Shadowfever Read online

  I wanted to step through and join that immense ancientness.

  I never wanted to step one foot closer to those shadows.

  Was the king himself summoning me? Or was part of the king standing behind me, even now? I had to know. I’d called Jericho a coward but could too easily be accused of the same.

  I need … the voice summoned.

  I understood that. I did, too. Sex. Answers. An end to my fears, one way or another.

  But the voice hadn’t come from the woman on the rug.

  It had come from the dark side of the boudoir, which was all bed because he required that much bed. It was a command I couldn’t refuse. I would slip through the mirror and Barrons would lay me back on the Unseelie King’s bed and cover me with lust and darkness. And we would know who we were. It would be okay. It would all be out in the open finally.

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  As I stared into the Silver that I knew was a killing mirror for anyone who wasn’t the king or his concubine, I was suddenly five again. More details of my Cold Place dream crashed over me and I realized there were many I still didn’t remember.

  I’d always had to pass through this chamber first: half white, half dark, half warm, half cold. But numbed and frightened out of my childhood wits by the nightmarish things that followed, I’d always forgotten how the dream had begun. It had always been here.

  And it had always been so hard to force myself to go through the enormous black Silver, because I’d wanted nothing more than to stay in the warm white half of this chamber forever, to lose myself in endlessly replaying scenes of what had once been but was now lost to me and I could never have again, and grief—oh, God, I’d never really known grief at all! Grief was walking these black halls and knowing they would be haunted for eternity with the residue of lovers too foolish to savor what time they’d had. Memories stalked these corridors, and I stalked those memories like a sad ghost.

  Still, wasn’t illusion better than nothing?

  I could stay here and never have to face that my existence was empty, that emptiness was all my life had ever been about: dreams, seduction, glamour.

  Lies. All lies.

  But here I could forget.

  Come NOW.

  “Mac. ” Jericho was shaking me. “Look at me. ”

  I could see him distantly, through sparkling diamonds and ghosts of times past. And behind him, through the mirror, I could see the monstrous dark shape of the Unseelie King, as if he was casting Jericho as his shadow on the other side, on the white half of the room. I wondered if the concubine’s shadow was different, too, through the king’s Silver. Did she become like him on his half? Large and complex enough to mate with whatever the king was? Over there, in the blessed, comforting, sacred dark, what was she? What was I?

  “Mac, focus on me! Look at me, talk to me!”

  But I couldn’t look. I couldn’t focus, because whatever was beyond that mirror had been calling me all my life.

  I knew the Silver wouldn’t kill me. I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  “I’m sorry. I have to go. ”

  His hands tightened on my shoulders and tried to turn me away. “Walk away from it, Mac. Let it go. Some things don’t need to be known. Isn’t your life enough as it is?”

  I laughed. The man who always insisted I see things as they were was now urging me to hide? On the rug behind him, the concubine laughed, too. Her head arched, her chin tipped up, as if she was being kissed by an invisible lover.

  He had to be the king. I slid my hand down his arm, twined my fingers with his. “Come with me,” I said, and ran for the Silver.

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  I was surprised by the ease with which I slid through the black membrane. I was stunned senseless by the cold that knifed into me.

  My brain issued an order to gasp. My body failed to obey it. I was crusted from head to toe with a thin sheet of glittering ice. It cracked as I took a step, tinkled to my feet, and I was instantly re-coated again.

  How was I supposed to breathe here? How had the concubine breathed?

  Ice coated the insides of my nose, my mouth and tongue and teeth, all the way down to my lungs, as all the parts of my body I needed to process air were sheathed in an impenetrable layer. I stumbled backward, seeking the other side of the mirror, where there was white and light and oxygen.

  I was so cold that I could barely move. For a moment, I wasn’t sure I would make it back through the Silver. I was afraid I would die in the Unseelie King’s bedchamber, repeating history, only this time I’d have left no note.

  When I finally slid through the dark membrane, warmth hit me like a blast oven, and I stumbled, went flying across the room, and slammed into the wall. The concubine stretched on the rug paid me no heed. I sucked in air with a greedy screech.

  Where was Jericho? Could he breathe on the other side? Did he need to breathe, or was it his natural environment? I glanced back at the mirror, expecting to see him moving darkly on the other side, scowling at me for having forced him to reveal his true identity.

  I staggered and nearly went down.

  I’d been so certain I was right.

  Barrons was collapsed on the floor, at the boundary of light and dark—on the white side of the room.

  Only two in all existence could ever travel through that Silver: the Unseelie King and his concubine, Darroc had told me. Any other that touches it is instantly killed. Even Fae.

  “Jericho!” I ran for him, dragged him away from the mirror, and sank to the floor beside him. I rolled him over. He wasn’t breathing. He was dead. Again.

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  I stared down at him.

  I stared into the darkness of the mirror.

  The Silver hadn’t killed me. But it had killed him. I didn’t like what that meant one bit.

  It meant I was indeed the concubine.

  It also meant that Jericho wasn’t my king.

  NOW.

  The command was enormous, irresistible, Voice to the nth degree. I wanted to stay with Jericho. I couldn’t have stayed if my life had depended on it. And I was pretty sure it did.

  “I can’t breathe over there. ”

  You do not live on this side of the Silver. Alter your expectations. Forgo breath. Fear, not fact, impedes you.

  Was that possible? I wasn’t buying it. But apparently it didn’t matter whether I bought it, because my hands were pushing me up and my feet were moving me straight into the dark Silver.

  “Jericho!” I cried as I felt myself being forced away.

  I hated this. I hated everything about it. I was the concubine but Jericho wasn’t the king, and I couldn’t deal with that—not that I was sure how well I would have dealt with it if he had been the king. Now I was being summoned to a place where I couldn’t breathe, where I didn’t really live according to my disembodied tormentor, and I had no choice but to leave him, dead again, by himself.

  I suddenly had no desire to learn anything else about myself. This was enough. I was sorry I’d been so hell-bent on knowing to begin with. He’d been right. Wasn’t he always? Some things just didn’t need to be known.

  “I’m not doing this. I’m not playing your stupid games, whatever they are, whoever you are. I’m going back to my life now. That would be Mac’s life,” I clarified. There was no reply. Only an inexorable pull into the darkness.

  I was once again puppet to an invisible puppet master. I had no choice. I was being dragged through and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Struggling, gritting my teeth, resisting every step of the way, I stepped over Jericho’s body and pushed back into the Silver.

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  It was pure instinct to fight for breath.

  I was encased in ice again the moment I slid through the Silver.

  Passing through the dark mirror peeled back a curtain, exposing more forgotten childhood memories
. Abruptly, I recalled being four, five, six, finding myself stuck in this alien dreamscape nightly. No sooner did I say my prayers, close my eyes, and drift off to sleep than a disembodied command would infiltrate my slumber.

  I recalled waking from those nightmares, gasping and shivering, running for Daddy, crying that I was freezing, suffocating.

  I wondered what young Jack Lane had made of it—his adopted daughter who’d been forbidden to ever return to the country of her birth, who was tormented by terrifyingly cold, airless nightmares. What horrors had he decided I must have suffered to be scarred in such ways?

  I loved him with all my heart for the childhood he’d given me. He’d anchored me with the day-to-day routines of a simple life, crammed it full of sunshine and bike rides, music lessons and baking with Mom in our bright, warm kitchen. Perhaps he’d let me be too frivolous, in an effort to counter the pain of those nightmares. But I couldn’t say I’d have done any differently as a parent.

  The inability to breathe had been only the first of many things my child’s mind had found so terrifying. As I’d gotten older, strengthened by the cocoon of parental love, I’d learned to suppress those nocturnal images and the bleak emotions the Cold Place engendered. By my teens, the recurring nightmare had been buried deep in my subconscious, leaving me burdened with an intense dislike of the cold and a vague sense of bipolarity I was finally beginning to understand. If occasionally images that made no sense to me slipped through a crack, I attributed them to some horror movie I’d flipped through on TV.

  Do not be frightened. I chose you because you could.

  I remembered that now, too. The voice that had demanded I come had tried to comfort me and promised I was capable of the task—whatever it was.

  I’d never believed it. If I was capable, I wouldn’t have dreaded it so much.

  I shook myself hard, cracking the ice. It dropped away, but I immediately re-iced.

  I repeated the shaking, the re-icing. I did it four or five more times, terrified all the while that if I didn’t keep cracking it, it would build up so thick that I would end up staying right here where I stood forever, a statue of a woman, frozen and forgotten, in the Unseelie King’s bedchamber.

  When Barrons came back to life, he would stand and stare through the mirror at me and try to roar me back to my senses and into motion, but there I’d be—right in front of his eyes, eternally out of his reach, because nobody but me and the Unseelie race’s mysterious creator could enter the king’s boudoir. And who knew where the king was?

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  For that matter, who knew who the king was?

  And I really wanted to, which meant I had to find a way to move around in his natural habitat. I’d done it before, long ago, in another life, as his lover, so surely I could figure out how to do it again. It seemed I’d left clues for myself.

  Fear, not fact, impedes you.

  I was supposed to alter my expectations and do without breath.

  When I re-iced again, I remained still and let the ice cover me, instead of resisting and struggling to breathe. I tried to imagine it as a comfort, a soothing coolness to a high fever. I made it all of thirty seconds before I panicked. Silvery sheets rained from me and shattered on the obsidian floor as I moved jerkily.

  I made it an entire minute the second time.

  By my third try, it dawned on me that I hadn’t actually drawn a breath since I’d passed through the mirror. I’d been so busy fighting the ice that I hadn’t realized I was no longer breathing. I would have snorted but I couldn’t. There literally was no breath on this side of the Silver. My physicality was a different thing here.

  Here I stood, fighting for something I didn’t even need, driven by a life of conditioning.

  Could I talk on this side? Wasn’t voice comprised of breath to drive it?

  “Hello. ” I flinched.

  I’d chimed like one of the dark princes, only on a different scale, high and feminine. Although my greeting had been comprised of English syllables, without breath to drive it the notes sounded as if slide-hammered on a hellish xylophone.

  “Is anyone here?” I iced again, frozen in place by sheer astonishment at the bizarre sound. I spoke in shades of tubular bells.

  Assured that I wasn’t going to suffocate, that I could talk, sort of, and that, as long as I kept moving, the ice would keep cracking, I began to jog in place and took a look around.

  The king’s bedchamber was the size of a football stadium. Walls of black ice towered overhead to a ceiling too high to see. Spicy black petals from some exquisite, otherworldly rose garden swirled at my feet as I bounced lightly from foot to foot. Clusters of frost that were trying to form on my skin rained down to join them. I was mesmerized a moment by the sparkling crystals against the black floor and flowers.

  Falling back, laughing, ice in her hair, a handful of velvety petals fluttering down to land on her bare breasts …

  Never cold here.

  Always together.

  Sadness overwhelmed me. I nearly choked on it.

  He had so many ambitions.

  She had one. To love.

  Could have learned from her.

  The tiny diamonds from the concubine’s—I couldn’t bring myself to say my, especially not standing so close to the king’s bed—side of the bedchamber hadn’t been extinguished at all. They’d become something else when they passed through and now shimmered on the dark air, midnight fireflies winking with blue flame.

  The bed was draped with black curtains that fluttered around piles of silky black furs and filled up a third of the chamber, the portion visible from the other side. I moved to it, slid my hand over the furs. They were sleek, sensual. I wanted to stretch out naked and never leave.

  It wasn’t the white warm place I found so comforting and familiar, but there was beauty here, too, on the far side of the mirror. Her world was the bright, glorious summer day that held no secrets, but his was the dark, glittering night where anything was possible. I tipped my head back. Was that a black ceiling painted with stars so high above me or a night sky sliced from another world and brought here for my pleasure?

  I was in his bedchamber. I remembered this place. I’d come. Would he? Would I finally see the face of my long-lost lover? If he was my beloved king, why was I so afraid?

  Hurry! Almost here … Come quickly!

  The command came from beyond a giant arched opening far across the bedchamber. The summons was beyond my ability to deny. I broke into a run, following the voice of my childhood pied piper.

  Once the king had held the Seelie Queen above all others, but somewhere down the eons, things had changed. He had puzzled over it for thousands of years, studying her, challenging her with subtle tests, in an effort to divine if the problem lay within her or within him.

  He was comforted on the day he realized it was through no fault of theirs but that the two who were the eternal glue of their race were coming apart because she was Stasis and he was Change. It was their nature. The oddity was how long they had remained together.

  He could not have prevented his evolution any more than she could have prevented her stagnation. All that the queen was at that very moment was all she would ever be.

  Ironically, the mother of their race—she who wielded the Song of Making, she who could enact the mightiest acts of all creation—was no Creator. She was power without wonder, satisfaction without joy. What was existence without wonder, without joy? Meaningless. Empty.

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  And she thought he was dangerous.

  He began to slip off more frequently, exploring worlds without her, hungering for things he could not name. The bright, silly court he once found harmlessly entertaining became to him a place of empty pursuits and jaded palates.

  He built a fortress on a world of black ice because it was the antithesis of all the queen had chosen. Here, in his dark
, quiet castle, he could think. Here, where there were no garish chaises or brilliantly clad courtiers, he could feel himself expanding. He was not drowned by incessant tinkling laughter, in constant petty disputes. He was free.

  Once, the queen sought him in his ice castle, and it amused him to see her horror at being leeched of all her bright plumage by the strange light on the world he had chosen, which cast everything black, white, or blue. It suited his need for Spartan surroundings while he sorted through the complexity of his existence and decided the next thing he would be. It was after he had found his concubine, long after he had realized he was no longer capable of tolerating his own people for more than a few short hours at a time, but before he’d begun his efforts to make his beloved Fae like himself.

  The queen had been seductive, she had been full of guile, she had been scornful. She had finally tried to use a small part of the Song against him, but he had been prepared for that because, like her, he looked into the future as far as it would permit and foreseen this day.

  They held each other at bay with weapons for the first time in the history of their race.

  As the imperious, unforgiving matriarch of their race stormed from his fortress, he padlocked his doors against her, vowing that until she gave him what he wanted—the secret to immortality for his beloved—no Seelie would ever again walk his icy halls. Only the queen could dispense the elixir of life. She kept it hidden in her private bower. He wanted that, and more: enough to make the concubine his equal in every way.

  I shook myself hard and stopped running. I iced instantly, but it didn’t terrify me. I waited a few moments before taking a step and cracking it.

  The memories on the king’s side of the Silver didn’t play out before my eyes like the residue of times past on the concubine’s side. Here they seemed to slide directly into my brain.

  It was as if I’d just been two people: One had been running down enormous halls of black ice, and the other had stood in a kingly reception hall, watching the first Fae queen fight with a mighty darkness, probing for weaknesses, manipulating, always manipulating. I knew every detail of her being, what she looked like in her true form and her preferred guises. I even knew the look on her face as she’d died.

  Come to me …

  I began to run again, down floors of obsidian. The king hadn’t been much for decorating. No windows opened onto the world outside his walls, although I knew they once did, in those early days before the queen turned his planet into a prison. I also knew that once there were simple yet regal furnishings, but now the only embellishments were elaborately carved designs in the ice itself, lending the place a certain austere majesty. If the queen’s court was a gaily painted whore, the king’s was a strange but natural beauty.