Fever 5 - Shadowfever (8 page)

I didn’t need to hear Ro say it. I been staring at the accusation blazing in her fierce blue eyes for the past five minutes. I don’t answer. I’m done answering her. She shoulda told us. She shoulda warned us. I never ever imagined the
Sinsar Dubh
could pull a stunt like that. She ain’t training us. She’s keeping us small. Afraid. Just like Mac said. What—I shoulda died so she could say,
Dani tried
? Feck that noise. Ain’t dying just so she can feel better ’bout things.
Jo says, “Grand Mistress, it looked like Barb was fighting it. From the information Jayne and his men gathered about the Book, we were pretty sure what that meant.”
“Och, and now you’re trusting Jayne?
I
teach you!
I
train you!”
Jo turns her face away a moment, and I remember that Barb was one of her best friends. But Jo, she surprises me with a little steel. When she turns back and starts talking again, her voice is steady. “She was going to kill herself soon, Rowena. Our first goal was to keep the Book from getting a new body. If Dani had gone near it, it could have taken a virtually unstoppable body.”
Ro cuts me a scathing glance. “Ever the liability, are you not, Danielle?”
I make a face, can’t help it. She’s always blaming me for something. Done trying to blow smoke up her ass. Sick of pretending to be things I’m not. “D’pends on how you look at it, Ro,” I say coolly. “And you’re always looking at it wrong.”
Jo sucks in a sharp breath.
I’ve gone too far, and I’m about to go farther. I don’t care. Ever since Mac disappeared, Ro’s made it plain she’d take me back into her good graces if I’d cooperate the tiniest bit. I been skirting around the subject, flirting with appeasing her just enough to keep her guessing, thinking I’ll come to heel.
But that ain’t never gonna happen.
I just watched a hundred of my sisters—so what if they’re sheep? They’re still my sisters—get butchered. And this old woman stands and glares at me? At least I own up to my sins. I go to sleep with ’em every night. Wake up with ’em every morning. See ’em in the mirror, staring right back at me. And I say, dude, get over yourself already.
“How’d the Book get loose, Ro?” I’m on my feet, sword in my hand. “Why’n’tcha ever tell us that? Cause maybe you fell asleep on the job? ’S that it?”
Her voice is tight and she’s even paler when she looks at Jo and snaps, “You will escort that child to her room
now
! And lock her in!”
As if
that’s
gonna happen. Nobody here can control me. Ever since I killed that Hunter, I been feeling like the dude that shot a giant with his slingshot. Ro can’t feck with my head like she used to.
“All I did is say what everybody’s been thinking but been too afraid to say. I ain’t afraid of you no more, Ro. I saw the
Sinsar Dubh
tonight. I know what I’m afraid of.” I back-kick my chair so hard it slams into the wall behind me. “I’m leaving. I’m done here.” I mean it. I really am. Used to think I was at least a little safe in the abbey, but we got Shades in the shadows, and now the Book snuck in, and fact o’ the matter is, I can make myself a safer place than this in a feckin’ Dark Zone!
’Sides, nobody here’ll even notice if I’m gone. Maybe I’ll check out Jayne, hang with the Guardians for a while.
“You will go to your room this very instant, Danielle Megan!”
Gah, I hate that name! Sissy name. Sissy girl.
“What would your mother think of you?” she snaps.
“What would my mother think of what you
made
me?” I snap back.
“I made you a proud and true weapon for the right.”
“Guess that’s why I feel like my sword most of the time. Cold. Hard. Bloody.”
“Ever the melodrama with you, isn’t it? Grow up, Danielle O’Malley! And sit down.”
“Feck you, Ro.”
I freeze-frame out.
The chilly Irish air blasts me, and if a couple places on my cheeks are especially cold, I ignore ’em. I ain’t crying. I never cry.
I miss my mom sometimes, though.
The world’s big.
So am I.
Dude
—I’m homeless!
I swagger into the night.
Free at last.

Why did you hang a Silver to Dublin in one of the white wings, when you know the House rearranges itself? Why didn’t you put it somewhere more stable and easily accessible?” I resume my questions as we walk.

That bipolar feeling from my high school days is back with a vengeance. He’s everything I despise. I want to kill him so badly that I have to keep my hands in my pockets, balled into fists.

He’s also the person who was intimate with my sister during the final months of her life, the only one who can answer all those questions no one else can—and who can seriously shorten the amount of time I have to spend in this wasteland of a reality.

Did you take her journal? Did she know Rowena or any of the
sidhe
seers? Did she tell you about the prophecy? Why did you kill her? Was she happy? Please tell me she was happy before she died
.

“No rooms in the White Mansion ever get completely dark, not even where night falls. I erred the first time I opened a Silver. I hung it in a place that did. A creature I believed securely imprisoned—one I did not ever intend to free from the Unseelie prison—escaped.”

“What creature?” I demand. This man who looks like a Versace ad, who walks and talks like a human, isn’t. He’s worse than someone possessed by a Gripper—one of those dainty, beautiful Unseelie that can slip inside a person’s skin and take over. He is one hundred percent Fae in a body that should never have been his. He’s a cold-blooded killer, responsible for butchering
billions
of humans, hundreds of thousands of them in Dublin on a single night, without a second thought. If there was a creature in the icy Unseelie hell that he never intended to set loose, I want to know why, exactly what it is, and how to kill it. If it worries him, it terrifies me.

“Watch the floors, MacKayla.”
I look at him. He’s not going to answer me. Pressing would only make me appear weak. We’ve resumed the search together. He’s unwilling to leave me on my own. I’m in no

Chasing Barrons, I might not have
wanted
to escape. I remember the bones in the Hall of All Days. I think of the beach in Faery with Alina. If I’d chosen to stay with her then, would I have eventually died from eating food with no substance, drinking water that was no more real than my sister?

I push memories of sex with the king, with Barrons, away. I distract myself with hatred for the man who killed my sister.
Was Alina happy?
It’s on the tip of my tongue again.
“Very,” he fires back at me, and I realize I’ve not only said it aloud but it seems he’s just been
waiting
for me to ask.
I’m appalled that I’ve been so weak. Offering my enemy the opportunity to lie to me! “Bullshit!”
“You are impossible.” Disdain etches his handsome face. “She was nothing like you. She was open. Her heart was not sealed away behind walls.”
“Look what
that
got her. Dead.”
I stalk off ahead, down a brilliant yellow corridor. The windows open on exactly the kind of summer day Alina and I always loved. I can’t get away from her ghost! I quicken my pace.
We hurry down a hall of mint, then one of indigo with French doors that open onto a turbulent stormy night, before turning onto a path of pale pink, and finally there it is—a towering arched entrance into a white marble hall. Beyond the elegant entrance, windows open onto a dazzling winter day, ice-encased trees sparkling like diamonds in the sun.
Peace settles over me. I’ve been here in my dreams. I loved this wing.
Once, long ago on her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love
.
Sunshine on ice
.
She warms his frost. He cools her fever
.
“You said Alina called you,” Darroc says behind me. “You said she was crying on the phone, that she was hiding from me. Did she make that phone call the day she died?”
He startles me from my reverie and, without thinking, I nod.
“What exactly did she say?”
I toss him a look over my shoulder that says,
You really think I’m going to tell you that?
If anyone is going to be answering questions about her, it’s going to be
him
answering to me. I step into the white marble corridor.
He follows me. “All you accomplish by persisting in your inane and erroneous belief that I killed Alina is guaranteeing that you will never find her true murderer. Humans have an animal of which you remind me. The ostrich.”
“My head is
not
buried in the sand.”
“No, it’s up your ass,” he snaps.
I whirl on him.
We glare at each other, but his words give me pause. Am I being an ostrich? Do I deny myself the opportunity to avenge my sister, because I’m stuck in a rut I refuse to get out of? Will I let my sister’s
real
murderer get away, because I can’t open my mind to see beyond my preconceptions? Barrons warned me from the beginning to not so blithely assume Darroc was definitely her killer.
A muscle works in my jaw. Each time I remember something about Barrons, I hate Darroc more for taking him from me. But I remind myself why I’m here and why I haven’t already killed him.
To accomplish my goal, there are certain answers I need.
I eye him speculatively. There are others I just
want
.
And once I get the Book in my hands and change things, I’ll never have another chance to ask. He’ll be gone. I’ll have killed him. Here and now is my one shot.
“She said she was going to try to come home but she was afraid you wouldn’t let her leave the country,” I say stiffly. “She said I had to find the
Sinsar Dubh
. Then she sounded terrified and said you were coming.”
“Me? By name? She told you ‘Darroc’ was coming?”
“She didn’t have to. What she said earlier made it clear.”
“And what was that? What so thoroughly incriminated me?”
I still have her message memorized. I dream it sometimes, word for word. “She said,
I thought he was helping me, but—God, I can’t believe I was so stupid! I thought I was in love with him and he’s one of them, Mac! He’s one of
them
!
Who else could that have been? You keep telling me she loved you. Was there someone else she was involved with that she thought she—”
“No! There was only me. She would never have sought another. I gave her everything.”
“Then you understand why I believe you killed her.”
“I do not, and did not. There are holes larger than Hunters in your puny human logic!”
“Who else could it have been? Who else did she fear?”
He turns and paces to one of the windows, where he stands gazing out at the dazzling winter day. Ice-crusted trees sparkle like they’ve been diamond-dipped. Drifts of powdery snow shimmer in the sunlight. The scene seems lit from within, like the concubine herself.
But there is only darkness inside me. I feel it growing.
“You are certain that the day you had this conversation with her was the day she died?”
It wasn’t a conversation, but I don’t tell him that. “Although the Garda didn’t find her body for two days, they estimated her time of death at about four hours after she called me. The coroner in Ashford said it was possible she died as much as eight to ten hours after she made the call. She said it was difficult to estimate exact time of death due to the way her body had been savaged.” I refuse to say “chewed on.”
Still staring out the window, his back to me, he says, “One morning after I left, she followed me to the house on LaRuhe.”
I catch my breath. These are words I’ve been waiting to hear since the day I identified my sister’s body. To learn what she did the last day she was alive. Where she went. How it came to such a bitter end.
“Did you know?” I demand.
“I eat Unseelie.”
He knew. Of course he knew. It amps up all the senses, hearing, sight, taste, touch. It’s what makes it so addictive—and the super-sized strength is icing on the cake. You feel alive, incredibly alive. Everything is more vivid.
“We’d been in bed all night, fucking—”
“T-the-fuck-M-I,” I snarl.
“You think I don’t know what that means. Alina used to say it. Too much information. It disturbs you to hear of the passion your sister and I shared.”
“It sickens me.”
When he turns, his gaze is cool. “I made her happy.”
“You didn’t keep her safe. Even if you didn’t kill her, she died on
your
watch.”
He flinches almost imperceptibly.
I think,
Nice, real nice, got that fake emotion down real well
.
“I thought she was ready. I believed what she felt for me would win in one of your idiotic human battles of morality. I was wrong.”
“So she followed you. Did she confront you?”
He shakes his head. “She saw me through the windows at LaRuhe—”
“They’re painted black.”
“They weren’t yet. I did that later. She watched me meet with my Unseelie guard and overheard our conversation about freeing more of the Dark Court. She heard them call me Lord Master. After my guard left and I was alone, I waited to see what she would do, if she would come in, if she would give us a chance. She didn’t. She fled, and I followed, at a distance. She spent hours walking around Temple Bar, crying in the rain. I waited, gave her space, time to clarify her thoughts. Humans do not think as quickly as Fae. They struggle with simple concepts. It is astounding your species ever managed to—”
“Spare me your condescending judgments and I’ll spare you mine,” I cut him off, in no mood to listen to him condemn my race. His race already did that. Billions dead. All because of their petty power struggles.
He inclines his head imperiously. “I went to her apartment later that day. I found her in the bedroom, climbing out the window, onto the fire escape.”
“See? She
was
afraid of you.”
“She was terrified. It made me angry. I had given her no reason to fear me. I dragged her back in. We fought. I told her she was human, stupid and small. She called me a monster. She said I tricked her. That it was all a lie. It was not. Or, rather, it was at first but then it wasn’t. I would have made her my queen. I told her that. And that I still would. But she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t even look at me. Finally I left. But I did not kill her, MacKayla. Like you, I do not know who did.”
“Who trashed her apartment?”
“I told you we fought. Our anger was as intense as our lust.”
“Did you take her journal?”
“I went back for it after I learned she was dead. It was not there. I took photo albums. It was then, when I found her calendar book, that I discovered her ‘friend’ Mac was really her sister. She lied to me. I was not the only one who was duplicitous. I have lived among your kind long enough to know this means she knew from the beginning something about me was not what it seemed. And wanted me anyway. I believe that if she had not been murdered, in time she would have come to me, chosen me of her own free will.”
Yes
, I think,
she would have come to you. With a weapon in her hand, just like I will
.
“I needed to know if you shared her unique talents. Had you not arrived in Dublin when you did, I would have had you brought to me.”
I absorb that and am furious. It’s very important to me to pinpoint the exact moment my life started going wrong. Especially now.
It goes back further than I’d realized.
The moment Alina left for Dublin and began heading toward the day she would encounter him, there’d been no hope of my life turning out any other way. Events had been set in motion that trapped me. I would have embarked upon exactly the same path, through a different door. If I’d not disobeyed my parents and flown to Ireland to investigate Alina’s murder, would he have sent the Hunters after me? The princes? Maybe dispatched the Shades to devour my town and drive me out?
One way or another, I would have ended up here, with him, in the middle of this mess.
“Because of your sister, I resisted harming you.”
More than anything he has ever said, those words stun me. I stand half dazed as they echo through my brain, knocking loose conflicting thoughts, nudging them to where they no longer oppose. Without warning, my convictions shift and settle into a new position. I’m startled by where they end up, but they moved with such logic and simplicity that I can’t deny the veracity.
Darroc
did
care about Alina.
I believe him.
There was something I’d never been able to explain to my own satisfaction: I’d wondered why Darroc hadn’t been more aggressive, more brutal with me from the very first. It had made no sense to me. He’d seemed almost lackadaisical in his efforts to abduct me and had kept offering me the chance to come willingly. What kind of world-destroying villain did that? It was certainly not what I’d expected from my sister’s murderer. Mallucé had been far deadlier, far more ruthless. Of the two, I’d been much more terrified of the wannabe vamp when I’d first arrived.
Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation that accommodates all variables is most likely the truth. Darroc had resisted harming me because of Alina. He’d restrained himself because he’d cared about my sister.
Just how much—and how much I could use it against him—remained to be seen.
“My deference undermined my efforts, and the Hunters began to question my conviction.”
“So you had me raped and turned
Pri-ya
,” I say bitterly. How quickly he’d gone from deference to murder, because that’s what turning me
Pri-ya
had been tantamount to. Until Barrons had pulled me back, no one had ever recovered from being made a mindless Fae sex slave. They died from it.
“I needed to solidify my position. Then I lost you before I even had the chance to begin using you.”
“Who was the fourth, Darroc? Why don’t you just tell me?” He’d stood there watching as the Unseelie Princes destroyed me. He’d seen me naked on the ground, helpless, weeping. I calm myself by imagining the many ways I might kill him when the time comes.
“I have told you before, MacKayla, there was no fourth. The last prince of the Court of Shadows that the king created was the first dark prince to die. Cruce was killed in the ancient battle between the king and queen. Some claim it was the queen herself who killed him.” “
Cruce
was the fourth Unseelie Prince?” I exclaim.
He nods. Then he frowns and adds, “If a fourth being was at the church, neither I nor my princes were capable of seeing it.”
He seems as disturbed by that thought as I am.
“I repeatedly offered you an alliance. I need the Book. You can track it. Some believe you can corner it. Some believe you
are
the fourth stone.”
I bristle. There’s little I’m certain of lately, but this much I’d bet the bank on. “I am
not
a stone.” I was pretty sure V’lane had the fourth and final one.
“Fae things change. They become other things.”
“Not people,” I scoff. “Look at me. I wasn’t carved from the cliffs of the Unseelie hell! I was born to a human woman!”
“You know that for a certainty? My sources say you and Alina were adopted.”
I say nothing, wondering who his sources are.
He laughs. “No one knows what the king truly did after he went mad. Perhaps he made one of the stones different, the better to hide it.”
“Stones don’t become people!”
“It’s what the
Sinsar Dubh
is trying to do.”
I narrow my eyes. Was Ryodan right? Was that what this was all about—the Book taking on a corporeal, sentient form? Interesting that both he and Darroc believed this, as if perhaps they had discussed it while forming other plans—plans such as killing Barrons and getting him out of the way! After all, it was Barrons that brought me back from the
Pri-ya
state where I could have so easily been used. Damned inconvenient for them.
“But the people it takes over keep killing themselves,” I say.
“Because the Book has not found the one strong enough to endure the merging.”
“What do you mean, ‘endure the merging’? Are you saying the right person could pick up the
Sinsar Dubh
without killing themselves?”
“And control it,” he says smugly.
I inhale sharply. This is the first I’ve heard of anything like this. And he sounds so confident, so certain. “Use
it
rather than being used?”
He nods.
I’m incredulous. “Just pick it up and open it? No harm, no foul?”
“Absorb it. All the power.”
“How? Who is this ‘right person’?” I demand. Was it me? Was that why I could track it? Was that why everyone was
really
after me?
He gives me a mocking smile. “Oh, trifling human, such delusions of grandeur you suffer. No, MacKayla. It has never been you.”
“Then who?”
“I’m the one.”
I stare at him. He is? I look him up and down. Why? How? What does he know that I don’t know? That Barrons didn’t know? “What’s so special about you?”