Fever 4 - DreamFever (37 page)

  I moved on. The second mirror showed an empty bedroom.

   The third was open on a prison cell containing human children. They reached through
bars for me with bony, pale arms and imploring eyes. I froze. There were a hundred of
them or more crammed into the tiny cell. They were filthy and bruised, with torn
clothing.

   I had no time for this. I couldn't afford the emotion. I stepped closer to the mirror and
turned my palm toward it to snap a picture so that later, after I'd gotten my parents out,
I could make Barrons help me find this place in the Silvers and free them. But just as I
was about to press the button, one of the children opened his mouth, snapped at me with
vicious teeth no human child had, and made a suggestion to me no human child would,
and I backed hastily away, cursing myself for allowing emotion to fog my mind.

   Dani had said some of the Unseelie were imprisoning children. With that awful
thought in mind, I'd looked into the Silver and seen its denizens colored by my fear and
worry, which had airbrushed telling clues. If I'd been thinking clearly, I would have
noticed the subtle wrongness in the shape of the "children's" heads, the unnatural
ferocity in their tiny faces.

  I didn't spare a glance for the fourth mirror but walked straight to the fifth. At a slight
angle from it, so the LM wouldn't see me doing it, I snapped a picture, sent it to
Barrons' cell phone, then slid my phone into my pocket.

  Only then did I let the impact of the scene hit me.

  We had a definite destination.

  He was in my living room, at my house, in Ashford, Georgia.

  The Lord Master had my mom and dad bound to chairs and gagged, with a dozen
black-and-crimson-clad guards standing around them.

  The Lord Master was in my hometown! What had he done to it? Had he brought
Shades with him? Were Unseelie walking the streets even now, feeding off my friends?

  The one place I'd tried so hard to keep safe, and I'd failed!

  I'd let V'lane take me there, given in to my weakness, stood outside my own home.
Was that the fatal act that drew the Lord Master's attention? Or had he always known
and only now decided to make use of it?

   In the mirror, across the fifteen or so feet that separated us, my daddy shook his head.
His eyes said, Don't you dare, baby. You stay on that side of the mirror. Don't you dare
trade yourself for us.

  How could I not? He was the one who'd taught me that the heart had reasons of
which reason knew nothing, the only quote of Pascal's I remembered. All the reason in
the world couldn't have talked me into turning away now, even if I hadn't had Barrons
as backup. Even without a safety net, this was a wire I'd have walked. I might have
found out my biological mother's name last night. I might have even begun thinking of
myself as Mac O'Connor, but Jack and Rainey Lane were my mom and dad, and always
would be.

  I walked to the wall. Daddy's eyes were wild now, and I knew, if not for the gag,
he'd be roaring at me.

  I stepped up, into the Silver.
 

But now we see through a glass darkly and, the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to
face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell
out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a
will wholly bent on evil.

                                     --Umberto Eco
                                   The Name of the Rose

G    ood of you to come," mocked the Lord Master. "Nice hat." Entering the Silver was
like pressing forward into a gluey membrane. The surface rippled thickly when I
touched it. When I tried to step into it, it resisted. I pushed harder, and it took
considerable effort to force my boot to puncture the silvery skin. I thrust in up to my
hip.

  Still the mirror pressed back at me with a buoyant elasticity.

  For a moment I stood half in each world, my face through the mirror, the back of my
head in the house, one leg in the Silver, one leg out. Just when I thought it would expel
me with the snap of a giant rubber band, it yielded--sucked me in, warm and
unpleasantly wet--and squirted me out on the other side, stumbling.

  I'd expected to find myself standing in the living room, but I was in a tunnel of sorts,
of moist pink membrane. My living room was farther away than it had looked from
outside the mirror. There were forty or so feet between me and my parents. Barrons had
been wrong. The LM was more adept with Silvers than he'd thought. Not only was he
capable of stacking Silvers, the tunnel hadn't been at all visible from beyond the glass.
In tennis-speak, this set went to the LM. But there was no way he was winning the
match.

   "As if I had a choice." I wiped my face with a sleeve, scrubbing at a thin layer of
smelly, slippery afterbirth. It was dripping off my MacHalo. I'd thought about removing
it before I'd entered the mirror (it's a little hard for people to take you seriously when
you're wearing one), but now I was glad I hadn't. It was no wonder people avoided the
Silvers.

  You had every choice, my dad's eyes said furiously. You chose the wrong one.

   My mother's eyes were saying way more than that. She began with the mess that was
my tousled black hair sticking out from under my "hat," went nearly ballistic over the
tight leather pants I was wearing, made short, scathing work of my butchered nails, and
by the time she got around to the automatic weapon that kept slipping around my
shoulder, banging into my hip, I had to tune her out.

  I took a step forward.

  "Not so fast," said the Lord Master. "Show me the stones."

  I swung my gun forward into my other hand, slipped the pack off my shoulder,
opened it, fished out the black pouch, and held it up.

  "Get them out. Show them to me."

  "Barrons didn't think that was a good idea."

  "I told you not to involve Barrons, and I don't give a fuck what he thinks."

   "You told me not to bring him. I had to involve him. He's the one who had the
stones. Have you ever tried to steal anything from Barrons?"

  The look on his face said he had. "If he interferes, they die."

   "I got your message loud and clear the first time. He won't interfere." I needed to get
closer. I needed to be between the LM and his guards and my parents when Barrons and
his men arrived. I needed to be in stabbing distance. Barrons planned to reconfigure his
Silver to connect to whatever destination the Lord Master was at, but he'd said it would
take time, depending on the location. Stall, he'd ordered. Once I get the photo, I'll work
on connecting to the other end. My men will come in behind you as soon as I have a
lock on the location.

  "Put down the spear, your gun, the pistol in the back of your pants, the switchblade in
your sleeve, and the knives in your boots. Kick them all away."

  How did he know where all my weapons were?

  My mother couldn't have looked more shocked if she'd found out I was sleeping with
half the Ashford High football team and smoking crack between touchdowns.

   I gave her my most reassuring look. She flinched. Apparently what I considered
reassuring lately came off a little ... savage, I guess. "It's been a rough few months,
Mom," I said defensively. "I'll explain it all later. Let my parents go," I told the LM.
"I'll cooperate fully. You have my word."

  "I do not require your word. I have your last living relatives. Being of such finite
duration, humans care deeply about such things. Alina told me her parents died in a car
wreck when she was fifteen. Yet another lie. Makes one wonder, does it not? I would
never have thought to look for them had you not led me here."

   How had I led him here? How had he followed me to Ashford? Could he track
V'lane? Was V'lane duplicitous? Working with the Lord Master? "They're not my
relatives," I said coolly. "My relatives are dead. When you killed Alina, you wiped out
the last of my line, except for me." I was hoping to make my parents' value seem a little
less than it really was. It always worked in the movies. "We were adopted."

   I snatched a quick look at my mom, even though I knew I shouldn't. Her eyes
shimmered with unshed tears. Great. She disapproved of everything about me, and now
I'd hurt her feelings. I was batting a thousand.

  The Lord Master didn't say a word. Just walked over to my dad and slammed him in
the face with his fist. My daddy's head snapped back and blood spurted from his nose.
He gave a dazed shake, and his eyes said, Get out of here, baby.

  "All right!" I shouted. "I lied! Leave him alone!"

  The Lord Master turned back to me. "Mortality is the consummate weakness. It
shapes your entire existence. Your every breath. Is it any wonder the Fae have always
been gods to your kind?"

  "Never to me."

  "Drop your weapons."

  I let my automatic slip to the ground, yanked the pistol from the back of my pants,
dropped the switchblade from the cuff of my jacket, and extracted a knife from each
boot.

  "The spear."

    I stared. If I tried to throw the spear the forty feet that separated us, what good would
it do? Even if I hit him dead in the heart, he was part human and wouldn't die right
away. I had no doubt at least one of my parents would be dead seconds after I'd thrown
it, if not both.

  Stall, Barrons had said.

  I pulled the spear from my holster and slid it from beneath my coat. The moment I
uncovered it, it crackled and sparked, shooting jagged white charges into the air.
Alabaster, it blazed with almost blinding luminosity, as if drawing power from the Fae
realm around it.

  I couldn't make my hand let go of it. My fingers wouldn't unclench.

  "Drop it now." He turned toward my mother and drew back his fist.

  I snarled as I flung the spear away from me. It lodged in the wall of the sleek pink
tunnel. The fleshy canal shuddered, as if with pain. "Leave. Her. Alone," I gritted.

  "Kick away the weapons and show me the stones."

  "Seriously, Barrons said not to."

  "Now."

  Sighing, I withdrew the stones from the pouch and peeled back the velvet cloth they
were wrapped in.

   The reaction was instantaneous and violent: The tunnel spasmed, moaning deep in its
wet walls, and the floor shuddered beneath me. The stones blazed with blue-black light.
The walls contracted and expanded, as if laboring to expel me, and suddenly I was
blinded by baleful light, deaf to all but the rushing of wind and water. I squeezed my
eyes shut against the glare. There was nothing to hold on to. I clutched the stones, trying
to cover them, and nearly lost the velvet cloth to the gale. My backpack banged against
my shins and was torn from my grasp.

   I howled into the wind, calling for my parents, for Barrons--hell, even for the Lord
Master! I felt like I was being ripped in ten different directions. My coat was being torn
from my shoulders, rippling in the hard breeze. I struggled to shove the stones back into
the pouch.

    Abruptly, all was still.

   "I told you," I growled, keeping my eyes closed, waiting for the retinal burn to fade,
"Barrons advised against it. But did you listen? No." There was no answer. "Hello?" I
said warily. Still no answer.

    I opened my eyes.

    Gone was the pink membranous canal.

    I stood in a hall of purest gold.

  Gold walls, gold floors--I tipped my head back--gold that stretched up as far as I
could see. If there was a ceiling, it was beyond my vision. Soaring, towering golden
walls to nowhere.

    I was alone.

    No Lord Master. No guards. No parents.

    I looked down, hoping to find my gun, knives, and backpack.

    There was nothing but smooth, endless gold floor.

    I glanced at the walls, searching frantically for my spear.

    There was no glint of alabaster to be found.

   In fact, I realized, as I turned in a slow circle, there was nothing on those gold walls
at all except hundreds, no, thousands, no--I stared; they went all the way up, vanishing
beyond my vision--billions of mirrors.

   Trying to absorb it, I tasted infinity. I was a minuscule dot on a linear depiction of
time that stretched endlessly in both directions, rendering me of utter and absolute
inconsequence.

    "Oh, shit, shit, shit."

    I knew where I was.

    The Hall of All Days.
 

I   have no idea how long I sat.

    Time, in this place, would become an impossible thing for me to gauge.

   I sat in the middle of the Hall of All Days--knees tucked up, staring down at the
golden floor because looking around made me feel small and vertiginous--trying to
take stock of my situation.

  Problem: Somewhere out there in the real world, in my living room, in Ashford,
Georgia, the Lord Master still had my parents.

  I imagined he was seriously pissed off.

  It wasn't my fault. He was the one who'd insisted I show him the stones. I'd
cautioned against it. But fault was as irrelevant as my presence in this vast, indifferent
place of all days.

  He still had my parents. That was relevant.

   Hopefully, Barrons was even now speeding his way to them through the reconfigured
Silver in his study, and hopefully his comrades were storming in through the mirror at
1247 LaRuhe, and hopefully that slippery pink tunnel that had too closely resembled a
portion of the female anatomy for my comfort was still intact and I had merely been
expelled by its labor pains, and hopefully within moments my parents would be safe.

  That was four too many "hopefullys" for my taste.

   It didn't matter. I'd been effectively neutralized. Plucked from the number set and
tossed into the quantum hall of variables, none of which computed into the only
equation I understood and cared about.