A Lick of Frost(4)

He ran his fingers over the metal. "That's simply not true. She's lying."

"The sidhe don't lie, Ambassador, you know that. That's a human habit."

Stevens's fingers were practically rubbing a hole through the watchband. "The Unseelie are capable of every evil. Their very faces show them for what they are."

It was Nelson who said, "Their faces are beautiful."

"You are fooled by their magic," Stevens said. "The king gave me the power to see through their deceptions." His voice was rising with each word.

"The watch," I said.

"So this," Shelby gestured at me, "beauty is illusion?"

"Yes," Stevens said.

"No," I said.

"Liar," he screamed, shoving his chair back so that it rolled on its wheels. He started walking past Biggs and Farmer, toward me.

Doyle and Frost moved like two halves of a whole. They simply stood in front of him, blocking his way. There was no magic to it, except the force of their physicality. Stevens stumbled back from them as if he'd been struck. His face contorted in terror, and he cried out, "No, no!"

Some of the lawyers were standing now. Cortez said, "What are they doing to him?"

Veducci managed to yell above Stevens's screams. "I can't see anything."

"We are doing nothing to him," Doyle said, his deep voice cutting under the higher-pitched voices like water undercutting a cliff face.

"The hell you aren't," Shelby yelled, adding to the noise of Stevens's screams and those of the others.

I tried yelling above the noise, "Turn your jackets inside out!" No one seemed to hear me.

Veducci bellowed, "Shut up!" in a voice that smashed through the noise like a bull through a fence. The room was stunned into silence. Even Stevens stopped screaming and stared at Veducci. Veducci continued in a calmer voice, "Turn your jackets inside out. It's a way to break glamour." He moves his head toward me, almost a bow. "I forgot that one."

The others hesitated for a second. Veducci took off his own jacket and turned it inside out, then put it back on. It seemed to galvanize the rest. Most of them began taking off their jackets.

Nelson said, as she folded her jacket so the seams showed, "I'm wearing a cross. I thought that protected me from glamour."

I answered her, "Crosses and bible verses would only work if we were of the devil. We have no connection to the Christian religion, either for good or ill."

She looked down, as if embarrassed to meet my eyes. "I didn't mean to imply anything."

"Of course not," I said. My voice was empty as I said it. I'd heard the insult too often to take it to heart. "One of the things the early church did was to paint anything they could not control as evil. Faerie was something they could not control. As the Seelie Court became more and more human-friendly, the parts of faerie that could not, or would not, play human, became part of the Unseelie Court. Since the things that humans perceive as frightening are mostly at the Unseelie Court, we got painted as evil over the centuries."

"You are evil!" Stevens screamed. His eyes bulged, his pulse was racing, and his face was pale and beaded with sweat.

"Is he sick?" Nelson asked.

"In a way," I said, softly enough that I wasn't sure any of the other humans in the room heard me. Whoever had done the spell on the watch had done too good a job, or a bad one. The spell was forcing Stevens to see nightmares when he looked at us. His mind wasn't coping well with what he was seeing and feeling.

I turned to Veducci. "The ambassador seems ill. Perhaps he should be taken to see a doctor?"

"No," Stevens yelled. "No. Without me here they will take over your minds!" He grabbed Biggs, who was closer. "Without the king's gift you will all believe their lies."

"I think the princess is right, Ambassador Stevens," Biggs said. "I think you are ill."

Stevens's hands dug into the inside-out designer jacket that Biggs was now wearing. "Surely you see them for what they are now?"

"They look like all the sidhe to me. Except for the color of Captain Doyle's skin, and the princess being petite, they look like nobles of the sidhe court."

Stevens shook the bigger man. "The Darkness has fangs. The Killing Frost has skulls hanging from his neck. And she, she is withered, dying. Her mortal blood contaminates her."

"Ambassador…" Biggs began.

"No, you must see it, as I do!"

"They didn't change at all when we turned our jackets inside out," Nelson said. She sounded a little disappointed.

"I told you, we are not doing active glamour on any of you," I said.