A Kiss of Shadows (25 page)

“I cheated,” I said.

“No, you did not. You merely used tactics that they were not prepared for. It is the mark of a good soldier to use the weapons available to him or her.”

We looked at each other. “Does anyone but the queen know that I have the hand of flesh now?”

“Sholto knows, and his sluagh. It will not be a secret by the time we land.”

“It may frighten any would-be challengers,” I said.

“To be trapped forever as a shapeless ball of flesh, never to die, never to age, merely to continue; oh, yes, Princess, I think they will be afraid. After Griffin . . . left you, many became your enemy, because they thought you powerless. They will all be remembering the insults they heaped upon you. They'll be wondering if you have come back holding a grudge.”

“I'm invoking virgin rights—that means that I have a clean slate, and so do they. If I acknowledge an old vendetta, then I lose my status as a virgin, and I'll be sucked right back into the middle of all this crap.” I shook my head. “No, I'll leave them alone if they leave me alone.”

“You are wise beyond your years, Princess.”

“I'm thirty-three, Doyle, that's not a child by human years.”

He laughed, a small dark chuckle that made me think of what he'd looked like last night with half his clothes gone. I tried to keep the thought out of my face, and I must have succeeded, because his own expression didn't change. “I remember when Rome was merely a wide spot in the road, Princess. Thirty-three years is a child to me.”

I let what I was thinking into my eyes. “I don't remember you treating me like a child last night.”

He looked away, not meeting my eyes. “That was a mistake.”

“If you say so.” I looked out the window, watching the clouds. Doyle was determined to pretend that last night never happened. I was tired of trying to talk about it, when he so obviously didn't want to discuss it.

The flight attendant came back. This time she knelt, skirt tight across her thighs. She smiled up at Doyle, magazines spread in a fan across one arm. “Would you like something to read?” She laid her free hand on his leg, slid her hand along the inside of his thigh.

Her hand was an inch from his groin when Doyle grabbed her wrist and moved her hand. “Madam, please.”

She knelt closer to him, one hand on either of his knees, the magazines partially hiding what she was doing. She leaned in so that her breasts pressed against his legs. “Please,” she whispered. “Please, it's been so long since I was with one of you.”

That got my attention. “How long has it been?” I asked.

She blinked as if she couldn't quite concentrate on me with Doyle sitting so close. “Six weeks.”

“Who was it?”

She shook her head. “I can keep a secret, just don't deny me.” She looked up at Doyle. “Please, please.”

She was elf-struck. If a sidhe has sex with a human and doesn't try to tone down the magic, they can turn the human into a sort of addict. Humans that are elf-struck can actually wither and die from want of the touch of sidhe flesh.

I leaned close to Doyle's ear, close enough that my lips brushed the edges of his earrings. I had a horrible urge to lick one of the earrings, but I didn't. It was just one of those wicked urges you get occasionally. I whispered, “Take her name and phone number. We'll need to report her to the Bureau of Human and Fey Affairs.”

Doyle did what I asked.

The flight attendant had tears of gratitude shining in her eyes when Doyle took her name, number, and address. She actually kissed his hand and might have done more if the male flight attendant hadn't ushered her away.

“It's illegal to have sex with humans without protecting their minds,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” Doyle said.

“It would be interesting to know who her sidhe lover was.”

“Lovers, I think,” Doyle said.

“I wonder if she always flies the L.A. to St. Louis run?”

Doyle looked at me. “She might know who'd been flying back and forth to Los Angeles often enough to set up the cult that's worshiping them.”

“One man doesn't constitute a cult,” I said.

“You told me the woman mentioned a handful of others, some of them with ear implants, or perhaps even sidhe themselves.”

“That's still not a cult—it's a wizard with followers, a sidhe-worshiping coven at best.”

“Or a cult at worst. We have no idea how many people were involved, Princess, and the man who could have answered the question is dead.”

“Funny how the police didn't mind me leaving the state with a murder investigation hanging over my head.”

“I would not at all be surprised if your aunt, our queen, made some phone calls. She can be quite charming when she wants to be.”

“And when that fails, she's scary as hell,” I said.

He nodded. “That, too.”

The male flight attendant took care of first class for the rest of the flight. The woman never came near us again, until we were getting off the plane. Then she took Doyle's hand, and said, voice urgent, “You will call me, won't you?”

Doyle kissed her hand. “Oh, yes, I will call, and you will answer every question that I put to you honestly, won't you?”

She nodded, tears trailing down her face. “Anything you want.”

I had to drag Doyle away from her. I whispered, “I'd take a chaperone with me when you go to question her.”

“I had not intended going alone,” he said. He looked at me, our faces very close because we were whispering. “I learned very recently that I am not unaccessible to sexual advances.” His look was very frank, open, the look I'd wanted on the plane. “I will have to be more careful in the future.” With that he raised up, so that he was too tall for whispering, and began to walk down the narrow hallway toward the airport proper. I followed him.

We left the noise of engines behind and walked toward the sound of people.

Chapter 20

 

THE PEOPLE WERE A LARGE MURMUROUS NOISE THAT SWELLED TOWARD
me and over me, as if I were being swallowed in a sea of noise as I walked down the concourse. The crowd walked back and forth at the opening like bits of multicolored debris, a wall of people. Doyle walked just ahead of me like an advance guard, which was exactly what he was.

Our gate was in line with the broad hallway that led deeper into the airport. Doyle was at the opening of the concourse, standing to one side, waiting for me. Then through the crowd I saw a tall figure come striding toward us. Galen was dressed in layers of green and white: pale green sweater, paler green pants, and an ankle-length white duster coat floating out behind him like a cape. The sweater matched his hair, which fell in short curls to just below his ear, except for one long thin braid. His father had been a pixie, whom the queen had had killed for the audacious crime of seducing one of her handmaidens.

I don't believe the queen would have killed the pixie if she'd known he'd begotten a child. Children are precious, and anything that breeds, that passes the blood along, is worth keeping around.

I was happy to see him but knew if he was here, then a photographer wasn't far behind. Frankly, I'd been surprised we hadn't stepped out into a barrage of media. Princess Meredith had been missing for three years, and now she was coming home, alive, well. My face had been plastered across the supermarket tabloids for years; sightings of the Elven American Princess had rivaled Elvis sightings. I didn't know what had been done to save me from the media frenzy, but I was grateful.

I dropped my carry-on bag beside Doyle and ran to Galen. He swept me up in his arms and planted a kiss on my mouth. “Merry, good to see you, girl.” His arms curved around my back, holding me a foot above the ground with ease.

I've never liked my feet dangling helplessly. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he transferred his hands from my waist to my thighs to support me.

I'd been running into Galen's arms since I could remember. After my father's death he'd been my defender among the Unseelie more than once—though being a half-breed like myself, he didn't have much more clout than I did. What he did have was six feet of muscle and trained warrior to back up his threat.

Of course, when he swept me up in his arms at age seven, it was minus the kiss and other things. At just a little over a hundred, Galen was one of the youngest of Andais's royal guard. A mere seventy years between our ages—among the sidhe it was like growing up together.

The V neck of his sweater cut low over the swell of his chest, showing a curl of chest hair that was a darker green than his hair, almost black. The sweater was pettably soft, clinging to his body. His skin was white, but the sweater brought out the undercast of pale, pale green so that his skin was either pearl white or a dreamlike green depending on how the light hit it.

His eyes were a green the color of new spring grass, more human than the liquid emerald of my own. But the rest of him—the rest of him was too unique for words. I'd thought that since I was about fourteen, except he wasn't who my father had promised me to. Because Galen was too nice a guy. He didn't play politics well enough for my father to feel confident that Galen would live to see me grown. No, Galen spoke when silence would be wiser. It was one of the things I'd loved about him as a child and feared about him as I grew older.

He danced me around the hallway to some music that only he could hear, but I could almost hear it as I looked into his eyes, traced the curve of his lips with my gaze.

“I am glad to see you, Merry.”

“I can tell,” I said.

He laughed, and it was a very human laugh. Nothing but Galen's mirth to make it special, but that had always been special enough for me.

He leaned in close, whispering against my ear. “You cut your hair. Your beautiful hair.”

I laid a gentle kiss on his cheek. “It'll grow back.”

There were only a few reporters, because they hadn't had enough notice to plan a large-scale assault. But most of them had a camera. Pictures of sidhe royalty, especially if they were doing anything unusual, could always find a market. We let them snap their pictures because we couldn't stop them. Using magic against them was infringement on freedom of the press. So the Supreme Court had decreed. Reporters who routinely covered the sidhe were often psychics in their own right, or witches. They knew when you were using magic on them. All it took was one report and you could be in civil court. Let's hear it for the First Amendment.

The fey took two different tacks about the reporters. Some were very decorous in public, never giving anything of interest to the paparazzi. Galen and I were of the school that you give them something to photograph. Something unimportant so that they won't dig for more sensational stuff. Give them something positive, upbeat, and interesting. This was encouraged by Queen Andais. She'd been on a kick to give her court better, more upbeat publicity for the last thirty years or so. My lifetime. I'd been paraded with my father on spring outings. There'd been a public engagement ceremony between myself and Griffin. There was no private life if the queen decreed it public.

Someone cleared their throat and I looked past Galen to find Barinthus. If Galen looked unique, Barinthus looked alien. His hair was the color of the sea, the oceans. The turquoise of the Mediterranean; the deeper medium blue of the Pacific; a stormy greyish-blue like the ocean before a storm, sliding into a blue that was nearly black, where the water runs deep and thick like the blood of sleeping giants. The colors moved with every touch of light, melding into each other as if it wasn't hair at all. His skin was the alabaster white of my own. His eyes were blue, but the pupils were slits of black. I knew for a fact that he had a clear membrane like a second eyelid that came up over his eyes when he was underwater. When I was five he taught me to swim, and I'd loved the fact that he could blink twice with one eye.

He was taller than Galen, nearly seven feet tall, as befit a god. He was wearing a royal blue trench coat open over a black designer suit, but the shirt was blue silk with one of those high round collars that the designers are trying to sell so men don't have to wear ties anymore. Barinthus looked splendid in it all. He'd left his hair loose and flowing free around him like a second cloak. And I knew that someone else, probably my aunt, had picked his clothes for him. Left to his own devices Barinthus was a jeans-and-T-shirt—or less—man.

Galen and Barinthus had been two of the most frequent visitors to my father's house, out among the humans. Barinthus was a power among the sidhe; he was pure Old Court. The sidhe still whispered about the last duel he'd fought, long before I was born, in which a sidhe had drowned in a summer meadow miles from any water. Barinthus, like my father, never agreed to fight a duel unless mortality was invoked. Anything less was not worth his time.

Galen let me slide to the ground. I went to Barinthus, holding out both my hands in greeting. He drew his hands out of his coat pockets carefully, keeping them in loose fists until my own hands could be placed in his. He had webbing between his fingers, and he had been sensitive about it ever since a reporter in the fifties had called him “the fish man.” Hard to believe that someone once worshiped as a sea god could be embarrassed by a twentieth-century hack, but there it was. Barinthus had never forgotten that little bit of publicity.

The webbing was completely retractable, just a thin extra line of skin between his fingers unless he chose to use it. Then he could expand the skin and swim like . . . like a, well, um, fish. Though this was not a compliment to be paid out loud, ever.

He took my hands in his and leaned down from his great height to plant a civilized but well-meant kiss on my cheek. I returned the favor. Barinthus liked to be civilized in public. His personal side was not for public consumption, and he had the power to make sure that even the queen herself couldn't change his mind. Gods, even fallen ones, should be treated with a certain respect. That reporter in the fifties, the one who had plastered the fish man headline along the worldwide news service, had died in a freak boating accident on the Mississippi that summer. The water just rose up and slapped the boat, eyewitnesses said. Strangest thing they'd ever seen.

The cameras kept taking pictures. We kept ignoring it. “It is good to have you back among us, Meredith.”

“It's good to see you, too, Barinthus. I hope the court is safe enough for me to make this more than an extended visit.”

The clear second eyelid blinked over his eyes. When he wasn't swimming, it was a sign of nervousness. “That you will have to discuss with your aunt.”

I didn't like the sound of that. The reporter shoved a tiny tape recorder in my face. “Who are you?” That he had to ask meant he was on the job since I left home.

Galen moved in, smiling, charming. He opened his mouth to answer, but another voice filled the bustling hush. “Princess Meredith NicEssus, Child of Peace.”

The man who'd spoken pushed away from the far windows where he'd been leaning.

“Jenkins, how unpleasant to see you,” I said.

He was a tall thin man, though next to Barinthus he wasn't that tall. Jenkins had a permanent five-o'-clock shadow, so heavy that I'd asked him once why he didn't just grow a beard. He'd replied that his wife didn't like facial hair. I'd replied that I couldn't believe anyone would marry him. Jenkins had sold pictures of my father's hacked body. Not in the United States, of course, we're too civilized for that, but there are other countries, other newspapers, other magazines. People bought the pictures and published them. He was also the one who'd surprised me at the funeral and snapped pictures of me with tears trailing down my cheeks, my eyes so angry they had a glow to them. That one had been nominated for a prize of some kind. It lost, but my face and my father's dead body were worldwide news thanks to Jenkins. I still hated him for that.

“I heard a rumor that you'd be coming back for a visit. Are you staying the whole month until Halloween?” he asked.

“I can't believe that anyone would risk my aunt's displeasure talking to you,” I said, ignoring his question. I'd had lots of practice ignoring reporter's questions.

He smiled. “You'd be surprised who talks to me and about what.”

I didn't like the phrasing on that. It sounded vaguely threatening, vaguely personal. No, I didn't like it one little bit.

“Welcome home, Meredith,” he said and gave a small but strangely stylish bow.

What I wanted to say to him wasn't fit for public consumption, but there were too many tape recorders. If Jenkins was here, then the television people couldn't be far behind. If he couldn't have an exclusive, he'd make sure there was a crowd.

I said nothing. I let it go. He'd been baiting me since I was a child. He was only about ten years older than I was, but he looked twenty years older, because I still looked like I was in my early twenties. Maybe I wasn't going to live forever, but I was going out well preserved. I think that really bothered Jenkins, covering people who either didn't age or aged more slowly than he did. There were moments when I was younger that it had been a comfort that he would probably die first.

“You still smell like an ashtray, Jenkins. Don't you know that smoking will shorten your life expectancy?”

His face went hard and thin with anger. He lowered his voice and whispered, “Still the little bitch of the west, heh, Merry.”

“I've got a restraining order against you, Jenkins. Stay back fifty feet or I'll call the cops.”

Barinthus came up to us and offered me his arm. He didn't have to say it. I knew better than to get into an insult match with a reporter in front of other reporters. The restraining order had been put in place after Jenkins plastered my picture all over the world. The court's attorneys had found several judges who thought that Jenkins had indeed exploited a minor and invaded my privacy. After that he was forbidden to speak with me and had to stay back fifty feet.

I think the only reason that Barinthus hadn't killed Jenkins for me was that the sidhe would have seen that as a weakness, too. I wasn't just sidhe royalty, I was two deaths away from the Unseelie throne. If I couldn't protect myself from overzealous reporters, I didn't deserve to be in line for the throne. So he'd become my problem. The queen had forbidden any of us from harming the press after Barinthus's little boating accident. Unfortunately, the only thing that would have rid me of Barry Jenkins was his death. Anything short of that, and he'd just heal and crawl back after me.

I blew Jenkins a kiss and walked past him on Barinthus's arm. Galen trailed behind us fielding questions from the press. I caught parts of the story. Family reunion, home for the coming holidays, yadda-yadda-yadda. Barinthus and I outdistanced the reporters because they were hanging back with Galen. So I asked something serious. “Why has the queen suddenly forgiven me for running away from home?”