Swallowing Darkness

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The woman talking with Galen was one of their wizards. Specialist Paula Gregorio was only inches taller than me, with sleek black hair, a thin dark face, and huge brown eyes. Her eyes dominated her face so that she looked younger than she was, and much more delicate than the personality that burned out of them.

She shook my hand a little too hard, like some men will when they want to test another man. But our hands were the same size, and no matter how fit she was under that uniform, she didn't have the strength to hurt my hand. I might have looked as delicate as Specialist Gregorio, but comparatively, I was a lot harder to hurt. I was only part human, and she was all human.

But the fact that she didn't like me from the moment she saw me was not a good start, since, theoretically, she was here to keep me safe and alive; it would have been better if she'd liked me. But one flick of those big dark eyes to Galen let me know exactly why she didn't like me. What had he been doing out here for the last few hours with Specialist Gregorio to make her look at him that way and me the other?

Knowing Galen, nothing he thought of as flirting. He was just being friendly. He'd have talked the same way to a male wizard, but Gregorio didn't know that, and explaining it would have sounded either insulting to her or like I was trying to keep her away from Galen. Neither was what I meant, so I let it go. Hopefully, my safety would not depend on her. If it did, we had other problems than the fact that she thought Galen liked her.

The second wizard was tall, though not as tall as most of the sidhe, which put him just shy of six feet. He was as blond and pale as Gregorio was black-haired and dark. Staff Sergeant Dawson had an easy smile and hair cut so short you could see scalp on either side of his cap. "Princess Meredith, it's an honor to escort you to safety." He shook my hand, and there was no physical challenge to it, but there was a flare of magic. Not on purpose, because his own face looked too startled for that, but just a very powerful human psychic touching the hand of the new queen of faerie.

He didn't drop my hand, but he jerked, as if it hadn't felt entirely good. I drew my hand out first, slowly, being polite, but as I gazed up at him in the light of flood lamps, I saw something I hadn't before. There was an uptilt to his blue eyes, and the fingers of his hand were just a little too long, a little too thin, a little too delicate for his height. There was a sound like bells, and the scent of flowers, though not roses.

"What was that?" he asked, in a voice gone just a little breathy.

"I didn't hear anything," Gregorio said, but she looked out into the dark, past the lights. She trusted Dawson's instincts. I bet he had a lot of odd hunches that proved to be right.

"Bells," Galen said, and he moved closer to Dawson and me. He looked at me over the wizard's shoulder. He and I shared a moment of knowledge.

Dawson noticed it. "What is it? I heard the bells too, but you both know what it is. Is it something dangerous?" He was rubbing his hands on his arms as if he were cold, but I knew he wasn't cold from the winter chill. Though I had no doubt that his skin ran with goose-flesh, as if someone had walked over his grave.

I started to say something ordinary to hide it all and not spook him more, but what came out of my mouth was the opposite. "Welcome home, Dawson."

"I don't know what... " But the words died on his lips, and he simply gazed at me.

Gregorio turned back to us. She jerked Dawson by the arm hard, so that it broke our eye contact. "We were warned about her effect on men, Sergeant."

He looked embarrassed, and then stepped away from me so that he addressed his next words to the night beyond us. "It's not that I'm not flattered, ma'am, but I've got a job to do."

"Do you both think that I just tried to seduce the sergeant?" I asked.

Gregorio glared at me. "You just can't seem to leave any men for the rest of us, can you?"

"Specialist Gregorio," Dawson said in a sharp voice, "you will not speak to the princess like that. You will treat her and her party with the utmost respect." But he still didn't look too closely at me when he said it.

"Yes, sir," she said, but even those two words held anger.

"It isn't my physicality that called to you just now, Sergeant Dawson."

He shook his head. "I'll be riding in the first truck with the male driver. We've got a female driver and the specialist to ride with you in the second vehicle."

"You have some faerie blood in your ancestry," Rhys said.

"That's not... " But again Dawson's words failed him. His hands were balled into fists, and he was shaking his head.

"Don't make us have to put up wards against you, Princess," Gregorio said.

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

"What's so funny?"

In my head I thought, "You couldn't ward against me now if you tried." Out loud, I said, "I'm sorry, Specialist, I'm just tired, and it's been a rather difficult few days. It's just nervous tension, I think. Just get us out of here. Farther away from the faerie mounds will be better for all of us."

She looked like she wanted to argue but just nodded and went to check on her sergeant.

Rhys and Galen moved close to me. Rhys said, "Your power called to his blood."

"You mean his genetics?" I asked.

"I suppose so," Rhys said.

Doyle moved up behind me, putting his hands on my shoulders, drawing us all in close to talk. "Is this what it means to call someone's blood?" I asked.

Rhys nodded. "Yes, it's been so long since any of us could do it that I'd forgotten what it meant."

"I don't understand," I said, pressing myself back into the curve of Doyle's body. Sholto and Mistral were on either side of our group, but they were watching outward while they listened, as if Doyle had told them to do it. He probably had.

"You hold the hand of blood, Merry," Doyle said against my hair. "The power to call blood isn't just calling it out of the body," Rhys said. "It's also being able to call to the magic in a person's body. It may be that now you'll be calling to any fey blood in the humans around us. That's good on one hand; it will up their power level, and maybe yours. But it's going to creep out the humans you do it to until you figure out how to do it a little more quietly."

"What does it mean, exactly, that my hand of blood calls to Dawson's blood?"

"It means that your magic calls to his."

"Like calls to like," Mistral said, his eyes still directed out into the night.

"The fey in Europe intermarried with a lot of humans whose families immigrated to the United States," I said.

"Yes," Rhys said.

"So this may happen a lot?" I asked.

He nodded and shrugged. "Maybe."

"But it means more than that," Mistral said. "It means that the princess may be able to call the part-fey to her cause."

I looked up, trying to see Doyle's face, but he laid his cheek on top of my head. Not to stop me from seeing his face, but just for comfort, I think. "What does that mean?"

Doyle spoke low, his chest and throat so close to me that his voice vibrated against me. "Once, to hold some hands of power, you could call the humans to be your army, or your servants. You could call them to your side, and they came willingly, lovingly. The hand of blood was one of the few that could make humans want to join you. Literally, if you have all the power that the hand of blood once held, you call to the magic in their blood, and they will answer."

"Do they have a choice?" I asked.

"When you master this power, they will not want to have a choice. They will want to serve you, as we do."

"But... "

Rhys put his fingertip on my lips. "It's a type of love, Merry. It's the way men were supposed to feel for their lord and master. Once it wasn't like it is now, or has been for so long." He lowered his finger, and looked utterly sad. "I could do it too, call men to me. I gave them safety, comfort, joy. I protected them, and I did love them. Then I lost my powers, and I couldn't protect them. I couldn't save them anymore." He hugged me, and because Doyle was so close, he hugged us both.

Rhys whispered, "I don't know whether to be happy that this kind of power is returning to us or sad. It's so wonderful when it works, but when it went away, it was like I died with my people, Merry. They died, and they were pieces of me dying. I prayed for true death then. I prayed to die with my people, but I was immortal. I couldn't die, and I couldn't save them."

I felt the liquid on my face. I pressed my face against his cheek, and felt tears from his one good eye. The goblin who took his other eye had taken its tears too. I felt Doyle's arms tighten around us both. Then I felt Galen come in behind Rhys and hold him too.

Sholto put a hand on Rhys's hair, and Mistral's deep voice came. "I do not know if I want to be responsible for so many again."

"Me, either," Rhys said, in a voice squeezed with tears.

"Me, either," I said.

Doyle spoke. "You may have no choice."

And that was the truth, the wonderful and horrible truth.