He walked toward me looking as my father would if he had never known pain, never been wounded, never died, but the smile was wrong. It was his face, but it wasn't my father's smile.
I backed away, so that his outstretched hand wouldn't touch me. "Who are you?"
He held out his hand. "Come to me, Meredith, but take my hand, and we can step out of this dream."
"And where will we appear once the dream is finished?" I asked.
"Someplace wonderful."
I shook my head. "Liar."
"We cannot lie outright, Meredith; you know that."
"Drop this guise and show me your true face."
"Take my hand."
"Drop this disguise and perhaps I will."
He stepped closer to me, hand still held out toward me. "Who do you want me to be?" he asked.
"Show yourself as you truly are, and stop tormenting me with my dead father's face."
"I thought the sight of Essus would comfort you," he said, and frowned as if he didn't understand, and maybe he didn't.
"You were wrong; show me your face." My voice was strident, not with anger, but fear.
"If you let me hold you now, it will be as if Essus were here to embrace you one last time. I can give you that, Meredith; my powers have returned. The Goddess has blessed us both again."
"The Goddess gives Her power where She will. I do not question it, but one man's blessing is another's curse; drop this illusion and show me ..." I stopped, because the moment I said illusion, I knew; Goddess and Consort help me, but I knew.
One moment I was staring up into the face of my dead father, and next it was Taranis, the King of Light and Illusion. He was all red and gold of hair, his eyes like green petals of some exotic flower, tall and commanding, and truly one of the most handsome men to ever grace the high courts of faerie.
"Come, Meredith, embrace me as one of the fathers of your children."
I screamed.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
HE GRABBED MY wrist and started to pull me to him, but I thought, I need something to hold on to, and my other hand found smooth wood to grip, a carved banister leading up to nowhere, but it was a handhold, and I made my choice that I'd let him break my arm before I let go.
"Meredith, I'd never hurt you."
"You raped me!"
"Lies, Meredith, all lies. I saved you from the Unseelie monsters. You have a babe that grows horns, and another spotted like a dog, but our daughter is perfect. They are twisted of body, and it is a miracle you have survived."
His eyes began to glow as if every green petaled layer of his iris were turning to green flame, and I was falling into that flame. I wanted to touch his hair, colored like all the brilliance of a fiery sunset. My hand loosened on the banister behind me, and then a single rose petal fell and landed on the mound of my breast. I was not a victim.
He held my wrist; so be it. I opened my hand and laid my palm against his skin and called one of my hands of power. His skin began to writhe as if it were turning liquid where I touched him.
He yelled and let me go. "What is this?"
"The hand of flesh is my hand of power, as my father carried it before me."
Taranis's arm began to roll up on itself, as the bones and muscle began to spill out to the surface, turning inside out, and spreading up his arm.
"Stop this!" he yelled, but even as I watched, the flowing skin had stopped just short of his shoulder. If he'd laid the arm against other bare skin it would have spread, but he had jerked away quickly enough that it hadn't turned his entire body inside out. The hand of flesh could do that, and had. It had been one of the worst things I'd ever seen, but I was half sorry it hadn't done just that to Taranis.
"This is dream; you don't have this power outside of dream." He was staring at his arm, and the horror on his face as he looked up at me made part of me ... happy.
"You knocked me unconscious and nearly killed me before you mounted me last time. I was too hurt to fight back."
"This is not real!" He yelled it at me.
"I don't know, uncle dear; perhaps when you wake up your arm will be healed, or perhaps it will be a reminder to you to stay away from me, my babies, and everyone I hold dear, because if you ever touch me by force again, in dream or reality, I will destroy you, Taranis."
"It isn't real," he said, but his voice was uncertain.
"For your sake, I hope not," I said. "Honestly, for my own sake, I hope it is."
"I saved you, Meredith; why do you hate me?"
I wished for a sword, and one was in my hand. The hilt was cool and perfect. You had to look close to see the carved tiny bodies melting into each other as the only warning for what might happen if you touched the sword. It was Aben-dul, once my father's centuries before I was born, and it fit my hand as it had the first time it appeared to me in reality. It had never just appeared in my hand before, but this was a dream--anything was possible.
"Where did that come from?" And now he was afraid, and that made me fiercely happy.
"You can stop me from leaving this dream, but you can't stop me from creating what I need inside it."
"You shouldn't be able to do that," he said.
"You said it yourself, uncle: I have traveled through dream to soldiers who held relics of my blood and pain. The Goddess comes to me in my dreams. I hold my father's hand of power and a sword of Unseelie grace, but I am Seelie as well as Unseelie. I hold the wonders and nightmares of both courts inside me, uncle dearest."
"Stop calling me that; I am the father of your baby."
I wrapped both hands around the sword and only the fact that I carried the hand of flesh kept me safe from the magic of the blade, and got into the stance that I'd learned so long ago. I hadn't kept up my sword practice, because I'd realized as a teenager I was never going to choose a blade as my weapon in a duel, and I was never going to challenge anyone to a duel, and so long as they challenged me I chose the weapons, but I knew how to hold a sword. I knew enough to bleed him unless he killed me first, but I'd blasted the arm that held his hand of light; if I was lucky, I'd crippled his magic. If I'd been certain the sword would work here as it did in the real world, I could have used my hand of flesh without touching him, but I wasn't sure enough to risk using it as anything but a sword.
"I was pregnant when you raped me, you psychotic bastard! Now break us both free of this dream, or I swear by the Summerlands, and the Darkness that Swallows the World, I will do all in my power to kill you, uncle dearest."
"Do not call me that, Meredith; you are my queen and will be my wife."
I started forward, doing a feint with the sword. He jerked back, his wounded arm useless at his side. "Come, uncle, let us embrace and I will finish what I began with your arm."
He vanished from the dream, and a second later I woke in bed with Doyle and Frost looking down at me. Doyle was pinning my arms down across my body, because the sword Aben-dul was still in my hands.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
MERRY, MERRY, DO you know who we are?"
"Doyle, Frost," I said, my pulse so hard in my throat that it choked my voice down to a whisper.
Frost smoothed my hair back from my face and asked. "Do you know where you are?"
"We are in Los Angeles, in Maeve's house, in our bedroom."
Frost smiled down at me. "Do you remember that we love you?"
I smiled up at him. "Yes, that I always remember." Just gazing up into his face and answering that question helped slow my frantic heartbeat and chase away the last clinging terror of the nightmare.
Doyle's deeper voice turned me to look at him. "If you remember that, then relax your arms, so that I know you will not strike out with the sword you hold in your hands."
I realized that my arms were tense underneath his, as if I meant to use Aben-dul once I was free of the strength that held me down. I fought to relax my arms, but it was as if the thought of not being ready to strike when the need arose frightened me,
as if I expected Taranis to appear in the room once I was unarmed. There was a chance that even accidentally touching someone who did not carry the hand of flesh would turn them inside out. I didn't want to hurt my lovers, but ... The fear wasn't rational.
Normally, I would have said that with Doyle and Frost beside me I was utterly safe, but Taranis had nearly killed Doyle with his hand of power. If he still had a hand of power. If the damage I had caused in dream had truly happened to him in reality, then he might have lost his greatest weapon, because often when our hands were damaged, the hands of power went with the injury. Or sometimes the magic became so wild that it wasn't safe to use, like a fire that you meant to use to cook your dinner, but that got out of hand and burned down the house instead.
"Some thought has gone through your eyes, our Merry," Doyle said.
"I had a dream," I said.
"It was not a Goddess-sent dream," Frost said, "because when you cried out in your sleep we were both able to wake and watch over you."
"And there are no flower petals raining down from nowhere," Doyle said.
"But though we awoke," Frost said, "we could not rouse you, as if it had been a dream from the Goddess."
"If it was not the Goddess, then what held you so tight to this dream?" Doyle asked.
"My uncle entered my dream and trapped me there."
"You mean Taranis?" Doyle said, and I saw the fear on his face now. Good to know I wasn't the only one.
"Yes."
They both leaned over me, too close, and even though I loved them both it was as if I couldn't get enough air. I started to try to sit up, but Doyle still had my arms pinned with the sword, and suddenly I was panicked. It took everything I had not to struggle and lash out at the two men I loved most in the world, because they were too close and were holding me down, and my rapist had been in my dreams.
"I need room." I managed to choke the words out.
"We are in our room," Doyle said.
"Move away from me, please," I said.
They exchanged a look over me, but Frost moved back as I'd asked. Doyle did not. "You seem not yourself, Merry. We have seen spells placed inside others we loved that turned them against us. I would not risk your using this sword upon anyone you love."
"I need to be armed with his touch still fresh upon me, Doyle," I said, fighting not to strain against the ease with which he held my arms and the sword down, harmless.
Frost slid off the bed and came back with one of his own blades. Normally I would have been more distracted by the nude beauty of him in the silver cloud of his hair, but somehow men and the things that went with them were all confused with images of a very different man, the one in my dreams, but not the man of my dreams. One of the men of my dreams sat on the bed and offered me his blade, hilt first. It would have been a knife to him, but to me it was as big as a short sword. Sometimes I felt very much the hobbit to their elves. That ordinary-world thought helped me push back the panic.
"An exchange, our Merry," Frost said gently.
"It is a fine blade, but not a fair exchange for this one," I said.
"No one but you in this room can touch that blade and keep sanity and life, so let it go and take up Frost's knife, and then tell us what happened in the dream."
I breathed deeply, forcing myself to take even breaths, and then I let it out slow, counting as I did so. Control your breathing and you control nearly everything else, but first gain control of yourself; always begin there. Those had been my father's words to me. That helped calm me, too.
I let go of Aben-dul, and it lay heavy across my legs, but my hands were empty enough to wrap around the hilt that Frost was offering. Doyle moved back then, sliding off the bed; after a moment Frost echoed him. I had room to sit up, and some weight that had been trying to make me panic and lash out at them eased. It wasn't a spell put on me by Taranis, but it was his damage. He'd raped me, and there were moments when even the most beloved of my partners had to give me space, and time to work through the issues of that attack. I was happy I didn't remember most of it, didn't remember the sex, only waking afterward with the concussion that almost killed me and my unborn children.
"I wish we did not have to ask, Merry, but what happened in the dream?" Doyle said.
I took in another deep breath and counted it out slowly, then nodded. I told them about the dream, everything that had happened in it.
"Do you believe that the injury to his arm will follow him out of dream?" Doyle asked.
"I do not know."
"That is not possible," Frost whispered.
"Once the king could use dream to seduce and bed a woman, and the children that came from those dreams were real enough," Doyle said.
"Are you saying he was able to get women pregnant from just visiting them in their dreams?" I asked.
They both nodded.
I must have paled, because they moved toward the bed, then hesitated and looked at each other, then back at me. "We would comfort you if you would allow it, Merry, but we do not wish to rush this moment," Doyle said.
I nodded, but I didn't really want to be touched right that second. I gripped the hilt in my hands tighter, so that the leather-wrapped metal dug into my hands a little, helped remind me that I was awake and not trapped.
"I will take comfort in a little while, but right now just explain to me how he could do that in just a dream."
"Once he was the Lord of Dreams, but that was centuries before we came to the Western Lands. I do not believe that he can make dreams as real as he once could," Doyle said.
"Do not tell her that, for we do not know. He should not have been able to use his hand of light through the mirror when he nearly killed you, and that was months ago. The Goddess returns and wild magic follows in Her wake," Frost said.
Doyle nodded. "And the magic is like most of our powers, like nature itself; the storm does not mean to tear down your house, but it still might."
"Which means that we have no way of knowing who will have gained powers from the return of the Goddess," I said.
"Sadly, no," Doyle said. He gave me a very solemn look.
"What?" I asked.
"If you damaged his arm in this reality, then he may seek revenge outside of dream."
Frost said, "Or he will be so terrified of Merry that he will not come near her."
"It could go either way, true," Doyle said.
"I didn't know he had ever been able to enter dreams," I said.
"Once upon a time," Doyle said.
"The queen could enter nightmares, or speak to us through them, as well," Frost said.
"So he was the Lord of Dreams, and she was what, the Lady of Dreams?"
They both shook their heads, and I was feeling better, because I was a bit distracted by them both standing there nude. Sadly, I still had weeks to go before we could have sex. It had been too long.
"Merry, did you hear what we said?" Doyle asked.
I blinked and had to think; had I heard anything that those lovely mouths had been saying in the last few minutes? I finally said, "No, I'm sorry, but your being nude distracted me."
They smiled at each other, and then at me. I would have said, Don't be conceited, but it was just truth that the two of them standing there nude, bodies not even ready for such things, had made me think of sex, and longing. I still ached too badly to do anything about it, even if the doctors hadn't warned against it, but that my body was interested again was nice. After being hugely pregnant for so long, and so ill with the triplets, it was nice to feel something close to normal and think that maybe my body could get back to doing something besides having babies.
"You're going to have to repeat everything you just said. I will endeavor not to be distracted, but perhaps if you sat down and put the sheet across your laps, that might help my powers of concentration."
Their smiles turned to mischievous grins, but they did as I suggested and sat down on the sides of the bed that had become theirs, Frost to my left and Doyle to my rig
ht. Once they had piled the sheet in place, Doyle said, "She was the Queen of Nightmares, for she was never merely a lady of the nobility, Merry, but always destined to be more."
"But the king was once just a lord?" I asked.
They both nodded, Frost's hair spilling forward around his bare shoulders. His ponytail had come undone in the night, as it often did. Even braiding didn't always hold it, as if the hair itself didn't like to be bound.
"Who was the royal family of the Seelie Court, then?" I asked. It had never occurred to me that Taranis didn't descend from a "royal" line like Andais did, but then he'd been king for over a thousand years. I wasn't thirty-five yet; it was a little before my time.
"They were killed in the last great war between the two main courts," Doyle said.
I stared up at him. "Then why isn't our queen the high queen of everything in faerie?"
"Because the remaining Seelie nobles preferred death to the Golden Court being swallowed into the Court of Nightmares, which was one of the Unseelie names back then."
"Why didn't my aunt just slaughter them until the survivors surrendered? It is one thing to say you would rather die, but if you see enough people die before you, most relent, or so I'm told," I said.
"Not always," Doyle continued, "but though we had won the war, our side was sore hurt, and if we had continued the fighting it might have meant the destruction of all the sidhe."
"So a Pyrrhic victory," I said.
"If the fighting had continued, yes."
"I did not know things were so dire," Frost said.
"What do you mean, you didn't know?" I asked.
"Belief and need did not turn me into the Killing Frost until Taranis was already king. The first battles I fought in were against the goblins when the courts of the sidhe joined forces against common foes."
I knew that once my tall, commanding Frost had been little Jack Frost, a child-size embodiment of the hoarfrost that he painted on windows and the edges of things as he followed in the train of the Winter King. But people thought his work beautiful and paid attention to it, and once mortals pay attention and begin to believe or tell stories about something, it grows stronger, more alive. Just as love and belief made the toy rabbit in the Velveteen Rabbit story into a real bunny, so, too, had the man beside me gone from something that danced over the snow, barely more than a thought of cold and icy beauty, to the Killing Frost beside me. For my Frost, it had been the love of a mortal girl named Rose. She was long in her grave, but it was for love of her that Frost had been willing to grow tall and strong enough to build a life with her. I owed her a thank-you, and since I could not give it, when we had a second daughter to name and Frost suggested "Rose," no one had argued. We'd just found the prettiest version of it, Bryluen, Cornish for "rose."