THE SKY BOILED WITH STORM CLOUDS OVER THE SMALL WOODS that bordered the parking lot. The wild hunt wasn't a tentacled nightmare anymore. It looked like a storm, if storms could hover against the tops of trees and drape like black silk dripping between the trunks.
Lightning flashed from the ground into the clouds - Mistral was still alive and fighting back. Who else? Green flame flickered through the trees, and something hard and tight in my chest eased - that flame was Doyle's hand of power. He was alive as well. In that moment nothing else really mattered to me. Not crown, not kingdom, not faerie itself; nothing mattered except that Doyle was alive and not so hurt he could not fight.
Ash and Holly put on a burst of speed so that they were ahead of Jonty and me as we neared the open area closest the trees. There wasn't enough cover to hide anything in the open field, until from thin shadows, goblins appeared. They didn't materialize, but emerged like a sniper hidden in his gillie suit in the field - except that the only camouflage the goblins had was their own skin and clothes.
Ash had called Kurag, Goblin King, as we ran to this place. To do so, he had bared his sword and put a hand on my shoulder to come away with blood to smear upon the blade. Blood and blade: old magic that worked long before cell phones were a dream in a human's mind. Personally I wouldn't have wanted to run on the icy road with a bared blade. But Ash wasn't human, and he made it all look easy.
Ash and his brother ran ahead of Jonty - whoever got to the rendezvous first would lead the goblins without argument. But I didn't care - as long as we saved my men, I didn't care who led. I would have followed anyone in that moment to save them.
One of the brothers fell to talking with the waiting force. It wasn't until the other brother got close enough for his eyes to flash crimson that I knew it was Holly come back to Jonty and me. Holly was struggling to breathe normally. Outrunning someone whose legs were almost as tall as he was took more effort than was pretty, even for a warrior as formidable as he. His voice held only a hint of the breathlessness that made his shoulders and chest rise and fall so rapidly. "The archers will be ready in moments. We need the princess."
"I am not much of an archer," I said, still cradled in the heat of Jonty's body, and the blood. The blood that flowed from his cap down to my body was warm. Warm as if it spilled from a freshly opened wound.
Holly gave me a look that appeared irritated even in the forgiving glow of moonlight. "You carry the hand of blood," he said. He let that anger that was always just below the surface for him fall into his voice.
I nearly asked what that had to do with archers. But the moment before I said it, I did know. "Oh," I said.
"Unless Kitto exaggerated what you did in Los Angeles to the Nameless," Holly added.
I shook my head, the warm blood creeping down my neck between my skin and the borrowed trench coat. The blood should have been disturbing, but it wasn't - it felt like a warm blanket on a cold night: comforting. "No, Kitto didn't exaggerate," I said. I didn't like that Kitto had borne tales to the goblins, but forced myself to accept that he was half theirs and still had to answer to their king. He'd probably had little choice in what he told them.
"The full hand of blood," Holly said, and his voice wasn't so much angry as skeptical. "Hard to believe it lies in such a fragile creature."
"Look at my cap, if you doubt her power," Jonty rumbled.
Holly gazed upward, but his eyes didn't stay on the cap long. His gaze slid down to me, and something in that look was both sexual and predatory. I could feel the blood plastering the back of my hair, my shoulders, arms; I must have looked like an accident victim. Most men would have found it frightening, but Holly looked at me as if I'd covered myself with perfume and lingerie. One man's nightmare, another's fantasy.
He reached a hand up, tentatively, as if he thought either Jonty or I would protest. When we didn't, he touched my shoulder. I think he meant to merely get a touch of blood on his fingers, but the moment his fingers brushed me, a look of wonder came over his face. He leaned in toward me, the wonder being eaten by something that was part desire, and part violence. "What have you been doing, Princess, to feel like this?"
"I don't know what you're feeling, so I don't know how to answer." My voice was small. Of all the men I'd agreed to have sex with, Holly and his brother were the ones who gave me the most pause.
Jonty's arms tightened around me, almost possessively. That was both good and bad. If all of Jonty was in proportion, then I could not satisfy him and live to tell the tale. But it was hard to tell with the Red Cap; his possessiveness might have had nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the blood magic.
Holly drew his hand from my shoulder. He began to lick the blood from his hand like a cat that has dipped its paw in your glass of milk. His eyes fluttered closed as he licked. "She calls your blood," he said, in a low voice better suited for a bedroom than a battlefield.
"Yes," Jonty said, and that one word from him had the same overly intimate tone.
I was missing something, but did not want to admit that I didn't know what was happening, or why they were so fascinated with the fact that touching me made the Red Cap bleed more. At a loss, I changed the subject. "If you want me to call blood from our enemies, we need to get closer to the archers." I fought to keep my voice matter-of-fact, as if I knew exactly what was happening and either didn't care or took it completely in stride.
"And who will hold you while you call blood, so those dainty feet do not touch the cold ground?" Holly said.
"I will stand on my own."
"I will hold you," Jonty said.
"You are a goblin, Jonty. Goblins fight among themselves as sport, which means it is likely there is at least a nick somewhere on your body. If you have a wound, even a small one, when I call blood, I will bleed you, too."
"I am no Red Cap to brawl for the sake of brawling. I save my flesh for other things," Holly said. He licked the last of the blood from his hand in a long smooth movement that should have been sensual, but managed to be mostly just unnerving.
"I will stand on my own," I repeated.
"Your brother waves to get our attention," Jonty said then to Holly, and moved forward.
Holly hesitated, as if he would block our way, but then moved aside, speaking as Jonty passed him. "I will see you survive this night, Princess, for I mean to have you."
"I remember our bargain, Holly," I called back.
The smaller goblin hurried to keep up with Jonty's longer strides. It was like a child running after an adult, though Holly wouldn't have thanked me for the comparison. "I hear reluctance in your voice, Princess, and the sex will be all the sweeter for it."
"Do not torment her on the edge of battle, Holly," Jonty said.
Holly didn't argue; he just abandoned the topic for the time being. "The archers will cut them for you, but you have to weaken them enough to bring them down," he said to me.
"I know what you want me to do."
"You don't sound certain."
I didn't voice my doubts, but this was a wild hunt. A true wild hunt, which meant it was the essence of faerie. The creatures could bleed, but how do you kill something that is formed of pure magic? This was ancient magic, chaos magic, primeval and horrible. How do you kill such things? Even if I bled them enough to bring them to earth, could they be truly slain by blade and ax? I had never heard of anyone fighting and winning against such a hunt.
Of course, I had never heard that the spectral hunts could bleed if cut. Sholto had called this one into being, using magic that he and I had raised as a couple. Was it my mortal blood that had made the hunt vulnerable to bleeding? Was my mortality truly contagious, as some of my enemies claimed?
Following this idea to its logical extension meant that if I sat on the throne of our court, it would condemn all of the sidhe to age and die. But at this moment if my mortal flesh had made this hunt mortal in turn, I was grateful for it. It meant they could bleed and die, and I needed them to die. We needed to win this battle. I would not spread my mortality through all of faerie, but to have shared it with these creatures - well, that would be a blessing.
