A Stroke of Midnight (Merry Gentry #4)(27)

“Are you saying the mirror appeared because I asked how I looked?”
“Hush,” Frost said, then he nodded.
“Now that,” Doyle said, “is interesting.”
“The sithen hasn’t answered to whims since—” Frost stopped as if trying to think how long.
“Long enough, my friend, that I, too, am not certain when the last time was.”
“So is this good,” I said, “or not?”
“Good,” Doyle said.
“But dangerous,” Frost added.
Doyle nodded. “I would be careful what I said aloud from now on, Meredith. An idle comment could have grave consequences, if the sithen has truly returned to that much life.”
“What do you mean?”
“The sithen is a living thing, but it does not think like any living thing I have ever known. It will interpret what you say in its own way. You ask how you look, and it gives you a mirror. Who knows what it might offer you, depending on what you said.”“What if I yelled for help, would it do anything useful?” I asked.
“I do not know,” Doyle said. “I have heard of it giving you objects you asked for, but never touching people. But there are enchanted items locked within its walls, things that simply vanished. Some theorize that they did not go back to the gods, but inside the very walls. There are things that I would not want appearing before you without more help than this.”
“More help than you and Frost?”
He nodded.
I started to ask what object could possibly be so dangerous that the Killing Frost and the Queen’s Darkness could not keep me safe, but I didn’t. One disaster at a time. It was almost as if something wanted to keep us here tonight, distracted by one semi-important event after another. I shook my head. “Enough, we are leaving now. Rhys and the police are waiting.”
When we stepped out the door we were in the main corridor just inside the outer doors. My room should have been three levels down, and nowhere near this area. The guards waiting to accompany us were staring at us as we walked out.
Galen said, “That door wasn’t there before.”
“No,” Doyle said, and he got everyone in formation, with me in the center, hidden once again behind a phalanx of guards. I would have said men, but at least three of them were female, including Biddy. She and Nicca would probably be useless in a fight. They were still too magic befuddled, but we were afraid to leave them behind. I was almost certain that without someone to stop them, they would have sex, and until I cleared it with the queen that was an automatic death by torture for both of them. Doyle did make them stop holding hands. He thought the police might get the wrong idea.
Cathbodua and Dogmaela had joined our little band. I suddenly had three women in my personal entourage who might have owed more allegiance to Cel than to me. Doyle made some noises about me needing ladies in waiting, and wouldn’t it be useful if they were also trained warriors. But I knew the real reason. We took them with us because the queen might at any moment change her mind and demand them back into Cel’s service. We took them out into the snow to meet the police because they were safer with us than without us.
CHAPTER 13

I DIDN’T SEE THE POLICE BUT I HEARD THEM, A RUMBLE OF DEEP male voices. Sound carried so much better on those still, bitterly cold nights. My cheeks were stinging, and my breath had fogged and frozen in the fur of the hood. Barinthus had kept me warm on the walk to the faerie mounds after the assassination attempt, but I walked on my own power now. The snow was knee high for me, and my boots didn’t quite keep it from soaking into the knees of my jeans. I tried to call the feel of the summer sun to put inside my shield and help keep back the cold, but it was as if I couldn’t remember what summer felt like. The moonless night was clear with a thousand stars flung across the darkness like bits of glittering ice, diamond glints across black velvet. I focused on the fight to lift one foot, then the next, and struggle through drifts that the taller sidhe walked through effortlessly. It was undignified for a princess to fall on her face, but it took effort to keep from doing it. I suppose that struggling through the snow wasn’t exactly dignified either, but that I could do nothing about. 
But it was Biddy who stumbled. Nicca caught her before she hit the snow. I heard her apologize, “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m so cold.”
“Stop, all of you, stop,” I said. Everyone obeyed, some of them looking out at the snow, fingers near weapons.
It was Galen who asked, “What’s wrong, Merry?”
“Are Biddy and I the only ones here with human blood?”
“I think so.”
“I tried to conjure the feel of summer sun, and I couldn’t remember what it was like.”
Doyle had worked his way back to me. “What is wrong?”
“Check Biddy and me for a spell, a spell that attacks only human blood.”
He pulled off one of his black gloves and put his hand just above my face, not touching skin, but searching my aura, my shielding, my magic.
He growled low and soft, but the sound raised the hair on the back of my neck. “I take it you found something.”
He nodded. Then he turned to Biddy, who was half fainting in Nicca’s arms. “I am sorry, Doyle. I am truly better than this.”
“It is a spell,” he told her, and lifted off her helmet to lay his hand above her face. He handed the helmet to Nicca and turned to me, unable to hide the spark of angry color in his eyes. He was fighting down his power, raised by anger. Anger at himself most likely for letting yet another spell slip under his nose. We had some truly subtle spells being worked on us. One of us would have noticed something big, but such small spells were harder to guard against.
“It is tied to mortal blood. It simply sucks at your energy, and fills you with cold.”
“Why is Biddy more affected than Merry?” Nicca asked. He was covered completely in a thick cloak, except for his wings. They were held tight together as if they would stay warmer that way, and maybe they did. He was warm-blooded; moth wings did not change that.
I answered him. “She’s half-human, I’m less than a fourth human. If it is seeking human blood, she’s got more than I have.”
“Are the human police affected?” Hawthorne asked.
Doyle put his hand back over me, and this time I felt a warm pulse of magic shiver over my shields. “It is like a contagion. It was put on either Biddy or the princess, then jumped from one to the other. If we do not remove it, it will spread to the police.”
I looked up at him, speaking with the warmth of his magic against my skin, like breath. “What would it do to full-blooded humans?”
“It made a warrior of the sidhe stumble in the snow. She is disoriented, and would be useless in a fight.”
Frost was staring off into the darkness. He and another fringe of guards were all staring out into the cold night. His voice carried to me. “Is this the beginning of a more overt attack?”
“Who would be so bold as to attack the human guards?” Amatheon wondered aloud. He’d been eager to come out into the cold, anything to be farther away from the queen, I think. But I remembered again that he had been Cel’s creature for centuries. Did a few acts of honor and kindness erase centuries of allegiance? And as close to Cel as he had been, he had to have witnessed some of the horrors the female guards spoke of, didn’t he? I made a mental note to ask him later, with Doyle and Frost at my back. Onilwyn was inside the faerie mound, because he had not recovered from the beating Maggie May and I had given him. Cold iron forces even the sidhe to heal human slow. Him I did not trust at all. Amatheon I was beginning to trust; was I wrong to trust him? Of course, the question itself meant I didn’t trust him, not really.“Who indeed,” I said, and fought not to look at him, not to let him know with body language that I wondered if it was him.
Either I betrayed myself, or he felt insecure, because he said, “I will make any oath that I did not know of this.”
“You said you were a man without honor,” Adair said. “A man without honor has no oath.”
“Enough,” Doyle said, “we will not squabble amongst ourselves, not this close to the humans.”
“Doyle’s right. We will discuss this later.” I raised my face up to him, and said, “Can you remove it so that Biddy and I do not infect the police?”
“I can.”
“Then do it, and let us get this done.”
“You sound angry,” Galen said.
“I am tired of whoever is doing all this. Tired of these games.”
“It is a good sign, in a way,” Doyle said.
I looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“It means our murderer fears the human police, fears they may find him where our magic has failed.” He stuffed his gloves in the pocket of his coat and slid my hood off, so that the cold air spilled around my face. I shivered.
“I am afraid I will have to make you colder before I am done.”
I nodded. “Get this off of me, and I will warm myself.”
He pushed my cloak back. The cold rushed in, stealing the shell of warmth that the cloak had made. I fought not to shiver as he spread his hands over me, not touching even so much as my clothing, but caressing just above my body. His power shivered over my aura, and it felt as if he scooped something off of me, almost like flicking an insect off my skin.