Seduced by Moonlight (Merry Gentry #3)(61)

What had happened? What had changed since Barinthus and the others left the mound and came to fetch me? Barinthus had said she was getting better; this was as bad as I’d ever seen her.
I was afraid to speak, afraid to make any noise, for fear that all that anger would turn in my direction. I wasn’t the only one perplexed about how to proceed, for Doyle stood in front of me, and a little to one side, as motionless as I was, as motionless as we all were. Our entrance through the door had turned her eyes to us, but now that we’d stopped moving, she had turned all that attention back to Eamon. None of us seemed willing to risk sharing that attention with him.
She drew the whip out behind her, and there was room among the kneeling men, room, as if this wasn’t the first time the whip had come snaking back along the floor. Not the first time that night, nor the twelfth, nor the twentieth. The men stayed like a strange garden of beautiful statues, so very still, as the whip whispered back along the floor. The queen sent the whip forward, using her whole arm, shoulder, back, and finally lower body. She threw the whip the way you throw a good punch. Her wrist flicked at the last moment and gave it that added curl that would make it crack.
It made the sound of a tornado rushing past, and I knew from hard experience that on the receiving end of that lash, the sound was even more overwhelming, like standing on the railroad tracks while the train thunders down toward you, and you can’t move out of the way. Not because you don’t want to, but because you’re chained in place.
Eamon could have moved, but he did not. He stood there, and used that tall, commanding body as a shield for whoever lay behind him. The bullwhip struck him full across the chest with a near-explosive crack that overwhelmed the sound of it hitting his flesh. With a small whip you’d have heard the meaty slap of it. But this was her largest whip, the one that looked like a melanistic anaconda, something long enough and thick enough to crush your life out. I feared that particular whip, because I was mortal, and though Eamon’s flesh reddened, it did not bleed. I would have bled.
I like rough play, but not the way the queen did it. She played over the edge and down into the abyss. She went places that my body didn’t want to go, and couldn’t have survived even if I had. I realized in that moment not who was chained to the wall behind Eamon, but what. There were a few humans who lived at our court. Most were not like Madeline Phelps, the publicist. It wasn’t a job. They had been chosen hundreds of years ago, and taken to faerie, some willingly, some not. But they stayed willingly now, because if they stepped but one foot outside faerie, they would age and wither and die. It was a sacred trust, the humans you captured. Some were servants, but usually it was something that attracted sidhe attention. Some were stolen for their beauty or musical talent; in Ezekiel’s case the queen had admired his ability at torture. You prized them enough to steal them away from the human world. It was illegal now, but once when we had been a law unto ourselves, both courts had done it. But for whatever reason, once they were given a home here, it was considered bad form, a breach of contract, a sin, to take their lives. They were offered a life of immortality without aging, so you could abuse them, but not to the point of killing them. You couldn’t steal from them the very thing that had made them willing to come to faerie in the first place. 
Once I realized she had a human against the wall, I was almost certain who it was. Tyler was her current human lover. Last time I’d seen him, he’d been a blond with a skater’s cut and a real tan. He was barely old enough to be legal. He was also, according to current rumor, a pain slut. If he was enjoying what the queen was doing to him, he’d passed from pain slut to suicidal.
The great black whip came whispering and slithering back along the stone floor. She sent it out behind her among her silent, immobile guards, and it was roaring through the air, cutting like lightning, against Eamon’s flesh. The force of it moved his body as if he’d been shoved, but other than a reddish mark, there was no sign it had hurt him.
Andais made a sound low in her throat, almost a growl, as if that did not satisfy her. She let the whip fall to the ground, like some discarded skin, suddenly empty of life.
She raised her pale hand with its carefully painted nails and gestured toward Eamon. He stumbled back and had to catch himself on the rim of the alcove, or he would have fallen in on top of the one he sought to protect. His fingers grew mottled with the effort to keep himself from falling that last inch backward. Her power filled the room like the pressure before a storm, when the air feels solid and hard to swallow. The pressure grew, and grew, until it was hard to breathe, as if my chest could barely lift against her magic. I knew in that one moment that if she wanted to, she could make the air so heavy that you would suffocate, or at least I would; you could not kill the sidhe by mere suffocation.
She squeezed her hand into a tight fist, and Eamon’s arms began to shake with the effort of holding himself against the push of her magic. He spoke between gritted teeth: “Do not do this, my queen.” His fingertips moved, his grip beginning to break. He dug into the very stone with the strength that had allowed the sidhe to conquer nearly all of Europe. The stone cracked under his fingertips, but he was able to dig himself fingerholds in it. Blood filled those holes, and began to trickle down the rock. He’d sliced open his fingers, but he held his ground.
I struggled to force my chest to rise and fall, but it was as if I were pushing against some great weight. I could not catch my breath. The cup spilled from my hand, and only Galen’s hand on my arm kept me upright. I’d never felt her magic like this. Not like this.
She began to walk toward Eamon, slowly, pushing her power before her like some huge invisible hand. I knew from my own experience that the closer she was to you physically, the stronger this particular magic could be.
Eamon began to tremble, and the blood flowed faster, pooling out of the rock, running down in scarlet rivulets. The effort to hold against the force of her magic made his heart race, his pulse beat harder, and that forced his blood to run faster, made it spill out of him.My vision ran in streamers of grey and white and star-like patterns. Someone else grabbed my other arm, I couldn’t see who. My knees buckled, and I sagged in his arms as darkness ate the light. The air was solid, and I could not breathe it. The light went grey, and then I gasped. My breath came in a long ragged cough that doubled me nearly in two, and only other hands kept me from falling to the floor. When the coughing fit passed, the light came back, and I realized the air was cool against my face. I could breathe again. Galen had a double grip on my right arm, and Adair had my left, a hand around my waist, while my legs remembered how to stand.
I thought the queen had left the room, but she hadn’t. She was merely standing in front of Eamon, narrowing her magic down upon him. She had concentrated it on a smaller and smaller point until the rest of the room had emptied of her power.
Eamon had kept his grip on the wall, his mouth open wide, but he wasn’t gasping, because gasping implies breathing, and I didn’t think he was doing that. It was as if she could bring the pressures of atmospheres to bear upon you. She could use the very air as a weapon. I’d always known everyone was afraid of her, but I’d never seen her use her power like this, and for the first time I realized it wasn’t just her absolute ruthlessness that kept her in power for over a thousand years. I looked at the faces of the guards, the greatest warriors the sidhe had to offer, and I saw fear on their faces.
They were afraid of her. Truly afraid of her.
Andais laughed, and it was a wild, unnerving sound that promised pain or death.
She’d picked up a blade while I was mostly unconscious. Now she used that blade on Eamon’s chest. She sliced at him as if he were a piece of shrubbery that she wanted to clear away. I expected to see blood spraying, but the air was so heavy that it held the blood close. Made it drip slowly, so that she’d made half a dozen wounds before the first began to bleed.
“Lady help us,” Doyle said, and his voice sounded so sad, so empty. He was standing almost directly in front of me. I realized that somewhere in her walk toward Eamon, he had moved to block me from her sight. He sighed, and glanced back at the others. There was a look on his face that I’d never seen before.
Rhys sighed back at him. “I hate having to do this.”
“As don’t we all,” Frost answered from my other side.
I found that I had enough breath to speak. “What are you going to do?”
Doyle shook his head. “There is no time to explain.” His black eyes were turned away from me, looking at Eamon and the queen. Eamon’s chest and stomach were decorated in blood, shallow cuts dripping down his body. There were deeper wounds on his chest that looked like wide scarlet mouths. She’d opened him up on one side of his body so that the white bones of his ribs glittered through the blood. 
He repeated, “There is no time,” then he was striding toward the queen. Frost followed him, and Rhys followed them both, giving me a backward glance. “It will look worse than it is. Remember, we’ll heal.”
My pulse was suddenly faster. What were they planning to do? I started forward, but Galen and Adair held my arms. What had been comforting, and supportive, was suddenly a trap. They held me, not so I wouldn’t fall, but so I would not follow.