Swallowing Darkness_A Novel

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  It seemed like another lifetime ago when Sholto and I had managed to have our first encounter in Los Angeles. He had proven to me that the extra bits had more uses than the obvious. “You mean the little tentacles with the suction on them.”

  “Yes,” he said, and there was a weight to his gaze. It wasn’t an idle offer. He wanted to know how I truly felt about his extra bits, and he was wasting no time finding out. We’d had sex, but he had been terribly wounded, and no extra bits had been used.

  I studied his face, then looked down at Doyle. He watched me patiently, almost passive in his waiting. He would abide by whatever I said, in that moment. Centuries of service to the queen had taken men who might have been more dominant and accustomed them to taking orders both in bed and out of it. Doyle could be a very dominant lover, but when it came to choices and preferences, he was like most of the queen’s guard; he waited for my lead. It was up to me to make this moment what it was to be: good, ill, hurt feelings, or simply pleasure.

  I said the only thing I could think of when a man offers me oral sex. I held my hand out toward him and said “Yes.”

  He gave me that smile that I had only recently known was possible for him, a smile that made all that handsomeness a little more human, a little more vulnerable. I valued that smile, and it made the yes worth it. I shoved my small doubts down, and watched his body go from an exotic tattoo to the reality of the image. I didn’t know if it had been the magic of the wild hunt, or the times he had used the extra bits to comfort me this past night, but I could no longer see him in all his glory as anything but beautiful.

  The tentacles were the same moonlight white as the rest of him; the thickest ones were just at the point where chest gave in to stomach. They were as thick as a good-sized python, but white with a marbling of gold on the skin. I knew from my nightflyer tutor, Bhátar, that those were for heavy lifting. They were what the nightflyers picked you up with, and carried you away. Under them was a line of longer, thinner tentacles, the equivalent of fingers, but a hundred times more flexible and sensitive. Then just above the belly button was a fringe of shorter tentacles with darker tips. I knew that those were secondary sexual organs like breasts because there was no human male equivalent. If I’d been a female nightflyer they would have had other tasks to do, but he had proven in our one brief moment in Los Angeles that there were uses for me too. Inches below all that was something as straight and thick and lovely as any man in court could boast. Without the extras in between, Sholto would have been welcome in any bed.

  Once I had been horrified at the thought of having to embrace him with all the extras revealed, but as he knelt beside us and reached for me, all I could think of was how many uses we might find for so many of his extra bits. Was it the magic of faerie? Was it part of the magic that made me queen to his king that I could think of nothing but pleasure when reaching for him? If it was magic, it was good magic.

  He took me in his arms, wrapped me against his body so that all of him touched me, but he did not try and embrace me with all of it. He simply laid it against my body as his two strong arms held me, and he kissed me. He kissed me, gently but firmly, but there was part of him that held back, like a tension in his body. I thought I understood; he was waiting for me to recoil from his touch. Instead I moved into that kiss, ground myself against all those extra bits, and let one hand caress one of those thick, muscular tentacles. He pressed himself harder against me, responding to my passion and my lack of fear. With most men I’d have been very aware that his erection was pressed against the front of my body, and I might have shuddered at the promise of it, but there were so many sensations with Sholto that it was almost as if my body couldn’t pick and choose. The thicker parts streatched around me like extra arms. The thinner pieces caressed and tickled along my skin, and the lowest pieces eased their way between our bodies, between my legs, and I felt those searching “fingers” seeking that most intimate of spots. One of the long, stretching fingers found the spot, and proved to me once more that they had suction on the end, like small mouths that seemed designed to fit around that part of a woman’s body, so that it was like some perfect key to fit the lock of my body. The sensations began to build almost immediately.

  I felt the hum of energy from Sholto before I opened my eyes to see that his skin glowed with power. The white of his skin was all moonlight, but the tentacles had other colors. The bigger arms had bands and shapes that moved like colored lightning around me. Some were marbled with gold to match the yellow and gold of his eyes. The lower ones glowed white, their tips like red embers. I knelt embraced in color and magic humming against my skin, so that I made a small sound just from that.

  “I take it the tentacles do other things than just glow,” said Doyle, still lying next to me.

  I nodded wordlessly.

  “It is a combination of sidhe and nightflyer,” Sholto said.

  “It looks like colored lightning,” Mistral said. He reached out, as if to touch one of the tentacles, then drew his hand back.

  Sholto reached a thick limb and touched the other man’s fingertips. A tiny jolt of colored light jumped between them. The air smelled of ozone, and every hair on my body stood to attention.

  Doyle sat up. “What was that?”

  Mistral was rubbing his fingers together as if still feeling the sensation. Sholto had drawn his limb back, a considering look on his face. His limbs had pulled away from the more intimate part of my body.

  “I’m not certain,” Mistral said.

  “Once,” Sholto said, “the nightflyers answered to the gods of the sky. We flew for them, and rode the lightning that they could call. Some say the nightflyers were created by a god of the sky and a goddess of the dead.”

  Mistral looked at his hand, then across at the King of the sluagh. The look on Mistral’s face was one of pain. His eyes were the black of the sky before it shatters to earth. “I had forgotten,” he said, almost as if to himself. “I had made myself forget.”

  Doyle said, “I did not know that you were…”

  Mistral put a hand across his mouth. I think they were both startled. “Forgive me, Darkness, but do not say that name out loud. I am not that name anymore.” He took his hand from Doyle’s mouth.

  “Your power calls to mine,” Sholto said. “Perhaps you are he again.”

  Mistral shook his head. “I did terrible things back then. I had no mercy, and my queen, my love, had less mercy than I did. We were…We killed.” He shook his head. “It began in magic and love, but she fell in love with our creations in every sense of the word.”

  “You are he, then,” Sholto said.

  Mistral gave him a look of utter despair. “I would beg you to tell no one, King Sholto.”

  “It’s not every night that a man meets his creator,” Sholto said. He was watching the other man with an edge of anger on his face, or maybe defiance.

  “I am not that. The being who acted in such arrogance was punished for it, and is no more. Whatever I was once, the true Gods took it from me.”

  “But our dark goddess,” Sholto said. “It is said that the gods tore her to pieces and fed her to us.”

  Mistral nodded. “She would not give up control over you. She would not give you the independence to be your own people. She wanted to keep you as…pets and lovers.”

  Perhaps I looked surprised, because he spoke to me. “Yes, Princess, I know well that there are many uses for all those parts. She who was once my love and I fashioned them for pleasure as well as terror.”

  “You kept your secret well,” Doyle said.

  “When the gods themselves humble you, Darkness, wouldn’t you hide yourself in shame?”

  “But your magic calls to mine,” Sholto said.

  “I never dreamed that the return of magic to faerie would waken that in me.” Mistral looked frightened.

  “This is a legend so old my father never told it to me,” I said.

  “It is part of our lost creation myths,” Doyle said, “before
the Christians came and sanitized them.”

  Mistral crawled off the bed. He was shaking his head. “I cannot afford to be near when Sholto glows.”

  “Don’t you want to know what would happen?” Sholto asked.

  “No,” Mistral said. “I don’t.”

  “Leave him,” Doyle said. “Nothing we do with Meredith is about force. We will not force Mistral now.”

  Sholto looked at Doyle, and there was that moment of arrogance that was all sidhe, and no amount of tentacled extras could disguise where it came from. I watched the thought cross his face and travel all the way through his eyes that he wanted to try. He wanted to know what would happen if he and Mistral joined their magic.

  “No,” I said, and touched Sholto’s face. I brought him down to meet my gaze.

  That arrogant defiance stayed for a second, then he blinked and was simply arrogant. “As my queen wills it.”

  I smiled at him because even I didn’t believe it. He would remember this moment, and he would not forget the feel of power. Sholto was a very nice guy for a king, but in the end all kings seek power; it is the nature of who they are, and this king would not forget that the “god” who created his race was awake again.

  I did the only thing I could think of to break the terribly serious atmosphere. I looked down at Doyle and said, “All my good work is undone with this serious talk. I’ll have to start all over again.”

  He smiled at me. “How could I forget that nothing dissuades you from your goal?”

  I put into my eyes all that I felt for him. “When my goal is such as this, why would anything dissuade me?”

  He came to me, with Sholto still wrapped loosely around me. But when he touched the other side of us, there was no jump of power. For Doyle, Sholto, and me, it was just flesh and the magic of any sidhe when pleasure is in the air. Mistral found a seat on the edge of the garden that surrounded us, and did his best to ignore us. I hated for him to feel left out or sad, but it seemed important for us to make love in this place. It needed love, and so did I.

  Mistral’s deep voice said, “I was dying in the field. How did I get here, and where in faerie is here?”

  “They rescued me from the hospital,” Doyle said, then he frowned. “You were crowned and…” He raised my left hand, and for a moment it didn’t look like my hand. There was a new tattoo on it, one of thorny vines and blooming roses.

  He rose to his knees, but he wasn’t looking at me now. He reached across to Sholto.

  The other man hesitated, then offered him his right hand. Doyle held the paler hand in his black one, and the same tattoo curled around Sholto’s hand and wrist.

  Mistral walked back to us, and we saw that the marks of the arrows seemed to have vanished as had Doyle’s burns. Neither of them looked happy to be healed, but instead were very serious.

  Doyle drew our hands together so the tattoos were touching. “I did not dream it, then. You were handfasted and crowned by faerie itself.”

  “By the Goddess,” Sholto said, and he sounded way too satisfied. The three men were acting oddly, and I had one of those moments when I knew I was missing something. That happened sometimes when you are barely more than thirty and everyone else in your bed is hundreds of years old. Everyone was young once, but sometimes I wished I had a cheat sheet so I wouldn’t need all the explanations.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Sholto said, again all too smug.

  Doyle pulled Sholto’s hand down so I could see our two hands together. “You see the mark?”

  “The tattoo, yes,” I said. “It’s a shadow of the roses that bound our hands.”

  “You have been handfasted with Sholto, Merry,” Doyle said, and he said each word slowly, carefully, giving me the intensity of those dark eyes.

  “Handfasted. You mean…” I frowned at him. “You mean married?” “Yes,” he said, and there was rage in that one word.

  “It took both our magics to save you, Doyle.”

  “The sidhe do not marry more than one spouse, Meredith.”

  “I bear children by all of you, so by our laws you are all my kings, or will be.”

  Sholto raised his hand, gazing at it. “I’m too young to remember when faerie married us to each other. Was it always like this?”

  “The roses are more a Seelie mark,” Doyle said, “but yes, handfasted and marked as a couple.”

  I stared at the pretty roses on my skin and was suddenly afraid.

  “Am I within my rights to refuse to share Meredith?” Sholto asked.

  I gave him a look. “I would be careful what you say, King of the sluagh.”

  “Faerie has married us, Meredith.”

  I shook my head. “It helped us save Doyle.”

  “We are marked as a couple.” He held his hand out to me.

  “When the Goddess makes me choose, she lets me know ahead of time. There was no choice offered, no warning of loss.”

  “By our laws—” Sholto started to say.

  I interrupted him. “Don’t start.”

  “He’s right, Merry,” Doyle said.

  “Don’t complicate this, Doyle. We did what we had to do last night to save you both.”

  “It is the law,” Mistral said.

  “Only if I am with his child and no one else’s, which is not true. The goddess Clothra, who got pregnant from three different lovers, wasn’t forced to marry just one of them.”

  “They were her brothers,” Mistral said.

  “Were they really, or is that just what legend made of them?” I was asking someone who might actually know.

  Mistral and Doyle exchanged a look. Sholto wasn’t old enough to know the answer. “Clothra lived in a time when gods and goddesses were allowed to marry whom they would,” Doyle said.

  “She wouldn’t have been the first goddess to marry a close relative,” Mistral said.

  “But the point is, she didn’t marry any of them, and the sovereign goddesses, the ones whom humans had to marry to rule, had many lovers.”

  “Are you saying that you’re a sovereign goddess, a living embodiment of the land itself?” Sholto asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “No, but I am saying that you wouldn’t like what would happen if you tried to make me be monogamous with just you.”

  Sholto’s handsome face set in petulant lines, and it was close enough to one of Frost’s favorite emotions to make my chest tight. “I know you do not love me, Princess.”

  “Don’t make this about hurt feelings, Sholto. Don’t be ordinary. In the old days there were different kings, but only one goddess to marry to rule, right?”

  They exchanged looks. “But they were human kings, so the goddess outlasted them,” Doyle said.

  “From what I heard, the sovereign goddess didn’t give up her lovers just because she had a king,” Sholto said.

  Doyle looked down at me. I couldn’t read the expression on his face. “Are you saying you will change a thousand years of tradition among us?” he asked.

  “If that is what it takes, then yes.”

  He looked down at me, the expressions on his face all mixed together. A frown, a half-smile, amusement in his eyes; but what I valued the most was the fear leaving them. For it had been fear when he saw the marks on Sholto and me.

  “I will ask again,” Mistral said. “Where are we? I do not recognize this bower we rest in.”

  “We are in my kingdom,” Sholto said.

  “The sluagh have no place so fair inside their faerie mound,” Mistral said, his voice thick with certainty and sarcasm.

  “How would any of the Unseelie nobles know what is inside my kingdom? Once Meredith’s father, Prince Essus, died none of you darkened my door again. We were good enough to fight for you, but not to visit.” Sholto’s voice held that anger that he’d come to me with, an anger forged of years of being told he wasn’t quite good enough to be truly Unseelie. There had been years of the sluagh being used as a weapon. And like all weapons, you use it, bu
t you do not ask a nuclear bomb if it wants to blow things up. You simply push a button, and it does its job.

  “I have been inside your mound,” Doyle said. His deep voice held an edge of something. Was it anger? Warning? Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  “Yes, and the sluagh would not follow the hound when they already had a huntsman.” The two men glared across the bed at each other.

  I’d known there was bad blood between them when they first came to me in L.A., but this was the first hint I had at what might lay behind it.

  “Are you saying the queen tried to put Doyle in charge of the sluagh?” I asked. I sat up in the bed, the petals spilling around, as if the blanket had fallen back to being just flower petals.

  The men looked up at the trees and vines that held the canopy aloft. “Perhaps we should finish this discussion in a more solid part of faerie?” Mistral asked.

  “I agree,” Doyle said.

  “What do you mean ‘more solid part’?” Sholto asked, laying a hand on the tree that formed one post.

  “The blanket has gone back to what it began as. Some faerie magic does that,” Doyle said.

  “You mean like in the fairy tales, it only lasts a while,” I asked.

  He nodded.

  A voice called from a distance, “My King, Princess, it is Henry. Can you hear me?”

  Sholto answered, “We hear you.”

  “The opening to your new room is beginning to grow narrow, My King. Should you come away before it closes into a wall again?” He tried for neutral, but the worry was plain in his voice.

  “Yes,” Doyle said. “I think we should.”

  “I am king here, Darkness, and I say what we will and will not do.”

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “as princess and future queen of all, I’ll break the tie. We go before the wall grows solid.”

  “I will agree with our princess,” Mistral said. He crossed to us and held his hand out to me.

  I took the offered hand. He smiled at that one touch, wrapping his much larger hand around my small one, but the smile was full of something softer than anything I’d seen before. He started leading me down the path toward the bone gate. The herbs on the path were no longer trying to touch me. In fact, the stones that had been held together by the herbs were a little lose underfoot, as if whatever had formed them was letting go. We left Doyle and Sholto kneeling on the bed still glaring at each other. When we were back in Sholto’s original bedroom, I would ask more questions about their mutual dislike.