A Kiss of Shadows

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “It is very rare for a child to receive the same gifts as the parent,” Doyle said.

  Sholto walked toward the door, tying the grey trench coat in place as he moved. Blood soaked into the cloth where the cut tentacle pressed against it. “Come, Doyle, Bearer of the Painful Flame, Baron Sweet-tongue, come and see what you think of Meredith’s gifts.”

  I was familiar with the first title, but not the second. I asked, “Baron Sweet-tongue—I’ve never heard you called that.”

  “It is a very old nickname,” he said.

  “Come, Doyle, you are too modest. It was the queen’s pet name for him, once.”

  The two men looked at each other, and again there was a weight of old grudge in the air. “The name is not for what you assume, Sholto,” Doyle said.

  “I assume nothing, but I think the sobriquet speaks for itself. Don’t you, Meredith?”

  “Baron Sweet-tongue does have a certain ambiance,” I said.

  “It is not for what you think,” Doyle repeated.

  “Well,” Sholto said, “it is certainly not because of your honeyed words.”

  That was true. Doyle didn’t go in for long speeches, and he was not an accomplished flatterer. “If you say it’s not sexual, then I believe you,” I said.

  Doyle made a small bow to me. “Thank you.”

  “The queen doesn’t give out pet names except for sex,” Sholto said.

  “Yes, she does,” I said.

  “When, and for what?”

  “When she thinks the nickname will bother the person bearing it, and because she enjoys being irritating.”

  “Well, the last is certainly true,” Sholto said. He had his hand on the door handle.

  “I’m surprised no one barged in on us,” I said.

  “I put a small spell of aversion on the door. No mortal would want to pass it, and few fey.” He started to open the door.

  “Don’t you want your . . . limb? They might be able to reattach it.”

  “It will grow back,” he said.

  I must have looked as disbelieving as I felt, because he smiled in a half-superior, half-apologetic way. “There are some benefits to being half nightflyer—not many, but a few. I can regenerate any lost body part.” He seemed to think about that for a second, then added, “So far, anyway.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t try.

  “I think the princess needs to get some rest, so if we could see your friend . . .” Doyle said.

  “Of course.” Sholto held the door for us.

  “What about the mess?” I asked. “We’re just going to leave bits of tentacle and blood all over the floor?”

  “The baron made the mess, let him clean it up,” Sholto said.

  “Neither the body parts nor the blood belong to me,” Doyle said. “If you want it cleaned up, I suggest you do it yourself. Who knows what damage a talented witch could do with a body part left lying around?”

  Sholto protested, but in the end he slipped the severed tentacle in his coat pocket. They left the body-sized one where it lay. If I were Sholto I would definitely be overtipping the cleaning staff, just to make up for whoever had to do the bathroom.

  We rode back up in the elevator, and Doyle knelt on the floor studying what was left of Nerys the Grey. She was a ball of flesh about the size of a bushel basket. Nerves, tendons, muscles, internal organs all glistened wetly on the outside of that ball. They all seemed to be functioning normally. That lump of flesh even rose and fell with breath. The sound was the worst: a high, thin screaming, muffled because her mouth was now on the inside of her body, but still she screamed. She shrieked. The shivering that had been growing less, grew more. I was suddenly cold standing there in my bra and pants.

  I got my shirt from the floor where I’d left it, and slipped it on, but knew that mere cloth wasn’t going to take care of this particular kind of cold. It was more a shivering of the soul than the body. I could pile myself with blankets and it wouldn’t help.

  Doyle looked up at me, kneeling beside that pulsing, screaming ball. “Most impressive. Prince Essus himself could not have done better.” The words were a compliment, but his face was so empty I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or not.

  I actually thought it was one of the most horrible things I’d ever seen, but I knew better than to share the observation. It was a powerful weapon, the hand of flesh. If people believed I’d use it easily, often, it was more of a deterrent. If they thought I feared it, then the threat would be less. “I don’t know, Doyle, I saw my father turn a giant inside out once. Do you think I could do something that large?” My voice was dry, interested, but in an academic sort of way. It was the voice I’d cultivated at court. The voice I used when I was trying not to have hysterics or run screaming from a room. I had learned to watch the most awful things and make dry, urbane comments.

  Doyle took the question at face value. “I don’t know, Princess, but it will be interesting to discover the limits of your power.”

  I disagreed, but I let the comment stand, because I couldn’t think of anything dry and urbane enough to cover the situation. The muffled shrieks continued as fast as the ball of flesh could draw breath. Nerys was immortal. My father had once done this to an enemy of the queen’s. Andais kept that ball of flesh in a trunk in her room. Periodically, you’d find it sitting around her bedchamber. To my knowledge no one ever questioned what it was doing out of its trunk. You just picked it up, put it back, locked it away, and fought down any visuals that came to mind when you found it sitting in the queen’s bed.

  “Sholto asked that you grant Nerys death. Do it, so we can get out of here.” I sounded disinterested, even bored. I thought if I had to stand there and hear that thing screaming for much longer, I’d join it.

  Still on his knees, Doyle held the sword up to me, hilt first, the blade lying on his hands. “It is your magic—let it be your kill.”

  I stared at the bone hilt, the three ravens and their jeweled eyes. I didn’t want to do it. I stared at the blade for a minute more, trying to think how to get out of this without appearing weak. Nothing came to mind. If I got squeamish now, then Nerys’s torment was for nothing. I would have gained a new title but not the reputation that went with it.

  I took the sword, and hated Doyle for offering it to me. It should have been easily done. Her heart was trapped and pulsing on the side of the ball. I thrust the blade into it. Blood poured black, and the heart stopped beating, but that thin screaming didn’t stop.

  I glanced at the two men. “Why isn’t she dead?”

  “The sluagh are harder to kill than the sidhe,” Sholto said.

  “How much harder?”

  He shrugged. “It’s your kill.”

  In that instant I hated them both, because I realized finally that it was a test. It might be that if I refused the kill they’d leave her alive. That was not acceptable. I couldn’t leave her like this, knowing that she’d never age, or heal, or die. She’d just continue. Death was mercy; anything else was madness, hers and mine.

  I stabbed the sword into every vital organ I could find. They bled, shriveled, ceased to function, and still the screaming went on. I finally raised the sword in a two-handed motion above my head and just started stabbing. At first I paused between stabs, or slices, but every time the screams just went on and on, trapped inside that ball of meat. Some where around the tenth blow, or the fifteenth blow, I stopped pausing, stopped listening, and just kept stabbing.

  I had to make the screaming stop. I had to make her die. The world narrowed down to the pounding of the blade into the thick meat. My arms raised and lowered, raised and lowered. The blade bit into the flesh. Blood sprayed across my face, my shirt. I ended on my knees beside something that was no longer round, no longer whole. I’d hacked the thing into pieces, unrecognizable pieces. The screaming had stopped.

  My hands were soaked with blood, crimson to the elbows. The sword blade was scarlet, the bone hilt was solid blood, and still the hilt fit
my hand well, not slippery at all. The green silk shirt I’d put back on was black with soaked blood. My slacks had gone from purple to a violet black. Someone was breathing too fast, too ragged, and I realized it was me. Sometime during the butchering there had been a fierce satisfaction, almost a joyfulness in the sheer destruction. Now I stared down at what I had done and felt nothing. There wasn’t enough of me left to feel anything about this, so I felt nothing. I was numb, and it wasn’t a bad way to be.

  I got to my feet using the edge of the bed. The bed was already spattered with blood—what was one more handprint? My arms were sore, the muscles shaking from too much exercise. I offered the sword to Doyle as he’d offered it to me. “Good sword, the hilt never got slippery.” My voice sounded as empty of emotion as I felt. I wondered if this was what it was like to be crazy. If it was, it wasn’t so very bad.

  Doyle took the sword and dropped to his knees, head bowed. Sholto echoed him, kneeling, bowing his head. Doyle saluted me with the bloody sword and said, “Meredith, Princess of Flesh, true royal of the blood, welcome to the inner circle of the sidhe.”

  I stared down at both of them, still echoingly numb. If there were ritual words to answer with, I couldn’t think of them. Either I’d never known them, or I just couldn’t make my mind work right now. The only thing I could think to say was, “May I use your shower?”

  “Be my guest,” Sholto said.

  The carpet squished under my feet, and when I walked off that section of carpet I left bloody footprints behind me. I stripped and showered in the hottest water I could stand against my skin. The blood wasn’t red by the time it ran down the drain; it was pink. It was while I watched that pinkish water swirl down the drain that I realized two things. First, I was glad I’d had the courage to finish Nerys rather than leave her in that horror. Second, part of me had enjoyed killing her. I’d have liked to think that the part that enjoyed the kill was motivated by the mercy of the first thought, but I couldn’t afford to be that generous to myself. I had to wonder if the part of me that enjoyed sinking blade into flesh was the same part that made Andais keep her own bit of flesh in a locked trunk in her room. The second you stop questioning yourself is the second that you become the monster.

  Chapter 17

  I ARRIVED BACK AT MY APARTMENT WITH MY HAIR STILL DAMP FROM THE hotel shower. Doyle insisted on unlocking the door for me, in case it had been magically booby-trapped. He was taking his job of bodyguard seriously, but from Doyle I wouldn’t have expected less. When he pronounced it safe I walked onto the grey carpet barefoot. I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of loose men’s shorts, clothes Sholto had borrowed from Gethin. The only thing I couldn’t borrow from the man was shoes. My clothes were still in the hotel room, so blood-soaked that even the underwear had been unusable. Some of the blood had been Nerys’s, some of it mine.

  I turned on the light switch by the door. The overhead light blazed to life. I’d paid extra to be able to paint the apartment a color other than white. The walls of the front room were pale pink. The couch was mauve, purple, and pink. The overstuffed chair in the corner was pink. The drapes were pink with ties of purple. Jeremy had said it was like being inside an expensively decorated Easter egg. The bookcase was white. The entertainment center was white. I turned on the standing lamp by the overstuffed chair. The light over the small white kitchen table and chairs was next. Lacy white curtains framed the big window in front of the table. The window glass was very black and somehow threatening. I closed the drapes, shutting the night out behind the white blind. I stood for a moment in front of the only painting in the front room. It was a print of The Butterflies’ Haunt by W. Scott Miles. The picture was mostly green, and the butterflies were painted to nature, so there was precious little pink or purple in the picture. But you never choose a painting just because it matches a room—you choose a painting because it speaks to you. Because it says something that you want to be reminded of daily. The picture had always seemed peaceful, idyllic, but tonight it was just paint on a canvas. Tonight nothing was going to please me. I turned on the kitchen lights and went for the bedroom.

  Doyle had stood quietly to one side as I moved around the room turning on all the lights like a child waking from a nightmare. Light to chase away the bad things. The trouble was that the bad things were in my head now. There was no light bright enough for that.

  He followed me as I went into the bedroom. I hit the overhead light as I moved through the door.

  “I like what you’ve done with the bedroom,” he said.

  The comment made me turn and look at him. “What do you mean?”

  His face stayed impassive, unreadable. “The living room was so very . . . pink. I feared the bedroom would be, as well.”

  I looked around the room at the soft grey walls, the burgundy wallpaper border with its mauve, pink, and white flowers. The bed was a king-sized four-poster, leaving almost no room between the foot of the bed and the closet doors. The bedspread was a deep, rich burgundy with a mound of pillows: burgundy, purple, mauve, pink, and a few black, just a few. The mirrored dresser was cherry wood, varnished so dark it was almost black. The dresser near the window matched it. Jeremy said that my bedroom looked like a man’s room with a few touches added by his girlfriend. There was a black lacquer cabinet in the corner farthest away from the bathroom door. The cabinet was Oriental, with cranes and stylized mountains. The crane had been part of my father’s livery. When I bought it, I remembered thinking he would have liked it. There was a philodendron plant on top of it, grown so long that the vines fell like green hair around the beautiful wood.

  I looked around the room, and suddenly it felt like it wasn’t mine and I didn’t belong here. I turned back to Doyle. “As if it makes a difference to you what color my bedroom is.”

  He didn’t flinch, but his face became even more unreadable, more passive, a trace of arrogance creeping in, and it reminded me of Sholto’s courtly mask.

  The comment had been mean, and meant to be. I was angry with him. Angry with him for not killing Nerys for me. Angry with him for forcing me to do what had to be done. Angry with him for everything, even the things that weren’t his fault.

  He watched me with cool eyes. “You’re quite right, Princess Meredith, your bedroom is no concern of mine. I am a court gelding.”

  I shook my head. “No, that’s the problem. You’re not a gelding; none of you are. She just won’t share.”

  He shrugged, making it look graceful. The movement caused him to wince.

  “How is your wound?” I asked.

  “You were angry with me seconds ago, now you are not. Why?”

  I tried to put it into words. “It’s not your fault.”

  “What is not my fault?”

  “You did not endanger me. You saved my life. You didn’t send the sluagh after me. You didn’t cause the hand of flesh to manifest tonight. It’s not your fault. I’m angry, and I want someone to blame, but you shouldn’t pay the price for other people’s shit.”

  He raised black-on-black eyebrows at that. “A most enlightened attitude for a princess.”

  I shook my head. “Drop the title, Doyle. I’m Meredith, just Meredith.”

  The eyebrows went up even farther, until his eyes looked impossibly wide, and his expression actually made me laugh. The laughter sounded normal, felt good. I sat down on the edge of the bed and shook my head. “I didn’t think I’d be laughing tonight.”

  He knelt in front of me. “You have killed before—why is this different?”

  I looked at him, surprised that he’d understood exactly what was bothering me. “Why was it so important that I kill Nerys?”

  “A sidhe comes into their power through ritual, but that doesn’t mean that the power will manifest itself. After the first time the power is used, then the sidhe must bloody themselves in combat.” He put a hand on the bed on either side of me, but not touching. “It is a kind of blood sacrifice; it will ensure that the powers do not go back to sleep, but
continue to grow.”

  “Blood makes the crops grow,” I said.

  He nodded. “Death magic is the oldest of all magics, Princess.” He gave that small smile. “Meredith.” He said my name softly.

  “So you had me chop Nerys up so that my powers wouldn’t go dormant again?”

  He nodded again.

  I looked into that serious face. “You said a sidhe comes into their power after a ritual. I had no ritual.”

  “The night you spent with the roane was your ritual.”

  I shook my head. “No, Doyle, we did nothing ritualistic that night.”

  “There are many rituals for awakening the power, Meredith. Combat, sacrifice, sex, and many more. It is not surprising that your power chose sex. You are descended from three different fertility deities.”

  “Five actually. But I still don’t understand.”

  “Your roane was covered in Branwyn’s Tears; for that one night he acted the part of a sidhe lover for you. He brought on your secondary powers.”

  “I knew it was magical, but I didn’t know . . .” My voice trailed off. I frowned at him. “It seems like there should be more to it than just good sex.”

  “Why? It is sex that makes the miracle of life—what could be greater than that?”

  “The magic healed Roane, gave him back his sealskin. I didn’t try to heal him, because I didn’t know I could.”

  Doyle sat down beside the bed, his long legs curled up against the dresser. “Healing one skinless roane is nothing. I have seen sidhe raise mountains from the sea, or flood entire cities, when they came into their power. You were lucky.”

  I was suddenly scared. “You mean my coming into my powers could have caused some great natural disaster?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d think someone would have warned me,” I said.

  “No one knew you were leaving us, so we could give you no parting advice. And no one knew that you had secondary powers, Meredith. The queen was convinced that if seven years with Griffin in your bed and years of duels had not awakened your powers then they were not there to waken.”