Mistral's Kiss

I threw that warmth, that weight of power against our enemies. I called their blood by the flash of lightning and the flicker of green-gold flame. I called their blood and knew that the Red Caps at my back bled with them. I could feel it. The ones who waited ahead of us bled, too.

A goblin came ru

Now I understood why he was abasing himself—he had been afraid I'd take the message badly.

"Tell them I'll aim better," I said wryly.

He ducked his head, bumping his forehead to the earth, then sprang to his feet and raced back the way he had come. I drew my magic back, swallowed the hand of blood. The pain was instantaneous, grinding, and sharp, like broken glass flowing through my veins. I screamed my pain, wordlessly, but kept the magic inside me.

I fought to visualize the creatures inside the cloud. Tentacles, veined with silver and gold, white and pure, muscled magic. I fell to my knees with the pain. Jonty reached for me, and I hissed, "No, don't touch me." The magic wanted to bleed someone, anyone, and his touch would make him the target.

I closed my eyes so I could mentally draw the picture of what I sought. When I could see it, shining and writhing across the inside of my eyes, I reached my left hand out again, and threw that broken-glass pain into the image. My pain intensified for a shining, breathless moment—all there was in that second was the pain, so much pain. Then it eased, and I could breathe again…and I knew the hand of blood was busy elsewhere.

I kept my eyes closed so nothing else could catch my eye. I was afraid that if I saw the goblin warriors again, I'd bleed them by accident. I knew what I wanted to bleed, and that was above their heads in the sky. I thought about all the beautiful things that could have flown above their heads. Did it have to be frightening? There was such beauty in faerie, why did it have to be nightmarish?

I heard the sound of wings whistling overhead, and opened my eyes. I'd fallen to the ground on top of Ash's cloak, though I didn't remember falling. Above us, so close that the great white wings brushed Jonty's head, were swans. Swans gleaming white in the moonlight: There had to be more than twenty of them, and had I seen what I thought I saw on their necks and shoulders? Chains and collars of gold? It couldn't be—this was the stuff of legends.

It was the nameless Red Cap who voiced my thought: "They had chains on their necks."

I heard the wild call of geese next. They flew just overhead, following the line the swans had taken. I got to my feet, stumbling on the edge of the borrowed trench coat. Jonty caught me, but it didn't seem to hurt him or me. I felt light and airy, as if the hand of blood had become something else. What had I been thinking just before the swans flew overhead? That the beauty in faerie was too often nightmarish?

There was a flight of cranes then: my father's bird, one of his symbols. The cranes flew low and seemed to dip their wings at us, almost in a salute.

"They fall!" shouted Bithek.

I looked where he pointed. The storm cloud had vanished, and with it most of the creatures. There had been so many, a writhing mass of them, but now there were only a few—less than ten, maybe—and one of them had already crashed through the trees. A second fell earthward, and I heard the sharp crack of the trees breaking under the weight like a ca

Inside my head, I could finally admit, it was Doyle I most needed to survive. I loved Rhys, but not like I loved Doyle. I let myself own that. I let myself admit, at least inside my own head, that if Doyle died, part of me would die as well. It had been the moment at the car, when he'd shoved Frost and me inside and given me to Frost. "If not me, it must be you," he'd said to Frost. I loved Frost, too, but I'd had my revelation. If I could have chosen my king this moment, I knew who it would be.

Pity that I wasn't the one doing the choosing.

Figures started toward us, and the goblins parted to form a corridor for my guards. When I finally recognized that tall, dark figure, something in my chest eased, and I was suddenly crying. I started walking toward him, then. I didn't feel the frozen grass under my bare feet. I didn't feel when broken stubble cut me. Then I was ru

Doyle wasn't alone; dogs, huge black dogs milled around his legs. Suddenly I remembered a vision I'd had of him with dogs like this, and the ground tilted under my feet, vision and reality melding before my eyes. The dogs reached me first, pressing warm muscled fur against me where I knelt, their great panting breath hot on my face as I held my hands out to touch them. Their black fur ran with a tingling rush of magic.

The bodies writhed under my hand, the fur growing less coarse, smoothing, the bodies less dense. I looked up into the face of a racing hound, white and sleek, with ears a shining red. The other hound's face was half red and half white, as if some hand had drawn a line down the center of it. I'd never seen anything so beautiful as that face.

Then Doyle was standing in front of me, and I threw myself into his arms. He lifted me off the ground and hugged me so hard it almost hurt. But I wanted him to hold me hard. I wanted to feel the reality of his body against me. I wanted to know he was alive. I needed to touch him to know it was true. I needed him to touch me, and let me know that he was still my Darkness, still my Doyle.

He whispered into my hair, "Merry, Merry, Merry."

I clung to him, wordless, and wept.

CHAPTER 22

EVERYONE LIVED, EVEN THE HUMAN POLICEMEN, THOUGH some were driven mad by what they had seen. Abeloec fed them from his cup of horn and they fell into a magical sleep, destined to wake with no memory of the horrors they had seen. Magic isn't always bad.

The black dogs were a miracle: They changed depending on who touched them. Abe's touch turned the great black dogs into lapdogs to lie before a cozy fire, white with red markings—faerie dogs. Mistral's touch turned them to huge Irish wolfhounds, not the pale, slender ones of today, but the giants that the Romans had feared so much—these were the hounds that could snap the spine of a horse with their bite. Someone else's touch turned a dog into a green-furred Cu Sith that loped off toward the Seelie mound. What would their king, Taranis, think of its return? He'd probably try to take credit for it, claim it as proof of his power.

In the midst of the return of so much that was lost, other things much more precious were returned to me. Galen's voice shouting my name turned me in Doyle's arms. He was ru