Shadowfever Read online

  I force my gaze to V’lane. Then I widen my view to absorb them both, being careful to avoid the Unseelie Prince’s eyes.

  Thesis and antithesis. Matter and antimatter.

  They stand like statues, neither moving nor seeming to breathe. They study each other, assess, measure.

  Prince of Consuming Night. Prince of Glorious Dawn.

  The air between them is so charged that I could power all of Dublin if only I could figure out how to plug into it.

  Black ice rushes forward from the Unseelie Prince’s feet, encompassing the cobblestones.

  It is met halfway by a bed of brilliantly colored blossoms.

  The ground shudders beneath my feet. There is a thunderous crack, and suddenly the cobbled pavement splits jaggedly between them, revealing a narrow, dark fissure.

  “What are you doing, Darroc?” I demand.

  “Tell him,” Darroc orders, and the prince opens his mouth to speak.

  I clamp my hands to my ears to shut out the hellish sound.

  V’lane uses language to communicate with me. All the Seelie have been using my language in my presence. I realize it has been a great concession.

  The Unseelie Princes grant no concessions. Their language is a dark melody that the human ear was not made to hear. Once, I was forced to listen helplessly as they crooned to me, and it drove me mad.

  By the time the Unseelie Prince stops speaking, V’lane is regarding me with an expression of faint astonishment.

  Warily, I remove my hands from my ears but keep them close in case the UP decides to start “talking” again.

  “He claims you killed Barrons, sidhe-seer. Why?”

  It hasn’t escaped me that V’lane won’t use my name. I suspect that, if he did, those of his race would think him weak.

  “Who cares? He’s dead. Gone. Out of both of our ways. It’s not like you didn’t want him dead, too. ” I wonder if they really burned his body. I will never ask.

  “And it was the spear that killed him?”

  I nod. I have no idea, but it’s simplest to agree. The less time I spend thinking about Barrons, the better.

  He looks from me to the prince at my side. “And after you killed Barrons, you decided your enemy was your friend?”

  “A girl needs friends. ” I’m bored. Tired of this posturing. I need to sleep. I need to be alone. “Look, V’lane, the Seelie are immortal, and the Unseelie are immortal. What are you going to do? Waste everyone’s time beating each other up all night? As far as I know, there’s only one weapon here tonight that kills Fae, and I’ve got it. ”

  “You do not. ”

  “You do,” Darroc corrects.

  Just like that, my spear is heavy in my holster. I jerk a hard look his way. “About damned time. ” I guess he finally feels the threat level has risen sufficiently. Or maybe he’s bored, too.

  I slip my hand inside my jacket and close my fingers around the hilt. I love my spear. I’m going to keep it in the new world I create, even though it will be a world without Fae.

  “You do not,” V’lane says.

  “I thought you couldn’t see or hear him. ”

  “I smell the stench of him. ”

  My spear is gone.

  My spear is there.

  Gone again.

  I look from V’lane to Darroc. V’lane is staring in Darroc’s general direction. Darroc is staring hard at the Unseelie Princes. They’re having a silent battle over me and my weapon, and it infuriates me that I have no control. One instant, V’lane takes my spear; the next, Darroc gives it back. It flickers in my fingers, solid then gone, solid then gone.

  I shake my head. This could go on all night. They can play their silly games. I have more important things to do—like get enough sleep that I’m sharp enough to be on the hunt. I’m dangerously exhausted. I no longer feel numb. I’m brittle, and brittle can crack.

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  I’m preparing to turn and walk away from it all, when the sound of automatic gunfire shatters the night.

  The Seelie hiss, and all those capable of sifting vanish—including V’lane—leaving roughly a third of them still standing in the street. They turn on their attacker, snarling. As the bullets hit them, some of the lesser castes flicker and stumble. Others turn toward us and launch themselves into the Unseelie to escape.

  I hear the voices of Jayne and his men, shouting to each other, closing in behind them. I catch the glint of a rifle up on the rooftop a block down and know snipers are moving in.

  Good. I hope they take down hundreds of Fae tonight, cart them off and imprison them with iron. I hope Dani makes rounds and kills the ones they catch.

  But I’m not about to die from friendly fire in this screwed-up reality. I have a whole new world waiting for me in the future.

  I turn to the Unseelie Prince to command it to sift me out of here. My enemy, my salvation.

  Darroc barks a harsh order.

  The prince’s hands are on me and it’s sifting before I even manage to get the words out.

  TIME IS THE ONLY TRUE GOD, AND I AM FOREVER. THEREFORE, I AM GOD.

  Your logic is flawed. Time is not forever. It is always. Past, Present, and Future. There was a time in the past when you did not exist. Therefore, you are not God.

  I CREATE. I DESTROY.

  With the whimsy of a spoiled child.

  YOU FAIL TO DIVINE THE MASTER DESIGN. EVEN THAT WHICH YOU CALL CHAOS HAS PATTERN AND PURPOSE.

  —CONVERSATIONS WITH THE SINSAR DUBH

  11

  I stand on a balcony, staring out at the darkness. Snow swirls around my face, lands in my hair. I catch a few flakes in my hand and study them. Growing up in the Deep South, I didn’t get to see a lot of snow, but what I did see didn’t look like this.

  These flakes have complex crystalline structures, and some are tinged with faint color at the outer edges. Green, gold, dirty like ash. They don’t lose cohesion on the warmth of my skin. They’re tougher than the average snowflakes, or I’m colder than the average human. When I close my hand to melt them, one of the flakes cuts into my palm with sharp edges.

  Lovely. Razor snow. More Fae changes in my world. Time for a new one.

  Time.

  I ponder the concept. Ever since I arrived in Dublin at the beginning of August, time has been a strange thing. I have only to look at a calendar to confirm what my brain knows—six months have passed.

  But of those six months, I lost the entire month of September to a single afternoon in Faery. The months of November, December, and part of January were calendar pages torn from my life while I was in a mindless, sex-crazed oblivion. And now part of January and February had flashed by in a few days, while I was in the Silvers.

  All told, in the last six months, four of them whizzed past, with me virtually unaware of the passage of time, for one reason or another.

  My brain knows it’s been six months since Alina died.

  My body doesn’t believe a word of it.

  It feels like I found out my sister was murdered two months ago. It feels like I was raped on Halloween ten days ago. It feels like my parents were kidnapped four days ago, and I stabbed Barrons and watched him die thirty-six hours ago.

  My body can’t catch up with my brain. My heart has jet lag. All my emotions are raw because everything feels as if it took place over a short period of time.

  I push my damp hair back from my face and breathe deeply of the cold night air. I’m in a bedroom suite at one of Darroc’s many strongholds in Dublin. It’s a penthouse apartment, high above the city, furnished in the same opulent Louis XIV Sun King style of the house at 1247 LaRuhe. Darroc certainly likes his luxuries. Like someone else I know.

  Knew.

  Will know again, I correct.

  Darroc told me he keeps dozens of such safe houses and never stays more than one night in any of them. How am I ever going
to find them all to search for clues? I dread the thought of remaining with him long enough for him to take me to each for a night.

  I fist my hands. I can handle this. I know I can. My world depends on it.

  I unclench my hands and rub my sides. Even hours after the Unseelie Prince touched me, my skin is still chilled in the shape of its handprints. I turn away from the cold, snowy night, close the French doors, and scatter my remaining runes at the threshold, where they pulse like wet crimson hearts on the floor. My dark lake promised I would sleep safely if I pressed one into each wall and warded the thresholds and sills with them.

  I turn and stare at the bed, in the same daze I’ve been functioning in for the past several hours. I shuffle past it to the bathroom, where I splash cold water on my face. My eyes feel swollen and gritty. I look in the mirror. The woman that looks back frightens me.

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  Darroc wanted to “talk” when we arrived. But I know what it was really about. He was testing me. He showed me pictures of Alina. Made me sit and look at them with him and listen to his stories, until I thought I might go insane.

  I close my eyes, but my sister’s face is burned into the backs of my eyelids. And there, standing next to her, are my mom and dad. I said I didn’t care what happened to them in this reality, because I’m going to make a new one, but the truth is I’d care in any reality. I’ve just been blocking it.

  I will not ask Darroc what happened to my parents after I was swept off to the Hall of All Days, and he doesn’t offer the information.

  If he told me they were dead, too, I don’t know what I’d do.

  I suspect this is another of his tests. I will pass it.

  That’s my girl, Daddy encourages in my mind. Chin up; you can do it. I believe in you, baby. Sis-boom-bah! he says, and smiles. Even though he hadn’t wanted me to pursue cheerleading, he’d still driven me to tryouts, and when I’d made the first cut, he’d had one of his clients at Petit Patisserie bake me a special cake shaped like a pair of pink and purple pom-poms.

  I double over like I’ve been kicked in the stomach, and my mouth wrenches wide on a sob that makes no sound because I inhale it at the last second.

  Darroc is out there with the princes. I don’t dare betray grief. I don’t dare make a sound that they might hear.

  Daddy was my greatest cheerleader, always telling me wise things I rarely listened to and never understood. I should have taken the time to understand. I should have spent more time focused on who I was inside and less on who I was outside. Hindsight, 20/20.

  Tears run down my face. As I turn away from the mirror, my knees go out from under me and I collapse to the bathroom floor in a heap. I curl into a ball, silently heaving.

  I’ve held it at bay as long as I can. Grief crashes over me, drowning me. Alina. Barrons. Mom and Dad, too? I can’t bear it. I can’t keep it all in.

  I cram a fist in my mouth to stop my screams.

  I can’t let anyone hear. He would know I’m not what I pretend to be. What I must be to fix my world.

  There I sat on the couch with him, looking at my sister in all those pictures. And each one reminded me how, when we were little, in every single picture taken of us together, her arm was around me, protecting me, watching out for me.

  She was happy in the pictures Darroc showed me. Dancing. Talking with friends. Sightseeing. He’d taken so many of her photo albums from her apartment. Left us with hardly any. As if the paltry few months he’d spent with her gave him more right to her possessions than me—who’d spent my whole life loving her!

  I hadn’t been able to trace my fingers over her face in front of him because it would have betrayed emotion, weakness. I’d had to lavish all my attention on him. He’d watched me the entire time with those glittering copper eyes, absorbing every detail of my reaction.

  I knew it would be a deadly mistake—and the last I ever made—to underestimate the ancient, brilliant mind behind those cold metallic eyes.

  After what seemed like years of torture, he finally began to look tired, yawning, even rubbing his eyes.

  I forget his body is human, subject to limits.

  Eating Unseelie doesn’t keep you from needing sleep. Like caffeine or speed, it wires you hard but, when you crash, you crash just as hard. I suspect that’s a large part of the reason he never sleeps more than one night in the same place. It’s when he’s most vulnerable. I imagine it must chafe, to have a human body that needs sleep after having been Fae and not needing anything for eternity.

  I decide that’s when I’ll kill him. When he’s sleeping. After I’ve gotten what I want. I’ll wake him and, while he’s still feeling humanly muddled, I’ll smile and drive my spear through his heart. And I’ll say, “This is for Alina and for Jericho. ”

  My fist isn’t keeping my sobs down.

  They’re beginning to leak around it in soft moans. I’m lost in pain, fragments of memories crashing over me: Alina waving good-bye at the gate the day she left for Dublin; Mom and Dad tied to chairs, gagged and bound, waiting for a rescue that never came; Jericho Barrons, dead on the ground.

  Every muscle in my body spasms and I can’t breathe. My chest feels hot, tight, crushed beneath a massive weight.

  I fight to keep the sobs in. If I open my mouth to breathe, they’ll come out, but I’m waging a hopeless battle: Sob and breathe? Or don’t sob and suffocate?

  My vision starts to dim. If I lose consciousness from holding my breath, at least one great cry will explode from me.

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  Is he at my door, listening?

  I dredge my mind for a memory to banish the pain.

  When I recovered from being Pri-ya, I was horrified to realize that, although my time with the princes and afterward at the abbey was blurred, I retained every single memory of what Barrons and I had done together in bed in graphic detail.

  Now I’m grateful for them.

  I can use them to keep myself from screaming.

  You’re leaving me, Rainbow Girl.

  No—that’s the wrong one!

  I rewind, fast.

  There. The first time he came to me, touched me, was inside me. I give myself over to it, replaying every detail in loving memory.

  In time, I’m able to remove my fist. The tension in my body eases.

  Warm in memories, my body shivers on the cold marble bathroom floor.

  Alina’s cold. Barrons is cold.

  I should be cold, too.

  * * *

  When I finally sleep, the cold invades my dreams. I pick my way through jagged-edged ravines gouged into cliffs of black ice. I know this place. The paths I walk are familiar, as if I’ve walked them a hundred times before. Creatures watch me from caverns chiseled into the frozen walls.

  I catch glimpses of the beautiful, sad woman slipping barefoot across the snow, just ahead. She’s calling to me. But each time she opens her mouth, an icy wind steals her words. You must—I catch, before a gust carries the rest of her sentence away.

  I cannot—she cries.

  Make haste! she warns over her shoulder.

  I run after her in my dreams, trying to hear what she’s saying. Stretching out my hand to catch her.

  But she stumbles at the edge of an abyss, loses her footing, and is gone.

  I stare, stunned and horrified.

  The loss is unbearable, as if I myself have died.

  I awaken violently, snapping up from the floor, gasping.

  I’m still trying to process the dream when my body jerks and begins to move like a pre-programmed automaton.

  I watch in terror as my legs make me rise, force me to leave the bathroom. My feet carry me across the room, my hands open the balcony doors. My body is propelled by an unseen power into the darkness, beyond the protection of my crimson ward line.

  I’m not functioning of my own volition. I kno
w it, and I can’t stop myself. I’m completely unprotected where I stand. I don’t even have my spear. Darroc took it away before the prince sifted me out.

  I stare out at a shadowy outline of rooftops, awaiting, dreading whatever command might come next. Knowing I won’t be able to refuse subsequent orders any more than I could this one.

  I’m a puppet. Someone is yanking my strings.

  As if to underscore that point, or perhaps merely to make a mockery of me, my arms suddenly shoot straight up into the air, flail wildly above my head before dropping limply back to my sides.

  I watch my feet as they shuffle a cheery two-step. I wish I could believe I’m dreaming, but I’m not.

  I dance on the balcony, soft-shoeing it faster and faster.

  Just as I begin to wonder if I’m going to be the fairy-tale girl that danced herself to death, my feet go still. Panting, I curl my fingers tightly around the wrought-iron railing. If my unknown puppet master decides I’m to fling myself off the balcony next, it’s in for a hell of a fight.

  Is it Darroc? Why would he do this? Can he do this? Does he have so much power?

  The temperature drops so sharply that my hands ice to the railing. When I jerk them away, ice shatters and falls into the night below, tinkling against pavement. Small patches of skin from my fingertips remain on the railing. I back up, determined not to commit forced suicide.

  Never hurt you, Mac, the Sinsar Dubh croons in my mind.

  I inhale sharply. The air is so bitterly cold it burns my throat and lungs.

  “You just did,” I grit.

  I feel its curiosity. It doesn’t understand how it hurt me. Skin heals.

  That was not pain.

  I stiffen. I don’t like its tone. It is too silky, too full of promise. I try desperately to get to my dark lake in time to arm myself against it, to defend myself, but a wall erupts between me and my watery abyss, and I can find no way around or through it.

  The Sinsar Dubh forces me to my knees. I strain against it every inch of the way, teeth clenched. It whips me around and I collapse onto my back. My arms and legs fly out as if I’m making snow angels. I’m pinned to cold metal girders.