A Caress of Twilight mg-2

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  "But the Nameless is a part of the courts, a part of who you were. You should be able to track it as you would track your own shadow." The moment I finished, I knew I should have kept quiet.

  All the anger flowed into her face, her posture, her hands where they gripped her elbows. She shivered with rage. I think for a second she was too angry to speak.

  Doyle stood, putting himself in front of me. "Have you told the Seelie Court?"

  "You do not need to hide her away, Darkness. I am working too hard to keep her alive to kill her myself. And, yes, the Seelie know what has happened."

  "Will the two courts come together to hunt the Nameless?" he asked. He hadn't moved from in front of me, which left me peeking around his body like a child. That wasn't exactly the way to be a strong presence. I moved so I could see the mirror, but they both ignored me.

  "No."

  "But it is to each one's benefit, surely."

  "Taranis is being difficult. He's acting as if the Nameless is made up of only Unseelie energy. Pretending that all his light has no taint." She looked like she'd tasted something sour. "He will not claim its parentage, so he will give no aid, for to give aid is to admit his part in its making."

  "That is foolishness."

  She nodded. "He was always one more interested in the illusion of purity than in purity itself."

  "What can stand against the Nameless?" he asked, voice soft, almost as if he were thinking aloud.

  "We do not know, for we bound it without testing it. But it is full of old, old magicks, things we no longer tolerate among even the Unseelie." She sat down on the end of the bed, almost jerkily. "Whoever released it, and hid it from our sight... if they can truly control it, it is a powerful weapon."

  "What do you need of me, my queen?"

  She looked up at that, and the look was not unfriendly. "What if I said come home, come home and protect me? What if I said I don't feel safe without you and Frost at my side?"

  He dropped to one knee. His face was lost in a wave of his own hair. "I am still captain of the Queen's Ravens."

  "You would come?" she asked, voice soft.

  "If you commanded it."

  I sat on the bed and tried to keep my face neutral. I hugged my knees to my chest and tried to not look anything, nothing. If I could just not think, it wouldn't show on my face.

  "You say you are still the captain of my Ravens, but are you still my Darkness, or do you belong to another now?"

  He kept his head down and stayed silent. I kept trying to think of nothing. She gave me a very unfriendly look. "You have stolen my Darkness from me, Meredith."

  "What do you want me to say, Aunt Andais?"

  "It's good to remind me that you are my blood. Seeing his back sliced up makes me hope you are more mine than I knew."

  Nothing, nothing, I would think nothing. I imagined emptiness like looking through a pane of glass into another pane and another and another. Clear, nothing.

  "The Nameless was loosed for a reason, Darkness. Until I know what that reason is, I'm covering my assets. The fair Meredith is one of those assets. I still hope to get a child out of her."

  She looked at me, and it was not a friendly look. "Is he as magnificent as he looks?"

  I fought for a neutral voice to match the face. "Yes."

  The queen sighed. "A pity, but I didn't want to give birth to puppies, now did I?"

  "Puppies?" I said.

  "Didn't he tell you? Doyle has two aunts whose true forms are dogs. His grandmother was one of the hounds of the great hunt. Hellhounds, humans call them now, though you know we have nothing to do with hell. A different religious system altogether."

  I remembered the baying and the look of hunger in Doyle's eyes. "I was aware that Doyle wasn't pure sidhe."

  "His grandfather was a phouka so evil that he bred in dog form with the wild hunt itself and lived to tell the tale." She smiled, and it was sweetly malicious.

  "Doyle's as mixed a bag of genetics as I am then." The voice was still neutral; yeah for me.

  "But did you know he was part dog before you took him to your bed?"

  Doyle stayed kneeling through all this, his hair hiding his face.

  "I knew he owed his bloodline in part to the wild hunt before he came inside me."

  "Really?" She made it sound like she didn't believe me.

  "I've heard the belling of the hounds come out of his mouth." I moved my hair so she could see the bite mark on my shoulder, very near my neck. "I knew that he dreamed of my flesh in more than one way before I allowed him to satisfy either hunger."

  Her eyes grew hard again. "You surprise me, Meredith. I never thought you had the stomach for violence."

  "I do not enjoy hurting people. Violence in the bedroom when all agree is different."

  "I've never found it different," she said.

  "I know," I said.

  "How do you do that?" she asked.

  "How do I do what, my queen?"

  "How do you sound so neutral, utterly neutral, yet somehow you manage to say 'go to hell' with a smile and a neutral word."

  "It's not deliberate, Aunt Andais, believe me."

  "At least you didn't try to deny it."

  "We do not lie to each other," I said, and this time my voice was tired.

  "Arise, Darkness, and show your queen your ravaged back."

  He stood without a word, gave his back to the mirror, and swept his hair to one side.

  Andais came close to the mirror, reaching out with one gloved hand, so that for a second I thought her hand would keep traveling and come out like a 3-D image. "I had taken you for a dominant, Doyle, and I don't enjoy being dominated."

  "You never asked what I enjoyed, my Queen." He was still facing away from the mirror, his back to it.

  "I also never thought you'd be so blessed down below." She sounded wistful now, like a child who hadn't gotten what she wanted for her birthday. "I mean, you are descended from dogs and phoukas, and they are not much in that way."

  "Most phoukas have more than one shape, my Queen."

  "Dog and horse, sometimes eagle, yes, I know all about that. What does that have to do..." She stopped in midsentence, and a smile crooked at the edges of her lipsticked mouth. "Are you saying that your grandfather could turn into a horse as well as a dog?"

  He spoke softly. "Yes, my Queen."

  "You're hung like a horse." She started to laugh.

  He said nothing, only shrugged his broad shoulders. I was too startled at her laughter to join it. It wasn't always a good thing to amuse the Queen.

  "My Darkness, it is wondrous, but a horse you are not."

  "The phoukas are shape-shifters, my queen."

  The laughter faded around the edges, then she said in a voice still light with it, "Are you implying that you can change the size?"

  "Would I imply something like that?" he asked in his neutral voice.

  I watched emotions flow across her face too fast to catch: disbelief, curiosity, and finally a hard-edged wanting. She stared at him the way misers stare at gold, a covetous, clinging, selfish want.

  "When all this is over, Darkness, if you have not fathered a child with the princess, we will make you live up to this boast."

  I think I failed at the neutral face, but I tried to hang on to it.

  "I do not boast, my queen," Doyle said, almost in a whisper.

  "I don't know what to wish for now, my Darkness. If you make babies with Meredith, I will never know the joy of you. And I still believe what I have always believed, and what has truly kept you out of my bed."

  "Dare I ask what that is?" he said.

  "You may dare. I may even answer."

  Silence stretched for a second or two, then Doyle said, "What do you believe that has kept me out of your bed all these years?" He turned his head enough to see her face when he asked.

  "That you would be king in truth, not merely in name. And I will not share my power." She looked past him to me. I fought to keep a blank face,
and knew I was losing. "What of you, Meredith? How do you feel about having a true king, one who will demand a share of your power, and a share of more than your bed?"

  I thought of several answers, discarded them all, and tried, very carefully to tell the truth. "I share better than you do, Aunt Andais."

  She stared at me, a look in her eyes that I couldn't read. I met that gaze with one of my own, letting the sincerity of what I'd said show in my eyes.

  "You share better than me, you share better than me. What does that mean, when I do not share at all?"

  "It is the truth, Aunt Andais. It means exactly what it says, nothing more, nothing less."

  She stared at me for a long, long moment. "Taranis does not share his power either."

  "I know," I said.

  "You cannot be a dictator if you do not dictate."

  "I am learning that a queen must rule those around her, truly rule them, but I am not learning that a queen must dictate to all around her. I am finding that the counsel of my guards, who you so wisely sent with me, is worth listening to."

  "I have counselors," she said, and it sounded almost defensive.

  "So does Taranis," I said.

  Andais sat back against one of the bedposts. She seemed almost to slump, the one bare hand playing along the black ribbons on her dress. "But neither of us listens to anyone. The emperor has no clothes."

  The last comment caught me off guard. It must have showed, because she said, "You look surprised, niece of mine."

  "I didn't expect you to know the story."

  "I had a human lover some time ago who was fond of children's stories. He read to me when I could not sleep." There was a dreamy wistfulness to her voice now, a true note of regret.

  She continued in a more normal tone. "The Nameless has been freed. It was last seen headed west. I doubt it will get as far as the Western Sea, but I thought you should know, all the same." With that, she made a gesture and the mirror went blank.

  My eyes were very wide in the glass. "Can you make the mirror so that no one can get through without signaling to us first?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "Do it."

  "The queen may take that ill."

  I nodded, looking at my scared face in the mirror, because now that I didn't have to pretend, I could look as scared as I felt. "Just do it, Doyle, just do it. I don't want any more surprises tonight."

  He went to the mirror and made small gestures at its edges. I felt the spell prickle along my skin as I climbed back into the bed.

  Doyle turned from the mirror and hesitated by the edge of the bed. "Do you still want company?"

  I held out my arms to him. "Come to bed, and hold me while we sleep."

  He smiled and slipped under the sheet. He spooned his body against mine until I lay cupped in his arms, his chest, his stomach, his groin, his thighs. He encircled me and I pulled the warm silken hardness of him around me.

  He spoke softly as I began to drift off to sleep. "You do not mind that my grandmother was a hound of the wild hunt and my grandfather a phouka?"

  "No." My voice was thick with sleep. Then I asked, "Could I really end up having puppies?"

  "It is unlikely."

  "Okay." I was almost asleep, when I felt him hold me tighter, as if I was his security blanket instead of the other way around.

  Chapter 21

  The Grey Detective Agency didn't usually get called to murder scenes. We had helped the police in the past when something mystical was doing something bad, but that was usually as decoys or advisers. I could count on both hands the number of murder scenes I'd seen and still have a couple of fingers left over.

  I had one less finger to count today. The woman's body was already on a gurney. Her yellow hair trailed across her face, darker gold where the ocean had touched it. Her very short evening dress was pale blue on the edges but dark blue where the water had soaked into it. A broad ribbon, probably white, sat just under her breasts, tightening the dress enough to show cleavage. Her long legs were bare and tanned. Her toenails were painted a funky blue to match the fingernails. Her lips were an odd blue color, too; but it was lipstick, not some sign of her death.

  "The lipstick color is called asphyxiation."

  I turned to the tall woman just behind me. Detective Lucinda Tate walked up with her hands plunged inside the pockets of her slacks. She tried to give me her usual smile, but it didn't work. Her eyes stayed worried and the smile vanished before it had really gotten started. Her eyes were always cynical under the humor, but today the cynicism had spilled out and swallowed the humor.

  "I'm sorry. Lucy, what did you say about the lipstick?"

  "It's called asphyxiation. It's supposed to mimic the lip color of a corpse who died from suffocation. Nicely ironic," she said.

  I looked down at the woman again. There were bluish and white tints around the eyes, the nose, the edges of the lips. I had a strange urge to wipe off the lipstick and see if the lips really were the same color. I didn't do it, but the urge was like a great itch across my palms.

  "So, she suffocated," I said.

  Lucy nodded. "Yeah."

  I frowned. "She didn't drown?"

  "I doubt it. None of the others did."

  I stared up at her. "Others?"

  "Jeremy's had to go with Teresa to the hospital."

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "Teresa touched a lipstick that one of the women had been about to put on before she died. Teresa started hyperventilating, then she couldn't breathe. If we hadn't had paramedics on the scene, she might have died. I should have known better than to invite one of the most powerful clairvoyants in the country into this mess."

  She glanced at Frost, who was standing a little out of the way, one hand on the other wrist, very bodyguardish. The effect was somewhat ruined by his silver hair spilling around him in the wind, as if it was trying to pull loose from the ponytail. A pale pink shirt matched the show hankie in the white suit jacket that matched the slacks. The slender silver belt matched his hair. His shiny loafers were creamy tan. He looked more like a fashion plate than a guard, though the wind gave occasional glimpses of the black shoulder holster underneath all that V white and pink.

  "Jeremy said you were running late today," Detective Lucy said. "You getting much sleep lately, Merry?"

  "Not much." I didn't bother to explain it wasn't Frost who had kept me up last night. We were doing friendly banter, empty, meaningless, something to say to fill the windy silence while we stood over the dead woman.

  I looked down at her face, lovely even in death. The body looked thin, not exactly strong, more like she'd dieted her way to a size whatever. If she'd known she would die last night, would she have gone off her diet the day before?

  "How old was she?"

  "Her ID says twenty-three."

  "She looks older," I said.

  "Dieting and too much sun will do that to you." Any flash of humor had gone now. She was somber as she looked up on the cliff above us. "You ready to see the rest?"

  "Sure, but I'm a little puzzled about why you called Jeremy and all of us in. It's sad, but she got herself killed, or choked to death, or something. She suffocated, it's horrible, but why call us in?"

  "I didn't call in your two bodyguards." For the first time there was true hostility on her face. She pointed down the beach at Rhys. Frost might have been uncomfortable, but Rhys was having a very good time.

  He watched everything with an eager eye, smiling, humming the theme song to Hawaii Five-O under his breath. Or at least that's what he'd been humming when he went farther down the beach to watch some of the uniforms wade in the surf. Rhys had already done Magnum, P.I., until Frost told him to stop. Rhys preferred film noir and would always be a Bogart fan at heart, but Bogie wasn't making movies anymore. In the last few months Rhys discovered reruns in color that he actually enjoyed.

  He turned toward us and waved, smiling. His white trench coat billowed out around him like wings as he began to trudge his way
back up the beach. He had had to take off his tan fedora to keep it from blowing into the sea.

  "Rhys is creepy around murder scenes," Detective Lucy said. "He always has such a good time, like he's happy someone's dead."

  I didn't know how to explain that Rhys had once been worshipped as a god of death, so death didn't bother him all that much. But that part was best not shared with the police. I said, "You know how much he loves film noir."

  "This isn't a movie," she said.

  "What's got you all upset, Lucy? I've seen you at worse murder scenes than this. Why are you so ... bothered?"

  "You just wait. You won't need to ask once you've seen it."

  "Can you just tell me, Lucy, please?"

  Rhys came up to us, face all shiny like a kid on Yule morning. "Hi, Detective Tate. There's no burst blood vessels in the girl's eyes, no bruising anywhere that I could find. Does anyone know how she suffocated?"

  "You looked at the body?" Her voice was cold.

  He nodded, still smiling. "I thought that's what we were here to do."

  She pointed a finger at his chest. "You weren't invited to this show. Merry was, and Jeremy was, and Teresa was, but you -- " She poked the finger into his chest, " -- were not."

  The smile faded and left his tricolored blue eye cold. "Merry has to have two bodyguards with her at all times. You know that."

  "Yeah, I know that." She poked again, hard enough that he was shoved backwards just a little. "But I don't like you around my murder scenes."

  "I know the rules, Detective. I haven't messed with your evidence. I've stayed out of the way of everyone from the EMTs to the video photographer."

  The wind gusted, blowing her dark hair across her face, so she was forced to take a hand out of her pocket to smooth it back. "Then stay out of my way, too, Rhys."

  "Why, what did I do wrong?"

  "You enjoy this." The last was almost spit in his face. "You're not supposed to enjoy it." She stalked back up the beach toward the stairs that led up to the road, the parking lot, and the club on its little promontory.

  "Who licked her fur the wrong way?" he asked.

  "She's creeped out by whatever's up the stairs, and she needs someone to take it out on. You're it."