A Shiver of Light

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HE GRABBED MY wrist and started to pull me to him, but I thought, I need something to hold on to, and my other hand found smooth wood to grip, a carved banister leading up to nowhere, but it was a handhold, and I made my choice that I’d let him break my arm before I let go.

“Meredith, I’d never hurt you.”

“You raped me!”

“Lies, Meredith, all lies. I saved you from the Unseelie monsters. You have a babe that grows horns, and another spotted like a dog, but our daughter is perfect. They are twisted of body, and it is a miracle you have survived.”

His eyes began to glow as if every green petaled layer of his iris were turning to green flame, and I was falling into that flame. I wanted to touch his hair, colored like all the brilliance of a fiery sunset. My hand loosened on the banister behind me, and then a single rose petal fell and landed on the mound of my breast. I was not a victim.

He held my wrist; so be it. I opened my hand and laid my palm against his skin and called one of my hands of power. His skin began to writhe as if it were turning liquid where I touched him.

He yelled and let me go. “What is this?”

“The hand of flesh is my hand of power, as my father carried it before me.”

Taranis’s arm began to roll up on itself, as the bones and muscle began to spill out to the surface, turning inside out, and spreading up his arm.

“Stop this!” he yelled, but even as I watched, the flowing skin had stopped just short of his shoulder. If he’d laid the arm against other bare skin it would have spread, but he had jerked away quickly enough that it hadn’t turned his entire body inside out. The hand of flesh could do that, and had. It had been one of the worst things I’d ever seen, but I was half sorry it hadn’t done just that to Taranis.

“This is dream; you don’t have this power outside of dream.” He was staring at his arm, and the horror on his face as he looked up at me made part of me … happy.

“You knocked me unconscious and nearly killed me before you mounted me last time. I was too hurt to fight back.”

“This is not real!” He yelled it at me.

“I don’t know, uncle dear; perhaps when you wake up your arm will be healed, or perhaps it will be a reminder to you to stay away from me, my babies, and everyone I hold dear, because if you ever touch me by force again, in dream or reality, I will destroy you, Taranis.”

“It isn’t real,” he said, but his voice was uncertain.

“For your sake, I hope not,” I said. “Honestly, for my own sake, I hope it is.”

“I saved you, Meredith; why do you hate me?”

I wished for a sword, and one was in my hand. The hilt was cool and perfect. You had to look close to see the carved tiny bodies melting into each other as the only warning for what might happen if you touched the sword. It was Aben-dul, once my father’s centuries before I was born, and it fit my hand as it had the first time it appeared to me in reality. It had never just appeared in my hand before, but this was a dream—anything was possible.

“Where did that come from?” And now he was afraid, and that made me fiercely happy.

“You can stop me from leaving this dream, but you can’t stop me from creating what I need inside it.”

“You shouldn’t be able to do that,” he said.

“You said it yourself, uncle: I have traveled through dream to soldiers who held relics of my blood and pain. The Goddess comes to me in my dreams. I hold my father’s hand of power and a sword of Unseelie grace, but I am Seelie as well as Unseelie. I hold the wonders and nightmares of both courts inside me, uncle dearest.”

“Stop calling me that; I am the father of your baby.”

I wrapped both hands around the sword and only the fact that I carried the hand of flesh kept me safe from the magic of the blade, and got into the stance that I’d learned so long ago. I hadn’t kept up my sword practice, because I’d realized as a teenager I was never going to choose a blade as my weapon in a duel, and I was never going to challenge anyone to a duel, and so long as they challenged me I chose the weapons, but I knew how to hold a sword. I knew enough to bleed him unless he killed me first, but I’d blasted the arm that held his hand of light; if I was lucky, I’d crippled his magic. If I’d been certain the sword would work here as it did in the real world, I could have used my hand of flesh without touching him, but I wasn’t sure enough to risk using it as anything but a sword.

“I was pregnant when you raped me, you psychotic bastard! Now break us both free of this dream, or I swear by the Summerlands, and the Darkness that Swallows the World, I will do all in my power to kill you, uncle dearest.”

“Do not call me that, Meredith; you are my queen and will be my wife.”

I started forward, doing a feint with the sword. He jerked back, his wounded arm useless at his side. “Come, uncle, let us embrace and I will finish what I began with your arm.”

He vanished from the dream, and a second later I woke in bed with Doyle and Frost looking down at me. Doyle was pinning my arms down across my body, because the sword Aben-dul was still in my hands.