Лорел Гамильтон - A Caress Of Twilight

"I meant no criticism, Aunt Andais. I was merely stating a fact. We did not expect your call tonight."

"It is not night, niece, it is morning, just not yet dawn. I see you have slept no more than I."

"I, like you, aunt, have had better things to do than sleep."

She touched the full skirt of her ball dress. "Yes, another party." She didn't look happy about it.

I wanted to ask if the party had not gone to her liking, but didn't dare. It was too personal a question to ask the queen, and she was too easily offended.

She took a deep breath that made the front of her gown shift, almost as if it wasn't tight enough around her body, a bustier without a boost. If you weren't too well endowed, you could wear those gowns that seemed to just float around your body. For me, it would have been an embarrassment waiting to happen. Nudity on purpose is very different from falling out of your dress by accident.

She turned those dramatic eyes to us. The unhappy look changed, narrowed, to one I knew all too well. Malice.

"You're bleeding, my Darkness."

I glanced down at Doyle and realized he was still mostly on his side, turned toward me, which gave her a view of his back and the fingernail marks on his dark skin.

"Yes, my queen," he said in his perfectly neutral, perfectly careful voice.

"Who has harmed my Darkness?" But her eyes were already on me, and it was a very unfriendly gaze.

"I do not see it as harm, my Queen," Doyle said.

Her eyes nicked down to him, then back to me. "You've been a busy girl, Meredith."

I pushed up from Doyle, so that I was more or less sitting upright. "I thought you wished me to be a very busy girl, Aunt Andais."

"I don't know if I've seen your bare breasts before, Meredith. They are a little large for a sidhe, but very nice." Her eyes didn't hold lust, or kindness, only a dangerous light. All that she'd said so far could be mistaken for politeness. She'd never seen my breasts bare, so she should compliment them; but only if I was trying to be attractive, which I was not. I just happened to have no clothes on. I did not feel the least bit luscious around my aunt, and there was more to it than just being heterosexual, much more.

"And you, my Darkness, it's been so many centuries since I saw you nude that I can't remember. Is there some reason you have your back to me? Is there some reason you hide yourself from my sight? Is there some. . aberration that I don't remember that spoils all that darkness?"

She was within her rights to compliment him, but asking if he was deformed, demanding he flaunt himself to her, that was impolite. If it had been almost anyone else, I'd have told her to go to hell.

"There is nothing spoiled here, Aunt Andais," I said, and I knew my tone wasn't neutral enough. I'd lost the knack of keeping my voice in line over the years I'd been away from the court. I was going to have to relearn, and quickly.

She gave me very cold eyes. "I was not talking to you, Princess Meredith. I was speaking to my Darkness."

She'd used my title; not niece, or just my name, but my title. It was not a good sign.

Doyle squeezed my arm again, tighter this time, as if telling me to behave. He answered Andais, but not in words. He rolled onto his back with his knees bent so his thigh hid him from her view, then he lowered the leg closest to her, slowly, like a curtain coming down.

There was heat in her eyes now, real heat, real need. "My, my, Darkness, you have been keeping secrets."

He turned and looked at her. "Nothing you couldn't have discovered at any time in the last thousand years." Now it was his voice that was not neutral. It was just a slight change in tone, a mild inflection of reproof, but I'd never heard him lose even that much control in front of Andais.

It was my turn to lay a warning hand on his stomach, just a touch to remind him who we were speaking to. I don't think my face showed the fear that was curling along my spine.

King Taranis might not hurt me for fear of Andais, but Andais might hurt me in a fit. She might regret it later, but dead is dead.

The look she gave Doyle was enough to tighten my hand against his skin, just a light digging of nails. It made his body react, and I hoped I'd done enough to remind him to tread lightly.

"Have a care, Darkness, or I will grow distracted and forget why I called."

"We await your news, Queen Andais," I said.

She looked at me then, some of the heat going from her eyes, replaced by puzzlement and, underneath, tiredness. Andais wasn't usually this easy to read, I think because she didn't have to be careful around anyone. "The Nameless is free."

Doyle spilled his legs to the floor and sat up. Suddenly it didn't matter that he was nude, nobody cared. The Nameless was the worst of both courts, Seelie and Unseelie. It was the last great spell that the two courts had cooperated on. They had stripped themselves of everything too awful, too hungry, to allow us to live in this new country. Nobody had demanded it of the sidhe, but we didn't want to be forced out of the last country that would have us, so we'd sacrificed some of what we were in order to become more. . human. Some said that the Nameless was what caused us to begin to fade, but that wasn't true. The sidhe had been fading for centuries. The Nameless was just a necessary evil. So we didn't turn America into another battlefield.

"Did you set it free, my queen?" Doyle asked.

"Of course not," she said.

"Then who?" he asked.

"I could tell you a pretty story, but in the end, the answer is, simply, I don't know." It was obvious she didn't like saying it, and equally obvious that she was speaking the truth. She stripped off one of the black gloves in an abrupt movement and began to run it over and over through her hands.

"There are very few beings in faerie who could do such a thing," Doyle said.

"Don't you think I know that?" she snapped.

"What would you have us do here, my queen?"

"I don't know, but the last hint we had of it, it was traveling west."

"Do you believe it will come here?" he asked.

"It is unlikely," she said, slapping the glove against her arm. "But the Nameless is nearly unstoppable. It is everything we have given up, and that was a great deal of wielding power. If it was sent for Meredith, then you would need all the preparation time you could manage."

"Do you truly think it was loosed to hunt the princess?"

"If it had merely been set free, it would have ravaged the countryside by now. But it has not." She stood, giving us a view of the nearly naked back of the dress. She turned back to us with an abrupt gesture. "It vanished from our sight, all of our sights, very quickly. We cannot track it, which means that the thing is getting some very highly placed help."

"But the Nameless is a part of the courts, a part of who you were. You should be able to track it as you would track your own shadow." The moment I finished, I knew I should have kept quiet.

All the anger flowed into her face, her posture, her hands where they gripped her elbows. She shivered with rage. I think for a second she was too angry to speak.

Doyle stood, putting himself in front of me. "Have you told the Seelie Court?"

"You do not need to hide her away, Darkness. I am working too hard to keep her alive to kill her myself. And, yes, the Seelie know what has happened."

"Will the two courts come together to hunt the Nameless?" he asked. He hadn't moved from in front of me, which left me peeking around his body like a child. That wasn't exactly the way to be a strong presence. I moved so I could see the mirror, but they both ignored me.

"No."

"But it is to each one's benefit, surely."

"Taranis is being difficult. He's acting as if the Nameless is made up of only Unseelie energy. Pretending that all his light has no taint." She looked like she'd tasted something sour. "He will not claim its parentage, so he will give no aid, for to give aid is to admit his part in its making."