A Kiss of Shadows

by Laurell K. Hamilton

She smiled, and it was the first genuine smile I’d seen on her tonight. An almost embarrassed movement of lips. She wagged a gloved finger at me. “No, my motives are my own. I want you to choose someone for your bed tonight. Take them back to the hotel with you, I don’t care who, but I want it to begin tonight.” The smile was gone. She was her royal self once more, unreadable, self-contained, mysterious and absolutely obvious all at the same time.

  “You never have understood me, Aunt.”

  “And what, pray, does that mean?”

  “It means, Auntie dearest, that if you had left off that last order, I would probably have taken someone to my bed tonight. But being commanded to do it makes me feel like a royal whore. I don’t like it.”

  She settled her skirts so the train glided behind her and walked toward me. As she moved, her power began to unfold, flitting around the room like invisible sparks to bite along my skin. The first two times I jumped, then I stood there and let her power eat over my skin. I was wearing steel, but a few knives had never been enough for me to withstand her magic. It had to be my own newfound powers that kept it from being so much worse.

  Her eyes narrowed as she came to stand in front of me. With me standing on the small raised platform, we were eye-to-eye. Her magic pushed out from her like a moving wall of force. I had to brace my feet as if I were standing against wind. The small burning bites had turned into a constant ache like standing just inside an oven, not quite touching the glowing surface, but knowing that one tiny shove and your skin would burn and crisp.

  “Doyle said your powers had grown, but I didn’t quite believe it. But there you stand before me, and I must accept that you are true sidhe, at last.” She put her foot on the lowest step. “But never forget that I am queen here, Meredith, not you. No matter how powerful you become, you will never rival me.”

  “I would never presume otherwise, my lady,” I said. My voice was just a touch shaky.

  Her magic pushed at me. I couldn’t draw a good breath. My eyes blinked as if I were looking into the sun. I fought to stand and not to give ground. “My lady, tell me what you wish me to do and I will do it. I have not offered challenge in any way.”

  She came up another step, and this time I did give ground. I did not want her to touch me. “Simply by standing in the face of my power you challenge me.”

  “If you wish me to kneel, I will kneel. Tell me what you want, my queen, and I will give it to you.” I did not want to get into a contest of magic with her. I would lose. I knew that. It left me with nothing to prove.

  “Make the ring have life on my finger, Niece.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I finally held my hand out to her. “Do you want the ring back?”

  “More than you will ever know, but it is yours now, Niece. I wish you joy of it.” That last sounded more like a curse than a blessing.

  I went to the far edge of the table, gripping it to steady myself against the growing pressure of her magic. “What do you want from me?”

  She never answered me. Andais made a gesture with both hands toward me and that pressure became a force that shoved me backward. I was airborne for a second until my back met the wall, and my head hit a heartbeat later. I kept my feet through a shower of grey and white flowers on the edge of my vision.

  When my vision cleared, Andais was standing in front of me with a knife in her hand. She pressed the tip of it against the small hollow at the base of my throat, pressed the tip of the blade until I felt it bite into my skin. She put her finger against the wound and came away with a trembling drop of my blood clinging to her leather-clad finger. She held her finger upside down so the drop fell quivering to the floor.

  “Know this, niece of mine. Your blood is my blood, and that is the only reason I care what happens to you. I do not care if you like what I have planned for you or not. I need you to continue our bloodline, but if you will not help do that, then I do not need you.” She withdrew the knife very slowly, drawing it back an inch or two. She laid the flat of the blade against my face, the point dangerously close to my eye.

  I could taste my pulse on my tongue, and I’d forgotten to breathe. Looking into her face, I knew that she would kill me, just like that.

  “That which is not useful to me is discarded, Meredith.” She pressed the flat of the blade into my flesh so that when I blinked the tip of the knife brushed my eyelashes. “You will pick someone to sleep with tonight. I don’t care who. Since you have invoked virgin right, you are free to go back to Los Angeles, but you will have to pick some of my Guard to take with you. So look at them tonight, Meredith, with those emerald-green-and-gold eyes of yours, those Seelie eyes of yours, and choose.” She put her face next to mine, so close that she could have kissed me. She whispered the last words into my mouth. “Fuck one of them tonight, Meredith, because if you don’t, tomorrow night you will entertain the court with a group of my choosing.”

  She smiled, and it was the smile that touched her face when she had thought of something wicked, and painful. “At least one that you choose must be enough my creature to spy for me against you. If you go back to Los Angeles.”

  My voice came out the barest of whispers. “Must I sleep with your spy?”

  “Yes,” she said. The blade point moved a fraction closer, so close it blurred in my vision, and I fought not to blink, because if I did the point would pierce my eyelid. “Is that all right with you, Niece? Is it all right with you that I make you sleep with my spy?”

  I said the only thing I could say. “Yes, Aunt Andais.”

  “You’ll choose your little harem tonight at the banquet?”

  My eyes weren’t fluttering. They were twitching with the need to blink. “Yes, Aunt Andais.”

  “You’ll sleep with someone tonight before you fly back to your western lands?”

  I widened my eyes and concentrated on her face, on looking at her face. The knife was a blur of steel taking up most of my right eye’s vision, but I could still see, still see her face looming above me like a painted moon.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  She drew the knife from my face and said, “There. Was that so difficult?”

  I sagged against the wall, eyes shut. I kept them closed because I couldn’t keep the rage out of them, and I didn’t want Andais to see it. I wanted out of this room, just out of this room, and away from her.

  “I’ll call Rhys to escort you to the banquet. You look a bit shaken.” She laughed.

  I opened my eyes, blinking to clear the tears that had gathered from being forced not to blink. She was walking down the steps.

  “I’ll send Rhys to you, though perhaps with the spell in the coach you might need another guard. I will think on who to send to your side.” She was nearly to the outer door when she turned and said, “And who shall my spy be? I shall try to pick someone beautiful, someone who is good in bed, so that the chore may not be too onerous.”

  “I don’t sleep with stupid men or mean-spirited ones,” I said.

  “The first does not limit the field too terribly much but the last . . . someone generous of spirit, that is a tall order.” Her smile brightened—obviously she’d thought of someone. “He might do.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Don’t you love surprises, Meredith?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well, I do. I like surprises a great deal. He will be my treat to you. He’s scrumptious in bed, or was sixty—or is it ninety years?—ago. Yes, I think he’ll do nicely.”

  I didn’t bother to ask who again. “How can you be sure that he’ll spy for you once he’s in Los Angeles?”

  She paused with her hand on the door handle. “Because he knows me, Meredith. He knows what I’m capable of, both of pleasure and of pain.” With that she swung open the double doors and had Rhys come back in the room.

  He glanced from her to me. His eyes widened just a touch, but that was all. His face was carefully blank as he walked to me and offered me his arm. I took it gratefully. It se
emed to take a very long time to walk across that floor to the open door. I wanted to run to it and keep running. Rhys patted my hand, as if he felt the tension in my body. I knew he’d seen the small wound on my neck. He could make his own guesses as to how it got there.

  We made it to the door, then out into the hallway beyond. My shoulders relaxed just a touch.

  Andais called after us, “Have fun, children. We’ll see you at the banquet.” She closed the doors behind us with a sharp bang that made me jump.

  Rhys started to stop. “Are you all right?”

  I clutched his arm and pulled him into a walk again. “Get me away from here, Rhys. Just get me away from here.”

  He didn’t ask questions. He just led me down the hallway away from there.

  Chapter 28

  WE WALKED BACK THE WAY WE HAD COME, BUT THE HALL WAS STRAIGHT now and narrower—a different hallway all together. I glanced behind us, and there was no double door. The queen’s rooms were elsewhere. For a moment I was safe. I started to shiver and couldn’t stop.

  Rhys hugged me with both his arms, pressing me to his chest. I sank against him, arms sliding around his waist, under his cloak. He stroked my hair from my face. “Your skin is cold to the touch. What did she do, Merry?” He raised my head back, gently, so he could see my face while I clung to him. “Talk to me,” he said, voice soft.

  I shook my head. “She offered me everything, Rhys, everything a little sidhe could want. The trouble is, I don’t trust it.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  I pulled away from him then. “This.” I touched my throat where the blood was drying. “I am mortal, Rhys. Just because I’m offered the moon doesn’t mean I’ll survive to put it in my pocket.”

  There was a look on his face that was gentle, but I was also suddenly aware of how very much older he was than I. His face was still young, but the look in his eye was not. “Is that the worst of the injuries?”

  I nodded.

  He reached out and touched the spot of blood. It didn’t even hurt when he touched it. It really wasn’t much of a wound. It was so hard to explain that what was hurting didn’t show on my skin. The queen was living in denial about what Cel was, but I wasn’t. He’d never share the throne with me: One of us would have to be dead before the other sat on the throne.

  “Did she threaten you?” Rhys asked.

  I nodded again.

  “You look totally spooked, Merry. What did she say to you in there?”

  I stared at him and didn’t want to tell him. It was as if saying it out loud would make it more real. But it was more than that. It was the fact that if Rhys knew, he wouldn’t be totally displeased. “It’s sort of good news, bad news,” I said.

  “What’s the good news?”

  I told him about being named coheir.

  He hugged me tight and hard. “That’s wonderful news, Merry. What could possibly be bad news after that?”

  I pulled back from the hug. “Do you really think Cel will let me live long enough to displace him? He was behind the attempts on my life three years ago, and he didn’t have nearly this good a reason for wanting me dead.”

  The smile faded from his face. “You bear the queen’s mark now—even Cel would not dare kill you. It’s death by the queen’s mercy if anyone harms you now.”

  “She stood in there and told me that I left the court because of Griffin. I tried to tell her that I hadn’t left because of a broken heart, that I’d left because of the duels.” I shook my head. “She talked over me, Rhys, like I wasn’t saying anything. She is in very major denial, and I don’t think my death would change that.”

  “You mean her baby boy would never do such a thing,” he said.

  “Exactly. Besides do you really think he’d risk his own lily-white neck? He’ll have someone else do it if he can—then they’ll be the ones in danger, not him.”

  “It’s our job to protect you, Merry. We’re good at our job.”

  I laughed, but it wasn’t a good laugh, more stress than humor. “Aunt Andais has changed your job description, Rhys.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s walk while I tell you. I feel the need for more distance between myself and our queen.”

  He offered me his arm again. “As my lady wishes.” He smiled when he said it, and I went to him, but I slid my arm around his waist instead of taking his arm. He stiffened, surprised for a second, then slid his arm across my shoulders. We walked down the hallway, arms wrapped around each other. I was still cold, as if some inner warmth had been extinguished.

  There are men that I can’t walk arm in arm with, as if our bodies have different rhythms. Rhys and I moved down the hallway like two halves of a whole. I realized that I simply couldn’t believe that I had permission to touch him. It didn’t seem real to suddenly be given the keys to the kingdom.

  Rhys stopped, turning me in his arms, until he could rub his hands up and down my arms. “You’re still shivering.”

  “Not as badly as before,” I said.

  He planted a soft kiss on my forehead. “Come on, honey bun, tell me what the Wicked Witch of the East did to you?”

  I smiled. “Honey bun?”

  He grinned. “Honey bear? Honey child? Snookums?”

  I laughed. “Worse and worse.”

  His smile faded. He glanced at the ring lying against the whiteness of his sleeve. “Doyle said the ring came to life for him. Is that true?”

  I glanced at the heavy silver octagonal band and nodded.

  “It lies quiet against my arm.”

  I looked up into his face. He looked . . . forlorn. “The queen used to let the ring choose her consort,” he said.

  “It’s reacted to almost every guard I’ve touched tonight.”

  “Except me.” His voice was so thick with regret that I couldn’t let it stand.

  “It has to touch bare skin,” I said.

  He started to reach for my hand and the ring. I pulled away from him. “Please don’t.”

  “What’s wrong, Merry?” he asked.

  The light had faded to a dim twilight glow. Cobwebs draped the hallway like great shining silver curtains. Pale white spiders larger than my two hands together hid in the webs like round bloated ghosts.

  “Because even at sixteen I was the one who said stop. You should have known better.”

  “A little slap and tickle and I’m exiled from the game forever. Baby, that is cruel.”

  “No, it’s practical. I don’t want to end my life nailed to a Saint Andrew’s cross.” Of course, now that didn’t apply. I could tell Rhys and we could do it up against a wall right this minute, and there would be no penalties. Or so Andais said. But I didn’t trust my aunt. She’d told only me that the celibacy had been lifted. I only had her word that Eamon knew, and he was her consort, her creature. What if I threw Rhys up against a wall, and then she changed her mind? It wasn’t going to be real, to be safe, until she announced it in public. Then, and only then, would I really believe it.

  A large white spider came to the edge of the webbing. The head was at least three inches across. I was going to have to pass right under the thing.

  “You see one mortal woman tortured to death for seducing a guard and you remember it for the rest of your life. Long memory,” Rhys said.

  “I saw what she had her pet torturer do to the guard who transgressed, Rhys. I think your memory is too short.” I stopped him, pulling on his arm, just short of the heavy-bodied spider. I could call will-o’-the-wisps, but the spiders weren’t impressed by them.

  “Can you call something stronger than a will-o’-the-wisp?” I asked. I stared at that waiting spider, its body bigger around than my fist. The spider webs above my head seemed suddenly heavier, weighed down with the round bloated bodies like a net full of fish about to spill on my head.

  Rhys looked at me, face puzzled, then he looked up as if just seeing the thick webs, the scurrying sense of movement. “You never did like the spiders.
”

  “No,” I said, “I never did like the spiders.”

  Rhys moved toward the spider that seemed to be lying in wait for me. He left me standing in the middle of the hall, listening to the heavy scurrying and watching the webs waver above my head. He did nothing that I could see. He simply touched a finger to the spider’s abdomen. The spider started to scurry away, then it stopped abruptly, and started to shake, legs spasming frantically. It writhed and jerked, tearing a partial hole in the webbing, and it dangled helplessly half in and half out of the webbing.

  I could hear dozens of the things running for safety in a soft clattering retreat. The webs swayed like an upside-down ocean with the rush of their flight. Lord and Lady, there had to be hundreds of them.

  The spider’s white body began to shrivel, falling in upon itself as if some great hand were crushing it. That fat white body turned to a black dry husk until I wouldn’t have been sure what it was if I hadn’t seen it alive.

  There was no sense of movement in the spiderwebs now. The hallway was utterly still except for Rhys’s smiling figure. The dim, dim light seemed to collect around his white curls and the white suit until he glowed against the grey cobwebs and the greyer stone. He was smiling at me, cheerful, normal for him.

  “Good enough?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I only saw you do that once before and that was in battle, but that was when your life was in danger.”

  “Do you mourn the insect?”

  “It’s an arachnid, not an insect, and no, I don’t mourn it. I’ve never had the right kind of power to walk safely through this place.” But . . . I’d really meant for him to call fire to his hands, or brighter lights, and frighten them away. I hadn’t meant for him to . . .

  He held his hand out to me, still smiling.

  I stared at the black husk swaying gently in the webbing as our movement caused tiny air currents to pass through the hallway.

  Rhys’s smile didn’t change, but his eyes grew gentle. “I am a death god, or was once, Merry. What did you think I was going to do, light a match and yell boo?”

  “No, but . . .” I stared at his offered hand. I stared at it for longer than was polite. But finally, tentatively, I reached toward him. Our fingertips touched, and his breath came out with a sigh.