Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [56]
Flower petals began to rain down upon the bed. Not just the rose petals that sometimes fell around me, but flowers of all colors and kinds. They formed four pillows that went across the width of the bed’s head. They formed a blanket, which pulled itself down to the foot of the bed, turning itself down for the night.
Sholto looked at me. His look was a question. I answered it as best as I could. “Your sithen has prepared a place for us to sleep and to heal Mistral.”
“And to heal you, Meredith.”
I squeezed his arm. “To heal us all.”
Sholto walked to the bed on a spill of green grasses so bright that it looked too green to be grass. The moment I stepped from the stone to the grass, I realized that it was small stones too. I gazed down at what we walked upon, and knew that it was formed of emeralds. It crunched underfoot, but it wasn’t sharp or hurtful. I had no words for the texture of the emeralds. It was almost as if they were real grass, but just happened to be formed of precious stones.
Sholto laid Mistral in the center of the bed. It was as if he knew what needed to be done to heal him. Deity wasn’t talking just to me tonight.
The bed was tall enough that I had to climb, rather than step, onto it. Vines in the bed frame curled around me, lifting me. It was actually a little more help than was comforting. The bed was a marvelous thing, but the thought of vines that could move that much curling around me while I slept wasn’t a completely good thought.
Sholto knelt on the other side of Mistral from where I was crawling up beside him. “Who is the fourth pillow for?” he asked.
I knelt in the surprising softness of herbs, vines, and petals, and stared at the pillow. I started to say, “I don’t know,” but in the middle of the breath to say it, another word came. “Doyle.”
Sholto looked at me. “He is in the human hospital miles away, surrounded by metal and technology.”
I said, “You are right,” but the moment I said it, I knew we had to get Doyle. We had to rescue him. Rescue him? I said it out loud. “We have to rescue him.”
Sholto frowned at me. “Rescue him from what?”
I had that moment of panic that I’d felt before. It wasn’t words but a feeling. It was fear. I’d only felt it twice before: once when Galen had been attacked by assassins, and the other time when Barinthus, our strongest ally in the Unseelie Court, had been at the wrong end of a magical plot in which our enemies had maneuvered the queen to kill him.
I gripped Sholto’s arm tightly. “There is no time to explain. Mistral can rest here in the magic of faerie. We will return and give our magic to him, but for now, Doyle’s life hangs in the balance. I feel it, and this feeling has never been wrong before, Sholto.”
He didn’t argue again, which was one of the qualities I valued about Sholto. The petal blanket slid over Mistral where Sholto had laid him without the aid of any hands we could see or sense. Magic touched every wound that the iron had made; it was the best we could do until we returned to him.
Sholto turned to me. Without Mistral’s body to block the view, the tentacles looked like some sort of clothing, and they were the only thing he was wearing above the waist. “How do we reach Doyle in time?” he asked.
“You are the Lord of That Which Passes Between, Sholto. You took us where a field met woods, and where the shore met ocean. Isn’t there anything in a hospital that is a place between?”
He thought for a second, then nodded. “Life and death. A hospital is full of people who hover between. But there is too much metal and technology for me, Meredith. I have no human blood in me to help me work major magic around such things.”
I took one of his hands and wrapped my much smaller fingers around his. “I do.”
He frowned at me. “But this is not your magic. It is mine.”
I prayed. “Goddess guide