“Are you sure?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes.” He helped me stand, but the high heels that hadn’t seemed that high turned underneath me, and he had to catch me or I would have fallen. A small pain sound escaped him, and I remembered he was hurt, too.

“Frost, you’re hurt. I’m so sorry, so sorry …” I pushed away from him, but he wouldn’t let me go. I pushed against his chest, trying to force him to let me go, but he flinched and I realized I was pushing against his wounds. I started to cry again. “Everyone keeps getting hurt.”

Galen picked me up, and Frost let him. “I’m not hurt,” he said with a smile.

“Not yet,” I said, as I curled my arms around his neck and buried my face against the side of his neck. The tears stopped and I was suddenly exhausted. I started shivering again, trembling in his arms as if I would shake myself apart.

I felt him walking and lifted my head enough to see we were following the nurse and that Frost was behind us. The guards that had been waiting outside the little alcove seating area closed in on either side of us. Usna and Cathbodua were there, her raven feather cloak had morphed into a fitted black leather trenchcoat, but I knew it was partly illusion. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her still being on guard duty now that I knew she was pregnant, but it was too hard for me to think about, so I let it go for now. Uniformed police came in at the front and back of the knot of security. They’d given me the breathing room I asked for, but my guards both sidhe and human DSS had been doubled, and the police were determined that I didn’t get killed on their watch.

“Where’s Doyle?” I asked.

“He’s tearing Saraid and Dogmaela a new one,” Galen said.

“It wasn’t their fault,” I said.

“He’s really mad at himself, but he’s going to take it out on them.”

“Why is he mad at himself?”

Frost spoke from just behind us. “Because we both believe if we’d been with you this wouldn’t have happened.”

I shook my head, fought to talk around my chattering teeth, and said, “That’s not true. I don’t think that’s true.”

I tried to think, was there a moment when someone could have done something? Would Doyle and Frost have made the difference? Would that have been much better than Saraid and Dogmaela? Frost had been hurt; he couldn’t have been there today, but Doyle … would Doyle being there have made the difference, or would he have died, too? That thought was too awful. I pushed it back and started to shake until I could barely keep hold of Galen. He held me closer, tighter, as if trying to share his warmth.

The nurse, whose name was Nancy, yes, Nurse Nancy, led us to a private room. One thing being a faerie princess had always gotten me was a better room at the hospital. Being a princess didn’t keep me out of the hospital; in fact, it seemed to put me in more often than if I hadn’t been one, but I did usually get a private room. It was the only way to control the media and the gawkers. I’d been newsworthy all my life, and right at that minute I would have traded all of it for Sholto to walk through the door alive.

The police wanted to secure the room, so did the men and one woman of the diplomatic service, but the sidhe pointed out that none of them could look for magical dangers. It was like trying to get a rugby huddle into one room, no one wanted to be left outside, and each branch of guard wanted to search the room.

Nurse Nancy settled it all. “We’ve got to get the princess out of her wet clothes, so unless you’ve already seen her na**d in person, you have to get out.”

All the humans, both goverment issue and police issue, went in an embarrassed mass for the door. There were enough of them that they had a traffic jam at the door. One of the cops stepped back and asked, “Are you sure that just the two fathers are enough protection for her once we leave the room? She had four guards at the beach.”

It was Cathbodua who said, “Only Usna and I are leaving of our seven guards. I think five Raven guard should be enough.”

“She had four at the beach, remember?” he said.

“Nothing personal, but two of the four were human. This is five of the Raven guard.”

Galen sat me on the bed where the nurse told him to, and then she produced a large plastic bag. “We can put your clothes in here, Princess, if the police don’t need them for evidence. Then they can go home with you.”

I touched the jacket, cold with seawater and wet with blood, and didn’t want to take it off. In some part of my mind I knew it made no sense, but it felt as if once I took it off that Sholto would be more lost to me. Stupid, but it was his jacket, he’d put it on me himself, and it was his blood on it—it was his in a way nothing else would ever be again.

Galen bent over and held my chin in his hand, made me look into his eyes. “Merry, you have to get warm, and for that the clothes have to come off. No one’s going to take the jacket away.”

I nodded, because I was shivering too hard to talk.

Nurse Nancy touched my face. “She’s cold and clammy to the touch. We have to get her out of these clothes now.”

“We will,” Galen said. He sat beside me on the bed and began to slide the jacket off one arm. I let him take it, because it was Galen, and I trusted him to help me keep it.

Frost stood beside me and helped take the other sleeve off, but when he bent a certain way, he hesitated in midmotion as if something hurt.

I grabbed his hand in mine and just looked at him as I sat there shivering in the short skirt and tiny top. Funny how sexy outfits are never good emergency clothing.