Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [121]
“Dear God,” Hayes said.
“I think you mean Goddess,” Dawson said.
The man on the ground stared up at me, his face frightened. “Where am I?”
“Cahokia, Illinois,” I said.
“I thought I was back in the desert. I thought….”
Hayes gripped his shoulder, and turned him to look at her. “It’s all right, Orlando. She saved us. We’re safe.”
I wasn’t sure about that last part, but I let it go. I had only a few nails left, only a few more lives to save. When I was healed, would I lose the ability to save them? I wanted to be healed, but I didn’t want to lose any of them. They had offered their lives to save us, and I wanted to repay that. They shouldn’t die in our war.
I felt the call close by. There were more wounded. I would do what I could. I would do what the Goddess helped me do. I wanted to save them all. The question was, could I?
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I HAD EIGHT SOLDIERS WITH ME, EACH CLUTCHING A BLOODY nail, each brought back from the brink of death. Once the last nail was out of my body, the call faded. There was something about the pain and the injury that had made the magic possible.
A sidhe warrior appeared out of the dark, dressed in crimson armor that gleamed in the moonlight, as if made of fire. His name was Aodán, and I knew that his hand of power matched his armor. I felt him call his hand of power, and I spoke without thinking. “Kill him.”
They should have hesitated. They shouldn’t have taken my orders. Dawson was the ranking officer, but they aimed their recovered guns at the figure and fired. The bullets did what bullets had been doing to faerie from the moment humans had made them. They tore through that brilliant armor, and into the flesh underneath. He died before he could send his hand of fire to scorch us. I could feel them calling their hands of power. If we could keep shooting them before they had time to unleash that power, we could win this. Such a simple solution, if you had soldiers who would follow unhesitatingly, and a complete willingness to kill everything in your path. Apparently, I had both.
Other soldiers joined us, not because of me, but because we had formed a unit on the field of battle. We seemed to know what we were doing, and we had an officer with us. They formed around us because we were moving with purpose, and you need purpose in the midst of battle. Purpose, and no hesitation.
I felt magic come our way. Some cried out in horror at whatever illusion one of the armored sidhe had created. I’d been able to share glamour with one or two other sidhe before. I spread that pool of protective glamour out and out. I spread it farther than I’d ever attempted before, spreading it over my people, the way you’d spill water over fevered skin.
As the screams of my men stopped and they began to murmur, I spoke low to Dawson. “Shoot the ones in armor.” I had to concentrate on keeping all of us free of the illusions. Even shouting would make me stumble.
Dawson never questioned me. He simply yelled out my order, “Shoot the ones in armor! Fire!”
Immortal warriors who had seen more centuries than any of us would ever dream of fell before our weapons. They fell like dreams brought down to earth. They couldn’t cloud the minds of the men, and without their illusions to stop the soldiers from firing, we mowed them down.
Dilys stood, all in yellow, glowing like she had swallowed flame, and it had filled her skin and her hair, and blazed out of her eyes. She wore no armor of any kind. Her dress looked as if she were expecting to walk down some marble staircase to a ball. But where the warriors fell, their magical armor pierced by human ingenuity, she stood. The bullets seemed to hit a wavering glow, like heat off a summer road. The bullets hit, hesitated, then melted, in little spurts of orangey light.
“What is she?” Dawson said, beside me.
“Magic,” I said. “She is magic.”
“What kind of magic?” Hayes asked.
“Heat, light, sun. She’s a goddess of the summer heat.” I’d always wondered what she’d been before