A Stroke of Midnight (Merry Gentry #4)(15)

He gave a dry little laugh. “I’m sorry if I made this harder for you. I tend to get a little obsessed.”
“Good-bye, Gillett.”
“Bye, Merry.”
I hung up and leaned heavier on the desk. Galen held me against him, careful of my hurt arm. “Why didn’t you let Gillett come down?”
I raised my face and looked at him. I searched that open face for some hint that he understood what had just happened. His eyes were green and wide and innocent.
I wanted to cry, needed to cry. I’d called Gillett because the murders had raised ghosts for me. Not real ones, but those emotional pains that you think are gone for good until they just rise again to haunt you, no matter how deep you bury them. 
Doyle came to me. “I watch you grow more worthy of being queen every day, Meredith, every minute.” He touched my good arm lightly, as if not sure I wanted to be touched at that moment.
My breath came out in a sharp cry, and I threw myself against his body. He held me, his arms fierce and almost painful. He held me while I cried because he understood some of what it had cost me to let go of childish things.
Barinthus came up to us and put his arms around us both, hugging us to him. I glanced up, and found tears running down his face. “You are more your father’s daughter in this moment than you have ever been.”
Galen hugged us from the other side, so that we were warm and close. But I realized in that moment that Galen, like Gillett, was a child’s wish. They held me, and I wept. Crying didn’t cover it. I wept the last of my childhood away. I was thirty-three years old; it seemed a little late to be letting go of childish things, but some wounds cut us so deep that they stop us. Stop us from letting go, from growing up, from seeing the truth.
I let them all hold me while I cried, through Barinthus cried, too. I let them hold me, but part of me knew that Galen, and only Galen, didn’t understand what was happening. He’d been my closest confidant among the guards. My friend, my first crush, but he’d asked, why didn’t I let Gillett come?
I cried and let them hold me, but it wasn’t just my father’s loss I was mourning.
CHAPTER 7

I CLEANED OFF THE REMNANTS OF THE MAKEUP THAT I HADN’T cried away. Got the lipstick that still looked like clown makeup off, and even gave Frost a makeup cleansing cloth so he could do his own face. We were clean and neat and presentable when we started back to the crime scene. I felt hollow inside, as if a piece of me were missing. But it didn’t matter. Walters would be here soon with the CSU team. We needed to have finished the questioning of the witnesses before then in case they said something that we didn’t want the human police to know. I wanted justice, but I also didn’t want to make the bad publicity worse by sharing some dark secret with the human world.
Doyle stopped so abruptly that I ran into him. He pushed me farther back into Galen and Usna’s suddenly waiting arms, as if he’d given some signal that I had not seen. With Doyle and Adair in front and Galen and Usna suddenly very close on either side of me, I could not see what had frightened everyone. Barinthus, Hawthorne, and Frost were bringing up the rear. They had turned to face back down the hall as if they were worried about someone sneaking up behind us. What was happening? What now? I couldn’t even manage a drop of fear. I’m not sure it was bravery so much as exhaustion. I was simply too tired emotionally and physically to waste the adrenaline on fear. In that second, if we’d been attacked, I’m not sure I would have cared.
I tried to shake it off, this feeling of desolation. I called, “Doyle, what is it?”
Barinthus answered, “The Queen’s Ravens are in the hall, blocking our way.” I guess being seven feet tall does give you a better view.
I realized then that my guard feared almost every sidhe right now. They were right. One of the sidhe had committed murder, and I was in charge of catching the killer. Wonderful. I’d just given someone else a reason to want me dead. But what was one more?
Adair moved to the center of the hallway to hide me behind his armored back, as Doyle moved down the hallway. Barinthus answered my question before I’d even thought it. “Doyle is conferring with Mistral.”
Mistral was the master of winds, the bringer of storms, and the new captain of the Queen’s Ravens. He’d taken Doyle’s place when it became clear that Doyle wasn’t coming back to his old job.“What’s happening?” Galen asked, and his voice held enough anxiety for both of us.
Usna bent over me, sniffing my hair. “You smell good.”
“Keep your mind on business,” Galen said, looking up the hallway toward where Doyle had gone. He had a gun out, held down along his leg. If I’d been choosing between sword and gun, I’d have made the same choice. When I first came back to faerie, guns were outlawed inside the mounds, but after the last few attempts, my aunt had decided that my guards and hers needed all the help they could get. So our men could carry guns, if they knew how to use them. Doyle and Mistral had been the judge of who was competent to carry and who wasn’t. Some guards treated guns the way others treated the idea of carrying around a poisonous snake. It might be useful, but what if it bit you.
Usna had a short sword in either hand, pointed both directions up and down the hallway. His grey eyes, which were the most ordinary thing about him physically, were keeping watch, but his face was pressed against the top of my head. He put first one cheek, then the other against my hair. He was looking down each end of the hallway as he did it, but he was also almost scent marking me. Cat-like and inappropriate for the situation, if he’d thought like a human. But it was Usna, and I knew that he was aware of everything in the hallway, even while trying to put the scent of his skin against my hair.
I found it oddly comforting. Galen did not. “Usna, stop it.”
A soft sound somewhere between a purr and a growl sounded from the other man. “You worry too much, my little pixie.”
“And you don’t worry enough, my little kitten.” But Galen grinned as he said it. We all felt a little better for Usna’s teasing.
“Quiet, both of you,” Frost said from behind us. They shut up, looking a little sheepish but happier. Usna stopped trying to rub his face against my hair. Which meant he’d done it almost more to tease Galen than to tease me.
Doyle was taking too long. If something had gone horribly wrong, Barinthus or Adair would have warned us. But it was taking too long. The unnatural calm was beginning to slip away from me on tiny cat paws of anxiety.
I had a license to carry a gun in California. I also had a diplomatic waiver that pretty much covered me anywhere, anytime, on the basis that my life was in danger often enough that being armed was a necessity. I had guns. But Andais wouldn’t let me go into the press conference armed. I was a princess; princesses did not protect themselves, they had others to do that for them. I thought the idea archaic and shortsighted and downright ironic coming from a queen whose claim to fame had been as a goddess of battle. Standing there with Galen and Usna pressed against me, with the others like a wall of flesh around me, I vowed that the next time I left my room, I’d be armed. 
Doyle returned, and Adair gave him room to pass, then moved back to the center of the hallway like some golden wall. I realized that Adair was being just that, a wall of flesh and metal to keep death from me. He’d said I was his ameraudur, another echo of my father’s ghost, for he had been the last ameraudur among the royals of either court. To be called ameraudur held more honor than king, because the men chose you, and followed you through love, the kind of love men have shared with one another on battlefields as far back as time can see. Oaths bound a guard to risk his life for his charge, queen or princess, but ameraudur meant he did it willingly. It meant that coming back from a battle alive with his leader dead was worse than death. A shame that he would never live down. Two of my father’s guards took their own lives for shame of letting their prince die. To lay your life down for your ameraudur was the highest honor.
Seeing Adair standing there so straight, so proud, so ready to die, made me think about my new title. Made me afraid of it. I did not want anyone dying for me. I had not earned it. I was not my father and never would be. I could never ride into battle with them and hope to survive. How could I be their ameraudur if I could not do that?
Doyle’s dark face was empty for me. Whatever he thought about Adair’s new pet name for me, he was keeping it to himself. His face was so empty now that the only thing I was certain of was that I wasn’t in immediate danger. Other than that, he could have worn the same expression for anything. I wanted to yell at him to show me what he was feeling, but he spoke before I could lose that much control.
“The queen sent them to fetch you back when you are finished with your ‘murder business,’ as she worded it. Vague enough that they cannot fetch you immediately.” Doyle gave a small wry smile, and shook his head. “In truth, Mistral is now in charge of the crime scene.”
“What?” Galen and I asked together.
“Did the queen rescind her offer to Meredith?” Barinthus asked. “Are Mistral and the queen now in charge of this murder?”
“No,” Doyle said. “Rhys thought of a different spell to search for our murderer. He wished to chase this new magical clue down, but needed someone to keep the crime scene safe. When Mistral and the others came, he put them to guard the hallway.”