Лорел Гамильтон - A Kiss Of Shadows

I glanced at the two men. "Why isn't she dead?"

"The sluagh are harder to kill than the sidhe," Sholto said.

"How much harder?"

He shrugged. "It's your kill."

In that instant I hated them both, because I realized finally that it was a test. It might be that if I refused the kill they'd leave her alive. That was not acceptable. I couldn't leave her like this, knowing that she'd never age, or heal, or die. She'd just continue. Death was mercy; anything else was madness, hers and mine.

I stabbed the sword into every vital organ I could find. They bled, shriveled, ceased to function, and still the screaming went on. I finally raised the sword in a two-handed motion above my head and just started stabbing. At first I paused between stabs, or slices, but every time the screams just went on and on, trapped inside that ball of meat. Somewhere around the tenth blow, or the fifteenth blow, I stopped pausing, stopped listening, and just kept stabbing.

I had to make the screaming stop. I had to make her die. The world narrowed down to the pounding of the blade into the thick meat. My arms raised and lowered, raised and lowered. The blade bit into the flesh. Blood sprayed across my face, my shirt. I ended on my knees beside something that was no longer round, no longer whole. I'd hacked the thing into pieces, unrecognizable pieces. The screaming had stopped.

My hands were soaked with blood, crimson to the elbows. The sword blade was scarlet, the bone hilt was solid blood, and still the hilt fit my hand well, not slippery at all. The green silk shirt I'd put back on was black with soaked blood. My slacks had gone from purple to a violet black. Someone was breathing too fast, too ragged, and I realized it was me. Sometime during the butchering there had been a fierce satisfaction, almost a joyfulness in the sheer destruction. Now I stared down at what I had done and felt nothing. There wasn't enough of me left to feel anything about this, so I felt nothing. I was numb, and it wasn't a bad way to be.

I got to my feet using the edge of the bed. The bed was already spattered with blood—what was one more handprint? My arms were sore, the muscles shaking from too much exercise. I offered the sword to Doyle as he'd offered it to me. "Good sword, the hilt never got slippery." My voice sounded as empty of emotion as I felt. I wondered if this was what it was like to be crazy. If it was, it wasn't so very bad.

Doyle took the sword and dropped to his knees, head bowed. Sholto echoed him, kneeling, bowing his head. Doyle saluted me with the bloody sword and said, "Meredith, Princess of Flesh, true royal of the blood, welcome to the inner circle of the sidhe."

I stared down at both of them, still echoingly numb. If there were ritual words to answer with, I couldn't think of them. Either I'd never known them, or I just couldn't make my mind work right now. The only thing I could think to say was, "May I use your shower?"

"Be my guest," Sholto said.

The carpet squished under my feet, and when I walked off that section of carpet I left bloody footprints behind me. I stripped and showered in the hottest water I could stand against my skin. The blood wasn't red by the time it ran down the drain; it was pink. It was while I watched that pinkish water swirl down the drain that I realized two things. First, I was glad I'd had the courage to finish Nerys rather than leave her in that horror. Second, part of me had enjoyed killing her. I'd have liked to think that the part that enjoyed the kill was motivated by the mercy of the first thought, but I couldn't afford to be that generous to myself. I had to wonder if the part of me that enjoyed sinking blade into flesh was the same part that made Andais keep her own bit of flesh in a locked trunk in her room. The second you stop questioning yourself is the second that you become the monster.

I ARRIVED BACK AT MY APARTMENT WITH MY HAIR STILL DAMP FROM THE hotel shower. Doyle insisted on unlocking the door for me, in case it had been magically booby-trapped. He was taking his job of bodyguard seriously, but from Doyle I wouldn't have expected less. When he pronounced it safe I walked onto the grey carpet barefoot. I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of loose men's shorts, clothes Sholto had borrowed from Gethin. The only thing I couldn't borrow from the man was shoes. My clothes were still in the hotel room, so blood-soaked that even the underwear had been unusable. Some of the blood had been Nerys's, some of it mine.

I turned on the light switch by the door. The overhead light blazed to life. I'd paid extra to be able to paint the apartment a color other than white. The walls of the front room were pale pink. The couch was mauve, purple, and pink. The overstuffed chair in the corner was pink. The drapes were pink with ties of purple. Jeremy had said it was like being inside an expensively decorated Easter egg. The bookcase was white. The entertainment center was white. I turned on the standing lamp by the overstuffed chair. The light over the small white kitchen table and chairs was next. Lacy white curtains framed the big window in front of the table. The window glass was very black and somehow threatening. I closed the drapes, shutting the night out behind the white blind. I stood for a moment in front of the only painting in the front room. It was a print of The Butterflies' Haunt by W. Scott Miles. The picture was mostly green, and the butterflies were painted to nature, so there was precious little pink or purple in the picture. But you never choose a painting just because it matches a room—you choose a painting because it speaks to you. Because it says something that you want to be reminded of daily. The picture had always seemed peaceful, idyllic, but tonight it was just paint on a canvas. Tonight nothing was going to please me. I turned on the kitchen lights and went for the bedroom.

Doyle had stood quietly to one side as I moved around the room turning on all the lights like a child waking from a nightmare. Light to chase away the bad things. The trouble was that the bad things were in my head now. There was no light bright enough for that.

He followed me as I went into the bedroom. I hit the overhead light as I moved through the door.

"I like what you've done with the bedroom," he said.

The comment made me turn and look at him. "What do you mean?"

His face stayed impassive, unreadable. "The living room was so very… pink. I feared the bedroom would be, as well."

I looked around the room at the soft grey walls, the burgundy wallpaper border with its mauve, pink, and white flowers. The bed was a king-sized four-poster, leaving almost no room between the foot of the bed and the closet doors. The bedspread was a deep, rich burgundy with a mound of pillows: burgundy, purple, mauve, pink, and a few black, just a few. The mirrored dresser was cherry wood, varnished so dark it was almost black. The dresser near the window matched it. Jeremy said that my bedroom looked like a man's room with a few touches added by his girlfriend. There was a black lacquer cabinet in the corner farthest away from the bathroom door. The cabinet was Oriental, with cranes and stylized mountains. The crane had been part of my father's livery. When I bought it, I remembered thinking he would have liked it. There was a philodendron plant on top of it, grown so long that the vines fell like green hair around the beautiful wood.

I looked around the room, and suddenly it felt like it wasn't mine and I didn't belong here. I turned back to Doyle. "As if it makes a difference to you what color my bedroom is."

He didn't flinch, but his face became even more unreadable, more passive, a trace of arrogance creeping in, and it reminded me of Sholto's courtly mask.

The comment had been mean, and meant to be. I was angry with him. Angry with him for not killing Nerys for me. Angry with him for forcing me to do what had to be done. Angry with him for everything, even the things that weren't his fault.