Swallowing Darkness

"Can it heal the Red Caps?" Doyle asked.

"They're metal," I said.

"They are dying, Meredith. I don't think it will hurt them now," Rhys said. One of his arms was in a sling, and the sleeve of his uniform was blackened.

Mistral's coat was a blackened ruin across his back. Had Taranis himself attacked with his Seelie warriors? I realized that Sholto was still missing.

"Where's Sholto?"

Doyle dropped his hand from my face, and answered me while turning away. "Sholto is well. The sluagh came to his call. It is all that saved us from Taranis and his men. They fled from the sluagh."

I grabbed Doyle's arm with my free hand. The other was squeezed tightly in Galen's hand. There was too much happening, and I didn't know how to cope with it all. But I knew one thing; I didn't want Doyle's face to look like that.

He turned and looked at me, but his face was that old unreadable darkness, only his eyes flinching around the edges. Now I knew what that little flinch meant.

"I want to wrap you around me like a coat, and cover you in kisses, but we have wounded to save. But do not doubt what I feel for you, even in the midst of this." The first hard tear slid down my cheek. "I thought you were dead, and... "

Galen's hand dropped away, and Doyle wrapped me in his arms. I clung to him as if his hands on my body were air and food, and everything I needed to live.

I heard Rhys say, "Come on, Dawson, let's see if those little nails will help Jonty."

I wanted to melt into Doyle's kiss and never come up for air, but there was duty. There was always duty, and some horror that had to be fought, or healed, or... Everyone thinks they want an extraordinary life, but you don't. When standing knee-deep in yet another disaster, ordinary begins to look very good.

We broke apart, and he led me to Jonty's side. Dawson was already kneeling on the ground. He held the nail that had come out of me when I healed him. He held it point down above one of the wounds.

"We'll have to get the shrapnel out of his body first," Rhys said.

"It didn't work that way for us," Dawson said.

"How did it work?" I asked, my arm wrapped around Doyle's lean waist, the strength of him beside me almost too good to be real.

Galen was carefully not looking at Doyle and me. I realized that he had come to me first. That he had swept me off my feet, and though I had been glad to see him, it hadn't been the feelings I had had for Doyle. It simply hadn't. I couldn't change how my heart felt, not even to save the feelings of one of my best friends.

"Like this," Dawson said, and he began to pass the nail over Jonty's wounds, point down, as if he were invisibly carving something. My hand tingled. The mark of blood on my palm tingled.

I stepped away from Doyle. He tried to catch my hand, but I drew it away before he could touch it. Somehow I wasn't sure that him touching the hand of blood while it was itching to be used would be a good thing. I didn't entirely understand what was happening, but I didn't question the urge to step up and drop to my knees beside Dawson.

I spoke words without willing them, as if the universe had been waiting for me to speak them, and with each word, it was as if time itself let out a breath that it had been holding. "You call me with blood and metal. What would you have of me?"

Dawson looked at me, and his lips moved, but it was as if he too wasn't in complete control of what he said. "Heal him, Meredith. I ask this with blood and metal and the magic you have given to this flesh."

"So be it," I said, and I spread my hand over Jonty's back. My skin ran with heat, as if the blood in my body was turning to molten metal. There was a moment of almost unbearable pain, then blood fountained upward from Jonty's body. Metal rained upward, expelled from the body with the blood.

Jonty came to with a gasp. But the blood kept pouring out. I scrambled back from him, and Dawson came with me. The blood slowed, but though the metal was out, the wounds were not healing.

Jonty turned his head with obvious effort, and said, "You call my blood, My Queen. You cleanse me of the human metal. I die for you, and I am content."

I shook my head. "I don't want you to die for me, Jonty. I want you to live."

"Some things are not meant to be, Princess," he said.

"It looks like it's a good thing we didn't come when the call first hit us, or we might be dying too," said a voice from the dark. I turned and found the goblin twins, Ash and Holly. In the dark you could have mistaken them for full-blooded sidhe, so tall and straight, only a little more bulky in the muscles, but hitting the gym a little harder could explain that away. Their yellow hair was a little short, just touching their shoulders. If it had been longer, they could have indeed passed for sidhe.

It was too dark to see that Ash's eyes were a solid green like the leaf of the tree he was named after, and Holly's eyes were the scarlet of winter berries. Only the solid color of their eyes with no whites truly betrayed their goblin blood.

"I did not call to you," I said.

"Your magic calls to the Red Caps, and our father's blood is in us," Ash said.

"I hate that your white-fleshed magic calls to us," Holly said.

They nodded in unison. "We hate that your hand of blood calls to us as if we were Red Caps. We are Seelie, and you have helped us understand that there is more to us than goblin blood, but yet your power calls to us as if we are lesser things," Ash said.

"For me, it was enough that your magic in Los Angeles made me a more powerful goblin, but I thought it would make me what the goblins had once been," Holly said. "But, even I, even we, are still less, or your magic would not pull at us like a dog to its master's whistle." His voice was bitter.

"Would you let them die for pride's sake?" I asked.

"We are goblins," Holly said. "We do not heal anything. We slaughter and destroy. It is what we are, and the treaty that brought us to America so long ago stole us away from ourselves. There is no room for goblins anymore."

I stumbled as I got to my feet, stepping on the hem of my coat. Holly laughed at me, but I didn't care. I knew something. I got it. Knew it; understood it. I wasn't even certain in that moment what "it" was, but the compulsion of it moved me toward the twins. It kept me walking across the winter grass, the frosted weeds making a dry sound against the leather of my coat.

Doyle came to my side. "Have a care, my Merry."

He was right to be cautious, but the feeling inside me was right, too. The scent of flowers rode the air, as if a breath of summer's heat trickled across the cold moonlight.

Rhys came to our side and touched Doyle's arm. "The Goddess is near, Doyle. It will be all right."

I kissed Doyle first, and he had to bend down to help me do it, then I kissed Rhys. He looked at me, and there was sadness on his face. But it was not a sadness that I could fix. I could only kiss him gently on the lips, and let him know that I saw him and appreciated him, but nothing that either of us could do would make me love him the way I loved Doyle or Frost. That it pained him pained me, but not enough to change it.

I walked the rest of the way alone. Ash and Holly stood in front of me. They tried to look arrogant or hostile — their handsome faces were made for both — but under all of it was uncertainty. I made them rethink themselves, and neither sidhe nobles nor goblin warriors are accustomed to rethinking anything. Their sense of rightness is absolute in most things. I gazed into their eyes, and wasn't sure what was about to happen, but as the scent of roses grew stronger on the cold air, I knew the Goddess was coming. The scent of roses mingled with the rich scent of herbs and leaves, as if we stood on the edge of some forest glade.

"Do you smell flowers?" Holly asked.

"I smell forest," Ash said. "A forest like nothing in this land."

"What are you doing to us?" Holly asked.

"You wanted to be sidhe." I held my hands out to them.

"Yes," Ash said.

"No," Holly said.

I smiled at Holly. "You both want power, don't you?"

"Yes," Holly said, his voice a little reluctant.

"Then each of you take my hands."

"What happens if we do?" Ash asked.

I smiled, then I laughed, and the scent of roses and the sensation of summer sun on my skin was so real that it was almost dizzying to have my eyes see the winter's dark.

"I don't know what will happen," I said, and that was the truth.

"Then why should we do it?" Ash asked.

"Because if you let the smell of summer and autumn fade, if you miss this moment of power, you will always wonder what would have happened if you took my hands."

The brothers looked at each other. They had a moment between them made up of years of scheming, fighting, surviving, all come to this second, this choice.

"She's right," Ash said.

"It is a sidhe trick," Holly said.

"Probably," he said, then he smiled.

Holly gri

"Yes."

Holly reached out, and Ash echoed him. They reached out for my hands as if they'd practiced the movement. Their fingers tingled power down my skin, and it must have felt the same for them, because Holly started to draw back.

Ash said, "Don't stop, Holly."

"This is a bad idea, brother," he repeated.

"This is power," Ash said, "and I want it."

Holly hesitated a heartbeat longer, then his hand moved with his brother's so that they took my hands in theirs in echoing moves. "I've followed you all my life," he said. "I won't stop now."

Then the field and the winter's cold were gone, and we stood in a circle of standing stones on a wide plain under a full moon and a summer's spill of stars.