Fever 4 - DreamFever (8 page)

  I was in a basement.

  I found the guns in the crates, stacked next to the deafeningly loud generators that
were powering the room I'd been living in, next to what looked like a year's supply of
gasoline.

    There were dozens of crates of guns and twice as many crates of ammo. It seemed a
little risky to me to keep so much ammunition next to so much gasoline, but who was I
to judge? I was just glad it was all there. I sat on a crate and examined the different
guns, finally settling for a semiautomatic with a shorter barrel than the rest. It resembled
an Uzi, with a few minor differences.

   Before all hell had broken loose on Halloween, I'd been researching guns on the
Internet and had been angling to get Barrons, with his unlimited connections, to buy me
one. The gun I chose now was a PDW: a personal defense weapon. Perfect for a woman

of my size and stature. Highly manageable, highly effective, highly illegal. Able to fire
even from a prone position. I intended to practice firing from every position possible.
Gunfire might not kill Fae, but I was willing to bet it might slow down the non-sifting
kind.

  I crammed clips of ammunition into my pack everywhere they'd fit, then filled my
boots and the pockets of the new black leather coat I'd found draped over a chair in just
my size. It irked me that Barrons had been making fashion choices for me, but not
enough to be stupid about it: I needed that coat. I was pretty sure it was winter in
Dublin, and it had been cold already in late October.

   I wasted a lot of time searching the basement for my spear, because I knew Barrons
well enough to know that he'd have requisitioned it, if it'd been possible. When I didn't
find it, I ruled out the possibility of it still being at the church. He'd have checked there.
Which meant someone else had picked up my spear and backpack. I needed to know
who.

  I discovered crates of protein bars and loaded up on those, too. Like I said, Barrons
plans for everything.

  I'm not so sure he planned for one thing, though.

  His OOP detector--the one he'd worked so hard to restore to sanity so he could use
me some more, tracking down his precious Objects of Power--wasn't hanging around.

  "Thanks," I told the empty house, "but I'll take it from here."

  Besides, knowing him, he'd probably amped up his brand on the back of my skull,
while I'd slumbered nearly unconscious from one of our marathon sex sessions, or put a
new, improved one on me somewhere else. I had no doubt Barrons could find me one
way or another. He wasn't the kind of--whatever he was--that a woman could lose, if
he didn't feel like being lost.

   I walked through the silent house, which was crammed with furniture covered with
dusty sheets, and stepped out onto the front steps. The house had been built on an
elevation with a good view of the neighborhood. I'd spent so much time driving in
Dublin, hunting the Sinsar Dubh, that I'd gotten pretty familiar with it. I was on the
northern outskirts of the city. Dawn smudged the horizon, and the first rays of sun
slanted across a sea of gray roofs.

  I smiled.

  It was the start of a brand-new day.
 

T   he wards knocked me on my ass the moment I tried to leave the property.

   "Ow!" I rebounded like a rubber ball off a brick wall and landed on the lawn. Or,
rather, what was left of the lawn, which was dirt. I was in a Dark Zone. It wasn't winter
but Shades that had stripped the yard of life. Mother Nature left grass, even in her
harshest moments. Shades left nothing. Barrons must have brought me here after they'd
already claimed the neighborhood. What better place to hide a weapon from the enemy
than deep in their own territory? Especially since he and they seemed to have a tacit
agreement to leave each other alone.

   I took off my MacHalo--it was light enough that I wouldn't need it again until
nightfall, and I suspected the Shades that had devastated this area had moved on to
more-fertile ground, anyway--hooked it onto a strap on my pack, and rubbed my head.
The wards had nearly split my skull. My molars hurt, even my scalp felt bruised. I
hadn't seen that coming. I narrowed my eyes. Faint silver runes glistened on the
sidewalk I'd just tried to cross. Wards were sneaky things, often hard to see, made
doubly so this morning by a thin coating of frost. But now that I knew they were there, I
could discern the telltale shimmer of Barrons' subtle work, vanishing east and west
around both sides of the house. Although I knew he was meticulous, I still walked the
perimeter, looking for a gap.

  There wasn't one.

   I decided it must have been an aberration that the wards had repelled me so violently.
Barrons warded things out. He never warded me in. I stepped onto the lightly iced
sidewalk in a different place.

  I went flying backward again, teeth vibrating, ears ringing.

  I sat up, growling. The nerve. If I hadn't been determined to leave before, I was now.

  "He has warded me out, as well, MacKayla. Or I would have come for you long ago."

    V'lane's voice preceded his appearance. One moment I was glowering at the air, the
next at V'lane's knees. For a moment, I kept my gaze fixed there. A woman might feel a
little terrified after what I'd been through--not that I did, just that some other woman
might.

   V'lane is Seelie, one of the alleged "good" guys, if any of the Fae can be called that,
but he's still a death-by-sex Fae, same as those masters of killing lust that had so
recently devolved me into the lowest common denominator. All Fae royalty, whether
light court or dark, can turn humans Pri-ya with sex. And like his darker, deadly
Unseelie brethren--when in his natural high glamour--V'lane is too beautiful for a
human to look at directly. I'm no exception. The dark princes had made my eyes bleed.
V'lane could, too, if he felt like it.

   Since the day I met him, he'd been using his death-by-sex magnetism on me to
varying degrees, although I now knew just how "gentle" his coercion had really been
compared to what he could have done in his efforts to make me help him track the
Sinsar Dubh. We'd had an ongoing battle about what form he would assume in my
presence, with him always turning on too much sexual charisma and me always
insisting he "mute" it.

 I raised my gaze to the inevitable perfection of the Seelie Prince's face, bracing
myself for the impact.

  There was none.

   He stood before me with every bit of his death-by-sex Faeness dampened. For the
first time since I'd met him, I was able to look directly at him, absorbing his inhuman,
incredible perfection without being affected by it. V'lane looked as close to a human
male as he could get, in jeans, boots, and a loose linen shirt half unbuttoned. He was
apparently unaffected by the frigid weather--or perhaps the cause of it. Fae can affect
the weather with their moods. His beautifully muscled golden body was no more perfect
than that of any airbrushed model; his long golden hair no longer shimmered with a
dozen seductive, otherworldly shades; his flawlessly symmetrical features might have
graced any magazine cover. The only aspect of his Fae nature he'd retained were those
bottomless, ancient, iridescent eyes. He was still something to see: tawny, sexy man
with alien, glowing eyes, but I was not assaulted by a frantic desire to tear off my
clothes, I didn't feel a tingle of lust, not the faintest sensation of being weak at the
knees.

  And he'd done it without my even having to ask.

   I wasn't about to thank him. It was the least he could do after what his race had done
to me.

   He studied me while I studied him. His eyes contracted slightly, then widened
infinitesimally, which on a human face meant very little but on a Fae's was an
expression of astonishment. I wondered why. Because I'd survived? Had my odds really
been so low?

  "I have been monitoring these wards and sensed the disturbance. I am pleased to see
you, MacKayla."

   "Thanks for the rescue," I said coldly. "Nice of you to show up when I needed you.
Oh, wait," I barked a sharp little laugh, "I remember now. You didn't. In fact, your
name crashed and burned when I tried to use it." If he'd never given me his name on my
tongue, I wouldn't have been so fearless that night. I'd been lulled into complacency,
believing I had a Seelie Prince available at the snap of my fingers to sift in and sift me
out to instant safety. It had made me feel invincible when I shouldn't have. And when
I'd needed him the most, it had failed. Better never to have depended on it at all. I
should have kept Dani by my side that night. She could have whisked me to safety.

  He spread his hands, palms up, and bowed his head in a gesture of subservience.

  I snorted. The holier-than-thou Seelie Prince was bowing his head to me?

   "A thousand apologies could not atone for the harm my brethren were permitted to
inflict upon you. It sickens me that you were--" He broke off, bowing his head even
more deeply, as if he couldn't bring himself to go on.

  It was a completely human gesture.

  I didn't trust it one bit.

   "So." I picked myself up off the ground and dusted off my new leather coat. "What's
your excuse for failing me on Halloween? Barrons said he was stuck in Scotland.
Actually, he said it was `complicated.' Was it complicated, V'lane?" I asked sweetly, as
I slung my gun around the back side of my shoulder. It banged into my backpack. I
liked the solid, reassuring weight of my weapons and ammo.

  He winced at the tone of my voice, not missing the arsenic in the sugar. While I'd
been busy being Pri-ya, V'lane had obviously been busy expanding his repertoire of
human expressions. Still, these expressions were different than that first one. They were
too large for a Fae, overblown. Iridescent eyes met mine. "Exceedingly."

   I hooked my thumbs in my jeans pockets. "Go on." I smiled. There was nothing he
could say that would ever make me trust again in something so mystical and
fundamentally flawed as a Fae name embedded in my tongue, but I wanted to see how
far he might go to get back into my good graces.

   "Aoibheal was my first priority, MacKayla. You know that. Without her, all else is
insignificant. Without her, the walls can never be rebuilt. She alone is our hope of
reclaiming the Song of Making."

   The Fae were matriarchal, and only the Seelie Queen could wield the Song of
Making. I knew very little about the Song, just that it was the stuff from which the walls
of the Unseelie prison had been forged, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Roughly
six thousand years ago, when the Compact had been negotiated between our races,
apportioning shares of the planet, Aoibheal had jury-rigged an extension of those
ancient walls to separate Fae and human realms. Unfortunately, her tampering had
weakened the prison walls, enabling Darroc the Lord Master to bring them all crashing
down on Halloween.

  So why didn't Aoibheal just sing them back into existence?

   Because in typical Fae infighting fashion, the Unseelie King had killed the long-ago
Seelie Queen before she'd been able to pass on her knowledge to the next one.
Aoibheal, latest in a long succession of queens to rule with diminished power, had no
idea how to sing the Song of Making. They needed me--OOP detector extraordinaire--
to find the one remaining clue to re-creating the Song: the Sinsar Dubh, a deadly book
that contained all the dark magic of the Unseelie King. The king had been close to
discovering it when his mortal concubine killed herself, and he'd abandoned his
experiments that had created the dark half of the Fae race.

  "And only I can find the Book she needs to do it," I said coolly. "So who's
expendable?"

   His eyes narrowed minutely and he glanced sideways. Pink Mac wouldn't have even
noticed it. I wasn't her anymore. My spine snapped straight, and I went nose to nose at
the ward line with him. If I could have reached through it and grabbed him by the
throat, I would have. "Oh, God, you actually thought that through and decided it was

me! You knew I was in trouble and didn't help me!" I snarled. "You believed I would
survive it! Or was it that you figured I'd be even easier to use if I was Pri-ya?"

  His iridescent eyes blazed. "I could not be in two places at once! I was forced to
choose. The queen would not have survived the night. It was imperative she survive."

  "You son of a bitch. You knew they were coming for me."

  "I did not!"

  "Liar!"

  "By the time I learned what they'd planned, it was too late, MacKayla! Despite my
powers, I failed to foresee how dangerous Darroc had become. None of us foresaw it.
We believed the walls would weaken further on Samhain, we even believed more of the
Unseelie would escape, but we did not believe Darroc could succeed in bringing the
walls down completely. Not only did he accomplish the unthinkable, he managed to
block all Fae magic as thoroughly as he demolished your human grids. For a time that
night, not one of us could sift. Not one of us could change form. Not one of us could
draw upon the birthright of our magic. I was forced to carry my queen to a new hiding
place on human"--he sneered the word--"feet."

  "While I lay on my human ass and your fairy"--I sneered the word--"brethren
fucked my brains out and nearly killed me."

   "But failed, MacKayla. But failed. Remember that. You are queenly in your own
right."

  "So the end justifies the means? Is that what you think?"

  "Do they not?"

  "I suffered," I gritted. "Horrible, unspeakable things."

  "Yet you stand here now. Toe to toe with a Seelie Prince. Impressive for a human.
Perhaps you are becoming what you need to be."

   "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger? That's what you think I should take away
from this?"

  "Yes! And be glad for it."

  "Let me tell you something." I fisted my hand in the collar of his shirt. "What I will
be glad for is the day the last one of you is dead."