A Caress of Twilight (Merry Gentry #2)(35)

Frost pushed the door open, entering first; he'd checked and the wards had been intact. The sweet clean smell of lavender and sage incense met us at the door. The main altar sat in the far corner of the living room so that everyone could use it. You didn't need the altar. You could stand in the middle of a meadow, or a woods, or a crowded subway and deity was always with you -- if you paid attention, and if you invited it into your heart. But the altar was a nice reminder. A place to start out every day with a little communion   of the spirit.
People often thought that the sidhe had no religion -- I mean they were once gods themselves, right? Well, sort of. They were worshipped as gods, but most sidhe acknowledge powers greater than they are. Most of us bend knee to Goddess and Consort, or some variation thereof. Goddess is the giver of all life, and Consort is all that is male. They are the template for everything that descends from them. She, especially she, is a greater power than anything on the planet, anything that is flesh, no matter how spiritual that flesh may once have been.
Except for the thin trail of incense from the altar, and a small carved bowl of water that had been added to the altar, the apartment looked empty. It didn't feel empty though. There was the small skin-tingling of magic nearby -- not big magic but more the everyday kind. Doyle was probably on the mirror talking to someone. He'd opted to stay behind today and try to uncover more information about the Nameless from some of our friends at court. Doyle's magic was subtle enough that he might go completely undetected as he moved around amongst them. I could not have done it.
Rhys locked the door and pulled a taped note off it. "Galen's out apartment hunting. He hopes we like the flower." He pulled a second note from the door. "Nicca hopes to finish up the bodyguard job today."
"The actress is in no danger," Frost said, as he began to slip his jacket off. "I believe most sincerely that her agent put her up to it, to get more attention for a ... how do they say, flagging career."I nodded. "Her last two movies were pretty much flops, both financially and artistically."
"That I did not know. But the media is there to photograph us more than her."
"She's taking you to all the hot spots where you are bound to get seen." I wanted to slip off the high heels, but we were going right back out to work. So instead I walked to Kitto's covered hidey-hole and knelt down, smoothing my skirt behind automatically so the buckles on my shoes wouldn't snag my hose.
I could see his back curled toward the opening. "Kitto, you awake?"
He didn't move.
I touched his back, and the skin was cold. "Mother help us. Frost, Rhys, something's wrong."
Frost was at my side instantly; Rhys hung back. Frost touched the goblin's back. "He's like ice." He reached farther in so he could feel the pulse in the neck. He waited, waited for too long, before finally saying, "His blood does flow but slowly." He reached in and began pulling Kitto out from his nest. He came like one already dead, his limbs moving as if he was just dead weight.
"Kitto!" I didn't scream his name but it was close.
His eyes were closed, but it seemed I could see the vibrant blue of his pupils behind the closed lids, as if the skin was translucent. His eyes fluttered open and a slit of blue showed before his eyes rolled up into his head. He was murmuring something, and I bent close to hear. It was my name, "Merry, Merry," over and over.
He'd stripped down to his shorts, and I could see his veins through his skin, the muscles. A dark shape on his chest moved, and I realized that it was his heart beating. I could see it. It was if he were melting, or ...
I looked up at Frost. "He's fading."
He nodded.
Rhys had gone to the bedroom door and brought Doyle out. They gathered round us, but the looks on their faces said more than words.
"No," I said, "it's not hopeless. There's got to be something that we can do."
They all exchanged looks, that flitting game of glance throwing, like the thoughts were too heavy to bear and you had to throw them to the next person and the next.
I grabbed Doyle's arm. "There has to be something."
"We do not know what would hold a goblin from fading."
"His mother was sidhe. Save him the way you'd save another sidhe."
Doyle looked a little disdainful, as if I'd insulted them all.
"Don't go all high and mighty on me, Doyle. Don't let him die because he's less mixed than either of us."
His expression softened. "Meredith, Merry, a sidhe fades only if he wishes it so. Once the process is begun, it cannot be stopped." 
"No! There has to be something we can do."
He frowned down at us all. "Hold him, while I try to contact Kurag. If we cannot save him as sidhe, we will try to save him as goblin."
Kitto lay still in Frost's arms. "Merry needs to hold him," Doyle said, as he went for the bedroom.
Frost laid Kitto in my arms, across my lap. I slumped to the floor, put a hand under his legs, and pulled him into my lap. He fit; here was a man who I could hold in my lap. I'd spent much of my life around beings smaller than Kitto, but none who had looked so sidhe. Maybe that was why he seemed so doll-like at times.
I laid my cheek against his icy forehead. "Kitto, please, please, come back, come back from wherever you've gone. Please, Kitto, it's Merry."
He'd stopped murmuring my name. He'd stopped making any noise, and his weight, the way his body slumped against me ... He felt dead. Not dying, but dead. There is a weight to a dead body that the living, no matter how sick, do not have. Logically, it has to be the same, but it never feels the same.
Doyle came back out, muttering under his breath. "Kurag is not near his mirror, or any still body of water. I cannot reach him, Merry. I am sorry."
"If Kitto were sidhe, what would you do to save him?"
"The sidhe do not fade from lack of faerie," Doyle said. "The sidhe fade only when they wish to."
I held his cold body in my arms and felt the beginnings of tears. But tears wouldn't help him, damn it. I needed to talk to Kurag, now. What was one thing all goblin warriors had on their bodies at all times? "Give me your blade, Frost."
"What?"
"My blade is trapped under Kitto's body. I need a blade, now."
"Do as she says," Doyle said.
Frost didn't like doing something he didn't understand, but he took out a knife from behind his back, one that was almost as long as my forearm, and handed it to me hilt first.
I took my hand out from under Kitto's legs, and said, "Hold the blade steady."
Frost dropped to one knee steadying the blade with both hands. I took a deep breath, placed my finger against the point, and jerked downward. It took a second for the blood to well.
"Merry, stop -- "
"Hold the blade, Frost. That's all you have to do, so do it. I can't hold the blade and Kitto, too. Just do it."
He frowned but stayed kneeling, holding the blade as I drew my bleeding finger down that shining surface. The blood didn't coat it, just stained it, almost beading on the immaculate surface.
I dropped the shields that kept me from seeing spirits, kept me from shedding magic like old body skin. The magic flared for a second, glad to be free, then I willed it into the blade. I pictured Kurag, his face, his voice, his rough manner. "Kurag, I call you; Kurag Thousand-Slayer, I call you; Kurag, King of the Goblins, I call you. Thrice called, thrice named, come to me, Kurag, come answer your blade."
The surface gleamed through the light latticework of blood, but it was just metal.
"No sidhe has called a goblin by blade in centuries," Rhys said. "He won't answer."
"The naming of three is very powerful," Doyle said. "Kurag might be able to ignore it, but few others of his people could."
"But I have something he won't ignore." I leaned close to the blade and blew my breath warm upon it until it fogged with the heat of my body.
The blade glittered through the fog, the blood. The fog cleared and the blood soaked into the surface as if it had been drunk. I was left staring into a dim silvered surface. A blade, even the highest quality, is not like a mirror, no matter what the movies show. A blade gives an uncertain image, misty, as if you need to adjust some button or knob, but there is none. There is only a vague outline of a small portion of a person's face; their eyes are the most clear.A blur of yellow lump-covered skin and two orange eyes appeared in the downside blade half; the upper was less clear but showed Kurag's third eye like a dim sun seen through cloud.
His voice was as clear as if he'd been standing in the room. It boomed out in a surprising rumble that made me jump. "Meredith, Princess of the Sidhe, was that your sweet breath that blew across my skin?"
"Greetings, Kurag, Goblin King. And Twin of Kurag, Goblin King's Flesh, greetings also." Kurag had a parasitic twin who consisted of one violet eye, a mouth, two thin arms, two thin legs, and small, though fully functional genitalia. The mouth could breathe but not speak, and to my knowledge I was the only one who ever acknowledged his existence as separate from the king's. I still remember the horror I felt when I realized there was an entire person trapped in the side of Kurag's body.
"It has been long since a sidhe has called the goblins by blood and blade. Most of the warriors who fought beside us after the great treaty have forgotten this old trick."
"My father taught me many tricks," I said. Kurag and I both knew that my father had often contacted him by blade and blood. My father had been Andais's unofficial ambassador to the goblins, because no one else wanted the job. My father had taken me to the goblin hill many times as a child.