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Inside my head, I could finally admit, it was Doyle I most needed to survive. I loved Rhys, but not like I loved Doyle. I let myself own that. I let myself admit, at least inside my own head, that if Doyle died, part of me would die as well. It had been the moment at the car, when he’d shoved Frost and me inside and given me to Frost. “If not me, it must be you,” he’d said to Frost. I loved Frost, too, but I’d had my revelation. If I could have chosen my king this moment, I knew who it would be.
Pity that I wasn’t the one doing the choosing.
Figures started toward us, and the goblins parted to form a corridor for my guards. When I finally recognized that tall, dark figure, something in my chest eased, and I was suddenly crying. I started walking toward him, then. I didn’t feel the frozen grass under my bare feet. I didn’t feel when broken stubble cut me. Then I was ru
Doyle wasn’t alone; dogs, huge black dogs milled around his legs. Suddenly I remembered a vision I’d had of him with dogs like this, and the ground tilted under my feet, vision and reality melding before my eyes. The dogs reached me first, pressing warm muscled fur against me where I knelt, their great panting breath hot on my face as I held my hands out to touch them. Their black fur ran with a tingling rush of magic.
The bodies writhed under my hand, the fur growing less coarse, smoothing, the bodies less dense. I looked up into the face of a racing hound, white and sleek, with ears a shining red. The other hound’s face was half red and half white, as if some hand had drawn a line down the center of it. I’d never seen anything so beautiful as that face.
Then Doyle was standing in front of me, and I threw myself into his arms. He lifted me off the ground and hugged me so hard it almost hurt. But I wanted him to hold me hard. I wanted to feel the reality of his body against me. I wanted to know he was alive. I needed to touch him to know it was true. I needed him to touch me, and let me know that he was still my Darkness, still my Doyle.
He whispered into my hair, “Merry, Merry, Merry.”
I clung to him, wordless, and wept.