Divine Misdemeanors

Chapter Twenty-five

I was snuggled against the sweet scent of Frost’s back, one arm across his waist, my hips curving around the firm roundness of his ass. Doyle lay against my back, spooning me just as perfectly. They were a foot and an inch or two taller than I was, so spooning meant we had to choose if we wanted our faces next to each other, or our groins. There was no way to have both.

Doyle snuggled in his sleep, one arm flung across me and over Frost’s side. Of all the men, they touched each other the most in their sleep, as if they needed reassurance that not only I was there, but that the other man was, too. I liked that.

Doyle moved a little more and I was suddenly aware that his body was very happy to be pressed up against my ass. The sensation pushed me further out of the drowsy sleep. I couldn’t see a clock, so I didn’t know how long we had until the alarm sounded, but however long we had, I wanted to use it.

Music sounded. It wasn’t the alarm. It was Paula Cole’s “Feelin’ Love,” which meant it was my phone. I felt Doyle and Frost wake instantly. Their bodies tensed, muscles ready to spring out of bed for some emergency. I’d noticed that most of the guards woke like that, unless I woke them with petting and sex, as if anything else always meant some crisis.

“It’s my cell phone,” I said. Some minutia of tension slid away from their tensed muscles. Frost reached one long arm down to the side of the bed and began to rummage in the clothes pile, which was where all the clothes had ended up last night.

One of the interesting things about the Treo was that it could play an entire song, and that’s what it was doing as Frost fumbled through the clothes. For me to reach the ground someone would have needed to steady me so I didn’t fall out of bed, but Frost could reach the floor easily. There was no tension in his body as he finally held the phone back up in the air in my general direction.

We were far enough into the song to make me debate once more on the song as my main ring tone. It was fine until it played too far into the song in public. The sexually explicit lyrics didn’t bother me, but I kept waiting for some little old lady or mother with small children to protest. So far no one had, or maybe I’d just gotten to the song in time.

I unlocked the phone and was suddenly talking to Jeremy Grey, my boss. “Merry, it’s Jeremy.”

I sat up, searching for the glowing face of the bedside clock, afraid I’d overslept. The blackout curtains in the main bedroom made the light not helpful. “What time is it?”

“It’s only six; you’re hours from needing to be in the office.” He sounded grim. Jeremy was usually pretty upbeat, which meant something was wrong.

“What’s wrong, Jeremy?”

The men had both rolled over on their backs and were watching me. They were tense again, because they, like me, knew that Jeremy wouldn’t call this early for anything good. Funny how no one ever wakes you up with good news.

“There’s been another fey murder.”

I sat up straighter, letting the sheet pool in my lap. “Like the other one?”

“I don’t know yet. Lucy just called.”

“She called you, not me,” I said. “After the mess my presence made of the last murder, I think I’m probably persona non grata.”

“You are,” he said, “but if I feel I want you and your guard’s opinion she’s left me a very explicit message. She said ‘Bring whatever employees you think will be the most helpful on this. I trust your judgment, Jeremy, and I know you understand the situation.’”

“That is an odd way for her to ask.”

“This way when you show up, it’s not her bad, it’s mine, and I can make the case for needing you better than she can.”

“I’m not sure Lucy’s superiors aren’t right, Jeremy. Her having to come save me made her lose the only witness we had.”

“Maybe, but if a fey, especially a demi-fey, wants to run they will. They disappear better than almost any of us.”

He was right, but … “That’s true, but it was still a mess.”

“Bring only guards who can do enough glamour to hide in plain sight. Bring more guards; two wasn’t enough from what I saw on the news.”

“If I bring more guards, it’s more people to hide,” I said.

“I’ll have some of the other people meet us there, so we all show up in a mass. We’ll hide you with numbers, and leave Doyle and Frost at home. They don’t do good glamour, and they’re too damn noticeable.”

“They won’t like that.”

“Either you’re Princess or you aren’t, Merry. If you are going to be in charge, then be in charge. If you’re not, then stop pretending.”

“The voice of experience,” I said.

“You know it,” he said. “If I need you, meet Julian here.” He gave me the address to meet so we wouldn’t show up in a car that was associated with me.

“They won’t let this many of us inside a crime scene, Jeremy,” I said.

“Some of us don’t need to be inside the crime scene to do our jobs, and it won’t hurt our reputation to have more of our people on camera milling around with the police.”

“Thinking like that is why you’re the boss.”

“Remember that, Merry. You have to earn the right to keep being the boss. Get off the phone, enjoy a few more hours with your boyfriend, but be ready to go earn the title Princess. Leave your two shadows at home, and bring ones who can blend in better when I call.”

I hung up and explained to Doyle and Frost why they were not going with me if I had to go. They didn’t like it at all, but I did what Jeremy had told me to do. I was the boss. He was right. Either I claimed the role or someone else would. I’d almost lost it to Doyle before, and now Barinthus. There were too many leaders among us and not enough followers. Doyle and Frost dressed in jeans and T-shirt and suit respectively. I chose a summer weight dress and heels. The heels were for Sholto who was coming to help guard me today. He was as good at glamour as any and could travel instantly from his kingdom to the edge where the sand met the surf because it was a place between and he was the Lord of that which passes between. He and King Taranis were the only sidhe left who could do magical travel.

The real problem was that only two of the guards were truly that good at personal glamour. Rhys and Galen could go with me as the main guards, but we needed more guards than that. I knew Doyle and Frost well enough to know that if they couldn’t be with me, they would insist on more guards, which was fine, but who? Sholto was great at glamour and he was on his way, but who else? Instead of relaxing we spent a lot of the morning debating who would go with me.

Rhys said, “Saraid and Dogmaela are both almost as good at glamour as I am.”

“But they have only been with us a few weeks,” Frost said. “We have not trusted them with Merry’s personal safety.”

“We have to try them sometime,” he answered.

Doyle spoke from the edge of the bed, where he was sitting as I got dressed. “They were Prince Cel’s pet guards only a few weeks ago. I am not so eager to give them personal guard duty over Merry.”

“Nor I,” Frost said.

Barinthus spoke from near the closed door. “I found them competent guards here at the beach house.”

“But that’s just running the perimeter,” Doyle said. “I would trust all the guards to do that. Merry’s safety is a different type of duty altogether.”

“We either trust them, or we need to send them away from us,” Rhys said.

Doyle and Frost exchanged a look, and then Doyle said, “I am not as distrustful as that.”

“Then you must let some of them guard Merry,” Barinthus said. “They have already begun to suspect that they will never be trusted because of their association with Prince Cel.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“They have spent centuries with a queen and a prince to answer to; they feel the need of someone to lead them. You have left many of them here at the beach house off and on these few weeks. I am who they have to follow.”

“You are not their leader,” Rhys said.

“No, the princess is, but your caution to keep them farther from her has left a vacuum of leadership. They are frightened by this new world that you have brought them to, and they wonder why you have not taken any of them as your ladies-in-waiting.”

“That was a human custom that the Seelie Court adopted,” I said. “It’s not an Unseelie custom.”

“True, but many of the ones with us now were longer at the Seelie Court than at our own. They would like something familiar.”

“Or is it you who would like something familiar?” Rhys asked.

“I don’t know what you mean, Rhys.”

“Yes, you do.” And there was something far too serious in Rhys’s voice.

“I say again that I do not know what you mean.”

“Coyness does not become you, sea god.”

“Nor you, death god,” Barinthus said, and there was an edge of irritation to his voice now. It wasn’t anger. I’d rarely seen the big man truly angry, but there was some tension between the two of them that I’d never seen before.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

It was Frost who answered. “Of those of us at your side, they are two of the most powerful.”

I looked at Frost. “What does that have to do with the tension between them?”

“They begin to feel their way back to their full powers, and like rams in springtime they want to butt heads to see who is stronger.”

“We are not animals, Killing Frost.”

“But you would remind me that I am not truly sidhe. Nor was I one of Danu’s children when she first came to the shores of our homeland. All this you remind me with my old nickname. I was the Killing Frost, and once even less than that.”

Barinthus studied him. Finally, he said, “Perhaps I do see those who were once less than sidhe, but are sidhe now as lesser still. I do not mean to feel that way, but I cannot deny that I find it difficult to see you with the princess and about to be father to her children when you have never been worshipped and once were but a childlike thing to skip across the still winter’s nights and paint the windowpanes with hoarfrost.”

I’d had no idea that Barinthus thought that the sidhe who began life as non-sidhe were lesser, and I didn’t try to keep the surprise off my face. “You never mentioned any of this to me, Barinthus.”

“I would have taken anyone as father to your children if it would have put you on the throne, Meredith. Once you were on the throne, we could have solidified your power base.”

“No, Barinthus, we could have taken the throne and been victim to assassination attempts until some of us died. The nobles would never have accepted me.”

“We could have made them accept your power.”

“You keep saying ‘we,’ Kingmaker. Define ‘we,’” Rhys said.

I remembered Rhys’s warning when I’d first entered the beach house.

“We as in us, her princes and nobles,” Barinthus said.

“Except for me,” Frost said.

“I did not say that,” he said.

“But did you mean it?” I asked, and held my hand out to Frost, so he came to stand tall and straight beside me. I leaned my head against his hip.

“Is it true that you were crowned by faerie itself with the blessing of the Goddess herself?” he asked. “Did you truly wear the crown of moonlight and shadows?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Was Doyle truly crowned with thorn and silver?”

“Yes,” I said, and played with Frost’s hand, rubbing my thumb over his knuckles, and feeling the solid comfort of his hip against my cheek.

Barinthus put his hands before his face, as if he could not bear to look at us anymore.

“What is wrong with you?” I asked.

He spoke without moving his hands. “You had won, Merry, don’t you understand that? You had won the throne, and the crowns would have silenced the other nobles.” He lowered his hands and his face looked tormented.

“You can’t know that,” I said.

“Even now you stand before me with him at your side. The one you gave up everything for.”

I finally understood what was bothering him, or thought I did. “You’re upset because I gave up the crown to save Frost’s life.”

“Upset,” he said, and he gave a harsh laugh. “Upset—no, I wouldn’t say I’m upset. If your father had been given such a blessing he would have known what to do with it.”

“My father left faerie for years to save my life.”

“You were his child.”

“Love is love, Barinthus. What matters what kind of love it is?”

He made a disgusted sound. “You are a woman, and perhaps such things move you, but Doyle.” He looked at the other man. “Doyle, you gave up everything we could have ever wished for to save the life of one man. You knew what would happen to our court and our people with a failing queen and no heir to the bloodline.”

“I expected that there would either be civil war or assassins would kill the queen and there would be a new ruler of our court.”

“How could you hold the life of one man above the better good of your entire people?” Barinthus asked.

“I think your faith in our people is too great,” Doyle said. “I think that Merry crowned by faerie and Goddess or not, the court is too deeply divided with power factions. I think that the assassins wouldn’t have stopped with the queen. They would have aimed at the new queen, at Merry, or at those closest and most powerful near her until she stood alone and helpless as they saw it. There are those who would have been happy to turn her into a puppet for their hand.”

“With us at her side and in our full power they would not have dared,” Barinthus said.

“The rest of us have been brought back into our power, but you have only regained a small portion of yours,” Rhys said. “Unless Merry brings you back fully into your powers, then you are not as powerful as most of the sidhe in this room.”

The silence in the room was suddenly heavier, and the very air was suddenly thicker, like trying to drink our breath.

“The fact that the Killing Frost may be more powerful than the great Mannan Mac Lir must rankle,” Rhys said.

“He is not more powerful than I am,” Barinthus said, but in a voice that held some of the slurring of the sea, like angry waves crashing on rock.

“Stop this,” Doyle said, and he actually moved to stand between them.

I realized that it was Barinthus’s magic making the air thick, and I remembered stories of him being able to make humans fall down dead with water flowing out of their mouths, drowned on dry land miles from water.

“And will you finally be king?” Barinthus asked.

“If you are angry with me, then be angry with me, old friend, but Frost had no say in the choices we made on his behalf. Merry and I chose freely.”

“Even now you stand guard over him,” Barinthus said.

I stood up, still holding Frost’s hand. “Are you bothered that we gave up the crown for just one man, or are you bothered that we gave it up for Frost?”

“I have no quarrel with Frost as a man, or a warrior.”

“Then is it really that he’s not sidhe enough for you?”

Rhys stepped just enough around Doyle so he could meet Barinthus’s eyes. “Or do you see in Doyle and Frost what you wanted with Prince Essus but were always afraid to ask for?”

We all froze, as if his words were a bomb that we could all see falling toward us, but there was no way to stop it. There was no way to catch it, and no way to run. We just all stood there, and I had moments for my childhood memories of my father and Barinthus to run through my head. It was quick flashes. A hand on someone’s arm, a hand held a little too long, an embrace, a look, and I suddenly realized that my father’s best friend might have been more than just his friend.

There was nothing wrong with love in our court no matter what sex you chose, but the queen didn’t let any of her guard have sex with anyone but her, and one of the terms for Barinthus joining her court had been that he had joined her guard. It had been a way to control him, and a way to say that she had the great Mannan Mac Lir as her lackey and hers in every way, only hers.

I’d always wondered about her insisting that Barinthus join her guard. It hadn’t been standard at the time for exiles from the Seelie Court Most of the other sidhe who had come from that time had just joined the court. I’d always thought it was because the queen feared Barinthus’s power, but now I saw another motive. She had loved her brother, my father, but she had also been jealous of his power. Essus was a name that people still spoke as a god, at least in the recent past, if you counted the Roman Empire as recent, but her own name, Andais, had been lost so completely that no one remembered what she had once been. Had she forced Barinthus to be her celibate guard to keep him out of her brother’s bed?

I had a moment to think about Essus and Mannan Mac Lir joined as a couple both politically and magically, and though I didn’t agree with what she’d done, I understood the fear. They were two of the most powerful of us. Combined, they could have owned both courts, if they’d been willing to, because Barinthus had joined us before we were cast out of Europe. Our internal wars had been our own business and no matter for human law, so they could have taken first the Unseelie and then the Seelie Court.

I spoke into that weighted silence. “Or was it Andais who made it impossible for you to have his love? She would never have risked the two of you joining your power together.”

“And now there is a queen of faerie who would have let you have all you desired, but it is too late,” Rhys said quietly.

“Are you jealous of the closeness you see between Frost and Doyle?” I asked it with a careful, quiet voice.

“I am jealous of the power I see in the other men. That I will admit to, and the thought that without your touch I will never come back to my power is a hard thing.” He made certain to give me eye contact, but his face was a mask of arrogance, beautiful and alien. It was a look that I’d seen him give Andais. It was his unreadable face, and he’d never had to use it on me before.

“You flooded every river around St. Louis when Merry and you had sex only in vision,” Rhys said. “How much more power do you want?”

This time Barinthus looked away, and would not meet anyone’s eyes. That was answer enough, I supposed.

It was Doyle who stepped forward a step or two, and said, “I understand wanting to have all the old power back, my friend.”

“You have regained yours!” Barinthus yelled. “Don’t try to soothe me when you stand there full to bursting with your own power.”

“But it is not my old power, not completely. I still cannot heal as I did. I cannot do many things that I once could do.”

Barinthus looked at Doyle then, and the anger in his eyes had turned them from happy blue to a black where the water runs deep and there are rocks just under the surface, ready to tear the hull of your boat and sink you.

There was a sudden splash against the side of the house. We were too far above the sea for the tide to find us, and it was the wrong time of day for it anyway. There was another slap of water, and this time I heard it smack into the huge windows of the master bathroom attached to this bedroom.

It was Galen who slid from the doorway and walked farther into the bathroom to check on the sound. There was another burst of water on the glass, and he came back, his face serious. “The sea is rising, but the water is like someone picked it up and threw it at the windows. It is actually separating from the sea, and seems to float for a moment before it hits.”

“You must control your power, my friend,” Doyle said, his deep voice going deeper with some strong emotion.

“Once I could have called the sea and washed this house into the water.”

“Is that what you want to do?” I asked. I squeezed Frost’s hand and then moved forward to stand with Doyle.

He looked at me then, and his face showed great anguish. His hands ground into fists at his side. “No, I would not wash away into the sea all we have gained, and I would never harm you, Merry. I would never dishonor Essus and all he tried to do by saving your life. You carry his grandchildren. I want to be here to see the babes born.”

His unbound hair writhed around him, and where most hair seemed to blow in wind, there was something of liquid in the way his hair moved, as if here in this room somehow the currents below touched and played with his ankle-length hair. I was betting that his hair didn’t tangle either.

The sea quieted outside, the noise drawing away until it was just the quiet hush of water on the narrow beach below. “I am sorry. I lost control of myself, and that is unforgivable. I, of all sidhe, know that such childish displays of power are pointless.”

“And you want the Goddess to give you back more power?” Rhys asked.

Barinthus looked up and that flash of black water showed for a moment, then was swallowed into something calmer, more controlled. “I do. Wouldn’t you? Oh, but I forgot, you have a sithen waiting for you, regained from the Goddess only last night.” There was bitterness to his voice now, and the ocean sounded just a little rough, as if some great hand stirred it with an impatient hand.

“Maybe there’s a reason the Goddess hasn’t given you back more of your powers,” said Galen.

We all looked at him. He leaned in the doorway looking serious but calm.

“You have no stake in this, boy. You don’t remember what I lost.”

“I don’t, but I do know that the Goddess is wise, and she sees further into our hearts and minds than we do. If this is what you do with only part of your power back, how arrogant would you be with all of it back?”

Barinthus took a step toward him. “You have no right to judge me.”

“He is father to my children as much as Doyle,” I said. “He is a king to my queen as much as Doyle.”

“He was not crowned by faerie and the gods themselves.”

There was a knock on the door. It made me jump. Doyle called out, “Not now.”

But the door opened, and it was Sholto, Lord of Shadows and That Which Passes Between, King of the Sluagh. He came in with his unbound hair, in a white-blond cloak over a black-and-silver tunic and boots.

He wasted a smile on me, and I got the full impact of his tricolored eyes: metallic gold around the pupil, then amber, then yellow like aspen leaves in the fall. His smile faded as he turned to the other men and said, “I heard you yelling, Sea Lord, and I have been crowned by faerie and the gods themselves. Does that make this fight more mine?”