The Green's Hill Novellas (19 page)

“No,” Leah said seriously, rolling over in her bed and kissing his chest. “Really. And it’s not even an ‘Oh my God! We’re getting too close!’ sort of thing. It’s more. He’ll tell a joke that you would have gotten or start a sentence that you would have finished, and when the girl doesn’t get it or doesn’t finish the sentence or doesn’t meet his eyes at the right moment, he’ll get this—I don’t know. You know how proud he is, right? And how he’ll sneer at anything or pop off at the mouth just to avoid seeming close to human?”

Marcus nodded. He’d seen it. Not firsthand, not since that first time they’d been together outside of the vault, but he’d seen Phillip do it to other people.

“Well, he’ll get this look on his face that’s almost—I don’t know. Wounded. It’s like he’s been hurt to the center of him. And then he’ll be a complete asshole, and, well, finis. Relationship over.”

Marcus couldn’t help it. He was cheered up. The behavior of his lover was deplorable, and the surge of happiness certainly didn’t speak well of Marcus, but it was a sign of hope. He’d thought he’d be locked in this weird emotional limbo for a hundred years—at which time he’d been prepared to give up, just because one hundred was a big round number, and it sounded like a long time.

Twenty years sounded like a long time too, but in Phillip’s company, they’d sort of flown right by.

“So that news makes you happy?” Leah asked, grinning unrepentantly in the face of his extended canines.

“Does that make me a bad person?” Marcus asked innocently, and her grin widened.

“Not if you’re willing to go down on me again, baby—you do it sooo… mmmm… yeah… my God… oh fuck… oh….
Jesus, Marcus, fuck me through the goddamned floor!
”

Leah was a screamer too, and Marcus didn’t mind—not this time. Not one bit.

And so things continued, and might have continued to that one-hundred-year mark, but then Adrian brought Cory home and their lives were turned upside down—and run through a meat grinder, resized, reapportioned, and served up raw.

That Adrian brought a human home was no big deal—he did so all the time, especially when he was recruiting and worried about the recruit (the people Adrian tended to recruit were often living dangerously). He brought them home and let them wander the hill and find the place they fit best. He did
not
make love to them in the hill—and he didn’t make them exclusively his.

Cory looked like a standard recruit—five zillion piercings, dyed black hair, so much makeup you could barely tell her gender.

But something was different about her, and it was clearly apparent from the first night Adrian brought her home. Phillip and Marcus had watched from around a corner as he all but spirited her into his room, his tongue so far down the girl’s throat that it was a wonder she could breathe.

“Oh good,” Renny said softly, rounding the corner and ignoring the fact that the two of them were trying to look invisible. “He finally talked her into it.”

“Talked her into what?” Marcus asked. Renny was a little werekitty, brought over by her mate. Renny weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet. She could curl up in a corner as a kitten
or
as a girl, and right now, Renny seemed to be the one person who could answer any questions about Cory and would talk. Marcus had tried asking Adrian’s best friend, Bracken, one of Green’s elves, the week before. Bracken—characteristically—told him to fuck off and then shoved Phillip toward him and told
Phillip
to fuck him off.

“We don’t work that way!” Phillip snapped with wounded dignity, and Bracken nodded in satisfaction.

“And I don’t bear tales.” With that, the grumpy fucker stalked off, and Phillip had been left looking after him in admiration. It was true. Adrian, for all his sweetness, was best friends with a guy who made Phillip look like Dr. Seuss.

“He talked her into coming here,” Renny said now, looking at the two of them like they were stupid. “He’s been courting her for months.”

“
Courting!
”
Marcus exclaimed—in a fierce whisper, of course. “What about Green?”

Renny shrugged. “I’m sure they’ll all end up together somehow. You have to know Cory. She’s….” Renny gazed off into space for a minute, her demeanor as distracted as her flyaway, static-charged, fine brown hair. Marcus and Phillip looked at each other, wondering whether to prompt her or not, when suddenly Renny shook herself and said, “Bright,” as though that pause had never happened. “I knew her in school. She was bright—so bright, people would refuse to look at her. She’s so bright, she can’t see the darkness around her for the brightness. You’ll see. Green will see it too. It’s really amazing.”

With that, Renny spotted Mitch at the end of the hall and trotted away.

Marcus and Phillip looked at each other dubiously.

“Really amazing?” Phillip muttered. “I’ll have to see that for myself—holy
Goddess
!
What in the
hell
?”

There was… a force. A terrible, wonderful, blood-saturated magic force being unleashed in the hill. Phillip reached out both hands to Marcus’s shirt and
clung
,
simply whimpering, and Marcus leaned up against the wall. Both of them had come in their jeans, just from that one sweep of sex magic, and their crotches mashed wetly together as they held each other and shuddered.

The next wave was starting to roll; they could feel it.

Marcus was the one with the presence of mind to haul Phillip to their room, and after that, about all they could be sure of was that Marcus topped, because he always topped, and that they frequently didn’t have room to do more than bite each other and scream before the wave of magic rolled through the room and they were coming again, coming and coming and still hard.

Eventually it ended. It had to end. And when it did, they lay tangled in their blood-and-come-soaked sheets and shivered, and that was where they were, wondering what in the fuck had happened, when the dawn came.

And that was their first introduction to Cory.

THEY’D GIVEN
Adrian hell the next night—taking a virgin sorceress in a hill already saturated with blood and sex magic? Lunacy, incredible lunacy. Adrian had been embarrassed, until Marcus had stepped forward, literally, and stood in front of their leader like he was protecting someone innocent.

“You guys—have you seen her?”

Grace joined him and nodded for him to continue, and he figured that
she
at least knew where he was going.

“She dresses like she’s got nothing to lose. He couldn’t read her mind, right?”

“Right!” Adrian spoke up and moved out from behind Marcus, flashing a wry smile. “And she doesn’t know what she is, either.
I
don’t know the whole of it. But I know I’ve tasted human, shape-shifter, and fey for a hundred and fifty years, and she’s an entirely different breed of bird. And….” He made the last word meaningful and suddenly looked as stern as any of them had ever seen him. “She’s off-limits, you hear? She’s mine.”

They all looked at him uneasily. None of them wanted to ask how this would affect that tender, timeless bond that Adrian had with Green, but no one wanted it to end either.

The next few weeks were fraught with terrible unease among the vampires: shape-shifters were being murdered, including poor Renny’s mate, Mitch; there was an enemy stalking Adrian’s people, and Cory was a target. But she fought off the enemy well enough on her own on a few occasions, and although her pale, freckled skin gained a few scars, she gained an absolute beauty in the eyes of Adrian’s people and the shape-shifters.

One night, Cory and Adrian made love, except bigger, down on the front lawn in full view of anyone who cared to watch. (It was Green’s hill—they
all
cared to watch.) Phillip sank to his knees in front of Marcus and took him inside his wet mouth, right there at the hall window, while Marcus fought to stay standing.

After Marcus had clenched his hands in Phillip’s hair and spent everything, including his soul, Phillip came up and kissed him, a totally unsolicited, tender kiss, and then turned his attention to the two lovers out on the lawn. He leaned back into Marcus’s arms, and together they watched a sort of magic happen that they’d only ever seen in Green’s bed.

“She’s healing him,” Marcus muttered. He couldn’t explain it—what she was doing really was magic—but there had always been a cloud, a pain, a well of aching melancholy in Adrian’s heart, and Cory was filling it, making him whole.

Phillip grunted and snuggled into his arms, and Marcus closed his eyes and savored. There must have been some spare magic from all that healing out on the lawn, because it had given them this moment, this sweet, unforced moment, when Phillip wasn’t trying to find someone else and was simply, quietly, right where he belonged.

Marcus would have died for Cory for that moment alone.

It really was such an odd time—there was the enemy and the fear, and at the same time, there was the amazing love. The night that Green joined Cory in Adrian’s bed was another moment that Marcus wouldn’t forget. Luminous, beautiful, the wave of sensuality that washed the hill spawned an entire generation of lower fey and drove the vampires into a lovely, sexual, sensual frenzy that they would use as a watermark for relationships for years to come.

Phillip spent it with his girlfriend. Marcus spent it alone, in the next bed, aching—right up until he felt Phillip’s girlfriend’s mouth on his cock.

Marcus had no choice but to fall into the threesome, the woman in the middle, just like the one that was happening in Green’s room. It was sweet and wonderful, and Marcus didn’t know when his heart had ever hurt with quite so much passion and pain.

Phillip was in his bed, but he thought having someone else there with them was the way it should be.

The night afterward, he went up alone into the garden to see what Cory had wrought in the throes of sex and sorcery.

It was amazing. Fully grown trees had erupted from the earth—thornless oak trees, and lime trees—all of them grown and twisted into the shapes of the three lovers who had coupled and tripled in the hill the night before.

His throat grew tight with the beauty of it. Erotic, yes, but… but lovely. Loved. He saw Adrian, in all of his haunted beauty; Green, in all of his kindness; and this new person, this teenaged child, as a powerful force of nature. Marcus had spoken to Adrian’s lover before this, but he’d never really thought of connecting that vital, aggressive little person with the woman who could love two immortal beings at once.

It’s such a grand sort of lover to do that. All I’ve really ever wanted was one lover who would love me alone.

The thought made standing in that garden intolerable. He had just turned on his heel to go back down the stairs and join Phillip in the vampire common room to plan what they were doing that night, when he ran into the little person in the flesh.

“Jesus,” he swore, darting backward with such preternatural speed that he hit the tree behind him.

The grand lady of the manor, the woman with two vampire marks, and the lover of Lord Green and his consort Adrian, burst into giggles.

“Crap!” she swore. “For crying out loud, I didn’t mean to scare you!” She giggled some more, and his vampire senses picked up the scent of blood under her skin.

“You’re blushing!” he accused, and she turned her head around, taking in the erotic pictures of the grove with one jerk of her chin.

“Wouldn’t you?”

Marcus remembered all those years Phillip screamed fit to bring down the rafters. “I have,” he said dryly, and she stopped looking embarrassed and grinned at him. His stomach clenched a little, and he realized that she was a younger version of Grace and a human version of a geode—plain and dusty on the outside but with a beautiful, precious center—and stronger than she looked.

“Phillip?” she inquired delicately, and he rolled his eyes.

“God—even you know, and you just got here!”

“What
is
the deal with you guys?”

Marcus looked away. “We’re… us,” he said after a minute. “He wants us to be….” He gestured vaguely. “He wants us to be
this.
But we’re not. We’re us. But only when he’s between girls.”

“Ouch,” she said softly. “It’s hard, I think, when your beloved doesn’t know how you feel.”

A part of him flared to anger. She should talk. The whole world knew how Bracken looked at her, and she never saw. But then, he thought, as she looked at him with compassionate eyes, that it was not entirely her fault. Bracken wouldn’t reach for Adrian’s beloved for all the lovers in the world.

“I like that word,” Marcus said softly.

“What word?” she asked curiously.

“Beloved,” he told her. “It’s a good word.”

She smiled a little, looking embarrassed all over again. “It’s Green’s word. It’s one of the things you have to learn, being here, you know?”

He nodded. Yeah. All sorts of ins and outs to this place, that was for certain. This little girl was doing better than he had, and that was also a fact.

“I was just on my way down to Phillip,” he said after an awkward silence, and she stepped to the side as though to let him pass.

“I was just on my way to look at the stars and pray for clarity,” she said dryly. He stopped on his way past her to ruffle her hair, and the sound of her throaty laughter followed him down the stairs.

“What kept you?” Phillip asked as Marcus walked into the vampire common room. This was the only place in the hill with leather couches, most of them black, hardwood floors without carpeting, the better for cleanup, and the biggest television available in any given year. Most of the vampires were gathered, along with the shape-shifters who were good for feeding duty. Phillip was feeding from his girlfriend, but he pulled away from Tina’s throat as he spoke and caught her body as it fell limply against him in ecstasy. His face was covered in blood, and as Tina practically purred (she was a werepanther), he wiped his palm across his mouth and flickered his tongue over it to catch the last drop.