Merry Gentry 05 - Mistral's Kiss (24 page)

“Unless Kitto exaggerated what you did in Los Angeles to the Nameless,”

Holly added.

I shook my head, the warm blood creeping down my neck between my skin and the borrowed trench coat. The blood should have been disturbing, but it wasn’t—it felt like a warm blanket on a cold night: comforting. “No, Kitto didn’t exaggerate,” I said. I didn’t like that Kitto had borne tales to the goblins, but forced myself to accept that he was half theirs and still had to answer to their king. He’d probably had little choice in what he told them.

“The full hand of blood,” Holly said, and his voice wasn’t so much angry as skeptical. “Hard to believe it lies in such a fragile creature.”

“Look at my cap, if you doubt her power,” Jonty rumbled.

Holly gazed upward, but his eyes didn’t stay on the cap long. His gaze slid down to me, and something in that look was both sexual and predatory. I could feel the blood plastering the back of my hair, my shoulders, arms; I must have looked like an accident victim. Most men would have found it frightening, but Holly looked at me as if I’d covered myself with perfume and lingerie. One man’s nightmare, another’s fantasy.

He reached a hand up, tentatively, as if he thought either Jonty or I would protest. When we didn’t, he touched my shoulder. I think he meant to merely get a touch of blood on his fingers, but the moment his fingers brushed me, a look of wonder came over his face. He leaned in toward me, the wonder being eaten by something that was part desire, and part violence. “What have you been doing, Princess, to feel like this?”

“I don’t know what you’re feeling, so I don’t know how to answer.” My voice was small. Of all the men I’d agreed to have sex with, Holly and his brother were the ones who gave me the most pause.

Jonty’s arms tightened around me, almost possessively. That was both good and bad. If all of Jonty was in proportion, then I could not satisfy him and live to tell the tale. But it was hard to tell with the Red Cap; his possessiveness might have had nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the blood magic.

Holly drew his hand from my shoulder. He began to lick the blood from his hand like a cat that has dipped its paw in your glass of milk. His eyes fluttered closed as he licked. “She calls your blood,” he said, in a low voice better suited for a bedroom than a battlefield.

“Yes,” Jonty said, and that one word from him had the same overly intimate tone.

I was missing something, but did not want to admit that I didn’t know what was happening, or why they were so fascinated with the fact that touching me made the Red Cap bleed more. At a loss, I changed the subject. “If you want me to call blood from our enemies, we need to get closer to the archers.” I fought to keep my voice matter-of-fact, as if I knew exactly what was happening and either didn’t care or took it completely in stride.

“And who will hold you while you call blood, so those dainty feet do not touch the cold ground?” Holly said.

“I will stand on my own.”

“I will hold you,” Jonty said.

“You are a goblin, Jonty. Goblins fight among themselves as sport, which means it is likely there is at least a nick somewhere on your body. If you have a wound, even a small one, when I call blood, I will bleed you, too.”

“I am no Red Cap to brawl for the sake of brawling. I save my flesh for other things,” Holly said. He licked the last of the blood from his hand in a long smooth movement that should have been sensual, but managed to be mostly just unnerving.

“I will stand on my own,” I repeated.

“Your brother waves to get our attention,” Jonty said then to Holly, and moved forward.

Holly hesitated, as if he would block our way, but then moved aside, speaking as Jonty passed him. “I will see you survive this night, Princess, for I mean to have you.”

“I remember our bargain, Holly,” I called back.

The smaller goblin hurried to keep up with Jonty’s longer strides. It was like a child running after an adult, though Holly wouldn’t have thanked me for the comparison. “I hear reluctance in your voice, Princess, and the sex will be all the sweeter for it.”

“Do not torment her on the edge of battle, Holly,” Jonty said.

Holly didn’t argue; he just abandoned the topic for the time being. “The archers will cut them for you, but you have to weaken them enough to bring them down,” he said to me.

“I know what you want me to do.”

“You don’t sound certain.”

I didn’t voice my doubts, but this was a wild hunt. A true wild hunt, which meant it was the essence of faerie. The creatures could bleed, but how do you kill something that is formed of pure magic? This was ancient magic, chaos magic, primeval and horrible. How do you kill such things? Even if I bled them enough to bring them to earth, could they be truly slain by blade and ax? I had never heard of anyone fighting and winning against such a hunt.

Of course, I had never heard that the spectral hunts could bleed if cut.

Sholto had called this one into being, using magic that he and I had raised as a couple. Was it my mortal blood that had made the hunt vulnerable to bleeding? Was my mortality truly contagious, as some of my enemies claimed?

Following this idea to its logical extension meant that if I sat on the throne of our court, it would condemn all of the sidhe to age and die. But at this moment if my mortal flesh had made this hunt mortal in turn, I was grateful for it. It meant they could bleed and die, and I needed them to die. We needed to win this battle. I would not spread my mortality through all of faerie, but to have shared it with these creatures—well, that would be a blessing.

THE ARROWS CUT THE NIGHT SKY LIKE BLACK WOUNDS ACROSS

the stars, vanishing into the boiling black silk of the clouds. We waited in the winter night for screams to let us know the bolts had found their mark, but there was nothing but silence.

I stood on the ground, pulling the borrowed trench coat around me. I stood on Holly’s cloak, which he had thrown on the ground to keep my bare feet from the rough ground and the cold. “The cloak gets in the way of my ax,”

he’d said, as if he were afraid that I might think he was being gentlemanly.

Then he moved forward to be with his brother and the other warriors.

Only Jonty and one other Red Cap stayed back with me, though every Red Cap who had come out tonight—a dozen of them—had touched me before they went to take their place in the ranks. They had laid their mouths, in a strange sort of kiss, against my shoulder where the coat hung heavy with blood from Jonty’s cap. One had caught the coat in his pointed teeth and torn it before Jonty had slapped him away. The ones who came after had widened the hole until the lips of the last few touched my bare shoulder where the blood had begun to dry to my skin. I had neither offered the Red Caps the familiarity, nor been asked; Jonty had called them, and spoken in a Gaelic so old that I could not follow it.

Whatever Jonty had said to them had turned their faces to me, and the look in their eyes was that odd mix of sex, hunger, and eagerness that I’d seen in Holly. I hadn’t understood the look—and hadn’t had time to question it—

but because it cost me nothing to have their lips pressed to my shoulder, I allowed it. Then I noticed that each of the Red Caps who touched me began bleeding afresh after touching Jonty’s blood on my body.

I was fighting an urge to scream my impatience at them, but the Red Caps weren’t the ones delaying; the other goblins squabbled about who would go where. If Kurag, Goblin King, had come, there would have been no arguments, but Ash and Holly, though feared warriors, were not kings, and all other leadership among the goblins is a constant state of struggle. The goblin society represented the ultimate in Darwinian evolution: only the strongest survive, and only the very strongest lead.

If I had been truly queen enough to lead them, they would have done what I ordered, but I didn’t have their respect yet, so I knew better than to try to lead here. It would have undermined Ash and Holly, and gained me nothing.

Besides, battlefield tactics wasn’t my strongest suit, and I knew that. My father had drilled into me from an early age to know my strengths and weaknesses. Find allies who complement you, he’d said. True friendship is a type of love, and all love has power.

Jonty leaned over me and said, “Call your hand of power, Princess.”

“How do you know they are hurt?”

“We are goblins,” he said, as if that settled it.

Another line of green flame flickered through the trees, and I was close enough now to see the black tendrils back away from it. I didn’t argue again, but called the hand of blood.

I concentrated on my left hand. It didn’t emit a beam of power, or anything like you see in the movies; it was simply that the mark, or key, to the hand of blood lay in the palm of my left hand. Or maybe
doorway
was a better term. I opened the mark in the palm of that hand, and though there was nothing to see with the naked eye, there was plenty to feel.

It was as if the blood in my veins had suddenly turned to molten metal. My blood tried to boil with the power of it. I screamed, and thrust my hand toward the cloud. I projected that burning, tearing power outward. I realized in that moment that it wasn’t just the archers who were shooting blind—I had never before tried to use the hand of blood on a target I could not see.

For a heartbeat the power turned back on me, and every small scrape I’d accumulated in the past twenty-four hours bled. Each tiny wound bled like a fountain, and I fought my body, fought my own magic to keep it from destroying me.

Lightning struck the cloud, and illuminated it, as it had inside the sluagh’s mound. But I wasn’t horrified this time, I was joyous; a fierce triumphant joy. If I could see it, I could make it bleed.

I had the blink of an eye to spot my targets. A breath to see that the tentacled mass was white and silver and gold, not the black and grey and white it had been. I had an instant to note that the hunt had a terrible beauty before I thrust my power toward that shining mass and screamed,

“Bleed!”

Green flame climbed up the trees and lightning flared behind it so that both powers met mine in the cloud at the same instant. The cloud flashed green in reflected color. I called for blood and black fountains of it exploded into the green-yellow flare.

The light died, leaving the night blacker than before. My night vision had been ruined from staring into the light. Something spattered against the left side of my face, something that felt wet, but carried no shock of temperature difference. Only two things feel like that: water at body temperature, and very fresh blood. If I had been a warrior, I would have whirled, gun up, but I turned slowly, like a character in a horror movie who doesn’t really want to see the blow before it falls.

All that met my eyes was the shortest of my Red Cap guards, Bithek.

Someone had sliced open his scalp to spill blood in a gory mask down his face, so that even his eyes were lost to the dark flow of it. Then he shook his head like a wet dog, spattering me with warm drops. I closed my eyes, put up a protecting hand.

Jonty’s chided Bithek. “You’re wasting the blood.”

“But so much, can’t keep it out of my eyes. I’d forgotten that it was ever like this,” Bithek growled.

I looked behind me at Jonty and found him as bloody as the other guard. It made me look around at all of them. They were all covered in blood, but even by moonlight and starlight, I could see now that the blood welled from the caps on their heads.

“Your magic brings our blood, Princess,” Jonty said.

“I don’t understand…”

“Make them bleed for us,” the last Red Cap said.

I looked at him. “I can’t remember your name,” I said.

“For this magic, I would follow you nameless, Princess Meredith. Bleed our enemies, and cover us in their blood.”

I turned away from the Red Caps. I didn’t understand completely, but trusted. One mystery at a time—later, later I would unravel it all.

Even facing away from the Red Caps, I could still feel them. It was as if their power complemented mine, fed it. No; our powers fed each other; they were like a warm battery at my back, comforting, energizing.

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 running toward us in a blurring speed that would have done any sidhe proud. He was no taller than me, but had four arms to my two, and a face that was noseless and strangely unfinished. He dropped to his knees, and would not meet my eyes. He actually put two of his arms on the ground and abased himself—striking, because in goblin society the lower you go, the more respect you feel for the person you’re addressing. I didn’t usually get that kind of greeting from anybody. He said, “A message from Ash and Holly: “‘Aim your magic better, Princess, before you bleed us all to death.’”

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.