Mistral's Kiss (Merry Gentry #5)(32)

“I will heal,” Frost said, voice tight.
The trees closed overhead with a sound like the ocean waves rushing along a shore. Leaves tore and rained down on us as the branches wove a shield of leaves, thorns, and bright red berries above. The shadow it cast made Frost’s skin look grey for a moment, and it frightened me.
“You heal gunshot wounds if the bullet goes through and through. You heal nonmagical blades. But Black Agnes was a night-hag and once a goddess. Is your wound of blade, or claw?”
Frost tried to take his hand back, but I wouldn’t let him. Unless he wanted to be appear undignified, he couldn’t break free. Our hands were covered in his blood, sticky and warm.
Doyle was at Frost’s side. “How badly are you hurt?”
“We do not have time to tend my wounds,” Frost said. He wouldn’t look at Doyle, or any of us. He arranged his face in that arrogant mask, the one that made him impossibly handsome, and as cold as his namesake. But the terrible wounds on the right side of that face ruined the mask. It was like a chink in armor; he could not hide behind it.
“Nor do we have time to lose my strong right arm,” Doyle said, “not if there is time to save it.”
Frost looked at him, surprise showing through the mask. I wondered if Doyle had never, in all these long years, called Frost the strong right arm of the Darkness. The look on his face suggested so. And maybe it was as close as Doyle would come to apologizing for abandoning him to the fight with Agnes in order to save me. Had Frost thought Doyle left him behind on purpose?
A world of emotion seemed to pass between the two men. If they’d been human men, they might have exchanged some profanity or sports metaphor, which is what seems to pass for terms of deepest affection between friends. But they were who they were, and Doyle said, simply, “Remove enough weapons so we can see the wound.” He smiled when he said it, because of all the guards Frost would be the one carrying the most weapons, with Mistral a distant second.
“Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,” Rhys said.
We all looked at him, and then beyond him. The air boiled black, grey, white, and horrible. The hunt was coming toward us like a ribbon of nightmares. It took my eyes a moment to find Sholto on the island. He was a small, pale figure running—running full out—with that sidhe swiftness. But fast as he was, he wouldn’t be fast enough—what chased him moved with the swiftness of birds, of wind, of water. It was like trying to outrun the wind; you just couldn’t do it.Doyle turned back to Frost. “Take off your jacket. I’ll make a compress. We’re not going to have time for more.”
I glanced back toward the island. Sholto’s guards, his uncles, tried to buy him time. They offered themselves as a sacrifice to slow the hunt. It worked, for a while. Some of that fearful boil of shapes slowed and covered them. I think I heard one of them scream over the high bird-like chittering of the creatures. But most of the wild hunt stayed on target. That target was Sholto.
He crossed the bridge and kept running. “Goddess help us,” Rhys said, “he’s coming here.”
“He finally understands what he’s called into being,” Mistral said. “He runs in terror now. He runs to the only sanctuary he can see.”
“We stand in the middle of four-leaf clovers, rowan, ash, and thorn. The wild hunt cannot touch us here,” I said, but my voice was soft, and didn’t hold the certainty I wished it had.
Doyle had ripped Frost’s shirt away and torn Frost’s own jacket into pieces small enough to be used as compresses.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
Doyle shook his head, pressing the cloth in an area that seemed to run under Frost’s arm and into his shoulder. “Get us out of here, Meredith. I will tend Frost. But only you can get us out.”
“The wild hunt will pass us by,” I said. “We stand in the middle of things that they cannot pass through.”
“If we were not its prey, then I would agree,” Doyle said. He was trying to get Frost to lie down on the clover, but the other man was arguing. Doyle pressed harder on the wound, which made Frost draw a sharp breath. He continued, “But Sholto told us to run, if we were sidhe. He has conjured it to hunt us.”
I started to turn away, but couldn’t quite tear my eyes from Frost. Once he had been the Killing Frost: cold, frightening, arrogant, untouched, and untouchable. Now he was Frost, and he wasn’t frightening, or cold, and I knew the touch of his body in almost every possible way. I wanted to go to him, to hold his hand while Doyle tended his wound.
“Merry,” Doyle said, “if you do not get us out of here, Frost will not be the only one hurt.”
I caught Frost’s gaze. Pain, I saw there, but also something hopeful, or good. I think he liked that I was so worried about him. “Get us out, Merry,” Frost said between gritted teeth. “I am fine.”
I didn’t call him a liar, but I did turn away so I couldn’t watch. It would have distracted me too much, and I didn’t have time to be weak.
“I need a door to the Unseelie Court.” I said it clearly, but nothing happened.
“Try again,” Rhys said. 
I tried again, and again nothing happened.
“Sholto said No doors,” Mistral said. “Apparently his word stands.”
Sholto’s feet had touched the edge of the field I’d made. He was only yards away from the first of the clover. The air above him was thick with tentacles and mouths and claws. I looked away from it, because I couldn’t think while I was staring into it.
“Call something else,” Abe said.
“What?” I asked.
It was Rhys who said, “Where rowan, ash, and thorn grow close together, the veil between worlds is thinner.”
I looked up at the circle of trees that I’d called into being. Their branches had formed a lace of roof above us. They still hushed and moved above us the way the roses in the Unseelie Court moved, as if they had more life than an ordinary tree.
I began to walk the inside of the circle of trees, searching not with my hands, but with that part of me that sensed magic. Most human psychics have to do something to get themselves in the mood for magic, but I had to shield constantly not to be overwhelmed by it. Especially in faerie—there was so much of it that it became like the engine noise of some great ship, and you ceased to “hear” it after a while, though it was always there thrumming along your skin, making your bones vibrate to its rhythm.
I reached out from behind those shields and searched for a place in the trees that felt…thin. I couldn’t look simply for magic; there was too much of it around me. Too much power flowing toward us. I needed to cast out for something more specific.
“The clover has slowed them,” Mistral called.
This made me glance back, away from the trees. The cloud of nightmares rolled above the clover like a pack of hounds that had lost the scent.
Sholto just kept running, his hair flying behind him, the nude beauty of him beautiful in motion, like watching a horse run across a field. It was a beauty that transcended sex; simply beautiful for its own sake.
“Concentrate, Merry,” Rhys said. “I’ll help you look for a door.”
I nodded and went back to looking only at the trees. They thrummed with power, inherently magical and invested with further power because they had been called into being by one of the oldest magicks.
Rhys called from across the clearing. “Here!”
I ran to him, the clover tapping at my legs and feet as if patting me with soft green hands. I passed Frost on the ground, where Doyle sat holding his wound. Frost was hurt, very hurt, but there was no time to help—Doyle would take care of him. I had to take care of us all.
Rhys was standing by a group of three of the trees that looked no different from the others, really. But when I put my hand out toward them, it was as if reality had been rubbed thin here, like a good-luck penny rubbed in your pocket.
“You feel it?” Rhys asked.
I nodded. “How do we open it?”
“You just walk through,” Rhys said. He looked back at the others. “Everybody gather around. We need to walk through together.”
“Why?” I asked.
He grinned at me. “Because naturally occurring doorways like this don’t lead to the same place every time. It’d be bad if we were separated.”
“Bad’s one way of putting it,” I said.
Doyle had to help Frost to his feet. Even so, he stumbled. Abe came and offered his shoulder to lean on, still grasping the horn cup in one hand, as if it was the most important thing in the world. It occurred to me then that the Goddess’s chalice had gone back to wherever it went when it wasn’t mucking about with me. I had never held on to it the way Abe did with his, but then, I had been afraid of its power. Abe wasn’t afraid of his cup’s power; he was afraid of losing it again.Mistral was backing toward us. “Are we waiting for the Lord of Shadows or leaving him to his fate?”
It took me a second to realize he meant Sholto. I looked toward the lake. Sholto was almost here, almost to the tree line. The sky behind him was totally black, as if the father of all storms was about to break, except that instead of lightning there were tentacles, and mouths that shrieked.
“He can escape the same way,” Rhys said. “The door won’t close behind us.”