High Voltage Read online

  So, maybe, those adorable little kids with Dancer’s dark wavy hair and beautiful sea-surf eyes were never a possibility.

  Maybe Ryodan’s right.

  Maybe I’m not human.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The throne belonged to Conchobar, to Cathain, the witch’s glove

  “YOU WILL FIND,” A towering, pale-skinned Fae male with waist-length silver hair purred to Ryodan, pushing through the crowd, “even for an abomination like you, some of us are far more difficult to kill.”

  It was two against a thousand. Sucky odds.

  I narrowed my eyes, modifying my assessment. Beyond the Fae, seven black beasts began to prowl silently forward from the perimeter of the room.

  Yes! It took immense effort to resist my urge to fist-pump the air.

  The Nine were here. Thank you, Ryodan.

  Had been all along, perhaps melted into a trellised column, camouflaged as a piece of furniture. Or, more precisely, blended chameleonlike with concrete walls and LED screens.

  Fae can sense their own hallows, the spear and sword, if they get close enough, which, Mac says, has to be within a dozen feet or less. But they can’t sense the Nine, which makes them Fae enemy number one. One of the Nine can sneak up right behind them and kill them before they even know a threat is in their vicinity.

  As far as I know, nothing can pick up on the Nine’s presence. I once asked Kat what she felt when she was around them and she’d said, Not a bloody thing. Complete and utter silence. They don’t exist at all. I’d thought at the time, what a gift that must be to a woman who never escaped the vast, combustible, and often terrible emotions of the world. Talk about a “ground zero.” Hers was a gift I’d never wished to have. I pick up way too much of the world’s terribleness without enhanced empathy.

  A wintry Fae female draped in an ermine-trimmed snowy cloak, and a throng of obsequious courtiers, sliced imperiously through the cluster at the bottom of the staircase and moved to join the male. I committed every detail of them both to memory. Marked them as mine.

  Savagery blazed from her ancient eyes, in a face so bloodless it was tinged blue. A sneer bared sharp white teeth and the flicker of a pale, restless tongue. Long lashes were dusted with glittering crystals. Her hair was so colorless, frosted with tiny, translucent diamonds, it reflected whatever shade she stood near. Her nails had been sharpened to cruel points, ten incessantly tapping ice picks.

  “She’s becoming a princess,” I murmured to Ryodan. As she wasn’t yet fully transformed, she lacked the deadly burn of the Sidhbha-jai, the killing sexuality endemic to royalty of the Light Court.

  “Already got that,” Ryodan growled.

  “The only reason we did not transform into royalty before, the only reason sniveling humans assumed our rightful places was—”

  “Time on our world diminished you,” I cut her off. “Making us more powerful.”

  “But no more,” she spat, delicate nostrils flaring. “The courts are once again strong and I am Winter-born.” When she stomped her foot, a thin layer of ice gushed forth, coating the floor between us. When she stabbed me with a gaze of storm and frost, my breath painted tiny ice crystals on the air. “Give me the sword, human, and I will not make you suffer.” Her eyes narrowed to slits of fiery ice and she purred, “Much. At first.”

  Objective two: she wanted the sword, Mac was alive. But where? Every Fae in the club was glancing beyond my shoulder, staring hungrily at my weapon.

  The Nine moved stealthily nearer, melting through the sea of Fae in that nearly invisible way of theirs, seeming to morph from one Fae to the next and, although inhuman heads were swiveling, alien eyes scanning, they remained just beyond Fae vision, causing a stir with no concrete point of focus. “Where’s your queen?”

  “She is not our queen and will never be. The pretender is worse than dead,” she said, with a hard rime smile.

  “In other words,” I said, smiling icily back, “you have no bloody idea where she is. And it’s chafing your fairy ass, isn’t it, honey?”

  Ryodan made a sound of choked amusement beside me.

  Amusement vanished and she spun in a whirl of ermine-trimmed cloak, snarling, “Take the sword from her. Shave the bastard to pieces no larger than a newt and bring her to me. Mostly intact.”

  As she stalked away, she left a thick layer of ice in her wake and all I could think was, That’s going to be a bitch to fight on, envisioning us slipping and sliding around, trying to kill each other.

  We were too closely surrounded for me to kick up into the slipstream but I didn’t need to. Ryodan grabbed my arm and yanked me up into his.

  Straight up.

  Bloody hell, I have never once managed to achieve a perfectly vertical ascent. Yet another challenge to work on. As we went, I kicked off my heels, in anticipation of battle.

  A vast black tunnel stained with crimson blossomed around me. Then we were slamming down hard on the opposite side of the dance floor.

  Winter-born spun, snarling from the far side of the club. “I said bring her to me!” she screamed. “What is wrong with you imbeciles? Must I do everything myself?” She reared back and flung two long, slender, icy white hands at us, releasing dozens of glittering, deadly ice picks.

  “Slipstream. Now,” Ryodan snarled.

  “I don’t think so,” I snarled back.

  He shoved me up so hard and fast, I went tumbling head over heels down his black and blood tunnel, where I wasted precious seconds trying to figure out how to shift out of his mode of travel and into my own. I finally regained my balance and kicked into my long starry passageway then shifted abruptly down into freeze-frame, stripping off my left glove and yanking my sword from my back with my right as I went.

  I thrust my sword into the first Fae I saw, with a long-overdue roar of satisfaction.

  One down, a thousand to go, I thought fiercely.

  I plunged into the carnage. The bastards thought to kill Mac, thought to take our world, had been torturing and killing our people for two long years unchecked.

  In the periphery of my vision I could see The Nine slashing their way toward Winter-born, leaving slaughtered Fae in their wake. She was precisely who we needed to kill, to buy time before another princess would be born, and I knew what Ryodan was thinking: kill her before she became lethal to me. The Sidhbha-jai is my kryptonite. If turned on me at full force, it shorts me out, renders me helpless. We’d had no idea new royalty were being born. Not a bloody clue. We’d been cut off for too long.

  I spun, I stabbed, I whirled, I battled. I came back to life in Elyreum, being what I needed to be, doing what I was born to do.

  Fae after Fae fell beneath my blade. Then Ryodan was behind me and we moved into flawless formation, fighting back to back.

  “I told you to get the fuck out of here,” he growled over his shoulder.

  “Tell the sun to leave the sky,” I growled back.

  “It does when night moves in. I’m night.”

  “Scientifically untrue. The sun remains, you just don’t see it.”

  “We’ve accomplished our objectives. Retreat.”

  “Not the boss of me.”

  “Bloody hell, don’t I know that. Something’s wrong. The bitch is losing Fae left and right and doesn’t care. She’s waiting for something. I’m pulling the plug. Now.”

  But it was too late. I’d argued too long.

  The debilitating, soul-searing burn of the Sidhbha-jai slammed into me and charred my insides to useless ash. “J-Jayne,” I stuttered. “He m-must be h-here s-s-somewhere. F-Find him. K-Kill him!” That bastard! He wasn’t in hiding with his family. He’d been working for the Winter Court, likely offered amnesty, if he brought them my sword!

  “I will. Get out!” Ryodan roared.

  But I couldn’t. Nothing was working
right. I thudded down into slow-mo and crashed to my knees. Then Ryodan had me and was flinging me over his shoulder.

  “Don’t touch my left hand!” I screamed, rearing up on his back like a cobra, desperate to keep the ungloved, lethal appendage away from him.

  A prince sifted in directly behind us, blasting me with staggering sexuality and, as he reached for me (I ached to go to him, burned to be his slave, hungered to worship my master!) I managed to retain a grip on a single shred of my mind, smiled sweetly at him with utter adoration and offered him my left hand, silently begging him to seize me from Ryodan’s shoulder and take me to Paradise.

  Dark, unholy promise burned in his gaze. Blood pooled in mine as I proffered my deadly hand. Take me, take me, I willed.

  He accepted my submission as his royal due and reached.

  As our fingertips met, an explosion of high voltage stabbed up into my head, shot down into my body, and as it flared to lethal life, the Fae prince exploded into a thousand fragments of pale white flesh and paler, sharp bone.

  Bits of him rained down on the club and, as the killing grip of the Sidhbha-jai released my mind, I caught a glimpse of Winter-born’s pale, incredulous face in the crowd.

  Then Fae began to scream and trample each other in their haste to escape.

  I kicked up, launching myself like a rocket from Ryodan’s shoulder, vaulting high into the air, desperate to get away from him because the voltage was still arcing and crackling inside me.

  Off-balance, I missed the slipstream entirely, slammed into the floor, rolled and sprang to my feet.

  Whatever I’d set free inside me wasn’t done yet, not nearly exhausted, it was still building, building, and I had no idea how to control it.

  “Dani, get back here!” Ryodan roared.

  I had to do something with it before he grabbed me again. Before I sent it shooting into him. I was not killing Ryodan. I’d done it twice before and hated it both times.

  I spun on Winter-born and flung my hand at her, at the precise instant she thrust two pale, slender, icy hands at me.

  Bolts of lightning exploded from my fingertips, one after the next, shattering her ice-summoned weapons, blasting a path through them, as I sent my power gunning for her—

  Holy hell, she sifted out! I’d missed!

  Furious, I slammed more bolts into the walls, into the floor. If I couldn’t kill her at least I could obliterate their horrific club from the face of our earth. I dumped energy from my body in powerful surges of lightning, then, abruptly, I was—

  Sailing in space, crystal clear and cool, surrounded by an infinity of stars on a nebula-painted canvas of black velvet sky.

  It was vast but I was enormous. It was ancient but I was, too. It was timeless but I was without end.

  There was wind here. Gusting, swirling waves of it buffeting my body. It felt as if I might catch one and go shooting up higher, higher, before channeling the borrowed velocity to dive beneath a moon, perhaps go ricocheting out around a star.

  I’d always thought space was still but it wasn’t, it was living and flowing, ebbing and changing. Not emptiness here but some kind of…dark matter that defied understanding, the stuff of the Cosmos, rife with possibility, as if all the hopes and dreams and desires that had ever been and would ever be were nestled deep within superdense molecules of darkness we could never comprehend, and, every now and then, something came along whose wings, or melody, rippled against that dark matter, stirring it up with lightning and song, with bolts of extreme high voltage, changing, waking, beginning something new, stitching things together in ways that defied comprehension, making connections, forging patterns and symmetry from chaos.

  I felt a great breeze then and turned whatever head I had into the wind. An enormous black Hunter sailed along beside me, head rocking gently as it buffeted the waves, lips pulled back as it chuffed softly and turned its gargantuan head to fix me with a single glowing orange eye. Ready?

  I frowned. For what?

  I fly.

  I see that.

  You fly, too.

  What was it saying? That I might remain here with it, flying through the greatest unexplored territory of all? Discover the secrets of the Cosmos, behold its ancient mysteries?

  All of that and more.

  But my people. This wasn’t my world. Mine was in danger once more, and probably always would be. My world needed me. I had a job to do.

  I closed my eyes, willing it all to go away.

  When I opened them again, I stood blinking repeatedly, blinded by the sudden, harsh light, the jarring transition.

  I was in the club but things had changed while I’d drifted in the cosmic vision. The surviving Fae had vanished; sifted, flown or run away, leaving behind only the dead, the Nine and me.

  “Dani.” Ryodan’s voice seemed to come from a great distance.

  I blinked again, staring dazedly at the destruction around me.

  Walls were splintered and crumbling. The floor was cleft by a fifty-foot-wide crevice with jagged edges that dropped to a bottomless abyss. The LED panels had been shattered, spraying bits of glass and wiring everywhere, and those people trapped beneath the floor were gone. I shivered. Fallen to their deaths down the gorge I’d carved. A small part of my brain said, A better death than the one they were facing. A bigger part said, Yet more people you failed to save.

  The structure of Elyreum groaned, as timbers contorted in a hopeless effort to accommodate the compromised foundation.

  “Dani,” Ryodan said again.

  “Honey,” I heard Lor say. “Can you hear us?”

  I nodded tightly.

  “Put your hand down, Dani,” Ryodan said softly, carefully.

  I hadn’t realized it was still raised. I stared at it, turning it this way and that, trying to process it. My left forearm had sprouted darkly beautiful obsidian thorns. It looked like a black velvet, studded opera glove.

  I forced it to drop to my side.

  “Look at me, Dani,” said Ryodan in a low, intense voice.

  I turned slowly and met his gaze. His eyes flickered strangely, swirling with shadows and I saw, as clearly as if he’d spoken the words: Goddamn, I was right. She isn’t human. I knew it. Then, Shit, this wasn’t at all what I expected. Fuck!

  The words hadn’t come to me in the usual manner of his silent communications—deliberately telegraphed. I’d gotten an entire memory attached to his first thought, nothing with the second.

  He hadn’t believed I was human since he saw me outside Temple Bar as I’d stood watching street mimes, laughing my ass off, one hand shoved in my pocket, the other cramming a cheeseburger in my mouth. I’d had two black eyes and was badly bruised, still drunk on being able to freeze-frame all over the city before I learned to lock my mental grid down.

  But that wasn’t when we’d met. We hadn’t met for some time after that.

  Still, he had a flawlessly detailed memory of walking up behind me, stopping a matter of mere inches from my back, pausing for a moment, inhaling deeply, before vanishing in that eerie, instant way of his. If I’d sensed an electrifying presence behind me, I’d written it off as my own excitement at finally being free in the world.

  He’d known about me long before he came to find me on that water tower, to rope me into working for him.

  I tried to ponder that thought but my brain was sluggish and uncooperative. I couldn’t access any of my mental vaults. Was this how normal people felt? How terrible that must be! How did they even stand it? I had sludge in my head.

  My legs went out from under me then.

  As I slumped to the floor, I cried out to Ryodan, “Don’t catch me! Don’t touch me! I’m dangerous!”

  Ryodan smiled faintly but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I think we’ve figured that out.”

  FALLING

  Belong, e
tymology: Old English, “gelang,” “at hand,” “together with.”

  Definition: To be suitable, advantageous, appropriate.

  To have the proper qualifications, especially social, to be a member of a group, to fit.

  To be attached, bound by birth, allegiance or dependency.

  To be a son, daughter, mother, father, lover.

  Families belong to each other.

  I have no idea what the word means.

  My mom said I “belonged” in a cage.

  But I know better.

  I’ve never belonged anywhere.

  —DANI O’MALLEY

  What have I become, my sweetest friend

  “HEY, SHAZ-MA-TAZ,” I GREETED him with weary cheer, as I trudged into my bedroom and flipped on the overhead light.

  He raised his great shaggy head from the mattress on the floor and peered at me, scanning me intently from head to toe. It was a look we’d often given each other after battle, ascertaining whether the other was okay.

  His violet eyes widened. “You’re thorny!” he exclaimed. “That’ll be a tryllium scratch!”

  One of my old passwords used to be thornybitch314159, a combination of how I sometimes felt plus the first six digits of pi. I considered choosing more wisely in the future. “That I am. I assume tryllium’s good?”

  “The best!” he enthused, but sobered quickly. “Are you all right, Yi-yi?” he fretted. “It grew again.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, slipping out of my dress. “I’m going to wash up then I need big-time cuddles. Oodles of them.”

  “And we’ll put the mattress back up?”

  “You betcha.” I headed for the shower.

  Ryodan had dropped me off and left, seething, a few minutes ago.

  I couldn’t help it. I needed to be alone. I’d gotten used to being alone. Something was happening to me and I wanted time to focus my brain on it.