The Green's Hill Novellas (20 page)

“Nice table manners, dickhead,” Marcus snapped, and Phillip rolled his eyes.

“I’m dining casual.” He shrugged. “Wait a sec—gotta clean up. Look at me, darlin’. We’ve got somewhere to be.” Tina met his eyes with a vapid, somnolent gaze of her own, and with one mighty swing of his vampire will, he whammied her into sleep.

Phillip set her down indifferently in the corner of the black leather couch, pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and cleaned his face up, then threw on the leather jacket and turned around. He looped an arm over Marcus’s shoulders as they walked.

“Seriously, man, where the fuck have you been? She’s not big on conversation, and I was a half a swallow from having to take her to bed.”

“And wouldn’t that be a tragedy?” Marcus fell in step with him, their bodies syncing perfectly. They’d been walking together like this, in perfect compatibility, since Phillip had emerged from the vault.

“Jesus, don’t be a dick. Where were you?”

Marcus shrugged. “I went up to look at the garden—it’s pretty fucking spectacular. Have you seen it?”

Phillip rolled his eyes. “It’s trees. What’s to see? And that took you so long?”

“I met with the lady of the house. We had a chat.”

“Well, isn’t that cozy? Is she still plain as a potato?”

Marcus turned aggressively to him, thrusting forward with his shoulders until Phillip was backed up against the wall of the hallway looking surprised and turned on at the same time.

“Don’t talk about her that way,” he growled. “She’s perfect, Phillip, and we need to treat her with respect, you hear?”

Phillip sighed and surprised Marcus with his sadness—and his remorse. “She’s like Grace,” he muttered, and Marcus nodded, letting his sarcasm show.

“You think?”

Phillip looked away, and Marcus was suddenly aware that they were in a darkened corridor that led from the bottom part of the darkling to the upper level. They were alone and their bodies were pressed together. Phillip arched his hips against Marcus, and in addition to being embarrassed, he was very, very aroused.

“You’re good at that,” Phillip whispered. “So good at knowing the goodness in people. You sure you want to keep taking me along for those recruiting missions?”

Marcus swallowed and pressed his groin forward. “I don’t want anyone else by my side.” It was the truth, in all ways, incontrovertible and absolute.

Phillip let a little smile slip through that pouty, disdainful façade he usually wore and thrust his face forward. His eyes closed, and Marcus was stunned to realize that he was asking for a kiss.

Marcus had never been able to deny him anything he wanted. Phillip’s lips parted and Marcus’s tongue entered, tasting the shape-shifter Phillip had sampled for dinner. And
that
was when Adrian’s voice sounded in both their heads.

“Family meeting, boys. All vampires, front lawn
.
”

Marcus groaned and deepened the kiss for a moment. Dammit. Damn Adrian. How many chances would he get where Phillip was willing and soft and admiring one of the few things Marcus could actually do better than he could?

How many chances would he get where he could think the word
beloved
and expect that someday it might be returned?

IT HAD
been such a lovely night, a night of such promise of peace, of such lovely things to come. It had fooled them all, lulled them into complacency and into a belief that all would be well, simply because the leaders they loved to follow also loved to love. It left them totally unprepared for the night that destroyed their hearts—everybody’s hearts—and Phillip and Marcus had a front-row seat.

The enemy responsible for the unsettling shape-shifter deaths had finally revealed himself. He’d been after Adrian, poor, tortured Adrian, the whole time. They’d established a meeting to parlay—and to fight. No one fooled themselves that there wasn’t going to be bloodshed, but Goddess… the terrible things they lost! As long as Marcus was sentient, he would never forget the jumble of images from that night.

They had awoken, angry and ready for battle, and Adrian had given a fierce smile as they launched themselves off the top of the hill. They had flown out over Gold Country, then over Folsom Lake toward the gravel pits where the enemy—a half elf from Adrian’s tortured past—had decided to confront Adrian once and for all.

Adrian was so… so
full
that night. He was full of his beloveds, Green and Cory; full of his friends; and full of his people, the vampires. He was full to bursting with a complex, brilliant mixture of fear for them, pride, and that intense, charismatic spark of leadership that he had always been capable of but had never let burst forth.

Until Cory, until his healing in the garden, he had never believed in himself enough to lead his people into battle. Now he did.

Marcus had hovered, waiting for his orders, as Adrian descended for a moment to talk to a shape-shifter who had been there and get the lay of the land. Beyond the rise where they hid, Marcus could hear Cory herself bandying words with the enemy, and he smiled with fangs. She was fierce and sarcastic and bloodthirsty—all the things Green and Adrian were not—and he loved her for it, just like the rest of the hill.

He was not prepared to watch Adrian leap into the sky in a moment of panic that every vampire in his head could feel. He was certainly not prepared to watch Adrian, their gentle Adrian, fly into a magic trap and….

Disappear. Explode. Disintegrate like a popped balloon. His blood covered the upturned faces of Cory and Green as they watched the vampire they both loved more than life explode in a tragic burst of sorcery before they even realized he was coming to save their lives.

Marcus kept thinking,
She’s barely nineteen
,
as Adrian’s beloved, soaked in the gentle rain of her first lover’s blood, started sucking in power for a terrible scream.

Marcus knew what she was doing. They’d all watched her learning what her sorcerous power was and what she could do with her will and emotion. Her emotion now was terrible, terrible destructive grief, and a cold, rational part of him expected her to destroy.

Marcus felt the loss—in his chest, in his head—of the man who made him, of the friend who had succored him, of the vampire who had created his beloved because of Marcus’s desperate plea. In Marcus’s despair, he wanted Adrian’s beloved to destroy
him,
so Marcus wouldn’t have to wake up to a bed without a lover and a life without a leader and a heart without a purpose
.

Green called out in a mighty voice, “My people,
move
!”
and Marcus did not. It was Phillip, swooping down from the sky and knocking him practically into the next town, who saved him from that destruction. It was Phillip who pinned him to the side of a tractor with main force as the little girl with the punk haircut and the piercings and the power and the broken heart killed every enemy on the battlefield with the power of her heartbroken sunshine scream.

It was Phillip who yelled into his face, “If you won’t live for yourself, goddammit, then live for me, asshole! Live for
me
!”

Marcus forgot pride then, and shame, and who it was that was supposed to lead the two of them when they were together. Instead he broke, weeping in his lover’s arms until they had to either fly from that place or die by the sun.

They learned something about grief after that night, watching Cory and Green grieve.

Adrian had given Cory the third vampire mark as he’d died, and with it came the maker’s bond to the entire kiss of vampires. Every vampire in Green’s hill felt the power exchange, and every vampire in Green’s hill refused to talk to her about it, not even to hint to her that their leader, their heart of the hill, didn’t even realize she was MIA.

It was hard enough watching her grieve herself to death.

She’d been such a solid little person when Adrian had first spirited her into his room. Her hips had been wide and her thighs chunky, and her semiperpetual scowl had been fortified by a plain, wide-cheekboned face, and she’d seemed invincible.

After Adrian’s death, she had become almost transparent with pain, and as lovely and fragile as a blown-glass sculpture of a warrior with sharp and tiny spires and clear and deadly swords.

Green held her together, and together they held the hill together as the entire hill drifted about in a white-fog sea of shock.

When Green sent her away to school, in the hopes that living in a place where not every heart beat with the same grief might give her a chance to recover, there was a certain relief, coupled with a frightening despair. Maybe, maybe their leader would become stronger with a break from the wall of grief the hill had become. Maybe, maybe the vampires could keep it together.

It was at this time that the “blood/sex/magic room” became more and more necessary to survive.

Adrian had been the one to name it and probably the one to make sure it was built. Marcus had asked him about it once, and Adrian, creator of vampires, beautiful boy and demigod in bed, had blushed.

“They had one in the kiss where I was brought over,” he mumbled. “It… it just feels like part of a healthy kiss to me, mate—but not something I’m comfortable talking about, to tell the truth.”

Adrian had rarely gone into the blood/sex/magic room.

It consisted of a giant bed, and someone must have changed the sail-sized sheets during the day, but Marcus had never seen them. It was, quite simply, the site of an ongoing vampire blood orgy, and a night spent in the room was a night of shifting, groaning bodies biting, licking, sucking, fucking, feeding, and rolling about in the excesses of sex and blood and come.

It was the vampires’ equivalent of the full-moon dog run of the shape-shifters, and although most vampires did not spend a lot of time in that room,
all
of them spent
some
time there.

As Adrian had said to Marcus shortly after he’d been brought over, when he was nearly despondent at the idea that he’d never again see the sun, it was impossible to despair after the full-throttle release of sex and bloodlust in a room where no one could hurt or be hurt by anything you did.

The term “endorphins” had not been in vogue then, but it was now, and that room had become the sanctuary for the vampires to get high off their own blood/sex endorphins; and when Cory left the hill, there wasn’t a vampire in its environs who didn’t spend a night a week there.

Marcus resisted at first.

Phillip had slept in Marcus’s bed since the night Adrian died. There had been no sex between them at first, no making love, just a simple body-contact desire—cold or not, there was someone there to anchor them both in reality, to keep them from simply staying out on the front lawn and physically disintegrating with the sunrise.

After the first week, Marcus couldn’t take it anymore. He awoke with Phillip in his bed, looking at Marcus with expectant, frightened eyes, that lean mouth flat and grim, and his body reacted. He took that mouth in a punishing kiss, and Phillip groaned, then growled, and Marcus had him flat on his stomach and was pounding into him with fury and despair within moments.

Afterward, Phillip did an unexpected thing—he held Marcus to his chest and whispered nothing, simple comfort words, into Marcus’s hair as Marcus broke and wept blood all over his bare chest.

There was sex in their bed after that—lots of wordless, intense comfort sex—that helped ease the loss of Adrian but did nothing to assure Marcus that he would not be mourning Phillip the next time a pretty shape-shifter walked by.

After Cory had been gone for a month, coming back from school on weekends for stressed, unsatisfying visits, Marcus rose one evening to find Phillip standing naked at the side of his bed.

“Where are we going?” he asked muzzily, wondering how the guy could have been awake long enough to get naked.

Phillip took his hand—an unusual gesture in itself—and pulled him up out of bed. Marcus was… rumpled. He looked down at himself next to Phillip’s pale beauty and realized he hadn’t showered in several days and hadn’t changed clothes either.

“Look, man. I don’t know what you and me are, but you’re fucking falling apart, and I can’t watch and not do anything.”

Marcus looked back at him, mute agony vibrating from every still vessel in his body. “You don’t know what we are?” he asked, a second away from hysterical, vicious laughter.

Phillip shrugged. “Look—whatever relationships are here, we’ve got one. And just like you wouldn’t let them kill me, I’m not going to let you die of grief, okay? Now come
on.
You hate going here, but it’s better with a big crowd, and there’s a full moon tonight, and half the hill is going to be there, and I think Green will be too.”

Goddess. Green? Marcus had needed Green’s healing for so long. He hadn’t wanted to ask. He hadn’t wanted to bother. Marcus was the stable one, right? The one who could keep the young ones anchored, the one who kept Phillip from flying beyond the pale. Marcus was the one Grace depended on, and the whole world needed Green, and why would Marcus need him more than anyone else?

“Green?” he asked hoarsely, and Phillip stroked his hand. The gesture was self-conscious, but Phillip’s high brow was wrinkled, and he looked sad beyond measure.

“I know I’m not enough,” he admitted.

“You’re waiting for someone else,” Marcus said gently. He didn’t even let his voice get bitter when he added, “Someone real.”

“You’re real to me now,” Phillip said decisively, still frowning and stroking his hand. “Do you think some random woman could mean more to me than you do right now? Come on, brother—let’s go heal.”

Maybe it was the promise of Green, and maybe it was just enough that Phillip cared, that he acknowledged he cared, but Marcus felt a sudden, bright, ripping slash of hope through his miasmic armor, and he clung to the red pain of it. Goddess—if there was hope, he would suffer the pain of healing.

He didn’t like to think of those hours in that big bed, with the smooth limbs and voracious orifices of the other vampires there with him. But he did remember that first night, because his initial disappointment that Green wasn’t there was acute, and he felt cheated. Then Phillip took his mouth in that mass of bodies, and then he was penetrated by slick fingers, and then, oh Goddess, Phillip was inside him while others kissed him and suckled from him, fingered him, and stroked. Those other mouths, breasts, cocks, hands—those were not what mattered. What mattered was that Phillip looked at him, truly looked at him, while moving inside his body. Under the cover of the orgy, Phillip seemed to see him as a lover in need for the first time in twenty years.