Merry Gentry 05 - Mistral's Kiss by Laurell K. Hamilton Page A

vanished.”
    “Vanished how?” Abe asked.
    “Just vanished, as if he became air.”
    “He was taken by his sphere of influence,” Mistral said.
    “What does that mean?” I asked.
    “Air, earth.”
    I shook my hands at him, as if waving away smoke between us. “I don’t understand.”
    “Hawthorne was engulfed by the trunk of that tree over there,” Rhys said.
    He pointed to a large greyish-barked tree. “He didn’t fight it. He went smiling. I’d bet almost anything that if we could identity it, it would be a hawthorn tree.”
    “Galen and Nicca did not go smiling,” Frost said.
    “They have never been worshipped as deities,” Doyle said, “so they do not know to relax into the power. If you fight it, it will fight back. If you let it take you, then it is more gentle.”
    “I know that once upon a time, some of the sidhe could travel through ground, trees, the air. But forgive me, guys, that was a thousand years before I was born. A thousand years before Galen was born. Nicca is older, but he was always too weak to be a god.”
    “That may have changed,” Abe said.
    “Just as Abe’s power returned,” Doyle said.
    Abe nodded. “Once, so long ago that I don’t want to remember, I didn’t just make queens. I made goddesses.”
    “What are you saying?” I asked.
    He brought the horn cup in front of him. “The Greeks believed in it, too, Princess. That the drink of the gods could make you immortal; could make you a god.”
    “But they didn’t drink from it.”
    “The drinking is—” He seemed to search for a word. “—more metaphorical, at times. It was my power, and Medb’s, that gave the gods and goddesses of our pantheon their marks of power. The colored lines, Princess, they paint the skin.”
    Rhys looked down at his arm, where there had been that one faint fish. Now there were two, one swimming down, another swimming upward. It formed a circle, like a fish version of yin and yang. The blue lines weren’t faint now—they were bright, clear blue, deeper than a summer sky. Rhys’s curls had been plastered flat by the rain, so the face he turned to us seemed startled and unfinished.
    “You bear both marks now,” Doyle said. With his hair in a tight braid, he looked as he always looked. He stood in the middle of all the disarray like some dark rock I might cling to.
    Rhys looked up at him. “It can’t be that easy.”
    “Try,” he said.
    “Try what?” I asked.
    The men were all exchanging some knowledge from look to look. I didn’t understand.
    “Rhys was a deity of death,” Frost said.
    “I know that; he was Cromm Cruach.”
    “Don’t you remember the story he told you?” Doyle asked.
    In that moment I couldn’t remember. All I could think was that Galen and Nicca might be dead, or hurting, and it was somehow my fault.
    “Once I brought more than just death, Merry,” Rhys said, still gazing down at his arm with its new mark.
    My mind started working finally. “Celtic death deities are also healing deities, according to legend,” I said.
    “According to legend,” Rhys said. He gazed up at Aisling.
    “Try,” Doyle said to Rhys, again.
    I looked at Rhys. “Are you saying you can bring him back from the dead?”
    “The last time I had both symbols on my arm, I could.” He looked at me, and there was such pain on his face. I remembered what he had told me now.
    Once his followers had worshipped him by cutting and hurting themselves, sacrificing their blood and pain, but he had been able to heal them. Then he lost the ability to heal, and his followers thought he was displeased. They decided he wanted the deaths of others, and they began the sacrifices. He had slaughtered them all to stop the atrocities. Slain his own people to save the rest.
    He had never lost the ability to kill small creatures with a touch. In Los Angeles he’d recovered the ability to kill other faerie creatures with a touch and a word. He’d killed a goblin that way, at least.
    Rhys gazed up