Bloodfever (15 page)

“Did you steal the amulet?”

He laughed. “Ah, so that was what you were after. I wondered. It amplifies the will, MacKayla.”

“Your point?”

“I have no use for it. My will needs no amplifying. My will shapes worlds. The amulet was fashioned for one like you with no will of which to speak.”

“Just because we can't manipulate reality with our thoughts doesn't mean we don't have will. Maybe we
do
shape reality, just on a different scale, and you don't see it.”

“Perhaps. The queen suspects such might be the case.”

“She does?”

“That is why she sent me to help you, so that you may help us, and together we may ensure the survival of both our races. Have you learned anything about the
Sinsar Dubh
?”

I thought about that a moment. Should I tell him? What should I tell him? Perhaps I could use it as leverage. “Yes.”

The palm trees stopped swaying, the waves froze, the birds halted mid-dive. Despite the sun, I shivered. “Would you please start the world again?” It was creepy frozen. Things moved once more.

“What have you learned?”

“Did you know my sister?”

“No.”

“How could that be? You knew about me.”

“We learned of you because we were watching Barrons. Your sister, who we've since become aware of, did not know Barrons. Their paths never crossed, ergo nor did ours. Now, tell me of the
Sinsar Dubh
.”

“Why were you watching Barrons?”

“Barrons needs watching. The book, MacKayla.”

I wasn't done yet. The book was big information, surely worth more of an exchange. “Do you know the Lord Master?”

“Who?”

“You're kidding, right?”

“No. Who is this Lord Master?”

“He's the one bringing the Unseelie through. He's their leader.”

V'lane looked astonished. No more so than I felt. He and Barrons both knew so much yet were missing chunks of essential information. They were so smart in some ways, and so blind in others.

“Is he Fae?” he demanded.

“No.”

He looked incredulous. “How can that be? A Fae would not follow a
hu
man.”

I hadn't said he was human. He was something more than that. But the way V'lane had just sneered the word human—as if a life-form just couldn't get any lower—pissed me off so I didn't bother correcting him. “You're the one who's supposed to be all-knowing.”

“Omnipotent not omniscient. We are frequently blinded by how much we see.”

“That's absurd. How can you be blinded by vision?”

“Consider being able to see the atomic structure of everything around you, MacKayla, past, present, and part of the future, and exist within that skein. Consider possessing awareness of infinite dimensions. Imagine being able to comprehend infinity—only a handful of your race has yet achieved such awareness. Consider seeing the possible ramifications of each minute action you might make, from your slightest exhalation upon the breeze, in all realities, but you cannot piece them together into a guaranteed finale because every living thing is in constant flux. Only in death is there stasis and even then, not absolute.”

I had a hard enough time functioning on my tiny little nearsighted human level. “So, what you're saying in a nutshell,” I distilled, “is that for all your superiority and power, you're no smarter or better off than we are. Perhaps worse.”

A heartbeat stretched into half a dozen. Then he smiled coolly. “Mock me if you will, MacKayla. I'll sit at your deathbed and ask you then if you would rather be me. Where is this human fool that fancies himself master of anything?”

“1247 LaRuhe. Warehouse behind it. Huge dolmen. He brings them through there. Would you mind squashing it for me?”

“Your wish, my command.” He was gone.

I stared at the empty chaise. Had he really gone to destroy the dolmen through which the Unseelie were being brought? Would he kill the Lord Master, too? Would my vengeance be achieved so anticlimactically? And without me there as witness? I didn't want that. “V'lane!” I shouted. But there was no reply. He was gone. And I was going to
kill
him if he killed my sister's killer without me. The dark fever I'd caught that first night I'd set foot in Dublin had turned into a fever of a different kind: a bloodfever—as in I wanted blood, spilled for my sister. Spilled by my hand. That savage Mac inside me still hadn't found an audible voice, still wasn't speaking with my tongue, but we spoke the same language, she and I, and agreed on critical things.

We would kill my sister's killer together.

“Junior?” said a soft, lilting voice. A voice I'd never expected to hear again.

I shuddered. It had come from my right. I stared out at the waves. I would not look. I was in Faery. Nothing could be trusted.

“Junior, come on, I'm over here,” my sister coaxed, and laughed.

I nearly doubled over from the pain of it. It was exactly Alina's laugh: sweet, pure, full of endless summer and sunshine and the sure knowledge that her life was charmed.

I heard the slap of a palm on a volleyball. “Baby Mac, let's play. It's a perfect day. I brought the beer. Did you get the limes from the bar?”

My name is MacKayla Evelina Lane. Hers is Alina MacKenna Lane. I was Junior on two levels. Sometimes she'd called me Baby Mac. I used to pilfer limes from the condiment tray at The Brickyard on Saturdays. Cheap, I know. I never wanted to grow up.

Tears burned my eyes. I gulped deep breaths and forced air in and out of my lungs. I fisted my hands. I shook my head. I stared out at the sea. She was not there. I did not hear the thud of a ball hitting sand. I did not smell Beautiful perfume on the breeze.

“The sand's perfect, Junior. It's powder. Come
on
! Tommy's coming today,” she teased. I'd had a crush on Tommy for years. He was dating one of my best friends so I pretended I couldn't stand him, but Alina knew.

Don't look, don't look. There are ghosts and there are worse things than ghosts.

I looked.

Behind the volleyball net, buffeted by a gentle tropical breeze, my sister stood, smiling, waiting to play. She was wearing her favorite neon lime bikini, and her blond hair was pulled back in a bouncy ponytail through the flap of the faded Ron Juan ball cap she'd gotten in Key West on spring break two years ago.

I began to cry.

Alina looked stricken. “Mac, honey, what's wrong?” She dropped the volleyball, ducked under the net, and hurried across the sand to me. “What is it? Did somebody hurt you? I'll kick their frogging petunias. Tell me who. What did they do?”

My tears turned into sobs. I stared up at my sister, trembling from the violence of my grief.

She dropped to her knees next to me. “Mac, you're
killing
me. Talk to me. What's wrong?” Her arms went around me, and I was crying against her neck, lost in a cloud of peach shampoo, Beautiful perfume, Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil, and the bubble gum she'd always chewed on the beach to hide the smell of beer on her breath from Mom.

I could feel her warmth, the silkiness of her skin.

I was touching her.

I buried my fingers in her ponytail and sobbed.

I missed her hair. I missed mine. I missed her. I missed me.

“Tell me who did this to you,” she said, and she was crying, too. We'd never been able to stand each other's tears. We'd always ended up crying with each other. Then made pacts that we would stand up for each other forever, take care of each other forever. Pacts that I now knew we'd started making when she was three and I was one, and we'd been left in a world that wasn't ours—to hide us, I'd begun to suspect.

“Is it really you, Alina?”

“Look at me, Junior.” She pulled away, and used one of the towels to dry my tears, then dried her own. “It's me. It's really me. Look, I'm here. God, I've missed you!” She laughed again and this time I laughed with her.

When you lose someone you love abruptly, without warning, you dream of getting the chance to see them, just one more time, please God, one more time again. Every night after her funeral I'd lay awake in my bedroom, down the hall from hers, and call good night, even though I knew it would never be answered again.

I'd lay there clutching photographs, re-creating her face in my mind in exacting detail, as if—if I got it exactly perfectly right—I could take it into my dreams, and use it as a road map to lead me to her.

Some nights, I couldn't see her face and I cried, begged her to come back. I offered all kinds of deals to God—He doesn't make them, by the way. In my despair, I offered deals to anyone or anything that would listen.

Something had heard me. Here was my chance to see her again. I didn't care how. I didn't care why. I absorbed every detail.

There was the mole high on her left cheek. I touched it. There were the freckles on her nose that drove her crazy, the tiny scar on her lower lip from where I'd accidentally bashed her in the mouth with a guitar when we were kids. There were those sunny green eyes, like mine but with more gold flecks. There was the long blond hair, so much like mine used to be.

She was wearing the tiny sterling silver heart earrings I'd saved for six months to buy her from Tiffany's for her twenty-first birthday.

This was Alina, right down to her toenails painted her favorite summer shade, Cajun Shrimp. It clashed horribly with her lime bikini and I told her so.

She laughed and took off across the sand. “Come on, Junior, let's play.”

I sat, frozen for a long moment.

I can't tell you all the thoughts that went through my head then:
This isn't real, it can't be. Maybe it is. Maybe it's dangerous. Could this be my sister in another dimension, another version of her, but Alina all the same? Hurry up and ask her questions about her journal and the Lord Master and what happened in Dublin. Don't ask her questions; she might disappear.
All those thoughts passed swiftly and left a single directive in their wake: Play with your sister right here, right now. Take it for what it is.

I stood and ran across the sand, kicking up white powder with my heels. My legs were long, my body strong, my heart complete.

I played volleyball with my sister. We drank Coronas in the sun. I hadn't brought the limes, of course, but we found a margarine bowl of them in the cooler, and squeezed them into the bottles, pulp slipping down the frosty sides. A beer would never taste so good again as it did that day with Alina in Faery.

Eventually, we sprawled on the sand and soaked up the sun, toes teasing the edge of the surf. We talked about Mom and Dad, we talked about school, we talked about the hot guys that walked by and tried to coax us into another game of volleyball.

We talked about her idea of moving to Atlanta, and how I would quit my job and go with her. We talked about me getting serious about life finally.

It was that thought that sobered me. I'd always been planning to get serious about life and here I was, being exactly who I'd been back then, taking the path of least resistance, the easy way out, doing what made me feel good right now, consequences be damned.

I rolled over and looked at her. “Is this a dream, Alina?”

She turned toward me and smiled. “No.”

“Is it real?”

She smiled again, sadly. “No.”

“Then what is this?”

She bit her lip. “Don't ask me, just enjoy the day.”

“I need to know.”

“It's a gift from V'lane. A day on the beach with me.”

“An illusion,” I said. Water to a man stranded for two and a half days in the desert without a drink. Beyond refusing, even if it was poisoned. I knew better but it didn't stop me from trying: “So if I were to ask how you met the Lord Master, or where to find the
Sinsar Dubh
?”

She shrugged. “I don't know those things.”

I wasn't surprised. V'lane must have lifted her from my memories, which meant she would know only what I knew, and made questions about anything other than experiences I recalled, or my current situation, pointless. “How long have I been here?” As V'lane's creation, she should know that.

She shrugged again.

“Longer than a human hour?”

“Yes.”

“Can I leave?”

“Yes.”

“Could I choose to stay?”

“And have anything you wanted, MacKayla. Forever.”

Alina
never
called me MacKayla. In fact, neither did my parents or any of my friends. Only V'lane did. Was he behind those sunny eyes? And still, I wanted to stay here, lose myself on this beach, in this sun, live this day over and over again for the rest of my life. Forget the rain and the fear, the pain and my uncertain future. I could die happily on a hammock in the sun, seventy years from now, surrounded by lost dreams.

“I love you, Alina,” I whispered.

“I love you, too, Mac,” she whispered back.

“I'm sorry I failed you. I'm sorry I missed your call. I'm sorry I didn't figure out something was wrong.”

“You never failed me, Mac. You never will.”

Tears filled my eyes. Where had those words of absolution come from? Did the icy Fae prince understand more about human emotion than he let on?

I hugged Alina, inhaled deeply, and memorized every sensory detail I could greedily gather.

Then I squeezed my eyes shut and went to that place in my head that was so alien, and I fed the foreign fire. When I'd stoked it hot enough and high enough, I murmured, “Show me what is true,” and opened my eyes.

My arms were empty. Alina was gone.

V'lane knelt in the sand before me.

“Never do that to me again,” I said in a low voice.

“You did not enjoy your time with her?”

“It wasn't her.”

“Tell me you did not enjoy it.”