Лорел Гамильтон - A Stroke Of Midnight

I FELL TO MY KNEES BESIDE HIM. THE BRIGHT RED OF THE BLOOD framed him, so that his hair was greener than I knew it to be. A moment before I had wanted to hold him more than anything in all of faerie. Now I hesitated, my hand hovering over his face. I wanted to touch him, have him open his eyes and smile up at me. I was afraid to touch him, afraid he would be cold to the touch, afraid to know.

I made myself touch the side of his face. His skin was cool but not cold. A tightness in my chest eased minutely. I touched the side of his neck, pushed my fingers against his skin, searching. Nothing, nothing, then a faint flutter. The relief made me slump, my hand sliding down the side of his neck into the curls at the back of his head, but they were heavy with blood. I raised my hand up, and the fingers were bright with blood. “Where is it all coming from?” I didn’t realize I’d said it aloud until Adair answered me. “We have not had time to check for his wounds, Princess.”

I nodded to let him know I’d heard him. “We have to get the bleeding stopped.”

Adair knelt at Galen’s shoulders. “I have sent for a healer.”

I shook my head. “His skin is cool. We need to stop this blood loss now, not wait for a healer.”

“A sidhe who can die from blood loss is no sidhe at all.” I glanced up to find Kieran, Lord of Knives, kneeling with his hands bound behind his back. But Ivi still kept the lord at sword point. Kieran had only one hand of power, and it was the only magic left to him, which made many among the sidhe consider him weak. But that one hand was a deadly one. He could use his magic like a blade to stab deep into the body, even from a distance. I knew now how Galen had fallen without even drawing a blade or a gun. But why ambush Galen?

My gaze traveled to the other three kneeling there. The rest were all women of Cel’s guard. That did not surprise me. There was another richly dressed lord, lying on his side, moaning. His hands were tied behind his back, but there was a smaller pool of blood beginning to seep out from him. His face was turned away from me, and it didn’t matter who it was. Later it might, but now, unless he could heal Galen, I didn’t care who he was.

Adair helped me turn Galen onto his side. He was limp as the dead. I was having trouble breathing again, past the taste of panic. There were two wounds in his back, deep and clean. Somehow, miraculously, they had missed the heart. They were still fearfully deep, but bleeding out this quickly wasn’t from a wound in his back, especially if it missed the heart.

We eased him onto his back, and when his body settled against the blood-slick floor, there was a fresh gush of blood from his leg. I crawled to his legs, and found the third wound, high up on the thigh. They’d cut his femoral artery. A human could bleed out in twenty minutes. The blood should have been spurting out. The fact that it was only seeping meant that he had lost most of the blood in his body. Which meant that even if someone could close the wounds immediately, he might not recover. The sidhe can take a lot of wounds, a lot of blood loss, but there has to be enough blood left to keep the body running, the heart pumping.

Frost had remained standing in front of me during all of it, guarding me. I couldn’t argue with his division of labor, not with Galen lying limp and pale on the floor. I was a great deal easier to kill than Galen.

But Frost had watched as we found the wounds. “Where is the healer that you sent for?”

Adair shook his head. “I do not know.”

“We’re running out of time,” I said. “We have to close the wounds and keep what little blood he has left inside him.”

“I can close his wounds,” a woman’s voice said. We looked to find one of the kneeling prisoners smiling at us. Her hair was the color of yellow corn silk, her eyes triple colors of blue, silver, with an inner circle of light, if light had a single color. I’d never known what to call the final color of Hafwyn’s eyes.

The other women said, “No… You cannot help them. You betray our master…” and other less complimentary things.

Hafwyn shrugged with her hands still bound behind her. “We are captured, and our master is still imprisoned. I think it would not be a mistake to have some favor on other shores.”

She raised one of her dark eyebrows. With her very blond hair, in a human I would have thought dye, but in a race where your eyes could be three different colors, what was black eyebrows and blond hair?

“You are a traitor to your oath if you do this,” Melangell said. There was blood running down her face from a wound that had split the side of her helmet. If she’d been human, her brains would have spilled out, but she was barely bleeding.

“I never made an oath to Prince Cel,” Hafwyn said. “It was Prince Essus I vowed to serve. When he died, no one asked if we would serve Cel, we were simply given to him. No one living has my oath of loyalty.” She looked at me as she said it, and there was something in her face, some need, some message.

“Can she really heal him?” I asked.

“She can close his wounds,” Adair said, “but that’s all.”

“It is more than any of the rest of us can do for him,” said Hawthorne. “Though, in truth, it never occurred to me to ask Galen’s assassins if they could help heal him.” I searched his face for the irony that should have gone with those words, but he simply looked as if he were stating a fact.

“Do we trust her?” Nicca asked.

I laid a hand against Galen’s cooling skin. “No,” I said, “but untie her anyway.” Earlier that day I had been ready to give Galen up to an unknown lover. But that was different from losing him to death. I could live with his smile being for someone else if I knew he was happy. But to never see that smile again, to never feel his hand warm in mine again… I couldn’t stand that.

Frost touched my shoulder, made me look up at him. “You must move away before I will allow Hafwyn to touch him.”

I started to protest, but he touched my face and shook his head. “This could be a ruse to get close to you. I will not risk you to save him.” His hand went around my arm, and I had little choice but to go with him, though I was still reluctant to stop touching Galen. If we couldn’t save him, these would be my last moments to touch him while he felt… alive.

Hafwyn knelt in the drying blood in her leather armor. She took off the leather gauntlets and tucked them into her sword belt. She settled her short sword more solidly at her hip, and I fought the urge to scream for her to hurry. She was entirely too calm, but then she had helped kill him. Why should she truly want to save him? Was this just a play effort on her part? She would do us a favor, but it would not work, so she could curry favor with us yet lose no favor with Cel and his people. Goddess help me, there were moments when I wished I did not see so many motives for the people around me. It was not a comforting way of looking at the world.

I cuddled in against Frost’s body, my arms clinging around his waist, my cheek pressed so hard against him that I heard his heartbeat. He wrapped his arms around me, though it meant he would have to move me to draw almost any of his weapons. As a bodyguard he should have moved me to the side, left himself some room to maneuver, but as my lover, my friend, and Galen’s friend, I knew that he wasn’t clinging to me just for my comfort. It was impossible not to like Galen. It was his gift to make people like him. The tension in Frost’s body as he held me told me more clearly than any words that I wasn’t the only one who would miss Galen. It said something about our Galen that he had melted the Killing Frost.