Fever 5 - Shadowfever (35 page)

.
I jerked. Was I that easy to read?
You’re wondering what kind of man I am and how I feel about all this
.
I stared.
You think you betrayed me and one day I will kill you for it
.
I’m not sure why I even bother talking
. My eyes flashed with temper. I hated being so transparent.
That you allied with Darroc to attain your goals did not betray me. I’d have done the same
.
Then why are you so pissy?
That you fucked him will be forgiven once you fuck me. Another woman might run headlong toward absolution
.
I put an end to our discussion by staring straight ahead.
It was slow going. Fiona couldn’t move very quickly. We proceeded at a snail’s pace through rose halls, to sunshine, to bronze.
“The libraries,” Barrons said as we passed. “We’ll stop on the way back, since we’re in here anyway. I want another look around.”
I felt a sudden tension in the cloaked figure next to me as the dark hood turned my way.
I didn’t need to be able to see her face to sense the bitterness of her gaze or divine the morbid turn of her thoughts.
His comment had driven home that he and I would be walking out of here together and she would be dead. And I knew she thought we would be having a fabulous time, dancing and fighting, having sex and living, while her existence would be over, extinguished as if she’d never been born, unmourned, unmissed.
I felt hatred emanating from beneath that cloak, malevolent and dark, and was glad to see black floors ahead.
I felt like we were prison guards, taking the long, slow, hellish walk to the electric chair. The convict between us would have done anything to escape her sentence, but fate had left her no choice but to crave oblivion.
“How?” she whispered, as we entered the black tunnel.
I looked at Barrons and he looked at me. Once we’d stepped onto the black floors, I’d begun to feel the sexual tension this part of the castle inevitably stirred. One glance at his face confirmed he was feeling it, too.
I was horrified to realize that Fiona must be feeling it, too.
Barrons replied tightly, “There is a Silver that divides the chamber of the Unseelie King and the concubine’s. Only those two can step through it. All others die instantly.” “Even … you?”
So she knew he could die. And come back.
“Yes.”
There was that awful wet sound, laughter but not. “She … knows now.” Barrons gave me a look that clearly said,
Shut her up or I’ll end it now
. “Yes. I know all of it, Fiona,” I lied.
She moved forward, silent once again.
* * *

Christian was asleep in the Unseelie King’s big bed, long black hair a silken fan across a pillow.
If Fiona hadn’t been skinned and in so much pain, I would have pushed her across the white half of the boudoir into the mirror to get it over with, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.
“Who the—What the fuck?” Barrons stalked across snowy furs, through diamond-studded air, to the enormous Silver, staring at the male in the bed.
I glanced at the fireplace, expecting to see the concubine, trying to figure out how I would explain things to Barrons if the queen’s memory residue was stretched out there, but the furs were empty, the fire banked to low white embers.
His voice startled Christian awake; the young Scot rolled over and sprang to his feet.
Silk sheets dripped from his body, leaving him nude and visibly aroused. For a moment I thought he’d gotten rid of the tattoos, but they appeared, moving up his legs, his groin, and his abdomen, then around the side of his chest, before vanishing again.
I joined Barrons at the edge of the mirror, trying not to stare, but gorgeous naked men are gorgeous naked men.
I wondered if memories of the king and queen’s lovemaking had been affecting him the way they’d got to me. His eyes glittered with lazy sensuality, and I could too well imagine the bent of his dreams. He might be difficult to pry out of the chamber when the time came.
He stood on the dark side of the boudoir and looked at me. “I must be dreaming. Bring that sweet ass over here and I’ll show you what God made women and well-hung Scotsmen for.”
“Who the bloody hell is that?” Barrons demanded.
“Christian MacKeltar.”
“That’s not Christian MacKeltar!” Barrons exploded. “That’s Unseelie royalty!”
“Ah, fuck me.” Christian ran his hands through his long, dark hair, muscles rippling in his shoulders. “Is that really what I look like, Mac?”
I almost said,
I don’t know, I can’t stop looking at your
—
Fiona pushed me.
The bitch actually shoved me from behind.
I was so flabbergasted, I didn’t even gasp. I was speechless. I’d come here on a mission of mercy and she’d tried to kill me
again
!
She’d concluded from what Barrons had told her that I would die if I touched the Silver, too, and her final act had been to try to take me with her.
She pushed me hard enough that I shot straight through the unresisting Silver and crashed squarely into Christian, knocking him backward onto the bed. We got tangled up in each other, trying to get out.
Behind me, Barrons roared.
On top of me, Christian made a raw, horny sound and ground himself against me.
I sucked air between my teeth. Every instinct in my body wanted to have sex, here, now, with anyone. This place was dangerous. “Christian, it’s the chamber. It makes sex—”
“I know, lass. Been here awhile.” He raised one of his arms that was pinning me to the bed. “Get out from under me. Move your ass!” he gritted.
When I didn’t react instantly, he snarled, “Now! I won’t be able to say it again!”
I looked at him. His eyes were out of focus, fixed on some point inside me, like a Fae prince. I shot out from beneath him and scrambled from the bed.
He crouched there a moment on his hands and knees, balls heavy, erection huge and flat to his stomach, then he lunged to his feet, trying to cover himself, his hand a hopelessly inadequate shield. He tried to yank a sheet from the bed, but the black silk was king-sized, for acres of bed. Cursing, he began digging among pillows and furs, looking for his clothes, while I tried not to watch and failed miserably.
“Mac!” Barrons thundered.
My heart was pounding. I wanted Barrons, not Christian, but the man I wanted was on the other side of the mirror, and this damned half-white, half-black boudoir was Ecstasy on steroids with a shot of adrenaline, and it made things so dreamy and confused …
It was the awful sound of Fiona’s laughter that broke the spell.
I turned to see her standing right next to the mirror, looking up at Barrons, her hood down.
She spoke the longest sentence she’d said tonight.
“How does it feel to want someone more than they want you, Jericho?” Her voice dripped venom. “If she went through that mirror, she belongs to the king. I hope wanting her eats you alive. I hope he takes her from you. I hope you suffer for all eternity!”
Barrons said nothing.
“You should have left me to die where you found me, you bastard,” she said bitterly. “All you did was give me a life that made me want things I couldn’t have.”
I would have told her it wasn’t like that at all. Barrons didn’t feel that way about me, or about anyone, but before I could say a word, Fiona threw herself at the mirror.
I braced myself for her to slam into me.
I was
that
sure I wasn’t the Unseelie King.
I was ready for the stench of her to assault my nostrils, her mutilated body to slam into mine. I would deflect her toward the bed, where I would stab her and put us all out of her misery, once and for all.
Fiona fell over dead the instant she touched the mirror.
“Hello, Ms. Concubine,” Barrons mocked.
Oh, if he only knew.
But Christian didn’t tell him before we left, and neither did I.

(Unless someone planted false memories.)
2. I don’t even
like
the concubine. (Unless I fell out of love with her a long time ago.)
3. I don’t feel like I’m split into multiple human parts, and I’ve never been attracted to women. (Unless I’m repressing.)
4. I hate Fae, and especially Unseelie. (Am I overcompensating?)
5. If I were the king, wouldn’t the Unseelie Princes have known me and not raped me? Wouldn’t somebody … recognize me or something?
6. Where have I been for six or seven hundred thousand years? And how could I not know about it? (Okay, so maybe somebody forced me to drink from the cauldron.) PROS: things that make it look like I could be
1. I knew what the White Mansion looked like inside. I also knew every step I walked in the Unseelie prison. Same with knowing that Cruce had wings. I have a ton of knowledge I can’t explain having. (Maybe somebody planted memories. If they can plant false ones, why not real ones?)
2. I’ve been dreaming of the concubine all my life and, even though she was unconscious, she managed to summon me. (Maybe she was manipulating me in the Dreaming like she did the Keltars.)
3. I can conjure runes that are supposedly part of what was used to reinforce the Unseelie prison walls. (Not sure which column this goes in. Why would the king have helped?) (Maybe it’s part of my
sidhe
-seer gifts.)
4. The Book hunts me and plays with me like a cat worrying a mouse. (Can’t think of a way out of this one. There’s obviously
something
different about me.)
5. K’Vruck poked at me mentally, then said, “Ah, there you are.” (WTF????)
6. I can go through the mirror that only the king and concubine can go through, and the queen is the concubine. Barrons can’t. Fiona couldn’t.
7. When I was in the White Mansion, I could see the concubine but not the king, which makes perfect sense if it was the king’s memories I was living, because when you’re remembering something, you don’t see yourself in the memory, you see who else was there and what happened around you.
I dropped my pen and snapped my journal shut. Daddy could have used those last two PROs to get me life without parole.
I needed to perform more experiments with the Silver. That was all there was to it. Once I proved someone else could go through, I could quit driving myself nuts.
“Right,” I muttered. “More experiments. Sound like someone else we know?” Like maybe an obsessed king that had experimented an entire race of monsters into being. There was no getting around a brutal fact: If my tests failed, my test subjects would die. Was I so desperate to exonerate myself that I was willing to become a murderer? Sure, I’d killed a lot in the past few months, but in the heat of the fight, not premeditated, and Fiona had
wanted
to die. A pure human would be the best test.
I could probably find someone hanging out at Chester’s who was in love with dying. Or too drunk to—
Was I losing my humanity? Or had I always been a little short to begin with? I clutched my head and groaned.
Suddenly every muscle in my body tensed as if standing up in greeting, even though I didn’t move. “Barrons.” I dropped my hands and raised my head.
“Ms. Lane.” He took a chair across from me with such eerie grace that I wondered how I’d ever believed he was human. He poured himself into the brocade wing chair, like water over stone, before settling into sleek muscle. He moved as if he knew where everything in the room was, in precise measurements. He didn’t walk, stalk, or prowl; he glided with flawless awareness of all other atoms in relation to his. It made it easy for him to conceal himself behind inanimate objects and to assume a similar … structure or something.
“Have you always moved like that in front of me and I just never noticed? Was I oblivious?”
“No and yes. You were oblivious. Head up that tight pink ass. But I never moved this way in front of you.” His look dripped sexual innuendo. “I might have moved this way a time or two
behind
you.”
“Not hiding anything from me anymore?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“What does someone like you conceal?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” His glittering eyes raked me with a hard once-over. It had been nearly a week since we’d killed Fiona in the Silvers, and my wardrobe was giving me more fits than ever. I was wearing distressed black leather pants with a tattooed gray grunge element and my favorite baby-doll pink tee that said
I’m a JUICY girl
across the front and had chiffon cap sleeves. I’d tied a Goth scarf around my blond curls and had on a pair of Alina’s dangling heart earrings. My fingernails had grown out and I’d done a French manicure on my hands, and but I’d painted my toenails black. The dichotomy didn’t end there. I had on a black lace thong and a pink-and-white-striped cotton bra. I was having issues. “Identity crisis, Ms. Lane?”
There was a time when I’d have fired back a pithy retort. But I was drunk on the moment: sitting in my bookstore, sipping hot cocoa, staring across a coffee table at Barrons by candle and firelight, with my journal and iPod handy and the assurance that my parents were well and my world was mostly fine except for my own little personality crisis. Friends and loved ones were safe. I breathed. So did the people that mattered to me. Life was good.
Not long ago, I’d thought I would never step foot in this place again. Never see the faint, sexy lift of his lips that told me he was amused but still waiting to be
really
wowed. Never bicker and banter and argue and plan. Never bask in the knowledge that, so long as the previous owner of this establishment was alive, this place would stand bastion in far more than mere latitude and longitude, keeping Dark Zones, fairies, and monsters at bay. It was the place of last defense in my heart.
Although I hated him for letting me grieve, I couldn’t be more grateful that he was unkillable, because it meant I would never have to grieve him again.
I could never be broken about Barrons. Nothing could hurt me where he was concerned, because he was as certain as the nightfall, he would recur as eternally as the dawn. I still had questions about what he was and concerns about his motives, but they could wait. Time might sort things out in ways pushing and prying never could. “I don’t have any idea what to wear anymore, so I tried to cover all bases.”
“Try skin.”
“Little chilly for that.”
We looked at each other across the coffee table.
His eyes didn’t say,
I’d heat you up
, and mine didn’t say
What are you waiting for?
His didn’t reply,
Fuck if I’m making the first move
, so I was careful not to say,
I wish you would, because I can’t, because I’m …
and he didn’t snap …
choking on your pride?!
“As if you aren’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“Really, Barrons,” I said drily. “I’m not the only one who didn’t just not have that conversation, and you know it.”
There was the faint, sexy lift of his lip. “You’re a piece of work, Ms. Lane.” “Right back at you.”
He changed the subject. “The Keltar moved their wives and children into Chester’s.” “When?”
Our sojourn in the White Mansion had cost us nearly five weeks, Dublin time. We’d stopped in the libraries on the way out and taken as many of the Unseelie King’s books as we’d been able to wrap up and carry out along with Fiona’s body. I’d not only missed Dani’s birthday, I’d missed my own, on May 1. Time sure did fly.
“About three weeks ago. Long enough that they’ve settled in. They refuse to leave until we give them the queen.”
“Which will be never,” I said.
“Precisely.”
“How many kids?” I tried to picture Chester’s with families living on the cool chrome-and-glass top floor. Towheaded tots carrying blankets and sucking their thumbs, walking along the balustrade. It seemed terribly wrong—and laughably right. Maybe it could eradicate some of the fundamental badassness of the place.
“The four Keltar Druids brought their wives and children. They breed like it’s their personal mission to populate their country in case somebody attacks again, as if anybody wants the bloody place. There were dozens of them. Everywhere. It was total chaos.” “Ryodan must be losing his mind.” I had to bite my lip not to laugh. Barrons sounded downright consternated.
“A child followed us on our way to see the queen. Wanted Ryodan to fix a toy or something.”
“Did he?”
“He got upset because it wouldn’t shut up and tore its head off.”
“The child?” I gasped.
He looked at me like I was crazy. “The bear. The battery was dying and the audio file was looping. It was the only way to make it stop.”
“Or put a new battery in.”
“Child screamed bloody murder. Army of Keltars came running. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
“I want to see my parents. I mean, visit with them.”
“V’lane agreed to help the Keltar get Christian out of the Unseelie prison. He has them rebuilding the dolmen at LaRuhe he crushed for you.” He shot me a look that said,
Too bad you didn’t think before you did that one; would have saved time
. “He believes that once it’s complete he can reestablish the connection and bring him out.”
So V’lane was playing nice, batting hard for the team. We had serious unfinished business, but I no longer had his name in my tongue and I suspected he was avoiding me. I’d been in no mood for confrontations in the past week. Confronting myself was hard enough. “If you don’t arrange it, I’ll go by myself.” We’d have Christian soon! The moment I’d returned from Fiona’s mercy killing, I’d begun lobbying to get Christian out of the Unseelie prison. I would have begun my campaign sooner, but finding out I was Not the Concubine had thrown me for a wicked, mind-numbing loop. “When will he be back?”
“Your pretty college boy isn’t so pretty anymore.”
“He isn’t
my
pretty college boy.”
Our gazes locked.
“But I still think he’s pretty pretty,” I said, just to antagonize him.
See you in bed with him like I saw in the Silvers, I’ll kill him
.
I blinked. I did
not
just see that in Barrons’ eyes.
He evaporated from the chair and reappeared five feet away, standing in front of the fire, his back to me.
“They expect to have him back any day now.”
I wanted to be there when they got Christian out, but the Keltar had made it clear they didn’t want me around. I should never have told them I’d fed their nephew Fae flesh. I wasn’t sure if they found it cannibalistic, sacrilegious, or both, but it had certainly offended them. I’d gone light on details about what it had done to him. They’d find out soon enough. I shivered. The time was approaching. We would be doing the ritual soon. “We need to have a meeting with everyone. Keltar,
sidhe
-seers, V’lane. Iron out the details.” What would happen when we finally had the Book under lock and key? How did Barrons think he was going to use it once it was contained? Did he know the First Language? Was he that old? Had he learned it over time, or been taught? Did he plan to let us re-inter it at the abbey again, then sit down and read it?
And do
what
with the knowledge?
“Why don’t you just tell me what you want the
Sinsar Dubh
for?”
No longer staring into the fire, he faced me.
“Why do you keep moving like that? You never used to do it before.” It was unnerving. “Does it unnerve you?”
“Not at all. It’s just … hard to follow.”
A haze of red slithered through his eyes. “Doesn’t faze you at all?”
“Not a bit. I only want to know what changed.”
He shrugged. “Concealing my nature requires effort.” But his eyes said,
Think you accepted the beast? Stare at it, day in, day out
.
Not a problem
.
“The queen came to—”
“She’s conscious?” I exclaimed.
“—briefly before she went under again.”
“Why does it always take you so long to tell me the important things?” “While the queen was lucid, Jack had the presence of mind to ask her who sealed her in the coffin.”
Expectancy straightened my spine. “And?”
“She said it was a Fae prince she’d never seen before. He called himself Cruce.” I stared, stunned. “How is that possible? Is anyone who’s supposed to be dead actually dead?”
“Doesn’t seem like it.” “Did he have wings?”
He gave me a look. “Why?”
“Cruce does.”
“How do you—ah. Memories.”
“Does it bother you? That I’m …”
Not the Concubine
. I couldn’t finish the sentence. “No more human than I? On the contrary. You’ve either lived a very long time or you prove reincarnation. I’d like to know which it is, so we’d know whether you can die. Eventually the Unseelie King will come looking for you. He and I are overdue for a talk.” “What do you want the Book for, Barrons?”
He smiled. Well, he showed me his teeth, anyway. “One spell, Ms. Lane. That’s all. Don’t worry your pretty little head.”
“Don’t talk down to me. It used to shut me up. Doesn’t work anymore. A spell for what? To change you back to whatever you were before? To let you die?”
His eyes narrowed and the rattlesnake stirred in his chest. He looked at my face closely, as if reading the tiniest nuances of the way my nostrils flared on each breath, the shape of my mouth, the movement of my eyes.
I raised a brow, waiting.
“Is that what you need to think of me? That I want to die? Must you dress me up in chivalry to find me palatable? Chivalry demands a suicidal bent. I don’t have one. I can’t get enough of life. I get off on waking up every day for infinity. I
like
being what I am. I got the best end of the deal. I’ll be here while it’s happening. I’ll be here when it ends. And I’ll stand up from the ashes and do it all over when it begins again.”
“You said somebody beat me to damning you.”
“Melodrama. Did it curry favor? You kissed me.”
“You don’t feel damned?”
“God said, Let there be light. I said, Say please.”
He was gone. No longer standing in front of me. The bookstore seemed empty and I looked around, wondering where he’d gone so quickly and why. Had he melted up against a bookcase, faded into a drape, wrapped himself around a pillar?
Suddenly there was a fist in my hair, behind me, pulling my head back, arching my spine up from the sofa.
He closed his mouth over mine and pushed his tongue in, forcing my teeth wide. I grabbed his arm, but as sharply as he had my head pulled back, all I could do was steady myself.
He wrapped his other hand around my neck, forcing my chin higher, kissing me more deeply, harder, keeping me from resisting.