Mistrals Kiss   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

Figures started toward us, and the goblins parted to form a corridor for my guards. When I finally recognized that tall, dark figure, something in my chest eased, and I was suddenly crying. I started walking toward him, then. I didn’t feel the frozen grass under my bare feet. I didn’t feel when broken stubble cut me. Then I was running, with the Red Caps jogging beside me. I picked up the edges of the borrowed coat like a dress, and held it out of my way so I could run to him.

Doyle wasn’t alone; dogs, huge black dogs milled around his legs. Suddenly I remembered a vision I’d had of him with dogs like this, and the ground tilted under my feet, vision and reality melding before my eyes. The dogs reached me first, pressing warm muscled fur against me where I knelt, their great panting breath hot on my face as I held my hands out to touch them. Their black fur ran with a tingling rush of magic.

The bodies writhed under my hand, the fur growing less coarse, smoothing, the bodies less dense. I looked up into the face of a racing hound, white and sleek, with ears a shining red. The other hound’s face was half red and half white, as if some hand had drawn a line down the center of it. I’d never seen anything so beautiful as that face.

Then Doyle was standing in front of me, and I threw myself into his arms. He lifted me off the ground and hugged me so hard it almost hurt. But I wanted him to hold me hard. I wanted to feel the reality of his body against me. I wanted to know he was alive. I needed to touch him to know it was true. I needed him to touch me, and let me know that he was still my Darkness, still my Doyle.

He whispered into my hair, “Merry, Merry, Merry.”

I clung to him, wordless, and wept.



CHAPTER 22

EVERYONE LIVED, EVEN THE HUMAN POLICEMEN, THOUGH some were driven mad by what they had seen. Abeloec fed them from his cup of horn and they fell into a magical sleep, destined to wake with no memory of the horrors they had seen. Magic isn’t always bad.

The black dogs were a miracle: They changed depending on who touched them. Abe’s touch turned the great black dogs into lapdogs to lie before a cozy fire, white with red markings — faerie dogs. Mistral’s touch turned them to huge Irish wolfhounds, not the pale, slender ones of today, but the giants that the Romans had feared so much — these were the hounds that could snap the spine of a horse with their bite. Someone else’s touch turned a dog into a green-furred Cu Sith that loped off toward the Seelie mound.