A Stroke Of Midnight   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

Adair slowly, carefully, began to draw himself out of me, which brought another sound of half-pain from me.

“Meredith,” she said, “I didn’t know you had it in you.” Then she laughed at her joke, and was still laughing when Adair had moved enough of his upper body to reveal her to me.

Andais’s body glinted in the thin light, glinted with fresh, and not so fresh, blood. She was covered in it. Her long hair was plastered along her body with blood and thicker things.

Amatheon tried to move out from inside me, but he was at a bad angle for it. Rhys came to help me, cradling me in his arms, helping give Amatheon a little more room to maneuver.

But it was Rhys’s lifting that got me free of him. He stood with me in his arms, and I was just as glad, for I doubted I could have stood. Frost and Doyle stood by us, not quite guarding me against the queen, but close.

“We were coming to find you, niece. It seems we didn’t need your policemen after all.”

“What do you mean?” I said in a hoarse voice.

“We have a confession to our murders, Meredith, and we did not need forensics to get it.” She bent down near her feet and raised her hand upward; a thick rope trailed down to something on the ground. My eyes saw it before my mind would accept it. There was a body at her feet, curled on its side, so covered in blood and so destroyed that I could not tell if it was man or woman.

Andais pulled on the ropes in her hand and the figure screamed. She wasn’t holding ropes. She was holding intestines, and they were still attached.



CHAPTER 39

“DID YOU HEAR ME, MEREDITH? TORTURE HAS SOLVED YOUR crimes before the police could even finish processing their so-called evidence.” She gave another jerk with her hand, and tore a ragged scream from the man’s throat. I was almost certain it was a man.

I cuddled in against Rhys’s chest, and fought to keep my face as blank as I could. I know I did not keep all the horror off of it, because it was too awful. It was simply one of the worst things I’d ever seen, and I could not hide entirely how I felt about it. I fought to hide my feelings, knew I failed, and finally wasn’t certain I cared. Sometimes Andais became angry if you didn’t appreciate her work. I could never enjoy it, so all that was left me was to show her how frightening, how nightmarish I thought her talents could be.

She gave a low throaty laugh. “Such a look, Meredith. Do you find Gwennin’s fate terrible?”

I nodded, huddling in tighter against Rhys. His arms tightened around me.