Meredith Gentry 01 - A Kiss of Shadows Read online

  “Let me ward your back, then I’ll tell you on the way down to the van.”

  “Do we have time?” he asked.

  “Sure. Hold the shirt out of the way so the burns are bare.”

  He looked like he didn’t believe me, but when I turned him to face the door, he didn’t argue. He held the silk shirt out of the way so I could work.

  I spilled power into my hands like holding warmth cupped between my palms. I slowly opened my hands, palms facing Jeremy’s bare back. I placed my hands just above his skin. That trembling warmth caressed his back, and Jeremy shivered under its touch.

  “What runes are you using?” he asked, voice just a touch breathless.

  “I’m not,” I said. I spread that warm power across the scars, down his back.

  He started to turn.

  “Don’t move.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not using runes? What else can you use?”

  I had to kneel to make sure the power covered every scar. When I was sure that everything had been covered, I sealed it, visualizing the power like a coating of glowing yellow light just above his skin. I sealed the edges of that glow so that it clung tight to his skin like a shield.

  Jeremy’s breath came out in a shivering gasp. “What are you using, Merry?”

  “Magic,” I said, and stood.

  “Can I let the shirt down?”

  “Yes.”

  The grey silk slid into place, and the warding was so solid in my mind’s eye that I felt like the cloth should bunch over the magic, but it didn’t. The silk slid over his back as if I’d done nothing to it. But I never doubted that I’d done my job.

  He began to tuck the shirt in, before he even turned to face me. “You used just your own personal magic for that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why not use runes? They help empower our magic.”

  “Many runes are actually ancient symbols for long-forgotten deities or creatures. Who knows? I might be invoking the very sidhe that injured you. I couldn’t risk it.”

  He slipped his jacket on, straightened his tie. “Now tell me what scared you about the scars on my back?”

  I opened the apartment door. “While we go to the van.” I went out into the hallway before he had time to argue. We’d used up too much time, but not to ward his back would have been too careless for words.

  We clattered down the stairs in our dress shoes. “What was it, Merry?”

  “A dragon. A wyrm actually, since it didn’t have legs.”

  “You saw a vision in the scars?” He got to the outside door before me, and held it open out of long habit. I drew the gun from behind my back, clicking the safety off.

  “I thought the Host was miles away,” Jeremy said.

  “One lone sidhe could hide from me.” I held the gun down at my side so it wouldn’t be immediately noticeable. “I won’t be taken back, Jeremy. Whatever it takes.”

  I stepped into the soft California night, before he could say anything. A lot of the fey, especially the sidhe, considered modern weapons cheating. There was no written rule against using guns, but it was still considered bad form, unless you were a member of the Queen’s, or the Prince’s, elite guard. They got to carry guns if they were protecting the royal body from harm. Well, I was a royal body, a wee, disowned royal body, but still royal whether the rest of them liked it or not. I had no guard to protect me, so I’d do it myself. Whatever that took.

  The night was never truly dark here—there were too many electric lights, too many people. I searched that gentle darkness for a lone figure. I searched with eyes, and energy, casting outward in a straining circle as we hurried to the waiting van. There were people in the other houses. I could feel them moving, vibrating. A line of seagulls moved along one of the roofs, half-asleep, moving in protest, aware of my magic sweeping over them. There was a party on the beach. I could feel the energy rising higher, excitement, fear, but the normal fear; should I do it, should I not; is it safe? There was nothing else, unless you count the shivering energy of the sea that was constantly with you near the shore. It got to be like white noise, something ignored, like the crush of so many people, but it was always there. Roane was somewhere in that huge rolling power. I hoped he was having a good time. I knew I wasn’t.

  The sliding door of the van opened, and I got a glimpse of Uther crouched in the dimness. He held his hand out to me, and I gave him my left hand. His hand engulfed mine, pulling me into the van’s interior. He slid the door closed behind me.

  Ringo looked back over the driver’s seat at me. He barely fit in the driver’s seat, all that muscle, those inhumanly long arms, that huge chest squeezed down into a seat made for humans. He smiled, revealing a mouth of some of the sharpest teeth I’d ever seen outside of a wolf. The face was slightly elongated to accommodate the teeth, which made the rest of his more human face seem out of proportion. The teeth flashed out of a solid brown of skin. Once upon a time, Ringo had been a fully human gang member. Then a group of visiting sidhe from the Seelie Court had gotten lost in the wilds of deepest, darkest Los Angeles. A group of gang members had found them. Cultural interaction at its best. The sidhe got the worst end of the fight. Who knows how it happened? Maybe they were too arrogant to fight a bunch of inner-city teenagers. Maybe the inner-city teenagers were just a hell of a lot more vicious than the visiting royals had expected. However it happened, they were losing. But one of the gang members got a bright idea. He switched sides on condition that he get his wish.

  The sidhe agreed, and Ringo shot his fellow gang members to death. His wish was to be one of the fey. The sidhe had given their word to grant his wish. They couldn’t go back on their word. To make a full human into a part fey, you have to pour wild magic, pure power, into them, and it is the human’s will or desire that chooses the shape of that magic. Ringo had been in his early teens when it happened. He’d probably wanted to appear fierce, frightening, to be the toughest son of a bitch around, so the magic had given him his wish. By human standards he was a monster. By sidhe standards, ditto. By fey standards, he was just one of the gang.

  I don’t know why Ringo left the gangs. Maybe they turned on him. Maybe he got wise. By the time I met him, he’d been an upstanding citizen for years. He was married to his childhood sweetheart and had three kids. He specialized in bodyguard work and did a lot of celebrities that just wanted some exotic muscle to follow them around for a while. Easy work, no real danger, and he got to rub elbows with the stars. Not bad for a kid whose mother had been a fifteen-year-old junkie, father unknown. Ringo keeps a picture of his mom on his desk. She’s thirteen, bright-eyed, well groomed, pretty, with the world in front of her. By the next year she was on drugs. She died at seventeen, overdose. There are no pictures of his mother after age thirteen in his office or in his home. It’s as if, for Ringo, everything after that wasn’t real, wasn’t his mother.

  His oldest daughter, Amira, looks eerily like that smiling picture. I don’t think she’d survive if he found her doing drugs. Ringo says that being on drugs is worse than dead; I think he believes it.

  Neither of them remarked on the gun as I slipped it back into the waistband of my pants. They’d probably been with Jeremy when he found the gun and the papers.

  Jeremy got in the passenger-side seat. “Let’s get to the airport” was all he said. Ringo put the car in gear and away we went.

  Chapter 9

  THE BACK OF THE VAN WAS EMPTY EXCEPT FOR CARPET AND A MODIFIED seat-belt harness that Jeremy had had installed on one side. Uther’s seat. I started to crawl into the middle row of seats but Uther touched my arm. “Jeremy has suggested that if you sit with me my aura may serve to overlap yours, thus confusing our pursuers.” Each word was carefully enunciated, because the tusks may have looked like they came out of the skin over the mouth, out of the face, but in reality the tusks were modified teeth, attached inside the mouth. It meant if he were careless, he had a tendency to slur his speech. He’d worked with one of Hollywood’s leading s
peech coaches to learn his Midwestern college professor voice. It did not match a face that was more pig than human, with a double set of tusks curling out of it. We’d had one client faint after he spoke to her for the first time. Always fun to shock the humans.

  I glanced up at Jeremy. He nodded. “I may be the better magician, but Uther’s got that older-than-God energy whirling around him. I think it’ll help them overlook you.”

  It was a great idea, and a simple one. “Gee, Jeremy, I knew there was a reason you were the boss.”

  He grinned at me, then turned to Ringo. “It’s a straight shot up Sepulveda to the airport.”

  “At least we won’t hit rush hour,” Ringo said.

  I settled into the back of the van, next to Uther. The van came out on Sepulveda a little too fast, and Uther caught me before I had time to fall. His big arms pulled me against him, cradling me against a chest nearly as big as my entire body. Even with my shields firmly in place he was like a large, warm, vibrating thing. I’d met other fey who had no real magic to speak of, just the very barest of glamour, but they were so old and had been around so much magic all their lives that it was as if they’d absorbed the power into the very pores of their skin. Even the sidhe wouldn’t find me caught within Uther’s arms. They’d sense him, not me. Probably. Initially.

  I relaxed against Uther’s broad chest, the warm safety of his arms. I don’t know what it was about him, but he always made me feel safe. It wasn’t just the sheer physical size. It was Uther. He had a center of calm like a fire that you could huddle around in the dark.

  Jeremy turned in his seat, as far as the seat belt would allow, wrinkling his suit, which meant what he had to say was serious. “Why did you ward my back, Merry?”

  “What?” Uther said.

  Jeremy waved the question away. “I had an old sidhe injury on my back. Merry put a ward on it. I want to know why.”

  “You are persistent,” I said.

  “Tell me.”

  I sighed, cuddling Uther’s arms around me like a blanket. “It’s possible that the sidhe that injured you could call the dragon out of your back or force you to shape-shift into one.”

  Jeremy’s eyes widened. “You can do that?”

  “I can’t, but I’m not a full-blooded sidhe. I’ve seen similar things done.”

  “Will the warding hold?”

  I’d have liked to have simply said yes, but it was too close to a lie. “It will hold for a while, but if the sidhe that did the spell is here, he may be powerful enough to breech my magic, or he could simply keep hitting the ward with his own power until he wears the magic away. The chances of the same sidhe being on this hunt are very slim, Jeremy, but I couldn’t let you help me, and not ward it.”

  “Just in case,” he said.

  I nodded. “Just in case.”

  “I was very young when this was done, Merry. I can protect myself now.”

  “You’re a powerful magician, but you’re not sidhe.”

  “It makes that big a difference?” he asked.

  “It can.”

  Jeremy fell silent and turned in his seat to help Ringo find the quickest way to the airport. Uther said, “You are tense.”

  I smiled up at him. “And you’re surprised?”

  He smiled, that very human mouth under the curved bone of the tusks, the piggish snout. It was like part of his face was a mask, and underneath was just a man, a big one, but just a man.

  He ran thick fingers through my still-wet hair. “I take it Branwyn’s Tears were still active when Jeremy went up?”

  I’d have never taken time for a shower otherwise, and Uther knew that. “So Jeremy told me.” I sat up so that I wasn’t soaking his shirt with my hair. “Didn’t mean to get you wet. Just forgot. Sorry.”

  He pressed my head, gently, back to his chest with a hand as big as my head. “I was not complaining, just remarking.”

  I settled back against him, my cheek resting on his upper arm.

  “Roane left just after we arrived. Did he go for help?”

  I explained about Roane and his newfound skin.

  “You didn’t know you could heal him?” Uther asked.

  “No.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “Very interesting.”

  I looked up at him. “Do you know something I don’t about what happened?”

  He gazed down at me, small eyes almost lost in his face. “I know that Roane is a fool.”

  That made me stare at him, searching his face, trying to read what lay behind those eyes. “He’s a roane, and I’ve given him back the ocean. It’s his calling, his heart of hearts.”

  “You’re not angry with him?”

  I frowned, shrugging awkwardly in his arms. “Roane is what he is. I can’t blame him for that. It would be like yelling at the rain for being wet. It just is.”

  “So it does not bother you, at all?”

  I shrugged again, and his arms settled around me, cradling me almost like a baby, so I could gaze up at him more comfortably. “I’ll admit to being disappointed, but not surprised.”

  “Very understanding.”

  “I might as well be understanding, Uther—I can’t change things.” I rubbed my cheek against the warmth of his arm and realized what part of Uther’s charm was. He was so large and I was so small, it was like being a child again. That feeling that if someone could hold you in their arms completely, nothing could hurt you. It hadn’t been true when I believed it as a very little girl, and it certainly wasn’t true now, but it was still nice. Sometimes false comfort is better than no comfort at all.

  “Damn,” Jeremy said, raising his voice for our benefit. “There’s a wreck up ahead—looks like Sepulveda is completely blocked off. We’ll try to take side streets around it.”

  I rolled my head back against Uther’s arm to see Jeremy. “Let me guess, everyone else is trying to exit here, too.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Settle in. It’s going to take a while.”

  I moved my head so I was looking up at Uther again. “Heard any good jokes lately?”

  He gave a small smile. “No, but my legs are going to fall asleep if I must keep them tucked under like this for long.”

  “Sorry.” I started to move away so he could adjust.

  “No need to move.” He put one arm under my thighs, kept the other arm behind my back, and picked me up. He held me like a baby, effortlessly, while he straightened his legs out in front of him. He settled me onto his lap, one arm behind my back, the other lying loosely across my legs and his.

  I laughed. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be . . . big.”

  “And I wonder what it would be like to be small.”

  “But you were a child once. You remember what that was like.”

  He gazed into the distance. “Childhood was a very long time ago for me, but yes, I do remember. But that is not the kind of small that I mean.” He looked down at me, and there was something in his eyes, something lonely, needy. Something that pierced that calmness in him that I valued so much.

  “What’s wrong, Uther?” My voice was soft. There was something very private about us being back there alone with no one in the middle seats.

  His hand rested lightly on my thigh, and I was finally able to read the look in his eyes. It wasn’t a look I’d ever seen in Uther’s face. I remembered his comment when I was getting fitted for the wire, how he’d wait in the other room because it had been so long since he’d seen a naked woman.

  The surprise must have shone on my face, because he turned his face away from me. “I’m sorry, Merry. If this is completely unwelcome, tell me so, and I will never mention it again.”

  I didn’t know what to say, but I tried. “It’s not that, Uther. I’m about to get on a plane and go Goddess knows where. We may never see each other again.” Which was partially true. I mean, I was leaving town. I couldn’t think of any way to finish this in this short drive without hurting his feelings or lying to him. I wanted to avoid both.


  He spoke without looking at me. “I thought you were human with some fey blood in you. I would never have suggested this to someone who was raised human. But your reaction to Roane’s desertion is proof that you don’t think like a human.” He turned almost shyly back to me. The look in his eyes was so open, so trusting. It wasn’t that he thought I’d say yes. He didn’t know, but he was trusting me not to react badly.

  It had just been yesterday that I’d first thought of how very alone Uther must be out here on the coast. How many times had I cuddled against him like this, thinking of him as some kind of big brother, a father substitute? Too many. It had been unfair, and he’d always been the perfect gentleman because he thought I was human. Now he knew the truth, and it had changed things. Even if I said no, and he took it well, I’d never be able to treat him this casually again. I’d never be able to cuddle in his big arms in innocence. That was gone. I mourned that, but there was no recovering it. All I could do now was try and keep Uther from getting hurt. The trouble was I didn’t know how to do that because I didn’t have a clue what to say.

  My thinking had taken too long. He closed his eyes and moved his hand off my thigh. “I’m sorry, Merry.”

  I reached up and touched his chin. “No, Uther, I’m flattered.”

  He opened his eyes, looked at me, but the hurt was there, plain to see. He’d put his heart on his sleeve, and I’d put a knife through it. Dammit, I was about to get on a plane and never see these people again. I didn’t want to leave him like this. He was too good a friend for that.

  “I am part human, Uther. I can’t . . .” There was no delicate way to put it. “I can’t take the damage that a full-blooded fey could take.”

  “Damage?”

  So much for being coy. “You’re too large for my body, Uther. If you were . . . smaller, I could have sex with you for an afternoon, but I don’t see us dating. You’re my friend.”