Divine Misdemeanors_A Novel

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Rhys put his forehead against mine and whispered, “How do you feel about the big guy taking over?”

  “I don’t know. There are so many other problems to solve.”

  His hand moved to the back of my neck and he moved our faces apart so he could move in for a kiss, but he spoke as he did it. “If you want to stop the power he is building you must do it soon, Merry.” He kissed me as he said my name, and I let myself sink into that kiss. I let the warmth of his lips, the tenderness of his touch, hold me in a way that nothing else had today. Maybe it was finally being inside, away from the prying eyes that seemed to be everywhere, but something hard and unhappy loosened inside me as he kissed me.

  He hugged me to him, and our bodies touched from shoulder to thigh as close as we could. I could feel his body growing hard and happy to see me against the front of my own. I don’t know if we would have tried for a little predinner privacy in the bedrooms, because Caswyn came down the hallway from the bedrooms, and suddenly a lot of the happy seeped away from me.

  It wasn’t that he was not lovely, for he was, handsome, tall, slender, and muscular as most sidhe warriors were, but the air of sorrow that clung to him made my heart ache. He’d been a minor noble at the Unseelie Court. His hair was straight and raven black like Cathbodua’s or even Queen Andais herself. His skin as pale as mine, or Frost’s. His eyes were still circles of red, red-orange, and finally true orange, like a fire banked down in his eyes. Andais had quieted that fire in him by the torture she’d done to him, the night her son died and we fled faerie. Caswyn had been brought to us by a cloaked woman who told us only that Caswyn’s mind would not survive any more of the Queen’s Mercy. I wasn’t entirely certain his mind wasn’t already broken beyond repair. But since Caswyn had been the whipping boy for Andais’s anger at us we took him in. His body had healed because he was sidhe, but his mind and heart were more fragile things.

  He came down the hallway like a raven-haired ghost in an oversized white dress shirt untucked and billowing over a pair of cream dress slacks. The clothes were borrowed, but surely Frost’s shirt had fit him better last week? Was he still not eating?

  He came straight for me as if Rhys wasn’t holding me. Rhys moved aside so that I could embrace Caswyn. He wrapped himself around me with a sigh that was almost a sob. I held him and let the fierceness of his grip envelop me. He’d been clingy and overly emotional since he had been rescued from the queen’s bloody bed. She’d tortured him to punish me in a way, and because my lovers had been out of reach. She’d picked him at random. He’d never been anything to me, not friend or enemy. Caswyn had been as neutral as the courts allowed and centuries of diplomacy had crashed against Andais’s madness. The cloaked noblewoman had said, “The queen asked him to bed her and as he was not one of her guards to be ordered so, he politely refused.” Caswyn had been one rejection too many for her sanity. She’d turned him into a red ruin on her sheets and made certain to show it to me with a spell that turned a mirror into a video phone better than anything human technology had yet created. When I’d first seen him, he’d been so unrecognizable that I thought he was someone I cared for.

  When she told me who it was I’d been puzzled. He was nothing to me. I could still hear Andais’s voice, “Then you don’t care what I do to him?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that, but finally I’d said, “He is a noble of the Unseelie Court and deserves protection from its queen.”

  “You refused the crown, Meredith, and this queen says he deserves nothing for his years of hiding. He’s no one’s enemy and no one’s friend. I always hated that about him.” She’d grabbed his hair and made him beg while we watched.

  “I will distroy him.”

  “Why?” I’d asked.

  “Because I can.”

  I’d told him to come to us if ever he could. Days later, with the help of a sidhe who wanted no one to know her identity, he had come. I could not take responsibility for my aunt’s deeds. It was her evil and I was just an excuse for her to let out all her demons at once. I think and Doyle agreed, Andais was trying to force the nobles to assassinate her. It was a queen’s version of “Suicide by cop.”

  Moments like that weren’t uncommon for Queen Andais, my aunt, and that was one of the reasons that so many of the guards had agreed to exile rather than stay with her once they had a choice. Most of them liked a little tie-me-up-tie-me-down, but there was a line that few would cross willingly, and Andais wasn’t a dominant in the sense of modern bondage and submission. She was a dominant in the old sense of might makes right, and being absolute ruler meant absolutely that. The old adage “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” applied to both of my royal relatives on both thrones. What I hadn’t foreseen was her idea of pain and sex spreading to outside her personal guard, or that the nobles would keep taking the abuse. Why hadn’t someone tried to kill her by now? Why didn’t they fight back?

  “I thought you were gone,” Caswyn said. “I thought you were hurt, or worse; we all did.”

  “Doyle and Frost wouldn’t let that happen,” Rhys said.

  Caswyn looked at him, still trying to drape all of that six-feet-plus frame around my much smaller one. “And how would they keep Princess Meredith from being cut to pieces with glass? Weapon skill and bravery won’t stop every threat. Even the Queen’s Darkness and the Killing Frost cannot stop the perils of modern life like man-made glass. It would have cut them all to pieces, not just the princess.”

  He spoke the truth. Old-fashioned glass made of naturally occurring substances with heat added could fall on my guards all day and not harm them, but anything with artificial additives, or metals, would cut them as much as me.

  Doyle came across the room, speaking as he moved. “You are right, Wyn, but we would have shielded her body with ours. Meredith would have been unhurt no matter what happened to us.” Aloud we’d started calling him Wyn because my aunt had made his full name a thing whispered in the dark with blood and pain.

  I pushed gently on Wyn’s chest to make him ease up and not lean so heavily on me. I couldn’t take that kind of hugging forever without it beginning to hurt a little. The angle of my neck wasn’t right for it.

  “And the deli is owned by one of my Gran’s cousins, a brownie named Matilda. She would have kept me safe.”

  Wyn unbent enough for his shoulder to go across mine, and my arm to encircle his waist. I could stand like that for hours, and he just seemed to need to touch me a lot. He was six feet of muscled warrior, but the queen had truly broken him in every way. His body had healed, as the sidhe do, but he only seemed to feel truly safe when he was with me, Doyle, Frost, Barinthus, Rhys, or anyone he perceived as powerful enough to keep him safe. The others made him afraid, as if he feared that Andais would snatch him away if he wasn’t with someone strong.

  “One brownie does not seem enough protection,” he said in that uncertain voice that he’d had since he came to us. He’d never been the boldest of men, but now his fear was always there trembling below his skin, as if it ran in his blood now, so that fear was everywhere inside him.

  I smiled up at him, trying to get him to smile back. “Brownies are a lot tougher than they look.”

  He didn’t smile; he looked horrified. “Oh, Princess, forgive me.” He actually dropped to one knee and bowed his head, all that pale hair sweeping out and around his body. “I forgot that you are yourself part brownie. I did not mean to imply that you were not powerful.” He said all of it with his head bowed, and his gaze fixed on the floor, or at best my sandaled feet.

  “Get up, Wyn. I took no offense.”

  He dropped lower so that he could lay his hands on the floor by my feet. His hair covered his face, so all I had was his ever-more-frantic voice. “Please, your majesty, I meant no offense.”

  “Wyn, I said that I took no offense.”

  “Please, please, I didn’t mean any harm …”

  Rhys knelt down by him. “Did you hear what Merry said, Wyn? She’s no
t mad at you.”

  His forehead touched his hands on the floor so that he was in a position of abject abasement. He was saying “Please, please, don’t,” over and over again.

  I knelt beside Rhys, and touched the long unbound hair. Caswyn actually screamed and laid himself flat on his stomach, hands out before him beseeching.

  Doyle and Frost came to kneel on either side of him with us. They tried to calm him, but it was as if he couldn’t hear us or see us, and whatever he was hearing and seeing was terrible.

  I finally yelled at him. “Wyn, Wyn, its Merry! It’s Merry!” I lay flat on the hardwood floor near his head. I could see nothing through all that hair, so I reached to smooth it back from his face.

  He screamed, and scrambled back from my touch. The men tried to touch him, too, but he screamed at every touch, and scrambled away from us on hands and knees until he found a wall to huddle against. He held his hands out in front of him as if warding off blows.

  In that moment I hated my aunt.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IT WAS HAFWYN WHO MOVED FORWARD, ARMS OUTSTRETCHED. “LET me help you, Caswyn.”

  He was shaking his head over and over, his hair in a wild profusion across his face so that his wide, staring eyes were framed by strands of his hair. It made him look wild, feral, and a little mad.

  She started to bend and touch him, but he screamed again, and Galen was suddenly at her side, taking her wrist and saying “Make sure he sees you and not her before you touch him.”

  “He would never hurt me,” she said.

  “He may not know it’s you,” Galen said.

  I started to get up off my knees and Rhys’s hand was there to help me stand. Doyle and Frost were standing there staring at Caswyn. Their faces showed such grief.

  I started toward them with Rhys’s hand in mine. He drew back, and I looked at him. “My powers bring death, Merry. That won’t help here.”

  I looked at Doyle and Frost, and even Barinthus still standing against the sliding-glass doors. I could see Amatheon and Adair out on the deck. They looked away when I made eye contact, as if they were happy to be outside cooking steaks, and not inside trying to make this better. That did seem easier, but the point to being a royal, a real one, was that you couldn’t just do the easy things. Sometimes you had to do what was hardest if that was what your people needed. Caswyn needed something right now, and I was all we had.

  I prayed, “Goddess, help me help him. Give me the power I need to heal him.” I smelled roses, which was the scent that I smelled when the Goddess was answering prayers, or trying to get my attention.

  Galen said, “Does anyone else smell flowers?”

  “No,” said Hafwyn.

  “Does anyone else smell flowers or plants?” Rhys asked.

  There was a chorus of deep bass “nos” throughout the room. I moved toward Galen and Hafwyn where they stood in front of Caswyn. The scent of roses was stronger as I moved toward them. That was one way I knew that the Goddess was saying yes. Inside faerie or a dream I got to see her, but in everyday life it was often perfume, or other less-dramatic signs.

  Hafwyn moved away from Galen and Caswyn. Her blue eyes were wide as she said to me, “I can only heal the body, not the mind.”

  I nodded, and went to stand beside Galen. He looked down at me. “I’m not a healer.”

  “Me either,” I said. I reached for his hand, nervous. The moment his hand wrapped around mine the scent of roses was even stronger, as if I stood beside a bank of wild roses thick with summer’s heat.

  “Flowers again,” he said, “stronger than before.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How do we help him?” he asked.

  And that was the question. How did we help him even with the scent of flowers around us, and the presence of the Goddess on the very air? How did we heal Caswyn outside of faerie?

  The scent of roses was so thick it was as if I’d drunken rose water, so that it sat sweet and clean on my tongue. “May wine,” Galen said, “I can taste May wine.”

  “Rose water,” I said softly.

  I started to kneel, and Galen knelt with me. “Goddess, let Caswyn see us. Let him know that we are his friends.”

  Galen’s hand grew warm in mine, not heat warm, but as if he had been out in the sunshine and his skin held that warmth. He was smiling that welcoming, good-natured smile of his, and Caswyn was looking at him. His wide eyes began to lose their complete panic.

  He said, “Galen.”

  “Yes, Wyn, it’s me.”

  He looked frantically around the room, but he ended up staring at me. “Princess, where did she go?”

  “Where did who go?” I asked, but I was pretty certain who “she” was.

  Caswyn shook his head, making his hair slide over his face again. “I dare not speak her name after dark. She’ll find me again.”

  “She’s not in Los Angeles.”

  “Los Angeles?” he made it a question.

  Galen asked, “Wyn, do you know where you are?”

  Caswyn licked his lips, his eyes looking afraid again, but it was a different kind of fear now. It wasn’t fear of some post-traumatic-stress vision, it was fear that he didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t know why he didn’t know.

  His eyes were wide and frightened as he whispered, “No, I don’t know.” He reached out to us and we both reached for him together with our unclasped hands. Was it accident or design that we touched him simultaneously, and both touched the bare skin of lower arms where the sleeves had been rolled back? Whatever the cause, the moment we all made skin contact magic breathed through us. It wasn’t the overwhelming magic that it might have been inside faerie, but maybe that wasn’t what Caswyn needed. Maybe what he needed to heal was something gentle, something like the touch of spring, or the first heat of summer when the roses fill the meadows.

  Tears filled his eyes as he gazed at us, and we drew him into our arms and held him while he wept. We held him and the scent of flowers was everywhere.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I SLEPT THAT NIGHT BETWEEN GALEN AND CASWYN WITH RHYS ON the far side of the big bed. There had been no sex, because Wyn needed to be held more than he needed to be fucked. In a very real way he’d been fucked up enough already, and the hands that held him as he drifted off to sleep were there to try to heal that. It had not been the restful end to the day that I’d wanted, but as I drifted off to sleep with Wyn spooned in my arms, and Galen spooned against my back, I realized that there were worse ways to end a day.

  The dream started with me in the military Hummer. It was the one that the National Guard had rescued me with when I’d called for help so that my relatives couldn’t take me back to either court. But none of the soldiers were in the Hummer. None of my guards. I was alone in the back with the Hummer driving itself. I knew that wasn’t right, so I knew it was a dream. I’d dreamed about the bomb going off before, but always before it had been closer to the reality. Then I realized that the Hummer was black, completely, utterly black, and I knew it wasn’t a military anything, but a new form of the Black Coach. It was the coach that had been coming to the beck and call of the ruler of the Unseelie Court for centuries. Once it had been a coach and four with horses blacker than any moonless night and eyes filled with fire that had never warmed anyone by a campfire. Then it had changed on its own and become a long black limousine with unholy fire under its hood. The Black Coach was a force of its own, a thing of its own, older than any of the fey courts, older than anyone could remember, which meant that it had existed for thousands of years or else it had simply appeared one day. Either way, it was somewhere between a living being and a magical construct, and it definitely had a mind of its own.

  The question was, why was it in my dream? And was it just a dream, or did the Black Coach exist for “real” inside the dreamscape? It didn’t talk, so I couldn’t ask it, and I was alone so I couldn’t ask anyone else.

  The car drove itself over the narrow road. We were coming
to the open meadow where the bomb had gone off. I’d ended up with shrapnel in one arm and shoulder, huge nails that had fallen out as I magically healed the wounded soldiers. I had never before had the gift of healing by the laying on of hands, but that night I did. But first there was the explosion.

  The cold winter air came through the open window. I’d lowered it to use magic against our enemies because the soldiers were dying, dying to protect me, and I couldn’t let that happen. They weren’t my soldiers, my guards, and somehow giving their life to protect me hadn’t seemed right. Not if I could stop it.

  The explosion ripped the world apart with noise and force. I waited for the blow and the pain, but it didn’t come. The world wavered with the vibration, and suddenly it was daylight, bright hot daylight. I was blinded by the glare of it all, and sand was everywhere. I had never been anywhere with so much sand and rock. The heat through the open window was like peering into a broiling oven.

  The only things that were the same were the explosions. The world reverberated with their impact, and the Hummer’s wheels rocked on the uneven ground of what had been a road before a bomb had put a crater in the middle of it.

  There was another Hummer in desert camouflage colors, and there were soliders on one side of it using it for cover as something too big for a bullet and too small for a rocket whirred past. It made another impact crater in the road.

  I heard a voice shouting, “They’re getting into our range. They’re getting into our range!”

  The soldier on one end tried to move out from the Hummer but a bullet whizzed by him and hit the dirt of the road. They were pinned down and about to die.

  Then the soldier at the other end of the line turned and saw the black Hummer. He had his rifle across his lap, one hand on it, but his other hand was wrapped around something at his neck. I thought it would be a cross, but then I saw his face, and knew it was a nail. A nail on the end of a leather cord tied around his neck.