A Lick Of Frost   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

I had to walk farther into the room to see past the milling lawyers and security guards until I found the second set of EMTs with a second injured figure on a gurney. Doyle lay on the gurney, motionless. There was something wrong with his clothing. It was torn up, as if great claws had raked it. The world narrowed down, as if the edges of the room were collapsing, down, down, until all I could see clearly was him. In that moment, I didn't care about the mirror, or Hugh, or that Taranis had finally done something that he couldn't hide from the rest of the sidhe. There was just that still dark form on the gurney and nothing else.

Galen stayed with me, his free hand on my arm. I wasn't sure if he was guiding me, or holding me back. I stood beside the gurney, staring down at the tall muscled form of my Darkness. Doyle, who had fought a thousand battles before I was born. Doyle, who had seemed indestructible like his namesake. You cannot kill the dark, it is always with us.

His clothing wasn't torn; it was burned like Abe's. His black skin just didn't show the marks from a distance the way Abe's paler skin had, but there were shallow burns across his upper chest and one shoulder. And his face — one half of his face was bandaged from forehead to nearly chin. I knew that the fact that they'd tended his face first meant it was worse than his chest. There was a bag of clear liquid on top of his body. A flexible tube ran from it to his arm, where there was tape and a syringe.

I looked at the two techs. "Will he…?"

"Unless shock sets in, it's not life-threatening," one of them said. Then they were pushing him toward the doors. "But we've got to get him to the burn unit."

"Burn unit," I repeated. I felt slow and stupid.

"We've got to go," the other tech said, and his voice was gentle, as if he knew I was in shock.

Rhys was beside me. "Merry, we need you at the mirror. Galen can go with them."

I shook my head.

Rhys grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me away from Doyle so I had to look into his face. "We need you to be our queen right now, not Doyle's lover. Can you do that, or are we on our own here?"

Anger was instant, anger that made my blood run hot. I started to say "how dare you," but just then Taranis yelled, "How dare you touch your king!" I swallowed the words, but couldn't keep the anger off my face.

"Merry, I'm sorry. I'm more sorry than I can say, but we need you now."

My voice came tight, warm, but controlled, very controlled, "Call the house. Send one of the healers to the hospital, or maybe both the healers.