Fever 4 - DreamFever (14 page)

  Momentarily incapacitated was no way to arrive at the scene of potential danger.
Superspeed was worse than being sifted. Sifting was smooth. Superspeed was a horse
and carriage on a rutted road, at jet speeds, with no shocks.

    I looked up from the shoes and blinked. For a moment, words eluded me.

    "Ms. Lane. Good to know you're alive. I'd begun to wonder."

    Turning to the uniformed troops behind him, Inspector Jayne snarled, "Fire!"
 

I   t seemed a lifetime ago that the tough-talking, burly inspector standing before me had
picked me up, dragged me off to the Garda station, and interrogated me for the murder
of his co-worker and brother-in-law, Inspector Patrick O'Duffy. At least half a lifetime
must have passed since I'd opened his eyes to the Unseelie that had invaded Dublin by
sneaking bits of their immortal flesh into his dainty sandwiches the afternoon I'd invited
him to the bookstore for tea.

   Then I'd taken him on a sightseeing tour and forced him to confront what was
happening to his city, for the dual purposes of enlisting his aid in tracking the Book and
getting him off my ass. After that, we'd spoken only whenever he had a tip about the
Book's location, and very curtly at that, until the day he picked me up off the street
again and shocked me by asking me to make him my special "tea" one more time. I
hadn't seen that coming. I'd expected him to close his eyes and mind to the impossible-
to-explain, like most people do. He had surprised me.

  I eyed him speculatively. When his men paused between rounds, I said, "Are you still
eating Unseelie?" Or was he just going after the ones he could see?

   Dani made a choking sound. "Eating Unseelie? Eating it? Are you fecking kidding
me? It's goopy, and some of `em ooze green stuff and they have ... like ... pus-filled
things in `em! Ugh. Just fecking ugh!" She stuck her tongue out and shook her head
violently. "Ugh!" she exploded again.

    I shrugged. "Long story. Tell you later."

    "Need-to-know basis. Don't." She made a retching sound.

   "You get used to it," Jayne told her. To me, he said, "I've been eating it since the day
I asked you to feed it to me."

  "You never came back for more."

   "And be dependent on you? What if you weren't around when I needed it?" He
snorted. "I never let it wear off, because if I did, I wouldn't have been able to see them
to kill them to get more. Vicious cycle. Had the wife prepare it for breakfast every day.
Now with the lot of them showing themselves, it's not the problem it once was. My men
eat it. Wife feeds it to our kids in sandwiches. Fire!"

  The men resumed shooting. Screams of fury filled the night sky.

  The noise was deafening. When it finally stopped, I snapped, "What are you doing?
You can't kill them! You're just pissing them off!" I could feel their anger--dark, deep,
ancient. I could feel more than that, too: a cunning patience born of eternity, the
unflappable certainty that they would outlive this nuisance in the streets below that
dared offend. We were nothing. We were dust already, death waiting to happen. They
were outraged that we had the audacity to even gaze upon them without being on our
knees, worshipping, praying to them, begging for their permission to breathe.

   I learned a few months ago that telepathy with Hunters goes both ways, at least for
me. They can get in my head, but I can get in theirs, too. And they don't like that one
bit. Even now I could feel them both pressing at me, trying to decide what I was that
made me ... different. Guess I wasn't as notoriously well known among Unseelie as I'd
expected after my abduction by the LM and his Unseelie Princes.

  "Good!" Jayne said. "Because they're pissing me off. They're in my city, and I'll not
be tolerating it. They think I'll be making it easy for them to hover over my streets? Spy
on us? Track down our survivors? We're showing them otherwise, aren't we, now?
They're not taking one fecking more of mine!"

   He turned back to his group of fifty or so crisply uniformed and helmeted men and
issued a quiet command. Four of them broke off, moved down the street, and began
setting a massive gun on a tripod. Most of his men were armed with dated-looking
semiautomatics, a few with tommy guns--the only ones that seemed to be having any
impact on the Hunters. When Jayne shouted "Fire" again, they raised their guns in tight
unison and sprayed bullets at two of the Unseelie's most fearsome.

  A smile tugged at my lips.

  Jayne was deliberately provoking the Hunters.

  Pissing them off because they'd pissed him off.

   My smile grew. When I'd reluctantly fed this man Unseelie, I'd never have foreseen
this moment. How perfect. How right. We needed him, here in the streets, seeing that
those who survived continued to do so. This man would never stop serving his city and
his people, even though his pay had been terminated months ago. He was
police/protector to the core.

  Delighted by the serendipity of it all, I laughed.

  Jayne glanced at me sharply, and for a moment his grim expression was tinged by a
smile. The admiration must have shown in my eyes, because he said, "It's what we do,
Ms. Lane. We're the Garda."

  "Feck the Garda," one of his men shouted. "We're the Guardians! A new force for a
new world!"

  "Hear, hear!" the men cried.

  I nodded appreciatively. The Guardians. I liked that. "It's good to see you, too,
Jayne," I murmured. "Especially like this." What an unexpected boon. The Hunters
were pushing at me more insistently now. I sent the only message necessary upward and
didn't need to use one ounce of telepathy to do it.

 I raised my spear, shook it threateningly. It shimmered alabaster in the light from my
MacHalo. Following suit, Dani thrust her sword into the air.

   The Hunters hissed and reared back with such sudden violence that the vortex caused
by the flapping of their great dark wings sucked the litter on the streets into the air and
lifted the lids off trash cans. Bits of debris stung my face and hands. Lids clanged into
the brick buildings, bouncing from wall to wall.

  We will hunt you until the end of time, sidhe-seer. We will eradicate your line.

  I was pretty sure it already had been, except for me, but couldn't have replied if I'd
wanted to. I was on my knees, clutching my head. It was an awkward feat, wearing a
MacHalo and holding a spear.

  They'd surprised me.

   These Hunters weren't just bigger. They were something else, too. Weren't all of
them the same? When the Unseelie King had done his experiments and created his dark
race, had he made variations on his themes? Were some of the same castes more deadly
and powerful than others? The bastards had nearly split my skull with their threat. I
hadn't been prepared for it. I was going to have to regard every Fae I encountered, from
this moment on, as a wide-open possibility, unpredictable in any but the most basic
ways. It pissed me off. A knife should be a knife. How was I supposed to live in a world
where a knife could be a grenade? I was going to have to make no assumptions. Ever.
Expect the unexpected.

  I might be on my knees outside, but I wasn't inside. I sought that dark cave where I'd
so recently been an animal. Try, you fuckers, I blasted them.

  They screamed again. I heard the pain in it, and smiled.

  Trash-can lids clattered to the pavement. Debris battered my head and shoulders. The
night stilled.

  The Hunters were gone.

   I lifted my head and watched two winged silhouettes fly past the moon. It was an
eerie sight. Even more eerie, the moon had a crimson tint around the edges, like a halo
of blood.

  Was the juxtaposition of Fae and human realms changing them? Were the dimensions
bleeding together, altering each other? What would our world be like in a few more
months? A few more years?

  I pushed up from my knees to find Jayne staring at my spear.

  "Those are the weapons you spoke of at our tea," he said. "The ones that can kill the
Fae."

  I inclined my head. I didn't like the way he was staring.

  "We've never tried to bring down one of those devil-dragons."

  "Hunters," I told him. Ironic and fitting that he'd singled out his Fae equivalent to
harass. "They're enforcers of Fae law. Although they're Unseelie, they work for both
courts, depending on who pays best."

   I saw a flash of amusement in his dark eyes, then it was gone, and he was staring
fixedly at my spear.

  My fingers tightened around it.

  "We know we can't cage them like the others we capture. They're too big. But with
that spear, we could kill them where they fell."

  "Cage them? You're caging Unseelie? How?"

   "Took us some time to sort it out. When you opened my eyes to what was happening,
I opened my mind to the old legends. We Irish are steeped in them. I kept stumbling
across lore that said the Old Ones couldn't abide iron. I decided that if werewolves
hated silver and vampires hated holy water and garlic, and those things could harm
them, perhaps iron could harm a Fae."

  "Does it?" I asked.

   "To some degree. It seems to interfere with their power. Enough of it can trap and
hold some of them where they are. The more pure the iron, the better. Steel doesn't
work so well." He slipped his closefitting helmet from his head and showed me the
inside. "We coat them with iron. We lost a few good men before we learned what your
so-called Hunters could do."

 "Iron keeps the Hunters from being able to project into your head?" I'd be altering
my MacHalo the moment I could get my hands on some!

  "Not entirely. It dampens it, makes it survivable. We all heard what you heard. Just
not as painful. But we've gotten pretty used to them trying to feck with us. We're
wearing iron everywhere. Around our necks, in our pockets. It's what we make our
bullets from."

  "Feckin' brilliant!" Dani exclaimed. "Mac, we need iron!"

   Jayne glanced at my spear, then at Dani's sword. "Do you know how much good we
could do with one of your weapons?" He searched my face. "It's not like we're looking
to leave you unarmed. The two of you could share the sword."

   "No," Dani and I snapped at exactly the same moment. I tensed. I didn't need to look
at Dani to know she hovered on the verge of superspeed, a heartbeat from whizzing us
out of there.

  "Ms. Lane, we're all in this together."

  "Not that together."

   "Look at us. We're capturing hundreds of Fae a week. Locking up the ones that can't
pull that vanishing-into-thin-air trick. Now, there's a lethal move for you," he said
bitterly.

  "They call it sifting," Dani told him.

  He cursed. "Well, those sifters come back and kill my men. They either sneak in
behind us or track us, like they're playing with us. They'd think twice if they knew we
had a way to kill them. You have two weapons that can. You can't tell me that's fair."

  "What the feck is fair, Jayne? Is it fair that I got dragged into this to begin with?"

  "We all got dragged into this," he growled.

  Touch�, I thought. "We can work something out," I offered. "We'll kill them for
you." The more Fae dead, the happier I'd be.

  "Some of them will still get away. Unless you're saying you'll hunt beside us. Be
there to bag the buggers the moment we take them down."

  "I can't. I'm hunting something else, and without it none of this will ever end."

  His eyes narrowed. "Would that be the Book I was helping you track?"

   "If I don't find it, Jayne, we'll never be able to drive them from our world, and I'm
afraid the longer the walls are down, the more screwed up things are going to get.
Maybe irrevocably."

  He measured me coldly. Finally he said, "I should barter with you. Demand favor for
favor. But it's not my way. I care more that people survive than I care for vengeance.
You might take a lesson from that. Your Book is still in Dublin."

  "It's not my Book," I hissed. When he'd called it that, my spine had iced with violent
chills. As if somehow it was. Or wanted to be. Or I was having some hint of a
premonition of things to come. I shook it off. So, the Sinsar Dubh was still being
spotted in Dublin. That explained why so many Fae were here. We were all hunting it. I
wouldn't have thought it would be so difficult to find. It had been months since the
walls had come down. Didn't it want to be found by Unseelie? Weren't they kin? What
did it want in this city? It was a huge world out there, with countless countries and
opportunities for chaos and destruction. Yet it remained in Dublin. Why?

   "It took one of my men a few weeks ago on his way home to his family. Would you
like to know what it did then, Ms. Lane? After it hitched a ride home to his wife, kids,
and his mother?"

   I kept my head perfectly still and said nothing. I wasn't about to ask. I knew what
happened when the Book took over a human. I'd seen so much carnage in the last few
months that I was running out of room in my head for more gory images. "I'm sorry," I
said, knowing it wasn't enough. I understood him wanting one of the Hallows. I could
even have made a really good case for it myself, in his shoes. A kinder, gentler Mac
would care. A nicer me would share.

  I wasn't, and I wouldn't.

   "It's unfortunate there aren't more weapons to go around," I told him with complete
sincerity, but it didn't change a thing. I had enough to worry about, and I had plans in
the works that were every bit as good or better than Jayne's. I'd meant it when I said we
could work something out. We could stop by once a week, wherever he and his men
were keeping the Fae caged, and kill them all for him.

  "I'd prefer it not end this way," he said softly, and sliced air with a hand gesture. His
men closed in around us.

  Dani moved to stand next to me, shoulder to shoulder. I imagined that to them we
looked like two young girls, huddling close, daunted by such a show of armed
manpower.