Feverborn (17 page)

With a sigh and enormous inward focus, I filled my veins with the unending summer of the Seelie court. Beckoned into my body a peaceful day, grass rippling, no clouds in the sky.

Not a hint of thunder.

When I had it under control, I opened my eyes and said, “What the bloody hell did you do to my uncle? What is that…
thing
in there?”

Ryodan said stiffly, “Dageus is one of us now.”

“You fucking turned him into a…what the fuck are you anyway?”

“He was dying. There was no other option. Of all possible future scenarios, if I saved him, fifty-two percent of them were favorable,” Ryodan said.

“Fifty-two bloody percent? And you thought that was good? Forty-eight percent of the outcomes weren’t? Christ, I’d hate to know what a sick fuck like you considers ‘unfavorable.’ ”

“You would,” Ryodan agreed.

“So, what was your plan? Send us home with someone else’s body and never tell us?” I said.

“He will be incapable of speech for some time. No telling how long,” Ryodan said.

“But then—when he could talk—you were going to tell us?”

Ryodan’s gaze was shuttered. “If there had been an opportunity that was…opportune.”

“Christ,” I said again, disgustedly. “You weren’t even going to let us know he was alive. How the bloody hell did you plan to keep Dageus from telling us? Were you planning to keep him caged down here forever?” Thunder began to grow in me again. I inhaled deeply, fisted my hands, exhaled slowly, and opened them.

“We were working on that,” Barrons said.

“Dageus would never give up Chloe,” I said.

I glanced in the door again. Glanced sharply away. My uncle was in the same kind of pain I’d been on those bloody cliffs.

And not human. Not entirely.

Never again entirely.

Changing. Becoming something else. Bile flooded the back of my throat. Now, Dageus, too, was something else, something more. And he’d already been complicated to begin with. “You had no right—”

“Your uncle is alive,” Ryodan snapped. “Would you prefer he wasn’t? Would Chloe prefer he wasn’t? I broke every goddamn code we live by to save that bastard’s life. And will pay an enormous price if I’m betrayed.”

“Good,” I snarled.

“You’re being an ass,” Mac growled. “And you know it.
Ryodan saved your uncle’s life. Dageus is here. He’s not the same as he was before and he’s messed up right now, but in time he’ll be just like Barrons and Ryodan.”

“Now there’s a horrible thought,” I said flatly.

She snorted. “That’s not what I meant. He’ll be capable of living again.”

“And what else will he be?” I looked at Ryodan. “What price will he pay for his miraculous second life?”

“He’ll live forever,” Mac said heatedly. “So will you. That means you’ll always have family. That’s priceless.”

“And the other prices? The ones that cut into flesh and bone? I’m not daft, lass. This kind of thing always has consequences. Terrible ones.”

“Perhaps he will choose to discuss them with you. If so, we’ll probably have to kill you,” Ryodan said.

“We made a pact,” I reminded him.

“Does it matter, Christian?” Mac said. “Your uncle isn’t at the bottom of a gorge or buried in the ground. One day you’ll be able to talk to him again. He didn’t die for you. That must be a weight off your shoulders.”

“My clan has the right to know.”

“If you tell your clan, the tribunal will hear of it and you’ll lose him,” Barrons warned.

“What is this tribunal?” I demanded.

Mac perked up beside me, suddenly all ears.

Barrons shot me a look, something ancient and feral moving in his dark eyes. “None of your bloody business. There are terms, Highlander. You may know he’s alive. You may be of help to him through what lies ahead. But no one else may
know. If word of his existence gets out, you’ll only be giving him back to your clan to lose him again. Permanently.”

“Our secrets. Yours now. And yours, ours,” Ryodan reminded.

“You don’t know my secrets.”

He smiled faintly. “You might be surprised. We shared blood.” His eyes said he knew what that meant. In a druid sense. And that maybe I didn’t know what that meant in a whatever-the-fuck-he-was sense. That I was as bound to him as he was to me. And I wondered for the second time if he’d not left most of the dungeon unprotected for a reason. If he’d not perhaps arranged this very scenario, wanting me bound to them. What better way to get help with my uncle, draw another Keltar into the fold? Was he that diabolical?

I dismissed him and weighed Barrons’s words for truth. “Your tribunal would take him? It
could
take him from you?”

“Yes. And yes,” Barrons said levelly.

“Truth. Fuck.”

“He must always remain hidden. You uncle died in that gorge,” Ryodan said.

“Chloe.”

Barrons said, “Perhaps in time. She, like Mac, would have reason enough to protect his secret. If she passes our tests.”

“You would test my aunt.” I was incensed.

“You should hope they would,” Mac said. “No point in giving him back only for her to lose him again.”

“My entire clan can be trusted.”

Barrons and Ryodan snorted.

Mac said, “Save your demands for another day, Christian. Deal with today.”

I turned to look at Dageus, shuddering on the stone slab. Finally, I said, “What is he going through?”

Ryodan said to Barrons, “I’ll take the Highlander from here. Get her out of here.” He jerked his head at Mac.

“Oh, come on!” Mac protested. “Don’t you trust me by now?”

“Need-to-know basis, Mac. And you don’t. But he,” Ryodan jerked his head at Christian, “might just prove a grand babysitter while we figure out how to save the world.”

Babysitter, my arse.

Mac and Barrons vanished down the hall.

When Ryodan opened the door, I followed him inside, unable to shake the feeling he might just have intended the evening to end this way all along.

“H
ave you located the other Unseelie princes?” Cruce asked.

The roach god had to finish molding his many roach parts into the stumpy-legged shape of a human dwarf before he had the mouth to reply.

“All but one have been slain,” he said, when he’d completed his tongue. He craned his neck to stare up at the tall prince, roaches scuttling to shift position with his movement. It was complicated to function in this form. It required incessant readjustments, yet it was this mimicry of those around him that had enabled him to strike his first alliance long ago. The more he donned it, the more he despised its limitations, envied those who suffered none.

“Which one remains?”

“He was once a Highlander, now mutated.” He shifted slightly, settling the remaining stragglers into place, reinforcing his knees.

“Useless. Who killed my brethren?”

“Ryodan and Barrons.” He observed his new ally closely. “I was there, beneath the desk when they placed their heads on it.”

The winged prince demonstrated no weakness of rage at the news. He absorbed and moved on. The roach god’s satisfaction with his choice of allies increased. Success did not grace the stupidly violent, but the patient, the unseen, those who lurked and bided and seized the correct moment.

“The Seelie princes?” Cruce demanded.

“Dead as well. The last of them slain by the same two.”

“The concubine? The female that was in this cavern the night they imprisoned me,” Cruce clarified. “The one with the Unseelie king. You were there that night, were you not?”

“Ryodan bade me scatter my parts through the abbey that night, while the wards were down, listen and learn. He misses no opportunity. I’ve seen no sign of that woman.”

“And the Unseelie king?” Cruce said.

He shook his head, masses of roaches swaying and churning, but not one of them slipped. In his upright form, he was cohesive enough to do a few things. Far too gelatinous to do most. He resented that deeply. He was tiny, weak, in a world of giants who crushed him beneath their heels, drenched him with sticky hair spray or canned poisons that made him sick, sick, sick, even flushed him down a toilet as if he were excrement.

“No one leads my race. They are lost. Who do they follow?” Cruce said.

“They scatter, establishing small strongholds, warring among themselves. Most do nothing but feed and slaughter.”

Cruce shook his head. “The depths to which my race has descended.”

The roach god had studied the world carefully for eons. When the Fae began to walk openly, he had finally been able to show his face, too, as the powerful entity he was. He that knew the world’s best-kept secrets could rule it. He suffered no delusion of being king himself. But he intended to be the one who stood beside the king, granted every liberty.

In his estimation, the recently freed Unseelie and the Seelie who now had no ruler were primed to follow any powerful, focused Fae. He told the prince this. “Still,” he grated, “I have no way to open this chamber.” He measured his next words carefully. “There is an Unseelie princess on this world. She was the one who bargained for the prince’s deaths. She would see you slain as well if she knew you existed.”

“Is that a threat?” Ice flared out across the floor, instantly freezing his many feet to the hard, cold surface.

He’d not spoken carefully enough. “Of course not. A warning among allies.”

Cruce was silent for a time. Eventually the ice beneath the roach god’s feet warmed enough that he could shift and free himself. Then the prince murmured, “I believed the bitches destroyed long ago by the king himself. Is there only one?”

“I have only seen one. I’ve heard of no others.”

The prince thought about this, then said, “It must be risked, and if it draws her attention, so be it. How solid is the form you now wear?”

The burn of it. Not nearly solid enough. He’d walked among men long enough to have adopted their expressions, mimicking them when he mimicked their form. Roaches rearranged
into a sour look with downturned mouth and narrowed eyes. He couldn’t imagine how smoothly such things would occur in a cohesive body.

Cruce read the answer on his face. He stood and plucked a single feather from an enormous black wing, gilded iridescent blue and silver. “Can you carry this out when you leave?”

The roach god nodded, thousands of hard shiny brown shells rustling to perform the simple task.

The prince asked him many more questions about things he would have deemed insignificant, much like Ryodan, but the kind that knit together a much vaster, cohesive view than the roach with his divided parts and eyes. The roach god answered them fully, omitting no detail, however minor, from the recent rash of papers hung on every street corner, to the strange black spheres and the talk he’d overheard about them, to the terror-inspiring walking trash heap he’d seen the other day.

When he was finished, Cruce said, “Find an Unseelie who calls himself Toc.” He described him to the roach god. “Tell him Cruce is on this planet and would see the Unseelie united, see them rule. Then tell him this…” The winged prince bent low and spoke at length, and the roach god nodded and committed his instructions to his very long memory.

“Before they come,” Cruce finished, “I need you to bring the ingredients I’ve instructed you to ask Toc to prepare. With it, I will make icefire. Once I’ve finished, you will conceal it where I instruct.”

“Will I be able to carry it?”

“That is why I chose it. One drop of Toc’s blood added to each drop of icefire will cause flames to explode, which no
water can extinguish. It spreads rapidly. How fare you in fire?”

The roach god smiled. He’d survived nuclear fallout. Fire was nothing to him. “Do you really believe this will work? That you’ll be free in mere days?” He licked his lips with anticipation, rustling roach against roach. Freedom. So near. He would never be controlled again. And perhaps this new ally could force the gift he sought from his prior master.

Before this great winged prince crushed the arrogant prick like a bug.

Cruce laughed softly. “Not at all. But it will topple the first of many dominos. And once they begin to fall, my freedom is assured. Go find Toc and do as I’ve told you. And remember, when you next report to Ryodan, you must henceforth omit those areas of information I detailed.”

The roach god relaxed and let his body scatter into a horde of shining, virtually indestructible insects. He dispatched several parts of himself to collect the feather that had drifted to the floor of the cavern and scuttled off with it, tugging it into the unseen crack beneath the door.

I
raked a hand through my hair, stared at my reflection and snorted.

The paint was still visible after multiple oil and shampoo treatments. I’d even tried a stale jar of peanut butter. I’d had no luck salvaging Barrons’s rugs either. The problem was the same with both items: employ a chemical harsh enough to remove the oil paint—destroy the wool or hair.

I have a strong desire to
not
be bald.

After trying for over an hour to lift the crimson from my blond, I conceded defeat. It would go away eventually, and I was in no mood to go dark again. I didn’t even like the phrase “go dark.”

I blew my hair dry the rest of the way, shrugged out of my bathrobe, and glanced around my sixth-floor bedroom for something to wear. The room was a wreck. I hadn’t cleaned it in months.

Although it had moved floors again, it had a penchant to
remain on the backside of BB&B, overlooking the back alley and the garage where Barrons stored his cars, and beneath which he and I often rested and fucked and lived. When Barrons isn’t around, I can’t get to our subterranean home beneath the garage. The only access to those lower levels is through the dangerous stacked Silver in his study, and I don’t have the power to survive the many traps with which he mined the path. Once, the Book helped me navigate that deadly terrain, but my inner demon no longer offers help.

Ergo, showering upstairs. At least when my bedroom spontaneously relocates, it does so in toto, with all my belongings in it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t clean itself in the process.

I rummaged for jeans and a tee-shirt in a pile of clothes I was reasonably certain had been laundered at some point, then preloaded my spear in its holster before positioning it beneath my left arm. Given the amount of Unseelie flesh in my body, I preferred to err on the side of caution.

I’d opted for a double shoulder harness, so I could carry my 9mm PPQ with its sixteen-cartridge magazine beneath my left arm, and tucked an extra magazine in my waistband. I slid dirks into both boots and my Ruger LCP .380 crimson trace—with an eight-pound trigger so I was less likely to shoot myself in the ass—into my rear pocket. I pushed Cruce’s cuff farther up my arm so it was snug, then eased a lightweight jacket over it all, zipping it at the bottom. I pocketed two more bottles of Unseelie flesh (for emergency only!) and reached for my backpack, to eliminate the useless and outdated and then restock it with fresh supplies.

When I was invisible I hadn’t worried about any of this.
Now that I was back to being hunted by most of Dublin, countless creepy wraiths, an entity called the Sweeper that wanted to “fix” me (and I didn’t think that meant neuter my female parts, although I did wonder exactly what the hell it
did
mean), and haunted by something that looked like my sister, I wanted all weapons all the time.

I’d left Barrons and Ryodan back in the office at Chester’s, bottles of red and black ink on the desk, needles gleaming in trays nearby. I’d never seen Ryodan sporting the same unusual tats as Barrons, but when I’d left, Barrons had been tracing exactly those outlines on Ryodan’s back.

Expecting trouble?
I’d shot over my shoulder.

They’d raised their heads and given me such an identical look of
You’re still here/what-the-fuck, is she asking questions again?/Christ, woman, go home for a while
, that I’d wondered how I could possibly not have realized they were related long before I overheard them talking about it.

After making plans to meet later that night, I’d taken the Hunter that Barrons had summoned back to BB&B and into the funnel cloud. The man has some seriously neat tricks. The Hunters might tolerate me, even cede a degree of respect, but I’d had no luck calling one myself, staring up into the sky.

I dumped the contents of my backpack on the bed. My little pink carry iPod fell out first and I smiled. How long had it been since I listened to a few hours of happy one-hit wonders? I connected it to my dock, only to discover the battery was dead. While I waited for it to draw enough juice to boot up, I rummaged through the other items in my pack, tossing out old water bottles, stale protein bars, dead batteries from my MacHalo I’d not wanted to further litter the streets with,
tucked a music box up high on one of my shelves along with a glittering bracelet with iridescent stones and a small pair of jewel-encrusted binoculars, turned to throw my spare-change set of blood-and-goo-stained clothing into what I thought was the dirty laundry pile in the corner—

Music box?

I spun back around and stared at it, nestled on my shelf, stunned. The sides were elaborate gold filigree, the lid a lustrous pearl encrusted with gems, each winking with a tiny inner flame. It squatted on ornate legs, half the size of a shoe box. More gems were embedded in the sides and each held a small swaying fire. The lid was attached with diamond-crusted hinges. There were no locks, and I somehow knew it had other ways of protecting itself.

How long had it been since I’d completely emptied this backpack?

Bracelet? Binoculars?

Had I ever?

How the hell had the music box gotten in there?

The dirty clothes dropped unheeded from my hands.

I narrowed my eyes, thinking, trying to recall the last time I’d used this particular pack. I hadn’t carried it since the night I discovered Barrons had a son, the night I forced my way into his hidden lair and got my throat ripped out by a beautiful young boy. I’d been rummaging for a tarot card the Dreamy-Eyed Guy had given me, remembered touching something that made me shiver, but I was totally OCD that night about finding the card and had ignored the alert of proximity to an OOP. Hadn’t bothered to see what it was. I’d had far bigger problems on my mind.

Had I been up here again since then, for longer than to grab something or take a quick shower and hurry back out?

I frowned, thinking that even if I had, I might not have sensed the music box’s presence. I almost always had at least one OOP on me somewhere (Cruce’s cuff, the most recent acquisition). I sleep and shower with my spear, I keep my
sidhe
-seer senses on low volume pretty much constantly. I wouldn’t have picked up on anything else in the room with me unless I’d been actively hunting for it.

Had I really pilfered this OOP that dreamy, numb day in the White Mansion, months ago? I’d thought I left it there on the shelf of the crystal curio cabinet, but I had a dim memory of pocketing various trinkets, objects I’d been certain I simply couldn’t live without.

I stared at it on the shelf, horrified that it was here, so close to me when I’d been so strenuously avoiding thinking about it lest the
Sinsar Dubh
catch wind of what I suspected it might be.

I hadn’t felt a thing when I touched it this time, but with my current high, no object of power out there could penetrate my deadened senses.

I nosed cautiously around inside myself for my evil inner Book.

Nothing.

When I hunted for my lake last night, I’d not been able to spy even a drop of those still glassy waters. The lake was as gone from me right now as all my
sidhe
-seer gifts.

Did that mean the Book, too, would prove impossible for me to reach and conversely and more importantly, that
it
couldn’t reach me right now?

Was I looking at the box that held the Song of Making?

Could the solution to our problem of the black holes be so simple? Had someone, long ago, tucked the all-powerful melody away and concealed it directly beneath the future Seelie queen’s nose? If so, why? Assuming the original queen, who’d been alive at the same time as the concubine, wanted to pass the song along, she certainly wouldn’t have given it to the king’s mistress she’d so despised! Was this the result of some twisted Fae sense of humor? Had the queen concealed that very thing the king had so desperately wanted in the same house with the woman he’d wanted it for?

I scowled. The idea that this box might contain the song seemed suspiciously serendipitous. The universe didn’t work that way. At least not for me. The things that got tucked away in my curio cabinets were psychopaths, not all-powerful songs.

Yet time and again I’d recalled the melody it had played, the power I felt listening to it, and wondered if it might just be. This was the thing I’d been so studiously avoiding contemplating for even a second, grateful it was in the White Mansion, far away from me and my
Sinsar Dubh
, even as I grew increasingly certain we might need it. I hadn’t realized how critical our state of affairs was until two days ago when Ryodan pointed out that the black holes could ultimately destroy the Nine.

And here it was. Staring right at me.

I closed my eyes, searching my memory, drifting back to that day in the concubine’s house, trying to methodically re-create my steps. My time in there was so vivid, like all my time in Fae, as overblown and sensually saturating as the Fae
themselves. And so surreal. Each time I’d been inside the mansion, I’d felt an intense bipolarity. I now understood it was because of the Book’s/king’s memories inside me, amplified by the residue of their consuming love in the psychically sticky house. It had seemed I’d been the Unseelie king himself, dancing with his concubine, whirling her around the boudoir, clutching her gown. I’d wandered through her private chambers in a daze, found one of her favorite bracelets, the special seeing glasses I (the king!) had crafted for her.

My eyes snapped open. Bloody hell, I
had
picked all three of those things up. Then completely forgotten I’d done it, obsessed with my quest to bring Barrons back to life.

If the music box did contain the colossal song, dare I risk touching it again, knowing the enormous evil I carried inside me? What if the Book took me over like it had the day I killed the Guardian, and destroyed the song?

Could it?

I stood, torn between wanting to tuck the music box into my pack so I could protect it and show it to Barrons, and not wanting it on my person, in case my high wore off and the
Sinsar Dubh
caught on to me.

Although…I mused, I’d toted it out of the mansion, which meant the Book had been in close proximity to it once before. And done nothing. But then, we hadn’t needed the song back then either. Might it try to hold my soul hostage for it now that we did? Insist I capitulate or it would destroy it? Could it do any of those things?

Why the hell wasn’t my Book talking to me anymore?

I cursed. I knew nothing about the
Sinsar Dubh
’s abilities or limits and I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to go poking around
trying to discover something. And since I knew nothing for sure, not wanting to underestimate it, I tended to pack that abyss of the unknown with fears of potentially greater power than it had. Or not.

I sighed, waffling in indecision. After a moment’s deliberation, I stooped and pried up the loose floorboard where I’d stashed my journals, hoping Barrons—the man has an uncanny knack for discovering my innermost secrets—would never find them, grabbed a shirt, used it to pick up the box, tucked it beneath the floor, and replaced the board. Then I scooted a rug over it for good measure.

I’d bring Barrons back to see it later. I’d trust it to him, like the amulet, far sooner than I’d trust myself. Dani—I corrected myself mentally, Jada—and Dancer could investigate it. See if we might really get so bizarrely lucky. The king had been meddling in my life since childhood. I’d never forgotten that my grade school principal and high school gym coach were two of the king’s many skins. The Seelie queen was, too. Who could ever guess what Fae were up to?

One day, I vowed, grabbing my pack to take it downstairs so I could restock it with fresh supplies later, I would no longer be afraid of who and what I was. One day I would be unified, suffer no crippling doubts, and make decisions fearlessly.

One day, like the day I first met Jericho Barrons in this very store and refused to give him my last name, I’d be “Just Mac” again. No hitchhikers, no screwed-up hair, and no dead sister look-alikes.

At seven o’clock that evening I deposited my umpteenth box of debris near a wobbly stack of broken furniture by the back door and rummaged for my cellphone to shoot Barrons a text that I needed the Hunter back in twenty minutes to make our meeting on time.

Given Barrons’s endlessly surprising resources, I had no doubt he might have coerced one Fae or another to help me restore my store, but I didn’t want a magical solution. There was something cathartic about cleaning BB&B myself. No magic. No trade-offs or threats. Good, simple, hard work. Besides, I figured I had another twenty-four hours of Unseelie flesh high and could accomplish a great deal with the extra strength and energy until then.

However, I mused, glancing back through the doorway at the commerce portion, when it came to the floors and furniture, I was definitely going to need assistance. Barter with some local woodworkers, if any had survived the fall of the walls and subsequent ice, learn to run a power sander, stain properly, and make everything gleaming and new again. I liked the idea of refinishing my bookcases, a satisfying nesting task that could be completed without any woo-woo elements.

In the meantime I’d managed to stack an enormous pile of debris in the alley behind BB&B and had no aversion to asking Barrons to somehow make the trash outside disappear. It wasn’t as if we had trash pickup anymore.

I opened the back door to toss my last box of junk on the pile and froze. With the funnel cloud whirling around the eight-block circumference of BB&B, the day had been unnaturally quiet. Very little penetrated to the eye of the storm.

Yet now I heard something odd approaching: whirring and clanking, ponderous and large, coming from my left, from deep in the adjacent Dark Zone.

I eased the door shut to the tiniest of slivers, wondering if we’d trapped some gruesome Unseelie inside our funnel cloud with us. Even armed to the gills, I had no intention of bursting out into the deepening gloom of dusk in Dublin, which can slam down hard and fast, to confront whatever it was. I’d let it come to my turf, where lights blazed into the alley from the top of BB&B, and assess it before taking action.