Лорел Гамильтон - A Stroke Of Midnight

I let Frost help me to my feet. “One fit in over a thousand years, I think you’re overdue.”

Doyle shook his head. “It is my fault that Rhys and the police are waiting in the cold. Inexcusable.”

I touched his arm, but it was hard muscle encased in leather, as if he could not allow himself any softness. “I don’t think it’s inexcusable.”

“If she comforts us again, we will be even later,” Frost said.

Doyle smiled, a quick flash of teeth. “It is nice to be comforted instead of punished.” He held up the fur cloak. “Please, just for now. We will find something else more to your liking, but just for now.”

I still didn’t like the idea of wearing the cloak, but after what I’d just heard about Cel and his guard, it seemed a lesser evil. I allowed him to put the cloak around me. “How does it look?” I asked.

The wall quivered like a horse’s skin when a fly lands. Doyle shoved me behind him. Frost already had his sword naked in his hand. Doyle aimed a gun at the rock wall.

A full length mirror surrounded by a gilt frame floated up through the stone, shining in the darkness of the room.

I peered at it around Doyle’s body, my pulse in my throat. “Where did that come from?”

Doyle still had a gun pointed very steadily at the bright surface. “I do not know.” Almost all the fey could use mirrors to make a sort of phone call. Doyle and some of the other sidhe could travel through mirrors. We stood waiting for a figure to appear, for something terrible to happen. But the mirror just hung on the wall, as if someone had put it there to be a mirror and nothing more.

The tip of Frost’s sword lowered.

Doyle glanced at us. “Why did it appear? Who sent it?”

Frost stepped closer to the mirror. “Meredith, look at yourself in the mirror.”

Doyle looked skeptical but he moved so I could see myself. The red and gold of the fur went well with my hair and skin, and brought out the gold in my eyes. With the hood up, I looked delicate and a little ethereal, like something between a Victorian Christmas card and a barbarian princess. Well, a small barbarian princess.

“Now, thank the sithen for the use of the mirror, and say you no longer need it.”

I frowned at him, but did as he suggested. “Thank you for the mirror, sithen. I do not need it right now.”

The mirror stayed on the wall, as if it had always been there.

“Please, sithen, a mirror could be used to harm her, please take it away,” Frost said.

It felt as if the very air shrugged, then the wall quivered again, and the mirror began to sink back into the wall. When the wall was empty stone once more I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

“Are you saying the mirror appeared because I asked how I looked?”

“Hush,” Frost said, then he nodded.

“Now that,” Doyle said, “is interesting.”

“The sithen hasn’t answered to whims since—” Frost stopped as if trying to think how long.

“Long enough, my friend, that I, too, am not certain when the last time was.”

“So is this good,” I said, “or not?”

“Good,” Doyle said.

“But dangerous,” Frost added.

Doyle nodded. “I would be careful what I said aloud from now on, Meredith. An idle comment could have grave consequences, if the sithen has truly returned to that much life.”

“What do you mean?”

“The sithen is a living thing, but it does not think like any living thing I have ever known. It will interpret what you say in its own way. You ask how you look, and it gives you a mirror. Who knows what it might offer you, depending on what you said.”

“What if I yelled for help, would it do anything useful?” I asked.

“I do not know,” Doyle said. “I have heard of it giving you objects you asked for, but never touching people. But there are enchanted items locked within its walls, things that simply vanished. Some theorize that they did not go back to the gods, but inside the very walls. There are things that I would not want appearing before you without more help than this.”

“More help than you and Frost?”

He nodded.

I started to ask what object could possibly be so dangerous that the Killing Frost and the Queen’s Darkness could not keep me safe, but I didn’t. One disaster at a time. It was almost as if something wanted to keep us here tonight, distracted by one semi-important event after another. I shook my head. “Enough, we are leaving now. Rhys and the police are waiting.”

When we stepped out the door we were in the main corridor just inside the outer doors. My room should have been three levels down, and nowhere near this area. The guards waiting to accompany us were staring at us as we walked out.

Galen said, “That door wasn’t there before.”

“No,” Doyle said, and he got everyone in formation, with me in the center, hidden once again behind a phalanx of guards. I would have said men, but at least three of them were female, including Biddy. She and Nicca would probably be useless in a fight. They were still too magic befuddled, but we were afraid to leave them behind. I was almost certain that without someone to stop them, they would have sex, and until I cleared it with the queen that was an automatic death by torture for both of them. Doyle did make them stop holding hands. He thought the police might get the wrong idea.

Cathbodua and Dogmaela had joined our little band. I suddenly had three women in my personal entourage who might have owed more allegiance to Cel than to me. Doyle made some noises about me needing ladies in waiting, and wouldn’t it be useful if they were also trained warriors. But I knew the real reason. We took them with us because the queen might at any moment change her mind and demand them back into Cel’s service. We took them out into the snow to meet the police because they were safer with us than without us.

I DIDN’T SEE THE POLICE BUT I HEARD THEM, A RUMBLE OF DEEP male voices. Sound carried so much better on those still, bitterly cold nights. My cheeks were stinging, and my breath had fogged and frozen in the fur of the hood. Barinthus had kept me warm on the walk to the faerie mounds after the assassination attempt, but I walked on my own power now. The snow was knee high for me, and my boots didn’t quite keep it from soaking into the knees of my jeans. I tried to call the feel of the summer sun to put inside my shield and help keep back the cold, but it was as if I couldn’t remember what summer felt like. The moonless night was clear with a thousand stars flung across the darkness like bits of glittering ice, diamond glints across black velvet. I focused on the fight to lift one foot, then the next, and struggle through drifts that the taller sidhe walked through effortlessly. It was undignified for a princess to fall on her face, but it took effort to keep from doing it. I suppose that struggling through the snow wasn’t exactly dignified either, but that I could do nothing about.

But it was Biddy who stumbled. Nicca caught her before she hit the snow. I heard her apologize, “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m so cold.”

“Stop, all of you, stop,” I said. Everyone obeyed, some of them looking out at the snow, fingers near weapons.

It was Galen who asked, “What’s wrong, Merry?”

“Are Biddy and I the only ones here with human blood?”

“I think so.”

“I tried to conjure the feel of summer sun, and I couldn’t remember what it was like.”

Doyle had worked his way back to me. “What is wrong?”

“Check Biddy and me for a spell, a spell that attacks only human blood.”

He pulled off one of his black gloves and put his hand just above my face, not touching skin, but searching my aura, my shielding, my magic.