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I screamed, "Jeremy!"
Alistair and I fought over where my hands were, and I glimpsed the mirror. It was full of grey, swirling fog. It shivered, rippling like water. It bowed out like a bubble. It was only then that I knew that the magician was sidhe. He or she was hiding themselves from me, but the mirrors, that was sidhe magic. Then Alistair won the fight and slipped the tip of himself inside me. I cried out, and it was half protest and half pleasure. My mind didn't want this, but the oil still rode my body. I screamed, "No!" but my hips twitched under him, trying to help him slide inside me. I wanted, needed him to be inside me, to feel his naked body inside of mine. Still, I screamed "No!"
Alistair flinched and pulled out of me the small distance he'd won, rising to his knees, brushing at his back. He came away with a small smear of crimson. He'd crushed the spider. Another small black spider crawled down his arm. He batted it away. Two more spiders crawled over his shoulders. He tried to touch the middle of his back and turned like a dog chasing its tail, and I saw his back. The skin had split open, and a wave of tiny black spiders poured out. They swarmed over him like black water, a moving, biting second skin. He screamed, clawing at his back, crushing some of them, but there were always more, until he was a moving mass of them. They poured into his open mouth as he shrieked, and he choked, and still he screamed.
All the mirrors were pulsing, breathing, the glass stretching out and in like something elastic and alive. I heard a man's voice in my head: "Get under the bed, now." 1 didn't argue. I rolled off the bed and crawled under it. The red sheets spilled down over the edge, hiding everything but a thin sliver of light.
There was a sound of breaking glass, like a thousand windows breaking all at once. Alistair's screams vanished under the sound of falling glass. The glass burst on the carpet like brittle hail, a tinkling, sharp sound.
Silence filled the room by degrees, as the glass settled over the room. There was a sound of splintering wood. I couldn't see it, but 1 thought it was the door. "Merry, Merry!" It was Jeremy.
Roane yelled, "Merry, dear God."
I crawled to the edge of the bed and lifted the rim of the sheet to see the floor glittering silver. I called, "I'm here. I'm here." I reached my hand out from under the bed, waving it, but unable to move farther without getting cut on the glass.
A hand gripped mine, and someone laid a suit jacket over the glass so that Roane could pull me out from under the bed. It wasn't until he was cradling me in his arms that I realized I was still covered in Branwyn's Tears, and what that might mean for us. But I'd gotten a glimpse of what lay on the bed, and it stole the words from my mouth. I think I forgot to breathe for a second or two.
Roane carried me toward the door. I stared back over his shoulder at what lay on the bed. I knew it was a man. I even knew it was Alistair Norton, but if I hadn't known what I was looking at, I'm not sure I'd have known it was human. The shape was as crimson as the sheets it lay on. The glass had turned him into so much raw meat. I couldn't see the spiders under all that blood. I knew two things, maybe three. First, the magician on the other end of the spell was sidhe; second, he or she had tried to kill me; third, if it wasn't for Jeremy getting a spell through the ward, I'd be just a smaller red lump on the blood-soaked bed. I owed Jeremy a very big favor.
Chapter 6
THE POLICE WOULDN'T LET ME SHOWER. THEY WOULDN'T EVEN LET ME wash my hands. Four hours after Roane carried me out of the bedroom, I was still trying to explain to the police exactly what had happened to Alistair Norton. I wasn't having much luck. No one believed my version of events. They'd all watched the tape, and they still didn't believe me. I think the only reason I hadn't been charged with Alistair's murder was that I'd been outed as Princess Meredith NicEssus. They knew and I knew that all I had to do was claim diplomatic immunity and I could walk out the door. So they were taking their time about charges.
What they didn't know was that I was almost as eager to avoid bringing in the diplomats as they were. Once I claimed diplomatic immunity, they'd contact the Board of Human-Fey Relations. They would contact the ambassador to the sidhe courts. The ambassador would contact the Queen of Air and Darkness. He'd tell her exactly where I was. Knowing my aunt, she'd tell them to keep me "safe" until her guard could arrive to bring me back home. I'd be trapped like a rabbit in a snare until someone came along to snap my neck and take me home like a prize.
I sat at the small table with a glass of water in front of me. I had a blanket that the paramedics had given me draped over the back of the chair. The blanket had been to keep me warm in case of shock and to cover the ruined front of my dress. I'd spent part of the last few hours being cold and needing the blanket, but the rest of the time it was as if my blood ran hot. I was either shivering or almost sweating, a combination of shock and Branwyn's Tears. Going from one extreme to the other had given me an amazing headache. No one would get me anything for the headache because they were all pla
I'd still been glowing softly when the first police backups had arrived. I wouldn't be able to do glamour as long as the oil was in my system. So I couldn't hide. Some of the first uniforms recognized me; one of them had said, "You're Princess Meredith." The soft California night had taken a breath around us, and I knew it was only a matter of time until the Queen of Air and Darkness sent someone to investigate this latest whisper. I had to be out of town before that happened. I had at least one more night, maybe two, before my aunt's guard would arrive. I had time to sit here and answer questions. But I was getting tired of answering the same questions.
So why was I still sitting in the hard-backed chair, looking across a small table at a detective I'd never met before? First, even if I walked out of here without being charged or claiming diplomatic immunity, they would contact the politicians. They'd do it to cover their asses. Second, I wanted Detective Alvera to believe me about Branwyn's Tears and just how serious it would be if there was more of the oil out there. Probably it was a gift from whatever sidhe had set up the leech spell. The one bottle may have been all anyone outside the courts had. That was the best-case scenario. But if there was even the slightest chance that humans, with or without sidhe help, had figured out how to manufacture Branwyn's Tears and it was out on the market, then it had to be stopped.
Of course, there was another possibility. The sidhe that set Norton up in his little magic-rape scam might have been giving Branwyn's Tears to lots of others. This was probably the more likely of the two worst-case scenarios, but I couldn't tell the police that another sidhe had been involved with Alistair Norton. You do not take sidhe business to the human police, not if you want to keep all your body parts attached.
Police are good at smelling lies, or maybe, to save time, they just assume everyone is lying. Whatever the reason, Detective Alvera didn't like my story. He sat across from me, tall, dark, slender, with hands that looked too big for his narrow shoulders. His eyes were a solid brown with a fringe of dark lashes that made you notice them, or maybe that was just me tonight. Jeremy had laid a warding over me to help me control the Tears. He'd traced runes across my forehead with his finger and his power. Nothing visible to the police, but I could feel them like a cold fire if I concentrated. Without Jeremy's spell, Goddess knew what I'd have done by now. Something embarrassing and slutty. Even protected by the runes I was very aware of all the men in the room.