A Stroke Of Midnight - By Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,126

you saying, Rhys?" Doyle was leaning to one side of the door.

"That according to the FBI and the people who escorted Carmichael out, only a few minutes had passed since I put Carmichael outside of the mound."

"It's been hours since then," I said. I was sitting on the corner of the wide marble edge of the tub, trying to make myself small, so we weren't too crowded.

"Not according to the humans outside," Rhys said.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"It means that the sithen is playing with time," Doyle said.

"Time always runs funny inside faerie," I said.

"But only in pockets," Rhys said, "and only by a few minutes, maybe an hour. Faerie has been on the same time schedule as the mortal world since before we came to America." He leaned against the double sinks, fitting himself beside Galen.

Nicca had most of the far corner of the room for himself and the sweep of his wings. "What does it mean?"

Frost spoke from the wall on the other side of the door. "It means that it isn't only the sidhe and the demi-fey who are regaining some of their old powers."

"You told me that the humans reacted to the entrance to faerie as if the hallway had its old glamour," Doyle said. "Why should we be surprised that the sithen is gaining back other abilities as well."

I hugged my knees, trying to ignore the scratchy dried blood on my jeans. Kitto was testing the nearly full tub. I said, "Sometimes you talk about the sithen as if it's just a building, sometimes you talk as if it's a being in its own right, sometimes you speak of the sithen as if it is faerie. I asked my father once if the sithen was alive, and he said yes. I asked if it was a person, and he said no. I asked if it was faerie, and he said yes. I asked if it was the totality of faerie, and he said no. Does anyone alive today actually know what the sithen are?"

"You do ask the most difficult questions sometimes." Rhys crossed his arms, the white of his trench coat framing his pale suit. A wet line on his trousers showed where the snow had stained the cloth. He'd made two more trips outside that night than most of the rest of us.

"Does that mean you can't answer the question, or you won't?"

"You're Princess Meredith NicEssus, our future queen; if you order it, we have to answer," he said.

I frowned at him. "I did not order you to tell me, Rhys, I asked."

He rubbed the heel of his hand against his good eye, and when he lowered it, he looked tired. He might be boyishly handsome forever, but his face could still hold lines of weariness now and then. "I'm sorry, Merry. But if the sithen is messing with time, then we're going to have to post a guard outside of faerie, so that we can figure out the difference between the two places chronologically. That will tell us how bad it is right now, but..."

"But not how big the difference will grow," Nicca said.

Rhys nodded. "This could get really bad."

"I'm losing something here," I said. "Why do you all look so worried?"

"Don't look at me," Galen said. "I don't know why they all look gloomy about it either. I mean the sithen does a lot of weird stuff, it always has."

"And what if the sithen decides to make the difference between inside faerie and outside faerie not just hours to minutes, but years to days?" Rhys said.

Galen and I exchanged a look. He said, "Can it do that?" I said, "Oh."

"It has in the past," Rhys said.

"I thought that the queen or king of the court controlled the time difference," I said.

"Once," Doyle said, "but that ability went away long ago."

"Wait," Galen said, "did you say the queen could control how big the time difference was?"

Several of us nodded.

"Didn't the old stories say that only hours would pass inside faerie, but centuries would pass outside in the human world?"

"Yes," Doyle said, looking at Galen as if he had said something smart.

"We accomplished a lot in the last few hours, but the rest of the world has used up only a few minutes. In effect, our sithen is moving faster than everybody else. Isn't that opposite of the way it used to work? Didn't mortal time move faster than ours?"

I watched the rest of them exchange glances, except for Kitto, who seemed totally