“Yes, I suppose I do need to kiss the girl.”
“No, uncle, I’m quoting a movie that you’ve never seen.”
“I do not know what you are talking about, Meredith. The assassins are even now in place, and I promise you they will strike, as they did this morning for your shadow lord.”
“You don’t even know there was a movie of ‘The Little Mermaid,’ do you?”
“I have read the story by Hans Christian Andersen, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yes, that is what I mean. I forgot the Seelie Court enjoys reading fairy tales, and laughing at how wrong the humans get things.”
“It would be a shame if you kissed me too late to save them, Meredith. I can only offer their safety for a little while, and then the assassins will do their jobs and it will be too late.”
“They made a movie of the story. They made a movie of ‘The Little Mermaid,’ and there was a song in it called ‘Kiss the Girl.’”
“What does it matter, Meredith? Why this delay, do you want them dead?”
“You don’t understand. By killing Sholto you put them all on alert, and I trust my men, and the human guards, and the human police, to fight.”
“It will not be a fight, Meredith, any more than Sholto had a chance to fight.”
“What of my babies? What happens to them if I let you bespell me?”
He settled his weight more firmly against me, one knee between my legs. “They are our babies, Meredith. They will come with you to the Seelie Court. They will be princesses and prince here with us.”
“You’ll never take them to a Disney movie, or read them a fairy tale without showing your disdain for the human who wrote it. You won’t love them.”
“I will love them, as I love you, Meredith.”
“You don’t love me!” I yelled it at the floor, the echo of my own voice strident in my ears.
“I love you, Meredith.”
“Swear it, swear that you love me truly, swear it by the Darkness That Eats All Things; swear that oath, uncle, and I may give you your willing kiss.”
“That is an Unseelie oath, and I will not utter it.”
“It is an oath that will hunt you down and destroy you if you break it. The only reason not to take such an oath is that you know you do not love me.”
“You will love me, Meredith. You will adore me. Our children will see us as a devoted couple.”
“You are not their father! The genetic tests will come back in a few weeks and that will prove that I was pregnant before you forced yourself on me. The tests will prove that you are a rapist, a liar, and infertile, and I will do everything I can to get you convicted of my rape. I will plaster it across the human media, that the great King of the Seelie is so insecure that he has to beat and rape rather than seduce.”
“You won’t; you will drop the charges against me, Meredith. You will tell everyone that you came to me willingly, Meredith.”
Of course I would; he was right, of course.
“You will tell the newspapers and the television that the Unseelie kept you prisoner and it was only when Shadowspawn, Darkness, and Storm were dead that you felt safe enough to escape to the Seelie Court with your babies.”
“You always go too far, uncle,” I said. “You almost have me under your spell, and then you say something that is so outrageous that even your magic can’t make me believe it. You are evil, uncle, did you know that?”
He got both of his legs inside mine, and only the dress with all its layers of petticoats kept him from pressing closer, but even through all the clothing I could feel him against me. I had to swallow past the lump in my throat. I prayed to Goddess that he would not touch me again.
“Do you feel that, Meredith?”
“I don’t know what you mean, uncle.” It was a lie, but I was not going to play along.
He ground himself in against my ass. “Do you feel me now, Meredith?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“I dressed you for this dream, Meredith; I can just as easily undress you with a thought.”
“Don’t.”
“Kiss me, Meredith, and then you will want me to, and it will not be rape.”
“Lust magic is the same as date-rape drugs in human courts, Uncle Taranis. Even if you bespell me, humans have forensic wizards who specialize in understanding spells like this; I have too many friends among the human police. They won’t believe that I was willing. Even if you win this moment, the police will free me of your spell eventually, and when they do, you will be jailed, or exiled from this country.”
“At worst they would limit me to the Seelie Court, Meredith, and that is where I stay anyway.”
“No, uncle dearest, you had a king of another kingdom assassinated; that is an act of war, and that is the one thing that will get you kicked out of this country.”
“Only you know what I did, Meredith, and once we kiss, you won’t tell.”
“You don’t believe the human wizards will free me once you have me under your spell?”
“No, Meredith, I don’t. Human magic has never been a match for mine. Now, about that dress.”
“No,” I said.
My clothes vanished and I was suddenly naked against the rugs and the stone. He was still pressed against my ass, but now he felt bigger and harder, eager for his conquest.
“NO!” I pulled my hand free, and I prayed as never before,
Let this work, let my hand of power be real here!
Taranis made his clothes vanish. I had a moment of feeling him naked on top of me, pinning me to the floor, and then his hips began to shift, to hunt for an angle that would let him enter me, and I shoved my hand against his bare arm. The same arm that I had twisted in the last nightmare he’d given me.
His arm began to fold in upon itself. He let me go, and it was his turn to scream, “NO!”
I turned and saw him on his knees, naked, and maybe he was handsome, but all I could see was the monster he was, and his left arm was a curling, deformed thing. I waited for it to reach the main part of his body and turn him inside out so that he wouldn’t be able to hide the monster inside, behind the handsome façade. I would make him into the truth of himself, and pull the horror out so all the world could see it.
“Meredith! Help me, Meredith, help me!”
I said, “No.”
He vanished, and a second later I woke in the hospital with Doyle bending over me. He wasn’t dead. I wasn’t trapped with Taranis, and he hadn’t bespelled me, and maybe, just maybe, the damage I’d done to him in dream would be real when he woke. Now, all we had to do was stop the assassins from killing Doyle and Mistral the way they’d killed Sholto.
A SOUND IN
the darkened room had frightened me at first, and then I’d seen the nightflyers plastered to the wall around the window, and my heart had lifted, because only Sholto could have brought them to L. A. He wasn’t dead? Had it been another dream? No, it had been real. I held Doyle’s hand in mine and looked around the room for Sholto.
Galen was on the other side of the bed. “I told you what she’d think when she saw the nightflyers. I’m sorry, Merry, but Sholto is still dead.”
“How did they get to L. A. without him?”
“Kitto brought them,” Doyle said.
I looked from one to the other of them. “Am I still dreaming?”
Galen smiled. “I could pinch you to prove we’re real.”
It made me smile a little. I tried to reach for his hand, but I was still hooked to an IV, so he took my hand instead. “No pinching necessary,” I said, “but how did Kitto bring the sluagh across the country?”
Doyle answered, “He used his hand of power.”
“The hand of reaching only lets him bring someone through a mirror during a call.” I looked at the mass of nightflyers covering the far wall and clinging to part of the ceiling. There had to be at least two dozen of them, though the way their flat bodies overlapped it was hard to get an accurate count, but still … “It would take hours to bring through this many of the sluagh. How long was I trapped in dream?”
My heart was pounding in my throat again, because though Doyle was here safe beside me, Mistral was not.
“You have only been asleep a short time, Merry; it has not been hours,” Doyle said.
“Where is Mistral?” I asked.
“At the main house, in charge of seeing that no harm comes to the babies. A hate group had claimed responsibility for trying to assassinate you, so I made Mistral stay at the house and see to the defenses there. He made me swear I would explain that only duty to our children would keep him from your side.”
“Doyle, you and Mistral are in terrible danger. Taranis means to have you both killed, as he killed Sholto. He fears the three of you the most of my men, and he intends to strip me of you, and then try to claim me for himself.”
Doyle touched my face, looking very hard into my eyes, as if trying to tell if I was telling the truth, or mad, or still dream befuddled.
“It was not just a nightmare, Doyle. Taranis was in my dreams again.”
Galen cursed softly. “Damn it, we let them put you to bed without the herbs in your pillow. I am so sorry, Merry; I should have thought of it.”
“We know that it is not a human hate group, but traitors among the sidhe themselves,” Doyle said.
“How do you know? Did Taranis invade someone else’s dreams?”
“No, but Rhys and Barinthus went to the beach house to make certain the sidhe there cooperated with the police, and forced them all to let the police take their fingerprints.”
“Are you saying one of the sidhe at the beach killed … shot Sholto?”
“Rhys and the police both quickly realized that the angle of the shot meant it could not have come from the hillside, but had to come from one of the upper windows of the house itself.”
“A lot of them didn’t want to cooperate with the police,” Galen said.
“I understand the murderer not wanting to cooperate with the police, but why did the rest refuse?”
Doyle and Galen exchanged a look, and it was Doyle who said, “They felt that the human authorities had no sway over them. I sent Rhys and Barinthus to convince them that they were mistaken.” There was something ominous in the way he said the last; at another time I might have asked how harsh the methods of persuasion had been, but frankly, I didn’t care. How dare they not want to help solve Sholto’s … murder.
“They refused to help when they thought that I’d been the attempted target?”
“They said that Sholto was not their king, and that he died so easily proved he was either not sidhe or contaminated by your mortality.”
I just stared at him for a few seconds. “What?”
They exchanged another look between them.
“What was that look just now? You’ve mentioned almost everybody but Frost; where is he?”
“He’s with a doctor,” Doyle said.
I started to sit up, and he held me down with one hand on my shoulder. “He is all right, or as all right as when he entered the hospital,” Doyle said.
“What does that mean?” I asked, and it was as if the fear from the dream had just been waiting below the surface, because it came bubbling up now. I fought the panic, and knew it was at least partly the nightmare and Taranis, but … sometimes there was so much that I felt as if I’d been on the edge of panic for months.
As if talking about him had conjured him, the door opened and Frost was there, looking tall and unbelievably handsome. His hair glinted in the dim light of the room the way the Christmas tree had looked on Christmas Eve when I was little, all gleaming and beautiful as my father turned out the lights because Santa wouldn’t come if the lights were on. We celebrated Yule and the winter solstice as a religious holiday, but he wanted me to have a more American holiday when I was very small, and had even been willing for me to go to Christian church with some of my school friends, and to temple with my friends who were Jewish. My father had wanted me to understand my country, not just our people. Frost’s hair looked like that long-ago Christmas tree tinsel, and the Christmas mornings I’d seen on television, but that never quite happened to me. I’d so wanted brothers and sisters, and family holidays that hadn’t been full of political debate, or photo opportunities for the press. Frost coming through that door made me feel like Christmas morning was supposed to feel, and never had.
Whatever he saw on my face made him smile, that bright, too-wide one that made his face both less model perfect and more amazing all at the same time. Galen moved back so Frost could take my hand and lean in to kiss me. He hesitated somewhere in the middle of standing back up, as if something in the middle of his body had caught, or hurt.
“What did the doctor say?” Doyle asked.
“He gave me some antibiotics and told me not to do anything physically taxing for at least three more days.”
“Wait, are you saying that the dog scratches are infected?” I asked.
“It would seem so,” he said; he held my hand in his, and smiled down at me.
“You can’t get infection from a wound, except through poison, or an evil spell. None of the fey can just get an infection.”
“Nonetheless, it is why I am not healing as I should.”
“Frost, you … I’ve seen you heal bullet wounds in less time than these scratches. They were deep, but not that deep.”
“The doctor assures me that these are natural antibiotics, not man-made, so I should not have an allergic reaction to them, and because I have never had antibiotics before, the infection shouldn’t be immune to it, as it might be if I had had more modern medical care.”
“Frost, are you saying you’re healing human-slow, as slowly as I might heal?”
Frost wouldn’t look at me. I looked at Doyle and Galen at the foot of the bed. “Someone talk to me, now,” I said.
“Some of the newer sidhe were not happy that Frost isn’t healing as he did before he left faerie,” Doyle said.
“Before he was with me, you mean,” I said. I held both their hands in mine, squeezed them tight.
“It doesn’t matter what caused it,” Frost said, and his face was still serene, peaceful, even happy.
“You were immortal and unaging. You would have been this beautiful and amazing forever, and loving me has stolen that from you. How? How did just being my lover damage your immortality?”
He raised my hand and rubbed his lips along my knuckles. It felt wonderful, but all I could think was that he would age now. That in loving him I’d killed him.