“Princess,” he said, “are you all right?”
I nodded. “I think so.” I touched his hand. “I’m glad to see that you’re okay. I heard screaming.”
He got a strange look on his face. “I’m okay now.”
I thought it was an odd way to phrase it. But Galen was beside me, taking me into his arms, and there was no time to question Dawson. Galen lifted me off my feet, holding me so tightly that I couldn’t see his face clearly. But I could see Jonty’s back over Galen’s shoulder. The sight stole the smile from my face.
The Red Cap’s back was a mass of wounds, a red ruin. Doyle and the others laid him gently down on the grass. I knew why they’d moved him slowly now. “Oh, my God, Jonty,” I said.
Galen loosened his grip enough to see my face as he lowered me to the grass. “I’m sorry, Merry.” Blood was drying on the side of his face from a gash near his temple.
“You’re hurt.”
He smiled. “Not as bad as some.”
I looked back at Jonty with the other men grouped around him. They were too serious, too quiet. I didn’t like it. “Jonty’s heart is still beating. If we can get him to a healer he won’t die.”
Galen’s face was stricken in the moonlight, so pain-filled. “But you would have died.”
He was right. If the bomb had done that much damage to a Red Cap, then I’d have been so much red ruin. Me, and our babies, would have been turned into so much raw meat.
“Cel’s followers did this,” I said.
“Dawson told us,” Galen said.
I started toward Jonty and the others. Galen slid his hand in mine and we walked to him hand in hand.
Doyle laid his hand against my cheek, and I pressed my face against his hand. “The Red Caps did our duty for us,” he said.
The comment made me raise my face from his hand and look past Jonty and the other guards. Soldiers were standing, helping wounded move across the field, but the Red Caps were still figures lying across the grass. Almost none of them were sitting up, and none were standing.
“How are the humans up and the Red Caps so hurt?”
“We were hurt,” Dawson said, “but we healed.”
“What?” I asked.
“Every solider who you healed earlier healed on their own. Then we healed the others.”
“What?” I asked again, because it still didn’t make sense.
“We healed them,” Dawson said. “We used the nails. They were like some sort of magic wands.”
“Can it heal the Red Caps?” Doyle asked.
“They’re metal,” I said.
“They are dying, Meredith. I don’t think it will hurt them now,” Rhys said. One of his arms was in a sling, and the sleeve of his uniform was blackened.
Mistral’s coat was a blackened ruin across his back. Had Taranis himself attacked with his Seelie warriors? I realized that Sholto was still missing.
“Where’s Sholto?”
Doyle dropped his hand from my face, and answered me while turning away. “Sholto is well. The sluagh came to his call. It is all that saved us from Taranis and his men. They fled from the sluagh.”
I grabbed Doyle’s arm with my free hand. The other was squeezed tightly in Galen’s hand. There was too much happening, and I didn’t know how to cope with it all. But I knew one thing; I didn’t want Doyle’s face to look like that.
He turned and looked at me, but his face was that old unreadable darkness, only his eyes flinching around the edges. Now I knew what that little flinch meant.
“I want to wrap you around me like a coat, and cover you in kisses, but we have wounded to save. But do not doubt what I feel for you, even in the midst of this.” The first hard tear slid down my cheek. “I thought you were dead, and….”
Galen’s hand dropped away, and Doyle wrapped me in his arms. I clung to him as if his hands on my body were air and food, and everything I needed to live.
I heard Rhys say, “Come on, Dawson, let’s see if those little nails will help Jonty.”
I wanted to melt into Doyle’s kiss and never come up for air, but there was duty. There was always duty, and some horror that had to be fought, or healed, or…. Everyone thinks they want an extraordinary life, but you don’t. When standing knee-deep in yet another disaster, ordinary begins to look very good.
We broke apart, and he led me to Jonty’s side. Dawson was already kneeling on the ground. He held the nail that had come out of me when I healed him. He held it point down above one of the wounds.
“We’ll have to get the shrapnel out of his body first,” Rhys said.
“It didn’t work that way for us,” Dawson said.
“How did it work?” I asked, my arm wrapped around Doyle’s lean waist, the strength of him beside me almost too good to be real.
Galen was carefully not looking at Doyle and me. I realized that he had come to me first. That he had swept me off my feet, and though I had been glad to see him, it hadn’t been the feelings I had had for Doyle. It simply hadn’t. I couldn’t change how my heart felt, not even to save the feelings of one of my best friends.
“Like this,” Dawson said, and he began to pass the nail over Jonty’s wounds, point down, as if he were invisibly carving something. My hand tingled. The mark of blood on my palm tingled.
I stepped away from Doyle. He tried to catch my hand, but I drew it away before he could touch it. Somehow I wasn’t sure that him touching the hand of blood while it was itching to be used would be a good thing. I didn’t entirely understand what was happening, but I didn’t question the urge to step up and drop to my knees beside Dawson.
I spoke words without willing them, as if the universe had been waiting for me to speak them, and with each word, it was as if time itself let out a breath that it had been holding. “You call me with blood and metal. What would you have of me?”
Dawson looked at me, and his lips moved, but it was as if he too wasn’t in complete control of what he said. “Heal him, Meredith. I ask this with blood and metal and the magic you have given to this flesh.”“So be it,” I said, and I spread my hand over Jonty’s back. My skin ran with heat, as if the blood in my body was turning to molten metal. There was a moment of almost unbearable pain, then blood fountained upward from Jonty’s body. Metal rained upward, expelled from the body with the blood.
Jonty came to with a gasp. But the blood kept pouring out. I scrambled back from him, and Dawson came with me. The blood slowed, but though the metal was out, the wounds were not healing.
Jonty turned his head with obvious effort, and said, “You call my blood, My Queen. You cleanse me of the human metal. I die for you, and I am content.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want you to die for me, Jonty. I want you to live.”
“Some things are not meant to be, Princess,” he said.
“It looks like it’s a good thing we didn’t come when the call first hit us, or we might be dying too,” said a voice from the dark. I turned and found the goblin twins, Ash and Holly. In the dark you could have mistaken them for full-blooded sidhe, so tall and straight, only a little more bulky in the muscles, but hitting the gym a little harder could explain that away. Their yellow hair was a little short, just touching their shoulders. If it had been longer, they could have indeed passed for sidhe.
It was too dark to see that Ash’s eyes were a solid green like the leaf of the tree he was named after, and Holly’s eyes were the scarlet of winter berries. Only the solid color of their eyes with no whites truly betrayed their goblin blood.
“I did not call to you,” I said.
“Your magic calls to the Red Caps, and our father’s blood is in us,” Ash said.
“I hate that your white-fleshed magic calls to us,” Holly said.
They nodded in unison. “We hate that your hand of blood calls to us as if we were Red Caps. We are Seelie, and you have helped us understand that there is more to us than goblin blood, but yet your power calls to us as if we are lesser things,” Ash said.
“For me, it was enough that your magic in Los Angeles made me a more powerful goblin, but I thought it would make me what the goblins had once been,” Holly said. “But, even I, even we, are still less, or your magic would not pull at us like a dog to its master’s whistle.” His voice was bitter.
“Would you let them die for pride’s sake?” I asked.
“We are goblins,” Holly said. “We do not heal anything. We slaughter and destroy. It is what we are, and the treaty that brought us to America so long ago stole us away from ourselves. There is no room for goblins anymore.”
I stumbled as I got to my feet, stepping on the hem of my coat. Holly laughed at me, but I didn’t care. I knew something. I got it. Knew it; understood it. I wasn’t even certain in that moment what “it” was, but the compulsion of it moved me toward the twins. It kept me walking across the winter grass, the frosted weeds making a dry sound against the leather of my coat.
Doyle came to my side. “Have a care, my Merry.”
He was right to be cautious, but the feeling inside me was right, too. The scent of flowers rode the air, as if a breath of summer’s heat trickled across the cold moonlight.
Rhys came to our side and touched Doyle’s arm. “The Goddess is near, Doyle. It will be all right.”