A man’s voice called out. “Stop it, Cleo, stop wailing outside the door. I left a message for Josh, he’ll take care of you.”
The cat meowed again and scratched at the door.
“Stop it!” he called out.
I thought I knew the voice. “Brennan,” I said, softly.
“Who’s there!” His voice sounded strident, almost panicked.
“Brennan, it’s Meredith.”
“Meredith, you can’t be here. I am crazy.”
The cat pawed at the door again. I used my free hand to touch the doorknob and open it. The cat slid inside as soon as there was an opening big enough for her slender body. We had to open the door wider for Sholto and me to step through.
The cat was already rubbing back and forth on his boots when he finally saw us. The dark of his desert tan had lightened, but his large brown eyes and short dark hair were the same. The hair was a little longer, but I knew that face now. One hand was around his necklace, and the other was holding a gun. It looked like a Glock, but I wasn’t an expert on guns. I recognized ones I’d shot, or the people around me used frequently.
He blinked up at us, confused, as if he weren’t sure what he was seeing. “Meredith, you don’t look … is there someone with you? Are you holding someone’s hand?”
“Why can’t he see me?” Sholto asked, softly.
I didn’t know, but out loud I said, “Yes, I have Sholto with me.”
“Why can’t I see him clearly?”
“What do you see?” I asked.
“It’s like heat in the desert, the air wavering until you start thinking you see things that aren’t there in the pattern of it.”
I tugged on our bound hands and drew Sholto a step farther into the room. From the look on Brennan’s face, Sholto must have simply appeared—one moment a wavering in the air, the next fully formed, solid, and real.
“What the hell!” Brennan exclaimed. He startled enough that the cat backed away from him, hissing, as if his foot had hit her accidentally.
“I’m sorry, Cleo, you okay?” He offered her the hand that had been tight around the charm around his neck, though perhaps charm wasn’t the right word. It was a long, dark nail, with a leather cord bound around the top of it so that it hung point down just at that small depression at the base of the neck. It still looked discolored as if my blood might still have been on it. It had been part of the shrapnel used in a bomb. Every nail that had bled me had fallen out as I healed people that night, and each soldier who had been healed and gained a nail had kept it as a sort of talisman. I think it had started as superstition for having survived, but it had become more. It had become their cross, their holy item that gave them a direct link to Deity. But somehow, I was that deity. Their prayers that involved that bit of metal went to me, if the need was dire enough, but this was no desert battlefield.
I looked at the gun still in his hand as he tried to persuade the cat to come closer to him. I remembered that he’d said someone else would look after the cat, and I suddenly knew that there were battles being fought in this room.
“You called me, Brennan,” I said.
He stopped trying to coax the cat and shook his head. “I didn’t call you with blood, metal, and magic this time, Meredith. I got no wounds.” He held his hand up as if to show it healed and whole.
“Not every wound leaves blood behind,” Sholto said.
Brennan glanced at him. “I remember you from when I visited Meredith in Los Angeles, but I don’t remember you with a crown, either of you.” He started to motion with his gun, stopped himself in midmotion, and used his free hand. “What’s with all this?”
“What were you thinking just a few minutes ago?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Brennan, you wrapped your hand around the symbol at your neck and you prayed. You prayed for something important enough to call me to your side and bring King Sholto with me. What was it?”
He shook his head again. “No.”
“Brennan, you prayed to the Goddess and I’m here; tell me.”
He glanced at us both again. “Why are your hands bound together?”
“It’s how faerie and the Goddess handfasted us,” I said.
“What does that mean, handfasted?”
“It means we are married, but with no official legalities.”
“The Goddess herself has wed us,” Sholto said. “It is the way all marriages were once between our kings and queens.”
I smiled at him and went up on tiptoe to offer him a kiss.
“Oh God,” Brennan said, and the sound was almost a sob.
I turned back to him. “What, what is it? What do you need so badly that you were about to shoot yourself?”
He looked at the gun in his hand as if he’d almost forgotten it. “It sounds too pathetic.”
“You brought us all the way from L. A.—the least you could do is tell us why,” I said.
He nodded as if that made sense to him. “Okay, okay, that’s fair.” He wrapped both hands around the gun, not like he was going to use it, but more like he was holding on to it as a sort of comfort object. He talked without looking at us.
“Jen is dating someone and it’s serious. He’s got money, a nice house, great career, hell, even his ex-wife says good things about him. They had a little girl and they seem to share the custody without getting all ugly the way most people do. Jen deserves someone that good. Someone who can give her all the things I can’t. Someone who isn’t crazy. Someone who doesn’t wake up in a cold sweat reaching for his gun.”