[Merry Gentry 04] - A Stroke of Midnight by Laurell K. Hamilton Page B

our way.” I guess being seven feet tall does give you a better view.
    I realized then that my guard feared almost every sidhe right now. They were right. One of the sidhe had committed murder, and I was in charge of catching the killer. Wonderful. I’d just given someone else a reason to want me dead. But what was one more?
    Adair moved to the center of the hallway to hide me behind his armored back, as Doyle moved down the hallway. Barinthus answered my question before I’d even thought it. “Doyle is conferring with Mistral.”
    Mistral was the master of winds, the bringer of storms, and the new captain of the Queen’s Ravens. He’d taken Doyle’s place when it became clear that Doyle wasn’t coming back to his old job.
    â€œWhat’s happening?” Galen asked, and his voice held enough anxiety for both of us.
    Usna bent over me, sniffing my hair. “You smell good.”
    â€œKeep your mind on business,” Galen said, looking up the hallway toward where Doyle had gone. He had a gun out, held down along his leg. If I’d been choosing between sword and gun, I’d have made the same choice. When I first came back to faerie, guns were outlawed inside the mounds, but after the last few attempts, my aunt had decided that my guards and hers needed all the help they could get. So our men could carry guns, if they knew how to use them. Doyle and Mistral had been the judge of who was competent to carry and who wasn’t. Some guards treated guns the way others treated the idea of carrying around a poisonous snake. It might be useful, but what if it bit you.
    Usna had a short sword in either hand, pointed both directions up and down the hallway. His grey eyes, which were the most ordinary thing about him physically, were keeping watch, but his face was pressed against the top of my head. He put first one cheek, then the other against my hair. He was looking down each end of the hallway as he did it, but he was also almost scent marking me. Cat-like and inappropriate for the situation, if he’d thought like a human. But it was Usna, and I knew that he was aware of everything in the hallway, even while trying to put the scent of his skin against my hair.
    I found it oddly comforting. Galen did not. “Usna, stop it.”
    A soft sound somewhere between a purr and a growl sounded from the other man. “You worry too much, my little pixie.”
    â€œAnd you don’t worry enough, my little kitten.” But Galen grinned as he said it. We all felt a little better for Usna’s teasing.
    â€œQuiet, both of you,” Frost said from behind us. They shut up, looking a little sheepish but happier. Usna stopped trying to rub his face against my hair. Which meant he’d done it almost more to tease Galen than to tease me.
    Doyle was taking too long. If something had gone horribly wrong, Barinthus or Adair would have warned us. But it was taking too long. The unnatural calm was beginning to slip away from me on tiny cat paws of anxiety.
    I had a license to carry a gun in California. I also had a diplomatic waiver that pretty much covered me anywhere, anytime, on the basis that my life was in danger often enough that being armed was a necessity. I had guns. But Andais wouldn’t let me go into the press conference armed. I was a princess; princesses did not protect themselves, they had others to do that for them. I thought the idea archaic and shortsighted and downright ironic coming from a queen whose claim to fame had been as a goddess of battle. Standing there with Galen and Usna pressed against me, with the others like a wall of flesh around me, I vowed that the next time I left my room, I’d be armed.
    Doyle returned, and Adair gave him room to pass, then moved back to the center of the hallway like some golden wall. I realized that Adair was being just that, a wall of flesh and metal to keep death from me. He’d said I was his ameraudur, another