I prayed as I found the wound. It was almost as wide as my palm, and blood was welling out of it. Something that held a lot of blood had been punctured. I’d had human anatomy in college, but for the life of me, or for the life of Hayes, I couldn’t seem to think what organ was on this side of the body. I didn’t know what had been damaged, but I knew she was going to die if I couldn’t help her.

“We were just supposed to take some supplies up to a school, but they ambushed us. The cutest little boy stabbed me, because I hesitated. I couldn’t kill a child, or thought I couldn’t, but they killed Dickerson, and Breck, and Sunshine, and then he tried to kill me, and suddenly he wasn’t a child anymore, he was just another murdering bastard.” She started to cry, and that made her groan with pain.

I prayed for guidance. I was trying to hold pressure on the wound, but without a medical kit, or the Goddess granting me the ability to heal with my hands, I couldn’t save her. And then I realized that she, Hayes, had healed other wounded with her hands, because she’d told me so when she was on leave last time; had that only been two months ago?

“Heal yourself, Hayes,” I said.

She shook her head. “I killed that little boy, Meredith. I killed him. I killed him, and I can’t forgive myself. We killed the men before everyone but me died, but the boy … he couldn’t have been more than ten. My little brother’s age. Jesus, Meredith, how could I kill a kid?”

“He tried to kill you, Hayes, and if you don’t heal yourself, he will have killed you.”

“Maybe I deserve to die.”

“No, Hayes, no you don’t.” I kept pressure on the wound to try to slow the blood loss while I helped her forgive herself, because I knew now that was why I was there.

She cried harder, and that made the wound hurt more and gush hot around my hands. She slipped lower in the doorway. She was going to bleed to death in front of me.

“Goddess, please, help me to help her.”

I smelled roses and I knew the Goddess was with me, and then I felt/saw/knew that she would be standing over us. To me she was a cloaked figure, because Goddess comes to us all in different ways, or all ways.

Hayes looked up and said, “Grandma, what you doing here?”

“You let this woman heal you, Angela May Hayes. Don’t you fight her.”

“You don’t know what I did, Grandma.”

“I heard, but Angela, if a boy is old enough to pick up a weapon and kill you, then he’s not a child anymore, he’s a soldier just like you are, and you did what you had to do.”

“He was Jeffrey’s age.”

“Your brother would never hurt anyone.”

“Jeffrey was a baby when you died, how do you know?”

I felt the smile like the sun coming through clouds after a storm. You couldn’t help but smile when the Goddess smiled. “I keep watch over my babies. I saw you graduate from college. I’m so proud of my angel, and I need you to live, Angela. I need you to go back home and help your mama and Jeffrey and all the rest, do you hear me, Angela?”

“I hear you, Grandma.”

“You have to get better; you’ll be my angel for real one of these days, but not tonight. You heal and go home to our family.”

“Yes, Grandma,” she said.

The blood slowed and then stopped pouring out. I hadn’t done anything, but Angela Hayes had, and the Goddess had, and Hayes’s grandmother had.

“I think I’m better,” Hayes said, and grabbed my hand with hers. “Thank you, Meredith, thank you for bringing my grandma to talk to me.”

“The Goddess brought your grandmother,” I said.

“But you brought the Goddess.”

I held her hand tight and said, “The Goddess is always there for you; you don’t need me to find Her.”

Hayes smiled and then frowned. “I see lights.”

I glanced down the road and saw a line of armored vehicles of all kinds coming over the hill, their lights cutting the thick starlight so that the night seemed both more black and less at the same time.

“They talk about a red-haired Madonna that appears when people need her. No one seems to know it’s you but us.” I knew she meant the other soldiers.

“It’s better that way,” I said.

She gripped my hand tight. “Then you better go before the trucks get closer.”

I touched her face and realized I still had her blood on my hands, so I left the bloody imprints of my fingertips on her skin. “Be well, be safe, come home soon,” I said.

She smiled, and this time it was bright and real. “I will, Meredith, I will.”

The dream broke while I was still holding her hand. I woke in my bed in Los Angeles with the fathers of my babies on either side of me. My hands and nightgown were covered in blood, and it wasn’t mine.

CHAPTER

TWO

YOU’D THINK, AFTER a goddess had sent me halfway around the world to save a life and brought me back to my own bed, that my life would be full of magic, and it was, but it was also full of normal things. That’s what no one tells you: that even when Deity takes a hand in your life, and you answer their call, your ordinary life doesn’t go away. I was still pregnant and it had not been a trouble-free pregnancy. If you are following Deity’s plan for you, it isn’t always the easy path; sometimes it’s the hard one. So why follow? Because to do any less is to betray your own abilities and gifts, and the faith that Deity has in you. Who would do that willingly?

Ultrasound pictures are grainy, black and white and gray, and really not all that clear, but it’s a way to get the earliest picture of your unborn child. We had quite a little album of the blurry images at thirty-four weeks into the pregnancy, but the latest one … it was the money shot, because it showed something the other ones hadn’t: We were having triplets.

The twins, as we’d begun to call them, were still floating in front of the picture, but it was as if they were petals of a flower finally opening up enough to show a third baby, shadowy and much less distinct, but very there. The third baby was visibly smaller than the other two, which wasn’t uncommon, Dr. Heelis, my main obstetrician, assured us.

We were all sitting in the conference room at the hospital now, because Dr. Heelis had been joined by Dr. Lee, Dr. Kelly, and Dr. Rodriguez. They each had their specialties in gynecology and delivering babies, or something else needed as a precaution. I hadn’t gained most of the extra medical specialists since they spotted the third baby; they’d been my team almost from the beginning of my pregnancy, because I was Princess Meredith NicEssus—legal name Meredith Gentry, because Princess looks so pretentious on a driver’s license. Dr. Kelly was the new face, but then what was a new doctor compared to a whole new baby?

I was the only faerie princess to be born on American soil, but not for much longer. One of the babies was a girl. My daughter would be Princess Gwenwyfar. We were still negotiating on the rest of her names, since we wouldn’t know until DNA testing who her father was; I’d narrowed it down to six.

All six of them sat on either side of the long oval conference table, strung out like strong, handsome beads on the string of my love.

Doyle, Darkness, sat on my left. He was everything his name promised: tall, handsome, and so dark he was black. Not the way people’s skin was black, but like a dog’s skin and hair could be so black that it had blue and purple highlights in the sun. In the dimmer light of the conference room his skin was just unrelieved blackness, as if the darkest night had been carved into flesh and made real. His ankle-length hair was back in its usual braid so that his pointed ears with their edging of silver earrings showed. If he’d hidden the ears no one would have known he wasn’t pure-blooded Unseelie sidhe, but he made sure the one sign that he wasn’t pure sidhe showed most of the time in public. I’d never asked him why, but it was a constant slap in the face to every other sidhe who could hide their mixed heritage. He’d stood at the side of the Queen of Air and Darkness for over a thousand years with his less than pure genetics, flaunting them, and the glittering throng had feared him, because he had been the queen’s assassin and captain of her guards. No one lived that Doyle was sent to kill. Now he was my Darkness, the Princess’s Darkness, but he wasn’t my assassin. He was my bodyguard, and he’d guarded my body well enough that I was pregnant with his child. That was some good guarding.