Swallowing Darkness (Merry Gentry #7)(55)

“It’s war, then,” I whispered.
“What?” Dawson asked.
“We will give Cel what he wants,” I said.
“You can’t give yourself to him,” Hayes said.
“No, I cannot,” I said, and my voice sounded like someone else’s, as if I didn’t recognize myself anymore.
“If we don’t give him you, what do we give him?” Mercer asked. “War,” I said simply, and began to walk across the field. My soldiers came with me. Either Cel would die this moment or I would. Seeing Doyle thrown onto the ground like so much motionless garbage, I was content with that. 
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I ORDERED MY SOLDIERS TO SHOOT THE UNSEELIE NOBLES who were standing. Cel was a prince of faerie. He was heir to a throne. He had diplomatic immunity. They shouldn’t have taken my order, but we had crossed a battlefield together. I had saved their lives. My orders through their sergeant had kept us alive and unharmed. We were a unit, and as a unit they fired on my order.
I watched the nobles’ bodies jerk and dance to the explosion of the bullets. The noise was deafening. They were wounded in a sort of silence, because the guns were so loud, and seemed to have nothing to do with the movement at the other end of the barrel. It was as if we fired, but they fell because of something else. But not all of them fell; most remained standing. I had to do something before they unleashed their hands of power on us all.
Blood leaked black in the moonlight, but it wasn’t enough blood. I needed more, so much more. For the first time I felt no dread of my power, no pain at the call of it, just a fierceness that was almost joy. That fierceness poured over my skin in a wash of heat. It hit my left hand and poured out my palm.
Dawson yelled next to my ear. “What are you doing?”
I had no time to explain. I said, “The hand of blood.” I pointed that hand, palm out, toward our enemies. I should have worried that I would hit Doyle, but in that moment I knew, simply knew, that I could do it. I could control it. It was mine, this power, it was me.
Blood fountained in black sheets from their wounds. They screamed, then Cel raised his hand. I knew what he meant to do. Without thinking, I stepped out from between my men, my soldiers, my people. Dawson grabbed for me to pull me back behind the shield of their bodies, but then Cel’s hand of old blood hit us all, and Dawson’s hand fell away. There were yells behind me, but I had no time to look.
I screamed “Mine!” There was pain. I could feel the nails in my arm and shoulder again; the knife wound I’d taken in a duel; claw marks in one arm and thigh from an old attack. It hurt, and I bled for him, but he could only make the wound as bad as it had been, and I had never had a blood injury that was near fatal.
“What did you do?” Dawson asked. “One minute we were bleeding, now we’re not.”
I had no space in my concentration to explain. Cel’s hand might not kill us, but there were others at his side who could. It was a race now to see if I could bleed them to death faster than they could recover themselves.
I screamed, “Bleed for me!”
Blood geysered from them, and I could feel their flesh tearing under my power, their wounds like a doorway that my power could rip apart. The blood arched, black and shining liquid. The sound of it was like rain on the grass and trees around them.
The brilliant armor in all its rainbow colors began to turn black with blood and gore. They were screaming now, but what they screamed was “Mercy!” They called for mercy, but as I watched Doyle lay motionless at their feet, covered in black blood, I discovered that I had no mercy to give them.
I had never meant them to die for me. The thought came, “What did you think would happen if you sent soldiers against the Unseelie?” But even Cel wasn’t supposed to be mad enough to fight the United States Army. I hadn’t foreseen this, hadn’t dreamed that he would be so out of control. But my lack of foresight didn’t matter. I had asked for help, and my help was dying around me.
I stood there bleeding, staring across the yards of the frosted grass at my cousin’s mad eyes. His helmet left his face bare save for a crosspiece down the line of his nose. His eyes burned with the color of his magic. He had called all his power, and I realized that it wasn’t enough. It had never been enough.The wind picked up the long blackness of his hair where it spilled free around his armor. He’d always worn it loose in battle. Too vain to hide his beauty, too bad a warrior to be willing to hide the hair that marked him as high court Unseelie. He would never braid it or put it back as Doyle did.
Cel was weak, evil-minded, and petty. Faerie would never accept him. I was going back to L.A. but I could not leave my people to him. I could not leave faerie in his inadequate hands.
I whispered onto the wind, “Bleed for me.” The wind carried my voice, my magic, and where it moved it began to form into a whirlwind. A tornado formed of ice and blood and power. Faerie was the land, the land was faerie, and I had been crowned its queen. It rose to my word, my power, and my desire.
The nobles around him who could move, ran. Those who could crawl did so. They picked up their wounded and fled. Cel screamed at them, “Come back, cowards!”
His concentration had slipped away from me, and my old wounds were closed, as if by…magic.
Cel lashed out at his followers. Some fell in the winter-kissed grass, brought low by ancient wounds reopened by the man they would have made their king.
A wave of blackness moved across the field, as if a different night moved in a line above the frost. This night was moonless, and darker than dark. I knew, before she materialized completely, who would be standing in the way of my cold wind and blood.
Andais, Queen of Air and Darkness, stood in front of her son, as she had always stood in front of him. She wore her black armor, carried her raven blade. Her cloak spilled out behind her, and it was darkness itself spun into cloth, and more. She held darkness around her, and I felt her power of air push back at my own.
The twister I had conjured with faerie’s help stopped moving forward. It did not die or fade, but it stopped, as if its twisting front had hit an invisible wall.
I pushed at that wall, willed my power to move forward, and for a moment the wall softened. I felt the whirlwind move forward; then it was as if the air was drawn away from it, sucked out and sent whirling into the moonlight. She pulled the air from my whirlwind as she could pull the air from your lungs.
Lieutenant Dawson barked orders and the soldiers formed two lines, one standing, one kneeling, both pointing at her. Would I have fired on my queen? I had a moment of hesitation, and that was my undoing. Darkness poured over us, and we were blind. The next moment the air was heavy, so heavy. We could not breathe. We had no air even to call for help. I collapsed to my knees, my hands on the cold grass. Someone fell against me, and I knew it had to be Dawson, but I could not see him. She was the Queen of Air and Darkness, a goddess of battle, and we would die at her feet.
  
CHAPTER FORTY
I WAS LOST IN THE DARK. HER BLACKNESS HAD TAKEN THE SKY. Only two things remained, the ground under my cheek, and the body next to me in the choking dark. I no longer knew right from left, and only the frozen ground let me know up from down, so I did not know who lay pressed against me in the blackness. A hand found mine, a hand to hold while we died.
The frost crunched under my free hand, and I clung to the warmth of that other hand. The frost began to melt against my hand, and I wished for Frost, my Killing Frost. He had let faerie take him away because he thought I loved him less than Doyle. It broke my heart to think that he would never know that I had loved him too.
I tried to say his name, but there was no air left to spare for words. I clung to the melting frost and the human hand, and let my tears speak for me into the frozen ground.
I regretted the babies inside me, and I thought, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.” But part of me was content to die. If Doyle and Frost were both lost to me, then death was not the worst fate. In that moment, I stopped fighting, because without them I didn’t want to go on. I let the dark and the choking wash over me. I gave myself to death. Then the hand in mine spasmed; it clung to me as it died, and it brought me back to myself. I could have died alone, but if I died there was no one left to save them, my men, my soldiers. I could not leave them to the airless dark, not if there was anything I could do to save them. It was not love that made me fight again, it was duty. But duty is its own kind of love; I would fight for them, fight until death took me silently screaming. The babes inside me, without their fathers to help raise them, were almost a bitter thing, but the soldiers who clung to me had lives of their own, and she had no right to steal them. How dare she, immortal that she was, take their few years away.
I prayed, “Goddess, help me save them. Help me fight for them.” I had no power in me to fight the dark and the very air made too heavy to breathe, but I prayed all the same, because when all else is lost, there is always prayer.
At first, I thought nothing had changed, then I realized that the grass under my hand and cheek was colder. The frost crunched as my fingers flexed, as if the melting that my warmth had caused had never happened.
The air was bitingly cold, like breathing in the heart of winter when the air is so cold it burns going down. Then I realized that I was breathing a complete full breath of the frigid air. The hand in mine squeezed, and I heard voices saying, “I can breathe,” or simply coughing as if they’d been fighting to draw a full breath all this time.