Feverborn Read online

  25

  “Inside these prison walls, I have no name…”

  The first time the Unseelie-king-residue came to the white, bright half of the boudoir in which he’d left her trapped by magic beyond her comprehension, the Seelie queen melted back against the wall, turned herself into a tapestry, and watched silently as a graphic scene of coupling unfolded before her unenthusiastic but eventually reluctantly fascinated gaze.

  Hers was the court of sensuality, and he had once been considered king of it for good reason. Passion drenched the chamber, saturating the very air in which her tapestry hung, draping another bit of sticky, sexually charged residue on her weft and weave.

  A visitor would have seen no more than a vibrant hunt scene hung upon the wall of the boudoir, and at the center, before the slab upon which the mighty white stag was being sacrificed, a slender, lovely woman with pale hair and iridescent eyes, standing, staring out from the tapestry and into the room.

  She’d cut her queenly teeth on legends of the enormously brilliant, terrifyingly powerful, wild, half-mad godlike king that had nearly destroyed their entire race, and certainly condemned it to eternal struggle, with his obsession over a mortal.

  She despised the Unseelie king for locking her away. For killing the original queen before the song had been passed on. For dooming them to striking alliances with weaker beings in order to survive, limping along with only a hint of their former grandeur and power.

  She despised herself for not seeing through her most trusted advisor, V’lane, and being locked away by him as well, in a frozen prison, trapped in a casket of ice, scarcely daring to hope the seeds she’d planted long ago among the Keltar and O’Connor and various others might come to fruition and she would live. Carry on to try to survive the next test she’d also foreseen.

  This—spelled into a chamber with memory residue—was not living. Buried in another coffin of sorts while her race suffered who knew what horrors.

  The Unseelie prison walls were down. Even frozen in her casket, diminishing, being leeched of her very essence by the void-magic of the Unseelie prison, she’d felt the walls around her collapse, had known the very moment the ancient, compromised song had winked out.

  She, more than any of the Seelie, understood the danger her race now faced. She was the one who’d used imperfect song, fragments she’d found hither and yon through the ages, to bind the Fae realms to the mortal coil. She’d only been able to secure her imperiled court by marrying it to the human planet.

  Irretrievably.

  And if that coil were devoured by the black holes, so, too, would be all the Seelie realms.

  With the king, she’d pretended to know none of this, yet it had been precisely why she’d urged him to take action.

  She knew their situation was worse even than that. She’d sought the mythic song herself, striving to restore that colossal magic from which their race had sprung. She’d studied the legends. She knew the truth. The song called an enormous price from imperfect beings, and they all were, to varying degrees. There was no easy way forward. It would cost her many things.

  But she knew something else, too: a thing not even the Unseelie king knew. If she were able to manipulate and seduce him into saving Dublin, thereby her court, the price demanded would be levied most harshly against him.

  The tapestry she’d become rippled and shuddered as she watched the residue of the Unseelie king’s lies. For if she believed them, it was her on that pile of lush furs and bloodred rose petals, as diamonds floated lazily on the air, illuminating the chamber with millions of tiny twinkling stars.

  If she believed him, she had once been mortal, and once been in love with the slaughterer of their race, the maker of the abominations, the one who’d cared nothing for the former queen to whom he’d been trothed, and less for the court he’d abandoned.

  Cruce forced a cup from the cauldron of forgetting on you, the king had said before he left.

  She’d never drunk from the cauldron. The queen was not allowed.

  Before you were queen. When you were mine.

  She didn’t believe him. Refused to believe him. And even if she had—how could it matter? She was what she was now. The Seelie queen, leader of the True Race. She’d spent her entire existence as that. Had no memory of his lies. Wanted none.

  And yet, she could divine no purpose for this charade.

  He needed nothing from her. He was the Unseelie king. He was an it, an entity, a state of existence, enormously beyond any of their race’s comprehension. He needed nothing from no one. Legend was too complex and contradictory to unravel his origins. Or theirs.

  She narrowed her fibrous eyes, the threads of the tapestry rippling. How could such a being as the mad king fabricate such depth of emotion as she was now seeing?

  Emotion was alien to their race in this, its purest essence. They felt but facsimiles of it, enhanced by living with the primitive race she’d chosen to settle her people among, for that very reason. To expand their pale existence, to amplify their wan desires in order to sate them more amply.

  Yet on the great round dais, a woman that looked and moved identically to her, gazed down at the being she’d taken inside her body, inside her very soul, and laughed as Aoibheal had never known laughter. Touched as she herself had never touched. Was moved by the king she loathed far more intimately and with greater sensation than she had ever believed possible.

  Forget your foolish quest, the woman on the bed said, sobering suddenly. Run away with me.

  The king residue was abruptly angry. She could feel it, even as a tapestry. We had this conversation. We will never have it again.

  It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t need to live forever.

  You won’t be the one left behind when you die.

  Make yourself human with me, then.

  Aoibheal narrowed her eyes further. A Fae make itself human for a human? Never. Only one, Adam Black, had ever insisted on such an absurd, devaluing action, and there were reasons for his madness that were her fault entirely.

  The king displayed the proper Fae response.

  Revulsion.

  Refusal to abandon the glory that it was to be of the Old Race, the honored ones, the First Race. Perhaps in his case even—the First One. Still…the song had not been entrusted to him. Rather to a female. For good reason. Women were not blinded by passion. They were clarified by it.

  As the king rose and towered over the woman he claimed Aoibheal was, she felt what the woman on the bed felt and it was chafing and uncomfortable: tired of fighting for something she knew she would never attain. Weary of trying to make the blind see. Knowing her lover had passed beyond her ability to reach.

  But the woman on the bed felt something else Aoibheal could not understand at all.

  That love was the most important thing in the universe. More so even than the song. That without love and without freedom, life was worth nothing.

  The woman on the bed wept after the king was gone.

  The woman in the tapestry watched in silence.

  If she must pretend to be that woman to secure her Court’s existence, so be it.

  But it would cost the king everything.

  26

  “Separate the weak from the obsolete, I creep hard on imposters…”

  “It can’t be human,” I protested, staring at the thing that looked so heartbreakingly like my sister. “It’s not possible. I’ve heard of doppelgangers but I don’t believe in them. Not this perfect. Not this detailed.” Except for a few minor things, like the diamond ring on her finger.

  The imposter was sitting, leaning against the crate, its head swinging back and forth between us, eyeing me warily as if to ascertain I wasn’t about to begin moving toward it again.

  I gazed at Barrons in mute pain and protest. Now more than ever, I was wondering if I’d ever escaped the Sinsar Dubh’s clutches that night in BB&B.

  You are here and I am here and this is real. Barrons shot me a cool, dark look. Don’t flake ou
t on me now, Ms. Lane.

  I stiffened. I never flake out.

  Remember that. And don’t do it. Focus on the moment. We’ll figure this out. You’re trying to see the whole fucking picture in a single moment. That’s enough to make anyone crazy. What do you do on a bloody minefield?

  Try to get off it?

  One step at a time.

  He was right. Focus on the moment.

  I looked back at the thing masquerading as my sister. It sat, looking as confused and disturbed as it had since the moment I’d first seen it. Then it looked up at Barrons, searchingly. “Who are you? What are you to her?”

  Barrons said nothing. Answering questions isn’t high on his list with anyone but me, and that’s only because I have things he wants.

  It went on in a rush, “My sister is carrying the Sinsar Dubh. It’s in her clothing somewhere. We have to get it away from her. We have to save her.” It cringed as it spoke the words, snatching a quick glance at me, as if it expected me to suddenly rain death and destruction on its head for speaking those words.

  “I’m not carrying the Sinsar Dubh,” I snapped to whatever it was. “It’s inside me. It has been since birth. But it’s not in control of me.”

  I hoped.

  It blinked at me. “What?”

  “My sister died over a year ago in an alley on the south side of the River Liffey after scratching a clue into the pavement. What was that clue?”

  “It was 1247 LaRuhe, Jr. But, Mac, I didn’t die.”

  I felt like I’d just been kicked in the stomach by a team of frigging Clydesdales. For the teeniest of instants I wondered if it was possible. “Someone watched you die,” I prompted.

  “A girl with red hair. She took me to the alley. But she left before I…I—”

  “Before you what?” I demanded coldly.

  It shook its head, looking hurt and confused and lost. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s all…fuzzy.”

  Oh, that was convenient. “You don’t remember. That’s because my sister died. Dead people don’t remember things. They sent Alina’s body home to me. I saw it. I buried it.” I’d mourned it. It had become my inciting incident, the catalyst that had reshaped my entire life.

  “Mac,” it gasped. “I don’t know! All I know is I was in that alley and I was gouging a clue into the pavement for you. Then…I guess…I must have lost consciousness or something. Then two days ago I found myself standing in the middle of Temple Bar with no freaking clue how’d I gotten there! I have no idea what happened. And everything has changed! It’s all so different, like I came to in the wrong—” It broke off, narrowing its eyes. “That happened a year ago? I was in that alley a year ago? I’ve lost a year? What is the date, I need to know the date!” Its voice rose with hysteria as it surged to its feet.

  I took a step forward without meaning to and it pressed back against the crate, trying to become paper thin. Its hands went to its head, then one shot out to ward me off. “No, please, don’t come any closer!” It whimpered until I took a step back.

  I looked at Barrons.

  It is conceivable, his eyes said.

  “Bullshit!” I snapped. “Then how do you explain the body I buried?”

  Fae illusion?

  I cursed and spun away. Turned my back on the imposter. I couldn’t keep looking at it. It was dicking with me royally. I couldn’t believe the body I’d buried hadn’t been her body. I didn’t want to believe it.

  Because deep down—desperately and with every ounce of my being—I wanted to believe it. Discover that someone, somehow, perhaps a Fae, had hidden my sister away and she’d never died at all. What a dream come true!

  Unfortunately, I don’t believe in clichéd happy endings anymore.

  “Why do you have a ring on your finger?” I shot over my shoulder.

  “Darroc asked me to marry him.” Its voice caught on a sob. “You said he’s dead. Is that true? Have I really been missing for a year? Is he alive? Tell me he’s alive!”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Barrons. Is it really human? Could whatever it is be fooling even you? I sent silently.

  I sense her as fully human. Further, Ms. Lane, she smells like you.

  I blinked, my eyes snapping wide. Do you think she’s my sister? If Barrons believed it, I might have a complete meltdown. Or suspect my entire reality of being false. Barrons was nobody’s sucker.

  Not enough evidence to make that call.

  What do I do?

  What do you want to do?

  Get that thing out of here.

  Kill it?

  No. Remove it

  What will that accomplish, Ms. Lane?

  It will make me feel better at this very moment and that’s enough.

  Continue questioning her, he ordered.

  I don’t want to.

  Do it anyway. I’m not taking her anywhere.

  She’s not a “her.” She’s an “it.”

  She’s human. Deal with it.

  I waited for him to remove the imposter. He didn’t. Pissed, raw, seething, I kicked a crate out from the wall and dropped down on it. “You can start by telling me about your childhood,” I fired at it.

  It gave me a look. “You tell me,” it fired right back.

  “I thought you were afraid of me,” I reminded.

  “You haven’t done anything.” It shrugged. “At least not yet. And you’re staying far enough away. Besides, if I really lost a year and Darroc’s dead, do your worst,” it said bitterly. “You’ve got my sister. I don’t have anything left to lose.”

  “Mom and Dad.”

  “Don’t you dare threaten them!”

  I shook my head. It was acting like my sister. Bluffing me like I would have bluffed. Tried to keep the Book from knowing I had parents, if it didn’t already know, then threatening if the Book appeared to be threatening them. Another twist of the worm in my apple. I was rapidly losing my grip on reality.

  “Who was your first?” Failure, I didn’t add.

  It snorted. “Leave it to you to remind me of that. LDL.”

  Limp-dick-Luke. The town jock had remained a virgin much longer than most high school guys for a reason. He hadn’t wanted word to get out that the powerhouse on the football field wasn’t in bed. The loss of her virginity had been an epic failure. He’d never managed to get hard enough to break her hymen. But Alina had never told. Only me, and we’d christened him LDL. I’d never told either.

  If my sister wasn’t dead, what had I been fighting for? Grieving? Avenging? If my sister wasn’t dead, where the hell had she been for a year?

  Dani carried the blame for her death. If my sister wasn’t dead, what really happened that night in the alley?

  “Rightie?” I looked at Barrons. I so didn’t want this thing—or anyone for that matter—checking out that man’s package, but there were things, intimate things, Alina and I had shared. Such as eyeing a man’s crotch and deciding which side he tucked his dick down. Alina used to say, “if you can’t tell where it is, Jr., you don’t want to know any more about it.” Because it wasn’t big enough to be noticeable.

  Barrons stood, legs wide, arms folded, blocking the stairs, watching us with dispassionate calm, studying, analyzing, mining this unfolding madness for validity.

  Its eyebrows rose as it looked at him. “Goodness. Serious leftie.”

  Barrons shot me a lethal look.

  I ignored it. I wished I could figure out something to ask the fraud that I didn’t know the answer to, because if this was some kind of projection, the Book inside me could very well have access to all the information I did. Might have “skimmed my mind” like the corporeal one for every last detail. But if I didn’t know the answer, I couldn’t confirm it. Complete catch-22.

  You’re thinking with your brain, Ms. Lane. It’s not your most discerning organ.

  What is? I snapped silently.

  Your gut. Humans complicate everything. The body knows. Humans censor it. Ask. Listen. Feel.

  I
blew out an angry breath and shoved my hair back. “Tell me about your childhood,” I said again.

  “How do I know you’re not the Sinsar Dubh, playing games with me?” it said.

  “Ditto,” I said tightly. “Maybe what’s inside me is merely projecting you.” And I was lost in a vortex of illusions.

  Understanding manifested in its eyes as it absorbed what I’d said. “Oh, God, neither of us know for sure. Shit, Jr.!”

  “You never used to say—”

  “I know, fudge-buckets, petunia, daisies, frog. We made up our own cuss words.” It snorted and we both blurted at the same time, “Because pretty women don’t have ugly mouths.”

  It laughed.

  I bit my tongue. Hating that I’d spoken with the imposter. The inflection so much the same. Cant of head nearly identical. I refused to laugh. Refused to share one moment of camaraderie with a thing that simply couldn’t exist.

  “How is the Book inside you? I don’t understand,” it said. “And why hasn’t it taken you over? I heard it corrupted anyone that touched it.”

  “I’m the one asking the—”

  “And exactly why is that? If you really are Mac, with the Book inside you somehow, and you aren’t corrupted, and I really am your older sister”—it emphasized its seniority just like Alina would have—“and I’m not dead, don’t I deserve a little understanding?” It frowned. “Mac, is Darroc really dead? I can’t find him anywhere.” Its face seemed to tremble for a moment, threaten to collapse into tears, then it stiffened. “Seriously. Tell me about Darroc and what the heck happened to Dublin, and I’ll tell you about my childhood.”

  I sighed. If this was somehow magically my sister, she was as stubborn in her own way as I was. If it wasn’t, I still obviously wasn’t going to get anywhere unless I bartered a bit.

  So, I filled it in on Darroc’s pointless death when the Book had popped his head like a grape and gave it a scant sketch of recent events. Then I folded my arms and leaned back against the wall.

  “Your turn,” I said to the softly weeping woman.

  27