A Caress Of Twilight

Chapter 34

That afternoon, Maeve and Gordon Reed showed up at our door. It had been only days, but Gordon looked like it had been years. His skin had gone from sallow to grey. He seemed to have lost weight, so that the strong bones that had once made him a tall, commanding figure now made him look like a large-boned skeleton, covered in paper-thin greyness. His eyes looked larger in his face, and the pain in them looked constant. It was as if the cancer were sucking him dry, eating him from the inside out.

Maeve had said on the phone that Gordon was worse, much worse, but she hadn't prepared us for this. No mere words could prepare you for watching a man die.

Frost and Rhys had met their car on the street so they could help her husband up the short flight of steps to our apartment. Maeve had followed them up with huge sunglasses hiding most of her face, and a silk scarf around all that blond hair. She held an ankle-length fur coat tight at her throat as if it were cold. She looked like a Hollywood imitation of a great movie star. Of course, who had a better right to the look?

The men helped Gordon into the bedroom so he could rest while we did the first part of the fertility rite. Maeve was apparently going to pace the living room while she waited. She'd almost lit up a cigarette before I could tell her no smoking in my home.

"Meredith, please, I need it."

"Then you can do it outside."

She lowered her sunglasses enough to show me those famous blue eyes. She was wearing her human glamour again, trying to look as un-sidhe as possible. She kept that blue stare on me as she flung open the coat to frame that long golden body. She was nude except for her boots.

"Do I look dressed for your neighbors' viewing?"

I shook my head. "Your glamour is good enough to hide you buck naked in the middle of a highway, so close the coat, and take your nerves and your cigarettes outside."

She let the coat fall closed, leaving a thin line of her body showing between the soft mounds of fur. "How can you be so cruel?"

"This isn't cruel, Maeve, and well you know it. You spent too many centuries around the courts to think I'm being cruel just because I don't want your cigarettes stinking up my apartment."

She actually pouted at me. I'd had enough. "When I come back inside heavy with magic, I want to find Conchenn, goddess of beauty and spring, not some spoiled star. No glamour either. I want to see those lightning-kissed eyes."

She opened her mouth — to protest, I think. I stopped it with a wave of my hand. "Save it, Maeve, and do what you need to do to help this work."

She pushed her sunglasses back over her eyes and said in a much smaller voice, "You've changed, Meredith. There's a hardness in you that wasn't there before."

"Not hardness," Doyle said, "command. She will be queen and she understands that now."

Maeve glanced from him to me. "Fine, what's with the bikini? I thought you were going to fuck, not go to the beach."

"I know you're angry and scared about your husband, and that cuts you some slack, but there's a limit to that slack, Maeve. Don't push it."

She lowered her head, still fingering the unlit cigarette and unused lighter. "I don't mean to be such a fucking prima donna, but I am desperately worried about Gordon. Can't you understand that?"

"I understand, but if I wasn't having to sit here and argue with you, I could already be at the ritual site preparing myself."

I turned my back very deliberately on her, hoping she'd take the hint. "Doyle, you've extended the wards to include the little garden area in the house behind us, as I requested?"

"Yes, Princess, I have."

I took a deep breath. Here was the moment that I had been dreading. I had to choose one of the men to act as my consort for the ritual, but who? I don't know what I would have decided, because Galen said, voice clear but uncertain, "I'm whole again, Merry."

Everyone but Maeve turned to stare at him. He looked a little uncomfortable under the scrutiny, but there was also a pleased smile on his face, and a look in his eyes that I hadn't seen in a long time.

"I don't mean to dampen the mood," Rhys said, "but how do we know he's cured? Maeve and Gordon may not get another shot at this."

Doyle interrupted. "If Galen says that he is healed enough for this ritual, I for one believe him."

I looked at Doyle. His face was its usual dark mask, unreadable. He rarely spoke unless he was certain of something.

"How can you be certain?" Frost asked.

"Meredith needs a consort to her goddess. Who better than the green man whose life has only recently returned to him?"

I knew that the green man was sometimes a nickname for the Goddess's Consort, sometimes a name for the generic forest god. I looked at Galen. He certainly was the green man.

"If Doyle thinks it's all right, then let it be Galen."

I don't think Frost was happy with the choice, but everyone else took it in stride, and Frost kept his mouth shut. Sometimes that's all you can ask of a man, or anyone else.