Swallowing Darkness_A Novel

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  It made me look up at Sholto. His white-blond hair had begun to escape from the ponytail he’d worn to rescue me. He’d used glamour to make his hair look short, but the illusion might have been harmed if someone had become tangled in his nearly ankle-length hair. Strands of his hair trailed around a face as handsome as any in the courts. Only Frost had had a more masculine beauty. I pushed that thought away and tried to give Sholto his due. The tentacles had ripped his t-shirt apart. It clung like a lace of rags around his chest and stomach. Shreds of the cloth were still tucked into his jeans, with their belt, and the heavy collar was still intact, so it, along with the sleeves, kept it all in place, but the chest and stomach revealed were lovely, the skin pale and perfect. The tattoo that decorated him from just under the breastbone to his belt looked like someone had drawn one of those sea anemones, done in shades of gold, ivory, and crystal, with edges of blue and pink, soft colors, like the sun caressing the edge of a seashell. One thicker tentacle had been drawn so that it curled up over the right side of his chest, looking as if the tentacle had been frozen in mid-movement, so that the tip was close to the darker paleness of one nipple. I wasn’t certain, but I was pretty sure that the tattoo had changed. It was almost as if the tat was literally formed by what the tentacles were doing when he froze them into art.

  I knew that the slender hips, and everything else that was held inside his jeans, was lovely, and that he knew what to do with it.

  He lifted my hand, and his face wasn’t soft now. It was thoughtful. “You look like you are weighing and measuring me, Princess.”

  “And well she should be,” Gran said.

  Without looking at her, I said, “He spoke to me, not to you, Gran.”

  “So you would take his side over mine already?”

  I did look at her then. I saw the anger in her eyes, and a covetousness that wasn’t her, but might be my cousin. It was as if Cair had put her desire to possess into the spell, her jealousy given magical form. Subtle, and nasty. Not unlike my cousin, come to think of it. Magic was often like that, colored by the personality of the maker.

  “He is my lover, the father of my child, my future husband, my future king. I will do what all women do. I will go to his bed, and his arms, and we will be a couple. It is the way of the world.”

  A look of deep hatred came over her face, and it was almost as if the expression were not hers. I clung more tightly to Sholto’s hand, and had to fight the urge to wiggle a little farther away in the bed from this woman, because though it was Gran, there was something in her that wasn’t.

  Galen moved up beside us. “The expression on your face, Gran, it doesn’t look much like you.”

  She looked at him, and her face softened. Then that other looked out of her true-brown eyes for a moment. She looked down, as if she knew she couldn’t hide it.

  “And how do ya feel, Galen, that you share her with so many?”

  He smiled, and true happiness was shining in his face. “I’ve wanted to be Merry’s husband since she was a teenager. Now I will be, and we’ll have a child together.” He shrugged, spread his hands. “It’s so much more than I ever thought I’d have. How can I be anything but happy?”

  “Do ya not wanne be king in yer own right?”

  “No,” he said.

  She looked up then, and the other was in her eyes, sharp and pure, and uncomprehending. “All of you want to be king.”

  “As her only king, I would be a disaster,” Galen said simply. “I am not a general to lead armies, or a strategist for politics. The others are better at all that than I am.”

  “You mean that,” she said, and the voice didn’t sound very much like Gran at all.

  I didn’t fight the urge to wiggle closer to Sholto and Galen then, and farther away from Gran and the stranger’s eyes. Something was wrong with her, in her.

  That strange voice said, “We could let her keep you, let her be queen of the Unseelie. You would be no threat to us.”

  “No threat to whom?” Doyle asked. There was no sight of the thread now. I didn’t know if they’d destroyed it, or just hidden it. I’d been too caught up in Gran’s strange state to notice. It wasn’t good that I hadn’t noticed, but the world had narrowed to the stranger in my grandmother’s eyes.

  “But you, Darkness, you are a threat.” There was no accent now. There were simply well-spoken words, and because it was Gran’s throat saying it, the words still sounded vaguely like her, but a person’s voice is made up of more than just their larynx and mouth. There is a piece of yourself in your voice, and the words she spoke now belonged in someone else’s mouth.

  She glanced across the bed at Sholto. “Shadowspawn and his sluagh are a threat.” Shadowspawn was a nickname that even the queen rarely said to his face. A lesser fey, even my grandmother, would not have risked such an insult to the King of the sluagh.

  “What have they done to her?” I asked. My voice was soft, almost a whisper, as if I were afraid that if I spoke too loudly, it would tip the tension building in the room. Tip it over, and spill it into something bloody and awful and irrevocable.

  Gran turned to Doyle, one hand spread wide. It was one of those moments that seem frozen in time. It is the illusion that you have all the time in the world, when in fact you have milliseconds or less to react, to survive, to watch your life be destroyed.

  He reacted in a blur of movement that I couldn’t follow. He was simply a dark blur, as the power burst from Gran’s hand—a power that she had never possessed. White-hot light burst forth, and for a moment the room was illuminated in eye-searing brightness. I could see Doyle caught against that light, moving her arm, her body, away from the bed, away from me. I had an almost slow-motion view of the white light cutting across the front of his body.

  There was a shuddering scream from near the window as the white light hit the giant tentacles still in the opening. The bed moved. It was Galen throwing himself on top of me, as a living shield. I had time to see Sholto leap over the bed, and go to join the fight, then all I could see was Galen’s shirt. All I could feel was his body above mine, tensed for a blow.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THERE WAS ONE TERRIBLE SCREAM, A SOUND OF SUCH DESOLATION that I pushed at Galen, tried to move him away. I had to see. Doyle had been an immovable wall; Galen moved, but not away. His body was softer, less certain of itself, but I was just as trapped. I might have forced him to move if I’d been willing to hurt him badly enough, but I was unwilling to hurt more of the people I cared for.

  Galen took a breath that broke in a sob. I heard Rhys’s voice. “Goddess, help us!”

  I pushed harder at Galen’s chest. “Move, move, damnit, let me see.”

  He turned back to me, pressing his face against my hair. “You don’t want to see.”

  I’d been frightened before; now it was panic. I screamed at him. “Let me see, or I will hurt you!”

  It was Rhys who said, “Let her see, Galen.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Galen, move. Merry isn’t like you. She’ll want to see.” The tone in his voice turned the panic to ice in my veins. I was suddenly calm, but it wasn’t true calm. It was what happens when terror turns to something that will let you function, for a time.

  Galen moved slowly, reluctance in every muscle as he crawled off the bed on the opposite side from where he’d started. He put himself close to the very thing he hadn’t wanted me to see.

  I saw the nightflyer first, wrapped around Gran like a shroud. One of the spines that they could carry inside their bodies had pierced her through. I saw the spikes on the spine, and knew why he, for it was a he, had not taken the spine back out. It would cause more damage going back, but it wasn’t like a blade. You couldn’t cut it off, so that the injury wasn’t inflicted twice. It was a piece of the nightflyer’s body. Why not just take it back out and be done with it?

  Gran’s hand reached to empty air. She was still alive. I sat up, tried to get up, and no one stopped me. That was bad in and of itself.
It meant that there was more. Sitting up, I caught a glimpse of that more.

  Doyle lay on the ground, eyes blinking up at the ceiling. The front of his borrowed surgical scrubs was blackened, and part was peeled away to show the raw burned flesh underneath.

  Rhys knelt beside him, holding his hand. Why wasn’t he shouting for a doctor? We needed a doctor. I hit the call button beside the bed.

  I half fell and half crawled out of bed. When the IV pulled, I tore it out. A trickle of blood oozed down my arm, but if there was pain, I didn’t feel it.

  I knelt on the floor between the two of them, and only then could I see Sholto on the far side of Doyle. He was collapsed on his side, his hair spilled across his face so that I could not see if he were awake and watching me, or beyond that. The remnants of the t-shirt that had framed the perfection of his chest now showed a black-and-red ruin. But whereas Doyle’s injury was on his stomach, the bolt of power had taken Sholto over the heart.

  So much had gone wrong in so short a space of time that I couldn’t take it all in. I knelt on the ground, frozen in my indecision. A sound made me look at the woman who had raised me. If ever I had truly had a mother, it was she. She stared at me with those brown eyes that had shown me all the kindness I had ever known from a mother. She and my father had raised me together. Now I stared up at her from my knees, the only way she would be taller than me as she had been when I was small.

  The nightflyer unfurled its fleshy wings enough that I could see that the spine had taken her just under the heart. Maybe even gone through the bottom part of it. Brownies are a tough lot, but it was a terrible wound.

  She stared at me, still alive, still trying to breathe past the daggerlike spine. I took her hand, and felt her grip, which had always been so strong, now frail, as if she could not hold my hand, but she tried.

  I turned to Doyle, and took his hand in mine. He whispered, “I have failed you.”

  I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said. “It’s failure only if you die. Don’t die.”

  Rhys went to Sholto and searched for a pulse, while I held the hands of my grandmother and the man I loved and waited for them to die.

  It was one of those moments when strange things come into your mind. All I could think of was what Quasimodo says as he gazes down at the Archdeacon who raised him dead on the pavement below, and the woman he loved hung and dead. “Oh! All that I have ever loved.”

  I threw my head back and screamed. In that moment no baby, no crown, nothing was worth the price in both my hands.

  Doctors came, and nurses. They fell upon the wounded, and they tried to pry my hands out of Gran and Doyle’s hands, but I couldn’t seem to let go. I was afraid to let go, as if the worst would happen if I did. I knew it was stupid, but the feel of Doyle’s fingers wrapped around mine was everything to me. And Gran’s fragile grip was still warm, still alive. I was afraid to let go.

  Then her hand spasmed against mine. I looked into her face, and the eyes were too wide, the breath not right. They eased her off the spine, and forced the nightflyer back, and as the spine came out, her life spilled with it.

  She collapsed toward me, but other arms caught her, tried to save her, pulled her hand away from mine. But I knew she was gone. There might be moments of breath, and pulse, but it was not life. It was what the body does at the end sometimes, when the mind and soul are gone, but the body doesn’t understand yet that death has come, and there is no more.

  I turned to the other hand still in mine. Doyle gave a shuddering breath. The doctors were pulling him away from me, sticking needles in him, putting him on a gurney. I stood, trying to hold on to his hand, his fingers, but my doctor was there, pulling me backward. She was talking, something about me needing to not upset myself. Why do doctors say such impossible things? Don’t get upset; stay off your leg for six weeks; lower your stress; cut back on your work hours. Don’t get upset.

  They pulled Doyle’s fingers out of mine, and the fact that they could pull him away from me said just how hurt he was. If he hadn’t been hurt, nothing short of death would have moved him from me.

  Nothing short of death.

  I looked at Sholto on the floor. They had a crash cart. They were trying to restart his heart. Goddess, help me. Goddess, help us all.

  The doctors were clustered around Gran. They were trying, but they had triaged the wounded. Doyle first, then Sholto, then Gran. It should have been comforting, and it was, that they took Doyle first. They thought they could save him.

  Sholto’s body jerked with the jolt of power they put through his body. I heard their words in snatches, but I saw a head shake. Not yet. They hit him again, with more, because his body jerked harder. His body convulsed on the floor.

  Galen tried to hold me, tears streaming down his face, as they put a sheet over Gran’s body. The police in the room seemed unsure what to do with the nightflyer. How do you handcuff that many tentacles? What do you do when the room is charred, and the dead woman is the one whom everyone said did it? What do you do when magic is real, and cold iron burns the flesh?

  I saw the doctors shake their heads over Sholto. He was so terribly still. Consort help me, help me help them. Help me! Galen tried to press my face into his chest, to keep me from looking. I pushed him away, harder than I meant to, so that he stumbled.

  I went to Sholto. The doctors tried to keep me away, or talk to me, but Rhys kept them back. He shook his head, said something I couldn’t seem to hear. I knelt by Sholto’s body. Body. No. No.

  The nightflyers that the police weren’t trying to arrest came to me, and to their king. They huddled around him, like black cloaks, if cloaks could have muscle and flesh, and pale unfinished faces.

  A tentacle reached out to touch his body. I reached to the nightflyers on either side of me, as you’d reach for a hand of your fellow bereaved. The tentacles wrapped around my hands, squeezing, giving what reassurance they could. I screamed, but not wordlessly this time.

  “Goddess, help me! Consort, help me!” I was filled with such rage, horrible, burning rage, as if my heart would burst with it, my skin run in sweat with the heat of my anger. I would kill Cair. I would kill her for this. But tonight, now, this moment, I wanted our king to live.

  I glanced into the face of the nightflyer beside me, the black eyes, the pale lipless mouth, the razor teeth. I watched a tear glide down that pale, flattened cheek. Their anger; their rage; their king, but…he was my king, too, and I was his queen, their queen.

  I smelled roses. The Goddess was near. I prayed for guidance, and it wasn’t a voice in my head. It wasn’t a vision. It was knowledge. I simply knew what to do, and how to do it. I saw the spell all the way through, and knew that if it were to work, there was no time to worry that at the end was potentially something horrible. Nothing that faerie could show me tonight would be as horrible as what I’d already seen. Nightmares could not frighten me tonight, for I was past fear. There was only purpose.

  I reached out to Sholto; the nightflyers moved their tentacles back so they only held my wrists as I laid hands on their king’s body. I had raised magic before, with sex and life, but that was not the only magic that ran through my veins. I was Unseelie sidhe, and there is power in death, as there is in life. There is power in that which hurts, as well as in that which saves.

  I had a moment of thinking of using this magic for Doyle, but this magic was only for the sluagh. It would not work for my Darkness.

  The Goddess had given me choices along the way; bring life back to faerie with life or death, with sex or blood. I had chosen life and sex over death and blood. In that moment, with Gran’s blood on my gown, I chose again.

  I looked for Rhys, because I knew Galen would not do what I needed, not in time. “Rhys, bring me Gran’s body.”

  Rhys had to argue with the doctors, and Galen helped him win the argument. Rhys brought her body to me. He laid her body on top of Sholto’s, as if he knew what I meant to do.

  They say the dead do not bleed, but that’s
not true. The recently dead bleed just fine. The brain dies, the heart stops beating, but the blood still flows out, for a time. Yes, for a time the dead do bleed.

  Gran looked so small lying on top of Sholto. Her blood flowed out and down his pale skin, over the blackened burns the hand of power had made.

  I felt Rhys and Galen at my back. I heard, vaguely, unimportantly, Galen arguing. But it didn’t matter; nothing mattered but the magic.

  I put my hands with the bracelets of tentacles on top of Gran’s thin chest. Tears bit at my eyes, and I had to blink them away to keep my vision clear. My skin flared to life, moonlight glow. I called my power. I called all of it. If ever I were truly queen of faerie, princess of the blood, let it be this night, this moment. Give me all of it, Goddess. I ask this in your name.

  My hair glowed so brightly I could see the burning garnet of it from the corners of my eyes, see it flow down the front of my gown, like red fire. My eyes cast green and gold shadows. The nightflyers that touched me glowed white, and that glow slid around the circle of them, so that their flesh glowed like sidhe flesh, white and moonlight bright.

  Sholto’s body began to glow, as white and pure as our own. His hair ran with yellow and white light, like the first glow of dawn in a winter’s sky. I heard his first breath, a rattling sound, the sound of death living in a gasp.

  His eyes opened, wide and already full of yellow and gold fire. He stared up at me. “Merry,” he whispered.

  “My king,” I said.

  His gaze went to the nightflyers glowing around us. They burned as brightly as any sidhe had ever burned. Sholto said, “My queen.”

  “On the life of my grandmother, I swear vengeance this night. I call kin slayer against Cair.”

  He put his hand over mine, and the glowing tentacles of the nightflyers flowed over his hand and mine, binding them together. “We hear you,” the nightflyers said, almost with one voice.

  “Merry,” Galen yelled, “don’t do this!”

  But I understood something I had not before. When Sholto had called the wild hunt into being inside faerie, I had not been with him. I had already begun to run. I would not run tonight. We had called the power together with our bodies, and it was with our bodies that we would ride it.