Лорел Гамильтон - A Stroke Of Midnight

I drew breath to ask them to move, but another voice filled the silence first. “Oh, Meredith, brava.” She clapped, and others clapped with her, because when the queen applauds so do you.

The endorphins left in a rush, tightening my body painfully around the two men, almost as if my body was squeezing them tighter. It brought a small moan of protest from my body. I was going to be sore.

Adair slowly, carefully, began to draw himself out of me, which brought another sound of half-pain from me.

“Meredith,” she said, “I didn’t know you had it in you.” Then she laughed at her joke, and was still laughing when Adair had moved enough of his upper body to reveal her to me.

Andais’s body glinted in the thin light, glinted with fresh, and not so fresh, blood. She was covered in it. Her long hair was plastered along her body with blood and thicker things.

Amatheon tried to move out from inside me, but he was at a bad angle for it. Rhys came to help me, cradling me in his arms, helping give Amatheon a little more room to maneuver.

But it was Rhys’s lifting that got me free of him. He stood with me in his arms, and I was just as glad, for I doubted I could have stood. Frost and Doyle stood by us, not quite guarding me against the queen, but close.

“We were coming to find you, niece. It seems we didn’t need your policemen after all.”

“What do you mean?” I said in a hoarse voice.

“We have a confession to our murders, Meredith, and we did not need forensics to get it.” She bent down near her feet and raised her hand upward; a thick rope trailed down to something on the ground. My eyes saw it before my mind would accept it. There was a body at her feet, curled on its side, so covered in blood and so destroyed that I could not tell if it was man or woman.

Andais pulled on the ropes in her hand and the figure screamed. She wasn’t holding ropes. She was holding intestines, and they were still attached.

“DID YOU HEAR ME, MEREDITH? TORTURE HAS SOLVED YOUR crimes before the police could even finish processing their so-called evidence.” She gave another jerk with her hand, and tore a ragged scream from the man’s throat. I was almost certain it was a man.

I cuddled in against Rhys’s chest, and fought to keep my face as blank as I could. I know I did not keep all the horror off of it, because it was too awful. It was simply one of the worst things I’d ever seen, and I could not hide entirely how I felt about it. I fought to hide my feelings, knew I failed, and finally wasn’t certain I cared. Sometimes Andais became angry if you didn’t appreciate her work. I could never enjoy it, so all that was left me was to show her how frightening, how nightmarish I thought her talents could be.

She gave a low throaty laugh. “Such a look, Meredith. Do you find Gwennin’s fate terrible?”

I nodded, huddling in tighter against Rhys. His arms tightened around me. “Yes, aunt, I find it terrible.”

“But you cannot argue with the results, aye?”

I could have, but I chose to be indirect about it. “If you tell me it’s Gwennin, then I will believe you, but in truth I would not have known him.”

“Oh, it is he.” She looked down at the figure at her side, tightening her grip on his body. He moaned, and that did not make her happy enough. She jerked again, and that made him scream again. That pleased her.

“What reason did he give for killing Beatrice?” I asked the question without implying that everyone standing there would have confessed to anything, from the Kennedy assasination to the rape and pillage of Rome, to make the pain stop. No one could have withstood what she had done to him.

“She had come to his bed, then suddenly she began to refuse him.”

“He killed Beatrice because she refused to continue as his lover?” I fought to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

Andais pulled, sharp and sudden, tearing another shriek from his throat. “Tell her what you told me,” she said.

He coughed to clear his throat, and the sound was wet. He spat blood, then finally managed to speak. His voice was as broken as his body, hoarse and raw from screaming. “I did not mean for her to die. She is fey, immortal. I did not use cold iron or steel. It should not have been a killing blow.” He coughed again, and started to fall flatter to the ground, but Andais kept her grip on his intestines, so he struggled to prop himself up on one skinless arm.

When he had recovered a bit, I asked, “You stabbed her in the back because she refused to continue as your lover?”

“She was a distraction, not a lover.”

“A distraction?” I said. “Because she was lesser fey, and they can’t be lovers?”

“Yes,” he said in that raw voice.

Strangely, I wasn’t feeling as sorry for him as I had moments ago. It was still pitiable, and no one deserved such treatment, but… “If she meant nothing to you, then why did her refusal of your attentions drive you to murder her?”

“I did not mean her death.” His voice broke, not from tears but from the abuse Andais had forced on him.

“But, Gwennin, if she truly was only a distraction, you could have found a dozen like her. Many lesser fey would have jumped at the chance to bed a sidhe lord.”

His formless face, that held only the shadow of his bone structure to let me know it was indeed him, could give me no emotion. Andais had stripped that away with his skin and flesh. But his voice held something. “They would not have been Beatrice.”

And there was the truth. He had loved her in his way, and she had scorned him. He hadn’t meant to kill her, only to hurt her as she hurt him. He had stabbed her through the heart as she had wounded him. He had no way of knowing that faerie had become so fragile that a blade that was neither cold iron nor steel could kill her.

“And the human reporter?” I asked. “Why did he have to die?”

“He was witness,” Gwennin said.

My breath came out, and I cuddled in against Rhys, and wanted nothing more than to hide my eyes from the waste of it all. But I didn’t hide, I kept looking. If I’d been a hundred percent certain I could have stood on my own, I would have had Rhys put me down, but falling into the mud would have ruined what little authority I still possessed.

“I would ask that we wait on the human police and their science, just to confirm. It will make the press conference go better if the police can be up there confirming it all.”

“Press conference? He dies no later than tomorrow.”

“Aunt Andais, he killed a human reporter. If we do not show him well and fairly whole to the press, it could undermine all the good publicity you have built up over these long decades.”

She let out an audible breath. “There is wisdom in your words, Meredith. The press will need him whole, or more whole than this.” She smiled down at him. “It does seem a shame to waste such healing on one who is dead already.”

I couldn’t argue that, but said, “We dare not let the humans see him like this.”

“You think it would offend the humans?”

“I think it would confirm all that the Seelie Court says of us.”

“Your covering of mud, mine of blood—they look very much the same,” she said.

I looked at my hand on Rhys’s white shirt, and realized she was right. I was covered in thick, dark mud. Amatheon was as black with earth as the queen was with blood. His hair was plastered down the length of his body. When he’d vanished his hair had been shorn above his shoulders; now it seemed to be at least to his calves.

Adair was less filthy, for he had been on top. But his hair, too, fell in brown waves around his face, no longer shorn stubble. It did not touch his broad shoulders, but it was a start.