Deadhead (6 page)

Harry said, “I do hate to disagree with you, my dearest one, but your brother brings up a valid point. Your visitor doesn’t want to leave you, and she’s anticipating your every move. If you would just allow me, this one time, to assist you?”

Wes shook his head in wonder, looking through spells and ingredients. “How are you sure any of this works, anyway? Do you just drink a bunch of cheap booze, try stuff, and hope it flies?”

Flying
. I shot Wes a look and nodded enthusiastically.

“Uh, no.” He glared at me with his one good eye. “No, no, no. I’m not flying her around on my back. I’m not a taxi, Marnie-Jean.”

That was exactly what I was thinking, and bounced a bit on my butt in the grass, pumped. My spriggan thought maybe the deal wasn’t solid, so I poked Wes hard in the shoulder with a
you’d-better
older sister glare. He poked me back with his hard dead-guy finger, and the spriggan and I yelped.

“
Ow!
” The spriggan had a moment of fear; she didn’t like that my body felt pain like that, and she hadn’t expected this dead guy to injure me. I let her see just what Wesley was capable if he really wanted to hurt me.

“First things first,” Batten said. “We’ve got to get her out.”

Harry put a hand on Wes’s shoulder and bent to speak in his ear. My spriggan and I tried to listen in, but Harry shot me a look and took Wesley aside, where he began to think in my brother’s direction, blocking all feeling through our Bond. I was being kept out of the loop. Wes looked uncertain, and it seemed like Harry had to repeat himself several times before Wesley got the full picture.

Wes said, “We’d better warn Batten before we… yeah. Okay.” He looked me up and down and shrugged. “If you’re sure she’ll forgive you? I don’t have to live with her afterward. I can hide in Canada.”

Batten grumbled, “Don’t like the sound of that.”

Neither did I, frankly, but I wasn’t sure if those were my worries or those of my spriggan. The three men had a private consultation a few feet away. Batten grumbled, but nodded that he understood, and strode back to finish settling the honeysuckle plant into its new home in my yard. I tried to catch his eye questioningly, but he avoided my glances. Wes and Harry turned to face me in unison, and both of them set their shoulders like they were preparing for a physical rumble.

That’s exactly what they’re doing
, I thought, and the spriggan jerked in my brain with alarm. She poked through my memories to figure out if they’d really hurt me, and as a last ditch effort to encourage her to leave, I showed her Harry and Wes going feral and chasing me through the yard in a savage night of bloodlust brought on by a black witch’s spell. I flashed back on Harry’s pale grey eyes going over to pure white, his fangs becoming tearing weapons, sinking into my hand so hard I felt the little bones snap. The spriggan knew any pain to befall me would hurt her, too, and she began to panic.

Wes bolted in my direction without warning, hissing, showing me full fang. Part of me didn’t buy it, and that was trouble; the spriggan instantly latched on to my doubt. He stopped close to me, getting in my face, spittle flying from behind his fangs.

The spriggan had a surprise of her own. My hands snatched at the air near the ground, grabbing green energy with a natural fluidity my witchcraft had never allowed. She dragged that power into us and slammed Wes with both of my palms. He was not expecting it; I felt a blast of strength heat my hands inside my gloves and Wesley went flying back. He landed on his ass with a grunt of surprise, shaking his head.

That was some serious Raiden from Mortal Kombat shit
, I enthused. I didn't have time to explain any of that to the spriggan before Harry approached.

“Very nicely done, Nameless One,” Harry said, smiling benevolently. “The young lad was not anticipating such a formidable defense. Perhaps you’d like to try it on me?”

Harry’s attack was a blur ending in a vice grip on both of my biceps, his fingers digging in enough to impress upon my intruder the strength of his hands. She accessed my self-defense training to whip both my fists outward like Hood had showed me; on anyone else, including Wes, it would almost certainly have worked to break his grasp. Her green power was impressive, and the heat of it roared through my arms. Harry blinked with surprise but managed to keep hold, pressing his cold fingertips into my flesh harder.

I attempted to drop out of his grasp, using the downward swing of my weight to unbalance him. He held me up effortlessly. I tried to use that shift in balance to throw my body into his left side, but he would not be moved. Centuries of experience had him moving with grace and ease to counter any move I might make, while his implacable, unblinking grey gaze challenged me and my hitchhiker. After a minute’s struggle, I hadn’t even unseated his top hat. He grinned, swinging me around and dragging me up into the cold, relentless clutch of his arms. Pressed belly-to-belly like this, I could see directly up into his mouth, and he’d clearly planned that.

I watched his fangs slide out from behind his human canines, slowly, like the well-crafted threat it most certainly was. He opened the Bond abruptly, his hunger and command roaring into my body hard enough to claim every inch, his authority over his companion vibrating my tightened muscles as they strained against him. He turned his unholy platinum gaze down at me, showing me a dollop of sympathy; he intended to hurt me. It was going to be bad. It was going to be worse than anything I’d felt, a punishing blow to shock my system. If anyone could, it was Harry. I writhed and a horrified whimper escaped from deep in my throat, and I cast around for help. Wesley and Batten averted their eyes. This was no bluff.

“Brace yourself, love,” Harry whispered against my mouth.

The spriggan drew a last blast of power from the earth under my feet and brought a knee up. It hit Harry squarely in the groin. For a second, his grasp slipped, and she took her chance. Snatching every last drop of control she could, the spriggan used my legs to escape, bolting for the forest.

Wes shouted and Batten rocked into motion. His powerful legs kept up with me for the first ten steps but soon fell behind. He wasn’t my biggest problem.
It’ll never work
, I thought.
The dead are too fast
. My little legs pumped desperately as I pelted through the wet grass. Her extra energy was thwarted by the unsteadiness of the liquor in my veins, and my Keds slipped clumsily. Harry was an undaunted shadow racing at my side in the dark, and within moments, Wesley joined him.

The two immortals sped ahead of me to cut me off, pouncing and leaping like wild things in the moonlight. Their speed was breathtaking, no matter how many times I saw it. Harry was in front of me in a flash, stopping suddenly, a wall of immortal clout. I dodged him, but his arm shot out and collected me in one smooth motion that mocked my efforts. A low growl was my only warning before he sank fang.

Without the Bond’s tempering and warming and transmuting the act into one of lust, trust, and affection, the raw pain was astonishing. Harry let me,
made
me feel it. The shock rocked my body into an arch, and my arms flailed helplessly at the air. I opened my eyes to see Wes’s hand coming at my face. It closed over my nose and mouth while I wriggled in a vain attempt to throw off the revenant—
Vampire! Vampire!
—latched onto my jugular. Harry dug in further, pressing painfully deep, as he’d never done before. A cry leaked out of my throat against Wes’s insistent palm. I inhaled, thrashing crazily against the both of them, and the last of the powdered herbs blasted up my nostrils.

The next round of sneezing caused so much pain around the fangs buried in my flesh that I nearly passed out. I shook uncontrollably until one last jolt raked the spriggan free; she fled in a small desperate swan dive, a green arch in the air that tumbled pitifully to the grass.

Harry released his titan grip but loosely held me as he settled me to the ground beside my little ward. “Now,” he said, “let us give her a reason to stay out.”

I belly-crawled to my spriggan; part of me felt empty and naked without her, and my head swirled and pounded to match the throb in my neck. I pressed one gloved hand to my wound. As my brother shapeshifted into his slipper-humping bat form with audible pops and snaps and squeaking noises, I averted my eyes and instead watched my spriggan quake like an injured mouse.
Mina,
I thought.
That’s her name. Mina. She remembers a greener place.

“Mina,” I said softly.

“Trouble,” Batten said. “That’s her name.”

“Good heavens,” Harry murmured. “Then won’t she fit in perfectly here?”

“She didn’t mean harm,” I said, scooting across the grass toward the tiny, limp figure. My temple throbbed with what promised to become a whopping post-adventure headache. “She was doing her best to survive and spread. That’s her job.”

The spriggan’s small, yellow eyes fluttered open but rolled back in her head.

“Thing’s dangerous,” Batten muttered. “Reconsider this bush transfer. Should squish it while it’s neutralized.”

I felt a nurturing, mother-bear urge to hide the spriggan away and then punt Batten through a wall for suggesting such a thing, but I knew that was because I was still sharing a link with the creature; she had been in my brain, in my body, in my very self.

“No,” I said softly, gazing over to the honeysuckle now wedged next to the wide swath of forested land at the west of the property. Protected forest. “She’s not a danger. She wants a cozy place to live and spread, to ramble and roll.”

Roots. Permanence. Safety. Shelter
. But there was the other craving. A new wonder, painted with wide strokes across her tiny, green heart. The flutter of wings. The lift off. Soaring on a draft.
Flight. Freedom
. Not being shoved from one pot to another, and crammed into place by grubby hands that would never understand her needs and wants. I felt myself nodding.
Flight and freedom, to return to a place of safety
. Mina’s chest rose and fell rapidly, and though her lashes fluttered, her eyes remained closed.

Wes’s bat body quivered next to her, and the subtle cupping of wind under membranous wings stirred the spriggan. Mina floundered in the stiff stalks of grass, which were up to her chin; she flailed, swimming through it, hesitating between the inviting security of my face and the temptation to crawl onto the bat and take flight.

I lowered my face close to her and whispered, “You coulda just asked, you know.” Then I set her on the back of my gloved hand; both she and the glove were a deep shade of green, and she blended in but for her wild eyes. My right hand I turned palm down, spreading my fingers. I focused on the yellow candle’s flame still wiggling behind us in what was now full night, drawing the warmth in visible ripples as psi trembled around the heat. Now that I was alone in my head, the Blue Sense rebounded without difficulty. I dropped my hand next to Bat-Wes and wriggled it a bit to encourage her to hop on.

Wes flapped his wings and made as if to take off, and it jolted her into a last minute decision. She flung her tiny, stick-thin body onto the damp, matted fur on his back, slick with the effort of his transformation. He hunched as he became accustomed to her tiny weight clinging to him, then took four clumsy steps and lifted off.

Harry dodged as the bat fluttered directly at his top hat, and removed it to swing chidingly at Wes. He made a haughty noise of disapproval and aimed his very best frown at them as they swung into the shelter of the dark forest, flitting from tree to tree, stirring moths into flight and fluttering every leaf in his wake.

I felt Batten crouch at my side. “You all right?”

I touched my wound once more and looked at my glove as it came away dark with blood. I turned the stained fingertips up at Harry, who sucked his teeth unhappily.
Mostly
unhappily, I noted through the Bond. There was a current of something decidedly molten that he was damping down but unable to entirely extinguish, and, remembering other nights of pursuit through these same woods, ending with his fangs buried joyously, riotously, unabashedly in my far more than willing flesh, I could hardly blame him. I caught his eye to let him know exactly what I thought of that.
Yes, please
.

“Oh, I do apologize, my pet. How perfectly thoughtless and inconsiderate of me,” he said, motioning for me to shift closer to him. I leaned against his kneeling form and waved a hand at Batten to turn around and not watch as Harry softly and modestly tended my wound. He spared an extra kiss for my forehead too, and expressed wordlessly through the Bond how much he regretted having to hurt me. I smiled up at him and nodded; no explanations were needed. It worked. I was free. And, having warmed slightly from his feed, Harry also had a bit more flush than usual, and something I wanted to free. But
definitely
not with Batten standing around.

The odd couple returned through the dark, a black patch fluttering against the star-pricked sky. When her ride landed, Mina rolled agilely off Wes-bat’s back like a tiny green gymnast and marched through the jungle of the lawn to face me. She cocked her wee head to one side and considered me for a long moment. She seemed to come to some decision. Reaching one thin hand out, she patted the tip of my shoe as if to comfort me, gave her tushie two meaningful slaps that none of us understood, then turned towards her honeysuckle and darted into the foliage.

I said, “I’m going to assume two butt-slaps is spriggan sign language for thank you.”

Wesley took a few awkward steps and abandoned us to flight. He’d stay that way for the rest of the night, likely sulking about having been made to play dude-witch and taxi; transforming back to his revenant form would offer a bit more healing to his scars, so that was a bonus.

Harry dusted off the front of his shirt with a fine, pale hand. “Ripping good stuff. Very nicely done, my darling minion, if one ignores the unwarranted nasal invasion, failed magic, unwanted landscaping, and... oh, never mind all that. Come inside and I shall make for you a victor’s feast of meat and wine and of course the scones.”