Chapter 20
It seemed even less funny half an hour later. Of course, when you're about to walk into a major press conference, and you're certain they're going to ask questions you can't answer truthfully, nothing seems very funny.
More St. Louis city policemen than I'd seen in a while met us on the tarmac and closed ranks around us. With the guards around me, and the police around them, I felt like a very short flower inside some very tall walls. Next time I'd have to wear higher heels.
We entered the lounge that is just for private planes and there met the rest of my guards. The only one I knew well was Barinthus. I saw him when the police parted like a curtain, just a glimpse between Doyle's dark back and Galen's brown leather. Frost was behind me in a silver fox coat that nearly trailed on the ground. When I'd pointed out how many animals had died for the coat, he'd informed me that he'd owned the coat for more than fifty years, long before anyone thought badly of owning fur. He'd also touched my long leather coat and said, "Please don't complain to me when you're wearing half a cow. "
"But I eat cow, so wearing leather uses the entire animal; it's not wasteful. You don't eat fox. "
He'd gotten a strange look on his face. "You have no idea what I've eaten. "
I didn't know what to say after that, so I gave up. Besides, the January cold had hit us like a hammer when we stepped out of the plane. Coming from Los Angeles to St. Louis in the middle of winter was almost a physical wrenching. It made me stumble on the steps. Frost steadied me, toasty in his immoral fur coat. Fur was warmer than leather, even if it was lined. But I huddled in my long leather coat, hands in leather gloves, and walked down the steps with Frost's bare hand on my elbow the whole way. When I was on flat ground he let me go, and everyone fell back into a bodyguard circle. Sage and Nicca brought up the rear. If we were attacked, no one was expecting much of Nicca. One, he wasn't used to having huge wings to deal with when he moved. Two, he was huddled in a cotton blanket over a bare chest. The sidhe can't freeze to death, but some of them can still be cold. Nicca was spring energy; he could be cold. His wings were held tight together, drooping like a frostbitten flower behind him.
Rhys cursed softly. "I should have gone shopping for a heavier coat. "
"Told you so," Galen said, though he wasn't much better in his leather jacket. It was too damn cold for something that left your ass and legs bare.
Kitto was probably the warmest of us non-fur-bearing sidhe in a bulky down coat that was nearly a Day-Glo blue. It wasn't attractive, but he was warm.
The private lounge was warm enough that the difference between cold and hot fogged my dark glasses. When I took them off, Barinthus's hair gleamed through the forest of bodies around me. His hair isn't as shiny as Frost's, though few sidhe could boast that, but Barinthus has some of the most unusual hair in either court.
His hair was the color of ocean water. The heartrending turquoise of the Mediterranean; the many deeper blues of the Pacific; the bluish grey of the sea before a storm, melting into a blue that was nearly black. The color of water when it is deep and cold, and the currents run thick and heavy like movement of some great ocean beast. The colors moved, and flowed into each other, with every trick of the light, every turn of his head, so that it didn't seem like hair at all. But it was hair, hair like a cloak to the ankles of his nearly seven-foot frame. It took me a blink or two to realize that he was wearing a long leather coat dyed a deep sky blue like a robin's egg. His hair seemed to blend into the soft leather. He came toward us with his hands extended and a smile on his face.
Once he'd been a sea god, and he was still one of the most powerful of all the sidhe, for he seemed to have lost less of what he was. He'd been my father's best friend and chief adviser. He and Galen had been the most frequent visitors to my father's home after we left the court when I was six. We left because by that late age I'd shown no magical talents, unheard of in a sidhe, however mixed her genetics. My aunt, the queen, had tried to drown me like a purebred puppy that didn't meet standards. My father had packed me and his entourage and gone to live among the humans. Aunt Andais had been shocked that he'd left faerie over a small misunderstanding. Small misunderstanding, her exact words.
Barinthus's blue eyes with their slits of pupils were warm with true joy at seeing me. There were others who were looking forward to seeing me for political reasons, sexual reasons, so many reasons, but he was one of the few who wanted to see me just because he was my friend. He'd been my father's friend, now he was mine, and I knew that if I had children, he would be their friend, too.
"Meredith, it is good to see you once more. " He reached to take my hands in his, as was his wont in public, but another guard pushed between us. He reached for me as if to steal a hug, but he never finished the movement. Barinthus pulled him back by the shoulder. Doyle moved in front of me to block him, and I stepped back so abruptly that I slammed into Frost. The fur of his coat tickled along my cheek. His hands found my shoulders as if he were ready to swing me around behind him, farther away from the upstart guard.
The guard in question was within an inch or two of Doyle's height, which made him nearly six feet tall, but not quite. The first thing I noticed about him was his coat, not usually the first thing I noticed about the guards of the sidhe. The fur coat seemed to be made of alternating broad stripes of black and white mink. Bad enough the animals had to die, but for a striped coat - that was just sad. It did match the hair tied back from his face to trail down over one shoulder to the bottom of his thighs. His hair was a series of narrow stripes - black, pale grey, dark grey, and white - all perfectly uniform so there was no mistaking his hair for someone who had gone grey. It was either an elaborate and well-done dye job, or he wasn't human. His charcoal-grey eyes were a shade darker than most, but they could have been human eyes.
"Just wanted a little squeeze," he said in a voice that sounded less than sober.
"You are drunk, Abloec," Barinthus said in a disgusted voice. His grip on the man's shoulder tightened so that his white skin seemed to be melting into the striped fur.
"Just happy, Barinthus, just happy," Abloec said, with a slightly lopsided smile.
"What is he doing here?" Doyle asked, and his normally low voice held an edge of rumbling growl to it.
"The queen wished the princess to have six guards. I was allowed to choose two, but she chose the other three. "
"But why him?" Doyle said, with emphasis on the word him.
"Is there some problem here?" one of the human police officers asked. I would have said he was tall, except I had Barinthus to compare him to, and few looked tall beside the sea god. His grey hair was cut very short, very severely, and it left his face stranded and bare looking. He would have looked better with more hair around his face to soften the features, but there was a look in his eyes, a set to his shoulders, that said he couldn't have cared less if his hairdo flattered his bone structure.
Madeline Phelps, publicist to the Unseelie Court, stepped up beside the officer. "No problem, Major, no problem at all. " She smiled when she said it, showing very white, very straight teeth, framed by a deep burgundy, almost purple lipstick. The color matched her short, pleated skirt and body-fitting double-breasted suit jacket. Purple was probably the new in-color for the year. Madeline kept track of things like that. She'd cut her hair since last I saw her. It was very close to her head, but left long in thin lines around her face and down her neck, so though the hair was shorter than anyone's except the major's, it managed to touch the collar of her royal purple jacket. When she moved her head to smile up at the policeman, the light caught purple highlights in her brown hair, as if she'd given it a wash of color rather than a true dye. Her artful makeup complimented a slender face, and though she was a few inches taller than me, she was small for a full-blooded human.
"It looks like a problem," the major said.
I wondered what I'd done to deserve someone with the rank of major being in charge of my police security.
Was the queen keeping as many secrets from us as we were from her? Looking up into the major's serious face, I thought, Maybe.
Madeline smiled and tried to win him over, even putting a hand on his forearm. His eyes didn't thaw; in fact, he stared at her hand until she took it away. "Do you know the old saying about the duck?" he asked in a voice that was still utterly serious.
She looked puzzled for a second, regained her smile, and shook her head. "Sorry, can't say that I do. "
"If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it's a duck," he said.
Madeline looked puzzled again, which didn't mean she was. She capitalized on being small and cute, and only at odd moments did you realize just how shrewd and business-like she really was.
I'd never had much patience with women who hid their intelligence. I thought it set a bad precedent for the rest of us. "He means if it looks like a problem, sounds like a problem, and acts like a problem, then it's a problem," I said.
The major, whose nameplate said WALTERS, turned his cold grey eyes on me. It wasn't just the normal unreadable cop eyes, either; he was mad about something. But what? His eyes thawed a little, as if he liked that I'd stopped playing games, or as if he wasn't mad at me. "Princess Meredith, I'm Major Walters, and I'm in charge of this detail until we cross over onto sidhe territory. "
"Now, Major," Madeline said, "you and Captain Barinthus are both in charge, that's what the queen agreed to. "
"You can't have two leaders," the major said, "not and get anything done. " He glanced at Abloec, then at Barinthus, and the look said he didn't like the way Barinthus was running his men. What Major Walters couldn't know, and none of us would ever admit outside the sidhe, was that if things weren't running smoothly, it was almost always Queen Andais's fault, or her son's. But since Prince Cel was still locked safely away, it had to be something that the queen had done.
For the life of me I couldn't think why she'd have allowed Abloec to be seen in front of as much media presence as was likely to be in the press conference. He was addicted to everything, drink, cigarettes, drugs. You name it, Abe liked it. Once he'd been the greatest libertine of the Seelie Court, a lover and seducer par excellence. He was cast out of the Seelie Court for seducing the wrong woman, and Andais would only allow him into the Unseelie Court on one condition. He had to join her guard, which meant that Abe went from being one of the busiest lovers of the sidhe to being celibate. He'd taken to drink, and when stronger drugs were invented he took those. Unfortunately for him it was almost impossible for a sidhe to become completely impaired by alcohol or drugs. You could get drunk, but never to the point where you passed out. Never to the point where true oblivion could ease your pain. The best Abe could do was take the edge off and become addicted to damn near everything. My father had kept him far from me, and my aunt despised him, thought him weak. So he'd been hidden away on small duties for centuries, an embarrassment to us all. So why was he here, now, in such a public forum? It made no sense. Not that everything Andais did made sense, but in public she always came off as the perfect queen. A drunken guard was not good press. A drunken guard entrusted with the life of a princess and heir to a throne was worse than simply bad press, it was careless. Andais was many things, but careless was not one of them.
"I earned the right to be here, Darkness, trust me on that," Abe said. His smile was gone, and there was something very sober in his charcoal-grey eyes.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Walters asked.
Neither the guards nor I had to ask. If he'd earned it, then he'd done something that he'd hated but had pleased the queen. It usually involved sex, or sadism, or both. The guards kept their secrets about what humiliations the queen demanded of them. There's an old saying that you'd crawl over broken glass for someone, or something. Apparently that wasn't just a saying with the queen. What would a person do to end hundreds of years of celibacy? What wouldn't he do?
It must have shown on at least some of our faces, because Walters looked even grumpier and said, "What aren't you telling me?"
Barinthus and Doyle gave him their empty faces, honed to unreadability by centuries of court politics. I turned in against Frost's body so that my face was hidden from the major. I just didn't give good blank face anymore.
Frost slid one arm across my shoulders, but opened his coat so that I was snuggled inside it. Most people would have thought that he was trying to get me closer to his body, but I knew better: He was opening his coat so he could go for his gun, or knives if he needed to. Hugging was fine, but for the guards, duty had to come first.
Since it was my life they were protecting, I never got my feelings hurt about it.
"To my knowledge, Major," Barinthus said, "we are not concealing anything from you that will impact your ability to perform your job. "
Walters almost smiled. "You're not going to deny that you're withholding information from me, from the police?"
"Why should I deny it? You would have to be a fool to believe that we have shared all we know with you, and I don't think you a fool, Major Walters. "
He looked at Barinthus, and it wasn't an entirely unfriendly look. "Well, that's good to know. You don't want Abe here, do you?"
"Obviously not," Barinthus said.
"Then why is he here?"
Madeline tried to intervene. "Major, we really must get them all ready for the press conference. "
He ignored her. "Why is he here?"
Barinthus blinked at him, and his second eyelid flicked down and up. The clear membrane allowed him to see underwater. When it showed on dry land, it meant he was nervous.
"You heard me say that Abloec was not my choice, but the queen's. "
"Why would she send a drunk?"
"I resent that," Abloec said, leaning in toward the major.
Walters wrinkled his nose. "Your breath smells lethal. "
"Just good scotch," Abloec said.
Barinthus grabbed him by both shoulders. "We need some privacy, Major Walters, to discuss things. "
Walters gave Barinthus a sharp nod and called his men out. He tried to leave two, but Barinthus asked him not to. "You are welcome to put officers at both doors, as long as they are outside and do not try to eavesdrop. "
"Unless you yell, they won't hear you. "
Barinthus smiled. "We will try not to yell. "
Walters herded his men out, and Doyle called, "Please, hold the door for Ms. Phelps. "
The publicist looked at him, her eyes wide, mouth in a little O of surprise. It was an act, because she recovered too quickly. "Now, Doyle. " She put her well-manicured hand on his arm in its black leather jacket. "I have to get you all presentable for the press conference. "
He looked at her much the way Walters had, except meaner. She let go of his arm and took a step back. For a moment the real Madeline stared out; ruthless, determined. She played her trump card with a face that was harsh with her anger. "The queen's orders are for me to make sure you are all lovely for the press conference. When she asks why I didn't do that, do you want me to tell her that you contradicted her orders?" She, more than most of the humans who dealt with the court, knew what the queen was capable of, and she used that knowledge well.
I turned in Frost's arms so that my face was framed by the fur of his coat. "None of us is contradicting my aunt's orders," I said.
The look she gave me was just this side of insolence. Madeline had enjoyed the queen's favor for seven years now. Seven years of basking in the absolute power the queen had over beings who could have snapped Madeline in half with their bare hands. She felt safe behind the shield of Andais's power. Up to a point, she was right. Beyond that point - well, I was about to remind her of what that point was.
"We have a major press conference, Meredith. " She didn't even bother to use my title now that no other humans were around to listen. Her glance flicked from Galen's much loved, old brown leather jacket to Doyle's short black on
e, and finally to Kitto's Day-Glo parka. Her lip curled just a bit. "Some of the coats, some of the hair, and you are seriously not wearing enough makeup for this kind of photo opportunity. I have makeup and wardrobe outside. " She turned toward the door as if she'd fetch them.
I said, "No. "
She turned back, and the arrogance on her face would make any sidhe proud. "I can call the queen on my cell, but I promise you, Meredith, that I am following her orders. " She actually slipped a small phone out of the inner pocket of her blazer. A phone so tiny it hadn't disturbed the line of her jacket.
"You are not following her orders, not to the letter," I said. I knew I looked small, near child-like, peeking from amid the ticklish fur of Frost's coat. And for the first time it didn't matter, not to people like Madeline. I could hide my power until we needed it. I didn't have to be forceful to win this one.
She hesitated with the phone open in her hand. "Of course I am. "
"Did my aunt tell you to dress us, and primp us, as soon as we came in out of the cold? Were those her express orders?"
She narrowed her carefully lined and shaded eyes. "Not in so many words, no. " She sounded uncertain, then gained her businessy tone as she continued, "But we have the press conference, and then you'll have to change again before the big party. We have a timetable here, and the queen doesn't like to be kept waiting. " She hit a button on her phone, put it to her ear.
I stepped out from the warmth of Frost's body and whispered in her other ear, "I am heir to the throne, Madeline, and you've always been nasty to me. I'd start trying to make nice if I were you and I liked my job. "
I was leaning so close that I heard my aunt's secretary answer the phone, but not what he said. Madeline said, "Sorry, hit the wrong button. Yes, they're here. We've got some challenges, but nothing we can't handle. Okay, okay, great. " She hung up and stepped back from me the way I'd seen people step back from Andais and Cel over the years, as if she was afraid.
"I'll wait out in the hall. " She licked her lips, glanced at me, but couldn't completely meet my eyes. She wasn't as good at court politics as some. There were those who had tried to kill me before, who would smile and nod to my face, acting as if we'd always been best friends. Madeline wasn't up to that level of duplicity. It made me think better of her.
She hesitated at the door. "But please, hurry. We really do have a rather tight schedule, and the queen did say, exactly, that she had outfits for everyone for the party tonight. She'll want everyone changed before the festivities begin. " She didn't look at me as she left, as if she didn't want me to see what was in her eyes.
When the door clicked firmly behind her, Galen asked, "What did you say to her?"
I shrugged and cuddled back against Frost. "I reminded her that as heir to the throne, I might have some say in who gets hired or fired. "
Galen shook his head. "She went pale. That wasn't just from the threat of being unemployed. "
I looked at him. "Exiled from faerie, Galen, not just unemployed. "
He frowned. "She's not elf-struck. "
"She's not addicted to us, no, but her reaction tells me that she doesn't want to lose her special place among us. She doesn't want to lose the chance of touching sidhe flesh even if it's only in passing. "
"Why does knowing that matter?" he asked.
"It means that we have leverage with Madeline that we didn't before, simple as that. "
"That's not simple," he said.
I looked into his so-honest face, and the near pain it caused him to watch me outthink him, outmaneuver him. I might never need the knowledge that Madeline valued her job enough to be nice to me; but then again, I might. Every bit of knowledge, every bit of weakness and strength, pettiness, cruelty, or kindness, of everyone, could be the very piece of information you needed to survive. I had learned not to undervalue anyone's allegiance, even if it was allegiance simply from the need to cover all bets. It wasn't that Madeline would be cruel to Cel when he was freed, but she'd be nice to both of us now, and that was a start.