“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 ra**st 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.”