Another fifteen minutes.
IT GOT
better. After a month, they let Marcus out of what amounted to a giant vault in the basement, where they kept new vampires locked up so they didn’t go running amok through the rest of the hill. Marcus had to admit—if Adrian had been a less skilled tutor, and if there hadn’t been a steady procession of warm bodies coming through his room nearly every hour, they might have needed to lock that thing on him.
Blood and body lust were
not
comfortable obsessions.
But it was a condition Marcus learned to live with.
A month after Gina had flown in front of Marcus’s car, causing him to swerve off Foresthill Road and down a gulley into a tree, Marcus was told to feed deeply and then taken to meet Green.
Green wasn’t human either—but he wasn’t a vampire, and he wasn’t a shape-changer, and for the first five minutes of their acquaintance, Marcus simply stared at him, blinking and trying not to be a fool.
Green had hip-length, butter-colored hair, astonishing emerald-colored eyes, and pointed ears.
Yes. Pointed ears. He also had a face that was almost a perfect triangle—wide-set eyes, wide cheekbones, pointed chin. He had attenuated fingers and toes (and bare feet), a torso that was unusually long and narrow (and no shirt), and was at
least
six and a half feet tall.
The look he gave Adrian was heavy-lidded with affection, and Marcus had to reevaluate everything he knew about this world—again.
There had been a steady stream of willing bodies through Marcus’s little vault, all of them male. Marcus, half-numb with his new, frightening drives, had simply assumed that this would be his life now—willing body after willing body. He’d even started to forget that he’d liked women when he’d been alive. He’d never been fucked into the mattress before by another man, and he’d certainly never sucked another man’s cock or fingered a tightened sphincter or fucked a willing ass or a willing mouth before his induction into the vampire world, but he found, when his mind cleared of the bloodlust, that he enjoyed these things.
He’d started a vague assumption that this was who he was now.
Looking at the unadulterated sweetness passing between Adrian and Green, he suddenly remembered the look in his girlfriend’s eyes when he’d finally made his move and kissed her like they would end up in bed together. He remembered the way she sighed when he was inside her and the way her little yelps of passion had made the entire world crystallize and shimmer with heat and desire.
He wasn’t aware he was weeping until he wiped his hand across his eyes and saw that it was covered with a mixture of blood and brine, and his vision was red with it.
They were meeting in the front room of the hill, which had a wraparound window overlooking a canyon silvered with starlight. Before Marcus could even wipe his eyes, the room was empty of everyone except Green.
“Marcus, is it?” Green asked gently, and Marcus nodded, beyond words. “Come here, Marcus. There are some things I’m not sure you know.”
The first thing that Marcus didn’t know was that making love to Green was like making love to sunshine on a summer’s day. For a vampire, it was both heartbreaking and precious to have that touch of warm flesh without the promise of iron-rich blood beneath. (The elves bled sugar-sweet ichor—it was the vampire’s equivalent of fifty-year-old scotch.)
The second thing Marcus didn’t know was….
Everything.
Green’s hill—Adrian’s home—was a commune, perhaps the only place in the world where every preternatural being in the world was welcome, and most gathered. Green was a sidhe, a high elf, the kind with all the power, but he wasn’t the only fey creature in the place.
In fact, the fey creatures outnumbered the vampires
and
the shape-shifters, and if you counted the tiny ones, the little sprites who mostly just looked like glowing lights unless you got close, and all the kinds of not-so-tinies, the pixies and nixies and brownies and gnomes and trolls and ogres and yunwi-tsunsdi (Native American pixies) and every other creature from folklore who lived there, the fey outnumbered the vampires and shape-shifters in astounding numbers.
And Green didn’t give a shit. They were
all
his children.
As Green’s flesh merged with Marcus’s that night, he didn’t fuck. He stroked, he touched, and he
talked.
“Different than with women, mate, right?” he said, palming Marcus’s cock with a touch so fantastic Marcus almost came just then. “But you like women, and that’s good. So do I.”
That surprised Marcus. “Yeah?” he asked, arching into Green’s touch, his kind words, his complete understanding of Marcus’s
complete
confusion.
Green moved his head down and took a lazy swipe with his tongue. Marcus’s cock tingled, and something wondrous short-circuited that whole blood-fuck circuit in his body, and for the first time in ever, he just wanted to
fuck.
But not now. He wanted to talk to Green more.
“Absolutely, mate, and they’re one of the world’s wonders. Don’t worry. You’ll have a woman in your bed again, right?”
“Right,” Marcus groaned as Green used his mouth some more.
“And in the meantime,” Green said between licks, “you can practice being as good a vampire as you were a man.”
It was only as Marcus’s body washed hot and cold with orgasm that he remembered his girlfriend. She had already mourned him, attended his coffinless service, and was probably moving in with his parents to share their grief, and he’d been fucking and feeding without even thinking about her pain.
Green swallowed and wiped his mouth and then moved languidly to Marcus’s side. He pulled a tissue from the side of his big hand-carved bed and began carefully wiping Marcus’s blood-brine tears from his cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Marcus—I’m sure it was a lot to lose.”
Marcus nodded and took the tissue and tried to hold himself together. He failed miserably and ended up sobbing into Green’s arms until Green stood up, holding a hefty armload of vampire as though he were a child, and ran him down to the darkling, both of them as naked as day.
When Marcus awoke the next morning, he was starving, but not so hungry that he savaged the throat of the young shape-shifter who had been waiting in his room for the sunset. The young
female
shifter, he realized somewhat amazedly, as she all but purred and shivered in his arms.
It wasn’t until they’d brought the act of feeding to a natural—and mutually satisfying—sexual conclusion that he realized something else.
He was in a different room.
THE ROOM
was one of the largest in the hill; Marcus was never comfortable having it to himself. Gina explained, not long after that first morning, that Adrian was trying to make him welcome. Gina had been a good person in real life but so unhappy in the human world that she’d been on the verge of self-extinction. Marcus was different—he’d been recruited by force. Gina had been distraught, and Adrian had felt bad for both the new vampire and her unintended victim.
The room was the hill’s way of telling him he had his space to be angry if he didn’t feel like fitting in. As Marcus grew more accustomed to Green’s hill—and to being a vampire—he found he wasn’t angry at all.
He was sad at first. When he was allowed out of the hill at night (and oh! the freedom of flying, the amazing roar of the wind in his ears and the peculiar cold wonder of the earth from two hundred feet in the air!), he took one opportunity to sneak away from the hill and go see how his family was doing.
He sat in the darkness below his parents’ window and listened with his new, improved, super vampire hearing, just to hear their conversation.
That wasn’t what he heard.
Yes, he heard their words and their sorrow… but he also heard their blood pounding through their veins, and even though he’d fed that night before he left, he
wanted
it.
He was appalled. For a terrible moment he was literally torn, half of him consumed with the alien urge to storm into his family’s home and
devour
them—rip their veins from their flesh and guzzle the blood as it pumped, hot and iron-oxygen fresh, from their cooling flesh.
He fought it. It took slow, stiff movements, and then, in the back of his mind, he heard Green’s words.
You can practice being as good a vampire as you were a man
.
He took two running jumps and flew.
He confessed to Adrian later, both that he’d gone farther than he promised and that the compulsion to… to
eat
the people he loved had almost driven him insane. He and Adrian were not lovers—not on a regular basis, anyway. But Adrian had made him—had literally willed him to swallow, willed his brain to spark when there was no oxygen and no electricity, and the only thing driving his sentience was magic. There was a bond; when Marcus had become calmer and not needed to fuck or feed off anything that moved, he could sense it and realized it was what had kept him from losing his sanity in the first place. So on this night, instead of sex—raw sex, tender sex, any sex—Adrian had folded him up in a very brotherly sort of embrace in the few moments before dawn.
“Most of us can’t be trusted around our loved ones for over a year after we’ve changed,” he told Marcus seriously, his sky-spangled eyes intent. “Love can be an all-consuming emotion, brother. In our state, it takes some practice to separate the eating from the embracing—you were lucky.”
Marcus shuddered in Adrian’s arms, suddenly so supremely grateful for the kindness at Green’s hill that he didn’t have words. He would have given up his nice bedroom—attached bathroom, solid oak furnishings, two king-size beds, oak paneling, nice, soft-green wool blankets and everything—and just lived in that vault in the basement with the crappy shower. He would have given up anything just to know that he had people who would love him through this change and do it unconditionally.
“How long did it take you, Adrian?” Marcus asked, feeling the dawn lethargy overtake him.
“That’s different,” Adrian said, voice sad. “The only person I’d loved when I was alive was Green.”
Marcus would have asked more, but the sun rose, and they slept.
TIME PASSED.
In one way, it seemed to pass furtively, slowly, with no sun to mark the changing of the days. But in another, the world seemed strangely fluid, timeless, and ten years of death went by far faster than someone who had lived thirty-three years of life could ever imagine.
For one thing, people were not idle at Green’s hill.
There was no clock to punch, there were no deadlines, work evaluations, or paychecks, but the hill
was
a collective. There was simply a gentle expectation that if you had a talent or a gift or an area of expertise, you would lend yourself to making things run smoothly.
Marcus, who had taught the concept of group work to his high school classes for
years
, found himself being a part of the group with very little effort. Once he had earned his new room by simply not being a blood-fucking savage, he found that he was needed to tutor the younger werecreatures—many of whom had dropped out of school and life before Adrian found them and offered them a way out of going nowhere—to get their GEDs, and he enjoyed that.
He also enjoyed helping Adrian check up on Green’s businesses and on Green’s people, who either ran them or frequented them; he was good at that too. He would watch in fascination, though, as Adrian would start chatting up humans, male or female, and begin the process that would make the change in that young person’s life—permanently.
Marcus’s new leader had an eye for kids like Gina—kind, clever, and very, very lost. It became a fascinating game to walk into a group of twentysomethings and try to guess which one would be Adrian’s choice to join the hill.
It wasn’t always who Marcus thought he’d choose.
Marcus would go for the sweet ones, the gentle ones, the ones who seemed too fragile for this world. Sometimes Adrian would go for those people too, but sometimes he’d go for the tough kids, the ones with the foul mouths, the ones with the anger and the history of trouble. Marcus asked Adrian why once and was met with that fuck-me grin and love-it-or-lay-it shrug.
“The ones who are too gentle will grow bitter in this life, mate. You need some strength to survive as a vampire or a shifter. The ones who hide their gentleness under a tough mouth or some violence with their fists—those are the ones who will survive with their goodness intact, yeah?”
Marcus had to admit that it seemed to work for Adrian. He was never wrong about his choices. Never.
And life wasn’t all work either at Green’s hill, and that helped make the time speed by. One winter awakening, about five years after his arrival, Marcus was missing his family particularly badly after the (admittedly spectacular) Christmas/Solstice holidays. That was when Gina came to his room holding an armload of gear.
“What’s this?” he asked, catching the parka and the boots and the gloves and the skis—skis? Damn… he hadn’t been skiing since….
“You used to love to ski,” Gina said, hopping over to his bed like a little girl. “I remember, you know, when I was in your class. You’d always let us out early on Fridays so you could go up the hill. I mean, you did, didn’t you?”
They had been lovers on and off in the past years, but it hadn’t been serious. Marcus had come to appreciate that monogamy did not always figure in the seriousness of a relationship here, and he, like everyone else who’d been recruited to this life, found that Adrian and Green were the gold standard for the emotional depth he wanted out of a real relationship. Gina was not that person, but that didn’t mean they weren’t friends.
“I did!” Marcus said, surprised. Of course, flying was easier now, and it had the same rush, but still…. A human memory crafted of snow-cut crystal made his skin tingle with the remembered feeling of wind on his face, the smell of pine and cold, and the color of the platinum moon as it bounced off the drifts.