“Meredith! Help me, Meredith, help me!”
I said, “No.”
He vanished, and a second later I woke in the hospital with Doyle bending over me. He wasn’t dead. I wasn’t trapped with Taranis, and he hadn’t bespelled me, and maybe, just maybe, the damage I’d done to him in dream would be real when he woke. Now, all we had to do was stop the assassins from killing Doyle and Mistral the way they’d killed Sholto.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
A SOUND IN the darkened room had frightened me at first, and then I’d seen the nightflyers plastered to the wall around the window, and my heart had lifted, because only Sholto could have brought them to L. A. He wasn’t dead? Had it been another dream? No, it had been real. I held Doyle’s hand in mine and looked around the room for Sholto.
Galen was on the other side of the bed. “I told you what she’d think when she saw the nightflyers. I’m sorry, Merry, but Sholto is still dead.”
“How did they get to L. A. without him?”
“Kitto brought them,” Doyle said.
I looked from one to the other of them. “Am I still dreaming?”
Galen smiled. “I could pinch you to prove we’re real.”
It made me smile a little. I tried to reach for his hand, but I was still hooked to an IV, so he took my hand instead. “No pinching necessary,” I said, “but how did Kitto bring the sluagh across the country?”
Doyle answered, “He used his hand of power.”
“The hand of reaching only lets him bring someone through a mirror during a call.” I looked at the mass of nightflyers covering the far wall and clinging to part of the ceiling. There had to be at least two dozen of them, though the way their flat bodies overlapped it was hard to get an accurate count, but still … “It would take hours to bring through this many of the sluagh. How long was I trapped in dream?”
My heart was pounding in my throat again, because though Doyle was here safe beside me, Mistral was not.
“You have only been asleep a short time, Merry; it has not been hours,” Doyle said.
“Where is Mistral?” I asked.
“At the main house, in charge of seeing that no harm comes to the babies. A hate group had claimed responsibility for trying to assassinate you, so I made Mistral stay at the house and see to the defenses there. He made me swear I would explain that only duty to our children would keep him from your side.”
“Doyle, you and Mistral are in terrible danger. Taranis means to have you both killed, as he killed Sholto. He fears the three of you the most of my men, and he intends to strip me of you, and then try to claim me for himself.”
Doyle touched my face, looking very hard into my eyes, as if trying to tell if I was telling the truth, or mad, or still dream befuddled.
“It was not just a nightmare, Doyle. Taranis was in my dreams again.”
Galen cursed softly. “Damn it, we let them put you to bed without the herbs in your pillow. I am so sorry, Merry; I should have thought of it.”
“We know that it is not a human hate group, but traitors among the sidhe themselves,” Doyle said.
“How do you know? Did Taranis invade someone else’s dreams?”
“No, but Rhys and Barinthus went to the beach house to make certain the sidhe there cooperated with the police, and forced them all to let the police take their fingerprints.”
“Are you saying one of the sidhe at the beach killed … shot Sholto?”
“Rhys and the police both quickly realized that the angle of the shot meant it could not have come from the hillside, but had to come from one of the upper windows of the house itself.”
“A lot of them didn’t want to cooperate with the police,” Galen said.
“I understand the murderer not wanting to cooperate with the police, but why did the rest refuse?”
Doyle and Galen exchanged a look, and it was Doyle who said, “They felt that the human authorities had no sway over them. I sent Rhys and Barinthus to convince them that they were mistaken.” There was something ominous in the way he said the last; at another time I might have asked how harsh the methods of persuasion had been, but frankly, I didn’t care. How dare they not want to help solve Sholto’s … murder.
“They refused to help when they thought that I’d been the attempted target?”
“They said that Sholto was not their king, and that he died so easily proved he was either not sidhe or contaminated by your mortality.”
I just stared at him for a few seconds. “What?”
They exchanged another look between them.
“What was that look just now? You’ve mentioned almost everybody but Frost; where is he?”
“He’s with a doctor,” Doyle said.
I started to sit up, and he held me down with one hand on my shoulder. “He is all right, or as all right as when he entered the hospital,” Doyle said.
“What does that mean?” I asked, and it was as if the fear from the dream had just been waiting below the surface, because it came bubbling up now. I fought the panic, and knew it was at least partly the nightmare and Taranis, but … sometimes there was so much that I felt as if I’d been on the edge of panic for months.
As if talking about him had conjured him, the door opened and Frost was there, looking tall and unbelievably handsome. His hair glinted in the dim light of the room the way the Christmas tree had looked on Christmas Eve when I was little, all gleaming and beautiful as my father turned out the lights because Santa wouldn’t come if the lights were on. We celebrated Yule and the winter solstice as a religious holiday, but he wanted me to have a more American holiday when I was very small, and had even been willing for me to go to Christian church with some of my school friends, and to temple with my friends who were Jewish. My father had wanted me to understand my country, not just our people. Frost’s hair looked like that long-ago Christmas tree tinsel, and the Christmas mornings I’d seen on television, but that never quite happened to me. I’d so wanted brothers and sisters, and family holidays that hadn’t been full of political debate, or photo opportunities for the press. Frost coming through that door made me feel like Christmas morning was supposed to feel, and never had.
Whatever he saw on my face made him smile, that bright, too-wide one that made his face both less model perfect and more amazing all at the same time. Galen moved back so Frost could take my hand and lean in to kiss me. He hesitated somewhere in the middle of standing back up, as if something in the middle of his body had caught, or hurt.
“What did the doctor say?” Doyle asked.
“He gave me some antibiotics and told me not to do anything physically taxing for at least three more days.”
“Wait, are you saying that the dog scratches are infected?” I asked.
“It would seem so,” he said; he held my hand in his, and smiled down at me.
“You can’t get infection from a wound, except through poison, or an evil spell. None of the fey can just get an infection.”
“Nonetheless, it is why I am not healing as I should.”
“Frost, you … I’ve seen you heal bullet wounds in less time than these scratches. They were deep, but not that deep.”
“The doctor assures me that these are natural antibiotics, not man-made, so I should not have an allergic reaction to them, and because I have never had antibiotics before, the infection shouldn’t be immune to it, as it might be if I had had more modern medical care.”
“Frost, are you saying you’re healing human-slow, as slowly as I might heal?”
Frost wouldn’t look at me. I looked at Doyle and Galen at the foot of the bed. “Someone talk to me, now,” I said.
“Some of the newer sidhe were not happy that Frost isn’t healing as he did before he left faerie,” Doyle said.
“Before he was with me, you mean,” I said. I held both their hands in mine, squeezed them tight.
“It doesn’t matter what caused it,” Frost said, and his face was still serene, peaceful, even happy.
“You were immortal and unaging. You would have been this beautiful and amazing forever, and loving me has stolen that from you. How? How did just being my lover damage your immortality?”
He raised my hand and rubbed his lips along my knuckles. It felt wonderful, but all I could think was that he would age now. That in loving him I’d killed him.