A Kiss of Shadows

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  The ladies’ room was visible from where I stood. I didn’t question it, just walked calmly to it. When the door shushed behind me, I turned and wrote the symbols for protection and strength on the door. I had enough blood coming out of my body that I could have written a letter. I pressed my hands to the door and I called power. I might have feared doing it so soon after what I’d accidently done in the room, but I had no choice. I poured my power into that door, those runes, and I knew that no one of the blood would be able to pass. I knew it, because I willed it so, and I was sidhe, and I had warded the door with my own blood. No one uses blood—it’s too powerful to waste on small things, not to mention unsanitary—but a little overkill wasn’t a bad thing tonight. I needed time to think.

  I walked through the small lounge area with its sofa and line of mirrors, to the real bathroom beyond. What I saw in the far wall made me realize I didn’t need time to think: I was leaving. There was a window set high in the wall. All I had to do was get to it.

  I grabbed a handful of paper towels to shove against the worst of the arm wounds while I looked for something to stand on. Once outside I was going to have to find medical help. But I had to survive first, or the only medical help I’d be getting was from the medical examiner.

  Gethin’s voice—or I assumed it was him, as it wasn’t the hag—said, “Little sidhe, little sidhe, let me come in.”

  I didn’t give the next line. If he wanted to quote children’s stories he was welcome to it. I was getting out of here. I finally dragged one of the curve-backed chairs from the lounge to the stall closest to the window. I had to jump to grab the metal top bar above the stall, which knocked the chair over. I hung there by my arms for a second, then started using my feet to climb up the wall and get the rest of my body close to my hands. The wounds that had been slowing down, bled faster. I slipped twice in my own blood before I could perch on top of the stall and look at the small window. It was a very small window, and it was one of those moments when I was glad I was small.

  I was balanced between the bathroom stall and the windowsill when something slammed into the window. I had a glimpse of tentacles and a razored mouth snapping at the glass, as I fell to the floor. I had to climb back to the window—not to escape through it, but to ward it. They couldn’t get in, but now I couldn’t get out.

  I was trapped, losing more blood than my body could handle, and out of ideas. If I couldn’t do anything else, I could at least try to slow the bleeding on my arms. I got a pile of paper towels and went to the sink. What I really needed was a cloth or strong thread to hold the towels in place. I was using the mirror to see how deep the wound on my left arm was when I noticed something in the mirror. Down, down in the depths of the reflection, something small and dark was moving.

  I turned, paper towels pressed to the wound, to search the room. The stalls were pale pink and plain, the walls pale pink. Even the few pipes that peeked out of the walls and ceiling had been painted pale pink to match. There was nothing dark in the room except my slacks and bra, and that wasn’t what I was seeing.

  I turned back to the mirror and it was still there. It was like a dark shadowy figure walking down some crystal hall, coming closer, growing minutely larger. I didn’t instantly think it was the sidhe that had tried to kill me at Alistair Norton’s, because a lot of sidhe can do mirror magic. For all I knew it was the sluagh coming through the mirror to spill over me. I couldn’t ward the mirror—it wasn’t a door or a window, not as I understood it. To come through the mirror meant they had better magic than I did, and I couldn’t stop them.

  The door opened, and my heart almost stopped beating, but it was just two women. Two ordinary, human women, who couldn’t have been the least bit sensitive or they would never have been willing to come through the door. They came in laughing, gave me some strange looks, but went into adjoining stalls still laughing and talking. They saw me dressed and not bleeding, because it was the image I’d projected. Good to know something was working.

  I didn’t know what to do. Then I noticed something new in the mirror. There was a tiny spider crawling over it. No, not over it—inside it. The spider was inside the mirror, crawling on the other side of the glass. It was just like the spiders that had helped save me at Norton’s house. It was the fey who had saved me. He, or she, had saved me once. If I ever needed saving again, this was it.

  I tore off a piece of paper towel and wrote in blood: HELP ME. I waited until the blood had dried a little then I crumbled the paper into a hard, tight ball. The toilet flushed behind me. I was running out of time.

  I passed my fingertips just above the surface of the mirror, careful not to touch it. I didn’t want to touch the mirror directly until I had a sense of exactly what spell it was. I could feel the trembling line of power where the magic pulled like a string against the solidness of it. The magic was like a weak spot, a metaphysical crack. Whether the practitioner had found a weakness in the mirror and exploited it, or made the weakness, I didn’t know. I pressed my fingers against the cool glass and thought of the heat that had forged the mirror. I spread my fingers apart and the glass fell to pieces like cotton candy on a summer day. A hole opened in the mirror, and a line of white, dazzling light spilled out of it like a distant flash of diamonds.

  I threw the ball of paper into that melted hole. I smoothed the mirror back into place like molding clay. I spread it even with my bare hand. The door opened behind me. I was out of time. There was a lump in the glass, not perfect. I leaned into the mirror, pretending to check my nonexsistent lipstick, blocking the view.

  The first woman had opened a tiny purse and was really fixing her lipstick.

  But I wasn’t looking at my lips. I was watching that shadowy figure low in the mirror. I could see tiny shadow arms moving, unwrapping my message. I heard a male voice ring like a bell in the room. “Done.”

  The woman froze in front of the mirror. “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Julie, did you hear that?”

  The other woman still in the stall said, “Hear what?” The toilet flushed, and Julie joined her friend at the sink.

  To my horror the shadowy figure started growing larger. He was going to come out of the mirror. He was going to walk out of the freaking mirror. I didn’t have enough glamour left in me to cover this. Dammit.

  I tried to think of some way to distract the women, when I realized exactly what to do. I crossed the room to the light switch and flipped it off. As the darkness slammed around us like a black wall, I felt the pressure in the room change. I knew someone was crawling through the mirror as if pulling aside a thick crystalline curtain. I swallowed to clear my ears and wondered what to do with the two yelling women.

  Chapter 15

  I STOOD IN THE DARK, FEELING SOMEONE, SOMETHING MOVING IN THE dark, and knew it wasn’t the women, and it wasn’t me.

  One woman said, “What the hell is going on?”

  “Lights are out in the ladies’ room,” I said.

  “Brilliant,” the other woman said. “Let’s get out of here, Julie.” I heard the two of them stumbling toward the door in the dark.

  They slid out into the hallway, a flash of brightness against the pitch black, before the door closed behind them.

  A wavering yellow-green flame sprang to life in the dark. The flames cast flickering shadows on a dark, dark face.

  Doyle’s skin wasn’t brown—it was black. He looked as if he’d been carved from ebony. His cheekbones were high and sculpted, the chin a little too sharp for my taste. He was all angles and darkness. Those angles looked deceptively delicate, like the bones of a bird, but I’d seen him be hit full in the face with a war hammer once. He’d bled, but he hadn’t broken.

  The moment I saw him, fear rushed through me in a wave of coldness that left my fingertips tingling. If he hadn’t saved my life once already, I’d have been sure he meant my death now. He was the queen’s right hand. She would say, “Where is my Darkness? Bring
me my Darkness.” And someone would die or bleed or both. It was Doyle that should have been given the task of my death, not Sholto. Had he saved me earlier, to kill me now?

  “I mean you no harm, Princess Meredith.”

  The moment he said it out loud, I could breathe again. Doyle didn’t play word games. He said what he meant, meant what he said. The problem was that most of the time he said things like, “I’ve come to kill you.” But this time, he meant me no harm. Why, or rather, why not?

  I was standing trapped in a ladies room with wards that would not hold on the door and window. Eventually the sluagh would break through, and I didn’t trust Sholto to save me from them. If it had been almost anyone but Doyle I’d have fallen into his arms with relief, or just let myself faint from blood loss and shock. But it was Doyle, and he simply wasn’t a person that you fell into the arms of, not without checking for knives first.

  “What do you want, Doyle?” The words came out harsher than I meant them to, angry, but I didn’t take them back or apologize for the tone. I was fighting not to shiver visibly, and failing. I was still bleeding from a half dozen wounds on my arms, blood sliding inside my slacks like a warm worm working against my skin. I needed help, and I couldn’t hide that fact from him. It put me in a very weak bargaining position. When dealing with the queen, that was a bad place to be. And make no mistake about it, when dealing with Doyle you were dealing with the queen, unless things had changed drastically in the court in three short years.

  “To obey my queen in all things.” His voice was like his skin, dark. It made me think of molasses and other thick, sweet things. A voice so deep it could hit notes low enough to make my spine shiver.

  “That’s not an answer,” I said.

  His hair looked very short and clipped close to his head, black but not as black as his skin. But I knew the hair wasn’t short—it was long. His hair was always in a tight thick braid down his back. I couldn’t see it, but I knew the braid reached to his ankles. The braid left the tips of his pointed ears bare and visible.

  The green flame glittered off the earrings in those fantastic ears. Two fine diamond studs graced each dark earlobe, and two dark jewels almost the color of his skin sat beside the diamonds like dark stars. Small silver hoops climbed up the cartilage of both ears to the very top where the ear curled into a soft, fleshy point.

  The ears showed that he was not full high court, but a bastard mix like myself. Only the ears betrayed him, and he could have hidden them behind his hair but he almost never did.

  I glanced down at the small silver necklace that was the only other jewelry he wore. A small silver spider with its fat body in the shape of some dark jewel sat on the black cloth of his chest.

  “I should have remembered that your livery is a spider.”

  He gave a very small smile, which for Doyle was an outrageous amount of expression. “Normally, I would give you time to adjust to my presence, our predicament, but your wards will not hold forever. We must act if you are to be saved.”

  “Lord Sholto was sent here by the queen to kill me. Why send you to save me? Even for her that makes no sense.”

  “The queen did not send Sholto.”

  I stared up at him. Did I dare believe him? We rarely lied outright to each other. But someone was lying to me, because they couldn’t both be telling the truth. “Sholto said I was under the queen’s order of execution.”

  “Think, Princess. If Queen Andais truly desired your execution she’d drag you home so that the court could see what happens to sidhe who flee the court against royal orders. She would make an example of you.” He motioned at the room, his hands spreading flame as he moved, like afterimages. “She would not have you killed in hiding, where no one would see.” The flame collected back upon itself like water droplets sliding over a plate, but stayed dancing above his fingertips.

  I put a hand on the edge of the sink. If this conversation didn’t end soon I was going to be on my knees, because standing wasn’t going to be an option. How much blood had I lost? How much blood was I still losing?

  “You mean that the queen would want to see me die,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Something thudded into the window with enough force that the room seemed to shake. Doyle whirled toward the sound, drawing a long knife, or a small sword, from behind his back. The greenish flames hung floating in the air above one of his shoulders like an obedient pet.

  The light played on the blade and the carved-bone hilt. The hilt was a trio of crows, their breasts meeting, their wings entwined, their beaks open bearing jewels for the pommel.

  I sank to the floor, one hand on the sink. “That’s Mortal Dread.” It was one of the queen’s private weapons. I’d never heard of her loaning it to anyone for any reason.

  Doyle turned slowly from the empty window. The short sword caught the wavering light. “Now do you believe that the queen sent me to save you?”

  “Either that, or you killed her for the sword,” I said.

  He looked down at me, and the look on his face said he didn’t see the humor in that last remark. Good, because I wasn’t being funny. Mortal Dread was one of the treasures of the Unseelie Court. The sword had mortal blood tied to its forging, which meant that a death wound from Mortal Dread was truly a death wound for any fey, even a sidhe. I would have said that the only way to get the sword was to pry it from my aunt’s cold, dead hands.

  Something large was hitting the window over and over again. I’d hoped they’d try to break the wardings by magic, which would take some time, but they were going to simply destroy what I’d warded. If the window was no longer there then the ward would no longer work. Brute force over magic—sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Tonight it was going to work. There was a sharp crumbling sound as the glass cracked around the wire that ran through it. Without the wire in the glass, it would have already broken.

  Doyle knelt by me, sword pointed tip down like you’d hold a loaded gun for safety. “We are out of time, Princess.”

  I nodded. “I’m listening.”

  He reached his empty right hand toward me, and I flinched, falling back on my butt on the floor. “I must touch you, Princess.”

  “Why?”

  The glass cracked enough that wind oozed through the room. I could hear something large rubbing against the wall, and the high twittering calls of the nightflyers urging their beefy brethren on.

  “I can kill some of them, my princess, but not all of them. I will lay my life down for you, but it will not be enough, not against the might of nearly the entire sluagh.” He leaned in close enough that I had to either let him touch me, or lie on the floor and start crawling crabwise backward away from him.

  I laid my hand against him, touching the leather of his jacket. He continued pushing forward, and my hand slid off to the black T-shirt underneath. I felt something wet. I jerked back, and my hand was covered black in the eerie half-light.

  “You’re bleeding,” I said.

  “The sluagh were most persistent that I did not find you tonight.”

  I had to put one hand behind me to keep from falling to the ground, because he was that close. Close enough to kiss, or to kill.

  “What do you want, Doyle?”

  The glass behind us shattered, spraying the floor in a tinkling shower of shards like a sharp hard rain. “My apologies, but there is no time for niceties.”

  He let the sword fall to the floor and grabbed my upper arms. He pulled me against him, and I had a second to realize that he meant to kiss me.

  If he’d tried to knife me, I’d have been prepared, or at least not surprised, but a kiss . . . I was lost. His skin smelled like some exotic spice. His lips were soft, and the kiss gentle. I was frozen in his arms, too shocked to know what to do, as if he’d bespelled me. He whispered against my lips, “She said, it must be given to you, as it was given to me.” There was a thread of anger in his whispered words.

  I heard something fall through the window
, a heavy plop. Doyle released me so suddenly that I fell back to the floor. In one fluid movement he picked up the sword, turned, and moved across the floor in a dancelike movement that never left his knees. He drove the sword into a black tentacle as big as he was, that had spilled through the crack in the window. Something screamed on the other side of the broken glass. He pulled the sword from the tentacle, and it began to retract through the window. Doyle stood, moving just ahead of its motion. He raised the sword above his head and brought it down with a force that made the blade a shining blur. The tentacle fell in pieces in a wash of blood that spilled like black water in the greenish-yellow light.

  The rest of the tentacle retracted through the window to a sound like the wind howling. Doyle turned back to me. “That will make them hesitate, but not for long.” He strode toward me, bloody sword naked in his hand. It had all happened in seconds. He’d even managed to stand to one side so the blood had missed him, as if he’d known where to stand, or what the blood would do.

  Watching him move toward me, I couldn’t stay on the ground. He was here to keep me alive, but as he moved closer every instinct I had screamed out. He was an elemental thing carved of darkness and half-light, armed with a killing sword and moving toward me like death incarnate. In that one moment I knew why humans had fallen down and worshiped us.

  I used the sinks to pull myself to my feet, because I could not meet him crouched like a hunted thing. I had to stand before that dark grace, or bow down before it like a human worshiper. Standing made the room waver in lines of color and darkness; I was so light-headed I was afraid I’d fall, but I kept my feet with a death grip on the sinks. When my vision cleared, I was still upright, and Doyle was close enough that I could see green flames reflected in the dark mirrors of his eyes.