In the morning the golden goddess of Hollywood was crying at our kitchen table. It might have been baby hormones, but then again, it might not. Maeve liked to pretend that it was Gordon who'd been the brains of the two, but the truth was that when she wanted to, she had a very good mind. A logical mind, a dangerous mind. She was trickier to deal with when she was thinking than when she was seducing. Crying meant either real emotion, or she was about to try to manipulate me. I didn't want her sad, but I sort of hoped she was, because I didn't want all her skills directed at me. She was the goddess Conchenn again, and there had been men and women greater than me over the centuries who hadn't been able to tell her no.
I stood in the doorway, debating a retreat, but I hesitated too long. She raised her head, and showed me tear-streaked, lightning-kissed eyes. Her hair was the yellow-blond of the glamour she usually wore, but her eyes were real. Of course, being Seelie sidhe, her skin was still flawless. She didn't have the decency to get blotchy or hollow-eyed. Though she was dabbing at her nose with a Kleenex, her nose wasn't the least bit red. If I sobbed my nose got red, and eventually my eyes would get red. Maeve could probably have cried for a hundred years and still have looked this perfect.
She dabbed at her eyes. "I see you're dressed to go." Her voice showed the tears that her skin did not. She sounded thick and snuffling, as if she had been crying for hours. Somehow the voice sounding less than perfect made me feel better. Probably shallow of me, or maybe even insecure, but true.
She'd said I was dressed to go, not that I looked good. Which was a roundabout insult among us. If a fey has taken time with her wardrobe, then it was an insult not to compliment her, unless of course you thought she'd failed in her choices. I had taken care with my wardrobe today. I knew that not only would I be seeing my aunt, the queen, in the outfit, but there would be reporters as well. Every time we left Maeve's house there seemed to be reporters.
A black, ankle-length skirt hugged my hips and flared out as it flowed down my legs, in a material not found in nature so it wouldn't wrinkle on the plane. A black leather belt with a matching buckle was cinched tight at my waist. A green silk-and-spandex T-shirt was topped with a black bolero-cut jacket. Antique gold-and-emerald earrings picked up the green. Calf-high black boots showed under my skirt. They had three-inch heels, and the leather was shiny, and gleamed when the light caught it. I'd thought the emerald-green shirt brought out the green of my eyes, and the fit, along with the scoop neck, showed off my breasts. I'd normally have worn a shorter skirt, but it was January in St. Louis, and showing off my legs wasn't worth risking frostbite. But the skirt flowed as I moved, and the black over-skirt gave an impression of floating, catching in the slightest wind, whether of my movement or air.
I'd thought I looked good, until Maeve had worded her sentence oh, so carefully.
"I take it you don't approve of the outfit," I said, and went for the teapot under its cozy. Galen had had to search Los Angeles over to find an honest-to-goddess tea cozy to keep our tea warm. Most of the men preferred a strong black tea for breakfast instead of coffee - Rhys being the exception. He just didn't think that hard-boiled detectives should drink tea, so he drank coffee. His loss. More tea for me.
She looked at me, almost startled. "I forget sometimes that you were raised out among the humans in your formative years. Though, frankly, you can be blunt even by human standards." She dabbed at her eyes again, but there were no more fresh tears, just the tracks drying on her face. "You don't play the game."
I added cream to the sugar I'd put in my tea and stirred as I looked at her. "What game would that be?"
"I'm angry with you, so I imply that you don't look good. You're not supposed to ask me outright what I think of your outfit. You're supposed to simply worry that I think you look bad. It's supposed to eat at you, undermine your confidence."
I sipped my tea. "Why would you want to do that?"
"Because it's your fault what happened last night."
"What's my fault?"
A sound very close to a sob broke from her lips. "I had sex with that... that false sidhe."
I frowned, then finally realized what she meant. "You mean Sage?"
She nodded, and there were fresh tears. In fact she laid her head back on the pale pine of the table and sobbed. Sobbed as if her heart would break.
I set my tea down and went to her. I couldn't stand to hear that broken sound. I'd heard it often enough over the last few weeks since her husband had died, but lately, less. I was glad it was less. Most of the stories talk about what happens to the poor mortals who fall in love with the immortal, and how badly it goes for them, but Maeve was showing the other side. When the immortal truly fell in love with a mortal, eventually it ended badly for the immortal. We died, and they didn't. Simple, horrible, true. Watching Maeve mourn Gordon had made me worry about what I was getting myself into with a sidhe spouse. Eventually, whomever I married would be a widower. No way around it. Not a pretty thought.
I touched her shoulder, and she cried harder. "Did Sage hurt you?" I asked, and thought it was stupid even as I said it.
She raised her head enough to give me a tearful version of her how-dare-you face. She said in a snuffly voice, "He could not hurt a princess of the Seelie Court."
I patted her shoulder. "Of course not, I apologize for saying it. But if he didn't hurt you, then why are you crying about it? The sex couldn't have been that bad."
She sobbed harder, covering her face with her hands. I think she said, "It was wonderful," but it was too muffled for me to be certain.
I still didn't understand why she was so upset, but the pain was real. I hugged her shoulders, laid my cheek against her hair. "If it was wonderful, then why are you crying?"
She said something, but it was lost in all the crying. "I'm sorry, Maeve, I couldn't understand you."
"It shouldn't have been wonderful."
I was glad she couldn't see my face because I probably looked as puzzled as I felt. "It was your first taste of sidhe flesh in a century. Of course it was wonderful."
She lowered her hands and turned to look at me, so that I had to stand back to give her room. "You don't understand," she said. "He isn't sidhe. It's a lie, an illusion, like the apple tree in my house. It was gone this morning."
"The tree?"
She nodded.
I frowned; I couldn't help it. "But I touched it, the leaves, the bark, the blossoms. I smelled the scent. It was real. Illusions can hide things, or make one thing look like another, but illusion can't bring something out of nothing. There has to be something real for the illusion to attach to."
"Normally, yes, but the sidhe once could build an illusion so solid that you could walk across it. Do you think that stories of castles in the air are fairy tales, Merry? Once the sidhe could do that. We could create something out of nothing. Things made of pure magic that were as real as anything in existence."
"So it was a real tree," I said, slowly.
"Real while the magic lasted, yes. If there had been apples on the tree, you could have eaten them and they would have filled your belly. It was the way we had of making our few fey animals feed us again and again. They were magic, and that could be renewed."
"I know there is such a thing as illusion that is real, but my father said that such talents were lost long ago."
She nodded. "They were."
"So that is beginning to return to us, along with other magicks?"
"Yes." She smiled then, a watery version of the smile that had launched a thousand blockbuster movies, years before the term blockbuster meant anything. She took my hand in hers. "And you have brought that back to us, Merry, you and your magic."
I shook my head. "No, not me, the Goddess. I couldn't do any of this without divine help."
"You are too modest," she said.
"Maybe," I said, and I couldn't help myself, "though of course when you have such bad taste in clothes, it's hard not to be humble."
She wouldn't meet my eyes for a moment. "I am sorry, but I wanted to hurt you."
I squeezed her hand then took my hand out of hers. "Why?"
"Because I blamed you for Sage seducing me last night."
"Rhys made it sound like you were doing more of the seducing," I said.
She actually blushed. "Truth. Hard, but the truth. I saw him shining in the dark. He glowed like a golden moon. I..." She turned so I couldn't see her face, put her back to me. "I knew that he was not one of your men. I thought he would not refuse me, and he didn't."
"You seduced him. It was wonderful. And now you're having morning-after regrets?" I said.
"Silly, isn't it."
"The fey don't regret sex, Maeve."
"You've never truly been Seelie Court, Merry. You don't know what the rules are there."
"I know that anyone who isn't pure-blooded is less, no matter her talents or magicks."
She turned in the chair enough to look at me again. "Yes, yes."
"I didn't think you held with that anymore."
"Neither did I."
I tried to reason it out. "You're upset because you enjoyed being with someone who wasn't pure sidhe?"
"I'm upset because Sage is not a prince of either court. He's a demi-fey whom your magic has brought into something more, but he is not sidhe, Merry. He will never be truly sidhe. A hundred years from now, even with his tricolored eyes, he will not be sidhe."
"You see how they are." It was Frost from the doorway. Neither of us had heard him come up, and we both jumped.
He wore a standard white dress shirt, tie, and dress slacks, but the tie was silver and only a shade less bright than the hair that shimmered around his shoulders. His slacks were dark grey, thick material, cut well so the pants managed to be roomy in the front and over the thighs but form-fitting from behind. I'd admired the view earlier. A silver-and-diamond tie bar and matching cufflinks glittered as he moved into the room. His usual loafers had given way to dark grey boots, mostly hidden by the generous cut of pant cuffs.
"How who are?" I asked.
"The Seelie." He said Seelie as if it was a dirty word. The way most Seelie said Unseelie.
Maeve stood up from the table. "How dare you."
"How dare I what?" he asked as he moved toward us.
"How dare you insult the Seelie."
"They would say the same of us," Frost said, and there was a level of anger in him that I wasn't sure of. I hoped this new anger wasn't his answer to the pouting. Trading one problem for another was not what I'd had in mind.
Maeve opened her shapely mouth, then closed it. She couldn't call him a liar, because it was true. She finally settled for, "I don't know what to say," in a much more subdued voice.
Frost turned to me. "She'd never have touched Sage if she was still part of the golden court."
"Oh, I don't know," I said. "I'm proof that more than one Seelie will sully her body with those not of her court."
He shook his head, and his hair caught the light more than the small diamonds he wore. No jewel could truly compete with his hair. "Uar the Cruel wed your grandmother to avoid a curse. Besaba went to your father as part of a treaty. Trust me, Merry, the shining ones do not come willingly to our beds."
"As you should know, Jackie Frost."
He winced but didn't back down. He turned to her and moved forward enough to invade her personal space by American standards. When she didn't move back, he invaded her space even by fey standards. They were almost touching, the entire lengths of their bodies. It managed to be threatening, not erotic. Frost was taller, but only by a few inches. They met each other's eyes, opponents, evenly matched.
She looked at him, but her words were meant for me. "He was not always sidhe. Did you know that?" Her voice was calm, but held malice the way the air can hold the beginnings of a storm.
"Yes," I said, "I know Frost's origins."
She glanced at me then, and surprise showed on her face. "He would not have told you willingly."
I shook my head. "He showed me willingly with his magic. I've seen him dancing over the snow. I know what he is, and what he was, and it changes nothing for me."
Her lovely face went from surprise to astonishment. She stepped away from him and took my arm. "Of course it changes how you feel. You thought you were bedding a sidhe, and you find he is merely the hoarfrost brought to life."
I looked down at her hand, and my face must have been as unfriendly as I was beginning to feel, because she dropped away from me.
"You mean it. You truly mean it. It makes no difference to you."
I shook my head. "None."
She looked puzzled then. "I don't understand that."
"You came back into your powers as Conchenn just last night. You slept with your first sidhe in a century. You wake up this morning, and you don't sound like Maeve Reed. You sound like just another Seelie noble. I've never understood why the Seelie embraced such a Victorian view of sex. It's so un-fey-like."
"You don't understand, Merry, how could you? Sleeping with a human would be forgiven, but not fucking a demi-fey. My need outrode my common sense last night. I was power-drunk. This morning, I'm sober."
"But you're exiled from the Seelie Court, Maeve, and the Unseelie Court doesn't care about origins, only about results. It's not where you come from, but what you can do for us."
She shook her head. "I can't shield my eyes. I can't make my glamour cover them this morning, and I don't know why. I've worn this glamour for decades. It feels almost more real than my true form, but I haven't been able to cover my eyes again. You gave me power, Merry, but you stripped me of things, too."
"So it's my fault that you fucked Sage?"
"Maybe," she said, but even in that one word there was doubt. She didn't really believe it.
"It doesn't really matter what the Seelie Court thinks of your actions, Maeve. If you ever go back there, the King of Light and Illusion will see you dead. You're welcome to join the Unseelie Court and come with us. You can be in the heart of faerie tonight." I watched her while I said it, and saw the hunger in her face before she hid it.
She gave me her publicity smile. "I am Seelie sidhe, Merry, not Unseelie."
"I was once a member of the golden court," Frost said.
"You were never a member of the court, Jackie Frost. Never!"
He gave her a cold smile. "Allow me to rephrase. I was once barely tolerated at the court of beauty and illusion. Tolerated because as others faded in power, I grew. Not through some other sidhe's powers, but through the minds of the humans. They remembered me when they'd forgotten all of you beautiful, shining deities. Little Jakual Frosti, Jackie Frost, Jack Frost." He stepped in close to her again, and this time she shrank back from him, just a little. "But who still speaks of Conchenn? Where are your poems, your songs? Why did they remember me, and not you?"
Her voice was small. "I don't know."
"I don't know, either, but they did." He leaned in even closer, close enough almost, to kiss. "Me they remembered, when so many they forgot. 'Tis a mystery."
He began to glow then as if the moon were trapped inside his body, and the light spilled out of his eyes, making them nearly as silver as his hair. The wind of his power filled the air around his body with a glowing halo of his own hair. He stood before her like some metallic vision, forged of liquid silver.
She couldn't stand so close to his power and not respond. She'd been without the touch of sidhe for too long for that. The need would not be quenched in one night's embrace, a few washes of power. Such hunger goes deeper than that.
His power brought hers in a golden rush, drained her hair to white-blond, and filled the air around her with the swaying of it. They were so close that their powers intermingled, yellow and silver merged in a line between them. This was not godhead, this was merely the power of the sidhe.
I watched them, and understood why my human ancestors had thought they were gods. Now they'd probably be mistaken for angels, or big men from Mars. I watched them glow at each other, and even through the light I could see the raw need on Maeve's face. Frost didn't look hungry, he looked satisfied.
He leaned in and pressed his shining lips to hers. The physicality of the kiss was chaste, but his power thrust into her like a spear of silver light. I saw that long shaft of power nearly bisect her golden-yellow light. For an instant her light darkened at its core, a flash of orange and red, like true flame. Then he drew back, stepped back until she glowed alone. "You would not turn me from your body, not even now with the memory of Sage's flesh like a raw wound in your mind."
His power folded away, leaving him pale, and still beautiful, but not a shining thing.
Maeve's power faded a little at a time as she spoke. "I could have taken lesser fey to my bed over the last hundred years. Other exiles like me. But I did not do it, because I hoped that someday the court would see Taranis's treachery, and when he was dead, I would be welcome back. They would forgive my human lovers, for the Seelie always did love human flesh in the dark. But you do not sully yourself with the lesser fey. You do not do that, and ever regain prominence in the high court of faerie."
"There is more than one high court of faerie," Frost said.
She shook her head. "No, there isn't. Not for me."
He shook his head. "This attitude will grow tiresome before we finish our visit to the Seelie."
"Frost, you just don't remember what they're like. You have not begun to see tiresome."
He sighed. "I remember all too well, Maeve." He looked sad for a moment. "I do not wish to return there and watch them treat us as lesser beings."
"Then stay here, with me." She turned to me. "Don't go back, Merry. Taranis wants you to visit him for a reason. He does nothing without a reason, and it will not be a reason that you will like."
"I know," I said.
She balled her hands into fists. "Then why go?"
"Because she will be queen of the Unseelie Court, and she cannot begin her reign by showing fear to Taranis," Doyle said from the doorway.
"But you are afraid of Taranis," Maeve said. "We all are."
Doyle shrugged. He was wearing black jeans tucked into knee-high black boots, a black T-shirt, black leather jacket. Even his belt buckle was black. The only color showing was the silver earrings that graced the pointed curve of his ears. There was even a diamond stud in one earlobe. "Afraid or not, we must show a brave face."
"Is it worth dying for? Is it worth getting Merry killed?" She pointed at me, rather dramatically, but she was an actress. Besides, the sidhe could be a dramatic lot, even without training.
"If he kills Merry, Queen Andais will kill him."
"He released the Nameless to try to kill me so that I wouldn't reveal his secret. Do you really think he'd hesitate at full-out war between the courts?"
"I didn't say war, Maeve."
"You said the queen would kill Taranis; that means war."
Doyle shook his head. "For slaying the heir to her throne, I think Andais would do one of two things. Either challenge him to a personal duel, which Taranis will not want; or have him assassinated, discreetly."
"You mean you would kill Taranis," Maeve said.
"I am no longer the Queen's Darkness." He came to stand next to me. "I have heard that she has a new captain of her guard now."
"Who?" Frost asked.
"Mistral," Doyle said.
"The Bringer of Storms. But he has been long out of favor."
Doyle nodded. "Nonetheless, that is her new champion."
"He is no assassin, and he is never discreet. He comes like his namesake with much wind and noise." Frost was openly disdainful.
"But Whisper is quiet enough to make up for it," Doyle said.
Frost looked startled. Maeve was frowning. "I don't know these names."
"They have all but faded into their names," Doyle said. "What you once knew them by is no more."
"Whisper," Frost said. "I thought he'd gone mad."
"I'd heard that rumor, too."
I remembered Mistral. He was everything the queen abhorred, loud, bragging, quick to anger, unforgiving. He was almost the epitome of a bully, but he was too powerful to be refused entrance to the dark court once he'd gotten himself kicked out of the golden. Queen Andais made sure we accepted all who were powerful, but she didn't have to like them, or use them much. She could make sure they were always seated far away from her and given duties that kept them from her sight.
Mistral had been so out of favor during my lifetime that I barely remembered his face, and could not truly recall ever having spoken with him. My father had thought him a fool.
"I don't remember anyone among the guard called Whisper," I said.
"He displeased the queen once, long ago," Doyle said, "and she had him punished. He was given to Ezekiel in the Hallway of Mortality for" - he frowned, looked at Frost - "for seven years, wasn't it?"
Frost nodded. "I believe so."
I swallowed before I could speak. "He was given over to be tortured for seven years." My voice was breathy with the horror of it. I'd been in the Hallway of Mortality. I knew exactly how good at his craft Ezekiel was, and I could not imagine seven years of such attention.
They were both nodding.
Even Maeve looked pale. The Seelie Court did not condone torture, at least not the overt kind that Ezekiel dished out. They had more subtle ways of doing it, magical ways, that were less messy, less personal. You could cause someone excruciating pain without getting your hands dirty. Queen Andais liked calling a spade a spade. Torture was supposed to be messy, or what good was it?
"I have heard tales of your Hallway of Hell."
"See, Taranis even lets his court adopt the words of a faith that tormented and tortured our followers," Frost said. "He has allowed his court to become an ape of the humans."
"If your century begins with seventeen, or earlier," I said.
Frost shrugged, as if a few hundred years made no difference.
"Call it what you will, but that your queen would mete out such punishment is proof that I do not want to be a part of your court."
"What did he do to earn seven years with Ezekiel?" I asked.
"I don't think anyone knows but Whisper and the queen," Frost said.
I looked at Doyle. "You've been her left-hand man for a millennium, or more. You'd never left her side until she sent you here to Los Angeles to fetch. You know, don't you?"
He let out a small breath. "If she wanted others to know, Merry, she would have told them. I will not endanger anyone by sharing that particular bit of truth."
I let it go. I didn't want Andais to have an excuse to send any of us to the Hallway of Mortality. I could live the rest of my days without knowing what Whisper had done to merit seven years, as long as I never had to endure another minute with Ezekiel's voice in my face.
Frost turned to Maeve. "You've refused to go to the Unseelie Court with us, even though you know that Taranis may try to kill you while we're gone."
"You will be turning me over to new bodyguards at the airport."
"The same human bodyguards who nearly got themselves killed trying to save you from the Nameless. The same bodyguards who, if we hadn't come along, would have died to a man, and you with them."
"We will take another plane to another country, far from the king and his powers."
"She will probably be safer than we will, Frost. For we will beard him in his den, the very heart of his power."
"But she would be safer still at the Unseelie Court, under the queen's protection," Frost said.
"We have had this discussion," Doyle said. "It is done."
Frost looked at her. "It isn't that you loathe the Unseelie Court, or even that you're afraid of them, of us. It's that you're afraid that once you enter the darkling throng and are surrounded by faerie once more, you will never leave."
"She could make me a prisoner, for my own protection, and you would not be able to break me free," Maeve said.
"You wouldn't be a prisoner, Conchenn, you'd simply embrace the dark, because the light won't have you. Many a Seelie lord and lady has found that the dark is not half so ugly as they thought, or half so terrible as they were taught." He took a step toward her, and she took a step back.
"They embraced the dark because they had no choice," she said in a voice that was almost choked. "It was the darkness or be exiled from faerie forever."
"Exactly," Frost said. "There are no prisoners among us. Whisper could have fled the Unseelie Court. The queen would not have pursued him, for she knows that for a sidhe to leave the Unseelie Court is to have no place to go. No home in faerie. We take the queen's laws, not because we have no choice, but because even seven years of torment is better than being cast out, as you were, by your king."
I saw tears shine in her eyes as she rushed past us all and out the far door.
"Did you have to do that?" Doyle said.
Frost nodded. "Yes, I think I did. She's endangering herself by refusing to go to the Unseelie Court. It's foolish."
"Not half so foolish as entering the Seelie Court of our own free will," Doyle said.
The two men looked at each other, and something passed between them. Frost's shoulders slumped just a little before he straightened and said, "I do not like either plan."
"You've made that clear," Doyle said.
Frost looked at me. "I will go with Merry, but I will not like it." He smiled, but it was wistful, so full of old sorrow that it made my chest tight. "And I fear, my sweet, sweet, princess, neither will you."
I would have argued with him if I could, but since I agreed with him, it seemed silly. "We visit the Unseelie Court first, Frost, and the goblin court after that, and only then the Seelie Court."
He shook his head, and the smile became bitter. "I hope that the sights we see at the goblin court are the worst we will have, but I fear that no horror will compare to the bright beauty that awaits us at our last stop."
Sadly, no one argued with him.