Лорел Гамильтон - Mistral's Kiss

“He can escape the same way,” Rhys said. “The door won’t close behind us.”

I looked at him. “Don’t we want it to?”

“I don’t know if we can close it, but if we can, Merry, he would be trapped.” There was a very serious look in his one eye — a measuring look. It was the look that I was beginning to dread from all the men. A look that said: The decision is yours.

Could I leave Sholto to die? He had called the wild hunt. He’d offered himself as prey. He’d trapped us here with his no doors. Did I owe him?

I looked at what chased him. “I couldn’t leave anyone to that.”

“So be it,” Doyle said from beside me.

“But we can go through ahead of him,” Mistral said. “We don’t have to wait.”

“You’re sure he’ll sense the door?” I asked.

Everyone answered at once. Mistral said, “Yes.” Rhys said, “Probably.” Doyle and Frost said, “I do not know.” Abe just shrugged.

I shook my head and whispered, “Goddess guide me, but I can’t leave him. I can still taste his skin on my mouth.” I stepped in front of the men, closer to the farther edge of the trees. I yelled, “Sholto, we’re leaving, hurry, hurry!”

He stumbled, fell in the clover, and rolled to his feet again in a blur of motion. He dived through the trees, and I thought he’d made it, but something long and white whipped around his ankle just before it cleared the magical circle. It caught him in that instant when his body was airborne, not touching the clover, not inside the trees. The tentacle tried to lift him skyward, but his hands reached desperately for the trees. He caught a limb with his hands, and he was left suspended, feet above the ground.

I was running forward before I had time to think. I don’t know what I planned to do when I got there, but I didn’t have to worry, because a blur of movement rushed past me. Mistral and Doyle were there before me.

Doyle had Frost’s sword in his hands. He leapt into the air in an impossibly graceful arc, and cut the tentacle in two. I smelled ozone a second before lightning crashed from Mistral’s hand. The lightning hit the cloud and seemed to bounce from one creature to another, illuminating them. It was too much light. I screamed and covered my eyes, but it was as if the images were carved inside my lids.

Strong hands were on mine, pulling my hands away from my eyes. I kept my eyes tight shut, and Doyle’s deep voice came. “Clawing your eyes out won’t help, Meredith. It’s inside you now. You can’t unsee it.”

I opened my mouth and screamed. I screamed and screamed and screamed. Doyle picked me up in his arms and started running toward the others. I knew Mistral and Sholto were behind us. Whimpers replaced my screams — I have no words for what I’d seen. They were things that should not have been. Things that could not have been alive, but they had moved. I had seen them.

If I had been alone, I would have fallen to the ground and shrieked until the wild hunt caught me. Instead I clung to Doyle and buried my nose and mouth against the curve of his neck, keeping my eyes fixed on the clover, and the trees, and my men. I wanted to replace the images that were burned inside me — it was as if I had to clean my eyes of the sight of the hunt. I breathed in the scent of Doyle’s neck, his hair, and it helped calm me. He was real, and solid, and I was safe in his arms.

Rhys moved to help Abe with Frost. Doyle still had Frost’s sword naked and bloody in his hand, held away from me. The blood smelled the way all blood smells: red, slightly metallic, sweet. If these creatures bled real blood, then they couldn’t be what I had seen; they weren’t nightmares. What I had seen in that lightning-kissed moment was nothing that would ever bleed real blood.

Doyle told Mistral to enter first, because we didn’t know where the doorway led. The Storm Lord didn’t argue, he just did what he was told. All of us, including Sholto, followed his broad back between the trees. One moment we were in the clover circle; the next we were in moonlight, at the edge of a snowbanked parking lot.

THERE WAS A MARKED CAR AND SEVERAL UNMARKED CARS SITTING there. Inside, cops and FBI stared at us, eyes wide. We had simply appeared out of thin air; I guess it was worth a stare or two.

“How are we going to explain this?” Rhys asked softly.

The car doors started opening. Police of all flavors poured out into the cold. Then there was wind at our backs…warm wind, and a sound like birds, if birds could be too large, and too frightening for words.

“Oh, God,” Rhys said, “they’re coming through.”

“Mistral, Sholto, hold the door closed if you can. Give us time,” Doyle said.

Mistral and Sholto turned to face that warm, seeking wind. Doyle ran toward the cars; I was still in his arms. The others followed, though Frost’s wounds caused him to follow slowly behind us.

The police were calling to us. “What’s wrong?” “Is the princess hurt?”

“Stay in your cars and you’ll be safe,” Doyle yelled.

The closest car held two dark-suited men. One was young and dark, the other older and balding. “Charles, FBI,” the younger one said. “You don’t give us orders.”

“If the princess is in danger, I can, by your own laws,” said Doyle.

The older one said, “Special Agent Bancroft, what’s happening? That’s not geese I’m hearing.”

A uniform that was St. Louis city, one Illinois state trooper, and a local precinct cop joined us. Apparently, when the rest of the police went away after we’d last dealt with them here, they’d left a little bit of everybody behind. No one wanted to be left out, I guess.

“If you all stay in your cars, you will be safe,” Doyle repeated.

One of the younger uniforms said, “We’re cops. We’re not paid to be safe.”

“Spoken like someone who is not even close to his pension,” another officer said, one with more weight around his middle.

“Jesus,” one of them said. I didn’t have to glance back, for now Frost had caught up with us. He’d bled all over Rhys, so that it looked like Rhys was hurt worse. Abe was still bleeding from falling among the bones.

One of the uniforms touched his shoulder radio and started requesting an ambulance. Doyle yelled above the growing sound of wind and birds, “There is no time. They will be upon us in moments.”

“Who?” Bancroft asked.

Doyle shook his head and moved around the agent. He laid me in the passenger seat of the car, then opened the backseat door, saying, “Put Frost inside, Rhys.”

“I will not leave you,” Frost said. The men laid him in the seat even as he protested.

Doyle grabbed Frost’s shoulder and said, “If I die, if all of us die, if the others are gone into the ground for good, then you must survive. You must take her back to Los Angeles and not return.”

I started to get out of the car then. “I won’t leave you.”

Doyle pushed me back into the seat. He knelt down and gave me the full weight of his dark eyes. “Meredith, Merry, we cannot win this fight. Unless help arrives, we will all die. You have never seen this wild hunt, but I have. We will give them sidhe to hunt, and they will ignore this car. You and Frost will be safe.”

I gripped his arms, so smooth, so muscled, so solid. “I won’t leave you.”

“Nor I,” Frost said, struggling to sit up in the backseat.

“Frost,” Doyle almost yelled it, “I do not trust anyone but you and me to keep her safe. If it is not to be me, then it must be you.”

Bancroft said, “Get in and drive, Charlie.”

The younger agent didn’t argue this time; he got behind the wheel. I was still holding on to Doyle, shaking my head over and over. One of the other cops had gotten a first-aid kit out of the car. Bancroft took it and crawled into the back with Frost.