Frost pushed off me, rolling over the foot of the bed. I scrambled onto all fours, crawling to the foot of the bed. Frost knelt near Doyle’s head. Nicca knelt near his feet. Doyle’s spine bowed, his hands scrambling at the air. It was as if every muscle in his body were straining at once in different directions. If he’d been human, I’d have thought poison, but you couldn’t poison the sidhe, not with strychnine, at least.
Another shriek tore from his mouth, and his body rocked with the force of the spasms. “Help him!”
Frost shook his head. “I don’t know what this is.”
I spilled over the foot of the bed. Before I could touch him, his skin seemed to split, and his body ran like water, if water could scream, and writhe, and bleed.
Chapter 16
I reached out, and Frost grabbed my hand, pulled me back. “We don’t know what this is.” I didn’t fight him, because he was right.
So I clung to his arms and didn’t know what to do. I was supposed to be princess of faerie, and all I could do was kneel and stare while that strong body rolled itself into a mess of naked muscles and bone that glistened in the air, wet with blood.
When Doyle screamed again, I screamed with him. The others spilled into the room behind us with guns and swords, and none of it would help. I prayed, prayed as I had for Nicca, but there was no glow from the chalice this time. There was nothing but Doyle writhing on the floor, and the blood that crept outward like a widening dark pool on the carpet.
Frost walked backward on his knees, moving us away from that spreading wetness. He stumbled when he did it, and that one small movement freed one of my hands. It made no sense—in fact, it was the opposite of good sense—but I had to do it. I had to touch what was lying on the carpet, because it couldn’t be Doyle. That writhing mass of muscle, bones, and tissue could not be my tall, handsome, Darkness. It wasn’t possible.
My fingertips found wet, warm flesh, no skin. Whatever I touched in the second before Frost jerked me back was something deep within Doyle’s body, something never meant to be caressed by human hand.
Frost held my wrist and seemed horrified by the red blood on my fingertips. “Don’t do that again, Merry.”
“Is that fur?” Rhys asked the question, pointing a pale finger.
I looked back at what was left of Doyle, and at first I didn’t see it. Then, among all the dark flesh, I saw an equally dark wash of fur, flowing like slow water to coat the naked meat that had once been a man. The bare glistening bones sank into that fur, and once hidden away they began to re-form with a sound like stones grinding together. A mouth formed out of that fur and bone, and it screamed, and it sounded human, but it wasn’t.
When it was over, a huge black dog lay panting on its side amid the blood and fluids. My eyes tried to make sense of it, tried to see Doyle in that furred shape, but it was all dog. A huge black mastiff-type dog. I remembered the shadow dogs in my vision. What lay before us was a twin of the dogs that had formed from the shadows under the trees.
The great shaggy head tried to rise, but fell back as if exhausted. I tried to reach out to pet it, and Frost wouldn’t let me. “Let me go, Frost,” I said.
Rhys knelt on one knee near the dog’s hind legs. “It’s Doyle’s dog form. I thought never to see it again.” He reached out with the hand that wasn’t holding a gun, and stroked down that furred side.
The dog raised its head and looked at him, then again fell back against the carpet, as if the effort had taken too much.
I stared at that furred form and was so happy that he was alive, not a disintegrating mass of flesh, that I didn’t care if he was a dog. At that moment, it was so much better than what I’d feared. He wasn’t dead. I’d learned long ago that with life, there is hope. With death, there is none. I believed sincerely in reincarnation. I knew that in another lifetime I might see the dead again, but it had been cold comfort at eighteen when my father died. It would have been very cold comfort if Doyle had turned into something that couldn’t be healed, but only killed as a mercy. “Let go of me, Frost.”
He released me reluctantly.
“Doyle, can you hear me?” I asked.
“It is still me, Merry.” Doyle’s voice was deeper, more growling, but it was definitely his voice.
I crawled to him, my knees sinking into the wet carpet. The blood was already cooling. I touched one of the long silken ears. Doyle nuzzled his great head against my hand.
Rhys stroked his hand down the furred side. “I always half envied you shape-shifters. Thought it must be cool to be an animal, some of the time.” He laid his hand over Doyle’s chest, over his heart, as if he could feel more than just the heavy thud of it. “But I’ve never seen a change that violent.”
I brushed my hand down the warm and strangely dry fur, as if all that fur hadn’t come through a wash of blood. Of course, maybe it hadn’t. I didn’t know that much about the mechanics of shifting form; no one really did. One of the first things to be lost when the fey left faerie in Europe was shape-shifting. Those of us who had fled to America, but kept to our hollow hills, had retained more of some abilities, but most of us were a backward lot and didn’t trust or sometimes even believe in modern science. So there were no scientific studies of the phenomenon.
The fur was so soft, so thick under my hand. “Changes this violent only happen when one sidhe tries to force another into shifting against his will.” My hand slid down the fur until my hand touched Rhys’s fingertips. That one small touch thrilled along my arm up into my shoulder, my chest, a spasm of muscles and skin that was both pleasure and pain. It stole my breath, made me stare wide-eyed into Rhys’s face.Doyle’s chest rose and fell under our hands, his heart like a great, thick drum.
“The magic isn’t gone yet.” Rhys’s voice was hoarse.
Doyle rolled onto his back, his great muzzle opening wide, flashing a gleam of teeth like small white knives. Both Rhys and I pulled our hands back from him, just in case. He’d spoken only once. Some retained more of themselves in animal form than others. I’d never seen Doyle as anything but sidhe.
Doyle strained at the air with paws bigger than my hands. He growled, but there were words in it. “I can feel it, growing, growing inside me.”
Then it was as if the dog’s body split asunder, like a seed, and something huge, and black, and slicker-furred than dog sprang out of him. Rhys and I were left to scramble back. Frost grabbed me around the waist and ran us backward to the wall, giving room to the huge shape growing at the foot of the bed.
It spilled upward like a genie from a bottle, except that the bottle was Doyle’s body. A great black horse shape flowed upward, as if something of flesh could be formed of water and smoke, because solid flesh did not push into the air like a fountain, or smoke rising from some great fire.
Maeve and Sage came through the door in time to see the horse become truly solid. The dog form was simply gone, like black smoke that faded around huge dark hooves.
The dog had been the size of a small pony, so the horse was even more massive. It tossed its black head and nearly scraped its nose on the ceiling. The neck was thicker than my waist. It stamped on the carpet with hooves the size of dinner plates. It moved uneasily on its huge legs, and even little movements made everyone back up. All the men were staring. Kitto seemed more frightened than the rest. He had moved back through the crowd so that he stood near the door, and I think only Maeve and Sage blocking the door kept him in the room. Another phobia to add to the list for the goblin.
It was Sage who broke the silence. “I’ll be damned.”
“Probably,” the horse said. It was still Doyle’s voice, but instead of the growl of the dog, it was higher-pitched and had lost that near-animal undertone. To say that the horse’s voice sounded more human seemed wrong, but was still true.
Doyle shook out a mane as black as his own hair. “I have not been in this form since the first weirding.”
Rhys came forward and passed a hand down the side of that smooth neck. The horse’s body gleamed like some dark jewel.
I started forward, but Frost held me tighter, pressing the back of my nude body against the front of his, but he wasn’t excited to be there. He whispered, “It’s not over. Can’t you feel it?”
“What?”
“Magic,” he breathed.
“Pressed this close to you, all I can feel is you. You all feel like magic to me.”
He looked down at me then, and I saw a thought in his eyes, as if he hadn’t known that before. “Then we make it harder for you to sense other magic?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“That is not good,” he said.
I rubbed my body against his, and felt him swell against me, instantly. “I love it,” I said, “I love being with you, all of you.”
I don’t know what he would have said, because the horse tried to rear and found there was no room. It rose above us like some black demon, hooves slicing the air. Rhys threw himself backward, rolling across the floor to end up against the other’s legs.
The great form seemed to spread like a black coat, opening down the middle. Black wings stretched out of that opening, and the horse’s form faded into smoke, or black mist. When the mist cleared there was a huge black eagle standing on the carpet. Its outspread wings must have been eight feet, maybe more. One wing brushed the far wall and folded against it. There simply wasn’t room.