her no smoking in my home.
"Meredith, please, I need it."
"Then you can do it outside."
She lowered her sunglasses enough to show me those famous blue eyes. She was wearing her human glamour again, trying to look as un-sidhe as possible. She kept that blue stare on me as she flung open the coat to frame that long golden body. She was nude except for her boots.
"Do I look dressed for your neighbors' viewing?"
I shook my head. "Your glamour is good enough to hide you buck naked in the middle of a highway, so close the coat, and take your nerves and your cigarettes outside."
She let the coat fall closed, leaving a thin line of her body showing between the soft mounds of fur. "How can you be so cruel?"
"This isn't cruel, Maeve, and well you know it. You spent too many centuries around the courts to think I'm being cruel just because I don't want your cigarettes stinking up my apartment."
She actually pouted at me. I'd had enough. "When I come back inside heavy with magic, I want to find Conchenn, goddess of beauty and spring, not some spoiled star. No glamour either. I want to see those lightning-kissed eyes."
She opened her mouth -- to protest, I think. I stopped it with a wave of my hand. "Save it, Maeve, and do what you need to do to help this work."
She pushed her sunglasses back over her eyes and said in a much smaller voice, "You've changed, Meredith. There's a hardness in you that wasn't there before."
"Not hardness," Doyle said, "command. She will be queen and she understands that now."
Maeve glanced from him to me. "Fine, what's with the bikini? I thought you were going to fuck, not go to the beach."
"I know you're angry and scared about your husband, and that cuts you some slack, but there's a limit to that slack, Maeve. Don't push it."
She lowered her head, still fingering the unlit cigarette and unused lighter. "I don't mean to be such a fucking prima donna, but I am desperately worried about Gordon. Can't you understand that?"
"I understand, but if I wasn't having to sit here and argue with you, I could already be at the ritual site preparing myself."
I turned my back very deliberately on her, hoping she'd take the hint. "Doyle, you've extended the wards to include the little garden area in the house behind us, as I requested?"
"Yes, Princess, I have."
I took a deep breath. Here was the moment that I had been dreading. I had to choose one of the men to act as my consort for the ritual, but who? I don't know what I would have decided, because Galen said, voice clear but uncertain, "I'm whole again, Merry."
Everyone but Maeve turned to stare at him. He looked a little uncomfortable under the scrutiny, but there was also a pleased smile on his face, and a look in his eyes that I hadn't seen in a long time.
"I don't mean to dampen the mood," Rhys said, "but how do we know he's cured? Maeve and Gordon may not get another shot at this."
Doyle interrupted. "If Galen says that he is healed enough for this ritual, I for one believe him."
I looked at Doyle. His face was its usual dark mask, unreadable. He rarely spoke unless he was certain of something.
"How can you be certain?" Frost asked.
"Meredith needs a consort to her goddess. Who better than the green man whose life has only recently returned to him?"
I knew that the green man was sometimes a nickname for the Goddess's Consort, sometimes a name for the generic forest god. I looked at Galen. He certainly was the green man.
"If Doyle thinks it's all right, then let it be Galen."
I don't think Frost was happy with the choice, but everyone else took it in stride, and Frost kept his mouth shut. Sometimes that's all you can ask of a man, or anyone else.
Chapter 35-36
Chapter 35
I needed to be alone to prepare myself for the ritual. Doyle hadn't liked me being on my own for even a little while, but we'd extended the house wards across the back wall to the small neglected garden of the house behind us. Neglected was good in this case because it meant that no pesticides or herbicides had been used in a very long time. We'd put up a ritual circle earlier in the day. I opened a doorway in that circle, stepped through, and closed it behind me. Now I