Galen held my hand, and Frost had his arm around my shoulders and it helped, but … I had prayed to Goddess and the Consort, but the petals that had fallen from the sky had been all white, no pink, just white, and I’d known that there would be no help even from Her.
I was starting to shiver and couldn’t seem to stop. A nurse came and kneeled in front of me so she could look into my face, because I seemed to be staring at the floor. “Princess Meredith, please let us take your clothes and get you in something warmer. You’re in shock and the cold, wet clothes aren’t helping.”
I just shook my head.
She pushed a strand of hair back behind her ear to try to get it to stay in the ponytail she’d started her shift with, but she needed to take it out and redo the ponytail, just shoving it back behind her ear wasn’t going to fix her hair. I almost told her that, and then realized concentrating on her hair I’d stopped listening to what she was saying.
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t hear any of that,” I said.
“We have to get you warm, honey, or we’ll be admitting you next.”
“Can we just take her home?” Galen asked.
“We’d like to get her warm and dry, and have a doctor look at her.”
Frost asked, “I thought you did all that before we arrived.”
The nurse smiled, sort of an unhappy or maybe frustrated smile. “The Princess wouldn’t go into a private area, she just kept insisting she was all right.”
Frost hugged me with the one arm across my shoulders and spoke low with his face against my hair. “Merry, you need to let the doctors look at you.”
“I’m all right,” I said, and even to me it felt automatic.
Galen raised my hand that he was holding up so that he could lay a kiss on the back of it, but I pulled back at the last second. “I have blood on my hands.”
“There’s no blood on the back of your hand.” He held it up so I could look at it. “See, all clean.”
I just shook my head, over and over again, and shivered harder. My teeth started to chatter.
“We have to get her dry and warm,” the nurse said, her voice sounding like there was no more arguing about it.
“I’m fine,” I managed to say between chattering, and even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I had no idea why I didn’t want to let them help me, except that I hadn’t been shot. Sholto had been shot. Sholto was dead, not me. I realized that part of me seemed to think that if I just didn’t let them help me, they’d be able to help him more. It made no sense, but that was finally the thought I dragged up into the front of my head, from where it had been hiding in the back of my thoughts, so I was acting on it, but didn’t know why.
“Merry,” Frost said, “you are not fine. Where does she need to go for a doctor to look at her?”
“Follow me,” the nurse said, obviously happier now that someone was being reasonable.
I didn’t want to be reasonable. I wanted to be totally unreasonable. I wanted to scream at her, lash out at Frost, scream at the world, and the only thing that kept me from it was that voice in my head saying, “That makes no sense.”
I was a princess, a queen actually, Sholto’s queen, which meant I had to do better. The last thing I could do for him was to remember I was his wife—funny, but I’d never thought the word wife much about Sholto and me, but we had been married by the very magic of fairie and Goddess, and that was about as blessed a union as you could get.
I thought of something I hadn’t before. I looked at Frost. “Has anyone told the sluagh that their king is dead?”
“They know,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes.” He helped me stand, but the high heels that hadn’t seemed that high turned underneath me, and he had to catch me or I would have fallen. A small pain sound escaped him, and I remembered he was hurt, too.
“Frost, you’re hurt. I’m so sorry, so sorry …” I pushed away from him, but he wouldn’t let me go. I pushed against his chest, trying to force him to let me go, but he flinched and I realized I was pushing against his wounds. I started to cry again. “Everyone keeps getting hurt.”
Galen picked me up, and Frost let him. “I’m not hurt,” he said with a smile.
“Not yet,” I said, as I curled my arms around his neck and buried my face against the side of his neck. The tears stopped and I was suddenly exhausted. I started shivering again, trembling in his arms as if I would shake myself apart.
I felt him walking and lifted my head enough to see we were following the nurse and that Frost was behind us. The guards that had been waiting outside the little alcove seating area closed in on either side of us. Usna and Cathbodua were there, her raven feather cloak had morphed into a fitted black leather trenchcoat, but I knew it was partly illusion. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her still being on guard duty now that I knew she was pregnant, but it was too hard for me to think about, so I let it go for now. Uniformed police came in at the front and back of the knot of security. They’d given me the breathing room I asked for, but my guards both sidhe and human DSS had been doubled, and the police were determined that I didn’t get killed on their watch.
“Where’s Doyle?” I asked.
“He’s tearing Saraid and Dogmaela a new one,” Galen said.
“It wasn’t their fault,” I said.
“He’s really mad at himself, but he’s going to take it out on them.”
“Why is he mad at himself?”
Frost spoke from just behind us. “Because we both believe if we’d been with you this wouldn’t have happened.”
I shook my head, fought to talk around my chattering teeth, and said, “That’s not true. I don’t think that’s true.”
I tried to think, was there a moment when someone could have done something? Would Doyle and Frost have made the difference? Would that have been much better than Saraid and Dogmaela? Frost had been hurt; he couldn’t have been there today, but Doyle … would Doyle being there have made the difference, or would he have died, too? That thought was too awful. I pushed it back and started to shake until I could barely keep hold of Galen. He held me closer, tighter, as if trying to share his warmth.
The nurse, whose name was Nancy, yes, Nurse Nancy, led us to a private room. One thing being a faerie princess had always gotten me was a better room at the hospital. Being a princess didn’t keep me out of the hospital; in fact, it seemed to put me in more often than if I hadn’t been one, but I did usually get a private room. It was the only way to control the media and the gawkers. I’d been newsworthy all my life, and right at that minute I would have traded all of it for Sholto to walk through the door alive.
The police wanted to secure the room, so did the men and one woman of the diplomatic service, but the sidhe pointed out that none of them could look for magical dangers. It was like trying to get a rugby huddle into one room, no one wanted to be left outside, and each branch of guard wanted to search the room.
Nurse Nancy settled it all. “We’ve got to get the princess out of her wet clothes, so unless you’ve already seen her na**d in person, you have to get out.”
All the humans, both goverment issue and police issue, went in an embarrassed mass for the door. There were enough of them that they had a traffic jam at the door. One of the cops stepped back and asked, “Are you sure that just the two fathers are enough protection for her once we leave the room? She had four guards at the beach.”
It was Cathbodua who said, “Only Usna and I are leaving of our seven guards. I think five Raven guard should be enough.”
“She had four at the beach, remember?” he said.
“Nothing personal, but two of the four were human. This is five of the Raven guard.”
Galen sat me on the bed where the nurse told him to, and then she produced a large plastic bag. “We can put your clothes in here, Princess, if the police don’t need them for evidence. Then they can go home with you.”
I touched the jacket, cold with seawater and wet with blood, and didn’t want to take it off. In some part of my mind I knew it made no sense, but it felt as if once I took it off that Sholto would be more lost to me. Stupid, but it was his jacket, he’d put it on me himself, and it was his blood on it—it was his in a way nothing else would ever be again.