few of them as magical as that first kick.) The body of our land felt bloated and full, roiling with human gas, lost werewolves who could not see their way to the other side.

  Green looked at me beseechingly. “Beloved?” he asked. Then I felt a spear of power aimed at our heart.

  With a gasp of outrage, I looked out into the murky twilight of the closing gray day and saw a burn of orange on the horizon.

  It wasn’t the sun, which had hidden behind an iron-gray cloudbank for the past week, oblivious to the lot of us working hard at our Christmas.

  It was her.

  Our first glimpse of an enemy who had harried us for over a year, and unimpressive from a distance. A single woman, blazing orange—and from a guess, she was blazing with other people’s power. We’d met enemies like this, ones who could steal from the preternatural creatures in their personal sway, and she was probably getting her groovy hot orange glow from the werewolves who had just disappeared into our borders.

  I heard a savage oath from Bracken next to me. “She wouldn’t be so fucking bright if we could break the blood bond with all her goddamned minions.”

  I looked at him and grinned. “Beloved, think you can make it rain in the borderlands?”

  Brack looked at me, confused. “Rain? That’s Green’s province.” Well, Green did control the weather in the hill.

  “Not rain, my darling,” I said, thinking about how I’d direct the power just there, and let Bracken follow my lead. I squinted through the whipping wind and held my breath. “Do you feel it?”

  Everyone hovering on the hill with me, including the angels—who were flapping their wings slowly and without personal investment in the battle—stopped for a moment and held their breath.

  Oh, holy Goddess, she’d mistimed it. She must have been banking on the power of twilight and the grayness of the day. That made it harder to see, and perhaps she was hoping for some of her people to slide under the defenses. Perhaps she had thought she would have won already—and it was a good thought, because two hundred werewolves was a lot of killing fury under your control.

  She hadn’t counted on them simply disappearing like that.

  It didn’t matter why, or what she had thought she could gain. Nothing mattered now, because they were coming.

  The vampires had arisen.

  Phillip and Marcus zoomed through first, followed by Grace. Then the whole kiss came boiling up from the trapdoor, covering the grove below our feet with angry bodies—souls ready for battle, born bloodletters who wanted a chance to be set free.

  Oh, was she lucky we’d accidentally hidden her werewolves.

  “Phillip, Marcus, Grace, need you.”

  Next to me, Green was having the same conversation with the other elves, the ones inside the hill. A heartbeat later, the last of the sidhe streamed outside—all of the landbound looking up at those of us who could fly with awe.

  Lambent was one of the ones who could.

  He rose up next to me and asked, just under the wind, “Can Kyle do it, Your Nibs?”

  Yes, he and Kyle had been comforting each other. I didn’t see it lasting—but then, I hadn’t seen Max and Renny lasting either, which proved my perception in these matters was often for shit.

  “Sure.” I called the grieving young vampire. He rose, gaunt but focused, and listened to the mental call I gave my captains.

  Very carefully he approached Lambent in the air, a march of two hummingbirds. As they hovered, bobbing with the air currents, he sank his teeth delicately into Lambent’s pink-fl
ushed skin.

  The other vampires were executing the same stately dance with the lot of us, and Phillip took his turn with me. I managed a short caress of his coarse black hair before he punctured and then licked just enough to hold the blood in.

  By the time he’d finished, the lot of us were holding out our hands, and the vampires’ spit was pretty much the only thing keeping us from raining blood on the sacred ground of the Goddess grove. The angels had apparently been eager to donate, and Marcus was looking just a little bit drunk on angel blood.

  “Bracken?”

  His eyes glowed faintly in the early dark, what had been the whites pulsing instead with the dark ruby color of new blood.

  “Yes, beloved?”

  I didn’t touch him physically, but I did join with Green and let a tendril of power twine with Green’s and then Bracken’s. I can’t explain it any better than letting vines of our will snake together, spun like yarn.

  “Do you feel that, beloved?” I asked, probing at the edge of Green’s property where my shields kept the werewolves both out of the property itself and locked in limbo.

  I heard Bracken’s grunt. Then I felt him tugging lightly at my blood.

  “Everyone ready!” Green and I called together, both mentally and out loud, and I spoke in a low undertone to Brack. “Not too much from me, beloved. The children need some.”

  I could feel them pulsing in my body, sending tingles to my extremities, through my fingertips, in the ends of my toes. They enjoyed the rush of power, the adrenaline running through my veins—Green had told me this, and when the lightning was crackling through my body, I could feel it too. When I touched down and let the power furl back under my ribcage, pulsing with my heart, that surety would disappear, going back to where it had been before that marvelous flutter with just Green and me in the kitchen.

  But right now, I savored it. I was afraid for us, yes. But I was not alone, not even in my body, and that was comfort.

  I felt the readiness of our people roaring in my blood, felt it ripple and swell, rise and crest—

  And peak.

  “Bracken, now!”

  I felt his power tugging the blood from our veins, thin trickles of crimson twirling through the air like the threads of a licorice whip and joining, combining elves, sorceress, angels, all into one slightly thicker rope. Bracken wrapped it around the power Green and I sent snaking along the boundaries of the property in a steady circle like a sprinkler hose.

  Almost exactly like a sprinkler hose.

  I felt a wobble and gasped, handing my wrist to Green so he could heal the puncture and stop the blood flow. It took barely a brush of his hand, almost absentminded, and then both of us were twining with Bracken again, pooling the blood around the areas most populated with werewolves. In volume it wasn’t much blood—we weren’t exsanguinating our people, just borrowing a bit of what they had to spare—but combined with the power the vampires were giving me and that Green was taking freely from the elves, it became a small whirlpool, a blood grenade set to cleanse the tainted.

  “Song!” Green called, and I remembered. The last time we’d done something like this, we’d had an entire chorus, complete with rehearsal and timing. This time all we had was a song everyone in the hill could sing.

  “Rain will fall!” I shouted. And then, at the top of our lungs, with no conscious effort toward harmony or even staying in key, Green, Bracken, and I began to chant. “Rain will fall and trees will grow and rain will fall and trees will grow and….”

  As the groundswell of chanting started up just like the first borrowed drops of blood, I left them to it. I sent my own voice soaring—as pure in pitch as I could manage, because when I let go of the melody line, that was when we all let go of the blood and the power and….

  “You will have lovers,” I sang. “We will have lovers….”

  “Again!”

  As a people we roared the word, and as the focus of our blood magic, Bracken flung the blood through our shields so hard that any body, tree, human, or werewolf would be penetrated by the fine mist and cleansed, left standing as the blood diffused through their systems, taking the mind-warping magic of our adversary with it.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Quietly elves began to heal the small puncture wounds on themselves and each other—although now that Bracken wasn’t pulling their blood from their bodies with magic, the vampire spit would probably keep the whole works inside their skin where it belonged.

  But that was all, in that moment. And then….

  Then the werewolves began to tumble into sight at the borders of our land. They were, to a one, dizzy and disoriented—and naked. But they were no longer hostile to us, and they were very confused to find they’d just been werewolves and now no longer knew what they were.

  “Did we get them all?” I asked Green. He thought about it and shrugged.

  “No,” he said, not seeming perturbed. “But it’s still early yet. If we try this again in a few weeks, we may be able to round up the stragglers.”

  I noticed his compassion for the poor lost werewolves wandering inside no-man’s-land seemed to have run out, and honestly I couldn’t blame him. We really were going to an awful lot of effort not to kill people, and it was starting to piss me off.

  With that anger building, I looked out across the murky sky.

  Our enemy was fading. Fading, in fact, and falling. A controlled fall, so not deadly, but still, we’d weakened her. Weakened her badly—and suddenly I wanted an end to it.

  I don’t even remember the conscious decision, but one moment I was hovering, watching with satisfaction as the newly freed werewolves began stumbling around in the frost and thinking we should probably send them some sprites to act as will-o’-the-wisps to guide them to their clothes and cars before the snow-laden air did them harm. The next moment I was streaking across the sky with a precision I hadn’t possessed this summer but had honed in the attacks since.

  I was barely aware of what was probably half the hill streaking after me and Green shouting my name while remaining over the grove, hovering.

  I felt the power depletion the moment we left Green’s land, but I had flown without that backup before. I was freezing—the hooded sweatshirt and jeans I wore weren’t enough for being this far up and flying in the cold—but hot fucking vengeance was making up for a lot of heat loss.

  She was down.

  I hurtled past trees and underbrush, looking for the telltale glow of burnt orange as I passed. She’d need her power in the cold and the rough terrain, and providing she’d not been killed with the fall, she’d be hoofing it.

  I was going so fast that I thought the white streaks blurring past my vision were from speed. It wasn’t until my face started stinging that I realized it was snow.

  I took my eyes from the horizon for a moment to register the complete dark of the sky above me and the enchantment of the falling white, and when I pulled my head out of my ass I realized I had almost missed her. It took all the control I’d learned in the past months to stop—just stop—and lower myself to the ground.

  She was running, and I landed about ten feet behind her in a patch of forest that was both spare and steady, with trees about every twenty feet or so.

  “Elf bitch!” I screamed, too furious to be a grown-up about using her name. She turned anyway, and we faced each other under moonlit snowfall and a winter-dark sky.

  If, as we suspected, Nimuetia waxed and waned by the solstice, pulling her sustenance from the obscene rituals of flesh and sex that Connor and Iris had described, she was so far into the bottom of her swing she was almost subterranean with want.

  Her flesh was sunken into her cheeks. Skin sagged at her neck and even flapped around the bones of her skinny forearms. Her eyes glowed from black pits like coals in a skull, and her bright, rich robes flapped around a ribcage and spine both clothed in fragile, brittle skin.

  Her hair fell lank and coarse down her hips. On a good day, it was probably the color of an LA
sunset. Today it was a dirty ginger—fruit-flavored bubblegum at the bottom of the subway.

  Her teeth were whole and sound, though, and she pulled back skinny flaps of chapped lips to snarl.

  “Is that all you’ve got, Cory Kirkpatrick Green?” she hissed, her voice sibilant and dry. “Elf bitch?”

  “Nimuetia,” I named her. Then I got nasty. “Mistress of putrid sex, witch-master of obscene blood rites, succubus of toxic greed. How’s that?”

  She flinched, and for a moment some animation returned to those desiccated features. I must have named her aright—at least in her perception of herself—because the power shield she held around herself flickered, and for a moment she was soft and sad and puzzled.

  “But what is your name?” she whispered. “What is it? Lady Cory? We’ve heard that—it holds no power over you. Why can we not call your name?”

  Well, for one thing, because it was too goddamned complicated for even me to remember. But for another? Well, part of elvish naming rituals involved naming what a person was, as well as who they were related to. I suspected she knew very little about who I was.

  “I got no idea,” I lied. But then, I wasn’t elvish—at least not in this matter. Whatever spam filter my blood had undergone during my mother’s repeated reboot of the baby thing, I had never had the stricture placed on me concerning truth-telling that the elves had. Once that had bothered me, and I’d worked hard to be just like them. Now that it turned out I was like them? I had no problem letting this one little similarity slip away.

  “None?” she asked derisively. Oh, yes, it rankled that I could tell a bold-faced lie, I could see that.

  “Okay, maybe a little, but that’s not what concerns me. You know what concerns me?”

  She waved a languid hand, and I swear even the skin on her fingers flapped. “I don’t care what your concerns are,” she said, bored.

  My eyes narrowed. “Remember that I can kill you as we stand, and say that again without irony,” I snapped. I hoped I could kill her as we stood. She was still glowing, and everything she’d done had been sneaky and defensive—what defense did she have up her sleeve?