Divine Misdemeanors

Chapter Fifteen

The only light in the huge great room of the beach house was the glow of the roomy kitchen to one side, like a glowing cave in the growing dimness. Amatheon and Adair were in that glow panicking. They were both a little over six feet tall with broad shoulders, their bare arms in the modern T-shirts muscular from centuries of weapon practice. Adair’s honey-brown hair was knotted and braided into a complicated club between his shoulder blades; unleashed, it hit his ankles. Amatheon’s hair was a deep copper red, and curled enough so that the ponytail of knee-length hair was a foam of burnished red as he leaned down toward the chiming oven. They had kilts on instead of pants, but you just didn’t see six feet-plus of immortal warrior panicking about anything often, but panicking in a kitchen with pots in their hands and the oven open while they peered inside in a puzzled manner was a very special and endearing type of panic.

Galen put me down gently but quickly, striding toward the kitchen to save the meal from their well-meaning but ineffectual ministrations. They weren’t actually wringing their hands, but their body language said clearly that they’d run away if they could convince themselves it wouldn’t be cowardly.

Galen entered the fray totally calm and in control. He liked to cook, and he’d taken well to modern conveniences, but then he’d visited the outside world often all his life. The other two men had only been outside faerie for a month. Galen took the pot out of Adair’s hands and put it back on the stove on low heat. He got a towel, leaned in past Amatheon’s waterfall of hair, and began taking pies out of the oven. In moments everything was under control.

Amatheon and Adair stood just outside the glow of the kitchen, looking crestfallen and relieved. “Please, never leave us in charge of a meal again,” Adair said.

“I can cook over an open fire if I have to,” Amatheon said, “but these modern contrivances are too different.”

“Can either of you grill steaks?” Galen asked.

They looked at each other. “Do you mean over an open fire?” Amatheon asked.

“Yes, with a wire rack so the meat sits above the flames, but it’s real fire and it’s outside.”

They both nodded. “We can do that.” They sounded relieved. Adair added, “But Amatheon is the better cook of the two of us.”

Galen got a platter out of the refrigerator, took plastic wrap off it, and handed it to Amatheon. “The steaks have been marinating. All you have to do is ask everyone how they like their steaks cooked.”

“How they like them cooked?” he asked.

“Bloody, not so bloody, brown in the middle, gray in the middle,” Galen said, wisely not even trying to explain rare, medium, and well done for the men. The last time either of them had been out of fairyland one of the Henrys was king of England. And that had been a brief outing into the human world, then back they’d gone to the only life they’d ever known. They’d had one month of modern kitchens and not having servants to do all the grunt work. They were actually doing better than some of the others who were new to the human world. Mistral was, unfortunately, not taking well at all to modern America. Since he was one of the fathers of my babies, that was a problem, but he wasn’t here tonight. He didn’t like traveling outside the walled estate in Holmby Hills that we called home. Amatheon, Adair, and many of the other guards were cuter about it, and not so frustrating to the rest of us, which was nice.

Hafwyn joined Galen in the kitchen. Her long yellow braid moved in rhythm against the back of her body as she walked. She began to take things from him and hand things to him as if they’d done this before. Was Hafwyn helping in the kitchen more? As a healer, she didn’t have guard duty, and as a healer we didn’t feel that her having a job outside of that was a good idea, but she could heal with her hands, so no hospital or doctor would take her. Magic healing was still considered fraud in the United States. There had been too many charlatans over the centuries, so the law didn’t leave much room for the genuine article.

Rhys was still beside me in the dimness of the huge living room, but Doyle and Frost had moved across the room past the huge dining room table that was all pale wood gleaming in the moonlight. They were silhouetted against the huge glass wall that looked directly out onto the ocean. There was a third silhouette that stood a foot taller than them. Barinthus was seven feet tall, the tallest sidhe I’d ever met. He was bending that height over the shorter men, and without hearing a word, I knew they were reporting the day’s events. Barinthus had been my father’s closest friend and advisor. The queen had feared him as both a kingmaker and a rival for the throne. He’d only been allowed to join the Unseelie Court on the promise that he would never try to rule there. But we weren’t in the Unseelie Court anymore, and for the first time I was seeing what my aunt Andais might have seen. The men reported to him and asked his advice; even Doyle and Frost did. It was as if he had an aura of leadership wrapped around him that no crown, title, or bloodline could truly bestow. He was simply a point that people rallied around. I wasn’t even sure how aware the other sidhe were that they were doing it.

Barinthus’s ankle-length hair was unbound and spilled around his body like a cloak made of water, for his hair was every shade that ocean can be, from darkest blue to tropical turquoise to the gray of storm and everything in between. You couldn’t see the extraordinary play of colors in the low light from the moonlit windows, but there was something of movement and flow to his hair even in the dark that made it ripple in the glow of what little light was available as if it were indeed water. His hair actually hid his body so I couldn’t tell anything of his clothes.

He lived at the beach house to be near the ocean, and it was as if the longer he was near it, the stronger he grew, the more confident. He had once been Mannan Mac Lir, and there was still a sea god in there trying to get out. It was as if fairyland had drained him of his powers, but being near the ocean gave him back what most of the sidhe had lost when they had left faerie.

Rhys put an arm around my shoulders, and whispered, “Even Doyle treats him as a superior.”

I nodded. “Does Doyle realize that yet?”

Rhys kissed me on the cheek, and he’d gotten his power under control enough that it was just a kiss, nice, but not so overwhelming. “I don’t think so.”

I turned and looked at him; he was only six inches taller than I, so it was almost direct eye contact. “But you noticed,” I said.

He smiled and traced the edge of my face with one finger, like a child drawing in the sand. I leaned into that touch and he gave me more of his hand so that he cupped part of the side of my face in his hand. There were other men in my bed who could cup the entire side of my face in one hand, but Rhys was like me, not so big, and sometimes that was nice, too. Variety was not a bad thing.

Amatheon and Adair followed Hafwyn out the sliding-glass doors that led to the huge deck and the huge grill. The ocean rolled underneath that deck. Even without being able to see clearly, you could somehow feel all that power pulsing and moving against the pilings of the house.

Rhys put his forehead against mine and whispered, “How do you feel about the big guy taking over?”

“I don’t know. There are so many other problems to solve.”

His hand moved to the back of my neck and he moved our faces apart so he could move in for a kiss, but he spoke as he did it. “If you want to stop the power he is building you must do it soon, Merry.” He kissed me as he said my name, and I let myself sink into that kiss. I let the warmth of his lips, the tenderness of his touch, hold me in a way that nothing else had today. Maybe it was finally being inside, away from the prying eyes that seemed to be everywhere, but something hard and unhappy loosened inside me as he kissed me.

He hugged me to him, and our bodies touched from shoulder to thigh as close as we could. I could feel his body growing hard and happy to see me against the front of my own. I don’t know if we would have tried for a little predinner privacy in the bedrooms, because Caswyn came down the hallway from the bedrooms, and suddenly a lot of the happy seeped away from me.

It wasn’t that he was not lovely, for he was, handsome, tall, slender, and muscular as most sidhe warriors were, but the air of sorrow that clung to him made my heart ache. He’d been a minor noble at the Unseelie Court His hair was straight and raven black like Cathbodua’s or even Queen Andais herself. His skin as pale as mine, or Frost’s. His eyes were still circles of red, red-orange, and finally true orange, like a fire banked down in his eyes. Andais had quieted that fire in him by the torture she’d done to him, the night her son died and we fled faerie. Caswyn had been brought to us by a cloaked woman who told us only that Caswyn’s mind would not survive any more of the Queen’s Mercy. I wasn’t entirely certain his mind wasn’t already broken beyond repair. But since Caswyn had been the whipping boy for Andais’s anger at us we took him in. His body had healed because he was sidhe, but his mind and heart were more fragile things.

He came down the hallway like a raven-haired ghost in an oversized white dress shirt untucked and billowing over a pair of cream dress slacks. The clothes were borrowed, but surely Frost’s shirt had fit him better last week? Was he still not eating?

He came straight for me as if Rhys wasn’t holding me. Rhys moved aside so that I could embrace Caswyn. He wrapped himself around me with a sigh that was almost a sob. I held him and let the fierceness of his grip envelop me. He’d been clingy and overly emotional since he had been rescued from the queen’s bloody bed. She’d tortured him to punish me in a way, and because my lovers had been out of reach. She’d picked him at random. He’d never been anything to me, not friend or enemy. Caswyn had been as neutral as the courts allowed and centuries of diplomacy had crashed against Andais’s madness. The cloaked noblewoman had said, “The queen asked him to bed her and as he was not one of her guards to be ordered so, he politely refused.” Caswyn had been one rejection too many for her sanity. She’d turned him into a red ruin on her sheets and made certain to show it to me with a spell that turned a mirror into a video phone better than anything human technology had yet created. When I’d first seen him, he’d been so unrecognizable that I thought he was someone I cared for.

When she told me who it was I’d been puzzled. He was nothing to me. I could still hear Andais’s voice, “Then you don’t care what I do to him?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, but finally I’d said, “He is a noble of the Unseelie Court and deserves protection from its queen.”

“You refused the crown, Meredith, and this queen says he deserves nothing for his years of hiding. He’s no one’s enemy and no one’s friend. I always hated that about him.” She’d grabbed his hair and made him beg while we watched.

“I will distroy him.”

“Why?” I’d asked.

“Because I can.”

I’d told him to come to us if ever he could. Days later, with the help of a sidhe who wanted no one to know her identity, he had come. I could not take responsibility for my aunt’s deeds. It was her evil and I was just an excuse for her to let out all her demons at once. I think and Doyle agreed, Andais was trying to force the nobles to assassinate her. It was a queen’s version of “Suicide by cop.”

Moments like that weren’t uncommon for Queen Andais, my aunt, and that was one of the reasons that so many of the guards had agreed to exile rather than stay with her once they had a choice. Most of them liked a little tie-me-up-tie-me-down, but there was a line that few would cross willingly, and Andais wasn’t a dominant in the sense of modern bondage and submission. She was a dominant in the old sense of might makes right, and being absolute ruler meant absolutely that. The old adage “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” applied to both of my royal relatives on both thrones. What I hadn’t foreseen was her idea of pain and sex spreading to outside her personal guard, or that the nobles would keep taking the abuse. Why hadn’t someone tried to kill her by now? Why didn’t they fight back?

“I thought you were gone,” Caswyn said. “I thought you were hurt, or worse; we all did.”

“Doyle and Frost wouldn’t let that happen,” Rhys said.

Caswyn looked at him, still trying to drape all of that six-feet-plus frame around my much smaller one. “And how would they keep Princess Meredith from being cut to pieces with glass? Weapon skill and bravery won’t stop every threat. Even the Queen’s Darkness and the Killing Frost cannot stop the perils of modern life like man-made glass. It would have cut them all to pieces, not just the princess.”

He spoke the truth. Old-fashioned glass made of naturally occurring substances with heat added could fall on my guards all day and not harm them, but anything with artificial additives, or metals, would cut them as much as me.

Doyle came across the room, speaking as he moved. “You are right, Wyn, but we would have shielded her body with ours. Meredith would have been unhurt no matter what happened to us.” Aloud we’d started calling him Wyn because my aunt had made his full name a thing whispered in the dark with blood and pain.

I pushed gently on Wyn’s chest to make him ease up and not lean so heavily on me. I couldn’t take that kind of hugging forever without it beginning to hurt a little. The angle of my neck wasn’t right for it.

“And the deli is owned by one of my Gran’s cousins, a brownie named Matilda. She would have kept me safe.”

Wyn unbent enough for his shoulder to go across mine, and my arm to encircle his waist. I could stand like that for hours, and he just seemed to need to touch me a lot. He was six feet of muscled warrior, but the queen had truly broken him in every way. His body had healed, as the sidhe do, but he only seemed to feel truly safe when he was with me, Doyle, Frost, Barinthus, Rhys, or anyone he perceived as powerful enough to keep him safe. The others made him afraid, as if he feared that Andais would snatch him away if he wasn’t with someone strong.

“One brownie does not seem enough protection,” he said in that uncertain voice that he’d had since he came to us. He’d never been the boldest of men, but now his fear was always there trembling below his skin, as if it ran in his blood now, so that fear was everywhere inside him.

I smiled up at him, trying to get him to smile back. “Brownies are a lot tougher than they look.”

He didn’t smile; he looked horrified. “Oh, Princess, forgive me.” He actually dropped to one knee and bowed his head, all that pale hair sweeping out and around his body. “I forgot that you are yourself part brownie. I did not mean to imply that you were not powerful.” He said all of it with his head bowed, and his gaze fixed on the floor, or at best my sandaled feet.

“Get up, Wyn. I took no offense.”

He dropped lower so that he could lay his hands on the floor by my feet. His hair covered his face, so all I had was his ever-more-frantic voice. “Please, your majesty, I meant no offense.”

“Wyn, I said that I took no offense.”

“Please, please, I didn’t mean any harm …”

Rhys knelt down by him. “Did you hear what Merry said, Wyn? She’s not mad at you.”

His forehead touched his hands on the floor so that he was in a position of abject abasement. He was saying “Please, please, don’t,” over and over again.

I knelt beside Rhys, and touched the long unbound hair. Caswyn actually screamed and laid himself flat on his stomach, hands out before him beseeching.

Doyle and Frost came to kneel on either side of him with us. They tried to calm him, but it was as if he couldn’t hear us or see us, and whatever he was hearing and seeing was terrible.

I finally yelled at him. “Wyn, Wyn, its Merry! It’s Merry!” I lay flat on the hardwood floor near his head. I could see nothing through all that hair, so I reached to smooth it back from his face.

He screamed, and scrambled back from my touch. The men tried to touch him, too, but he screamed at every touch, and scrambled away from us on hands and knees until he found a wall to huddle against. He held his hands out in front of him as if warding off blows.

In that moment I hated my aunt.