A Caress Of Twilight

Chapter 10

I walked around the couch to greet the goddess. Kitto followed me, and I had to make him stay-by the couch. Left to his own devices, he'd have stayed glued to my side like an overly devoted puppy.

I smiled toward Maeve and Julian. " I can't tell you what an honor it is to meet you, Ms. Reed." I held out my hand, and she took one hand off of Julian's arm long enough to shake.

She gave me just the tips of her fingers; it wasn't so much a handshake as a touch. I'd seen a lot of women who didn't know how to shake hands, but Maeve hadn't even really tried. Maybe I was supposed to take her hand and kneel, but if she was waiting for genuflecting, she was in for a long wait. I had one queen and one queen only. Maeve Reed may have been a queen of Hollywood, but that just wasn't the same thing.

I knew my face looked puzzled, but I couldn't decide what was going on behind that lovely face of hers. We needed to know.

"You really did hire Kane and Hart to protect you from us, didn't you?"

Maeve turned a perfect look on me, pleasant, bemused, incredulous: eyes wide, beautifully lipsticked mouth open in a small o. It was a look for a camera, for a screen that would make her face twenty feet tall. It was a face to win over audiences and the heads of studios.

It was a great face, but it wasn't that great. "A simple yes or no will suffice, Ms. Reed."

"I'm sorry," she said, voice apologetic, face soft, eyes a little confused. Her grip on Julian's arm was too tight; it gave a lie to that casual confused act.

"Did you hire Kane and Hart to protect you from us?"

She gave the laugh that People magazine had once called the five-million-dollar laugh, the one where her eyes crinkled and her face shone and her mouth was just a little open. "What a strange idea. I assure you, Ms. Gentry I am not afraid of you."

She'd avoided a direct answer. She wasn't afraid of me; that much had to be true, because it is taboo among us to truly lie. If Doyle hadn't suggested in the van that I be rude, I'd have let it go, because pursuing it relentlessly would have been more than rude; it would have been insulting, and duels had started over less. But only among highborn sidhe could one be expected to know the rules. We were counting on Maeve assuming I'd been raised by savages — Unseelies and humans.

"Are you afraid of my guards, then?" I asked.

The laughter was still making her face shine, her eyes sparkle as she looked at me. "Whatever gave you such an absurd idea?"

"You did."

She shook her head, sending that long yellow sheet of hair sliding around her body. The glow of the laughter still shone in her face, and her eyes were just a little more blue. I realized suddenly that it wasn't the glow of laughter, which should have faded, but a very subtle type of glamour. She was purposefully making herself glow, just a little. And if she was glowing, she was using magic to try to persuade me to believe her.

I frowned, because I couldn't feel magic being used against me. Usually when another sidhe uses magic, you know it.

I glanced behind me at the guards. Doyle and Frost were standing, but they were unreadable now, imperious even. Kitto was still standing beside the couch where I'd left him. One small hand had a death grip on the white back, as if touching anything was better than standing untouched.

I wondered if he was feeling things I couldn't. I was only part fey; I was always willing to believe that I'd missed parts by that mixed heritage. I'd gained things, too — being able to do major magic surrounded by metal, for instance — but with every gain there can be a loss.

"Ms. Reed, I'll ask you one more time, did you hire Kane and Hart to protect you from my guards?"

"What I told Julian and his men was that I had some overzealous fans."

I didn't bother to look at Julian for confirmation. "I believe that's what you told Julian, Ms. Reed. Now, what's the real reason that you hired them?"

She stared at me with mock horror, or maybe it was real. She glanced at Frost and Doyle, and said, "Have you taught her no manners?"

"She has what manners she needs," Doyle said.

A look flickered through Maeve's eyes, fear, I think. She looked back to me, and down in those softly glowing blue eyes, that flicker remained. She was afraid. Very, very afraid. But of what?

"Did you really hire Julian and his people because of some overzealous fan?"

"Stop this," she whispered.

"Do you really believe that we will harm you?" I asked.

"No," she said, and she said it too quickly, as if she was relieved to finally be able to give a straightforward answer.

"Then why are you afraid of us?"

"Why are you doing this to me?" she asked, and her voice held all the sorrow of every maiden who had ever asked that question of a lover gone astray.

It tightened my throat to hear it. Julian looked stricken. "I think you've asked enough questions, Meredith."

I shook my head. "No, I haven't." I met those pain-filled blue eyes, and said, "Ms. Reed, you don't have to hide yourself from us."

"I don't know what you mean."

"That is entirely too close to a lie," I said softly.

Her eyes suddenly looked like blue crystal, and I realized I was seeing those blue-blue eyes through the shine of unshed tears. Then the tears slid slowly down her golden cheeks, and as they fell, the blue of her eyes blurred, changed, still blue, but tricolored like my own.

There was a wide outer edge of rich deep blue like a bright sapphire, then a much thinner ring of melted copper, and an equally thin circle of liquid gold around the dark point of her pupil. But what set her eyes apart even among the sidhe was that the gold and copper trailed out across her iris like streaks of color in a good piece of lapis lazuli, so that metallic glints shone out from that ring of faultless deep blue.

Her eyes were like a stormy blue sky shattered by colored lightning.

In the forty years she'd been a movie star, no camera had ever seen these eyes. Her real eyes. I'm sure some agent or studio head had long ago convinced her to hide the least human of her features. I'd hidden what I was and what I looked like for only three years, and it had killed parts of me to do it. Maeve Reed had done it for decades.

She kept her eyes averted from Julian, as if she didn't want him to see them. I took her hand from Julian's arm; she tried to fight me, and I didn't tug on her. I just kept a light pressure on her wrist until she raised the hand of her own accord. Then I took her hand full in mine, cradling it. I knelt in front of her and brought her hand to my lips. I laid the lightest of touches on that golden hand, and said, "You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen, Maeve Reed."

She took her other hand from Julian's grip and just stood there staring down at me, tears streaming like crystal drops down her cheeks. Slowly, she let the rest of the glamour go. The tan began to fade, or change, until she was no longer honey brown but an overall soft gold. Her hair grew paler, blond and blonder, until it was almost a white blond. I could not imagine why she'd changed her hair to the more standard yellow blond. Either color was well within human standards.

I held both her hands in mine while she stripped away a century of lies and stood before me a shining thing. Suddenly there seemed to be more colors in the room, a breath of sweet scented flowers that grew thousands of miles away from this desert place. She gripped my hands as if they were her only anchor, as if she might vanish into the light and sweetness if I let her go.

She threw back her head, eyes closed, and her golden glow filled the room as if a small sun had suddenly risen before me. She glowed, and she cried, and she held my hands so hard it hurt. Somewhere during all of it, I found I was crying, too, and her glow had called my own, so that my skin looked as if it were filled with moonlight.

She came to her knees beside me, looking wonderingly at my hands and hers, one glow pressed against the other. She began to laugh joyously, a little hysterically.

Somewhere in all the laughter, I could make out her words, "And I… thought the men. . were the danger."

She leaned into me suddenly and pressed her lips to mine. I was so startled by the kiss that I simply froze for a second. What I would have done if she'd given me time to think, I don't know, because she jerked away from me and ran back out the way she'd come.