Free Merry Gentry 03 - Seduced by Moonlight by Laurell K. Hamilton Page B

"Thisss one wouldn't shine for me. If you'd have glowed underneath me, I wouldn't have taken your eye."
    "I told you then, and I tell you now. You can force yourself on me, but you can't make me enjoy it. You're a lousy lay."
    She swarmed off the chair and was suddenly filling the mirror, as if she'd grown larger, all those legs reaching for us, those hands, and that strange half-formed mouth. She battered at the glass with her limbs and shrieked, "I will kill you, Rhysss, and the princessssss will not save Kitto. I will have him, and I'll make him sssshine for me!"
    Kitto screamed from the far side of the bed. We all turned and looked at him. His face was pale, his blue eyes huge in his face. He flung out his right hand as he screamed, "Noooo!"
    Rhys flung us both off the bed a second before I felt the spell shiver through the air above us. It was as if the glass had melted, and Siun began to slide through that melting. Head, one arm, her other arm flailing, searching for something to hold on to. She slid farther, fighting the fall, and not able to stop it.
    Kitto put both hands in front of him as if to ward her off, and he screamed again, wordless this time, pitched high with terror.
    Rhys pressed me to the carpet, covering my body with his. There was more screaming, and not all of it was Kitto's. Doyle's voice said, "Let the princess up, Rhys." He sounded puzzled.
    Rhys went to his knees, looking around the room, then staring toward the glass, and it was Doyle's hand that helped me to my feet.
    Frost was holding Kitto, rocking him as you'd comfort a child. I turned to look where Rhys was staring.
    Siun had stopped sliding through the mirror. Half her long black legs were on this side of the glass, and the other half were still back with Kurag. One of her hands reached into this room; the other was beating on the glass on the other side, as if trying to break it. She was cursing low and steady. She tried to struggle free, flashing her breasts in the sunlight, but she was trapped. If she'd been mortal, she'd have died, but she wasn't mortal, and she wasn't dying. She was just stuck.
    Doyle went close to the glass, but stayed out of the reach of Siun's struggling legs. "It seems solid now."
    Kurag spoke on his end of the glass. "Now isn't this a bitch of a predicament?"
    "Yes," Doyle said.
    "Can you fix it?" Kurag asked.
    Doyle glanced at Kitto, who seemed nearly catatonic in Frost's arms. "It was Kitto's magic. He could reverse it, if he understood how. But no one else in this room can do this."
    "What by the Consort's horns did Kitto do?" Kurag was close to the mirror on his side, looking at it, but carefully not touching the glass.
    "Some sidhe can travel through mirrors, as most can speak through them. Though I've never heard of any who could travel over this many miles." Doyle was studying the mirror and the trapped goblin as if it were a purely academic problem and he was trying to figure out how it worked.
    "Can Kitto undo it?"
    "Frost," Doyle said, "ask Kitto if he will free her from the mirror, send her back."
    Frost spoke low to the smaller man in his lap. Kitto shook his head violently, huddling in against Frost. "He's afraid that if he opens the mirror again, she'll fall through into this room."
    "Just push her back this way," Kurag said.
    Frost answered, "He says she can stay in the mirror until she rots."
    "She won't rot." Kurag turned back to Doyle. "She's not mortal, Darkness, she won't die." He tapped the glass lightly. "This will not destroy her."
    "Well, she can't just stay in the mirror like this," I said. I wasn't sure what we were going to do, but I knew just leaving her there wasn't an option.
    "Actually, Meredith, she could," Doyle said.
    I shook my head. "I don't mean that it's not possible, Doyle, I mean it's not acceptable. I don't want her in my bedroom mirror like some living trophy mounted on a wall."
    "I understand." He looked at the trapped goblin. "I will entertain suggestions, but in honesty,