Fever 4 - DreamFever (32 page)

  As if it had heard me, the Book began moving more quickly, heading right where we
wanted it.

    Then, suddenly, it was just ... gone.

  "What the--" I spun in a circle, my radar on high, searching, testing the night. I
couldn't pick up a thing. Not even a faint tingle.

  I glanced back down the street. Barrons was nowhere to be seen.

   I didn't like this one bit. We shouldn't have split up. That was always when bad
things happened in the movies, and that was exactly what I felt like at the moment: the
ing�nue, standing on a horror set. No lights, alone in a city of monsters, with an ancient,
sentient receptacle of pure evil somewhere in my immediate vicinity but no longer
detectable by me, and with no clue what to do next.

  I turned in a circle, stone in one hand, spear in the other.

  "Barrons?" I hissed urgently. There was no reply.

  Just as suddenly as it had disappeared, the Book was back on my radar. But it was
behind me now!

 I called for Barrons again. When there was still no answer, I tucked my spear under
my arm, whipped out my cell phone, and punched up his number.

  When he answered, I told him it had moved and where.

  "Wait for me. I'll be right there."

   "But it's moving. We're going to lose it. Head east." I thumbed End and took off
after the Book.

I was rushing toward it, trying to catch up, when the Book suddenly stopped, and I
could feel that I was closer to it than I'd initially thought. Way closer. All my readings
on the thing were wonky tonight.

  I froze.

  It was just around the corner, maybe twenty feet away from me.

  If I walked to the edge of the building and poked my head around it, I would see it.

   I could feel it there, perfectly still, pulsing with dark energy. What was it doing? Was
this its idea of cat and mouse? Was it ... amused?

  It began moving again. Toward me.

  Where the hell was Barrons?

  It stopped.

  Was it trying to spook me? If so, it was working.

   What if Ryodan was wrong? What if the Beast did have substance and could shred
me? What if whatever was carrying it had a gun and could blow my head off? I was
afraid if I retreated, the Book might take it as a sign of weakness, in the way a lion can
smell fear, and come after me for all it was worth.

  I put on my best bluster and took a step forward.

  It moved, too.

  I flinched. It was all the way to the corner now.

   What was carrying it? What was it doing? What was it planning? Not knowing was
killing me.

  I was a sidhe-seer. I was an OOP detector. This was what I was made for.

  I set my jaw, squared my shoulders, marched to the corner, and came face-to-face
with a pure psychopath.

   He smiled at me, and I really wished he hadn't, because his teeth were chain-saw
blades that whirred endlessly behind thin lips. He gnashed them at me and laughed. His
eyes were black-on-black, bottomless pools. Tall and emaciated, he smelled of dead
things, of coffins with rotting lining, of blood and insane asylums. His hands were white
and fluttered like dying moths. His palms had mouths, whirring with silvery blades.

  Beneath one arm was tucked an utterly innocuous-looking hardcover.

  But it wasn't the Sinsar Dubh that held me riveted.

  I stared at the psychopath's face.

  It had once been Derek O'Bannion.

  I had the spear and O'Bannion had been eating Unseelie, so stabbing him would
maybe kill him. But if I killed him, what would the Sinsar Dubh turn its full attention to
next?

  Me.

   Abruptly, he stopped laughing and yanked the Book out from beneath his arm. He
held it with both hands at the farthest possible distance from his body, and for a moment
I thought he was offering it to me.

  We were so close that, if I'd wanted to, I could have reached out and taken it. I
wouldn't have reached out and taken it for anything in the world.

   Then he jerked and spun the volume around, as if the text--if there was anything
inside it that remotely resembled text--was upside down and unreadable.

   From his mouth came the whine of metal grating on metal, and he opened and closed
his lips as if trying to form words, but nothing came out.

  For an instant, I glimpsed whites around his pupils. Was that horror in his eyes? Had
he just ground out "Help" with those metal teeth? I wanted to run. I couldn't stop
looking.

  Then his eyes were pure black again, and his body was jerking convulsively, as if he
was being ordered to perform and resisting every step of the way.

  His fingers closed on the edges of the Book, and it was no longer an innocuous
hardcover. Before my eyes it had morphed into the massive, ancient, deadly black tome
with intricate locks, and they were all falling away, and the book was opening in
O'Bannion's hands, and I knew that whatever was left of Derek O'Bannion inside the
psychopath did not want the Book to open. It wanted nothing more than to die without
ever having glimpsed so much as a single page. Not even one line.

  Yet he was being forced to open it.

  His fingers began to burn, then his hands were ablaze and he was screaming.

   The flames licked up his arms, spread down his chest and legs, and engulfed his face,
and suddenly Derek O'Bannion flared white-hot and erupted into ash that exploded ten
feet in every direction.

  I scrubbed frantically at myself, clawed ash from my hair, and spit it from my lips.

  An icy gust scattered all trace of what had been O'Bannion.

  The Sinsar Dubh whumped to the pavement at my feet.

  Open.
 

G    rowing up, I knew my parameters. I was pretty enough that one of the class jocks
would always ask me to prom, but I'd never score the quarterback.

  I was smart enough to squeak into college, but I'd never be a brain surgeon.

  I could lift my own aluminum-framed bike off the ceiling rack in the garage, but I
couldn't budge my dad's bike that he'd had since law school.

  There's comfort in knowing your limits. It's a safety zone. Most people find theirs,
get in it, and stay there for the rest of their lives. That's the kind of life I thought I was
going to live.

  There's a fine line between being stupid and knowing you have to test your limits if
you want to do any real living at all.

  It was a line I was poised on very delicately at the moment.

  The Sinsar Dubh lay open at my feet.

  I'd avoided looking at it since the moment it hit the pavement. Don't look down,
don't look down was my mantra.

  Merely opening it had incinerated O'Bannion.

  If I gazed into its naked pages, what would it do to me?

   I half whispered, half hissed Barrons' name, then was struck by the absurdity of what
I'd just done. Did I think if I didn't make much noise, the Book wouldn't notice me?

   Hello! It had noticed me. In fact, I was its sole focus. It had been playing with me
since the moment I'd appeared on its radar tonight.

  Because I was me? Or did it play any person who stumbled near?

  "Barrons," I shouted, "where the hell are you?"

  My only reply was an echo bouncing off brick buildings on the eerily silent street.

   I kept my gaze fixed straight ahead and tried to find the thing at my feet with that
sidhe-seer center of my mind.

  Got it!

  But it was ... inert.

  I wasn't getting any reading off it at all. Because of the stone in my hand? Because it
was conning me in the same way it conned everyone? By masquerading as nothing of
consequence at all?

   It was entirely too possible. There were too many unknowns. I was wrong. I wasn't
poised between stupid and testing my limits. Miles of uncharted stupid stretched on both
sides of the line on which I stood.

   I had to back away, a straight and narrow path down that line. Taking great pains not
to fall off on either side.

  I would wait for Barrons. Take no chances.

  I took a step back. Then another. Then a third, and my heel caught on something
solid, and I stumbled and began to go down.

  It was base instinct to try to balance myself by reaching out with both hands and
looking at the ground.

  "Shit!" I snapped, and yanked my gaze back up.

  But it was too late. I'd seen the pages. And I couldn't not look again.

  I dropped to my knees and knelt before the Sinsar Dubh.

                                           ***

I knelt before it because, on its ever-changing pages, I'd glimpsed the blond, icy-eyed
woman who had earlier stood sentinel, forbidding me entrance to one of the Haven's
most important libraries. I'd seen her moving from one scene within the Book to the
next.

  I needed to know who she was and how to get past her. I needed to know everything
the Book knew about her. How did it know her?

  You needed to know, Barrons would mock later; isn't that what your Eve told Adam
when she plucked your apple?

  It's not my apple, I would counter. You tried to pluck it, too. Aren't we all after the
same thing, thinking we "need" something the Book has in its pages? I have no idea
what tempts you, but something does. Tell me, Barrons, come clean: Exactly how long
have you been hunting it, and why?

  He wouldn't answer, of course.

  Like I said, miles of stupid on both sides of that line.

   But kneeling in front of it right now, I was absolutely certain I was on the verge of an
epiphany. That truly useful, liberating knowledge was minutes--no, mere seconds
away. Knowledge that would give me control over my life, power over my enemies,
that would shed light on the mysteries I was unable to solve, show me how to lead, how
to succeed, grant me whatever I wished for most.

  As I searched those two constantly changing pages, I was tormented by the drone of
an insect at my ear.

  I swatted at it incessantly, but it refused to go away. I was busy. There were things
here I needed to know, just beyond my comprehension. All I had to do was let go, quit
worrying. Learn, absorb, be. And everything would be all right.

  After a time, the buzz became a whine. The whine became a shout. The shout a
bellow, until I realized it wasn't an insect at all but a person roaring at me.

  Telling me about myself. Who I was. Who I wasn't. What I wanted.

  What I didn't want.

   "Walk away!" the voice thundered. "Get up, Mac. Haul your ass out of there now! Or
I'll come kill you myself!"

  My head snapped back. I stared down the street.

  I narrowed my eyes, squinted. Barrons came into focus.

  There was an expression of horror on his face. But it wasn't directed at the Book
open at my knees, and it wasn't directed at me.

  It was focused on whatever was behind me.

  Chills iced my spine. What made Jericho Barrons feel horror?

   Whatever it was, it was breathing down my neck. Now that I'd been jarred from the
trance I was in, I could feel it, malevolent, mocking, beyond amused, laughing, right
behind my ear.

  "What are you?" I whispered, without turning.

  "Infinite. Eternal." I heard the sound of chain-saw blades, felt a gust of breath that
smelled of oil, metal, and decay hot on my cheek. "Without parameters. Free."

  "Corrupt. An abomination that should never have been. Evil."

  "Sides of a coin, Mac," it said in Ryodan's voice.

  "I'll never flip."

  "Maybe something's wrong with you, Junior," it said, soft and sweet, in Alina's
voice.

  Barrons was trying to move toward me, hammering his fists on an invisible wall.

  I turned my head.

  O'Bannion crouched behind me, his emaciated body pressed to mine, the scent of
death surrounding us, those awful chain-saw blades an inch from my face.

  He gnashed his teeth at me and laughed. "Surprise! Gotcha, didn't I?"

  I didn't have to look back to know the Book wasn't lying on the pavement.

  It never had been.

   I hadn't actually seen a thing. It had all been illusion, glamour. Which meant the
Sinsar Dubh had somehow skimmed my mind and plucked from it the images it
believed would draw me in, keep me occupied. Some part of my brain must have been
thinking about the woman, wondering how I would get past her tomorrow.

 It had shown me a glimpse of what I wanted to see, then kept me busy hunting for
more with elusive, sketchy images, all promise, no substance.

  While in reality it had been crouching behind me, doing ... what? What had it been
up to while I'd been staring into pages that weren't there?

 "Learning you. Tasting you. Knowing you, Mac." O'Bannion's bladed hand caressed
my arm.

  I shook it off.

  "Sweet. So sweet." O'Bannion's breath was on my ear.

  I gathered my will, lunged to a half crouch, and dragged myself down the pavement,
away from it.

  "I SAY WHEN WE'RE DONE!"

   I was crushed to the street, flattened with pain, and I realized the stones hadn't been
protecting me, nor had any change in my strength or abilities. The Sinsar Dubh had
released me from my pain and could return it any time it chose.

  It chose now.

   It soared over me, rising, stretching, transforming into the Beast, telling me, in
graphic detail, what I could do with my puny little stones that only a fool would believe
could contain, could dampen, could ever hope to even brush the greatness of something
as limitless and perfect as it. It lacerated me with red-hot blades of hatred and cold black
blades of despair.

  Agony screamed inside my skin.

  I couldn't fight. I couldn't flee.

  I could only lie there whimpering, immobilized by pain.

When I came to, it took me a moment to figure out where I was.

  I blinked in the low light and remained motionless, performing a rapid physical
assessment of myself.