Swallowing Darkness (Merry Gentry #7)(53)

I prayed, “Goddess, help me help him.”
Brennan shuddered, his body convulsing, and there was a sound in his chest as he tried to breathe. Dawson said, “Help him, please.”
I laid my hand on his wound and prayed, and then there was pain. Pain that stole the world, and then I found myself waking, collapsed across the soldier’s chest.
A hand was stroking my hair. I opened my eyes to Brennan staring down at me. Dawson cradled Brennan’s head in his arms, and they both looked at me. They looked at me as if I were the most wonderful thing in the world. They looked at me as if I’d walked on water. The thought filled me with no comfort, only a vague anxiety. I had never wanted any human being to look at me like that. 
Brennan held a bloody nail up so I could see it.
Dawson said, “It fell out, just like mine did. Blood and the nail, and then he was healed.”
I nodded as if that made sense to me. This time I had a solider on each arm, but when Brennan took my injured arm, it didn’t hurt quite as much. I think I was healing each of my nail wounds every time I healed a solider. Did that mean that I could only heal as many as I had nails in my flesh? On the one hand, being healed would be good, but on the other hand, there were many more soldiers than the nails I had in my body. Would I lose the ability to heal the rest when I was healed myself? I didn’t want to stay injured, but…I let the thought go. We would do what we could, then we’d see. I did my best not to think too hard about anything. I did my best to keep walking, and let the men I’d saved help me. If I thought too hard, I’d be like Peter walking across the sea to follow Jesus. He did fine until he thought too hard, then he fell beneath the waves. I could not afford to fall. I could feel the need of the injured in the dark. That need called to me, and I had to answer it.
We found two soldiers together. I didn’t know what Cel and his people had done, but it was as if all of the wounded had crawled off to die. Where were the doctors, the medics? Where was everyone? I could hear the fighting in the distance, a little closer now as we moved, but whatever illusion had been used had made them crawl away to die, and not seek help.
Dawson and Brennan helped me kneel beside the fallen soldiers. It took me a moment to realize that one of the soldiers was a woman. She was hidden under a vest and some gear. Her skin was almost as dark as Doyle’s in the night of the trees.
Dawson said, “It’s Hayes.”
Brennan was kneeling beside the other soldier, who was collapsed on one side. “It’s Orlando, sir.”
I laid my hand against Hayes’s neck, and felt something sticky. I didn’t bother to raise my hand to the faint light. I knew it was drying blood. It shouldn’t be drying that fast, should it? Had I lost track of time?
I spoke out loud without really meaning to. “Was she ever wounded?”
“Yes,” Brennan said. “We both got hit in the same ambush. She dragged my ass to safety, just like she did Orlando here.”
“Was your chest wound an old wound?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. That prince, he pointed his hand at me and it was like the wound just came back. Then he ripped my vest back so he could see the wound. He seemed to enjoy seeing it.”
“Was she wounded in the neck?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Cel was hurting my people. He was hurting people who had sworn to protect me. They were dying to protect me and mine. It wasn’t right. We were supposed to protect them, not the other way around.
I prayed to the Goddess as I touched Hayes. She was brave, and had saved lives once with this wound in her body. It seemed wrong to make her live through it twice, but even in the midst of the horror, she had grabbed another solider and dragged him with her. So brave.
There was pain, and this time I didn’t pass out. This time I saw the nail push its way out of my flesh in a spurt of blood. The blood spattered Hayes’s face as her eyes flew wide, flashing white. She gasped, and grabbed my arm. The nail fell on to her chest, and her other hand closed on it automatically, as if she hadn’t noticed.
“Who are you?”
“I am Princess Meredith NicEssus.”
She clutched my arm, her fist clutching the bloody nail to her chest. She swallowed hard. “It doesn’t hurt.”“You’re healed,” Dawson said, leaning over her.
“How?”
“Let her heal Orlando, and you’ll see.”
Dawson helped me stand, but I was feeling a little better, and didn’t have to lean so heavily on his arm. I still let him and Brennan help me to my knees. I still couldn’t move my shoulder, though my hand and lower arm now had more range of movement.
There was no visible wound on Orlando, but his skin was cool to the touch, and I couldn’t find a pulse in his neck, not even that thready hesitation that Dawson had had. I tried not to think what that meant. I tried not to question this miracle, or to think too hard that I didn’t really know what I was doing or how. I prayed harder, and laid my hands on the man’s cooling skin.
A shower of rose petals blew across us, like pink snow. I felt the man shudder underneath my hands, and there was more pain, more blood, and another nail fell into his half-open hand. His hand convulsed around the nail, just like Hayes’s had done.
“Dear God,” Hayes said.
“I think you mean Goddess,” Dawson said.
The man on the ground stared up at me, his face frightened. “Where am I?”
“Cahokia, Illinois,” I said.
“I thought I was back in the desert. I thought….”
Hayes gripped his shoulder, and turned him to look at her. “It’s all right, Orlando. She saved us. We’re safe.”
I wasn’t sure about that last part, but I let it go. I had only a few nails left, only a few more lives to save. When I was healed, would I lose the ability to save them? I wanted to be healed, but I didn’t want to lose any of them. They had offered their lives to save us, and I wanted to repay that. They shouldn’t die in our war.
I felt the call close by. There were more wounded. I would do what I could. I would do what the Goddess helped me do. I wanted to save them all. The question was, could I?
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I HAD EIGHT SOLDIERS WITH ME, EACH CLUTCHING A BLOODY nail, each brought back from the brink of death. Once the last nail was out of my body, the call faded. There was something about the pain and the injury that had made the magic possible.
A sidhe warrior appeared out of the dark, dressed in crimson armor that gleamed in the moonlight, as if made of fire. His name was Aodán, and I knew that his hand of power matched his armor. I felt him call his hand of power, and I spoke without thinking. “Kill him.”
They should have hesitated. They shouldn’t have taken my orders. Dawson was the ranking officer, but they aimed their recovered guns at the figure and fired. The bullets did what bullets had been doing to faerie from the moment humans had made them. They tore through that brilliant armor, and into the flesh underneath. He died before he could send his hand of fire to scorch us. I could feel them calling their hands of power. If we could keep shooting them before they had time to unleash that power, we could win this. Such a simple solution, if you had soldiers who would follow unhesitatingly, and a complete willingness to kill everything in your path. Apparently, I had both. 
Other soldiers joined us, not because of me, but because we had formed a unit on the field of battle. We seemed to know what we were doing, and we had an officer with us. They formed around us because we were moving with purpose, and you need purpose in the midst of battle. Purpose, and no hesitation.
I felt magic come our way. Some cried out in horror at whatever illusion one of the armored sidhe had created. I’d been able to share glamour with one or two other sidhe before. I spread that pool of protective glamour out and out. I spread it farther than I’d ever attempted before, spreading it over my people, the way you’d spill water over fevered skin.
As the screams of my men stopped and they began to murmur, I spoke low to Dawson. “Shoot the ones in armor.” I had to concentrate on keeping all of us free of the illusions. Even shouting would make me stumble.
Dawson never questioned me. He simply yelled out my order, “Shoot the ones in armor! Fire!”
Immortal warriors who had seen more centuries than any of us would ever dream of fell before our weapons. They fell like dreams brought down to earth. They couldn’t cloud the minds of the men, and without their illusions to stop the soldiers from firing, we mowed them down.
Dilys stood, all in yellow, glowing like she had swallowed flame, and it had filled her skin and her hair, and blazed out of her eyes. She wore no armor of any kind. Her dress looked as if she were expecting to walk down some marble staircase to a ball. But where the warriors fell, their magical armor pierced by human ingenuity, she stood. The bullets seemed to hit a wavering glow, like heat off a summer road. The bullets hit, hesitated, then melted, in little spurts of orangey light.
“What is she?” Dawson said, beside me.
“Magic,” I said. “She is magic.”
“What kind of magic?” Hayes asked.
“Heat, light, sun. She’s a goddess of the summer heat.” I’d always wondered what she’d been before she fell from grace. Most of the really powerful ones hid their pasts, some out of shame for power lost, others for fear of enemies who had retained more power settling old scores. But as I had returned Siobhan’s illusions to her, so apparently I had given Dilys, or whatever her real name was, back her heat.