Divine Misdemeanors (40 page)

They didn’t shoot us, and they didn’t arrest us. It helped that we had so many wounded and that I was Princess Meredith Nic Essus. Every once in a while it doesn’t suck to be the celebrity.

I HAD TO HAVE STITCHES IN MY ARM, BUT THEY WERE THE KIND THAT
dissolved into the wound because the other kind of stitches would be grown over by the body before the doctor could get them out. I wasn’t sure I healed that fast but I was glad the doctor knew enough about the fey to take the precaution.

Lucy was as mad as I’d ever seen her. “You could have been killed.”

“He worked for the police, Lucy. I was afraid if we called you guys in it would get back to him.”

“None of our people would have talked to that serial-killing son of a bitch.”

“I couldn’t risk Julian, especially since it was my fault that they took him.”

“How was it your fault?” she asked.

“I put myself out as bait and we protected ourselves and our demi-fey, our fey, but we didn’t think to guard Julian and the others.”

“Why did they take him?” she asked.

“He comes over and gets a little skin-hunger fix now and then.”

“Is that code for sex?”

“No, it’s exactly what it sounds like. He comes over to get cuddled and we send him back home with his virtue intact. He slept over the
other night for the first time and apparently the bad guys saw him leave in the morning. They assumed he was another lover.”

“Don’t you have enough already?”

I nodded. “Some days too many.”

“They didn’t find out that Julian is gay?”

“Doyle said that when someone is heterosexual they think that first.”

She nodded as if that made sense to her. “You know that Lieutenant Peterson is screaming for us to arrest someone.”

“On what charges? Forensics can look at the blood patterns, but she attacked me. If Doyle hadn’t used his knife when he did it would be a lot worse than this.” I motioned at the bandaged arm.

“And I’ve seen Barinthus down the hallway. The doctors say that he’ll live, but that if he’d been human he wouldn’t have.”

“It’s hard to kill an ex-god,” I said.

She patted my shoulder. “You know we do know our job, Merry. We could have backed you on this.”

“Your boss’s boss doesn’t even like me at a crime scene for fear I’m going to get hurt by some overzealous reporter. Do you really think he’d have agreed to me walking in there to save Julian?”

She looked around the room, then leaned in and spoke quietly. “I’ll deny this if asked in public, but no. They’d have never let you go in.”

“I couldn’t let my friend die because we screwed up and didn’t put a guard on all my friends.” That made me think. “How is Julian doing?”

“He’s still in surgery. It looks like he’s going to pull through but he was cut up some. You don’t want to see the picture the little psycho bitch was using this time. It was a medical text on anatomy.” Lucy shuddered. “She hadn’t gotten too far when you got to him, but it would have been the worst of the lot, and they weren’t going to kill him first.”

“She wasn’t pretending that she was killing to gain power or magic. She’d admitted to herself that she liked the pain and the killing.”

“How do you know all that?”

“She told me some of it before she died.”

“What, she did a villain speech?”

“Something like that.”

“Patterson is the one who made Gilda’s wand. She knows everyone who bought items from him and she’s agreed to help us track all of them down for leniency.”

“Is she going to see jail?”

“One of the serial killers was a police employee, Merry. We’re having enough bad PR with the fey community without jailing the Fairy Godmother of L.A.”

“How are the fey reacting to Gilda ratting them out for the magical items?”

“She says it’s for their own good. The items are a danger to the community and she had no idea that her wand was evil.” Lucy made air quotes as she said evil.

“To hear Gilda, she’s crusading to destroy the work of the evil serial killer personally.”

“I trust Gilda to land on her feet in the public eye,” I said.

“Jeremy and the gang are out in the waiting room. Adam, Julian’s life partner, went all to pieces.”

“He hasn’t really recovered from his brother’s death yet.”

Lucy looked solemn. “I remember that one. You’re having a hell of a year, Merry.”

What could I say to that? I agreed with her.

There was a knock at the door and Doyle, Frost, and Galen came in. “I think that’s my cue to give you some alone time.” She said hi to all of them and left us to it.

Doyle took my good hand in his. “I almost let her kill you.”

“We almost let her kill you,” Rhys said and put a hand on my thigh under the sheet.

Galen just stood there looking down at me.

“You going to say ‘I told you so’?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I saw what she did to Julian, and I saw the picture she was trying to copy. We couldn’t let someone do that to Julian.”

“But if we hadn’t baited them in the first place he wouldn’t have been a target.”

“Or if we’d thought to put guards on our human friends and coworkers it wouldn’t have happened,” Rhys said.

Doyle nodded. “I thought of ‘us’ as only the sidhe and fey in the house with us. I forgot that our family is larger than that. It’s Jeremy and everyone at the agency. It’s Lucy and some of the other police officers. It’s the soldiers whom you saved and whom Goddess seems to have such an interest in. I have to stop thinking like a god who only had a small section of land and start thinking bigger.”

I winced a little at the wording. “All Steve wanted was for Bittersweet to be big enough to be his lover for real.”

“But what did Bittersweet really want?” Rhys asked.

“Death,” Doyle said.

“What?” I asked.

“She saw me, Merry. She saw me on the balcony, I know she did, and she still went for the knife. She still attacked you and gave me her back.”

“Maybe she just didn’t think you could hit a target that small from that distance at that angle with a blade,” Rhys said. “Most of us couldn’t have risked that throw so close to Merry.”

“I do not miss,” he said.

“But maybe the demi-fey didn’t know that, Doyle,” Rhys said.

“But why attack Merry then, why not attack you? She saw you draw your gun, and her lover was there to be saved. Why didn’t she try to save him? Why did she attack Merry and give me her back if she didn’t want to die?”

“I think part of her wanted to die,” I said, “but I think part of her just enjoyed causing pain. Bittersweet told me just before that other part rose and went crazy. She said that part of her wanted to be made
big and then it would cut the babies out of my body and dance in my blood. She said she couldn’t control it.”

“So you think she wanted to die and it was suicide by Doyle,” Galen said.

I shook my head. “No, I think she knew we would kill them both and she wanted to do the most harm, to cause the most pain to all of us that she could. I think she felt that killing me and the babies would hurt you all worse than anything else she could have done.”

We were all quiet, hearing the rush and hush of the hospital around us. “I’m glad they’re dead,” Galen said.

I let go of Doyle’s hand to reach out to him. His eyes were shiny with unshed tears. He leaned over my hand and kissed it. “I’m sorry we fought.”

“Me, too.”

“I’ll never like you taking chances but I promise not to unman you before battle again.”

I smiled and Rhys patted him on the shoulder. Doyle leaned over and laid a kiss on my lips. “We will have at least two of us in the room all night.”

“The killers are dead, Doyle.”

He smiled, and smoothed my hair back from my face. “There are always more killers, my Merry, and when I saw her strike you with the blade twice before I could get my aim certain I thought my heart would stop.”

“I’d already touched her with my hand of flesh.”

“But I did not know that.” He kissed me again and said, “Frost is letting Adam cry on his shoulder about Julian. It seems that the near-death experience has helped Adam see the errors of his way. I think Julian will not have to come to us for cuddling when he gets out of the hospital.”

“How did Frost end up holding Adam’s hand?”

“I saw him coming,” Doyle said with a smile.

“Me, too,” Rhys said.

“Me, three,” Galen said. “I’ll hold Julian’s hand if he needs it but Adam’s treated him badly and I’m mad at him for it.”

As if on cue Frost came through the door. Doyle moved back to give him room to do his own kissing. “Adam wants to thank you for risking everything to save the man he loves.”

“He loves him now,” Galen said.

“Don’t leave me alone with Adam again. I saw at least two of you duck back around the corner.”

“We’ll take first watch,” Doyle said. Frost nodded. And they did. And when their four hours were up Galen and Rhys were there, and then Amatheon and Adair, Usna and Cathbodua, Saraid and Dogmaela, Ivi and Brii, until I woke with light streaming around the curtains and it was Doyle and Frost again. “The doctor says you can go home today,” Doyle said.

“You’re here. I’m already home.” They both kissed me and we were touching when the doctor came in to finally let me get up and go home.

Some nights I sleep between my Darkness and my Killing Frost. Some nights it’s Rhys and Galen, and Mistral has finally agreed to share my bed with Barinthus. Barinthus is helping Mistral get more comfortable with the world outside of Maeve Reed’s house and grounds, and Mistral seems willing to share me with Barinthus though we haven’t crossed that barrier yet. I’m not sure what Mannan Mac Lir would do if sex with me gave him back as much power as it’s given Rhys and Doyle.

Some nights Royal joins us, some nights Adam and Julian come for dinner. Jeremy and his new human girlfriend have come a few times, too. She’s a little uncomfortable with all the touching, so we don’t touch Jeremy on the nights he’s with her. Uther and Saraid are making friends, and if it turns into more, well, that’s up to them.

Brennan and his unit are coming back to the States soon. They want to visit and that seems right, too. I haven’t had any more dreams where I visit the desert, but something tells me the Goddess isn’t done with that, or me. The government flagged the dirt sample at the
lab. They want to know where we got it. They don’t believe the truth. I’m finally showing, and strangers keep trying to touch my tummy like I’m some kind of lucky Buddha statue. I’m told they do that to all pregnant women, but I’ve seen women walk away smiling, and men shake Galen’s hand as if they were friends. Maeve Reed says she’s coming back from Europe soon. We need more money, more jobs for more of us. Even in the midst of such magic and so many blessings the real world calls and I think that’s the message that Goddess was trying to get out. The sidhe in Europe were forced to be little more than just another ethnic group. The sidhe in the United States hid themselves away in their hollow hills and remained apart from the humans. I think we’re supposed to be of the world, not apart from it, but we’re still supposed to be sidhe. We’re still supposed to be magic, and help the people around us see that they’re magic, too; it’s just a different kind of magic.