The word of a Sidhe is binding, I thought in giddy exhaustion. Sleep. He might as well have crooned that word with all the thrall at his usual command, given how it resounded through me. I wondered, too, exactly how our positions had gotten reversed. Hadn’t I been the one comforting him before?
“Okay,” I mumbled. My eyes drifted shut, but I still felt both the boys’ hands, and without thinking I sent a sluggish pulse of power to each point of contact. Christopher instantly picked up on it. His power flowed a little more strongly into mine, nudging it in the direction Elessir had asked for.
“Yes,” the Unseelie murmured, “exactly like that. Keep it coming. Make a little ball of light. Your body will know what to do with it.”
I could do that, couldn’t I? Sending light into the place where I was hurt sounded much simpler than flinging my spirit out of my body and fighting to put it back again, or battling pissed-off nogitsune. Or, for that matter, pissed-off alokhiu in dragon form. In fact, it sounded relaxing beyond belief. And so I turned my face towards my wounded shoulder while I shifted the hand Christopher wasn’t holding to the same spot, just enough to get it around the furry bulk of my cat.
Elessir’s fingers found mine. Though I sensed no answering magic in his touch, his grip was warm and sure as he squeezed my hand and then laid it, quite carefully, right over my shoulder. With that one small gesture, I felt the circumference of the light I was making expand.
How long I kept it up, I have no idea. I don’t remember Elessir ever telling me to stop. All I recall is that gentle flow of power, smoothing away the edges of my pain until it began to dissolve. Well, that—and I’m pretty sure as well that I heard him offering me something in the place of the magic he was still unable to summon. Soft syllables in the tongue of Faerie, words I still couldn’t understand, but I could and did respond to rhythm and cadence and pitch. Stripped of all artifice and seduction, his voice was still a thing of quicksilver and crystal.
I fell at last into deep, replenishing slumber, listening to Elessir sing.
* * *
When I woke up again, the candle by my bed had almost burned down. Fort had splayed his entire twenty-five-pound length across my belly and was letting out tiny, rattling kitty snores in his sleep. My shoulder still hurt, but the pain of it had dwindled down to a dull, bearable ache, no worse than if I’d just badly wrenched it. The rest of me was languid with weariness, though my head was clearer now. I wasn’t back up to speed yet, but now at least speed was in sight and possibly reachable after a couple of gallons of coffee and another week or two of sleep.
One other sound met my ears: Christopher’s bouzouki, quietly chiming against the silence as he plucked out a slow air. I lay there listening for a moment while his fingers slid like water along the strings and wove layers of chords every bit as comforting as my blankets and my cat. Then I murmured drowsily, “Hey there, beautiful.”
His hands froze on the instrument as his head snapped up. “Hey there, handsome,” he said, starting to smile, though the smile was as exhausted as his eyes. He was slouched in a chair someone must have brought in from the kitchen, since I didn’t keep chairs in my bedroom. The slouching didn’t look comfortable. In fact, it looked a minute or two away from ‘falling off the chair’.
“How long have I been out?” I couldn’t tell how many hours had passed since I’d been brought home. Turning my head to find out whether my bedside clock had power again, and therefore the ability to give me the time, smacked of effort. Regardless, I didn’t want to look at anything in the room but him. “Have you slept?”
Christopher pulled his phone from his jeans pocket, glanced at it, and reported, “You’ve been down about five hours. How’re you feeling, then?”
Producing a verdict on that took more concentration than it should have, which was an answer all by itself. “Limp,” I finally offered. I thought about it further, and then added, “Shoulder’s not so bad now.”
With care, Christopher leaned over to lay his bouzouki down out of my range of vision—presumably, his case was on the floor, though I wasn’t about to try to stir to look. Once his hands were free, he settled on the edge of the bed just beside me and laid a hand over my wounded shoulder. Much as Elessir had done, though I wasn’t about to note that out loud either. Unlike Elessir’s, his touch was warm with power. “It feels better,” he told me. “I wish I could fix it for you, Kenna.”
I lifted a hand to his cheek, and then higher, to his hair. “I know you’d fix everything for me in the world if you could.” Warders were like that, especially this one. “But you haven’t answered my second question.”
His mouth curled, tiredly wry. “That’d be because I’m not to agitate you. Jake’s orders, also Millicent’s.”
Which was pretty much what I’d expected. In my current state I couldn’t manage much of a punch, but I gave him a token tap to his chest nonetheless. And then I kept my hand there, just resting my palm against him, so I could feel the pulse of his heart. “I’ll be okay. So you should rest.” I paused. Then I finished, my voice small, “And I’m kind of lonely all by myself in this bed.”
“You’ve got the cat.”
He sounded teasing, and I could have replied in kind, but I didn’t have the brain for it. So I said instead, simply, “I’d rather have you.”
Did my voice shake on those four small words? Not that it would have been the slightest bit surprising if shock and reaction to everything that had happened since I’d been whisked off into Faerie were finally leaking out of me. But all I could tell was that I sounded hoarse, that I felt needy, and that Christopher’s expression abruptly gentled.
Without a word he picked up Fort, rousing the cat into a rumble of discontent, and dropped him lightly off the side of the bed. Then he drew the blanket aside and slid in beside me, pulling me with utmost care into his arms. The motion jarred my shoulder; I didn’t care. I burrowed into his embrace as he pulled the blanket back over us, and only after a few moments of losing myself in his warmth and his scent did I realize one of us was shaking. Maybe both.
“Please don’t ever do that to me again, Kenna,” Christopher whispered into my hair. “That’s two times now I thought I’d lost you. I don’t think I could take a third.”
“I swear to God, love, as long as it’s in my power, you’ll never have to.” My shoulder twinged as I tried to hug him properly. Stupid shoulder. I didn’t let it stop me though. “I won’t leave you.”
“Are you sure, lass? The bard… Elessir. He cares about you.” When I lifted my head in surprise, I found Christopher studying me moodily, his eyes gone the color of whiskey in the candlelight. “Did you think I hadn’t noticed? It was kind of hard to miss.”
Equal parts love, worry and hurt chased themselves through his voice, and here, I thought, was the thing that truly frightened him. My vanishing into Faerie and then getting possessed and shot before his eyes were not to be discounted—all of which had surely scared the hell out of me. But it seemed none of that had quite the same punch as the threat of losing to me to an Unseelie bard.
And so I kissed him, along his brow and each of his cheeks, until I came back at last to breathe against his lips, “I love you, Christopher Michael MacSimidh. I bargained with the Queen of the Unseelie for a shot at a life with you. Don’t you dare bail on me now just because okay, yeah, fine, Elessir’s a little less annoying than I previously thought.”
At that, Christopher let out a strangled bark of laughter. The worry in his eyes didn’t quite fade, though. “Lass, when… when she was in you, she made it clear you… have feelings for him.” He closed his eyes for a moment, set his jaw, and then looked at me again. “I’m not a big enough man not to be jealous. But I’m not a big enough asshole to force you to keep from choosing him if he’s what you want.”
Well. If this was going to be a question of reassurance, tired as I was, I was all at once sure of my ability to handle that. “May I call your attention to the number of individuals in this bed?
Two. Maximum capacity has now been reached, and I’m not about to shift anybody around when I’m finally getting comfortable. Besides…” My confidence faltered, but only a little, just enough to let my need come back into my voice. “That life with you I was talking about? I’d really like for it to start by you giving me tonight.”
His breath caught, and now at last, his face began to brighten. “Kenna, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I cracked an unsteady grin. “Do I really need to spell it out for you? I, ah, I’d gotten the feeling you wanted to take your time, but—”
Right over me, even before I’d finished speaking, Christopher blurted, “I had, but even before you disappeared I was dreaming o’ you and me—and then you were gone—” He cut himself off then, by way of laying a trail of kisses all around my face. Both his hands, his big lean musician’s hands, pressed in and slid intriguingly up and down my back and hips. When he came back up for air, he said, “Oh Jesus, girl, are you sure?”
For a single dismaying moment, even as I quivered at his contact, all I could think about was Jude—and what she’d told me of how it’d been for her when Melorite had claimed her body for her own. I’d already had a good idea of what she’d gone through then. I had an even better one now. Even with Christopher’s warmth surrounding me, even with the blanket cocooning us both, I felt unaccountably chilled. My muscles still remembered the alokhiu’s numbing cold soaking through me, not to mention the rowan dream that might have become my fate if I’d succumbed to Luciriel in Faerie. And which might, for all I knew, now wait for me some number of years down the road.
Did all the Sidhe do this, at least, all the ones with magic? Did they all use their gifts to ensnare those who weren’t as strong?
“I’m sure!” I practically screamed it, muffling the volume only by crying out the words right against Christopher’s neck. Then I caught myself and said it again, more gently, trembling in earnest now as I squeezed him with all my might. “I’m sure, love.” My last few words were on purpose, but the small, vulnerable tone in which I uttered them wasn’t part of the plan. I let them stand, anyway. “Help me remember this body’s mine. Please?”
“All right then.”
That was all Christopher said in reply. The shape of his embrace changed around me, protectiveness yielding to passion, while he resumed his evident quest to brush tantalizing kisses along every square inch of my face and throat. I did my best to respond in kind, and sent my fingers on a hunt for every button between his skin and mine.
What we did after that… well. We were both young, more or less in one piece, madly attracted to one another, and coming down off the adrenaline rush of a crisis that had almost destroyed the city and possibly also me. You’re smart people. I’m sure you can do the math. And I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I don’t go into details.
After all, sometimes a girl just needs her privacy.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It’s probably a measure of how much my life had changed in the last few months that I wasn’t terribly surprised by how fast I’d made my shoulder heal. Don’t get me wrong—on some level, I was absolutely tickled about it and had to resist the urge to make smug little jokes about mutant healing factors to myself, even if I made a much better Storm than I did a Wolverine. But that was only superficial. It took only three days for me to get back enough energy to do more than sleep or read, and by then, the place where I’d been shot settled down into a grumpy sort of stiffness that manifested only if I twisted the wrong way. That and a small puckered scar from the shotgun shell were the only souvenirs I had from what had gone down in Discovery Park.
Well… physically speaking, anyway.
I had nightmares, more than one, in which Melorite embraced me with arms of ice and turned me in slow pirouettes until I was dizzy with the need of her. Sometimes she kept me for herself, and kept me spinning until she was the only fixed point in my sight—and when I clung to her, my body dissolved into a ghostly shape of smoke and light. She breathed me in until I made her glow, suffusing her flesh with the stars that I had become.
Sometimes, though, she led me to Luciriel. That was even more frightening, for in the peacock-and-frost sight of the Unseelie Queen, I was laid bare. She had but to lift a hand, and I called forth my magic to shape myself at her whim. I made braids of my hair, and each braid became a flowering vine between my palms. In turn my hands changed to slender branches, and in languorous rapture I danced until my feet sank roots into the welcoming soil and I could move no more.
I was the Queen’s rowan, one with her forest of air and darkness, one with the Unseelie Court.
The first time that nightmare hit, I woke up screaming. After that Christopher began to spend the night at my house—not that I told him outright about the dreams, since I was skittish about admitting their existence to anybody, even myself. But with the house Wards being fueled by his power, I’m certain he just knew. Sleeping was easier after that, as long as I did it in his arms.
But he couldn’t stay glued to my side all day no matter how much we might have both wanted it. He had a city to Ward. And for that matter, for once I actually didn’t want him tagging along when I finally went in search of Millicent.
Seattle’s Warder First had made herself strangely scarce once it was clear I was out of danger. I never lacked for care, mind you. Jake’s healing abilities were still mostly mortal, but he kept after me to do careful, gentle exercises to work the stiffness from my shoulder. Thanks to the house brownies there wasn’t much in the way of household chores to do, but Aunt Aggie elected herself in charge of my meals—and cleaned my entire kitchen on general principle. How she worked around the brownies, she never said. But it would have taken a small nuclear device to dislodge her from my house, for which I was immeasurably grateful. She was after all the woman who’d raised me, my mother in almost all the ways that counted, though Elanna ana’Kirlath had been the one to give me life.
What I needed to fight off the dreams that haunted me, though, I could only get from Millie.
At any other time, I might have had to search the entire city for her. She’d always been prone to wander the streets, a habit she was passing down to Christopher—for Warders indeed walked their cities. Yet she did have a house, a fact I tended to forget along with the fact that she had a car. On the fourth day after the battle in the park, several hours into the morning and long after the daily walking of the Wards, I followed a niggling little instinct to that house.
It was raining again when I arrived, a blessedly normal Seattle rain, barely more than a drizzling mist and not even worth the trouble of an umbrella. Not that my shoulder appreciated the weather. The damp chill of November nipped at the air, aggravating the ache in my flesh even as I appreciated the walk from the bus stop to Millicent’s front steps.
As I came up those steps, Millicent opened her front door. I paused halfway up the concrete steps, caught between pleasure that I’d been right to seek her here and concern at how gray and worn she looked. Still, her eyes were alert as ever as she beckoned me inside. “You look like a drowned cat, girlie,” she said. “Get in here and let me put something hot into you.”
“You don’t have to tell me that twice,” I admitted as I stepped inside. Coat and hat hooks hung just inside the front door. I began to shrug out of my raincoat… only to have my shoulder complain halfway through. But I didn’t miss the old Warder’s tight little grimace. Or how she suddenly seemed unable to meet my eyes. “Look, Millie. You must know why I’m here, so let’s get this out of the way—for the record, I’m not mad at you for having to shoot me.”
She smiled a little while briskly moving to help me the rest out of the way out of the raincoat. Because of that sadness lurking in her eyes, I let her. “I’m glad, honey,” she said. “Because I really didn’t like having to do that. I never have.”
“I didn’t like having it done.” I offered her a crooked smile of my own and hugged her with the arm that wasn’t curr
ently griping at me. Then I studied her, smile fading. “Wait, you had to shoot somebody before? Do I want to know?”
Millicent pushed me in the general direction of her kitchen, which wasn’t exactly far. Her house was smaller even than my half of the duplex I shared with Jake and Carson, and in a few short steps I was through her tiny living room and taking a seat at her kitchen table. I couldn’t resist a few peeks around, since I’d never set foot in the place before. What I’d expected… well, even knowing Millicent as I did, I’d half-expected the place to smell like an old lady’s house. It didn’t. It smelled like the dozens and dozens of books she had on the shelves that lined almost every wall in sight. It smelled like a breeze wafting in from outside; she must have cracked open a window somewhere in the house, to air it out. And it smelled like the pot of good black tea she had near her stove, from which she filled two cups as I sat down. Next to those, she set a jar of sugar and a small porcelain pitcher of cream.
The tea helped make the kitchen seem homelier. Still, as Millie sat down across from me at the table, sipping at her tea, her dark look didn’t ease up. “To answer your questions in reverse order, probably not, and yes, I do. Or at least I can make a damned good guess. Luciriel, am I right?”
I nodded, and my hands shook a little as I added sugar and cream to my tea. “Do you know if there’s anything I can do?”
My words came out small and plaintive, shaking a little, like my fingers. The tea helped, and I drank it readily, but as soon as I spoke I felt myself tear up a bit. Just asking that question, with all that it implied… God. That was hard.
Compassion welled up in Millicent’s eyes, not exactly dimming her sadness, but at least offsetting it somewhat. Without warning, she reached over to clasp my nearest hand. “If it helps, honey, from what you told me, you struck the best possible bargain you could. It got you back to us intact. It got Luciriel to reaffirm her commitment to the Pact—and she may be scary as hell, but if she promised this, she’ll keep her word. And it gave us a way to save the city.”
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