A Kiss of Shadows

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I extended my arm outward, my hand cupping slightly upward. Niceven landed on my forearm. She was heavier than she appeared, but still light and strangely brittle, as if her tiny bare feet were made of dried bones. She wrapped both her hands around my index finger, then lowered her face toward my fingertip as if she meant to bestow a kiss. Tiny razor teeth bit into my finger. The pain was sharp and immediate. Her tiny petal tongue began to lap the blood tickling against my skin. She curved her body around my hand until every inch of her small being was insinuated against my skin. It was a strangely sexual movement, as if she gained more than mere blood from the feeding.

  The rest of the demi-fey hovered in the air around me like colored wind, moving gently. Their tiny mouths were blood-stained, miniature hands red with Galen’s blood. Niceven caressed my hand with her hands, her bare feet; a tiny knee beat against my palm.

  She raised her head and took a breath. “I am full of flesh and blood from your lover. I can hold no more.” She sat up in my hand, her head resting against my finger. “I would give much for a longer drink someday, Princess Meredith. You taste of high magic, and sex.” She stood and slowly lifted herself from my hand with slow beats of her wings. She hovered near my face just looking at me, as if she saw something I did not, or was trying to find something in me that was not there. Finally, she nodded, and said, “We will see you at the banquet, Princess.” With that she rose higher into the air, the others following her in a multi-colored cloud. The huge doors at the end of the room opened without anyone touching them, and once the bright flying crowd had vanished inside, the doors closed slowly behind them.

  A small sound brought my attention back to the room. Galen was leaning up against the far wall, his pants in place though not fastened. Rhys was dabbing at the small bites with a bottle of clear liquid, until Galen’s naked upper body gleamed in the lights.

  He gazed up at me. “Is it true about the celibacy being lifted?”

  “It’s true,” I said, and crouched on my heels by him.

  He smiled, but it left his eyes pain-filled. “I won’t be much use to you tonight.”

  “There will be other nights,” I said.

  The smile widened, but he winced as Rhys cleaned more of the wounds. “Why did Cel care if I in particular came to your bed?”

  “I think Cel believes that if I cannot sleep with you tonight, that I will sleep alone.”

  Galen looked at me.

  I didn’t wait for him to say something that would make all this even more uncomfortable. “I don’t know if you heard what I told the others, but if I don’t have sex tonight with someone of my choosing, tomorrow I entertain the court with a group of the queen’s choosing.”

  “You’ll have to take someone to your bed tonight, Merry.”

  “I know.” I touched his face and found it cool to the touch and lightly dewed with sweat. He’d lost a lot of blood, nothing fatal for a sidhe, but he would be weak tonight for many things, not just for sex.

  “If this was your punishment for disobeying Cel, then what was Barinthus’s punishment?”

  “He was forbidden to attend tonight’s banquet,” Frost said.

  I raised my eyebrows at that. “Galen gets cut up and Barinthus just misses supper?”

  “Cel is afraid of Barinthus, but he does not fear Galen,” Frost said.

  “I’m just too nice a guy.”

  “Yes,” Frost said, “you are.”

  “That was supposed to be a joke,” Galen said.

  “Unfortunately,” Doyle said, “it isn’t funny.”

  “We can’t keep the queen waiting,” Rhys said. “Can you walk?”

  “Get me on my feet and I’ll walk.” Doyle and Frost helped him stand.

  He moved slowly, arthritically, as if things hurt a great deal, but by the time they’d helped him to the far doors, he was moving on his own power. He was healing before our eyes, his skin absorbing the bites. It was like watching reverse film of flowers blooming.

  The oil helped speed the process, but mostly it was just his own body. The amazing flesh machine of a sidhe warrior. Within hours the bites would be healed; within days the rest of the damage would be gone as well. In a few days Galen and I could finally quench the heat between us. But for tonight there would have to be someone else. I looked at the other three guards in an almost proprietary way, like going into your kitchen and knowing the shelves are well stocked with your favorite things. None of them was a fate worse than torture. It was just a question of which one. How do you decide between one perfect flower and another if love is not an issue? I didn’t have the faintest idea. Maybe I could toss a coin.

  Chapter 30

  THE DOORS THAT OPEN FROM THE FOUNTAIN OF PAIN LEAD TO A LARGE antechamber. It is a dark room. The sourceless white light seemed very dim and very grey here. Something crunched under my feet, and I looked down to find leaves. Dried leaves everywhere. I looked up and found that the vines that entwined above our heads were dry and lifeless. The leaves had folded in upon themselves or dropped completely.

  I touched the vines near the door and there was no sense of life to them. I turned to Doyle. “The roses are dead.” I whispered it as if it were some great secret.

  He nodded.

  “They have been dying for years, Meredith,” Frost said.

  “Dying, Frost, but not dead.” The roses were a last defense for the court. If enemies penetrated this far, the roses would come to life and kill them, or try to, either by strangling or by the thorns. The newer, lower growth had thorns like any other climbing rose, but there were vines deep in the tangle that held thorns the size of small daggers. But they weren’t merely a defense. They were a symbol that there had once been magical gardens under the ground. The fruiting vines and trees had died first, so I’m told, then the herbs, and now the last of the flowers.

  I searched the vines with my eyes for any sign of life. They were dry and lifeless. I sent a flash of power into the vines and felt an answering pulse of power, strong still, but faint, nothing like the warm pressing presence it should have been. I touched the nearest vines gently with my fingers. The thorns were small here, but dry, like straight pins.

  “Stop petting the roses,” Frost said. “We have more pressing problems.”

  I turned to him, hand still on the roses. “If the roses die, truly die, do you understand what this means?”

  “Most likely, better than you do,” he said, “but I also understand that we can do nothing for the roses or the fact that the sidhe’s power is dying. But if we are careful, we may save ourselves this night.”

  “Without our magic we are not sidhe,” I said. I pulled my hand back without looking, spearing my finger on the thorns. I jerked back, which broke a thorn off in my skin. The small dark thorn was easy to see and easy to remove with an edge of fingernail. It didn’t even hurt that much, just a small dot of crimson on my finger.

  “How bad is it?” Rhys asked.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  A thick, dry hiss ran through the room like some great serpent gliding through the dark. The sound came from above us, and we all looked upward. A shudder ran through the vines, and dried leaves fell like a crumbling rain onto the floor, catching in our hair, our clothes.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  Doyle answered, “I don’t know.”

  “Then shouldn’t we get to the other room?” Rhys said. His hand went for a sword that was not there. But his other hand went for my arm, and he pulled me toward the closest door, back into the hallway. None of them were armed, unless Doyle still had my gun. And somehow I didn’t think a gun was what we needed.

  The others closed around me like a wall of flesh. Rhys’s hand touched the door handle, and vines spilled over the door like dry rushing water. He jumped back, pushing me away from the door and the reaching vines. Doyle grabbed my other arm, and we were suddenly running for the far door. They were moving too fast for my high heels. I stumbled, but their hands kept me upright and moving,
my feet barely touching the floor. Frost was ahead of us, going for the doors. He called back, “Hurry!”

  Rhys muttered under his breath, “We are.”

  I glanced back to see Galen. He was facing away from me, guarding my back with nothing in his hands but his own skin. But the thorns were not touching him. There was a sense of movement everywhere like a nest of snakes, but the thin, dry tendrils dangled above me like an octopus—reaching just for me. As Doyle and Rhys carried me farther into the room, the thorns receded behind me and fell above my head, brushing my hair, pulling at us. When Doyle turned his head to look upward, I caught a scarlet flash on his face, fresh blood.

  The thorns wrapped in my hair, trying to pull me away. I screamed, jerking my head down. Rhys grabbed the handful of my hair and together we pulled it free of the thorns, leaving strands of hair behind.

  Frost had the far doors open. There was a glimpse of brighter lights and faces turned toward us, some human, some not. Frost was yelling, “A sword, give me a sword!”

  A guard started to move forward, hand on his sword. I heard a voice yell, “No! Keep your sword.” It was Cel’s voice.

  Doyle barked out an order: “Sithney, give us your sword!”

  The guard at the door started to lift his sword from its sheath. Frost held his hand out for it. The vines poured over the opening in a dry rushing wave. There was a moment when Frost could have dived through the door, could have saved himself, but he turned back into the room. The door vanished behind a reaching, slashing wave of thorns.

  Rhys and Doyle took me to the floor. Doyle pushed Rhys on top of me. I was suddenly under a pile of bodies. Rhys hair spilled past my face like curly silk. I had a glimpse through his hair and someone’s arm of a black cloak. I was pressed so hard against the floor I not only couldn’t move, I could barely breathe.

  If it had been anyone but Doyle and Frost on top, I’d have been waiting for screams. Instead, I waited for the pile to grow lighter as the men were dragged away by the thorns. But the pile didn’t grow lighter.

  I lay flat on my stomach, pressed to the cool stone floor, staring out through Rhys’s hair. The arm that was braced outside the curtain was bare of cloth, and slightly less purely white, so it was Galen.

  My blood had been pounding in my ears until all I could hear was the beat of my own body. But minutes passed and nothing happened. My pulse quieted. I pressed my hands to the stones underneath me. The grey stone was almost as smooth as marble, worn away from centuries of passing feet. I could hear Rhys’s breathing next to my ear. The shift of cloth as someone above us moved. But over all was the sound of the thorns, a low continuous murmur like the sound of the sea.

  Rhys whispered against my hair, “May I have a kiss before I die?”

  “We don’t seem to be dying,” I said.

  “Easy for you to say. You’re on the bottom of the pile.” This from Galen.

  “What’s happening up there? I can’t see a thing,” I said.

  “Be happy you cannot,” Frost said.

  “What is happening?” I asked again, putting more force into my voice.

  “Nothing,” Doyle’s deep voice rumbled down through the pile of men, as if the other bodies carried the low tone of his words like a tuning fork straight down my spine. “And I find that surprising,” he said.

  “You sound disappointed,” Galen said.

  “Not disappointed,” Doyle said, “curious.”

  Doyle’s cloak slid out of sight, the weight above me was suddenly less.

  “Doyle!” I shouted.

  “Have no fear, Princess. I am fine,” he said.

  The pressure above me lightened once more, but not by much. It took me a few seconds to figure out that Frost was raising up, but not moving his body from the pile. “This is singular,” he said.

  Galen’s arm vanished from my sight. “What is it doing?” he asked.

  I couldn’t hear anyone walking around, but I could see Galen to one side, kneeling. I parted Rhys’s hair from my face like two edges of a curtain. Frost was kneeling beside Galen. Doyle was the only one standing alone on the other side of us. I could see his black cloak.

  Rhys raised upward, bracing with his arms like half a push-up. “Strange,” he said.

  That was it. I had to see. “Get off of me, Rhys. I want to see.”

  He lowered his head over my face so he was looking at me upside down, still supporting his upper body with his arms, but pinning my lower body with his. Under other circumstances I’d have said he was doing it on purpose. But the material of my dress was thin enough and his clothing light enough that I could tell he wasn’t happy to see me. Staring into his tri-blue eye from inches away but upside down was almost dizzying, and somehow strangely intimate.

  “I’m the last body between you and the great bad thing,” he said. “I’ll move when Doyle tells me to move.”

  Watching his small round mouth move upside down made my head hurt. I closed my eyes. “Don’t talk upside down,” I said.

  “Of course,” Rhys said, “you could just look up.” He drew his face back, pulling back until he was on all fours above me like a mare shielding her foal.

  I stayed flat on the ground but craned my neck backward. All I could see was the snaking tendrils of the roses. They hung above us like thin, fuzzy, brown ropes waving gently back and forth almost as if there was wind, but there was no wind, and the fuzziness was thorns.

  “Other than the fact that the roses are alive again, what am I supposed to be seeing?”

  Doyle answered, “It is only the small thorns that are reaching for you, Merry.”

  “And?” I said.

  His black cloak came closer as he stood above us. “It means I don’t believe the roses mean you harm.”

  “What else could they want?” I asked. It should have felt silly talking from the ground with Rhys perched over me on all fours. But it didn’t. I wanted something, someone, between me and the rustling of the thorns.

  “I believe, I think, it may want a drink of royal blood,” Doyle said.

  “What do you mean a drink?” Galen asked it before I could. He sat back on the floor, moving so I could see most of his upper body. Blood had dried in spots and small trails down his upper body, but the bites were almost gone, leaving only the blood as proof that he’d been injured. The front of his pants was blood-soaked, but he moved better, less pain-filled. Everything was healing.

  I would not heal if the thorns tore into my body. I’d simply die.

  “The roses once drank from the queen every time she passed this way,” Doyle said.

  “That was centuries ago,” Frost said, “before we ever dreamed of traveling to the lands to the west.”

  I propped myself up on my elbows. “I have passed under the roses a thousand times in my life, and they’ve never reacted to me, not even when they still had a few blooms left.”

  “You have come into your power, Meredith. The land recognized that when it welcomed you tonight,” Doyle said.

  “What do you mean the land welcomed her?” Frost asked.

  Doyle told him.

  Rhys bent over to stare into my face again in that awkward upside-down movement. “Cool,” he said.

  It made me smile, but I pushed his head up out of my face anyway. “The land recognizes me as a power now.”

  “Not merely the land,” Doyle said. He sat down on the far side of me from Galen, spreading the black cloak around his body in a familiar gesture, as if he wore a lot of ankle-length cloaks. He did.

  I could see his face now. He looked thoughtful, as if contemplating some weighty philosophy.

  “This is all fascinating,” Rhys said, “but we can discuss whether Merry is the chosen whatever, later. We need to get her out of here before the roses try to eat her.”

  Doyle looked at me, dark face impassive. “Without swords we have very little chance of making either door with Merry alive. We would survive the roses’ worst attentions, but she would not. Since it is her safet
y that is paramount and not our own, we must think of a way out of this that does not require violence. If you offer the roses violence, they will return the favor.” He waved his hand upward, vaguely including the trailing vines. “They seem to be quite patient with us, so I suggest we use their patience to think.”

  “The land has never welcomed Cel, nor have the roses reached for him,” Frost said. He crawled around me to sit near Doyle. He didn’t seem to trust the roses’ patience as much as Doyle did. I agreed with Frost on this one. I had never seen the roses move before, not so much as a twitch. I’d heard the stories, but never thought to see the reality of it for myself. I’d often wished to see the room covered in sweet fragrant roses. Be careful what you wish for. Of course, there were no blooms, just thorns. That wasn’t exactly what I’d wished for.

  “Just because you put a crown on someone’s head doesn’t make them fit to rule,” Doyle said. “In olden days it was the magic, the land, that chose our queen or king. If the magic rejected them, if the land didn’t accept them, then bloodline or no bloodline, a new heir had to be chosen.”

  I was suddenly very aware of all of them looking at me. I looked from one to the other of them. They had almost identical expressions on their faces and I was half afraid I knew what they were thinking. The target on my back just kept getting bigger and bigger. “I am not the heir apparent.”

  “The queen will make you so, tonight,” Doyle said.

  I looked into his dark face and tried to read those raven-black eyes. “What do you want of me, Doyle?”

  “First, let us see what happens when Rhys opens the way for the thorns. If they react violently, then we will go no farther. Eventually, the other guards will rescue us.”

  Rhys asked, “Do you want me to move now?”

  Doyle nodded. “Please.”

  I wrapped a hand around both of Rhys’s arms, keeping him above me. “What happens if the roses pour over me and try tearing me limb from limb?”

  “Then we throw ourselves on your body and let the thorns rend us before they touch your white flesh.” Doyle’s voice was bland, empty of meaning, but still interested. It was the voice he used in public at court when he didn’t want anyone to guess his motives. A voice honed by centuries of answering to royals that were often not quite sane.