Лорел Гамильтон - A Stroke Of Midnight

“Do you hurt?” Doyle asked.

I shook my head.

“You flinched,” he said.

“The moth didn’t like me slumping,” I said. My voice was much steadier than my eyes. My voice didn’t sound like I was crying, not one little bit.

Kitto moved between the table he’d set up, and raised his finger to my face. He came away with a tear shining on the tip of his finger. He raised it to his lips, and licked my tear from his skin.

It made me smile, and the tears fell a little faster because of it, as if I’d been holding my eyes very still to keep the tears from falling. “The stew is one of my favorite dishes. It hasn’t changed. Everything else is changing, and I’m no longer certain that all the changes will be good.”

I leaned into the warmth of Galen’s body, and gazed at the others. I suddenly knew what I wanted. “Kiss me,” I said.

“Who are you speaking to?” Frost asked.

“All of you.”

Galen bent down toward me, and I raised my face to him. His lips touched mine, and my body moved of its own volition. My arms swept up his body, and we embraced as we kissed. My hands explored the naked warmth of his body, not as foreplay, but because twice in less than a day I had thought the darkness would take one or both of us, and we would never again hold each other this side of the grave.

We kissed, and his hands were strong and gentle on my body, and the tears came faster.

Galen broke the kiss first, but hugged me tighter, and said, “Merry, Merry, don’t cry.”

“Let her cry,” Rhys said. “To have a woman waste tears over you is not a bad thing.” He stepped up to me, where I still sat on the edge of the bed. He wiped my face with his good hand. “Are any of these tears for me?”

I nodded wordlessly, and touched his arm in its sling. He wiggled the fingers a little. “It will heal.”

I nodded again. “I sent you out into the snow, and didn’t even say good-bye.”

He frowned at me, his one good eye perplexed. “You don’t love me enough to shed tears at the thought of missing our last good-bye.” He wiped fresh tears away with his hand, still frowning.

I searched his face, the scars that had stolen his eye long before I was born. I traced the lines of those marks in his skin. I put a hand on either side of his shoulders, and drew him close to me, until I could lay a kiss upon the smoothness of the scar where his other eye should have been.

The thought that he was right, that I didn’t love him that much, made me cry harder, though I wasn’t sure why. It just seemed wrong. Wrong that I sent him out into the dark and the cold, and hadn’t cared enough to say good-bye. If someone’s willing to die for you, shouldn’t you care? Shouldn’t it matter more than that?

I moved my face back enough to kiss him gently on the lips. He came to that kiss still puzzled, hesitating, so that even as we kissed, his body was stiff and uneasy. I balled my hands into the cloth of his suit jacket, pulling him down to me, forcing him to catch himself on the bed with his one hand.

I kissed him as if I would climb inside him. He responded to the fierceness of my mouth with his own. He let me pull him down onto the bed, onto me, though he was awkward with the one arm in a sling. His body pressed against me, but it was as if his clothes offended me. I wanted bare flesh. I needed to feel his nakedness against me. To let me know he was real, and all right. That he was all right with being third in command. With not being my greatest love, and still having to risk his life as if he was. I wanted to hold him and tell him I was sorry that my heart didn’t have room for everyone, and most of all that he could have died out there in the dark and the cold, and we would never have known. That I wouldn’t have known. The Goddess had warned me to protect Galen and Barinthus. But it was as if Rhys wasn’t important enough to her to waste such power.

I would never be able to send him away again without wondering if I sent him to his death. I pulled his shirt out of his pants. I had to touch more of him. I had to tell him with my hands and my body that he did mean something to me. That I did see him. That I never wanted him to die in the dark where I could not find him.

He propped himself up on his good arm, so that I could slide the shirt free. I meant to run my hands over that pale skin, but Rhys let himself fall back upon my body, pressing his mouth hungrily against mine. I’d forgotten the moth. I’d forgotten everything but the feel of his body pressed against mine.

Pain, sharp and immediate like tiny needles, pierced the skin of my stomach. Rhys cursed, and drew back from me, as if something had bitten him, and maybe it had.

He raised up on his knees, and showed his stomach. It looked like a bloody version of the moth on my stomach. He touched it, and it was flat, one-dimensional. The skin around the outline and colors was ridged and red, puffy and swollen, but I could see the image of the moth on his stomach.

The other men crowded round, and it was Galen who asked, “It’s not the same thing we have, is it?”

“No.” Doyle touched it ever so gently, and even that made Rhys flinch.

“Ow,” Rhys said.

Doyle smiled. “Either the moth did not like being crushed or…”

“Yes,” Frost said.

“It cannot be,” Hawthorne said.

“It cannot be what?” Galen asked.

“A calling.” Doyle was pulling his black T-shirt out of his pants. I was about to point out that he’d never get the shirt off without taking his shoulder holster off first, but he raised the neck of the shirt over his head so that it sat behind his shoulders, still covering his arms, but leaving his chest and stomach bare.

“What is a calling?” I asked.

“What were you thinking just before you kissed Rhys?” he asked.

“That I didn’t want him to go into the dark alone, and not be able to find him.”

Rhys slid off the bed, acting as if he hurt, but he was using both arms again. He noticed it, too, because he took his arm out of the sling, flexing his fingers. “Healed.” He looked down at the wound on his stomach, then up at me. “It’s always the doom of any relationship to get matching tattoos.” He tried to make a joke of it, but his face didn’t match the lightness of his words.

I touched the moth on me, and it still flicked its wings, irritated at the touch. “Mine’s still alive.”

Doyle crawled up on the bed, and for once I moved back from him. “Explain, Doyle.” I put a hand up, not touching, but ready to keep him away from my body.

“It may be that your mark of power simply struck out in irritation. They can do such things.” He was above me now, on all fours, so that his body straddled mine but did not quite touch me. “But if it is a calling, then it will enable you to do just what you wish. You will be able to find Rhys in the dark or the light. You will have only to think of him, and your mark will guide you to him. Some of them would alert the bearer of the mark if the one they had called was in danger or injured.”

“A true calling could do many things,” Frost said.

“There has not been a true calling among us for centuries,” Hawthorne said.

“How can you doubt,” Adair said, and he had removed his helmet, so I could see him smiling. He looked so sure of it all. “She is our ameraudur.”

Doyle started to lie down on top of me, but I kept my hand in the way. I had more questions before we continued with our little experiment. The moment my hand touched his bare chest, the pain was sharp and immediate. But it wasn’t my hand that hurt, it was my chest, exactly where I touched Doyle. Blood trickled down his chest, just below the silver nipple ring. Other than a tightness around his eyes, he didn’t react to the pain at all.