Feversong Read online

  My hand is on his mouth, but not my hand alone. He speaks no more, his lips stitched by the greedy needles of a bloody crimson rune I summoned from my glassy lake, not hers. She never found hers. I made sure of it, keeping hers hidden through illusion and sleight of hand, subtle manipulation of her neural circuitry.

  He stumbles, tries to back away, but I fling rune after rune at him. They latch hungrily to his neck, his arms, onto his wings, those beautiful, majestic wings that should be mine, which he didn’t deserve and doesn’t honor.

  Clawing at himself, he crashes to the ice-dusted ground.

  A dozen more runes fly from my hands as I murmur quietly. I sling them onto his body, where they leech to his clothing and skin, spread and grow, until the Unseelie prince is immobilized by the same parasitic magic that fortified the Unseelie prison walls, runes nourished by the victim’s attempt to fight them, growing stronger and larger with the least resistance. In no time at all the Highlander will be cocooned in a bloody, inescapable prison.

  I’ll give him something to brood about and a hellish eternity in which to do it. Cretin. Idiot.

  “But I wanted to kill you,” I whisper as I lick his face in all its bloody, suffering goodness. “I wanted to watch you die. I’ve not killed in this form. I want to know how it feels.” I permit my essence to fully animate my face, backlight my eyes.

  He stares at me with horror. He gets it, belatedly, who Mac really is. Who I am.

  I AM.

  I plaster him with more runes, putty them gently over his eyes, his forehead, plug his nose, then shove him to the ground. Perhaps I kick him a few times for good measure. I don’t know, I don’t care, my mind has already moved on. I may not have the spear—at the moment—but I will gather my enemies and store them until I do.

  I pick him up and drag him behind the pile of rocks. I’ll collect him before I leave the abbey, take him with me to my lair.

  Perhaps I’ll play with him before he dies.

  It is in breaking things that you understand them.

  I’ve always been a curious sort.

  As I enter the demolished abbey from the rear, I keep my ears on the voices of sidhe-seers beyond the tumbled walls and my eyes focused for random opportunity.

  It’s everywhere.

  Here, I scrape ice from a box of rat poison used to protect the fortresses’ larders. There, I find a half-standing pantry containing ice-slicked, corked jugs of water from their artesian well. The two meet in a lovely drink of hemorrhagic death. No guarantee it will be imbibed or that enough will be drunk. But there’s a possibility it will. It’s enough to entertain.

  I move carefully over piles of slippery stone and splintered beams. Slip east, then down, knowing the way because my erstwhile host walked this path while I siphoned impressions from the leaky sieve of her mind.

  Below. Below. I would so prefer not to go below to the catacomb in which my prior incarnation was housed for SO FUCKING LONG I THOUGHT I WOULD GO INSANE. But I didn’t. I kept my cool, calm, collected self and waited for the right moment, amputating myself from within the Sinsar Dubh’s covers as it was being carried, slipping out the door unnoticed, so to speak, the ultimate sleight of hand.

  I stop outside the closed doors of the cavern. Long ago the king sealed and unsealed the doors of his great citadel in the Unseelie prison, frequently during his time of endless experimentation trying to re-create the Song of Making. For such an obsessive entity, he’s a careless bastard. Many of his memories are mine. Trapped inside the cavern, held immobile by his sticky spiderweb of runes, such knowledge did me no good. From outside the cavern it’s quite possibly all I need in order to contain (then kill!) the vestiges of my former self that cannot be permitted to exist within Cruce.

  I speak the spell that once opened and closed the ancient doors of the king’s personal demesne, and as I expected, the towering portals swing wide. Unlike the idiot king, I rarely use the same protection spell twice.

  In the shadowy interior a prince rises, glides toward the open entrance. The last time MacKayla saw him, Cruce was imprisoned. He is no longer. He’s a giant of a Fae, with enormous black wings dusted with an ornate design of sparkling iridescent flecks, a body of brutal strength and delicious perfection. He was made to rule, to crush, to conquer. Fury ignites my blood. His superb vessel should be mine.

  “Cruce,” I say as I step across the threshold.

  He stops, assesses me. “MacKayla. It was not you I thought would come.”

  My spear, my lovely spear, I was eager to kill him. To take from him what I can’t have for myself. Now I can only contain and store him with the bastard Highlander until one of the two deadly Hallows are mine.

  Still, I see no need to hasten to the endgame.

  Endgames are so anticlimactic.

  It’s over.

  Then there you are.

  Bored again.

  “Did you think I wasn’t listening? You offered me the world,” I say. “You said I would be your queen.” Cruce thinks I’m Mac. My eyes are green. Currently. “You have the Sinsar Dubh.”

  He’s wary. “That should make you fear me.”

  “Should it?” I know better. I’d been forced to leave behind half the magic I possessed to transfer myself into Isla O’Connor the night I escaped the abbey, but I’d cleverly embedded the majority of my prior self into the covers of the Book and planted a spell in the pages so that if they were ever read, the sentience I’d forsaken would cease to exist and crumble to dust. I will never permit another me to walk free in the world. I know what I’m capable of.

  “The king said me becoming him, you becoming my queen, wasn’t the only possibility,” Cruce probes. “I have thought long on that. What did he mean, MacKayla? Why did he seem to think the magic of our race might prefer you?”

  He’s wondering what power MacKayla possesses that she was able to open the king’s doors. He was interred before my self-flagellating vessel discovered me inside her, hence doesn’t know I stand before him. I stop a few paces from the great pretender who lived in Faery for half a million years as a Seelie prince, only to be exposed as the last made Unseelie prince, while I spent an eternity in solitary confinement. Now I’m the great pretender and he’s the one who will be imprisoned. “We must trust one another if we are to rule this planet together.”

  “Ah, now you seek to rule it with me?”

  “I freed you, didn’t I?” Toying with Cruce amuses me. He can sift. I can’t. He’s technically more powerful in that ability alone, and when I best him it will prove that my mind is so superior it doesn’t matter what power those around me possess. Everyone falls to me eventually. He’s a cretin. Idiot. MacKayla would never have said “rule.” She would have said something inoffensive like “guide.” That was his first and only red flag. Those that fail to protect themselves deserve any harm that befalls them. You are your own kingdom. Guard it. Or lose it.

  “Why is that?”

  “I believe you absorbed the spells from the Book, but it did not possess you. Is that true?” I know it for fact. Aside from a few redundancies, spells, music, wards, runes, he has nothing to compete with the enormous sentience of me. Although some of what he absorbed from reading the Book is equal to what I possess, it won’t matter. He won’t see his demise coming.

  He hesitates briefly then nods, eyes narrowed.

  “Then come with me now, and hurry. Our world is in danger. The Fae court has no ruler. If you can get them under control and help us with the black holes, the others will accept you.”

  Ah, there it is, what I wanted to see in his eyes. Interest, the belief that he has the possibility of a grand future. Desire. I know what impeded desire feels like. I know what Hell is. I will rain it down on this planet and everything on it.

  “You said I raped you. You despised me,” Cruce says silkily.

  “A minor offense. I’ve changed since then.” And how. There’s little satisfaction in imprisoning an already imprisoned mind. It’s the free ones, the h
ungry ones, those that fight, those with great ambition, that are so much fun to amputate and torture. They take the longest to break.

  He studies me a moment. “Then kiss me, MacKayla, and take back my name.”

  Now that the doors are open, he thinks to touch and thereby sift simple MacKayla Lane away from here, where he might interrogate her at his leisure. He senses a trap, just the wrong one. Like most powerful beings, he overestimates himself, and co-authors his own demise.

  I move near, tip back my head, and wet my lips.

  When he steps forward, mouth descending, arms extending, I slam both hands into his chest, plastering handfuls of dripping crimson runes to his skin, preventing him from sifting, freezing him in place.

  His eyes flare and he roars with rage, struggling against the runes, which of course only makes them stronger, faster.

  I slap a rune onto his mouth, stitching it closed.

  Moving with the heightened speed that eating Unseelie flesh bestowed on my vessel, I slam rune after rune onto his body, cover his mouth, then use one of my knives to hack his wings from his body and fillet them into tiny bits. Like the day I dismembered the Gray Woman, I slice and slash in a frenzied rush of power and the mighty Cruce falls before me. Despite his superior form, no one is superior to me. He is nothing. With MacKayla’s body, I can carve reality into whatever shape I desire.

  I AM.

  I slice, sever. Blood runs. Ebon feathers fall. The bird in the bush may not be mine but I can cripple and break it.

  I strip the three amulets from his neck, drop them around mine, summon more runes and finish spinning his bloody cocoon.

  Slowly. Bit by carefully chosen bit. To make absolutely certain he’s aware of everything that has happened, and is happening. I watch his eyes, drink his despair, blot his vision last. His suffering is exquisite.

  WE ARE DESIRE, LUST, GREED, AND THE PATH WE CHOOSE TO SUPREMACY.

  Not one thing less. Not one thing more.

  Those that conquer.

  Take notes. Once you truly, deeply, intimately understand what I’m saying, you’re that much harder to victimize.

  Then the game, for me, becomes that much more fun.

  BETRAYED

  * * *

  When my mother first discovered I could freeze-frame—which isn’t nearly as cool as teleporting, it just means I can move so fast no one can see me, and they feel only a breeze as I whiz by—she began tying me to stuff to keep me close to her.

  When I was really little just about anything worked: a chair, a table, the sofa where she would park me to watch cartoons while she’d frown over job ads in the paper.

  I don’t know how she supported us in those early years but somehow we got by. Times got leaner, though. Food was mostly canned beans and potted meat; there was no more of that sweet creamed corn I so loved.

  One day I figured out I could untie myself. Mom always said I was too smart for my own good, walking early, picking up big words and talking way before I should.

  She bought a dog leash the next morning, a pretty one with pink rhinestones. It must have cost much more than she could afford to spend, but it was for her daughter, not a dog.

  I snapped it within a week.

  She fetched thick rope and became an expert at tying complicated knots.

  But I was strong and fast and the rope frayed and split in no time. She’d say with an exasperated laugh—“Danielle Megan O’Malley, my little darling, you’re going to be as strong as ten men one day! What on earth did I give birth to, a superhero?”—and I’d preen.

  She had a lot of rules for me. The world was a bad place, she said, full of bad things that hunted for little girls like me. I was special and she had to protect me, and keep me hidden.

  Top on her list was no freeze-framing beyond the house. I was never to go out any of the windows or doors. OUTSIDE was a country I wasn’t allowed to visit until I was OLDER—both magical words that I heard capitalized and the color of warm butterscotch when she said them. To discourage it, she kept the shades tightly drawn, shutting out all the interesting things to see.

  But I’d peek when she wasn’t watching and OUTSIDE was irresistible—there were children and puddles to splash around in and sunshine and fog and flowers and bikes and things happening, and everything was always changing, like you were living in a TV show and you got to discover the plot as you went along, even make it up and shape it yourself.

  I wasn’t always great with her rules. She caught me in the yard more than a few times.

  One day after she found me sitting on the front stoop, watching girls jumping rope in the yard next door, she tied me to the fridge then went and bought a thick chain and screwed a heavy bolt into the sofa. She padlocked the chain around my waist.

  An hour later I smashed the lumpy green couch to smithereens, dragging it behind me, trying to freeze-frame through the doorway to the kitchen.

  She stood at the kitchen counter making dinner and I giggled and giggled because I thought it was so funny to see the couch all crooked and skewed with the stuffing poking out, but she got angry and said things I never wanted to hear her say again so, for a while that felt like years to me but was probably weeks, I stayed wherever she put me until she told me I could move.

  It was inevitable OUTSIDE would get me again; sneaking a peek behind the curtains, spying an ice cream vendor pushing his cart with dozens of children crowded around, licking their cones and spooning up their gooey sundaes and allowed to be OUTSIDE, and I knocked them over like little bowling pins, snatched up a whole tub of chocolate fudge caramel for myself and was back inside the house before Mom even knew I was gone. All the vendor saw was kids falling all over the sidewalk and maybe noticed a tub of ice cream missing but I’d already figured out that when grown-ups couldn’t explain something, they pretended it hadn’t happened.

  I almost got away with it.

  I would have gotten away with it. I even had a plan for how to get rid of the empty tub.

  She brought my lunch into the living room.

  I shoved the tub of ice cream behind a chair but she stayed and talked to me while I ate my beans and the ice cream melted and puddled out and she said those angry things again and I cried so hard I thought my tummy would split.

  I crossed-my-heart-hope-to-die swore I would never disobey her rules again. And most especially that I would never, never go OUTSIDE.

  She cried then, too.

  A few days later she came home from the grocery store with hardly any food but she had a bunch of tools and bars and sheets of metal. She told me we didn’t have any more money and she’d sold everything we could sell, so she had to go back to work.

  She was getting a dog to watch over me while she was out and she was going to build a very special cage for it. She’d even learned to use a blowtorch and hammer to do it. I thought she was terribly clever and exciting!

  I knew it was going to be a very special big dog because the cage was ginormous. I knew why she had to build it inside: it was three times as wide as any of our doors! Shortly before it was done, I played inside the cage, imagining all the fun I was going to have with my new, very best friend. With a best friend it would be a lot easier to resist the lure of OUTSIDE.

  I wasn’t as strong then as I am now. My strength increased as I matured, along with my other senses. But I knew the dog we were getting was going to be very, very strong because the bars on the cage were as big around as my mother’s arm and inside she bolted a thick collar and a heavy chain to the floor. She said the dog might have to be restrained sometimes when we had company.

  We never had company.

  I began to think I was the only one excited about the new addition to our family. While she worked on the cage, I’d dream up names for our dog and try them out on her, and her eyes would get strange and her lips would pull down.

  I’ve always slept hard.

  One night my mother gave me a bath, dried and brushed my hair, and we played games on the rickety kitchen table
until I nearly fell asleep on my stool. Then she carried me to her bed where I lay my head on her pillowcase—the one with the little ducks—and I put my hands on her face and stared at her with sleepy eyes because I loved watching her while I fell asleep, and she held me so close and so tight, snuggled up in her good mom-smell that I knew I was the most important thing to her in the whole world, and I slipped off to happy dreams.

  The next morning I woke up with a collar around my neck, chained on a small mattress inside the dog’s cage.

  JADA

  She stood by the edge of the mattress in the study on the silent, otherwise empty first floor of Barrons Books & Baubles, frowning down at the body draped in nearly transparent pieces of silvery cloth.

  Not that Ryodan knew she was frowning or even that she was in the room. Although his body shivered with agony, the rise and fall of his chest was nominal; she’d counted his breaths, twice a minute. His pulse was nonexistent. He’d either gone into a deep meditation or someone, no doubt Barrons, had put him into a magical, healing sleep.

  Unwrapping a protein bar, she knelt by the mattress, lifted the edge of one of the pieces of fabric and inhaled sharply. Raw, blistered flesh oozed pinkish liquid. She carefully released the edge and lifted another.

  He’d burned himself to the bone in places, to keep her safe, while she’d tried to rescue someone she’d known full well on some level wasn’t there.

  “The wound I refused to dress,” she whispered, for a moment fourteen again, chained in a dungeon with Ryodan trying to get her to face the atrocities of her life, stare them down cold, acknowledge and make some kind—any kind—of peace with them; his brand of tough love, the only thing that’d had the slightest chance of penetrating her formidable armor. She’d told herself it wasn’t concern but manipulation. Her thoughts and feelings about the man had always been at odds. She’d idolized him. Craved his attention and respect. Never trusted him. Yet what he’d done tonight…she could see nothing the mighty Ryodan might have gained from it.