The Green's Hill Novellas (21 page)

Phillip heaved and spent, and the moment was over. Someone was licking Phillip’s spend from his thighs, and Phillip was licking Marcus’s spend from his stomach, and Marcus simply closed his eyes and allowed himself to be rolled from body to mouth to body and joined the writhing, heaving, groaning orgy of communal vampire bodies trying to fill the void their leader had left when he left them.

They went back to that room a couple of times before Cory came back from school. She came back at the end of the semester, both triumphant and weakened. She had truly grieved herself almost to death, and then she had been attacked when her mourning was the most acute. Marcus and Phillip had gone down to the Bay Area to help when she’d been healing, and Marcus remembered the moment she had looked up and seen them both and realized that they were her people.

He’d been so terrified that she’d reject them, his hands had been shaking. She hadn’t, though. She’d smiled, the expression huge in her peaked, pale face, and nodded a little, accepting the faith and worship they had both given Adrian but was now hers by right. Before they’d left the Bay Area and come back up the to the hill, she and Green had claimed that power, blowing their combined mark through everyone who owed them blood fealty, and Marcus and Phillip had looked at the magic tattoos that had sprung up on their left and right wrists and felt hope. (The tats were inked so that when they clasped hands, the tattoos mingled. Marcus noticed this. He was not sure Phillip did.)

So Cory returned to her kiss and started making the small ritual blood exchanges that marked the vampires as hers. Her sorcery—and her own special person—made this exchange amazing. She seemed to have the ability to taste the things each vampire had cherished in life. Marcus tasted of “dry-erase marker and coffee,” and Phillip was “computer paper and hot chocolate.” In the end, they had loved similarly, and it gave him hope of a different sort.

But Cory wasn’t just bound to the kiss of vampires. Through accident, divine fuckup, and Bracken’s intense possessiveness as a lover, she ended up ritually bound to two other lovers besides Green—Bracken and a shape-shifter she did not love, who had been bound by accident. Bracken seemed able to deal with the situation, but Nicky, the other lover, was having a hell of a time fitting in.

She returned at Christmas, and so six months after Adrian’s death, Cory and the vampires had begun to find a balance. To the intense amusement (and sometimes discomfort) of the entire hill, she spent the next six months after that trying to find a balance with the lovers in her bed as well.

The big bed, the one with the red lights and the crimson sheets, was a place that Marcus and Phillip visited less and less often, and for a moment, a brief moment, Marcus began to feel even more hope. He began a quietly optimistic friendship with Cory and came to love her as much as he’d loved Adrian. Some of it may have been sexual—she had that plainly pretty thing going that had always made him search for the beauty underneath, and the hill’s little Goddess had it in spades. She was strong enough to survive heartbreak, smart enough to be the best student he’d ever had, and kind enough not to laugh when his infatuation made some of the moments between them heavy enough to cause blushes.

She was also off-limits, because she was in love with two men, one of them Green, and even Marcus, with all of his Phillip-doesn’t-love-me bullshit, wouldn’t put that weight on her shoulders. Perhaps the off-limits thing made it easier to love her—there would be no complications if he just thought of her from afar, right?

By February, Phillip had begun to bring girls to Marcus’s bed, one at a time, in an obvious, unspoken attempt to find a third lover to bind them together, and all of that peace disa-fucking-peared.

“WHAT THE
hell
,
Marcus?” Phillip was puzzled and pissed off, and Marcus didn’t care, fuck it all, not this time.

“She giggled like a hyena!” Marcus snapped, fighting the urge to kick his bed. Their bed. The bed they kept sharing with women who did nothing for him but showed Phillip’s increasing desperation to have one in their bed. Phillip’s bed hadn’t been fucked in for
months
,
but Marcus’s bed? No.
That
bed got the sheets changed every day.

“She giggled like a hyena,” he repeated, because the noise had made his teeth grind. “She had no sense of humor, she was dumb as a rock, and she gave the worst blow jobs in history!”

Phillip shrugged. “To
you
,
maybe.”

“To
anyone
,
Phillip. It’s hard to give a decent BJ when you keep talking while you’ve got the guy’s cock down your throat.”

Phillip fought off a smirk. “Well… yeah. That was sort of annoying.”

“It was
really
annoying, and I’m not sure how Nicky decided to recruit that woman, but I think some village is missing its idiot, okay?” Nicky, Cory’s third and accidental lover, was still struggling to find his place at the hill. He’d become, by default, a shape-shifter recruiter who was, possibly, the worst judge of character
ever.

Or that could just be Marcus’s opinion after Madison “Call Me Dissy” had
bitten his prick
while Phillip had been banging her from behind.

Marcus sank down to the bed, which was covered in a new black and burgundy quilt that Grace had made him for Christmas. He loved it a lot—and he also noticed that Phillip’s quilt was store-bought. Grace had made Phillip an Aran sweater for Christmas, but Marcus’s bed had been blessed by their head-mama vampire herself. Of course Phillip didn’t get it, in the same way he didn’t get the tattoos or the fact that the girls Marcus liked were too serious for Phillip and the girls Phillip liked were too… too… too
goddamned stupid to live
!

“Jesus, Marcus, when did you get to be such an asshole?”

Marcus glared at him. “When you decided to make being a threesome a pet project! Dammit, does there have to be a woman in here?”

“You
like
women!” Phillip reminded him snottily. “I
like
women! We
both
get off with women! What’s so bad about having one here? I mean… shit, Marcus. You keep acting like we’re human or something! You took care of
that
little problem twenty years ago—why can’t we party a little?”

“Because I don’t want a party! I just want you!”

A year. Almost a fucking year. Here it was, nearly Thanksgiving again—Adrian had been dead for a year and a half, and their little Goddess had been married to three lovers for almost six months, and Marcus and Phillip?

Well, they were in the same place they’d always been. Marcus was longing, and Phillip was futzing around because he thought love came around every goddamned day!

Phillip stopped and looked at him. “Since when?” he asked honestly, and twenty years of romantic backlog effectively shorted out every brain cell in Marcus’s head.

“Since when?” Marcus echoed blankly.

“Well, yeah. You never said you just wanted me. Since when was that an option?”

“Since when?”

“I woke up in here in another bed. I assumed you didn’t do guys.”

“Since when?”

“Well, you’ve only ever done
me.
I mean, I’ve never seen you sleep with Green!”

“And you take that to mean…?” Marcus was truly drawing a blank here—he could not seem to fathom the big thing that Phillip didn’t know. The thing Marcus wasn’t going to tell him, because the man wasn’t
ready
to know. Twenty years had gone by, and Phillip didn’t know?

Phillip shrugged. “I don’t know, man. It’s not like you’re in love with me or something.”

“Auuuuuggghhhhhh!”

He pulled back his fist and planted it in Phillip’s surprised face. Phillip had been a stockbroker—even as a fighter he tended to swoop and dive and tear with his teeth. He’d never broken up a fistfight or watched the werecreatures’ fracas in their common room, but Marcus had. When Phillip pulled back his arm to try to hit Marcus, Marcus caught his balled-up fist and pushed Phillip away.

“What in the
hell
,
you jerkwad! Jesus, try and get a guy laid….”

“
Auuughhh!
You
fucking
idiot!
Jesus
fucking
Christ
,
how can you
possibly
think this is about getting
laid
?”

Marcus’s fists bunched in Phillip’s shirt, and suddenly the two of them were crashing through the door to their room in a melee that Marcus couldn’t seem to stop. Phillip would block a punch, and Marcus would swing again and connect, and Phillip would swing and miss, and the whole time, Marcus was just
willing
him to come to his senses and figure it out.

And that was when someone grabbed him and Marcus by the shirt collars and shook them like misbehaving dogs.

“What in the
fuck
,
you idiot fuckheads?”

Marcus looked down at his dangling toes and held very still. “Sorry, Green,” he whispered. He looked from the corner of his eye and saw that Phillip was doing the same thing. Green was six feet seven inches tall, and although he didn’t advertise the fact, stronger than human. And apparently the two of them had gotten on his last nerve.

“Do you have any idea how tense we are here, mate? We’ve got two new shape-shifters on deck. You know that, right? Stronger than hell, and in the middle of some emotional bullshit that would curl your toes.” Teague and his partner in business (and apparently in everything), Jack, had joined the hill the day before. By all accounts Teague was skittish as hell, and Jack was hostile to everyone who wasn’t Teague. Marcus had a moment to think sourly that he was glad he and Phillip weren’t the only ones on the hill with heterosexuality issues, because it made him feel a whole lot less foolish about…. shit. Had they shattered their
door
?

“I’m sorry, Green,” Marcus said again and was rewarded by another shake from the back of his neck, this one gentler.

“And we’ve got some fucked-up werewolf business going down. You know that too, right? Tomorrow night you’re going on a run with Cory and Bracken—I need to know you two idiots are up to the job! They’re counting on you!”

Marcus grimaced. He and Phillip were Cory’s right-hand men out on the field. Whenever there was a supernatural threat that Cory felt needed her personal attention (and her formidable weapons), she and Bracken put together a team and investigated. They’d gotten pretty good at it—and since she and Green had widened their power base, there had been enough problems to keep Green and Bracken’s beloved pretty busy. Marcus and Phillip were always on her team, and Marcus liked it like that. He hated the thought, but he was pretty sure that if Cory had been on the hill just a little bit longer, had perhaps had a little more confidence in battle, that with all of her sorcerous gifts Adrian might not have had to die on that hillside in a burst of gentle blood rain. One thing was certain—she might not have been a vampire, but Cory took care of Adrian’s people like they were her own children. If she was yelling at someone, it was usually because that someone put his life thoughtlessly in danger, and for Cory, there were
no
acceptable losses.

It was that thought that finally made Marcus relax. He wriggled a little and was gently put down on the ground, Phillip with him.

“We’re fine,” Phillip said sourly, straightening his casual dress clothes. “He just decided to lose his temper for the first goddamned time in twenty years. We’ll figure it out.”

“Well, I hope so, mate. If you two can’t get this figured, maybe it’s time for a new living arrangement. There are at least three new empty rooms in the darkling—maybe one of you needs to move out!”

Marcus gasped, the sound reverberating around the hall like a rifle shot, and he turned stunned, hurt eyes toward the man who was father, big brother, best friend, best lover, and hero for the entire hill, all wrapped up in one.

“You’d do that?” he asked, his voice so laden with shock and hurt that Green moved his hand up to the back of Marcus’s neck again—but this time to massage and comfort.

Green lowered his head so they were temple to temple and said, “Only if you make me,” very softly. Then he turned those sensual lips to Marcus’s ear and said, “Tell him, Marcus. He doesn’t know where you’re coming from, and he needs to.”

Marcus looked at Green miserably, remembering that long-ago conversation with Grace, where she’d told him that Phillip wasn’t ready yet. But then, how long ago was that? For the first time, the weight of twenty years hit him—truly hit him. Twenty years they had been growing closer together with every sunset. Maybe, if Phillip wasn’t ready after twenty years, he never would be. If nothing else, the weight of this “crush” was beginning to remind Marcus with every passing second that he could never truly breathe.

“We’ll make it right,” he said numbly, and Green gave him a kiss on the temple before summoning something—Marcus thought it might have been a wood troll—that popped out of thin air to start working on their shattered door. Green ruffled Marcus’s hair, and then Phillip’s, and disappeared around the bend in the corridor, leaving Marcus and Phillip looking at each other in silence.

Marcus couldn’t do it—not now. Not in this tense moment of aftershock.

“I’m going to go flying,” he said abruptly and turned on his heel and left.

He knew he wasn’t alone about half a second after he walked outside and leaped into the air. For a moment he thought about ignoring Phillip, but then the thought crashed into his chest that maybe he and Phillip wouldn’t be a team forever. Maybe, in spite of all the time they should have had, all of the promises immortality had to offer, this would be the last time they went flying together.

He looked at Phillip, the man he’d loved for over a third of his existence, and gave a broken grin. The roaring of the wind was almost too loud in his ears to talk, so he went mind to mind, recalling those words from two guys on the top of a snow-covered hill a little more than twenty years earlier.