Лорел Гамильтон - Mistral's Kiss

WE MADE THE FAR SHORE, BUT I TRIPPED ON A SKELETON buried in the ground. Doyle picked me up and kept running. Gunshots echoed, and I saw Frost firing at Agnes as she threw herself on top of him. I had a glimpse of her face; something was wrong with it, as if her bones were sliding around under her skin. I screamed, “Frost,” as a glint of metal showed in her hand. More shots sounded. Mistral was beside Frost, blades flashing.

“Doyle, stop!” I shouted.

He ignored me, and kept running with me in his arms. Abe and Rhys were with him.

“We can’t leave Frost behind!” I said.

Doyle said, “We cannot risk you, not for anyone.”

“Call a door,” Abe said.

Doyle glanced behind us, but not at Mistral and Frost’s fight with the night-hag. He glanced higher than that. It made me look up, too.

At first my eyes perceived clouds, black and grey rolling clouds, or smoke — but that was only my mind trying to make sense of it. I thought I had seen all the sluagh had to offer, but I was wrong. What was pouring down toward the island where Sholto stood was nothing my mind could accept. When I worked for the investigative agency…sometimes at a crime scene — if it’s bad enough — sometimes your mind refuses to make an image out of it. It’s just a jumble. Your mind gives you a moment to not see this horrible thing. If you have the chance to close your eyes and not look a second time, you can save yourself. This horror will not go into your mind and stain your soul. At most crime scenes I didn’t have the choice of not seeing. But this; I looked away. If we didn’t get away, then I’d have to look.

We had to get away.

Doyle yelled, “Don’t look. Call the door.”

I did what he asked. “I need a door to the Unseelie sithen.” The door appeared, hanging in the middle of nowhere, just like before.

“No doors,” Sholto screamed behind us.

The door vanished.

Rhys cursed.

Frost and Mistral were with us now. There was blood on their swords. I glanced back at the shore, and saw Agnes — a dark, still shape on the ground.

Doyle started running again, and the others joined us. “Call something else,” Abe said, near breathless trying to keep up with Doyle’s pace. “And do it quietly, so Sholto can’t hear what you’re doing.”

“What?” I asked.

“You have the power of creation,” he panted. “Use it.”

“How?” My brain wasn’t working under the pressure.

“Conjure something,” he said, and stumbled, falling. He rejoined us, blood pouring down his chest from a new cut.

“Let the ground be grass and gentle to our feet.” Grass flowed at our feet like green water. It didn’t spread over everything like the herbs on the island. The grass sprang up in a path where we ran, and nowhere else.

“Try something else,” Rhys said from the other side of us. He was shorter than the rest, and his voice showed the strain of keeping up with the longer legs of the others.

What could I call from the ground, from the grass, that could save us? I thought it and had my answer; one of the most magical of plants. “Give me a field of four-leaf clover.” The grass spread out before us wide and smooth, then white clover began to grow through the grass, until we stood in the center of a field of it. White globes of sweet-smelling flowers burst like stars across all the green.

Doyle slowed, and the others slowed with him. Rhys said it out loud: “Not bad, not bad at all. You think well in a crisis.”

“The wild hunt is of ill intent,” Frost said. “They should be stopped at the field’s edge.”

Doyle sat me down amid the ankle-high clover. The plants brushed against me as if they were little hands. “Four-leaf clover is the most powerful plant protection from faerie,” I said.

“Aye,” Abe said, “but some of what is coming does not have to walk, Princess.”

“Make us a roof, Meredith,” Doyle said.

“A roof of what?”

“Rowan, thorn, and ash,” Frost said.

“Of course,” I said. Anywhere that the three trees grew together was a magical place — a place both of protection and of a weakening in the reality between worlds. Such a place would save you from faerie, or call faerie to you — like so many things with us, there was never a yes, or no, but a yes, a no, and a sometimes.

The earth underneath us trembled as if an earthquake were coming; then the trees blasted out of the ground, showering rock and dirt and clover over us. The trees stretched to the sky with a sound like a storm or a train, barreling down, but with a scream of wood to it. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. While the trees knit themselves together above our heads, I looked back. I could not help it.

Sholto was covered in the nightmares he had called. Tentacles writhed; bits and pieces that I had no word for flowed and struck. There were teeth everywhere, as if wind could be made solid and given fangs to tear and destroy. Sholto’s uncles attacked the creatures with blade and muscle, but they were losing. Losing, but fighting hard enough that they had given us time to make our sanctuary.

Frost moved to stand so that his broad chest blocked my view. “It is not good to gaze too long upon them.” There was a bloody furrow down one side of his face, as if Agnes had tried to claw his eyes out. I made as if to touch the wound, and he pulled away, catching my hand in his. “I will heal.”

He didn’t want me to fuss over him in front of Mistral. If it had just been Doyle and Rhys, he might have allowed it. But he would not have Mistral see him weak. I wasn’t sure how he felt about Abe, but I knew he viewed Mistral as a threat. Men don’t like to look weak in front of their rivals. Whatever I thought of Mistral, that was how Frost and Doyle saw him.

I took Frost’s hand and tried not to act concerned about his wounds. “He called the hunt. Why are they attacking him?” I asked.

“I warned him that he looked too sidhe,” Rhys said. “I wasn’t saying that just to stop him from doing something dangerous to us.”

Something warm dripped over my hand. I looked down to find Frost’s blood painting my skin. I fought the spurt of panic and asked calmly, “How badly are you hurt?” The blood was coming steadily — not good.

“I will heal,” Frost said, voice tight.

The trees closed overhead with a sound like the ocean waves rushing along a shore. Leaves tore and rained down on us as the branches wove a shield of leaves, thorns, and bright red berries above. The shadow it cast made Frost’s skin look grey for a moment, and it frightened me.

“You heal gunshot wounds if the bullet goes through and through. You heal nonmagical blades. But Black Agnes was a night-hag and once a goddess. Is your wound of blade, or claw?”

Frost tried to take his hand back, but I wouldn’t let him. Unless he wanted to be appear undignified, he couldn’t break free. Our hands were covered in his blood, sticky and warm.

Doyle was at Frost’s side. “How badly are you hurt?”

“We do not have time to tend my wounds,” Frost said. He wouldn’t look at Doyle, or any of us. He arranged his face in that arrogant mask, the one that made him impossibly handsome, and as cold as his namesake. But the terrible wounds on the right side of that face ruined the mask. It was like a chink in armor; he could not hide behind it.

“Nor do we have time to lose my strong right arm,” Doyle said, “not if there is time to save it.”

Frost looked at him, surprise showing through the mask. I wondered if Doyle had never, in all these long years, called Frost the strong right arm of the Darkness. The look on his face suggested so. And maybe it was as close as Doyle would come to apologizing for abandoning him to the fight with Agnes in order to save me. Had Frost thought Doyle left him behind on purpose?