Swallowing Darkness

Chapter Five

There was one terrible scream, a sound of such desolation that I pushed at Galen, tried to move him away. I had to see. Doyle had been an immovable wall; Galen moved, but not away. His body was softer, less certain of itself, but I was just as trapped. I might have forced him to move if I'd been willing to hurt him badly enough, but I was unwilling to hurt more of the people I cared for.

Galen took a breath that broke in a sob. I heard Rhys's voice. "Goddess, help us!"

I pushed harder at Galen's chest. "Move, move, damnit, let me see."

He turned back to me, pressing his face against my hair. "You don't want to see."

I'd been frightened before; now it was panic. I screamed at him. "Let me see, or I will hurt you!"

It was Rhys who said, "Let her see, Galen."

"No," he said.

"Galen, move. Merry isn't like you. She'll want to see." The tone in his voice turned the panic to ice in my veins. I was suddenly calm, but it wasn't true calm. It was what happens when terror turns to something that will let you function, for a time.

Galen moved slowly, reluctance in every muscle as he crawled off the bed on the opposite side from where he'd started. He put himself close to the very thing he hadn't wanted me to see.

I saw the nightflyer first, wrapped around Gran like a shroud. One of the spines that they could carry inside their bodies had pierced her through. I saw the spikes on the spine, and knew why he, for it was a he, had not taken the spine back out. It would cause more damage going back, but it wasn't like a blade. You couldn't cut it off, so that the injury wasn't inflicted twice. It was a piece of the nightflyer's body. Why not just take it back out and be done with it?

Gran's hand reached to empty air. She was still alive. I sat up, tried to get up, and no one stopped me. That was bad in and of itself. It meant that there was more. Sitting up, I caught a glimpse of that more.

Doyle lay on the ground, eyes blinking up at the ceiling. The front of his borrowed surgical scrubs was blackened, and part was peeled away to show the raw burned flesh underneath.

Rhys knelt beside him, holding his hand. Why wasn't he shouting for a doctor? We needed a doctor. I hit the call button beside the bed.

I half fell and half crawled out of bed. When the IV pulled, I tore it out. A trickle of blood oozed down my arm, but if there was pain, I didn't feel it.

I knelt on the floor between the two of them, and only then could I see Sholto on the far side of Doyle. He was collapsed on his side, his hair spilled across his face so that I could not see if he were awake and watching me, or beyond that. The remnants of the t-shirt that had framed the perfection of his chest now showed a black-and-red ruin. But whereas Doyle's injury was on his stomach, the bolt of power had taken Sholto over the heart.

So much had gone wrong in so short a space of time that I couldn't take it all in. I knelt on the ground, frozen in my indecision. A sound made me look at the woman who had raised me. If ever I had truly had a mother, it was she. She stared at me with those brown eyes that had shown me all the kindness I had ever known from a mother. She and my father had raised me together. Now I stared up at her from my knees, the only way she would be taller than me as she had been when I was small.

The nightflyer unfurled its fleshy wings enough that I could see that the spine had taken her just under the heart. Maybe even gone through the bottom part of it. Brownies are a tough lot, but it was a terrible wound.

She stared at me, still alive, still trying to breathe past the daggerlike spine. I took her hand, and felt her grip, which had always been so strong, now frail, as if she could not hold my hand, but she tried.

I turned to Doyle, and took his hand in mine. He whispered, "I have failed you."

I shook my head. "Not yet," I said. "It's failure only if you die. Don't die."

Rhys went to Sholto and searched for a pulse, while I held the hands of my grandmother and the man I loved and waited for them to die.

It was one of those moments when strange things come into your mind. All I could think of was what Quasimodo says as he gazes down at the Archdeacon who raised him dead on the pavement below, and the woman he loved hung and dead. "Oh! All that I have ever loved."

I threw my head back and screamed. In that moment no baby, no crown, nothing was worth the price in both my hands.

Doctors came, and nurses. They fell upon the wounded, and they tried to pry my hands out of Gran and Doyle's hands, but I couldn't seem to let go. I was afraid to let go, as if the worst would happen if I did. I knew it was stupid, but the feel of Doyle's fingers wrapped around mine was everything to me. And Gran's fragile grip was still warm, still alive. I was afraid to let go.

Then her hand spasmed against mine. I looked into her face, and the eyes were too wide, the breath not right. They eased her off the spine, and forced the nightflyer back, and as the spine came out, her life spilled with it.

She collapsed toward me, but other arms caught her, tried to save her, pulled her hand away from mine. But I knew she was gone. There might be moments of breath, and pulse, but it was not life. It was what the body does at the end sometimes, when the mind and soul are gone, but the body doesn't understand yet that death has come, and there is no more.

I turned to the other hand still in mine. Doyle gave a shuddering breath. The doctors were pulling him away from me, sticking needles in him, putting him on a gurney. I stood, trying to hold on to his hand, his fingers, but my doctor was there, pulling me backward. She was talking, something about me needing to not upset myself. Why do doctors say such impossible things? Don't get upset; stay off your leg for six weeks; lower your stress; cut back on your work hours. Don't get upset.

They pulled Doyle's fingers out of mine, and the fact that they could pull him away from me said just how hurt he was. If he hadn't been hurt, nothing short of death would have moved him from me.

Nothing short of death.

I looked at Sholto on the floor. They had a crash cart. They were trying to restart his heart. Goddess, help me. Goddess, help us all.

The doctors were clustered around Gran. They were trying, but they had triaged the wounded. Doyle first, then Sholto, then Gran. It should have been comforting, and it was, that they took Doyle first. They thought they could save him.

Sholto's body jerked with the jolt of power they put through his body. I heard their words in snatches, but I saw a head shake. Not yet. They hit him again, with more, because his body jerked harder. His body convulsed on the floor.

Galen tried to hold me, tears streaming down his face, as they put a sheet over Gran's body. The police in the room seemed unsure what to do with the nightflyer. How do you handcuff that many tentacles? What do you do when the room is charred, and the dead woman is the one whom everyone said did it? What do you do when magic is real, and cold iron burns the flesh?

I saw the doctors shake their heads over Sholto. He was so terribly still. Consort help me, help me help them. Help me! Galen tried to press my face into his chest, to keep me from looking. I pushed him away, harder than I meant to, so that he stumbled.

I went to Sholto. The doctors tried to keep me away, or talk to me, but Rhys kept them back. He shook his head, said something I couldn't seem to hear. I knelt by Sholto's body. Body. No. No.

The nightflyers that the police weren't trying to arrest came to me, and to their king. They huddled around him, like black cloaks, if cloaks could have muscle and flesh, and pale unfinished faces.

A tentacle reached out to touch his body. I reached to the nightflyers on either side of me, as you'd reach for a hand of your fellow bereaved. The tentacles wrapped around my hands, squeezing, giving what reassurance they could. I screamed, but not wordlessly this time.

"Goddess, help me! Consort, help me!" I was filled with such rage, horrible, burning rage, as if my heart would burst with it, my skin run in sweat with the heat of my anger. I would kill Cair. I would kill her for this. But tonight, now, this moment, I wanted our king to live.

I glanced into the face of the nightflyer beside me, the black eyes, the pale lipless mouth, the razor teeth. I watched a tear glide down that pale, flattened cheek. Their anger; their rage; their king, but... he was my king, too, and I was his queen, their queen.

I smelled roses. The Goddess was near. I prayed for guidance, and it wasn't a voice in my head. It wasn't a vision. It was knowledge. I simply knew what to do, and how to do it. I saw the spell all the way through, and knew that if it were to work, there was no time to worry that at the end was potentially something horrible. Nothing that faerie could show me tonight would be as horrible as what I'd already seen. Nightmares could not frighten me tonight, for I was past fear. There was only purpose.

I reached out to Sholto; the nightflyers moved their tentacles back so they only held my wrists as I laid hands on their king's body. I had raised magic before, with sex and life, but that was not the only magic that ran through my veins. I was Unseelie sidhe, and there is power in death, as there is in life. There is power in that which hurts, as well as in that which saves.

I had a moment of thinking of using this magic for Doyle, but this magic was only for the sluagh. It would not work for my Darkness.

The Goddess had given me choices along the way; bring life back to faerie with life or death, with sex or blood. I had chosen life and sex over death and blood. In that moment, with Gran's blood on my gown, I chose again.

I looked for Rhys, because I knew Galen would not do what I needed, not in time. "Rhys, bring me Gran's body."

Rhys had to argue with the doctors, and Galen helped him win the argument. Rhys brought her body to me. He laid her body on top of Sholto's, as if he knew what I meant to do.

They say the dead do not bleed, but that's not true. The recently dead bleed just fine. The brain dies, the heart stops beating, but the blood still flows out, for a time. Yes, for a time the dead do bleed.

Gran looked so small lying on top of Sholto. Her blood flowed out and down his pale skin, over the blackened burns the hand of power had made.

I felt Rhys and Galen at my back. I heard, vaguely, unimportantly, Galen arguing. But it didn't matter; nothing mattered but the magic.

I put my hands with the bracelets of tentacles on top of Gran's thin chest. Tears bit at my eyes, and I had to blink them away to keep my vision clear. My skin flared to life, moonlight glow. I called my power. I called all of it. If ever I were truly queen of faerie, princess of the blood, let it be this night, this moment. Give me all of it, Goddess. I ask this in your name.

My hair glowed so brightly I could see the burning garnet of it from the corners of my eyes, see it flow down the front of my gown, like red fire. My eyes cast green and gold shadows. The nightflyers that touched me glowed white, and that glow slid around the circle of them, so that their flesh glowed like sidhe flesh, white and moonlight bright.

Sholto's body began to glow, as white and pure as our own. His hair ran with yellow and white light, like the first glow of dawn in a winter's sky. I heard his first breath, a rattling sound, the sound of death living in a gasp.

His eyes opened, wide and already full of yellow and gold fire. He stared up at me. "Merry," he whispered.

"My king," I said.

His gaze went to the nightflyers glowing around us. They burned as brightly as any sidhe had ever burned. Sholto said, "My queen."

"On the life of my grandmother, I swear vengeance this night. I call kin slayer against Cair."

He put his hand over mine, and the glowing tentacles of the nightflyers flowed over his hand and mine, binding them together. "We hear you," the nightflyers said, almost with one voice.

"Merry," Galen yelled, "don't do this!"

But I understood something I had not before. When Sholto had called the wild hunt into being inside faerie, I had not been with him. I had already begun to run. I would not run tonight. We had called the power together with our bodies, and it was with our bodies that we would ride it.

"Get the humans out," I said, in a voice echoing with power, as if we knelt in a vast cavern instead of a small room.

Rhys didn't wait to ask questions; he forced Galen to help him. I heard Rhys say, "They will go mad if they see more. Help me get them out!"

I leaned in to Sholto, with our hands laced together by the nightflyers, glowing flesh on top of glowing flesh, so that when our lips touched, the flare of light was blinding even to me.

Out of that light, that pure, Seelie light, the far wall with its broken window began to melt. To melt in the light, but it did not melt away. Out of the white, cool light, shapes formed. Shapes with tentacles, and teeth, and more limbs than seemed necessary. But whereas the last time they had spilled out of darkness and an unlight, now they poured out of light and whiteness. Their skin was as white as any sidhe, but their forms were what the wild hunt of the sluagh was meant to be. They were formed to strike terror into the heart of any who saw them, and drive mad those who were weak.

Sholto, the nightflyers, and I turned as one being toward the spill of shining nightmares. All I could see tonight was the glow of eyes, the alabaster shine of skin, the white, sharp shine of teeth. They were a thing of terrible beauty, as hard and fine as marble brought to life, with a lace of tentacles and many legs, so that the eye tried to make of them one great shape. It was only by staring that you realized it was a mass of shapes, all different, all wondrously formed with muscles and strength enough to do their work.

The ceiling melted away, and larger forms slid down toward us. The nightflyers released my hand enough for me to touch one of the tentacles' shapes, what had been a mass of shape, so confusing, so antediluvian that even with power riding me, my mind could not make form of it. The magic protected me, or my mind might have broken, trying to see what dangled from the ceiling. But the moment I touched that first shining form, it changed.

A horse flowed out of the mass of shapes. A great white horse, with eyes that glowed with red fire, and steam puffing from its nostrils with every breath. Its great hooves struck green sparks from the floor.

Sholto sat, with the small body in his arms. Gran looked so small there, like a child. His arms, his chest, were covered with her blood as he held her out to me. There were other men in my life who would not have offered me the choice. They would have already decided what they would do, but Sholto seemed to understand that it had to be my decision.

I touched the neck of the horse, and it was real, and warm, and pulsing with life. I leaned against its shoulder, for it was too tall for me to mount without aid. It nuzzled my hair, and I felt something there. I reached my hand up and found leaves. Leaves and berries in my hair, woven in among the garnet glow.

Sholto looked at me, eyes a little wide, still holding the body of the woman I had loved above all other women. "Mistletoe," he whispered, "entwined in your hair."

I'd had it happen once before inside faerie, but never outside. I looked past the nightflyers, still glowing, and found Rhys and Galen the only ones still in the room. Galen was shielding his eyes, as the rest of us had done in that night that had brought power back to the sluagh. The night that Doyle had said, "Don't look, Merry, don't look." I had a moment to think of him, carried away from me. He was somewhere in this hospital, maybe fighting for his life. I started to lose my purpose, then I looked up at the writhing nightmares. I remembered that even a glimpse of what had boiled in the ceiling of the cavern had been madness. Tonight I could look into the center of that shining, writhing mass, and understand that it was raw magic. It was only a nightmare if that was what you thought it would be. Raw magic forms in the mind before it forms to the touch.

I stared into it, and knew that until I finished this hunt there was no way to do anything else. It was like starting an avalanche — you have to ride it to its end. Only then could I embrace my Darkness once more. I prayed the Goddess would keep him safe for me until the magic freed me of its power.

Rhys gazed at it all with wonder in his face. He saw what I saw: beauty. But then he had been a god of bloodshed and war, and before that a deity of death. Galen, my sweet Galen, would never be anything so harsh. This was not a magic for the faint of heart. My heart wasn't faint; it felt as if my heart were missing. Whatever it was that allowed me to feel was gone. I looked at Gran's body, and there was a roaring emptiness inside me. I felt nothing but vengeance, as if vengeance could be its own emotion cut free of hate, anger, or sorrow. Vengeance as if it were a force of its own, something, almost, alive.

Rhys walked to the circle of nightflyers, gazing up into the writhing mass of white light and shifting shapes. He stopped at the glowing edge of the circle. He looked at me now. "Let me go with you."

It was Sholto who answered. "She has her huntsman for tonight."

Galen spoke, still staring at the floor. "Where is Merry going?" He still didn't understand. He was too young. The thought came to me that he was older than I, by decades, but the Goddess whispered through my head, "I am older than all." I understood; in this moment I was she, and that made me old enough.

"Take care of her, Galen," I said.

He glanced up at me, and saw the horse with its flashing eyes and white skin. For a moment, he wasn't afraid, he was simply amazed. He, like me, was too young to remember when the sidhe still had their shining horses. We had only had stories before this moment.

The circle of nightflyers parted and Rhys and Galen both reached upward, as if it were planned. The white shapes above us reached out toward them. Galen's reach was longer, so the horse that formed for him was as white and pure as mine. It turned flashing eyes that glowed golden to my red. There was no smoke from this one's nostrils, and the sparks from the hooves were as golden as its eyes. Only the size and the sense of strength let me know that they were kin.

Rhys's hand also brought a white horse, but it was like an illusion, or a trick of the eye. One moment white and solid and very real, the next skeletal, like the proverbial steed of death.

Rhys spoke quietly and happily as he rubbed its nose. He spoke in Welsh, but a dialect I could barely follow. I could understand that he was happy to see the horse, and that it had been too long.

Galen touched his horse, as if he were certain that it would vanish, but it didn't. It butted him gently in the shoulder, and made a high, happy whinny. Galen smiled, because you couldn't help but smile at that sound.

Sholto held Gran's body out to Galen, and he took her gently in his arms. His smile was gone, and there was nothing but sorrow. I let him have the sorrow, let him grieve for me, because my own grief could wait; tonight there would be blood.

A shape from above touched Sholto's shoulder, as if it could not wait for him to touch it, like an overeager lover. The moment it touched him, it formed into something white and shining, but it was not exactly a horse. It was as if the great white steed had mingled with a nightflyer, so that there were more legs than any horse would have, though one graceful head rose from strong shoulders. Its eyes were the empty black of the nightflyers that had begun to sing around us. Yes, sing, in high, almost childlike voices, as if bats could sing as they flew above your head. I knew in that moment that my power had changed what this hunt would be. I was not sluagh, nor pure Unseelie, and though we would be terrible and we would bring vengeance, we would come on the songs of the nightflyers. We would come shining from the sky, and until the vengeance was done nothing could stand against us. The mistake last time had been not giving the hunt a purpose, but that mistake would not be made tonight. I knew who we hunted, and I had spoken her crime. Until she was hunted to ground, no power in faerie or mortal lands could withstand us.

Sholto lifted me to sit on the horse with its red, glowing eyes. He mounted his own many-legged steed. The nightflyers' song became a chant of words so ancient that I could feel more of the building fall away just from the sound of it. Reality tore around us, and I spoke the words, "We ride."

Sholto said, "We hunt."

I nodded, wrapping my fingers in the horse's thick mane. "We fly," I said, and kicked my bare heels into her flanks. She leaped forward into the empty night beyond. I should have been afraid. I should have doubted that a horse without wings could fly, but I didn't. I knew she would fly. I knew what we were, and the wild hunt, hunts from the air.

The mare's hooves did not so much strike the air as simply run on it. Her hooves flared with green flame at each step, as if the empty air were a road that only she could see. Sholto rode at my side, on his many-legged stallion. The nightflyers spilled around us, still shining, still singing. But it was what followed in our wake that would make the humans turn away, and hide inside their houses. They would not know why, they would simply turn away. They would think our passing the cry of wild birds, or wind.

We rode in a shine of white and magic, and dark dreams flowed in our wake.