A Caress of Twilight

Chapter 39



Lucy flashed her badge a lot to get us through the metal detectors with our guns and blades intact. The men even had to show the cards identifying them as queen's guardsmen before the nurse in charge would let us on the floor. But finally we stood at the bedside of a man... well, of a male. He was a tiny, misshapen thing. Sage was tiny, too, but he was perfectly proportioned. He was meant to be the size he was; clearly, the man who lay in the bed with the sheets tucked up under his arms was, even at a glance, wrong.



I am Unseelie Court and I call many shapes right, pleasant, but something about this one made the hair on the back of my neck crawl. It made me want to look away, as if he was hideous, though he wasn't.



I wasn't the only one having trouble. Rhys and Frost had looked away, turned their backs. Their reaction said that they either knew him or knew what had happened. It was a turning away like a shunning. Had he broken some age-old taboo? Doyle did not look away, but then he almost never did. Galen exchanged a look with me that said he was as puzzled and disturbed as I was. Kitto stayed near my side, where he'd insisted on being, one hand in mine like a child seeking comfort.



I forced myself to keep looking, to try to figure out what it was about this small man that made me want to cringe. He was a little over two feet tall, his tiny feet making small bumps in the sheet. Something about his body seemed foreshortened, even though everything was there. His head was a little big for the thin torso. His eyes were large and liquid, far too large for the face. It was as if the eyes were left over from some other face. His nose matched the eyes, but because the rest of the face had receded, the nose looked too large, as well. That was what it looked like, as if his eyes and nose had been left stranded while the rest of his face had grown smaller, meaner, pinched, and wasted.



Nicca moved through the rest of us and held his hand out. "Oh, Bucca, what has become of thee?"



The tiny figure on the bed remained immobile at first. Then, slowly, he raised one small hand on an arm so thin it was like thick string. He laid that tiny pale brown hand against Nicca's strong brown one.



Kitto turned a face shining with tears up to the lights. "Bucca-Dhu, Bucca-Dhu, what are you here?"



I thought at first Kitto had left out a word or two; then I realized he hadn't. He'd asked exactly what he wished to know.



"The two of you know him," Doyle said, making it more statement than question.



Nicca nodded, patting the tiny hand ever so gently. He spoke rapidly in the strangely musical tones of one of the old Celtic tongues. It was too rapid for me to follow, but it wasn't Welsh and it wasn't Scots, Gaelic, or Irish, which still left several dialects, not to mention countries to go.



Kitto joined in, speaking something close to what Nicca spoke, but not exactly -- a different dialect or maybe from a different century, like the difference between Middle English and modern English.



I watched Kitto's face, the eagerness, the sorrow. I knew he was very sad to find this man here in this condition, but that was all I could follow.



Doyle spoke in modern English at last. Maybe everyone else had been following just fine, but I had not. "Nicca knew him in a form not so different from this one, but Kitto remembers him as we are now, a sidhe. Bucca was once worshipped as a god."



I looked down at the wizened shape and knew what had made my skin crawl. Those huge brown eyes, that strong, straight nose -- they were very like Nicca's. I'd always assumed that Nicca's brown skin and eyes had come from the demi-fey in his heritage; but now, staring down at the tiny figure, I knew I'd been wrong.



I looked at the man with a renewed fit of horror, for now I could suddenly see it. It was as if someone had taken one of the sidhe and compressed him down into something the size of a large rabbit. I had no words for the horror that lay nearly lost in that hospital bed. And no thought to how he could have come to that form.



"How?" I asked softly, and wished instantly that I hadn't, because the small figure on the bed looked at me with those eyes, that shrunken face.



He spoke in clear though accented English. "I have brought myself to this, girl. Me and me alone."



"No," Nicca said. "That isn't true, Bucca."



The small figure shook his head, his dark hair cut short, but resting thick upon his pillow, bunching as he moved. "There are faces here I know, Nicca, beyond yours and the goblin's. There are others who were once worshipped and eventually lost their followers. They did not waste away like this. I refused to give up my power, because I thought it would diminish me." He laughed, and the sound was bitter enough to choke on. "Now look at me, Nicca, what my pride and my fear have done to me."



I was confused, to put it lightly, but, like is so often the case in fey society, the very questions I needed to ask were considered rudely direct.



The man in the bed turned his oddly heavy head to look at Kitto. "The last time we met, I thought you tiny." Those strangely compelling eyes looked up at the goblin. "You have changed, goblin."



"He is sidhe," Nicca said.



Bucca looked surprised, then laughed. "You see, I fought so hard for so many centuries to keep our blood pure, to mix with no one. I considered you an unclean thing once, Nicca."



Nicca kept patting the other man's hand. "That was long ago, Bucca."



"I would not let any of our pure Bucca-Dhu line go out among the other sidhe. Now all that is left of my line is those like you who were not pure." He turned his head and it looked like it took effort. "And all that is left of all the Bucca-Gwidden is you, goblin."



"There are others among the goblins, Bucca-Dhu. And you see the moonlight skin on these sidhe? The Bucca-Gwidden are remembered."



"They may share the skin, but not the hair or eyes. No, goblin, they are lost, and it is my doing. I would not let any of our people join with the others. We would stay the hidden people and keep to the old ways. There are no old ways left, goblin."



"He is sidhe," Doyle said, "acknowledged by the Unseelie Court as such."



Bucca smiled, but not like he was happy. "And even now all I can think is that I did not know the Unseelie sidhe had sunk so low as to accept goblins into their ranks. Even dying as I am, having seen the last of my people die before me, and I cannot see him as sidhe. I cannot." He took his hand out of Nicca's grasp and closed his eyes, but not like he'd fallen asleep, more like he was trying not to see.



Detective Lucy had been very patient through all of this. "Could someone explain to me what's going on?"



Doyle exchanged glances with Frost and Rhys, but none of them spoke. I shrugged. "Don't look at me. I'm almost as confused as you are."



"Me, too," Galen said. "I recognized either Cornish or Breton, but the accent was too archaic for me."



"Cornish," Doyle said, "They were speaking Cornish."



"I thought there weren't any goblins in Cornwall," Galen said.



Kitto turned from the bed and looked at the tall knight. "Goblins were not all one people any more than the sidhe were merely two separate courts. We were all more than this once. I was a Cornish goblin, because my sidhe mother was a Bucca-Gwidden, a Cornish sidhe, before she joined the Seelie Court. When she saw the form her babe had taken, she knew where to lay her burden down and left me among the snakes of Cornwall."



"There are nests of snakes everywhere in the Isles," Bucca said in a thick voice. "Even in Ireland, no matter what the followers of Padrig want you to believe."



"Most of the goblins are in America now," Kitto said.



"Aye," Bucca said, "because no other country would have them."



"Aye," Kitto said.



"Okay," Lucy said, "Whatever's happening, old home week, family feud, I don't care. I want to know how this Bucca, who lists his name as Nick Bottom, which I looked up -- a character from A Midsummer Night's Dream, very cute -- ended up here nearly sucked dry of life."



"Bucca," Nicca said softly.



The small figure opened his eyes. They were full of such aching tiredness that I had to look away. It was like looking down a tunnel into something worse than oblivion, so much worse than death.



His accent thickened with his emotions. "I cannae die, you understand that, Nicca, I cannae die. I was the king of my people and I cannae even fade like some did. But I am fadin'." He raised one piteously thin arm. "I am fadin' like this, like some giant hand is squeezin' me down."



"Bucca, please, tell us how you came to be attacked by the hungry ghosts," Nicca said in his soft voice.



"When this flesh I am still clingin' to fades, I'll be one of 'em. I'll be one of the Starvin' Ones."



"No, Bucca."



He held out that thin, thin arm. "No, Nicca, that is what happened to most of the others who were strong. We cannae die, but we cannae live, so we be betwixt and between."



"Not good enough for heaven," Doyle said, "nor bad enough for hell."



Bucca looked at him. "Yes."



"I always love getting insight into fey culture, but let's get back to the attacks," Lucy said. "Tell me about the attack on you, Mr. Bottom, or Mr. Bucca, or whatever."



He blinked up at her almost owlishly. "They attacked me at the first sign of weakness."



"Could you expand on that a little?" Lucy said. She had her notebook open, pen poised.



"You raised them," Rhys said. It was the first time he'd turned around, the first time he'd really looked at Bucca since we'd entered the room.



"Aye," Bucca said.



"Why?" I asked.



"It was part of the price I had to pay to rejoin the faerie courts."



That stopped us all. For a second, it seemed to make sense. Andais had done it, or had it done. That was why no one could track it back to her. It explained why none of her people had known about it. She hadn't used any of her people.



"Pay to whom?" Doyle asked.



I looked at him, almost saying aloud, we all know.



Then Bucca spoke. "Taranis, o' course."



Chapter 40



We all turned to the bed like a slow-motion scene from a movie.



"Did you say Taranis?" I asked.



"Are ya deaf, girl?"



"No," I said, "just surprised."



Bucca frowned up at me. "Why?"



I blinked down at him, thought about it. "I didn't think Taranis was this crazy."



"Then ya ha' not been payin' attention."



"She hasn't seen Taranis since she was a child, Bucca," Doyle said.



"I apologize then." He looked at me critically. "She looks like Seelie sidhe."



I wasn't sure what to do with the compliment. I wasn't even sure if, under the circumstances, it was a compliment.



Lucy walked around to the far side of the bed. "Are you saying the King of the Seelie Court had you raise these hungry ghosts?"



"Aye."



"Why?" she asked. We seemed to all be asking that question a lot today.



"He wanted them to kill Maeve Reed."



Lucy just stared at him. "Okay, I'm lost. Why should the king want the golden goddess of Hollywood dead?"



"I don't know why," Bucca said, "and I didna care. Taranis promised to give me enough power to recover some of what I'd lost. I was finally willing to join the Seelie Court. But he promised it to me on condition of Maeve's death, and that I could control the Starving Ones. Many o' them were friends of old. I thought they were like me and would welcome a chance to return, but they are no longer Bucca, or sidhe, or even fey. They are dead things, dead monsters." He closed his eyes and took a deep shaking breath.



"The first time I faltered, they attacked me, and now they feed, not to return to the old ways, but because they are hungry. They feed for the same reason that a wolf feeds. Because it hungers. If they gain enough lives to return to something close to sidhe, it will be so awful that not even the Unseelie Court will be able to match the horror of them."



"Not to complain," Lucy said, "but why didn't you tell all this to the social worker or the ambassador?"



"It was when I saw Nicca, and even the goblin, that I knew I'd been a fool. My time is past, but my people live on. As long as me blood is walkin' around, then the Bucca are not dead." Tears glittered in his eyes. "I tried to save meself, even if it meant destroying what was left of me people. I was wrong, terrible wrong."



He reached out for Nicca's hand this time, and Nicca took his with a smile.



"How do we stop them?" Doyle asked.



"I raised them, but I cannae lay them. I have not the strength."



"Can you tell us the spell?" Doyle asked.



"Aye, but that da' na mean you can do it."



"Let us worry about that," Doyle said.



Bucca told us how he'd planned to lay the ghosts. Lucy actually took notes. The rest of us just listened. It wasn't a matter of magic words, more of magical intent and just knowing how to think it through.



When he'd finished telling us everything he knew about the Starving Ones, I asked, "Have you been hiding the Nameless from the Unseelie Court?"



"Girl, have ya not been payin' attention? Taranis is hidin' it."



"You raised that for him, too?" I couldn't keep the surprise out of my voice.



"I raised the Starvin' Ones with a little help from Taranis, but Taranis raised the Nameless with only a little help from me."



"He was one of the main powers behind its casting," Doyle said.



"Why would Taranis do that?" I asked.



"I thought he meant to take some of his power back from the thing," Bucca said, "and mayhap he did, but it didn't work out like he'd planned."



"So Taranis is controlling the Nameless," Galen said.



"Nay, lad, do not ya un'erstand yet? Taranis freed it, gave it orders to kill this Maeve, but he no more controls it than I do the Starvin' Ones. He hid what he had done, but it is the thing itself that is hiding it now. Taranis was not half-panicked when he realized that, I tell you. He was scared, and he should be."



"What do you mean?" I asked.



"When I tried to send the Starvin' Ones through Maeve's wards, they couldna reach her. They turned on me, and found other prey. I saw the thing that you call the Nameless. It will breach her wards, and once it has killed her, then what will it do?"



"I don't know," I said softly.



"Anything it damn well pleases," Bucca said.



"What he means," Rhys said, "is that once the Nameless kills Maeve Reed it won't have a purpose anymore. It will just be this huge powerful thing, and it will destroy everything around it."



"Now there is a smart boy," Bucca said.



I looked at Rhys. "How do you know that for certain?"



"I gave most of my magic to that thing. I know what it will do, Merry. We have to keep it from killing Maeve. As long as she's alive, it will keep trying to kill her, and it will keep trying to hide its presence until it's done that. Once she's dead it'll just explode all over the city. The most alien energy the fey had to offer will be let loose in Southern California. The thing will stomp through L.A. like Godzilla through Tokyo."



"How am I supposed to convince Peterson that some ancient fey magic is about to stomp the city?" Lucy asked.



"You aren't," I said. "He won't believe it anyway."



"Then what are we going to do?" she asked.



"We're going to go keep Maeve Reed alive. Maybe convince her that Europe would be good this time of year. Maybe just keep her moving ahead of it until we can figure out something else."



"Not a bad idea," Rhys said.



"I take it back," said Bucca. "You're a smart one, too."



"Glad to hear that," I said. "Does someone have a cell phone?"



Lucy had one. I took it from her, and she gave me Maeve Reed's number out of her little notebook. I dialed, and Marie, the personal assistant, answered. She was hysterical. She began to scream, "It's the princess, it's the princess!" Julian took the phone from her. "Meredith, is that you?"



"Yeah, Julian, what's wrong?"



"Something's here, something so psychically big I can't even begin to sense all of it. It's trying to get through the wards, and I think it's going to do it."



I started for the door. "We're on our way, Julian. We'll send the police on ahead of us."



"You don't sound surprised, Meredith. Do you know what this thing is?"



"Yes," and I told him as we ran through the hospital toward the cars. I told him what it was, but I didn't know if anything I told him was going to help at all.