Лорел Гамильтон - A Lick Of Frost

He hesitated. "Do you need a ride to the hospital, Princess Meredith?"

I glanced at the clock behind the desk. We'd been driven here by Maeve Reed's driver in her limo. He'd planned on doing some errands for Ms. Reed, then coming back to pick us up in about three hours, or at least check on us. Surprisingly, it hadn't been three hours yet. "A ride would be lovely. Thank you, Officer," I said.

DOYLE AND ABE HAD A ROOM TO THEMSELVES IN THE HOSPITAL, though when we hit the door with our nice escort of uniformed officers it was hard to tell who belonged in the room and who didn't. There was a crowd of my other guards and medical staff, way more medical staff than needed to be here, and predominantly female. And why did the uniforms who drove us come inside? Apparently, the police were a little fuzzy on whether the attacks on my guards was another attempt on my life. Better safe than sorry, they seemed to think. Seeing the number of men Rhys had ordered to meet us at the hospital, apparently he had thought the same thing.

Abe was on his stomach, trying to talk to all the pretty nurses. He was in pain, but he was still who and what he'd always been. He had once been the god Accasbel, the physical embodiment of the cup of intoxication. It could make you a queen. It could inspire poetry, bravery, or madness. So the legends said. He'd opened the first pub in Ireland, and was the original party boy. If he hadn't been wincing every so often, I might have said he was having a good time. Instead, he might just be putting on a brave face. Or he might be enjoying the attention. I still didn't understand Abe well enough to guess.

I had to weave my way through the crowd of my own lovely guards. On most days, I might have noticed them, but today they were just blocking my view of the one guard I wanted to see.

Some of them tried to speak to me, but when I answered no one, they finally seemed to understand. They parted like a curtain of flesh, and I could finally see the other bed.

Doyle lay terribly still. There was an I.V. hooked up to one arm, feeding him clear fluid. There was a small drip with knobs, which probably meant that some of the clear liquid was painkiller. Burns hurt.

Halfwen stood tall and blond and beautiful beside his bed. She wore a dress that had been in style in the 1300s or earlier, a plain sheath that clung in all the right places, but was short enough at the ankles to give her room to move. When I'd met her she'd been in armor, a guard in my cousin Cel's service. He'd forced her to kill things for him and forbade her to use her amazing healing gifts because she refused his bed. True healers were rare among the sidhe now, and even the queen had been shocked at the waste of Halfwen's talents. She'd been one of the female guards who had left Cel's service to join me in exile. Queen Andais was also shocked, I think, at the number of female guards who chose exile over staying to serve Cel. I wasn't shocked. Cel had come out of his months of imprisonment crazier and more sadistic than when he'd gone in. He'd been put away for trying to kill me, among other things. His freedom had been the deciding factor of me going back into exile. The queen admitted in private that she could not guarantee my safety around her son.

Halfwen and others had come west with tales of what Cel did to the first female guard he took to his bed. It was the stuff of serial killers. Except she was sidhe, and she would heal, she would survive. Survive to be his victim again, and again, and again.

At last count I had a dozen female "volunteers." A dozen in a month's time. There would be more, because Cel was insane, and the women had a choice now. Andais hadn't understood how so many of them could prefer exile to Cel's attentions, but then the queen had always overestimated his charms and underestimated his repulsiveness. Don't let me mislead you. Prince Cel was as handsome as most of the Unseelie sidhe, but pretty is as pretty does, and what he did was ugly.

I stood by Doyle's side, but he didn't know I was there. If I still had the wild magic of faerie at my command, I could have healed him in an instant. But the magic had spilled out into the autumn night and done wonders and miracles, and was still working them in faerie. However, we weren't in faerie. We were in Los Angeles in a building built of metal and man-made things. Some magics would not even work in such a place.

"Halfwen," I said, "why have you not tried to heal him?"

A doctor short enough that he had to look up at Halfwen but could look down at me said, "I cannot allow the use of magic on my patient."

I looked at him, gave him the full-on stare with the triple irises. Some humans, if they've never had to meet our eyes, are bothered by it. It can be a help in negotiations, or persuading. "Why can you not," I read his nameplate, "Dr. Sang?"

"Because it is magic that I do not understand, and if I do not understand a treatment I cannot authorize it."

"So if you understood you'd stop interfering," I said.

"I am not interfering, Princess Meredith, you are. This is a hospital, not a royal bedchamber. Your men are disrupting the operation of this hospital by their very presence."

I smiled at him, and felt my eyes stay cool and untouched by it. "My men have done nothing. It is your staff that is failing. I thought all the hospitals in the area had been briefed about what to do if one of us was brought in. Didn't they tell you what to wear, or carry, to help the staff function?"

"The fact that your men are using active glamour to bespell our nurses and female doctors is an insult," Dr. Sang said.

Galen spoke from the other side of the room. He was slumped down in one of two chairs. "I've told him over and over that we aren't doing anything. It isn't active glamour, but he won't believe me."

He looked tired, a tightness around his eyes and mouth that I hadn't noticed before. The sidhe don't age, really, but there are signs of wear. The way a diamond can be cut by the right kind of blade.

"I do not have time to explain to you, but I won't allow you to stand between my people and my healers," I said.

"She admits," he motioned at Halfwen, "that her powers are not at full strength outside of faerie. She's not certain she can heal him. The more often his bandages are opened, especially with this many people here, the greater the chances that he'll get a secondary infection," Dr. Sang said.

"The sidhe do not get infections, Doctor," I said.

"Forgive me if I'm a little skeptical about that, Princess, but this man is my patient," Dr. Sang said. "I am responsible for him."

"No, Doctor, he is mine. He is my Darkness, my right hand. He would see himself as responsible for me, but I am trying to be his queen, which makes me responsible for all my people." I reached out to touch his hair, but drew back. I did not want to wake him if all we could offer was pain. For the healing we would disturb him, but simply because I could not bear to be so close and not touch him was not reason enough to wake him from the sleep that the drugs and shock had given him.

My hand ached to touch him, but I forced my hand into a fist at my side. Rhys's hand wrapped around my fist. I looked into his single triblue eye, his handsome face with the scars that had taken his other eye, only partially hidden by the white patch he'd worn today. I'd never known Rhys any other way. The face that rose above me when we made love, or looked up at me from the bed, was this face, scars and all. It was simply Rhys.

I touched his cheek. Would I love Doyle less if he was scarred? No, though it would be a loss for both of us. It would mean that the face I had grown to love would be forever changed. But dammit, he was sidhe. A simple burn shouldn't have damaged him like this.