A Caress of Twilight mg-2

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I watched them doing a minor job of shining at each other, and realized that the charm wasn't for our benefit. I glanced behind me at Frank. He was staring at her as if he'd never really seen a woman before, or at least not one like this. Maeve Reed was trying to be inhumanly charming, but still humanly beautiful, for the benefit of her human bodyguards, not us. She would have used more special effects if the show had been for us.

  "Ms. Reed," Julian gushed, moving in to take her elbow, steering her away from us, "we would never neglect you. You're not only our client, but one of the most precious objects we've ever been asked to guard. We would lay our lives down for you. What more can men do when they worship a woman?"

  I thought he was laying it on a bit thick, but I hadn't spent any time around Maeve Reed. Maybe she liked the compliments thick.

  She managed a delicate blush that I knew was magic and not real. I could feel it in the air. Sometimes the most simple physical changes take the most magic. She slid her arm through his and lowered her voice enough that we couldn't hear what was said. Oh, we could have eavesdropped, but that would have been rude and she would probably have sensed the spell. We didn't want to antagonize the goddess; not yet, anyway.

  They turned back to face us, both smiling, both charming, her grip on his arm very firm. Something in Julian's eyes was trying to give me a message, but I couldn't quite read it behind his hip yellow tinted glasses.

  "Ms. Reed has persuaded me to remain at her side for the duration of your visit." He raised an eyebrow as he spoke.

  And finally I got the message. Ms. Reed had hired Kane and Hart to protect her from us. She was afraid of the Unseelie Court, enough that she wouldn't be alone with us without backup, both magical and physical. Although her magic thrummed through this house, this land, these walls, she still feared us. You'd think the fey wouldn't be so superstitious, especially about other fey, but they often are. My father said it came from knowing almost nothing about any other fey culture but the one we were born into. Ignorance breeds fear.

  There'd been so much magic inside Maeve's walls that almost from the moment we'd driven through the gates I'd begun to not "hear" it. It was a skill you learned if you spent too much time in and around major-brouhaha magic. You had to deaden its touch, or you spent all your time sensing the constant magic around you, and it deadened you to newer spells, more immediate dangers. It was like being bombarded by a hundred radio stations at once. If you tried to listen to all of them, you heard nothing.

  I looked into Maeve Reed's smiling, unreadable face and shook my head. I turned to look at Doyle. I tried to ask with my eyes and face how rude and how human I was allowed to be today.

  He seemed to understand, because he gave a tiny nod. I took it to mean I could be as rude and human as I wanted. I hoped that was what it meant, because I was just about to pay several mortal insults to the golden goddess of Hollywood.

  Chapter 10

  I walked around the couch to greet the goddess. Kitto followed me, and I had to make him stay-by the couch. Left to his own devices, he'd have stayed glued to my side like an overly devoted puppy.

  I smiled toward Maeve and Julian. " I can't tell you what an honor it is to meet you, Ms. Reed." I held out my hand, and she took one hand off of Julian's arm long enough to shake.

  She gave me just the tips of her fingers; it wasn't so much a handshake as a touch. I'd seen a lot of women who didn't know how to shake hands, but Maeve hadn't even really tried. Maybe I was supposed to take her hand and kneel, but if she was waiting for genuflecting, she was in for a long wait. I had one queen and one queen only. Maeve Reed may have been a queen of Hollywood, but that just wasn't the same thing.

  I knew my face looked puzzled, but I couldn't decide what was going on behind that lovely face of hers. We needed to know.

  "You really did hire Kane and Hart to protect you from us, didn't you?"

  Maeve turned a perfect look on me, pleasant, bemused, incredulous: eyes wide, beautifully lipsticked mouth open in a small o. It was a look for a camera, for a screen that would make her face twenty feet tall. It was a face to win over audiences and the heads of studios.

  It was a great face, but it wasn't that great. "A simple yes or no will suffice, Ms. Reed."

  "I'm sorry," she said, voice apologetic, face soft, eyes a little confused. Her grip on Julian's arm was too tight; it gave a lie to that casual confused act.

  "Did you hire Kane and Hart to protect you from us?"

  She gave the laugh that People magazine had once called the five-million-dollar laugh, the one where her eyes crinkled and her face shone and her mouth was just a little open. "What a strange idea. I assure you, Ms. Gentry, I am not afraid of you."

  She'd avoided a direct answer. She wasn't afraid of me; that much had to be true, because it is taboo among us to truly lie. If Doyle hadn't suggested in the van that I be rude, I'd have let it go, because pursuing it relentlessly would have been more than rude; it would have been insulting, and duels had started over less. But only among highborn sidhe could one be expected to know the rules. We were counting on Maeve assuming I'd been raised by savages -- Unseelies and humans.

  "Are you afraid of my guards, then?" I asked.

  The laughter was still making her face shine, her eyes sparkle as she looked at me. "Whatever gave you such an absurd idea?"

  "You did."

  She shook her head, sending that long yellow sheet of hair sliding around her body. The glow of the laughter still shone in her face, and her eyes were just a little more blue. I realized suddenly that it wasn't the glow of laughter, which should have faded, but a very subtle type of glamour. She was purposefully making herself glow, just a little. And if she was glowing, she was using magic to try to persuade me to believe her.

  I frowned, because I couldn't feel magic being used against me. Usually when another sidhe uses magic, you know it.

  I glanced behind me at the guards. Doyle and Frost were standing, but they were unreadable now, imperious even. Kitto was still standing beside the couch where I'd left him. One small hand had a death grip on the white back, as if touching anything was better than standing untouched.

  I wondered if he was feeling things I couldn't. I was only part fey; I was always willing to believe that I'd missed parts by that mixed heritage. I'd gained things, too -- being able to do major magic surrounded by metal, for instance -- but with every gain there can be a loss.

  "Ms. Reed, I'll ask you one more time, did you hire Kane and Hart to protect you from my guards?"

  "What I told Julian and his men was that I had some overzealous fans."

  I didn't bother to look at Julian for confirmation. "I believe that's what you told Julian, Ms. Reed. Now, what's the real reason that you hired them?"

  She stared at me with mock horror, or maybe it was real. She glanced at Frost and Doyle, and said, "Have you taught her no manners?"

  "She has what manners she needs," Doyle said.

  A look flickered through Maeve's eyes, fear, I think. She looked back to me, and down in those softly glowing blue eyes, that flicker remained. She was afraid. Very, very afraid. But of what?

  "Did you really hire Julian and his people because of some overzealous fan?"

  "Stop this," she whispered.

  "Do you really believe that we will harm you?" I asked.

  "No," she said, and she said it too quickly, as if she was relieved to finally be able to give a straightforward answer.

  "Then why are you afraid of us?"

  "Why are you doing this to me?" she asked, and her voice held all the sorrow of every maiden who had ever asked that question of a lover gone astray.

  It tightened my throat to hear it. Julian looked stricken. "I think you've asked enough questions, Meredith."

  I shook my head. "No, I haven't." I met those pain-filled blue eyes, and said, "Ms. Reed, you don't have to hide yourself from us."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "That is entirely too close to a lie,"
I said softly.

  Her eyes suddenly looked like blue crystal, and I realized I was seeing those blue-blue eyes through the shine of unshed tears. Then the tears slid slowly down her golden cheeks, and as they fell, the blue of her eyes blurred, changed, still blue, but tricolored like my own.

  There was a wide outer edge of rich deep blue like a bright sapphire, then a much thinner ring of melted copper, and an equally thin circle of liquid gold around the dark point of her pupil. But what set her eyes apart even among the sidhe was that the gold and copper trailed out across her iris like streaks of color in a good piece of lapis lazuli, so that metallic glints shone out from that ring of faultless deep blue.

  Her eyes were like a stormy blue sky shattered by colored lightning.

  In the forty years she'd been a movie star, no camera had ever seen these eyes. Her real eyes. I'm sure some agent or studio head had long ago convinced her to hide the least human of her features. I'd hidden what I was and what I looked like for only three years, and it had killed parts of me to do it. Maeve Reed had done it for decades.

  She kept her eyes averted from Julian, as if she didn't want him to see them. I took her hand from Julian's arm; she tried to fight me, and I didn't tug on her. I just kept a light pressure on her wrist until she raised the hand of her own accord. Then I took her hand full in mine, cradling it. I knelt in front of her and brought her hand to my lips. I laid the lightest of touches on that golden hand, and said, "You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen, Maeve Reed."

  She took her other hand from Julian's grip and just stood there staring down at me, tears streaming like crystal drops down her cheeks. Slowly, she let the rest of the glamour go. The tan began to fade, or change, until she was no longer honey brown but an overall soft gold. Her hair grew paler, blond and blonder, until it was almost a white blond. I could not imagine why she'd changed her hair to the more standard yellow blond. Either color was well within human standards.

  I held both her hands in mine while she stripped away a century of lies and stood before me a shining thing. Suddenly there seemed to be more colors in the room, a breath of sweet scented flowers that grew thousands of miles away from this desert place. She gripped my hands as if they were her only anchor, as if she might vanish into the light and sweetness if I let her go.

  She threw back her head, eyes closed, and her golden glow filled the room as if a small sun had suddenly risen before me. She glowed, and she cried, and she held my hands so hard it hurt. Somewhere during all of it, I found I was crying, too, and her glow had called my own, so that my skin looked as if it were filled with moonlight.

  She came to her knees beside me, looking wonderingly at my hands and hers, one glow pressed against the other. She began to laugh joyously, a little hysterically.

  Somewhere in all the laughter, I could make out her words, "And I... thought the men... were the danger."

  She leaned into me suddenly and pressed her lips to mine. I was so startled by the kiss that I simply froze for a second. What I would have done if she'd given me time to think, I don't know, because she jerked away from me and ran back out the way she'd come.

  Chapter 11

  Julian had gone after Maeve. It left young Frank standing by the exit looking lost. His eyes were too large in his pale, startled face. I doubted Frank had ever seen a sidhe in her full power.

  I was still kneeling, the glow beginning to fade from my skin, when Doyle came to stand beside me. "Princess, are you well?"

  I looked up at him and realized I must have looked a little startled myself. I could feel the heat on my mouth where her lips had touched mine. It was like I'd taken a sip of spring sunshine.

  "Princess?"

  I nodded. "I'm all right." But my voice came out hoarse, and I had to clear my throat before I said, "I've just never ..." I tried to put it into words. "She tasted like sunshine. And until this second I didn't know that sunshine tasted like anything."

  Doyle knelt beside me and spoke softly. "It is always difficult to be touched by those who hold such elemental powers."

  I frowned at him. "She said she thought it was the men she needed to be afraid of. What did she mean by that?"

  "Think how you were after just a few years alone out here... and magnify that by a human century."

  I felt my eyes widen. "You mean she's attracted to me." I shook my head before he could say anything. "She's attracted to the first sidhe she's touched in a hundred years."

  "Do not underestimate yourself, Meredith, but I have never heard it said that Conchenn was a lover of women, so, yes, it is the touch of sidhe flesh that she craves."

  I sighed. "I cannot blame her." And then another thought occurred to me. "You don't think she's invited us here to ask if I'll share one of you with her?"

  Doyle's dark eyebrows raised over the top of his sunglasses. "I had not thought of such a thing." He seemed to be thinking about what I'd said. "I suppose it is possible." He frowned. "But it would be the height of rudeness to ask such a thing. We are not merely your lovers but potential husbands. It is not casual."

  "You said it yourself, Doyle, she's been alone for a century. A hundred years might wear down anyone's sense of politeness."

  There was movement behind us; we turned to find Frost already on his feet facing the entrance. It was Rhys. "What have you guys been doing in here?"

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  He gestured at Doyle and me kneeling on the floor. There was still the faintest of glows to my skin like a memory of moonlight.

  I let Doyle help me to my feet; I was strangely unsteady. Maeve had caught me off guard, true, but I'd been touched a great deal more by other sidhe and not been this shaken.

  I spoke. "Maeve Reed dropped her glamour."

  Rhys's eye widened. "I felt it outside. You're telling me that all she did was drop her glamour?"

  I nodded.

  He gave a low whistle. "Sweet Goddess."

  "And that is the point," Doyle said.

  Rhys looked at him. "What do you mean?"

  "We have all been worshipped in the past, but for most of us it is in the long past. For Conchenn it has been less than three hundred years. She was still being worshipped in Europe when we were asked to... leave."

  "So you're saying that she's got more power because she was being worshipped?" Rhys asked.

  "Not more power," Doyle said, "but more..."

  "Oomph," I suggested.

  "I am unfamiliar with the word," he said.

  "More... jazz, more bite, more crack to the whip." I waved my hands in the air. "I don't know. Rhys knows what I mean."

  He came down the three steps to the living room. "Yeah, I know what you mean. She's got more of a charge to her magic."

  Doyle finally nodded. "I will accept that."

  Frost came to stand with us. Doyle looked at him from behind dark glasses, and the bigger man hesitated, frowning. "I have an insight to add, my captain."

  The two men carefully measured each other. I interrupted. "What's wrong with you two? If Frost has something to add, then let him say it."

  Frost continued to look at Doyle, as if waiting. Finally, Doyle gave one quick nod. Frost gave a small bow. "I have watched movies on Meredith's television set. I have seen how humans react to these movie stars. Their adoration of the actors is a type of worship."

  We all looked at him. It was Rhys who whispered, "Lord and Lady, if anyone could prove that she's been worshipped..." He let his voice trail off.

  Doyle finished the thought for him. "Then there would be grounds to exile us all from this country. The one thing we were forbidden to do was set ourselves up to be worshipped as gods."

  I shook my head. " She did not set herself up to be worshipped as a deity. She was just trying to earn a living."

  The men thought about that for a few seconds, then finally Doyle nodded. "The princess is correct by law."

  "I don't think Maeve intended to get around the law," I said.

  He shook h
is head. "I do not mean to imply otherwise, but whatever her intent, she has the added benefit of having been worshipped by humans for the last forty years. A human movie star cannot take advantage of that kind of energy exchange, but Maeve is sidhe, and she will know exactly how to use such energy."

  "What does that say about the models and actors in Europe that have sidhe blood in them?" I asked. "Or even the royal families of Europe? Sidhe had to marry into all the royal houses of Europe to cement the last great treaty. Are they all taking extra benefit from their human admirers?"

  "It is not something I can speak to," Doyle said.

  "I'll take a guess at it," Rhys said.

  Doyle frowned at him, and the look was clear even through the dark glasses. "We are not paid to guess."

  Rhys grinned through his fake beard. "Think of it as an extra plus when you hire me."

  Doyle lowered the glasses enough for Rhys to see his eyes.

  "Ooh," Rhys said. Then, laughing, he said, "I'll bet that anyone with enough sidhe blood in them can gain power from all that human adoration. They may not be aware of it, but how else do you explain the successful reigns of the royal houses with the highest percentage of sidhe blood? All are still active, while the houses that took the sidhe only once treated it like a plague and stopped, and they have died out."

  Julian came back into the room. "Ms. Reed has requested that this meeting continue out by the pool, unless there is some strong objection against it."

  "I don't see a problem with taking this outside on such a beautiful day," I said.

  "Nor I," Doyle said.

  The others agreed -- everyone but Kitto. He was still huddled by the couch. I finally had to go to him and take his hand. He whispered, "It will be very open and very bright out there."

  Kitto had spent centuries inside the dark cramped tunnels of the goblin mound. I'd always wondered why in the old stories the goblins always fought under a dark sky, as if they brought the darkness of the ground with them. If they were all as bothered by openness and light as Kitto, maybe they couldn't have fought without their darkness. Or maybe it was just Kitto. I shouldn't make such a wide assumption based on only one goblin.