Fever 4 - DreamFever (7 page)

   I thought he was a jackass, raised a manicured hand, and told him so with lofty
disdain. He challenged me to rebut. Mac 1.0 couldn't.

    But Mac 4.0 can.

   Sure, a lot of life is about sex. But you have to pull up high and look down on the
human race with a bird's-eye view to see the big picture, a thing I couldn't do when I
was nineteen and pretty in pink and pearls. Shudder. Just what kind of mate was I trying
to attract back then? (Don't expect me to analyze Mac 4.0's predilection for black and
blood. I get it, and I'm perfectly fine with it.)

    So, what's the big picture about our lust for sex?

   We're not trying to acquire something. We want to feel something: Alive. Electrically,
intensely, blazingly alive. Good. Bad. Pleasure. Pain. Bring it on--all of it.

    For people who live small, I guess enough of that can be found in sex.

   But for those of us who live large, the most alive we ever feel is when we're punching
air with a fist, uncurling our middle finger with a cool smile, and flipping Death the big
old bird.

                                     --Mac's journal
 

I   was mad as hell.

    I had so many grievances that I didn't even know where to begin listing them.

  I was pissed-off walking. Or rather pissed-off sitting, tangled in crimson silk sheets
that smelled like somebody'd been having a sexathon.

    That would be me.

    And that made me even madder.

   Just when you think your life has gotten as crappy as it can get, it goes and gets
crappier. Gee, Mac doesn't get to have a choice about having sex with someone. Good-
bye: dating, flirting, and building up to that special romantic moment. Hello: I'm getting
screwed senseless, and then, when I've gotten about as low as I can get, I'm getting

screwed back to my senses--although I wouldn't in a million years admit any such
thing to the man who was no doubt feeling impossibly smug that, by the power of his
sexuality alone, he'd rescued me from the mindless state it had taken multiple Unseelie
death-by-sex Fae to drag me to, kicking and screaming.

  If I knew Jericho Barrons, he was walking around feeling like his dick was the most
huge, magnificent, perfect, important creation under the sun.

  Which--I winced--I vaguely recalled telling him a time or two.

  Well ... maybe several times.

   I yanked the sheets up over my breasts with a snarl. The animal I'd been recently
hadn't left me. She was still in me and would be forever. I was glad. I welcomed her
feral nature. Pink Mac had needed a good dose of savagery. It was a savage world out
there.

  I was coldly glad to be alive, glad that I lived another day, no matter the methods by
which it had been accomplished. I was also seething, furious at everyone I'd met and
everything that had happened to me since the moment I'd left Ashford, Georgia.

   Nothing had gone as planned. Not one thing. My sister's murderer was supposed to
be a human monster that I was going to bring to justice, either via Ireland's Garda or by
my own methods. I wasn't supposed to get caught up in a deadly war between the
human race and a supernatural, supersexed, immortal, and mostly invisible race, little
more than a weapon to be used by whoever could figure out how to manipulate me most
effectively. And that was only the beginning of the many, many things that had gone
wrong.

  Speaking of manipulative bastards ...

   What was the point of Barrons' stamping a tattoo on the back of my skull if he hadn't
been able to use it to find me when I needed help the most? What was the point of
V'lane embedding his name in my tongue if, at the crucial moment, it wouldn't work?
Weren't Barrons and V'lane supposed to be the most powerful, dangerous, brilliant
players of all? That was why I'd allied myself with them!

   But both had failed me when I'd needed them the most. I'd counted on them. I'd
believed Barrons could find me. I'd believed V'lane would instantly appear when
summoned. I'd believed Inspector Jayne could help me with certain problems. Those
three had been the extent of my diversification.

  And who'd saved me?

  Dani. A thirteen-year-old kid. A girl.

  She'd blasted in, plucked me right out of the LM's grasp, and whisked me to safety.

  No, not safety. Not quite.

   She'd taken me to Rowena, who locked me in a cell and left me alone, hellishly
alone.

  To die?

  There were memories from the time of my capture by the LM and my early
incarceration at the abbey that weren't accessible. They were in me. I could feel them,
deep, dark, secreted away in a mind that had been impressionable but
uncomprehending. They weren't exactly memories, because memory is stored by a
brain that functions and mine hadn't during those traumatic hours. More like imprints.
Photographs snapped but not understood. Conversations overheard. Things seen. It
would take work to dredge them from the muck at the bottom of my psyche.

  But I would.

  The LM hadn't expected me to ever escape.

  Rowena hadn't expected me to live.

  "Surprise," I purred. "I did."

   I tossed back the sheet and pushed up from the bed. My body felt good. It was
sleeker, stronger than I remembered it being. I stretched and glanced down, then
blinked, admiring myself.

   Gone was all softness, save my breasts and butt. My calves, thighs, arms, stomach--
all were toned, shaped by smooth, sleek muscle. I flexed a bicep. I had one. Long
fingernails dug into my palms. I studied them. On Samhain, they'd been cut to the
quick.

   Just how long had I been having sex with Jericho Barrons? How long did it take to
resculpt a body like mine had been into--Savage Me was pleased to note--this much
more useful new shape? What had we been doing? Constant sexual gymnastics?

  I shut down that thought. I had a few too many memories that weren't remotely
blurry, and they gave rise to impossibly conflicting emotions.

  Like: Thanks for saving me, Barrons--too bad I'm going to have to kill you for doing
those things to me and seeing me like that.

  I'd had sex with Jericho Barrons.

  Not just sex. Incredibly raw, intensely intimate, completely uninhibited sex.

  I'd done everything a woman could do with a man. I'd pretty much worshipped every
inch of him. And he'd let me.

  Oh, no, much more than that--he'd enthusiastically participated. He'd egged me on.
He'd plunged right into my animalistic frenzy with me, met me move for move in that
dark lust-crazed cave where I'd been living.

  I turned to stare at the big silk-sheeted bed. It was exactly the kind of bed I'd expect
Barrons to sleep in. Sun King ornate, four-postered, draped in silk and velvet; a sensual
masculine lair.

  There were fur-lined handcuffs on the bedposts. I got knotted up in that memory for a
minute before I managed to extricate myself.

   My breathing was shallow and my hands were fists. "Oh, yes, I'm going to have to
kill you, Barrons," I said coolly. Partly because, for the most minuscule sliver of an
instant, while looking at those handcuffs, I'd imagined myself climbing back into bed
and pretending I wasn't cured yet.

   And I'd thought interacting with Barrons had been difficult before. Since the day
we'd met, we'd maintained a careful wall of non-intimacy between us and rarely
slipped. I was Ms. Lane. He was Barrons. That wall had been blasted to dust, and I
hadn't had anything to say about it. We'd fast-forwarded from formal and testy most of
the time to See Mac Bare All/Body & Soul, without a single ounce of relationship
progression along the way. He'd seen me at my absolute worst, my most vulnerable,
while he'd been in complete control, and I still didn't really know a damned thing about
him.

   We'd gotten as close as two human beings--well, overlooking the fact that he wasn't
one--possibly could. Now, in addition to wondering whether he'd spiked the Orb of
D'Jai with deadly Shades before he'd given it to me to give to the sidhe-seers and
whether he'd sabotaged the ritual at the MacKeltars' on Halloween because he wanted
the walls down between Fae and human realms, I knew that killing aroused him. Turned
him on. I hadn't forgotten that enlightening little detail I'd found poking around inside
his skull. It cast a harsh new light on the moment I'd watched him walk out of an
Unseelie mirror carrying the savaged, very dead body of a young woman.

  Had he killed her just for fun?

  My intuition wasn't buying it.

  Unfortunately, I wasn't sure what my intuition was worth where he was concerned. If
there was one thing I'd learned about Barrons, it was that speculating about him was as
pointless as tap-dancing on quicksand, with no solid ground in sight.

  Speaking of solid ground ...

  I glanced around. I was below it. I can feel belowground in my bones. I hate being
there. I hate confined, windowless spaces. Yet, for a time, this space belowground had
been my harbor in a brutal storm.

 What had happened to Dublin while I'd been Pri-ya, clawing my way back to sanity?
What had happened to the world?

  How was Ashford? Were Mom and Dad okay? Had anyone gotten the Book? What
was happening out there with all the Unseelie free? Was Aoibheal, Queen of the Seelie,
okay, or had the Unseelie gotten to her, too, on Halloween? She was the only one with

any hope of ever reimprisoning them. I needed her to be alive. Where was V'lane? Why
hadn't he come for me? Was he dead? I felt a moment of pure panic. Maybe he'd tried
to rescue me after all and that was one of those confused imprints, and the LM had
taken my spear and--

   My fingers clenched on emptiness. Oh, God, where was my spear? The ancient Spear
of Destiny was one of only two weapons known to man that was capable of killing an
immortal Fae. I remembered throwing it away. I remembered it hissing and steaming at
the foot of a basin of holy water.

  Where had it gone from there?

  Was it possible it was still lying there, in the church? Could I be so lucky?

  I needed it back.

   Once I had it, I could get to work on other things. Like figuring out how the Unseelie
Princes had managed to turn it against me at the critical moment. True to Fae lore--
which held that the Unseelie couldn't touch any of the Seelie Hallows, and vice versa--
they hadn't been able to physically take it from me, but they'd managed to coerce me
into turning it on myself, forcing me to choose between stabbing myself with it or
tossing it, putting me completely at their mercy.

  I not only needed my spear back--I needed to learn how to control it.

   Then I was going to kill every Unseelie I could get my Nullifying hands on,
slaughtering my way straight up the chain of command, not stopping until I'd taken out
all the Unseelie Princes, the LM, and maybe even the Unseelie King himself. And the
Seelie, too, with the exception of those I needed to restore order to our world. I was sick
of the terrifying, inhumanly beautiful, homicidal interlopers. It had been our planet first
and, although V'lane didn't seem to think that should count for much, it was all that
mattered to me. They were scavengers who'd damaged their own world so badly that
they'd had to go find another one--and now they were doing the same thing to ours.
They were arrogant immortals who'd created an immortal abomination--the Unseelie
court, the dark mirror of their race--and they'd lost control of them on our planet. And
who was paying the highest price for all their mistakes?

  Me. That's who.

   I was going to get tougher, smarter, faster, stronger, and spend the rest of my life
killing Fae, if that was what it took to put my world back the way it used to be.

  I might not have a spear at the moment, but I was alive and I was ... different.
Something irrevocable had changed inside me. I could feel it.

  I wasn't entirely certain what it was.

  But I liked it.

I ransacked the room before I left it, looking for weapons. There were none.

   Apart from what looked like a hastily plumbed shower in a corner of the room, the
rest of it was filled with my belongings that I'd kept at the bookstore.

   Wherever we were now, in his efforts to restore my memory, Barrons had gone to
some lengths to re-create pretty-in-pink Mac's world. He'd plastered the walls with
blown-up pictures of my parents, of Alina, of us playing volleyball with our friends on
the beach back home. My driver's license was stuck to a lamp shade, next to a photo of
Mom. My clothes were draped all over the place, arranged in outfits, complete with
matching purses and shoes. Every shade of pink fingernail polish ever made by OPI was
lined up on a shelf. Fashion magazines covered the floor, along with some other ones I
really hoped he and I hadn't looked at together. There were peaches-and-cream
candles--Alina's favorite--scattered on every surface. There were dozens of lamps in
the room and a blazing Christmas tree.

  My backpack was nowhere to be found, but Barrons had obviously been counting on
me regaining my sanity, because there was a new leather one, crammed with batteries,
LED lights, and a MacHalo. He'd used a black helmet to build it. All the lights were
black, except two. Guess he figured I'd've graduated from pink if I survived. I still liked
pink. I would always like pink. But there wasn't anything pink inside me anymore. I
might be back, but I was black Mac now.

   There was nothing useful here. I took a quick shower--I smelled like Jericho Barrons
from head to toe--got dressed, strapped the MacHalo on my head, clicked it on, and
headed for the door.

  I was locked in.

  It took me less than a minute to kick the door down. I not only had muscle now, I had
another useful tool in my new black toolbox: rage.

Barrons seems to plan for everything. I want to be like him.