A Lick Of Frost

CHAPTER 12

WE WERE MET BY A BOIL OF BODIES AT THE DOOR TO THE BIG house. Dogs, faerie hounds, met us with barks, bays, yips, and noises that sounded like they were trying to talk. Since they were supernatural in origin I wouldn't have put it past them.

There were so many dogs trying to greet so many different masters at the door that we couldn't move forward. As dogs will, they were acting as if we had been gone days instead of only hours. My hounds were like greyhounds, but not quite. There were differences in the head, the ears, the line of body from shoulders to tail, but they had that muscled grace. In color they were white, a pure, shining white like my own skin, but with marks of red, again like my own hair. Mi

Some of the larger hounds looked like Irish wolfhounds had, before they'd gotten mixed with anything less beefy. There were only a few of them among the greyhounds, but the few towered over everything else like mountains rising above a plain. Some had rough coats, some smooth, but all were a variation of red and white. Then you had the terriers that spilled around our ankles. They, too, were mostly white and red, except for a few who were black and brown. The old black and tan, brought back to existence by wild magic, was the breed that most of the modern terriers are descended from.

Rhys had the most terriers, but then he was a god of death, or had been. Our people see the land of the dead as an underground place, most of the time, so the fact that he had earth dogs was logical. He didn't seem to mind that he had none of the graceful hounds, or the huge war dogs. He knelt in the mass of barking, growling dogs, all so much smaller, and glowed with the joy that all of us showed. We had always been a people who honored our animals. They had been much missed.

There was one other exception to the color of the dogs — Doyle's hounds. They were not as tall as the wolfhounds, but meatier, black muscle over bone. They were the original shape the dogs had come to us in, black dogs, what the Christians called hellhounds. But they had nothing to do with the devil. They were the black dogs, the black of void and nothing from which comes life. Before there is light, there must be darkness.

Doyle tried to walk unaided but stumbled. Frost gave his strong arms to his friend. Strangely, there was no dog to greet Frost. He and only a few others had touched the black dogs but they had not changed into some other hound for them.

None of us knew why, but I knew it bothered Frost. He feared, I think, that it was a sure sign that he was not enough to be truly sidhe. Once he had been the hoarfrost, Jack Frost, and now he was my Killing Frost, but there was always that insecurity that he was not born sidhe, but made.

Hovering above the sea of dogs were small winged fey; the demi-fey. To be wingless among them was a mark of great shame. All that had followed me into exile had been wingless until I brought new magic back to faerie. Pe

I waved back. To be greeted like this by a cloud of demi-fey and our dogs was an honor I never thought I would have.

I offered to help Frost with Doyle, but Doyle refused. He wouldn't even look at me. His supposed «weakness» had cut him deeply. One of the big black dogs pushed at me and gave a soft growl. Mungo and Mi

My hounds were capable of protecting me if they had to, but against the black dogs they looked fragile. I stroked their heads. Mungo leaned against my leg, and the weight was comforting. I wanted nothing more than a nap with my dogs on the floor by the bed, or at the door. Not all my men liked a furry audience, and sometimes neither did I. Regardless, we had one more task to do before we could rest.

We called my aunt, Andais, Queen of Air and Darkness, as soon as we got inside. I would have put Doyle and Abe to bed immediately, but Doyle had pointed out that if someone else told the queen before we did that I had been offered her rival's throne she might view it as treason. She might view it as me jumping ship. Andais didn't take rejection, any type of rejection, well.

She was already fairly pissed that so many of her most devoted guards had dumped her for me. I didn't see it as dumping her for me. I saw it as them choosing a chance for sex after centuries of forced celibacy. For that, most men would have gone to any woman. It helped that I wasn't a sexual sadist and Auntie Andais was, but that, too, was a fact best not shared.

Doyle had insisted on being present for the call. He wanted her to see what Taranis had done. I think he thought the visual aid would cut through her usual fits of temper. She was more stable than Taranis, but there were moments when my aunt didn't seem entirely sane. Would she like this unexpected news or hate it? I honestly didn't know.

Doyle sat on the edge of my bed. I sat beside him. Rhys sat on my other side. He'd jokingly said, "You promised me sex, but I know you, you'll get distracted unless I stay by your side." It was a joke with some bite in it for Rhys and me. But Doyle said yes to his staying with us too quickly. It let me know that my Darkness was hurt worse than he'd let on.

Frost stood at the corner of the bed. It's easier to go for a weapon when you are standing.

Galen stood beside him. He'd insisted on being included in the call, and nothing anyone had said could dissuade him. In the end it had been easier to just give in. Galen's arguments that we needed at least one more able-bodied guard on the call had some merit. But I think he, like me, wasn't sure what Andais would do with the news from the Seelie Court. He was afraid for me, and I was afraid for us all.

Abe lay on the far side of the bed. He hadn't wanted to be included, but hadn't argued with Doyle's order. I think Abe was afraid of Andais. Of course, so was I.

Rhys moved to the mirror. His hand was close to the glass, but not quite touching it. "Everybody ready?" he asked.

I nodded. Doyle said "Yes."

"No," Abe said, "but my vote doesn't count, apparently."

Frost just said, "Do it."

Galen just watched the mirror with eyes that were a little too bright. It wasn't magic, it was nerves.

Rhys touched the mirror, using such a small piece of magic that I didn't even feel it. The mirror was cloudy for a moment, then the black bedroom of the queen appeared. But she was not there. Her huge black-draped bedspread was empty except for a pale male figure.

He lay on his stomach across the black fur and sheets. His skin wasn't just white, or even moonlight skin like mine, but so pale it had a translucent quality to it. It was what skin would have looked like if it could be formed of crystal. Except that this crystal was cut with long crimson slashes on arms and legs. She'd left his back and buttocks untouched, which probably meant the cuts were for persuasion and not torture. Andais liked to go for the center of the body when she was causing pain for the sake of pain.

The blood shimmered in the lights, again with a jewel quality that I'd never seen in blood before. The man's hair spread to one side of his body, catching the light in small prism rainbows. He was so still that for a moment I thought there was some awful wound we could not see. Then I saw his chest rise and fall. He lived. He was hurt, but he lived.

I whispered his name, "Crystall."

He turned, slowly, obviously in pain. He laid his cheek against the fur underneath him, and stared at us with eyes that looked empty, as if there was no hope left. It hurt my heart to see that look in his eyes.

Crystall hadn't been a lover of mine, but he had fought with us in faerie. He had helped defend Galen when he might otherwise have died. The queen had decreed that all the guards who wished could follow me into exile and then too many of them had opted to come, so she had had to take back her generous offer. The men who had left were safe with me. The men who had not been in the first few groups that Sholto, Lord of that Which Passes Between, had brought to Los Angeles had been trapped in faerie with her. Trapped with a woman who didn't take rejection well, when they'd openly chosen another woman. I was seeing what the other woman, my aunt, thought about that.

I reached out toward the mirror, as if I could touch him, but it wasn't one of my powers. I could not do what Taranis had done so easily earlier today.

"Princess," Crystall whispered, and his voice was hoarse, roughened. I knew why his voice sounded like that. Screaming will do that. I knew because I had been at the queen's mercy more than once. The queen's mercy had become a saying among the Unseelie sidhe, as in, "I'd rather be at the queen's mercy than do that."

Andais had seen exile from faerie as worse than any torture she could devise. She did not understand why so many of her fey had chosen it. Just as she hadn't understood why my father, Essus, took me and our household into exile in the human world after Andais tried to drown me at six years of age. If I was mortal enough to die by drowning, then I wasn't sidhe enough to be allowed to live. Sort of the way you'd drown a puppy that your purebred bitch dropped after you realized it wasn't the mating of your dreams, but some mongrel that had gotten inside the fence.

Andais had been shocked when my father left faerie to raise me among the humans, and she had been equally shocked when, many years later, nearly her entire guard would have followed me into the Western lands. For her, to leave faerie was worse than death, and she couldn't understand why it wasn't a fate worse than death to everyone else. What she failed to understand was that the queen's mercy had become a fate even worse than exile.

I stared into Crystall's luminous, hopeless eyes, and my throat tightened around the tears that I knew I could not afford to shed. Andais had left us a present to look at, but she'd be watching, and she would see tears as weakness. Crystall was her visual aid. Her example to us, to me. I wasn't certain what the message was supposed to be, but in her mind there was one. But, Goddess help me, other than her jealousy and hatred of rejection I couldn't see any message here.

"Oh, Crystall," I said. "I am sorry."