Bloodfever Read online

  “Oh, gee, let’s see…maybe because I trust you less than I trust the Shades?” At least the Shade was too stupid to be deceptive. I think.

  “What is trust, sidhe-seer, but expectation that another will behave in a certain fashion, consistent with prior actions?”

  “Great definition. Examine your prior actions. ”

  “I did. It is you who do not see me clearly. I came to you offering a gift to protect your life. You are a beautiful woman who dresses to command male attention. I gave it to you. I did not know the Sidhba-jai would distress you as it did. I even offered to pleasure you without price. You refused me. Perhaps I was offended. You menace me with a weapon stolen from my race. You speak to me of reasons not to trust when you have given me a multitude. You are a suspicious larcenous being with homicidal tendencies. Despite your continued threats to do vile things to me, I remain here, withholding what offends you, offering aid. ”

  I was getting low on matches. How cleverly he’d turned things around, as if he’d done nothing wrong, and I was the dangerous one. “Oh, drop the act, Tinkerbell, and get rid of my problem. Then we’ll talk. ”

  “Will we? Talk?”

  I frowned and lit another match. There was a catch here somewhere but I wasn’t sure what it was. “I said we would. ”

  “As friends, we’ll talk. ”

  “Friends do not have sex, if that’s what you’re getting at. ” That wasn’t true, but he didn’t necessarily know that. I’m heir to the “sex is just sex” generation and I hate it. Not only friends have sex, people who don’t like each other have sex. I’d once caught Natalie and Rick, two people I know for a fact can’t stand each other, banging away in the bathroom at The Brickyard. When later I’d asked her what had changed, she’d said nothing, she still couldn’t stand him, but he’d sure looked hot tonight. Doesn’t anybody get that sex is what you make it, and if you treat it like nothing, it is? I don’t clean the restrooms anymore. I leave that to Val. She’s lower on the seniority totem pole.

  For the past few years, I’ve been on a quest for a good old-fashioned date, the kind where the guy calls, makes the plans, picks you up in a car that’s not his dad’s or his other girlfriend’s, and takes you somewhere that shows he put thought into what you might like, not what he might get off on like the latest how-many-naked-boobs-can-we-cram-into-this-movie-to-disguise-the-complete-lack-of-plot movie. I’m looking for the kind of date that starts with good conversation, has a sweet and satisfying middle, and ends with long, slow kisses and the dreamy feeling that you’re walking on clouds.

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  “That is not what I was implying. We will sit, the two of us, and talk of more than threats and fears and the differences between us. We will spend one of your hours as friends. ”

  I didn’t like the careful way he’d phrased that. “One of my hours?”

  “Our hours are much longer, sidhe-seer. See how freely I converse with you? Telling you of our ways. So trust begins. ”

  Something about the Shade drew my attention. It took me a minute to figure out what it was. Its demeanor had changed. It was still predatory, but it was angry now. I could sense it the same way I’d felt its mockery earlier. I could also sense that its anger was not directed at me. I lit another match and contemplated it. I had four matches left, and an uneasy suspicion that V’lane might be doing something to rein in the amorphous life-sucker.

  Was it possible this unnaturally strong Shade could take me, even in the light, if V’lane weren’t here right now? Had he been holding it at bay since the beginning?

  “One hour,” I ground out. “But I’m not taking the cuff. And you won’t do that sexing-me-up thing. And I need coffee before we begin. ”

  “Not now. At a time of my choosing, MacKayla. ”

  He was calling me by name like we were friends. I didn’t like it one bit. I lit my third-last match. “Fine. Fix my problem. ”

  I was wondering just what I’d agreed to, and how many more demands V’lane would make before getting rid of the Shade—I had no doubt he’d draw it out until the last moment to scare and humiliate me as much as possible—when he mocked silkily, “Let there be light,” and suddenly all the lights in the room popped on.

  The Shade exploded, shattering into countless dark pieces. They scrabbled toward the night, frantic cockroaches fleeing a bombed room, and I could sense the Unseelie was in unspeakable pain. If light didn’t kill them, it was certainly their version of Hell.

  After the last quivering fragment scuttled over the sill, I hurried to shut the window. The alley was once again brightly lit. And empty.

  V’lane was gone.

  I collected my flashlights, tucked them back into my waistband, and walked through the store, hunting for Shades lurking in corners or hiding in closets. I found none. All the lights were back on, inside and out.

  It disturbed me deeply. As effortlessly as V’lane had helped me, he could dump me back into the dark if he felt like it, without ever even having to enter the store.

  What else could he do? How powerful was a Royal Fae? Shouldn’t the wards keep him from being able to influence physical matter beyond them? Speaking of wards, why hadn’t they kept out the Shades? Had Barrons only warded the property against the Lord Master? If he could perform such tricks, why not ward the entire building against everything? Except, of course, store patrons, although it was obvious the bookstore was just a cover—Barrons needed more money like Ireland needed more rain.

  I needed answers. I was sick of not getting any. I was surrounded by egotistical, unpredictable, moody, pushy jackasses, and my feeling was if you can’t beat them, join them. I was confident I, too, could be a pushy jackass. I just needed a little practice.

  I wanted to know more about Barrons. I wanted to know if he lived in this building or not. I wanted to know more about his mysterious garage. He’d slipped up not long ago, and mentioned something about a vault three floors beneath it. I wanted to know what a man like him stored in an underground vault.

  I began with the store. The front half was just what it seemed, an eclectic and well-stocked bookstore. I dismissed it and moved to the rear half. The first floor was as impersonal as a museum, liberally and exorbitantly fitted with antiquities and artwork, but nothing that betrayed any real glimpse into the mind of the man who’d acquired the many artifacts. Even his study, the one room I expected to offer some personal portrayal of the man, presented only the cool, impersonal reflection of a large wood-framed mirror that occupied the wall between cherry bookcases, behind the ornate fifteenth-century desk. There was no bedroom, kitchen, or dining room on the first floor.

  Every door on the second and third floors was locked. They were heavy, solid wood doors with complicated locks that I couldn’t force or pick. I started out stealthily jiggling the doorknobs because I was afraid Barrons might be in one of the rooms, but by the time I got to the third floor, I was giving them good hard shakes and pissed-off kicks. I’d awakened tonight to find myself in the dark. I was tired of being in the dark. I was tired of everyone else having control of the lights.

  I stomped back downstairs and outside to the garage. The rain had abated but the sky was still dark with thunderclouds, and dawn was a promise I wouldn’t have believed, if I’d not lived through twenty-two years of them. Down the alley to my left, Shades restlessly shaped and reshaped the darkness at the edge of the abandoned neighborhood.

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  I flipped them off. With both hands.

  I tested the garage door. Locked, of course.

  I went to the nearest blacked-out window and smashed it in with the butt of my flashlight. The tinkle of breaking glass soothed my soul. No alarm went off. “Take that, Barrons. Guess your world isn’t so perfectly controlled, after all. ” Perhaps it was warded like the bookstore, against other threats, not me. I broke out the jagged edges so I wouldn’t get cut, hoisted myself over th
e sill, and dropped to the floor.

  I flipped on the light switches by the door then just stood there a minute, grinning like an idiot. I’ve seen his collection before, even ridden in a few of the cars, but the sight of them all together, one gleaming fantasy after another, is a total rush to somebody like me.

  I love cars.

  From sleek and sporty to squat and muscley, from luxury sedan to high-performance coupe, from state-of-the-art to timeless classic, I am a car fanatic—and Barrons has them all. Well, maybe not all. I haven’t seen him driving a Bugatti yet, and really, with 1003 horsepower and a million-dollar price tag, I’m hardly expecting to, but he’s got pretty much every car of my dreams, right down to a sixty-four and a half Stingray, painted what else but British racing green?

  There, a black Maserati crouched next to a Wolf Countach. Here, a red Ferrari stretched on the verge of a purr, next to a—my smile died instantly—Rocky O’Bannion’s Maybach, reminding me of sixteen deaths that shouldn’t have happened to men who hadn’t deserved to die, and at least part of it was on my head: sixteen deaths I’d celebrated because they’d bought me a temporary stay of execution.

  Where do you put such conflicting feelings? Is this where I’m supposed to grow up and start compartmentalizing? Is compartmentalizing just another way of divvying up our sins, apportioning a few here and a few over there, shoving our internal furniture around to hide some, so we can go on living with the weight of them individually, because collectively they’d drown us?

  I shoved all thought of cars from my mind and began looking for doors.

  The garage had once been some kind of commercial warehouse, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it occupied nearly a city block. The floors were polished concrete, the walls poured concrete, the beams and girders steel. All the windows were painted black, from the glass-block apertures near the ceiling, to the two double-paned glass openings at ground level by the doors, one of which I’d busted. The garage had a single retractable dock door.

  Other than that and a bunch of cars, there was nothing. No stairs, no closets, no trapdoors hidden beneath rubber mats on the floor. I know, I looked, there was nothing.

  So where were the three subterranean levels and how was I supposed to get down to them?

  I stood in the center of the enormous garage surrounded by one of the finest car collections in the world, tucked away in a nondescript alley in Dublin, and tried to think like its bizarre owner. It was an exercise in futility. I wasn’t sure he had a brain. Perhaps there was only a coldly efficient microchip in there.

  I felt more than heard the noise, a rumble in my feet.

  I cocked my head, listening. After a moment, I got down on my hands and knees, brushed a thin veneer of dust from the floor, and pressed my ear to the cold concrete. Far beneath me, in the marrow of the ground, something bayed.

  It sounded maddened, bestial, and it raised the fine hair all over my body. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the mouth capable of making such a sound. It bayed over and over, each soul-chilling howl lasting a full minute or more, echoing up from its concrete tomb.

  What was down there? What kind of creature possessed such lung capacity? Why was it making such a sound? It was darker than a wail of despair, emptier than a funeral dirge; it was the bleak, tortured baying of a thing beyond salvation, abandoned, lost, condemned to the agony of hell without beginning or end.

  Chicken flesh sprouted all over my arms.

  There was a new cry then, this one more terrified than tortured. It rose in gruesome concert with that long, terrible howl.

  They both stopped.

  There was silence.

  I rapped my knuckles on the floor in frustration, wondering just how far in over my head I was.

  No longer feeling quite so jackassy or pushy, I left to go back to my room. As I stepped into the alley, the wind scooted trash along the pavement, and the dense cloud cover drifted apart to reveal a window of dark sky. Dawn was moments away, yet the moon was still bright and full. To my right, in the Dark Zone, Shades no longer crouched in the shadows. They’d fled something, and it wasn’t the moon or the dawn. I’d watched them a lot from my window lately; they ceded the night in petulant degrees, the largest of them lingering until the last.

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  I glanced to my left and sucked in a breath.

  “No,” I whispered.

  Just beyond reach of the building floodlights a tall, black-shrouded figure stood, folds of midnight cloth rustling in the wind.

  Several times over the past week, I’d thought I’d glimpsed something out a window, late at night. Something so trite and clichéd that I’d refused to believe it was real. And I wouldn’t now.

  Fae were bad enough.

  “You’re not there,” I told it.

  I dashed across the alley, vaulted up the stairs, kicked open the door, and burst through it. When I looked back, the specter was gone.

  I laughed shakily. I knew better.

  It had never been there to begin with.

  I took a shower, dried my hair, got dressed, grabbed a chilled latte from the fridge, and made it downstairs just in time for Fiona to show up, and the police to arrive to arrest me.

  FOUR

  I told you. He was working on my sister’s case. ”

  “And when did you see him last?”

  “I told you that, too. Yesterday morning. He stopped by the bookstore. ”

  “Why did he stop by the bookstore?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I told you that, too. To tell me he’d reviewed her case and there was still no new evidence and that he was sorry but it was going to have to stay closed. ”

  “Do you expect me to believe Inspector O’Duffy, who incidentally has a lovely wife and three children he takes to church every Sunday, followed by brunch with his in-laws—a family outing he’s missed only four times in the past fifteen years, and then for funerals—bypassed that in favor of making an early morning, personal visit to the sister of a deceased murder victim to tell her an already closed case was staying closed?”

  Well, fudge-buckets. Even I was gripped by the illogic in that.

  “Why didn’t he use the phone?”

  I shrugged.

  My interrogator, Inspector Jayne, waved the two officers flanking the door from the room. He pushed up from the table and circled it, stopping behind me. I could feel him back there, staring down at me. I was acutely aware of the ancient stolen spear tucked into my boot, inside the leg of my jeans. If they charged and searched me, I was in big trouble.

  “You’re an attractive young woman, Ms. Lane. ”

  “Point?”

  “Was there something going on between you and Inspector O’Duffy?”

  “Oh, please! Do you really think he’s my type?”

  “Was, Ms. Lane. Do I think he was your type. He’s dead. ”

  I glared up at the Garda looming over me, trying to use dominant body posture to intimidate me. He didn’t know how bad my day had already been, or that there wasn’t much in the human world that frightened me anymore. “Are you going to arrest me or not?”

  “His wife said he’d been distracted lately. Worried. Not eating. She had no idea why. You know?”

  “No. I told you that, too. Half a dozen times now. How many more times do we have to go over this?” I sounded like a bad actor in a worse movie.

  He did, too. “As many times as I say we have to. Let’s take it from the beginning. Tell me again about the first time you saw him here at the station. ”

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  “Open your eyes and answer the question. ”

  I opened my eyes and stared daggers up at him. I still couldn’t believe O’Duffy was dead. Royally screwing up my world, he’d had his throat cut holding a scrap of paper with my name and the address of the bookstore written on it. It hadn’t taken long for his brothe
rs in—well, not exactly arms, the Dublin police don’t carry guns—to come looking for me. I’d spent the morning battling Shades and a death-by-sex Fae, discovered something monstrous lived beneath Barrons’ garage right behind my bedroom, and now I was in the police station being interrogated on suspicion of murder. Could my day get any worse? Oh, they’d not pressed formal charges, but they’d sure used scare tactics on me back at the bookstore, making them think they were. And they’d made it clear they’d jump on any reason they could find to back me up against a wall and start snapping mug shots. I was a stranger in this city, nearly all the answers I gave sounded evasive because they were evasive, and O’Duffy’s Sunday morning visit to me really did look suspicious.

  I repeated the story I’d told an hour ago, and an hour before that and an hour before that. He asked the same questions he and two men before him had asked, all morning and a good part of the afternoon—they’d let me stew for forty-five minutes while they went to lunch and came back smelling scrumptiously of vinegary fish and chips—phrased in minutely different ways, all designed to trip me up. The caffeine from my chilled latte had worn off hours ago and I was starving.

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  On one level, I could appreciate what Inspector Jayne was doing; it was his job, he was doing it very well, and it was obvious Patrick O’Duffy had been his friend. I hoped they’d done the same for Alina. On another level, it infuriated me. My problems were so much bigger than this. It was an epic waste of my time. Not only that, I felt exposed. With the exception of my trip across the back alley this morning, I hadn’t set foot outside of the bookstore since I’d seen what I’d seen in the warehouse at 1247 LaRuhe a week ago. I felt like a walking target with a bull’s-eye painted on my forehead. Did the Lord Master know where to find me? How high was I on his list of priorities? Was he still wherever he’d gone when he’d stepped through that portal? Was he watching the bookstore? Did he have his Rhino-boys, those watchdogs of the Fae—the lower caste of enormous, ugly, gray-skinned Unseelie with wide, squat, barrel-bodies, jutting underbites, and bumpy foreheads—waiting to grab me the moment I walked out of the police station by myself? Should I try to get myself formally arrested? I discarded that thought the instant I had it. Humans couldn’t keep me alive. I blinked, startled to realize I no longer quite counted myself in that camp.