I looked back at Adair and Galen. “Is he right?”
“They’ll heal,” Galen said, but even he didn’t seem sure.
“Mistral speaks truly.” Adair looked away from the slaughter, and the face he turned back to me held such pain, and shame. The Ravens came of a tradition in which not to willingly take a death blow meant for your leader was the worst of shames. But that loyalty was bought by being worthy of loyalty. We were not always hereditary rulers; in fact, that was a human idea that we embraced, but once the best of us had ruled, regardless of bloodline, so long as they were sidhe.
Mistral turned his face from me, as if he could see my hesitation written across my face, but he whispered, “Mother help us, for no one else will.”Andais’s bare arms were slathered with blood, and as those smoothly muscled arms wove through the air, drops of blood followed them. Not the blood of her victims, but hers. She was bleeding. Bleeding from small wounds at her shoulder, chest, and neck. The Queen of Air and Darkness had wounded her own flesh in her battle frenzy. She feinted at Rhys’s body, almost the same move she’d used on Doyle. Her arm flew out in an arc that I both knew was coming and could never have avoided. It was like watching fate strike, no way to stop it.
I screamed his name, “Rhys!” as the blade plunged into his eye, his only eye. She ground the knife into his face as if she’d cut that last blue orb from his flesh.
Amatheon tried to lure her out, but it was as if she didn’t see him. She saw nothing but the ruin she was making of Rhys’s face, heard nothing but the screams she finally had torn from his throat.
My power came upon me like an invisible dagger spilling into my left hand. The hand of blood, my second hand of power. Always before it had been a thing that caused me pain to use, a pain so intense it doubled my vision, but not this time. This time it came quietly, suddenly, and more completely than I’d ever felt it. I’d used my hands of power, but until that moment I hadn’t embraced them. I was human enough to want pretty powers, not some of the most frightening among us. But that was a child’s wish, and it fell away from me. I had one of those moments of clear sight when it is as if you can see through to the heart of everything around you.
I didn’t have to conjure the smell and taste of blood; the room stank of it. As if someone had poured raw hamburger on the floor, and we had all stepped in it. The taste not just of blood but of meat clung to the back of my throat.
Barinthus had thrown himself across Rhys, used his back as shield, while she screamed and hacked at him. Rhys had thrown his head back, and his good eye was a red ruin. He was still screaming, wordless, hopeless.
I looked at the wounds in her shoulders, and with Galen and Adair still holding my arms, I simply thought, Bleed. Blood trickled out of the wounds on her arms, faster than before, but no one seemed to notice that the queen was bleeding, least of all her. She was too lost in battle lust to notice. I had no hope of slaying her. She was truly immortal. What I hoped was to weaken her, distract her. I could no longer watch and do nothing. I called the blood from her body, and she ignored me. She cut at Barinthus as if she planned on hacking a hole through him; as if she’d crawl inside him and drag Rhys back out the other side.
I had meant to distract her, but that had been a fool’s thought. She, who had been a goddess of battle, would not be slowed by a little blood loss. My father’s words came back to me: If you ever stand against my sister, kill her, Meredith, kill her or never lift a hand against her.
I extended my left hand, palm out, and I let my magic go like letting a bird, long trapped, wing skyward. It felt so good to let it out, to let go, to stop trying to be something I wasn’t. This was a part of me, too, this blood. Blood spurted from her arms, and still she did not notice, but some of the men did.
Adair had already let me go and stepped back. I think he didn’t want to be too close when Andais awoke from her lust. I think Adair didn’t want her to think he’d had anything to do with it.
“Merry, Merry don’t.” Galen pulled on my right arm, reached across as if he’d take both my arms. I thought, Bleed. He jerked back from me with the tiny ice wound on his hand gaping as if I’d cut him with a blade. His eyes were wide, and I saw fear there. Fear of me, or for me, I couldn’t tell.
Blood poured down her arms like crimson water, and still she carved at Barinthus’s back. I thought at her what I’d thought at Galen, Bleed, and the small wound across the front of her body widened as if an invisible knife had cut across her skin. She slowed, hesitated between one blow and another.
I looked at the pure white line of her throat with that tiny bloody point, a bare nick in the skin, but somehow across the room it loomed large in my vision. I could see it so clearly, smell her blood just under that pure skin. I made a fist of my hand, and pictured what I wanted that small wound to do. Her white throat opened like a second mouth, a red ruin of a mouth. I think she would have screamed, but she couldn’t. Blood gushed from her body, and she forgot Barinthus. Forgot Rhys. Forgot everything, but turned those tri-grey eyes to me. I saw recognition in those eyes. The air around me grew heavy like the weight of a storm. I screamed, “Bleed for me!”
Blood gushed from her throat, pouring out as if some giant pump were spewing it out of her. If she’d been human, she’d have fallen and died, but she wasn’t human. She raised a hand toward me.
Galen threw himself in front of me, and went to his knees, hands at his throat, his mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. I didn’t have time to be horrified, or wonder what she’d done. He’d sacrificed himself so that I could kill her, because in that moment I forgot she was queen, or sidhe, or anything, I simply wanted her to stop. Dead is stop.
My voice came out in a hiss, a sound like a knife being drawn from a sheath, and the only word was, “Blood!” The power lashed outward from me, and it hit the men along the way, glancing blows, as if an unseen blade sliced along their wounds, spurting blood as the spell passed them.
The queen saw it coming, saw her peril. She clenched her fist and suddenly it was as if the air were solid, and my chest could not rise to breathe. I began to fall, but not before the spell hit her, not before I saw blood pour from her mouth, her nose, her ears, her eyes. I fell to my knees beside Galen’s writhing body, but even as my vision clouded grey, dancing with white stars for lack of air, I saw Andais fall to her knees. She stared at me with her blood-rimmed eyes, and I think she said something, but it was lost. My ears were ringing with the silent scream of my body, fighting to breathe. I fell onto my stomach. Even as I died, I fought to watch her.
Andais collapsed like a broken, blood-soaked doll, facedown on the floor. She made no effort to catch herself. She just fell, and blood welled out of her like a scarlet lake spreading out and out.
Darkness ate my vision, and my body fought on the floor against her magic, fought to breathe, and couldn’t. I lay on the floor pressed to death by her last spell, and though my body panicked for me, scrambling for air, I wasn’t afraid. My last thought before darkness ate my vision blind was, Good, as long as she can’t hurt them anymore, it’s good. Then my body stopped fighting to breathe, and there was nothing, but darkness and the absence of pain.Chapter 30
I stood on a mountain looking out over the land. I could see the land spreading green and rich until it merged with the misty blue of the horizon, like looking out at an emerald ocean of land. I stood for a glorious moment alone on the crest of that great hill, and then I knew that I wasn’t alone. Not a sound, or a movement, just the certain knowledge that when I next looked behind me, someone would be there. I expected it to be the Goddess, but it was not. A man stood in the bright sunlight. He wore a cloak that covered his face in shadows and swirled in the sweet wind, hiding his body. One moment I thought I saw broad shoulders, the next not so broad, but slender of waist. It was as if the body the cloak covered changed even as I watched.
The wind streamed my hair back from my face and billowed his cloak around him. It brought with it a scent of forest and field. He smelled of wilderness untamed and of fresh-tilled earth; but over all the rich scent of him was a perfume that was impossible to describe. It smelled, for lack of a better term, masculine. But it was more than that. It was the way a man’s neck smells when you are deeply in love and lust. That sweet scent that makes your body tighten and your heart fill. If the cologne manufacturers could have bottled it, they’d have made a fortune, because he smelled like being in love.
He held out his hand to me, and like his body the hand changed even as I walked toward him. The tone of the skin, the size of the hand; it was as if his form swam through many forms, until the hand that took mine was Doyle’s dark skin, but when I looked up it was not Doyle’s face that I saw in the hood. It was shadows and glimpses of all my men. All who had known my body flew across the face of the God, but the arms that pulled me close were very solid, very real. He pulled me in tight to his body, the cloak streaming around both of us, almost like wings. I laid my face against his chest, wrapped my arms around his waist, and felt utterly safe, as if nothing else would ever hurt me again. It was like being home, the way home is supposed to be but never really is. Peaceful, content, exactly what you need, and everything you ever wanted. It was a moment of perfect peace. Perfect happiness, as if this feeling could go on forever.