Swallowing Darkness

Chapter Thirty-Eight

I had eight soldiers with me, each clutching a bloody nail, each brought back from the brink of death. Once the last nail was out of my body, the call faded. There was something about the pain and the injury that had made the magic possible.

A sidhe warrior appeared out of the dark, dressed in crimson armor that gleamed in the moonlight, as if made of fire. His name was Aodán, and I knew that his hand of power matched his armor. I felt him call his hand of power, and I spoke without thinking. "Kill him."

They should have hesitated. They shouldn't have taken my orders. Dawson was the ranking officer, but they aimed their recovered guns at the figure and fired. The bullets did what bullets had been doing to faerie from the moment humans had made them. They tore through that brilliant armor, and into the flesh underneath. He died before he could send his hand of fire to scorch us. I could feel them calling their hands of power. If we could keep shooting them before they had time to unleash that power, we could win this. Such a simple solution, if you had soldiers who would follow unhesitatingly, and a complete willingness to kill everything in your path. Apparently, I had both.

Other soldiers joined us, not because of me, but because we had formed a unit on the field of battle. We seemed to know what we were doing, and we had an officer with us. They formed around us because we were moving with purpose, and you need purpose in the midst of battle. Purpose, and no hesitation.

I felt magic come our way. Some cried out in horror at whatever illusion one of the armored sidhe had created. I'd been able to share glamour with one or two other sidhe before. I spread that pool of protective glamour out and out. I spread it farther than I'd ever attempted before, spreading it over my people, the way you'd spill water over fevered skin.

As the screams of my men stopped and they began to murmur, I spoke low to Dawson. "Shoot the ones in armor." I had to concentrate on keeping all of us free of the illusions. Even shouting would make me stumble.

Dawson never questioned me. He simply yelled out my order, "Shoot the ones in armor! Fire!"

Immortal warriors who had seen more centuries than any of us would ever dream of fell before our weapons. They fell like dreams brought down to earth. They couldn't cloud the minds of the men, and without their illusions to stop the soldiers from firing, we mowed them down.

Dilys stood, all in yellow, glowing like she had swallowed flame, and it had filled her skin and her hair, and blazed out of her eyes. She wore no armor of any kind. Her dress looked as if she were expecting to walk down some marble staircase to a ball. But where the warriors fell, their magical armor pierced by human ingenuity, she stood. The bullets seemed to hit a wavering glow, like heat off a summer road. The bullets hit, hesitated, then melted, in little spurts of orangey light.

"What is she?" Dawson said, beside me.

"Magic," I said. "She is magic."

"What kind of magic?" Hayes asked.

"Heat, light, sun. She's a goddess of the summer heat." I'd always wondered what she'd been before she fell from grace. Most of the really powerful ones hid their pasts, some out of shame for power lost, others for fear of enemies who had retained more power settling old scores. But as I had returned Siobhan's illusions to her, so apparently I had given Dilys, or whatever her real name was, back her heat.

Others of the armored warriors had hidden behind her wavering shield. They huddled around her as they were supposed to huddle around me, but I would never burn like that. I was not sun, but moon.

In that moment, I didn't want to kill her. I wanted her to come back to me. I wanted her to be one of my court. I wanted the summer's heat to warm us all.

I called, "Dilys, we are all Unseelie. We should not be killing each other."

She spoke in a voice that held an edge of roar, and I realized it was the sound of some great fire, as if her very words burned. "You say that because your human weapons cannot harm me."

Hayes flinched beside me. She whispered, "It hurts to hear her speak."

"Not as much as it would if the princess wasn't shielding us all," Dawson said.

He was right. The glamour that protected them from the illusions was also saving them from the full force of that burning voice. She wasn't fire, she was the heat of sun. It fills the fields with life, but too much of it and the fields wither, die, and become lifeless dust.

You needed water and heat for life. Where was her mate? Where was her balance? The ring on my hand pulsed once. It had been known as the Queen's Ring for centuries. Andais had given it to me to show her favor. But she was a thing of destruction and war only. I was life as well as death; I was balance. The ring had once belonged to a goddess of love and fertility. Andais had taken it from the Goddess's dead finger.

Death should never take the tools of life, because it won't know how to use them. But I knew.

There was a rain of pink petals around me and my soldiers. The ring pulsed harder, hot against my finger. Something moved at the edge of the clearing. A white figure limped out from among the trees. It was Crystall. The last time I'd seen him, he'd been in the queen's bed, being tortured to a red ruin. One of the serious downsides to being immortal and being able to heal from almost anything was that if you fell into the hands of a sexual sadist, the "fun" could last a very long time.

She'd picked him as her victim because he'd been one of her guards who had tried to answer my call. He would have come to L.A. with me, but Andais declared that she could not lose all her guard to me. So she punished those who had to stay but did not wish to stay. She wasn't getting volunteers to take the place of the guards who had come to me. She'd been too harsh a mistress for too long. The men knew what to expect, and they just weren't signing up. That had made her even worse to the men she still had. Crystall showed that as he moved into the clearing.

When he could no longer lean on the trees, he fell to the ground on all fours and began to crawl toward us. The soldiers aimed their guns around him, as if they expected to see what had injured him coming out of the trees. It was a thought. Where was the queen? Why was she letting Cel and so many of her nobles go against her express orders? It wasn't like her to sit idly by if she could punish people. But watching Crystall crawl, seeing the bloody wounds on his body, I thought that she might be busy. Sometimes she fell so far into her bloodlust that she forgot everything but the pain and flesh under her hands. Was she somewhere intoxicated with sadistic pleasure while her son imploded her kingdom? Had she lost control to that degree?

I started moving toward Crystall. The soldiers moved with me, guns trained on Dilys, on the trees, on the dark, but I wasn't sure there was anything to shoot right now. Later. There would be things to shoot later.

Dilys called across the field in her voice with its edge of fire sound. "Your bloodline is corrupt, Meredith. Your aunt has tortured her guards until they are useless for anything but slaves."

I looked at the golden figure, and called back. "Then why are you helping Cel? Isn't he just as corrupt?"

"Yes," Dilys said.

"You'll help him kill me, then you'll kill him," I said.

She said nothing, but her light flared a little brighter. It was the magical equivalent of that little smile that you can't always keep from your face. That satisfied, things-are-going-my-way smile.

Crystall collapsed, and I thought for a moment that he wouldn't get back up, but he did. He began to crawl, painfully, slowly, toward that golden glow.

I started to go forward and help him, but the ring pulsed harder, and I took that as a sign. I stayed where I was. I let him do that slow, piteous crawl. His white hair, which I knew in the right light wasn't white but almost clear, like crystal or water, dragged on the ground, like a rich cloak fallen on hard times.

Dawson said, "Do you want us to help him?"

"No," I said in a low voice. "I want her to help him."

He gave me a look, then when my look didn't make any sense to him, he did the look with Brennan and Mercer. Mercer said, "But won't she kill him?"

"Not if she wants to be saved," I said.

"I don't think she's the one who needs saving," Mercer said.

Dilys yelled at me. "Aren't you going to help him, Princess?"

"He's not here for me."

"You speak in riddles," she said.

Crystall continued his agonizingly slow crawl across the field with its dead and wounded. But it was clear now that he wasn't aiming for me. He was crawling inexorably toward that golden glow.

"Do not let him throw his life away, Meredith. If he tries to harm me in this condition, I will destroy him."

"He's not here to harm you, Dilys," I said.

"Why else is he here but to save you and your humans?"

Crystall had reached the edge of the golden light, but had not quite touched it. The light, like sunlight will, sparkled through his skin and hair as if he were made of his namesake, crystal. Her light caught rainbows along his body. Small, winking colored lights, to chase back the dark.

He put out his hand, and the moment it entered the circle of her light, he knelt and looked at her. The blood on his body gleamed as if formed of rubies.

"What magic is this?" Dilys asked, but her voice was not the burning thing it had been.

Crystall stood, and walked into that light. His body began to glow, like sunlight on water, or the reflected light on diamonds. He moved into her sunlight, and reflected it, making it a thing of beauty.

"What are you doing to him, Meredith?"

"It is not me who is doing it."

Crystall was almost within touching distance of her golden, glowing form. He stood there, tall and lithe, his body lined with muscles, but lean like a runner. He had always had a delicate strength. He was like a jewel thrown into the sun, gleaming with rainbows from the tips of his hair to every inch of bare skin. The wounds had closed, as if just being near her power had healed him.

She looked... frightened. "I am no healer, but he is healed. How is this possible?"

Crystall held his hand out to her.

"What does he want?" she yelled, and the fear was plain in her voice.

"Take his hand, and you'll know."

"It's a trap," she said.

"I wear the queen's ring, Dilys. I saw you burning with the heat of the summer sun, and thought, 'Where is her balance?' Where is her coolness to keep her from burning everything to death?"

"No!" She shouted it at him.

Crystall simply held his hand out to her, as if he could hold that shining hand out forever.

Then her golden hand began to move, as if of its own accord. Her fingertips brushed his, and the golden heat became half silver, and I saw the waver of heat meet the sparkle of water in front of them, like the sun on the surface of a summer lake.

Then they were in each other's arms. They kissed as if they had always kissed, though I knew they had not. He had never been her lover, her god to goddess, but he was what was left. He was the coolness she needed, and I had called what I could find.

Her glow banked to a hard, yellow light as if she were carved of it. Crystall glowed as if he were formed of rainbow light.

"Oh, my god," Hayes whispered.

"Yes," I said.

"What did you do?" Dawson said.

"They will be a couple, and there will be children. Two children."

"How do you know that?" Brennan asked.

I smiled at him, and knew that my eyes had begun to glow, green and gold.

He swallowed hard, as if the sight disturbed him. "Oh, yeah, magic."

"Make love, not war," another solider said.

"Exactly," I said.

Then there was a shriek from the far edge of the field. Cel stood there, screaming wordlessly at me in his gray and black armor, surrounded by followers in every color of armor and some that looked like bark and leaves or animal pelts, but they would stand up to anything but steel and iron. Those dreamlike warriors carried a figure between them, and from the moment I recognized him, my heart failed me. His hair fell loose around him, blacker than the moon-fed night. Their white sidhe hands seemed an insult against all his dark perfection.

Cel screamed across the field at me. "He still lives, barely! Is this mongrel worth your life, cousin? Will you walk to me across this field to save him?"

I could not take my gaze from him, dark and so terribly still. Was he even still alive? Only death would make him so still. The thought that I had lost them both, my Darkness and my Killing Frost, was too much. Too much pain, too much loss, just too much.

I whispered his name. "Doyle." I willed him to look up, to move, to let me know that if I walked to him, there would be something to save. My hand went to my stomach, still flat, still so unmoved by the pregnancy, and I knew that I could not trade myself for my Darkness. He would never forgive me if I made such a bargain. A wave of nausea washed over me, and the night swam, but I couldn't faint. I couldn't be weak; there was no time for weakness. I pushed the feelings away that would unman me, and clung to the ones that would help me: hatred, fear, rage, and a coldness that I didn't know I had inside me.

"It's war, then," I whispered.

"What?" Dawson asked.

"We will give Cel what he wants," I said.

"You can't give yourself to him," Hayes said.

"No, I cannot," I said, and my voice sounded like someone else's, as if I didn't recognize myself anymore.

"If we don't give him you, what do we give him?" Mercer asked.

"War," I said simply, and began to walk across the field. My soldiers came with me. Either Cel would die this moment or I would. Seeing Doyle thrown onto the ground like so much motionless garbage, I was content with that.