go, my friend. Let us just get her back to the vehicle and be-gone."
I put my arm through Doyle's leather-clad arm, though I thought it was too hot for the leather. Frost trailed us, and a glance showed that he was doing his job of searching the area for threats. Unlike a human bodyguard, Frost looked from sky to ground, because when faerie is your potential enemy, danger can come from nearly anywhere.
Doyle was keeping an eye out too, but his attention was divided by trying to keep me from twisting an ankle in the sandals that looked great with the dress but sucked for uneven ground. They didn't have too tall a heel, they were just very open and not supportive. I wondered what I'd wear when I got really pregnant. Did I have any practical shoes except for jogging ones?
The major danger had passed when I'd killed my main rival for the throne and given up the crown. I'd done everything I could to make myself both too dangerous to tempt anyone and harmless to the nobles and their way of life. I was in voluntary exile, and I'd made it clear that it was a permanent move. I didn't want the throne; I just wanted to be left alone. But since some of the nobles had spent the last thousand years plotting to get closer to the throne, they found my decision a little hard to believe.
So far no one had tried to kill me, or anyone close to me, but Doyle was the Queen's Darkness, and Frost was the Killing Frost. They had earned their names, and now that we were all in love and I was carrying their children, it would be a shame to let something go wrong. This was the end of our fairy tale, and maybe we had no enemies left, but old habits aren't always a bad thing. I felt safe with them, except that while I loved them more than life itself, if they died trying to protect me I'd never recover from it. There are all sorts of ways to die without dying.
When we were out of hearing of the human police, I told them all my fears about the killings.
"How do we find out if the lesser fey here are easier to kill?" Frost asked.
Doyle said, "In other days it would have been easy enough."
I stopped walking, which forced him to stop. "You'd just pick a few and see if you could slit their throats?"
"If my queen had asked it, yes," he said.
I started to pull away from him, but he held my arm in his. "You knew what I was before you took me to your bed, Meredith. It is a little late for shock and innocence."
"The queen would say, 'Where is my Darkness? Someone bring me my Darkness.' You would appear, or simply step closer to her, and then someone would bleed or die," I said.
"I was her weapon and her general. I did what I was bid."
I studied his face, and I knew it wasn't just the black wraparound sunglasses that kept me from reading him. He could hide everything behind his face. He had spent too many years beside a mad queen, where the wrong look at the wrong moment could get you sent to the Hallway of Mortality, the torture chamber. Torture could last a long time for the immortal, especially if you healed well.
"I was lesser fey once, Meredith," Frost said. He'd been Jack Frost, and, literally, human belief plus needing to be stronger to protect the woman he loved had turned him into the Killing Frost. But once he had been simply little Jackie Frost, just one minor being in the entourage of Winter's power. The woman he had changed himself completely for was centuries in her human grave, and now he loved me: the only non-aging, non-immortal sidhe royal ever. Poor Frost - he couldn't seem to love people who would outlive him.
"I know you were not always sidhe."
"But I remember when he was the Darkness to me, and I feared him as much as any. Now he is my truest friend and my captain, because that other Doyle was centuries before you were born."
I studied his face, and even around his sunglasses I saw the gentleness - a piece of softness that he'd only let me see in the last few weeks. I realized that just as he would have had Doyle's back in battle, he did the same