Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [17]
She looked at me, and there was pain in her eyes. “Oh, Merry, child, do nae call me by a title.”
“The fact that you don’t approve of my choice in men doesn’t give you the right to use your magic to trash my hospital room, Gran.”
“It was the spell. You know that.”
“Do I?” I let my voice hold coldness, because I wasn’t sure. “The spell was designed to simply magnify what you truly feel, Gran. You truly do hate Sholto, and Doyle, and they are the fathers of my children. That will not change.”
“Are you saying the ol’…woman made the stuff float and hit everyone?” the older cop asked. He sounded doubtful.
Gran pulled at Sholto’s grip. “I am meself again, Lord of Shadows. Ya can let me go.”
“Swear. Swear by the Darkness that Eats all Things that you will not try and hurt me, or anyone in this room.”
“I’ll swear ta no hurt anyone in this room, at this moment, but I will nae promise beyond that, because ya are the murderer of my mother.”
“Murderer,” the older cop said.
“He killed her mother, my great-grandmother, about five hundred years ago, or am I off by a century or two?” I asked.
“You’re off by about two hundred years,” Rhys said. He was in front of the policemen, smiling, pleasant, but he didn’t have a magic that could go with the smile. Someone else in the room did though. “Why don’t you talk to the nice policemen, Galen?” Rhys said.
Galen looked puzzled, but he moved the small distance to the policemen. If it bothered him to be standing directly under a crowd of nightflyers it didn’t show. Which meant it didn’t bother him, because Galen was almost incapable of lying that well.
“I’m sorry that you had to see our mess,” he said, and he sounded reasonable, friendly. One of his abilities was to truly be pleasant. Most people wouldn’t think of that as a magical ability, but to be able to charm people wasn’t a small thing. I’d begun to notice that it worked really well on humans. It also worked to a certain degree on the other sidhe and some of the lesser fey. Galen had always had a bit of this kind of charm, a kind of glamour, but since we’d all gotten our powers boosted, his “friendliness” had grown to the level of real magic.
I watched the policemen’s faces smooth out. The younger one smiled, all the way to his eyes. I couldn’t even hear what Galen was saying, but I didn’t need to. He’d understood what Rhys had wanted him to do. With Galen’s pleasant magic easing the way, we got the policemen their guns, and they left, happy with the nightflyers still hanging like bats from the ceiling, and the tentacles still writhing in the window like some sort of really good 3-D. Though Sholto letting go of Gran had been the thing that had made the older cop succumb to Galen’s charm. I think if the older cop had continued to see anyone in danger, he wouldn’t have been so easily won over.
Oh, and Sholto had put his tentacles away. Once he would have had to use glamour to hide them, but they would have still been there. He’d been able to hide them, even if you were touching his chest and stomach. They had felt smooth and perfect. Strong glamour, that. But when the wild magic escaped, or was called into being by Sholto and myself, he had gained a new ability. His tentacles could look like a very realistic tattoo, and it was a tattoo, but with a thought he could make it tentacles again. It was similar to the tattoos on Galen and myself that looked like a butterfly and a moth, respectively. I’d been grateful when they stopped being alive, but trapped in our skin. It had felt very wrong.
Several of the men had tattoos, and some of them could become real. Real vines to twine down the body. None were as real as Sholto’s mark, but then it was the only mark that had begun life as part of his own body.
Galen’s winning personality didn’t work if the person was too afraid, or was looking directly at something too frightening, so Sholto smoothed his extra bits back into the delicate tattoo. Galen’s was a mild magic by our terms, but it was very, very useful