Лорел Гамильтон - A Caress Of Twilight

I leaned in and gave him a very gentle kiss. "We do some rough stuff."

He suddenly hugged me to him. "No, Meredith, no, you don't. You never scare me." He held me, and I relaxed against him, let him hold me. Almost too tight. It almost hurt.

I stroked his sides and what I could reach of his back, until he began to relax. His arms were not quite so crushing. I'd thought only days ago about sending Nicca back home, because I did not want him to be king. He wasn't able to be king, and it had nothing to do with whether or not he could breed.

I held him, stroked him gently, until the sudden panic in him eased. When he was calm, he reached for me again, and I went to his arms, his mouth, his body. I hoped King Taranis wouldn't call while we were in the midst of things, but the lovemaking took the last wounded look from his eyes. I needed to see those brown eyes turned to me with nothing but smiles in them.

When Rhys stepped out of the bathroom with his towels, we were just finishing. He cursed under his breath. "Is it too late to join in?"

"Yes," I said, and gave Nicca a last parting kiss. "Besides, I get the shower next." I scrambled out of bed and went for the bathroom before Nicca could protest. I left them laughing, and I left the room laughing myself. What better way is there to begin a day?

That afternoon, Maeve and Gordon Reed showed up at our door. It had been only days, but Gordon looked like it had been years. His skin had gone from sallow to grey. He seemed to have lost weight, so that the strong bones that had once made him a tall, commanding figure now made him look like a large-boned skeleton, covered in paper-thin greyness. His eyes looked larger in his face, and the pain in them looked constant. It was as if the cancer were sucking him dry, eating him from the inside out.

Maeve had said on the phone that Gordon was worse, much worse, but she hadn't prepared us for this. No mere words could prepare you for watching a man die.

Frost and Rhys had met their car on the street so they could help her husband up the short flight of steps to our apartment. Maeve had followed them up with huge sunglasses hiding most of her face, and a silk scarf around all that blond hair. She held an ankle-length fur coat tight at her throat as if it were cold. She looked like a Hollywood imitation of a great movie star. Of course, who had a better right to the look?

The men helped Gordon into the bedroom so he could rest while we did the first part of the fertility rite. Maeve was apparently going to pace the living room while she waited. She'd almost lit up a cigarette before I could tell her no smoking in my home.

"Meredith, please, I need it."

"Then you can do it outside."

She lowered her sunglasses enough to show me those famous blue eyes. She was wearing her human glamour again, trying to look as un-sidhe as possible. She kept that blue stare on me as she flung open the coat to frame that long golden body. She was nude except for her boots.

"Do I look dressed for your neighbors' viewing?"

I shook my head. "Your glamour is good enough to hide you buck naked in the middle of a highway, so close the coat, and take your nerves and your cigarettes outside."

She let the coat fall closed, leaving a thin line of her body showing between the soft mounds of fur. "How can you be so cruel?"

"This isn't cruel, Maeve, and well you know it. You spent too many centuries around the courts to think I'm being cruel just because I don't want your cigarettes stinking up my apartment."

She actually pouted at me. I'd had enough. "When I come back inside heavy with magic, I want to find Conchenn, goddess of beauty and spring, not some spoiled star. No glamour either. I want to see those lightning-kissed eyes."

She opened her mouth — to protest, I think. I stopped it with a wave of my hand. "Save it, Maeve, and do what you need to do to help this work."

She pushed her sunglasses back over her eyes and said in a much smaller voice, "You've changed, Meredith. There's a hardness in you that wasn't there before."

"Not hardness," Doyle said, "command. She will be queen and she understands that now."

Maeve glanced from him to me. "Fine, what's with the bikini? I thought you were going to fuck, not go to the beach."

"I know you're angry and scared about your husband, and that cuts you some slack, but there's a limit to that slack, Maeve. Don't push it."

She lowered her head, still fingering the unlit cigarette and unused lighter. "I don't mean to be such a fucking prima donna, but I am desperately worried about Gordon. Can't you understand that?"

"I understand, but if I wasn't having to sit here and argue with you, I could already be at the ritual site preparing myself."

I turned my back very deliberately on her, hoping she'd take the hint. "Doyle, you've extended the wards to include the little garden area in the house behind us, as I requested?"

"Yes, Princess, I have."

I took a deep breath. Here was the moment that I had been dreading. I had to choose one of the men to act as my consort for the ritual, but who? I don't know what I would have decided, because Galen said, voice clear but uncertain, "I'm whole again, Merry."

Everyone but Maeve turned to stare at him. He looked a little uncomfortable under the scrutiny, but there was also a pleased smile on his face, and a look in his eyes that I hadn't seen in a long time.

"I don't mean to dampen the mood," Rhys said, "but how do we know he's cured? Maeve and Gordon may not get another shot at this."

Doyle interrupted. "If Galen says that he is healed enough for this ritual, I for one believe him."

I looked at Doyle. His face was its usual dark mask, unreadable. He rarely spoke unless he was certain of something.

"How can you be certain?" Frost asked.

"Meredith needs a consort to her goddess. Who better than the green man whose life has only recently returned to him?"

I knew that the green man was sometimes a nickname for the Goddess's Consort, sometimes a name for the generic forest god. I looked at Galen. He certainly was the green man.

"If Doyle thinks it's all right, then let it be Galen."

I don't think Frost was happy with the choice, but everyone else took it in stride, and Frost kept his mouth shut. Sometimes that's all you can ask of a man, or anyone else.

I needed to be alone to prepare myself for the ritual. Doyle hadn't liked me being on my own for even a little while, but we'd extended the house wards across the back wall to the small neglected garden of the house behind us. Neglected was good in this case because it meant that no pesticides or herbicides had been used in a very long time. We'd put up a ritual circle earlier in the day. I opened a doorway in that circle, stepped through, and closed it behind me. Now I stood not just in the wards of the house but in a circle of protection. Nothing magical could cross this circle, nothing less than a deity or the Nameless itself. The hungry ones that were slaughtering people would have been stopped by it; they weren't deities yet.

The yard had been planted within an inch of its life like most yards in Southern California. It was an abandoned lemon tree grove, now. The small trees were covered in dark green leaves. It was too late in the season for blossoms. I mourned that. But the moment I walked between the close crowding trees and the dry, crumbling grass and leaves underfoot, I knew this was it. The trees whispered among themselves like elderly ladies talking of the past softly with their heads close together in the warm, warm sun. The eucalyptus that lined the street just outside the garden wall was a heavy spicy scent that rode the air to mingle with the smell of the warm lemon trees.