A Stroke Of Midnight   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

“I did not bid you stand,” she yelled at them.

They stayed on their feet. I could not look away from her to see exactly what they were doing, but this was about to go badly.

Barinthus’s deep voice came from farther into the room. He must have been standing there the entire time, and I hadn’t seen him. It takes a commanding presence to make you not see a seven-foot-tall, mostly blue demi-god. Andais was that commanding presence. With her hand bruising my chin, forcing me to meet her grey gaze from inches away, she was more than commanding, she was frightening.

“Queen Andais, Meredith has done nothing but as you have bid her.”

“Silence, Kingmaker!” She had glanced back at him when she yelled, and I realized that she must have made him kneel, because I could not see him in that part of the room.

She turned back to me, and her eyes shone as if there was light behind them. It was like watching the moon behind grey clouds, pushing light up through the colors of her eyes, but the eyes themselves did not truly glow. It was an effect I had never seen in any other sidhe’s eyes.

“Then what is this smear of red on her mouth, and on the face of my Killing Frost?” She let the fur she’d wrapped herself in fall to the floor, as she put her thumb against my mouth and rubbed hard enough that I had to fight not to make a small pain sound. There was still enough lipstick left to stain her white thumb.

She stood there nude and pale and frightening. If she was beautiful I could not see it. Andais often stripped before she tortured people, so she wouldn’t ruin her clothes. Her nudity did not bode well.

I finally realized that she intended to get angry about me playing favorites in front of the media. She was going to throw a fit, and punish me for kissing Frost, instead of dealing with the murders. Displacement is a fine coping mechanism, but this was not sane.

No logic would save me. All the arguments that I had prepared were dust before her incomprehensible anger.

“Do you think that I give orders simply to be ignored?”

I spoke carefully around her grip on my chin. “I had to distract the cameras…”

She let me go so abruptly that I stumbled. Doyle caught my arm, then took me into the circle of his arm, putting me farther from her and closer to the middle of the men. I couldn’t argue with the precaution. She was not acting like herself. Andais was temperamental and a sadist, but she never let either interfere this badly with the business of her court. We had a dead human reporter, and cameras still in the faerie mound.