A Stroke Of Midnight

“Good to be awake.” I frowned around at the room. “Though a little more light would be nice.” The light that was everywhere and nowhere in most of the sithen began to seep through the room.

“My, my, my,” Rhys said.

“What?” I asked.

“When the lights went out in your room, the entire sithen went dark,” Doyle said.

“Nothing we did could get the lights back on,” Rhys said.

I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat. “Until…”

“Until you requested a little more light,” Rhys said. “Yeah, the queen is going to have mixed feelings about the sithen’s new affection for you.”

“Mixed how?” I asked.

“Happy you’re so powerful, pissed that the sithen isn’t listening to her anymore.”

I licked my dry lips.

“Enough of this until after they’ve eaten.” Doyle called for the food to be brought in. Kitto came with a tray, and others followed behind with drink. Frost came as the first of the guards that just carried weapons. He looked at me, and gave me a smile that seemed to be reserved just for me. If he had any of Doyle’s qualms about the new “tattoos” of power, they did not show. Maybe he was simply too relieved to see me awake. Or perhaps he worried less about power than Doyle did. Or maybe I didn’t understand my two men as much as I thought I did. Me, not understanding the men in my life? That I believed.

CHAPTER 37

THE STEW WAS THICK WITH BEEF, THE BROTH DARK AND HEAVY with a faint tang of some meaty ale to balance the sweetness of the onions. Maggie May knew my favorite dishes, and this one had been on the list since before my father and I left faerie for the human world, when I was six. My eyes got hot, and my throat tight. It was the same stew it had always been, and it was nice to have something that hadn’t changed, something that was the same as it had always been.

“Merry,” Galen said, “are you crying?”

I shook my head, then nodded.

He put his butterfly-free arm around my shoulders, hugging me close. I must have bent over too much, because the moth on my stomach fluttered frantically. The feel of it struggling in my skin made the good stew roll uneasily. I sat up very straight. I had good posture, but until the moth was truly a tattoo, no slumping.

“Do you hurt?” Doyle asked.

I shook my head.

“You flinched,” he said.

“The moth didn’t like me slumping,” I said. My voice was much steadier than my eyes. My voice didn’t sound like I was crying, not one little bit.

Kitto moved between the table he’d set up, and raised his finger to my face. He came away with a tear shining on the tip of his finger. He raised it to his lips, and licked my tear from his skin.

It made me smile, and the tears fell a little faster because of it, as if I’d been holding my eyes very still to keep the tears from falling. “The stew is one of my favorite dishes. It hasn’t changed. Everything else is changing, and I’m no longer certain that all the changes will be good.”

I leaned into the warmth of Galen’s body, and gazed at the others. I suddenly knew what I wanted. “Kiss me,” I said.

“Who are you speaking to?” Frost asked.

“All of you.”

Galen bent down toward me, and I raised my face to him. His lips touched mine, and my body moved of its own volition. My arms swept up his body, and we embraced as we kissed. My hands explored the naked warmth of his body, not as foreplay, but because twice in less than a day I had thought the darkness would take one or both of us, and we would never again hold each other this side of the grave.

We kissed, and his hands were strong and gentle on my body, and the tears came faster.

Galen broke the kiss first, but hugged me tighter, and said, “Merry, Merry, don’t cry.”

“Let her cry,” Rhys said. “To have a woman waste tears over you is not a bad thing.” He stepped up to me, where I still sat on the edge of the bed. He wiped my face with his good hand. “Are any of these tears for me?”

I nodded wordlessly, and touched his arm in its sling. He wiggled the fingers a little. “It will heal.”

I nodded again. “I sent you out into the snow, and didn’t even say good-bye.”

He frowned at me, his one good eye perplexed. “You don’t love me enough to shed tears at the thought of missing our last good-bye.” He wiped fresh tears away with his hand, still frowning.

I searched his face, the scars that had stolen his eye long before I was born. I traced the lines of those marks in his skin. I put a hand on either side of his shoulders, and drew him close to me, until I could lay a kiss upon the smoothness of the scar where his other eye should have been.

The thought that he was right, that I didn’t love him that much, made me cry harder, though I wasn’t sure why. It just seemed wrong. Wrong that I sent him out into the dark and the cold, and hadn’t cared enough to say good-bye. If someone’s willing to die for you, shouldn’t you care? Shouldn’t it matter more than that?

I moved my face back enough to kiss him gently on the lips. He came to that kiss still puzzled, hesitating, so that even as we kissed, his body was stiff and uneasy. I balled my hands into the cloth of his suit jacket, pulling him down to me, forcing him to catch himself on the bed with his one hand.

I kissed him as if I would climb inside him. He responded to the fierceness of my mouth with his own. He let me pull him down onto the bed, onto me, though he was awkward with the one arm in a sling. His body pressed against me, but it was as if his clothes offended me. I wanted bare flesh. I needed to feel his nakedness against me. To let me know he was real, and all right. That he was all right with being third in command. With not being my greatest love, and still having to risk his life as if he was. I wanted to hold him and tell him I was sorry that my heart didn’t have room for everyone, and most of all that he could have died out there in the dark and the cold, and we would never have known. That I wouldn’t have known. The Goddess had warned me to protect Galen and Barinthus. But it was as if Rhys wasn’t important enough to her to waste such power.

I would never be able to send him away again without wondering if I sent him to his death. I pulled his shirt out of his pants. I had to touch more of him. I had to tell him with my hands and my body that he did mean something to me. That I did see him. That I never wanted him to die in the dark where I could not find him.

He propped himself up on his good arm, so that I could slide the shirt free. I meant to run my hands over that pale skin, but Rhys let himself fall back upon my body, pressing his mouth hungrily against mine. I’d forgotten the moth. I’d forgotten everything but the feel of his body pressed against mine.

Pain, sharp and immediate like tiny needles, pierced the skin of my stomach. Rhys cursed, and drew back from me, as if something had bitten him, and maybe it had.

He raised up on his knees, and showed his stomach. It looked like a bloody version of the moth on my stomach. He touched it, and it was flat, one-dimensional. The skin around the outline and colors was ridged and red, puffy and swollen, but I could see the image of the moth on his stomach.

The other men crowded round, and it was Galen who asked, “It’s not the same thing we have, is it?”

“No.” Doyle touched it ever so gently, and even that made Rhys flinch.

“Ow,” Rhys said.

Doyle smiled. “Either the moth did not like being crushed or…”

“Yes,” Frost said.

“It ca

“It ca

“A calling.” Doyle was pulling his black T-shirt out of his pants. I was about to point out that he’d never get the shirt off without taking his shoulder holster off first, but he raised the neck of the shirt over his head so that it sat behind his shoulders, still covering his arms, but leaving his chest and stomach bare.