Swallowing Darkness (25 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

RHYS CURLED MY ARM THROUGH HIS, AND LEANED IN TO TALK
to me as we walked. Doyle had my other arm, so he could hear. Though, frankly, with the superior hearing of the sidhe, Mistral and Sholto could probably hear too. The point was that the soldiers we walked through did not hear.

I’d expected Sholto to fight to keep my arm, but he had graciously and uncomplainingly let Rhys take his place. Then he’d dropped back like a good bodyguard beside Mistral. Sholto was most agreeable for a king.

Most of the soldiers gave us eye flicks and tried not to stare, but some didn’t bother being subtle. They stared as we walked past. Most of us looked like something out of a movie. Doyle’s more modern suit was hidden under a gray cloak that looked like something out of a Dickens novel. Mistral had simply fastened the neck of his blue and fur cloak so that one got glimpses of his bare chest as he moved. Sholto had chosen a white coat that looked like a cross between a trench coat and an officer’s coat from World War II. It hid the very unmodern clothes, so that he, of all of us, could have walked out into a crowd and been the least noticeable.

I realized that Sholto usually dressed to blend in, wherever he was. He dressed appropriately, if he could. I guess when you spend your life with your body so out of the ordinary, you don’t want clothes to set you apart.

“Why are you wearing a uniform?” I asked.

Rhys asked, “Don’t you remember what duty you gave me?” He looked far too serious.

“You had Gran’s blood on your clothes,” I said.

He nodded.

Doyle leaned across and asked, “But why did you not get clothes from the Unseelie Court, or your own house?”

Rhys was one of the few sidhe who had his own house away from faerie. He’d said that the magic interfered with television reception, and he liked his movies. Frankly, I think it was to get some privacy. Though he did love movies.

“How much time do you think has passed?” he asked.

“The sluagh said we were in the enchanted sleep for days,” I said. “Maybe inside the sluagh’s mound, but out here, and at the other courts, it’s only been hours.”

“Time moves differently around Merry, but not in all of faerie,” Doyle said, almost like he was speculating out loud.

Sholto moved up beside us, or rather leaned over me. I was short enough to make that possible. “Are you saying that my court is a few days ahead of the rest of faerie now?”

“So it would seem,” Doyle said.

Mistral added, “The time inside the Unseelie Court changed when the princess was inside last too. Not by days, but hours’ difference in the few clocks that we had, and those outside.”

“I don’t think it’s me, exactly. I think it’s the magic of the Goddess.”

“But it is you who is the nexus for it,” Doyle said.

That I couldn’t argue with.

Captain Page simply stopped walking ahead of us. He turned with Walters at his side. “What are you all whispering about?”

“Don’t bother,” Walters said. “They’ll just lie.”

“We never lie,” I said.

“Then you’ll hide so much that you might as well lie,” he said.

“Why are you so unhappy with me, Major?” I asked.

He gave me a look, as if I should know.

“I am sorry that I endangered your men and the other police and federal agents last time. I would change the level of danger around me if I could, Major. Please believe that I am not having a good time either.”

His face softened, and he nodded. “I’m sorry. I know that you are in real danger, and that awful things keep happening to you. I know it’s not just us mere humans who are in the way of it all.”

It was the way he said “mere humans” that gave me a clue. “Has something been happening on your end of the problems that I don’t know about, Major?”

“Your uncle, the King of Light and Illusion, is demanding that we turn you over to him. He says that he will protect you from your kidnappers.” He motioned to the men around me.

“Let me take the next one,” Page said.

Walters motioned for him to go ahead.

“Your aunt, the Queen of Air and Darkness, is demanding that you return to her court, and she says that she will protect you.”

“Did she really?” I asked.

“You seem more surprised by that one,” Page said.

“The last time she spoke to me she admitted that she could not keep me safe inside faerie and bid me flee to Los Angeles.”

The two men exchanged glances. “Her court has been very adamant,” Page said.

“Her court,” Doyle said. “Not the queen herself?”

“No, but then we haven’t spoken directly to either of them. We’ve been talking to subordinates.”

Page gave a laugh. “You don’t talk to the president to find out what he wants you to do, not without more brass on your shoulders than I’ve got.”

“Who has made the demands on behalf of the queen?” Doyle asked. “Her son, Prince Cel,” Page said.

“Yeah,” Walters said, “he seems very worried about his cousin.” Walters watched my face as he said it.

I fought to keep a blank face and give nothing away. But I knew Cel didn’t want me well. He wanted me dead. Me pregnant meant that the queen could give me her throne now. She’d vowed in open court that she would give the throne to whoever got with child first. Technically, I could have pushed the matter, and demanded a crown now, before the babies were even born. But I knew better. I knew that if I went back to the Unseelie Court pregnant, I would never live to see them born. Cel had to kill us all now.

“Our queen is different from most leaders,” I said. “Trust nothing that doesn’t come from her personally. Taranis is fond of flunkies delivering his messages, but Queen Andais likes the personal touch.”

“Are you saying that your cousin is lying?” Page asked.

“I’m saying that until a few weeks ago he was the sole heir to his mother’s throne. How would you feel if your birthright was suddenly up for grabs, Captain?”

“You’re saying he’s a danger to you,” Page said.

I looked at Doyle. Did I tell the truth? He nodded.

“Yes, Captain, Prince Cel is a danger to me.”

“If he makes an appearance,” Doyle said, “we will have to treat him as a very dangerous person.”

“We would have to attack the prince?” Page asked.

“At the very least make certain he does not come near the princess,” Doyle said.

“Damnit,” Walters said. “Who else who’s supposed to be on your side is actually a danger to the princess?”

I laughed. “You don’t have time to hear the list, Major. Which is why I need to get away from here. Faerie is no longer safe for me or mine.”

The two men looked even more serious. Page began yelling orders, and people in uniforms started moving like they had a purpose. Actually, it looked like they were simply running about, but things started getting done, and we were taken to our very own Humvee, what the Hummer was before the idle rich all wanted one. Which meant that it was painted for camouflage, and was just scarier looking, like the difference between guns for Olympic shooting and guns for killing things. They both shoot, but just by looking at them you know that they can’t do each other’s jobs.

Galen was standing beside the Humvee, talking to a woman with short dark hair. Her face was raised to his, and she was studying his face as if trying to memorize it. He was simply being his usual charming self, but her body language was much more intimate than that. They both looked at us as we came up. Galen with a glad smile, but the woman…I swear it wasn’t a friendly look.

He was in uniform too. The new digital camo was mostly browns and grays and eye-tricking shapes, though oddly, I hadn’t had any trouble seeing anyone in the new camo. Weren’t the uniforms supposed to be invisible in the wilderness? Maybe it didn’t work on the fey. Interesting. The dull colors seemed to bring out the green under tone of his pale skin. His father had been a pixie, and it showed in his skin color and his green hair. He hugged me so thoroughly that my feet came off the ground and I was left a little breathless. He finally put me down, then studied my face. His usual smile faded to something far more serious.

“Merry,” he said, “I thought I’d lost you.”

“What has been happening while we slept?”

“We found Onilwyn’s body, and the marks of your magic on him.”

I nodded. “He tried to help the Seelie assassins kill Mistral, then he tried to kill me.”

Galen hugged me tightly again, burying my face in his chest. “When we didn’t find any marks from any of the other guards on him, we thought you were alone. Alone and without me or Rhys to protect you.”

I pushed back so I could breathe better. “Sholto got there.”

“Before?” he asked.

I shook my head.

Sholto said, “We were killing the archers at the time, but I will never forgive myself for leaving her alone in the snow.”

Galen looked at him. “She is our priority. Her safety. Nothing else really matters.”

“I know that,” Sholto said.

“You left her alone in the snow. You said it yourself.”

Sholto opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. He nodded. “You are right. I was derelict in my duty. It will not happen again.”

“See that it doesn’t,” Galen said.

Doyle and Rhys were looking from one man to the other. “Is that our little Galen talking, or have you learned to throw your voice?” Rhys asked.

“I think our little Galen is growing up,” Doyle said.

Galen scowled at them both.

Mistral said, “It must have been very dangerous where you have been for Galen Greenhair to be talking like the Darkness.”

The rest of us exchanged looks, then I said, “The Western Lands are safer, Mistral, but they are not safe.”

“Nowhere will be safe for Merry, while our enemies live,” Galen said.

I hugged him. He was saying the truth, but to hear him be so harsh hurt something inside me.

“We can’t kill them all,” Rhys said.

“The problem is not killing them all,” Doyle said. “The problem is that we do not know who they all are.”

And that was indeed the problem.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE WOMAN TALKING WITH GALEN WAS ONE OF THEIR WIZARDS.
Specialist Paula Gregorio was only inches taller than me, with sleek black hair, a thin dark face, and huge brown eyes. Her eyes dominated her face so that she looked younger than she was, and much more delicate than the personality that burned out of them.

She shook my hand a little too hard, like some men will when they want to test another man. But our hands were the same size, and no matter how fit she was under that uniform, she didn’t have the strength to hurt my hand. I might have looked as delicate as Specialist Gregorio, but comparatively, I was a lot harder to hurt. I was only part human, and she was all human.

But the fact that she didn’t like me from the moment she saw me was not a good start, since, theoretically, she was here to keep me safe and alive; it would have been better if she’d liked me. But one flick of those big dark eyes to Galen let me know exactly why she didn’t like me. What had he been doing out here for the last few hours with Specialist Gregorio to make her look at him that way and me the other?

Knowing Galen, nothing he thought of as flirting. He was just being friendly. He’d have talked the same way to a male wizard, but Gregorio didn’t know that, and explaining it would have sounded either insulting to her or like I was trying to keep her away from Galen. Neither was what I meant, so I let it go. Hopefully, my safety would not depend on her. If it did, we had other problems than the fact that she thought Galen liked her.

The second wizard was tall, though not as tall as most of the sidhe, which put him just shy of six feet. He was as blond and pale as Gregorio was black-haired and dark. Staff Sergeant Dawson had an easy smile and hair cut so short you could see scalp on either side of his cap. “Princess Meredith, it’s an honor to escort you to safety.” He shook my hand, and there was no physical challenge to it, but there was a flare of magic. Not on purpose, because his own face looked too startled for that, but just a very powerful human psychic touching the hand of the new queen of faerie.

He didn’t drop my hand, but he jerked, as if it hadn’t felt entirely good. I drew my hand out first, slowly, being polite, but as I gazed up at him in the light of flood lamps, I saw something I hadn’t before. There was an uptilt to his blue eyes, and the fingers of his hand were just a little too long, a little too thin, a little too delicate for his height. There was a sound like bells, and the scent of flowers, though not roses.

“What was that?” he asked, in a voice gone just a little breathy.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Gregorio said, but she looked out into the dark, past the lights. She trusted Dawson’s instincts. I bet he had a lot of odd hunches that proved to be right.

“Bells,” Galen said, and he moved closer to Dawson and me. He looked at me over the wizard’s shoulder. He and I shared a moment of knowledge.

Dawson noticed it. “What is it? I heard the bells too, but you both know what it is. Is it something dangerous?” He was rubbing his hands on his arms as if he were cold, but I knew he wasn’t cold from the winter chill. Though I had no doubt that his skin ran with goose-flesh, as if someone had walked over his grave.

I started to say something ordinary to hide it all and not spook him more, but what came out of my mouth was the opposite. “Welcome home, Dawson.”

“I don’t know what….” But the words died on his lips, and he simply gazed at me.

Gregorio turned back to us. She jerked Dawson by the arm hard, so that it broke our eye contact. “We were warned about her effect on men, Sergeant.”

He looked embarrassed, and then stepped away from me so that he addressed his next words to the night beyond us. “It’s not that I’m not flattered, ma’am, but I’ve got a job to do.”

“Do you both think that I just tried to seduce the sergeant?” I asked.

Gregorio glared at me. “You just can’t seem to leave any men for the rest of us, can you?”

“Specialist Gregorio,” Dawson said in a sharp voice, “you will not speak to the princess like that. You will treat her and her party with the utmost respect.” But he still didn’t look too closely at me when he said it.

“Yes, sir,” she said, but even those two words held anger.

“It isn’t my physicality that called to you just now, Sergeant Dawson.”

He shook his head. “I’ll be riding in the first truck with the male driver. We’ve got a female driver and the specialist to ride with you in the second vehicle.”

“You have some faerie blood in your ancestry,” Rhys said.

“That’s not….” But again Dawson’s words failed him. His hands were balled into fists, and he was shaking his head.

“Don’t make us have to put up wards against you, Princess,” Gregorio said.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

“What’s so funny?”

In my head I thought, “You couldn’t ward against me now if you tried.” Out loud, I said, “I’m sorry, Specialist, I’m just tired, and it’s been a rather difficult few days. It’s just nervous tension, I think. Just get us out of here. Farther away from the faerie mounds will be better for all of us.”

She looked like she wanted to argue but just nodded and went to check on her sergeant.

Rhys and Galen moved close to me. Rhys said, “Your power called to his blood.”

“You mean his genetics?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” Rhys said.

Doyle moved up behind me, putting his hands on my shoulders, drawing us all in close to talk. “Is this what it means to call someone’s blood?” I asked.

Rhys nodded. “Yes, it’s been so long since any of us could do it that I’d forgotten what it meant.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, pressing myself back into the curve of Doyle’s body. Sholto and Mistral were on either side of our group, but they were watching outward while they listened, as if Doyle had told them to do it. He probably had.

“You hold the hand of blood, Merry,” Doyle said against my hair. “The power to call blood isn’t just calling it out of the body,” Rhys said. “It’s also being able to call to the magic in a person’s body. It may be that now you’ll be calling to any fey blood in the humans around us. That’s good on one hand; it will up their power level, and maybe yours. But it’s going to creep out the humans you do it to until you figure out how to do it a little more quietly.”

“What does it mean, exactly, that my hand of blood calls to Dawson’s blood?”

“It means that your magic calls to his.”

“Like calls to like,” Mistral said, his eyes still directed out into the night.

“The fey in Europe intermarried with a lot of humans whose families immigrated to the United States,” I said.

“Yes,” Rhys said.

“So this may happen a lot?” I asked.

He nodded and shrugged. “Maybe.”

“But it means more than that,” Mistral said. “It means that the princess may be able to call the part-fey to her cause.”

I looked up, trying to see Doyle’s face, but he laid his cheek on top of my head. Not to stop me from seeing his face, but just for comfort, I think. “What does that mean?”

Doyle spoke low, his chest and throat so close to me that his voice vibrated against me. “Once, to hold some hands of power, you could call the humans to be your army, or your servants. You could call them to your side, and they came willingly, lovingly. The hand of blood was one of the few that could make humans want to join you. Literally, if you have all the power that the hand of blood once held, you call to the magic in their blood, and they will answer.”

“Do they have a choice?” I asked.

“When you master this power, they will not want to have a choice. They will want to serve you, as we do.”

“But….”

Rhys put his fingertip on my lips. “It’s a type of love, Merry. It’s the way men were supposed to feel for their lord and master. Once it wasn’t like it is now, or has been for so long.” He lowered his finger, and looked utterly sad. “I could do it too, call men to me. I gave them safety, comfort, joy. I protected them, and I did love them. Then I lost my powers, and I couldn’t protect them. I couldn’t save them anymore.” He hugged me, and because Doyle was so close, he hugged us both.

Rhys whispered, “I don’t know whether to be happy that this kind of power is returning to us or sad. It’s so wonderful when it works, but when it went away, it was like I died with my people, Merry. They died, and they were pieces of me dying. I prayed for true death then. I prayed to die with my people, but I was immortal. I couldn’t die, and I couldn’t save them.”

I felt the liquid on my face. I pressed my face against his cheek, and felt tears from his one good eye. The goblin who took his other eye had taken its tears too. I felt Doyle’s arms tighten around us both. Then I felt Galen come in behind Rhys and hold him too.

Sholto put a hand on Rhys’s hair, and Mistral’s deep voice came. “I do not know if I want to be responsible for so many again.”

“Me, either,” Rhys said, in a voice squeezed with tears.

“Me, either,” I said.

Doyle spoke. “You may have no choice.”

And that was the truth, the wonderful and horrible truth.