Bloodfever (21 page)

I let him finish both pages before reclaiming my notebook.

“So,” I said brightly, “now that you know I'm nuts—” I broke off and stared at him. “You
do
know I'm nuts, right?” There was something very wrong with the way he was looking at me.

“MacKayla,” he said softly, “come somewhere with me, somewhere … safer than this. We need to talk.”

I sucked in a breath. “I didn't tell you my name was MacKayla.” I stared at him, a little too toasted to deal with the panic I was feeling over this unexpected paradigm shift. I'd been trying to destroy my chances at normalcy only to find out I'd never had any chance at normalcy in this situation because the normal boy wasn't normal.

“I know who you are. And what you are,” he said quietly. “I've met your kind before.”

“Where?” I was bewildered. “Here, in Dublin?”

He nodded. “And elsewhere.”

Surely not. Was it possible? He'd known my name. What else did he know about me? “Did you know my sister?” I was suddenly breathless.

“Aye,” he said heavily, “I knew Alina.”

My mouth dropped.
“You knew my sister?”
I practically screeched. How did he know us? Who
was
this man?

“Aye. Will you come with me, somewhere private we can talk?”

When my cell phone rang, even buried as it was in my purse, it was so loud it nearly scared me out of my skin, and pub patrons three booths down turned to glare. I didn't blame them; it was an obnoxious ring, a blaring band of celestial trumpets, set on full volume. Obviously Barrons hadn't wanted me to miss a call.

I fumbled for it, flipped it open, and pressed send. Barrons sounded pissed. “Where the fuck are you?” he demanded.

“None of your business,” I said coolly.

“I saw two Hunters in the city tonight, Ms. Lane. Word is more are on the way. A great deal more. Get your ass home.”

I sat there frozen with a dead line. He'd said what he had to say and hung up.

I can't explain what the word “Hunters” does to me, but it gets me where I live. It gets me in my most sacred place, the one where I used to feel safe but never will again so long as there are Fae in my world. It's as if certain things are programmed into a
sidhe
-seer's DNA and we have gut reactions that can't be diminished, controlled, or overcome.

“You've gone white as a sheet, lass. What's wrong?”

I considered my options. There were none. The pub I was in closed early on weeknights. It was either make a run for the bookstore now, or wait a few hours, and if more Hunters were on the way, in a few hours it would only be more dangerous.

“Nothing.” I slapped down a few bills and some change. Why hadn't Barrons come after me? My phone rang again. I dug it out.

“I would only make us a bigger target, and I've got my hands a bit full at the moment,” he said. “Stay close to the buildings, under overhangs when possible. Lose yourself in throngs of other people when you can.”

What was he—a mind reader? “I could catch a cab.”

“Have you seen what's driving them lately?”

No, but I sure was going to be looking now that he'd said that.

“Where are you?”

I told him.

“You're not far. You'll be fine, Ms. Lane. Just get here fast, before more arrive.” He hung up again.

I stuffed my journal and phone in my purse and stood up.

“Where are you going?” Christian said.

“I have to leave. Something's come up.” Whatever crimes I might lay at Barrons' feet, I believed he could protect me. If there were Hunters in the city tonight, I wanted the most dangerous man I knew at my side, not a twenty-something Scottish guy who'd known my sister—who was, grim case in point, dead—so obviously he'd been of no help to her. “I want to know everything. Can I come see you at Trinity?”

He stood. “Whatever's going on, Mac, let me help you with it.”

“You'll only slow me down.”

“You don't know that. I might be useful.”

“Don't push me,” I said coldly. “I'm sick of being pushed.”

He assessed me a moment, then nodded. “Come see me at Trinity. We'll talk.”

“Soon,” I promised. As I left the pub, I marveled at my ignorance. I'd been sitting there, believing Rowena the final, critical piece. While I'd been busy analyzing my board, making judgments and decisions, feeling pretty smart about myself, a player I'd known nothing about had strolled up and sat down, and like everyone else, he knew a great deal more about me than I knew about him.

I was back to feeling dumb.

Just where on the game board was I supposed to place Christian MacKeltar?

I took a mental swipe at it, toppled all the pieces, and stepped into the night. The heck with it. Right now I needed to get back to the bookstore, undetected by my mortal enemy, monsters whose sole purpose was to hunt and destroy people like me.

My dad had this thing he used to say to me when I'd try to convince him that a
D
on my report card was really close to a
C
. He'd say,
Mac, baby, close only counts in hand-grenades and horseshoes.

I was really close; in fact, I was almost home when the Hunter found me.

FIFTEEN

I
t was as if a new Dublin had been born while I was inside the pub, and I realized, with the exception of our brief drive through Temple Bar the other evening, I'd not walked through the district in over a month. It had been that long since I'd taken a good look at my world.

Night was
their
time and they came out in droves.

Rhino-boys were driving the cabs.

A caste of Unseelie new to me, ghastly white and painfully thin with enormous hungry, wet eyes and no mouths, was running the street vendor stands.

Where had the original owners gone? I was pretty sure I didn't want to know.

There was one Unseelie for every ten humans on the street. Many of them wore glamours of attractive people and were paired off with real people, and I knew they were going into bars wearing the guise of sexy tourists and picking up the real tourists.

And doing what with them?

I didn't want to know that, either. I couldn't kill them all. In these numbers, I was useless against them. I forced myself to look straight ahead. There were too many Unseelie around me and I'd had too much to drink. My stomach was a roiling, queasy mess. I had to get out of here. Somewhere I could breathe. Maybe throw up.

The
sidhe
-seer coalition was starting to look better to me. We would need hundreds of us to fight what was happening in this city. And we only had two weapons. It was crazy; we had to find more ways to kill them.

I kept my head down and hurried through the streets, mixing in with other tourists, keeping tight beneath the eaves whenever possible, wondering what Barrons had his hands full of tonight.

The night was buzzing with Fae and I felt like a tuning fork, vibrating from their sheer numbers and nearness. I had an overwhelming desire to start screaming at everyone to run, to leave, to do … something … I couldn't remember … something that lurked somewhere in my genetic memory … a thing we'd learned to do … long ago … a ritual, dark thing … we'd paid a terrible price … it had been our greatest shame … we'd made ourselves forget.

Footsteps sounded behind me in the darkness as I turned down Dreary Lane and onto Butterfield, solid, intentioned footsteps like rank and file soldiers. I didn't dare look back. If I did and whatever was back there startled me, I was just buzzed enough that my face would betray me, and whatever it was couldn't possibly know I was a
sidhe
-seer, unless I gave myself away, so all I had to do was keep walking, as if nothing was wrong.

Right?

“Human,” growled something behind me, “run. Run like the mangy cur you are. Run now. We like to chase.”

The voice was straight out of a nightmare. And surely it was not talking to me.

“You.
Sidhe
-seer. Run.”

It had called me
sidhe
-seer.

It knew I was one by sight.

The only Unseelie who knew my face were the Lord Master's minions, which meant he was back from wherever he'd been—and looking for me.

I'd believed any Hunters in the city tonight were there by coincidence, not design. I'd been wrong. They were there to capture me. I could fight, I had the spear tucked securely in my holster, but with the numbers of dark Fae I'd been seeing and no backup, I needed no encouragement to be a coward. I glanced over my shoulder. The street was packed with Rhino-boys, two abreast, stretching back farther than I could see.

There are times when brave is just stupid: I ran.

Down one street. Up the next. Through an alley. Across a park. I vaulted benches and splashed through fountains. I ran until my lungs burned and my legs were weak. I got turned around by the old brewery and tacked on an extra six blocks to my journey.

I ran.

I ran as if my feet had Dani's wings, and finally, blessedly the footsteps behind me faded and there was silence but for the pounding of my shoes on cement.

I spared a glance over my shoulder.

I'd lost them. I'd really, truly done it. Rhino-boys might be strong, but with their stumpy arms and legs, they were neither swift nor lithe of limb.

I turned a corner and drew up just short of plowing into a brick wall. Dead-end alleys spring up as unexpectedly as one-way streets in this city. I had to get out, before the soldiers tracked me down again. There was no way I could scale the wall. It was twelve feet of sheer brick and there were no convenient Dumpsters piled in front of it.

I was three blocks from Barrons Books and Baubles. It was just over this wall and down two streets. Close, so close.

I turned.

And froze.

It was as if a giant freezer had opened in the sky above me. The temperature plunged bitterly. Tiny, glistening bits of ice began to pellet my skin.

It was there. I knew what it was. Every cell of my being knew what it was. And not because I'd read about them, or Barrons had told me about them, or I'd seen sketches of them.

The beast above me hovered darkly. I could feel the great
whuf-whuf
of giant wings beating air. The scent of brimstone and ancient dusty things filled my nostrils. If Hell had dragons and they smelled, this was their scent.

Sidhe
-seer, it said, without speaking at all. The voice was inside my head, in that hot, alien place.
Slave. We own you.

“Get out,” I snarled, and lashed out at it with all the hot, alien fire in my head.

It was gone from my mind, but not from above me. I could feel the air moving. I could smell its acrid stench.

I gauged the distance to the end of the alley, mentally calculated my run from there. How fast was it? For that matter, how
big
was it? The descriptions I'd read had varied widely. Could it fit between buildings? Could it swoop down and pluck me from the sidewalk in its talons? Might it rip the bookstore apart, rafter from eave, looking for me? Summon all its dark brethren to demolish the building? Would anyone even notice, or did Hunters have the same “cloaking” effect as Shades and Dark Zones? Did I dare lead it to Barrons? Did I dare not? If I got inside somewhere, anywhere, would it leave me alone or assume an eternal dark perch on my eave like Poe's raven, only far more macabre and deadly? Could it shift? Simply materialize wherever I was?

“Fuck,” I said emphatically. Sometimes there's just no other word for it.

I had to know what I was trying to outrun. Knowledge is power. That is one truth I've learned that has never failed me.

Brushing ice flakes from my face, I looked up.

Straight into eyes that glowed like twin furnaces from Hell, staring malevolently back at me from a swirling fall of black ice.

The books I'd read had compared the Royal Hunters to the classic human depiction of the Devil.

The books had been right.

Somewhere in our ancient human past a
sidhe
-seer, or a few, must have had something to do with recording religious myths and the Bible. They'd seen the Hunters, and had used their memories to scare the hell—literally—out of humanity.

For a moment it was hard to separate the thing from the night; they were both forged of blackness. Then my vision cleared and something in my genes kicked in, and it was clearly visible. Great, dark, leathery wings flapped from a great dark leathery body, with a massive satyrlike head, cloven hooves, and a forked tail. Its tongue was long and bisected down the middle. It had long curved black horns with bloody tips. It was black, but it was more than black; it was the absolute, utter, and complete absence of light. It
absorbed
the light around it, swallowed it up, took it into its body, devoured it, and spit it back out again as a miasma of darkness and desolation. And it was cold. The air paddled by its slow-moving wings churned with glittering black ice flakes, swirling beneath the great, leathery sails. It was the only Fae—besides V'lane, that first time we'd met—whose presence in our world altered our world around it. V'lane, too, had iced the air, though not so overtly or dramatically. It was powerful. It was making me feel so sick to my stomach that I almost couldn't breathe.

It laughed inside my head. I closed my eyes and forced it out again; this time it wasn't easy. It knew where to find me inside myself. Was that why we feared them so deeply—because these Fae could get inside our heads?

Would a
sidhe
-seer that wasn't as strong as me be able to withstand it, or would it rip her mind to shreds, one memory or personality trait or dream at a time, sift its talons through the tatters, before destroying her body as almost an afterthought?

I opened my eyes.

My personal Grim Reaper stood in the alley, directly in front of me, a dozen feet away, dark robes rustling softly in the unnatural wind generated by the beast's wings.

It stood in silence, as always, regarding me from beneath its deep black cowl, though it had no face, no eyes, nothing beneath that hood I could discern, with which to regard me. It was shadows and night, like the Hunter above me, only
it
wasn't there, and the Hunter was. What an absurd time to torture myself for my failings.

Ignoring it, I pushed back my jacket, slipped my spear from its holster, and fisted my hand around the hilt. It wasn't my problem. Dragon-boy from hell was.

Black hail began to fall, tiny pellets stinging my skin. The Hunter was incensed; its displeasure iced the night.

How dare you touch our Hallows?
roared in my head.

“Oh, screw you,” I snapped. “You want me? Come and get me.” I focused on that foreign place in my mind, stoked the strange fire, and boxed up my mind as securely as I could. The thing's roar had nearly split my head.

Could the Hunter cram itself into the tight alleyway? Could it sift or resize itself?

We would see, and if it did, the moment it got close I would freeze and stab it.

I waited.

It hovered.

I looked up … and smiled.

Fury blazed in its fiery eyes, yet it made no move toward me. It wasn't about to risk getting near my spear, and we both knew it. I could kill it. I could take forever from it, and the thing's arrogance was immense as its wingspan; it didn't consider any master it might choose to serve worth dying for.

I realized then, or had some surfacing of a shred of collective memory, that the Hunters were feared even among their own kind. They had something … I wasn't sure what … but something that even their royal brethren didn't mess with. They were of the Fae … but perhaps not completely. They served whomever they wished, only if there was something in it for them, and stopped serving whenever they felt like it. They were mercenaries in the purest sense of the word.

It feared the spear. It would not risk death. I had a chance.

I broke into a run.

So long as the soldiers didn't find me, so long as more Hunters didn't show up, I would survive tonight. I could make it to the bookstore and Barrons would have some plan—he always did. Perhaps we could get out of the city for a few days. Perhaps, loath though I was to consider it, we would hook up with other
sidhe
-seers. There was safety in numbers.

As I sped past my Phantom Reaper, it did something so utterly unexpected and incomprehensible that my mind failed to process it.

It swung out its scythe and the blunt of the wood caught me in my midsection.

In my mind I screamed—
but you're not real
—even as I doubled over and lost the breath in my lungs.

Real or not, its scythe was.

For the second time tonight, my paradigm was brutally shifted: My Grim Reaper was
corporeal.

Impossible! I'd thrown a flashlight through it, had watched it tumble end over end before crashing into a wall. It had no substance!

Laughing, it moved toward me. Now that I knew it was real, I could feel its malevolence, a dark, pulsating hatred, barely contained beneath the voluminous black shroud. Directed at me,
all
for me.

I stared in disbelief, laboring to suck air into my lungs. I'd exhaled to a painful point. My chest was locked down tight, my lungs deflated.

I'd been played. Lulled into believing my enemy wasn't an enemy, until it had been ready to make its move. Had it been spying on me all those times? Watching and waiting for the right moment?

I'd talked to it. I'd confessed my sins to it! What
was
it?

I wheezed violently, sucking down air.

It approached, dark robes shifting as it glided forward.

I sensed Fae—I didn't sense Fae. Perhaps I could nullify it, perhaps I couldn't.

It swung its scythe. I leapt. It whirled and parried, I ducked and jumped. The wood staff zinged as it sliced through air, and I knew if even one of those blows landed on me it would turn bone to dust.

It wasn't trying to get me with the curved blade. It wanted to pulverize, to maim. Why? Did it have a special death planned for me?

As we danced our macabre waltz, suddenly the alley was flooded with Rhino-boys; the rank and file soldiers had found us.