Rampant, Vol. 1

By Amy Lane

Little Goddess: Book Four
Vol. 1

Lady Cory has carved out a life for herself not just as a wife to three husbands but also as one of the rulers of the supernatural communities of Northern California—and a college student in search of that elusive degree. When a supernatural threat comes crashing into the hard-forged peace of Green's Hill, she and Green determine that they're the ones in charge of stopping the abomination that created it. To protect the people they love, Cory, Bracken, and Nicky travel to Redding to confront a tight-knit family of vampires guarding a terrible secret. It also leads them to a conflict of loyalties, as Nicky's parents threaten to tear Nicky away from the family he's come to love more than his own life.

Cory has to work hard to hold on to her temper and her life as she tries to prove that she and Green are not only leaders who will bind people to their hearts, but also protectors who will keep danger from running rampant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781634763493

Amy Lane

Award winning author Amy Lane lives in a crumbling crapmansion with a couple of teenagers, a passel of furbabies, and a bemused spouse. She has too damned much yarn, a penchant for action-adventure movies, and a need to know that somewhere in all the pain is a story of Wuv, Twu Wuv, which she continues to believe in to this day! She writes contemporary romance, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and romantic suspense, teaches the occasional writing class, and likes to pretend her very simple life is as exciting as the lives of the people who live in her head. She’ll also tell you that sacrifices, large and small, are worth the urge to write. Website: www.greenshill.com Blog: www.writerslane.blogspot.com Email: [e-mail] Facebook: www.facebook.com/amy.lane.167 Twitter: @amymaclane

Book preview

Rampant, Vol. 1

By Amy Lane

Little Goddess: Book Four

Vol. 1

Lady Cory has carved out a life for herself not just as a wife to three husbands but also as one of the rulers of the supernatural communities of Northern California—and a college student in search of that elusive degree. When a supernatural threat comes crashing into the hard-forged peace of Green’s Hill, she and Green determine that they’re the ones in charge of stopping the abomination that created it. To protect the people they love, Cory, Bracken, and Nicky travel to Redding to confront a tight-knit family of vampires guarding a terrible secret. It also leads them to a conflict of loyalties, as Nicky’s parents threaten to tear Nicky away from the family he’s come to love more than his own life.

Cory has to work hard to hold on to her temper and her life as she tries to prove that she and Green are not only leaders who will bind people to their hearts, but also protectors who will keep danger from running rampant.

Table of Contents

Blurb

About Jack & Teague & Katy—

Acknowledgments

Character Lexicon

Cory: Buzzkilling

Green: Master of Ceremonies

Cory: The Trials of a Chess-playing Hamster

Green: Between Winter and Spring

Teague: Hawk and Wolf

Cory: What in the fuck is that thing?

Bracken: Other Things to Fear

Cory: Queen of the Fucking Night

Green: The Damage Done

Cory: Midnight in a Man’s World

Cory: Vampire Queen Dearest

Nicky: Dark Musings

Cory: Blood Sunrise

Green: True Sunshine

Cory: The Body Politic

Bracken: The Other Side of Helpless

Cory: Garden Pleasures

Bracken: Knight’s Restraint

Cory: Queen Forward

Nicky: Grooming

Cory: Lasting Impressions

Bracken: Knight’s Unyielding Position

Cory: Research

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Copyright Page

About Jack & Teague & Katy—

THE GREEN’S Hill Werewolves have gone through a couple of incarnations by the time this edition of Rampant goes out. They started out as short novellas on my website, and then they were later picked up by an independent publisher. When Dreamspinner Press told me that they wanted to publish my Little Goddess series, one of my first orders of business was to get the werewolves back so all of Green’s hill could be under one roof.

That’s happened, but the timeline is just a little bit off. The Green’s Hill Werewolves will be published in two volumes in the early part of next year, before Quickening Volumes 1 and 2. So if you haven’t read about Jack and Teague and Katy yet—well, there really is a story out there. In the meantime, just know that they’re important—and their story is coming.

Amy

Acknowledgments

HOW DO I love these people? Let me count the ways…

I love everyone who has been with me from the very beginning. I love the people who edited for me when I was an independent writer, shipping my book from person to person in the hopes of feedback, any feedback at all. I love the fans who loved me through all my flaws and continue to love my writing in spite of the fact that my learning curve is as flat as day-old root beer. I love Gin and my current editing team because even though they may possibly hold small private ceremonies to burn me in effigy, they have the grace and good humor not to let me know this happens and to keep all the photographic evidence to themselves.

I love my family, who still thinks my writing is cool, and my husband, who listens to me talk about imaginary people at inopportune times.

I love my best friend Mary, because… like whoa. You cannot even believe what she puts up with.

I love Damon and Tere and Rayna and Kate and everyone in my convention crew, because they listen to my bullshit when I’m at my most vulnerable.

I love Elizabeth and Lynn, because after seven years, they still want me to write for them, and they’re still happy to hear from me when I do.

Character Lexicon

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED IN VULNERABLE:

Cory. Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick op Crocken Green started this little adventure as a gas station clerk, and then she met Adrian, a vampire who loved her, and Green, who loved them both. She is now married to Green, Bracken, and Nicky, carries three of Adrian’s marks and so leads his kiss of vampires, and is still trying to get that degree.

Green. Vernal Green, Lord of Leaves and Shadows. The leader of most of the supernatural peoples in Northern California, Green is not a warrior. Instead he leads and heals with sex and love, and people would die to protect him.

Bracken. The youngest full-blooded sidhe on the hill, Bracken was Adrian’s lover and fell in love with Cory at first sight. He stepped away from her then, because Adrian loved her and they didn’t share well, but upon Adrian’s death, he became her full-time lover.

Adrian. Adrian started life as the sexually abused cabin boy whom Green rescued on his way to America. Adrian became a vampire so he wouldn’t age and leave Green alone, and even after he fell in love with Cory, he couldn’t survive without his ties to Green.

Arturo. Arturo came from the jungles of South America to the new world in the fifties, trying to find an easier life. He found Green’s hill instead, and instead of conquering, fell exquisitely in love (in a very heterosexual way) with a leader who would lead with compassion instead of violence.

Grace. A devoted family woman, Grace was dying of untreated breast cancer in Redding when Adrian heard her yearning to see her family grow, with or without her. He granted her wish and made her a vampire, and Grace has come to love her Green’s hill family even more intensely than she loved the mortal family she left.

Mitch. Mitch was Renny’s first lover. Renny loved him since they were kids—when Mitchell was accidentally transformed into a werekitty, Renny actually seduced him so he’d bite her and turn her too. Mitch was skittish and independent and refused to accept Green’s generosity and live in the hill, but Renny’s heart was so twined with his that she almost lost all of her humanity when he was one of Sezan’s first victims.

Max. Max is the police officer who tried to ‘save’ Cory from Green’s hill when she first met him. In the end, Green’s hill saved him, and he ended up beguiled by a girl who was more cat than human.

Renny. Renny became a werecat to follow her first husband, Mitch, into the life. When Mitch was killed, Renny’s cat personality became dominant and nearly feral. She’s become more human since she and Max have become a couple and gotten married… but not by much.

Marcus. Marcus was a history teacher with a passion for snow skiing. He’s got curly brown hair, big brown eyes, and a teacher’s affection for Cory. He enjoys their project of documenting the world they’ve found themselves in as he tries to make sense of living with fangs and a taste for blood.

Phillip. Phillip was a stockbroker with a passion for snow skiing. After Marcus found him buried in an avalanche and brought him over as a vampire, the two spent twenty years struggling with their sexuality and their boundless love for each other. What they finally decided upon was a relationship based on the sentiment I apparently can’t live without you, asshole, and that seems to be working for them.

Sezan. Part sea-nymph, part human, Sezan is what happens when someone is warped from conception on. He came to NorCal to torment and kill Adrian—but he had help.

Crispin. Crispin was the kiss leader of the Folsom vampires until Sezan arrived and brainwashed/drugged/threatened him to force Crispin into Sezan’s own vendetta.

Crocken and Blissa. Bracken’s parents, Crocken and Blissa, are a study in opposites. Blissa is a flittery sex kitten of a four-foot pixie, and Crocken looks like an undusted pile of rocks. Together (and with a little bit of Green’s magic to make everything fit the way it should) they managed to produce Bracken, whom they love to distraction.

Leah. Leah’s little brother died and Leah descended into a spiral of sex, drugs, and self-destruction. Adrian saved her from all of that, but Leah’s emotional makeup does not include any sort of monogamous relationship. Still, she misses the stability of having a small nuclear family and has spent years trying to find a balance in the hill.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED IN WOUNDED

Nicky. Nicky is an Avian—a shapeshifter who turns into a bird. He met Cory while she was attending CSU San Francisco immediately after Adrian’s death, when he was working for Goshawk, the bad guy. Nicky accidentally bonded to Green and Cory in the course of saving Bracken’s life, but because he was trying to atone for his assault on Cory at the time, Green and Cory took them into their family—and their bed.

Mario. Mario was an Avian who worked for Goshawk, the bad guy in Wounded who convinced Nicky to mind-rape Cory on their first date. Mario’s wife, Beth, was killed in an assault on Green’s hill, and Green gave Mario back his will to live. Mario is midheight, stocky, and very proud of his Mexican heritage.

LaMark. LaMark is another sweet-tempered Avian who had the misfortune to meet up with Goshawk while struggling with his identity. Unfortunately, LaMark’s identity is not a comfortable one—a gay, black Avian is sort of doomed wherever he goes, isn’t he? In spite of that, LaMark is a nice guy with a sense of humor and a blinding smile.

Andres. Andres is the leader of the San Francisco vampires. In Wounded, he allied his vampires with Cory’s—and passed up on an opportunity to take both Cory and Bracken into his bed.

Orson. Orson is the leader of the San Francisco werewolves. He’s not a particularly physical fighter, but he is an aggressive advocate for his people.

Mist. Green’s old lover, Mist betrayed Green to Titania and Oberon. When Green escaped their faerie hill, Mist watched jealously as Green fought for a place of his own. Mist was responsible for sending Sezan Adrian’s way—he couldn’t stand that Green was happy, especially with someone Mist considered inferior.

Morana. Mist’s lover at the time of Wounded. She’s mostly just a smug, superior, elitist bitch who thought Green was a good lay. For that alone we despise her.

Goshawk. Goshawk was the leader of the Avians in San Francisco. He was working on world domination when he convinced Nicky to mind-rape Cory in order to get her most powerful memories to drive his power. Nicky was guilt-ridden and turned against his former leader in order to help the girl he hurt.

Timmy and Danny. Timmy and Danny were two of the Avians who were set against Green’s hill. They were captured instead and given sanctuary. Like LaMark, Mario, and Nicky, they chose to stay at the hill instead of rejoining Goshawk’s forces.

Titania and Oberon. The traditional leaders of the sidhe in England, Titania and Oberon ruled over a court full of sexual excesses and cruelty. They held Green prisoner in their famed faerie hill because nobody could provide sexual satisfaction like Green. Green hoarded his power, though, and eventually snuck himself and his lime trees out of their garden and across the sea.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED IN BOUND

Chloe. Grace’s bitter, unpleasant daughter. Chloe had to have her memories of her vampire mother and of Green’s hill wiped in Bound because she was not the kind of mortal Green allowed at the hill (i.e., she was a real bitch).

Gavin and Graeme. Chloe’s sons, they adored Green’s hill and completely accepted all of the strangeness within. Once a year they come back to the hill—Green has arranged a sham camp to cover for their chance to visit with their grandmother and all the other people they have come to love.

Sweet. Sweet is one of the more promiscuous sidhe at the hill—but also one of the most pleasant. She’s also one of the three sidhe who are known for being healers.

Ellen Beth. Ellen Beth was brought to the hill when her lover was infected with some poisonous blood. Her lover died horribly, and Ellen Beth was turned over to Sweet for emotional healing. Sweet decided to keep her, and Ellen Beth has been happy to be kept.

Erik. Erik is a werecoyote with a sad past and a long-ago history with Green, Bracken, and Adrian. He is content to live in Austin and run his own company, until he meets up with Green and Green introduces him to Nicky. Both of them realize that they have something in common—too low-key for the intense emotions of the hill, they both make better secondary characters… except to each other, where they are the heroes of their own story.

Kyle. The lone survivor of the Folsom vampires, Kyle’s beloved, a girl named Davy, was killed because she and Cory vaguely resembled each other—and because they were friends. Cory took Kyle into her kiss and forced him to want to live.

Hallow. Hallow is a sidhe and a professor at Sacramento State University, where Cory and the other students attend school. He is also—by Green’s request—a counselor for the students themselves. Although Green usually counsels his own people, he felt that he was way too close to the situation as Cory’s lover and her leader to be objective or effective, and thus his trust in Hallow.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED IN JACK & TEAGUE (& KATY)

Jack. Jack is actually a nice, quiet young man. When his sister—who became a werewolf by choice—is killed, Jack asks Green for some answers to her world and the people who would kill her. Paired with Teague to be human liaisons to Green’s hill and to go out and deal with violent and legal matters outside the hill, Jack fell utterly and irrevocably in love with his damaged, noble partner. When the two of them become werewolves (Jack by accident and Teague by choice), Jack’s transition to the hill is marred by his realization that Teague really is the great man Jack has always believed—and that means that his loyalties cannot ever be exclusively Jack’s.

Teague. Teague was brutally abused as a child and inculcated in the same ideas of hate and prejudice that killed Jack’s sister. One night while hunting a werewolf, he is injured while saving the life of a young man who looks very human—and Adrian pays him back by bringing him to Green. From that moment on, he is Green’s devoted subject. When Jack is injured and Cory comforts him while waiting for the injury to heal, Teague’s loyalty is transferred to the lady of the house, even while he pursues a relationship with Katy and Jack, whom he loves beyond reason.

Katy. Katy has loved Teague Sullivan since she was barely old enough to talk. When she found that fate had brought him to Green’s hill too, she pursued him—and Jack—with a single-minded quest for happiness. Now that they’re a family, she wants to be a part of Teague’s adventures whenever she can be.

Lambent. Lambent joined the hill just before Jack and Teague were bitten. He had always been semi-independent of Titania and Oberon, but until he ended up on Green’s hill, he had no idea how much he’d valued his autonomy—or how much he hated the antique laws that governed sidhe behavior in the old country.

CHARACTERS WE MEET IN RAMPANT

Tanya. A not-yet-mated sylph.

Sam. Offspring of the other and a human.

Walter. A sweet, young, newly made vampire.

Rafael. The leader of the Redding vampires.

Annette. Nicky’s unpleasant ex-girlfriend.

John and Terry. Nicky’s parents.

CREATURES

Sidhe. High elves—lots of powers, humanoid attributes, and physical beauty.

Fey. All of the underclasses of elves existing at Green’s hill—pixies, nixies, sprites, gnomes, sylphs, red-caps, trolls, fairies, etc. etc. etc.

Weres. Shapechangers, they age at about 1/3 – 1/4 the speed of a human, have super strength, super speed, and whatever characteristics their creature possesses. Werecreatures reproduce by biting humans. They probably can carry young of their own species, but interspecies mating is so prevalent at Green’s hill that no one knows for sure.

Vampires. The blood-sucking undead—but in a nice way.

Sylphs. Sexless fey, they choose their gender when they choose their mates.

Avians. The only shapechanger that’s born and not made by another shapechanger. The Avians are bonded for life with the person/people involved in their first sexual experience. If this mate doesn’t produce offspring within ten years, the Avian is doomed.

Cory: Buzzkilling

GETTING BAD news when you’re suspended fifty feet above the ground is the definition of buzzkill.

Green and Bracken were below me, ready to catch—don’t get me wrong, I’m not stupid. But there I was, holy shit and cannyagimmehallelujah, I was flying! Suspended off the ground, hovering in the crystal-shard February blue, watching the fat-sheep clouds scudding much farther above me and shivering convulsively. Below me I could see big clumps of crocuses and pinks defiantly brightening Green’s gardens. In the foothills they were rare, but in Green’s hill, the rare was commonplace, and that crunchy sweet smell was teasing us with the promise of spring as I practiced my flying.

Last year, I’d been put in a position where being able to fly would have been extremely handy, but my lack of control had completely biffed that opportunity, so my husbands and I—yes, husbands, no shit, we all had rings—were out here practicing my stuff. You never know when you might plummet hundreds of feet from a bad guy’s nasty, slippery, dead-fleshed grasp, and a little initiative might make hitting bottom a lot more comfortable, right?

So there I was, arms spread like a psychotic bird—because Nicky shrieking about in his bird form wasn’t psychotic enough for both of us—and Green and Bracken just freaking out whenever my flight plan deviated and it looked as though they couldn’t even hyperspeed it fast enough to catch me, and I was trying not to have too much fun.

I mean, it was sort of fun, even if it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a female Yeti (is that a Yetina? I have no idea), but I was terrified, and I’m not that great at driving fast so what in the fuck made me think flying would be such a swell idea? Besides, my life was so intimately tied with the three men helping me that getting hurt or killed with what was, essentially, a training exercise, was absolutely unriskable. So I was having fun, but I was working very hard at being in control of myself—hovering, swooping, diving, and unintentionally scaring Bracken enough to make his sidhe-pale skin blanch almost green. Green, on the other hand, was handling the panic well. The occasional frustrated Beloved… would waft up on a warning breeze, but mostly he had faith that I wouldn’t put myself in more danger than necessary.

But I guess you can’t help but buzz a little when you’re, well, buzzing, so it was a definite distraction when Hallow, my professor-cum-shrink, pulled up in a rather spiffy white Lexus, looking as though someone had died.

Dammit, you don’t look like someone died in my world unless the news is pretty fucking dire, right? I mean… people do die around us, all the time.

I came dropping out of the sky like lead shit from a helium duck.

Green and Bracken both screamed, Fuck! and then scrambled to find a place below me, but I beat them to it, putting a big fat slice of power below me and sort of skimming off it like one of those giant bounce-house slides. I whooped up for about ten feet at the end and then set another cushion of will beneath me, coming to a rest about two feet off the ground on all fours before sinking slowly until I hit grass, like a Labrador on a punctured air bed.

Bracken collapsed next to me, his haggard face buried in his hands, his onyx-black hair in disarray around his perfect, inhumanly beautiful triangular features.

When his eyes met mine, they were murky and dark with hints of green like a pond in shadow, but when he opened his mouth, all of that murkiness disappeared.

I cannot fucking do this. It scares the piss out of me every fucking time.

I sat back on my haunches and scooted into him, leaning my head on his shoulder. At no time was the subject in real danger. I grinned, mimicking the humorless voice of a TV documentary narrator. He grunted and jerked away, and I looked up to Green for help.

Green smiled and blew out an exasperated breath, shaking his hip-length butter-colored hair down his back. Really, mate—after everything else we’ve done, you can’t take a spin in the garden? Your mother let you do this when you were four.

No one could resist Green when he was determinedly good-natured, and Bracken was no exception. He looked up, the corners of his sour grimace quirking upward, and shook his head. It’s a good thing I’m mortal, mate—I don’t think I could take scares like that for a millennium.

And now I wanted to smack him. The big hoser had given his immortality up for me, because I was mortal, and he’d just rubbed salt in that wound. Typical, for Bracken.

I smacked the back of his head for real, and felt much better.

Oww…. And then, also typical Bracken, he realized how badly he’d screwed up before he could get mad. By the time Hallow walked up, he was repeatedly smacking his forehead with the heel of his hand, and Nicky had landed in the open patch of green I’d fallen on and was rolling barefoot on the frost-melted grass.

I was about two breaths away from ripping into Nicky like a kid into a Christmas present for losing his handmade woolen socks when I remembered why I’d fallen out of the sky in the first place.

Hallow had the same preternaturally beautiful features as Green—triangular bone structure, clean lines, and overlarge eyes—but his were blue. Unlike my beloved, though, Hallow’s beauty had never moved me. I liked the guy, but that didn’t keep me from spitting venom at him now.

Who died? I demanded, and for all his professorial dignity, Hallow managed to look sheepish.

I’m so sorry about that—I do have bad news, but it’s not that dire. He wore his hair long, like Green’s, but his was plaited and pulled back from his aesthetic features. He was playing with the end of the braid.

So no one died. But someone was about to. Cough it up, dammit! I growled. I had been doing so well this time around—some of my other flying attempts had rewritten disaster movie scripts—and if he was going to drop in and make me just drop, well, he’d better have a damned good explanation.

Have you ever heard bad news that made your eyes glaze over and your brain black out? I understand it doesn’t happen for really bad things, like death or dismemberment or even cancer, but I knew a girl in high school who swore that it happened whenever her current boyfriend broke up with her. Apparently it made the next ten minutes after each breakup horribly awkward, because she would deny all knowledge of the preceding conversation.

When I came to, I was staring at Hallow with eyes that were dried by the wind and with a little bit of drool tracking the corner of my lips. The men were all staring at me as though I were a rabid bear, and I had to ask Hallow to repeat what he’d just said.

I swear to the Goddess I was listening the second time, and it still didn’t make any sense.

What do you mean, I’m not going to graduate? This much had seeped in, but it was like getting cold maple syrup through the baked hardpan of a planetary desert.

Hallow grimaced uncomfortably. My sudden-onset senility was worrisome to him, but since I’d been working my ass off for nearly the last four years through both junior college and state college to try to get my BA ASAP, I had to admit that the 180-degree mind-fuck was leaving my cortex a little sore.

"You will graduate, Lady Cory—"

Would you stop calling me that like it’s going to calm me down? I snapped, and he gritted his teeth and continued.

It’s just that you have too many units right now to graduate with a bachelor’s degree.

I blinked slowly. How in the fuck is that even possible?

Hallow took another deep breath and waded in again. You took so many units last year that you have more than enough to graduate. But you don’t have them in the right places. If you take the classes you need in the right places, you will have so many units that you will have enough for two bachelor’s degrees. If you apply for the master’s course and take the nine units of thesis work, you’ll have enough for two bachelor’s and a master’s degree. Which I suggest you do. But it means that—

I don’t graduate this year. Okay. I was finally starting to understand.

Hallow sighed and let out a whole lot of tension from his shoulders. That’s right, my lady, you’ll have to wait until next year.

Now, two years ago I would have pitched a fit of cosmic proportions—six zillion light-years from here, some species that registered emotional sound through its skin would have shuddered, turned brown, and said, What in the fuck was that?

But I was older now. I was more mature than that. I was the leader of my fucking people, and I did not pitch fits over bizarre twists of bureaucratic insanity, I simply… I just…. Oh Jesus… I was going to be the first person in my family to ever graduate from college. I’d about worn my impending letters like some sort of badge of triumph over the ignominy of white-trash-dom that I’d been trying to shake my entire life.

Uhm, Cory? Bracken said gently, throwing himself under the bus of my potential meltdown. He was used to it. Our relationship had the passion of a sailor addicted to the sea—the storms were exhilarating and the smooth sailing was a thing of beauty, and he could weather the rolling thunder of my bitchiness like no other lover.

Beloved? Green asked, even more gently. Of the three of them, his sweetness, and the kind and even keel of his beautiful soul, could be the only things that would calm me down.

Nicky, my shape-shifting accidental lover, had no such finesse. Well hell, Cory, what are you going to do?

I turned to him and blinked rapidly, trying to slam this bit of unwelcome news into perspective. I mean, shit, hadn’t I just thought someone had died? I’d been prepared to deal with death, for crap’s sake, couldn’t I take a change in my goddamned plans?

I growled, grunted, and tried again from behind grinding teeth, finally finding my outlet.

I am going to go knit.

And with that, I turned on my heel and stalked through Green’s glorious gardens, blind to their loveliness, and pounded up the stairs to the landing and into the living room, leaving my three husbands wincing in sympathy behind me.

Renny, my best friend and part-time giant tabby cat, had a built-in radar as to whether or not I needed a girl friend or a kitty when I was upset.

She was curled up in a big purring tabby-cat blob on the olive-turquoise-violet colored quilt at my feet as I sat cross-legged on the gi-freaking-normous bed I shared with Bracken, knitting Nicky another goddamned pair of socks.

Nicky actually stuck his head in first, but I glared at him, and he cringed when he saw the burgundy, brown, and lime-green yarn I was working with. He knew they were his, because always trendy for Nicky, and he ducked right on back out. One of the things that made our polyamorous marriage work was that Nicky had learned to recognize when I needed my man friend with the nice body and comforting smell and when I needed one of my beloveds who could steady the world when it rocked beneath my feet.

I should have been ashamed that this was one of those times, but what the fuck. Sometimes even Lady Cory, beloved to Lord Green and queen of the goddamned vampires, could get stuck in a petty, shit-kicking funk about dumb fucking bullshit that complicated her life, right?

Well, not for long.

Bracken stalked in after about half an hour, so lost as to what to do for me that he was actually squinting in puzzlement.

What are you making? he demanded—and he was probably unaware of how arrogant he sounded. He was trying, honestly, to make conversation.

Socks for Nicky, I replied mildly, and his frown deepened.

Little fucker lost the last pair in trans, he said, and I nodded glumly. It happened sometimes. Nicky was an Avian, a bird shape-shifter, and they were the only species that didn’t have to strip naked to shift. They carried their clothes and stuff on the oil in their feathers—except when a bird is stressed or tired, that oil gets a little thin, and something has to go. I freaked Nicky out by almost plummeting to my death, and he lost his socks.

You like Nicky, I reminded him. It had not always been so, but Bracken had finally accepted Nicky’s accidental and unintentional place in my bed and my life. Still, it didn’t hurt to remind Brack that Nicky had his place. Besides, there were things we could do with three people in a bed that we couldn’t do with two, and Bracken had been raised with enough sexual diversity and privilege to enjoy those things.

We were bound. If either of us took our pleasure outside our marriage or any of my preexisting bindings—like, say, Green or Nicky—Bracken would die horribly. Not me. Bracken. There is always a flip side to the passion of the Goddess’s magic, and this was one of them. Marriage? Fabulous—but you’d better make good and damned sure that you were in it for the long haul. If I had been a sidhe instead of a human sorceress, Bracken and I would be locked inside this binding for a lot more than a mortal lifespan—not that either one of us would have minded then either, not even a little teeny bit, but like I said, he’d been raised with some freedoms.

In the context of those freedoms, Nicky had gone from being a nuisance to a perk—even if he was only my perk. Bracken was bound to me and Nicky was bound to me, and the two of them had learned to tolerate each other, except in bed.

In bed, Bracken had taken to being my primary lover like sex was a competitive event. It was like a sweet lovers’ game, except the stakes seemed to be the increasingly colorful state of Green’s once pristinely finished wood-paneled walls. My losses of control—even small ones—in bed tended to change the state of the world around me. Sometimes it was cute—olive, turquoise, and lavender paneling in the living room, for example.

Sometimes it was huge. Green and I, with our beloved vampire, Adrian, had completely reformed the crown of Green’s hill, complete with trees doing erotic things with their trunks, if you can believe that bullshit. Bracken and I had created a hotel.

Sometimes it was terrifying. The things I had done upon Adrian’s death were an object lesson of why power shouldn’t be allowed to run rampant.

So Bracken strategized and Nicky accepted—and I treated their efforts with affection and passion and as practice sessions to control my body, my mind, and my magic.

No—I loved my husbands, all three of them, but no combination of us would ever be what Green and Adrian and I had been, and I knew better than to try.

Right now, Bracken was wishing that he didn’t like Nicky quite so much, because it was much easier to use my lesser lover as a scapegoat than to figure out a way to comfort me. Not knowing how to comfort me was item number 2657 on the list of things that made Bracken cranky—and per usual when he was cranky, he found some way to purge that emotion from his extremely passionate system.

You never make me socks! he accused, perfectly serious, and I fought the urge to laugh.

You hate stuff on your feet! I responded. It was true. All elves did. Even outside just now, in the chilly February, Bracken and Green had been barefoot. Besides, I just finished your sweater for this year! I fingered the gray wool on his arm. The yoke of the thing was a dark, masculine green and purple over a cream background. My first venture into Fair Isle patternworking—I was very proud.

Well, I wouldn’t hate it if you made it! he protested, a little panic in his voice. Really bad shit happens to elves if they lie, and he was obviously hoping he really felt this way and wasn’t just saying this to make me feel better. He brightened when the nausea and cramping didn’t start, and he continued on, a little more confident. But I wouldn’t want them in…. Bracken wrinkled his nose, and I held out my hands. Those colors. Enough said. And they’d need to be strong. But not plain. He stroked the smooth fingering-weight wool between my fingers. And it needs texture… this is ordinary. If I’m going to wear something on my feet it needs to press your fingertips into my flesh.

I nodded, completely bemused, and unbidden, a pattern for Bracken’s socks began to emerge in my head. Man’s colors, lots of texture, not plain….

And not feminine either, he emphasized, and I stifled the urge to chortle. From his square shoulders to his frequent glower, there was not an effete inch to Bracken’s bisexual skin. I could make these things

Reviews for Rampant, Vol. 1

[Gerisgrltrl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Cory and Bracken meet Nicky's parents while investigating supernatural occurrences in Redding.