Страница 71 из 81
I kept my eyes closed and moved my hands upward, to find very short hair, and the roughness of the begi
I had a moment of relief so complete that I half fell onto the body. It wasn't Doyle. He wasn't dead. I let myself collapse onto the body. I hugged it to me, my hands searching for the uniform, the weapons they hadn't even bothered to remove. Such disdain, such arrogance.
Dawson knelt on one side of me, and Jonty came to the other. "I am so sorry, Princess Meredith," Dawson said, touching my back.
"The Darkness was a great warrior," Jonty said in his deep voice.
I shook my head, pushing myself up from the body. "It's not him. It's not Doyle. It's an illusion."
"What?" Dawson said.
"Then why are you crying?" Jonty asked.
I hadn't even realized I was crying, but he was right. "Relief, I think," I said.
"Why are they holding the glamour in place to make it look like Darkness?" Jonty asked.
Until that moment I hadn't thought about it, but he was absolutely right. Why would they not drop an illusion guaranteed to make me angrier at them if they were truly giving up? Answer: they weren't giving up, and they hoped to gain something through the trick. But what?
Jonty helped me to my feet, his hand so large that it encircled my upper arm with his hand almost in a fist, as if he could have wrapped his hand around me over and over.
He kept moving me over the frozen ground away from the glamour-hidden body. "What's wrong?" Dawson asked.
"Mayhap nothing, but I do not like it."
I started to say "Jonty," but never got it out. It wasn't the sound of the bomb that hit first; it was the physical push of the explosion. The rush of energy hit us before the sound so that we had a moment of being hit. Then Jonty was cradling me, hiding me against his body, and only then did the sound hit, a sound that rocked the world and deafened me. It was like getting hit twice by something huge and angry. I'd heard stories that giants could be invisible, and this was like that. It seemed wrong that something so powerful could be so unseen. That something so destructive could be merely chemicals and metal. There was something so alive about it, as it drove us to the ground, and smashed the world around us.