“We would have rescued you.”
Not tried. Just, “we would have.” Such arrogance. Such surety. It wasn’t human. More than the magic, more than the otherworldly beauty, that was sidhe, and so not human. The arrogance wasn’t pretense. Neither was the certainty. He was the Darkness. He had once been the god Nodons. He was Doyle.
He had moved so I could see him easily as the ambulance’s wheels hit the road in a sound of gravel. I stared up into that dark, dark face. I looked into those black eyes. There were pinpoints of color in that darkness that were not reflections. He carried colors in the black depths of his eyes that were no colors in the ambulance.
Once he had used those colors to try to bespell me at my aunt’s orders. A test to see how weak I might be, or how strong.
The colors were like multicolored fireflies, flitting and dancing in his eyes. “I can let you sleep until we reach the hospital,” he said.
“No,” I said. I closed my eyes against the pretty lights.
“You are in pain, Merry. Let me help you.”
“I’m the doctor here,” Hardy said, “and I say no magic on the injured until it’s explained to me.”
“I do not know if I can explain it,” Doyle said.
“No,” I said, eyes still closed. “I don’t want to be unconscious, Doyle. The last time that happened I woke up in Taranis’s bed.”
His hand convulsed around mine, clutching at me as if he were the one in need of comfort. It made me open my eyes. The colored lights were fading as I looked into them.
“I failed you, my princess, my love. We all failed you. We did not dream that the king could travel through sunlight. We thought that a lost art.”
“He surprised us all,” I said. Then I thought of something I wanted to know. “My dogs. He hurt them.”
“They will live. Minnie will bear a scar for a time, but she will heal.” He raised my fingers to his lips and kissed them. “The veterinarian we took her to said she is going to have puppies.”
I stared at him. “The puppies weren’t injured?”
He smiled. “They are fine.”
For no reason I could think of, that one bit of news made me feel better. My hounds had defended me, and the king had tried to kill them. But he had failed. They would live, and they would have puppies. The first faerie hounds to be born in more than five centuries.
Taranis had tried to make me his queen, but I was already pregnant. I already had my kings. Taranis had failed in every way. If the rape kit came back positive, though positive seemed the wrong word, then I would see King Taranis, King of Light and Illusion, in jail for rape.
The press were going to eat him alive. Charged with the abduction, beating, and rape of his own niece. The Seelie Court had been the shining star of the human media. That was about to change.
It was the Unseelie Court’s time to shine, even if it was with a darkling light. We would be the good guys this time.
The Seelie had offered me their throne, but I knew better. Hugh and others might want me, but the golden throng would never accept me as queen. I carried babies whose fathers were Unseelie lords. I’d been the child of an Unseelie prince, and they had treated me as worse than nothing.
There would be no golden throne for me. No, if throne there be, then it would be the throne of night. Maybe the throne needed a new name? Throne of night sounded so sinister. Taranis sat on the Golden Throne of the Seelie Court. It sounded so much more cheerful. Shakespeare said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I didn’t believe it. Golden throne, throne of night. Which throne would you rather sit on?
I’d survive tonight. I even knew I was trying to think of anything, everything, to keep from dwelling on what Taranis had done, and the fact that Frost wasn’t going to be waiting for me at the hospital. I was finally pregnant, and I couldn’t be happy about it. For political reasons the rape kit coming back positive would be good. It meant we owned Taranis. But for my own reasons, I hoped he’d lied. I hoped he hadn’t had his way with me while I was unconscious. Had his way with me, nice euphemism. I hoped he hadn’t raped me while I was unconscious. I hoped he hadn’t raped me while I bled into my skull from the blow he had dealt me.
I started to cry, hopelessly, helplessly. Doyle bent over me, whispering my name and that he loved me.
I buried my hand in the warmth of his hair, drew him close so I could breathe in the scent of his skin. I buried myself in the feel and smell of his body, and wept.
I had won the race to sit on the throne of the Unseelie Court, and it was bitter ashes on my tongue.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
L
AURELL
K. H
AMILTON
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of the Meredith Gentry novels:
A Kiss of Shadows, A Caress of Twilight, Seduced by Moonlight, A Stroke of Midnight,
and
Mistral’s Kiss,
as well as fifteen acclaimed “Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter” novels. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Visit the author’s official website at
www.laurellkhamilton.org
.
By Laurell K. Hamilton
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
A KISS OF SHADOWS
A CARESS OF TWILIGHT
SEDUCED BY MOONLIGHT
A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT
MISTRAL’S KISS
A Lick of Frost
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Laurell K. Hamilton
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
B
ALLANTINE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group and A.P. Watt Ltd. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” from
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, Revised
edited by Richard J. Finneran, copyright © 1933 by the Macmillan Company, copyright renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Rights outside the United States administered by A.P. Watt Ltd., London. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group and A.P. Watt Ltd. All rights reserved.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hamilton, Laurell K.
A lick of frost : a novel / Laurell K. Hamilton.
p. cm.
1. Gentry, Meredith (Fictitious character). 2. Women private investigators—Fiction. 3. Supernatural—Fiction. 4. Faeries—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A443357L53 2007
813'.54—dc22 2007027388
eISBN: 978-0-345-50223-0
v3.0