Swallowing Darkness by Laurell K. Hamilton Page B

bring you here like this?”
    I turned to look at her, so lovely. She was my mother’s twin, but they weren’t identical. Eluned was just a little more sidhe than my mother, a little less human. She wore gold from head to toe. Her red hair like my own and her father’s sparkled against her dress. Her eyes were the many-petaled eyes of Taranis, except that my aunt’s were shades of gold and green intermingled. I stared into those eyes and had a memory so sharp that it stabbed through me from stomach to head. I saw eyes like these except only shades of green—Taranis’s eyes above me, as if in a dream, but I knew it wasn’t a dream.
    Sholto touched my arm, lightly this time. “Meredith.”
    I shook my head at him, then held my bloody hand out toward my aunt. “This is your mother’s blood, our grandmother’s blood, Hettie’s blood.”
    “Are you saying that…our mother is dead?”
    “She died in my arms.”
    “But how?”
    I pointed at my cousin. “She used a spell to make Gran into her instrument, to give her Cair’s hand of power. She forced Gran to attack us with fire. My Darkness is still in the hospital with injuries that Gran gave him with a hand of power she never owned.”
    “You lie,” my cousin said.
    The dogs growled.
    “If I lied I could not have called the hunt, and pronounced you kin slayer. The hunt will not come if the vengeance is not righteous.”
    “The blood of her victim marks her,” Sholto said.
    Aunt Eluned drew herself up to her full sidhe height and said, “You have no voice here, Shadowspawn.”
    “I am a king, and you are not,” he said, in a voice as haughty and arrogant as her own.
    “King of nightmares,” Eluned said.
    Sholto laughed. His laughter made light play in his hair, as if laughter could be yellow light to spill in the whiteness of his hair. “Let me show you nightmares,” he said, and his voice held that anger that has passed heat and become a cold thing. Heated anger is about passion; cold anger is about hate.
    I didn’t think he hated my aunt specifically, but all the sidhe who had ever treated him as less. A few short weeks ago a sidhe woman had lured him to a bit of tie-me-up sex. But instead of sex, sidhe warriors had come and cut off his tentacles, skinned all the extra bits away. The woman had told Sholto that when he healed, and was free of taint, she might actually sleep with him.
    The magic of the hunt changed slightly, felt…angrier. It was my turn to reach out and warn him. I’d always known that to be drafted to ride in the hunt could mean being trapped, but I hadn’t realized that calling it could also trap the huntsman. The hunt wanted a permanent huntsman, or huntswoman. It wanted to be led now that it was back. And strong emotions could give it the key to your soul. I’d felt it, and now I saw Sholto begin to be incautious.
    I gripped his arm until he looked at me. The blood that had left a mark so bright and fresh on Cair’s face left no mark on his arm. I stared into his eyes until I saw him look back, not in anger, but with that wisdom that had let the sluagh keep their independence when most of the other lesser kingdoms had been swallowed up.
    He smiled at me, that gentler version that I had only seen since he found out that he was to be a father. “Shall I show them that they did not unman me?”
    I knew what he meant. I smiled back, and nodded. The smiles saved us, I think. We shared a moment that had nothing to do with the hunt’s purpose. A moment of hope, of shared intimacy, of friendship as well as love.
    He’d meant to show Aunt Eluned what nightmares could truly be. To show his extra bits in anger to horrify. Now he would reveal himself to prove that the nobles who had hurt him had failed to mutilate him. He was whole. More than whole, he was perfect.
    One moment it was a tattoo that decorated his stomach and upper chest, the next it was the reality. Light and color played on the pale skin, gold and pale pink. Shades of