“Who are you?” I asked.
He walked toward me looking as my father would if he had never known pain, never been wounded, never died, but the smile was wrong. It was his face, but it wasn’t my father’s smile.
I backed away, so that his outstretched hand wouldn’t touch me. “Who are you?”
He held out his hand. “Come to me, Meredith, but take my hand, and we can step out of this dream.”
“And where will we appear once the dream is finished?” I asked.
“Someplace wonderful.”
I shook my head. “Liar.”
“We cannot lie outright, Meredith; you know that.”
“Drop this guise and show me your true face.”
“Take my hand.”
“Drop this disguise and perhaps I will.”
He stepped closer to me, hand still held out toward me. “Who do you want me to be?” he asked.
“Show yourself as you truly are, and stop tormenting me with my dead father’s face.”
“I thought the sight of Essus would comfort you,” he said, and frowned as if he didn’t understand, and maybe he didn’t.
“You were wrong; show me your face.” My voice was strident, not with anger, but fear.
“If you let me hold you now, it will be as if Essus were here to embrace you one last time. I can give you that, Meredith; my powers have returned. The Goddess has blessed us both again.”
“The Goddess gives Her power where She will. I do not question it, but one man’s blessing is another’s curse; drop this illusion and show me …” I stopped, because the moment I said illusion, I knew; Goddess and Consort help me, but I knew.
One moment I was staring up into the face of my dead father, and next it was Taranis, the King of Light and Illusion. He was all red and gold of hair, his eyes like green petals of some exotic flower, tall and commanding, and truly one of the most handsome men to ever grace the high courts of faerie.
“Come, Meredith, embrace me as one of the fathers of your children.”
I screamed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HE GRABBED MY wrist and started to pull me to him, but I thought, I need something to hold on to, and my other hand found smooth wood to grip, a carved banister leading up to nowhere, but it was a handhold, and I made my choice that I’d let him break my arm before I let go.
“Meredith, I’d never hurt you.”
“You raped me!”
“Lies, Meredith, all lies. I saved you from the Unseelie monsters. You have a babe that grows horns, and another spotted like a dog, but our daughter is perfect. They are twisted of body, and it is a miracle you have survived.”
His eyes began to glow as if every green petaled layer of his iris were turning to green flame, and I was falling into that flame. I wanted to touch his hair, colored like all the brilliance of a fiery sunset. My hand loosened on the banister behind me, and then a single rose petal fell and landed on the mound of my breast. I was not a victim.
He held my wrist; so be it. I opened my hand and laid my palm against his skin and called one of my hands of power. His skin began to writhe as if it were turning liquid where I touched him.
He yelled and let me go. “What is this?”
“The hand of flesh is my hand of power, as my father carried it before me.”
Taranis’s arm began to roll up on itself, as the bones and muscle began to spill out to the surface, turning inside out, and spreading up his arm.
“Stop this!” he yelled, but even as I watched, the flowing skin had stopped just short of his shoulder. If he’d laid the arm against other bare skin it would have spread, but he had jerked away quickly enough that it hadn’t turned his entire body inside out. The hand of flesh could do that, and had. It had been one of the worst things I’d ever seen, but I was half sorry it hadn’t done just that to Taranis.
“This is dream; you don’t have this power outside of dream.” He was staring at his arm, and the horror on his face as he looked up at me made part of me … happy.
“You knocked me unconscious and nearly killed me before you mounted me last time. I was too hurt to fight back.”
“This is not real!” He yelled it at me.
“I don’t know, uncle dear; perhaps when you wake up your arm will be healed, or perhaps it will be a reminder to you to stay away from me, my babies, and everyone I hold dear, because if you ever touch me by force again, in dream or reality, I will destroy you, Taranis.”
“It isn’t real,” he said, but his voice was uncertain.
“For your sake, I hope not,” I said. “Honestly, for my own sake, I hope it is.”
“I saved you, Meredith; why do you hate me?”
I wished for a sword, and one was in my hand. The hilt was cool and perfect. You had to look close to see the carved tiny bodies melting into each other as the only warning for what might happen if you touched the sword. It was Aben-dul, once my father’s centuries before I was born, and it fit my hand as it had the first time it appeared to me in reality. It had never just appeared in my hand before, but this was a dream—anything was possible.
“Where did that come from?” And now he was afraid, and that made me fiercely happy.
“You can stop me from leaving this dream, but you can’t stop me from creating what I need inside it.”
“You shouldn’t be able to do that,” he said.
“You said it yourself, uncle: I have traveled through dream to soldiers who held relics of my blood and pain. The Goddess comes to me in my dreams. I hold my father’s hand of power and a sword of Unseelie grace, but I am Seelie as well as Unseelie. I hold the wonders and nightmares of both courts inside me, uncle dearest.”