Becoming

By

Amy Lane

The 5^th Jack & Teague (& Katy) story

Prologue

Jack

Teague wasn’t the only one who had bad dreams—at least not this night.

Two days after the ‘Werewolf Debacle’ (as Jack was starting to think of it) he lay beside his lovers. He should have been hearing their breathing in the dark, but instead he was sweating, trying to recapture the dream as it had ripped apart his night. Jack had been a big reader as a kid, and much of his life had been spent in stories of knights and ladies, quests and battles, silly idealistic bloodshed for a sheltered, bloodless boy. This dream had been just like them. He remembered bold lines and fairy tale colors—just like a comic book or a kid’s story. And just like a comic book or a kid’s story, the movements had been broad and stylized—it hadn’t looked real at all, but the beautiful parts had been more beautiful and the scary parts had been terrifying…

Unlike in real life, when she was a rather plain college student, Lady Cory was very beautiful in the dream. Her hair was a glorious scarlet waterfall and her eyes flashed green/brown fire. There were no freckles to make her average, and her cheekbones seemed to have moved up and gotten a little narrower. The results were lovely and terrible and terrifying—there was nothing of the friendly, frightening human being that Jack had been humanly jealous of. In her place was an inhumanly beautiful, cold and bloodless monarch, the kind that men would die for and women would kill to serve.

Teague stood before her—wearing armor polished to a sheen, of course. He held his helmet under his arm, and was kneeling on one knee with his head bent forward in servitude.

“I give to thee, my Lady, all that is in my power...” Not Teague’s words in real life, of course, but Jack could see the sentiment was real. The Lady could too, and she bent her head and replied. Her words were humble—but her face was haughty and indifferent and Jack felt a blaze of anger in the dream because he knew—just knew—that bitch had no idea what it was she was being offered.

“Your sacrifice is unnecessary, Sir Knight. You serve us well. Be happy, go home to your lovers. Be well.”

Of course Teague wouldn’t just let that stand, now would he? He’d have to go and do the noble goddamned thing and make her accept what he was offering.

Jack watched in horror as Teague turned the sword inward, and-- grabbing it by the blade-- thrust it into his chest. (Of course, in real life, this would be impossible since he was wearing two tons of armor, but just for Jack’s dream, because he was horrified and freaked out, that fucking sword slid in like the steel plating was butter.) And the damned Lady of the house—she did nothing. She did jack-fucking-diddly-shit as Teague reached inside that wreckage of metal and chest cavity and pulled out his still beating heart.

In the dream, Jack started to scream—one of those terrible screams that you have when you’re asleep, where your mouth is open and your chest is working like a bellows but no sound comes out. Teague looked at him with that beautiful fuck-me grin and winked. When he spoke, blood frothed and bubbled from between his lips.

“Don’t worry, Jacky. There’ll be enough for you when she’s done.”

But the Lady Cory was gnawing on that thing, flashes of scarlet blood coating her cheeks and dribbling down her chin, and Jack was pretty damn sure there was going to be nothing left.

Jack’s eyes opened in the dark and his heart—still securely in his chest, unlike Teague’s dream heart—hammered blood in his ears.

He turned to Teague, his bantam, wiry body back-spooning into Jack’s arms, just in time for Teague to gasp like a swimmer who’d been under for too long. He struggled to sit up, making what sounded like suppressed screams in his throat, and Jack tightened his embrace and forced him to lie down.

After a few minutes Teague’s body relaxed, and he turned away from Katy who was soundly asleep and let Jack kiss his forehead and nuzzle his cheek. As his breathing calmed down and his terrible shivers stopped, Jack spoke, his voice startling in the dark.

“What do you dream about, beloved?”

Teague hauled in another breath and Jack felt one final, convulsive shiver rock his scrawny, tree-root body.

“Letting you down,” he said after a moment, and Jack kissed his forehead. It was still clammy from the dream, and Teague made a rough sound in his throat before his shoulders came down in that self-protective cocoon that Jack recognized so well.

“Impossible,” Jack said fervently. In his head, he was thinking that his dream could wait. Teague had enough on his mind.

Teague

Personal Debt

When Teague Sullivan was fourteen years old, he made a miraculous discovery.

Girls wanted to touch him.

Boys probably wanted to touch him too, but he didn’t figure that out until Jacky, and it was beside the point. The point was, Teague was never touched unless he was getting beaten. When Michelle Campos, with glossy dark hair in rolled curls and vivacious brown eyes and the sexual confidence of a girl who knew she was wanted, pinned him behind the boy’s lockers after sixth period gym, murmured breathily into his mouth and put her hands on his shoulders, Teague was mesmerized. Not by Michelle, although she was pretty damned awesome, but by the feel of her palms on his flesh.

He opened his mouth to her kisses, and she tasted like soda and chocolate. He didn’t get a lot of sweet in his life, so he learned to love sweet, although he never ever asked for it. She pulled up his shirt and rubbed his bare skin with her whole hand, and he must have whimpered in complete surprise when she hit his nipples and his whole body tingled because she laughed into his mouth and kissed him harder.

Before he could protest (not that he would have) she had unbuttoned his jeans and was on her knees, in the dark of the locker-room, with his hard, aching cock in her mouth and her hands massaging his thighs. He couldn’t have said at that moment which one felt better. When his vision went dark and his body exploded and his eyes rolled back into his head, he might have said it was the mouth on his cock, but it was a near thing.

He didn’t know what to do then.

He stood there, stroking her hair as she laughed some more into the closeness of his thighs, and then they heard voices.

“Ooops!” she said, standing up and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She had a wicked smile, and he found himself answering it, feeling shy and dumb and inept. It didn’t matter. She gave him a quick kiss on the mouth, letting him taste himself, and then held her finger to her lips and disappeared through the back entrance to the boy’s locker room, leaving Teague to haul up his jeans and continue breathing, although that second one was somewhat of a stretch.

He’d felt vaguely ashamed of that moment.

Not of her mouth or her hands or anything she’d done—that had been wonderful. So wonderful in fact that sex became like soda or chocolate—that sweet thing he would never reach for but would take only when it dropped into his lap. (Which it did frequently, much to his constant surprise and puzzlement. He didn’t do anything! Why did women keep wanting to feel him up and blow him?)

No, he felt ashamed because of what he didn’t do. He hadn’t done anything to deserve that miracle of firing nerves and human touch. He’d just smiled at her a little in math and that had been all. But she’d kept smiling at him and he’d kept returning it, every day a little longer, and then… then on this day, she’d blessed him with human touch and orgasm, and he hadn’t paid his debt.

He never got a chance to pay that debt. Michele’s boldness had been an act of desperation and goodbye—her parents were moving her to an even smaller school in an even smaller town, because the assumption is that sex doesn’t happen in small schools in small towns. Anyone who’s ever been to one could tell you different, but parents are often afraid of sex, and there’s no reasoning with them.

So Teague learned his second lesson.

He learned that if you don’t see the person ever again, any mistakes you make, any fuck-ups or uncomfortable moments could be pretty much forgotten.

Teague lived to be fourteen because he learned quickly and acted on the knowledge. He learned to be a fucking awesome lover in the same way. He never wanted to feel that sense of shame and debt for not giving back. He also learned to only go home with girls who wouldn’t want to know his name in the morning.

Teague had been almost thirty when he woke up in Green’s bed after being healed of what should have been a mortal wound. He never said a word to Green—he never had to—about how Green’s touch was like food to a starving man and balm to a ravaged soul. Green knew. But when Teague found himself sharing a bed with Jacky and then Katy, being touched constantly, especially in sleep, became a sweet and terrible part of his life.

Sweet because it was the thing he craved most of all and never wanted to admit to needing.

Terrible because he could not see how, in his entire history, he had ever come to deserve such kindness. How could he repay it? It was like that long ago blow-job—perfect, exquisite, and stolen from the pain that the world should be.

So that touch as he went to sleep haunted his dreams. Whether his lovers were being chased by a dragon with his father’s face or whether he was locked in his head, screaming in his skull as his traitorous body destroyed what he loved best, it was all about being touched and how if it didn’t hurt, Teague Sullivan didn’t deserve it.

Now that he’d had love for a couple of weeks and learned that it hurt sometimes worse than no love at all, he would have thought the dreams would ease up a little, but they didn’t. Life became a crapshoot. One day he was sitting with his family and ready to reach for them like he had a right to be happy, the next day he was howling his chest raw because he had no right to be happy, none at all. It was almost easier when he expected to be beaten all the time—at least then he’d known what was coming. It had sucked, but he hadn’t been touched then. He didn’t know the opposite of ‘suck’. He didn’t know that sometimes heaven might allow ‘rock’ as opposed to ‘suck’.

The dreams hurt. They ripped his mind like demons playing gleefully in the viscera of his broken heart.

That was what love should feel like, right? That was all he deserved?

He certainly didn’t deserve Jacky holding him, rocking him, kissing his forehead like a child, making him feel protected and safe. He definitely didn’t deserve the softness of Katy, pressed up against his back in sweetness, better than chocolate and soda and softer than cotton candy or puppy fur. He didn’t deserve them—he knew he didn’t. But they wouldn’t let him up, wouldn’t let him out of bed into the cold and the dark and the wet.

They wouldn’t let him go, and so he accepted them, he had to, because even when he didn’t deserve them he knew better than to hurt them when punishing himself. Any asshole knew that was a debt you could never repay, and Teague always paid his debts.

That didn’t make accepting Jacky’s comfort any easier, any less painful, but it did make it possible.

Love was a debt to repay. Teague may have to work his whole life to be even, but it would be worth it not to feel the shame of ingratitude at the end.

Since he wasn’t sleeping with Green or the Lady Cory, this went double for them. It went triple or quadruple—they asked for nothing. They didn’t hold him down and make him accept their love. They didn’t force him to acknowledge his feelings—because God knew that was more pain than it seemed worth most of the time. They didn’t look boldly at his scars and feel that pain twice—once for him and once for themselves. They just asked him to do a job, and expected him to be competent.

It was, by far, the most painless love Teague had ever experienced.

And although he couldn’t rank it first—he just couldn’t, some stubborn part of his soul had to make Jacky first and Katy a close second and nothing he could tell himself about duty first, comfort second could change that—he could rank it equal.

He’d die for his King and Queen, just as he’d die for Jacky and Katy. Goddess knew, dying for them might even be easier than living for them, but he wasn’t planning on testing that out anytime soon.

He hated to admit it, but he was starting to enjoy the drug of comfort. He may even become addicted to it, like his father had been to liquor. But since he’d yet to beat anyone’s head in with a broken bottle or kill kittens just for sport, he thought maybe the addiction to his lovers’ skin might be his little secret.

He certainly wouldn’t let it get in the way of repaying his debts.

Which is why it hurt something vital in him to confess to Jack the nature of his dreams. He couldn’t repay that—he just couldn’t. He was in Jack’s debt, just to be able to say the words and lay them at Jack’s feet. It felt better, sharing that sort of burden, and he couldn’t take Jack’s anxieties in the same spirit. He’d always carried Jack’s burdens—it was the nature of their relationship.

He could tell Cory or Green—they were his leaders, they bore the weight of their people on their shoulders, and as one of their men, he laid his life on the line in return.

But he’d already done that for Jack several times. He had no currency to repay the confidence. So he just blurted it out and trusted in what Jack and Katy had been trying to tell him for the past week or so—part of being lovers was taking another person’s pain. He wasn’t sure if he believed that—he wasn’t even sure if it worked—but he did know that when he closed his eyes, wrapped in Jack’s arms, he knew for a certainty that he wouldn’t be waking up with another dream, at least not on this night.

The next morning, Katy woke him with a sleepy kiss.

“Last two das were nice, pappi, but today I’ve gots to work.” She smelled spicy and exotic as she kissed him—something about the soap she’d brought to use in the shower, but he liked it. It was like cinnamon and bay leaves—both warm and sharp, just like her.

“You have a good day, Katy,” he mumbled, and she surprised him by keeping her face close and regarding him with warm brown eyes.

“Last time I told you to sleep in, Teague, you didn’t. You got all hurt and then went on a run and then you and Jacky, you almost got killed, and then we had to sit on you to make you sleep in. I know you’ve got to meet werewolves and be all functional today but… could you, just for me pappi, let me think of you tucked in here with Jacky for an hour? Don’t get into no fights, don’t get all hurt on your inside. Just sleep. Make love. Try a do-over, okay?”

Teague blinked. “Maybe I’m just not designed for sleeping in. You ever think about that, Katy?”

She shook her head and swore softly in Spanish. “I think you got some time to go before your heart’s all better, that’s what I think. I think you might kill us first while it’s mending. ‘Bye…”

“Katy…” He’d hurt her, and he didn’t know how, and she scowled at him and gave him a flipped wrist with an open palm. Talk to the palm, Teague, I’m done talking to you.

“Fine, dammit!” he snapped before she could slam the door. “I’m staying here in bed. Are you happy?”

She looked over her shoulder as she got to the door, and he couldn’t help but think that even the sulky thrust of her lower lip was charming. “You gonna get laid?” she asked, considering.

Teague risked a look at Jacky who squinted one eye at him and went back to feigning sleep to keep out of the argument.

“No,” he said punitively, and as Jack sat up in bed and protested, “NO?” Katy let out a musical laugh and slid gracefully out the door.

Teague grunted, a reluctant smile twitching his usually compressed mouth. “Serves you right,” he grumbled and then hauled the comforter over his shoulder and retreated to the corner of the bed where he usually slept.

Jack scooted next to him and grabbed him around the waist in spite of his startled squawk, and then Teague found himself hauled up back-to-front with his lover.

“What in the…”

“Humor me,” Jack murmured, and then he… fondled Teague, for lack of a better word.

“I thought we were supposed to be sleeping,” Teague muttered, but he wasn’t protesting very hard. God, Jack’s touch, Katy’s touch—it really had become his drug, hadn’t it?

Jack’s hand slid across Teague’s chest, rubbing deliberately against Teague’s sensitive nipples and down his stomach, and Teague arched into it, appreciating the pure touch of skin on skin.

“You go ahead and sleep all you want,” Jack murmured into the sensitive hollow of his ear, “just let me touch you while you sleep.”

Teague bit back on a half-strangled sound. It might have been “please” before he killed it.

“Please?” Jacky asked plaintively, and then Teague felt like a coward for not saying the word first.

“I really do need to run today,” he protested half-heartedly. “That’s not just bull…sh…eeeet…”

“Bullsheet?” Jack chuckled, but he had just wrapped his arm over Teague’s shoulders and framed Teague’s throat with his long-fingered hand. It was an intimate position, a vulnerable position—especially when the hand was large and it was attached to a tall, strong man. Teague’s vulnerability slammed into his chest, and it occurred to him that he literally gave Jack his safety, his life, just with that one gesture.

He wanted to run. It took all of his will to simply lie passive under Jack’s seductive touch.

Jack seemed to sense this—carefully, he stroked down from Teague’s throat and whispered, “Shhhhh… take it easy, big man,” into his ear.

Teague swallowed. “I wasn’t kid…”

“I know.” Sometimes these exchanges got heated, sharp—Teague’s driving need to run coming up against Jack’s possessive need to keep him in their bed. But not this time. Maybe it was the enforced intimacy of the day before, or maybe Jack just knew what he needed, but this time, Jack’s voice only grew gentler.

“Here, beloved,” he whispered, and Teague blushed under the endearment at the same time he blushed under Jack’s hands. “Here, I’ll make you a deal.”

“Yeah?” Teague hated the note of pleading in his voice, but his insides were still raw. The day before he’d had an emotional pain dump of epic proportions, a 9.9 on the Richter scale of internal cataclysms—he couldn’t have another argument right now. He wouldn’t do it. He needed something easy… God help him, he needed to give in. But he was stubborn. He would negotiate. He wouldn’t go too far into the debt of touching… he couldn’t. That was his code. It had kept him sane for thirty soulless years. Yes, whispered his traitorous body, but those years were before Jacky. He told the voice to shut up—Jack was offering him a way out.

“Yeah,” Jack muttered, nibbling on his ear again. Teague’s hips started to arch and wiggle and he tried to make himself stop that. It was impossible to stay out of personal debt when your body was taking touch on credit.

“What’s the deal?” He tried to turn then, thinking he would pin Jacky down, ravish him, take his long, drooling cock into his mouth and make him crazy. Jacky would touch him then, unreservedly, and Teague could earn the touches that way. But Jack kept his arms around Teague’s chest and tightened the embrace, not letting him move unless he jerked his body out of Jack’s control—and that would lead to a fight, to a conflict, and Teague… oh Goddess… he was still bleeding from thinking Jacky was dead, from having his lovers tend to him like a fraught, weepy child.

“The deal,” Jack murmured, biting the nape of his neck gently and then laving it with his tongue, “is that once—just once—you stay here and let me make love to you. No running away, no fighting to be on top, to be in charge. Stay here, let me touch you. Touch back if you want to, but don’t take over.”

Teague’s supreme discomfort with the idea came out with the whine in his throat. “I’m… I’ve got to… Jacky, I’m not good with that…”

Well, it was obvious he wasn’t good with it—his body was straining against itself, and Jack’s hands started rubbing his shoulders in more insistent circles. “Just let me, Teague.” Jacky pushed on Teague’s shoulder insistently, and Teague found himself rolling over onto his stomach. “Let me—I promise, you let me take care of you, and I’ll let you go running. No strings attached, no drama—you’ll just put on your shoes and go.”

Jack sat up then and straddled Teague’s thighs while his hands worked big-palmed magic on the twisted, knotted steel bars at Teague’s shoulders.

“Damn, Teague—you just woke up—how can you be this tight?” Jack wriggled, and Teague could feel the long muscles of his inner thighs against the corded muscle of Teague’s flank. Jack’s cock was semi-hard and nestled between Teague’s legs near the crease of his buttocks, and Teague kept wanting to clench his ass cheeks to keep it there or bring it closer, which surprised the hell out of him in general.

He grunted a non-committal sort of reply to Jack’s question and forced himself not to move, not to respond, to just lay there and accept the wonder of Jack’s touch as it was bestowed on him.

“So,” Jack asked, leaning forward so his lips would touch Teague’s spine between his shoulders, “do we have a deal?”

“I’m not good at this,” Teague temporized, because he wasn’t sure he could. To lay down and just accept touch? To not give anything in return? To exercise complete trust in another human being—even Jacky—not to hurt him when he had relinquished control?

“Not good at accepting love?” Jack asked, still bent over Teague’s back. “I never would have guessed.” He rained some more kisses along Teague’s back and then shifted, so that he was no longer straddling Teague’s thighs—the better to knead the muscles in his lower back and buttocks, really.

Teague made a sound of loss for Jack’s cock, no longer wedged near his bottom, and tried to think of something to say to the sarcastic truth Jack had just given him.

“You’ll just let me go?” he ended up whining, and wondered when he’d turned into a six- year-old girl.

“After we shower,” Jack affirmed, and Teague, mesmerized by the absolute wonder of Jack’s hands, moving from his lower back to his scrawny, muscular ass, couldn’t do more than grunt and agree.

“You like that.” Jack wasn’t asking—it seemed obvious because Teague couldn’t stop himself from arching into Jack’s strong, massaging pushes against his skin. “May I…” a thumb traced the furrowed line, and brushed on the scars Teague knew were there on the backs of his thighs and towards his opening.

Teague whimpered. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t want Jacky to know, to think about the pain, to worry about the shit that had happened to him when he’d been helpless. He didn’t want Jacky to think about him that way, period.

“They’re just scars,” he managed to say, glad his face was turned away. “I’ve got lots.”

“I know,” Jack murmured against the side of his bottom. “You’ve got lots. And they all hurt both of us. How about you let me touch these, and then they won’t be able to hurt us anymore, okay?”

I AM NOT WORTH ALL THIS PAIN.

He was almost biting his tongue in an effort not to say it. Instead, he pulled his arms underneath him in an effort to escape.

Jack literally threw his long body on top of him, pinning him to the mattress. Teague kept his shoulders tight, because they both knew he could throw Jack at any time. He’d proven that two nights ago—he was the meanest, most aggressive werewolf in the pack. They both knew it. And Jack was a beta—not anywhere near as strong as Teague, and certainly not as tough. He defeated Teague’s intentions with two words.

“You promised.”

They stayed there, in tableau for a couple of minutes, Teague’s breathing harsh in his own ears. Teague’s glance slid sideways to the red-numbered clock on the end-table, and he saw that they had a good, long time before he was going to have lunch with Cory and talk about the werewolves locked in the basement.

Eventually, that’s what decided him. He didn’t want to burden Cory and Green with anymore of his bullshit. Cory especially—she took too much on her narrow shoulders as it was. She wouldn’t talk about the werewolves in the basement until she knew if Teague was going to be okay. So he had to make himself okay, had to make it okay with Jacky, right here, in the privacy of their bedroom, before he left it.

Teague’s shoulders softened, pressed into the mattress, and Jack’s tackle became more of an embrace. “They’re just scars,” he repeated stubbornly, but they could both hear the catch in his voice, both feel the way his whole lower body clenched against the memory of a long ago bastard with a broken bottle.

“We both know that’s a lie,” Jack murmured, and Teague snarled into the pillow—a human sound, but still visceral and angry.

“Can’t we just leave my shit alone, Jacky? We’ve been doing this for a few weeks… can’t we just stick to that pattern? It was good, right? I didn’t let you down in the sex department?” Jack had sat up but he kept the flat of his hand between Teague’s shoulder blades to keep him pinned down. “We were all good,” Teague finished helplessly, and Jack’s other hand came up to ruffle reassuringly through his hair.

“The sex was great, Teague—never doubt it,” Jack said, scooting back until he was straddling the bottom of Teague’s thighs again. “It was just one sided. You gave, I took. That’s not fair, man—don’t you want to get a little back?”

I get it back when you let me touch you. “I don’t want to be a pain in the ass.”

Jack laughed breathily as he contorted impossibly forward and kissed the base of Teague’s spine. “You are—frequently. I like it.”

In spite of himself, the slowly burgeoning erection unfolding under his belly, and his discomfort with this situation, Teague found himself chuckling. “Didn’t we do enough of this yesterday?”

“Yesterday was about comfort. Today is about you letting me give you something.”

Jack’s tongue carefully traced a crooked path across Teague’s right cheek and descended into the tender skin of the cleft. His movements were so deliberate that he must have been chasing a scar across Teague’s skin. Teague gasped, all words gone, and held his breath. Jack used his palms to separate the halves of Teague’s bottom, and continued that torturous path, replacing pain and fear with love and joy.

Jack paused, right where… where…

Teague tensed his body again, hoping that would be the end of it, praying that it wouldn’t. “What are you doing, Jacky?”

Jack’s breath puffed against his secret skin when he spoke. “Giving you better memories.”

Teague almost came off the mattress when Jack’s tongue touched home.

“Oh, God… Jacky…”

It was warm, and it was wet, and it was invading, plunging into him, teasing, laving, and Teague was left, held in place only by the pleasure, the drug of touch, as Jack licked and penetrated and gave. Teague’s vision went black behind his clenched eyes and he gasped and moaned softly. Jack shifted off his thighs and between them, so Teague was lying spread-eagled and vulnerable beneath him as his fingers came into play.

It was… it was… oh God…it was sweet. But he wanted more. His hips started undulating, pressing against the mattress, and he let a whimper slip out, a begging sound. Jacky pulled away and whispered “Roll over,” gruffly, and God help him, Teague did.

Jack didn’t take up where he left off. He straddled Teague’s stomach instead and started kneading the muscles of Teague’s shoulders and his chest.

Teague’s cock was so hard it hurt.

He scowled up at Jack fiercely, unable to articulate his pain or his want or his need. Self-denial was too deeply ingrained in him to break the habit now.

Jack grinned in his face—he was panting slightly, and his own cock was hard on Teague’s belly, but he was smiling smugly. Teague was even more affronted—and more than seven-eight’s tempted to whip his body around and fuck that smile right off Jacky’s pretty face.

“You want something, Teague?”

Teague closed his eyes and counted to ten. “I’m fine, Jacky. No worries. Never…nnnngghhhhh…” because Jack’s fingertips had found his nipples and pinched, “better.”

Jack’s body came forward and his hips scooted backwards until they were groin to hard, aching groin. He hovered over Teague’s face, lips to lips for a moment. “Because it would be okay, you know, if you wanted something. I’d be happy to give you whatever you wanted…”

Teague wanted Jack to kiss him. He’d always thought kissing overrated until he’d first kissed Jack, and it had been passionate and intimate, the way kissing a stranger wasn’t. He’d kissed Katy too, and the sweetness had been a surprise, but that passion and that intimacy—he’d learned it all from Jack.

He didn’t have any words. Teague lifted his lips up to Jack and prayed that the boy would forget his game and just kiss him, without games or strings or caveats…

…and oh, God, his mouth was glorious. It was hard, and fierce, and wanting. Jack wanted Teague as much as Teague wanted Jack, and their tongues meshed and mated and their lips whispered… Teague groaned and lifted his hands, not in mastery but in need. He needed to wrap his arms around Jack’s shoulders and hold him—it was imperative.

Their bodies ground together as they kissed, just the friction of their cocks between their stomachs and the terrible, terrible want between them.

Jack tried to move—Teague knew it was to finish what he’d started, to take Teague’s erection into his sweet mouth and try and suck his brains out his dick. Teague didn’t let him.

“Stay,” he muttered between kisses. “Oh God… please stay…” Because he needed an anchor, someone to hold onto, so he didn’t disintegrate, fly into outer space, lose himself completely in the unbearable high of being touched. He needed Jacky—whether he came and… oh…oh… Christ… he was going to come…or not. Teague needed to hold Jack. It was more important than orgasm, more important than his pride, more important than breath.

He needed to hold Jacky. He just did.

His climax shattered through his synapses and exploded out his skin. He held onto Jack, clenching him so tight Jack could barely move, could barely breathe, even as Jack’s own climax shot a scalding path across Teague’s belly. They clung together, breathing hard, while Teague’s arms convulsed around Jacky’s shoulders.

“Anything,” Jack panted. “I’ll do anything you need me to.”

They were touching, skin to skin, sex to sex. Jack had touched him, without reservation, without reciprocation.

It was a debt Teague could never repay.

Cory

Being the Royal Bank

I looked at the shiny silver knife in the werewolf’s shaking hands, and was completely baffled.

“You wrapped that in bubble-wrap and shoved it up your ass?” The sincere dedication to hatred in that act was really out of my league.

Behind me I heard Teague grunt. “So I smell, my Lady.” He sounded as baffled as I was. Bracken wasn’t confused in the least—he was cracking up.

Well good—Bracken was in good form today, which, considering how rocky things had been between us the day before was a good sign. I don’t like it when the people I care about put themselves in danger. I really don’t like it when they do that and I’m left out. It makes me all pouty and irritable, and Bracken gets the brunt of it. Especially when he’s the dumbshit who gets shot!

Teague also seemed to be in good fighting trim—and this heartened me to no end. We’d heard him—hell, the whole hill had heard him—have a class six emotional hurricane two nights before. I didn’t blame him—I’d been in the process of a similar storm myself—but Teague…well shit. Teague was so damned repressed, so honestly sure that he didn’t deserve anything, much less honest emotions—man, the fact he’d walked out into the living room, fresh from a shower after his run, looking like he could take on a biker bar and then some, was a testament to the guy’s resilience, that was for damned sure.

A good thing we were all hunky-dory, because this negotiating thing wasn’t going so well.

“Shut up, cunt, and let me the fuck out of here.” The guy was a mixed bag of genetics, with straight black hair and cinnamon colored skin and light gray eyes—he was also about seven buckets of terrified, pissed-off crazy.

I looked around the bare steel room, and at the four other werewolves in it. They were at the opposite end of the room from Macshitsyerpants and looking at the guy like he smelled really, really bad.

Well, his hands were coated in feces—and they were wolves in their other lives. He didn’t smell that great to me either.

I squinted at the guy. “I’ve got to say, I’m at a loss. What in the fuck was your plan?”

Because really, this was a lose/lose situation for the guy. After we’d taken him and his buddies out two nights ago, we’d brought them here. We were pissed—I mean seriously pissed. The fuckers had set up a ‘peace treaty’ meeting and then tried to ambush us. We should have taken them out before the ambush even had a chance to take effect, but Teague had brought Jacky, and shit had gone down and… well, we were as pissed at ourselves for walking into the trap as we were for these assholes for springing it.

Since we’d killed fifteen out of twenty of them, we figured we’d let these five sit in lock-up until we didn’t feel like annihilating them on general principle.

And it wasn’t like lock-up was that bad—it had a bathroom (one of those little portajohns, but still, it wasn’t like they hadn’t seen each other’s junk before, right?) and food and water—we’d even given them a big warm soapy bucket for a sponge bath and some clean clothes. We put cots in, and gave them blankets—hell, someone had even brought in a box of (untouched) paperbacks. I mean, we wanted negotiators, not hostages, right? And we’d thought it might be going well, until Bracken, Teague and I had walked into the vampire vault (so called because that’s where we put our brand new or out-of-control vampires) and this guy had reached into his soiled shorts and pulled out what had proven to be a knife.

I looked at him again. “Do you have any idea how many people are outside who would be willing to kill you if you lay one finger on us? Besides the fact that the three of us did some serious damage to you’re entire pack two nights ago as it is?”

“I don’t give a fuck!” the guy screamed—spit flew out of his mouth, and with that and the smell, I was really glad I was across the room from him. “Just let me the fuck out of here, and I won’t fucking kill you!”

“Or maybe,” I said with a grimace, “you put that thing down and we won’t kill you?”

I was charging as we talked. Of course I was—I had a shield at the ready, because I was standing between Bozo Macshitsyerpants and my beloved and my friend. I’m not stupid—just mortal. The plan was that nobody else got to shed a drop of blood because these guys were brain-damaged assholes with no sense of family, honor, or organization.

He’d shoved a silver knife up his ass?

I looked at the guy in complete disbelief, shaking my head and wishing I was the type of power-mad psycho-bitch who could just fry all these fuckers where they sat and get rid of this little problem.

“I just want the fuck out of here!” the guy sobbed, and I sighed. He was so pathetic.

“Okay, Junior,” I said, trying to take the irritation out of my voice. “I’ll make you a deal. You put away the pig-sticker, and we’ll take you outside for a bit while we work this out—does that work for…”

The dumbshit rushed me—knife out, arms flailing, shouting spittle and drool, the whole nine yards. He didn’t even use his werewolf speed, and I was in the process of throwing a shield up between that knife and me and the guys when Teague did something supremely stupid.

He threw himself in front of me.

And took the silver knife right in the middle of his ribs.

Teague screamed and fell to my feet and I screamed and used my shield to slam Macshitsyerpants back against the steel wall with enough force to make his head crush in a little bit. I wasn’t sure if he was dead yet, so I kept him mashed there like a gurgling bug and sank to my knees in front of Teague, glaring at Bracken to stand back so the guy wouldn’t bleed out.

GREEN!!!!

He was coming.

“Jesus, you dumb Irish motherfucker, what in the hell did you think you were doing?” I fished in the pocket of my jeans for the bottle of herbal salt-wash that counteracted silver in were creatures and iron in the sidhe. Our lives were risky enough that I never went anywhere without it.

“Protecting… my… queen…”

Christ, spare me from heroes. With a yank I cleared the knife from under his ribs, grimacing as the blood welled up from it. The knife wasn’t that long—five inches maybe—and on a werewolf this sort of wound was normally cake. A few minutes panting, some beer, some salty meat, and he’d be good to go.

But it was long enough to drive the silver deep into Teague’s body, and that was bad—that made the wound worse than it would be on a human. Teague was starting to froth blood at the mouth and turn gray, like a guy with a really fatal infection, and wherever Green was, it was time for me to pony up and do some first goddamned aid.

“I was throwing a shield up,” I muttered, taking the bottle and squirting about half of it on the wound itself.

He hissed, “I’d forgotten you could do that, lady.”

“Well goddammit, remember—I can protect you. It’s my job to protect you!” I parted the wound to see how deep it went. It was already turning a dark gray, like Teague’s skin. Shit. I knew what I’d have to do.

“I… beg…to…differ…”

“Fuck.” I would not argue about this right now. I swore again, and then without wincing or cringing or any of the girly shit that I really really really wanted to do because I was so not a healer, I shoved the little plastic bottle as far into his flesh as I could before the icky, squishy give stopped. Then I took it in both hands and squeezed as much of the salt-wash as I could into the wound.

Teague gasped again and made a ‘manly-pain’ sound. GREEN! I called in my head with all the shock and terror I was not voicing, and he was suddenly next to me, holding his hands to his ears.

“Holy blue fuck!” he muttered. “Even in my head that’s worse than a grieving baonsidhe—now move!”

I did, looking helplessly at my red-dripping hands, while Green moved in to bend down and kiss Teague on the lips. Sex was the hallmark of his healing: the kiss would be as necessary to Green as a bandage would be to a human doctor.

“Cory?” Nicky said—he’d apparently arrived on Green’s heels. “That guy on the wall-- are you going to kill him or is he going to be art?”

I looked at the guy—his skull was reshaping itself, so apparently I didn’t kill him straight off. “He’s too ugly to be art,” I snarled, and I was a werewolf’s whisker away from squashing the guy flat. Macshitsyerpants yelped, and there was a sudden, rank smell of urine as five frightened werewolves voided their bladders.

“Lady, please don’t.”

The voice was soft but sound—Teague had apparently broken away from Green’s best healing kiss to stop me from killing Dumbfuck Macshitsyerpants, and I was damned if I knew why.

“Any particular reason?” I asked, skeptical.

Teague sat up and nodded respectfully to Green, who, in turn, gave Teague a hand up. His skin was already flushing, and his wound had knit up while Green was touching him, but his dark blue T-shirt was split wide down the middle and blood—both red and the infected gray—saturated both the T-shirt and the gray-green flannel shirt over it.

“It’s my job,” he said tersely. “Tomorrow, fair fight. These guys,” a nod at the other werewolves, “can see whose dick is bigger.”

‘These guys’ were crouching in a puddle of their own piss, making puppy-whimpering noises. I think if someone had asked them at that moment, they would have told me that my alpha was five feet, nine inches of pure dick, with a topper of dark-blonde hair.

“Awesome,” I muttered, looking at my hands and chasing down nausea. I’d had blood on my hands before—but it was usually someone I’d killed or fought with. And it hadn’t been turning gray. “We’ll have a gladiator death match, complete with audience and-are-you-fucking- shitting-me, asshole?”

Teague blinked and gave a thin smile of retribution, not even surprised at how fast I downshifted. “I want to kill the guy who just knifed me, Lady—and if I recall, he was the one shitting.”

“Auuuugghhhh…” I wanted to scrub my gory hands through my hair and over my face, but I couldn’t. I was going to just stalk outside to the anteroom at the bottom of the stairs and before the vampire common room, when I heard Green clear his throat. This werewolf thing was my barbecue. I was Teague’s entre to the new world of the preternatural, and wolves got really confused with too many leaders. With a sigh, I looked around again at the odd assortment of frightened young men who had signed on for what they thought was an everyday gang rumble and who ended up the surviving members of a massacre.

“You! Assholes!” I barked, “Are you ready to go get a shower and change out of those dumbshit clothes?” They’d come dressed as their own little brown and green gang—they looked like big fat dorkfish.

They nodded hopefully.

“Excellent. Nicky?”

“Yes, my liege.” He bowed ironically and it was all I could do not to flip him a gore-crusted bird.

“I want you and seven of your closest were-critter friends to escort these guys upstairs. They can wait in the anteroom for now, and as soon as the vampires wake up, let them know they’re breakfast.” The vampires would be able to keep track of the werewolves for a little while after the blood donation—it wasn’t a sure-fire security system, but these guys had never been fed from. They looked scared enough for it to act as a pretty darned good threat.

Nicky nodded and trotted up the stairs—the better to gather suckers to help him—and I looked at the four saddest werewolves on the planet.

“You! Assholes! Strip to your skin, leave your nasty old laundry in here, and meet us out in the anteroom.” I gave Macshitsyerpants a squeeze, just to hear him gurgle, and then I raised him up to the ceiling and dropped him, smiling with some sick satisfaction as he yelped to the crunch of an ankle bone. It would take that a good couple of hours to heal completely.

“You! Dumbfuck! You get to stay here all night. And we’re not cleaning jack.”

Teague was looking at me beseechingly, or I really would have killed the fucker. Bring a knife to a negotiation? He deserved to die just for being that ass-stupid. As it was I led the way outside of the anteroom to let the werewolves get naked, and just as I cleared the vault itself I was thrown into the side of the door hard enough to see stars.

“What in the fu…”

“What—you’re not happy that he’s got to serve you, you want to fucking get him killed too?”

I glared at Jacky, wondering when my head exploded. “Jacky?”

Suddenly Bracken was between me and Jacky, growling, which is never a good sign, and Teague was hauling at his partner’s arm.

“Jacky, it was my own dumb-fuck fault, you hear me? She was throwing a shield up and I just…”

“You say that, but you’re the one with the blood…”

I reached behind my head to feel the bump back there--it felt like it was actually bleeding-- and Green got there in time to stop me.

“Don’t want to mix Teague’s blood and yours, beloved,” he muttered softly, and I jerked my hands away. Don’t want to mix—no making vampire were-things, no having the were-critters bite the sidhe, no were-critter sorceresses or vampire sorcerers, nope, nuh-nugh, no thanks. We’d seen where that goes and it wasn’t pretty.

He passed his hand over the bump on my head and it went away, and so did the pain, which was good, because if Bracken thought for one minute that Jack had really hurt me, he’d kill him, and then we’d be fucked.

“Bracken, down boy!” I snapped, jumping into the fray. Bracken glared at me.

“He hit you!”

“He pushed me—it was an accident!” I hoped Brack would take it at that—it had felt more personal than that, but I wasn’t going to cry foul.

“You!” Jacky turned away from Teague, who was gruffly ordering his beta out of the room. “You got him hurt—are you happy? Is there anything else you want from him? More blood? You fucking ghoul…”

My eyes widened with shock—not so much at the harsh words, since I give out plenty of that on my own, but from the anger aimed at me. He closed in on me and grabbed my arm, shaking me, forgetting he was a werewolf and I was not. My head was smacking back against the wall, even though Green had my shoulders and was trying to keep me still. Jacky’s grip on my arm hurt but I fought the urge to throw up a shield. If Bracken knew how rattled I was getting, he really would kill Jacky, but ouch… dammit… I couldn’t focus and then… Teague jumped in and stopped the whole thing.

He went wolf, and Jacky—bonded to him in his heart and probably in his body as well by now—went with him.

In a heartbeat, even less, Jack was on his back, his furry body tangled in a puddle of jeans and a thermal shirt, whining in submission. Teague’s blonde hackles were up all along his spine, and his jaws were locked—without biting—around Jacky’s throat.

Green, Bracken and I stared at the wolf tableau for a moment, shocked and saddened.

Christ. What a fucking choice. It was one I’d never want to make—but it was also one that Bracken or Nicky wouldn’t force me to make either. We all loved Green too much to hurt him that badly.

Teague growled and backed off, staring at Jacky’s puzzled, hurt wolf with fierce, ungiving eyes. This was his wolf’s decision—support the pack over his lovers.

Jacky whined and bumped noses, and Teague licked him resignedly, and that much giving, that much forgiving, made him abruptly human again.

He was much less assured as a man than he was as a wolf. He looked down at his mate, who was now human, lying on the floor, looking stunned and devastated.

“Jacky…” he mumbled, and Jack looked away.

Teague didn’t have a whole lot of resources in him to deal with a lover turning his back. In fact, he only had one. In a moment, he was a wolf again, hauling ass up the stairs for the main room, and I said, “Fuck!!!” and Green touched my face and the back of my head again, then said, “I’ve got him, you get this goatfuck!” and then he was gone. He breezed by Nicky who had returned and was looking at us with horrified eyes, and I squinted at him, wondering if it was the adrenaline or the tears making my vision so blurry.

Then I couldn’t look at Nicky anymore, so I turned towards the goatfucker in question. “Nicky, help him up,” I said numbly, and Jack looked at me with unfriendly eyes.

“You know,” I stopped for a minute to wipe my eyes with the heel of a shaking hand, “I could have grown old and died without forcing him to make that choice.”

Jack dropped his glare, misery suffusing every line of his long, nearly unblemished body. “I thought he’d choose me,” he muttered.

“He did,” I snapped, wiping my eyes again. Fuck. The blood on my hands was making them sting. “If he hadn’t done that, Bracken would have killed you.” I was deadly serious—I could feel Bracken’s entire body vibrating behind me. Jack had yelled at me—he had gotten in my face, he had grabbed my arm through my sweatshirt with bruising, supernaturally strong fingers. (Green hadn’t known about the bruises to heal them—they throbbed now under my sweatshirt and I made a mental note to hide them until they could be taken care of.) Nobody did that to me—not with Bracken at my side.

Jack looked up, startled, and saw Bracken. My beloved’s lips were drawn back from his teeth in a horrible snarl, and he was growling, like a true wolf. Jack turned pale and looked at me, really looked at me. I am small—a lot smaller than he is—and my hands (and by now, probably my face) were covered in Teague’s blood. My face was cold, so it was probably pale, and all in all, I looked little and plain and human.

And Jack had hurt me, and hurt me on purpose. I don’t think he was a dishonorable man, not at heart—Teague couldn’t love somebody like that.

“I’m sorry,” he said weakly, gazing into space at something I couldn’t see. “I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s okay,” I said automatically, but I wiped my eyes again and Bracken snarled, “The hell it is.”

“All right, it’s not,” I sniffled. “But we’ve got other stuff to do. Jacky, get your clothes—Nicky needs to go find us some more wolves, go with him. If you don’t want to do that, go to the common room, or back to your bedroom or… hell, anywhere but right here, right now, okay?”

“I’m so sorr…”

“OKAY!” I was nodding, trying to get him to find his good sense and go. Clumsily, as though not actually seeing what he was doing, he gathered his clothes in front of his groin and did just that. I found myself hoping his good sense was wadded up somewhere in his jeans and boxers, because I certainly hadn’t seen it from where I was standing.

As he wobbled his way up the stairs, I turned to the wide-eyed werewolf ‘negotiators’ who had come out of the vault in time to see most of what had just happened.

“That gold werewolf,” I said with the strongest, angriest voice I had, “was your alpha. He just picked me and Green over his own mate.” I looked them in the eye, one by one, letting my fuck-with-me blaze out my eyes. “If you want to die slow, you can get in the ring tomorrow with your buddy in the other room. If you want to die quick, you can fuck with me today. If you’re set on choosing life? Then I suggest you do whatever the fuck I say, are we understanding each other?”

Four heads—different heights, different hair color, different eyes. One motion: bobbing earnestly up and down, as they all agreed with exactly what I was saying.

Green

Mama Cory, Papa Green

The sidhe treasured their parents—after a fashion.

The fact was that Bracken’s family—parents and children, working in concert to support a leader, was the norm, probably from the race’s inception. It was one reason (among many) that incest was not a taboo for Green’s people.

The leader was the parent. The people in the parent’s hill were the children. Having a taboo against ‘incestuous’ relationships would have doomed the race.

Some sidhe broke away from their parents—Green had, when he’d been only fifty years old. For much of his life, he’d preferred to flit about the world. He would find a lover, usually mortal, and settle down until his mortal had died. After he’d mourned (always longer than the sidhe thought proper) he would move on.

But Green’s first leaders had been compassionate and indulgent. As Green had started his own faerie hill, he’d remembered them fondly. They had played, broke bread together, made love, frequently and with great enjoyment. Green’s childhood had been a happy one.

But he had learned very quickly that not all mortals had that sort of comfort.

It had been a hard realization—and for a century or two, Green had avoided the human race as a whole, simply to avoid that terrible, aching pain that came with having lovers who had never been taught how to love.

Eventually he learned the joys of teaching them how to love, a discovery that made all the greatest joys—and all the greatest pains—of his long life possible.

When Cory joined the hill and became a lover to its two leaders, she had—unwittingly at first—assumed the job of the hill’s mother. (If he had asked Cory, Green was sure she would have said Grace, the very maternal vampire, did a fine job as hill mother, and her own services were not needed. Both Green and Grace knew that while Cory was still learning like a journeyman learns from a master, she was the true hill mama, down to her tough-love disposition.)

And she had done a fine job mothering Teague. She had listened, given advice, kept him from the worst parts of himself, and, along with Green and Bracken, had stood back and prayed when it was time for Teague to confront his own demons. She had even chased him into the rain and forced him to forgive himself—a classic mother move if Green had ever seen one.

Teague went to her when he was stressed, confided in her when he was confused, and valued her beyond measure.

But boys—especially human boys—sometimes had violent, human reactions that women were not comfortable with.

Sometimes a boy just needed his father.

Teague’s heart had been screaming for a father since he was born.

Green had snagged a blanket as he’d blurred through the house, and as he outstripped the wolf, streaking through the gardens to the South Placer hills beyond Green’s environs, he kept it tucked under his arm.

Elves could move in what Cory called ‘hyperspeed’—Green thought of it as ‘blurring’ or ‘moving’—but he didn’t need his hyperspeed to keep up with Teague. He just needed to run, barefoot, fleet and graceful, across the earth that sustained him. He did, for several miles across the rough grass and twiggy undergrowth of the foothills, until Teague showed signs of flagging.

Of course, Teague being Teague, it took a while. Even after his pace slowed he still pushed himself until his body strained and his fur was slicked against his lean wolf’s body with sweat and his breath came in ragged pants. Suddenly, just like a switch going out, his back end flopped to the ground as his front paws churned into the mud in front of them.

Slowly, Green stepped out from behind the trees he’d been using for cover. He held the blanket spread out between his hands and waited patiently. Teague looked at him from miserable wolf’s eyes—green-hazel in color, like Teague’s as a man.

Teague whimpered and looked away, and Green sighed, kneeling to the forest floor and wrapping him in the blanket. As Green’s arms moved around him, he felt the change, and as he stood, there was a short, scrawny, exhausted man wrapped in a blanket and being held like a child. Green walked back toward the hill and the house at an easy pace, cradling him like the little boy he’d never been.

“He turned away from me, Green.”

Green looked at him—they were the first words he’d said in nearly twenty minutes. His hair was plastered to his head with sweat, like his fur had been when he was a wolf, and he was pale—so pale. If Teague didn’t figure this out, didn’t find his balance with his lovers, Green had no doubt he’d make himself sick, just like Cory had before Bracken. Unlike Cory, Teague didn’t have any good memories to sustain him. As a package of flesh, he would probably catch pneumonia, get a fever, develop cancer—something physical that doctors would give a name to. As a supernatural being—even a werewolf—he would simply waste away.

“He didn’t understand, mate. Give him time. He’s nearly as stubborn as you, right?” It was true—Green had no doubt. Jacky had a good heart under all that jealousy and selfishness. He’d never had a reason to look beyond his own needs, that was all.

“How can he love me again?” Teague asked, and his naked, bleeding voice was all the proof needed that the man was at the end of a very short survival rope. “He thinks I turned against him… that I picked you over him… I… I’m no damned good at this.” That naked voice hardened, became bitter. “You should have never put us together, Green. I’m only going to hurt them.”

Green sighed, looked around, and found a nice tree to lean against. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt—they might get damp in the November dew, but unlike last week, the afternoon had some thin, butter-colored sunshine to offer, and Green (like most elves) was seldom bothered by the cold.

He settled himself in, cradling Teague close for warmth, and took advantage of his height and size in the same way he had for Jacky two days ago. His children—his lost, sad, wayward children. A good father needed to be there in the calm after the tantrum. All children would frighten themselves with the force of their emotions—even the fully grown ones.

“How could he love you?” Green asked when he was settled. “How could he not love you—that’s the real question.”

Teague harrumphed, some of his usual fight back in place. “I don’t even know why I’m asking you—I’m not sure why you love me, either!”

Green kissed his forehead, exactly like he would have kissed a five-year-olds. “I love you because you’re strong, Teague Sullivan. You’re brave and you’re kind. I love you because you try, and because as sore has your heart is, you still haven’t given up on love. I love you because you defend me and mine, and because you simply are. Is that good enough?”

Teague just lay there, wrapped in his arms, weeping silently in the cold November sunshine. “Bracken would have killed him.”

“Mmm-hmmm. I might have killed him—I love you both, mate, but that’s my beloved he was threatening. You did exactly right.”

“Why does he hate her so much?”

Ah, there was the brave Teague Green had been looking for. It was a ballsy, necessary question.

“Because he thinks she threatens your love for him.”

“Why can’t he see?” For the first time, Teague showed some animation. He sat up, adjusting his body on Green’s lap, unconsciously snuggling into Green like Cory would. “I… I was nothing, until I met you. I was nothing before I came to work here. Doesn’t he see… I wouldn’t be the thing he loves if I didn’t have a… a family to fight for?”

Green smiled at him, for the first time making sure Teague could see his expression-- the acceptance, the sober attention. Green wanted Teague under no misconceptions that he was loved and loved well. “You were most definitely something fine before you came here, Teague—but you’re right. Your belief in yourself, your self worth—it comes from serving us, form being a part of a larger purpose. There is no shame in that. Jacky—he’s always been an island, you see? A lonely boy, up in his own head. He’s never seen the world as something that could hurt him. You’ve seen it as chaos, Teague—you know the only way to keep your family safe from the chaos is to fight on the side of order. But maybe he’d know some of this if you spoke to him.”

Teague grunted, and Green threw back his head and laughed. When he was done he looked at the stubborn little Irishman with sincere affection, and saw that he was blushing to the roots of his hair and couldn’t meet Green’s eyes.

Green abruptly sobered. His voice slid into cockney territory—Adrian territory—and he clucked reassuringly. “Aye, Teague—I know. You and words—not friends, not so much, am I right mate?”

Teague grunted, rolled his eyes and said, “No. Me and words aren’t friendly.”

“I didn’t think so. Ye see, ducks, you and words—you’re afraid, aren’t you? You give too many words, you give too much of your heart, and that’s a bad thing, aye?”

Teague nodded and leaned his head against Green’s shoulder so he wouldn’t have to meet eyes. “Aye,” he muttered.

Green’s long-fingered cupped Teague’s chin and raised his angry, depthless hazel eyes. “The problem with that, luvie, is that this boy already has your heart. He and Katy—they hold it beating in their hands, aye?”

Teague blinked at him slowly. “Aye,” he whispered despondently.

“Well I’ve got news for you, mate. They’re going to keep breaking off pieces of it—especially Jacky—if they don’t know what it is they hold. Katy not so much—she’s softer, she’ll give and yield and you need that. But ye need yer Jacky as well, aye?”

Teague swallowed—Green watched his Adam’s apple bob. “Aye.”

“Well then—ye need to risk your words, mate. If they don’t know what it is that’s beating in their hands, they’re going to make some mistakes in the keeping of it, aren’t they.” It was a statement, in spite of the lilt at the end.

“Aye,” Teague conceded, still staring at Green with wide, child-like eyes. “Green?”

“Aye?” And Green tilted his lean mouth so that Teague would know he was aware of his accent and the way it went from cultured British to Cockney to Lake County to Wales and back.

“Where are you, when your voice goes like that?” Teague’s voice throbbed with a need Green recognized.

“Under the moonlight, ducky—with Adrian by my side.” Ah, gods—it even hurt to say. Cory knew—it broke her heart to hear the cockney in his voice, but sometimes, she all but begged him to break her heart.

Teague nodded and leaned against Green again.

“You ready to go back, mate?” Green asked, although his bottom wasn’t as cold and his body wasn’t as sore as all that.

“No, Green. I’d… I’d really love just to hear you talk some more.”

Green looked down at him, but Teague was relaxed, his arms crossed against his chest, a look approaching peace on his usually scowling face.

“Aye, werewolf. We could sit here and talk. You up for some stories?”

“Yeah,” Teague sighed dreamily. There was a space, and Green knew what was coming before he even said it. “Tell me about Adrian.”

It wasn’t a hardship. Green and Cory talked about him freely now—no more of that horrible, heart-steeling silence before they mentioned his name. And Teague was so earnest—and he so rarely reached for anything.

So Green started with their arrival in the foothills, and the hard ungiving land. By the time they’d met their first werewolf, Teague was dozing serenely on his shoulder, and Green was ready to move on. But he kept his gate steady and his footsteps silent, to give his poor werewolf a chance to heal.

Jack

Bruises

Jack managed to get his clothes back on, and for an hour he followed a grim, angry Nicky around, pretending to be useful when dealing with the Southern California werewolves. Eventually, each of the ‘negotiators’ had a room—and two roommates who would sleep in resentful shifts. By the time they were done with the logistics, Jack had the feeling the new guys would have eaten their tongues rather than do anything to further piss off one little college student and her terrible fist of death.

“You grabbed that chick?” said the last guy to get shoved into Nicky’s grasp by Bracken (who was standing in front of Cory like a sentinel of death.) “You may be dumber than the assholes who dragged me into this clusterfuck.”

Jacky was starting to agree.

This house, this operation, this place—it was all so much bigger than he was. These guys that he was housing—they had lost their friends trying to kill Cory and Bracken—and him and Teague. Jack had been so immersed in his own personal bullshit on the night they’d arrived and the battle went down, he hadn’t even comprehended how ugly the massacre had been.

Now he was starting to realize how stupid his own actions were. If he’d taken control of the carload of guys at the airport, maybe fewer people would have died. Teague was right—Teague had been right all along. Jack wasn’t made for this paramilitary shit. He wasn’t good at it. He could take orders—he’d always been good at having Teague’s back—but he’d never been great at the battle itself, or thinking through the strategy or…

Or apparently seeing the big picture.

By the time the whole thing was sorted out, Nicky’s unfriendly glare had lightened up maybe one tenth of an iota. “You have possibilities to not be a complete asshole,” he said as he dropped Jack off at his own door. “Now could you stay out of the way and try not to hurt anyone today?”

Jack turned bleak eyes to the guy who had carried off his wife’s orders with the crisp efficiency of an army lieutenant. “Too late. Damage done.”

Nicky shook his head. “I hope you know—your guy saved your life today.”

Jack blinked. “What do you mean?” and Nicky shook his head.

“You know, you really must have been riding his coat tails for the last year and a half. I’ve seen Bracken kill before—and so have you. Do you remember the expression on his face?”

Two nights ago, Bracken had been pissed. He’d reached out his hand with his teeth bared in fury and a snarl of irritation and literally grabbed the blood from his targets and yanked it across a vacant field.

Jack had seen that expression not an hour before, right before Teague had turned wolf and taken him down.

“Holy Christ.” He almost sat down, right there in the hallway.

Nicky rolled his eyes in disgust. “Yeah, Jack—you know why we love Teague? It’s because he’s not convinced he’s the only person on the planet with problems. Katy should be home soon—maybe you should just go wait for her. I’m done babysitting.”

Jack made his way into the bedroom feeling numb and used. How could he have fucked everything up so badly?

He’d been eating in the were’s common room, making tentative gestures of friendship towards some of the people there, when a sort of electricity passed through the hill. A few moments later, Green had sprinted by, moving with some serious preternatural speed—Jack wouldn’t have been able to see the elf move at all if he hadn’t been a werewolf on occasion.

In spite of the electricity—the group knowledge that something was decidedly up-- nobody moved. The pretty, dark-haired girl who had been talking quietly at the table next to Jack caught his apprehensive look. “Word will spread,” she said with certainty. “And if it pertains to us, personally, someone will let us know.”

The words were hardly out of her mouth when Nicky appeared and gave him a nod from the doorway. “He’s fine, but you may want to see for yourself.”

Jack could hardly remember shouting at Cory after that, or Teague’s angry voice, pulling him away. Until Nicky had brought it up, he hadn’t been able to recall Bracken’s murderous expression—he’d been convinced that, just like in his dream, Teague had gone and sacrificed himself for the indifferent Lady of the House.

He was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling when Katy came in. He was desperately trying to recapture the smell, the touch, the transcendent moment of making love that morning, when Teague reached up and held him so tight he couldn’t breathe, and actually asked for something.

Stay. Please stay.

Jack had loved that moment—it had been everything he’d ever dreamed about love.

In this particular moment, thinking back on it, Jack hated himself so badly that he thought not hiding under the bed like a child when Katy walked in was one of the bravest things he’d ever done.

“Heya, mijo,” she said happily, and then got a good look at Jack’s face and let loose a string of expletives that almost rivaled what Jack had heard out of Cory’s mouth. She finished up with, “What did you do?”

Jack looked away—just like he had with Teague, and he had to admit it rankled. He had not known he was a coward, and now he couldn’t seem to escape the fact.

“Don’t you do that to me!” Katy snapped. She looked wildly around for something to throw, since she’d already dropped her purse, but their room was bare and Spartan—even with their personal things it was still very masculine—very Teague. She settled for kicking the stuffed chair that Jack had started to claim as his, and then running up and grabbing his shoulders to shake him.

“Don’t you do that! It took us weeks to put that man together, to fix him, to make his heart strong enough to not run away. I walk in here and you look like you knifed him in his damned heart. Don’t look away from me, pendejo—you gots to fucking own up!” She was right there in his face, and he couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes.

Jack rubbed his hand across his mouth and spoke to the far side of the room. “It’s just,” he said quietly, taking some of the heat from Katy’s angry flare, “that I don’t understand why he needs the hill. When it was just the two of us, he was okay, you know? Why couldn’t he have loved me then, when it was just us?”

Katy shook her head and muttered something that sounded like, “I have no words.” Then she sighed and flopped on the bed next to him.

“He… it may have seemed like just the two of you, Jacky—I know it did. But it wasn’t. Who were you working for, that entire time?”

Jack shrugged. “Green.”

“Yeah, mijo—and I know the first time you were ever at the hill was when I bit you. But Teague… he’d been here before. He knew what he was serving. He liked it that way.”

Jack’s eyes widened considerably. Of all the dumbshit things that had never occurred to him. “But why?” He was whining and he didn’t care.

Katy stood up and started to pace. Her mouth moved quickly, like she was talking in rapid-fire Spanish, but no words came out for a minute. “Why? Jacky, you dumbass—why not?”

Jack opened his mouth in surprise, and she just kept going right over him.

“I know you thinks you all anybody needs, but… damn! Jacky—here at the hill, you’re never lonely. Yeah, you’re never alone, but if I gets mad at you, I run out that door and there are a hundred people who will sit and listen to my problems. I want to go shopping, I’ve got a pretty plastic card that make all my dreams come true—and all I’ve got to do to earn it is go work at a place where people smile at me and make me feel like I do good, just to show up. I don’t even got to do that if I don’t want to—Green don’t make nobody work. We just do—because not one of us that these people haven’t helped in some way, and usually big shit, too. They don’t just fix your flat tire in the rain, mijo—they save your life! And it’s bigger than that—you know it is. Because there I was, trapped in some asshole’s silver cage, and you know, even when I was out of my mind, even when I thought you and Teague were the bad guys, I still knew that somewhere out there, help was coming. I knew help was coming for me.”

She’d been pacing the whole time, and now she sank slowly down on the bed next to a speechless Jack, who was trying to make his brain wrap around the world she’d shown him. He’d been living in it, eating, drinking, dreaming in it, but he hadn’t known he was in it, not until now, when he saw how Katy fit in.

“Even if they didn’t get there on time, Jacky—we all know about your sister, about Renny’s first husband, about Adrian. People die—people die here. I knew that. But just the idea… just the thought… that even if that asshole killed me, someone was on their way to get me.” She looked at Jack and he met her eyes for the first time since she came in. “Goddess, Jacky—do you have any idea what peoples like me and Teague would do, just to know somebody would be coming to the rescue? They don’t even have to make it in time. They just got to give a shit.” She shook her head and sighed, leaning against him, stroking his arm and trying to get him to understand. “That’s powerful shit, Jacky. That’s big fucking medicine, right there, you know?”

Jack tried to imagine it. His parents had always had money—when his sister was doing drugs they’d thrown her into rehab after rehab, not once wondering if maybe what she needed was simply to know they’d come after her because they cared and not because they had to.

For the first time since Green had come to his apartment and offered him solace, Jack thought about his sister. He’d been angry when she died—he’d thought her new people had deserted her, just as the two of them had been deserted by the people in authority for their entire lives.

Now he wondered… seriously wondered. Were you scared, Sara? Or did you know someone would have your back? Did it matter? Did it make it easier, knowing someone had your back?

And someone really did have her back, Jack realized. Jack was here, in the hill, the place Sara had told him would care for her. Green had come and taken care of the things she cared about, since her backup had been too late.

The enormity of what Jack didn’t know assaulted him again, and he had a sudden flash to two nights before.

They had been hijacked and ambushed, and not once had Bracken or Nicky or even Teague acted like they were alone. Bracken had been cocksure that help was coming—he’d been pissed off, because he and Cory were at odds, but he’d known she was going to save their asses.

… if we don’t kill you in the next five minutes, my beloved will when she arrives.  You and your friends?  You just became a domestic dispute of cosmic proportions—and that alone is a reason to kill you.

Teague had been wounded—and Green had healed him. Cory’s hands had been dripping with Teague’s blood—not because she’d been hurting him, but because she’d been tending to him. And Jack had stalked in and assumed the worst and he’d… he’d…

He told Katy then, about what had happened, what he’d done. Afterwards he never could figure out where he got the words or the bravery to do it.

When her hand cracked across his cheek, it was almost a relief.

The stillness in the room then was suffocating, and he was a coward again because Katy broke it.

“Jacky!” She was in tears, and so was he. “You turned away from him? How could you make him make that choice?”

“Because I’m an asshole,” he muttered. He’d never thought he was, but God… the look of betrayal on Teague’s face came back to him again, and he thought he’d be sick. Before he could actually finish his thought, or say anything else, there was a tentative knock on the door.

“Come in,” Katy said automatically. Maybe it would be Teague, or Green, or someone to make them feel better.

But it wasn’t. Jacky was beginning to learn that atonement didn’t come cheap or easy.

It was Cory.

“Hi,” she said, looking over her shoulder like she was expecting someone she didn’t want to see. She closed the door behind her and dumped an armload of clothes on the dresser next to her: Teague’s, left on the floor of the anteroom. When she was done, she turned to face them, smiling weakly. “Look—I need to do this and then find Green before Bracken sees, okay? I just…” Her voice firmed. “Jack, I really think you need to see this—it might make dealing together easier, okay?”

Jack looked up at her, his eyes still unfriendly. God, he hated himself for everything he’d done, he really did—but he resented her. He couldn’t help it. He looked at her and saw the person who put his beloved in danger. It wasn’t rational or kind, but there it was.

Her mouth quirked up on one side, as though she knew exactly what was going through his head.

“Right. See, here’s the thing.” She unzipped the hooded green sweatshirt she was wearing, revealing a plain, oversized man’s blue shirt underneath. It was, Jacky realized, way oversized—it was bunched at her middle and hung nearly to hear knees. It must have been Bracken’s or Green’s—and she looked so much younger in it.

“How old are you, Lady?” Katy asked, echoing his very thought.

Cory wrinkled her nose. “Why does everyone ask me that? I’m old enough to drink—how’s that?”

Barely, Jack realized in surprise, and then she took the sleeve of the shirt--it went nearly to her elbows--and raised it up to her pale shoulders, and he forgot about how old she was.

There were bruises on the back of her arm—four swollen, red-purple, blood-filled hematomas exactly the size of his fingers. The one from his thumb on the front was especially heinous, and he moaned a little in his throat. She lowered her sleeve and pulled up the other one, and there was an identical set of marks—but he must have pinched her flesh in his hand because the hematoma was raised in a wedge shape behind the finger-marks.

Jack stared at her in horror.

“I’m not a werewolf,” she said unnecessarily. “I’m not an elf. I can do some pretty cool stuff with my power, and I really do function as an excellent weapon. But there’s a reason Bracken and Nicky guard me. I chafe under it, and I give them shit, but the fact is, my physical body is just not that strong. I…” she blushed and shrugged. “I’m mortal and I’m weak. Bracken would have killed you, just to keep me safe from something like this, you understand?” She quickly put her sweater back on and zipped it up, putting her hands in the pockets like an ordinary street kid, using all that extra fabric as defense against the world.

“Teague’s spent the last month getting used to jumping between me and anything threatening. He… he saved your life today. He jumped between us to keep me safe and to keep Bracken from killing you—it was all about keeping his family from being hurt, okay? You’ve got to forgive him for that.”

Jack’s mouth was dry and he fought against darkness in his vision and bile in his throat. He’d done that. He’d laid hands on someone weaker than he was and…

“Why didn’t you defend yourself?” he rasped, knowing his voice sounded petulant but God… she could have pulverized him. She could have squashed him against the wall like a bug!

Cory flushed and looked away. “Well, you’re Teague’s beloved, you know? I don’t like to use my shit against family—not when they don’t have the same shit to fight back with…”

He didn’t hear her next words, because her bruises flashed in front of his eyes and her words, I’m mortal and weak rang in his ears, and he absolutely had to go to the bathroom to be violently ill.

Katy

Not One of the Mens

Katy and Cory watched him run down the little hallway, and then winced at the unmistakable sounds coming from the bathroom.

Cory grimaced. “Wonderful—I’m batting oh-in-a-thousand today—maybe I should buy a lottery ticket and see what else I can fuck up.”

Katy was usually very shy around the lady of the house. Cory was smart, like Jacky—and she seemed to have her shit together in ways that Katy hadn’t even dreamed of when she’d been clawing her way through the back-alleys and smack houses of Angel’s Camp. But this hadn’t been her fault—it hadn’t. Katy, as much as she loved Jack, well, she’d slapped him across the face for a reason.

“It wasn’t your fault, Lady. Jacky—he’s like…” she floundered for a minute and then said the first dumb thing that came into her head. “He’s like a little boy making a fort in his bedroom, you know? There he is, and he thinks, ‘Hey—I gots Teague in here, we have a fort together!’ and then I come and play, and he thinks, ‘This is it—this is the most people who can come into my fort!’ But the whole time, he doesn’t realize that the fort in his bedroom is also in a house, which is also on a street, which is also in a city, you know? It’s not just me and Teague and Jacky in his fort, there’s a whole world protecting the fort, and he just thinks that’s what it does, right?” Oh God… she was fucking this all up, she was sure of it until Cory gave her an out and out blinding grin. Katy, who knew that she was pretty and the Lady Cory was not, suddenly also knew that the Lady Cory was beautiful.

“That’s awesome, Katy—you’re right. He doesn’t know how big we are. I guess…” she looked down to the bathroom again. The sounds of barfing had stopped, but Jack was making weak little sobs that echoed from the toilet and then down the hall, and she looked away again. “I guess we’ll tell him some other time, you think?”

Katy nodded and sighed. “I should probably go make sure he’s okay… I know, I know he hurt you and all but…”

Cory looked up and put her hand tentatively on Katy’s as it waved generally between them. “Katy, believe me—you don’t ever have to apologize for loving someone in spite of their flaws. Remember me? I’m the one married to a cave man?”

Katy shook her head and suddenly Cory’s grip on her hand fluttered. Cory got a look for all the world as if she was listening to music in her head. She blinked then, and gave that tentative, shy smile.

“Green’s back with Teague—he, uhm, he thinks that Jacky doesn’t love him anymore, so you should be prepared for… you know. Beating his stubborn Irish head in with affection, right?”

Katy grinned at her widely and gave her a quick, exuberant hug. “Right—good point. He’s not so bright when it comes to love, no?”

Cory shrugged. “None of us are—except maybe Green.” She turned to leave and then turned back, her pale, freckled cheeks washed with a blush. “Oh yeah—Bracken and I don’t go back to work until Tuesday, but Grace is having a sale on those samplers—the same artist as before, with the wolves. She wants to know if you want one?”

And now it was Katy’s turn to blush. Lady Cory, all ninja-bitch and shit, going off to fight with the mens, and she was getting Katy needlepoint—this was a good place. A good place, with good family here. Jacky had to see it—he had to understand that you wanted these people to love you, and that it would only make your heart bigger and stronger to have them at your back.

“That’d be nice,” she muttered, ducking her head shyly, and Cory said “Okay then,” and made her way out.

Katy sighed and went back to help Jack out, because Goddess knew he would have been pissing his own pants for the last week if someone hadn’t helped him with the fly.

He had just finished brushing his teeth when the door opened and Teague stumbled in. He was wrapped in nothing but a hand-knitted blanket, which he’d secured around his waist like a bath towel.

Katy ran up to him, fully intending to hug him until he begged for mercy, but, like Cory had warned, he was too prepared for rejection to accept her.

Keeping his head down, he started rooting through his dresser for clothes, and Katy took a deep breath and tried another tack.

“Uhm, whatchu doin’ pappi?”

Teague swallowed and kept his face turned away. His dark blond hair was slicked back against his head with sweat, and his hazel eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue and grief. “Figured I’d find another room.”

Katy laughed and felt her spine shift into place. “No,” she said gently, and taking a page from his book, simply nudged him away from the dresser. “Now sit down, I’ll find you some clothes, and you can go shower and wash those nasty feets, but you me and Jacky are sleeping in here if I have to beat you, shoot him, and drag your bleeding bodies into that bed, you hear me?”

She heard a puff of air from him that might have been a laugh, and then his hands came out and rested on hers, warm and still a little bit muddy from a long run as a wolf.

“That’s… uhm… sweet, field mouse—but you and I both know it’s not going to work. I’m… I have to work here. I…” She risked a look at his face and if anyone recognized that terrible, fruitless struggle for words to name the maelstrom inside your heart, it was Katy. But she also knew Teague would never feel right unless he found those words on his own.

“I’m too broken to love without the hill,” he said at last. “I… need a reason to think I deserve you. Jacky—he can’t live with that. I’ll just…”

“Stay,” Jack said from the bathroom. “Please stay.”

Teague’s face crumpled like a child’s, and Katy grabbed his hands hard and then moved forward to lean her head on his chest. “You don’t really want me,” he whispered, the voice so like a child’s that Katy thought she’d just burst into tears and then they wouldn’t get anything done. She womaned up though, and swallowed all that in her throat, and soothed Teague’s chest with her hands.

“Of course we want you, pappi,” she murmured, just for form. She knew the person he needed to believe it from was Jack.

“I’m stupid,” Jack said. Katy risked a look at him. He’d stopped at the end of the hallway and his hand was gripping the door frame so hard his knuckles were white, and he looked, if anything, even worse than he had when he’d just finished puking. His face was taut and pale, and the self-directed anger was burning through his blue eyes. “I didn’t know what I was doing—I was like a kid playing with a hand grenade. You threw yourself on the grenade for me, and I… I didn’t even know you’d saved my life.”

Teague scrubbed at his face, his chin still wobbly, and Katy hoped that they could get through this because, dammit, something had to come from all this pain.

“I wasn’t just saving you,” he said honestly. “Jacky, you were hurting someone…you were hurting her…and after all she’s done for us…”

Jack moaned a little. “I know,” he said softly, and Katy believed him. Nothing like seeing the bruises of your bad deeds to make you know you’re the bad guy. “I’m… I’m aware of my complete stupidity, okay Teague? Please—don’t… don’t let this take you away from us.”

“Why do you want me, Jacky?” Teague asked, his voice raw. “You don’t even know me.”

And of all the sounds of hurt and disillusionment that she’d heard Jacky make in the last hour, this one was the worst.

“That’s not true!” Jack rushed up to them, but Teague’s bubble of hurt, of self-containment was so perfect and inviolable that he stopped, just outside of the place of comfort for all of them.

“What do you think you know?” Teague asked, a tinge of bitterness in the sound. “You know I’ve been hurt. You know I’m lonely. You know I love you and Katy. That doesn’t make me your ideal mate, Jack. It just makes me vulnerable.”

Jack closed his eyes and swallowed. “I’d never…” Oh fuck, because he had. He’d done it more than once, each time more unforgivable than the last. “I’ll never hurt you again.”

Teague looked up at him, everything in his eyes naked and bleeding. “I need to be sure,” he said softly. “I can’t… I can’t do this, if I’m worried. I can’t do this if I think I’ll go to sleep with you next to me one day and wake up alone in the morning. I need to know you can accept everything about me--including where my loyalties are.”

Restlessly he turned back toward the dresser, where his clothes lay in a bundle. He picked up the T-shirt he’d been wearing that morning, the one with the hole and the dried blood on it, and he fingered the rent thoughtfully in the silence before turning back to Jack.

“I have violence in me, Jack.” It was unequivocal—they all knew it was true. “I was a stone cold killer for a lot of years—that hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that now that I’m fighting for love and for people I can believe in, I’m going to throw my life into the battle with a lot more passion. You know I’d die for you, for Katy—you know that. You need to know that I’d die for Green and Cory and even that sonofabitch Bracken. Hell, I’d probably die for Nicky if I had to—anything, you understand, to keep this place alive. You need to get behind them, Jacky, because if you’re against them, that’s leaving me in the middle.”

Jack blinked and swallowed, his face taut and pale. He was considering Teague’s words carefully, Katy could tell, measuring the rebelliousness of his own heart against what he needed to be for Teague.

“I can do that,” he said after a moment, with complete certainty.

Teague nodded, and pulled out some clothes, and then moved toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Katy asked, because it wasn’t to the shower, that was for damned sure.

“I’m… I need to sleep alone tonight,” he said, his voice empty. “I… I want you two to watch me fight tomorrow. Cory said I could take down the fucker with the knife in a one-on-one. I need you to see me do it.”

Sleep alone? Oh God. “Pappi!” Katy’s voice was thick and broken. “You… who gonna make the night monsters go away? You can’t sleep alone—you’ll scream and scream and no one will kiss you better…”

The thought destroyed her. They knew—they’d heard him, they’d soothed him in his sleep. That was their job—they kept him together. They patched his heart up because it had been ripped open too many times to hold together on its own.

Teague pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eyes. “You can’t just love me when I’m weak, Katy,” he said after a moment of pulling himself together. “You can’t just love me because I need you. You need to love me when I’m strong. You need to love me when I’m an evil motherfucker, defending the shit I love. I’ll… I may die quicker alone, but at least I’ll know what’s real.” He put his hand on the doorknob and looked up at both of them, meeting their eyes so they’d know he was serious.

“Please come tomorrow—the hill will tell you when.”

And with that he was gone, leaving Katy alone with Jack, who was sinking to his knees, sobbing like a child.

Cory

Never Alone

I admit it—I stood around the corner from their room and waited to see what would happen. But I was keeping Green company so that was okay.

I ran into him after passing Teague down the hall, but Teague was so shell-shocked that he didn’t even see me, and I had a horrible skeleton-fingers-up-the-spine chill of fear.

The last time I’d seen someone look that shell-shocked it was when I was looking in the mirror after Adrian died. Teague felt like someone had died. You can’t hold someone when you think they’ve died, and if anyone needed to be held, it was Teague. And since I’d been there before, since I knew that feeling of betrayal, of loss, I knew what was coming next.

Green and I stood shoulder to shoulder and I read the bad news on Green’s face as he unabashedly used his super-elf hearing to listen in on their most intimate, most painful conversation.

About midway through, he bumped me and I winced and he cast me a sharp look before putting his hand on my upper arm through my sweatshirt to heal me.

Thanks, beloved.

You should have gotten someone else to do it.

I couldn’t let Bracken see.

He caught my eyes then and nodded with a grimace. We both knew that this situation, as bad as it was, could be a whole lot worse. At that moment, the door opened, and we didn’t need to speak in each other’s heads for me to read his little shove at my shoulders.

It was my turn.

“Hey Teague,” I said, keeping my voice friendly and neutral—didn’t know anything, didn’t see anything, just a friend, walking down the hall.

He looked ghastly—pale, red-eyed, dirty, and his bare shoulders drooped over his scarred chest—but he managed a roll of the eyes.

“You are so full of shit,” he muttered, and I grimaced.

“Brown eyes,” I replied softly. “Can’t help it. They won’t let you move out for long, you know that, right?”

Teague shrugged—he wasn’t so sure. “How’d you know?” he asked seriously, and I could only give him the truth.

“It’s exactly what I wanted, right after Adrian died. I figured it would hurt less to be alone, you know?” I bumped his shoulder with my own and nodded him down the hall.

“No one died,” he said tersely. “Where are we going?”

“I figure you can room with Mario—he’s got a king-sized bed, and no designs on your body. This way, you can go take a shower before you come and sit down and watch movies with me in the front room. And you feel like someone died, so don’t give me that shit.”

“I’m watching movies with you?” he asked, genuinely surprised.

“And eating ice cream and dancing to our favorite cd’s, just like girlfriends at a slumber party, now don’t change the subject.” I figured it would just be the movies and the ice cream, but I added the rest to see him roll his eyes and scowl, which was a damned sight better than his expression of bleak hopelessness, thank you very much.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he growled, but he was lying and we both knew it. I stopped walking and turned to him, my eyebrows raised.

“Bullshit. You feel like you lost him, like he’ll never love you again. I figure, you’re probably planning to make him watch you off old Javier, as painfully and savagely as possible, and then you’re going to turn to him and say, ‘See—I told you I was a fucking monster, now go the fuck away!’—am I right?”

Teague turned bright red, from his the pale flesh of his bare stomach to the roots of his hair. “It’s a plan,” he defended weakly.

I snorted and turned back down the hallway. “It’s a sucky one. For one thing, even if you could do it—and I don’t think you can-- it’s not going to work.”

“Sure I can do it,” he said, his voice hard and flat and he was trying to convince me he was a badass. I already knew he was a badass—that wasn’t the point.

“Look—I know physically you can do it—and I could really give a fuck how you kill that shitbag. That’s not the point. The point is, Teague, we both know you’re a better man than that. You’ll kill, yes, out of necessity, and in this case, I’m willing to concede—this guy has to die, and there has to be some theatre so his buddies will go home and tell their buddies to leave us the fuck alone. It’s gone that far, and I don’t have to like it to see that we need it. But you’re not into torture. And even if you were, just for this one time, just to drive Jacky away, you wouldn’t do it because it would be a lie. You’re a better man than lying to him to get him to do the right thing. You’ll let him see the real you, and make his own decision, and that’s why the plan won’t work.”

His voice was thick with all the emotion he hadn’t let loose with his mates. “And why’s that?”

“Because he loves you, dumbshit. You could probably eat the bad guy a piece at a time while Javier watched you and screamed for mercy, and Jacky would be there with a napkin and ketchup. So do what you have to, be all manly if you have to, but be out in the front room in forty-five minutes for dinner, movies, and fattening shit, or I’m having Green drag you out.” I stopped in front of Mario’s door and gave a courtesy knock on the door.

“Did you hear that, bird-man?”

The door opened and Mario rolled his eyes at me. His blue-black hair was combed back from his high forehead and he was wearing a tight shirt and loose jeans. Mostly, he was looking none the worse for the wear after his showdown with a rabid werewolf two nights before.

“Yeah, Princess, I gotchu—don’t worry about bothering Green. I’ll drag wolf-boy out and watch witchu, ‘kay?”

I smiled at him gratefully, glad he read my cue and admitted he’d heard the whole conversation. “Sounds like a plan—don’t be late!”

“Who says I don’t want to be alone?” Teague demanded, when he’d found his tongue and his bearings there in Mario’s doorway.

“Who says you get to?” I snapped back. “As-fucking-IF!” Then I turned around and kept walking, enjoying his grunts of irritation as I went.

Nobody was alone at Green’s hill. Ever. That was my new goddamned law.

Teague

Solace of the Hill

He didn’t remember that Cory and the others had school until he woke up the next morning.

Good to her word, during the evening she and a revolving throng of people whom Teague had gotten to know in the last couple of weeks came and went. They would sit down, put a new dessert in Teague’s hand, actively watch television for a while and then move on.

It didn’t occur to him that he was being ‘handled’ in the same manner he’d seen the hill ‘handle’ Cory or Green, until after the vampires had woken up.

Phillip and Marcus had walked in (they were rarely far apart from each other) and Marcus said, “Holy Goddess—I haven’t seen one of these since the last time you threw me over.”

They were standing behind the couch as Teague squinted at them over his shoulder, the pieces falling into place. Phillip cast the love of his life a sour look from under the black fall of hair of his widow’s peak. “If you don’t learn when to shut the fuck up, I may still throw you over.”

Marcus caught Teague’s eyes apologetically. “You wish,” he returned, bumping shoulders with his beloved. “I’m like flesh and blood Velcro.”

“There’s an appealing thought… you couldn’t come up with something better than that you Dago bastard?”

Marcus shrugged and blushed, and leaned over and whispered something in Phillip’s ear that made him blush as well. Teague watched them, his heart breaking into small, bruised, dripping, bloody pieces, and Phillip saw his expression.

“Brother, we’ve officially become a break-up party liability.” And the two of them made themselves scarce in quick-time.

He turned back to the movie—they were watching Independence Day, because there was nothing like a good disaster movie to put things into perspective—and saw Cory looking at him with wordless sympathy. He shrugged silently and slipped into the colorless, emotionless void that had comforted him for the last few hours. Cory was leaning against Bracken, her knitting in her hands, and her feet in Teague’s lap. It was a familiar, brotherly pose, and with the vampire’s prompting, it occurred to him that it was very deliberate. She was touching him in a way that had nothing at all to do with sex. She was touching him like a mother or a sister—or a friend.

That’s where he stayed for another half an hour, conscious that Mario had tilted his head back and started to snore in the chair next to him, and that Nicky was crouched at Cory’s feet, mouthing the lines to the climactic speech at the end of the movie. That’s where they were when a vaguely familiar female voice spoke up behind him.

“Oh my God—whose break-up party?”

Teague might have smiled a little—he didn’t look behind him, but he recognized a were-leopard—was it Leah? Was that the name? And someone must have elbowed her in the side and clued her in.

“Are you shitting me? Naww… really? Them? Impossible-- that’s like asking two ass-cheeks to ride home in different cars, and making the sphincter drive.”

Teague’s eyes bugged out. Looking to his left he saw that Cory’s and Bracken’s eyes were pretty damned huge as well, and then they all made the mistake of meeting those bulged out eyes and cracking up. Teague tended to laugh in short breaths, little blasts of happiness in between painful moments of self-denial. He wasn’t sure when the first little burst of breath went from laughter to sobs, he really wasn’t. He would have sworn it couldn’t happen—he’d been avoiding thinking, avoiding feeling since Jacky had burst in by the vampire vault, and it wasn’t like he had a whole lot of emotional reserves anyway. By the time he’d spoken to Green, he’d been emotionally exhausted. Green’s soothing presence had been a balm, an aloe bandage on his shredded soul.

He didn’t think he had any tears or pain left by the time he walked out of the room he’d been sharing with Jack and Katy for the past weeks. He’d been relieved—he figured maybe he’d never have to cry again.

But something about laughing… God… something about letting an emotion—any emotion—register on his radar cracked his heart wide open.

Within moments, the room had cleared of everybody but Cory and Bracken, and Cory was holding Teague’s head in her lap as he cried, and Bracken was holding her.

He wasn’t sure how long it lasted. When his sobs had been reduced to little hiccups, he looked at the television and realized that Knight’s Tale was playing—not one of his favorite movies, but then, he’d been out of it for a while. He was glad someone was happy with what was on TV.

He cleared his throat and made to move—God, these people were going to think he couldn’t keep his shit together in a copper pot, but Cory’s arms tightened around his shoulders.

“Stay, wolf-man. You need to know that you’ll never be alone here, okay?”

“Jacky…”

“Will love you as much tomorrow as he loved you yesterday. But in the meantime, you don’t need to be alone. We’ve got your back, baby. It’s what we do.”

He didn’t remember falling asleep after that. He must have—and one of the uber-strong super-beings in the damned hill must have carried him back to Mario’s room like a child. He knew that he woke up from a dream—it didn’t matter which one, they were all blood-saturated and ended with him, alone, covered in his lovers’ blood—and the flannel sheets were a different color, and they smelled like someone else.

A light tap on his shoulders eased the scream in his throat.

“Easy, wolf-man—orders are to sleep in. You’ll be doing the gladiator thing when everyone gets back from school.”

“Oh Christ!” Teague scrubbed at his eyes and glowered at the thin yellow sunlight coming in through Mario’s full sized window. (The room he’d shared with Jack and Katy had a small skylight, stealing sun from the only corner of the room to face outside.) “They have school today—I forgot… don’t you have school too?” He glared at Mario who was sitting up on the bed in jeans and a sweatshirt, working on what looked like a law text as it sat in his lap.

Mario held out a little palm-pilot-something-or-whatsis. “Yeah—La Mark’s gonna send me my homework and drop off my papers. It’s all good.”

Teague’s head felt heavy and his neck felt slender and no good at all for holding the damned thing up. He fell back against the pillows and fought the temptation to pull the blankets over his head. “Why didn’t you go with them?”

Mario pulled the covers up over Teague’s eyes for him and then went to the window and pulled the heavy curtains shut. They were green like the sheets, Teague noted mournfully—his and Jacky’s stuff was blue and red and cream.

“Exactly why you think I didn’t, wolf-man. I’m here to watch your back. Now go back to sleep—it’s only seven in the morning.”

“Jesus—what time do they leave?” Teague grumbled, and it turned out to be around six in the morning to make their eight-o-clock class, but he found that out later. As it was, he fell back asleep before Mario finished speaking.

He dreamed again—but it was a very different dream this time.

This time, he heard Green’s sharp cockney, cutting through the wool in his head, until he could dream the story he’d heard the previous afternoon. He saw it like a movie, like pictures, and was able to read the expression on the faces of the players with detailed accuracy, thanks to Green’s pitch-perfect narration.

Adrian had just finished doing his bit with the other vampires, to learn self-control, right? And we decided to move up to a part of the state that had as few people as possible. But you’ve got to remember—we were limited. The coffin wasn’t as light proof as it should have been, so we could really only move by night…

It was night and two men made their way across the twisted landscape of gold country in a little buckboard pulled by a single indifferent horse. The buckboard was light, and carried only a couple of items—a store of bread and dried fruit, wooden tools, some with metal edges (carefully wrapped), woolen blankets, a few changes of clothes for each man, and an empty coffin, covered by an oilskin tarp.

The road the men were following wasn’t really a road—it was more of a narrow path that followed the American River from the split with the Sacramento to El Dorado hills. They’d slept in the valley’s shadow the day before, but now it was time to make the slow, winding road up the side of the cliff to the hill where their lime trees were planted.

The lime trees had been Green’s ticket from England. Salt water negated magic of any sort, and crossing the sea was usually lethal for any sort of land elf. Green had hoarded power for a hundred and fifty years while held a captive in Oberon’s Faerie Hill, and fed it, driblet by orgasm, into those trees. The place was so saturated in power anyway, no one noticed Green’s subtle power signature or caught on to his plan—at least until he had disappeared, through the quarried stone walls and into the night.

When Green and Adrian arrived in San Francisco, Adrian had immediately converted. His last sunrise had been spent in Green’s arms, staring at the ocean from a tiny hotel room, and yearning for the moment when they could be together as equals, immortal to immortal. Adrian had spent ten years locked in the hold of a ship, being raped and abused as sort of a privilege and a reward to the ship’s crew. From their first touch, Green became all the sunshine and daylight he would ever need.

When they’d been in San Francisco and it became apparent that Adrian would need a good couple of months to become accustomed to his new life as a vampire, Green had given three lime trees to a Yawknapsatani (the name of the sidhe in this part of the world back then) to take the rest of the trees up north and plant them somewhere they might thrive with a little help from Green. They’d sworn by it, by touch, blood, and song, and a month later, Green had received a map leading him to this place with the warning to be done with the ‘blood-eater’s business’ by early spring—otherwise his beloved trees might not survive too long without Green’s help.

Green and Adrian had only seen San Francisco. It had felt a lot like England, although Green knew enough about the taste of dirt in the air to know that there were dry grasses and dust on the wind, even in the winter. He had a feeling that the world beyond the bay city was probably more inhospitable than he’d imagined when he was coming up with a plan using nothing more than desperation and scantly heard rumors of a new world.

In the five-night journey in the horse and trap, Green didn’t see much to revise his opinion. The first two nights were easy enough. Once they cleared the rolling hills around the bay (when Green and Adrian had pulled the damned trap more than the horse) they’d had a hell of a time finding sheltering trees beyond the long stretches of fairly flat lands. They followed the river—grateful that it was not salt—and always quit an hour or two before dawn for two reasons.

The first was that they needed to find a place for Adrian to sleep—even in early April, the sun was fierce, and the coffin and the tarp were not enough for Green’s peace of mind. More often than not, they dug out a place to put the coffin inside, making sure there was at least a foot of insulating dirt on top.

The second was that they were still honeymooning, and even if it was only bathing each other in the river shallows by the grey twilight of pre-dawn, Green needed to touch him.

Letting him die had hurt—oh, Goddess… it was a subject he didn’t even talk about with Cory. He had stayed to watch, because Adrian had been afraid and he’d had to, and the absolute, stomach-dropping, stark, painful fear of watching the pale, lovely boy become a pale, lovely corpse was something that had awakened Green for years afterwards with a scream in his throat and rank sweat stinking his body. After the terrible betrayal of his last consensual lover and the mind-numbing, body-killing horridness of being Oberon’s favorite concubine—oh Goddess. Green had finally found a lover who made him love, who made him feel again, and he was letting him DIE?

When the stirring of Adrian’s soul wind had ruffled that white-blonde hair and opened those sky-spangled eyes again, Green had fallen to his knees, clasped that pulse-less cold hand to his cheek and wept.

Adrian had blinked around Lucian’s dark-suited shoulder and smiled wanly at his only true lover. “No worries, luv—didn’t even hurt.”

The next few months had been an education in sexual insatiability and fearsome bloodlust, but Green clung to that sky-blue optimism, and it had kept him sane.

The stolen moments by the river before dawn had been lovely. On one night, after Adrian had fed chastely and minimally from an unwary (and now very happy) husband and wife they had met on the road, Green had him stand, naked and star-light-white, in the ankle deep shallows. He had taken a bit of cloth and had, simple touch by simple touch, bathed Adrian from his wiry, muscular calves, up to his groin and the crease of his thighs and his buttocks, up his concave, taut stomach, and into the hollows of his tender neck—and even behind and in his ears. Adrian had stood still the entire time, arms raised above his head, being as marble still as a vampire could—but he couldn’t sustain that sort of tranquility for long.

He’d started little, unwilling grunts as Green had bathed his thighs. He’d let loose a whimper as Green had paid gentle attention to his privates and the sensitive places between his creases and the entrance into his body that was only used for sport now. He’d started panting when Green had reached his chest and his pearly little nipples. By the time Green had moved to his neck, Adrian was wiggling, vibrating, emitting a series of wordless words that all but begged for possession.

When Green had claimed his mouth with warmth and strength and passion, Adrian had groaned, clutched him close, and spent himself against Green’s taut, warm thigh—and then Green had truly taken him, body and soul, in the waning starlight.

But that had been before the hills, before the oaks had thickened to become difficult, before the land had given in to pine trees, digging into granite or slippery shale. As the two of them clawed their way up the side of the hill on some sort of joke of a path and the night raced by on cougar’s swift paws, Green was seriously wondering if either one of them would ever see a moment like that again.

Green could smell the lime trees but he couldn’t see them yet when the he saw the first deadly ray of gold reach across the horizon.

“FUCK!” The echoes of the oath hadn’t stopped dying off the hills before Green shoved Adrian into his coffin, threw the tarpaulin over the damned thing and found a crumbling, red-dirt-crusted spot in the east-facing cliff wall they were trying to negotiate.

Then he used all the sidhe power he had in his bones and literally vibrated the casket into the side of the bloody hill with main force and a fucking lot of desperation. Adrian was still complaining in shock and surprise (and a bit of discomfort—if it hadn’t been for the quick healing of your average vampire his brain would have splattered like an egg inside of his skull) when the sunlight hit their mountainside and his day death shut him up.

Green was left gasping—exhausted, shell-shocked, and still quivering with fear. He’d seen Adrian die once—he wasn’t sure if he could survive seeing it again. The whole reason he’d agreed with the transition to vampire was that he, oh goddammit, he didn’t want to lose another lover to the merciless spiked boots of Time. In particular, he didn’t want to lose Adrian.

As he stood there, leaning against the hill, rocks and stray earth falling around his shoulders, he heard a sound above his own heartbeat.

Slowly, he looked up and found himself face to face with a really angry brown bear.

He didn’t know—or care—about the difference between bears back then. In fact, he wasn’t so clear on them now—he didn’t know that a brown bear was smaller than a Grizzly, or that a black bear was bigger than a brown bear. At this precise moment, he discovered that a California bear was a damned sight bigger than the little buggers they had back in England, and this monster was far taller than he was, had mass, reach, heinous, hideous claws, and seemed to have an entire bee’s nest shoved up his arse over something.

Green didn’t wait for the bear to swipe first—he charged the damned thing, and together, they tumbled down the cliff. Green burrowed into the bear’s fur, fumbling for his skin. They rolled off a ledge, the bear (thankfully) on the bottom, and landed—hard—on the path below them. The bear was dazed—but not for long—and Green took the opportunity plow his hands in through that dense, thick pelt and grab the loose skin with both hands.

Then he ripped it open. The bear reared his head back and roared in shock, and Green used the sidhe strength he so rarely relied on to punch his hand through the thing’s ribcage and yank out its heart.

He had no idea how long he laid there, splayed over the twitching corpse of the bear, but eventually his breath caught and his heartbeat returned to normal, and he pulled himself out of the bloody pit of the thing’s chest and took stock.

Bloody hell. He didn’t eat meat—Adrian didn’t eat anything—and here was a life that would be wasted completely if someone who didn’t know something about dressing a dead animal didn’t emerge from the woodwork.

And then—oh Goddess. He was covered in blood.

He’d killed before. He was not pretty or skilled at it--he’d swung into a human regiment once, drunk on grief and a berserker’s rage, and emerged dripping in viscera and completely alone. He knew it was in him and knew when to use it and for the most part was unashamed of the violence that could pulse in his veins.

But it was something that Adrian had never seen.

Adrian had relied on Green’s compassion, his tenderness. Green had been the gentle healing to a violence-rent soul. It was irrational (although Green knew he was often ruled by emotion) but suddenly it became imperative that Adrian NOT see him covered in blood.

He gave a grunt and looked below him, over the ledge of this portion of the road, and saw the river, ripping it’s way through the canyon. He was an elf—he could move at amazing speeds—but not on terrain such as this, where every footfall was rife with the possibility of slipping on loose shale and crumbling red dirt. He gave another grunt and looked above him—Holy Goddess, he’d fallen a long way. He gasped and looked at the fallen corpse of his enemy and gave it a vicious, irrational—and highly satisfying—kick in the side. Bloody fucking thing—he was in the thick of it now, wasn’t he?

And then, to make matters worse, there was a bloodthirsty monster stalking him. Hurt beyond madness, maddened by grief, it slunk in the shadows, just waiting for a moment to rip out an innocent throat, to feast on the sweet ichor of…

“Stop it,” Green’s voice echoed in Teague’s head. “I give you this precious fucking memory to dream of, you’d best remember it right.”

Teague grunted, came partially awake, realized that he’d allowed his own dream, his own madness, to intrude, and let out a wolf whine in shame.

“No worries,” Green’s voice smelled like wildflowers. Was that possible? “Now see it through to the end, right mate?”

Teague’s answer was to sink again into the dream, where he could smell the dust and the pine and the bright orange poppies, peeking through the crevices of the rocky soil, taunting Green with a little bit of softness in this terribly hard land…

By mid-morning, Green had just about decided what to do. He’d recovered his breath and sat next to the cooling body of the bear, measuring his options. His bib-overalls (the steel rivets carefully treated with salt-water and herbs) and thermal shirt were sopping with blood, and so was the long queue down his back—he absolutely could not face Adrian like this.

The bear would be good for another day—especially down in the coolness of the canyon, where he was more likely to be found, either by a predator or by the miners who periodically ventured the river down there. He would feel better about the kill if he knew the meat would be used. He stood with a sigh and bent, getting his back and legs and shoulders into the lift. Even for a sidhe, six-hundred plus pounds of hairy predator was something of a lift. He just about had the thing balanced, and was working up to a good trot across the scrabble path, when a wolf crossed his path.

Green slowed, moving smoothly—if the wolf wanted the bear, he could have it, but otherwise, Green was a wood-elf. When he wasn’t vibrating with desperation and panic, he was usually pretty comfortable in a rural setting. Besides, while he did not know bears, he was relatively comfortable with wolves—they were usually content to watch his kind, and had no need to interfere.

But suddenly the wolf was a naked human, his hair long, straight, and white and his body—still muscular and sound—was covered in sagging skin.

This was not just a wolf—it was an old skinchanger, a werewolf.

Green was so surprised he dropped the bear. It landed in the dust with a heavy, bone-breaking thud, and Green and the werewolf stared at it in surprise.

“It is just as well,” the werewolf said after a moment. “My brothers will want to eat it, and they would rather not journey down to the river today.”

Green looked up, wondering if his eyes were as big as they felt. “You speak English.”

The old man blinked, and sank to his haunches, as comfortable in that position nude as Green would be. Green joined him, hunkering down in the middle of the hard-scrabble trail, by the corpse of the dead bear. It only seemed polite.

“I like humans,” the werewolf replied mildly—his voice was canyon deep, and sonorous, but not without humor. “These days, humans speak English.”

After centuries of learning Gaelic, Latin, Pictish, Welsh, Old German, Old French, and a dozen Scandinavian language which no longer existed, Green had to agree. “These days, in these ways, yes, it’s true.”

“So, is there any other reason you were hauling a perfectly good dinner for my tribe down to the river?”

Green sighed and looked at himself. “Yes, brother—I need to wash.”

The old werewolf looked at him wisely. “When you get to your trees at the top of the hill you will be able to call water—why not wait until then? You will need your strength, brother—even for your kind, it will not be an easy climb if you wish to beat the dawn again.”

The blush traveled from Green’s chest to his cheeks, he could feel it. He did not know what it looked like, through the gore and fleshy matter crusted on his face, but the werewolf sniffed the air and looked at him with some amusement.

“Surely your blood-eater has no problem with violence!”

Green shrugged and looked away. “Not from me,” he muttered, and the werewolf nodded, as though this was not at all unusual.

“This is not the hardest land to live in,” the man said after a moment of stillness. There wasn’t even a breeze across the succulents and grasses to break the quiet. “There is water and game, and the snows aren’t too bad and the droughts do not last for lifetimes.”

A nod then, a smile. Green was used to people speaking in poetry—it was the hallmark of the sidhe.

“But as easy as this land may be,” the werewolf continued, “it is still difficult to survive. A challenge—especially for people like you, who come from an easier place.”

“Yes,” Green said, wondering where this was going.

“Do you not think your blood-eater will be happy to know that you can defend yourself in such a place? I saw you—shoving him into the earth in panic. You are afraid he cannot fend for himself. Wouldn’t it be a relief if one of you could survive?”

Unexpectedly, Green felt tears. He’d been a captive for over a hundred years—how bloody good was he at surviving if that were true? “I am not a warrior elf,” he said, trying not to be wretched.

The werewolf nodded sagely. “This is good—warriors die when they are young, or live to be naked old men, having senile conversations with strangers. The world needs more men who do not kill because they love it. It’s good when these men can take care of themselves. It means they will survive to teach others to love.”

They sat for most of the day. The werewolf brought his brothers—a motley assortment of people from every age and genetic heritage to pass over this part of the continent. They lived in a quiet pack, and after thanking Green for the meat, hoisted the monster of a creature over their backs and disappeared down the road.

The older werewolf, the pack’s alpha, stayed and shared some tubers and vegetables with Green, and Green—who had been living off of hard-tack for more than a week—was grateful. They moved to where Adrian’s coffin was buried in the late afternoon, and Gray Wind the werewolf chief helped set up a sun-blind, using the tarp and watched over Green as he slept.

He woke Green near sunset and helped to pull the coffin out of the side of the hill—it was harder than it sounded, and more than once the old Indian remarked that it was a good thing Green didn’t love that blood-eater too much, or they would have needed to go to the other side of the hill and pull it out that way.

At dark, Gray Wind turned wolf and faded into the wilderness—he would visit later that night, and allow Adrian to feed from him, and the long tradition of were-creatures and vampires living in symbiosis would begin. But first, Green lifted the lid of Adrian’s resting place and waited for the soul-wind to blow through him again.

Adrian’s sky spangled eyes opened, took in Green’s appearance, the blood, the savagery, and his transparent, helpless relief that Adrian would survive.

“Bloody hell, mate—whatever you fought, I’m glad it’s dead!”

Green smiled then, his shoulders shaking in helpless laughter, and Adrian sat up, pushed his crusted hair back from his face, and kissed him, gore and all.

The dream was abruptly over.

Teague opened his eyes into the room—the sun was bright enough through the drapes that it would have been impossible to go back to sleep again anyway. Teague looked to where Mario had been sitting earlier, and was unsurprised to see Green instead.

Green reached out an absent hand and smoothed Teague’s hair back—the gesture was sexless, genderless, and paternal, and Teague shivered and accepted it.

“I would have died,” he said. “In captivity. I don’t know where you were held captive, but I would have gnawed my own legs off. I couldn’t have done it.”

Green tilted his head back against the headboard, closed his eyes and smiled. “You silly boy—you’ve lived your whole life in captivity. First in your father’s grasp and then in your own mind. And you’ve done worse than chew your legs off—you’ve gnawed your heart into tiny pieces. But you’ve survived.”

“I don’t want to just survive,” Teague said, shocking the hell out of himself. “I… I want them, Green. I want them to love me for me. I…” His chest ached. God… Goddess… whatever—it hurt, just to admit. “I…for a minute, yesterday, I was happy. I…” Teague turned away from Green and buried his face in the pillows, hoping he would smother himself rather than let the words come out, but they burst free anyway. “I could be so happy with them.”

Green was suddenly stretched out behind him, spooning him into a cocooning embrace that Teague couldn’t fight, didn’t want to.

“You will be, mate. You’ll see. Having them watch you fight was exactly right—and Jack’s need to accept who you are is exactly right. You’ll get your happy ending, mate. I cannot choose to think otherwise.”

Teague had learned that elves couldn’t lie—so he noticed. He noticed that Green didn’t say, “I have no doubts.”

And it was actually comforting, to know that Green had doubts. Because that made two of them. But it made two of them who hoped—no, more than that. Three…no, five… no… more. Teague realized that everybody who had sat and watched the movie in the common room with him would be hoping that afternoon.

Whether he and his lovers had a hope of becoming forever or not, he would never be alone. ‘Captivity’, Green had said. Not anymore. For the first time in his life, Teague felt free.

Jack

Passive Atonement

Jack had learned to love Katy, even though she had only showed up to be with Teague. The fact that she didn’t leave him alone after Teague left only cemented the deal.

She was the one who helped him to his feet, who sat him in his stuffed chair and stroked his face until the sobs settled in his chest. She was the one who crooned at him until he was ready to quiet and to listen. For a few moments they sat in silence, and he appreciated her, her softness, her gentleness—he and Teague were all sharpness, rough edges, hard planes. Katy fit well with them. Fit well with him. The thought almost started him off again, and he couldn’t do that.

“Where do you think he is?” Jack asked when the silence pressed to hard on his chest.

“In the front room having a break-up party,” Katy answered promptly, without having to think, and Jack squinted at her. He’d never heard of such a thing.

“What, college boy—you never see one of those in a dorm? They’re in all the movies.”

Jack flushed. “I only started watching movies after I started rooming with Teague.”

Katy blinked at him slowly. “Oh, mijo…you really did think life was your own little blanket fort, didn’t you? Didn’t you see? The world—it don’t just wait outside while you and your people make nice. You either deal with the world or it falls down and crushes your head!”

“Or your heart,” Jack said softly. His face threatened to crumple again. Teague had looked… sad. Defeated. Lonely. All of the things that Jack had sworn he’d never be again, and Jack had driven him to that place in his heart. And now… now Teague was out with the world, and Jack was here, alone.

Katy patted his cheek. Well not alone.

“He’ll come back,” she said softly. “He has a point, that’s all. He is hurt—but he’s not just our lover anymore. We got to do more than kiss his boo-boos and make it better. We’ve got to obey him, just like a leader. And we’ve got to obey the people he bows to. This ain’t America anymore, Jacky. This is like the the…” she waved her arms, looking for the word, and Jack found himself smiling. She did that a lot—and as reserved as he and Teague were, it was lovely to see some animation, some excitement, in the eyes of the other member of their family.

Katy’s arms stilled in a dramatic flare, and she found her words. “Like the United Peoples of Green or something! Green’s the big shit, Cory’s his other half—Teague’s like his… his… cabinet or something, you know? We’re not just being married to the guy who breaks our hearts. We’re being married to the Secretary of Big Fucking Werewolf Shit, and if the President say our guy has to go keep the peace, baby, that’s what he do!”

Jack reached out an arm and pulled gently on Katy’s waist as she sat on the arm of his chair. She took the hint and allowed herself to be pulled into his lap, and he feathered his hand through her blue-black hair. “That’s what he do,” he echoed softly, mindless of the grammar. He’d loved poetry classes in college—sometimes, the worst grammar said the best goddamned things.

“Yeah, mijo,” she said into his chest. Her voice was a sad little echo, and he realized that he’d done this to her, too. His own stupidity—his complete lack of judgment—had not just driven Teague away from him, but away from her.

“Why didn’t he take you with him?” Jack wondered aloud. “He could have stayed in your room… you… you didn’t do anything wrong.”

Katy looked up at him, her tears running her mascara, and he tenderly wiped them away with his thumbs and then wiped his thumbs on his jeans.

“Don’t you get it, Jacky? He loves me—I don’t doubt that. But you’re the one he followed. You’re the one he became a werewolf for. He can’t just love one of us. He can love his family and be happy, or he can break his heart and be alone.”

Jack sighed in frustration. “Dammit—that’s not fair! I’m not… I’m not worth all of that!”

A small, soft hand grasped his chin and forced him to meet a pair of red-rimmed brown eyes. “Now see—that’s what he’s felt like these last weeks. And we finally convince him it’s not true and…”

“Yeah,” Jack whispered miserably, “and I fuck it all up. And part of the reason he feels like it’s not true…”

“Is that the shit he does here at the hill is important. Yeah—you’re starting to get it now, aren’t you pendejo!”

Jack frowned. “What’s pendejo mean?” he asked suspiciously.

Katy grinned at him tiredly. “Let’s just say it’s not as bad as puta and leave it at that, okay, Jacky?”

Jack nodded. Okay—in either language, he was an asshole. He guessed he knew that now, didn’t he?

They had their own little break-up party in their room. Jack and Teague’s television had been moved in, as well as their own dvd collection, and Jack put in You’ve Got e-Mail. Katy was about to slip away and get them some food when Grace showed up with a tray—including some desserts, and presented it to her.

Jack saw Katy blush. She cast him a surreptitious glance, and looked back at Grace gratefully. “Thank you,” she said, her voice soaked in shame for something that Jack had done—something that Katy had nothing to do with.

Grace rolled her eyes and caught Jack’s miserable glance and winked. “He’s not the only one to not know what he’s dealing with here. No worries, Katy. You guys are welcome in the were common room, or with the vamps…”

Katy shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “It would be better if he didn’t see us at all. At least not until tomorrow.”

Grace took the tray back from Katy and put it on the dresser by the door, snagging Teague’s soiled, discarded clothing as she did so and tossing it in a little pile outside the door. Then she turned to Katy and enfolded the girl in a long-limbed hug.

Jack watched as Katy went willingly. The older vampire’s freckled cheeks scrunched up in sympathy, and she tucked his lover into her embrace like Katy was her own daughter, recovering from a broken heart. If nothing else in the rest of the day proved to be an education, this would. Jack may have thought they lived in a vacuum, but Teague and Katy—who had been torn so badly in their lives one would think they were almost beyond repair—had been out, engaged and active in a community that cared about them.

As Katy sniffled a little and Grace said soft things about how Teague wouldn’t be gone for long, Jack had to wonder at his hubris. He’d wanted to be their everything—how could he be their everything when he didn’t even know about the world they walked in?

Eventually Grace left—taking Teague’s dirty clothes with her—and Katy made plates and sat with Jack, so they could eat.

“I’m a fool,” Jack said quietly, taking a bite of lasagna like a chastised child.

“Yeah, Jacky—we know. What you being foolish about now?” Katy took a bit of garlic bread with relish—it occurred to Jack that Grace had a sense of humor about being a cook that couldn’t eat her own food.

“This is a family. I thought… I thought I was the only family you guys had. This place… it’s bigger than me.”

Katy looked at him with big eyes. “You really are stupid, aren’t you?”

Jack grimaced. “Let’s hope I’ve wised up enough to do the smart thing tomorrow.” He took another glum bite.

Katy reached across the arms of their chairs and took his hand to her lips and kissed it. “Oh now mijo—don’t you worry about that. All you got to do tomorrow is love him. I think it could be the only thing you’re good at.”

Her lips were warm (and a little buttery) on the back of his hand, and he turned the hand around to cup her cheek. “Now look at who’s all optimistic and shit.”

Katy gave him a watery grin and pressed his palm to her skin. “Grace said he fell apart like a little baby, Jack. I gots to believe he’ll forgive you for anything—now you just gots to make sure ‘anything’ don’t happen again, right?”

Jack’s food lost all appeal whatsoever, and he reclaimed his hand. Fell apart like a little baby. God, Goddess, whoever. Let him be the sort of man Teague needed. Please, let him not fuck this up again.

They slept curled up together, in their pajamas. Jack had wondered—would they make love without Teague? Would they want to? Would it be comforting?

Maybe, if they knew he’d be gone forever, they could have. Maybe.

But now, they didn’t want sex. They wanted their mate, and touching skin was comfort, but without their mate, it wasn’t sex.

They woke up late, and as soon as they’d showered Jack sent Katy out into the were-room to get the buzz. She came back in short order, carrying some sandwiches and some milk, and a resigned expression.

“After the students get home and the vampires wake up—in the banquet room by the dance floor. You and me gots front row seats, mijo. He’s downstairs now, helping to clear out the room and get it ready. We can go to the common room if we want.”

“But what if he…” God, this was stupid. But it was becoming like seeing the bride before the wedding day. They didn’t want to see him until he’d done this thing, until they could prove to him that they (Jacky) wouldn’t let him down again.

Katy shook her head, positive. “Green told me. He said we could go to the common room, we could go outside—Green would keep him busy down there or on the running trail. Don’t worry, Jacky—we won’t do anything to fuck this up, okay?”

“Speak for yourself,” Jack said with an air of resignation.

Katy’s look was pointed. “Umm, no, Jacky. You don’t get to do that. We get enough from Teague. You take your lumps, you be a little bit humble—you don’t get to hate yourself, ‘kay?”

Jack had to smile. “’Kay. Katy?” He took a bite of sandwich and chewed thoughtfully.

“Yeah, mijo?”

“How come neither of us are worried that Teague will lose?”

Katy’s harrumph was almost comical. “He’s the meanest bastard in the pack, Jacky. I been telling you that since we met.”

The meanest bastard in the pack. Well—he had to be, didn’t he? He’d been saving his own ass, saving Jack’s ass—keeping people alive and well who had no business being alive and well, and doing it for years.

For the first time, Jack felt a sense of pride in the fact. It meant he didn’t have to worry—Teague wouldn’t die. Not today. He was the meanest bastard in the pack.

A few hours later, Jack wasn’t so sure.

The banquet room had been completely cleared. All of the hand-planed banquet tables were stacked up against the far wall, near the stairs, and the chairs had been shoved over there and stacked as well. The walls were a burnished combination of earth and tree roots, and the far wall from the stairs opened up into a wider area. There had been a band there after everyone had eaten on Thanksgiving, and now it was literally roped off. Thick, wiry hemp ropes, tied to wooden rings screwed into the wooden, blocked one end. The three rounded, asymmetrical walls on the other side of the rope marked the other boundaries of the ring.

As Jack and Katy walked through the crowd in the room they found they were ushered to the very front of the ropes. Green, Cory, Nicky and Bracken were there, as well as Grace and her sidhe lover, Arturo.

Cory was vibrating with tension.

“This is so fucking barbaric,” she muttered to no one in particular. “And unnecessary. I could have killed him yesterday.”

“Teague needs this,” Green said mildly.

“Yeah, well Goddess save me from macho assholes,” she snapped, and Green leaned forward to say softly, “So far, She’s done a very nice job indeed, you think, beloved?”

Cory put her hands over her eyes and growl/screamed and kicked fruitlessly at the floor under her feet.

“She doesn’t look happy,” Katy observed quietly, and Jack shrugged. Yeah. It looked like she was concerned for Teague—bully for her. The guy had taken a knife for her the day before.

Katy stomped on his foot. Hard.

“Nobody wants anybody getting hurt here—that concern is for our boy, you be fucking grateful, mijo, hear me?”

Jack sighed. So much for resolutions—it was time to pony up. “You’re right,” he said softly. “I’m just nervous.”

At that moment the other werewolf entered the room, flanked by two vampires Jack vaguely recognized as Marcus and Phillip. The captive’s hands were tied in front of him and he was wearing a pair of brown jeans and nothing else. His hair fell in lank black strings around his face and his expression was pure hatred. Jack started to see why the man had to be put down—there was no reason in him. It was all pure, unadulterated animosity, and it was obviously something that couldn’t be allowed to prosper here.

The werewolf stood in the corner looking angry and rabid—and alone. When his opponent walked in, he raised his head for a moment—his eyes were flat and unintelligent, and Jack thought that he was more beast than man in that moment.

Teague was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with no shoes, and for a moment Jack wondered why a guy who wore long-sleeved Henleys in the summer would be that stripped down before the reason smacked him in the face. This was as close to naked in public as Teague would get—and since Teague might have to turn wolf, he was stripped down to make it easier. (Although, Jack thought sourly, Teague seemed to avoid getting caught in his clothes so far. It was almost like a magic superpower or something.)

Teague didn’t look at Jacky or Katy—but he didn’t look at Green or Cory either. His attention was all business. The guy in the corner got the up, down, and sideways, and Jack had a sudden déjà vu.

“I know that look,” he said softly to Katy. “That’s his… his ‘fighting’ look.” The thing was, until this very moment, Jack hadn’t known it was his fighting look. He’d thought of it as Teague’s ‘game face’—because Teague got it under certain tense situations, but now Jack realized something. Teague really had been covering his ass for a year and a half. He’d known when violence was pending. He’d known when someone was going to throw a punch. He only wore that face when he was going to have to draw blood.

Jack had never known. Fighting had always been an unpleasant surprise. To Teague, it had been a violent change in the air, like the smell of a storm on the wind.

Teague liked storms.

“He likes this,” Katy said with surprise and a little awe, and Jack nodded, acknowledging that it was true. How could he have worked with the man for a year and a half without seeing that Teague’s flat, assessing eyes and taut face hid a boundless wealth of sheer violent joy? Teague had been born in violence. The fact that he had forged a gentle man from that material was nothing short of a miracle—but it didn’t change the fact that violence was in his blood. Of course it would give him some satisfaction to turn this… this terrible gift, this blood soaked legacy to something productive, something he believed in.

Teague nodded then to Green and Cory. Cory gave him an irritated, narrow-eyed glare that Jack was willing to concede was mostly concern, and Green nodded his head with gentle nobility. Teague grinned and winked at Cory then, who flipped him off in turn, and that was apparently his signal to proceed.

One of the vampires had a steel knife, and he used that to cut the bonds at the werewolf’s hands, and then it was just the two of them, one desperate and the other deadly, in the ring.

Bad guy rushed Teague first.

It wasn’t a gather or a charge—it was hardly a rush. The guy didn’t pull in his resources or gauge his speed. He just ran, his body tilting dangerously out of balance, and Teague gave the move the attention it deserved: he sidestepped and let the guy go crashing headfirst into the wall.

He came back snapping and feral, growling even in his human form, and Teague stepped out of his way for the next charge. The trip to the wall was a little longer this time, but no more painful when he hit.

The werewolf sat back on his human haunches and shook his head, and Teague walked up to him and spoke.

“Look, man—your heart’s not in this… if you just give it up and let us help…”

The fucker turned his head and sank his very human teeth into the flesh of Teague’s arm. Teague grunted—didn’t even flinch—and then grabbed the guy’s throat with his free hand, pressed him to the floor, and changed into a wolf, leaving his clothes in a puddle on the floor.

Jack felt the change—it sizzled in the air and pulled at his skin, and he and Katy clasped human hands to resist it. Teague’s power—his personality, his personal strength—it exerted enough force over the shape changers to force their own changes. Every shapeshifter in the room felt it—most of them simply shifted their weight from leg to leg, like a child who had to go to the bathroom—but the younger ones, the ones with less discipline—they changed with their leader.

Wolves, cougars, Avians, coyotes, giant cats--it would have been total chaos, but Teague--his two front paws on the throat of a mangy looking red wolf at his feet—barked once, commandingly, and every shape-shifter in the room—both those who had changed and those who hadn’t—stood absolutely still.

This was Jack’s mate. This was the man Jack loved. Jack had seen this in him from the very beginning, but now Jack could see that it was a thing, a quality, that was never meant to be Jack’s alone.

Teague backed off of the wolf under his paws and stood warily, growling in his throat, waiting to see what the other animal would do.

The foreign werewolf stood up, snarled, and leapt at Teague, his jaws open to snap, but he never made it. Teague caught his enemy’s throat in his teeth and ripped, pulling the entire thing out—larynx, jugular, everything—in mid-leap. The wolf’s body continued it’s original trajectory and landed, twitching, yards away.

Teague trotted over and waited to see if the young man would heal—it looked like it. Shapeshifters in general could take an incredible amount of punishment. This particular one appeared to be too mean to kill. He laid there, his body changing back into a frightened, angry, rabid young man, and suddenly, as though a switch had been flipped, he was in a naked fighting crouch, snarling like a wolf without a wolf’s innate intelligence behind the savagery.

Teague backed up and changed quicker than breath—but not quick enough. His opponent rushed him, landing on him just as his human legs started to bear his weight, and Jack clamped his teeth together in an effort not to shout at Cory to do something. He glanced at them and saw that Green had his arms wrapped securely around Cory’s shoulders—she had the same idea. Jack looked back at the man he loved more than life and saw why Green was stopping her: apparently they all needed to have a little faith.

Teague grabbed his opponent’s shoulders in hard, human hands and shoved him back against the wall, shouting, “Give up, goddammit! You can walk away from this!” The man was struggling, but Teague had him pinned securely—the only way he was getting out of it was to yield or die.

“Fuck. You.” The enemy hawked spit in Teague’s face, and Teague’s eyes went flat and grim and then he used his werewolf strength to do something truly horrific.

He punched his arm under the guy’s ribcage thrusting into the flesh itself. As the man screamed blood and spittle and death in his face, Teague grabbed hold of his heart and ripped it out of his body.

The audience gave a shocked gasp, and Teague’s opponent went limp, his eyes dying even as he saw his own heart, beating in his enemy’s hand.

Teague took a step back as the body slid to the floor. He was a little dazed—he looked at the quivering thing in gore-soaked hands and just sort of dropped it, on the body of his kill. His face was crusted in blood from ripping his enemy’s throat, and his chest was heaving back and forth as though he’d sprinted for miles. His scarred chest was smeared with blood and viscera and sweat, and his body—his battered, wiry, bantam body—was bare and barbaric, naked and bloody and victorious for all of the world to see.

He looked up at Green automatically, and then to Cory. It was almost shocking for Jack to see the little college student suddenly appear regal and queenly—not in the way of Jack’s dream, but in the way of a real person, whose confidence had been hard won. Together, in concert, they nodded their heads back, and then Green looked over at Jack and gave a little jerk of his chin.

The message was clear: He’s all yours mate.

Teague didn’t seem to think so. He managed one half-panicked, half-resigned look at Jack before he turned towards Cory. Cory looked at him with no sympathy, and actually said something out loud, which was a relief for Jack who was getting tired of all of this tacit discussion.

“I’ve got clean-up, Teague—go deal with the hard shit.”

Teague looked at her miserably. “It’s my mess…”

“Nope. Not gonna fly—now get out of here. I’ve got to cook something, and if I don’t do it quick and don’t do it clean, Green’s gonna make me ask Lambent, AND THAT WOULD REALLY SUCK!” She pitched her voice loud on purpose, just to get the fire-elf’s attention, and he cast a sour look her way.

“By all means, my liege, show us that your dick is as big as every other blokes here.”

Cory grinned sweetly at the ruddy-faced elf. “It’s not bigger than everyone’s darling. Just yours.” Then she turned back and met Teague’s miserable expression and gave him a stern ‘shooing’ with her two hands. “Go, Teague—you can’t be happy if you’re just good with the one and forsake the other.”

Teague had no choice, and Jack was—for once—profoundly grateful for the Lady of the House. Teague turned to Jack defiantly and Jack grinned at him, and advanced. Damned if he wasn’t going to kiss that man within an inch of his life.

Teague put his hands behind his back, and then remembered he was naked and put them in front of his crotch, and then trotted to where his jeans lay in a puddle and picked them up to hold in front of his vulnerable bits. Jack made sure he was looming over his lover before he even stood up.

They regarded each other for a moment so fraught with tension that Jack could actually smell the blush travelling over Teague’s skin. If Jack had looked, he could have seen it travel, starting at Teague’s chest and then working it’s way across his shoulders and his neck and even down to his thighs, but Jack had seen all that (if only once or twice) in bed. Right now, he was more interested in what was going on behind Teague’s depthless hazel eyes.

He looked horrified—probably at himself. And ashamed.

“Give it up,” Jack murmured after a moment. “I’m going to kiss you. I’m going to hold you. And if you think you’re ever going to spend a night in another bed, you’re completely off your rocker.”

Teague’s lips quirked, even as he ducked his head shyly. “Don’t want to touch you all covered in blood and shit, Jacky.”

Jack met Katy’s eyes over Teague’s shoulders, and she grimaced because she knew what he was going to do, but she nodded anyway. Jack put his hands behind his back like a good boy. “No hands involved, I swear,” he murmured, and then, because he would have died if he didn’t, he lowered his head as Teague just gazed at him, all starry-eyed and dumb-struck, and touched lips with his beloved.

Teague gasped—and Jack used the opportunity to slip his tongue in. Teague tasted like blood, and sweat, and a little like fur, and Jack didn’t care—he swept Teague’s mouth with his tongue and licked at his palette and his teeth and his lips deliberately. He wanted no ambiguity in the kiss. I love you, right down to the blood on your hands, you dumb Irish motherfucker. It couldn’t have been clearer if he’d used Cory’s power to burn the message into the burnished root-tangled walls.

Teague groaned at Jack’s invasion, his acceptance, his benediction, and Jack lifted his hands up to Teague’s shoulders and pushed him up against the gnarled wooden wall, and kissed him and kissed him and kissed him, until Teague broke away, panting, and clutching his clothes to his groin with a little more force.

“Let me shower,” he gasped, and Jack nodded with a little smile.

“As long as I can brush my teeth,” Jack panted and Teague actually grinned.

“I’ll do that in the shower, now let’s go…”

They made it back to the room using preternatural speed—Teague got there first and was running the shower as Jack and Katy walked in. Katy hung back by the door for a minute, and Jack turned to her with his hand extended. “What?”

She shrugged, looking embarrassed. “I don’t know, mijo—this is your make-up thing, you knows? You really want me here with your make-up thing?”

Jack snorted. “He broke up with both of us, sweetheart—you get the hurt, you get the make-up sex. It’s only fair.”

Her slow-blooming grin was unrepentantly sexy. “There’s gonna be some awesome make-up sex, isn’t there?”

Jack answered the grin with one of his own. “Oh yeah. Just as soon as I…”

Katy nodded vigorously. “I know baby—as soon as you brush your teeth—now hurry! That man can take a damned quick shower!”

Jack managed to get in and out of the bathroom before Teague got out—he had a thought about going into the shower and joining him, but the shower wouldn’t fit three and he’d meant what he said to Katy. She shared the heartbreak, she shared the joy.

When he got out to the bedroom, Katy was bouncing restlessly on the bed.

“What now?” she asked and he rolled his eyes, feeling nervous too.

“I don’t know—it’s like I just want to offer myself up to him—I don’t want him to ever doubt that my…” Jack blushed. He was talking too much—this next part sounded great in his head but sappy and overdone out loud. But he couldn’t help it. He looked at Katy slowly, still blushing. “I want him to know that my body is just like my heart. It’s always his.”

Katy flashed him that wood-erecting grin again. “Baby, hurry up and get naked. Man, I’m looking forward to this!”

Teague

Tender Reckonings

Teague didn’t know what to expect when he walked into the bedroom. He was thinking more talk, which was probably necessary, but he was tired of talking. He wanted his family back. He wanted to claim them. He didn’t know the relationship protocol for saying, “It’s all forgiven. I want you now.”

Turns out, he didn’t need to.

He walked down the short hallway, a towel knotted around his waist, prepared to go through his drawers and find clothes and sit down and say whatever needed to be said, and instead, he found Jacky on his knees on the floor, bent over the bed.

He was naked, and his backside glistened with lubricant. Katy was laying on her stomach in front of him, talking softly in his ear as she anchored his hands in front of him with her own.

“I want to touch you!” he complained, and she laughed softly, wickedly, and Teague’s erection was instant, burgeoning, and painfully hard.

“Katy,” he rasped, and she looked up at him, her brown eyes innocent and challenging at the same time.

“What, pappi?”

“Take off your clothes, lay on your back, and spread your knees. He wants to touch you—make him taste you instead.”

Her smile was slow and sensuous as she wriggled out of her jeans and threw them over the bed. “It’s good to have you back, pappi.”

Teague growled and his towel fell to the floor. Words. He was tired of them. His family had come and seen him be savage and violent, and they’d claimed him anyway. It was time to return the favor.

He leaned over the bed as Katy scooted down, losing her bra and her sweater as she opened her bare thighs around Jack’s head. Teague touched lips with her, and she arched off the bed and wrapped her arms around his shoulders and oh Goddess she was soft and silky under his hands. He pulled away and suckled a lush breast, playing the nipple with is tongue, and she knotted her hands in the hair at his neck, and then she made a little keening sound as Jacky began to taste her.

Teague pulled away long enough to ask “You know what you’re doing, Jacky?”

Jack raised a shiny face to his lover. “I’m not very good at this,” he muttered, and Katy laughed throatily and reached down between her thighs to push at his head.

“You know what you’re doing, Jacky—just keep…” she moaned. “Yeah. Like that…”

Teague leaned over Jack’s side, so he could talk in his ear while Jack was busy. “Don’t ever turn away from me again.”

Jack turned to look at him around the plumpness of Katy’s thigh. “Never,” he swore. “Never.”

Teague kissed him, tasting Katy, tasting them and before he could get lost in the kiss, before the kiss became everything and he lost this fantasy of Jack pleasuring Katy as Teague fucked him into oblivion, Teague broke off the kiss and positioned himself at Jack’s backside.

Jack was already stretched and prepared, and Teague had to rest his head on Jack’s spine for a moment to get control of himself. The thought of Jack and Katy in here, making him ready for Teague… God… God damn that was sexy. They were his. It was that simple and that absolute.

Teague’s cock probed at Jack’s entrance, and Jack made a muffled whimper, a begging sound, and he must have stopped what he was doing because Katy made one too. Their physical happiness literally depended on him, and all of the triumph he’d felt and squashed in his chest when defeating his enemy surged back into him now.

He thrust deeply into Jack, and grunted, “Mine!” Jack howled, the noise muffled in Katy’s flesh, and she giggled a little and then gasped as Jack seemed to remember what it was he was doing. Teague didn’t give him much of a chance.

He pounded, hard and slow, and every time their bodies were flush, Katy gasped. Jack’s hands, which had been up on either side of Katy’s thighs on the bed, suddenly disappeared as Jack grabbed for his cock.

Teague knotted one hand in Jack’s hair and dragged his head back while yanking Jack’s other hand off of his body.

“Her, Jacky. Play with her!” Because as much as he loved Jack, Teague knew his lover’s greatest failing was an inability to think beyond the two of them. Loving Katy, touching her slickness, making her scream, that was a start.

Katy gasped and shrieked and Teague rewarded Jack’s good behavior with a reach around. Jack felt long and full in his hand, and as Teague thrust hard into Jack’s body, his erection became slick with fluid as well. Jack groaned, and rested his head on Katy’s thigh and Katy protested.

“No, you can’t do that, Jacky!” and Teague stopped. Just stopped moving, and waited for Jack to keep going. It became a lesson—Teague wouldn’t move until Jack remembered—there was more to their relationship than the two of them. Jack appeared to be motivated—his busy fingers worked and his clever tongue must have been doing something right. Katy’s eyes were glazed and her mouth was parted, and Teague slowly worked Jacky to the point where…

“Teague…I’ve got to come!” He was begging, but Teague wasn’t giving, not yet.

“You…” thrust “know” thrust “what” thrust “to do…”

Suddenly Katy started to gibber. “Oh God… Jacky, that’s my… my… not… oh… yes…right there…” and then her body bucked, practically coming off the bed and her thighs clenched around Jack’s head and Teague, mesmerized by the sight of her beautiful climax had mercy on Jack and cut loose his own desires. He started pounding, hammering at Jacky, stroking him quickly, and as Katy relaxed and scooted backwards on the bed, Jack buried his face in the sheets and howled. His climax spurted across Teague’s hand, and again and again and again, and Teague let go of Jack’s cock to put both hands at Jack’s hips and thrust into him until his own orgasm ripped through his body and he poured himself into his lover’s flesh.

He groaned, and then louder, and then, in a frenzy, he hauled Jack up by the chest to bite the joining of neck and shoulders, hard enough to leave a mark, and Jack groaned some more, an aftershock making his body clench around Teague’s tight enough to make Teague bite him again. Finally they were done and lay, collapsed at the side of the bed, panting, while Katy turned herself around and came to kiss them both.

She kissed Jacky first, licking daintily at her own taste around his mouth and on his chin, and Jack grinned at her and kissed her back. Then she raised her face to Teague, and he possessed her. His body, still buried in Jack’s, stirred, stiffened, and Jack groaned as Teague’s hips gave another convulsive round of pistoning as he and Katy continued the ripe, passionate, lingering kiss.

But eventually the passion banked, ebbed, and left them cooling their sweat, rubbing noses to cheeks and chins and jawlines as their breathing became completely normal.

“Want to lie down?” Katy asked at last, and both the men grunted in protest as Teague pulled out. He stood to go get a washcloth and both Jack and Katy said, “No!” and he turned back to them and shook his head.

“We like the stickiness,” Katy sulked. “Not for forever, but… don’t wash it away when it was wonderful, okay pappi?”

Teague nodded and crawled up on the rumpled bed, not surprised when they climbed up on either side of him. He plumped the pillows and sat up at the head of the bed, and was truly satisfied when they clambered up and snuggled on either side of him. Katy tucked herself under his arm and kissed his chest, rubbing it absently as she smiled up at him.

Jack sat up taller and wrapped his arm around Teague’s shoulders. Teague leaned back against him and closed his eyes, allowing himself to be comforted. Allowing himself to be loved.

“Never turn away from me again,” he whispered, surprised. He’d thought Jacky and Katy would do the talking. Turned out, he had words in his heart too.

“I won’t,” Jack murmured, bumping his nose along Teague’s jaw line. Teague closed his eyes and returned the bump, and then found himself talking again.

“I mean it,” he said roughly. “There’s only so much of me. It all goes away when you turn your back.”

“I know that now,” Jack said back. He reached across Teague’s body and took Katy’s hand, and together they made themselves into the human safety net that Teague had come to rely on. “I’ll never do it again.”

Teague closed his eyes and figured that was about all the talking he could stand. He’d spent the last few weeks learning how to be happy and becoming the man his lovers needed. He figured now was a good time to put all of that learning into practice.

The remaining werewolves were easily dealt with—but Cory wasn’t convinced that they were the end of the matter.

They discussed it before the students left for school, and after she, Teague, and Brack had put the werewolves on a four a.m. plane out of town. “The thing is,” she mumbled through a bite of eggs and cheese, “they’re going to go back, tell everyone to leave us the fuck alone, and they’re going to make pretty credible witnesses. But from what I can tell, it’s sort of a big snake pit down there. A little alpha on every corner, no big alpha holding the whole thing together.”

Teague grunted in agreement and took the plate of bacon she handed him. He watched in amusement as Bracken gave her sausage to replace the bacon. Cory took a bite while she was talking before she even realized what he’d done, and then glared at him while she was still chewing. With a sigh, she held the sausage down next to her chair. Renny was there in cat from, and she took the meat with a clawless swipe of her paw.

“We never did figure out who’s converting the homeless,” Teague reminded her, and she looked up from another helping of eggs on her plate in bemusement.

“Bracken Brine Granite op Crocken,” she snapped, out of patience, “you are trying to make me fat!”

“You lost ten pounds over Thanksgiving,” the elf replied with a scowl. “Who in the fuck does that?”

Cory gave Teague a rather abashed look. “We’ve had this argument before,” she confessed. “The weird thing is, there’s not a single scale on the hill. I don’t know how he thinks he knows!”

“I know,” Bracken said, coming back with a bottle of chocolate milk for Teague and a chocolate muffin that he put down for Cory. “Mostly I know the same way I know Teague lost weight too. Your jeans are sliding off your ass. So’re his. I suggest you both eat.”

Teague blushed and Cory rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue. “I can’t believe he thinks he’s more mature than we are,” she hissed, and Bracken managed a smile of smug superiority before he yelped and hopped off his stool.

“Dammit, Renny!”

Cory took a napkin and dabbed at the blood on his ankle with appropriate soberness, but she cast Teague a wicked look of amusement over her shoulder, and Teague laughed.

He laughed a lot in this place. Not loudly—he might never laugh loudly—but that little chuff of amusement no longer had to force its way out of his chest. He liked it that way.

“So the werewolves,” Cory muttered with a pointed look at Bracken after he sat down.

“And the homeless,” Teague prompted, and Cory sighed, shoving the remains of her breakfast aside and resting her chin on her hands. She and Bracken had worked the night before after the week of talking to the werewolves, and the stress of being three or four or five people was starting to tell on her. She looked very mortal and very tired.

“The way I see it,” she said quietly, “is that our boys are going to go home and put the fear of God into their boys down South. That’ll be great. They’ll kill each other in-house, make sure none of their mistakes make it up here, and for a while—I’d give it a year—we’ll be blissfully unaware of how truly shitty that morass is down there, living up here in wolf-topia, right?”

Bracken mulled the thought over. “Right,” he agreed. “And whoever was making psycho-wolves, well, he’s going to stop just so nobody notices.”

“Unless it’s a glitch, like a serial killer’s thing, yeah,” Cory said, looking at Teague for agreement, which Teague gave.

“And even if it’s a glitch,” he reasoned, getting into the game, “serial killers know how to lay low. Now’s the time to do it.”

“Right.” Cory yawned, but her murky brown eyes were still focused as they worked things through. “So for a year, they’ll leave us alone—and then they’ll start forgetting. We’ll start seeing bad guys and dumbshit activity. Now, if we’ve done our job with those four, someone will call us and warn us, especially if they last that long. That would be nice, but we can’t bank the farm on it. But the first sign of anything hinky…”

“We need to send someone down there to kick ass,” Teague muttered, and Cory agreed. She gave a sleepy, worn smile from her cupped chin on the wooden table.

“We’ve got a war brewing,” she said softly.

“Then what was this last week about?” Teague asked, curious.

“A year of peace. We did all of that for a year of peace. Aren’t you glad you signed on, Teague?” There was some bitterness in her words, some recrimination, and Teague hated to hear it, but before he could reply Bracken put his hand on the back of her neck and she leaned into it as he murmured something in her ear. “This is our last week before finals,” she said back softly. “We can’t skip it—you know that. I’ll nap on the way down.”

“Yeah,” Teague said belatedly, meaning it. “I am glad I signed on.”

Cory smiled up at him again, looking dreamy and happy, the bitterness gone. “Hey, you haven’t seen us at our best. Wait until you see Christmas. It’s gonna be a trip!”

Teague’s best Christmas to date had been the last one. He and Jacky had exchanged gifts, talked excitedly about how they thought Green had gotten his gifts to them under their tiny tree, drank beer, and watched football. Low key, but, well, it had been his only Christmas actually with somebody who gave a shit.

He’d privately cherished that memory, but now that he and Jacky were living at the hill, he learned that Christmas should never be low key.

One day while the students were out and Katy and Jacky were at the bakery, Green came and got him from the garage (he was working on the Mustang) and said, “Wash up, mate—come with us. We can be back before everyone gets home, it will be a grand surprise!”

Teague had no idea where he was going until he ended up in the woods surrounding the gardens behind the hill itself—past the dividing line where the oak and scrub turned into pine and undergrowth. He and Green were by no means travelling alone: they came with an entourage of fey and shifters, ranged in size from flitting sprites to compact pixies, to what looked like a four foot by four foot pile of rocks holding hands with a compact pixie. (He later learned that the happy couple was actually Bracken’s parents—a thing that about blew his mind out his left ear.)

The motley assortment of walking mythology was hunting for a Christmas tree.

It had to be about eight feet tall, and perfectly proportioned, and most importantly, it had to be in a position to be lifted from the ground, wrapped tenderly in cloths, and replanted into the floor of Green’s home for a bit before being returned.

Apparently some of their company were wood-nymphs—two foot tall, perfectly proportioned women with green skin and green hair… everywhere. (Green assured him that not only did the tiny women not feel the cold, they also grew to human sized—when it suited them. Sort of like trees themselves, actually.)

When they found a tree (or rather Arturo spotted it and the littles chittered, cooed, tinkled, and generally fussed over it) Green asked him with a smile if it would do.

Teague blinked. “It’s perfect,” he said with some bemusement. “Why ask me—I’m not an expert!”

Green’s smile was one-hundred-percent tolerant affection. “It’s going to be your tree too, Teague—and Jacky’s and Katy’s as well. Is this the tree you want?”

Teague looked at the tree again with new eyes—it looked now less symetrical than it had when Arturo had first pointed it out, but now it looked personally perfect, like shoes you like on the rack but fit well when they’re on your feet. “It’s an excellent tree,” he said soberly, and the tinkling, chittering, chattering cheer from his little entourage was worth the careful consideration and sincerity.

Afterwards, he sat in the front room and drank hot white chocolate with Kahluah and watched as Cory and the other students—and Jacky and Katy as well—exclaimed over the tree and decorated it with blown glass ornaments and tiny snowflakes, hand cut from translucent white paper and strung on red string.

Cory came into the kitchen to lean into Green and thank him. “It’s wonderful, beloved—I’ve never decorated one this big!”

Green smiled indulgently at her and rubbed noses. “I thought you humans keep saying size doesn’t matter!”

Cory laughed softly. “You’re right—especially in Christmas trees where it’s all symmetry.”

Bracken came up then and looped his arms over her shoulders as she leaned into Green. “Last year’s was bigger,” he said critically, and Green nodded.

“It was too big for the house this year. This way, we get to be acquainted with this one for a few years—he’ll be happy when we put him back, you think?”

Teague blinked, trying to put their conversation together. “Why didn’t you decorate last year’s?” he asked Cory, and she shrugged.

“It was sort of a surprise for me, when we got home from the city. Green wanted to do Christmas up really huge.” Her smile was all for her beloved. “Not that size matters or anything.”

Teague turned his attention to his own lovers, who were engaged in a snowflake fight. Jack was winning, and Katy was wearing a glittering rain of translucent rainbow snowflakes in her black hair, on her cheeks and in her eyelashes. Jack bent to take one of them out of her eyelashes and as she stood there, waiting for him to finish, he snuck in a kiss that she responded to with a smile—and an open mouth. They would have a ‘last year’s tree in their history. They would remember this snowflake fight and try to recreate it. They were, already, building good memories, memories of each other, to become a family—a true family—like Cory and Green and Bracken and Nicky.

Jack and Katy surfaced from their kiss and caught him, staring at them with shining eyes. They exchanged wicked glances then, and Teague had the foresight to put down his cocoa before being chased around the myriad halls of the hill, being showered by translucent snowflakes and avoiding the mistletoe dripping from every doorway.

Eventually he allowed himself to be caught, to be kissed, and to be seduced and lured into their own bedroom, but in the meantime he whooped laughter like a child, and another little piece of his heart was patched together and sealed with the rest of it. The damned thing was getting more and more sound, more and more capable of sustaining his life and that of his lovers by the day.

That didn’t mean that Teague wasn’t still a taciturn, defensive, grumpy fucker on occasion—it just meant the pay off was bigger when he let down is guard.

One night after he’d been out, patrolling with the vampires, engaging in mock fights and making sure the neighbors from the surrounding hills didn’t venture too close to Green’s territory, he crawled into bed with Jacky, hoping for once to fall asleep. Except…

“Where’s Katy?” he asked irritably.

“In her room, planning Christmas.”

“This late?” Teague blinked, threatening to sit up, but Jack wrapped a long arm around his chest and pushed.

“She’s wrapping presents, Teague—let her be. She’s really psyched about this whole thing, okay? Now tell me about the job.”

“Job was boring. The vampires ate, Nicky cracked bad jokes, and nobody grabbed my ass. Are we happy now? I’m ready for bed!” There was more to it than that. Fighting with the vampires was no joke, and Teague would have some of his bruises the next morning, werewolf healing or not. But just because Jacky had accepted who he was didn’t mean he was okay with Teague being hurt.

“I was just wondering if we were going to go shopping for Christmas.”

Teague grimaced in the darkness. “I need to see if we can leave the place unescorted, Jacky. Far as I know, the full moon is in three days—we’d better wait until that’s over before we go alone, you think?”

“That’s cutting it close, Teague!” Jack sounded really anxious, and Teague grinned. It was cute. Just was.

“Well then maybe we can get someone to take us—Cory, Brack, and Nicky are going tomorrow. Cory asked if we wanted to go.” Teague had said he’d check with Jacky—and he’d planned to. In the morning!

“Fun. Wonderful.” Jack turned over in bed and sulked, and Teague sighed. Just a little bit of goddamned sleep—was it too much to ask?

He grunted and sighed and rolled over, missing Jack’s body but not wanting to give in to the sulk. “You know—there’s always the internet,” he said dryly.

“Yeah, great. I was looking today and I saw a great pair of man’s underwear for you. They were pink and had ‘Batter up’ on the crotch!”

“Only if your pair has a catcher’s mitt on the ass!”

“Teague, this is serious!”

Teague growled. “You know, Princess, unless Santa’s gonna slide down the fucking chimney early this year, I’m pretty sure this could have waited until morning!”

"Unless your dick is Santa, I'm not counting on it," Jack snapped back. He propped himself on his elbow and Teague tucked his hands under his armpits and glared up at him. No touchie-feelie sweetness tonight—all Teague wanted was bed.

"I was just wondering what you wanted for Christmas,” Jack was saying sulkily.

“I liked the model car display,” Teague replied at a loss. “You know… something like that?”

“We weren’t sleeping together last year, Teague!” Jack said, using his hands to talk, which was dangerous in the dark, even for a werewolf. Teague barely ducked a grand gesture, and he sat up in bed so Jack could sort of see him with his werewolf-vision.

"Do you have any idea how tired I am?"

"Not really, asshole, since you just patently lied to me about the job!" Apparently Teague hadn’t been as sly about hiding the bruises as he’d thought. "I was just wondering what we're going to do for Christmas, since we're fucking each other instead of, well, whatever we were doing last year."

“We’re not ‘fucking each other’,” Teague grunted, not liking the phrase in the least in this context.

Jack’s hand found his cheek in the dark, and although their words had been the sharp, tangy sort of banter they had perfected during the whole of their relationship, the hand on his cheek was everything they’d been in the past month.

“Not right now,” Jack said with some humor, and Teague kissed his palm.

Teague sighed and kissed that soft palm again, using a graze of teeth. “I’m really honestly tired, Jacky. If I promise to have people take us out tomorrow, can we go to sleep now?”

Jack took his hand back and used it to turn Teague around and spoon up behind him. “Will you tell me about the job?” he asked softly.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow if you promise not to get me anything… you know…”

“Gay?” Jack supplied cheekily.

“I was gonna say ‘sappy’, smart-ass. And you haven’t told me what you want for Christmas.”

“I thought Santa was gonna bring me a big ol’ dick up my…”

“Shut up.”

“Yes sir.”

Jack kissed his shoulder in the dark and Teague relaxed against him, but he still didn’t know what he was going to get Jack and Katy for Christmas. Now that the students were out of school and the excitement of Christmas (or Yule—the fey were mostly pagans) was starting to permeate the hill like the sound of a distant waterfall, it seemed incumbent on him to make some sort of big romantic gesture or something.

He was pretty sure he was going to fall short.

“You want my help?” Cory looked at him oddly, and Bracken eyed the two of them with amusement.

“Well we’re all here together, aren’t we?” Teague grunted. The shopping trip had been okayed—which, considering the fact that the full moon was so damned close was a minor miracle, but Teague took it at face value. Maybe Green had faith, right?

Not too much faith—Green was with Jack and Katy in the other side of the wood-and- glass three-story structure that was built into a hill in one of Auburn’s oldest down-town streets. It was where Grace’s yarn store and Katy’s bakery sat, and the majority of the stores were little hand-crafted boutique stores. It was close to Green’s hill, and many of the businesses were Green’s, with Green’s people inside. If somebody turned furry, there were plenty of folks who would help cover.

“I just think you’d be better off asking a real girl,” Cory was saying now, doubtfully, and then she ducked as Bracken tried flicking the back of her head.

“I’m asking a friend!” Teague said with some desperation. “I’ve managed three gifts my entire life—real book shelves for Jacky last Christmas and gift certificates to amazon.com for his birthdays. I’m sort of thinking they need me to do better than that!”

“That’s not bad!” Cory protested, but Bracken put both hands squarely on her shoulders, gave her a shove towards Teague, and then took off. She glared at his retreating back and then looked sourly at Teague. “He thinks we’ll talk better without him,” she explained unnecessarily.

“He could be right,” Teague told her. “He’s scary as hell.”

She wrinkled her nose. “You think? I don’t see it.”

Teague just rolled his eyes. The guy could rip out someone’s viscera from a hundred yards away—he’d hate to know what she found scary. “Whatever. Christmas presents. What do you do for them?”

Cory sighed. “I knit. It’s weird. I don’t know if other husbands do this, but mine get all gooey when I knit something for them, which is funny because knitting makes me happy, so it’s really like being a selfish bitch and getting praised for it.” She shrugged. “What’s to do?”

“So last Christmas…” Teague asked with what he felt to be exaggerated patience.

“Last Christmas, I made Green and Bracken scarves when I was in recovery,” she said thoughtfully. “I barely had time to make Nicky a hat. Green and I got Bracken a chess set because that was Adrian’s gift to Bracken, we got Nicky a motorcycle and made Brack pick out the helmet.”

“Recovery?”

“Bad shit stories, remember Teague? I was sick for a long time.” Her voice was sober as it hadn’t been when she’d talked about Bracken’s chess set.

“What did Green get you?”

And now the sadness was palpable. “The marble bench with Adrian’s likeness—the one in the garden.”

Teague grimaced. “How do you top that?” he asked, almost to himself, and Cory grinned. She looked just like what she was—a plain college student. And Queen of the Northern California Fey and Undead.

“You don’t, sweetie. You’re right. The first year’s the hardest. This year I think I’m getting clothes in three sizes—at least that’s what he’s been threatening to get me for the last month.”

Teague blinked and looked at her. Her jeans were falling off her hips and her chin and cheeks looked sharper than they had when he’d arrived a nearly a month and a half ago, sitting disconsolate in the living room, waiting to hear if Jack would live or die.

“Why three sizes?”

She sighed and took his arm and started pulling him in a specific direction. The building was designed with lots of glass looking out into the dark, and even though it was fairly crowded, there was a curious sense of isolation as they walked the white tiled halls.

“One to fit me now, one to fit me when I gain a little weight, and one to fit me when I’m where he thinks I should be.”

“If you don’t have scales on the hill, where is that exactly?” Teague asked. He was starting to get on the concern bandwagon—she was easy to care for, the little Queen of the Hill.

She sighed and shrugged. “I think he’ll be happy when I start my period—I haven’t had one in a year and a half—it’s sort of freaking everybody out.” She gave him another grin. “And isn’t that information you wish you didn’t have.”

Teague looked at her carefully, thought of calming Jack down about the bruises on his body from the work outs, thought of Katy’s constant pampering and the way she always brought him something to eat every night if he didn’t eat in the common room, and made a realization.

“People will always worry about us, won’t they?” The thought was boggling. It was as though he’d been working this entire time and he’d had no idea what he was working toward.

Cory grinned at him. “Yeah. It’ll drive you crazy sometimes—but you’ll never want to change it.” She tugged on his arm and they walked into a glass blower’s shop. The shelves were stocked with some of the most frighteningly lovely, exquisite things Teague had ever seen.

“This place scares the hell out of me!” he whispered. If he spoke normally, he was afraid his voice would splinter the store’s wares to powder.

“Yeah,” she said, looking at him carefully. “Scares me too. Shit this fragile—doesn’t feel like people like us should be anywhere near it, you think?”

Teague blinked. She was speaking in metaphors—and he followed her. “But it’s so pretty,” he said after a moment. “Maybe the risk is worth seeing what’s in here?”

“Yeah.” And with that she turned to the slightly built young man behind the counter and—to Teague’s surprise—bowed. “Master Splinter—good to see you tonight.”

Teague watched the guy startle up from the book of color theory he was reading and bow low at the waist, and then he realized that in spite of the longish hair around his shoulders and the understated height, the guy had pointy ears and a faintly fuschia cast to his skin. He was one of Green’s.

“My lady! How can I help you tonight!”

Cory smiled, looking self-conscious, and dragged Teague up to the front counter. “Actually, we’re here for Teague. He wants something beautiful to give his mates for Christmas—do you have time to do something custom?”

She needn’t have worried—from the way the guy was fawning over her, he probably would have gone without sleep for a week, just to be who she needed. It took them a while, but Cory helped. She had a surprisingly poetic soul, and when she was done outlining what she had in mind, Teague looked at her with a little bit of awe.

“What?” She asked him irritably as they left the store, leaving Splinter in their wake, making illustrations and graphics for all he was worth.

“You’re just… every now and then I see why we’d follow you to hell and back,” he said at last, feeling stupid.

“Shut the fuck up.” She punctuated this with a slug on his arm. She put her shoulder behind it, and it might have bruised a mortal—barely—but it only served to emphasize how mortal and how fragile she was.

He’d die to defend her. He’d die to defend Green too, but Green wouldn’t survive without Cory—he’d throw himself in front of anything life or death dealt out.

As he caught up to Jacky and Katy, he bumped Jack’s shoulder with his own and took Katy’s hand in his, rubbing her thumb softly with his wrist. She smiled up at him and Jack slung an arm over his shoulder, and he realized that he really could love his mates and his leaders. He never would have thought his heart was big enough—of all things, this surprised him the most.

Christmas really was everything the hill had cracked it up to be. Nobody was allowed to open presents in their rooms—it was the one rule. It meant that people were constantly wandering into the living room under the tree to open presents or watch their particular friends open gifts, but that was part of the excitement. Someone was always receiving something. Someone was always giving something. From around five in the morning until dinner time, someone was always exclaiming with ‘Thank you’s and ‘You’re welcome’s. (And after the Christmas banquet it was the vampires’ turn.) It was the one time of the year that everybody came into the front room and greeted the world. In a place the size of Green’s hill, it was sometimes the only one time of the year people actually saw each other—and they were always happy for the honor.

But it wasn’t easy on the Lord and Lady of the house.

It took a while for Teague to notice that what was joyful for everybody else was a joyful responsibility for Cory and Green. He’d opened his own presents—a quilt and bedding to him and Jack from Katy, who had commissioned one of the elves who worked in Grace’s store to do one custom, with three wolves appliquéd in the center. The whole hill had seen them as wolves—one of the animals was golden, one was dark haired, and one had bright gold hair over black fur underneath. The colors were cleverly done with different fabrics, and the effect was breathtaking. Teague and Jack had been impressed—both with the final product and with the symbolism.

Jack had gotten Katy a little privacy screen for their room—although she was still keeping her own, exclusively female sanctuary down the hall—and had gotten Teague ceramic figurines of wolves to paint. Jack had been embarrassed about his gift.

“It’s… I know it’s dumb,” he said, red-faced. “But you love models, and this was close to a model, and I wanted it to be… you know… important. I’ll take it back. You hate it. I’m so bad at this—you’d think I could manage giving a damned gift but…”

Teague had laughed. It was exactly how he’d felt when they’d started shopping. “It’s not pink underwear, Jacky—I think you did fine.”

Jack flipped his hair back and gave Teague a private and positively evil smile. “That’s in the next box.”

Teague blushed. “As long as you got the pair that says ‘catcher’, that’s fine.”

And that’s when Jack and Katy finally made it through the sixty-zillion layers of tissue and gold wrapping paper that had kept Teague’s gift to them safe from gravity and Teague’s own shaking hands. Underwear (and the lack thereof) were forgotten, as the two of them knelt breathlessly over the colored glass sculpture that Teague—with a lot of help from Cory—had designed.

They were speechless.

Three wolves—their bodies only an abstract suggestion as they formed the base—pointed their muzzles at a distant moon and howled. One—delicate and female—was colored a rich, exotic burgundy. Another, the taller one, was a blue slightly paler than indigo. The third was a translucent forest green.

The silence went on so long that Teague got nervous. “So. Uhm. It’s okay?”

Katy started squealing in some arcane pitch of voice that made Teague’s wolf cringe, but she launched herself at him with a lot of enthusiasm, so he figured it was a good thing. Jacky hugged them both, and it was pretty damned maudlin there for a minute—and satisfying. Pretty damned satisfying too.

Teague looked over to where Cory sat, being presented with what appeared to be miles of strings of preciously formed, cut, molded, or carved beads, one bead at a time. She caught his eye over the myriad heads in the sitting room and smiled sweetly, and then she nodded to Green. Green looked up and excused himself—the two of them had been sitting for most of the morning, being gracious and kind, and hosting Christmas with the aplomb of an Arthur and a Gwynyfar. Teague wasn’t sure if Jack or Katy had noticed that Bracken and Nicky had been in constant, subtle attendance with glasses of water or soda or eggnog, and small finger foods for breakfast, since they didn’t seem to have had time to sit down and eat. Teague figured that they were too busy for a conversation, and he was surprised when Green nodded him over.

Cory was busy talking to the tiny sprites, while she held a stiffened piece of string straight in front of her and the smaller fey came up and presented her with one bead at a time before placing it on the string. At her feet there were dozens of ‘necklaces’—she had been doing this for more than an hour.

“Thank you!” she said, and although her voice was rough her enthusiasm was just as bright as it had been that morning when the werewolves had come out for the breakfast buffet that sat on the kitchen table and the breakfast nook and the surrounding counters. Cory nodded soberly at the tiny creature—it looked like a cross between a gerbil and a bluebird, with surprisingly human arms under its wings. “It’s beautiful—it’s completely different and precisely perfect. I will think of you every time I see that bead!” The bead itself was hand-carved, with tiny little loops etched into its sanded-wood surface. It was truly one-of-a-kind—but then, so was every one of what must have been thousands of beads that she’d received that morning.

It didn’t make her sincerity any less real, though, and Teague felt a surge of affection for her. Everyone was special. Everyone was cherished. Every gift was just that. A gift.

She stopped for a moment and looked at the next supplicant. “Hold on just a minute, okay? I want to give it my full attention—just give me a sec.” She smiled as she said it, and a very humanoid little fairy holding a bead like a dewdrop from a spider’s web bowed patiently and waited her turn.

Cory looked at Green beseechingly. “I don’t think there are many more…” she said, and Green grimaced good-naturedly.

“Don’t be so sure, beloved. But don’t worry. I’ll spread the word that you need a break and you can join us when the queue finishes up.”

Teague felt bad. “I can come back…”

“No no no!” Cory said anxiously. “It’s just that Katy and Jacky got clothes from us, but your gift is bigger. You need us to show it to you! I want to be there too…” she sounded distressed, and Green bent down and kissed her cheek.

“We’ll wait outside for you, right beloved? Don’t worry. You’ll get a chance to see his face when he ‘opens it’.”

Cory nodded anxiously and then grinned and flashed the charm bracelet that Teague had asked Katy to pick out for her. His exact words had been “Something girly, but us.” Every tinkling silver charm was either a wolf in a different pose or the moon in a different phase.

“Thank you—make sure you let Jack and Katy know I love it!”

Teague flushed and bowed and then allowed Green to lead him quietly outside. As they were walking, Green looked significantly at Bracken’s mother, a four-foot-tall, charmingly beautiful little pixie who both floated and walked with equal kittenish grace, and Blissa nodded.

“They can wait until tomorrow, Green—they’re quite aware that she’s getting tired.” Blissa’s wings were rainbow colored although her skin was decidedly purple, but she sounded as matter-of-fact as any mother Teague had ever heard.

“Thank you, Blissa—she’d make herself sick if we let her. Tell her we’ll be outside at the old barn, okay?”

Another pixie appeared with Teague’s battered denim jacket, and a newer fleece-lined denim jacket for Green along with a hand-knit scarf in green and gold. Teague looked at the scarf with his eyebrows raised—Cory had given him, Jack, and Katy, fingerless mittens (the better to wear while turning into a werewolf without shredding the knitting). He was wearing his pair now and the work was finer and far more practiced—and more complex than the rough, simple scarf. Green caught the direction of his gaze and smiled fondly.

“It was the first thing she ever made.”

Teague wanted to blush, just looking at Green’s expression. Love that clean and simple almost didn’t belong on earth. “She does good work,” is what he said, and as he and Green slid outside into the refreshing December cold, he was grateful for that work. It kept his hands a hell of a lot warmer than his pockets, which is what he usually used.

Green took him walking down the landing and across the drive, their feet crunching in the gravel and then crunching on the frost-ridden grass. The property in this direction was simply short-cut grass, although Teague had heard that after Christmas Green would let the snow that usually fell in this area accrue everywhere but the crown of the hill that had been formed with Adrian’s garden. About two-hundred yards from the house in the hill were a series of outbuildings—there were three of them and they looked like old barns or maybe converted garages, and Green led Teague to the far one.

It had a big green and red bow and a ribbon wrapped around the entire building, and a smaller plastic tube, the kind used to hold architect’s plans, (also wrapped in ribbons and bows!) leaning against the front door.

“Merry Christmas, Teague,” Green said quietly. “This is from my family to yours.”

Teague looked at the old barn and saw a good foundation. Green opened the smaller door next to the big double front door, and he saw neat stacks of lumber, drywall, plumbing supplies, and tools, as well as buckets of clean shiny nails, drywall screws, and the assorted paraphernalia used to convert a big barn into a family home.

“Wow,” he murmured. “Just… shit. Wow. I…”

“You don’t have to move in right away!” Cory called, running across the yard in her T-shirt and sleep pants and bare feet. The door above the landing slammed—they could hear it from where they were—and Teague watched as a formless blur that must have been Bracken came zooming across the yard.

“Goddammit!” Bracken swore, materializing and slowing down in time to pick her up and run her towards them. “I swear, it’s like you were sneaking out on purpose.” He set her down on the frost covered ground and wrapped her black pea-coat around her, adding in a hooded scarf for good measure, and then he swung her up into his arms.

Cory glared at him and then—in spite of the fact that she was in his arms—ignored him, concentrating on Teague instead.

“We had a couple of floor plans drawn up,” she said earnestly. “You and Jack and Katy can pick which ones you want. And everybody will help. Because you’re not going to be doing werewolf shit all the time, right? It’s just…”

Teague looked for permission at Bracken, and Bracken nodded so he could drop a kiss on his little sorceress’s cheek. “It’s just perfect,” he said gruffly. “They’ll love it. I love it. Thank you.”

She grinned at him and Green came over and took her from Bracken—she didn’t protest, and Teague could detect an air of penitence in the way she raised her arms obediently in the transfer. “We’re really glad you’re here, Teague,” she murmured. “We’re really really grateful for you and your family. You don’t have to worry about reaching for stuff anymore. We want you to have whatever you want. We want you to be happy.”

Teague nodded, not able to find any words. “I am,” he said after a minute. “I am. Could you… could you send them out? I want to show them…”

He wanted to be alone for a minute is what he wanted. He wanted to absorb and enjoy. He had a home. He had a family. He had a purpose. All the things he could have become, and he’d become this. It was almost more than he could bear.

Cory pulled him down into an awkward hug, and Green dropped a kiss on his hair, like a father. “We’ll send them out in a minute,” she murmured. “We’re glad you like.”

He gave a watery smile. “Don’t like. Love. Thank you.”

She grinned back, and they turned around and left him there, wandering in the wonder of the raw materials with which to build the rest of his life. He was still there, trying to visualize how they would use the vast space of the cold barn, when Jack and Katy got out there and stood with him in the dark warmth, smelling the raw lumber and the cold steel.

“It’s better than a blanket fort, right Jacky?” Katy said, her voice a little bit lost in the awe of the gift.

“Who’s got a blanket fort?” Jack asked, sounding confused. Teague looked at Katy—he understood what she meant: Jack, thinking it could just be the three of them, not understanding that they had an entire hill of people who loved them enough to see them happy.

“Not us,” Teague murmured. Katy leaned her head on his shoulder, Jack pulled him in against his chest, and they stood there in the Christmas quiet and planned what their home would become.

Cory

Royal Betrayals

“You want to go where? How? Why?”

Teague had pulled me aside on the morning before New Year’s Eve. I’d picked up a teeny-tiny virus the day after Christmas. It was plenty easy for Green to heal me, which he did, but the resulting moratorium on me doing anything at all in the week between Christmas and New Years Eve had made me a little testy. I got to go running the day after tomorrow, and I’d been hoping Teague could join me, and, well, his request just didn’t make any sense.

“I need to leave the hill, Cory—the day after tomorrow, in the morning. I’d be back before dark. But I want to go alone, okay? Could you… I don’t know. Make up a reason for me to leave? Cover for me?”

Teague looked restless and unhappy to be asking me this, and I didn’t know what to tell him. He should be restless and unhappy to make a request like this. Of all the things to reach for, he wanted to reach for being alone?

“Can you give me a reason?” I asked, entertaining the thought of going along with him. It wouldn’t work—for one thing, nobody would let me out of the house, and for another, Bracken would have to come. Teague liked Bracken, but Bracken wasn’t Teague’s best friend. I was. It was flattering—and a terrible responsibility too.

Teague paced a little and looked around, seeing who was in the living room. The answer was ‘no one’—they’d all bugged out discreetly when he’d seen me knitting and walked in with that ‘can-we-talk’ vibe radiating from him like a child’s fever. I actually breathed a sigh of relief. It was the closest I’d come to being alone since I’d awakened next to Bracken the day after Christmas, flushed, feverish, and coughing up a lung.

“I have this thing,” he said at last, blushing up along his Irish-pale neck and into his ears. “I…Christ, Jacky doesn’t even know about this. I… go up to Mokolumne Hill every year and… let’s just say I give the old man the send off he deserved.”

I blinked and swallowed, my throat suddenly sore and dry. “That’s a horrible assed tradition to keep,” I said roughly. “That’s like us, celebrating the time I almost died.”

“Maybe you’re celebrating the time you chose to live,” Teague said squarely, meeting my eyes with some resolve. I blushed and tried not to cough. Damn. Green leaves the hill for half a day and the damned virus tries to sneak back. I guess running in two days was right out.

“Maybe you need to start celebrating the day you leave all that behind you,” I said without dropping my eyes. “They’d want to be a part of that.”

Teague looked away, looked down at his battered, working-man’s hands. He’d started roughing out the frame in the last week—not too much work, it was cold and we were still doing the ‘holiday vacation’ thing—but it had made him happy.

“I… they have to deal with my bullshit every day, Cory. Every fucking day, something comes up. Someone has to tip-toe around me, Jacky has to worry if I’m all right, Katy has to remind me I have a family now. It would be just a fucking miracle if I didn’t have to burden them with something this goddamned ugly, you know?”

I gave it up and released a cough and glanced over my shoulder to see Bracken glaring at me from the doorway. “Tell me about it,” I muttered. “Teague, I’m the poster child for letting my mortal human bullshit get in the way. You want to know what I’ve learned from hard experience? I’ve learned that once you join hands and go skipping into the wild-blue-future with someone, they’re in it for the long haul, and they’re in it for the ugly and the clean. Asking them to go with you out to Mokolumne Hill will be the best Christmas gift you could give.”

I coughed again and Bracken was suddenly at my elbow with a cup of honey tea that he apparently pulled fully heated out of his ass--and a hand on my forehead. “I’ll go get Lambent,” he muttered. “And then I’m calling Green.”

“It’s a cold, asshole,” I muttered, leaning into that hand on my face in spite of myself. “Even mortal old me isn’t going to drop dead from a damned cold.”

Bracken seized my face in his hands and forced me to look into his pond-shadow eyes. “We’re in it for the ugly and the clean, beloved. You’d best learn to take what you dish out. Now you stay here with that blanket on your lap and finish your little chat with the wolf man, and then you’re done. No audiences with sprites, no planning next semester, no nothing. We’re putting in movies and you’re sitting in my lap like a good little mortal, and we’ll forget that you spent four hours this morning on the computer helping Grace with inventory without your slippers on, shall we? I’ll get you some tomato soup for dinner, and we’re done.”

I closed my eyes and felt his breath on my face. It sounded lovely. “Agreed,” I murmured, and he kissed me softly on the lips, because we both knew he wasn’t coming down with a damned head cold, was he?

He left and I met Teague’s eyes ironically. “I think he just made my point,” I said mildly, and Teague shrugged, looking away.

“And I think you just made mine. No. It would be best if I do this alone.”

Ha! Like I was going to let that happen.

I had to sneak away from Bracken and Teague—I told them I was going to the bathroom and to pick out some more yarn for a project—but I managed to get down the hall and knock on the door to the werewolves’ shared room.

Katy was asleep already, curled up on her side in the dark of a lamp—she worked baker’s hours, it didn’t surprise me. Jack was awake and he answered the door in his sleep-pants and a T-shirt, and holding a book I was pretty sure he’d borrowed from me. He frowned when he saw me, because honestly, I’d been avoiding him since he’d all but rattled my teeth from my skull, but I tried not to be a coward about these things so I put that aside.

“Hey,” I said quietly, standing in their doorway, “you need to know that Teague’s taking a trip the day after tomorrow. He’ll probably try to sneak out after Katy goes to work and before you wake up. It’s fine if he goes, right, but… well. You may want to find a way to be with him.”

Jack blinked. “I’m surprised you’re not going,” he said, and the tone of his voice made me suck on my teeth.

“I’m not his beloved, okay? You are. And if you want, I can help you sneak into his car, but only if you’re not a complete bastard to me in the meantime.” I masked a cough, because Green hadn’t gotten back from his business yet and I was still sick, and glared at him to force him not to make a big stinking deal about this.

Jack swallowed and blushed and made an effort not to be an asshole, and then said, “What did you have in mind?”

The morning Teague was planning to leave, I made sure I was up before him, waiting in the breakfast nook as he came walking past the living room on his way to the stairs.

“Hey, Teague!” I kept my voice low—there’s something about being up that early in the morning that makes loud voices sort of obscene—especially when it’s cold. It’s like mother nature needs you to observe the sleep of the world with silence. He looked at me and pulled on the mittens I’d made him and followed it up with the hat I’d finished for him the day before.

“There’s a picnic lunch down in the car for you,” I said, keeping my eyes on him and very carefully not watching as Jack ran down the stairs in his wolf skin. There was a change of clothes and Jack’s coat, gloves, and hat down there too, but I didn’t mention that. “And we replaced your cell phone and the charger, so don’t freak out. We also have a new contact out at Angel’s Camp—I put the number in your phone, so look for ‘Elm’ if you need to get a hold of anyone, okay?”

Teague nodded at me tersely, and I gave him an impromptu hug. Hopefully I’d given Jack enough time to get his clothes on—he’d have a better chance of staying in the car if he was fully clothed with boots and everything by the time Teague got down there.

“Don’t be afraid to reach for us,” I told him softly. “Don’t be afraid of how you’ve changed. It’s okay, right?”

His arms tightened around me and I could feel the need in them. Not for me—for somebody--while he did this. I thought that maybe I’d really done the right thing in sending Jacky down there. Teague could do this alone. He didn’t have to.

Teague kissed my cheek and turned silently towards the stairs to the underground garage, and I held my breath.

In about five minutes, I saw the lights from the Mustang as it crunched its way across the icy gravel drive, and then the house was as silent as it ever got. (The vampires were still awake, but they were mostly downstairs in their own common room). I gave a little sigh of relief and made my way back to bed. Green was there, looking at me reprovingly from the edge of the bed, while Bracken continued to sleep unaware that I’d even left.

“Meddling, beloved?” he asked quietly, pulling back the covers and ushering me under them. I went, shivering—because being up at four a.m. in the winter did that to you—and he climbed in next to me, making me the happiest filling in an elf-oreo-cookie ever.

“Yes,” I chattered, backing up against Bracken and burrowing into Green’s embrace. I pulled his T-shirt out of his cotton shorts and put my hands against the blessedly warm, satiny small of his back. “Yes, I was meddling, why do you ask?”

Green laughed and adjusted his head so his long yellow queue streamed behind him. “No reason at all,” he rumbled, rubbing his hands up and down my shoulders until the shivers stopped. “Not a reason in the world.”

Jack

Bonding

Jack thought Teague looked unsurprised to see him sitting in the car, lacing his boots and breathing hotly on his half-mitted hands.

“She put you up to this?” he asked gruffly as he trotted down the stairs and to the driver’s side of the Mustang.

“C..Lady Cory? Yeah. Did she tell you?” Jack hadn’t ridden in the front seat of the Mustang since going Christmas shopping. As he belted in and smelled the cold leather and oil, he realized that he missed it. For a year and a half his entire reason for living was to be right here, in this car, at Teague’s side.

Teague shook his head and stood with the door to the ‘Stang open, and grunted. “Didn’t tell me anything—just can’t lie for shit. I thought I got out of there a little easily.”

Jack stood up out of the car and leaned on the roof with his door open. “You gonna make a big furry-assed deal out of this, or can we get our asses in gear so we can be back in time for New Year’s Eve. I understand there’s one hell of a party.”

“You don’t like parties,” Teague murmured. Neither one of them made a move to get in the car.

“Neither do you.” Jack was stonewalling. He knew it. But Teague hadn’t overtly kicked him out of the car yet, and that was encouraging.

“You don’t even know where I’m going,” Teague sighed. He reached into the car and turned the key in the ignition to warm it up inside. The garage wasn’t too chilly—it was underground, and the worst of the frosty cold stopped at the door. But the car needed warming up anyway.

“You’re going the same place you went last year, Teague. You left early in the morning, you came back in the afternoon, and you didn’t talk for a week. You didn’t eat for a week either. Our next job, you were the one who picked a fight. Remember that? You almost got shot!”

“I remember,” Teague grunted, rubbing his chest uneasily.

“I’d rather not go through that again,” Jack said reasonably. “How about this time, I go along.”

“I’m gonna be a grumpy asshole anyway,” Teague sighed, and Jack was pretty sure he knew Jack had won. “There’s no reason for you to catch that in the teeth.”

“How about because I love you and I choose to. Will that do you? Can we get in the goddamned car now?”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

And away they went. Teague cranked the music as soon as they cleared Green’s driveway.

Jack was prepared for a long, silent run, but there was a big hamper of food next to him and he decided to dive right in. The first thing out was one of the two big thermoses of hot-white-chocolate-with-hazelnut-cream, and while it may have made Jack happy, he knew that once he gave Teague a big-assed mug full of it, Teague would be as pleased as a little kid. Jack found it in himself to let loose of the resentment that Cory had to tell him about this little adventure. She’d done it for him and Teague, and for their little family, and it was hard to stay mad at someone for that.

“Mmmmm…” Teague all-but-groaned. “Damn, Jacky—it’d be worth becoming a werewolf just to get this in your coffee mug every morning.”

Jack grunted an agreement, and then found his balls and asked, “So. Where are we going?”

Teague sighed. “Angel’s Camp. But we have to stop somewhere first.”

The ‘stop’ was at a liquor store for a bottle of Jose Cuervo gold. Jack was surprised—Teague drank nothing but beer—but as the car drove around the lake and then took the rolling back roads towards Mokolumne Hill, he started to have an inkling of what this was about.

Mokolumne Hill is one of those places that has become an icon for bad roads and possible vehicular death. The road winds closely along the hill, switchbacks abound, and rails are thin and often falling off the crumbling scrabble of soil. By the time they arrived at the hill, the sun was up, and Jack was supremely grateful. Werewolf or no werewolf, he didn’t want to become a highway statistic, no matter how carefully Teague was driving.

Near the crown of the hill was a pull-out, where slower traffic could pull over and allow faster traffic to pass, and Teague was no thing if not cautious as he pulled the car into the muddy shoulder and parked. He should be cautious. Not too far from this spot was where his father had gone off the road and died.

He got out and grabbed the tequila and walked to the front of the car, looking out over the mist shrouded, ice-coated valley in the thin orange sunlight of morning.

Jack sat, torn. Teague was so good at isolating himself, at creating an impenetrable force- field of space around his body, that it was hard to know if he was being stoic or truly wanted to be left alone. But watching Teague’s shoulders slump as he stood, alone and shivering in the dawn, Jack didn’t think he could stand to watch him be alone for another moment.

He stepped quietly out into the dawn.

Teague was muttering—two months ago, Jack wouldn’t have been able to make out real words, but he heard them now.

I’m more than you ever said I would be, and I’ve got more than you ever said I could have. Nobody beats me, nobody hurts me—just your ghost you ass-ripping motherfucker. I’ve let you eat up most of my life up to now—but I’ll tell you something. This is the last thing you’ll ever get from me, Sean Sullivan. It’s the last drop of Cuervo you’ll ever drink, it’s the last thing your kid is ever gonna do for you.

It’s more than you deserve you sonofabitch.

Teague pulled his shoulder back and hurled the Cuervo out into the desolate valley below. It sailed far, far from where they stood before plummeting down, and Jack realized that Teague probably picked this exact spot because there wasn’t a soul in sight for miles on this side of the road.

The distant tinkle of glass reached them and Jack watched Teague dumbly, feeling useless. Teague turned—making sure his face was averted, and muttered, “We’d best be going, Jacky. We’ve got a party.”

“Yeah, wait a minute,” Jack said. He didn’t have anything to throw, he thought wretchedly, and he picked up a rock because that’s all he had. If he was going to do a grand gesture a rock would have to do.

“He’s mine, motherfucker! You can’t hurt him anymore!” He really put his diaphragm into it, shouting loud enough to echo off the valley, to make his throat burn with the anger.

He turned a defiant face to Teague, realizing that his face was freezing and wet. It was enough for Teague to come and comfort him, squaring that bantam little body protectively in front of him. Jack looked down and framed Teague’s scowling, freckled cheeks in his slender hands.

“He can’t hurt you anymore, beloved,” Jack told his lover softly. “You’re ours, okay?”

Teague nodded mutely, and when Jack wrapped long arms around his shoulders, Teague leaned against his chest willingly.

“You’re ours,” Jack repeated. “Ours.”

They stood quietly then—if Jack expected Teague to fall apart, he was mistaken. Maybe all of that had been cleansed, purged, in their tumultuous first days at Green’s Hill. Maybe the only place it would ever come out was Green’s Hill—one set of arms alone was not enough to keep Teague safe from the bloody monster of his dreams. But it didn’t matter. Jack was his comfort, his harbor, his beloved, and while the scary dreams might never be gone completely, Jack and Katy would be there to quiet him in the night. It would be enough.

The drive home was quiet too, at least until Mokolumne Hill was safely in their rearview mirror.

“We need a ceremony,” Teague said into the blue. “Something… permanent. I know we’re supposed to, like physically bond…”

“I have,” Jack said, surprised. “So has Katy.”

Teague’s eyes got big.

“How do you know?” he asked, surprised.

Jack shrugged. “Because we were watching a show on T.V. that used to get me hot because the actor looks just like you, but I didn’t get hot until you walked into the room. I said something to Katy and she realized the same thing. Katy and I turn each other on, but otherwise, it’s you and no one else.”

Teague blushed. “Oh.”

Uh-oh. “What?” Jack turned to him, surprised. Of all things, he didn’t expect this to be a problem.

“Uhm… you know that thing that happens when the vampire’s feed?”

Jack frowned. “Not anymore.”

“Oh.”

Jack shook his head, not sure what to say. And then he realized it didn’t matter. “It’s no big deal,” he said, meaning it. Teague had said he was damaged—if this was the extent of the damage, well, so what?

“Well… it’s another reason for the thing,” Teague muttered. “A big thing—a… ceremony, like what we just did, only not horrible.”

Jack felt his chest grow tight. “Like, you know, a wedding?”

Teague nodded. “Yeah. Like… in front of the hill. Like us, and the hill, and… you know.”

“Like a wedding.”

Teague grunted. “Whatever.”

Jack smiled to himself. Like the opposite of what Teague had planned for himself two months ago. Like Jack and Katy, loving him for a very long life. Like announcing ‘forever’ to the world. Like Teague never being alone, ever ever again.

“Like a wedding,” he repeated, happy with the idea.

“Forget I said anything,” Teague grumbled. Jack, comfortable that they were on a straightaway, reached over and took Teague’s hand as it rested on the steering wheel and brought it to his lips.

“Katy and I would be happy to marry you.”

“That sounds so…”

“Gay?”

“Shut up.”

Jack laughed all the way back to the hill.

Epilogue

Green

Putting The Past To Bed

“Absolutely,” Cory was saying, “February eleventh would be perfect.”

Green fought the urge to goggle, and Bracken’s wide eyes met his as they shared the same thought. But neither of them put a voice to it, and Cory continued to talk to Teague, animation in every line of her still-healing body. Green thought privately that the next time she decided to run across the yard in her bare feet in December, he’d actually spank her bare pink bottom himself.

“I thought you hated being in public,” Bracken interrupted. Tact and Bracken were still virtual strangers after all.

Teague blushed. “You guys… the hill. You got to see all the bad shit. Maybe it’s time for you to see the good shit, you know?”

Cory nodded at Teague at the same time she rolled her eyes at Bracken. Bracken shrugged, but she soldiered on. “I get it, Teague. I think it’s perfect. The day is great. You guys get an idea of what you want and we’ll do the rest, okay?”

Teague gave an actual smile, and Cory launched herself at him for the hug. “I’m so glad you came here,” she said softly, and he mumbled thank you before he went to tell his mates that the wedding was a go.

“February eleventh?” Green asked as soon as he was out of earshot. “Isn’t that the day…”

“Yeah,” she murmured. “It’s the day I looked up.” Cory and Adrian had possessed, when all was said and done, just a handful of days as lovers. Cory had been so sure that someone as beautiful as Adrian could never love someone as plain as she was, that she hadn’t even looked him in the eyes for their first year of acquaintance. She’d worked her nowhere job in one of Green’s gas stations, and Adrian had come and gone, checking on Green’s people who habited the place, and only at the end had she looked up, met his eyes, allowed herself to fall in love.

“Beloved,” Green said quietly. They’d been sitting on the couch together—Cory leaning on Bracken and knitting while Green caressed her calf absently while he worked. Now he put the laptop down entirely and held out his arms. She went to him, rubbing her face on his shoulder.

“I’m tired of bad shit anniversaries, Green.” She said it softly, but Green had no doubt that she meant it sincerely. “I’ve got so few good memories of Adrian. I’m throwing that one—or at least the regret in it—under the bus. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine,” he told her. He met Bracken’s eyes over her shoulders and Bracken looked stricken for a moment. Anything that threatened Adrian’s memory would hurt him. But after a considering silence, he patted her shoulder and leaned in for the group hug.

“Adrian would probably you rather forgive yourself for that one,” he said, and she lifted her arm and held Bracken to her chest as Green was holding her.

“Do you think he’d be with us?” she asked hesitantly. “If he’d stayed with us, do you think… this thing we’ve become, we all would have done it together, right?”

“I have no doubts, beloved.” And Green didn’t. Not a single one.

Jack and Teague and Katy were proof of all that a group of people could become if they opened their hearts to love. His beloved, with her enormous heart and her unlimited capacity for bravery? There was nothing she couldn’t be, no family she couldn’t forge. Together, there was nothing they couldn’t become.