Divine Misdemeanors_A Novel

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “I could kill you both for falling asleep on duty,” Rhys said.

  Ivi gave a small nod. “You’re third in command, you have that right.”

  Brii finally managed to talk around the sword point and his pulse. “We failed the princess.”

  Rhys moved in one motion, taking the sword from Brii’s throat, lowering his gun to the floor, and standing in the doorway as if he’d just walked through. With Frost and Doyle around me, I sometimes forgot that there was more than one reason that Rhys had been third in command of the Queen’s Ravens. When everyone is this good, it’s hard to remember just how good that is.

  “It was the Goddess herself who did the enchanted sleep,” Rhys said. “None of us can fight that, so I guess I won’t kill you tonight.”

  Ivi said, “Shit.” He went to his knees outside the shower doors, laying his head on his arm that held the gun. Brii leaned his back against the half wall by the shower. He had to adjust the long bow at his back so it didn’t get damaged against the tile. He was one of the guards who hadn’t embraced guns yet, but when you were as good with a bow as he was, it wasn’t as big a problem as it might have been, according to Doyle.

  I leaned my hair back into the water enough to finish rinsing off. It was Rhys’s turn in the shower anyway. He’d cleaned his weapons first.

  “What do you mean, the Goddess herself?” Brii asked.

  Rhys started to explain, a much edited version of things. I turned off the shower, and opened the door to get the towels that always seemed to be hanging where we needed them. I had a moment to wonder if Barinthus put out the towels, but I doubted it. He didn’t strike me as that domestic.

  Brii handed me the first towel, but his eyes were all for Rhys and the story. I bent over to wrap my hair, and it was Ivi’s hand that traced my back and slid lower. It made me look at him, because I would have thought that talk of the Goddess would have distracted him from such things. But, unlike Brii, his eyes were on me. There was a heat in his eyes that shouldn’t have been there after a month of freedom—a month when we had almost an even number of male and female sidhe guards.

  “Ivi,” Rhys said, “you aren’t listening to me.” He didn’t sound angry, but rather puzzled.

  Ivi blinked and shook himself like a bird settling its feathers. “I would say apologies, but we’re both so old that that’s an insult, so what do I say, that the sight of the princess naked distracted me from anything you could say?” He smiled at the end but it wasn’t a completely happy smile.

  “You and the others were supposed to talk to Merry at dinner about this.”

  “The Fear Dearg are back,” Ivi said. “I remember them, oh Lord of Death. It was they I first thought of when we woke and found that both of us were asleep on duty.” Ivi made a face; it was anger, disgust, and other things I couldn’t read.

  “I am too young to remember, for I was not yet aware,” Brii said, “but I came to true life not long after the end of it and I remember the stories. I saw the wounds and the damage done. When such enemies are about, what good soldier complains about anything else?”

  I stood there with my hair in its towel, but the other towel loose in my hands. “I’m missing something here,” I said.

  “Tell her,” Rhys said, making a little go-ahead motion with his gun.

  Brii looked embarrassed, and that was a rare emotion for the sidhe. Ivi lowered his bold eyes, but said, “I have failed at my post this night. How can I ask for more after that?”

  “Galen and Wyn were still deep asleep when I came in here. This should have woken them?” I asked.

  The three men looked at each other, and then Brii and Rhys both moved out through the door enough to see the big bed. They came back into the bathroom, with Rhys shaking his head. “They haven’t moved.” He seemed to think about that. “In fact, Doyle and Frost should be in here. All the rest of the guards should be in here with weapons drawn. These two”—and he motioned with his sword at them—“made a hell of a lot of noise rushing to save you.”

  “But no one else woke up,” I said.

  Rhys smiled. “The Goddess has kept everyone but the two of you asleep. I think that means you get to have your talk with Merry. My weapons are clean. Now it’s my turn in the shower.”

  “Wait,” I said, “what talk?”

  Rhys kissed me on the forehead. “Your guards are afraid of you, Merry. They’re afraid you’ll be like your aunt, and your cousin, or uncle, or grandfather.” He looked up as if thinking over the list.

  “There’s a lot of bad crazy in my family tree,” I said.

  “Most of the new guard who followed you out of faerie have stayed celibate.”

  I stared at him, and then turned slowly to stare from Brii to Ivi. “Why, in the name of the Danu? I told you my aunt’s celibacy rule didn’t hold anymore.”

  “She said that in the past,” Brii said slowly, “and she was fine if it was casual lusts, but if we found someone we cared for …” He stopped and looked to Ivi.

  “I never fell in love with anyone,” Ivi said, “and after seeing what she did to some of the lady loves, I had never been so happy that I was a cad and a bounder in my existence.”

  “I have six fathers and six consorts. I’m okay that the rest of you have sex, make friends, fall in love. It would be wonderful if more of you fell in love.”

  “You seem to mean that,” Ivi said, “but your relatives have seemed sane over the centuries, but they weren’t.”

  I realized what he was saying. “You think I’m going to go crazy like my aunt, and cousin, and uncle, and …” I thought about it, and could only nod. “I guess I see your point.”

  “None of them but your grandfather was always cruel and horrible,” Ivi said.

  “There’s a reason his name is Uar the Cruel,” I said, and I didn’t try to keep the look of disgust off my face. He’d never had any use for me, nor I for him.

  “It always seemed that jealousy was what undid your relatives—jealousy of affection, of power, of possessions even,” Brii said. “You have a relative on both thrones of faerie, and they are both vain and hate anyone who even hints that they may not be the most beautiful, the most handsome, the most powerful.”

  “You believe that if you go to other lovers I will see it as a rejection of my beauty?”

  “Something like that, yes,” he said.

  I looked from one to the other of them, frowning. “I don’t know how to reassure you, because you’re right about my blood relatives. My father and grandmother were sane, but even my own mother isn’t quite right. So I don’t know how to reassure you.”

  “It’s the fact that you haven’t touched any of them that’s creeping them out,” Rhys said.

  “What?”

  “The queen would only let the guards she hadn’t slept with find other lovers. If she’d had sex with you then you were hers forever even if she never touched you again.”

  I stared at him. “You mean before the celibacy nonsense that was her rule?”

  “Her law,” Ivi said.

  “She was always a very possessive woman,” Rhys said.

  “She was always crazy, you mean,” I said.

  “No, not always,” Rhys said.

  The other men agreed.

  “And the very fact that once the queen wasn’t mad, but just ruthless, is what frightens us about you, Princess Meredith,” Ivi said.

  “You see,” Brii said, “if she had always been mad then we would trust that your reasonableness would last, but once the queen was reasonable. Once she was a good ruler or faerie and the Goddess wouldn’t have chosen her.”

  “I see the problem,” I said, and wrapped the almost forgotten towel around me. I felt a little cold all of a sudden. I hadn’t thought about my family quite like this. What if it was genetic? What if sadistic craziness was inside me somewhere, waiting for a chance to come out? Was it possible? Well, yes, but … My hand went to my stomach, still so flat, but there were babies in there. Would they take after m
e and my father, or … That was the most frightening of all. I trusted myself, but the babies were unknown.

  “What can I do?” I asked. I wasn’t even sure which fear I was asking about, but the men had only one fear to focus on.

  “We failed you tonight, Princess Meredith,” Brii said. “We do not deserve any more consideration than our lives.”

  “When the Goddess moves among us none can stand in her way,” Rhys said.

  “Do you really think that the Darkness or the Killing Frost would see it that way if something had happened to her?” Ivi asked.

  “If something had happened to her, neither would I,” Rhys said, and there was that hardness to him that he hid most of the time behind jokes and his love of film noir, but more and more I glimpsed it. He’d come back into a lot of his power that had been gone for centuries, and there is something about that much power that makes you harder.

  “See,” Ivi said.

  “Again, I feel like I’m missing something. Rhys, just tell me what they keep tiptoeing around.”

  Rhys looked from one man to the other. “You have to ask for yourselves. That’s always been the rule.”

  “Because if you won’t ask for yourself, you don’t want it that badly,” Brii finished for him, a little sadly. He began to put all his arrows away, and turned for the still-open door.

  “Stay, for if I ask it can be for both of us,” Ivi said.

  Brii hesitated in the doorway.

  “I want it badly enough to ask,” Ivi said.

  “Ask what?” I said.

  “Make love to us, have sex with us, fuck us. I don’t care what you call it, but please touch us. If you touch us tonight and let us have other lovers tomorrow and are calm about it, then it will be proof that you are not your aunt, or even your uncle of the Bright court. He wouldn’t kill lovers who went to another bed, but he destroyed them politically at court, because to go directly to another bed after a night with him said, to him at least, that he wasn’t good enough to make you not want someone else.”

  “See why I would not ask tonight?” Brii said. “It is a great honor to be in the bed of our ruler, and it should not be a reward for such badly done duty.”

  “The Goddess woke you first,” I said. “There has to be a reason for that.”

  “I don’t smell flowers,” Rhys said.

  “Me neither, but maybe this isn’t about Goddess work, as much as the fact that someone should have told me that sooner. I lived in fear of my aunt my entire life. I’ve been her victim of torture, and my cousin made my childhood a misery when my father wasn’t watching.”

  “We need to know how much of the queen is in her niece,” Ivi said, and he was very solemn, unlike his usual teasing self. I realized that maybe his teasing, like Rhys’s humor, was hiding more serious things.

  “Rhys needs the shower, and the beds are all taken, but the couches are big enough.”

  Rhys kissed me on the cheek. “Have fun.” He moved past me to the showers, but put his weapons at the back of the shower, where the shelf had been designed for less lethal things, but it worked perfectly for weapons, as we’d all discovered.

  “The couches are big enough for what?” Brii asked.

  “Sex,” I said. “Sex tonight, but tomorrow you have to persuade one of the other guards to be with you, because this only works if you go from my bed almost directly to someone else, right?”

  “Will that not bother you?” Brii asked.

  I laughed. “If I wasn’t part fertility deity you wouldn’t get sex tonight. Rhys did his duty very well tonight, and if I were truly mortal flesh I’d be a little sore, but I am not, and the power will rise between us and it will be good.”

  “So your orders are to make love to you now, but find another guard to sleep with as soon as possible?” Ivi asked.

  I thought about it, and then nodded. “Yes, those are my orders.”

  Ivi grinned at me. “I like you.”

  I smiled back at him, because I couldn’t help it. “I like you, too. Now let’s go find the couches and prove just how much we like each other.”

  I heard the shower turn on behind us as we moved for the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THERE WERE ACTUALLY TWO LIVING ROOMS IN THE BEACH HOUSE. One was smaller and more intimate, if you could use that word for a space large enough to hold the dining room, kitchen, entrance, foyer, and a small sitting area off to one side. It was the Great Room, but the part that was a living room was smaller than the rest, so it was the small living room. The big one was a room to itself, with a bank of windows that ran from high-peaked ceiling to carpeted floor. It was one of the few carpeted areas in the house, so water tracked in here would be a problem, which was why it was isolated from most of the other rooms, and didn’t have a door connecting to the beach. The long, wide sectional couch made a nearly full square in the room. There was only one narrow entrance on one end, and coffee tables built into the furniture at intervals, so you had a place to put your drinks, if the small golden wood table that sat to one side, next to a fully stocked bar, wasn’t enough to set your drinks down.

  The couches themselves were white, sitting in a sea of tan carpet. The color scheme was very close to Maeve Reed’s main house. There were cool colors—whites, creams, tans, golds, and blues—in other parts of the house, but here there was nothing to distract the eye from the amazing expanse of ocean, and if you weren’t bothered by heights you could stand near the windows and gaze down at sharp rocks that were pounded by the sea.

  It was both a beautiful room and a cold one. It felt like a place created to entertain business associates, not friends. We were going to try to add some warmth to the decor.

  The sky was still black against the glass. The sea stretched out, and almost oily in its ink-black shine, as it reflected the ripe moon.

  The tan carpet was faded to a gray-white by the moonlight and the dark. The couches glowed almost ghostly in the moonlight. It was bright enough that it made thick shadows around the room. It took a bright moon to make shadows like that. The three of us walked into those bright shadows and our skin reflected the light as if we were white water to shine under the glow of the moon.

  The house was so silent that I could hear the rush and murmur of the sea on the rocks below. We moved in a silence formed of moonlight, shadows, and the sighing of the sea.

  I moved toward the couch that was closest to the glass wall, because to call it a window didn’t do it justice. It was a wall of glass so that the sea stretched out forever until it met the curve of the world in a dark, moving circle that glowed and shimmered under the touch of the moon.

  Something about the play of light made me want to see more of the view, so I passed the couch up and stood at the edge of the glass, where I could have that dizzying glimpse of the sea and the rocks, the water foaming silver and white in the dark light.

  Brii began to take off his bows, arrows, and blades, laying them carefully on the long table to the side of the room.

  Ivi came to me with his holstered gun and the sword at his belt. He came to me with the body armor vest still in place. Most of the men were tentative after so long without a woman, but Ivi grabbed my upper arms in an almost bruising grip and lifted me off the ground so he could kiss me. There was no bending down for this man; he made me come to him, and he was strong enough to pick me up off the ground and simply hold me where he wanted me.

  The towel on my hair fell to the floor, so that my hair was wet and cold against our faces. He put one arm around my waist to hold me. The other hand he wrapped in my wet hair and pulled hard and sharp, so that I cried out for him, part pain and part something else.

  His voice was harsh and fierce, already going lower as some men’s do. “The others said you liked pain.”

  My voice came out breathy, strained with the hold he had on me. “Some pain, not a lot.”

  “But you like this,” he said.

  “Yes, I like this.”

  “Good, because s
o do I.” He had to let go of my hair to pin me more tightly against his body as his other hand undid the Velcro of his vest. Then he flung me to the carpet and jerked his vest over his head in almost the same movement.

  I lay there, breathless from the suddenness of it, and he’d hit just the right note so that I felt passive. The willing victim was a game I enjoyed if it was done right. Done wrong and he’d have a fight on his hands. The towel that had been covering me had come undone so that I simply lay on it naked and bare for the moonlight and for him.

  He pinned my legs by kneeling on them, trapping my lower body, while he stripped off guns, sword, belt, and T-shirt. They made a pile around him like petals torn from an impatient flower.

  He rose above me, putting more pressure on my legs, so that it was almost pain, but not quite. I had seen him nude, because most of us had no problem with nudity, but getting a glimpse of a man without his clothes is not the same thing as looking up the line of that same body as it kneels over you, and you know that this time everything that body promises is about to be yours.

  His waist was long and slender. Even the muscles under all that gleaming skin were long and lean, as if no matter what he did he wouldn’t bulk up. He was built like a long-distance runner, grace and speed mixed in with all that strength. His hair fanned out around him, and I realized it was moving on its own with no wind but his own magic to make it spread out around him like a body-long halo of white, gray, and silver, and the vines that traced that hair glowed more brightly, as if electric wire had been run to every line of vine and leaf so that they were painted in shades of green. The spiral of his eyes had begun to move, as if I would grow dizzy if I looked too long.

  Whatever he saw in my face, it made him undo his pants, and push them down slender hips so that he revealed that last part of himself already hard and long and thick, as if his body had decided that the rest of him was slender enough and it would make up for it here. He pressed against the front of his own body, thick and long, and everything you could want in that moment.